Flashbulb

[JohnHoward]

About 10 posts above talks about hoaxes featuring battery powered blinking lights & balloons. Being the topic is “flashbulb” I’m reminded of a late night party trick from the 70s involving flash cubes. Those square “flashcubes” weighed a fraction of an ounce and were triggered, not by batteries, but by a shutter activated firing pin in the camera that broke a little tab or something. You could manually do the same with a paper clip. Pulled from a pocket and set off at the right time they were a little stoners pyrotechnic show.
What would a flashcube on a party ballon, activated by a time delay device look like if set off at hundreds or thousands of feet altitude?

 

[JMartJr]

What would a flashcube on a party ballon, activated by a time delay device look like if set off at hundreds or thousands of feet altitude?

whattaya know, you can still get flash cubes! Would not have expected that -- shows the value of checkinginstead of just going with an assumption! ^_^

 

[Ann K]

About 10 posts above talks about hoaxes featuring battery powered blinking lights & balloons. Being the topic is “flashbulb” I’m reminded of a late night party trick from the 70s involving flash cubes. Those square “flashcubes” weighed a fraction of an ounce and were triggered, not by batteries, but by a shutter activated firing pin in the camera that broke a little tab or something. You could manually do the same with a paper clip. Pulled from a pocket and set off at the right time they were a little stoners pyrotechnic show.
What would a flashcube on a party ballon, activated by a time delay device look like if set off at hundreds or thousands of feet altitude?

I thought they were just for photography. Damn, I've led a sheltered life!

 

[davo27]

If we believe you and you see them everytime you go out, then obviously they are not unusual in your location. (and if they were aliens then the amateur and professional astronomers in your location would be telling people.



i don't understand how this makes sense. so the premise here is that you are not seeing extraterrestrials, and you are not seeing satellites...rather your special group are the only ones who can see these things because you are specialer than us?

is this like how only certain people can see fairies? if you want to find out how rare or not-rare it is for people to see fairies, then this is the wrong site for you because 'you have to believe' in order to see fairies and skeptics tend not to believe in magical thinking.

(ps i see flashing lights in the sky all the time. not as much if i have my glasses on. even with glasses i always figured it was my bad vision, as my prescription isnt 20/20. 20/20 makes me dizzy as i tend to only wear my glasses if driving which apparently i dont do enough to 'get use to' full vision. so my optometrist leaves my prescription just enough to drive safe. Now i know many of those flashes are satellites.)

The premise here is that I've seen something which I think my be a bit spooky (*my* best description here until we have a better understanding of how this part of alleged reality works).

Counterclaims have been made that what I've seen is prosaic and not unusual. I've inferred that this means this type of non-unsual observation could be made anywhere (this may be a false assumption).

This is not a competition for me. I'm genuinely interested in figuring this out. If the claim is that this is an easy observation to make, that seems like a claim that would be easily falsifiable.

Until I'm able to gather better quality data, I'm looking to knock the low hanging fruit off the possibility list, which I figured was the right way to go about this.

Oh, and I don't see them *every* time I go out. I take the dog outside every night, and look up every time the sky's clear. I never see these flashes then. I've only seen them on the 2 occasions I've gone out as part of a group. The cumulative time I've spent looking at the sky outside of the group settings vastly exceeds the group occasions.

Other than the fact that I'm open to the possibility of a non-conventional answer here which offends conventional thinking, I don't get the push back on the request for additional data (which to me, appears to be more ideological than practical). There are a lot of people viewing this site. I'm not expecting anyone to go 'running errands', just someone who may be interested, spend 20 minutes looking at the sky (I'm sure that plenty of people here are doing this anyway), and report whether they made the same observation or not.

 

[davo27]

About 10 posts above talks about hoaxes featuring battery powered blinking lights & balloons. Being the topic is “flashbulb” I’m reminded of a late night party trick from the 70s involving flash cubes. Those square “flashcubes” weighed a fraction of an ounce and were triggered, not by batteries, but by a shutter activated firing pin in the camera that broke a little tab or something. You could manually do the same with a paper clip. Pulled from a pocket and set off at the right time they were a little stoners pyrotechnic show.
What would a flashcube on a party ballon, activated by a time delay device look like if set off at hundreds or thousands of feet altitude?

I love the out of the box thinking! Again, seems incredibly elaborate, but who knows? My memory of these is pretty hazy - were these flashes a shorter duration than 0.5-1 second?

 

[FatPhil]

Those square “flashcubes” weighed a fraction of an ounce and were triggered, not by batteries, but by a shutter activated firing pin in the camera that broke a little tab or something. You could manually do the same with a paper clip. Pulled from a pocket and set off at the right time they were a little stoners pyrotechnic show.
What would a flashcube on a party ballon, activated by a time delay device look like if set off at hundreds or thousands of feet altitude?

My memory of my early exposure to cameras is rusty, I'm not sure I actually had a flash cube mount on anything I owned, even though I clearly remember the existence of the cubes (I can even tell you which of the kitchen cupboards my parents kept them in). Almost in disbelief, I had to go off and verify that firing pin mechanism was real, and this is what I found:

https://www.lightstalking.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/flashcube-copy.jpg.webp
via: https://www.lightstalking.com/flashcubes/

Yeah, pretty sure I never owned such a camera. I have learnt something today - thank you!

 

[deirdre]

just someone who may be interested, spend 20 minutes looking at the sky (I'm sure that plenty of people here are doing this anyway), and report whether they made the same observation or not.

i see. well i dont know about everyone else who lives in the northern hemisphere, but im not doing it now simply because it's too cold to stand outside looking at the sky at 3:00 in the morning when i dont even know if the sun angle is right for my part of the world compared to yours.

if i remember next spring/summer and am out at 3am i'll try to remember what i see and report back.

 

[davo27]

i see. well i dont know about everyone else who lives in the northern hemisphere, but im not doing it now simply because it's too cold to stand outside looking at the sky at 3:00 in the morning when i dont even know if the sun angle is right for my part of the world compared to yours.

if i remember next spring/summer and am out at 3am i'll try to remember what i see and report back.

Massive empathy for not wanting to go out in the cold. Please don't.

Not directed at you, but just to clarify: our group outings have been just after sunset (higher chance of these being LEO observations), someone in the group has been making his own observations throughout the night - so information from any time as well would be useful.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

If we believe you and you see them everytime you go out, then obviously they are not unusual in your location. (and if they were aliens then the amateur and professional astronomers in your location would be telling people.

i don't understand how this makes sense. so the premise here is that you are not seeing extraterrestrials, and you are not seeing satellites...rather your special group are the only ones who can see these things because you are specialer than us?

is this like how only certain people can see fairies? if you want to find out how rare or not-rare it is for people to see fairies, then this is the wrong site for you because 'you have to believe' in order to see fairies and skeptics tend not to believe in magical thinking.

(ps i see flashing lights in the sky all the time. not as much if i have my glasses on. even with glasses i always figured it was my bad vision, as my prescription isnt 20/20. 20/20 makes me dizzy as i tend to only wear my glasses if driving which apparently i dont do enough to 'get use to' full vision. so my optometrist leaves my prescription just enough to drive safe. Now i know many of those flashes are satellites.)

I haven't educated myself deeply about about the CE5 Experience thing, but I think it goes something like this:

You go into a transom trance. You send psychic signals to your friendly neighborhood Aliens. They send back a psychic message. This is a close encounter of the 5th kind. CE5, get it?

The lowest order, entry level type CE5 experience is seeing a "Flashbulb." Because it's a purely psychic experience... well of course ordinary people can't see it. It's not light.

When you get more adept, you get deeper psychic messages. Peace, love, oneness with the Universe. That kind of thing.

 

[davo27]

I haven't educated myself deeply about about the CE5 Experience thing, but I think it goes something like this:

You go into a transom trance. You send psychic signals to your friendly neighborhood Aliens. They send back a psychic message. This is a close encounter of the 5th kind. CE5, get it?

The lowest order, entry level type CE5 experience is seeing a "Flashbulb." Because it's a purely psychic experience... well of course ordinary people can't see it. It's not light.

When you get more adept, you get deeper psychic messages. Peace, love, oneness with the Universe. That kind of thing.

Yes and no - I'm far from an expert. Beyond the basics, I haven't delved too deeply. I think Steven Greer may've initially done some useful work, but as best as I can tell he appears to be a narcissist - with all the unpleasantness that that entails. It's a generic process that he didn't come up with. I don't think there are any rules; I believe that at its most basic it's supposed to be about quieting the mind/focus, and intent.

I think you bring up an interesting point that this may be described as a psychic phenomenon, rather than actual light. That's not something I'd considered, despite there being a lot of conjecture that experiencer/abduction events may well be some form of mind interference rather than physical events. This isn't something I opine on one way or the other, although there is some discussion about it from some of the less nutty people in the UFO space. We were mindful in the group setting to attempt to rule out some form of group hysteria/delusion. We each gained definite impressions and cross-checked the details we held, trying to not be influenced by the others' impressions. We're interested and perhaps naive, but not nutty.

On the other hand, I've seen photos (I've given up trying to assess the credibility or not, of photos/videos I see. Combination of never being quite good enough, and too easy to hoax these days. I note them as interesting and think little more about them.) of purported unusual lights/craft/beings from CE5 events. As I said - they're not much use to me, but some people present them as legitimate. *If* that's the case, that points to them not simply being psychic events.

I'm not really sure where increasing adeptness leads. If there's psychic activity involved (very big if...), I'm not even sure what that means - innate ability, or some form of technological process? I understand that we're currently in the infancy of being able to use technology to implant imagery in peoples' minds?

Initiating contact this way would on the surface seem to point to an innate ability, but perhaps some type of technology could scan brain function at a macro scale ***if*** this was a plausible type of technology. I don't know - I don't believe these things, but I wouldn't 100% rule them out either (I'm coming from a starting point of thinking something is going on). I'm just following thought possibilities on your prompting. This may be getting quite a ways off topic. (I'm starting to learn, I think, Landru).

 

[deirdre]

You send psychic signals to your friendly neighborhood Aliens. They send back a psychic message.

ah. then we're gonna have to ask Rory to come back to do the before-psychic-attempt and the after-psychic-attempt experiment, because there is no way i'm letting aliens into my head. (even though logically i know it's much much more likely you are just connecting with angels, but why risk it).

 

[davo27]

ah. then we're gonna have to ask Rory to come back to do the before-psychic-attempt and the after-psychic-attempt experiment, because there is no way i'm letting aliens into my head. (even though logically i know it's much much more likely you are just connecting with angels, but why risk it).

Sounds interesting - in a definitely previously debunked kinda way...

 

[Mendel]

That's not something I'd considered, despite there being a lot of conjecture that experiencer/abduction events may well be some form of mind interference rather than physical events. This isn't something I opine on one way or the other, although there is some discussion about it from some of the less nutty people in the UFO space.

Personally, I would not label anyone who considers "mind interference" as "less nutty".
This is what the cliché tinfoil hats are supposed to protect against.

The whole "group event CE5 meditation" thing is mind interference, but it has no alien source, it's you doing it to yourselves.

 

[Mendel]

I understand that we're currently in the infancy of being able to use technology to implant imagery in peoples' minds?

Cinemas are old technology.

scan brain function at a macro scale

this is either meaningless, trivial, or requires very expensive apparatus installed in medical facities.
And even then it can't do what they do in the movies.

 

[davo27]

Cinemas are old technology.

this is either meaningless, trivial, or requires very expensive apparatus installed in medical facities.
And even then it can't do what they do in the movies.

If I'm not confabulating, I'm sure I've read about experiments using magnetic impulses to affect the visual cortex - not in an effective way, rather first baby steps. I may be wrong about this. There is, as I'm sure you're aware, ability to similarly fish some imagery from the brain. I'm aware of the gulf between what I've suggested as a possibility, and the limitations of fMRI (as described in this article), however, regardless of method, I think that the proof of concept of fishing info out of the brain has been established. Who knows how this technology may be able to be expanded upon in the future?

https://www.science.org/content/article/mind-reading-algorithm-can-decode-pictures-your-head

Content from External Source

All I'm trying to do here is illustrate that it's conceivable that with sufficient technological advancement, some of these things may be possible.

 

[Mendel]

I'm sure I've read about experiments using magnetic impulses to affect the visual cortex - not in an effective way, rather first baby steps.

a cursory google search shows me that this method does not "implant imagery" in any way. if you have read different, please cite a source.

There is, as I'm sure you're aware, ability to similarly fish some imagery from the brain.

My awareness is that this is purely science fiction. Basically, based on vague hints the AI sort of guesses what the person saw.

Article:

The researchers took this training one step further, by teaching an A.I. model to link functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data with images.

Together, these two models allowed Stable Diffusion to turn fMRI data into relatively accurate imitations of images that were not part of the A.I. training set. Based on the brain scans, the first model could recreate the perspective and layout that the participant had seen, but its generated images were of cloudy and nonspecific figures. But then the second model kicked in, and it could recognize what object people were looking at by using the text descriptions from the training images. So, if it received a brain scan that resembled one from its training marked as a person viewing an airplane, it would put an airplane into the generated image, following the perspective from the first model. The technology achieved roughly 80 percent accuracy.



“This is not practical for daily use at all,” says Sikun Lin, a computer scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara who was not involved with the project, to New Scientist’s Carissa Wong.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-ai-used-brain-scans-to-recreate-images-people-saw-180981768/

Based on the included image (landing aircraft/clock tower/heart-shaped kite/steam engine), I'd put the accuracy at less than 6%, because it only identified the steam engine once and then guessed a completely different model of engine, and missed everything else.

fMRI machine:


Compare:

this is either meaningless, trivial, or requires very expensive apparatus installed in medical facities.
And even then it can't do what they do in the movies.

 

[davo27]

@Mendel everything you say here is correct.

 

[Ann K]

ah. then we're gonna have to ask Rory to come back to do the before-psychic-attempt and the after-psychic-attempt experiment, because there is no way i'm letting aliens into my head. (even though logically i know it's much much more likely you are just connecting with angels, but why risk it).

Well ...no. It's more likely that aliens exist than angels, for starters, because their existence doesn't require any appeal to the supernatural. And surely that would be essential for any "mind control", that the perpetrator actually exist.

 

[JMartJr]

Mendel's post 3 up from here earns a "like" just for the heart shaped kite picture... Now back to your thread.

 

[Easy Muffin]

My pushback is only aimed at this hypothetical (as we can't be sure of the data). So many observations of flashes in a small window, on 2 separate nights seems to be very unlikely to me. I'm not asking for anyone to run errands, I'm simply asking for those making this claim to back it up - if you're postulating that these observations are not unusual, show me that they're not unusual.

Fair enough. I got the impression it's not unusal but I wasn't there with you, of course. Maybe you're right and it was - I guess I'd just like to see harder evidence than a retelling.

** Lot's of intent here to be snark free. I'm not always very good with social niceties. I'm sure we could have a laugh together if we were doing this face to face.

Yeah, no hard feelings at all. I'd love to see the southern sky for myself one day!

 

[John J.]

I'm sure I've read about experiments using magnetic impulses to affect the visual cortex

Electromagnetism is subject to the inverse square law, so you'd need an extremely powerful source to have any effect on the nervous system at even a few tens of metres.

And it's hard to imagine a technology using electromagnetism that could pinpoint the appropriate parts of the visual system, from a considerable distance, in a number of close-together individuals so that they all see a flash in the same part of the sky.

We've known since Werner Penfield that direct electrical stimulation of the brain can evoke visual imagery; more recently transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been used (with a fluctuating magnetic field in very close proximity to the scalp) to induce electrical currents in the brain for various research and therapeutic purposes. (I suspect that the claims made for TMS in some areas of therapy are over-optimistic, but maybe that's for another thread).

Astronauts- particularly the Apollo astronauts- report(ed) seeing anomalous flashes, which are believed to be caused by cosmic rays, although the exact mechanism (or mechanisms- there are a number of plausible explanations) haven't been determined
(Wikipedia article "Cosmic ray visual phenomena",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena

Charged particles (like the protons or atomic nuclei that make up cosmic rays) can be artificially accelerated up to very high speeds and aimed precisely at a target- of course, such a particle has a good chance of colliding with matter in Earth's atmosphere; but a sufficiently productive and energetic source might allow a charged particle beam, delivering an "effective" number of particles onto a small target after substantial travel through the atmosphere.

Maybe the lights you see aren't the space brothers peacefully acknowledging your CE5 attempts:
Maybe they're zeroing their weapons!

 

[FatPhil]

Electromagnetism is subject to the inverse square law, so you'd need an extremely powerful source to have any effect on the nervous system at even a few tens of metres.

It's more complicated than that, that's just the static part, Coulumb's law - there's a component to the electromagnetic force, caused by the *acceleration* of charged particles which induces a force on another charged particle proportional to the inverse of the distance between them, not its square (relativity is not forgotten about here). It might sound as if this would cause effects to grow without bound (as the accelerations on all target particles later induce a force back on the original wiggler, and all the other targets for that matter, and so on /ad infinitum/), but the propagation isn't equal in all directions, it kinda only has to spread out over a circle, not a sphere, so it all magically stays energy-preserving.

I'm not a physicist, the above is only true to hand-waving levels of accuracy (e.g. anything quantum has been ignored), and I know I'm pretty terrible at explaining things like this. Please consult a real physicist for more info.