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Sound in Utah today?!

Absolutely know this? No.

That said, I'd bet my life their drone technology can't defy the laws of physics and turn on a dime while going thousands of MPH and move in a different direction without skipping a beat.

Just curious, are their any UFO stories that have made you question anything?

Like my sexuality?
 
You believe what you want. I’ll laugh at it. And fwiw, I believe in aliens. I just don’t think they are wasting their time on our dumb asses. I believe that **** is China and some sort of reckoning is coming in the next 30 years.
This. To me any aliens capable of traveling here would be so far advanced they would not give 2 ***** about us, and I seriously doubt any research would be done on any level that would be worth the risk. If they wanted our resources, which is unlikely considering how small-scale we are and how much more abundant any of our resources are elsewhere in the universe, they would just come and take it, and we could do little to stop them. All this heroic sci-fi ******** is just that, ********. L Ron Hubbard got it right to a point in battlefield earth. They came and just had huge drones circling the planet dropping a gas that killed most of the life on the planet, targeted at humans. In a month or so it was all over. I don't care how many smart-*** fighter pilots you have, they would undoubtedly use AI far beyond our understanding for any kind of invasion and it would be over in a matter of weeks if not days. If we could, our best bet would be to negotiate a surrender of some kind, but my bet is that if an alien race made the effort and used the resources to get here, they would already be on the hunt for resources at a planetary destruction level, so odds are that would yield nothing. I just cannot see anything on the level of research going on where they would risk discovery or whatever to what, see what kind of food we eat? I mean we would be a curiosity perhaps, but nothing more. Humans tend to over-inflate our own importance and uniquity. Look at how many species on our own planet we just wiped out long before we cared enough to study them. We are just another species for them.

I imagine if it were a scenario where we were the only other sentient race they have ever found in their space-faring explorations it might be somewhat different, but I doubt we are the only sentient species in the universe, and even in our own galaxy. The drake equation could suggest as many as 10,000 sentient races out there. But it may only be 1. I guess it could be 2, but that seems less likely than 10,000 imo, just because the universe is so vast, and even our galaxy is so vast, that it seems if the conditions for life developed on 2 planets independent of each other that would imply those conditions can happen with some regularity, which to me implies there would more likely be either 1 sentient race right now (us), or a larger number. 2 seems too specific and too much like lightning striking exactly twice. So if we assume there are say even 100 sentient races in our galaxy and one of them has developed inter-stellar travel, what are the odds they 1) study all of the other 99 or 2) just choose us?

I don't know, it is an interesting subject. I just do not see us being unique enough to warrant sporadic investigatory missions over a century (or more like centuries with what most UFO believers posit) with no other activity and to incur that level of risk. It does make for fun sci-fi stories though.
 
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This is an interesting take on the subject of other intelligent species in the galaxy.


Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely – or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations – not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself – were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery … only far less likely.

The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number – there are as many planets as stars, maybe more – suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there’s no evidence of it.

Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can’t study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn’t.
 
Ufology is a fun subject, I’ve enjoyed it since the 1950’s and the days of the big Washington D.C. flap, but, there’s $$$ to be had in meteorites, sometimes lots of money….And, given the detonations heard, this was no grain of sand, it was likely big, and likely dropped many meteorites. Finding them is another story, but the professional hunters will be giving it a shot by now…

Get eyewitness accounts of fireball from 3 cardinal directions, or video recordings from same, triangulate the witness reports, giving you the fireball’s path, and from that you have a good idea where any potential strewn field will be located. I have no idea what the terrain in the potential strewn field is like, how remote, etc. But, in general, it’s far better landing in a desert landscape than forested, in terms of potential recovery of meteorites. In the United States, meteorites belong to the property owner upon whose property they land. So, permission to hunt is required. Many dry lake beds, managed by the BLM, can be hunted, and any meteorites found, can be kept by the finder.


For the meteor to be so visible and so loud, it had to be of a substantial size. Ricketts noted that the shooting stars that are typically seen at night are like "little pieces of grains of sand flying through the atmosphere."

"The big one that we saw today is going to be much larger than a piece of grain of sand."

A lot bigger...

…..But where exactly could it have crashed? Ricketts had an educated guess.

Based on videos and projected paths, he said that the meteor could be somewhere in the Uinta Mountains near southwest Wyoming. And perhaps it landed in just the right location that a hiker -- who can spot the difference between Earth rocks and space rocks -- might happen upon it someday.



 
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So, an experienced meteorite hunter has found the first piece, so pieces did reach the ground. One proposed name(the nomenclature committee of the Meteoritical Society assigns official names) is “Great Salt Lake”. The reddish-brown staining seen on the cut and polished face looks like oxidation, which is puzzling. Found 3 days after the fall, weathering shouldn’t be that rapid. But, regardless, beautiful fresh black fusion crust. There’s more out there!


View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GoXoAhdjZo0
 
So, an experienced meteorite hunter has found the first piece, so pieces did reach the ground. One proposed name(the nomenclature committee of the Meteoritical Society assigns official names) is “Great Salt Lake”. The reddish-brown staining seen on the cut and polished face looks like oxidation, which is puzzling. Found 3 days after the fall, weathering shouldn’t be that rapid. But, regardless, beautiful fresh black fusion crust. There’s more out there!


View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GoXoAhdjZo0

Given the weathering how do they know it wasn't from an earlier meteorite?
 
Given the weathering how do they know it wasn't from an earlier meteorite?
That was my first thought. But, the fusion crust is exceptionally fresh, indicating a very recent fall. I also wondered if I was not seeing oxidation, but something just resembling the oxidation I am used to seeing on slices. I guess if there had been heavy rains, since the fall, and before recovery, one might see oxidation spots on interior surfaces that are not crusted, or in slices. In any case, with crust so fresh, it’s likely a very recent fall, and assuming the hunter had the flight path figured out, and was looking in the area where one would expect the strewn field from that path, it likely is from that witnessed fall. There are also tests that will tell you the “terrestrial age”, the length of time it has been on Earth, but it’s likely from that fireball, the hunter is experienced.
 
The hunter said on the news last night that he is not yet giving up the information of exactly where he found it. Still wants to find other pieces himself, I guess.
 
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The hunter said on the news last night that he is not yet giving up the information of exactly where he found it. Still wants to find other pieces himself, I guess.
I just realized he is a real well known meteorite hunter. I’m surprised if he doesn’t have more company out there by now. It’s a very competitive hobby….
 

It’s a race,” he said. “... Very few guys are telling each other any secret information, that’s for sure. They’re all out there trying to find a piece.”

So far, the results of the competition have come in quickly, and pieces of the meteorite are being found at a startling pace. “The takeaway message here is that this is an amazingly rare event,” Karner said, “because we recovered the rock just three days after it came to Earth.”

The fall over Salt Lake City was unique for a number of reasons, Dayton explained. The first rarity was the meteor flew over a major urban area like Utah’s capital, meaning there were numerous eye witnesses and even video recordings of the fiery ball shooting across the sky. It also happened during the daytime, so witnesses had a much better idea of where the meteor was headed.

First-hand accounts are important, since they give hunters the data needed to postulate a meteor’s trajectory.


Once they have the trajectory and approximate time of the fall, scientists and hunters use Doppler radar data, which is generally used to track precipitation, to make informed guesses about where chunks of the space rock landed.

Dayton said the scientific community has a particular interest in this sort of data, and during this hunt, they made it available to the public.

“They can see not only precipitation, water droplets with radar, but they can also see flocks of birds and airplanes, and they can see rocks falling from the sky,” he said. “And we’re able to slice through time, through milliseconds, and watch those rocks move. And we can kind of predict a path.”

And then the race is on.

“Basically, at that point, it’s a treasure map, right?” he said. “Because X marks the spot.”


Or spots. The hunt isn’t over, and it’s possible many more pieces of meteorite are strewn around the Great Salt Lake, still to be discovered.

Based on the number of calls he’s been receiving, Dayton thinks word will start spreading soon, and increasing numbers of people will join the hunt.
 
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