UFOs
What's going on?
What is going on with these things?
I was pretty young when I first encountered stories about 'flying saucers" but never gave much credence to the idea that the government was hiding evidence of aliens at Rosswell.
Though I've always wondered about these things in the sky that all sorts of credible people have reported.
I've never jumped to the conclusion that it must be aliens - there was no information about aliens - just stories of unexplained things in the sky.
Soon we will get to see a long awaited report about all the US government knows about UFOs (Now called UAP's for unexplained aerial phenomenon)
I'm very curious to see what it reveals.
But I don't expect anything very breathtaking.
The media reports lately have been of Navy pilots reporting UAP's. We get enigmatic crude videos of (I guess) a pilot's heads up display and audio of "what was that!!!" They report on objects not shaped like airplanes moving in ways that airplanes never could. I take Navy pilots as generally reliable witnesses. I don't think they have a conspiracy to deceive us.
And yet, and yet . . . they are reporting things that are physically impossible as far as I know and I actually know a lot on a layman level.
That is a problem.
I'm not prepared to toss out physics to accommodate anecdotal reports.
I think there must be another explanation. I don't know what it is.
There's an interesting article about this at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/opinion/ufo-sightings-report.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
The author, Adam Frank is part of a team that has a NASA grant to search for extra terrestrial civilizations
He's convinced that there are many. It seems that the universe contains a billion trillion planets where life could arise. It isn't likely that it only arose here.
As a scientist he says we need to treat UFO's as a scientific matter.
What is the hard data evidence - as opposed to anecdotal reports? How do we gather that evidence? The anecdotal reports are significant enough that we should apply significant resources to that project.
We should find out what's going on there.
One of the issues here is the reliability of eye witness reports. There is this idea that an eye witness can report what really occurred. They were there on the spot and saw with their own eyes. It is very well known that that is not reliable. It's even less reliable when it depends on remembering
Professor Frank points out that the pilots were perceiving these objects often through things like HUDs - that is what they see is provided by very complex computer systems I can imagine how that could be hacked to produce what they see by unfriendly actors without the objects being there. Radar data about the objects would be great. That would report concrete data about position and velocity. But even that can be hacked.
But let's not be that paranoid. Let's imagine that there are aliens hiding from us and flying around in enigmatic phenomena - if we gather as much data as we can about the UFO's we may get a clue to things in physics we don't know about
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.