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Here is an interesting video from Manitoba. Almost certainly flares, but it would be nice to confirm that. https://in.mashable.com/science/78131/ufo-or-false-alarm-couple-baffled-after-spotting-mysterious-lights-in-canada At one point the two initial objects seem to move very rapidly...

I agree, and that presumably means we are in an alternate without time travel, which is probably a good thing.

Niven (who wrote the Svetz stories) also discusses an interesting temporal conjecture - the Chronological Protection Conjecture; in any universe where time travel is invented the historical timeline keeps changing until time travel is never even invented, which is the only stable condition.

If the universe allowed time travel, I'd expect a flood of refugees coming back from the Heat Death of the Universe to live in our more comfortable environment; this would happen exponentially (and instantly), causing the universe to collapse in a Big Crunch due to the excess (unconserved) mass...

The fact that the ends of the green beam are rounded is not necessarily proof that this is not a rolling shutter effect. In the Tom Scott video upthread the ends of the beam he is using are definitely tapered, rather than cutting off at right angles; it seems that the beam still continues to be...

One thing that occurs to me is that the LASD helicopter was in some danger flying so near to a tethered balloon. One hopes they were taking appropriate safety measures.

Was this an anonymous post on Facebook or some other social media? Usually a clue that the video is CGI. A helicopter flying around a UAP would attract a lot more attention than a single post on social media.

The questions seem to assume that they are talking about a particular government. Some governments are more corrupt than others, so if you cherry-pick all the worst governments around the world you'll get a high score, but if you choose a relatively well-behaved government the score will be low...

Phil Plait nailed it in that article. The rock has several species of terrestrial diatoms embedded in it, and a few no-one has managed to identify; obviously the terrestrial diatoms came from Earth, so why should we expect that the unknown ones are extraterrestrial?

That's correct - but most biologists who are looking for a shadow biosphere are looking for exotic microbes, rather than sentient beings.

My daughter (a PhD) had as a lecturer Milton Wainwright, a maverick microbiologist who has made many unusual claims about life-forms which came from space. Here's his IMDB page; he's been on Ancient Aliens, NASA' Unexplained files, and has published several papers on his (bat-crazy) theories...

Kappa Cassiopeiae (4000 ly) and Rho Cassiopeiae (8100 ly) are two of the most distant stars which are visible to the naked eye - both are unusually bright and large, and extraordinarily distant. From our viewpoint they are right next to Eta Cassiopeiae, which is a sun-like star 19 light years...

A common misperception. None of the visible stars we can see in the sky are anywhere near as distant as a million light years. Alpha Centauri is only four light years away, Sirius is eight - even a really distant star like Deneb is only 1500 light years way, and it is a relatively simple...

Was the tower illuminated by a searchlight for some reason? That would make it appear taller and more visible at a distance, as well as creating a conic effect. Perhaps they were adjusting the light display prior to activating it for the Easter festival, and illuminating the work site with some...

This is the aspect that has always intrigued me. If the light from the headlights were 'bent' by some mysterious light-bending effect, then the light reflected by the road coming back towards the observer would be bent as well, so the headlight beam would appear straight. Light always follows a...

The original video shows 'pulses' of light travelling across the sky. I wonder if these are more 'rolling shutter' artefacts, like the ones we may have seen in this thread. https://www.metabunk.org/threads/skinwalker-ranch-laser-beam-stops-and-starts-in-mid-air.13479/ This could still be a...

I'd expect that any 'shadow biosphere' or any extraterrestrial tissue would be fairly easy to distinguish from terrestrial biota. The DNA of all organisms found on Earth so far shows that we are all descended from a last common ancestor; I'd expect shadow biosphere or extraterrestrial tissue to...

I've read a few attempts to imagine a universe where causality can be violated. One is the Novikov Self-consistency principle; where effect can precede cause, but only if it is self-consistent. That is to say, if you go back in time and try to change events, you can't change them. So you would...

The 'shadow biosphere' hypothesis is quite a significant one, and the fact we haven't found one seems to show that evolution is real, but suggests to me that local abiogenesis is much more important than panspermia in the development of life in the Cosmos. As @Ann K notes, the fact that every...

It is a question of 'false positives' and 'false negatives'. It seems very likely that there are many 'false positives' that can and do occur in the search for extraterrestrial life; this could extend to the detection of oxygen on a distant planet (which could be caused by non-biotic chemical...