[colordrops]

Funny enough I was just reading the book "In Plain Sight" [1] before I flipped over to hacker news. It's a book about the serious investigation into UAPs by various governments, and is heavily sourced, with often times a half dozen references per page, many official and declassified sources. It's hard to come out of reading it without being strongly convinced that these UAP are not of human or natural origin.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614

Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.

[ducktective]

>Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.

Unless Elon tweets about this or VCs start funding UFO startups, average programmer is gonna say BS on anything that challenges the status quo especially in ideology department.

[actually_a_dog]

Personally, I 100% believe that UFOs and alien life both exist. After all, it would be hubris of the highest order to claim that we could identify every aerial visual phenomenon. And I find it extremely hard to believe that in the vastness of the universe, this infinitesimal speck we live on is the only place that the thing we call "life" exists. What I don't believe is that UFOs and aliens are connected, or that aliens routinely visit this planet.

First of all, if aliens did visit this planet, why here? There have to be many more interesting planets to go look at than Earth. If they stumbled on this planet by accident at some point, why would they bother to come back? Even if there aren't more interesting places, what's the probability that an alien being could even breathe the air here? I'm not willing to go full on Signs and speculate that contact with water might be deadly to them, but it's pretty reasonable to guess that aliens would have evolved in places with significantly different atmospheres than Earth has.

And, of course, none of this even touches on the vast distances in interstellar space and the level of technology that it would take to come here. It's certainly conceivable that aliens who are 5 million years ahead of us in societal development might have such technology, but how probable is it? And if they had that level of technology, why not just send a stealthy probe with the alien equivalent of a Really Damn Big Telescope(tm) and park it somewhere out in the asteroid belt if they're that interested in the antics of 7.7 billion primitive bipeds? Nothing really seems to add up for me in the direction of "aliens visit the Earth frequently and UFOs are evidence of those visitations."

[colordrops]

> First of all, if aliens did visit this planet, why here? There have to be many more interesting planets to go look at than Earth. If they stumbled on this planet by accident at some point, why would they bother to come back?

Where does this idea come from that we are "uninteresting" or less interesting than other places? Also why would these advanced beings not be able to canvas the entire galaxy? What if other places are more interesting, and teaming with alien craft, like Yellowstone is teaming with tourists, and we just see the occasional craft because we are a backwater.

> Even if there aren't more interesting places, what's the probability that an alien being could even breathe the air here? I'm not willing to go full on Signs and speculate that contact with water might be deadly to them, but it's pretty reasonable to guess that aliens would have evolved in places with significantly different atmospheres than Earth has.

Why does that matter? We can't breath in the ocean or space but we explore there.

> And, of course, none of this even touches on the vast distances in interstellar space and the level of technology that it would take to come here. It's certainly conceivable that aliens who are 5 million years ahead of us in societal development might have such technology, but how probable is it?

We have no idea whether it's possible or probable, and thus we also have no idea whether it's impossible or improbable.

> And if they had that level of technology, why not just send a stealthy probe with the alien equivalent of a Really Damn Big Telescope(tm) and park it somewhere out in the asteroid belt if they're that interested in the antics of 7.7 billion primitive bipeds? Nothing really seems to add up for me in the direction of "aliens visit the Earth frequently and UFOs are evidence of those visitations."

Why do we send people in person into the jungle to monitor animals instead of just cameras to record everything remotely? Why do people go to Yellowstone to see the sites instead of just looking at pictures?

[ducktective]

1- Those "aliens" and UAPs could be terrestrial. Imagine an underwater civilization evolved independently from humans in a time scale much larger than our written history.

2- They can have all sorts of agendas. There are discussions that they have visited or interacted with human civilization since thousands of years ago. They may want to affect the course of our development for example.

[cbdc_watcher]

Excellent deducktion

[jiggawatts]

> really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.

Not downvoting, but I used to be a huge "UFO fan" around the ages of 8-11. I read book after book, all breathlessly outlining the "reams of evidence" available. I watched documentaries on television, saw UFO topics covered in the newspaper, and I had a shelf full of books all in agreement. Must be true, right?

Except that even as young child I started noticing that all of the photos were blurry. All of them. Focus dispels UFOs just like turning on the light dispels the monster in the bedroom.[0]

Years later I read a book by a "UFO fan" who remained a fan into his adulthood, and got the opportunity to research them as his day job. He was looking into crop circles and cattle mutilation specifically around the time of their peak popularity[1] but as a result of his investigations he rapidly converted from a life-long believer to a sceptic.

Why?

Because he noticed that that evidence of UFO visitations respected state borders. Specifically, there are state-level laws[2] in the USA related to things such as insurance claims related to dead livestock. Cows are stupid, eat poisonous or dangerous things all the time and die. One dead cow represent a loss of hundreds to thousands of dollars. Many dead cows could be a serious financial problem, so there is insurance available for lifestock. The policies apply differently in different jurisdictions, and some would cover "unexplained external causes" such as little green men anally probing cattle for mysterious reasons, and in some areas the policies would not cover this. Unsurprisingly, cattle mutilations and the associated evidence like crop circles would only turn up in areas where the insurance covered it, and never in areas where it wouldn't, even if that was across the road in a paddock owned by the same farmer. Odd huh?

One theory -- that sells books -- is that little green or grey men visit our planet across interstellar distances and amuse themselves by cutting holes into cattle. But not low-value livestock like chickens. Just the high-value ones, like cattle.

The other theory is that selling books and making insurance claims is the only reason anyone talks about any of this seriously. That people see a dozen dead cows, have nothing they can legitimately put on an insurance claim, and are staring down the barrel of financial ruin. What to do? Just drive the tractor in circles over still green crops, bending them down, call Janice from the local news, claim that the circle is impossible, and point at the dead cows you cut a few times with a sharp box cutter a few hours before the news crew turned up. Suddenly, there's "evidence" that you can put on an insurance claim and your farm will survive until the next year.

> many official and declassified sources

The word "declassified" makes UFO fans excited because it's got all the elements of an official secret that they uncovered through their intelligence and sleuthing. It's the same addictive narrative that made QAnon popular.

Most (all?) military observations of potential enemy aircraft are classified! That means nothing. The value of these observations isn't particularly higher than anyone else's either. If one young pilot sees a splotch on the IR feed that "moves oddly", people run off with that and claim that "government has evidence of UFOs!" This recent one is the best example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q

At first blush that looks exactly like an optical effect such as Glory [3] that appears to move only because the observer is moving with respect to nearby clouds. The background is moving, and Glory remains stationary relative to the observer because the Sun doesn't move in the sky like the clouds do. It "accelerates away" because the IR camera is on a gimbal on the tip of a Javeline missile and reached its limit. It stops tracking the "target" which then seems to "shoot away" in the picture.

This and similar "evidence" is about as good as it gets. I've never seen anything even remotely convincing. Nonetheless, book after book just collates and rehashes the same evidence, including pictures long since discredited[0] as clear fakes. The authors get paid and can feed their families. The readers get to be entertained just like I was when I was a kid.

Everyone gets something, but we don't get to invite visiting alien dignitaries to speak at a UN convention in much the same way that Air Traffic Control doesn't schedule flights differently on Christmas Eve to avoid hitting Santa.

[0] Several famous UFO photos that adorned book covers published by legitimate print houses turned out to be chandeliers that the photographer had thrown into the sky like a frisbee and then quickly snapped an out-of-focus picture of. On commission for the print house.

[1] Speaking of which, isn't that odd all by itself? Crop circles weren't a "thing" until they were. And then vanished again. While they were popular, like a meme on Reddit, there were all sorts of interesting variations. Similarly, the aliens themselves evolve just like bad Fifty Shades of Grey fan art. Some traits are never mentioned by any "witnesses" until after a particular story, and then it's a common trait many people claim to have seen.

[2] I read this over 15 years ago so I might be confusing a legal boundary with a corporate "coverage area" boundary in a contract, but the gist of the story is the same either way.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon)

[agileAlligator]

I've been a UFO skeptic for quite some time, but the Ariel School Incident [1] is one that lives rent-free in my head. The eyewitness accounts make it even more convincing, because

1. They don't exactly agree with each other (which is to be expected since eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable, it would be more suspicious if they id)

2. Many of these people repeat the story years after the incident, as grown adults. As far as I know, they haven't received a single cent for their troubles.

3. It's not like these kids had much exposure to the pop culture idea of UFOs - yet their drawings are very similar to what we think of when we think UFO.

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident

[AgentME]

A lot of UFO videos seem to be some kind of optical effect. The object rotates exactly in tune to when the HUD shows that the camera is rotating. The object suddenly zips away as soon as the HUD shows that the camera has suddenly stopped rotating to track the object. You see these obvious things in some of the most famously regularly brought up videos like the Tic Tac and Gimbal UFO videos, and almost nobody picks up on these. Seeing UFO fans still bring up those videos is the best evidence they just want to play make-believe instead of understand anything.

[colordrops]

How do you explain the visual confirmation by the pilots as well as the objects showing up on radar? It's fine to be skeptical but don't be so dismissive when you yourself are leaving out important details that negate your claim.

[jiggawatts]

Many of those videos with "eyewitness" corroboration have to be taken in context.

For example, the video clips typically show a small blurry splotch a few pixels in size. What's not always obvious is what level of magnification is used. In many cases its a digital zoom on top of a telephoto lens. The unaided human eye would see just a tiny speck, which could be anything, and may not even be the same "object"!

The other context is pilots rarely fly in empty skies, especially military aviators. Many "sightings" have been in the context of drills, war games, or similar. The pilots may not be aware of things such as small drones used by officers for monitoring, or secret testing of UAVs. E.g.: A question that designers would like to answer is: "Can this stealth drone be spotted in realistic scenarios by pilots not told about its presence?"

Etc...

[sammalloy]

> Except that even as young child I started noticing that all of the photos were blurry. All of them. Focus dispels UFOs just like turning on the light dispels the monster in the bedroom.

Not exactly. Jacques Vallée and others have spent a lot of time addressing the question of why UFO photos are always blurry and out of focus. His ideas about it are fascinating. There’s also a lot of photos that aren’t blurry, such as the 1971 Cote UFO. It doesn’t mean they are alien, but there’s definitely something real getting photographed that’s still unidentified. I’ve also been interested in how writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Liu Cixin address the topic of how an advanced alien species could control physics, the noosphere, and the human mind itself.

[jiggawatts]

> 1971 Cote UFO

That could be anything. Damage to the film negative is a simple explanation!

Any single picture is basically just fan-art. I and many others with a reasonable level of scepticism wouldn't accept anything other than the same UFO or "design" of UFO turning up in many photos, ideally from some sort of scientific sky survey array run by non-UFO-fanatic astronomer types.

In fact, several such survey systems are being built right now, and a few are already operational.

The operational ones have not found anything.

Strange, isn't it that the better the quality of the survey, the less likely UFOs are to turn up in the data?

[sammalloy]

You’re preaching to the choir. I am very much a skeptical materialist. The problem is that there are a significant number of unknowns and unidentified reports that have never been explained. And those are the ones we are talking about.

[thedorkknight]

Neither the comment your responding to nor the paper the submission is on deal with either cattle mutilation nor crop circles

[jiggawatts]

The linked paper on arXiv[1] starts off with: " We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear. Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected" (emphasis mine)

The word "ships" is a bit of a stretch to say the least without some really good evidence.

What's their "scientific" evidence? In the synopsis they say: "Adobe colour system" which... umm... how can I put this politely... they looked at the pictures in Photoshop!

The calibrated scientific instrument that they used to quantitively gather evidence for visiting aliens is the eyedropper tool.[3]

This is what I'm talking about. There's no evidence, just people promoting themselves to make a buck, get published, make insurance claims, or just have a laugh. Call me when they have an in-focus picture that's not just a splotch a few pixels across.[2]

[1] There is no special requirement, peer review, or any of the actual scientific process required for publishing a pre-print on arXiv. It's just a dumping ground for students, and is about as authoritative as GitHub.

[2] They have their photos in the paper. Go have a look, they're hilarious! These could be anything, such as airliners, satellites, or whatever your imagination can come up with: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.11215.pdf

[3] This feels like kicking a puppy, but I have to point out that in all PC colour systems, including Adobe RGB are non-linear and require gamma correction to obtain scientifically-relevant linear light intensity levels. The Photoshop eyedropper tool specifically does not do this, returning the encoded non-linear values. The paper mentions none of this, yet they use the RGB values directly in formulas to estimate metrics like distance. They also mention "RGB spectrum" as if that means anything without the context of the camera filters, sensor response curves, etc...

[torotonnato]

I don't think they are using Photoshop, but that would be hilarious :D It's just the camera sensor's color space (Adobe RGB). Anyway, gamma correction should be problem, unless they shoot raw images and in this case the color space gets out of the equation.

I was curious, so I found another paper by the original authors and the color correction is more carefully considered, since they seem to take into account the sensor response too [0].

[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.07403.pdf

[jiggawatts]

This paper also doesn't mention "gamma" and uses the word "linear" only in other contexts.

Even if they're using RAW photos, the response curve is still non-linear because the individual pixels "saturate" as they get closer to the maximum exposure. This shifts colours, because a bright colourful source will saturate the pixels of the matching colour first, and then the other colours a bit later. A bright yellow meteor trail will saturate red and green, and then blue.

Their entire method and conclusion all hinges on analysing the relative intensities of RGB colours of photos of very bright meteor trails.

These guys are so unscientific it's almost a parody of science. It reads like a bunch of high school students doing "science" with their dad's camera, and then a kind professor submits their homework to arXiv to make them feel like they're Just Like The Big Boys.

Having said that, there is some amazing real scientific research being done with CotS camera equipment!

Examples:

https://astronomytechnologytoday.com/2018/06/28/miniwasp-par...

https://petapixel.com/2022/07/25/telescope-made-from-multipl...

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1561833

That last one is a beautiful example of how to do science right, with detailed calibration data and characterisation of every aberration in the system.

[torotonnato]

>These guys are so unscientific...

Naaaaa, this is not my field, so I assume I'm missing some crucial pieces of information (which the paper apparently lack too, I agree on that).

>A bright yellow meteor trail will saturate red and green, and then blue.

Here I assume that they can do their job, but maybe you are right. Since they are doing their observations at two "meteor stations", maybe they know what they are talking about though.

>Their entire method and conclusion all hinges on analisying the relative intensities of RGB colours of photos of very bright meteor trails.

They use a simple mathematical model, with even other obvious limitations, like considering the atmosphere homogenous, so?

Here I'm citing the calibration part (which is a bit disappointing, true :) at the end of page 4:

...The color chart in Fig. 10 allows us to evaluate the color characteristics of the Moon and check the calibration of our cameras. The Moon has a color relative to the sky background: B - G = -2.5 log (1.7 / 2.7) = 0.5. We take into account the color correction in the Jhonson B - V system according to [x] due to Rayleigh scattering equal to 0.14 magnitude. Let’s get the estimate B - V of the Moon: B - V = 0.50 + 0.60 - 0.14 = 0.96. The actual color of the Moon is B - V = 0.91 according to [1] and differs from our estimate by 0.05 magnitudes within the photometric error. In Figure 9 we can see a local feature (water tower). The color diagram of the tower in Fig. 12 gives a distance estimate of 0 ± 1 km. The actual distance is about 300 meters. Thus, colorimetric measurements confirm our estimates...

EDIT: page 4 of the UAP paper

[retcore]

>It's just the camera sensor's color space (Adobe RGB)

Sensors don't have a color space. It's a transformation applied in the camera software. Unfortunately no commercially available camera either exposes using the sensor data output itself, leading to often considerable non linearity between the measurable output values and the actual exposure. This is applied to the raw file for exposure and post processing raw conversion. You need to analyse the non de-bayered raw files directly to assess what's happening in the captured data.

[behnamoh]

What if UFOs blur images taken from them? We already have similar technology that blocks cameras using laser.

[jiggawatts]

Then detect the interference.

It's a similar problem to "jamming" in military radar systems. You might be half-blind while jammed, but you're aware that you are being jammed in the same way that you won't miss someone shining a torch in your face.

Multiple cameras across a wide range of wavelengths (UV-Visible-IR) would be fantastically difficult to hide from, for a range of parameters such as UFO size, altitude, speed, etc... To the point where it starts to become physically impossible, irrespective of technology level.

For example, various militaries have looked into tracking high-altitude spy planes via the disturbance they make in the air. You can camouflage the plane all you want, but you can't stop air from existing.

[beders]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The fascination around UAP has been around for decades and basically each decade there's new reporting and new pictures or even videos. And also, every decade, once actual scientists and debunkers get their hands on the material, those phenomena are readily explained. It takes a certain expertise and a Navy pilot simply doesn't have that.

These stories make great clickbait though.

[nprateem]

Blah, blah, blah. The usual rebuttal.

Like climate deniers, debunkers gonna debunk.

It's strange that these people are trusted to handle and launch nukes, but apparently when squadrons of UAPs show up simultaneously on the most advanced sensor systems in the world they suddenly can't be trusted.

[ben_w]

At that level, trust and skill are specialisms, not generic statements.

By analogy, I'm a skilled software developer, graduated 2006, learned to read from a Commodore 64 user manual etc., but I make iOS apps, put me on a Rust project and don't even know the syntax.

I trust a fighter pilot to be really good at spotting potential hazards in the air, and also things which are not responding to the appropriate IFF signals. While I know too little about what they do to guess much of what else they're good at, I suspect that suggesting they're too good to make mistakes is like suggesting I'm too good to write bugs.

[nprateem]

No, but in aggregate, I trust them to be able to collectively say "something weird is going on". 100+ ex-service personnel testified in front of Congress about UFOs interfering with and disabling nukes in siloes over several decades. Can't find a link ATM but it's on Youtube somewhere I think.

[ben_w]

"Weird" describes far more options than just ETs.

My dad worked in the defence sector, on IFF transponders; Plessy when I was young, Marconi bought them out, I think his division was bought by BA around the time he retired. Not sure who before Plessy.

But I digress: one of his stories was about a light in the workshop that would not switch off. Eventually they got a technician in, who saw the switch did nothing to the light, measured the thing with an ammeter and confirmed that the switch both worked and was connected to the light, traced the wires to the light and confirmed they were the only ones.

Nothing made sense. The light stayed lit even without power.

He took the light out of the fixture and the light stayed lit.

Weird story, right? Can you work out what was going on from that description? My only hints are that it's a true story and that it wasn't aliens.

[nprateem]

Exactly. If something's weird, it should be investigated. Not curtail the careers of people who do report it to discourage others reporting weird things. However, when those weird things are backed up by multiple sensors, and relate to multiple objects flying in formation maneuvering in ways far beyond technology we know about, there are only a few possibilities, and they should all be seriously considered.

The US government/military (and probably still large parts of the secret side) has been actively FUDding over the years (e.g. curtailing careers of people who report UFOs, project Blue Book), so you have to weigh things up on the balance of what evidence you can find. Short of little green men landing in front of a news crew, some people won't accept anything, even now the US is admitting to investigating them.

[jablongo]

This comment thread is attached to an article by “actual scientists”

[api]

Well hey, one possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn't one.

[krono]

This would be covered by the zoo hypotheses[1] I think.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis

[inglor_cz]

The ZOO hypothesis is uncannily attractive, because it a) sort-of humbles our egos and b) would actually be plausible even within humanity itself.

If we discovered another human civilization with a living and technological standard of Europe of 1022 AD, we would be able to keep an eye on them without revealing ourselves much. An occassional slip-up would be possible (a crashed drone), but most of the time, we would be able to let them live as they wish without interfering with them much. Probably to the point that the targeted civilization might consider any hypothesis of our surveillance a hoax or heresy.

And that is mere 1000 years of technological development on Earth. If the gap between us and hypothetical aliens is, say, 100 million years, I can't even begin to imagine the difference.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Something similar exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

[alrlroipsp]

> 100 million years

That's a lot of evolution, considering mammals is barely that old.

[sterlind]

not necessarily. UFOs might not hide intentionally; maybe they don't care but happen to rarely hang out in populated areas.

for instance, maybe they just care about the sea floor, and only surface to beam data back. or they're preferentially attracted to fast-moving objects like fighter jets, or sources of unusual EM signatures.

if UFOs are alien drones trying to hide, why do they suck at it?

[api]

Maybe they’re very good at it. We see them rarely and see them clearly or get good photos almost never but they’re actually all over the place. The ones we see are malfunctioning in some way or flukes caused by chance conditions of light, angle, etc.

[krono]

Interesting points that I had completely overlooked!

By the way, without knowing how many there might be in total and how often they were seen/discovered, we can't really say if hiding from us is something they'd suck at :)

[echelon]

I like to think the reason for non-detection is that an alien civilization already had their AGI moment. The AI proliferated throughout the galaxy, to several galaxies, and ultimately found a way to "break" our classical and limited understanding of physics.

That the reason we're not seeing them is because we're looking for industry and megastructures, waste gasses, EM spectrum activity, etc., but that their needs are well beyond any of these things. That they don't have massive material or energy needs. And that maybe they've already been here, but consider us to be too primitive to acknowledge.

Or that maybe they're actively here now reconstructing our light cone to learn about us (ie. we've already all long since passed, and now we're all just holographic shadows of something that once happened long ago).

Or that maybe it's future us / Earth-AI doing that archeology.

Or a future AI "Space Jesus" is resurrecting our neural connectomes from non-lossy backwards projection of photons.

Or the same thing, except we'll all be put into museums or played with for sport. An outcome somewhat adjacent to Roko's Basilisk.

Of course this is all just mortal fantasy.

Dark forest is my other frequently thought about scenario, but that one scares me.

[dhsysusbsjsi]

Or they are so advanced that their “bodies” are made up of individual units teeming with nanotechnology components, most of which are atoms wide, working to generate power from atoms absorbed from external environment, self repair and more. Units take on different roles. Advanced energy transport system that stores hydrocarbons and carries around highly volatile elements on iron structures in a liquid directly to the site needed for energy. Billions of these nano machine units take on a form to create an ultra low power, powerful neural network capable of self learning as well as passing on learned behaviours.

Oh wait that’s humans.

[echelon]

It's an exceedingly slow to adapt algorithm. Extinction is a fairly common result for stumbling upon an ecological niche, maximizing fit, and then having that niche disappear.

Novel information sharing is slow, lossy, and the information stores themselves quickly degrade.

Incredibly poor solution in the limit.

[behnamoh]

I think AGI would love to keep increasing its storage and computation power. Unless the very fabric of the universe serves as that, I don't know how an AGI would "break" our classical understanding of physics and not make a super giant computer the size of galaxies... But if that's the case, does it mean we're living in a matrix made by an AGI?

[api]

If dark forest were true I doubt we would be here. Earth has been broadcasting that it is a likely biosphere since the atmosphere became oxidizing. This much free oxygen is not likely to exist without some process constantly replenishing it and I’m not aware of any natural options for that at planetary scale.

[BerislavLopac]

I think there is one very powerful argument against the idea that any alien life form has visited Earth since the humanity existed: the humanity still exists.

[colordrops]

That makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about the nature of advanced alien life.

[BerislavLopac]

Maybe, but it fits 100% with all of the advanced life we have observed so far.

[elif]

There's certain topics on HN you have to pay the karma tax for broaching. It wasn't always this way but it is where we are.