It's not a joke. That's one of the things they do.[1]
The classified reports are probably more useful. Some of these events were detected by various military sensor systems. DNI can request and analyze the raw sensor data. The various Navy reports say nothing about what the ship's sensors recorded.
DoD now has something called the "All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office". Here's the bio of the person running it.[2] He's a physicist with both an academic career and lots of management level jobs in the intelligence community.
Useful comments in the ODNI assessment include:
"Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a
majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared,
electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation."
144 reports originated from USG sources. Of these, 80 reports involved observation
with multiple sensors. Most reports described UAP as objects that interrupted pre-planned training or other military activity.
So this is being taken more seriously. It's also being done at a level in the intelligence community that can get access to the raw sensor data if needed. The head of the new office spent years with CIA and NRO, incidentally.
Other than that, not much is being said. Partly because saying more would give away info on exactly how good various sensors are.
Reminds me of this week's Vice Motherboard story of astronomers investigating a second interstellar meteor reaching Earth. What I hadn't expected is that they were given access to classified US military data, from sensors designed for missile detection:
Hadrien Devillepoix, research associate at Curtin University’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told Motherboard over email that the raw data Loeb and Siraj are pulling from is classified and having even high-level bolide (meteor) data from that database is a “blessing” that’s been helpful in some applications but found to be limited in others.
"Does this mean that those sensors are bad at the job they were designed for? No,” he said. “The satellite sensors behind the CNEOS catalog were presumably designed for detecting rocket and missile launches. Since the average meteor comes in at 10 times the speed of a ballistic missile, it is not surprising that in some cases the speed of these fast meteors can be poorly estimated.”
Thank you for this post. I have been trying to get people to pay attention to this topic for years. Congress has woken up (thanks to a couple of former DoD officials whistleblowing) and we are now starting to de-stigmatize the topic which has been putting our military pilots in some jeopardy.
Yeah there are airplanes, and maybe the adversary makes better airplanes sometimes. So supposedly that never happens, but with rockets it totally did, Soviets had way better rockets for decades. Until like 2010 or something, Spacex, apart from that.
Like if you want to talk about the unknown designation, whatever unidentified, whatever, you're supposed to start by apologizing for talking about it. Come on. The Manhattan Project was big into aliens and talked about it a lot, we landed on the Moon and intend to land on Mars, so we're already attempting to be aliens for other cultures. Really the aliens were Francisco Pizarro, Hernán Cortés and Hernando de Magallanes. That's alien contact, that's space travel, that's time travel, travel to the past, past meeting the future. I have yet to see an alien movie not informed by the Spanish Conquest of America. The line "take me to your leader?" Vasco da Gama upon arrival in India, killed the leader and ate his heart, "now I'm your leader.". You can't make this stuff up. So they don't, they just paint the Hispanics green, they glow and shit, yeah. Water the story down. Never outdo them. Never get even close to the amount of gold Pizarro tortured out of Atahualpa (not that the Kechwa were even 1% better, they played the Game of Empires, as the Xauxas and Aymaras say, for those tribes the Kechwa were aliens too). To a much lesser extent Alexander of Macedon, nobody cares about his saying that Europeans and Asians should intermarry and blend, as he did with Roxanne.
Like do they screen for Americans that have seen alien movies for those jobs? Know the definition? It used to be aliens were from a different country, then a different continent, then a different planet in the Solar System (eg Martians or Venusians) then when that was ruled out Europa (the moon of Jupiter), microbes on Mars with systems tested in the Southern part of the Kechwa empire (the Atacama, big NASA presence because of its sterility), and finally, looking out to other star systems. Finding inhabitable planets, that does get a budget in NASA, SETI, presidents of America have seen alien movies and read science fiction, Strategic Defense Initiative had Robert Heinlein on its board, science fiction writers are hired by DoD, there's a market for science fiction per se, science fiction is restricted in torture wards along with religious texts, all because they're worth something. And some science fiction technologies have come about, like telescreens, and "new drugs" (Huey Lewis and the News) "New Drug", not all of them but that is how it must be. So really science fiction is what someone does when she has a good idea but doesn't have all the money and all the theory needed to develop it, so instead of taking it to the grave, what does she do? Write science fiction.
I'm not seeing it. Surely you don't mean a silhouette of an aircraft with twin booms to the horizontal and rear stabilizers, or a delta wing silhouette is a 'UFO'?
Edit: Apparently I am totally oblivious. Please have no regrets for downvoting this comment.
Part of what’s happening here is a foundational visual design concept known as leading lines.
Our eyes follow lines to their natural conclusion. A boy pointing in a photo, you’ll first follow their arm and hand to where they are pointing.
What’s happening is you as the viewer are following those lines as the first thing you see and then trying to visually parse the various craft that the lines point to.
Hence why for many of us the ufo takes further effort to find, as it is has deliberately been placed outside of the dominant focus area.
The positioning is always weirdly intentional with these designs, too. Something's definitely being indicated by the location of the UFO in the design.
I just love the idea of a bunch of wound up low IQ US-first nationalist grunts going up to Canada, actually being welcomed with courtesy somewhat, occasionally finding common ground in sports and outdoors activities, and eventually the grunts either settle and stay or turn around and go home because why mess up those nice folks lives?
Either that or whatever latent racial issues might be in Canada would touch off and turn the place into nothing like we’ve seen up there before.
The metric system is our best line of defense. Also in the east, french on highway signs. This gets American invaders very confused, most just turn back.
That little corridor is right in the golden era of civilization with a lot of interest in the stars…if there’s an easy target to see from space that region has a few buildings of note and maybe some things we aren’t aware of under water now.
FWIW I completely missed it as well for about a minute. Perception is a weird thing. My guess is we were both drawn to thinking why one of those three planes in the center is a UFO that we didn’t look at the rest.
Funny, I also didn't see it at first and then felt stupid after reading the comments. I was trying to figure out whether the thing that looks like a dude in a bat-wing suit might be from one of the declassified UFO sightings...
I think people are missing who makes this stuff. 20-25 year olds who use heavy doses of humor and sarcasm to joke with fellow 20-25 year olds in the same situation as them. No one thinks what hacker news will think about this. Same for the O’s that OK something like this. I’ve got a collection of patches I couldn’t even wear on the flightline because if the CO saw them it would be NJP for me.
I thought it was a perfectly amusing patch myself. I think the innuendo is pretty clear. If it was really sensitive or classified it would not be on a patch. I am sure this will rile up a conspiracy theorist or two though.
> after the launch a new satellite appeared just where Molczan predicted….it seemed that NROL-11's patch had inadvertently revealed classified details about its payload's whereabouts
There's classified and then there's classified. Lots of stuff that's secret are not as world-changing as confirming the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial visitors.
What's funny is the arma unit I play with makes funny patches as well, like our Logistics team got nicknamed Gremlin's because they where stealing everything not nailed down which ended up been this patch - https://imgur.com/a/jhGCxas
I could swear there was a discussion here or on Reddit about a year ago that talked about military insignias and how some of them were intended to be lighthearted and poke fun. Does anyone remember that thread?
The morale (semi-official) or unofficial ones certainly usually have an element of humor or ridiculousness. The official ones must follow guidelines and must be approved, so that has taken a bit of the fun out of it.
Edit: Just to be clear - this example, National Intelligence Manager for Aviation (NIM-A) is part of the cabinet and not the DoD / USAF and wouldn't have to follow those examples.
Can also add that the weather unit out of Dobbins has a good sense of humor.
Saw their convoy coming back from running post-hurricane weather radar on the Florida pan-handle -- a long line of Humvees and all-black trailers festooned with antennas.
And most of them had alien head stickers on their trailers.
It's not "making fun" so much as work in science and defense is pretty boring but the passion for the field is typically by people who shared a childhood interest in the fantastical and mysterious components of it - and the associated stories.
It's like when they labeled missile defense "Star Wars."
More, I think, preying on the public's interest in UFOs to justify another massive military budget. All of the wild PR around UFOs with absolutely nothing of substance to back it seems to be a very effective PR campaign.
They don’t need to prey on anything to justify a military budget of any size. The military budget just is, and grows, as a basic assumption like “bees can fly” or “magenta is a color”.
The newer insignia is a reference to the NASIC one. "The majestic sphinx – an ancient symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and the challenges that NSIC analysts will
solve – is invoked out of pride in an organization that traces its roots back to the earliest days of aerospace intelligence." Riddle of the space sphinx, I guess.
Wait. That logo seal doesn’t even have the circular text aligned properly. It looks like someone is still trying to master “type on a path” in Illustrator. C’mon, man!
I’ve had people hastily publish (and print on merchandise!) my draft/concept graphics on two occasions. I’ve learned to deliberately deteriorate them now before sharing.
That's a good idea, actually. Maybe at work we too should start delivering POCs to customers with large red blinking banners attached, so they don't mistakenly get the idea that it's a finished product.
I'd guess they haven't updated the old one (larger UFO) with the new one (correct distance between 4-engine jet wing and red arrow cutout, better lettering work)...
Look at "intelligence" on the right of the seal. It veers to the right side of the band it's in as the curve is not tight enough to match the circle. Really amateur stuff.
In the second image, the first and last letters of the text "office of the director of intelligence" are farther away from the center than the letters in the middle, suggesting they haven't been placed on a circular path correctly.
These images are also different in how they render the UFO, and how they render the landscape underneath (the first one has the land in blue and the ocean in white, while the second one has the colors reversed).
Not only does the campy looking UFO make the entire thing look like a bit of a joke, but the misaligned text really finishes off the unprofessional appearance.
Where's the patent drawing? I see a cartoony desk lamp UFO in the logo/seal, and then in the article there are a bunch of angular drawings followed by a 3D render of what looks more like a yam with somebody's challenge coin stuck in the middle.
Well if what they say about UAPs is true, you could do the same thing the 4D version of minecraft does where it visualises what 4D objects would look like for us in our 3D reality.
The animation would morph and sometimes vanish depending on what angle you’re looking at it from!
It could of course be the AvroCar [1]. Although in this case they are referring to 'UFOs', there have been multiple experimental aircraft that look exactly like flying saucers.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
It is UFO, unidentified flying object, not a tag for alien spacecraft. I don't know what is the big deal here. Nowadays lots of aircraft like 'copters , balloons are in the air, most bought by amateurs. They even operate them in swarm.
I think somebody added a 4-5’ tall inflatable dummy to a large drone and flew it around LA for a while. Pilots reported it as a person with a jet pack.
It's kind of a standardization given that uniforms, other clothing, accessories, wall mounted devices, etc all expect the same relative dimensions for these things. Attaching a circle to a sewn in velcro patch that expects a rectangle looks not great.
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The classified reports are probably more useful. Some of these events were detected by various military sensor systems. DNI can request and analyze the raw sensor data. The various Navy reports say nothing about what the ship's sensors recorded.
DoD now has something called the "All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office". Here's the bio of the person running it.[2] He's a physicist with both an academic career and lots of management level jobs in the intelligence community.
Useful comments in the ODNI assessment include:
"Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation."
144 reports originated from USG sources. Of these, 80 reports involved observation with multiple sensors. Most reports described UAP as objects that interrupted pre-planned training or other military activity.
So this is being taken more seriously. It's also being done at a level in the intelligence community that can get access to the raw sensor data if needed. The head of the new office spent years with CIA and NRO, incidentally.
Other than that, not much is being said. Partly because saying more would give away info on exactly how good various sensors are.
[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelima...
[2] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Jul/20/2003039076/-1/-1/1/DR-...