Unidentified flying object
(→Project Mogul: finished shovelling the crap) |
(→Actual conspiracy) |
||
| Line 39: | Line 39: | ||
#Caused them to tell everyone they knew. | #Caused them to tell everyone they knew. | ||
#Created the impression of a government cover-up. | #Created the impression of a government cover-up. | ||
| + | The government has been known to keep the american public misinformed. The government is notorious for blantantly lying to the public and covering up alien space craft and encounters. | ||
| + | |||
| + | Bottom line is- DONT TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT. | ||
==The USAF line== | ==The USAF line== | ||
Revision as of 21:02, 9 August 2010
| The woo is out there |
| Aliens did it and ran away |
“”UFOs are real. The Air Force doesn't exist.
|
| —Discordian Koan. |
An unidentified flying object is any observed atmospheric phenomenon for which there is no apparent explanation. These are more likely to occur at night, since many identifiable flying objects have funny flashing lights and little else to go by in the dark.
How "unidentified" a phenomenon is depends partly on the quality of the observation and the amount of effort invested in identifying it. Multiple observation locations and reasonably accurate bearings and azimuths can make identification much easier. Single observations of brief phenomena are more difficult to analyze.
The basic list of what needs to be eliminated for something to remain "unidentified" would proceed from known commercial and private airflights, to harder to verify military flights, to weather balloons, meteorites, kites, atmospheric phenomena (like the Northern Lights,[1] or strangely lit clouds), pranksters, and, of course, alien spacecraft.
Barring omniscience, there will always be some things in the sky that humanity cannot identify. However, in popular meaning, "Unidentified Flying Object" has come to mean "Alien Spacecraft" by default. Identifying UFOs as flying saucers negates the "U" part of UFO, of course. So far, no verified alien machinery has been found on Earth. We have, however, left examples of alien machinery on the Moon and Mars, and quite possibly Venus. There are also two or three objects hurtling out of the solar system, on their way to starring roles in Star Trek movies.
Contents |
How the whole thing got started
First wave of interest
The first notable wave of interest in UFOs was actually in the 1890s. Interestingly, this helps put later waves of interest in UFOs in perspective: because popular culture had yet to define what a UFO was supposed to look like, the spacecrafts described were rarely shaped like flying saucers (in one incident, the supposed craft was shaped "like a giant cigar") and the flashing lights later common to many stories were much rarer.[2] The craft were also much slower (though they would've passed for fast at the time).
Kenneth Arnold
On December 10, 1946, a U.S. Marine C-46 transport plane crashed on the southwest side of Mount Rainier in Washington State, and was not located until the next summer. [3] A private pilot named Kenneth Arnold volunteered to aid with the search. While he was circling the mountain he spotted a cluster of nine brightly glowing meteors rushing past his plane toward the massive, remote bulk of Mt. Adams to the south.
Since they were pieces of a meteoric fireball in the process of breaking up, they seemed to be flying in formation, so Arnold assumed they were aircraft, and he naturally interpreted their brightness to be the sun glinting off of polished aluminum. The pieces were tumbling, and this made them hop up and down in the airstream. Arnold told reporters they flew "like a saucer skipping over water."
This was a highly publicised UFO sighting, and it sparked a national obsession with "flying saucers" that bordered on mass hysteria. Suddenly there were many more sightings. Some were ordinary mistakes but most were outright copycat hoaxes. An important point that is often missed is how Arnold's description of the actions of his nine meteors skipping like saucers somehow got garbled into the shape of the objects being like saucers, and once that got locked into the public's mind, all UFOs suddenly began to look like saucers.
Many frauds came forward to push this hysteria, including George Adamski who claimed to have ridden across the solar system with Venusians.
Project Mogul
In the late 1940s, the USAF ran Project Mogul, a top secret attempt to detect sound waves from potential Soviet nuclear explosions using microphones flown by high-altitude balloons. On July 7, 1947 Mogul Flight #4 crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.[4][5] A rancher found the debris field and brought some of the debris to the nearby air base. The public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field made a press release reporting that a crashed "flying disc" has been recovered. The press went nuts, cementing the meme of the "flying saucer" in the public's consciousness. After the sensation hit the headlines, the officer was reprimanded, and new information was announced: the wreckage was from a weather balloon. Years after the fact, the story got embellished and mutated into different versions, becoming the archetypal "crashed saucer" myth, complete with recovered alien corpses (or live aliens!) and a government cover-up.
The rise of the conspiracy
The first was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, which sparked a poisonous conspiracy mindset that, before, had largely been found only within fringe groups. The second event, the Tet Offensive in 1968, seemed to validate this mindset to many people, who realized with shock that the government had lied to them and victory in the Vietnam War was actually nowhere in sight. The third and final event was the cover-ups and incredible abuses of power of the Nixon Administration in the Watergate affair.
It was only after this vast attitude shift occurred that people looked back and read ominous things into the comedy of errors that took place at the beginning of the UFO era. Alien bases were imagined to exist in the southwestern United States. An entire alphabet soup of imaginary government agencies were cooked up, that supposedly controlled all information on the alien presence. Even the information that these agencies existed was, conveniently, also classified top secret. There were imaginary projects to recover downed flying saucers and imaginary projects to overhaul and test-fly recovered flying saucers. And the very lack of evidence for any of these claims was put forth as proof that a conspiracy to hide the truth existed.
In the fall of 1977 and again in the spring of 1982, Steven Spielberg made a pair of movies (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) with "good" aliens and "bad" federal agencies that tapped into the new mythology and made enormous amounts of money. In reality, no coordinated government plan to respond to alien contact, if there even is/was any, has ever been made public.
Actual conspiracy
It has been alleged by at least one wing-nut[6] that the government created the alien conspiracy theories to provide a cover for other projects, such as the Lockheed Skunk Works. Gullible farmers would be shown so-called "alien crash sites," and told to keep quiet. This cunning plan did two things:
- Caused them to tell everyone they knew.
- Created the impression of a government cover-up.
The government has been known to keep the american public misinformed. The government is notorious for blantantly lying to the public and covering up alien space craft and encounters.
Bottom line is- DONT TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT.
The USAF line
The United States Air Force "identify" all unidentified flying objects as "weather balloons".[7] So there.
The USAF did actually launch an investigation of UFOs - Project Blue Book - that lasted between 1952 and 1970. It didn't find anything interesting.[8]
Seriously, the list of crashed UFOs (complete with body counts!) reads like a history of general aviation fatalities. Yet we are told these are advanced beings with superior technology. If they are so advanced, why do they always crash? (Conversely, if millions of visits to Earth have been made, their crash rate is a lot lower than, say, the United States' Interstate 25 highway) And always the evidence is "believed by some to be buried" or "reported recovered" or "the memo also states that it was believed" and even reports from foreign governments are somehow shut down by the US government. And every single scrap of wreckage is whisked away by the Air Force which is omnipotent in this area, but so incompetent they allowed B-52s to fly over the USA with armed nuclear warheads on board (for which the Secretary of the Air Force was sacked).
Evidence
There is a bit of a discrepancy between the evidence needed to show an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs and the evidence so far acquired and used by UFO enthusiasts. If they were real, it would - in principle - not be difficult to show their alien origin.
Evidence we need
- Images taken by the aliens of their own homeworld.
- A sample of alien DNA (or the equivalent).
- Exotic material never yet produced on Earth, perhaps as part of "UFO" wreckage.
- A mathematical proof which would be quite routine for the alien but which has not been solved by us on Earth at this time.
- Similarly, any technology or scientific theory - unification of quantum mechanics and relativity would be nice.
Evidence we got
- Blurry pictures of hubcaps captured mid-toss.
- Unsteady handheld video of some lights floating in the darkness which could well be the parking lot of a desert roadhouse a half-mile away.
- A black dot seen in two frames.
- Anecdotes and stories - but never photographic evidence - of closer encounters with spacecraft.
- Project Blue Book, cataloguing every UFO story anyone bugged the USAF with for eighteen years and listing why pretty much every one was conventionally explicable.
Conclusions on evidence
Now with the wide spread of cheap mobile phone cameras, high quality point & shoot cameras, as well as cheap, high definition handheld recorders an influx of much clearer and well-focused, UFO recordings are expected. Any time now. Aaaaaany time now... indeed, the quality of UFO evidence has not increased with the technological ability to capture it.
UFO proponents usually defend the lack of evidence based on a form of special pleading for UFOs. Perhaps science shouldn't discount eyewitnesses, no matter how drunk, or should drop some of its intellectual rigour for the sake of UFOs - say, to forget about reproducing any experiments, as most of the time no two UFO reports ever cite the same details with true independence.
Genuine Weirdness
While it can be assumed that a large amount of UFO sighting are either mistakes or bullshit there are several examples of genuine weirdness surrounding UFOs. There have been numerous reports of UFOs by credible witnesses, ranging from airline pilots, to Mercury Astronaut Gordon Cooper, to former POTUS Jimmy Carter. While these may have been, like other reports of UFOs, simple cases of mistaken identity, it proves that there are credible witnesses of UFO phenomena and that not everyone who sees them is batshit crazy. A notable example of odd behaviour by the government was the 2006 O'Hare International UFO sighting, during which over a dozen employees witnessed numerous UFOs over gate C-17. The FAA declined to investigate and stated the sighting was a "weather phenomenon." Many UFOlogists state that this runs counter to FAA regulation, which decrees that any potential security threat be investigated. Finally, during Project Blue Book, the last serious USAF investigation into the UFO phenomenon, the committee found that 701 reported cases remain unidentified. It must be noted that this does not mean alien, it means "unidentified."
See also
- Roswell - The mother of all UFO conspiracies.
- Everything You Know Is Wrong! -- Firesign Theatre
- Those flashing lights in the sky over there! Quick, look! Nevermind, you missed it. It was there though, I swear.
- Crop circles - revealed to be a hoax ages ago, but still used as "proof".
- Alien abduction - When UFOs get a little too close.
- Raëlism - When aliens are your creator.
- The Aetherius Society - when aliens contact humanity via a taxi driver's radio.
- SETI — projects to try to detect any alien communications.
- Rods
Footnotes
- ↑ See Wikipedia on Aurora Borealis
- ↑ "Later," as in: "during the era of commercial aviation." Go figure.
- ↑ A Curtis Commando R5C transport plane crashes into Mount Rainier, killing 32 U.S. Marines
- ↑ The Roswell Incident and Project Mogul, The Skeptical Enquirer
- ↑ Return to Roswell, The Skeptical Enquirer
- ↑ Ramsay, Robin. "Disinformation About UFOs." Conspiracy Theories. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. 114-25. Print.
- ↑ At least according to Ed Stein...
- ↑ Of course, that's what they want you to think.