Howdy y’all!
When I was a young man still living in the US and driving, late one night I was driving on an urban highway. It was a clear night in late spring or early summer. Traffic was light with few other cars around. However, I was following a car about a quarter mile ahead of me. As it turned out, we both took the same exit.
The car ahead had stopped at the traffic light on the frontage road. As I approached, the light turned green, and the car split in half! The left light went left and the right, right.
It took me a second to realize that what I took for a car had been two motorcycles. It was dark enough and they were far enough away from me that I couldn’t see any detail other than the rear lights.
It occurs to me as I look through the video and photographs of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon that a similar trick of the eye and camera is taking place.
Having taught high school university-level psychology for twenty years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying perception — I’m the kind of nerd who actually studies something other than the textbooks and tries to stay current in the field I teach, unlike some teachers I knew. Admittedly, I’m no expert, but I’m better informed than the average person.
Human beings evolved to rely on our eyesight over all other senses — SPOILER! There are no sensory learning styles. No one is a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner. As such we put a lot of resources into interpreting the world around us visually and like any other expensive thing you’ve bought, you want to use it. However, because rendering a three-dimensional world through a two-dimensional electrical representation — the back of the eye ball is a 2D canvas stimulating neural receptors — takes a lot of brain architecture and energy, we’ve developed shortcuts to make it easier.
We rely on depth cues to help us determine the size of an object and how far away it is from us. One of them is our binocular vision. We compare the neural firings from our two eyes to help triangulate distance to an object. Shadow is used to separate foreground and background. The infamous vanishing point for the horizon. And, when we have ambiguous or missing information, we just fill it in. If you want more information about this, hit me up in the comments.
We have tons of these shortcuts that generally work for us, but occasionally break down. In class, we used optical illusions to demonstrate the various ways we determine depth, shape, and relationships between objects and how easily they broke down. The human brain is easy to fool.
In the example of the dividing car, I lacked a lot of information. I couldn’t see the vehicles attached to the lights, but because they were approximately car width a part and maintained the distance relatively well, I just assumed it was a car. It was dark, and there were no visual cues for what else might explain the two red lights in front of me.
An object in the air lacks the cues that objects on the ground have. The moon appears larger the closer to the horizon it gets. While we may think it is changing its size, it isn’t. A hovering object may actually be moving away from you. Something moving impossible fast, may be moving at an acute or obtuse angle and you assume it is a right angle. An UAP hovering and then shooting off at an impossible speed may just be a change in course. So, unless you’ve got your UFO on radar, and there are anomalies there, too, you can’t rule out optical illusion and confusion due to a lack of environmental cues.
You got to ask yourself, which is more likely, a misinterpretation of the visual information or a visitor from another planet?
Also, as Neil deGrasse Tyson is so fond of pointing out, we should have better images than this. Everybody and their monkey has a smartass phone now with a pretty darn good camera in it. And, we’d rather take a picture or video of something rather than protect ourselves from danger or render aide, so where are all those pictures? Why are the aliens only showing up where military aircraft can take fuzzy low resolution jiggling photos?
Anywho, what do you make of the UAP information released by Trump, Biden, and Congress — as with most things, Trump is lying when he says he’s the only one releasing UFO files? Is there any reason to believe that aliens are visiting us here on planet Earth? I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments!
Blog On, Siblings!
Jack
Image Attribution
The image was found on a BBC article, but all NASA photographs are public domain.
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I have not visited the site….because I do not believe and the truth is subjective when we deal with those UFOs….my bad UAPs….anyway all I have read about the release is just garbage out nothing….just I thought. a waste of time and a diversion. chuq
Pretty sure, Trump had no more than a diversion in mind, but that doesn’t mean it is without meaning or merit. For my part, I’m pretty sure we’re not being visited by aliens or demons. I haven’t looked at the “evidence” either, and I don’t plan to. You can’t trust anything coming out of this administration, even the UAP files.
Jack
I got the “Secure connection failed, try again” message. I suspect that’s a glitch in my service.
A large portion of the world is coming to see reliance of fossil fuels as a major risk. And if the stand off about the Straight goes on much longer, countries are going to have their domestic politics pushing them to put increasing pressure on us (spelled USA) to make whatever deal it takes to get the oil moving again. Impeachment and removal may well be the only way to break the impasse.
Howdy Bob!
My apologies for my delay in responding to this comment. Time just got away from this week. Spring has finally sprung here in the far northern prairie, so I’ve been putting in my garden and other such excuses.
The one saving grace from this time is that Trump’s legacy may be pushing us all towards renewables. That idea alone keeps me smiling and hopeful.I’m equally convinced that Trump is content to squeak about an impending deal every few days to manipulate the stock market and continue enriching himself with insider trading rather than actually effectuate an ending to the mess. I figure he knows if he does nothing long enough, someone else will eventually fix it and he’ll blame them for whatever shortcomings that solution has.
I’ve heard a lot of commentary on the increase in public napping and head nodding Trump is engaging in. I read recently that excessive daytime napping in older adults is a sign of congestive heart failure. All signs point to him not making it to 2028 or maybe even 2027.
Blog On, Sibling!
Jack
I wonder if even China can make enough solar panels and wind turbines fast enough to meet the coming demand now that the only countries with oil and gas resources can see fossil fuels as a secure source of energy, and some of them aren’t entirely sure either (Columbia). A fun conspiracy theory could be built on the idea that the whole Iran war was really a plot to create the big enough oil shock to finally get the would off it’s collective butt and get on with the transition.
Mr. Trump is not a well man in mind or body. That much is obvious.
Howdy Bob!
What does it say about us as a collective of people that we have elected someone that unwell to office and cannot admit because of politics that he should be removed? Once we’ve moved past doing the right things for the right reasons to doing the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the wrong reasons, we are surely going very very wrong and nothing good can come of it.
The trickster part of me really likes the Iran War-Oil Shock-Forcing the Transition Conspiracy Theory.
Huzzah!
Jack
Some, likely, a major part of the problem and the devolution centers around the question of, “What is the Truth, and how can we know it?”. That brings to mind this article about GenZ’s relationship to that question:
https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerptthe-future-of-truth-steven-rosenbaum/?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=wired&utm_mailing=WIR_Daily_051626&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_content=WIR_Daily_051626&bxid=5bd6730124c17c1048004ec8&cndid=31950619&hasha=f928381c17165d018c0bf4c042428f4f&hashc=ebe61e290ff5f6dab2702263b67c4c485180ab2deb59e026490fcd63c88404f5&esrc=AUTO_PRINT&utm_term=WIR_Daily_Active
Then there is the observation that Propaganda and Advertising are the same thing, only the product being sold is different, and we have lived in an increasingly dense advertising environment since the development of commercial radio. Then came TV. Then came the internet and social media and deep fakes. The “fire-hose of falsehoods” is not new.
Still, though, Philip K Dick was right, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it does not go away.”
That may be reason to hope.
Jack I do believe there are ‘demons’ in this admin…..have a great Sunday my friend chuq
One thing that seems to have gone out of fashion is alien abduction stories, but then, we have been putting all the “space aliens threaten everything” stories into super hero movies. Also, a lot of that energy got sucked up by the Q-Anon crowd.
Yes, as the “Outsider” trying to break in it is easy to blame everything on “The Establishment” until you become it. Part of Trump’s problem is that he never stopped despite claiming to have won.
The UFO files have another problem as a go to repeating new item. They haven’t found any definite, provable aliens. Eventually, the content gets boring to any but the ET nerds.
Howdy Bob!
There are some interesting and unexplored storylines coming out of Trump. The outsider becoming the insider is one of them. The unintended consequences is another, especially where some of his pet obsessions are concerned like alternative clear energy sources, civil rights, and immigration. We’ll end up embracing and furthering all of them a lot more closely and faster than if he hadn’t served.
Jack
Nothing that anyone associated with this administration says or does surprises me any more. Our wonderful vice president, JD Vance has declared that not only does he believe in UFOs, he firmly believes that they aren’t aliens at all but demons. And apparently there are several other members of Congress, that grand old home for the intellectually and ethically challenged, who believe the same thing.
Once upon a time at the dawn of the internet I was with a loosely organized group called the Odyssey Fringe Science Research Network. Among the group were a couple of engineers, a chemist, a former New York medical examiner, a marine archeologist, and me, someone with a background in photography and film processing and a computer programmer
Every single case of paranormal activity, UFOs, crop circles, hauntings, etc that we looked at was either a deliberate fake, a case of mistaking a mundane event/object for something outside of the ordinary, or the reporting person suffering from some sort of delusion or even being outright mentally ill.
Every. Single. One.
What especially astonished me at the time was how the “true believers” simply refused to accept any of the evidence we might have found debunking the subject of their belief.
Crop circles were a Big Deal at the time, especially in the UK for some reason. In several cases we not only had photos and even video of them being made by ordinary people, we had the tools they used, the techniques they used, and even had the people who made them who freely admitted faking them.
Bigfoot? Frauds, all of them. We had the admissions of the people who faked the footprints and how they did it, we even had a pair of the modified boots one fellow used to make the prints. We had stills from the videos showing the gap between the glove and the sleeve of the gorilla suit one fellow wore to fake a video showing his wrist and the watch he was wearing. One of our people even had a modified gorilla costume she got from one of the fakers.
Didn’t matter in the slightest to the true believers. We were all part of some grand conspiracy by the Illuminati or the Masons or that era’s equivalent of the “Deep State”.
Things actually seem to have become worse in the 25 or 30 years since I was involved with the group. The claims have become more outrageous and bizarre, and the media seems to be in collusion with the creators of this crap by giving them a voice and spreading their frauds or delusions world wide.
One thing I find interesting is that there seems to have been a shift towards this whole “demon” thing. I’m enormously curious as to why there would be this shift away from more mundane (Oh, lord, did I just call alien sightings “mundane”?) aliens and this push into the realm of religious symbolism.
Howdy Grouchy!
Yes. Yes you did call alien sightings mundane.It is completely normal to believe that aliens visit us on planet Earth. It is completely abnormal to believe in demons and devils. Unless you are an End of Times Prosperity Gospel white supremacist evangelical type who needs to justify their means to reach their ethnic cleansing ends or just appeal to your gullible constituents and donors.
You know what Festinger said, right? “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” Like Jesus said, there is no convincing some people.
I think the Interwebs has made everything worse, not better. All of the nuts have found each other. The eccentric town crank has found their tribe and now feels emboldened to push their eccentric crankish beliefs on the rest of us and the media feels obligated to cover it. Unless it is the metallic monolith that appear sporadically around the world. Then, they’re just cool.
Huzzah!
Jack
In addition to all the ways the eye/brain can be fooled, and the fact that photographs are 2D images, we have our cognitive bias to interpret ambiguous information according to our belief system, and see whatever it is that hope or fear to see. Oh, and various atmospheric conditions can mess with distant images too.
My strongest impression of the files release is DISTRACTION. Too many people are proving that they can pay attentions to two things at a time for extended periods, like war and Epstein, or make the connection between war on Iran and the price of gas.
The debate and imagining about visitors from outer space has been going on since the famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast. In earlier times people saw angels and devils and signs from God. Then, there is the Big Question: Are we alone in the universe, or not? And if not, should we fear the others, or hope to be friends?
The one sure thing is that the ET believers will believe, and the skeptics will not.
Howdy Bob!
I’m with you, Festinger, and Jesus on this one. To paraphrase Jesus, “There’s no convincing some people.” I guess both the demons and devils and aliens are in response to the question, “Are we alone in the universe.” They just have different cultural roots and probably fulfill the same cultural need. I imagine there are imagined sightings of all sorts of supernatural and non-existent beings all over the world. The form they take depends on the culture the viewer belongs to.
Trump is undoubtedly trying to wrest control of the news cycle away from all of the bad news — although, not all of it has been bad for his allies; maybe that doesn’t matter to him — during the week. The UFO file dump is an easy fix, though. He can turn to it almost any time. They don’t even have to release anything new. They can just warm over some the crap that Biden released, claim he hadn’t released anything unlike the virtuous Trump, and crow about their transparency.
He himself demonstrated that people can deal with the Firehose of falsehood by following the things that resonate with them and ignore the rest. In fact, he has turned out to be his own worst enemy. He got us conditioned to believe conspiracy theories and now that he occupies the establishment seat, he becomes the focal point of conspiracy theories to explain the motivations of his own murky actions. That can pair up with his other big legacy item, getting us to accept alternative clean energy sources and EVs.
Huzzah!
Jack