IIRC this was a study (survey?) done by a American company.
There are tons of UFO sighting in plenty of non-NA or EU countries such as Brazil and South Africa
^ this is true.
This post is insanely misleading.
^ this guy is right.
^ made the right call here
^ ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I'd like to add that for many countries like mine, a UFO sighting wouldn't even register as "unidentified" or having an outer space origin. The locals would attribute it to something religious instead.
Berrrrr. VWOOP! widdle widdle, shooom. Pew, pew, pew. Buh luh luh luh luh luh. So sayeth the lord. Amen.
And now we paint ourselves green and dance in his shiny circular beamy holy goodness.
You ain’t gotta give, but I’m taking donations. If your neighbor don’t drop a dollarydoo in the plate, don’t judge him too harshly.
LOL I'd donate
I was wondering why the sightings were dominated by English speaking countries, this may be the reason. Thanks.
This is just a heatmap of English speakers.
If you think the most English speakers live in the US and UK I've got some very surprising news for you
Most native speakers live in the U.S. and the UK based on population numbers. We're talking over 400 million native speakers.
But as far non-native speakers, Google tells me that's India. But most English speakers in India don't speak it as their first language. They learned it in school, they didn't grow up speaking it at home.
As a Canadian, I must say:
Bonjour
Gor-la-mi
That's because the source of the data is an English website which collected only English reports.
I prefer to believe that the anglos are just conspiracy-brained morons.
Or maybe we're just really bored and stupid.
I suspect chronic boredom is widespread but almost no one realises it.
One of our chief industries is entertainment. Everyone knows it.
How many people eat food because they know they need it vs because they just want it. I think chronic boredom is like that but worse and far more subtle. It amplifies a lot of our other issues, such as adhd and obesity.
And I don't think you need to be bored to enjoy good entertainment. Not to mention the industry runs on greed mostly. It would be in their interest that people didn't find the problem as that could lead to people finding a cure. How would e.g. Netflix keep profiting from producing such poor content? How about those who profit so much from feeding ads to our brain dead states?
This is my biggest problem with believing anything alien related; how come all of the video evidence is taken on a phone camera from 2001, and the fact basically all sightings happen in the US?
The people making this shit up have to try harder than that!
The UK is just as bright on that map.
Oh, our cultural colony follows in our footsteps?
Quite the shocker from Airstrip One over there.
There's a somewhat rational theory that Roswell happened because it was the site of the nuclear bomb testings and aliens "only try to contact civs that are at splitting the atom tech level".
It has some merit to it, but yeah, look at that map. Hardly convincing when looking at the reported sightings.
Because that's where the freak show is.
I think its a mix of idiots everywhere, and the government secretly testing prototype aircraft. The idiots see the prototype aircraft, don't recognize it, and immediately go "eyljuhns!"
Or more accurately, total classified air flights. There's a reason so many reports happen near US military facilities.
This looks more like a map of any English speaking news source I would see online.
I mean I see us politics and us topics on lemmy and my local newspaper all the time, but hardly ever hear anything from far away places like Ghana, Romania, south America, middle east or south east asia unless in specifically look for it on some lesser known sites.
The official language of Ghana is English. They have plenty of news online, you just don't know about it.
It's not English that aliens are attracted to, we are imagining them. UFOs appeared when humans gained the ability to fly. Their ships got faster and more maneuverable as ours did. We are literally just seeing illusions, many of which we create.
I'm pretty sure they polled English speakers. As someone who likes speculating about aliens, I was blown away when I discovered how common it is for people to claim to see aliens in countries like Brazil. You just don't hear about it because most of it is in Portuguese. I wouldn't be too surprised if most countries had similar levels of "sightings" but cultures are more geared towards people having a "huh, not my problem" kind of response, view it as some kind of religious event, or are too preoccupied with other things to notice anything strange in the sky. The result is that the map would be skewed towards countries with america-like cultures (if we assume it's a cultural difference, then the US would appear to be the most susceptible to not only attributing unusual properties to strange sky objects, but also be the most likely to speak up about them).
That is because people are morons and don't know how cameras work. Even the military thinks things like low flying geese are some how aliens, when clearly their evidence is to the contrary. I am not saying that there aren't aliens. They probably do exist, but the evidence we keep getting shown for it is laughable.
Americans trying to explain why the map looks like this
Do you think the US has more people than all of Asia or something?
No, but in this case it's not just population. If some potato farmer in northern Asia sees a UFO (especially before the proliferation of smartphones), how would it be reported and appear on this map? Lots of other reports come from pilots and such and again, far different distribution between continents.
When the first dinosaur bone was discovered, noone had heard about it before and people believed that bones they found before were from some animals
After people knew about dinosaurs they started finding them other places in the world at a rapid pace. Many people thought it was all a hoax
So you know, unless you know about them you don't know what to report. And americans think most about aliens I guess.
That being said, probably there aren't secret aliens around. probably 🫣
So... what were they mistaking the aliens for?
I mean, the actual verified "alien craft" in America is actually more of a "not sure what that is" grainy footage in an age where Donald Trump tweeted out classified satellite images that showed the cameras we use are actually far more advanced and show far more detail than any we knew existed. And that technology was over a decade old at the time!
My guess is secret and experimental technologies being tested by the military.
I think its like bigfoot / mothman etc - once someone in your area is talking about seeing a thing, it increases the likelihood you will think you saw that thing specifically next time you see something that would be otherwise unexplainable to you
So… what were they mistaking the aliens for?
Ghosts. Spirits. Dragons. Or any other mythical creatures, or mythical phenomena of your choice.
If there were aliens, those are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And those are the descriptions I would expect in basically all the world, almost everywhere that isn't the US, even today.
So it couldn't be Americans mistaking ghosts for aliens? Or bigfoot, a creature that we haven't been able to verify because their culture advanced past ours and is able to cloak themselves and occasionally go on joyrides in their more advanced technology and forget to turn on the cloaking device? We have just as much evidence for all of these things.
You didn't get the point I made.
No, I'm pretty sure I fully understand you. I'm just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don't understand as fantastical things. There aren't ghosts, spirits, dragons or aliens that have secretly visited earth but choses not to make actual contact. My point is that all of those things are equally unlikely. I assumed my over-the-top absurdity made that clear.
And I feel like you might be underestimating literally all of the world if you think these things are actually aliens. You're implying that they would assume something they don't understand is some mystical nonsense. That "almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today" is superstitious and wouldn't know what aliens are.
I’m just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don’t understand as fantastical things.
Yes.
As I said: If there were aliens, those fantastical things, are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And in most non US places. After all, aliens are a modern US legend, invented from Americans, for Americans.
I didn't say that there were any aliens anywhere. Or that there were any other fantastical things anywhere.
That “almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today” is superstitious and wouldn’t know what aliens are
Didn't we just establish that aliens are superstition? I think you are overestimating how many people share "aliens" as the most popular superstition which comes to mind first.
Most of the US shares that. A lot of other places probably don't. Don't underestimate how many strange stories about strange things in the night are out there :D
Ya know what? I misread this interaction. My bad. I didn't realize we were arguing the same point. The last week has shown a lot of people on this site arguing fervently for the case of aliens visiting earth, and I made assumptions. I'm sorry buddy.
No worries! I hope I was not too much of a dick in my response, and I totally understand why and how you would read things the way you did. I'll just try to express myself more clearly in the future. You know, this communication thing? It's a never ending struggle! :D
It sure is. In my life and job I go out of my way to be very exact in my language, but that was a skill I had to learn after years of interactions like this, where I've been on both sides of the misunderstanding. And I still struggle not sounding like a robot when I explain things clearly. English is an expansive language with a lot of utility, but the flipside is that meaning can often be ambiguous and require lots of words to be clear.
I have several relatives who "see" plots all the time. Every time I deal with them I get to hear about them. Bet you didn't know that there is a plot to turn frogs gay and convert our children into drag queens.
They sound like they do their own research. What lovely, intellectual people.
You don't choose your family.
The USA is very interested in aliens*
This is the answer, close the thread.
Meanwhile the Netherlands chilling with the extraterrestrials.
Maybe that's where they got their terraforming abilities.
or the aliens are just us experimental stealth planes
And what's that weird dividing line in the middle? Do they just stop and go: "nope, gotta focus on the East Coast, sorry bruh"?
Less people live in that line
Oh, you don't know about the line? Believe it or not, the line is actually real:
For the lazy: it’s cause there is less water after than line.
Which is why even the trees obey the line. Thanks, Rocky Mountain rain shadow!
Oooh, so these aliens are attracted to water!
I mean, even if alien sightings were real you would expect them to correlate with population density. Fewer people means fewer people that can spot aliens.
Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. "Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!
He had his flaws, but I still think of him as our greatest president.
The defining speech of President Whitmore. Right up there with the Gettysburg address.
Between him and Morgan Freeman, the U.S. has had some really good presidents.
That all these sightings just happen to occur in the US reminds me of how I'd watch old Dr Who episodes and chuckle at how all the aliens always ended up in the same sand pit in England.
Apparently, aliens are very interested in anglophone countries
Aliens only understand English speaking countries with just a dash of French mixed in
Aliens are allergic to Mexican food, apparently.
Now plot sightings of the Virgin Mary and Mexico is at the top of the charts.
Psychosis is molded by culture.
USA NO 1!
Our senses and brains are remarkably easy to fool. Stage magicians even make a career out of making us think we've seen things we haven't.
How many times have you seen a shadow, or a silhouette and thought it was a person/monster/whatever? Our brains are wired to see familiar things in unfamiliar circumstances, and it bases it on things we're familiar with. UFO sightings follow predictable patterns based on what style or shape of "alien ship" are biggest in pop culture at the time. We conjure up monsters we saw in movies, or read about in books or magazines.
they are trying to recreate the movies
they aren't interested in here, they are from here
Let me guess, the source for this image is a US/western UFO reporting organization.
Sad to see so many dots around newfoundland but I'm also not that surprised lol
Sad to see so many dots around newfoundland but I’m also not that surprised lol
Not a lot of people know this, but until they invent interstellar jet engines the aliens have to stop in Gander to refuel before going on to the US.
"No, Dean, you were just drunk again"
Turns out they love guns
They're still trying to find the team that crashed in Roswell.
I would like to see an overlay of "Reported Demon and Angel sightings" from the past few thousand years.
No but it 's different this time!
Lmao is it just me or is the entirety of Hawaii lit the fuck up
How could it „be just you“?
I guess a better phrasing would be “do my eyes deceive me or is the entirety of Hawaii lit the fuck up”
Fuck yeah that’s better!
The United States has a big and powerful enough military to defeat god and enough nukes to do it 8 more times, of course aliens want to investigate.
Speculative. Why do you assume Aliens with the technology to travel this far would see nuclear weapons as a threat to them?
There are presumably no physics that provide protection from extremely powerful explosions (of any kind).
Just because you can imagine some magical force field that these hypothetical aliens might possess doesn't mean that such a thing can actually exist.
It makes as much sense as the magical means of propulsion that would allow aliens to cross interstellar distances.
The crossing is easy. Voyager is crossing interstellar space. Doing it fast? No so easy.
We don’t have to imagine force fields or any other MCU-tech, what if you had a way to disable all those weapons before they could even be launched at you? Or even in flight?
EMP exist now, and humans can shoot missiles out of the air - it’s perfectly imaginable that Aliens could think about our explosion delivery systems as being slow and vulnerable as fuck.
There was lots of stories about aliens doing exactly this when I was interested in the topic a decade ago or something. I don't know how much of that is possible to find on today's web since it's all censored and removed now.
Alien tech is much more advanced than what we have here. But I think it's clear that they are not like humans in the way that they build weapons and measure their status that way. They won't use technology against us unless they absolutely have to, in self defense.
“Censored”? Hey try to get a life, kid. Lmao
The upside to that is that humans could and probably would just sneak nukes onboard their ships and set them off on the inside if they did try to invade, a tactic for which they'd have no real defense.
Any civilization that had those things, even rudimentary Trinity Test ones, are on a whole different playing field than any that came before by virtue of the nature of nukes, so it is reasonable that aliens would investigate nuclear powers first.
There are presumably no physics that provide protection from extremely powerful explosions.
A few hundred metres of tungsten and ablative ceramics can protect from a nuke just fine.
The even harder problem that doesn't appear to have any physics to support it is carrying around whatever structure you're proposing and making sure that it doesn't destroy the ship or itself while you do so.
This species has presumably mastered FTL interstellar travel. They’d have solved nukes too.
Exactly
You know, I do wonder what the map of cell phone and camera sales would look like overlaid onto this...
You tend to get less reports of things in areas with much, much lower population densities. The map is as much a population density map as it is a UFO sighting one
it's basically a population map combined with communication access
Also the map of countries with black site projects
And very coincidentally and unrelated: gigantic military spending that unexpectedly can't be fully accounted for. Strange!
A more accurate title for this post could be: "English-Based UFO Reporting Organizations Primarily Receive Reports from, Unsurprisingly, English-Speaking Countries."
We don't have bad video cameras here
Would be interesting to divide these numbers by expected camera availability and surface area coverage. Consider how many more cameras are on any US military vehicle (there's at least 6 on every tank, for example) and those vehicles are spread across the world
cause : effect; believing in things that don't exist, seeing things that don't exist.
a casually religious friend says he's not worried about dying. expects to just wake up in heaven
Damn, I guess they really are going to land on the White House lawn.
It's just where they got appointed to film the blockbusters
We have a lot of nuclear weapons........
Not surprising at all. There are enough nukes to destroy more than the 1 planet all the nukes are on. Of course this is going to raise concern in the intergalactic community especially with how backwards our politics are.
They probably see Earth the same way the rest of the world sees North Korea.
they do the most interesting buttholes
"Aliens from outer space" sighted frequently over areas of the world where fictional media depicting aliens from outer space is widespread. Hmm. Shocker.
It's almost like we've conditioned ourselves to equate UFO = other worldly being.
I saw an alien.
It was between 2010-2014 and i was recently gifted my first phone. A used Sony Ericsson w300i. Fast forward a few weeks later, i was on the roof playing with the filters on the phone camera. One of them was a Sepia filter and as i tried it, i randomly pointed it toward the sky and then toward the sun. That's when i saw a small dark object hovering near the very bright sun as to hide using it. It was shaped like a sphere and seemed very far up in the sky. It was very fast, it's movement unnatural as it was doing oval shaped circles around the sun.
Wait, so you were using an old phone that had an ancient sensor? You then pointed that ancient sensor at the sun and a dark spot showed up? Most likely at the most exposed portion of the sensor and you're saying that was a UFO?
Then why did it disappear later ? If it was an over exposed camera shouldn't it show up every time not only once ?
Are you asserting that 'Aliens' is a much more likely answer in your scenario than 'image sensor issue'?
I knew i should've written UFO as in unidentified flying object and that it was a mistake using the word alien as it tends to have heavy connotation with green men and wackos. No,i don't believe aliens are traveling light years and playing hide and seek with us. I saw some weird shit and want to understand what it was. I was told it was caused by overexposure and i answered that it happened only once and that as far as i know it should be repeatable but i didn't.
I don't think you're crazy and you saw what you saw. It probably just wasn't aliens, it was likely some astronomical phenomenon. You could've seen a comet or an asteroid or a planet passing over the sun, that's what your description sounds like to me, anyway.
People think that things like cameras and radar are perfect instruments. They can be overloaded by things like pointing them at the sun, internal reflections, radar can have false signals, etc. I once thought I saw a UFO while in a car and then realized it was just an internal reflection of a light off of the glass. It looked like it was moving super fast and everything.
People will also do things like over expand compressed videos and images and then act surprised when they see compression artifacts and think they are real.
You should see commercial radar systems operating in choppy water. Millions of yellow dots that appear and disappear. Aliens? No, literally just returns from waves. But if you turn the sensitivity down too far, now you can't see jet skis and sailboats.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. I mean no reasonable person would conclude aliens from a flip phone camera using filter pointed directly at the sun with one of the worst lenses ever built for a camera in history.
I mean I laughed, so well done if that was the intent.
If my story have made someone less miserable for a few seconds then am happy i shared it.
I like that someone downvoted you.
But in all seriousness, me and a friend of mine once saw a flying object that matches your description, except it was around 4am and we were on the beach, camping. At some point, it flew into the horizon (really freaking fast, headed to a different country, so I doubt it was a drone). No drugs were involved.
When I was a teen I was outside with my step-brother playing catch late at night in the street and we saw one. Never talked about because we felt like idiots. I still do.
I like the "no drugs involved" part. We're describing something we saw with our own eyes and yet is so outlandish we can only accept that people wouldn't believe us.
You say you saw it with your own eyes, but you were looking through a camera. That's not the same thing.
I am not judging you and when I was a kid, I too saw some shit. Many people have, it's very common. What's up for debate is whether it's aliens or not, is all.
I'll give kind of the opposite story. An Illinois town's PD has made the news at least twice for chasing a UFO. In the 80s they were on some TV special about unexplained events, talking about the time they chased a triangular-shaped UFO for a long time. I remember watching that, and then going to the nearby air base for an air show, complete with a triangular-shaped stealth bomber...
Its probably not entirely fair distribution you’re seeing.
This starts way back in 1906? A country like China didn’t even have any tech growth till around the year 2000 basically.
They don’t even have an open policy of sharing such things.
Russia did for the longest time, but it’s limited due to the population distribution (basically 80% lives near the western border) so an enormous amount of ground is never watched let alone “stuff” being reported.. let alone that “stuff” getting out to media or the public.
The EU has always had a more open policy regarding UFO’s, especially Belgium shared a lot of footage over the years.
But also much of South America openly shared stuff for the longest time.
It’s only been the USA that turned into a “joke” but due to the paranoia people get whenever a government starts to deny things they first admitted too, people start to report anything and everything.
Ribbit
Americans are very interested in aliens, and you'll note the heat map correlates with wealth (and thus smartphone access).
Some of the more interesting UAP encounters are entirely non-US
and you’ll note the heat map correlates with wealth (and thus smartphone access).
It doesn't, or else there would be a lot more sightings all over Europe, South Korea and Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Saudi Arabia and various emirates, and a good junk of China.
Also, smartphones didn't exist for the first 101 years of the reporting time span.
It most definitely still correlates with wealth, regardless of that factors
Regardless, simple google searches of "UAP sightings South America/Asia/India/ etc" will yield many results - this is not a US phenomnon
However it is primarily a cultural phenomenon, it's simply spread to the rest of the world as part of the US cultural zeitgeist and near-hegemony.
You said right, REPORTED
I want ayylmao nutjobs to gb2 Reddit. Is it too much to ask? They infuriate me. I bet 100 buckaroos that these very same schizos are also Flat Earthers x QaNons.
THEY'RE GONNA TERK ER JERBS!
THE ALIENS ARE COMING RIGHT FOR US!
BLAM
They’re going right for the jugular!
Juggalo's have it coming!
/s
Ogoodbodogooooo!
IIRC this was a study (survey?) done by a American company.
There are tons of UFO sighting in plenty of non-NA or EU countries such as Brazil and South Africa
^ this is true.
This post is insanely misleading.
^ this guy is right.
^ made the right call here
^ ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I'd like to add that for many countries like mine, a UFO sighting wouldn't even register as "unidentified" or having an outer space origin. The locals would attribute it to something religious instead.
Berrrrr. VWOOP! widdle widdle, shooom. Pew, pew, pew. Buh luh luh luh luh luh. So sayeth the lord. Amen.
And now we paint ourselves green and dance in his shiny circular beamy holy goodness.
You ain’t gotta give, but I’m taking donations. If your neighbor don’t drop a dollarydoo in the plate, don’t judge him too harshly.
LOL I'd donate
I was wondering why the sightings were dominated by English speaking countries, this may be the reason. Thanks.
This is just a heatmap of English speakers.
If you think the most English speakers live in the US and UK I've got some very surprising news for you
Most native speakers live in the U.S. and the UK based on population numbers. We're talking over 400 million native speakers.
But as far non-native speakers, Google tells me that's India. But most English speakers in India don't speak it as their first language. They learned it in school, they didn't grow up speaking it at home.
As a Canadian, I must say:
Bonjour
Gor-la-mi
That's because the source of the data is an English website which collected only English reports.
I prefer to believe that the anglos are just conspiracy-brained morons.
Or maybe we're just really bored and stupid.
I suspect chronic boredom is widespread but almost no one realises it.
One of our chief industries is entertainment. Everyone knows it.
How many people eat food because they know they need it vs because they just want it. I think chronic boredom is like that but worse and far more subtle. It amplifies a lot of our other issues, such as adhd and obesity.
And I don't think you need to be bored to enjoy good entertainment. Not to mention the industry runs on greed mostly. It would be in their interest that people didn't find the problem as that could lead to people finding a cure. How would e.g. Netflix keep profiting from producing such poor content? How about those who profit so much from feeding ads to our brain dead states?
This is my biggest problem with believing anything alien related; how come all of the video evidence is taken on a phone camera from 2001, and the fact basically all sightings happen in the US?
The people making this shit up have to try harder than that!
The UK is just as bright on that map.
Oh, our cultural colony follows in our footsteps?
Quite the shocker from Airstrip One over there.
There's a somewhat rational theory that Roswell happened because it was the site of the nuclear bomb testings and aliens "only try to contact civs that are at splitting the atom tech level".
It has some merit to it, but yeah, look at that map. Hardly convincing when looking at the reported sightings.
Because that's where the freak show is.
I think its a mix of idiots everywhere, and the government secretly testing prototype aircraft. The idiots see the prototype aircraft, don't recognize it, and immediately go "eyljuhns!"
Or more accurately, total classified air flights. There's a reason so many reports happen near US military facilities.
This looks more like a map of any English speaking news source I would see online. I mean I see us politics and us topics on lemmy and my local newspaper all the time, but hardly ever hear anything from far away places like Ghana, Romania, south America, middle east or south east asia unless in specifically look for it on some lesser known sites.
The official language of Ghana is English. They have plenty of news online, you just don't know about it.
It's not English that aliens are attracted to, we are imagining them. UFOs appeared when humans gained the ability to fly. Their ships got faster and more maneuverable as ours did. We are literally just seeing illusions, many of which we create.
I'm pretty sure they polled English speakers. As someone who likes speculating about aliens, I was blown away when I discovered how common it is for people to claim to see aliens in countries like Brazil. You just don't hear about it because most of it is in Portuguese. I wouldn't be too surprised if most countries had similar levels of "sightings" but cultures are more geared towards people having a "huh, not my problem" kind of response, view it as some kind of religious event, or are too preoccupied with other things to notice anything strange in the sky. The result is that the map would be skewed towards countries with america-like cultures (if we assume it's a cultural difference, then the US would appear to be the most susceptible to not only attributing unusual properties to strange sky objects, but also be the most likely to speak up about them).
That is because people are morons and don't know how cameras work. Even the military thinks things like low flying geese are some how aliens, when clearly their evidence is to the contrary. I am not saying that there aren't aliens. They probably do exist, but the evidence we keep getting shown for it is laughable.
Americans trying to explain why the map looks like this
https://xkcd.com/1138/
Do you think the US has more people than all of Asia or something?
No, but in this case it's not just population. If some potato farmer in northern Asia sees a UFO (especially before the proliferation of smartphones), how would it be reported and appear on this map? Lots of other reports come from pilots and such and again, far different distribution between continents.
When the first dinosaur bone was discovered, noone had heard about it before and people believed that bones they found before were from some animals
After people knew about dinosaurs they started finding them other places in the world at a rapid pace. Many people thought it was all a hoax
So you know, unless you know about them you don't know what to report. And americans think most about aliens I guess.
That being said, probably there aren't secret aliens around. probably 🫣
So... what were they mistaking the aliens for?
I mean, the actual verified "alien craft" in America is actually more of a "not sure what that is" grainy footage in an age where Donald Trump tweeted out classified satellite images that showed the cameras we use are actually far more advanced and show far more detail than any we knew existed. And that technology was over a decade old at the time!
My guess is secret and experimental technologies being tested by the military.
I think its like bigfoot / mothman etc - once someone in your area is talking about seeing a thing, it increases the likelihood you will think you saw that thing specifically next time you see something that would be otherwise unexplainable to you
Ghosts. Spirits. Dragons. Or any other mythical creatures, or mythical phenomena of your choice.
If there were aliens, those are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And those are the descriptions I would expect in basically all the world, almost everywhere that isn't the US, even today.
So it couldn't be Americans mistaking ghosts for aliens? Or bigfoot, a creature that we haven't been able to verify because their culture advanced past ours and is able to cloak themselves and occasionally go on joyrides in their more advanced technology and forget to turn on the cloaking device? We have just as much evidence for all of these things.
You didn't get the point I made.
No, I'm pretty sure I fully understand you. I'm just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don't understand as fantastical things. There aren't ghosts, spirits, dragons or aliens that have secretly visited earth but choses not to make actual contact. My point is that all of those things are equally unlikely. I assumed my over-the-top absurdity made that clear.
And I feel like you might be underestimating literally all of the world if you think these things are actually aliens. You're implying that they would assume something they don't understand is some mystical nonsense. That "almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today" is superstitious and wouldn't know what aliens are.
Yes.
As I said: If there were aliens, those fantastical things, are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And in most non US places. After all, aliens are a modern US legend, invented from Americans, for Americans.
I didn't say that there were any aliens anywhere. Or that there were any other fantastical things anywhere.
Didn't we just establish that aliens are superstition? I think you are overestimating how many people share "aliens" as the most popular superstition which comes to mind first.
Most of the US shares that. A lot of other places probably don't. Don't underestimate how many strange stories about strange things in the night are out there :D
Ya know what? I misread this interaction. My bad. I didn't realize we were arguing the same point. The last week has shown a lot of people on this site arguing fervently for the case of aliens visiting earth, and I made assumptions. I'm sorry buddy.
No worries! I hope I was not too much of a dick in my response, and I totally understand why and how you would read things the way you did. I'll just try to express myself more clearly in the future. You know, this communication thing? It's a never ending struggle! :D
It sure is. In my life and job I go out of my way to be very exact in my language, but that was a skill I had to learn after years of interactions like this, where I've been on both sides of the misunderstanding. And I still struggle not sounding like a robot when I explain things clearly. English is an expansive language with a lot of utility, but the flipside is that meaning can often be ambiguous and require lots of words to be clear.
I have several relatives who "see" plots all the time. Every time I deal with them I get to hear about them. Bet you didn't know that there is a plot to turn frogs gay and convert our children into drag queens.
They sound like they do their own research. What lovely, intellectual people.
You don't choose your family.
The USA is very interested in aliens*
This is the answer, close the thread.
Meanwhile the Netherlands chilling with the extraterrestrials.
Maybe that's where they got their terraforming abilities.
or the aliens are just us experimental stealth planes
And what's that weird dividing line in the middle? Do they just stop and go: "nope, gotta focus on the East Coast, sorry bruh"?
Less people live in that line
Oh, you don't know about the line? Believe it or not, the line is actually real:
"Why 80% of Americans Live East of This Line"
https://youtu.be/wwJABxjcvUc
For the lazy: it’s cause there is less water after than line.
Which is why even the trees obey the line. Thanks, Rocky Mountain rain shadow!
Oooh, so these aliens are attracted to water!
I mean, even if alien sightings were real you would expect them to correlate with population density. Fewer people means fewer people that can spot aliens.
More humans -> more alien sightings
Perhaps we've been the aliens all along.
It's the opposite. Watch the movie Signs.
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Good bot
XKCD population density maps
Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. "Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!
He had his flaws, but I still think of him as our greatest president.
The defining speech of President Whitmore. Right up there with the Gettysburg address.
Between him and Morgan Freeman, the U.S. has had some really good presidents.
That all these sightings just happen to occur in the US reminds me of how I'd watch old Dr Who episodes and chuckle at how all the aliens always ended up in the same sand pit in England.
Apparently, aliens are very interested in anglophone countries
Aliens only understand English speaking countries with just a dash of French mixed in
Aliens are allergic to Mexican food, apparently.
Now plot sightings of the Virgin Mary and Mexico is at the top of the charts.
Psychosis is molded by culture.
USA NO 1!
Our senses and brains are remarkably easy to fool. Stage magicians even make a career out of making us think we've seen things we haven't.
How many times have you seen a shadow, or a silhouette and thought it was a person/monster/whatever? Our brains are wired to see familiar things in unfamiliar circumstances, and it bases it on things we're familiar with. UFO sightings follow predictable patterns based on what style or shape of "alien ship" are biggest in pop culture at the time. We conjure up monsters we saw in movies, or read about in books or magazines.
they are trying to recreate the movies
they aren't interested in here, they are from here
Let me guess, the source for this image is a US/western UFO reporting organization.
Sad to see so many dots around newfoundland but I'm also not that surprised lol
Not a lot of people know this, but until they invent interstellar jet engines the aliens have to stop in Gander to refuel before going on to the US.
"No, Dean, you were just drunk again"
Turns out they love guns
They're still trying to find the team that crashed in Roswell.
I would like to see an overlay of "Reported Demon and Angel sightings" from the past few thousand years.
No but it 's different this time!
Lmao is it just me or is the entirety of Hawaii lit the fuck up
How could it „be just you“?
I guess a better phrasing would be “do my eyes deceive me or is the entirety of Hawaii lit the fuck up”
Fuck yeah that’s better!
The United States has a big and powerful enough military to defeat god and enough nukes to do it 8 more times, of course aliens want to investigate.
Speculative. Why do you assume Aliens with the technology to travel this far would see nuclear weapons as a threat to them?
There are presumably no physics that provide protection from extremely powerful explosions (of any kind).
Just because you can imagine some magical force field that these hypothetical aliens might possess doesn't mean that such a thing can actually exist.
It makes as much sense as the magical means of propulsion that would allow aliens to cross interstellar distances.
The crossing is easy. Voyager is crossing interstellar space. Doing it fast? No so easy.
We don’t have to imagine force fields or any other MCU-tech, what if you had a way to disable all those weapons before they could even be launched at you? Or even in flight?
EMP exist now, and humans can shoot missiles out of the air - it’s perfectly imaginable that Aliens could think about our explosion delivery systems as being slow and vulnerable as fuck.
There was lots of stories about aliens doing exactly this when I was interested in the topic a decade ago or something. I don't know how much of that is possible to find on today's web since it's all censored and removed now.
Alien tech is much more advanced than what we have here. But I think it's clear that they are not like humans in the way that they build weapons and measure their status that way. They won't use technology against us unless they absolutely have to, in self defense.
“Censored”? Hey try to get a life, kid. Lmao
The upside to that is that humans could and probably would just sneak nukes onboard their ships and set them off on the inside if they did try to invade, a tactic for which they'd have no real defense.
Any civilization that had those things, even rudimentary Trinity Test ones, are on a whole different playing field than any that came before by virtue of the nature of nukes, so it is reasonable that aliens would investigate nuclear powers first.
A few hundred metres of tungsten and ablative ceramics can protect from a nuke just fine.
The even harder problem that doesn't appear to have any physics to support it is carrying around whatever structure you're proposing and making sure that it doesn't destroy the ship or itself while you do so.
This species has presumably mastered FTL interstellar travel. They’d have solved nukes too.
Exactly
You know, I do wonder what the map of cell phone and camera sales would look like overlaid onto this...
You tend to get less reports of things in areas with much, much lower population densities. The map is as much a population density map as it is a UFO sighting one
There's an XKCD for that
it's basically a population map combined with communication access
Also the map of countries with black site projects
And very coincidentally and unrelated: gigantic military spending that unexpectedly can't be fully accounted for. Strange!
A more accurate title for this post could be: "English-Based UFO Reporting Organizations Primarily Receive Reports from, Unsurprisingly, English-Speaking Countries."
We don't have bad video cameras here
Would be interesting to divide these numbers by expected camera availability and surface area coverage. Consider how many more cameras are on any US military vehicle (there's at least 6 on every tank, for example) and those vehicles are spread across the world
cause : effect; believing in things that don't exist, seeing things that don't exist. a casually religious friend says he's not worried about dying. expects to just wake up in heaven
Damn, I guess they really are going to land on the White House lawn.
It's just where they got appointed to film the blockbusters
We have a lot of nuclear weapons........
Not surprising at all. There are enough nukes to destroy more than the 1 planet all the nukes are on. Of course this is going to raise concern in the intergalactic community especially with how backwards our politics are.
They probably see Earth the same way the rest of the world sees North Korea.
they do the most interesting buttholes
"Aliens from outer space" sighted frequently over areas of the world where fictional media depicting aliens from outer space is widespread. Hmm. Shocker.
It's almost like we've conditioned ourselves to equate UFO = other worldly being.
I saw an alien.
It was between 2010-2014 and i was recently gifted my first phone. A used Sony Ericsson w300i. Fast forward a few weeks later, i was on the roof playing with the filters on the phone camera. One of them was a Sepia filter and as i tried it, i randomly pointed it toward the sky and then toward the sun. That's when i saw a small dark object hovering near the very bright sun as to hide using it. It was shaped like a sphere and seemed very far up in the sky. It was very fast, it's movement unnatural as it was doing oval shaped circles around the sun.
Wait, so you were using an old phone that had an ancient sensor? You then pointed that ancient sensor at the sun and a dark spot showed up? Most likely at the most exposed portion of the sensor and you're saying that was a UFO?
Then why did it disappear later ? If it was an over exposed camera shouldn't it show up every time not only once ?
Are you asserting that 'Aliens' is a much more likely answer in your scenario than 'image sensor issue'?
I knew i should've written UFO as in unidentified flying object and that it was a mistake using the word alien as it tends to have heavy connotation with green men and wackos. No,i don't believe aliens are traveling light years and playing hide and seek with us. I saw some weird shit and want to understand what it was. I was told it was caused by overexposure and i answered that it happened only once and that as far as i know it should be repeatable but i didn't.
I don't think you're crazy and you saw what you saw. It probably just wasn't aliens, it was likely some astronomical phenomenon. You could've seen a comet or an asteroid or a planet passing over the sun, that's what your description sounds like to me, anyway.
People think that things like cameras and radar are perfect instruments. They can be overloaded by things like pointing them at the sun, internal reflections, radar can have false signals, etc. I once thought I saw a UFO while in a car and then realized it was just an internal reflection of a light off of the glass. It looked like it was moving super fast and everything.
People will also do things like over expand compressed videos and images and then act surprised when they see compression artifacts and think they are real.
You should see commercial radar systems operating in choppy water. Millions of yellow dots that appear and disappear. Aliens? No, literally just returns from waves. But if you turn the sensitivity down too far, now you can't see jet skis and sailboats.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. I mean no reasonable person would conclude aliens from a flip phone camera using filter pointed directly at the sun with one of the worst lenses ever built for a camera in history.
I mean I laughed, so well done if that was the intent.
If my story have made someone less miserable for a few seconds then am happy i shared it.
I like that someone downvoted you.
But in all seriousness, me and a friend of mine once saw a flying object that matches your description, except it was around 4am and we were on the beach, camping. At some point, it flew into the horizon (really freaking fast, headed to a different country, so I doubt it was a drone). No drugs were involved.
When I was a teen I was outside with my step-brother playing catch late at night in the street and we saw one. Never talked about because we felt like idiots. I still do.
I like the "no drugs involved" part. We're describing something we saw with our own eyes and yet is so outlandish we can only accept that people wouldn't believe us.
You say you saw it with your own eyes, but you were looking through a camera. That's not the same thing.
I am not judging you and when I was a kid, I too saw some shit. Many people have, it's very common. What's up for debate is whether it's aliens or not, is all.
I'll give kind of the opposite story. An Illinois town's PD has made the news at least twice for chasing a UFO. In the 80s they were on some TV special about unexplained events, talking about the time they chased a triangular-shaped UFO for a long time. I remember watching that, and then going to the nearby air base for an air show, complete with a triangular-shaped stealth bomber...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_tcyQbfRo8
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Its probably not entirely fair distribution you’re seeing. This starts way back in 1906? A country like China didn’t even have any tech growth till around the year 2000 basically. They don’t even have an open policy of sharing such things. Russia did for the longest time, but it’s limited due to the population distribution (basically 80% lives near the western border) so an enormous amount of ground is never watched let alone “stuff” being reported.. let alone that “stuff” getting out to media or the public.
The EU has always had a more open policy regarding UFO’s, especially Belgium shared a lot of footage over the years. But also much of South America openly shared stuff for the longest time. It’s only been the USA that turned into a “joke” but due to the paranoia people get whenever a government starts to deny things they first admitted too, people start to report anything and everything.
Ribbit
Americans are very interested in aliens, and you'll note the heat map correlates with wealth (and thus smartphone access).
Some of the more interesting UAP encounters are entirely non-US
It doesn't, or else there would be a lot more sightings all over Europe, South Korea and Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Saudi Arabia and various emirates, and a good junk of China.
Also, smartphones didn't exist for the first 101 years of the reporting time span.
It most definitely still correlates with wealth, regardless of that factors
Regardless, simple google searches of "UAP sightings South America/Asia/India/ etc" will yield many results - this is not a US phenomnon
However it is primarily a cultural phenomenon, it's simply spread to the rest of the world as part of the US cultural zeitgeist and near-hegemony.
You said right, REPORTED
I want ayylmao nutjobs to gb2 Reddit. Is it too much to ask? They infuriate me. I bet 100 buckaroos that these very same schizos are also Flat Earthers x QaNons.