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Comment by pierrebai | Hacker News Reader

100g is an acceleration of 1000m/s/s, so after 1s the thing would be 1km away. Yet this was infer by eye. These fantastic values are made up on the spot and not instrument-based measurements.

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.

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Along these lines, I wish people would be extremely specific about what their eyes actually saw versus what they inferred. As you say, what Fraver saw seems to have been a reflective object that seemed to be close to the water’s surface, which vanished, and then later possibly another reflective object some distance away. If I wanted to do a magic trick along these lines, I would have two silver balloons a distance apart, pop one and then draw attention to the other. This would make it seem like the first had flown impossibly fast. I’m not saying this is what happened, but this sort of thing has to be considered when the only other explanation being offered is completely outlandish.

> 100g is an acceleration of 1000m/s/s, so after 1s the thing would be 1km away. Yet this was infer by eye. These fantastic values are made up on the spot and not instrument-based measurements.

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.

At 1km/s^2 after one second you would be 0.5 km away. (Average speed over that second is half the final speed, or just memorize s = 0.5at^2, whichever is preferred.)

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