CIA Releases UFO Documents

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-central-intelligence-agency-cia-collection/

by acdanger • 6 years ago

189 193 6 years ago

astrea3• 6 years ago

I sometimes think the earth passed through a wormhole and we now exist in some alternate dimension. What does the Simpsons have to say about this?

senectus1• 6 years ago

Mandela Effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFicynChnoE

op03• 6 years ago

Dont have a cow man.

imposterr2• 6 years ago

It all started when they killed that damned ape.

h2odragon• 6 years ago

Its more waves in the ocean. like Vinge's "Zones of thought" but more "pressure differentials of st00pit" in a sea of more than 3 dimensions.

I'm waiting for magic to come back.

quotemstr• 6 years ago

One theory holds that the world ended when the Large Hadron Collider got switched on and that everything since has been a demented simulation.

grishka• 6 years ago

Oh so that's why some people want 2007 back. The collider won't be turned on for another year, and you get to see cute emos.

alickz• 6 years ago

Damn CERN back at it again. Quick, someone hook a phone up to a microwave so we can go back in time.

Hnrobert422• 6 years ago

I understand that the latest CoVID-19 relief act in the US requires the US IC to make an unclassified report on what they know about UFOs to Congress in Spring 2021.

cyral• 6 years ago

FYI The budget bill included Covid relief, but that wasn’t the purpose of it. It’s the same thing that happens every year.

Hnrobert422• 6 years ago

Sorry. Was going from memory.

infocollector• 6 years ago

When I read a few PDFs in this collection - it does not seem helpful. Anyone else perhaps can confirm that this is the case?

ALittleLight• 6 years ago

I opened four at random and only one seemed to be about UFOs that I could tell. It was a reply stating that the air force, and not the CIA, dealt with UFOs.

_vkye• 6 years ago

I don't know the provenance of this stuff, any of it, it's presented as a raw dump so legwork is on us but at least individual PDFs are OCR'd. Firebugging the site and adding a rule for a:visited { color: purple } helps out when hunting for anything odd.

June 26, 1996 just 30 minutes past midnight - Lithuanian police spot a UFO "near the Lithuanian border": https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/ufos/C055...

"Patrol officers Jaunius Pozera and Laimis Kraujalis placed the whole Vilnius police on the alert. Vehicle loads of soldiers from the Aras Rapid reaction force, sniffer dogs and police reinforcements immediately arrived on the scene of the emergency."

"At an altitude of 20-30 meters above the ground, they noticed a spherical object hanging and 'Pulsing,' alternately shrinking and expanding. At the same time, they heard what they described as 'a strange sound like an electric or electronic crackle,' wanting to take a closer look at the UFO, the policemen moved toward it. When they had advanced about 50 meters through the long grass, the police said, the sphere moved away, rose higher and rapidly departed in the direction of Vilnius."

" ... it was noted that the tall grass around the place over which the sphere had 'hung' was flattened to a radius of 10 meters.'

The geography of this FBI translation/writeup from Moscow's news agency is a bit bizarrely described, perhaps something definitely lost in translation, but it looks like it happened on the Lithuanian border with Belarus, some 10 miles away from the city.

"Police commissioner Valentinas Juchnevicius said in a radio interview today that both officers who watched the shining object 'are psychologically healthy, normal people, not noted for crankiness.'

Edit: this is fascinating. More of these I look at, more they look like a lazy search-and-dump of various US intelligence agencies' foreign media monitoring translations. For example, a translated Bosnian op-ed came up mentioning UFOs because the columnist was sarcastically complaining about how Washington normally communicates with extraterrestrials but yet can't find Karadzic (who'd been on the run for a time.)

kordlessagain• 6 years ago

can't find Karadzic

Maybe they don't let us use their scanners.

rasengan6• 6 years ago

The 8th document [1] made it clear to me that alien life exists and a coverup took place as records make it appear that Dr. Davidson had a different stance.

We are not alone.

[1] https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/ufos/C055...

owens99• 6 years ago

Can you provide more information?

furyofantares• 6 years ago

What did you believe before reading that document?

rasengan6• 6 years ago

That he didn't think it was a space message [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Davidson#Personal_life

vncecartersknee• 6 years ago

It's hard to read but it seems to just be saying "Can you please track down the message and give it to him because he wont stop asking for it and it's getting annoying" ?

Can't really see any evidence of a coverup there.

rasengan6• 6 years ago

It says that they tried to satisfy him with a fake story and that he was too smart for that.

chrononaut4• 6 years ago

Yeah, this seems a bit bizarre.

Without any knowledge of what this incident is referring to and with only this context, "the message was in identifiable morse code and from a known US licensed radio station" should by default be more plausible than "a space message".

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

I see zero evidence to support your conclusion in that link.

"Someone wanted to say something else but military PR didn't want that" is wholly not evidence.

But to be fair I don't really understand the alternate reality conspiracy game everyone plays online and might be missing that you're having a laugh.

imposterr2• 6 years ago

Not to be contradictory for the sake of it, but I see nothing specific about alien life in that. A̶l̶l̶ ̶I̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶r̶a̶d̶i̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶o̶r̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶M̶o̶r̶s̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶d̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶o̶r̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶t̶a̶l̶k̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶i̶g̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶i̶g̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶e̶n̶s̶u̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶l̶o̶c̶a̶l̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶(̶e̶.̶g̶.̶ ̶f̶a̶m̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶m̶i̶c̶r̶o̶w̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶n̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶d̶d̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶a̶b̶s̶)̶.̶

Edit: upon closer reading, you're right, the Morse code item was made up. But I still stand by my point that beyond the fact that they don't seem too keen to release the recording, there's nothing specifically in the document to indicate it is alien or substantial.

rasengan6• 6 years ago

It says they made up a story about morse code to brush Dr. Davidson off, but it didn't work.

Benjammer• 6 years ago

"RE DR LEON DAVIDSON X LEON DAVIDSON [REDACTED]

DR LEON DAVIDSON IS ON OUR BACKS AGAIN. HE WANTS A VERBATIM TRANSLATION OF THE "SPACE" MESSAGE AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE TRANSMITTER FROM WHICH IT CAME. YOUR ATTENTION IS CALLED TO [ILLEGIBLE]-ETTER TO DAVIDSON FROM WALLACE W ELWOOD X WALLACE W ELWOOD, CAPTAIN, USAF X USAF, ATIC X ATIC, DATED 5 X 5 AUGUST 1957 X AUGUST 1957, IN WHICH ELWOOD TELLS DAVIDSON THE MESSAGE WAS IN IDENTIFIABLE MORSE CODE AND FROM A KNOWN US X US LICENSED RADIO STATION. THIS WAS INTENDED TO SATISFY DAVIDSON THAT HE DID NOT X NOT IN FACT HAVE A SPACE MESSAGE. HE IS NOT X NOT SATISFIED AND EXPLAINS THAT THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOUNDS ON THE TAPE RECORDING OF THE MESSAGE ARE NOT X NOT MORSE-TYPE. CAN YOU OBTAIN FROM ATIC THE MESSAGE TRANSLATION, AND THE TRANSMITTER, SHORTLY: WE'D LIKE TO DISMISS THIS MAN ONCE AND FOR ALL. IF YOU CANNOT OBTAIN THIS INFORMATION, DAVIDSON IS GOING TO PRESSURE US FOR PERMISSION TO USE CHICAGO OFFICE LETTERHEAD AND OTHER US X US GOVERNMENT LETTERHEAD HE HAS RECEIVED IN THIS MATTER IN AN ARTICLE FOR SOME SPACE MAGAZINE. WE ARE SENDING BY BUCKSLIP THIS DATE A PUBLICATION OF DAVIDSON'S CRITICIZING THE AIR FORCE FOR CONCEALMENT OF INFORMATION ON FLYING SAUCERS. INCIDENTALLY, DAVIDSON IS NO X NO FOOL AND IT APPEARS THAT ATIC IS TREATING HIM AS ONE IF THEY THINK HE CAN BE SATISFIED WITH A SOP SUCH AS CAPTAIN ELWOOD'S."

My take: Davidson got hold of a recording of an unknown morse code message, and started claiming it was aliens. The air force just doesn't want to deal with him, so someone sends him an official letter that says "It's not aliens." He doesn't believe them and says he can tell by the "characteristics" of his recording that it isn't a morse code type machine. He asks for the official identifying information of the source of the signal, and further, pressures them that if they don't respond, he will use some official letterhead he has to fabricate something for a magazine story. The recipient of the message here is being asked to give Davidson that information, if possible. They further indicate they will attach with the letter a story ("buckslip" is a magazine insert, like an ad) of Davidson's, criticizing the air force for hiding UFOs. At the end, the ATIC is admonished for not sending Davidson the full information up front, as he "is no (I repeat, no) fool," and that the previous sop (a concession of no great value in an attempt to appease someone while not satisfying their actual requests) should not have been attempted at all, because it just made him more suspicious.

Furthermore, after reading about Davidson [0], apparently he never believed it was aliens at all, he was trying to uncover secret CIA experimental aircraft.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Davidson#Personal_life

iSnow3• 6 years ago

My take is that Captain Elwood sent him a letter more or less reading "This is a Morse code recording from a domestic station but we won't say more about it, but it's not aliens" and that only riled Davidson up, presumably because he wasn't talking about aliens in the first place, so why the red herring.

Now they ask to find the decoded message and give the man the sending station so he shuts up. At the end they warn that just sending him some no-content letter (or [I am guessing they imply] made-up stuff) won't do.

joubert• 6 years ago

On CD-ROM?

forgingahead• 6 years ago

This was the result of a 25-year multi-team feasibility study about upgrading from the previous medium: floppy disks.

techdragon2• 6 years ago

I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or legitimate... having worked in government IT before this sounds sadly plausible.

toast0• 6 years ago

The CIA stopped responding to FOIA with zip disks ages ago.[1] I would expect a hundred megs or so of pdfs/scanned documents to be on a CD-R though; much less expensive than per page copy fees. Can't tell if the disc in question is actually pressed or a writable disc; the label is offset a bit, but not enough for me to get a good idea of the underlying color.

[1] For removal of doubt, I just made that up.

tempodox2• 6 years ago

We should be glad it wasn't a tape reel.

mc322• 6 years ago

The CIA and not NASA or the USAF? Why would the CIA handle this information, or did they abscond with it from others like USSR, etc?

jazzyjackson• 6 years ago

Because aliens is a cover story for flying in each others airspace

DennisAleynikov• 6 years ago

boy would this be the best possible outcome

alternatively we're just a zoological survey site

me_me_me2• 6 years ago

why would any gov test a super secret technology in foreign territory risking it being exposed or worse capture?

ketamine__• 6 years ago

What a great time in history to encourage more conspiracy-minded thinking.

stretchcat3• 6 years ago

I had the opposite first reaction; give the conspiracy theorists a big dump of juicy mostly harmless nonsense to sink their teeth into, to get their minds off the more disturbing stuff, if only by a little.

knolax• 6 years ago

I wouldn't call UFO conspiracy theories harmless given the past occurrence of UFO suicide cults like Heaven's Gate.

godzillabrennus• 6 years ago

The fascists turned a pizza place into a conspiracy theory about pedophiles.

They manufactured a conspiracy about some omnipotent leaker of facts and called this fictional character Q.

UFO facts from government archives might make them declare war on the Pepe frog or some other bananas reaction.

mc322• 6 years ago

I know right. If Facebook gets a whiff of this, they’ll ban people for conspiratorial discussion and making stuff up.

therockspush• 6 years ago

As if the government hiding things is a conspiracy at this point.

The official narrative has always been that if the masses found out about ET visiting us they would lose their shit. I don't think much would change even if this is how they found out.

Its not like suddenly learning there are aliens means they don't have to go to work tomorrow.

astrea3• 6 years ago

I've been thinking that. Strange that suddenly UFO things are being declassified and important government figures are mentioning secret galactic federations.

krapp3• 6 years ago

important government figures are mentioning secret galactic federations

One retired Israeli government employee said something about a "galactic federation[0]." Surreptitously making it plural makes it seem as if the entire UN security council was having secret meetings about it.

[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weird-news/former-israeli-space...

thunderrabbit2• 6 years ago

For a while Steven Greer has been saying the government is prepping for a false flag UFO "attack" to perpetuate war, this time against extra terrestrials.

D13Fd• 6 years ago

The physical CD-ROM looks like something from a bad infomercial.

frabjoused• 6 years ago

It almost feels like whoever released it was having a last laugh. You want it, here you go.

tpmx2• 6 years ago

C05517813.pdf is.. just weird.

"TAKE 5 OF 8--POSSIBLE SCENARIOS FOR SUMMER KIDNAPPINGS OF 5 BARNAUL COEDS DETAILED, INCLUDING POSSIBILITY THEY WERE ABDUCTED FOR SLAVERY, ORGAN TRANSPLANTATIDN SCHEMES, OTHER MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION"

Edit: this one seems like pretty random musings of a CIA agent in the USSR based on disapperances that happened there.

Probably just some serial killer? :/

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaul_Maniac

sjg0073• 6 years ago

where is BARNAUL?

tpmx2• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaul

guerrilla• 6 years ago

Maybe: "Barnaul is the largest city and administrative center of Altai Krai, Russia, located at the confluence of the Barnaulka and Ob Rivers in the West Siberian Plain"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaul

sjg0073• 6 years ago

Nonsense. It's overly specific. Try again.

techdragon2• 6 years ago

From what I can tell (I could be wrong about this) this has nothing to do with the recently legislated requirement to release information regarding UFOs that was added into the budget bill. This seems to just be either coincidence or timed to take advantage of recent interest in UFO material due to the news about what was included in the budget bill.

lend0007• 6 years ago

Many of these are correspondences with random people with varying levels of credibility. Taken alone, we can't draw any conclusion from a single person claiming an observation of a UFO.

Statistically, however, there needs to be a convincing psychiatric study that people with no history of mental illness and "good moral standing" in the community can have a single hallucinatory event, often with multiple witnesses and specific details common across different sightings, to discount these observers as crazy, like so many here do. What is the mechanism? Our society is mostly based on witness testimony and trust, at the end of the day (we are coming back full circle with the advent of deepfakes).

I'm not talking about seeing a dot of light moving strangely in the distance or something seen for only two seconds. Skeptical people rightly point out that those typically have a prosaic explanation, and often not a very exceptional one.

I'm referring to the "close encounters" in which the witness(es) couldn't possibly mistake the giant black triangle silent floating 50 feet over a car with dozens of witnesses. Or the ranchers who check on the strongest bull in their herd one day, and the next find it precisely mutilated about a field, along with a dozen others, with no blood to be found. Or the entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically.

I do not doubt that some of them are crazy, but all of them? With what mental illness?

sjg0073• 6 years ago

If the truth is out there, start with yourself.

philip142au• 6 years ago

With hypnotism its trivial, maybe a guy who previously worked at a travelling circus lost his job and goes around and hypnotises people to believe they saw a UFO.

paulryanrogers2• 6 years ago

Mass hysteria can make otherwise rational people behave very irrationally. And once claims are made--for many cultures--it's difficult to recant without losing face. There's also the risk of being left out of a group if close companions make a claim.

Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt. People preach, seek out, and legit believe (despite no hard evidence) in supernatural healing, limbs regrowing, divine languages, divine laughter/joy, spontaneous creation of jewels, etc.

IME the claims that become most popular are the ones impossible to falsify. So testimony is usually all that's left.

lend0007• 6 years ago

it's difficult to recant without losing face

Not sure if that applies to this highly derided topic.

I do agree the mass hysteria angle has a place in the digestion of all these accounts, but what is the mechanism? Is it reproducible? Is it only applicable to panic situations? What about when you have tangible forms of evidence to follow the account (such as air-to-ground and infrared radar [0])? Incidentally, that's the account that was convincing enough to get me interested enough in this subject to study it with an open mind.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...

skissane2• 6 years ago

Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt

I firsthand experienced a charismatic Christian telling me a story about how one time his car wouldn't start, and then some stranger appeared to help him get it started again, and then once the car was running the stranger was gone – totally believable, everyday occurrence, except for my interlocutor's insistence that the stranger wasn't a human being, but actually an angel sent by God appearing in human form.

I wonder what that random stranger would think if he knew he's been turned into an angel in the mind of the person he helped.

e2e8• 6 years ago

There are at this point billions of cameras running continuously or within arms reach. Instead of speculating about silly eye witness reports, lets wait for the physical evidence to materialize. Look how many videos there are of the Chelyabinsk meteor.

lend0007• 6 years ago

If I linked 50 videos and photos (you could easily find some yourself with a search engine), I suspect you would say something like "look how easily you could do this with CGI." Sure, it's true, but using that No True Scotsman line of thinking, literally nothing will change your mind.

So unless you have an answer to this alleged isolated hallucinatory mental illness that lacks any scientific rigor, can you really refute thousands of witnesses or the validity of their other forms of evidence, such as photos and videos?

Bancakes• 6 years ago

Billions and almost none of them have any low-light performance to speak of. Like capturing dark grey triangles in the night sky.

ryanmercer2• 6 years ago

Look how many videos there are of the Chelyabinsk meteor.

That event was immediately noticeable and happened in an area where the vast majority of vehicles have dash cams due to insurance fraud.

Not a lot of people stare at the sky though looking for flying objects that they cannot identify. Most cameras aren't pointed in a direction to capture much (if any) of the sky either. Also, go outside next time the moon is out, get your phone out and take a photo or video of it... looks like a tiny blob of light doesn't it, far worse than what your naked eye sees.

In December I was curious about MUFON so joined, paid to take the test to become a field investigator as I was curious what people are reporting (largely commercial aircraft I suspect after having worked at an airport for 15 years and seeing aircraft appear to do wonky stuff due to distance/speed/absurdly bright landing lights), and joined the MUFON facebook group.

On the Facebook group, when you sift through the hot chaff of people claiming they've been telepathically communicating with umpteen races of aliens that "their sources" given them "intel" about, you get a lot of photos and videos of what are almost certainly commercial aircraft. In once instance in the past few weeks someone posted a photo of an "alien ship" that was blatantly a Mylar balloon in the shape of a sun with wavy rays of Mylar around the edge of the balloon.

Then factor in things like stars, planets, satellites, toy and commercial drones, Chinese lanterns, balloons, space debris reentering the atmosphere, military aircraft refueling, etc and you quickly realize that probably 99.999999999999999999999999% of Unidentified Flying Objects are man made and natural phenomenon, often extremely boring stuff.

Recently there was some siting off of Hawaii of some blue orb. I had multiple people get into arguments with me on the MUFON group about it's origins. I believe it was random space junk, immediately a man began insisting it was an "ion propulsion" alien ship crashing after it had been shot, kept insisting that only that bluish glow could be create by an ET exotic technology star drive, I quickly pointed out more than a dozen materials that create a blue flame when they burn at which point he kept arguing with me and got quite hostile insisting it's a downed alien craft.

The past 2-3 days that group has had people sharing a recent article about Juno detecting an FM radio signal from one of Jupiter's moons. Almost everyone on those posts is adamant it is an extraterrestrial signal that NASA is trying to cover up. Virtually none of them are willing to even entertain the idea that this is 100% a natural phenomenon that science can fully explain.

Even if all of the cameras we have deployed around the planet were capable of getting high resolution, stable, quality images of the bulk of Unidentified Flying Objects, some people would simply claim a conspiracy when you showed they were very much not little green men in flying saucers.

LargoLasskhyfv6• 6 years ago

The ranchers got pranked by black helicopters stealhtily moving in from Kirtland AFB, NM for assessment of the downwind effects of nuclear testing.

What better way of using cattle as bioindicators?

Mew? Moo!

inetknght• 6 years ago

Got a link to a declassified report? Or is that just a rumor?

names_are_hard• 6 years ago

Interesting question. To add to it, if indeed it is so easy for people to be misled into believing they saw things that they didn't, what does that say about eyewitness testimony in court used to convict suspected criminals?

We discount people who make extraordinary claims because their claims contradict our understanding of the world. But if some percent of eyewitness testimony is totally fake even when it is unbelievable, shouldn't we also discount testimony at an even greater rate when it doesn't contradict our worldview? Or are we to believe that this particular tendency to see things that didn't happen is limited to aliens and not run of the mill murders?

cher88• 6 years ago

Reminds me of the "Mandela effect"

https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange...

apeace• 6 years ago

Worth looking up John Mack. He was a psychologist and Harvard professor who researched stories of alien abductions and tried to make sense of them from a psychological point of view.

To the best of my understanding (do your own research), he hypothesized that many of these stories were true, even if the explanations were not really aliens. They were spiritual and cultural phenomena that people really experienced.

entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically

You're referring to the 1994 incident in Zimbabwe, which Mack famously studied. It's certainly an interesting one!

I remember going through all the videos on the internet about that incident, and ultimately being unimpressed with the investigation. There were 60 kids at the school, Mack only interviewed a few. Why is that? I get the feeling they actually interviewed many more but cherry-picked stories to fit their narrative. There were also stories about UFO sightings in Zimbabwe in the days leading up to that event, I'm sure many of the kids had heard about it before they went to recess that day?

I've never read any of his actual long-form publications on that incident though (don't even know if there are any), so perhaps I missed something.

Back to your basic question: "how could all these people be crazy?" I don't think anyone knows, and I'm not sure many people are studying it. But even a super smart Harvard professor couldn't make a strong case one way or the other, even after studying a school full of children directly after one of the most compelling UFO sightings in history. So it's probably best to move on, assume it wasn't aliens, and wait for someone to capture an alien craft clearly on video. Personally I use it as a reason to upgrade my iPhone and get those sweet new cameras ;)

endofreach• 6 years ago

A good friend of mine, who came to Europe when he was 17, once said to me: "in Africa you see things that you just can not believe as a European". He told me how in places without electricity, small villages, really "creepy vibes" exist. For example one story where, in broad daylight there is a cow lying on the side of the road. Blood runs from the cow across the road to the other side. It's not broad daylight there, it's pitch black where the trail of the blood ends. The sky, the street, everything. He says almost every African from smaller areas knows these experiences.

In the West, such things are horror stories. Another friend kind of jokingly said it might be „due to radiation, which affects the crazy energies of nature“ in the west. That‘s why we don‘t have these sightings.

I know, no scientific contribution, but finally the possibility to share this story in a proper forum.

Because what makes me think: my friend is smart, not crazy and told it very convincingly. At least in such a way that I believe that he has seen it.

That doesn't make it real, I know, but kind of scary for a European.

In corners of South America without infrastructure I have also experienced very strange situations and felt the darkest energies, had the weirdest encounters and strangest hallucinations...

Anyways, i am glad that for me, these are just stories. I don‘t want to be the guy that has one of those encounters and then has to either forget about it or fight for his credibility.

BatteryMountain• 6 years ago

Interestingly, a good chunk of claims (ufo sightings, seeing aliens, crop circles, claims of abductions, probings, inter-dimensional communication, astral projection etc) seem to originate from America. Why is that? Why is the the rest of the world so quiet about this stuff?

wiz21c• 6 years ago

because it's CIA files ?

skinkestek• 6 years ago

Norway has Hessdalen and others.

And crop circles I associate mostly with England.

anonAndOn• 6 years ago

We embrace nutters, charlatans, and second-rate sci-fi authors especially if they go on to found religions.

King-Aaron3• 6 years ago

There are many cases from all over the world. Russia, South America, Australia, France, etc. In fact non-US governments are often a fair bit more open about it too.

rubyn00bie• 6 years ago

Well... I would probably say most of the time it's a combination of stress, bullshit, and someone(s) in denial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

If I had to guess most of these went down because the child or relative of someone powerful, authoritative, and very disconnected from reality (gullible), did some bullshit the powerful person couldn't reason about. Literally, leaving their brain unable to compute reality instead choosing (and very likely believing) "bat shit" as the reason... Depending on how powerful the person who just skipped-a-beat of reality; the narrative might never be questioned. cough trump cough

I mean; like with UFOs, most of the imagery people use to describe are _known_ to them before the event. They're related to what the person knows and is capable of imagining.

With all that said, I'm not trying to explain them all as bullshit or nonsense; but, the list without the bullshit is a lot smaller. I do think it's a bit unfortunate though as I'd love to speculate and wonder about something besides the trite psuedo-hallucinations all these stories contain.

icare_1er• 6 years ago

Does not really apply to radar operators and F16 pilots all having the same "mass hysteria" the same day...

fsloth• 6 years ago

People are really easy to fool. It's not necessarily insanity, but rather confusing stimuli. People can interpret certain stimuli completely wrong. The thing is, the things we 'see' are pure reconstructions by the brain of the visual input - not the photons themselves. And sometimes the signals screw up our visual system, making us see weird shit mainly because the brain is trying to interpret the signal in one way and trying it's best to maintain this interpretation. This is not hallucination as such, it's just visual system getting confused.

Personal experience: 1) when my son was 2, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I heard something. I went to check his room. As I peered through the door I was 100% convinced I saw him walking in the room. But as I entered the room I realized that was not possible as he was several meters away from the position, a sleep. The carpet on the room was really colourful playmat. As I retraced my steps I realized the patterns on the carpet in the near darkness were close enough for my brain to interpret the visual signal as my son walking. In another circumstance I could have easily thought I saw a ghost (if I was so inclined).

2) This is even more weird. I give you the mating crows. I walked by some familiar trees planted next to an office building in bright daylight and noticed something black moving in one of them. I could not see immediately what it was until I realized it was two crows which appeared to be mating or fighting - and as I did not hear anything I guessed the latter. Being the curious naturalist I am I approached tree. Yep, crows. I tried get as close as I could - until I was right next to the tree and noticed the "crows" were actually a black plastic bag wriggling in the wind. This illusion was so convincing and powerful I've never been fooled so well by anything else.

So, what do I conclude? I'm 40, and in the past 20 years I've seen two times strange events that I could have easily intepreted as proof of supernatural activity if I was so inclined - ghosts and some weird magic transfiguration.

Based on this sampling, it's quite likely people have 'witnessed' all sorts of strange things their visual cortex has produced. I totally now believe people have actually seen ghosts - except it was all in their head and they weren't crazy - just their brain doing what it always does and missing the context a bit.

Also makes you think how reliable eye witness statements are in some contexts that have short span and potential for confusion.

NetOpWibby• 6 years ago

The mind is spooky

tgv• 6 years ago

Statistically, however, there needs to be a convincing psychiatric study

Only if you can assume that everyone (without a mental illness) always knows and tells the literal truth. Which isn't the case, as has been proven over and over. Check witness studies and autobiographical memory.

yholio• 6 years ago

It's pretty easy to design the study if you observe that accounts of telepathic aliens descending from metallic crafts are strongly correlated with demographics subjected to cultural depictions of such aliens and crafts in popular media.

It remains to this day largely an American phenomenon, and the secretive and technological nature of the cold war cannot be ignored as a factor. Brainwashing a school that aliens arrived seems preferable to leaking information about critical and advanced (for its era) defense technology.

alphabettsy• 6 years ago

Religious people and some entire groups make claims about experiences with God all the time.

dhnajsjdnd• 6 years ago

I recall reading a similar argument about the miracles of one of the Catholic saints (Joan of Arc, perhaps)?

pjc502• 6 years ago

As someone who was into this stuff as a kid, and read every book I could get my hands on, as well as a bit of academic study of the history of religious experience, I eventually grew into the conclusion:

people with no history of mental illness and "good moral standing" in the community can have a single hallucinatory event, often with multiple witnesses and specific details common across different sightings

... yes, they can.

It's not a mental illness, it's "pareidolia" or something similar. The "face on mars" is a great example. The brain is a pattern-recognition neural net. It's really good at finding patterns. So good that it finds patterns which aren't there. Occasionally they can be really strong.

Spookily, while typing this post, I saw a bright oval dot moving at high speed across my peripheral vision, outside the window. Just before it disappeared from view my bleary eyes resolved it as a seagull, being under-lit by the dawn light against houses and trees that are still in shadow.

(I think we'd do well to recognize that there's no sharp boundary between "sane" and "mentally ill" either, and that "mentally ill" should not be used to automatically discount people! Schizophrenia is known to produce hallucinations as a common symptom, but not depression or bipolar, while migrane headaches can produce flashing lights in the field of vision but are not usually classified as a mental illness)

riffraff• 6 years ago

also, sheer numbers.

If you have 10 people who don't smoke, exercise, eat healthy etc.. they're unlikely to get cancer. If you have 10 million, a lot of them will.

Same for random hallucinations. One in ten people? Not likely. One in ten million? Practically certain.

MarcScott• 6 years ago

The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan delves into this quite a bit. It's years since I read it, but he talks about how in history people often suffered hallucinations and mass hallucinations that had a religious theme. They were visited by angels, demons, witches etc. In the 50s when Hollywood started churning out Sci-fi movies, the nature of these hallucinations altered and became all about UFOs.

secfirstmd3• 6 years ago

On a side note I read recently that a lot of ghost sitings in the past may have been caused by Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Which maybe explain why it happens more often indoors and in older homes it seems.

Phemist• 6 years ago

I would happily recommend you to read "Hallucinations" by Oliver Sacks. This book is not about UFO sightings, but about how ordinary people can have wild hallucinations. For example, an elderly woman who would regularly have very vivid, daytime, hallucinations of a concert being played in her living room. She knew it was not "real", but it was comforting and a welcoming distraction from the isolation that elderly folk often suffer from. It is quite an eye-opening book.

chronolitus• 6 years ago

I have a feeling you would enjoy the All Gas No Brakes episode about bigfoot hunting in Minnesota.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsXhk1xmYAI

Having watched it, I suddenly have little doubt that we as a species are very capable of generating lots of witness accounts for any fantastical event.

goodcanadian3• 6 years ago

I do not doubt that some of them are crazy, but all of them? With what mental illness?

Not crazy, necessarily, but lacking critical thinking skills. I have seen things in the sky that I didn't know for certain what they were. I did not make the leap from, "I don't know," to "alien spacecraft," however. Some people come up with the most bizarre explanations for really rather mundane things, and then convince themselves of the truth of it. If someone is already primed with the bizarre idea, they are more likely to see it, too.

DrBazza• 6 years ago

If your starting view point isn't "there must be a rational explanation for this", then you're also unlikely to report things without bias, unconsciously, or otherwise. If you think "aliens!" before "probably a planet/bird/plane", you're going to forget or ignore lights, squawking, the sound of an engine and so on. Observer bias.

Just look at the Ancient Aliens guy, if you take him at face value, everything is an alien, including piles of rocks on other rocks.

Then look at James Randi.

And it's 2020, everyone has a better camera in their pocket than at any time in history. Where's the evidence? The 'gimbal' video has been plausibly debunked.

UFOs as alien spacecraft do not exist. Sorry.

We don't live in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where it's full of 'teasers' that torment some random guy on a farm in the middle of nowhere having flown light-years to get here.

UFOs as mis-identified natural or man made phenomena do exist.

krapp3• 6 years ago

I'm reasonably convinced black triangles are mostly paredolia and hype like all UFO reports, and the rest are experimental stealth blimps[0,1] or some other kind of classified lighter than air technology. Not aliens and not anti-gravity.

Cattle mutilations are real as well, and certainly not aliens. Probably some government agency doing tests or experiments, cults and natural predation.

As far as "entire schools full of children reporting metal objects landing with beings coming out to communicate with them telepathically," children do make things up and confabulate, and children do suffer peer pressure. Mass hysteria does exist and has been documented.

No one is saying that mental illness is responsible for every UFO case, but it is likely responsible for a lot of them. It's worth remembering, however, that human perception and memory are faulty and that a perfectly rational, clinically sane person can suffer hallucinations, misinterpret phenomena based on limited information, or have false memories.

[0]http://www.thestealthblimp.com/

[1]https://rimstar.org/space/jp_aerospace_balloon_airship_to_or...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

sandworm1014• 6 years ago

Mandatory XKCD on the subject: https://xkcd.com/1235/

I dismiss all references to the quality of the witnesses. Such human factors are too muddy and debatable. Arguments about any one event, was that particular things real or not, wont ever answer the question. We must analyze UFO reports in an international context. The phenomena is very mush only reported in the western world. There is also a temporal association between UFO reports and contemporaneous Hollywood movies on the subject. A real phenomena, as in the XKCD above, should be country and culturally agnostic. Reports should ebb and flow with the number of potential witnesses, not the release dates of movies.

goda903• 6 years ago

I dislike this XKCD. Where is the line for the total number of photos and videos take of unidentified phenomenon? Has it gone down? Or has it actually gone up, but because of the exponentially growing amount of media being produced in the world, the people who are exposed to these photos and videos are proportionally tiny. Add on to that, the fact that phone cameras are terrible at distance. Ever try taking a picture of the moon with it? Your eyes can see much better than the photo taken by the average smartphone. And if the object is moving around quickly, do you have time to take your phone from your pocket, open the camera, focus on the object, and get a good picture before it is out of sight?

m3kw9• 6 years ago

Yes? No?

sahin• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25755415

blackrock• 6 years ago

Did anyone get probed?

Those were the creepiest scenes from the 80s movies.

King-Aaron3• 6 years ago

From an arbitrary click-through of some of these, it doesn't seem to be particularly ground-breaking. I still feel that the US Navy gimball/go-fast/etc videos are the closest thing to a "smoking gun" on the subject so far, and along with the interviews with Commander David Fravor are the most credible sightings to date.

I'd really love to see the government release their real thoughts on the UAP subject - be it exotic technology from a foreign power, exotic technology from the US, or indeed extra terrestrial. However I feel we'll all be old and/or dead by the time that actually happens.

infradig• 6 years ago

Not much of a smoking gun... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8

King-Aaron3• 6 years ago

Being fair, I said 'the closest thing to' a smoking gun. Plus you can't take these videos in isolation without considering that they were taken by trained observers using military grade sensor equipment. Not some random yokel in 1975 with an instamatic camera.

LargoLasskhyfv6• 6 years ago

Viewing of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS686LcT1Us (2minutes) is deemed obligatory to "get in the mood" ;-)

a0-prw• 6 years ago

When people can literally believe their dicks are disappearing, while said organ is in plain view, any extraordinary claims about UFOs should be treated sceptically:

"Koro is a culture-bound syndrome delusional disorder in which an individual has an overpowering belief that his or her sex organs are retracting and will disappear"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(medicine)

LargoLasskhyfv6• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) :-)

ackbar032• 6 years ago

I had a friend in high school who used to do a magic trick where he would claim that he made your dick disappear. He used to do it all the time and find it amusing. He ipo'd his startup last year and made a lot of money.

ismaildonmez• 6 years ago

Real life Randy Marsh then :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_Magic

snapetom• 6 years ago

What was the trick?

DoctorOetker• 6 years ago

... especially when there is a government organized disinformation campaign: check out the documentary Mirage Men!

noodlenotes• 6 years ago

Reminds me of "running amok" from Malaysia and Indonesia.

In a typical case of running amok, an individual (often male), having shown no previous sign of anger or any inclination to violence, will acquire a weapon (traditionally a sword or dagger, but currently any of a variety of weapons) and in a sudden frenzy, will attempt to kill or seriously injure anyone he encounters and himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_amok

Culture-bound syndromes are fascinating.

andrewflnr2• 6 years ago

Interesting. It's almost exactly a modern mass shooting, just with an edged weapon. Nothing new under the sun after all.

capableweb3• 6 years ago

And related to that, somehow UFOs sightings tend to be mostly happening in the US and not so much outside of it, leading further evidence to it being a culture-bound syndrome rather than real-life events.

JohnJamesRambo• 6 years ago

Or does the USA just do a lot of weird flying experiments? Isn’t that the Occam’s Razor answer?

Implying Americans are crazier seems odd. What would cause that? Higher rates of mental illness making their ancestors emigrate from their original countries? Is there any data on that? Western Diet causing mental illness? Too much empty space?

colordrops• 6 years ago

If the CIA did indeed have documented evidence of extraterrestrials, then they've obviously been keeping it a secret. What makes anyone think that this extra-judicial agency wouldn't redact and filter the contents of an FOIA request?

nix232• 6 years ago

No one said something about extraterrestrials, a UFO is just that: An unidentified flying object.

Havoc• 6 years ago

CDrom but no torrent?

retox• 6 years ago

The direct download is fast enough, 350MB at +5MB/s doesn't take long. I was surprised at the speed actually.

1970-01-01• 6 years ago

What we want is something like 4K video of UFOs flying around the Rocky Mountains. That would be satisfying proof that taxes are not being wasted. What we get is some bullshit that came out of someone's mouth, which was then typed into a report, and finally scanned into PDF and put online for the public to see. At least its not disinformation.

staticvar• 6 years ago

I used to think UFO sighting meant some kind craft piloted by extra terrestrial beings. Are they often planes piloted by humans you don't know?

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