Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation as to why it should be aliens beyond "we're important!" which...we're not.
And if it is aliens, and they've been doing it for thousands of years...why. Why skirt around, yet do it so clumsily our radars and cameras can spot it, and people 2000 years ago could see it?

because its not aliens, its people seeing what they want to see.

The first image is a painting made in 1710 of an event that transpired in biblical times, theres no connection there that justifies an argument of "this dude saw an alien spaceship and painted it". Its actually meant to be god deacending in the form of a dive with the sun as a disc in the sky behind him shining the light of the heavens down on the masses witnessing the baptism of christ. Verdict: No alien

The second one is a Serbian fresco of the crucifixion of christ, the two figures are meant to be the man in the moon and his counterpart in the sun, weeping for his loss. Somewhat common in Byzantine religious artwork of the era. Verdict: No alien.

The last one of the cave - who knows. Could be a cloud raining, could also be a hoax as I cant find any details about it. Verdict: Maybe aliens.

So no, i do not believe we got the internet from a ufo in roswell. I reject a lot of the ancient alien stuff, but i acknowledge the ancient paintings do show what looks like a modern 'flying saucer' image.I've heard some peopkle against the idea of ancient aliens try to explain it away and their explanations seem pretty lame, frankly.

They're aren't likely going to be exciting explanations. In my native land for example, we call that last image 'drawing of a hat.'

Looks more like a snake who ate an elephant to me.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Ok, the whole flying saucer thing didn;'t start in the like late 40's-early 50's. Theres a lot of historical artwork the shows things that look like them.

It really did, though. The 40s/50s is when sightings of 'unidentified flying objects' exploded in frequency, and only subsequently did historical images of religious significance got retroactively reinterpreted as aliens in spaceships rather than angels/God. With roughly a millennium of preserved art it's not hard to find imagery that bears a resemblance to contemporary depictions of aliens, especially when the criteria are so vague as 'round objects in the sky'.

Maybe the conspiracy was the friends we made along the way.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Ok, the whole flying saucer thing didn;'t start in the like late 40's-early 50's. Theres a lot of historical artwork the shows things that look like them.

this might be not as clear as you think

sun shinning rays of light thru clouds is not something special, or you can look at paintings about angels and ask yourself if those are Aliens or not
and the question is, are modern day portrayal inspired by old paintings or inspired by the same natural phenomenon as those were

I mean 90% of Aliens/Monsters in modern Pop Culture are inspired by the work of a single artist and it is not unlikley that that someone saw an old picture and thought I draw my spaceships to look like that, and years later people who have seen the space ship drawing first

If it is aliens, we've apparently been invaded by just..thousands of species, because until pop-culture unified the global iconography, every ghost/fae/angel thing looked different. why were ancient israelites abducted by burning wheels with eyes and from the 50s onwards it's all been grey short dudes?

 Matt Swain wrote:
Ok, the whole flying saucer thing didn;'t start in the like late 40's-early 50's. Theres a lot of historical artwork the shows things that look like them.

In order:
-A window into heaven with god looking down, you can even see his face in the middle.
-Beings depicted inside of shooting stars.
-An abstract shape.

You are also missing that this stuff is being cherry-picked from countless other works that bear no similarity to whatever pet theory is being proposed.

Cronch wrote:
I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation as to why it should be aliens beyond "we're important!" which...we're not.
And if it is aliens, and they've been doing it for thousands of years...why. Why skirt around, yet do it so clumsily our radars and cameras can spot it, and people 2000 years ago could see it?

That's a foolish argument. There are humans that study everything from dung beetles to snow leopards. Why shouldn't there be some aliens that are curious enough about humans to do flyovers? Also, just because we can occasionally perceive them doesn't mean they care. They may not even intentionally be hiding or even attempting to hide.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Also principles created in purely mechanical calculation devices like babbages difference engines were applies to electronics to create basic computers.

So no, i do not believe we got the internet from a ufo in roswell. I reject a lot of the ancient alien stuff, but i acknowledge the ancient paintings do show what looks like a modern 'flying saucer' image.I've heard some peopkle against the idea of ancient aliens try to explain it away and their explanations seem pretty lame, frankly.

In response, episodes in the history of thought have a tendency to rhyme.

Anaximander was a Greek philosopher, pre-dated Socrates and Pythagoras. He was a practical philosopher, having created sun-dials and other devices we might call scientific. He was drawn to cosmology and attempted to explain the origin of the universe this way.

"At the origin, after the separation of hot and cold, a ball of flame appeared that surrounded Earth like bark on a tree. This ball broke apart to form the rest of the Universe. It resembled a system of hollow concentric wheels, filled with fire, with the rims pierced by holes like those of a flute. Consequently, the Sun was the fire that one could see through a hole the same size as the Earth on the farthest wheel, and an eclipse corresponded with the occlusion of that hole. The diameter of the solar wheel was twenty-seven times that of the Earth (or twenty-eight, depending on the sources) and the lunar wheel, whose fire was less intense, eighteen (or nineteen) times. Its hole could change shape, thus explaining lunar phases. The stars and the planets, located closer, followed the same model."

If you read the fragment in full, it sounds similar to modern theories of the Big Bang. Was Anaximander prescient, understanding concepts that would not be widely acknowledged for centuries? Did the descriptions of his thoughts somehow inspire scientists thousands of years later?

Not really. A classical mechanical understanding of the cosmos requires an explanation of an original force, a "prime mover." We live in a world of cause and effect, the Greeks understood this about the same as we do today. To get to the beginning of the story, forces needed to interact with one another. A different explanation of the universe - that of the creator - might not lead to the same conclusions.

When I see cave drawings that resemble flying saucers, I think about human perception. What was it they saw that could have inspired them to draw something resembling phenomenon we observe today? While it's tempting to say they are drawing what they saw, cave drawings are not always representational. Some also depict 30 foot men with spears attacking villages - or regular sized men attacking tiny faery villages. I'm not always sure what I'm seeing.

Something about round things flying through the air, lights from the heavens shining down, etc appears in a lot of art. Maybe it's a signal, dunno, but people can draw many different conclusions from what they are perceiving. If we were living in a more religious age, we might call them Angels or the Hand of God.

Don't know if this qualifies as explaining it away, but I definitely don't trust the notion that's a drawing of a spaceship. It could be a representation of something real, or it could have been imagination. It could have been something that was observed, but we're interpreting it as a spaceship because we're looking for spaceships. If we lived in a culture dominated by Flying Spaghetti Men, we might be perceiving it as an ancient parmesan shaker.

But it could be a flying saucer. Just saying we have no way to know.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a... oh it is a bird.

https://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/13982663/thumb/1.jpg

With all the satellites pointing at earth and photographing every square inch of this planets surface every second of every minute of every day, I feel like wed have a lot of photos of these things in flight if they were as common as theyre being made out to be.

chaos0xomega wrote:
With all the satellites pointing at earth and photographing every square inch of this planets surface every second of every minute of every day, I feel like wed have a lot of photos of these things in flight if they were as common as theyre being made out to be.

The pentagon is releasing more and more incidents of things being caught on camera now.

as to them being russian or chinese planes, unless they've learned to cancel inertia that doesn't explain some things that have been seen and recorded.

Also, for a long time people did not report seeing things, like airline pilots. If an airline pilot reported seeing a UFO, the standard result was the end of his career as corporate decided his stability was questionable and therefore he could possibly maybe be a liability, and POOF went his career and future. Airline pilots learned not to report things as their futures was not a concern of the airlines. After retirement some came forward with what they saw.

The miliar\y had the same issue, with servicemen reporting things not only being looked down on by the brass but mercilessly taunted by their peers.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Cronch wrote:
I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation as to why it should be aliens beyond "we're important!" which...we're not.
And if it is aliens, and they've been doing it for thousands of years...why. Why skirt around, yet do it so clumsily our radars and cameras can spot it, and people 2000 years ago could see it?

How do you know what a non human intelligence might consider important or not? I mean we spend millions building deep submersibles to go 7 miles down and look at lifeforms that live there. We spend humdreds of millions to send a robot to mars to look at rocks.

What if an alien intelligence considers ANY form of intelligent, sentient life to be important to some degree?

I wonder why Aliens haven't mastered MRI scanners and prefer going via the butt for examinations.

Its curious.

And do they just not care enough about our planet to be involved in so many near misses.

The pentagon is releasing more and more incidents of things being caught on camera now.

The point is that I could go on google maps or any number of other platforms that host satellite photography and comb through mile upon mile upon mile of landscape, spot lots of different airplanes and ships, etc. and not see a single UFO anywhere. I know theres occasionally articles about weird gak spotted, but so far all of them have turned out to be relatively mundane things that someone gets overly excited and jumps to incorrect conclusions about.

as to them being russian or chinese planes, unless they've learned to cancel inertia that doesn't explain some things that have been seen and recorded.

Not much of whats actually been recorded and publicized would require anything that advanced. Again, as I stated previously, the most extreme claims that would justify the "1000 years more advanced than anything we have" claims are all based on hearsay and things heard down the grapevine rather than capabilities documented on the publicly released film, or anything at all that was observed by Mk1 eyeball. In fact, the observed visual capabilities of these things are fairly mundane, they haven't been seen moving particularly fast or performing maneuvers that are particularly out of the ordinary, at least not as far as released video is concerned. Things like supposedly rapid accelaration/deceleration, crash dives/climb through extreme altitude in very short intervals of time, etc. have only ever been captured via radar and other sensors - but these are the exact sorts of observations that existing domestic and foreign electronic warfare systems are capable of causing, and have been causing for several decades.

Sorry, but the truth - at least as far as what has been revealed - isn't that sexy.

Ok, but if aliens DO care...why do they only seem to observe some tiny boring towns and rarely if ever do so over big cities?
If they hide, they are doing worse job of it than human photographers working for Discovery Channel. If they don't hide, they seem to be picking the worst targets to observe. Why even send manned ships instead of microsatellies in the first place?

Interesting have been reading about one of the 'sightings', reading about the tictok one (fighter aircraft with the camera mounted on the nose) and it did apparently include radar tracking as well as the visual/camera recording.

The figures quoted for the velocity (acceleration and top speed) are utterly insane and estimated at something like 100,000mph and at one point entered and emerged from water. So there is absolutely no way it could be within our current tech abilities. There is some discussion theoretical physics and manipulation of gravity curves (which does feel a little bit like 'a wizard did it' as a plot device I will admit, although at least it is acknowledging there has to be some sort of future tech involved.

But, I get the feeling there might be something more to this. Some quite 'learned' individuals are commenting - check out Eric Weinstein (i.e. not crack-pots) saying that there is going to be more to this and very possible some high-def video and that the releases so far have served to inure the public to the concept. We had the news last year in April and now the latest videos being de-classified, and there haven't been any mass 'Orson Welles reading War of the Worlds' type panic in the street. So as a next step we might possibly have some more video, perhaps high-def and something that can't easily be dismissed.

UFOs are a bit like Bigfoot and the Loche Ness Monster. We've had years and years of "sightings" and "eye witness accounts" and "abductions" and all such things and yet despite increasing monitoring we've never really had an increase in evidence. If anything we've had reductions.

At this point I'd argue that many people are simply at a state where they are open to believe it, but require quite substantial evidence/a major Tv campaign.


Although I do wonder how many people believe "ancient aliens"

this comes down to a single question

does alien live exist, or are we alone in the Galaxy

if yes, the chance that our planet was explored once in its history is >0
if no, well there are no aliens

@Kodos - I think this is why a lot more academics are willing to discuss the possibility now that we might not be alone, certainly in terms of life if not multi-cellular and intelligent life.
Think the discovery of such a vast quantity of Earth-like planets in our galaxy at least makes it a possibility.

But, you are right, the only thing we know for sure is that multi-cellular life has come into existence at least once!

 Overread wrote:
UFOs are a bit like Bigfoot and the Loche Ness Monster. We've had years and years of "sightings" and "eye witness accounts" and "abductions" and all such things and yet despite increasing monitoring we've never really had an increase in evidence. If anything we've had reductions.

At this point I'd argue that many people are simply at a state where they are open to believe it, but require quite substantial evidence/a major Tv campaign.

Although I do wonder how many people believe "ancient aliens"

Well, this is where the latest news comes into it. I'd be the first to say ancient aliens, pyramid landing platforms are nonsense (unless we are talking about Stargate of course).

It's the context of this latest info: Lots of eyewitness accounts by military personnel, radar data, camera tracking to verify that there is something there. And now the release of previously classified material by the Pentagon (with the promise that there is more to come). That we can't explain these UAP at all doesn't make their observations invalid.

 Flinty wrote:
I would prefer the Culture.

They would turn us into meatballs.

 Pacific wrote:
Interesting have been reading about one of the 'sightings', reading about the tictok one (fighter aircraft with the camera mounted on the nose) and it did apparently include radar tracking as well as the visual/camera recording.
The figures quoted for the velocity (acceleration and top speed) are utterly insane and estimated at something like 100,000mph and at one point entered and emerged from water. So there is absolutely no way it could be within our current tech abilities. There is some discussion theoretical physics and manipulation of gravity curves (which does feel a little bit like 'a wizard did it' as a plot device I will admit, although at least it is acknowledging there has to be some sort of future tech involved.
But, I get the feeling there might be something more to this. Some quite 'learned' individuals are commenting - check out Eric Weinstein (i.e. not crack-pots) saying that there is going to be more to this and very possible some high-def video and that the releases so far have served to inure the public to the concept. We had the news last year in April and now the latest videos being de-classified, and there haven't been any mass 'Orson Welles reading War of the Worlds' type panic in the street. So as a next step we might possibly have some more video, perhaps high-def and something that can't easily be dismissed.

That behavior (extreme speed/acceleration/deceleration/rate of climb, etc.) has only been recorded on radar and other sensors though and is not evidenced in any of the publicly released recorded material. All of those things are explainable as a result of electronic warfare capabilities which already exist which can spoof radar into seeing false positives or motion and behavior that isn't actually occuring, etc.

With regards to the object entering the water, there are claims that a sonar operator detected an object traveling 70 knots beneath the surface (admittedly pretty fast for something like a full size attack submarine, but maybe not for a smaller object) - but there is nothing to actually link that to the TicTac (not TicTok lol) or suggest that it was an aerial vehicle which entered the water and zoomed away beneatht the waves. Its linked to the TicTac by virtue of timing - it was detected within the same extended two week timeframe of events/activities/encounters, I believe the same day as one of the visual sightings of it, but there was no observed transition from aerial flight to underwater travel of the object in question.

There is FLIR video of a different object, captured years later, entering the water but there is nothing to suggest it was a transmedium craft which zoomed away beneath the waves, versus a drone which flew too low and hit the drink. It occurred at night and helicopters were not able to identify debris or the object itself in the water, but that just means that they coudln't find anyhing in the dark or that it sunk quickly enough for them to not notice it, etc. Hardly out of the ordinary.

The initial contact with the TicTac, which wasn't recorded and only reported verbally, was that it was sighted moving erratically about 50 feet above a section of churning water where there appeared to be some submerged object, but then the TicTac suddenly accelerated away as the Hornet approached (estimated approx. 5 miles). This is explainable fully within the realm of the mundane. The churning water was a (Russian/Chinese/other)submarine or submersible near the water surface (hence churning water) launching an aerial vehicle using a tether (hence seemingly erratice movement being buffeted by wind and wave). They released the tether (probably in an oh gak moment when they realized the fighter was coming in) and the object accelerated away (like you do). There are in my mind two likelihoods as to what the object in question is:

1. A pill-shaped balloon. They already exist.
2. A hybrid airship UAV using a cylindrical lifting body with internal ducted thrusters for stealth purposes. I don't know of anything exactly like this that exists, but all of these features exist independently of one another and could theoretically be combined to produce a new type of vehicle that even military pilots are not familiar with. In fact, there are similar things out there that already exist that have some (but not all) of these features. Its not out of the realm of possiblity or plausibility.

Launching balloons via submarines is hardly new (nor for that matter is launching UAVs but I digress) - the US Navy did exactly that with PALLADIUM in order to collect intel from Russian/Cuban radar installations during the Cold War. Basically the same concept, launch a balloon carrying a radar reflector from a sub, as it ascends it comes up on long range search radar as an unidentified object, then tracking and targeting RADAR systems are brought online in order to try to identify and target the object, at which point a variety of US aircraft and ships use a variety of different sensor systems to collect waveform data from said tracking/targeting systems. Subs have also been known in the past to use balloons to extend the range of their sensor and communications capabilities beyond the horizon. I.E. stick a radio transmitter/receivier, radar antenna, camera, or other such objects on a balloon and launch it while submerged or partially subjmerged on a tether to a higher altitude so you can extend coverage beyond the ~8 mi horizon at sea-level, then reel it back in and disappear when you're done. None of this is new, unusual, or necessarily even all that novel. A light enough balloon filled with helium could accelerate pretty rapidly if it were suddenly untethered, and thats before accounting for the potential of a ducted fan providing additional thrust/acceleration. And even veteran military pilots often make errors in visual identification and reporting with objectst that they have a lot of familiarity with (such as misidentifying a pair of US Army Black Hawk helicopters as a pair of Iraqi Mi-24 Hinds). Its not hard to imagine them misunderstanding what they are seeing if its something they have never seen before, from miles away, while traveling at hundreds of miles per hour.

With regards to the performance that has actually been recorded and released, what we have seen so far is pretty boring. The released TicTac video shows an object that is sitting basically stationary about 20k feet above sea level - pretty balloon like. It appears to suddely acclerate away at the last second, but the pilot who recorded it (Lt Graves) could not confirm that it actually did accelerate away, and admits that its entirely possible that the motion was the result of the TicTac being buffeted away by the Hornets jet wash - again, pretty balloon like. This video was recorded within 5-10 miles of the object, its unclear if Lt Graves ever actually made direct visual contact with it, but he was clear in his own assessment that it was floating/sitting in place and not moving much as he observed it at closer ranges.

When he made initial contact with the TicTac via FLIR, at approximately 20miles distance, he claims that the object was moving erratically (in his own words going from 50k feet in altitude down to a couple hundred feet in a split second and then back up to tens of thousands of feet, etc.), but for whatever reason this isn't part of the recordings that were released, and its questionable how true this is or if it has been exaggerated, etc. Why it would behave erratically at 20miles but remain more or less stationary at ~5 miles seems to be a bit mysterious...

...except that a systems engineer from Raytheon who helped design and test the FLIR system used to record the video has come forward with the suggestion that the erratic behavior that was observed was the result of a well-known glitch in the FLIR that caused it to jump between similar-looking targets because the system has difficulty resolving them as being separate and distinct objects. While the glitch/performance issues were massively improved upon, the engineer says they were never completely eliminated. Its not hard to posit that a largely featureless tictac shape might cause the FLIR to struggle in such a manner, jumping between a tic tac at 200 feet above sea level and another one at 50,000 feet, and another at say 24,000 feet, etc. This jives with some of the RADAR observations made in and around that time by the USS Princeton and other vessels, which indicated there were at times over a dozen such objects flying around out there. Its not hard to imagine that multiple such objects, at 20+ miles distance, fell within the FLIRs field of view and the system was cycling between them rapidly, and the pilot -presumably unaware of the performance issue- took this to be the motion of a single object rapidly climbing and diving rather than separate objects at different heights basically remaining stationary. It would also explain why Lt Graves might have never been able to make direct visual contact with it - because the object he was viewing in the FLIR wasn't where he thought it was. Likewise it explains why it suddenly stopped jumping around erratically and seemed to just float in place - as the other tic tacs left the FLIRs field of view the sensor remained focused on the one Tic Tac that remained within it.

Unidentified.
"nuff said" basicly.

I visualy cannot identify the passenger jets that fly above my home every hour i just see white dots during daylight and bright blinking lights at night, so they are by defination UFO.


In regards to "visitors", shure they exists. But have you as a human tryed to teach a monkey to write? That might be how they see us. Why would they bother to teach their tecno to us??
And it would do nothing but fule a new scale of conflict on this planet, humans aint programmed by nature to share.......

There have been lots of experiments relating to tool use and social communication by chimps and other apes, including people living among them. We train lots of animals by living alongside them.

I prefer to be the unseen master of my goldfish.

People just blow past the reality that by the only evidence we have to go off life on another world would most likely be exclusively microbial, and almost certainly not intelligent. Look at the history of life on earth.

But there are a lot of stars in the galaxy, so even if the vast vast majority of life is single celled, just the sheer number of data points would lead to other intelligent life existing as well. Otherwise you get back to believing that humans are somehow unique, which seems unlikely given the sheer number of available planets.

It also took many billions of years for humanity to evolve and that even required a mass extinction event to wipe out dinosaurs. It could be on other worlds the way life typically evolves (at least based on our current 1 data point of Earth) could end up with the chances of what we'd consider "intelligent" being very low. There could be many many worlds where life is highly evolved, it just never really develops technology.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
People just blow past the reality that by the only evidence we have to go off life on another world would most likely be exclusively microbial, and almost certainly not intelligent. Look at the history of life on earth.

And yet we are there. There's no reason to think we are only ones out there. It's a bloody big galaxy. You can put your imagination of how big it is to ^10 and still not big enough.

Bigger issue is there isn't feasible way to get info good enough from those distances. And any travel method is going to be basically one way trip. You can go there but by the time you would get back it's irrelevant.