
More UFOs Than Ever Before - prismatic
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/26/more-ufos-than-ever-before/
======
archgoon
> Lazar believed these were the components of a nuclear reactor powered by an
> element then unknown on earth: element 115, which, once dismissed as
> fantastical, was synthesized into existence in a Moscow lab in 2003

The element isn't fantastical, and anyone with a basic understanding of
chemistry would expect it to exist (albeit, not for very long); Lazar's
attributed properties to it were (and are). As a side note, since 2010, the
entire bottom row of the Periodic Table has now been filled out with synthetic
elements (and names since 2016).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscovium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscovium)

------
DanielBMarkham
There is an epistemological truth here that is overlooked: for any non-
reproducible phenomenon, physical or psychological, we can make no judgments
on what happened.

The default answer is always going to be "no" for some people and "yes" for
others. These are the folks who just have to have a firm answer. The actual
answer is "nobody knows"

I also want to believe, so I tend to be extremely skeptical of any UFO
stories. But looking throughout history, I have to admit that I am in no
position to make a decision one way or another. A bunch of really respected
guys made some observations of a thing with instrumental evidence that we
don't understand? Cool. There's something we don't understand. Spinning up
some tale of the atom bomb or aliens? That's just to sell books to the rubes.
We don't know. That's okay.

 _If_ there are other intelligent lifeforms around, and _if_ they have any
developmental parallels in their society to ours, they probably think of us as
nothing more than a particularly advanced form of fungus. And _if_ they were
to come here to observe, they'd either use a blind or come and go in such a
way to create the kind evidential noise we currently see in the public record.
So while I wish something is going to come along and settle this, it ain't
going to happen.

------
scottmsul
I think there's probably something to the UFO phenomenon. However I'm
convinced Bob Lazar is a fraud. It's a tricky case because certain parts of
his story are verifiable, like that he worked at Los Alamos and that his
friends did see a moving light in the sky. The best explanation I've seen is
here:

[http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-
strange...](http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-
places/looking-at-the-bob-lazar-story-from-the-perspective-of-2018/)

[http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-
strange...](http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-
places/bluefire-main/bluefire/particle-beams-and-saucer-dreams/)

The explanation is he worked on particle accelerators as a mechanic (not a
physicist), and they were shooting particle beams into the sky. However since
this is all likely classified he would be forced to stick to his UFO story.

~~~
clubm8
Why would someone want to shoot a particle accelerator into the sky? (The
article mentions plasma balls, but as a non physicist I wonder still "Why?")

The US military probably does not want plasma balls because they look pretty.

~~~
scottmsul
Radar spoofing, it's mentioned in the second link. But the author admits it's
only a guess.

------
goda90
The argument that the government wouldn't be able to cover something like that
up is kind of weak imo. They had just spent years keeping the Manhattan
project under wraps and they were starting to ramp up all sorts of spying and
secrets surrounding the Cold War. And for info that does get out(like numerous
eye witnesses), we've seen real life examples of how effective the strategy of
treating believers like they're nuts is when it comes to other government
programs like PRISM. People talked about NSA spying for years but got
dismissed until we got some big document dumps.

------
JoeAltmaier
There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'. Every
time someone sees a jetliner compressed by humidity and heat into a row of
dots (the windows) around a cigar shape, they're convinced its the first time
anyone has ever seen such a thing.

The burden of proof for a 'real' ufo is heavy, and nobody makes any real
effort. Its reasonable to dismiss the entire topic as overheated descriptions
of normal phenomena.

~~~
leeoniya
crown flashes and ball lightning have to be some of the strangest

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CPk0mKVnnCs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CPk0mKVnnCs)

~~~
Gravityloss
Whoa. It's a completely different class of dynamic phenomenon, unlike anything
I've ever seen. Thank you for posting.

------
dmoy
Unmentioned in the article (or I missed it because I just woke up) is the fact
that lockheed's skunkworks started pumping out weird shit around the end of
WWII. Seems like that would have some effect.

------
lostgame
Wow. An interesting nod to the incredibly fascinating third season of David
Lynch's 'Twin Peaks', whose brilliant eighth episode and the accompanying
Secret History of Twin Peaks and Final Dossier novels were astounding examples
of historical fiction. I was quite impressed as to just how deep that rabbit-
hole went.

~~~
criddell
Every time I read a Paris Review article linked from here, I'm glad I did.
They've published a lot of great stuff that you can easily read in a short
sitting.

------
exabyte
"Robert Jamison, a retired USAF nuclear missile targeting officer, told of
several occasions having to go out and 're-start' [nuclear] missiles that had
been deactivated, after UFOs were sighted nearby. Similar sightings at nuclear
sites in the former Soviet Union and in Britain were related. ... The
incidents were never officially explained."

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-
dea...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-
nukes/)

------
fucking_tragedy
We're in an era where there's an arms race in the lightweight and unmanned
aircraft space between the most powerful nations on Earth.

Of course there are going to be more UFO sightings domestically. Where else
are we going to develop and test these things?

It's well known that the government is happy to feed conspiracy theorists
disinformation in order to protect classified information[1], like the
existence of secret weapons.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men)

------
reggieband
I have a more dark and cynical outlook on UFOs and their continued presence in
our culture. I watch Joe Rogan and I saw most of his interaction with Lazar as
well as his even weirder interaction with Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge. In
both cases I got the impression that they were dupes. Tom had these crazy
stories about high-level military officers bouncing him around between each
other. They all seemed to be giving him a wink-and-nudge that he was on to
something and he should keep digging. They actively encouraged him to publicly
share whatever he learned.

I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military guys
pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying the
waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified aircraft. At
the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public thirst for
unearthing military secrets. When guys like Bob Lazar and Tom DeLonge show up
they must be happy to get free dissemination of their programs.

I'd even go so far to believe that Bob could have been one of a few that were
set up by the military using an elaborate stage-show with the hope of creating
false leaks. The idea of the military staging the kind of things Bob reports
after psychologically filtering for types of people who believably exaggerate
is not beyond possibility in my mind. You may not have to work very hard at
tricking someone if you find the kind of person who really wants to be
tricked.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
> _I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military
> guys pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying
> the waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified
> aircraft. At the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public
> thirst for unearthing military secrets._

This is the thesis of the documentary "Mirage Men".

------
carapace
This is very well-written, from my point of view it's a showcase of how the
mind works to prevent cognitive dissonance.

The author compares meeting the neighbors with meeting _God_.

> My relationship to UFOs is like my relationship to God.

I call this "cognitive leverage". There's a sort of if-then structure: IF
aliens exist THEN something-something-God. The THEN-clause is too
psychologically immense so the brain invalidates the IF-clause and organizes
thought and perception in alignment with the result.

> I want to believe, but find it hard.

> I wish I could see one for myself, as I wish I could see the Virgin Mary
> floating above the yellow roses in my backyard.

Would you want to meet somebody that made that big a deal about it? It would
be wildly uncomfortable for anyone but a megalomaniac, eh?

The reason the "G-men" don't openly talk about the UFOs, and the reason the
spacemen don't land on the White House lawn, is right there: it would cause
too much trouble because humans are nuts.

One classic way that this sort of denial of reality presents itself is in
trivially invalid reasoning, for example when Cohen postulates that we can
hide the existence of ultra-tech aircraft but not UFOs.

And here is a textbook rationalization:

> Belief in UFOs is really no stranger than any other sort of belief, no
> stranger than a belief in prophets or ancient codes.

That fails to account for e.g. his own neighbor who "had been in the military
when he saw the UFO." and who presumably believes in UFOs only because he has
seen one. He wasn't raised in a UFO cult, eh?

------
antonvs
> Some suggest it was the first atomic bomb [that] sent a shock wave across
> the universe. It registered in distant solar systems as deep-sea earthquakes
> register with us. It was a clarion call. It said: DANGER! It meant the
> previously harmless human race had gotten ahold of matches that could
> immolate all of creation.

...or all of planet Earth, whichever comes first. Hint: it's not the former.

~~~
exabyte
Assuming that UFO's are being controlled by an alien species and that they are
in fact more frequent since the event of nuclear explosions on earth, then I
think the safest assumption we can make is that the nuclear event sent a
strong enough signal to notify them of our existence.

If that's the case, I don't think we should speculate too quickly on how they
would interpret the signal.

However it does seem like there has actually been action taken by an alleged
UFO. Look at the following link: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-
personnel-ufos-dea...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-
ufos-deactivated-nukes/)

There's a youtube video with testimony given by a commander that I can't find
at the moment, but it's pretty insane.

~~~
dogma1138
Well the problem with that is that they would need to be passing by only a few
light years from earth to detect it, if it’s even detectable on astronomical
scales.

It’s not that they came here centuries after the nuclear tests, because even
if they have FTL that is the shortest time frame that makes sense unless a
nuclear explosion causes some signals that some how move faster than light
which both violates physics as we know it and would be really unlikely to go
unnoticed based on just how much data we have from nuclear blasts and nuclear
reactors.

~~~
exabyte
yeah but you're also assuming that they're subject to the same dimensions of
time and space as we are

~~~
dogma1138
The signals still needs to get there so unless they have listening posts or
are in the neighborhood the timing doesn’t match.

And in general the gamma burst form a nuclear explosion is so minuscule on
galactic scales that it’s unlikely they can even pick it up over the
background noise.

A spectral analysis of the atmosphere of the earth and the detection of
fission borne radioactive isotopes is a much more likely method which means
they would need to be actively observing the earth to detect it and still the
same light speed capped timeline is in effect.

------
nerf_javascript
The end of the article is really crazy when you look at it -- Stimson growing
up w/ great-grandma who was told stories by GW as a child, advising Truman
about the atomic bomb. That "one life" thing really shocks you into
perspective...

In less than 200 years, we went from rioting farmers at the mercy of nature to
the most powerful war-faring nation on the planet with the ability to turn a
war in which other superpowers struggled. We went from the bloodiest battle
numbering over a thousand dead to obliterating entire cities and hundreds of
thousands of people with just two bombs.

I would've thought that as we raise the standard of life in our society, we'll
inevitably create technology that will be used to become more efficient at
killing, but it's actually turning out to be the opposite -- as we get better
at waging war, we're developing the technology that will raise our standard of
life.

~~~
Sharlin
To be fair, in 200 years _most of the developed world_ went from bickering
nobles and rioting peasants to a bunch of powers capable of waging megadeath
war. Industrialization is like that. Honestly, the transition of the Soviet
Union was even more impressive, going from an agrarian backwood to a hydrogen-
bomb-wielding superpower in less than fifty years, albeit cutting some corners
in the process.

------
allnightowl
Maybe it’s hysteria, but I’ve seen 2 clear examples of UFOs/UAPs with my own
eyes and I can assure anyone reading this that multiple types of craft either
not of this world or ultra top secret are a part of our reality.

~~~
nprateem
But what about this author who's never seen one who says they don't exist?
Surely you'll reconsider what you saw!?!?

------
mortenjorck
_> I wish I could see one for myself, as I wish I could see the Virgin Mary
floating above the yellow roses in my backyard. When I said this to my
neighbor, who runs a blog called I Saw One Too, he shook his head sadly and
said, “No you don’t. You really don’t.”_

The one time I thought I was seeing something unexplainable out on the highway
at night (thankfully revealed, after ten minutes or so, to be the oddest
atmospheric occlusion of the moon I’ve ever seen), the one thought on my mind
was “man, I really don’t want to be one of those people who’s seen a UFO.”

~~~
criddell
> man, I really don’t want to be one of those people who’s seen a UFO

You just reminded me of the Saturday Night Live sketch _Close Encounter_. It's
one of the funniest things they've done.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfPdYYsEfAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfPdYYsEfAE)

------
aplummer
I’ve always assumed people were seeing vehicles like this one
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar)

~~~
Animats
Oh, that thing. It was a lemon. A cool looking lemon, but a lemon.[1]

There are three videos:

#1: Classified SECRET. It hasn't flown yet, but it's going to be really great.
See this cool mockup!

#2: Classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY. It flies! Well, hovers about 1m off the
ground in ground effect. Wobbles too much. But with our elaborate testing
program, a NASA wind tunnel, and maybe with more powerful engines and active
stabilization, it can work!

#3: UNCLASSIFIED. Well, here we are flying this thing around the back lot at
NASA Ames as a hovercraft. Not too useful, but cool looking.

It's a nice video history of a failed project.

Meantime, the Army was also funding the UH-1, the "Huey" helicopter, which
started flying around the same time and was far more useful. So the Army
killed off the disc project and ordered a few thousand Hueys. The USAF,
meanwhile, had figured out that swept back wings worked in high-speed flight,
and didn't need to fool with discs.

[1]
[https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/army_saucer/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/army_saucer/)

~~~
725686
Holy cow, the Hiller Flying Platform rocks!

~~~
Animats
If you're in Silicon Valley, there's one at the Hiller Aviation Museum. They
have a good collection of strange VTOL craft.

------
spease
First thing I thought of is this:
[https://xkcd.com/1235/](https://xkcd.com/1235/)

I haven’t ever heard of a corresponding increase in UFO videos. It’s awfully
convenient none of these suspected aliens buzz crowds full of people with
4k60Hz/40MP phone cameras.

~~~
DrBazza
Came here to post that exact link.

Cameras have never been better and in such widely available quantities, in
just about every cell phone, and UFO pictures have never been worse.

Also Occam's Razor. Far more likely to be an Earth-bound phenomena.

Roswell: has technology to fly light years, but crashes in (possibly bad)
Earth weather. Erm, ok.

------
UFODocThrowaway
[https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/assessment-s...](https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/assessment-
situation-statement-position-ufos.pdf)

------
Animats
Where are the Instagram photos?

~~~
twic
Any time a meteor or whatever goes anywhere near Russia, there's dashcam
footage of it. If there are UFOs, they're avoiding Russia.

------
thaumaturgy
I was hoping in the beginning that this would present some interesting new
explanation for UFO ... hysteria, but it didn't really get there.

The argument from governmental incompetence isn't terribly compelling to me.
The occasional leaks of vast cover-ups -- like the extent of the NSA's
surveillance apparatus -- suggest that the government is in fact quite good at
keeping sensitive information hidden from the public.

The UFO phenomena appears to me to track more closely with the rise of the
extraterrestrial in popular sci-fi. It starts with the War of the Worlds radio
broadcast in 1938, made even more compelling perhaps by the events of World
War I and the technological advancements that would have seemed to be
happening at break-neck speed at the time, and seen through the lens of a
global tension as events began leading up to World War II. It was based on a
story written in the late 1800s which was just another of many popular British
invasion works of fiction at the time, just with an element of science
fiction, owing to Wells' training as a science teacher.

From there we have the rapid progression of Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Space
Ghost, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Unsolved Mysteries, The X Files, and a whole
pile of other shows, movies, comic books, and magazines. Frequency of UFO
reports [1] seems largely US-centric and tracks pretty well with metrics like
number of hours of TV watched [2]. It also correlates well with the most
common locations for the sightings: in rural areas, who have in recent years
shifted their interest in conspiracy theories from the great UFO coverup and
towards QAnon and the deep state and all that.

So while the nuclear age may have inspired some of the fiction, it looks to me
like it's the entertainment age that created UFO mass hysteria. For the people
involved, any phenomena they experienced -- strange lighting, whether real or
imagined, or sleep paralysis, or the delirious effects of a sleep aid, or,
maybe, proximity to experimental aircraft -- would all be best explained by
the fiction they were most familiar with: extraterrestrials.

As cultural interest has shifted towards domestic issues, and we have begun to
explore space ourselves, and ubiquitous surveillance has spread to every
person's pocket but has yet failed to produce any clear, incontrovertible
evidence for alien spacecraft, reports of UFO sightings have likewise been
trending downwards.

[1]:
[http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html](http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxevent.html)

[2]:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-
did-tv-watching-peak/561464/)

edit: as I was writing this, ~reggieband posted a comment to this thread that
pretty sweetly exemplified my main points: he was watching a Joe Rogan
podcast, and thinks that Bob Lazar is being duped into being a part of a
government conspiracy to conceal classified aircraft.

------
rasz
more sightings, less pictures

------
bitL
If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most
likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe
even originating life. Who knows, maybe this is some alien university project
on how to make life on a distant planet from the scratch? We can observe that
cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they
make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; maybe somebody was doing alien
PhD in a better bipedal design in carbon-based life forms and just planted
results here to see how they proliferate...

If you look at religions, they all resemble optimization algorithms to build
civilizations with different attributes; one could seed different "rules" to
different parts of the world and observe which rules become the dominant ones
and which kind of civilizations they bring. Moreover, having a conflict
between different civilizations that couldn't be reconciled by any other way
than a total annihilation, it could provide a needed impetus for progress as
the permanent conflict it brings forces people to develop quickly and throw
out inefficient ways to survive. From this point of view, globalization might
be worse for our progress as species; USA vs China competition might be a
needed conflict to progress in any meaningful way.

~~~
ben_w
> We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we
> have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design;

This totally misrepresents evolution. DNA isn’t programmed to adapt to local
changes, but rather it’s _not_ programmed to perfectly reproduce without
errors. Some errors are useful and get passed on, most errors are either
useless or harmful and don’t. And lots of small changes equals a large change
— we don’t have to be able to leap a mountain in a single bound to reach the
top, either literally or metaphorically, just make a lot of small steps.

~~~
bitL
The problem with this thinking is that it completely disregards the time
complexity/probability of that happening. So having certain "bits flipped" in
DNA in a certain sequence in multiple representatives of the same species in
the same location for the change to propagate has too low probability,
especially when the number of instances of biological species was usually
quite low due to constant struggle for survival; the complexity of growing
e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is again unthinkable with our
current computing power (we can't even model that properly with reinforcement
learning on fastest supercomputers). So as a conclusion, theory of evolution
is fitting for small adaptive changes but is either too optimistic or outright
wrong for large jumps inside species; we are obviously missing something very
important there. Listening to Dawkins I can agree with his local adaptations
arguments but then he suddenly makes a jump and says "and this happens all
over millions of years" and that somehow makes that happen, which is a
position of faith and not science. Better would be if biologists finally
admitted we have no clue about mechanism that allows these jumps; references
to random sampling are laughable and fitting freshmen at a university and I am
saddened this is accepted - we are likely going to miss some great discoveries
because somebody will be insisting on this ridiculous hypothesis instead of
figuring out the proper algorithm behind it.

~~~
ben_w
> the complexity of growing e.g. a new leg because you somehow need it is
> again unthinkable with our current computing power (we can't even model that
> properly with reinforcement learning on fastest supercomputers).

On the contrary, the _complexity_ is so trivial it’s something I did in 30
minutes, on a laptop, in 2008, as a “prove it to myself” response to a young-
Earth Baptist Creationist.

What we can’t do is _simulate full-lifecycle organ-scale multi-cell protein
folding in real time_ , but that’s a very different thing.

~~~
bitL
What do you mean? You trivially simulated the process of figuring out that an
animal needs to grow a new leg/organ in response to some environmental
situation or to gain "an upper leg" against its adversaries? Are you serious?

~~~
ben_w
Genetic algorithms are a very easy to implement form of AI. The hard part is
to create a fitness function which does what you actually want — In the wild,
reality and competitors are your fitness function, and none needs to be
created; conversely, in a simulation the fitness function is necessarily
artificial, and can be made to reach any goal you want, from “compose a song”
to “write the rules for an AI for this video game so I don’t have to” to
“discover a new superconductor” to “design a clock” to “learn to walk”… etc.,
and all of those are real examples.

Separately, as an algorithm, evolution also has easily characterisable failure
modes (local minima), and we do observe those failure modes in organic
examples.

But, to emphasise, the fact artificial evolution requires us to write our own
fitness functions is merely an implementation detail; these algorithms _work_
because _evolution works_. They produce novel solutions without the authors of
the programs creating the solutions.

~~~
bitL
Genetic/memetic algorithms are just a rough approximation of a certain
selection mechanism we see in the nature, like what Deep Learning is to brain.
Making a conclusion that some trivial algorithm with even complicated custom
cross-over function can be translated to real-world is as much fantasy as
thinking one could upload consciousness to TensorFlow. I never understood how
anyone calling themselves a scientist could make such a leap, but obviously
it's popular and people made a "scientific" career doing just that...

~~~
ben_w
> Genetic/memetic algorithms are just a rough approximation of a certain
> selection mechanism we see in the nature

This is irrelevant to my argument. If the simplified version is capable of
doing what you have said is unexplained, it is unreasonable to assume that the
more complicated version will fail to be capable of the same.

> I never understood how anyone calling themselves a scientist could make such
> a leap, but obviously it's popular and people made a "scientific" career
> doing just that...

Occam’s Razor. Start with the simplest possible model, make a prediction, look
carefully at reality to see if you were wrong (an act which is easier the
simpler the model), and only update the model when reality disagrees with it.

Me coding a genetic algorithm can easily reproduce the entirety of any
specific human’s genome if I pick the correct fitness function. Pretty
pointless to do so beyond proof of concept, but proof of concept is enough to
make the point in this case.

