The trend of UFO sightings follows revolutions in photography. There’s been spikes in the amount of them when cameras became widespread and photos were easier to develop, when cameras became digital, when photo-manipulation software came about, and this next one will be because machine learning-based video generation is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

      • WanderWisley@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        The study, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications by researchers from Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University, found surprising links between reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) and macroeconomic trends:

        Counter-cyclical pattern: Within a given region over time, UAP sightings tend to increase during economic recessions and decrease during economic booms. Wealth correlation: Across different regions, sightings are more common in wealthier areas. Attention proxy: The researchers argue that these patterns align with traditional metrics of public attention and that during times of crisis or uncertainty, people may have more free time or be more inclined to notice and report unusual events, or perhaps focus on extraordinary phenomena to ease anxiety. Policy implications: The study suggests that this UAP metric could help policymakers understand how variations in public attention might influence regional responses to monetary policy decisions, such as interest rate changes.

        • EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          Thank you! These are fantastic details, and I appreciate it! The correlation between having extra free time, and therefore having more time to see and report UFO’s is really practical. Great study.

          Whats interesting is that result implies that there’s a fixed amount of UFO’s to be seen. If numbers go up or down according to the amount of time available in a population, it certainly implies there’s a fixed amount of UFO activity that we are or are not aware of depending on how often we’re looking. Granted, it’s likely this activity is explainable as false positives: drones in the sky, kites, etc have all been mistaken as UFO’s. So it could just be a fixed amount of human made things that are misidentified.

          But the same result would occur if it wasn’t false positives. And that’s facinating. I would have assumed the amount being reported would stay relatively fixed, or just vary greatly regardless of income.

          Thanks again!

  • Hegar@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    I always heard that UFO sightings dropped drastically once cell phones became widespread.

    • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Aside from that one time the Goodyear blimp in NJ took a 5 month break in 2020 and then showed up to the first Giants game and then people filmed the UFO.

      NJ also had a mass panic last year with “drones”. Absolutely a UFO rash by real definitions, not the UFO=alien version. Those people went outside at night and saw distant planes landing for the first time. There’s what, 4 major airports that put descent over the state? I’m sure there were some drones (something about [training for?] lost radioactive material) but it was definitely less than what was reported. Cell phone video was an awful option for aircraft at night but everywhere.

  • Davy Jones@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    AI-made aliens of all kinds and sizes. I wouldn’t mind recreating the cantina scene from the original Star Wars trilogy by walking into a bar and, in real-time, using deepfake technology to transform everyone into a random alien species from Star Wars.

  • Pechente@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    In addition to intentional manipulation, AI might hallucinate things that aren’t there when used in computational photography when it’s trying to fill in the gaps.

    Blurry cloud? Now it’s a weird looking airplane.

    • Ech@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      AI might hallucinate things that aren’t there when used in computational photography when it’s trying to fill in the gaps.

      So it’s putting things that “aren’t there” in when it’s…filling in things that aren’t there? This is why “hallucinate” is such a problematic term. It obfuscates the fact that this is what these programs do with everything - they were designed from the start to make shit up. It’s not “hallucinating”, it’s fulfilling its core programming function.

  • phorq@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    I’m just waiting for Bigfoot’s OnlyFans videos directed by Tarantino to finally leak

  • Tonava@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    I saw UFO a couple years ago, and I have no idea what the fuck did I actually see. I’m still so baffled I always want to share this story:

    I was walking my dog way past midnight, and saw some lights move steadily, hovering over the nearby highway I was walking towards, and thought, ah, a helicopter, how weird for one to fly so low and close to the road. Only after it had moved out of my sight (there was forest both sides and the path I was on was going under the highway) I suddenly realized it couldn’t have been a helicopter; there was no sound and at that distance it would have been LOUD. I saw nothing when I got to a higher place where I could see the highway in both directions. There were no other people around or even cars driving by, since it was so late.

    I checked all flights in the area for that night, since maybe I had seen something fly far away and mistook it to be closer? But I found nothing, no planes or helicopters had been in the air in couple hours at that time. It was way too big to be some commercial type of drone that were around then (about a small helicopter sized), and a military drone sounds just unlikely considering the time and place (Finland, no military bases or border anywhere close, and we weren’t in the NATO yet either). It couldn’t have been a truck or something since it was clearly floating and a bit too high for that, and from that position and distance I would have heard the road rumble under the tires too.

    I don’t think I was hallucinating, since that vision was so clear and lasted long enough for me to look away a few times, and I don’t have a history of visual hallucinations or anything. Too bad I didn’t film it, but I really didn’t realize something was weird until it was too late!

      • Tonava@sopuli.xyz
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        1 day ago

        It was just too big for that. If it was, it’s not something that was commercially available here, but if someone had build something that size and flown it around, I couldn’t have been the only witness in all these years!

        There’s one company I know that’s been building unmanned airships here, so I’ve thought could it have been one of those. But I think their test flights weren’t yet made in that year, and those are anyway too slow to disappear like that. And not things you’d fly at that place at that time either…