Spoiler: “Real” here meaning “we don’t know what they are”.
A researcher YouTube already put together a video showing the unlikelihood that it’s extra terrestrial, and more of a visual phenomena of the camera they were testing out on these planes. If someone would be kind as to link it.
One thing that is not really explained is why experienced pilots would not be aware of the phenomena explained in this video. Seems to me they would experience this all the time.
fwiw I don't think it's actually an extraterrestrial object.
It's interesting that people jump straight from "object we don't understand" to "therefore it must have come from another planet". If I ever suggest to someone that it could be, for example, an animal that no one has ever seen before, atmospheric phenomena we've never observed before, experimental aircraft from another country, experimental aircraft from the US, disinformation campaign by the US military for some yet unknown reason, lone scientist's experimental drone, simultaneous hack of all pilots systems, etc, I'm usually met with "don't be silly, those are impossible". Well, why isn't "alien spaceship from another planet" also impossible? Why is that more likely than the other explanations?
This. Being a pilot is a lot of work. Depending on the craft, there’s a lot of things you must know and commit to memory; some things shouldn’t be committed to memory (best if technical manuals, standard operating procedures, etc are used).
Very experienced pilots share similarities with very experienced engineers. Maybe the analogy I’m looking for is: an engineer might not know the capabilities and limitations of each peripheral device they use, but can still be experienced. Also bear in mind, that this type of piloting is a high-stakes job; extraterrestrial craft are arguably less common than those made on earth and the pilots probably take this into consideration.
That said, I think this this whole ordeal is really interesting. Reading the comments, I think the “lasers” and “plasma” stuff + dropping “vehicle” from the nomenclature (i.e. “unidentifiable aerial phenomenon”) is rather interesting.
Read Christopher Mellon's, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Minority Staff Director Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, twitter (https://twitter.com/ChristopherKMe4) for his take on this.
The debunker misses a lot like multiple visual and radar confirmations on the target.
I haven't found anyone serious trying to understand what happened. There's a lot of info, even just on the overlay of the cameras.
Id really like to know what the velocity, altitude and acceleration of these things was.
Do you know of anybody who has done an analysis of these videos?
It can't. Read through Christopher Mellon, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Minority Staff Director Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, twitter (https://twitter.com/ChristopherKMe4).
The debunker doesn't address the fact that in addition to the FLIR-lock, there was multiple visual and radar confirmations.
I wonder how many times Christopher Mellon has been convinced of UFOs in the past.
Something I've noticed with this recent dump of videos is the only people I personally know who are interested in convincing themselves that it is truly unexplainable are ones who have already claimed other videos represented UFOs as well. A lot of people have taken the "I want to believe" mantra to heart, and it has affected their ability to actually reason about what they are seeing.
Visual and radar confirmations of what, though? A balloon is a physical object that you can see in visible and radio light.
The data seem to show a slow-moving object at a higher altitude. I'd trust the actual data over nebulous claims of an object appearing to be moving fast. It's hard and unreliable to judge an object by eye, and easy to fall prey to optical illusions.
You know, to me it looks more like a hot pixel on an infrared array or mirror speck than any resolvable object. The thing seems to move around / jitter very slightly so maybe not a hot pixel though. Was there a crew report of actually seeing this, or just the camera or video images? With these cameras you basically should default to any other possible artifact before supposing it's a "UFO"...
There where two pilots and two feeds that displayed the same image, so the only other conclusion is that both the pilots had a hot pixel on the exact same corresponding location.
That's maybe lottery like chances. What's the chance it's aliens, given we see no sign of intelligent life when we look to the stars, and given the size and distances involved? Probably worse.
The logical conclusion is that it's neither. Given our current priors.
It is interesting how even relatively simple phonemena can quickly confound when they are being projected (ie. when some information is lost).
Every day objects that find themselves at the right place and time in completely different setting from when they are normally seen, at drastically different scales, they confound our minds because they break patterns our minds are built to recognize.
If you hoped for something else, perhaps this is an opportunity to empathize with those who point phones and cameras at the Sun, get pulsing or flashing, and believe it miracle. Or who point infrared camera zooms at the horizon, and discover the Earth flat.
Before you do a victory lap, realize that those explanations are by a game developer that is going solely off only the information in the videos. People with more information have said it is not those things.
It's probably not aliens. It's probably not a hot air balloon. Be more skeptical. Allow things to be unexplained if no explanation is sufficient. When every video someone links points to the same video, your warning lights should be going off.
The Pentagon and Navy would not have released these as "UFOs" if a game developer watching blurry footage could have told them what they were.
I still think this known military plasma laser tech is the highest likelihood of being the explanation:
"Researchers working with high-power laser weapons discovered that they could create a glowing ball of fire in the sky by crossing the beams of two powerful infrared lasers…By moving the laser beams around the sky, the researchers found they could shift the plasma ball back and forth at very high speed…. At night, they demonstrated their skills, flying their glowing creations in formation high above the cold desert."
This is (or something like it) is the most likely scenario based on what we know. I'm amazed at the number of people who fail to apply Occam's Razor in this case, especially when UFO sightings have been used as disinformation in the past.
What's fascinating (and scary) to me is the number of people who selectively look at some of the evidence, come up with an explanation, ignore the rest of the evidence, and then call it "case closed". All while mocking anyone else who picked a different subset of the evidence.
Well we don't know what the tech in the article actually looks like because there are no pictures. FLIR lock on superhot plasma seems possible during the day and the shape in the videos does seem like it could pass for a such a plasma ball IMO.
Here's another (personal) theory: the "UFO" is actually the result of the jet's own laser weapon/defense system which is why the pan rate is so consistent in the videos - i.e. it's aimed by the pilot himself.
I think the "looks like a solid object" --> stable geometry + opacity, which to me means that the laser plasma system produces a consistent effect in the same way you get a red spot with standard laser pointer, though it's a second order incandescence with plasma so it's more volumetric like.
That's super interesting and I almost want to believe that something like this could be behind the videos, but Fravor described the object as being tictac shaped with a smooth white surface, not a glowing ball of plasma. Also, it doesn't seem like a laser-induced floating ball of plasma would cause the ocean just beneath it to become turbulent and frothy, like the tictac thing did
I'm unsure if "smooth white surface" might not just be a well-defined / focused plasma ball. See my link below for a laser plasma tic tac in a lab setting.
I didn't see the turbulent / frothy part of the video, but could imagine there being reflection creating visual illusions or the heat / microwave emissions of the plasma [2] causing mirage diffraction, mild steam, or even wind effects on the surface - the latter could be caused by oscillating laser patterns used to produce more plasma effects via increasing mass - ie laser plasma lowers localized air mass, but moving around slightly could energize more air mass to produce a far larger effect once energy isn't the gating factor.
[1] Which could be from a 1MW or more laser setup, to my knowledge 60kW is the largest anti-missile laser, but with big multi-diode / multi-optic arrays this would be possible)
The water turbulence wasn't in the video actually. From the wikipedia article:
"They looked down at the sea and also noticed a turbulent oval area of churning water with foam and frothy waves "the size of a Boeing 737 airplane"[14] with a smoother area of lighter color at the center, as if the waves were breaking over something just under the surface.[14] A few seconds later, they noticed an unusual object hovering with erratic movements at a height they estimated to be about 50 feet (15 m) above the churning water. Both Fravor[15] and Slaight later described the object as a large bright white Tic Tac, 30 to 46 feet (9.1 to 14.0 m) long, with no windshield nor porthole, no wing nor empennage, and no visible engine nor exhaust plume."
So they noticed a disturbance in the water that appeared to be caused by something under the surface, and it was only then that they noticed the tictac object hovering above the ocean. Whatever you make of it, it's very strange.
That link is super cool, but I imagine that if you scaled it up to the point where it produced a uniform plasma orb 30+ feet in diamater (would love to see the napkin math on how much energy this would take), the visible light from the plasma would be blinding, which was definitely not what the pilots described.
And an even better article I read a few days ago (now cannot find the link) where the Navy says that "To the Stars" "Academy of Arts and Sciences" fronted by Blink 182 ex Tom DeLozenge should not have released the videos before because they had not been properly cleared for public release at that time. But now they have been. Officially unclassified and released.
Also, predicting HN comments before reading them:
> this still doesn't prove it's not an above TS ECI SAP
> this is clearly a disinformation campaign to hide our own advanced tech
> these are obviously Chinese drones. But the Russians are probably involved
> ahahaha, the whack jobs talking about aliens, reminds me of crazy conspiracy theorists, ahahah, they all talk the same, you can tell them from how they used concise sentences that they must be crazy and wrong
> I agree with the mainstream consensus. Tell me what to think, I will not say 'it's aliens' until the government tells me its OK to say that
> I sleep better knowing this is OUR tech
> BUT, if it IS aliens, they are clearly here to destroy us, so we need to prepare for war.
OMG, I checked the comments and I see it's worse. People are still claiming that "the analysis" confirms these are clearly weather balloons, or "visual artifacts". This is not 1947 people
predicting this will vanish from the front page in 3...2...1... Now let's all go back to worrying about the pandemic or idolizing the new shiny
Suppose a nation state spend several trillion dollars on investigating every improbability to achieve science fiction like travel capacity & speed to eventually reach the conclusion we have reached global maximum of physics as it is.
What is the superior strategy to this nation state other than sending adversaries on a similar resource waisting wild goose chase?
First of all why does every nation state have to see other nations as adversarial? They could just share those insights and everyone gains. We're all in the same game of life.
The biological warfare capabilities of the USSR that were revealed when the iron curtain fell were a complete surprise to the Western world.
The game of power is completely different because communism practiced today has nothing in common with the communism of the USSR. Thus we cannot assume we are going to be lucky again our adversaries paradigm breaks and momentum is lost before they deplete their military capabilities.
Suggesting and half confirming an unknown unknown to an adversary is very efficient to expand this relative peaceful periode we live in. Every additional amount of resource adversaries waist on unachievable capabilities is an additional resource not invested capabilities that can be useful to tip the power balance.
Nobody wants a military arm race between global powers but I think it is naive to assume what we wish for is a reasonable reflection of how our reality is actually constructed.
> But … admitting that they see things in the sky and they can’t identify them, that to me is the most amazing part of this
Really?
What is amazing about this?
There have been thousands of UFO sightings over the past decades and a huge proportion of these have been explained. But not all. There are still a few sightings that we have no explanation for, there is nothing amazing about it.
Obviously, that doesn't mean these unexplained sightings are aliens, they are most likely natural phenomena we haven't figured out yet, but there's nothing remarkable about admitting we have no explanation for something.
The technology exists, and it is among the toppest of secrets. If you have a head for technical reading, you can have this patent: US20120105181A1. That is a rundown of the mathematics involved. You will also need to know about Radiatively Induced Fermion Resonance. Studying this secret relentlessly for years, I have found little bits of the puzzle. They are nuclear powered aircraft. They utilize a mercury-thorium solution as a fuel source and working fluid. Not a nuclear reactor, but a generator, directly converting the exploitable thorium beta decay chain, to a nuclear magnetic moment. The torus configuration is a self driving EM pump that then creates a force normal to gravity, like a super maglev. This is gimballed to achieve flight and maneuver. Many people have independently reversed this design, and the math is solid. I myself have collected documents to support every claim I just made. There is OPINT, SIGINT, HUMINT in there too. You dont see any Homer Hickam or North Korea types building them because they require literal tons of mercury, and the nuclear material. Mercury is very well controlled on a global scale, just like uranium, all kinds of environmental regulation.
The reason this tech will never be publicly released: they are flying nuclear hazmat nightmares. They put out an identifiable form of radiation when they operate. They can be detected, once you know how they run.
And we already have something better, there are rumors about newer ones with a better tech, but I dont quite understand the technical claims they make for how those work. Something about pulsed lasers and antimatter, the phrase Schwinger limit kept showing up.
Anyway, go buy an old Levitron off of Ebay, set it on your desk, any whenever you feel glum about the future, give it a spin and remember that its a hand powered UFO.
I have no way of verifying any of this, but your writing makes me reminisce about the weirder parts of the internet about 15 years ago. It was a time with a weird cross pollination between internet sleuths, fringe academia, x-files aestheticians and citizen journalists - before the waves of commercialisation would push these fringes out of sight and drown them in noise.
I remember spartan looking websites with thorough and somewhat level headed journalism and research made by often highly educated hobbyists into the history of all kinds of stuff from CIA to Oluf Palme, from Göbekli Tepe to the backside of geopolitics.
This is probably partly my mind playing tricks on me but what stood out was the depth of research, the common courtesy and the long well thought out replies people would write.
People really had read the books, the docs, the papers and made up their minds from that.
Today so much gets derailed into superficial identity or tribal politics, completely bonkers conspiracy-fiction ala Inforwars or psyop bullshit that is hard to attach any messenger to.
Does anyone know where to get that hit of fringe without all of the hysteria and insanity today?
1) Engines requiring "tons of mercury" (and, presumably, more tons of thorium etc. dissolved in it) are likely to be heavier than competing technologies. For aircraft use, it's a significant drawback.
2)An engine that is based on heavy spinning parts might perhaps drive propellers, but military propeller aircraft have stopped being secret futuristic tech between 80 and 100 years ago.
3) Thorium is quite stable. How could its decay be exploited as a power source? Other radioactive elements, like the plutonium isotopes used in space probes (for heat production) offer a better compromise between stable enough to store and use as fuel and unstable enough to be weight-efficient.
4) Patent US20120105181A1 is illustrated with an actual Levitron toy.
I'd assume it's a joke, but US20130175895A1 by the same author is a bit more interesting and along the same lines, and it has the appearance of egregious crackpot material (competing in the prestigious free energy/perpetual motion division).
I read a reasonable-sounding hypothesis that this could have been adversaries testing the aircraft’s tracking and target-acquisition capabilities.
If you’re testing someone’s active radar, you would want a prominent object to catch their attention, which then moves in increasingly erratic patterns until tracking fails.
The projected image/combined laser beam seems like a feasible way to achieve this, and I don’t think it takes a huge level of commitment from a national military to build one.
Maybe coincident lasers were being projected from submarines just beneath the surface.
54 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadA researcher YouTube already put together a video showing the unlikelihood that it’s extra terrestrial, and more of a visual phenomena of the camera they were testing out on these planes. If someone would be kind as to link it.
One thing that is not really explained is why experienced pilots would not be aware of the phenomena explained in this video. Seems to me they would experience this all the time.
fwiw I don't think it's actually an extraterrestrial object.
Very experienced pilots share similarities with very experienced engineers. Maybe the analogy I’m looking for is: an engineer might not know the capabilities and limitations of each peripheral device they use, but can still be experienced. Also bear in mind, that this type of piloting is a high-stakes job; extraterrestrial craft are arguably less common than those made on earth and the pilots probably take this into consideration.
That said, I think this this whole ordeal is really interesting. Reading the comments, I think the “lasers” and “plasma” stuff + dropping “vehicle” from the nomenclature (i.e. “unidentifiable aerial phenomenon”) is rather interesting.
That's what UFO means - 'unidentified'.
The debunker misses a lot like multiple visual and radar confirmations on the target.
Tl;dr it can simply be explained as a balloon drifting in the wind.
The debunker doesn't address the fact that in addition to the FLIR-lock, there was multiple visual and radar confirmations.
Something I've noticed with this recent dump of videos is the only people I personally know who are interested in convincing themselves that it is truly unexplainable are ones who have already claimed other videos represented UFOs as well. A lot of people have taken the "I want to believe" mantra to heart, and it has affected their ability to actually reason about what they are seeing.
The data seem to show a slow-moving object at a higher altitude. I'd trust the actual data over nebulous claims of an object appearing to be moving fast. It's hard and unreliable to judge an object by eye, and easy to fall prey to optical illusions.
I suppose there's a non-zero chance it's 2 instruments failing in precisely the same way in precisely the same spot at precisely the same time.
Stranger things have happened.
The logical conclusion is that it's neither. Given our current priors.
> This comment on ArsTechnica on the same subject links to some videos which have nice explanations for the videos: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/navy-releases-three-... Basically lens flare, balloon, and a plane.
The video links there are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Btns91W5J8&t=7s , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M&t=20s , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1oTg0kxzDs .
Every day objects that find themselves at the right place and time in completely different setting from when they are normally seen, at drastically different scales, they confound our minds because they break patterns our minds are built to recognize.
It's probably not aliens. It's probably not a hot air balloon. Be more skeptical. Allow things to be unexplained if no explanation is sufficient. When every video someone links points to the same video, your warning lights should be going off.
The Pentagon and Navy would not have released these as "UFOs" if a game developer watching blurry footage could have told them what they were.
"Researchers working with high-power laser weapons discovered that they could create a glowing ball of fire in the sky by crossing the beams of two powerful infrared lasers…By moving the laser beams around the sky, the researchers found they could shift the plasma ball back and forth at very high speed…. At night, they demonstrated their skills, flying their glowing creations in formation high above the cold desert."
https://www.wired.com/2007/05/plasma-laser-uf/
And honestly given the way things tend to happen in this universe I don't know if it's all that valid.
It's just weird to see people pull it out during a debate as a legitimate argument.
Here's another (personal) theory: the "UFO" is actually the result of the jet's own laser weapon/defense system which is why the pan rate is so consistent in the videos - i.e. it's aimed by the pilot himself.
See this article:
https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/politics/us-air-force-laser-f...
The specific "tic tac" appearance may just be what the effect ends up looking like - see the picture in this article for a tic tac-looking laser plasma ball: https://www.slashgear.com/super-powerful-laser-creates-plasm...
I didn't see the turbulent / frothy part of the video, but could imagine there being reflection creating visual illusions or the heat / microwave emissions of the plasma [2] causing mirage diffraction, mild steam, or even wind effects on the surface - the latter could be caused by oscillating laser patterns used to produce more plasma effects via increasing mass - ie laser plasma lowers localized air mass, but moving around slightly could energize more air mass to produce a far larger effect once energy isn't the gating factor.
[1] Which could be from a 1MW or more laser setup, to my knowledge 60kW is the largest anti-missile laser, but with big multi-diode / multi-optic arrays this would be possible)
[2] https://www.slashgear.com/super-powerful-laser-creates-plasm...
"They looked down at the sea and also noticed a turbulent oval area of churning water with foam and frothy waves "the size of a Boeing 737 airplane"[14] with a smoother area of lighter color at the center, as if the waves were breaking over something just under the surface.[14] A few seconds later, they noticed an unusual object hovering with erratic movements at a height they estimated to be about 50 feet (15 m) above the churning water. Both Fravor[15] and Slaight later described the object as a large bright white Tic Tac, 30 to 46 feet (9.1 to 14.0 m) long, with no windshield nor porthole, no wing nor empennage, and no visible engine nor exhaust plume."
So they noticed a disturbance in the water that appeared to be caused by something under the surface, and it was only then that they noticed the tictac object hovering above the ocean. Whatever you make of it, it's very strange.
That link is super cool, but I imagine that if you scaled it up to the point where it produced a uniform plasma orb 30+ feet in diamater (would love to see the napkin math on how much energy this would take), the visible light from the plasma would be blinding, which was definitely not what the pilots described.
And an even better article I read a few days ago (now cannot find the link) where the Navy says that "To the Stars" "Academy of Arts and Sciences" fronted by Blink 182 ex Tom DeLozenge should not have released the videos before because they had not been properly cleared for public release at that time. But now they have been. Officially unclassified and released.
Also, predicting HN comments before reading them:
> this still doesn't prove it's not an above TS ECI SAP
> this is clearly a disinformation campaign to hide our own advanced tech
> these are obviously Chinese drones. But the Russians are probably involved
> ahahaha, the whack jobs talking about aliens, reminds me of crazy conspiracy theorists, ahahah, they all talk the same, you can tell them from how they used concise sentences that they must be crazy and wrong
> I agree with the mainstream consensus. Tell me what to think, I will not say 'it's aliens' until the government tells me its OK to say that
> I sleep better knowing this is OUR tech
> BUT, if it IS aliens, they are clearly here to destroy us, so we need to prepare for war.
OMG, I checked the comments and I see it's worse. People are still claiming that "the analysis" confirms these are clearly weather balloons, or "visual artifacts". This is not 1947 people
predicting this will vanish from the front page in 3...2...1... Now let's all go back to worrying about the pandemic or idolizing the new shiny
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-...
What is the superior strategy to this nation state other than sending adversaries on a similar resource waisting wild goose chase?
The game of power is completely different because communism practiced today has nothing in common with the communism of the USSR. Thus we cannot assume we are going to be lucky again our adversaries paradigm breaks and momentum is lost before they deplete their military capabilities.
Suggesting and half confirming an unknown unknown to an adversary is very efficient to expand this relative peaceful periode we live in. Every additional amount of resource adversaries waist on unachievable capabilities is an additional resource not invested capabilities that can be useful to tip the power balance.
Nobody wants a military arm race between global powers but I think it is naive to assume what we wish for is a reasonable reflection of how our reality is actually constructed.
Really?
What is amazing about this?
There have been thousands of UFO sightings over the past decades and a huge proportion of these have been explained. But not all. There are still a few sightings that we have no explanation for, there is nothing amazing about it.
Obviously, that doesn't mean these unexplained sightings are aliens, they are most likely natural phenomena we haven't figured out yet, but there's nothing remarkable about admitting we have no explanation for something.
The reason this tech will never be publicly released: they are flying nuclear hazmat nightmares. They put out an identifiable form of radiation when they operate. They can be detected, once you know how they run.
And we already have something better, there are rumors about newer ones with a better tech, but I dont quite understand the technical claims they make for how those work. Something about pulsed lasers and antimatter, the phrase Schwinger limit kept showing up.
Anyway, go buy an old Levitron off of Ebay, set it on your desk, any whenever you feel glum about the future, give it a spin and remember that its a hand powered UFO.
I remember spartan looking websites with thorough and somewhat level headed journalism and research made by often highly educated hobbyists into the history of all kinds of stuff from CIA to Oluf Palme, from Göbekli Tepe to the backside of geopolitics.
This is probably partly my mind playing tricks on me but what stood out was the depth of research, the common courtesy and the long well thought out replies people would write. People really had read the books, the docs, the papers and made up their minds from that.
Today so much gets derailed into superficial identity or tribal politics, completely bonkers conspiracy-fiction ala Inforwars or psyop bullshit that is hard to attach any messenger to.
Does anyone know where to get that hit of fringe without all of the hysteria and insanity today?
1) Engines requiring "tons of mercury" (and, presumably, more tons of thorium etc. dissolved in it) are likely to be heavier than competing technologies. For aircraft use, it's a significant drawback.
2)An engine that is based on heavy spinning parts might perhaps drive propellers, but military propeller aircraft have stopped being secret futuristic tech between 80 and 100 years ago.
3) Thorium is quite stable. How could its decay be exploited as a power source? Other radioactive elements, like the plutonium isotopes used in space probes (for heat production) offer a better compromise between stable enough to store and use as fuel and unstable enough to be weight-efficient.
4) Patent US20120105181A1 is illustrated with an actual Levitron toy. I'd assume it's a joke, but US20130175895A1 by the same author is a bit more interesting and along the same lines, and it has the appearance of egregious crackpot material (competing in the prestigious free energy/perpetual motion division).
Can you share with the rest of the class?
If you’re testing someone’s active radar, you would want a prominent object to catch their attention, which then moves in increasingly erratic patterns until tracking fails.
The projected image/combined laser beam seems like a feasible way to achieve this, and I don’t think it takes a huge level of commitment from a national military to build one.
Maybe coincident lasers were being projected from submarines just beneath the surface.