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U.S. Fighters About to Get Infrared Sensors That Could Be Huge for UFO Reporting

68 points by jseliger 7y ago

moreBullshit 7y ago
It's almost like there's a requirement to say UFO once a week. Can we talk about events with complete information? Can we not hypothesize about speculative nonsense. Wake me when someone has an answer. I don't care about questions.
svd4anything 7y ago
> We see this in action in the "Go Fast" and "Gimbal" videos released by the Pentagon that supposedly show UFOs. I don't believe these videos show anything really out of the ordinary at all, and certainly nothing definitively so, and there has been some very good forensic analysis done on them already that reinforces this point of view. Nick West, in particular, has really done compelling work on this topic. Some of his videos are posted below and are worth consideration. The third video that was released, the one of the infamous "Tic Tac" from 2004, looks like, well a Tic Tac, at least to me. Regardless, they all show FLIR footage taken by Hornets' targeting pods.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  My theory is that many of the observations are ball lightning maintained and transported by radar. If so, studying the phenomena could have fantastic implications for nuclear fusion, which would make the investment well worth it. The metallic cigar shapes could, within the realm of possibility, be free electrons in a similar toroidal path, giving the appearance of a shiny surface. That in turn could perhaps shield our spacecraft in the future.
- libertine 7y ago
  The odd part is the radar-visual claims, and why would someone like Navy Cmdr. David Fravor (who claimed to have visual contact and was in pursuit of the object), would throw all of his legacy out the window, all for a lie that could easily be debunked. I find it hard to pin that the US Navy pilots aren't as sharp as we perceived to be, or that these actors had something to gain with this, or if it was easily debunked why weren't the actors involved briefed on what it was.
  - alluro2 7y ago
    I agree - and with this kind of stuff, somehow we're prone to looking at the government like it's a perfectly running black box, with an all-reaching, all-encompassing power and control over information. But if you look at these pieces of information that have gone out - "something is being reported by our people, we don't actually know what is it, people are talking about it to the outside as well, we thought we add some equipment to see if we can find out more" - it seems much more realistic to me, and much more in line with inefficient, clumsy and sometimes incompetent government that it is...
themodelplumber 7y ago
The author made a very good case overall. More sensors means more measurement, which means more control of time and space, and the further enabling of an outward-looking stance. All of which is going to be of benefit as humanity leans harder on the science of the natural world and begins reaching for new ways to prevent catastrophic wars and disasters and explores space travel options. The more sensors, and the smarter they can operate, the better. The 20th century was in many ways a huge list of reasons why we shouldn't cocoon ourselves and "not explore" things that are what I call NO-NOs: Next order natural occurrences. Think we know it all, have seen it all, and can predict it all? Nope! And sensors are going to help us navigate and push through to new levels of understanding. It sounds crazy but there are still influential people in the military affairs community who don't believe we should look into UFOs. Not because they claim they don't exist, but because they claim the tech is too far beyond us, and there's nothing we can do about it! So why try? This is literally their reasoning. For a good example, listen to Lt. Col. Halt USAF (RET) recap his experience at Rendlesham in recent interviews. This psychology is exactly what will keep us from moving forward and exploring whatever else is really out there. No cover-up conspiracies needed, just plain old heads-down psychology. Keep the world the way it is. You can't argue with the psychology and expect to get anywhere; it is too self-protective. So arguing for more and better sensors is probably the best stance we have right now.
m_mueller 7y ago
I wonder what people here think of Bob Lazar. On one hand I have a very hard time believing the physics he describes without hard proof, on the other his story has been remarkably consistent, there's bits of tangential evidence and as a whole it AFAIK wasn't falsified for 30 years now. It's certain to me at least that he worked at Los Alamos. I have only two explanations: 1) he was a Los Alamos employee that came up with a scheme to sell books and such, and has a remarkable gift for acting and telling that story consistently for decades. But then why the FBI raids and such, is that invented too? 2) pretty much his entire story is true. But could such a huge project be kept secret?
- carlosdp 7y ago
  From what I understand, records show he worked at Los Alamos, but not his role, so he could have been a janitor for all we know. We also know he didn't actually go to MIT like he claims, and the way he explains the "alien tech" are not the way a real engineer would talk about these things. So I'd say definitely a crackpot...
  - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    How do we know that he didn’t go to MIT? And what does he say that is inconsistent with how a real engineer would talk about something?
    - tenfivewest 7y ago
      There’s a video of him being asked who his professors were at Caltech and MIT. He names two people, one was from a community college and a high school I think. And he doesn’t explain the science in a detailed or verbose way.
      - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
        Neither of those explanations are very satisfying. At best they might make the story suspicious, but that doesn’t seem like enough to say we know something.
dmix 7y ago
I find it uninspiring that we still only get grainy video or flir video from these jets. They claim multiple jets detected on but there was no ground based radar, satellites, or other sources that could correlate these "sightings"? The evidence always seems so thin and from a single source, almost on purpose.
- lolc 7y ago
  But this is the nature of UFO! They're always zipping about in the gray area of "barely detectable". If an object is easy to detect, it's also easy to identify with our array of sensors. If it's not detectable we don't know there's an UFO. So we'll always puzzle over grainy footage and blips on the radar. These cameras are going to clear up some of the mysteries we've seen in the past. But they are going to find more, further out.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Cool, wake me up when something more than one or two jets in the same area meaning their auto-targeting computers + pilots voice logs are all we have to work with.
    - lolc 7y ago
      Oh you don't have to participate if you don't like to puzzle. I know I don't most of the time.
      - dmix 7y ago
        Yep, as long as enough people are watching I dont need to waste the cognitive effort connecting pieces myself. I was originally interested in all of this new buzz but I now know to skip it.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  What has struck me a few times with the videos from fighter jets is that the UFO does not seem to move relative to the camera, that is, it's stuck in the middle or something. Which of course to me implies it's a speck or something on the camera. (I'm not a photographer though. I did read that e.g. scratches on a camera lens don't really have a noticeable effect on the final picture as well)
King-Aaron 7y ago
It's probably a logical fallacy of some kind on my part, but does it seem to anyone else that stories about UFO's are recently becoming more common in the mainstream media?
- aoeusnth1 7y ago
  I'm also noticing this.
- ericmcer 7y ago
  I listened to a podcast interview with Dan Aykroyd recently and he talked about the exact same thing. He is convinced they are doing soft preparation to begin unveiling extraterrestrial life to us. Dan Aykroyd is definitely not a legitimate source haha, but he is someone who is very ear to the ground on this stuff, and you are not alone in noticing a recent uptick in sightings , news, leaks, etc. about UFOs.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    It would be quite the movie plot if extraterrestrial life were revealed right when the humanity needs to work together in a massive push to avoid the climate catastrophe.
    - krapp 7y ago
      That would basically just be "Day the Earth Stood Still," but with an environmental, rather than anti-war message. And it's too late to avoid the climate catastrophe anyway, so the only reason aliens would actually show up is for the free real estate after humanity completes its self-fumigation.
      - imtringued 7y ago
        It's never too late. We are just one World War 3 away from the solution...
        7y ago
dev_dull 7y ago
I’m not a UFO-interested person, but some of the news around this stuff is just... bizarre. For example, this patent[1] from the secretary of the navy activated last Friday for “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”? The circumstances around the patent are even more intriguing. Here’s a quote from a patent lawyer here on HN regarding this patent[2]: Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum. 1. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants
- ddalex 7y ago
  Is there any sane element to that Patent? I tried to follow the explanations, but reeks of magic thinking to me... which is indistinguishable from high level technology.
  - King-Aaron 7y ago
    I want to believe it, but I don't know which way Occam's razor falls on this. It's probably more reasonable to believe that these lawyers managed to game the patent office into accepting it...
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      What if, and bare with me here, there's some super exotic technologies that we've been working on for a long time and we're this close to making it work and are concerned that the Chinese, notorious patent trolls, will get there first - and then as a preemptive strategy the Navy files these but intentionally obscures the relevant (almost real) physics? Of course the question then becomes: why even mention this stuff at all? It's not the the Military would really care about a patent in that sense. I don't believe it either, but The X-Files fan in me can't help but wonder.
    - ahje 7y ago
DrBazza 7y ago
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ Assuming UFO != alien, then this is definitely interesting. There are definitely atmospheric phenomena we know little or nothing about. Sprites, elves, jets, ball lightning and so on. More data on that would be exciting. 2019: "Quick get my worst camera so I can snap this UFO!"
nabla9 7y ago
Tyler Rogoway just keeps writing these fantasy UFO articles and people just refuse to read the articles that debunked the findings.
- jackcodes 7y ago
  Could be the case that people don’t know about them, because after all, they aren’t linked anywhere.

68 points by jseliger 7y ago

It's almost like there's a requirement to say UFO once a week. Can we talk about events with complete information? Can we not hypothesize about speculative nonsense. Wake me when someone has an answer. I don't care about questions.

svd4anything 7y ago

> We see this in action in the "Go Fast" and "Gimbal" videos released by the Pentagon that supposedly show UFOs. I don't believe these videos show anything really out of the ordinary at all, and certainly nothing definitively so, and there has been some very good forensic analysis done on them already that reinforces this point of view. Nick West, in particular, has really done compelling work on this topic. Some of his videos are posted below and are worth consideration. The third video that was released, the one of the infamous "Tic Tac" from 2004, looks like, well a Tic Tac, at least to me. Regardless, they all show FLIR footage taken by Hornets' targeting pods.

ganzuul 7y ago
My theory is that many of the observations are ball lightning maintained and transported by radar. If so, studying the phenomena could have fantastic implications for nuclear fusion, which would make the investment well worth it. The metallic cigar shapes could, within the realm of possibility, be free electrons in a similar toroidal path, giving the appearance of a shiny surface. That in turn could perhaps shield our spacecraft in the future.
libertine 7y ago
The odd part is the radar-visual claims, and why would someone like Navy Cmdr. David Fravor (who claimed to have visual contact and was in pursuit of the object), would throw all of his legacy out the window, all for a lie that could easily be debunked. I find it hard to pin that the US Navy pilots aren't as sharp as we perceived to be, or that these actors had something to gain with this, or if it was easily debunked why weren't the actors involved briefed on what it was.
- alluro2 7y ago
  I agree - and with this kind of stuff, somehow we're prone to looking at the government like it's a perfectly running black box, with an all-reaching, all-encompassing power and control over information. But if you look at these pieces of information that have gone out - "something is being reported by our people, we don't actually know what is it, people are talking about it to the outside as well, we thought we add some equipment to see if we can find out more" - it seems much more realistic to me, and much more in line with inefficient, clumsy and sometimes incompetent government that it is...

themodelplumber 7y ago

The author made a very good case overall. More sensors means more measurement, which means more control of time and space, and the further enabling of an outward-looking stance. All of which is going to be of benefit as humanity leans harder on the science of the natural world and begins reaching for new ways to prevent catastrophic wars and disasters and explores space travel options. The more sensors, and the smarter they can operate, the better. The 20th century was in many ways a huge list of reasons why we shouldn't cocoon ourselves and "not explore" things that are what I call NO-NOs: Next order natural occurrences. Think we know it all, have seen it all, and can predict it all? Nope! And sensors are going to help us navigate and push through to new levels of understanding. It sounds crazy but there are still influential people in the military affairs community who don't believe we should look into UFOs. Not because they claim they don't exist, but because they claim the tech is too far beyond us, and there's nothing we can do about it! So why try? This is literally their reasoning. For a good example, listen to Lt. Col. Halt USAF (RET) recap his experience at Rendlesham in recent interviews. This psychology is exactly what will keep us from moving forward and exploring whatever else is really out there. No cover-up conspiracies needed, just plain old heads-down psychology. Keep the world the way it is. You can't argue with the psychology and expect to get anywhere; it is too self-protective. So arguing for more and better sensors is probably the best stance we have right now.

m_mueller 7y ago

I wonder what people here think of Bob Lazar. On one hand I have a very hard time believing the physics he describes without hard proof, on the other his story has been remarkably consistent, there's bits of tangential evidence and as a whole it AFAIK wasn't falsified for 30 years now. It's certain to me at least that he worked at Los Alamos. I have only two explanations: 1) he was a Los Alamos employee that came up with a scheme to sell books and such, and has a remarkable gift for acting and telling that story consistently for decades. But then why the FBI raids and such, is that invented too? 2) pretty much his entire story is true. But could such a huge project be kept secret?

carlosdp 7y ago
From what I understand, records show he worked at Los Alamos, but not his role, so he could have been a janitor for all we know. We also know he didn't actually go to MIT like he claims, and the way he explains the "alien tech" are not the way a real engineer would talk about these things. So I'd say definitely a crackpot...
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  How do we know that he didn’t go to MIT? And what does he say that is inconsistent with how a real engineer would talk about something?
  - tenfivewest 7y ago
    There’s a video of him being asked who his professors were at Caltech and MIT. He names two people, one was from a community college and a high school I think. And he doesn’t explain the science in a detailed or verbose way.
    - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
      Neither of those explanations are very satisfying. At best they might make the story suspicious, but that doesn’t seem like enough to say we know something.

dmix 7y ago

I find it uninspiring that we still only get grainy video or flir video from these jets. They claim multiple jets detected on but there was no ground based radar, satellites, or other sources that could correlate these "sightings"? The evidence always seems so thin and from a single source, almost on purpose.

lolc 7y ago
But this is the nature of UFO! They're always zipping about in the gray area of "barely detectable". If an object is easy to detect, it's also easy to identify with our array of sensors. If it's not detectable we don't know there's an UFO. So we'll always puzzle over grainy footage and blips on the radar. These cameras are going to clear up some of the mysteries we've seen in the past. But they are going to find more, further out.
- dmix 7y ago
  Cool, wake me up when something more than one or two jets in the same area meaning their auto-targeting computers + pilots voice logs are all we have to work with.
  - lolc 7y ago
    Oh you don't have to participate if you don't like to puzzle. I know I don't most of the time.
    - dmix 7y ago
      Yep, as long as enough people are watching I dont need to waste the cognitive effort connecting pieces myself. I was originally interested in all of this new buzz but I now know to skip it.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
What has struck me a few times with the videos from fighter jets is that the UFO does not seem to move relative to the camera, that is, it's stuck in the middle or something. Which of course to me implies it's a speck or something on the camera. (I'm not a photographer though. I did read that e.g. scratches on a camera lens don't really have a noticeable effect on the final picture as well)

King-Aaron 7y ago

It's probably a logical fallacy of some kind on my part, but does it seem to anyone else that stories about UFO's are recently becoming more common in the mainstream media?

aoeusnth1 7y ago
I'm also noticing this.
ericmcer 7y ago
I listened to a podcast interview with Dan Aykroyd recently and he talked about the exact same thing. He is convinced they are doing soft preparation to begin unveiling extraterrestrial life to us. Dan Aykroyd is definitely not a legitimate source haha, but he is someone who is very ear to the ground on this stuff, and you are not alone in noticing a recent uptick in sightings , news, leaks, etc. about UFOs.
- adrianN 7y ago
  It would be quite the movie plot if extraterrestrial life were revealed right when the humanity needs to work together in a massive push to avoid the climate catastrophe.
  - krapp 7y ago
    That would basically just be "Day the Earth Stood Still," but with an environmental, rather than anti-war message. And it's too late to avoid the climate catastrophe anyway, so the only reason aliens would actually show up is for the free real estate after humanity completes its self-fumigation.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      It's never too late. We are just one World War 3 away from the solution...
      - 7y ago

dev_dull 7y ago

I’m not a UFO-interested person, but some of the news around this stuff is just... bizarre. For example, this patent[1] from the secretary of the navy activated last Friday for “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”? The circumstances around the patent are even more intriguing. Here’s a quote from a patent lawyer here on HN regarding this patent[2]: Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum. 1. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants

ddalex 7y ago
Is there any sane element to that Patent? I tried to follow the explanations, but reeks of magic thinking to me... which is indistinguishable from high level technology.
- King-Aaron 7y ago
  I want to believe it, but I don't know which way Occam's razor falls on this. It's probably more reasonable to believe that these lawyers managed to game the patent office into accepting it...
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    What if, and bare with me here, there's some super exotic technologies that we've been working on for a long time and we're this close to making it work and are concerned that the Chinese, notorious patent trolls, will get there first - and then as a preemptive strategy the Navy files these but intentionally obscures the relevant (almost real) physics? Of course the question then becomes: why even mention this stuff at all? It's not the the Military would really care about a patent in that sense. I don't believe it either, but The X-Files fan in me can't help but wonder.
  - ahje 7y ago

DrBazza 7y ago

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ Assuming UFO != alien, then this is definitely interesting. There are definitely atmospheric phenomena we know little or nothing about. Sprites, elves, jets, ball lightning and so on. More data on that would be exciting. 2019: "Quick get my worst camera so I can snap this UFO!"

nabla9 7y ago

Tyler Rogoway just keeps writing these fantasy UFO articles and people just refuse to read the articles that debunked the findings.

jackcodes 7y ago
Could be the case that people don’t know about them, because after all, they aren’t linked anywhere.