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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

What about a third option, it's a visual artifact on the FLIR recording?

This. It fits a lot of aspects of past "UFO" sightings that were actually just a reflection. The major issue in this case is multiple witnesses, and also supposedly multiple instruments detecting it (I've seen this claimed in comments but not the evidence itself)

If the thing behaves as though it has no inertia and does all these amazing movements, what else does? A reflection or otherwise illusory object can do all that easily, in fact thats the default behavior.

How do you explain the pilots who said they saw it visually for 5 minutes?

And on other radar systems within the strike carrier group. The Nimitz event was tracked on multiple systems of varying technologies, for multiple days, not just the planes. FLIR was just one piece of the puzzle, of which video was released.

Because that carrier group was testing technology that combines sensor data from all different vehicles by transmitting it between them to create a unified view. Can't recall if that was a known fact or theory, but it's an entirely plausible thing for the military to develop.

Exactly. I understand skepticism when it comes to ufos, I’m of the belief most of the reports are nonsense and/or the ramblings of the mentally ill, attention seeking, etc. but, I feel like people should at least have read or listened to the pilots to have an opinion on this one.

I've seen this claimed and I doubt the claim is made up, but I haven't seen the evidence itself. The FLIR video is the only publicly available evidence I'm aware of

I don't, that combined with other info may be enough to fully rule out any possibility of reflection

I consider the possibility of reflection high by default, especially with the properties this thing has (glow around it, seems to immediately react to camera movements, movements that appear to violate inertia)

But I'm definitely no authority on this, just sharing my perspective based on previous similar things I've read about.

Nothing your saying makes sense, multiple pilots are not going to see the same reflection, not to mention these objects were tracked by spaced based radar, the radar on the ships, the radars on the fighter jets, sonar, and via infrared and high def video! The video that has been available to the public is a grainy copy of the original as many of the Navy witness have stated.

If they're all using the same equipment it could be having the same artifact. If closely examined it should be different from different instruments then. And what I said is based on a lack of confirmation of multiple instruments detecting the same anomaly and taking the necessary steps to rule out any sort of reflection style thing

If it were just recorded by one sensor that would have been my initial assumption. This was (unless I am totally confused or misreading things) recorded by more than one unit and there were associated visual sightings.

My best money would be on something experimental of ours being tested against our own aircraft, like some kind of decoy or jamming device.

I've seen this claimed but do we actually have confirmed source of that (multiple instruments detecting the same thing)?

Without any specific location where these experiments are kept and without someone trustworthy who would honestly report on what they see, it seems as if any investigation would be fruitless as the actual craft is only wheeled out to be spotted by sensors incapable of identifying it.

I was thinking it could be an anomoly of its signal processing (eg fusion) system. Look at the failures in AI systems posted here. There could be some inputs, bad training, or logic errors causing this.

Also, that fits with the jammer hypothesis, too. People are experimenting with feeding malicious input to NN's. They've messed them up with tiniest changes to image. One could probably do something like that with these techs, too.

What about a fourth option, multiple lasers projecting holograms.

I’m not sure what this would look like exactly or how plausible this is but I can’t discount that from my perspective as an eyewitness.

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