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Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous UAVs
- excalibur 7y ago> The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel. That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time. The authors are not actually suggesting that the craft are flying faster than light speed, they are arrogantly defining the reference frame of a traveler aboard the ship as "proper time". It would still take over 4 years to get to Alpha Centauri from our perspective.
- arthurcolle 7y agoFair point. All I know is I want to fly one of those.
- jerf 7y ago"That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space" If the observed accelerations of my car were sustainable in space, I'd be able to do interstellar travel pretty easily. Stack this up with the other crazy assumptions made in this piece (check out the first comment, for instance). You want to assume high tech has 1000G acceleration? OK, you know, sure, fine. But it also moves through the air at massively supersonic speeds without causing friction or sonic booms? That's another separate piece of technology that's basically magic. (Honestly not even sure which I find less believable!) And then this amazing advanced technology is flying around is moving around on that flight pattern because... uhh... why would any aircraft fly that way again? Look at that flight path. What possible use could that have? I've never heard even a sketch of a motive that suggests why these craft would fly in such crazy patterns around aircraft that isn't better met by some other approach, that is, whatever goals something flying such an astonishing craft may have, they could simply obtain directly. The theory that these are "technologically advanced craft" requires an incredibly precise combination of high technological skill matched with utter ineptitude and stupidity, beyond merely "oh we just don't understand their goals". This is not intelligence acting in ways we don't understand; this is lack of intelligence.
- typeformer 7y agoPlease see exactly how these objects were tracked before you degrade these researchers work. They're using the scientific method but you are not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316
- droithomme 7y ago> moves through the air at massively supersonic speeds without causing friction or sonic booms? Wasn't one of these tictac anomalies seen going into and coming out of the ocean at supersonic speeds? Water isn't very compressible and hitting the water at modest speeds is often a death sentence for bridge jumpers and can completely annihilate a falling airplane. But here's something large, fast, and observed going into an incompressible liquid as if it wasn't even there. Obviously if this is some sort of tech it is doing things we don't even think are possible according to known laws of physics. Which is interesting.
- typeformer 7y agoMaybe you could say that the are obviously not from this world...as many of the piolets have said.
- Iv 7y agoThat quote makes me think this is not a serious paper. EDIT: Read some parts, yep. That's someone who hopes that with enough integrals and over-analysis no one will notice they base their claims on very sketchy data and assumptions. A good example as to why people who decide on how to spend taxpayer money should have a bit of science education. This is intended at impress someone who doesnt do math.
- whatshisface 7y ago>they are arrogantly defining the reference frame of a traveler aboard the ship as "proper time". Arrogantly? That's the correct definition of proper time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time
- excalibur 7y agoPoint taken. I was personally unfamiliar with (or more likely had forgotten) the term, but that doesn't mean it's not well-established.
- ceejayoz 7y ago> That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space... Usain Bolt has an average acceleration of 3.09 m/s^2 in the 100 meter dash. Per http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel.php http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel..., this means he can run to Alpha Centauri in a subjective time of 6.9 years (8.4 here on Earth).
- starpilot 7y agoThey mention this in the paper: > Such a craft accelerating at a constant 1000 g for half of the trip and decelerating at the same rate for the remaining half would reach the Alpha Centuri system within 5 days’ ship time due to the fact that it would have been traveling at relativistic speeds for most of the trip. However, for those of us on Earth, the trip would take over four years.
- dfsegoat 7y agoThis is the footage from the 2004 Nimitz Incident that is one case study in the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY This is another more compelling video, but was not covered in this paper (was from 2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVRg7LLaQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVRg7LLaQA The US Navy has certified that these videos are authentic, and were not for public release. [1] 1 - https://time.com/5680192/navy-confirms-ufo-videos-real/ https://time.com/5680192/navy-confirms-ufo-videos-real/
- arthurcolle 7y agoI hope they release an HD version of the normal video feed at some point. There might be a mountain of potentially usable data that isn't being released at present. Apparently during the Nimitz incident there was a brief period where there were hundreds of these UFOs that descended from the sky (upper bound that the radar picks up is 80,000 feet, and these were at picked up at that altitude) and were basically tracking the Nimitz Strike Group. Such a wild story.
- openasocket 7y agoI hope they release the raw footage with telemetry data. I'm not sure about ATFLIR specifically, but I know that these sorts of systems usually embed actual telemetry data in the feed (in a similar way to close captioning data) which is then rendered onto the video by the media player. All these copies of the footage are of the video after being rendered, with the data stripped out.
- dfsegoat 7y agoAccording to the Sr. Radar/EW officer on the USS Princeton which had all the radar tracks (Kevin Day I believe) - all of the data were wiped. "Despite this, Day intended to write an after-action message about the encounter. When Day went to review the records from the previous day, all the data was gone. He never wrote the after-action message." [1] [1] - http://entertainermag.com/blog/2019/08/30/exploring-the-unbelievable-navy-veteran-kevin-day-to-speak-at-ufo-congress/ http://entertainermag.com/blog/2019/08/30/exploring-the-unbe...
- codezero 7y agoThis is a fun paper. I wish they had done some work to acknowledge and/or dismiss other potential reasons for the appearance of the UAVs, like instrumental, environmental, etc. The section that implies that they can just assume they are flying physical objects because the observers are professionals is pretty weak.
- calibas 7y agoThey do acknowledge potential issues: "these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth." And their selection process: "These encounters were selected from a subset of cases for which there were multiple professional witnesses observing the craft in multiple modalities (including sight, radar, infrared imaging, etc.)." Some of the cases have multiple witnesses and video of the objects. You can look at it yourself.
- codezero 7y agoAs someone who has published a lot of peer reviewed physics papers none of how this is presented feels rigorous. It’s fine to muse about the “what if” here but they don’t present this work that way, in my opinion, as they appear to be reinforcing their work with witnesses and not science. Nothing really wrong with that in general but personally I’d rather see an attempt to dismiss as many other possibilities as possible. I would love to see a thorough analysis and understanding of how the sensor pod works, as well as the software it runs to see if it could be contributing to anomalous measurements in the HUD. An exploration of any local environmental data, astrological, optical, and chemical reasons something may appear the way it does in the sensor data. I’d much prefer a release of the entire data set of raw sensor information along with it.
- typeformer 7y agoIf you would like to know more about the technology tracking these crafts see this compiled list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316
- narrator 7y agoMeanwhile, uncontacted Stone Age Tribe elders observes anomalous large bird possibly made out of shiny rocks in the sky traveling at faster than any bird flys or animal runs. It does not make noise like bird and it does not flap wings but makes low drowning sounds like a fast flowing river. It would be able to traverse to the big unknown mountain far off in the distance in minutes to hours. Stone Age Tribe Hacker News drum circle meeting says that tribal elders smoked too much sacred pipe last night or maybe supreme elder tribal shaman has secretly made it out of shiny rocks and leaves. They ask, why would it fly like that in a straight line, doesn't the bird know that the world ends just over the horizon?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoYou seem to be sarcastically suggesting that it'd be dumb to dismiss such sightings because we have those planes today. It'd still be correct to dismiss the stone age sighting of something like a modern airplane, since they weren't around yet.
- droithomme 7y agoHe mentioned uncontacted stone age people. That's a reference to tribes today who choose not to connect with the outside world. For example, the Sentinelese are said to not even have fire. They have metal now only because a few years ago a big freighter crashed on their island, which surely was perceived the same as a UFO crash would be to us.
- eitland 7y agoThere's a story that reaches the front page of HN from time to time of a Russian family that fled from Stalin into the Taiga sometime before the space race and were only found I think in the late 70ies. One of the observations they had made from the wilderness was satellites, and IIRC they had figured out the objects had to be man made. That story always touches me in more than one way.
- narrator 7y agoI'm just saying that if E.Ts who can traverse interstellar distances are visiting us, they are using technology that we have absolutely no understanding of or conception of how it might even be possible. The only analogy for this is comparing this to the interaction between uncontacted stone age tribes and modern civilization.
- joshvm 7y agoCan the link be updated to the (open access) peer reviewed article? https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939 https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939
- exabrial 7y agoFrom the comments: https://www.metabunk.org/2004-uss-nimitz-tic-tac-ufo-flir-footage-flir1.t9190/page-8#post-222154 https://www.metabunk.org/2004-uss-nimitz-tic-tac-ufo-flir-fo... pretty good discussion
- typeformer 7y agoPeople explanations on that thread are weak AF.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- typeformer 7y agoIf you're interested to know more about exactly what was the wide and varied spectrum of sophisticated technology that tracked these ET crafts following the Nimitz group over six days I've compiled a list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316
- starpilot 7y agoFYI your post was flagged and you're risking a hellban trying to promote it.
- typeformer 7y agoyikes
- typeformer 7y agoThanks for the heads up
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- blincoln 7y agoI'm disappointed that the authors don't even consider that the observations might be of rare atmospheric phenomena. Some of those (red sprites, etc.) look unreal. What the Navy observed also sounds an awful lot like WWII "foo fighters". Occam's Razor tells me it's probably some sort of natural phenomenon that happens to be attracted to planes for some reason.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoWhat natural phenomenon would be attracted to planes?
- blincoln 7y agoI don't know for sure. I'm not a physicist. I would assume it could be the metal in the plane, vortices created by its motion through the air, changes to the Earth's magnetic field caused by the metallic object moving through it, something like that.