UFO's in the backcountry?

Merry Christmas!!!

Well, to relieve my irrational anxiety I was hoping for tons of responses from people saying they’ve been backpacking for 40 years and never saw a UFO.   Instead I now fear satellite beams and need to replace my gear with alien repelling colors. ;)

Yes I know…this is silly and I should get over it.  I’m also afraid of spiders, eggplant and bowling….

Given that no one here appears to have been abducted I suppose I’m in the clear.  At the very least it’s been interesting to hear all your stories!!!

I did have one kinda weird thing happen, though very likely not extra terrestrial.   I was hiking up Whitney last year and looking down on upper (west) Hitchcock lake…and saw a very bright rectangle “bar”.  It appeared to be 3 to 4ft long and maybe 6-12″ tall.  It was a warm incandescent looking light.  It was scanning the lake and shore here and there the whole time I was climbing the switchbacks. Looked as if a hiker was sitting on the shore holding this weird long rectangle spotlight and scanning around periodically.  I chalked it up to some weird photography light someone hauled in.

It appeared to be 3 to 4ft long and maybe 6-12″ tall.
Going back to the link I posted above, it is very difficult to estimate size and or distance, of an object we are not familiar with , particularly against a dark or of uniform colour background.
We all know that, for example, the moon does not change size, yet it appears much larger at the horizon than when high up.
Same for the sun.

Yes very true about the size thing.  I actually had to think for a while before posting that estimate.  It could have been 10 feet wide for all I know.   Wish I took a pic….but at the time I didn’t suspect it was anything more than some dude with a big weird light.

I remember it was bright enough to illuminate Mt Hitchcock in a pretty serious way.  My spot headlamp paled in comparison…so the thing must have been 500+ lumens.  Again…total unscientific guess.

You might want to avoid Loch Leven lakes above Interstate 80 in the  Sierras. My scouts saw a UFO 5 years ago on a trip. Bright light moving unlike anything they had ever seen. I didn’t see it myself though…

Franco tries to act all skeptical, yet his very own avatar photo is of an actual alien abduction from a Tarptent Moment and Scarp.

Of course there are UFOs but apparently they are only only interested in North America and only Americans can see them.

UFO sightings/alien encounters are reported worldwide, it’s not just an American thing.

Think about drone technology.  Drones can stop on a dime go up down left right.

I still don’t get why people would think that for someone with enough intelligence to get to earth would be flying around in something with lights on it?

Millions of years ahead of us and they would still be using lumen styled lights. Really???

Then you find out that almost all sightings are near airports. Wow!!!

The problem with other worlds of intellect like ours is that it is not just us on the planet that communicate. So what if it was frogs that become as intelligent as humans instead of us?  Would we have a Wright brother frog flying across a pond?  Probably not. But who’s to say a frog couldn’t be the smarter species?

And for the sake of this conversation, humans are 1 out of how many species on this earth?  The fact that we evolved was 1 in a million already.

So for other words to have human like intelligence that can use there minds to create machines that can travel out of orbit would have to be divided by another million over what scientific numbers are already out there.

Im sure there are plenty of species smarter than us out there. I just think the number is no where near as high as everyone thinks that can do anything about it other than maybe glide along a lake.