Discovery Institute doesn’t believe in nuts&bolts aliens

[Laird]

The visual evidence can be interpreted in myriad ways.

Even when corroborated by radar? It seems not to me.

Physical equipment is used by parapsychologist seeking to record ghosts, PK, and subtle bodies.

But not radar.

Anyhow, I don't want to get into an argument, I just wanted to express my reservations about your approach, so I'll probably leave this exchange here.

Even when corroborated by radar? It seems not to me.


But not radar.

Anyhow, I don't want to get into an argument, I just wanted to express my reservations about your approach, so I'll probably leave this exchange here.

I am totally open to criticism, as I said I [had] been [previously] more sympathetic to Nuts & Bolts explanations for a sub-section of the UFO/UAP phenomenon. 

I just don't get why seeing something on radar is vastly different than parapsychologist physical equipment that has sought to measure PK / Ghosts / OOBErs / etc.

I don't take [discussing] any error of my views here as a personal attack.

You are so certain of what is really an opinion backed up only by absence of direct physical-to-the-touch evidence, where of course absence of such type of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I notice that you have not attempted to explain away the 1957 RB-47 case I described in post #15. I suppose you are inherently claiming that with the RB-47 case, somehow, temperature inversions and/or equipment malfunctions were responsible for the strong radar returns and ECM/ELINT signals recieved from the exact same direction as the observed brilliant light emitted by the object. Needless to say, this explain-it-away explanation won't work.

You disparage the general reliability and accuracy of radar, despite it's regular and essential use along with emitted electromagnetic IFF signals, in airport air traffic control where safety is paramount. If radar was as unreliable as you claim, it wouldn't be used in this way where many lives are at stake. And radar targeting and detection of other EM signals are universally used for A-A missile targeting by military fighter aircraft, a critical military capability not to be entrusted to a basically unreliable sensor.

Yes of course I’m certain. The problem is that you completely fail to understand the point that interstellar travel is impossible which is also explained in the OP linking to the article by Discovery Institute. For that very reason there are more mundane explanations to the observations than the nuts&bolts hypothesis. E.g the 1957 RB-47 case has a terrestial origin whatever it was. Now I have responded to it!

…And I’m also correct about radar by the way.

Another common myth surrounding radar anomalies is the existence of elusive radar traces that cannot be explained by conventional means. While it is true that radar systems can sometimes detect unidentified objects or traces in the sky, there are scientific explanations for these occurrences. Weather phenomena such as temperature inversions, atmospheric ducting, and anomalous propagation can cause radar echoes that appear unusual or unexplained. By understanding these natural phenomena, we can debunk the myths surrounding elusive radar traces and provide rational explanations.

https://fastercapital.com/keyword/radar-anomalies.html

Sbu,

I'd love to know exactly what you would consider good physical evidence for UFOs.

I mean I seriously doubt that pieces of a craft would convince you. Unless the isotopic ratios were vastly different from normal Earth elements, there would be the problem that zillions of new materials are made nowadays. I would also be less convinced by a lump of stuff, but a radar chase observed by multiple people, followed perhaps by a crash.

I think it is possible for many people to dismiss shedloads of evidence using one reason or another.

However, think how that would have worked back when you were doing your undergraduate work. Suppose you doubted all the equipment on the lab bench, together with any reagents you used .....

You might discover one or two sources of error during your time, but you wouldn't finish any of your work on time (ultimately the lab would be needed for another class, or it would be closing for the night).

Put simply, you would have flunked your degree.

Nothing in science has the complete certainty of maths (and even then there are Gödel's theorems).

David

Sbu,

I'd love to know exactly what you would consider good physical evidence for UFOs.

I mean I seriously doubt that pieces of a craft would convince you. Unless the isotopic ratios were vastly different from normal Earth elements, there would be the problem that zillions of new materials are made nowadays. I would also be less convinced by a lump of stuff, but a radar chase observed by multiple people, followed perhaps by a crash.

I think it is possible for many people to dismiss shedloads of evidence using one reason or another.

However, think how that would have worked back when you were doing your undergraduate work. Suppose you doubted all the equipment on the lab bench, together with any reagents you used .....

You might discover one or two sources of error during your time, but you wouldn't finish any of your work on time (ultimately the lab would be needed for another class, or it would be closing for the night).

Put simply, you would have flunked your degree.

Nothing in science has the complete certainty of maths

David

Sbu,

I'd love to know exactly what you would consider good physical evidence for UFOs.

I mean I seriously doubt that pieces of a craft would convince you. Unless the isotopic ratios were vastly different from normal Earth elements, there would be the problem that zillions of new materials are made nowadays. I would also be less convinced by a lump of stuff, but a radar chase observed by multiple people, followed perhaps by a crash.

I think it is possible for many people to dismiss shedloads of evidence using one reason or another.

However, think how that would have worked back when you were doing your undergraduate work. Suppose you doubted all the equipment on the lab bench, together with any reagents you used .....

You might discover one or two sources of error during your time, but you wouldn't finish any of your work on time (ultimately the lab would be needed for another class, or it would be closing for the night).

Put simply, you would have flunked your degree.

Nothing in science has the complete certainty of maths

David

We have built the worlds biggest machine to verify such basic physics. Maybe it's instructive to take what's going on inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as an example. Each proton being smashed is accelerated to 7 TeV in the 27 km long ring of superconducting magnets. How much is that? Using the formula for kinetic energy E = 1/2 * m * v^2, we can calculate the energy of the protons at these relativistic speeds to be equivalent to an insect (60 mg) flying at 20 cm/s.

1/2 * 6 * 10^-5 * (0.2)^2 = 1.2 * 10^-6 J

Converting this to TeV:

1.2 * 10^-6 J * (1 eV / 1.602 * 10^-19 J) * (1 TeV / 10^12 eV) ≈ 7.5 TeV

But in comparison, this insect has 36 thousand trillion nucleons, and we are comparing with just 1 proton.

When the LHC is running it’s consuming 200 MW from the french power grid. This is enough electricity to power 400000 western households.

It should be obvious that it’s not possible to build an engine that can accelerate your nuts-and-bolts spacecraft to anywhere near the speed of light.

I will believe in nuts-and-bolts UFOs the day I can see them for myself. Testimonies from celebrity-status seeking former military employees are certainly not enough.

Yes of course I’m certain. The problem is that you completely fail to understand the point that interstellar travel is impossible which is also explained in the OP linking to the article by Discovery Institute. For that very reason there are more mundane explanations to the observations than the nuts&bolts hypothesis. E.g the 1957 RB-47 case has a terrestial origin whatever it was. Now I have responded to it!

…And I’m also correct about radar by the way.



https://fastercapital.com/keyword/radar-anomalies.html

Sure, interstellar travel is impossible in our present physics - I have never denied that. The point is that a strong body of evidence has accumulated for the existence of somethings that appear to be manufactured flying craft of some kind exhibiting impossible flying characteristics according to our physics and aeronautics knowledge. Many of these sightings cumulatively and individually can't be plausibly explained away by any known "normal" phenomena. 

You choose to claim that this phenomenon must of absolute certainty be of terrestrial origin , whatever that means, without being able to specify it. Pie in the sky. Please produce some actual plausible "normal" explanations for the better cases.

I choose to accept the natural conjecture that the most likely explanation is that beings thousands to millions of years ahead of present humanity in their development of science and technology (and that therefore may have capabilities indistinguishable from magic) may have in fact achieved the capability of getting here from other star systems in our galaxy. You seem to have the view that the LHC results along with other present physics theory is the end of this science and is the ultimate truth, and that further development by humanity is now forced to a halt, never to make new fundamental discoveries. The end of science. The history of science and a little humility should demolish this view.

The ETI hypothesis is of course not the only possible one, but it is presently the only one with any plausibility at all, looking at the better cases. Of course, other rather "far out" hypotheses are possible, like a race of advanced Earthly beings having existed deep in the Earth for thousands or millions of years and only now choosing to appear on the surface (almost laughable as a hypothesis). Or travelers from some other plane of reality or dimensional reality, or time travelers from our own future. Or even more fantastic speculations involving what is sometimes termed the "Deep Weird".

There is another remotely considered possibility, that it is psychological and possibly paranormal -  I think the notion is invalid that the UFO phenomenon is for instance due to illusions, the clouding of mens' minds, by some form of extreme mind power on the part of these advanced beings, because of the rare but stubbornly and cumulatively existing evidences of physical presence in our atmosphere. 

Similar reasoning excluding them applies to the conjectures that these phenomena are immaterial and psychological manifestations of humanity's "collective unconscious"  (psychically manifesting collective contemporary public anxieties).

Whatever the hypothesis is, to have any sort of plausibility whatsoever, it can't be suggesting that the "culprit" is rare and unknown non-sentient natural phenomena; this is very much implausible, due to the obvious signs of extremely advanced science and technology. The remaining region of hypotheses all involve advanced sentient beings from some source, one possibility being physical and extraterrestrial in our local Galaxy. The somewhat more unlikely "ultraterrestrial" other-dimensional beings, time-travelers, and other such hypotheses suggested above would complement that set of sentient being hypotheses, which are the only even slightly plausible conclusions.

We have built the worlds biggest machine to verify such basic physics. Maybe it's instructive to take what's going on inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as an example. Each proton being smashed is accelerated to 7 TeV in the 27 km long ring of superconducting magnets. How much is that? Using the formula for kinetic energy E = 1/2 * m * v^2, we can calculate the energy of the protons at these relativistic speeds to be equivalent to an insect (60 mg) flying at 20 cm/s.

1/2 * 6 * 10^-5 * (0.2)^2 = 1.2 * 10^-6 J

Converting this to TeV:

1.2 * 10^-6 J * (1 eV / 1.602 * 10^-19 J) * (1 TeV / 10^12 eV) ≈ 7.5 TeV

But in comparison, this insect has 36 thousand trillion nucleons, and we are comparing with just 1 proton.

When the LHC is running it’s consuming 200 MW from the french power grid. This is enough electricity to power 400000 western households.

It should be obvious that it’s not possible to build an engine that can accelerate your nuts-and-bolts spacecraft to anywhere near the speed of light.

I will believe in nuts-and-bolts UFOs the day I can see them for myself. Testimonies from celebrity-status seeking former military employees are certainly not enough.

The reason why that is not obvious, is that it is simply not possible to anticipate what future technologies (or technologies built by aliens) can achieve!

I don't know what Turing would have said if he had been told the computing power of the computers that are built nowadays. He might even have baulked at the computing power of a smartphone.

I do remember a conversation I had with a microprocessor specialist sometime in the 1980's. He believed that we would soon have home machines with 1 megabyte of core memory. I didn't believe him!

By now, the only problem with obtaining such a computer is that nobody builds computer systems with such a puny amount of memory.

Nevertheless I doubt that spacecraft could be built to travel at such high speeds, because it would sweep out an enormous volume of space, and the tiniest spec of dust would wreck the whole thing.

However, I already described an alternative scenario. Suppose an early alien race had decided to keep tabs on what was happening in the galaxy, it might release a huge number of spacecraft that would travel much slower but would lurk inside an interesting solar system and wait for signs of life.

That of course is assuming that no way to cheat the speed limit of C exists.

David

Sure, interstellar travel is impossible in our present physics - I have never denied that. The point is that a strong body of evidence has accumulated for the existence of somethings that appear to be manufactured flying craft of some kind exhibiting impossible flying characteristics according to our physics and aeronautics knowledge. Many of these sightings cumulatively and individually can't be plausibly explained away by any known "normal" phenomena. 

You choose to claim that this phenomenon must of absolute certainty be of terrestrial origin , whatever that means, without being able to specify it. Pie in the sky. Please produce some actual plausible "normal" explanations for the better cases.

I choose to accept the natural conjecture that the most likely explanation is that beings thousands to millions of years ahead of present humanity in their development of science and technology (and that therefore may have capabilities indistinguishable from magic) may have in fact achieved the capability of getting here from other star systems in our galaxy. You seem to have the view that the LHC results along with other present physics theory is the end of this science and is the ultimate truth, and that further development by humanity is now forced to a halt, never to make new fundamental discoveries. The end of science. The history of science and a little humility should demolish this view.

The ETI hypothesis is of course not the only possible one, but it is presently the only one with any plausibility at all, looking at the better cases. Of course, other rather "far out" hypotheses are possible, like a race of advanced Earthly beings having existed deep in the Earth for thousands or millions of years and only now choosing to appear on the surface (almost laughable as a hypothesis). Or travelers from some other plane of reality or dimensional reality, or time travelers from our own future. Or even more fantastic speculations involving what is sometimes termed the "Deep Weird".

There is another remotely considered possibility, that it is psychological and possibly paranormal -  I think the notion is invalid that the UFO phenomenon is for instance due to illusions, the clouding of mens' minds, by some form of extreme mind power on the part of these advanced beings, because of the rare but stubbornly and cumulatively existing evidences of physical presence in our atmosphere. 

Similar reasoning excluding them applies to the conjectures that these phenomena are immaterial and psychological manifestations of humanity's "collective unconscious"  (psychically manifesting collective contemporary public anxieties).

Whatever the hypothesis is, to have any sort of plausibility whatsoever, it can't be suggesting that the "culprit" is rare and unknown non-sentient natural phenomena; this is very much implausible, due to the obvious signs of extremely advanced science and technology. The remaining region of hypotheses all involve advanced sentient beings from some source, one possibility being physical and extraterrestrial in our local Galaxy. The somewhat more unlikely "ultraterrestrial" other-dimensional beings, time-travelers, and other such hypotheses suggested above would complement that set of sentient being hypotheses, which are the only even slightly plausible conclusions.

I agree that evaluating the Nuts & Bolts hypothesis solely on our current physics knowledge is not the best standard, given that some future physics may reveal FTL travel is possible. (Before it was shut down I believe the head of Berkeley's parapsychology lab said Psi could be the key to FTL travel...)

However, I think we still have to acknowledge that it seems quite difficult to travel across the physical universe. Even if aliens *could* come here, it isn't clear that this is worthwhile. And their supposed behavior of hiding and only making themselves known in strange ways, leading to a lack of smoking gun evidence, is also bizarre for supposedly advanced beings. Their dependency on probing the body's orifices is also questionable, as they should have at least the level of medical equipment we have?

Trying to come up with plausible reason for extraterrestrials to act this way leads to what seem to me desperate conjecture, like the idea that the advanced civilization is running psychological experiments on us.

When people meet these aliens, they often act in ways that are "Deep Weird" in nature ->

The Nordic Aliens

During the 1950s, many people alleging to be contactees, especially those in Europe, claimed encounters with beings fitting this description. Such claims became relatively less common in subsequent decades, as the grey alien supplanted the Nordic in most alleged accounts of extraterrestrial encounters.

The Aliens who gave a man in Wisconsin pancakes

...The craft eventually landed in his backyard. The saucer opened up. Sitting inside were three mute aliens which Joe described as “Italian looking.”

Joe was given a large container, and somehow discerned that these strange creatures wanted water. When he returned with the liquid, one of the aliens was cooking pancakes on a flame-less cooking appliance. The creatures gave Joe the pancakes, saluted him, and flew away south, into legend.

From the Deep Weird Thread

“It was like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing. At first, I thought it was someone dressed up...trying to scare us. I laughed at it, we both did, then it went up in the air and we both
screamed. When it went up, you could see its feet were like pincers.”

...Faber claimed to come upon a bipedal, hair-covered being that stood around eight feet tall with a slight stoop. The creature had a hairless face and glowing eyes. Upon noticing Faber, the creature jumped into the water and vanished, leaving behind a huge footprint, a broken tree limb, and a hideous stench. Faber reported his encounter to the sheriff’s department of two adjacent counties, as well as to two local papers.

However, if this portion of the encounter was “standard,” what occurred to Faber three days later was anything but. As he retired to bed for the evening, Faber became aware of a presence. He looked to the doorway and saw five pink, glowing humanoids with bulbous heads and luminous eyes, clothed in tight-fitting skin-diving suits, gliding through the air. He claimed that these beings, though hovering several inches above the floor, still made the motion of walking, and that each one was around five feet tall, again with a slight stoop...

Floating up the stairway was a truly bizarre being. It had a flat, orange face with large red eyes and rough red hair. As it came up the staircase, its head began rotating in an unnatural manner to face Ken, coming all the way over its left shoulder. It was right as Ken realised that this thing was wearing a light blue jumpsuit that he panicked, retreated into his room, shut the door behind him, and loaded his underwater spear gun...

Then there are the weird ways the cases connect to synchronicities, and how people have even seen the dead among the aliens as they once saw dead among the Fairy sightings. (See Passport to Magonia for more on the UFO/Fairy connection.)

As to what is going on, I agree that the Jungian Collective Unconsciousness theory is not satisfying. It's hard to see why aliens with odd appearances or UFO craft would manifest but not angels, dragons, unicorns, etc.

However, I also think given the nature of the cases that Nuts & Bolts is also an unsatisfying theory.

I agree that evaluating the Nuts & Bolts hypothesis solely on our current physics knowledge is not the best standard, given that some future physics may reveal FTL travel is possible. (Before it was shut down I believe the head of Berkeley's parapsychology lab said Psi could be the key to FTL travel...)

However, I think we still have to acknowledge that it seems quite difficult to travel across the physical universe. Even if aliens *could* come here, it isn't clear that this is worthwhile. And their supposed behavior of hiding and only making themselves known in strange ways, leading to a lack of smoking gun evidence, is also bizarre for supposedly advanced beings. Their dependency on probing the body's orifices is also questionable, as they should have at least the level of medical equipment we have?

Trying to come up with plausible reason for extraterrestrials to act this way leads to what seem to me desperate conjecture, like the idea that the advanced civilization is running psychological experiments on us.

.........................................

As to what is going on, I agree that the Jungian Collective Unconsciousness theory is not satisfying. It's hard to see why aliens with odd appearances or UFO craft would manifest but not angels, dragons, unicorns, etc.

However, I also think given the nature of the cases that Nuts & Bolts is also an unsatisfying theory.

Yes, as a single blanket explanation for all encounters of all kinds with UFOs and UFO beings. But there is no rule or principle that would prevent this phenomenon from being very multi-faceted.

You might consider the distinct possibility that the UFO phenomenon is really comprised of several radically different phenomena, of which only one is ETIs, which hypothesis does fit best for a certain subset of sightings, notably the many classic encounters like the 1948 Nash-Fortenberry case, the 1957 RB47 radar/ECM/ELINT case, and many others that are plainly of what appear to be extraterrestrial vehicles.

For the rest of the encounters, we could consider all the really far-out hypotheses, visitors of other sorts such as extradimensional, alternate universe, occult, time traveling, or sources within humanity itself such as a supposed psychically-manifesting collective unconscious.