Saturday, June 5, 2021

UAP Is This Year's Summer Hit

After yesterday's disheartening post, I figured I'd post on something which is a lighter topic... or so I hope.  It seems that US intelligence agencies are taking Unidentified Aerial Phenomena seriously. UAP is the new non-sensationalized term for UFOs, probably because the latter term has been inextricably linked in the public imagination with aliens... and all of the attendant baggage.

While the intelligence report doesn't offer a definitive explanation of the UAP/UFO situation, the mere fact that there is an acknowledgement that something funny's going on is preferable to sweeping the whole thing under the rug.  Right now, I am going to state that I have no doubt that there is life on other planets in this vast universe, but that I do not believe that any of these organisms have visited this planet.  My personal feeling is that most UAP/UFO consist of vagaries of human perception.  People don't always have a good handle on judging the speed of objects, and pareidolia causes mistakes in perception... simply put, people trick themselves into seeing things 'wrong'.  Additionally, there are probably aircraft that the general public aren't aware exist, and with the growing preponderance of drones, such aircraft would not be subject to the physical limitations of human pilots.

Recently, I saw a livestream with Chelsea Manning, a former military intelligence operative (she was a recent guest on the QAA Podcast), and she noted that the current crop of videos being broadcast in the news media are the products of military equipment- they are not to be interpreted in the manner in which you'd interpret a video taken with an iPhone camera.  Without a knowledge of the sources of these images, interpreting them is a fool's errand.  The content of the stream I watched was similar to this video.

Mick West is one of the yeomen of the UFO debunking community, and is consistently entertaining.  His analysis is sober, but never boring.

Post title riffing off last year's big hit, which melted conservatives' brains for months.

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