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entirelyuseless's avatar

Not a UFO specifically, but certainly unidentified images.

https://www.churchpop.com/2...

You cannot trust the point of view here which takes for granted a specific (religious) explanation, but the fact remains that thousands of people, multiple times, saw images that no one has been able to explain.

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

I thought that any stellar siblings of our sun would, by now, be distributed across the whole milky way as a result of differing orbital speeds and accumulated drift over 2 billion years. Wouldn't it be pretty weird for aliens to cross the galaxy and only visit our star but not expand generally?

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disqus_qiWRQ1aQ38's avatar

There have been several unexplained mass sightings of enormous black triangles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

They're probably secret US military tech though

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RobinHanson's avatar

Obviously simple life will be more common. I don't see how that changes this analysis.

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Michael Vassar's avatar

How could mass delusions possibly be all that unlikely?

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Benjamin Cole's avatar

Perhaps life is more common than thought, galactically. After all, life emerged on volcanic vents at the bottom of the Pacific.

This makes the background story more plausible.

My reservation is the current "pro-UFOs" buzz revolves around radar and thermal images, and perhaps they can been faked or misunderstood.

It remains supremely irritating that every ballyhooed credible eyewitness, like the Navy pilot, never takes an effing picture or video.

Show me the money----just one good, non-fake video) of a UFO ----backed up by numerous witnesses.

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RobinHanson's avatar

I mean to be merging such stories.

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TGGP's avatar

"The UFOs as aliens hypothesis is only as believable as the most a priori believable story for how it could be true"Shouldn't it be the sum of independent probabilities of different stories multiplied by a second probabilistic statement about UFOs given each story? If the top two most likely stories were roughly equally likely, you certainly wouldn't settle for just one.

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Romeo Stevens's avatar

My favorite take so far is that it's future humans experimenting with warp drive and not even realizing it creates backwards temporal effects.

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RobinHanson's avatar

Naked DNA doesn't last remotely as long as DNA within an organism.

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Petter's avatar

> star system in this cluster during this period. Some kinds of life could last that long.

What kinds of life did they have in mind here? This article seems to suggest that it would be hard: https://www.nature.com/news....

Would some other kind of RNA be better here?

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lump1's avatar

Just one small, tangential quibble: non-alien explanations of UFO phenomena would not require *mass* delusions - just ordinary individual delusions and misperceptions. Unless you know something I don't, there has never been a mass-sighting of a UFO that remains unexplained. There are unexplained sightings by individuals and small groups, but the fact that such phenomena too-conveniently avoid population centers is one reason I think UFO explanations should follow the model of how we explain paranormal phenomena in general. There are also prima facie credible people with hard-to-dismiss accounts of having spoken to dead ancestors. Until the dead become splashier (and why wouldn't they?), I won't take these stories at face value.

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