Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous UAVs
preprints.org
preprints.org
Stone Age Tribe Hacker News drum circle meeting says that tribal elders smoked too much sacred pipe last night or maybe supreme elder tribal shaman has secretly made it out of shiny rocks and leaves. They ask, why would it fly like that in a straight line, doesn't the bird know that the world ends just over the horizon?
One of the observations they had made from the wilderness was satellites, and IIRC they had figured out the objects had to be man made.
That story always touches me in more than one way.
Most people have enough to deal with trying to figure out their social standing vs their neighbors and fighting off the vague dread of their own eventual death.
The HN crowd is absolutely not the exception here, though we could probably swap "social standing" with "JS framework anxiety".
Two possibilities:
1. UFOs are visiting Earth.
2. The US military wants to convince us they are.
I'm not sure which is scarier.
My father, who had both respected military and civilian careers, had a close encounter when he was a boy. He did not encounter a UFO in his career (though his was one of the careers where you might) or, if he did, he took his security oath too seriously to talk about it.
My brother, who had a military career of some note, and top secret (or better?) clearance, admitted to me that the official line is they're visiting Earth but not occupied -- in other words, UFOs are real, and you might encounter them, but let's not talk about aliens. (This was years ago.)
You'll notice that's exactly what they're doing now -- saying, hey, this is happening, but we're not going to editorialize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY
This is another more compelling video, but was not covered in this paper (was from 2015):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVRg7LLaQA
The US Navy has certified that these videos are authentic, and were not for public release. [1]
Apparently during the Nimitz incident there was a brief period where there were hundreds of these UFOs that descended from the sky (upper bound that the radar picks up is 80,000 feet, and these were at picked up at that altitude) and were basically tracking the Nimitz Strike Group. Such a wild story.
"Despite this, Day intended to write an after-action message about the encounter. When Day went to review the records from the previous day, all the data was gone. He never wrote the after-action message." [1]
[1] - http://entertainermag.com/blog/2019/08/30/exploring-the-unbe...
I find it strange that the twisting motion at 2:04, is attributed to object acceleration instead of the telescope turning to avoid the pole of an alt-az mount.
If you want more info regarding the AtFlir system see the link in this post:
I would like to just ask something I may have missed: how did they shield themselves from the (very) classic error of mistaking something small and close, like a bird or a bug, for something big and distant? There is an abundance of footage of blurry insects close to a camera being mistaken for very fast alien ships.
I mean, this is supposedly locked by radars, why is the distance measured by those not given?
And I must say, reading the analysis of the Nimitz incident by this paper, it is a glorious case of over-analysis. They base themselves on an oral recollection of approximate values, add to it wild assumption ("Since we want a minimal power estimate, we took the acceleration as 5370 g and assumed that the UAV had a mass of 1000 kg.") and to unnecessarily complicated calculations to guess random things about this supposed vessel.
Also worthy of note is that this is part of a program [1] paid by a senator in the direction of a close friend, who is a UFO enthusiast, and had to justify spending 22 million USD with some things.
In such a case, I don't think they have an excuse for not having actual radar data as well. I suspect such data would dismiss cases as something easily identifiable like a meteorite.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Iden...
Watch Histoy's Unidentified series.
Time to slink out now for me. I derive some entertainment from the puzzling over what a UFO might be. The ensuing unwarranted speculation into alien origins puts me off. And the people who posit a government conspiracy tend to assume just those origins.
This jumps to some of his comments about the other folks involved in the story: https://youtu.be/f7XJD_54aNk?t=549
Another part of what he says: https://youtu.be/f7XJD_54aNk?t=1868
Say what you will of Corbel, but the entire 2 hours of interview are worth watching, Fravor is about as solid of a person to report this as you can get.
Per your link, the AATIP program you are mentioning only ran from 2007-2012, and was then dissolved. The new videos are from 2014/2015 etc. and with this all happening now, why do they have to justify anything for a program that no longer exists?
Further, I don't think $22M really needs to be justified "with some things" when compared to the remainder of defense spending:
- The Air Force is spending $850M to replace a $5 part in the W88 nuclear warheads currently in service. [1]
- A single F-35 aircraft in FY2019 is $85M. [2]
... compared to these, you can probably find dozens of small DOD programs that were laughable, but still ate $20-100M with zero accountability [3].
1 - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30039/u-s-to-spend-hun...
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
3 - https://www.fbo.gov/index.php?_psort=current_set_aside_s-d-a...
side note: Somebody should probably clarify this in the wiki article for AATIP:
> Although the official AATIP program has ended, a related group of interested professionals have extended the effort, founding a nonprofit organization called "To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science".
The authors are not actually suggesting that the craft are flying faster than light speed, they are arrogantly defining the reference frame of a traveler aboard the ship as "proper time". It would still take over 4 years to get to Alpha Centauri from our perspective.
If the observed accelerations of my car were sustainable in space, I'd be able to do interstellar travel pretty easily.
Stack this up with the other crazy assumptions made in this piece (check out the first comment, for instance). You want to assume high tech has 1000G acceleration? OK, you know, sure, fine. But it also moves through the air at massively supersonic speeds without causing friction or sonic booms? That's another separate piece of technology that's basically magic. (Honestly not even sure which I find less believable!)
And then this amazing advanced technology is flying around is moving around on that flight pattern because... uhh... why would any aircraft fly that way again? Look at that flight path. What possible use could that have?
I've never heard even a sketch of a motive that suggests why these craft would fly in such crazy patterns around aircraft that isn't better met by some other approach, that is, whatever goals something flying such an astonishing craft may have, they could simply obtain directly.
The theory that these are "technologically advanced craft" requires an incredibly precise combination of high technological skill matched with utter ineptitude and stupidity, beyond merely "oh we just don't understand their goals". This is not intelligence acting in ways we don't understand; this is lack of intelligence.
Wasn't one of these tictac anomalies seen going into and coming out of the ocean at supersonic speeds? Water isn't very compressible and hitting the water at modest speeds is often a death sentence for bridge jumpers and can completely annihilate a falling airplane.
But here's something large, fast, and observed going into an incompressible liquid as if it wasn't even there.
Obviously if this is some sort of tech it is doing things we don't even think are possible according to known laws of physics. Which is interesting.
EDIT: Read some parts, yep. That's someone who hopes that with enough integrals and over-analysis no one will notice they base their claims on very sketchy data and assumptions.
A good example as to why people who decide on how to spend taxpayer money should have a bit of science education. This is intended at impress someone who doesnt do math.
Arrogantly? That's the correct definition of proper time.
Usain Bolt has an average acceleration of 3.09 m/s^2 in the 100 meter dash. Per http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel..., this means he can run to Alpha Centauri in a subjective time of 6.9 years (8.4 here on Earth).
> Such a craft accelerating at a constant 1000 g for half of the trip and decelerating at the same rate for the remaining half would reach the Alpha Centuri system within 5 days’ ship time due to the fact that it would have been traveling at relativistic speeds for most of the trip. However, for those of us on Earth, the trip would take over four years.
The section that implies that they can just assume they are flying physical objects because the observers are professionals is pretty weak.
And their selection process: "These encounters were selected from a subset of cases for which there were multiple professional witnesses observing the craft in multiple modalities (including sight, radar, infrared imaging, etc.)."
Some of the cases have multiple witnesses and video of the objects. You can look at it yourself.
Nothing really wrong with that in general but personally I’d rather see an attempt to dismiss as many other possibilities as possible.
I would love to see a thorough analysis and understanding of how the sensor pod works, as well as the software it runs to see if it could be contributing to anomalous measurements in the HUD. An exploration of any local environmental data, astrological, optical, and chemical reasons something may appear the way it does in the sensor data.
I’d much prefer a release of the entire data set of raw sensor information along with it.
It is very curious and stunning if the corroborating data exists. I don’t even consider video on a HUD as sufficient to do real science on these encounters.
pretty good discussion
What the Navy observed also sounds an awful lot like WWII "foo fighters". Occam's Razor tells me it's probably some sort of natural phenomenon that happens to be attracted to planes for some reason.