Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of UFOs

I have to admit, I haven't seen it yet but I have read some of the comments and I think it is appropriate here.

https://www.briandunning.com/ufo/faq.php

Who are THEY?

THEY are those who profit from the lack of public science literacy: the TV shows selling you more of the same old storytelling, the UFO personalities in the press, even some in Congress who seem determined to "get to the bottom of this".
The better you understand the real sciences involved, the less susceptible you are to the firestorm of popular misinformation.

Why aren't interviews with my favorite UFO personalities included?

This movie teaches astronomy to build a better picture of how we might meet another civilization one day. False stories claiming past alien visitations play no role in that.

https://www.briandunning.com/ufo/blog.php

We wrapped the summer film festival season with a couple of pretty nice wins for The UFO Movie:

Best Documentary - Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival
Best Director - L.A. Sci-Fi & Horror Festival
Finalist - Raw Science Film Festival

For me the biggest moment was having the film featured by The SETI Institute for their movie night in October! Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak and I stayed on for an extra 90 minutes (!!) doing Q&A.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...fo-report/

Another real issue is that pilots sometimes see things that they cannot readily identify, West says, and they may misidentify such objects. Regardless of what such pilots actually observe, this is a problem. “If something there is hard to identify—like a novel drone—then we need to figure out how to identify it,” he says. “If the pilots are making mistakes, then we need to figure out why.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...fo-report/

IMO there's definitely *something* Weird going on with UAPs/UFOs, though I don't think ETH is valid barring some new incredible evidence.

That said I do think this quote is telling:

Although the task force’s unclassified assessment is not expected until June 25, the New York Times provided a cursory preview of its contents in an article on June 3. Citing anonymous senior officials familiar with the report’s contents, the story said that the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs.

Lastly, according to the New York Times article, the final report includes a “classified annex” of information deemed unsuitable for public release—leaving more than enough room for die-hard UFO advocates to remain convinced that the U.S. government is hiding the truth.

I think the classified sections likely have reports of Weird type cases, but it's also plausible the classified parts are related to mundane human issues.

The trotting out of professional (pseudo?) skeptics does make me think less of the article though.

Actually the article continued past that, and is more balanced that I thought:

A similar view is held by Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies, who says openness should be prioritized as much as possible in future investigations. “We don’t know whether the UFO problem is an intelligence one, due to foreign adversaries, but we do know, from its long history, that it is absolutely a scientific problem that deserves serious attention,” he says. “In a subject that has been too long ignored, downplayed and ridiculed, the government and scientific community should study UFOs openly and, importantly, with an open mind.”

IMO there's definitely *something* Weird going on with UAPs/UFOs, though I don't think ETH is valid barring some new incredible evidence.

That said I do think this quote is telling:


I think the classified sections likely have reports of Weird type cases, but it's also plausible the classified parts are related to mundane human issues.

The trotting out of professional (pseudo?) skeptics does make me think less of the article though.

Actually the article continued past that, and is more balanced that I thought:

I think it is safe to assume there is both weird stuff and explainable stuff and some of the stuff that looks weird might be explainable if we have more knowledge.  The case that @nbtruthman  pointed out is certainly interesting and I can't find any counter-evidence for it but I agree with you, there is nothing there that suggests ETs.

I have to admit, I haven't seen it yet but I have read some of the comments and I think it is appropriate here.

https://www.briandunning.com/ufo/faq.php



https://www.briandunning.com/ufo/blog.php

Dunning committed fraud, hard to take him seriously.

Now to just assume any argument he makes is false is, understandably, Ad Hominem.

But just as Grusch and others seem to be grifting UFO believers, I can't help but feel Dunning is going to work on UFO disbelievers.

Dunning committed fraud, hard to take him seriously.

Now to just assume any argument he makes is false is, understandably, Ad Hominem.

But just as Grusch and others seem to be grifting UFO believers, I can't help but feel Dunning is going to work on UFO disbelievers.

Thank you for that - I didn't know.  I will probably watch the video when I can but will look out for critique.

I think it is safe to assume there is both weird stuff and explainable stuff and some of the stuff that looks weird might be explainable if we have more knowledge.  The case that @nbtruthman  pointed out is certainly interesting and I can't find any counter-evidence for it but I agree with you, there is nothing there that suggests ETs.

Yeah my problem with ETH is you have to assume there are real aliens in the disks/triangles/spheres/etc...but just about everything else involved with UFOs/UAPs - abductions & encounters - would need an alternative explanation.

So the aliens people see, and even the ones conduct[ing] abductions, are not actual aliens due to the Weird issues with those cases...which just leaves the disks/triangles/etc where we conveniently don't see the craft up close nor do we see aliens come out of them?

All that said I do understand it's odd to think there is a UFO/UAP phenomena where, for reasons not understood, people *think* they are contacting aliens. Why would these entities pretend to be from other planets?

I just ran across a UFO paper published in the Journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration back in 1990, by well-known UFO expert and investigator Jacques Vallee. The title is Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects. This is an attempt at a comprehensive examination of the major hypotheses for the UFO phenomenon in conjuction with a debunking of the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis.

https://www.academia.edu/35990861/Five_A...view-paper

I have some objections to his not giving hardly any mention or weight to the many classic cases that involved actual physical encounters and electromagnetic interactions, in particular reflection of radar beams off their surfaces and their emission of powerful electromagnetic signals (such as the RB47 case), and directly observed aeronautically and physically impossible flight characteristics and even maneuvers apparently of imperfect pilots correcting their echelon formations (such as the Nash-Fortenberry encounter). In these classic encounters the objects, apparent vehicles, directly interacted with the witnesses' aircraft, and sometimes with ground stations. The witnesses were highly qualified pilots, and considerable instrumented data on the electromagnetic signatures was obtained.

This class of UFO encounters give the strong impression of being "nuts and bolts" physical craft, "somebody else's hardware".

I think that the undoubted existence of this category of UFO encounters strongly argues for the conclusion that at least a certain subset of the UFO phenomenon shows definite characteristics that could best be interpreted and explained by the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Vallee strongly argues against this possibility, in part by citing theoretical considerations such as involving physics and exobiology (they are not believable according to our currect science and technology), but he seemingly ignores the classic interactive cases mentioned above. I think evidence always trumps theory.

The most interesting part of the paper to me is the concluding section speculating on what much stranger things UFOs might be, given the argument that they are not extraterrestrial spacecraft from alien planets. 

Vallee has some interesting ideas. At first, he I think rightly discounts the untenable for many reasons alternative blanket "explain away" theory that regards the entire UFO phenomenon as a projection of the consciousness of the witnesses. This is the so-called "Psycho-Sociological Hypothesis". Proponents of this theory point out that science-fiction and legends, too, stay one step ahead of human scientific realizations, implying perhaps a psychological/sociological origin. This theory relates to the "collective unconscious of mankind responds to world anxieties by psychically manifesting semi-physical phenomena" hypothesis.

Then he mentions the suggestion that they are really "Earth Lights," an unrecognized physical, terrestrial phenomenon which impresses the consciousness of the witnesses to take the form of a mental image, possibly a mythological figure.

Then there is the proposed approach that the UFO phenomenon is a sort of control system, reserving judgment as to whether the control would turn out to be human, alien or simply natural.

"There are two interesting variants of this: ( 1) An Alien intelligence, possibly earth-based, could be training us (1) towards a new type of' behavior. It could represent the "Visitor Phenomenon" of Strieber (1987) or some form of "super-nature," possibly along the lines of a "Gaia" hypothesis. (2) Alternately, in a Jungian interpretation of
the same theme, the human collective unconscious could be (psychically) projecting ahead of itself the imagery which is necessary for our own long-term survival beyond the unprecedented crises of the 20th century." In extension of that hypothesis, one could theorize that there exists a remarkable state of psychic functioning that alters the percipient's vision of physical reality and also generates actual traces and luminous phenomena, visible to other witnesses in their normal state."

Finally, Vallee proposes his own favorite group of hypotheses, the ultraterrestrial visitor beings from other dimensional realms, time travelers, and so on, explanations, far stranger than the previous. Vallee even wrote a book about this approach, Dimensions (Vallee, 1988). It occurs to me he could have added the notion that there is a multiverse and some of these have physical contact with our universe.

"....we could hypothesize extraterrestrial travellers using radical methods of spacetime manipulation, notably the use of four-dimensional wormholes for space and possibly even time travel. Such travellers could perform many of the physical feats ascribed to ufonauts and they could also manifest simultaneously throughout what appears to us as different periods in our history. This hypothesis represents an updating of the ETH where the "extraterrestrials"can be from anywhere and anytime, and could even originate from our own
earth."

Concluding this discussion and overview, I might point out that Vallee I think thankfully ignores (if he was even aware of it) mention of the even more far-out hypthesis that the source of the phenomenon may be from the world of the occult, or afterlife spiritual realms.

Probably want to merge this with the older thread? ->

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-f...in-of-ufos

I am amenable to the idea that the visitors that seem to be in technological vehicles could be from a multiverse of sorts, where their technology works similarly enough to ours for them to fly around in certain areas. Since I reject “laws of nature” & causal necessity in favor of regularities + dispositional causality I don’t see this as an impossibility.

I’ve been reading about Vallee’s Control System idea…and it feels a bit too Gnostic to me, even if Vallee himself doesn’t believe the system has to be run by conscious entities. My issue in part is that the long lasting impact and deep philosophy developed under the major religions and their starting miraculous events differs quite strongly from the UFO phenomenon.

It’s not clear what control UFOs exert on human consciousness on a collective scale. Even the Pythagorean cult, whose exact history is admittedly in dispute, seems to have a bigger real world impact than any UFO sighting. For most people UFOs are curiosities at best, whereas even a “smaller” major religion like Shintoism seems to have had important historical effects. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has likely exerted more global cultural impact than any UFO.

So what is it about UFOs that exert any kind of major shift in human thinking? This doesn’t even get into the clearer message of major religions versus UFOs which vary so much that some could be physical craft made by humans while others are clearly absurd Deep Weird encounters.

[Laird]

Probably want to merge this with the older thread?

Will do in the absence of objection from @nbtruthman.