Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena | Hacker News Reader

Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

dni.gov

200 pointstailspin2019236 comments

Direct link to the PDF report: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelima...

> "Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation."

> "Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings."

They didn’t release any details on specific incidents, right? This pdf is all there is?

Yep, it doesn't look like there's anything else that has been published.

80 encounters with multiple sensors. 143 reliable encounters with one sensor (144 minus 1 balloon). RF emission in a few encounters.

They could conceive of no explanation for any of them..

They have a lot of data and cannot explain much.

No, they said that in most cases crucial data was lacking.

Yes, they probably have a lot more data, but they won't release it to the general public for "security reasons".

> they won't release it to the general public for "security reasons"

This is pretty clearly non-scare quotey security reasons territory. We are unsure if what’s on the scope is an adversary’s. Publishing a detailed quantification of how little we know and in what form would be a self goal.

Yep. And other countries may very well be having the same issues trying to indentify US-originated UFOs.

This is the reminder after they explained millions of identified objects or sensor artifacts. In theory a non trivial fraction of these may be sensor errors for example, but so far they haven’t been identified as such. Ditto for clouds, balloons, drones, aircraft, missiles, falling space debris, etc etc.

Only 18 exhibited unusual behavior that exceeded the capabilities of known technology.

For the rest, I imagine they can conceive of explanations, but they lack sufficient data to explain with certainty.

The "multiple sensors" part is important. Anything that has video or radar returns from multiple points is much more interesting than a single-point view. Most illusions break down when observed from multiple widely separated points, like several warships operating together.

So little hard data is being released.

Does multiple sensors mean multiple sensors on a single plane/ship or sensors on multiple planes/ships?

After looking at the document, I took this to mean the former (multiple on same plane/ship)

> reliable encounters with one sensor

There's no such thing. An anomaly that doesn't appear on multiple sensors is a defect with your sensor.

That doesn't make sense. If I can see something that I can't smell, that doesn't imply that my eyes are defective.

Of course. But if you see something that none of the people around you see, then you might want to question your own sensor or signal processor.

but then you look at one of the examples like the pyramid one and YT analysis that took couple of days to pinpoint the direct cause https://olhardigital.com.br/en/2021/04/27/colunistas/suposto... NVD with 3 blade iris

Wtf is NVD? An acronym database lists many explanations like Natural Vaginal Delivery.

IIRC its Night Vision Device. Essentially night vision cameras have triangle shaped iris which causes triangle shaped lens flare - hence the triangles in the footage.

Yeah, this "RF energy" statement is too vague.

Ok, you detected what exactly? At which frequencies? Power? BW? Does it look like something (unmodulated signal? Modulated? How?)? Do you have a recording of it?

Considering that they were not directly in contact with the object, it is 100% necessarily true, so the statement is entirely meaningless without specifics like the ones you request.

The RF emissions acknowledged here are something I'd never heard of before. Stating the obvious; even though this report is completely vague on that front (and all others), the fact that this was mentioned means that there was likely an RF abnormality in a few event reports. It's not really logical to assume they are talking about something trivial that a plastic bag would 'produce'. But yea - agreed, this is missing so much info.

Think SIGINT, MASINT, and EW platforms. That's what RF means to me.

This seems awfully brief and doesn't have much detail. The tittle says it's a "preliminary" report. Is this the expected UAP report or just a preliminary document about it?

I would want to see summary statistics for each reported incident and descriptions of the most compelling phenomenon. This document raises a lot of questions and answers few.

The document says they have 21 reports of UAP that "appear to demonstrate advanced technology" including moving at "considerable speed" "without discernable means of propulsion." I need more detail! Are these reports among those confirmed by multiple trustworthy sensors and observers? What do we know about these UAP? What speed? Do we have video?

I'm also not really impressed by their idea to use "advanced algorithms" and "machine learning". Are UFO encounters so frequent we need to resort to big data? I do think it's an excellent idea to process recorded radar data looking for UAP signs though.

> I'm also not really impressed by their idea to use "advanced algorithms" and "machine learning". Are UFO encounters so frequent we need to resort to big data?

I had that same thought - on first read this report seems to contain summary analysis of 144 UAP incidents. Not the sort of numbers that immediately make me think "I need ML to process those!"

ML/AI/"algorithms" are the buzzwords of the day in the public and private sectors right now.

Agreed; ML doesn't make sense to me in the context in which they present it. Seems like they just crammed in a buzzword there.

Later in the report, it says this:

    One proposal is to use advanced algorithms to 
    search historical data captured and stored by radars

They do not mention ML in that context, but it seems like a more promising way in which they might usefully employ it.

144 _reported_ incidents. They also talk about how some of the cases going unreported. It would make sense to sieve through the radar data (I'd guess all the ATC radars are being recorded, because why not?) to look for those.

Yep that's fair enough. And satellite imagery too I guess.

Most ATC now uses secondary radars. Those generally only pick up aircraft carrying transponders.

Good point. What about the radars used by Air Force to guard the airspace? Do they cover the interior, or only the borders?

Secondary radar == just an RX only antenna?

Transmitter also, but not powerful enough to get a useful return from an aircraft without a transponder at any significant range.

I think one proposal is to have advanced wide-field cameras placed in "locations of interest". This would be much like an optical observatory and would generate petabytes of data.

Do you have more details on this or a source? I’m curious!

This program (FRIPON) https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2020/12/aa38649-... was cited here https://www.3af.fr/global/gene/link.php?doc_id=3695&fg=1 as a candidate for repurposing for UAP detection. I'm not familiar with the legitimacy of the 3af french org, so perhaps should be taken w/ a grain of salt?

Interesting!

If you're curious, this previously released footage is quite detailed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/pentagon-relea...

You might have misunderstood the point of the ML strategy. The idea is to train a model on explainable event data such as weather balloons or wildlife as collected via various existing sensors. Then take this model and use it on historical sensor data to identify events that do not match the traits of the known events. I feel like this is a pretty reasonable use for ML.

Nine pages? All this hoopla for the month leading up to the release and we get NINE measly pages with no supporting documentation? am I missing something? I expected to see something similar in quality/detail to an FAA accident investigation, this is a worthless executive summary.

I would not call it a report either, this is a request for more funding, the last sentence is:

> The UAPTF has indicated that additional funding for research and development could further the future study of the topics laid out in this report.

I would be more interested in a BEA style analysis of each incident. But at least it lays down some possible causes:

  - Airborne Clutter
  - Natural Atmospheric Phenomena
  - USG or Industry Developmental Programs
  - Foreign Adversary Systems
  - Other

And I would say the the order reflect the decreasing probability of each cause.

The fact they don't include "just other normal planes" in that list calls into question the quality of this whole document. It really seems like this document was just thrown together with no real intent to get into the weeds on the reports. It does also seem like they are trying so hard to be vague to avoid running afoul of information classification rules. The White House needs to tell them to stop going so overboard with classification. Overclassification is a real problem in government.

If they knew it was just another normal plane then it would not be unidentified. They actually identify countless objects every day. This report was not about them.

All the things in that list are like that though, "Airborne Clutter", "Natural Atmospheric Phenomena", etc. If they knew it was one of those it wouldn't be unidentified. It is entirely possible for a plane to be detected but not identified as such, so planes should be possible causes too.

I honestly don't know what you mean. If it's a plane, but not detected as such, then by definition they don't know it's a plane to put it into a "normal plane" category.

We know ever recorded flight path of every aircraft. If it is plane-like and isn't one if those planes and we don't know precisely what or whose plane it is, there are two categories in the list that are the most likely explanations.

  -USG or Industry Developmental Programs

  - Foreign Adversary Systems

That list is a list of possible causes of UAP. UAPs are things that have not been categorised. None of those listed categories are categories UAPs have been put into. Instead, they are categories that UAPs could be put into in the process of becoming identified aerial phenomena.

We know every recorded flight path, sure, but it would hardly be surprising for some ordinary plane flights not to be recorded (e.g. of small planes with a malfunctioning transponder).

If a small plane without a functioning transponder was detected on radar, without visual or flight path information, it would be a UAP, since it would be unidentified. If someone then sees the plane, or the pilot later says "that was me", it would cease to be a UAP and be put in the "normal plane" category. I.e. "normal plane" should be one of the possible causes of UAP.

Small planes:

1) Still often file a flight path in advance, and must do so if they are using instruments to fly, which is anytime they are flying at night, reduced vision, or even mildly poor weather. Even those who choose not to file will still have their takeoff/landing activity recording in flight logs.

2) If the transponder fails they will still be in radio contact. They are required to radio control, and will be proactively contacted by control as well, and then be tagged on radar.

3) If both radio & transponder are not functioning, it is a serious enough incident to require an incident report afterward as it will require an emergency landing performed with significant risk & without coordination of control.

In all of the above circumstances there will be easy data available to identify the aircraft.

At best, your argument says there are circumstances where a normal plane will-- very briefly during flight-- be a UAP as control attempts to regain coms or land the plane safely. They will never make it to the point of needing to be accounted for in a National Intelligence report on UFO's and their possible causes.

UFO reports have turned out to be planes multiple times in the past. One of the problems that often arises is that humans are not very good at judging how far away things are when that thing is quite a ways away from them. Which leads to them looking at registered flights in the area they think the object is in, and not finding a registered flight, because they're looking at the wrong spot.

Frequently these take place around military test/training sites though, which may quite likely have things in flight which are not on pre-registered paths or transmitting location data while in flight, because it's classified even above the need-to-know of just your standard radar technicians or fighter pilots. On top of that, human error is a possibility and things can be lost track of or end up in places not originally intended.

The report released today leaves the door open to all of this, so people asserting that the DoD has conclusively said that the objects reported to the UAP task force exhibit movements impossible to explain by known human technology are simply mistaken.

You seem to be talking about civilian reports of UFOs. Those are irrelevant in this report. Sure, those happen and turn out to be planes, but civilian mistakes are not the scope of this report. It is a report about incidents logged by military and intelligence agencies. There is no need for a "normal plane" category" because they already know if something is a normal civilian or commercial plane based on easily obtainable data from flight plans airport logs etc, along with their own much better tracking capabilities and sensors. Those resources will be able to identify if something is a normal plane long before the incident needs to be analyzed by an intelligence task force.

They're listing possibilities. Planes are one possibility, just as balloons, birds, and everything else they listed. Planes have been with high confidence attributed to multiple civilian recorded videos posted online (not in this dataset). Planes are a legitimate, high likelihood possibility for some of the reports. It has to be included on any list of possibilities used in investigating them.

I misunderstand what you mean by Planes have been with high confidence attributed to multiple civilian recorded videos posted online

It sounds like you're saying that civilians have videos of planes but the people taking the video don't know what they are. Is that what you mean? If so, the people taking the video may not know what it is, but that doesn't mean US Military & Intelligence agencies don't know.

In general though, you seem to be faulting a report whose explicit scope was an assessment only of UAP reports originating from Military or intelligence community sources. It was not an examination of every civilian report & video of something they can't identify.

Balloons, birds etc fall into various categories, yes. Planes on the other hand will be identifiable by by military & intelligence agencies. They don't need a special category because we have the data necessary to identify them. Meaning if we can't identify them, they aren't a normal plane, so we don't need to include that in a list of possibilities.

The Air Force knows how to identify other planes. It's not hard (for them). Radar and flight plans give little margin of doubt.

Problem is that pretty much everyone here can lay those causes easily...

The "other" bin sounds oddly suspicious. Why would the report creators step out of their way not to clearly define a bin for intelligent (and far more advanced) extraterrestrial activity?

Because that is so unlikely that, had they listed it, they should have also listed things like Angels or Ra's chariot.

Note: there are more people in the US who believe in the literal existence of Angels and Ghosts than UFOs.

They referenced 18 cases in which "observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics". Of course this does not mean the object/phenomenon actually exhibited unusual movement or flight characteristics, rather that the person who observed it thought it might have been.

They need to list each of those 18 key cases they referenced, as well as what their current state of knowledge about each is. One incident they say they already know for certain was just a balloon, but they don't say which incident it was. Maybe this is just a preliminary document, but if so, or if they think this is sufficient, it's not sufficient and we do need a deeper report. The longer this drags on the more wild stories some people in the public and press will spin to justify their belief that a lot, or even most, of the UFO sightings are really aliens visiting Earth.

Worth noting that those 18 key cases came from a pool of 144 cases meeting the criteria "witnessed firsthand by military aviators and that were collected from systems we considered to be reliable", which came from a larger (size unspecified) pool of less reliable reports. They also point out that the reports disproportionately come from the area immediately surrounding US military testing/training facilities.

> They also point out that the reports disproportionately come from the area immediately surrounding US military testing/training facilities.

Is that because the observers are disproportionately likely to be near US military testing/training facilities?

I don't think entirely so. Perhaps to some extent there is a sampling bias, since members of the military spend a lot fo time around military facilities. But much of the reports are from aircraft carrier strike groups that tend to meander around and take trips between US bases and also patrol strategically important water areas.

A significant number of the reports come from the immediate visible vicinity of San Clemente Island off the coast kind of in between San Diego and Los Angeles. San Clemente Island and San Nicolas Island next to it is the site of a US Navy base with multiple runways used to test drones and other aircraft and run training exercises from companies on the mainland. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman all have extensive engineering facilities both in Los Angeles and San Diego. In fact in the 2004 "Nimitz incident" the carrier was undertaking a training exercise next to San Clemente when the objects were reported to have appeared on the radar display and when they sent out the fighter planes which reportedly saw an object and got it on infrared camera.

The report points that out as a likely reason.

I didn't expect to see anything like that, but I wanted to.

Some poor staffer pulled an all-nighter to write this 5 months and 29 days ago, and the rest of the time has been spent wordsmithing and going through clearances.

Most likely the original report was like 20 pages long, and after those 5 months, the "publishable" parts is what we are seeing here.

Not from this report, but these quotes are crazy:

> "In this country we've had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities" [1]

> "We also have data suggesting that in other countries these things have interfered with their nuclear technology and actually turned them on, put them online." [1]

How is stuff like this possible or is it just hyperbole?

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/25/ufos-us-gove...

Some weapons systems may be configured to automatically power on to a more ready (as opposed sitting in low power sleep mode) mode (not launch) when unknown objects appear on a sensor system. Whether this is a wise way to do things stands to be seen.

Nuclear weapons do not have situational awareness. They’re intended to be used as part of a larger deployment system with a human in the loop. There’s no threat model for them that includes self-arming when mysterious aircraft approach their storage location.

It's not hyperbole. Computer systems have been used for decades to move weapons into a more ready state. Fortunately they have required a human to confirm before launch (as far as we know).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Just a reminder that Fermi's paradox is no longer a paradox if "they" are already here. ;-)

I'm not saying there are little green men in these unidentified aircraft, but if you were part of an interstellar civilization in this galaxy, and you identified there was a life-supporting planet a few light years away, you'd send probes there for sure... wouldn't you? We certainly would, if we had the means.

I don't think anthropomorphizing aliens is a good way to speculate on how they possibly would behave. I really don't have a better system, but I see this tendency in alot of discussions about 'them'. (Disclaimer: I usually play as isolationist in Stellaris)

I don't think it's anthropomorphism so much as logical deduction. Our planet's chemical makeup has been advertising its life-supporting properties for millions of years. Lately we've been (perhaps foolishly) advertising ourselves to the galaxy via radio, etc. Surely it would be interesting to other observers in the galaxy.

Perhaps by setting off nuclear weapons, we advertised ourselves as a potential threat, inviting more scrutiny.

Here's an article that discusses this concept in more detail, if you're interested:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lets-search-for-a...

Also, Stellaris is a great game for these thought experiments. =)

In my view, reasoning "this is what we would've done" or placing logical deduction based on -our- understanding of a fantasized encounter is exactly anthropomorphism.

While I'm not a stranger to the notion that eventual intelligent alien beings might in many regards have similar behaviors, wants and needs as humans, I'm personally inclined to think of aliens as much, much higher on the kardashev scale (c.f. ghosts and angels as discussed elsewhere in this thread) than something I personally imagine as a couple of hundred years into-human-future tech.

Autonomous / AI probes is a pretty nice theory and I somewhat adher to it myself as a techie, but it does reek of anthropomorphism IMO.

In either case, all our fantasies are colored by our experiences, I guess what I'm saying is that even though I think anthropomorphizing aliens is bad, I'm just explaining it from my frame of reference, too.

Such a defeatist view. You might as well say "it's pointless to try to understand anything not strictly human".

I think we are allowed to discuss things from an anthropomorphic lens because thats the only point of reference.

>You might as well say "it's pointless to try to understand anything not strictly human".

No that's the opposite of my point. I'm saying that I believe we should try to understand the possible 'them' from a less anthropomorphic perspective.

>I think we are allowed to discuss things from an anthropomorphic lens because thats the only point of reference.

That was pretty much my point in my last paragraph and why I in my original reply said I don't have a better system.

I think too often UFO debates become too "either or". People will say "it can't be aliens; it's advanced technology from Russia or China!"

In all cases... why not both? I think we should open our minds to all the possibilities.

I think it's unlikely that humans are "special". There are billions of possibilities regarding how life could have evolved elsewhere. (And that's not even considering panspermia theories; it could also look very much the same in certain pockets of our, or other, galaxies, due to effects like that.) I think there is likely to be a wide variety of life. I think there are probably other human-like life forms in the universe, just as there are probably life forms that are so different that they might resemble ghosts and angels to us.

One interesting thing about UFO reports is that there are a wide variety when it comes to descriptions of the craft. You have the "classic" saucer shape, cigar shape, "tic tacs", spheres... (etc, etc). I think a lot of the confusion on this topic is due to this inconsistency. What if we're being visited by multiple types of interstellar life?

Anyway, some life in the universe might be more easily anthropomorphized in this way. Some not at all. I certainly don't want to anthropomorphize this phenomenon fully; then I would have to assume that there is a colonization ship on its way and we're all doomed. I hope advanced life in the galaxy isn't the same as humanity, otherwise our planet probably has a very violent future.

>I think there is likely to be a wide variety of life. I think there are probably other human-like life forms in the universe, just as there are probably life forms that are so different that they might resemble ghosts and angels to us. >Anyway, some life in the universe might be more easily anthropomorphized in this way.

I completely agree.

>What if we're being visited by multiple types of interstellar life?

Sure, that's a possibility. This makes me think of that university (and more places certainly exist) that was simultaneously hacked by two different APTs (if memory serves me). Maybe humans/Earth is really that interesting that there are several different kinds of aliens, or alien ship designs from the same species, at the same time here. Intuitively that doesn't sit well with my gut instinct, on the other hand as it is an unknown, unexplained, speculative phenomenon, I guess all bets are off...

If you assume (without much evidence) that these are Von Neumann probes I think it's likely that there would be multiple types from different sources.

You can look to how other animals behave on the Earth if you want to step outside of the "anthropomorphic" lens. Perhaps it would still be a "terrestropmorphic" but I think it's well established on Earth that beings that need certain conditions to continue existing seem to be interested in signs that lead them to other areas that advertise those conditions. Species all across the phylogenetic tree exhibit this behavior regardless of intelligence, size, etc.

It’s not a good way, but most of the other ways are even worse.

There was a nice article in Ars Technica[0] about the number of civilizations on other planets that could have detected our human civilization, it was depressingly low.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/who-could-know-were-...

This part caught my eye.

    These objects include birds, balloons, recreational
    unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or airborne debris 
    like plastic bags

It never occurred to me how utterly "alien" a wind-borne plastic bag's behavior might seem on radar.

A constantly shifting radar cross section, sudden directional changes no "actual" flying craft could manage, etc. After all it's an object with significant surface area but nearly zero mass being buffeted around in a region of the atmosphere with swirling wind currents.

Depending on the angle, the radar cross-section of a modern stealthy aircraft is reportedly about the same as a small bird or even a bumblebee. So the radar cross section of an airborne plastic bag or balloon would be pretty similar.

That said, I think the visual reports and videos from military aviators are pretty clearly describing something else.

Visual experiences are often misleading especially at thousands of feet of altitude and in the ocean where reference objects for judging scale and distance are scarce. The military, and airlines and flight schools generally, explicitly train people about how visual perception can easily be flawed or mislead by normal/everyday things with non-interesting explanations.

Page 5 at least settles one debate. BIRDS AREN'T REAL, they're just "Airbone Clutter"

> Airborne Clutter: These objects include birds, balloons, ..

From a first skim, it looks intentionally vague and noncommittal, and in classic form, released on a Friday afternoon to minimize coverage. Also of note: there was no input at all drawn from the CIA, which is the agency most frequently associated with the topic for a variety of reasons, aside from the Air Force. "The majority of UAP data is from U.S. Navy reporting [i.e. not in-the-know] , but efforts are underway to standardize incident reporting across U.S. military services..."

I'm also unconvinced they used serious statistical rigor in finding correlations around where sightings occur. For a better analysis of the UAP phenomenon in France, which concludes with a very low p value that there is a relationship between UAP's and nuclear facilities, see: [0].

Despite the baby steps being made in the process of disclosure, it seems more and more likely that deliberate disclosure has been and will continue to be a multi-decade, slow drip of information with no particularly historic address saying "There is nonhuman intelligence visiting and engaging with Earth. We could not tell you before for national security reasons, but now we can tell you." At least, not without many years of plausibly deniable hints before-hand.

[0] https://cnes-geipan.fr/sites/default/files/2015-09-01_Spatia...

Perhaps it is because there is no evidence of nonhuman intelligence visiting and engaging with Earth. I'm not sure who's surprised by this report.

That’s because you’ve only looked on the top side. If you peek over the edge at the bottom you will see.

> "There is nonhuman intelligence visiting and engaging with Earth. We could not tell you before for national security reasons, but now we can tell you." At least, not without many years of plausibly deniable hints before-hand.

Do you really think that'll be the outcome?

I'd be shocked.

If there is nonhuman intelligence in our solar system, it's orders of magnitude smarter than us, and I'd also wager it's probably by design impossible for us detect.

> I'd also wager it's probably by design impossible for us detect.

Humans are orders of magnitude smarter than dolphins, yet that doesn't prevent humans from experimenting on them.

An interstellar intelligence is probably post-biology.

Biological aliens are more than likely carbon and water based, and most likely use oxygen/oxidation for energy. The worlds that harbor these must be of a certain temperature and mass, which means the biological aliens evolved adapted to these conditions. Gravity, gravity wells, temperatures, metabolic and resource needs that are far from ideal for space.

Let's also assume post-biology intelligence has the extra benefit of duplicating, transmitting, and modifying memories, experience, etc. and optimizing it. Compute nodes probably have access to more than the sum total of human knowledge at an instant, and can probably run math, chemical, and physical simulations rapidly. These intelligences will be orders of magnitude smarter than us. Imagine a trillion of the smartest humans operating at peak performance, except even smarter.

These intelligences will also be concerned about other intelligences that have more resources and that may not take a friendly disposition. Unless there's an omnipotent intergalactic police force that prevents attack and extermination, intelligences will hide their presence by default.

Since other adversarial intelligences probably also have technologies beyond our own, the technological needs and techniques for advanced cloaking may be beyond our present understanding.

I didn't claim alien intelligence wouldn't study us. (They probably would.) I claimed they would remain very well hidden.

For observation, yes you're right. I'm not disagreeing there. We do that in nature all the time -- e.g. wildlife safaris with large telephoto lenses downwind lions/tigers/etc.

But when we experiment with dolphins, the beach ball has to be visible so we can see what the dolphin does with it (even if we're hidden behind two-way glass). If it is aliens (and I'm not suggesting it is) why can't it be that they're measuring our intelligence capacity? This is the proverbial, beach ball, as it were.

> If there is nonhuman intelligence in our solar system, it's orders of magnitude smarter than us, and I'd also wager it's probably by design impossible for us detect.

Likely in the galaxy, seems unlikely there is advanced nonhuman intelligence hiding in our solar system.

> seems unlikely there is advanced nonhuman intelligence hiding in our solar system

Maybe.

I did some Googling, and apparently the human race has produced between 1 and 2 billion cars in the last 100 years [1]. That's an incredible feat!

Assuming a post-biology intelligence has started space manufacturing, they probably have the capacity to produce an incredible volume of intelligent probes.

Wikipedia claims that the Milky Way galaxy is composed of 100 - 400 billion stars. [2] This figure isn't far out of the ballpark for the number of cars we've made in 100 years.

Creating a single space probe to reach a star is probably within their capability, and I'd wager they can match and exceed our industrial capacity for vehicle production. It's not hard to imagine they could send at least one probe to every star. They have a lot of time to do it, too.

Important factors I'm not accounting for are time of travel and interstellar expansion, but I don't think that changes the fact that an advanced race could manufacture and send a lot of probes in all directions.

Maybe they've already made it here. Maybe before we even arrived.

[1] https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-advice/how-many-cars-are-th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way

What are the time-scales involved in system formation, the evolution of a technologically sophisticated culture capable of doing what you say, sending probes out (at sub-luminal speeds) and reporting back? Isn't that reason enough to estimate that while there may be such advanced alien societies, we will never have the possibility of contact?

Or through a vanishingly small chance, happen to find ourselves in a system relatively near one of those 100-400 billion stars around which such an advance civilization had earlier arisen?

I can't help but wonder that if a non-human post-biology entity has had an extra billion years to develop, they may have solved the distance problem already in ways that we couldn't fathom yet.

> If there is nonhuman intelligence in our solar system, it's orders of magnitude smarter than us

Why would this nonhuman necessarily be smarter than us? Here on earth we are surrounded by animals with non-human intelligence. Do you really believe that they are more intelligent or do you believe that they are not intelligent at all?

it looks intentionally vague and noncommittal, and in classic form, released on a Friday afternoon to minimize coverage.

As a guess, they do that both because this is information gathered for security reasons and there are limits to what they can reasonably say without compromising security and because no matter how they write it it turns into wild speculation about aliens by the general public and conspiracy theories and the like. That stuff even creeps into HN discussion in a way and to a degree that is not the norm here.

Minimizing the public furor is probably the least worst thing they can do, all things considered.

"Security reasons" doesn't pass the smell test -- US adversaries are going to see the report regardless of what time it's released, whereas significantly fewer of its own citizens will.

> That stuff even creeps into HN discussion in a way and to a degree that is not the norm here.

HN discussion isn't some sacred thing, and probably never was. This is an interesting topic (and depending on the true nature of it, arguably the most interesting topic) and there's plenty of information to sift through. If HN discussions were meant to be stifled around official, manicured government and corporate press releases, that sounds more like naïveté than a free thinking scientifically-minded forum. Some of us are interested in other things besides the most elegant possible Haskell one-liner.

Let me try to say that a little more clearly:

A. Maybe they keep it vague for security reasons knowing that other countries will read it, not just the American public.

B. Maybe they publish it on a Friday in hopes of getting the least amount of nuttiness out of the American public.

When you publish something for all the world to see, you have to take into account both of those dynamics, not just one or the other. They will both occur. Addressing only one or the other will go bad places.

One simple reason to not go into depth on the evidence is it would reveal the capabilities of radars and similar sensors.

Likewise, if they know one of these was say a drone test by a contractor from a grey/black program they're obviously not going to disclose that.

So there's a bunch of banal reasons security could apply here.

That’s presuming they actually have more information. If these phenomena really are of a nature that we have no previous experience with then they may be as much in the dark as the rest of us. That situation could be entirely due to the stigma they mention that surrounds reporting such things or if these incidents represent some unknown technology far beyond what we are capable of then it may be next to impossible to gather more information beyond chance radar returns and images without some concentrated effort.

If you rule out aliens and sensor artifacts, then the only conclusion must be these UAP are most likely human made.

If that's the case, it would be embarrassing for the US and Pentagon. We (the US) should be the best in all defense technology given how much we spend on it.

> Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.

Seems like a convenient place to hide some cool planes.

It is seems unlikely that U.S. super secret military programs would test their super secret aircraft in spaces where non-secret military programs perform scheduled and easily avoidable training and drills.

A reminder that UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. This is just a report on what the military saw in the air and could not identify.

It neither confirms nor denies popular ideas about aliens visiting earth.

In most cases, you can guess these are probably aircraft from other countries. In some cases, they may be experimental aircraft being developed in secret by some organization or other.

I am someone who thinks there likely is alien activity on earth, but government reports about unidentified flying objects aren't about efforts to prove or disprove that aliens from elsewhere visit earth. They are data on sightings in US air space of things we could not identify. That's all they are.

If you want to extrapolate "It's aliens!" Coolios. If you want to insist "Aliens don't exist! This is nonsense!" Equally coolios.

"Aliens" isn't why the US government tracks this stuff. National security is the goal and nothing more than that should be inferred in terms of what the US government "believes" in.

> I am someone who thinks there likely is alien activity on earth

Can you elaborate on why you think this (or provide some additional detail)?

For example, do you mean "intelligent" life? Or is this more along the lines of panspermia?

Thank you.

No, I don't care to elaborate on my personal opinions about this topic. I only noted that because I habitually remind people on HN that UFO just stands for Unidentified Flying Object and the reason the US government is interested is for national security reasons.

I noted it just to suggest "If you are inferring that I am on your side in thinking only nutters believe in aliens you are wrong."

I have no desire to have that conversation here. Comments on this topic are consistently appallingly bad by HN standards and my only desire is to say "Keep it real people. This is not a government report on aliens. That's not what this is."

I think if you threw out why you feel there is alien activity with a "not looking to debate it" that would be more interesting than saying you think people are going to argue with you. If you've stated reasoning in the past maybe just link to that?

I, for one, 100% believe that at least some of this is advanced, non-human tech.

Trying to convince HN about the "why" is at best problematic. I could give evidence from my own observations and experiences, but they would be easily dismissed due to lack of evidence.

I'll just say that we, as humans, do not fully understand how consciousness works. I'm certain that there are others in this galaxy who do, and I have personal experience to back that up. What percentage of HN is going to believe that I, for whatever reason, have come into contact with an advanced, non-human intelligence?

Spoiler: near zero. That's why I post about this topic on a burner account.

I mean, I’ll believe that something happened to you that has completely convinced you, and it’s a nice piece of data that helps explain why some people believe differently than I do. The goal of every discussion doesn’t have to be to convince the other person, just acknowledging the existence of differences is enough sometimes.

Was this a conscious contact? Would be interesting to read about this experience.

Since this is the HN crowd, I'll explain it this way: if you assume your brain is a biological machine, what if you could decipher its firmware and hack into it? What if you could remotely exploit it and take over its sensory inputs? It's hard to say if a contact is "conscious" or not because "they" seem to have the power to exploit and control it, to communicate by sending symbolic language and imagery.

Contact is difficult to explain to this crowd; when I turn the tables and imagine someone explaining their experience to me, it would sound like something indistinguishable from magic. Something so unbelievable that you would immediately discount it and look for alternate explanations, or question the person's sanity.

Thank you! But how do you know that your brain did not just make it up? How to distinguish between real and imaginary?

That is exactly the difficulty. I have a picture of an object in the sky (which I reported to MUFON) that occurred before this happened. But I have no evidence, other than the fact that other humans also witnessed the object, that it was real.

Having some views that are out of the mainstream, I sympathize that trying to have a good faith argument can be frustrating, but remember it’s generally bad actors and trolls who are most likely to downvote and reply to a post they think they can easily shame. There’s plenty of people who would appreciate a different perspective even if it’s mostly downvotes.

I recommend the excellent documentary “Behind the Curve” for a good look at what happens to people when their views are marginalized. They dig in and develop tunnel vision. The way the lab leak theory for COVID subtly shifted from conspiracy theory to real theory illustrates how important it is not to be dismissive.

Seconded! I’m one of them too.

(Thanks for posting some encouragement.)

Wasn't trying to be confrontational. It just seemed like you might have a contrarian view that might be worth hearing.

I didn't think you were being confrontational. It's just not something I'm interested in discussing at this time.

I'm also not interested in a large number of people inferring I believe the opposite and then acting like I'm "lying" or "did an about face" on my opinion should I ever change my mind and decide I wish to discuss it.

People are really bad about making unfounded inferences no matter how carefully you talk about a thing and then hanging their baggage on you over what they imagined you believe when you never said anything about what you believe.

Government reports about unidentified aerial phenomena aren't motivated by a belief in aliens. Me reminding people of that fact is not motivated by a belief that "aliens don't exist."

Maybe "UFO" will stop getting used in titles and the new term UAP will get popular and these conversations will generally improve.

After I left my comment, the title was changed. That's a good thing and makes my reminder less pertinent. Maybe I will just stop leaving them entirely.

Do you really think there is a single human being that reads HN and thinks "UFO" means 100% aliens? I sorta doubt anyone here needs such a reminder.

Yes, I think the reminder is helpful. In fact I saw a fella on HN argue that because some rocks on Mars looked a bit like faces, we should consider the alien possibility. (This was many months or years ago; HN becomes an orange blur after awhile, but it was surprising enough to stick in my memory.)

Edited to tone down the intro sentence a bit.

Ctrl-F, "If UFOs are real", someone actually wrote that in this comments section. Yes, the concept of objects that are in the air/flying and you can't identify what they are, is real, and that commenter was using the incorrect definition of UFO=aliens...

> In most cases, you can guess these are probably aircraft from other countries.

From the report: "We currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary."

They also say: "We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated."

Basically, the summary of the report is that there are 10+ incidents that they cannot explain to what they believe is insufficient data, so please give them more money so they can collect and analyze more data to try and identify them.

Bill Nelson sorta said as much in this interview: https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/06/04/ufo-nasa-navy...

Actually, I really prefer the term UAP (Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon) over the term UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). Using the name object makes everybody assume that it is physical object, which may or may not be true.

Yeah, if we could just get a copy of that data real quick, that'd be greeeaat.

This. Even the ones which are already public, like the FLIR recordings, would be much more useful if they also released tapes from other MFDs ("screens" inside the cockpit) that were also recorded in that moment, eg the radar display.

Yes because projections have been developed to emit infrared and projections can also be detected on radar.

[1] https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~scidemos/LightOptics/InfraRed...

[2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Advances_in_Radar_Techn...

This. It's 2021. Release something or just shut up. A potato quality video from a fighter that clearly has way better video and capabilities is not gonna cut it for me, sorry.

rationally, that would fall under 'sources and methods' which the DOD/DNI/TLA are not going to release.

They care far less about the data than the system to get the data. Releasing it provides potential enemies information on systems capability.

I'm loving the conversation here. I cannot imagine how little the DNI cares about this.

> In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.

Does this mean the objects emit RF energy of some sort?

That's one possibility, but I think the phrasing in the report is intentionally chosen so as not to rule out RF emission passing through or past the object, or RF emission from another direction being reflected towards the observer by the object.

I'm guessing it's just their way of saying "we have RWR recordings of the radio waves, but since it's SIGINT we won't be giving you any details for another 40 years."

I’m surprised nobody has suggested that these phenomenon could be an advanced electronic interference platform and that they may be able to interfere with the computing systems of multiple remote sensing systems at once.

I think that is what was meant by "These observations could be the result of ... spoofing" in the document just released.

Didn’t catch that. I searched for interference. Good to hear this is on their minds.

Doesn't explain visual confirmation by pilots.

Easily explained by most people being unreliable witnesses, even professionals. Especially if all their instruments are telling them one thing.

Although possible, unless they have figured out how to hack your eye sight then it still leaves some seriously unanswered questions.

Are there any plausible theories why this stuff is getting released right now?

It looks like there is no immediate reason for action. And no real reason why they wouldn't have gone on for another decade denying it.

They had to release it.

>The report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was required by the Intelligence Authorization Act passed by Congress late last year. The U.S. intelligence community was given 180 days to prepare an unclassified and classified report on what the U.S. government knew about UAPs.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/highly-anticipated-ufo-repor...

The classified report probably has the good stuff. It doesn't surprise me that this is extremely watered down for the public: Far more plausible than "aliens" is "foreign government figured out they can do something cool"[0], and if it's the latter, the US is not going to want to make it clear how much they do and don't understand about it.

[0] Even this category can be divided out into plausible and implausible options. For instance, I'd likely believe another government figured out they could mess with our military sensors over having developed antigravity.

I can't get around thinking there are simply just a bunch of I-want-to-believers in government, some of whom started/supported AATIP and its successor. They need budget, so invoke National Security. I truly doubt there is any "good stuff".

Our government expects visitors soon and this was a step towards preparing the public to what is about to come? xD

Something like that sounds plausible. If they knew for sure, I doubt they would want to dump all evidence at once. Would be incredibly interesting to see how the world would change if that happened tho.

It sounds a little out there but I consider it even more likely than just some Senator casually sneaking it into a bill.

Would love to know the full story behind why they break now 50+ years of secrecy.

The Senate ordered DNI to write a public report last year.

There is a whitest kids you know sketch about this where the government was talking about the invasion by ak47 weilding bears.

The reporters asked: "wait a minute, are we invading Iran again?"

This always is on my mind when I see these reports.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvjgIxuVdo4

Senator Rubio added it into one of the COVID bills last year requesting disclosure of this information. It also funds the continued investigation of UAP sightings.

But the could have just made up some national security bs like they do whenever else they dont want to answer. What is different this time.

There is a 60 minutes piece about this a few weeks back which are interesting to watch. I think its mostly they want to figure out what we are up against since it seems to be happening on a regular basis.

I saw not too far back that the Pentagon/other places got absolutely fucking swamped by FOIA requests, to the point it was seriously bogging man-power down internally, when COVID lockdowns started because people had nothing better to do.

To make them all stop, they basically said "okay, we're going to release these reports in some determined length of time"

Sounds fairly reasonable.

The longest period of time that anything can legally be kept classified without exceedingly special circumstances is 75 years. Roswell was 74 years ago.

Wow that's quite a coincidence. Seems like they got a late start if that really what's about to go down... https://www.justice.gov/archives/open/declassification/decla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

"The datasetdescribed in this report is currently limited primarily to U.S. Government reporting of incidents occurring from November 2004 to March 2021."

So what happened to observations from before 2004?

Interestingly the Nimitz incident was 14 November 2004 (14 days into this stated time window of analysis).

If UFOs are real and their existence has so far been dismissible by benefit of the doubt (that the pictures and footage are fake), then the era of deniability may be ending. We’re surely not far from cryptographically verified social media content - companies like TruePic are already doing this, attempting to solve the problem of deepfakes. It makes sense to me that now would be the time for some honesty about this stuff. I wrote a piece to this effect a few weeks ago.

https://benlumen.substack.com/p/nothing-is-real-right-now-so...

Nothing too crazy here. Exactly as expected.

Except for the dozen or so incidents that had multiple sensor contacts from some of the most advanced technology we can produce while in close proximity to military training groups and no one knows what the F they were or how they were staying in the air. No big deal really. At least this report seems to open a path to normalizing basic reporting of such things so more information can be gathered. It’s worrying that they mention near mid air misses.

I found it quite curious how they defined UAP as “Airborne objects not immediately identifiable” in the last section of the report.

I guess the whole point of dropping the UFO acronym was to change the idea of “objects” for “phenomena”, which is much broader in scope. By keeping the word “objects” in the definition, they make the same mistake of defining upfront what is being reported.

It is an extremely dumb mistake. There are many optical illusions that make almost everyone observe things that are not true. Machines are susceptible to similar kinds of errors.

To name it an object (for most people this means a physical object) is creating a wrong frame of mind. The first focus should be on the observation and the way it was observed.

Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment.

And there you have it. The "money quote" in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Of course the Military / Espionage / Industrial Complex community is going to try to keep paranoia about "UAP's" and "UFO's" stoked... as long as they can use that to justify more $$$ flowing into their coffers.

They have to play a delicate balancing act though: stoke just enough fear to keep the money flowing, but not so much that anybody starts demanding they actually deliver anything measurable with that money.

Nice gig if you can get it.

The sensors mounted on U.S. military platforms are typically designed to fulfill specific missions. As a result, those sensors are not generally suited for identifying UAP.

Anybody want to team up on a new startup focused on "UAP sensors" and sell them to the government for $43,927.33 each?

While you are not wrong about organizations trying to obtain a larger budget, but it it a fallacy to assume a priori this is the case. Regardless, the budget required to research UAPs would be a drop in the bucket for what is spent on defence. There are much more efficient ways to attract tax payer money.

Contrarily if they truly are observing things they cannot explain should there not be money allocated towards researching this? If not only for air safety of the pilots and crew.

While I agree w/ you that the Military Industrial Complex as an entity will do almost anything to justify increasing funding, I think this is a cynical take on this particular issue and is attempting to explain something we don't fundamentally understand with something we do - military budget increases. Unless the DoD fabricated the videos, and duped radar operators and pilots, or faked the whole thing in some way, this is a seriously interesting phenomenon ...regardless of whether it aligns with the military's insatiable appetite for more funding. Remember, Luiz Elizondo resigned because the ATAP program had insufficient funding (22M) given what he thought he was uncovering.

I'm not (necessarily) accusing them of faking the observations. But I wouldn't put it past them to take something that has (mostly or totally) prosaic / boring explanations, and keep the "air of mystery" going just enough to where people never quite get the answers they are looking (hoping?) for, and are willing to keep funding their research as a side effect.

There are probably some officials with this outlook, but you have to admit it is very sudden change in strategy after years of vehemently denying everything, and it in no way explains the footage or accounts which are the actual topics of interest here.

It's also wrong to characterize is as fear mongering, since most people who are seriously pushing disclosure for this stuff are more likely driven by curiosity and accountability than fear. Ironically, Mick West, one of the most well known skeptics on this topic, had a paralyzing fear of aliens as a child...

You are accusing the government of intentionally "stoking" paranoia for publishing their data. Elsewhere in this same discussion, someone is promoting their theory that publishing it on a Friday is designed to intentionally get as little press coverage as possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27636564

Maybe it's just data gathered for security reasons and published in a somewhat sanitized format to satisfy public interest in the data while protecting national security.

The government publishes a lot of data. It's the public that makes the few anomalies in this particular data set into some kind of weird thing for reasons the government cannot control no matter how carefully they frame the whole thing.

You are accusing the government of intentionally "stoking" paranoia for publishing their data.

No I'm not. I'm accusing the Military / Espionage / Industrial complex of stoking paranoia in order to get other parts of the government to give them more money.

Elsewhere in this same discussion, someone is promoting their theory that publishing it on a Friday is designed to intentionally get as little press coverage as possible.

There's absolutely no reason that both of those things can't be true simultaneously. See above about the "delicate balancing act" that the gomers have to carry out to keep getting more money, without actually providing anything of value.

Maybe it's just data gathered for security reasons and published in a somewhat sanitized format to satisfy public interest in the data while protecting national security.

Sure, and maybe there is a tiny teapot in orbit between Earth and Mars. *shrug*

The best quote I've got on UFOs is from Leroy Chiao, a former ISS commander.

"Probably some sort of secret military program" [0]. Cannot find original on youtube any longer.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1eWnHHMrck&t=30s

I don't really like that explanation either because, as they state in this OP document, each report has to be looked at individually because they are all actually different. He says "these objects" as if the reports are all the same and explainable by the same thing. It is possible a handful of them are actually experimental aircraft (judging by their inclusion of that as one possible explanation for some incidents in the report and their statement that the reports disproportionately come from the area around DoD testing facilities, it's plausible), but that doesn't mean all the reports are examples of that, or even that a significant number of them are.

Oh yeah I watched that live on the news and I was kind of startled that he just said “well looks like the trend lines are moving and the cats out out of the bag I guess I’ll just come out and say…” I really remember this interview because I’ve always suspected this was a very advanced craft. I had an encounter in the mid 90’s and what impressed on me by looking at it was that this was something that moved, not in a natural way like a bird or a plane (or drone) but more like you were peering into a video game world like TRON. I cannot shake that feeling and it’s obvious if you’ve ever witnessed this craft. So that’s interesting right there.

Well that is one of the categories and is probably what the classified briefing was about but it doesn’t apply to the incidents they weren’t able to explain.

Seems curious that a secret military program would choose to fly their super secret aircraft in airspace where the usual, non-secret military was known to be performing scheduled and easily avoidable training exercises.

Hosting page: https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-...

Note that the first thing this report does is throw away 20 years of data, it summarizes only data from the last two years because only that data was standardized. It also ignores data from some types of observers they consider less reliable including FAA data. So as a summary of all that is known about UAP observations this report is severely lacking. The complete lack of data to accompany the report also severely compromises the report. It reads like an exercise in data exclusion to make writing the report trivial. If I was a senator who asked for this report I'd be really upset with the quality of it.

> The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management.

What exactly does "signature management" mean in this context? Cloaking?

Yeah, they respond somehow to being detected

No input by the CIA but did you catch the note about some data gathered from the FBI?

"I WANT TO BELIEVE" (in the Cigarette Man, Moulder and maybe especially Scully)

Lol, looks like DNI.gov wasn't ready for the traffic. I'd have thought that all the .gov sites were pretty robust, just as a matter of principle.

Nope they are very far behind typically and that’s the assumption I start with

You should look at a few technology related executive orders to show how difficult coordination of this is and how behind they are

Or atleast as a security measure. Denial of service is a security concern... embarrassing.

The only thing they left out was swamp gas as a possible explanation (RIP Hynek).

Seems like another whitewash, "it can't possibly be happening" report.

If you spend some serious effort on this and stay away from the crazies you'll come to the opposite conclusion of this report. A good starting point is Vallee's books.

I don't know about Vallee, but after being briefly in the defense industry, reading much, and having some experience with aerospace everything seems to fit very well into one of three categories

1) known US aircraft activity either simply misinterpreted or kept secret from the public or even most of the military apparatus, sometimes strongly denied either as a way to disseminate vague information to adversaries or misinformation

2) foreign or personal aircraft either known or unknown to the US.

3) rare weather phenomena, hallucinations, optical phenomena, or other miscellaneous things which might be rare but with mundane explanations

The thing to notice is cameras have become much more prevalent and much higher resolution, but "UFOs" in pictures haven't. The only things that aren't obviously something understandable are still fuzzy dots on screens despite screens and cameras getting enormously better.

Just look at this https://media.gvwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/28154540... and tell me that if you saw that you wouldn't think it was a spaceship. It was kept super secret for a quite a long time and surely was the source of plenty of UFO reports.

I'm not convinced or even particularly suspicious that anything that "isn't what it seems" is anything more than mundane.

Where to begin?

1) This isn't a recent phenomena. People have been seeing discs in the sky for literally thousands of years.

2) Aircraft can't make 90 degree turns or descend from 80,000 feet to the deck approximately instantly.

3) Groups of extremely highly trained military pilots have seen them, and the video and IR data has been released from these encounters. You can't make 4 people in 2 aircraft hallucinate at the same time, and fool all the instrumentation on them (radar, IR...) and also fool the battlespace radars on the cruisers directing them. And if you could, that too would be kind of interesting to look at whatever that is.

You're repeating old points you don't understand because as you acknowledge, you don't know the subject. Please start with Vallee.

> 1) This isn't a recent phenomena. People have been seeing discs in the sky for literally thousands of years.

People have reported talking to ghosts and angels for thousands of years too. People's senses and memory is fallible and can lead to misinterpretations and misunderstanding.

> 2) Aircraft can't make 90 degree turns or descend from 80,000 feet to the deck approximately instantly.

You are assuming that their reports that the objects actually made these movements are indeed correct perceptions of the movements seen.

> 3) Groups of extremely highly trained military pilots have seen them, and the video and IR data has been released from these encounters. You can't make 4 people in 2 aircraft hallucinate at the same time, and fool all the instrumentation on them (radar, IR...) and also fool the battlespace radars on the cruisers directing them. And if you could, that too would be kind of interesting to look at whatever that is.

A lot of conflation going on here. The Nimitz incident did involve 4(?) people, but not at the same time. The radar technician (radar data has not been released) did report seeing multiple objects on the radar, but not much else about them such as the rapid, physics-defying movements reported by the Fravor the pilot who reportedly saw an object with his own eyes. The IR video captured by another pilot also does have reasonable explanations (even including the on-screen display sensor readings) that counteract the claims that the object was moving as fast as they thought it was at the time, or as the video might make it seem.

> but not at the same time.

The initial two F-18's had two people each.

And they all saw the same object from the same perspective which could have resulted in similar visual effects leading them to misjudge how far away the object was. They reported that it was very far away but the sensor readings in the thermal video and other alternate theories about what the object was suggest that it wasn't as far away as they thought. Which if true would explain why they thought it was moving faster than they thought.

I was referring to the disjoin between the radar technician, the fighter team with Fravor, and the later fighter plane that actually captured the infrared video.

> And they all saw the same object from the same perspective

This just isn't true if you listen to their interviews. I'm going to assume you're just the disinformation guy now.

I mean that they saw it from in the air at the same distance, and all most likely mistakenly thought the object was farther away from them than it actually was. Especially since they have all been in communication and crosstalk plants seeds in other people's heads. If one pilot says "hey that object looks like it's 10 miles away" then all the other people will by default have that thought, even if it is actually only 5 miles away. This is true especially when in the air because it is extremely difficult to judge distances and sizes.

FAA doc on visual perception in the air:

https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media...

Failures in visual perception for pilots and people in boats are widely known shortcomings of human eyes. We just aren't evolved to see things at that scale accurately.

For those that can't be bothered, the photo linked above is a Lockheed Martin F-117, an early-era stealth fighter jet.

“The thing to notice is cameras have become much more prevalent and much higher resolution, but "UFOs" in pictures haven't.”

Just two examples of high resolution UAP videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBQ1Ftj4hPE&ab_channel=OrdoN...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVmGhxYrkug&t=0s&ab_channel=...

The problem is not resolution per se, but the fact that is quite easy nowadays to manipulate images and videos (I'm not saying these videos are fake, BTW).

They're not fake, they're just two videos of an insect flying past a drone.

The second, not unlikely at all.

The first doesn't look like an insect to me even after being primed by your comment prior to watching it.

There's a pretty meticulous review of the second video out there — the raw vídeo was available online for some time — that proves it's neither bug nor CGI.

I haven't found any analysis of the first one though, it could be CGI but it doesn't seem to be an actual bug.

It's a bug, dude, come on. It's pretty obvious.

It could be CGI, but an actual bug? Not at all if you analyse the vídeo closely.

The “bug” appears several miles away, following the mountains, and crosses the camera in just a second. That's not a real real bug.

But lets try again: watch all of the following:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4tDSbqa8tyOLSOhF82YkiP7u...

You do most definitely not have a single piece of data that tells you that it appears "several miles away". It does not. It appears a few tens of meters away, at the very most.

It does. This data is in the video itself. Just look into the trajectory of the “object” in the video, or watch some of the analysis that were done about it.

Meeting an insect while flying at speed and altitude isn't going to look like an insect, it's just going to look like a blur zooming past suddenly.

Doesn't seem like the first camera is moving much, or does it and I don't notice?

Look at 0:21. If you pick a point at the bottom of the screen, you can see how fast the drone is moving relative to the buildings. It's going quite fast.

I looked at that and then continued watching:

At the point where the object passes the camera platform is moving right to left while the approaching object is moving far to near and right-to-left.

Note: I'm not saying it is or isn't a natural phenomena or is or isn't a hoax, only that I think the first one probably isn't an insect.

The bug is flying in one direction, the drone in another.

> The thing to notice is cameras have become much more prevalent and much higher resolution, but "UFOs" in pictures haven't.

Get out your phone, and take a picture of your hand. Its very close, and you'll get a great photo.

Now, go outside at night, look at the beacon on top of a crane in the distance, or a plane landing a few kilometres away. Try to take a photo of it with your phone camera.

We have great cameras, sure, but not everyone is carrying a 300mm lens in their pocket

Not a person who has looked much into this stuff, but the videos you see online lately sure seemed impressive. FWIW, I felt educated by videos by Mick West, who is a debunker. Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwa-yYCEGEc&t=1316s is one that a technical person such as an HN reader might like.

I find it hard to listen to Mick West, because he's built a brand around debunking things - I like to remain sceptical around most things however when you have a vested interest in being 'anti' towards a topic it's as biased as being a 'believer' in something.

So nobody wants to consider the possibility that these may be time-travelling humans visiting us from the future?

Why only from the future? Hehe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(2002_film)

Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment.

Nice gig if you can get it.

The sensors mounted on U.S. military platforms are typically designed to fulfill specific missions. As a result, those sensors are not generally suited for identifying UAP.

Anybody want to team up on a new startup focused on "UAP sensors" and sell them to the government for $43,927.33 each?

What can you really trust in this report? If you take it gave value it's pretty interesting. Given funding we should learn more over the next decade or two.

It's a cookbook!

I can't believe this is it. What a bunch of garbage.

Obviously this isn't birds or balloons

This neither confirms nor denies that Satoshi was an alien intelligence

There are some smug looking dudes at Lockheed right now

Next: A conspiracy theory that the government is covering up the fact that UFOs don't exist.

If UFOs don't exist why would we need to give money to the military industrial complex to track UFOs and Chinese air traffic?

https://fas.org/irp/nro/fy08/cbjb.pdf

That's a question for the National Reconnaissance Organisation.

That's what they want you to not believe!

Contrary to popular opinion, UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, not Aliens From Another Galaxy Visiting Us For Some Damn Reason.

Objects that fly and are not readily identifiable totally exist and are a concern for the military as they may be aircraft from another country violating our air space on a spy mission or some such.

That's what the government wants you to believe.

Shhhh.

I see no reason we couldn’t have multiple conflicting conspiracies, it would not be the first time.

Not a theory, the intelligence community has been covering up the fact that UFOs don't exist since 1947, e.g. http://oregonmufon.com/PDFs/UFODisinformation.pdf

The government doesn't want us to know that everyone, everywhere is able to identify, with 100% certainty, all flying object ever encountered. If we knew how powerful we actually are, Big Brother would never be able to control us!

Am I the only one who’ve been noticing a shift of narrative regarding UFOs in the past few years? I wonder what the endgame is…

An eccentric billionaire constituent of Harry Reid that was obsessed with UFOs forced the armed services to go on a wild goose chase a few years back. This is the result.

Who was that constituent?

What evidence do you have that he had any influence on Harry Reid?

Robert Bigelow. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/28/ufos-secre...

Its part of some deliberate disinformation campaign. All the videos released thus far have been thoroughly debunked by the likes of thunderf00t. If there are non-debunked videos, I am not aware of them.

Most of the news coverage involves Lt. David Fravor, Bob Lazar or Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell.

Why this stuff is being leaked? I cannot fathom. I assume we are signaling to some foreign entity our ability to track items as small as birds, or angling for more funding.

> I assume we are signaling to some foreign entity our ability to track items as small as birds

This strikes me as the most likely scenario. While large (small plane size) military drones have been around for decades much smaller (bird size) ones have begun to proliferate. These small drones don't have the duration or capabilities of larger ones but they're good enough for a lot of tasks.

They're made of composites and small enough they're not going to show up well on civilian primary radar. Even some military primary radars might miss them or at least have limited detection ranges.

Someone using such small drones might act a lot more provocatively towards the American military because they think they're not being seen. At least more provocatively than if they only had larger drones or manned aircraft.

So leaks showing those drones can be detected and tracked. It's a subtle "we can see you, you're not as clever as you think". The US doesn't want some overzealous PLAN (or whomever) drone pilot doing something stupid requiring a military response.

I think that's exactly it.

I'd also like to add that, of all the claims made about incredible flight characteristics of these UFOs-- none of the videos are of anything like that.

Can you link to the thorough debunkings you are talking about?

I'd be happy to.

Debunking of UFO videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3viYcYPRdu4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWWGmiZs4JA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCH7BWGpl5s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th4VlqQyVr4

Bob Lazar debunk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghkFTRY4ZB0

I've only been noticing it the last few months. My one theory is it's right wing media trying to say "your government is hiding something from you and lying about aliens!" and then to extrapolate that (without saying so) to "what else is it hiding and lying about, e.g. the 'truth' about Covid?".

But this theory falls apart when Obama has even talked about the UFOs, but maybe he also noticed the rising interest and just innocently quipped that "we don't know exactly what's out there" to mean "we don't know which country's tech these things are."

I just can't imagine these are not non-US Military drones.

I think the problem is in the US we think of drones as the DJI phantom and not FPV drones.

I mean if you look at FPV pilots like Johnny FPV or Mr Steele on youtube then extrapolate out a few billion $ on research and development you would end up with something completely alien.

So how are they getting so close to naval groups? Aren’t those training missions in part based around detecting enemy ships and aircraft? Wouldn’t failing to detect some nearby vessel launching a surveillance drone be a massive piece of incompetence? How far behind would the navy be if all it takes to get the jump on them is a battery powered drone?

Angel or Devil, I don't care

For in front of that door

There is you

-DB

For anyone looking for a sane analysis of the "leaked" UFO videos, look no further than Mick West.

https://www.youtube.com/user/mickword

Just kill me or give me cooler technology. Until then, this is all a pointless exercise.

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