Search results

I may have said this before, either here or somewhere else, but one thing (not necessarily the only thing) that would convince me that aliens had visited us would be finding a message, in some human language, in a prominent public place, saying followed by a proof that satisfies...

I would find the 'thousands of credible witnesses over many decades' argument persuasive, at least to dispose me favourably towards accepting that aliens have visited earth, except that the same argument would apply to ghosts, sympathetic magic, witches, precognition, and a bunch of other stuff...

Yes, but the Soviet Luna program did have three successful land-and-return missions to the moon, and brought back lunar soil samples. OK, not a planet, but often forgotten.

Thanks. Yes, the images in post #22 are the kind of thing I was looking for. They do show some change between the beginning and end of the supposed satellite video, but: a) the changes are very small, compared either with other satellite images or theoretical expectations from the speed of a...

I noticed that one of the Corridor Crew guys said that contrails don't show up in infrared, in which case someone had better delete the pages and pages of IR contrail photos here on Metabunk! There seems to be an issue over whether the clouds etc in the video show parallax, as you would expect...

Just curious: is there any known government/military IR sensor system (FLIR, etc) which would give images in color? Looking through Google Images for IR photos there do seem to be some color images (e.g. in this commercial piece)...

That depends what you mean by an inertial frame. If we reject Newton's Absolute Space, there is probably no way of defining an exactly inertial frame, but for practical purposes some frames come closer to the ideal than others. Over a short period of time the surface of the earth would be...

By a uniform gravitational field I meant one in which the direction and strength of the gravitational force is uniform, i.e. which does not vary in different parts of the field. I think this is consistent with respected usage, but even if it isn't, it is an intelligible concept. In Einstein's...

The claim was about the frame of reference, not the object. A frame of reference in which the free-falling object is static would not be an inertial frame as usually defined*. *You may be thinking in terms of Einstein's Principle of Equivalence, which implies that a set of objects all of...

I don't know about that, but I forgot to mention Harry S. Truman as one of the 'interested' Presidents covered in the article. I'm not vouching for the accuracy of Graff's article, just drawing it to readers' attention. It's not a peer-reviewed historical paper. No footnotes! There are...

Via a reference in the UK Times today, I found an article in the magazine/website Politico , dated November 17 2023, credited to Garrett M. Graff, with the headline "Which Presidents have seen UFOs? Yep, it's more than one." This is not to be confused with another article in the same journal...

Thanks for your very clear explanations. I probably wasn't clear enough myself. The aim of my first para was to set out as strongly as I could why 9/11 'truthers' find the 'free fall' argument persuasive. The argument leads them to the 'either-or' choice I described. My next para pointed out...

Surely the underlying idea is that 'free fall speed' would be incompatible with any simple theory of sequential collapse, which 9/11 conspiracy theorists assume (rightly or wrongly) is the 'official' explanation of the collapse of the Twin Towers (and possibly WTC7, but that gets more...

Not strictly true. Humans, and their ancestors going back at least a few hundred thousand years, most definitely do hunt elephants. Not just big game hunters, but indigenous peoples. Some of the pygmies of West Central Africa have very effective, if rather nasty, methods of killing forest...

Just to expand a bit on a point I made briefly in my post #5 above: The control of evolutionary processes might take several forms, such as selective reproduction (eugenics), genetic engineering, or biochemical controls (as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World). The direction in which such...

It certainly is! That doesn't make it good usage. As I recall, many of the people who were labelled as climate change 'deniers' preferred to be described as 'skeptics' (or 'sceptics' in the UK), which is more polite, arguably more accurate, and only one letter longer than 'denier'. For...

In general I think Metabunk's politeness policy is about right, and I say that as someone who has occasionally fallen foul of it. The policy allows robust debate and disagreement but not insults or imputations of dishonesty. There are of course borderline cases. Personally I think the term...

That's an encouraging thought, but to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, human history suggests that we shouldn't be too optimistic. It is true that historical empires have all (so far) tended to collapse, for a variety of internal and external reasons, but they may do a great deal of damage...

A while ago Richard Dawkins coined the term 'universal Darwinism' to express the concept that if complex life has emerged anywhere in the universe, it must have evolved in accordance with the same principles of natural selection which he believes have applied on Earth. This does not imply that...

I agree. I took it for granted that at least 99.99% of UFO reports are nonsense! I was just musing on whether we should welcome the existence of alien life or not. I think that when the conquistadors arrived in Mexico some of the inhabitants initially welcomed them as gods. That didn't end...