You must be talking about blimps, Right?
Do you have images of hot air ballons or blimps looking like the UFO in the pictures?

Though for all hot air balloons enthousiasts.
Do you think that is a good idea to fly a hot air balloon so close of the trees?
:-k

http://www.ufoevidence.org/Photographs/Photo328.htm
http://www.ufoevidence.org/Photographs/Photo327.htm
http://www.ufoevidence.org/Photographs/Photo326.htm

Of course not. Just that I will not be badgered (or "wolverined") into making a concession I do not agree with.

:-s

I never questioned/doubted your intelligence, nor did I attack you. Rather, I pointed out the flaws in your presentation and attempted to offer food for thought. This doesn't mean I'm not interested in what you have to offer. It's an interesting discussion, and as you previously noted:

Hot-air ballons can be just about any shape.

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But all of them have a basket under the balloon where the pilot stands.
Whatever the shapes.
http://www.aerostar.com/images/Bruit.jpg

Rioux, do you think that it is possible to make crop circles from a hot air balloon?

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No. Not all hot-air ballons have a gondola for a pilot.

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Uhh, no.

Close. It's much bigger than that! Try 4". :P


Rioux you keep posting the same pictures. We've seen them. Reply to the questions/comments instead. How can you, from the pictures you keep posting, figure out what size the object it? There is nothing behind it, so it could be miles away and be miles in diameter.

So, I ask again. How big is it and how can you tell? What altitude is it flying at and how can you tell? Hey, why not add, how close to the trees is it and how can you tell?

Well?

The object is close to the trees because it share the same dark aera than the trees themselve probably caused by the angle with the sun and the camera.
http://www.leftmedia.org/UFO/UFOPhot...zeTypeAalt.jpg

When the object move farther away than the trees in a clear aera we see its silver metallic surface.
http://www.leftmedia.org/UFO/UFOPhot...zeTypeCalt.jpg

So the object cannot be miles away and be miles in diameter.

Sorry for the epistle everyone, I've clearly been thinking about this issue far too much lately...

I greatly appreciate your thoughtful response Wolverine, and your facility with proper skeptical methodology is inspiring.

Gzhpcu, I understand how the application of skeptical methodolgy can feel like a personal affront, and in some cases it is used that way, unfortunately--but I think some of the guys here are just trying express the rigorously objective kind of scrutiny that the skeptical method calls for--and it's these very principles that will, someday soon I hope, more clearly resolve the issues we're discussing here. In debates like this, I'm trying to learn how to better get in touch with my inner Spock, and I think it helps :-k

I’ve been thinking about the nature of skepticism a lot lately, and it seems clear that many people mistake this for ‘disbelief.’ The distinction is, in my mind anyway, the essential issue to this discussion (and much much more, of course). Disbelief is really no different than belief: neither is scientific. We often hear scoffing remarks about the ‘believers’ of ET visitations, but the ‘disbelievers’ are no better. Both make the mistake of taking the existing evidence or lack thereof, as ‘proof.’ But that’s unwarranted—we don’t know, we can’t be certain, one way or the other. Until we have a body of convincing evidence in either regard, the only sensible, skeptical position, is to be vigilant and discerning of the evidential aspects of the situation. So, while the burden of presently convincing evidence remains on advocates of the ETH, that’s a far cry from claiming that we already –know- they’re wrong, because we don’t—we just don’t have convincing data.

Understanding that, some people resort to the ‘logical fallacy’ arguments we’ve heard—viz, that ET’s couldn’t get here with any practicality because of the enormous distances involved, and ‘the laws of Relativity.’ Regarding practicality, that’s clearly a technical issue that we can’t establish as fact, because we cant assume that other forms of intelligent life would not have superior propulsion technology to us Earthlings. And the argument that Relativity bars such travel only demonstrates a lack of understanding of the physics involved. And this is especially dirty pool, because most people don’t understand Relativity well enough to argue the point.

So I’ve been checking up on Special Relativity to see if I was right in a previous post when I mentioned that to a traveler moving at relativistic speeds, it’s possible to traverse huge distances in brief subjective time. Spending an appreciable time at velocities at a significant fraction of C, a being visiting the Earth could get here in very quickly, as he/she/it measures time. In other words, it doesn’t take a minimum of 4 years for a traveler to get to Earth from the Centauri binary star system if relativistic speeds are experienced along the way. In fact, if the pilot could survive the acceleration forces (or if the propulsion system accelerated all matter of the ship and pilot uniformly), it’s feasible to travel here from there in, say, an hour. This is the correct understanding of present Relativity theory—not that it takes four+ years subjective time to travel four LY’s.

Interestingly, if your craft can generate a constant acceleration, distance takes on new meaning to a traveler—greater and greater distances become less and less significant. For example, from http://astsun.astro.virginia.edu/~jh...s/quest7.html:
That leaves us with a perfectly open question. As the Drake Equation thread demonstrates, most of us arrive at the possibility that at least one (or perhaps many more) form of intelligent life exists in our galaxy right now. And they could have technology capable of Relativistic velocities. Therefore, they may at some point visit the Earth. So, logic doesn’t exclude the possibility, and a negative can’t be proven evidentially, so there’s no scientific basis to reject the possibility of alien visitations. To do so is to expose nothing more substantial than an unconsidered ‘belief’ as equally baseless as the position of the ‘ufo believers.’ ‘They are here’ and ‘no they’re not’ are equally unscientific positions to take.

Certainly, I agree that the current fringe-enthusiast policy of ‘looking for flying saucers’ is a far cry from the more reasonable ‘investigating the atmosphere for unusual phenomena,’ and despite my somewhat galvanized interest on the topic, it is indeed the latter that I’m suggesting. I don’t rule out the ETH for the reasons we just covered, but I also don’t rule out several other more prosaic explanations because the situation can be interpreted equally convincingly for many of them until we have more data, which I think we should try to acquire with scientific methods. Let’s not let the intellectually repugnant positions of the UFOists bar us from looking carefully and objectively at the issue of rare and possibly exotic aerial phenomena.

I accept that I do not have a clear sense of how much observational power we currently exercise viewing the sky, from below and from above. Perhaps you or someone here could help the laymen like myself understand the likelihood of these observational mechanisms detecting an interesting phenomenon in the sky. I’d like to have a reasonable idea of how much we can see between these different resources, and what the chances are that such information would be given consideration by trained eyes.

Since I’m not sure how else to better do this, I can only suggest that, as a benchmark of sorts, we were to take a typical aerial sighting of an unidentified object (presumably) and try to gauge what might be detected if such a scenario were to occur as reported, given the tools at hand. To establish one possible variety of case, let’s look at a typical ‘sighting’ report as if it’s a reasonable assessment of the event. Let’s say for argument’s sake that a 30ft object were to enter the atmosphere at some high rate of speed, say, Mach 5, then stop over an inhabited suburb in broad daylight, and hover a few stories off the ground for ten minutes, then execute a rapid series of zigzag motions as it climbed and exited the atmosphere at the original velocity…for approximately a total time near Earth of twenty to thirty minutes. If we further go on to postulate that this happens three times a year (and arbitrary number), somewhere over the surface of the Earth, is there any way we can take a reasonable guess at how likely it would be for us to spot such activity with our current sources? Of course, I don’t expect a calculation, just an impression from someone who is familiar with our current observational capabilities. Do we really have a reasonably good chance of detecting this, and would you expect us to glean any scientific evidence from such an event? Certainly our capabilities have increased dramatically over recent years, and I wonder how long it might take, given a situation as described, before we would have a likelihood of gathering some solid scientific piece of data to evaluate.

I’ve always assumed that such an event would be well beyond our means to detect and substantiate, if such a thing were to happen once or twice. And further, if we managed to detect and establish this event in some credible way, who would have the data and what would happen to it? I suppose that my suggestion for an equipped and qualified team of highly responsive, professional scientific investigators, was born from a concern that we’d very likely never see, or perhaps learn of, such an event if it were to occur, unless we prepared a proper context to record such an event—an open, publicly available research database of detected aerial phenomena. But maybe that’s no longer true, given current surveillance technology and infrastructure.

And if you’ll indulge me on a kind of thought experiment, I’d like to consider the idea of ‘false memories’ for a moment--maybe you can explain where my reasoning goes awry. If an abundance of these apparent sightings cases are attributable to erroneous recollection, then why are so many of these reported accounts so similar in nature—that is, focused on aerial phenomena exhibiting specific, unusual movements? Why do we not hear a similar number of accounts of something else that’s alarming and memorable…gremlins, for example? Seriously. We’ve all heard about gremlins, from folklore to Hollywood films, so, by the ‘false memory’ model, shouldn’t people be occasionally taking blurry photos of their neighbor’s cat, thinking they saw a gremlin? The land should be rife with rumors of these fanciful little demons appearing and disappearing, reeking havok across the countryside. So, where are they?

I should also clarify about the naïve notion of placing an option on tax forms to give a buck to aerial phenomena research—I didn’t intend to suggest that this entailed a vote in favor of the argument, but rather only a possible means to see that real research into unusual atmospheric phenomena could be funded without drawing on money from other programs. Sure, half the people in our country believe that ET’s are visiting our world…but I suspect about half also believe in angels and devils too :roll: I’m just being practical—if the people want work done to investigate, then give them the option to fund a genuine scientific study, one perhaps organized by the government or academic scientists.

I don’t think there’s any good argument against a vigorous research program focused on unusual events in our atmosphere. We explore the bottom of the sea in search of new species, conditions, and phenomena…and I think that a skyward search has only become taboo in scientific circles because of a small, vocal, and occasionally belligerent number of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ who relentlessly push their own personal beliefs and agendas in the public eye. Let’s not let that blind us to the possibility that we may have much more to learn about some aspects of our sky.

This is true, but only from the viewpoint of the traveller in the spacecraft. It would still take nine years or more for a round trip from the point of view of someone on Earth. Incidentally the amount of energy required to travel that fast would be phenomenal; on the order of a supernova (although perhaps a little less than a blazar). Worse would be the friction with the interstellar medium: each dust grain which hit your shield would explode with the force of an Hiroshima bomb.
So interstellar travel would never be trivial; the impression I get is that if the ET hypothesis is correct, the aliens achieve all this technical wizardry in travelling from star to star then fly around with their lights on impersonating hot air balloons and oil platform flares.

My own estimate of the Drake equation figures gives around 400 civilisations in our galaxy alone; but that is because I am optimistic about the length of time advanced civilisations persist (once they reach a certain level of sophistication, a very long time indeed, in my opinion).
But this estimate is not confirmed by the Fermi paradox; if there were 400 advanced civilisations with an average age of several million years in our galaxy, then they would already be here; they would not just be arriving from Proxima (there is nothing much there anyway) but they will have been here for millions of years.
All the indications are that Earth-type planets are rare; and an advanced civilisation would have mapped all such planets millions of years ago, and put an outpost or a whole civilisation here. No such outpost or civilisation is evident- so my estimate based on the Drake equation appears to be wrong.


You see, that would be such incredibly irrational behaviour that I despair of ever understanding an extraterrestrial species that did such things. And with all their lights on too.


Some of the modern defence radar is very good, I live nead a phased array station at Fylingdales which could probably pick up such a so-called 'fastwalker'; yet many unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are not detected on radar at all, and this radar invisibility seems to be switched on and off at random- are they simply being mischievous?


I do have a theory about the erratic movements of many UAP;
-ahem-
once someone sees an unidentified phenomenon in the sky, his/her body and mind goes into a high-adrenaline mode; many people report being 'spooked' or that their sense of time changes. This causes that observer to focus upon the object and it becomes subjectively magnified in their mind- perhaps similar to the well known 'Moon at the horizon; illusion, or perhaps more like the relationship between the hunter and the prey. In short, a kind of tunnel vision develops, and the object becomes magnified.
Now the second physiological effect comes into play; in order to see objects clearly, our eyes constantly make small involuntary movements, which shift the image of the object from one location on the retina to another; this tiny shift also appears to help with edge perception and prevents the receptors in the retina becoming accustomed to the visual input (and therefore ignoring it). These involuntary movements are called Autokinesis.
I believe that in a situation where someone observes an UAP the two involuntary, unconscious effects of adrenaline rush and autokinesis cause the object to apparently dart all over the sky.
This is a flight or fight response; but as humans evolved to fear predators and hunt prey on the ground, where visual cues would eliminate the effects of autokinesis, then the 'wobbly eye syndrome' was never removed by evolution. In general tiny objects in the sky posed little threat to our hominid ancestors, so we are quite simply not evolved to observe them accurately.

Add this mechanism to the unreliability of memory and many similar seeming phenomena are perhaps not so puzzling after all.

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Johnno, nice quick try, already better than many "real" UFO photos .
Make sure to have the shadows cast in exactly the same direction as the photo, it will "absorb" the model even more in the pic. Even though the cutting and pasting is done very well, it still looks a bit like a separate object. I don't know what would improve that, some trial and error I guess? Maybe it is that I'd expect the object to look a bit more faint and hazy, that far away in the sky. And I had some problems in finding the light source location in the basis picture too, I mislooked at the mountains at first. Maybe another ground picture would give better results? (though I love the rocket launch combination ) But I'm sure with some trials you'll get really nice results, and it looks like a lot of fun to do it!! If only I had time and a camera, we culd do a little contest .

And remember, 13° (although I would make your Star Wars object float flat like in your pic, that looks better in that case)

I noticed that I made my "old" one not grainy enough, too clear and with too much of the image space dedicated to the UFO to compare with the "real" old UFO pics. Instead, I should just have added 3 black pixels in the sky :roll: .

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Scourge,
I have no problem with the application of skeptical methodology. What I do not like, is being told "to have the courtesy to answer the question", when I am doing what I consider my best to answer the question, and am being told that I am discourteous.

Thanks, after all it was just quick and dirty. Didn't use the same palette, just copied and pasted, so you can probably spot the difference if you play around with any graphics program for a bit and check out the colours pixel for pixel. But I intend to do better later on.


Yeah, this was just a old pic I had of the model after I built it, taken with a flash against a cardboard background. I'm sure it'll turn out much better when I take the model(s) outside, put up a tripod, take a pic of the sky, then set up the model(s) straight away and take another pic against the same patch of sky, with the model(s) up in front of it. Then copy paste. Should turn out much better than taking some old pic from a indoor enviroment and try to make it look like it's outside.

But as I said earlier, won't get a chance til saturday or sunday.

Johnno:

Sorry, I've done some editing of my last post while you were answering. It is changed a bit from the original message (I noticed I mislooked on the mountains). I'll watch my edits more closely in the future. Your answers still apply though.

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Replying to the updated stuff I didn't cover in my previous reply.

Hehe, I posted at 2:37am my time, after working on it for like half an hour. The problem is that the model is quite small to begin with, not a lot of detail, so no matter how small you make it it'll still be pretty much the same colour because there aren't small shadows that break up the colours. So it'll still look kinda artificial, after all, it's just a model. But yeah faint and hazy would do. I'll give it a go when I do the next picture.

The reason I chose that picture was because of the rocket launch, nothing else. Just trying out the different techniques and functions.

Trust me, it'll be better when I go out with the models and put em up against the sky <