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Which Conspiracy Theories Do You Believe In and Why?


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11 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Another incident that should have been all over the news, at least in the UK, was The Alderney Incident. In a nutshell, Captain Ray Bowyer, a commercial aircraft pilot, was forced to land his plane after witnessing two massive objects, each about a mile wide, in the sky over Alderney. These objects were seen by all his passengers, as well as the captain of a nearby airliner. Guernsey Air Traffic Control also had the object on radar.

Here's the transcript of his communication with ATC:
 

For me, this is one of the most compelling cases we have. I challenge anyone to listen to the man speak and come up with a terrestrial explanation for what he, his passengers, Air Traffic Control, as well as the captain of another passenger jet, all saw in the sky over Alderney that morning.
 

This was an unusual event, although the idea that two mile-wide UFOs could sit above the Channel Islands and just off the densely-populated Cotentin Peninsula in broad daylight in 2007 and no-one took a photograph seems a mite implausible. It's like the 2006 Chicago UFO incident, when apparently lots of people in the second-busiest airport on Earth saw a disc-shaped object floating above the terminal but no-one took a photograph or even video of it.

Again, it's intriguing but not conclusive. In fact, the dramatically decreasing frequency of UFO and other odd sightings (the Loch Ness Monster) as the availability of high-resolution camera and video mobile phones has increased is more than a little suggestive that a lot of these sightings were either made up or mistakes.

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26 minutes ago, Werthead said:

This was an unusual event, although the idea that two mile-wide UFOs could sit above the Channel Islands and just off the densely-populated Cotentin Peninsula in broad daylight in 2007 and no-one took a photograph seems a mite implausible. It's like the 2006 Chicago UFO incident, when apparently lots of people in the second-busiest airport on Earth saw a disc-shaped object floating above the terminal but no-one took a photograph or even video of it.

Again, it's intriguing but not conclusive. In fact, the dramatically decreasing frequency of UFO and other odd sightings (the Loch Ness Monster) as the availability of high-resolution camera and video mobile phones has increased is more than a little suggestive that a lot of these sightings were either made up or mistakes.

Bowyer has said that the objects were four or five miles off the northern coast of Alderney, a tiny island with a population of less than 2000. So to suggest that a lack of photographic evidence means it did not happen is pretty lame debunking. Did you watch the video? Listen to the conversation between the pilots and ATC? They had it on freakin' radar, ffs.

In order to debunk this, your only option is to say that everyone involved, Bowyer, his passengers, ATC, and the other pilot, were all either lying or hallucinating, whilst the radar was malfunctioning. That all seems pretty unlikely to me.

Also, your assertion that there's been a dramatic decrease in the number of sightings and/or photographic evidence is way off the mark. There are literally bazillions of new photos and videos out there. The problem is that with today's image manipulation tools, it's very easy to call fake whenever something interesting appears online.

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10 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

This discussion of UFO’s brought this cogent thought to mind:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/settled.png

Scot, what you think of the Bowyer case? You're a lawyer. If this guy gave evidence in a courtroom, I suspect you'd have a pretty hard time convincing yourself that he wasn't credible.

 

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18 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Bowyer has said that the objects were four or five miles off the northern coast of Alderney, a tiny island with a population of less than 2000. So to suggest that a lack of photographic evidence means it did not happen is pretty lame debunking. Did you watch the video? Listen to the conversation between the pilots and ATC? They had it on freakin' radar, ffs.

In order to debunk this, your only option is to say that everyone involved, Bowyer, his passengers, ATC, and the other pilot, were all either lying or hallucinating, whilst the radar was malfunctioning. That all seems pretty unlikely to me.

Also, your assertion that there's been a dramatic decrease in the number of sightings and/or photographic evidence is way off the mark. There are literally bazillions of new photos and videos out there. The problem is that with today's image manipulation tools, it's very easy to call fake whenever something interesting appears online.

The Channel Islands have a population of 170,000. The objects were allegedly a mile wide, each, and were located high in the sky. Tens of thousands of people live along the French coast a few miles away. I can see planes landing at my local airport 30 miles away, and they're not a mile wide. They would have been in visual range of probably a quarter million people or more, and were apparently emitting a bright lights that people on planes dozens of miles away could see them. Yet no photographs. No video. Not even any ground eyewitness reports at all (apart from two people on hearsay).

The pilot was highly experienced and did the same route for years, so would be aware of unusual climactic and lighting situations which would give rise to atmospheric phenomena. That counts as a strong point in his favour that something was going on. The radar return was less convincing: the equipment on the island is not the best and sometimes picks up false returns from passing ferries. The radar also picked up one possible contact, not two, and that seems to have disappeared quickly.

In terms that something unusual could have happened, sure, it seems that something did. That nature of the event remains unknown, however, so it's not really helpful to latch onto it as proof that little green men are visiting us.

The problem with these claims is that no reasonable explanation is ever offered for them which even remotely survives contact with Occam's Razor (how did they travel here, why travel here and not make contact, why are they not spotted more frequently, etc). The other problem is that the old explanation of "Ah, why would otherwise reasonable and educated people lie about this stuff?" has been conclusively answered in the age of fake news and science denialism: there is no reason, people just do.

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25 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Scot, what you think of the Bowyer case? You're a lawyer. If this guy gave evidence in a courtroom, I suspect you'd have a pretty hard time convincing yourself that he wasn't credible.

 

It is interesting.  However, for extraordinary claims extraordinary proof is necessary.  

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12 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It is interesting.  However, for extraordinary claims extraordinary proof is necessary.  

But the request is not for it to be considered proof of the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. The request is for it to serve as cause for a more open minded approach to the phenomenon.

Occam's Razor seems to mean that even if there are real extra-terrestrial visitors, this possibility will not be seriously considered until it can be proven to a greater extent than more mundane explanations. This almost religious adherence to Occam's Razor is too excessive, in my view.

I can't tell you that UFO's are real aliens. But I certainly think it is a real possibility. Occam's Razor is not going to force me into becoming a sceptic just for the sake of it.

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31 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The Channel Islands have a population of 170,000. The objects were allegedly a mile wide, each, and were located high in the sky. Tens of thousands of people live along the French coast a few miles away. I can see planes landing at my local airport 30 miles away, and they're not a mile wide. They would have been in visual range of probably a quarter million people or more, and were apparently emitting a bright lights that people on planes dozens of miles away could see them. Yet no photographs. No video. Not even any ground eyewitness reports at all (apart from two people on hearsay).

The pilot was highly experienced and did the same route for years, so would be aware of unusual climactic and lighting situations which would give rise to atmospheric phenomena. That counts as a strong point in his favour that something was going on. The radar return was less convincing: the equipment on the island is not the best and sometimes picks up false returns from passing ferries. The radar also picked up one possible contact, not two, and that seems to have disappeared quickly.

In terms that something unusual could have happened, sure, it seems that something did. That nature of the event remains unknown, however, so it's not really helpful to latch onto it as proof that little green men are visiting us.

The problem with these claims is that no reasonable explanation is ever offered for them which even remotely survives contact with Occam's Razor (how did they travel here, why travel here and not make contact, why are they not spotted more frequently, etc). The other problem is that the old explanation of "Ah, why would otherwise reasonable and educated people lie about this stuff?" has been conclusively answered in the age of fake news and science denialism: there is no reason, people just do.

So, just because you can see aircraft landing from 30 miles away, they were all probably lying? Is that it?

And don't even bother with the Occam's Razor stuff. We cannot even begin to imagine the motivations of beings able to overcome the challenges of interstellar, or even inter-dimensional travel. We ourselves go to great lengths to study all kinds of species in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places on Earth, so you could quite easily apply those arguments to the perspective of Polar Bears or microbial life bubbling out of thermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific.

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12 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

So, just because you can see aircraft landing from 30 miles away, they were all probably lying? Is that it?

And don't even bother with the Occam's Razor stuff. We cannot even begin to imagine the motivations of beings able to overcome the challenges of interstellar, or even inter-dimensional travel. We ourselves go to great lengths to study all kinds of species in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places on Earth, so you could quite easily apply those arguments to the perspective of Polar Bears or microbial life bubbling out of thermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific.

No, I'm certainly not saying these folks were lieing.  People are mistaken about what they see all the time, there is no need to claim they are being deliberately deceptive to account for what they believe they saw.  I'm only saying that "eyewitnesses" without more still makes for healthy skepticism.  

I'm not saying I haven't seen things I can't explain.  Heck, last night as I was driving to pick up dinner for my family about 7:15 I saw a bright star just fade out.  It was clearly in my line of sight, above the tree line, and it was a cloudless night.  The star just faded away.  What did I see, I'm not sure.  But I put an extraterrestrial space vehicle on the extremely unlikely end of the spectrum of possibilities.  

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2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No, I'm certainly not saying these folks were lieing.  People are mistaken about what they see all the time, there is no need to claim they are being deliberately deceptive to account for what they believe they saw.  I'm only saying that "eyewitnesses" without more still makes for healthy skepticism.

Scot, that reply was @Wert, not you mate. :)

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3 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No, I'm certainly not saying these folks were lieing.  People are mistaken about what they see all the time, there is no need to claim they are being deliberately deceptive to account for what they believe they saw.  I'm only saying that "eyewitnesses" without more still makes for healthy skepticism.  

I'm not saying I haven't seen things I can't explain.  Heck, last night as I was driving to pick up dinner for my family about 7:15 I saw a bright star just fade out.  It was clearly in my line of sight, above the tree line, and it was a cloudless night.  The star just faded away.  What did I see, I'm not sure.  But I put an extraterrestrial space vehicle on the extremely unlikely end of the spectrum of possibilities.  

Interesting that while we think extra terrestrial visitations are extremely unlikely, there is the opposite argument, erroneously called the Fermi paradox, which argues that if E.T's exist, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we have not encountered them yet.

So maybe we have encountered them, but are just highly unwilling to believe it.

Anyway, I am a believer in the Rare Earth Hypothesis, but at the same time I am tantalized by the UFO phenomenon. So talk about a walking contradiction.

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36 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No, I'm certainly not saying these folks were lieing.  People are mistaken about what they see all the time, there is no need to claim they are being deliberately deceptive to account for what they believe they saw.  I'm only saying that "eyewitnesses" without more still makes for healthy skepticism.  

I'm not saying I haven't seen things I can't explain.  Heck, last night as I was driving to pick up dinner for my family about 7:15 I saw a bright star just fade out.  It was clearly in my line of sight, above the tree line, and it was a cloudless night.  The star just faded away.  What did I see, I'm not sure.  But I put an extraterrestrial space vehicle on the extremely unlikely end of the spectrum of possibilities.  

Just wondering, how would irrefutable proof of aliens affect your faith?

 

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29 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Interesting that while we think extra terrestrial visitations are extremely unlikely, there is the opposite argument, erroneously called the Fermi paradox, which argues that if E.T's exist, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we have not encountered them yet.

So maybe we have encountered them, but are just highly unwilling to believe it.

Anyway, I am a believer in the Rare Earth Hypothesis, but at the same time I am tantalized by the UFO phenomenon. So talk about a walking contradiction.

You are misconstruing the "Fermi Paradox".  When the word "encounter" is used it doesn't mean "visited Earth".  It means that we on Earth perceive some sort of remnant or signal from those civilizations like electro-magnetic signals.  We (human civilization) have been sending Electro-Magnetic signals into space ever since we started using Radio, and potentially, ever since we started using the Telegraph (really not sure on that one).  That means we have a shell of EM emissions that have gone out from Earth to approximately 100 light years (or more).  Fermi asks why haven't we perceived similar signals that are obviously not of natural origin.  

That said the Fermi Paradox does rely upon the assumption that other intelligent life will use the EM spectrum to communicate over long distances.  I wonder if, perhaps, other species don't use some other means of long distance communication that we haven't thought of.  :)

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A good example of the credibility issue comes from the Rendlesham Forest Incident, often described as "Britain's Roswell" but in many respects the evidence for it was far superior: multiple US military and British civilian police were involved as witnesses, it happened several times across two nights and there was substantial photographic coverage of the physical evidence and a tape recording made by the US base commander who personally investigated.

The facts were that on the night of 26 December 1980 several US servicemen saw unusual lights falling from the sky towards Rendlesham Forest, which lay between the USAF airbases at Woodbridge and Bentwaters. They entered the forest to investigate. They saw flashing lights on the eastern horizon through the forest. One of the servicemen later claimed to have found a diamond-shaped vehicle covered in hieroglyphics and examined it at close range for 40 minutes, allegedly even touching this. However, none of the other servicemen backed this up. Civilian police arrived to investigate the following morning and found trees in the area had been chipped and disturbed and possible markings on the ground in a triangular shape.

Two nights later the flashing lights were spotted again and a larger investigation was mounted with the base commander himself leading a foot patrol through the forest. Repeated flashing lights were spotted and a very bright star-like object was spotted which seemed to be "sending light" towards the ground.

Later on, of course, the whole thing was found to be bullshit. The unusual "falling lights" turned out to be a meteorite, widely spotted across the south of England on the same night. The flashing lights were from the pretty massive Orford Ness lighthouse a couple of miles away: the lighthouse had a shield which meant that from most inland angles the light couldn't be seen (so they weren't used to it), but the route the military patrol took through the forest brought it into view. The "landing site" turned out to be ordinary animal ruts which littered the entire forest. The chipped trees were because forest rangers had been going through and clearing out debris. The "star-like object" turned out to be the star Sirius, which in clear and cold weather can appear to be exceptionally bright and through atmospheric conditions can indeed appear to be seen shining light down at specific points on the ground (any bright star or planet can do this, but because Sirius is the brightest star in the sky which twinkles - due to the vastly greater distance the light has travelled - it has a notably different appearance).

The oddest thing was the alleged eyewitness: not only did none of his fellows back up his account of the craft, he produced an apparently falsified notebook to prove his allegations but on video it did not appear to contain any of the same information as in his verbal accounts (or, damningly, his "direct" readings from the notebook). He also did not report any of the information about seeing or touching the craft in his debriefing with the base personnel. It appears that he falsified the information to get money for appearing on UFO TV shows, particularly in the United States. He also appears to have had a vivid imagination that had difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality: when he underwent hypnosis to better recount the event, he instead reeled off the plot from a Sci-Fi channel B-movie he'd seen a few few months earlier.

If that incident turned out to have a rational explanation, despite its apparently excellent credentials for a real encounter, the reliability of far vaguer accounts and reports must be suspect.

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So, just because you can see aircraft landing from 30 miles away, they were all probably lying? Is that it?

 

Cherrypicking one part of the comment and ignoring the rest because it is inconvenient is really not a good idea. As I said, a couple of hundred thousand of people were easily within visual range of the phenomena and yet less than a dozen people saw it. That's about 0.0055% of the possible eyewitnesses. If a massive event took place in the sky and only 10% of the people within visual range saw it, that would be still be questionable (which appears to be the case with the 2006 Chicago incident), but 0.0055%?

Furthermore, all of the 100% verified sightings in the incident came from the air, suggesting the phenomenon was invisible from the ground. If this was an encounter with spacecraft or vehicles, they would be symmetrical objects, visible from all directions including below. Since the pilot's reliability would seem to be reliable, the chances of this being a freak and rare atmospheric phenomenon, the result of sunlight refracting from the waves through a strange cloud formation, would appear to be high. The fact a second object appeared to be visible behind the first is reminiscent of such light refraction phenomena.

Also, the Channel Islands and the English Channel are full of shipping, boats, cruise liners and other craft. The English Channel is the busiest waterway on the planet, adding thousands to tens of thousands of potential further witnesses who apparently saw nothing.

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And don't even bother with the Occam's Razor stuff. We cannot even begin to imagine the motivations of beings able to overcome the challenges of interstellar, or even inter-dimensional travel. We ourselves go to great lengths to study all kinds of species in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places on Earth, so you could quite easily apply those arguments to the perspective of Polar Bears or microbial life bubbling out of thermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific.

 

According to current science it is not possible to travel faster than the speed of light to visit other star systems. This may be overcome through exotic (and purely theoretical) physics, but the energy expenditure involved would be staggering. In addition, the point of travelling to another star system to study life there, not make contact but put yourself in risk of discovery (and possibly being shot down) seems incoherent, no matter the intelligence levels involved. Polar bears and microbial life living in thermal vents do not have anti-aircraft missiles or nuclear weapons.

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I'm not saying I haven't seen things I can't explain.  Heck, last night as I was driving to pick up dinner for my family about 7:15 I saw a bright star just fade out.  It was clearly in my line of sight, above the tree line, and it was a cloudless night.  The star just faded away.  What did I see, I'm not sure.  But I put an extraterrestrial space vehicle on the extremely unlikely end of the spectrum of possibilities.  


 

High-level atmospheric cloud can cause that effect. Another possibility - and worth checking on the orbital tracker - is the International Space Station (which is frequently misidentified as a UFO) which looks like an incredibly bright star until its respective angle changes and it seems to abruptly fade out. It's quite uncanny, even after you see it dozens of times.

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5 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Just wondering, how would irrefutable proof of aliens affect your faith?

 

I can't say for sure.  But it would be interesting to have such an experience and see what impact it has.  I do believe in Extraterrestrial life (that's an awful lot of space out there to have nothing but us floating around in it) I'm just skeptical that such life has physically made its way to Earth.

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7 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Another possibility - and worth checking on the orbital tracker - is the International Space Station (which is frequently misidentified as a UFO) which looks like an incredibly bright star until its respective angle changes and it seems to abruptly fade out. It's quite uncanny, even after you see it dozens of times.

Wert,

I've seen the ISS in orbit an watched it fade out.  It looked a lot like that.  What is intersting is that I only had the star in sight for a couple of seconds before it faded out.  If it was the ISS.  I got really lucky.  :)

It was apparently the wrong time of day for the ISS:

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/view.cfm?country=United_States&region=South_Carolina&city=Columbia#.WiARplWnGUk

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8 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Cherrypicking one part of the comment and ignoring the rest because it is inconvenient is really not a good idea. As I said, a couple of hundred thousand of people were easily within visual range of the phenomena and yet less than a dozen people saw it. That's about 0.0055% of the possible eyewitnesses. If a massive event took place in the sky and only 10% of the people within visual range saw it, that would be still be questionable (which appears to be the case with the 2006 Chicago incident), but 0.0055%?

So if thousands of people, across hundreds of miles, witnessed and reported it, and subsequently kicked up enough of a stink to freak out their elected representatives, would that count? Because that's exactly what happened during the Phoenix Lights Incident.

 

9 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Furthermore, all of the 100% verified sightings in the incident came from the air, suggesting the phenomenon was invisible from the ground. If this was an encounter with spacecraft or vehicles, they would be symmetrical objects, visible from all directions including below. Since the pilot's reliability would seem to be reliable, the chances of this being a freak and rare atmospheric phenomenon, the result of sunlight refracting from the waves through a strange cloud formation, would appear to be high. The fact a second object appeared to be visible behind the first is reminiscent of such light refraction phenomena.

Um, no. This is a quote from Paul Kelly, who was the Jersey ATC controller during the incident.

"The pilot from Blue Islands was en route to Jersey at the same time and as he went past Sark he described an object behind him to his left. The description was very similar to Captain Bowyer’s and they described it as being in exactly the same place. But they were looking at it from opposite sides. The Blue Islands plane was at 3,500ft at the time so, again, both pilots placed it at the same altitude. If the object was stationary, our equipment would not have picked it up because the radar would have screened it out."

The comment about the radar perhaps explains the single, faint contact on the ATC's radar system. 

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10 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Wert,

I've seen the ISS in orbit an watched it fade out.  It looked a lot like that.  What is intersting is that I only had the star in sight for a couple of seconds before it faded out.  If it was the ISS.  I got really lucky.  :)

It was apparently the wrong time of day for the ISS:

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/view.cfm?country=United_States&region=South_Carolina&city=Columbia#.WiARplWnGUk

Could have been a small meteor. I've seen that happen during the day. At the time I thought/hoped it might be something else, but it was probably just a bit of rock burning up in our atmosphere. 

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Spocky,

The problem with "the Phoenix Lights" is that there is a reasonable explanation for what they saw (phophorus flares at a distance) and no evidence of the incredible thing they claim they saw (the wedge or V shaped vehicle projecting the lights).  I'm skeptical of the Phoenix lights.  

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Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Spocky,

The problem with "the Phoenix Lights" is that there is a reasonable explanation for what they saw (phophorus flares at a distance) and no evidence of the incredible thing they claim they saw (the wedge or V shaped vehicle projecting the lights).  I'm skeptical of the Phoenix lights.  

Scot, the flares explanation is far from reasonable. Are you aware of the fact that the first sighting occurred in Henderson, Nevada, at around 7pm? Sightings then continued across the state, with multiple people reporting a massive, solid object, blotting out the stars as it travelled overhead. The craft is said to have then slowed to approx 30mph as it entered Phoenix at around 8:45pm, and people were looking at it for over five minutes at a time.

The Air Force dropped the flares in Phoenix at around 9:30pm.

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