In which case their behavior makes absolutely no sense to me, either completely hiding themselves, or full outright reveal would make sense to me, but this weird “let humans have sneak-peaks but never any actual proof” is just weird.
For whatever it’s worth: Jacques Vallée highlighted how the baffling & seemingly nonsensical nature of these encounters is one of the few constants. One I recall (off the top of my head — I was told this one, I have no idea how to offer references here) was a report of some ship landing in a farmer’s field and then perfectly normal-looking people coming out to offer the baffled farmer… pancakes. Just pancakes. Upon close inspection it became clear that they were perfectly normal pancakes with the single exception of having absolutely no salt.
There are other oddities like MLB encounters where the MLBs were driving absolutely brand-new cars from half a century prior. If these are to be taken at face-value, one has to wonder what kind of being goes through the effort of looking human and trying to blend in but constructs a car that’s several decades out of style and basically cannot be acquired that new anymore. It smacks of the way Rowling’s wizards are strangely clueless about how to pass as muggles.
Vallée’s point, though, was that these phenomena seem to adapt to what’s expected of them, but always with a twist. It’s almost as though they’re trying to keep us off-balance as to what they are, confirming our suspicions whatever they may be 90% of the way and then tossing in something bizarre that doesn’t fit the picture at all.
A number of people have noticed the strange similarity to DMT entities, and to legends of faeries.
Of course, I’m sure there’s nothing to these. Just statistical anomalies plus quirks of human cognition. That seems to clearly explain 90% of the phenomena. There’s just this little bit off to the side that we haven’t quite figured out how it fits…
Indeed, the category “UFO,” so named because it’s the bin into which we put the things we can’t identify, seems to have the common property that all the things in it are hard to identify. In fact, as we get better sensors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sensor ranges.
In fact, as we get better sensors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sensor ranges.
That’s actually just false, just FYI. By reports, fairly often they show up specifically as though they’re trying to be seen.
There’s also a whole set of incidences where UFOs showed up to fuck with nuclear machinery, demonstrating that (a) they knew exactly where the “hidden” bases were and (b) they could control the launch process better than the people at the control panels. Understandably, this isn’t something that gets advertised very much and can be explained away. It’s pretty important to make such incidences as plausibly deniable as possible given the game theory of MAD.
But in terms of “better sensors make the UFOs seem to vanish”, that’s just flat-out false. That’s not what the reports suggest basically at all.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were “real”. How could these events happen? Physical aliens would be grabby, we wouldn’t see stars next to us lacking Dyson swarms, if the aliens arrived recently you would expect to have seen their starship decelerating in a flare of gamma rays. (Assuming propulsion methods we know of, most high isp high thrust engines emit such a flare).
When I brainstormed this I thought of one kinda unsatisfying idea. In parallel universe theories, the earth may be an attractor for parallel earths, and we could be seeing bleedover from these parallel realities. Simulator glitches would also explain this. Neither is a satisfying explanation and not obviously exploitable or reproducible, this is just me trying to understand what could do this. If real, we could be seeing the ghosts of other flying machines from other timelines or corrupt memory from a simulator showing essentially the same.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were “real”. How could these events happen?
One possibility:
Suppose that our 3D-ish reality is actually a tiny part of something much, much larger.
And when I say “larger”, I don’t mean just “more dimensions” or “parallel universes”. It’s worth remembering that our impressions of space, time, object, etc. are basically bits of software interface that let us interact with… something… in ways that seem to be relevant to our survival. That doesn’t mean they represent reality as it actually is, any more than the folder icons on your computer desktop represent the state of your computer as it actually is.
If there’s something we’d interpret as entity-like when it interacts with our tiny corner of existence, but whatever that something is operates mostly in the bigger context, we’d find its behavior immensely baffling. Kind of like ants trying to make sense of an anteater, or of a storm.
Or a kid fucking with the ants out of passing curiosity.
The kinds of things we think of as resources only make sense in the context of our survival. What if “survival” as we think of it looks about as meaningful to mega-”entities” with a larger perspective as our watching a rock finish rolling downhill? Oh no, it stopped moving. The horror. And how callous of us not to care about the rock-in-motion’s possible desire to keep existing!
And I mean this much, much more vastly than with UFO-type stuff. We don’t know where the laws of physics come from for instance. We notice beautiful symmetries and fascinating correspondences between different parts. But what that shows is a kind of consistency. A river is relatively consistent too. It still makes sense to ask where the river comes from, even though you can fully explain the river’s local behavior based on the shape of the terrain and the presence of already-moving water. It’s awfully strange to pretend we know everything about the river because we can give these explanations. Those explanations miss almost everything about almost everything.
So I think there’s a lot of room for reality to be pretty immensely vast. Far more vast than even this already mind-bogglingly overwhelmingly huge physical universe.
Mostly we just talk about the tiny thing humans are used to talking about.
For whatever it’s worth: Jacques Vallée highlighted how the baffling & seemingly nonsensical nature of these encounters is one of the few constants. One I recall (off the top of my head — I was told this one, I have no idea how to offer references here) was a report of some ship landing in a farmer’s field and then perfectly normal-looking people coming out to offer the baffled farmer… pancakes. Just pancakes. Upon close inspection it became clear that they were perfectly normal pancakes with the single exception of having absolutely no salt.
There are other oddities like MLB encounters where the MLBs were driving absolutely brand-new cars from half a century prior. If these are to be taken at face-value, one has to wonder what kind of being goes through the effort of looking human and trying to blend in but constructs a car that’s several decades out of style and basically cannot be acquired that new anymore. It smacks of the way Rowling’s wizards are strangely clueless about how to pass as muggles.
Vallée’s point, though, was that these phenomena seem to adapt to what’s expected of them, but always with a twist. It’s almost as though they’re trying to keep us off-balance as to what they are, confirming our suspicions whatever they may be 90% of the way and then tossing in something bizarre that doesn’t fit the picture at all.
A number of people have noticed the strange similarity to DMT entities, and to legends of faeries.
Of course, I’m sure there’s nothing to these. Just statistical anomalies plus quirks of human cognition. That seems to clearly explain 90% of the phenomena. There’s just this little bit off to the side that we haven’t quite figured out how it fits…
Interestingly, in European folklore demonic spirits are afraid of salt.
Indeed, the category “UFO,” so named because it’s the bin into which we put the things we can’t identify, seems to have the common property that all the things in it are hard to identify. In fact, as we get better sensors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sensor ranges.
It’s as if they’re watching us. Adapting.
That’s actually just false, just FYI. By reports, fairly often they show up specifically as though they’re trying to be seen.
There’s also a whole set of incidences where UFOs showed up to fuck with nuclear machinery, demonstrating that (a) they knew exactly where the “hidden” bases were and (b) they could control the launch process better than the people at the control panels. Understandably, this isn’t something that gets advertised very much and can be explained away. It’s pretty important to make such incidences as plausibly deniable as possible given the game theory of MAD.
But in terms of “better sensors make the UFOs seem to vanish”, that’s just flat-out false. That’s not what the reports suggest basically at all.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were “real”. How could these events happen? Physical aliens would be grabby, we wouldn’t see stars next to us lacking Dyson swarms, if the aliens arrived recently you would expect to have seen their starship decelerating in a flare of gamma rays. (Assuming propulsion methods we know of, most high isp high thrust engines emit such a flare).
When I brainstormed this I thought of one kinda unsatisfying idea. In parallel universe theories, the earth may be an attractor for parallel earths, and we could be seeing bleedover from these parallel realities. Simulator glitches would also explain this. Neither is a satisfying explanation and not obviously exploitable or reproducible, this is just me trying to understand what could do this. If real, we could be seeing the ghosts of other flying machines from other timelines or corrupt memory from a simulator showing essentially the same.
(I think pReal is small, less than 5 percent)
One possibility:
Suppose that our 3D-ish reality is actually a tiny part of something much, much larger.
And when I say “larger”, I don’t mean just “more dimensions” or “parallel universes”. It’s worth remembering that our impressions of space, time, object, etc. are basically bits of software interface that let us interact with… something… in ways that seem to be relevant to our survival. That doesn’t mean they represent reality as it actually is, any more than the folder icons on your computer desktop represent the state of your computer as it actually is.
If there’s something we’d interpret as entity-like when it interacts with our tiny corner of existence, but whatever that something is operates mostly in the bigger context, we’d find its behavior immensely baffling. Kind of like ants trying to make sense of an anteater, or of a storm.
Or a kid fucking with the ants out of passing curiosity.
The kinds of things we think of as resources only make sense in the context of our survival. What if “survival” as we think of it looks about as meaningful to mega-”entities” with a larger perspective as our watching a rock finish rolling downhill? Oh no, it stopped moving. The horror. And how callous of us not to care about the rock-in-motion’s possible desire to keep existing!
And I mean this much, much more vastly than with UFO-type stuff. We don’t know where the laws of physics come from for instance. We notice beautiful symmetries and fascinating correspondences between different parts. But what that shows is a kind of consistency. A river is relatively consistent too. It still makes sense to ask where the river comes from, even though you can fully explain the river’s local behavior based on the shape of the terrain and the presence of already-moving water. It’s awfully strange to pretend we know everything about the river because we can give these explanations. Those explanations miss almost everything about almost everything.
So I think there’s a lot of room for reality to be pretty immensely vast. Far more vast than even this already mind-bogglingly overwhelmingly huge physical universe.
Mostly we just talk about the tiny thing humans are used to talking about.