
U.S. Fighters About to Get Infrared Sensors That Could Be Huge for UFO Reporting - jseliger
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28903/u-s-fighter-jets-are-about-to-get-infrared-sensors-that-could-be-huge-for-ufo-reporting
======
dev_dull
I’m not a UFO-interested person, but some of the news around this stuff is
just... bizarre. For example, this patent[1] from the secretary of the navy
activated last Friday for “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”?

The circumstances around the patent are even more intriguing. Here’s a quote
from a patent lawyer here on HN regarding this patent[2]:

 _Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the
invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy
attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical
circumstances, in a public forum._

1\.
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en)

2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants)

~~~
Rebelgecko
I feel like these patente are a red herring to throw off Chinese and Russian
scientists. If this research was real, it would probably be classified and the
Navy would've used the mechanisms that exist for keeping patents secret.

~~~
krapp
That doesn't make sense unless one assumes Chinese and Russian scientists are
idiots who can't tell real science from BS... in which case there would be no
reason to throw them off to begin with.

~~~
King-Aaron
That's my thought too. Someone else mentioned the math being basically
nonsense, but surely if it was there to misdirect other scientists there must
be some grain of sense to it - otherwise it'd just be an exercise in futility?

~~~
krapp
The misdirection would only work until someone actually read it and pointed
the nonsense out, though. If it were actually intended to fool someone, it
would probably be less obviously wrong. A patent for something feasibly
advanced but not too out of the ordinary, or something hidden as a red herring
in an actual classified document intended to be intercepted. I have a hard
time believing a foreign government would waste a significant amount of time
and money on American patents on woo-woo antigravity and things.

In another thread, I thought it could just be someone trolling the patent
office, but I don't know.

~~~
King-Aaron
I think I'll just file this one under "interesting but probably not worth
thinking about"

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dmix
I find it uninspiring that we still only get grainy video or flir video from
these jets. They claim multiple jets detected on but there was no ground based
radar, satellites, or other sources that could correlate these "sightings"?
The evidence always seems so thin and from a single source, almost on purpose.

~~~
Cthulhu_
What has struck me a few times with the videos from fighter jets is that the
UFO does not seem to move relative to the camera, that is, it's stuck in the
middle or something. Which of course to me implies it's a speck or something
on the camera.

(I'm not a photographer though. I did read that e.g. scratches on a camera
lens don't really have a noticeable effect on the final picture as well)

~~~
flyinglizard
If they are taking those videos with their targeting pods, then the pod
follows the locked target, keeping it in the frame center. It would be
different if they took the videos with their gun sight, which is fixed in a
single direction.

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King-Aaron
It's probably a logical fallacy of some kind on my part, but does it seem to
anyone else that stories about UFO's are recently becoming more common in the
mainstream media?

~~~
ericmcer
I listened to a podcast interview with Dan Aykroyd recently and he talked
about the exact same thing. He is convinced they are doing soft preparation to
begin unveiling extraterrestrial life to us. Dan Aykroyd is definitely not a
legitimate source haha, but he is someone who is very ear to the ground on
this stuff, and you are not alone in noticing a recent uptick in sightings ,
news, leaks, etc. about UFOs.

~~~
adrianN
It would be quite the movie plot if extraterrestrial life were revealed right
when the humanity needs to work together in a massive push to avoid the
climate catastrophe.

~~~
krapp
That would basically just be "Day the Earth Stood Still," but with an
environmental, rather than anti-war message.

And it's too late to avoid the climate catastrophe anyway, so the only reason
aliens would actually show up is for the free real estate after humanity
completes its self-fumigation.

~~~
imtringued
It's never too late. We are just one World War 3 away from the solution...

~~~
krapp
Humanity could bomb itself back to being just a single stone age tribe
tomorrow and it likely wouldn't reverse the course of climate change.

The avalanche has begun, it's too late now for the pebbles to vote.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Nuclear winter? That could reverse the course of climate change, and then
some. (It's not a _good_ answer to the climate problem...)

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svd4anything
> We see this in action in the "Go Fast" and "Gimbal" videos released by the
> Pentagon that supposedly show UFOs. I don't believe these videos show
> anything really out of the ordinary at all, and certainly nothing
> definitively so, and there has been some very good forensic analysis done on
> them already that reinforces this point of view. Nick West, in particular,
> has really done compelling work on this topic. Some of his videos are posted
> below and are worth consideration. The third video that was released, the
> one of the infamous "Tic Tac" from 2004, looks like, well a Tic Tac, at
> least to me. Regardless, they all show FLIR footage taken by Hornets'
> targeting pods.

~~~
libertine
The odd part is the radar-visual claims, and why would someone like Navy Cmdr.
David Fravor (who claimed to have visual contact and was in pursuit of the
object), would throw all of his legacy out the window, all for a lie that
could easily be debunked.

I find it hard to pin that the US Navy pilots aren't as sharp as we perceived
to be, or that these actors had something to gain with this, or if it was
easily debunked why weren't the actors involved briefed on what it was.

~~~
alluro2
I agree - and with this kind of stuff, somehow we're prone to looking at the
government like it's a perfectly running black box, with an all-reaching, all-
encompassing power and control over information. But if you look at these
pieces of information that have gone out - "something is being reported by our
people, we don't actually know what is it, people are talking about it to the
outside as well, we thought we add some equipment to see if we can find out
more" \- it seems much more realistic to me, and much more in line with
inefficient, clumsy and sometimes incompetent government that it is...

------
themodelplumber
The author made a very good case overall.

More sensors means more measurement, which means more control of time and
space, and the further enabling of an outward-looking stance. All of which is
going to be of benefit as humanity leans harder on the science of the natural
world and begins reaching for new ways to prevent catastrophic wars and
disasters and explores space travel options. The more sensors, and the smarter
they can operate, the better.

The 20th century was in many ways a huge list of reasons why we shouldn't
cocoon ourselves and "not explore" things that are what I call NO-NOs: Next
order natural occurrences. Think we know it all, have seen it all, and can
predict it all? Nope! And sensors are going to help us navigate and push
through to new levels of understanding.

It sounds crazy but there are still influential people in the military affairs
community who don't believe we should look into UFOs. Not because they claim
they don't exist, but because they claim the tech is too far beyond us, and
there's nothing we can do about it! So why try? This is literally their
reasoning. For a good example, listen to Lt. Col. Halt USAF (RET) recap his
experience at Rendlesham in recent interviews.

This psychology is exactly what will keep us from moving forward and exploring
whatever else is really out there. No cover-up conspiracies needed, just plain
old heads-down psychology. Keep the world the way it is. You can't argue with
the psychology and expect to get anywhere; it is too self-protective. So
arguing for more and better sensors is probably the best stance we have right
now.

------
nabla9
Tyler Rogoway just keeps writing these fantasy UFO articles and people just
refuse to read the articles that debunked the findings.

~~~
jackcodes
Could be the case that people don’t know about them, because after all, they
aren’t linked anywhere.

------
DrBazza
Obligatory [https://xkcd.com/1235/](https://xkcd.com/1235/)

Assuming UFO != alien, then this is definitely interesting. There are
definitely atmospheric phenomena we know little or nothing about. Sprites,
elves, jets, ball lightning and so on. More data on that would be exciting.

2019: "Quick get my worst camera so I can snap this UFO!"

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m_mueller
I wonder what people here think of Bob Lazar. On one hand I have a very hard
time believing the physics he describes without hard proof, on the other his
story has been remarkably consistent, there's bits of tangential evidence and
as a whole it AFAIK wasn't falsified for 30 years now. It's certain to me at
least that he worked at Los Alamos. I have only two explanations:

1) he was a Los Alamos employee that came up with a scheme to sell books and
such, and has a remarkable gift for acting and telling that story consistently
for decades. But then why the FBI raids and such, is that invented too?

2) pretty much his entire story is true. But could such a huge project be kept
secret?

~~~
carlosdp
From what I understand, records show he worked at Los Alamos, but not his
role, so he could have been a janitor for all we know.

We also know he didn't actually go to MIT like he claims, and the way he
explains the "alien tech" are not the way a real engineer would talk about
these things. So I'd say definitely a crackpot...

~~~
lawnchair_larry
How do we know that he didn’t go to MIT? And what does he say that is
inconsistent with how a real engineer would talk about something?

~~~
tenfivewest
There’s a video of him being asked who his professors were at Caltech and MIT.
He names two people, one was from a community college and a high school I
think.

And he doesn’t explain the science in a detailed or verbose way.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Neither of those explanations are very satisfying. At best they might make the
story suspicious, but that doesn’t seem like enough to say we _know_
something.

~~~
carlosdp
I mean, the claim that he worked at a secret lab on alien tech should be the
suspicious part...

The burden on proof is on him to prove the story is real, not on others to
disprove the stuff he makes up.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Sure, but that’s besides the point. Once parent comment asserts a fact about a
specific detail, they now have an obligation to cite the evidence for that
particular fact. Lazar’s obligation to prove his own claims is a legitimate
but separate issue.

