> No. I was more concentrated on looking at the FLIR. It was inside of 20 miles. You’re not going to see it with your own eyes until probably 10 miles, and then you’re not going to be able to visually track it until you’re probably inside of five miles, which is where Dave Fravor said he saw it.
These are trained military pilots. Our eyes can’t see an object like that twenty miles out. If the system has a lock and it tells you it’s that far away, you don’t waste time and lose focus by trying to see for yourself something you already know you won’t be able to make out with the naked eye.
Additionally, it’s not as if no one saw it with their naked eye. Fravor’s word is as as good as his, and he says saw it. The value here is in the fact that this pilot is telling you he was watching the machines confirm what his colleague had seen. I take man + machine as a harder proof than two men, and not much less than 2 men + machine.
Edit: also seen by the squadron commanding officer:
> And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.
So, yeah. Two men + machine, rather than three men + machine.
What I find more interesting is that NORAD didn’t debrief him, which means they either knew who was behind it or were already tracking it separately and knew what they needed to know (both very possible). Or perhaps since everything he saw and all his maneuvers were better documented in the real-time system logs dump and FLIR capture than he would be able to reliably recall, there was literally nothing he could add.
> A device based upon this principle would make a really exquisite radar spoofing tool. The ionized plasma would give a good radar return, giving targeting radars something else to lock on to, instead of incoming aircraft. The ability to project an object of apparent solidity to enemy radar, instantly manipulatable, would be a most valuable little toy to have in your bag of tricks.
This is the kind of stuff we’ve been doing to fool guided air-to-air countermissiles into not hitting their targets for a long time now. Penaids. Just fancy ones.
This is crucial because modern aerial warfare involves missile armaments effective at these distances, so much of it is a game of who can find and acquire a target lock on their enemy first.
These phenomena are interesting because (1) multiple sensor systems from multiple platforms/locations consistently tracked the object in ways that corroborate each other, and (2) other pilots have actually flown close enough to report visual contact.