This UFO stuff seems to frequently break into my scope of attention when there are big things happening politically.
Authoritarians also love the "occult" and the idea of aliens fit that category. Occult beliefs legitimize irrational behavior.
Regardless, if you've not seen the existence of or any episode of Ancient Aliens (or Finding Bigfoot) you'll see what i'm saying: some of these spectacles are more for fun than for politics, because they can be outright funny.
Search for "The Amalgamated Flying Saucer Club of America", there's a lot of discussion that these photos may have been a hoax. I'm not sure why these would be just getting release by National Archives now, perhaps as a distraction?
Maybe, or maybe they wanted to avoid giving the content unearned credibility through concealment. The easiest way to turn a mystery into a nothingburger is to release it to the public.
> ... there's a lot of discussion that these photos may have been a hoax.
Yes, or sightings by people constitutionally unable to distinguish Venus from a UFO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash%E2%80%93Landrum_inciden...
Seems clear that it was some black program cold war nuclear propulsion vehicle that never saw the light of day.
Though, I'm not sure how good finishing technology was back then, this could have been faked.
I really wonder why we can't get a clear answer on whether these are really extraterrestrial or just advanced tech. One would imagine if it were a conspiracy that it would have leaked in full by now.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57629/whats-the...
> These are known to be Paul Villa’s UFO photographs from 1964 and are part of a larger narrative where he claimed contact with extraterrestrial beings. [...] > > How these photographs wound up in the Goddard Space Flight Center records collection is unknown.
https://xcancel.com/humansareindef1/status/17581524853055121...
> Initial observations: narrow focal depth...object sharpness in front of trees implies it's small, around 8 to 12 in. > > Vented disc brake rotors were introduced in the 60s, patented in 1929. This looks like a vented disc brake rotor with a domed hubcap on top. Compare the images.
(Click through to either the Twitter thread or the StackExchange quotation-of-the-Twitter-thread to see the images of the original hubcap and the "UFO" side by side.)
When you focus a SLR camera "to infinity", ie. the maximum settable focus for distant objects, the lens has an actual physical distance at which things will still be focused. Usually it's like 50 feet from the camera. So when the camera lens is focused to infinity, things >= 50 feet away will be in focus.
Because the trees are slightly out of focus, the lens has been set shallower than infinity, which means the UFO is closer to the camera than the physical infinity (50'). It's physically impossible for an object more distant than the trees to be in focus without the trees being in focus.
Don't spoil the magic!!!!!!
Some photo might be proven to be eg distant lights or inconstant lighting… but a bespoke prop and old / bad cameras? we can only say “it looks super fake”
What's old is new again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Meier#Photographs,_films...
Most UFO/UAP lore relies on the impossibility of proving a negative, which BTW is a recognized logical fallacy.
I normally say it this way:
* A pseudoscientist assumes a theory is true until it's proven false.
* A scientist assumes a theory is false until it's proven true.The scientific method requires replication, and there are events in the universe that are inherently long-tailed and leave little trace evidence. That doesn't make their observers crazy or pseudo-scientists. There are some weird things out in this wide universe of ours that happen on the tails of observability.
It's called the "null hypothesis." It's the gold standard of scientific experimental design.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis : "The null hypothesis (often denoted H0) is the claim in scientific research that the effect being studied does not exist."
> There are some weird things out in this wide universe of ours that happen on the tails of observability.
Yes, that is true. And in science, we assume such things are not real until positive evidence leads us to a different conclusion. Consider the ether theory, the idea that an evanescent substance filled all of space and was responsible for the propagation of light. But because it had not been directly observed, scientists invoked the null hypothesis to assume it wasn't real. Tests then confirmed that it wasn't real, and this led to relativity theory.
I think this definition is tying too much epistemic certainty on the part of the scientist towards the null hypothesis versus the alternative hypothesis being tested, hence my disagreement to what I consider a view lacking nuance. In short, if the scientist has no reason to doubt the null hypothesis then there is no reason to test. So the scientist must first be willing to allow the null to be proven unlikely / rejected.
I don't think we're going to see any further agreement this deep in the semantics, so let's move forward understanding each other to be in general agreement on the metaphysical construction of the scientific method.
> And in science, we assume such things are not real until positive evidence leads us to a different conclusion
We assume them to be untestable, not necessarily false. Just unable to be tested. The scientific method only has three states: untested, agrees with available evidence, or rejected by available evidence. If no evidence, then untested.
String theory is a great example of this. Wonderfully mathematical and logical, but we haven't figured out how to test major components of it specifically yet that would distinguish it from alternative theories.
On the contrary, that's the point at which positive evidence may contradict the null hypothesis, assuming it exists. But the null hypothesis must be the default initial assumption.
My point is that if the scientist assumes anything but the null hypothesis a priori, it's not science, it's marketing. This is why the null hypothesis is the default initial position in any legitimate scientific investigation.
The alternative is to assume the truth of a theory and seek falsifying evidence. But this may require proof of a negative, which is frequently impossible. I can't prove Bigfoot's nonexistence, but this failure doesn't support Bigfoot's existence.
...but not photograph any of them, of course. These "Plejaren" sound suspiciously indistinct from Second Directorate goons.
Still not your concrete proof of alien craft, but the Navy FLIR footage has always spooked me a lot more than the 1960s Roswell-era stuff.
I'm not one, and I still think that. Well, maybe not that last bit.
