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The original article cites pilots, Congress-people, and members of the intelligence services saying there are hundreds of credible instances of apparently advan

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.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  That's exactly what's in the article. I could quote it, but I'd basically just be copying and pasting the whole thing. Every element of my previous comment is in the original article. Either the pilots, Senators, and intelligence officials are lying (or absurdly incompetent) or it is as they say.
  - simonh 4y ago
    They don’t have to be lying, just mistaken, like the pilots on some if the video we do have. Sometimes people make mistakes, it happens.
    - Loquebantur 4y ago
      The idea of multiple military pilots, radar operators, analysts, etc. being mistaken simultaneously in the same way over the course of extended periods of time on multiple occasions is rather concerning. Maybe they should build in a third seat on those planes and staff it with some intellectually adequate people from hacker news? The point isn't pilots and other professionals being perfect, it is about the probability of them being wrong (should be slim). Independent probabilities multiply, making such a confluence of mishaps exceedingly unlikely.
      - simonh 4y ago
        Sure, the fact that we have pilots on recordings clearly and obviously misreading instrument data also shown in the same recordings is concerning, but that's where we are. I don't understand how this can be such a huge surprise though. Humans make mistakes, we have multiple layers of checks and controls for the management of complex systems like planes because of this. It's why airliners have co-pilots, it's why we like to have multiple confirmations from different systems before making life or death critical decisions. Yet still friendly fire incidents happen, mid-air collisions happen. Accidents like the shooting down of flight 655 by the USS Vincennes happen, in which a whole bridge crew and leadership with access to all the information misinterpreted it at multiple levels of review. Similar full system failures by multiple personnel simultaneously have lead to warship collisions. It boggles my mind that somehow knowing all of this about the ever present potential for human error, even by highly trained competent people, goes out of the window when it comes to potential "UFO" sightings. All of a suddens military pilots and sensor operators are perfect paragons that never make mistakes and should never be questioned.
    - tcmart14 4y ago
      This is the crappy part. I am sure some are mistaken, honestly. But then there are some I am sure are just fishing for book deals. Both of these can be true simultaneously. The problem is differentiating who is honestly mistaken and who has other motives.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > or absurdly incompetent This is your error. There is no "absurdity" needed, as we didn't evolve for accurately perceiving phenomena seen while manoeuvring in transsonic flight, and we don't develop a perfect "common sense" for them either. I'm not going to try to come up with something counterintuitive about flight, because I don't even do flight simulators. But I can say this general category of us doing things we didn't evolve for is also why so many people — even smart people — struggle with the Monty Hall paradox, even though it's fairly simple probability.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    Yes they are all incompetent. The process selects for bullshitting ability, pork-barrel manufacturing skill and charisma.
4bpp 4y ago
It's not clear how many independent sources this actually reflects. All that we, as members of the general public, have to go by is a low-quality video, and a bunch of "soandso said that soandso said that soandso saw..."-type reports that involve a chain of "soandso"s not selected for critical thinking (news media, congresspeople) and ending in people that all belong to the same command structure (the US military), which could have any number of reasons, some enumerated downthread, to order them to report independently having seen something - or, even more straightforwardly, to have standing orders that prevent individual personnel from coming forward and saying that to their knowledge no such thing happened if whoever the higher-ups tasked with talking to the media pulled the statement that hundreds of members of the crew independently saw the UFO out of their rear end.
low_tech_love 4y ago
Exactly, plus my second-cousin and the neighbor of my father-in-law also swear they saw it.

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.

ALittleLight 4y ago
That's exactly what's in the article. I could quote it, but I'd basically just be copying and pasting the whole thing. Every element of my previous comment is in the original article. Either the pilots, Senators, and intelligence officials are lying (or absurdly incompetent) or it is as they say.
- simonh 4y ago
  They don’t have to be lying, just mistaken, like the pilots on some if the video we do have. Sometimes people make mistakes, it happens.
  - Loquebantur 4y ago
    The idea of multiple military pilots, radar operators, analysts, etc. being mistaken simultaneously in the same way over the course of extended periods of time on multiple occasions is rather concerning. Maybe they should build in a third seat on those planes and staff it with some intellectually adequate people from hacker news? The point isn't pilots and other professionals being perfect, it is about the probability of them being wrong (should be slim). Independent probabilities multiply, making such a confluence of mishaps exceedingly unlikely.
    - simonh 4y ago
      Sure, the fact that we have pilots on recordings clearly and obviously misreading instrument data also shown in the same recordings is concerning, but that's where we are. I don't understand how this can be such a huge surprise though. Humans make mistakes, we have multiple layers of checks and controls for the management of complex systems like planes because of this. It's why airliners have co-pilots, it's why we like to have multiple confirmations from different systems before making life or death critical decisions. Yet still friendly fire incidents happen, mid-air collisions happen. Accidents like the shooting down of flight 655 by the USS Vincennes happen, in which a whole bridge crew and leadership with access to all the information misinterpreted it at multiple levels of review. Similar full system failures by multiple personnel simultaneously have lead to warship collisions. It boggles my mind that somehow knowing all of this about the ever present potential for human error, even by highly trained competent people, goes out of the window when it comes to potential "UFO" sightings. All of a suddens military pilots and sensor operators are perfect paragons that never make mistakes and should never be questioned.
  - tcmart14 4y ago
    This is the crappy part. I am sure some are mistaken, honestly. But then there are some I am sure are just fishing for book deals. Both of these can be true simultaneously. The problem is differentiating who is honestly mistaken and who has other motives.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > or absurdly incompetent This is your error. There is no "absurdity" needed, as we didn't evolve for accurately perceiving phenomena seen while manoeuvring in transsonic flight, and we don't develop a perfect "common sense" for them either. I'm not going to try to come up with something counterintuitive about flight, because I don't even do flight simulators. But I can say this general category of us doing things we didn't evolve for is also why so many people — even smart people — struggle with the Monty Hall paradox, even though it's fairly simple probability.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Yes they are all incompetent. The process selects for bullshitting ability, pork-barrel manufacturing skill and charisma.

4bpp 4y ago

It's not clear how many independent sources this actually reflects. All that we, as members of the general public, have to go by is a low-quality video, and a bunch of "soandso said that soandso said that soandso saw..."-type reports that involve a chain of "soandso"s not selected for critical thinking (news media, congresspeople) and ending in people that all belong to the same command structure (the US military), which could have any number of reasons, some enumerated downthread, to order them to report independently having seen something - or, even more straightforwardly, to have standing orders that prevent individual personnel from coming forward and saying that to their knowledge no such thing happened if whoever the higher-ups tasked with talking to the media pulled the statement that hundreds of members of the crew independently saw the UFO out of their rear end.

low_tech_love 4y ago

Exactly, plus my second-cousin and the neighbor of my father-in-law also swear they saw it.