[US] Department of Defense formally released three Navy videos that contain ‘unidentified aerial phenomena.’ … When the videos were published in 2017 and 2018 by The New York Times …, they gave new hope to those looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. … ‘it’s time that we make progress to understand the extraordinary technology being observed during these events.’ (
Interesting article and comments, Robin. Thank you. It came up as the first result, when I did a google search for "defeating anti-UFO bias". I performed that search, just now, to start to try to figure out how to best publicize my new book, "ET Faces", in which I present some of the thousands of the ETs' self-portraits and other face artworks that I have discovered, in NASA and ESA space telescope images.-This is a really-huge discovery but it turns out that if no one knows about it, nothing happens! So I now need to somehow get the word out. (Any suggestions would be much-appreciated.)-Since you are probably curious to see some of the images that I found: When looking at the book's page, on Amazon, the "Look Inside the Book" link, just above the book's cover image at the upper left, should enable you to look at the sample images, in the book. I will try to post the URL and then also an image of a screen of sample images, below. If the URL doesn't work, for some reason, you should be able to go to amazon and search for either 'Thomas P. Gootee' or 'ET Faces'.-https://www.amazon.com/dp/B...-https://uploads.disquscdn.c...
When I look at deep sea fish, those fish feel alien; they behave in ways I do not expect and have an appearance I do not expect. I would expect extraterrestrials and interdimensional travellers to be alien to me in the way deep sea fish are alien. The objects in the videos are not alien like that; ergo, these objects are human, but some advanced type of human technology. They feel and behave like human objects, but like human objects that move faster than other objects I have encountered; but they do not move or behave in ways that feel alien or inhuman.
The videos date from 2004 and were illegally circulated in the mid-2000s. The US government declassified the videos in 2020; that’s 16 years. To me, it’s the length of time that would be sufficient for later iterations of the same craft to have been developed and those versions captured on video in 2004 to be irrelevant so far as secrecy goes. Based on this, I suggest that the objects are experimental US military vehicles of a design now surpassed—hence it was safe to declassify these old videos this year.
Counterpoint: there is a secret human organisation that has developed these devices independently of any government. The organisation usually suggested is a remanent of the Nazis, based in Antarctica. To me, this feels like a coping strategy on the part of the people who would prefer the Nazis to have won the war—although it also appeals to people who are frightened of the Nazis and their demonic potential, since the Nazis are secular demons for us. It is unlikely: if ruthless Nazis had such advanced weapons, why not use these wonder weapons to bring their old foes to their knees? It makes no sense.
If the devices were built by some other “third force”, why haven’t they capitalised on their immense financial potential or undertaken world domination?
Conclusion: experimental US military device, now rendered obsolete by sixteen years of technical advance.
Surely less than .01%.I would judge "reports" absent video with the same assumptions though - they are waaaay more likely to not be explained by aliens. A long list of simpler explanations precedes the Tsoukalos hypothesis. Do UFO videos released by the Navy carry extra authority as alien evidence? https://www.nytimes.com/199...
As a rule of thumb, truths tend to become clearer as data comes in while false impressions tend to remain unclear. For example, five months ago a novel coronavirus was unheard of; now we know the genomes of over a dozen variants, the typical progression of the disease and several atypical progressions, the risk factors, the places it hits hardest (nursing homes), etc. ad nauseam (literally, in 22% of reported cases).
If we thought we saw aliens in 1947 and we still think we might have seen an alien, we probably didn't. If we had, by now we'd be looking a picture of a crab-squirrel and saying, "We call him Jimmy. He's a refugee from (nasal squeal followed by sound of exploding harmonicas). His diet is mostly WD-40 and ground seashells. He hates dogs.".
That's a good one. But have we looked? Would we notice some strange bacteria or virus like thing in a field or parking lot, particularly if it wasn't related to life as we know it?
"Reports" as in "I saw the face of Jesus in a piece of toast once", or videos?
If there are 3-100k+ videos of discrete UFO sightings, then I would lean heavily towards the broadest and most literal definition of UFO - these are more likely to be illusions/measurement errors, experimental craft, and yes, hoaxes, etc than aliens. And alien technology is really low on the list of likely explanations. I mean really low.
My bias here is that we know for certain that humans engage in trickery and myth perpetuation for <reasons>. Crop circles and sasquatch come to mind in the private sector. Potemkin villages, inflatable tanks, and yep - UFOs, come to mind in the public sector. We also know from at least the NYT article that people invest a personal sense of hope into the alien existence question, so like agent Mulder, they want to believe.
I just think it's odd that the government still flirts with this stuff and ask that we all press on that issue before entertaining aliens. I don't want to repeat the contradictions one must ignore to accept the "alien conclusion" at face value, but it seems like hilarious "13 monkeys"-level stuff that the federal government - not the Sun or TMG - released these videos and nothing more, and atop their history of UFO fakery, some segment of the population gives it enough credibility to leap to alien tech as a plausible answer vs. looking them in the eye and asking what they're really about.
I'm not saying I'm immune to such thinking myself in other areas, but it would seem the more interesting question is "wut? this is still a thing? why are you (USG) still doing this? Who's the actual audience and why? Is this taking the place of a "big god" for a some segment of population? Is this not aimed at US population but at another government/population? How does this stuff fit within the foreign or domestic policy strategy over the decades or is it actually just the recurring chaos of tomfoolery by some analysts?"
Or we can argue about how many aliens might fit within the spacecraft. I don't know. Seems to sidestep the glaring question of a government that may either be idiots or assumes we all are.
The other day whilst driving by an airport, a large inbound 747 cargo plane appeared to hang motionless in the air about 100m off the ground. Was it physically behaving this way? Of course not.
A better exploration of this topic would be to examine why the government persists in this coy game of releasing bits of info implying aliens, but never the full work product that would come from leveraging the vast "weight of the state" to get to a real answer.
I mean, if it's more likely (highly likely) that these videos are doctored or at best ignorant measurement error, shouldn't we come at this from a different angle? It would imply that this is disinformation - a very long-running campaign at that - and to what end?
If one really thinks that the US government has zero non-alien explanation for these videos, then there's a lot more corroborating data that they are not releasing, and then one must ask, "why release this shite and not the other shite?"
In either scenario, the giver is distrusted. So too must the gift be distrusted.
Here is a similar plausible theory. There are a small number of aliens visiting our planet for unknown reasons. They don't want us to know they are here because it would be very disruptive to us, and they don't want to disrupt us. Occasionally, despite their efforts to not be seen, there is some mistake that happens and they are seen. At that point they have two choices:
1) Ignore the sighting since it is likely that the sighting will be discredited or forgotten. This has happened many times and is the easiest thing for them to do.
2) Erase the sighting through some very large effort, for example rewind time. This is a lot of work, very expensive, or risky so it is not worth the effort and expense for small sightings that will be ignored anyway.
The aliens do not know ahead of time whether a particular sighting will turn out to be important or not. As time passes it becomes increasingly more expensive or risky to rewind time or otherwise erase the sighting. The Navy sightings seemed for many years like they were going to be ignored and now so much time has passed that it is expensive to rewind time to erase them.
This theory explains why there are occasional sightings, but they are poorly documented or not credible. The real sightings like a crash that leave evidence trigger an immediate rewind. Immediate rewinds are relatively cheap.
I also assume that aliens, like us, are not uniform. There is a spectrum of aliens with some that are very meticulous and careful, and others that engage in less controlled and risky activities. The ones we spot are like teenagers having fun on a Friday night after a drinking party. When they engage in a risky activity and are sighted, they are embarrassed and try to hide that fact and hope the parents never find out. Sometimes years pass before the parents find out and at that point it is very hard to undo the sighting.
Interesting article and comments, Robin. Thank you. It came up as the first result, when I did a google search for "defeating anti-UFO bias". I performed that search, just now, to start to try to figure out how to best publicize my new book, "ET Faces", in which I present some of the thousands of the ETs' self-portraits and other face artworks that I have discovered, in NASA and ESA space telescope images.-This is a really-huge discovery but it turns out that if no one knows about it, nothing happens! So I now need to somehow get the word out. (Any suggestions would be much-appreciated.)-Since you are probably curious to see some of the images that I found: When looking at the book's page, on Amazon, the "Look Inside the Book" link, just above the book's cover image at the upper left, should enable you to look at the sample images, in the book. I will try to post the URL and then also an image of a screen of sample images, below. If the URL doesn't work, for some reason, you should be able to go to amazon and search for either 'Thomas P. Gootee' or 'ET Faces'.-https://www.amazon.com/dp/B...-https://uploads.disquscdn.c...
When I look at deep sea fish, those fish feel alien; they behave in ways I do not expect and have an appearance I do not expect. I would expect extraterrestrials and interdimensional travellers to be alien to me in the way deep sea fish are alien. The objects in the videos are not alien like that; ergo, these objects are human, but some advanced type of human technology. They feel and behave like human objects, but like human objects that move faster than other objects I have encountered; but they do not move or behave in ways that feel alien or inhuman.
The videos date from 2004 and were illegally circulated in the mid-2000s. The US government declassified the videos in 2020; that’s 16 years. To me, it’s the length of time that would be sufficient for later iterations of the same craft to have been developed and those versions captured on video in 2004 to be irrelevant so far as secrecy goes. Based on this, I suggest that the objects are experimental US military vehicles of a design now surpassed—hence it was safe to declassify these old videos this year.
Counterpoint: there is a secret human organisation that has developed these devices independently of any government. The organisation usually suggested is a remanent of the Nazis, based in Antarctica. To me, this feels like a coping strategy on the part of the people who would prefer the Nazis to have won the war—although it also appeals to people who are frightened of the Nazis and their demonic potential, since the Nazis are secular demons for us. It is unlikely: if ruthless Nazis had such advanced weapons, why not use these wonder weapons to bring their old foes to their knees? It makes no sense.
If the devices were built by some other “third force”, why haven’t they capitalised on their immense financial potential or undertaken world domination?
Conclusion: experimental US military device, now rendered obsolete by sixteen years of technical advance.
There are PLENTY of things that were not clear in 1947 that are still not clear today.
Surely less than .01%.I would judge "reports" absent video with the same assumptions though - they are waaaay more likely to not be explained by aliens. A long list of simpler explanations precedes the Tsoukalos hypothesis. Do UFO videos released by the Navy carry extra authority as alien evidence? https://www.nytimes.com/199...
Fingerprints may be another thing to look for. Perhaps SETI should fund a search for alien microbes and fingerprints.
What % of the things that you ever saw did you take videos of?
As a rule of thumb, truths tend to become clearer as data comes in while false impressions tend to remain unclear. For example, five months ago a novel coronavirus was unheard of; now we know the genomes of over a dozen variants, the typical progression of the disease and several atypical progressions, the risk factors, the places it hits hardest (nursing homes), etc. ad nauseam (literally, in 22% of reported cases).
If we thought we saw aliens in 1947 and we still think we might have seen an alien, we probably didn't. If we had, by now we'd be looking a picture of a crab-squirrel and saying, "We call him Jimmy. He's a refugee from (nasal squeal followed by sound of exploding harmonicas). His diet is mostly WD-40 and ground seashells. He hates dogs.".
That's a good one. But have we looked? Would we notice some strange bacteria or virus like thing in a field or parking lot, particularly if it wasn't related to life as we know it?
"Reports" as in "I saw the face of Jesus in a piece of toast once", or videos?
If there are 3-100k+ videos of discrete UFO sightings, then I would lean heavily towards the broadest and most literal definition of UFO - these are more likely to be illusions/measurement errors, experimental craft, and yes, hoaxes, etc than aliens. And alien technology is really low on the list of likely explanations. I mean really low.
My bias here is that we know for certain that humans engage in trickery and myth perpetuation for <reasons>. Crop circles and sasquatch come to mind in the private sector. Potemkin villages, inflatable tanks, and yep - UFOs, come to mind in the public sector. We also know from at least the NYT article that people invest a personal sense of hope into the alien existence question, so like agent Mulder, they want to believe.
I just think it's odd that the government still flirts with this stuff and ask that we all press on that issue before entertaining aliens. I don't want to repeat the contradictions one must ignore to accept the "alien conclusion" at face value, but it seems like hilarious "13 monkeys"-level stuff that the federal government - not the Sun or TMG - released these videos and nothing more, and atop their history of UFO fakery, some segment of the population gives it enough credibility to leap to alien tech as a plausible answer vs. looking them in the eye and asking what they're really about.
I'm not saying I'm immune to such thinking myself in other areas, but it would seem the more interesting question is "wut? this is still a thing? why are you (USG) still doing this? Who's the actual audience and why? Is this taking the place of a "big god" for a some segment of population? Is this not aimed at US population but at another government/population? How does this stuff fit within the foreign or domestic policy strategy over the decades or is it actually just the recurring chaos of tomfoolery by some analysts?"
Or we can argue about how many aliens might fit within the spacecraft. I don't know. Seems to sidestep the glaring question of a government that may either be idiots or assumes we all are.
The are well over 100K UFO reports out there; do you think they are all doctored?
The other day whilst driving by an airport, a large inbound 747 cargo plane appeared to hang motionless in the air about 100m off the ground. Was it physically behaving this way? Of course not.
A better exploration of this topic would be to examine why the government persists in this coy game of releasing bits of info implying aliens, but never the full work product that would come from leveraging the vast "weight of the state" to get to a real answer.
I mean, if it's more likely (highly likely) that these videos are doctored or at best ignorant measurement error, shouldn't we come at this from a different angle? It would imply that this is disinformation - a very long-running campaign at that - and to what end?
If one really thinks that the US government has zero non-alien explanation for these videos, then there's a lot more corroborating data that they are not releasing, and then one must ask, "why release this shite and not the other shite?"
In either scenario, the giver is distrusted. So too must the gift be distrusted.
Here is a similar plausible theory. There are a small number of aliens visiting our planet for unknown reasons. They don't want us to know they are here because it would be very disruptive to us, and they don't want to disrupt us. Occasionally, despite their efforts to not be seen, there is some mistake that happens and they are seen. At that point they have two choices:
1) Ignore the sighting since it is likely that the sighting will be discredited or forgotten. This has happened many times and is the easiest thing for them to do.
2) Erase the sighting through some very large effort, for example rewind time. This is a lot of work, very expensive, or risky so it is not worth the effort and expense for small sightings that will be ignored anyway.
The aliens do not know ahead of time whether a particular sighting will turn out to be important or not. As time passes it becomes increasingly more expensive or risky to rewind time or otherwise erase the sighting. The Navy sightings seemed for many years like they were going to be ignored and now so much time has passed that it is expensive to rewind time to erase them.
This theory explains why there are occasional sightings, but they are poorly documented or not credible. The real sightings like a crash that leave evidence trigger an immediate rewind. Immediate rewinds are relatively cheap.
I also assume that aliens, like us, are not uniform. There is a spectrum of aliens with some that are very meticulous and careful, and others that engage in less controlled and risky activities. The ones we spot are like teenagers having fun on a Friday night after a drinking party. When they engage in a risky activity and are sighted, they are embarrassed and try to hide that fact and hope the parents never find out. Sometimes years pass before the parents find out and at that point it is very hard to undo the sighting.
Hadn't seen it. I can't judge its contribution in 1990, but it seems to add little value today.
Interestingly, we never observed a contamination by alien life, like microorganisms, which should happen in case of landings.
Did you see also "Five Arguments Against the ExtraterrestrialOrigin of Unidentified Flying Objects"https://www.scientificexplo...
Interesting.