14 ms·

No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

95 points by aluket 5y ago

starkd 5y ago
So, basically they are saying they don't know what the hell they are.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  or they do and they don't want to say.
  - wombat-man 5y ago
    yeah I think it's more likely that it's some kind of experimental propulsion test that is sometimes being noticed. Like they wandered into a room above their clearance level or something. Someone on earth made these.
    - madspindel 5y ago
      Sometimes? Over 120 times according to the report.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
        That's just the numerator. We'll likely never know the denominator, so if this was a real thing, let alone a new classified technology, we can't say how successful it is.
    - morpheos137 5y ago
      Can you provide an example of a past technology that was unimagined by mainstream physicists and that was sucessfully implemented in secret and kept secret for decades? I can't think of anything. Fission bombs were widely believed to be physically possible, were developed in secret but used publicly within several years. I do not beleive the military has some secret antigravity, inertia modifying technology or warp drive of whatever. These things always start with basic physics. There is no known basic physics to support such things. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that the military simply developed them from theory to implementation in secret.
      - jamesdmiller 5y ago
        The ability to break the Enigma code might qualify. German scientists, I think, considered it unbreakable.
      - wombat-man 5y ago
        it could be some kind of new tech, or maybe an illusion. I really don't know enough about military history to answer the question but if a research lab had some kind of groundbreaking tech like this it would make sense to me for them to try to keep it under wraps. It does seem unlikely that they'd be able to keep the secret this well though. I'll give you that.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  “Unidentified”, if you will.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  Different teams within government often don't know what each other are doing. If there's a relative difference in both security clearance AND organization goals, there are very likely to be projects that will never be connected to phenomena. eg Drone Mesh network testing over naval ships or Stealth-Treaty-breaking experimental craft that are being developed nonetheless.
- swader999 5y ago
  That's the idea with 'Unidentified Flying Object'. But I guess we didn't need this report to tell us this.
- weego 5y ago
  Yes hence the unidentified. Someone on reddit a while back asked how come UFO pics and video are always so shaky and blurry. The answer of course is that if it was high res and steady cam we'd quickly be able to identify what it was so it stops being a UFO. It's kinda like asking how come all the cars in the scrap yard have been in accidents.
babelfish 5y ago
Is this really a surprise to anybody? UFO means "unidentified flying object", not "alien".
- phpnode 5y ago
  I've heard a lot of credulous people describing these reports as proof of aliens. To me the idea that aliens exist is unsurprising, but aliens being here would imply FTL is possible, and that would be a huge discovery!
  - komaromy 5y ago
    > aliens being here would imply FTL is possible Why? There are plenty of stars within a sub-light-speed radius since events that could've announced us to the galaxy: advent of radio, first nuclear tests, etc.
    - lazide 5y ago
      The sheer timescales and energy levels involved with all known methods of transportation is what makes it unlikely - at least for life on the timescales we live on. The odds someone is interested enough to spend truly mind boggling amounts of energy (literally moving hundreds of mountains worth) and hundred of years to check us out after one of those events - and not even say hi - is low. That they are also so close - also low. If they have some sort of magic drive tech (implied by the behavior of these drive sightings), then that changes the math a lot. Most people mean ‘magic drive tech’ when they say FTL.
      - userulluipeste 5y ago
        "The odds someone is interested enough to spend truly mind boggling amounts of energy (literally moving hundreds of mountains worth) and hundred of years to check us out after one of those events - and not even say hi - is low. That they are also so close - also low." How could one even begin to make that kind of reasoning? Then the conclusion estimating the low probability is based on what? If I'd have to guess, I'd say otherwise - once a reasonably developed civilization (Kardashev type II and above) gets access to colossal amount of energy, there aren't that many things worth spending it (and attention in general) for. Life may or may not be plentiful around in the universe (it occured relatively shortly after Earth formation), but I'd bet sentient life is orders of magnitude more scarce, considering that it took billions for it to develop on Earth. That alone would make potential cradles for sentient life to be very interesting destinations to check once in a while. To provide here a relatable example, let's imagine a mostly desert continent, with a community living somewhere on its coast. At one point they develop enough capabilities to safely venture out in the desert and to make long journeys. How interested would they be in revisiting some oasis where they encountered some earthworms and small plants, and how interested would they be in revisiting a place (even across the continent, if that is what takes) with apes which happened to also exhibit some signs of primitive engineering? P.S.: With all that, I still hope we're alone within a large enough vicinity, so we won't have to deal with anyone else for as long as our species exists.
yasp 5y ago
Why does it feel like this report has been teased for weeks, almost akin to the release of a new blockbuster movie or similar cultural product?
- ngoldbaum 5y ago
  Because the UFO fanatics have been hyping it as it might have lent them some legitimacy.
- brundolf 5y ago
  It's really bizarre coming from such a (historically) no-nonsense organization Maybe this is just so unavoidable as a marketing/PR strategy these days that even the military feels compelled to participate?
- sliq 5y ago
  Because it is an outstanding topic, coming from the highest government places. That is indeed interesting. No reason to bring your negative vibes in here.
- hbosch 5y ago
  UFOs make for sexy, apolitical news. Perfect for hitting a broad audience, and the more sensational you are the longer you can keep them tuning in.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Someone who is hoping to get a government contract to track UFOs is probably paying a lot of money for publicity.
webwielder2 5y ago
Well, duh.
Udik 5y ago
Did anyone seriously expect the report to say that those things are "aliens"? The fact that it says that (at least some) encounters did actually occur and that they cannot be explained is already some news.
king_magic 5y ago
The NY Times Headline is much more informative and interesting: > U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either Sub header: > A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government I haven't been following this closely. Why?
  - octopoc 5y ago
    The US government was always pretty tight-lipped about UFOs until recently. FTA: > In an unprecedented move, the US government is preparing to issue an unclassified report detailing what it knows about a series mysterious encounters with unidentified flying objects.
- swader999 5y ago
  "Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government." Feels like we are being primed for something new to be afraid of and give our treasure to in defense of. Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I hope the script doesn't go that way.
  - tzs 5y ago
    My guess as to the reason for the shift. 1. Up until sometime in the last decade or so, the UFO sightings that were not successfully explained as natural phenomenon or optical effects that made something ordinary like an airliner appear as something else were all accidental sightings of government projects. 2. Then sightings started that the government recognized as the same technology, except not from the government. Whatever it is the government was experimenting with that occasionally led to an accidental sighting is now being experimented with by someone else, and the government does not know who that is. When it was just the government projects getting accidentally sighted, they wanted to discourage reports and discussion to try maintain secrecy. Now that someone else is doing similar work, they want to know who and how they got the technology. They need people to report and discuss sightings so they can try to get past the secrecy of whoever is doing these new experiments.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
Nazis. From the moon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  Hey DanG - Looks like people think moon Nazis are more absurd than space aliens traveling across the universe to harass the US military. How about if the unknown advanced aircraft turn out to be Nazis, I get +3 karma for each downvote and I get to pick the site topcolor for a day? Time traveling Nazis (from past or future) and aliens that self-identify as Nazis would count.
osipov 5y ago
If you enjoyed the report about the UFOs, you may also enjoy reading about project NEMESIS: Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secretive-nemesis-electronic-warfare-capability-will-change-naval-combat-forever https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secret... In a nutshell: "for years, the Navy has been developing and integrating multiple types of unmanned vehicles, shipboard and submarine systems, countermeasures and electronic warfare payloads, and communication technologies to give it the ability to project what is, in essence, phantom fleets of aircraft, ships, and submarines. "
booleandilemma 5y ago
Have they ruled out software bugs, and literal bugs crawling on the camera lens? If so, what the heck are they seeing out there? Have other country’s militaries reported seeing anything?
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It's the weirdest thing I have ever seen. (I would like to know the placement of the camera on the jet. Is it exposed to the elements, or protected inside the skin of the craft?)
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  This has occurred already in a different area of paranormal activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)
radicaldreamer 5y ago
They seem associated with the ocean as well, many reports of the craft originating or disappearing into the ocean ("transmedium" vehicles). Is it possible that there's some form of life that originates in the ocean, has evolved intelligence that is in a totally different paradigm than us, and this is their equivalent of going to "space"? It makes sense in the macro-sense as well as we're very lucky to not be a water world in the habitable zone. Life evolved in the oceans far earlier than on land and we know very little about the ocean due to it's large size.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  It's camera artefacts, dude.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > It's camera artefacts, dude Does the U.S. report take a view on this? I'm not particularly swung by the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But I am curious if this is a classified project, domestic or foreign, or just a series of similar artefacts.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      It doesn't need to. It's easy enough to view the videos and confirm that this is, in fact, what they are.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > It doesn't need to. It's easy enough to view the videos and confirm So the U.S. government is going through the trouble of declassification to reveal the limits of its sensors to adversaries? From what we can tell, the reports categorise them as UFOs. That implies a non-artefact theory.
        Apocryphon 5y ago
nynx 5y ago
Well, assuming this isn't a psyop, this is incredibly exciting. These things are doing maneuvers that simply aren't possible with the technology we have currently. This means that the scifi future of our dreams is nearly upon us.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  These things aren't "things". They are mostly camera artefacts. They're not doing anything.
  - nynx 5y ago
    I would include that in the psyop contingency. It seems pretty stupid to go through all this ado just for camera artifacts.
  - inciampati 5y ago
    A number of the recent reports include visual contact with the UFOs. Camera artefacts would not explain such observations from sober-minded and sharp-eyed fighter pilots.
samstave 5y ago
Breakaway civ.
Animats 5y ago
I wonder if we get good data in the report. The flybys of U.S. Navy ships had to have produced lots of sensor data. In particular, synchronized radar data, or electro-optical data if we're really lucky, from several ships in a task group would resolve many ambiguities. Most positional illusions break down when seen from multiple viewpoints. Some of this stuff suggests someone fooling around with drones. But whose drones?
- ChrisGranger 5y ago
  Everyone seems to point to nation states, but there are literally thousands of billionaires in the world. Maybe an individual with really deep pockets is having a laugh.
  - Animats 5y ago
    Probably not even that expensive. Skymagic [1], the drone show company, could create many of the effects seen. [1] https://vimeo.com/skymagicshow https://vimeo.com/skymagicshow
  - vecter 5y ago
    Assuming the flight characteristics of the tic tac are as they've actually been reported by visuals (which is a big assumption), there is no way a random billionaire built these. Literally zero.
gfodor 5y ago
They exist. They are real. They aren't ours. They aren't an adversary's, because a) the military would never admit it if that were possible and b) if it were the case the adversary would have already taken over the world. There's no evidence they were made by aliens, leprechauns, or ghosts. But there's evidence they were made. Not that they are swamp gas or funny clouds. So lets get past that, and realize there's something seriously insane going on, and it implies there is, or was, a capacity for non-natural creation + engineering by non-humans. My 2c is extra-terrestrial civ is less likely than co-terrestrial civ (subterrainean/ocean) - but lets stop talking about this like they are hallucinations or possible atmospheric phenomenon.
- md_ 5y ago
  > My 2c is extra-terrestrial civ is less likely than co-terrestrial civ (subterrainean/ocean) - but lets stop talking about this like they are hallucinations or possible atmospheric phenomenon. Why? This whole thing reminds me a bit of the "Havana Syndrome", in that: - It's an extraordinary claim, presented with limited evidence. - It defies obvious logical explanation (i.e., a motive). - The phenomenon lacks a clear definition, leaving the door open for multiple disparate phenomena with different causes to be lumped together. I believe the third aspect is really underemphasized as a causal factor in "hard to explain" phenomena: because this may in fact be multiple different phenomena, with different causes, it's likely that any single mundane explanation does not explain all observations, and thus appears to be a weaker explanation than it is. This is sort of a "defender's dilemma" of strange phenomena: if you can't explain all of them, you appear to be unable to explain them. But because of the aforementioned definitional problem, that's not necessarily a surprising or meaningful thing. To your specific point: the idea of a co-terrestrial civilization is extraordinary. I struggle to imagine the only evidence would be a few spurious radar signatures and odd videos.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    I agree with the concerns, however as someone who has been kept up a bit with the phenomenon, the main body of stuff to look at are the set of reports which involve: - Multiple expert witnesses, usually pilots or radar operators, getting visual and sensor confirmation from multiple vantage points - Air and ground tracking - High cohesion and consistency (in terms of object size, cardinality, dynamics, and timing) between the witness reports Taken together, these reports form a closure over the set of plausible explanations that should approximately explain all or none of them. My 2c is that any plausible explanations are by and large "big" and non-trivial ones like shared delusions.
transistor-man 5y ago
Is there a formal link to the report?
- ssully 5y ago
  It is currently slated to be released on June 25th. This article is based on early details reported on by interviews with people who have seen early versions of the report.
staunch 5y ago
The public has a right to know certain things, like if there is any evidence of aliens visiting Earth. The right should probably be an explicit constitutional amendment: The people, being free citizens of the universe, shall never be denied access to any information that may pertain to the existence of alien life.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
notional 5y ago
Weird how aliens always show up around USG locations and vehicles. All the land mass in the world and some how it's always around the super militarized North America.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Weird how aliens always show up around USG locations and vehicles. All the land mass in the world and some how it's always around the super militarized North America. Let's ignore the alien-origin hypothesis and assume the report says that these were not camera artefacts. If that were the case, if these are, in fact, objects, then yes--it makes sense that they are observed most frequently (and credibly) by the military.
notJim 5y ago
A lot of these videos have already been debunked as being visual artifacts from the cameras or parallax. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8
- tcldr 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, this is confirming at least 120 sightings as UFOs in the literal sense – rather than visual artefacts.
- Diederich 5y ago
  I watched the first part of this link, where he covers the 'tic tac' FLIR video, saying that it's probably a commercial aircraft far away. As others have stated, what makes this particular case so compelling isn't the video, it's the testimony of the people who were there, people who have a lot of credibility.
WalterBright 5y ago
It's hilarious watching CNN reporters pushing this UFO speculation. Don't they realize this even further besmirches any credibility they have left on other topics, like all their conspiracy theories? I remember when UFO sightings were relegated to the tabloids like The National Enquire. CNN has sunk to tabloid level.
- swebs 5y ago
  Every outlet was reporting on this, at least when it was big news a year ago.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Every one that did should be ashamed of itself. And using that as an excuse for other outlets doesn't fly. Yesterday, CNN was flogging the UFO tabloid crap. What do you think that says about CNN's credibility about other topics? Don't you want to laugh when they unctuously say "follow the science"? Note that personally I believe we should follow the science. But I laugh when CNN says it. Their pundits have no idea what science actually is.
dorkwood 5y ago
I think we need to be a bit more imaginative rather than just jumping to "aliens" every time. There are other possible explanations that are just as fun! An animal species we've never seen before, for example. Or time travelling humans. Or maybe one guy happened across faster-than-light travel in his garage and is hoarding it from everyone else.
- spideymans 5y ago
  > Or maybe one guy happened across faster-than-light travel in his garage and is hoarding it from everyone else. Uh oh. Vulcans incoming.
icyfox 5y ago
The NYT article on the same topic includes this bit as well: > In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. I don't place a lot of trust into reports from a single pilot out at sea because of how widespread and wacky some visual phenomenon can look to the naked eye (and even to some sensory systems). Even two pilots in separate crafts might see the same illusion. In many ways these are similar to the old fuzzy images of UFOs from fifty years ago - irreproducible results inhibit real science. But with something this consistently observable, this close to a major metropolitan area, I'm genuinely surprised that more military or research crafts weren't sent to observe. With the full weight of the intelligence and scientific community on this - we could at least rule out some of the hypotheses.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
My biggest question when I see statements about these UFOs being aliens is “Where is the mother ship”? The constraints on something built to operate in the Earth’s atmosphere are much different than a ship that can actually cross interstellar distances. So if we are seeing the equivalent of alien fighters (small, fast, highly maneuverable) there should also be the equivalent of an aircraft carrier which provides the long distance transport and logistics for these fighters.
swebs 5y ago
>Senior US administration officials briefed on the findings of the report said that the majority of more than 120 incidents over the past 20 years did not derive from any US military or other advanced US government technology, according to The New York Times. So they have no evidence that it's aliens, no evidence that it's US military technology, and no evidence that it's foreign technology. In other words nothing new has been discovered and we're still at square 1. Not really news, but I guess it's good to keep us updated.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > nothing new has been discovered and we're still at square 1 If there is even a shred of evidence these are not sensor artefacts, that's square 2. It means we are contending with real objects. Maybe not flying ones, but objects nonetheless. That merits attention. (And funding, which I imagine is the point of all this.)
  - colordrops 5y ago
    The pilots in the tic tac video visually confirmed the physical objects, even talked about shape and color. That's certainly more than a shred of evidence.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > pilots in the tic tac video visually confirmed the physical objects, even talked about shape and color Visual confirmation is helpful. It doesn't rule out atmospheric effects. Radar is the missing piece. If we have a radar hit, something interesting is going on.
      - danlugo92 5y ago
        There's been (according to them) loads of radar hits.
      - king_magic 5y ago
        Multiple radar confirmations of the tic tac did exist. That’s why they went out there (and ended up seeing it visually, about 50 feet above the surface of the ocean, with the ocean churning beneath it). That’s extremely interesting and frankly I cannot think of anything except for maybe sophon-level technology (fictional concept from the Three Body Problem trilogy) that could spoof both visual human sight while concurrently spoofing multiple sensors. I’m skeptical as hell about stuff like this, but I’m really struggling to see how this could be anything that could have been produced/faked by human-level technology.
Tistel 5y ago
There is a guy on YouTube, who is a PhD physicist, called Thunderf00t (sp?). He thinks it might be a duck in the Cmd. Frasier (sp?) video. Some species of duck do crazy kamikaze dives into the water. Flapping wings might not show up due to camera shutter speeds. Given wind speed variation at differ altitudes and the relative velocities of the plane and bird it might appear to be going much faster than it is from the birds frame of reference. It’s a much more sane theory. Speed of light and distance between planets and all that. Or it could be the dirty commies messing with the US with some drones.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
NASA literally spends Billions annually trying to find poop of single celled organism which might have existed eons ago in another plant, That's why it's hard for me to buy the U.S. Govt. covering up 'alien' story.
cwkoss 5y ago
I wonder if a swarm of drones can move faster than a single drone, using the technique like the catepillars who crawl over each other in a leap-frogging fashion to move at roughly 2x the speed of an individual.
treeman79 5y ago
4 year old spherical drone. Have the leds emit light to confuse. https://www.livescience.com/58928-spherical-drone-display.html https://www.livescience.com/58928-spherical-drone-display.ht... I imagine the tech has improved some since
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hliyan 5y ago
Not all the observations are explainable. However, if you take away one observation -- the claims about high-g acceleration and supersonic flight -- the following seems to fit: battery powered drones with regular (possibly quad) rotors, sea-launched (possibly from vessels disguised as merchant vessels) by a foreign power to observe US military. This would explain: FLIR footage and close range radar, but no contact on long range radar. Would also explain why primarily Navy pilots have observed these objects while commercial pilots don't, and why they seem to be seldom seen over land. Also explains why all the sightings seem to be around the continental US. Also explains the lack of exhaust plumes. Also explains the lack of sonic booms (I know of no way a solid object could cross the sound barrier without a boom). Multiple such drones might also explain why they appear to travel faster than the fighters -- perhaps they are observing two identical craft. All one has to do is discount the high-g claims as embellishment by pilots. I could be wrong, but I know of no way to account for all the observations.
- spideymans 5y ago
  Were the high-g claims verified with sensor or radar data?
- superfist 5y ago
  It is hard for me to believe that modern radar systems would have any problems with tracking such drones. And one of the bizarre features of those UAP is that they appear and disappear from radar system suddenly so it is impossible to track their origin or final destination.
tejohnso 5y ago
The purpose of the report is not to conclude whether any of this unexplained behaviour is due to alien craft. The purpose is to get the information out, stop pretending it doesn't exist, and provide a platform to move forward without the lies and the coverups. At least, that's what I gathered. Whether they actually manage to do that remains to be seen. It's already been a shocking past few years in terms of what has been admitted to and reported. We already have the navy on record validating the authenticity of some of the footage, combined with multi-sensor data and eye witness reports indicating something very strange is going on. We also have several government officials who are on record that they are genuinely concerned. What we need now is transparency so that a multiple discipline, open investigation can be carried out publicly without stonewalling and obfuscation.
firefoxd 5y ago
Someone posted this video here then deleted it. (I'm pretty sure he was an alien) It's just bokeh: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk
- gfodor 5y ago
  This video is easily debunked and it's weird that it is in the mix because its the Nimitz report that is interesting.
poundofshrimp 5y ago
NY Times article on the same topic: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/politics/ufos-sighting-alien-spacecraft-pentagon.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/p...
stronglikedan 5y ago
I can't read past the paywall, but regarding the first photo (and the one I've seen the most), Kyle Hill makes a very thorough and compelling case for jet engine exhaust in IR, here: https://youtu.be/I_n1xpKBBcs?t=1074 https://youtu.be/I_n1xpKBBcs?t=1074
teilo 5y ago
Once it is granted that the objects and their detectable properties are real, and not illusions, there are really only a few possibilities. 1) Advanced and highly secretive technology developed by some government. 2) The same, but by a group within our own government, but off-budget and highly secret (think NSA in the bad old days when it didn't officially exist). 3) The same, but by a non-governmental group of industrialists or similar, but still terrestrial. 4) Aliens Given the occurrence of these phenomena around military deployments, bases, and nuclear facilities, my money's on #1. Defaulting to aliens seems attractive to those who presume the technology is too advanced, seemingly violating the laws of physics, and thus an exotic explanation is required. This is illogical. If the objects are real, and (big) if they are violating the laws of physics as we know them, that means that our understanding of physics needs to be revised. Physics is physics. Explaining it as "aliens" doesn't explain anything. If the physics is wrong (or rather, incomplete, which we already know is the case), then there is no reason to presume that some terrestrial group would be incapable of making and leveraging discoveries that would enable it to create these craft/drones. We are not lacking in historical examples of tremendous technical advances far outpacing the current understanding. Germany, during WWII, made tremendous advances with the jet engine and in rocketry, even in robotic analog guidance systems, that shocked the scientists in the US. To this day, much of what we acquired with Operation Paperclip is still classified. Why? I'm not going to speculate, but there must be a reason we still don't know what all was acquired from the Germans by the US and Russia. The same thing could happen again. If new physical principles were, at some point, discovered, leveraged, and developed by some group (governmental or otherwise), they have had quite a few decades to improve on it. Think about how far technology and materials science has come in the public arena in the last 50 years. Add in some exotic discoveries, and some group with the resources to leverage them, and a terrestrial explanation becomes quite plausible. No aliens required.
- restalis 5y ago
  "If the objects are real, and (big) if they are violating the laws of physics as we know them, that means that our understanding of physics needs to be revised. Physics is physics." One little issue here though. The current understanding of physics is the result of study performed on inert systems, under total (or big enough degree of) scientists' control. Areas which aren't easy to be subjected to experiments are avoided. (Among other things, choosing something like that would pose a high risk of loose speculation on the limited data sets at hand, and an even higher risk of results staying unverifiable by independent parties, both reflecting badly on the scientists involved.) When confronted with something hardly explainable like UFO reports, the easy way out is denial or questioning the source and information veracity.
simonsarris 5y ago
All the mealy UFO chatter (months of it!) makes me wonder if its just a big PR campaign to convince military people to actually report oddities. Maybe they [military] don't want to be seen as dumb for seeing something they can't explain, so they don't report possible foreign spy drones enough. So now the gov has to literally to psyop everyone into caring so the troops finally report sightings they can't explain. Imagine the latest US military drone tech testing their drones by sending them over other US bases and doing weird stuff, flashing lights, making crazy patterns, etc, hoping for a funny report. But then: The base never reports anything. So the drone team has to go "oh crap, what else don't they notice?" So to save face the gov launches a huge PR campaign saying "GUYS UFOS ARE REAL AND WE TAKE THEM VERY SERIOUSLY [so if you're in the air force please report when you see a weird light, thanks]" (I have absolutely no evidence that this is remotely true)

95 points by aluket 5y ago

starkd 5y ago

So, basically they are saying they don't know what the hell they are.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
or they do and they don't want to say.
- wombat-man 5y ago
  yeah I think it's more likely that it's some kind of experimental propulsion test that is sometimes being noticed. Like they wandered into a room above their clearance level or something. Someone on earth made these.
  - madspindel 5y ago
    Sometimes? Over 120 times according to the report.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y ago
      That's just the numerator. We'll likely never know the denominator, so if this was a real thing, let alone a new classified technology, we can't say how successful it is.
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    Can you provide an example of a past technology that was unimagined by mainstream physicists and that was sucessfully implemented in secret and kept secret for decades? I can't think of anything. Fission bombs were widely believed to be physically possible, were developed in secret but used publicly within several years. I do not beleive the military has some secret antigravity, inertia modifying technology or warp drive of whatever. These things always start with basic physics. There is no known basic physics to support such things. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that the military simply developed them from theory to implementation in secret.
    - jamesdmiller 5y ago
      The ability to break the Enigma code might qualify. German scientists, I think, considered it unbreakable.
    - wombat-man 5y ago
      it could be some kind of new tech, or maybe an illusion. I really don't know enough about military history to answer the question but if a research lab had some kind of groundbreaking tech like this it would make sense to me for them to try to keep it under wraps. It does seem unlikely that they'd be able to keep the secret this well though. I'll give you that.
elliekelly 5y ago
“Unidentified”, if you will.
Supermancho 5y ago
Different teams within government often don't know what each other are doing. If there's a relative difference in both security clearance AND organization goals, there are very likely to be projects that will never be connected to phenomena. eg Drone Mesh network testing over naval ships or Stealth-Treaty-breaking experimental craft that are being developed nonetheless.
swader999 5y ago
That's the idea with 'Unidentified Flying Object'. But I guess we didn't need this report to tell us this.
weego 5y ago
Yes hence the unidentified. Someone on reddit a while back asked how come UFO pics and video are always so shaky and blurry. The answer of course is that if it was high res and steady cam we'd quickly be able to identify what it was so it stops being a UFO. It's kinda like asking how come all the cars in the scrap yard have been in accidents.

babelfish 5y ago

Is this really a surprise to anybody? UFO means "unidentified flying object", not "alien".

phpnode 5y ago
I've heard a lot of credulous people describing these reports as proof of aliens. To me the idea that aliens exist is unsurprising, but aliens being here would imply FTL is possible, and that would be a huge discovery!
- komaromy 5y ago
  > aliens being here would imply FTL is possible Why? There are plenty of stars within a sub-light-speed radius since events that could've announced us to the galaxy: advent of radio, first nuclear tests, etc.
  - lazide 5y ago
    The sheer timescales and energy levels involved with all known methods of transportation is what makes it unlikely - at least for life on the timescales we live on. The odds someone is interested enough to spend truly mind boggling amounts of energy (literally moving hundreds of mountains worth) and hundred of years to check us out after one of those events - and not even say hi - is low. That they are also so close - also low. If they have some sort of magic drive tech (implied by the behavior of these drive sightings), then that changes the math a lot. Most people mean ‘magic drive tech’ when they say FTL.
    - userulluipeste 5y ago
      "The odds someone is interested enough to spend truly mind boggling amounts of energy (literally moving hundreds of mountains worth) and hundred of years to check us out after one of those events - and not even say hi - is low. That they are also so close - also low." How could one even begin to make that kind of reasoning? Then the conclusion estimating the low probability is based on what? If I'd have to guess, I'd say otherwise - once a reasonably developed civilization (Kardashev type II and above) gets access to colossal amount of energy, there aren't that many things worth spending it (and attention in general) for. Life may or may not be plentiful around in the universe (it occured relatively shortly after Earth formation), but I'd bet sentient life is orders of magnitude more scarce, considering that it took billions for it to develop on Earth. That alone would make potential cradles for sentient life to be very interesting destinations to check once in a while. To provide here a relatable example, let's imagine a mostly desert continent, with a community living somewhere on its coast. At one point they develop enough capabilities to safely venture out in the desert and to make long journeys. How interested would they be in revisiting some oasis where they encountered some earthworms and small plants, and how interested would they be in revisiting a place (even across the continent, if that is what takes) with apes which happened to also exhibit some signs of primitive engineering? P.S.: With all that, I still hope we're alone within a large enough vicinity, so we won't have to deal with anyone else for as long as our species exists.

yasp 5y ago

Why does it feel like this report has been teased for weeks, almost akin to the release of a new blockbuster movie or similar cultural product?

ngoldbaum 5y ago
Because the UFO fanatics have been hyping it as it might have lent them some legitimacy.
brundolf 5y ago
It's really bizarre coming from such a (historically) no-nonsense organization Maybe this is just so unavoidable as a marketing/PR strategy these days that even the military feels compelled to participate?
sliq 5y ago
Because it is an outstanding topic, coming from the highest government places. That is indeed interesting. No reason to bring your negative vibes in here.
hbosch 5y ago
UFOs make for sexy, apolitical news. Perfect for hitting a broad audience, and the more sensational you are the longer you can keep them tuning in.
cwkoss 5y ago
Someone who is hoping to get a government contract to track UFOs is probably paying a lot of money for publicity.

webwielder2 5y ago

Well, duh.

Udik 5y ago

Did anyone seriously expect the report to say that those things are "aliens"? The fact that it says that (at least some) encounters did actually occur and that they cannot be explained is already some news.

king_magic 5y ago

The NY Times Headline is much more informative and interesting: > U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either Sub header: > A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government I haven't been following this closely. Why?
- octopoc 5y ago
  The US government was always pretty tight-lipped about UFOs until recently. FTA: > In an unprecedented move, the US government is preparing to issue an unclassified report detailing what it knows about a series mysterious encounters with unidentified flying objects.
swader999 5y ago
"Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government." Feels like we are being primed for something new to be afraid of and give our treasure to in defense of. Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I hope the script doesn't go that way.
- tzs 5y ago
  My guess as to the reason for the shift. 1. Up until sometime in the last decade or so, the UFO sightings that were not successfully explained as natural phenomenon or optical effects that made something ordinary like an airliner appear as something else were all accidental sightings of government projects. 2. Then sightings started that the government recognized as the same technology, except not from the government. Whatever it is the government was experimenting with that occasionally led to an accidental sighting is now being experimented with by someone else, and the government does not know who that is. When it was just the government projects getting accidentally sighted, they wanted to discourage reports and discussion to try maintain secrecy. Now that someone else is doing similar work, they want to know who and how they got the technology. They need people to report and discuss sightings so they can try to get past the secrecy of whoever is doing these new experiments.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

Nazis. From the moon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky

zxcvbn4038 5y ago
Hey DanG - Looks like people think moon Nazis are more absurd than space aliens traveling across the universe to harass the US military. How about if the unknown advanced aircraft turn out to be Nazis, I get +3 karma for each downvote and I get to pick the site topcolor for a day? Time traveling Nazis (from past or future) and aliens that self-identify as Nazis would count.

osipov 5y ago

If you enjoyed the report about the UFOs, you may also enjoy reading about project NEMESIS: Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secretive-nemesis-electronic-warfare-capability-will-change-naval-combat-forever https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secret... In a nutshell: "for years, the Navy has been developing and integrating multiple types of unmanned vehicles, shipboard and submarine systems, countermeasures and electronic warfare payloads, and communication technologies to give it the ability to project what is, in essence, phantom fleets of aircraft, ships, and submarines. "

booleandilemma 5y ago

Have they ruled out software bugs, and literal bugs crawling on the camera lens? If so, what the heck are they seeing out there? Have other country’s militaries reported seeing anything?

hellbannedguy 5y ago
It's the weirdest thing I have ever seen. (I would like to know the placement of the camera on the jet. Is it exposed to the elements, or protected inside the skin of the craft?)
Apocryphon 5y ago
This has occurred already in a different area of paranormal activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)

radicaldreamer 5y ago

They seem associated with the ocean as well, many reports of the craft originating or disappearing into the ocean ("transmedium" vehicles). Is it possible that there's some form of life that originates in the ocean, has evolved intelligence that is in a totally different paradigm than us, and this is their equivalent of going to "space"? It makes sense in the macro-sense as well as we're very lucky to not be a water world in the habitable zone. Life evolved in the oceans far earlier than on land and we know very little about the ocean due to it's large size.

user-the-name 5y ago
It's camera artefacts, dude.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > It's camera artefacts, dude Does the U.S. report take a view on this? I'm not particularly swung by the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But I am curious if this is a classified project, domestic or foreign, or just a series of similar artefacts.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    It doesn't need to. It's easy enough to view the videos and confirm that this is, in fact, what they are.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > It doesn't need to. It's easy enough to view the videos and confirm So the U.S. government is going through the trouble of declassification to reveal the limits of its sensors to adversaries? From what we can tell, the reports categorise them as UFOs. That implies a non-artefact theory.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago

nynx 5y ago

Well, assuming this isn't a psyop, this is incredibly exciting. These things are doing maneuvers that simply aren't possible with the technology we have currently. This means that the scifi future of our dreams is nearly upon us.

user-the-name 5y ago
These things aren't "things". They are mostly camera artefacts. They're not doing anything.
- nynx 5y ago
  I would include that in the psyop contingency. It seems pretty stupid to go through all this ado just for camera artifacts.
- inciampati 5y ago
  A number of the recent reports include visual contact with the UFOs. Camera artefacts would not explain such observations from sober-minded and sharp-eyed fighter pilots.

samstave 5y ago

Breakaway civ.

Animats 5y ago

I wonder if we get good data in the report. The flybys of U.S. Navy ships had to have produced lots of sensor data. In particular, synchronized radar data, or electro-optical data if we're really lucky, from several ships in a task group would resolve many ambiguities. Most positional illusions break down when seen from multiple viewpoints. Some of this stuff suggests someone fooling around with drones. But whose drones?

ChrisGranger 5y ago
Everyone seems to point to nation states, but there are literally thousands of billionaires in the world. Maybe an individual with really deep pockets is having a laugh.
- Animats 5y ago
  Probably not even that expensive. Skymagic [1], the drone show company, could create many of the effects seen. [1] https://vimeo.com/skymagicshow https://vimeo.com/skymagicshow
- vecter 5y ago
  Assuming the flight characteristics of the tic tac are as they've actually been reported by visuals (which is a big assumption), there is no way a random billionaire built these. Literally zero.

gfodor 5y ago

They exist. They are real. They aren't ours. They aren't an adversary's, because a) the military would never admit it if that were possible and b) if it were the case the adversary would have already taken over the world. There's no evidence they were made by aliens, leprechauns, or ghosts. But there's evidence they were made. Not that they are swamp gas or funny clouds. So lets get past that, and realize there's something seriously insane going on, and it implies there is, or was, a capacity for non-natural creation + engineering by non-humans. My 2c is extra-terrestrial civ is less likely than co-terrestrial civ (subterrainean/ocean) - but lets stop talking about this like they are hallucinations or possible atmospheric phenomenon.

md_ 5y ago
> My 2c is extra-terrestrial civ is less likely than co-terrestrial civ (subterrainean/ocean) - but lets stop talking about this like they are hallucinations or possible atmospheric phenomenon. Why? This whole thing reminds me a bit of the "Havana Syndrome", in that: - It's an extraordinary claim, presented with limited evidence. - It defies obvious logical explanation (i.e., a motive). - The phenomenon lacks a clear definition, leaving the door open for multiple disparate phenomena with different causes to be lumped together. I believe the third aspect is really underemphasized as a causal factor in "hard to explain" phenomena: because this may in fact be multiple different phenomena, with different causes, it's likely that any single mundane explanation does not explain all observations, and thus appears to be a weaker explanation than it is. This is sort of a "defender's dilemma" of strange phenomena: if you can't explain all of them, you appear to be unable to explain them. But because of the aforementioned definitional problem, that's not necessarily a surprising or meaningful thing. To your specific point: the idea of a co-terrestrial civilization is extraordinary. I struggle to imagine the only evidence would be a few spurious radar signatures and odd videos.
- gfodor 5y ago
  I agree with the concerns, however as someone who has been kept up a bit with the phenomenon, the main body of stuff to look at are the set of reports which involve: - Multiple expert witnesses, usually pilots or radar operators, getting visual and sensor confirmation from multiple vantage points - Air and ground tracking - High cohesion and consistency (in terms of object size, cardinality, dynamics, and timing) between the witness reports Taken together, these reports form a closure over the set of plausible explanations that should approximately explain all or none of them. My 2c is that any plausible explanations are by and large "big" and non-trivial ones like shared delusions.

transistor-man 5y ago

Is there a formal link to the report?

ssully 5y ago
It is currently slated to be released on June 25th. This article is based on early details reported on by interviews with people who have seen early versions of the report.

staunch 5y ago

The public has a right to know certain things, like if there is any evidence of aliens visiting Earth. The right should probably be an explicit constitutional amendment: The people, being free citizens of the universe, shall never be denied access to any information that may pertain to the existence of alien life.

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notional 5y ago

Weird how aliens always show up around USG locations and vehicles. All the land mass in the world and some how it's always around the super militarized North America.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Weird how aliens always show up around USG locations and vehicles. All the land mass in the world and some how it's always around the super militarized North America. Let's ignore the alien-origin hypothesis and assume the report says that these were not camera artefacts. If that were the case, if these are, in fact, objects, then yes--it makes sense that they are observed most frequently (and credibly) by the military.

notJim 5y ago

A lot of these videos have already been debunked as being visual artifacts from the cameras or parallax. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8

tcldr 5y ago
As far as I can tell, this is confirming at least 120 sightings as UFOs in the literal sense – rather than visual artefacts.
Diederich 5y ago
I watched the first part of this link, where he covers the 'tic tac' FLIR video, saying that it's probably a commercial aircraft far away. As others have stated, what makes this particular case so compelling isn't the video, it's the testimony of the people who were there, people who have a lot of credibility.

WalterBright 5y ago

It's hilarious watching CNN reporters pushing this UFO speculation. Don't they realize this even further besmirches any credibility they have left on other topics, like all their conspiracy theories? I remember when UFO sightings were relegated to the tabloids like The National Enquire. CNN has sunk to tabloid level.

swebs 5y ago
Every outlet was reporting on this, at least when it was big news a year ago.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Every one that did should be ashamed of itself. And using that as an excuse for other outlets doesn't fly. Yesterday, CNN was flogging the UFO tabloid crap. What do you think that says about CNN's credibility about other topics? Don't you want to laugh when they unctuously say "follow the science"? Note that personally I believe we should follow the science. But I laugh when CNN says it. Their pundits have no idea what science actually is.

dorkwood 5y ago

I think we need to be a bit more imaginative rather than just jumping to "aliens" every time. There are other possible explanations that are just as fun! An animal species we've never seen before, for example. Or time travelling humans. Or maybe one guy happened across faster-than-light travel in his garage and is hoarding it from everyone else.

spideymans 5y ago
> Or maybe one guy happened across faster-than-light travel in his garage and is hoarding it from everyone else. Uh oh. Vulcans incoming.

icyfox 5y ago

The NYT article on the same topic includes this bit as well: > In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. I don't place a lot of trust into reports from a single pilot out at sea because of how widespread and wacky some visual phenomenon can look to the naked eye (and even to some sensory systems). Even two pilots in separate crafts might see the same illusion. In many ways these are similar to the old fuzzy images of UFOs from fifty years ago - irreproducible results inhibit real science. But with something this consistently observable, this close to a major metropolitan area, I'm genuinely surprised that more military or research crafts weren't sent to observe. With the full weight of the intelligence and scientific community on this - we could at least rule out some of the hypotheses.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

My biggest question when I see statements about these UFOs being aliens is “Where is the mother ship”? The constraints on something built to operate in the Earth’s atmosphere are much different than a ship that can actually cross interstellar distances. So if we are seeing the equivalent of alien fighters (small, fast, highly maneuverable) there should also be the equivalent of an aircraft carrier which provides the long distance transport and logistics for these fighters.

swebs 5y ago

>Senior US administration officials briefed on the findings of the report said that the majority of more than 120 incidents over the past 20 years did not derive from any US military or other advanced US government technology, according to The New York Times. So they have no evidence that it's aliens, no evidence that it's US military technology, and no evidence that it's foreign technology. In other words nothing new has been discovered and we're still at square 1. Not really news, but I guess it's good to keep us updated.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> nothing new has been discovered and we're still at square 1 If there is even a shred of evidence these are not sensor artefacts, that's square 2. It means we are contending with real objects. Maybe not flying ones, but objects nonetheless. That merits attention. (And funding, which I imagine is the point of all this.)
- colordrops 5y ago
  The pilots in the tic tac video visually confirmed the physical objects, even talked about shape and color. That's certainly more than a shred of evidence.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > pilots in the tic tac video visually confirmed the physical objects, even talked about shape and color Visual confirmation is helpful. It doesn't rule out atmospheric effects. Radar is the missing piece. If we have a radar hit, something interesting is going on.
    - danlugo92 5y ago
      There's been (according to them) loads of radar hits.
    - king_magic 5y ago
      Multiple radar confirmations of the tic tac did exist. That’s why they went out there (and ended up seeing it visually, about 50 feet above the surface of the ocean, with the ocean churning beneath it). That’s extremely interesting and frankly I cannot think of anything except for maybe sophon-level technology (fictional concept from the Three Body Problem trilogy) that could spoof both visual human sight while concurrently spoofing multiple sensors. I’m skeptical as hell about stuff like this, but I’m really struggling to see how this could be anything that could have been produced/faked by human-level technology.

Tistel 5y ago

There is a guy on YouTube, who is a PhD physicist, called Thunderf00t (sp?). He thinks it might be a duck in the Cmd. Frasier (sp?) video. Some species of duck do crazy kamikaze dives into the water. Flapping wings might not show up due to camera shutter speeds. Given wind speed variation at differ altitudes and the relative velocities of the plane and bird it might appear to be going much faster than it is from the birds frame of reference. It’s a much more sane theory. Speed of light and distance between planets and all that. Or it could be the dirty commies messing with the US with some drones.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

NASA literally spends Billions annually trying to find poop of single celled organism which might have existed eons ago in another plant, That's why it's hard for me to buy the U.S. Govt. covering up 'alien' story.

cwkoss 5y ago

I wonder if a swarm of drones can move faster than a single drone, using the technique like the catepillars who crawl over each other in a leap-frogging fashion to move at roughly 2x the speed of an individual.

treeman79 5y ago

4 year old spherical drone. Have the leds emit light to confuse. https://www.livescience.com/58928-spherical-drone-display.html https://www.livescience.com/58928-spherical-drone-display.ht... I imagine the tech has improved some since

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hliyan 5y ago

Not all the observations are explainable. However, if you take away one observation -- the claims about high-g acceleration and supersonic flight -- the following seems to fit: battery powered drones with regular (possibly quad) rotors, sea-launched (possibly from vessels disguised as merchant vessels) by a foreign power to observe US military. This would explain: FLIR footage and close range radar, but no contact on long range radar. Would also explain why primarily Navy pilots have observed these objects while commercial pilots don't, and why they seem to be seldom seen over land. Also explains why all the sightings seem to be around the continental US. Also explains the lack of exhaust plumes. Also explains the lack of sonic booms (I know of no way a solid object could cross the sound barrier without a boom). Multiple such drones might also explain why they appear to travel faster than the fighters -- perhaps they are observing two identical craft. All one has to do is discount the high-g claims as embellishment by pilots. I could be wrong, but I know of no way to account for all the observations.

spideymans 5y ago
Were the high-g claims verified with sensor or radar data?
superfist 5y ago
It is hard for me to believe that modern radar systems would have any problems with tracking such drones. And one of the bizarre features of those UAP is that they appear and disappear from radar system suddenly so it is impossible to track their origin or final destination.

tejohnso 5y ago

The purpose of the report is not to conclude whether any of this unexplained behaviour is due to alien craft. The purpose is to get the information out, stop pretending it doesn't exist, and provide a platform to move forward without the lies and the coverups. At least, that's what I gathered. Whether they actually manage to do that remains to be seen. It's already been a shocking past few years in terms of what has been admitted to and reported. We already have the navy on record validating the authenticity of some of the footage, combined with multi-sensor data and eye witness reports indicating something very strange is going on. We also have several government officials who are on record that they are genuinely concerned. What we need now is transparency so that a multiple discipline, open investigation can be carried out publicly without stonewalling and obfuscation.

firefoxd 5y ago

Someone posted this video here then deleted it. (I'm pretty sure he was an alien) It's just bokeh: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2oaQWmqkk

gfodor 5y ago
This video is easily debunked and it's weird that it is in the mix because its the Nimitz report that is interesting.

poundofshrimp 5y ago

NY Times article on the same topic: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/politics/ufos-sighting-alien-spacecraft-pentagon.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/p...

stronglikedan 5y ago

I can't read past the paywall, but regarding the first photo (and the one I've seen the most), Kyle Hill makes a very thorough and compelling case for jet engine exhaust in IR, here: https://youtu.be/I_n1xpKBBcs?t=1074 https://youtu.be/I_n1xpKBBcs?t=1074

teilo 5y ago

Once it is granted that the objects and their detectable properties are real, and not illusions, there are really only a few possibilities. 1) Advanced and highly secretive technology developed by some government. 2) The same, but by a group within our own government, but off-budget and highly secret (think NSA in the bad old days when it didn't officially exist). 3) The same, but by a non-governmental group of industrialists or similar, but still terrestrial. 4) Aliens Given the occurrence of these phenomena around military deployments, bases, and nuclear facilities, my money's on #1. Defaulting to aliens seems attractive to those who presume the technology is too advanced, seemingly violating the laws of physics, and thus an exotic explanation is required. This is illogical. If the objects are real, and (big) if they are violating the laws of physics as we know them, that means that our understanding of physics needs to be revised. Physics is physics. Explaining it as "aliens" doesn't explain anything. If the physics is wrong (or rather, incomplete, which we already know is the case), then there is no reason to presume that some terrestrial group would be incapable of making and leveraging discoveries that would enable it to create these craft/drones. We are not lacking in historical examples of tremendous technical advances far outpacing the current understanding. Germany, during WWII, made tremendous advances with the jet engine and in rocketry, even in robotic analog guidance systems, that shocked the scientists in the US. To this day, much of what we acquired with Operation Paperclip is still classified. Why? I'm not going to speculate, but there must be a reason we still don't know what all was acquired from the Germans by the US and Russia. The same thing could happen again. If new physical principles were, at some point, discovered, leveraged, and developed by some group (governmental or otherwise), they have had quite a few decades to improve on it. Think about how far technology and materials science has come in the public arena in the last 50 years. Add in some exotic discoveries, and some group with the resources to leverage them, and a terrestrial explanation becomes quite plausible. No aliens required.

restalis 5y ago
"If the objects are real, and (big) if they are violating the laws of physics as we know them, that means that our understanding of physics needs to be revised. Physics is physics." One little issue here though. The current understanding of physics is the result of study performed on inert systems, under total (or big enough degree of) scientists' control. Areas which aren't easy to be subjected to experiments are avoided. (Among other things, choosing something like that would pose a high risk of loose speculation on the limited data sets at hand, and an even higher risk of results staying unverifiable by independent parties, both reflecting badly on the scientists involved.) When confronted with something hardly explainable like UFO reports, the easy way out is denial or questioning the source and information veracity.

simonsarris 5y ago

All the mealy UFO chatter (months of it!) makes me wonder if its just a big PR campaign to convince military people to actually report oddities. Maybe they [military] don't want to be seen as dumb for seeing something they can't explain, so they don't report possible foreign spy drones enough. So now the gov has to literally to psyop everyone into caring so the troops finally report sightings they can't explain. Imagine the latest US military drone tech testing their drones by sending them over other US bases and doing weird stuff, flashing lights, making crazy patterns, etc, hoping for a funny report. But then: The base never reports anything. So the drone team has to go "oh crap, what else don't they notice?" So to save face the gov launches a huge PR campaign saying "GUYS UFOS ARE REAL AND WE TAKE THEM VERY SERIOUSLY [so if you're in the air force please report when you see a weird light, thanks]" (I have absolutely no evidence that this is remotely true)