ectospheno
3 months ago
Humans are bad eye witnesses. We don’t like this so it’s easier to scour the world looking for evidence we were right all along. Combine this with how well we see patterns even when they aren’t there and you get ufos.
someone7x
3 months ago
This isn’t about eyewitnesses, it’s about looking at historical pictures of the sky before the advent of space flight.
> Villarroel and her team used the digitized scans to study the night sky as it was before the 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1, to eliminate the possibility of seeing space-based interference from human activity.
> Under the auspices of Villarroel’s Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, they identified more than 107,000 transients.
datavirtue
3 months ago
Sounds good, but then you have the lights over Arizona in 1995 and other incidents that are on video.
Are Aliens here goofing off? Probably not but humans are either conjuring these manifestations of mass hallucinations or they are actually happening. I guess the first case is a really a version of the second case.
We used to have issues with fairies, now it's humanoids visiting in crafts.
JohnFen
3 months ago
I think that people are, for the most part, seeing real phenomena of various sorts. The problem is that people tend to jump from "I don't know what that is" directly to "it's aliens", ignoring the vast number of other, much more likely, possible explanations.
> We used to have issues with fairies, now it's humanoids visiting in crafts.
I wish I could find it, but many years ago I read a great paper on this. The thesis was that when people see things they can't explain, they will interpret what they see in the context of their society. Technologically-oriented societies produce explanations of a technological nature. Mystically-oriented societies will produce explanations of a mystical nature, and so on.
As I said in another comment, people tend to see what they expect to see rather than what is actually there.
zeroc8
3 months ago
But the fact remains that people are seeing things or lights buzzing around the sky in a manner we cannot explain.
JohnFen
3 months ago
Yes. Humans tend to see what they expect to see rather than what is actually there.
rkomorn
3 months ago
The best example of this is all the "ghost hunter" shows that were (are?) popular.
If you listen to static looking for something to hear, you're gonna find something.
If you see a heat pattern left by someone leaning on a locker and you want to see something, you're gonna see "a face and body!!!" instead of just the fact that the shoulder pressed more than the arm and left a larger circle.