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The U.S. military takes UFOs seriously. Why doesn't Silicon Valley or academia?
- yosito 6y ago"Takes UFOs seriously" is much different than "thinks there are aliens visiting earth". The US military takes UFOs seriously because they're likely to be foreign military threats or natural phenomena that pose a risk to US security. When the media or your neighbor start talking about UFOs, they probably mean "aliens are here", which there simply isn't much evidence for.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoExactly this. Contrary to popular perception, UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, not Tourists From Other Galaxies.
- neaden 6y agoYeah, by definition a UFO represents one of two things. 1. A craft you can't identify. 2. An error with your instruments/pilots visuals. Either one of those are of interest to the military.
- cyanydeez 6y agoand due to all the new tech since the 60s, theres even more chances of seeing shit you cant identify, flying around
- ncmncm 6y agoBy reports, they have not taken them seriously enough to shoot any down. That strikes me as extremely irresponsible. If foreign powers are using drones and balloons to collect data on military exercises, that is a direct threat to readiness, both from the collected data and from the failure to control airspace around military assets.
- allturtles 6y agoThere's a good probability that some of these UFOs are commercial aircraft. Shooting them down would be... not good.
- dogsgobork 6y ago"Shoot first and ask questions later" isn't a great doctrine for diplomacy either.
- ncmncm 6y agoCommercial aircraft swooping around naval vessels on maneuvers should expect to be shot down, and even be disappointed not to be. If you weren't there to be shot down, what were you after? Maybe a story about how unready the Navy is for modern warfare conducted with cheap expendable drones. You don't need to dodge an Exocet missile if you can take out the targeting system that would have directed it.
- allturtles 6y agoI'm not sure what incident you're referring to. e.g. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk, there's no swooping, and no indication that the ship was "on maneuvers." Navy ships and aircraft can't help being near commercial aircraft much of the time, and vice versa, since flight paths crisscross the whole world. But whether they "deserve to be shot down" or not (a highly questionable moral position I think), it would be pragmatically unwise to do so. You will either create a domestic political crisis that will shake up the whole military, or an international incident, depending on the carrier.
- ncmncm 6y agoNobody said "deserve to be shot down", so the quote marks are at best disingenuous. Since I unambiguously referred to an incident reported when naval ships were on maneuvers, you imagine some entirely other time, place, and circumstance. I will leave my response to your speculative moralizing to the reader's imagination.
- playguardin 6y agoIt's pretty clear that this is US tech that the military is teasing as ufo to hype it's advanced nature. I think they have developed some advanced drives etc. "Our weapons are so bitchin everybody thinks they are ufos yo!"
- w0de0 6y agoThat seems nonsensical, unnecessary, impossible to organize in an institution of such a size as the military- industrial complex, and unlikely to create the type of reaction you posit - when revealed, I imagine the reception a bad, inexplicable joke has when told by a cranky uncle. In short, no, that’s not “pretty clear” - in my opinion!
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- almost_usual 6y agoShareholders don’t care about UFOs.
- sharemywin 6y agobesides even if we got the technology all we do is make real hoverboards that you have to rent by the hour.
- sschueller 6y agoI believe the only reason they take it "seriously" is because they try to get more funding for things such as the space force. With all the HD smart phones in the world why are all UFO sightings filmed through potatoes?
- sharemywin 6y agoThe one they released in the article were actual radar from military pilots.
- sschueller 6y agoI don't see how radar can be considered 100% accurate. For all we know there could be a simple software bug in the system causing such anomalies. We do all kinds of signal processing to get radar to work. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate
- weare138 6y agoLook up the USS Nimitz incident. It was tracked on the ships radar and visually confirmed by multiple fighter pilots deployed to investigate.
- mrtweetyhack 6y agojust count the brain cells
- gwmnxnp_516a 6y agoIt is pretty unlikely that the earth has ever been visited by UFOS due to the physics laws such as light speed and the size of universe, the closest starts where is likely that there is life, are thousands of years away. For instance, the closest galaxy, Canis Major Dwarf, is 25 thousands light-years away from the earth. So, a trip from a galaxy like that to the earth would take thousands and thousands of years. Even the light coming from this galaxy is the image of 25 thousand years ago. That might be the reason the academia is skeptical about UFOs. Another physical limit is that nothing can achieve the speed of light and even at the light speed a trip to the galaxy would take 25k years.
- sharemywin 6y agoFrom the article: The most famous example (the one Musk was asked about) occurred when Navy pilots reported a craft resembling a Tic Tac that was moving unlike anything seen in the U.S. arsenal: They said it “wasn’t behaving by the normal laws of physics.” The craft’s movements were, however, typical of both military and civilian UFO reports: Descending from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in an instant; stopping in midair and reversing direction without inertial effects; exceeding the speed of sound without generating a sonic boom; and submerging into the ocean
- sharemywin 6y agoNot trying to say it couldn't have been some kind of radar mirages or some other explainable phenomenon. But why release it if it had an easy explanation.
- klyrs 6y agohttps://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/that-navy-ufo-footage-has-an-optical-explanation/ https://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/that-navy-ufo-footage-has-a...
- gwmnxnp_516a 6y agoWell, there has been cases where ball lighting phenomena, was misidentified as UFO. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning). What I wanted to say is that based on current known physical laws, it would take an imaginable time for anything from other galaxy to arrive to earth. Unless someone proves that the physical laws are wrong or any life from other galaxy is capable of living more than thousands of years.
- remarkEon 6y agoDiscussion of “are these aliens?” aside for a moment, I kinda feel like tech (I’m assuming „Silicon Valley“ is just a stand-in term there) does take them seriously? Whenever these articles come up on this website there’s a good amount of discussion that goes in a number of interesting directions, be it determining what they actually are or theorizing about the likelihood they’re of exotic origin (terrestrially developed technology or otherwise) and assigning probabilities to those explanations. The article seems to come from a false premise, that unless scientists entertain non-terrestrial explanations they’re not “taking it seriously”. Okay, but who says that this should be the standard? NBC? There’s plenty of scientists within the broader Defense space, who, I think we can assume, take this very seriously. It’s just a different definition of “serious”.
- wildermuthn 6y agoLet’s assume for the moment that these are not erroneous sensors or secret domestic/foreign tech. Two facts to build upon: 1) We have seen them on Earth 2) We have seen them nowhere else. This means that although they have sufficiently advanced technology and desire to hide from us across the entire universe, they do not have sufficiently advanced technology and/or desire to hide from us on Earth. So there’s the contradiction: either they want to hide from us but can’t, or they don’t want to hide from us but have. In either case, the contradiction suggests these hypothetical not-erroneous-and-not-secret-tech sightings are also not extraterrestrial. If not aliens, then what? I see two options that fulfill the condition of either not desiring to hide from us, or not being able to, while avoiding the question of why we see no evidence for intelligent life in the rest of the universe. Both rely on locality being fixed to Earth: - human time travelers - simulation experimenters In the first case, if time-travel is possible, then the only sightings of time-travelers would be those that do not cause grandfather paradoxes — i.e., they would only travel to the past with such a low-profile that they wouldn’t endanger their own future visits to us. Moreover, if time-travel is possible, it is plausible that future humans would be technologically advanced enough to develop time-travel without being sufficiently advanced to hide from us completely. As unlikely as this seems, it is still more likely than aliens having the power to hide from us everywhere except on earth. The second possibility is even more fascinating. Why would simulators of our universe need to virtually plug-in and take a joy ride? They wouldn’t, of course. But if they went through the trouble of simulating us, it isn’t hard to imagine them fiddling with their experiment to whatever end it is they have. Laws of physics wouldn’t apply to their fiddling. In this wild scenario, the experiment wouldn’t be generic, but specific: manipulating the simulation so that a lot of people end up talking and thinking about aliens visiting Earth. Beyond those basic conclusions, we’d have to peer into the motivations and goals of the gods, which seems as fruitful as it seemed thousands of years ago. When the only plausible non-explainable explanations resort to time-travel and gods, you know the initial hypothesis is incorrect. Beyond erroneous sensors, the real reason for these sightings is our existential angst as it becomes more and more obvious we are alone in this universe. We want to believe.
- LinuxBender 6y agoTime travel is problematic for a few reasons, but the big one that comes to mind is that earth, our solar system and our galaxy are moving at a high rate of speed through the universe. Traveling through time also requires knowing the location where the earth will be at the time you want to travel to. Every few seconds, your destination just got a lot further away. I am curious how people hypothetically solve that one.
- StanislavPetrov 6y agoMany people fear the unknown. This is especially true for something that essentially shatters their paradigm of reality. Its psychologically easier to simply ignore anomalies or try to rationalize them away (its just ball lighting!) than to sincerely consider the possibilities.