The Real British X-Files 239
blakeharris snips from a site called The X-Journals: "Nick Pope used to work for the British Ministry of Defense and for 3 years headed up their UFO project. His remit was to investigate UFO sightings reported to the British government, looking for evidence of any potential threat, or anything judged to be of any 'defence significance.'" Some very interesting anecdotes in here, as well as some background on how certain files about these sightings came to be preserved in the first place.
Re:Lameduck release. RTFA carefully (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading the article carefully? Amazing, your brain turns off at all the sections that would counter your conspiracy-theories.
Some quotes:
"I never authorized the destruction of a UFO file and following the 1967 ruling, nobody should."
"The introduction of the Freedom of Information Act (passed in November 2000 and coming fully into force in January 2005) effectively reversed the default position and the presumption now is that information is released, unless any of the formal exemptions apply."
Another interesting tidbit: they are so busy with FOI requests, they can't spare the time to investigate new incidents.
You also say "What has been released are sightings that can be/have been proven to be false sightings". Now we could presume a huge conspiracy and alien underground bases dominating the British government, OR we could presume there really isn't much to see here... Occam's razor makes this an easy one. And that is if you consider that your statement is correct in the first place, which it isn't. Unless you can prove the following sightings to be false sightings (as stated in the article, which you "read so carefully")
"Some of the more interesting incidents included: 26th April 1984: Members of the public report a UFO in Stanmore. Two police officers attend the scene, witness the craft and sketch it.
13th October 1984: a saucer-shaped UFO is seen from Waterloo Bridge in London by numerous witnesses.
11th September 1985: 2 UFOs tracked on a military radar system travelling 10 nautical miles in 12 seconds.
4th September 1986: a UFO passes an estimated 1.5 nautical miles from the port side of a commercial aircraft.
"
Apparently you can prove them to be false sightings - I'd recommend you contact the British MoD and tell them the good news.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you inspect each and every case where a person thinks they saw something "unexplainable"? People think they see weird shit all the time, be it UFO's, their dead relatives, Elvis or God. Yes, we basically should subject any such sightings to rigorous scientific investigation. In practice, though, if there's nothing other than the testimony of a superstitious kook to suggest that what they saw is real, there's no real incentive to waste resources on investigating such things.
Paranoia and scientific caution are separate (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. Paranoia and distrust of the Government should be unlimited, both on principle and for very good reasons of precedent.
That is separate from one's level of confidence in the data though.
You can totally distrust government while still having a rational head on your shoulders when dealing with evidence. A scientific approach to analysing UFO reports (and only stating what you know, not what you imagine) isn't optional, except to those who are more interested in fiction than in reality.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you a moron? I believe you are. I just said that UFOs were reported by pilots and NASA astronauts. Seriously, guys who actually went and walked on the Moon and otherwise have been high ranking USAF pilots have seen UFOs, and you want to dismiss it as superstitious kook BS? How many pilots must report something they can't explain before you deem the reported phenomenons worthy of scientific and methodological investigation?
Now that's a bit off topic, but the real reason is that "sceptics" like you have settled on a frozen idea of what's possible and what's not, and what you deemed permanently impossible you'll just ignore even if presented with most compelling reports or even if you see it with your own eyes. People like you just keep trying to find justifications for what they permanently consider impossible, without considering for a minute that maybe they're wrong about what's possible and what's not. It's called denial.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a plethora of UFO reports out there from civil and military pilots, as well as air traffic control staff, radar operators, military base personel, and yes, even astronauts who went to the Moon.
That is well and true, it however has a little problem: Those are UFOs in the literal sense, they are "unidentified flying object", not extra terrestrial spacecrafts. When you can't tell what something is, it simply means you don't know, it doesn't confirm that aliens are involved.
When it comes to hard evidence, there is simply nothing that points to E.T. Blobs of light in the sky can be lots of things, clouds, planets, satellites, floating lanterns, lense flare, insects and tons of more stuff. How many clear non-blurry pictures are there of alien space crafts? None. You'd guess in a time where every mobile has camera people would come up with some good pictures, but that hasn't happened.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
A professional astronomer was making the following remark : "it is our job to observe the sky and find uncommon things. Occasionally we do, but it is impressive to see how a professional with good tools is less likely to observe UFOs than an amateur with bad tools is."
UFO = Unindentified Flying/Floating Object. It does not mean "Alien spaceship". When an astronaut says "hey, I saw something passig by there !" it is classified as a UFO because no one wants to take the time to find the identification of the debris he observed.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, guys who actually went and walked on the Moon
Does that give you magic power to detect alien spacecraft or immunity from mistaking something you see? Your appeal to authority [wikipedia.org] just isn't a very good argument.
Now that's a bit off topic, but the real reason is that "sceptics" like you have settled on a frozen idea of what's possible and what's not,
No, they are skeptic because they haven't seen good evidence.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
What are you gonna do with those?
Sort them into the "unexplained" folder and move on. Just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it was an alien spacecraft. That case, as all the others, doesn't give you hard evidence for anything. Do we have now a clear picture of a space craft? Nope. Any idea how its propulsion system works? Nope. Who piloted it? Nope. Any idea about anything at all? Not really.
If you want to demonstrate that alien spacecrafts are real, you have to come up with some good evidence, not just an single unexplained anomaly. Find multiple anomalies that follow the same pattern and you might be getting somewhere, but a single one off doesn't really help you much with anything, especially not when you fill in the lack of facts with random UFO fiction.
When it comes to weird things happening in the air I like the story of British Airways Flight 9 [wikipedia.org], full of mystery and suspense and it also happens to be fully explained in the end.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the MoD wants to find an explanation. Something flying past at mach 10 could be a new type of missile or experimental aircraft.
The MoD was never looking for aliens, they were looking for new weapons that could be used to attack the UK.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
But they tend to focus on average Joe's UFO sightings rather than the well documented and really hard to explain ones.
You miss the point. If you want to prove the existence of alien spacecraft you don't have to find hard to explain cases, you have to find the opposite, well explained ones. You need clear pictures and well observed objects, not anomalies in the sky that you couldn't identify.
And my appeal to authority is justified in that you'd think that a highly trained elite pilot who's flown for years and even been to space would know what he's looking at when he looks in the sky around him.
The human visual system is build to measure distances and velocities at small scales. When you fly high up in the air you have the exact opposite, huge velocities, great distances and worst of all nothing to use as reference. No amount of experience will help you when you encounter an unexpected thing in the sky, as it becomes nearly impossible to judge size or velocity just by sight.
Re:British English (Score:5, Insightful)
We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.
That's why it's a TV license and not a BBC license.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you're the one who's missing the point, it's not about proving alien life, it's about getting ANYONE to get off their ass and investigate that whole shit, because it's obviously worth investigating,
What do you want to investigate? We don't have a crashes spacecraft to poke around in and neither do we have any idea when or why an UFO might pop up. So you literally have to sit around and wait for something to happen, as people are watching the sky already anyway, be it birdwatchers, astronomers, air traffic controllers, military or just random guy with mobile phone. If you want to investigate something you need something to investigate, random events at random times that happen only every few years in the world and don't leave any trace evidence are just a little troublesome to investigate properly.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:1, Insightful)
Military aircraft have many types of recording instruments and so do ground based installations and yet you can't provide a single shred of evidence besides "some dude said".
Videos? Pictures? ANY kind of visual or auditory records of the UFO itself, the malfunctioning equipment or the radar?
No? Then it's all bullshit.
Don't bother (Score:5, Insightful)
The UFO conspiracy nuts will NEVER be happy. It isn't a matter of finding the truth, it is a matter of religion for them. They want to believe there are aliens visiting the Earth so they'll just keep on making up reasons why it could be happening. They'll ignore contradictory evidence, etc, etc. It is an argument you can't win. It is like the Creationists or any other nutty group like that. They have a view point they wish to be true, and so they'll only pay attention to things that would show that. They ignore or dismiss anything they don't like. There is no reasoning with the because it isn't a position based on reason.
Goes double since I imagine the truth is real boring. For example I'd personally bet on the high speed radar UFOs being glitches. As good as military radar is, it isn't perfect. It can get confused and display false positives. That is actually the idea behind active radar jamming. You send out strong signals that cause all sorts of false readings, so they can't tell where the real aircraft are.
Well that's not very exciting at all. Much more exciting to think it is some kind of alien craft that is so amazing it can travel at FTL speeds across the galaxy, yet can't even avoid primitive radar, something human planes can do.
Precisely (Score:4, Insightful)
I think many people forget that in science, and really in all facets of life the burden of proof is on the claimant. You make a claim that extraterrestrial craft are visiting Earth, it is then incumbent on YOU to provide good evidence of that fact. You don't get to say "Well here's something that isn't explained, thus it must be an ET UFO." No, if it isn't explained it isn't explained. That isn't evidence. You have to provide some real concrete evidence to back up your theory.
The "Well you can't explain it so I must be right," crap is the same thing the religious fundies pull. "Oh evolution doesn't explain everything about the state of organisms on this planet, so god must have created us." "Oh the big bang doesn't explain where the universe came form so god must have created it."
Those are not legit arguments and neither is "You can't explain what this is so it must be an ET UFO." Nope, I don't have to provide an explanation or evidence. You do. If you are sure it is of extraterrestrial origin, then you need to furnish the proof of that fact. Otherwise, in the absence of sufficient evidence we have to write it off as a "Don't know."
That is actually what UFO means: Unidentified Flying Object. It simply means an object seen in the sky, that the observer(s) were not able to positively identify. That does NOT mean it is an alien craft. The nutjob movement has co-opted the term and has tried to twist it in to "Anything in the sky we can't immediately explain is an alien craft."
So for all you UFO nuts out there: Put up or shut up. Let's see proof, and not the kind of BS fake proof the creationists trot out. Let's see some real, valid, empirical proof, not wild speculations. If you can't provide that, then shut your yap.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
Even knowing which of these is the case would be interesting. Beyond that, knowing exactly what they are seeing, or why they are seeing it, is worth knowing.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
Well you're obviously not a scientist, otherwise you'd want to know.
Obviously you're not a scientist, or you'd know the number one idea behind science is mistrust of our conclusions. You check and double-check continuously, until the mountain of results is overwhelming. And even then you keep in mind that you might still be wrong, that the next experiment may not fit with the rest.
The one thing you don't do, that you must never, ever do as a scientist is jump to conclusions on flimsy data. When something is unknown or unidentified, you don't default to the first thing that comes to mind. You might, and in fact should, form hypotheses. There's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft. But there isn't even remotely sufficient evidence to validate that hypothesis.
And this is unfortunate, as I think there would be few things more amazing than the discovery of alien intelligence, here, visiting Earth. But knowing how much I'd like such a thing to be true, brings us back to the number one idea behind science. Knowing how easy it is to interpret data in accordance not to reality, but to our desires, you have to mistrust your conclusions, especially those you'd really like to be true. To do otherwise is not science, it's superstition, it's religion, it's a million things but the one thing it is not is science.
Re:Precisely (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, we've done a lot of observing with respect to UFOs. We've done a little bit of hypothesising, but not very much. We've done almost no testing. 'They can't explain it so I must be right,' as you point out, is not the right attitude for science. The correct approach is 'they can't explain it therefore it merits further study.'
Re:Parent wears a Tinfoil hat to work (Score:3, Insightful)
Paranoid may or may not be justified. However considering the sort of people you find involved in government, especially national governments, distrust by default is the only rational position.
Re:Don't bother (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly, nothing short of the government releasing documents stating that there are UFO and they've been covering it up all along will satisfy these people. It doesn't even enter into their thinking that the reason why the government hasn't released such documents is because no such documents exist because there are no UFOs.
The run up to the Iraq war was like this. The weapons inspectors couldn't find WMD, so that must be prove that they exist and are being hidden!