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It's "The Professor" (Russell Johnson)! A Twilight Zone episode(?).
Looks like he was in two of the first season episodes... travelin' through time (kind of typecast, I guess?).
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All About UFO's
- Thread starter Ron Texas
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Looks like he was in two of the first season episodes... travelin' through time (kind of typecast, I guess?).
Of course. When confronted with dubious old dudes with southern-US accents, people with low intelligence, or people acculturated within coercive hierarchies like certain church or military contexts, my reflex is to doubt. Even though it's entirely possible for individuals with those characteristics to be truthful at times, despite cultural and/or cognitive disadvantages.
Naysayers gonna nay. I can decide what I want to believe myself
I basically covered much of the gamut of this "lying, crazy, or telling the truth as he recalls it" proposition under confabulation. That term has ample scope, including:
We know that brain trauma—like high-g flight or contact sports—is a precursor, and that 'normal' asymptomatic people can confabulate. And that the self-perceived veracity of these stories may increase rather than decrease with time.
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There is the logical fallacy ad hominem. Confabulation, that is to say that people cannot remember what happened, is also a criticism of the person per se. I am not sure it is so useful.
Haha, you are hard to please. You said I sometimes offer biased conclusions, and I agreed. Not that your response had much to do with poor Will's struggle over that ellipsis.
No, confabulation isn't just not remembering. Nor is it just making things up. I thought some elaboration on the term would help (there's a great deal more which you could follow up if interested) but apparently not.
Think about your statement for a moment "can't remember what happened". Now we are talking about observations of things (or non-things) people can't identify or explain. How can there be a memory of "what happened" when people don't know that in the first place? Now think about the usual processes of observation and memory. We take in sensory data, mixed with emotions, process said data both consciously and unconsciously, apply imperfect pattern-matching, and fill in gaps with imagination.
Categorising all this (and more) as "ad hominem" is simply denying what we already know about perception and memory (as if some "top people" are immune perhaps, which they aren't).
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Certainly optical and other illusions can be in play but that is just an element toward later confabulation. However a delusion is something held in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, by the definition of the term. In at least some of these UFO/UAP observations we lack incontrovertible evidence either way. If you throw terminology around willy-nilly then there isn't much to be gained here.
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Right. Confabulation is a memory error. A delusion or illusion from a UFO sighting does not have to be a memory error.
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Japanese lawmakers have called on the Ministry of Defense to establish a dedicated department to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), including UFOs and unidentified drones.
On May 16, members of the “Parliamentary League for UAP Clarification from a Security Perspective” delivered a formal proposal to Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, urging the government to strengthen surveillance and data collection in response to recent incursions by drones and surveillance balloons, particularly those believed to originate from China.
The proposal calls for the Ministry to form a specialized division focused on three key tasks: collecting and analyzing UAP-related data, disclosing relevant findings to the public, and reporting investigation results regularly to the National Diet.
Yasukazu Hamada, former Defense Minister and leader of the UAP league, emphasized the urgency of comprehensive readiness. “It is critically important that we close any gaps in our response to these unexplained aerial events,” Hamada said. “Our position is to proceed with every possible scenario in mind.”
defence-blog.com
On May 16, members of the “Parliamentary League for UAP Clarification from a Security Perspective” delivered a formal proposal to Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, urging the government to strengthen surveillance and data collection in response to recent incursions by drones and surveillance balloons, particularly those believed to originate from China.
The proposal calls for the Ministry to form a specialized division focused on three key tasks: collecting and analyzing UAP-related data, disclosing relevant findings to the public, and reporting investigation results regularly to the National Diet.
Yasukazu Hamada, former Defense Minister and leader of the UAP league, emphasized the urgency of comprehensive readiness. “It is critically important that we close any gaps in our response to these unexplained aerial events,” Hamada said. “Our position is to proceed with every possible scenario in mind.”
Japan may form first-ever UFO research office
Japanese lawmakers have called on the Ministry of Defense to establish a dedicated department to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), including UFOs and unidentified drones. On May 16, members of the "Parliamentary League for UAP Clarification from a Security Perspective" delivered a...
defence-blog.com
Preliminary findings. UFOs in Japan:
1) are more reliable than those in the US
2) appear smaller but are equally roomy
3) get more light-years per quark - based on testing by the Extraterrestrial Protection Agency (Your Space-Time May Vary).
1) are more reliable than those in the US
2) appear smaller but are equally roomy
3) get more light-years per quark - based on testing by the Extraterrestrial Protection Agency (Your Space-Time May Vary).
4) They may also have a 'loudness' button.
More news emerging regarding alien technology. Apparently UFO/UAP are striking aircraft then turning into weather balloons to avoid detection. I'm watching with 'bated breath to see if Ross Coulthart can pry this secret alien technology from the Japanese so it can be used in the service of freedumb. Although I see he's had since May, what's taking so long?
It wasn’t space debris that struck a United Airlines plane—it was a weather balloon
Speaking of watching Coulthart (against my normal recommendation) the first two and a half minutes of that last one are unusually funny in their breathy histrionics and erratic variations in volume. "That wasn't ordinary Coulthart, if it was Coulthart at all."
It wasn’t space debris that struck a United Airlines plane—it was a weather balloon
Speaking of watching Coulthart (against my normal recommendation) the first two and a half minutes of that last one are unusually funny in their breathy histrionics and erratic variations in volume. "That wasn't ordinary Coulthart, if it was Coulthart at all."
terryforsythe
Major Contributor
An interesting paper, titled Aligned, multiple-transient events in the First Palomar Sky Survey by Dr. Beatriz Villarroel et al., has been released for publication. The paper pertains to transient objects discovered in astronomical data that pre-date Sputnik (i.e., the phenomena likely are not man-made objects). The link I have is to the draft version, but it has been released after peer review:
Here is the paper's conclusion:
This paper presents a first systematic search for multiple, simultaneously appearing and vanishing optical point
sources on long-exposure photographic plates that also exhibit spatial alignment. We focus on the red POSS-I plates,
and present five top candidate events with three or more transients aligned along a narrow band. The most statistically
significant case (Candidate 5) coincides in time with the well-documented Washington D.C. 1952 UFO flap—one of
the most prominent mass sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) in recorded history. A separate study
(Bruehl & Villarroel 2025) confirms a statistically significant (>3σ) temporal correlation between VASCO transients
and independent historical UAP reports.
The origin of the transients remains unknown. One plausible explanation is that they are caused by brief light
emissions from artificial objects in orbit or by objects with anomalous movements in Earth’s atmosphere—emissions
so brief that they appear as point sources rather than streaks, despite the telescope tracking the stars. Alternatively,
they could arise from solar reflections off flat, highly reflective surfaces at geosynchronous altitudes. The latter
interpretation is further supported by our shadow test in Section 8, which reveals a significant deficit of such events
within the Earth’s umbra, consistent with a solar reflection origin and difficult to reconcile with many explanations,
including photographic plate defects.
Our results motivate continued investigation of historical sky surveys and the application of similar alignment-based
detection methods to modern deep-sky imaging. Whether or not these events ultimately point to the existence of
NTAs, the identification of statistically improbable, spatially aligned transients in pre-satellite data represents a novel
observational anomaly deserving of further scientific attention. Future work may help clarify whether these transients
constitute a new class of astronomical phenomena—or represent the first hints of artificial activity near our planet.
Here is a video, by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, briefly discussing that paper:
Here is the paper's conclusion:
This paper presents a first systematic search for multiple, simultaneously appearing and vanishing optical point
sources on long-exposure photographic plates that also exhibit spatial alignment. We focus on the red POSS-I plates,
and present five top candidate events with three or more transients aligned along a narrow band. The most statistically
significant case (Candidate 5) coincides in time with the well-documented Washington D.C. 1952 UFO flap—one of
the most prominent mass sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) in recorded history. A separate study
(Bruehl & Villarroel 2025) confirms a statistically significant (>3σ) temporal correlation between VASCO transients
and independent historical UAP reports.
The origin of the transients remains unknown. One plausible explanation is that they are caused by brief light
emissions from artificial objects in orbit or by objects with anomalous movements in Earth’s atmosphere—emissions
so brief that they appear as point sources rather than streaks, despite the telescope tracking the stars. Alternatively,
they could arise from solar reflections off flat, highly reflective surfaces at geosynchronous altitudes. The latter
interpretation is further supported by our shadow test in Section 8, which reveals a significant deficit of such events
within the Earth’s umbra, consistent with a solar reflection origin and difficult to reconcile with many explanations,
including photographic plate defects.
Our results motivate continued investigation of historical sky surveys and the application of similar alignment-based
detection methods to modern deep-sky imaging. Whether or not these events ultimately point to the existence of
NTAs, the identification of statistically improbable, spatially aligned transients in pre-satellite data represents a novel
observational anomaly deserving of further scientific attention. Future work may help clarify whether these transients
constitute a new class of astronomical phenomena—or represent the first hints of artificial activity near our planet.
Here is a video, by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, briefly discussing that paper:
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On Dr Villarroel, strange happenings she'd discussed on her X page with arXiv. That's an open-access archive that is not peer reviewed. They even post papers that have been rejected by peer reviewed pubs, yet have refused to post her papers that have been published in peer reviewed journals. It's very odd. Her response to that is not shy:
"rXiv is where physicists and astronomers share preprints — if a paper isn’t there, it almost doesn’t exist.It serves as the central hub for open scientific exchange, where unpublished, newly accepted, and even rejected manuscripts are shared so that other researchers can read, test, and build upon the work. It’s how ideas circulate rapidly and transparently — long before (and sometimes regardless of) formal publication. Now, both of our accepted and peer-reviewed papers — in PASP and Scientific Reports — have been rejected from arXiv server: in one case I was told to replace an older work; in the other, that the research was “not of interest” to arXiv. Empirical results, peer review, and publication in high-quality journals are no longer enough to satisfy the gatekeepers. Scientists are being prevented from reading new results. The UFO stigma remains strong."
"rXiv is where physicists and astronomers share preprints — if a paper isn’t there, it almost doesn’t exist.It serves as the central hub for open scientific exchange, where unpublished, newly accepted, and even rejected manuscripts are shared so that other researchers can read, test, and build upon the work. It’s how ideas circulate rapidly and transparently — long before (and sometimes regardless of) formal publication. Now, both of our accepted and peer-reviewed papers — in PASP and Scientific Reports — have been rejected from arXiv server: in one case I was told to replace an older work; in the other, that the research was “not of interest” to arXiv. Empirical results, peer review, and publication in high-quality journals are no longer enough to satisfy the gatekeepers. Scientists are being prevented from reading new results. The UFO stigma remains strong."
If nothing else, Dr Hossenfelder has achieved peak click-face.
I blame Big Saucer
Is this a 1 hour and 40 minute video to tell me that these visible dots were found on a very small number of a massive photographic emulsion glass plate collection from decades ago and that they don’t know what caused the dots? So more study is needed.
Although the collection of space data using far far more sensitive and sophisticated instrumentation across the electromagnetic spectrum (not just a tiny slice of visible and near IR and near UV wavelengths) and analyses of the modern data have continued to skyrocket in the many years since the Palomar survey was decommissioned? And these modern surveys cover larger swaths of the entire sky and in greater detail. Even modern run-of-the-mill amateur astrophotography equipment is superior in many ways to the glass plate images previously captured by professional observatories.
One important difference, however, is that most individual backyard astronomers lack the skill, knowledge, patience, and historical collection to systematically analyze their data. However, there are an increasing number of amateur citizen scientists who contribute their data to larger professional projects and who participate in preliminary analyses of professional databases. Blinking images to find new “dots” in a star field is just one example of historically popular contributions by amateurs.
But we are free to speculate on what caused the limited phenomena displayed on the archived photographic plates in this study. This doesn’t appear like much of a breakthrough in our understanding of the natural world, but we are to believe that it is the organized power of “UFO bias” that prevents this information from becoming more mainstream and from the authors being more widely acclaimed by their fellow researchers.
I did read the draft paper and am not sure what more can be squeezed out in an interview with the first author. There are many other long videos that I would prefer to watch, but if I am missing something very remarkable and tangible by skipping this interview, please enlighten me.
terryforsythe
Major Contributor
As inferred in the paper, the reason pre-Sputnik photographic plates were used is that there were no man-made satellites or space junk to interfere with the analysis, at least that have ever been acknowledged by the U.S., Russia or Germany.
The problem today is that currently there are over 11,000 satellites in orbit, and probably even more pieces of junk floating around in Earth orbit. Any identified anomolies amost certainly are going to be presumed to be those.
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The lack of artificial satellites and junk is not “inferred in the paper” - it is stated in the very first line in the Abstract.
Despite the junk, professional astronomers using modern sky surveys have been discovering astounding numbers of asteroids, other previously unknown bodies, novae and extragalactic supernovae, and transient phenomena on a routine basis for years. The new ground-based Rubin Observatory is bringing discoveries to another level.
A Swarm of New Asteroids | Rubin Observatory
Watch the sky move! Rubin Observatory reveals over 2,100 new asteroids in its First Look preview
rubinobservatory.org
The Rubin Observatory found 2,104 asteroids in just a few days. It could soon find millions more
"We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years."
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