22 ms·

UFOs invading military airspace multiple times a month, but public won't be told

247 points by emptybits 7y ago

paxys 7y ago
I'm going to guess foreign surveillance drones
- beamatronic 7y ago
  There are a million peaceful civilian purposes for this kind of propulsion technology, if that’s what this is.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- xeromal 7y ago
  Definitely drones. Quiet and exhaust free.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    Traveling 2400 MPH?
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    >Quiet and exhaust free. Which is fairly impressive at the reported velocity of 2400mph.
    - ianai 7y ago
      What if it’s a hack? Get the enemy to think they’re seeing UFOs and maybe they’ll slip up on “mundane” foreign planes? Not a huge effect but it might only need to work once. But the news of water ice on titan - and a huge band of it - makes me wonder if life hasn’t spawned twice (at least) in the solar system.
      - inflatableDodo 7y ago
        One thought I had was a plasma ball being generated by focusing high UV from a satellite. That fits some of the supposed behaviour.
        sterlind 7y ago
        FLIR shows a very low heat signature, though. Plasma is hot (and usually doesn't maneuver.)
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
        The femtosecond mini plasma holograms are cold enough (on average) to touch - Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Aerial and Volumetric Graphics Rendered by Focused Femtosecond Laser Combined with Computational Holographic Fields - https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06668 https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06668
        jacobush 7y ago
        While maybe not exactly impossible that would require some insane UV laser power from a satellite.
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
        Might not be space, the water disturbances could be projectors submerging.
        jacobush 7y ago
        Well a nuclear sub might have the power needed. Still insane though. :) Probably you would need several lasers too, intersecting where you want to have the plasma ball.
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
        Thinking about the current efficiency of big lasers, a sub also has the benefit of being able to dump heat fast.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  It's possible foreign drones might be speedy. It's implausible for them to be speedy with no visible Stonking Big Flame out the back. It's also implausible for them to accelerate really suddenly or submerge underwater without harm.
- atupis 7y ago
  How about hypersonic glide vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Technology_Vehicle_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Technology_Vehicle_....
  - JulianMorrison 7y ago
    Goes fast. Doesn't go slow or hover. Doesn't turn or accelerate suddenly. Doesn't swim.
- starpilot 7y ago
  > On Princeton's radar however, it was noticed that the object now dropped from 28,000 ft to near sea level in less than a second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident
inflatableDodo 7y ago
>"We know a little more about the UFO itself. It is described as “wingless, white, and shaped like an oblong pill. It was 24-30 (40 in the NYT article) feet long and had no visible markings or glass. The USS Princeton was able to faintly track the “capsule” via its SPY-1B radar system, but the fighters were not able to get a radar lock on the object. The “capsule” was not only more maneuverable than the Hornets but also much faster —for it to have reached the CAP point ahead of the Navy fighters it would have had to have flown in excess of 2,400 miles an hour. According to FighterSweep.com, which published a detailed chronicle of the event in 2015, the object did not emit hot jet exhaust typical of ordinary aircraft." https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a14456936/that-time-the-us-navy-had-a-close-encounter-with-a-ufo/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a14456936/that-tim...
- mrob 7y ago
  This lists three possibilities: Malfunction of equipment and/or crew, US government operating a real UFO, or aliens operating a real UFO. I can think of one more which seems more likely: US government testing secret radar spoofing tech (probably operated from a submarine).
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Why not a foreign government? Or even a private corporation?
    - mrob 7y ago
      Risky to test it on the US and not some smaller country. Less risky if it's the US testing it on itself.
      - onion2k 7y ago
        Unless it's already been tested on smaller countries successfully. In which case testing against the US is just a logical step.
modzu 7y ago
weather balloon
- hieudang9 7y ago
  the one thing truth is no evidence about UFO at least HD quality in 4K era All are SD quality.
  - JulianMorrison 7y ago
    1) Stuff recorded on people's phones is going to have poor resolution, particularly at night when anything but the most cutting edge phone cameras produce a grainy mess. 2) The military is not going to give you full-resolution video, they keep secrets like that reflexively.
    - sgt101 7y ago
      If UFO's were "real" (as in actual aliens or other amazing things) then I would have expected a vast increase in footage and photos over the last five years as cameraphones and dash cams became pervasive. This has happened for "fireballs" and meteors - lots of amazing dashcam footage from Siberia and Canada and so on. Why not alien spaceships? Because alien spaceships are not here.
      - JulianMorrison 7y ago
        There are an absolute heap of videos. Mostly of lights at night when phone cameras are weak, or dots high in the sky, but still. Go look on the MUFON site. Meteors have the showmanship advantage of being big, bright, high, and visible from a very large area. Both meteors and UFOs have the problem of "whoa what was that, didn't have time to get my camera out". UFOs additionally have the problem of "too amazed to act".
      - majkinetor 7y ago
        UFOs must be real because there are no single incidents so far in the universe as we know it. Intelligent life happened here, it must happen again somewhere else. This should be made axiom really. You/we/whatever is not unique in the universe. So, "If UFO's were real" is not really a question. Whether this was an UFO or something else is a question. Your other questions "why not spaceships etc" are antrophorphic in nature and not relevant at all.
_lol 7y ago
Did newsweek get hacked?
- bdamm 7y ago
  Yes, its editorial board seems to have been hacked some time ago.
- numlocked 7y ago
  Not exactly, but it is owned by folks associated with Olivet university, and this bizarre scheme: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is-inside-this-internet-rabbit-hole.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is...
_of 7y ago
IMHO, Newsweek has really lowered their journalistic standards.
fuck_off_12345 7y ago
I know this won't satisfy anyone, but I've followed this subject for years with varying degrees of interest / belief. Someone close to me is former military whose position required a top secret clearance. The work that they did involved analyzing various forms of SIGINT. After years of me prying, this person admitted to me: 1. Within the Navy (and presumably other armed forces) the UFO stuff is an open secret. 2. The 'official line' used internally is that the craft are extraterrestrial (or at least origin unknown), and ... 3. They're official labelled drones, i.e., there is no reason to believe that they're "manned" In other words, it's fairly well known within the military (at least where people are likely to encounter them) and the official position is somewhere along the lines of "they're here but not here". Personally I've never seen anything I'd label a UFO. But the prevailing narrative -- uptick in UFO sightings following the Manhattan Project, interest in our weapons / energy capabilities -- I'm 100% comfortable with. If it is a military psy-op, it's one playing out on a massive scale over a vast timeframe. That in and of itself is mind boggling.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  Am a former military intelligence officer of an MNNA nation, had SIGINT and VISINT postings during my career including in the aerospace command which is integrated with the national air and strategic missile defence systems and while we could track loose bird flocks with OTH Radar probably as far as the Indian subcontinent we've never seen aliens. Don't get me wrong some of these are really fucked up and can't be dismissed as a weather balloon or a sensor error easily, but saying that UFOs are an open secret is simply wrong. So either the US is unique in the of attention they get or that UFOs ignore the area between the Straights of Gibraltar and the Straights of Aden like a plague which would also contradict the first assumption given the sheer number of US assets in the area.
  - lovetocode 7y ago
    I also have over a decade of SIGINT experience and can confirm that this persons friend was pulling a hilarious fast one.
    - 7y ago
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
What if some of these are optical effects? Like sunlight glinting off water or windshield? The "bright spot" can move from one position in the field of view to another with enormous apparent velocity, because there is no large distant physical object moving about.
- obituary_latte 7y ago
  What accounts for the radar signatures then?
  - wnkrshm 7y ago
    I wouldn't discount atmospheric effects that we haven't seen much yet. Or at least not with high enough frequency to understand their origins and behavior. I'm thinking of some form of ball-lightning, a self-contained plasma. It's still an unexplained phenomenon with a history of observation (or multiple phenomena classified under one label). A self-contained plasma could very much be opaque/reflective for radar (depending on the plasma frequency) and also emit light. Maybe it'll even be absorptive to some of the active radars trying to paint it, making some of the involved airplane and ship radars actually stabilize and guide the phenomenon (e.g. it 'escaping' as soon as a painting radar gets closer). Lots of maybes but infrequent natural phenomena that cannot be easily observed with human senses and where humans usually don't go are still a valid hypothesis in my opinion.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
    IDK, but whenI hear "moves with ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories, with no visible means of propulsion"; then my first thought is that seems more akin to lens flare than it seems like an aeroplane. Which is more likely in Occam's razor: a new source of refracted light, or a new kind of aircraft?
    - postalrat 7y ago
      Occam's razor only works until it doesn't.
thrwaway190502 7y ago
Take a look at this: https://imgur.com/a/uhFOF9u https://imgur.com/a/uhFOF9u Decide for yourself what you think is being shown there. Okay, ready? This is what the picture I just linked actually shows: I googled "grainy photo" and then "first photo ever taken" to get the grainiest one ever. I don't know if it's the first one ever taken, but this photo is one of the oldest ones we have. "Taken in 1824, it shows the view outside of a window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes France." How did you do?
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Okay, pretty neat, but how is that relevant?
  - thrwaway190502 7y ago
    I expected UFO buffs to fill in the picture with their own narrative. In reality I selected the picture literally only for its graininess. I was showing that you can read a great deal into tiny grainy images.
    - JulianMorrison 7y ago
      Pareidolia is a thing and so is its modern cousin "over-zoomed pixels that seem to make a shape". The Nimitz videos are a relatively rare category, though, instrument-first observation. Most UFOs are observed with human eyes. Which have good resolution and good light level compensation.
- PavlikPaja 7y ago
  >How did you do? I don't know what I'm supposed to see here, but it looks suspiciously like the first photo ever taken.
  - thrwaway190502 7y ago
    Doubt you guessed that, unless you already happened to be familiar with that photo. You were supposed to guess before I told you the answer.
viach 7y ago
There are probably checklists in news sites articles release planning workbook: ... 345. Topics to consider on Fridays and periods with no really important news. 1. UFO 2. Yetti ... 549. Advances in AI 550. Tesla .... ... /s
nabla9 7y ago
There are few very high profile UFO cranks, Sen. Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow, who give support for these narratives in the US and are able to lobby government money for UFO issues. That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story that nobody else in the scene saw the same way. It was not seen as worth of report or anything. One airman in the videos even says "It's a drone". https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/navy_pilots_2004_ufo_a_comedy_of_errors/ https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/navy_pilots_2004_ufo_a...
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story This Newsweek article quotes Gary Voorhis, whereas the pilot in previous reports was Dave Fravor. “At a certain point, there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking,” Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, stationed aboard the Princeton missile cruiser escorting the USS Nimitz, testified. “They all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”
  - nabla9 7y ago
    He is basically describing normal encounter with drones but using so vague language that it generates hype (there is movie coming).
newnewpdro 7y ago
If these things are real, and they aren't a secret US Military/R&D project, it sounds like American air superiority has come to an end and things are going to get real interesting in the next major conflict.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  Americans can still have their air superiority over other humans - maybe the aliens will just stand by and watch while we destroy each other in the next conflict. With such technology one can imagine they'd have the best seat in the house for such a show...
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of a sophisticated terrestrial US adversary, like Russia or China, not aliens. But it's probably just the US military testing something secret, or just a complete fabrication, either way leaked to project magical capabilities.
    - lwansbrough 7y ago
      The US spends more on defence than the next 10 countries combined and hosts many of the brightest aerospace engineers in the world. I’m not saying what you’re suggesting isn’t possible, but with those numbers stacked against them, it would be a very lucky innovation. And how kind of them to test their technology on US military instead of their own military in private...
      - newnewpdro 7y ago
        I meant the US military, we're in agreement.
- StanislavPetrov 7y ago
  If these things are real we never had air superiority.
steve19 7y ago
Presumably some or many ufo sightings are highly classified military tests that any random military pilot or radar operator is not ever going know about or even be told about after they sighted it. Its even possible tests are done knowing other military pilots are in vicinity to guage their reaction to it. To me this is the simplest explanation (if weather balloons and drones are ruled out).
- baddox 7y ago
  It would make sense that secretive military aviation projects would purposefully fly near unsecretive unsuspecting military aircraft to determine how detectable they are. It also makes sense that the military would publicly embrace the UFO narrative as a way to continue concealing their secretive projects.
  - fit2rule 7y ago
    Its also reasonable to understand the desire for people to describe these events in human terms, and ignore the possibility that we are not alone in the universe - especially since their technology appears to be far, far superior to anything we have at our disposal. However, no such conclusions can be made - either pro- or anti- the "But its Aliens" argument - since the entire subject is couched in dire secrecy, with a lot of people whose lives would change, drastically, if it were the case that these UFO's turn out to be non-human in origin.
    - bdamm 7y ago
      The assumption that people's lives would change requires scrutiny. For most I think it would be a promotion of Enquirer headlines to premiere news, but little else. SpaceX would soon become a public company. But what else? Life goes on, unaffected. People still would need to pay their taxes.
      - mattlondon 7y ago
        I think it would change a lot of people's belief systems in a major way. E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden? For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)
ed 7y ago
Source Washington Post article https://outline.com/sXxw5V https://outline.com/sXxw5V
nwrk 7y ago
Foia Man in Black's department CIA records here: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact-or-fiction https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact...
almost_usual 7y ago
Is this video legit? Why are they turning the same direction constantly? Are most of these UFO sightings witnessed by a pilot and co-pilot? Is radar data recorded so it can be replayed later? The skeptic in me thinks these experiences might seem ‘real’ but aren’t. If there is some measurable and documented proof then there can be an investigation.
bartimus 7y ago
It's probably the Russians playing around with their Gyroscopic Inertial Thruster drones.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  You forgot the sarcasm tag.
lwansbrough 7y ago
Is it only the US that’s detecting this stuff? That’s a very important question IMO because it might provide some insight into its origin (terrestrial or otherwise) depending on the answer.
- sterlind 7y ago
  I'm too lazy for citations, but these are detected around the world. There's been military footage released from South America (Brazil I think?), Russia and many others. I've also heard that other militaries don't have the same stigma against UFOs that the US does, given our tangled history with Project Blue Book, experimental aircraft testing and the cold war.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    A side note to this is the flak the Indian army got this week for proclaiming they found evidence of a Yeti in the discovery of giant tracks through the mountain snow. https://mobile.twitter.com/adgpi/status/1122911748829270016 https://mobile.twitter.com/adgpi/status/1122911748829270016 Just to add that the stigma surrounding paranormal occurrences is not universal. Unless I'm missing some context here
    - Intermernet 7y ago
      I'd like to recommend a book: My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Mystery by Reinhold Messner Yes, that Reinhold Messner. It's a really good book, with an interesting ending.
RappingBoomer 7y ago
likely earthlights...little understood plasma/ball lightning phenomenon...they can move very fast at times...my aunt (a former bank VP) saw one in san antonio decades ago...in her kitchen...
- BrissyCoder 7y ago
  Well if she's a former bank VP...
  - tomjakubowski 7y ago
    then she's one of the extraterrestrials!
- scirocco 7y ago
  Really trying to understand what difference it makes that she is a VP
  - imdsm 7y ago
    Some people (and organisations/governments) attribute credibility to people in positions of power and/or professional prestige.
    - scirocco 7y ago
      Perhaps, but the fact that she works in a bank might reduce her credibility in a science-oriented discussion
forgingahead 7y ago
Must be Sophons
- spookyuser 7y ago
  Yikes, we'd be so screwed. Although from the reasons outlined in the book, I think it makes it very unlikely that actual aliens would come to the planet and look around before doing anything. They would probably just kill us from light years away.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  You can't see sophons.
  - mkl 7y ago
    They can manipulate your retina to make you see whatever they want you to; UFOs, if they feel so inclined. But yes, not the particles themselves.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      Anyway the shape is like a droplet.
smithy76 7y ago
What sort of physics could explain something that could make such maneuvers?
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Something massless (like the dot of a laser pointer against the wall). Something slinking around the laws of relativity / inertia by moving the grid, not the object on the grid, Alcubierre warp style. Or the textbooks are wrong (it wouldn't be the first time).
- real_looper 7y ago
  brutino physics?
- krapp 7y ago
  Before you ask why something appears to break the laws of physics, you should first ask whether it's likely you truly understand what classified, cutting edge military technology is capable of. Remember that the SR-71 Blackbird was developed in the 1960s, and it seems advanced even today.
PavlikPaja 7y ago
>$?? million aircraft >mic made of rotten potato
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  well being strapped to two jets engines makes for a very noisy environment
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Come on. How is USS Princeton video not already debunked and classified as optical effect in camera? If you look at it, you can see how the "UFO" rotates at rate ~2x faster than the camera, which implies some reflection is happening. If it was an actual object, why would its rotation be coupled to the sensor recording the video?
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Do you really think the military, with all their technological snazz and pizazz, is going to be chasing lens flares? Consider the fact that this was a radar incident too. And that the ships were using meshed synthesized radar, not just one ship at a time.
  - daemin 7y ago
    I would more likely consider it a software bug than anything else. Some sensor data is feeding in and making it appear that something is there.
    - JulianMorrison 7y ago
      A radar bug and a FLIR bug, that exists in 3D space such that multiple seperate jets maneuvering around it see it as having a position? That's an issue in itself if so.
      - daemin 7y ago
        If all systems are interconnected and transfer data between them, then an anomalous reading could get carried through like a virus...
        JulianMorrison 7y ago
        Through the meshed radar, conceivably. You wouldn't expect it to affect the FLIR (which is displaying a sensor's input, not a tactical view) or to have an effective "position" in space.
interferencers 7y ago
It’s official. A new media campaign has begun. The zombie fad is dead. Space aliens are the new default. After this we will cycle back to dinosaurs, and after that, we’ll have a toy marketing cartoon blitz, and run a contest between 80’s/90’s style garbage toy cut-outs like power rangers, ninja turtles and G.I. Joe. It’ll be like Reagan all over again, except two terms of Trump instead, then we’ll vote in his veep for a term, dump him for a democrat and then crash the economy and stoke fires and blame the party lines (right gets pork barrel payola, left gets tax shamed) as readily as blaming farts on the dog, BAU.
GlennS 7y ago
I feel like a lot of the people commenting on this thread would really benefit from reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan (who was himself once a UFO believer). He has a really good section on UFO sightings, which he compares to stories about abduction by demons from Medieval times. His main explanation for the increase in UFO stories in the second half of the 20th century is the decline in other forms of abduction myths, like the demon one. People report seeing what they're expecting to see based on the stories they've been exposed to. The massive increase in aircraft obviously helped too.
- nprateem 7y ago
  And when the "demons" show up on radar simultaneously to being witnessed?
ilaksh 7y ago
I would really like to believe in alien spacecraft. But so far the only "evidence" I've ever seen has been incredibly poor quality images and video that could be pretty much anything as far as I can tell. Anyway I believe that people may sometimes see something, but its much more likely its secret military aircraft. But if there was a good recording of something really fantastical then maybe. Also, Newsweek is the kind of publication that happily publishes whatever the military asks them to.
throwaway66666 7y ago
Thought experiment. If we assume that "alien intelligence is here" in some form like UFO sightings, why not also assume they are on the internet? I believe someone would learn so much more about us from reading wikipedia, than flying a UFO above north carolina at 90k feet. No? And if they mastered long-distance space flight and life discovery, what stops them from reverse-engineering how to connect to an unprotected starbucks guest wifi. Or even posting here like you and me sometimes do. Do you think they would be more perplexed by the stuff we do to each other in real life (micro; prisons, crime, violence. and macro; governments, military, borders). Or with the way we treat each other on line? (scams, trolls, harassment, narcissism, mistreating privacy data)
- peteradio 7y ago
  They watched Independence Day and know they'd be infected by malware.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Our memes would conquer them even faster.
  - mtberatwork 7y ago
    If we were ever to intercept an alien television signal (or some version of that), I wonder if we would be able to discern what's entertainment and what's a news broadcast/documentary on their world? Perhaps they may mistake some of our SciFi films as reality on Earth?
    - nwatson 7y ago
      That's the premise of the movie "Galaxy Quest" [1]. It's a great film. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Per UFOlogy, they also have telepathy. Internet connection would pale in comparison, they can just scoop an understanding of us en-masse straight out of our heads. Technology wouldn't take long to interpret. Secrets and motivations would be an open book. Figuring how to do anything useful with the resulting mess would probably be the biggest problem.
djsumdog 7y ago
This has been going on for a very long time. Peter Jennings did a famous UFO documentary in 2005 that's worth watching. It goes into decades worth of reports.
tzfld 7y ago
Many wrongly think UFOs being equivalent to alien flying saucers. No, it is an unidentified object, which means that they can be a bird or a plane, until it's identified.
mothsonasloth 7y ago
Until a UFO crash lands on my front garden, I'm going to continue worrying about; weird weather, extinction of species, privacy and data leaks, increasing restrictions of freedom by western governments and the price of a loaf of bread.
- sbenitoj 7y ago
  If you go gluten free you can take that last one off your list of worries too ; )
  - staticautomatic 7y ago
    Or, you know, eat gluten-free bread.
    - azinman2 7y ago
      Or just stop eating bread, but otherwise eat gluten.
- hedora 7y ago
  This might be a good time to watch “They Live”.
  - mothsonasloth 7y ago
    Never seen this, added to my watch list. Now that Duke Nukem reference makes sense! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTK8eff1Zsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTK8eff1Zsk
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    It's always a good time. I am honestly suprised there is not a remake. But with the cape-fest spewing from hollywood right now, perhaps it should wait a bit longer.
- chmike 7y ago
  That would be a straightforward way to know the truth. But it can take a long time until a UFO would crash in someones front garden, if they are real. An alternative path is to use the inductive research process. In this process, we assume that testimonies are reports of real encounters with Unconventional Flying Objects. These objects flying in our atmosphere must respect the law of physics that we know very well. Could we deduce their propulsion mechanism from the collected data ? This is the research path followed by the physic professor Auguste Meessen since 1972. The result is the pulsed electromagnetic propulsion system (PEMP) that requires an intense alternating magnetic field. He also suggest a new type of oscillator that can produce this intense field. The outer shell of the UFO must be supraconductive at room temperature and above. The side effect is that it isolate the object and the passegers from the intense field. This theory still needs experimental validation. Since humans don’t master supraconductivity at room temperature, it would be a strong hint that UFOs are from ET origin. This is just to remind that ufology can be matter of scientific research and that we don’t have to captured a UFO to start studying it. 1. "Pulsed EM Propulsion of Unconventional Flying Objects" http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Pulsed_EM_Propulsion_of_Unconventional_Flying_Objects.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Pulsed_EM_Propulsion_of_... 2. "Evidence of Very Strong Low Frequency Magnetic Fields" http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen)/UFO_Evidence_of_Very_Strong_Low_Frequency_Magnetic_Fields.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen)/UFO_Evidence_of_Very_Strong... 3. "Production of EM Surface Waves by Superconducting Spheres: A New Type of Harmonic Oscillators" http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Production_of_EM_Surface_Waves_by_Superconducting_Spheres.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Production_of_EM_Surface...
RickJWagner 7y ago
Huh. Well, I thought Newsweek jumped the shark, but it seems a number of publications are giving this serious coverage. Interesting.
neilv 7y ago
If Newsweek considers this an important story, why not assign it to someone who's spent decades cultivating Pentagon sources, etc.?
dave84 7y ago
Reverse engineering the WiFi wasn’t a problem, it’s the JavaScript interpreter they’re struggling with.
- booleandilemma 7y ago
  The aliens aboard oumuamua saw JavaScript and kept going.
  - usgroup 7y ago
    Muhahaha... Thanks JavaScript, you ruined extraterrestrial encounter.
    - DougN7 7y ago
      Or maybe it saved us from annihilation :)
      - deepaksurti 7y ago
        Because it wants to annihilate us :)
      - preordained 7y ago
        They knew we were already doomed, so they didn't bother. On the other hand, maybe some benevolent aliens will see it as the distress signal it is...
      - usgroup 7y ago
        Aliens brought us Lisp years ago; and they are pissed that we still don’t use it :)
  - king_magic 7y ago
    You need to install like 60 npm packages just to enter LEO, can’t even imagine how painful it is to configure a landing.
- amelius 7y ago
coldcode 7y ago
I won't believe they are real aliens until they post in Hacker News. In reality how would we even know they are aliens? If you are an advanced race, you would have the technology to either hide your presence or affect the human identification in some way. If you didn't care if humans saw you, why not show up in Times Square? Why would you only show up in the US and only in ways no one but the military or government can see? Does not follow Occam's razor.
- zadler 7y ago
  Maybe they operate on a different time scale, fully intend to make contact but experience tells them that it’s better to take it slow. There could be any number of reasons.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Doesn’t it? Have you seen Star Trek? The federation exploration missions usually seek to speak first with the leaders and minimize their involvement with civilizations that haven’t matured enough. Not that they don’t still screw it up sometimes. Too many variables for Occam’s razor to be applied to that question. They could be as fallible as an emotional being might be and yet generally with benign, exploratory and diplomatic intentions as the federation in Star Trek. They’re merely adhering to the “most powerful” government’s diplomatic requirements. You know, because they met the US first by chance. There could be a good story in there somewhere...
- usgroup 7y ago
  Real alien here; AMA.
  - mcphage 7y ago
    What's with all the cow probing?
    - thrill 7y ago
      Practice.
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ConfusedDog 7y ago
I feel like a caveman looking at a modern aircraft. There's no reference whatsoever to associate to with that UFO's observed maneuvers... or it could be a distortion of infrared spectrum due to something else. They are so blatantly trespassing US airspace is very unnerving. It means either doesn't care about being shot down, or simply doesn't think it would happen. For the god sake, we couldn't even identify what this thing is.
charliebrownau 7y ago
2019 and we still have footage to "expose" ufos like its recorded on an VHS tape With the amount of planes, cars with dashcams, cctv and people with overpriced phones with cameras We cant get any better footage ?
cs702 7y ago
As XKCD points outs, billions of people are carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives: https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ Where are the millions of sightings of flying saucers?
- postalrat 7y ago
  Some night try to take a good picture of the Moon with you phone. I'm sure a UFO would be much harder to capture.
- 3131s 7y ago
  There are endless UFO sighting videos posted on Youtube every day.
rail-guns 7y ago
I’m gonna go out on a limb and call it: rail gun projectiles ultra flat trajectories inertial steering and guidance stealth coatings that survive launch forces with protective sabot barrel buffer blocks self destruct mechanisms that cause fragments to accelerate to hypersonic speeds upon termination satellite tracking and situational awareness permits relative (not perfect) secrecy when conducting tests
verytrivial 7y ago
I've seen this and similar videos before. They're presented usually without any context or commentary. In particular I've only ever seen heard people describing what they see live on the infrared camera display, not via eyeballs or other sensors. By my eyeballs this looks like a CMOS or whatever sensor clipping or processing artifact caused by sunlight glint on the camera housing dome. Google "blackmagic black sun" for a visible light example -- it happens and looks like an issue fixable (or caused) in software. The white extensions beyond the black blob are where the glinting is below the over-powering threshold. The "rotation" is where the camera and/or dome are rotating relative to the sun as the aircraft orientation changes and cleaning/buffing streaks in the dome are picking up the glint. The camera is clearly not pointing directly forward/aft during the footage, but I'm not sure where it is pointing. Note how the object stays dead-center below the tracking annotations -- autotracking is good, but I'm not sure it is that good, which again makes me think that the location is determined by camera geometry and is not something flying outside the aircraft.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Things this doesn't explain: - the radar contact, from multiple radars, both ships and aircraft. - the visual contact. - the fact multiple fighters engaged it, and it seemed to have a position in 3d space.
- keanebean86 7y ago
  Nice try aliens! "@$^#& Glar you were seen by one of their primitive aircraft! Quick, get on thier communication network and claim it's lens flairs and cmos artifacts!"
- icebraining 7y ago
  It doesn't stay dead-center at 0:31.
yohann305 7y ago
What’s funny is that UFOs always look and behave like the tech of the time era it was recorded at !
wintorez 7y ago
It's possible to keep a technology secret, but how easy it is to keep the underlying physics/science secret?
erik_landerholm 7y ago
Look it’s the greatest reality show ever. Sometime in the future we invent time travel and we send drones back to look at stuff. People have found them and decided, “hey, this obviously works let’s ‘invent’ it.” So of course they cover it up, they don’t want competition, for the idea they stole, from the future. Just assume time travel is possible, what makes more sense, traveling back to our own planet or some other super advanced civilization inventing FTL, finding us, and giving a shit to buzz around and mess with us? Who doesn’t want a sweet 21st century photo to post on future Instagram!
YjSe2GMQ 7y ago
UFO is a very potent story. And the US government had used it in the past as decoys (allegedly): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation#The_Truth_Is_Out_There https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation#The_Truth... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz Wouldn't be surprised if this is a sequel.
- eof 7y ago
  I definitely buy the core the thesis of HyperNormalisation, but I find it equally likely the CIA/deepstate would push a narrative that all those UFOs that started popping up right around the time we were getting nuclear off the ground was totally just the super awesome USA government's super secret technology.
  - overthemoon 7y ago
    Yeah--that after discarding the alien theory people gravitate to US technological tests is pretty flattering to a government that spent record-setting amounts of money on the F-35.
Udo 7y ago
The space nerd in me says, yes, maybe it's time. Maybe the Fermi paradox is about to be resolved. Maybe we're "just" seeing drones, but at least we're seeing something. However, the realist in me has lots of reasons to doubt all aspects of this reporting - and it's a good default strategy, especially when things seem too "good" or to spectacular to be true. In any case, there is not really a lot to go on. Even if this went properly public, what exactly does the data say? And coming back to the space nerd perspective, if these sightings are indeed extraterrestrial, they don't seem to bode well. Why would someone show off like that but don't leave a message? It's because they either don't care that we see them or because they want us to know that they're more advanced. I just hope our civilization hasn't yet reached a threshold of development where another civilization considers rubbing us out as a preventative measure.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
I am 100% sure there is no proof of aliens visiting us known by the US government because if there was Trump would have tweeted it by now. I will be here all day!
elizabetta 7y ago
They have been watching us for so long. I am a life long abductee. I have seen more than anyone can imagine. They are already here. Have been for millennia. During My last visit with ‘them’, I was told they are slowly showing themselves and the media is slowly introducing the idea of aliens to children. This done through the world governments. They are here to help. To also fight the group of very bad aliens who want to annihilate us and take over this planet. Which BTW. A war of sorts is happening in space. This earth is the only one if it’s kind anywhere. In any universe. It is considered very important. And has for many many billions of years. We are only one civilization of many that have come and gone. Our entire world leaders have known everything since ancient times - but control and dumb us down. To keep us subservient.
jvanderbot 7y ago
This is probably due to the rise of automated vehicles but not for the reasons you'd think. I've dealt with the problem of automated contact aquisition and tracking, esp with Radar, and let me tell you: fast tracks moving at insane speeds with sometimes-faint signatures are the norm. a perfectly calm sea, esp near shore, can create 100s or a 1000 spurious tracks if automated tools are trusted. The incorrect association of signatures to hypothesized contacts can produce "jumps" in their location, altitude that makes it look like inhuman maneuverability. Second, the proliferation of small aircraft does bias operators (and algorithms) to assume a real contact from small signatures, esp at low altitudes where noise is greatest. In a well integrated, multi-vehilce sensor network, a small false positive rate for each individual recognition and classication module produces enough bullshit to trick automated trackers into labelling targets. If we cant assume common sense filtering like "aircraft cant go from hover to mach 3 in one sweep", then the possible associations of sensor data to hypotheses is astronomical, and bullshit propegates. Its a mess when you integrate so many sensors and systems and try to make sense of the resulting noise.
thb567 7y ago
Too simplistic reasoning here,if aliens are actually here, motivation and drive could also be completely alien to us. Toying with hardware near some primitive military infrastructure could be just about anything, tests for an invasion or maybe they are just collecting samples from the jets exhaust or anything
satokema_work 7y ago
to quote the video from a previous UFO article "it's a [bleep]ing drone, bro"
oldway 7y ago
Why don't we consider in the supernatural like angels instead of aliens https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2012/04/space-angels-aliens-or-sign-of-the-apocalypse/ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2012/04/space-angels-aliens-o...
- YjSe2GMQ 7y ago
  Because it's the same thing. Angel, alien - what's the difference? "Holy books" will likely be exactly useless. If one can't tell the difference then one can't tell the difference.
ggm 7y ago
"Military admits it can't control drone incursions"
nprateem 7y ago
For people who don't believe in UFOs - surely you've got to admit that there's something pretty odd about detailed descriptions of flying machines ("Vimanas") being written about thousands of years ago by the Indians in the Mahabarata?
LinuxBender 7y ago
Are we saying that the military can't shoot down some prototype that some company is trying to show off? If so, then I would suggest the demo was a success.
erlangNewb 7y ago
The video looks like a spot of debris on a camera lense.
blackflame7000 7y ago
SR-72 in testing maybe?

247 points by emptybits 7y ago

paxys 7y ago

I'm going to guess foreign surveillance drones

beamatronic 7y ago
There are a million peaceful civilian purposes for this kind of propulsion technology, if that’s what this is.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
xeromal 7y ago
Definitely drones. Quiet and exhaust free.
- droithomme 7y ago
  Traveling 2400 MPH?
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >Quiet and exhaust free. Which is fairly impressive at the reported velocity of 2400mph.
  - ianai 7y ago
    What if it’s a hack? Get the enemy to think they’re seeing UFOs and maybe they’ll slip up on “mundane” foreign planes? Not a huge effect but it might only need to work once. But the news of water ice on titan - and a huge band of it - makes me wonder if life hasn’t spawned twice (at least) in the solar system.
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      One thought I had was a plasma ball being generated by focusing high UV from a satellite. That fits some of the supposed behaviour.
      - sterlind 7y ago
        FLIR shows a very low heat signature, though. Plasma is hot (and usually doesn't maneuver.)
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
        The femtosecond mini plasma holograms are cold enough (on average) to touch - Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Aerial and Volumetric Graphics Rendered by Focused Femtosecond Laser Combined with Computational Holographic Fields - https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06668 https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06668
      - jacobush 7y ago
        While maybe not exactly impossible that would require some insane UV laser power from a satellite.
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
        Might not be space, the water disturbances could be projectors submerging.
        jacobush 7y ago
        Well a nuclear sub might have the power needed. Still insane though. :) Probably you would need several lasers too, intersecting where you want to have the plasma ball.
        inflatableDodo 7y ago
        Thinking about the current efficiency of big lasers, a sub also has the benefit of being able to dump heat fast.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
It's possible foreign drones might be speedy. It's implausible for them to be speedy with no visible Stonking Big Flame out the back. It's also implausible for them to accelerate really suddenly or submerge underwater without harm.
atupis 7y ago
How about hypersonic glide vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Technology_Vehicle_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Technology_Vehicle_....
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Goes fast. Doesn't go slow or hover. Doesn't turn or accelerate suddenly. Doesn't swim.
starpilot 7y ago
> On Princeton's radar however, it was noticed that the object now dropped from 28,000 ft to near sea level in less than a second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident

inflatableDodo 7y ago

>"We know a little more about the UFO itself. It is described as “wingless, white, and shaped like an oblong pill. It was 24-30 (40 in the NYT article) feet long and had no visible markings or glass. The USS Princeton was able to faintly track the “capsule” via its SPY-1B radar system, but the fighters were not able to get a radar lock on the object. The “capsule” was not only more maneuverable than the Hornets but also much faster —for it to have reached the CAP point ahead of the Navy fighters it would have had to have flown in excess of 2,400 miles an hour. According to FighterSweep.com, which published a detailed chronicle of the event in 2015, the object did not emit hot jet exhaust typical of ordinary aircraft." https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a14456936/that-time-the-us-navy-had-a-close-encounter-with-a-ufo/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a14456936/that-tim...

mrob 7y ago
This lists three possibilities: Malfunction of equipment and/or crew, US government operating a real UFO, or aliens operating a real UFO. I can think of one more which seems more likely: US government testing secret radar spoofing tech (probably operated from a submarine).
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Why not a foreign government? Or even a private corporation?
  - mrob 7y ago
    Risky to test it on the US and not some smaller country. Less risky if it's the US testing it on itself.
    - onion2k 7y ago
      Unless it's already been tested on smaller countries successfully. In which case testing against the US is just a logical step.

modzu 7y ago

weather balloon

hieudang9 7y ago
the one thing truth is no evidence about UFO at least HD quality in 4K era All are SD quality.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  1) Stuff recorded on people's phones is going to have poor resolution, particularly at night when anything but the most cutting edge phone cameras produce a grainy mess. 2) The military is not going to give you full-resolution video, they keep secrets like that reflexively.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    If UFO's were "real" (as in actual aliens or other amazing things) then I would have expected a vast increase in footage and photos over the last five years as cameraphones and dash cams became pervasive. This has happened for "fireballs" and meteors - lots of amazing dashcam footage from Siberia and Canada and so on. Why not alien spaceships? Because alien spaceships are not here.
    - JulianMorrison 7y ago
      There are an absolute heap of videos. Mostly of lights at night when phone cameras are weak, or dots high in the sky, but still. Go look on the MUFON site. Meteors have the showmanship advantage of being big, bright, high, and visible from a very large area. Both meteors and UFOs have the problem of "whoa what was that, didn't have time to get my camera out". UFOs additionally have the problem of "too amazed to act".
    - majkinetor 7y ago
      UFOs must be real because there are no single incidents so far in the universe as we know it. Intelligent life happened here, it must happen again somewhere else. This should be made axiom really. You/we/whatever is not unique in the universe. So, "If UFO's were real" is not really a question. Whether this was an UFO or something else is a question. Your other questions "why not spaceships etc" are antrophorphic in nature and not relevant at all.

_lol 7y ago

Did newsweek get hacked?

bdamm 7y ago
Yes, its editorial board seems to have been hacked some time ago.
numlocked 7y ago
Not exactly, but it is owned by folks associated with Olivet university, and this bizarre scheme: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is-inside-this-internet-rabbit-hole.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is...

_of 7y ago

IMHO, Newsweek has really lowered their journalistic standards.

fuck_off_12345 7y ago

I know this won't satisfy anyone, but I've followed this subject for years with varying degrees of interest / belief. Someone close to me is former military whose position required a top secret clearance. The work that they did involved analyzing various forms of SIGINT. After years of me prying, this person admitted to me: 1. Within the Navy (and presumably other armed forces) the UFO stuff is an open secret. 2. The 'official line' used internally is that the craft are extraterrestrial (or at least origin unknown), and ... 3. They're official labelled drones, i.e., there is no reason to believe that they're "manned" In other words, it's fairly well known within the military (at least where people are likely to encounter them) and the official position is somewhere along the lines of "they're here but not here". Personally I've never seen anything I'd label a UFO. But the prevailing narrative -- uptick in UFO sightings following the Manhattan Project, interest in our weapons / energy capabilities -- I'm 100% comfortable with. If it is a military psy-op, it's one playing out on a massive scale over a vast timeframe. That in and of itself is mind boggling.

dogma1138 7y ago
Am a former military intelligence officer of an MNNA nation, had SIGINT and VISINT postings during my career including in the aerospace command which is integrated with the national air and strategic missile defence systems and while we could track loose bird flocks with OTH Radar probably as far as the Indian subcontinent we've never seen aliens. Don't get me wrong some of these are really fucked up and can't be dismissed as a weather balloon or a sensor error easily, but saying that UFOs are an open secret is simply wrong. So either the US is unique in the of attention they get or that UFOs ignore the area between the Straights of Gibraltar and the Straights of Aden like a plague which would also contradict the first assumption given the sheer number of US assets in the area.
- lovetocode 7y ago
  I also have over a decade of SIGINT experience and can confirm that this persons friend was pulling a hilarious fast one.
  - 7y ago

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago

What if some of these are optical effects? Like sunlight glinting off water or windshield? The "bright spot" can move from one position in the field of view to another with enormous apparent velocity, because there is no large distant physical object moving about.

obituary_latte 7y ago
What accounts for the radar signatures then?
- wnkrshm 7y ago
  I wouldn't discount atmospheric effects that we haven't seen much yet. Or at least not with high enough frequency to understand their origins and behavior. I'm thinking of some form of ball-lightning, a self-contained plasma. It's still an unexplained phenomenon with a history of observation (or multiple phenomena classified under one label). A self-contained plasma could very much be opaque/reflective for radar (depending on the plasma frequency) and also emit light. Maybe it'll even be absorptive to some of the active radars trying to paint it, making some of the involved airplane and ship radars actually stabilize and guide the phenomenon (e.g. it 'escaping' as soon as a painting radar gets closer). Lots of maybes but infrequent natural phenomena that cannot be easily observed with human senses and where humans usually don't go are still a valid hypothesis in my opinion.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  IDK, but whenI hear "moves with ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories, with no visible means of propulsion"; then my first thought is that seems more akin to lens flare than it seems like an aeroplane. Which is more likely in Occam's razor: a new source of refracted light, or a new kind of aircraft?
  - postalrat 7y ago
    Occam's razor only works until it doesn't.

thrwaway190502 7y ago

Take a look at this: https://imgur.com/a/uhFOF9u https://imgur.com/a/uhFOF9u Decide for yourself what you think is being shown there. Okay, ready? This is what the picture I just linked actually shows: I googled "grainy photo" and then "first photo ever taken" to get the grainiest one ever. I don't know if it's the first one ever taken, but this photo is one of the oldest ones we have. "Taken in 1824, it shows the view outside of a window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes France." How did you do?

JulianMorrison 7y ago
Okay, pretty neat, but how is that relevant?
- thrwaway190502 7y ago
  I expected UFO buffs to fill in the picture with their own narrative. In reality I selected the picture literally only for its graininess. I was showing that you can read a great deal into tiny grainy images.
  - JulianMorrison 7y ago
    Pareidolia is a thing and so is its modern cousin "over-zoomed pixels that seem to make a shape". The Nimitz videos are a relatively rare category, though, instrument-first observation. Most UFOs are observed with human eyes. Which have good resolution and good light level compensation.
PavlikPaja 7y ago
>How did you do? I don't know what I'm supposed to see here, but it looks suspiciously like the first photo ever taken.
- thrwaway190502 7y ago
  Doubt you guessed that, unless you already happened to be familiar with that photo. You were supposed to guess before I told you the answer.

viach 7y ago

There are probably checklists in news sites articles release planning workbook: ... 345. Topics to consider on Fridays and periods with no really important news. 1. UFO 2. Yetti ... 549. Advances in AI 550. Tesla .... ... /s

nabla9 7y ago

There are few very high profile UFO cranks, Sen. Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow, who give support for these narratives in the US and are able to lobby government money for UFO issues. That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story that nobody else in the scene saw the same way. It was not seen as worth of report or anything. One airman in the videos even says "It's a drone". https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/navy_pilots_2004_ufo_a_comedy_of_errors/ https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/navy_pilots_2004_ufo_a...

inflatableDodo 7y ago
>That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story This Newsweek article quotes Gary Voorhis, whereas the pilot in previous reports was Dave Fravor. “At a certain point, there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking,” Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, stationed aboard the Princeton missile cruiser escorting the USS Nimitz, testified. “They all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”
- nabla9 7y ago
  He is basically describing normal encounter with drones but using so vague language that it generates hype (there is movie coming).

newnewpdro 7y ago

If these things are real, and they aren't a secret US Military/R&D project, it sounds like American air superiority has come to an end and things are going to get real interesting in the next major conflict.

fit2rule 7y ago
Americans can still have their air superiority over other humans - maybe the aliens will just stand by and watch while we destroy each other in the next conflict. With such technology one can imagine they'd have the best seat in the house for such a show...
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of a sophisticated terrestrial US adversary, like Russia or China, not aliens. But it's probably just the US military testing something secret, or just a complete fabrication, either way leaked to project magical capabilities.
  - lwansbrough 7y ago
    The US spends more on defence than the next 10 countries combined and hosts many of the brightest aerospace engineers in the world. I’m not saying what you’re suggesting isn’t possible, but with those numbers stacked against them, it would be a very lucky innovation. And how kind of them to test their technology on US military instead of their own military in private...
    - newnewpdro 7y ago
      I meant the US military, we're in agreement.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
If these things are real we never had air superiority.

steve19 7y ago

Presumably some or many ufo sightings are highly classified military tests that any random military pilot or radar operator is not ever going know about or even be told about after they sighted it. Its even possible tests are done knowing other military pilots are in vicinity to guage their reaction to it. To me this is the simplest explanation (if weather balloons and drones are ruled out).

baddox 7y ago
It would make sense that secretive military aviation projects would purposefully fly near unsecretive unsuspecting military aircraft to determine how detectable they are. It also makes sense that the military would publicly embrace the UFO narrative as a way to continue concealing their secretive projects.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  Its also reasonable to understand the desire for people to describe these events in human terms, and ignore the possibility that we are not alone in the universe - especially since their technology appears to be far, far superior to anything we have at our disposal. However, no such conclusions can be made - either pro- or anti- the "But its Aliens" argument - since the entire subject is couched in dire secrecy, with a lot of people whose lives would change, drastically, if it were the case that these UFO's turn out to be non-human in origin.
  - bdamm 7y ago
    The assumption that people's lives would change requires scrutiny. For most I think it would be a promotion of Enquirer headlines to premiere news, but little else. SpaceX would soon become a public company. But what else? Life goes on, unaffected. People still would need to pay their taxes.
    - mattlondon 7y ago
      I think it would change a lot of people's belief systems in a major way. E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden? For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)

ed 7y ago

Source Washington Post article https://outline.com/sXxw5V https://outline.com/sXxw5V

nwrk 7y ago

Foia Man in Black's department CIA records here: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact-or-fiction https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact...

almost_usual 7y ago

Is this video legit? Why are they turning the same direction constantly? Are most of these UFO sightings witnessed by a pilot and co-pilot? Is radar data recorded so it can be replayed later? The skeptic in me thinks these experiences might seem ‘real’ but aren’t. If there is some measurable and documented proof then there can be an investigation.

bartimus 7y ago

It's probably the Russians playing around with their Gyroscopic Inertial Thruster drones.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
You forgot the sarcasm tag.

lwansbrough 7y ago

Is it only the US that’s detecting this stuff? That’s a very important question IMO because it might provide some insight into its origin (terrestrial or otherwise) depending on the answer.

sterlind 7y ago
I'm too lazy for citations, but these are detected around the world. There's been military footage released from South America (Brazil I think?), Russia and many others. I've also heard that other militaries don't have the same stigma against UFOs that the US does, given our tangled history with Project Blue Book, experimental aircraft testing and the cold war.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  A side note to this is the flak the Indian army got this week for proclaiming they found evidence of a Yeti in the discovery of giant tracks through the mountain snow. https://mobile.twitter.com/adgpi/status/1122911748829270016 https://mobile.twitter.com/adgpi/status/1122911748829270016 Just to add that the stigma surrounding paranormal occurrences is not universal. Unless I'm missing some context here
  - Intermernet 7y ago
    I'd like to recommend a book: My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Mystery by Reinhold Messner Yes, that Reinhold Messner. It's a really good book, with an interesting ending.

RappingBoomer 7y ago

likely earthlights...little understood plasma/ball lightning phenomenon...they can move very fast at times...my aunt (a former bank VP) saw one in san antonio decades ago...in her kitchen...

BrissyCoder 7y ago
Well if she's a former bank VP...
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  then she's one of the extraterrestrials!
scirocco 7y ago
Really trying to understand what difference it makes that she is a VP
- imdsm 7y ago
  Some people (and organisations/governments) attribute credibility to people in positions of power and/or professional prestige.
  - scirocco 7y ago
    Perhaps, but the fact that she works in a bank might reduce her credibility in a science-oriented discussion

forgingahead 7y ago

Must be Sophons

spookyuser 7y ago
Yikes, we'd be so screwed. Although from the reasons outlined in the book, I think it makes it very unlikely that actual aliens would come to the planet and look around before doing anything. They would probably just kill us from light years away.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
You can't see sophons.
- mkl 7y ago
  They can manipulate your retina to make you see whatever they want you to; UFOs, if they feel so inclined. But yes, not the particles themselves.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    Anyway the shape is like a droplet.

smithy76 7y ago

What sort of physics could explain something that could make such maneuvers?

JulianMorrison 7y ago
Something massless (like the dot of a laser pointer against the wall). Something slinking around the laws of relativity / inertia by moving the grid, not the object on the grid, Alcubierre warp style. Or the textbooks are wrong (it wouldn't be the first time).
real_looper 7y ago
brutino physics?
krapp 7y ago
Before you ask why something appears to break the laws of physics, you should first ask whether it's likely you truly understand what classified, cutting edge military technology is capable of. Remember that the SR-71 Blackbird was developed in the 1960s, and it seems advanced even today.

PavlikPaja 7y ago

>$?? million aircraft >mic made of rotten potato

LoSboccacc 7y ago
well being strapped to two jets engines makes for a very noisy environment

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Come on. How is USS Princeton video not already debunked and classified as optical effect in camera? If you look at it, you can see how the "UFO" rotates at rate ~2x faster than the camera, which implies some reflection is happening. If it was an actual object, why would its rotation be coupled to the sensor recording the video?

JulianMorrison 7y ago
Do you really think the military, with all their technological snazz and pizazz, is going to be chasing lens flares? Consider the fact that this was a radar incident too. And that the ships were using meshed synthesized radar, not just one ship at a time.
- daemin 7y ago
  I would more likely consider it a software bug than anything else. Some sensor data is feeding in and making it appear that something is there.
  - JulianMorrison 7y ago
    A radar bug and a FLIR bug, that exists in 3D space such that multiple seperate jets maneuvering around it see it as having a position? That's an issue in itself if so.
    - daemin 7y ago
      If all systems are interconnected and transfer data between them, then an anomalous reading could get carried through like a virus...
      - JulianMorrison 7y ago
        Through the meshed radar, conceivably. You wouldn't expect it to affect the FLIR (which is displaying a sensor's input, not a tactical view) or to have an effective "position" in space.

interferencers 7y ago

It’s official. A new media campaign has begun. The zombie fad is dead. Space aliens are the new default. After this we will cycle back to dinosaurs, and after that, we’ll have a toy marketing cartoon blitz, and run a contest between 80’s/90’s style garbage toy cut-outs like power rangers, ninja turtles and G.I. Joe. It’ll be like Reagan all over again, except two terms of Trump instead, then we’ll vote in his veep for a term, dump him for a democrat and then crash the economy and stoke fires and blame the party lines (right gets pork barrel payola, left gets tax shamed) as readily as blaming farts on the dog, BAU.

GlennS 7y ago

I feel like a lot of the people commenting on this thread would really benefit from reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan (who was himself once a UFO believer). He has a really good section on UFO sightings, which he compares to stories about abduction by demons from Medieval times. His main explanation for the increase in UFO stories in the second half of the 20th century is the decline in other forms of abduction myths, like the demon one. People report seeing what they're expecting to see based on the stories they've been exposed to. The massive increase in aircraft obviously helped too.

nprateem 7y ago
And when the "demons" show up on radar simultaneously to being witnessed?

ilaksh 7y ago

I would really like to believe in alien spacecraft. But so far the only "evidence" I've ever seen has been incredibly poor quality images and video that could be pretty much anything as far as I can tell. Anyway I believe that people may sometimes see something, but its much more likely its secret military aircraft. But if there was a good recording of something really fantastical then maybe. Also, Newsweek is the kind of publication that happily publishes whatever the military asks them to.

throwaway66666 7y ago

Thought experiment. If we assume that "alien intelligence is here" in some form like UFO sightings, why not also assume they are on the internet? I believe someone would learn so much more about us from reading wikipedia, than flying a UFO above north carolina at 90k feet. No? And if they mastered long-distance space flight and life discovery, what stops them from reverse-engineering how to connect to an unprotected starbucks guest wifi. Or even posting here like you and me sometimes do. Do you think they would be more perplexed by the stuff we do to each other in real life (micro; prisons, crime, violence. and macro; governments, military, borders). Or with the way we treat each other on line? (scams, trolls, harassment, narcissism, mistreating privacy data)

peteradio 7y ago
They watched Independence Day and know they'd be infected by malware.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Our memes would conquer them even faster.
- mtberatwork 7y ago
  If we were ever to intercept an alien television signal (or some version of that), I wonder if we would be able to discern what's entertainment and what's a news broadcast/documentary on their world? Perhaps they may mistake some of our SciFi films as reality on Earth?
  - nwatson 7y ago
    That's the premise of the movie "Galaxy Quest" [1]. It's a great film. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/
JulianMorrison 7y ago
Per UFOlogy, they also have telepathy. Internet connection would pale in comparison, they can just scoop an understanding of us en-masse straight out of our heads. Technology wouldn't take long to interpret. Secrets and motivations would be an open book. Figuring how to do anything useful with the resulting mess would probably be the biggest problem.

djsumdog 7y ago

This has been going on for a very long time. Peter Jennings did a famous UFO documentary in 2005 that's worth watching. It goes into decades worth of reports.

tzfld 7y ago

Many wrongly think UFOs being equivalent to alien flying saucers. No, it is an unidentified object, which means that they can be a bird or a plane, until it's identified.

mothsonasloth 7y ago

Until a UFO crash lands on my front garden, I'm going to continue worrying about; weird weather, extinction of species, privacy and data leaks, increasing restrictions of freedom by western governments and the price of a loaf of bread.

sbenitoj 7y ago
If you go gluten free you can take that last one off your list of worries too ; )
- staticautomatic 7y ago
  Or, you know, eat gluten-free bread.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    Or just stop eating bread, but otherwise eat gluten.
hedora 7y ago
This might be a good time to watch “They Live”.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago
  Never seen this, added to my watch list. Now that Duke Nukem reference makes sense! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTK8eff1Zsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTK8eff1Zsk
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  It's always a good time. I am honestly suprised there is not a remake. But with the cape-fest spewing from hollywood right now, perhaps it should wait a bit longer.
chmike 7y ago
That would be a straightforward way to know the truth. But it can take a long time until a UFO would crash in someones front garden, if they are real. An alternative path is to use the inductive research process. In this process, we assume that testimonies are reports of real encounters with Unconventional Flying Objects. These objects flying in our atmosphere must respect the law of physics that we know very well. Could we deduce their propulsion mechanism from the collected data ? This is the research path followed by the physic professor Auguste Meessen since 1972. The result is the pulsed electromagnetic propulsion system (PEMP) that requires an intense alternating magnetic field. He also suggest a new type of oscillator that can produce this intense field. The outer shell of the UFO must be supraconductive at room temperature and above. The side effect is that it isolate the object and the passegers from the intense field. This theory still needs experimental validation. Since humans don’t master supraconductivity at room temperature, it would be a strong hint that UFOs are from ET origin. This is just to remind that ufology can be matter of scientific research and that we don’t have to captured a UFO to start studying it. 1. "Pulsed EM Propulsion of Unconventional Flying Objects" http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Pulsed_EM_Propulsion_of_Unconventional_Flying_Objects.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Pulsed_EM_Propulsion_of_... 2. "Evidence of Very Strong Low Frequency Magnetic Fields" http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen)/UFO_Evidence_of_Very_Strong_Low_Frequency_Magnetic_Fields.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen)/UFO_Evidence_of_Very_Strong... 3. "Production of EM Surface Waves by Superconducting Spheres: A New Type of Harmonic Oscillators" http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Production_of_EM_Surface_Waves_by_Superconducting_Spheres.pdf http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/UFO_Production_of_EM_Surface...

RickJWagner 7y ago

Huh. Well, I thought Newsweek jumped the shark, but it seems a number of publications are giving this serious coverage. Interesting.

neilv 7y ago

If Newsweek considers this an important story, why not assign it to someone who's spent decades cultivating Pentagon sources, etc.?

dave84 7y ago

Reverse engineering the WiFi wasn’t a problem, it’s the JavaScript interpreter they’re struggling with.

booleandilemma 7y ago
The aliens aboard oumuamua saw JavaScript and kept going.
- usgroup 7y ago
  Muhahaha... Thanks JavaScript, you ruined extraterrestrial encounter.
  - DougN7 7y ago
    Or maybe it saved us from annihilation :)
    - deepaksurti 7y ago
      Because it wants to annihilate us :)
    - preordained 7y ago
      They knew we were already doomed, so they didn't bother. On the other hand, maybe some benevolent aliens will see it as the distress signal it is...
    - usgroup 7y ago
      Aliens brought us Lisp years ago; and they are pissed that we still don’t use it :)
- king_magic 7y ago
  You need to install like 60 npm packages just to enter LEO, can’t even imagine how painful it is to configure a landing.
amelius 7y ago

coldcode 7y ago

I won't believe they are real aliens until they post in Hacker News. In reality how would we even know they are aliens? If you are an advanced race, you would have the technology to either hide your presence or affect the human identification in some way. If you didn't care if humans saw you, why not show up in Times Square? Why would you only show up in the US and only in ways no one but the military or government can see? Does not follow Occam's razor.

zadler 7y ago
Maybe they operate on a different time scale, fully intend to make contact but experience tells them that it’s better to take it slow. There could be any number of reasons.
52-6F-62 7y ago
Doesn’t it? Have you seen Star Trek? The federation exploration missions usually seek to speak first with the leaders and minimize their involvement with civilizations that haven’t matured enough. Not that they don’t still screw it up sometimes. Too many variables for Occam’s razor to be applied to that question. They could be as fallible as an emotional being might be and yet generally with benign, exploratory and diplomatic intentions as the federation in Star Trek. They’re merely adhering to the “most powerful” government’s diplomatic requirements. You know, because they met the US first by chance. There could be a good story in there somewhere...
usgroup 7y ago
Real alien here; AMA.
- mcphage 7y ago
  What's with all the cow probing?
  - thrill 7y ago
    Practice.
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ConfusedDog 7y ago

I feel like a caveman looking at a modern aircraft. There's no reference whatsoever to associate to with that UFO's observed maneuvers... or it could be a distortion of infrared spectrum due to something else. They are so blatantly trespassing US airspace is very unnerving. It means either doesn't care about being shot down, or simply doesn't think it would happen. For the god sake, we couldn't even identify what this thing is.

charliebrownau 7y ago

2019 and we still have footage to "expose" ufos like its recorded on an VHS tape With the amount of planes, cars with dashcams, cctv and people with overpriced phones with cameras We cant get any better footage ?

cs702 7y ago

As XKCD points outs, billions of people are carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives: https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ Where are the millions of sightings of flying saucers?

postalrat 7y ago
Some night try to take a good picture of the Moon with you phone. I'm sure a UFO would be much harder to capture.
3131s 7y ago
There are endless UFO sighting videos posted on Youtube every day.

rail-guns 7y ago

I’m gonna go out on a limb and call it: rail gun projectiles ultra flat trajectories inertial steering and guidance stealth coatings that survive launch forces with protective sabot barrel buffer blocks self destruct mechanisms that cause fragments to accelerate to hypersonic speeds upon termination satellite tracking and situational awareness permits relative (not perfect) secrecy when conducting tests

verytrivial 7y ago

I've seen this and similar videos before. They're presented usually without any context or commentary. In particular I've only ever seen heard people describing what they see live on the infrared camera display, not via eyeballs or other sensors. By my eyeballs this looks like a CMOS or whatever sensor clipping or processing artifact caused by sunlight glint on the camera housing dome. Google "blackmagic black sun" for a visible light example -- it happens and looks like an issue fixable (or caused) in software. The white extensions beyond the black blob are where the glinting is below the over-powering threshold. The "rotation" is where the camera and/or dome are rotating relative to the sun as the aircraft orientation changes and cleaning/buffing streaks in the dome are picking up the glint. The camera is clearly not pointing directly forward/aft during the footage, but I'm not sure where it is pointing. Note how the object stays dead-center below the tracking annotations -- autotracking is good, but I'm not sure it is that good, which again makes me think that the location is determined by camera geometry and is not something flying outside the aircraft.

JulianMorrison 7y ago
Things this doesn't explain: - the radar contact, from multiple radars, both ships and aircraft. - the visual contact. - the fact multiple fighters engaged it, and it seemed to have a position in 3d space.
keanebean86 7y ago
Nice try aliens! "@$^#& Glar you were seen by one of their primitive aircraft! Quick, get on thier communication network and claim it's lens flairs and cmos artifacts!"
icebraining 7y ago
It doesn't stay dead-center at 0:31.

yohann305 7y ago

What’s funny is that UFOs always look and behave like the tech of the time era it was recorded at !

wintorez 7y ago

It's possible to keep a technology secret, but how easy it is to keep the underlying physics/science secret?

erik_landerholm 7y ago

Look it’s the greatest reality show ever. Sometime in the future we invent time travel and we send drones back to look at stuff. People have found them and decided, “hey, this obviously works let’s ‘invent’ it.” So of course they cover it up, they don’t want competition, for the idea they stole, from the future. Just assume time travel is possible, what makes more sense, traveling back to our own planet or some other super advanced civilization inventing FTL, finding us, and giving a shit to buzz around and mess with us? Who doesn’t want a sweet 21st century photo to post on future Instagram!

YjSe2GMQ 7y ago

UFO is a very potent story. And the US government had used it in the past as decoys (allegedly): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation#The_Truth_Is_Out_There https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation#The_Truth... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz Wouldn't be surprised if this is a sequel.

eof 7y ago
I definitely buy the core the thesis of HyperNormalisation, but I find it equally likely the CIA/deepstate would push a narrative that all those UFOs that started popping up right around the time we were getting nuclear off the ground was totally just the super awesome USA government's super secret technology.
- overthemoon 7y ago
  Yeah--that after discarding the alien theory people gravitate to US technological tests is pretty flattering to a government that spent record-setting amounts of money on the F-35.

Udo 7y ago

The space nerd in me says, yes, maybe it's time. Maybe the Fermi paradox is about to be resolved. Maybe we're "just" seeing drones, but at least we're seeing something. However, the realist in me has lots of reasons to doubt all aspects of this reporting - and it's a good default strategy, especially when things seem too "good" or to spectacular to be true. In any case, there is not really a lot to go on. Even if this went properly public, what exactly does the data say? And coming back to the space nerd perspective, if these sightings are indeed extraterrestrial, they don't seem to bode well. Why would someone show off like that but don't leave a message? It's because they either don't care that we see them or because they want us to know that they're more advanced. I just hope our civilization hasn't yet reached a threshold of development where another civilization considers rubbing us out as a preventative measure.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

I am 100% sure there is no proof of aliens visiting us known by the US government because if there was Trump would have tweeted it by now. I will be here all day!

elizabetta 7y ago

They have been watching us for so long. I am a life long abductee. I have seen more than anyone can imagine. They are already here. Have been for millennia. During My last visit with ‘them’, I was told they are slowly showing themselves and the media is slowly introducing the idea of aliens to children. This done through the world governments. They are here to help. To also fight the group of very bad aliens who want to annihilate us and take over this planet. Which BTW. A war of sorts is happening in space. This earth is the only one if it’s kind anywhere. In any universe. It is considered very important. And has for many many billions of years. We are only one civilization of many that have come and gone. Our entire world leaders have known everything since ancient times - but control and dumb us down. To keep us subservient.

jvanderbot 7y ago

This is probably due to the rise of automated vehicles but not for the reasons you'd think. I've dealt with the problem of automated contact aquisition and tracking, esp with Radar, and let me tell you: fast tracks moving at insane speeds with sometimes-faint signatures are the norm. a perfectly calm sea, esp near shore, can create 100s or a 1000 spurious tracks if automated tools are trusted. The incorrect association of signatures to hypothesized contacts can produce "jumps" in their location, altitude that makes it look like inhuman maneuverability. Second, the proliferation of small aircraft does bias operators (and algorithms) to assume a real contact from small signatures, esp at low altitudes where noise is greatest. In a well integrated, multi-vehilce sensor network, a small false positive rate for each individual recognition and classication module produces enough bullshit to trick automated trackers into labelling targets. If we cant assume common sense filtering like "aircraft cant go from hover to mach 3 in one sweep", then the possible associations of sensor data to hypotheses is astronomical, and bullshit propegates. Its a mess when you integrate so many sensors and systems and try to make sense of the resulting noise.

thb567 7y ago

Too simplistic reasoning here,if aliens are actually here, motivation and drive could also be completely alien to us. Toying with hardware near some primitive military infrastructure could be just about anything, tests for an invasion or maybe they are just collecting samples from the jets exhaust or anything

satokema_work 7y ago

to quote the video from a previous UFO article "it's a [bleep]ing drone, bro"

oldway 7y ago

Why don't we consider in the supernatural like angels instead of aliens https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2012/04/space-angels-aliens-or-sign-of-the-apocalypse/ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2012/04/space-angels-aliens-o...

YjSe2GMQ 7y ago
Because it's the same thing. Angel, alien - what's the difference? "Holy books" will likely be exactly useless. If one can't tell the difference then one can't tell the difference.

ggm 7y ago

"Military admits it can't control drone incursions"

nprateem 7y ago

For people who don't believe in UFOs - surely you've got to admit that there's something pretty odd about detailed descriptions of flying machines ("Vimanas") being written about thousands of years ago by the Indians in the Mahabarata?

LinuxBender 7y ago

Are we saying that the military can't shoot down some prototype that some company is trying to show off? If so, then I would suggest the demo was a success.

erlangNewb 7y ago

The video looks like a spot of debris on a camera lense.

blackflame7000 7y ago

SR-72 in testing maybe?