I think this class of UFO (the floating tic tac) is the result of secret rail gun testing projects, with novel inertial guidance packages inside them. Hence the lack of any obvious propulsion. They’re a new kind of guided ballistic penetrator, maybe with aerogel exteriors, and steerable internals.
> is that there is no real way to distinctly classify something like a UFO or USO in such a way that it gets reported and an investigation occurs on an official level within the military.
This is what is all about. A UFO is probably not an alien, it is probably a human mistake, an innocent flyer (weather balloon, etc), or a non-expected craft (civilian, enemy, etc). If the military doesnt know about them, isnt trying to figure out which, and isnt improving its ability to determine which, then it is ignoring data and allowing intel and intel training to lapse.
In other situations it might pay off well to have those skills, practices, and policies established.
It's not mysterious, it's not exciting, it's just just military paying attention where it is boring yet useful to pay attention.
My guess is it's the US military projecting. They've almost certainly got covert flying vehicles cruising around so naturally they'd want to know about any sightings of their own craft, or an enemy doing the same thing in the airspace.
What better way to gauge how well the tech is working than by crowdsourcing the sightings?
Soon they’ll be A/B testing stealth designs. “Model AST—12-7 flying over NYC generated 23 reports of UFO sightings, whereas model TYR-X3 generated 5 along the same route; moving forward, we should adopt TYR-X3 for all chemtrail operations...”
There's actually schemes to detect stealth aircraft through the changes in signal strength they induce in cell phones below their flight path. Not precise enough for targeting, but good enough to put up a plane to confirm...
Cell towers are too low to use them to detect a stealth plane passing in between their antennas and anything on the ground, but satellites could be used. We're surrounded by radio signals originating from the sky, so at least in theory the right equipment could detect a stealth plane not thanks to the radio waves it reflects but the ones it doesn't let pass through itself.
What's the range of a cell phone signal? The signals from the cell towers will be aimed parallel with the ground. There is going to be an inverse square relationship with the signal strength and distance. A stealth plane is also more likely to be up way high too. The more signals there, the more populous the area, the more likely that a plane would be even higher. How many signals are needed for a disturbance to be noticed/tracked?
Maybe if the stealth plane was 50,000ft or lower, but considering comercial traffic usually flies up to 39,000ft, and some private traffic at 45,000ft, you probably won't find stealth aircraft below 50,000ft.
> Maybe if the stealth plane was 50,000ft or lower, but considering comercial traffic usually flies up to 39,000ft, and some private traffic at 45,000ft, you probably won't find stealth aircraft below 50,000ft.
F-117 service ceiling was 45,000 ft according to Wikipedia - B-2's is 50,000ft. Ironically, the B-2 has some design compromises to allow it to operate at low altitudes for penetrating strikes, as stealth wasn't quite as trusted when it was being designed - and low altitudes allow operating below the horizon from radar installations. (The B-21 renderings look like they've dropped those compromises - high altitude penetration only)
I'll agree that using cell phones to detect the presence of stealth aircraft is more than a little dubious, though.
Nick Cook wrote a book in 2001 entitled The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity. It's notable because Cook was an editor for Jane's Defense Weekly, a legendary and reputable defense publication of the utmost credibility.
A few years ago in a thread similar to this I discussed[0] and dissected[1] the book. My conclusion was that Cook is mistaken, but given incidents like this, and the fact he later uncovered a black UAV program, I always wonder.
It's entirely possible that there have been secret R&D programs looking into such things. It's also possible that these programs were fruitless since there may not be such a thing or the energies required to access it may be way past our Kardashev ranking.
It never hurts to wonder. If we assume the Tic Tac is a man made craft, it doesn't seem a far stretch to also assume it may employ antigravitics. Perhaps it can be traced back to Die Glocke [1]. Your linked HN posts also mention Hutchison, an interesting character who appears repeatedly down the rabbit hole, where you'll also discover Schauberger and Leedskalnin. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in these topics, which often delve into conspiracy and pseudoscience, making it hard to discuss them without sounding like a crazy person. In any case, it's fascinating to ponder, even if it's all just science fiction.
>"Although no evidence of the veracity of Witkowski’s statements has been produced, they reached a wider audience when they were retold by British author Nick Cook, who added his own views to Witkowski’s statements in The Hunt for Zero Point.[4]"
The WW2 "Bell" experiment narrative was actually my largest complaint with Cook's book. While it makes for a fantastic story that's pretty much screenplay material, it's very unlikely to be true.
Yes, Die Glocke / the bell has been embellished beyond all recognition of whatever it really was. I bear some guilt with my comment above; it would have been more appropriate to suggest that the bell's mysticism may have inspired fringe research, e.g. Podkletnov, similar to how Rife may have inspired Hutchison, and Hutchison inspired Bushman, and so on.
A lot of the super cranky claims around the Bell come from Joseph Farrell and others. It could have been any number of things if it did exist. My money is on an enrichment device or something else related to a-bomb R&D. It could also have been a fringe physics experiment, and maybe it just didn't work. The Nazis pursued a lot of odd things.
That was a fascinating Sunday morning diversion, thanks!
I can easily believe there was a programme researching that. There's been research into all sorts of crackpot ideas, especially in wartime. The film The Men Who Stare at Goats was based on a true story of US military research, and there was WW2 research into death rays after all.
Mistaken, or failed research that was well secreted? It took 30 years for Bletchley Park to leak, despite involving thousands.
Cook now seems to be a defence consultant specialising in climate change.
Another one to add to my impossibly long reading list though. :)
There have been reports of UFO sightings for 50+ years. This is not a new phenomenon. There were reports of UFOs during WW2 (so called Foo Fighters).
If this existed during WW2 it means it started development way before that. The implications that such level of technological advancement was available at that time, and is still under active funding and development today doesn't add up.
UFOs aren't all the same. Each sighting could be something different. A UFO just means "unidentified" — what might be flying unidentified today is very different from 50 years ago, given the technological advancement since.
>If this existed during WW2 it means it started development way before that. The implications that such level of technological advancement was available at that time, and is still under active funding and development today doesn't add up.
I tend to agree it doesn't fit, but one way of looking at it is, even if highly improbable: the fundamental physics breakthroughs were made back then, and ever since the craft have been updated with modern avionics and electronics suites.
The problem here is defying the "laws" of physics. Of course, we're probably wrong about them and the universe could very well be a multidimensional place, but so far as we know no plane or drone can fly that way.
"Let me underline this again for you, the Nimitz encounter with the Tic Tac proved that exotic technology that is widely thought of as the domain of science fiction actually exists. It is real."
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A blurry video and some eyewitness reports are not extraordinary evidence. Humans lie all the time, but very rarely discover new physics.
I like TL;DRs, too and sometimes post them myself, but not every subject can be reduced to that. Sometimes you just have to read or write long form documents.
What's the TL;DR for WWII? What's the TL;DR for the taxonomy of animal species, or how to run a nuke plant?
The mere mention of the word "extraordinary" is presumptive and asserts a line of reasoning that must be defended if one requires claims to be interpreted through it.
The appears to be an argument about semantics, enabled by Sagan's failure to precisely define "extraordinary". For the sake of argument, I'll define it here as "breaking the laws of thermodynamics". A reactionless thruster, which is one of the "scifi" technologies alluded to by the article, breaks the first law of thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics is so fundamental to physics that it is "extraordinary" that anything violating it is correct, i.e. the prior probability of the supposed violation being correct is extremely low, and low enough that we have to consider unlikely alternative explanations, e.g. failures of the research process itself. For non-extraordinary claims, we can assume that the scientists are not lying or insane, but when the prior probability is low enough, these possibilities are no longer ignorable.
It doesn't surprise me to be truthful. I believe the plurality of so-called "UFO researchers" are selling something. Be it books or speaking engagements.
I confess my opinion may be colored by the fact that I live not far from the Roswell UFO museum.
With the proliferation of mobile devices, you'd expect there to be an increase in footage of such sightings with an equivalent increase in quality. Yet virtually everything available is low quality, grainy rubbish. On the other hand, the accessibility of video editing software makes such claims dubious at best regardless of quality or presentation.
I agree with others who've suggested this is either a counter intelligence effort or the military is doing something and wants to involve others in "sightings," probably to gauge the success of certain programs. If it's not some sort of clever projection, those UFOs probably have US markings on them. Otherwise, the belief it has something to do with aliens is probably wishful thinking.
I'd recommend listening to John Michael Godier's top 10 lists regarding alien messages, first contact, or SETI [1] if you want a healthy dose of realism. In particular, his "10 SETI messages that we may not want to receive" [2] is especially good, even if the first part is rather depressing.
Try photographing a bird with a phone camera. Then try it with no advance notice, whipping it out and shooting as fast as you can. You'll get a blur, just like the crappy phone camera photos of "UFOs" all over the Internet.
It's an extraordinary claim, sure, but it isn't impossible that some fraction of UFOs are someone else. "They are here but are not making overt contact" is one potential Fermi paradox answer. The apparent abundance of possibly habitable planets demands some answer here I think.
There are many rational reasons an alien intelligence would avoid overt contact with some being altruistic (prime directive type thinking), some neutral (same reason we decontaminate space probes), and some selfish (we are aggressive and capable of rapid technological progress).
There's also other solutions to the Fermi Paradox that don't require alien contact but likewise don't exclude the possibility for life. For one, it's possible FTL (or FTL-ish) travel isn't something that can be done in our universe. The other is to reflect on what we've done as a species. Consider the last time we sent manned probes to another world--then consider how many unmanned probes. I'm of the mind to believe that if we do encounter anything alien, it'll likely be autonomous or intelligent probes. It'll catalog us and move along.
I still stand by my point with cameras. Mobile devices, dash cams, etc., are all vastly prolific. While it's true they don't capture anything far away particularly well, the shear number of these devices ought to suggest that multiple sightings by large groups of people could be corroborated--even if the footage isn't particularly great. But, we're not seeing that.
It may not be impossible these UFOs are other intelligences, but it's exceedingly unlikely. More so when you consider that a non-trivial fraction of those same habitable worlds you mention are, at present, speculative at best and around stars that are unfriendly to life at worst. TRAPPIST-1 comes to mind as an example of worlds directly measured via the transit method: A large number of worlds in a habitable zone surrounding a red dwarf known to be a flare star.
Then there's another consideration. If life is common in our galaxy (or in the universe), far more intelligent beings may simply be uninterested in us--a relatively pedestrian world around a fairly ordinary star with intelligent primates that haven't yet figured out how to leave their home world with any degree of consistency.
> With the proliferation of mobile devices, you'd expect there to be an increase in footage of such sightings with an equivalent increase in quality.
Phones have lenses with wide focal lengths and tiny sensors. You need a very different device to capture small objects far away from you with high resolution.
I recently had a wildfire close to home, and had airplanes flying at very low altitude. The sight of the belly of those airplanes flying the whole day on top of my home along with the noise was spectacular so I thought I might capture a snap to share with my remote coworkers. The result was not even mediocre; my phone captured a tiny insignificant object in the sky, not that awe inspiring machine that I just felt grazed my head IRL
That is true, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that if a particularly noteworthy event occurred, there should be at least one or more observers attempting to film it along with commentary.
Of course, your comment raises another interesting prospect. Anything of decent quality that claims to be a UFO sighting should be immediately suspect as it may be a professional production.
I’ve personally seen what some would call a UFO, and was too awestruck to even consider recording the event. I’m not saying it was an alien craft, but it was being chased by military jets and lost their trail when it started flashing a row of rainbow lights and rose from above the trees to disappearing like a satellite in the sky. I’ve never really spoken about it and who knows what it was. All I know is it didn’t follow any propulsion rules I’ve ever seen, and didn’t even think about the chance to record it until much later.
The Tic Tac thing is insane. As far as I understand, its evidence was:
- At least two radar systems (boat and then plane) registering it
- At least two IR/thermal imaging systems (the two planes') registering it
- At least four eye-witnesses registering something when looking for it (two people on each plane, seeing something large near the water's surface with the Tic Tac coming out and flying around)
- The ship radar registering it again, later, at a location it told the planes to go as procedure (but the planes didn't see it when they got there)
That's not bad. But here are the two extremes of interpretation:
1. Alien visitors are real, and it was an alien craft
2. By a probabilistic lottery, all of these systems happened to fail at the same time (the radar was defective; the IR was defective; the humans' brains were defective, sharing a hallucination), and there was absolutely nothing
I actually think #2 is likelier than #1, which is pretty hilarious. #1 is such a fantastic assertion, especially with our not seeing aliens in space (leading to the Fermi paradox), firmly outside the bounds of our experience. Extremely unlikely combinations of ordinary things happening (tech failure, hallucinations) is within our experience though.
And with there being room inbetween for "maybe there was a whale surfacing at the same time", "maybe it's elite government tech", etc., I have to err on the alien visitor-skeptic side.
from the article, a description of "Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC)" system:
>What most don't realize is that the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group wasn't just equipped with some of the most advanced sensors the world had to offer, but that it also had hands-down the most advanced networking and computer processing capability of any such system. Dubbed Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), this integrated air defense system architecture was just being fielded on a Strike Group level for the first time aboard Nimitz and the rest of its flotilla.
>Our readers are familiar with CEC and the follow-on iterations that have come since, as we talk about the concepts behind them often. At its very basic level, it uses the Strike Group's diverse and powerful surveillance sensors, including the SPY-1 radars on Aegis Combat System-equipped cruisers and destroyers, as well as the E-2C Hawkeye's radar picture from on high, and fuses that information into a common 'picture' via data-links and advanced computer processing. This, in turn, provides very high fidelity 'tracks' of targets thanks to telemetry from various sensors operating at different bands and looking at the same target from different aspects and at different ranges.
>Whereas a stealthy aircraft or one employing electronic warfare may start to disappear on a cruiser's radar as it is viewing the aircraft from the surface of the Earth and from one angle, it may still be very solid on the E-2 Hawkeye's radar that is orbiting at 25,000 feet and a hundred miles away from the cruiser. With CEC, the target will remain steady on both platform's CEC enabled screens as they are seeing fused data from both sources and likely many others as well.
So these 3 paragraphs state:
1. Instead of each platform (plane, boat, ...) relying on only it's own sensors, the platform sensors (radar, IR ...) are automatically sharing their observations across platforms by data links, fusing them into one scene, such that each platform has the eyes and ears of all platforms combined. Obviously only 1 sensor needs to malfunction or misinterpret signals such that they are gossiped across platforms where the operators seemingly "independently" observe the imagination, i.e. data fusion potentially triggers common hallucinations. Regarding the pilots, navigators: I speculate for example this could have been the augmented reality HUD overlay showing the IR feed...
2. the system was "just being fielded", increasing the odds of initial wrinkles in the data fusion system.
3. again the system was "just being fielded", increasing the odds of human operators misinterpreting their display systems as depicting what the sensors of their platform are sensing, since before introduction of sensor fusion this would have always been the case. Human operators would thus more easily fail to realize that their "independent observations" were not in fact independent at all.
Interesting thought. I don't know any details of how that data fusion system works. But I can easily think of combinations of bad input and filters that result in phantoms with seemingly omposdible characteristics. But the fact remains that the information is still vague and contradictory, so it probably not possible to get close to the truth. Almost everything is neccesarily speculation, on either side.
If these incidents were aliens, I would expect a lot more reactions from the military, politic, and financial markets. All reactions seem muted.
Secondly, why would aliens reveal themselves in such a way? Either land on the White House lawn or stay out of sight. This 50 year UFO appearances, with some but not really a lot of witnesses, don't make sense for me.
> Secondly, why would aliens reveal themselves in such a way?
It is a possibility if those “aliens” are biological humans in possession of technology far superior to anything we have now. Then you’d want to keep it a secret.
Why keep it a secret?
If we somehow where able to meet humans with a technology level below ours, wouldn't it make sense to give them technology to better themselves?
Judging by the number of times people have tried and failed to prevent knowledge of "advanced weapons" from leaking... pretty much all of human history.
Why would you give powerful and highly advanced technology to a race that is constantly fighting itself and doesn't value its native environment enough to protect it?
At least we recognize it? If there are other sentient races like ours, who's to say we aren't the best off? There's a lot of ways that races like ours can fall off the deep end (such as an actual all-out nuclear war), but it could also be possible that we're the worst off, too. Some people care about the environment, but it's hard to get started and become civilized without pollution and deforestation and all the other things that come with needing fuel- England could very well have run out of trees at some point had they not gone "oh, this is bad, let's fix this". One cannot expect the first version of an air conditioner to be 100% efficient and not leak refrigerant into the atmosphere, but over time, because of it, we have the basis for being able to send food across the entire world and populate it (at a cost [1]). We, as a race, also have the basis for very efficient power generation, in the form of nuclear reactors (my favorite kind, uranium salt, can run for a long time and are much more efficient than light water ones are, not to mention less polluting, and its failure mode is much less spectacular- they just didn’t get developed, unfortunately). As far as it goes, we’ve done pretty well, but there is, as always, room for improvement.
[1] Such as Hawaii, where everything is slightly more expensive.
I think we have so many expert people with professional equipment looking at the sky daily yet we never get any sight from them with verifiable data. It's always personal anecdotes from amateurs.
> we never get any sight from them with verifiable data
This is false. In the above example of the Nimitz, we have sighting by two professional pilots, and radar/scanner readings. This is not a lone example.
You're trying to reason about 'alien' intelligence in terms of human traits. What makes you think they are even interested in us at all? Maybe they just came here to re-up on potassium.
You really can't reason about alien intelligence at all. Look at how hard it is for, say, a typical American to reason about a devout Muslim in Iran or vice versa. In that case we are talking about two beings of the same damn species with a lot of common history.
If aliens are coming here their motives could be anything including irrational or just non-rational.
I've speculated for a while that a "post-singularity" post-scarcity intelligence would get... bizarre... due to lack of hard scarcity constraints. It would just fan out across state space. It would be less Star Trek and more Lexx. Maybe they do make crop circles as interactive art. Maybe they do strange stuff to us to slowly convert us to their religion. Who knows? We can't know.
The planet could have been seeded with life to free bound oxygen or concentrate certain elements on the surface for easy retrieval at a later date. Semi intelligent life could have been an accident. It is probably not the case but fun to think about.
It could be the alien equivalent of anthropology or zoological grad students trying to study indigenous life on our planet. Encounters could be explained as them pulling drunk pranks on the natives.
this is probably military needing new legal framework to operate according to now that china plans to land and stay on the moon, India has tested satellite shooting weapons and russia has been investing in its 'space force'
Efficient Anti-satellite weapons are low-tech if we are talking about space-to-space combat.
Heck, I read an article in Russian that argued that bows+arrows or catapults/ballistae could be efficient weapons when compared to lasers that you see in SciFi.
They are just preparing the public for the shit tons of satallites and drones there are about to be everywhere watching us. "Oh good its not a UFO it is the UberMcDonald's Delivery Drone Mothership."
I have a lot of biases in my vision. Optical illusions are clearly one example of exploiting those biases.
I suspect there are a lot of biases in processing return signals from radar, an expectation of motion like things actually move.
So, if i had the resources of a nation, and some idea of how radar actually works, i could build a device that actually made a steady turn from, say west to north, look like something else.
I know very little about how radar works in the nitty gritty details, but i know a little bit about how our eyes are fooled by optical illusions. dynamically changing color, and maybe some little helper parts that fly away and change color or produce smoke would really mess with my eyes.
it's weird how fireworks always fly right toward you no matter where you stand, right?
Extending that to radar and infrared seems totally reasonable. Also, my eyes have a lot of evolution both adding biases, and ensuring those biases don't mess up very often.
Automated systems don't even have 80 years of engineering effort to accurately represent what's happening.
I'm not really one for compilation videos, but I stumbled across this one when looking for info on the tic tac incident and it's pretty interesting - 4 Most Compelling Videos Of UFOs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7pgMfzTEZc
The thing I don't understand is where did they get the footage of the F-18's chasing it? And why did they only get/release a few seconds and not the entire video? If it's this important, then why only release a sneak peek?
This reminds me of something I saw that I never really talked about. Maybe about 7 years ago, I was out bicycling at around 10pm at night outside of Socorro NM (a small desert college town), and to the west I saw a light appear from behind some mountains steadily heading up and north in a slightly curved path. I thought it was a plane or a helicopter until it suddenly disappeared after about 30 seconds. I assumed it turned off its lights or that I somehow misunderstood what I saw, but a minute later, a new light appeared from the same original spot, followed the path again, and disappeared. This sequence repeated maybe ten times. I assume it was some kind of missile test that I saw. The White Sands Missile Range was 10+ miles to the southeast (the wrong direction), though I think I remember there also being other explosive testing ranges nearby to the west. I would love to know what exactly I saw, though I never knew how to go about finding that out even if the information was published somewhere.
Nah it was way after sunset, it was definitely a point light source, the repetitions followed a strict schedule (I had started watching the time after the third one), and it had the steady motion you'd expect of an object with mass propelling itself that an illusion wouldn't necessarily have. It really seemed like a fast plane in the distance at night, and I wouldn't have given it a second thought had it not been for the disappearance or the repetition. I believe I saw a puff of light when it winked out, but it was hard to tell. The mountains it appeared behind were 10 miles away, and it was probably further than that.
The town was surrounded by various explosives testing ranges. Occasionally everyone would hear the loud thump of a bomb being test during the day. Mythbusters was known for using some bomb range nearby. I'm pretty confident it was some kind of military or scientific test I saw, I'm just mainly curious about the specifics.
My dad saw something like that a long long time ago and we later found out it was a helicopter or small plane searching for weed grow sites. (Very common in our neck of the woods in the 90s and staggering waste of taxpayer resources)
Some atmospheric phenomenon that I don’t recall made it appear much closer than it actually was. (He was intrigued enough to talk to a friend who was an atmospheric science professor) In his case the repetition was the chopper flying box patterns to search.
Coincidentally, (as in literally, not that I think there's any relationship between what you saw and this), Socorro is the site of one of the more famous UFO incidents of the 20th Century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Zamora_incident
It is a tactic within itself to report on your own operations as "something unidentified that moves in ways we don't understand" just in case it is seen by the naked eye.
This article seems to imply it must be a craft of some kind, but I'm not convinced natural phenomena can be ruled out. As an example, ball lightning is still not particularly well understood and behaves in rather peculiar seeming ways. The speed that this 'object' moved at makes much more sense if it's entirely electromagnetic in nature.
Isn't this most likely just a response to the surge of drones over the last half decade?
I imagine UFO sightings have proportionally increased and thus the number of ad-hoc reported sightings within the Navy finally crossed the threshold.
It could even be a foreign government or spy agency doing amateur reconnaissance with new tech.
As the article states,
> The lack of a structured procedure and classification system, and the nebulous fear of being stigmatized by reporting things like UFOs [is] something that has long plagued the military and private sectors alike
There is also the nebulous fear of people overreacting whenever you finally decide to implement these common-sense policies. You must be hiding something, even if you were ironically just trying to be more transparent.
I don't mean to sound like a denier. The released IR footage from the same observation period [0] is incredible and, if real, proves that high-G maneuvers without exhaust or aerofoils exist and we are still lacking some very fundamental understanding about the nature of gravity.
I also found the article to be well thought-out and that it covered most of the most obvious answers without trying to paint a particular picture. I'll have to pay more attention to Rogoway.
Speculating on the shape of the aircraft, would the round tic-tac shape provide the least average air resistance in every direction provided an aerofoil is not needed for flight?
One major problem with sites like the skeptical Enquirer is that they exist to serve their main purpose -to be skeptical. This by itself is fine to an extent and much of their content can and does legitimately debunk nonsensical and unfounded claims. But when your main purpose is skepticism, it can become self serving to the point that you cherry pick arguments, evidence, cases and lots of other things in order to always ensure that a known explanation can be found no matter what, even if it has to be stretched thin. Unknown things do happen, forcing them to conform to a certain easy bracket of the known is its own type of irrationality.
I don’t think there’s a real scientific problem here that needs solving, it’s mostly appeasing the pilots so they have some bureaucratic black hole to write down their concerns and management can just say “okay we have a record of it, we’ll let you know if anything comes up”.
That's a big part of this article, it talks about a network of censors. Since stealth crafts are typically only stealthly at certain angles, the combination of multiple view points would highlight any stealth objects, and that merged picture could be broadcast to all assets in the area. It also happens that experimental network was the place the incident occured, and it seeminly recorded everything. Shortly after the incident uniformed officers came and confiscated the recordings.
So, what if the US Airforce.. or CIA.. have technology that can bugger around with the cockpits and instruments of US Navy fighters? Or arbitrary other aircraft cockpits.
Now, they don't want to say that they have this, but they want other people (like the Russians and Chinese and French) to know that they do have it.
Or at least to make them think that they would like them to think that they have it.
How does fudging instrument displays explain the visual sightings by humans? No agenda here, but I do think those must be assessed on their own merits or lack thereof.
> "It came up on our left hand side (rapidly veered) to the north, we saw a bright light and it just disappeared at a very high speed ... we were just wondering. We didn't think it was a likely collision course .. (just wondering) what it could be," she said.
> A pilot on Virgin Flight 76 added that his flight crew had seen "two bright lights at 11 o'clock (which) seemed to bank over to the right and then climb away at speed."
First time in early 1990ies, second time it was about 10 years ago.
First sight looked like a formation of lights that moved in sync across the night sky in a straight line. The formation was long, like a long rectangle or long cylinder made of stars. Not too many stars, maybe a hundred. Moving slowly straight in the direction of it's length. I could not tell how far it was, so I can't really judge for the size of it, but it was "flying" higher than the peak of the nearby mountain (which is 1km high and about 10km away), and the lenght was comparable to 1/2 of the south-west ridge of that mountain which itself is aprox. 5-6km long. So the UFO would have to be at least 1km long if it was closer, but it could be many km long if it was further. My family members saw it, as we were on the balcony at home and had clear unobstructed view. I might exagerate about the size of it, but I really did saw it. It could be easily recorded if someone had a videocamera, but we did not. We always had a photo camera at that period but nobody thought about the possibility of taking a picture. We could have tried if we had film, but I don't remember why we did not try. We didn't even talk about the possibility. When you see something like it, it does not occur to you that you might need proof and that nobody will believe. But I don't care, since I saw what I saw. Of course there can be millions of explanations what it was, but there weren't any gived and nobody else mentioned seeing it when we asked around the next day. It could have easily been a formation of airplanes.
The other sight, was when I was by the nearby river with my partner, who did not see the UFO. It was a regular summer night, and something flew across the sky, at extreme velocity, just like a meteorite does. But suddenly right before going out of sight, it changed direction nearly 90 degrees and continued with the same high velocity. It all happened in a blink of an eye, of course it would be very hard to have it recorded.
The point of my stories is that you don't always have a chance to make a recording when you see something strange.
Exactly. I believe I saw one or more UFOs when I was kid, maybe 10 or 11 years old, while riding my bike to a local park. Three or four stationary white lights in the sky, equidistant from each other. Of note, this was in an early afternoon mid-summer day without a cloud in the sky. And they weren't drones, this was in the late 70s.
I wonder if it's possible that you saw multiple satellites at once moving in the sky?
>second situation
I wonder if a meteor could bounce when it hits a denser part of the atmosphere and change direction a bit, and maybe it was only the angle you were seeing it from that made the change in direction look as extreme as 90 degrees?
I think that for each situation there could be many explanations, and one would have to assess the probability of all of them happening and then decide based upon such an assessment - finally choose the most probable and easily achievable.
>>first situation
> I wonder if it's possible that you saw multiple satellites at once moving in the sky?
I have a sketch of what I saw from that period, but it does not have enough details to investigate it now. I would not like to discuss based on false personal memory after such a long time.
Still, I could add (out of my memory of what I saw) is that the lights (stars) were in a long rectangular (or cylindrical) formation, were brighter than the rest of the lights in the night sky (brighter than the rest of the stars). They all moved together in sync (imagine looking at a train painted nonreflective black with randomly dispersed luminiscent dots all over it, they will all move in the same direction and with same speed). I was in central Europe and was looking towards south-west, the objects were moving from the south-west part of the sky towards the south part of the sky.
I don't think that there is big enough probability of having that many satellites in a rather narrow patch of the sky (they can't be on the same orbit, so they would have to be on 100 different orbits and still look to be in the same place and appear as to being part of a big formation).
I think that some optical phenomena would be a better explanation of what I saw. Maybe we were looking at a projection of many starts - but projected from where and how.
Most simple and believable explanation is many airplanes flying in a formation.
>>second situation
>I wonder if a meteor could bounce when it hits a denser part of the atmosphere and change direction a bit, and maybe it was only the angle you were seeing it from that made the change in direction look as extreme as 90 degrees?
Optics (refraction, reflection and parallax effects) can explain such a thing if there was some barrier which was met by the object or was introduced on the line of sight between me and the object.
If if was a meteor (which most of the time you don't see until it hits the atmosphere and starts burning) then it would lightup even more upon hitting something. Plus meteors usually have a trail, which i did not see.
The speed must have been immense, since it crossed the sky in a mere instant. I would expect an even bigger flame and trail with such speed.
I can't recall if it was completely dark at that moment or shortly after sunset, but it was in the evening and I was looking to north - northwest, and the object appeared from the west part of the sky, and exit on the north part of the sky, after changing direction (so it was moving from west to north in the begining and then changed north). This are all aprox directions, just to have it illustrated.
Friendly reminder: UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, not Suspected Alien Aircraft From Another Planet.
Asking "why the hell" the DOD would be interested in Unidentified phenomenon in its territory goes well beyond sensationalism and straight into stupidity.
My favorite conspiracy theory (emphasis on theory, this is pure speculation) is they're Chinese drones.
The logic basically goes that 3M accidentally created a force field[1] in a factory[2], factories are mostly in China now, so if "running a factory" leads to antigravity tech, China would be the ones to develop it.
As much as "I want to believe", if it's true they're not American, it's quite possible they're not alien, just foreign.
I've noticed a weird kind of racism in some folks who talk about China: they simultaneously think they'll conquer the world and that they can't invent technology on their own.
It's certainly interesting logic to conclude "If it's not American, it must be alien".
> I've noticed a weird kind of racism in some folks who talk about China: they simultaneously think they'll conquer the world and that they can't invent technology on their own.
“I've noticed a weird kind of racism in some folks who talk about China: they simultaneously think they'll conquer the world and that they can't invent technology on their own.”
That’s just normal racism. Mexicans are too lazy to work, but come here and steal our jobs. Muslims come here to force Sharia Law on everyone, but fail to integrate and keep to themselves. Illegals are using public services for free, but pay taxes using fake information and are criminals. Obama was incompetent, but also managed to build complex shadow government. You can just keep going.
By using a dichotomous framework of stereotypes you can easily make a case against an entire population because if one negative stereotype doesn’t fit a given individual you simple apply the other one.
Any blanket criticism of millions or billions of people is bound to be highly inaccurate and also have some non zero degree of accuracy just due to the sheer numbers of people and how common these traits are in any population.
Racism is taking the non-zero existence of a complaint and extrapolating it to the broader population without caring to get to know the individual people.
Unfortunately, it was probably an evolutionary survival technique that worked thousands of years ago but has pretty disastrous consequences today.
Why do you think it is a biological trait rather than a politically useful tool? What do we know about racism outside the context of complex mass societies with highly stratified classes of members? Maybe it's an effective con and not a natural instict.
What's that got to do with racism of the type this thread has been about?
edit, to be clear, what sort of contradictory, no-win steriotypes to chimps have about other chimp groups or did early modern humans have about neanderthals?
It's racism to doubt that China has antigravity ships and that this is the obvious commonsense answer to these sightings?
Prior to the US having a nuclear program there were papers being published on the possibility of fusion reactions that split the atom. These papers then disappeared during the Manhattan project, signaling that research was happening which was being suppressed.
Is there evidence that China had papers on antigravity research and that such papers have recently stopped being published.
Assumption: the military is in control of this narrative and the narrative is meant for the consumption of our adversaries. Conclusion: the intended narrative is that we are testing advanced systems against our own battle groups. Beware. I don’t know what the tech is or if it’s as sensational as being reported by the “witnesses” but the intent is to give the impression that we have highly sophisticated tech waiting in the wings
>the intent is to give the impression that we have highly sophisticated tech waiting in the wings
Interesting theory. Considering all the hubbub I've heard about "anti carrier cruise missiles[1]" lately, it could make sense there's an incentive to project strength.
The problem with that is, there are credible sightings from quite a while ago, before drones really took off, not to mention the speed, acceleration and size of the "drones" are far superior to any drone.
Airport employees, pilots and bystanders have all reported seeing it, but it was dismissed. I remember seeing an interview with a retired Air Force officer who said that nothing's being done about the supposed UFOs is because once you start working on something people will demand results, and if you say we can't do a damn thing about these, your career will be in jeopardy.
why does this article keep returning anew on hacker news?
The military wants people to feel no stigma for reporting observations they fail to explain on their own? Good, no problem with that, it is their duty to watch out for such contingencies. And they probably don't see it as their duty to explain and share footage of each and every incident, and the internal conclusions, ... because they don't want others to know their level of alertness, the resolution and sensitivity of their systems, ...
Why is thedrive.com so intent on portraying such events as "unexplainable" by a collection of humans? They are re-creating the stigma by conflating UFO's with the seemingly impossible.
I.e. even if it is "just a sensor malfunction" or "just an optical effect", it is important to the military that the human operators report these deficiencies up the chain of command: if accidental situations can fool the systems and operators (UFO sightings) into seeing things that don't exist, or misinterpreting things that do exist, then obviously:
1. such hallucinations could be artificially induced (think chaff, camouflage, ...) and hence it is important to take note of spontaneously arising confusing observations
2. such hallucinations increase the noise floor and distract from potential true invasions of air space: if you can address and learn from UFO sightings to improve sensor systems, then a true violation of air space requires less work to detect than if it is hiding in a stack of illusory UFO reports
172 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadThis is what is all about. A UFO is probably not an alien, it is probably a human mistake, an innocent flyer (weather balloon, etc), or a non-expected craft (civilian, enemy, etc). If the military doesnt know about them, isnt trying to figure out which, and isnt improving its ability to determine which, then it is ignoring data and allowing intel and intel training to lapse.
In other situations it might pay off well to have those skills, practices, and policies established.
It's not mysterious, it's not exciting, it's just just military paying attention where it is boring yet useful to pay attention.
What better way to gauge how well the tech is working than by crowdsourcing the sightings?
What's the range of a cell phone signal? The signals from the cell towers will be aimed parallel with the ground. There is going to be an inverse square relationship with the signal strength and distance. A stealth plane is also more likely to be up way high too. The more signals there, the more populous the area, the more likely that a plane would be even higher. How many signals are needed for a disturbance to be noticed/tracked?
Maybe if the stealth plane was 50,000ft or lower, but considering comercial traffic usually flies up to 39,000ft, and some private traffic at 45,000ft, you probably won't find stealth aircraft below 50,000ft.
F-117 service ceiling was 45,000 ft according to Wikipedia - B-2's is 50,000ft. Ironically, the B-2 has some design compromises to allow it to operate at low altitudes for penetrating strikes, as stealth wasn't quite as trusted when it was being designed - and low altitudes allow operating below the horizon from radar installations. (The B-21 renderings look like they've dropped those compromises - high altitude penetration only)
I'll agree that using cell phones to detect the presence of stealth aircraft is more than a little dubious, though.
A few years ago in a thread similar to this I discussed[0] and dissected[1] the book. My conclusion was that Cook is mistaken, but given incidents like this, and the fact he later uncovered a black UAV program, I always wonder.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957586
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971548
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Glocke
>"Although no evidence of the veracity of Witkowski’s statements has been produced, they reached a wider audience when they were retold by British author Nick Cook, who added his own views to Witkowski’s statements in The Hunt for Zero Point.[4]"
The WW2 "Bell" experiment narrative was actually my largest complaint with Cook's book. While it makes for a fantastic story that's pretty much screenplay material, it's very unlikely to be true.
I can easily believe there was a programme researching that. There's been research into all sorts of crackpot ideas, especially in wartime. The film The Men Who Stare at Goats was based on a true story of US military research, and there was WW2 research into death rays after all.
Mistaken, or failed research that was well secreted? It took 30 years for Bletchley Park to leak, despite involving thousands.
Cook now seems to be a defence consultant specialising in climate change.
Another one to add to my impossibly long reading list though. :)
If this existed during WW2 it means it started development way before that. The implications that such level of technological advancement was available at that time, and is still under active funding and development today doesn't add up.
I tend to agree it doesn't fit, but one way of looking at it is, even if highly improbable: the fundamental physics breakthroughs were made back then, and ever since the craft have been updated with modern avionics and electronics suites.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A blurry video and some eyewitness reports are not extraordinary evidence. Humans lie all the time, but very rarely discover new physics.
No, it doesn't require extraordinary evidence.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-016-9779-7
The one in question has 1326 characters, which is, I dare say, quite manageable.
What's the TL;DR for WWII? What's the TL;DR for the taxonomy of animal species, or how to run a nuke plant?
Thermodynamics is so fundamental to physics that it is "extraordinary" that anything violating it is correct, i.e. the prior probability of the supposed violation being correct is extremely low, and low enough that we have to consider unlikely alternative explanations, e.g. failures of the research process itself. For non-extraordinary claims, we can assume that the scientists are not lying or insane, but when the prior probability is low enough, these possibilities are no longer ignorable.
On other parts of The Internet it's known as a UFO organisations and other “mysteries of the universe", plus there is the $37.4 million of debt; https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/all-the-dumb-things-...
It doesn't surprise me to be truthful. I believe the plurality of so-called "UFO researchers" are selling something. Be it books or speaking engagements.
I confess my opinion may be colored by the fact that I live not far from the Roswell UFO museum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident
I agree with others who've suggested this is either a counter intelligence effort or the military is doing something and wants to involve others in "sightings," probably to gauge the success of certain programs. If it's not some sort of clever projection, those UFOs probably have US markings on them. Otherwise, the belief it has something to do with aliens is probably wishful thinking.
I'd recommend listening to John Michael Godier's top 10 lists regarding alien messages, first contact, or SETI [1] if you want a healthy dose of realism. In particular, his "10 SETI messages that we may not want to receive" [2] is especially good, even if the first part is rather depressing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEszlI8-W79IsU8LSAiRbDg/vid...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVpHTMj3XM
It's an extraordinary claim, sure, but it isn't impossible that some fraction of UFOs are someone else. "They are here but are not making overt contact" is one potential Fermi paradox answer. The apparent abundance of possibly habitable planets demands some answer here I think.
There are many rational reasons an alien intelligence would avoid overt contact with some being altruistic (prime directive type thinking), some neutral (same reason we decontaminate space probes), and some selfish (we are aggressive and capable of rapid technological progress).
I still stand by my point with cameras. Mobile devices, dash cams, etc., are all vastly prolific. While it's true they don't capture anything far away particularly well, the shear number of these devices ought to suggest that multiple sightings by large groups of people could be corroborated--even if the footage isn't particularly great. But, we're not seeing that.
It may not be impossible these UFOs are other intelligences, but it's exceedingly unlikely. More so when you consider that a non-trivial fraction of those same habitable worlds you mention are, at present, speculative at best and around stars that are unfriendly to life at worst. TRAPPIST-1 comes to mind as an example of worlds directly measured via the transit method: A large number of worlds in a habitable zone surrounding a red dwarf known to be a flare star.
Then there's another consideration. If life is common in our galaxy (or in the universe), far more intelligent beings may simply be uninterested in us--a relatively pedestrian world around a fairly ordinary star with intelligent primates that haven't yet figured out how to leave their home world with any degree of consistency.
Phones have lenses with wide focal lengths and tiny sensors. You need a very different device to capture small objects far away from you with high resolution.
Seemed like everyone was getting kidnapped a generation ago.
Of course, your comment raises another interesting prospect. Anything of decent quality that claims to be a UFO sighting should be immediately suspect as it may be a professional production.
- At least two radar systems (boat and then plane) registering it
- At least two IR/thermal imaging systems (the two planes') registering it
- At least four eye-witnesses registering something when looking for it (two people on each plane, seeing something large near the water's surface with the Tic Tac coming out and flying around)
- The ship radar registering it again, later, at a location it told the planes to go as procedure (but the planes didn't see it when they got there)
That's not bad. But here are the two extremes of interpretation:
1. Alien visitors are real, and it was an alien craft
2. By a probabilistic lottery, all of these systems happened to fail at the same time (the radar was defective; the IR was defective; the humans' brains were defective, sharing a hallucination), and there was absolutely nothing
I actually think #2 is likelier than #1, which is pretty hilarious. #1 is such a fantastic assertion, especially with our not seeing aliens in space (leading to the Fermi paradox), firmly outside the bounds of our experience. Extremely unlikely combinations of ordinary things happening (tech failure, hallucinations) is within our experience though.
And with there being room inbetween for "maybe there was a whale surfacing at the same time", "maybe it's elite government tech", etc., I have to err on the alien visitor-skeptic side.
>What most don't realize is that the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group wasn't just equipped with some of the most advanced sensors the world had to offer, but that it also had hands-down the most advanced networking and computer processing capability of any such system. Dubbed Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), this integrated air defense system architecture was just being fielded on a Strike Group level for the first time aboard Nimitz and the rest of its flotilla.
>Our readers are familiar with CEC and the follow-on iterations that have come since, as we talk about the concepts behind them often. At its very basic level, it uses the Strike Group's diverse and powerful surveillance sensors, including the SPY-1 radars on Aegis Combat System-equipped cruisers and destroyers, as well as the E-2C Hawkeye's radar picture from on high, and fuses that information into a common 'picture' via data-links and advanced computer processing. This, in turn, provides very high fidelity 'tracks' of targets thanks to telemetry from various sensors operating at different bands and looking at the same target from different aspects and at different ranges.
>Whereas a stealthy aircraft or one employing electronic warfare may start to disappear on a cruiser's radar as it is viewing the aircraft from the surface of the Earth and from one angle, it may still be very solid on the E-2 Hawkeye's radar that is orbiting at 25,000 feet and a hundred miles away from the cruiser. With CEC, the target will remain steady on both platform's CEC enabled screens as they are seeing fused data from both sources and likely many others as well.
So these 3 paragraphs state:
1. Instead of each platform (plane, boat, ...) relying on only it's own sensors, the platform sensors (radar, IR ...) are automatically sharing their observations across platforms by data links, fusing them into one scene, such that each platform has the eyes and ears of all platforms combined. Obviously only 1 sensor needs to malfunction or misinterpret signals such that they are gossiped across platforms where the operators seemingly "independently" observe the imagination, i.e. data fusion potentially triggers common hallucinations. Regarding the pilots, navigators: I speculate for example this could have been the augmented reality HUD overlay showing the IR feed...
2. the system was "just being fielded", increasing the odds of initial wrinkles in the data fusion system.
3. again the system was "just being fielded", increasing the odds of human operators misinterpreting their display systems as depicting what the sensors of their platform are sensing, since before introduction of sensor fusion this would have always been the case. Human operators would thus more easily fail to realize that their "independent observations" were not in fact independent at all.
Secondly, why would aliens reveal themselves in such a way? Either land on the White House lawn or stay out of sight. This 50 year UFO appearances, with some but not really a lot of witnesses, don't make sense for me.
It is a possibility if those “aliens” are biological humans in possession of technology far superior to anything we have now. Then you’d want to keep it a secret.
[1] Such as Hawaii, where everything is slightly more expensive.
This is false. In the above example of the Nimitz, we have sighting by two professional pilots, and radar/scanner readings. This is not a lone example.
If aliens are coming here their motives could be anything including irrational or just non-rational.
I've speculated for a while that a "post-singularity" post-scarcity intelligence would get... bizarre... due to lack of hard scarcity constraints. It would just fan out across state space. It would be less Star Trek and more Lexx. Maybe they do make crop circles as interactive art. Maybe they do strange stuff to us to slowly convert us to their religion. Who knows? We can't know.
Heck, I read an article in Russian that argued that bows+arrows or catapults/ballistae could be efficient weapons when compared to lasers that you see in SciFi.
I suspect there are a lot of biases in processing return signals from radar, an expectation of motion like things actually move.
So, if i had the resources of a nation, and some idea of how radar actually works, i could build a device that actually made a steady turn from, say west to north, look like something else.
I know very little about how radar works in the nitty gritty details, but i know a little bit about how our eyes are fooled by optical illusions. dynamically changing color, and maybe some little helper parts that fly away and change color or produce smoke would really mess with my eyes. it's weird how fireworks always fly right toward you no matter where you stand, right?
Extending that to radar and infrared seems totally reasonable. Also, my eyes have a lot of evolution both adding biases, and ensuring those biases don't mess up very often.
Automated systems don't even have 80 years of engineering effort to accurately represent what's happening.
The other possibility is some nut job in the administration has a pet project.
This reminds me of something I saw that I never really talked about. Maybe about 7 years ago, I was out bicycling at around 10pm at night outside of Socorro NM (a small desert college town), and to the west I saw a light appear from behind some mountains steadily heading up and north in a slightly curved path. I thought it was a plane or a helicopter until it suddenly disappeared after about 30 seconds. I assumed it turned off its lights or that I somehow misunderstood what I saw, but a minute later, a new light appeared from the same original spot, followed the path again, and disappeared. This sequence repeated maybe ten times. I assume it was some kind of missile test that I saw. The White Sands Missile Range was 10+ miles to the southeast (the wrong direction), though I think I remember there also being other explosive testing ranges nearby to the west. I would love to know what exactly I saw, though I never knew how to go about finding that out even if the information was published somewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dapweXhhfLU
The town was surrounded by various explosives testing ranges. Occasionally everyone would hear the loud thump of a bomb being test during the day. Mythbusters was known for using some bomb range nearby. I'm pretty confident it was some kind of military or scientific test I saw, I'm just mainly curious about the specifics.
Some atmospheric phenomenon that I don’t recall made it appear much closer than it actually was. (He was intrigued enough to talk to a friend who was an atmospheric science professor) In his case the repetition was the chopper flying box patterns to search.
I imagine UFO sightings have proportionally increased and thus the number of ad-hoc reported sightings within the Navy finally crossed the threshold.
It could even be a foreign government or spy agency doing amateur reconnaissance with new tech.
As the article states,
> The lack of a structured procedure and classification system, and the nebulous fear of being stigmatized by reporting things like UFOs [is] something that has long plagued the military and private sectors alike
There is also the nebulous fear of people overreacting whenever you finally decide to implement these common-sense policies. You must be hiding something, even if you were ironically just trying to be more transparent.
I don't mean to sound like a denier. The released IR footage from the same observation period [0] is incredible and, if real, proves that high-G maneuvers without exhaust or aerofoils exist and we are still lacking some very fundamental understanding about the nature of gravity.
I also found the article to be well thought-out and that it covered most of the most obvious answers without trying to paint a particular picture. I'll have to pay more attention to Rogoway.
Speculating on the shape of the aircraft, would the round tic-tac shape provide the least average air resistance in every direction provided an aerofoil is not needed for flight?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9D8dzl4zGk
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/navy_pilots_2004_ufo_a...
https://badufos.blogspot.com/
Now, they don't want to say that they have this, but they want other people (like the Russians and Chinese and French) to know that they do have it.
Or at least to make them think that they would like them to think that they have it.
Would you see films like this?
> "It came up on our left hand side (rapidly veered) to the north, we saw a bright light and it just disappeared at a very high speed ... we were just wondering. We didn't think it was a likely collision course .. (just wondering) what it could be," she said.
> A pilot on Virgin Flight 76 added that his flight crew had seen "two bright lights at 11 o'clock (which) seemed to bank over to the right and then climb away at speed."
First time in early 1990ies, second time it was about 10 years ago.
First sight looked like a formation of lights that moved in sync across the night sky in a straight line. The formation was long, like a long rectangle or long cylinder made of stars. Not too many stars, maybe a hundred. Moving slowly straight in the direction of it's length. I could not tell how far it was, so I can't really judge for the size of it, but it was "flying" higher than the peak of the nearby mountain (which is 1km high and about 10km away), and the lenght was comparable to 1/2 of the south-west ridge of that mountain which itself is aprox. 5-6km long. So the UFO would have to be at least 1km long if it was closer, but it could be many km long if it was further. My family members saw it, as we were on the balcony at home and had clear unobstructed view. I might exagerate about the size of it, but I really did saw it. It could be easily recorded if someone had a videocamera, but we did not. We always had a photo camera at that period but nobody thought about the possibility of taking a picture. We could have tried if we had film, but I don't remember why we did not try. We didn't even talk about the possibility. When you see something like it, it does not occur to you that you might need proof and that nobody will believe. But I don't care, since I saw what I saw. Of course there can be millions of explanations what it was, but there weren't any gived and nobody else mentioned seeing it when we asked around the next day. It could have easily been a formation of airplanes.
The other sight, was when I was by the nearby river with my partner, who did not see the UFO. It was a regular summer night, and something flew across the sky, at extreme velocity, just like a meteorite does. But suddenly right before going out of sight, it changed direction nearly 90 degrees and continued with the same high velocity. It all happened in a blink of an eye, of course it would be very hard to have it recorded.
The point of my stories is that you don't always have a chance to make a recording when you see something strange.
I wonder if it's possible that you saw multiple satellites at once moving in the sky?
>second situation
I wonder if a meteor could bounce when it hits a denser part of the atmosphere and change direction a bit, and maybe it was only the angle you were seeing it from that made the change in direction look as extreme as 90 degrees?
>>first situation
> I wonder if it's possible that you saw multiple satellites at once moving in the sky?
I have a sketch of what I saw from that period, but it does not have enough details to investigate it now. I would not like to discuss based on false personal memory after such a long time.
Still, I could add (out of my memory of what I saw) is that the lights (stars) were in a long rectangular (or cylindrical) formation, were brighter than the rest of the lights in the night sky (brighter than the rest of the stars). They all moved together in sync (imagine looking at a train painted nonreflective black with randomly dispersed luminiscent dots all over it, they will all move in the same direction and with same speed). I was in central Europe and was looking towards south-west, the objects were moving from the south-west part of the sky towards the south part of the sky.
I don't think that there is big enough probability of having that many satellites in a rather narrow patch of the sky (they can't be on the same orbit, so they would have to be on 100 different orbits and still look to be in the same place and appear as to being part of a big formation).
I think that some optical phenomena would be a better explanation of what I saw. Maybe we were looking at a projection of many starts - but projected from where and how.
Most simple and believable explanation is many airplanes flying in a formation.
>>second situation
>I wonder if a meteor could bounce when it hits a denser part of the atmosphere and change direction a bit, and maybe it was only the angle you were seeing it from that made the change in direction look as extreme as 90 degrees?
Optics (refraction, reflection and parallax effects) can explain such a thing if there was some barrier which was met by the object or was introduced on the line of sight between me and the object.
If if was a meteor (which most of the time you don't see until it hits the atmosphere and starts burning) then it would lightup even more upon hitting something. Plus meteors usually have a trail, which i did not see.
The speed must have been immense, since it crossed the sky in a mere instant. I would expect an even bigger flame and trail with such speed.
I can't recall if it was completely dark at that moment or shortly after sunset, but it was in the evening and I was looking to north - northwest, and the object appeared from the west part of the sky, and exit on the north part of the sky, after changing direction (so it was moving from west to north in the begining and then changed north). This are all aprox directions, just to have it illustrated.
Asking "why the hell" the DOD would be interested in Unidentified phenomenon in its territory goes well beyond sensationalism and straight into stupidity.
Well what else would they call them if they don't fucking know what they are?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C_-HLD21hA
The logic basically goes that 3M accidentally created a force field[1] in a factory[2], factories are mostly in China now, so if "running a factory" leads to antigravity tech, China would be the ones to develop it.
As much as "I want to believe", if it's true they're not American, it's quite possible they're not alien, just foreign.
I've noticed a weird kind of racism in some folks who talk about China: they simultaneously think they'll conquer the world and that they can't invent technology on their own.
It's certainly interesting logic to conclude "If it's not American, it must be alien".
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-physics-of-plastic-sheets-an...
[2] http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html
China is the new USSR :)
I don’t think that’s true for China, at least not today.
China is contained in South East Asia and poses no ideological threat to the West.
That’s just normal racism. Mexicans are too lazy to work, but come here and steal our jobs. Muslims come here to force Sharia Law on everyone, but fail to integrate and keep to themselves. Illegals are using public services for free, but pay taxes using fake information and are criminals. Obama was incompetent, but also managed to build complex shadow government. You can just keep going.
By using a dichotomous framework of stereotypes you can easily make a case against an entire population because if one negative stereotype doesn’t fit a given individual you simple apply the other one.
Racism is taking the non-zero existence of a complaint and extrapolating it to the broader population without caring to get to know the individual people.
Unfortunately, it was probably an evolutionary survival technique that worked thousands of years ago but has pretty disastrous consequences today.
edit, to be clear, what sort of contradictory, no-win steriotypes to chimps have about other chimp groups or did early modern humans have about neanderthals?
Prior to the US having a nuclear program there were papers being published on the possibility of fusion reactions that split the atom. These papers then disappeared during the Manhattan project, signaling that research was happening which was being suppressed.
Is there evidence that China had papers on antigravity research and that such papers have recently stopped being published.
Interesting theory. Considering all the hubbub I've heard about "anti carrier cruise missiles[1]" lately, it could make sense there's an incentive to project strength.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_ballistic_missile#Ch...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Ai...
Airport employees, pilots and bystanders have all reported seeing it, but it was dismissed. I remember seeing an interview with a retired Air Force officer who said that nothing's being done about the supposed UFOs is because once you start working on something people will demand results, and if you say we can't do a damn thing about these, your career will be in jeopardy.
The military wants people to feel no stigma for reporting observations they fail to explain on their own? Good, no problem with that, it is their duty to watch out for such contingencies. And they probably don't see it as their duty to explain and share footage of each and every incident, and the internal conclusions, ... because they don't want others to know their level of alertness, the resolution and sensitivity of their systems, ...
Why is thedrive.com so intent on portraying such events as "unexplainable" by a collection of humans? They are re-creating the stigma by conflating UFO's with the seemingly impossible.
I.e. even if it is "just a sensor malfunction" or "just an optical effect", it is important to the military that the human operators report these deficiencies up the chain of command: if accidental situations can fool the systems and operators (UFO sightings) into seeing things that don't exist, or misinterpreting things that do exist, then obviously:
1. such hallucinations could be artificially induced (think chaff, camouflage, ...) and hence it is important to take note of spontaneously arising confusing observations
2. such hallucinations increase the noise floor and distract from potential true invasions of air space: if you can address and learn from UFO sightings to improve sensor systems, then a true violation of air space requires less work to detect than if it is hiding in a stack of illusory UFO reports