I'm not a big UFO buff but when someone told me about this incident in passing yesterday I had to examine further. I am astounded that nobody has tried to find the wreckage of this jet. They found the wreckage of the Edmund Fitzgerald with a mini sub and that was in 730 feet of water. Why hasn't someone like National Geographic or the Discovery Channel sponsored an expedition to find and film this plane's wreckage and get answers?
Except they don't know where it crashed. Here they have a much smaller area to search. I'm fairly certain in 1953 that even the U.S. military lacked the advanced sonar that's available to the average person to use from a boat in 2022.
Small plane wrecks are not easy to find. When people were searching for Steve Fossett in the Sierra Nevada of California in 2007 they found a number of other wrecked aircraft that nobody even knew were up there. Planes disappear.
It seems plausible that one day someone will find it. Lake Superior should be far easier to search than say the Atlantic and presumably the freshwater will be kinder to the airframe than the salty sea.
History suggests technology and access improves though. Practically everyone takes for granted daily use of what was pretty specialized equipment not long ago.
Chemistry labs, companies that want to get rid of expensive to dispose of chemicals? A lab I worked for was caught decades ago (before my time) because bottles of chemicals were found in a rogue landfill with the name of the lab on them that allowed to track the origin. Turns out the chemical waste company didn't do the job it was paid for.
If there is a radar operator here, I want to know if it is at all realistic for an attack on an aircraft to result in it simply disappearing from the scope. Wouldn't the falling debris of the plane still show up for several minutes until it fell below what the radar could see? If this is so, doesn't this story imply the larger object had to have "eaten" the smaller one (the plane, I am assuming)?
The radar cross section of any falling debris would not necessarily be big enough for a radar to detect, especially with 1953 tech on a stormy night. Also, two blips "merging" on a radar scope is a common occurrence when two targets are closer together than the pulse length.
This article tries really hard to make this a UFO mystery, but jets fell out of the sky pretty regularly in 1953, especially in storms and at night. Radar technology was also not anywhere near what we have today and even with modern technology we can still just outright lose a plane. MH370 still hasn't been found for example.
(I'm not a radar operator per se but I did study weapons engineering at the NL naval college and spent several years of my military career specifying specs for advanced naval radar systems)
I've mostly just operated marine commercial navigation radars, but having said that, I wouldn't expect the return to be very good. You would still have reflected energy, but it would be much closer to noise, so it would have to be much closer to be automatically detected, or even to be detectable on screen by my own observation. A tracker assigned to it certainly wouldn't maintain itself.
I am not a radar operator. My understanding is that radar reflections are related to the size, shape, and texture of an object. A normal plane will be a large blob on the return, while, for example, a B2 stealth bomber is designed with special materials and angles to appear around the size of a large bird.
So an intact jet fighter will show up as a big dot, while falling debris might look like many small dots, or be too small for the resolution of the radar display.
There's also numerous sources of interference and background noise, including from weather. So on a stormy night it might not be apparent what is debris vs water.
The article is really more of an advertisement for a TV show than journalism and doesn't give a very clear account, but it sound plausible that two dots converging and disappearing from radar could represent an in-air collision. And if over the great lakes during a storm, investigators would be looking underwater for hundreds of pieces of non-magnetic aluminum spread over many square miles.
Confused, and probably mistrustful of whatever organisation confirms their existence.
The problem with UFOs is not the aliens part, and only to a certain extent the government conspiracy part - it's mainly the absurdity of the central claim: that aliens pop in on earth every so often to probe random people, blow up the occasional aircraft, and appear as shining lights in the sky every so often.
Well, why? Why would doing any of that make any sense to an alien species that must (with our best understanding of our local interstellar geography) travel several light years just to get here?
It's like if Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, and decides "huh, okay, we've got to this place, but let's not actually interact with the locals or claim any of the resources, or really do anything that would make this trip worthwhile; we'll just float just off the coastline and stare at them through our telescopes for several decades instead".
Your comment presupposes that this mysterious phenomenon that in some cases apparently can't be explained is indeed caused by literal aliens from another world, with motives and reasoning similar in some basic way to our own. What if it isn't either of these things at all but remains as something without a clear explanation? We don't actually know what a certain genuinely currently inexplicable (and they do exist) subset of UFO encounters really are. The common assumption is that they're extraterrestrials of some kind, but that might be completely wrong, and the reality (whatever it is) subject to rules of "behavior" that don't have to and don't in practice at all conform to how human cognition and logic normally operate or reason.
Tbh, that sort of answer makes more sense to me. After all, the literal meaning of "UFO" is just something that flies that hasn't been clearly identified. In that sense, a UFO could well be a secret vehicle from another country, a homemade drone that doesn't behave as expected, a previously unknown weather condition, or something else equally mundane.
These are creatures that can travel between stars, potentially better galaxies, and back again for research, which implies at the very least FTL travel (and moreover, FTL travel that leaves no emissions or traces that we can detect), yet they let themselves get seen by random Joes who happen to get their cameras out?
yeah, alcubierre drive at least theoretically possible, if no known way of implementing it yet exists... and it would also leave no emissions or traces, since it would work by literally bending spacetime and not via propulsion of any sort. Emissions depend on ejecting mass behind you, and all that, which probably looks pretty retro if you can just make the ground you're on go downhill (in the spacetime sense) in order to accelerate your craft
> yet they let themselves get seen by random Joes
maybe visual stealth is either tough, or they actually want to desensitize us to themselves? the best known treatment of desensitization in phobias is through neutral repeated exposure.
> and they turn some off but leave the rest
given that there's likely many more of us than there are them, and also that they probably don't really want the job of being Sky Nannies, but also that they want to neutralize the most egregiously dangerous situations (a whole bunch of missiles on standby might satisfy that) or at least try to teach a lesson ("stop that!" lol)... I'm already wildly speculating but if they're fallible intelligences that do not have omnipotence but meet our criteria for "good actors", then this is an entirely plausible scenario
Bending space-time definitely leaves traces! That's what we call gravity.
The problem with all this stuff is that you can come to with explanations for everything, but at a certain point the explanations require so many further explanations that the whole situation becomes absurd. For example, sure, maybe they're trying to desensitise us to their existence, except alien sightings come in all sorts of different shapes and formats. Okay, well maybe it's not just one group of aliens, maybe there's multiple different groups, except now we've got to imagine some sort of alien council acting together in this plan with little-to-no disagreement.
Each little step down this path is somewhat plausible, but if you step back and view the claim as a whole (their is an intergalactic council of aliens with incredible travel and cloaking abilities (outside of visible wavelengths), doing undercover excitements on humans, possibly with the knowledge of our governments, in order to desensitise us to their existence), it becomes absurd.
This sort of thing is the problem for which Occam's Razor was invented: given a problem with two solutions, one of which requires fewer assumptions than the other, take the solution with the fewest assumptions. So: do we accept the various mundane explanations for these events, or do we imagine some incredibly specific untestable scenario involving aliens that come to earth with nonsensical motives behaving in ways that even we as humans would describe as illogical?
As an aside, this idea that we need to be desensitised to aliens seems kind of weird to me. Humans are really good at dealing with weird events. We're living through a climate catastrophe, a pandemic on a scale unknown to previous generations living in less connected worlds, we live our lives perpetually attached to a world knowledge centre, and all of this in the last few decades. I mean, aliens would definitely be something else entirely, but I can't imagine that it wouldn't very quickly become just another part of our lives.
I agree with you. I just like wildly speculating in a way that at least maintains internal consistency so that the "path" laid seems plausible. Mostly for fun. ;) But I get it, the more twists and turns you add to this path that don't have empirical support, the more "out there" you get. Shrug.
> Humans are really good at dealing with weird events. We're living through a climate catastrophe, a pandemic on a scale unknown to previous generations living in less connected worlds
> I can't imagine that it wouldn't very quickly become just another part of our lives
There are so many people driven by fear and paranoia right now (see: many conservatives, if you'll permit the stereotype for a minute, but there IS some science to back that up at least) that the paranoia itself would be dangerous. It's like how the Khwarazmian Empire got completely wiped out because they were deeply suspicious (without basis in fact) of Genghis Khan's multiple trade envoys, who they simply assumed were spies, and who they managed to send back missing most of their heads (gravely upsetting the Genghis, and the rest is history). All it would take is for a few rogue states to send nukes up at some "monitoring" mother ships (just look at Russia with its pre-emptive "NATO-fearing" war) and that might be the end of that...
I knew about this story since I was a kid reading UFO books in the library. It terrified me. I felt like surely it was more likely that the jet was sucked up into a mothership type UFO then the more mundane explanation, that it crashed in bad weather.
