“There will be no bell-bottom pants or leisure suits”
I remain optimistic. I have a barely-used baby blue, bell-bottom leisure suit and a skin-tight rayon shirt (missing the top three buttons) and a pair of Elvis glasses that I can still kind of see through that are awaiting that glorious day.
How strange it is that now everybody carries a high resolution video camera with some telephoto capability - but all we still get are the same blurry photos that we’ve seen for 70 years.
The early boom of UFO sitings was probably driven by people’s increased interest in the sky - Cold War fears of Soviet bombers plus space exploration. The later booms resulted from our accelerated mental decay. A new boom will just be attention-seeking, entertainment.
For historical parallels, I recommend study of religious figures, miracles, and such. Start with sightings of faeries. Perhaps read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s non-fiction book, “The Coming of the Fairies” (1922). Some background:
Cellphone cameras are not suitable for telephoto shots. Tiny sensor, tiny lens with less than 7mm focal length, object less than 0.2 degrees = uninterpetable dot
The moon is 0.5 degrees across, it takes around a 700mm lens (35mm format equiv.) to fill the frame with the moon. For cellphone sensors, the lens is still about 10x too short a focal length.
The high-res of a cellphone camera comes from pixels with about 1/7th the area of pro cameras, or 1/30th the area of astronomical cameras. If the UFO is moving fast without lights, it won't show up at all,particularly if there's anything bright in frame. Then there is processing not meant for such sujects and heavy video compression on a phone.
Most of all, though, people are looking at the bright phone and not at the sky, and even if they do look at the sky, their night vision is destroyed. If they see something anyway, it will take several seconds to get a shot, and at least several more to override the default zoom, ISO and shutter speed.
You are obviously an expert at photography, but you misinterpreted my comment. I was not comparing modern photos of UFOs by cellphones with photos from astronomical cameras. I was comparing cellphone camera photos with snapshots taken from 1947 (the year the UFO boom began) to ~2000 by mass-market cameras - plus the occasional military aircraft gun camera.
Then and now, photos are taken at a wide range of distances in widely varying conditions. The new ones are not much better than the first one, taken on 4 July 1947 by Coast Guard Yeoman Frank Ryman from the yard of his home in Lake City, north of Seattle. Published on the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Later classified as a weather balloon.
Common 35mm film cameras were much, much better than any common digital camera. A Polaroid has a film area 250x bigger than a cellphone sensor. The 1971 Costa Rica UFO photographed from above was using a 9"x9” mapping camera with a sensor thousands of times bigger than a cellphone camera.
Many high-quality photos of UFOs have been published over the last 10, 20, 30+ years, and they get called fake if they look too good (and they almost always are fake). The CARET photos come to mind -wayyy too good. Also brings to mind the Fermi paradox, which is only a paradox if one a priori rules out all the evidence.
The old film data is a lot harder to fake, particularly the observatory plate archives. No stunning close-ups, but the temporal patterns of over a hundred thousand pre-Sputnik anomalies independently confirmed and replicated is stronger evidence collectively than any one digital video. Here's a post about that research: https://exoreality.substack.com/p/lurkers-in-the-dark
Nice one. All part of the fake - science - space - narrative. As if exiting/entering our atmosphere is that easy. Just zip and zoom. Damon on Mars, soon joined by Musk (based on his own words). Yawn. The Artemis II movie was a disappointment. Where is the Moon bus?
Dr. Briggs! Did you find the comic mystery Plan 9 for Murder entertaining? Dare I ask you for a blurb for the jacket of the follow-up mystery? Keep up the good work; your substack is a daily pleasure.
Sorry to be cheeky! I just thought you might enjoy the UFO connection. If it's not your cup of tea, just skip it and give it to an enemy. Best regards.
Never believed in aliens. Even back in the days when I was liberal atheist watching The X-Files with all my friends who all wanted to believe! The Fermi paradox made more sense to me. Also it was so clear to me that the aliens were a new religion. Powerful beings, watching over you, interfering occasionally, eventually coming to save you. That's a poorly developed religion.
These days I think Joshua Charles and Daniel O'Connor are right and there are some unexplained phenomena that can definitely fit into the demonic realm which has always been with us. And Joshua Charles also astutely pointed out that new revelation is now coming from our government, in the form of disclosure, instead of God. They absurdity of trusting our government with any form of revelation cannot be overstated
The anomalies in the observations of interstellar object 3I-Atlas could use some statistical analysis, also analysis of the anomalously low publication numbers on 3I-Atlas, missing data, and other possibly related anomalies such as the spate of daytime bolides, meteor building hits and oddly slow entry trajectories.
has the best collection of evidence I have seen, but really annoying AI writing style.
This substack has been publishing good research on government intel agency archive documents, though his interpretations of them aren't always persuasive to me: https://geoffcruickshank.substack.com/
It is clear that there has been a lot of deliberate disinfo from these agencies on UFOs, what isn't at all clear is what their actual knowledge is, if any. The spaceship hypothesis is only one of several, the demonic hypothesis seems to be popular among religious senior officials and officers.
I like astronomy and sci-fi. Michael Rennie was an excellent spaceman and Gort was the coolest of the non-terrestrials. Still, I don't believe in UFOs and little green men from space.
Aliens do exist in the galaxy, but space travel would have to be an extremely advanced science and there is no reason for such advanced aliens to wanna come visit this silly rock. What would be the reason? Other than to commune with nature, there is no purpose in coming here.
Well, this rock would not be so silly if there were only a few non-advanced life forms around. Can't you see the travel brochures? "A rare chance to see what we were like billions of years ago! Bring the kids for a unique educational experience!"
Abductions always struck me as bogus. If the aliens are so advanced, why are their experiments on humans so painful and always seem to involve anal probes? Wouldn't they have scanners like Star Trek or other advanced means?
I did some work a bit related to Dreamland or Area 51 or Groom Lake (take your pick on the name) when I was stationed at Nellis several decades ago - the things people get completely wrong and invent conspiracy theories about is a hoot. Saw a map a few years ago that porported to show UFO sightings around the world. Interesting how the vast, vast majority were from the US. Maybe the Government here has special de-clocking rays so they can't stay hidden.
From the inception of the UFO era in the 1940s up to the 1970s, the Ufonauts were benign Aryan Space People who just wanted us not to kill ourselves with nuclear bombs. That was the golden era of White people UFO groups. However, as of the 1970s, the Space People were no longer Aryan and no longer benign. So, my prediction is that *if* there is an upsurge of 'UFO stuff', it will be cruelly dark and more like Heaven's Gate or Mothman than anything from the early days.
Dang! I am the only guy in California who hasn't seen a UFO. My UFO philosophy is simple: if they have the ability for interstellar travel, then they are light years ahead of us (literally) and the ball is in their court. If they choose they can reveal themselves publicly (Klaatu style) and that will be that.
“There will be no bell-bottom pants or leisure suits”
I remain optimistic. I have a barely-used baby blue, bell-bottom leisure suit and a skin-tight rayon shirt (missing the top three buttons) and a pair of Elvis glasses that I can still kind of see through that are awaiting that glorious day.
I’ll join you in my Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress
Oh my gosh! We’ll make a dashing couple at the disco. 🕺 💃
There's always Halloween.
I like your work! I completely overlooked that possibility.
What's the big deal? Just repeat after me:
Klaatu barada nikto.
There. Everything's all right....
How strange it is that now everybody carries a high resolution video camera with some telephoto capability - but all we still get are the same blurry photos that we’ve seen for 70 years.
The early boom of UFO sitings was probably driven by people’s increased interest in the sky - Cold War fears of Soviet bombers plus space exploration. The later booms resulted from our accelerated mental decay. A new boom will just be attention-seeking, entertainment.
For historical parallels, I recommend study of religious figures, miracles, and such. Start with sightings of faeries. Perhaps read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s non-fiction book, “The Coming of the Fairies” (1922). Some background:
https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/2023/08/20/from-malekin-to-modern-times-multiple-witness-sightings-of-faeries/
Cellphone cameras are not suitable for telephoto shots. Tiny sensor, tiny lens with less than 7mm focal length, object less than 0.2 degrees = uninterpetable dot
The moon is 0.5 degrees across, it takes around a 700mm lens (35mm format equiv.) to fill the frame with the moon. For cellphone sensors, the lens is still about 10x too short a focal length.
The high-res of a cellphone camera comes from pixels with about 1/7th the area of pro cameras, or 1/30th the area of astronomical cameras. If the UFO is moving fast without lights, it won't show up at all,particularly if there's anything bright in frame. Then there is processing not meant for such sujects and heavy video compression on a phone.
Most of all, though, people are looking at the bright phone and not at the sky, and even if they do look at the sky, their night vision is destroyed. If they see something anyway, it will take several seconds to get a shot, and at least several more to override the default zoom, ISO and shutter speed.
You are obviously an expert at photography, but you misinterpreted my comment. I was not comparing modern photos of UFOs by cellphones with photos from astronomical cameras. I was comparing cellphone camera photos with snapshots taken from 1947 (the year the UFO boom began) to ~2000 by mass-market cameras - plus the occasional military aircraft gun camera.
Then and now, photos are taken at a wide range of distances in widely varying conditions. The new ones are not much better than the first one, taken on 4 July 1947 by Coast Guard Yeoman Frank Ryman from the yard of his home in Lake City, north of Seattle. Published on the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Later classified as a weather balloon.
https://www.historylink.org/File/871
Common 35mm film cameras were much, much better than any common digital camera. A Polaroid has a film area 250x bigger than a cellphone sensor. The 1971 Costa Rica UFO photographed from above was using a 9"x9” mapping camera with a sensor thousands of times bigger than a cellphone camera.
Many high-quality photos of UFOs have been published over the last 10, 20, 30+ years, and they get called fake if they look too good (and they almost always are fake). The CARET photos come to mind -wayyy too good. Also brings to mind the Fermi paradox, which is only a paradox if one a priori rules out all the evidence.
The old film data is a lot harder to fake, particularly the observatory plate archives. No stunning close-ups, but the temporal patterns of over a hundred thousand pre-Sputnik anomalies independently confirmed and replicated is stronger evidence collectively than any one digital video. Here's a post about that research: https://exoreality.substack.com/p/lurkers-in-the-dark
Nice one. All part of the fake - science - space - narrative. As if exiting/entering our atmosphere is that easy. Just zip and zoom. Damon on Mars, soon joined by Musk (based on his own words). Yawn. The Artemis II movie was a disappointment. Where is the Moon bus?
Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.
And sometimes a cigar shaped UFO is just a cigar shaped UFO
Dr. Briggs! Did you find the comic mystery Plan 9 for Murder entertaining? Dare I ask you for a blurb for the jacket of the follow-up mystery? Keep up the good work; your substack is a daily pleasure.
Because of the "Plan 9" I had to go check out your book. Have the Kindle version ready to read.
Have fun! I hope you enjoy it!
I am unbelievably behind on everything. I hope to get to the book next week. Thanks for the reminder.
Sorry to be cheeky! I just thought you might enjoy the UFO connection. If it's not your cup of tea, just skip it and give it to an enemy. Best regards.
Never believed in aliens. Even back in the days when I was liberal atheist watching The X-Files with all my friends who all wanted to believe! The Fermi paradox made more sense to me. Also it was so clear to me that the aliens were a new religion. Powerful beings, watching over you, interfering occasionally, eventually coming to save you. That's a poorly developed religion.
These days I think Joshua Charles and Daniel O'Connor are right and there are some unexplained phenomena that can definitely fit into the demonic realm which has always been with us. And Joshua Charles also astutely pointed out that new revelation is now coming from our government, in the form of disclosure, instead of God. They absurdity of trusting our government with any form of revelation cannot be overstated
The anomalies in the observations of interstellar object 3I-Atlas could use some statistical analysis, also analysis of the anomalously low publication numbers on 3I-Atlas, missing data, and other possibly related anomalies such as the spate of daytime bolides, meteor building hits and oddly slow entry trajectories.
https://thesentinel.network/p/start-here
has the best collection of evidence I have seen, but really annoying AI writing style.
This substack has been publishing good research on government intel agency archive documents, though his interpretations of them aren't always persuasive to me: https://geoffcruickshank.substack.com/
It is clear that there has been a lot of deliberate disinfo from these agencies on UFOs, what isn't at all clear is what their actual knowledge is, if any. The spaceship hypothesis is only one of several, the demonic hypothesis seems to be popular among religious senior officials and officers.
I like astronomy and sci-fi. Michael Rennie was an excellent spaceman and Gort was the coolest of the non-terrestrials. Still, I don't believe in UFOs and little green men from space.
Aliens do exist in the galaxy, but space travel would have to be an extremely advanced science and there is no reason for such advanced aliens to wanna come visit this silly rock. What would be the reason? Other than to commune with nature, there is no purpose in coming here.
Well, this rock would not be so silly if there were only a few non-advanced life forms around. Can't you see the travel brochures? "A rare chance to see what we were like billions of years ago! Bring the kids for a unique educational experience!"
Abductions always struck me as bogus. If the aliens are so advanced, why are their experiments on humans so painful and always seem to involve anal probes? Wouldn't they have scanners like Star Trek or other advanced means?
I did some work a bit related to Dreamland or Area 51 or Groom Lake (take your pick on the name) when I was stationed at Nellis several decades ago - the things people get completely wrong and invent conspiracy theories about is a hoot. Saw a map a few years ago that porported to show UFO sightings around the world. Interesting how the vast, vast majority were from the US. Maybe the Government here has special de-clocking rays so they can't stay hidden.
From the inception of the UFO era in the 1940s up to the 1970s, the Ufonauts were benign Aryan Space People who just wanted us not to kill ourselves with nuclear bombs. That was the golden era of White people UFO groups. However, as of the 1970s, the Space People were no longer Aryan and no longer benign. So, my prediction is that *if* there is an upsurge of 'UFO stuff', it will be cruelly dark and more like Heaven's Gate or Mothman than anything from the early days.
Dang! I am the only guy in California who hasn't seen a UFO. My UFO philosophy is simple: if they have the ability for interstellar travel, then they are light years ahead of us (literally) and the ball is in their court. If they choose they can reveal themselves publicly (Klaatu style) and that will be that.
The Invaders -Alien Missile Threat
I'm looking forward to the X-Files revival, then. But they'll never top Jose Chung.
Dr. Briggs, what do you think of those Christians (Joshua Charles, Daniel J O'Connor) claiming that "aliens" are demons?
Sketches made by those who report contact bear eery resemblance to the demonic figure (Lam)that Aleister Crowley summoned ~100 years ago.
I think most, perhaps all, are mistakes. That some are demons is of course possible.
Maybe Crowley was actually summoning aliens.
Charles and O'Connor posit that they're one and the same.