I find this subject fascinating. As the article states, Navy pilots are on record as eye witnesses for this stuff, along with the various radar feeds, etc. I'm curious what HN thinks of the following:
There are 3 comprehensive possibilities (correct me if you think differently):
1. These crafts are ET origin
2. These crafts are human origin (secrete military tech or similar)
3. This is a psyop
Due to the supposed feeds and eye witness accounts, it seems infeasible there is a 'weather balloon' type explanation
Any of these 3 possibilities is very interesting. I have my own take for what is most likely. But I'd like to hear thoughts of others.
The pilots claim they saw a flying saucer that was rotating in weird ways, and provide a grainy video that's kind of convincing. The analysis proves it was lens flare.
There are additional debunked UAP videos released by the military, including one that is lens bokeh around starlight, which is debunked by showing the configuration of the "triangle UAPs" matches the positions of stars at that time, including additional evidence that the camera used on those ships has triangle aperture.
This tells me there's a chance of a disappointing but realistic option 4: military incompetence. They take these videos, they don't know what they are, so they go into some data pipeline and categorized as UAP. Then people/congress become aware that there are "UAP videos", and we go through this declassification song and dance, only to get these bokeh and lens flare videos, that the military themselves do not know they are bokeh/lens flare, and they have to find out about it on YouTube.
Giving the military more benefit of the doubt, the likely option is 3: psyop. They spread UAP rumors to confuse adversaries, knowing these UAP videos they have are BS. When they release these easily debunked videos, the adversaries could be further confused, still not knowing what they really have.
Thanks for linking this analysis, it makes a lot of sense.
It's very funny how this particular video was released entitled "gimbal", as they mention. It seems to indicate that the same analysis was already done internally, but the full report wasn't shared so as to not reveal too much military tech, so all we got was the single-word video title.
Interesting analysis but doesn’t that not make sense since the radar was tracking a fleet of the same objects? Radar wasn’t picking up a fleet of lens flares.
Whereas we have the gimbal video, we don’t have any radar data to look at.
If we’re going to rely on pilots’ conversation as meaningful data, I started to get the impression from the gimbal video that the pilots are fucking around and know it’s a plane, and when they say a “whole fleet of’em out there” (the guy appears to be containing laughter as he says it) they’re sarcastically referring to all the other passenger planes in the sky.
> Navy pilots are on record as eye witnesses for this stuff
Yeah!
I used to work with someone who was a Marine F/A-18 weapons officer (back seat guy; I may have the aircraft type wrong). He knew everything there was to know about air combat & ground attack, but outside that, he was a complete moron. I mean, he seriously believed that we stole aircraft technology from aliens, because "there is no way that humans are that smart."
> As the article states, Navy pilots are on record as eye witnesses for this stuff, along with the various radar feeds, etc.
Watch the introduction to the 4 hour UAP panel that NASA hosted a few days ago[1], they address this.
According to NASA, even highly trained and experienced pilots can easily be fooled, and often reported UAPs are artifacts of the technology that detects them, or are indeed things like weather balloons. For example, NASA even used the example of Navy pilots being fooled by a procession of commercial airplanes queueing to land at an airport 40+ miles away from their base.
They also emphasize that radar, detection systems, etc are not scientific instruments that are suitable for the detection or analysis of this phenomenon. They emphasize that the technology that the Navy et al. use are strictly optimized for defensive/offensive interception of conventional weapons. That's to say that they're calibrated for war and not for accurate scientific observation.
Going back to the procession of airplanes waiting to land, according to the instruments available to pilots and their own observations, those airplanes were doing things that were impossible to do without bending the laws of physics. Yet all they were were just a bunch of airplanes doing what all airplanes do.
> Due to the supposed feeds and eye witness accounts, it seems infeasible there is a 'weather balloon' type explanation
Pilots and their system are fallible, you'd have to assume some argument from authority to believe otherwise, which is why I think the military loves this conspiracy theory. It shifts criticism or suspicion of government and power to a narrative that they control and that inflates the military's competence and abilities, and assumes that the military is looking out for us and willing to tell us the truth.
Perhaps number 5 could be partial hypoxia leading to hallucinations and delusions as it pertains to pilots. I would not be surprised if a pilot swore they saw a Klingon bird of prey.
Too coincidental for pilot fatigue/shadows AND instrument malfunction to always happen at the same time in all of these cases. There are hundreds of reported instances in the past few years. This is simply not a serious explanation.
Strongly disagree. The sheer number of flight hours performed by all the world's professional pilots multiplied by the average percentage of a flight that a pilot could be considered to be "fatigued", multiplied by the odds of a cosmetic/minor sensor blip occuring is still an astronomically large number. That confluence of events probably happens quite regularity. This can be acendotealy verified hanging out at any general aviation flight club, and asking pilots about the times they got temporarily confused by some aerial phenomenon that turned out to be a strange reflection off a cloud. Happens literally all the time.
I'd even suggest a good percentage of reports are either deliberate hoaxes themselves or genuine reports of hoaxes carried out by others. If not hoaxes, then deliberate misreporting to cover up worse truths.
Ultimately almost any other such explanation is vastly more likely than advanced alien species having crossed the galaxies (undetected) to visit us only to crash land on our little ball of rock.
A few probably are secret military tech (nothing like antigravity, but I think most people - even in the military - probably don't have a good grasp of what true cutting edge technology is capable of,) but I think there are UFO true believers within the government trying to stir up publicity for funding[0]. To me that is the most intriguing, and plausible, explanation for a lot of this.
Because remember we just went through this with the Chinese balloon shit. "Sources" in the government making the same claims. Rumors about craft defying physics. But it all turned out to be balloons and paranoia and hype.
Probably a combination of 2 & 3 along with weird natural phenomena + the fact that human brains run on error prone wetware, are full of hacks, and make shit up all the time...
In short, given prevalence of aliens in popular culture + brains being predictive machines + existence of things that are hard to explain = it would be far more surprising if there weren't people claiming aliens.
Note 1: actual aliens would be really exciting, but Occam's Razor...
There are probably 5,000 comprehensive possibilities. You could sit around all day making up "what ifs". What if it's a psyop? What if it's some meteorite that crashed into a pile of pine resin and made a composite? What if it's a fake craft two dudes in a covert research lab made to troll an intelligence service with some experimental materials? What if the dude is actually lying?
Who cares? It's not going to amount to anything. Even if it exists, nobody's gonna let us see it.
N+1. They're 25 and they've just popped some amphetamine (now modafinil) to get them through the hangover from getting shit faced on shipboard moonshine last night.
Are the Navy pilots actual eye witnesses to seeing these crafts or are they eye witnesses to whatever is electronically displayed to their HUDS/Helmets/lenses?
It seems every video I've come across, it was all electronic so it has me thinking just a software error.
Every video I've seen, too, has been from some sort of electronic sensor. The US Navy was working on Project NEMESIS at least as far back as 2019, which sought to (and likely did) develop the means to spoof electronic signatures.
They’ve had “drones” (more like gliders) since the gulf war that can fake electronic signatures of different planes. They worked well and were targeted by Iraqi defenses.
It could also be some combination of the three, for example a craft that is human origin but derived from ET bits being presented in a pysop manner for some reason. The Navy's claimed operable AGRAV/room temperature superconductor patents and Salvadore Pais[1] add another layer of huh to the whole thing.
why is it always the navy pilots that always see the aliens, and not the commercial pilots. is it because navy pilots are more likely to be flying at some combination of high speed, bad weather conditions, or darkness that tends to make ordinary occurrences look more mysterious?
Because commercial pilots are in control of aircraft flying over densely populated areas, and often responsible for the lives of hundreds on board. A navy pilot typically just has the expensive aircraft and is somewhat expected to be crazy.
So, if a commercial pilot does see such things, they'd be far less likely to report them, as it may well ruin their career. Navy pilots, on the other hand may well get some commendation for identifying an unusual, or anomalous thing (enemy tech?).
Commercial pilots don't get scrambled to get eyes on radar anomalies in the middle of nowhere. They get paid to go from point A to point B using a pre-determined amount of fuel.
This reminds me of the "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" argument that religious people use regarding Jesus. Let's not railroad the options, here. There's room for nuance (like combinations or, frankly, just misunderstandings).
That's a convenient argument and a good analogy for the UFO phenomenon, because it omits the fourth option, which is that Jesus never existed outside of a carefully constructed narrative distributed by institutional authorities with the goal of manipulating their taxpaying population.
I do think believing that you are a deity is a sufficiently far fetched falsehood to justify calling you a lunatic. For the sake of argument I suppose I'm willing to accept "profoundly confused individual" as a fourth alternative. But I don't think it helps the rhetorical point against painting arguments for "lord lunatic or liar" as an unjustified demand for absolute beliefs.
And no, you're not a lunatic for believing someone else's bullshit.
I'd say there is a 4th comprehensive possibility: these are one or more natural phenomenon we've yet to document and may have no intelligence behind them at all.
PSYops. What about being a "navy pilot" validates these claims? That's like saying "Police officers have come out on record to say that bad buys have lazer guns". Of course they would say that, they want everyone to think THEY have big lazer guns too!
like any other piece of the military, Pilots are only allowed to disseminate what the current strategy-focus tells them to disseminate.
I do. If it were possible we'd surely see them everywhere. Even if time travel was a one-way trip there's enough future billions of us that there'd be massive numbers with the sort of incurable fascination seth the past that they'd be motivated to travel back and see what it was like.
Doesn't really seem any more or less likely than alien intelligence at any rate.
That reminds me of an amusing story I read in Analog several years ago. I don't remember the name or author.
It was about the first time travel trip. The team that developed the first time machine decided to send the first traveler to visit Shakespeare, figuring that Shakespeare had a flexible enough mind to not be freaked out by the visit.
When the traveler got to Shakespeare they were right that he did not freak out. In fact he took it entirely in stride. The time traveler was a little confused that Shakespeare was taking it so well. Shakespeare even asked what gift the time traveler had brought, saying that "all the early ones brought gifts".
The time traveler had in fact brought a gift--a nicely bound volume of Shakespeare's collected works. Shakespeare looked at it, said something about maybe he could sell the binding, then said probably not, and tossed it on a pile of books, which the traveler realized was a pile of similar books.
Shakespeare noticed that the traveler was now throughly confused and realized that the traveler was in fact one of the very earliest, and explained that most of early travelers brought books.
The traveler was still confused over the idea that Shakespeare had met other time travelers, saying "but I'm the first time traveler!". Shakespeare told him that he may have been the first to leave, but he certainly wasn't the first to arrive, and said at some stages in his life he was being visiting frequently by time travelers, which was actually annoying--although not as annoying as it was for Jesus, who Shakespeare says another time traveler decided to introduce them once.
At that point numerous other time travelers started arriving. They were reporters from throughout the timeline popping in to try to get an interview with the first time traveler. The first time traveller is now close to completely losing it, and Shakespeare says he can handle it and steps in to act as a press agent for the first time traveler.
If backwards time travel turns out to possible my guess is that there will be some limitation that prevents scenarios like the one in that story from happening. My guess is either (1) the time machine will only be able to go back to when it was created (think of it like going back to a save point in a game), or (2) when a time machine goes back to some point in spacetime it creates some sort of exclusion zone in a region around that point that precludes any other time machine from arrive at a point in that exclusion zone.
I suspect time-travelling and Shakespeare is a whole sub-genre, the one I know is one where Shakespeare travelled forward in time and enrolled in a university Shakespeare course - which he then failed...
There must be at least one where all his works were actually sent back in time for him to copy from, leading to all sorts of questions as to who originally wrote them.
BTW...I actually asked ChatGPT (just 3.5, don't have 4 access) what story it might be based on a description. Couldn't do it, gave lots of nonsense answers along the way, but when I prompted it with the name of the author and the word "immortal" it finally got it. Was kinda surprised actually, I'd think that's the sort of thing an LLM should be able to do quite well.
In fact, on further experimentation, my only conclusion is god help anyone who tries to use ChatGPT to help with studying literature.
Well, sure, it's possible my consciousness is one that's travelled along every single branch where the backwards-time-travel didn't happen, but that strikes me as extraordinarily unlikely if there have been even only a fifty such attempts in all human (future) history.
What I mean is when a particle travels back in time, the universe branches forward in parallel, from that particle, at the instant it arrives.
This resolves all paradoxes as the independently instantiated time streams can't interact.
I believe there are present theories of time/space that rely on this kind of idea.
It also might mean any time traveller could never get back to the exact "when" they came from. Though if there was a way to traverse parallel time streams, there'd be no paradox as the moment they arrived "back" would also branch.
Time traveling humans is more likely for the following reason: It requires only one thing: worm hole or some other yet-to-be-invented mechanism for traveling to the past. For this to be alien intelligence, two things are required: First alien intelligence has to exist, and second, they too need a mechanism for speedy travel, to travel to another galaxy such that they can reach the destination within an individual alien's lifetime.
Aliens could exist with or without speedy travel. We can assume slow-traveling aliens must be from long-lived civilizations, but we can't assume fast-traveling aliens are from short-lived civilizations.
Slow-traveling aliens likely come from a long-lived origin civilization (although it's possible that origin civilization went "extinct" millions of years ago, but its descendants continue to reproduce of spaceships traveling slowly outward in different directions, these descendants would arguably be from the same origin civilization, which must definitionally be long-lived).
Fast-traveling aliens might be from a civilization doomed to be short-lived, but they achieved FTL travel so we just happen to meet them. They could have popped up a million years ago, and be on schedule for extinction in another million years. But since they can travel quickly, they don't need to be a long-lived civilization in order for it to be likely that we might encounter them. They could be one of many short-lived civilizations.
In a universe without FTL travel, the probability that we encounter an alien civilization is dependent on the expected duration of an alien civilization; the more long-lived civilizations that exist, the more likely we'll encounter one, because they've had more time to slow-travel. In such a no-FTL universe, there could be a high probability of civilization, but with a low expected civilizational lifetime. So we'd be unlikely to encounter any civilization, despite the high number of them in the universe.
So what I find ironic is that even with a bunch of aliens crashing (regardless of how slowly) onto our planet, we can't actually infer much new information about the Fermi paradox, or whether we've made it past the Great Filter. Either we're encountering civilizations that must be long-lived because they're slow-traveling, in which case there may not be a filter because the paradox was resolved by the lack of FTL travel; or they can be both long-lived and unknowably short-lived, in which case we don't know where the filter is because any civilization we meet could go extinct next (perhaps achieving FTL travel even achieves some prerequisite for a specific class of extinction event?).
So either there might not be a filter, or we don't know where it is. The most informative scenario would be for us to meet a long-lived, fast-traveling civilization.
I'm probably more positive alien intelligence exists than I am that humanity will last long enough to discover such a mechanism. To be clear, I'd say both are quite likely - I just very much doubt the mechanism actually exists.
4. A bunch of well-fed military-industrial complex types, some lying, some naive and sincerely deluded -- stovepiping and embellishing each other's BS as usual.
Functionally, all of these can be classified under the first option, "ET origin", because they all involve the revelation that some advanced intelligence unknown to the mass of humanity is active on Earth.
But there is a fourth:
* These craft are of natural origin
Some very strange analogue of St Elmo's Fire which results in the formation of metallic spheres of unknown composition in the vicinity of jet fighters.
> "These craft are of natural origin. Some very strange analogue of St Elmo's Fire"
"we humans are property of some more highly evolved beings that live in a realm that we cannot see. Those invisible beings are immaterial: they are made of energy and Russell compares them to ball lightning."
There are 3 comprehensive possibilities (correct me if you think differently):
1. These crafts are ET origin
2. These crafts are human origin (secrete military tech or similar)
3. This is a psyop
Due to the supposed feeds and eye witness accounts, it seems infeasible there is a 'weather balloon' type explanation
Any of these 3 possibilities is very interesting. I have my own take for what is most likely. But I'd like to hear thoughts of others.