Hacker News Reader

Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com