A waste of what, exactly?
No, they’ll say it’s a flying saucer.
Now, I don’t converse with a lot of hardcore UFOlogists, because I tend to stick to the empirical approach, which ends up pissing off both believers and nonbelievers apparently, but “flying saucer” is not a term I can imagine anybody using in 2009. It’s just so archaic - who even uses the word “saucer” in casual conversation, ever? According to the “online etymology dictionary” the term dates to the 1880’s, for whatever thats worth.
Cups and saucers are used for coffee and tea on a daily basis around the world. Quite frankly, I’m more surprised that someone finds that to be an archaic term than anything else.
Its cooler than saying “Levitating Dish”
You have to realize that the internet contains people of all nationalities living in all different places in the world and just because they are speaking English does not mean they will use the same words and terms you are familiar with.
Anyway, I think all UFOs (in the sense of alien spaceships) sightings are not plasma or something like that, it is just what happens when someone sees something mildly interesting and then lets their imagination fly. People see what they want to see, whether or not it is actually there.
It’s not that I’m not “familiar with” the term flying saucer, its just that, like I said, I can’t imagine it being used in casual conversation. It’s like hearing someone refer to a car as an “automobile;” “UFO” just rolls off the tongue better. But I’m getting sick of talking about etymology when its not actually on topic at all.
Back on topic, you’re free to contest the conclusions of the Ministry of Defense of course - they have 3 categories for reported sightings, and you’ve pointed out one of them - but what is your logic for throwing out the rest of their conclusions? There are cases with multiple witnesses describing seeing ships with visible portholes, and entities inside, which I think necessitate further explanation beyond simple misidentification of natural phenomenon.
I feel such in-depth descriptions are hoaxes or, maybe, in occasional cases, perhaps due to something that alters the mind, perhaps drugs, lack of sleep or, maybe what the ministry suggested. Or the people could just be insane. Perhaps a game of telephone occurs and the story started at, “I saw a UFO last night, it was a glowing orb in the sky.” to “20 people witnessed a massive flying saucer land before their eyes.” Eyewitnesses are very very unreliable sources, even more so when their story has been retold many times before reaching you. There are countless eye witness accounts in which a person sees a full blown ghost, a transparent human, when the only video evidence of ghosts consists of circular orbs that look suspiciously like dust motes.
About as likely as ‘UFO’ is to be used in casual conversation too, I’d imagine. Unless you hang with a pretty far out crowd.
just because flying saucer and automoblie are not horibly butchered into three letter grunts does not mean they are out of date. the english language has suffered some terrible blows in recent years I must say.
Notoriously unreliable, even - but when you have multiple eyewitnesses describing the same thing independently of each other, that’s when it gets interesting. There is no such thing (scientifically) as a ‘mass hallucination’ which, even if all the witnesses were insane, would explain shared experiences. This is why I have always thought that the explanation for the phenomenon had to include some mind altering influence, so it is interesting (to me) that an actual scientific study bears out this hypothesis.
Far out? You have no idea. But also :facepalm:
Perhaps they were just having a bong party while watching the stars? But in seriousness, the way this is works is most likely either A. a hoax, B. a game of telephone like I mentioned earlier, C. the power of suggestion, one person sees an interesting glowy thing in the sky and claims, look, it’s a flying saucer! Everyone else looks and, having already gotten the idea in their head, they to agree with the rest of the group that it is a flying saucer. The story is then spread around and completely blown out of proportion by the tellers.
Tell me about it
In that instance I was referring to word usage as opposed to correct spelling, however that is something that is suffering aswell.
obviously I am not helping in that regard. 
The whole point of “Telephone” is that the story changes as it goes through multiple people, so this isn’t actually a valid analogy for sightings which are corroborated by multiple witnesses.
The power of suggestion hypothesis is not wrong. I’m sure that large numbers of reported sightings are in fact misidentifications as you have described. But it isn’t a satisfying explanation for some of the more specific sightings, such as this one, or pretty much any sighting where several highly credible individuals such as airline pilots come forward with reports.
The “bong party” hypothesis is interesting - some illegal substances have been alleged to induce shared hallucinations - but this also requires a “supernatural” explanation, since shared hallucinations do not exist in modern science.
how 'bout all of them are lying.seriously:all of the people that claim abduction by aliens must have already heard of that and then start to imagine a lie and tell it to everyone.
I don’t necessarily read the word UFO as ‘Aliens’ like a lot of people do.
UFO’s can be anything from testing vehicles and military objects.
Google have a new type of camera that looks like a ‘UFO’ that flies above the land and takes photos to update Google Earth.
Anyway… I took these the other day.
Shite quality I know. It was on my old phone.
And I scaled it up.
If I do see another one, Which I probably wont. Then I will take it with my camera.
Seriously? Read any of the links I’ve posted and then come back and tell me every group UFO sighting is a conspiracy involving dozens of people lying about what they saw for no monetary benefit.
PS- Adam, nice photos! Can you describe what you saw, like its manner of flight or behavior?
TBH it could be anything from the photo.
Well, I just saw it for a few seconds in the corner of my eye.
And I was then just like, WTF, you know?
With that shiver down my back.
You could just tell.
So I quickly grabbed the nearest thing that had a camera (My old phone -.-)
And took the photos before it went upwards and disappeared.
It was really stable and just moving slowly left to right, And when it went away, it was pretty fast.
There was no sound from it at all. :S
The lights were flickering from yellow, green, red and blue.
Alien Morse Code? Ha ha.
I meant telephone as in you tell all your friends about seeing a UFO. Your friends tell their friends a slightly different story and so on. By the time the story gets to the internetz it has turned into something completely different.
As for the bong party, many many things related to spirituality, “UFO” (every time I say UFO I mean alien spaceship) sightings or ghost sightings and other phony things is the power of suggestion. If somebody says, " Hey look at that, it looks like a UFO!" your brain (if you believe in UFOs) will want to see the UFO and if there is nothing there, it will create one. In a " bong party" where everyone had the same hallucination it probably went something like this:
Stoner A: wow man, look at that thing in the sky! It’s like some alien dude’s spaceship coming to abduct us.
(now all the other stoners look at the sky and imagine seeing a ufo because stoner A suggested it so they now imagine it)
Stoner B: wow man, it totally is an alien spaceship
and so on. People like to agree with the group so they sometimes imagine things just to go along. Under a hallucinagenic drug this effect is probably increased greatly.
Suggestion is why many “scientific” tests of mystical and super natural things come up with false positive, in an experiment with no definite form of measurement you must have a double blind or the results are invalid.
Thats what I said - it’s not a convincing explanation for group sightings because everyone’s story would by definition be slightly different.
Like I said, I’m sure this does in fact account for a large proportion of sightings. But the odds of every “UFO” which was created out of nothing by witnesses’ brains looking identical for every witness is virtually nill. Everyone’s individual conception of what a “UFO” looks like isn’t 100% identical - it could be a saucer, it could be triangular, it could be cigar-shaped, it could have glowing lights, it could have windows, it could be a black shape - so for multiple people to independently describe an identical object requires further explanation than simple suggestion.