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Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

I think the proper term here is "Unidentified Flying Object" for a reason. The pilot clearly said it looked like a cruise missile. The notion that "Unidentified = Alien" is rather far fetched. The acronym should be more accurately called "Undisclosed Flying Object".

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We've really gotta adopt a new term for this stuff. It's fine to be pedantic and say "well 'UFO' doesn't actually mean aliens in the first place", but the acronym has clearly been co-opted by pop culture to be closely tied with aliens for decades now. Even a minor change like "UFOB" (which has been used by the USAF officially) would probably make a big difference. People will continue to say UFO to mean aliens, and that's fine, but official press releases can use a different term so that people don't read the headlines and immediately think "wow, aliens!".

It's in American Airline's benefit to make this story get as big as possible, it's free advertising. They already know the term will be misunderstood, that is their goal.

I feel like this “all press is good press” argument gets deployed a lot as a sort of thought-terminating cliche. I don’t think it’s obvious that AA necessarily benefits from a story that does involve them but could also potentially make some people more afraid of flying.

It gets their name on the front page places like here and probably some regular media coverage, it doesn't say anything bad about the company, and your worry that it could cause people not to fly requires them reading and internalizing the entire article. And all that was required of them was using a correct term for the event.

I think the all press is good press more applies to lesser known companies. At this point everyone knows who american airlines are.

e.g. boeing/United airlines after the engine failure

Would guess they both would prefer it if that wasn't in the news.

Yes, the term now is UAP, unidentified aerial phenomenon. There is an official UAP Task Force in the Pentagon. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid uses it, Hilary Clinton uses it.

"Ariel phenomenon" sounds like the kind of word that will be very quickly co-opted by paranormalists and occultists.

You can run as fast as you like on the Euphemism Treadmill, but you won't get anywhere.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

The problem isn't with the term. Any term that means "An unknown flying thing" will come to be associated with aliens. If you start using a new term, that will just make it more exotic and interesting and "official seeming". "Authorities are reporting a UFT!" "What's that" "A UFO!!"

The interesting/curious/conspiracy-invoking concept is the unknown flying thing, whatever you call it. Whatever name you use will get associated with the interesting/curious/conspiracy aspect.

Yea, I don't understand why there can't be intelligible/non-conspiracy conversations about the extremely unusual stuff that has been reported by a good number of reputable people. It seems like there are a few plausible theories and we should be able to have conversations about wth they are.

You're suggesting the media use a new, accurate term to avoid the "wow, aliens" sensationalism and voluntarily lose out on page views/ad clicks? Cool, who do you think will go first?

Also the most straightforward explanation. UAVs and ALCM's can be dropped from high altitudes and have hundreds of miles of range and all look very similar, plus who knows what they're developing. The whole Southwest has plenty of military airspace and their toys don't always play nice with commercial air traffic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-launched_cruise_missile

Going a bit further, once an object has been confirmed as alien, then it's not really "Unidentified" anymore, now is it?

Almost a linguistic catch-22 version of the "ATM Machine" phrase. Not redundant, but guaranteed to be either colloquially misinterpreted, or technically incorrect.

It's kinda weird how words can just get coopted by popular use. Take calling someone a "Nimrod" -- before Loony Tunes, that would have been a compliment that meant "mighty hunter". But kids growing up in the 50s and on first heard it in when Bugs Bunny used it as an insult, contextually meaning idiot or bumbler or something -- which due to Loony Tunes' cultural influence is now the dominant meaning, supplanting the original biblical origin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod#Idiom)

>Going a bit further, once an object has been confirmed as alien, then it's not really "Unidentified" anymore, now is it?

Somehow confirming that it is not from Earth doesn't identify it. There are multiple types of flying objects, like planes and missiles, and could be multiple different aliens groups it could be from.

Also, how does one identify it as ‘alien’? It could be sent by humans from the future, or by “the first men”.

> Going a bit further, once an object has been confirmed as alien, then it's not really "Unidentified" anymore, now is it?

Depends. Let's take the opposite case, where the object has been determined to be of likely terrestrial origin (identifiable letters and numbers on a wing or tail), but otherwise still mysterious. Is it identified or not? How about if it is rumored to be US military, but officially no one will confirm or deny? How about if someone does officially confirm, but no specifics are available (so there is no project/program name, or branch, or model)?

Especially considering that official statements may be misinformation, at what point can we say that the FO is no longer U?

A similar continuum of identification specificity applies to non-terrestrial origins, all the way up to "Oh yeah, that was BortXd from Omega Draconis, he got drunk again at a tailgate party."

The way that "Unidentified Flying Object" and "Alien Spacecraft" have become synonymous is a remarkable pernicious evolution of language.

It's a strange thing - I don't think there's any conspiracy to create a cult, just a certain bias in the use of symbols makes "I couldn't explain what that was" become "intelligent creatures from other worlds created this effect".

This is exactly there's been a shift to using other acronyms, such as UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), which don't have the same baggage.

Universal Alien Persons

It's because UFO is never used to mean "plane of unknown precise identity or origin country". Other terms are used for those, like "plane with its transponder disabled" or whatever.

The problem is, when UFO reports occur they invariably seem to objects that cannot fly by any sort of conventional aircraft physics:

a) There are no wings. Ever.

b) They are often reported as moving slowly or even hovering, which missiles cannot/would not do.

Thus UFO has come to be synonymous not with its literal meaning of a flying object that doesn't light up with proper ID codes on radar, but a flying object that is not merely unidentified but unexplainable. Unexplainable Flying Object would be a more accurate expansion given how it's used. That doesn't automatically imply aliens, but the whole "secret military breakthrough" angle is no more falsifiable than aliens are.

It's a huge mystery how an airline pilot could possibly see a cruise missile shaped object right outside of the White Sands Missile Range. Probably aliens.

Are there cruise missiles that operate at those altitudes? Seems like "sitting duck" height for a cruise missile.

Altitude fits the mission.

If you're throwing Tomahawks at the Taliban, you'll get longer range from a higher altitude approach, with little risk of being detected let alone shot down.

If you're trying to hit Moscow, by all means, try to avoid radar by going 50 feet off the ground.

Either there's military activity that the military doesn't want to talk about, or extraterrestrials consider green chile a delicacy that is otherwise unobtainable in the universe. Both seem equally plausible.

Because cruise missiles regularly do close unannounced fly-by's of passenger jets in civilian airspace /s.

this is not reddit

Depends. In the 80s there were “UFO” sightings in upstate NY which were tomahawk missiles flying between Rome and Griffis AFB for testing purposes. I believe they appeared triangular from some angles due to landing gear.

the northeast of the state is actually pretty far from WSMR, and no launches from WSMR leave the range that I'm aware of (or at least haven't for a long time. They did launch a V2 after WWII, and it went the wrong direction and hit the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez.)

It was over 300 of miles from the white sands missile range. The plane had just flown over the western edge of Oklahoma, in the far northeast corner of new Mexico. It was closer to the air force academy in Colorado Springs than it was to white sands.

There is absolutely zero chance a cruise missile would be fired without closing the airspace to civilian aircraft.

The pilot was at 37,000 feet and said the object was above them. Commercial planes top out at about 42k feet and would have shown up on ADS-B. A U-2 flying at 60k would look like a long cylindrical object about the size of a cruise missile (in the same way a 747 looks small from the ground), and not show up on instrurments. Oh and they regularly fly out of Nevada to swoop down over New Mexico/Texas on their way to Mexico and Central America.

Tell that to the people on the plane that was shot down above Ukrainian airspace.

shh, those were aliens too, at least according to Russia.

Wait, wait, wait...you're saying that because a missile has shot down a plane before in another country during a conflict, the United States military is firing cruise missiles without clearing civilian airspace?

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down with a surface-to-air missile, a weapon intended specifically for targeting aircraft. A "cruise missile" by comparison is intended for terrestrial targets and has a minimum range of a few hundred miles. Should the missile come in contact with an aircraft during its initial launch phase, your warhead would basically come right back down on top of you - which is why they close the airspace.

I'm not sure how that's related? Ukraine was a warzone at the time.

And still is at the time :(, just nobody cares anymore

This is reference to this incident that happened during peacetime in 2001 - not later incident during the conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812

this is a poor comparison

Cruise missiles are able to fly in controlled and uncontrolled airspace on Military Training Routes (MTR). There are procedures in place for a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) to be requested and published that alerts other operators of the hazard to flight.

Speaking as a pilot, If there was a NOTAM I can guarantee with 100% certainty an airline pilot would know about it. Also the military doesn’t screw around with this sort of thing, I think the chance is virtually nil they intentionally flew an unmanned aircraft that close to an airliner.

The military screws around constantly. That's why Cavalese happened. That's why that Apache crashed showing off in Afghanistan. IR655 got blown up. Like, we have lots of "military screwing around" instances and like zero aliens. It's so hard to believe that it's aliens.

Just doesn't make sense in a Bayesian sense.

Also pilot here: I’d drop that figure to 90% as there are so many notams it’s easy to miss the needle in the haystack with the ridiculous volume of irrelevant notams out these days.

https://ops.group/blog/the-problem-of-bullshit-notams/

It's not military. It's private weapons development company. There's no payload, so they do not need to notify commercial airliners, and it's a classified project, so they cannot anyway.

They are testing hypersonic missile systems for both ABM and warhead delivery.

0 chance implies no one makes mistakes.

> There is absolutely zero chance a cruise missile would be fired without closing the airspace to civilian aircraft.

Sometimes the military misses a lot of items on the checklist, and accidentally ships a nuclear missile where it didn't intend [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_n...

I wouldn't say "absolutely zero chance", but I'd say "it's unlikely this was an expected outcome, and it's possible that someone is in deep trouble right now."

For others unfamiliar and reticent to google, a "U-2" is:

> The Lockheed U-2, nicknamed "Dragon Lady", is an American single-jet engine, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force and previously flown by the Central Intelligence Agency.

U-2s don't fly fast.

They do when they’re flying the opposite direction as you.

Also, he’ll if we civilians know what kinds of retrofits have been made in the past several decades, particularly for the purpose of testing and development.

The U2 is a very well-understood and photographed airframe. Even if given engine upgrades, it wouldn't be more than a few mph faster than before. Those big glider wings limit it to a very narrow, predictable, flight envelope.

A320 and U-2 go the same speed. Also the U-2 has big wings and a big radar signature. Basically this makes no sense.

They go the same speed, but the U-2 is at twice the altitude.

Due to retinal persistence you will see the part of an aircraft that is longest in the direction of travel (the body) more clearly than the wings. Only military aircraft carry radar, commercial planes depend on TCAS which requires the other object to be transmitting a beacon signal.

On the contrary, the USA has accidently dropped nuclear missiles from planes, and have experience all kinds of other incompetence over the decades.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...

There are quite a few more safeguards in place now to prevent accidentally letting a missile reach over 30k feet above US soil.

If a private weapons contractor was testing a new hypersonic missile without any warhead on it, under a classified program - it seems to me that they would need to fly it outside restricted space to test long distances range and guidance systems.

As long as they were not at commercially used altitudes, it seems to me that they wouldn't advise anyone.

I'm not completely up to speed on modern cruise missiles, but don't they leave a smoke trail/contrail/etc behind them if they have a conventional propulsion system? Or do they burn fairly clean in flight?

Aside from launch where they typically have some kind of boost stage, cruise missiles fly at low altitudes with small turbofan engines. Not much of a visual exhaust signature:

https://youtu.be/BGoJl8Lr46g

https://youtu.be/WyeMyhKE5Yw

Ah fair enough. Thats some impressive footage by the way!

You think the range officer just let this one get away? They shut down highways during testing, let alone airspace.

Did you mean to reply to another comment? The article doesn't make any mention of "alien".

UFOs in american english are a common colloquial term for aliens from mars (or other sci fi plots)

The last two paragraphs of the article is clearly talking about aliens.

> Former CIA Director John Brennan thinks there may be life on other planets too. December’s Covid-19 relief bill included a directive to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to share what they know about UFOs within 6 months. People with the highest of security clearances think there’s something out there.

> ‘Something’ of course doesn’t necessarily mean extraterrestrial in origin, even though New Mexico is home to Roswell…

Is that 6 months up yet? I forgot to put that date into my calendar

They released their files, it hasn't been six months yet. I haven't looked at them, but the lack of hype makes me assume they're nothing huge.

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-centr...

> December’s Covid-19 relief bill included a directive to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to share what they know about UFOs within 6 months.

Seems like that Covid-19 relief bill was about everything but the Covid-19 relief, lol

It most assuredly was. The amount of fat in that bill is stunning. This rather proves it.

> Former CIA Director John Brennan thinks there may be life on other planets too.

Found this in the article. This is close enough to "aliens!" if added to an article about airline incidents.

Indeed. Also, there's a world of difference between "there may be life on other planets", and "intelligent life from other planets is visiting earth".

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