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UFOs & Aliens

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Do aliens and UFOs exist? (Two choices which you can change.)

Aliens do exist (over 70% sure). (UFOs are manned and are not just robotic drones.)
3
18%
Aliens don't exist.
4
24%
I'm not sure about aliens.
1
6%
UFOs are alien-made (over 90% sure).
4
24%
UFOs are man-made.
3
18%
I'm not sure about UFOs.
2
12%
 
Total votes: 17

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by John-B »

Some linked subjects aren't funny. This morning a programme about monsters listing some which may be fantasy and some that seem to be real, probably genetic experiments that escaped or were let loose, like an aggressive human-like figure with a goat's head, (fantasy but Americans claim to have been terrified recently), and a ? natural hybrid wolf/Coyote that kills poultry.

Also animals not seen for a long time like a Mongolian monster death worm with nasty teeth which attacks animals and humans, it's venomous and "swims" under the sand before attacking (probably mythical); a ? natural or hybrid Tasmanian wolf thought to be extinct but recently seen, a huge bird bigger than a condor seen in USA also assumed extinct, and others.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

Post by Brian-H »

John-B wrote: Thu Dec 03, 2020 12:17 pm an aggressive human-like figure with a goat's head
Species (1995)
John-B wrote: Thu Dec 03, 2020 12:17 pm monster death worm with nasty teeth which attacks animals and humans, it's venomous and "swims" under the sand before attacking
Tremors (1990)

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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I watched a bit of "Alien Files Unsealed", on TV early this morning 7am to 8am. Description of the TV program "Experts open previously off-limits files in a bid to answer some of the most mysterious questions surrounding UFOs and extra-terrestrial life."

In the bit that I saw, George W. Bush had authorised the building of a moon-base for a first-line defence against alien attack (seriously, that's what they said in the TV program).

So I did a search in wikileaks and found something that has, until now, not been revealed.
Here is what I discovered, which I believe is an exclusive find.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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I'm still sceptical about all this UFO and alien stuff but I think it's a little unfair to joke about ufologists. Most of us laugh at sci-fi films and I've been a Red Dwarf fan since watching nearly all of the episodes decades ago - Oh to have Kryten as my servant or even better, a skutter. :D

However, there are so many unexplained real-life occurrences reported by the public and experienced pilots and police, radar images, etc. that need explaining. The Blaze TV shows usually give a plausible explanation that doesn't involve aliens but then conclude that it's all down to aliens. The plausible reasons need a proved precise explanation but that never happens, probably due to military and intelligence systems in most countries being so secretive.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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In section 6 in the entry Science and Pseudo-Science, Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information, it states There is widespread agreement for instance that creationism, astrology, homeopathy, Kirlian photography, dowsing, ufology, ancient astronaut theory, Holocaust denialism, Velikovskian catastrophism, and climate change denialism are pseudosciences.

As such, ufology disregards all the hard work undertaken by real academics in several related areas of real science such as : aerodynamics, archaeology, astronomy, classical mechanics (aka Newtonian mechanics), electromagnetism & electromagnetic field theory, fluid mechanics, physics, quantum mechanics & quantum field theory, thermodynamics, and last but by no means least, palaeoanthropology.

To view those Blaze UFO programs as being serious about Unidentified Flying Objects would be like viewing Top Gear as a serious scientific study of automobiles. If those UFO TV programs are not tongue-in-cheek then they can only be viewed as being as dangerous as many other conspiracy theories, such as Trump's "vote-fraud" is a danger to democracy. Thus I can only see UFO TV programs as a joke, worthy of humorous response. Star Trek was science-fiction with drama; Red Dwarf is science-fiction with humour; UFO TV programs are not documentaries, they can only be fantasy mixed with covert humour, just as Top Gear is.

Unidentified Flying Objects in our skies are neither man-made or alien-made. They are either illusions or delusions (you missed the illusions option form the poll so I had to opt for man-made), and, it makes no difference who thinks they've seen something as all "witnesses" are the same - humans using highly flawed human senses and flawed rationale. Examples of illusions are "atmospheric ducting" phenomena such as looming/sinking/towering/stooping and best of all is the way that ships appear in the sky due to fata morgana



EDIT 17th Dec. The above is no longer there so this next one shows Chicago from 60 miles away, the other side of Lake Michigan - that's right, 60 miles away.


Regarding radar, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Radar is not infallible, it relies on interpretation, either by a computer system or an operator, or both. In conventional single-antenna systems (such as found on trawlers or commercial ships) the single-beam from the antenna is not a straight line, it is like a torch beam that spreads out wider as the distance increases. Parts of the beam, or the whole beam, can be ducted, resulting in reflections that are returned from elsewhere. The further the distance being "viewed", the more likely this is. Where computers are used to correct any potential atmospheric effects, they cannot always correct it if the atmospheric effect is unusual. Where a computer is not being used, it is up to the operator to be aware of the effects.

Note that military ships use phased arrays, see gif below (4G and 5G mobile phone systems also use phased array antennas), but even these radar systems are not infallible, mainly due to the man-machine interface.
Phased_array_animation.gif
Phased_array_animation.gif (235.02 KiB) Viewed 42682 times
See also Radar and anomalous propagation and Radar and fata morgana

But as a prime example of the issues of military radar on military ships, and operator confusion, it's worth looking at the case of Iran Air Flight 655 an Airbus A300 on a routine commercial flight from Bandar Abbass to Dubai, shot down by the USS Vincennes on 3rd July 1988. As well as flawed software at the time, after a psychological evaluation of the crew, requested by Admiral Fogarty, it was concluded that "stress and inexperience of the crew in warfare, resulted in misjudgement and unconscious distortion of data which played a significant role in the misinterpretation of the data of the Aegis System" -- Note that Aegis uses the AN/SPY-1 phased array radar. So even phased array military radar systems cannot prevent mistaken operator conclusions.


Finally, the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote about UFOs: "The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable. Unfortunately there are no cases that are both reliable and interesting"
Last edited by Brian-H on Thu Dec 17, 2020 4:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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When I said that it's a bit unfair to joke about ufologists, what I had in mind was all the research they do, which involves visiting historical sites and describing the human culture in the past, as well as the more recent human experiences of UFOs. All of which is genuine and instructive but interspersed with comments that aliens have been involved without evidence, which spoils it.

I've learnt so much about the world's historical sites from these programmes, they are like travel programmes but with a UFO slant.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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I'd hardly call that research, indeed proper archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists feel angered by that type of pseudoscientific activity plus the bizarre insinuations that are made, which can sometimes frustrate the real scientific deductions and even reduce the amount of funding.

I suppose that the problem with real scientific endeavour is that it's not lightweight, but there are plenty of relatively lightweight documentaries and updates on archaeology and palaeoanthropology that I've watched, which don't involve any crazy nonsense.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Brian-H wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 7:05 pm The only other way would be some technology that we are not aware of e.g. "anti-gravity" but that is a non-starter (does not exist, more to come soon, ish).
We've been told that the Higgs boson controls or enables mass and gravity affects mass, so if the Higgs boson could be disabled or an anti-Higgs boson found, then perhaps this would be a way of making an object mass-less and therefore disabling gravity for a zone around a flying object. Please comment.

As a side issue, I always thought that photons were mass-less (either in wave form or particle form) as they travel at the speed of light, but they are affected by gravity as they pass stars on their way to us, so how is this?

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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Anti-gravity is a topic that's interested me ever since I saw a BBC Horizon episode on "reactionless motion" in the late 80's. This was covered again in another Horizon about 20 years later (a bad quality recording of which, I have found on the internet) - "reactionless motion" had been debunked, and this later Horizon episode both covered that debunking and other areas of anti-gravity.

Reactionless motion basically negates Classical Mechanics (aka Newtonian Mechanics), the latter says that a "reaction" (pushing against something external) is required to move anything. Classical Mechanics covers objects larger than a nanometre (a thousandth of a micrometre) and travelling slower than the speed of light. See image below.
classical_mechanics.jpg
John-B wrote: Fri Jan 01, 2021 11:12 am We've been told that the Higgs boson controls or enables mass and gravity affects mass, so if the Higgs boson could be disabled or an anti-Higgs boson found, then perhaps this would be a way of making an object mass-less and therefore disabling gravity for a zone around a flying object. Please comment.
The problem with this is that it's trying to combine everything in the above image.

If we take the Voyager space probes as good examples, they're large objects travelling at ~15 km/s, and their behaviours in terms of velocity and direction, and their radio transmissions, all fall well into Classical mechanics. The fact that they (as well as the planets and everything on the planets) are "made up" of particles that fall into the other areas of the above image, does not alter their behaviour. So it is not possible to apply e.g. Quantum Field Theory to some of the parts whilst leaving the rest of the parts as being "Classical" i.e. who or what decides on the delineation or border between e.g. Voyager and the rest of space around it ?

John-B wrote: Fri Jan 01, 2021 11:12 am As a side issue, I always thought that photons were mass-less (either in wave form or particle form) as they travel at the speed of light, but they are affected by gravity as they pass stars on their way to us, so how is this?
I found the answer to that here
While it is true that photons have no mass, it is also true that we see light bend around sources with high mass due to gravity. This is not because the mass pulls on the photons directly, but instead because the mass warps the space-time through which the photons travel.
Imagine a bowling ball on a mattress. The ball is a massive object — say, the Sun — and the mattress represents space-time, in which it sits. (Of course, space-time is four-dimensional, but it’s a bit harder to imagine that!) When you place the bowling ball on the mattress, it deforms the surface. If a grid were drawn on the mattress, you would see the grid deform, so the straight lines of the boxes were no longer straight. The same is true for a star sitting in space-time — the star deforms space-time around it, causing it to curve toward the star.


For me, the main issue with light is the wave-particle duality . This is also covered by the above image, in that "every particle or quantum entity may be described as either a particle or a wave". So Voyager, travelling at ~15 km/s, could also be described as a large bundle of waves tightly bound together, passing through our solar system's bow-wave which consists of many types of particles which are also, individually, mini-waves. But as said already, you cannot then say that some of the particles can be changed whilst others cannot.

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Re: UFOs & Aliens

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^ re-reading the above, it's a bit of a convoluted explanation.

Rather than edit it, here is the straightforward answer to the very good question "if the Higgs boson could be disabled or an anti-Higgs boson found, then perhaps this would be a way of making an object mass-less and therefore disabling gravity for a zone around a flying object"

Fundamentally, if you make any particle mass-less, then it's no longer going to hang around the other particles that have mass. It's the mass of particles that "glues" everything together. Even if it were possible to surround an object with mass-less particles (should they exist) then
1. they're not going to stay adjacent to the object
2. even if they did, they won't affect the mass of the main object
3. if you made the entire object out of mass-less particles, then it would by very nature just fall apart

If you had "anti-mass" particles (using the analogy of positive and negative charge) then they're going to be repelled by all the "positive mass" particles and run like hell into the space between the galaxies

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