The Galileo Project: Daring to Look Through New Telescopes | Hacker News Reader

The Galileo Project: Daring to Look Through New Telescopes

projects.iq.harvard.edu

80 pointsmadspindel66 comments

These UAPs love to troll US Navy pilots but seem otherwise not at all interested in communicating.

I'd love to get paid to work on this, the technical challenges are pretty interesting if you take the "observables" seriously.

There will be more on this in Brian Keatings (he's a cosmologist) podcast this Monday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3tBDJk6rgc

The title should really be changed, perhaps even resubmitted under a new title to give it a second chance at serious conversation. Everyone's talking about haha look bad picture quality ufo crazies (and they're not wrong), but the article is about comets traversing interstellar space that we can observe when they drop by our solar system.

Yes. And those things aren't ufos, they aren't even flying.

Is Voyager 2 flying? Not sure if the definition of flying is propulsion and/or steering, or if it requires atmosphere. If it's the former, Oumuamua might actually count if you choose to not reject the implausibly unlikely but interesting-to-explore hypothesis that it's a space ship. Or at least that it has propulsion (iirc that's the part we're sure of) regardless of whether it's intelligently designed or can steer.

They are falling, thier movement dominated only by gravity. Flight is a winning fight against gravity by another stronger force. A floating balloon is flying. A falling meteor isn't

Oumuamua wasn't just falling, is the interesting thing about it. For Voyager probes I guess one could argue are falling most of the time, but specifically on this topic, comets are not always only acted upon by environmental forces.

Hmm actually isn't that characteristic of a comet, it being icey and having a "tail" of exhaust gas? But then Oumuamua's acceleration could iirc not be explained by that exhaust, so it's even more than just that.

Of course that doesn't make it a space ship, it (presumably) lacks controls for one, but it does mean that comets are by definition not falling, and specifically the objects this project will be looking for might be doing even more than just venting under influence of heat.

Those forces are nothing compared to the acceleration of gravity. Flying means that gravity has been overcome.

And they've been identified and even given names

If this project wants to be taken seriously they should really improve their copy editing.

> For example, a megapixel image of the surface of a human-scale UAP object at a distance of a mile will allow to distinguish the label: “Made in Country X” from the potential alternative “Made by ETC Y” on a nearby exoplanet in our galaxy.

An unparsable, non-grammatical sentence that seems to be trying to make some very odd claims like this one doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

I think the last quotation marks are just in the wrong place (should be at the end of the sentence).

Fwiw, the sentence didn't impede my reading flow.

OK, that at least allows me to understand what the sentence is supposed to say.

I still find the content of the claim highly dubious. For one thing it would obviously depend on how big the label is. In addition it certainly depends on what kind of optics are in front of that camera. My smartphone camera has more than a million pixels but there's no way I could read a label on an object a mile away with it.

Note that 'iq.harvard.edu' is The Institute for Quantitative Social Science. I can't help but think they are trolling.

Wait why is this downvoted? It’s a fair point...

One Navy pilot insisted on Joe Rogan/Lex Fridman that UFOs would visit their carrier strike group day after day for weeks.

I always wondered why nobody thought about getting a few goddamn proper cameras out there in the fleet and on the planes so that we would finally have some quality high resolution pictures.

If I was a senior officer on one of those ships sailing near California, I would have hired 5 camera crews from Hollywood and called Elon Musk to lend me the team who is filming SpaceX launches, who are able to get clear pictures of a rocket screaming and many kilometers per second from tens of miles away.

If I was just a regular sailor, I would have gotten my hands on a DSLR with a good zoom lens and film it for eternal Internet and world fame. Imagine being the one who got the first clear shot of an UFO that you see every day for weeks.

Or maybe that pilot was just full of shit...

If anyone has the ability to get a clear image of a nearby vehicle or aircraft, a carrier strike group does.

E.g., https://www.ball.com/aerospace/Aerospace/media/Aerospace/Dow...

What does this have to do with the article? The edited headline mentions UFOs presumably for clickiness value, but the article is about interstellar comets that show acceleration properties we're not sure about, like Oumuamua did.

Though I can understand the confusion, given the misleading headline and they never explain what UAP stands for (so it could be a euphemism for UFO since I imagine "ufo research" is a good way to get your funding cut). I happen to have read a book on Oumuamua so coincidentally know that this isn't exactly UAF (yes at this point I'm parodying U* TLAs) fighter pilot related.

The article also says UAPs. UAPs include UFOs but not interstellar comets and such stuff. The A stands for Aerial. The title is not misleading UAP is what normal people name UFO. Its just more correct because some things visible in the sky are not not flying and or not an object. for example ball lightnings.

> If I was a senior officer on one of those ships sailing near California, I would have hired 5 camera crews from Hollywood and called Elon Musk to lend me the team who is filming SpaceX launches.

This was back in 2004, before Musk even had any money, before high resolution cell phone cameras were common, and when policy around sightings was basically "don't ask, don't tell". If you're going to dismiss eyewitness testimony, at least get the basic facts right.

Now that the official policy is changing, maybe we'll see better imaging.

PayPal IPO’d and was acquired by eBay in 2002. Presumably Musk had hundreds of millions by 2004.

I assume you’re taking about Cmdr. Fravor?

When he was interviewed on Lex Friedman, he was asked why more was not done at the time to investigate.

His reply was along the lines that he and everyone else had plenty to do for their day job already. They were doing ‘work ups’ for a deployment and Cmdr. Fravor was at that time the youngest of that rank on that ship and perhaps in the navy. So it would be a large reputation as risk to stop a busy training schedule to investigate this.

He also said that if it had a Russian or Chinese flag, they would have no issue in re-assigning every resource available to investigate.

A potential explanation I've recently heard is that, due to the impossibly fast, silent maneuvers made by UFOs, is that maybe they have Alcubierre drives - they don't move through space, they move space around themselves, enabling moves at any acceleration/speed without the ship experiencing the utterly brutal acceleration observed. This localized bending of spacetime would create gravitational lenses that obscure their true shape, so a "clear" picture is not possible unless one turned off their engine, in which case it would be in freefall, a clumsy move. The sharpest footage yet seems to be from CBP in Puerto Rico in 2013, you can see the footage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldV5LUsTkJM

The description on the video has a link to a page that goes into much more detail. Obviously the page gives similar vibes to any (other?) conspiracy theory page, but the explanation seems more consistent than any other I've heard.

I am worried about a time when we do get a good quality photo, the hard part would become convincing everyone that it is a real photo and not cgi.

I have this fear for pretty much everything, so much of our digital lives depend on the assumption that things are real. Security cam footage, audio recordings for criminal proceedings, UFO footage, everything, how will we prove something is actually real in the digital world ?

Think about the reddit AMA proofs[0], I am pretty sure within 10 years there would be no way to actually provide proof for a digital entity representing something real. There are obviously proofs for digital-to-digital entities (cryptographic signatures), but what is the "cryptographic signature" to prove that something is real ?

[0] => https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/wiki/proof

You've said it, cryptographic signatures are the way. Then it all becomes a trust economy where someone vouching for a claim puts their reputation at stake, and that is exactly what gives the claim a certain level of reliability.

> I am worried about a time when we do get a good quality photo, the hard part would become convincing everyone that it is a real photo and not cgi.

Perhaps corroboration, as video/camera ubiquity approaches. I'm encouraged by such things as the Chelyabinsk meteor [1] in 2013, or the impressive (and thankfully non-fatal) "Hollywood-style crash" in which a car seemingly takes flight over a highway in California earlier this month, and as covered by The Drive [2].

Yes, these things were either bright or in broad daylight, but might still have been CGI. It's the coverage by more than one independent recording device that provides evidence favouring real rather than faked footage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

[2] https://www.thedrive.com/news/41623/speeding-camry-soars-ove...

It would be like everything else today. Reality would bifurcate along political lines.

I'm convinced that one day we'll have a public trust net. It's the only thing I can think of that can solve questions of belief and trustworthiness at scale. If I know Sally from high school and she highly trusts the general announcing the findings because she knew him at West Point, it is going to take a lot of evidence or other members of the trust net that to convince me that they're faking the photo.

The drawbacks of trust nets are well known, but I think they're solvable if we're willing and if people have a secure way to opt out.

There are actually already a lot of great pictures of UFO's out there [0]. The problem is exactly as you said: because these are typically from ordinary people or organizations, people cry "I could do this with Photoshop!" (and that is probably the true origin for many of them). I know someone personally who has a pretty good quality photo, which isn't faked, and isn't a plane or drone or ball lightning, but I wouldn't expect to be able to convince a reasonably skeptical person on the internet about its validity. So you end up with the skeptics taking a No True Scotsman position, which is intellectually counter-productive.

So, we have this "phenomenon" which is clearly quite active on our planet, but which does not want to be identified, for whatever reasons. Perhaps the reason there are any sightings at all are because of the sheer volume of their activity, because they are exerting influence on events, or as a means of making a slow and gradual introduction. Is there a military cover-up of this information? Absolutely. The amount of secrecy around this for nearly 80 years is unparalleled. Is it because some general or defense contractor or masonic lodge really cares so much if people know that there is a greater intelligence here? Probably not. The disclosure of centralized, credible phenomenon-related information is likely driven entirely by the phenomenon itself. So even with this movement for transparency the last few years, I'm not optimistic about getting the truth anytime soon.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/falwxl/here_are_a_bunc...

>Is there a military cover-up of this information? Absolutely. The amount of secrecy around this for nearly 80 years is unparalleled. Is it because some general or defense contractor or masonic lodge really cares so much if people know that there is a greater intelligence here? Probably not. The disclosure of centralized, credible phenomenon-related information is likely driven entirely by the phenomenon itself. So even with this movement for transparency the last few years, I'm not optimistic about getting the truth anytime soon.

I'm curious. what do you mean when you say that the disclosure of credible information of the phenomenon is driven entirely by the phenomenon itself? And why does this make you pessimistic?

As for one plausible reason for the secrecy by governments. I assume it's because they don't like to look like they're ignorant (few governments do), and stay secretive because to do otherwise would be to reveal that they're just as clueless as the general public or any private research effort.

I've always said that it's "funny" how UFOs as a rule magically prevent auto-focus from working.

In this era, this kind of project is just the bucket of ice water we need to shake off some silly beliefs and get back to reality.

Or discover that the CCP has secretly developed fully functional hypersonic planes...

I, on the other hand, don't understand why people assume that all photos should be great looking. I own Samsung Galaxy S9+ and the quick close photos it takes are very good, but when I want to focus on something that is 20 meters apart it looks bad. Pictures taken at night are super bad. I know that there are some magnificent smartphones in the wild, but I doubt most people have them... Obviously people want to believe and will post grainy looking things as UFOs, but in reality it's also not that easy to make good, sharp photo or video for objects from further away.

Keep in mind that DSLRs were sold in huge numbers, and many come with great telephoto or zoom lenses.

Why is it that nobody has ever obtained an in-focus picture of a mysterious flying craft?

I mean, I would understand if a significant proportion were out-of-focus, or a tiny dot due to distance. But... never? Ever ever? Not one? Not in the history of the human race? With billions of phone cameras in pockets? Hundreds of millions of "proper" cameras out there, and at least a few million high-end DSLRs with decent glass attached?

Makes it seem like UFOs are the invisible dragon in my garage, if you know what I mean...

I suggest grabbing a random DSLR with decent glass and trying to capture a bird in flight against the sky. Most of the time not even the species will be discernable. People with no prior experience photographing birds will have a hard time taking anything that is not blurry. It is actually not that easy even tracking something in flight through the viewfinder, especially at long focal lengths. Shaking, focus / depth of field, dynamic range, sensor noise and exposure time all work against you.

So I would be extremely suspicious of sharp clear properly exposed pictures of UFOs.

Birds are much harder to take pictures of than a UFO would, though. They are flying only a few meters above you, therefore having much higher and less predictable angular velocity, as well as requiring more lens movement to focus compared to infinity.

I can take clear pictures of airplanes flying ~400m above me without any issues.

With my DSLR I took many zoomed photos of airplanes over passing (not landing). The pictures were clear, you could see many details.

Can you upload a few to imgur and link them?

(I don't think you are lying, but it's nice to see an example. Also I strongly like "pics or it didn't happen".)

I'm not the GP however I do the same, and even as a fairly lousy photographer I'm able to get photos where you can usually see some reasonable detail. Here are some examples: https://imgur.com/a/Nr5NIgt

All shot on a Canon 1100D with a 75-300mm zoom lens, using manual focus with the "full auto" mode for controlling aperture, shutter time etc. Usually I am leaning out of a window or standing in my garden to capture these shots.

As you can see, none of these images are particularly "good": the subjects in the first three images are underexposed due to their dark colouring against a light background, some are slightly out of focus, some show evidence of dirt or other marks on the camera sensor, yet you can still make out various details on all of them. One would imagine that if there were an equivalent photo of an actual "alien" UFO, it would be on the front page of newspapers across the world.

Nice!

(One trick that I use for family photos is to use a delay of 1 second, to avoid the movement when I press the shutter. (It's not useful when there are kids. One second later they are in another room.))

I've been meaning to pick up a shutter release accessory for a while now since the 1100D only has 10s shutter delay in automatic modes, or 2s delay in the manual modes. Fortunately the movement when pressing the shutter button isn't much of a problem for these type of shots as the camera + lens is weighty and quite well balanced.

I shoot birds in flight as a hobby. It takes some skill, but it's not _that_ hard. And a bird taking up 1/4 of your FOV is close enough that you have to focus on it. A plane/UFO taking up 1/4 of your FOV is much further away, and you can just pre-set your focus at 'infinity'. >1% of UFO photos should definitely be taken with good equipment by someone who knows how to use it.

I'm from Mick West "camp" ( https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest/videos ) - you don't need to try argue with me that UFOs are not aliens, BUT "there are billions of phone cameras" is simply a bad argument IMO. My phone is quite old now, but still is way above what most people in the world have, and I know that I wouldn't be able to make good photo of something on the sky, because I tried (wasn't supposed to be UFOs of course). I'm sure there are ways to do good photos for objects from distance with this and even weaker phones, but I, like most people, didn't invest my time into it. Also - let's be honest - you see your supersharp, ideal photo/video of weird spaceship-like object from some random human with great camera: would you really believe it's real? I know I wouldn't, it's just to easy to fake things.

It's not that easy though. First you have to rule out the night cases, and then it's not that easy to catch a moving object with your phone in the focus.

But I do agree with your sentiment.

Phone cameras are not built to take clear pictures of objects miles away from you.

Nobody assumes all photos should be great looking, but if there were really spacecraft or aircraft of foreign origin, wouldn't you expect the occasional high-quality image or video of it?

Instead we only see blurry UFO images, because all images that aren't blurry turn out to show mundane things.

No I wouldn't expect that. Assuming these things could be real (the only thing I could even imagine would be some form of a probe without live being on board) how many of them could be flying here? There are only a couple of thousands reported sightings a year - even if some of them would be real (which I don't believe) it's obvious to me that the chance that a real alien spaceship is captured on high-quality image/video is super small and this is not an argument for them not being real, there are much better and honest ways to disbelieve that (mainly knowing some physics and how big are the distances between star systems).

US navy surface vessels have state of the art electro-optical sensors capable of taking very detailed photos and videos of airborne and surface targets.

These are used for both SAR and for target identification purposes you don’t want to blow up another civilian aircraft or a fishing vessel by mistaking it for with a military target.

I don’t know exactly what the US is running but sensors from other countries I’ve seen are capable of reading the tail number of a passenger jet from a substantial distance.

These sensors are also thermally stabilized and corrected for atmospheric disturbances as much as possible, and usually capable of visual spectrum + NIR and NUV to provide even higher fidelity.

If these sightings around carrier battle groups and fleets are indeed so common we should have pretty decent evidence of what these things are.

If that's true, that's another reason to not believe in US army engagement into that topic. Some of the released videos are easy to debunk (like the "pyramid ufo" which in reality is bokeh effect as proven by Mick West https://www.youtube.com/c/MickWest/videos and others) and are still being considered as unexplained by US army or whoever did this recent UFO report.

These are the sort of sensors that are on surface vessels https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30057/u-s-warships-hav...

These systems are powerful and precise enough to be used for fine grained targeting, in fact in many cases the guns of the ship and the CIWS systems will be guided with electro optical sensors rather than radar.

Radar picks things up, the ElOp system then interrogates the target, ranges it with with a laser which provides much higher precision than radar range finding and if need be guns go brrrttt…

All right. For some reason they didn't use that before - maybe it wasn't available at the time, or maybe they are using that, but they deliberately want to spread disinformation. Anyway, we'll see how it will go with this linked project, it's privately funded and it will require new research, so there is no harm in doing that, only new opportunities.

“I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside. Run, he’s fuzzy, get out of here.” — Mitch Hedberg

Maybe they have some sort of skin on the craft that scatters light in a way where it appears not to be in focus.

If the craft is, in effect, bending gravity to fly, maybe it also bends the light around it causing it to look blurry.

My conspiracy theory is that aliens don't want definite proofs of their existence, just vague ones.

So in all of their technological might they track in real time the location of all photo sensors in the world, and only reveal themselves in locations where only potato cameras are present.

There are millions and millions of sharp photos; on all of them you see it's not an alien spacecraft (but weather ballons, light reflections and very mundane objects).

Independently of how good our technology is, there'll always be pictures of low quality that leave room for speculation.

You can't get a clear picture of a UFO by definition. As soon as you get a clear picture it stops being an unidentified flying object and starts being either an identified flying object or an inconvenient optical effect.

however, don't let these simple facts ruin the magic. ;)

Sometimes the real world is more fun: China has hypersonic FO operational since 2019 per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-ZF

I've made tens of thousands of razor-sharp photos over the last ten years. Three years ago I visited the world's largest model train track in Hamburg (go see it, it's amazing!) and in one part of the track they have a little UFO coming down on a wire.

I took several photos of it, but after I come home I realized they were all unsharp - unlike the rest of my photos, which were fine, including those taken during the night cycle. I wrote that down to 'excessive realism' on the part of the builders...

Anyway, apparently the device that causes photos to blur can easily be miniaturized and installed on a 5cm large UFO.

I don't think that's the problem, the problem is that progress in cameras is parallel to progress in drones and CGI, so we always will be able to explain away everything. If there is something to this phenomenon, no individual video is going to be enough.

For instance, if we see something like these, the explanation is going to be drones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVTlN41Mr9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5CSReaPNcg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a95YERVRBM

If we see something like these, CGI, I suppose:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wskl8NJ2wU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE-Yrv1-chI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JRi7VUZTcA

This one is taken by a military grade camera at night, I suppose it could be a drone or a bird:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1qiZ_L8wX4

Because it's not reproducible it's always possible to explain away everything. It's an epistemology nightmare but I find it very interesting, specially when you have testimonies from people that you don't have a reason to doubt. I have to think if, maybe, our priors are too strong in one direction.

Did UFOs become more rare proportionally to how our cameras became better (and more ubiquitous) over the past decades?

https://xkcd.com/1235/

It's quite the opposite https://www.statista.com/chart/8452/ufo-sightings-are-at-rec...

Won't happen, as we all know, the aliens have special technology that prevents all decent cameras from capturing their craft.

I am not sure if you are joking because a lot of UFO proponents actually do believe that

Yes I'm joking, but that some may think I'm not doesn't surprise me. People believe a lot of shit and there's a lot of people.

Craft cloaking footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsNJMCXHUE

Somebody just posted (and deleted?) an answer to your post with a video of the night sky and a man tracking satellites as they disappear at the terminator. That guy was telling “this is cloak tech” whereas he doesn’t even understand that a satellite is bright only when lit up with the sun. Satellites you see crossing the sky can, and will, disappear mid-sky because they get into the shaded part of the earth. This is why you can’t see LEO sats long after the sun go down, and brainless interpolation is why idiots like the poster of that video believe they see cloak tech.

I like your comment, except the last sentence. The guidelines ask to write civil comments, and I believe it even includes people that is not here.

The video is 15 minutes long and I get bored a. When does exactly the satellite "gets cloaked"? The second comment in YouTube links to https://earthsky.org/space/i-saw-a-flash-in-the-night-sky-wh... Is that a good explanation?

Yes that was not very subtle, sorry about that.

It might be iridium flares, although it looks like he got slow moving sats, so higher in altitude. Either way, they all look like that, fast straight moving lights, not pulsating like stars, not red/green like planes.

You can see the ISS very clearly when it passes above. It sometimes disappears mid-pass when it is late and the shadow of the earth is obscuring half your sky. You can also see the SpaceX sat train (60 sats in a straight line) passing by just after a launch. This will freak you out though, it looks like a straight comet trail moving half the sky in 1 min.

Working outside of a falsifiable framework is a waste of time. Nothing made inside of it carries any weight in reality.

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