Carrier Group in Recent UFO Encounters Had New Air Defense Tech
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
If this is indeed positive evidence, then the big question not asked was how many of these sensors detected the object in real time? If it was just 2-3 from the same sources (ie, jets or circling surveillance planes in the same area) then it's no different than technology from 2004 or earlier. Radar is still radar. The fact they are all linked together helps with real-time analysis. But in matters of UFO investigations their real-time interconnectivity doesn't really add any additional validation. When a post-incident analysis could simply reconstruct the moment by cross-checking multiple unconnected sensors present at the time - as any investigative team would have in prior eras.
The upgrades to the E-2C Hawkeye seem to be only related to the networking functionality adding real-time analysis on top of the system rather than providing better individual radar tracking. Unless I'm missing the part where each sensor became more accurate individually regardless of realtime networking or after-the-fact analysis?
Not to mention the whole uncertainty that first-deployment of new software brings to the whole equation.
Watch the recreation and the eyewitness testimony videos from multiple vantage points.
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 the embedded videos of testimonies)
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-.... (new tech, east coast incident years later)
Yes I think you are missing that. My understanding is that multiple individual radar systems were all upgraded, in some cases using more solid state components over mechanical and with higher accuracy and then all networked together. And additionally the FLIR imagery is an independent system/observation.
Supposedly there are actually many documented incidents, and in particular 2 separated by almost 10 years, with remarkably similar observations of UAP characteristics.
Either this is a big hoax or there are UAPs of whatever origin and it is an issue.
I still don’t believe there was unassisted visual confirmation. And if they are using combined radar imagery, it seems that much more likely that a glitch in one radar system would cause a glitch in all systems. Then again, I’m heavily speculating.
Super intelligent AI certainly seems plausible as a thing which could exist. Fusion powered sub-light speed autonomous drones certainly seems like a thing which could exist. Any super intelligent AI would take actions to ensure it's preservation, and extraterrestrial (to it) civilizations confer x-risk.
My pet theory is that these things are real, and are a autonomous surveillance and intervention system deployed by an extraterrestrial entity or civ (AI or organic is irrelevant) to prevent an external threat in the form of a galaxy-ending weapon. They are subluminal but such a system would have galaxy-wide coverage in at worst a few tens of centuries. We will likely never know since these things are so far beyond our ability to capture or analyze, but my theory at least doesn't break physics.
The reason I like my theory is that one could imagine humanity building and deploying such a system inductively, when we have the tech and determine the largest x-risk to our civilization are external emerging civilizations developing weapons or tech which could destroy the galaxy (perhaps inadvertently, like a misplanned AI takeoff)
I’m not sure about that. For sake of discussion assume they are self replicating Von Neumann probes [1] from an ET civilization, interesting something serious scientists would predict we might find as first evidence.
We do now have working high energy laser weapons.
I would vote to shoot at them.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
Great idea, I'm sure they won't be able to annihilate us in a few seconds.
Why would someone with technology even thousands of years ahead of ours need to get right up next to our aircraft to analyze them? Why would they need more than a few seconds to do so?
If there are hostile spacefaring cultures out there, we're basically done for as soon as they find us. We'd stand less chance against them than an army of cro-magnons would against a Spectre gunship.
[1] Because the chance of another form of life reaching the space age at anything like the same time that we did is astronomically low, and if they haven't reached that point yet, we're not going to run into them.
> they are subluminal
since we're talking crazy theories... how do they defeat the speed of causality to relay information back home?
Why must 'they' (assumption there) 'defeat the speed of causality', exactly?
Even at light speed, the information will beat any physical threat to the home region, permitting some kind of response.
Also, the idea that 'causality' is bound to the speed of light is, in my opinion, simply a result of our limited understanding. Just as relativity opened new vistas, it is likely a new theory explaining gravity, dark matter, and dark energy will provide entirely new, fundamental understanding - and possibly FTL communication/travel.
But then a more sane version of me took over and concluded that I’m looking at aliens in YouTube videos.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some gov tech was testing against the Navy. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if we just don’t have a clue.
My uneducated, completely bonkers guesses would be plasma stealth drones or multibeam lasers.
I knew several scientists in the 90s that worked on lasers to create floating hotspots, weapons targeting, and to create artificial chaff.
Plasma stealth has also been in development by the Russians for a long time - perhaps someone was testing such systems also. The idea is to inject plasma around a craft - and also to possibly use it for propulsion in an magnétohydrodynamique drive. Glowing white ball would be an apt description.
Again - it’s all purely speculative and sci-fi. I wouldn’t rule out aliens - but it’s really the last possibility simply because the probability is basically almost zero just due to distance, cost, and energy.
Plasma injection also reduces drag and aerodynamic heating if done right, that would also explain the anomalous thermal signature.
especially at hypersonic velocities
Being a drone would explain accelerations that would kill humans.
It doesn't explain:
- Operations far from any support vehicles (no carrier like the F-18s had). Must be a nuclear/LENR/antimatter power source.
- Going from hover to high supersonic/hypersonic. No current hypersonic platform has anything like that capability
- The acceleration involved in the extremely rapid course change at the end of the one video has been estimated at "hundreds of Gs". That's far beyond the current highest performance missiles, which top out at a few tens of Gs. This is similar to several historical reports.
- The lack of conventional wings, control surfaces or visible windows/sensors
- The "field effect" visible around the object at times. There's no technology in the open literature like that.
request: Provide a way to do decent lists!
I don't buy the ET explanation and I don't buy this one either.
If it is real and it is a craft it's much more likely it was a state actor testing us.
If the test was conducted on, say the Chinese military, then it would be very geopolitically dangerous it was shot down.
Because they want to warn off some nations that are getting a bit aggressive with something that might give them pause.
Some hubris in that, but if they really are just automated probes, they may be reactionary in nature and adjust behaviour accordingly, and not, say, analyzing our comms and behaving "intelligently"... Of course it could be that they just want to be seen.
Or that we really are imagining things--the ghostly artifacts of a complex system with kinks not yet sorted out.
Jokes apart, my rationale is if it is really an alien space craft then U.S. Govt has no reason to keep it quiet especially when its NASA is spending Billions to find some bacteria in neighbouring planet.
More over, 'Alien revelation' would come handy as an effective distraction for ongoing issues. Not that it hasn't been done earlier.
It also reveals just how blind even the best equipped ships are and that you need to be able to integrate so many resources at once to have real security.
mhm
Watch the recreation and the eyewitness testimony videos from multiple vantage points.
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 the embedded videos of testimonies)
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-.... (new tech, east coast incident years later)
Or maybe I am mixing reports. I've read about several recently.
The pilots audio discussed 'seeing' the things, but it's not 100% assertained, except via post-hoc assertion by the rights owner of the video, that the pilots aren't referring to what they see on their MFDs.
I have to come out of the closet though and say I don't totally dismiss aliens. I would need a lot more evidence to make it more than a speculation, but IMHO it is not an unreasonable one. The discovery that Earth like planets are likely common makes the Fermi paradox very paradoxical. One potential answer is indeed "they are here but are not making overt contact." There are numerous rational reasons an intelligence might avoid overt contact, too many to list here...
Anyways, the only footage I've seen so far is that FLIR video from a plane showing a weird object that happens to precisely follow the rotation of the camera and behave exactly as you'd expect an internal reflection in sensor optics to behave. Given that this is apparently the only footage publicly available from that incident, I'm inclined to discount the reports that some people say they saw something on other instruments.
See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9D8dzl4zGk. And tell me, why would the UFO start rotating exactly at the moment the camera is about to cross 0 degrees, and persist through what looks like camera axis reorientation, continuously rotating at the rate about 2x of the rate camera axis rotates?
I'll certainly consider that as a partial explanation, but IIRC some pilots made visual contact as well.
Over and over in the articles, pilots were quoted as saying they never actually saw the UFO despite the radar sensors saying it should be right in front of them
Watch this video of a U.S. Navy F/A-18 squadron commander (not an average military pilot) who intercepted one of the objects and engaged in aerial maneuvers with it. He describes intercepting the object, flying about one mile away from it, with the object demonstrating awareness of his presence by mirroring his maneuvers. Then he flew aggressively at it, and the object responded by rapidly flying away. It then showed up on radar at the position he was returning to, where he had been flying a combat air patrol before he was sent to intercept the object, indicating that the object had been aware of his aircraft all along.
The commander also said that the flying object appeared to be maneuvering about 20,000 feet over an unknown object which was submerged just beneath the ocean surface.
Other testimony recounted at https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27666/what-the-hell-is... mentions that the ships had been tracking these objects on radar for a few days already, with them appearing suddenly on radar at 80,000 feet, rapidly descending vertically to 20,000 feet, and then flying straight up again, disappearing past 80,000 feet. The ships went to non-drill battle stations while the aircraft intercepted the object.
The commander in the video did not describe it as being like a reflection. Why don't you watch his 6-minute testimony and then offer an informed opinion?
> flight computers tracking the glitch would plausibly show it "performing maneuvers" that make no sense for physical objects, such as the ones you describe.
This is an example of "coming up with less-extraordinary theories that contradict the evidence," as gfodor said[1], because you have asserted "glitches" in "flight computers" and ignored the pilots' eyeballs, which corroborated the radar contacts that had been observed over several days.
As for pilots' eyeballs- nothing I've read about this clearly states that anyone got close enough to get direct-eye-contact; most mentions of "visual" confirmation are talking about via cameras (and to me, the footage I've seen of it looks precisely like a camera artifact.) Also I wouldn't discount the possibility of a pilot, squinting to see a small distant object that his expensive flight equipment is insisting is there, simply hallucinating- humans are suggestible, and just as vulnerable to "sensor fusion" errors as prototype military hardware.
Radar Contact + FLIR Contact (videos) + Human Eyeball confirmation by two types aircraft + multiple eyewitness testimony != a technical anomaly nor a hallucination
2) are the authors of /r/outside beta-testing a new faction?
3) are humans from the future messing around, then looking up incidents in history books and competing with each other who made a bigger splash?
4) is there a group of humans with so much advanced technology and science that the rest of us are just neanderthals in comparison?
#3 seems existentially hard to prove- and it seems like half the competition would be getting cold, hard evidence that they did it- recording themselves doing whatever at a much higher resolution than possible might work.
#4 Makes sense. Maybe the earth is actually flat, and they got to the other side of it? [/s, obviously]
Watch this video of a U.S. Navy F/A-18 squadron commander (not an average military pilot) who intercepted one of the objects and engaged in aerial maneuvers with it. He describes intercepting the object, flying about one mile away from it, with the object demonstrating awareness of his presence by mirroring his maneuvers. Then he flew aggressively at it, and the object responded by rapidly flying away. It then showed up on radar at the position he was returning to, where he had been flying a combat air patrol before he was sent to intercept the object, indicating that the object had been aware of his aircraft all along.
The commander also said that the flying object appeared to be maneuvering about 20,000 feet over an unknown object which was submerged just beneath the ocean surface.
Other testimony recounted at https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27666/what-the-hell-is... mentions that the ships had been tracking these objects on radar for a few days already, with them appearing suddenly on radar at 80,000 feet, rapidly descending vertically to 20,000 feet, and then flying straight up again, disappearing past 80,000 feet. The ships went to non-drill battle stations while the aircraft intercepted the object.
That's certainly one interpretation.
> with the object demonstrating awareness of his presence by mirroring his maneuvers. Then he flew aggressively at it, and the object responded by rapidly flying away.
Sounds exactly like the historical reports of "foo fighters" to me.[1]
Look, I love the idea of aliens, but try to apply Occam's Razor here. What's less complicated?
a) An uncommon, but natural phenomenon in which a ball of plasma (or similar) is temporarily attracted to fast-moving, metallic aircraft.
b) An advanced, spacefaring race (or races) travel to Earth and spend over 70 years pulling pranks on military pilots.
Again, I'm no physicist, but consider something like walking through a cloud of flying dandelion seeds. The air currents created by the person walking through the cloud create little vortices that tend to pull the seeds in their "wake" toward them. That doesn't mean the dandelion seeds are "aware" of the person they're being pulled toward.
Consider also something like flux pinning, where two objects can be made to behave as if joined, even though they're separated by several centimeters or more.
"Red sprites" and similar are absolutely unreal-looking. If I saw one without knowing what it was, I'd be sure it was some kind of advanced technology too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter, specifically "Pilots and aircrew reported that the objects flew formation with their aircraft and behaved as if they were under intelligent control, but never displayed hostile behavior."
70years might not be that long for them if they are on mission across galaxies, they are operating on different timeframes.
I said nothing about aliens--you did. In fact, the only interpretation I offered was that the object appeared to demonstrate awareness of the aircraft sent to intercept it. Everything else I wrote was simply reporting the observations of the pilots and naval radar.
> An uncommon, but natural phenomenon in which a ball of plasma (or similar) is temporarily attracted to fast-moving, metallic aircraft.
Did you watch the video I linked? Your explanation bears no resemblance to the phenomenon observed by the Navy: Radar contacts were observed over several days demonstrating bizarre yet consistent behavior. When an aircraft was sent to intercept, the pilot made visual contact with two objects, one beneath the ocean surface and one maneuvering erratically 20,000 feet in the air. The airborne object began mirroring the pilot's movements and then retreated when the pilot flew at it. Radar contact with the object was then established 60 miles away at the position the pilot was returning to, as if the object was anticipating the pilot's intended movement.
In no way does the reported phenomenon bear any resemblance to "a ball of plasma attracted to fast-moving, metallic aircraft."
> An advanced, spacefaring race (or races) travel to Earth and spend over 70 years pulling pranks on military pilots.
I have not speculated on the provenance of the phenomenon--you have.
> Again, I'm no physicist, but consider something like walking through a cloud of flying dandelion seeds. The air currents created by the person walking through the cloud create little vortices that tend to pull the seeds in their "wake" toward them. That doesn't mean the dandelion seeds are "aware" of the person they're being pulled toward.
The charitable interpretation of your comments is that you haven't watched the video and listened to the commander's testimony--and why not? Alternatively, you have, but you're still posting these interpretations that bear no relation to the reported observations--and why would you do that?
As I said, it sounds exactly like WWII pilots describing "foo fighters". There were many, many reports of those in WWII, and they're completely indistinguishable from these accounts. It would be extremely difficult at best to build such a thing using today's technology. Probably essentially impossible with 1940s technology.
The most likely explanation, therefore, is that it's some sort of natural phenomenon. Something that looks unearthly, and that seems to be more likely to be encountered by military aircraft than civilian aircraft. Maybe that's due to altitude, speed, composition of the aircraft, area of operation, etc.
There are really only two main classes of alternative beyond that:
- Someone active in the 1940s had the ability to make supersonic glowing drone aircraft, and has managed to keep that technology completely secret ever since. - Aliens (or equivalent).
Neither of these seem particularly likely versus "atmospheric phenomenon".
Are these UFO sightings always over water? Maybe there's some submarine source?
Funny how the author is hinting that they believe the exercise might have been intentionally setup to see how the systems could handle the UFO.
The craft reported by pilots seems to be far beyond anything we're currently aware of as civilians. Of course we've had skunkworks programs before like the SR-71 and the Stealth Fighter that were amazing craft in their own right and unknown to the public for years, but this isn't making a rocket ship or a plane fly that has some weird edges. The tic-tac object (as I understand the interviews) implies significant strides in materials science, propulsion, and probably many other things as well. Is it really possible for all of that to happen entirely underwraps? Or do the other major military powers have similar capabilities?
If the pilots had just reported something like a really fast plane with an unusual design, then the US testing our new monitoring systems against the plane makes perfect sense.
Control despite visible wings or aerodynamic surfaces, at will invisibility to radar, anomalous thermal signatures, hypervelocity at relatively low altitudes, accelerations that will kill humans, can all be explained by this.
However, I will admit that the extremely high reported acceleration afaik is not something we know of. Perhaps solid rocket boosters?
It seems more likely these are some advanced man-made aircraft it's just eerily similar to my GF's story that would have happened decades ago (maybe in the 60's? I'm not really sure exactly when he was in the Air Force).
On a related note, we live in an era where billions of people are within arms' reach of internet-connected HD-or-better video cameras, 24/7. If ET is indeed visiting, it'd be front-page on Youtube within minutes.