
How UFO culture took over America - pseudolus
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/aliens-real-ufo-area-51-nevada-pentagon-history-1046067/
======
cowboysauce
Growing up I was really into UFOs and watching UFO documentaries is still a
guilty pleasure of mine. One of the things that struck me is that people who
investigate UFOs are their own worst enemies. Often, while watching
documentaries, people will say "I've never believed in UFOs until I saw one".
For the longest time statements like that really confused me. How could you
not believe that people sometimes see things that they can't identify? Then I
realized that to most people UFO means alien spacecraft. UFO people have
pushed the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's totally aliens" narrative to
the point that the entire field is tainted.

As the article mentions, it seems like the idea of aliens visiting the Earth
has become almost some sort of religion. The other thing is that actual
science isn't very sexy. I'm reminded of the Hessdalen lights, unidentified
aerial lights that have been appearing over a valley in northern Norway for
several decades. There's a monitoring station there with all sorts of
instruments, but there still isn't a definitive explanation for the lights.
"These are alien spaceships" is definitely a much more thrilling explanation
than "we have several possible explanations, mostly involving some sort of
plasma in the atmosphere".

One of the documentaries I was watching was by the History channel and it was
really bad. They didn't even attempt to present prosaic explanations and took
everything at face value. One episode even talked about native Americans being
descended from aliens and being able to summon UFOs. I know the History
channel is complete trash, but this series was apparently done in
collaboration with MUFON.

The entire thing has been tainted so completely that it can actually interfere
with real science. The study of upper atmospheric light was likely held back
for years because pilots who saw it were afraid to mention that they saw
lights in the sky.

These things are almost certainly worthy of study, but the entire field of
interest needs to be completely cleansed of the woo and pseudoscience that
plagues it.

~~~
risk000
>I know the History channel is complete trash, but this series was apparently
done in collaboration with MUFON.

The history channel is not complete trash. They have good experts on there and
their productions are beautiful - what are you comparing them against?

>These things are almost certainly worthy of study, but the entire field of
interest needs to be completely cleansed of the woo and pseudoscience that
plagues it.

Yeah, the guy who invented Newtonian physics believed in an all-powerful
Creator-God who created the world in a week or so. It would be fun to see you
sit down with him and explain to him that the basis of his worldview was, in
your opinion, 'woo'.

>The other thing is that actual science isn't very sexy.

Actual science also doesn't explain very much. It punts on the question of
consciousness and on the question of ultimate things - the two most
significant questions that a person seeking 'scienza' could probably ask.

~~~
cowboysauce
>The history channel is not complete trash. They have good experts on there
and their productions are beautiful

The History channel uncritically presents any wild ideas that get them
viewers. Here are some of the things they presented during an episode on
Native Americans and aliens:

* Native Americans are descended from aliens

To start, I'm going to gloss over the unsavory implications of saying
something that could be re-worded as "certain ethnic groups aren't fully
human". They gave absolutely no evidence for this, no explanation as to why
native Americans in particular and not Europeans or Asians. The entire thing
reeked of the "noble savage" trope. Plus the ignorance in assuming that there
weren't dozen of different native tribes.

* Alien spacecraft use native reservations as refuges from the government because of existing treaties

The evidence they gave for this was an eye-witness who claimed to see a craft
that was being followed by a government helicopter, only for the helicopter to
break off its pursuit after the craft crossed onto native land. So, these
crafts can travel between stars, but can't outmaneuver a helicopter? Also,
call me cynical, but I can't imagine that the government would deign to
respect native treaties in such a situation. What could the tribal government
even do to protest a violation of such treaties? Who would take them
seriously?

* Native Americans can telepathically summon/control UFOs, allegedly due to their alien heritage

I'm an American and yet I can't summon predator drones. I can't even summon an
Uber without a credit card. Seriously, what kind of authentication system is
that?

* The aliens gave the natives medical knowledge

Except when it really matters, like during those smallpox epidemics. They
couldn't even share knowledge about variolation?

>Yeah, the guy who invented Newtonian physics believed in an all-powerful
Creator-God who created the world in a week or so. It would be fun to see you
sit down with him and explain to him that the basis of his worldview was, in
your opinion, 'woo'.

And yet you never see chemistry textbooks based on Newton's alchemical
theories. You do see textbooks on Newtonian physics because the work that
Newton started was empirically tested over centuries and when its predictions
failed, new theories were created and empirically tested to supersede them.

>Actual science also doesn't explain very much.

Science explains the ebb and flow of the tides. It explains the dance of
eclipses and the never-ending cycle of the seasons. What explanation comes
from a psychic who claims to channel the spirit of a 10,000 year old alien who
lived in Atlantis?

------
Insanity
Lex Fridman recently had David Fravor on his podcast and they spoke about
this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E)

~~~
dau
After having discarded every sighting reported by individuals as unverifiable
and unplausible so far, this one is finally different. It's the combination of
respected fighter pilots, instrument recordings with authenticity asserted by
Pentagon, visual confirmation of the object and multiple observers involved
that makes this incident unique and remarkable.

~~~
Barrin92
there's actually nothing remarkable about it and in fact most of the more
exciting claims of the footage can be put into context with basic
trigonometry[1], and Lex should have questioned much of what Fravor said in
that podcast. I hope it doesn't turn into the next Joe Rogan show.

[1][https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M](https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M)

------
Animats
Mandatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1235/](https://xkcd.com/1235/)

If only there was a network of automatic telescopes watching the sky 24/7.

Oh, there is.[1] GEODSS, with pairs of automated telescopes, picks up
satellites, larger space junk, and incoming missiles and asteroids. It has a
star catalog and a satellite orbital catalog, and reports anything it doesn't
already have on file.

One of the GEODSS sites is no longer used by the USAF, and it's now run by MIT
to detect near earth orbit asteroids.[2] The University of Arizona also has
Spacewatch, with two automated telescopes.[3] Those two between them have
discovered several hundred thousand minor asteroids.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Near-
Earth_Asteroid_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Near-
Earth_Asteroid_Research)

[3] [https://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/](https://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/)

~~~
peter303
With a billion cellphone cameras out there there are both things that have
become more believable because there is video now. And things less believable
Because no one has really captured them. An example of the former is tornadoes
which footage was rather rare until cameras become commonplace. An example of
the latter is Bigfoot with not much new imagery.

Now what category would you assign UFOs?

~~~
cowboysauce
Was the existence of tornadoes really ever in doubt? I mean the connection
between tornadoes and hook echos on weather radar has been know since at least
the 50s and Ted Fujita is well known for his work on tornadoes during the 70s.
I was really into meteorology as a kid during the late 90s and early 2000s and
I don't remember ever reading anything that implied that there was doubt that
tornadoes existed.

~~~
ncmncm
Tornados are supposed to be pretty common in LA, where they are called,
instead, "weather events".

There are lots of places that have more or less frequent tornadoes where real
estate people and homeowners would rather they not be mentioned.

~~~
joubert
“Although Los Angeles County has never experienced the monsters that terrorize
the midwest, tornadoes, albeit smaller ones, are not unknown here. Since 1950,
at least 42 tornadoes were reported to have occurred in Los Angeles County.
Most were quite small, covering short distances and doing little or no
damage.”

—
[http://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we701.php](http://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we701.php)

------
Hickfang
Assuming these UFOs are vessels from off-earth and want their presence to
remain hidden then why do the space aliens persist in buzzing US air bases.

~~~
postalrat
Why would I assume they want their presence to remain hidden?

~~~
Hickfang
> Why would I assume they want their presence to remain hidden?

Why don't they land in time Square or go on a reality television program?

------
pp19dd
Form whatever idea you will of all this chaff, one thing is indisputable. You
yourself can file a FOIA request at the Pentagon requesting "cockpit videos
cleared for release to Louis Elizondo in the Fall (September-October) of 2017"
and you'll get a copy of those videos directly from the horse's mouth.

As an ultra-skeptic who is drawn toward primary sources, I've been following
the cluster of these stories closely for years with an eye to their
provenance. More I thought about all this, I think the whole thing collapses
to two life-changing possibilities, rationalizing my way down directly from
the videos:

1) No new physics.

Cockpit videos - faked by military for a psyop campaign, coordinated with
patriot testimonies by credible individuals. Navy patents filed by the US Navy
on behalf of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais and document leaks added to effect more
confusion. There's a precedent for this type and scale of operation going back
to the Star Wars program days, where Reagan himself participated in attempting
to drain the Soviet Union's R&D budget.

If the videos were planted for personal gain by a soon-to-be-laid-off
employee, Elizondo, and then engineered into credibility through the FOIA
chain of custody - it explains why and how, but doesn't explain everyone
else's participation, unless the military chose to exploit the incident and
launch a psyop campaign in its wake. If the Navy patents were entirely
unrelated to all this, perhaps an innocent case of fraud, incompetent bosses
doubling down on made up claims by an employee yoked to their own careers.

2) Discovery of new physics.

Cockpit videos - show maneuvering capabilities we're plainly unfamiliar with.

Leaked Carrier Strike Group report details that behavior and those
capabilities in far greater detail than speculating at potato-quality camera
smudges will:
[https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...](https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf)

Pilot's testimony of the encounter - shared by Insanity in comments here -
demonstrates the pilot's expertise and credibility in greater detail:
[https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4264](https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4264)

Patents filed by the US Navy on behalf of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais - imply
expensive engineering of impossible inventions without being able to
adequately explain the physics behind them: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
zone/31798/the-secretive-in...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
zone/31798/the-secretive-inventor-of-the-navys-bizarre-ufo-patents-finally-
talks)

Reports of other unknown craft stalking secret nuclear depot sites - imply
someone remotely observing neutron emissions, which I understood is beyond our
ability to detect or pinpoint at distances over a few dozen yards:
[https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35674/the-bizarre-
myst...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35674/the-bizarre-mystery-of-
unexplained-aerial-incursions-over-loring-air-force-base)

Tangentially related, we have two claims to a technology that if proved
working will revise physics as we know them, Mach Effect thrusters and the
famous EmDrive. The lesser known one is a result of Dr. Jim Woodward's
divergent theory of inertia as a result of gravitational interactions of
everything in the universe. He started work on his theory and prototype drive
after claiming to have seen a flying object that violated known physics and
therefore he knew they must work somehow and started working it out backwards:
[https://www.wired.com/story/mach-effect-thrusters-
interstell...](https://www.wired.com/story/mach-effect-thrusters-interstellar-
travel/)

Partial resolution:

There are two papers by Dr. Martin Tajmar out of Dresden due to be released in
February 2021. He's tightly lipped about what's in them, but he's an expert on
the matter. He and his team built and launched a solid state gallium ion drive
into space and demonstrated their orbital correction capabilities. Over the
years he tested several prototypes of both the EmDrive and the Mach Effect
thrusters and dismissed them in various iterations of his thrust measurement
experiments, the latest published works describing the observed miniscule
effects as thermal vibrations and interactions of the Earth's magnetic fields
with power lines in the test chamber. But they were inconclusive.

This time around, Tajmar built a magnetic shielding chamber meant to exclude
those effects. One paper is for analysis of the conventionally microwave-
described EmDrive, and other one is for its laser version. Mark your calendar
and the papers might put a nail in parts of this coffin.

The publication date is somewhat telling. The papers were meant to be released
in the Space Propulsion 2020 conference this month but due to Covid-19 they
were delayed until March. It's a stretch that a significant scientific
breakthrough would be delayed, but, on the other hand he is a German.

Tajmar himself wasn't hopeful prior to the latest measurement experiment:
"This is such an extraordinary claim that you must, as Carl Sagan said, have
extraordinary proofs. You must be really super sure on that. Without that,
it's just a fairy tale.”

~~~
throwaway189262
I'm a fan of military aircraft theories. Both videos are off the US coast in
waters patrolled by military.

The perfect place to test something you don't want anyone else to find if it
crashes. And over the ocean, the best place to test something radioactive.

I think nuclear drones could have this kind of physics defying performance.
It's funny to think the US would build thousands of nuclear reactors, weapons,
boats, but no planes. Especially when they were proven viable in the 60's.

There's nuclear planes out there. Probably drones. I'm sure of it

~~~
blincoln
The objects in the Navy footage behave basically the same as the WWII-era "foo
fighters" that the article mentions.

Seems me that this eliminates the "advanced aircraft built by humans"
explanation.

I also think it's extremely unlikely that any hypothetical aliens would have
the technology to send vehicles to the Earth, but be unable to do better than
semi-randomly swarm around warplanes for decades.

IMO, it's an obscure natural phenomenon, like red sprites, and we just haven't
figured out what it is about the environments whete they've been encountered
that makes them more likely to be seen by military aviators and less so by
civilian aircraft.

I'm far from the first person to suggest this, but one of the recurring
problems with imagining alien encounters is that we tend to base it on
encounters between different branches of the human race, e.g. the First
Nations meeting European colonists for the first time. But statistically, what
are the chances of intelligent life evolving on another planet and developing
spacecraft at anything close to the same time as we did? Basically zero.
Either they haven't even developed electrical systems yet, or they did so
hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. If we ever run into
spacefaring aliens, they won't have vehicles that are the equivalent of an
F-22 to our Sopwith Camel or even an ancient Chinese warship. They'll have
technology that's so far beyond our own that we may not even be able to
understand why someone would want to accomplish what it does. i.e. as Alastair
Reynolds once put it, the equivalent of trying to explain to a stone-age
proto-human what ETERNAL BLUE is. We won't even have the context to
understand.

~~~
postalrat
I think you can view biology as an advance technology that is far beyond our
understanding and capability to reproduce. We don't have any of the problems
you claim we would when trying to understand it.

------
peter303
Shared delusions can be fun and entertaining. As long as they dont rob you or
your family important resources or make you do dangerous things.

------
1kGarand
I will just leave this here.

[http://kirkmcd.princeton.edu/JEMcDonald/mcdonald_aaas_69.pdf](http://kirkmcd.princeton.edu/JEMcDonald/mcdonald_aaas_69.pdf)

------
zwkrt
The UFO shows that I see on the history channel and the like are completely
disheartening to me. The problem is not the people believe in UFOs or that
there are shows about them; rather it seems the show is intentionally stroking
a specific type of right wing conspiracy theory regarding the fact that the
government is hiding information from the public and that the government’s
power comes mainly from their exclusive harnessing of alien information and
alien technology.

I see it as a direct and logical continuation, in fact even a normalization,
of the conservative tendency to disregard research, experts, and complicated
logical reasoning. It is much easier to think that aliens gave us the
transistor than it is to realize that there are in fact people out there who
are very smart and dedicated. The fact that these types of shows are shown on
a channel called “the history channel” borders on criminal irresponsibility in
my view.

~~~
ColanR
> right wing conspiracy theory regarding the fact that the government is
> hiding information from the public

You mean information like the existence of the surveilance that Snowden
proved?

~~~
retrac
That notion was taken credibly by sensible people even before the Snowden
leak. Snowden was hardly the first leak, after all, just the most spectacular.

If the US government can't even keep its own spy programs secret without
repeated leaks, it's hard to believe they've managed near-100% success with
their alien guests since '47.

~~~
cat199
agreed hard to keep secrets, but compartmentalized research into abstract
weapons/physics/non-earthlings is probably easier for employees to digest
ethically speaking than breaking the law to exert control over your fellow
citizens

------
segfaultbuserr
UFO is real by definition, and after reading a number of Wikipedia articles
that cite various official reports by many governments, I started to believe
that evidences already showed that there are definitely some (1%?) UFOs which
cannot be attributed to known natural phenomena or man-made technologies. Of
course, I don't think they are alien spacecrafts, and alternative
explanations, such as unidentified natural phenomena are more likely. However,
there are two problems regarding to UFOs. The first problem is, it's not a
single phenomenon, but a class of different phenomena, potentially hundreds of
different things. The next problem is, their appearances are entirely
unpredictable, you cannot just wait at a place and keep observing it with a
rack of instrumentation. These two problems mean that UFO will continue to be
an open question for many decades, if not forever, and most researches will
not recognize them as an genuinely unknown physical phenomena.

Consider Ball Lightning [0]. It's real, and there are 200 years of anecdotal
reports from everywhere in the world. Yet, until recently, it was not
recognized as a real phenomenon by many researchers in the scientific
communities - for good reason, "I never saw one in my life, and why should I
believe these random stories on ball lightning, if there's no irrefutable data
recorded by a scientific instrument?" But because of its unpredictable nature,
it's highly unlikely to carry a scientific observation to begin with. It was
only scientifically observed in 2014, for a duration of only 1.6 seconds [1],
by a coincidence. If arguing for the existence of ball lightning is that
difficult, now imagine the case of UFO.

I believe a lot of data can be potentially gathered on UFO - acoustic,
optical, radar, or X-ray measurements are all possibilities. However, because
of the not-a-single-phenomenon and unpredictable nature of UFOs, such
scientific investigations will never be funded. And even if there are funded,
such projects will be a wild-goose chase on unpredictable UFOs, and such UFOs
will disappear before you are ready to do some observations on them. It's
unlikely to find anything significant. And don't even mention that UFO's
popular connotation of aliens alone is enough to discredit the potential
scientific efforts of investigations.

On the other hand, hypothetically, imagine that UFOs could always appear at a
specific geographical locations in a predictable manner, only then the members
of academia will start treating it seriously and real researches will be
funded. But it's not going to happen.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning)

[1] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24886-natural-ball-
li...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24886-natural-ball-lightning-
probed-for-the-first-time/)

------
shadowprofile77
First of all, it's important to distinguish very clearly between UFOs and
"aliens from another world visiting us". The two are not at all necessarily
related and the public discourse, especially in mass media, UFOlogy dogma and
literature, only weakens arguments because of this forced connection based on
tenuous leaps of logic.

By definition, any unidentified object in the sky is a UFO unless it's clearly
identified, as many here have already mentioned. Thus, for one thing, many
UFOs can simply be this: things that may or may not be natural but which have
some rational explanation and have not been clearly labeled as such.

However, and more importantly I think, is the possibility that even a
genuinely inexplicable UFO event (such as the 1978 nuclear storage events
linked to in another comment here [1], the 2004 Nimitz UFO incidents and the
2014 and 2015 events among others) may not be the classical aliens in the sky
concept that gets pushed despite little substance, though it might indeed be a
case of unknown objects moving around human installations with a certain
frequency. The latter is a highly documented, definitively observed phenomena,
the former is very shaky assumption and absolutely nothing more. Evidence of
unknown objects moving in seemingly incredible ways abounds. There is no
evidence at all of those objects being ships from another world in the galaxy
or Universe.

What this boils down to is that UFOs as a genuinely, currently inexplicable
phenomena could very well be completely real. They might even be corporeal
expressions of an intelligent nature. This however doesn't have to mean that
they came from space or from aliens in any classical sense. They could have
come from a completely unknown source that doesn't get nearly as much
attention as the UFOs = aliens supposition. Certain authors have covered this
with their own speculations and arguments, such as Jacques Vallee, Micheal
Persinger, and even others with more sensationalist arguments like John Keel.
None of them are necessarily less likely to be wrong than those who argue that
we're dealing with aliens, and at least some of these arguments seem more
plausible than the dogmatic skeptic stance of completely disregarding all
sightings as anything except humans being confused by normal, known phenomena.

An important sub-point to the previous paragraph is that the government might
seem to be playing stupid not because of some giant coverup of secret
knowledge or much less clandestine contact with extraterrestrials, but the (to
me) much more likely possibility of a general attempt to cover up that they
also have no clue what's going on whenever they come across cases that none of
their resources let them explain. It's possible that (as is common with any
kind of organizational thinking) they detest looking stupid and prefer looking
ambiguous to admitting ignorance of something completely outside their ability
to control or monitor clearly.

1\. [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-
in...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-inventor-of-
the-navys-bizarre-ufo-patents-finally-talks)

