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From the article: > In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — say they observed small spherical objects flying in formation. O
by cmroanirgo 8y ago
From the article:
> In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — say they observed small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic-Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind, and no exhaust.
"It's very mysterious, and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed," he said, calling it a "truly radical technology."
> "Imagine you see highly advanced vehicles, they appear on radar systems, they look bizarre, no one knows where they're from. This happens on a recurring basis, and no one does anything,"
> “Pilots are upset, and they’re trying to help wake up a slumbering system,”
> In 2017, the Pentagon first confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a government operation launched in 2007 to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats.” As the Post’s Joby Warrick reported, the investigation ranged from “advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters.”
etc, etc.
So no there's little that explicitly states UFO is all about ET, but the inference is very high, considering the credibility of the witnessess and the frequency in which such things occur. That the sightings are typically over restricted airspace (military bases) is also rather indicative that these sightings are not balloons, other (known) aircraft, nor meteors.
- ridgewell 8y ago>Others say they’ve seen white, Tic-Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind, and no exhaust. These sound like weather balloons to me. I don't think most engineers or academy graduates are trained in meteorology either. Not that I'm saying this is the definite answer or that I am somehow correctly inferring all of this. I'm just proposing that legitimate explanations exist.
- Razengan 8y agoAmazing how you cut the very next sentence after that quote which rules out ““balloons.””
- inamberclad 8y ago> "It's very mysterious, and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed" Not sure what balloon exceeds the speed of a jet aircraft in the same body of air.
- ridgewell 8y agoA balloon at 50,000 feet rapidly descending doesn't fit the bill at all?
- inamberclad 8y agoNot if it descends faster than 9.81 m/s^2 (or slower, since a deflated balloon will create a lot of drag), neglecting a violent downdraft on what looks like a pretty normal day.
- driverdan 8y agoThey're often stars or planets. Unless you have knowledge and training to identify celestial bodies it's easy to mistake them for something much closer. Distance is very hard to judge against a solid background like the sky.
- readhn 8y agoB.S.! Flying an aircraft requires a lot more skills from a human than typing code on a PC in your pajamas and talking about space. if you are a pilot who is flying for 10-20-30 years. You can tell. Now, this is not 1 pilot - 1 event we are talking. Many cases. Im not claiming its proving existence of ET or anything like that. Just that perhaps there is something there.
- sjburt 8y agoSR-71 pilots complained about having trouble telling stars from fishing boats to the point where an additional artificial horizon was added for night flying. There were reports of pilots rolling the plane up to 45 degrees without realizing it.
- readhn 8y agoapples and oranges. totally different conditions.
- newnewpdro 8y agoThe altitude the SR-71 cruises at is nowhere near where these sightings are occurring, it's practically in space.
- warent 8y agoThis is a good point, but I've never heard of a tic-tac shaped star or planet.
- derefr 8y agoI don’t see what privileges the hypothesis of “aliens” over “other countries’ aerospace R&D assets being used in an intelligence-gathering capacity.” Especially given the “seen over [i.e. examining] military bases” part.
- ianai 8y agoNot really a distinction. Both would be considered UFOs.
- derefr 8y agoThe parent comment said “ET”, which is what I was rebutting.
- rotexo 8y agoFor that matter, what privileges "other countries' aerospace R&D assets being used in an intelligence-gathering capacity" (when those R&D assets at the very least bend what is possible in aviation) or "aliens" or "von neumann probes" or whatever over "inexplicable information is being released in a targeted fashion by some party intent on distracting the public from ongoing news events?"
- derefr 8y agoUsually the null hypothesis (“the reports are made up”) is denied by the fact that these events can be—and are—just as often observed by neutral (but not naive amateur) observers. Often these events are reported by private pilots who were flying in the airspace, or air traffic controllers in civilian airports who see the thing on their radar, or meteorologists examining satellite imagery. There are also reports that come from government-affiliated persons, but where those affiliations are very distant. Unless you believe that the US government somehow manages to get their shit together way better for UFO propaganda than they do for, say, evidence-sharing in criminal investigations, then I personally find it implausible that entities as distant from one-another as the US Navy, the National Weather Service, and NASA, would all be speaking from the same side of their faces. (And also, re “distraction”—who exactly does a UFO report distract? There’s never been one that’s made front-page news AFAIK. Local news of a UFO sighting [without any local UFO crackpots to get inured to] might work to distract a very small town from a psy-op going on in the area, but even a moderately large city wouldn’t even notice the news. You’d do much better covering up a psy-op with, say, an amber alert. That usually becomes 24-hour local news coverage!)
- burtonator 8y agoThe key thing is we DO NOT know what these are? Why can't they be unicorns? As long as you're jumping to conclusions they could be flying unicorns as well as aliens. Both are as plausible considering that we have no evidence for either.
- darepublic 8y agoUnicorns are less plausible than extraterrestrials imo
- maxerickson 8y agoDo pilots still do lots of amphetamine?
- logjammin 8y agoI know HN comments are supposed to be thoughtful etc but all I have on this is fuckin lol well played
- takeda 8y agoIt's based on facts though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_substituted_amphetamines#Military_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_culture_of_substit... There is suspicion that it might be still used today.
- logjammin 8y agoNo yeah I know! It gave it extra punch for some reason. Solid chuckle
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 8bitsrule 8y agono air intake, no wind, and no exhaust... None of those are needed for 3D holographic projections. they appear on radar systems That one may be a little tougher.
- segfaultbuserr 8y agoI generally find the idea of "alien comes to visit" is ridiculous, but I have to acknowledge that UFOs, specifically, the subset of it, "non-natural, artificial-looking, non-illusion (hey, they even appear on the radar!), real flying objects in the lower atmosphere that cannot be built by the current human civilization" is a true phenomenon after reading these reports. But if they can be detected by a radar (at least some of them), it means their existence is not completely beyond the known realm of current physics. Doesn't it mean we can/should do lots of more objective observations of these phenomenon? For example, what are their infrared radiation patterns? What are their EM wave reflection patterns? What do they look like on the optical spectrum, what happens when you point a laser toward it, etc... So why don't we see people doing that? Especially the military, because they always have enough funding to carry out a large experiment without immediate purposes, such as the HAARP, without assuming conspiracy theories, it's just an array of large and sophisticated HF transmitters, which just happened to be the subject of conspiracies. I think many military installations can be as suspicious as HAARP in the eyes of conspiracy theories, such as those VLF radio stations for communicating with nuclear submarines (conspiracy theorists can describe as them a mind-control device), or those phased-array for radio astronomy (conspiracy theorists can say, if moon landing is fake, why are they still launching these facilities? To create artificial natural disasters to install the new world order, or something... well, can I make a million dollars by becoming the next Alex Jones now?), but it just happened to be HAARP, rather than something like SuperDARN. Jokes aside, one possible explanation comes to mind is that all researches are classified, and then it comes with full of conspiracy theories that rarely make sense. However, there are quite a few widely-documented UFO spotted by the public, which would allow the much larger civilian researcher groups to collect data, and these activities are very unlikely to be "silenced" as well, since they are already public. Another answer is that the researchers are biased, it may be true, just like the "classified military" explanation, but I don't think it can explain 100% of it. Military cannot classify everything, and not 100% of the established researchers are so biased that they even refuse to check it with some equipment (which is, as well, essentially for concluding that these phenomena are just illusions, not real). I think the ultimate answer is their unpredictability. Their occurrence is essentially random. You cannot observe something with sophisticated equipment if you are not prepared to, even if you can, you cannot successfully establish a influential project to do that. An example would be ball lightning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning), most scientists before 1960s don't believe it's a real phenomenon, because no objective observations can be carried out, not even a single instance has been capture by the researchers until recently, in 2014. I think the same goes for UFOs. And if you do see UFOs occur in a predictable manner, it's very likely that they are secret military aircraft or misidentified natural phenomena than "non-natural, artificial-looking, non-illusion, real flying objects in the lower atmosphere that cannot be built by the current human civilization"-kind of UFOs. On the other hand, imagine if there's a predictable occurrence of this kind of UFOs at specific locations around the world, there may even be recognized academic institutions to research them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]