So the anomaly that the carrier group tracked, then scrambled fighter jets for. The object that four different pilots saw visually, and was confirmed on multiple different sensors. That was camera glare?
The video is only one piece of the evidence. The pilots are trained, and other sensor systems confirmed what the camera was showing. This analysis is pretty flimsy.
The "saucer" shape and its rotation were IR glare, that's the point of the video. He's very clear that he's NOT debunking the existence of an object. The exhaust of a jet engine, or another high-heat signature, could cause such glare.
AFAICT no pilots saw this shape with their naked eye. They were miles away from the target and relying on what they saw via their sensors.
So actually Commander Fravor saw the object with his own eyes, he is one of the pilots who was sent in to engage the craft after it appeared on radar from the carrier group, here is a detailed video of him talking about the incident with Lex Fridman(AI reasearcher - MIT) on his podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E
Exactly. Zero of the GPs objections are inconsistent with this explanation. The carrier group tracked an unknown object and scrambled fighters to investigate. The pilots may have visually observed the object, but it would have been too far away to really ascertain any visual detail. Instead they relied on infrared sensors which… suffered from glare, and so rendered incorrect visuals for the object. Its strange shape and rotational behavior are now explained.
What remains is still an unidentified flying object, but one whose behavior is reasonably mundane and doesn't require advanced technology to explain.
The object might of existed for a millisecond. Test of a new stealth tech - quick directional laser burst to temporarily damage/blind IR camera. After that Jet was flying in circles trying to track its own camera glitch.
I don't know much about this whole story (I'm not a UFO person) and am learning most of what I know about it from this video and this thread, but: the people saying that this video depicts an actual object rotating in the sky appear to be making the extraordinary claim here: the connection between the rotation and the camera system seems compelling. The horizon is moving as the camera/plane moves; the object is not moving. You can't refute that with "these are highly trained fighter pilots": the horizon is moving with the camera, the object isn't. Training's got nothing to do with it. The shape we're looking at is, in part, an artifact of the camera, unless the aliens are somehow reprogramming the camera to fuck with us.
> The shape we're looking at is, in part, an artifact of the camera, unless the aliens are somehow reprogramming the camera to fuck with us.
It's possible the IR glare is an intentional countermeasure produced by the craft. It might sound far-fetched, but the military can already jam some cameras already, and they apparently license this technology too:
The first time these craft were spotted on radar was during a Navy exercise where they were testing new radar equipment, and the craft were coming from the direction of San Clemente island (an island that is a Navy base). Here's a short video that talks about the radar sighting:
Sightings of these UFOs have only ever been mentioned by US forces.
Who knows what is going on, but if I had to make a guess and I considered all of this information, it seems likely that the "UFOs" are experimental US aircraft.
Fraver (not sure he was one of the ones in this incident) has a history of UFO pranks, shutting down engines and gliding over campfires then lighting up after burners when right over them, explicitly to give a UFO experience, and someone found a contemporaneous report of him doing it, so it wasn't just a story.
As a former member of USMC Aviation, it's valid to point out that skilled navy pilots can have some of the same range of differences in belief, action and motivation that the general populace does. I flew with a pilot on a transport helicopter that was blasting Eye of the Tiger and taking every turn at maximum bank, constantly looking for AA to get to fire at us so he could call in F-18s and watch the fireworks. Some of them are cranks.
BUT... I don't think any US military pilot expects their cockpit recordings or FLIR video to be public at some later time, I'm not sure what the motivation would be to lie about this stuff. The harm to you as a respected pilot would be fairly severe, and you'd have to get your co-pilot to go along with it.
"Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin
That "four different pilots" stuff has not been confirmed as far as I know. All people involved in these stories are hustlers, including that one ex-pilot who peddles the story.
You must look at every statement they make separately. They give one fact that can be verified and then they tie lies or unverified stuff on that.
> btw. Luis Elizondo is has not been charge of any UFO stuff
I have no conviction on the UFO phenomenon other than it would be cool if aliens exist, and even cooler if they were already on Earth. Still, I can't get enough of it – I especially love thinking about the most epistemically offensive conspiracy theories, like "the moon is a spaceship" or "Antarctica is an alien base." I sometimes fall asleep to Ancient Aliens.
But, fact is, the only government agents with any "authority" in this "movement" – which became especially fervent around the dissolution of Q-Anon, btw – are people who worked for DIA in Information Operations. That is, their specialty is in manipulating the public, not alien technology.
The "Lue anon" moniker about sums it up. My theory is the recent reinvigoration of the UFO movement is an attempt by US intel agencies to pre-emptively herd the most impressionable people with their own controlled conspiracy, rather than allow a hostile actor to manipulate them during the next election.
Also, I predicted this 10 months ago, the last time "disclosure" was imminent, in a comment [0] that I think has aged well so far.
I'm quite surprised to see this community be so on board with the "Oh really, the obvious saucer was lens glare and not aliens?" train.
USAF and reitred officals have gone on record to say that they actively release doctored footage and/or false narratives, sometimes via pop culture figures, to muddy waters on current technology or to sow discourse among enemies. This reeks of n example of that, and not aliens.
The gimbal video is not a video of the object from the Nimitz incident. There is a video of that but it’s less compelling in terms of evidence, but also afaik not cleanly debunked. (I think it’s called FLIR?)
They're all ATFLIR videos. It's basically the same thing - a far away hot object, likely another aircraft, turns into an IR cylinder-shaped blog on screen which is then incorrectly interpreted as being an actual cylinder. The apparent movement at the end is just the ATFLIR losing lock as the guy constantly zooms in and out.
Naive question: If a carrier group cannot, in essentially real-time, document three dimensional trajectories at this point (four if you include speed), what possible defense can they claim to have against evasive incoming missiles, etc.
To actually answer your question, they probably can sometimes track four dimensional trajectories, however not always, and they are not going to give you that data because that would reveal how good their tracking algorithms and sensors are. Sensor fusion is a thing:
Even with fusion, the fewer the sensors the less accurate the tracking will be. In these videos there may only be one or two sensors actually tracking the object.
Hitting a target with a missile is a somewhat different problem, you just have to get the missile there based on whatever data you have (which might be from the carriers sensor data, the missiles own sensors, or both). For example an IR missile doesn't know the location of its target, it just knows how far off center the IR light from the target is from the missiles current flight path and it can correct course based on that simple angular offset to eventually hit the target (with some additional math since the missile has to go to where the target will be when it gets there.) Similarly stopping an evasive incoming missile does not require that you know its exact location. Also as a defensive missile gets closer to the incoming missile it may be able to get better data on where its target actually is and how it is moving. Missiles move very fast so on the final approach there is not much ability to change direction at all, it would require too many g's to turn the missile, so you can model the final approach as a straight line. When it's close your own tracking systems probably work better as well because the targets cross section takes up more of the sky.
Carriers are most likely partly obsoleted by hypersonic missiles that travel and maneuver at mach 20 (which Russia and China have), in addition to 100 megaton nuclear torpedoes that travel at 120mph (which Russia has).
Do you have links to reading more about this? The video saying it was glare made it seem like the object was very far from the jet, much farther then the naked eye could see. Was it closer at some point?
> So the anomaly that the carrier group tracked, then scrambled fighter jets for. The object that four different pilots saw visually, and was confirmed on multiple different sensors. That was camera glare?
I don't think we can trust the accounts of anyone in the employ of the government, past or present, when it comes to this kind of thing.
For all we know to misinform is the mission, propaganda if you will.
Consider how much of what you said above is practically verbatim regurgitation of their vernacular. Jargon is often abused to sound qualified, smart, and authoritative. AKA B.S. alert.
Flimsy is an extremely generous and flattering word if you know anything about the details of this case or the testimony of the Navy's top pilots who witnessed and tracked this object from different vantage points both visually and with instruments.
^This is the key point. These objects have been tracked on radar, FLIR, and multiple pilot witness testimony off both coasts for decades now. Attempting to debunk a single one of these three leaked videos is pointless because they do not show the entire context of the events happening.
I implore everyone to watch these two interviews with Christopher Melon, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. And to read the DNI report on UAPs It will change your entire perception of these incidents and show you to view them as true national security issues.
There are unknown objects flying with impunity in our restricted military airspace, some that exhibit characteristics that nothing of human origin can accomplish. This should terrify you.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Please explain to me your logic. I'm just listing things that people with credibility in our government said, including the Department of National Intelligence.
I agree that there's something in these videos - at least in Gimbal. I don't think it's a saucer-shaped thing or necessarily of extraterrestrial origin. It could be a drone (either ours - another branch of DoD/govt - or another nation's) etc. Still an interesting mystery, but no proof of anything extraordinary IMHO.
In the case of relying on Christopher Mellon's credentials, I'd point out that he has a commercial interest of some kind with To The Stars Academy, the production company which seems to be behind all of these videos' presence on the History channel.
In their 2021 annual meeting notes [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b5a458fe749405f83225...], To the Stars Academy notes that "Christopher Mellon, a member of TTSA’s advisory board, [is] no longer with the company" implying he was employed by them in some fashion. Thus prior to 2021, he likely stood to benefit commercially from these films' distribution, particularly when he was quoted alongside them.
Why should a peaceful demonstration of technical superiority terrify anyone?
It's clear whomever, or whatever, possesses this superior technology could fly circles around and/or obliterate us on a whim, but has expressly decided not to, and instead simply announced: "Hey, I have this."
If they/it perceived us as a threat, we'd surely be gone already. That leaves only our hopefully sane response, to influence what happens next.
“Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He is a private equity investor and an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science”
Equity investor. No conflicts there!
“in our restricted military airspace”
In fact, they’re actually the most heavily instrumented research, development, test and training areas on the planet. Let me repeat that: research, development and test.
I honestly don’t know what to make of these observations other than I’m utterly convinced they’re not alien, super high tech or break the laws of physics (eg inertia). There was no alien crash in Roswell. I also file believe any government is competent enough for the claimed cover up and associated psyops.
What I do find interesting is the overlap between people who buy into various conspiracy theories and people who are religious, were religious or would otherwise be likely to be religious.
There’s some fascinating psychology here and I think it boils down to a combination of wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan rather than just a collection of random stuff that just happens.
“Can’t be explained” is typically “hasn’t been explained yet”. Lack of an explanation is nothing more than that. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I approach this from the other direction. Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide.
Like this is Main Character Syndrome at its finest.
> wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan
You may not have meant this by your comment, but in general I find a related analysis common among atheists, that religious people believe what they do because it feels good. I find that's often wrong, and when generally applied condescending, as if atheists are simply more emotionally mature. On the contrary many religious people will tell you they believe what they do because it seems to them to be true.
One might consider the existence of the universe extraordinary evidence (for the existence of God).
That said I think we can mostly agree that based on what we know so far, "aliens" is a fairly implausible explanation for any given unexplained phenomenon. Where ever you fall on that debate, I don't think it has anything to do with religious beliefs except as far as the biases of the people who conduct these psychology studies goes.
Albert Einstein was once asked to clarify his faith, here is his reply:
“Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”
I read this often and maintain the attitude that scripture, science, art are all branches of the same Tree.
You can't really extrapolate being alone in the universe from "aliens aren't visiting us." The fact that we exist at all, especially as a random occurrence of events, would suggest it's not that bizarre of an event. If we were single celled organisms having this conversation, then yeah, life outside of earth would seem more unlikely.
But we have 4.543 billion years worth of evidence showing that life REALLY likes to live. To get from a single celled organism to me typing to you over the internet tells me there's probably something universal to this process.
To me it's a lot more "Main Character Syndrome" to suggest we are wholly unique and alone in the universe. We are the special chosen species that made it out of an infinite number of probabilities. Sounds insane.
Of all the life we can see only one (or a few for the more generous of you) species has what humans commonly call intelligence.
Intelligence as we commonly refer to it is not a given in evolution. Evolution seeks forward propagation of genetic material, it doesn't seek an "intelligent" state.
It's reasonable to assume there is life elsewhere in the universe. It's quite a bit more of a stretch to assume there is _intelligent_ life elsewhere in the universe, aside from the problem of defining what intelligence is.
AC Clarke posited perhaps extra-terrestrial life came, they observed & they quarantined our corner of the galaxy to inhibit the escape of slavery, murder & environmental destruction.
For all we know, it takes a whole universe banging molecules together before metabolizing self-replicating life randomly arises. If it has only emerged one time in the entire universe, nothing would look different to us than it does right now.
Or maybe it happens all the time. But with only one sample, we have no data either way.
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics
This doesn't account for the fact that you don't know what - if any - benefits do exotic materials and funky physics might bring if they exist and are feasible to exploit. The benefits might be so much larger than Dyson Swarms, that it would be wastful\unnecessary to use Dyson Swarms, except maybe as a hobby or as a low tech fallback for civilizations like camping enthusiasts and survivalists. Why bother with stars when you have tech to live in the 21 dimensions that those born-yesterday biologicals can't even sense yet ?
The Dyson 'Paradox' doesn't strike me as much of a paradox, imagine if a group of ants looked at the sky and wondered why aren't extraterrestials building tunnels inside the moon's regolith like ants do on Earth. It's just assuming too much. It's of course a valid scenario, it just isn't the only one.
The Dyson Swarm is more or less a science fiction concept. Is its lack of existence really your reason for believing we’re alone in the universe?
You seem keen to make fun of dogmatic people but attaching a hypothetical concept which is so trivial and fringe to your mental model seems like pretty dogmatic behavior. If you’d never heard of a Dyson Swarm, like the vast, vast majority of people haven’t, would your view of extraterrestrial life have significantly changed?
The problem with your comment is you just lumped together a string of un-credible events and then summarise you're not convinced. To be frank Roswell and psyops (whatever that is) would not be enough to utterly convince me too. What I do find very interesting though is credible recent eye witness testimonies coming from US Navy pilots and the work at Harvard University for the Galileo Project, along with the other many recent activities around the study of UAPs (whatever they might be).
The problem as I see it with this area is it's been far too stigmatised, so no researchers would ever dare touch it for fear of being labelled conspiracy theory believing nutcases. That sentiment is now dying off thankfully and we can start to find out what on earth is going on.
I'm surprised you're more convinced by eye witness testimonies. People are notoriously unreliable. If anything, this glare is better proof of green men than just talk.
How are you utterly convinced when it can't be proven true or false and don't have any other explanation for it? Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them?
We don't have extraordinary evidence therefore it's not possible that it's anything weird doesn't seem very scientific.
>Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them?
Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way
There’s still a huge engineering gap between our current tech and the theoretical possibility of a Dyson Swarm. I don’t find it at all implausible that such a thing would need too much energy, effort, collective will, or some other resource, to make it practical. There could still be plenty of stealthy sub-Dyson civilizations, or even supra-Dyson civilizations that have found it in their interest not to be detectable.
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide.
Robin Hanson has the most plausible ET hypothesis to explain these UFO observations. Basically it goes:
1) Life only evolved once in the galaxy.
2) However it spread to one or more stars its system of origin through the process of panspermia.
3) This sister planet that shares a common life origin with us evolved an advanced civilization that predates ours by 10-100 million years.
4) However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres, this sister civilization developed a highly anti-growth world government.
5) They've sent local probes or outposts to study us because we're interesting as a sister branch in the tree of life, and also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This explains why we have spacefaring ETs poking around but no resource gobbling Dyson spheres expanding through the light clone. If civilizations were widespread, then almost certainly one would be gobbling resources. But if there are only two civilizations, ours and theirs, it's quite believable that the earlier of the two fell into an anti-growth world government.
The idea of panspermia isn't a new one. There are several variations.
The very early universe was relatively warm. Simple or even complex life could've evolved and spread through parts of the Universe with relative ease given the much shorter distances. It seems highly unlikely though given the rarity of metals (in the astronomical sense; meaning anything other than hydrogen and helium) and the likely needed timescales. This probably means at best it was organic molecules of some level of complexity.
There are later versions of this where panspermia occurred much more recently, either intentionally or not.
Whatever the case it's all unprovable speculation. If we ultimately the same unlikely patterns repeating on different wrolds then I guess we can revisit.
So how recent in this hypothesis did this occur? There are fossil records for people going back millions of years. Are we talking all life? Or just people? If it's all life then we need to go back billions of years, at which point we're just talking about spreading amino acids. Such a connection will be similar to our fraternal bond with bananas.
> However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres
This seems unlikely. Why? Because the tech for a Dyson Swarm is basically stainless steel, solar panels and the ability to build things in space in large quantities. The last one is significant of course but is largely gated on the high cost of getting things into orbit, which is something likely to plummet in the coming centuries.
Saying we could build a self-sustaining orbital within 1,000 years I don't think is a stretch. Only industrial scale separates building 1 and building a million.
But there's another problem: people often neglect the energy cost of interstellar travel. It's... massive. And this is even assuming you solve the reaction mass problem. Interstellar travel almost seems predicated on a Dyson Swarm simpsly to have sufficient energy.
> ... also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This is a well-trodden avenue of thought on the Fermi Paradox. What if alien civilizations just stop growing? If there's 1, sure that might be possible. But what if there were 1,000? Would they all follow this path? It gets increasingly unlikely that not one would grow significantly. Non-growth civilizations would be at an extreme disadvantage with another who has vastly more energy and matter at their disposal. Like you almost have to grow just in case someone else does.
But all of this just seems like highly selective curve overfitting to reach the desired conclusion that UFOs are alien in origin.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that when people who hold power over large groups of people actively mislead them and deny them of a source of authority, those people grasp at what pieces of information they do have in order to build a narrative that isn't tainted by lies.
It is, and I cannot stress this enough, entirely unhelpful for you to ascribe it to main character syndrome or compare it to the belief in an omnipotent God.
If sources of truth in human societies like governments and scientific institutions would stop lying or misleading people nearly constantly then you could call conspiracy people lunatics, or fringe. But you simply cannot.
Not only are people being lied to, but they are being actively disinformed for "their own good." There are massive socializing forces that have taken an active role in manipulating society based around the idea that they know better.
And the ironic part is that, to a degree, they do know better. People act stupid in groups and have important information WITHHELD for various reasons that make it impossible to discern the truth.
If you want to start minimizing the amount of bullshit beliefs that people hold, supernatural or otherwise, you can start by tearing down the systems that are used to create false narratives which push people into those beliefs.
I think you hit on the key part of conspiracy thinking. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that many of the most conspiracy minded are also extremely religious, in the US anyway. I don't know anything about conspiracy thinking in the context of Islam or Hinduism, for example.
It seems like the tendency to accept a higher power in control of your life and the world leads to believing in other earthly powers being able to exert vast control over the world.
In France, it was also deeply religion people of Christian or Muslim faith who felt is was their duty to tell me about the shadow groups controlling the world. The best part was that these shadow groups were all French, based in Paris.
Dyson Swarms are only plausible if your society is still stuck in an exponential growth mode. It assumes technological advancement, but stagnant sociological development, or perhaps even worse; pathological development, like a hegemonising swarm.
I think that many UFO theories make the same mistakes. They assume high tech aliens with low tech motives.
I mostly agree with your take, but I'll pick on this sentence:
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way
The fact that we can come up with the idea of a Dyson Swarm doesn't mean that not finding any in our observations results in we "being alone in the galaxy". It's also Main Character Syndrome, in a way.
Even discarding the idea of alien life being so different from ours that we wouldn't recognize it even if we were looking right at it, and assuming a "human like civilization", it's perfectly possible for there being unknown physics to us that make the idea of a Dyson Swarm unnecessary. Using our own civilization as an example, in the 1950s and 60s we did all of our data broadcasting over radio waves, and built huge powerful antennas that screamed about our presence to the wider universe. People then thought "well, if we're broadcasting all this stuff, where are the alien broadcasts? why can't we hear them? we must be alone in the galaxy". Fast-forward to now. Our current tech allows pretty much all communications to be over cables, and we're being much less wasteful with our emmiting; our radio emissions are diminishing over time.
So, not a century has passed, and already newer technology has proven our assumptions of alien life wrong. Why would it be any different with Dyson Swarms? You can't know how more advanced technology looks like, you can only extrapolate with what we have now.
Atheists have religious beliefs too, they just believe in different things. Atheists are no better than any other humans. There is nothing special about an atheist. They are just as susceptible as any other human. I agree with your post other than this portion.
I think a lot of people just find the topic of conspiracy theories interesting and entertaining. You don't need to hate on them for what is essentially a hobby.
Totaly true . Look at alex jones. He is a full blown crazy person that believes in the supremacy of the christian race… oh yes racism goes also realy well with religion
- There are visual observations, and what are, ( by military standards), flimsy short images/video.
- This analysis partially explains one part of it, without excluding the presence of an object.
- There is also Radar data, but it has not been published or time correlated to the reported visual observations.
Observations:
- These Aliens only seem to want to goof around with folksy US pilots.
- Pilots known to simulate UFO sightings, fans of UFO invasion stories and stories of Russians shooting UFO's and getting shot back. ( watch the interview...).
- These Aliens show up exclusively during their training time and with sightings restricted to areas with US carrier groups exercises.
Also...
- The Aliens don't show up with their "Tic Tac's" or seem to be interested on the Ukraine conflict.
- They don't care about EU or Latin America citizens...
- Don't want to play around with the Russian or Chinese Air Force.
- They don't show up in the data of any of the existing Military satellites capable of reading a bus ticket on the ground from 400 km.
- These Aliens don't show up in the observations of the
thousands of professional and amateur astronomers,
that scan the sky a total of thousands of hours every
night, using some of the most exquisite optical instruments available.
I would say: They either don't exist, or if they do, they are pretty dumb and we have nothing to fear.
The sightings are military classified aircraft, explaining why they appear during trainings. The govt would rather have you believe they are UFOs than the public suspecting where tax dollars are being funneled, and enemies being weary.
Because some of the reported changes of speed are not within any technology conceivable for the next 100 years. Like physically doing Mach 200 with no noise or sonic boom and show up 80 Miles ( the way point of the interview...) after a few seconds. ( And how did they know where the way point was?)
What is the point of this story? Someone lacking context could watch this and arrive at the conclusion that "the Navy video of a UFO has a simple conventional explanation", which is how the presenter delivers his arguments. He meticulously demonstrates that the shape of the object which is the subject of the video is an artifact of camera glare from overexposure. In case you are not convinced, he breaks it down into four reasons, supporting each of them with data based on a detailed understanding of the system. If you are still not convinced that this shake is camera glare by the end of the video, I would be surprised.
And yet, whether the shape of the subject is representative of the object or an artifact of the camera is almost irrelevant to whether or not this is a video that should be investigated. The source of the glare is clearly not part of the camera or the aircraft. We should not treat the silhouette of the object as valuable data, but it says nothing of the actual object that is being tracked. The presenter does not suggest this, and the post spins the whole event as being
"debunked". I don't know why "debunking" things seems to have become a cottage industry, but there was considerable effort put into analyzing and visually modeling this thoroughly condescending presentation.
He literally says something to the effect of "I'm only saying that the glare is obscuring the true shape of the object" in the first minutes of the video.
Yet the title of the article says the video was camera glare. Which doesn't even make sense. But what it suggests is that the entire contents can be explained away as camera glare. So blame the media in this case perhaps?
The intention of the video is to show that there is no advanced technology or unexplainable phenomena captured in the video. If this is already evident to you, then the video isn't for you. But there are a lot of people who watch this video and think the object itself is rotating or deforming strangely, when in reality, all evidence suggests it's just some kind of terrestrial aircraft. Whether they know who/what is driving the aircraft is up to the Navy.
Mick West debunked these to my satisfaction ages ago. The only question I have left is whether the whole thing was a US Navy psyop or whether the navy was just looking the other way and playing coy when those pilots were creating a retirement career in UFOlogy.
People read "Navy confirms authenticity of the video" as "This is important and Navy can't explain it." (if they try).
Only thing Navy does it confirms that the video is real. They don't say that they have even tried to identify or that there is any reason to identify. They have hundreds or thousands of hours of video or radar images of drones etc. they don't care to identify.
Navy does not engage with these hustlers from "To the stars academy" at all. That's the only good response. To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (media & entertainment company) makes this stuff up and sells it.
> People read "Navy confirms authenticity of the video" as "This is important and Navy can't explain it."
Precisely. There is a huge gap between what the Navy has actually claimed about the videos and what people think the Navy has claimed. 'The video is authentic' is not the same as 'the video shows what it's purported to show.'
are you kidding now? that pilot does not even know how cameras work at all and your using him ???
this American pilot does not know how depth of field works... can't even notice in his own video recordings, this beyond funny. He thinks you can't have objects at different distances in focus at the same time ahahaha, does not get how parallax works... gave up after those dumb errors and smug attitude as he was saying such dumb things, i bet he made even more mistakes.
is he really a "fighter pilot" or they just not trained to understand their gear?
That is possible, but I think strains credibility. The GOFAST video is egregious, I find it hard to believe nobody in the US Navy was able to calculate the actual [mundane, very... balloon-like] speed of that object using basic trigonometry. I think it's more likely the Navy knew there was nothing actually exotic in that video.
The Defense Department described the subject of GOFAST, Gimble and FLIR videos as "UAV, Balloons, and other UAS". 'Balloons'; they know what it is. They're not even lying, they're being coy or misleading.
i think they are, there is a video of a "fighter pilot" who does not understand basics of a cameras... he thinks you can't focus on objects at different distances at the same time.... how did he ever get to fly a jet? or parallax i mean he should know how that works
The UAP report debunks the idea that all the evidence the government has has been debunked. Time will tell but the report reversed Project Blue Book, which ruled out non-human technology.
Well, the only reason they were scrambled to begin with is that they had been tracking these objects for weeks using advanced radar. As I understand it, the radar is based on multiple resolutions. The active radar can point in the direction of objects of interest and get very very precise measurements. It's not just the video, its the radar data.
The thing that pushed me over the edge in believing these things is the long podcast interview between Commander David Fravor and Lex Fridman.
Unfortunately, radar data - from all the incidents in question - will never be released, as the hardware involved is highly classified. We only get footage from the IR camera because the IR tech is not "classified" (basically off-the-shelf FLIR cameras with fancy object tracking software).
Not that I know of, so I take your point there. Here's a related video with some radar data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh4QngYJG4I . In the interview, Frevor does talk about the radar and instrumentation on the plane, but it's been a while since I listened to it.
Fravor is a convincing person, but he's also ultimately an asset of the US military. I want to believe him, but unfortunately the simplest and most likely explanation for this situation is that he's lying, and lying in combination with other people. Most likely because they were incentivized or asked to.
I listened to maybe half of that interview, and I really really do not buy the response to Lex's question of "Why didn't this cause more commotion in the ranks?"
Fravor said because he was the commander of 17 airmen and 300 sailors and has the weight of that command on him. I get it, but this is also his job, and we all tend to acclimate to our jobs. I don't think this guy and all other witnesses were so burdened with the idea of being a CO that they weren't able to process a potentially world-changing event. If this was in the middle of a real war and real combat - of course that's different. But this was just during the millionth training exercise of this guy's career.
He was also quick to move on from this question, and did so without any prompting from Lex. He went on to what sounded like a rehearsed talking point (I'm sure because he's said it so many times) about how he doesn't get paid for these appearances, but there's no way to know what other outside incentives he may have to go on these shows. That Lex doesn't push back on this at all is disappointing, but I get that he's not there to interrogate him.
The final sticking point - Fravor admits that he's an apologist for secrecy and the US government hiding things for reasons of "national security". Clearly someone with this belief would welcome the idea of lying repeatedly, very publicly, to help cover something up. What I'm implying is that something did happen that day (that is much more mundane), but we're not getting the honest story, and Fravor outright suggesting it was something we know to be impossible with currently technology is likely obfuscating the truth of something that is probably an embarrassing mistake/leak/something that the US government doesn't want there to be public clarity on.
Your interpretation is entirely plausible. At the same time, I found the interview to be very convincing in terms of Fravor's credibility. He mentions details about who was with him, bar scenes, and generally comes across as a professional. Historical sightings (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter ) and angelic phenomena ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over... ) are much older and at least predate the current US military objectives.
It's also totally possible that this is some kind of funding grab. That Rubio et al. are simply pawns being teased and pushed around in the name of national security to fund large and barely monitored government research and military funding. It could be some of both.
A good point brought up by Fravor and conveniently ignored by people is that when describing the incident, they saw multiple objects. Their camera pods, however, could only track one at a time.
Isn't he only debunking the image that appeared on the video as being glare as opposed to the actual object? So the object is real, but what appeared in the video is glare, not an actual representation of the object?
West contends that what is being seen in the video is actually infrared glare that hides a hot object behind it and only rotates in the way it does because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.
UFO-ers were using things like the rotation speed as definitive evidence of some like other-worldly advanced technology. Demonstrating that it was the glare/gimble brings it back into the realm of just a normal far-away plane. It also casts doubt on the expertise of the pilots/military who didn't realize what happened.
Yes, that is correct. There was still an unidentified flying object, but the remaining aspects of its behavior do not require invoking advanced unknown technology to explain.
IR video tends to bloom. If the object is hot enough, (for instance, a jet engine exhaust, a burning vehicle, a refinery flare...) you'll have a blob of smudge around/behind it on the video. The video is contending that the rotation of what is seen on the video isn't the object itself rotating. Instead, the blob is elongated as a result of glare/lens flare/diffraction gradient, and this elongation is aligned with the rotational axis of the gimbal. As the gimbal nears gimbal lock, it is forced to rapidly rotate to continue tracking the object. This rapid rotation of the gimbal causes the glare to rapidly rotate.
I do have a background in IR video, gimbals, and translating between gimbal telemetry and real life coordinates and the explanation in the video looks good to me.
Readit News
The video is only one piece of the evidence. The pilots are trained, and other sensor systems confirmed what the camera was showing. This analysis is pretty flimsy.
AFAICT no pilots saw this shape with their naked eye. They were miles away from the target and relying on what they saw via their sensors.
This analysis doesn’t reject an actual object being tracked: it confirms it and describes it as one that causes IR glare!
What remains is still an unidentified flying object, but one whose behavior is reasonably mundane and doesn't require advanced technology to explain.
Dead Comment
It's possible the IR glare is an intentional countermeasure produced by the craft. It might sound far-fetched, but the military can already jam some cameras already, and they apparently license this technology too:
https://techlinkcenter.org/technologies/selective-camera-jam...
The US Navy has (admittedly controversial) patents for technologies that could produce a craft with these flight characteristics:
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Cezar+Pais
The first time these craft were spotted on radar was during a Navy exercise where they were testing new radar equipment, and the craft were coming from the direction of San Clemente island (an island that is a Navy base). Here's a short video that talks about the radar sighting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyP79v9e84
In the Nimitz case, the "UFO" disappeared, and then met the pilots at their rendezvous point. How did it know where the rendezvous point was?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBpcfeHI0Kk
Sightings of these UFOs have only ever been mentioned by US forces.
Who knows what is going on, but if I had to make a guess and I considered all of this information, it seems likely that the "UFOs" are experimental US aircraft.
This is in the first 15 seconds of the YouTube video.
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Fraver (not sure he was one of the ones in this incident) has a history of UFO pranks, shutting down engines and gliding over campfires then lighting up after burners when right over them, explicitly to give a UFO experience, and someone found a contemporaneous report of him doing it, so it wasn't just a story.
BUT... I don't think any US military pilot expects their cockpit recordings or FLIR video to be public at some later time, I'm not sure what the motivation would be to lie about this stuff. The harm to you as a respected pilot would be fairly severe, and you'd have to get your co-pilot to go along with it.
"Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin
I find it very, very, very hard to believe that a fighter pilot would _shut down_ his engines in flight, at night, even more so if it's for a stunt.
Slightly more believable if he went to idle, and then full military power. Slightly.
You must look at every statement they make separately. They give one fact that can be verified and then they tie lies or unverified stuff on that.
btw. Luis Elizondo is has not been charge of any UFO stuff. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history...
I have no conviction on the UFO phenomenon other than it would be cool if aliens exist, and even cooler if they were already on Earth. Still, I can't get enough of it – I especially love thinking about the most epistemically offensive conspiracy theories, like "the moon is a spaceship" or "Antarctica is an alien base." I sometimes fall asleep to Ancient Aliens.
But, fact is, the only government agents with any "authority" in this "movement" – which became especially fervent around the dissolution of Q-Anon, btw – are people who worked for DIA in Information Operations. That is, their specialty is in manipulating the public, not alien technology.
The "Lue anon" moniker about sums it up. My theory is the recent reinvigoration of the UFO movement is an attempt by US intel agencies to pre-emptively herd the most impressionable people with their own controlled conspiracy, rather than allow a hostile actor to manipulate them during the next election.
Also, I predicted this 10 months ago, the last time "disclosure" was imminent, in a comment [0] that I think has aged well so far.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339120
The late Senator Harry Reid of Nevada disagreed with you. <https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/luis-elizondo...>
USAF and reitred officals have gone on record to say that they actively release doctored footage and/or false narratives, sometimes via pop culture figures, to muddy waters on current technology or to sow discourse among enemies. This reeks of n example of that, and not aliens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/202...
They're all ATFLIR videos. It's basically the same thing - a far away hot object, likely another aircraft, turns into an IR cylinder-shaped blog on screen which is then incorrectly interpreted as being an actual cylinder. The apparent movement at the end is just the ATFLIR losing lock as the guy constantly zooms in and out.
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Naive question: If a carrier group cannot, in essentially real-time, document three dimensional trajectories at this point (four if you include speed), what possible defense can they claim to have against evasive incoming missiles, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion
Even with fusion, the fewer the sensors the less accurate the tracking will be. In these videos there may only be one or two sensors actually tracking the object.
Hitting a target with a missile is a somewhat different problem, you just have to get the missile there based on whatever data you have (which might be from the carriers sensor data, the missiles own sensors, or both). For example an IR missile doesn't know the location of its target, it just knows how far off center the IR light from the target is from the missiles current flight path and it can correct course based on that simple angular offset to eventually hit the target (with some additional math since the missile has to go to where the target will be when it gets there.) Similarly stopping an evasive incoming missile does not require that you know its exact location. Also as a defensive missile gets closer to the incoming missile it may be able to get better data on where its target actually is and how it is moving. Missiles move very fast so on the final approach there is not much ability to change direction at all, it would require too many g's to turn the missile, so you can model the final approach as a straight line. When it's close your own tracking systems probably work better as well because the targets cross section takes up more of the sky.
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/03/russias-new-pos...
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/10/14/will-ground-bas...
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I don't think we can trust the accounts of anyone in the employ of the government, past or present, when it comes to this kind of thing.
For all we know to misinform is the mission, propaganda if you will.
Consider how much of what you said above is practically verbatim regurgitation of their vernacular. Jargon is often abused to sound qualified, smart, and authoritative. AKA B.S. alert.
I came here to say this.
There will be no further discussion.
Dead Comment
Flimsy is an extremely generous and flattering word if you know anything about the details of this case or the testimony of the Navy's top pilots who witnessed and tracked this object from different vantage points both visually and with instruments.
I implore everyone to watch these two interviews with Christopher Melon, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. And to read the DNI report on UAPs It will change your entire perception of these incidents and show you to view them as true national security issues.
1. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V0uWX1C4m8xEL0HHYqbnE?si=e...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdxcgS4spRM&t=1393s
3. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelima...
There are unknown objects flying with impunity in our restricted military airspace, some that exhibit characteristics that nothing of human origin can accomplish. This should terrify you.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Please explain to me your logic. I'm just listing things that people with credibility in our government said, including the Department of National Intelligence.
In the case of relying on Christopher Mellon's credentials, I'd point out that he has a commercial interest of some kind with To The Stars Academy, the production company which seems to be behind all of these videos' presence on the History channel.
In their 2021 annual meeting notes [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b5a458fe749405f83225...], To the Stars Academy notes that "Christopher Mellon, a member of TTSA’s advisory board, [is] no longer with the company" implying he was employed by them in some fashion. Thus prior to 2021, he likely stood to benefit commercially from these films' distribution, particularly when he was quoted alongside them.
It's clear whomever, or whatever, possesses this superior technology could fly circles around and/or obliterate us on a whim, but has expressly decided not to, and instead simply announced: "Hey, I have this."
If they/it perceived us as a threat, we'd surely be gone already. That leaves only our hopefully sane response, to influence what happens next.
Being terrified would be exactly wrong.
Equity investor. No conflicts there!
“in our restricted military airspace”
In fact, they’re actually the most heavily instrumented research, development, test and training areas on the planet. Let me repeat that: research, development and test.
https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/navbas...
What an incredible coincidence. Alien trolls or Occam’s razor?
And with all that, all we get are appeals to authority and fuzzy pics.
It’s akin to “Air Force pilots bewildered by objects over Area 51, must be aliens!”
What I do find interesting is the overlap between people who buy into various conspiracy theories and people who are religious, were religious or would otherwise be likely to be religious.
There’s some fascinating psychology here and I think it boils down to a combination of wishful thinking and the comfort derived from there being a Grand Plan rather than just a collection of random stuff that just happens.
“Can’t be explained” is typically “hasn’t been explained yet”. Lack of an explanation is nothing more than that. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I approach this from the other direction. Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way and even if we aren’t it requires an awful lot of hubris to suggest a species would spend the considerable effort and tens of thousands of years to come here and hide.
Like this is Main Character Syndrome at its finest.
You may not have meant this by your comment, but in general I find a related analysis common among atheists, that religious people believe what they do because it feels good. I find that's often wrong, and when generally applied condescending, as if atheists are simply more emotionally mature. On the contrary many religious people will tell you they believe what they do because it seems to them to be true.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
One might consider the existence of the universe extraordinary evidence (for the existence of God).
That said I think we can mostly agree that based on what we know so far, "aliens" is a fairly implausible explanation for any given unexplained phenomenon. Where ever you fall on that debate, I don't think it has anything to do with religious beliefs except as far as the biases of the people who conduct these psychology studies goes.
Albert Einstein was once asked to clarify his faith, here is his reply:
“Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”
I read this often and maintain the attitude that scripture, science, art are all branches of the same Tree.
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Dead Comment
But we have 4.543 billion years worth of evidence showing that life REALLY likes to live. To get from a single celled organism to me typing to you over the internet tells me there's probably something universal to this process.
To me it's a lot more "Main Character Syndrome" to suggest we are wholly unique and alone in the universe. We are the special chosen species that made it out of an infinite number of probabilities. Sounds insane.
Intelligence as we commonly refer to it is not a given in evolution. Evolution seeks forward propagation of genetic material, it doesn't seek an "intelligent" state.
It's reasonable to assume there is life elsewhere in the universe. It's quite a bit more of a stretch to assume there is _intelligent_ life elsewhere in the universe, aside from the problem of defining what intelligence is.
Or maybe it happens all the time. But with only one sample, we have no data either way.
This doesn't account for the fact that you don't know what - if any - benefits do exotic materials and funky physics might bring if they exist and are feasible to exploit. The benefits might be so much larger than Dyson Swarms, that it would be wastful\unnecessary to use Dyson Swarms, except maybe as a hobby or as a low tech fallback for civilizations like camping enthusiasts and survivalists. Why bother with stars when you have tech to live in the 21 dimensions that those born-yesterday biologicals can't even sense yet ?
The Dyson 'Paradox' doesn't strike me as much of a paradox, imagine if a group of ants looked at the sky and wondered why aren't extraterrestials building tunnels inside the moon's regolith like ants do on Earth. It's just assuming too much. It's of course a valid scenario, it just isn't the only one.
You seem keen to make fun of dogmatic people but attaching a hypothetical concept which is so trivial and fringe to your mental model seems like pretty dogmatic behavior. If you’d never heard of a Dyson Swarm, like the vast, vast majority of people haven’t, would your view of extraterrestrial life have significantly changed?
The problem as I see it with this area is it's been far too stigmatised, so no researchers would ever dare touch it for fear of being labelled conspiracy theory believing nutcases. That sentiment is now dying off thankfully and we can start to find out what on earth is going on.
We don't have extraordinary evidence therefore it's not possible that it's anything weird doesn't seem very scientific.
Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
There’s still a huge engineering gap between our current tech and the theoretical possibility of a Dyson Swarm. I don’t find it at all implausible that such a thing would need too much energy, effort, collective will, or some other resource, to make it practical. There could still be plenty of stealthy sub-Dyson civilizations, or even supra-Dyson civilizations that have found it in their interest not to be detectable.
Robin Hanson has the most plausible ET hypothesis to explain these UFO observations. Basically it goes:
1) Life only evolved once in the galaxy.
2) However it spread to one or more stars its system of origin through the process of panspermia.
3) This sister planet that shares a common life origin with us evolved an advanced civilization that predates ours by 10-100 million years.
4) However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres, this sister civilization developed a highly anti-growth world government.
5) They've sent local probes or outposts to study us because we're interesting as a sister branch in the tree of life, and also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This explains why we have spacefaring ETs poking around but no resource gobbling Dyson spheres expanding through the light clone. If civilizations were widespread, then almost certainly one would be gobbling resources. But if there are only two civilizations, ours and theirs, it's quite believable that the earlier of the two fell into an anti-growth world government.
The very early universe was relatively warm. Simple or even complex life could've evolved and spread through parts of the Universe with relative ease given the much shorter distances. It seems highly unlikely though given the rarity of metals (in the astronomical sense; meaning anything other than hydrogen and helium) and the likely needed timescales. This probably means at best it was organic molecules of some level of complexity.
There are later versions of this where panspermia occurred much more recently, either intentionally or not.
Whatever the case it's all unprovable speculation. If we ultimately the same unlikely patterns repeating on different wrolds then I guess we can revisit.
So how recent in this hypothesis did this occur? There are fossil records for people going back millions of years. Are we talking all life? Or just people? If it's all life then we need to go back billions of years, at which point we're just talking about spreading amino acids. Such a connection will be similar to our fraternal bond with bananas.
> However at some point between the tech to travel between stars and full Dyson spheres
This seems unlikely. Why? Because the tech for a Dyson Swarm is basically stainless steel, solar panels and the ability to build things in space in large quantities. The last one is significant of course but is largely gated on the high cost of getting things into orbit, which is something likely to plummet in the coming centuries.
Saying we could build a self-sustaining orbital within 1,000 years I don't think is a stretch. Only industrial scale separates building 1 and building a million.
But there's another problem: people often neglect the energy cost of interstellar travel. It's... massive. And this is even assuming you solve the reaction mass problem. Interstellar travel almost seems predicated on a Dyson Swarm simpsly to have sufficient energy.
> ... also concerning as a fast growing civilization that contravenes their anti-growth norms.
This is a well-trodden avenue of thought on the Fermi Paradox. What if alien civilizations just stop growing? If there's 1, sure that might be possible. But what if there were 1,000? Would they all follow this path? It gets increasingly unlikely that not one would grow significantly. Non-growth civilizations would be at an extreme disadvantage with another who has vastly more energy and matter at their disposal. Like you almost have to grow just in case someone else does.
But all of this just seems like highly selective curve overfitting to reach the desired conclusion that UFOs are alien in origin.
https://tothestars.media/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company)
It is, and I cannot stress this enough, entirely unhelpful for you to ascribe it to main character syndrome or compare it to the belief in an omnipotent God.
If sources of truth in human societies like governments and scientific institutions would stop lying or misleading people nearly constantly then you could call conspiracy people lunatics, or fringe. But you simply cannot.
Not only are people being lied to, but they are being actively disinformed for "their own good." There are massive socializing forces that have taken an active role in manipulating society based around the idea that they know better.
And the ironic part is that, to a degree, they do know better. People act stupid in groups and have important information WITHHELD for various reasons that make it impossible to discern the truth.
If you want to start minimizing the amount of bullshit beliefs that people hold, supernatural or otherwise, you can start by tearing down the systems that are used to create false narratives which push people into those beliefs.
Deleted Comment
It seems like the tendency to accept a higher power in control of your life and the world leads to believing in other earthly powers being able to exert vast control over the world.
Dyson Swarms are only plausible if your society is still stuck in an exponential growth mode. It assumes technological advancement, but stagnant sociological development, or perhaps even worse; pathological development, like a hegemonising swarm.
I think that many UFO theories make the same mistakes. They assume high tech aliens with low tech motives.
> Given the huge benefits of a Dyson Swarm and the fact that it seems to require no exotic materials and no more physics it looks increasingly likely that we are very alone in the Milky Way
The fact that we can come up with the idea of a Dyson Swarm doesn't mean that not finding any in our observations results in we "being alone in the galaxy". It's also Main Character Syndrome, in a way.
Even discarding the idea of alien life being so different from ours that we wouldn't recognize it even if we were looking right at it, and assuming a "human like civilization", it's perfectly possible for there being unknown physics to us that make the idea of a Dyson Swarm unnecessary. Using our own civilization as an example, in the 1950s and 60s we did all of our data broadcasting over radio waves, and built huge powerful antennas that screamed about our presence to the wider universe. People then thought "well, if we're broadcasting all this stuff, where are the alien broadcasts? why can't we hear them? we must be alone in the galaxy". Fast-forward to now. Our current tech allows pretty much all communications to be over cables, and we're being much less wasteful with our emmiting; our radio emissions are diminishing over time.
So, not a century has passed, and already newer technology has proven our assumptions of alien life wrong. Why would it be any different with Dyson Swarms? You can't know how more advanced technology looks like, you can only extrapolate with what we have now.
Since we haven't been able to build such a thing I think it's fair to say it requires something or other that's exotic to us.
- This is certainly a very interesting interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIUBjvY4PnQ
- There are visual observations, and what are, ( by military standards), flimsy short images/video.
- This analysis partially explains one part of it, without excluding the presence of an object.
- There is also Radar data, but it has not been published or time correlated to the reported visual observations.
Observations:
- These Aliens only seem to want to goof around with folksy US pilots.
- Pilots known to simulate UFO sightings, fans of UFO invasion stories and stories of Russians shooting UFO's and getting shot back. ( watch the interview...).
- These Aliens show up exclusively during their training time and with sightings restricted to areas with US carrier groups exercises.
Also...
- The Aliens don't show up with their "Tic Tac's" or seem to be interested on the Ukraine conflict.
- They don't care about EU or Latin America citizens...
- Don't want to play around with the Russian or Chinese Air Force.
- They don't show up in the data of any of the existing Military satellites capable of reading a bus ticket on the ground from 400 km.
- These Aliens don't show up in the observations of the thousands of professional and amateur astronomers, that scan the sky a total of thousands of hours every night, using some of the most exquisite optical instruments available.
I would say: They either don't exist, or if they do, they are pretty dumb and we have nothing to fear.
Why do you say aliens? It seems more likely they are experimental human developed aircraft.
Dead Comment
And yet, whether the shape of the subject is representative of the object or an artifact of the camera is almost irrelevant to whether or not this is a video that should be investigated. The source of the glare is clearly not part of the camera or the aircraft. We should not treat the silhouette of the object as valuable data, but it says nothing of the actual object that is being tracked. The presenter does not suggest this, and the post spins the whole event as being "debunked". I don't know why "debunking" things seems to have become a cottage industry, but there was considerable effort put into analyzing and visually modeling this thoroughly condescending presentation.
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Only thing Navy does it confirms that the video is real. They don't say that they have even tried to identify or that there is any reason to identify. They have hundreds or thousands of hours of video or radar images of drones etc. they don't care to identify.
Navy does not engage with these hustlers from "To the stars academy" at all. That's the only good response. To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (media & entertainment company) makes this stuff up and sells it.
https://tothestars.media/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company)
Precisely. There is a huge gap between what the Navy has actually claimed about the videos and what people think the Navy has claimed. 'The video is authentic' is not the same as 'the video shows what it's purported to show.'
https://youtu.be/ro29w4ESw44
this American pilot does not know how depth of field works... can't even notice in his own video recordings, this beyond funny. He thinks you can't have objects at different distances in focus at the same time ahahaha, does not get how parallax works... gave up after those dumb errors and smug attitude as he was saying such dumb things, i bet he made even more mistakes.
is he really a "fighter pilot" or they just not trained to understand their gear?
The Defense Department described the subject of GOFAST, Gimble and FLIR videos as "UAV, Balloons, and other UAS". 'Balloons'; they know what it is. They're not even lying, they're being coy or misleading.
Quick inspection shows that it was done with tree.js. Neat!
The thing that pushed me over the edge in believing these things is the long podcast interview between Commander David Fravor and Lex Fridman.
Did the Navy release the radar data, or an analysis based on it?
I listened to maybe half of that interview, and I really really do not buy the response to Lex's question of "Why didn't this cause more commotion in the ranks?"
Fravor said because he was the commander of 17 airmen and 300 sailors and has the weight of that command on him. I get it, but this is also his job, and we all tend to acclimate to our jobs. I don't think this guy and all other witnesses were so burdened with the idea of being a CO that they weren't able to process a potentially world-changing event. If this was in the middle of a real war and real combat - of course that's different. But this was just during the millionth training exercise of this guy's career.
He was also quick to move on from this question, and did so without any prompting from Lex. He went on to what sounded like a rehearsed talking point (I'm sure because he's said it so many times) about how he doesn't get paid for these appearances, but there's no way to know what other outside incentives he may have to go on these shows. That Lex doesn't push back on this at all is disappointing, but I get that he's not there to interrogate him.
The final sticking point - Fravor admits that he's an apologist for secrecy and the US government hiding things for reasons of "national security". Clearly someone with this belief would welcome the idea of lying repeatedly, very publicly, to help cover something up. What I'm implying is that something did happen that day (that is much more mundane), but we're not getting the honest story, and Fravor outright suggesting it was something we know to be impossible with currently technology is likely obfuscating the truth of something that is probably an embarrassing mistake/leak/something that the US government doesn't want there to be public clarity on.
It's also totally possible that this is some kind of funding grab. That Rubio et al. are simply pawns being teased and pushed around in the name of national security to fund large and barely monitored government research and military funding. It could be some of both.
West contends that what is being seen in the video is actually infrared glare that hides a hot object behind it and only rotates in the way it does because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.
The whole “lens flare from a far away plane” hypothesis has been throughly debunked. You have to ignore evidence to reach that conclusion.
IR video tends to bloom. If the object is hot enough, (for instance, a jet engine exhaust, a burning vehicle, a refinery flare...) you'll have a blob of smudge around/behind it on the video. The video is contending that the rotation of what is seen on the video isn't the object itself rotating. Instead, the blob is elongated as a result of glare/lens flare/diffraction gradient, and this elongation is aligned with the rotational axis of the gimbal. As the gimbal nears gimbal lock, it is forced to rapidly rotate to continue tracking the object. This rapid rotation of the gimbal causes the glare to rapidly rotate.
I do have a background in IR video, gimbals, and translating between gimbal telemetry and real life coordinates and the explanation in the video looks good to me.