The government has previously used UFOs to divert attention.
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
The "flying triangles" seen from US naval vessels look like jet drones. [1] Those are commercial products, priced around $10,000. One of those zipping around looks like a UFO. Some versions can hover pointing upward; they have enough thrust.
There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and military UAVs.
Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
The B-21 is getting close to operational, the NGAD is in development, and god only knows what sort of experimental drone tech is being worked on in the dark. That adds up to a lot of test flights and more, and a lot of reasons to throw out the same old "UFO" chaff to cover it.
I have to say that X-44 does look similar in shape to some of the UFO pictures I've seen. Especially the one where the UFO flies past the plane window.
Dude, you can't even get a good picture of the moon on most phones without some AI assistance. How the hell are you going to snap a clear photo of something much smaller and dimmer?
A challenge for the incredulous, bring me some high quality cellphone pictures of airplanes at night without using any extra equipment like tripods, lenses or stabilizers.
smartphones are optimized for selfies thus the lens is super flat. Any photo I try to take at a distance looks awful, and moon photos are even worse. You'd be better off taking these pictures with a 1960's film camera with an actual lens. Not only did standard cameras have 4.5k resolution (35mm) but the lens allows you to zoom in!
The other day while I was in the countryside I saw a military drone (I live near an airport doing military maintenance). It was the second time in a few months. I had my phone in my backpack, yet I didn't take any photos. Somehow the four seconds or so wasn't enough for me to make the decision.
> and yet sightings of UFOs (or any cryptid) have been at an all-time low.
Source? I see the opposite when I Google around for reports per year. There was a dip during COVID, buts it's easy to attribute that to people not being outside, and it's picked right back up since.
Well, there are plenty of UFO recordings using iPhones.
I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S. military. Sadly most of it is classified.
Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
No? Why would it, any more so than what came before? We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I guess (must not have limited resources, like, at all) all using physics we're not even on the verge of discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict what we have discovered, but also leave no to-us-detectable trace anywhere we can detect, in their visits or with their sensing equipment or their civilization itself, but also also be pretty bad at hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but also also also good enough that we can't quite prove they're real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away, instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.
"Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the rest still holds, too.
The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's not technically impossible that Russell's Teapot exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens" barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and does miracles sometimes".
> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
Isn't the paranoid atmosphere cold war and the increase in weapons testing, satellites, spy balloons, etc. a much simpler explanation?
I think the whole atmosphere around governments spying, covering things up, and generally engaged in a lot of sloppy covert action is bound to make UFOs seem more credible.
probably a good number of drunks/kooks and then probably a handful of unknown phenomena that would have a reasonable explanation if we had better photos/descriptions.
*edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in origin.
I will say my thoughts on the matter:
Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only planet with life)
Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low chance
Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united states? near 0% chance
This is a contradiction. Not that eye witness testimonies are completely without merit, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and eye-witness testimony alone does not meet that standard....no matter who the witness is.
I am not saying we know for a fact that extra terrestrials have landed on planet earth. I agree with you, there is still not enough evidence.
However I am tired of reading so called skeptics dismissing people who come forward claiming they have seen UFOs as kooks or drunkards.
There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Video recordings that can't be explained, radar observations etc. Please also realize that most of what has been recorded so far is classified as top secret, according to testimony from people with direct access to this evidence and like I said in my parent comment, we also have plenty of credible eye witness reports.
It's sad that people aren't more curious - not everything is about distracting from Donald Trumps misadventures with classified documents...
> There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Nah. I'd wager it's more likely to be earthlings from an alternate reality or that time travel turns out to be feasible and it's our descendants, than that it's space aliens ("but one of those is entirely based on speculative physics and both require our model of the universe to be pretty damn wrong, to allow such travel" yeah, I know—that's how incredible I find the space alien hypothesis). I don't think those are credible guesses, either, but I'd say they're more likely to be true than "it's aliens". That explanation's got a lot of things working against it.
There are also tons of people who have claimed to see ghosts, tons of medieval peasants that saw witches, tons of people accused of summoning the devil in the 80s.
There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.
that was covered by the second portion of my comment. There are a few that are legit we don't know what that was. If we had better details/pictures/video of them we might be able to say better.
In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems low though.
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-...