Edward Current
Senior Member
Perhaps thousands of people have had a major, life-changing UFO experience, where they claim to have witnessed a craft taking up a large part of the sky, maybe hovering, suddenly accelerating off without a sound, etc. I encounter these people almost every day on Twitter, and their accounts can be very compelling. (Here's a YouTube link to a caller on a radio show describing his experience, and here's his description on Twitter.) Meanwhile, skeptics are incredulous of such extraordinary claims without the commensurate evidence. The response to "too bad you didn't get a picture" is usually a variation of one of the following: (1) I was too stunned; (2) it didn't occur to me; (3) it happened too fast; (4) a picture of what I saw wouldn't have turned out regardless.
But one thing I haven't come across is an attempted picture of such a major experience. No one has ever shown me an image and said, "I shot this when the craft was hovering 70 feet overhead — unfortunately, you can't see the anti-gravity machine in the picture, but trust me it was there."
Has anyone heard of such a thing? An experiencer who, rather than justifying why they didn't take a picture, did take a picture — it just doesn't show what they saw?
Every day, people take millions of photos of novel or weird stuff that they come across. For example, twin tornadoes forming and touching down (Twitter link). And there's no shortage at all of videos showing distant lights and blurry dots. Just not those up-close, astonishing, life-changing appearances…even in attempt.
Perhaps on some level during the experience, the mind realizes that it's imaging something that isn't in "meat space." The situation is fundamentally different from walking around at a restaurant coming across a soda machine that won't stop spewing ice, or whatever. Instead of being an otherwise ordinary waking state, it's something else. And, even though the experience may have been triggered by real lights or shapes in "meat space," the extraordinary aspect — the filling in of details — is subjective and exclusive to the experiencer. And, on some level, the experiencer knows this. They may even subconsciously realize that photography could falsify the account's extraordinary aspect, spoiling the magic.
Regardless, in an age when everyone seems to be always recording, witnessing a giant triangle or saucer in the sky is the one time people are committed to being in the moment.
There are more trivial explanations for cases, including that the incident happened before cell phones.
But one thing I haven't come across is an attempted picture of such a major experience. No one has ever shown me an image and said, "I shot this when the craft was hovering 70 feet overhead — unfortunately, you can't see the anti-gravity machine in the picture, but trust me it was there."
Has anyone heard of such a thing? An experiencer who, rather than justifying why they didn't take a picture, did take a picture — it just doesn't show what they saw?
Every day, people take millions of photos of novel or weird stuff that they come across. For example, twin tornadoes forming and touching down (Twitter link). And there's no shortage at all of videos showing distant lights and blurry dots. Just not those up-close, astonishing, life-changing appearances…even in attempt.
Perhaps on some level during the experience, the mind realizes that it's imaging something that isn't in "meat space." The situation is fundamentally different from walking around at a restaurant coming across a soda machine that won't stop spewing ice, or whatever. Instead of being an otherwise ordinary waking state, it's something else. And, even though the experience may have been triggered by real lights or shapes in "meat space," the extraordinary aspect — the filling in of details — is subjective and exclusive to the experiencer. And, on some level, the experiencer knows this. They may even subconsciously realize that photography could falsify the account's extraordinary aspect, spoiling the magic.
Regardless, in an age when everyone seems to be always recording, witnessing a giant triangle or saucer in the sky is the one time people are committed to being in the moment.
There are more trivial explanations for cases, including that the incident happened before cell phones.
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