I worked on stealth aircraft that would occasionally cause civilian UFO reports.
It was common for the reports to mention that these UFOs maneuvered unlike any man-made aircraft, which was always a good chuckle because they were usually just flying straight or banking normally.
However when seasoned military pilots like Fravor speak on the matter, I listen. When a bunch of them speak about the same incident, I take them at their word.
The now debunked sensor recordings were also reported by seasoned military pilots. You can even hear them discussing their observations on some of the recordings. In one of them they are patently misreading the sensor data displayed in the video.
I’m sorry, but if that doesn’t thoroughly and permanently discredit this line of reasoning, I don’t know what will.
As long as there are mysterious 1990s era X-Files/Control like stories to be generated for clicks and attention, nothing will. Why are these stories being released primarily on clickbaity media like The Hill, CNN or Fox News? The "whistleblowers" could just open up to related non-profits, respected security blogs or other outlets which aren't driven to squeeze out every possible ad and sponsorship dollar.
In the end, there is zero accountability or consequences for these kinds of articles and the sparse "unclassified" information is fuzzy enough to inject all kinds of speculation. This is not to dismiss the topic as a whole, it's the framing that I find weird.
I am not leaning in either direction at all. Optical phenomena, sensor artifacts, weather, foreign or compartmentalized tech, or aliens... The point is not to be contrarian - it's important to keep an open mind until proven otherwise. However, this heavy X-Files like framing of mysterious otherworldy tech roaming around military facilities is somewhat over-the-top and doesn't really seem to (!) serve the case.
Also, there are probably also projects that are compartmentalized to a degree where part of the military does not know about other parts of the military doing/building/researching specific stuff. What better way to test your capabilities than exposing them to real world scenarios against the arguably most advanced defense systems on the planet?
The information is just too sparse to reach any meaningful conclusion so it's ideal clickbait media material, even if the topic itself is serious and important.
All of this just sounds like miscalibrated radar/ghost images etc. You've got extremely sensitive instruments for tracking stealthy vehicles, operating on somewhat noisy frequencies, no wonder you might sometimes see things that actually aren't there.
This despite the existence of people like Rendlesham's Colonel Halt, and so on, is, indeed, a very interesting military-UAP venn-ecosystem. I think it's a fascinating combination to study.
Military psychology also naturally disincentivizes "looking into things" (see for example Colonel Halt's thoughts on "what to do about it"[1]) and there's a ping-pong false dichotomy that develops: Did we make it or didn't we; Did we cause it or didn't we. It's the perfect recipe for meaningless distraction from very important questions.
This problem also further isolates important aspects of the military role in potentially damming up exploration & science efforts, especially when we examine its comparatively premium level of day-in, day-out access to what are de facto scientifically-capable exploration & discovery tools.
Is it any wonder, in that light, that the accompanying de facto "scientists", i.e. pilots, radar operators, and privileged officers, are seeing extraordinary things? No. And that's a huge opportunity wrapped up in a problem, because the chartering mindset interferes.
1. “There’s no doubt it was something beyond anything we know or understand. […] I have concerns, but I don’t think we can do anything about it. I think this is beyond us.”
“So: Quit worrying about it.” -- From just after the 8m mark in:
(An example of a rather stunning mindset, given the circumstances, and in comparison to the known-reliable mindset of exploratory effort / scientific learning & exploration)
Fravor admitted to UFO pranks in the 90s (gliding over camp fires and then turning on afterburners). Some were found reported on UFO forums at the time.
Yea I thought it was a hilarious way to debunk UFO reports of the past by civvies on the ground who lack advanced warship and get fighter radar systems.
I had assumed this pilot was mostly discussing observations made during non-combat missions. Training and other enforcement activities in times of peace probably make up the majority of a military pilots career flying hours.
Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665
These were supposed to be the smoking gun evidence. UFO believers inside the DoD and as high up as US Senators fought for years to get them declassified.
As soon as they were public, they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective. More generally this showed how easy it is to misinterpret the information being put out by complex sensors like FLIR, even the operators do it.
That explanation fails to account for the multiple other sensors that picked them up, including several different radar systems and the fact that multiple pilots witnessed them with their eyes. However the other sensor data are classified which makes it impossible to draw any conclusions.
I deeply hate the laziness that is behind those arguments and the people that follow.
Here are some claims of something extraordinary. We have multiple High End sensors Witness this. Your Government is not even recording this data, let alone give it to you. They don't want you to investigate it, they don't want to investigate it themselves yet multiple independent people on different ships and official documentation all tell the same story: Something extraordinary happened.
The response? Let's google "$event + debunk" and believe the first Result. Mick Wests Explanation has many issues and straight up ignores multiple facets of the event. But it sure had a great chilling effect on actually figuring out what that was. And why? Because the possibility of something extraordinary happening is unpalatable to the reflexive skeptics. Things are a priori declared to be ordinary and any evidence that doesn't fit that get's ignored.
Have you read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World book from 1996? Because this kind of crap always turns out to be garbage. We live on a rock circling a star.
The only thing that makes the world more interesting than it really is is our brains that love to make crap up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.™
Mick West has one major problem. He takes a video, and works to create any sort of elaborate explanation with zero consideration given to probability or externalities. If he can create the same visual effect he then declares his concept as the "truth", and everything else "debunked." Zero effort is made to challenge his own conclusions or assess their probability.
As an example in the Gimbel video [1], he concludes the a pilot is unknowingly locked onto another ship and what's actually showing up is just the exhaust of that ship. Would the military be unable to determine the presence of another ship in their immediate vicinity? The pilots reference a fleet of such ships showing up on instrumentation, as well as implying unusual aerodynamic factors. These factors are all completely ignored. I would put the probability of aliens as something near 0, but I would assess even that probability as higher than 'another ship's exhaust', even if one may be able to create a similar effect through such. I think the best explanation is simply *shrugs*. It's okay to accept uncertainty.
All that said I'm extremely skeptical of these videos and even testimony for a simple reason. All this stuff started coming out at the same time three other things also happened. There was a leak about a bunch of sci-level research supposedly being done by the military. Shortly thereafter the Navy publicly patented it. Here [2] is a patent on an inertial mass reduction tool. A web crawl for the author's name "Salvatore Pais" is an interesting and utterly bizarre. If we were researching e.g. alien technology, patenting it achieves nothing except advertising it to the world. And that's something you'd actually want to keep secret.
This was (and has been) happening also at the time that the US military has began failing to meet recruitment goals, and the endless absurd failures of technology (Zumwalt class destroyers, F-35, submarines running into rocks, ships running into each other, etc) seems to imply there's been a brain drain in the military. I think this is largely just a covert recruiting campaign to get more higher-brow types interested in the military. Come enlist, and build a Stargate! It sounds a whole lot more fun than "Come join us and push ads on people who don't want them." Unfortunately it's also probably completely fake.
What a poor debunk of the debunk. I had respect for David Fravor but listening an ex F/A-18 pilot say confidently "There is 0% chance that I'm wrong" and keeping using argument from authority convinced me that he's just wrong.
They exhibit all the characteristics of bokeh and sensor glare, and it’s speculation that they are anything else.
As for instrument measurements, the track that turns out to be a bird is identified as such mainly by simply correctly interpreting the instrument data.
So we’re back the square one. All the ‘smoking gun’ evidence turns out to be a damp squib and now we’re just expected to believe unrecorded ‘radar measurements’ and eye witness accounts.
> False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that.
It says it, but does it actually show it? The videos released by the Pentagon that Mick West analysed were also supposed to have been checked by defence analysts.
That just proves they were actually unidentified objects. The flying part was missing since they didn't exist in physical form just glare.
UFO fans are already convinced the events are UFOs which to them always means extraterrestrial aliens they just have to prove their point. Like flat Earthers have to prove how they are not wrong.
> Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me.
I honestly don't know why anyone thinks West has managed to explain everything. These objects were picked up by multiple sensor systems which wouldn't show the same artifacts. Of the hundreds to thousands of reports, the DoD analysis managed to explain all except something like 14. There's still something to left to explain here.
All of them? Lol, okay. Honestly it’s pretty disrespectful to these pilots, who clearly witnessed something that defies mainstream explanation. Not saying it’s aliens, but secret military projects that use highly classified propulsion technology is just as interesting, and far more concerning.
Most of these weren't things pilots saw with their physical eyes. You need to pay attention to the accounts. There are some though, to be clear. But these cases aren't like the ones we're seeing videos of. They are often something that flew between the aircraft vertically. This could easily be a bird (lower altitudes) or even part of a weather balloon that is just in free fall (these are launched all the time and have small payloads that frequently fall into the ocean). There are also tons of surveillance drones (foreign and domestic) and a few of these have been seen at night and when people look through night vision optics they'll see triangular shapes. This is something you can replicate, which builds strong evidence.
I don't know if you've ever been in a small private aircraft, but if you have you may have seen another plane crossing your path. It is quite hard to see such an object until it is right on you (thank god for ADS-B). I couldn't imagine the same situation in a fighter jet. Having also seen things like balloons and birds while flying, I can tell you that things don't look the same. Your perspective is really different and optical illusions are abound (people even frequently misinterpret flight paths looking up at planes and birds). Yes, you get training for this, but at the same time that training doesn't break the illusion.
I have two EXTREMELY vivid recollection of UFOs that I saw.
One as a child of ~6 years of age which I know is true because another witness said it was a signaling flare before I knew what signaling flares were, and as my grandpa correctly pointed out, it looked NOTHING like a signaling flare.
The second one is much later, from a time I was obsessed with UFOs, and I don't know if I really saw it or it was a dream. It just bothers me so much that I can't recollect if it was all a dream or not and that I've had this memory for so long.
> Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence.
Occams Razor suggests that if these objects appear almost exclusively over US military facilities and US military training ranges, they're most likely operated by the US military.
(Sorry to the Navy pilot whose security clearance is too low to be in on the secret.)
Yeah - also, if something can travel light years and have no major signs of atmospheric entry and exit then they have definitely mastered cloaking. The f35B is pretty close already. There's way to many holes in the 'Alien Theory', to many technological absurdities. If these's truly are aliens, then they are the steam punk kind with awkward technological leaps.
The easy explaination is they are advanced military craft. Northrop Grumman built the B-2 in the late 80's and that already looks like a UFO to me. The US doesn't even publish it's full TS budget. The unclassiified spend on the f35 is almost $400B. Imagine what else the US been cooking up with it's unlimited checkbook and army of engineers at the big defense contractors.
And for... decades. Even many times the speed of light requires the ship to travel decades (from the perspective of Earth or their home planet).
I definitely buy the US stealth tech. You dogfood your stealth technology with your own systems and own people. Unlikely to fool the enemy if you can't fool yourself. But I do think there are also likely foreign surveillance systems. These could be drones or even balloons (probably smaller than the one that made the news). Combine these two things (along with glitches, optical illusions, and just random shit falling from the sky) and it isn't surprising you see these events.
> The easy explaination is they are advanced military craft.
That's not easy at all given the alleged capabilities of these objects tracked across multiple sensor systems. An easier explanation is actually some kind of active sensor spoofing.
If they were anywhere close to evenly distributed across the US or the globe, one would expect plenty of eyewitness data from commercial airline passengers.
That this phenomenon appears specific to personnel and locations related to US military bases seems like an important piece of data.
I'll take the other side of this argument since Occams Razor may not be the tool for the job of understanding or characterizing these phenomena.
Since there are numerous reports spanning decades and even dating to the 19th century, before manned flight, and these reports come from all over the globe and the descriptions involve similar events and very similar observations between widely spaced events then it follows that these "UAPs" are not all likely to be related to a project operated by the US military.
I keep an open mind about everything that I don't understand until I have the data needed to form an opinion. I am not convinced that decades of reports from educated and uneducated people living in widely separated regions that all describe similar situations can all be related to secret operations carried out by one nation's military. I have a hard time branding all these people as delusional or as liars when I have never met them. I am also not qualified to assign any of this to any category except "unexplained and interesting enough to study".
A much simpler explanation than these are objects operated by the US military is that there is a selection bias with public awareness and media reporting on reports regarding the US military. I can think of at least a dozen plausible explanations as to why such selection bias would exist.
One would imagine if someone in the 90s saw a Blackbird aircraft, would assume it's an unidentified body. Yet it is just not unclassified. Imagine the tech the RAF has now that will be unveiled in 20 years
There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to know better.
Obviously it's unscientific to jump to conclusions and assume that anything that doesn't make sense must be aliens or magic or whatever but at the same time, it's also unscientific to ignore physical observations just because they seem like something that might support what fringe idiots believe.
The close-minded approach is to accept someone’s fantastical claim because you want to, or just because the claim is being made, when the claim is contrary to mountains and centuries of evidence. The open-minded take incorporates all the possible evidence to reach the most likely conclusion. And the conclusion is never, so far, either aliens or magic. It’s just silly to conclude that an observation that has no immediate natural explanation will not be explained naturally and is, instead, the work of aliens or magic. Especially in light of the fact that everything we have explained, thus far, has had a natural explanation.
I don’t think aliens and magic belong in the same category though.
Magic/supernatural by definition is contrary to physical laws and scientific understanding.
But the existence of aliens would in no way contradict any physical laws or scientific consensus. It would be a shock, obviously, just like it was a shock when we discovered that other galaxies exist, or black holes, or that nuclear fission is possible.
If intelligent aliens do exist and are close enough to us to be detected (or to detect us), which is certainly possible and maybe even probable, then we’re likely going to find out about them someday. Is that what’s happening now with these UAP? It seems that we don’t know yet, but it’s as unscientific to throw out the aliens hypothesis a priori as to insist it’s definitely aliens and no other explanation is possible.
“Conclusions so far” based on what? This is exactly what this is about. Nobody is asking for a leap-of-faith belief in aliens, but allowing science to happen.
Let videos of whatever weird phenomenona be released and studied. Add more sensors or whatever is needed to explain what pilots see. Maybe send a scientist or two up there to figure out what’s going on.
The closed-minded approach is to say we know definitely that you're right/wrong.
The open-minded approach is to say: maybe we don't know everything, we shouldn't jump to conclusions, rather we should wait for more evidence so that we understand the situation better.
It doesn't matter whether it's aliens, magic, or new scientific discoveries.
It's US chauvinism that leads people here assume that any advanced tech beyond our capabilities must be magic or aliens. The US isn't the only country with secret military research projects.
Every time one of those fantastic items gets explained, it's always mundane and boring, and never dampens the enthusiasm for the next one.
I recall one about B+W photographs of "wood elves" taken around 1910 or so by a couple girls. The girls insisted it was genuine. Photographic experts declared the photos were genuine and could not have been faked.
When the girls were in their 80's, they finally confessed that the "wood elves" were drawn on paper, cut out, and propped up with sticks. They took photos of it with a brownie camera. They laughed with glee at the credulous people who took it seriously (because they so wanted to believe in wood elves).
Quite a bizarre strawman [1] that doesn't prove your point at all. Here we have multiple professional pilots reporting similar events, with recorded evidence from the tracking systems on their fighter planes. And enough evidence that even Congress has authorised to look into it further. It probably is all some natural thing happening, but it's not some hoax by teenager girls in the 1920s.
* Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes was one of the boosters of the photograph. This sounds weird but there's about an Arthur Conan Doyle book that relates to reality in messy detail. There's generally no deducible explanation of random events, they're just random. And so the method of "excluding all other explanation" is generally worthless in trying to look at single events - actually "shit happens".
* I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts. Their two dimensionality is obvious when I look at them. But they fooled the people of their day because photography was quite new and people's visual processing had not adjusted to it.
> There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical.
Is there? I doubt it.
Think about the time and money costs of all the "seems fantastical" stuff that turned out to be bunk. Then compare it with the losses from "seems fantastical" stuff dismissed too soon. I'd bet the former is orders of magnitude larger.
Or just think about it from an individual perspective. People have lives to lead, things to do. I could spend the rest of my life looking at reports of psychic phenomena, for example. Or I could look back at the literal century of people investigating the claims and finding nothing but charlatans and fools, say, "good enough", and get on with my life. If the kooks actually find something good, I say it's their job to demonstrate it clearly, not mine to debunk all their failures.
Should society devote some small fraction of its energies to investigating fringe stuff? Sure. You never know when you'll strike gold. But I'm happy to argue that time and money sucked up by it currently is well over any sort of demonstrable ROI.
Yeah, exactly. Galileo was persecuted for stating the earth revolves around the sun. Anything fantastical is immediately seen as taboo and this still happens today.
I personally find UAPs/UFOs fascinating. There's some unexplained phenomema going on and no one knows what it is. There's a massive taboo around claiming aliens/intelligent life, which makes it a subject few will admit to or investigate seriously. Then you have things like Fermi's paradox, a thought experiment that shows it is unlikely for the universe to only have 1 intelligent species in it.
Most likely there is some natural phenomena behind all of this, but I really hope it's something more interesting.
For the longest time we didn't know the lightning event we now call sprites occurred. Pilots had said they saw such things bit without evidence at the time no one had any idea if they were real or not. Probably plenty of other explainable events that we've not captured yet out there.
> There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical.
Two things:
1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and
2. The burden of proof belongs to the one making the claim, not on the other side to refute the claim.
Anything in the realm of "new physics" (eg claims such objects defy inertia and accelerate at a rate that would kill any person) or extraterrestial origin is certainly an extraodinary claim.
Extraterrestial origin is the easiest to dismiss because of just how extraorindary such claims are. An awful lot of hand-waving happens when you point out the fundamental problems and timelines with interstellar travel just because people want it to be true. Claims like "we once thought it impossible to go to the Moon" are no argument at all.
I've seen nothing that comes close to the standard of extraordinary evidence.
I am not making any claims about whether or not these phenomena are extraterrestrial, I truly have no idea. But suppose that there is a civilization that is dramatically more advanced than ours. Perhaps they have uncovered deeper laws of physics that allows them to develop technologies orders of magnitude more powerful than our own. To such a civilization, our technology might seem as rudimentary as stone age tools seem to us. We could say less about their technology than our distant ancestors could have said about ours.
This civilization could be so advanced that they have the means to communicate with us without our being able to measure it with our present technologies, but they could nevertheless influence people's thoughts much as the gravitational pull of the moon creates the tides. If this were true, their influence would likely be felt long before we had the technology to detect it. But once we did detect it, we would realize we have been under their influence for a long time (perhaps predating the formation of our civilization). We would also immediately feel silly for having hubristically assumed that we are the peak of intelligence.
We have these fantasies of colonizing mars and beyond and yet we fail to have the imagination to consider that perhaps it's all already been colonized. We could be the children of our interstellar ancestors. Perhaps much like we fantasize about sending some kind of seed of humanity to a terraformable planet, our ancestors already figured this out and we are the fruit of the seeds they sent out from their home eons ago.
I am not claiming that this is the truth (in fact I am sure what I wrote is wrong in some important ways that are beyond me) but it is just as extraordinary to me to assume that there isn't anything out there wildly more intelligent than us (or the most powerful ai we can dream up) as it is to assume that there isn't.
> There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to know better.
The thing is, in science, as Sagan so succinctly put it- Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence.
One landing in a public area, now that would be evidence hard to ignore.
I am not. However, I do not accept a closed-minded alien. The alien is interested in particular US military installations but not in me? Okay, maybe not me, but wouldn't the pyramids be more interesting?
This makes it boils down to 1. sensors artifacts, 2. US military program not shared with all pilots or 3. another country collecting data on US.
I mean, I GN an adult Dungeons and Dragons centered on multiple worlds and I love considering different worlds and how they might work. But the people who extrapolate the unexplained to a claim that there's some fantastical things that science is suppressing seem so starved for "the fantastical" that they're distorting the entire situation. Science isn't there to squash your fun. Science doesn't deny that uncertainty is a constant part of ordinary human experience - scientifically established positions are merely a reliable tip of an iceberg of uncertainty.
The claim in the article is stronger than just "lights". He used the word "objects" which suggests these UAP are being detected on multiple modalities.
The great thing about perception is that "Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence." uses one word (fly) in a way which can be read as implying they are there. Sorry. You saw something. your sensors reported something. Was it there? Good question. it IS a question.
Really what I think a good editor would have done is intrude like this: "Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities are routinely perceived to fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence.
You could add (if any) at the end if you wanted to maintain the skepticism.
There are so many reasons why these things are routinely perceived: CCD errors. Optical in-lens problems. Wind shear effects. Differential lighting and occultation. Mis-attribution of large distant objects to smaller fast moving near objects and vice-versa. Bugs on the windscreen.
Being a "US Navy fighter pilot" doesn't somehow insulate you from perceptual problems in the system, or systemic bias. I would suggest that the certainty of decision making vested in a fighter pilot might very well actually re-inforce the "I know what I saw" aspect here.
Here's an example of receiver bias: Why are they seen flying over the military bases? Let me ask, if this is the predominant place that US Fighter Pilots would expect to see anything: Why yes, it is. Thats their main focus of alertness in take off and landing, performing their job.
Remember, the objects display "impossible" nonlinear flight trajectories. So I hardly think "which way is up" matters at this point.
CCDs aren't used much these days. But the principle is the same: if you think any kind of digital sensor behind a camera is an error-free input source, I have a UFO detector to sell you..
Excluding otherworldly forms of speculation about why possible aliens are visiting us, this subject really boils down to four tangible questions about how we arrived at this footage and the eyewitness accounts from Fravor et al:
- Is it aliens?
- If not, do these sightings represent real unexplainable technological phenomena (advanced propulsion technology)?
- If not, are the eyewitness accounts credible?
- In any case, why is the DoD letting eyewitnesses go public?
With the answers to these questions we can enumerate several interesting possible explanations:
1) It’s not aliens, sightings do not represent any real unexplainable physical phenomena, the eyewitnesses have collectively deluded themselves somehow and are not credible, the DoD has allowed them to go public seeing the matter as benign (the “lens glare” hypothesis)
2) It’s not aliens or any unexplainable phenomenon, the eyewitnesses are deluded, but the DoD has let them go public for some ulterior motive, possibly to sow confusion and provide cover for real technologies they are working on (the “useful idiots” hypothesis)
3) It’s not aliens or any advanced technology, maybe it’s even completely fabricated, and the eyewitnesses are involved in a PSYOP. Possibly to delude US adversaries into chasing their tails, or to provide cover for real technologies (the “PSYOP” hypothesis)
4) It’s not aliens, but it is an advanced technology being developed in secret by the US, the eyewitnesses are unaware of the providence of said technologies, and the DoD has let them go public as a PSYOP to sow confusion or to signal capabilities to adversaries (the “skunk works” hypothesis)
5) It is aliens, it is known by governments worldwide, and the DoD has let the eyewitnesses go public because they see it as a benign public good or are not willing or capable of stopping the flow of said information (the “UFO whistleblower” hypothesis)
6) It is aliens, it is unknown by some other governments, and the US wants to sound the alarm, possibly to signal other nations to come forward with their own information and start working on a global strategy for managing the situation (the “Earth defence” hypothesis)
I am surprised you haven't proposed the most likely (and sadly boring) for me:
7) They are not aliens or any unexplainable phenomenon, witnesses are all deluded or victims of things like lens glare and the DoD has let them go public (importantly without stigmatising them) to:
a) Encourage others serving at the frontline to come forward when they see UFO in case it is foreign adversarial tech (such as the spy balloon) without worrying of being stigmatised
b) satisfy public demand by being as transparent as possible with the situation to prevent further delusion and conspiracy theories in the public.
I don't think people realize how much of our understanding of physics needs to be broken for aliens to be visiting us. Or that these creatures are willing to spend decades or generations away from their planet/home/family. Space is a hell of a lot bigger than people really think. Even several times the speed of light is slow in terms of these interstellar distances.
Our understanding is so incomplete that we have to posit the presence of dark matter and dark energy - comprising the majority of the universe - to explain the parts we think we do understand. With so much we cannot account for, it seems unwise to have firm beliefs like this about what isn’t possible.
As I see it. Let's say that human civilization does not turn Earth to a nuclear wasteland but rather resolves its social issues and proceeds with colonization of Solar System. We already sent probe out of our Solar System. It does not look for me to be impossible technology to build a probe with AI and robots smart enough to reach another star system, decelerate there, build some factories on asteroids and copy itself sending copies to further star systems. Of course at the same time exploring its "home" star system and transmit information they got to Earth.
So very quickly (in universe scale) our sphere of knowledge will expand limited only by some fuel tanks capacity required to accelerate and decelerate.
Yes, there will be years, decades, centuries and millenniums for this information to reach Earth. That's the nature of cosmos (according to our current knowledge) and we will have to deal with it.
Eventually probe will find planet with life. May be life is more abundant than we imagine now. May be not. Surely there will be protocols for the probe to investigate life. It's hard to imagine what those protocols would be. May be explore freely until certain technology advances are observed and then hide. So may be our ancestors saw alien probes on a regular basis and just didn't care. But now those probes observe that we've got quick airplanes so they hide better.
My point is that developed civilization inevitably will expand its sphere of influence at speed limited by speed of light. Probably slower than that. But billion of years at 0.1c is still huge chunk of universe. Are we sure that no civilization born within this radius billion years ago?
Right, absolutely fair comment. I would also add however that people don't realize how much of our understanding of physics needs to be broken for these objects to have a terrestrial technological origin.
Consider the following aspects of the observed phenomena:
- Intelligent characteristics (chasing / following / loitering behaviour)
- Ability to generate and withstand extreme G-forces
- Ability to expend/sustain extreme bursts of energy
- Lack of visible exhaust
- Bizarre aerodynamic characteristics
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I am a technologist and I took some aerospace-related courses in university. The first two aspects combined seem to rule out control by a human in the cockpit, and given the history of AI I would say autonomous control by a computer as well. Although not altogether the possibility of remote control by a human.
But the last three aspects transcend not only everything I think I know about existing technology, but also my understanding of:
- Newton's Third Law of motion and the rocket equation
- Fluid mechanics/Navier-Stokes equation
- Thermodynamics
i.e., it exceeds our current science by such an enormous margin that I couldn't even begin to approach how to analyze it. Therefore, I think that if we rule out the possibility of a delusion/hoax, it's far more likely that these objects are alien than a secret skunk works project.
> - In any case, why is the DoD letting eyewitnesses go public?
It seems there is a lot of pressure from high-up in the government to release at least old-enough footage of UAP, given the recent releases of UAP footage[0,1].
Right, I think my reasoning still applies whether it's coming from DoD or the White House. We still need to know why because they could have just continued the coverup, it's only since 2019 that they've changed their policy.
Why don't commercial pilots report the same things? I believe they have far more time in the air.
It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability. Even ignoring the technological implications of interstellar flight or the ability to enter our atmosphere without being detected, these objects are apparently massively more capable than any kind of vehicle we have. To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna.
It seems very likely that fighter pilots and finely-tuned military equipment would be very eager to pick up false signals from background noise and interpret it as vehicles that stretch out understanding of physics.
See this NARCAP (civilian flight safety) report https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20 for a case where a FedEx flight crew documented an encounter with the commonly reported pulsating orb type anomaly. There is a video.
Observed behavior:
> The UAP/Light came from above and stopped/hovered near FL37, about the same altitude as the aircraft, shone a light on the 767 and briefly approached the aircraft. Then it instantly matched the speed, and heading of the aircraft and maintained a consistent separation.
a. The light descended vertically, stopped abruptly, and shone a light on the 767 causing the crew to believe that there was another airliner on a collision heading with its landing lights on.
b. It changed direction from vertical descent to a sudden stop/hover, to approaching the aircraft briefly, to taking the same heading and speed of the aircraft at about the same altitude and an estimated distance of 1-2k ft.
c. It matched the altitude, speed, and heading of the aircraft, 575mph and at 37,000ft for over 32 minutes.
d. The UAP/Light changed colors and turned away from the aircraft on a perpendicular heading, West, just inside the Mexico/US border.
e. The UAP/light did not have wings or running lights. It was a new and unique observation to the experienced air crew.
> It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability
And in fact, apparently they do here too. It's been documented these UAPs have an interest in our nuclear capabilities. There has been many testimonies from people in the military these UAPs buzz around nuclear silos and apparently are able to disable them. See this well researched video for information on Robert Hastings https://youtu.be/l4EXL7jgqns
Here’s the thing that gets me. A 767 costs hundreds of millions of dollars and yet I’ve filmed better videos with a potato. Why is the pilot filming with his smartphone? Why does the plane not have a sophisticated high-quality purpose-built camera system that can record phenomena like this?
I find the Alaska case to be the most interesting. As the visual report of an object was supported by detections from the Soviet facing long range radar that were state of the art at the time.
"To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna."
To play devil's advocate for a moment: they'd have to know the capabilities of these jets to make that determination, and observation of some sort would be required to do so.
"Artifacts" (anomalous errors) appear on flight systems' sensors all the time, and atmospheric distortions can easily appear to the naked eye as flying/moving objects. I don't buy either that other countries have such advanced technology or that extraterrestrial intelligences are visiting us: the simpler explanations I noted cover more or less every published UAP we have seen.
>> To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna
I always find it odd that we ascribe a human understanding of logic to an alien species. Seems to me we wouldn’t know jack shit about motivations, capabilities, approaches to decision making, etc…
An autonomous monitoring system for galactic-scale existential risk bearing technologies would def have probes that monitored the technological development of remote civilizations.
On the navy video I remember one of the guys mentioning they think it is a drone.
It such hubris to believe those are alien craft and not foreign military drones. As if alien craft is the more probable explanation than another country having drones the US Navy does not.
you seriously claim this after we all witnessed russia - the supposed number 2 or 3 military power in the world loose a hundred thousand soldiers to ukraine in less than a year? the reality is that the USA has the most advanced military and no one else comes close... so yes, aliens are far more likely explanation than china having anti-gravity drones
Other incidents crashes, like Roswell. Obviously I cannot vouch for any of those :-) just wanted to point that air fighters at the time were much less sophisticated than today. Maybe people that travels between stars are not so interested in bringing state-of-the-art war machines with them. The technology to maneuver a drone or vehicle at incredible speed or angles might still be vulnerable to bullets or missiles.
I think what bothers us most about incidents like this is that any country or human organization that had massive air superiority over everyone else would inevitably use it to their advantage.
And yet, here are the reports, but no one is coming forward to say "yes, we Canadians actually never cancelled the Avro Arrow and have been decades ahead of the rest of you all this time- now please remove that Danish flag from Hans Island".
It's such a foreign idea that someone might have this advantage and not use it that the best answer we have is "I guess they aren't humans". Maybe that says a lot about us.
antigravity is a civilization changing technology that has unlimited economic value. the idea that the americans would use it exclusively for spying instead of colonizing the solar system and beyond is... improbable to say the least
The United States *does* have massive air superiority over everyone else and it's not even close. We have three times as many planes as Russia, our next closest "competitor" and we have more than the closest four (China, India and South Korea) combined. This doesn't touch on the fact that we also have the most technologically advanced air force by far and the carrier groups to support them anywhere in the world. It should surprise no one that these sightings almost exclusively happen by military personnel near military installations.
They demonstrate technology so advanced that it's more plausibly from another more advanced civilization than from a nation or person that lives on the same planet.
If this technology were developed by a private individual, there's incentive to keep it hidden. No businessperson wants to have a military grade target on their back, but I feel like some are paranoid/wealthy enough to want to develop their own tech
Readit News
It was common for the reports to mention that these UFOs maneuvered unlike any man-made aircraft, which was always a good chuckle because they were usually just flying straight or banking normally.
However when seasoned military pilots like Fravor speak on the matter, I listen. When a bunch of them speak about the same incident, I take them at their word.
I’m sorry, but if that doesn’t thoroughly and permanently discredit this line of reasoning, I don’t know what will.
In the end, there is zero accountability or consequences for these kinds of articles and the sparse "unclassified" information is fuzzy enough to inject all kinds of speculation. This is not to dismiss the topic as a whole, it's the framing that I find weird.
I am not leaning in either direction at all. Optical phenomena, sensor artifacts, weather, foreign or compartmentalized tech, or aliens... The point is not to be contrarian - it's important to keep an open mind until proven otherwise. However, this heavy X-Files like framing of mysterious otherworldy tech roaming around military facilities is somewhat over-the-top and doesn't really seem to (!) serve the case.
Also, there are probably also projects that are compartmentalized to a degree where part of the military does not know about other parts of the military doing/building/researching specific stuff. What better way to test your capabilities than exposing them to real world scenarios against the arguably most advanced defense systems on the planet?
The information is just too sparse to reach any meaningful conclusion so it's ideal clickbait media material, even if the topic itself is serious and important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6nox5_QStw&t=1082s
This despite the existence of people like Rendlesham's Colonel Halt, and so on, is, indeed, a very interesting military-UAP venn-ecosystem. I think it's a fascinating combination to study.
Military psychology also naturally disincentivizes "looking into things" (see for example Colonel Halt's thoughts on "what to do about it"[1]) and there's a ping-pong false dichotomy that develops: Did we make it or didn't we; Did we cause it or didn't we. It's the perfect recipe for meaningless distraction from very important questions.
This problem also further isolates important aspects of the military role in potentially damming up exploration & science efforts, especially when we examine its comparatively premium level of day-in, day-out access to what are de facto scientifically-capable exploration & discovery tools.
Is it any wonder, in that light, that the accompanying de facto "scientists", i.e. pilots, radar operators, and privileged officers, are seeing extraordinary things? No. And that's a huge opportunity wrapped up in a problem, because the chartering mindset interferes.
1. “There’s no doubt it was something beyond anything we know or understand. […] I have concerns, but I don’t think we can do anything about it. I think this is beyond us.”
“So: Quit worrying about it.” -- From just after the 8m mark in:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cswsp9
(An example of a rather stunning mindset, given the circumstances, and in comparison to the known-reliable mindset of exploratory effort / scientific learning & exploration)
Extremely detailed visual and sensor events.
Tons of human witnesses. Tons of activity.
There was a detailed Reddit thread on the incident from a Seaman many, many years ago long before news of the Tic Tac came out.
I’m on mobile but perhaps someone else can paste the thread URL.
Could be an elaborate hoax but that’s one heck of a long con game.
I don't trust the military or Congress since they're happy to spend money on ESP or telekinesis studies and still not be able to reach a conclusion.
Military pilots have mistaken Venus as a UAF.
I can't just trust an eyewitness account of something fishy as evidence for exterrestrial beings visiting us with faster than light speed vehicles.
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Some other stuff were stealthy cruise missiles. Not too big but they flew so low that they would cause some “shock and awe”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmNfPkdCRf8
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You mean dudes who are under constant stress, likely sleep deprived, and likely have some health issues due to the physical demands of the job?
Those probably would be the last people I listen to.
These were supposed to be the smoking gun evidence. UFO believers inside the DoD and as high up as US Senators fought for years to get them declassified.
As soon as they were public, they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective. More generally this showed how easy it is to misinterpret the information being put out by complex sensors like FLIR, even the operators do it.
<videos released>
If they release the radar data we will know!
<radar data released>
If they release ...
Here are some claims of something extraordinary. We have multiple High End sensors Witness this. Your Government is not even recording this data, let alone give it to you. They don't want you to investigate it, they don't want to investigate it themselves yet multiple independent people on different ships and official documentation all tell the same story: Something extraordinary happened.
The response? Let's google "$event + debunk" and believe the first Result. Mick Wests Explanation has many issues and straight up ignores multiple facets of the event. But it sure had a great chilling effect on actually figuring out what that was. And why? Because the possibility of something extraordinary happening is unpalatable to the reflexive skeptics. Things are a priori declared to be ordinary and any evidence that doesn't fit that get's ignored.
The only thing that makes the world more interesting than it really is is our brains that love to make crap up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.™
As an example in the Gimbel video [1], he concludes the a pilot is unknowingly locked onto another ship and what's actually showing up is just the exhaust of that ship. Would the military be unable to determine the presence of another ship in their immediate vicinity? The pilots reference a fleet of such ships showing up on instrumentation, as well as implying unusual aerodynamic factors. These factors are all completely ignored. I would put the probability of aliens as something near 0, but I would assess even that probability as higher than 'another ship's exhaust', even if one may be able to create a similar effect through such. I think the best explanation is simply *shrugs*. It's okay to accept uncertainty.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKHg-vnTFsM
---
All that said I'm extremely skeptical of these videos and even testimony for a simple reason. All this stuff started coming out at the same time three other things also happened. There was a leak about a bunch of sci-level research supposedly being done by the military. Shortly thereafter the Navy publicly patented it. Here [2] is a patent on an inertial mass reduction tool. A web crawl for the author's name "Salvatore Pais" is an interesting and utterly bizarre. If we were researching e.g. alien technology, patenting it achieves nothing except advertising it to the world. And that's something you'd actually want to keep secret.
This was (and has been) happening also at the time that the US military has began failing to meet recruitment goals, and the endless absurd failures of technology (Zumwalt class destroyers, F-35, submarines running into rocks, ships running into each other, etc) seems to imply there's been a brain drain in the military. I think this is largely just a covert recruiting campaign to get more higher-brow types interested in the military. Come enlist, and build a Stargate! It sounds a whole lot more fun than "Come join us and push ads on people who don't want them." Unfortunately it's also probably completely fake.
[2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
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A recruitment advertising campaign, aliens, and then lastly a plausible camera illusion mixed with some unclear or just mistaken testimony?
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Speculation that also does not factor in multi eye witness accounts and radar measurements.
As for instrument measurements, the track that turns out to be a bird is identified as such mainly by simply correctly interpreting the instrument data.
So we’re back the square one. All the ‘smoking gun’ evidence turns out to be a damp squib and now we’re just expected to believe unrecorded ‘radar measurements’ and eye witness accounts.
It could be a plane (or something else) and reflecting light in a way that causes bokeh/glare
Looks like for every ten "I want to believe" person there's also another 'skeptic' that will discard a video for unrelated reasons
False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that.
Mick West does good work, but he's not _neccesarily_ right on all accounts. Definitely good armchair expert porn though.
It says it, but does it actually show it? The videos released by the Pentagon that Mick West analysed were also supposed to have been checked by defence analysts.
UFO fans are already convinced the events are UFOs which to them always means extraterrestrial aliens they just have to prove their point. Like flat Earthers have to prove how they are not wrong.
I honestly don't know why anyone thinks West has managed to explain everything. These objects were picked up by multiple sensor systems which wouldn't show the same artifacts. Of the hundreds to thousands of reports, the DoD analysis managed to explain all except something like 14. There's still something to left to explain here.
This is like saying "of the hundreds to thousands of firefox segfaults, the Mozilla programmers managed to explain all except something like 14.
Of course, there's something left to explain and improve. But Occam's razor applies, and we prefer simpler answers (like a sensor quirk).
I don't know if you've ever been in a small private aircraft, but if you have you may have seen another plane crossing your path. It is quite hard to see such an object until it is right on you (thank god for ADS-B). I couldn't imagine the same situation in a fighter jet. Having also seen things like balloons and birds while flying, I can tell you that things don't look the same. Your perspective is really different and optical illusions are abound (people even frequently misinterpret flight paths looking up at planes and birds). Yes, you get training for this, but at the same time that training doesn't break the illusion.
The second one is much later, from a time I was obsessed with UFOs, and I don't know if I really saw it or it was a dream. It just bothers me so much that I can't recollect if it was all a dream or not and that I've had this memory for so long.
Occams Razor suggests that if these objects appear almost exclusively over US military facilities and US military training ranges, they're most likely operated by the US military.
(Sorry to the Navy pilot whose security clearance is too low to be in on the secret.)
The easy explaination is they are advanced military craft. Northrop Grumman built the B-2 in the late 80's and that already looks like a UFO to me. The US doesn't even publish it's full TS budget. The unclassiified spend on the f35 is almost $400B. Imagine what else the US been cooking up with it's unlimited checkbook and army of engineers at the big defense contractors.
And for... decades. Even many times the speed of light requires the ship to travel decades (from the perspective of Earth or their home planet).
I definitely buy the US stealth tech. You dogfood your stealth technology with your own systems and own people. Unlikely to fool the enemy if you can't fool yourself. But I do think there are also likely foreign surveillance systems. These could be drones or even balloons (probably smaller than the one that made the news). Combine these two things (along with glitches, optical illusions, and just random shit falling from the sky) and it isn't surprising you see these events.
That's not easy at all given the alleged capabilities of these objects tracked across multiple sensor systems. An easier explanation is actually some kind of active sensor spoofing.
That this phenomenon appears specific to personnel and locations related to US military bases seems like an important piece of data.
Since there are numerous reports spanning decades and even dating to the 19th century, before manned flight, and these reports come from all over the globe and the descriptions involve similar events and very similar observations between widely spaced events then it follows that these "UAPs" are not all likely to be related to a project operated by the US military.
I keep an open mind about everything that I don't understand until I have the data needed to form an opinion. I am not convinced that decades of reports from educated and uneducated people living in widely separated regions that all describe similar situations can all be related to secret operations carried out by one nation's military. I have a hard time branding all these people as delusional or as liars when I have never met them. I am also not qualified to assign any of this to any category except "unexplained and interesting enough to study".
Manned flight dates to 1783, and engine-powered flight to 1851. Did you mean heavier-than-air flight?
Obviously it's unscientific to jump to conclusions and assume that anything that doesn't make sense must be aliens or magic or whatever but at the same time, it's also unscientific to ignore physical observations just because they seem like something that might support what fringe idiots believe.
Magic/supernatural by definition is contrary to physical laws and scientific understanding.
But the existence of aliens would in no way contradict any physical laws or scientific consensus. It would be a shock, obviously, just like it was a shock when we discovered that other galaxies exist, or black holes, or that nuclear fission is possible.
If intelligent aliens do exist and are close enough to us to be detected (or to detect us), which is certainly possible and maybe even probable, then we’re likely going to find out about them someday. Is that what’s happening now with these UAP? It seems that we don’t know yet, but it’s as unscientific to throw out the aliens hypothesis a priori as to insist it’s definitely aliens and no other explanation is possible.
Let videos of whatever weird phenomenona be released and studied. Add more sensors or whatever is needed to explain what pilots see. Maybe send a scientist or two up there to figure out what’s going on.
The open-minded approach is to say: maybe we don't know everything, we shouldn't jump to conclusions, rather we should wait for more evidence so that we understand the situation better.
It doesn't matter whether it's aliens, magic, or new scientific discoveries.
There are many ways to be close minded.
Whose accepting someone's fantastical claim and what claim is that? Its mostly people speculating and acknowledging that its unexplained.
But that's not what's being done per the article. The evidence isn't even being looked at because of the aforementioned closed mindedness.
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I recall one about B+W photographs of "wood elves" taken around 1910 or so by a couple girls. The girls insisted it was genuine. Photographic experts declared the photos were genuine and could not have been faked.
When the girls were in their 80's, they finally confessed that the "wood elves" were drawn on paper, cut out, and propped up with sticks. They took photos of it with a brownie camera. They laughed with glee at the credulous people who took it seriously (because they so wanted to believe in wood elves).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
Even Arthur Conan Doyle wrote an article about the Photos.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies,_pag...
* Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes was one of the boosters of the photograph. This sounds weird but there's about an Arthur Conan Doyle book that relates to reality in messy detail. There's generally no deducible explanation of random events, they're just random. And so the method of "excluding all other explanation" is generally worthless in trying to look at single events - actually "shit happens".
* I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts. Their two dimensionality is obvious when I look at them. But they fooled the people of their day because photography was quite new and people's visual processing had not adjusted to it.
Is there? I doubt it.
Think about the time and money costs of all the "seems fantastical" stuff that turned out to be bunk. Then compare it with the losses from "seems fantastical" stuff dismissed too soon. I'd bet the former is orders of magnitude larger.
Or just think about it from an individual perspective. People have lives to lead, things to do. I could spend the rest of my life looking at reports of psychic phenomena, for example. Or I could look back at the literal century of people investigating the claims and finding nothing but charlatans and fools, say, "good enough", and get on with my life. If the kooks actually find something good, I say it's their job to demonstrate it clearly, not mine to debunk all their failures.
Should society devote some small fraction of its energies to investigating fringe stuff? Sure. You never know when you'll strike gold. But I'm happy to argue that time and money sucked up by it currently is well over any sort of demonstrable ROI.
I personally find UAPs/UFOs fascinating. There's some unexplained phenomema going on and no one knows what it is. There's a massive taboo around claiming aliens/intelligent life, which makes it a subject few will admit to or investigate seriously. Then you have things like Fermi's paradox, a thought experiment that shows it is unlikely for the universe to only have 1 intelligent species in it.
Most likely there is some natural phenomena behind all of this, but I really hope it's something more interesting.
Fermi's paradox isn't what you've stated.
Listen to the scientists. Not the politicians. Not the military.
So the question should be why are so many people believing in aliens when there is so little evidence for them?
Two things:
1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and
2. The burden of proof belongs to the one making the claim, not on the other side to refute the claim.
Anything in the realm of "new physics" (eg claims such objects defy inertia and accelerate at a rate that would kill any person) or extraterrestial origin is certainly an extraodinary claim.
Extraterrestial origin is the easiest to dismiss because of just how extraorindary such claims are. An awful lot of hand-waving happens when you point out the fundamental problems and timelines with interstellar travel just because people want it to be true. Claims like "we once thought it impossible to go to the Moon" are no argument at all.
I've seen nothing that comes close to the standard of extraordinary evidence.
This civilization could be so advanced that they have the means to communicate with us without our being able to measure it with our present technologies, but they could nevertheless influence people's thoughts much as the gravitational pull of the moon creates the tides. If this were true, their influence would likely be felt long before we had the technology to detect it. But once we did detect it, we would realize we have been under their influence for a long time (perhaps predating the formation of our civilization). We would also immediately feel silly for having hubristically assumed that we are the peak of intelligence.
We have these fantasies of colonizing mars and beyond and yet we fail to have the imagination to consider that perhaps it's all already been colonized. We could be the children of our interstellar ancestors. Perhaps much like we fantasize about sending some kind of seed of humanity to a terraformable planet, our ancestors already figured this out and we are the fruit of the seeds they sent out from their home eons ago.
I am not claiming that this is the truth (in fact I am sure what I wrote is wrong in some important ways that are beyond me) but it is just as extraordinary to me to assume that there isn't anything out there wildly more intelligent than us (or the most powerful ai we can dream up) as it is to assume that there isn't.
I see this quote often in this thread. It is stated as a fact, with attribution to Carl Sagan. Yet I see no supporting reasoning for this conclusion.
I find it ironic that - in a thread with so much emphasis on evidence - this statement is repeated as if it was gospel.
I ask: why? What is an extraordinary claim? What constitutes extraordinary evidence?
This response doesn't make sense because there wasn't an extraordinary claim being made.
He just said we don't know what it is and shouldn't assume it's uninteresting.
If this number is "infinity" for you, that is unreasonable.
You know, "you didn't actually see what you think you saw."
The thing is, in science, as Sagan so succinctly put it- Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence.
One landing in a public area, now that would be evidence hard to ignore.
This makes it boils down to 1. sensors artifacts, 2. US military program not shared with all pilots or 3. another country collecting data on US.
I see lot of "close minded" people looking at the evidence and concluding that it's not enough evidence to conclude aliens are visiting us.
It looks like these UAPs are everywhere but the evidence is so low level that I wouldn't even conclude they aren't just planes or ducks instead.
number of times in the last century weird stuff has been revealed to be classified projects: dozens, hundreds?
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I mean, I GN an adult Dungeons and Dragons centered on multiple worlds and I love considering different worlds and how they might work. But the people who extrapolate the unexplained to a claim that there's some fantastical things that science is suppressing seem so starved for "the fantastical" that they're distorting the entire situation. Science isn't there to squash your fun. Science doesn't deny that uncertainty is a constant part of ordinary human experience - scientifically established positions are merely a reliable tip of an iceberg of uncertainty.
The claim in the article is stronger than just "lights". He used the word "objects" which suggests these UAP are being detected on multiple modalities.
You just contradicted the rest of your post.
Really what I think a good editor would have done is intrude like this: "Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities are routinely perceived to fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence.
You could add (if any) at the end if you wanted to maintain the skepticism.
There are so many reasons why these things are routinely perceived: CCD errors. Optical in-lens problems. Wind shear effects. Differential lighting and occultation. Mis-attribution of large distant objects to smaller fast moving near objects and vice-versa. Bugs on the windscreen.
Being a "US Navy fighter pilot" doesn't somehow insulate you from perceptual problems in the system, or systemic bias. I would suggest that the certainty of decision making vested in a fighter pilot might very well actually re-inforce the "I know what I saw" aspect here.
Here's an example of receiver bias: Why are they seen flying over the military bases? Let me ask, if this is the predominant place that US Fighter Pilots would expect to see anything: Why yes, it is. Thats their main focus of alertness in take off and landing, performing their job.
CCDs aren't used much these days. But the principle is the same: if you think any kind of digital sensor behind a camera is an error-free input source, I have a UFO detector to sell you..
- Is it aliens?
- If not, do these sightings represent real unexplainable technological phenomena (advanced propulsion technology)?
- If not, are the eyewitness accounts credible?
- In any case, why is the DoD letting eyewitnesses go public?
With the answers to these questions we can enumerate several interesting possible explanations:
1) It’s not aliens, sightings do not represent any real unexplainable physical phenomena, the eyewitnesses have collectively deluded themselves somehow and are not credible, the DoD has allowed them to go public seeing the matter as benign (the “lens glare” hypothesis)
2) It’s not aliens or any unexplainable phenomenon, the eyewitnesses are deluded, but the DoD has let them go public for some ulterior motive, possibly to sow confusion and provide cover for real technologies they are working on (the “useful idiots” hypothesis)
3) It’s not aliens or any advanced technology, maybe it’s even completely fabricated, and the eyewitnesses are involved in a PSYOP. Possibly to delude US adversaries into chasing their tails, or to provide cover for real technologies (the “PSYOP” hypothesis)
4) It’s not aliens, but it is an advanced technology being developed in secret by the US, the eyewitnesses are unaware of the providence of said technologies, and the DoD has let them go public as a PSYOP to sow confusion or to signal capabilities to adversaries (the “skunk works” hypothesis)
5) It is aliens, it is known by governments worldwide, and the DoD has let the eyewitnesses go public because they see it as a benign public good or are not willing or capable of stopping the flow of said information (the “UFO whistleblower” hypothesis)
6) It is aliens, it is unknown by some other governments, and the US wants to sound the alarm, possibly to signal other nations to come forward with their own information and start working on a global strategy for managing the situation (the “Earth defence” hypothesis)
7) They are not aliens or any unexplainable phenomenon, witnesses are all deluded or victims of things like lens glare and the DoD has let them go public (importantly without stigmatising them) to:
We've greatly increased the amount of things that can be done, but I wouldn't be so confident about the things that can't be done.
As I see it. Let's say that human civilization does not turn Earth to a nuclear wasteland but rather resolves its social issues and proceeds with colonization of Solar System. We already sent probe out of our Solar System. It does not look for me to be impossible technology to build a probe with AI and robots smart enough to reach another star system, decelerate there, build some factories on asteroids and copy itself sending copies to further star systems. Of course at the same time exploring its "home" star system and transmit information they got to Earth.
So very quickly (in universe scale) our sphere of knowledge will expand limited only by some fuel tanks capacity required to accelerate and decelerate.
Yes, there will be years, decades, centuries and millenniums for this information to reach Earth. That's the nature of cosmos (according to our current knowledge) and we will have to deal with it.
Eventually probe will find planet with life. May be life is more abundant than we imagine now. May be not. Surely there will be protocols for the probe to investigate life. It's hard to imagine what those protocols would be. May be explore freely until certain technology advances are observed and then hide. So may be our ancestors saw alien probes on a regular basis and just didn't care. But now those probes observe that we've got quick airplanes so they hide better.
My point is that developed civilization inevitably will expand its sphere of influence at speed limited by speed of light. Probably slower than that. But billion of years at 0.1c is still huge chunk of universe. Are we sure that no civilization born within this radius billion years ago?
Consider the following aspects of the observed phenomena:
- Intelligent characteristics (chasing / following / loitering behaviour)
- Ability to generate and withstand extreme G-forces
- Ability to expend/sustain extreme bursts of energy
- Lack of visible exhaust
- Bizarre aerodynamic characteristics
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I am a technologist and I took some aerospace-related courses in university. The first two aspects combined seem to rule out control by a human in the cockpit, and given the history of AI I would say autonomous control by a computer as well. Although not altogether the possibility of remote control by a human.
But the last three aspects transcend not only everything I think I know about existing technology, but also my understanding of:
- Newton's Third Law of motion and the rocket equation
- Fluid mechanics/Navier-Stokes equation
- Thermodynamics
i.e., it exceeds our current science by such an enormous margin that I couldn't even begin to approach how to analyze it. Therefore, I think that if we rule out the possibility of a delusion/hoax, it's far more likely that these objects are alien than a secret skunk works project.
It seems there is a lot of pressure from high-up in the government to release at least old-enough footage of UAP, given the recent releases of UAP footage[0,1].
0: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/216571...
1: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3491437-watch-n...
It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability. Even ignoring the technological implications of interstellar flight or the ability to enter our atmosphere without being detected, these objects are apparently massively more capable than any kind of vehicle we have. To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna.
It seems very likely that fighter pilots and finely-tuned military equipment would be very eager to pick up false signals from background noise and interpret it as vehicles that stretch out understanding of physics.
You just don't hear about it because of stigma.
See this NARCAP (civilian flight safety) report https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20 for a case where a FedEx flight crew documented an encounter with the commonly reported pulsating orb type anomaly. There is a video.
Observed behavior:
> The UAP/Light came from above and stopped/hovered near FL37, about the same altitude as the aircraft, shone a light on the 767 and briefly approached the aircraft. Then it instantly matched the speed, and heading of the aircraft and maintained a consistent separation.
a. The light descended vertically, stopped abruptly, and shone a light on the 767 causing the crew to believe that there was another airliner on a collision heading with its landing lights on.
b. It changed direction from vertical descent to a sudden stop/hover, to approaching the aircraft briefly, to taking the same heading and speed of the aircraft at about the same altitude and an estimated distance of 1-2k ft.
c. It matched the altitude, speed, and heading of the aircraft, 575mph and at 37,000ft for over 32 minutes.
d. The UAP/Light changed colors and turned away from the aircraft on a perpendicular heading, West, just inside the Mexico/US border.
e. The UAP/light did not have wings or running lights. It was a new and unique observation to the experienced air crew.
> It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability
And in fact, apparently they do here too. It's been documented these UAPs have an interest in our nuclear capabilities. There has been many testimonies from people in the military these UAPs buzz around nuclear silos and apparently are able to disable them. See this well researched video for information on Robert Hastings https://youtu.be/l4EXL7jgqns
Interesting though.
To play devil's advocate for a moment: they'd have to know the capabilities of these jets to make that determination, and observation of some sort would be required to do so.
"Artifacts" (anomalous errors) appear on flight systems' sensors all the time, and atmospheric distortions can easily appear to the naked eye as flying/moving objects. I don't buy either that other countries have such advanced technology or that extraterrestrial intelligences are visiting us: the simpler explanations I noted cover more or less every published UAP we have seen.
I always find it odd that we ascribe a human understanding of logic to an alien species. Seems to me we wouldn’t know jack shit about motivations, capabilities, approaches to decision making, etc…
They do. Here's a Forbes article about it[0].
I'm firmly in the "it isn't aliens" camp but there are no shortage of UFO/UAP reports with multiple, credible eyewitnesses.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2021/06/26...
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It such hubris to believe those are alien craft and not foreign military drones. As if alien craft is the more probable explanation than another country having drones the US Navy does not.
Maybe not. Even when it all started, a few cases were alledgedly air combat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantell_UFO_incident
Other incidents crashes, like Roswell. Obviously I cannot vouch for any of those :-) just wanted to point that air fighters at the time were much less sophisticated than today. Maybe people that travels between stars are not so interested in bringing state-of-the-art war machines with them. The technology to maneuver a drone or vehicle at incredible speed or angles might still be vulnerable to bullets or missiles.
And yet, here are the reports, but no one is coming forward to say "yes, we Canadians actually never cancelled the Avro Arrow and have been decades ahead of the rest of you all this time- now please remove that Danish flag from Hans Island".
It's such a foreign idea that someone might have this advantage and not use it that the best answer we have is "I guess they aren't humans". Maybe that says a lot about us.
And that the behaviour of other countries could be a problem to the manufacturing country--trade and cooperation etc.
And if the advancements are used for spying then of course they'll be kept quiet for as long as possible.
Showing your cards early, even if you think they're good, may not be the best approach.
This kind of tech could only come from a superpower, and you really think they wouldn't brag about it?
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