Reading blindfolded

Hey ATS, long time no chat.

As some of you know, asking the right questions is just as important as is the search for their answers. Keep in mind, right does not mean not weird, or not funny.

Having had a good enough experience 8 years ago (good enough to make me acknowledge there actually is something to all this UFO biz, unfortunately) I was brought here looking for answers. Soon though, I found out the importance (and lack of) good questions. Or weird ones.

So, I kept looking. One thing was certain from the beginning though - whatever the answer is, it is HUGE. That alone is enough to make one rethink a thing or two. I have tried using logic and deduction (hence, the OP title, self pun intended) mixed with thinking of the right questions and drawing possibilities from there.

Lets start with a normal question, is there a human alive on planet Earth who has the answer to the origin of the phenomenon. Two possibilities.

1. Yes, but they are keeping it a secret.
=> Why? Two options:
A. They have a gain (they are in contact with the phenomenon orit is human advanced tech that is behind it all).
B. The truth is a lot scarier/weirder/difficult to comprehend than even popular fiction paints it as.

2. No
=> Why? The phenomenon is beyond the scope of human understanding and def doesn’t want to be revealed. And judging by the trickster element, the high strangeness accounts and inconsistency mixed with consistency among various experiences, one of its aims is to disorient and deceive the experiencer.

OK, so far so good. Lets, for a moment, disregard the fact that we have some advanced vehicles that would account for some of the UFO cases. Also, lets disregard the possibility that it is all human tech behind it all throughout history.

Now, let us dive into two very realistic, imo, ideas that are just that - ideas, far from proven fact. One, the Universe as we see it in its large magnitude is merely another layer of repetition in the grand scheme of things. As some might say, we may be living in a muscle cell of an animal which is extending in the current moment so thats where inflation is coming from. And that is half a joke.

So, with that possibility in mind, lets compare ourselves and our place in the Universe with a bacteriophage living in a person’s intestines. Strikingly similar in some ways, no? One difference is complexity, but apart from that, people require energy to create more people, the same way the bacteriophage needs a host cell to spread its DNA and give birth to other bacteriophages with the cost of the existance of the host cell. Think of it as bad code that starts replicating itself and affecting a system, many times bigger than itself. Sounds familiar? And if it is true with some norms of deviation, then the systems we know and experience repeat themselves throughout all sizes and beyond our perception and that opens a lot of crazy possibilities, too.

Anywho. Point is, what do you do if you have a bad bacteriophage infecting your body and killing off a specific kind of undoubtedly useful cells and microorganisms that are a part of your immune system? You basically bomb the place with antibiotics. Like literally blow it up. Imagine tiny cell people screaming while being blown to bits, and all kinds, including the useful ones, the so called immune system. Anyway, point is, it recently turned out you can kill or regulate bacteriophages by inserting a specific type of bacteriophage, one that kills only the type of bacteriophages that you carry that are causing the hypothetical health issue. And luckily so, due to the fact that nowadays bugs are growing resistant to antibiotics with a decent and worrying pace due to overusage but that is another topic.

Why am I saying all of this in the UFO forum? Think about the comparison above. Now think about the UFOs as something that has targeted life on Earth as something of high interest/danger, a bacteriophage regulating and keeping tabs on another bacteriophage that can prove dangerous. Something that has been “inserted” into the “Universe” from that hypothetical “creature” of enourmous unimaginable size that we inhabit. I know this all seems a stretch, but think about how much exactly can the bacteriophage understand the world around it. With size come some limitations, surely and that might actually apply to us.

Btw, might be the right moment to mention that this is all speculation, I am far from inhabiting the back of a high horse, thinkinkg I got it all figured out. Just connecting the dots here, possibly making a fool out of my internet based persona, that is what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, pattern finding. Or is it?

Anywho.

Then think about this idea. We may have come to a point when we are able to observe and manipulate these small microorganism but that doesn’t mean we understand them, by a stretch. What if! Intelligence has evolved a long time ago or even, intelligence and self awareness may be a characteristic that is repeated at some points throughout sizes. And if so, it is also acceptable that one intelligence may not recognize and fully comprehend another. The reason this question popped in my mind was exactly bacteriophages, they look almost made up, are borderline weird as much as we can understand them, so I entertained the thought of “hey, maybe a tiny self aware, city building civilization once inhabited Earth and it created bacteriophages to fight off a certain enemy but things went haywire and now the whole mini civilaztion is gone and the bacteriophages are king.

Some will say I gotta lay off the Rick and Morty episodes, in defense, I will state I have watched none recently. And am in my thirties.

With that being said... tbc tomorrow

Meanwhile, bacteriophages

Or in other words, do aliens on other planets wonder about the true origin of those pesky, yet outstanding physics bending UFOs flying in their skies?

This covers option 2 from the two possible answers on that simple question I postulaed in the OP. Tomorrow I will cover option 1. Meanwhile, looking forward to your creative thoughts, bashing, or whatever feedback you got.

P.s. I can imagine the reaction of the guy whose muscle cell we are inhabiting during the 40s “hey, what the heck did those little f*****s dare do inside me?!”

a reply to: ch1n1t0

we may be living in a muscle cell of an animal which is extending in the current moment so thats where inflation is coming from.
Or in other words, do aliens on other planets wonder about the true origin of those pesky, yet outstanding physics bending UFOs flying in their skies?

Absolutely!
Today I was standing on my deck out back feeding my squirrels. I noticed a little ant that kept going for my bag of peanuts. Each time I would divert him only for him to take another path and try again. I did not want the ant in my peanuts. So, I took a big breath and puffed him off the railing.
And then I felt horrible. Would he die? It’s about a 14-foot drop. (I googled it and they actually kinda glide) When he finally gets home tonight (if I didn’t cost him an extra days travel) will he be pissed off and tell his wife about the horrible blonde giant?
I guess when you think about it the perceptions are endless, and that’s just earth. But I still think there are infinity more options available.
*Your post and the earlier ant answer lead me down a strange path.
So if we survive earth because of our size + gravity. A “person” on a different size planet with different gravity, would also be a different size; right?

a reply to: ch1n1t0
Multiple witnesses made these drawings of the phenomenon they observed. There are variations from witness to witness but obviously they all observed some kind of unknown structured craft. I think examining cases like these leads to insight into the phenomenon, since for at least this case and some others like it, we know what the phenomenon actually is.


Kiev UFO (pdf)

a reply to: Arbitrageur

In other words, when people say they know what they saw. Sometimes they really don't and eye witness testimony is unreliable?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I think that is a very interesting and informative article by our dear Jim Oberg. And while it really does shed some light onto people’s perception and how that can be and is flawed by default and so, can be useful, but as much as I tried, I still can not find a way to apply the information from the article to what I have seen and others have, too.

First, UFO flaps. And no, it isn’ definitely mass panic, I saw something in an area where this was already happening for an year or so. And we didn’t even know about that when we went hiking the mountains in the region in question. Just later after trying to find out what it was we might have misperceived I found about multiple witness cases before ours, and numerous times at that. Did we observe the NATO rocket defense shield that is said to have been stored in the same area of the Balkan mountain chain from 2008 to maybe 2012? Might be, but if that is the case, it means that is some serious tech we are talking about and can be easily misperceived for aliens... but I just don’t know. I have talked with pilots and all of them said it wasn’t the likeliest explanation, judging by our report.

Second, these lights, from what I understood from reading the article, were moving in one direction. What about hovering lights, ones that are doing turns, accelerating, etc? Physical craft, Encounters of the third kind? Are these planes and drones, even when they hover few hundred feet in front of you without making a squeek?

originally posted by: ch1n1t0
Are these planes and drones, even when they hover few hundred feet in front of you without making a squeek?

Yes indeed, that exact misperception can and does happen. I can't say they're all planes of course, probably not but at least some certainly are. I remember a case here on ATS where someone posted a video of a UFO that hovered for several minutes, and it didn't make a sound, at least not any that the person making the video could hear. It was just there in the air motionless, hovering.

Turns out Phage found the extended version of the video where at the end you could then clearly see it was a plane on a descent path toward the observer making it appear to "hover" for about 5 minutes, then eventually it made a turn and you could then tell it was a plane.

So that dispels two false notions you have:
1. "Planes can't hover". Maybe most can't but they can definitely present the illusion of doing so.
2. "Couldn't be a plane since it didn't make any noise" This one always kills me because there are many factors that determine whether you can hear noise from the plane. I constantly have planes flying around me where I live, some I can hear, some I can't. It depends on things like distance, altitude, thermal inversions, which way the wind is blowing, and other factors.

The other lesson from that story is someone had to edit the plane out of the end of that video to post the version where it just looked like a "UFO". There's plenty of incentive to do such things now to make money off youtube channels.

As for your implied distance, that's another observer fallacy that they can determine the distance to a UFO when they can't, and many examples can be shown where observer distance estimates can be ridiculously far off, maybe even by a factor of 10 times or 100 times the actual distance.

Some witnesses of this UFO thought it was the size of a football field because their estimate of the distance was way off:



The Infamous Yukon UFO we now know was over 100 times further away than witnesses thought it was, and this is very common. Witnesses think they know how far away the UFO is, but they don't.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I appreciate that you said that you can't actually state they're all planes. Indeed, more than once, I have been freaked out by a plane that seemed to hover just to turn out to be a plane soon after, I also am aware of the "stars moving" illusion that is especially possible to happen to people viewing the stars above sea during the night. I know how both of these look.

You did mention, however, 5 minutes. What about 6 hours? Of objects going from stationary to moving, some above, some below the horizon and quite clearly not cars, as they didn't blink in and out of existence as car headlights would due to the forests (and were visible from where we stayed)

I want to make something very clear - my end goal is not to explain the whole UFO phenomenon in my own mind as that would be pretentious, although it is a fun venture and I'm doing my fair share of speculation. However, what I really want to understand is what we saw, not any youtube video clip that was cut short with malicious intents, even the more convincing ones, which are pre-Internet times and are just a few, I'm interested to the point that these might be hints to getting an answer about what we've seen. Quite self-centered, I know, but you would also understand my position if you were in those shoes.

So I'm interested in this, and I have so far failed to find a good suggestion for 8 years now. Not going by aliens a slight bit. But not convinced it was a misperception, due to the length of the observation along with the fact other people had seen these same lights prior in the same area. We also had a few close-up glimpses of details that don't fit with meteors, reentry space scrap, or planes. And many have seen the same things in the same area, Including amateur astronomers that have filed reports and some even made the mistake to go on TV.

I'm really looking for something simple - an explanation for a black physical object that passes between the observer and background lights, has a visible physical shape (or at least so it seems in the observer's mind) that appears in the observer's eye same as the size of a 2 story house viewed from a dozen or so meters distance. Made no sound and had its body oriented perpendicularly to the horizon while actually flying horizontally. The same as one of the illustrations in Jim's article. Also, it dove from high up in the sky as a pale red dot to this full size triangle, but then stopped "falling", instead kept its height while going West. Didn't flinch one bit too, while positioned in such a way.

What we observed for 6 hours wasn't planes, neither were drones (unless military such). Again, that might be NATO's missile defense technology that was secretly held there at around that period of time (and no longer is). But tell me - is it logical for such a system to have such "craft" that seemed to operate in such ways? Does defense system require noise-cancelled engines that can also enable the craft to hover and fly in such positions?

Thank you for your input, it is appreciated quite a bit. I am curiously looking forward to your thoughts on this.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

One thing that goes well along your thoughts and as an explanation to our experience, as subjective and prone to misidentification our minds are, is that we might have been victims of quite a complicated hoax involving drones. But I have two problems with that - absolutely silent (I'm a sound engineer, trust me) drones back in 2010 in remote mount parts of Bulgaria - doesn't really make sense; and two - why? Nothing really came out of this, only one teacher got ridiculed on TV from one of the earlier times these were observed, which I only later found out about. Oh, and these happened always during new moon or a day prior/after. This one weirds me out to this day.

I'm more inclined on the NATO/military explanation. But I'm yet to find something that fits what we had seen in terms of capabilities.

a reply to: mirageman

Thanks for chiming in, mirageman, indeed, I don't think being exceptionally rational and level headed when observing something weird should be considered as something wrong, and I know you don't too. But while the human brain can be misled, what interests me about these cases is how and why in people end up being misled in a particular manner where a pattern can be observed. Is it pop-culture references mixed with misidentifications of mundane things, even for trained or rational observers? Is it high strangeness which doesn't really work as an explanation cause it doesn't really mean much? Is it military? Or a mix of these?

a reply to: ch1n1t0
What you describe reminds me somewhat of the UFO over Illinois in January 2000. It was described by multiple police officers as it flew through their districts, and one of them even took a photo of it which didn't turn out too well, but well enough to rule out some common explanations like Venus, etc.

The Edge of Reality - Updated Report on the Illinois Police UFO case, January 5th, 2000.

To this day I still don't know for sure what it was they saw, but the witnesses all thought it was rather large. I think I have a pretty good idea what it was though. In any case that documentary is fun to watch, see if it sounds anything like your case if you have time to watch it.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Well, that is quite interesting that you brought that case up. It is quite a perplexing one indeed. By the way, I just checked and 5th of January 2000 was a day prior to New Moon.

Besides that, the general observations they had does resemble what we saw (silent, slow, black) but some others do not. The size and the incredible acceleration are lacking in our case. While there were stationary objects that went on to bursts of acceleration in various directions, just to come to a stop, I can not tell if these were 3,600 mph bursts due to not having an estimate of distance and size, and honestly, they didn’t look like it, as much of an uneducated guess that is. The one we saw clearly and seemed as large as a military UAV, and if my estimate of its size is anywhere near correct and keeping in mind the fact that it took it around 14-15 seconds to become indistinguishable in the distance, it wasn’t moving mind bendingly fast, but was faster than a nowadays commercially available drone, and was dead silent.

I am quite curious to see what you think they saw, if you shared your suspiciouns, it’d be highly appreciated. A u2u would be just as fine, if you do not intend on expressing theories publically that you are not sure about. Also, thanks for linking to the Illinois case, rewatching the docu atm.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Okay, watched the documentary now, second part, 04:06, where the police officer says the craft almost seemed like built up from different pieces, like a lego.

Some of the lights that we saw in the distance seemed to come together and fly conjoined for a little while, to separate later on and continue solo. Before we had seen any of the physical shapes attached to these lights later during the night, this connecting and disconnecting that took place every now and then in pairs, was the main reason we quite quickly understood this wasn't a regular thing that we are observing.

Although the passing of the triangular shape between us and the town lights below in the skirts of the mountains where we were located on top of, was quite short, I can't really tell of any such surface details. Nevertheless, from the few cases which are out there that really had me intrigued and also had their fair share of resemblance with our experience, in some of these instances the "crafts" in question did actually conjoin together and separate. And this resonated with what we had seen happen with some of the more distant lights. So I actually had this theory of the supposed craft, or whatever they are, might be modular in nature. And I think I have seen this postulated on ATS not so long ago.

Now I am even more curious to hear out your thoughts on what these police officers observed.

eta - Something I am not sure I have stated before, but prior to our sighting I wasn't that much into UFOs, not anymore than the regular Joe, having watched Spielberg's movies, The X-Files, but other than that, wasn't following UFO lore in depth at all. And I actually wasn't aware of the Belgium wave and even the concept of black triangular UFOs. So I wouldn't say I had a prebuilt notion of what UFOs to expect, I more like expected them to be like flying saucers from the movies. Interestingly enough, the only other shape that we made sense of due to it being much closer to us than the majority of these "objects", was of a disc, but wasn't merely as clear as the triangular shape due to its position with a sky behind it and not village lights, so I am not 100% certain about that particular object's real shape, might have been the mind building on the few details that were easily noticed though.

Also, these being described as "pipes" sounds quite similar to our fellow KPB's "rivets" observation when it comes to these giant triangles.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Check this video after the 15th minute regarding Farmington, New Mexico in 1950. March 15th, 16th, 17th.

Check the moon phase on these days..www.calendar-12.com...

originally posted by: ch1n1t0
I am quite curious to see what you think they saw, if you shared your suspiciouns, it’d be highly appreciated. A u2u would be just as fine, if you do not intend on expressing theories publically that you are not sure about. Also, thanks for linking to the Illinois case, rewatching the docu atm.

They said it was the size of a two story house, and what immediately came to mind for a size match was a rigid hull airship or blimp. When they said it hovered for a long time and wither made no noise at all or some heard a faint hum, again I thought blimp.

The military has had ideas for stealth blimps and I think there's a patent for one, but objections to military testing a secret blimp over such a populated were noted, so what if it was an advertising blimp instead of a military blimp?

Debunking my own UFO sighting, 14 years later

For years now, Crave's Eric Mack has been telling the story of the UFO he saw over a decade ago. Turns out he's probably had it all wrong that whole time...

It appeared to be a large, triangular craft that hovered less than 1,000 feet off the ground, blotting out the stars and leaving only the flashing white and red lights on each point of its three-sided form. It was silent, but as I've told the story over the past 14 years, I saw it quickly move in one direction, then the other, banking with incredible speed and agility before disappearing...

In fact, one of the more infamous triangular UFO sightings in recent memory took place around that time just outside of St. Louis. On January 5, 2000 -- within a few months of my own sighting and just a few hours' drive to the west -- seven people, including four police officers, reported seeing a giant triangle with lights at the corners. According to the resulting police report, it was described as "a very large flying object...flying very low from 500 to 1,000 ft., and was flying very slowly. The object was making no noise."...

I first heard those transcripts read out loud on an October 7 episode of Skeptoid, a weekly science and skepticism podcast I often listen to, and my ears perked up, especially when I realized the date and geographic region matched up with the year and rough area of my own sighting. Skeptoid had arrived at a different, more mundane explanation for the odd triangular craft, however...

Skeptoid suggests another type of flying machine... but that I had never seen mentioned as a possible explanation, perhaps because it is so non-threatening and mundane: blimps.

The size, flashing lights and flight path of many of the triangular UFOs spotted in Illinois and Missouri while I was in college match the description of blimps in overnight transit between events in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Kansas City.

Interestingly, back then some local reporters did check with the Federal Aviation Administration, and the FAA actually cited advertising blimps as a likely explanation for the strange sightings, but it seems to have been buried by more sensational narratives involving alien craft or secret military testing, which I now know rarely happens outside of specific testing grounds in places like Nevada or here in New Mexico.

So he thought that matched a lot of aspects of his sighting but not the exceptional speed. When you dig into the details of the Illinois case, it's really difficult to confirm any exceptional speed from the witness descriptions which are rather vague. Even the reconstructions didn't result in any thing supersonic and they didn't report any supersonic booms.

However for his own sighting (not the one in Illinois, but with similarities), he has another idea about what might have led him to exceptional speed conclusions in his case:

But one thing doesn't fit, right? What about the sudden, quick motions of the triangular craft observed by my colleague and myself, as well as other witnesses?...

And it's just as big a letdown as the realization that my top-secret military craft or alien UFO may have been just a blimp: it also could have been two blimps.

Two blimps flying in a formation or at least both visible from my perspective -- which was inside a car traveling at 60 miles per hour at 5 a.m. -- could easily explain what I saw when you factor in that some of the lights were blinking and that I was pretty groggy from just waking up.

Also, there were definitely no sonic booms accompanying movements that seemed to be a huge craft covering a few miles in a split second. In fact, traveling a mile per second -- which would be a very conservative estimate for the perceived motion of my UFO sighting -- would equal more than five times the speed of sound. Yet the huge craft remained silent as it appeared to make these maneuvers, which leads me to think in retrospect now that it never actually made them.

So to everyone whom I've spooked over the last 14 years or so with my tale of a UFO the size of a football field stalking small Midwestern communities, or of the insane new military technology that might be flinging it across the skies, mea culpa.

He got that idea partly from Skeptoid who also thinks an advertising blimp was involved in the Illinois case:

The St. Clair Triangle UFO

Writing in the St. Louis Riverfront Times three months after the incident, reporter William Stage said he'd been advised by the FAA that the object reported was an advertising blimp. The American Blimp Company, since acquired by Van Wagner Airship Group, was the largest operator in the region, and still is nationwide. It only took me two phone calls to Van Wagner to learn that the 20+ year veterans there have heard all the UFO stories so many times they've forgotten more than they remember. Of the St. Clair incident, one veteran told me "Everyone in the airship industry knew what it was, but the news still reported it as a UFO."

Some people say that Roswell was a trojan horse of sorts. If it was well think about that foe a while. Give us the Teck and then they can control it. Smiles. In fact , to me that seems to be the case , or our technology is that advanced. Your choice.