What are YOU talking about when you say UFO?

Originally posted by Orkojoker

It's the strong patterns of appearance and behavior repeated over and over again in various countries that have me convinced of the reality behind these reports.

or...what you're seeing is the UFO meme in action. Like with the contactees someone got the ball rolling and it has spiralled out from there, the UFO meme is deeply ingrained in human culture.

Originally posted by cripmeister

Originally posted by Orkojoker

It's the strong patterns of appearance and behavior repeated over and over again in various countries that have me convinced of the reality behind these reports.

or...what you're seeing is the UFO meme in action. Like with the contactees someone got the ball rolling and it has spiralled out from there, the UFO meme is deeply ingrained in human culture.

Yes, cripmeister, you're right. We should probably just dismiss the consistency in the body of unexplained reports as runaway "meme" replication. Cognitive dissonance isn't very comfortable, is it?

An unidentified flying object, often abbreviated UFO or U.F.O., is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object. Therefor the term is not exclusively reserved for extraterrestrial space craft.

Originally posted by Perks
An unidentified flying object, often abbreviated UFO or U.F.O., is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object. Therefor the term is not exclusively reserved for extraterrestrial space craft.

Agreed...I think that it might turn out that the word 'extraterrestrial' is unwarranted, tacked-on belief-system baggage in many cases. An anomaly can be an anomaly without being ET.

Originally posted by cripmeister
or...what you're seeing is the UFO meme in action. Like with the contactees someone got the ball rolling and it has spiralled out from there, the UFO meme is deeply ingrained in human culture.

It's as if you're completely unfamiliar with the basic research and literature on this topic from the 50's and 60's. Other posts of yours reinforce this impression. And I'm sorry, but no reasonable person who's done his or her homework on UFO fundamentals would chalk the phenomenon up to a "meme" in action.

You're the author of nearly 1800 posts here on ATS, a good fraction of them in this (UFO) forum. And while there's no duty to be well-informed about a topic before offering opinions on it (see Neil DeGrasse Tyson), at least ask yourself why it is you have no apparent reservations about passing your ignorance on to others. Please take a break from the youtube videos and go read! Try Hynek's "The UFO Experience" or even the Condon Report itself. And if you don't, just know that your opinion is not shared even by the psychology and sociology professionals who've skeptically studied those 'meme' aspects of the topic.

I think it's insinuated that when someone posts the UFO and Aliens thread, they are speculating on otherworldly aircraft (or at the least, want the readership to do so for whatever their reasons) ... if someone chose to post in Military Aircraft/Weapons or whatever, that puts a whole different slant to the thread, no? I would always question intent and forum choice is intent with agenda (of some sort) is it not?

The ET mythos dominates pretty strongly so when I say UFO I feel I have no choice but to say "UFO" in scare quotes because I think that the ET hypothesis is too dominant. It is ultimately born from a narrow materialistic / physicalism paradigm and is, therefore, barking up the wrong tree. There are better ways to think of them. I say that as a "UFO contactee" in other words as an initiated mystic. Initiated by "them".

"To put it bluntly, the UFO phenomenon does not give evidence of being extraterrestrial at all. Instead it appears to be inter-dimensional and to manipulate physical realities outside of our own space-time continuum." -Jacques Vallee

Originally posted by cripmeister

Originally posted by Orkojoker
I like to reserve the term UFO for those phenomena described in the subset of reports which have plenty of detail, reliable witnesses and which have undergone thorough analysis by people who know what they're doing. The key feature common to all of these reports is that they have not yielded a conventional explanation despite investigation. Bottom line is we don't know what they are, but we can be relatively certain of what they are not.

But not enough detail so it can be identified. I would also argue that there is no such thing as a *reliable witness* because human perception is flawed.

Oh no!!, does this mean all these years I thought the sky was blue, but it might really be green because every human's perception is flawed?

People's perception ONLY becomes flawed when they describe seeing some flying saucer is what you really meant, because when people describe normal every day things, everyone believes that without questioning..

So, the real problems here are social stigmas and denials and so forth...

Originally posted by TeaAndStrumpets

Originally posted by cripmeister
or...what you're seeing is the UFO meme in action. Like with the contactees someone got the ball rolling and it has spiralled out from there, the UFO meme is deeply ingrained in human culture.

It's as if you're completely unfamiliar with the basic research and literature on this topic from the 50's and 60's. Other posts of yours reinforce this impression. And I'm sorry, but no reasonable person who's done his or her homework on UFO fundamentals would chalk the phenomenon up to a "meme" in action.

You're the author of nearly 1800 posts here on ATS, a good fraction of them in this (UFO) forum. And while there's no duty to be well-informed about a topic before offering opinions on it (see Neil DeGrasse Tyson), at least ask yourself why it is you have no apparent reservations about passing your ignorance on to others. Please take a break from the youtube videos and go read! Try Hynek's "The UFO Experience" or even the Condon Report itself. And if you don't, just know that your opinion is not shared even by the psychology and sociology professionals who've skeptically studied those 'meme' aspects of the topic.

Well said. Vague dismissal of the evidence without actually addressing it - or even displaying an awareness of it - is the trademark of far too many members frequenting this forum. People on both sides of the aisle need to be at least moderately well-read of the topic if there is going to be any worthwhile discussion hereabouts. Good, thought-provoking points can be made on each side when everybody is on the same page. Unfortunately, a majority of those posting in these threads seem to have barely scratched the surface of the serious literature, if that.

Originally posted by Orkojoker

Originally posted by cripmeister

Originally posted by Orkojoker

It's the strong patterns of appearance and behavior repeated over and over again in various countries that have me convinced of the reality behind these reports.

or...what you're seeing is the UFO meme in action. Like with the contactees someone got the ball rolling and it has spiralled out from there, the UFO meme is deeply ingrained in human culture.

Yes, cripmeister, you're right. We should probably just dismiss the consistency in the body of unexplained reports as runaway "meme" replication. Cognitive dissonance isn't very comfortable, is it?

edit on 24-6-2012 by Orkojoker because: (no reason given)

What exactly are you referringto here, reports with corraborating evidence or just eye witness accounts?

Originally posted by cripmeister

What exactly are you referringto here, reports with corraborating evidence or just eye witness accounts?

Both. Probably the best we have available are some of the radar-visual reports, but even without corroborating evidence like radar there are compelling multiple witness cases that should not be so easily dismissed as unworthy of consideration.

Originally posted by Orkojoker

Originally posted by cripmeister

What exactly are you referringto here, reports with corraborating evidence or just eye witness accounts?

Both. Probably the best we have available are some of the radar-visual reports, but even without corroborating evidence like radar there are compelling multiple witness cases that should not be so easily dismissed as unworthy of consideration.

Of course the meme idea isn't a valid explanation for radar-visual reports, photographic evidence etc but when it comes to eye witness reports it's something to entertain. In my opinion of course.

Originally posted by cripmeister

Of course the meme idea isn't a valid explanation for radar-visual reports, photographic evidence etc but when it comes to eye witness reports it's something to entertain. In my opinion of course.

Sure, I see what you're saying. Look at all the reports on MUFON and all the videos on YouTube that are almost certainly sky lanterns and the like, but which get defended to no end as "proof" of alien visitation. There is no doubt that the popular conception of UFOs - which bears little resemblance to the reality of the topic - leads many people to leap to unwarranted conclusions when they see something in the sky that they personally cannot identify. These kind of easily dismissed reports (if there even is an actual report) have nothing to do with the true unknowns.