France Releases Classified UFO Files

GregH said:
... and astronomers covering anything further out, I think we would have seen evidence of such a ship already.

Astronomers are not covering "anything" further out nearly as well as you suggest. The resources don't exist to even track all the largish rocks that pass dangerously close to Earth orbit, much less things in orbits that aren't dangerous. And nearly nothing within the Sol system, but out of the plane of the ecliptic, is tracked.

And, of course, rocks floating in space aren't trying to hide. Heck, just paint the thing black, and we'd only see it if it crossed the face of some other body...
 

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Umbran said:
Astronomers are not covering "anything" further out nearly as well as you suggest. The resources don't exist to even track all the largish rocks that pass dangerously close to Earth orbit, much less things in orbits that aren't dangerous. And nearly nothing within the Sol system, but out of the plane of the ecliptic, is tracked.

And, of course, rocks floating in space aren't trying to hide. Heck, just paint the thing black, and we'd only see it if it crossed the face of some other body...

Fair enough, there may not be comprehensive coverage at any given time. But after 60 years of "sightings" (Roswell was 47 wan't it?) to say that with all the astronomers, looking through pretty much the whole EM spectrum, with both ground based and space based instrumentation, looking both in our neigbourhood and out into the milky way (and beyond), that there still may be alien ships hiding in our vicinity, pretty much breaks Occam's Razor in my opinion.

Greg
 

GregH said:
But after 60 years of "sightings" (Roswell was 47 wan't it?) to say that with all the astronomers, looking through pretty much the whole EM spectrum, with both ground based and space based instrumentation, looking both in our neigbourhood and out into the milky way (and beyond), that there still may be alien ships hiding in our vicinity, pretty much breaks Occam's Razor in my opinion.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Really. It applies. The volume of space you need to search, and the size of the object you're trying to find, make it rather like finding a needle in a haystack. At any given time, we are only looking at a small percentage of the sky. And all you'd have to do to hide a mothership would be to park it in an asteroid orbit - we could look straight at it, and not realize it for anything other than a previously uncatalogued rock. Paint it black, and we'd never even know we were looking straight at it.

Also note - all those folks looking out into the Milky Way and beyond are not going to detect things in our local area. If you're busy with binoculars looking at the birds across the street, you aren't going to notice the beetle walking on the windowsill.
 

Umbran said:
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I prefer:
We think they're searching exotic circumlunar orbits at the moment. Which is uncomfortably close to the truth, but it's a big sky." -- By Now, The Uzbekistanis Have Discovered The Disappearance Of Their Orbital Platform - The Onion
:-)

Umbran said:
Really. It applies. The volume of space you need to search, and the size of the object you're trying to find, make it rather like finding a needle in a haystack. At any given time, we are only looking at a small percentage of the sky. And all you'd have to do to hide a mothership would be to park it in an asteroid orbit - we could look straight at it, and not realize it for anything other than a previously uncatalogued rock. Paint it black, and we'd never even know we were looking straight at it.

Also note - all those folks looking out into the Milky Way and beyond are not going to detect things in our local area. If you're busy with binoculars looking at the birds across the street, you aren't going to notice the beetle walking on the windowsill.

I agree in principle with everything you say. Space is indeed very big. And I'm in no way implying that there has been a comprehensive search for extraterrestrials in the neighbourhood. I guess, I just find it very hard to believe that anything could stay hidden for that long with all the eyes we've had looking up at the sky.

As far as "paint it black", well it still has to communicate, so we should have heard some sporadic radio frequencies, it would still give off a heat signature - unless they never fire a retro rocket, or have managed to find a way to completely mask any manner of energy use at all. I just can't believe that something can be up there for that long, and it wouldn't be noticed. 60 years is a very long time.

Just my $0.02.

Greg
 

GregH said:
I guess, I just find it very hard to believe that anything could stay hidden for that long with all the eyes we've had looking up at the sky.

My point is that, compared to the amount of sky, we have very few eyes. Think about it - we don't have the ability to track all the near-Earth asteroids. We don't have enough eyes to keep track of the things that could very likely kill us, much less find things we don't know are a threat.

Also, note that we have not had particularly good, or particularly many, telescopes for all 60 years. Heck, IR telescopy didn't even start (much less become good, or common) until the 1960s! For something like half of those 60 years, we were effectively blind as a bat.

As far as "paint it black", well it still has to communicate, so we should have heard some sporadic radio frequencies

Assuming that they use wide-angle radio broadcast, and assuming that they do need to communicate at interplanetary ranges. But tight-beam is far more efficient.

it would still give off a heat signature - unless they never fire a retro rocket

You're in orbit around the sun - you don't have to fire a rocket unless you want to change your orbit. It isn't hard to miss infrequent events.

or have managed to find a way to completely mask any manner of energy use at all.

We don't have IR eyes just scanning the sky at random, you know, much less anything like complete coverage. Those telescopes are expensive, and are busy looking at specific things. They'd have to be emitting above-expected heat while crossing the field of view of a handful of telescopes.

And the field of view of the majority of telescopes (IR or otherwise) is typically tiny. They are generally watching light from very small cones of space. Failing to cross those cones is not difficult.
 
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the Jester said:
This is a hard claim to support, given that we don't know what the technology is like.

Look at many sci-fi conventions for FTL travel, for instance: you have to be away from a gravity well, hyperspace, etc- many of them imply that a secondary system would be necessary to actually go down to a planet.

This isn't about any particular technology this is about relative SOPHISTICATION of technology. A technology sophisticated enough to build even a sub-relativistic slower-than-light interstellar transport is incredible.

And the level and sophistication of ANY particular set of technologies that can do this at a scale that can move non-trivial masses across interstellar distances is great enough that the objects and artifacts associated with the UFO phenomena would be unnecessary for them.

Why? Because anyone that advanced has much better ways of observing us that do not create the laughable sort of "encounters" claimed to occur. Anything that capable doesn't NEED the whole UFO shtick, because their technology is so good they could observe us through methods not subject to our detection.

Remember the episode of the X-Files where the roaches were an alien equivalent to our lunar probes? This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. The technology required is so far in advance of our own that they would have to deliberately use non-optimal methods of surveillance knowing it would alert us to the fact we were being surveilled by someone.
 

LightPhoenix said:
Has anyone gotten the website to load yet? It's been a few days now. I know the post above was jokingly referring to the US blocking the website, but now my mind is wandering...


I haven't been able to.
 

Umbran said:
lotsa good points

Ok, I see your point. I'm not an astronomer by trade so I'll concede those points you're making (although I have worked in the near-Earth space business for the last 10 years - and I do think that due to third-body perturbations they'd have to make some orbit corrections over a 60 year period). I'm still a little skeptical that it would have gone completely unnoticed, but I acknowledge that there's the possibility that if something is out there, it could conceivably go unnoticed. I don't happen to believe there is something out there, but then I guess the downside of my argument is that I can never prove it. And UFO-ologists will always be able to say "maybe".

And then, there's Fermi's Paradox which in my mind pretty much sums up the whole problem with ETs.

Greg
 

HeavenShallBurn said:
This isn't about any particular technology this is about relative SOPHISTICATION of technology. A technology sophisticated enough to build even a sub-relativistic slower-than-light interstellar transport is incredible.

Not necessarily true. Sophisticated technology is required to make it into what we'd call "affordable". If, for some reason, a civilization decided to throw massive amounts of resources at such a project, it can be accomplished with brute force and ignorance.

Getting a mass across interstellar distances at sublight speeds is a matter of normal physics. Keeping a population healthy with limited resources for that time is a matter of normal biology. Neither actually requires anything particularly exotic, so long as resources are available.

Why? Because anyone that advanced has much better ways of observing us that do not create the laughable sort of "encounters" claimed to occur. Anything that capable doesn't NEED the whole UFO shtick, because their technology is so good they could observe us through methods not subject to our detection.

Hold on a second - first you're talking about relative sophistication, but now you're talking about particular technologies again. Specifically, ones that avoid detection.

Relatively speaking, we have far more spohisticated tech than the humans of, say, 10,000 BC. Better yet - take wildlife as an example. They have no tech and all, and aren't even particularly sentient. Relatively speaking, we are unto gods. But, we cannot manage to observe pandas, tigers, and chimpanzees without them detecting us as well. So relative sophistication is not sufficient for the task.
 

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