Radar data confirms: USS Omaha was surrounded by swarm of UFOs
mysterywire.com
mysterywire.com
They don't even have to be all that high-tech; the US was doing similar things in the 1960s.
Once you go to fixed wing, 138 knots is pretty simple. Just look at the list of unmanned aerial vehicles - it's big and dominated by fixed wing aircraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicl...
1) can hover a few meters above the ocean without generating rotor downwash
2) can accelerate away at 100+g
Both of those rule out any known drone or helicopter. David Fravor, one of the pilots, explains this in an interview here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E
Obviously such a claim would need evidence and a plausible motive and shouldn't be suspected without evidence; but, also obviously, it's one of many hypotheses that would have a much higher probability of being true than extraterrestrially-originated visitation.
On the flip side, the public that has both a less formal and generally lower understanding of this and other things, also led on by various forms of popular culture, have a wholly fantastical minds image when they hear "UFO".
One thing that will be interesting is to see if any other nations have had encounters like this and can supply video and sensor data evidence.
There is no major military that hasn't participated in large scale fabrications as a concealment technique for their own operations or technological developments. The US military certainly has on multiple occasions.
Back in the day of only a handful of newspapers and of 1 camera per 1 million people (at least on the average day, the average person wouldn't lug their camera around with them), we had sightings of Yeti, Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, etc.
Now we have the internet, an unstoppable torrent of crappy news and the mother of all tabloids, everyone has a high resolution camera in their pockets at all times, and cryptoids are all but gone.
I would have expected 16k HDR resolution photos of Yeti by now.
I feel betrayed! :-p
To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons.
Thus why it's the only remaining gap in the "ufo of the gaps" theory!
I recall reading a few weeks ago that not only the sailors have consumer grade equipment but that there are procedures in cases like this for sailors to use that equipment so there is more footage to analyze later
We are asked to believe the military is intelligent, but if that's the case then I have my doubts.
So I guess the correlation is: cryptids can't coexist with smartphones. Makes sense. I get a feeling that cryptids aren't the social media type.
Also if there are aliens monitoring humans, obviously they'll adjust their operations as our devices change.
I doubt highly intelligent beings from another world would give a damn what our devices were capable of.
It’s unclear how you’ve reached the conclusion that #2 is unlikely without knowing how widespread the use of this technology is, and in what circumstances/locations it’s being used.
Classified military technology exists and is being tested all the time, without any high-res pictures leaking.
I guess another theory is that aliens are pranking these people. "Hey Blart, lets go to Earth and let one guy without a camera see part of our spaceship from a distance. Everyone will think he is crazy. HAHAHA"
Photographing something like this would probably require a DSLR type camera with a great zoom/telephoto lens. I would expect they have that equipment on military ships, but I don’t think the ubiquity of cell phone cameras has significantly changed the ability to photograph this kind of phenomenon.
Obviously the aliens have some anti surveillance tech that renders our cameras less useful!
So far, all we got is grainy video and verbal accounts from military pilots using jargon-laden language that sounds authoritative released to the general public.
The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts".
Occam's Razor is intended to apply in EXACTLY situations like this.
The good news is that if these phenomena are as common as people say, it should be possible to devise procedures, measurements, and analysis to start to rule out what these are not.
Bear in mind, every new story doesn't indicate a new sighting - these stories are mostly retreads of the same few incidents and a vague pins-and-twine narrative connecting other stories like the Pais patents to get some extra mileage out of it.
In particular, the Alizondo character keeps popping up as some kind of head of a government research project. He's been trotting this stuff around for years, but according to a 2019 story in The Intercept, the dude's employment story doesn't check out: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history...
I suppose the news outlets are hungry for clicks now that Stable Genius isn't around to send them a zinger everyday.
> The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts".
There's a lot to unpack here.
Yes, they are intended to handle known things. Drones, weather balloons, cloud formations, jet plumes. These are all known, and our observations do not match them.
Impartial nor critical? I would suggest you watch the interviews with the pilots from the USS Nimitz incident. It's mentioned a major reason we don't hear a lot of these accounts is because of the stigma of reporting UFOs, which is why his copilots have been silent on the matter until now.
Lastly they are real objects. Multiple eye witness accounts with multiple radar signatures, from carriers and jets.
I did and I am not convinced their observations reveal much about these phenomena. Military pilots are very capable people with good eyes, but they're trained and focused strictly on their very demanding job. They are not in the air to conduct general-purpose scientific observations, nor do they necessarily have the tools at their disposal to truly evaluate what they're seeing.
> Drones, weather balloons, cloud formations, jet plumes. These are all known, and our observations do not match them.
Do not match any? Or some? or one? There's multiple videos out there, very different from each other and each could have a different explanation.
It really does come down to Occam's Razor.
The person who commented on your comment clearly provided information about what you said, but you're just disagreeing with him.
In isolation yes, the videos are not remarkable. But it's not in isolation, as you seem to be discounting the context they're taken and ignoring the relevance of the eye witness accounts and their flight behaviour on radar (descending from space, disappearing and reappearing a hundred miles away, etc).
Unless you think they're all in on something or lying, which is fair enough, but from how the situation is unfolding with demands from congress, experiences of all the service members, and civilian pilots, I'm partial there is something of a phenomena here.
> It really does come down to Occam's Razor
Heuristics apply in the general case but definitionally may not when there is enough evidence the event is an outlier.
Now I figure it was just a rogue cloud, weather balloon or weird atmospheric effect, but there are still phenomena that are hard to capture on camera.
If you've ever tried taking a photo of a particularly pretty moon with your phone, you'll know what I'm talking about. The striking orange harvest moon that seems to dominate the night sky suddenly becomes a little smear of light when you look at the photo on your phone.
Most phones or other cameras that people casually carry around have a relatively wide angle lens and accompanying FOV. That means anything at a distance will end up looking even further in the distance (ie, smaller) once you take the shot.
So to get a nice, clear picture of a distant object in the sky you're going to need a telephoto lens. That's fine, and there are plenty of people out there casually carrying around a telephoto. Except now you have a new problem: you need to track the moving object through your telephoto. Not impossible, of course, but not easy for typical person who happens to see a strange object in the sky while they have their camera with them.
Also, if the object is moving, you'll need a fast shutter speed. And if you increase your shutter speed you're going to have to increase your ISO as well. If you're seeing this strange object at night, that means you're likely pushing your ISO into a range where your photo starts to get pretty grainy.
All of these aren't insurmountable problems, people that shoot flying birds and planes do it all the time. But it takes a combination of equipment and photography skills that aren't exactly common. So now we're looking at a venn diagram of "people who see something strange in the sky" and "people who have the equipment and skills to get a good photo" to calculate our odds of having a really great photo of a UFO by now.
All that said, the point is still valid ("why don't we have more photos now?"). But at the same time, it's not as easy of a problem as many seem to think.
So, my comment here is about 2014 and the tic tac incident, not the swarm-of-drones incident from last year.
If they really did have reports for the two days leading up to the tic tac incident I have to think they would have tasked an aircraft with top notch (beyond any handheld camera) photographic capabilities to investigating such an alarming intrusion.
Or, they are really stupid.
Or, the radar hits in the preceding two days were just phantom hits and possibly assessed as such at the time, with jets sent up to look just as a "why not" kind of thing since they were already in the area for training.
My bet is with the last possibility, because I find it hard to think so badly of the Navy people. And the hits were just phantom / ghost hits in a new system. Which means: not alien / Russian / etc. craft.
And the actual object actually seen by the pilots was some chunks of ice falling from outer space, some of which made whitecaps and another of which was seen flitting erratically and thus moving in ways that no known aircraft is capable of. It "came up to meet" Dave Fraver AS HE WAS GOING DOWN yeah no surprise there, and, as the sonic boom from his jet slammed into the snowy ice, it, again no surprise, disintegrated and disappeared, because sonic boom, which disintegration he interpreted as out-of-this-world acceleration. OK, maybe the other Navy people are with it, but Dave may have been experiencing some effects of the G forces or something. He seems like a nice guy.
The other pilot who spoke about this described the movement of the object in a way that exactly matches what I said, a falling slab of snowy ice. Her words: "Like when you drop your cell phone in the kitchen and it bounces around."
Again this entire comment is talking about the tic tac incident, from 2014, not the summer of 2020 incident.
https://www.gsmarena.com/myth_debunked_samsungs_100x_zoom_do...
Also, if they were radar-spy drones, they don't have to go home -- they've likely transmitted everything they need (overhead satellite or a nearby sub?). They're going away far enough to sink to the bottom of the ocean with little chance of recovery/identification.
So, I can imagine drone that carries some basic RF sensors, a basic quadcopter (or equiv) propulsion system, then a one-time-use escape system. Perhaps a short-range turbine or simple chemical rocket.
But we can make an educated guess.
> Also, if they were radar-spy drones, they don't have to go home -- they've likely transmitted everything they need (overhead satellite or a nearby sub?). They're going away far enough to sink to the bottom of the ocean with little chance of recovery/identification.
IIRC submarines have looked for them, following that theory. Nothing was found.
> So, I can imagine drone that carries some basic RF sensors, a basic quadcopter (or equiv) propulsion system, then a one-time-use escape system. Perhaps a short-range turbine or simple chemical rocket.
The drone theory makes a lot of sense when you ignore the fact that they are flying for over 10 hours non stop, and going faster than 160kt. Oh, and that they are also moving really fast once they are submerged.
2) 100g is likely within our capability today.
Old, 400g tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)#Engines_and_p...
Also, these stories always assume radar have no failure mode, no false indications, no possibilities of fooling. IOW, enthusiasts ignores and never consider failures but adopt never seen, never encounters aliens with impossible tech that always happens in isolated area with no other capabilities to monitor.
And all that does not even start to account for the impossibly large inter-stellar distances.
I'll take weird failure over hugely fantastical theories.
These values are deducted by an estimation of the space traveled and an estimation of the time it took. And these estimations are consistent with the ones that come from the radar operators.
Also keep in mind that 100 G is a very conservative middle value. They said "hey, what if our estimations are really, really off", and provided a lower and upper boundaries for the g-forces, that are 40 G and 521,770 G, respectively.
> I'll take weird failure over hugely fantastical theories.
I'll take decades of constant and consistent reports over "skeptical" conclusions deducted from wrong a priori probabilities.
Plus, isn't that part of what the whole dog-fighting thing?
The fact is that when pilots say 'there's no way a balloon could do that' or 'that doesn't look like any drone I ever saw'... pilots aren't necessarily best placed to assess the realistic flight possibilities or appearances for a drone or a balloon, because they're imaginign balloons and drones they've seen before, and aren't considering the range of possibilities for what could be created.
Who are best placed to identify things flying around if not pilots with hundreds (or thousands) of hours flying?
That's why they say they've never seen anything like it, and they don't know any tech that could do what those 4 pilots observed.
And you'll say: you're just nitpicking the idea is that pros aren't pros at everything.
I'm not, I'll even fix that analogy for you: a croupier gets impressed by card trick.
Now the problem is, pilots are trained observers, and they get to see a lot of things from their jets. Cars, trucks, houses, rivers, trees, ships, helicopters, drones, different types of planes - not only because they do recon, they also have to target some of those things, and they train a lot for it. Distances, sizes, cost of maneuvers, etc.
With that said: what other type of people are best trained to take a guess at what things are from up above? Drone operators? Balloon operators? Weather balloon folks? Aerospace engineers?
Can they be fooled still? Probably - but if you can fool 4 pilots at the same time, their tens of million of dollars jets with sensors, and the most advanced radar systems, all at the same time, then you're not a magician - you simply have tech way superior to what those guys have.
That's the thing, it doesn't even need to be an actual craft. If it's something that can create optical illusions on jet pilots and jam radars, how are they supposed to do anything if their senses and systems fail?
I think that if I wanted to solve this at all costs, one of tve things I'd do (in addition to working with radar engineers and scientists of course) is to hire a number of magicians to get them to try to recreate the experience of the pilots.
Because those pilots are good and highly skilled, but so are Penn and Teller and they still get fooled from time to time so it is not impossible.
I.e. I disagree with everyone: those that underestimate pilots and say we don't have good photos and also those who think pilots are infallible.
So now they have to go off to the coast of the USA in a restricted area used for navy drills and testing, probably coming from the Pacific side. Let's say Penn and Teller get access to a brand new submarine from China that's has stealthy as they can be, enough to set up the experiment.
Then they had to stay there for days teasing both the ships radars and navy pilots by make things pop up on their radars and make them move large distances in short periods of time (seconds), and get them to chase radar blips.
Now comes the day that a squadron of jets are asked to check something nearby their location (which mean they have to tap into Navy communications systems), launch the illusion, make it react to the pilots unexpected behavior (one dove the other remained above), and then make it desapear (and then proceed to jam radars, to eventually exit out).
(This is roughly the story of the Fravor incident.)
I think just the first point, of entering USA waters, more specifically restricted waters and air space actively controlled by the Navy - which was doing drills - already shows technology superiority.
Which was my point.
They have to know what the radars and sensors are and how they work (hackers, compromised top level people), how to jam them (superior tech), how to be stealthy (superior tech), how to create illusions for jet pilots while fooling jet sensors (superior tech).
I'm not saying these are aliens, but surely looks like tech superiority or the whole defense system collapsing all together even the pilots.
If this was done by a couple of guys, with too much free time on a shoe string budget, that can fool the most advanced navy, well that's not good either.
Like a large flake of ice falling.
The other pilot said the motion was like if you dropped your cell phone in the kitchen and it was bouncing around before settling down.
Exactly like a falling massive but flat flake of snowy ice that fell off of an object that had entered the atmosphere from outer space and fallen to the water, where the early chunks remained causing whitecaps.
Not hovering. Erratic motion.
Edit:
Listen, the US Defense department knows what these are. They are just soft letting China and Russia know that this was cute.
I wonder if those reports could potentially be consistent with a submersible craft launching drones. Maybe such a craft could even be... "catapulting"?... or otherwise giving the drones an initial boost, too, combined with self-propulsion, which could perhaps make them fly from the surface faster than they could with self-propulsion alone.
(Obviously this is all pure uninformed speculation on my part and could be total nonsense. And one would think one of these hypothetical submersible crafts would've likely been detected at least once, given the US Navy was operating in the vicinity on multiple occasions.)
But I would also think the Navy would the best available technology and techniques to detect what would probably have to be a foreign submersible in their waters, and that if this were routinely happening they'd likely end up detecting it eventually through some means. Or if it were one of their own skunkworks crafts, they'd probably figure that out afterwards. (I know very little about this field, though.)
Or even if they did fail to ever detect it beyond a few eye witness reports from pilots, I'd think this would be at/near the top of their list of plausible theories.
If this is indeed an explanation for some of the incidents, I could believe that they have in fact identified it and are doing some kind of psyop/deception operation, perhaps to confuse or signal to a foreign power.
[1]The Navy can't seem to avoid collisions at sea! And sea-faring navigation tech is hundreds of years old.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39913/multiple-destroy...
Edit: Whoops, sorry for the necro. I have to watch out better for old tabs...
To me it would seem much more likely that the top brass know or strongly suspect they're indeed drones invading our airspace but are acting like they're unexplained phenomena as part of some sort of psyop/deception/intelligence/adversary-signaling stratagem. I'm not sure what the motive would be, there, but that sounds more plausible than random speculators online having more inference ability than the entire US military. Even if you assume the height of institutional incompetence, surely someone among the most powerful military in history would propose such a theory.
What kind of "cheap drone" can do that?
Conspiracy nuts are like broken clocks, and sometimes they're really the first people to put together stories before the Amazon Washington Post will report it
That being said, it doesn't invalidate the conspiracy theorists. They fill a useful role - public discourse has three unwritten rules. Assume everyone is speaking in good faith, assume consequences of their actions that they didn't advocate for are accidental and assume that they are only working with information in the public sphere.
All three of these assumptions are unsound, so public discourse is always slightly divorced from reality. We can't have discourse without those rules, but the crazies provide a helpful chorus of "but what if we assume bad faith/indirect action/private knowledge". These ideas need to be in the conversation, even if only peripherally. It is pretty obvious that there is a lot of that negative stuff going on, even if we don't know which specific cases are coincidence vs intent.
It's often extremely divorced from reality. For instance the Israel / Palestine conflict.
What?
Some people refused to believe, for example, that big tech firms work with the gov. The idea seems quaint now but some didnt even believe Snowden!
In the end, a balance is needed.
Many academics have been a proponent of the leak theory, whats shocking is not the press picking it up now, rather how quickly it was discarded before.
It absolutely is _now_ but try saying that between Mar 2020 and Mar 2021 you got downvoted into oblivion.
As it is now we have a huge majority in these discussions that believe that because we haven't found where the virus came from it must be from a lab for the simple reason that almost everyone "know" that we found the source in a few months last time (SARS-CoV) while in reality we have still not found the source after 15 years of hard work.
On top of that these discussions are political in nature when it becomes anti-china or pro-US or whatever and by then should be downvoted.
TBH, the lab leak hypothesis should seem less damaging to the Chinese government's reputation than the wet market hypothesis. On one hand, you have an isolated failure of lab safety protocols, on the other, you have decades of government support of wild animal trade despite mountains of evidence for its risk of zoonotic disease outbreak, not to mention environmental costs.
Maybe I disagree with your view on this, so I reflexively reject the rest of the comments you make on HN, even if one of them was insightful and could really help me. That might be a little dumb, so I would try not to do that, personally. I get if you would do differently tho, seems like you might from what you say here. ;p;) xx
I posted a couple different sources on this, but I'm glad this post is the one that got upvoted to front page, because it's a good compilation of the various resources about this newly released footage: explanatory discussion with George Knapp, actual footage, Twitter thread where announced, transcript of footage.
Why do you put his name and title in scare quotes?
He was a member of the U.S. Senate for 30 years, many of those years as the leader of the Democrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Reid
His legacy is respected enough that they're trying to rename the airport in Las Vegas after him.
The general take away is that anti-aircraft/missile systems are good enough that the only solution is to saturate the air defense and exhaust the 500-1500 million dollar missiles the carrier group has on hand to deploy (assuming you got past the air wing).
A swarm of ultra-cheap drones each with 50-100kg of explosive changes the cost dynamics of defending a ship/carrier group.
And then there is the matter that a CIWS/C-RAM would need at least some kind of upgrade to be able to engage (small, slow) drones: https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-we-rely-on-the-Phalanx-CIWS-t...
(I have no experience at all with these besides seeing some probably-fake Youtube videos supposed to show these shoot down mortar sheels)
Throwing "wave after wave" of anything eventually overwhelms a defender.
A small-caliber gun with a good fire-control system or a couple of marksmen should be a better answer. Asymmetric threats have been a major concern for modern armies at least since the first Gulf War. The threat used to be swarm of small boats. Now it's also swarm of UAV. Answers exist to both.
Regarding the most likely origin of a UAV swarm targetting a US carrier close to the shore of the USA, I will go with the US army. It's good way to test both your offensive and defensive capabilities at the same time.
Do you happen to have any pointers to more details (e.g. forum threads)? I love reading about that kind of optimization in games.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=US+Carrier+grou...
Also can fit in a backpack or purse.
I see some articles where 10-15 IAI Harpy drones have been purchased by countries like the US and India for $100 million.
Versus a late model Tomahawk missile being ~$1.5 million each?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
Lots of comments about why it could be overwhelmed. The ammo is still expensive and limited
https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-we-rely-on-the-Phalanx-CIWS-t...
It looks like like Raytheon is still pushing the Phalanx though
https://www.flightglobal.com/civil-uavs/raytheon-offers-phal...
Northrop wants to use lasers
https://warriormaven.com/land/army-c-ram-base-defense-will-d...
For the range, I think the typical outer perimeter of a carrier group is 100 to 200 nautical miles as patrolled by the air wing. Then at 20 nautical miles you would run into ships, and that's still too far away to launch a big swarm of ultra cheap drones because they wouldn't make it to the carrier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_Tactical_UAS
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2021/05/05/turkey-converts-si...
And deploying drones at Mach 20 might be rather hard on the drones...
Air superiority was always the first phase of winning the war. Boots on the ground was and always be the final phase. And the first phase was, throughout history, archers, ballistae, cannons, airplane and currently aircraft carrier. But these last ones are way too expensive and too juicy of a target. So the future of air superiority are drones. If anything the past 20 years of using Predator drones in Afghanistan already proves my point, but the HN crowd likes to downvote without actually thinking, but that's OK. Have at it.
- Computer vision is incredibly cheap and small in 2021 (particularly "hit this giant thing that looks like a warship").
Western military thinking is obsessed with ever advancing technological solutions (with high associated costs/limited numbers). But "massing," be it small boats or small aircraft/drones defeats it consistently. Good enough is often good enough.
No matter how good your technological advantage is, it can never be in two/four/six places at once and that $1M smart defensive missile can only shoot down so many incoming targets.
That's why the US's nuclear defense was ultimately MAD, because Russia simply built tons of dumb/cheap nukes that overwhelmed anything the US could shoot down even assuming the perfect defensive platform. If the defense is 10x or 100x the cost/space/complexity, you'll win the mass war every time.
We need more Embraer Super Tucanos and less F-35s, because an F-35 can never be in eight places at once no matter how advanced it is, same logic with cheap & small Vs. expensive & large warships. Warships need more computer controlled guns that shoot big bullets and less smart missiles that take up 100x the space, 100x the cost, and thus you get 100x less supply.
A drone is an Embraer Super Tucano on steroids, because now you've reduced the pilot cost/limitation. The fact that the US doesn't already have offensive/defensive drone swarms means they're asleep at the wheel.
Drones seem to have a lot of disadvantages to previous generations of rocket technology.
Any modern air defenses/fighters will both outrange and destroy aircraft such as the Super Tucano which won't be able to mount sufficient radar to observe even non-stealth F-15s. A Super Tucano retails for 11 million dollars as a base cost and 30 million dollars typical expense.
The drone swarm concept only really works when you get radically below the marginal cost of AA missiles making it impractical to shoot down the adversary force. A propeller plane can typically win a dogfight against a modern jet in a guns battle.
We're talking about defensive missiles and guns, nobody is using a defensive gun to try and sink an enemy warship.
> Any modern air defenses/fighters will both outrange and destroy aircraft such as the Super Tucano which won't be able to mount sufficient radar to observe even non-stealth F-15s.
Of course, that's a built-in assumption. Another built in assumption is that it is a 1:4 or 1:8 F-35:Super Tucano ratio, since it is a "mass" strategy. A lot of cheap "good enough" assets instead of fewer incredible ones.
Even if the F-35 has air superiority where it is, it doesn't where it isn't, that's both obvious but also the trap the US has walked into by reducing the number and increasing the technological superiority.
Drone swarms are the ultimate anti F-35, because they're cheap, mass in numbers, and "good enough." The F-35 literally doesn't have the munitions onboard to kill more than half a dozen.
Considering that an F-35 currently goes 20:1 with F-15's the ratio with a Tucano could easily be 1:100 or even 1:1000. Given the speed and range differences F-35's could likely return to base, reload and return to fighting the approaching Tucanos for a 30:1+ ratio on the Tucano's for a given wave.
The salient datapoint would be when it is cost ineffective to shoot A2A missiles at the Tucano/Drone and the F-35s simply wouldn't be able to reload again.
How sure are you that the US doesn't have drone swarms? They haven't announced that they have them. So far as I have seen, it hasn't leaked that they have them. But I suspect that the US military has several capabilities that are not generally known.
There is no reason the drones couldn't wait to start their engines until they are at the ~40 mile line after being dropped at the edge of the CAP patrol.
EDIT: it looks like a good glide ratio is 60:1 meaning that the above scenario could play out outside the effective radar range of the carrier group, and hundreds of miles away from the CAP patrol.
e.g. the E-2 Hawkeye, which is carrier-embarked, launches from the catapult, and (in modern variants) includes a surveillance radar that will detects threats out to 300 nautical miles and beyond.
It doesn’t really sound much like a drone anymore though, more like some kind of “glide bomb”. Hey! Look at that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-154_Joint_Standoff_Weapo...
(FWIW, I mean this in jest, not condescendingly.)
Most weapons use off the shelf components from the time they were designed, and moving to more modern components doesn’t save enough in production cost to justify the cost of redesign, testing and certification processes. If a 90’s chip was “good enough” to meet spec in the 90’s then it’s still good enough in 2021. (Assuming we’re even still building the 90’s variant and not just maintaining existing inventory.)
For example, a Jonker JS-1 Revelation is a fairly state-of-the-art design manufactured with high-tech materials (including carbon-fibre and Kevlay). It is over 7 meters long and has an 18 meter wingspan, in order to carry a total payload of ~300 kg, which is roughly about where you start for bombs expected to have serious effects on blue-water combat ships.
How exactly are you delivering a swarm of these from 60,000 feet?
But you could create a long-range gas powered plane, with Ardupilot and a GPS receiver, and get pretty long range with that. Here is one that crossed the Atlantic on less than 3 quarts of gas.
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/model-plane-f...
You could easily design a slightly larger model, stick a Nvidia Jetson nano on the front with a camera, and have a go at it. With economies of scale, you could do the whole thing for less than $1000 USD per unit. Cheap.
Individually, the planes are dumb, stupid and slow. But launch enough of them, and some might get through.
If the drones have less range than the combat radius of the fleets air power, they just need to locate and destroy the launch platform.
Something like this should be sufficient (peak thrust 131N):
https://www.rocketryworks.com/h100w-14a-dms-high-power-singl...
Larger motors are available for not much more money.
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No one is going to try to take out a carrier in the middle of the ocean, but there isn't much need to do that either.
Carriers are primarly used to attack land-based targets these days. So either they have to stay waaaay off-shore and rely on tankers to refuel planes for combat sorties (which reduces the cadence) or they will get within (for example) 500NM of land. Low and slow gas-powered drones can achieve this now.
The "launch site" is any spot of land near the coast accessible by a truck.
The ISR satellites pick up launches by ballistic missiles that rise up high in the atmosphere, which have a very large IR signature. The sats are not going to pick up a gas-powered small aircraft, even if you use a small solid rocket for launch assist.
Also, you're going to want to re-think the economics of this, if you're using a $100K USD missile to destroy a $10K pickup truck on a regular basis. Nevermind the cost (like the aircraft hours) needed to get the missile on-target. Nevermind that the enemy can field 10 times the number of trucks that you have aircraft, at 100 times less cost.
Commercial satellite picked up an f15 banking in Gaza recently, so the ability to imagine and scan in near real-time the land and sea around carrier strike groups and other valuable assets and locations seems likely.
Other way to think about the costs are a 1 million dollar missile that takes out a $5000 rocket that’s being used to threaten billions of dollars of ships, thousands of lives, a potential ecological disaster if one sinks, and the ships are defending or “liberating” billions or trillions of dollars in resources and shipping.
EDIT: I couldn't easily find data on the AN/SPY-6 AESA radar that's going into the newest generation of ships, but the AN/SPY-1 PESA system from the prior generation has 6 MW peak power output.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/hit-and-sunk-swedis...
On the other hand engaging a target typically uses 100+ rounds or ~$1500-3000 per target.
Definitely cheaper than a good drone (~$5000-20000?), but maybe not far cheaper.
If there wasn't FLIR and radar corroborating one another, I'd think they might be an experiment specifically in creating false images on sensors. I'm not sure how one would go about faking both FLIR and radar in the same shape and same place with rapid motion of the images. If someone managed, the likely shapes might be a sphere or an amorphous blob.
When we talk about the distance of drones, should we be assuming these weren't launched from nearby from under the water, from above the radar's ceiling, or from that civilian craft in the video?Might they be lighter-than-air for hovering but with powerful propulsion for changing direction? I think it'd be premature given we don't know what they are to speculate on their launch point or maximum range.
Just curious how carrier battle group defenses supposedly fair against a nuclear ASBM with evasive terminal maneuvers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210528131648/https://www.myste...
Debunking by Thunderf00t:
Even just looking at that video now, you can see it has been "debunked" by this latest release of info and 5 seconds of looking through the comments and you can see people pointing out falsehoods stated in the video.
Would you care to actually point out what parts of Thunderf00t's debunking you object to?
I also cannot fathom how a real scientist debunking wishful thinking gets labeled a "pessimist" by the science fans (I'm not calling you a science fan, I'm talking about the horde of Muskrats that are very angry with Mason).
That being said: I do believe the stuff this article is about is different from what Mason debunks in his video (his video predates this release), so I don't think we should consider the two together at all.
Alright then.
You would almost think it's really about the shady ad-tech they have on their site not being legal in Europe.
/s
They have a pretty invasive tracking which wouldn't pass the GDPR standards and make them some money.
Most of their users are from the US.
Why would they remove all that tracking which costs money, then lose income only to allow a tiny percent of users read their news? There's nothing for them to figure out.
If they want to talk about radar data, that would be something different from video of video. An assertion about the data is also not the data, it is just a mere assertion about the data.
FLIR is the same system that showed the tic tac objects in another incident.
Also in the San Diego area.
The pilot in the tic tac incident, Dave Fravor, said that he is a class clown type.
He also said that the programmer of the FLIR system is one of his best buddies and was at his wedding.
He said there were three other people with him on that day (2 fighter craft, 2 people in each one) so he says it’s not just him, he has others who back him up. But, notice, that is just his assertion. The other three people have gone dark and don’t want to talk. An assertion about having backup is not backup. It is just a mere assertion.
All we have for tic tac is Dave and the FLIR video.
Imagine you are a Top Gun trained fighter pilot and get to experience the immersive 3D way of being that others don’t have any inkling of. You might feel pretty special.
And then when you get back to earth, you’re just another ordinary Dave.
What if you could juice things up a little bit, so that when you’re back on the ground, people would still know how special you are? What if your buddy who works on the FLIR system could be in on it?
Again, all we have for tic tac is Dave and the FLIR video.
Kinda similar with this new incident, since everyone on board apparently was unable to locate or forgot they had their smartphones.
I would bet dollars to donuts that self described class clown Dave Fravor and his FLIR programmer buddy are still best buddies and still live in the San Diego area.
Doesn’t prove anything, but food for thought.
Also would be surprised if military pilots were allowed to carry their cell phones with them, nor would it likely be advisable to take a phone video while you're piloting a fighter jet.
For the cell phones it would have been safe for you to assume I was referring to the people who were on the ships at the time of the more recent supposed incident.
It's precisely the opposite, she avoided talking until now. She asked Fravor to remain anonymous, and she came forward in a 60 Minutes interview if I recall correctly.
Just to add up, 4 pilots were eye witnesses (2 pilots on 2 planes).
From what they say it sounds like they were seeing large panels of ice or snow that flaked off of a large snowball core, something that must have been big enough to survive reentry.
She described the motion as bouncing around with no discernible trajectory, something you would expect from a falling flat-ish object.
He says it “came up to meet him” (and then disappeared btw) but that kind of wording is often heard from fighter pilots, often even referring to the ground “coming up” so I don’t take it as confirming that the thing was actually going upward.
The FLIR shows another similar item seemingly flitting off suddenly (“accelerating”) but that kind of visual can come from the system suddenly losing its lock on the object.
Because that was the context of the event: they didn't happen to come across it.
It was being recorded in radars for days, and the squadron were asked to check it, by a radar operator, because they were doing an exercise near by.
Oh, and remember: one of the jets remained above while the other dove. 2 different types of observations - he was on the plane that dove down, she remained up above.
That's what makes the event bizarre: it wasn't a single random phenomena, it was happening for days and then observed by 4 witnesses at different angles/altitudes.
It would be easier to wrap this up into a lie, hoax, propaganda to get funding, then to recurring meteorological rare phenomena never observed by radars or pilots.
Not snowing. The objects came in from space, on a ballistic trajectory. Something like a large ice ball, like a micro comet. Not a snow storm. Nothing to do with weather.
An ice ball from space could easily go undetected and enter the Earth's atmosphere and land in the ocean. If it was big enough, some parts of it could survive all the way down. It would probably break up as it fell, or possibly even before entering the atmosphere.
I'm envisioning a long chain of these large ice balls / snowballs, origin unknown, hurtling through space on a trajectory that places them on earth in roughly the same area over the course of a couple / few hours. Not an everyday event, but more plausible than the mystery aircraft theory.
If a large body of ice hit the water, the impact site of the body that hit the water first could have whitecaps. The ice object could even float back toward the surface and stay just under the surface, also causing whitecaps. The size of a 737 would be not out of the realm of possibility for such an object.
Meantime, at least one smaller (still large) "flake" was still falling, tumbling in the air due to its shape. Listen to Alex's description on 60 Minutes of how it moved. A large flake of ice falling through the air fits the description perfectly. The color also fits. It also explains why the object could just disappear: the sonic boom from a nearby jet encounter could shatter the snowy ice object and make it dissipate in a matter of seconds.
By lucky coincidence, out of all the millions of flights of fighter aircraft over water over the last few decades, in this one single instance, a pilot, several pilots together in fact, happened to be there to notice the falling ice. A remarkable sighting, but not unbelievable by any stretch.
If… IF… it's true that it lasted for days, that's would be a problem for my explanation. Thing is, we don't know for sure that that is the case here.
First of all, the source of the radar data? A system that was programmed by Fravor's buddy.
Second of all, another poster said that the radar system was new at the time and bugs were still being worked out, and that ghost contacts are common at such a time.
BTW the acceleration seen on the FLIR video is explained perfectly by the system losing the lock on the object. (Which, assuming it's undoctored footage and the accounts are accurate, would have to be a different flake of ice which was falling somewhat later than the first flake, because it was a different sortie by a different pilot).
The assertion about two viewpoints is carefully emphasized by Fravor (I saw him with Lex Fridman) but notice that we never hear from the second viewpoint the details that he adds.
Alex sat there in the chair on 60 Minutes giving a brief overview and refraining from contradicting anything Dave said but also leaving some details to him alone (possibly because, having a different perspective much higher up, she wasn't able to confirm everything he said). For example, notice that she did not confirm that the object flew upward. He alone said "it came up to meet him" as he was going down.
So we have one person's word for that part of this, and many of the other details. His word alone. He would then reply "oh but three other people saw it" but I say, listen to what they say: silence. We are going on his word alone.
Never heard of such a theory and I'm glad you shared it, it was out of my realm of possibilities since it never occurred to me.
But like you said, this doesn't explain the recurrent event, or the radar information.
>We are going on his word alone.
There. This is where I'm split, and where a lot of people tend to handle carefully because of the respect people have for US Navy, specially pilots, and no one seems to dare to say:
- What if Fravor was wrong and led everyone who trusted him into the wrong conclusions?
Could he have seen something ordinary and blew it out of proportions due to his - clearly massive - ego, just because he couldn't identify what ever it was, even with all of his experience and being one of the main guys in the ship?
Everyone could have seen something and not identify it, and relied on Fravors approach to try to figure out what it was, and the frame of reference for the squadron was based on his information.
Could they have missed what ever it was if it wasn't mentioned by a radar operator dealing with bugs/glitches? Probably. Yet they were looking for something in the area, and something they found. Was just a coincidence that they came across something that was in one of the areas pinned by the radar? It's a large ocean.
On the other hand, only they know what they saw, and they're experienced bunch. Plus it had to be an odd, and rare, chain of events (forgot to mention that other squadrons flew after them and got another video that leaked). Yet again, they were all trying hard to look for something - things that could have gone unnoticed if they weren't looking for something (like a commercial plane at a distance they aren't used to see on their sensors data).
Yep but nobody is experienced with this stuff I guess. But I get what you mean and agree.
Thanks for being a reasonable person and replying thoughtfully, that’s a breath of fresh air on the internet sometimes. :)
Also according to the breathless film maker Jeremy Corbell, FLIR data can only be released to the public as grainy hand shaking video of FLIR screens shot over someone’s shoulder, I guess because the data is in a “special” format and programmers who are able to figure out how to parse special data formats do not actually exist. /s
This says much more than it actually says
Average cell camera lens is around 24mm. If you were to photograph an air show with that you, you would be getting nothing usable. Even at 500mm you will need to crop out the majority the frame.
Then comes lens shake mathematics. If you were photographing a baseball game you’d have to be shooting at 1/1000 of a second to stop the motion of the ball.
To capture the motions of objects such as these you’d need a professional camera maxed out shutter speed 1/8000 of a second and a 500mm lens with an extender. Run the numbers on that budget...
Then think of the ISO factor. Image sensors sensitivity at night is still developing. Good luck capturing an object moving 10gs at ISO 12,000...
Getting a picture of an object in motion with a cell phone is not gonna turn out great. Especially at great distances. You need thousands of dollars worth of equipment and a firm grasp of photo science. It’s not for amateurs.
Brass tacts. You need an amazing camera, amazing lens, and the technical prowess to know how to stop motion through photography.
Average cell camera lens is around 24mm. If you were to photograph an air show with that you, you would be getting nothing usable. Even at 500mm you will need to crop out the majority the frame.
Then comes lens shake mathematics. If you were photographing a baseball game you’d have to be shooting at 1/1000 of a second to stop the motion of the ball.
To capture the motions of objects such as these you’d need a professional camera maxed out shutter speed 1/8000 of a second and a 500mm lens with an extender. Run the numbers on that budget...
Then think of the ISO factor. Image sensors sensitivity at night is still developing. Good luck capturing an object moving 10gs at ISO 12,000...
Getting a picture of an object in motion with a cell phone is not gonna turn out great. Especially at great distances. You need thousands of dollars worth of equipment and a firm grasp of photo science. It’s not for amateurs.
Brass tacts. You need an amazing camera, amazing lens, and the technical prowess to know how to stop motion through photography.
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If you've gone to the trouble of automating an apology, I'll instantly assume they don't care, and be insulted that they think we're dumb enough to fall for it.
It's tiresome. It's a massive game of "I don't know, therefore my theory is correct" being played by, or on, people who don't quite get that ignorance isn't evidence in favor of their pet theory.
I don't like the way this story is unfolding.
Consider that there is a large corpus of military and civilian accounts of truly unexplained phenomena.
You have pilots reports, supposedly the best trained observers, that:
- saw some tech they've never seen before that impressed beyond belief;
- or after all the best squadrons can be easily fooled/deceived/ by something, or even on their own with optical illusions and group pressure.
- or that are willing to lie about some event to have some fame and spotlight.
Then you have the best radar systems, jets, and overall military tech that:
- are properly tracking unidentified tech;
- have flaws and glitches, way more then we would have expected - even arrays of systems are failing/glitching all together;
- are not properly tested and fail to filter stuff that shouldn't appear;
- can be manipulated by foreign entities;
- are operated by individuals who are not properly trained to operate and interpret the information output.
What ever the scenario is, it's not good.
As somebody in the UK, that kinda seems messed up.
Yet the entire point of Star Wars was to end MAD. They used fear of an attack to justify spending money to try and end our best defensive tool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...
Why would any military allow something as top secret as such evidence and then confirm its veracity to the point of allowing pilots to go on 60 mins to talk about it? This reeks of fabrication. To what end? Who knows but I’m sure there will be money flowing to address this new “threat”.
All well and good, but where are the artifacts? Objects or material of unexplainable origin.
The evidence being reported is easy to fake. The military has lied to the public for many years when it suits their interests. The default position should be that the sightings are either:
1. part of a disinformation campaign for an as-yet unknown operation
2. a weapon system developed by one of the world's many militaries
The bar for extraterrestrial classification is high because the claim is so extraordinary. Not one iota of physical evidence explainable only by extraterrestrial visitation has ever been publicly presented.
Since 2010 or so, almost every human has carried a device capable of taking photos and yet even the photographic evidence for extraterrestrial craft is still underwhelming.
A foreign military doing recon?
A DARPA project being tested on our own military?
The people raving about the UFOs being aliens don't want to miss out on the clicks though! As well as them trying to push the narrative that the government is hiding things (like aliens!) from you, and you can't trust it. "Next up, after these ads about gold and these diet supplements, the truth about the so called Coronavirus 'pandemic'!"
Edit: DARPA tesed HGV in 2010 with the Falcon HTV-2 [2], so 11 years ago, imagine what they are up to now. If you look to this launching footage [3] in infrared, when the gliding vehicle is released, it looks like a ball. The UFO video may have inverted infrared. Also, the fact that those gliding vehicles don't need propulsion and are highly maneuverable (compared to conventional aircraft) and that it ends with a crash in the water make it very likely that this is a HGV.
Edit 2: The DARPA hypersonic program is still in progress in 2021, they even double the spending [4]. And there is some info for 2020 with a program called "HSW-ab" which is highly classified [5].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_veh...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Technology_Vehicle_...
[3]: https://youtu.be/BMnMaS2t57Y?t=40
[4]: https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/exclusive-dod-asks-2-9b-...
[5]: https://breakingdefense.com/2020/02/lockheed-martin-air-forc...
The US state is not a single person, so maybe there's some part of the state that is removed enough from everything else that they can't/won't stop the Navy here. But that hasn't been how things have operated with previous advanced projects, so I'm skeptical of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sq658Okvao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAU9ofjcx-Y&list=PLsPUh22kYm...
Hint: it's a psyop.