4 ms·

Both virginia beach and catalina are near military infrastructure. Some of the channel islands are owned by the navy entirely. I'd wager that these are just tra

by asdff 4y ago

Both virginia beach and catalina are near military infrastructure. Some of the channel islands are owned by the navy entirely. I'd wager that these are just training exercises by our own government. If the U.S. government had some new underwater based drone that could fool current gen fighters, they'd be testing this tech near their coastal military bases instead of in area 51 in the nevada desert because that's the only place to test this stuff out, near an ocean. Plus the bases are carrying out regular training sorties all the time anyhow, so there is always military equipment in the air that you can test against without having to plan a new flightplan and therefore raise suspicion just to test your equipment.

rngname22 4y ago
Counterargument: it could be that recent detections of UFOS are just more likely at these installations as that's where our best sensors are (our best ships and aircraft) most often, in other words there are other hotspots of activity but we don't have military sensors in those areas 24/7. But if a civilian group pushed on this, we'd at least find out where the limits are before gov/military stopping it. Actually, UAPx went and tried to record with sensors off Catalina but I believe only for a week. Loeb's Galileo Project will likely place optical sensors near these hotspots but haven't seen any mention by them of sonar or acoustic monitoring.
sour-taste 4y ago
Some UFO activity has been claimed by the Navy to not be them: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/pentagon-releases-three-ufo-videos-taken-by-us-navy-pilots https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/pentagon-relea... You don't need to believe them but that's what's been publicly said.
- lazide 4y ago
  If it was too-secret-project-x, why tell the normal navy? Especially if it didn’t have or require a pilot that could get killed if someone shot it down.
heavyset_go 4y ago
I suspect the reason the military decided to go on a public PR campaign about UAPs is to keep people looking for foreign drones zipping around. There's a distributed network of hundreds of millions of phone cameras in every corner of the country, and the UAP meme can be the motivation to record and amplify sightings of adversarial drones. Also, admitting that adversaries might be/are flying drones in US territory would be embarrassing domestically and internationally, and could cause a panic. Steeping it in mystery and hinting at "aliens" is silly and interesting enough to be a harmless spectacle.
- asdff 4y ago
  I don't think adversaries would be so brazen just for the sake of not having their equipment captured. It was a huge risk for the US to fly U2s over enemy territory because they would get shot down and the USSR reverse engineered one of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_S-13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_S-13
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I think drone designs have become so disposable that the value of collected intelligence and dick-waving outweigh the risk of being caught and reverse engineered. Such programs have value in intelligence and psyops against the US. I think we'd also be shocked at just how trivial some of the drones are that are able to evade defenses or detection. I suspect we're good at detecting airplane-sized targets, maybe even ICMB-sized targets, but we have little to detect and stop drone-sized targets that can fly at relatively low altitudes, can be launched from inside the US, are easily smuggled and assembled domestically, etc.
    - asdff 4y ago
      It just makes you wonder what they would even be spying on if they were adversaries, because you could just go to san onofre beach with a set of binoculars if you wanted to observe these formations coming out of camp pendleton in an even more discrete manner than some newfangled drone that the military might very well detect, because you can never be sure of the adversaries capabilities. Dick waving ruins the element of surprise and also invites an arms race, that you'd be a fool to play against the US military industrial complex.

by asdff 4y ago

rngname22 4y ago

Counterargument: it could be that recent detections of UFOS are just more likely at these installations as that's where our best sensors are (our best ships and aircraft) most often, in other words there are other hotspots of activity but we don't have military sensors in those areas 24/7. But if a civilian group pushed on this, we'd at least find out where the limits are before gov/military stopping it. Actually, UAPx went and tried to record with sensors off Catalina but I believe only for a week. Loeb's Galileo Project will likely place optical sensors near these hotspots but haven't seen any mention by them of sonar or acoustic monitoring.

sour-taste 4y ago

Some UFO activity has been claimed by the Navy to not be them: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/pentagon-releases-three-ufo-videos-taken-by-us-navy-pilots https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/pentagon-relea... You don't need to believe them but that's what's been publicly said.

lazide 4y ago
If it was too-secret-project-x, why tell the normal navy? Especially if it didn’t have or require a pilot that could get killed if someone shot it down.

heavyset_go 4y ago

I suspect the reason the military decided to go on a public PR campaign about UAPs is to keep people looking for foreign drones zipping around. There's a distributed network of hundreds of millions of phone cameras in every corner of the country, and the UAP meme can be the motivation to record and amplify sightings of adversarial drones. Also, admitting that adversaries might be/are flying drones in US territory would be embarrassing domestically and internationally, and could cause a panic. Steeping it in mystery and hinting at "aliens" is silly and interesting enough to be a harmless spectacle.

asdff 4y ago
I don't think adversaries would be so brazen just for the sake of not having their equipment captured. It was a huge risk for the US to fly U2s over enemy territory because they would get shot down and the USSR reverse engineered one of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_S-13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_S-13
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I think drone designs have become so disposable that the value of collected intelligence and dick-waving outweigh the risk of being caught and reverse engineered. Such programs have value in intelligence and psyops against the US. I think we'd also be shocked at just how trivial some of the drones are that are able to evade defenses or detection. I suspect we're good at detecting airplane-sized targets, maybe even ICMB-sized targets, but we have little to detect and stop drone-sized targets that can fly at relatively low altitudes, can be launched from inside the US, are easily smuggled and assembled domestically, etc.
  - asdff 4y ago
    It just makes you wonder what they would even be spying on if they were adversaries, because you could just go to san onofre beach with a set of binoculars if you wanted to observe these formations coming out of camp pendleton in an even more discrete manner than some newfangled drone that the military might very well detect, because you can never be sure of the adversaries capabilities. Dick waving ruins the element of surprise and also invites an arms race, that you'd be a fool to play against the US military industrial complex.