Things may not be what they appear

A few interesting notes, first is a phenomenon most commonly witnessed at night. Perhaps you've been driving down the road late at night, its dark out and as you drive you perhaps see a person/dog/what could be an animal etc, but as you get closer to the spot where you see this object it suddenly becomes a road sign.

When people look at things that their brain can't understand it does its best to "fill in the blanks" with the most appropriate image and most obvious possibility. In the above example, it makes sense to see a person standing on the side of the road, so when your eyes notice an object but cant quite make it out clearly it builds an image of what it roughly 'imagines' the object is. Obviously as your distance to the object decreases and your eyes get more solid information about what the object is your brain says "oops" and corrects the image to what it really sees.

Another interesting point is that it's said that when Columbus and his ships approached the coast of the new world the natives stood on the beach, but as the ships got closer and closer they couldn't see ships they simply seen a disturbance on the waves. Where as a European standing on the same beach would have a mental image of not only a ship, but an approaching ship the European would easily be able to understand what was going on, where as the Natives having never seen an eastern ship, or one approaching for that matter simply seen waves. Because their brains did not understand it was possible for something like that to happen, it simply "filled in the blanks" for them so that it seemed as if it were only a disturbance of the waves. Waves were the ONLY possible explanation for the natives, and thus their brain 'made it so'.

This is interesting to me because I use that reference all the time when explaining things to people. If your brain is not open to the possibility of something happening, it likely never will. This theory also applies to one point the OP mentioned and thats the fact that UFO enthusiasts are most likely to see a UFO, of course a portion of that is simply them WANTING to see a UFO, but I don't believe that is the case all the time.

Also an additional note to add to OPs finds, for any disbelievers of the theories hes presented how many times have you been looking all over your house for something to find that it was sitting out in the open the whole time. My cell phone the other day was placed directly in the center of my coffee table and I sat there frustrated for almost 5 minutes looking everywhere around my house, including the coffee table (SEVERAL times hah) ... after watching my frustration for a few minutes a buddy of mine hopped up out of the computer chair took one look at the table and said, hey isn't that your phone right there.

Originally posted by mystiq
Which is why I'm not even going to attempt to film them, because the cost of good equipment is too much. I can tell by looking and observing when something is unusual. We have many small planes fly over our roof, some fairly low. They make noise and go fast. What we've observed are 2 types of crafts. One is covered in one big red light, completely to my eyes. My son has made out a disc shape and when visiting in the Okanagan, a diamond shaped craft, underneath. They are completely soundless and very slow flying comparatively speaking. We have even watched one being chased by a helicopter against the mountains to the northwest, and you could still hear the chopper. It was kind of a cat and mouse game, with the chopper gaining and the craft blinking ahead until it disappeared. The second shape was a dark/black triangle ufo, with three lights, one in each corner. It made a vibrational sound of sorts, and we ran outside when it flew over.

I think they would be able to morph as well as cover themselves with lights and clouds to fool people.

Originally posted by EarthCitizen07

Yeah its pointless to film anything now-a-days because the naysayers always have the last word with their nonsense. You can have the best camera and all the expertise in the world...it means didly squat to them.

When so called respected investigative groups like mufon say 90-95% of all sightings are misinterpretated, as though everyone is too dumb to discern a plane and/or ballon from an actual ufo... When they make such outrageous comments then you know who they work for and it ain't for the people.

Originally posted by Raustin
I think this is a good video for people to see, it highlights how easily a video camera can make something look completely different. What starts out sort of looking like a UFO soon sprouts wings and lo and behold, it's a plane. I've seen a ton of people claiming similar footage to be the real deal.Video

[edit on 26-11-2008 by Raustin]

Originally posted by LoneWeasel
With respect, I think this is a little naive and in any case misses the point. I remember John Lear making the point (or he may have been quoting someone else, I can't remember) that if even 0.000001% of the claims made about UFO activity were true - that's enough. It's the responsible thing to do, it sorts the pretenders from the real thing, and it distinguishes the real contributors and students in the field with the bored teenagers that dominate You Tube.

Originally posted by LoneWeasel
There's plenty of material on these boards alone that has not yet been completely debunked. We have a choice - either search for that 0.000001% among the hours of videos shot on mobile phones and posted to online video sites with the caption "I like, totally discovered this alien in my back yard", or we can search for it among the hours of painstaking work that people like Zorgon and MikeSingh (and others) have come up with. I'm not a betting man, but I know where my money's at....
LW