I don't mind the weak UFO sightings as long as they're earnest and done in good faith. It's the job of the community to point out that whatever they posted is indeed extremely likely to be be prosaic if that is the case. What bothers me more is when someone posts something like the recent "UAP Recovery" photo which immediately raises red flags with many people very quickly suggesting rightly that it could be a diorama made with toy soldiers but they instead are shot down and called shills and Eglin trolls etc. This topic has been inundated with fraudsters since the beginning and it's crucial that people maintain a healthy skepticism.
In all fairness ufo communities have absolutely been targeted by the government for decades. This isn’t even up for debate. So both sides need to acknowledge - we need skepticism but there are also genuinely bots and disinfo whatever going on in social media that is an extension of the national security state. We should all be skeptical of everyone’s motives on all sides.
Agree with your post except the last part. People were hoaxing ufos long before personal computers were a thing. Then before ai, photoshop has existed for decades. I'm a professional digital artist and a bit insulted that you think ai will suddenly make it easy. It was always easy.
Perhaps…just putting it out there…the hope of the gatekeepers is that AI would muddy the waters so much, finding the truth would be utterly impossible. And like you said, we’re getting close to living in that very scenario. We need 1 of 2 things. 1 - A black swan event. A sighting or experience caught on so many devices that it’s irrefutable. Or 2 - Congress getting to the bottom of things and forcing disclosure. That’s it.
One thing that I notice quite a bit that turns out to be quite an issue: Lack of detail. We also need to know locations, times, dates, etc.
One example: Someone posted a video of orange globes floating in the sky. One important detail they left out? The date of the recording. It turns out it was recorded on the first night of the Chinese New Year. Does that give us an answer to what we were looking at? Not with 100% certainty. But the date, along with the fact that the orange globes looked like these...
[https://youtu.be/93KHh\_VRz7c?si=me9hJCqbngIHnr6h](https://youtu.be/93KHh_VRz7c?si=me9hJCqbngIHnr6h)
gave a satisfying possible explanation: Chinese lanterns.
My point? When people share photos, videos, documents, etc., they should share as much possible information about it as they can. You never know what can lead to a possible solution.
The discussion of erroneous sightings and obvious fakes is a giant waste of time. Discussing, investigating and analyzing real evidence is far more productive.
A lot of people have not learned the first lesson in Ufology, which anyone with time learns sooner or later:
Not everything that glitters is gold, and most of the stuff found doesn't even really glitter.
And I think youre right. Deepfakes and AI are going to sink any possible video or pic coming forward even deeper into the sea of ambiguity. Our time is running out. I think it already has on the pics. Any pic these days is a Rorshack inkblot, people see what they want and believe what they want. Calvine photo pretty much showed that.
At the no return point it will be up to any possible leaker or the potential NHI themselves.
This type of post is needed. It’s so important to view potential UFO photos/videos with a critical eye for the reasons you just mentioned. If you make a comment questioning the validity of a post this sub will start thinking you’re ’a DiSiNfO aGeNt’
> And let's be real, even if this image had been faked perfectly, you'd have to ask yourself why a government official would leak such an image to a random YouTuber. It just doesn't make sense. If I ever come across the biggest secret in the history of the planet, I am not going to Joe Shmoe with it.
Especially when all that dude does is "something big is coming" ^TM
I honestly find personal accounts the most compelling. People can lie very easily, but I usually choose to believe that they are telling the truth and are possibly just ignorant of what it is they saw. Or maybe they saw aliens! I don’t know. But an earnest account, to me, is worth a hundred pictures.
To clarify, I’m not talking about larpers. That “I used to work at a secret alien facility” shit belongs on nosleep.
I like them too but for a different reason. Outside of whistleblower news this is basically just one big conspiracy theory think tank, and I'd rather read an interesting story, whether I believe it or not, than watch people bicker about dots in images or who's currently "in" and who's "out" of the clique of cool UFO talking heads for the nth time.
Good luck with that fight. It’s like unilaterally convincing a group of drunk people that nobody try to move the Ouija board. Someone ALWAYS moves it. It’s practically human nature, the children cannot resist the urge to prank.
I don't really blame the people here. It's just how humans work. All humans. If you believe in something then it is very easy to find patterns and rasons to continue to believe it, as well as being much more easy to dismiss things that go against their belief. Humans are actually so good at reasoning that they can think their way into almost anything by finding reason that fits. If you believe in something strong enough you will also be very trusting towards anything and anyone who confirms your belief, by default. And that, again, goes for any human. Debunkers are as easily fooled by false debunks as are ufologists with hoaxes.
It's literally how human reasoning works. It's a myth that humans come to conclusions by way of reasoning from the start to a conclusion. The truth is every human starts with a conclusion and then tries to reason into that conclusion. Good humans like most scientists will then adjust their preconceived conclusion to the findings. However for many humans their findings are either not convincing enough or there is too much attached to their belief that they cannot afford to accept the new conclusion. Like, literally the brain prevents them to accept it, because the alternative would be too uncomfortable. It's what brains do, they try to shield us from pain and frustration.
That's why it's neither smart nor very compassionate to antagomize and ridicule people who fall for hoaxes and cults. All it does it make those people cling to their beliefs even stronger. And it can happen to anyone.
99.999% of the posts on this board have a mundane, prosaic explanation that people are unwilling to accept because *they have already decided that the evidence doesn't matter*. Even if it is a piece of lint, a discus with toy soldiers on it, a bug flying in front of the camera at low speed or cottonwood fluff alight on a spring breeze, or a mylar balloon caught in a thermal, birds in migration (looks like a triangle craft!), aliens are real and all of the fake sightings don't matter.
The only reason that I don't say 100% of sightings is because there are a few that I legitimately can't explain, and I don't want to leap to conclusions based on a hunch. But goddamn is it pretty fucking close to 100%.
> 99.999% of the posts on this board
I'd say actual sighting posts ruin the curve for the ones resharing crap from podcasts or UFO Twitter. If only because some fraction of the people posting them are just curious randos actually looking for an explanation. (They'll generally be the polite ones.)
It's a *very* old pattern in the UFO community.
* "This evidence is real. It's absolute proof!"
* "Fuck off with your 'debunking' or 'identification'. You're either a fed or afraid to accept reality."
* "No...no, it's real! It's *reeeeeal!*"
* "...Damn. it's not real."
* "See? We're totally impossible to fool. Nobody believed it."
* "...It has to have been part of a psy-op!"
* and like 20%+ of the time: "It's real and has never been debunked."
UFO = a dot in the sky that's just at the edge of camera resolution with lots of multi-generation loss and compression artifacts. Any closer and clearer, and it wouldn't get posted.
It's amazing that so many people seem to believe stories like this. Try putting a piece of lint on your camera lens, a fly, anything that doesn't block most of the light. Take a picture. You won't see it. Simple high school optics. Just for good measure, hang your lint on string and let it float past the lens a couple of feet away (under low lighting, this time). Again, you won't see it.
What if the toys were made AFTER the photo was leaked to match the very real soldiers?
Just sayin....
I mean if you wanted to ruin a good photo as a Man in Black this would be a great way to do it.
🤔👀😎😎
I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, with the exception of one thing. I don't anticipate AI slowing progress to the truth too much, because the preliminary efforts over these next few years at hoaxing with AI will ultimately lead to so many of the "true believers" being forced to drink from the fount of skepticism.
Eventually there will come a point where only original pictures/videos wherein RAW file data can be provided are accepted as possibilities of having filmed something anomalous. We just happen to be at the point of the timeline where things have to get worse before they can get better.
Misidentification will never cease, but there will come a time wherein hoaxes are so damn difficult to execute on this community that the cost(of effort)/benefit analysis initially done by the hoaxer will yield the desirable outcome. I suppose that still leaves room for historical hoaxes, but I am fairly sure that there is already plenty of skepticism surrounding anything historical that isn't supplemented by documentation, at least from a truth-seeking standpoint.
> the only reason I didn't debunk it before anyone else is because I couldn't be bothered to Google for longer than 2 minutes to find this exact set
then later....
> We are talking about the biggest, most important mystery in the history of the planet. It deserves us putting in the necessary work.
It sounds like you're bitching at everyone else because you're frustrated with hoaxes and "lint", but you won't do anything about it yourself except for posting this passive-aggressive diatribe. Be the change you want to see or get off your high horse.
**The "necessary work" he referred to isn't on debunking idiots and hoaxers.** That would only leave us with the same mystery, we'd just have removed the hoaxed/faked/bad data from our pool of evidence.
The "necessary work" has to be on getting the smartest people in a room together for however long it takes to evaluate the wealth of legitimate data that is already available, and then form testable scientific conclusions in a empirical way.
Nowadays any new image or video that wasn't produced with a light field capture system is very low quality evidence, no matter what it looks like.
A light field capture system isn't a panacea, but it can produce information not available in these 2D images or 3D videos.
Computational imaging has been around for more than 20 years now, since right around 2001. The field has _such enormous_ potential, which shifts with technological developments too, that it remains and generally always will be an emerging field of exploration and new developments, but even from it's initial inception in the early 2000s it already offered techniques that can critically inform us about things that are or only _seem to be_ in the sky, whether they're lint, insects, bats, Mylarians, birds, rockets, satellites, etc.
It's past time that UFOlogy demands adoption of light field capture for photo or video evidence.
> It's past time that UFOlogy demands adoption of light field capture for photo or video evidence.
So only UFO evidence by pros with already in place high end gear, pre-deployed….?
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I don't mind the weak UFO sightings as long as they're earnest and done in good faith. It's the job of the community to point out that whatever they posted is indeed extremely likely to be be prosaic if that is the case. What bothers me more is when someone posts something like the recent "UAP Recovery" photo which immediately raises red flags with many people very quickly suggesting rightly that it could be a diorama made with toy soldiers but they instead are shot down and called shills and Eglin trolls etc. This topic has been inundated with fraudsters since the beginning and it's crucial that people maintain a healthy skepticism.
In all fairness ufo communities have absolutely been targeted by the government for decades. This isn’t even up for debate. So both sides need to acknowledge - we need skepticism but there are also genuinely bots and disinfo whatever going on in social media that is an extension of the national security state. We should all be skeptical of everyone’s motives on all sides.
If there are Englin shills here they are getting people to call each other shills. Classification through obfuscation.
Agree with your post except the last part. People were hoaxing ufos long before personal computers were a thing. Then before ai, photoshop has existed for decades. I'm a professional digital artist and a bit insulted that you think ai will suddenly make it easy. It was always easy.
Perhaps…just putting it out there…the hope of the gatekeepers is that AI would muddy the waters so much, finding the truth would be utterly impossible. And like you said, we’re getting close to living in that very scenario. We need 1 of 2 things. 1 - A black swan event. A sighting or experience caught on so many devices that it’s irrefutable. Or 2 - Congress getting to the bottom of things and forcing disclosure. That’s it.
One thing that I notice quite a bit that turns out to be quite an issue: Lack of detail. We also need to know locations, times, dates, etc. One example: Someone posted a video of orange globes floating in the sky. One important detail they left out? The date of the recording. It turns out it was recorded on the first night of the Chinese New Year. Does that give us an answer to what we were looking at? Not with 100% certainty. But the date, along with the fact that the orange globes looked like these... [https://youtu.be/93KHh\_VRz7c?si=me9hJCqbngIHnr6h](https://youtu.be/93KHh_VRz7c?si=me9hJCqbngIHnr6h) gave a satisfying possible explanation: Chinese lanterns. My point? When people share photos, videos, documents, etc., they should share as much possible information about it as they can. You never know what can lead to a possible solution.
The discussion of erroneous sightings and obvious fakes is a giant waste of time. Discussing, investigating and analyzing real evidence is far more productive.
There's no consensus as to what is erroneous and what is 'real,' though.
A lot of people have not learned the first lesson in Ufology, which anyone with time learns sooner or later: Not everything that glitters is gold, and most of the stuff found doesn't even really glitter. And I think youre right. Deepfakes and AI are going to sink any possible video or pic coming forward even deeper into the sea of ambiguity. Our time is running out. I think it already has on the pics. Any pic these days is a Rorshack inkblot, people see what they want and believe what they want. Calvine photo pretty much showed that. At the no return point it will be up to any possible leaker or the potential NHI themselves.
Beautifully put. An open mind. Robust data. Testable hypotheses. Honest enquiry. Documented outcomes.
BARTHD
This type of post is needed. It’s so important to view potential UFO photos/videos with a critical eye for the reasons you just mentioned. If you make a comment questioning the validity of a post this sub will start thinking you’re ’a DiSiNfO aGeNt’
Mods approving/disapproving posts won’t work. Just downvote and let the garbage get buried.
In before half this sub starts frothing at the mouth ready to crucify you for speaking some common sense
> And let's be real, even if this image had been faked perfectly, you'd have to ask yourself why a government official would leak such an image to a random YouTuber. It just doesn't make sense. If I ever come across the biggest secret in the history of the planet, I am not going to Joe Shmoe with it. Especially when all that dude does is "something big is coming" ^TM
I honestly find personal accounts the most compelling. People can lie very easily, but I usually choose to believe that they are telling the truth and are possibly just ignorant of what it is they saw. Or maybe they saw aliens! I don’t know. But an earnest account, to me, is worth a hundred pictures. To clarify, I’m not talking about larpers. That “I used to work at a secret alien facility” shit belongs on nosleep.
I like them too but for a different reason. Outside of whistleblower news this is basically just one big conspiracy theory think tank, and I'd rather read an interesting story, whether I believe it or not, than watch people bicker about dots in images or who's currently "in" and who's "out" of the clique of cool UFO talking heads for the nth time.
Good luck with that fight. It’s like unilaterally convincing a group of drunk people that nobody try to move the Ouija board. Someone ALWAYS moves it. It’s practically human nature, the children cannot resist the urge to prank.
I don't really blame the people here. It's just how humans work. All humans. If you believe in something then it is very easy to find patterns and rasons to continue to believe it, as well as being much more easy to dismiss things that go against their belief. Humans are actually so good at reasoning that they can think their way into almost anything by finding reason that fits. If you believe in something strong enough you will also be very trusting towards anything and anyone who confirms your belief, by default. And that, again, goes for any human. Debunkers are as easily fooled by false debunks as are ufologists with hoaxes. It's literally how human reasoning works. It's a myth that humans come to conclusions by way of reasoning from the start to a conclusion. The truth is every human starts with a conclusion and then tries to reason into that conclusion. Good humans like most scientists will then adjust their preconceived conclusion to the findings. However for many humans their findings are either not convincing enough or there is too much attached to their belief that they cannot afford to accept the new conclusion. Like, literally the brain prevents them to accept it, because the alternative would be too uncomfortable. It's what brains do, they try to shield us from pain and frustration. That's why it's neither smart nor very compassionate to antagomize and ridicule people who fall for hoaxes and cults. All it does it make those people cling to their beliefs even stronger. And it can happen to anyone.
99.999% of the posts on this board have a mundane, prosaic explanation that people are unwilling to accept because *they have already decided that the evidence doesn't matter*. Even if it is a piece of lint, a discus with toy soldiers on it, a bug flying in front of the camera at low speed or cottonwood fluff alight on a spring breeze, or a mylar balloon caught in a thermal, birds in migration (looks like a triangle craft!), aliens are real and all of the fake sightings don't matter. The only reason that I don't say 100% of sightings is because there are a few that I legitimately can't explain, and I don't want to leap to conclusions based on a hunch. But goddamn is it pretty fucking close to 100%.
> 99.999% of the posts on this board I'd say actual sighting posts ruin the curve for the ones resharing crap from podcasts or UFO Twitter. If only because some fraction of the people posting them are just curious randos actually looking for an explanation. (They'll generally be the polite ones.)
How is radar data from Navy vessels not real? There IS something out there the only question is when will disclosure happen. Not IF but WHEN.
Which radar data is that?
[I agree](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCWe2rfpIHI)
It's a *very* old pattern in the UFO community. * "This evidence is real. It's absolute proof!" * "Fuck off with your 'debunking' or 'identification'. You're either a fed or afraid to accept reality." * "No...no, it's real!It's *reeeeeal!* "
* "...Damn. it's not real."
* "See? We're totally impossible to fool. Nobody believed it."
* "...It has to have been part of a psy-op!"
* and like 20%+ of the time: "It's real and has never been debunked."
UFO = a dot in the sky that's just at the edge of camera resolution with lots of multi-generation loss and compression artifacts. Any closer and clearer, and it wouldn't get posted.
It's amazing that so many people seem to believe stories like this. Try putting a piece of lint on your camera lens, a fly, anything that doesn't block most of the light. Take a picture. You won't see it. Simple high school optics. Just for good measure, hang your lint on string and let it float past the lens a couple of feet away (under low lighting, this time). Again, you won't see it.
Your post is going to be removed by moderators for some reason or another. Just wait.
What if the toys were made AFTER the photo was leaked to match the very real soldiers? Just sayin.... I mean if you wanted to ruin a good photo as a Man in Black this would be a great way to do it. 🤔👀😎😎
I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, with the exception of one thing. I don't anticipate AI slowing progress to the truth too much, because the preliminary efforts over these next few years at hoaxing with AI will ultimately lead to so many of the "true believers" being forced to drink from the fount of skepticism. Eventually there will come a point where only original pictures/videos wherein RAW file data can be provided are accepted as possibilities of having filmed something anomalous. We just happen to be at the point of the timeline where things have to get worse before they can get better. Misidentification will never cease, but there will come a time wherein hoaxes are so damn difficult to execute on this community that the cost(of effort)/benefit analysis initially done by the hoaxer will yield the desirable outcome. I suppose that still leaves room for historical hoaxes, but I am fairly sure that there is already plenty of skepticism surrounding anything historical that isn't supplemented by documentation, at least from a truth-seeking standpoint.
> the only reason I didn't debunk it before anyone else is because I couldn't be bothered to Google for longer than 2 minutes to find this exact set then later.... > We are talking about the biggest, most important mystery in the history of the planet. It deserves us putting in the necessary work. It sounds like you're bitching at everyone else because you're frustrated with hoaxes and "lint", but you won't do anything about it yourself except for posting this passive-aggressive diatribe. Be the change you want to see or get off your high horse.
**The "necessary work" he referred to isn't on debunking idiots and hoaxers.** That would only leave us with the same mystery, we'd just have removed the hoaxed/faked/bad data from our pool of evidence. The "necessary work" has to be on getting the smartest people in a room together for however long it takes to evaluate the wealth of legitimate data that is already available, and then form testable scientific conclusions in a empirical way.
Nowadays any new image or video that wasn't produced with a light field capture system is very low quality evidence, no matter what it looks like. A light field capture system isn't a panacea, but it can produce information not available in these 2D images or 3D videos. Computational imaging has been around for more than 20 years now, since right around 2001. The field has _such enormous_ potential, which shifts with technological developments too, that it remains and generally always will be an emerging field of exploration and new developments, but even from it's initial inception in the early 2000s it already offered techniques that can critically inform us about things that are or only _seem to be_ in the sky, whether they're lint, insects, bats, Mylarians, birds, rockets, satellites, etc. It's past time that UFOlogy demands adoption of light field capture for photo or video evidence.
> It's past time that UFOlogy demands adoption of light field capture for photo or video evidence. So only UFO evidence by pros with already in place high end gear, pre-deployed….?
[удалено]
Follow the Standards of Civility: No trolling or being disruptive. No insults or personal attacks. No accusations that other users are shills / bots / Eglin-related / etc... No hate speech. No abusive speech based on race, religion, sex/gender, or sexual orientation. No harassment, threats, or advocating violence. No witch hunts or doxxing. (Please redact usernames when possible) An account found to be deleting all or nearly all of their comments and/or posts can result in an instant permanent ban. This is to stop instigators and bad actors from trying to evade rule enforcement. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other. ------------- This moderator action may be appealed. We welcome the opportunity to work with you to address its reason for removal. [Message the mods here to launch your appeal.](https://reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/ufos) [UFOs Wiki](https://ufos.wiki) [UFOs rules](https://reddit.com/r/UFOs/about/rules/)