
Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous UAVs - arthurcolle
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201908.0233/v1
======
narrator
Meanwhile, uncontacted Stone Age Tribe elders observes anomalous large bird
possibly made out of shiny rocks in the sky traveling at faster than any bird
flys or animal runs. It does not make noise like bird and it does not flap
wings but makes low drowning sounds like a fast flowing river. It would be
able to traverse to the big unknown mountain far off in the distance in
minutes to hours.

Stone Age Tribe Hacker News drum circle meeting says that tribal elders smoked
too much sacred pipe last night or maybe supreme elder tribal shaman has
secretly made it out of shiny rocks and leaves. They ask, why would it fly
like that in a straight line, doesn't the bird know that the world ends just
over the horizon?

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
You seem to be sarcastically suggesting that it'd be dumb to dismiss such
sightings because we have those planes today. It'd still be correct to dismiss
the stone age sighting of something like a modern airplane, since they weren't
around yet.

~~~
droithomme
He mentioned uncontacted stone age people. That's a reference to tribes today
who choose not to connect with the outside world. For example, the Sentinelese
are said to not even have fire. They have metal now only because a few years
ago a big freighter crashed on their island, which surely was perceived the
same as a UFO crash would be to us.

~~~
eitland
There's a story that reaches the front page of HN from time to time of a
Russian family that fled from Stalin into the Taiga sometime before the space
race and were only found I think in the late 70ies.

One of the observations they had made from the wilderness was satellites, and
IIRC they had figured out the objects had to be man made.

That story always touches me in more than one way.

------
dfsegoat
This is the footage from the 2004 Nimitz Incident that is one case study in
the paper:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY)

This is another more compelling video, but was not covered in this paper (was
from 2015):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVRg7LLaQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVRg7LLaQA)

The US Navy has certified that these videos are authentic, and were not for
public release. [1]

1 - [https://time.com/5680192/navy-confirms-ufo-videos-
real/](https://time.com/5680192/navy-confirms-ufo-videos-real/)

~~~
Iv
Having spent a few years in skeptic groups helping debunk aliens and yeti
footage, I must say that these are refreshing documents: authenticated videos,
sensors are specified, we even have original audio of one!

I would like to just ask something I may have missed: how did they shield
themselves from the (very) classic error of mistaking something small and
close, like a bird or a bug, for something big and distant? There is an
abundance of footage of blurry insects close to a camera being mistaken for
very fast alien ships.

I mean, this is supposedly locked by radars, why is the distance measured by
those not given?

And I must say, reading the analysis of the Nimitz incident by this paper, it
is a glorious case of over-analysis. They base themselves on an oral
recollection of approximate values, add to it wild assumption ("Since we want
a minimal power estimate, we took the acceleration as 5370 g and assumed that
the UAV had a mass of 1000 kg.") and to unnecessarily complicated calculations
to guess random things about this supposed vessel.

Also worthy of note is that this is part of a program [1] paid by a senator in
the direction of a close friend, who is a UFO enthusiast, and had to justify
spending 22 million USD with some things.

In such a case, I don't think they have an excuse for not having actual radar
data as well. I suspect such data would dismiss cases as something easily
identifiable like a meteorite.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Iden...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program)

~~~
typeformer
We know for sure that at least the radar from E-2C Hawkeye plane in the area
that had returned was confiscated by plainclothes officials who landed on the
Nimitz via helicopter.

~~~
lolc
How do "we" know this?

~~~
typeformer
Because the guy on the plane responsible for the data testified on camera that
he was instructed to grab the the "bricks" (specialized hard drives)
immediately upon landing and they were then confiscated and quickly flown off
of the carrier rather than being stored in the safe as per usual.

Watch Histoy's Unidentified series.

~~~
lolc
Oh ok. I don't trust that story. Sounds like somebody is embellishing if not
inventing things. It's unfortunate but this is my general experience with UFO
events that get publicized. People confabulate stories that fit the alien
origin and government conspiracy narrative.

Time to slink out now for me. I derive some entertainment from the puzzling
over what a UFO might be. The ensuing unwarranted speculation into alien
origins puts me off. And the people who posit a government conspiracy tend to
assume just those origins.

------
excalibur
> The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the
> flight characteristics required for interstellar travel. That is, if these
> observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could
> easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and
> cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time.

The authors are not actually suggesting that the craft are flying faster than
light speed, they are arrogantly defining the reference frame of a traveler
aboard the ship as "proper time". It would still take over 4 years to get to
Alpha Centauri from our perspective.

~~~
jerf
"That is, if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space"

If the observed accelerations of my car were sustainable in space, I'd be able
to do interstellar travel pretty easily.

Stack this up with the other crazy assumptions made in this piece (check out
the first comment, for instance). You want to assume high tech has 1000G
acceleration? OK, you know, sure, fine. But it _also_ moves through the air at
_massively_ supersonic speeds without causing friction or sonic booms? That's
another _separate_ piece of technology that's basically magic. (Honestly not
even sure which I find less believable!)

And then this amazing advanced technology is flying around is moving around on
that flight pattern because... uhh... why would any aircraft fly that way
again? Look at that flight path. What possible use could that have?

I've never heard even a sketch of a motive that suggests _why_ these craft
would fly in such crazy patterns around aircraft that isn't better met by some
other approach, that is, whatever goals something flying such an astonishing
craft may have, they could simply obtain directly.

The theory that these are "technologically advanced craft" requires an
_incredibly_ precise combination of high technological skill matched with
utter ineptitude and stupidity, beyond merely "oh we just don't understand
their goals". This is not intelligence acting in ways we don't understand;
this is lack of intelligence.

~~~
typeformer
Please see exactly how these objects were tracked before you degrade these
researchers work. They're using the scientific method but you are not.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316)

~~~
jerf
They may be using the form of the scientific method, but they are not using
the substance. I value the latter much, much, much more than the former.

------
codezero
This is a fun paper. I wish they had done some work to acknowledge and/or
dismiss other potential reasons for the appearance of the UAVs, like
instrumental, environmental, etc.

The section that implies that they can just assume they are flying physical
objects because the observers are professionals is pretty weak.

~~~
calibas
They do acknowledge potential issues: "these observations are either
fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far
more advanced than any known craft on Earth."

And their selection process: "These encounters were selected from a subset of
cases for which there were multiple professional witnesses observing the craft
in multiple modalities (including sight, radar, infrared imaging, etc.)."

Some of the cases have multiple witnesses and video of the objects. You can
look at it yourself.

~~~
codezero
As someone who has published a lot of peer reviewed physics papers none of how
this is presented feels rigorous. It’s fine to muse about the “what if” here
but they don’t present this work that way, in my opinion, as they appear to be
reinforcing their work with witnesses and not science.

Nothing really wrong with that in general but personally I’d rather see an
attempt to dismiss as many other possibilities as possible.

I would love to see a thorough analysis and understanding of how the sensor
pod works, as well as the software it runs to see if it could be contributing
to anomalous measurements in the HUD. An exploration of any local
environmental data, astrological, optical, and chemical reasons something may
appear the way it does in the sensor data.

I’d much prefer a release of the entire data set of raw sensor information
along with it.

~~~
saul_goodman
So, basically all the stuff that's impossible to get 15 years after it
happened. Yes it would be great to scientifically eliminate all other
possibilities. But it's probably not going to happen. The paper is an attempt
to treat the subject matter seriously with the limited amount of tangible
information still available.

~~~
codezero
Why should that data be impossible to get? They seemed aware of the
exceptional nature of what they were observing, I would be surprised if the
data wasn’t archived somewhere.

------
exabrial
From the comments: [https://www.metabunk.org/2004-uss-nimitz-tic-tac-ufo-flir-
fo...](https://www.metabunk.org/2004-uss-nimitz-tic-tac-ufo-flir-footage-
flir1.t9190/page-8#post-222154)

pretty good discussion

~~~
typeformer
People explanations on that thread are weak AF.

------
blincoln
I'm disappointed that the authors don't even consider that the observations
might be of rare atmospheric phenomena. Some of those (red sprites, etc.) look
unreal.

What the Navy observed also sounds an awful lot like WWII "foo fighters".
Occam's Razor tells me it's probably some sort of natural phenomenon that
happens to be attracted to planes for some reason.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
What natural phenomenon would be attracted to planes?

~~~
blincoln
I don't know for sure. I'm not a physicist. I would assume it could be the
metal in the plane, vortices created by its motion through the air, changes to
the Earth's magnetic field caused by the metallic object moving through it,
something like that.

------
typeformer
If you're interested to know more about exactly what was the wide and varied
spectrum of sophisticated technology that tracked these ET crafts following
the Nimitz group over six days I've compiled a list here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316)

~~~
starpilot
FYI your post was flagged and you're risking a hellban trying to promote it.

~~~
typeformer
Thanks for the heads up

------
joshvm
Can the link be updated to the (open access) peer reviewed article?

[https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939](https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939)

