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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Robert Bigelow doesn't believe "something unexplainable" has been happening in our skies - he believes the explanation for those things is alien spacecraft. He isn't interested in seaching for truth, he has an agenda.

It's also disingenuous to skip over more plausible explanations, including hoaxes, the memetic effect of UFO culture, classified military aircraft and disinformation campaigns, and misidentification of other mundane aerial phenomena, to assume that anything unidentified in the sky is likely an alien spacecraft.

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I can see where you might think I was asserting one way or the other whether Robert Bigelow was qualified for this work, and that's my fault. I have no opinion about this man specifically. I am just saying that I think this problem is worth further study by the organizations which exist for the purpose of knowing these kinds of things. That being said, according to the article, "Mr. Bigelow said he was 'absolutely convinced' that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth." And while on the surface that might seem to reveal his having an agenda and disqualify any of his analyses, do we feel the same way about physicists that believe God created the universe? Or do we just feel that way about people with out-group beliefs? I suppose a better analogy here would be the business owner of a company doing physics research, since he's not a scientist.

But beyond that, I think we can agree that the conversation elsewhere in this thread demonstrates there is a whole lot of negative context which serves to drive people away from taking it seriously.

> And while on the surface that might seem to reveal his having an agenda and disqualify any of his analyses, do we feel the same way about physicists that believe God created the universe?

I don't, but only so long as they don't ascribe magical or supernatural qualities to physical phenomena.

It's one thing to believe alien spacecraft as an extremely unlikely possibility, and another to consider it not only likely, but indisputably so. The lack of skepticism combined with unfalsifiable claims are what disqualify him, in my view.

There does seem to be a fringe of interesting events in the field worth studying. I'm not convinced that there aren't plausible explanations for them - after all, how many "black triangle" sightings are likely to have been classified stealth aircraft? But I also think the negativity serves a valuable purpose as long as it keeps people from entertaining flights of fancy.

I'll believe the Robert Bigelows and Bob Lazars and Whitley Streibers of the world when they can back their claims up with undeniable and irrefutable evidence. Given the nature of their claims, I don't believe that's an unreasonable bar to set. Even Einstein was doubted until someone proved him right.

This is not a hoax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Ai...

I'm not saying it was an alien craft, but there are a limited number of plausible explanations for an event like this and none of what you listed is a plausible explanation.

Too bad no one at an entire airport had a camera or took a picture.

To be fair, it was 2006, and "everybody's phone has a great camera" was several years off. The article does mention someone may have snagged it on a plain digital camera.

Not taking a side, just pointing that out.

Phones had cameras back then. Disposable Cameras were available at every airport shop.

And Someone allegedly photographed it, but no one bothered to examine or release the photos?

Well, faced with all this suspicion and negativity, what incentive would anybody have to present their photos to the public? And so let's just scrap this whole incident at the airport. No pictures, no video, no UFO. There is still a substantial body of photographic, video, expert reliable witness accounts of unexplained phenomena happening in our skies going back decades. The government's chief skeptic guy that headed up Blue Book eventually changed his mind over the years in the face of this relatively small but very reliable subset of witness accounts [0].

The vast majority of people are looking at Venus or the moon or streetlights or drunken hallucinations. But we don't care about those people. We care about the 0.0003% (or whatever) of people that check all the boxes on a long list of reliability factors. And yet, that still isn't good enough for some people, because of the hugely negative pseudoscience context that this carries with it. "It's folklore!" In fact, I'll assert that a strange enough advanced aircraft could fly nuclear weapons over this country, and until our pilots shot it out of the sky and spread the wreckage across three states, it would hardly get any attention because of the context this subject carries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek#Change_of_opini...

What incentive? Huge incentives, obviously. This entire thread is a promotion to help a former government official kickstart a business to "research" this phenomenon, where his partner is contractually obligated to get paid $100,000 a year.

Some did. Most were cheap and even the most expensive ones took 2MP pixel shots. Good luck capturing a fast moving object from a long distance with a Motorola Razr.

Also, it wasn't seen by 'everyone at the airport'

>"The disc was visible for approximately five minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it."

It also apparently was not visible on radar or visually from the control tower. Who cares if it was 'aliens' or not, it's a damned interesting phenomena that should be studied for it's own sake.

And yet no surveillance cameras captured it? No cameras at the gate? No cameras near or around? This was 2006, well after the days when the idea of 24/7 eyes everywhere was considered a conspiracy, it was the days of bush and the Patriot Act and consistent airport watch. And we get... no actual real evidence?

Pretty sure they don’t have security cameras pointed at the sky

I'm pretty sure that if there were really a giant unidentifiable craft hovering over an American airport terminal less than a decade after 9/11 someone would have found a way to point something at it.

I am inclined to agree with you, but on the other hand, according to that WikiPedia article the FAA concluded it was an unexplained weather phenomenon. That is easier to believe, but it makes it no easier to understand how no hard evidence was recorded.

Most do especially at flight control to record incoming planes along with steady snap cams that relay black and white feeds unless O’Hare is somehow less serious than Helsinki airport in 2005

This was over a gate (C-17 iirc) and thus may have been out of view for any flight control cams.

Because it totally makes sense that the military would fly highly-classified aircraft in full view of thousands of people, essentially giving away any element of surprise in the event the shit hits the fan (thinking Phoenix Lights here)

I completely agree that the Phoenix lights were weird. I don't know what they were, I don't think they were birds, but I also don't think they were a big black alien triangle.

Neverthless, the military does sometimes test classified aircraft in view of civilians. And they have been known to use or even encourage UFO sightings as misinformation to cover up their activity.

Fiction has to make sense, but reality doesn't always have to make sense.

And yet you're refusing to believe in the "reality" (hypothetical) of an alien ship visit, because it doesn't make sense (to you... and possibly to me). Probably because (among other things), we think FTL travel is impossible (... we think... cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) which makes any visitation from realistically far away essentially impossible or at least highly impractical ("cryosleep" for centuries, etc.)

And so a sensible person seeks (perhaps justifiably) prosaic explanations for everything and automatically excludes any hypothesis without a prosaic explanation (with the incredibly audacious conceit of assuming we already understand enough about the universe to make such assumptions), while the fantastical person, not as bound by the need for evidence, can wildly speculate (which would of course include nonhuman intelligences somehow visiting us over distances that are insurmountable to us currently, but might also include basically, well, anything, since without the hard-evidence requirement, you're free to get creative)

I think both of these points exist as extremes on a continuum and that they're both wrong in some capacity. I think pragmatism and reasoning and rationality are a good basis, however... just, limiting, as well.

We might advance a bit on the evidence front here if there was a scientific way to evaluate mass eyewitness testimony (individual eyewitness testimony has come under fire recently https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-..., but perhaps, if you multiply the number of witnesses, the errors will tend to cancel each other out and you might end up with something more like Evidence with a capital E. (This would be useful in far more areas than mere UFO observation, of course.)

I'm not refusing to believe in the hypothetical reality. Of all the hypothetical realities I can conceive, "actually aliens" is the one I want most to be real. I want to live in that world, and not just see it in fiction.

What I am refusing to do is believe that hypothetical reality to be more likely than it is, based on the evidence (or lack thereof) presented and what it does or doesn't actually prove. I'm slotting it in the rank it deserves, which is slightly ahead of demons in likelihood but still less likely than everything else.

But yeah, the likelihood that it's aliens is not entirely zero.

Fair enough!

Also, this came out moments ago. Timely? https://twitter.com/cnn/status/943105094345723904

You do? I don't know if I want to live in that world. Depends on how friendly the aliens are I suppose?

This is a really cohesive statement of the opinion I have about it, thanks. It always surprises me to meet people that can't push their internal boundaries to even think about the possibility. The kind of thinking that if humans haven't done it before -- and taken plenty of pictures! -- it can't possibly happen. The same person that thinks, "Well, since nobody has eaten all the stars in the galaxy for computational power, aliens can't possibly exist," despite the fact that we can't even generate the kinds of radio signals that would be needed for our own receivers to pick them up beyond a handful of light years. I will go to my grave dying to know how and why people think this way.

Actually, when I see the videos of the Phoenix Lights, I immediately recognize plane-dropped flares. Every video I've ever seen of those lights appear to me to be plane-dropped flares. I spent many years in the infantry and deployed four times and I can tell you with certainty that's what they are. I think even the Air Force came out and said they had dropped flares that night.

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