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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

We've had electronics that can survive 20,000 Gs since the 1940s. (Using vacuum tubes!) There's no reason these couldn't be some highly advanced drones from a skunkworks somewhere.

The behavior of the top brass in regard to the Navy incidents seems to suggest they knew what the UFOs were, and weren't overly concerned as a result.

[Edit] The Proximity Fuze was screwed on to the front of artillery shells, and had to deal with 20,000 G of acceleration. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze

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If some UAP is a physical object doing the apparent high-g maneuvers, the g-forces on the onboard electronics are the least of its problems.

The sort of apparent movements of many UAPs would cause extreme heating of the air. They'd leave trails of hot ionized gas in their wake and cause sonic booms. The trails would show up on radar and infrared. The FLIR cameras many UAPs are captured on would easily detect their wakes if they were in fact physical objects. When those wakes cooled they'd also form condensation trails.

Being that we don't ever see any of those things with UAPs it should be apparent they're sensor artifacts or detection of mundane objects from weird perspectives. No drone or alien spaceship is going to emit visible and infrared light detectable on a camera yet not physically interact with the atmosphere.

Totally speculative, but what if the propulsion system is something like an Alcubierre drive? Then the object isn't moving, just moving the spacetime around itself.

The Alcubierre drive a mathematical construct and not a real thing that can be built. It was was real then the energy needed to warp space around even a tiny spaceship would destroy the Earth. If their magic space warp drives didn't destroy the Earth they would be warping light's path around them. So we wouldn't see them.

Of all the possibilities for UAPs, super magic propulsion drives are the among the least likely of a number of unlikely explanations.

Cameras are weird and lenses have a lot of weird properties. Autofocus and aperture adjustment add more weirdness. Image sensors have their own weird properties and behaviors. Cameras on stabilized gimbals on a moving aircraft compound all of those properties and effects. That's all on top of the unintuitive nature of looking at things in the sky which often lacks a helpful visual perspective.

So sensor artifacts and co fusing perspective is far far more likely than magic space warp drives.

Sensor artifacts don't account for first-person eyewitness testimony from airforce pilots so they're out.

Either the pilots are telling the truth or they're lying. Sensor artifacts are totally implausible in both cases.

Eyewitness testimony isn't actually worth all that much, even from pilots. At any given time there's thousands of planes in the air at a variety of altitudes. There's also bright satellites, stars, and astral bodies. Between any given pilot and those things is a lot of turbulent atmosphere (even in the clearest weather), a canopy, and often sunglasses or a helmet visor.

Even for a trained pilot the reference-free venue that is the sky is a bit mind bending. Even something the size of an airliner looks like an indistinct pill from a few km away. Atmospheric ducting [0] can make a plane too distant to pick up on radar visible to the eye or an EO/FLIR sensor.

There's also the pesky habit of "eyewitness" accounts being absolutely terrible. Someone can claim to have "seen" an object while they only did so through their plane's cameras. They think they remember "seeing" the thing so that's their story.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_duct

I suggest you familiarize yourself with some of that eyewitness testimony because everything you wrote simply does not apply:

https://youtu.be/ZBtMbBPzqHY?t=459

If you have more to say that you'd also want me to address, it better be directly relevant to the events described in this video.

Here's the issue I have with that. We have some of the greatest minds on earth working for institutions like NASA,etc. Then we have private industry like SpaceX, etc pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible with Space flight and Rockets. You can even go further and include Russia and China in this equation and what they have learned throughout the decades. And yet there seems to exist some very special "Organization" that can develop and implement things that we can't even explain, the disparity is crazy to even consider. It's like developing a F18 Fighter during the time of Ox carts. Doesn't make sense to me.

We know that the NSA has generally stayed some years, perhaps a decade or two, ahead of public knowledge. Why not other agencies? Granted, physical objects and manufacturing are harder to keep under wraps than papers and bytes.

It seems to me that the situation, rather than being either "sensor glitches" or extremely advanced tech, could be a combination. Tech that's a few years ahead, observed under poor conditions.

I can only speculate, but I'd imagine that anyone working in areas that touch on the technology that could lead to these kinds of capabilities get scooped up quietly, and no one else really knows. From the outside it would look like the research was a dead end. This kind of thing has happened before.

That's one read. The other is that UFOs existed in a blind spot, as it would require they (organizationally) admit their lack of ability to understand or respond to these phenomena.

Given how ossified the upper echelons of the military typically are, this is not an unlikely scenario.

Which is why the recent moves to (1) mandate reporting, (2) centralize investigation in a single, funded, and persistent group with a clear mission, (3) that's authorized with access and has lines of communication to actually clear incidents as classified-known or not... is encouraging.

What electronics could survive that much sustained acceleration? 20kG stretches my sense of plausibility.

I’d guess the parent is referring to airline flight recorders, aka the “black box”.

Radar sets in anti-aircraft artillery shells, laser terminal guidance in artillery shells.

The proximity fuze, one of the technological secrets which helped win WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze

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