UFOs are real

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > UFOs are real

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

If they couldn't even track down that jetpack dude that kept buzzing LAX last year (causing the entire airport to be closed down several times) then there's zero chance they'd be able to catch a UFO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnLW5SHzMNs

# ¿ Apr 4, 2021 20:10

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 03:57

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

wilfredmerriweathr posted:

With how many starlink satellites are in orbit these days, this is gonna become more and more frequent. I'm an astronomer and I camp in the desert a lot and it's hella noticeable.

Here in Australia we had a whole bunch of people calling talkback radio this morning after witnessing a perfectly straight line of dozens of lights streaking across the sky, which of course was Starlink: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-13/what-were-these-lights-in-the-sky-eastern-australia/100064630

# ¿ Apr 13, 2021 06:52

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Ratios and Tendency posted:

What if they're in a line

That's a side view of a triangle

# ¿ Apr 13, 2021 13:13

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Mulaney Power Move posted:

i think a good example of ufology at its best was the case of the phoenix lights where you had so many variations of what people say they saw that they decided their were multiple different incidents - more than one ufo that night! - rather than writing it off as subjective interpretation of seeing flares.

Similarly, there was a UFO incident in Westall Australia in 1966 where several hundred school children and staff witnessed a silvery object descend out of the sky, land not too far away behind some trees, and then 20 minutes later took off vertically. At the time pretty much everyone said that the actual landing was obscured behind the trees but some of the kids ran over to the area shortly after it took off again.
Of course in the intervening years researchers have apparently collected over 400 alleged eyewitness accounts and a lot of them have wildly different details: some claim there were three UFOs, some people claim that they were a kid at the school and they got within a few metres of the landed craft, some say there were flashing lights, some say the craft was making sound, etc etc

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/v...9f19327eb1c23fc
https://www.theage.com.au/national/academic-throws-light-on-40-year-old-ufo-mystery-20051002-ge0z6n.html

The government had been launching high altitude weather balloons at the time to monitor radiation during the Maralinga nuclear tests and they were pretty much the exact size and colour of the UFO that people most often described and one had been launched the previous day
https://www.facebook.com/1057704475...17268096384282/

# ¿ Apr 13, 2021 14:11

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Mulaney Power Move posted:

lol so finally after all these decades we get a real photo at last and it's from a basement in mexico and we know it's real because whitlet streiber said it has a vag

oh and it's blurry of course

For some reason Geller posted an especially blurry version of the photo. It's been kicking around for at least a year and the earlier versions were somewhat less blurry:

Eyyyy, there's that grussy that everyone's been talking about

The photo gained traction a few weeks back when someone used it for a fake ring camera video by animating it slightly, the version that Geller posted might have been a screenshot from that video

# ¿ Aug 29, 2023 08:49

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Non Compos Mentis posted:

Thats a big grussy

Whitley Streiber said it was pretty average :shrug:

You need to up your grussy game

# ¿ Aug 29, 2023 09:21

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Non Compos Mentis posted:

hes going to try and have sex with one of the mantids

At this point I'd even make do with a classic 1950s Hairy Dwarf

# ¿ Aug 29, 2023 11:18

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

jokes posted:

Could be a rock. Could be a space artifact from an interstellar civilization seeking to make coded contact and prepare humanity for a great ascension to the stars.

It kind've feels like "The pyramids/stonehenge/etc was made by aliens! You can't prove it wasn't!" for the modern generation.

I grew up in the 1970s when Erich von Daniken's bullshit was still wildly popular. It later turned out that he was a serial conman who'd been scamming people and embezzling businesses for decades before he got around to writing his books. When he finally got busted his excuse was "It's their fault for trusting me with the money"

quote:

Following his release, von D�niken became a manager of the Hotel Rosenh�gel in Davos, Switzerland, during which time he wrote Chariots of the Gods? (German: Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, literally "Memories of the Future"), working on the manuscript late at night after the hotel's guests had retired. The draft of the book was turned down by several publishers. Econ Verlag (now part of Ullstein Verlag) was willing to publish the book after a complete reworking by a professional author, Utz Utermann, who used the pseudonym of Wilhelm Roggersdorf. Utermann was a former editor of the Nazi Party's newspaper V�lkischer Beobachter and had been a Nazi bestselling author. The re-write of Chariots of the Gods? was accepted for publication early in 1967, but not printed until March 1968.[9] Against all expectations, the book gained widespread interest and became a bestseller. Von D�niken was paid 7 percent of the book's turnover, while 3 percent went to Utermann. In 1970, Der Spiegel referred to the hype over D�niken as D�nikitis.

In November 1968, von D�niken was arrested for fraud, after falsifying hotel records and credit references in order to take out loans for $130,000 over a period of twelve years. He used the money for foreign travel to research his book. Two years later, von D�niken was convicted for "repeated and sustained" embezzlement, fraud, and forgery, with the court ruling that the writer had been living a "playboy" lifestyle. He unsuccessfully entered a plea of nullity, on the grounds that his intentions were not malicious and that the credit institutions were at fault for failing adequately to research his references, and on 13 February 1970 he was sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment and was also fined 3,000 francs. He served one year of this sentence before being released.

His first book, Chariots of the Gods?, had been published by the time of his trial, and its sales allowed him to repay his debts and leave the hotel business. Von D�niken wrote his second book, Gods from Outer Space, while in prison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken#Early_life

# ¿ Aug 31, 2023 04:34

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Vakal posted:

Also another thing that often gets conveniently over looked is that there are more pyramids than just the three big ones at Giza.

There are smaller ones with the oldest being short with rounded tops. Then get larger and more "sharp" at the top as they got the building methods and designs hammer out.

Also we have written records of the Egyptian dudes who oversaw the building of some of the pyramids

# ¿ Aug 31, 2023 06:18

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Megillah Gorilla posted:

�The Friends of Khufu Gang,�

loving suckups :argh:

(Khufu (aka Cheops) was the pharoah who commissioned the Great Pyramid)

# ¿ Aug 31, 2023 15:11

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

deep dish peat moss posted:

The infamous map of UFO sighting reports that shows a heavy bias for North America and Western Europe is notably gathered from a reporting agency that collects UFO report data only from US sources

There's a similar issue with bigfoot, it turns out there's been a whole lot of sightings in Australia as well, plus a handful in the UK and Russia and a smattering throughout SE Asia

That hairy hominid sure does get around!

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 03:57

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

maybealabia posted:

Twice in my life I've seen something that I could call a UFO and I really have no explanation for what I saw but I believe it's much more likely that it was my brain poorly interpreting something mundane rather than a top secret alien space ship angel Kaiju ghost or whatever

The pareidolia effect is hardwired into our brains, it's an automatic cognitive reflex which alerts us to imminent danger by immediately extrapolating from incomplete evidence and dumping adrenaline into the system so we can react faster. It happens to me quite frequently when I'll spot a dark shape near my hand and immediately go "GAH, A SPIDER!" only to then realise it was just a crack in the wall or a bunch of little sticks or something. Your brain fills in the details and if you don't go back for a second look you'll have an incorrect memory of what actually occurred, there's a shitload of psychological studies showing that memories can be incredibly unreliable.
One of the best examples from my life was one time when I was walking home at night past a metal railing fence and I spotted a grey object with dark banding darting towards me and my brain went "LOOK OUT, A RACCOON IS ATTACKING YOU!" so I leapt sideways to avoid it. Turns out it was just a rounded cover over a drainage pipe and the 'dark banding' was the shadow from the fence, and the 'darting towards me' was just the shift in perspective as I was walking past. The real kicker is that I live in Australia and we don't even have raccoons here.
If I hadn't taken a second look I would have sworn up and down I saw a raccoon. :shrug:

This is also why anecdotal evidence isn't counted as actual scientific evidence, it's simply not verifiable.

BigBadSteve posted:

But "mass hysteria" as an explanation for unexplained sightings is generally laughable, except in very specific cases like the first radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds being mistaken for news reporting by many listeners, causing actual hysteria.

I'd also include instance where someone reports a weird phenomena (eg: Mothman, chupacabra, Popobawa the assrape demon) and then other people also start reporting sightings

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 04:34

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

BigBadSteve posted:

Have you considered the fact that there might actually be an escaped lion or other big cat loose in the woods?

The 'evidence' was reeeeeeeeeeally shoddy
https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1681899247803703296

.... but yeah, there's been verified cases where escaped exotic animals have been caught

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Don't forget that the good ol' Loveland Frog was originally sighted & reported by a police officer, it turned out to be an iguana with a missing tail

There's also been several instances in the UK where the police have mobilized dozens of officers and helicopters in response to a report of a tiger on the loose only for them to discover it was a stuffed toy or a lifesize garden ornament

Of course sometimes they actually turned out to be a big cat that someone had secretly been keeping as a pet which escaped

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Weird poo poo just turns up sometimes. Here's an article from the Dec 21 1926 edition of the London Daily Mirror where a farmer in East Sussex UK shot a mystery animal which was very obviously an Australian wombat:

An article in the Western Daily Press newspaper on the same date points out that a female wombat had escaped from the exotic animal collection at the Pippingford Park estate two years earlier, which is about 28 miles north of where the farmer shot it dead. A man called Hayley Morriss had taken over the estate after WW1 and he was a keen naturalist who had "made a fortune in China" and apparently spent it on his hobbies and let the estate fall into disrepair. He was also imprisoned for three years in 1925 for conspiring to "procure a girl of 15 years" with the intent that he might "carnally know her".

Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Sep 1, 2023

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 07:40

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Vakal posted:

It can't be over stated how war throws fuel on the ol' technology fire.

For example, when WWI started, no one had a clue how to use those new fangled aero-planes on the battle field. The best they could come up with was just dropping hand grenades from the cockpit:

Cut to about 40 years later and we're rocking B-52 carrying 70,000 lbs of high yield bombs.

Then another 40 years the B-2 stealth bombers are starting to fly around

We're about another 40 years out from that so I would not be surprised if there are pill shaped super-drones buzzing around.

Wars always kick technology development into higher gear (eg: radar, etc etc) but the same is also true of porn, which has pushed a crazy amount of innovation in communication tech

Warhawks and nerdy perverts, we salute you! :patriot:

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 08:06

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Megillah Gorilla posted:

From reddit: "The best UFO footage could be the greatest leak, totally not CGI we promise"

https://i.imgur.com/EAdivEe.mp4

It's a loving pot lid. Someone found a very similar design on amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Creuset-Signature-Enameled-Cast-Iron-Cookware/dp/B08X7J82NZ?th=1

Others noted how the camera doesn't even follow the UFO - almost like it's not even there and was added later.

Someone always tracks down the exact common household item they used for the fake UFO :v:

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

The George Adamski fake UFO photos were simply delightful.

It's super obvious he made them out of Sears gas lanterns and some random junk but bless his cotton socks for giving it a red hot go.

Sometimes when they confront the faker with the evidence they pull a Uri Geller and go "Well what I saw was real and what you found was clearly inspired by the aliens and therefore not only doesn't debunk my argument, it's further proof that I'm right!"

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

When someone found the exact model of garbage can lid that Billy Meier built one of his model UFOs out of, Billy said that the aliens had tried to telepathically send their beamship schematics to us, but chose the Germans right before WWII as their recipients and when the nazis were able to build a half-flyable UFO the horrified Pleiadians cancelled sending the full schematics. postwar, unrelated designers found the incomplete plans and made trash can lids out of them

http://www.billymeierufocase.com/wcufodeconstruction.html

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 17:07

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Zefiel posted:

Lol, ballsy. If we�re gonna post fakes even back then as a preteen I was surprised people were falling for this one:

There's also been a bunch of people posting fakes for clicks, or trying to go viral on Reddit, or just being smugmos and trolling people to prove their gullibility.

Way back in 2003 the UK TV station Channel 4 commissioned a fake UFO for a 'documentary' to see if they could fool people and get media attention, they hired some movie FX guys and some hot air balloon manufacturers and model aircraft pilots and spent three months working on a really complex steerable UFO which ended up being pretty lovely and the entire project was one clusterfuck after another. They still got a fair bit of media attention around the globe, though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP6_Yg0p8G8

In 2009 two random dudes in New Jersey tied some flares to helium balloons and caused quite a panic. Eventually they confessed and a judge charged them with misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges which carried a small fine and 50 hours community service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cW8RsWNnKg
A whole bunch of TV shows and UFO experts argued that the effect they caused couldn't possibly be manmade and had to be alien tech, lol

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 19:58

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Yeah here's another recent CGI fake which made it onto the news. They were smart about it and coordinated a bunch of people to call the news station at around the same time and sent in several different videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqZYWGYQrc
They paid some random guy on fiverr to create the CG effects, lol. This poo poo is only going to get more and more common

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 20:08

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

I can't help but read Overdog's posts in a Rodney Dangergield voice and that one was a cracker

https://i.imgur.com/bp6SH6g.gifv

# ¿ Sep 7, 2023 09:46

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Icochet posted:

I'd pay good money to see a pissing alien

# ¿ Sep 7, 2023 18:17

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Zefiel posted:

Welp, they're coming out of one of our volcanos now. Explain this, skepticailures:

https://twitter.com/Hechizero_38/status/1695047668828143856?s=20

Phil Poling just posted a breakdown of the "Mexican volcano UFOs" video

TL;DR: it's a train of Starlink satellites, filmed at an angle. They're actually just points of light, the elongated cigar shape is caused by low shutter speed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBEdXynx4mY

If you want to see it yourself here's a handy link: https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-train-how-to-see-and-track-it

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 09:17

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

redshirt posted:

So UFO's come from underground now??!

UFOlogy has been connected to Hollow Earth Theory for a long long time now:

Note also that the holy city of Shambhala (said to be the Kingdom of Maitreya, the future Buddha but also prophesized to be the birthplace of Kalki, the next incarnation of Vishnu) is said by some to be found inside the Hollow Earth. The Nazis and the Soviets were pretty keen on finding Shambhala:

quote:

Inspired by Theosophical lore and several visiting Mongol lamas, Gleb Bokii, the chief Bolshevik cryptographer and one of the bosses of the Soviet secret police, along with his writer friend Alexander Barchenko, embarked on a quest for Shambhala, in an attempt to merge Kalachakra-tantra and ideas of Communism in the 1920s. Among other things, in a secret laboratory affiliated with the secret police, Bokii and Barchenko experimented with Buddhist spiritual techniques to try to find a key for engineering perfect communist human beings. They contemplated a special expedition to Inner Asia to retrieve the wisdom of Shambhala � the project fell through as a result of intrigues within the Soviet intelligence service, as well as rival efforts of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat that sent its own expedition to Tibet in 1924.

quote:

Hitler sent several expeditions to Tibet in the 1930s "to contact the Agartha and Shambala", supposedly part of Nazi esotericism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambhala#Expeditions_and_location_hypotheses

It sounds like a nice place :buddy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlWrMpV1vy0

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 10:31

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Rad-daddio posted:

Turn the Radio Telescope Off

A Message to You, SETI

# ¿ Sep 12, 2023 19:47

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

temple posted:

Mexico just showed alien dick
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxWhk4GLYz0JzqhF13ImeqX8ioFZVSvasO?si=idIc6BBBRMR7I33z

Spaceman got nards?

Megillah Gorilla posted:

UFO spotted on google maps it's a loving bird

Feel free to jump to the 30 second mark if you don't want to watch an idiot using google maps poorly

https://i.imgur.com/1H3du5R.mp4

They also spotted bigfoot on Google Earth satellite photos it's just a pond or a shadow, there's lots of random dark blobs all over that area

https://www.news.com.au/technology/...cbf7c280a947fd5

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 11:40

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

pop fly to McGillicutty posted:

Nah bro they sequenced the DNA! I'm about to get taken home! Chorizubulon has the best food and I can't wait to go back!

A Texas veterinarian tech got hold of some alleged bigfoot DNA samples back in 2012 and ran genome sequences and determined that bigfoot was a hybrid between humans and a previously unknown species of giant prehistoric lemur: https://www.livescience.com/27140-bigfoot-dna-study-questioned.html

Mainstream science was somewhat skeptical and has yet to accept her findings as conclusive

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 13:56

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

naem posted:

how do people have such specific ideas about what an alien is or what interaction with them would be like

it�s like a religion

There's an excellent book called "Round In Circles" by Jim Schnabel which goes into the history of the crop circles phenomenon and the scientists who spent years and years studying it. They broke into two main camps: scientists who were absolutely adamant that the crop circles were a natural phenomenon caused by localized tornadoes and scientists who were absolutely adamant that they were being caused by alien visitors. They feuded for years and years over their pet theories, writing up papers and published regular "cerealogy' journals and holding seminars and flying in guest lecturers from overseas and doing media interviews and rushing around documenting new crop circles whenever they appeared and holding weeklong "field trips" where they monitored fields and tried to collect footage of crop circles being created.
Spoiler: the entire 'phenomenon' was just a hoax, and always had been. The author of the book should know, he was one of the main offenders and had created dozens and dozens of crop circles over the years which the scientists swore couldn't possibly have been made by humans.

Bigfootology is also broken into similar opposing camps, with one group of 'researchers' being absolutely adamant that bigfoot is a mundane flesh & blood creature which is just really good at hiding, and the other group which is absolutely adamant that bigfoots are dimension-traveling creatures which communicate via telepathy. Each camp holds their own annual conventions and is convinced that the other guys are nuts who have missed the entire point.

I keep comparing UFOlogy to bigfootery because both fields work exactly the same way and have people forming similar theories based off pretty much the same type of evidence and jumping to similar conspiracy theories to explain why "the real evidence" has been withheld from the public. Many Bigfootologists believe that the forestry department has been systematically hiding evidence of bigfoot for decades and the Smithsonian has been collecting giant skeletons and hiding them away because they'd disprove current scientific theories on evolution n' poo poo. They're also usually pretty darn sure they know what will happen when they inevitably interact with the thingie and they're sure it'll happen real soon.

There's also always a fringe element who believe they're already in regular communication with the thingies: there's a whole lot of people who believe that bigfoots talk to them telepathically, a whole lot of spiritualists who believe that specific dead people talk to them, and UFO dudes who believe that aliens are talking to them telepathically or that they have special UFO summoning skills:

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

One of the main "UFO summoners" is a guy called Ron Bingham who gets a fair amount of media attention. He claims that he can telepathically communicate with UFOs, ghosts and even bigfoot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaPCCZFsoM

He seems to be a pretty harmless but deeply deluded guy who believes he's got special UFO super powers. He's been doing this for several decades which is pretty sad. You see the exact same thing in bigfoot circles, I've done a few posts ITT about the communities of bigfoot "communicators" who believe they have a special psychic bond with bigfoot.

Here's a video interviewing a few other UFO summoners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvy_K81PbS8

Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Sep 13, 2023

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 17:05

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

redm posted:

that thing is made out of gd paper mache

Well maybe they evolved from cellulose-based lifeforms, you don't know :colbert:

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 18:01

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Puckanas posted:

Sadly, it sounds like untreated mental illness.

Oh definitely. A whole lot of it is also encouraged by locals feeding stories to gullible explorers/tourists for tips. "Yetis? Oh I'm not really supposed to talk about it to outsiders but .... yeah I heard lots of stories. If we go out into the hills I bet I can even find a footprint for you, you wanna hire me as a guide?"

The guys who were pulling all the crop circles hoaxes were going to the regular Crop Circle Explorers meetings at the local pub and quietly hanging out with the true believers and sometimes even going on their "field expeditions" with them

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 20:02

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

KrunkMcGrunk posted:

You can gently caress it after I get to eat one of its feet

You better hurry, someone already ate all the toes off one of its feet

Megillah Gorilla posted:

and the lols start coming and they don't stop coming

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 20:11

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

It's clearly a goblinoid (possible a leprechaun) and not an alien

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDUjTVHJWxA

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 20:22

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Bug Squash posted:

NASA just did their analysis of the "Go Fast" video...

...and it turns out it's just something going relatively slow and the UFO community was wrong again.

Yeah the Corridor Crew guys came to the same conclusion a few years ago, it's a relatively slow moving object filmed from a very fast moving plane and the parallax effect makes it look like the object is moving quickly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHDlfIaBEqw&t=252s

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 19:09

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Vakal posted:

Every probe they sent past the moon punches through a giant projection screen and the other side is the "real space" along with a much bigger, better and more advanced Earth.

One of my favourite "hollow earth" crackpot theories was the Koreshans with their "Cellular Cosmogony" model, which posited that the world was actually on the inside of a sphere and the sun, moon and stars were being reflected off mercurial discs which floated in the centre of the hollow earth

Their cult leader renamed himself Koresh and claimed to be the new messiah but they don't seem to have any connection to David Koresh and the Branch Davidians as far as I can tell, that was just a complete coincidence

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 20:02

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

mediaphage posted:

perhaps. but i don�t think the ufo grift has become anything close to a household name like that dude which is more of what i was getting on. just about everyone knows about the seditious q anon fucker and half of republicans think he�s a hero.

nobody outside of someone who has a passing interest in ufos (regardless of what side you come down on) knows who david grusch is. i still don�t think it comes close to what he could make as an ex- military dude with a ts clearance somewhere in the mic which makes the circumstances around his losing it more interesting for me

Yeah there's always been hoaxers and bandwagoneers who jump onto the latest woo trend and they do it for a whole variety of reasons, there's no single explanation for their behaviour. Sometimes it's an attempted grift right from the start (there's a long LONG history of these fakers touring their 'discoveries' around the country and charging admission at state fairs so people could gawk at it) and sometimes they just do it for shits & giggles, like the crop circle fakers. Sometimes an attempted hoax takes on a life of its own and the truth isn't revealed until many many decades later:

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Ivan T. Sanderson has his fingerprints all over this stuff, his name just keeps popping up over and over and over. The word 'cryptozoology' was first seen in print in Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans' 1955 book Sur la Piste des B�tes Ignor�es but he attributes Sanderson with coining the term in the 1940s. Sanderson got a real reputation as an intrepid explorer and monster investigator and he occasionally got called him in when there was a mystery to be solved, such as the 1948 Clearwater Beach Giant Penguin case. Giant three toed footprints were found along the beach short and a nearby river bank and mystified the town, and when Sanderson was called in to figure it out he announced it was definitely a gigantic penguin and there was no way the footprints could have been faked due their depth and stride. Here's a photo of Sanderson holding a plaster cast of one of the footprints:

Soon after there were several reported sightings of the giant penguin, which described it as being 15' tall and having alligator feet.

Decades later, long after Sanderson had died, a local newspaper reporter revealed that the tracks had been created by two local pranksters who just attached heavy iron monster feet onto their shoes

It turns out that they'd been trying to create a dinosaur hoax but Sanderson derailed it when he told everyone it was a giant penguin.

Bigfoot started out as a similar prank back in '58 when workers discovered giant footprints around a logging camp and a local reporter ran a story about it:

.... and the culprit wasn't revealed until almost half a century later when his family gave the game away after he died

Of course, sometimes the explanation for a hoax is just plain mental illness. :shrug:

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 15:59

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Rad-daddio posted:

Lmao the origin of all cryptozoology is just bored dudes having fun in the wilderness.

It also ties back into the old "fearsome critters" folklore that lumberjacks used to invent such as hoop snakes, snallygasters, glawuckas, goofus birds, agropelters, etc etc.. Bored dudes have been making up tall tales about weird critters hiding in the American woods for centuries, and some of them turned into jokey folkore that gets sold as tourist souvenirs (jackalopes, etc) and some turn into bizarre national obsessions (bigfoot, dogmen, aliens, etc)

The hodag was an interesting case, it started out as a pretty obvious tall tale and featured in several Paul Bunyan stories but it briefly crossed over into cryptozoology territory in the 1890s until those spoilsport nerds at The Smithsonian rained on everyone's parade:

quote:

In 1893, newspapers reported the discovery of a hodag in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. The articles claimed the hodag had "the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end". The reports were instigated by well-known Wisconsin land surveyor, timber cruiser and prankster Eugene Shepard, who rounded up a group of local people to capture the animal. The group reported that they needed to use dynamite to kill the beast.

A photograph of the remains of the charred beast was released to the media. It was "the fiercest, strangest, most frightening monster ever to set razor sharp claws on the earth. It became extinct after its main food source, all white bulldogs, became scarce in the area."

Shepard claimed to have captured another hodag in 1896, and this one was captured alive. According to Shepard's reports, he and several bear wrestlers placed chloroform on the end of a long pole, which they worked into the cave of the creature where it was overcome.

He displayed this hodag at the first Oneida County fair. Thousands of people came to see the hodag at the fair or at Shepard's display in a shanty at his house. Having connected wires to it, Shepard would occasionally move the creature, which would typically send the already-skittish viewers fleeing the display.

As newspapers locally, statewide, and then nationally began picking up the story of the apparently remarkable living creature, a small group of scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. announced they would be traveling to Rhinelander to inspect the apparent discovery. Their mere announcement spelled the end, as Shepard was then forced to admit that the hodag was a hoax.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 16:25

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Shinjobi posted:

How dummy thicc do you think the real aliens that exist will be

Asking for a friend

According to Uri Geller and Whitney Streiber they have tiny bony asses but the phattest pussy you've ever seen. Like, shockingly large pussies that will make you question everything you thought you knew

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Eyyyy, there's that grussy that everyone's been talking about

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 17:29

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Stocky Manhood posted:

Hey guys I saw a UFO

*Pie plates on string in front of a scratched up lens*

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 22:18

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

naem posted:

I�d like to apologize to all believers/skeptics by pointing out that I am also a moron

and that people seem drawn to opposite ends of the argument spectrum instead of having some kind of dialogue in-between like, ever?

we can all agree that this is all very interesting and fun but the fact that people are dumb is also interesting and fun to point out

Oh I'm goddamn fascinated by the entire thing and have been for decades. I grew up watching SPOOOOOOOOKY shows like In Search Of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK4PGCQQ4Oc

..... and reading SPOOOOOOOKY books like this:

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 01:27

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Communist Thoughts posted:

It seems like a version of this is happening with the UAPs where people argue over whether the physics defying UAPs are aliens or new secret super drones, but we haven't seen any evidence at all of either.
Any evidence that's been shown is so far all easily explained as balloons, camera artifacts or birds.

The same thing happened with bigfootery, with people coming up with crazy theories to explain why it can keep avoiding being spotted by more people or filmed on video or trailcams which eventually became accepted wisdom across large parts of the community. Bigfoot can see in the infrared spectrum so it can sense trailcam sensors! Bigfoot is telepathic and knows when you're looking for it! Bigfoot can use infrasound attacks to make people feel unwell and scare them away from its territory! Bigfoot is an extra-dimensional being which can hop between planes of existence to avoid people! Bigfoots are aliens and they go back home on their spaceships!

They've written lots of books about this poo poo:

It's pretty much the equivalent Mitch Hedberg joke about "Bigfoot is actually blurry" to explain why Science can never pin it down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LwFrKUeChY

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 02:33

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Mumpy Puffinz posted:

How do you gently caress a 4 dimensional being? Put it in their time slot?

It turns out that what we assumed were "anal probes" were actually temporal anchors which opened your root chakra to the 4th dimension energy

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 02:43

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Also loved the Mr Spok show.

There's a Youtube channel that's making fake 1970s 'unsolved mysteries' documentaries and they made one in that style, they did a great job:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgGEJFUwReI

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 14:34

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 03:57

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

naem posted:

so alien enthusiasts are a bit much and insist all kinds of very specific things exist based on no to very little evidence and jump to conclusions and it�s like religion and an identity at this point

BUT skeptics are also like, just as weird about it and their identity is that there aren�t aliens, and one could land and shake their hand and say �hello here are your free hoverboots and atomic fusion earthling� and they�d still deny it

both sides seem to be completely irrational

Willatron posted:

Can't really say I've seen a skeptic this stubborn about it.

Well yeah, naem's counterexample is a hypothetical event which (as far as we know) has never happened outside of scifi, but "alien enthusiasts jump to crazy conclusions on insufficient evidence" happens a heck of a lot, it's dumb as hell to say both sides are on equal footing.

The modern UFO craze started in the late 1940s but in the 75+ years that people have been trying to capture indisputable evidence of their existence they haven't come up with one single piece of worthwhile evidence. (There were actually earlier UFO fads, back in the late 1890s there were many reports of mystery airships made of wood and canvas, some of which were said to have come from Mars. Note that there were a bunch of early scifi stories in the 1880s featuring fanciful airships similar to those that were reported.) The bigfoot craze has been going for at least 65 years and the hunt for Himalayan yetis/abominable snowmen has been going on for over a century now and they also haven't found any indisputable evidence. The modern Loch Ness monster craze kicked off in 1933 but even though there's now houses and motels all along the lake's foreshore and 24hr livefeeds of the loch from multiple viewpoints they still haven't come up with any compelling evidence, etc etc etc.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 15:15

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > UFOs are real

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