
The US Navy Admits UFO Videos Are Real - TakakiTohno
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/09/18/those-ufo-videos-are-real-navy-says-please-stop-saying-ufo/
======
nickpinkston
I still think this known military plasma laser tech is the highest likelihood
of being the explanation:

"Researchers working with high-power laser weapons discovered that they could
create a glowing ball of fire in the sky by crossing the beams of two powerful
infrared lasers…By moving the laser beams around the sky, the researchers
found they could shift the plasma ball back and forth at very high speed…. At
night, they demonstrated their skills, flying their glowing creations in
formation high above the cold desert."

[https://www.wired.com/2007/05/plasma-laser-
uf/](https://www.wired.com/2007/05/plasma-laser-uf/)

~~~
iamnothere
This is (or something like it) is the most likely scenario based on what we
know. I'm amazed at the number of people who fail to apply Occam's Razor in
this case, especially when UFO sightings have been used as disinformation in
the past.

~~~
pbz
What's fascinating (and scary) to me is the number of people who selectively
look at some of the evidence, come up with an explanation, ignore the rest of
the evidence, and then call it "case closed". All while mocking anyone else
who picked a different subset of the evidence.

------
mncharity
Quoting
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23006754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23006754)
:

> This comment on ArsTechnica on the same subject links to some videos which
> have nice explanations for the videos:
> [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/navy-releases-
> three-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/navy-releases-three-
> videos-that-showcase-unidentified-objects/?comments=1&post=38845980)
> Basically lens flare, balloon, and a plane.

The video links there are
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Btns91W5J8&t=7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Btns91W5J8&t=7s)
,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M&t=20s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M&t=20s)
,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1oTg0kxzDs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1oTg0kxzDs)
.

~~~
imustbeevil
Before you do a victory lap, realize that those explanations are by a game
developer that is going solely off only the information in the videos. People
with more information have said it is not those things.

It's probably not aliens. It's probably not a hot air balloon. Be more
skeptical. Allow things to be unexplained if no explanation is sufficient.
When every video someone links points to the same video, your warning lights
should be going off.

The Pentagon and Navy would not have released these as "UFOs" if a game
developer watching blurry footage could have told them what they were.

------
lowdose
Suppose a nation state spend several trillion dollars on investigating every
improbability to achieve science fiction like travel capacity & speed to
eventually reach the conclusion we have reached global maximum of physics as
it is.

What is the superior strategy to this nation state other than sending
adversaries on a similar resource waisting wild goose chase?

~~~
notechback
First of all why does every nation state have to see other nations as
adversarial? They could just share those insights and everyone gains. We're
all in the same game of life.

~~~
lowdose
The biological warfare capabilities of the USSR that were revealed when the
iron curtain fell were a complete surprise to the Western world.

The game of power is completely different because communism practiced today
has nothing in common with the communism of the USSR. Thus we cannot assume we
are going to be lucky again our adversaries paradigm breaks and momentum is
lost before they deplete their military capabilities.

Suggesting and half confirming an unknown unknown to an adversary is very
efficient to expand this relative peaceful periode we live in. Every
additional amount of resource adversaries waist on unachievable capabilities
is an additional resource not invested capabilities that can be useful to tip
the power balance.

Nobody wants a military arm race between global powers but I think it is naive
to assume what we wish for is a reasonable reflection of how our reality is
actually constructed.

------
TheHeretic12
The technology exists, and it is among the toppest of secrets. If you have a
head for technical reading, you can have this patent: US20120105181A1. That is
a rundown of the mathematics involved. You will also need to know about
Radiatively Induced Fermion Resonance. Studying this secret relentlessly for
years, I have found little bits of the puzzle. They are nuclear powered
aircraft. They utilize a mercury-thorium solution as a fuel source and working
fluid. Not a nuclear reactor, but a generator, directly converting the
exploitable thorium beta decay chain, to a nuclear magnetic moment. The torus
configuration is a self driving EM pump that then creates a force normal to
gravity, like a super maglev. This is gimballed to achieve flight and
maneuver. Many people have independently reversed this design, and the math is
solid. I myself have collected documents to support every claim I just made.
There is OPINT, SIGINT, HUMINT in there too. You dont see any Homer Hickam or
North Korea types building them because they require literal tons of mercury,
and the nuclear material. Mercury is very well controlled on a global scale,
just like uranium, all kinds of environmental regulation.

The reason this tech will never be publicly released: they are flying nuclear
hazmat nightmares. They put out an identifiable form of radiation when they
operate. They can be detected, once you know how they run.

And we already have something better, there are rumors about newer ones with a
better tech, but I dont quite understand the technical claims they make for
how those work. Something about pulsed lasers and antimatter, the phrase
Schwinger limit kept showing up.

Anyway, go buy an old Levitron off of Ebay, set it on your desk, any whenever
you feel glum about the future, give it a spin and remember that its a hand
powered UFO.

~~~
kossTKR
I have no way of verifying any of this, but your writing makes me reminisce
about the weirder parts of the internet about 15 years ago. It was a time with
a weird cross pollination between internet sleuths, fringe academia, x-files
aestheticians and citizen journalists - before the waves of commercialisation
would push these fringes out of sight and drown them in noise.

I remember spartan looking websites with thorough and somewhat level headed
journalism and research made by often highly educated hobbyists into the
history of all kinds of stuff from CIA to Oluf Palme, from Göbekli Tepe to the
backside of geopolitics.

This is probably partly my mind playing tricks on me but what stood out was
the depth of research, the common courtesy and the long well thought out
replies people would write. People really had read the books, the docs, the
papers and made up their minds from that.

Today so much gets derailed into superficial identity or tribal politics,
completely bonkers conspiracy-fiction ala Inforwars or psyop bullshit that is
hard to attach any messenger to.

Does anyone know where to get that hit of fringe without all of the hysteria
and insanity today?

------
belzebalex
I haven't found anyone serious trying to understand what happened. There's a
lot of info, even just on the overlay of the cameras. Id really like to know
what the velocity, altitude and acceleration of these things was. Do you know
of anybody who has done an analysis of these videos?

~~~
CydeWeys
Yes, here's an in-depth explanation by someone who actually did the math:
[https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M](https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M)

Tl;dr it can simply be explained as a balloon drifting in the wind.

~~~
ballarak
It can't. Read through Christopher Mellon, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Intelligence and Minority Staff Director Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, twitter
([https://twitter.com/ChristopherKMe4](https://twitter.com/ChristopherKMe4)).

The debunker doesn't address the fact that in addition to the FLIR-lock, there
was multiple visual and radar confirmations.

~~~
oh_sigh
I wonder how many times Christopher Mellon has been convinced of UFOs in the
past.

Something I've noticed with this recent dump of videos is the only people I
personally know who are interested in convincing themselves that it is truly
unexplainable are ones who have already claimed other videos represented UFOs
as well. A lot of people have taken the "I want to believe" mantra to heart,
and it has affected their ability to actually reason about what they are
seeing.

------
troughway
Spoiler: “Real” here meaning “we don’t know what they are”.

A researcher YouTube already put together a video showing the unlikelihood
that it’s extra terrestrial, and more of a visual phenomena of the camera they
were testing out on these planes. If someone would be kind as to link it.

~~~
mouzogu
I think you mean this one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus)

One thing that is not really explained is why experienced pilots would not be
aware of the phenomena explained in this video. Seems to me they would
experience this all the time.

fwiw I don't think it's actually an extraterrestrial object.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
what do you think it is? a really advanced hobbyist f*cking with society?

~~~
dorkwood
It's interesting that people jump straight from "object we don't understand"
to "therefore it must have come from another planet". If I ever suggest to
someone that it could be, for example, an animal that no one has ever seen
before, atmospheric phenomena we've never observed before, experimental
aircraft from another country, experimental aircraft from the US,
disinformation campaign by the US military for some yet unknown reason, lone
scientist's experimental drone, simultaneous hack of all pilots systems, etc,
I'm usually met with "don't be silly, those are impossible". Well, why isn't
"alien spaceship from another planet" also impossible? Why is that more likely
than the other explanations?

------
hota_mazi
> But … admitting that they see things in the sky and they can’t identify
> them, that to me is the most amazing part of this

Really?

What is amazing about this?

There have been thousands of UFO sightings over the past decades and a huge
proportion of these have been explained. But not all. There are still a few
sightings that we have no explanation for, there is nothing amazing about it.

Obviously, that doesn't mean these unexplained sightings are aliens, they are
most likely natural phenomena we haven't figured out yet, but there's nothing
remarkable about admitting we have no explanation for something.

------
supernova87a
You know, to me it looks more like a hot pixel on an infrared array or mirror
speck than any resolvable object. The thing seems to move around / jitter very
slightly so maybe not a hot pixel though. Was there a crew report of actually
seeing this, or just the camera or video images? With these cameras you
basically should default to any other possible artifact before supposing it's
a "UFO"...

~~~
thysultan
There where two pilots and two feeds that displayed the same image, so the
only other conclusion is that both the pilots had a hot pixel on the exact
same corresponding location.

~~~
newsbinator
I wonder what the chances of that are. Seriously.

I suppose there's a non-zero chance it's 2 instruments failing in precisely
the same way in precisely the same spot at precisely the same time.

Stranger things have happened.

~~~
eloff
That's maybe lottery like chances. What's the chance it's aliens, given we see
no sign of intelligent life when we look to the stars, and given the size and
distances involved? Probably worse.

The logical conclusion is that it's neither. Given our current priors.

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tehjoker
"C.I.A. Admits Government Lied About U.F.O. Sightings" (1997)

[https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-
government-...](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-
lied-about-ufo-sightings.html)

------
asfarley
I read a reasonable-sounding hypothesis that this could have been adversaries
testing the aircraft’s tracking and target-acquisition capabilities.

If you’re testing someone’s active radar, you would want a prominent object to
catch their attention, which then moves in increasingly erratic patterns until
tracking fails.

The projected image/combined laser beam seems like a feasible way to achieve
this, and I don’t think it takes a huge level of commitment from a national
military to build one.

Maybe coincident lasers were being projected from submarines just beneath the
surface.

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24gttghh
Article is from 2019

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LargoLasskhyfv
Just some test runs of some electronic warfare aspects of _Project Bluebeam_.

