No doubt many of you have read about the recent and “much-awaited” preliminary report on the government’s assessment of UFO phenomena.
According to this article, “The report finds that an overwhelming majority of more than 120 sightings in the past 20 years did not come from any U.S. military or other government technology.”
So the next question automatically becomes: Where did they come from?
Some have promoted the theory that they are super-advanced foreign military craft. Others have commented that the phenomena may be “alien” spacecraft — not necessarily “extraterrestrial” but rather “experimental technology” developed by other countries.
Both of these scenarios are naturally a chief concern for the United States because if hostile countries are involved, that would threaten the world’s largest military power.
Of course there are untold numbers who insist the objects are most certainly and definitely “otherworldly.”
From my personal perspective, I tend to agree with Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine. Michael is a science historian and a longtime analyst of UFO theories and other phenomena – and he points out the blurry and hazy element to the sightings. He notes that several billion people have smartphones that take crisp, clear images, not to mention satellites that can precisely render detail on the ground.
He then puts forth this challenge: “Show me the body, show me the spacecraft, or show me the really high quality videos and photographs … and I’ll believe.”
I admit that when I was considerably younger, I fancied the idea of visitors from other parts of the universe. Looking back, I’m sure it had a lot to do with my love of sci-fi movies. In fact, one of my favorites was “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (the 1951 version), in which an alien lands and tells the people of Earth that they must live peacefully or be destroyed as a danger to other planets. (Actually, the warning in the movie is not so far-fetched even today.)
However, as I matured, I began to see things differently. Based on my current perspective, there are simply too many rational thinking hurdles to overcome for me to accept the idea of extraterrestrial visitors.
Yet … stranger things have happened.
What’s your take? Will these blurry images that move and shift and disappear in the blink of an eye be explained in the final governmental report? Or will they remain in the UFO file with a “to-be-determined-later” notation?
P.S. Further reading on this topic can be found here.
Nan's Notebook 
Nan, there seems to be a lot of passion in legislators around this topic, but we let it drown out other issues – like our hunger and poverty problem, threats to our democracy, civil rights issues, gun governance issues, expanding health care further, addressing climate change and our water issues, infrastructure woes, debt issues, etc. Keith
LikeLiked by 3 people
Right after reading your comment, I came across this in the National Review:
LikeLiked by 3 people
True. And, any solution to anything certainly won’t neatly fit on a bumper sticker slogan.
LikeLiked by 2 people
They will probably remain unidentified forever.
They would probably have mundane explanations, if only we had enough information. But we don’t have enough, and that’s what leads to speculation.
LikeLiked by 4 people
When I was young(er) the explanation was always untethered weather balloons for spacecraft and floating trees for Nessie.. As Michael Shermer points out, in these days of different methods of taking crisp shots outside in most lights, there’s really no choice not to have anything definitive.
Nonetheless, I have a secret hankering for there to be otherworlders who pop in to make sure we don’t have the ability to ruin their planets too but who one day be ready to help people recover this world as it should be and live in peace as we should.
Huge Hugs
LikeLiked by 5 people
Perhaps though, wearing my contrarian hat, war is THE or at least A major driver of technological progress in human history? Or even social progress (the military was the first major institution to push for racial integration).
You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. -The Third Man
LikeLiked by 3 people
War demands the ability to change, or be destroyed in a rapid timeline. Alas, the need for intelligent generals does not produce intelligent generals.
War is a major hindrance to technological progress. It diverts research and resources from any really beneficial development to produce expensive and otherwise useless nonsense, that actually causes only harm. It thwarts co-operation of great minds to develope technology. Militaries are traditionally some of the most conservative environments in any society. In peacetime they cling on to the conservative values of past, because the job of killing people is very hard to justify through any other set of values. War often demands rigid discipline and as such it produces major authoritarian hierarchies. Shared technology is far more likely to produce new and better technology, than secret technology – the way new technology is treated by military.
The wars during the Italian reneissance in late medieval times 14th and 15th century were often conducted more as mock battles of great showmanship in wich the pomp of an army decided who would yield. The art and culture for support of artistry (that produced great art even a bit later) was a result of prosperity the city states could create by not being engaged in bloody wars all the time, altough symbolically and politically they had all declared “war” against each other. The era of the Borgias, France and Germany coming to make their wars (about who gets to decide who is the pope) in Italy, led to a cultural decline, the end of wich we are still awaiting.
The Swis have developed a fairly harmonious and wealthy culture, albeit the rights of women have dragged behind other western countries and while they truly are a multicultural society, they are ridiculously xenophobic. Are their problems the result of not having war, or some other factors?
Afghanishtan has been in a state of bloody war for at least a couple of generations and has produced absolutely nothing, that could even distantly resemble technological advancement, cultural finesse, great art, nor human rights.
Still, advanced weaponry is as good a guess as any for the UFO’s, since it is secretive and the super fast secret jet plane of one is the UFO of a nother. Likelihood for something that we know could exist is always a better explanation, than something that we know nothing about. However, in grand total we simply do not know and jumping to conclusions is usually not very productive.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Kieth says ‘smokescreen.’ Likely.
Neils says we’re not ready yet.
David says, hopefully.
I cannot dismiss anyone’s comment since I don’t have anything better to offer, but I going to hang close to DavidProser.
I spent many weekends in my youth helping Flash Gordon, aka Buster Crabb, stop the evil plans of Ming the Merciless, so I have the first-hand knowledge to declare it could definitely happen, maybe. For real.
I have noticed one thing in particular about aliens: like gods, they always take on the characteristics of the people who invent them. I did not remember The Day The Earth Stood Still until I searched it. There were those nine-foot-tall human-like beings in their aluminum onesies.
Back to the real ufos or uaps. I don’t think they could come from our solar system. If there were any aliens, regardless of their physical appearance, with such superior intelligence and living in our neighborhood, they would have demolished every probe we have sent to all our neighbors. Surely they would be aware of what we have done/are doing to the earth and say, “Hell no! Not in my backyard.” (Vaporizer rays deployed.)
May 18, 2021, · NASA plans to fly a probe to Saturn’s moon Titan to capture extraterrestrial life that could exist in organic compounds and then harness its methane lakes to power the journey back to Earth. Uh-huh. We are not looking for aliens. We are looking for natural resources. We need something new to fight about.
Scientists just mapped 1 million new galaxies, in 300 hours (In 300 hours.)
https://www.space.com/fastest-all-sky-map-ever-askap?utm_source=notification
There are 400 billion stars in the Milky way galaxy.
There are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, but we are still counting and searching.
If we just consider our own galaxy with an estimated 100 billion planets, what can we rule out?
A final point: when scientists describe a planet as habitable, they are talking in the sense of ‘human’ habitability. There could be gods out there.
LikeLiked by 2 people
One Navy pilot stated he has seen UAP every day for the past several years, which would make, by my count, several hundred “sightings” by military personnel (just him alone).
I wouldn’t be shocked to find out those whatevertheyares had alien pilots, illegal aliens, every damned one of them! I imagine the GOP will want to build a wall around the planet to keep the illegal aliens out.
LikeLiked by 6 people
As a child, teenager, and even a young adult, the idea of space travel was thrilling. Now, in the light of sober contemplation, understanding the distances to just the nearest stars–odds are they have no intelligent life anyway–interstellar space travel is and will always be next-to-impossible. The one way we can achieve starflight is to somehow make ourselves immortal, so that we have the time to take a slow boat to Alpha Centauri, just to find out if they have planets with life on them. Not even intelligent life, but any kind of life.
Without immortality, the stars are just lights in the firmament.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I say all unidentified flying objects are of terrestrial origin until proven otherwise. Show me the body, like in the quote you mention above, or I won’t believe any extraordinary claim about anything seen or supposedly seen by anyone, anywhere, at any time. I wanna believe these things are from “space aliens” or some such thing, but I just don’t. I see no evidence to support it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to take some pics of Bigfoot.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Maybe they are scouts for the forthcoming hunting party. Like in PREDATOR? You can’t be the only sentient being with a taste for Long Pig?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Where are they coming from though? According to intelligence reports, the objects move at speeds and in ways that exceed our current technology. I don’t know either, but I think it’s good to know exactly what is flying around in our airspace. 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
Whose current technology are we speaking about?
Here is an example: I saw a video of the gun cameras of two US navy jets tracking an unidentified object flying away from them. The pilots later said, that the object moved much faster than they did and was of the shape of a pill, or Tictac candy. I have heard from Finnish fighter pilots, that depending on light and speed, fighter planes often appear to the naked eye, as if they had no wings. The US planes were F/A-18F Super Hornets that have the absolute maximum speed of Mach 1.6 and were propably flying a lot slower. On the video the target looks like a flat object, wich could just as well be a two engine fighter plane – especially of the Soviet design, that has the engines well apart from each other. Already during the 1970’s the Soviets developed and mass produced Mig-31 fighters, that can easily outrun any US fightercraft with max speed up to 3.84 Mach. To a regular fighter pilot someone flying that fast, could seem like the faster plane moving far over double the speed of the Super Hornet. I am guessing, that the US pilots must know about this technological difference between some of their equipment and the equipment of some other nations, yet it might feel bewildering (depending how deeply they have assumed some assumptoin of technoligical supremacy – as tends to be the case for at least the military personnel of some of the greater armies in the world) when first encountered and those encounters are very rare indeed. So, I am not counting out the possibility of the pilots making the observation and the officials making the analysis later having been so ingrained in their own national propaganda, that what actually seemed like an impossibility was well known not to be impossible at all.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think they are out there somewhere,but if they were to be curious about our galaxy or even our solar system, they’d be so advanced, they’d remain hidden.
So what has been seen, I doubt is extra terrestrial….but then again.
It’s hard to imagine how huge the universe is and how insignificant we are, but we are a mere blip in space and time, but perhaps an interesting one.
LikeLiked by 3 people
My feelings are it’s just the usual assortment of ‘something else’. I’ve read a few of these articles which are coming out and what surprised me was that most, if not all, of these visual encounters are already a few to several years old. There have been no ‘new’ encounters really, we’re just talking anew about the old ones, which of course generates new hype. That’s the most puzzling thing to me personally. Why are we suddenly talking about it as if it’s a brand-new thing?
Whatever though, that’s okay.
There’s lots of reasons to be skeptical that these objects are extraterrestrial (or ‘alien’) in origin. Never mind the vast, unbridgeable distances between stars for now and just consider one reason which begs our attention: The very poor photos and footage we are shown. The Great Unifier of all weird claims, from Bigfoot to ghosts, to Nessie to UFOs, are the questionable photos and videos offered as ‘proof’. This is the biggest of the big red flags for deception as far as I’m concerned.
In an age where billions of people have ready access to smartphones to photograph everything from meals at restaurants to catastrophic explosions, all the UFO footage ever presented is blurry, grainy, computer generated or ambiguous in some way.
Consider tornado footage for a moment. Just a couple decades ago, video footage of tornadoes was pretty rare and what we did have wasn’t generally nice and clear. It was understandable though because not everyone happened to have a movie camera on hand when a tornado suddenly roared through town. Today however, YouTube is so full of high-resolution tornado footage we can literally watch tornadoes wreak havoc on the ground for hours. The reason of course is because so many people now have camera phones at instant access, and tornado footage — even at high resolution video — has become common enough to gain millions of followers on YouTube.
If everyone now has quality cameras which are instantly accessible, shouldn’t our latest footage of UFO activity reflect that? Why is it then that new footage of UFO activity is at the same low level of quality it was several years ago when nobody had conveniently accessible cameras to record it? What’s your best guess as to why would that be?
This is a very strong case that the footage is not real or at least has been misrepresented.
Remember what Carl Sagan wrote: “All claims require evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Saying something is a UFO of alien origin IS an extraordinary claim. What we’ve seen recently in these films is NOT extraordinary evidence. It’s just more of the same ‘Ho-hum Stuff’. Show us something other than ‘gun camera’ footage, or radar blips, or triangles on a green screen, or monochrome, grainy dots supposedly flying over oceans.
Show us footage which really shows us something. We can wait.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Much ado about nothing.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Hundreds of years ago when people believed in angels and demons, there were innumerable reports of people actually seeing angels and demons and being visited by them. For the last century or so, as science fiction and the dawn of space rocketry started making the idea of space travel plausible to the mass public mind, people have been seeing aliens and alien spaceships. Oddly enough, nobody seems to see angels and demons any more.
I’m with Shermer too. If there were alien spacecraft flying around in the Earth’s atmosphere under conditions where people could see them at all, by now we would have unambiguous, indisputable photographs and video of them. We don’t. On the other hand, we have an abundance of evidence that humans are prone to misinterpret what they see or even have outright hallucinations (or lie). Notice that this point is equally true regardless of what you believe about whether aliens exist or, if they exist, what their attitude would be toward us (both of which are completely unknowable at our present state of knowledge).
There will always be things in the sky we can’t identify. That doesn’t mean they must be alien spaceships.
The claim that intelligent aliens are visiting us is an extraordinary claim. To be accepted or even considered, it needs extraordinary evidence. So far there is no evidence at all.
LikeLiked by 6 people
“Oddly enough, nobody seems to see angels and demons any more.” Well, I saw the Prophet Mohammad fly into Heaven on his horse a few times. Does that count? 🙂
LikeLiked by 4 people
Were you smoking a baby when you saw that?
LikeLiked by 3 people
This wins “Teh Internet” for question of the day!
LikeLiked by 3 people
Drinking one.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I chose answer B, “to-be-determined-later.” At no time will anyone say we know for a fact that this is true/not true. Some things/phenomena will always be explained (eventually).
I like to invoke Poe’s sonnet to science when I contemplate such things. I wrote one, a retort, to “magic.’
Here’s Poe’s: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48625/sonnet-to-science
LikeLiked by 2 people
Nope you are all wrong, aliens visit our planet and even kidnap humans to examine them. Deny facts at your own peril as you could have your internal organs removed through your nose.
It is amazing that the brain for some people will either manufacture the thing they want desperately to see or they interpret an unusual event into what they desperately want it to be.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Although this post is a few months old, I recently came across the following in an article published by The Guardian and entitled “‘What I saw that night was real’: is it time to take aliens more seriously?”:
You can read the full article here .
LikeLike