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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

I still think this known military plasma laser tech is the highest likelihood of being the explanation:

"Researchers working with high-power laser weapons discovered that they could create a glowing ball of fire in the sky by crossing the beams of two powerful infrared lasers…By moving the laser beams around the sky, the researchers found they could shift the plasma ball back and forth at very high speed…. At night, they demonstrated their skills, flying their glowing creations in formation high above the cold desert."

https://www.wired.com/2007/05/plasma-laser-uf/

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That's super interesting and I almost want to believe that something like this could be behind the videos, but Fravor described the object as being tictac shaped with a smooth white surface, not a glowing ball of plasma. Also, it doesn't seem like a laser-induced floating ball of plasma would cause the ocean just beneath it to become turbulent and frothy, like the tictac thing did

I'm unsure if "smooth white surface" might not just be a well-defined / focused plasma ball. See my link below for a laser plasma tic tac in a lab setting.

I didn't see the turbulent / frothy part of the video, but could imagine there being reflection creating visual illusions or the heat / microwave emissions of the plasma [2] causing mirage diffraction, mild steam, or even wind effects on the surface - the latter could be caused by oscillating laser patterns used to produce more plasma effects via increasing mass - ie laser plasma lowers localized air mass, but moving around slightly could energize more air mass to produce a far larger effect once energy isn't the gating factor.

[1] Which could be from a 1MW or more laser setup, to my knowledge 60kW is the largest anti-missile laser, but with big multi-diode / multi-optic arrays this would be possible)

[2] https://www.slashgear.com/super-powerful-laser-creates-plasm...

The water turbulence wasn't in the video actually. From the wikipedia article:

"They looked down at the sea and also noticed a turbulent oval area of churning water with foam and frothy waves "the size of a Boeing 737 airplane"[14] with a smoother area of lighter color at the center, as if the waves were breaking over something just under the surface.[14] A few seconds later, they noticed an unusual object hovering with erratic movements at a height they estimated to be about 50 feet (15 m) above the churning water. Both Fravor[15] and Slaight later described the object as a large bright white Tic Tac, 30 to 46 feet (9.1 to 14.0 m) long, with no windshield nor porthole, no wing nor empennage, and no visible engine nor exhaust plume."

So they noticed a disturbance in the water that appeared to be caused by something under the surface, and it was only then that they noticed the tictac object hovering above the ocean. Whatever you make of it, it's very strange.

That link is super cool, but I imagine that if you scaled it up to the point where it produced a uniform plasma orb 30+ feet in diamater (would love to see the napkin math on how much energy this would take), the visible light from the plasma would be blinding, which was definitely not what the pilots described.

This is (or something like it) is the most likely scenario based on what we know. I'm amazed at the number of people who fail to apply Occam's Razor in this case, especially when UFO sightings have been used as disinformation in the past.

Occam's razor is just a heuristic. It has no actual predictive power.

And honestly given the way things tend to happen in this universe I don't know if it's all that valid.

It's just weird to see people pull it out during a debate as a legitimate argument.

What's fascinating (and scary) to me is the number of people who selectively look at some of the evidence, come up with an explanation, ignore the rest of the evidence, and then call it "case closed". All while mocking anyone else who picked a different subset of the evidence.

This is not what the pilots saw and it was daytime.

Well we don't know what the tech in the article actually looks like because there are no pictures. FLIR lock on superhot plasma seems possible during the day and the shape in the videos does seem like it could pass for a such a plasma ball IMO.

Here's another (personal) theory: the "UFO" is actually the result of the jet's own laser weapon/defense system which is why the pan rate is so consistent in the videos - i.e. it's aimed by the pilot himself.

See this article:

https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/politics/us-air-force-laser-f...

Then how do you explain the tic tac that looks like a solid object?

I think the "looks like a solid object" --> stable geometry + opacity, which to me means that the laser plasma system produces a consistent effect in the same way you get a red spot with standard laser pointer, though it's a second order incandescence with plasma so it's more volumetric like.

The specific "tic tac" appearance may just be what the effect ends up looking like - see the picture in this article for a tic tac-looking laser plasma ball: https://www.slashgear.com/super-powerful-laser-creates-plasm...

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