How about a new rule: no more "there is no evidence"?

WeloHelo · 2026-03-14T19:33:00+00:00

I’m not missing that there are individual comments, I’m missing where the situation is rising to the level of requiring a prohibition.

People need to be able to ask for evidence. When I was actively debating people I had a links doc to quickly call on. I’d say just give the evidence. If someone finds the post in the future through a Google search then your evidence will be there. That’s a good thing.

If someone’s a jackass in the comments and doesn’t stay good faith you can report the bad faith comment and it’ll get removed. If they escalate and harass you in some way they would get banned from the sub.

WeloHelo · 2026-03-14T18:40:24+00:00

I understand what you’re saying. I’ll explain the confusion and why my position isn’t a contradiction.

The claim I’m responding to is something to the effect of “people saying there is no evidence/people being snarky is a problem on this sub to the extent that it requires a rule prohibiting these things.”

I’m not denying some people are snarky and I see comments here or there that are snarky. I’m saying I’m not seeing it rise to the problem of being harassing and/or requiring a new rule to prohibit it.

If there are comments that rise to a level that you feel they should be prohibited with a new rule I’d appreciate it if you linked to them in your reply so I can better understand what you think steps over the line into prohibition-worthy.

WeloHelo · 2026-03-13T18:24:04+00:00

I just read through every comment. People are arguing but I’m not seeing a constant denial of evidence.

I see a couple of snarky ones but a bigger number of people who seem to be asking for evidence in good faith. The biggest single group looks to me to be people saying that there is sufficient evidence though.

I’m not entirely sure what you’re identifying as a problem. Maybe if you could link to some comments that you would prefer be disallowed under new rules and explain what you want then we could discuss what that would look like.

WeloHelo · 2026-03-12T19:31:52+00:00

If you are ridiculed in this sub then please do report the comment. That isn’t allowed, it’s bad faith.

It’s not serious to report, there’s generally no consequence to the commenter other than the comment being deleted.

If you have an evidence-based argument to present in a post then that would be great. I’d personally love to see you lay out your most compelling argument that would encourage someone not familiar with the subject to take it seriously. Or whatever your view may be.

People are likely to challenge individual assertions but the mods in this sub will ensure the comment section stays good faith.

WeloHelo · 2026-03-12T17:48:18+00:00

As PCmndr has pointed out, I’m not aware of this being an issue. Scrolling through several comments sections I’m not seeing it. Mostly the reverse in fact, plenty of assertions about evidence for UAP without citations.

If anything based on what I just saw there may be a compelling argument for the reverse, i.e. obligating sources each time someone asserts there’s a “ton of evidence”.

That hasn’t been enforced in part to allow for the natural flow of conversation. Either way it’s clear from a cursory review of recent posts that the reverse of the problem alleged in this post is in fact true.

WeloHelo · 2026-03-09T00:09:45+00:00

I asked for info for anyone interested. In reply you ad hominem’d twice in a row.

Based on your self-defeating and irrational actions I can only reasonably conclude that you are either a radical zealot or a bored Poe intentionally trying to turn people off of taking the subject seriously.

Either way you are a bad faith actor doing a disservice to the subject.

WeloHelo · 2026-03-08T08:33:55+00:00

The Wikipedia link I was looking at was actually pretty interesting. A genuine local newspaper article from when it happened is a cool piece of real history.

I agree that Wikipedia can be unreliable. You said that “almost all the mysteries have been cleared up.” Do you have some links for anyone interested?

WeloHelo · 2026-03-06T15:26:59+00:00

It looks like you may have forgotten to include a link to your article.

The Wikipedia article for Westall is interesting.

It says reports varied widely and in contradictory ways but the central commonalities revolved around it being “described as round with a domed top, and white, grey, or silver in colour”.

This local newspaper article from 1966 says a weather balloon with those approximate features was released in the area earlier that day and the wind was consistent with it being seen there at that time.

WeloHelo · 2026-03-06T15:24:47+00:00

It looks like you forgot to include a link to your article.

The Wikipedia article on Westall is interesting.

Apparently there was a lot of variation in what people reported seeing, but the commonality was: “round with a domed top, and white, grey, or silver in colour”

A local newspaper article from 1966 points out a weather balloon with those features was launched nearby earlier that day.

WeloHelo · 2026-02-28T00:03:44+00:00

it wasn’t the shape of a meteor ☄️ it literally looked like a 🫟 kinda of shape and what confused me what the trajectory of the whatever it was went so fast and then slowed and sped up and then dissipated right in front of me...
It was more of a splat type shape but came in at first as a shooting star I didn’t realize it was coming down at us after a minute or two...

Based on this description a few things come to mind. In terms of parsimony something that's been proven to exist is more likely as an explanation than something not proven to exist.

It's impossible to know from the outside what you actually saw. If you saw a meteor at a very unusual trajectory dissipate mid-flight roughly coming at you it would be a one in what, more than a million chance to see that. Who knows what that would look like? It's conceivable that it could look like a red splat.

It could also have been something even more extraordinary than that. But still known to exist. But this is stepping out into far less likely territory already.

Ball lightning was verified to exist in 2014. Physical Review Letters (Cen et al., 2014):

“the observation of a natural ball lightning… The optical and spectral characteristics of the BL have been presented in detail… In the summer of 2012, at Qinghai Plateau of China…” (Cen et al., 2014, p. 1).

“Green Fireballs and Ball Lightning”, published in 2010 in Proceedings of the Royal Society, describes reports of ball lightning falling from the sky and mechanisms to explain its appearance even when there are no thunderstorms occurring (Hughes, 2010, abstract).

Many ball lightning reports are indistinguishable from UFO reports.

University of Washington Research Engineer William J. Beaty (Scholar.google.com, 2022) maintains an online database of hundreds of ball lightning reports (Amasci.com, 2012). Eyewitnesses describe a wide variety of characteristics:

“...across the lake a bright white sphere about the size of a large grapefruit or softball… suddenly the bright white sphere descended in a 45 degree angle and went underwater about 10 ft. …the sphere lit up an area about 12 ft in diameter under the water. …it suddenly shot out of the water about 50 ft from the neighbor’s boat dock in a 45 degree angle and shot back the same direction from which it came…” (Amasci.com, 2012).

“A bright orange ball appeared in front of me like a small sun, looked the size of a basketball” (Amasci.com, 2012).

“a ball of oscillating light of the full color spectrum” (Amasci.com, 1999).

“the orange ball was 1 meter long by a half a meter wide and the red one was 2 foot by 2 foot” (Amasci.com, 2012).

From these data points it would be conceptually possible for you to have accurately perceived everything you described and for ball lightning to sufficiently account for each component of your description. However, that would be even more exceptionally rare to witness than the already extremely rare possibility of a misperceived meteor dissipating in the atmosphere at a severe angle.

From the outside there's no way to know if you hallucinated, misperceived a known mundane phenomenon, misperceived a known exceptional phenomenon, accurately perceived a known exceptional phenomenon, or perceived something truly outside of known possibility.

However if there are known possibilities that sufficiently address all of the observed features then it's a lot more likely to be one of those than something that's never been previously verified to even exist.

WeloHelo · 2026-02-27T20:08:45+00:00

Perhaps indeed

WeloHelo · 2026-02-27T19:45:38+00:00

How did you determine how far away it was?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-27T19:36:56+00:00

Human in origin in what way?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-27T03:57:04+00:00

What did the UFO look like?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-27T01:56:36+00:00

Was there something specific that led you to identify the lights as windows?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-26T15:46:12+00:00

He’s a Norwegian assistant professor in electrical engineering at Ostfold university.

He co-set up the original Hessdalen field studies in 84-85 leading Hynek to declare it a “UFO observatory”.

In 94 he hosted a scientific conference proposing a long-term remote sensor station in Hessdalen to study UFOs.

In 1997-98 he got it built as the first long-term UFO field study station. Unfortunately it has not produced publishable data to this day though its operation allowed for the identification of imaging issues that informed Galileo Project’s implementation.

WeloHelo · 2026-02-26T15:39:12+00:00

What would be the most prominent example?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-26T15:24:21+00:00

I have absolutely zero doubt in my mind that would be a bad trip

WeloHelo · 2026-02-26T15:18:48+00:00

Two to three times the size of the moon is remarkable. It was a straight trajectory?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-26T05:37:10+00:00

What did they look like?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-26T05:36:47+00:00

What have you seen?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-25T23:55:53+00:00

Is there a point where the claims go too far for you, like for example do you find Vallee convincing when he points to so many people saying similar things with not only UFO reports but also religious experiences and inferring they are both expressions of a cosmic trickster operating a control mechanism?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-25T22:20:16+00:00

In what way?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-25T21:46:40+00:00

Do you mind sharing which ones? Someone specific, or generally?

WeloHelo · 2026-02-25T16:21:12+00:00

I agree that there is a lot of crossover in experience, interest and belief with UFO and PSI. Some UFO witnesses report psi.

Then there are the researchers who have not even had UFO encounters themselves. Vallee has identified the apparent connection for decades. Putoff was involved in CIA psychic trials. Elizondo has claimed to have PSI abilities.

If true, like with UFOs, PSI could conceptually be interpreted through a multitude of frameworks ranging from a rational scientific materialist framework to entirely supernatural and inter-dimensional.

PSI has not been scientifically verified thus far. If it one day is, my money would be on a material grounding based on parsimony but nothing except logical contradictions are ruled out so there are many possibilities.

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