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A couple weeks ago the United States Navy declassified two videos of "unidemtified aerial phenomena" encountered by fighter pilots in 2004 and 2015. The videos have been circulated online for some time now, but this official acknowledgement confirms that versions on the Internet are the real ones and not fakes created using special effects.
I like to give Robert Anton Wilson's answer whenever I'm asked if I believe in UFOs - of course I believe in unidentified flying objects, because I encounter numerous unidentified non-flying objects in the course of my regular life. The real question has a similar answer - I believe that it's practically a given that intelligent alien life exists somewhere in the universe.
I do think whether or not they've come to Earth from other planets and encountered humans, though, remains an open question. Personally I'm not willing to dismiss it out of hand, but I haven't seen a lot of good, verifiable evidence of contact. There's plenty of evidence of what UFO enthusiasts think are their spacecraft, but when you start digging into most of the contactee accounts all sorts of issues come up.
As a magician, it seems to me that it's more likely contactees are encountering spirits. Accounts similar to "alien abductions" are as old as humanity, they just didn't call them aliens before the space age. Look into accounts of "demon attacks" and "faerie abductions" and you'll see what I'm talking about. People today just filter them through a technological lens because we live in a technological society.
The basic problem with aliens coming to Earth is that especially for living beings, interstellar travel is hard. The only ways we've figured out to do it consume a huge amount of energy, even if we do figure out how to make the right kinds of exotic matter and so forth. Convert a star from matter to energy and you're good. Otherwise, you probably aren't.
That suggests it's unlikely that an alien race would do it on a lark, or do it just so they can, as Douglas Adams once put it, land in front of some poor sap no one will ever believe and walk around in front of them making beep-beep noises. It's like, you harnessed the energy of a supernova and spent years hurtling through space for that?
But I did have a bit of a brainstorm thinking the issue over recently with regard to the spacecraft. There is one sort of vehicle that might fit most of the criteria for alien spacecraft - or, more accurately, alien space probes. It's called a Von Neumann probe. Mathematician John von Neumann came up with the idea when he was trying to figure out the most efficient way to explore the universe.
A Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating spacecraft. Think like the space probes we send around the solar system, but with some sort of integrated maker tech that allows them to build copies of themselves when they encounter the right raw materials. So you send out one probe, and centuries later there could be thousands or hundreds of thousands or even more.
If a few of these probes showed up in our solar system, they might very well have a directive to get as much information as possible about the Earth and at the same time hide from the locals. I probably would program it that way. Probes like these arriving on Earth "running on automatic" could explain why UFOs do their best to disappear when they confront fighter planes and the like.
We're not quite to the point where we could build one of these yet, but I'm willing to bet we could have the technology to do it within a century or so. The capabilities exhibited by UFOs show higher technology than ours, so that seems to be feasible - more feasible than interstellar ships piloted by real live aliens.
Anyway, I have no real idea what's going on, and the Von Neumann idea is more a thought experiment than a theory with any real evidence. I do hope that someday we get to the bottom of the UFO mystery and figure out once and for all what these things are.
The U.S. Navy has officially acknowledged three incidents reported by F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilots of "unidentified aerial phenomena" -- what most refer to as UFOs -- and released video of the encounters.
The Defense Department on Monday published the videos of the separate incidents, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, "which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017," officials said in a statement.
"After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena," according to Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough.
The Navy has previously stated the videos did belong to the service, but did not give credence to the idea its pilots have confronted alien spacecraft.
I like to give Robert Anton Wilson's answer whenever I'm asked if I believe in UFOs - of course I believe in unidentified flying objects, because I encounter numerous unidentified non-flying objects in the course of my regular life. The real question has a similar answer - I believe that it's practically a given that intelligent alien life exists somewhere in the universe.
I do think whether or not they've come to Earth from other planets and encountered humans, though, remains an open question. Personally I'm not willing to dismiss it out of hand, but I haven't seen a lot of good, verifiable evidence of contact. There's plenty of evidence of what UFO enthusiasts think are their spacecraft, but when you start digging into most of the contactee accounts all sorts of issues come up.
As a magician, it seems to me that it's more likely contactees are encountering spirits. Accounts similar to "alien abductions" are as old as humanity, they just didn't call them aliens before the space age. Look into accounts of "demon attacks" and "faerie abductions" and you'll see what I'm talking about. People today just filter them through a technological lens because we live in a technological society.
The basic problem with aliens coming to Earth is that especially for living beings, interstellar travel is hard. The only ways we've figured out to do it consume a huge amount of energy, even if we do figure out how to make the right kinds of exotic matter and so forth. Convert a star from matter to energy and you're good. Otherwise, you probably aren't.
That suggests it's unlikely that an alien race would do it on a lark, or do it just so they can, as Douglas Adams once put it, land in front of some poor sap no one will ever believe and walk around in front of them making beep-beep noises. It's like, you harnessed the energy of a supernova and spent years hurtling through space for that?
But I did have a bit of a brainstorm thinking the issue over recently with regard to the spacecraft. There is one sort of vehicle that might fit most of the criteria for alien spacecraft - or, more accurately, alien space probes. It's called a Von Neumann probe. Mathematician John von Neumann came up with the idea when he was trying to figure out the most efficient way to explore the universe.
A Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating spacecraft. Think like the space probes we send around the solar system, but with some sort of integrated maker tech that allows them to build copies of themselves when they encounter the right raw materials. So you send out one probe, and centuries later there could be thousands or hundreds of thousands or even more.
If a few of these probes showed up in our solar system, they might very well have a directive to get as much information as possible about the Earth and at the same time hide from the locals. I probably would program it that way. Probes like these arriving on Earth "running on automatic" could explain why UFOs do their best to disappear when they confront fighter planes and the like.
We're not quite to the point where we could build one of these yet, but I'm willing to bet we could have the technology to do it within a century or so. The capabilities exhibited by UFOs show higher technology than ours, so that seems to be feasible - more feasible than interstellar ships piloted by real live aliens.
Anyway, I have no real idea what's going on, and the Von Neumann idea is more a thought experiment than a theory with any real evidence. I do hope that someday we get to the bottom of the UFO mystery and figure out once and for all what these things are.
2 comments:
In the summer of 2017 I saw two white orbs of light one underneath the other in the early night sky in the direction of Antares. They grew in intensity and in size for a few seconds, showing up as being larger than a full moon. Then it was as if they turned off completely.
The following summer I saw only one such orb in the same time of day (night) and in the same patch of the sky. It manifested in a very similar way to the first two.
Last fall (2019) I saw another white orb in the same direction, at the same time of day (night). This time it didn't turn off completely. Instead it started to move and it seemed it was heading in the direction of my building. The sky wasn't clear, but there were gaps in the clouds and I could clearly see a triangular shaped object hovering in silence a few hundred few over the ground and going over my building, having moved in a S->N-E trajectory. There were smaller orbs on the object, one at each apex I the triangle.
We're they real aliens? I don't know. What I do know is that people have been making such machines in secret for at least a few decades.
Correction: last fall I didn't see the object in the direction of Antares, because Antares had moved more towards the western horizon by that time, instead of being towards the south. And the time was not around 11pm or 12am, but more around 9pm this time.
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