UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Ha...
(a picture of Have Blue - the precursor to the stealth fighter. It defiantly looks like something out of this world to the eyes of someone in 1977)
So, really, its likely that any UFO is military in nature, rather than extraterrestrial.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-t...
The thing that makes these interesting is the fact that they exhibit aeronautic behavior, while tracked by multiple computers and witnesses, that is not physically possible with known methods of propulsion, not because they look like shiny discs.
The director of this program is on record saying that after deploying extensive analytical resources at the Pentagon onto all the evidence (cross referencing radar signatures, satellite feeds, etc) and leveraging internal expertise to rule out alternatives there remain cases for which there remains no explanation consistent with the idea that these are aircraft in any government's inventory or any other natural phenomena.
Either this person is lying, or somehow otherwise should be given no credibility, or the government has decided to reveal that there are in fact objects in the sky whose origin are, to the best of our country's ability to analyze them, unknown. This person specifically ruled out the idea in their NPR interview that these objects are part of some hidden government advanced aircraft program.
You can believe what you want to sleep better at night, such as that there is in fact some hyper-advanced tech the government has that this program was kept in the dark about, but there's not much wiggle room at this point other than to accept that the level of public acknowledgement of the UFO phenomena by the federal government (and particularly, the department of defense) has changed significantly now and that there is a very high prior that there are objects in the sky whose origins are a mystery.
I hope some enterprising aeronautical engineering student at Calpoly parters with some compsci engineers at Stanford to take this up...
The fact that the aircraft is moving at G forces unsustainable by biological life isn't surprising either given advances in drone tech.
It would also make sense to shut the UFO program down as well if it was ending up with these secret programs getting accidentally revealed.
There's also the publicly acknowledged reports of NASA and various governments/military conducting investigations and spending millions of dollars in the process.
Historically it would have been politically difficult for governments to come out and admit this - and when they did (like after Roswell) it was quickly retracted.
Peel back the social conditioning and reconsider the likelihood of this given all the reports.
But here’s my problem with what you’re saying: where did they come from then, and how did they get here? Why do we not have any evidence of their planet in any reasonable distance from Earth? Given what we understand about modern physics, we have three conclusions we can arrive at:
1. We fundamentally misunderstand physics, in particular the central concept that the speed of light is a hard speed limit on motion, and aliens are capable of arriving here faster than light,
2. The aliens have technology capable of arriving here from so distant a home world that they are either inconceivably long lived or else their entire society existed on a transport vessel for generations and generations,
3. Sightings of UFO are examples of popular hysteria, and aliens are not, and have never been anywhere near Earth.
Given the available evidence, Occam’s Razor suggests #3. I understand that reports from distributed and disconnected sources can be encouraging, but realistically speaking it still presents insufficiently extraordinary evidence to me to abandon possibility #3.
Yes, I know that that idea is pretty out there, but we're already talking about ideas that bend or break the known physical laws, so why not consider it? I honestly don't see it as being any less absurd than the idea that the speed of light is not a universal constant, an that is required for almost all hypotheticals involved extra-solar intelligence.
A satellite program like this could easily monitor distant parts of the galaxy without travelling faster than light, or require a generational ship.
Keep in mind that we think we know how to reach a destination faster than light (although not travel faster than light). We just don't know how [edit: to build the engine] or even if it's a practical approach. What it shows is that physics does allow us to reach a distant star and return in a single lifetime.
> inconceivably long lived
I'm not sure about this one. That species would have had to evolve somehow, unless they solved the mortality problem or unless Earth-like evolution is not universal. Even if they could, given the timeframes, why would they visit?
My point is that, yes, we don't have enough evidence to abandon possibility #3. We also don't have enough knowledge to abandon possibility #1 and #2.
That being said, I'd wager that if ET has visited Earth less than 1% of the sightings are authentic - we aren't that interesting.
However, I grew up, and learned physics. And then later I learned about things like Molecular Nanotechnology.
Aliens, as popularly conceived, have not been here, and will not be coming here.
Why? I'll explain.
Space is big. Like, really big. The distance to the nearest star system is 4 light-years away. Even for a small object, it takes an enormous amount of energy to get going at a "reasonable" speed, like at some fraction of the speed of light. For an example of a more reasonably-sized object, Voyager 1 would take 70k years to get to the closest star system (4LY away) if it was headed in the right direction.
But then you have to stop! If you accelerate up to 0.1c (very fast), you have to decelerate to arrive at your destination. This is where the rocket equation kills you. Even with super-mass efficient ion drives (which with our current technology provide very low thrust), accelerating your spaceship to a reasonable speed, and then have enough delta-V to stop at the destination requires an even more crazy amount of energy.
If any aliens are headed to our solar system, we'd see their drive flairs from a long way out.
The most efficient system is to use a light sail (really, a laser sail). This is so you don't have to carry all that reaction mass with you, thus bypassing the rocket equation. And then there's a trick where you detach most of your sail, allowing it to reflect light back towards the ship for the deceleration half of the trip.
But again, even for a small (like 1kg) payload, this requires a stupendous amount of energy. And we'd see them coming because they'd be shining a big, big laser in our direction.
There are also Bussard ramjet drives, and other speculated technology, but these would all likely be slower because of the mass required to build it.
Now simply flinging out a bunch of von Neumann replicators out in every direction would be much less obvious (though very slow), until the space dust starts building infrastructure in our solar system... but that's a talk for another day.
It is helpful to think of what would aliens want from us that they can't get at home.
Raw material, like in the mini-series V, Oblivion, Uplift War trilogy, etc? It is too expensive to ship matter anywhere. If you need a lot of it for a construction project, you'd be better off heading to the galactic core.
Maybe they want our cultural uniqueness? But they could easily simulate many virtual worlds with different starting conditions, and poke around those without leaving the comfort of home. That would be much easier, especially after they get bored with humans.
And if they have advanced molecular nanotechnology, it isn't just waiting millions of years for results. They are likely running at a much higher "clock rate" than we are now. You can run an uploaded mind much faster than a biological one. So these hypothetical aliens would instead be waiting billions of years of subjective time for their probes to find something interesting.
Maybe, but I find that unlikely.
If they do want to pursue those sorts of activities, then can do much more, much faster while closer to home. Why settle for observing one naturally evolved species, when you can make dozens (or thousands) of your own?
From a Newtonian perspective quantum physics sounds like a complete joke. There are undoubtedly other discoveries yet to be made. I can certainly countenance that future scientific advancements could make what we think of today as being impossible as being possible without violating the laws we have discovered.
So we don't yet have a grand unified field theory, but for what we do understand, at reasonably attainable energy levels, there just isn't room to jam in some sort of faster-than-light communication or faster-than-light travel.
If you look at how it all fits together, any sort of magic like that seems highly unlikely.
Nothing we've observed in the sky, dating back billions of years, suggests FTL either. Until I see something that can even hint at FTL, I'm completely discounting it.
We've only known there's a pervasive limit for a century. We've known for a few decades that the limit is quite subtle i.e. the violation of local realism. It's not at all difficult to imagine that there is more to know in this field. I mean, it took 200-odd years before Newtonian mechanics was supplanted. So there's form.
Also, you don't need to go faster than light as long as you don't go back. If alien explorers are going at a decent fraction of light speed, they can get a fairly long way in a sensible timespan for them. Just not for the folk back home.
My objection to the conspiracy theory idea is that it just doesn't make any sense. They drew huge pictures and built great monuments then got shy. They now play peekaboo with rednecks and the odd fighter pilot.
Governments could be covering up alien tech from a long gone race but one that's still here? A race that they collude with but let out to do a bit of probing because, presumably, the government can't find bodies for them.
So nah. They're not here but it's not technically inconceivable that they haven't been in the past or won't be in the future. It just doesn't seem very likely.
Occam's Razor still suggests #3, but #4 is more likely than #1 and #2.
Occam's Razor would throw that one out too of course.
- These are really old things
- They are autonomous and are driven by some computing system/AI
- They have the ability to harvest, store, and leverage an immense amount of energy and convert it into propulsion (or more specifically, allows the repositioning of the object's atoms in spacetime) in a way we don't understand but doesn't break the laws of thermodynamics and allows travel at near light speed for long periods of time.
- Their purpose isn't to communicate back to the origin (since the speed of light) but to autonomously take interventional action at their destination upon arrival based upon observation (this is the part that should scare you and if I were to go out on a limb is the reason these things aren't disclosed)
That's it. Speculation about their original origin is irrelevant with regards to assuming it's an extremely unlikely thing for unmanned autonomous agents to exist with (a relatively incremental) post-human level of technological capability.
If anything, there are many variants of resolving the drake equation which would make it surprising to not see such things, since it would imply there was never AI takeoff anywhere or any mechanism to deploy long-lived, self sufficient, autonomous probes. I'd expect us to be able to construct primitive versions of this within 100 years.
Well, for starters, it would require an extraordinary number of people to keep such a secret [1], so not really as probable as you may think. But it's still fun to think about.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/math-formula-charts-the...
That was rude, I know, but remember that the evidence required is proportional to the claim.
Extraterrestrial machines literally flying within our atmosphere is an extraordinary claim and requires more evidence than a huge number of circumstantial reports.
I imagine the claim like a hole in the ground that needs to be filled with nice clear evidence in order for people to swim in it comfortably. These circumstantial reports are like a bunch of 12oz cups and the hole you're trying to fill is more akin to a lake than a puddle.
See http://siriusdisclosure.com/ countless testimonies, videos and proofs.
If it’s an extraterrestrial, how did it get here?
There’s no evidence that FTL is possible and even if it were it would probably require huge amounts of power. We’d notice it being used.
We may as well be saying that these are angels from heaven, I guess is my point. There are tons of reports of ‘divine’ stuff happening as well, but jumping to God existing being a likelihood is not something an objective observer would do.
What I really want to know is what the alien technology is that makes all of these videos grainy and impossible to make out details in, and how did Bigfoot acquire it?
True, but remember that ~75% of the universe is 'dark energy' that is making the universe fly apart, eventually, faster than light speed. So, we hypothesize that eventually, everything will be faster than light.
What I am saying is that we don't know enough physics at the moment to say definitely that FTL is impossible. We really don't know any physics when talking about the majority of mass-energy of what we know currently, really. Extra-solar visitors may have figured a bit more of this out and realized that FTL is somthing you just go around, who knows.
Why would an alien species just do atmosphere drive-bys? Why wouldn’t they pop down and say hello?
Why on earth would NASA, SETI, SpaceX, etc cover up the biggest scoop (biggest FUNDING scoop) of Earth’s history?
Why wouldn’t any of the other LEO piercing countries in the world grass it up? Thousands of people working in each of the space-faring countries, all keeping quiet about it.
Why would the US, Russia, China, probably even North Korea agree on this one thing? Alright guys we are all agreed on not telling the plebs about the aliens? Ok cool, back to the war then lads.
If you can answer why, I’m down to clown on your theory.
There's some odd stuff in some NASA footage you can see for yourself. But now with CGI you probably won't accept any videos you can see on youtube as being real.
But this still isn't enough for you because until you actually see one with your own eyes you aren't willing to accept it. That is excellent scepticism. However, we accept a lot of scientific reports without actually running the experiments ourselves... There seems to be a mismatch there.
Healthy scepticism is healthy, but barring a "smoking gun" that is unavoidable (i.e. an "Independence Day"/"District 9" scenario) you probably will never believe it. I suggest that's due to conditioning and how the US Gov directed Hollywood to ridicule this sort of thing in the past.
If we relax things back to "normal" and view the reports (the volume, quality of sources, corroborating evidence like multiple witnesses, radar confirmation, WW1 Foo fighter reports, etc) then the balance of probabilities seems to lie with "yes, they're here and they've been here a long time", at least for me.
I mean the Mahabarata alone does appear to contain an account of nuclear fallout and diagrams of UFOs, and that was written thousands of years ago.
In the book, two things stood out to me. First, there are a quite a few UFO sightings that are corroborated by non-human sensor data (mostly radar and video). Second, the narrative paints a picture where US government officials are much more secretive than any other nation, by far. Within that context, the releases of the last few weeks are even more surprising.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in a modern, not-too-X-files-like take on UFO phenomena.
I agree that the releases from the US Gov the last few weeks have been VERY surprising, nearly a 90 degree shift from the "deny everything" policy that they assumed for the last few decades.
Going one step further, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I just wonder, what actually has changed to prompt this change in policy of denying everything
The election of credulous anti-science buffoons.
However we know it is one of...
* A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings.
* One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify.
* A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet.
Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence.
I'm surprised BBC picked this up.
It's basically a filler story that the BBC news would put on at the end of the news along the lines of "little boy saves hamster".
Nothing here says the audio is even genuine.
Not meta comment, aren't all flying objects UFOs until you've identified them?
HN eschews all modern UI affordances as a form of status signalling. It's like how millionaire startup founders like to wear cargo shorts and hoodies.
It's Y Combinator's way of saying, "we're so fucking successful we can afford to have a site that eclipses even Craigslist in un-usability."
I just don’t see why if we had a “confirmed” ufo sighting on military video that was a product of such a program, would we really discussing this in such a manner?
What important news is getting buried? ;)
So let's drum up the "crazy" about UFOs. So when real UFOs are seen (the ones we created and want to keep secret) nobody can get a serious dialogue going because the UFO signal-to-noise ratio is awful. Everyone will focus on how crazy anyone sounds when they claim they have UFO footage. Especially when one of our military partners or adversaries manage to snag some airborne or satellite imagery of it.
How can people be so Blind??? Look Carefully! That is Just a small Insect (a Bug) walking on the camera's lens! (or on the window that the camera is looking through, on it's inner side) How can't you see it? (you can almost see it's legs!) You can see that it's a bug by it's stability, a target outside the aircraft, like for example another plane would NEVER be so stable related to the aircraft's sight. This also explains why it looks so blurry, that is because the insect is walking on the camera's lens (or on the inside window) and therefore it's out of focus.
Probably it was a Night Flight so they saw it only through their IR camera and not from their aircraft's window. Test it, find a small insect and locate it very close to your smartphone's camera, see how similar it looks to what you see here... (The glow in the video is because of the IR camera).
Pilots can get wrong like any other human been, Many pilots crashed into the sea becouse of Spatial Disorientation, they got confused and thought that the sea is the sky. Also In 2004 Mexican aircraft pilots thought that they are following a UFO but later it turn out to be just some Oil platforms (in the sea below them) that they saw in their IR camera, search in Google for more information about that.
Probably they did some maintenance works on the aircraft on a hot day/night before it took off and some bugs went inside, this things happens!
Also what is an ASA.
(I think the speck would have to be on the lens itself though; a speck on the dome would stay fixed during gimbal rotation. Speck on the lens rotates by virtue of the DSP compensating for the camera rotation to keep the world level.)
I suppose also the "shape" of the object could be lens flare (or another imaging artifact) due to the object being very bright. At least some portion of such an artifact would track with the lens as well.
Also, the "halo" effect is an artifact of the imaging system I'm told.
So just because the object is hotter than the sky & clouds doesn't mean much. It could be "room temperature" (say, an insect or fresh bird poo). Or it could be reflective, and simply be reflecting the heat of the plane or camera itself.
What would be helpful is to know the range of temperatures represented by that image. The object is overexposed, so at least we could get a lower bound on its temperature.
Unfortunately, the sources in the story DO NOT inspire credibility...
>"...said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program]...
To the point: recently, he's been vocal to state that all these UFO reports in the media over the last few days are just preliminary Flase Flag UFO events, designed to confuse and obfuscate the real problem.
Then suddenly one of the two lights went out. The other one continued the same movement and also went out about a minute later.
This steady swinging movement is an unexplainable riddle for me.
A friend of mine also sighted something in the bright day sky of Spain. He told me that he looked up and then that thing whooshed away in an incredible speed over the Mediterranean Sea.
It's really weird. Either our senses and even the technical equipment like cameras are just fooled or we have extremely strange things going on over our heads.
Rational me doesn't want to believe me, but well, what if it was something.
That transition happens at precisely the moment that the object rotates.
Count me as convinced by the "speck of dust on gimbal-mounted camera" idea [1].
However, given the huge amounts of exo planets discovered everywhere around us in the last year or two, I consider it highly unlikely that we are alone.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/boeing-unveils-new-pl...
Not saying you are wrong, but a 13 year span doesn’t necessarily rule out the link OP posted.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2017/12/19/boeing-offers-sne...
Misspelled "Camera" also.
Edit: Well this comment is obsolete now that they updated the title. Good work!
But seeing as this is from the military, it makes it more implicit that it's alien.
Or this could be just a strategy for another goal?
For example, somebody mentioned they are trying hard to redirect attention from something else?
Update: I put the word prove in quotations.
The only thing it has going for it, in my opinion, is that the pilots would have been pretty used to seeing stuff in their cameras and would know the difference between something ordinary and something extraordinary. I do think its more likely that it was some military test plane than something extraterrestrial though, personally.
This is just conjecture though. Its pretty difficult for us to have a meaningful discussion about whether Congresses reaction is noteworthy without knowing for sure what they did or didn't see.
Based on what we have to work with, I'm not seeing anything noteworthy here besides some ATC/pilot folks conversation looking at a black smudge on a grainy sky. I guess unless we got to see the original video, its impossible to tell, really.
> They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data.
Do we know this for sure? Is there a source for that?
It's a popular culture thing that this term is used to mean "of extraterrestrial origin".
So, is it a UFO? Absolutely, pretty much by definition until someone identifies it.
Is it of extraterrestrial origin? Almost definitely not. It just doesn't make sense that there are aliens hurtling around and occasionally buzzing rural folk in Alabama, and the occasional fighter pilot, for larks. They might be doing that but it's much more likely that they're not.
This is, of course, entirely unrelated to the question of whether or not there is extraterrestrial life (probably) and extraterrestrial civilisation (no idea).
Yes, they legitimately saw something that they could not explain at the time.
> Do you think this proofs there are UFOs?
Of course there are flying objects that haven't been identified by someone. That doesn't mean they are extra terrestrial though.
> Somebody mentioned they are trying hard to redirect attention from something else?
Who's "they"?
One day, several strange zones appeared in the world, on a line that extends to a star Deneb. The brave 'stalkers' found all sorts of strange and miraculous objects there - artefacts (some people will remember a popular russian game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with similar things): they can kill and they can cure, but what we do know that the civilization that left them exists on an unfathomable scientific level to us and we can not even start to comprehend them, these objects are like magic to us.
And these strange zones, these strange objects were just a waste to this civilization. They just traveled through the cosmos and did not even notice us when they dumped them, like we, humans, do not notice ants that crawl under our feet while we take a picnic near a road.
I think it presents an incredibly realistic view of an ETI visiting this planet, especially if life is common in the universe. They don't come for us; hey are just passing through.
I have to wonder, realistically, how modern governments would respond to such a visitation.