Why do people believe in conspiracy theories, or why does Tom exist...

[sgreger1]

The irony was you critiquing someone on semantics and then me being semantical in correcting your spelling on semantics. I really was just trying to be funny by putting that first. I guess you are over sensitive about such things. Which might mean you do care about spelling, or your inability at it. Hey I am pretty bad at it too but I am used to double checking things, even on forum posts. Sad I know, but this is how habits get a hold of us.

Ken

LOOLOLLO, okay I was obviously late to the party on that one. I get the irony now. Misinterpreted your intent, i'm an asshole. Carry on.

[sgreger1]

Incidentally my even biggest weakness in forum stat points is homophonophobia. Funny how it also tends to be a pet peeve of mine. I really have to scan my stuff to pick up the numerous to, too, two mistakes I make by touch typing habit without thinking of context of the sentence.

As for bad spelling = dumb or not, it does not equal dumb. And considering this site has international appeal...

However with spellcheckers embedded in browsers, it does tend to show a bit of laziness. On a forum, does it matter, no, I mean this is casual communication at best. But in these debates on such heated topics, well there comes a point where care helps to make ones point. That is all.

However to re-emphasize, I was just being silly by pointing that out.

Ken

My crappy browser doesn't have spell check unfortunately Stupid IE 2004 or whatever it is we are using here at my office.

[sgreger1]

Okay, I have the UFO video my wife's boss took on a DVD he gave me. The problem is that it is protected in some way. I can view it in the video player but cannot save it to my hard drive because it says "You do not have permission" to access the file.

I can ask him to give me an unprotected version tomorrow but then he wont be able to get it until monday. I can post the video right now if someone can tell me of a program that will allow me to open protected files on a DVD.

I know it can't be hard to do.




Anyways, the video is 350mb and about 9 minutes long. The guy stayed zoomed in on the thing hoping to get some detail which kind of ****s it up because there is no point of reference for most of the movie. Around 7 minutes in he zooms out and you can see this thing flying behind the trees. With the tries in the foreground you have a better point of reference to see that it's a moving object in the sky.

The weird thing is that it's so bright. It's got this stadium lighting around the edges and it's MEGA bright. He described it as like a thousand flood lights. It's so bright you can only make out it's general shape, and it glows blue in color. He said at first him and the neighbor couldn't figure out what it was, and him being a scientist he figured it was maybe a blimp or something at first. Then he broke out the camera because he realized it was completely silent and would have to have a MAJOR power source. He recorded it for 10 minutes and then said it just kept flying around for a while so he turned the camera off since he wasn't sure how long it would be there. He said later on it just exploded up into the sky.


Skeptics: You are going to point out that it's night time, etc etc. But no one can deny that this is a) A giant circular object flying in the sky, it looks unlike any flying machine ever made, no airplane lights itself up like that B) it hovers, banks, is obviously not a jet. C) It should be making noise but it's not.

Basically, I would like someone to come up with a logical explanation as to why this thing could be any conventional aircraft, because I am at a loss. This was filmed by a guy in his 50's who's a chemist for a defense contractor. He doesn't believe in aliens or anything like that, and my wife knows him and that this isn't some kind of hoax. So I am very curious what it is.

Additionally, the light will blink from time to time and the whole thing will be invisible, then the light turns back on. Not sure why. I tried messing with the brightness and contrast, but since I can't save the file i'm restricted to only what the crappy DVD player will allow me to do.

If someone can help me find a way to save it onto my hard drive even though the disc is protected, that would be sweet because I want to mess with it in the video editor.

Thanks

[sgreger1]

Okay so here is the best I could do. I used a freeware ripper, which left a watermark saying iSkysoft in the upper left hand corner. I tried to crop it out as much as I could. I used iMovie to chop it down to only a minute or two since the gist of it can be captured in that amount of time, the rest of the movie is essentially the same thing just happening over and over again. The original I have is much larger but it made it small on youtube for some reason. If anyone wants the original I have the full 9 minutes but this video shows the basics.

About 6 seconds in you see it fly behind the tree, this gives it somewhat of a point of reference. The rest of the time this dude kept trying to zoom in so you have no other objects as a point of reference. After about 1 minute you will see the light turns off, then back on a few times. When it turns off it looks like there is an orb in the middle or something. I don't know, can anyone explain what this might be? He said it stayed hovering and floating around for a long ass time and then just shot up into space. He said it was about 500 feet up and the size of a house. He said that lights were like this giant flood light and he could barely look straight at it.

Any theories?

[justintempler]

Symantics Justin. The point is not to validate conspiracy theories in general, but to make note that FEMA having done exercises in rounding people up is what breeds these new conspiracy theories where people think FEMA is being trained to round people up. Conspiracies by the government to spread disinformation and infiltrate dissident groups is what leads to current conspiracy theories that allege the gov is manipulating the media etc. The point is that this is why people believe these things, because we have seen things happen in the past, and many of them have come true.

In the past people alleged that the government was controlling the media for example. People used to think the government was trying to cover up UFO's or the fact that the government was gathering intelligence on UFO's. It turned out, years later, that this was true, that they actually spent money to launch a campaign aimed at making people not believe UFO's existed, and then denied the existence of UFO's for years only for it to come out at a later date that they had been usin the Air Force to monitor the phenomena for 20 years.


Or how about the conspiracy theory that no WMD's existed in Iraq and that the government had made an elaborate hoax in order to convince the entire world Saddam had WMD's as a preface to war in Iraq. People said "Lol, every country's intelligence agencies agree they have WMD's, how could government pull off such an elaborate scheme that would cost trillions and involve the death of tens of thousands of people".

Turns out it was true.

I'm sure there are countless other examples.

It's not semantics, you see conspiracy theories where none existed. And you're also willing to rewrite history in order to do it.

I grew up during the 60s and 70s right in the middle of the height of those UFO investigations. They did just the exact opposite of what you claim. This was a public program that everyone knew about. They spent 20 years investigating Unidentified Flying Objects to see if there was any evidence of alien presence. After 20 years of spending taxpayer money and coming up empty they actually decided to close the program down for lack of results.

It's ironic when people complain about government waste but when the government actually does defund a program they get accused of a coverup.

What would you have them do? Spend a few more million/billion dollars?

and as a bonus I'll let Glenn Beck from Fox News debunk the FEMA camp conspiracy for me....

[tom502]

sgreger- That's VERY interesting. Post it on Above Top Secret, I think they will like this.

[devilock76]

LOOLOLLO, okay I was obviously late to the party on that one. I get the irony now. Misinterpreted your intent, i'm an asshole. Carry on.

No you're not, you just got caught in a moment, happens to all of us. Stick around, you, will find about my over and misuse or lack of use of commas,,,, and amazing run on sentences that I just use and use and never really come to the fruition of a point.

"It's a kind of magic."

Ken

[devilock76]

My crappy browser doesn't have spell check unfortunately Stupid IE 2004 or whatever it is we are using here at my office.

Get thee some Firefox, or better yet Chrome.

Ken

[sgreger1]

Get thee some Firefox, or better yet Chrome.

Ken

I wish. The IT guy would punch me in coin purse if I downloaded a better browser for my work station. Why does my company use like a 2005 browser? Isn't there like security problems with ie?

[devilock76]

I wish. The IT guy would punch me in coin purse if I downloaded a better browser for my work station. Why does my company use like a 2005 browser? Isn't there like security problems with ie?

In my personal opinion everything with the name Microsoft is a security problem. I despise having to use XP at work. At home I mostly run Linux for everything. I will say Windows 7 does have one improvement I am really happy about which is the biggest fix to MS security issues in their OS to date. That is that you can in effect log in to the admin account temporarily from a non admin account to install. Basically a run as admin. Us Unix and Linux users consider that akin to SU where *nix admin's know you really never log in as root, you just SU (super user) to the account from yours as need be (or use sudo, which is out of scope for this site's focus) and do your admin work there. This basic separation of admin and user functionality is why it is very hard for malware to really take a hold on most Linux systems that have semi competent administrators.

Ken

[lxskllr]

I wish. The IT guy would punch me in coin purse if I downloaded a better browser for my work station. Why does my company use like a 2005 browser? Isn't there like security problems with ie?

If your company's IT policy allows it, you could run a portable install of Firefox, as well as a ton of other software from a flash drive.

http://portableapps.com/

http://www.pendriveapps.com/

[sgreger1]

If your company's IT policy allows it, you could run a portable install of Firefox, as well as a ton of other software from a flash drive.

http://portableapps.com/

http://www.pendriveapps.com/

Flash drives or anything that plugs into the USB are strictly verboten around here. I can't even plug in my ipod

// It's a conspiracy!

[lxskllr]

Flash drives or anything that plugs into the USB are strictly verboten around here. I can't even plug in my ipod

// It's a conspiracy!

Well then, get back to work! :^P

[ratcheer]

I wish. The IT guy would punch me in coin purse if I downloaded a better browser for my work station. Why does my company use like a 2005 browser? Isn't there like security problems with ie?

The security problems they know are preferable to having to roll out a new browser to everyone and also heve new problems they are unfamiliar with. It is the IT mindset. I am not defending them, I am just explaining how they see it.

Also, many of the younger IT crowd probably see things just as you do, but they have to follow the dictates of their management.

Tim

[devilock76]

If your company's IT policy allows it, you could run a portable install of Firefox, as well as a ton of other software from a flash drive.

http://portableapps.com/

http://www.pendriveapps.com/

I have used portable apps, most often I use portable GIMP for graphics work on the go.

Ken