I've had a look at some of the images and footage, and if that's the kind of thing that convinces people we've been visited by aliens, I'm going to write "give this man all your money. Signed, the aliens" on a post-it note and have a whip round from the loonies
The best evidence for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is that they haven't tried to contact us yet.
It also betrays a complete absence of a sense of humour. In their position, I'd definitely be ****ing with us.
In my entirely humble and modest opinion, I think I’ve trained extremely well for an alien invasion. I’ve finished XCOM: Enemy Unknown more times than I can count - I finished a run literally 10 minutes ago - and I’ve racked up 468 hours so far. And I’ve even beaten the original game, complete with the bug that cranks the difficulty all the way even if you selected the easiest option. Not to worry, I think I got this…
Possibly, possibly not. I haven’t personally seen the footage you’re referring to, but I have seen plenty of footage of “UFO sightings”. Even if we don’t know exactly what the “unidentified object” actually was, “alien spacecraft” is very far down the list in terms of probability. In the 80-odd years that people have been reporting & recording “UFO sightings”, there is so far exactly zero concrete, verifiable, unambiguous, and undeniable evidence that we have been visited by intelligent non-terrestrial lifeforms. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Ok, fuzzy, indistinct black or white blobs, in very poor quality videos, must be aliens. Brought to you by the same country, in which many people claim to have been abducted and probed, by aliens...
The video isn't poor quality, relatively speaking. It's a targeting camera, locked on using infrared/radar signature while both objects are traveling in the region of Mach 1 moving relative to each other at multiple mile range.
It's shonkey enough to not have a clearly defined outline, which would go a long way to show what it actually was. I think the important thing to note is despite people taking it to mean, UFO does not mean alien spacecraft, and the focus should be the "unidentified" part. We saw something, didn't know what it was so didn't engage, here's a report about it. Just because they couldn't identify it on mission, does not mean they haven't since identified it, you wouldn't let on to enemy forces that you knew the flight signatures of they're new aircraft/long range missle/drone/whizzy-go-bye-bye machine.
The "unidentified" in "unidentified flying object" means exactly that: it has not been conclusively identified. We see faces or recognisable objects in the almost-random distribution patterns of clouds. We anthropomorphise animals. We anthropomorphise inanimate objects. We're hard-wired to look for patterns in seemingly random noise, because it's how our ancestors were able to make a distinction between "a bunch of leaves in the jungle" and "a tiger's face hiding amongst a bunch of leaves in the jungle". We're technically blind when we move our eyes quickly, but we never even perceive it because our brains "fill in the gaps" by basically making an "educated guess" at "what we should have seen". Seriously: get your face right up close to a real mirror - not your phone's selfie camera or any other kind of camera/screen because your brain's processing lag is way smaller than any optical sensor technology we've created; now look around and try to see your eyes moving. You can't see your eyes moving, and you never will see your eyes moving, because of saccadic masking. It's also why analogue clocks seem to simply stop if you look at them in just the right way - aka 'chronostasis'. In short: your brain is a tricksy ******* that lies to you. Constantly. People see footage of "UFO sightings" and immediately leap to "alien spaceship". Not because they're "stupid", or mistaken, or don't understand what they're seeing; but because our brains have incredible neuroplasticity and we have 80+ years of cultural indoctrination that boils down to "UFOs = aliens". We see "UFOs" and immediately think "aliens" not because that's what's actually there; but because we're hard-wired to want to see things that are out of the ordinary. This is basically every single "UFO sighting" that's ever been recorded. "Yeah we're gonna file that under 'UFO' because it could be any one of the following: super-secret military test by 'The Good Guys'; sensor acting weird in a way we don't want to be exploited by 'The Enemy'; some kind of new thing made by 'The Enemy' we spotted and we don't want 'The Enemy' to know that we know about the new thing; or, dude, if you don't know then I don't know, because that's just a blurry and blobby mess".
Also once your brain gets stuck down one path it can become very hard to break free and assess the situation again, for example if you mishear a lyric in a song the first time you hear it you are highly likely to just mishear it again in the future, now apply that to something like an optical illusion...
In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Ford Prefect mentions "Teasers": usually rich kid aliens with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them, meaning that they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one's going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.
