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UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots
- cyberpunk0 9y agoSuppose Tom delonge is on to something then haha
- mrgreenfur 9y agoDoes anyone think it could be a reflection or a trick of light that is dependent of the viewers position? Eg it's int he same position relative to the viewer and then suddenly "flys away" because the conditions for it to be visible have changed?
- sddfd 9y agoMeh, is this getting picked up by every news outlet? What important news is getting buried? ;)
- nudiustertian 9y agobcuz anything with governments and ufos is basically printing money
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI assume because there is a feeling that the footage is not faked (as footage of UFO's tend to be), and because the military's incentives to fake a UFO video are usually very much in the opposite direction (i.e. nothing to see here, carry on).
- deelowe 9y agoLittle green men would seem to me like an all too convenient coverup, if I were a person of power interested in keeping secrets.
- Waterluvian 9y agoI actually think it's perfect. Imagine they have future tech that absolutely crushes any current or next-gen competitors. The public is nosey and every year becoming more and more able to record high quality footage. So let's drum up the "crazy" about UFOs. So when real UFOs are seen (the ones we created and want to keep secret) nobody can get a serious dialogue going because the UFO signal-to-noise ratio is awful. Everyone will focus on how crazy anyone sounds when they claim they have UFO footage. Especially when one of our military partners or adversaries manage to snag some airborne or satellite imagery of it.
- mmjaa 9y ago"SRA in the halls of power", is the going theory for why this story is making its rounds.
- 27182818284 9y agoIf you haven't watched the video, especially the one with the two pilots chatting about the object, you should. If anything it is at least entertaining and will remind you quite a bit of the ATC scene from Close Encounters.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pqh 9y ago"Possible UFO" is a silly phrase if you think about it.
- elif 9y agoMaybe its identification is classified. E.g. the speaker is implying "i cannot confirm or deny whether this is identified"
- nkrisc 9y agoThey possibly knew what it was?
- mtgx 9y agoThey both saw it and didn't see it. OMG, it was a quantum UFO! Those aliens must be advanced as hell.
- d0lph 9y agoBecause probably for most people UFO means flying saucer.
- icc97 9y agoLiterally yes, but when the UFO hunters go out, there's a fairly implicit 'Alien' in front, or at least 'Secret military'. But seeing as this is from the military, it makes it more implicit that it's alien.
- cmurf 9y agoLinguistically it suggests it might be identified or identifiable, which belies the whole first word, unidentified, of the acronym. It's not just silly, it's an oxymoron.
- narrator 9y agoSo where does the rubber hit the road? Oh, you saw a UFO flying around, great. Might as well be 1 million lightyears away if they aren't going to give us advanced technology. The first wheel the people of the interior of Papua New Guinea ever saw was on the bottom of a Japanese airplane flying overhead, so there's that. Seriously, we might as well be a primitive tribe in the Amazon seeing an airplane flying overhead in the 1950s. Ho hum, time to get back to work scavenging for food.
- FeistyOtter 9y agoThere is a very deep soviet science-fiction novel by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic. It is relatively unknown in western world, which is very sad since in Russia it is considered one of the pinnacles of Soviet-Russian science fiction works. The plot is as follows: One day, several strange zones appeared in the world, on a line that extends to a star Deneb. The brave 'stalkers' found all sorts of strange and miraculous objects there - artefacts (some people will remember a popular russian game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with similar things): they can kill and they can cure, but what we do know that the civilization that left them exists on an unfathomable scientific level to us and we can not even start to comprehend them, these objects are like magic to us. And these strange zones, these strange objects were just a waste to this civilization. They just traveled through the cosmos and did not even notice us when they dumped them, like we, humans, do not notice ants that crawl under our feet while we take a picnic near a road.
- narrator 9y agoI read that book. It was the most deeply pessimistic sci-fi book I have ever read. Lots and lots of smoking and drinking too. I liked it though.
- Jetroid 9y agoI've always loved this book. I still remember the phrase "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND LET NO ONE LEAVE UNSATISFIED!" to this day. I think it presents an incredibly realistic view of an ETI visiting this planet, especially if life is common in the universe. They don't come for us; hey are just passing through. I have to wonder, realistically, how modern governments would respond to such a visitation.
- jeiting 9y agoDoes anyone have a link to a "long read" taking this apart based on the evidence? The NYT article doesn't really provide a good skeptic's analysis.
- crispyambulance 9y agoYeah, the NYT article was a thrilling read and quite unusual to see on the landing page (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog...). Unfortunately, the sources in the story DO NOT inspire credibility... >"...said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program]... This guy has also been involved in "paranormal investigations" and "zero-point energy research" according to wikipedia. Nice fodder for the X-files, but not reality. It is a pity that the NYT reporter didn't take more skeptical view.
- benjohnson 9y agoKeep in mind one branch of the military was successfully flying this in 1977: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Have_Blue_bottom_view.jpg/220px-Have_Blue_bottom_view.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Ha... (a picture of Have Blue - the precursor to the stealth fighter. It defiantly looks like something out of this world to the eyes of someone in 1977)
- dkersten 9y agoAnd then there's stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar So, really, its likely that any UFO is military in nature, rather than extraterrestrial.
- gfodor 9y agoThis is a common retort (in my view, to make people feel better and not have to consider the implications otherwise) -- here's the pentagon official in charge of the program stating unequivocally that these are almost certainly not related to any aircraft in any national inventory https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-the-pentagon-spent-million-to-study-ufos https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-t... The thing that makes these interesting is the fact that they exhibit aeronautic behavior, while tracked by multiple computers and witnesses, that is not physically possible with known methods of propulsion, not because they look like shiny discs.
- justonepost 9y agoWhy would he necessarily know the complete inventory? Presumably there are top secret programs where it's all very much a need to know basis.
- dkersten 9y agoOr he knew them but didn't want to reveal anything about them.
- 0xFFC 9y agoExcuse me, I am generally a naive person. But what is your take on this video? Do you think this is legitimate? Do you think this “proves ” there are UFOs? Or this could be just a strategy for another goal? For example, somebody mentioned they are trying hard to redirect attention from something else? Update: I put the word prove in quotations.
- dkersten 9y agoThe video quality is terrible, so who knows, but I've never seen any UFO footage that had any kind of decent quality video. Hell, a 2004 camera phone would be almost as good as this video. Yes, yes, its in the dark and moving fast and whatnot, but I thought that the military would have had much better imaging tech, even back in 2004, than this grainy low res thing. May as well be someones camcorder. The only thing it has going for it, in my opinion, is that the pilots would have been pretty used to seeing stuff in their cameras and would know the difference between something ordinary and something extraordinary. I do think its more likely that it was some military test plane than something extraterrestrial though, personally.
- forgotpassagan 9y agoThey intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data. I'm sure Congress has seen the original, and it's pretty startling that they still think the object is a legit UFO
- dkersten 9y ago> I'm sure Congress has seen the original, and it's pretty startling that they still think the object is a legit UFO This is just conjecture though. Its pretty difficult for us to have a meaningful discussion about whether Congresses reaction is noteworthy without knowing for sure what they did or didn't see. Based on what we have to work with, I'm not seeing anything noteworthy here besides some ATC/pilot folks conversation looking at a black smudge on a grainy sky. I guess unless we got to see the original video, its impossible to tell, really. > They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data. Do we know this for sure? Is there a source for that?
- ucha 9y agoIt's not a possible UFO, just a UFO. U stands for unidentified not extra-terrestrial.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoAt first I thought it was a spec of dirt stuck on the window, because it kept its position constant relative to the moving airplane. But then when it twisted, I had to give up that explanation.
- kristaps 9y agoCamera could be gimbal mounted, behind a fixed glass dome - if the speck is on the dome and the camera gimbal moves, it would appear like "the UFO" rotating.
- cyberpunk0 9y agoSo there's a spec of dirt on each fighter's camera?
- alexsb92 9y agoI thought so too, but I think in that case it would simply change position in the image and it wouldn't be in the center.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y agoIsn't the object showing up on the ASA as well. Also what is an ASA.
- icc97 9y agoThe pilot was witnessing it too
- ethagknight 9y agoMy brother is in the Navy, and lots of his friends are pilots.. those guys are jokesters, and I could absolutely see them pulling a prank along the lines of "oh my, thats a UFO! oh, its a smudge of cream cheese on the display."
- WaltPurvis 9y agoWell, I mean, it's a flying object, and they clearly can't identify it, so it's not a "possible" UFO, it's the literal definition of a UFO.
- rdiddly 9y agoYeah, pet peeve of mine. The word "possible" was added inappropriately. They are absolutely sure, already, that it's a UFO. Which isn't saying much, and deliberately so. It's the first and vaguest thing they call it. If they ever found out what it was, they would stop calling it a UFO. So a more accurate title, if you're optimistic about it being some particular (identified) thing, such as (I presume) alien spacecraft, would be "Possible Non-UFO Spotted by US Fighters." Misspelled "Camera" also. Edit: Well this comment is obsolete now that they updated the title. Good work!
- tzahola 9y agoWell I guess medias have taught people that UFO means extraterrestrial alien craft. I think the most optimal response to such new neologisms is to accept them once they attain a critical momentum ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- sctb 9y agoThanks. We've reverted the title to the article's.
- ataturk 9y agoWhy disclose this now? The incident took place 13 years ago.
- rrauenza 9y agoPossibly related? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/boeing-unveils-new-plane-mystery-aircraft/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/boeing-unveils-new-pl...
- signa11 9y agohow ? the link that you provide is from 2k17, while the article is from 2k4...
- dguaraglia 9y agoNew planes go through extensive experimental phases. The F-35 took over a decade from first flight to being generally available and that’s not even considering the several competing aircraft that were weeded out before the F-35 was selected. Not saying you are wrong, but a 13 year span doesn’t necessarily rule out the link OP posted.
- orliesaurus 9y agoPossibly Timetravel sarcasm
- ortusdux 9y agoTurns out that's the MQ-25, a unmanned refueling ship for fighters
- adventured 9y agoIt's a new tanker drone https://www.defensenews.com/air/2017/12/19/boeing-offers-sneak-peek-of-mq-25-tanker-drone/ https://www.defensenews.com/air/2017/12/19/boeing-offers-sne...
- brango 9y agoI'm sold on the whole UFO cover-up thing. If you peel back the social ridicule (very successfully induced by US government collaboration with Hollywood) and consider the huge number of circumstantial reports from across the military and non-military it seems pretty clear there's stuff in the skies of non-human origin. Historical art suggests they've been flying for centuries. There's also the publicly acknowledged reports of NASA and various governments/military conducting investigations and spending millions of dollars in the process. Historically it would have been politically difficult for governments to come out and admit this - and when they did (like after Roswell) it was quickly retracted. Peel back the social conditioning and reconsider the likelihood of this given all the reports.
- dsacco 9y agoI’m open minded to what you’re saying, and I agree that dismissing alien contact due to popular zeitgeist is silly. But here’s my problem with what you’re saying: where did they come from then, and how did they get here? Why do we not have any evidence of their planet in any reasonable distance from Earth? Given what we understand about modern physics, we have three conclusions we can arrive at: 1. We fundamentally misunderstand physics, in particular the central concept that the speed of light is a hard speed limit on motion, and aliens are capable of arriving here faster than light, 2. The aliens have technology capable of arriving here from so distant a home world that they are either inconceivably long lived or else their entire society existed on a transport vessel for generations and generations, 3. Sightings of UFO are examples of popular hysteria, and aliens are not, and have never been anywhere near Earth. Given the available evidence, Occam’s Razor suggests #3. I understand that reports from distributed and disconnected sources can be encouraging, but realistically speaking it still presents insufficiently extraordinary evidence to me to abandon possibility #3.
- brango 9y agoYeah #3 is certainly the most likely and is what I always assumed. But over time I've come to think that they are here. So probably the next most likely is #1. Maybe they just know more science than we do. Look how far we've come in the last 200 years. What if they have a few millennia on us?
- cattown 9y agoEntertaining, almost convincing. I want to believe. However we know it is one of... * A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings. * One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify. * A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet. Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence. I'm surprised BBC picked this up.
- justonepost 9y agoWhy not? It's obviously very fact based. #2 seems pretty likely. If the US (or some other government) has a drone that can move in ways not generally known about, it seems like news to me.
- jl6 9y agoCould also be a genuine error like a fly on the lens or a bug in the viewfinder software.
- deepnotderp 9y agoThat's a thermal camera, so I'm a little bit doubtful it's a bug, plus there were apparently multiple witnesses and computers there.
- jl6 9y agoThis story got picked up because there’s actual video footage. But unfortunately only one video. If there were multiple observers, why can’t we see multiple videos?
- icc97 9y agoThe pilot is witnessing it too
- jl6 9y agoIsn’t it in the dark? Isn’t he just witnessing it on the tracking screen?
- slg 9y agoWas this how the video was released? It seems edited specifically in a way to cause the most mystery. The video starts and ends with it in sight of the camera. There is obviously more to the encounter which raises the question, why was it edited out?
- thrill 9y agoThe video is either edited for stabilization or that is the smoothest tracking while banked of another flying object that I've seen - or it's something in the camera system.
- LyndsySimon 9y agoIt's the camera system. Another forum where I was reading about this has lots of military and ex-military pilot members, and they identified the make and model of the imaging equipment that was used. No one there seemed to question the validity of the video itself.
- gmisra 9y agoFor those interested in other "legitimate" UFO sightings, I'd recommend "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record" by Leslie Kean [1]. The author is an investigative journalist who sets out to interview observers of relatively well-documented UFO encounters, and ends up speaking mostly with military pilots from around the world. It's a good read, and is even-handed and well written, especially considering the genre. In the book, two things stood out to me. First, there are a quite a few UFO sightings that are corroborated by non-human sensor data (mostly radar and video). Second, the narrative paints a picture where US government officials are much more secretive than any other nation, by far. Within that context, the releases of the last few weeks are even more surprising. Highly recommended for anyone interested in a modern, not-too-X-files-like take on UFO phenomena. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8287034-ufos https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8287034-ufos
- timothevs 9y agoThanks for sharing the book. I agree that the releases from the US Gov the last few weeks have been VERY surprising, nearly a 90 degree shift from the "deny everything" policy that they assumed for the last few decades. Going one step further, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I just wonder, what actually has changed to prompt this change in policy of denying everything
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- LyndsySimon 9y agoI've been suspicious for some time that the US federal government believes that there is likely to be sort of major societal upset in the near future. I can't imagine that it would be "Disclosure", though. I don't know what it could be.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> I just wonder, what actually has changed to prompt this change in policy of denying everything The election of credulous anti-science buffoons.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoMy only issue with this - and I can’t figure a way out - is that this was a program launched in secrecy, funded with soft money, officially shut down five years ago but by all accounts has continued to operate in the dark... yet we get all this info, military videos, and more from individuals that participated in said program all in public and without extreme anonymity, etc such that would be typical in such a case. I just don’t see why if we had a “confirmed” ufo sighting on military video that was a product of such a program, would we really discussing this in such a manner?
- colanderman 9y agoThere's an angle displayed near the top of the screen, which counts down to 0° L and then starts counting up from 1° R. That transition happens at precisely the moment that the object rotates. Count me as convinced by the "speck of dust on gimbal-mounted camera" idea [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15961848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15961848
- OhDagny 9y agoOh look, a blob.
- neo4sure 9y agoNIce distraction while the biggest tax overhaul for a long time is steamrolling over. Maybe we can ask the aliens to pay off our debt.
- vorotato 9y agoHey meta question here, why do dupes not link to the thing they're a duplicate of. Kinda sounds like it would make navigating to dupes a lot less of a pain. Not meta comment, aren't all flying objects UFOs until you've identified them?
- ryandvm 9y agoMeta Answer: HN eschews all modern UI affordances as a form of status signalling. It's like how millionaire startup founders like to wear cargo shorts and hoodies. It's Y Combinator's way of saying, "we're so fucking successful we can afford to have a site that eclipses even Craigslist in un-usability."
- CaptSpify 9y agoAlternative view: "We're successful because we have a site that works simply, without much unneeded complexity, and choose to keep it simple for the sake of our users."
- vorotato 9y agoLinks are notoriously complex. One time I had a user whose head exploded when they saw a link to a duplicate.
- _nalply 9y agoI once saw something I can't explain. Two spots on the night sky a bit larger than a star and of the color of an incandescent light about a half thumb on an outstreched arm apart. They were slowly moving across the sky, however with a swinging movement forward and backwards about a thumb with a period of two seconds. Like two people side by side walking together two steps ahead then a step back the whole time, just in the sky and this was a smooth movement. Then suddenly one of the two lights went out. The other one continued the same movement and also went out about a minute later. This steady swinging movement is an unexplainable riddle for me. A friend of mine also sighted something in the bright day sky of Spain. He told me that he looked up and then that thing whooshed away in an incredible speed over the Mediterranean Sea. It's really weird. Either our senses and even the technical equipment like cameras are just fooled or we have extremely strange things going on over our heads.
- Avamander 9y agoI know a family friend, ~ 80-year-old woman, told me that she one day looked out of the window and saw a really dark, saucer-like object, far, hovering over the woods, she said she blinked, rubbed her eyes, walked outside and it was still there, yelled for her kids to wake up and look out of the window but when her kids woke up it was too late, the object just vanished. She got visibly annoyed when her kids started chuckling at the story. Rational me doesn't want to believe me, but well, what if it was something.
- cmroanirgo 9y agoDr Steven Greer of the disclosure project[1] recently made a dvd, called 'Unacknowledged'. It's been #one on iTunes documentary (apparently) for a while. In it he talks about 'Unacknowledged Special Access Projects' (USAPs), which basically are illegal. The core of these USAPs is the UFO issue and he has countless witness testimonies from irrefutable military and private personnel, and has advised many people in Washington (CIA director, president elects) about them and they are generally amazed (apparently). One of the things he explicitly mentions (and has been doing so for years), is that there is a secret agenda and that False Flag UFO encounters will be released, which will allow the military industrial complex to continue enslaving humanity. To the point: recently, he's been vocal to state that all these UFO reports in the media over the last few days are just preliminary Flase Flag UFO events, designed to confuse and obfuscate the real problem. [1] http://siriusdisclosure.com/ http://siriusdisclosure.com/
- tiplus 9y agoI am not sure about UFO sightings because it seems unlikely to me that aliens would approach us like this. However, given the huge amounts of exo planets discovered everywhere around us in the last year or two, I consider it highly unlikely that we are alone.
- simonblack 9y agoDirt on the camera lens or image-sensor.
- ThisIsJustABug 9y agoComment.
- ThisIsJustABug 9y ago# # # How can people be so Blind??? Look Carefully! That is Just a small Insect (a Bug) walking on the camera's lens! (or on the window that the camera is looking through, on it's inner side) How can't you see it? (you can almost see it's legs!) You can see that it's a bug by it's stability, a target outside the aircraft, like for example another plane would NEVER be so stable related to the aircraft's sight. This also explains why it looks so blurry, that is because the insect is walking on the camera's lens (or on the inside window) and therefore it's out of focus. Probably it was a Night Flight so they saw it only through their IR camera and not from their aircraft's window. Test it, find a small insect and locate it very close to your smartphone's camera, see how similar it looks to what you see here... (The glow in the video is because of the IR camera). Pilots can get wrong like any other human been, Many pilots crashed into the sea becouse of Spatial Disorientation, they got confused and thought that the sea is the sky. Also In 2004 Mexican aircraft pilots thought that they are following a UFO but later it turn out to be just some Oil platforms (in the sea below them) that they saw in their IR camera, search in Google for more information about that. Probably they did some maintenance works on the aircraft on a hot day/night before it took off and some bugs went inside, this things happens!