My bet has to be on it being an elaborate disinformation campaign, to throw off our nationstate adversaries and keep the public in fear and/or distracted. It requires one to be super cynical, but our government has done worse to US citizens in terms of disinformation [0] (but not since the 70s that i know of).
That explanation accounts for why these sightings only appear to happen in the US, and is (to me) far more believable than an encounter with otherworldly technology.
At least with respect to the 2004 encounter, I think the least likely explanation is that the object belonged to another superpower - b/c it feels like something totally out of reach in multiple domains for 2004 tech.
I've been pondering these reports as well, and my hunch is that the US is recognizing an increasing occurrence of drone or otherwise long distance, stealth aircraft that are regularly penetrating US airspace... and they want to know more. A regular feature of such articles is a well respected aviator stating, "if I'd seen it while alone, I might not have reported it."
Even if it just gets US mil personnel to feel more comfortable reporting unidentified aerial things, ie by distancing that experience from UFO kookery, then it's a PR campaign success.
There's no way these are advanced technology from any country. If someone invented any technology that's 100X better than the state of the art, not to mention something that violates the laws of physics as we know them, it would be impossible to keep it a secret. There would have to be too many people involved. At a minimum you'd have credible rumors, like there were during the Manhattan and Apollo projects
If you go looking there are "credible" rumours. So-called "whistleblowers" or "SSP insiders" are videotaped on Gaia and other places to share their story. You can certainly find these if you look a bit. I trust the "whistleblowers" and "former insiders" less than thousands of random civilians who see things in the sky or have experiences tho. But your mileage or trust of different sources may vary and that's totally cool. Clearly something is going on.
I definitely agree we didn't simply "invent" this. If these are ours or we know how they work, we had to have help building them. Otherwise it's just too weird to consider an entirely parallel set of physical theories that tens of thousands of people must have learned and put into practice and it's not credibly in the open. There has to be something else stopping that from coming out, which to me implies secret cooperation with a civilization way beyond our own.
Honestly that's just sampling bias. The current high profile crop are only from Navy pilots. But there's lots of data of unexplained things happening over other areas (Phoenix lights, Belgium wave, Mexico City UFOs). The difference now is that instead of random civilians, or other country militaries, saying they saw it and being ignored by the media mostly, the US armed services are pushing the story out there. None of that means that armed services are the only ones that have encountered this or have evidence of it. But the coordinated narrative, "authority source" and push definitely raises the prominence of these stories in relation to others.
"Easily explained" is not really cutting it for a lot of people. And that's cool. That's part of the difficulty with this, everyone has different thresholds where they're convinced about something which basically none of us have any idea is. What's "easily explained" for guy X might be "way too convenient" for gal Y. ;p ;)x
Most of the UFO sightings occurred around 8:15-9:00 PM, while the flairs were known to be ignited around 10:00 - 10:30 PM. Really bizarre fact about the Phoenix lights, the Governor of Arizona at that time has admitted he saw the UFO (UAP - whatever) [0].
I am guessing since the sightings don’t occur over land that might be because no one is looking for them there. The Navy is very keen on sensor technologies, and trying out new, more powerful ones. These are always tested offshore. Any rival power that wanted to keep tabs on them would be in the vicinity of the sensors being tested.
> It's also interesting how these alleged observations seem to exclusively happen within restricted US airspace over oceans - but not over US land.
Sounds like the detected craft were attempting to be stealthy and were caught out by military use of cutting edge technology as the "rules changed."
That and we only hear about the well documented cases, where advanced sensors meet recording technology from multiple sources - military systems in other words.
It would also be easier to find strange unauthorized stuff in the less populated and more heavily scrutinized areas - no fly zones monitored regularly by military staff for instance. Over land there is a lot of legitimate traffic to "hide" in.
Couldn't the "elaborate disinformation campaign" just be TV shows? The "ancient aliens" crap has been airing in the US for about 10 years now, it must have had some effect on the beliefs of the population by now.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the increased political instability across the US and other countries. A certain subset of the population is prone to conspiratorial thinking. What better way is there to distract those people from political issues?
This is kind of backed up by the fact that the countries that are releasing the most UFO stuff are the ones experiencing the largest spike in instability.
I don't think anyone is distracted by this to the exclusion of all other considerations, certainly not of political issues. Even conspiracy theorists are capable of holding more than one thought in their head at a time.
You can't have multiple forms of advanced military targeting and recording and corroboration and high degrees of trust in the chain of possession and the observers themselves etc, any place other than where all that stuff is operating and operating in that heightened state like a training exercise or any other actual operation.
When was the last time the Navy was flying a bunch of fighter jets with all their hottest weapons and targetting tech active over your house?
We do have lot's of what IS "any place other", which is randos cell phone an dash cam footage. We quite rightly dismiss most of it, but it exists,ans it's all that can possibly exist, and so there is no discrepency to find "interesting".
I also don't find it remarkable at all that Russia and China aren't publicizing their own "nutcase" stories any more than we ever did, especially considering their pilots are pprobably even less likely to report anything even slightly odd that will end their careers.
This is pretty interesting! I hope it's at least some new and exciting drone capabilities that someone has developed. Do we know if any other nations have observed anything similar? Are there other nations with similar pilots/activity to our navy pilots who might have seen similar activity over the ocean that we could ask?
Videos of blurry splotches and eye witness testimony that repeats the word "technology" over and over to imply that unlike the last 6, _this_ blurry splotch is an alien spacecraft is really just annoying at this point.
EDIT: Hey judge2020 did you watch Dr Mason's analysis I linked above? It's very informative and pretty entertaining too.
I'll take your downvote as a no.
> _this_ blurry splotch is an alien spacecraft is really just annoying at this point.
I don't think anyone taking themselves seriously is considering these alien spacecraft; 'UFO' simply means unidentified flying object, which very well might be some another world superpower testing their own tech or testing the U.S. military's reaction and response to these things, likely using simple drone tech with outer shells that make it easy to stay 'unknown' by keeping their distance.
I think you're taking yourself too seriously if you don't consider that it's alien. Or that it implies cooperation with aliens. I'm not saying decide that it's that, but at least open to consider it. It just seems too arrogant to consider: we're the only ones, what we know is the limit of possibility, and we're so special that even if they're out there they will never visit us. I know there are aliens, they visited us and had some tech interactions. But right now I don't know how much overlap there is between these "sightings" and aliens. I know a lot of the current narrative is disinfo and I think these tech are mostly ours, but how did we develop them? That's where the alien overlap is that I see. What you believe is valid and is up to you, but I reckon it's smart to stay open to the possibility. I don't see there is as much gained by pre-answering that question in the negative if you don't know, as there is by staying curious and open. I think that's the way to "take yourself seriously" if that's what you want to do. :)
From a outside-US perspective, most UFO reports do seem to come from the US military, but there's also scattered reports from the rest of the world. If turns out to be a top secret US/Russian/Chinese/Moon nazi research program, this could be the beginning of a new arms race. However, since nobody seem to know what the hell these are, that leaves us with aliens or an unknown terrestrial party.
I'd feel better if it turned out to be extra-terrestrial; if the aliens are out there, watching and haven't annihilated us yet, then at least there's hope they're benevolent.
I'm with you on that. Also that Arthur C Clarke quote, "Either we're alone in the universe, or we're not. Both possibilities are terrifying." I don't really agree they're "terrifying" but, yeah, it's not really easy for people to accept either way. So we end up in some sort of collective fantasies about these things, probably ;p :) xx
> It just seems too arrogant to consider: we're the only ones, what we know is the limit of possibility, and we're so special that even if they're out there they will never visit us.
I think the alternate view is the opposite of arrogant or that we’re so special; either the zoo hypothesis, or that we are so simple that communicating with us would be akin to trying to communicate with an ant for example.
Something I haven't heard mentioned is the possibility that these might be artifacts of the sensors themselves or of the image processing software used: i.e., a bad Kalman filter that won't settle down properly or such.
The pics are too fuzzy to be useful for judgment and the objects usually too small to discern shape and/or size. I am puzzled that the images appear so unclear yet the pilots verbal descriptions sounds very clear.
Before buying into UFOs, I want what I've always wanted: some clear photos.
I do find it interesting that the artifacts of the sensors themselves seem to be very similar to the eyewitness accounts of these objects that have appeared throughout the last several hundred years of history.
I wonder if some of this is related to the recent space missions other countries engaged in, though I understand these are usually way smaller than your average "mars/moon" ship/probe.
I doubt the current administration is keen on giving a statement on this, let alone releasing documents/material.
> and starts mirroring me, so as i'm coming down it's coming up... It's mimicking your moves?... yeah it was aware we were there... "he says it was about the size of his f18 with no markings"... it gets right in front of me and it just disappears.
I keep having to check it's not April fools. Hard to suspect this is not an optical phenomena, I'm sure people found ships that appeared to hover way above the horizon similarly spooky. I wonder how much the refractive air phenomena we already know might be the start of an explanation for these things? what happens if we have very low density pockets further up in the atmosphere due to similarly large temperature differences? imagine a whole bunch of mirrors in the sky essentially, then take the shape of that air into consideration! that would make it pretty easy to start explaining objects that appear to defy aerodynamics and physics of moving objects more generally, it would likely significantly distort the image of the source object as to become unidentifiable too. Consider that most of these sightings seem to occur in fighter jets, I imagine the air density differences around these things must get pretty interesting at high speed - it would be pretty amusing if it turned out they are the source of their own optical illusion both in terms of the source and the phenomena.
This whole video is a bit silly though... the ridiculous astonishment at the start, of the admittance of existence of a phenomena that by definition is unidentified, and that if we eliminate everything we know all that remains is, uhm aliens !? - as if we know everything (except aliens of course, they somehow escape our infinite knowledge)... we're being bated right?
You could be right of course, but how then are we explaining the appearance of these things on several different sensor platforms, all allegedly very sophisticated? Presumably the people who design these radar systems try and make them account for air density etc. I mean, look, military contractors aren't always the savviest geniuses (see e.g. the F-35 program for hilariously inept and expensive examples), but different sensors on the planes and the ships seeing these things ... dunno.
There's also the tidbit from the original NYT stories from a couple years ago, repeated elsewhere in other interviews with pilots, that the objects were doing things like speeding off and seconds later appearing on radar at the waypoints that the fighter jets had already planned. Allegedly, of course. I'm not one to believe the government uncritically, but it seems to me that the critical view on this can't just be "swamp gas"-style explanations anymore.
> how then are we explaining the appearance of these things on several different sensor platforms
That would be trickier to explain, but we should be careful with the story telling here, they report instances of many visual anomalies, and slotted in only one story where there was a ground radar anomaly preceding the visual one that did not match exactly, i.e correlation with very low sample size is pretty meaningless.
...Knowing that, it's still interesting to seriously consider it anyway - visual systems use light, and radar uses radio, both are propagating electromagnetic waves of different frequency, they permeate solids (or not) differently, but they are all share similar basic behaviours i.e both are sensitive to density of the medium and can experience refraction and total internal reflection. So it's not unthinkable that a single event could explain both.
> Presumably the people who design these radar systems try and make them account for air density etc
I'm sure they do, but they cannot accommodate phenomena that they are not yet aware of. And even if we figured this out it's probably going to be difficult to tune those anomalies out in an automated way, in the same way that it takes a human to understand that a mirror is a mirror by analysing the behaviour of an image... perhaps with multiple radar from very different origins that do not concord they could be filtered out in a simpler way.
[EDIT]
Interesting section in the wiki on radar [0]:
> Clutter refers to radio frequency (RF) echoes returned from targets which are uninteresting to the radar operators. Such targets include natural objects such as ground, sea, and when not being tasked for meteorological purposes, precipitation (such as rain, snow or hail), sand storms, animals (especially birds), atmospheric turbulence, and other atmospheric effects, such as ionosphere reflections, meteor trails, and Hail spike. Clutter may also be returned from man-made objects such as buildings and, intentionally, by radar countermeasures such as chaff [1].
Perhaps a more likely explanation is perceived correlation between a short freak weather even in an area with lots of radar focused on it, e.g a super dense and short hail storm that suddenly drops like a stone. followed by these more common visual phenomena.
I think it’s important to note that advances in detection tech have made it possible to detect “unreal objects”. I was parsing through this book and one of the most recent advances is the ability to detect holograms.
So you are saying an optical illusion showed up on radar and infrared cameras and appeared similar from the vantage points of two jet fighters, one of them descending to get a closer look.
I don't see how that video was silly. They observed something, the equipment and radar picked it and it affected water also.
The other pilot in the 60 Minutes video mentioned how they're seeing stuff like that almost every day. Whatever it is should be investigated, even if it's just a mere optical illusion.
OT but this site has a permissions thing that is invisible for some users (eg. me) - the page immediately darkens (but is readable) and nothing is clickable. Windows/Chrome (extension?) issue perhaps - displays ok in e.g. Edge.
All this talk about UAPs reminds me of growing up in Texas in the 80's; kids claimed they saw a black planes flying at night. My older cousin claimed one flew over his head at low altitude and we all just wondered what was going on.
I didn't really know what to believe as a kid, I thought people were making it up because the pentagon had recently admitted there was a new jet in the USAF arsenal.
Eventually, the first gulf war came in the 90's and all was revealed. I learned my best friend's father (and neighbor) was a machinist for Lockheed Martin making parts for the F117.
What I find interesting is the cultural reaction of the USA compared to others. Others see UFOs as phenomena to be observed and investigated, while the USA sees them as threats to national security.
The US sees UFOs as phenomena to be observed and investigated - there are tons of American UFO groups such as MUFON to that effect. Meanwhile the governments and militaries of many countries have considered UFOs a possible security threat. There's no real difference between the way Americans treat UFOs, culturally or officially, and anywhere else.
Looks like the military industrial complex is trying to convince the public that the Space Force is needed. I don't even believe they're foreign UFO's. The US is probably making up these videos themselves. Thats why no one is freaking out about this. No one believes the Pentagons BS anymore.
Very good point, it make sense.
As wiki says "The Outer Space Treaty does not ban military activities within space, military space forces, or the weaponization of space, with the exception of the placement of weapons of mass destruction in space, and establishing military bases, testing weapons and conducting military maneuvers on celestial bodies.[6][7]"
So very high probability is that they need approval for additional money spending in that area.
Some of these declassified videos are almost 20 years old (i.e. much older than Space Force) and the descriptions across various personnel are congruent; after years of corroborations nobody has betrayed evidence of some kind of conspiracy or hoax.
There are people very much freaking out about this stuff. It's a fun subject to discuss and if you do so, you will invariably encounter people who are totally unwilling to grapple with the implications.
58 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadIt's also interesting how these alleged observations seem to exclusively happen within restricted US airspace over oceans - but not over US land.
Other UFO HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
My bet has to be on it being an elaborate disinformation campaign, to throw off our nationstate adversaries and keep the public in fear and/or distracted. It requires one to be super cynical, but our government has done worse to US citizens in terms of disinformation [0] (but not since the 70s that i know of).
That explanation accounts for why these sightings only appear to happen in the US, and is (to me) far more believable than an encounter with otherworldly technology.
At least with respect to the 2004 encounter, I think the least likely explanation is that the object belonged to another superpower - b/c it feels like something totally out of reach in multiple domains for 2004 tech.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#:~:text=COINTELPRO%....
edit: what's in the videos? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
UFOs == aliens was a connection that came about later.
If it was a civilian drone they would go after it and people controlling it, a foreign spy plane would cause diplomatic turmoil.
Its either their misinformation campaign, testing of their next gen tech, or aliens. Listed by probability with first being in high 90s.
Not only that they happen in the US, they frequently happen to US military, the very kinds of sensors arrays you would want to spoof.
I definitely agree we didn't simply "invent" this. If these are ours or we know how they work, we had to have help building them. Otherwise it's just too weird to consider an entirely parallel set of physical theories that tens of thousands of people must have learned and put into practice and it's not credibly in the open. There has to be something else stopping that from coming out, which to me implies secret cooperation with a civilization way beyond our own.
and they almost all happen over declared testing areas where the air force has trialed new stuff on navy crews without telling them in the past...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Offic...
Sounds like the detected craft were attempting to be stealthy and were caught out by military use of cutting edge technology as the "rules changed."
That and we only hear about the well documented cases, where advanced sensors meet recording technology from multiple sources - military systems in other words.
It would also be easier to find strange unauthorized stuff in the less populated and more heavily scrutinized areas - no fly zones monitored regularly by military staff for instance. Over land there is a lot of legitimate traffic to "hide" in.
This is kind of backed up by the fact that the countries that are releasing the most UFO stuff are the ones experiencing the largest spike in instability.
When was the last time the Navy was flying a bunch of fighter jets with all their hottest weapons and targetting tech active over your house?
We do have lot's of what IS "any place other", which is randos cell phone an dash cam footage. We quite rightly dismiss most of it, but it exists,ans it's all that can possibly exist, and so there is no discrepency to find "interesting".
I also don't find it remarkable at all that Russia and China aren't publicizing their own "nutcase" stories any more than we ever did, especially considering their pilots are pprobably even less likely to report anything even slightly odd that will end their careers.
It's not interesting at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWWGmiZs4JA
Videos of blurry splotches and eye witness testimony that repeats the word "technology" over and over to imply that unlike the last 6, _this_ blurry splotch is an alien spacecraft is really just annoying at this point.
EDIT: Hey judge2020 did you watch Dr Mason's analysis I linked above? It's very informative and pretty entertaining too. I'll take your downvote as a no.
I don't think anyone taking themselves seriously is considering these alien spacecraft; 'UFO' simply means unidentified flying object, which very well might be some another world superpower testing their own tech or testing the U.S. military's reaction and response to these things, likely using simple drone tech with outer shells that make it easy to stay 'unknown' by keeping their distance.
Is a serious individual and advocating that these maybe extraterrestrial.
He gave a fascinating Joe Rogan interview recently: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V0uWX1C4m8xEL0HHYqbnE
I'd feel better if it turned out to be extra-terrestrial; if the aliens are out there, watching and haven't annihilated us yet, then at least there's hope they're benevolent.
I think the alternate view is the opposite of arrogant or that we’re so special; either the zoo hypothesis, or that we are so simple that communicating with us would be akin to trying to communicate with an ant for example.
Something I haven't heard mentioned is the possibility that these might be artifacts of the sensors themselves or of the image processing software used: i.e., a bad Kalman filter that won't settle down properly or such.
The pics are too fuzzy to be useful for judgment and the objects usually too small to discern shape and/or size. I am puzzled that the images appear so unclear yet the pilots verbal descriptions sounds very clear.
Before buying into UFOs, I want what I've always wanted: some clear photos.
People with cellphones have massively multi-megapixel cameras with jitter reduction.
When a meteorite lands in Russia a hundred dashcams record it from multiple angles. Beautiful video.
But UFOs? Still just camera splotches that human beings tell stories about in absurd detail.
I doubt the current administration is keen on giving a statement on this, let alone releasing documents/material.
I keep having to check it's not April fools. Hard to suspect this is not an optical phenomena, I'm sure people found ships that appeared to hover way above the horizon similarly spooky. I wonder how much the refractive air phenomena we already know might be the start of an explanation for these things? what happens if we have very low density pockets further up in the atmosphere due to similarly large temperature differences? imagine a whole bunch of mirrors in the sky essentially, then take the shape of that air into consideration! that would make it pretty easy to start explaining objects that appear to defy aerodynamics and physics of moving objects more generally, it would likely significantly distort the image of the source object as to become unidentifiable too. Consider that most of these sightings seem to occur in fighter jets, I imagine the air density differences around these things must get pretty interesting at high speed - it would be pretty amusing if it turned out they are the source of their own optical illusion both in terms of the source and the phenomena.
This whole video is a bit silly though... the ridiculous astonishment at the start, of the admittance of existence of a phenomena that by definition is unidentified, and that if we eliminate everything we know all that remains is, uhm aliens !? - as if we know everything (except aliens of course, they somehow escape our infinite knowledge)... we're being bated right?
There's also the tidbit from the original NYT stories from a couple years ago, repeated elsewhere in other interviews with pilots, that the objects were doing things like speeding off and seconds later appearing on radar at the waypoints that the fighter jets had already planned. Allegedly, of course. I'm not one to believe the government uncritically, but it seems to me that the critical view on this can't just be "swamp gas"-style explanations anymore.
That would be trickier to explain, but we should be careful with the story telling here, they report instances of many visual anomalies, and slotted in only one story where there was a ground radar anomaly preceding the visual one that did not match exactly, i.e correlation with very low sample size is pretty meaningless.
...Knowing that, it's still interesting to seriously consider it anyway - visual systems use light, and radar uses radio, both are propagating electromagnetic waves of different frequency, they permeate solids (or not) differently, but they are all share similar basic behaviours i.e both are sensitive to density of the medium and can experience refraction and total internal reflection. So it's not unthinkable that a single event could explain both.
> Presumably the people who design these radar systems try and make them account for air density etc
I'm sure they do, but they cannot accommodate phenomena that they are not yet aware of. And even if we figured this out it's probably going to be difficult to tune those anomalies out in an automated way, in the same way that it takes a human to understand that a mirror is a mirror by analysing the behaviour of an image... perhaps with multiple radar from very different origins that do not concord they could be filtered out in a simpler way.
[EDIT]
Interesting section in the wiki on radar [0]:
> Clutter refers to radio frequency (RF) echoes returned from targets which are uninteresting to the radar operators. Such targets include natural objects such as ground, sea, and when not being tasked for meteorological purposes, precipitation (such as rain, snow or hail), sand storms, animals (especially birds), atmospheric turbulence, and other atmospheric effects, such as ionosphere reflections, meteor trails, and Hail spike. Clutter may also be returned from man-made objects such as buildings and, intentionally, by radar countermeasures such as chaff [1].
Perhaps a more likely explanation is perceived correlation between a short freak weather even in an area with lots of radar focused on it, e.g a super dense and short hail storm that suddenly drops like a stone. followed by these more common visual phenomena.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar#Clutter
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutter_(radar)
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Advances_in_Radar_Techn...
The other pilot in the 60 Minutes video mentioned how they're seeing stuff like that almost every day. Whatever it is should be investigated, even if it's just a mere optical illusion.
What we should seek is understanding.
I didn't really know what to believe as a kid, I thought people were making it up because the pentagon had recently admitted there was a new jet in the USAF arsenal.
Eventually, the first gulf war came in the 90's and all was revealed. I learned my best friend's father (and neighbor) was a machinist for Lockheed Martin making parts for the F117.
So very high probability is that they need approval for additional money spending in that area.
There are people very much freaking out about this stuff. It's a fun subject to discuss and if you do so, you will invariably encounter people who are totally unwilling to grapple with the implications.