
The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program - farseer
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html
======
dang
See also
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-
flying-object-navy.html) (via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941580)),
which is an extension of this story.

------
volgo
IMO, the fishy part of the article is the cronyism involved in this program:

"The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and
initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada
Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had
an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace
research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr.
Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce
expandable craft for humans to use in space."

So... Harry Reid's friend is absolutely convinced there are aliens, gets Reid
to convince congress to fund the program, and all the money goes back to his
own company? Not fishy at all.

~~~
frankquist
Say that you are interested in investigating puzzling phenomena, and you have
the money. What more logical step is there than to approach your senate
majority leader friend?

Such oddball connections are probably the only the way such a program would
ever get funded.

Edit: well, obviously he didn't have the money. Misspoke. I meant the means (a
company with the required infrastructure).

~~~
glenstein
For me, the logical next stop would be to pause and think very long and very
hard about why the subject isn't treated as legitimate by mainstream science.

~~~
putlake
What we often fail to realize -- esp. in our tech bubble -- is that science is
now mistrusted by the mainstream in society.

~~~
duckMuppet
I think it's more to do with the those claiming things in the name of science
that puts many people off.

Science is a process, a method by which we can answer certain types of
questions. To often people hear things like settled science, or the science is
crystal clear, not up for debate.. These are political posturing and have
little to do with actual science. It's absurd, and some people realize this.

As with any science, data comes in late, or sometimes not at all. There are
quite a few FDA prescription drugs that were approved and later recalled, some
with devastating effects on their consumers.

The truth is, science is done by people, people who are infallible. People who
make mistakes, who see things from a certain point of view, or who don't have
all the data yet. Additionally, prediction models can be tweaked to say
exactly what you want to, with devastating effect on our community.

You can't say anything though. Even in grad school labs, to make certain
statements or even hint about things can lead to problems with your advisor,
or research, or worse yet, peers.. Academia is a great place, at least it has
been for me, as long as you keep your head down and focus on research.. i dont
think it's the best place now if you truly want to question everything. I
wouldn't even venture where you could go for that now.

I think this has led to a generalized mistrust, and it falls on all of us. The
reality is that data is always changing, models change, etc.. People who put
policies into legislation need to balance not only the aspect of the science,
but the overall big picture; cultural, societal, expectations, desires etc. as
well. That's politics. I think it was Russ Roberts who said you can engineer a
bridge, but you can't engineer society in the same way. And i think that's
right, too Often we miss that.

~~~
dTal
FYI, you meant "fallible". "Infallible" means they _don 't_ make mistakes.

------
gfodor
It's been pretty clear for some time now for those who study the facts that
there is a very good chance there are real objects in the sky that maneuver in
ways that conventional aircraft are unable to and cannot be explained
adequately as other observed phenomenon. The taboo around this subject due to
the common hypothesis they are due to extraterrestrials is a shame because
there's been plenty of documented evidence that not only has this been going
on but that governments around the world take it seriously enough to
investigate it.

I found this book to be a good take that avoids hyperbole and tries to stick
to the evidence and facts:

[https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-
Offic...](https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-
Officials/dp/0307717089)

If you were to ask me to guess, my bet is that current and past government
programs to investigate these objects have concluded that a) they are non-
threats to US national security and that b) performing further invasive means
to investigate them past our current level of understanding is too risky to
pursue. So (again if I had to guess) the consensus is, theories of their
origin aside, "don't look into it further, and be assured that there will be
no harm in not doing so," which is why you can see a program like this shut
down without necessarily assuming that it was a waste or a wild goose chase.

~~~
api
Part of the problem is all the crazy mythology around the subject. But strip
that off and it has always seemed to me that there is an interesting residue
of facts. It's not enough to prove anything but it's enough to be intriguing.

One possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that they are here but are just
not making overt obvious contact. If this were true we'd probably be talking
about a "post-singularity" super intelligence. It would be nearly immortal and
thus very patient. Contact protocols might take thousands of years.

~~~
gfodor
After reading "The Dark Forest" I've leaned towards the idea that we are under
pervasive observation (likely by hard-to-detect autonomous AI agents of some
form, the origin of which is relatively inconsequential) and once the
probability tilts towards a non-zero value that we are a threat beyond a
certain blast radius we'll be wiped out.

If that were true, and the message of that being the case were delivered
somehow to our governments, the general status quo around these phenomena and
the propaganda steering people away from caring about them would be
explainable. People have barely gotten used to the idea of mortality, but to
know your race was doomed to extinction with certainty would almost certainly
cause massive civil unrest and a major disruption to almost all human
institutions and culture that assume our collective future is unbounded.

Perhaps this is too tinfoil but it's an internally consistent story, perhaps
with the exception of how or why these agents would be detectable at all, when
they surely could conceal themselves completely -- perhaps it's just
probabilities though since there would not be much downside of detection by a
primitive civilization such as ours.

~~~
rdtsc
> the message of that being the case were delivered somehow to our
> governments,

That would make a fun plot for a movie. But having worked with the government
and then also having observed leaks of top secret information and tools coming
out the supposedly most secretive government institutions, I cannot believe
they would be competent enough to keep that information under a tight lid for
long.

Someone, somehow would have ex-filtrated some proof by now.

What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but
perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert
attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.

~~~
EthanHeilman
>But having worked with the government and then also having observed leaks of
top secret information and tools coming out the supposedly most secretive
government institutions, I cannot believe they would be competent enough to
keep that information under a tight lid for long.

What I find interesting is that certain government programs are very leaky and
others we have not seen any leaks. For instance we know the NSA has
cryptanalysis programs, yet no leaks of US cryptanalysis have occurred. The
Snowden documents have very little information on these programs.

Large numbers of people knew about ULTRA across many nations on both sides of
the iron curtain. ULTRA was kept secret for 42 years, well past the point that
the main utility of keeping it secret has passed.

Why? What makes one program more leaky than another.

>What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but
perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert
attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.

There so many motivations for a disinformation campaign here.

~~~
api
We're also assuming Snowden was not an intentional leak. Spy games get weird
and complicated. They don't call it the "puzzle palace" for nothing.

------
akhilcacharya
The most interesting part to me

>Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas
for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and
program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial
phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced
physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any
physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service
members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.

>“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da
Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has
conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked
as a contractor for the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is
this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic
signals involved or its function.”

They claim to have physical evidence? Seems like a buried lede if even
remotely true.

~~~
WaxProlix
Prosaic bits of metal and rock, perhaps, spun to be containing some sort of
unknowable potential for unknowable purpose.

~~~
crooked-v
There's also "unexplained aerial phenomena" as the generic cover for materials
recovered from the secret research programs of other countries.

~~~
wolf550e
But come on, if US intelligence agencies recovered metallurgy from Russian
hypersonic missiles or something like that, why would they use UFO for cover?
And why would they store it outside of AFRL? I think it's just a way to funnel
taxpayer money, there is nothing real being investigated. Not extraterrestrial
tech, not foreign tech, not even domestic tech.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
>I think it's just a way to funnel taxpayer money

They only spent $22 million on the whole program. Accounting errors in the
Pentagon literally amount to trillions of dollars. $22 million is about 20% of
the cost of a single F-35. They have much better ways to funnel taxpayer money
- $22 million isn't even pocket change for the Pentagon.

~~~
valuearb
$22M could have meant a lot to Reid’s retirement plan.

------
avenoir
My grandmother's sister was married to a man who served as Captain of the 1st
rank on a nuclear submarine in the Soviet and maybe even Russian Navy (I don't
know exactly when he retired). As I found out later in life, he was also one
of the liquidators of Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the effects of which
ultimately led to his early death in early 2000s. I know for sure he already
retired from military by mid 90s when I was about 10 or 11. Right around that
time, me and my pops used to visit them in Moscow on just about every summer
break and I remember during one of our stays with his family my dad asked him
about this particular subject. His response is something I still remember
word-for-word which would translate roughly to "We know they exist. There are
people (in the government) working on this. I don't know anything more and
this is all i can tell you." I'm not trying to make any conclusions here or
get ridiculed. Just sharing something that came from a man who must've had a
pretty high clearance in Soviet military. Or maybe he was just trolling us lol

~~~
kevinskii
When I was in submarine sonar school, one of my instructors claimed to have
heard sounds under the sea that were not of this world. He said that they made
him believe in alien visitation.

In the many years and countless thousands of miles of voyages that followed, I
never heard a goddamned thing. Oh well.

~~~
ianai
You and he were probably using entirely different generations of sonar.

------
kilroy123
The one guy featured in this article, Luis Elizondo, is apart of Tom Delonge's
(guy from the rock band Blink 182) wacky new company To The Stars Academy
[https://tothestarsacademy.com](https://tothestarsacademy.com).

So yeah, I'm not sure he can be taken very seriously. Just listen to Tom
Delong on Joe Rogan's podcast and see how wacky this all is.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_3mnJfHzY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_3mnJfHzY)

~~~
throwaway7645
That academy link is pretty "out there" and def hard to take seriously when
you see consciousness and other things mentioned like that.

------
flipfloppity
Interesting read that expands further on the Navy pilot encounter:
[https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-
edition/](https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/)

Worth noting that the object was observed by a total of 3 F-18s, an E-2
Hawkeye, and a cruiser on the surface.

~~~
madaxe_again
It’s totally anecdotal, and I’m just some guy on the internet, but I’ve seen
these, or at least something similar, twice - once above Bath, UK, in 2012 -
the first hint something was up was a pair of sonic booms as two typhoons
hurtled into the airspace over the city. Needless to say, ran out of the
office to gawp, and the fighters were circling a _thing_ hovering at about
20,000 feet - bulky ovular object with greebles and lumps, just sitting there
in the sky. As they approached it moved sideways as though on rails, and after
a few minutes, a cloud formed around it, which then dissipated over a minute -
the thing was gone. This was written up in the press the next day as a
helicopter pilot in distress. Here’s the story the press ran with - there was
no helicopter, I swear it.
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/Sonic-
boom-r...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/Sonic-boom-rocks-
large-Britain-Typhoon-jets-despatched-helicopter-emitting-hijacking-
signal.html)

The other was at night in the Kazakh steppes, watching a triangle of lights
dance in impossible fashion, before zooming up into the sky and disappearing -
although given that I was near Baikonur, I give more credence to this one
being man made.

But the thing over Bath was enough to break my mind. I still struggle to
believe I saw anything. Others who saw it with me took the helicopter story
and clung to it, because the alternatives are just too damn weird to process.
I can understand why the pilot in the story you link was mocked - giving
credence to something like this invokes painful cognitive dissonance.

Anyway. I’m just a guy on the internet, but I know I saw _something_.

Also, don’t forget Foo Fighters - pilots have been seeing odd things since at
least WWII.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter)

Oh, and there was this peculiar sighting a few years ago - not by me, but
credible and bizarre - but again, maybe mundane.
[https://jpcvanheijst.com/red-lights-over-the-pacific-
ocean-a...](https://jpcvanheijst.com/red-lights-over-the-pacific-ocean-
august-2014)

~~~
mrspeaker
Doesn't sound the same as yours, but I saw the "triangles in the sky" in the
late 90s in Australia. I came home from work at about 1am, and noticed three
lights up in the sky moving at the same slow speed in a triangle-ish formation
(For a while I thought they were connected, but then seemed to move
independently, and just looked... odd). I watched them for a couple of minutes
go across the sky, then had to go and wake up my parents to show them and
prove I wasn't imagining it. I tried to take a photo, but this was the 90s and
my night-time SLR skills were bad ;)

20 years later someone described the exact same thing on /r/astronomy and I
remembered it. I spent a weekend "researching" it and there were lots of
article and sightings but no real info (I was pretty intrigued at that
point!). Then someone replied on the astronomy post that it was "Maybe the
NOSS satellites."... I looked them up, and yep - it was exactly what I
remembered:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxN2ieE8N9A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxN2ieE8N9A)

~~~
King-Aaron
In 1996 (Around June I think), myself and around 200-odd people at the
Karratha drive-in cinema witnessed a nearly identical phenomenon as you
describe. It was about 9pm - 10pm, and I have fond memories of everyone around
us staring straight up, instead of at the cinema screen.

~~~
mrspeaker
Karratha?! I was south of Perth - maybe it was the same ones! I went to call
the observatory, so I dialed the operator (remember operators?) and she said
"You saw the lights too? If you find out what they are, call me back!"... I
never got through to anyone though and just let it go.

~~~
King-Aaron
It would be interesting if it was the same event. Though unlike the formation
you showed, I recall the three stars initially coming together from different
locations in the sky to form the triangle - they weren't initially in
formation. They stayed in formation then for a few minutes, before
disappearing

------
neurotech1
Cmdr. Dave Fravor was one of the most squared away F/A-18 pilots in the Navy.
He is not some conspiracy "nut" and if he says he saw something, I'd believe
him. He is held in high regard by those who served with him.

Cmdr. Fravor was featured in the PBS Carrier series [0][1]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_(documentary)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_\(documentary\))

[1] [http://www.pbs.org/show/carrier/](http://www.pbs.org/show/carrier/)

~~~
michaelcampbell
> Cmdr. Dave Fravor was one of the most squared away F/A-18 pilots in the
> Navy. He is not some conspiracy "nut"...

I see no correlation, implication, or relevance between these 2 statements.

~~~
passwordreset
It doesn't say this in TFA, but Fravor was one of the airmen who reported the
incident to the NYT, hence the relevance. As he was allegedly denigrated by
some as a nut, the 2nd sentence fragment is relevant as well. Neither
correlation nor implication are needed to understand neurotech1's message;
however, it does reference facts outside the article that one could gather
from a quick google search, if desired.
[http://www.google.com/search?q=fravor+ufo](http://www.google.com/search?q=fravor+ufo)

------
staunch
An F-18 pilot saying "there's a whole fleet of them" on radar is pretty
incredible.

[https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005607812/look-at-
tha...](https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005607812/look-at-that-thing-
us-navy-jet-encounters-unknown-object.html?playlistId=1194811622217)

~~~
nsxwolf
What is that thing?!

~~~
magnat
Looks like an insect stuck on the camera lens.

~~~
jboggan
There were multiple contacts and the F-18s had telemetry on the objects, it
wasn't just an optical trick. Also how do two different jets see the same
insect stuck on a lens?

~~~
AgentME
Is there video available from multiple jets? Maybe they didn't ever clearly
see it. Maybe they kinda thought they saw something, and lead themselves to
believe they did because the other jet was so sure of it.

About the radar comment: how often are there false positives on the radar? If
they didn't see anything at all, would they have written off the radar results
because they normally get that kind of noise? Maybe after thinking they saw
something, they read too far into the radar noise.

Yeah, I know I'm proposing a couple coincidences, but we only hear about the
situations where all the coincidences line up. And really, a couple mild
coincidences lining up like this must happen often across the world, and seems
more likely to describe this case than this being something extraordinary.

------
remir
There's no doubt there's a kind of aura of ridicule around the subject of UFOs
and I'm sure credible people don't want to be associated with it.

That being said, I think it's something worthy of exploration. My interest in
the subject really began when I listen to people around me who saw and
experienced things. It's one thing to read books or watch documentaries about
UFOs, but it's another when normal "everyday people" who aren't interested in
this kind of thing tell you their stories.

~~~
valuearb
What’s worth exploring is space. Better telescopes, more monitoring, etc will
actually tell us something about tye possibilities or existence of alien life.

Chasing down misidentified flying objects and hoaxes will not. The idea that
numerous spaceships, each with more potential kinetic energy than mankind has
created in its entire history, are just flying around our atmosphere without
leaving massive and easily recordable emissions is ludicrous.

~~~
madaxe_again
It’s ludicrous if you assume they’re using diesel engines and air screws or
something.

If they can snap accelerate with essentially infinite jerk, as observations
seem to suggest, then they’re not playing by the same rule book as us, and
have fancy inertialess tech that’s beyond our ken.

I’m not some true believer in little green men, just a scientist who won’t
rule out what seems impossible just because it seems so.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and all
that.

~~~
haZard_OS
As a scientist myself, I don't care nearly as much about possibility as I do
about probability.

At present and without extraordinary evidence to the contrary, I see human
error as vastly more probably than "inertialess technology".

~~~
gfodor
For which case(s), specifically, and how does human error resolve the issue?

Or do you not know any specific credible cases of unexplained UFOs, and just
dismiss the entire phenomenon because of its "low probability."

(I'm being facetious because many or all of the interesting cases easily rule
out human error as the source of the phenomenon. Simultaneous human (and
radar!) hallucination maybe, but not error.)

------
jorblumesea
The fact that the military is not concerned is the most telling sign. In many
ways the military would rather you believe in flying saucers instead of
looking for black projects and it's suspected that the original UFO myths were
perpetrated by the government to cover up top secret aircraft development.

Had someone seen the SR-71 in the 70s, it would have been considered a UFO or
"alien technology" because it was so ahead of its time.

Many maneuvers "impossible for a plane" are impossible due to the pilot being
human, not due to the plane not being capable. The F35 is capable of flight
that would legitimately kill the pilot. No pilot, and suddenly you have lots
more room to try crazy stuff including extremely high G speeds and turns,
wingless designs or just crazy ideas.

~~~
deepnotderp
Honestly after seeing the crazy stuff the Su 47 Berkut is capable of, I'm
almost certain half of these things are just experimental drones.

------
tomalpha
>”...largely funded at the request of Harry Reid...”

>”Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire
entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s”

I don’t know who these people are beyond the fact that one of them was
apparently a US senator, but this comes across as capable of being perceived
as a conflict of interest (whether true or not). And not necessarily a
monetary conflict if the recipient was indeed a billionaire.

~~~
skndr
It's the same Bigelow creating inflatable space habitats:
[https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/17/16488646/bigelow-
aerospa...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/17/16488646/bigelow-aerospace-
united-launch-alliance-b330-habitat-lunar-depot)

~~~
akhilcacharya
Yeah, seems like the potential for expertise is there.

------
dwaltrip
Where is the HD footage that actually shows features of the mysterious
"unidentified objects"?

Why is all the evidence grainy and obscured?

The prospect that life from another star system traveled hundreds of trillions
of kilometers, only to hide for the past few decades, peeking out briefly for
low-quality photoshoots, is beyond absurd.

~~~
probably_wrong
I once tried to take a picture of a deer, that I saw running away from me and
hiding behind a tree. I knew perfectly well were it was, in which direction it
would go, and had enough time to set my phone's camera properly. And yet,
thanks to a slow auto-focus and low light, my pictures ended up a blurry,
unrecognizable mess. Not even I would believe my story.

I gained a lot of respect that day for people who claim to have seen something
and yet have no evidence other than blurry, shaky films. If I couldn't do it
under perfect conditions, I don't expect a random guy to become all of a
sudden a great photographer. In fact, if I wanted to get a picture of a plane
_right now_ , with the equipment I have at hand, it would be barely more than
a small, dark spot.

I don't know whether UFOs are real (and, even if they are, if they really are
aliens and not weird, unknown airplane prototypes). But the lack of HD footage
would not be on my top list of reasons against it.

~~~
valuearb
Intelligent Aliens aren’t deer, anyone who has mastered interstellar travel
are closer to god’s in terms of the power they’d have over us. No need to
hide, and probably impossible to hide their massive power sources.

~~~
sumedh
> No need to hide

Maybe they dont want make contact with a primitive species?

~~~
valuearb
Why would they care? We don’t hide from ants.

~~~
sumedh
Do ants have nuclear weapons?

~~~
valuearb
Tbe amount of power needed to travel here from a nearby star in any reasonable
time is equivalent to detonating a nuclear bomb every few seconds.

It would be like us being afraid of a civilization that had just discovered
gunpowder.

~~~
sumedh
They won't be afraid of us, they probably don't want us to do something crazy
like trying to use the nuclear weapons against them and hurt earth(humans) in
the process.

------
Tasboo
Since people are sharing their own anecdotes, I'll share mine. Rather my dad's
and my sister's anecdote. They were driving home one summer evening near
sunset in Wisconsin when they saw in the perfectly clear sky ahead of them
what appeared to be something floating in the sky. They way they described it
was it looked like how a school bus might look at night from a distance with
it's lights on in the inside except just the upper half of the bus, like a row
of closely placed lights on a horizontal object. They say it moved around a
bit in the sky, clearly some distance away from them and then slowly shrank
and disappeared. These two people are not the type of people to lie about
something like this. My dad hates science fiction and has zero imagination. My
sister is a goody two shoes who would be hard pressed to adamantly lie about
this. They told my mom and I this as soon as they arrived home. They looked
like they saw a ghost or something when they told us.

Adding to this, is that like a month or two later, we were talking to a friend
of ours in the area and our friend also confirmed seeing the same object
except they live about 10 miles east of us. The thing is, our friend just told
us this without us bringing the subject up, so it wasn't like she was 'me
too'ing our story. The friend was relieved a bit that someone else had seen
what she had seen.

Keep in mind, this is the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. Moderately poor area.
Just farms, very small towns, and forests for miles. No planes fly this low in
the area. No airfields for at least 30 miles, and the nearest airfield is for
very small planes only. The only planes you see in in our area are ones way up
in the sky.

Googling the description of what they describe comes up with something that
people refer to as a 'cigar' shaped ufo (the recent astroid sighting has
muddied the google results of this a bit). So it seems at least some other
people have seen something similar to this.

------
aptsurdist
One of the most fascinating aspects of the video is that the thing rotates.

As others have noted, the camera is auto-centering the object. If you look at
the object's movement relative to the clouds in the background, it seems that
the object might be turning and exposing its broader side to the relative
direction of travel as seen from the camera. And then slowing down in the
plane as viewed from the camera.

Note, this movement is relative and it's very hard to get a sense of
perspective. So rather than slowing down, this could be the object banking and
changing direction to move towards or away from the camera?

Maybe it's just a foreign aircraft with some kind of wingless shape like the
B-2 bomber? I can't find a good source, but it seems there are blogs talking
about new foreign stealth drones that could look like this. ([http://defence-
blog.com/news/new-stealth-bomber-spotted-in-c...](http://defence-
blog.com/news/new-stealth-bomber-spotted-in-china.html) \-- not sure if this
source is legit)

P.S. This is all assuming that this is indeed some kind of flying thing and
not some kind of mirage.

------
valuearb
“The Pentagon quietly ran a $22 million program to study unidentified flying
objects from 2008 to 2012 at the behest of former Senator Harry Reid, the New
York Times reported on Saturday, after considering numerous accounts of
unexplained phenomena that could involve advanced technology developed by
foreign governments or even aliens dropping in to spy on our crapsack world.
For years, this program had federal contractors scurrying around trying to
identify unexplained phenomena like Mulder and Scully instead of developing
new and innovative ways to kill people.

The unclassified but secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification
Program was funded $22 million from 2008 to 2011, with the vast majority of
the funding going to Bigelow Airspace. That’s a company conveniently owned by
one of Reid’s friends and donors, Robert Bigelow”

------
ianai
Spend more looking for UFOs or, you know, we could invest in, say, cyber
security for our elections and infrastructure programs...

~~~
eric_h
Yes - let's criticize the 0.0036% portion of the budget that seems somewhat
wasteful ;)

~~~
ianai
True. There’s lots wrong.

------
rl3
> _A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at
> the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science
> fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against
> some of the technologies discovered._

Except that, if said technologies are of man-made origin, then the United
States is—given its rich history with regards to black aerospace programs—the
most likely operator.

Maybe Nick Cook was more right than I've been willing to admit:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957586)

------
blhack
How much do the various militaries and defense contractors communicate with
one another? Is it possible that we end up spying on our own technology across
departments/contractors?

------
olegkikin
I looks like the plane is making a left turn, and yet the object is dead
center in the screen with barely any shake. And it's definitely not
stabilized, because all the lines on the display are still.

So maybe the pilot has some crazy ability to track a flying object perfectly
while turning, but try doing it in any game and I think you will fail.

~~~
eric_h
I know nothing about the current state of military tech, but that looks like a
targeting camera that has some sort of edge detection allowing it to track the
object.

The vertical lines to the left and right of the object appear computer
controlled, to me, especially because they track the left and right edges of
the object and the vertical length changes in a way that seems reactive to the
object on screen.

The brief moment where those lines don't have the object centered and then it
just jumps back into place (at the very end of the video ~31-32s) screams
computer assisted to me.

In short, I don't think that's manual tracking, because I'm pretty sure that
even a Navy pilot would have trouble tracking it that perfectly by hand.

~~~
neurotech1
The pod is an AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR[0][1], a type of IRST (InfraRed Search &
Tracking) system. The pod is either cued by the F/A-18 radar, or automatically
tracked by pod itself. The ATFLIR has a computer assisted stabilization
system.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/ASQ-228_ATFLIR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/ASQ-228_ATFLIR)
[1]
[https://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/atflir/](https://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/atflir/)

------
hawktheslayer
It's always crazy to see HN and Drudge link to the same article.

------
swendoog
From the article:

"A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at
the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science
fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against
some of the technologies discovered"

Wait, what? What are the "technologies discovered"?

~~~
valuearb
This director is the sane crazy nut working with Tom DeLonge now.

------
nyolfen
any old excuse to link this excerpt from adam curtis' hypernormalisation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQX08u9PGPA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQX08u9PGPA)

------
djffheioi1
What concerns me about these things is the likelihood of it being an
earthbound experimental aircraft. If it's not ours, and it looks like magic to
us, we're losing our air superiority.

------
phkahler
I find the video a little odd. The pilot is tracking the object in his center
of view but is not turning aggressively to intercept it.

~~~
ceejayoz
The video is from the FLIR camera, which is gyroscopically stabilized and
locked onto the object. I don't think you can tell what the parent plane is
doing unless part of it comes into the FLIR's view. News helicopters have the
same tech.

------
INTPenis
Military loves funding. I wouldn't be surprised if military guys were fanning
the flames of the UFO claims in front of the right legislators to get the
funding they want.

Find out what a person truly believes in and you can rule them.

------
neil_macintyre
Does anyone have a link to the official government release of this
information. I have been searching for sometime but only can find secondary
news cites (and we all know they have there ways of messing with the facts).

------
DoubleCribble
And if they do exist, then what? Piss 'em off by trying to kill or capture
one?(more likely) Send Richard Dreyfuss up for an extended visit to
Wyoming?(less likely)

------
jl6
It looks like a bug on the lens...

------
codeonfire
My guess is they send regular pilots up on training to see if they detect
whatever latest stealth drone they are also testing. They obviously are not
going to tell the pilots beforehand.

~~~
pfisch
That does not adequately explain what happened over O’Hare airport
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting)

or any of these other sightings really.

------
starrychloe
See also [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40234/what-
is-t...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40234/what-is-this-
unknown-object-in-this-military-video)

------
maxsavin
They're out there folks

------
nkkollaw
The video looks fake..?

~~~
berkut
It's an Infrared camera video, taken from the Super Hornet's IRST system which
can slave / gimbal independently of the aircraft's manoeuvring, hence why it's
centred.

~~~
nkkollaw
I see.

I guess I'm just kind of disappointed that never seem to be a good-quality
video to look at when we're talking about UFOs.

------
eksemplar
I never knew that HN was so full of people who might be spotted on reddits
conspiracy subteddit.

------
jim_combinator
Harry Reid is as crooked as a dog's hind leg. In fact, that democrat putz is
so crooked they'll have to screw him into the ground when he dies. Anyway, I
hope his buddy Robert Bigelow the male gigolo finds something interesting and
shares his wares because something's going on up there.

~~~
dang
Please stop posting uncivil, unsubstantive comments to HN. You're welcome
here, but comments like this are not, regardless of how bad some other people
may be.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

------
valuearb
A partial list of things more believable than UFOs are Alien spaceships

1) Chemtrails.

2) 9/11 conspiracies.

3) JFK assassination conspiracy.

4) Vaccines cause autism.

5) Cell phones cause cancer. etc, etc.

The only theory less believable than UFOs being Aliens is flat earth.

~~~
noetic_techy
Or just very advanced earthly technology hidden in plane sight via the
ridicule of people who lump it in...

