I’m just curious and would like to know what any of you think about the Pentagon’s recent release of documents and video footage of UFOs (or UAPs as they call them nowadays)? My own take is nothing concluded. The footage is impressive, but proves nothing. We have to remember that UFO simply means UNidentified Flying Object, not “alien spacecraft from another world.” But that’s just my opinion. I think science will eventually be able to explain these things as natural phenomena or perhaps the Russians or the Chinese have developed some kind of high tech spy craft we don’t know about…YET! But we’ll see.
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My reaction is that life is full of baffling and unexplained things that are nevertheless un-actionable in that they produce only un-falsifiable hypotheses (or at least not falsifiable at our present state of understanding). So it is important to just be able to sit with uncertainty, to admit “I can’t explain it” or “I don’t know”.
True story. My wife had a first love in high school, a five-year relationship that ended amicably by mutual agreement upon them going separate ways to college, partly because of her dawning realization that the boy had some, shall we say, character flaws. They had very little contact over the years but she was aware that he had gotten into some major trouble for his role in an investment scam of some sort.
Last Thursday my wife mentioned in passing that she had awakened with an image of this guy’s face and a conviction that he was dead. She didn’t take it seriously. She hadn’t thought of him in probably a year and hadn’t spoken to him in maybe ten years.
Saturday a mutual friend notifies her that the guy died in the foreign country he lived in, probably of a heart attack. On Thursday.
Neither of us can explain that or come up with a hypothesis for how that would work that is falsifiable, so we don’t take it as proof of anything like, say, telepathy or whatever. It is puzzling and weird but so are a lot of things in life. C’est la vie.
I think it’s even less difficult to sit with uncertainty on UFOs, given that 100% of the video evidence is fuzzy reflection-like things at the edge of visual detection that can very easily be optical illusions with prosaic explanations.
I see it as a distraction. Another “look, squirrel” moment to produce a more benign conspiracy to reduce the concentrated attention on the Epstein “conspiracy”.
Of all the things the Pentagon should be concerned with, UFO’s are about as important as discovering Atlantis…
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As you say, the U in the acronym says it all.
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I say its about time for them to be released.
I have a lot to say about the UFO debate as I am–after all–a professional science fiction writer, and I get irritated when well-intentioned people think that I should abandon skepticism because I write material that is intended to entertain and–perhaps–encourage my readers to question authority.
Having said this, I think that anyone with the technology to travel between the stars would also mean that we would have no way of seeing them if they don’t want to be seen.
Also, the application of Occam’s Razor suggests that misidentification, wishful thinking, and malice are much more likely than extra-terrestrial aliens when explaining UFOs.
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Exactly, on the one hand no objective evidence for alien life visiting this planet, on the other hand Occam’s razor suggests simpler explanations for the unexplained. So, keep an open mind, but not so open that it lets all sorts of paranoid unevidenced crap fall in.
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