Newsgroups: alt.astronomy,alt.ufo.reports
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: newsletter from VASCO network

[uploaded 45 times; last 28/09/2024]

Science as an over-trained predictive model.
============================================
(I must really write an article related to the topic, above).

I was trying to contact the group that was researching "disappearing
stars" to try and compare notes against what seems to be happening in
the sky as seen from various space telescopes (i.e. whether centered
on the earth, low earth, cis-lunar, or solar orbit).

The VASCO people are looking at old telescope images that appear to
show stars in some images and not show them in other images sometimes
taken just days earlier or later. The interesting aspect is the images
are culled from old records from the US Navy and Palomar Observatory
and mostly pre-date satellites or man-made objects that could easily
explain the features being seen.

But they are like many other groups and appear to be a bit tardy in
replying to email. (This may in itself be a good mental model to
answer one of their quandaries; keep reading).

A newsletter from VASCO turned up in my inbox this morning and SOMEHOW
disappeared even from the spam and trash box after I went out to feed
the cat and came back to think up a reply. These sort of things tend
to happen when you are blind. Maybe I hit the wrong button somewhere,
or my speech-recog s/w might have taken one of my comments to myself
out of context and done it for me. In which case don't know why it
wasn't even in the trash bin. Dam dem compooters! ;)

The substance of the email was very familiar to anyone that's done any
reading on "scientific" UFO research, such as it is.

The list of questions in the email included: Why is UFO evidence so
crappy? Why don't aliens (if that's what they are) just talk to us
instead of providing only crappy evidence?  Why don't UFO's make sonic
booms? Doesnt this prove they are not real? Normal objects compress
air when they move very fast. Why are all the photos so blurry even
when everyone has mobiles? Why don't telescopes see them?  Why hasn't
NASA seen them?  And a few others along those lines.

As I said, why aliens (if that what they are) don't land in Washington
and declare themselves might be simply they have experience and they
assume (or "know" in one or other sense) we don't. VASCO doesn't seem
to answer emails.  Possibly for exactly that kind of reason.

But in general, if you try to use the archaic reasoning we all
supposedly learned in grade school you maybe should not expect to
always get sense in science. Grade school reasoning is about
deduction. It works great for geometry where all assumptions are know
to start with. Deduction goes from the general to the particular.  But
science is about induction -- going from the particular to the
general. You don't know the assumptions to start with.  You don't know
how the universe works to start with.  You are trying to learn what
the assumptions are from what you see.  Unfortunately an infinite
number of sets of assumptions can all lead to the same
observations. And while some rules of thumb talk about "the simplest" it
turns out there's a math proof that you can't figure out what the "simplest"
of anything in general is -- it's mostly a mathematical self-contradiction.
So it turns out inductive reasoning is much harder than deductive
reasoning, theoretically. I've written briefly about this before and won't
try to replicate the mountain of academic research here.

But more specifically, if you get a bunch of contradictions when using
deductive reasoning then you have made an incorrect assumption.  Given
you now *know* you have a mistake somewhere, you can't trust yourself
to pick *where* it is. The older assumptions are no more likely right
than the latest one in the mix. You might hope the old ones are
"good".  But really even this is not a good assumption. You can't be
sure you know all the assumptions in there.  Another "undecidable problem".

If you get a contradiction then you know at least one of your
assumptions is wrong.  If you get a whole bunch of contradictions then
likely you have made a whole bunch of mistakes and you don't really
know where.  But it sounds possible and maybe likely even your
most fundamental assumptions about (whatever) are totally off.

We know from the "best two scientific theories we have" -- quantum
theory and general relativity -- reality is screwy.  There are
observations that don't fit the theories. There are problems getting
the 2 theories to agree at the very small and very large scale. They
are great (apparently) for the data they were tuned on. But they don't
seem to be entirely robust out of their special areas. This is a very
common data science problem. :)

But one thing our 2 best theories agree on -- the nature of reality
is apparently totally different from classical understanding. I.e. most of
our everyday assumptions are wrong. Relativity is "famous" for
pointing at the possibility the universe is like a frozen fish-tank
(Bloch Universe). When you make "spacetime" the basic model of how the
universe works then it turns out "nothing changes".  The history of some
particle wiggling and waggling across the universe just gets to be a "world
line" -- a fixed path through 4d spacetime. The world line doesn't
change. It's like a plot on a piece of paper. It might *describe*
"change". But the plot itself is fixed.  If nothing can change in 4-space then
how do you remember anything?  How to you move a rock from one place
to another?  What happens to cause an effect?  What happens to free will?

Unfortunately the same thing mostly happens in the other Big Theory.
In quantum physics a system is modeled by a fixed set of "base states"
plus a function that tells you the probability of information moving
about the system -- the wave function (possibly time-varying --
whatever time is -- pls check back with GR). The "possible states" are fixed.
Only the wave function can change. The wave function doesn't exist
inside the system. So how that is meant to operate is not explained.
The time that controls the wave function is apparently not inside the
system. Maybe neither exist at all, in the philosophical sense. But it
seems to make sense to think of the "base states" as unchanging and
immutable. Another (set of) frozen fish tanks. Even scientists expert
in the specific area are of 2 minds whether time (in the time-varying
part of the mess) must always be regarded as coming in chunks or
whether it can be a continuum which obviously has a lot of math
problems with divergence and ending up with many answers looking like
infinity divided by infinity and you have to just guess what happens
and try to make it look like you know what you're talking about.

I have some experience writing programs for quantum computers.
In a simple QC the base states are e.g. all the possible bit patterns in
a computer memory. The quantum program changes the wavefunction --
maybe you could imagine a program *is* the wavefucntion -- so that
eventually when you measure some part of the system you get the
answer you are looking for. Maybe.  If you're lucky.

You note that each combination of bits in the computer is fixed.
E.g. 01010. But when you write the program you also think about
changing one bit from a 0 to a 1 by making the wave function make the
probability of (sometime) measuring that bit as "1" instead of
measuring it as "0". You "pretend" you can change the bits.  But you
are not changing the bits. You are changing the wave-function.  The
quantum program proceeds step by step. This is like a clock.  It is
like time. But it is not inside the computer memory anywhere.  Maybe
the universe is like this. The program or "source code" and the
program counter for the program is "time" but it is totally outside
the universe and may not be possible to access. In a QC there is no
way the quantum program can read itself or it's own program counter
unless the quantum computer is explicitly created to allow it.  And
why would it be?

Maybe all our basic assumptions about everything are totally wrong and
it will take a mighty mighty effort to correct that given how much is
based on all the wrong ideas. Come back in 1000 years? 10,000? 100,000?

We have recently begun to appreciate science only partly understands
about 5% of the material or energy that apparently makes up what we
laughingly refer to as the universe.  We know some things about the
other 95%. Mostly how strange it is.  But there are a lot of questions.
Very basic questions.

Our understanding of the 5% may be not much better, no matter we
can build steam engines and skyscrapers that don't fall over all the time.
Well. On an appropriate teeny timescale.

And (getting back to the VASCO email) who says all evidence is crappy?
Science and scientists have a lot of trouble dealing with situations
where it cant get things back to the lab to torture. You might imagine
astronomers are better at handling this big lack. They cant get stars back to
the lab or even examine their density profiles directly. But they use
a pretty good idea by experimenting with the data. Just like we do
in data science. You make some assumptions based on part of
the data -- e.g. some list of stars with a given property -- then go
see whether other parts of the data you DIDN'T see before you made the
assumptions also has the same properties. If you can do this often enough
then you can be statistically sure there is some robustness to the
theory you came up with. This is why inductive thinking is a bit
harder than naive deduction.

And, maybe finally, we have an idea why aliens (if that's what they
are -- but it also applies to many other alternative explanations
like "UFO's are dinosaurs", "UFO's are Atlantians" (also hooking in
with the other funny things even the military keep seeing --
unidentified underwater objects), etc.

Why would anyone talk to humans. They are like insects. They have some
limited fixed ideas they refuse or are not capable of changing.
They don't understand any of the fundamentals any civilized being
understands.  (Don't listen to them whine on how clever they
are. BOR-ING!)  You can't talk to them about anything. They are still
at the stage of making pointless loud noises, and are totally pre-occupied
with their own genitals.

If anyone seems very eager to talk with little children about little
children interests and maybe is eager to show them a bag of stuff
little kids would be interested in they are possibly NOT the kind of
people you want little kids talking with.  If a little kid yells out
something incomprehensible to an adult they might respond with "that's
nice" or ignore them totally. That's normal.  Being too interested to
talk is not normal.

In the past I've been involved in helping sick and injured wildlife
and abandoned pets. It very rarely works out well. Animals have very
fixed ideas and limited capability of understanding.  They associate
people with harm and can not understand some people are trying to help
them. They do not understand medicine is meant to help them. They do
not understand that medical procedures -- even if they briefly are
painful -- are intended to help them.  They will fight tooth and nail
to prevent medical treatment.  They will refuse to eat food laced with
medicine because it smells bad.  At the first opportunity they will
escape their electrically heated beds and cages and run out in the
wet grass, fall asleep, and die of pneumonia. They oftentimes seem
to work against their own best interests. They just can't learn.

Possibly a good a mental model of human civilization.

--
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
- Marie Curie

[One of our UFO reports has gone missing!]
The Strange Case of the ODNI's Missing UAP Report
The Debrief, 24 Nov 2022 15:26Z
In this Thanksgiving installment of The Intelligence Brief, we look
at the latest on a "missing" UAP report set to be delivered last month.

  On Halloween, NASA and intelligence agencies looking at UFOs seem to be
  gearing up to play them down
  NBC News, 04 Nov 2022
  On Halloween, NASA and intelligence agencies looking at UFOs, or UAPs, seem
  to be gearing up to play them down.

ON THIS DAY: 1953 UFO Sighting Makes Jet and Its Crew Disappear
1077 WRKR, 23 Nov 2022
One of the most mysterious Michigan UFO encounters took place over Lake
Superior On November 23, 1953.

U.S. Feds Raided a UFO Blogger's Houses
Gizmodo Australia, 18 Nov 2022
Earlier this month, agents from both the FBI and the U.S. Air Force raided
multiple homes belonging to a man who runs a little-known blog about UFO.

Nation's Largest Center for Historical Records on UFOs to be Established in
New Mexico
The Debrief, 18 Nov 2022
The largest historical archive of records on unidentified aerial
phenomena in the nation will be unveiled in New Mexico in the coming
years, according to a group of leading UFO historians and archivists.
The National UFO Historical Records Center (NUFOHRC) will be "dedicated
to the preservation and centralization of UFO/UAP information in the
United States," according to a press release announcing the new
non-profit organization.
[Researcher and historian David Marler] expressed appreciation for the
renewed public interest in the UFO subject seen in recent years.
"What I find though is that, despite the ever-increasing amount of
people that are looking at the UFO or UAP subject, not a lot of
people--a very small percentage--are interested in the history," Marler
told The Debrief.
"Everyone wants to know what's new," Marler says, "and part of that is
due, I think, to the framework by which the intelligence community
[and] the media in recent years has framed the discussion; this `new'
discussion."
"Everyone seems to be looking at 2004 moving forward," Marler told The
Debrief, noting that "we know that this history is diverse and rich and
stretches many decades back, if not even further."

Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events
B.E. Zhilyaev, V. N. Petukhov, V. M. Reshetnyk
Main Astronomical Observatory, NAS of Ukraine,
Zabalotnoho 27, 03680, Kyiv, Ukraine
[...] We present a broad range of UAPs. We see them everywhere. We observe a
significant number of objects whose nature is not clear. Flights of single,
group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to
15 degrees per second. Some bright objects exhibit regular brightness
variability in the range of 10 - 20 Hz.  Two-site observations of UAPs at a
base of 120 km with two synchronised cameras allowed the detection of
a variable object, at an altitude of 1170 km. It flashes for one hundredth
of a second at an average of 20 Hz. [...]
An object contrast makes it possible to estimate the distance using
colourimetric methods.  [Objects with 0 albedo] are observed in the
troposphere at distances up to 10-12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12
meters and speeds up to 15 km/s. [...]
[Astronomers in Ukraine have undertaken their own independent survey
of objects they see flying over the Kyiv region at speeds around 15
km/sec.  They are watching the daytime sky at the zenith and in front
of the moon.  They see many objects -- some bright and some dark,
different sizes.  They travel often singly but sometimes in large
groups.  They report brightness is linked with speed. The spectrum
of bright objects is reportedly not reflected sunlight.  Objects
have been spotted inside the atm upto ~10 km but also out to ~1000 km
above the earth, travelling up to ~1000 km/sec.  They are not likely
anything sent by Russia or any other country].