I saw a UFO once, and it looked and behaved exactly like everyone says it does. Silvery oval shape, hovering and moving left/right in a straight line before accelerating at an insane rate. Moved across the sky in a quarter of a second. It was about half a nail's width at arm's length distance.
I did hear a stereotypically UFO hovering sound a few minutes later even though there was nothing anywhere around me.
Either this is psychological and people have some kind of built-in hallucination effect for this specific phenomena in the sky. Which is interesting and should be studied. Or it's the real thing. And if it's real it's not going to affect our life by any amount unless we want it to. If the aliens wanted to land and share information or anything else with us they would have done it already, and we can't force them to do any such thing so who cares.
I am also extremely skeptical of Roswell type claims of crashed craft, unless the aliens have horrible QA engineers or we get millions of visitors per century I doubt they would crash one of their flying cars on our planet.
> I am also extremely skeptical of Roswell type claims of crashed craft
Roswell's official city slogan is "We Believe" but I suspect what most Roswell residents believe is that tourist dollars are good, rather than anything about aliens. The alien myth has been a major economic boon to the city.
I think this is the number one reason for UFOs being judged as aliens or even as flying objects at all. People don't realize that that if you have no idea of the distance, size or speed, then you can't even attempt to estimate any of them and seemingly impossible things happen. Planets look like balloons, cars look like stars, etc. This seems to be the problem with those military pilot's videos and accounts.
Whenever someone says it was "as big as a ..." or "impossibly fast", they're usually interpreting what they actually saw through their faulty intuition about those things. Angular size like the OP said is a useful observation, but not actual size.
I experienced this the first time I flew on a plane. I was watching the clouds passing by just below the plane and had a feeling for our comfortable speed, then suddenly a whispy bit of cloud in the foreground shot past much faster than I thought we were travelling and gave me a little shock. I then realized the clouds I'd been watching were probably much further away than I'd imagined.
I don't think those papers mean what you think they mean. I could be wrong, I'm not perception studies expert, but the first one seems to say that binocular parallax (signals from looking with two eyes) are relatively reliable, especially in daylight conditions (the case you critique). Second two seems to talk about how high up in the sky something is as being the biggest distortion in estimating distance. Also the last one involved bizarre artificial conditions of looking through light bending prisms. Our eyes are definitely unreliable (to a certain extent), you have a blindspot in the middle of your vision in both eyes (retinal optic nerve spot) but you nearly never see it because your brain can interpolate. But I think judging something like this, in the well lit conditions described, I think you're exaggerating the difficulty. And I dislike that because it seems dishonest, and cruel to witnesses. It's a form of gaslighting. You have people (Navy pilots, civilians) coming forward and seeing things, and then everyone else wants to say, "Are you sure you saw that?" I get it, because you didn't see it, so it's natural to doubt. But you will walk across the street today, and reach down and pick up a coin, and I'll stop you and say, are you sure those cars are that far away, are you sure you see the coin. Don't cross the street, don't touch that coin. Maybe it's a hallucination. Maybe it's a bomb. Maybe it's a snake. Of course I wouldn't do that. That would be crazy. People casting doubt should doubt their own doubt too. It shouldn't be natural to doubt when so many people say the same thing.
It was behind some trees about 30-40 meters away, I ran across the street to get a better view(it was suspicious after all) and didn't notice much parallax shift, but I doubt I would have seen much against a blue sky. Obviously if you don't have a good view of a random object like that it's extremely hard to judge distance. It might as well have been a point object that's almost impossible to judge anything other than color/shape/movement. The movement is what made me realize it's a UFO, if it disappeared or kept moving at a reasonable rate I wouldn't have though twice about it since it's probably some white/silver balloon being blown in the wind or something.
Even if it was close by, you don't jump from almost stationary to the other side of the sky from your perspective at a reasonable speed.
Speaking of seeing UFOs, my best experience with unidentified objects was October 16th last year in Florida / Poinciana on what was moonless night around 5am morning. I believe this is Starlink satellite. Any other ideas?
The second one is an out of focus blob and the first is a nondescript dot. It'd probably be more interesting to hear what it was doing. Satellites go fairly fast across the sky but they go in straight lines at a constant speed, and they don't stop, reverse or turn.
You see that "fuzzy ring surrounding a darker area" look? That is what a point light source looks like when it isn't in focus. In that case, zooming it is just going to give you a bigger blur.
That's so cool. The few minutes later is weird. Maybe it was something invisible nearby, or maybe the sound traveled to you, but a few minutes 180s*330m/s would be around 59Km away. If it was that far in the atmosphere it would have been huge, and maybe not even made a sound because the air would have been pretty thin that far away.
I hear that the crashes were shoot-downs or Trojan horse style gifts designed to lure us into co-operation with ETs who sly gave us tech far too advanced for us to figure out, then promised to slowly teach us how some of it works in exchange for whatever cooperation. There's lots of narrative and can be argued both ways, but without people seeing some hard data they believe, probably we'll have zero consensus.
Maybe its their kids having fun, 'borrowing' the little 'shuttle car' of their parents, while on a field trip with the 'big camper' to study the strange creatures.
I did hear a stereotypically UFO hovering sound a few minutes later even though there was nothing anywhere around me.
Either this is psychological and people have some kind of built-in hallucination effect for this specific phenomena in the sky. Which is interesting and should be studied. Or it's the real thing. And if it's real it's not going to affect our life by any amount unless we want it to. If the aliens wanted to land and share information or anything else with us they would have done it already, and we can't force them to do any such thing so who cares.
I am also extremely skeptical of Roswell type claims of crashed craft, unless the aliens have horrible QA engineers or we get millions of visitors per century I doubt they would crash one of their flying cars on our planet.