rsmurphy wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 5:27 pm

Dave N wrote:Any good stories

I ain't seen shit which is total bullshit. I enjoyed reading your experiences though. Are you or any of your homies close to Marfa? Do you know about or have seen the lights?

Dr. Steven Greer is a famous ufologist and has a practice called CE5 in which one develops a certain technique in getting to make "contact" with these vehicles. And, yeah, I know how this all sounds to cynics and non-believers but I don't care. It's interesting to me, much like the occult or psionics were in my youth.

I’ve seen the Marfa lights on a night when they were really poppin’. They were fading in and out, one here, then another there, then another. I’d totally dismiss it as a mirage effect from cars on Hwy 67, but there were lights fading in and out on the mountains, too. I suppose those could’ve been hikers with flashlights.

I want to see something freaky! Closest I've come was a total eclipse, which is pretty fucking cool. I didn't become familiar with Chinese lanterns until this century, but the first time I noticed them, as eerie as they looked I figured it was something natural because it didn't make me feel uneasy.

rsmurphy wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 5:57 pm I want to see something freaky! Closest I've come was a total eclipse, which is pretty fucking cool. I didn't become familiar with Chinese lanterns until this century, but the first time I noticed them, as eerie as they looked I figured it was something natural because it didn't make me feel uneasy.

Come visit! We’ll go on a West TX UFO hunt. I’m willing to try the Greer method with you. No esoteric shame over here!

rsmurphy wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 2:21 pm When I was a kid I thought that you could skip a stone or otherwise disturb a body of water and that interference would create a new universe(s) on an infinitesimal level.

biscuitdough wrote:Science fiction is fun but, as it says on the label, fictional.

Wasn't it Arthur C Clarke who imagined space elevators and now we have a International Space Elevator Consortium? Things imagined, even outlandish things, might have the capacity to become real the more knowledgeable we get.

Speculating about how technology could develop isn't the same as insisting (and the UFO "theorists" insist) that an unlikely extraterrestrial intervention and a complicated coverup are behind every lens flare.

biscuitdough wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 9:17 pm Speculating about how technology could develop isn't the same as insisting (and the UFO "theorists" insist) that an unlikely extraterrestrial intervention and a complicated coverup are behind every lens flare.

You are conflating conspiracy theorists with ufologists who want nothing more than to study the small percentage of cases that cannot be explained, and to not be thought of as conspiracy theorists for wanting to bring legitimacy to their work.

Arthur C. Clarke's main scientific claim to fame is that he was the first to speculate that satellites in geostationary orbit could be used as relays for radio communication. This turned out to be an excellent idea. It wasn't science fiction though; he published it as a research paper. On the other hand, he also hosted that stupid "Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers" TV show.

rsmurphy wrote: Also, it was previously mentioned that UAP is strictly an American phenomenon and that's patently false.

This would imply that not only is the US government covering it all up, but every other government in the world is as well, and successfully too. Even tinpot African nations whose governments are constantly overthrown by coups. And yet as far as we know, no pieces of alien craft have ever been leaked by anyone or made their way onto the black market.

If UFOlogists want their work to be taken seriously, they should start from the position that whatever they are looking at is most likely to not be aliens.

Right now, the scientific community is all abuzz at the announcement that a room temperature superconductor has been discovered. If it's true, then it's the most important discovery of the century. If it's true, all our shit just got changed forever.

Notably, the default position among scientists is to assume it's probably too good to be true and there is some mistake. This is what good scientists do - try as hard as they can to prove their conclusions are false, to find the mistake. Whereas what cranks do, is they start from their conclusion and then cherry-pick data to support it. If it walks like a crank and quacks like a crank, that's reason enough to be skeptical.

On the subject of speculative technology, here's a wild idea I heard proposed recently - using our sun as a massive gravitational telescope. Much like the way astronomers use gravitational lensing of closer galaxies to see more distant galaxies, we could do the same thing with the sun - except, we can point and focus it. All you have to do is chuck a probe out into the outer solar system and get it to take a picture of the sun exactly as it crosses the precise focal point of the thing on the other side that you're trying to look at. The object would appear as a halo around the sun, which can be reconstructed back into an image again. We have no way to park the probe so you'd need to send a new probe for every picture you take, so not cheap, but this is something we could do with current technology. With a lens the size of the sun, they reckon it would be powerful enough to resolve surface details on extra-solar planets. That's something I hope to live to see!

When you look at the incredible lengths that scientists and engineers go to, to find out the real shit, it's on a whole different level. They built the world's most ambitious contraption and detected the Higgs boson. They took close up photos of Pluto. They built machines to detect neutrinos and gravity waves. The James Webb telescope is up there orbiting the sun at the L2 lagrange point, 1.5 million km from Earth, picking up infrared light from galaxies 30 billion light years away with instruments that must be kept just above absolute freezing, and it's all working as planned. They're going to send a probe through the plumes of Enceladus to try to detect microbial life. They're going to drill the Martian soil.

Mind-blowing discoveries are happening all the time, and yet the US Congress and the public at large are more interested in tall tales from former pilots trying to sell a book.

And if the USA has found alien ray guns that can turn you into charcoal briquette, you might wonder why Putin isn't using technology recovered from UFOs that crashed in his own, much larger country, to win the Ukraine war. And why Ukraine aren't using their alien weaponry to defend themselves. Now would be the time.

The "Havana Syndrome" microwave weapon also seems to be a no-show.

rsmurphy wrote: Sun Jul 30, 2023 8:01 am

biscuitdough wrote: Sat Jul 29, 2023 9:17 pm Speculating about how technology could develop isn't the same as insisting (and the UFO "theorists" insist) that an unlikely extraterrestrial intervention and a complicated coverup are behind every lens flare.

You are conflating conspiracy theorists with ufologists who want nothing more than to study the small percentage of cases that cannot be explained, and to not be thought of as conspiracy theorists for wanting to bring legitimacy to their work.

So you're saying there's not a something like 90-100% overlap between these two groups? Astonishing if true.

biscuitdough wrote:So you're saying there's not a something like 90-100% overlap between these two groups?

What I am saying is there are dedicated astrophysicists, philosophers, and scientists interested in the phenomena of intelligent life outside of Earth and/or a possibility for said intelligence to traverse vast distances of space and time. Does that make sense at all? Sometimes putting thoughts to paper for me can get jumbled so I want to be sure I'm being as clear as possible.