7 ms·

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

by 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.
- runjake 5y ago
  They could be, with RF and laser equipment running reasonably-advanced software to spoof such sensors. There are a lot of gotchas to work out here, but it's my best guess, aside from "craft that defy physics." Source: worked on such military equipment, back in the early 90s.
  - marcusverus 5y ago
    > They could be, with RF and laser equipment running reasonably-advanced software to spoof such sensors. How would such RF and laser equipment spoof sensors that are thousands of feet in the air and moving at hundreds of miles per hour and moving in unpredictable ways? Radar is off the table--that would presumably have been detected, right? How would our spoofer spoof multiple sensors, separated by significant distance? Remember that some of these events involved multiple aircraft and ships, all of which saw the same data on their sensors. How could the spoofer engage all of these targets without its physical presence being detected by the various players, with all their various systems constantly searching? Spoofing seems possible, but it seems like some kind of pre-planned hack would be the least offensive flavor of that particular theory. But even then, some of the pilots swear they saw these things with their own eyes (sometimes multiple people in a single aircraft, sometimes multiple people in different aircraft), which casts doubt on the whole 'spoofing' idea. Of course, the most likely answer is that these reports are some simply untrue. If someone has an impossible story that you can't independently verify, there's no good reason to believe them.
    - nobody9999 5y ago
      >Of course, the most likely answer is that these reports are some simply untrue. If someone has an impossible story that you can't independently verify, there's no good reason to believe them. As Carl Sagan (among others) pointed out, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Or, more recently, what Matt O'Dowd calls the "Space Time[0] Mantra": "It's never aliens. Until it is." I'm going to wait for that "Klaatu barada nikto[1]" moment before I buy into any claims of intelligent aliens visiting our little world. [0] https://www.pbs.org/show/pbs-space-time/ https://www.pbs.org/show/pbs-space-time/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto
danbruc 5y ago
At least those videos [1] are just birds, see for example this analysis [2]. Skip to the meat of it, if you dislike the style of the video. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPn-YMp9vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPn-YMp9vI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  What kind of a freaking bird travels at fighter jet speeds and rotates like that? I'm a photographer who loves watching birds, taking photos, I watch other bird photographers. It's never anything like that.
  - danbruc 5y ago
    It isn't. The bird is between the sea and the jet and for all practically purposes stationary. When the camera pod on the jet tracks the bird and keeps it in the center of the field of view, what you are seeing is a parallax motion of the sea in the background due to the motion of the jet. This refers to the second clip in the linked video which also also the focus of the linked analysis.
    - bufferoverflow 5y ago
      You need to listen to the interview with the pilots who filmed this. They were chasing it, and couldn't catch up.
      - robotresearcher 5y ago
        Which is what you’d see of a bit of gum stuck to the sensor lens. I’m not saying that’s what this is, I’m pointing out that what the pilots perceive is not to be taken at face value.
        TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        Are you sure it wasn't swamp gas?
zardo 5y ago
Even with the video evidence from the Nimitz incident, all the calculations rest on the pilot's estimate of the vehicle size.
runjake 5y ago
1. (US) military pilots are trained to recognize the shortcomings of their sensory perceptions in this exact regard. 2. This doesn't explain the many, separate close-up encounters, such at the Nimitz and east coast/Atlantic Ocean encounters. PS: FWIW, I don't think these things are extra-terrestrial.
- zardo 5y ago
  1. They are trained to estimate the sizes of featureless flying tic-tacs?
  - runjake 5y ago
    They are trained in identifying aircraft and grok flight characteristics, and for the lack of better phrasing because I'm eating a taco at lunch, how one's senses can be wrong or skewed.
    - cma 5y ago
      But some of those pilots made critical mistakes describing the tic tac, things like FOV changes on the camera were interpreted by them publicly as velocity changes of the object.
      - pmarreck 5y ago
        The information from multiple different radar signals tracking the same objects would seem to rule such things out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY
        cma 5y ago
        I'm only talking about the pilots' description of that part of the video, where the zoom level changes and Fraver says something like look at it accelerate here.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
1shooner 5y ago
The study addresses this: the cases selected for analysis include multi-modal observation (e.g. visual + radar).
tejohnso 5y ago
> 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. I think this neglects the training and capability of the pilot to the point of being insulting. You're basically saying that a (let's say) 15 year veteran of the U.S. Air Force can't tell the difference between a small drone and a plane, doesn't understand basic physics / optics, and when uncertain, assumes that anything observed must be a plane because "all we see are planes". Preposterous. Also, even if that were the case, it's pretty hard to explain away when the same object is being observed from multiple angles, with multiple humans, and multiple high precision sensors, with all observations confirming the same conclusions.
- cma 5y ago
  When stabilized against the ocean some of the things the pilots said were pulling impossible G levels of acceleration were actually flying in a straight line: https://www.metabunk.org/data/MetaMirrorCache/49d95870dca331fa57d4d6d745b24945.gif https://www.metabunk.org/data/MetaMirrorCache/49d95870dca331... Some of the other high g-force examples turned out to be an FOV change of the camera footage when toggling IR.
  - ghostly_s 5y ago
    what does traveling in a straight line have to do with acceleration?
    - cma 5y ago
      Straight line with continuous speed has no acceleration. They were saying it violently swerved around inducing acceleration/g-forces from turning.
      - ghostly_s 5y ago
        That doesn't seem to be the claim the paper is analyzing, they are looking at the forces when gaining elevation to the flight level of the pilots and in circling around the pilots at a several-mile delta as confirmed by radar data.
kipchak 5y ago
The odd thing about the Nimitz story is that it wasn't just pilots, but an entire carrier group, which was undergoing initial training/practical operation of it's brand new Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC)[1], which essentially allows various ships and aircraft to combine or fuse and radar data.. A plane for example could radar lock and fire a missile at something it's radar doesn't see. Pilot error is definitely possible, but multiple systems also failing at the same time seems less likely. If it is a sensor issue, it seems to have persisted into more recent versions of the system and their exercises.[2] On one hand it's possible it's due to working out kinks with new systems. On the other if you had craft and you wanted to see how well it could perform against CEC radar it would have been a pretty good time to do so. Of course it's possible even given all that the whole thing is bogus. [1]https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA471258.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA471258.pdf Page 19 [2]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28305/carrier-group-in-recent-ufo-encounters-had-new-air-defense-tech-just-like-nimitz-in-2004-incident https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28305/carrier-group-in... [2]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-pilots-disclose-recent-ufos-encounters-new-radar-tech-key-in-detection https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-...
sitkack 5y ago
These VFX artists have a fun video where they analyze some Pentagon UFO footage, one of the hypothesis they have is that is just parallax. https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw?t=274 https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw?t=274
- TooKool4This 5y ago
  Which leads me to the question: why isn’t the Pentagon/Navy doing basic analyses and arriving at conclusions such as simple optical effects vs. UAP (aliens!?) If you assume the Pentagon/Navy is not incredibly incompetent and can indeed understand things such as parallax, I’m led to think this entire change in stance around UFOs is some sort of shitty psyops campaign designed to obscure information around secret/next-gen aircraft that are being developed.
  - kipchak 5y ago
    Another rung down the psyops tier, perhaps it's intended to make "near-peers" think there's next gen aircraft that is being obscured.
pmarreck 5y ago
It's clear from your comment that you haven't seen this shortish 60 Minutes piece yet. You should. It would fairly quickly dissuade you of this theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY

by dvh 5y ago

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.
runjake 5y ago
They could be, with RF and laser equipment running reasonably-advanced software to spoof such sensors. There are a lot of gotchas to work out here, but it's my best guess, aside from "craft that defy physics." Source: worked on such military equipment, back in the early 90s.
- marcusverus 5y ago
  > They could be, with RF and laser equipment running reasonably-advanced software to spoof such sensors. How would such RF and laser equipment spoof sensors that are thousands of feet in the air and moving at hundreds of miles per hour and moving in unpredictable ways? Radar is off the table--that would presumably have been detected, right? How would our spoofer spoof multiple sensors, separated by significant distance? Remember that some of these events involved multiple aircraft and ships, all of which saw the same data on their sensors. How could the spoofer engage all of these targets without its physical presence being detected by the various players, with all their various systems constantly searching? Spoofing seems possible, but it seems like some kind of pre-planned hack would be the least offensive flavor of that particular theory. But even then, some of the pilots swear they saw these things with their own eyes (sometimes multiple people in a single aircraft, sometimes multiple people in different aircraft), which casts doubt on the whole 'spoofing' idea. Of course, the most likely answer is that these reports are some simply untrue. If someone has an impossible story that you can't independently verify, there's no good reason to believe them.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >Of course, the most likely answer is that these reports are some simply untrue. If someone has an impossible story that you can't independently verify, there's no good reason to believe them. As Carl Sagan (among others) pointed out, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Or, more recently, what Matt O'Dowd calls the "Space Time[0] Mantra": "It's never aliens. Until it is." I'm going to wait for that "Klaatu barada nikto[1]" moment before I buy into any claims of intelligent aliens visiting our little world. [0] https://www.pbs.org/show/pbs-space-time/ https://www.pbs.org/show/pbs-space-time/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto

danbruc 5y ago

At least those videos [1] are just birds, see for example this analysis [2]. Skip to the meat of it, if you dislike the style of the video. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPn-YMp9vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPn-YMp9vI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs

bufferoverflow 5y ago
What kind of a freaking bird travels at fighter jet speeds and rotates like that? I'm a photographer who loves watching birds, taking photos, I watch other bird photographers. It's never anything like that.
- danbruc 5y ago
  It isn't. The bird is between the sea and the jet and for all practically purposes stationary. When the camera pod on the jet tracks the bird and keeps it in the center of the field of view, what you are seeing is a parallax motion of the sea in the background due to the motion of the jet. This refers to the second clip in the linked video which also also the focus of the linked analysis.
  - bufferoverflow 5y ago
    You need to listen to the interview with the pilots who filmed this. They were chasing it, and couldn't catch up.
    - robotresearcher 5y ago
      Which is what you’d see of a bit of gum stuck to the sensor lens. I’m not saying that’s what this is, I’m pointing out that what the pilots perceive is not to be taken at face value.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        Are you sure it wasn't swamp gas?

zardo 5y ago

Even with the video evidence from the Nimitz incident, all the calculations rest on the pilot's estimate of the vehicle size.

runjake 5y ago

1. (US) military pilots are trained to recognize the shortcomings of their sensory perceptions in this exact regard. 2. This doesn't explain the many, separate close-up encounters, such at the Nimitz and east coast/Atlantic Ocean encounters. PS: FWIW, I don't think these things are extra-terrestrial.

zardo 5y ago
1. They are trained to estimate the sizes of featureless flying tic-tacs?
- runjake 5y ago
  They are trained in identifying aircraft and grok flight characteristics, and for the lack of better phrasing because I'm eating a taco at lunch, how one's senses can be wrong or skewed.
  - cma 5y ago
    But some of those pilots made critical mistakes describing the tic tac, things like FOV changes on the camera were interpreted by them publicly as velocity changes of the object.
    - pmarreck 5y ago
      The information from multiple different radar signals tracking the same objects would seem to rule such things out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY
      - cma 5y ago
        I'm only talking about the pilots' description of that part of the video, where the zoom level changes and Fraver says something like look at it accelerate here.
EdwardDiego 5y ago

1shooner 5y ago

The study addresses this: the cases selected for analysis include multi-modal observation (e.g. visual + radar).

tejohnso 5y ago

> 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. I think this neglects the training and capability of the pilot to the point of being insulting. You're basically saying that a (let's say) 15 year veteran of the U.S. Air Force can't tell the difference between a small drone and a plane, doesn't understand basic physics / optics, and when uncertain, assumes that anything observed must be a plane because "all we see are planes". Preposterous. Also, even if that were the case, it's pretty hard to explain away when the same object is being observed from multiple angles, with multiple humans, and multiple high precision sensors, with all observations confirming the same conclusions.

cma 5y ago
When stabilized against the ocean some of the things the pilots said were pulling impossible G levels of acceleration were actually flying in a straight line: https://www.metabunk.org/data/MetaMirrorCache/49d95870dca331fa57d4d6d745b24945.gif https://www.metabunk.org/data/MetaMirrorCache/49d95870dca331... Some of the other high g-force examples turned out to be an FOV change of the camera footage when toggling IR.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  what does traveling in a straight line have to do with acceleration?
  - cma 5y ago
    Straight line with continuous speed has no acceleration. They were saying it violently swerved around inducing acceleration/g-forces from turning.
    - ghostly_s 5y ago
      That doesn't seem to be the claim the paper is analyzing, they are looking at the forces when gaining elevation to the flight level of the pilots and in circling around the pilots at a several-mile delta as confirmed by radar data.

kipchak 5y ago

The odd thing about the Nimitz story is that it wasn't just pilots, but an entire carrier group, which was undergoing initial training/practical operation of it's brand new Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC)[1], which essentially allows various ships and aircraft to combine or fuse and radar data.. A plane for example could radar lock and fire a missile at something it's radar doesn't see. Pilot error is definitely possible, but multiple systems also failing at the same time seems less likely. If it is a sensor issue, it seems to have persisted into more recent versions of the system and their exercises.[2] On one hand it's possible it's due to working out kinks with new systems. On the other if you had craft and you wanted to see how well it could perform against CEC radar it would have been a pretty good time to do so. Of course it's possible even given all that the whole thing is bogus. [1]https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA471258.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA471258.pdf Page 19 [2]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28305/carrier-group-in-recent-ufo-encounters-had-new-air-defense-tech-just-like-nimitz-in-2004-incident https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28305/carrier-group-in... [2]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-pilots-disclose-recent-ufos-encounters-new-radar-tech-key-in-detection https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-...

sitkack 5y ago

These VFX artists have a fun video where they analyze some Pentagon UFO footage, one of the hypothesis they have is that is just parallax. https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw?t=274 https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw?t=274

TooKool4This 5y ago
Which leads me to the question: why isn’t the Pentagon/Navy doing basic analyses and arriving at conclusions such as simple optical effects vs. UAP (aliens!?) If you assume the Pentagon/Navy is not incredibly incompetent and can indeed understand things such as parallax, I’m led to think this entire change in stance around UFOs is some sort of shitty psyops campaign designed to obscure information around secret/next-gen aircraft that are being developed.
- kipchak 5y ago
  Another rung down the psyops tier, perhaps it's intended to make "near-peers" think there's next gen aircraft that is being obscured.

pmarreck 5y ago

It's clear from your comment that you haven't seen this shortish 60 Minutes piece yet. You should. It would fairly quickly dissuade you of this theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY