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.
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.
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!
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.
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!"
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
A more accurate title for this post could be: "English-Based UFO Reporting Organizations Primarily Receive Reports from, Unsurprisingly, English-Speaking Countries."
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.
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
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
"Aliens from outer space" sighted frequently over areas of the world where fictional media depicting aliens from outer space is widespread. Hmm. Shocker.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.