Why isn't there more discussion about the UFOs reported by navy pilots?
I normally never take reports of ufos seriously, but major news outlets are reporting on videos taken by Navy pilots and the news anchors seem to take it as a joke. Even if these ufos are just high tech government drones or weather balloons, you'd think people would at least be curious in finding out what these things are.
Around the office normally I hear chatter about the news and current events, but nothing about these ufos. Nobody brings them up. On discussion forums, talk about the ufos seems really sparse as well. Even subreddits dedicated to ufos seem to not care very much about these videos being on the mainstream news. Now with legitimate proof that there is something strange in the air, why does nobody seem to care?
What are the leading explanations to what these things are? One explanation I've heard for at least one of the videos is that it's a stationary weather balloon that only appears to be moving due to the camera on the plane moving. I can accept this explanation for that video, but what about the other videos? And what about the navy pilot testimonies? Is this all just a publicity stunt for History Channel's new show?
Personally, I thought that at least the New York Times article seemed very publicity-stunt-like, almost like a sponsored article. The weird mention of the show in the middle of the article felt very strange and out-of-character for the NYT:
Overall, there also just still isn't any truly definitive evidence, and there are perfectly reasonable explanations for the strange videos. I thought this was a great comment about it on HN:
It occurred to me that this could be some kind of PR move by the history channel but I didn't think CNN and New York Times would stoop low enough to have sponsored content. But it seems like every mainstream news article does mention the history channel show. Now that you point it out it seems obvious that it's all sponsored content. I knew the big outlets misreported stuff and would report on fabricated stories without checking sources, but this feels like a new low.
Also thank you for that HN comment/explanation, that seems the most likely now. If history channel went low enough to pay mainstream news outlets to promote their videos, there is little doubt in my mind they paid these pilots to make up events as well.
What is there to discuss? As per this article:
There's nothing interesting in the idea that pilots are seeing strange objects in the sky when they're probably just military drones or spy planes. The most interesting explanation I can think of is that China or Russia has developed some spy technology that the US doesn't know about - and that's not the sort of thing that is going to start office gossip.
I honestly think it is interesting if they're seeing advanced military drones with the capabilities that they're talking about. We won't ever get to see how they work, but the more academic types could at least analyze the videos and speculate.
After reading Deimos's comment though, I think this is just sponsored content in the main stream media, which is horrifying.
Howdy pardner.
So I tend to get most of my news, for better or worse, from reddit – and I've recently decided to go on a reddit hiatus. Can you link me to anything particular regarding this story? It sounds interesting!
This been posted a couple of times here on Tildes:
Frustrated pilots got Navy to stop dismissing UFO sightings
‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects
probably because UFO =/= anything interesting per se. a lot of UFOs are, most likely, as cliche as it sounds, weird military shit that isn't known to the public or misidentification of mundane things. anything more than that is extraordinary, and would require extraordinary evidence that simply isn't likely to exist, much less be conclusive.
There seems to have been some Conspiracy Theory Inflation going on post-9/11, where aliens used to be a pretty big deal, but lost ground to government cover-ups that seemed more plausible, and Flat Earth which is more for the "trust no one but me" crowd. You also can't prove that it's not a secret government vessel by the nature of secrets and governments and vessels, and if you could somehow could prove its from space, the average person's life doesn't change the next day compared to the fallout of an uncovered political conspiracy.