What's the most likely explanation for UFO sightings?

[Dr. MB]

When people think UFOs they think aliens. But nothing about UFOs inherently suggest that they're alien spacecraft - that's the whole point of the "unidentified" part. I've heard a number of different theories and some are even more unsettling than the concept of alien species traveling to Earth.

Obviously skeptics discount all UFO sightings as hoaxes, misidentification, hallucination, or some combination of the three. And I tend to agree, actually - most of the time. UFO researchers have documented a conventional explanation for the majority of reported sightings. The night sky is a dark place with a lot of different light sources.

But then there are the sightings you can't really explain. Crafts behaving in strange patterns, zooming around the sky at inhuman speeds, moving in patterns that no known object could move at. Close-up encounters with these craft, fireballs in the sky, glowing orbs. What the hell is going on here?

And for the skeptics - even if you don't believe there's anything that we don't know of in the sky, assume that witnesses are telling the truth. Then what's the most likely explanation for what they're seeing? If there were strange objects in the sky, what would they be?

Personally, I really don't know. I said earlier that the majority of sightings are misidentified known flying objects, but obviously far from all. I'd think it's a combination of either #4 or #5 with #6. I'm almost positive the US military has worked on some ultra-powerful devices that evade detection. Where they came up with the idea? Probably not on their own.

[darklordoftech]

Simple misindentification and classified military airplanes.

[T'Chenka]

The majority are fake... liars, delusional, halluinating, mentally ill, all of these things. Some are real spacecrafts or at least aircraft IMO. Humans or others piloting, I do not know.

I have always been interested in - but do not necessarily subscribe to - the theory that advanced otherworldly beings have assisted and/or sped up our physical and cultural evolution at certain times in human history. The earliest Egyptian pharoahs were described as superior beings / gods and there is ancient Egyptian artwork depicting UFOs. Food for thought!

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Well, UFOs are unidentified. The Northern Sentinelese shoot arrows at UFOs that happen to be helicopters.

[Sestak]

In order of likelihood; 1, 3, 2, gap, 6, massive gap, 4, ridiculous gap, 5.

The military thing is at least plausible. But ultimately, pretty much everything leans drastically towards the first three simply by the fact that most UFO evidence is captured through instruments known to be imperfect (even, on the imperfect end of instruments that we have developed) or has at least been documented in an imprecise or imperfect manner.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Planes, Helicopters are misinterpreted for UFO and Rockets most of them are out here in the Western part of the country.

We get alot of rocket sightings in desert

There maybe Aliens but Rickets are the best explanation for UFO sightings

God maybe an Alien out there and maybe reincarnation,

[West_Midlander]

Any of the above.

[Sirius_]

I don't doubt that aliens exist, but I'd be willing to bet that a huge chunk of "ufo sightings" are just people who didn't know that you can see satellites.

[S019]

A mix of 1 and 6, 4 and 5 are completely absurd.

[vitoNova]

People smoking excessive amounts of crack rocks is the only logical explanation.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Rockets are UFOs aren't they, Planes, Rockets and Helicopters are mistaken as UFOs

The question is, is God extraterrestrial life that has not pushed the Rapture, but reincarnation, until a time of his chosing

[Boobs]

Rockets are UFOs aren't they, Planes, Rockets and Helicopters are mistaken as UFOs

The question is, is God extraterrestrial life that has not pushed the Rapture, but reincarnation, until a time of his chosing

Congratulations on 50,000 utterly perfect, amazing, groundbreaking posts.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Rockets are UFOs aren't they, Planes, Rockets and Helicopters are mistaken as UFOs

The question is, is God extraterrestrial life that has not pushed the Rapture, but reincarnation, until a time of his chosing

Congratulations on 50,000 utterly perfect, amazing, groundbreaking posts.

[Canis]

My Grandfather worked at Area 51 in the 80s and was a classified aircraft test pilot and engineer when I last visited him in 2019 around when the Area 51 raid memes were going around I asked him about the ufo and alien rumors. He told me about how one day he tested this aircraft that was meant to disable enemy radar (the aircraft we would use in desert storm to take out the Iraqi radar btw) and then the next day he went to a liquor store in the military base and he saw a magazine were on the cover of it was a picture of the jet he tested the day before with a caption saying "UFO Sighting" and an article about people seeing unidentified aircraft and being scared they were aliens. My grandpa bought the magazine and showed his CO and his CO took the magazine from him and called the publisher and told them to stop printing that article and to ask for permission when sharing pictures of UFOs as they were leaking classified aircraft. With most UFO sightings they just seem to be misidentification of Military aircraft or weapons. My grandpa ended the story laughing about how he still wants the magazine back because he didn't get to finish reading all the articles lol. There are some sightings like the tic tac ufos that the military can't even identify that I have no clue what they are but id says 90-95% of UFO sightings are misidentified military craft or weapons.

[RINO Tom]

Government-sanctioned experiments are an incredibly likely answer.  I mean, you would obviously want that kept top secret if you're the military...?

I will say, however, that I find the dichotomy between a lot of people believing that there IS life somewhere in the Universe besides Earth and shooting down anyone who claims to have seen a possible UFO of extraterrestrial origin as immediately crazy or lying is kind of strange and speaks to tribalism.

[Alben Barkley]

Simple misidentification, but sometimes that may be of secret military projects. Especially near air force bases.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

1, 2 and 6. Mostly 1 though.

It usually get misidentified for:
stars
satellites
aircraft
visual/optical illussions
birds
and stuff like that

Aliens are not interested in visiting Earth, and if they to, their technology is likely going to be much better than a simple typical UFO (that would also be detected through other means). It's not because sci-fi movies make UFO's appear in the same shape, alien ships also will have that shape.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

I will say, however, that I find the dichotomy between a lot of people believing that there IS life somewhere in the Universe besides Earth and shooting down anyone who claims to have seen a possible UFO of extraterrestrial origin as immediately crazy or lying is kind of strange and speaks to tribalism.

It's incredibly anthropocentric to believe aliens have an interest in visiting Earth, and if they do... it's likely with hostile intentions.

Life in the universe is going to be incredibly common yes, even if we're the only advanced species one in our galaxy. But you should mention the difference between "life" and "intelligent life".

I recommend a book:

[LM Brazilian Citizen]

Although I put it as simple misidentification, many of the cases are either hallucinations or hoaxes or secret military projects, there're hundreds of sightings that occur near or inside  military bases, the Roswell case in 1947 involved a weather balloon from a military project, which at the time was top secret, Project Mogul, as well as other sightings at the time in the USA, that involved another weather balloon project, Project Skyhook, used to measure radiation in the atmosphere that could come from the Soviet Union, with the beginning of the Atomic Age and the Cold War.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

Government-sanctioned experiments are an incredibly likely answer.  I mean, you would obviously want that kept top secret if you're the military...?

I will say, however, that I find the dichotomy between a lot of people believing that there IS life somewhere in the Universe besides Earth and shooting down anyone who claims to have seen a possible UFO of extraterrestrial origin as immediately crazy or lying is kind of strange and speaks to tribalism.

Like...

It's important to look more into alien sociology, which is hard to do, and based on human sociology, astrobiology and very hypothetical assumptions, yes.

If you know how much energy it requires and how much effort it takes to travel far in the interstellar galaxy, you know it's very unlikely aliens will just visit us to say: "hi". More likely, is that they have superb telescopes that are able to observe very far away and quite in detail (better than our current generation of telescopes). They'll most likely observe. Perhaps they're not interested in all. Or perhaps they are interested in making diplomacy efforts when the time is ready or when we will receive a radio signal. The problem such a radio signal might easily not get detected or get lost in the massive amounts of data, or not being recognized as a signal (although an alien attempt to make contacts will likely know how to "establish communication from a distance" best, so it's probably going to be kinda obvious or something universal (which is maths and physics). Arrival is a movie that goes into detail about communication problems with aliens, but we sent this into space with one of the Voyager spacecrafts. The likelihood of it ever getting caught by aliens is incredibly slim, but it shows more into detail in how we try to communicate with aliens, and how they're likely to communicate with us.



But it absolutely makes no sense for aliens to visit us, and if they do, it's likely with hostile intentions, because they're not going to enter earth, fly in UFO crafts just for the lolz. That would be dumb and incredibly wasteful of them. And I believe humans are already very wasteful with resources, in the sense that it might actually kill us before we start to be meaningful with regards to size of the galaxy and universe, because this is not the way to preserve life.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

The problem with aliens, there are likely going to be so much more differences. Alien life is likely to be primitive and abundant. Multicellular life, i'm kinda unsure about because there are numerous pros and cons of why it should be common and why it should not, but we should also question whether multicellular life is the only route life can take in order to be advanced, perhaps there are other ways of becoming sentient, and we might not understand the concept of "life" enough to make a judgment about it, perhaps because our definition of life might be misjudged and not accurate at all, and secondly it's hard to determine whether life is sentient or not, and to what degree. We even can't look inside the minds of our own friends, neighbors and other people. It's always some kind of guess of how they think, and whether how they think is the same as I think. To say in short: we don't know enough in that regard.

We don't have a definition of what is supposed to be intellectual life, and if we are considered intelligent life in the minds/eyes of whatever kind of thing other aliens use if they discover us, partially because our definition of life might be flawed, since it might not be a universal thing, and what is life and what is not life might not be accepted universal. Similar to how we will have a hard time agreeing whether advanced AI is alive or not.

If life follows a similar evolution on other planets, and with the time issue incalculated, considering we evolved very rapidly in a short time on a geological scale, while the universe is much older than our age as a species, and considering the life of a animal species is not that long (on average human species existed 1 to 7 million years, before it is accepted to be a different species, and so is the same case for most mammals), life is most likely transformative or perhaps more accurate entirely artificial instead of organic. If we make contact with such a civilization, while we "enslave" our own advanced AI species, that might be seen as a violation or not polite as all. We are an organic species driven mostly by survival and our instincts. That might not be the case anywhere else (it might, but it's not a given). I think if we ever will have robots, it will be important to focus on AI rights too, and not work on an enslaved robotic population, and we will have ethical questions regarding AI life (regardless of whether it is possible or not).

Alien life might look very alien literally actually. I don't rule it out that some concepts of life might look so alien to us that we are staring at it, not realizing it is alive. If we didn't have science, would we consider a tree alive? Our definition of sentience might be very flawed, and our brains are very primitive, focused on survival mostly, but not focused on what we will need it for in the future perhaps. Like for example, it's a possibility the universe itself or the concept of a universe is sentient, and therefore alive, similar to how bacteria are alive inside a human body. We don't see bacteria as sentient, perhaps the universe don't see us as sentient too, but it might look everything inside of it as alive. We have no idea of what is happening outside the universum, and what there is there, and perhaps we will never know. Our brain is trained to look at things from a human perspective, but we don't have a universal perspective on things and we certainly know that above all we don't know much.

Returning to multicellular life, i saw it has been proposed that it's recurrence or origin is quite common, and that single cellular life has evolved a couple of times throughout history in multicellular life. Perhaps the circumstances of the evolution itself are unique to earth, limiting it to this place, but since it looks like Earth-like planets are common over the galaxy, it seems like multicellular life might be surprisingly be common, but that doesn't mean intelligent life (like us) might be not a fluke, since that itself doesn't seem to be a common evolution, again considering that our definition might be flawed of it, but in regards to civilization-building species, we're certainly the first on planet Earth.

Multicellular life seems to have evolved around 2 million years, with complex live arising in the Ediacarium before the Cambrium, but the Cambrian explosion is noted for sudden evolution of harder shells, life that is able to protect itself probably as a counterevolution to the evolution of the eye which centers around than too (and also a more complex brain seems to have evolved around that time), which means the first real apex predators probably originate from the early Cambrium, while the hard shell and vertebrades (the chordata class) originate from than too. Trilobites (one of the first arthropodes / insects) also originate from that day, and what is striking about them is their defence / protection. They got extinct when that protection got dated, and they needed other things.

How single-cellular life evolved into multi-cellular life, might also be a question, but I have some hypotheses for it. It seems oxygen played a role into this evolution, but i'm not sure. The rise of photosynthesis seems to have caused an mass-extinction among archo-bacteria too (or emigration of their species into more extreme territories), because oxygen was toxic too them and changed the climate and ecosystems of Earth rapidly. But also cancer might have played a role in that. Cancer only is common in every multicellular species. But it seems like what made single-cellular life into multicellular life, might've been cancer itself. It's certainly a possibility. Anyway, these are mostly hypotheses, but ones that i've read over the years. It's possible that if cancer didn't exist, all life on Earth was still primitive (but there's no consensus around this).

[Conservatopia]

Even if extraterrestrial life existed it would be so far away that it wouldn't be able to visit us.  Faster than light travel just isn't possible.

Ultimately it seems all the people "abducted" are either dorks doing some crazy drugs or liars looking to make a quick buck.

Disclaimer: For religious reasons I don't believe there is any other life in the universe.  Nevertheless I have always been fascinated by UFOs and the like.

[Cassius]

Even if extraterrestrial life existed it would be so far away that it wouldn't be able to visit us.  Faster than light travel just isn't possible.

Ultimately it seems all the people "abducted" are either dorks doing some crazy drugs or liars looking to make a quick buck.

Disclaimer: For religious reasons I don't believe there is any other life in the universe.  Nevertheless I have always been fascinated by UFOs and the like.

I’ve always found it comic that people believe that if an alien civilization managed to crack faster than light travel they’d spend their time mutilating cattle, anally probing American farmers and drawing the Nazca Lin... my mistake, ‘landing strips’.

[Conservatopia]

Even if extraterrestrial life existed it would be so far away that it wouldn't be able to visit us.  Faster than light travel just isn't possible.

Ultimately it seems all the people "abducted" are either dorks doing some crazy drugs or liars looking to make a quick buck.

Disclaimer: For religious reasons I don't believe there is any other life in the universe.  Nevertheless I have always been fascinated by UFOs and the like.

I’ve always found it comic that people believe that if an alien civilization managed to crack faster than light travel they’d spend their time mutilating cattle, anally probing American farmers and drawing the Nazca Lin... my mistake, ‘landing strips’.

Maybe the aliens use earth as their place to just chill and muck about.  Although I must say they have a kinky idea of fun.

[Dr. MB]

Even if extraterrestrial life existed it would be so far away that it wouldn't be able to visit us.  Faster than light travel just isn't possible.

Ultimately it seems all the people "abducted" are either dorks doing some crazy drugs or liars looking to make a quick buck.

Disclaimer: For religious reasons I don't believe there is any other life in the universe.  Nevertheless I have always been fascinated by UFOs and the like.

I’ve always found it comic that people believe that if an alien civilization managed to crack faster than light travel they’d spend their time mutilating cattle, anally probing American farmers and drawing the Nazca Lin... my mistake, ‘landing strips’.

Think about what we do to chimpanzees. Is this really that different from what aliens are alleged to do to us?