52 ms·

As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

• alexfromapex 4y ago
  This pilot and another, commander David Fravor, have both given separate accounts that there are very technologically advanced craft well beyond US capabilities in US airspace (detected by multiple radars/instruments) on Joe Rogan's podcast. It's very interesting and would love to hear honest reports from the government on how much the level of activity is increasing.
• 3pac 4y ago
  I saw a UFO maybe 12-13 years ago. It did not look like anything a human would design, even with advanced technology. It looked something like the oblong silver blob in The Flight of the Navigator, just hanging there, "much in the way that a brick doesn't." It must have been 5 km away so it would have been pretty large. It was a breezy overcast day with low clouds, and the moving clouds obscured but never completely revealed it. Its stillness contrasted with the movement of the air, or any aircraft I have ever seen. I stared at it for a few minutes to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me. I had not been taking drugs. When I came back outside from fetching my camera, it was gone, and I thought, well, this is how it goes, nobody will believe me, so I won't even bother talking about it. I never had more than a passing, pop-culture interest in UFOs.
  • dilippkumar 4y ago
    Aha! You’re the person I’ve been searching for. A person who has seen something that is incredible (literally) and has a hard time following up because of a complete absence of data/evidence to back up your claim. Going back to your experience, what tools do you wish we as a society had that would help us document your experience? Did you try to document your experience? What were the barriers you encountered? If you were to document it, where would you go to document it? Ultimately, we need a civilian infrastructure of sensors, cameras etc pointing up at the sky to independently verify UAP. The first step in such an effort is some sort of statistical data that shows how often this occurs. With such data, we can build a realistic null hypothesis: (x number of cameras looking at y area of the sky for z years should find 0 UFOs if the null hypothesis is true) It’s impossible for a civilian effort to even begin to accumulate the data to make even vague guesses on what x, y and z should be. And so, identifying the barriers that you encountered to document your experience is actually kinda important.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • llamaLord 4y ago
      Can't tell if being sarcastic or not... But the vast majority of us carry an at least 12 megapixel camera in our pocket literally everywhere we go now...
      • NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
        https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/
        • stevenhuang 4y ago
          The mystery of the lack of good footage in the age of smartphones is less mysterious when one considers that perhaps the phenomenon itself is intelligent. And in fact if one considers witness testimony, that's what it seems to be.
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
      • suddenclarity 4y ago
        This is my opinion as well but it should be mentioned that wide angle lenses on phones are quite terrible at picking up small things, especially in low light. I tried once 2-3 years ago when I noticed a bright light late at night from my bedroom window. I'm 100% convinced it had a reasonable explanation but it did bother me that I spent several minutes without getting a decent image/video of something my eyes could see clearly. Since then, I'm a bit more understanding that phones doesn't capture everything but with that said - there are still a ton of DSLRs and telescopes. Unfortunately I didn't have the hindsight of fetching mine.
        • cameronh90 4y ago
          My current phone (Pixel 7 Pro) has a camera so good that I frequently use it to see things at a distance that I can't make out with my eyes, or to see in the dark when I can't. However, it does have instances where the images it produces are well below what I can see. I assume there's a large amount of AI clean-up going on that makes it do odd things when presented with odd inputs.
  • nradov 4y ago
    Could it have been a large mylar balloon?
    • doodlebugging 4y ago
      Until we have a positive ID that it was not it will be difficult to rule this out.
  • m3kw9 4y ago
    Same here it’s always always like that as if the ufo has an earth camera detector, I fathom it may still be technically feasible if they are advanced enough. This would explain why nobody has had a clear picture taken of an UFO. /sarcasm
    • twic 4y ago
      I've had this experience more times than i can count. Not with flying saucers, but with all manner of terrestrial things - animals, vehicles passing by, people doing things. You see it, you look at it for a bit, you think you should take a photo, and by the time you have your camera in hand and switched on, it's gone.
      • m3kw9 4y ago
        That’s what I’m talking about
    • grumple 4y ago
      There's a funny concept called the SEP field (Somebody else's problem) from The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem_Field https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Proble... We could conceive of a device that would function similarly, like a "Recording device avoidance" or "improbably inconvenient timing" field.
    • bitcurious 4y ago
      Surely you’re joking, but I had an experience that would line up with that theory. About 6 years ago, well into the iPhone age, I saw a weird looking triangle just kind of floating in the sky. It looked to be the size of an airplane, except it didn’t appear to be using its wings to generate lift. I grabbed my phone to take a photo, but as soon as I had it pointed in the right direction, it shut off! Then it zoomed off. A bit later I was at lunch, and my phone turned on with 40% of the charge still left. Realistically, it was some weird drone and a failing battery. But if I allow myself to dream for a moment, that was an alien UFO.
    • joeyjojo 4y ago
• ttpphd 4y ago
  This is a great reminder that I need to bookmark metabunk.org, where Mick West and others go into enormous detail about the UAP evidence, including simulations and reconstructions.
  • likeabbas 4y ago
    Mick and others do a great job. But they often leave key details out or selectively choose facts. For example, with the GIMBAL video, the pilots are on record saying the object is 6-8 nautical miles (NM) away as they saw on their Situation Awareness (SA) Screen. Mick’s attempt to debunk the GIMBAL rotation asserts that the object was 30 NM away, and he refuses to look at other evidence that contradicts the statement. Other scientists have done extensive efforts to show that the rotation of the gimbal object directly correlates with the flight path, which shows to be a vertical u-turn exactly as described by the pilots who had access to the SA https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1504855791060148224?s=20&t=6CQVRL3j_NB6IrfBdLwDQg https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1504855791060148224?s=... Metabunk have debunked a lot of things very well. But they have not debunked the 3 navy videos. I can provide more evidence to the analysis on the other two videos to show that these objects are exhibiting foight characteristics that are unique and defy the laws of physics.
    • dharmab 4y ago
      The SA page on the MPCD is very small and cluttered. Is it possible that the pilots made a mistake?
      • likeabbas 4y ago
        According to one of the pilots, there is a longer, classified video of the incident that shows the SA page and has the distance listed there. People make mistakes, but data doesn’t. And according to these pilots and the former head of the DoD UAP program, the data shows that there are craft moving in our airspace with impunity.
        • noizejoy 4y ago
• isthisthingon99 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • jbm 4y ago
    That is a nearly 2 hour video without any links or any details, with the top comment being from someone with the name "woke world order". Can you please offer some synopsis beyond the video title?
    • isthisthingon99 4y ago
      [dead]
• hwillis 4y ago
  Why don't commercial pilots report the same things? I believe they have far more time in the air. It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability. Even ignoring the technological implications of interstellar flight or the ability to enter our atmosphere without being detected, these objects are apparently massively more capable than any kind of vehicle we have. To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna. It seems very likely that fighter pilots and finely-tuned military equipment would be very eager to pick up false signals from background noise and interpret it as vehicles that stretch out understanding of physics.
  • sidlls 4y ago
    "To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna." To play devil's advocate for a moment: they'd have to know the capabilities of these jets to make that determination, and observation of some sort would be required to do so. "Artifacts" (anomalous errors) appear on flight systems' sensors all the time, and atmospheric distortions can easily appear to the naked eye as flying/moving objects. I don't buy either that other countries have such advanced technology or that extraterrestrial intelligences are visiting us: the simpler explanations I noted cover more or less every published UAP we have seen.
    • kcplate 4y ago
      >> To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna I always find it odd that we ascribe a human understanding of logic to an alien species. Seems to me we wouldn’t know jack shit about motivations, capabilities, approaches to decision making, etc…
      • Teever 4y ago
        well we make some reasonable baze line assumptions for an intelligent life form -- they have self preservation instincts and as such likely operate on some base level of game theory.
      • akomtu 4y ago
        From the descriptions, the aliens act like we would with a slightly better tech: they act like rangers in a national forest monitoring suspicious activity of smart beavers, but otherwise don't mess with the wildlife.
• stevenhuang 4y ago
  Glad to see this topic finally discussed here. With the shift in government posture and establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3100053/dod-announces-the-establishment-of-the-all-domain-anomaly-resolution-office/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/310005...) it will only be a matter of time until more service members come forward with their experiences and enough data is gathered to ascertain the inevitable: these craft are real and we've been visited by nonhuman entities since maybe even the beginning of human existence.
  • mbnull 4y ago
    I do remember the comment thread on the 2017 time article here on hn. Opinions already have changed considerably in the last 5 years. It also appears as if the process of disseminating information still accelerates (with promis coming out as experiencers and so on). I can only advise everyone to consider C.G. Jung and read Jaques Vallee. This situation is very complicated, but not at all bad in the end. As far as I can tell, nobody got the real answers, not the pentagon, nor the religions.
    • stevenhuang 4y ago
      I second those recommendations. Reality may be not as we think.
    • harimau777 4y ago
      Could you expand on how Jung is related? I think of him as a researcher in psychology which doesn't seem connected? I may be missing what you are getting at.
      • operatingthetan 4y ago
        https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691018225/flying-saucers https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691018225/fl...
      • mbnull 4y ago
• runjake 4y ago
  I worked on stealth aircraft that would occasionally cause civilian UFO reports. It was common for the reports to mention that these UFOs maneuvered unlike any man-made aircraft, which was always a good chuckle because they were usually just flying straight or banking normally. However when seasoned military pilots like Fravor speak on the matter, I listen. When a bunch of them speak about the same incident, I take them at their word.
  • dopeboy 4y ago
    What would you say is the most credible incident that everyone should take seriously?
    • runjake 4y ago
      The Nimitz Incident of 2004(?). Extremely detailed visual and sensor events. Tons of human witnesses. Tons of activity. There was a detailed Reddit thread on the incident from a Seaman many, many years ago long before news of the Tic Tac came out. I’m on mobile but perhaps someone else can paste the thread URL. Could be an elaborate hoax but that’s one heck of a long con game.
      • jseliger 4y ago
        The original appears to have been deleted, but you may be referring to https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1qyu5i/my_ufo_encounterexposure_while_on_board_an https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1qyu5i/my_ufo_encount...
        • belter 4y ago
          It starts by saying..."...I am relaying information and supporting circumstances, I did not see a UFO personally. However, it is an interesting story."
          • yazantapuz 4y ago
            This one? https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1qyu5i/my_ufo_encounterexposure_while_on_board_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1qyu5i/my_ufo_encount...
• likeabbas 4y ago
  I really wish people would take a look at the extensive analysis some scientists have done to show the 3 navy videos of UAP are showing flight characteristics that defy our laws of physics. This guy on Twitter has done a fantastic job to show the GIMBAL object performed what we can only describe as a “vertical u-turn” https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1504855791060148224?s=20&t=6CQVRL3j_NB6IrfBdLwDQg https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1504855791060148224?s=... This paper shows the tic tac video exhibited instantaneous acceleration to over 20,000 mph https://www.explorescu.org/post/2004-uss-nimitz-strike-navy-group-incident-report https://www.explorescu.org/post/2004-uss-nimitz-strike-navy-... Here is a paper from the National Aeronautical Observatory in Ukraine that tracked UAP via their two telescopes in different cities going Mach 15, stopping, and changing directions instantaneously https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.17085.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.17085.pdf
  • marmetio 4y ago
    What do you want people to get out of those analyses? They quantify the incredible observations, but they don't explain how those observations could be possible, nor rule out other explanations.
    • likeabbas 4y ago
      At least in terms of the 3 navy video, I would argue that the data purports, with high confidence, that the craft did exhibit flight performance characteristics that we cannot explain with modern technology or physics. And these are just the three videos that got released. Many people with security clearances have come forward and said the AATIP database has hundreds videos (with the classified sensor data) of craft showing advanced flight performance characteristics. I want people to understand that this phenomenon is real, and it’s happening constantly. So much to the point that it’s affecting military training operations and putting our fighter jet pilots at risk.
      • marmetio 4y ago
        We had AATIP and now we have UAPTF. They do stuff and brief Congress about it. Why is that not good enough?
• motohagiography 4y ago
  It makes sense to slow roll UAP/ET phenomena anyway, as they probably understand that beings of an emerging intelligence tend to align to whatever they percieve as powerful (just as other animals become dependent on human garbage dumps) and adapt to the dependency instead of evolving and developing themselves freely according to their natures. The dependency arrests their development, and ethically, who wants to be around just another bunch of pets? I could see there being some distinction between domestication and actualization, where the former stunts an evolution and the latter develops and accelerates it. The more interesting question around UAPs for me is under what conditions would we elevate a species on earth to participate as peers in our own civilizations, and what would the analogous criteria be for us to level up in the same way.
  • llamaLord 4y ago
    This conversation is going to happen pretty soon me thinks, just about computers running AI models rather then animals.
• mabbo 4y ago
  I think what bothers us most about incidents like this is that any country or human organization that had massive air superiority over everyone else would inevitably use it to their advantage. And yet, here are the reports, but no one is coming forward to say "yes, we Canadians actually never cancelled the Avro Arrow and have been decades ahead of the rest of you all this time- now please remove that Danish flag from Hans Island". It's such a foreign idea that someone might have this advantage and not use it that the best answer we have is "I guess they aren't humans". Maybe that says a lot about us.
  • h2odragon 4y ago
    [flagged]
  • mxkopy 4y ago
    If this technology were developed by a private individual, there's incentive to keep it hidden. No businessperson wants to have a military grade target on their back, but I feel like some are paranoid/wealthy enough to want to develop their own tech
  • tarkin2 4y ago
    This assumes the advancements can give a significant military advantage, through cost of production and overall military effectiveness. And that the behaviour of other countries could be a problem to the manufacturing country--trade and cooperation etc. And if the advancements are used for spying then of course they'll be kept quiet for as long as possible. Showing your cards early, even if you think they're good, may not be the best approach.
    • nprateem 4y ago
      They say on the nimitz video there's a whole fleet of them. This kind of tech could only come from a superpower, and you really think they wouldn't brag about it?
      • naasking 4y ago
• somat 4y ago
  On the subject of the term UFO. The term Unidentified Flying Object is perfectly fine. But then some people say "Aha, you mean aliens, right". No, It is like the SQL NULL, No unidentified object matches any other unidentified object. If I meant aliens I would have said it was an Identified Flying Object(IFO) or perhaps an Extrateresteral Flying Object(EFO), But all I said was that something was flying and I could not identify it. Once you identify it, it is no longer a UFO. Apparently The military abandoned the term UFO mainly because enough people attached more meaning to the term than it actually has. And it got awkward to use because of that attached meaning.
  • nqzero 4y ago
    the Unidentified part is ok. but one plausible explanation of many of these is that they're purely optical/EM, ie there's no Flying Object so at least until we're able to gather more data, UAP is much better
  • n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
    [dead]
• robbiex88 4y ago
  If you haven't listened to it yet, highly recommend the Ryan Graves episode on the Joe Rogan Experience.
  • stevenhuang 4y ago
    Or the one with Lex Fridman. https://youtu.be/qLDp-aYnR1Y https://youtu.be/qLDp-aYnR1Y
    • astrange 4y ago
      If the places to learn this info are JR and Lex Friedman, it can't possibly be true.
      • stevenhuang 4y ago
        Podcasts are just a form of easily digestible popular media. If you're actually interested in learning see UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record by Leslie Kean. There are many such books with independent accounts of those who have experienced strange phenomena, that are all consistent with each other. These books are well researched and highly sourced with credible witnesses. I suggest you reserve judgement on what is possible or not if you haven't engaged with the available evidence.
        • astrange 4y ago
          Oh I have. I also read all the legal documents for To The Stars; I thought it was notable that the marketing all sort-of kind-of offers to release alien hyperspace drives but none of the SEC documents do and their startup valuation doesn't include any.
          • stevenhuang 4y ago
            Yeah TTSA is a mystery, and people in UFOlogy don't really know what to think about it. On one hand they've done a lot to further the dialogue, but the weird spin they put into it makes what they do put out harder to take seriously.
• klghqr 4y ago
  The press and politicians started hyping up the UFO issue last year when it was clear that we were headed for cold war 2.0. It is a great narrative to get more funding, get people interested in space and the MIC, etc. The timing is suspect, it seems like just another manufactured crisis.
  • krapp 4y ago
    That doesn't actually make sense, though. UFO believers were losing their minds thinking "disclosure" had finally come, but most politicians never even mentioned it and the press never presented it as a crisis. If the government wanted to create fear and panic in order to justify funding, they had numerous real-world scenarios to draw on. Manufacturing a meme about UFOs is a stupid way to do that, assuming "it was clear that we were headed for cold war 2.0." The report itself didn't even manufacture a crisis. It was lackluster at best, failing to reach a definite conclusion, much less hype up an imminent threat that presumably needs funding.
  • stevenhuang 4y ago
    Truthfully, it can be both. Never let a good crisis go to waste, etc. For example with project bluebook, UFO sightings have been discredited through ridicule and served double duty as smokescreen for legitimate secret military development such as the U2 spy plane.
  • localplume 4y ago
    that doesn't make any sense though. UFOs dont get people interested in "space". if its aerospace then rockets and spacecraft do that just fine, and if its hard sciences then there are a billion other cool, real things. the MIC? yeah UFO people are famously pro-government and pro-military. the most well known media featuring UFOs/aliens, the X-Files, is full of government-related conspiracy theories.
• FpUser 4y ago
  I saw one myself when I was at University. Was watching night sky, lying on a beach at Black Sea resort. Basically it looked a regular satellite crossing a night sky of which one can usually see more than enough. Suddenly the "satellite" has made an instant 90 degree turn and kept going before disappearing over the horizon.
  • nradov 4y ago
    You might have seen two satellites. The second one appeared to intersect the path of the first from your perspective just as the first one faded from view.
    • FpUser 4y ago
      Total BS. What you described would've been very noticeable. Especially "fading" of visually slow moving satellite.
      • nradov 4y ago
        No, That's not how it works. From the perspective of an observer on the ground, a satellite can seem to suddenly disappear as it passes into the Earth’s shadow. It's entirely possible that you saw two different satellites. https://www.space.com/6870-spot-satellites.html https://www.space.com/6870-spot-satellites.html
        • FpUser 4y ago
          >"satellite can seem to suddenly disappear" And another one conveniently appears at the same point and same time just going 90 degrees different course? Sure.
          • nradov 4y ago
            Yes, that can sure happen. Some satellites are in low-inclination orbits and others are in polar orbits. There are many such satellites and their paths will occasionally appear to intersect. Seeing that is just a matter of luck.
• snowpid 4y ago
  It is very fascinating that it is not discussed in other democratic countrise.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• isaacg 4y ago
  These videos just look like optical artifacts of the lenses of the cameras, as discussed here: https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw Is there any evidence that there's more to these videos than that?
  • mach1ne 4y ago
    The countless eye witnesses for one.
    • scotty79 4y ago
      Human perception is easily manipulated by peer pressure.
      • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        So is human misperception.
    • gruez 4y ago
      That doesn't really make sense. If I show an optical illusion to one person and he gets fooled, showing it to n=1000 people isn't going to suddenly make the optical illusion real.
  • likeabbas 4y ago
    There’s tons of evidence that Mick West is wrong and these are not artifacts of the lens https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1598090753011781634?s=20&t=q1MwVO9NIEr9RxuDodgV1A https://twitter.com/the_cholla/status/1598090753011781634?s=...
  • Slighted 4y ago
    What an extremely annoying, pompous video. Doesn't inspire confidence in their ability to be neutral and factual in the slightest, assuming that its what they're actually striving for and not just a "dumb conspiracy theorists" propaganda piece.
• lizknope 4y ago
  Johnny Harris just made a good video on this last week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQSxY7TR6mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQSxY7TR6mI
  • suddenclarity 4y ago
    I felt like he should've been more clear that the government declaring "we don't know" is down to "we can't immediately identify" and not "there is no explanation". The night vision triangles shown being one example of this since they were declared "we don't know" and then immediately explained by the public.
• troyvit 4y ago
  Ever get the feeling this is how cats feel about laser pointers?
• bglazer 4y ago
  Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence etc. We should never underestimate human capacity for self delusion and fighter pilots are certainly not privileged in that regard. It’s also worth considering why this seems to be a phenomenon that exclusively effects military aircraft. I can certainly imagine that the military would not mind if it was seen as the last line of defense against a mysterious, extremely powerful force, especially when we’re effectively in peacetime. Apparently the aliens didn’t pick up an interest in the tens of thousands of sorties flown over Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s also worth remembering that the CIA was recently extremely vocally concerned about a mysterious “sonic weapon” death ray that turned out to be either frog noises or simply non-existent. The US government has shown that its quite willing to completely fabulate or at least tacitly support bullshit if it serves their purposes.
• supernova87a 4y ago
  In grad school in astronomy, there was a fellow grad student who was extremely excited after a night's observations that he'd discovered something remarkable -- it was a long hoped for distant galaxy that appeared in his images that night, and had all the right spectral signatures because it appeared in different filters, different exposures, and you could see it there in the image files, raw. Turned out, it was noise / amplifier signal correlated with the adjacent chip dumping overexposed pixels on readout. He was embarrassed after a professor pointed out (after inspecting the files) that it always appeared on the same exact pixel coordinates on the array, but learned his lesson to try to disprove your own observations with independent tests. I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. Were the pilots reporting things seen with their eyes, or looking at imaging displays that have been processed. And maybe... were recently illuminated with lasers... hm? There certainly seem to be a pathology of similar reports of "the object never moved in the viewfinder, and would imply the ability to move suddenly at supersonic speeds"
  • indymike 4y ago
    Reminds me of the mid 00's "flying rods" that were simply insects being captured in flight by digital cameras. The camera whould capture what looked like a semi-transparent corkscrew zipping through the air.
  • pmarreck 4y ago
    > I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. come on, man. at some point, after enough of these reports, toeing the line you're toeing starts to look ludicrous. these are trained observers, pilots who know what to expect in the sky. and do not take lightly that there is still a certain amount of embarrassment (a social cost) to even coming forward, so to even make this claim is still a brave act at this point. At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece (NOTE: literally only 13 minutes of your time, not "an hour", although admittedly, the show's name might suggest otherwise) about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY
• snickerbockers 4y ago
  There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to know better. Obviously it's unscientific to jump to conclusions and assume that anything that doesn't make sense must be aliens or magic or whatever but at the same time, it's also unscientific to ignore physical observations just because they seem like something that might support what fringe idiots believe.
  • Fezzik 4y ago
    The close-minded approach is to accept someone’s fantastical claim because you want to, or just because the claim is being made, when the claim is contrary to mountains and centuries of evidence. The open-minded take incorporates all the possible evidence to reach the most likely conclusion. And the conclusion is never, so far, either aliens or magic. It’s just silly to conclude that an observation that has no immediate natural explanation will not be explained naturally and is, instead, the work of aliens or magic. Especially in light of the fact that everything we have explained, thus far, has had a natural explanation.
    • vinaypai 4y ago
      It's US chauvinism that leads people here assume that any advanced tech beyond our capabilities must be magic or aliens. The US isn't the only country with secret military research projects.
      • vinaypai 4y ago
        To be clear the advanced tech doesn't actually have to be manoeuvering in amazing ways. It could be an electronic warfare system that messes with sensors to make it appear so.
        • revscat 4y ago
          My worst fear is simply an advanced technology that provides a means to remotely trigger action potentials at will. At that point anything is possible.
• phtrivier 4y ago
  So UFOs are now UAPs, but at least we're sliiiiighly further on the path to admiting that they're either Chinese, Russians, Americans, or very surprising. And I agree it's something to be monitored, and we must not assume any sighting is a joke - but it does not mean we have to assume any sighting is extraordinary either.
• zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  Could be a projection https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/05/11/us-navy-laser-creates-plasma-ufos/?sh=72e596db1074 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/05/11/us-nav...
  • traverseda 4y ago
    They even patented it! Yeah that's pretty obviously what this is.
    • newZWhoDis 4y ago
      Patents don’t have to work, you don’t even have to provide a demo. I have 4, I would know.
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      There are people who have patents for anti-gravity propulsion systems so this is hardly proof of what it is.
      • zizee 4y ago
        Anti-gravity doesn't have working demonstrations available: https://www.google.com/search?q=tangible+holographic+plasma https://www.google.com/search?q=tangible+holographic+plasma
• scotty79 4y ago
  I'm really surprised by fascination with mystery that many HN users display here. After all software developers and systems administrators of all people should be the first to doubt veracity of output of various devices and what their users believe about them and their output. Besides, US military has a history of intentionally misleading the public about what they are developing, with cover stories of aliens. Is it that hard to believe that they managed to convince some of their own? Does presence of alien intelligence on Earth really seem more plausible given interstellar distances and how much we know about our own solar system?
  • suddenclarity 4y ago
    Topic aside, people have blind spots when it aligns with their beliefs.
  • neom 4y ago
    Well, if you distill it, it's perfect for HN: Imaging/artifacting/tech issues (interesting), some country has technology that is beyond next level (interesting), Aliens (interesting).
  • DangitBobby 4y ago
    That's not nearly as fun.
• traverseda 4y ago
  Anything here that wouldn't be consistent with a tangible plasma hologram being broadcast from a nearby military installation? https://www.google.com/search?q=tangible+holographic+plasma https://www.google.com/search?q=tangible+holographic+plasma
• hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
  The pessimistic part of me thinks that was a top secret black project of either drones or sensor interference. The optimistic part of me thinks that was part of galactic refugee flights that hide themselves in deep ocean, using the humans as shields and can only be detected by the Empire if close enough. This part of me sincerly believes I will join the resistance by invitation.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  All these UFO photographs, all of which are fuzzy smears. With the ubiquity of excellent cameras, why aren't there any in-focus, sharp photos of them? We all know the answer.
  • meindnoch 4y ago
    The Chinese balloon was as big as a 7-storey building, in broad daylight, drifting very slowly. Where are the excellent high-resolution photos?
    • high_pathetic 4y ago
      There you go https://twitter.com/airlivenet/status/1621954241572257792 https://twitter.com/airlivenet/status/1621954241572257792
    • doug_durham 4y ago
      All over the news. There are tons of high quality, high resolution photos of the balloon.
  • doodlebugging 4y ago
    The easy answer is that they are all piloted by Bigfoot who is himself surrounded by a blurry cloud like Pigpen in Charlie Brown land thus blurring everything in his vicinity. The hard but most correct answer is that though many people routinely carry devices with cameras with them everywhere they go, when an event like many described occurs it takes time for someone to get the device into camera mode, focus the camera onto an object or event that could be in motion towards or away from them creating significant issues for the sensors in tracking and focusing past things like window screens, leaves on trees in the foreground, infrastructure in the near field hampering focusing on smaller objects in the farfield, etc. I have a device that I carry with me that purportedly has a great camera. Yet, in spite of the technological marvel that I have in my pocket, I have on many occasions attempted to take photos of simple everyday objects like birds migrating over my property, insects in my garden, etc that should be easy. Instead I have an impressive collection of out-of-focused photos because it turns out that even with the best sensors and excellent optics it is not trivial to get the sensor to understand which element in the field of view it is supposed to focus on without making some effort to assist it. I am willing to wager that most people who have these devices, like myself, are not trained photographers and that this fact explains why most photos are poorly focused and have no cultural data that allows one to estimate size or other physical characteristics. I photograph air shows when they have them at the nearby airbase because planes are cool and I grew up near a large military installation where the air was filled with the sounds of helicopters, jets, and artillery practice way back when the Vietnam War was still a thing. As a kid it was cool to see all this and as an adult it is still cool. The last time the Blue Angels came to town I took hundreds of photos using an fairly ordinary digital camera with lots of megapixels and great digital zoom that works well for shots that are easy to compose. Of the photos that I took from a vantage point less than half a mile horizontally and with the jets passing a few hundred above the terrain I ended up with a handful that are truly well focused and worth showing off. I blame the photographer, not the camera. I also suspect that most of the other people in the crowd that day also have a similar uncomfortably large collection of slightly out of focus photos of objects flying past them on a clear, cloudless day. To me, the absence of clear photos of any of this is explained by the context that the photographer was operating in at the moment - attempting to take a photo of something they considered strange, exciting, or extraordinary while keeping it in the field of view of the camera, adjusting focus and zoom, etc. My own bias, since we all have biases or we would not offer and defend opinions so freely, many times with very little supporting evidence, is to believe that something has been happening globally for a long time that is worth studying so that we can all understand why it is happening. I will keep the popcorn popping and enjoy reading any updates or debates and if I get lucky to live long enough to see a clear photo and a definite answer then I will consider that bucket list item crossed out.
• driggs 4y ago
  > Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence. Occams Razor suggests that if these objects appear almost exclusively over US military facilities and US military training ranges, they're most likely operated by the US military. (Sorry to the Navy pilot whose security clearance is too low to be in on the secret.)
  • themanmaran 4y ago
    Or they're observed over military facilities because that's the only location with a rigorous surveillance system.
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
      Or that it’s the point of greatest interest for some adversary (alien or terrestrial )
    • flatiron 4y ago
      Or from foreign entities wondering what’s up with our military facilities.
      • KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
        The calculus would be very strange because adversaries run the risk of losing the mint if it's shot down.
        • godelski 4y ago
          What mint? A drone? A balloon? These are relatively common for surveillance devices and can be quite small and can self destruct. Even the US does this, just isn't as flashy.
    • lamontcg 4y ago
      Or because they're sensor artifacts on military systems and those systems tend to be flown over military facilities.
• alien2b 4y ago
  UFOs are only spotted in USA. Either Americans are liars or the rest of the world is blind
  • threeseed 4y ago
    Also UFOs are only seen in poor conditions by those with poor quality cameras. It's never in the middle of the day, ground level, bright sunlight with a DSLR.
  • krapp 4y ago
    I shouldn't reply to an obvious troll account, but just because I've seen this claim come up several times now, and because it gives me an excuse to drop some high strangeness - UFOs have been spotted all over the world. It isn't just a US thing, although one could always argue the effect of the influence of US cultural hegemony on sightings elsewhere. Some entertainingly noteworthy examples: Japan Airlines Cargo Flight 1628 (1986)[0] Warminster, England (1964)[1] Tuscany (1954)[2] Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England (1980)[3] Varginha, Brazil (1966)[4] Voronezh, Soviet Union (1989)[5] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Cargo_Flight_1628_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Cargo_Flight_1... [1]https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/638338/warminster-thing-ufo https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/638338/warminster-thing-... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronezh_UFO_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronezh_UFO_incident
    • neom 4y ago
      They do make a decent point tho. I don't see articles in the BBC, CBC or NHK every couple months about these things, since I've been following (recent history), it's mostly been the Americans who frequently talk about/spot this stuff.
    • alien2b 4y ago
      Troll account? damm it so many snow flakes who cant have others voice out their opinions/observations.
• patientplatypus 4y ago
  I'll believe aliens exist when little green men walk up to me, shake my hand, and start discussing the engineering particulars of faster than light travel. Until then...
• m3kw9 4y ago
  So let’s see, over the course of centuries, you can see these things but they have had zero material effect on anyone on earth except the pilots that saw them.
• kypro 4y ago
  I don't get it. In recent years a number of people who I know and I view to be very intelligent have started talk to me about how they believe reports of aliens trolling US fighter pilots and that the US government is covering this up. And I'm aware that "trolling" might be viewed as an uncharitable way of looking at it, but I actually think that's the most accurate description of what's being reported in these sightings... Before I say anymore though, I think I'm someone who could easily believe in UFO sightings. I have had reoccurring nightmares for the last decade of my life involving alien invasions of Earth. They're always slightly different, but in general I have no idea how to protect those I love and no matter what I do everyone dies. I'm certain the reason I have these nightmares is because I view the risk of an ET encounter in my lifetime to be reasonably high given how rapidly our technology is improving. And I suspect that encounter, should it happen, won't end well. But despite these predispositions I still think these reports reek of BS... The descriptions of these sightings would imply that the aliens have highly advanced technology - far beyond anything we're capable of. And if they can move with the flexibility and speed described, and are aware of the presence of the US fighter jets as is claimed, then they probably don't need to make themselves visible, but are choosing to. So then you have to ask why they want to be seen and if they're trying to send us a message? But if that was the case then what message are they even sending by occasionally trolling fighter pilots with their superior manoeuvrability? Maybe it's a threat? But if they wanted to say, "we're here and we're far more advanced than you - don't piss us off", then presumably there would be better ways to do that? I mean if a large portion of the people you're trying to send a message isn't even certain about your presence, let alone your message, then you're not exactly doing a great job. And then on top of this you have to ask why is the government would even cover this up? This clip sums up why I don't really get the narrative that the US has an interest in covering up such undisputable evidence of UFOs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTHB8iC1C0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTHB8iC1C0E The only explanation that makes sense to me is that we're being routinely visited by intergalactic trolls. And while the US government are aware that weird things are being reported it's not really clear if these sightings are accurate, if they're even aliens, and if they are aliens what the message could be. If you believe these are UFOs and have an alternative explanation that makes sense, then please help me out. I'll probably have nightmares for the next year, but I would still like to understand why I'm wrong.
• Simplicitas 4y ago
  Call me a cynic, but the most likely explanation for all of this is the Military-Industrial Complex looking for small ways to keep obscene tax money flowing into it. The rebranding of "UFO" to "UAP" is a dead giveaway, just as it was for changing the "Department of War" to the "Department of Defense".
• m3kw9 4y ago
  If a ufo came they either come super sized that half the population on earth can see at any given moment or they’d come invisible.
• ggm 4y ago
  The great thing about perception is that "Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence." uses one word (fly) in a way which can be read as implying they are there. Sorry. You saw something. your sensors reported something. Was it there? Good question. it IS a question. Really what I think a good editor would have done is intrude like this: "Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities are routinely perceived to fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence. You could add (if any) at the end if you wanted to maintain the skepticism. There are so many reasons why these things are routinely perceived: CCD errors. Optical in-lens problems. Wind shear effects. Differential lighting and occultation. Mis-attribution of large distant objects to smaller fast moving near objects and vice-versa. Bugs on the windscreen. Being a "US Navy fighter pilot" doesn't somehow insulate you from perceptual problems in the system, or systemic bias. I would suggest that the certainty of decision making vested in a fighter pilot might very well actually re-inforce the "I know what I saw" aspect here. Here's an example of receiver bias: Why are they seen flying over the military bases? Let me ask, if this is the predominant place that US Fighter Pilots would expect to see anything: Why yes, it is. Thats their main focus of alertness in take off and landing, performing their job.
  • phendrenad2 4y ago
    What's a CCD error? And how does the CCD know which way you're pointing it to know where to inject the fake UFO?
    • ggm 4y ago
      Remember, the objects display "impossible" nonlinear flight trajectories. So I hardly think "which way is up" matters at this point. CCDs aren't used much these days. But the principle is the same: if you think any kind of digital sensor behind a camera is an error-free input source, I have a UFO detector to sell you..
      • phendrenad2 4y ago
• nprateem 4y ago
  Flying saucers appear throughout art of basically all times, the most obvious being [1]. World War 2 pilots reported foo fighters which could be a natural phenomenon but may be related to UAPs. But let's assume they are human. Why would a country keep this tech secret instead of shouting about it to demonstrate their total superiority? If China had it they'd have invaded Taiwan by now. If Russia, they'd have Ukraine. If the US it must be such a deep black project that those running it haven't called Biden and said "Joe, it's us. We're trying to keep it secret. Can you shut up about it?" But none of those things have happened. Now imagine there wasn't a sigma around aliens. We all know that statistically we can't be alone, but "where is everyone?" Maybe they've been here all along which is why SETI missed them. Or their tech makes ours look like matchsticks and we'd never detect them because they're so far advanced. I'd say we're either looking at sensors that malfunction so significantly so as to make artists from a few hundred years ago paint UFOs, or they aren't us. This stuff should be investigated with an open mind, even the possibility of aliens. [1] https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/j_geomancy/v2n2/pages/screeton_de_gelder.html https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/j_geoman...
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  What's the consensus on the most plausible rationale interpretation for these sightings?
  • throwaway4aday 4y ago
    The most rational statement would be that we don't know what they are so we should take some time and effort to find out.
• sega_sai 4y ago
  I think there UAPs are either * Atmospheric effects * Debris from space launches, or other kind of debris in the atmosphere * Artefacts in optics/radars * Human illusions * Secret flying devices from various countries * Aliens I think the top 4-5 possibilities are very likely. Realistically there are a plenty of cases where it's impossible to refute more interesting hypotheses, but since they are much less likely and there is no strong direct evidence for them, I personally don't consider those too seriously.
• nscalf 4y ago
  We spend trillions in military programs. If many pilots are saying they see something crazy in the sky, and are backed by other eye witnesses, on board radar, and supporting ships radars, the only reasonable response is investigations. There shouldn’t even be a discussion about that, it should be an immediate default.
  • graderjs 4y ago
    Yeah! It’s only our fear that it is legitimately something revolutionary that causes us to ‘protect ourselves’ by not looking at it… and it’s that same fear that causes us to pretend it is not legitimate, only because we’re afraid that it is. Which then causes us to not just do the rational thing of facing it and investigating it. We’re basically denying our first highly-informative impression because we don’t want it to be true. Humans are wack
    • nprateem 4y ago
      It also shows the outstanding success of the psyops in the 60s to discredit anyone reporting UFOs. Once you remove your socialised biases, it would seem obvious there's something intelligent there worth investigating.
      • graderjs 4y ago
        > Once you remove your socialised biases, it would seem obvious there's something intelligent there worth investigating. Well, yeah, but it's not my socialised biases, I don't have any about this topic! And it's not even generally Westerners, a lot of Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and folks from everywhere have the same fear--despite their history (but you know everyone these days is "modern" and skepticism of the Old Wisdom is trendy, sadly). Some of that fear, sure, is psyops, but less than you think. Probably more than half is simply the terror that our Human Myth is wrong. Ryan Graves (post author) said it well in a podcast (KONCRETE, I think). Paraphrasing: Most people don't have the ability to integrate this information into their reality and continue their day to day life immediately. It would require longer contemplation. So instead of doing that, they just block themselves from seeing it.
• throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  Let's say UFOs exist. What are you gonna do about it? Develop more advanced weapons to try and kill them? Until we have physical evidence, these reports are just distractions with no useful purpose.
• leashless 4y ago
  If there is sensor data it’s a glitch. If there are eye witnesses they’re unreliable. I guess to nail this down it’s going to take something like wreckage. But then how would we authenticate wreckage?
• dmitrybrant 4y ago
  Interestingly, just this week we saw a perfect example of how an actual UFO sighting would play out, namely the Chinese spy balloon. We saw real, actual photos of it in the sky, instead of grainy radar images and verbal testimony. We had a real acknowledgement of it from our government, and a real response to it, i.e. shoot it down. This is all very rational and satisfactory, and is exactly what would happen if there really was something unidentified in the sky. This is all to say: purveyors of UFO/UAP theories really need to step up their game. Give us something better than "we can't give you actual photos because of stigma!!"
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    It was a slow moving object that was visible to the naked eye during the day from many highly populated areas.
• hcrean 4y ago
  There is a genuinely terrifying explanation that fits all of the data-points: That something about routine exposure to the physical effects of flying military jets effects a pilot's perceptual accuracy. This is also definitely something that would be on the hush rota; if your seasoned missile operator just reported overtaking Santa's sleigh at Mach something, it wouldn't inspire much confidence in either the new recruits or the public. Combine that with targeting systems that likely have a strong false-positive-bias and you have a recipe for Earth having been visited by little green men.
  • WaxProlix 4y ago
    This doesn't do much for the data point of on-video capture of some such phenomena, though: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52457805 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52457805
    • hcrean 4y ago
      It sort of does: Whereas normally the person operating the camera would immediately identify the neighbour's Bombay Black 'Mr. Pickles'; now we have some fuzzy footage being sold to the tabloids that might be a puma roaming the wolds of north Wales... Or the aerial equivalent.
• thevania 4y ago
  a lot of weird stuff is happening all around us all the time maybe 20 yrs ago I was walking with 3 more friends down a poorly lit alley, it was already pitch dark night, when completely out of the sudden - it became bright as it would be mid-day, all 4 of us where just standing there completely awe struct trying to understand wtf is going on, I remember looking at the sky, it was blue the whole sky was blue with white clouds, perfect visibility, the whole thing lasted maybe 5 but not more than 10 seconds and then it just "switched off" to pitch dark night again, interesting was that there was no fade-in / fade-out the switch-on / off was instantaneous a few hundred meters further down the road we met some people that we asked if they saw some flash or bright light or smth like that and they were like no, nothing like that, we checked all the media / news / weather reports - no indication of anything that could have cause this i saw a lot of meteorites / exploding in the atmosphere but those create flashes that are very brief, this phenomenon took order of magnitude longer even though a ton of statistically improbable things happened to me during my lifetime, this one weirds me out to this day, and yes i consider myself to be sceptic, with engineering / physics formal education (phd) working in science all my life i believe weird stuff like this happens to a lot of people, they just don't like to talk about it because they are afraid of sounding "stupid" ... but if we want to seriously research such phenomena - we have to gather all the evidence there might be one thing i am looking forward to is the network as a sensor 6G vision, mobile networks are omnipresent and now (2030+) they will be able to function as "omnipresent radars" thus in some not so distant future we should be able to sense our environment in a multitude of ways continuously, thus trying to figure out wtf just happened should become easier :D
• deepnotderp 4y ago
  ITT: Multiple fighter pilots (whose sole job is to understand aerial objects by eye and sensors), radar, camera and infrared have seen these. “It’s a glitch, lens flare and/or the pilots are stupid, but me a programmer is an expert in this.”
  • mberning 4y ago
    Yeah it’s a bit disappointing, but I’m not surprised. Regardless of whatever it turns out to be, it should be earnestly looked in to and documented. And if it turns out to have some national security implication then just acknowledge that you looked at it, made a determination, and won’t be providing further comment at this time. I realize that would “stir the pot” but it’s hard to imagine that being worse, especially if this becomes a major topic in the zeitgeist.
  • radus 4y ago
    This is most threads on topics outside of the CS sphere
  • Slighted 4y ago
    Every once in a while I'll come across threads like this on HN where most posters make enormous assumptions, are confidently incorrect, or refuse to be even slightly open-minded, and it makes me lose faith in this place. It comes off as a red flag, indicative of the rest of the site. There's a relevant Reddit quote that I don't have access to at the moment, but it goes something like this: "I'm an expert on X topic. I've seen people talking about my subject of expertise with extreme inaccuracy many times before and its irritating... Immediately afterwards I'll move into another thread and will forget everything I just witnessed and will take reasonably convincing posts as factual (Even though they're of the exact same nature as the post that was entirely wrong but was reasonable and convincing enough that it got hundreds of upvotes)."
    • Infinitesimus 4y ago
      That is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect in action: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
• cratermoon 4y ago
  The Gettier Problem: True Justified Belief without Knowledge: https://academy4sc.org/video/the-gettier-problem-true-justified-belief-without-knowledge/ https://academy4sc.org/video/the-gettier-problem-true-justif...
• superb-owl 4y ago
  I wrote a bit about Lt. Graves and other military sources here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/uap-evidence-summary-skepticism-and https://superbowl.substack.com/p/uap-evidence-summary-skepti... As much as I'm thankful for Graves' work, I'd been hoping another pilot had come forward with new information, or even just more validation of his stories. https://www.uap.guide/ https://www.uap.guide/ is a great compilation of all official/verified evidence of UAP activity.
• pnw 4y ago
  There's a pretty compelling set of amateur analysis of the US Navy reports on https://www.metabunk.org/forums/ufo-videos-and-reports-from-the-us-navy.60/ https://www.metabunk.org/forums/ufo-videos-and-reports-from-... if you care to read a skeptical take on the topic.
• godelski 4y ago
  Let's talk about aliens visiting Earth. There seems to be this issue that isn't brought up frequently in favor of discussing things like the Great Filter (which is unlikely). This is a less fun story. Space is big. No, bigger than that. A LOT bigger than even that! Your brain can't really grasp these distances. Our closest star is still over 4 light years away. There's 41 stars <15 light years away (approx our stellar neighborhood). Within 50ly there are 1800 stars, but most of these are red dwarfs. There are ~150 stars that are similar to ours[0]. Most of our assumptions about Drake style estimates say the likelihood is not high that we'd find life from a set of 150 stars. (here's binning up to 5kly[1]) Let's suppose that an alien civilization is able to travel faster than the speed of light. How long is it going to take them to travel here even if they're 50ly away?[2] Even at 10c that's 5 years. Even at 50c that's still a year! (a year is probably reasonable time, but the speed is unreasonable). So to find alien life on Earth we'd have to have one of a few things happen: 1) Luck. Even if probability is low, there's no reason we couldn't just be lucky in having a relatively close neighbor and that they are significantly more advanced than us. 2) Alien life is extremely common. Far more common than our guesses. Not just life, but life more advanced than us! They're also good at being hidden (we can't find their radio signals despite looking specifically at these stars first. They could have just advanced way earlier and be past radio (why abandon radio?)). They would also have to either a) have pretty fast space drives (mind you >= 1c breaks our understanding of physics. See point 3) and/or b) be pretty willing to travel vast distances/spend a long time traveling (decades to generations). To travel to Proxima Centauri (4.2ly) at 0.5c you would track >3.5yrs onboard and >8 from Earth/"off ship" (~2/~4.5 at 0.9c).[3] Remember that the time "off ship" is still seen by the civilization sending the ship, so beings doing this would likely be giving up their lives at home. c) Aliens can send remote ships that either have extremely advanced AI (willing to wait years to recover that data) and/or the ability to communicate with said ship faster than the speed of light (we still have no physics mechanism for an ansible and this would break our understanding of causality). 3) There's ways to travel SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the speed of light. At these distances even 100c can be slow. This _shatters_ our understanding of physics, causality, and the universe[4]. They are ALSO able to drop out of warp being undetected (even our hypothetical FTL drives and wormholes have huge gamma signatures. That energy has to go somewhere and it is a lot of energy). So I'm not saying that it isn't aliens, but consider that space is a lot bigger than you even thought. I don't think many people consider this aspect of space travel when they are imagining aliens. Probably because this makes for extremely boring Sci-Fis (a few do consider this, like Ender's Game, but it is not common). These distances are so far beyond what our brains were designed to understand that even our wildest imaginations don't give us a reasonably okay intuition. [0] https://www.icc.dur.ac.uk/~tt/Lectures/Galaxies/LocalGroup/Back/50lys.html https://www.icc.dur.ac.uk/~tt/Lectures/Galaxies/LocalGroup/B... [1] https://lovethenightsky.com/stars-within-100-light-years/ https://lovethenightsky.com/stars-within-100-light-years/ [2] 50ly is fairly arbitrary, but near an estimate of civilizations that would be capable of picking up our radio emissions under the assumption that they had amazing detection capabilities and could detect a very weak signal with a lot of noise (the sun produces pretty strong radio emissions) [3] https://www.emc2-explained.info/Dilation-Calc/ https://www.emc2-explained.info/Dilation-Calc/ (for our 50ly example at 0.9998c will get you to Earth in ~1yr on board time. Still 50 years "off-ship") [4] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
• sbaiddn 4y ago
  If civilian claims he saw UFOs, I assume they are in a different set of mind. If a military aviator claims he saw UFOs, I assume they're helping cover TS stuff If I witness a UFO myself among countless others with no doubt about our sanity, I will more readily believe that C.S Lewis' "space trilogy" daemons have been sent by Lucifer himself than I'll believe in super-luminous travel.
  • radus 4y ago
    So you’re saying there’s a chance?
    • sbaiddn 4y ago
      Sure. Except for something that is mathematically proven, never assign 1 or 0 probability. I just don't believe aliens are likely generally given the universe's density vs the speed of light
• belter 4y ago
  - 40,000 to 70,000 Amateur Astronomers, scan the skies every night, with precision instruments capable to distinguish Jupiter atmosphere bands. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena... - About 500 observatories in the world, most of which are located in the Northern hemisphere study nightly stars, galaxies, planets and other celestial objects. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena... - By some rough estimate, it's likely that there are anywhere between 6,000 to 8,000 commercial planes in the air on average at any given time. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena...other than the usual meteors, lights and commonly explained images. - At least 140 Countries in the World have sophisticated Air Forces with optical sensors. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena... What a conspiracy would bring together from Italian to French to Brazilians to Norwegians? - The military have sensors capable to read a bus ticket on the floor of Moscow streets. We even know the Hubble Space Telescope is a copy of spy satellites pointed at Earth. Not much reported from those teams... - The F-18 have boxes like the AN/ASQ-228. A multi-sensor, electro-optical targeting pod with thermographic camera, low-light television camera, target laser rangefinder/laser designator, and laser spot tracker with a range of 40 miles. But all images we get from these UFO look they were taken with a cheap grainy amateur camera... - These UFO seem obsessed with the US military and the United States. Have they heard about the great military capabilities of the Swiss, Luxembourg, North Korean Armies? :-) These are most likely local US Top Secret Skunk works projects. Maybe the Chinese Balloon was an attempt to trigger them.
  • ericmay 4y ago
    > Maybe the Chinese Balloon was an attempt to trigger them. Now this is the game-behind-the-game “conspiracy” stuff I can get behind. Great idea/thread to pull on there. Much better than aliens. It seems “obvious” to me that the extraterrestrial thing is a coordinated effort. Likely the US is testing its capabilities against itself.
    • majestic5762 4y ago
      My theory is that the wealthy and secret fraternities who put their men in government and politics always need controversial subjects so that they can push hidden agendas behind them. Orchestration can be easy: just a handful of people know the truth, some execute knowingly, the rest are unknowingly part of the story. It could be useful to think why they need this UFO story to resurface. Better weapons and more funding? The aliens are the masters who ask for peace and a global government? The Overton Window has already widened. Once people accept the idea of UFOs/aliens, they will start accepting more crazy ideas. Not implying there is an evil plan. Maybe there is a good plan for a better world, and the only instruments are these kind of stories that keep us in a state of wonder. They've been cooking this UFO stuff for decades. Curios to see where it ends or what's born out of it. But it seems there are evidence and trustworthy people talking about these UFO sightings. Maybe they're true. Let's not forget that the Covid story was also true, but way more convincing that it should've been. What did they gain? More money and control. Who benefited? Everybody who joined the dance silently but knowingly: from Pfizer, WHO, to local governments, businessmen, medical staff, politicians, etc, to name a few. The whole Covid story is riddled with corruption, from top to bottom, in every country of this world. But everybody's happy: the elite at the top ruled out their plan, those at the middle executed and made a profit, while those at the bottom paid the price and are glad to be alive. 3 years ago this sounded like a crazy conspiracy, but the reality of today is that they managed to pull it off in public! What's even more perverse is that even those people who feel there is something wrong, now they feel hopeless and will accept whatever life throws at them. Anyway they're always busy working to afford existence or that expensive and instagramable M6 BMW they want so much. Educated, domesticated, but sophisticated cattle. Today we have deadly viruses, WW3, UFOs, draught and famine, climate change, economic crises. Too many things happening at once, no time to find the needle in the haystack, let's just trust the government and press when they start screaming at us again. I'd love the truth that aliens are visiting us, that there is more to science than we know, but life taught me that humans are always behind any kind of story. Either fabricate, or use some real truths, but always leverage a backdoor to exploit the human mind. The backdoor is our reaction to fear and the exploit is the story. Fear is primal and many other feelings eventually boil down to fear, even love. Fear of loneliness, of hunger, of failure, of an unfulfilling life, of reject, of pain. Fear of the unknown.
• atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  I'll admit my bias up front of hoping that alien life does exist. That said, I'm pretty sympathetic to the argument that much of this could be explained with equipment malfunctions given the prevalence of identification from military sources. However, one thing I'm not sure I understand is why it's happening mainly in the U.S. America is a gigantic exporter of weapons systems, especially when it comes to aircraft (much to France's ire). Wouldn't some of those same malfunctions/anomalies be happening in other countries who are using the same equipment?
  • leonidasv 4y ago
    Well, it happened in Brazil in 1986. https://pt-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Noite_dos_discos_voadores?_x_tr_sl=pt&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=pt-BR&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://pt-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Noite_dos_disco...
• divbzero 4y ago
  Are there reports of UAP by other countries around the world?
  • doodlebugging 4y ago
    Reports of strange things in the sky have been around for decades and are not confined to the US. It has been a global phenomena but it has recently gained a lot of air time in the US due to release of at least one video.
• fsckboy 4y ago
  > Congress must reveal the truth to the American people the military and intelligence communities have no idea what to do with this information, they've probably shared a lot of it with defense contractors who are scratching their heads, and congress and the administration have no idea what to do with this information, and it serves absolutely no purpose sharing it with the American people. We don't even know if it is information. It's a nothing burger. hey, there might be aliens out there in the vastness of space. do you feel better now?
• ck2 4y ago
  Sure, have FTL travel technology, master deadly space travel, but waste time and effort buzzing around a planet instead of parking in orbit and scanning everything while the world spins on its own energy. Or even send anything other than drones at first with all the unknown.
• nl 4y ago
  I don't understand why people jump straight from "this is real" to "this is alien tech"? To me, the public apathy shown by policy makers is exactly the reaction I'd expect to see if there was some top-secret program going on that either has access to the tech or was attempting to replicate tech a non-US country had. In both cases politicians and policy makers would be told by the intelligence community "don't worry, we've got this" and be given additional access depending on their clearance. There are numerous examples of this type of behavior that we know about: Manhattan project, the invention of public key encryption at GCHQ at least by the early 70's (at least 3 years before its public invention) and US Stealth technology are three that jump to mind. Surely a much simpler explanations for these observations is another similar program?
• 404mm 4y ago
  If you are interested in this new angle on UAP, check out the Merged Podcast (https://youtube.com/channel/UCHN8Do9rEyOTVNjL2I38yiA https://youtube.com/channel/UCHN8Do9rEyOTVNjL2I38yiA).
• animex 4y ago
  https://petapixel.com/2022/03/14/famous-navy-ufo-video-was-actually-camera-glare-evidence-suggests/ https://petapixel.com/2022/03/14/famous-navy-ufo-video-was-a...
• mark336 4y ago
  The real question is how many of you want to hang out with these guys. They are probably a bunch of nerds. Secondly, once they start empregnating your hot brunnettes you'll be like, why didn't we listen to the fighter pilot.
• NullByteDelight 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IZ091JnsDAs https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IZ091JnsDAs
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  People would rather believe that hundreds of military personnel are misreading equipment or swamp gas is messing with their sensors than there's some phenomenon we can't explain.
• bostonwalker 4y ago
  Excluding otherworldly forms of speculation about why possible aliens are visiting us, this subject really boils down to four tangible questions about how we arrived at this footage and the eyewitness accounts from Fravor et al: - Is it aliens? - If not, do these sightings represent real unexplainable technological phenomena (advanced propulsion technology)? - If not, are the eyewitness accounts credible? - In any case, why is the DoD letting eyewitnesses go public? With the answers to these questions we can enumerate several interesting possible explanations: 1) It’s not aliens, sightings do not represent any real unexplainable physical phenomena, the eyewitnesses have collectively deluded themselves somehow and are not credible, the DoD has allowed them to go public seeing the matter as benign (the “lens glare” hypothesis) 2) It’s not aliens or any unexplainable phenomenon, the eyewitnesses are deluded, but the DoD has let them go public for some ulterior motive, possibly to sow confusion and provide cover for real technologies they are working on (the “useful idiots” hypothesis) 3) It’s not aliens or any advanced technology, maybe it’s even completely fabricated, and the eyewitnesses are involved in a PSYOP. Possibly to delude US adversaries into chasing their tails, or to provide cover for real technologies (the “PSYOP” hypothesis) 4) It’s not aliens, but it is an advanced technology being developed in secret by the US, the eyewitnesses are unaware of the providence of said technologies, and the DoD has let them go public as a PSYOP to sow confusion or to signal capabilities to adversaries (the “skunk works” hypothesis) 5) It is aliens, it is known by governments worldwide, and the DoD has let the eyewitnesses go public because they see it as a benign public good or are not willing or capable of stopping the flow of said information (the “UFO whistleblower” hypothesis) 6) It is aliens, it is unknown by some other governments, and the US wants to sound the alarm, possibly to signal other nations to come forward with their own information and start working on a global strategy for managing the situation (the “Earth defence” hypothesis)
  • judge2020 4y ago
    > - In any case, why is the DoD letting eyewitnesses go public? It seems there is a lot of pressure from high-up in the government to release at least old-enough footage of UAP, given the recent releases of UAP footage[0,1]. 0: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2165713/statement-by-the-department-of-defense-on-the-release-of-historical-navy-videos/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/216571... 1: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3491437-watch-new-ufo-footage-declassified-by-the-military/ https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3491437-watch-n...
• derrida 4y ago
  I can't believe this meme still works in 2023. To those that haven't worked it out yet: Stories about UFOs act as a cover for what is a very sensible, ordinary and legitimate activity: maintaining secrecy around capabilities of spy craft. It provides cover by making in-credible any revelation by local residents and so on of actual probably very ordinary and boring aircraft capabilities. It lets their actual capabilities "fly under the radar" so to speak when you play up whimsical capabilities.
• thrwy298379 4y ago
  > However, just this past week, a Chinese surveillance balloon shut down air traffic across the United States. Untrue. The shutdown of air traffic was due to a glitch in FAA's NOTAM system. It's when events get conflated like this that Chinese allegations of a coordinated media attack gain cred. Stopped reading there.
• reso 4y ago
  Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665 https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665 These were supposed to be the smoking gun evidence. UFO believers inside the DoD and as high up as US Senators fought for years to get them declassified. As soon as they were public, they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective. More generally this showed how easy it is to misinterpret the information being put out by complex sensors like FLIR, even the operators do it.
  • wefarrell 4y ago
    That explanation fails to account for the multiple other sensors that picked them up, including several different radar systems and the fact that multiple pilots witnessed them with their eyes. However the other sensor data are classified which makes it impossible to draw any conclusions.
    • KingOfCoders 4y ago
      If they release the videos we will know! <videos released> If they release the radar data we will know! <radar data released> If they release ...
      • ALittleLight 4y ago
        The original article cites pilots, Congress-people, and members of the intelligence services saying there are hundreds of credible instances of apparently advanced technology documented by eyewitness testimony, video, radar, infrared, etc. Seems completely different than your parody here.
        • simonh 4y ago
          It really isn’t, it’s what’s happened. The recordings released a couple of years ago were also breathlessly reported to be classified smoking gun evidence, confirmed by analysts, that would change everything. Except when we got to actually see them, what we saw was video of pilots patently misreading the sensor data shown in the same recording, and some fuzzy lens flared blobs that could be anything.
• headsoup 4y ago
  Michio Kaku said something in an interview a while ago that struck me: to think about the universe being billions of years old, there is no reason there aren't planets out there millions of years of advancement ahead of us. And just imagine what we might be capable of (aside disaster of course) with another few million years of progress?...
  • can16358p 4y ago
    Well, there is more to it. That is one of the many interpretations of Fermi Paradox. But there may also be a great filter that might be preventing any civilization from reaching a certain tech level.
• srge 4y ago
  Maybe it should say something about a subject when talking about it requires courage and « debunking » it just requires an anonymous account on social media and the same set of blanket « arguments ».
• BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  To me this sounds like if I was saying "as an owner of a bank account, I witnessed decisions of the French budget that I do not understand. It must be secret money". He is a pilot, and saw stuff. Since there are not always data driven evidence (we just do not know, it could have been this or that) it is easier to say UFO. Maybe this is incompetence of the ones who monitor the sky, and they want to hide it. Maybe we cannot explain it because we do not know if this was a bird or a plane. Saying "UFO" is a bold word, that requires bold evidence. The fact that the super secretive army does not want to show their data just fuels the conspiracy.
  • yokoprime 4y ago
    What is OVNI? Is this French for UFO?
    • Luc 4y ago
      Yes.
    • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      Sorry, yes. Edited to UFO.
    • Karawebnetwork 4y ago
      Objet volant non identifié Objet: object volant: flying non identifié: Unidentified
• dustfinger 4y ago
  On the one hand, there are those whom favour the phenomenal over the mundane. On the other, there are those too quick to dismiss the phenomenal for the comforting familiarity of the mundane. Yet, the truth cannot be found unless both are dismissed out of hand until the root cause is known. I think the military should take these scenarios seriously and investigate them objectively.
• qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Imagine a civilization, long dead, leaving a gravestone. A laser in orbit of there homeworld, beaming short "candles" aka datapulses to the projected locations of worlds in other habittable star systems. We can see these worlds, we could beam a message there, even a short story how we failed with warnings. So what could be seen at the endpoint? A flickering light disk traversing a cloud cover, with the speed of planetary rotation. (400 m/s) I do want to believe, that this is whats out there. Lots of failed societies trying to warn us, the message encoded in math. Exponential Series.. for 100 years. Zero forever.
• t0bia_s 4y ago
  Every few weeks there appear some article about UFO. Is it propaganda for justify investment to military technology?
• jwally 4y ago
  Maybe a dumb question: Is it more probable that the UAP are extraterrestrials OR is it more probable they are an ancient civilization with advanced technology like Atlantis or Wakanda. The latter doesn't have to find earth or violate the known laws of physics. I think its a camera flare fwiw; but as I read through the comments it was an interesting thought that occurred...
  • robshrk 4y ago
    Or is it possible they are future humans. Perhaps time travel is only possible backwards with no return trip forwards.
• creamynebula 4y ago
  The clever aliens always make the evidence they leave ambiguous enough, and then they enjoy themselves reading the threads.
• l33tman 4y ago
  FWIW, the guy who wrote this article, Ryan Graves, is one of the aviators who flew and witnessed these, in addition to David Frevor (also mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Ryan was interviewed by Lex Fridman, a very good talk I think that felt balanced on the subject.
  • metadat 4y ago
    For convenience, here's a link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qLDp-aYnR1Y https://youtube.com/watch?v=qLDp-aYnR1Y p.s.: l33tman, including a link to referenced materials will add greater value to your comments and often be appreciated by others.
• supercheetah 4y ago
  Trying to rename UFOs to UAPs seems like a waste of effort to me. I don't think anyone that's already convinced they're made by aliens are suddenly going to be convinced that they're not. If anything, this will fuel their speculations of cover ups, and they'll probably even think this name change was ordered by little green men. I don't think anyone getting emails and letters about this stuff are going to see a drop in their volume about this stuff.
• michaelcampbell 4y ago
  > I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena This is more a "you" thing than a "phenomena" one, methinks.