Scientists Set the Bar Too High
A response to an article by Ethan Siegal.
I’ve noticed many scientists, especially astronomers, physicists, types, skeptical of the phenomenon are hesitant to publish anything about UFOs. When they do publish something, it leaves a lot out. Some require the impossible or highly unlikely in terms of evidence. Ethan Siegal for example requires one of the following in order to consider it extraordinary.
- size, as no aircraft has ever been built with a wingspan greater than about half a kilometer,
- mass, as no aircraft heavier than a few thousand tons has ever been even proposed,
- speed, as no aircraft or spacecraft-in-Earth’s vicinity has ever exceeded more than around 17 km/s (~11 miles/second) while near our planet,
- or acceleration, as no aircraft has sustained an acceleration in any direction of more than about ~10 times Earth’s gravity for more than a few seconds.
Nearly all the UFOs I’ve seen have been smaller than a kilometer and usually only a couple dozen meters in length. Calvine for example, is a lot smaller than his requirement but still is a good photograph. By requiring every UFO to be larger than any possible aircraft you leave out a lot. Size isn’t the only metric to judge veracity. Motion is also difficult to detect, especially very rapid motion that darts out of the viewport too quickly.
They also rarely jolt off at extraordinary speeds and when they do, they move too quickly to take a picture. Imagine trying to take a video or a picture of a bullet in flight and you might understand the problem. There’s no easy way to measure the mass of a UFO from a video and even when we do capture extraordinary movements it’s considered a fake or forgery. In addition, extreme speeds wouldn’t be picked up on phone cameras anyway since most phone cameras film at around 30 frames per second. Any motion faster than that, which leaves the camera’s viewport in under 33 milliseconds wouldn’t be picked up. That leaves little options, at least on video for what Ethan requires in terms of evidence.
One option is radar data, radar data operates at 1 to 20Hz which may not be picked up even on radar if it’s traveling fast enough. Even when unusual incidents are reported on radar, they get ignored by most of the scientific community. The observer for the NWS made a good point, they often keep quiet because of the fear of how they will be perceived. So ignoring the radar data and ignoring the actual videos and photographs what are we supposed to do? What Ethan and other scientists are asking is impossible or highly unlikely. There’s no controlled way to test UFO sightings with high precision and significance like a laboratory experiment so without that control, we have to rely on data.
Often the best cases get dismissed as distant jets because of the disbelief of debunkers and skeptics even when the object looks nothing like a jet, as in the case of the Gimbal video. There’s the reverse perspective, which is the incredulity of SETI and many scientists who entirely dismiss the topic out of hand. It provides some of the best evidence despite what they think. Even entire regions of the world have unusual UFO data which gets ignored. I wrote about how the data indicates something unusual about the Bermuda Triangle but so far no scientists have shown any interest. Instead of lambasting UFO research, maybe they can actually investigate.
