Mick West, who has long studied UFOs (or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the US government calls them) is not impressed with the recent flurry of reports that have given hope to believers that the ‘truth is out there’ that we are being visited by extraterrestrials. (I wrote about a recent New Yorker article that profiled a credulous journalist.) The seeming support, if qualified, given by high profile individuals has added to the expectation that the report that the US government will release later this month will vindicate their beliefs. West says that upon closer examination, these mysterious events invariably turn out to have mundane explanations.
In 2017 I helped solve a UFO case. Using a hi-tech infrared camera, the Chilean navy had recorded video of a mysterious object in the distance. The black-and-white footage showed a bizarre black shape flying across the sky, and at one point it seemed to emit plumes of hot gases. A special group was formed of military personnel, scientists and other experts. Over two years they carefully studied the case, eliminated all mundane possibilities, and finally concluded that this object was a “genuine unknown”. A real UFO, certified by a national military.
…Three days later I, and others, identified the plane as Iberia flight 6830, departing Santiago airport. The “hot gases” were just contrails, and the odd movement was the result of a low viewing angle and a powerful zoom factor on the infrared camera. The glare from the engines obscured the plane and created the unusual shape. Radar data confirmed that the exact location of the plane matched the UFO. Case closed. UFO enthusiasts were annoyed.
…The evidence is underwhelming. We are told there is secret, classified data we can’t see that proves something. But the people telling us this are the same people who gushingly promoted these videos as compelling evidence to the media. (Several of the New York Times’s much-discussed recent UFO pieces were co-written by Leslie Kean, who was so impressed by the Chilean case.) The History Channel’s pop-science television series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation adopted a similar approach, trotting out “experts” to express amazement and puzzlement at what was ultimately quite explicable.
I expect the Pentagon’s forthcoming UAP report to be more of the same. It’s a government report, but with no real funding the report will probably rely on work previously done as a pet project of former senator and UFO enthusiast Harry Reid – something the Pentagon does not want to talk about because it’s a bit silly.
I can understand the motivation behind this interest. Many people (myself included) would be fascinated if we make contact with extraterrestrials. The media outlets know that this topic generates great interest. That combination almost guarantees that anything that qualifies as a UAP will get a lot of publicity.
But the fact remains that it is extremely unlikely that what has been observed is anything more than something that is terrestrial-based. It just does not seem reasonable that beings from another planet that possess such advanced technology would come all this way just to play peek-a-boo with us.
Prior probability. Given our young technology, the likelihood of technologically advanced life evolving, the limiting speed of light and great distances involved, think horse, not zebra.
I’m impressed with these relatively stable films of flying objects taken from a jet traveling at several hundred kph on a non-parallel course thousands of meters away. Seems like maybe there’s more things that the government would be motivated to be secretive in the filming rather than the filmed.
Also, in the case of odd objects near our ships and military facilities — if the Chinese and Russians wanted to spy on those things, wouldn’t it make sense for them to make their drones pyramid- or saucer-shaped, since they are well aware of our tendency to seek out the least likely explanation?
The link was borked. Here it is.
Yep. Classic bullshitting.
Somebody tried to make the same move on a recent pharyngula thread. If it’s good enough evidence to support the alien hypothesis, then it’s probably not very coherent to think at the same time that it’s also insufficient for use with some alternative explanation (due to it being grainy, low resolution, low contrast, dark, possibly contaminated with digital artifacts, or whatever you feel like complaining about).
brucegee1962, #2:
Well, they do use their fleets of green pyramids just for that purpose, except of course that it’s got nothing to do with China or Russia and they’re not actually green pyramids. But other than that….
The Pentagon would probably do better to describe this set of questions as Unidentified Optical Phenomena.
The aliens do a good job only exposing themselves to the military, avoiding fly-bys of a commercial jet full of iPhones. This proves the aliens have superior intelligence -- to navy pilots.
Marcus Ranum, #5:
Not really necessary though. As evidenced by the case of Iberia flight 6830 mentioned in the OP or the one in my link in #3 (from Mick West’s youtube channel), the aliens have infiltrated the commercial airlines themselves, retrofitted their spaceships to look like commercial jets, and may even fill them with fake/disguised crew and passengers.
Of course they’re not equipped with iPhones to take selfies of the ships in flight, since they use some other fancy alien technology for that sort of thing. They simply don’t want to share the footage with us, because people complain so much about the poor customer service, flight delays, lost/damaged baggage, etc.
A new weapon against the UFO crazies is the Argument from iPhones. Given the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, why hasn’t there been an explosion in documented UFO sightings? A more traditional argument in the same vein is why are there not reports of UFO sightings from before sci-fi and the technological age? Remarkable that the aliens arrived on Earth just recently, not thousands or millions of years ago.
Argument from iPhones: https://xkcd.com/1235/
The other argument is not so good, because (a) there are UFO sightings before the tech age and in any case (b) things have to start some time.
Matt G @8:
Maybe you haven’t looked for them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object#Early_history
That there are many more known reports in the last century isn’t really a mystery. Mass media wasn’t around before then.
Not sure about the argument from iPhones either. Most people who own them spend most of their time indoors, and those I’ve seen outside are often absorbed in conversations with other iPhoners.
I don’t buy the flying saucer nonsense, but I also don’t buy glib dismissals (and xkcd is nothing if not glib).
15 or 20 years ago, one of the largest UFO groups in Britain shut itself down due to the increase in cameras and the reduction in the rate of UFO sightings.