[jibal]

> I think we're past the point of "is it real"

Indeed, rational people know it's not real.

(Yes, there are almost certainly other intelligent lifeforms in the universe. No, they have not been here. In the 1950's my brother became very interested in UFO sightings and maintained files of 3x5 cards detailing them. Then he grew up.)

[Izmaki]

I'd love to believe you, but as a European who - for some reason - never get these sightings unlike Americans, I find it hard to do so. Either our mysterious alien friends really love USA or you guys have some condition that the entire Europe does not, e.g., permissions to test military equipment without having to announce it to the public, let alone the freedom to move around in a large area without it becoming a political drama.

Imagine if the German military started doing unannounced missions in neighboring countries... now imagine if a military base in the US send a couple of fighter jets from one state to another state and back. Only one of those situations would give a cluster f** of international drama, thus "odd sightings" i.e. covert military operations could be more common in the US than the rest of the world.

I'd love to believe... but it always only happens in USA.

[anthk]

Spaniard there; there used to be UFO's in the 70's... coincidentally near the US military bases ;)

There was an infamous one in the Canary Islands.

Also, weird events under Huelva. A few paranormal, but some of them not religion/spiritual based.

If the aliens were real, their technology for sure would look as magic for humans. No, forget flying saucers or whatever. These kind of civilizations would have totally different ways to travel thousands of kilometers across the galaxy.

Teleporting "magic" would just be mundane technology for them.

A simple AM radio receiver with a wire, a coil and a magnet would just be sorcery for even the upper elite from the medieval times. And today an Elementary kid can build a simple receiver with junk from a junkyard or scraps from a workbench.

EDIT:

BTW, I forgot: on paranormal stuff on Huelva, I meant something like this:

https://0x0.st/Pr1Y.txt

I don't care about ouija's, haunted houses and whatever related to either ghosts or to religious stuff.

[jibal]

The laws of physics are the same for aliens.

And there is no "paranormal stuff".

[anthk]

The related news was broadcasted in Spain on serious TV news at lunch, not from some Alex Jones-lite kind of show with Reiki and the like.

On the laws of physics, we are like toddlers discovering an adult world. The quaterion concept it's almost from yesterday, and yet it drives real world stuff. Even networks, such as some hypercubic topology, as the one I've seen from mycrovtif. Yes, it's bound to the Hamming code, too. You don't need to break physics, but understand them better. And the case it's that there no intuition once you drive QM, where even 'particles' collide into themselves.

Said this, my point will serve as a slight hint in order to successfully understand the rest.

[jibal]

> The related news was broadcasted in Spain on serious TV news at lunch, not from some Alex Jones-lite kind of show with Reiki and the like.

Completely irrelevant.

> On the laws of physics, we are like toddlers discovering an adult world.

Perhaps you are, but not everyone is. FLT travel is well known to be impossible.

[anthk]

For an advanced civilization with huge Physics understanding, travel wouldn't be the correct word (moving through space with light speed bound limits).

For instance, when people talk about quantum entangling, information doesn't 'travel' faster than light. There's no transmission, in a similar way that here woudln't be any dx over t. There would be no actual move.

[elcritch]

> Either our mysterious alien friends really love USA

The USA is the best, who'd blame them! Perhaps aliens love American cheeseburgers and milkshakes from their time in Roswell. ;P

> you guys have some condition that the entire Europe does not, e.g., permissions to test military equipment without having to announce it to the public, let alone the freedom to move around in a large area without it becoming a political drama.

That's an interesting take. Though surely Germany or others have some more remote areas. Scotland has lots of empty land and the UK airforce right?

Then again, the amount of empty space in the wester US is not to be underestimated. I live near Mountain Home Idaho. If you drive over the desert to Nevada you cross air force land with big signs warning about it being an active test grounds. Lots of people have had fighter jets fly up and do simulated bombing runs on them as they drive through.

[anthk]

EDIT: wrong answer, sorry.

[jibal]

I think you're confused about who you're responding to.

[Izmaki]

I wasn't, I just missed the "not" in your reply that was phrased as an agreement. :) My bad. Sleepy eyes.

[jibal]

Sorry about the double negative, but I think the rest of my comment made my position clear.

[scrubs]

Lights? Human aircraft have lights for a reason ... for safety, movement on runways, and to aid with tracking among others. If alien ... why lights, and why lights in our visible spectrum? Aircraft lights are placed at extremal positions to help work out the approximate size and extent of the wings, tail, nose. They are not decorated with lights like a Christmas tree.

I checked reports on linked site ... triangular shapes and lights are a common theme. It seems both vaguely human designed to be seen without function just the kind of ambiguity that doesnt help. I remain skeptical.

[thesumofall]

> No, they have not been here

I think it is difficult to make an argument in either direction. But almost certainly they’ve not been flying weirdly shaped disks

[jibal]

It's not at all difficult to make an argument that we have not been visited by aliens. e.g.,

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1468rqs/cmv_e...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/05/th...

among many others. I think this comment from the marginalrevolution link is compelling:

"I write science fiction professionally, and I would cheerfully bet against these sightings being any alien technology. Why? Because zooming around in Earth's atmosphere and playing chicken with fighter planes doesn't fit any rational notion of why someone would go to the considerable trouble of sending a mission to the Solar System. (Jokes about alien teenagers aside.)

If the goal is to make contact, then there are much better ways of doing it than flitting around the atmosphere being coy.

If the goal is not to make contact, then contemporary human tech could already do a better job of observing while staying hidden. A big telescope on a near-Earth asteroid could watch us in considerable detail during close approaches. Small satellites could do the same. And small robotic probes disguised as -- say -- seagulls or cats could do all the sampling and exploring of the Earth's surface with nobody the wiser.

As it is, we have a phenomenon dating back at least 70 years and possibly thousands of years which never seems to DO anything.

My conclusion: it's probably a lot of different phenomena, mostly involving human perception. Maybe, if we're very lucky, there's some rare atmospheric phenomenon causing some of these sightings, and we might learn a little by studying it."

(It's also easy to make an argument that we have been visited by aliens, in the same way that it's easy to make an argument that the Earth is flat or that humans never landed on the moon ... easy if one doesn't adhere to basic principles of rational discourse.)

[thesumofall]

That wasn’t quite the point I was trying to make. Almost certainly we have not been visited in a shape or form that would resemble anything like the typical UFO sightings. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. However, we might have been visited in forms that are completely incomprehensible to us

[jibal]

It's the point I made--it is not at all difficult to make an argument that we have not been visited by aliens.

> we might have been visited in forms that are completely incomprehensible to us

So what? That's not an argument that we have been. It's not a rebuttal to the arguments that we haven't been. It's like saying that President Trump might be a shapeshifting reptile from Aldebaran. "It MIGHT be, so it's difficult to argue to the contrary"--wrong. It's like saying to someone who notes that there's no elephant in their dining room that there might be one that's invisible and very nimble so no one bumps into it--"it's difficult to argue otherwise"--wrong. It's a child's (or theist's) "anything is possible" logic. It's hypocritical because no one uses this sort of nonsense outside of such special pleading--imagine a lawyer for a mass murderer with hundreds of witnesses telling a jury that actually it was done by aliens with incomprehensible technology who created the illusion that it was their client who did it--"it's difficult to argue otherwise"--wrong. This sort of "might have been" garbage has no place in rational good faith discussion.