What about the other half?
A challenge for the incredulous, bring me some high quality cellphone pictures of airplanes at night without using any extra equipment like tripods, lenses or stabilizers.
And get this 70mm cameras are equivalent to 18k.
I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S. military. Sadly most of it is classified.
Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
Isn't the paranoid atmosphere cold war and the increase in weapons testing, satellites, spy balloons, etc. a much simpler explanation?
But I agree, it is a possible explanation.
No? Why would it, any more so than what came before? We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I guess (must not have limited resources, like, at all) all using physics we're not even on the verge of discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict what we have discovered, but also leave no to-us-detectable trace anywhere we can detect, in their visits or with their sensing equipment or their civilization itself, but also also be pretty bad at hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but also also also good enough that we can't quite prove they're real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away, instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.
"Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the rest still holds, too.
The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's not technically impossible that Russell's Teapot exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens" barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and does miracles sometimes".
Source? I see the opposite when I Google around for reports per year. There was a dip during COVID, buts it's easy to attribute that to people not being outside, and it's picked right back up since.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/05/20/global...
*edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in origin.
I will say my thoughts on the matter:
Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only planet with life)
Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low chance
Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united states? near 0% chance
This is a contradiction. Not that eye witness testimonies are completely without merit, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and eye-witness testimony alone does not meet that standard....no matter who the witness is.
However I am tired of reading so called skeptics dismissing people who come forward claiming they have seen UFOs as kooks or drunkards.
There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Video recordings that can't be explained, radar observations etc. Please also realize that most of what has been recorded so far is classified as top secret, according to testimony from people with direct access to this evidence and like I said in my parent comment, we also have plenty of credible eye witness reports.
It's sad that people aren't more curious - not everything is about distracting from Donald Trumps misadventures with classified documents...
Nah. I'd wager it's more likely to be earthlings from an alternate reality or that time travel turns out to be feasible and it's our descendants, than that it's space aliens ("but one of those is entirely based on speculative physics and both require our model of the universe to be pretty damn wrong, to allow such travel" yeah, I know—that's how incredible I find the space alien hypothesis). I don't think those are credible guesses, either, but I'd say they're more likely to be true than "it's aliens". That explanation's got a lot of things working against it.
There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.
However combined with what has been otherwise documented, I consider it a possibility we are being visited by aliens.
In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems low though.