Comment on This: The UFO Files Say More About Perception Than Extraterrestrial Life

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.