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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

I won’t be able to provide information that other people haven’t already but I have encountered one of these “aircraft”.

I own a small light sport airplane and was flying between UT and CA at 12.5k ft and saw one of these pass 1,000ft below me not far outside of Reno. ATC didn’t call it so presumably they didn’t see it on radar. It was exactly as described, small, shiny, cylindrical, no wings, and fast. If I could guess it was doing 500kts in the opposite direction. By the time I pulled out my phone to snap a picture it was gone. If it was a cruise missile it was flying over a populated area and not in restricted airspace or a MOA. Not sure what conclusions to draw other than these things are real and probably more common than people assume. It was not an airliner or private jet I’ve seen plenty of them.

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tbh this seems like the perfect situation to test US air defences and radar technology.

Flying a long range unarmed stealth drone in lightly populated areas through the US would tell you a great deal about how observable the drone is to US radars. Flying dangerously through Air traffic controlled space also ensures that the military radars get pointed in your direction at some point or another.

For an unarmed small(ish) drone the risks of getting caught are likely minimal. Crash in an unpopulated area (plenty of those in the west coast), self-destruct at high altitude or simply acknowledge the spying incident and point to the SR-71/U-2 as precedent.

This seems like the perfect situation to test how quickly you would like to be arrested.

If I understand the GP correctly, it’s hard to arrest the Russian or Chinese Air Force.

aye - or given how low cost/portable drones are now - any agents of those governments ( or other governments ).

It's also possible it is an internal US-on-US test of existing air defense systems? It's not like anything as huge as US air defense is totally monolithic, and people in the detection side may not even have need-to-know for the stuff being prototyped by offensive types.

Always fascinating to read about similar accounts. Have you checked MUFON for others who may have seen it when you did?

Edit: Any resemblances to these?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSLACOmOyjs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n36KOqbwrMY

I'm curious why you don't film the whole flight. I'm almost surprised it's not a requirement, given how cheap and easy it is now.

There is very little requirement on equipment to fly in the US, you don't even need a radio in the majority of the space (only when you approach towered airports and other busy / special areas). So we're far from requiring a camera :)

Sure but for what GA costs on a recurring basis, a small camera or two is such a negligible cost and is really valuable for learning.

Not to mention, there's a great possibility that these unidentified aircraft are American.

What you say may be true, but the conclusion isn't, I don't think.

Case in point: the FAA now requires a digital transmitter beacon (ADS-B) in most of the commonly used airspaces in the continental US as of last month.

I saw one too when I was flying in/around the restricted airspace near Cape Cod / Camp Edwards in MA. I was flying at 5,500 ft. Surprised the heck out of me, until I realized it was probably just a drone.

> ATC didn’t call it so presumably they didn’t see it on radar.

Not a reasonable presumption. VFR aircraft are lowest priority, and traffic calls for VFRs are very much not guaranteed. If a controller has too much to do, you won’t get traffic calls. And just because the frequency is quiet, doesn’t mean the controller is twiddling their thumbs. They could be on the landline or briefing the next controller.

While this is true something at that closing rate and speed would have stood out like a sore thumb, it’s also probable alarms would have gone off. Source: I’ve been inside of a center facility and had the privilege of playing with a scope and asking questions.

ATC operates on secondary radar (transponder data). If there is no transponder, it would not appear on their scope. Some facilities have an option to switch to primary radar, but it is not usually monitored.

I'm wondering how you estimate its speed and distance Wouldn't it look identical to a smaller, slower object closer to your aircraft?

It’s an educated guess from years of watching and avoiding other airplanes. The reason it drew my attention was the abnormal speed, then I focused in on it and realized it was a featureless cylinder.

How long ago did this take place?

Doesn't that mean you assumed it was similar size, speed, or distance as another plane? If you really have no idea what it is, I can't think of any way you could distinguish a large fast distant object from a small nearby slow one. It's too far away for our binocular depth perception to measure distance.

I hope I don't sound too critical. I wondered if the thing in the article's story was some small object ejected from the pilot's own plane and he overtook it as it slowed down so it appeared to be moving backwards. Since you had a similar experience, I wondered if there was some other information that helped you judge it.

> It was exactly as described, small, shiny, cylindrical, no wings, and fast.

When you say "small", can you give an estimate of it's length and diameter?

Are we talking small-plane-small, or welding-gas-cylinder-small?

I wonder if this was NASA's Super Guppy: https://www.kwch.com/2021/03/05/nasas-super-guppy-spotted-ov...

Is it possible this thing is like a cigar with a propeller rotates around the cigar so that you don't actually see there being a propeller because it's rotating? And somehow computer control maintains level flight, or maybe it's multiple propellers around the axis of the cigar.

Alternate theory: Boeing wheels one of these things out to buzz commercial aircraft and airports every time they have some sort of mishap as a PR diversion.

In the off chance you pass one again, would you consider mounting go-pro's on your plane, or one of those fancier ones that gets 360 degrees some bush-plane youtubers are using? I don't have a link handy to the model of camera.

There are dirt cheap HD dash cameras that would work nearly as well.

Which will capture 3 blurry pixels if anything...

Did it leave a trail?

Nope

What would you guess the dimensions were? Color(s)? Was there any vertical component to its trajectory?

Dimension: Fifth

Color: Twilight.

(a) They are common, lots of stories.

(b) Completely impossible to get good video about them.

a & b => bs

if something is small and fast and you are flying a plane i do not find it difficult to believe that capturing video might prove elusive

Oddly enough, people used to say the same thing about gorillas. They thought people were just confusing the natives with monkeys, or making up stories about monsters.

https://listverse.com/2010/04/16/10-beasts-that-used-to-be-m...

Surely things have changed between then and now.

We're talking about visual phenomena, and we capture video constantly.

I'm a pilot (recreational, and my license is not current). Although I've never personally seen a UFO, I've heard enough stories to believe it (not implying alien but nobody seems to know what they are). I've never once recorded anything while flying, ever. And I don't know anybody who ever records while flying (I don't mean for long periods of time, I mean at all). Why would I ever think to do that?

By the time I see the thing and pull out my phone it's already gone before I can hit record (unless it's really slow I guess, but those reports are much less common).

> Why would I ever think to do that?

...because one has seen UFOs in the past, and wants to capture them?

If I went on a walk through the woods behind my house and saw Bigfoot, I would probably carry a camera next time I went walking behind my house to try and get a picture of bigfoot.

I'm not sure how many people have claimed to see a UFO more than once. Sure, after the first time you might. But you're not thinking about it beforehand.

Also how many thousands of hours of flying and not seeing anything interesting do I have also add another thing I have to focus on when it will likely last only a few seconds and I can never guess when? I don't need another distraction while flying.

Pilots claiming to see these aren't typically trying very hard to convince others that they're real (or at least I've never met any, they're often hesitant to bring it up at all for fear of being labeled crazy). They're just reporting what they saw. So most really don't have much incentive to bother with installing a GoPro on their flights.

Yes, if my goal were to prove the existence of these things what you're saying makes sense. But my goal is to fly the plane to wherever I'm going.

Many private pilots have GoPro's mounted on their cockpits or even on their wings.

A380 has camera on it's tail, aerodynamic external camera system mounts are can be installed in almost all Airbus and Boeing models. Passengers have cameras.

There are satellites with radar, IR and visual range looking downwards.

>> Although I've never personally seen a UFO, I've heard enough stories to believe it.

Reminds me of growing up in fundamentalist religious communities where it was commonplace to hear of physical miracles. All sorts of people had stories of God healing people for example. And yet it never happened around me or on film, despite me spending over a thousand hours at religious services as the like.

Eventually I realized many people are just willing to believe things and succumb to simple cognitive biases.

But do you believe in evolution? :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgk8UdV7GQ0

LOL thanks for the clip.

Yep! That's my favorite TV bit of all time.

> And I don't know anybody who ever records while flying (I don't mean for long periods of time, I mean at all). Why would I ever think to do that?

The joys of having radio control. As a driver, I find a dash camera very valuable for the rare occasions I've needed it, but maybe pilots think "radio control knows where everyone is flying, and even if there's any accident, the black box will survive. That's all I need".

That's what they used to say about rocks falling from the sky. Right up until 1803. https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/L/L_Aigle.html

"Ernst Florens Chladni, was the first to publish (in 1794) the idea that meteorites might be rocks that originated not from Earth, but from space....The scientific community of the time responded with resistance and mockery." - Wikipedia

None of that is relevant today. Cameras are everywhere. External cameras, GoPros in cockpits.

Ball lightning stories disappeared with mobile phones. Ufo stories are also disappearing. It's less and less likely that everybody just happens to miss opportunity of taking pictures.

Cars disappeared for smartphone users too: https://www.amongtech.com/car-accidents-caused-by-smartphone...

Not really. I don't even have a camera on my car and most of the people I know don't either. Even with the accessibility of cameras it's hard to capture events that take place in a small time interval. That's why when someone sees something momentarily spectacular (like seeing a person throw a basketball into the hoop from behind their back at half court) they say things like "I wish I caught that on camera"

Camera's are definitely everywhere. Recently a meteorite struck Belgium. Lot's of videos and around 200 people testified of seeing it.

The difference can be lots of things of course: densely populated, maybe seen from further away etc. But it's indeed peculiar that now in the smartphone age, we hardly see any UFO's on video, relative to how many camera's there are.

https://www.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20210124_98361639

In this era, people can fake anything, as well as debunk anything. If someone doesn't want to believe something, no amount of video will be enough to convince that person.

That said, because they're very common, and that there are many stories about them across the history (and not just in recent times) and from many different sources, and that there's a lot of government documentation, and the fact that even Pentagon officially recognized that there's something going on, should be at least enough to steer you away from saying something is just 'bs'.

Reports of rare marine phenomenon such as rogue waves¹ were widely dismissed as “tall” (no pun intended) tales by sailors – and more recently – surfers. It wasn’t until the last few decades that photography and marine instruments provided empirical evidence for their existence.

I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss anecdotal reports of simalarly rare and hard-to-capture aeronautical pheonmenon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave

> wasn’t until the last few decades that photography and marine instruments provided empirical evidence for their existence.

Exactly my point. There are so many cameras in the air that you should trust less and less these ufo stories.

How do you take a good video of a fast moving... missile?

Well, if these were high altitude drones designed to be hard to see, the lack of good video is expected.

A cylinder like.. a cylinder with flat ends? No aerodynamic control surfaces? Was it metal? Was it rotating along an axis? Did it make a sound? Was it 1 foot, 10 feet or 100 feet long? Did it leave a vapor trail? Your story sounds like bullshit.

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