if I'm being frank — Noble Dust

Stop pretending that you are frank, and don't call me Shirley, either.

If you take him at face value, the reason he claims to have evidence without sighting it is because of what he describes as "black budget illegal programs". He details them more if you get past 10 minutes. I'm not saying it's worth your time.

Ufologist -- that's UFO-ologist, not Urologist.

Greer was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955. He claims he saw an unidentified flying object at close range when he was eight years old. He claims he saw another UFO when he was 35. Greer was trained as a Transcendental Meditation teacher and served as director of a meditation organization. He received a B.S. degree in biology from Appalachian State University in 1982 and an M.D. degree from the James H. Quillen College of Medicine of East Tennessee State University in 1987. He received his Virginia medical license in 1989 and worked as an emergency room physician, and in 1998 retired as a physician in favor of his ufology activities.

Fortunately he is retired from medicine. He should see a gastroenterologist ASAP since he is probably full of shit. That can be cured with a quart of potassium citrate and a large toilet.

Keep clowning until you see them face to face, ya bitter crank.

Fortunately he is retired from medicine. He should see a gastroenterologist ASAP since he is probably full of shit. That can be cured with a quart of potassium citrate and a large toilet. — BC

It's funny how these sorts of discussions always go from UFOs to people who are UFoS.

It's funny how these sorts of discussions always go from UFOs to people who are UFoS. — wonderer1

No, given the topic, it's INEVITABLE!

Oh, they're doing the alien thing again. What am I being distracted from?

Ukraine must be losing.

, mistaken acronym, Ukrainian Floating Operatives.

I think that P(psyop) > P(aliens). Between those two flavors of crazy, I pick the less crazy one.

I don't pretend to really understand it, but if I am not misinformed, as @jgill pointed out, from the standpoint of the ship, as you approach the speed of light, the distance traversed approaches zero and the time to cross it also approaches zero. It takes a million years for light to cross a gap of a million light years only for an observer stationary with respect to it. For the photon, no distance and no time.

https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.html#:~:text=From%20the%20perspective%20of%20a,doesn't%20experience%20distance%20either.

As an aside, I've often wondered if this reveals something very interesting and radical about the physical world. Maybe photons flying through space in the way we imagine a ball going through space isn't a thing at all. You can't observe a photon in flight, "from the side", so to speak. If you detect it, or there is a scattering event, its flight is over, no? It has been absorbed or converted to another form of energy. When we see a ball from the side of its path, we are receiving photons that are traveling directly to our retina from the ball. We only have evidence about the ball indirectly. We don't "see across a gap" nonlocally, even though phenomenologically, that's the way it feels to us when we watch a ball in flight. It feels like we are directly aware of something at a distance from us. We have a sense of the space in between. But this is just the phenomenology. In actuality it seems, all information is gained locally by direct contact, regardless of the means of detection. It is all touch in the end. A single photon mid-flight, untouched, is something that has never been observed. The existence of such cannot be verified.

If, from the photon's perspective, there is zero distance between its origin and destination, maybe in some sense, rather than there being an actual photon crossing a distance, it is rather a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other. One loses an energy level and the other gains one, maybe like a billiard ball transferring its energy to another ball. How it is determined which electron will interact with which other one halfway "across" the universe though is beyond me! It makes me wonder if we really understand what is going on with space and time at all. The model of a photon as a thing that passes through space works as a model, but maybe thinking about it like that gives the wrong intuition about what is actually happening.

Interesting also that photons are massless, no?

This is just fun speculation and I am probably confused with my inadequate physics education!

I don't pretend to really understand it, but if I am not misinformed, as jgill pointed out, from the standpoint of the ship, as you approach the speed of light, the distance traversed approaches zero and the time to cross it also approaches zero. It takes a million years for light to cross a gap of a million light years only for an observer stationary with respect to it. For the photon, no distance and no time. — petrichor

I'm not a physicist, and it has been 40 years since I took a course discussing special relativity and QM, so take this with a grain of salt...

The above sounds right. I'll point out some things to consider about the following:

If, from the photon's perspective, there is zero distance between its origin and destination, maybe in some sense, rather than there being an actual photon crossing a distance, it is rather a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other. One loses an energy level and the other gains one, maybe like a billiard ball transferring its energy to another ball. How it is determined which electron will interact with which other one halfway "across" the universe though is beyond me! It makes me wonder if we really understand what is going on with space and time at all. The model of a photon as a thing that passes through space works as a model, but maybe thinking about it like that gives the wrong intuition about what is actually happening. — petrichor

One problem I see with such a view is that photons do seem to travel through the intervening space between the initial and terminal electron. If that was not the case, I don't know how gravitational lensing could be explained.

Closer to home we can consider shadows. From our frame of reference it takes eight minutes for light
to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Yet our shadows on the ground move 'instantaneously' when we move. If it was "a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other, how would the electron on the Sun know which electron on the Earth to interact with, such that shadows appear as they do when we are walking along?

Time dilation aboard the ship. Lorentz factor. From the standpoint of Earth, yes. Hopeless. From the speeding ship perspective the clock ticks slower. — jgill

Your still wrong!
It still takes the same amount of time for you to travel 1,000,000 light years while traveling at the speed of light that it does for the light to do so.
That is the definition of light year, how far light travel in one year.

how would the electron on the Sun know which electron on the Earth to interact with, such that shadows appear as they do when we are walking along? — wonderer1

They would not know.
Photons travel the whole distance between point A and point B. This can easily be proven just by intercepting them at any point between A and B, Point C. Then try to intercept them at the same time in a different place along the same line, point D. There is nothing to intercept at the point furthermost from the source because it was already blocked.

Your still wrong! — Sir2u

$\Delta \tau =\Delta T\sqrt{1-\frac{{{v}^{2}}}{{{c}^{2}}}}$

On the right the time that passes on Earth (delta T), and on the left the time that passes onboard the ship (delta tau) moving at near light speed.

It llooks like specificity about reference frames is not clear in someone's mind.

That is the definition of light year, how far light travel in one year. — Sir2u

Because of length contraction the faster you go the shorter the distance between two points. So something that is 1 light year away to us is less than 1 light year away to an object moving at near the speed of light.

See here: https://www.emc2-explained.info/Dilation-Calc/

In the second set of boxes set the % of c to 99.9 and the distance to 100 light years. It shows that from the perspective of the ship the distance is 4.471 light years and will take 4.475 years to reach.

Because of length contraction the faster you go the shorter the distance between two points. So something that is 1 light year away to us is less than 1 light year away to an object moving at near the speed of light. — Michael

Ok, so a rock traveling at the speed of light comes from a star a million light years away to here. At the same time that it leaves, there is a super massive solar flare in the star. The rock arrives here a few years later but we will not see the flare for a million years.

Logically, if that is true then the object must have moved above the speed of light to be able to reach here before the actual light from the star's flare when it left did.

Does light, traveling at the speed of light not get affected by time dilation?

And I do understand the formula that is used, but how can you explain the illogicality of it?

Ok, so a rock traveling at the speed of light comes from a star a million light years away to here. At the same time that it leaves, there is a super massive solar flare in the star. The rock arrives here a few years later but we will not see the flare for a million years. — Sir2u

The rock and the flare arrive at the same time. From our perspective they took 1,000,000 years.

A ship followed them at 99% the speed of light. From our perspective it took 1,010,101 years to arrive because the distance is 1,000,000 light years. From the ship's perspective it took 142,492 years because the distance is 141,067 light years.

From our perspective the ship arrived 10,101 years after the rock and flare. From the ship's perspective it arrived 1,425 years after the rock and flare.

See also:

And I do understand the formula that is used, but how can you explain the illogicality of it? — Sir2u

Not sure you can. If you understood the nature of light in that no matter what reference frame it moves at light speed, c. Didn't Einstein come upon this while riding his bike?

How to explain that the sunlight hits you at a speed of c whether you travel towards or away from the Sun (or sit still)? Instead, the frequency/wavelength changes, like blue- and red-shift. This stuff has been verified and not falsified experimentally a few times over, and has various implications (also checked, entanglement not excluded).

Does light, traveling at the speed of light not get affected by time dilation? — Sir2u

Good question. Would the "ultimate" dilation be "not aging"? Anyway, photons are usually said to not decay, but who knows.

The Lorentz transformation ( above) describes what the two observers agree about. They can use it to figure out what the other party sees.

If UFOs are "alien spacecraft", I suspect that they are AI-machine probes and that their parent species are either extinct or postbiological. — 180 Proof

Addendum to the post excerpted above: a SciAm opinion piece by Martin Rees & Mario Livio ...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-aliens-may-be-artificial-intelligence-not-life-as-we-know-it/?fbclid=IwAR0dyFVyIjr_xqXDklbyBdW3qzSW5WpkWV77t0s6_i-X34_aDlyIzm7qMdg#

Relevant:

Will we know alien life when we see it?
^{— Tina Hesman Saey · Science News Explores · Mar 28, 2017}
Would extraterrestrial life even be life as we know it?
^{— Richard A Lovett · Cosmos · Jun 3, 2022}
Will We Know Alien Life When We See It?
^{— Conor Feehly · Nautilus · Jan 5, 2023}

The old anthropocentrism won't do.

Say, some sort of being could have "slow" thought (and other) processes lasting millennia, and it might not really register with us. If the universe (as we think of it) was like a "living" being of sorts, then (apropos) light speed would set some limitations.

For that matter, way out in the speculative wild, we could try to envision what 4-dimensional space might entail (I'm not thinking string theories here). Analogous to us thinking of 2-dimensional space, a "UFO" could emerge as if from nowhere and apparently (but only apparently) vanish again. I guess we'd still expect a gravitational footprint and more indications, but who knows, we're out where the wild things are.

Anyway, it's open-ended territory. Anthropocentrism also tends to elevate what we know of as consciousness, though something "grander" might occur.

(end 2¢ late babbling)

One problem I see with such a view is that photons do seem to travel through the intervening space between the initial and terminal electron. If that was not the case, I don't know how gravitational lensing could be explained.

Closer to home we can consider shadows. From our frame of reference it takes eight minutes for light
to travel from the Sun to the Earth. Yet our shadows on the ground move 'instantaneously' when we move. If it was "a matter of the two electrons on either end just interacting and transferring a quantum of energy from one to the other, how would the electron on the Sun know which electron on the Earth to interact with, such that shadows appear as they do when we are walking along? — wonderer1

I see what you are saying! But spacetime, and the way things are arranged "in it", even without such distortions, always presents such issues. Why, for example, if I aim a laser pointer at my ceiling from inside the house, do the photons never make it to outer space? To be sure, spacetime, whatever it is, and how things are ordered, has something to do with determining which things interact with which other things. Gravitational lensing is a warping of that, so I would expect it to have an impact.

I don't know what it all ultimately means, but I find it incredibly fascinating that for light, there is no distance, and that combined with the fact that we can't confirm the existence of photons actually mid-flight. If, from a photons frame, there is no distance between its source and its destination, that means that these are in some sense, from some frame of reference, touching, no? So is there actually a photon at all from its own perspective? From one perspective, it looks like there is a gap. From another, it looks like there is no gap.

I'm just thinking that maybe because we flatlanders insist on modeling these things in terms of familiar objects like thrown rocks, we might fail to make the imaginative leap to some radically different way of understanding what is going on.

Photons travel the whole distance between point A and point B. This can easily be proven just by intercepting them at any point between A and B, Point C. Then try to intercept them at the same time in a different place along the same line, point D. There is nothing to intercept at the point furthermost from the source because it was already blocked. — Sir2u

But really, operationally, if you try to "intercept" a photon that was "on its way" to something else, whatever you insert in what would presumably have been its path is in fact its final destination. You can't sort of watch it along its way. If you detect a photon, your detection device is its final destination, period. Perhaps there is just a handshake between that distant electron that dropped to a lower energy level and the electron in your measuring device that jumped to a higher one, and which electron interacted with whichever other one just had something do with how things are related. Sure, you can "partially intercept" a beam of light. But such a beam is really a bunch of discrete events, each of which is a single photon. And you can't watch any single photon flying. Some photons from point A were detected at point B. Some of those from point A were detected at point C. That's all.

If you are a proper verificationist and don't want to make claims about things that cannot be operationally verified, you can't say that photons actually cross distances, that they are at some point in time definitely located between their source and destination. This is simply unverifiable and speculative and part of one particular model. The claim cannot be tested. Maybe tomorrow we'll have a different model that explains the connection between the loss of energy at one location and the gain at another using a different illustrative picture than little flying particles.

It still isn't clear what is "really" going on with quantum interactions. We have many different interpretations. Some involve strange retrocausative elements and interesting transactions across time and space. Who knows?

It's fun to think about!

Well, now there has been the Congressional hearings about the issue with David Grusch giving testimony (referring to what started his OP) alongside two Navy pilots. Interesting hearing. I have to say that it made me a lot more of an UFO/UAP tinfoil hatter than I had been earlier. I'm not so sceptical I used to be.

The hearings:



In the hearings Grusch refers many times to this interview he made:



Thinking about this conspiracy from the political dimension:

If there would be a huge secret US government reverse-engineering and recovery program on UFOs, would the government be able to keep it hidden?

No, there would be at least the occasional whistleblower and obviously many who would want the information to be public. Likely there would be a disinformation campaign and likely this would be partly successful, as the idea is so incredible. Yet new people would sporadically come up through the decades and tell about it.

Would there be reasons for keeping it secret?

Of course: fear of a huge legal scandal, an angry Congress that has been sidelined (again), an even more distrustful population and naturally people getting frightened about the fact there being aliens etc. Also the possibility for the US and defense contractors getting a technological edge from the project if the reverse engineering is successful is a primary reason to keep it a secret even if the reverse engineering part hasn't (yet) gone anywhere.

Could the lid be kept on the program for many decades?

Yes, especially if the tech isn't easy to be reverse engineered. The conspiracy can easily be a "myth" for long. Once that reverse engineering is possible, then the lure to use the tech is obvious. The fear of the tech going into the "wrong hands" is an obvious reason not to have the scientific community openly research anything about tech that is more advanced than our existing science. Those in the know would have many reasons to keep it a secret as before.

Something like, well, in reality it could be?

Anyway, a nice summer topic to follow with popcorn. :blush:

I expect a debunking by the end of the week. — Baden

I just watched the congress hearing above. Three independent witnesses all very sober and well qualified, being taken very seriously by government and opposition. I think your expectation of debunking has been debunked.

There are a few sceptical arguments raised here and elsewhere:

(I.) That 'it' would be impossible to keep secret over the long term. Well it isn't secret, it's taken to be and presented as a fantasy conspiracy theory.

(2,) That the alien pilots must be crap if they keep crashing. That would be a strong point if they did keep crashing, How many crashes have there been? Maybe only one, maybe none..

(3.) That there must have been an international conspiracy to keep the secret. Again, if there has been only one crash, there will be only one government with hard physical evidence beyond radar recordings and dismissible video, and eyewitness reports. All other governments would have nothing more to keep secret except their complete ignorance, which governments are always slow to admit.

I'm not so sceptical I used to be. — ssu

That's about where I am. still sceptical, but not totally fanatically sceptical.

Cool. I don't do YouTubes so I'll have to look that up later on wiki or something to reassess my skept levels.

The evidence seems to support that UFOs are comprised of elusive lights or dark objects in the sky that dart about but leave no physical trace that can be subjected to further review and they reveal themselves to a select few.

Isn't that the best we can say?

"Ergo there are aliens" seems quite a leap from that.

I want to believe there are aliens so Trump will never have been the most powerful person and/or alien in the universe and/or in the future will not have been being so ever.

Isn't that the best we can say? — Hanover

I think I just did the best saying.

I think I just did the best saying. — Baden

Sort of. You started out better by calling it all bullshit, but as others seemed to be offering more tempered views, you turned diplomatic and said you'd look into it, but you won't because, well, it's all bullshit.