Hacker News Reader

Comment by inflatableDodo | Hacker News Reader

>"We know a little more about the UFO itself. It is described as “wingless, white, and shaped like an oblong pill. It was 24-30 (40 in the NYT article) feet long and had no visible markings or glass. The USS Princeton was able to faintly track the “capsule” via its SPY-1B radar system, but the fighters were not able to get a radar lock on the object. The “capsule” was not only more maneuverable than the Hornets but also much faster —for it to have reached the CAP point ahead of the Navy fighters it would have had to have flown in excess of 2,400 miles an hour. According to FighterSweep.com, which published a detailed chronicle of the event in 2015, the object did not emit hot jet exhaust typical of ordinary aircraft."

View on HN

This lists three possibilities: Malfunction of equipment and/or crew, US government operating a real UFO, or aliens operating a real UFO.

I can think of one more which seems more likely: US government testing secret radar spoofing tech (probably operated from a submarine).

Why not a foreign government? Or even a private corporation?

Risky to test it on the US and not some smaller country. Less risky if it's the US testing it on itself.

Unless it's already been tested on smaller countries successfully. In which case testing against the US is just a logical step.

I always think to myself that the technology we see and know about now, the spy planes and such, are ~50 years old, so what is operating now that we won't know about until some of us are 70 or 80 years old?

In some cases for things like stealth tech, sure. In most cases though, where there's an obvious commercial aspect to successful research, we see things fast. When there's a military invention that could lead to something like a microwave or nylon the company behind it want to reap billions from selling to the public as soon as possible.

This is one reason why I find stories like this one unlikely. If we assume this object is, say, a Chinese spy drone, why would the Chinese use this amazing new tech for something as mundane and boring as a spy drone? They could turn it in to a commercial engine, mount it on some aircraft, and completely dominate the air travel and air freight. As far as using technology to crush your enemies goes that would have a much greater impact on the US than watching what the country is up to from a drone.

>They could turn it in to a commercial engine, mount it on some aircraft, and completely dominate the air travel and air freight.

It's entirely possible that some novel propulsion technology would only work with extremely light craft under specific conditions, and either couldn't scale to the size of a commercial aircraft, or would be less efficient or cost effective at that scale than existing technology.

Ion propulsion is only useful in space, for instance.

A significant fraction of reported UFOs are much, much larger than the largest existing conventional jets.

You appear to be making a number of assumptions here which don't actually prove anything, you're just preaching to the choir of UFO believers.

First, that all UFO reports accurately describe craft that defy known physical laws (discarding the likelihood of hoaxes or misidentifications of conventional craft or other phenomena.) The significance of the fraction, in this case, is irrelevant.

Second, that people are able to accurately gauge the size of objects in the sky (they aren't, see phenomenon like the moon illusion as an example of how difficult it is, and how biased human perception can be.) Just because people see a roughly triangular formation of lights in the night sky, doesn't mean there's a vast, football-field sized black triangle hovering over the city.

And you should have said "A significant fraction of reported UFOs appear much, much larger," for your actual comment to be true, we would need examples of actual UFOs to test against the size of conventional jets.

Third, that the phenomenon on the video in the posted article shows a craft which uses the same or a similar form of technology as "much larger" UFOs, and that this somehow invalidates the premise that novel forms of propulsion exist which cannot arbitrarily scale.

You seem to be making the case that because the commenter did not offer provenance that none exists. Is my understanding of your point correct?

Seems unlikely that foreign governments could develop flying craft that violate most of the laws of physics as we understand them as far as momentum, propulsion and a variety other factors are concerned.

The US, sure, but a foreign government violating the laws of physics... not likely!

Iceland may have acquired elf tech.

One of them has a defense budget the size of a small moon and it isn't the foreign government.

That's no moon... (sorry, couldn't resist).

I mentioned another possibility in one of my other comments; a UV laser on a satellite (or some other suitable platform with a view of the entire flight volume, or multiple overlapping platforms) being focused to create a movable plasmaball.

> object did not emit hot jet exhaust

Is jet exhaust distinguishable from hot plasma ball in IR?

A plasma ball being moved by redirecting a laser generating it won't emit an exhaust tail.

I'm thinking a very very big version of this - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/a-floating-holograph...

I think you misunderstood. I was asking if you're looking at infrared view, would you be able to tell a difference between a jet's exhaust and a plasma ball (of a similar size) in a long distance.

A jet exhaust would change noticably as the aircraft rotates. If it is only racing away on a fixed line, maybe not, but otherwise I would think so.

If somebody has a laser that big, with batteries that good, that's an issue in itself.

True, it does seem pretty unlikely. But if the reports are in any way accurate, then the explanation will be probably something that seems pretty unlikely.

You left out flat out lying in an attempt to sway the human domain towards a certain solution: say, military budgets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE

Or lying in an effort to distract the current occupant of the White House, who might be a greater threat to the nation than extraterrestrials ;-)

They told him. Notice how he suddenly wanted a "space force"?

That's because the Russians founded it's own couple of months prior.

That video is super interesting and very fun to watch.

Thanks for sharing

> US government operating a real UFO

Or some other nation. By far the most likely explanation to me is that this is some classified military tech.

The government wouldn't test that kind of tech anywhere that could be detected. Gives your enemies a chance to pick it up, analyze it, and defeat it.

I'm skeptical of the part where it went to the CAP point. First, it was apparently only detected at the CAP point by the USS Princeton, it was gone by the time the jets arrived so we don't have multiple confirmation. But more importantly, how did the craft know to go to the CAP point? Even if the jets were bearing in that direction at the time (and I don't think they were) how would it know the distance to travel? Was it listening in on radio chatter, meaning they have reverse engineered our communications protocols, broken our encryption, and understand enough of our language and technical jargon to determine where to go? Were the exact coordinates of the CAP point even discussed over the radio while in the presence of the craft?

And the whole thing just seems weird to me. If you're an alien vessel visiting our planet, it seems like you're either going to try to make contact, or ignore people and just gather samples. But this? Just sort of bothering the US Navy? You could argue it was gathering samples of ocean water or something. But then why go to the CAP point? That can't be to collect scientific data. And that doesn't make sense as their attempt to contact us. As I mentioned above, they'd have to have a lot of knowledge of our language and communication to know where that point is, which means they know enough to simply make radio contact.

Telepathy, read the CAP point in cleartext right out of the pilot's head.

Why though? If you're an advanced race that built a thought-extracting brain scanner specifically for a random race they encountered on a random planet (which it would have to be), is reading waypoints off a random pilot's brain really the best use of that technology?

Why not? Bearing in mind that telepathy is a highly recurrent feature of UFO reports, it seems they already have that capacity (probably not via a gadget either), and it's a case of "if you have a hammer..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com