UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
It's also interesting how these alleged observations seem to exclusively happen within restricted US airspace over oceans - but not over US land.
Other UFO HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
My bet has to be on it being an elaborate disinformation campaign, to throw off our nationstate adversaries and keep the public in fear and/or distracted. It requires one to be super cynical, but our government has done worse to US citizens in terms of disinformation [0] (but not since the 70s that i know of).
That explanation accounts for why these sightings only appear to happen in the US, and is (to me) far more believable than an encounter with otherworldly technology.
At least with respect to the 2004 encounter, I think the least likely explanation is that the object belonged to another superpower - b/c it feels like something totally out of reach in multiple domains for 2004 tech.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#:~:text=COINTELPRO%....
edit: what's in the videos? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
UFOs == aliens was a connection that came about later.
If it was a civilian drone they would go after it and people controlling it, a foreign spy plane would cause diplomatic turmoil.
Its either their misinformation campaign, testing of their next gen tech, or aliens. Listed by probability with first being in high 90s.
Not only that they happen in the US, they frequently happen to US military, the very kinds of sensors arrays you would want to spoof.
I definitely agree we didn't simply "invent" this. If these are ours or we know how they work, we had to have help building them. Otherwise it's just too weird to consider an entirely parallel set of physical theories that tens of thousands of people must have learned and put into practice and it's not credibly in the open. There has to be something else stopping that from coming out, which to me implies secret cooperation with a civilization way beyond our own.
and they almost all happen over declared testing areas where the air force has trialed new stuff on navy crews without telling them in the past...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Offic...
Sounds like the detected craft were attempting to be stealthy and were caught out by military use of cutting edge technology as the "rules changed."
That and we only hear about the well documented cases, where advanced sensors meet recording technology from multiple sources - military systems in other words.
It would also be easier to find strange unauthorized stuff in the less populated and more heavily scrutinized areas - no fly zones monitored regularly by military staff for instance. Over land there is a lot of legitimate traffic to "hide" in.
This is kind of backed up by the fact that the countries that are releasing the most UFO stuff are the ones experiencing the largest spike in instability.
When was the last time the Navy was flying a bunch of fighter jets with all their hottest weapons and targetting tech active over your house?
We do have lot's of what IS "any place other", which is randos cell phone an dash cam footage. We quite rightly dismiss most of it, but it exists,ans it's all that can possibly exist, and so there is no discrepency to find "interesting".
I also don't find it remarkable at all that Russia and China aren't publicizing their own "nutcase" stories any more than we ever did, especially considering their pilots are pprobably even less likely to report anything even slightly odd that will end their careers.
It's not interesting at all.
I keep having to check it's not April fools. Hard to suspect this is not an optical phenomena, I'm sure people found ships that appeared to hover way above the horizon similarly spooky. I wonder how much the refractive air phenomena we already know might be the start of an explanation for these things? what happens if we have very low density pockets further up in the atmosphere due to similarly large temperature differences? imagine a whole bunch of mirrors in the sky essentially, then take the shape of that air into consideration! that would make it pretty easy to start explaining objects that appear to defy aerodynamics and physics of moving objects more generally, it would likely significantly distort the image of the source object as to become unidentifiable too. Consider that most of these sightings seem to occur in fighter jets, I imagine the air density differences around these things must get pretty interesting at high speed - it would be pretty amusing if it turned out they are the source of their own optical illusion both in terms of the source and the phenomena.
This whole video is a bit silly though... the ridiculous astonishment at the start, of the admittance of existence of a phenomena that by definition is unidentified, and that if we eliminate everything we know all that remains is, uhm aliens !? - as if we know everything (except aliens of course, they somehow escape our infinite knowledge)... we're being bated right?
There's also the tidbit from the original NYT stories from a couple years ago, repeated elsewhere in other interviews with pilots, that the objects were doing things like speeding off and seconds later appearing on radar at the waypoints that the fighter jets had already planned. Allegedly, of course. I'm not one to believe the government uncritically, but it seems to me that the critical view on this can't just be "swamp gas"-style explanations anymore.
That would be trickier to explain, but we should be careful with the story telling here, they report instances of many visual anomalies, and slotted in only one story where there was a ground radar anomaly preceding the visual one that did not match exactly, i.e correlation with very low sample size is pretty meaningless.
...Knowing that, it's still interesting to seriously consider it anyway - visual systems use light, and radar uses radio, both are propagating electromagnetic waves of different frequency, they permeate solids (or not) differently, but they are all share similar basic behaviours i.e both are sensitive to density of the medium and can experience refraction and total internal reflection. So it's not unthinkable that a single event could explain both.
> Presumably the people who design these radar systems try and make them account for air density etc
I'm sure they do, but they cannot accommodate phenomena that they are not yet aware of. And even if we figured this out it's probably going to be difficult to tune those anomalies out in an automated way, in the same way that it takes a human to understand that a mirror is a mirror by analysing the behaviour of an image... perhaps with multiple radar from very different origins that do not concord they could be filtered out in a simpler way.
[EDIT]
Interesting section in the wiki on radar [0]:
> Clutter refers to radio frequency (RF) echoes returned from targets which are uninteresting to the radar operators. Such targets include natural objects such as ground, sea, and when not being tasked for meteorological purposes, precipitation (such as rain, snow or hail), sand storms, animals (especially birds), atmospheric turbulence, and other atmospheric effects, such as ionosphere reflections, meteor trails, and Hail spike. Clutter may also be returned from man-made objects such as buildings and, intentionally, by radar countermeasures such as chaff [1].
Perhaps a more likely explanation is perceived correlation between a short freak weather even in an area with lots of radar focused on it, e.g a super dense and short hail storm that suddenly drops like a stone. followed by these more common visual phenomena.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Advances_in_Radar_Techn...
The other pilot in the 60 Minutes video mentioned how they're seeing stuff like that almost every day. Whatever it is should be investigated, even if it's just a mere optical illusion.
What we should seek is understanding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWWGmiZs4JA
Videos of blurry splotches and eye witness testimony that repeats the word "technology" over and over to imply that unlike the last 6, _this_ blurry splotch is an alien spacecraft is really just annoying at this point.
EDIT: Hey judge2020 did you watch Dr Mason's analysis I linked above? It's very informative and pretty entertaining too. I'll take your downvote as a no.
I don't think anyone taking themselves seriously is considering these alien spacecraft; 'UFO' simply means unidentified flying object, which very well might be some another world superpower testing their own tech or testing the U.S. military's reaction and response to these things, likely using simple drone tech with outer shells that make it easy to stay 'unknown' by keeping their distance.
Is a serious individual and advocating that these maybe extraterrestrial.
He gave a fascinating Joe Rogan interview recently: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V0uWX1C4m8xEL0HHYqbnE
I'd feel better if it turned out to be extra-terrestrial; if the aliens are out there, watching and haven't annihilated us yet, then at least there's hope they're benevolent.
I think the alternate view is the opposite of arrogant or that we’re so special; either the zoo hypothesis, or that we are so simple that communicating with us would be akin to trying to communicate with an ant for example.
Something I haven't heard mentioned is the possibility that these might be artifacts of the sensors themselves or of the image processing software used: i.e., a bad Kalman filter that won't settle down properly or such.
The pics are too fuzzy to be useful for judgment and the objects usually too small to discern shape and/or size. I am puzzled that the images appear so unclear yet the pilots verbal descriptions sounds very clear.
Before buying into UFOs, I want what I've always wanted: some clear photos.
People with cellphones have massively multi-megapixel cameras with jitter reduction.
When a meteorite lands in Russia a hundred dashcams record it from multiple angles. Beautiful video.
But UFOs? Still just camera splotches that human beings tell stories about in absurd detail.
So very high probability is that they need approval for additional money spending in that area.
There are people very much freaking out about this stuff. It's a fun subject to discuss and if you do so, you will invariably encounter people who are totally unwilling to grapple with the implications.
I didn't really know what to believe as a kid, I thought people were making it up because the pentagon had recently admitted there was a new jet in the USAF arsenal.
Eventually, the first gulf war came in the 90's and all was revealed. I learned my best friend's father (and neighbor) was a machinist for Lockheed Martin making parts for the F117.