Rare things that have been documented much better than UFOs

FatPhil said:
Using tech the general public isn't familiar with helps them add a layer of "we're experts" to what they're doing, and a veneer of mystery to what is seen as it's often less interpretable (yay - more noise!). On top of that, because it's not cheap and common tech, it actively discourages attempts at replication. So you have to trust them and their interpretation of what they're seeing. Which is OK, as they've already persuaded you they're experts. It's theatre, that's all.
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For many of the amateur "research groups" (so NOT the Skinwalker Ranch folks) the tech helps THEM feel like they are doing something serious as well. Anything from just a simple tape recorder to the flat Earther's beloved Nikon p900 -- it may be theatre even in those cases, but the audience is also the performer (as well demonstrated in "Scientifical Americans" by Sharon Hill.)
 
JMartJr said:
For many of the amateur "research groups" (so NOT the Skinwalker Ranch folks) the tech helps THEM feel like they are doing something serious as well. Anything from just a simple tape recorder to the flat Earther's beloved Nikon p900 -- it may be theatre even in those cases, but the audience is also the performer (as well demonstrated in "Scientifical Americans" by Sharon Hill.)
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Like the crowd at a Hypnotist's show, eh? (I've been to one, and all it did was convince me that we're doomed as a species.)
 
Edward Current said:
Here's one from the other day — 3 whales doing a seemingly coordinated jump:


Source: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/07/28/triple-whale-breach-synchronized-jump-cprog-orig.cnn


This wasn't captured from multiple angles, and the people filming were expecting to see whales...but still it's pretty rare if not unique footage.
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That whale on the left looks like it has arms and is awkwardly posed enough that it could easily have been identified as a sea monk or some other sea cryptid if it was seen a few hundred years ago. Great pic!
 
yoshy said:
That whale on the left looks like it has arms and is awkwardly posed enough that it could easily have been identified as a sea monk or some other sea cryptid
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whales v hussein statue.JPG

Dammit, he's back again.
Or the whales are doing Saddam Hussein impressions, which would be a rare thing to document.
 
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I feel SpaceX launches are a good addition to this, they are planned and if you live in the area they might be somewhat regular (idk, I don't live in the area), but for people that don't know about the launch these are effectively rare events and essentially "UFOs"

For example Falcon 9 launched and several posts on r/UFOs came up of people that saw it (the posts have since then been deleted by moderators, but they showed videos of some stage of the launch)


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1b6sym0/saw_this_outside_no_idea_what_is_was/


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1b6tm0k/bad_language_weird_thing_saw_in_oklahoma/


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1b6t668/unidentified_object_shoots_out_ring_of_light/


This kind of thing happens often when there's a rocket launch, and it shows how a big "ufo" that is actually visible gets recorded by many people and many different angles. And these are all recordings of people that saw it and decided to film it and then ask what it is because they don't know about the launch, I imagine there's a lot more recordings of cameras that just happen to capture the launch or from people that record it and just send it around to share it as a cool thing they saw (knowing it is a rocket launch but not knowing there was a scheduled launch).

This doesn't really happen when there's a single video of a saucer with lights all around just casually flying just above some trees or stuff like that.
 
FatPhil said:
But are orbital launches "rare things", someones doing one every couple of days:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbital_launches_by_year
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From 2001 to 2016, the US has launched less than 2 per month (source https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Orbital_launches_by_country.tab ). 2022 had 78 US launches, distributed over several States, from Florida to California.

They're really only big attention-getters when the launch is in the dark when nonetheless many people are about. I think they're also fairly novel for places like Vandenberg and Mojave, I doubt people near Cape Canaveral would be fazed by them.
 
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FatPhil said:
But are orbital launches "rare things", someones doing one every couple of days:
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They don't fit the description in my original question, but it's a great example just because, to the photographer, they are unexpected. They also refute the claim that things in the sky at night subtler than a large meteor can't be photographed well by amateurs.

I'd expect UFO enthusiasts to counter that rocket launches last too long or their effects are too persistent to be comparable to those tricky UFOs that always manage to skedaddle before we can get our phones out.
 
Saw one of only 2 B-29s still flying go past yesterday, managed to grab my camera and shoot some video (a bit shaky, but very identifiable.) Went and looked at FlightRadar24 this morning, to see if it would say who owned it, but it only said "private owner." While I was doing that, my wife found coverage in the local paper which led us to information on "Doc," the restored B-29, and how if I'd known sooner I could have mortgaged to house and gone for a ride! I also noticed on FR24 this morning that it was coming back at that exact moment, so grabbed my camera and ran outside to take some stills. I won't submit those in evidence here, since I had some notice (to my knowledge, UFOs are not shown on FR24!) but the video was grabbed on the fly...

Here's the video. If this had been a spaceship from Omicron Persei 8, it would have been pretty obvious...

Source: https://youtu.be/WPOHfFmNNt8?t=81
 
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JMartJr said:
Aurora Borealis viewed from Charlotte, NC... looking SOUTH!
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Presumably related to this:
Article:
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) — a division of the National Weather Service — is monitoring the sun following a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that began on May 8. Space weather forecasters have issued a Severe (G4) Geomagnetic Storm Watch for the evening of Friday, May 10. Additional solar eruptions could cause geomagnetic storm conditions to persist through the weekend.
 
As a baseball fan and player, I think this one takes the cake. I found it on Facebook and cannot guarantee that it's genuine, but it seems to be. (The slow-mo replay synced to the real-time audio was apparently edited.) A kid in a game hit two balls with one swing — one of them coming from an adjacent field — virtually simultaneously:



Here's a coincidence that may have never happened before, and may be the only time it will ever happen...and yet. It was caught on camera.
 
Edward Current said:
So I wondered, what are some other events that have been very well documented that are more rare than the thousands-to-millions of UFO encounters that weren't documented well?
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There is a phenomenon I do find genuinely baffling, and it has to do with words or expressions. I'm sure we've all experienced this...yet I have never seen any scientific research on it.

The phenomenon is that of hearing a word or expression, often for the very first time, only to hear the exact same word or expression in a completely different context sometimes just minutes or a few hours later.

For example, the very same day I got offered a computer job in the 'actuarial' department of a company.....a word I had never heard before...the BBC News had a report on government 'actuaries' raising concern over some issue.

Or there's Feb 24th 2021, where a friend on Facebook introduces a physics idea by someone called Koopman....a pretty rare name. That same day...the Daily Mail had an article about the coronavirus, in which a Dr Marion Koopmans from the WHO comments on the coronavirus.

I have a list of such cases, some are truly bizarre and freaky and the above are fairly minor by contrast. Of course, the standard scientific explanation would be coincidence. But I then have to work out what are the chances of me going 40 years without hearing a word...only to hear it twice on the same day within hours. Clearly there are specific odds for this, but this sort of synchronicity is not a rare event and one also has to wonder what are the collective odds of so many bizarre 'coincidences'.
 
Scaramanga said:
There is a phenomenon I do find genuinely baffling, and it has to do with words or expressions. I'm sure we've all experienced this...yet I have never seen any scientific research on it.

The phenomenon is that of hearing a word or expression, often for the very first time, only to hear the exact same word or expression in a completely different context sometimes just minutes or a few hours later.
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Article:
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (also known as the Baader-Meinhof effect or the frequency illusion) is a name for the experience of learning of or encountering something for the first time and then very soon after encountering it again, often in multiple places. The sensation is thought to result from having an increased awareness of the thing after the first encounter.


There's always a German-sounding scientist with a phenomenon named after them.
 
LilWabbit said:
Article:
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (also known as the Baader-Meinhof effect or the frequency illusion) is a name for the experience of learning of or encountering something for the first time and then very soon after encountering it again, often in multiple places. The sensation is thought to result from having an increased awareness of the thing after the first encounter.


There's always a German-sounding scientist with a phenomenon named after them.
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It's named for a terrorist organization. From your source:

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is named for the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a 1970s German terrorist group. The name of the phenomenon is thought to have been coined by Terry Mullen, who explained his experience with it in a 1994 letter to a Minnesota newspaper.
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Scaramanga said:
For example, the very same day I got offered a computer job in the 'actuarial' department of a company.....a word I had never heard before...the BBC News had a report on government 'actuaries' raising concern over some issue.
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The day I was diagnosed with a post-head injury effect called benign positional vertigo (a completely new phrase to me, as well as a new sensation) there was an article in the local paper about one of the Cleveland Indians baseball players who was sidelined with exactly the same condition.

It's called a coincidence for a good reason, Scaramanga. A gazillion events happen in a day, so some of them are bound to overlap. The only time it strikes a person as strange is when WE ascribe meaning to it. You answer the phone to the same person you were thinking of calling, or you send a birthday card to a twin only to receive the exact same card yourself from him, or you and a friend start singing the same song at the same time. I'm sure each of those happens somewhere in the world every single day. It only seems unusual when it happens to you.
 
I was once listening to More Than This by Roxy Music and ended up stopping at a traffic light at a street called strand and was behind a Toyota Avalon, unfortunately the universe isn't as forthcoming with lottery numbers.
 
Ann K said:
It's called a coincidence for a good reason, Scaramanga. A gazillion events happen in a day, so some of them are bound to overlap. The only time it strikes a person as strange is when WE ascribe meaning to it.
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No, I think some of these events are too easy to just dismiss as 'coincidence'. Of course a lot of coincidences do occur but its mostly things with odds of maybe 1000 to 1 and we shrug it off as coincidence. But I can think of some instances where it is a case of 'what the ***** ' and one is dealing with odds of trillions or more.

For example. I play Eve Online. One day I was in a fleet sent to destroy a player owned structure that the player had given a rather unusual name.....a rude two word slang expression ( that I can't repeat here ). A term I had never heard before in my life and had no idea what it meant or even that it was rude.

The Eve mission was accomplished. I logged off, and 5 minutes later was in another MMO in a completely different environment and context, and someone used that exact same slang expression ( and explained what it meant ). Here you have an expression I'd never heard in 66 years on this planet, being used in two completely unrelated contexts just 5 minutes apart !

That's one heck of a 'coincidence'. One can even work out the rough odds of a totally new expression being heard again within 5 minutes over lets say a 50 years period...its about 1 in 5.2 million. So we're getting towards lottery type odds.
 
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Scaramanga said:
For example, the very same day I got offered a computer job in the 'actuarial' department of a company.....a word I had never heard before...the BBC News had a report on government 'actuaries' raising concern over some issue.
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Ann K said:
The day I was diagnosed with a post-head injury effect called benign positional vertigo (a completely new phrase to me, as well as a new sensation) there was an article in the local paper about one of the Cleveland Indians baseball players who was sidelined with exactly the same condition.
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Scaramanga said:
One day I was in a fleet sent to destroy a player owned structure that the player had given a rather unusual name.....a rude two word slang expression ( that I can't repeat here ). A term I had never heard before in my life and had no idea what it meant or even that it was rude.
The Eve mission was accomplished. I logged off, and 5 minutes later was in another MMO in a completely different environment and context, and someone used that exact same slang expression ( and explained what it meant ).
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What would you folks say to the idea that you might well have heard the words before that they didn't particularly stick in your mind until the time you happened to hear them a couple of times in rapid succession? Obviously I don't know that you had! But as I have been searching in another thread for comets that I saw as a kid, and have had a couple of other incidents in recent weeks call my attention to the fragility of memory, I would expect we've all heard a lot of words that didn't stick with us the first time(s).

Not trying to be confrontational, just conversational...
 
Scaramanga said:
I logged off, and 5 minutes later was in another MMO in a completely different environment and context, and someone used that exact same slang expression
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Maybe your two "sources" picked up/ were reminded of the phrase from the same source, or connected sources, and repeated it.
Like a TV catchphrase or a neologism is picked up in a short space of time by a few people, so you suddenly start hearing it.
 
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JMartJr said:
What would you folks say to the idea that you might well have heard the words before that they didn't particularly stick in your mind until the time you happened to hear them a couple of times in rapid succession? Obviously I don't know that you had! But as I have been searching in another thread for comets that I saw as a kid, and have had a couple of other incidents in recent weeks call my attention to the fragility of memory, I would expect we've all heard a lot of words that didn't stick with us the first time(s).
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Hmm. I don't think so. That assumes I hear a word of phrase and then forget it. But....I'll remember a word or phrase even if I don't know what it means at the time. For example there are all sorts of online acronyms, especially in computer games. I had no idea what the phrase 'Welp' means until recently. Its not one I see that often, but when I did finally look up what it means its not like I'd forgotten it or that I'd heard it before.

So its not like one is hearing some phrase on a semi-regular basis infrequently enough to forget it. It's cases where one has genuinely never heard a phrase or expression before.

The Baader-Meinhof effect is fascinating anyway.....its curiously related to the Mandela effect in that there is a sense that arises of the mind making up reality as it goes along.
 
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Scaramanga said:
I logged off, and 5 minutes later was in another MMO in a completely different environment and context, and someone used that exact same slang expression ( and explained what it meant )
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Are you sure that it wasn't the same player in that game? Or a friend or even just a countryman of the first one, where the expression was more common? The world of gaming consists of a fraction of the population (most likely to be male and young), so you've selected a fairly homogeneous body of individuals, and that changes your odds of any coincidence considerably.

Now let's consider the alternatives to coincidence. Are you suggesting some nebulous and undefined causative factor? One that causes me to ask "why?" and "how?" and "are you kidding me?" I cannot think of a single thing that would cause these things that isn't itself MUCH less likely than just coincidence.
 
Scaramanga said:
Hmm. I don't think so. That assumes I hear a word of phrase and then forget it. But....I'll remember a word or phrase even if I don't know what it means at the time. For example there are all sorts of online acronyms, especially in computer games. I had no idea what the phrase 'Welp' means until recently. Its not one I see that often, but when I did finally look up what it means its not like I'd forgotten it or that I'd heard it before.

So its not like one is hearing some phrase on a semi-regular basis infrequently enough to forget it. It's cases where one has genuinely never heard a phrase or expression before.
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You do not remember the phrases that you forget.
Therefore, to your memory, it's like you remember all of them (even though you don't).
It's a type of self-selection bias.
 
Scaramanga said:
For example. I play Eve Online. One day I was in a fleet sent to destroy a player owned structure that the player had given a rather unusual name.....a rude two word slang expression ( that I can't repeat here ). A term I had never heard before in my life and had no idea what it meant or even that it was rude.
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Do you remember the expression? If so, what was the expression?
 
Scaramanga said:
No, I think some of these events are too easy to just dismiss as 'coincidence'. Of course a lot of coincidences do occur but its mostly things with odds of maybe 1000 to 1 and we shrug it off as coincidence. But I can think of some instances where it is a case of 'what the ***** ' and one is dealing with odds of trillions or more.
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Fortunately with 5e9 people living about 2e4 days, there are 1e14 man-days for a one-in-a-trillion daily thing to happen during anyone's lifetime. So perhaps a hundred of them will occur during your life. And because they're so unusual to any individual and their locale, you will hear of them, as the stories will get into the news (complete with exageration through retelling, to make it seem even less likely by the time you get to hear about it.

For example. I play Eve Online. One day I was in a fleet sent to destroy a player owned structure that the player had given a rather unusual name.....a rude two word slang expression ( that I can't repeat here ). A term I had never heard before in my life and had no idea what it meant or even that it was rude.

The Eve mission was accomplished. I logged off, and 5 minutes later was in another MMO in a completely different environment and context, and someone used that exact same slang expression ( and explained what it meant ). Here you have an expression I'd never heard in 66 years on this planet, being used in two completely unrelated contexts just 5 minutes apart !

That's one heck of a 'coincidence'. One can even work out the rough odds of a totally new expression being heard again within 5 minutes over lets say a 50 years period...its about 1 in 5.2 million. So we're getting towards lottery type odds.
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That's not how probability works, you're pretending everything's independent, when clearly these events aren't. What were the chances you'd switch to that other MMO after completing the EO mission? You did it, so it can't be that unusual. What are the chances someone else would switch from EO to that other MMO after the mission? Probably not vastly dissimilar chances than yours. Now multiply that by the number of EO players quitting after the mission. There being a person coincidence really isn't looking that rare. And once you accept that, then the word coincidence rarity evaporates too. The phrase stood out to you. So it probably stood out to others. That it was used immediately after it being brought to their attention doesn't seem improbable at all.
 
That slang example also has a lot of factors to consider:

You're already in a linked context - they may be different MMOs but they're still open chat in an internet game and there's a lot of shared culture from Barrens General in World of Warcraft to the lobby of a Call of Duty match.

The older you are, the higher the probability that there's some hip new slang term *everywhere* that you have neither heard nor can comprehend without looking it up. The more prevalent these words become the more likely you will eventually encounter them. And the less connected you are to the current media of "the kids" the higher the chance becomes that you first encounter them when they reach critical mass and "the kids" parents start using it correctly and on purpose.


What I guess I'm saying is that scenario doesn't sound like a one in five million event... It sounds like being old on the internet.
 
I guess it's open to argument whether this clip shows something rare, but I might not have believed the extent of the natural adaptation shown here if someone described it to me without the video or photos.

If you haven't seen this clip- I'm not giving any clues! It's only 2 minutes 26 seconds.

Posted by the BBC c. 2020, on YouTube. Originally from BBC TV series Seven Worlds, One Planet.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DErwvIjaAE

(It's in Iran, IIRC.)
 
Not available in the US -- used a VPN to see it. Oddly I'd seen a YouTube video of the same phenomenon in the past week. Coincidences gonna coincide.
 
JMartJr said:
Not available in the US -- used a VPN to see it. Oddly I'd seen a YouTube video of the same phenomenon in the past week. Coincidences gonna coincide.
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C'mon, spill the beans and tell us what to look for on YouTube, since I can't see the original posting.
 
John J. said:
Damn.
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Grab this tasty morsel whilst it's fresh - I'll delete this some time in the next (...does a quick ls -lt...) sixteen years or so:
http://fatphil.org/tmp/tweet.webm
That's what I downloaded from the wonderful google servers, alas it's corrupted just as it gets to most important part, not sure if the Beeb or Googoo is to blame.
Youtube also has that segment with id snxddjX0h8E apparently not geoblocked, and I notice there's a similar vid with id XFjoqyVRmOU that is perhaps even squawkier.
(And to watch/download them, just put the vid's id at the end of the URL "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=".)

Seems to be from episode 2, "Asia", of this BBC/Attenborough series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Worlds,_One_Planet
 
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