8 ms·

So there are really two options here. Either the instruments used to detect #1 and #2 are reporting inaccurate data, OR technology far beyond what the public kn

So there are really two options here. Either the instruments used to detect #1 and #2 are reporting inaccurate data, OR technology far beyond what the public knows about exists and has only been seen under circumstances where no one had a high resolution camera to get a detailed picture. #2 seems unlikely because the availably of high resolution cameras has gone up a ton in the past 10 years ( cell phones / satelites ), but a clear picture of a UFO has not shown up.

anamexis 5y ago
Or the US military is fabricating this.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Not saying they aren't, but what possible reason could they have for doing so?
  - srswtf123 5y ago
    Additional funding to fight this “new threat”?
    - krapp 5y ago
      Assuming the American military industrial complex doesn't already have a blank check and actually needs to justify spending anything to anyone, why would they concoct a threat as implausible as "aliens" when something more mundane, like "foreign drones" would be more likely to work?
- meowface 5y ago
  Yes, this can't be dismissed. (It's also plausible the military could be intentionally deceiving some of its own personnel, for some purpose. So a military pilot recounting a story may not necessarily be lying.) Obviously such a claim would need evidence and a plausible motive and shouldn't be suspected without evidence; but, also obviously, it's one of many hypotheses that would have a much higher probability of being true than extraterrestrially-originated visitation.
- frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  I find it far more likely that the different interpretations of UFO lead to divergent and self-reenforcing stories. What I mean by that is that UFO means unidentified flying object, which all flying objects, or even just those for which there is only a single report are classified as exactly that unidentified … opposed to identified … flying … objects. On the flip side, the public that has both a less formal and generally lower understanding of this and other things, also led on by various forms of popular culture, have a wholly fantastical minds image when they hear "UFO".
- GVIrish 5y ago
  Seems unlikely that they're participating in a large scale fabrication like this but it's possible. I think it's more likely that there is some black project that uses novel propulsion systems and they're covertly testing it against our own military to evaluate how effective it could be. Or it could be another nation that made a break through in propulsion. And of course, the extraterrestrial possibility. One thing that will be interesting is to see if any other nations have had encounters like this and can supply video and sensor data evidence.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Seems unlikely that they're participating in a large scale fabrication like this but it's possible There is no major military that hasn't participated in large scale fabrications as a concealment technique for their own operations or technological developments. The US military certainly has on multiple occasions.
oblio 5y ago
That's the main thing I found funny. Back in the day of only a handful of newspapers and of 1 camera per 1 million people (at least on the average day, the average person wouldn't lug their camera around with them), we had sightings of Yeti, Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, etc. Now we have the internet, an unstoppable torrent of crappy news and the mother of all tabloids, everyone has a high resolution camera in their pockets at all times, and cryptoids are all but gone. I would have expected 16k HDR resolution photos of Yeti by now. I feel betrayed! :-p
- jandrese 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons.
  - joshuahedlund 5y ago
    > To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons. Thus why it's the only remaining gap in the "ufo of the gaps" theory!
  - jameshart 5y ago
    Pilots and crew on aircraft certainly carry cameras - part of standard procedure on intercepting an aircraft includes photography for intelligence collection purposes.
  - notyourday 5y ago
    > To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons. I recall reading a few weeks ago that not only the sailors have consumer grade equipment but that there are procedures in cases like this for sailors to use that equipment so there is more footage to analyze later
  - natch 5y ago
    And the warship itself in 2020 doesn't have any onboard cameras… ? We are asked to believe the military is intelligent, but if that's the case then I have my doubts.
vbezhenar 5y ago
There are plenty of clear pictures of UFOs circulating in the Internet, but you won't believe it. Also if there are aliens monitoring humans, obviously they'll adjust their operations as our devices change.
- tom_mellior 5y ago
  Statements of the form "there is X on the Internet" are typically more convincing when accompanied by links.
- gabereiser 5y ago
  >Also if there are aliens monitoring humans, obviously they'll adjust their operations as our devices change. I doubt highly intelligent beings from another world would give a damn what our devices were capable of.
  - BTCOG 5y ago
    Furthermore, how would they have a clue what our devices are, or are capable of if they are not already here at the ground level?
tmn 5y ago
The most reasonable explanation is psyop. This follows Occam’s razor
notriskfree 5y ago
I always think that as well. Except, there is a large air show that takes place up the road from me; and I get a ticket some years. The aircraft are literally displaying themselves. Getting a decent picture of them whizzing past is far from easy.
BTCOG 5y ago
While I do agree with you and find it odd that no high quality photos ever surface and things are typically just hearsay, I also understand that even these newer iPhones and Android cameras take pretty crappy night photos and especially if you were trying to snap a picture quickly of a moving object in very low lighting.
pavelrub 5y ago
The “instruments” are direct visual sighting by several pilots. It’s unclear how you’ve reached the conclusion that #2 is unlikely without knowing how widespread the use of this technology is, and in what circumstances/locations it’s being used. Classified military technology exists and is being tested all the time, without any high-res pictures leaking.
- bob33212 5y ago
  If the average persons ability to capture a photo of bigfoot or a ghost or a UFO goes up 100x I would expect the number of photos during these sightings to go up some amount. Why would bigfoot go extinct at the exact time that everyone has cameras? I guess another theory is that aliens are pranking these people. "Hey Blart, lets go to Earth and let one guy without a camera see part of our spaceship from a distance. Everyone will think he is crazy. HAHAHA"
runarberg 5y ago
There is also the possibility that there was some rotor downwash but conditions were such that it was hard to see for the witnesses. Or even that it was clearly visible but none of the sailors paid attention to it. Then somebody mentioned not seeing it and a group mentality kicked in where everyone now agreed clearly not seeing it.
bgentry 5y ago
Have you tried taking a cell phone photo of a moving object far in the distance and with less than ideal lighting? You won’t get a good result if you can even capture it. Photographing something like this would probably require a DSLR type camera with a great zoom/telephoto lens. I would expect they have that equipment on military ships, but I don’t think the ubiquity of cell phone cameras has significantly changed the ability to photograph this kind of phenomenon.
dspillett 5y ago
> but a clear picture of a UFO has not shown up. Obviously the aliens have some anti surveillance tech that renders our cameras less useful!
crispyambulance 5y ago
I don't get what the motivation is for these news stories and the upcoming "report" that everyone is talking about. So far, all we got is grainy video and verbal accounts from military pilots using jargon-laden language that sounds authoritative released to the general public. The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts". Occam's Razor is intended to apply in EXACTLY situations like this. The good news is that if these phenomena are as common as people say, it should be possible to devise procedures, measurements, and analysis to start to rule out what these are not.
- krapp 5y ago
  The motivation is that this is a viral story, so it's guaranteed to get views. Bear in mind, every new story doesn't indicate a new sighting - these stories are mostly retreads of the same few incidents and a vague pins-and-twine narrative connecting other stories like the Pais patents to get some extra mileage out of it.
  - crispyambulance 5y ago
    Yeah, there's been a lot of re-hashing and people are conflating the several different videos together along with the verbal descriptions by pilots and piecing together entirely made-up narratives. In particular, the Alizondo character keeps popping up as some kind of head of a government research project. He's been trotting this stuff around for years, but according to a 2019 story in The Intercept, the dude's employment story doesn't check out: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history-channel-luis-elizondo-pentagon/ https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history... I suppose the news outlets are hungry for clicks now that Stable Genius isn't around to send them a zinger everyday.
- stevenhuang 5y ago
  Occam's razor breaks down precisely in the long tail. > The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts". There's a lot to unpack here. Yes, they are intended to handle known things. Drones, weather balloons, cloud formations, jet plumes. These are all known, and our observations do not match them. Impartial nor critical? I would suggest you watch the interviews with the pilots from the USS Nimitz incident. It's mentioned a major reason we don't hear a lot of these accounts is because of the stigma of reporting UFOs, which is why his copilots have been silent on the matter until now. Lastly they are real objects. Multiple eye witness accounts with multiple radar signatures, from carriers and jets.
topkai22 5y ago
So I saw a UFO a few years back (2017)- it was a circular object that stayed largely stationary. My in laws saw it to, so I wasn’t imagining it. Obviously I took a picture, but it was so small and far away that the photo is just a white dot in the distance. Now I figure it was just a rogue cloud, weather balloon or weird atmospheric effect, but there are still phenomena that are hard to capture on camera.
bitbuilder 5y ago
While I don't disagree with your point, whenever this point comes up I do feel the need to point out that getting a clear, high resolution photo of a (relatively) small moving object in the sky is actually a really hard problem for photography, especially at night. If you've ever tried taking a photo of a particularly pretty moon with your phone, you'll know what I'm talking about. The striking orange harvest moon that seems to dominate the night sky suddenly becomes a little smear of light when you look at the photo on your phone. Most phones or other cameras that people casually carry around have a relatively wide angle lens and accompanying FOV. That means anything at a distance will end up looking even further in the distance (ie, smaller) once you take the shot. So to get a nice, clear picture of a distant object in the sky you're going to need a telephoto lens. That's fine, and there are plenty of people out there casually carrying around a telephoto. Except now you have a new problem: you need to track the moving object through your telephoto. Not impossible, of course, but not easy for typical person who happens to see a strange object in the sky while they have their camera with them. Also, if the object is moving, you'll need a fast shutter speed. And if you increase your shutter speed you're going to have to increase your ISO as well. If you're seeing this strange object at night, that means you're likely pushing your ISO into a range where your photo starts to get pretty grainy. All of these aren't insurmountable problems, people that shoot flying birds and planes do it all the time. But it takes a combination of equipment and photography skills that aren't exactly common. So now we're looking at a venn diagram of "people who see something strange in the sky" and "people who have the equipment and skills to get a good photo" to calculate our odds of having a really great photo of a UFO by now. All that said, the point is still valid ("why don't we have more photos now?"). But at the same time, it's not as easy of a problem as many seem to think.
- behnamoh 5y ago
  Thanks for mentioning these points. Another explanation could be that _if_ these UFO's are in fact extraterrestrials with a technology advanced enough to travel to our planet, then it's plausible to assume that they also adapt their techniques based on our technological capabilities. In other words, if they are real and they know we have more advanced cameras compared to 100 years ago, chances are they are not going to reveal themselves to us as much as before, or they do that in situations where environment noise does not provide a high-res picture of them (like in the sea).
natch 5y ago
Or #3 a hunk of ice was falling from outer space and Dave, a self described class clown who happens to be best buddies with one of the people who works on the FLIR system and who went to his wedding, has polished up some of the details to better match what he thinks.

anamexis 5y ago

Or the US military is fabricating this.

gambiting 5y ago
Not saying they aren't, but what possible reason could they have for doing so?
- srswtf123 5y ago
  Additional funding to fight this “new threat”?
  - krapp 5y ago
    Assuming the American military industrial complex doesn't already have a blank check and actually needs to justify spending anything to anyone, why would they concoct a threat as implausible as "aliens" when something more mundane, like "foreign drones" would be more likely to work?
meowface 5y ago
Yes, this can't be dismissed. (It's also plausible the military could be intentionally deceiving some of its own personnel, for some purpose. So a military pilot recounting a story may not necessarily be lying.) Obviously such a claim would need evidence and a plausible motive and shouldn't be suspected without evidence; but, also obviously, it's one of many hypotheses that would have a much higher probability of being true than extraterrestrially-originated visitation.
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I find it far more likely that the different interpretations of UFO lead to divergent and self-reenforcing stories. What I mean by that is that UFO means unidentified flying object, which all flying objects, or even just those for which there is only a single report are classified as exactly that unidentified … opposed to identified … flying … objects. On the flip side, the public that has both a less formal and generally lower understanding of this and other things, also led on by various forms of popular culture, have a wholly fantastical minds image when they hear "UFO".
GVIrish 5y ago
Seems unlikely that they're participating in a large scale fabrication like this but it's possible. I think it's more likely that there is some black project that uses novel propulsion systems and they're covertly testing it against our own military to evaluate how effective it could be. Or it could be another nation that made a break through in propulsion. And of course, the extraterrestrial possibility. One thing that will be interesting is to see if any other nations have had encounters like this and can supply video and sensor data evidence.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Seems unlikely that they're participating in a large scale fabrication like this but it's possible There is no major military that hasn't participated in large scale fabrications as a concealment technique for their own operations or technological developments. The US military certainly has on multiple occasions.

oblio 5y ago

That's the main thing I found funny. Back in the day of only a handful of newspapers and of 1 camera per 1 million people (at least on the average day, the average person wouldn't lug their camera around with them), we had sightings of Yeti, Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, etc. Now we have the internet, an unstoppable torrent of crappy news and the mother of all tabloids, everyone has a high resolution camera in their pockets at all times, and cryptoids are all but gone. I would have expected 16k HDR resolution photos of Yeti by now. I feel betrayed! :-p

jandrese 5y ago
https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons.
- joshuahedlund 5y ago
  > To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons. Thus why it's the only remaining gap in the "ufo of the gaps" theory!
- jameshart 5y ago
  Pilots and crew on aircraft certainly carry cameras - part of standard procedure on intercepting an aircraft includes photography for intelligence collection purposes.
- notyourday 5y ago
  > To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons. I recall reading a few weeks ago that not only the sailors have consumer grade equipment but that there are procedures in cases like this for sailors to use that equipment so there is more footage to analyze later
- natch 5y ago
  And the warship itself in 2020 doesn't have any onboard cameras… ? We are asked to believe the military is intelligent, but if that's the case then I have my doubts.

vbezhenar 5y ago

There are plenty of clear pictures of UFOs circulating in the Internet, but you won't believe it. Also if there are aliens monitoring humans, obviously they'll adjust their operations as our devices change.

tom_mellior 5y ago
Statements of the form "there is X on the Internet" are typically more convincing when accompanied by links.
gabereiser 5y ago
>Also if there are aliens monitoring humans, obviously they'll adjust their operations as our devices change. I doubt highly intelligent beings from another world would give a damn what our devices were capable of.
- BTCOG 5y ago
  Furthermore, how would they have a clue what our devices are, or are capable of if they are not already here at the ground level?

tmn 5y ago

The most reasonable explanation is psyop. This follows Occam’s razor

notriskfree 5y ago

I always think that as well. Except, there is a large air show that takes place up the road from me; and I get a ticket some years. The aircraft are literally displaying themselves. Getting a decent picture of them whizzing past is far from easy.

BTCOG 5y ago

While I do agree with you and find it odd that no high quality photos ever surface and things are typically just hearsay, I also understand that even these newer iPhones and Android cameras take pretty crappy night photos and especially if you were trying to snap a picture quickly of a moving object in very low lighting.

pavelrub 5y ago

The “instruments” are direct visual sighting by several pilots. It’s unclear how you’ve reached the conclusion that #2 is unlikely without knowing how widespread the use of this technology is, and in what circumstances/locations it’s being used. Classified military technology exists and is being tested all the time, without any high-res pictures leaking.

bob33212 5y ago
If the average persons ability to capture a photo of bigfoot or a ghost or a UFO goes up 100x I would expect the number of photos during these sightings to go up some amount. Why would bigfoot go extinct at the exact time that everyone has cameras? I guess another theory is that aliens are pranking these people. "Hey Blart, lets go to Earth and let one guy without a camera see part of our spaceship from a distance. Everyone will think he is crazy. HAHAHA"

runarberg 5y ago

There is also the possibility that there was some rotor downwash but conditions were such that it was hard to see for the witnesses. Or even that it was clearly visible but none of the sailors paid attention to it. Then somebody mentioned not seeing it and a group mentality kicked in where everyone now agreed clearly not seeing it.

bgentry 5y ago

Have you tried taking a cell phone photo of a moving object far in the distance and with less than ideal lighting? You won’t get a good result if you can even capture it. Photographing something like this would probably require a DSLR type camera with a great zoom/telephoto lens. I would expect they have that equipment on military ships, but I don’t think the ubiquity of cell phone cameras has significantly changed the ability to photograph this kind of phenomenon.

dspillett 5y ago

> but a clear picture of a UFO has not shown up. Obviously the aliens have some anti surveillance tech that renders our cameras less useful!

crispyambulance 5y ago

I don't get what the motivation is for these news stories and the upcoming "report" that everyone is talking about. So far, all we got is grainy video and verbal accounts from military pilots using jargon-laden language that sounds authoritative released to the general public. The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts". Occam's Razor is intended to apply in EXACTLY situations like this. The good news is that if these phenomena are as common as people say, it should be possible to devise procedures, measurements, and analysis to start to rule out what these are not.

krapp 5y ago
The motivation is that this is a viral story, so it's guaranteed to get views. Bear in mind, every new story doesn't indicate a new sighting - these stories are mostly retreads of the same few incidents and a vague pins-and-twine narrative connecting other stories like the Pais patents to get some extra mileage out of it.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  Yeah, there's been a lot of re-hashing and people are conflating the several different videos together along with the verbal descriptions by pilots and piecing together entirely made-up narratives. In particular, the Alizondo character keeps popping up as some kind of head of a government research project. He's been trotting this stuff around for years, but according to a 2019 story in The Intercept, the dude's employment story doesn't check out: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history-channel-luis-elizondo-pentagon/ https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history... I suppose the news outlets are hungry for clicks now that Stable Genius isn't around to send them a zinger everyday.
stevenhuang 5y ago
Occam's razor breaks down precisely in the long tail. > The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts". There's a lot to unpack here. Yes, they are intended to handle known things. Drones, weather balloons, cloud formations, jet plumes. These are all known, and our observations do not match them. Impartial nor critical? I would suggest you watch the interviews with the pilots from the USS Nimitz incident. It's mentioned a major reason we don't hear a lot of these accounts is because of the stigma of reporting UFOs, which is why his copilots have been silent on the matter until now. Lastly they are real objects. Multiple eye witness accounts with multiple radar signatures, from carriers and jets.

topkai22 5y ago

So I saw a UFO a few years back (2017)- it was a circular object that stayed largely stationary. My in laws saw it to, so I wasn’t imagining it. Obviously I took a picture, but it was so small and far away that the photo is just a white dot in the distance. Now I figure it was just a rogue cloud, weather balloon or weird atmospheric effect, but there are still phenomena that are hard to capture on camera.

bitbuilder 5y ago

While I don't disagree with your point, whenever this point comes up I do feel the need to point out that getting a clear, high resolution photo of a (relatively) small moving object in the sky is actually a really hard problem for photography, especially at night. If you've ever tried taking a photo of a particularly pretty moon with your phone, you'll know what I'm talking about. The striking orange harvest moon that seems to dominate the night sky suddenly becomes a little smear of light when you look at the photo on your phone. Most phones or other cameras that people casually carry around have a relatively wide angle lens and accompanying FOV. That means anything at a distance will end up looking even further in the distance (ie, smaller) once you take the shot. So to get a nice, clear picture of a distant object in the sky you're going to need a telephoto lens. That's fine, and there are plenty of people out there casually carrying around a telephoto. Except now you have a new problem: you need to track the moving object through your telephoto. Not impossible, of course, but not easy for typical person who happens to see a strange object in the sky while they have their camera with them. Also, if the object is moving, you'll need a fast shutter speed. And if you increase your shutter speed you're going to have to increase your ISO as well. If you're seeing this strange object at night, that means you're likely pushing your ISO into a range where your photo starts to get pretty grainy. All of these aren't insurmountable problems, people that shoot flying birds and planes do it all the time. But it takes a combination of equipment and photography skills that aren't exactly common. So now we're looking at a venn diagram of "people who see something strange in the sky" and "people who have the equipment and skills to get a good photo" to calculate our odds of having a really great photo of a UFO by now. All that said, the point is still valid ("why don't we have more photos now?"). But at the same time, it's not as easy of a problem as many seem to think.

behnamoh 5y ago
Thanks for mentioning these points. Another explanation could be that _if_ these UFO's are in fact extraterrestrials with a technology advanced enough to travel to our planet, then it's plausible to assume that they also adapt their techniques based on our technological capabilities. In other words, if they are real and they know we have more advanced cameras compared to 100 years ago, chances are they are not going to reveal themselves to us as much as before, or they do that in situations where environment noise does not provide a high-res picture of them (like in the sea).

natch 5y ago

Or #3 a hunk of ice was falling from outer space and Dave, a self described class clown who happens to be best buddies with one of the people who works on the FLIR system and who went to his wedding, has polished up some of the details to better match what he thinks.