As much as I want to believe, I feel like this almost has to be some sort of disinformation campaign, either to cover up some sort of testing that the US military is doing and thinks someone else might have seen, or to make US adversaries think that we've made some sort of fundamental breakthrough and we're ineptly trying to cover it up by calling it a UFO. Probably the latter.
Would be interesting to read the article about this in 50 years or so once the political landscape has changed and it's safe to declassify, but I doubt I'll be around then.
Here's my theory about the recent influx of UFO footages coming from high places. US military was working on advanced drones. Nothing fancy, think current best tech, add 15 years and billion in r&d, that kind of stuff. Then when it was ready for test they flew it secretly before their own pilots and waited for reports. And waited. And waited some more. Silence. They disabled stealth, added flashlights, nothing. Military pilots didn't reported it. Maybe Venus. Or moonlight bouncing off swamp gas, but not UFO. Why?
In past decades whenever military pilot reported UFO they were laughed at, sent to psychologist, evaluated, sent behind the desk. Other pilots knew and when they saw something really weird they have kept it for themselves.
Then the higher ups panicked. If they don't report our drones, they will not report Chinese or Russian drones either. We have hundreds and thousands of eyes in the sky but they will not report because they are afraid to speak.
So they came up with a campaign. They started to publish official UFO footage and started more openly talk about it to show pilots that it is now ok to talk about UFO. Don't be afraid pilots, if you see something strange jus tell us, we take it seriously now.
There are no aliens. Videos you saw are created or modified to look legit, and officially supported or confirmed.
wouldnt it be a lot simple to just announce "hey if you think you see a ufo, 'its probably us' and we would appreciate a report so we can correlate sightings with our various stealth tests."?
One of the pilots in this incident was on Rogan saying how they used to fly silently without lights above remote campsites, then once they saw a campfire blast the lights and go straight up. They'd laugh as the UFO reports flowed in.
Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it.
It's not unrealistic to consider top secret tech as a possible explanation.
One counter point is usually: If we had tech this amazing, we'd be putting it to use commercially. However this tech might be autonomous and might need to be considering the G forces supposedly at play.
No, the stealth fighter was not in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it. The F-117 was delivered in 1982 and operational in 1983. It was 'declassified' in 1988 and displayed in 1990. And it wasn't even a fighter. It was for ground attack.
Besides the SR-71/A-12, there were other stealth aircraft that preceded the F-117. The immediate predecessor was Lockheed's Have Blue[0] which was flying in the 70s. Related to Have Blue, there was also Senior Prom[1], which was apparently a scaled down unmanned "cruise missile" variant of Have Blue.
And beyond airplanes, the first stealth helicopters were developed in the late 60s to early 70s and saw limited service during Vietnam. Called The Quiet Ones[2], these helicopters were painted with radar absorbing paint and had several novel mechanisms to reduce their noise, making them stealthy not only to radar but also to ground observers. They were tested over Area 51 and apparently near LA as well, so it seems likely they may have spooked some civilians at one point or another. The infamous "black helicopter" conspiracies/stories started popping up in the 70s, which doesn't seem particularly coincidental when you consider that we now know the The Quiet Ones existed.
The original Quiet Ones are long gone, but it's evident they were replaced by newer stealth helicopters that we don't yet know the names of. We can be pretty sure of this because famously one crashed during the raid on bin Laden[3].
Have Blue was the POC for the F-117, it wasn't used in actual operations. It was a test platform to demonstrate the concept's stealth capabilities and its ability to fly despite its non-conventional shape.
Yeah but it's a discussion about the public seeing spooky strange aircraft and calling in UFO reports, so considering pre-production aircraft seems obvious.
> The second operational aircraft[38] designed around a stealth aircraft shape and materials, after the Lockheed A-12,[38] the SR-71 had several features designed to reduce its radar signature. The SR-71 had a radar cross-section (RCS) around 110 sq ft (10 m2).[39] Drawing on early studies in radar stealth technology, which indicated that a shape with flattened, tapering sides would reflect most energy away from a radar beam's place of origin, engineers added chines and canted the vertical control surfaces inward. Special radar-absorbing materials were incorporated into sawtooth-shaped sections of the aircraft's skin. Cesium-based fuel additives were used to somewhat reduce exhaust plumes visibility to radar, although exhaust streams remained quite apparent. Kelly Johnson later conceded that Soviet radar technology advanced faster than the stealth technology employed against it.[40]
To be clear, a 10m^2 radar cross section is enormous compared to the F-117 (0.001 m^2) The F-117 was in a completely different league than the SR-71, but the SR-71 was in fact designed to be stealthy.
There were actually two A-12s. The Lockheed A12 was introduced in 1967 and retired in 1968. The McDonnell Douglass A12 was never built and finally cancelled in 1991.
I bet this was made on purpose. USA has learned some tricks from Soviets with their "fake patterns"
F-117 wasn't a fighter, and A-12 was not a CAS aircraft. Pretty much like Kirov was not really an "auxiliary craft," and Tu-22 M-1-2-3 were all nearly completely different aircraft
Tanks are so named because during WWI, the British decided to conceal their true purpose by calling them 'water carriers.' 'W.C.' was deemed an inappropriate initialism though, so the name was changed to 'tank' as in "a tank of water."
Yeah he admits how he is a prankster but then fully expects people to believe his explanation of a 60 second video clip without any other context than his interpretation?
I don't think they would operate in areas where training is taking place without notifying the pilots in the area that they are also operating there. The risk of collision is too high (and there apparently was at least one very close call).
It's one thing to confuse a civilian, it's not that hard. But your narrative doesn't explain actual fighter pilots observing objects flying orders of magnitude faster and making incredible maneuvers.
Honestly how many people have seen jet fighters do crazy movies at night. Not very many, they don't know what they are seeing. It is like a car accident. Happens every minute, how many people actually witness it? The aftermath maybe, but very few of the actual event.
Why put it commercially if keeping it secret gives you a huge advantage over foreign powers?
Case in point the satellite photo Trump leaked - leading civilian experts were dumbfounded that such a clear image from a satellite was even possible, let alone already deployed and in use.
Commercial applications for that would be huge, yet it’s staying secret.
I've heard tales of the wink and a nod method of releasing capabilities without broadcasting that's what they were doing. Back in the early days of satellite with ground penetrating radar, there were detailed images released of river deltas. It was supposed to be a boon for geology, but it was also meant as a shot across the bow to the Russians that we could see their underground bunkers and what not. Sometimes the clandestine games were cool. I miss the spy novels/stories of the 80s.
“The resolution is amazingly high,” Ankit Panda from the Federation of American Scientists told NPR, adding it was “much higher than anything I’ve ever seen.”
Tell it to Ankit Panda.
Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network at the One Earth Foundation, believes that the resolution is so high, it may be beyond the physical limits at which satellites can operate.
You have misunderstood. Ankit Panda was simply stating that the image resolution was higher than anything that had been publicly released so far. It wasn't anything unexpected.
Melissa Hanham is a policy specialist, not a physicist or optics engineer. She has no particular expertise in this area.
If you don't believe me then do the math yourself. It's easy enough to figure out the maximum diameter of a KH-11 based on the size of the available launch vehicles. And from that you can calculate the maximum resolving power. They can play some tricks with adaptive optics and digital image processing but that doesn't add much.
The minimum size of KH-11 mirrors has been common knowledge for many years now, since it influenced the Hubble telescope. From the book Power To Explore -- History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960-1990:
> "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."
They're 2.4 meters at their smallest, with later KH-11's possibly being larger. But even 2.4 meters is enough to get way better image quality than has been publicly released.
Wouldn't the boring answer be they made something that can disrupt radar systems into creating fantom objects. Creating fake objects that are remarkable would be useful for when distractions are needed. The final QA would be a real in the field test where the observers are not aware of the experiment.
That really does seem like the simplest, most boring explanation to me — some kind of camouflage/countermeasures/stealth technology that makes it really hard to recognize something or to get a reliable indication of its bearing or distance.
Naval patents of far fetched sounding room temperature superconductors and similar things may indeed be part of a disinformation campaign, but that does not mean the sightings of tic-tac shaped objects and other radar and pilot observed anomalies are part of the campaign as well.
What could be the case is that the observed tic-tac UFO's are real alien craft, about which word is now leaking out, but the US military is now using the confusion surrounding them for their own purposes. Hey, why not use the confusion for our own advantage.
Any potential adversaries are smart enough to realize that if the US military had really invented a fundamental breakthrough they wouldn't be spending a fortune on the B-21 program.
If spending a fortune on the B-21 program ensured no adversaries believed the US invented a fundamental breakthrough in aircraft design, that would be the best reason to do it.
This kind of thing is highly compartmentalized. The decision makers for the budget of the B-21 program probably aren't cleared to know about a program developing an engine that ignores inertia.
Maybe. Just plain politics is more likely. Decommissioning projects like this very likely touches upon various politicians' pork projects who don't want those to go away. The military brass tried to stop the production of the M1A1 once because they had better tanks, and wanted to buy those instead, but Congress didn't because too many of their districts relied on its production.
No that's incorrect. Decisions on programs the size of the B-21 are made by the USAF Chief of Staff, senior members of the Congressional Armed Services committees, and ultimately by the President. Those people are cleared for everything related to procurement. They couldn't do their jobs otherwise.
Most UFO stories are fairly easily debunked. Even if the this particular story was an outlier in apparent credibility, why would any think that a UFO story would be an effective way to spread FUD among US adversaries?
bingo. another disinfo campaign. intelligent aliens are just another made up bullshit story to distract people from other more important storeis and justify huge ass budget increases that go on for multiple decades.
there are more than enough idiots and suckers to persuade. this is the problem with democrazy. it's just one method for securing good leadership and it often can be systemically hacked. one way is to dumb down the population and feeed them nonsense. it works.
I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration. This is in the case if there is really no other way to traverse stars besides conventional rocketry.
But in case if there is a way to trick any of the fundamental physics we know after all, then very likely the guy will come right at our porch, and they've probably done so many times without us even noticing, and will only contact us, if ever, on their own terms.
Given the premise is right, and somebody can really do something on the level of fundamental physical force manipulation for space travel, then there would be no reason for them to not dispense with conventional space travel altogether, or at least to a reasonable extent where this technology is more practical than giant nuclear rockets.
And the same goes for things like stealth technology, or inertia control. If somebody can arbitrary manipulate gravity, entropy, or fundamental forces to travel stars, or make traversable wormholes, then inertia cancelation, invisibility by directly manipulating light, undetectable radio comms, and power sources unlimited or almost so by heatsink capacity should be child's play for them too.
This assumes they are not coming from some giant station on the other side of our sun, parked there for the last several hundred years. They could also be anywhere in our solar system, that our technology is not advanced enough to detect. We cant really keep track of all the space rocks floating near us and they aren't trying not to be seen.
That would be really weird for them to be hiding from us behind the sun. What's in it for them? They arrive in Sol to set up a base but the carbon-based predators on the wet planet must not be disturbed. Why should they care about us in that specific way? That tale sounds a lot like typical human hubris to me.
Why do we have rules about disturbing the tribes in the amazon or the Sentinelese. Maybe there are established rules about contacting primitive cultures? Maybe they are just watching for the Fermi Paradox to take care of us.
We tend to try to predict alien behavior basing it more or less on our own, 10000 year-long history. If intelligent life that travels the billion-old stars actually exists, I doubt we would be able to put their intentions and modus operandi into words with our constrained ideas and limited, lonely planet vocabulary.
Of course, for most of that history, the default result of a more technologically advanced culture meeting a more primitive one was the former immediately enslaving or committing genocide against the latter.
And let's be honest, if the Sentinelese were sitting on anything worth killing for, they would be long dead or "civilized" onto a reservation by now.
Here we're talking about meeting a culture not made of human subjects. We know nothing. When they're able to cross interstellar space we're unlikely to have anything they'd want. They'd be so advanced technically we might not even detect them given our limited understanding of physics.
The thing I do see an alien species could want from us is our capability to understand a blueprint and to reassemble them physically from transmitted information. Because that is how they might travel between galaxies. Their assembly, I hasten to add, would be a rather stupid thing to do on our part. If we want to live. But we might do it anyway because we're curious.
How are the scenarios of brute predators, noble protectors, or imperial fleets any more worthwhile to consider than those of the incessant replicators? My answer: Because our culture likes that kind of tale. Because we project our predatory and social features onto an unknown.
So whenever somebody explains phenomena like blips on a radar with an alien species that happens to be eerily similar to us I think of how people made god in their image and either rail against the blatant human-centrism or just disengage.
We also install remote/un-manned viewing platforms all the time. They sometimes require us to revisit them periodically to collect the data and load fresh media/power/etc. Then we upgraded them to use solar to replenish power, and installed wireless communications to make it so we don't have to visit. Maybe we just need to start listening for rogue broadcasts from our planet for these ET-phone-home devices?
If they're using any technology that we know to be feasible (and they haven't already been here for a century or more), their approach would involve a star-hot plume of nuclear flame that burns in the sky for weeks or months at least.
Now, as Baybal said, if they've uncovered fundamental physics that we don't know about, all bets are off. Or they could have showed up centuries ago and been hanging around ever since, for all we know, recorded by history as a supernova or something. But if they arrived recently and use known physics, we most likely would have seen them.
I suspect that space probes like STEREO would have been able to see a giant space station on the other side of the Sun, but they might not have been looking.
But why would they have come here hundreds of years ago? They'd have had to leave their planet hundreds (if not thousands) of years before that. Meanwhile, Seinfeld hasn't even reached them yet. What did they find so interesting about our system so many years ago that they would expend the time and energy for such a project? Who is paying for this?
If they're hiding from us on the other side of the sun, then that means they're probably on the same orbit as the Earth, but a full half orbit ahead. But then you'd think spacecraft like the Parker Solar Probe which has a perihelion of only 0.04 AU and a very eccentric orbit would be able to spot it.
Hiding on the other side of the sun only hides them from direct observation from exactly Earth.
I think that makes sense too, we are still finding out basic things about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Space wise we are really just getting started.
And the same goes for things like stealth technology, or inertia control.
We have stealth techonology, don't we?
Inertia control is not needed if you can create a field. The problem with acceleration is that it needs to be transmited from the engine to the human body. That happens through the seat in planes or rockets.
But if you were able to create a field that uniformly affected all the molecules of everything into the ship, including human bodies, you could perform sudden turns without crushing the crew.
So, positing the video is authentic, which seems likely, here's what we know:
- This object, estimated to be 40 feet in largest dimension, exhibited flight performance beyond an F-18
- These objects exhibit long flight endurance, indicating a high density power source
- The object was solid, as it was detected by the Aegis radar
- According to the pilot involved, the object did not obey the laws of physics as we know them
- The object flew without visible airfoils - no wings or rotor - and at low speeds including a hover
- The object allegedly hovered as low as fifty feet above the water, although I don't think this was caught on video
- The object departed the scene in a way the F-18 couldn't match
- The object changed orientation without apparent regard for direction of flight
- The video clearly shows some kind of nimbus, exhaust, or field around the object
If this is a classified project of some government, they've likely discovered new physics.
Personally I doubt that's the case, and these are the product of extraterrestrials.
(BTW, to the grandparent - there's a lot that's not understood by current physics. Dark energy, and dark matter, for starters. A new baryon may have been discovered recently. Quantum gravity. Much more I'm sure...)
Before we diagnose unicorns, why couldn't it have been a drone with cowling around its propellers/impellers, forced to be 40 foot long in order to carry an advanced miniaturized submarine fission reactor. That could give it
range and enough acceleration to make it seem to defy physics.
For one thing it was detected (according to the unclassified releases) as high as 80,000 feet AGL.
There's no design of any type right now that can fly at 80,000 feet AND hover at low altitude, all without airfoils. That is also without accounting for the extremely high-G turns with no airfoils.
If it had been some kind of nuclear ramjet (which wouldn't work at low speeds) there would have been a visible plume of hot gas. There wasn't.
All of it sounds outrageous, but my point was that it's actually just at one discovery distance from what we can do.
We know how to create a magnetic field using electricity. But magnetism only affects certain materials, the ones that can align electrons in some specific way. If the same thing was possible with all kind of matter, maybe finding the way to align its electrons, maybe not, the rest of effects you mention could be just collateral.
>I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration .
We have a tough time detecting asteroids until they've already flown by, I have a hard time believing we would spot a ship years in advance
The drive plume will be bright and hot and aimed right at us. Somebody running an all-sky radio survey will spot it, eventually. It will take a long time to decelerate, years if not decades even if it's only cruising at a small fraction of c. (Project Daedalus would have cruised at 0.12 c.)
Indeed, but take umbrage that no matter their level of technological sophistication, any race visiting us ij this manner would not only be very advanved, but also could not be hostile without violating or contradicting laws of the expanding universe, economics, and physics.
> I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration.
I think that they will teleport here and be minuscule and invisible (at first).
That's the point. If you will ever see a martian on your porch, and you haven't seem a giant nuclear rocket on which he came here, it will be the most direct proof that we missed something really big in our physics theories, something on the level of 5th force, existence of negative mass, or quantum gravity being a thing.
Anytime I try to pursue the UFO question I feel like I’m being intentionally gaslighted by government agencies. The public-ish analysis of UFOs, AATIP is an incredible farce. They focused on star trek warp drives and after the funding dried up they started hanging out with Blink 182 to smoke weed and pat each other on the back for being crazy alien believers. These aren’t sound scientific minds that are capable of analyzing the evidence available. Those people exist and I’m certain their analyses do as well, but no one gets to see them.
I struggle to even come up with narratives as to why this specific case would be made public. Perhaps the intelligence agencies knew it wouldn’t be possible to cover up so the best they can do is release the evidence that was expected to make its way to the public and say nothing about it officially. If I put on a tinfoil hat I could say that the AATIP’s purpose was to instill doubt that aliens exist, but that would imply that they do exist. It seems that the intelligence agencies are behaving like they want to give as little information as possible about it. I can’t imagine the AATIP was made top-down. It appears to just be a congressman’s publicity stunt.
Sometimes it has an easy explanation given typical information asymmetries and incentive structures. For example, you don't give away any of your external intel during a war (i.e. cold war) in the case that you are identifying something by your enemy that might be trying to hide from you. Letting them know you can detect them would be stupid. Also, for similar reasons, record and catalogue every strange phenomenon in case it could be something.
The natural correlate from a citizen perspective is that the government is hiding something (i.e. UFOs). Of course it is, that's the point. But then the point becomes less of a point the less justification there is for wartime behavior, which then leads to increased speculation that the government is hiding something which at some points boils over into widespread public sentiment.
Then at that point there is both incentive to do selective release and for the media to cover it since they know readers want to read about UFOs, etc.
I don't think one can cover just anything in an open society. Even the truly secret military gear like the original H-bomb, F-117, A-12, anti-powerline bombs, and navy stealth helicopter were impossible to hide completely. At least the fact of their existence was out long before the public saw them.
Even in paranoid USSR, people knew of computer guided recon drones, spy sats, Shkvals, Dvinas, R73 and Strelas — all of which were more secret than the bomb, and were equally bordering on "sci-fi" and unbelievable to the layman at the time.
The leak of Shkval's existence was of particular embarrassment to the Union's military and counterintelligence. Supposedly, there were less than 50 people in the whole Union who were privy to info on them in full, but even before it entered service it became an "urban myth" among civilians in military cities and such.
I don't think one can cover just anything in an open society.
If you really want to apply common sense to the hypothesis that aliens are real and here, consider the possibility that aliens themselves have become much more careful since the fifties, just because they know we have more tech to detect and intercept them and governments are no longer able to hide anything.
Or maybe they have a spy net on the ground already.
To add onto this:
Is this behavior reasonable for an alien species? I think so. It could be a probe to evaluate the behavior and technology of society on Earth. They could detect military response times, if they get greeted with missiles, hugs, or observations, etc. Keeping tabs on neighbors may be a good way to slowly initiate peaceful contact with another planet.
Another question to ask ourselves is “how much evidence is enough to convince ourselves that aliens exist?” Namely: is this FLIR video enough?
>If I put on a tinfoil hat I could say that the AATIP’s purpose was to instill doubt that aliens exist, but that would imply that they do exist.
I thought it was well established that AATIP existed to be a means for a well-connected paranoid billionaire to have his senator funnel him millions in government contracts to keep his floundering mismanaged space hotel business afloat.
> I struggle to even come up with narratives as to why this specific case would be made public.
Lots of people are talking about it. What's the problem with them also saying "yeah this happened and we have no idea what it is". It seems to me that the truth is probably exactly that.
Haha, it looks like a classic case of enthusiasm being mistaken for competence. I can't imagine any reasonable agent would have chosen to work on this project so you only get the kooks.
Imagine trying to explain some fancy load balancing AWS deployment to somebody who has never used a computer beyond a flip phone. It would be completely foreign.
That’s me (and also nearly everybody here) with regards to aviation and war making aviation machines. So while these articles and stories are definitely interesting, they might as well be fairy tales. The way our minds are reconstructing these things, and the way the mind of somebody involved in the relevant fields here (whatever they even are!) are likely very different.
That all said: if somebody has a link to any more well informed discussions about this, I sure would love a link!
I have heard a couple of podcasts that had some very credible US pilots talking about this. I think detecting life on other planets or aliens here would be great (so long as they are not trying to kill me yada yada). But, the most down to earth explanation is signal/sensor warfare testing.
Bare with me for a moment. The web is part of the sensor array of a spider. There are species of insects that tap on spider's webs to send a false positive signal to the spider on the web that a tasty prey has become trapped. The spider goes over to where on the web the vibrations indicated the prey is trapped and bang the spider gets killed by the assassin bug.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11628322
they could make drones go a fuel wasting wild goose chases etc. Or make the other sides drone defend the eastern front while you fly in from the west etc.
When I was in the Navy (1977 ~ 1981), our A-6E was equipped with an ECM suite that was designed to intercept and process pulse signals, automatically select the optimum countermeasures technique, and then apply the technique. One of these countermeasures was to send a return signal back to the radar, "telling the radar that the aircraft had accelerated (beyond the speed of light) and was now on the opposite horizon. The effect of this was reported to be a snapping off of the radar mast or tipping over of the mobile trailer the radar was in due to the torque of the radar dish moving to the new location.
There was several different programs the ECM would use and this is the only one I can remember at the moment.
When I went to the ECM school on the system, the first part of the class was listening to pilots being chased by surface to air missiles. The class was in a little building and it was Top Secret classified at the time. We could take notes, but they were locked up in a safe and we couldn't take them back to the squadron.
Counter measure techniques for radar are highly classified. They take a long time to develop and once you use them they aren't useful for very long. The enemy adapts.
On one hand, I feel like this tic-tac is the result of one of these techniques. On the other hand, they wouldn't test this out in the open where a Chinese or Russian satellite can listen to these countermeasure pulses.
I wonder what protections modern military radar systems use against such attacks. I find it plausible that they were played to see how well their detection works.
It might be the one upside to the cpc commies stealing (or were they fed it? (evil moustache twirl)) US tech. The US will know how “their” best tech works and might be able to cause ghost images to appear the pilots/AI.
The above discusses exploiting the Bethe Formula to produce a radiant point at some distant from a beam generator. IIUC the energy falloff suddenly increases below a threshold energy level therefore the particle beam will deposit most of its energy in a very short distance. Could the reported 'tic tacs' i.e. bright white elongated balls be the result of this? Would explain the supposedly physics defying nature of their aerial manoeuvres.
See also: the writing of Tom Mahood [1], some of the best and most authoritative I've ever seen on the subject. He also tears into Bob Lazar which is a nice bonus.
What I find kinda interesting about this is the HUD apparently being able to "lock on" or track or whatever the object.
Are these HUD things around the object just visual bounding boxes around something with high contrast, or are the HUDs doing sensor fusion with IR and radar and other things? Not just for UFOs but I've seen similar things from gun cam footage in Iraq etc and wondered how it works.
There is a Joe Rogan podcast with David Fravor, a pilot who also saw it. I believe he explains it's all visual locking but there are a lot if different camera types.
I'm interested, but this is all I have to say about it: get a bunch of physicists in a room and I'm sure they could come up with 100 other possible theories for this other than "aliens did it". I'm not saying these theories will be particularly convincing, some of them may involve time-travel (physicists are a whacky bunch) but these UFO people seem to be locked into a way of thinking of these things as solid objects zooming around, "an f-18 couldn't do that" etc. etc. Meh.
Yep, I was going to mention that podcast. They have a camera pod that can literally just track fast moving objects visually (probably uses computer vision stuff internally). He also mentions how the camera pods can switch between standard, IR and a few other modes. The IR didn't show any heat large heat sources, which you'd see on a commercial jet liner or fighter jet.
>Are these HUD things around the object just visual bounding boxes around something with high contrast, or are the HUDs doing sensor fusion with IR and radar and other things?
All of the above, and probably a bit more we're not really privy to.
Combination of IR contrast, sensor slaving and manual tracking, configured by the pilot as needed. The DCS flight simulator series has a pretty decent targeting pod simulation.
No active radar. All the tracking pods have FLIR/CCDs on them that allow tracking of objects (which I believe is based upon contrasting white hot / black hot returns). A "point track" for example would allow you to track an object on the ground as it is moving (important when using laser guided ordinance where the beam has to follow it).
> What I find kinda interesting about this is the HUD apparently
> being able to "lock on" or track or whatever the object.
And that's the answer to what this object was.
The tracking devices do not track regularly-flying objects so well, so how was this not-by-the-laws-of-physics object tracked? Because the object was dirt on the lens. This has been proven by several different methods. Firstly, the object stays on the same spot on the screen. Second, it rotates when the camera gimbal locks and rotates. Third, the filename of the published file is actually "GimbalLock" or something of the sort.
Yes both. One of the pilots (Fravor) went on Joe Rogan. He said his buddy stayed up circling and was also able to eyeball the craft. He wanted to get up close to it, and she covered him from above. Apparently his buddy got really disturbed and angry about the whole thing--that this stuff has been going on and that they weren't warned properly about it.
They both got the idea it was just a 'weird little thing' from the ship's radar operators, but when they actually saw it they both were obviously kind of gobsmacked. The unnamed female pilot apparently got kind of outraged that there was no procedure or information being shared in an organized way. Like nobody knows really what to even do in these situations because it's not really seriously talked about.
Like I said, the radar operators were seeing these things before the pilots even got into the air. So that rules out dust.
I was thinking more some kind of Russian disinformation operation--a low mass kite kind of craft remotely powered or towed by a fast underwater sister drone. Both operated from a submarine for example (Fravor reported large wave disturbances below the craft that did not match the craft's shape).
One of the most fascinating things about this UFO Navy story is that at least one of the UFO's employed radar jamming after being spotted.[0] To me, this is good evidence that we are not dealing with a currently unknown natural phenomina.
Yes, it's well known. It's human technology, but it's also almost certainly alien technology if we operate under the assumption that an alien species built something capable of travelling across the stars.
Regardless, I'm not even necessarily saying that it is evidence of aliens. Merely that it evidence against the idea that this is something which is naturally occurring.
While I know that I'll never be able to sit down with the intelligence analysts who looked at this video and sensor information, I really wish I could convene some sort of group to do just that.
I'd love to see some calculations on how much energy this UFO would have needed to perform the maneuvers it did. Whether there were any observable atmospheric effects like a wake even though there was no exhaust seen. Did it exhibit observable inertia, in other words did it move like bad movie special effects, or did it move like something real?
In the comments in the NYMag original article, one person wonders if it was the result of some advanced spoofing/decoy technology. I'm not sure what could cause what the sensors observed, but the idea seems interesting and brings a cause "down to Earth" so to speak.
Maybe calculating for a range of different masses would then give a range of possible energies involved.
Your point is pretty much why I'd like to see a bunch of experts dissect this phenomena. I want to see scientific rigor applied to this, and to see what conclusions can be drawn from the data available.
Hypothesis: Any aliens advanced enough to build an objecting moving as impossibly as the pilot says would also be advanced enough to not be detected doing so.
"Let's turn off the stealth systems and see if they keep regarding us as divinities like they did thousands years ago, keep attempting to shoot at us like they did in the last 50 years, or have evolved in the meantime therefore they're now ready to be welcomed in the galactic federation. Although from watching their entertainment and news feeds I'd bet this starship they won't be in another 3000 years".
That seems like false causality to me. If you or I made a really cool drone that could move that fast and be a major breakthrough in inertia, velocity and acceleration, would you bench it for 40years until you could make it invisible or would you test it out?
If the video is real then my guess is we are looking at a glider being towed at supersonic speed.
The air-tow could be flying higher in the atmosphere beyond the reach of basic ground defense systems. The glider would not give off a heat-plume but could have enormous maneuverability
Is there any part of this footage that can't be explained by a bit of matter stuck on the FLIR lens? Even it being apparently "cold" seems well explained by the dust/bug whatever casting a shadow onto the IR sensor array.
The pilots claim they physically saw it too. And the pilot who made the video was the 2nd group up from the first who claimed they saw it from their cockpits.
And the FLIR was tracking the target moving. If it was a piece of dust stuck on, it would have looked as if it were moving the same speed of the aircraft, wouldn't it?
So let me get this straight: We believe an alien civilization has traveled across the galaxy with faster-than-light technology, and has deployed aircraft that has broken our known laws of physics. But is susceptible to 1970s-era infrared radar technology? Okay. Got it.
While I don't think these UFOs are anything alien in nature at all, it's worth noting that we make absolutely zero effort to hide our space exploration probes and rovers from potential discovery.
My understanding is that a plasma stealth object should be high velocity and be optically bright to visual and IR. I don't maintain an hypothesis that that is the case but if any of my airmen would see such an object I would definitely like to have a report on that.
I'm thinking if you concentrate 10 powerful lasers at one point in the atmosphere it would be possible to generate a plasma that could be moved around at speeds that would be impossible for an aircraft. What I don't know is if that would be detectable via radar, which supposedly this phenomenon is.
Yes, you can detect projections via radar. This projections aspect was also my thought on this for a while and I did some research on it. I’ll append the link to the paper later. Another thing that comes to mind is there was a post here recently that talked about concentrated laser beams technology which looks interesting to consider.
Probably the easiest way to explain the erratic behavior.
After reviewing the footage with someone familiar with IR imaging, they pointed out that it looks like a FLIR sensor that was pointed at the sun for a prolonged period. There is only one piece of evidence and it doesn’t seem sufficient.
I am not following UFO information but I think I have only heard about them in my country (France) only twice in the last 15 years.
I heard about cases in the US much often. US are also probably 3 times or size (population) and 10 times (or whatever) military size - so maybe the numbers are consistent across countries.
I wonder however how much culture plays a role in the sightings. All UFOs in movies land in the US. You have Area51 and the extraterrestrial highway. You have Roswell and tranformers inside the Hoover Dam.
If I see a weird thing in the sky, UFO will be the 7th possibility on my list. Maybe in the US UFOs landing is business as usual for pepole ?
I have seen strange things happening while camping out under a Cessna 172 together with fellow european pilots in Sedona, Arizona in 1995. Multiple lights in the Sky, zigzagging across the sky in very similar fashion to what those F18 pilots report. I know you were trying to be cynical, but maybe there is something strange going on there.
My point is that if the news/reporting on UFOs in the US is much more prevalent than in, say, France, it is no surprise that people jump to that conclusion quicker than elsewhere. The movies are one another reason for that.
This is just an idea, I do not know how statistically sound this is. To give a counterexample, everytime I switch on the radio on a station which is supposed to have people talking (France Culture for instance) and I hear music, I assume they are on strike. I do not think than an American would jump on that conclusion.
I have a friend who has worked in US military black ops projects since at least the early '90s.
And back in the mid '90s he told me there were aircraft being built and tested which had flight characteristics similar to those described here.
This report is about a sighting in 2004, so it's more than possible that 10-ish years on, advances had been made that make this sighting quite believable.
If these are alien craft, maybe they're not flying through space ... or even warping space (Alcubierre-ish) but just leaping through it. Like stepping through a curtain.
If our whole understanding of space is wrong, then they'd be asking themselves "why are they making it so hard?".
Or they just don't care about humans, but are sucking out some valuable resource that we're not aware of. I keep thinking about that Bob Lazar interview, he claimed these alien aircraft fly off of a stable isotope of element 115. What if that element was rare, and they are mining it from, say, the core of our planet.
last week a story came out quoting an air force general saying that "technology exists that could transport a human anywhere on earth within an hour" [0]...
maybe... but the video of him speaking [0] (at the 12:00 minute mark) is unambiguous with his words -- "less than an hour" was his actual quote, and there is no mention about any specific plane or technology.
I think Occam's Razor says a good lawyer convinced the patent office to make a bad decision. Could be wrong, but this is easily explained by incompetence.
What's the issue with this patent? It is a parallel construction of what was observed without the prior observation being specific enough for prior art.
And if there was to be coercion or convincing, the US Navy Secretary would be good enough you'd think?
something smells fishy. He never looked at the object with his own eyes. C'mon. How can you not verify with your own eyes whether this thing was real or not? He says he was trying to capture the best video for later analysis. He couldn't have just glanced at the object for a second to make visual confirmation?
> No. I was more concentrated on looking at the FLIR. It was inside of 20 miles. You’re not going to see it with your own eyes until probably 10 miles, and then you’re not going to be able to visually track it until you’re probably inside of five miles, which is where Dave Fravor said he saw it.
These are trained military pilots. Our eyes can’t see an object like that twenty miles out. If the system has a lock and it tells you it’s that far away, you don’t waste time and lose focus by trying to see for yourself something you already know you won’t be able to make out with the naked eye.
Additionally, it’s not as if no one saw it with their naked eye. Fravor’s word is as as good as his, and he says saw it. The value here is in the fact that this pilot is telling you he was watching the machines confirm what his colleague had seen. I take man + machine as a harder proof than two men, and not much less than 2 men + machine.
Edit: also seen by the squadron commanding officer:
> And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.
So, yeah. Two men + machine, rather than three men + machine.
What I find more interesting is that NORAD didn’t debrief him, which means they either knew who was behind it or were already tracking it separately and knew what they needed to know (both very possible). Or perhaps since everything he saw and all his maneuvers were better documented in the real-time system logs dump and FLIR capture than he would be able to reliably recall, there was literally nothing he could add.
This is why I believe what they saw was some sort of test of a FLIR defeating tech. Like an IR laser projection from a sub launched drone. It explains why it could move so fast and have no propulsion, it was just a laser dot moving around the sky and he was the cat chasing it around.
I’m not sure how you can project anything into space that would be seen with continuity by both man and machine to look and act the same (keep in mind IR and visible light have different properties). If you’ve ever played with a laser pointer you’ll know what I mean: it drives the cat crazy when it jumps/skips/disappears because now it’s being projected on a different plane of surface (in the air: a different cloud or haze). It’s the continuity of movement (rather than many other “UFO” sightings reporting an object “suddenly appearing somewhere else in the sky”) that makes this all the more intriguing. An explanation Must take all this into account, and whatever it is, alien or terrestrial, it’s really cool tech, much more exciting than what you describe.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from that link, but it’s actually a really cool bit of educated speculation.
> A device based upon this principle would make a really exquisite radar spoofing tool. The ionized plasma would give a good radar return, giving targeting radars something else to lock on to, instead of incoming aircraft. The ability to project an object of apparent solidity to enemy radar, instantly manipulatable, would be a most valuable little toy to have in your bag of tricks.
Thanks for an interesting read (and a blast from the past). As I mentioned in my post: the tech to pull that off would be extremely cool, terrestrial or otherwise!
Prepare a long vertical trail of diffractive cloud media ahead of time, using some stealthy drones. Then draw on your “canvas” using a broad-spectrum beam, possibly from another stealthed drone (or combination of such.) The diffractive properties mean that the part of the “canvas” being hit becomes a point source, emitting in all directions (except directly above/below, where the rest of the “canvas” is—but unless you’re in a helicopter keeping still, you won’t really be able to notice that.)
This is the kind of stuff we’ve been doing to fool guided air-to-air countermissiles into not hitting their targets for a long time now. Penaids. Just fancy ones.
These military jets use what are effectively stabilized infrared telescopes, capable of tracking flying objects many miles away — long before human biological vision has any hope of seeing them.
This is crucial because modern aerial warfare involves missile armaments effective at these distances, so much of it is a game of who can find and acquire a target lock on their enemy first.
These phenomena are interesting because (1) multiple sensor systems from multiple platforms/locations consistently tracked the object in ways that corroborate each other, and (2) other pilots have actually flown close enough to report visual contact.
These are multi-million dollar machines built on billions in R&D for explicitly this purpose, with highly trained operators that spend thousands of hours in a simulator / live flight: Let them do their job.
It's really hard to see other flying objects when you're flying. Any pilot can confirm this. It can even be hard to see something within a mile! But at 20 miles, good luck finding it. Better to just trust the instruments.
The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
They'd still be cool even if they were here to strip mine our planet, anally probe us, and then enslave our species... it would just be a kind of shitty situation all in all though.
There sure are a lot of "I want to believe"-ers in this thread, who are presumably mostly normal, rational individuals for most of their lives until something like UFOs tickles them the right way.
I bet a lot of these same people have their minds boggled that some people are anti-vaxxers, or think global warming isn't real.
Would be interesting to read the article about this in 50 years or so once the political landscape has changed and it's safe to declassify, but I doubt I'll be around then.