So the anomaly that the carrier group tracked, then scrambled fighter jets for. The object that four different pilots saw visually, and was confirmed on multiple different sensors. That was camera glare?
The video is only one piece of the evidence. The pilots are trained, and other sensor systems confirmed what the camera was showing. This analysis is pretty flimsy.
The "saucer" shape and its rotation were IR glare, that's the point of the video. He's very clear that he's NOT debunking the existence of an object. The exhaust of a jet engine, or another high-heat signature, could cause such glare.
AFAICT no pilots saw this shape with their naked eye. They were miles away from the target and relying on what they saw via their sensors.
So actually Commander Fravor saw the object with his own eyes, he is one of the pilots who was sent in to engage the craft after it appeared on radar from the carrier group, here is a detailed video of him talking about the incident with Lex Fridman(AI reasearcher - MIT) on his podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E
I'm literally learning about this "gimball video" from this video, so I don't have all the background, but the video we're looking at wasn't taken by David Fravor; it was taken by Chad Underwood? In the video we're looking at, we don't so much have to guess how far away the object was; the camera video itself indicates it. It's too far away to discern shape and rotation accurately with a naked eye. The video goes into detail about this, and the details aren't complicated.
yeah I made a mistake and can't edit my comment. You are right the gimball video(OP's link) was from 2014 and was not related to David Fravor. Its confusing as there were three videos released at the same time in 2017 and they all came from the Pentagon(and were all black and white). David Fravor's incident(2004) was an eyewitness of him seeing the unidentified craft and there was a video taken by Chad Underwood in FLIR of the object. This same object was also seen on radar multiple times by the carrier group he was a part of and was the reason he was sent to investigate it. A link to all three videos and their details:
Spoken like a true none believer. I shun thee. Even the pentagon said they can't explain the UFOs, clearly they are preparing society for a big reveal. ;)
Edit: I'm betting half the downvotes are from people not picking up on my sarcasm, and the other half is from people picking up on my sarcasm.
Exactly. Zero of the GPs objections are inconsistent with this explanation. The carrier group tracked an unknown object and scrambled fighters to investigate. The pilots may have visually observed the object, but it would have been too far away to really ascertain any visual detail. Instead they relied on infrared sensors which… suffered from glare, and so rendered incorrect visuals for the object. Its strange shape and rotational behavior are now explained.
What remains is still an unidentified flying object, but one whose behavior is reasonably mundane and doesn't require advanced technology to explain.
We also need to be really honest about what we want this to be, and how that desire influences what we believe about it. I personally want this to be an alien spacecraft, because that's super interesting and exciting. I think the same is true of lots of other people. Unfortunately, there are much more mundane explanations which fit the evidence much better.
Given how horribly interactions between more technologically advanced and lesser technologically advanced societies seem to harm the lesser ones I'm not sure it would turn out well for humanity.
A civilization capable of interstellar space travel has probably overcome "The Great Filter". I like to think there's a decent chance they're enlightened; instead of conquerors. But even if they are here to conquer, we may be better off for it. I mean, it doesn't really look like humanity is going to make it past the filter on their own.
Any civilization sophisticated enough to make a boat that can cross the Atlantic Ocean has got to have its stuff together or else they would have just mutinied on the journey over, right?
Any civilization just sophisticated enough to make a boat that can cross the Atlantic Ocean... does not yet have the technology necessary to destroy themselves. Hence, the great filter.
To play on earthboundkid’s comment, some “enlightened” explorers traveled in advanced craft from the Old World to the New World. They brought genocide and near total devastation on every society they encountered. 1492. Columbus. But the literal and figurative descendants of those aliens put up a statue of him in New York and called him a hero.
I don't know why you would call the conquistadors "enlightened". I'm talking about a civilization that's developed planet ending technology...and yet managed to not end their planet.
Well, what he did was pretty damn amazing and consequential, even if not all the consequences were positive or amazing. It was inevitable that the New World would eventually be contacted by the Old World, whether by Asia or Europe or perhaps Africa, and inevitable that when that happened, the isolated peoples of the new world would be devastated by pathogens they’d never been exposed to. Anyway, I see no issue making a statue to the guy. I kinda like statues in principle. At the end of the day that’s all they are. The world was bigger than the Americas, and still is.
>It was inevitable that the New World would eventually be contacted by the Old World, whether by Asia or Europe or perhaps Africa, and inevitable that when that happened, the isolated peoples of the new world would be devastated by pathogens they’d never been exposed to.
It's not the pathogens people object to, so much as the slavery and genocide. Particularly, celebrating the originator and perpetrator of those crimes on the land where they were perpetrated.
By all means, write about Christopher Columbus in the history books (after Leif Erikson, who unlike Columbus actually set foot in America) but let's stop normalizing erecting statues to villains.
Have you read the plaque on the statue ? Do you know the text? You can put up a statue to say someone did something meaningful or historical, not that they were a good or noble person.
>You can put up a statue to say someone did something meaningful or historical, not that they were a good or noble person.
Yes, but we don't. We don't create statues of Christopher Columbus to place his actions in their proper historical context, or to memorialize his victims, any more than we do the Holocaust with statues of Hitler. We erect statues of Columbus because until relatively recently the entirely Eurocentric narrative about him considered him a heroic figure, and the subjugation of indigenous peoples a righteous and noble cause.
You abuse the pronoun “we” - I consider him a heroic figure, highly flawed, plus - for better and worse - symbolic of the opening of the new world, totally acknowledging the negative impacts. ..And have zero problem with statues of the guy.
I think that’s more the norm with people, if they even think about Columbus at all.
The problem with contemporary dialogue is the refusal to allow for grey zones, for nuanced and balanced viewpoints. Who is this “we” that you project upon? Do you consider that this presumption and projection may by symptomatic of a neuroticism unique to a overly loud illiberal subculture in the US? I do, it’s all that gives me faith in the survival of the greater whole.
>Do you consider that this presumption and projection may by symptomatic of a neuroticism unique to a overly loud illiberal subculture in the US?
No. I consider that not everyone in the US is completely culturally detached from the legacy of colonialism, and that some people have perfectly valid reasons to object to statues of people like Columbus.
You seem to understand the negative impacts of colonialism on an intellectual level, as a simple fact of history, but you also seem perplexed as to why anyone would care. Perhaps you should consider why someone would object to a statue of Columbus. Engage with the nuance you're referring to, by not dismissing those with views other than yours as being carriers of a social disease. Examine your own views and ask yourself why you consider it valid to keep a Columbus statue up to celebrate some of his accomplishments, but not to remove it as a statement of opposition to his other accomplishments.
Indeed. It could be something simple as a gas bubble.
It is now understood that all those weird stories about the Bermuda Triangle are caused by gas. But still people want to believe in other, more exciting stories because that is what we want it to be.
Edit: even the gas theory of the Bermuda Triangle is just that: a theory. The best explanation is probably nothing much is going on there.
And in the realm of mundane objects that may create very strange radar and visual patterns, we have our choice.
Space Data Corporation was operating as early as 1997. Their product is radio communications provided by balloon. IIUC, normally those balloons are tethered, but if a tether snapped and one got away and was caught in a high-altitude crosswind, you'd have a mostly-metal object catching sunlight and throwing it in weird ways as it tumbled.
I’d be floored if the radar data didn’t back this up. A carrier group would have scrambled fighters well before anything unidentified got within a hundred miles, much less ten.
Visual confirmation I don’t find remotely compelling. Besides the notorious general unreliability of human observers, humans simply cannot distinguish between small, nearby objects traveling slowly and large, far objects traveling quickly without additional contextual clues (e.g., a tiny plane-shaped object in the sky is probably the latter). Factor in that they were validating their observations against a sensor displaying a misleading image—in other words, providing incorrect contextual clues—and I think it’s not hard to call into question the accuracy of any visual claims.
It was picked up on radar over several different days and a training mission was scrubbed so that they could go investigate what they saw on radar.
You don't think humans could get better at judging distance of objects with practice? It seems like if any humans on earth could reliably do it, it would be seasoned fighter pilots that have thousands of hours of experience doing that exact thing.
I didn't think the radar track was at the same time was it? I thought the Tico's tracked it with the SPY-1 and they sent F-18s to investigate who then tracked it with the FLIR and visually.
Without a reference point you are unlikely to be able to guess the distance of an aircraft, especially an unknown one.
Here's a 4 hour interview with the pilot, David Fravor, on Lex Fridman's show where he goes into much more detail than you'll probably read elsewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E
This wasn't just a single radar. It was an AEGIS system compromised of multiple ships with state of the art radars, multiple plane radars, and visual confirmation by several pilots. They were tracking it for multiple days.
I think part of the problem here is that there are multiple incidents being conflated. For instance, people are saying that the pilots visually confirmed the incident with their own eyes, but (according to the article) that would not have been possible given the distance between the plane and the object.
Is there a source to indicate that in the specific incident being covered by this article, that there is any evidence beyond the video itself?
There are actually lots of different UAP incidents. In some there are supposedly objects that get really close to carriers, which are tracked by many different radar systems etc. The gimbal video one wasn't one of those, IIUC, it was just what you see in the video.
I'm quite confident that most people here are going to find a calm, measured, and thorough explanation of the observed phenomenon more credible than a snarky and instinctive dismissal that doesn't even bother to address a single one of the clearly demonstrated points in the analysis.
It's not the pilots job to theorize on whether the object is glare or not, just to describe what he's seeing. This is one plausible explanation, not THE explanation. There is still a UFO there, the video is just saying it probably doesn't look like what we see on screen.
If you're unwilling to even entertain that this might be a possibility because you want to believe... I guess do what you want.
> So the claim is...these highly trained pilots and the other sensor systems didn't realize that objects cause IR glare, but this guy did. Case closed.
And frankly the "this guy" appears to be someone with no expertise and who is strongly biased towards particular investigatory outcomes:
> Mick West is a British science writer, skeptical investigator, and retired video game programmer. He is the creator of the websites Contrail Science and Metabunk, and he investigates and debunks pseudoscientific claims and conspiracy theories such as chemtrails and UFOs.
Not to say he isn't right in this case, but I'm equality unenthusiastic about "skeptics" like that as I am about conspiracy theorists.
Edit: on second thought, I'm somewhat more unenthusiastic "skeptics" like that. Conspiracy theorists can at least be entertaining sometimes, while "skeptics" tend to just bore you with self-assured arrogance while they take pot shots at low-hanging fruit.
>Not to say he isn't right in this case, but I'm equality unenthusiastic about "skeptics" like that as I am about conspiracy theorists.
My working theory for what creates the lowest common denominator of internet comments, is that you have to believe whatever is necessary to believe to keep the conversation going.
If a skeptic debunks something by appeals to mundane facts relating to camera angles and physics principles, that closes the conversation. And for internet comment sections that is a problem. But, if them being right means they are arrogant, then we can talk about how arrogant they are, the nothing gets turned back into a something and the conversation can keep going.
The problem with both conspiracy theorists and non-expert "skeptics" is they both approach a phenomenon with their results already decided. It's just the conspiracy theorist has decided it's must be a conspiracy, and the "skeptic" has decided it must be some mundane thing with camera angles, and they both produce explanations to confirm their biases. They (especially the "skeptic") are just performing their identities.
And note the quotes around "skeptic," I'm not talking about people with real expertise in some area who show some crazy theory to be implausible or impossible.
> Conspiracy theorists can at least be entertaining sometimes, while "skeptics" tend to just bore you with self-assured arrogance while they take pot shots at low-hanging fruit.
I don't know about skeptics in general, but I found Mr. West's video to be pretty entertaining. He built some pretty impressive-looking simulations to support his claims.
I think conspiracy theories can be interesting and entertaining, but a lot of their theorists are kinda pathetic.
> Conspiracy theorists can at least be entertaining sometimes
Right up until they're sure that there's a child molestation ring in the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn't have a basement, and someone goes and shoots up the place because the conspiracy theory was so damn entertaining.
That's exactly why I said "sometimes." It might have been more precise to mean occasionally, but the clear intended meaning was that it was a minority of the time.
> Not to say he isn't right in this case, but I'm equality unenthusiastic about "skeptics" like that as I am about conspiracy theorists.
Yeah, it can be interesting to hear a dubunking from someone with an actual background in the field, but someone who's whole schtick is debunking is just as motivated to prove things wrong as the conspiracy theorists are to prove things right.
The object might of existed for a millisecond. Test of a new stealth tech - quick directional laser burst to temporarily damage/blind IR camera. After that Jet was flying in circles trying to track its own camera glitch.
I don't know much about this whole story (I'm not a UFO person) and am learning most of what I know about it from this video and this thread, but: the people saying that this video depicts an actual object rotating in the sky appear to be making the extraordinary claim here: the connection between the rotation and the camera system seems compelling. The horizon is moving as the camera/plane moves; the object is not moving. You can't refute that with "these are highly trained fighter pilots": the horizon is moving with the camera, the object isn't. Training's got nothing to do with it. The shape we're looking at is, in part, an artifact of the camera, unless the aliens are somehow reprogramming the camera to fuck with us.
> The shape we're looking at is, in part, an artifact of the camera, unless the aliens are somehow reprogramming the camera to fuck with us.
It's possible the IR glare is an intentional countermeasure produced by the craft. It might sound far-fetched, but the military can already jam some cameras already, and they apparently license this technology too:
The first time these craft were spotted on radar was during a Navy exercise where they were testing new radar equipment, and the craft were coming from the direction of San Clemente island (an island that is a Navy base). Here's a short video that talks about the radar sighting:
Sightings of these UFOs have only ever been mentioned by US forces.
Who knows what is going on, but if I had to make a guess and I considered all of this information, it seems likely that the "UFOs" are experimental US aircraft.
It would have to be a countermeasure that not only produces glare, but does so in a way that precisely tracks the orientation of the rotating camera on the F18. Again: an extraordinary claim; it's not impossible, but you'd need evidence to make it persuasive.
Just to be clear, I'm saying the object may be producing the IR as a countermeasure, I'm not suggesting that the countermeasure produces the rotation captured in the video -- the linked article suggests the rotation is an artifact of the tracking system. From the submitted article:
> what is being seen in the video is actually infrared glare that hides a hot object behind it and only rotates in the way it does because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right
Fraver (not sure he was one of the ones in this incident) has a history of UFO pranks, shutting down engines and gliding over campfires then lighting up after burners when right over them, explicitly to give a UFO experience, and someone found a contemporaneous report of him doing it, so it wasn't just a story.
As a former member of USMC Aviation, it's valid to point out that skilled navy pilots can have some of the same range of differences in belief, action and motivation that the general populace does. I flew with a pilot on a transport helicopter that was blasting Eye of the Tiger and taking every turn at maximum bank, constantly looking for AA to get to fire at us so he could call in F-18s and watch the fireworks. Some of them are cranks.
BUT... I don't think any US military pilot expects their cockpit recordings or FLIR video to be public at some later time, I'm not sure what the motivation would be to lie about this stuff. The harm to you as a respected pilot would be fairly severe, and you'd have to get your co-pilot to go along with it.
"Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin
I'm sure it was idle or just heavily lowered, but people dug around and found reports on old internet boards about time frame seeing him do it from the same timeframe and location.
If he never did it he pranked/lied about doing the prank and that is no better for credibility.
There is enough videos of F-18s doing 'push the throttle and bank' in a level flight on YouTube. It's fast, but it's not instantenious. And as an arm-chair pilot I can say what a multiton plane doesn't stay at the altitude with the engines at idle.
Have you listened to the joe rogan episode where he talks about it?
It seems a little ridiculous to compare the one where he turned his engine off and on one time at night over a couple campers to the episode where multiple pilots see it, with multiple sensors seeing it from planes and from ships. He engaged in horseplay once, therefor anything he ever says should not be believed seems lame.
Jets do this regularly over the Colorado River and various, otherwise desolate gathering places around AZ. I've witnessed such shenanigans a dozen or so times over the last 3 decades. One jet distracts onlookers while another sneaks up to buzz low over the deck(or, perhaps it's just incidental to their training Ops, IDK). These maneuvers are tests of skill, technology & amusement.
That "four different pilots" stuff has not been confirmed as far as I know. All people involved in these stories are hustlers, including that one ex-pilot who peddles the story.
You must look at every statement they make separately. They give one fact that can be verified and then they tie lies or unverified stuff on that.
> btw. Luis Elizondo is has not been charge of any UFO stuff
I have no conviction on the UFO phenomenon other than it would be cool if aliens exist, and even cooler if they were already on Earth. Still, I can't get enough of it – I especially love thinking about the most epistemically offensive conspiracy theories, like "the moon is a spaceship" or "Antarctica is an alien base." I sometimes fall asleep to Ancient Aliens.
But, fact is, the only government agents with any "authority" in this "movement" – which became especially fervent around the dissolution of Q-Anon, btw – are people who worked for DIA in Information Operations. That is, their specialty is in manipulating the public, not alien technology.
The "Lue anon" moniker about sums it up. My theory is the recent reinvigoration of the UFO movement is an attempt by US intel agencies to pre-emptively herd the most impressionable people with their own controlled conspiracy, rather than allow a hostile actor to manipulate them during the next election.
Also, I predicted this 10 months ago, the last time "disclosure" was imminent, in a comment [0] that I think has aged well so far.
I did think it was amusing that everyone said the government is covering up UFOs, but it turns out you can just ask Harry Reid about them and he didn't even put it in the classified budget.
> According to SEC filings, as of October 2018 only $1 million of those shares had been sold and the company had a $37.4 million deficit, largely from a stock incentive plan for its employees, prompting Ars Technica and Vice to question its financial sustainability.[4][5]
I happened to read the SEC filings when they were doing this and am certain it's fine and Vice reporters just don't know how startup finances work.
What I did notice is that the perfectly normal looking and very detailed Form C didn't say the company owned any IP from alien spaceships or was going to acquire it. Their website definitely suggested it though, so if you're lying you could sue for securities fraud.
I'm quite surprised to see this community be so on board with the "Oh really, the obvious saucer was lens glare and not aliens?" train.
USAF and reitred officals have gone on record to say that they actively release doctored footage and/or false narratives, sometimes via pop culture figures, to muddy waters on current technology or to sow discourse among enemies. This reeks of n example of that, and not aliens.
The gimbal video is not a video of the object from the Nimitz incident. There is a video of that but it’s less compelling in terms of evidence, but also afaik not cleanly debunked. (I think it’s called FLIR?)
They're all ATFLIR videos. It's basically the same thing - a far away hot object, likely another aircraft, turns into an IR cylinder-shaped blog on screen which is then incorrectly interpreted as being an actual cylinder. The apparent movement at the end is just the ATFLIR losing lock as the guy constantly zooms in and out.
Naive question: If a carrier group cannot, in essentially real-time, document three dimensional trajectories at this point (four if you include speed), what possible defense can they claim to have against evasive incoming missiles, etc.
To actually answer your question, they probably can sometimes track four dimensional trajectories, however not always, and they are not going to give you that data because that would reveal how good their tracking algorithms and sensors are. Sensor fusion is a thing:
Even with fusion, the fewer the sensors the less accurate the tracking will be. In these videos there may only be one or two sensors actually tracking the object.
Hitting a target with a missile is a somewhat different problem, you just have to get the missile there based on whatever data you have (which might be from the carriers sensor data, the missiles own sensors, or both). For example an IR missile doesn't know the location of its target, it just knows how far off center the IR light from the target is from the missiles current flight path and it can correct course based on that simple angular offset to eventually hit the target (with some additional math since the missile has to go to where the target will be when it gets there.) Similarly stopping an evasive incoming missile does not require that you know its exact location. Also as a defensive missile gets closer to the incoming missile it may be able to get better data on where its target actually is and how it is moving. Missiles move very fast so on the final approach there is not much ability to change direction at all, it would require too many g's to turn the missile, so you can model the final approach as a straight line. When it's close your own tracking systems probably work better as well because the targets cross section takes up more of the sky.
Carriers are most likely partly obsoleted by hypersonic missiles that travel and maneuver at mach 20 (which Russia and China have), in addition to 100 megaton nuclear torpedoes that travel at 120mph (which Russia has).
Its a common assumption made by layman that the existence of a weapon that can kill a system means its now obsolete. That is incorrect.
Systems do not become obsolete because they can be killed. They become obsolete when they no longer serve utility. Either something else does the job better, more efficiently or effectively or the nature of war has changed to the degree that its now irrelevant.
This mistake is most often made with Tanks and Carriers for some reason. The existence of Javelin ATGMs does not mean tanks are obsolete. And the existence of hypersonic AshMs does not make carriers obsolete. Those weapons do not replace the functionality of tanks and carriers.
Its like the common pop history myth that machineguns made horse cavalry obsolete in the first world war. It did not. Cavalry lasted through the war. Their tactics definitely had to change and adapt. And they were certainly used far more sparingly due to their low survivability but offensive cavalry weren't rendered obsolete until tanks came around. And horses in general weren't obsolete until armies became fully mechanized and replaced them with trucks. Some armies didn't manage that until after WW2.
Likewise the Battleship was not obsoleted because carrier aircraft could kill it easily. It was obsoleted because carrier aircraft and later smart weapons meant combat now happened over the horizon and those big guns weren't contributing to fleet actions anymore
Its been possible to kill a tank since literally the first battle they were employed. Ballsy German artillerymen learned that British tanks were not immune to a direct hit from a field gun fired over open sights. And Carriers have always been vulnerable to antiship weapons. Be it torpedoes from a sub, dumb bombs from an aircraft or fancy high tech missiles today.
I hope you'll excuse some pushback from another layperson--isn't the situation with Aircraft Carriers categorically different? In the examples you provided above (Cavalry, Tanks, and Battleships), there has never been a push-button solution to eliminating every single unit in the service of the enemy. Given the technology mentioned by GP, the small number of Carriers in service and the utter impossibility of hiding them, it would appear that such a solution does exist for Carriers.
So while it seems to be true that Aircraft Carriers are not obsolete in peacetime or in a conflict with minor powers, aren't they obsolete in the context for which they were created--namely, war with another great power?
Weapons on their own are dumb, stupid devices. Weapons in a system can be dangerous when deployed appropriately. For ASBM or hypersonic missiles, there are several steps in a successful engagement:
1. Detect the carrier. Sounds easy but they can move at 30+ knots, and can be quite difficult to detect when they want to hide.
2. Provide targeting data. This is needs to be much more accurate than just detecting that a carrier is operating "near" this point. Most weapons will require relatively precise data for this.
3. Transmit this data rapidly to the launch systems. Every minute counts as old targeting data is relatively useless.
4. Launch the weapon. This means keeping aircraft or missile batteries safe from attack, and getting the weapons in range of the carrier.
5. Have the weapon reach the target area. This means a reliable weapon with a low failure rate.
6. Have the weapon avoid any ECM or other countermeasures that might affect its targeting.
7. Have the weapon avoid any defenses, either the layered defenses (SAMS, point defence guns), fighters, etc.
8. Have the weapon detonate properly, in the best spot.
Lots of things to go wrong in this "kill-chain." Lots of places to interrupt, disrupt or out-right kill the weapon.
And sure we hear a lot about Russian super weapons like Zircon and the silly torpedoes. But as the Ukraine war is showing, a lot of Russian stuff sounds great until you see it in action. Or it's a Potemkin weapon, or too expensive.
Look at all the burning Russian tanks. These aren't monkey models sent to client states like Iraq. These are top of the line, with ERA etc. Yet most don't have Arena/Trophy, and are getting killed by a weapon designed 30 years ago.
Now perhaps the DF-21 deployed by the PLAN is more reliable than the Russian crap. But unless things get hot in the South China Sea we'll never know.
They have taken nearly the entire Black Sea coastline and most major cities east of the Dnieper River. That entire eastern part of Ukraine will collapse imminently under Russian advances.
And meanwhile none of the aforementioned weapons systems have been engaged.
Detecting a carrier is trivial. They are large above surface vessels that leave a huge wake. 30 knots is nothing. And once locked its trivial for satellites or spy planes to track. We even publish the location of our carriers: https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-Enterprise-(...
Russia is a spacefaring, highly advanced military. They have all of the targeting capabilities you describe.
100 megaton nuclear torpedoes aren't silly. They're extremely dangerous. They can trigger tsunamis, and destroy anything within tens of miles and cause third degree burns out to hundreds of miles.
I'm not sure you understand the scale of what you're dismissing.
You mean 95% of the ones on that list, which was made by an external observer. It's also a military engagement each time one of their vehicles gets exploded by a TB2 drone strike.
Most of these aren't in battle, it's because their equipment breaks on its own because they didn't maintain the tires for years, or runs out of fuel because everyone in the supply chain sold it for food money.
The Wikipedia map is good, but it's also out of date on that page, and the positions haven't moved much since then.
I'm skeptical of any list of equipment losses being comprehensive on both sides. We are very much in a fog of war situation.
The map you linked looks fairly dire to me. The Russians control the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea at this point, and all of Ukraine's eastern border. With Belarus to the north, it leaves Ukraine landlocked with only its western border for imports and exports (mainly via Poland). There's a cauldron
Russia has already captured many of the major cities east of the Dnieper, and it will be harder and harder for Ukraine to supply the eastern front, particularly across that river.
The aforementioned weapons systems only exist in labs if that. Hypersonics are expensive and Russia is poor. Look at their GDP.
And you do realize that satellites don't "lock" onto anything. They orbit around the earth. Geosynchronous orbits aren't used by RORSATs. Spyplanes? What spy planes? Russian maritime surveillance aircraft have limited range, (as do the PLANs) and can't see an infinite distance. Google the earth's curvature and you'll be able to find out how radar is limited.
Russia's military is a Potemkin village. Has been for decades if not longer. The only thing they have that's a threat is their nuclear weapons, and I'm even starting to wonder how reliable those are.
You keep talking about how dangerous Poseidon is. But Status-6 hasn't even been deployed, and probably never will. Why not talk about how dangerous Tsar Bomba is? And it's estimated speed is closer to 60mph.
I grew up when the Soviets were all 10 feet tall, with super T-80 tanks, with SS-20 missiles, nuclear powered cruisers and all sorts of scary stuff. Most of it turned out to be junk or too expensive for the USSR to afford. Same with Russia.
"The missile can be armed with a nuclear or conventional warhead and has been tested several times over the last few years in the Barents Sea and White Sea regions, both from surface warships and the latest class of multi-purpose submarine."
Sometimes it matters what a country spends its budget on rather than how much.
"U.S. efforts to reduce the roles and numbers of nuclear weapons, and convince other states to do the same, have included reducing the U.S. nuclear stockpile by over 85 percent since its Cold War high. Potential adversaries, however, have expanded and modernized their nuclear forces."
"Russia possesses significant advantages in its nuclear weapons production capacity and in
non-strategic nuclear forces over the U.S. and allies. It is also building a large, diverse, and
modern set of non-strategic systems that are dual-capable (may be armed with nuclear or
conventional weapons). These theater- and tactical-range systems are not accountable
under the New START Treaty and Russia’s non-strategic nuclear weapons modernization
is increasing the total number of such
weapons in its arsenal, while
significantly improving its delivery
capabilities. This includes the
production, possession, and flight
testing of a ground-launched cruise
missile in violation of the INF Treaty.
Moscow believes these systems may
provide useful options for escalation
advantage. Finally, despite Moscow’s
frequent criticism of U.S. missile
defense, Russia is also modernizing its
long-standing nuclear-armed ballistic
missile defense system and designing a
new ballistic missile defense
interceptor."
Oh and I forgot to address your ridiculous comment about winning every engagement in the Ukraine. Tell that to the 7K dead Russians. How about the 400+ destroyed MBTs, and 4K IFVs? If you think that Russia is winning this conflict currently, you've been listening to Tucker Carlson too much. Russia lost this war on D Day, when they failed to establish an air bridge at Hostomel when the VDV got smoked.
How many Russians are dead? Who counted the bodies and how did they do so during an active engagement? How many Ukrainians have died by comparison? Do you have complete information or do you have incomplete information during a literal fog of war situation?
Russia says they've lost 400 men, USINT says 7K. Who's telling the truth? They're both known to lie.
We can be relatively sure, based on the numerous maps of Russian advances that eastern Ukraine will fall in the next couple of weeks. You let me know if that's a win or a loss. I'm not sure. It's certainly a thing.
That map (nor most of the unbiased non-Russian ones) doesn't show an imminent collapse in the next two weeks. According to the UK MoD the invasion has reached a standstill. Hope you'll be back in two weeks with more accurate information...
As long as its useful to have a self propelled airbase that can launch strike aircraft from anywhere it goes air craft carriers will be relevant.
Emerging threats may change tactics, operations and spur development of countermeasures but they wont make an entire weapons system obsolete unless the change the nature of war.
>Given the technology mentioned by GP, the small number of Carriers in service and the utter impossibility of hiding them, it would appear that such a solution does exist for Carriers.
Carriers are not impossible to hide. A CSG that doesn't want to be found can do so. The ocean is a very big place. There are also grades to knowing "where" something is. Just knowing there is a carrier in the South China sea is valid for strategic planning but not much else. Knowing its somewhere to the south west of Taiwan can help plan operations but wont put warheads on foreheads.
A complete kill chain involves getting very precise and timely targeting information. This is something that needs to be done with some kind of sensor, RADAR, Thermal, Sonar etc. It must be timely because carriers are moving targets. A mere set of GPS coordinates is not good enough. By the time your missile gets there they will be wrong. So that means you need something nearby with a datalink and proper sensors to give targeting data. This could be a sub listening with sonar, a strike aircraft painting the carrier with radar or using an IRST to pick up its heat signature. It could be a warship of your own.
Point is, these kill chains are long and complicated and if you break it at any point your attack will fail or wont happen at all. Hypersonic missiles have very long kill chains, some of the longest. And they haven't been proven out in combat. "Finding" a CSG is much easier said than done.
> Given the technology mentioned by GP, the small number of Carriers in service and the utter impossibility of hiding them, it would appear that such a solution does exist for Carriers.
Strategic nuclear weapons, which one of the items you are referencing is, have been the “make it all go away” button for lots of things since they were created, but…MAD.
As for conventional anti-shipping missiles, people have been arguing that about carriers since weapons like the Exocet were available, but today, as then, remain at best highly speculative.
> So while it seems to be true that Aircraft Carriers are not obsolete in peacetime or in a conflict with minor powers, aren't they obsolete in the context for which they were created--namely, war with another great power?
Maybe, but so what? MAD has made war between great powers even more the exception among wars involving great powers than it was in the past, and it's almost always been the exception.
1. Current or future means of intercepting hypersonic missiles.
2. The ability to disable or reduce the enemy’s ability of launching hypersonic missiles, or of pinpointing and accurately tracking the exact location of aircraft carriers.
We don't have the capability currently to intercept Russia's hypersonic missiles.
We also have no defenses against 100 megaton underwater torpedo nukes that can be detonated miles from a carrier group and still wipe it out.
In an all out war with Russia, our carriers would be big, slow, sitting ducks against Mach 20 missiles with variable speed and high maneuverability as well.
"The missile flies with an advanced fuel that the Russians say gives it a range of up to 1,000 kilometers. And it's so fast that the air pressure in front of the weapon forms a plasma cloud as it moves, absorbing radio waves and making it practically invisible to active radar systems.
U.S. Aegis missile interceptor systems require 8-10 seconds of reaction time to intercept incoming attacks. In those 8-10 seconds, the Russian Zircon missiles will already have traveled 20 kilometers, and the interceptor missiles do not fly fast enough to catch up."
>We don't have the capability currently to intercept Russia's hypersonic missiles.
Say hello to SM-3. It has successfully intercepted hypersonic RVs in testing. Is it perfect? No. But if it done anything, the last month has made me feel more confident in what the US claims their weapons can do and dismissive for the Russians.
>We also have no defenses against 100 megaton underwater torpedo nukes that can be detonated miles from a carrier group and still wipe it out.
No such weapon exists. And if it did it would be wildly impractical. The largest nuke ever made was the Tsar Bomba and it was only 50 megatons and too large to be practical.
And we do have a counter to nuclear torpedoes. Its called the West's nuclear deterrence. Using a nuke on a carrier means nuclear war and nobody wants that.
I mean... assuming the Russians have anything that works is probably not a great assumption based on their performance in Ukraine.
But I think they provide overlapping, but different, roles. But missiles and torpedoes is why aircraft carriers travel in carrier groups that have defensive capabilities against torpedoes and missiles.
It wouldn’t make much sense for Russia to show their cards and use modern war tech on Ukraine, a country with a (relatively) primitive military. They’re barely even using fighter jets.
Maybe because they've barely been training those pilots and know the planes would likely be lost if used above Ukraine? Pilots in the Russian Air Force have supposedly been averaging less than 100 flight hours a year, which is next to nothing.
That number supposedly comes from official Russian sources. I say supposedly because I don't understand Russian and have to trust western sources about this, but these numbers have been widely disseminated for years and seem to be broadly treated as credible.
They are using modern tech, and it's getting wiped out. Their tanks are modern, their artillery is modern, their fighters are modern. And they're all getting wiped out.
Tanks being used by Russia in Ukraine:
T-72A
T-72B3 OBR.2016
T-80BV
T-80U
T-80BVM
T-90A
IFVs:
BMP2
BMP3
BMD4M
SAMs:
Tor
Buk
Pantsir
Fighters and Helos:
SU-25
SU-30/35
Su-34
Mi-24/35
KA-52
Mi-28
None of this is "monkey model" stuff like the the USSR sent to client states. These are all top of the line. Same with the artillery and missiles used. All the best the Russians have in any decent numbers.
Yes, Russia has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, they absolutely work and it's unwise to base your opinions on their nuclear and tactical capabilities based on their slow advance into Ukraine.
The Poseidon is a 100 megaton nuclear torpedo.
It doesn't need to get anywhere near a carrier group to knock out the entire group. It is twice as powerful as the largest nuke ever detonated (at 57megatons) and a Russian sub can carry four of these torpedoes:
“All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 km (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, doors, and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 kilometres (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 km (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of 900 kilometres (560 mi)."
I'm a tenth generation American. Pointing out facts is called being a realist. And I'm not impressed with a bunch of armchair generals that think that war with Russia would be easy because their Tik Tok feed told them so.
> Carriers are most likely partly obsoleted by hypersonic missiles that travel and maneuver at mach 20
That's assuming they can actually hit and inflict sufficient damage.
Also, you need to re-read your own sources.
> 100 megaton nuclear torpedoes that travel at 120mph (which Russia has).
The article is estimating that it's at most 2 megatons (still a lot, but 50x smaller) and that it's NOT supercavitating, so it would not travel at 120mph.
The other article does not support the conclusion that carriers are obsolete, at all. It poses the question, but does not answer it.
Why is china building carriers then? Hypersonic weapons still need to know where to go. Theres a reason an ICBM which flies upwards of mach 20 is ineffective against carriers
They are good at projecting power against lesser foes in a sub-nuclear confrontation. I think if we went to all out war against Russia and/or China our carriers would be some of the first casualties.
Hypersonic missiles apart from df-zf only exist in a lab. They are one of the biggest hype out there along with killer robots. When you hear about tests, it is mostly about work done at a university, which means the tech is still 5 to 10 years away.
I have heard that, in case of all-out war, the life expectancy of a carrier in the middle of a battle group was 21 minutes. (This was decades ago - it may be less with hypersonic missiles.) But they could launch all the planes in 19 minutes, so it could launch its entire attack before being killed. That was considered to be good enough.
And thus the old quote about sticks and stones being used to fight world war 4.
I'm not sure about Russia's or China's anti ballistic technology. I know their hypersonic tech is superior to our own currently.
But what if a country could deploy nuclear weapons against another nation and defend themselves against incoming missiles, due to a temporary technological advantage? It changes the game. I'm not sure if that's where we're at currently, but I know that the hypersonic and nuclear tech is why we are so hesitant to enter the Ukrainian war outright.
You know this? You have intel (that's probably classified NOFORN) or you've just read about Zircon? The Russians can hype their wunderwaffen til the cows come home, but they haven't demonstrated reliable, deployable systems.
If you think hypersonic weapons are any deterrent to the US involvement in Ukraine, you're just being silly. The Russians don't even have enough Kalibr cruise missiles to take out a 3rd rate military. They don't have enough money (or perhaps just too much corruption) to install active defenses for their MBTs (no Arena/Trophy).
The only reason we don't have US troops in Ukraine is because of the SS-18 Satan and Bulava SLBM.
And no one has an effective defense against the number of ICBMs/SLBMs on each side. The ABM systems around Moscow are too few to counter the number of warheads assigned, and the US missile defense is too raw (and also out of position) to defend against Russian missiles.
Extant American ballistic missile defenses don't seem sufficient to repel a committed ICBM/SLBM attack from Russia, or even China. THAAD and Patriot can only protect a relatively small area around each installation, not even remotely enough to protect the whole country in a war like that. GMD can intercept ballistic missiles mid course and has substantial range, but no more than a few dozen interceptors total for the entire country. Aegis is formidable and numerous, but the SM-3 interceptors used by those ships have substantially less range compared to GMD interceptors, and only some of the missiles carried by Aegis ships will be those SM-3s.
Do you have links to reading more about this? The video saying it was glare made it seem like the object was very far from the jet, much farther then the naked eye could see. Was it closer at some point?
> So the anomaly that the carrier group tracked, then scrambled fighter jets for. The object that four different pilots saw visually, and was confirmed on multiple different sensors. That was camera glare?
I don't think we can trust the accounts of anyone in the employ of the government, past or present, when it comes to this kind of thing.
For all we know to misinform is the mission, propaganda if you will.
Consider how much of what you said above is practically verbatim regurgitation of their vernacular. Jargon is often abused to sound qualified, smart, and authoritative. AKA B.S. alert.
This just seems to be a way that the government can point to an “expert” and say it was nothing, thereby alleviating the need for the government to comment on the “nothing”.
I’m guessing the classified file on this is very interesting.
Flimsy is an extremely generous and flattering word if you know anything about the details of this case or the testimony of the Navy's top pilots who witnessed and tracked this object from different vantage points both visually and with instruments.
^This is the key point. These objects have been tracked on radar, FLIR, and multiple pilot witness testimony off both coasts for decades now. Attempting to debunk a single one of these three leaked videos is pointless because they do not show the entire context of the events happening.
I implore everyone to watch these two interviews with Christopher Melon, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. And to read the DNI report on UAPs It will change your entire perception of these incidents and show you to view them as true national security issues.
There are unknown objects flying with impunity in our restricted military airspace, some that exhibit characteristics that nothing of human origin can accomplish. This should terrify you.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Please explain to me your logic. I'm just listing things that people with credibility in our government said, including the Department of National Intelligence.
I agree that there's something in these videos - at least in Gimbal. I don't think it's a saucer-shaped thing or necessarily of extraterrestrial origin. It could be a drone (either ours - another branch of DoD/govt - or another nation's) etc. Still an interesting mystery, but no proof of anything extraordinary IMHO.
In the case of relying on Christopher Mellon's credentials, I'd point out that he has a commercial interest of some kind with To The Stars Academy, the production company which seems to be behind all of these videos' presence on the History channel.
In their 2021 annual meeting notes [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b5a458fe749405f83225...], To the Stars Academy notes that "Christopher Mellon, a member of TTSA’s advisory board, [is] no longer with the company" implying he was employed by them in some fashion. Thus prior to 2021, he likely stood to benefit commercially from these films' distribution, particularly when he was quoted alongside them.
>It could be a drone (either ours - another branch of DoD/govt - or another nation's) etc
Pilot Chad Underwood gave private testimony to the senate congressional committee on this gimbal video stating the object did rotate without changing direction or altitude - a feat which is impossible by our current understanding of physics. So assuming the "drone" in gimbal belongs to something of terrestrial origin, either our government his hiding ground breaking physics capabilities or some other country on this planet has - both of which are terrifying.
>In the case of relying on Christopher Mellon's credentials, I'd point out that he has a commercial interest of some kind with To The Stars Academy, the production company which seems to be behind all of these videos' presence on the History channel.
I agree TTSA has sketchy origins, I've looked quite a bit into it. Chris Mellon comes from one of the wealthiest families in America, so I would have to assume that this venture could not have netted him enough money to make it worth while for him to lie to congress about this. He was the major architect to the Gillibrand amendment in last year's NDAA creating the new UAP office, and he and Lue Elizondo been regularly meeting with the Senate Intelligence committee to further pursue this topic. And to go on that, Lue Elizondo (former head of AATIP) made no money from his time at TTSA or the Unidentified TV show. If someone needed money, it would have been him imo.
If Underwood is responsible for the video we're looking at here today, we don't need to be terrified: the physics-defying motion is pretty clearly a camera artifact. The horizon is moving, the object isn't; the "object" we're looking at is the camera, and whatever the pilot is following is occluded by it.
Why should a peaceful demonstration of technical superiority terrify anyone?
It's clear whomever, or whatever, possesses this superior technology could fly circles around and/or obliterate us on a whim, but has expressly decided not to, and instead simply announced: "Hey, I have this."
If they/it perceived us as a threat, we'd surely be gone already. That leaves only our hopefully sane response, to influence what happens next.
If you look into Lue Elizondo's, former head of AATIP, comments on this, you will come to find that he believes these things are testing are doing reconnaissance to test our military capabilities - which is scary to me.
The technology they are displaying is awesome, but it is something we should be very wary of.
Assuming this is an advanced civilisation, this seems highly unlikely.
Our capabilities can be well enough assessed from the comfortable safety of billions of kilometres away simply from watching our relentless broadcasting of them in all directions for decades if not centuries now.
We even sent out devices at the limits of our sphere of physical influence, introducing ourselves and with instructions on how to understand what we say.
Certainly, by simple initial analysis of even our most basic technology they could then monitor our own satellite networks on a whim and see all of the same things about ourselves that we do, in realtime and in totality.
Ingesting our transmissions and emissions and assessing our capabilities would be something they could do far more thoroughly than we can ourselves. They'd likely also be able to project what we'll have ten or twenty years from now in detail.
Sending a craft in can only reasonably be interpreted as "hi" given a context of technological dominance, which by necessity is founded on informational dominance.
“Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He is a private equity investor and an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science”
Equity investor. No conflicts there!
“in our restricted military airspace”
In fact, they’re actually the most heavily instrumented research, development, test and training areas on the planet. Let me repeat that: research, development and test.
> Let me repeat that: research, development and test.
>What an incredible coincidence. Alien trolls or Occam’s razor?
The ODNI specifically stated in the 144 cases of UAP they were not able to identify that exactly none of them were from testing US Special Access Programs technology. This is in the official report http://dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-As...
>“Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He is a private equity investor and an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science”
> Equity investor. No conflicts there!
He left TTSA in 2021 and he's still a national security advisor to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He's also from one of the wealthiest families in the world, being a direct line from Carnegie Mellon. Typically when you are born wealthy you are naturally an investor in things you believe in.
“The ODNI specifically stated in the 144 cases of UAP they were not able to identify that exactly none of them were from testing US Special Access Programs technology. This is in the official report”
I’m going to be extremely generous and assume you have actually not read the report you state says exactly none of them were SAPs.
What your source actually says:
“USG or Industry Developmental Programs: Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected”
Apologies. I couldn’t remember the wording. I did read the report but it was last June.
With that said, I have watched more recent interviews with Lue Elizondo where he states that the UAPs being shown are not the result of SAPs, and that he would know as he had access to the SAPs since it was his job to investigate the occurrences.
I honestly don’t know what to make of these observations other than I’m utterly convinced they’re not alien, super high tech or break the laws of physics (eg inertia). There was no alien crash in Roswell. I also file believe any government is competent enough for the claimed cover up and associated psyops.
What I do find interesting is the overlap between people who buy into various conspiracy theories and people who are religious, were religious or would otherwise be likely to be religious.
There’s some fascinating psychology here and I think it boils down to a combination of wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan rather than just a collection of random stuff that just happens.
“Can’t be explained” is typically “hasn’t been explained yet”. Lack of an explanation is nothing more than that. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I approach this from the other direction. Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide.
Like this is Main Character Syndrome at its finest.
> wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan
You may not have meant this by your comment, but in general I find a related analysis common among atheists, that religious people believe what they do because it feels good. I find that's often wrong, and when generally applied condescending, as if atheists are simply more emotionally mature. On the contrary many religious people will tell you they believe what they do because it seems to them to be true.
One might consider the existence of the universe extraordinary evidence (for the existence of God).
That said I think we can mostly agree that based on what we know so far, "aliens" is a fairly implausible explanation for any given unexplained phenomenon. Where ever you fall on that debate, I don't think it has anything to do with religious beliefs except as far as the biases of the people who conduct these psychology studies goes.
Albert Einstein was once asked to clarify his faith, here is his reply:
“Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”
I read this often and maintain the attitude that scripture, science, art are all branches of the same Tree.
> I read this often and maintain the attitude that scripture, science, art are all branches of the same Tree.
Have you considered that having a tree where one of the branches lets you believe things based on little, bad, or no evidence, and those beliefs are then unable to be challenged, which leads to you being able to make laws based on those beliefs, is not a great idea? I sure wouldn't eat an apple from that tree!
Same said about arrogance and theist. Most religions are based on beeing something special and not a shitload of atoms nobody will remember as time pase by
I disagree. Religion usually involves deifying a entity that you consider to be superior, because it is not human. As an example, the word Islam literally means "submission" in reference to submitting to God. I'm not sure how that's arrogant. If anything being just a creature of god inherently means that we're nothing special in the grand scheme of things.
You can't really extrapolate being alone in the universe from "aliens aren't visiting us." The fact that we exist at all, especially as a random occurrence of events, would suggest it's not that bizarre of an event. If we were single celled organisms having this conversation, then yeah, life outside of earth would seem more unlikely.
But we have 4.543 billion years worth of evidence showing that life REALLY likes to live. To get from a single celled organism to me typing to you over the internet tells me there's probably something universal to this process.
To me it's a lot more "Main Character Syndrome" to suggest we are wholly unique and alone in the universe. We are the special chosen species that made it out of an infinite number of probabilities. Sounds insane.
Of all the life we can see only one (or a few for the more generous of you) species has what humans commonly call intelligence.
Intelligence as we commonly refer to it is not a given in evolution. Evolution seeks forward propagation of genetic material, it doesn't seek an "intelligent" state.
It's reasonable to assume there is life elsewhere in the universe. It's quite a bit more of a stretch to assume there is _intelligent_ life elsewhere in the universe, aside from the problem of defining what intelligence is.
I'm late to respond to your comment, but I qualified my statement with a reference to how we commonly refer to intelligence. Speculating about what's in the universe while ignoring what data we have is fooling, imo.
There are an estimated 8.7 million species on earth. The common interpretation of intelligence puts the ratio of intelligent-to-non-intelligent species we know of at about 1:8,700,000. Nothing I've seen in the literature on evolution suggests that evolution will lead to intelligence under than definition. Mammals led to humans, and only after the dinosaurs were wiped out by a mass extinction event.
So while I can't say for sure that intelligent life is more or less common at a universal scale, it makes far more sense to assume the rest of the universe and the mechanics of evolution are consistent with what we see on Earth. I don't think we'd be that unique in the cosmos, which seems to me to be an egotistical thing to think, anyway.
AC Clarke posited perhaps extra-terrestrial life came, they observed & they quarantined our corner of the galaxy to inhibit the escape of slavery, murder & environmental destruction.
For all we know, it takes a whole universe banging molecules together before metabolizing self-replicating life randomly arises. If it has only emerged one time in the entire universe, nothing would look different to us than it does right now.
Or maybe it happens all the time. But with only one sample, we have no data either way.
> But with only one sample, we have no data either way.
Sure we do, that one instance of life pushes the needle in favor of life. A fun exercise is to imagine or visualize the concept of nothingness, as far as you can take it. Eventually you realize even the "idea of nothingness" negates the meaning of "nothingness." You reach a paradox in awareness that you're incapable of resolving because to do so would mean the idea didn't exist in the first place. Applying it to life, the existence of life negates the existence of no-life, and increases the probability in our favor.
Functionally I think life is more commonplace than anyone realizes, and we're probably just incapable of understanding life outside of our perception of reality.
We know life is not nonexistent, but that's all we know.
Given that life exists, here are two possibilities: life is common but we just haven't seen other life yet, or life is unique and necessarily we're it. Since those two possibilities look exactly the same to us, what data can we have to prefer either one?
If we ever did see other life, then we could be confident that it's everywhere. But without seeing it, we don't know. We can only guess, according to our personal preferences.
In fact, I'd go further. Compared to not looking at all, looking for life and not finding it increases the likelihood that we're alone. Maybe not by that much, since astronomy isn't all that good yet, but the more we look without finding, the more rare we'll know life to be.
Excellent thinking, unassailable logic. I'd go a step further to state we truly are incapable of "understanding" nothingness, we're not constructed to know (in any sense) what that state is like. Precisely the reason we can't truly anticipate death, it's completely foreign to our sensibilities.
Humans evince resistance to an obvious reality, we can't know what is unknowable, that is to say, that which we are incapable of experiencing. I can't know what another person experiences let alone some living entity built according to some alternate template.
Logic dictates a conclusion that other life likely exists in the universe. Also the odds favor that we can't know what it is given the intrinsic limits to what humans are capable of knowing.
So we only have one data point of a planet producing what will quite possibly be a spacefaring civilization or, in the very least, one able to comprehend as such.
But if you accept that the Dyson Swarms are a likely outcome then we have a while bunch of negative data points in systems within even thousands of light years of us.
That then brings into focus the hypothesis about Dyson Swarm. Such a thing can be built incrementally, requires no material stronger than stainless steel and requires no energy tech beyond solar power. It is a massive engineering challenge to be sure but not requiring new physics is significant.
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics
This doesn't account for the fact that you don't know what - if any - benefits do exotic materials and funky physics might bring if they exist and are feasible to exploit. The benefits might be so much larger than Dyson Swarms, that it would be wastful\unnecessary to use Dyson Swarms, except maybe as a hobby or as a low tech fallback for civilizations like camping enthusiasts and survivalists. Why bother with stars when you have tech to live in the 21 dimensions that those born-yesterday biologicals can't even sense yet ?
The Dyson 'Paradox' doesn't strike me as much of a paradox, imagine if a group of ants looked at the sky and wondered why aren't extraterrestials building tunnels inside the moon's regolith like ants do on Earth. It's just assuming too much. It's of course a valid scenario, it just isn't the only one.
The Dyson Swarm is more or less a science fiction concept. Is its lack of existence really your reason for believing we’re alone in the universe?
You seem keen to make fun of dogmatic people but attaching a hypothetical concept which is so trivial and fringe to your mental model seems like pretty dogmatic behavior. If you’d never heard of a Dyson Swarm, like the vast, vast majority of people haven’t, would your view of extraterrestrial life have significantly changed?
The problem with your comment is you just lumped together a string of un-credible events and then summarise you're not convinced. To be frank Roswell and psyops (whatever that is) would not be enough to utterly convince me too. What I do find very interesting though is credible recent eye witness testimonies coming from US Navy pilots and the work at Harvard University for the Galileo Project, along with the other many recent activities around the study of UAPs (whatever they might be).
The problem as I see it with this area is it's been far too stigmatised, so no researchers would ever dare touch it for fear of being labelled conspiracy theory believing nutcases. That sentiment is now dying off thankfully and we can start to find out what on earth is going on.
I'm surprised you're more convinced by eye witness testimonies. People are notoriously unreliable. If anything, this glare is better proof of green men than just talk.
where did I say I was convinced? I said I was not unconvinced. I am curious and not out-ruling anything, especially now that we have credible academic research starting on the matter.
Why are you convinced by a hobbyist with no academic background? He is a retired video game programmer.
How are you utterly convinced when it can't be proven true or false and don't have any other explanation for it? Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them?
We don't have extraordinary evidence therefore it's not possible that it's anything weird doesn't seem very scientific.
>Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them?
Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
How are you supposed to discover something new about the universe if all doors are closed from the start? How do you go from zero evidence where something isn't worth being investigated further because there isnt sufficient evidence to there being sufficient evidence for it to be considered acceptable to investigate? The seems like a feedback loop that will result in nothing new ever being discovered unless something magical drops all evidence in your lap.
We have an observation. What do we do with it? First we check to see if it fits with the current model. If it doesn't fit the current model we then purpose a hypothesis and purpose a test that would prove the hypothesis there by expanding the current model.
The process isn't hey look at that, must be aliens.
We have unexplained phenomena. We have eyewitness accounts from the Navy's top pilots as well as instrument data and IR footage. If we cannot explain this phenomena with what we know, then we must consider the possibility its something that we don't know. Simply putting your head in the sand or attempting to debunk this documented phenomena with patently absurd explanations like "a lens flare" or "it was only Venus" isn't good enough for thoughtful people.
A squadron commander doesn't get into that position by being incompetent. Fighter jets are incredibly complex and demanding and there are lots of different aircraft to pilot in the navy.
I don't understand the nitpicking over a minor detail in a comment. Why are you talking about top squadron commanders now? What does top even mean? Top 50%? Top 95%? The point is the main individual was highly trained, in a high position and with years of experience.
> Simply putting your head in the sand or attempting to debunk this documented phenomena with patently absurd explanations like "a lens flare" or "it was only Venus" isn't good enough for thoughtful people.
So yeah I'm nitpicking that the poster inserted an invented fact that these were the Navy's "top pilots" to support their position while being a dismissive jerk.
> an invented fact that these were the Navy's "top pilots"
I don't think it is an invented fact. Top is ambiguous and has to refer to >50 percentile at a minimum. A commander of a squadron of f18s in the navy that graduated the navy's top gun program is most definitely above the 50th percentile (I would argue he would be in a very elite group of pilots that is much better than just half of others).
I definitely don't support condescending comments, but you too were dismissive.
There are multiple plausible hypothesis to explain these things, just dismissing the whole conversation as not worth discussing or being impossible seems very unscientific.
I might be overly pedantic with this point but saying a shiny balloon fits the limited data we have, doesn't mean it was a shiny balloon.
The thing that bothers me the most about this sort of discussions is that it's all done on "paper"[1]. It would be helpful to actually release a balloon, or whatever object you think it was, and check if you can reproduce the glare and other sensor data.
If it's very easy to reproduce then we can be more confident in that explanation and probably nail down more detailed characteristics of that object. Once we have that we can look where this object could've come from. For example, if it points to a balloon, did a company/organization lose a balloon in that time frame? Once we have all this info we would have an explanation that's more robust than someone saying: "It might be possible this and potentially that"
This requires money, time and the hardware. So I guess it's unlikely that will ever happen.
[1] Not saying it's useless. Those calculations and/or simulations are very useful to limit the types of objects it could be.
Of course being consistent with an explanation doesn't mean it definitely is that thing. But being consistent with a mundane thing means it looks the way it would look if it was the mundane thing.
It's very normal to not be able to prove what caused an event. This morning I heard a sound, it sounded pretty much exactly like a car horn, but maybe it was something else. We'll probably never know.
It's an excellent point that any organization serious about determining the cause would be conducting experiments, I can go honk some car horns and see if I find one that sounds similar. It doesn't seem like that happens with "UAP research", or the US Navy
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way
There’s still a huge engineering gap between our current tech and the theoretical possibility of a Dyson Swarm. I don’t find it at all implausible that such a thing would need too much energy, effort, collective will, or some other resource, to make it practical. There could still be plenty of stealthy sub-Dyson civilizations, or even supra-Dyson civilizations that have found it in their interest not to be detectable.
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide.
Robin Hanson has the most plausible ET hypothesis to explain these UFO observations. Basically it goes:
1) Life only evolved once in the galaxy.
2) However it spread to one or more stars its system of origin through the process of panspermia.
3) This sister planet that shares a common life origin with us evolved an advanced civilization that predates ours by 10-100 million years.
4) However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres, this sister civilization developed a highly anti-growth world government.
5) They've sent local probes or outposts to study us because we're interesting as a sister branch in the tree of life, and also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This explains why we have spacefaring ETs poking around but no resource gobbling Dyson spheres expanding through the light clone. If civilizations were widespread, then almost certainly one would be gobbling resources. But if there are only two civilizations, ours and theirs, it's quite believable that the earlier of the two fell into an anti-growth world government.
The idea of panspermia isn't a new one. There are several variations.
The very early universe was relatively warm. Simple or even complex life could've evolved and spread through parts of the Universe with relative ease given the much shorter distances. It seems highly unlikely though given the rarity of metals (in the astronomical sense; meaning anything other than hydrogen and helium) and the likely needed timescales. This probably means at best it was organic molecules of some level of complexity.
There are later versions of this where panspermia occurred much more recently, either intentionally or not.
Whatever the case it's all unprovable speculation. If we ultimately the same unlikely patterns repeating on different wrolds then I guess we can revisit.
So how recent in this hypothesis did this occur? There are fossil records for people going back millions of years. Are we talking all life? Or just people? If it's all life then we need to go back billions of years, at which point we're just talking about spreading amino acids. Such a connection will be similar to our fraternal bond with bananas.
> However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres
This seems unlikely. Why? Because the tech for a Dyson Swarm is basically stainless steel, solar panels and the ability to build things in space in large quantities. The last one is significant of course but is largely gated on the high cost of getting things into orbit, which is something likely to plummet in the coming centuries.
Saying we could build a self-sustaining orbital within 1,000 years I don't think is a stretch. Only industrial scale separates building 1 and building a million.
But there's another problem: people often neglect the energy cost of interstellar travel. It's... massive. And this is even assuming you solve the reaction mass problem. Interstellar travel almost seems predicated on a Dyson Swarm simpsly to have sufficient energy.
> ... also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This is a well-trodden avenue of thought on the Fermi Paradox. What if alien civilizations just stop growing? If there's 1, sure that might be possible. But what if there were 1,000? Would they all follow this path? It gets increasingly unlikely that not one would grow significantly. Non-growth civilizations would be at an extreme disadvantage with another who has vastly more energy and matter at their disposal. Like you almost have to grow just in case someone else does.
But all of this just seems like highly selective curve overfitting to reach the desired conclusion that UFOs are alien in origin.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that when people who hold power over large groups of people actively mislead them and deny them of a source of authority, those people grasp at what pieces of information they do have in order to build a narrative that isn't tainted by lies.
It is, and I cannot stress this enough, entirely unhelpful for you to ascribe it to main character syndrome or compare it to the belief in an omnipotent God.
If sources of truth in human societies like governments and scientific institutions would stop lying or misleading people nearly constantly then you could call conspiracy people lunatics, or fringe. But you simply cannot.
Not only are people being lied to, but they are being actively disinformed for "their own good." There are massive socializing forces that have taken an active role in manipulating society based around the idea that they know better.
And the ironic part is that, to a degree, they do know better. People act stupid in groups and have important information WITHHELD for various reasons that make it impossible to discern the truth.
If you want to start minimizing the amount of bullshit beliefs that people hold, supernatural or otherwise, you can start by tearing down the systems that are used to create false narratives which push people into those beliefs.
I think you hit on the key part of conspiracy thinking. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that many of the most conspiracy minded are also extremely religious, in the US anyway. I don't know anything about conspiracy thinking in the context of Islam or Hinduism, for example.
It seems like the tendency to accept a higher power in control of your life and the world leads to believing in other earthly powers being able to exert vast control over the world.
In France, it was also deeply religion people of Christian or Muslim faith who felt is was their duty to tell me about the shadow groups controlling the world. The best part was that these shadow groups were all French, based in Paris.
I think they must be wrong, since I have it on good evidence from my deeply-religious and conspiracy-minded family that the shadow groups are _US based_.
But seriously, I assume all these types of people have this sort of localized, my-version-is-the-right-version theories, since they do the exact same thing with their religion.
Dyson Swarms are only plausible if your society is still stuck in an exponential growth mode. It assumes technological advancement, but stagnant sociological development, or perhaps even worse; pathological development, like a hegemonising swarm.
I think that many UFO theories make the same mistakes. They assume high tech aliens with low tech motives.
I mostly agree with your take, but I'll pick on this sentence:
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way
The fact that we can come up with the idea of a Dyson Swarm doesn't mean that not finding any in our observations results in we "being alone in the galaxy". It's also Main Character Syndrome, in a way.
Even discarding the idea of alien life being so different from ours that we wouldn't recognize it even if we were looking right at it, and assuming a "human like civilization", it's perfectly possible for there being unknown physics to us that make the idea of a Dyson Swarm unnecessary. Using our own civilization as an example, in the 1950s and 60s we did all of our data broadcasting over radio waves, and built huge powerful antennas that screamed about our presence to the wider universe. People then thought "well, if we're broadcasting all this stuff, where are the alien broadcasts? why can't we hear them? we must be alone in the galaxy". Fast-forward to now. Our current tech allows pretty much all communications to be over cables, and we're being much less wasteful with our emmiting; our radio emissions are diminishing over time.
So, not a century has passed, and already newer technology has proven our assumptions of alien life wrong. Why would it be any different with Dyson Swarms? You can't know how more advanced technology looks like, you can only extrapolate with what we have now.
Atheists have religious beliefs too, they just believe in different things. Atheists are no better than any other humans. There is nothing special about an atheist. They are just as susceptible as any other human. I agree with your post other than this portion.
I think a lot of people just find the topic of conspiracy theories interesting and entertaining. You don't need to hate on them for what is essentially a hobby.
Totaly true . Look at alex jones. He is a full blown crazy person that believes in the supremacy of the christian race… oh yes racism goes also realy well with religion
- There are visual observations, and what are, ( by military standards), flimsy short images/video.
- This analysis partially explains one part of it, without excluding the presence of an object.
- There is also Radar data, but it has not been published or time correlated to the reported visual observations.
Observations:
- These Aliens only seem to want to goof around with folksy US pilots.
- Pilots known to simulate UFO sightings, fans of UFO invasion stories and stories of Russians shooting UFO's and getting shot back. ( watch the interview...).
- These Aliens show up exclusively during their training time and with sightings restricted to areas with US carrier groups exercises.
Also...
- The Aliens don't show up with their "Tic Tac's" or seem to be interested on the Ukraine conflict.
- They don't care about EU or Latin America citizens...
- Don't want to play around with the Russian or Chinese Air Force.
- They don't show up in the data of any of the existing Military satellites capable of reading a bus ticket on the ground from 400 km.
- These Aliens don't show up in the observations of the
thousands of professional and amateur astronomers,
that scan the sky a total of thousands of hours every
night, using some of the most exquisite optical instruments available.
I would say: They either don't exist, or if they do, they are pretty dumb and we have nothing to fear.
The sightings are military classified aircraft, explaining why they appear during trainings. The govt would rather have you believe they are UFOs than the public suspecting where tax dollars are being funneled, and enemies being weary.
Because some of the reported changes of speed are not within any technology conceivable for the next 100 years. Like physically doing Mach 200 with no noise or sonic boom and show up 80 Miles ( the way point of the interview...) after a few seconds. ( And how did they know where the way point was?)
Of course, you may have seen them and be in the camp that they are not achievable for the next 100 years. That is completely reasonable and I appreciate that point of view.
Is there hard evidence of objects performing these maneuvers? I keep hearing anecdotes like yours making it sound like we have irrefutable evidence of extraordinary tech.
The linked article and video suggest that there is an object behind the glare that the tracking pod is locked on to. I suppose it will be challenging to gather irrefutable evidence if an object is capable of these maneuvers, but the several videos and the radar data is enough refutable evidence to warrant the discussion of it/them being real.
What is the point of this story? Someone lacking context could watch this and arrive at the conclusion that "the Navy video of a UFO has a simple conventional explanation", which is how the presenter delivers his arguments. He meticulously demonstrates that the shape of the object which is the subject of the video is an artifact of camera glare from overexposure. In case you are not convinced, he breaks it down into four reasons, supporting each of them with data based on a detailed understanding of the system. If you are still not convinced that this shake is camera glare by the end of the video, I would be surprised.
And yet, whether the shape of the subject is representative of the object or an artifact of the camera is almost irrelevant to whether or not this is a video that should be investigated. The source of the glare is clearly not part of the camera or the aircraft. We should not treat the silhouette of the object as valuable data, but it says nothing of the actual object that is being tracked. The presenter does not suggest this, and the post spins the whole event as being
"debunked". I don't know why "debunking" things seems to have become a cottage industry, but there was considerable effort put into analyzing and visually modeling this thoroughly condescending presentation.
He literally says something to the effect of "I'm only saying that the glare is obscuring the true shape of the object" in the first minutes of the video.
Yet the title of the article says the video was camera glare. Which doesn't even make sense. But what it suggests is that the entire contents can be explained away as camera glare. So blame the media in this case perhaps?
There is no way to watch this video and come away with the understanding that there was no object at all. It spends a tedious several minutes demonstrating the connection between glare and objects emitting light, and multiple long, tedious disclaimers that it is not arguing that there is no object at all in the video. You have to want it to be saying something else to take away a different message.
Of course you can, the submitted article does exactly that. His emotions convey that he knows exactly what's going on, and he states, repeatedly, that it is lens flare. Rationally we can see that this is missing the forest for the trees, but anyone who doesn't think as critically will deduce that this is only a camera artifact. He operates this way on purpose, so that people who want to believe him have the proof they are looking for, and everyone else will quibble about meaningless details.
From the submission: A new detailed analysis of the modern poster child for UFO footage makes the case that the object in the video is not anything other than glare on the Navy jet’s gimbal camera system.
Done. Pilots are idiots, and so are your open minded friends. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
I didn't read the article. I only watched the video.
The video to me made a convincing case that the object seen in the video file is a glare at the location of a heat-emitting object.
I'd now be ready for a follow-up discussing whether the motion of the object (accounting for the gimbal system) is unusual or not. The video didn't get into it one way or another, but it's the obvious next question to ask.
He says that it is glare, at tedious length. As of last year he thought it was the exhaust of another aircraft[1], plus he has stated his goal is to debunk UFO videos. He could have spent some of his tedious length and extensive reconstruction demonstrating the apparent position and velocity of that other plane, but he chose to spend it going on about what he should think is an inconsequential detail.
He says that it's glare produced by an object that the plane is tracking. He does not say that the entire phenomenon is glare; he says the opposite of that. The level of parsing you're doing here dwarfs whatever tone you picked up from the video itself.
Looking forward to his analysis of the angular velocity, which would be far more interesting. I'm sure it will be out soon since the model on his website should already contain it.
He says it is glare, yes, but he also references other IR camera footage to provide other examples of glare. And in each of the examples there is an object that is the source of the heat glare (e.g. a burning car).
I had also never heard of this incident before. My takeaway from the video: There's a camera glare artifact around an object; the motion of the object has to be understood while taking the camera gimbal system's actions into account. The next step would be to model the object's motion while doing so and checking if it's doing anything interesting.
I agree the video would be better if it made any effort to get into that. It's like Part I to a two-part story!
Science deals with the data we can see, not the infinite number of unfalsifiable hypotheses we could construct in the space we don't see. Believing in the god of the gaps doesn't make you "open minded".
The intention of the video is to show that there is no advanced technology or unexplainable phenomena captured in the video. If this is already evident to you, then the video isn't for you. But there are a lot of people who watch this video and think the object itself is rotating or deforming strangely, when in reality, all evidence suggests it's just some kind of terrestrial aircraft. Whether they know who/what is driving the aircraft is up to the Navy.
Mick West debunked these to my satisfaction ages ago. The only question I have left is whether the whole thing was a US Navy psyop or whether the navy was just looking the other way and playing coy when those pilots were creating a retirement career in UFOlogy.
People read "Navy confirms authenticity of the video" as "This is important and Navy can't explain it." (if they try).
Only thing Navy does it confirms that the video is real. They don't say that they have even tried to identify or that there is any reason to identify. They have hundreds or thousands of hours of video or radar images of drones etc. they don't care to identify.
Navy does not engage with these hustlers from "To the stars academy" at all. That's the only good response. To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (media & entertainment company) makes this stuff up and sells it.
> People read "Navy confirms authenticity of the video" as "This is important and Navy can't explain it."
Precisely. There is a huge gap between what the Navy has actually claimed about the videos and what people think the Navy has claimed. 'The video is authentic' is not the same as 'the video shows what it's purported to show.'
are you kidding now? that pilot does not even know how cameras work at all and your using him ???
this American pilot does not know how depth of field works... can't even notice in his own video recordings, this beyond funny. He thinks you can't have objects at different distances in focus at the same time ahahaha, does not get how parallax works... gave up after those dumb errors and smug attitude as he was saying such dumb things, i bet he made even more mistakes.
is he really a "fighter pilot" or they just not trained to understand their gear?
That is possible, but I think strains credibility. The GOFAST video is egregious, I find it hard to believe nobody in the US Navy was able to calculate the actual [mundane, very... balloon-like] speed of that object using basic trigonometry. I think it's more likely the Navy knew there was nothing actually exotic in that video.
The Defense Department described the subject of GOFAST, Gimble and FLIR videos as "UAV, Balloons, and other UAS". 'Balloons'; they know what it is. They're not even lying, they're being coy or misleading.
i think they are, there is a video of a "fighter pilot" who does not understand basics of a cameras... he thinks you can't focus on objects at different distances at the same time.... how did he ever get to fly a jet? or parallax i mean he should know how that works
The UAP report debunks the idea that all the evidence the government has has been debunked. Time will tell but the report reversed Project Blue Book, which ruled out non-human technology.
Well, the only reason they were scrambled to begin with is that they had been tracking these objects for weeks using advanced radar. As I understand it, the radar is based on multiple resolutions. The active radar can point in the direction of objects of interest and get very very precise measurements. It's not just the video, its the radar data.
The thing that pushed me over the edge in believing these things is the long podcast interview between Commander David Fravor and Lex Fridman.
Unfortunately, radar data - from all the incidents in question - will never be released, as the hardware involved is highly classified. We only get footage from the IR camera because the IR tech is not "classified" (basically off-the-shelf FLIR cameras with fancy object tracking software).
Not that I know of, so I take your point there. Here's a related video with some radar data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh4QngYJG4I . In the interview, Frevor does talk about the radar and instrumentation on the plane, but it's been a while since I listened to it.
Fravor is a convincing person, but he's also ultimately an asset of the US military. I want to believe him, but unfortunately the simplest and most likely explanation for this situation is that he's lying, and lying in combination with other people. Most likely because they were incentivized or asked to.
I listened to maybe half of that interview, and I really really do not buy the response to Lex's question of "Why didn't this cause more commotion in the ranks?"
Fravor said because he was the commander of 17 airmen and 300 sailors and has the weight of that command on him. I get it, but this is also his job, and we all tend to acclimate to our jobs. I don't think this guy and all other witnesses were so burdened with the idea of being a CO that they weren't able to process a potentially world-changing event. If this was in the middle of a real war and real combat - of course that's different. But this was just during the millionth training exercise of this guy's career.
He was also quick to move on from this question, and did so without any prompting from Lex. He went on to what sounded like a rehearsed talking point (I'm sure because he's said it so many times) about how he doesn't get paid for these appearances, but there's no way to know what other outside incentives he may have to go on these shows. That Lex doesn't push back on this at all is disappointing, but I get that he's not there to interrogate him.
The final sticking point - Fravor admits that he's an apologist for secrecy and the US government hiding things for reasons of "national security". Clearly someone with this belief would welcome the idea of lying repeatedly, very publicly, to help cover something up. What I'm implying is that something did happen that day (that is much more mundane), but we're not getting the honest story, and Fravor outright suggesting it was something we know to be impossible with currently technology is likely obfuscating the truth of something that is probably an embarrassing mistake/leak/something that the US government doesn't want there to be public clarity on.
Your interpretation is entirely plausible. At the same time, I found the interview to be very convincing in terms of Fravor's credibility. He mentions details about who was with him, bar scenes, and generally comes across as a professional. Historical sightings (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter ) and angelic phenomena ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over... ) are much older and at least predate the current US military objectives.
It's also totally possible that this is some kind of funding grab. That Rubio et al. are simply pawns being teased and pushed around in the name of national security to fund large and barely monitored government research and military funding. It could be some of both.
A good point brought up by Fravor and conveniently ignored by people is that when describing the incident, they saw multiple objects. Their camera pods, however, could only track one at a time.
Isn't he only debunking the image that appeared on the video as being glare as opposed to the actual object? So the object is real, but what appeared in the video is glare, not an actual representation of the object?
West contends that what is being seen in the video is actually infrared glare that hides a hot object behind it and only rotates in the way it does because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.
UFO-ers were using things like the rotation speed as definitive evidence of some like other-worldly advanced technology. Demonstrating that it was the glare/gimble brings it back into the realm of just a normal far-away plane. It also casts doubt on the expertise of the pilots/military who didn't realize what happened.
Yes, that is correct. There was still an unidentified flying object, but the remaining aspects of its behavior do not require invoking advanced unknown technology to explain.
IR video tends to bloom. If the object is hot enough, (for instance, a jet engine exhaust, a burning vehicle, a refinery flare...) you'll have a blob of smudge around/behind it on the video. The video is contending that the rotation of what is seen on the video isn't the object itself rotating. Instead, the blob is elongated as a result of glare/lens flare/diffraction gradient, and this elongation is aligned with the rotational axis of the gimbal. As the gimbal nears gimbal lock, it is forced to rapidly rotate to continue tracking the object. This rapid rotation of the gimbal causes the glare to rapidly rotate.
I do have a background in IR video, gimbals, and translating between gimbal telemetry and real life coordinates and the explanation in the video looks good to me.
Interesting how so many are willing to accept "camera flare" as a concrete explanation.
One thing that bothers me about this explanation is we know those pilots had a lot of experience with those systems so I'd expect they'd know "camera flare" when they saw it on those displays. But it's clear from the audio they did not recognize it as that. And there was more than one pilot seeing it, and from different angles.
I'd like to hear what the pilots and ship crew members think about this.
I'd be wary of taking a pilot's subjective impressions as superior to a technical analysis of the optical system.
Pilots may be competent users of these systems, but they are not experts at anything beyond flying their missions, in general. Experience as users is not the same as expertise under unusual conditions.
The US Air force and Navy have a pretty bad track record of incompetent pilots. They have a history of losing numerous planes in training excercises, for example.
> They have a history of losing numerous planes in training excercises
There is a reason virtually every fighter jet ever made was made with ejection seats or retrofitted with them later: They're inherently risky aircraft, and almost impossible to bail out of.
If you have some actual statistics that show that USN and USAF pilots crash their jets at a greater rate than other nations, I'd like to see it. The absolute number of crashes tells nothing because some countries (Russia) barely fly their jets at all.
> The US Air force and Navy have a pretty bad track record of incompetent pilots. They have a history of losing numerous planes in training excercises, for example.
Or flying planes planes for the military is just really hard, and you're holding them to an unreasonable standard.
Even the best programmer writes software with bugs, especially when they're not playing it safe and just writing fizzbuzz over and over again.
you say that but there is a fighter pilot on youtube trying to debunk these videos but lacks any basic knowledge on how cameras work, while saying things like you can't focus on objects at different distances at the same time... he demonstrates this by having a camera very close to a object ahaha but never noticed he is in focus and so is his background.... :( dose not know what focal length is.. or how parallax works.
That was pretty painful to watch with the fast forward going on for so long. I didn't try to take that in.
Seems to me like our gov's own investigation would've found gimbal glare to be the culprit if that were the case. But they didn't. What they said is:
"Of the 144 reports we are dealing with here, we have no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation for them — but we will go wherever the data takes us..."
And:
"We absolutely do believe what we're seeing are not simply sensor artifacts."
FYI, Mick West is not an "expert". He has no experience with military hardware. Everyone involved in the incident, or has background knowledge of the classified details, says there are multiple sensors confirming the footage, including direct visual by the pilots. This can not possibly be explained by "lens flair".
People say trust the experts. Well, in this case, the experts are the ones who know the military hardware, who flew the plane, who tracked the objects (plural) on radar. That is not Mick West. Mick West is a professional debunker, which means he analyses these videos with a baked-in assumption that it's "fake", not from an unbiased view.
If you fall for Mick West's BS, you aren't any different from UFO nuts who fall for Steven Greeer's. I suggest thinking for yourself instead.
> "Don't believe the evidence in front of you! 'Think for yourself' and 'Make up your own reality!'"
I never said this. Evidence is very important. Notably Mick West offered no new "evidence", only supposition. Supposition in direct contradiction to known facts of the case (eg, other sensors, pilot reports, visual confirmations, etc).
I never claimed to know the answer. But I do claim that Mick West is generating faulty conclusions derived from bad assumptions. So in this case you could make a compelling argument that Mick West is the conspiracy theorist. So we go around and around debunking the debunker who debunked the debunker.
West suggests there is an object being tracked, just that it is obfuscated by the glare. From the article:
> West contends that what is being seen in the video is actually infrared glare that hides a hot object behind it
So, he's not debunking the existence of what the pilot saw. He's just saying that what we see in the video is not what the pilots saw.
That would be a fascinating countermeasure if the craft was able to rotate to reflect the sun at a tracking pod on a potentially hostile aircraft, or perhaps the craft itself emitted the IR "glare" to prevent it from being accurately photographed.
I watched that video when it first came out and saw what looked like sun glare in the middle of image and ignored it and kept looking for what was meant to be the UFO. It was even rotating like you see those FLIR videos that keep up-up during fly-overs. I was like -- "That's it? Seriously? Come on!" The rotation looks like ansiotropic surface features on the lense where someone has wiped (perhaps a bit too hard) the surface and left streaks. (Or it's reflections between elements, I don't know.) It's hard to know if the lense is rotating, or the camera itself -- you only see the nett result on the monitor after all the transformations are done.
Exact same thing with the more recent super fast UFOs that are so totally birds locked while the camera orbits against a deep-zoom background. I wonder how many other people have seen these exact features dozens of times, tried to point it out, but it just gets lost in the endless garbage factory that is media these days.
> But a new detailed analysis by self-described debunker, skeptic, and UFO investigator Mick West
Ignored as soon as I read the name "Mick West". The guy's brand is to be a debunker which in of itself is not bad but I am not gonna trust a video game developer's (brand aligning) explanations of this phenomenon compared to trained fighter pilots and the US Navy/Pentagon who have found no explanation of this phenomenon thus far.
> the US Navy/Pentagon who have found no explanation of this phenomenon thus far.
"Released no explanation to the public" != "have found no explanation". The DoD is simply not in a habit of releasing information to the public unless they're instructed to do so by the executive branch.
They did not have an explanation as of last spring when they were forced to disclose everything they knew about the phenomenon by an act of congress. There wasn't even a redacted appendix.
You're not characterizing the report correctly. The report that was released to the public is a 9 page preliminary assessment. It is almost entirely fluff. It does state that of the 144 reported cases of UAP over the course of the period of study, there were 21 reports written. Those would be the interesting reports, and precisely none of the those were released to the public, redacted or otherwise.
Recently Jim Lacatski confirmed that Colm Kelleher ran the daily operations of AAWSAP/AATIP. Colm was also the deputy administrator of NIDS which started in 1995.
This along with the fact that Lue Elizondo used remote viewing to “save soldiers” in Afghanistan are pretty shocking revelations.
AASWAP produced no results and shut down. Yet Elizondo talks often about a 23-minute close video of a craft. And has allegedly shown videos on his phone to people.
Only recently have people claimed the government has high quality evidence, yet the evidence seems to be unclassified (but not public).
If such evidence exists, it’s almost hard to believe it’s only recently been discovered and it hasn’t somehow leaked out. The whole ordeal is highly suspicious.
Mick West has some interesting videos and does a good job debunking a lot of crap, but to me he is on the complete opposite spectrum of a UFO truther in that he doesn't seem to leave any room for the possibility that he might be wrong.
With that said, I suggest reading this New Yorker piece [1] on the subject. It's actually how I came to learn about Mick. He is covered a bit in the story and gives decent counter points at certain parts.
I think I could have gone harder on my second sentence. I do think he has some good debunking video's, but I would agree with you in that he does ignore a lot of evidence. When I say he is on the opposite spectrum of a UFO truther, I mean that I don't take him serious because his only goal seems to be to get a debunk video out regardless of merit.
Mick West is a buffoon, and his “debunking” videos intentionally mislead his audience. I say this because he has had this explained to him again and again but he still ignores evidence.
When you have infrared, multiple radar, and visual observations simultaneously of an object and pretend all you have is a grainy infrared video REPEATEDLY it goes beyond skepticism into deceit.
We have a grainy infrared video, and claims of other infrared, radar and visual observations. Claims are easy to make and hard to analyze. Video is all we can analyze, and the video is unconvincing. Why then should we believe the claims?
We have incredibly strong claims that lead to congressional hearings and classified reports to Congress. The public videos are heavily redacted and lower quality than the classified ones.
So is your claim that they’re all lying? Is Congress in on it?
No, my claim is that a few are lying and/or exaggerating the truth, and most others are unwilling or unable to point out the lies. Just like what happened with Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", which were a much more consequential lie, I hope you'd agree.
It's definitely an easier explanation than supernatural alien craft.
Nothing in this analysis or conclusion contradicts the radar observations - how are they being "ignored"? And it is unclear to me (as an uninitiated person) how "visual" observations lend any more credence to the story when they are just retellings of the exact same kind of footage, except impossible to further analyze/corroborate.
The core claim of this joke of a production is that it’s just lens flare.
They use weasel words to hedge their bets, but their intention is pretty clear.
The facts are that these pilots also saw these things with their own eyes and got radar locks in addition to IR. These are “targeting” pods remember? It can’t just be lens flare.
The "production" explicitly acknowledges that there is obviously a real, physical object with a strong IR signature. But all we see about the object is the lens flare. Hence, none of the apparent rotations and jerks are those of the object, but come from the movement of the camera system itself. Please feel free to re-watch.
Didn’t they actually see the object on multiple radars using multiple types of detection methods? Assuming that’s true, the camera glare story seems unlikely.
The video states that there's something there, but its heat signature is causing the glare (the video is in IR). Was the object flying steadily and rotating weirdly throughout the video? You can't see how the object is flying, the smooth motion and weird rotation you perceive is the effect of the glare!
Why, at the time, were Navy pilots behaving so incredulously, and why did they not pull up along-side the UFO and simply eyeball its identification? And why did they let it get away? What is it that Navy pilots are supposed to be doing when they're inscrutably not pursuing possible unidentified threats?
A simple rule of thumb is if it's a grainy, out-of-focus, smeary blob doing impossible things, it's not a UFO. It's a hoax or an artifact of the camera.
Where are the sharp, hi-res UFO pix? If there are UFOs, that is?
Always find "UFO are aliens" belief so non-logical.
Like a FTL civilization would even be curious about earth, having such advanced sensor technology to avoid dust at beyond light speed that they actually need to cruise around in the atmosphere?
Or that their ship would be so small? There's no penalty for mass in space, why not make it the size of a city? Certainly a FTL civilization has no construction limitations.
We have small plane-sized craft because of our limitations on power and mass and construction abilities. Aliens that can "visit" would be nothing like us.
Sitting here knowing we have a helicopter and a land rover on Mars it doesn't feel like it's entirely impossible for an alien craft to be here, looking at us.
I can't make the leap to believe without doubt there is, or even to believe there probably is. But it is not impossible. We've already proved it's not, and we're not really all that smart.
Space is really big. The difference in effort between getting an oversized RC car to Mars and getting a huge supermaneuverable space-and-aircraft to the nearest habitable planet is about the same as walking down tree driveway to get your paper and… well, getting a huge supermaneuverable space-and-aircraft to the nearest habitable planet.
Then doing it over and over just to play mind games with the primitive apes on the planet while somehow evading anything resembling a decent camera or photographer?
I’m not going to say it’s strictly impossible. But it sure as hell isn’t plausible.
Anyone on Mars would have very clearly seen the Rover landing and known exactly what it was and where it was coming from. They also didn't arrive in Mars from the opposite end of the Galaxy, they arrived from the next planet over.
Most importantly, no one on Mars would think that the rover or helicopter are defying theaws of physics, bending space time or anything like that, which are real claims made by army personnel about the objects seen in some of these videos.
Yup, that's kind of where I am at. I think I lean more towards "this definitely isn't aliens", but if it's aliens then I definitely think these are unmanned drones keeping an eye on us.
Still convinced the intelligence and technology it would require to get here would make us identifying aliens in our ozone impossible. They'd only be seen if they wanted to be. First contact could be seeing a von neumann probe or some other kind of scout type aircraft in space but it wouldn't be like the videos.
Nitpick: This isn't "evidence", this is "analysis". The title of the video itself is "Gimbal UFO - A New Analysis". A photography magazine can't be expected to understand the difference though, I guess.
ugh, more and more each day I hate the fact that Obama undid the last of the legal impediments to domestically targeted military counter-intelligence operations. It is no coincidence that there is a massive gap in military related UFO sightings that matches up perfectly with when it was illegal for the government to spread paranoid delusion in the interest of national security. How anyone could think that an advanced spacefaring species could spend over 50 years reconnoitering the planet - but primarily in restricted airspace used for bleeding edge military flight tests and over a whole lot of empty ocean... its depressing.
From the first I thought it looked like a bug smashed on the gimble lens because of how it orated relative to the horizon. Fascinating explanation why it could be glare from an actual object.
Wasn’t this tracked by multiple operators in more than one location using visible light and also radar and was visually confirmed by pilots? How does glare explain that?
I suspect It’s a Chinese or Russian sub floating a balloon that specifically does things to capture information on our radar systems.we used to do it to them too.
It's amazing how many imbeciles on hacker news actually believe that we actually saw UFOs. There is simply no evidence for them. (The sheer idea of a "saucer" for a UFO is straight out of fiction even, it's also conveniently exactly the same shape as a smudge on literally anything. A smeared spec of mud becomes a UFO saucer.)
> Im pretty suspicious, why does an MIT AI researcher have a youtube channel? Does he not get paid enough with his salary?
Could you please elaborate on why you think that an MIT researcher having a YouTube channel where is had some very interesting interviews somehow makes it suspicious?
This podcast generates millions it is one of the most popular pop sci podcasts.
David Favor is not a random pilot he was Top Gun instructor at the time.
You suggested that someone adequately compensated was suspicious if they had some other media angle on the side. I asked what the cut off was. Would it be OK if they were poorly compensated?
If you have a degree and a job that would provide you a pretty affluent life, then I question the motive of your youtube channel. What that is for every person is different and doesn't disqualify them from being legitimate but I will always start with being skeptical of these people.
I learned to beware the guy trying to sell you some incredible financial advice. If it was so incredible, he wouldn't have to sell it now would he?
Yes I'm serious. Rich people don't need youtube channels. People don't do youtube as a hobby, they do it to make money, so thus I must question his motives, since I assume he has enough money.
There is a lot of quackery on youtube, not everyone has good intentions.
So when the pilot says “it’s rotating!” And the lens flare rotates with it, that’s just a coincidence? The far-away-plane hypothesis would have the exhaust as a point source. The lens flare would maintain it’s orientation as the plane rolled.
It's probably worth at least skimming the article prior to dismissing it. He's not saying nothing's there.
> He says that his video does not address the object itself as it’s not clear what the object is and there is nothing to say that it isn’t special or exemplary in some way. He just argues that his analysis shows that it isn’t actually exhibiting any incredible behavior and opens the door to other “mundane possibilities” like a distance small jet just flying away and the heat of the engines is what is creating a large glare on the thermal camera.
He's saying the supposedly magical behavior is explicable. Without that, it's a fairly boring "someone's probably flying a drone near our ships" sort of incident.
There are plenty of "mundane" explanation for the motion of the object to be real as well, and not just camera glare. No need to invoke aliens. For example, this video shows SDI technology from the 80s:
which appears perfectly capable (albeit in test) of in-place rotation/motion very similar to that of the object. It could very well have been a drone, but I find it incredible that people dismiss first hand accounts in preference to some internet armchair quarterback.
The video states that there's something there, but its heat signature is causing the glare (the video is in IR). Was the object flying steadily and rotating weirdly throughout the video? You can't see how the object is flying, the smooth motion and weird rotation you perceive is the effect of the glare!
It is bewildering that they expect people to actually believe intelligent people to discount the IR footage from the F-18 just based on this article that reads like the "it was a weather balloon" trope we often get whenever we ask questions.
edit: holy crap, there are actually lot of people on HN buying it!
I for one get really annoyed with the people who go “it’s aliens!” every time, but the cynical “debooonkers” that will seemingly go to any length to say it’s _not_ aliens bother me even more.
The video is only one piece of the evidence. The pilots are trained, and other sensor systems confirmed what the camera was showing. This analysis is pretty flimsy.