13 ms·

Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)

120 points by sebg 5y ago

smoyer 5y ago
Reaching relativistic speeds in minutes to hours and covering interstellar distances in days to weeks as proposed in the abstract seem to not be compatible - wouldn't a relativistic speed mean we'd need 4ish years to reach another star?
- thfuran 5y ago
  That depends whose clock you're using.
- netgusto 5y ago
  The durations are expressed in ‘ship time’, ie the perceived duration from the pov of the ship. This is explicited further in the document.
  - kmote00 5y ago
    Off topic comment: I'm pretty sure "explicited" is not a real word, but you've convinced me that it ought to be. Perfectly clear what you meant. Can somebody add this to the dictionary, please?
    - jointpdf 5y ago
      They probably meant: explicate — to give a detailed explanation of https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explicate https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explicate It seems like a relatively newer word in its usage: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=on&content=explicate&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cexplicate%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bexplicate%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BExplicate%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_e...
      - aordano 5y ago
        I read it more as "made explicit" rather than "explained"
    - netgusto 5y ago
      ah! TIL, I always thought it was a real word.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  From the body of the paper: > Such a craft accelerating at a constant 1000g for half of the trip and decelerating at the same rate for the remaining half would reach Proxima Centuri within 5 days’ ship time due to the fact that it would have been traveling at relativistic speeds for most of the trip (Figure 7B). However, for those of us on Earth, or anyone on Proxima Centuri b, the trip would take over four years.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  The important part is the last two words, proper time, which is the time measured by a clock travelling along some given world line [1]. In this case, the world line of the hypothetical interstellar craft. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time
dvh 5y ago
Here's my most recent thought. Pilots spent years up there and the only thing they see are other planes. If they see something it must be a plane, from the size they can estimate the distance. But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a plane, they think it must be far away. And when it flys same speed as plane, in "projected" large distance those speeds are enormous. And their agility is amplified in the same way. The result is that pilots see "planes" doing impossible manoeuvres at impossible speeds.
- count 5y ago
  The radar and FLIR aren't as easy to 'trick' though.
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    The analysis in this article is just plain bad; it came up in another UFO discussion about nine months ago. e.g. see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27355333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27355333 The article is published in a journal the subject matter of which has nothing to do with UFOs, or flight dynamics or anything similar. It does so happen that the principal author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that journal however; and the publisher of the journal has been on-again-off-again the lists of predatory publishers for some years.
    - pmarreck 5y ago
      > It does so happen that the principal author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that journal however So you mean to tell me that a person who does not need to fear harm to their reputation used their own science-focused business to take on the analysis of a phenomenon that is wrought with fallacious appeals to shame? > and the publisher of the journal has been on-again-off-again the lists of predatory publishers for some years. MDPI? I don't have time to research this thoroughly but aren't they just a multidisciplinary republisher from other journals who are ostensibly the responsible parties for ensuring proper peer review? > MDPI was included on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies in 2014[13][15] but was removed in 2015 following a successful appeal[14] while applying pressure on Beall's employer.[16] Some journals published by MDPI have also been noted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Norwegian Scientific Publication Register, two major scientific bodies, for lack of rigour and possible predatory practice.[ Jeffrey Beall has an obvious anti-open-access bias, and I believe that's why the "pressure on his employer" was successful. As an open-source developer, this makes it difficult for me to judge his claims fairly; the "ivory tower of accredited scientists working in secret and retaining sole access to prestigious journals while divvying out Truth From On High" is a model that I think needs to be put to bed (even if there are some drawbacks to that). What I can say is that capitalism does not seem to mesh well with basic science research and it can result in problems such as poor peer review.
swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
Artifacts on sensors, or even active jamming could explain massive changes in speed for recorded videos
billsmithwicks 5y ago
Quick, someone find a carpet to sweep this under! In all seriousness, I hope that the Galileo Project comes up with the goods in the next few years - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
oblib 5y ago
I won't venture to guess what these are but I did find it quite interesting that the old and more recent descriptions of sightings are very similar, and that we still do not know what they are or where they come from.
motohagiography 5y ago
Makes me wonder what the psychology and politics of anti-extraterrestrial beliefs and rules are. It's very plausible other beings exist, but what necessary axioms disintegrate if a society comes to believe in aliens, and why is it important to isolate and shame people who suspect it? I can see how our dominant moral systems are rooted in the idea of human primacy and a single One supreme being. Recognition that we can appeal to super beings to intervene on our behalf could arrest our evolutionary intellectual development by causing our civilizations to optimize for pleasing said beings, instead of organizing ourselves to elevate human minds that enable a more natural and free evolution for our species. There may be some evolutionary rule about life where a species only evolves along degrees of freedom and our development becomes arrested when we optimize for the constraint of appealing to the discretion of super beings, sort of like domesticated animals vs. wild ones. To adapt to co-existing with a technologically advanced species, you would need a conceptual or moral degree of freedom and agency beyond them, which made peaceful and free co-existence possible, and provided some basis for principled equality of life. (an agreement on a One god whose will has been revealed them as well would go a long way, and as an idea, could secure our ability to evolve independently of our advanced co-habitants. This may be the rational evolutionary case for monotheism, as a necessary condition for moral agency across significant differences.) The most obvious consequence of introducing a new super being species would be how we would organize ourselves and relate to each other around them, and not just find increasingly subtle ways to murder each other to secure their favoured status. If humans forfeited our moral agency by optimizing for becoming subjects of these super beings, we would be putting responsibility on the super beings to govern us, and arrest our own evolutionary development. Maybe the anti-extraterrestrial people have a deeper understanding of this. Or they just recognize, maybe the arrival of such a species would irreconcilably polarize us all between those who could sustain their own moral agency in the face of a superior power, and those who give it up to optimize for material animal ingroup security, and the ensuing war would wipe us all out - or the aliens would do it for us. Maybe it will take another couple hundred years for them to really arrive as we're not quite fully baked from an evolutionary perspective, and we need to be on average more intelligent than we rather obviously are now. I'm sure they laugh at our nuclear energy use and social media as being the civilizational equivalent to trepanation though. I wonder what their jokes are like.
Ancapistani 5y ago
Can anyone clue me in as to why this is on the NIH's website?
- sliken 5y ago
  From another comment "The article is published in a journal the subject matter of which has nothing to do with UFOs, or flight dynamics or anything similar. It does so happen that the principal author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that journal"
- nl 5y ago
  It's published in a journal that PubMed[1] indexes. The journal itself is about "research on all aspects of entropy and information theory" [2] which is why the paper is about estimation. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(journal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(journal)
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    Ah, thanks. That makes sense. Now I have to go back and re-read that paper with an eye toward the statistical techniques used.
jaqalopes 5y ago
It was news to me that in the Nimitz event ballistic missile defense radar was actually observing the UAVs in low Earth orbit days before the fighter jet encounter. Truly wild stuff. If I had to hazard a guess, these are unmanned (unaliened?) probes, the same ones that have been here for centuries or more. They may not even know or care what humans are or what we're up to. Maybe they keep dipping to the water to take algae samples or something similarly banal. And the reason they "run away" when the fighter jets get too close is just their onboard flight AI following a generic self-preservation script. However, none of this comports with the report of the fleeing tic-tac "appearing" directly at the fighters' pre-determined, secret CAP point.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  I had not caught that bit before, either: > The main incident occurred on 14 November 2004, but several days earlier, radar operators on the USS Princeton were detecting UAPs appearing on radar at about 80,000+ feet altitude to the north of CSG11 in the vicinity of Santa Catalina and San Clemente Islands. Senior Chief Kevin Day informed us that the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) radar systems had detected the UAPs in low Earth orbit before they dropped down to 80,000 feet. The objects would arrive in groups of 10 to 20 and subsequently drop down to 28,000 feet with a several hundred foot variation, and track south at a speed of about 100 knots.
  - kipchak 5y ago
    In the "GIMBAL" video the second operator mentions something similar, "there's a whole fleet of them, look on the ASA"
  - hindsightbias 5y ago
    What a coincidence: https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/navbase_coronado/about/installations/naval_auxillary_landing_field_san_clemente_island.html https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/navbas... One of the primary military function of San Clemente Island has been to support research and development of many of the Navy's weapon systems … This integrated set of ranges and operational areas covers approximately 2,620 square nautical miles (nm). The SCIRC consists of more than six dozen ranges and operational areas. The extent of these areas range from the ocean floor to an altitude of 80,000 feet.
hammock 5y ago
From the study: >Collectively, these observations strongly suggest that these UAVs should be carefully studied by scientists [9,10,11,12,13]. >Unfortunately, the attitude that the study of UAVs (UFOs) is “unscientific” pervades the scientific community, including SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) [34], which is surprising, especially since efforts are underway to search for extraterrestrial artifacts in the solar system [35,36,37,38,39], particularly, on the Moon, Mars, asteroids [40], and at Earth-associated Lagrange points. Ironically, such attitudes inhibit scientific study, perpetuating a state of ignorance about these phenomena that has persisted for well over 70 years, which is now especially detrimental, since answers are presently needed [41,42,43,44,45,46].
- rhacker 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence#Ufology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_in...
- pmarreck 5y ago
  I find this hilarious and poignant with regards to science, its ideals, and the flawed humans involved in it. Kind of hard to ask honest questions when some of those questions suffer logical fallacies like appeals to shame
mullingitover 5y ago
Right out of the gate, the paper is begging the question by stating that these are 'vehicles.'
- druadh 5y ago
  "Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles" "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) partially identified as being unknown anomalous aircraft, referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Vehicles (UAVs) or Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)" Are you referring to the use of a commonly accepted initialism, 'UAV', as them 'begging the question'? Otherwise, it took about 33% of the paper for them to use the word "vehicles". Don't be that guy.
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    > Are you referring to the use of a commonly accepted initialism, 'UAV', as them 'begging the question'? I've heard 'UFO' in the common vernacular in this context, but UAV isn't one I'm familiar with. UAV is the common term for a drone, not a UFO. Meanwhile regardless of how long it takes them to use 'vehicles' a second time in the paper, it's right there in the title.
  - hugh-avherald 5y ago
    When I google this term, the only site on the first page of results that uses 'Unidentified Anomalous Vehicles' is this paper. Even if UAV were an actually common term, it is still question-begging to use this term as opposed to the far, far more common 'UFO'.
mellosouls 5y ago
Interview from same year with pilot who took the Tic Tac video: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-...
graderjs 5y ago
I think it's funny that lots of the replies here are like: - The data is wrong, these are not as described. That's one possible response to new data. Some others are: - The data is right, how could this be? - The data is inconclusive, here's how to make it better. What I wonder is: - How would you know? - The first response is unscientific because it prevents further inquiry by the assumption: there's nothing interesting here. - The latter two are scientific because they encourage further investigation. The "how would you know" point is important. It's the data denier versus dozens of observers and instruments. Somehow they were all fooled, but the data denier is the one who sees clearly? Actually, I think data denier is not a great term here, by imprecision. I think what's really going one is more like: fear of new data. Indicated by the bold and frankly ridiculous explanations conjured to hold the existing world view together in the face of new data. Some examples of the perceptual gymnastics are quite funny: chewing gum was stuck to the sensor (erm, presumably to all sensors on all ships and aircraft?); or, it was actually an insect crawling on the sensor lens (at the same time as the humans were hallucinating in sync, no doubt?); or, the sensors tracked closer birds and erred on their size and speed (while the humans, simultaneously saw drones, I guess?); or, it was atmospheric phenomena dropping, in groups of 10 to 20, from low earth orbit to 'cruising altitude' (pretty crafty weather, right?) -- AFAIK no one yet has claimed it was birds, insects or chewing gum dropping from low earth orbit, but there's still hope we might see such hilarious 'explanations' at some point. Actually I prefer the term, "escapation" to "explanation" here, because it's less explaining something, than escaping from explaining it. I don't want to throw shade against the (coinage alert) dataphobes among us (they may even be someone you know, someone even in your own family...oh goodness), because their effort is fundamentally a noble one: protect the world we know. From all influences and enemies, foreign and domestic (and now alien, I guess?). And very human: for the new is scary. It means we are in the unknown, it means maybe we cannot rely on what we now merely thought we knew. (I'm reminded of a Beatles song here, anyone care to guess which one). In the light of new data and facing it head on, the world has shifted underneath our feet. Proverbial security rug pulled out from under us. We're...ahem...floating in space. In a...erm...zero g environment. Without bearings. Not knowing which way is up or down. So it is human. A response to fear. Which explains some of the anger that sometimes erupts, too. A noble, if misguided effort, to hold onto what is, at all costs. But it also is connected to another human frailty: confirmation bias - the bias everyone exhibits for confirming what they know, over discovering what they don't. I'm not sure how we "get over" this dataphobia as a collective--even in the face of new evidence it shows robust persistence--and I'm not sure what cue the dataphobes will eventually take, to change their views (nor from whom they may take it), but, you know--while it lasts, it is entertaining, in a harmless way (not laughing at the dataphobes themselves, but at the Herculean effort of there ideas in the face of data). And it provides refuge for those who cannot clip at the quick pace of change we now face. Not everyone has to find solace in that path, but for those who do--for the stragglers who lag behind our current pace--there's no shame in it. It's very human. And what better "antidote" (if one is needed) to all the new "alien" information upon us, than to double down on being "extra" human? So, friends, be not unkind to the sufferers of dataphobia among us. One day, on some topic, we may be dataphobes too. (Tone guidance: delivered with sincerity and only a little bit of gentle friendly prodding/ribbing)
zw123456 5y ago
Just to level set, I am NOT saying that ET's do not exist. But, I have personally seen a UFO or Unexplained blah blah, double speak thing. I live near Seattle, with a beautiful view of Lake Washington facing East and a wonderful view of Mt. Rainier, the location of the first documented UFO sighting. One beautiful sunny summer day, I was sitting out on my deck relaxing and I saw a UFO near Mt. Ranier, a bit south of the mountain. It was very shiny and seemed to be moving at hyper-sonic speeds between a location close to the mountain and then suddenly a location a bit east of Renton. I was thinking, Wow, that is bizarre !. It was silver and oblong shaped and seemed to be appearing in one location and then appearing in another location and then waving back and forth. Then appearing and disappearing. So completely strange. Of course, I immediately ran and got my binoculars, to get a closer look, but it was still a little fuzzy and hard to follow. So I switched to my spotter scope I use for target practice. Still, not definitive. I went to my Bird Watching scope which is the highest power I had. It was difficult to track but eventually, I detected that, the object turned out to be some guy in a paraglider with a very shiny parachute. He was sort of swinging back and forth. There was some sort of weird atmospheric anomaly that seemed to cause the image to move from one place to the other but, it was really one thing. Very interesting, had I not had access to a lot good optics and so forth, I could see someone getting weirded out by it. I saw later that other people had reported it as a UFO. I am not saying that all sightings are bunk. Not at all. I am just saying, that I can see how some things can be mis-interpreted. Very easily. It's very possible some sightings are ET, I do not know, this is just my one experience.
- viscanti 5y ago
  So flying objects remain unidentified until they're identified?
  - corndoge 5y ago
    Yes, convention is to refer to them as unidentified unless they're identified.
  - zw123456 5y ago
    Exactly
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
plebianRube 5y ago
The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it. Maybe the G force is absorbed by the entire universe.

120 points by sebg 5y ago

Reaching relativistic speeds in minutes to hours and covering interstellar distances in days to weeks as proposed in the abstract seem to not be compatible - wouldn't a relativistic speed mean we'd need 4ish years to reach another star?

thfuran 5y ago
That depends whose clock you're using.
netgusto 5y ago
The durations are expressed in ‘ship time’, ie the perceived duration from the pov of the ship. This is explicited further in the document.
- kmote00 5y ago
  Off topic comment: I'm pretty sure "explicited" is not a real word, but you've convinced me that it ought to be. Perfectly clear what you meant. Can somebody add this to the dictionary, please?
  - jointpdf 5y ago
    They probably meant: explicate — to give a detailed explanation of https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explicate https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explicate It seems like a relatively newer word in its usage: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=on&content=explicate&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cexplicate%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bexplicate%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BExplicate%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_e...
    - aordano 5y ago
      I read it more as "made explicit" rather than "explained"
  - netgusto 5y ago
    ah! TIL, I always thought it was a real word.
shkkmo 5y ago
From the body of the paper: > Such a craft accelerating at a constant 1000g for half of the trip and decelerating at the same rate for the remaining half would reach Proxima Centuri within 5 days’ ship time due to the fact that it would have been traveling at relativistic speeds for most of the trip (Figure 7B). However, for those of us on Earth, or anyone on Proxima Centuri b, the trip would take over four years.
Sharlin 5y ago
The important part is the last two words, proper time, which is the time measured by a clock travelling along some given world line [1]. In this case, the world line of the hypothetical interstellar craft. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time

dvh 5y ago

Here's my most recent thought. Pilots spent years up there and the only thing they see are other planes. If they see something it must be a plane, from the size they can estimate the distance. But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a plane, they think it must be far away. And when it flys same speed as plane, in "projected" large distance those speeds are enormous. And their agility is amplified in the same way. The result is that pilots see "planes" doing impossible manoeuvres at impossible speeds.

count 5y ago
The radar and FLIR aren't as easy to 'trick' though.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  The analysis in this article is just plain bad; it came up in another UFO discussion about nine months ago. e.g. see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27355333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27355333 The article is published in a journal the subject matter of which has nothing to do with UFOs, or flight dynamics or anything similar. It does so happen that the principal author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that journal however; and the publisher of the journal has been on-again-off-again the lists of predatory publishers for some years.
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    > It does so happen that the principal author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that journal however So you mean to tell me that a person who does not need to fear harm to their reputation used their own science-focused business to take on the analysis of a phenomenon that is wrought with fallacious appeals to shame? > and the publisher of the journal has been on-again-off-again the lists of predatory publishers for some years. MDPI? I don't have time to research this thoroughly but aren't they just a multidisciplinary republisher from other journals who are ostensibly the responsible parties for ensuring proper peer review? > MDPI was included on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies in 2014[13][15] but was removed in 2015 following a successful appeal[14] while applying pressure on Beall's employer.[16] Some journals published by MDPI have also been noted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Norwegian Scientific Publication Register, two major scientific bodies, for lack of rigour and possible predatory practice.[ Jeffrey Beall has an obvious anti-open-access bias, and I believe that's why the "pressure on his employer" was successful. As an open-source developer, this makes it difficult for me to judge his claims fairly; the "ivory tower of accredited scientists working in secret and retaining sole access to prestigious journals while divvying out Truth From On High" is a model that I think needs to be put to bed (even if there are some drawbacks to that). What I can say is that capitalism does not seem to mesh well with basic science research and it can result in problems such as poor peer review.

swagasaurus-rex 5y ago

Artifacts on sensors, or even active jamming could explain massive changes in speed for recorded videos

billsmithwicks 5y ago

Quick, someone find a carpet to sweep this under! In all seriousness, I hope that the Galileo Project comes up with the goods in the next few years - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home

oblib 5y ago

I won't venture to guess what these are but I did find it quite interesting that the old and more recent descriptions of sightings are very similar, and that we still do not know what they are or where they come from.

motohagiography 5y ago

Makes me wonder what the psychology and politics of anti-extraterrestrial beliefs and rules are. It's very plausible other beings exist, but what necessary axioms disintegrate if a society comes to believe in aliens, and why is it important to isolate and shame people who suspect it? I can see how our dominant moral systems are rooted in the idea of human primacy and a single One supreme being. Recognition that we can appeal to super beings to intervene on our behalf could arrest our evolutionary intellectual development by causing our civilizations to optimize for pleasing said beings, instead of organizing ourselves to elevate human minds that enable a more natural and free evolution for our species. There may be some evolutionary rule about life where a species only evolves along degrees of freedom and our development becomes arrested when we optimize for the constraint of appealing to the discretion of super beings, sort of like domesticated animals vs. wild ones. To adapt to co-existing with a technologically advanced species, you would need a conceptual or moral degree of freedom and agency beyond them, which made peaceful and free co-existence possible, and provided some basis for principled equality of life. (an agreement on a One god whose will has been revealed them as well would go a long way, and as an idea, could secure our ability to evolve independently of our advanced co-habitants. This may be the rational evolutionary case for monotheism, as a necessary condition for moral agency across significant differences.) The most obvious consequence of introducing a new super being species would be how we would organize ourselves and relate to each other around them, and not just find increasingly subtle ways to murder each other to secure their favoured status. If humans forfeited our moral agency by optimizing for becoming subjects of these super beings, we would be putting responsibility on the super beings to govern us, and arrest our own evolutionary development. Maybe the anti-extraterrestrial people have a deeper understanding of this. Or they just recognize, maybe the arrival of such a species would irreconcilably polarize us all between those who could sustain their own moral agency in the face of a superior power, and those who give it up to optimize for material animal ingroup security, and the ensuing war would wipe us all out - or the aliens would do it for us. Maybe it will take another couple hundred years for them to really arrive as we're not quite fully baked from an evolutionary perspective, and we need to be on average more intelligent than we rather obviously are now. I'm sure they laugh at our nuclear energy use and social media as being the civilizational equivalent to trepanation though. I wonder what their jokes are like.

Ancapistani 5y ago

Can anyone clue me in as to why this is on the NIH's website?

sliken 5y ago
From another comment "The article is published in a journal the subject matter of which has nothing to do with UFOs, or flight dynamics or anything similar. It does so happen that the principal author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that journal"
nl 5y ago
It's published in a journal that PubMed[1] indexes. The journal itself is about "research on all aspects of entropy and information theory" [2] which is why the paper is about estimation. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(journal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(journal)
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  Ah, thanks. That makes sense. Now I have to go back and re-read that paper with an eye toward the statistical techniques used.

jaqalopes 5y ago

It was news to me that in the Nimitz event ballistic missile defense radar was actually observing the UAVs in low Earth orbit days before the fighter jet encounter. Truly wild stuff. If I had to hazard a guess, these are unmanned (unaliened?) probes, the same ones that have been here for centuries or more. They may not even know or care what humans are or what we're up to. Maybe they keep dipping to the water to take algae samples or something similarly banal. And the reason they "run away" when the fighter jets get too close is just their onboard flight AI following a generic self-preservation script. However, none of this comports with the report of the fleeing tic-tac "appearing" directly at the fighters' pre-determined, secret CAP point.

h2odragon 5y ago
I had not caught that bit before, either: > The main incident occurred on 14 November 2004, but several days earlier, radar operators on the USS Princeton were detecting UAPs appearing on radar at about 80,000+ feet altitude to the north of CSG11 in the vicinity of Santa Catalina and San Clemente Islands. Senior Chief Kevin Day informed us that the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) radar systems had detected the UAPs in low Earth orbit before they dropped down to 80,000 feet. The objects would arrive in groups of 10 to 20 and subsequently drop down to 28,000 feet with a several hundred foot variation, and track south at a speed of about 100 knots.
- kipchak 5y ago
  In the "GIMBAL" video the second operator mentions something similar, "there's a whole fleet of them, look on the ASA"
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  What a coincidence: https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/navbase_coronado/about/installations/naval_auxillary_landing_field_san_clemente_island.html https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/navbas... One of the primary military function of San Clemente Island has been to support research and development of many of the Navy's weapon systems … This integrated set of ranges and operational areas covers approximately 2,620 square nautical miles (nm). The SCIRC consists of more than six dozen ranges and operational areas. The extent of these areas range from the ocean floor to an altitude of 80,000 feet.

hammock 5y ago

From the study: >Collectively, these observations strongly suggest that these UAVs should be carefully studied by scientists [9,10,11,12,13]. >Unfortunately, the attitude that the study of UAVs (UFOs) is “unscientific” pervades the scientific community, including SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) [34], which is surprising, especially since efforts are underway to search for extraterrestrial artifacts in the solar system [35,36,37,38,39], particularly, on the Moon, Mars, asteroids [40], and at Earth-associated Lagrange points. Ironically, such attitudes inhibit scientific study, perpetuating a state of ignorance about these phenomena that has persisted for well over 70 years, which is now especially detrimental, since answers are presently needed [41,42,43,44,45,46].

rhacker 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence#Ufology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_in...
pmarreck 5y ago
I find this hilarious and poignant with regards to science, its ideals, and the flawed humans involved in it. Kind of hard to ask honest questions when some of those questions suffer logical fallacies like appeals to shame

mullingitover 5y ago

Right out of the gate, the paper is begging the question by stating that these are 'vehicles.'

druadh 5y ago
"Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles" "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) partially identified as being unknown anomalous aircraft, referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Vehicles (UAVs) or Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)" Are you referring to the use of a commonly accepted initialism, 'UAV', as them 'begging the question'? Otherwise, it took about 33% of the paper for them to use the word "vehicles". Don't be that guy.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  > Are you referring to the use of a commonly accepted initialism, 'UAV', as them 'begging the question'? I've heard 'UFO' in the common vernacular in this context, but UAV isn't one I'm familiar with. UAV is the common term for a drone, not a UFO. Meanwhile regardless of how long it takes them to use 'vehicles' a second time in the paper, it's right there in the title.
- hugh-avherald 5y ago
  When I google this term, the only site on the first page of results that uses 'Unidentified Anomalous Vehicles' is this paper. Even if UAV were an actually common term, it is still question-begging to use this term as opposed to the far, far more common 'UFO'.

mellosouls 5y ago

Interview from same year with pilot who took the Tic Tac video: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-...

graderjs 5y ago

I think it's funny that lots of the replies here are like: - The data is wrong, these are not as described. That's one possible response to new data. Some others are: - The data is right, how could this be? - The data is inconclusive, here's how to make it better. What I wonder is: - How would you know? - The first response is unscientific because it prevents further inquiry by the assumption: there's nothing interesting here. - The latter two are scientific because they encourage further investigation. The "how would you know" point is important. It's the data denier versus dozens of observers and instruments. Somehow they were all fooled, but the data denier is the one who sees clearly? Actually, I think data denier is not a great term here, by imprecision. I think what's really going one is more like: fear of new data. Indicated by the bold and frankly ridiculous explanations conjured to hold the existing world view together in the face of new data. Some examples of the perceptual gymnastics are quite funny: chewing gum was stuck to the sensor (erm, presumably to all sensors on all ships and aircraft?); or, it was actually an insect crawling on the sensor lens (at the same time as the humans were hallucinating in sync, no doubt?); or, the sensors tracked closer birds and erred on their size and speed (while the humans, simultaneously saw drones, I guess?); or, it was atmospheric phenomena dropping, in groups of 10 to 20, from low earth orbit to 'cruising altitude' (pretty crafty weather, right?) -- AFAIK no one yet has claimed it was birds, insects or chewing gum dropping from low earth orbit, but there's still hope we might see such hilarious 'explanations' at some point. Actually I prefer the term, "escapation" to "explanation" here, because it's less explaining something, than escaping from explaining it. I don't want to throw shade against the (coinage alert) dataphobes among us (they may even be someone you know, someone even in your own family...oh goodness), because their effort is fundamentally a noble one: protect the world we know. From all influences and enemies, foreign and domestic (and now alien, I guess?). And very human: for the new is scary. It means we are in the unknown, it means maybe we cannot rely on what we now merely thought we knew. (I'm reminded of a Beatles song here, anyone care to guess which one). In the light of new data and facing it head on, the world has shifted underneath our feet. Proverbial security rug pulled out from under us. We're...ahem...floating in space. In a...erm...zero g environment. Without bearings. Not knowing which way is up or down. So it is human. A response to fear. Which explains some of the anger that sometimes erupts, too. A noble, if misguided effort, to hold onto what is, at all costs. But it also is connected to another human frailty: confirmation bias - the bias everyone exhibits for confirming what they know, over discovering what they don't. I'm not sure how we "get over" this dataphobia as a collective--even in the face of new evidence it shows robust persistence--and I'm not sure what cue the dataphobes will eventually take, to change their views (nor from whom they may take it), but, you know--while it lasts, it is entertaining, in a harmless way (not laughing at the dataphobes themselves, but at the Herculean effort of there ideas in the face of data). And it provides refuge for those who cannot clip at the quick pace of change we now face. Not everyone has to find solace in that path, but for those who do--for the stragglers who lag behind our current pace--there's no shame in it. It's very human. And what better "antidote" (if one is needed) to all the new "alien" information upon us, than to double down on being "extra" human? So, friends, be not unkind to the sufferers of dataphobia among us. One day, on some topic, we may be dataphobes too. (Tone guidance: delivered with sincerity and only a little bit of gentle friendly prodding/ribbing)

zw123456 5y ago

Just to level set, I am NOT saying that ET's do not exist. But, I have personally seen a UFO or Unexplained blah blah, double speak thing. I live near Seattle, with a beautiful view of Lake Washington facing East and a wonderful view of Mt. Rainier, the location of the first documented UFO sighting. One beautiful sunny summer day, I was sitting out on my deck relaxing and I saw a UFO near Mt. Ranier, a bit south of the mountain. It was very shiny and seemed to be moving at hyper-sonic speeds between a location close to the mountain and then suddenly a location a bit east of Renton. I was thinking, Wow, that is bizarre !. It was silver and oblong shaped and seemed to be appearing in one location and then appearing in another location and then waving back and forth. Then appearing and disappearing. So completely strange. Of course, I immediately ran and got my binoculars, to get a closer look, but it was still a little fuzzy and hard to follow. So I switched to my spotter scope I use for target practice. Still, not definitive. I went to my Bird Watching scope which is the highest power I had. It was difficult to track but eventually, I detected that, the object turned out to be some guy in a paraglider with a very shiny parachute. He was sort of swinging back and forth. There was some sort of weird atmospheric anomaly that seemed to cause the image to move from one place to the other but, it was really one thing. Very interesting, had I not had access to a lot good optics and so forth, I could see someone getting weirded out by it. I saw later that other people had reported it as a UFO. I am not saying that all sightings are bunk. Not at all. I am just saying, that I can see how some things can be mis-interpreted. Very easily. It's very possible some sightings are ET, I do not know, this is just my one experience.

viscanti 5y ago
So flying objects remain unidentified until they're identified?
- corndoge 5y ago
  Yes, convention is to refer to them as unidentified unless they're identified.
- zw123456 5y ago
  Exactly

deleted 5y ago

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plebianRube 5y ago

The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it. Maybe the G force is absorbed by the entire universe.