13 ms·

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 --

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
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  > At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this https://youtu.be/VCH7BWGpl5s https://youtu.be/VCH7BWGpl5s
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Darn it, I hate predictability. Why is it always, always, always "just watch this 'short' hour-long video of random people talking with fake authority and undeserved confidence", and never "here just check out this Cochrane meta study and review data & evidence linked" (I made the mistake of clicking and now YouTube thinks I want to see "this man shows evidence usa possesses exotic matter", "real photos of JFK killer" and "Chilling alien messages encoded in ancient tombs". That's not the bubble I want to be in!! :-D)
  - jerf 4y ago
    Go to your history and delete it. I assume this does little to nothing for ads, but it definitely does affect suggestions. I like the occasional "cute animal" video, but if you leave one in your history, YouTube becomes a cute animal machine.
    - elevaet 4y ago
      Hah this is so true. I always watch stuff like this in an incognito mode browser.
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Fascinating! I assumed it wouldn't work - sure they'd take it away from history view, but keep it as a data point regardless of deletion
  - angry_moose 4y ago
    The name of the show is 60 Minutes, a popular and generally reputable* US news program. The actual clip is 13 minutes. *Because I know it's coming, yes, they aren't perfect; but considering they've been going 55 years they're far better than most. I found they were pretty balanced in this clip - skeptical but not dismissive.
psychphysic 4y ago
It's worth mentioning also the infamous go fast and swivel videos have been explained. And both revealed that several pilots we mislead by the same simple phenomena. And it wasn't a pilot who explained it but engineers who actually knew how the sensors worked.
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
  Absolutely they have not, no credible debunking of those videos exist.
  - Jenk 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
    - LewisVerstappen 4y ago
      It's completely disingenuous to just link that video as an authoritative source (when it's not... in any way). You should also put Ryan Grave's response to that video - https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0 https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0
      - cycomanic 4y ago
        Except for that the reply doesn't actual counter any of the analysis made in the sceptic video, but instead criticises Mike for taking a sceptic approach and disregarding the audio from the pilots (because they essentially see the same thing as we see in the video). This is the typical approach one sees over and over again from most people invested in some sort of conspiracy theory, they never reply to technical criticism, but instead either switch to some other "evidence" or criticise the sceptic for "not taking an open minded approach".
        naasking 4y ago
        > because they essentially see the same thing as we see in the video If the pilots see the same thing with their eyes then that significantly undermines West's theory, because human eyes wouldn't have the same visual artifacts as these sensors. It would have to be an extreme coincidence for this all to line up just right across multiple sensor systems and human eyes as well. No impossible, but very implausible.
icare_1er 4y ago
Not at all. The tic-tac was recorded by radars; infrared from the plane; and seen by two experienced USAF pilots.
carabiner 4y ago
The tic tac was seen by naked eye though: > During a routine training mission in 2004, Dietrich and her then-commanding officer had noticed an unusual "churning" of the ocean surface before seeing "a smooth, white oblong object resembling a large Tic Tac breath mint flying at high speed over the water."
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  It was seen - by multiple fighter jet pilots (in different planes) - picked up by the fighter jet's radar - picked up by the USS Nimitz's radar. So yeah...
  - natch 4y ago
    Fighter jet pilot is a self-avowed prankster and “class clown” (his words). One of the people who wrote the software for that radar system is his good buddy, best man at his wedding, and was on duty nearby on that day. It could all be a big prank. Some of the eyewitnesses saw what they saw on, wait for it, a radar screen. Well technically it was another technology not exactly radar but I forget the name. [edit: FLIR, which may or may not be a type of radar… I know as much about this as I know about little green men.] But color me unconvinced. And sure there are other embellishments to the story but we really don’t know what’s real here and what’s not.
    - Sightline 4y ago
      Case dismissed, natch figured it out. Everyone go home and stop asking questions.
    - narrator 4y ago
      Coincidence theory at its finest.
      - natch 4y ago
        I know, right? Just by coincidence the little green men decided to single out some pranksters to reveal themselves to. Definitely the most likely explanation. /s
scarier 4y ago
Frankly, I think the reality is even less interesting than that. US military aviators are trained to be proficient systems operators, but typically (and, I want to stress, very reasonably) have little or no education in EM/EO theory, and don't always understand the assumptions that engineers baked into these systems to optimize them for their primary use cases (which, in the case of targeting pods, is identification and targeting of surface objects--air-to-air capability was something of an afterthought). Knowing a little bit about how these systems work, I think it's pretty obvious why targeting pods wouldn't be able to focus properly in these kinds of circumstances, and how their built-in tracking heuristics could lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions even by well-intentioned operators and analysts. I can't speak for the radar data, as I've never seen even leaked radar page footage from these events, but for those of you out there who think that what you see on the scope is a perfect analog of the real world, boy do I have some bad news for you... It's also interesting to me that every single one of these videos I'm aware of has come from what's generally regarded as the least capable and most error-prone targeting pod currently in US service.
- nostromo 4y ago
  I’m reminded of Aeroperú Flight 603. The pilots suspected their altitude indicator was wrong, so they asked air traffic control to confirm their altitude. They did and it agreed with their own readings so they ignored other indications that they were going to crash into the ocean, which is unfortunately what happened. Neither the pilots nor air traffic control apparently knew that both readings were supplied by the same faulty source on the plane and sent via the plane’s transponder. I often think of this when I hear people say that multiple sources indicate something strange. These systems are often intertwined and networked in unintuitive ways and just because something appears on multiple panes of glass does not necessarily mean it’s been independently confirmed.
  - deadbeeves 4y ago
    That's amazing. So ATC didn't have the capability to measure the altitude of any plane themselves?
PaulRobinson 4y ago
This comment - interesting though it is - has irked me. To me it's sometimes amazing the lengths people will go to in order to insist something they can't believe must be because another party is at best mistaken, or at worst lying. The article states that UAP were likely - in the view of the author who is speaking from personal experience and knowledge of incidents and people involved - witnessed by 50-60 people "every day". The unclassified material records UAP from multiple sources including naked eye and two completely different sensor technologies - radar and infrared. And yet, here we are. "Maybe there was just a glitch with the sensors". No. No glitch. No sensor malfunction. No lone guy on weird meds. Every day, UAP are being witnessed by credible, trained witnesses from multiple sources, and are not being mitigated because people fail to take them entirely seriously. The article states that this is a major national security problem for the US. Too true. If these start appearing near a Russian ICBM silo, do we entirely trust - without figuring out what they are - that they aren't going to trigger a nuclear war? It needs to be taken seriously. Hand-waving it away as mistaken people or flawed equipment despite professional men and women insisting they have already discounted those factors is an embarrassment to their professionalism and candour. It takes guts to talk about this. And let's just remember these aren't tinfoil hat wearing stoners: they're service people sworn to protect their country screaming out "hey, you need to look at this, because we can't mitigate for this, and it's dangerous". However, this isn't new, it's been culturally normal for decades. If I told you that one USAAF officer who had served at Roswell Army Air Field at the time of "the incident" in 1947 had since come forward and said "Look, I was scared about losing my pension so I didn't say anything at the time, but the truth is there was a cover-up, and we couldn't really identify what that thing that crashed was but it wasn't ours and it didn't seem Soviet. People were scared because that base was the largest base for the Strategic Air Command, and admitting that weird unidentified objects could just get into airspace around there and we couldn't do anything about it would have terrified the public", you'd think about it and go "sure, one guy, not buying it entirely". What if I told you ten individuals had all come forward - some with death bed confessions - and without evidence of collusion and for no payment or reward (not even a TV interview), had said similar things? What if they categorically insisted the updated explanation - not a weather balloon but an early warning radar system - was also not viable, because they were familiar with all those systems and this wasn't that? What about a hundred ex-service people? A hundred accounts like that, some of them notarised statements to be released after their death? Or made shortly before last rites when they knew the pension couldn't be withdrawn? Would a hundred people doing that make you think "glitch" or "human error"? The actual number is just over 600 right now. Seriously, _six hundred_ people have insisted that there was a significant security threat that never really got resolved, and about a dozen of them attest to life forms they couldn't really describe as human being present at the site. Perhaps that's all too much for you, so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal". It's taken 70 years to get to the point where we can start talking about this a little more openly. Let's not close this debate down again now. Is any of it ET in origin? Probably not. Tic-tacs might be drone tech. Roswell might have been Soviet after all. But we'll never know if we don't start showing a bit more curiosity rather than reflexing to "probably not real".
juskrey 4y ago
Throughout my already 20 year IT career, I can't even count how many times I've come across extremely paranoid explanations, often in the verge of insanity, of regular computer behavior like basic non obvious algos or glitches. From people otherwise normal. What is interesting, almost never I could change person's mind, once toxic explanation is in. Recently, with all that internet marketing and real surveillance tech, this worsened a lot. Some humans are just wired differently.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  This speaks to both sides of the problem in getting to the truth. On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speeds"). On the other hand, we use sensationalism to dismiss accurate reports ("You said your radar showed extremely high velocity, therefore what are you reporting, a UFO?"). The new approach seems best: report, collect, and analyze the data, and see where it goes.
  - deadbeeves 4y ago
    You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted. Why is it that alien spaceships (let's call them what people actually think is being discussed, and not just any random flying thing that we don't know what it is) only show up on equipment when you can barely tell what you're looking at, and never clearly and unambiguously from multiple places?
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      I look at it from the opposite perspective. If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful? The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security. Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.
MrMan 4y ago
[flagged]
tejohnso 4y ago
> Were the pilots reporting things seen with their eyes, or looking at imaging displays that have been processed There are cases where multiple pilots are seeing an object with their eyes, while ship radar is picking it up, and also aircraft infra-red is picking it up at the same time. Multiple aircraft, multiple sensors, multiple sets of eyes. Not only that, there is at least one case where a pilot engaged with the object, and the object responded with evasive maneuvers.
okdood64 4y ago
It's incredible that armchair experts can dismiss something as a glitch from corroborated observations from some of the best aerial operators of the most powerful and well funded military on earth. Yes, glitches exist, but don't yet account for all cases. One can read the congressional reports that say the same.
- heyoni 4y ago
  I thought the whole point of this article is that those reports are uninteresting because so much information is withheld. I’m also curious to know if there are reports similar to these coming from civilian or commercial pilots. I mean, it doesn’t take a too gun pilot to observe a tic tac shaped flying object but it seems to me that it’s all coming from the us military who share similar technology. There is one other group of UAP sightings I’m aware of and it’s from civilians and it seems to come almost strictly from civilians in North America.
  - okdood64 4y ago
    The tic-tacs in particular are observed around military areas which I presume has a civilian no-fly zone. But yes, to be fair, there is a selection bias here in a sense.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For all their powerfullness and funding, I expect something better than 240p imagery. Particularly when it happens all the time in one of the most heavily instrumented naval test ranges on earth. But that’s just me.
  - okdood64 4y ago
    What claim is being made? It's just a matter of taking these observations seriously.
revscat 4y ago
The explainable ones are boring. The unexplainable 1% are the exciting ones.

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

oldgradstudent 4y ago
> At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this https://youtu.be/VCH7BWGpl5s https://youtu.be/VCH7BWGpl5s
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Darn it, I hate predictability. Why is it always, always, always "just watch this 'short' hour-long video of random people talking with fake authority and undeserved confidence", and never "here just check out this Cochrane meta study and review data & evidence linked" (I made the mistake of clicking and now YouTube thinks I want to see "this man shows evidence usa possesses exotic matter", "real photos of JFK killer" and "Chilling alien messages encoded in ancient tombs". That's not the bubble I want to be in!! :-D)
- jerf 4y ago
  Go to your history and delete it. I assume this does little to nothing for ads, but it definitely does affect suggestions. I like the occasional "cute animal" video, but if you leave one in your history, YouTube becomes a cute animal machine.
  - elevaet 4y ago
    Hah this is so true. I always watch stuff like this in an incognito mode browser.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Fascinating! I assumed it wouldn't work - sure they'd take it away from history view, but keep it as a data point regardless of deletion
- angry_moose 4y ago
  The name of the show is 60 Minutes, a popular and generally reputable* US news program. The actual clip is 13 minutes. *Because I know it's coming, yes, they aren't perfect; but considering they've been going 55 years they're far better than most. I found they were pretty balanced in this clip - skeptical but not dismissive.

psychphysic 4y ago

It's worth mentioning also the infamous go fast and swivel videos have been explained. And both revealed that several pilots we mislead by the same simple phenomena. And it wasn't a pilot who explained it but engineers who actually knew how the sensors worked.

newZWhoDis 4y ago
Absolutely they have not, no credible debunking of those videos exist.
- Jenk 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
  - LewisVerstappen 4y ago
    It's completely disingenuous to just link that video as an authoritative source (when it's not... in any way). You should also put Ryan Grave's response to that video - https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0 https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      Except for that the reply doesn't actual counter any of the analysis made in the sceptic video, but instead criticises Mike for taking a sceptic approach and disregarding the audio from the pilots (because they essentially see the same thing as we see in the video). This is the typical approach one sees over and over again from most people invested in some sort of conspiracy theory, they never reply to technical criticism, but instead either switch to some other "evidence" or criticise the sceptic for "not taking an open minded approach".
      - naasking 4y ago
        > because they essentially see the same thing as we see in the video If the pilots see the same thing with their eyes then that significantly undermines West's theory, because human eyes wouldn't have the same visual artifacts as these sensors. It would have to be an extreme coincidence for this all to line up just right across multiple sensor systems and human eyes as well. No impossible, but very implausible.

icare_1er 4y ago

Not at all. The tic-tac was recorded by radars; infrared from the plane; and seen by two experienced USAF pilots.

carabiner 4y ago

The tic tac was seen by naked eye though: > During a routine training mission in 2004, Dietrich and her then-commanding officer had noticed an unusual "churning" of the ocean surface before seeing "a smooth, white oblong object resembling a large Tic Tac breath mint flying at high speed over the water."

LewisVerstappen 4y ago
It was seen - by multiple fighter jet pilots (in different planes) - picked up by the fighter jet's radar - picked up by the USS Nimitz's radar. So yeah...
- natch 4y ago
  Fighter jet pilot is a self-avowed prankster and “class clown” (his words). One of the people who wrote the software for that radar system is his good buddy, best man at his wedding, and was on duty nearby on that day. It could all be a big prank. Some of the eyewitnesses saw what they saw on, wait for it, a radar screen. Well technically it was another technology not exactly radar but I forget the name. [edit: FLIR, which may or may not be a type of radar… I know as much about this as I know about little green men.] But color me unconvinced. And sure there are other embellishments to the story but we really don’t know what’s real here and what’s not.
  - Sightline 4y ago
    Case dismissed, natch figured it out. Everyone go home and stop asking questions.
  - narrator 4y ago
    Coincidence theory at its finest.
    - natch 4y ago
      I know, right? Just by coincidence the little green men decided to single out some pranksters to reveal themselves to. Definitely the most likely explanation. /s

scarier 4y ago

Frankly, I think the reality is even less interesting than that. US military aviators are trained to be proficient systems operators, but typically (and, I want to stress, very reasonably) have little or no education in EM/EO theory, and don't always understand the assumptions that engineers baked into these systems to optimize them for their primary use cases (which, in the case of targeting pods, is identification and targeting of surface objects--air-to-air capability was something of an afterthought). Knowing a little bit about how these systems work, I think it's pretty obvious why targeting pods wouldn't be able to focus properly in these kinds of circumstances, and how their built-in tracking heuristics could lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions even by well-intentioned operators and analysts. I can't speak for the radar data, as I've never seen even leaked radar page footage from these events, but for those of you out there who think that what you see on the scope is a perfect analog of the real world, boy do I have some bad news for you... It's also interesting to me that every single one of these videos I'm aware of has come from what's generally regarded as the least capable and most error-prone targeting pod currently in US service.

nostromo 4y ago
I’m reminded of Aeroperú Flight 603. The pilots suspected their altitude indicator was wrong, so they asked air traffic control to confirm their altitude. They did and it agreed with their own readings so they ignored other indications that they were going to crash into the ocean, which is unfortunately what happened. Neither the pilots nor air traffic control apparently knew that both readings were supplied by the same faulty source on the plane and sent via the plane’s transponder. I often think of this when I hear people say that multiple sources indicate something strange. These systems are often intertwined and networked in unintuitive ways and just because something appears on multiple panes of glass does not necessarily mean it’s been independently confirmed.
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  That's amazing. So ATC didn't have the capability to measure the altitude of any plane themselves?

PaulRobinson 4y ago

This comment - interesting though it is - has irked me. To me it's sometimes amazing the lengths people will go to in order to insist something they can't believe must be because another party is at best mistaken, or at worst lying. The article states that UAP were likely - in the view of the author who is speaking from personal experience and knowledge of incidents and people involved - witnessed by 50-60 people "every day". The unclassified material records UAP from multiple sources including naked eye and two completely different sensor technologies - radar and infrared. And yet, here we are. "Maybe there was just a glitch with the sensors". No. No glitch. No sensor malfunction. No lone guy on weird meds. Every day, UAP are being witnessed by credible, trained witnesses from multiple sources, and are not being mitigated because people fail to take them entirely seriously. The article states that this is a major national security problem for the US. Too true. If these start appearing near a Russian ICBM silo, do we entirely trust - without figuring out what they are - that they aren't going to trigger a nuclear war? It needs to be taken seriously. Hand-waving it away as mistaken people or flawed equipment despite professional men and women insisting they have already discounted those factors is an embarrassment to their professionalism and candour. It takes guts to talk about this. And let's just remember these aren't tinfoil hat wearing stoners: they're service people sworn to protect their country screaming out "hey, you need to look at this, because we can't mitigate for this, and it's dangerous". However, this isn't new, it's been culturally normal for decades. If I told you that one USAAF officer who had served at Roswell Army Air Field at the time of "the incident" in 1947 had since come forward and said "Look, I was scared about losing my pension so I didn't say anything at the time, but the truth is there was a cover-up, and we couldn't really identify what that thing that crashed was but it wasn't ours and it didn't seem Soviet. People were scared because that base was the largest base for the Strategic Air Command, and admitting that weird unidentified objects could just get into airspace around there and we couldn't do anything about it would have terrified the public", you'd think about it and go "sure, one guy, not buying it entirely". What if I told you ten individuals had all come forward - some with death bed confessions - and without evidence of collusion and for no payment or reward (not even a TV interview), had said similar things? What if they categorically insisted the updated explanation - not a weather balloon but an early warning radar system - was also not viable, because they were familiar with all those systems and this wasn't that? What about a hundred ex-service people? A hundred accounts like that, some of them notarised statements to be released after their death? Or made shortly before last rites when they knew the pension couldn't be withdrawn? Would a hundred people doing that make you think "glitch" or "human error"? The actual number is just over 600 right now. Seriously, _six hundred_ people have insisted that there was a significant security threat that never really got resolved, and about a dozen of them attest to life forms they couldn't really describe as human being present at the site. Perhaps that's all too much for you, so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal". It's taken 70 years to get to the point where we can start talking about this a little more openly. Let's not close this debate down again now. Is any of it ET in origin? Probably not. Tic-tacs might be drone tech. Roswell might have been Soviet after all. But we'll never know if we don't start showing a bit more curiosity rather than reflexing to "probably not real".

juskrey 4y ago

Throughout my already 20 year IT career, I can't even count how many times I've come across extremely paranoid explanations, often in the verge of insanity, of regular computer behavior like basic non obvious algos or glitches. From people otherwise normal. What is interesting, almost never I could change person's mind, once toxic explanation is in. Recently, with all that internet marketing and real surveillance tech, this worsened a lot. Some humans are just wired differently.

ethbr0 4y ago
This speaks to both sides of the problem in getting to the truth. On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speeds"). On the other hand, we use sensationalism to dismiss accurate reports ("You said your radar showed extremely high velocity, therefore what are you reporting, a UFO?"). The new approach seems best: report, collect, and analyze the data, and see where it goes.
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted. Why is it that alien spaceships (let's call them what people actually think is being discussed, and not just any random flying thing that we don't know what it is) only show up on equipment when you can barely tell what you're looking at, and never clearly and unambiguously from multiple places?
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    I look at it from the opposite perspective. If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful? The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security. Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.

MrMan 4y ago

[flagged]

tejohnso 4y ago

> Were the pilots reporting things seen with their eyes, or looking at imaging displays that have been processed There are cases where multiple pilots are seeing an object with their eyes, while ship radar is picking it up, and also aircraft infra-red is picking it up at the same time. Multiple aircraft, multiple sensors, multiple sets of eyes. Not only that, there is at least one case where a pilot engaged with the object, and the object responded with evasive maneuvers.

okdood64 4y ago

It's incredible that armchair experts can dismiss something as a glitch from corroborated observations from some of the best aerial operators of the most powerful and well funded military on earth. Yes, glitches exist, but don't yet account for all cases. One can read the congressional reports that say the same.

heyoni 4y ago
I thought the whole point of this article is that those reports are uninteresting because so much information is withheld. I’m also curious to know if there are reports similar to these coming from civilian or commercial pilots. I mean, it doesn’t take a too gun pilot to observe a tic tac shaped flying object but it seems to me that it’s all coming from the us military who share similar technology. There is one other group of UAP sightings I’m aware of and it’s from civilians and it seems to come almost strictly from civilians in North America.
- okdood64 4y ago
  The tic-tacs in particular are observed around military areas which I presume has a civilian no-fly zone. But yes, to be fair, there is a selection bias here in a sense.
hindsightbias 4y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For all their powerfullness and funding, I expect something better than 240p imagery. Particularly when it happens all the time in one of the most heavily instrumented naval test ranges on earth. But that’s just me.
- okdood64 4y ago
  What claim is being made? It's just a matter of taking these observations seriously.

revscat 4y ago

The explainable ones are boring. The unexplainable 1% are the exciting ones.