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I think the proper term here is "Unidentified Flying Object" for a reason. The pilot clearly said it looked like a cruise missile. The notion that "Unidentified
by geocrasher 6y ago
I think the proper term here is "Unidentified Flying Object" for a reason. The pilot clearly said it looked like a cruise missile. The notion that "Unidentified = Alien" is rather far fetched. The acronym should be more accurately called "Undisclosed Flying Object".
- imglorp 6y agoAlso the most straightforward explanation. UAVs and ALCM's can be dropped from high altitudes and have hundreds of miles of range and all look very similar, plus who knows what they're developing. The whole Southwest has plenty of military airspace and their toys don't always play nice with commercial air traffic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-launched_cruise_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-launched_cruise_missile
- jandrese 6y agoIt's a huge mystery how an airline pilot could possibly see a cruise missile shaped object right outside of the White Sands Missile Range. Probably aliens.
- themodelplumber 6y agoAre there cruise missiles that operate at those altitudes? Seems like "sitting duck" height for a cruise missile.
- ceejayoz 6y agoAltitude fits the mission. If you're throwing Tomahawks at the Taliban, you'll get longer range from a higher altitude approach, with little risk of being detected let alone shot down. If you're trying to hit Moscow, by all means, try to avoid radar by going 50 feet off the ground.
- mbg721 6y agoEither there's military activity that the military doesn't want to talk about, or extraterrestrials consider green chile a delicacy that is otherwise unobtainable in the universe. Both seem equally plausible.
- lend000 6y agoBecause cruise missiles regularly do close unannounced fly-by's of passenger jets in civilian airspace /s.
- poisonarena 6y agothis is not reddit
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- redis_mlc 6y agoFYI: foreign governments are known to lock onto airliners in flight from naval and land-based weapons systems. Russia is thought to have shot down a few airliners "by accident" that way when they didn't disengage.
- Spooky23 6y agoDepends. In the 80s there were “UFO” sightings in upstate NY which were tomahawk missiles flying between Rome and Griffis AFB for testing purposes. I believe they appeared triangular from some angles due to landing gear.
- abruzzi 6y agothe northeast of the state is actually pretty far from WSMR, and no launches from WSMR leave the range that I'm aware of (or at least haven't for a long time. They did launch a V2 after WWII, and it went the wrong direction and hit the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez.)
- mwerd 6y agoIt was over 300 of miles from the white sands missile range. The plane had just flown over the western edge of Oklahoma, in the far northeast corner of new Mexico. It was closer to the air force academy in Colorado Springs than it was to white sands.
- King-Aaron 6y agoI'm not completely up to speed on modern cruise missiles, but don't they leave a smoke trail/contrail/etc behind them if they have a conventional propulsion system? Or do they burn fairly clean in flight?
- jcims 6y agoAside from launch where they typically have some kind of boost stage, cruise missiles fly at low altitudes with small turbofan engines. Not much of a visual exhaust signature: https://youtu.be/BGoJl8Lr46g https://youtu.be/BGoJl8Lr46g https://youtu.be/WyeMyhKE5Yw https://youtu.be/WyeMyhKE5Yw
- King-Aaron 6y agoAh fair enough. Thats some impressive footage by the way!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mike_d 6y agoThere is absolutely zero chance a cruise missile would be fired without closing the airspace to civilian aircraft. The pilot was at 37,000 feet and said the object was above them. Commercial planes top out at about 42k feet and would have shown up on ADS-B. A U-2 flying at 60k would look like a long cylindrical object about the size of a cruise missile (in the same way a 747 looks small from the ground), and not show up on instrurments. Oh and they regularly fly out of Nevada to swoop down over New Mexico/Texas on their way to Mexico and Central America.
- jonnycomputer 6y ago0 chance implies no one makes mistakes.
- wonder_er 6y ago> There is absolutely zero chance a cruise missile would be fired without closing the airspace to civilian aircraft. Sometimes the military misses a lot of items on the checklist, and accidentally ships a nuclear missile where it didn't intend [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_n... I wouldn't say "absolutely zero chance", but I'd say "it's unlikely this was an expected outcome, and it's possible that someone is in deep trouble right now."
- rattray 6y agoFor others unfamiliar and reticent to google, a "U-2" is: > The Lockheed U-2, nicknamed "Dragon Lady", is an American single-jet engine, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force and previously flown by the Central Intelligence Agency.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- l31g 6y agoU-2s don't fly fast.
- 6y ago
- bumby 6y agoYou think the range officer just let this one get away? They shut down highways during testing, let alone airspace.
- tyrust 6y agoDid you mean to reply to another comment? The article doesn't make any mention of "alien".
- dragontamer 6y agoUFOs in american english are a common colloquial term for aliens from mars (or other sci fi plots)
- kube-system 6y agoThe last two paragraphs of the article is clearly talking about aliens. > Former CIA Director John Brennan thinks there may be life on other planets too. December’s Covid-19 relief bill included a directive to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to share what they know about UFOs within 6 months. People with the highest of security clearances think there’s something out there. > ‘Something’ of course doesn’t necessarily mean extraterrestrial in origin, even though New Mexico is home to Roswell…
- vnxli 6y agoIs that 6 months up yet? I forgot to put that date into my calendar
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThey released their files, it hasn't been six months yet. I haven't looked at them, but the lack of hype makes me assume they're nothing huge. https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-central-intelligence-agency-cia-collection/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-centr...
- ttt0 6y ago> December’s Covid-19 relief bill included a directive to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to share what they know about UFOs within 6 months. Seems like that Covid-19 relief bill was about everything but the Covid-19 relief, lol
- joe_the_user 6y agoThe way that "Unidentified Flying Object" and "Alien Spacecraft" have become synonymous is a remarkable pernicious evolution of language. It's a strange thing - I don't think there's any conspiracy to create a cult, just a certain bias in the use of symbols makes "I couldn't explain what that was" become "intelligent creatures from other worlds created this effect".
- ehsankia 6y agoThis is exactly there's been a shift to using other acronyms, such as UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), which don't have the same baggage.
- sacomo 6y agoUniversal Alien Persons
- thu2111 6y agoIt's because UFO is never used to mean "plane of unknown precise identity or origin country". Other terms are used for those, like "plane with its transponder disabled" or whatever. The problem is, when UFO reports occur they invariably seem to objects that cannot fly by any sort of conventional aircraft physics: a) There are no wings. Ever. b) They are often reported as moving slowly or even hovering, which missiles cannot/would not do. Thus UFO has come to be synonymous not with its literal meaning of a flying object that doesn't light up with proper ID codes on radar, but a flying object that is not merely unidentified but unexplainable. Unexplainable Flying Object would be a more accurate expansion given how it's used. That doesn't automatically imply aliens, but the whole "secret military breakthrough" angle is no more falsifiable than aliens are.
- ryebit 6y agoGoing a bit further, once an object has been confirmed as alien, then it's not really "Unidentified" anymore, now is it? Almost a linguistic catch-22 version of the "ATM Machine" phrase. Not redundant, but guaranteed to be either colloquially misinterpreted, or technically incorrect. It's kinda weird how words can just get coopted by popular use. Take calling someone a "Nimrod" -- before Loony Tunes, that would have been a compliment that meant "mighty hunter". But kids growing up in the 50s and on first heard it in when Bugs Bunny used it as an insult, contextually meaning idiot or bumbler or something -- which due to Loony Tunes' cultural influence is now the dominant meaning, supplanting the original biblical origin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod#Idiom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod#Idiom)
- webmaven 6y ago> Going a bit further, once an object has been confirmed as alien, then it's not really "Unidentified" anymore, now is it? Depends. Let's take the opposite case, where the object has been determined to be of likely terrestrial origin (identifiable letters and numbers on a wing or tail), but otherwise still mysterious. Is it identified or not? How about if it is rumored to be US military, but officially no one will confirm or deny? How about if someone does officially confirm, but no specifics are available (so there is no project/program name, or branch, or model)? Especially considering that official statements may be misinformation, at what point can we say that the FO is no longer U? A similar continuum of identification specificity applies to non-terrestrial origins, all the way up to "Oh yeah, that was BortXd from Omega Draconis, he got drunk again at a tailgate party."
- boomboomsubban 6y ago>Going a bit further, once an object has been confirmed as alien, then it's not really "Unidentified" anymore, now is it? Somehow confirming that it is not from Earth doesn't identify it. There are multiple types of flying objects, like planes and missiles, and could be multiple different aliens groups it could be from.
- zepto 6y agoAlso, how does one identify it as ‘alien’? It could be sent by humans from the future, or by “the first men”.
- rococode 6y agoWe've really gotta adopt a new term for this stuff. It's fine to be pedantic and say "well 'UFO' doesn't actually mean aliens in the first place", but the acronym has clearly been co-opted by pop culture to be closely tied with aliens for decades now. Even a minor change like "UFOB" (which has been used by the USAF officially) would probably make a big difference. People will continue to say UFO to mean aliens, and that's fine, but official press releases can use a different term so that people don't read the headlines and immediately think "wow, aliens!".
- boomboomsubban 6y agoIt's in American Airline's benefit to make this story get as big as possible, it's free advertising. They already know the term will be misunderstood, that is their goal.
- Uehreka 6y agoI feel like this “all press is good press” argument gets deployed a lot as a sort of thought-terminating cliche. I don’t think it’s obvious that AA necessarily benefits from a story that does involve them but could also potentially make some people more afraid of flying.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoIt gets their name on the front page places like here and probably some regular media coverage, it doesn't say anything bad about the company, and your worry that it could cause people not to fly requires them reading and internalizing the entire article. And all that was required of them was using a correct term for the event.
- bawolff 6y agoI think the all press is good press more applies to lesser known companies. At this point everyone knows who american airlines are.
- bostonsre 6y ago