25 May 2021

Aliens In The Sky? Show Me Some Real Evidence!

Posted by Dan Satterfield

Houston, we have a problem.

News outlets have found that when they publish any story that has the letters UFO in it, they get a lot of hits. This leads to two things: More UFO stories and poor journalism.

Here is an example I saw this last weekend. It was on the NBC website and showed the image below:

From NBC story on UFO’s this last weekend.

Any meteorologist can tell you what you are looking at, and it’s not a flying saucer. It IS an altocumulus lenticularis cloud. We, meteorologists, call them lennies for short, and sometimes they can look just like a giant flying saucer! They are rather common over mountain areas and form when waves develop over a mountain range. They are often stationary and can form hundreds of miles from the mountains that caused them.

This is just one example of a bunch of poor stories on UFO’s where the reporter did not dig deep enough and this is the kind of story you need to dig deeper on! I am reminded of a famous quote by Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Isaac Asimov, the famed science fiction writer put it just as well:

Half the people on the planet are walking around with the greatest most sophisticated camera ever made in their pocket. Most shoot high definition colour video as well, so if all you have is a grainy black and white video, of some blurry object, I am not interested. It does not pass the Sagan test.

What you say!: “Haven’t you seen that video released by the Navy of the UFO below the fighter jet?”

Yes, and so did someone who knows trigonometry.

While the pilots claimed it was going thousands of miles per hour, the math says no. It was moving at about the usual wind speed at that altitude. The so-called alien is likely a balloon floating with the wind.

Oh, I know, the objects made a 600g turn! Ok, show me the video evidence! No one has produced any, and that includes the DOD. 

I am not saying that there is no intelligent life in the Universe, but I am saying we have no decent evidence of any aliens visiting Earth, and I’m starting to wonder how much intelligent life we have here!

By the way, I would not be surprised if a few of these reports turn out to be drones from other countries (and our own) engaged in spying. We certainly have that technology and so do other nations. This meets occam’s razor (when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.) which science has found is a good rule. 

In the meantime, Sagan rules. Science is the best way ever found for finding truth, and that means testable and verifiable evidence. When it comes to alien spacecraft, no one has produced any.