As much as I want to believe, I feel like this almost has to be some sort of disinformation campaign, either to cover up some sort of testing that the US military is doing and thinks someone else might have seen, or to make US adversaries think that we've made some sort of fundamental breakthrough and we're ineptly trying to cover it up by calling it a UFO. Probably the latter.
Would be interesting to read the article about this in 50 years or so once the political landscape has changed and it's safe to declassify, but I doubt I'll be around then.
Here's my theory about the recent influx of UFO footages coming from high places. US military was working on advanced drones. Nothing fancy, think current best tech, add 15 years and billion in r&d, that kind of stuff. Then when it was ready for test they flew it secretly before their own pilots and waited for reports. And waited. And waited some more. Silence. They disabled stealth, added flashlights, nothing. Military pilots didn't reported it. Maybe Venus. Or moonlight bouncing off swamp gas, but not UFO. Why?
In past decades whenever military pilot reported UFO they were laughed at, sent to psychologist, evaluated, sent behind the desk. Other pilots knew and when they saw something really weird they have kept it for themselves.
Then the higher ups panicked. If they don't report our drones, they will not report Chinese or Russian drones either. We have hundreds and thousands of eyes in the sky but they will not report because they are afraid to speak.
So they came up with a campaign. They started to publish official UFO footage and started more openly talk about it to show pilots that it is now ok to talk about UFO. Don't be afraid pilots, if you see something strange jus tell us, we take it seriously now.
There are no aliens. Videos you saw are created or modified to look legit, and officially supported or confirmed.
One of the pilots in this incident was on Rogan saying how they used to fly silently without lights above remote campsites, then once they saw a campfire blast the lights and go straight up. They'd laugh as the UFO reports flowed in.
Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it.
It's not unrealistic to consider top secret tech as a possible explanation.
One counter point is usually: If we had tech this amazing, we'd be putting it to use commercially. However this tech might be autonomous and might need to be considering the G forces supposedly at play.
Wouldn't the boring answer be they made something that can disrupt radar systems into creating fantom objects. Creating fake objects that are remarkable would be useful for when distractions are needed. The final QA would be a real in the field test where the observers are not aware of the experiment.
Naval patents of far fetched sounding room temperature superconductors and similar things may indeed be part of a disinformation campaign, but that does not mean the sightings of tic-tac shaped objects and other radar and pilot observed anomalies are part of the campaign as well.
What could be the case is that the observed tic-tac UFO's are real alien craft, about which word is now leaking out, but the US military is now using the confusion surrounding them for their own purposes. Hey, why not use the confusion for our own advantage.
Any potential adversaries are smart enough to realize that if the US military had really invented a fundamental breakthrough they wouldn't be spending a fortune on the B-21 program.
Most UFO stories are fairly easily debunked. Even if the this particular story was an outlier in apparent credibility, why would any think that a UFO story would be an effective way to spread FUD among US adversaries?
bingo. another disinfo campaign. intelligent aliens are just another made up bullshit story to distract people from other more important storeis and justify huge ass budget increases that go on for multiple decades.
there are more than enough idiots and suckers to persuade. this is the problem with democrazy. it's just one method for securing good leadership and it often can be systemically hacked. one way is to dumb down the population and feeed them nonsense. it works.
I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration. This is in the case if there is really no other way to traverse stars besides conventional rocketry.
But in case if there is a way to trick any of the fundamental physics we know after all, then very likely the guy will come right at our porch, and they've probably done so many times without us even noticing, and will only contact us, if ever, on their own terms.
Given the premise is right, and somebody can really do something on the level of fundamental physical force manipulation for space travel, then there would be no reason for them to not dispense with conventional space travel altogether, or at least to a reasonable extent where this technology is more practical than giant nuclear rockets.
And the same goes for things like stealth technology, or inertia control. If somebody can arbitrary manipulate gravity, entropy, or fundamental forces to travel stars, or make traversable wormholes, then inertia cancelation, invisibility by directly manipulating light, undetectable radio comms, and power sources unlimited or almost so by heatsink capacity should be child's play for them too.
This assumes they are not coming from some giant station on the other side of our sun, parked there for the last several hundred years. They could also be anywhere in our solar system, that our technology is not advanced enough to detect. We cant really keep track of all the space rocks floating near us and they aren't trying not to be seen.
And the same goes for things like stealth technology, or inertia control.
We have stealth techonology, don't we?
Inertia control is not needed if you can create a field. The problem with acceleration is that it needs to be transmited from the engine to the human body. That happens through the seat in planes or rockets.
But if you were able to create a field that uniformly affected all the molecules of everything into the ship, including human bodies, you could perform sudden turns without crushing the crew.
>I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration .
We have a tough time detecting asteroids until they've already flown by, I have a hard time believing we would spot a ship years in advance
Indeed, but take umbrage that no matter their level of technological sophistication, any race visiting us ij this manner would not only be very advanved, but also could not be hostile without violating or contradicting laws of the expanding universe, economics, and physics.
> I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration.
I think that they will teleport here and be minuscule and invisible (at first).
Anytime I try to pursue the UFO question I feel like I’m being intentionally gaslighted by government agencies. The public-ish analysis of UFOs, AATIP is an incredible farce. They focused on star trek warp drives and after the funding dried up they started hanging out with Blink 182 to smoke weed and pat each other on the back for being crazy alien believers. These aren’t sound scientific minds that are capable of analyzing the evidence available. Those people exist and I’m certain their analyses do as well, but no one gets to see them.
I struggle to even come up with narratives as to why this specific case would be made public. Perhaps the intelligence agencies knew it wouldn’t be possible to cover up so the best they can do is release the evidence that was expected to make its way to the public and say nothing about it officially. If I put on a tinfoil hat I could say that the AATIP’s purpose was to instill doubt that aliens exist, but that would imply that they do exist. It seems that the intelligence agencies are behaving like they want to give as little information as possible about it. I can’t imagine the AATIP was made top-down. It appears to just be a congressman’s publicity stunt.
Imagine trying to explain some fancy load balancing AWS deployment to somebody who has never used a computer beyond a flip phone. It would be completely foreign.
That’s me (and also nearly everybody here) with regards to aviation and war making aviation machines. So while these articles and stories are definitely interesting, they might as well be fairy tales. The way our minds are reconstructing these things, and the way the mind of somebody involved in the relevant fields here (whatever they even are!) are likely very different.
That all said: if somebody has a link to any more well informed discussions about this, I sure would love a link!
I have heard a couple of podcasts that had some very credible US pilots talking about this. I think detecting life on other planets or aliens here would be great (so long as they are not trying to kill me yada yada). But, the most down to earth explanation is signal/sensor warfare testing.
Bare with me for a moment. The web is part of the sensor array of a spider. There are species of insects that tap on spider's webs to send a false positive signal to the spider on the web that a tasty prey has become trapped. The spider goes over to where on the web the vibrations indicated the prey is trapped and bang the spider gets killed by the assassin bug.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11628322
they could make drones go a fuel wasting wild goose chases etc. Or make the other sides drone defend the eastern front while you fly in from the west etc.
The above discusses exploiting the Bethe Formula to produce a radiant point at some distant from a beam generator. IIUC the energy falloff suddenly increases below a threshold energy level therefore the particle beam will deposit most of its energy in a very short distance. Could the reported 'tic tacs' i.e. bright white elongated balls be the result of this? Would explain the supposedly physics defying nature of their aerial manoeuvres.
See also: the writing of Tom Mahood [1], some of the best and most authoritative I've ever seen on the subject. He also tears into Bob Lazar which is a nice bonus.
What I find kinda interesting about this is the HUD apparently being able to "lock on" or track or whatever the object.
Are these HUD things around the object just visual bounding boxes around something with high contrast, or are the HUDs doing sensor fusion with IR and radar and other things? Not just for UFOs but I've seen similar things from gun cam footage in Iraq etc and wondered how it works.
There is a Joe Rogan podcast with David Fravor, a pilot who also saw it. I believe he explains it's all visual locking but there are a lot if different camera types.
>Are these HUD things around the object just visual bounding boxes around something with high contrast, or are the HUDs doing sensor fusion with IR and radar and other things?
All of the above, and probably a bit more we're not really privy to.
Combination of IR contrast, sensor slaving and manual tracking, configured by the pilot as needed. The DCS flight simulator series has a pretty decent targeting pod simulation.
No active radar. All the tracking pods have FLIR/CCDs on them that allow tracking of objects (which I believe is based upon contrasting white hot / black hot returns). A "point track" for example would allow you to track an object on the ground as it is moving (important when using laser guided ordinance where the beam has to follow it).
> What I find kinda interesting about this is the HUD apparently
> being able to "lock on" or track or whatever the object.
And that's the answer to what this object was.
The tracking devices do not track regularly-flying objects so well, so how was this not-by-the-laws-of-physics object tracked? Because the object was dirt on the lens. This has been proven by several different methods. Firstly, the object stays on the same spot on the screen. Second, it rotates when the camera gimbal locks and rotates. Third, the filename of the published file is actually "GimbalLock" or something of the sort.
One of the most fascinating things about this UFO Navy story is that at least one of the UFO's employed radar jamming after being spotted.[0] To me, this is good evidence that we are not dealing with a currently unknown natural phenomina.
While I know that I'll never be able to sit down with the intelligence analysts who looked at this video and sensor information, I really wish I could convene some sort of group to do just that.
I'd love to see some calculations on how much energy this UFO would have needed to perform the maneuvers it did. Whether there were any observable atmospheric effects like a wake even though there was no exhaust seen. Did it exhibit observable inertia, in other words did it move like bad movie special effects, or did it move like something real?
In the comments in the NYMag original article, one person wonders if it was the result of some advanced spoofing/decoy technology. I'm not sure what could cause what the sensors observed, but the idea seems interesting and brings a cause "down to Earth" so to speak.
Hypothesis: Any aliens advanced enough to build an objecting moving as impossibly as the pilot says would also be advanced enough to not be detected doing so.
If the video is real then my guess is we are looking at a glider being towed at supersonic speed.
The air-tow could be flying higher in the atmosphere beyond the reach of basic ground defense systems. The glider would not give off a heat-plume but could have enormous maneuverability
Is there any part of this footage that can't be explained by a bit of matter stuck on the FLIR lens? Even it being apparently "cold" seems well explained by the dust/bug whatever casting a shadow onto the IR sensor array.
The pilots claim they physically saw it too. And the pilot who made the video was the 2nd group up from the first who claimed they saw it from their cockpits.
And the FLIR was tracking the target moving. If it was a piece of dust stuck on, it would have looked as if it were moving the same speed of the aircraft, wouldn't it?
So let me get this straight: We believe an alien civilization has traveled across the galaxy with faster-than-light technology, and has deployed aircraft that has broken our known laws of physics. But is susceptible to 1970s-era infrared radar technology? Okay. Got it.
While I don't think these UFOs are anything alien in nature at all, it's worth noting that we make absolutely zero effort to hide our space exploration probes and rovers from potential discovery.
My understanding is that a plasma stealth object should be high velocity and be optically bright to visual and IR. I don't maintain an hypothesis that that is the case but if any of my airmen would see such an object I would definitely like to have a report on that.
[+] [-] CommieBobDole|6 years ago|reply
Would be interesting to read the article about this in 50 years or so once the political landscape has changed and it's safe to declassify, but I doubt I'll be around then.
[+] [-] dvh|6 years ago|reply
In past decades whenever military pilot reported UFO they were laughed at, sent to psychologist, evaluated, sent behind the desk. Other pilots knew and when they saw something really weird they have kept it for themselves.
Then the higher ups panicked. If they don't report our drones, they will not report Chinese or Russian drones either. We have hundreds and thousands of eyes in the sky but they will not report because they are afraid to speak.
So they came up with a campaign. They started to publish official UFO footage and started more openly talk about it to show pilots that it is now ok to talk about UFO. Don't be afraid pilots, if you see something strange jus tell us, we take it seriously now.
There are no aliens. Videos you saw are created or modified to look legit, and officially supported or confirmed.
[+] [-] awb|6 years ago|reply
Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it.
It's not unrealistic to consider top secret tech as a possible explanation.
One counter point is usually: If we had tech this amazing, we'd be putting it to use commercially. However this tech might be autonomous and might need to be considering the G forces supposedly at play.
[+] [-] sambull|6 years ago|reply
I'm guessing this is part of the campaign, or else maybe alien tech? [1] I'll assume its to make someone else think we have tech we may not have.
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29232/navys-advanced-a...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjwkw/bob-lazar-says-the...
[+] [-] JimmyRuska|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corporate_shi11|6 years ago|reply
What could be the case is that the observed tic-tac UFO's are real alien craft, about which word is now leaking out, but the US military is now using the confusion surrounding them for their own purposes. Hey, why not use the confusion for our own advantage.
[+] [-] nradov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teslatelsa|6 years ago|reply
there are more than enough idiots and suckers to persuade. this is the problem with democrazy. it's just one method for securing good leadership and it often can be systemically hacked. one way is to dumb down the population and feeed them nonsense. it works.
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
But in case if there is a way to trick any of the fundamental physics we know after all, then very likely the guy will come right at our porch, and they've probably done so many times without us even noticing, and will only contact us, if ever, on their own terms.
Given the premise is right, and somebody can really do something on the level of fundamental physical force manipulation for space travel, then there would be no reason for them to not dispense with conventional space travel altogether, or at least to a reasonable extent where this technology is more practical than giant nuclear rockets.
And the same goes for things like stealth technology, or inertia control. If somebody can arbitrary manipulate gravity, entropy, or fundamental forces to travel stars, or make traversable wormholes, then inertia cancelation, invisibility by directly manipulating light, undetectable radio comms, and power sources unlimited or almost so by heatsink capacity should be child's play for them too.
[+] [-] wonderwonder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] preommr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narag|6 years ago|reply
We have stealth techonology, don't we?
Inertia control is not needed if you can create a field. The problem with acceleration is that it needs to be transmited from the engine to the human body. That happens through the seat in planes or rockets.
But if you were able to create a field that uniformly affected all the molecules of everything into the ship, including human bodies, you could perform sudden turns without crushing the crew.
[+] [-] TearsInTheRain|6 years ago|reply
We have a tough time detecting asteroids until they've already flown by, I have a hard time believing we would spot a ship years in advance
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OrgNet|6 years ago|reply
I think that they will teleport here and be minuscule and invisible (at first).
[+] [-] willis936|6 years ago|reply
I struggle to even come up with narratives as to why this specific case would be made public. Perhaps the intelligence agencies knew it wouldn’t be possible to cover up so the best they can do is release the evidence that was expected to make its way to the public and say nothing about it officially. If I put on a tinfoil hat I could say that the AATIP’s purpose was to instill doubt that aliens exist, but that would imply that they do exist. It seems that the intelligence agencies are behaving like they want to give as little information as possible about it. I can’t imagine the AATIP was made top-down. It appears to just be a congressman’s publicity stunt.
[+] [-] bloopernova|6 years ago|reply
Would be better to link to the source, surely?
[+] [-] blhack|6 years ago|reply
That’s me (and also nearly everybody here) with regards to aviation and war making aviation machines. So while these articles and stories are definitely interesting, they might as well be fairy tales. The way our minds are reconstructing these things, and the way the mind of somebody involved in the relevant fields here (whatever they even are!) are likely very different.
That all said: if somebody has a link to any more well informed discussions about this, I sure would love a link!
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ
Here's a short clip from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnIG-i2WCfg
He's really knowledgeable, has a ton of flight experience and carefully details everything his and the other pilots see from their aircraft.
[+] [-] Tistel|6 years ago|reply
Bare with me for a moment. The web is part of the sensor array of a spider. There are species of insects that tap on spider's webs to send a false positive signal to the spider on the web that a tasty prey has become trapped. The spider goes over to where on the web the vibrations indicated the prey is trapped and bang the spider gets killed by the assassin bug. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11628322
There is some evidence these signal warfare systems are being developed: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secret...
I think these are newest iterations of the Wild Weasel style of counter weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel
they could make drones go a fuel wasting wild goose chases etc. Or make the other sides drone defend the eastern front while you fly in from the west etc.
more signal warfare stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nulka
[+] [-] throwaway7951|6 years ago|reply
The above discusses exploiting the Bethe Formula to produce a radiant point at some distant from a beam generator. IIUC the energy falloff suddenly increases below a threshold energy level therefore the particle beam will deposit most of its energy in a very short distance. Could the reported 'tic tacs' i.e. bright white elongated balls be the result of this? Would explain the supposedly physics defying nature of their aerial manoeuvres.
[+] [-] andbberger|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strang...
[+] [-] ubertoop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hindsightbias|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|6 years ago|reply
Are these HUD things around the object just visual bounding boxes around something with high contrast, or are the HUDs doing sensor fusion with IR and radar and other things? Not just for UFOs but I've seen similar things from gun cam footage in Iraq etc and wondered how it works.
[+] [-] thdrdt|6 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Eco2s3-0zsQ
[+] [-] fit2rule|6 years ago|reply
All of the above, and probably a bit more we're not really privy to.
[+] [-] dharmab|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitteh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|6 years ago|reply
The tracking devices do not track regularly-flying objects so well, so how was this not-by-the-laws-of-physics object tracked? Because the object was dirt on the lens. This has been proven by several different methods. Firstly, the object stays on the same spot on the screen. Second, it rotates when the camera gimbal locks and rotates. Third, the filename of the published file is actually "GimbalLock" or something of the sort.
[+] [-] suby|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/navy-pilot-recalls-encounter-ufo-u...
[+] [-] mellosouls|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...
[+] [-] bloopernova|6 years ago|reply
I'd love to see some calculations on how much energy this UFO would have needed to perform the maneuvers it did. Whether there were any observable atmospheric effects like a wake even though there was no exhaust seen. Did it exhibit observable inertia, in other words did it move like bad movie special effects, or did it move like something real?
In the comments in the NYMag original article, one person wonders if it was the result of some advanced spoofing/decoy technology. I'm not sure what could cause what the sensors observed, but the idea seems interesting and brings a cause "down to Earth" so to speak.
[+] [-] mark-r|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvshepherd|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shartshooter|6 years ago|reply
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-nav...
[+] [-] bebop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|6 years ago|reply
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-a...
[+] [-] spookyuser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jostmey|6 years ago|reply
The air-tow could be flying higher in the atmosphere beyond the reach of basic ground defense systems. The glider would not give off a heat-plume but could have enormous maneuverability
[+] [-] JRKrause|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
And the FLIR was tracking the target moving. If it was a piece of dust stuck on, it would have looked as if it were moving the same speed of the aircraft, wouldn't it?
[+] [-] bloopernova|6 years ago|reply
The object had been observed before the pilot in the link flew. He was told to BOLO - be on the lookout - for this object.
[+] [-] CyanLite2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newnewpdro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elkos|6 years ago|reply
My understanding is that a plasma stealth object should be high velocity and be optically bright to visual and IR. I don't maintain an hypothesis that that is the case but if any of my airmen would see such an object I would definitely like to have a report on that.