Thread: Flying Saucer Fever Grips Iran, Theories Abound

How could you confuse Venus with a UFO?

Yeah, I just saw that too. I logged in to start a thread about it. Good thing that we have Johnnny .
Hey do you have a link to a video or something like that ?
Anybody here from Iran?

They're called un-manned reconnaissance aircraft and we've been flying them over that part of the world for years.

I have read about those, I don´t think it is the case.

Is it just me... but have you guys noticed that people either believe in this kinda stuff or they dont? If they do... then they are willing to believe in a whole lot more other weird stuff. Like the bermuda triangle, crop circles, etc. Those that dont tend to stick to scientific and logical reasoning.

Its kinda funny

"More colourful Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) have been spotted beaming out green, red, blue and purple rays over the northern cities of Tabriz and Ardebil and in the Caspian Sea province of Golestan."

It is not a planet or a plane... UFO doesn´t mean that it is aliens. It is something that we don´t know what the hell is.

Two Theories:
1) It's just the normal cycle that a society goes through when they wake up to the reality that they are not as all knowing and as relevant to the universe as they originally thought. It's like when the farmer gets TV or radio for the first time and they are exposed to new ideas that are alien to what the tribal leaders and mullahs have been telling them for centuries. You know, the same old stuff the West went through 800 years ago and longer like - the earth is flat - the earth is the center of the universe and then getting new and conflicting hints of other information. After all the new rumblings in the area from the Iraqi war and Gulf war people are beginning to reexamine their life. All the noise and flashing on the west horizon implies that Iran is not the center of the world (neither economically, religiously etc.) and this makes people uncomfortable. So the mind dreams up things until it can develop a mental model for what is really going on. The people are clearly not comfortable with the notion that their government and religious leaders are telling them everything and they feel vulnerable to change.

2) It just some of our boys getting giddy at the controls of the silly pre-targeting recon drones in another unauthorized flyby episode. Boys will be boys and they are probably mischievously checking out what real-estate areas have the most lucrative opportunity for investing in when we finish up the attitude adjustment over there.
-OD

Originally posted by OceanDude
2) It just some of our boys getting giddy at the controls of the silly pre-targeting recon drones in another unauthorized flyby episode. Boys will be boys and they are probably mischievously checking out what real-estate areas have the most lucrative opportunity for investing in when we finish up the attitude adjustment over there. -OD

Who says they're unauthorized???

Ok, here is the best I could find so far. It is a nice picture.
http://www.iran-daily.com/pdf/1.pdf

I heard that there is a nice video somewhere about the others colored UFOs. We just have to wait to see.

Well, it is interesting that they put that story on the front page - and that there seemed to be widespread sightings, and that there was the standard attempt at some kind of explanation. That seems to follow the pattern of most coverage of UFOs, although in the United States it is more likely to be in local newspapers than those with national circulation.

It might be interesting to see if there are follow up reports that are published, or if the sightings only occur on one night. There are potentially lots of explanations, ranging from an unpredicted meteor shower to an atmospheric interference to even military aircraft. They could also remain "unidentified."

Originally posted by Eggs
Is it just me... but have you guys noticed that people either believe in this kinda stuff or they dont? If they do... then they are willing to believe in a whole lot more other weird stuff. Like the bermuda triangle, crop circles, etc. Those that dont tend to stick to scientific and logical reasoning.

Its kinda funny

It's partially true, though not necessarily so. It appears that the most adamant believers tend to be people who say they have had experiences or sightings; some of those who haven't seem to be more skeptical. It's also fed by the number of hoaxes people have created and a fairly wide campaign of debunking both by non-believers and, for many years, the U.S. government.

But it doesn't necessarily hold true that people who say they have seen UFOs automatically believe in crop circles and other sorts of things. Obviously, you are likely to believe something you've experienced personally than something you haven't, so the levels of support in relation to other things can vary. The crop circle researchers seem to be leaning toward some theory that these are caused by some kind of atmospheric influence on falling dust debris, in which something smaller than a water spout could occur over a field. At the same time, the complexity of some of their reports indicates there are other explanations, one of which has been UFOs. There are some pretty good attempts to reproduce them as man-made which has made the crop circle believers develop a system of soil and plant analysis to support their contentions.

I think one of the conflicts that exists in dealing with these phenomena is that both science and logic has difficulty explaining these things because of the lack of physical evidence required for evaluation. Some researchers have tried to claim that perhaps one reason for the lack of evidence lies in that human development of science and logic is unable to grasp the ways in which UFOs materialize or move; others think we are just not advanced enough and need to discover new properties and laws that might apply. Still, with thousands of reports around the world, one would expect something to be found that could lend itself to more credibility.

The "mental disorder" theory is mostly applied to those who claim to have had "experiences"..or, in other words, abductions. This has set off quite a debate among those researchers, especially because of the ways hypnosis and be used (or misused) to produce different results. It generally doesn't seem to apply to UFO sightings, even though it makes some sense that there is a possibility that people's eyes and ears can play "tricks" on them. Of course, that possiblity becomes more diminished when many people see the same object. Most reports end up being explained as an illusion of some kind - but there always remains some number that aren't.

From the picture Vieope provided, the object seems to be pretty far away - and the farther away something is, the harder it is to determine what it seems to be, UFO or not.

So what do you think these sightings are? A US military aircraft or a UFO? I'm not sure what to think at this point.

This is Venus.

Other UFOs have been spotted in several northern and north-western cities moving quickly through the atmosphere emitting brightly coloured rays.

A reporter for the Irna state news agency observed a UFO last week for 90 minutes in the northern city of Bilesavar and was able to film it, according to a report in the newspaper Hambastegi.

Well, if you think that anything is possible, these sightings could be just about anything. I know that one journalist contends that our government has some vague allocations for money going to the armed forces - whether that goes for some kind of high tech secret weaponry/spy stuff or not is debateable. At the same time, you can't develop secret capabilities and have the whole world knowing about it or it wouldn't be very secret. So if those accounts do exist, or money is moved from one thing to another, it's possible that it has been used to develop things that the general public doesn't know about. That is one contention about the secrecy of Area 51 - that it isn't so much about UFOs but about testing and developing of advanced military equipment.

But the sightings in Iran are pretty widespread and the variety of colors and movements seem to contradict the idea that it would be one type of that military equipment. And if we were sure that Iran couldn't shoot something down, we wouldn't need to be using several different types of objects to fly over the area. . .one would be enough to accomplish that task. Why would we risk having them all discovered?

So this doesn't provide much of an answer. . .which means I'm not so sure what to think, except leave it in the category of "unidentified" flying objects in which we have no rational explanation for sighting. It should be interesting to see if there are more reports, or some new reports from other countries.

At this point I'm skeptical, but I guess anything is possible. Maybe they're interested in the war going on in neighbouring areas.

Me thinks it’s Muhammad and all his brothers, and nephews and in-laws and 1000’s of virgins and concubines returning in their multitude of colored and fiery chariots. No doubt they are displeased with the Iranian mullahs and clerics and want to take hostages, foreskins and first born virgins as repatriations for plagiarizing and reinventing their religious ideas without paying copyright royalties. They linger because they can’t find enough virgins to satisfy the old debt.
-OD

Originally posted by OceanDude
Me thinks it’s Muhammad and all his brothers, and nephews and in-laws and 1000’s of virgins and concubines returning in their multitude of colored and fiery chariots. No doubt they are displeased with the Iranian mullahs and clerics and want to take hostages, foreskins and first born virgins as repatriations for plagiarizing and reinventing their religious ideas without paying copyright royalties. They linger because they can’t find enough virgins to satisfy the old debt.
-OD

OceanDude.....LOL, you crack me TFU....LOL. You sir, have a gift for "the good one". I bow before a master...

Well, being skeptical is healthy - it would probably be easier for people to make assertions about the Iranian reports if there were photographs of closer sightings. Of course, even if the objects (or non-objects) were at a large distance, their movement and coloring obviously caught a lot of people's attention. At least enough to warrant some kind of explanation from an Iranian astronomer and a front page report in that particular newspaper.

I've seen some writers about these things try to contend that sightings are often associated with military activity. I haven't really seen a lot of information that sets a pattern to that, except some of the more famous American ones (Gulf Breeze, Nevada, Montana) have been in locations near military bases or ballistic missile installations. Terry Hansen, who published a pretty extensive account of the possibility of a military/government conspiracy theory in that matter, opened his book ("The Missing Times" with a report about sightings near ICBM bases in Montana and how they were covered by local and national media.

But your own reports of sightings took place at summer camp, and lots of others occur in places where there aren't military bases.

One thing is interesting, though - the term "UFO" came from the Air Force abbreviation used to describe unexplained phenomena encountered by pilots. There were reported sightings of "foo fighters" in the European theater during World War II - balls of light or smallish round discs. Both Allied and German pilots reported these sightings, sparking initial fear that the other side had some kind of new secret weapon. Our Air Force eventually attributed these experiences to either some kind of optical or electrical disturbance or to the stress factors associated with crew members flying into combat situations.

I believe the government started investigations following a group of sightings in 1947 (including the Roswell "incident") and formed the first of several versions of what later became known as "Project Blue Book." That investigative arm was publicly discontinued quite a few years ago. However, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was an astronomer at Ohio State University, was hired as a consultant. Although he was a skeptic, he said the government had only a few people assigned to Project Blue Book and most of their task was to "debunk" reports of sightings rather than necessarily investigate them. Hynek later established the Center for UFO Studies near Chicago.

I'm not sure that I would think any possible UFO "visitation" would have some interest in military operations. Even though there is some government control of media in places like the Sudan, I haven't seen reports of sightings while their own ethnic cleansing campaign is underway. And there are lots of other wars going on that would have gained their interest. Besides, I haven't seen documented reports of sightings in historical war texts so far- and one would think that someone would record a close sighting during, say, the American Revolution, when there weren't any kinds of planes in the sky.

kbm8795 you are right. I've read about WW2 pilots experiencing UFO sightings. I saw a little thing on TV & one pilot had re-drawn what he'd seen in the air. They compared the object & lined up a picture of the Stealth Bomber being very similar in size & shape.

When you say the government started numerous investigations in 1947, do you think it was the "secret government" that all the presidents that have existed don't even know about?

Originally posted by Johnnny
... When you say the government started numerous investigations in 1947, do you think it was the "secret government" that all the presidents that have existed don't even know about?

Johnnny, “the club” ain't what it use to be. We are currently upset about the Democrats and Republicans taking themselves too seriously these days, acting too uppity and not giving us enough respect. We might just very well put our full resources behind Nader or start a reparation movement with the American Indians to get things back on agenda.

-OD

I don't necessarily think that is the case at all. The government started investigations following a rash of public sightings in 1947, and the widespread news coverage set off more than a little public concern. At the time, tensions were already building about the fate of post-war Europe and the perceived threat of the Soviet Union's domination of that continent - and the start of the Cold War fed into the imaginations of many people. We had the atomic bomb for only two years, and after we used it in Japan, there was a growing fear that man had finally developed the potential to destroy everything. I think they still operate an annual festival which brings in a lot of people, with guest lecturers that keeps the discussion going about the validity of those reports.

Since there was some degree of fear (which escalated into the 1950's when the Soviets developed their own nuclear potential), it looks as if people demanded that our military and government respond in some manner to these sightings. It looks like the predecessors to Operation Blue Book were developed in response to that kind of public and media coverage. But it's also the time when the Roswell "incident" happened - and since it was fed by a public relations snafu at the local military air field, it has stood out for decades as potential evidence that a disc crashed and the contents taken by the military. That also seems to be the point where stories of threats and coverups start. It has also given the desert city a major economic boost - tourists flock to Roswell to see the museum, read the press reports and spend money on commemorative objects.

Since there are a few governments that openly investigate these sightings and report their findings to the public (most notably in France and Belgium) I don't think there is some kind of widespread secret government involving alien influence that even our President doesn't know about. Does the government coverup information? Well, that probably happens, just as it does with every other kind of policy. If the existence of these sightings were true and contained some evidence of life elsewhere, the contention is that there would be a lot of reasons for withholding that information from the public.

Of course, you have to think about how demanding some of the UFO believer groups can be - if they are already convinced something is "out there," and the government doesn't have anything to confirm that, it doesn't put those in charge in a good position. So they play this sort of conflicting game where the government seemed to be "debunking" all the believer claims, or, as Hynek says, really didn't investigate reported incidents.

But then, as someone who has had multiple sightings of your own, didn't you and your friends develop ideas about what you were looking at? Since you said in the other thread that you look up a lot in the sky now, would you be surprised if you ever saw another object like the one at camp?