Hacker News Reader

Here is another UFO incident from another country (Belgium) with multiple corroborating observations and very high acceleration/deceleration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave

The evidence includes:

1. Statements by thirty different groups of witnesses, three separate groups of police officers, documenting the sight of a large object flying at low altitude. An estimated 13,500 people on the ground saw the object, of which 2,600 filed written statements describing in detail what they saw.

2. Detection on radar of the object from two F-16 Fighter jets scrambled to intercept the object

3. Secondary detection of the object from ground radar at a nearby military airfield

4. Data from the F-16s suggesting near impossible maneuvers. Quoting wikipedia:

"During the first radar lock, the target accelerated from 240 km/h to over 1,770 km/h while changing altitude from 2,700 m to 1,500 m, then up to 3,350 m before descending to almost ground level – the first descent of more than 900 m taking less than two seconds. Similar maneuvers were observed during both subsequent radar locks. On no occasion were the F-16 pilots able to make visual contact with the targets [NB: it was around midnight hence poor visibility] and at no point, despite the speeds involved, was there any indication of a sonic boom."

5. A low quality photo, which may have been faked.

With regards to the evidence presented, I find it very difficult to come up with a convincing explanation of this incident.

Sounds like a cluster of balloons with directional radar reflectors on it? So what you're seeing is not a single rapidly moving source, but multiple stationary point sources each being detected intermittently?

You'd hope fighter pilots would be able to identify a balloon when they see one.

I guess so. What is the connection with this story in which no pilot made any visual contact with anything?

Explanation yes. Convincing explanation no. It could have been caused by balloons. Balloons can't fly at 2000km/h, nor accelerate at 100g, so for the ballon hypothesis to work you'd have to assume there was also a major malfunction in the two F-16 lock-on systems. You'd also have to assume there was a major failure in the military ground radar system.

However, when you make those assumptions, that opens up a can of worms for other possible explanations. Assuming there was sensor system malfunction, the incident could also be explained though a flock of helicopters flying around. Or it could have been several NSA spy planes flying around. I've seen both those explanations put forth as an explanation for what happened in Belgium.

I don't believe it's possible to disprove either your balloon hypothesis nor the helicopter hypothesis. There's just not enough evidence to make any convincing explanation.

Its also a little hard to believe the systems malfunction theory.

How is it that the systems from various departments of the government. Each of which are totally independent of each other, suddenly all malfunction at once at the same time, and the event happens, and then again the systems get back to functioning perfectly fine?

> The evidence includes

I highly recommend reading the Skeptical explanations section of that article.

Among other things:

[...] but the Belgian military only reported three such locks, and upon analyzing the data, all three radar locks were on each other.

Troublingly, the skeptical explanations section does not resolve the thousands of eyewitness reports from people claiming to see the UFOs. The reports describe a low flying object visible before the F-16s took flight. The helicopter explanation put forth in the section hypothesizes the eyewitnesses mistook at least 3 different models of helicopters as UFOs. While possible, I don't believe it likely that a fleet of helicopters could be flying in the area without the air traffic control nor the Belgian military being aware of it.

> Troublingly, the skeptical explanations section does not resolve the thousands of eyewitness reports from people claiming to see the UFOs

Actually, that section contains a very reasonable explanation:

Hallet's thesis is that the Belgian UFO wave was mostly a mass delusion, boosted by the work done by the SOBEPS. This mass delusion would have followed Philip J. Klass's law: Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs. This situation feeds upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subject, and then the « flap » quickly runs out of steam..

Trouble is, mass hysteria is a rather terrible explanation, as it is a logical explanation for nearly any observable phenomena. It can be adapted to retort practically any eyewitness account. For example, it's possible to argue for and against the hypothesis that the earth is flat using the retort that the other side is suffering from mass delusion. Furthermore, a mass hysteria explanation needs to be coupled with the an explanation of the unidentified objects detected on both the ground and F-16 radars.

I worked at a planetarium for a while. On nights when one of the naked-eye planets were low in the sky, we would get dozens of calls from people either wanting to know what they saw, or trying to report a UFO.

Often, these reports would claim that the light was flashing and jumping around - an effect from seeing it through a thick layer of atmosphere between the observer and the horizon.

Meteor showers or individual meteorites were another rich source of these reports. The variations that can occur here are enormous - see e.g. "Observation of Fireballs" and "Fireballs and Meteorite Falls": https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/observations/, https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/meteorites/

The first link above points out:

> "The collision of the meteoroid with atmospheric particles causes ablation, and thereby ionization, of both atmospheric and meteoroid constituents. While most of these excited states exist for about 10^-8 seconds only, there are also some atomic states which may persist for times exceeding several seconds (metastable levels). The emissions from such levels may be visible for variable amounts of time, and are designated as persistent trains (see Baggaley, 1980). They appear bright in the night sky after the meteor itself has disappeared. A large meteoroid entering the atmosphere leaves a substantial amount of material in its wake which is distributed along its trajectory."

The kinds of visual effects this can produce are affected by where the trail is relative to the observer - again, looking through more atmosphere tends to create additional effects.

And of course, planets and meteors are not the only causes of relatively uncommon visual effects. Clouds, refracted sunlight or moonlight, smoke, jet trails, etc. are all capable of producing effects whose true cause may either not be apparent to a casual observer or even not without careful study by trained observers.

In short, large numbers of eyewitnesses to something unexplained is most likely to demonstrate the limitations of untrained observers seeing some unusual but perfectly ordinary phenomenon.

This reminds me of a quote from the movie Prometheus - "God doesn't build in straight lines"

Meaning, if you see intelligent stuff being done. Objects moving up and down, left and right in perfect angles. Or if some one wrote up "Hello, World" on the skies its very unlikely its a natural phenomenon.

I'm not aware of anyone having observed hello world being written in the sky by a UFO.

Other than that, the point is not that these are just natural phenomena, but rather natural phenomena filtered through imperfect observing conditions and observation mechanisms, including radar and the human eye & mind.

There are many examples of straight lines in nature, though. That quote is truthy but not, in fact, true.

Radar signals need software to be interpreted. Need I say more than that?

Some team did their utmost best to write the code that's running in those F16s. They really were excellent engineers, with no doubt huge budgets. And they got it kind of running and after a few years of debugging got the most obvious crashes and other bugs fixed.

I think it rather likely that some disparate echoes got interpreted as reflecting from a single object, and that's how you get things travelling at incredible speeds.

This. I work with state of the art radar systems and automated target recognition / tracking. It's common to have false tracks jumping out of the noise. These tracks can accelerate zero to thousands, jump positions and altitides, whatever you imagine. If you build a machine to track jitters in electromagnetic returns and let it run wild, it'll show you all kinds of amazing things.

I am a massive skeptic when it comes to UFOs / the supernatural, but must relate one story. A friend of mine, who is now deployed with the UN, used to work as a fighter controller with the air force of a certain country. He is a sober and reliable person, but also made mention one time that it was 'common' to see unexplained objects on radar, and that it was policy to simply ignore them. These objects had characteristics (speed, change of direction) that made it impossible for them to be any kind of 'known' aircraft.

I know, I know - it's hearsay, and - again - I am a huge sceptic. Still, it was a bit of a disturbing conversation to have with someone I know and respect, and who was highly trained and in a position of authority.

Radar operators see odd returns all the time due to temporary atmospheric conditions, interference, birds, etc. I'm not trying to dismiss your friend's claims but just because a blip appears on a radar screen doesn't necessarily mean there's a real object.

>I am a massive skeptic when it comes to UFOs / the supernatural

Interestingly UFOs and supernatural events have been clumped together, but afaik these UFO claims typically don't require rewriting the laws of physics. If a UFO's existence was proven, and in the public domain, it would go from -100 to +100 in terms of people's attitudes of "that's all just a bunch of balogna" to "of course, we have always known it is very unlikely we are alone." However, a supernatural event would fundamentally shake up our scientific understanding of the universe. I think they're completely different types of possibilities.

> supernatural event would fundamentally shake up our scientific understanding

Surely we're due for one of these soon. Given our infantile understanding of quantum mechanics and physics, it's a matter of time before we observe something that defies modern science.

I know what you mean, but I guess it depends on how we define such an event? The difference between Newtonian physics failing to be accurate at relativistic speeds and the stuff of supernatural fiction coming to life seems pretty significant.

For most people, quantum theory is just as shocking as anything out of supernatural fiction. It's quite common to deny that it's real and to hope a traditional explanation will replace/modify it.

That hope has always been grounded in a fear of it's "supernatural" qualities and is becoming less likely as theorists find proofs limiting it's flexibility while keeping agreement with experiments.

I think a personal god who performs miracles, raises the dead, created the universe, knows everything, cares about whom you have sex with and in what position, etc, carries a lot more "baggage" than quantum weirdness.

Far more people are the opposite, though, accepting the existence of a personal god and the supernatural without question, while assuming science and quantum weirdness to be nonsense or outright lies.

But do you understand quantum weirdness? How would you describe it?

Doesn't String Theory require 13 dimensions or something? Maybe that is a way around FTL travel.

Keep your eye on HeartMath. Stanford is involved. There have been rumors of some awesome (in the true expression of the term) discoveries.

Could you elaborate?

>Interestingly UFOs and supernatural events have been clumped together, but afaik these UFO claims typically don't require rewriting the laws of physics.

Antigravity and FTL travel require rewriting the laws of physics AFAIK, or at least amending them. There are possibilites that only seem to work on paper, assuming the existence of fudge factors like negative mass.

Who said anything about antigravity or FTL? Nothing about UFOs require these things.

The "UFO claims" mentioned by wallace_f above often describe objects that appear to defy conventional physics and aerodynamics, and the nature of those claims are what's being discussed, not UFOs in general. Specifically the link between the claims being made and the claims also made by adherents of the supernatural, neither of which can coexist with a universe that operates under known physical laws.

Assuming that UFOs behave as described, and are actual physical craft which can hover silently over a point with no visible or audible engines, propellers or exhaust, which can make arbitrary breakneck maneuvers or suddenly vanish over the horizon in seconds, as is often described, then you need an unconventional explanation for their means of propulsion. It's either antigravity or magic, but it probably can't be, say, VTOL or just really good rockets.

So they move really fast? Nowhere near faster than light though. That doesn't defy physics. It's weird, but weird things are possible.

1) You're talking about something that would be hard to achieve with rockets, let alone propellers regardless of the drive technology.

2) Now you're talking about /bottle rockets/. There's a reason we don't use those for any serious purpose: They're worse than basically anything else in terms of both power and specific thrust.

Occam's Razor would suggest that overcoming these problems would be more plausible than an alien visitation, unless you have other theories...

>assuming that there is no lying involved

I've seen this video several times before, and it's usually explained as an FLIR artifact (I believe the pod has a steerable lens systen, so possibly the cause of the rotation seen in the video).

As to why the audio corroboates the video? Well, not everything you hear on the internet is true....

The energy available in compressed gasses is very small. Even if you compress to the limit where it turns into a liquid you're not going to get enough thrust to significantly accelerate a real aircraft. Some spacecraft use cold gas thrusters for attitude control but not for really moving around.

My immediate reaction (not being a physicist or an aeronautical engineer) is that I think it's unlikely you're going to see those kinds of performance characteristics in something "propulsion" based.

The first line of business would be the power source. The intuition would be that you need a mobile high energy power source. The counter-intuitive idea would be that the necessary power source would be so giant that it could never be mobile (like a dyson sphere), but there may be some method of linking a stationary power source with a mobile ship across vast distances. This offers control convenience if an advanced race still needs an authority structure and the possibility of remote monitoring. That also brings up the question of un"manned" exploration drone fleets bouncing between star systems and reporting back.

As for movement, I would like to think that something with the observed extreme acceleration and the assumed interstellar capability is using a highly performant computer to calculate adjustments to an inside-out standing wave solution that the ship's outer shell is built for. Imagine shifting waveforms and your ship just kind of repositions yet it feels like you're completely still. Any space debris or other objects encountered while repositioning might get trapped outside the ship so that whenever you arrive at your destination you have to shed the debris. I'm sure a physicist will chime in and say this can never work, but at least from a naive perspective I like the idea of it.

> we can safely assume that there _were_ actual physical flying objects in the are

Why not some kind of an advanced hologram combined with an electromagnetic disturbance? If it were possible, it could be used as a great decoy.