Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender341341 | Hacker News Reader

probably a good number of drunks/kooks and then probably a handful of unknown phenomena that would have a reasonable explanation if we had better photos/descriptions.

*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

View on HN

What about the countless credible eye witnesses? Not everyone who claims they have witnessed a UFO is a kook...

"credible eye witnesses"

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.

I am not saying we know for a fact that extra terrestrials have landed on planet earth. I agree with you, there is still not enough evidence.

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...

> 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.

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 also tons of people who have claimed to see ghosts, tons of medieval peasants that saw witches, tons of people accused of summoning the devil in the 80s.

There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.

You make a valid point and which is why eye witness evidence is not sufficient.

However combined with what has been otherwise documented, I consider it a possibility we are being visited by aliens.

that was covered by the second portion of my comment. There are a few that are legit we don't know what that was. If we had better details/pictures/video of them we might be able to say better.

In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems low though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com