Navy pilots report unexplained flying objects | Hacker News Reader

Navy pilots report unexplained flying objects

nytimes.com

167 pointsbkohlmann117 comments

The videos in the article are Gimbal[1] and Go Fast[2]. The incident that occured in 2004 is FLIR1[3].

This[4] analysis of Go Fast is pretty good, and sounds plausible, the author concludes that it's most likely a bird. He also analyzes FLIR1[5] and takes a look at Gimbal[6]. To me, it seems like FLIR1 might just be another jet moving away, and the "Tic-Tac" shape is just the IR-cone of a jet exhaust. As to Gimbal, Parabunk has yet to offer an analysis...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf1uLwUTDA0

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVRg7LLaQA

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY

[4]: http://parabunk.blogspot.com/2018/04/analysis-of-ttsa-2015-g...

[5]: http://parabunk.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-2004-uss-nimitz-tic...

[6]: http://parabunk.blogspot.com/2018/04/ttsa-gimbal-and-go-fast...

I do wonder if this is what they've released, what does the unreleased footage looks like?

Yep, none of these are new, and the thing about the navy making it standard operating procedure to report these things to get around the stigma of ufo sightings was a story from a month or two ago.

The real reason why this article is newsworthy is about halfway down:

> Lieutenants Graves and Accoin, along with former American intelligence officials, appear in a six-part History Channel series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” to air beginning Friday. The Times conducted separate interviews with key participants.

Happy memorial day, go enjoy some promoted TV.

When you start knowing to look for it, it’s amazing how many “news articles” are well-disguised PR exercises. I first started realizing this when simultaneously I noticed many articles, in many outlets, about Amelia Earhart. Then I recognized that almost all of them included a remark about an upcoming tv series on the subject...

It's appropriate that the first video is called "gimbal", because that's exactly what it is.

Watch the angle readout at the top of the video. The rotation of the object happens exactly around the time that the angle passes 0°. Why is this?

Have you ever watched a PTZ security camera rotate up and over the vertical axis and down the other side? It will tilt up until it nears the vertical axis, at which point it will rotate around that axis, and then tilt back down, now facing the other way. It does this to avoid gimbal lock [1], a state in which it would lose a degree of freedom of rotation. (In this case, it's not the vertical axis, but the forward axis.)

Why doesn't the image rotate then? [shallow speculation] The video software keeps it oriented so that it matches the plane's orientation. (Note that the feed is square, making it easier to make full use of the sensor regardless of rotation.)

Why does the object rotate? This should give you a clue where the object is. If the background is not rotating while the camera is rotating, but the object is, the object is on the camera. It will appear to rotate as the video software rotates the image to compensate for the camera rotation about the forward axis.

So why is the object moving? Well, it's not moving, not if it's on the camera. But whenever the camera moves, it would look like it's moving relative to the background.

So why is the camera moving? It's tracking the object. But the object isn't moving! Well, the camera doesn't track movement. It tracks position. The object is slightly offset from the center of the frame, so the tracking software slightly moves the camera to compensate. This of course does not change the situation, so the tracking software repeats its compensation. This constant camera movement in a single direction gives the appearance that the object is moving.

Why does the object show up on an infrared camera in the first place? It must be warm.

So… what is this warm object, which is stuck on the camera, slightly off-center, causing the tracking software to follow it, through and around the camera's axis, giving the appearance that the object is moving and then rotating?

Well, it's the same thing as this article in the NY Times, which, in service of securing funding from the UFO & Hitler Channel (as @floatrock astutely noted), decided to lend its gravitas to an easily-explainable video glitch which has been paraded by conspiracy theorists as incontrovertible validation of their deepest-held beliefs that extraterrestrials, against all probability, regularly visit Earth.

Bird shit.

Why am I paying for a NY Times subscription again?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock

I'd say a fly instead of avian excrement, but yeah, sounds conclusive.

That was the first thing I looked at, the angle vs. the movement. It doesn't necessarily have to be something on the camera, it could be internal interreflections.

The entire optical system is shielded from the environment by a transparent cover, probably spherical for a large field of view. Optical systems usually have some degree of internal interreflection that you try to suppress with anti-reflection coatings on the internal lenses. Usually, these coatings are highly angle-dependent. Specifically for very shallow incidence, almost parallel to the optical surface, you can't do much, there will be reflection. Another source of interreflection is the housing of the optical system - you usually try and suppress that by making surfaces 'black' but a very broad spectrum, brilliant light source can still produce a significant amount of reflected radiance.

The system was probably made with some requirements on these artifacts but it's always possible that for a certain off-axis angle, light gets coupled into the external, curved cover and then through the imaging system. Some of it makes it through at an angle that actually hits the sensor, in this case a virtual image or just some caustic from an object way off-axis.

Maybe it's the reflection of the sun from the sea. It is pretty static in terms of global incoming angle and does turn just right in relation to a turning aircraft to still hit the sensor - especially if you turn to still track it and keep it in the optical system's field of view.

The problem with that theory is that the object rotates but the clouds in the background don't.

I called out that fact as evidence for the theory, so I'm not sure what you mean. Can you clarify why this is contradictory?

Sorry I misunderstood your argument on first reading. My mistake.

Honestly my first thought after watching Go Fast was a bird. I've never flown as fast as these guys, but it looked a lot like when you see a bird underneath you. Seeing the analysis and that the pilots thought it was much closer to the ocean I can see the confusion. But I think the author put it well, that if you realize that it is not low flying, end of story.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a ton of stories like this. Flying is stressful and hard on the brain. It is easy to think something is at a different altitude or speed than it really is. If I made that misjudgement I'd be certain I saw a UFO too.

Hmm, are there many Ocean going birds that can fly at 50mph?

How certain is that speed?

Apparently yes. It looks like the Grey-Headed Albatross, a pretty large seabird, can reach a maximum horizontal speed of nearly 80 mph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_speed

Can't be. Only 3 albatross species exist in the northern pacific and none of them fit the length: Short-tailed albatross, Black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross. None of which are long enough head to tail.

The only other explanation is a Brown Pelican, which is too slow average 25 mph.

https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/jfo/v049n0...

The question was about if. So average speeds aren't great. We actually need to consider two different speeds. The obvious is maximum horizontal speed. The other isn't so obvious, maximum dive speed. We don't really know if the bird is flying horizontal to the ocean or it is diving. It could be flying somewhere in between. I did find a mention of a brown pelican diving at 41mph (which seemed like an average number). Consider that it might be higher than normal, better winds, just a stronger bird, or slight radar errors tracking such a small object, and that extra 9mph doesn't seem unreasonable. Or... it could not be specifically a brown pelican and just some other bird that fits the parameters. There are quite a lot that have diving speeds WELL over 50mph.

It always strikes me when these stories mention the UFO’s speed and altitude, usually presented as confirmation that the object is beyond known technology.

You cannot determine the speed or altitude of an unknown object visually! Close and slow looks just like distant and fast. Unless you have some other way to determine one of those variables (being able to judge the distance because you know the size of the object, for example), any claim of a UFO’s performance is bound to be bogus.

AFAIK the rangefinder on the targeting system is pretty good, with that data and the data of the plane (direction, altitude, velocity, etc...) getting the speed of an object is pretty trivial.

If this is indeed a bird, then you can definitely trust the sensor's data. If it's a smoke plume, something ethereal, ball lighting or anything not quite solid, the rangefinder will give false values.

This particular video is from a FLIR, which as far as I know is a passive system. How does it determine range?

Because it's not just a FLIR, it's a Raytheon AN/ASQ-228, an ATFLIR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/ASQ-228_ATFLIR

These things are not birds. To call them birds is insane, except if you're using the euphemism for "aircraft". Otherwise you and the other so-called "debunkers" with their convoluted logic are saying "I sitting at my computer am right, but all these government officials, scientific instruments, military personnel and civilians, they're wrong". Definition of crazy.

They're craft from unknown origins reported by multiple highly credible witnesses and systems and now being revealed to the public in a concerted way from the Navy, and former DoD and intelligence officials.

The narrative on this topic has changed, it's time to get up to date on the new perspective which is not ridicule but curiosity.

Take a look at these recent articles:

https://www.foxnews.com/science/christopher-mellon-official-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/ufos-exist...

https://nypost.com/2019/05/29/ufos-have-come-out-of-the-frin...

This incident is much larger than just the three FLIR videos, these objects were seen on multiple days, with both east and west coast incidents, at multiple vantage points. Forget TTSA as the source, are you really discounting these credible eyewitnesses testimonies from multiple vantage points? This goes well beyond just FLIR video, new radar technology was being deployed in both incidents and it flew by multiple aircraft at close proximity on multiple days. You'd think at some point an human eyeball would have recognized a bird.

https://youtu.be/PRgoisHRmUE (recreation of ONE of the west coast incident starts at around 9:00 in)

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27666/what-the-hell-is... (note embedded videos of testimonies)

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-... (new tech, east coast)

Even if you buy these skeptical writ-ups which only focus on FLIR videos and not the accounts of the whole incidents on multiple occasions, exactly what bird would fly at 48 mph that far off the coast of CA and be that 2 meters large? Even at 4 ft in length, a brown pelican averages only ~25 mph. The only other likely species at that size is an Albatross, however only 3 albatross species exist in the northern pacific and none of them fit the length: Short-tailed albatross, Black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross. Plus, a pelican only reaches 10,000+ riding thermals, which you wont find that far out into the ocean. What kind of bird can fly instantly back to a CAP position or ascend from 50 ft to 20,000 ft instantly?

https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/jfo/v049n0...

These writ-ups debunking the incident are pretty tunnel visioned.

Well, it’s a year later, and it doesn’t really seem like there’s anything new here. Luis Elizondo (who’s basically Guy Fieri mixed with Fox Mulder) looks and sounds like a crackpot, and keeping this up sure seems like a good way to drive sales of Leslie Kean’s book about UFOs. So I’m really not inclined to believe this is anything really extraordinary, since so little credible, verifiable information has trickled out over the past year.

“The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said.”

Yeeaaaah, sorry, but this sounds like complete bullshit to me. And IMO, way below what The NY Times should deliver.

Doesn’t look like The NY Times website is delivering much of anything..

I was just reading on the SpaceX subreddit on how a lot of people are reporting the Starlink satellites as UFO:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bso4wt/footage_of_s...

That's actually pretty funny though!

My family and I saw the Starlink satellites two days ago at midnight. They were twice as bright as anything else in the sky except the moon. It was surreal to see these bright points of light move across the sky in single-file lockstep motion, like a train on invisible tracks. My best guess was an asteroid had broken up in the atmosphere, but the lights were really too uniform for that to be correct.

I'm kind of worried right now. Is this a temporary configuration or will the Starlinks always be that visible? If it stays the same, the night sky is going to be wild once they lunch all 12,000 of them.

https://youtu.be/GEuMFJSZmpc

Anybody else notice an uptick of these sorts of articles lately in the mainstream press?

its a very successful marketing campaign by the history channel for the show mentioned in the article

Gotta drive that ad revenue somehow!

It's because there is marketing and PR behind this 2004 incident.

Organization called "To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science" is behind it https://coi.tothestarsacademy.com/

Both of those videos looks like optical illusions or radar bugs. Too bad there isn’t some sort of standard helmet cam so we can see from their direct perspective and get a better idea of how it might happen.

Someone’s digging through the radar data too and there could be more multi-source correlations.

So far it seems each of these are single source with two people in the plane seeing it? Or two pilots flying in tandem facing the same way and speed.

Those videos were FLIR, not radar. These are trained pilots with experience in identifying flying objects, and the thing that stood out to them is they didn't see a source of propulsion. The movement characteristics were unlike anything they've seen. The object in question was flagged for their inspection by radar and they followed up visually. What they saw was baffling. The videos came from the aircraft and have been released by the Pentagon.

Regarding how many eyes have seen this. Take a read of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group report of the incident (PDF) which might answer some of your questions and raise others: https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...

Edit: adding a couple of excerpts from the report.

- "AAVs would descend "very rapidly" from approximately 60,000 feet down to approximately 50 feet in a matter of seconds. They would then hover or stay stationary on the radar for a short time and depart at high velocities and turn rates"

- "The AAV did take evasive actions upon intercept by the F/A-18 demonstrating an advanced acceleration (G), aerodynamic, and propulsion capability."

- "The Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) was no known aircraft or air vehicle currently in the inventory of the United States or any foreign nation."

- "The AAV exhibited advanced aerodynamic performance with no visible control surfaces and no visible means to generate lift."

So here's what this comes down to. Three possibilities in order of likelihood:

* A: Psyop fakery: doctored videos were released through official channels, trying to fool other countries we saw something unusual. But why? Who benefits from that? What does it show to others, that our own military is unaware of experimental technology?

* B: Another country has made a giant leap in technology, possibly physics resulting in aerial combat superiority and this should scare any military leader, because if it's real this means the U.S. is no longer the biggest sky predator.

* C: Nonterrestrial origin.

I don't think there are any other possibilities. Last two are a game changer. First one is just bizarre. The weirdest thing, again, is that these videos were released by the Pentagon. You can request copies yourself by filing a FOIA request with the following wording "seeking cockpit videos cleared for release to Louis Elizondo in the fall (September-October) of 2017."

The other possibility is some sort of odd but natural atmospheric phenomenon.

An additional possibility is that some factions within the u.s. govt are well aware of and use the tech but for some unknown reason a decision was made to finally soft disclose it to the public.

Supposing that the videos are genuine, there is some serious, paradigm shifting tech on display here. It's my hope that this is being shown to the public so that the cat comes out of the bag and it forces the people sitting on the tech to come clean.

The military industrial complex is a deep and complicated network, who knows what kinds of complex power struggles happen under the noses of the general public.

or signaling to rivals that it has achieved some new breakthrough without disclosing it?

In response to your linked PDF, there are a multitude of problems that wikipedia lists about the reporting of the incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident#Skepti...

There's another possibility. These reports seem to be coming from a very specific class of pilot. Not just military pilots, but those flying the fastest aircraft. Not from commercial pilots or people just in general watching the sky. (Plane spotting is something many people do). I see one obvious possibility: Accelerating like that is a huge physiological strain, and may very well cause artifacts in vision.

For something like the FLIR footage I'm similarly skeptical. Artifacts can appear there as well, and frankly if some unknown research group or ET is able to mask their presence in the visual spectrum, heat signatures ought to be easy, it's tech that already exists.

Perhaps in some cases.

In some of these cases, your theory requires multiple systems (multiple human eyes, IR cameras, radar) to experience corresponding simultaneous glitches - sometimes aboard multiple craft, some of which are surface ships!

One of the incidents was picked up on radar both by the missile cruiser USS Princeton and (faintly) by an EC-2 Hawkeye radar plane. Those radar planes don't pull high G's, and last I checked the USS Princeton sure the heck doesn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident#Encoun...

Sure, but given thousands uponn thousands of flight hours, multiple simultaneous issues can line up. It's the swiss cheese model of systems failures, a fascinating way of explaining complex failures. Basically it says that if you have the potential for lots of small failures, they may on occasion line up and cause something quite a bit bigger.

It's certainly seems more plausible than a phenomenal that no other commercial pilots, plane spotters, or even military pilots flying slower aircraft have reported like this

If these kind of incidents aren't optical illusions or equipment malfunctions (two very big if's!) then the next most likely explanation IMHO is that these are drones being used by foreign nations to probe our nation's defenses and/or send a message to us that they have some very advanced unmanned aircraft.

If true (big "if!") that would explain why only military pilots have reported these things.

Maybe some cowboy fame-hungry fighter pilots got jealous of SEALs getting all the juicy post-retirement book deals?

Accelerating like that may be the only way to "catch" these crafts...

Except that, while the acceleration may cause these physiological issues, it isn't constant. The planes are at cruising speed when these phenomena are observed most of the time. And it certainly doesn't fit that it would be required in any case. If it's caught on FLIR that could occur regardless of speed or acceleration. If they see something stop and reverse directions there's no reason a commercial pilot couldn't. For that matter, there's no reason that millions of airline passe gets a year couldn't, but they don't. Even at higher altitudes and faster speeds, passengers and pilots of the Concorde, when it was still in service, didn't see these things.

There are simply too many ways to explain these things without the inconsistencies of attributing it to some secret research or ET type of thing. Believe if you want, but understand that there are more mundane explanations that fit more of the facts.

> A: Psyop fakery: doctored videos were released through official channels, trying to fool other countries we saw something unusual. But why? Who benefits from that? What does it show to others, that our own military is unaware of experimental technology?

Perhaps it's an attempt to mislead adversaries into considering the US has exceptional new capabilities.

Look at some of the stuff Putin has been leaking suggesting new weapons capabilities. Having credible sightings of arguably top-secret experimental military aircraft doing the impossible can be an effective means toward the same end.

Now everyone's left questioning if these videos are real or fake, if these capabilities exist or don't, it's quite ambiguous and I think that's by design.

      Psyop fakery: doctored videos were released through official 
      channels, trying to fool other countries we saw something 
      unusual. But why? Who benefits from that? What does it show to 
      others, that our own military is unaware of experimental technology?

I'm not saying that any of these possibilities are true, or even likely. But I can think of a few possibilities.

1. Certainly, there may be information that can be gleaned from these videos regarding the capabilities of our own aircraft. And certainly, foreign powers are eager to figure out the exact capabilities of each others' aircraft and other weapons. Suppose the USAF has doctored these videos in such a way that give a slightly skewed impression of the F/A-18's capabilities. Either to have folks under- or over-estimate them.

While the Hornets and Super Hornets have been around for decades, they have been continually upgraded, and even leading our foes to under- or over-estimate them by a few percent either way could be meaningful. Could mean the difference in a dogfight, missile attack, whatever.

2. Seems like a good way to for somebody to convince somebody that somebody out there has a highly advanced drone that seems to be several generations ahead of what's currently buzzing around the skies in the world's conflict zones. Heck, maybe the USAF is trying to scare the US government into providing more money to combat real or theoretical advanced drones like these.

Again, I'm not espousing any of these possibilities. Just thinking of possible answers to the "who would benefit if this is a US misinformation campaign?" question.

Trained pilots with the experience you cite regularly bomb friendly troops. The more you learn about perception and neuroscience (in my case to understand AI), the less you should trust people's explanations of what they think they've seen.

You forgot one other possibility, it could simply be some poorly understood environmental phenomena. I'm sure anyone who has being lucky enough to see ball lightning would probably think it's a UFO or a sign from god.

Navy Pilot’s 2004 UFO: A Comedy of Errors https://skepticalinquirer.org/2018/05/navy_pilots_2004_ufo_a...

Jacques Vallee, a noted computer scientist in his own right, is one of the best reads if you're interested in this stuff. He's not a crackpot and doesn't seem to be pushing an agenda one way or another.

Er...

"Vallée proposes that there is a genuine UFO phenomenon, partly associated with a form of non-human consciousness that manipulates space and time. The phenomenon has been active throughout human history, and seems to masquerade in various forms to different cultures. In his opinion, the intelligence behind the phenomenon attempts social manipulation by using deception on the humans with whom they interact."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vallée

To wit, there seems to be an intelligent phenomenon going on, and it appears throughout history. He doesn't say anything about what it could be, simply is describing the phenomenon.

Also, I've read his books. Wikipedia quotes don't really give the same impression as his writing.

It appears to have an observer quality to it. The one that sticks out the most in my recent memory is the 2006 Chicago O'Hare sighting. I remember this going through a pretty quick 1 or 2 day news cycle. Fairly alarming given the number of people witnessing the phenomenon and the backgrounds of the people observing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Ai...

Obviously rainbows are an example of a shared hallucination and the phenomena manifests differently dependent on the observer's viewing angle. At the moment I'm not convinced these aren't unexplained atmospheric phenomena because I've never seen one. I know some ideas put forth include ball lightning for at least some UFOs. Assuming these cases to involve intelligence may just be our misinterpretation of the phenomena.

Wait, rainbows are a shared hallucination?

It’s refracted light arcing in the atmosphere. That’s not a hallucination. Treating it as some continuous entity is a hallucination of our minds. There’s nothing suggesting the start of the arc has anything to do with the end, but we call the collective refraction phenomena we witness a rainbow. UFOs could also be something that we collectively fail to comprehend well enough to categorize the constituent parts.

> The FAA stance concludes that the sighting was caused by a weather phenomenon..

That's.. unspecific. The atmospheric research community would probably be highly interested in more details.

The majority of people throughout all history have believed in the supernatural. If you're one of them then this is probably the best explanation for the UFO phenomena. None of the naturalistic explanations are 100% satisfying.

As a sidenote I've noticed a lot of people in the UFO/ET community no longer believe ETs are from another planet. Most seem to think they're "interdimensional" beings (which just sounds to me like sciencey way of saying supernatural).

With rise of anti-scientific trends in society it's no wonder mimicry to science becomes irrelevant. We're back to witches on the brooms.

Turns out being an expert in computer science doesn't automatically make you an expert any anything else.

You may be interested in reading this piece by astrophysicist/MHD-ist Jean-Pierre Petit.

https://www.jp-petit.org/science/gal_port/Von_Ludwiger.htm

He proceeds to bash Vallée, Hynek, and some other lesser known ufologists. It's in French but Google Translate is very good nowadays.

I'd just like to point out that Navy pilots are not privy to all US government programs to build new flying objects. Some of those programs are secret.

As someone who has personally seen a couple of these things, I'm convinced that either extraterrestrial anthropologists are observing our planet, or human governments are operating highly advanced, top-secret craft. (I tend to think it's probably both.)

Think of it this way: if a group of violent, power-hungry monkeys on a nearby planet invented ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you'd want to keep an eye on them... wouldn't you?

I want to believe... But Occam's razors makes me think it's birds, meteorological phenomena, and other things you can misconstrue for more in a high stress situation (or through IR cameras).

I don't want to believe... it's simpler not to. There's a huge stigma against belief in this sort of thing. It's obvious by the responses on this thread; even if you have radar that corroborates sightings filmed on an IR camera, our collective response is still disbelief.

I think this problem is difficult for science to study because it's not readily reproducible. Not only that, but any evidence that /does/ exist has been ridiculed, suppressed, and/or outright ignored for too long. Now we're seeing efforts to reduce the stigma, and I applaud that.

Why would I want to keep an eye on them when "nearby" is an interstellar distance that they have no practical possibility of crossing any time soon, when I have technology that massively outclasses theirs, and when I know where they are but they don't even know I exist?

Wouldn't I have better and more interesting things to do with my time?

Obviously, for the extraterrestrial theory to work, you have to imagine you can warp or fold spacetime to get where you need to go, rather than using a conventional engine. Then the universe gets a bit smaller.

No, you just need to be patient and/or fast.

>Obviously, for the extraterrestrial theory to work, you have to imagine you can warp or fold spacetime to get where you need to go, rather than using a conventional engine.

That's fantasy, though. One might as well imagine aliens coming to Earth riding dragons through magic portals, as far as reality is concerned.

For any extraterrestrial theory to work and be plausible as a speculative explanation for real world events, it has to assume the speed of light is an inescapable hard limit on everything, because that seems to be the universe we actually live in.

Wormholes can exist on hard and solid physics theories, and people are trying to find out if they can make this work in practical situations.

Therefore, your "fantasy" of them coming to earth through magic portals may not be so far off. Whether or not a dragon makes for a good spaceship remains to be seen...

> Wormholes can exist on hard and solid physics theories, and people are trying to find out if they can make this work in practical situations.

You kind of skipped over the part where someone discovers that wormholes do actually exist, and that it's possible for anything to traverse them, much less circumvent the speed of light while doing so. There is, as yet, not "this" to make work in any practical situation. Theories abound, but not all of them agree that wormholes, if they were to exist, are even practical[0].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19665563

I favor the theory that they send out unmanned craft that have the ability to manufacture more craft when they reach a star system and repeat the process. I imagine we might have similar technically within 1000 years or so and might just do it. Then it's just a matter of 100s of thousands of years to visit all systems in our Galaxy.

> Wouldn't I have better and more interesting things to do with my time?

Not if you're a Xeno-Anthropologist!

Consider that we could be on other planets and on our way to the stars right now if we could cooperate better.

We know how to do it, we just chose not to.

Maybe that is unusual in the rest of the galaxy.

This is coming from the same species that's trying to decide if it should intervene in a war between rain forest people.

Listen, I've got to obtain that unobtanium somehow. Or at least get a further four movies out of it.

See Liu Cixin's cosmic sociology)

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixi...

Second: technological explosion. It took humans about a hundred thousand years to advance from stone tools to the age of agriculture, but only two hundred years to go from the steam age to the information age. Explosive advances in technology could occur at any moment in any civilization in the universe. Thus, even a primitive civilization that appears as harmless as a baby or a sprout is full of potential danger.

Pure fantasy. The only real advance in the last 400 years has been the development of an organised, systematic approach to science. The scientific method has driven all development. And the science says we're not travelling between stars any time soon.

There was similar attitude at the end of the 19th century - some people thought all major scientific discoveries had already been made.

"It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube." That was oddly specific. A search on UFO + cube leads to this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPquewvNAE4 with alleged photos of cube-shaped objects in clouds, which look cool.Yah just never know what to believe.

Jumping from "It's not American" to "Maybe it's extraterrestrial" seems like a big leap. What if they're Chinese?

Then they are probably full of vulnerabilities and exposed to the internet

why? there's no reason why the universe need conform to what you happen to believe about it. similar reports since 1930s and earlier. that suggests human tech level has nothing to do with it.

Pilots in planes as early as World War One experienced G-forces as high as 7g. That's plenty high enough to induce hypoxia, visual impairment, and hallucinations. The universe doesn't need to conform to my belief, but there are simpler explanations that don't require belief beyond already observed and known phenomena.

I agree hallucination works as a model for some of the data. It doesn't work for multiply corroborated data from independent observers, or multi-system signals, like the visual, radar, and FLIR data. At that point it comes across as trying too hard to fit the data to the model.

Hum, do we have the same observations from civilian flights? considering thousands of airliners are in the sky daily, we should.

The other thing that bugs me is the variance in the observations. One time it's giant tic-tacs, one time it's cubes inside a sphere, flying saucers... It sounds unlikely there are that many different types of UFOs out there

I have read about a few related to civilian flights, but this one always sticks with me [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_flight_1628_in...

yeah there's a lot of cellphone videos and reports from commercial pilots but some factors to consider are civilian witnesses can be more easily discredited or their videos said to be fakes to get YouTube views. and commercial pilots are discourage from talking about UFOs and in some cases that cost people their jobs. you can try a Google search, look at MUFON, check out secureteam10 on YouTube.

the military witnesses and the team behind to the stars academy is credible. it's highly significant to see something official get behind validating the data.

when Roswell happened people were ready to believe it and then 50 years of aerospace disinformation and counter intelligence has pummeled the public psyche into ridiculing and dismissing open discussion. which was a very successful psyop to create some cover for back engineering and development of these technologies.

it's funny to see otherwise intelligent engineering folks telling others how to think about this when really they don't realise they're just repeating the aerospace industry's developed talking points that were used to cover up the secret development.

space Force, whistleblowers, official data on sightings is a strong trend that suggests the writing's on the wall for disclosure.

as to the variety, again there's no reason why the universe need conform to your expectations of it. I think it's pretty cool that there is a variety of sightings. when you consider the variety of animals and plants on planet Earth even the variety of inventions of humans I don't see any reason why you would expect everything would look the same especially when you have to consider that these technologies would be way beyond what most people on earth understand.

but it's still pre disclosure which means that people have to choose for themselves right now whether they believe or not, because no authority has yet come out to tell people how to think about it. it's a serious issue and there are strong psychological reasons either way to either believe in anti-gravity, UFOs and aliens, etc, or to not believe in those things. and before we get mass public disclosure of authoritative evidence then it's gonna come down to these two camps with people and their psychological motivations, or choice, to believe or not.

the main defence of the debunker camp is shaming, to call the other side crackpots or conspiracy theorists, or to dismiss any and all collected evidence by whatever means such as applying convoluted logic to render the possible existence as something harmless.

while the main defence of the believers camp is to call the other side deluded sheep who can't think for themselves, and to substitute faith and belief to interpolate where the evidence might be lacking.

neither of these psychological reactions is that helpful I do believe that if a person was able to even handedly look at the collected evidence that would be useful but I think we're still in the era where that sort of thinking is not accessible to the public, because of the trauma of the 50 years of shaming discussion about this.

for a place that supposedly is all about intellectual curiosity HN is surprisingly dismissive of and uninterested in looking further into this topic than the aerospace industry's disinformation talking points. it's understandable because peer pressure and conformity is important to this collective of people. if you can't tolerate dissent on web frameworks how are you going to be able to discuss a topic where the stakes are even greater? it all makes sense.

why would the chinese take the insane risk of testing an experimental drone in US airspace and near US fighters during a training exercise...

why the hell would aliens take that risk

We are ants. It's no risk.

If they have that sort of capability then the fighter aircraft would have appeared to be in slow motion to them.

Easy. You have a fancy new technology that is borderline supernatural, what better way to make use of it that to have your adversary dismiss it as bird poo, ball lightning or some other system bug.

Wave it under their nose enough and it becomes like banner adds on a web page, they just don't notice it any more.

When you need to use the tech in anger, your may see you coming, but they will dismiss you as just another of those strange glitches that get reported all the time.

>Wave it under their nose enough and it becomes like banner adds on a web page, they just don't notice it any more. >When you need to use the tech in anger, your may see you coming, but they will dismiss you as just another of those strange glitches that get reported all the time.

That's the way cynics the internet mught behave, that's not the way the military or intelligence agencies behave.

Why would the Americans take the insane risk of overflying Soviet territory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident

Thanks - I’m very familiar with the U2 program. Stealthy reconnaissance missions at 70k ft are very different than trolling a squadron of F22s at 30k ft and lower during a known training mission.

Were they "stealthy"? Or just assumed to be too high to be shot down? (Which did end up happening)

Fair point, though as far as I know they didn’t intentionally troll soviet fighter jets.

> It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

I'm no expert, but how could this possibly make any aerodynamical sense for a flying vehicle? It makes me suspect that the objects are just meteorological phenomena.

Hologram to denote the shield, quadracopter cube?

MHD.

Also, completely off topic: why not try to make a MHD train instead of hyperloop ?

NYT doesn't take debit card and I don't have a credit card. Your loss NYT.

The unsubscribe process is even worse. You have to call them, it's not possible to unsubscribe in the website. Extra fun if you're not from the states.

Set you address as located in California. They are required by state law to allow you to unsubscribe via the web, and they enable that feature only if you say you live in the state.

Or subscribe via App Store. Unsubscribing is also a pain (10 clicks in obscure places) but no calling.

They also are now paywalling private mode browsing. You have to either log in with a free account or pay to read the article. Both of those kind of defeat the purpose of private browsing.

It's much more likely that this is just because of bugs in the code than aliens. I imagine these systems consist of millions of lines of code, sooner or later there will be a bug like this.

You might also consider that there are orders of magnitude more stars in our own galaxy than lines of code in any system built on Earth.

Uh, It just seems like insect in the sensor

This has been posted and upvoted a lot one month ago, why again? No new data.

Hooey! Sounds to me the Navy is in need of more funding and this is how they ask. FUD+$= Huge Penions/Perks.

earth lights...google hessdalen

Electrogravitic manipulation. Amazing, but if the science/tech behind it became public, it would be quickly weaponized.

Some day, maybe...

Just going by pure math conjecture it's unlikely there is intelligent life remotely similar to us in our galaxy. Supposing it takes ten thousand years for a technological civilization to double the number of planets it occupies. In that case it will fill the galaxy in less than a million years, so for two species to meet before one dies out or prevents the other from evolving they have to arise within the same million year period. In a galaxy over thirteen billion years old that's quite unlikely.

There is no pure math in this space - just hand-waving and conjecture.

We have exactly no information about xeno-evolution. It's not even a given that aliens would be motivated to colonise the galaxy, or that they'd do it in a way that would be recognisable to us.

It's hard enough to predict where human civilisation is going to be fifty years from now. The idea that we have any clue what an alien civilisation will do over millions of years is... unconvincing.

I think it disproves the distances are too vast. Nothing more. The rest is in your head.

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