Air Force Jet Was Scrambled to Intercept a UFO–Then Disappeared (2020)
history.com
history.com
That plus the obvious evidence of multiple different explanations promulgated by authorities strongly suggests some sort of coverup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Moncla#Reports_of_parts_...
This article tries really hard to make this a UFO mystery, but jets fell out of the sky pretty regularly in 1953, especially in storms and at night. Radar technology was also not anywhere near what we have today and even with modern technology we can still just outright lose a plane. MH370 still hasn't been found for example.
(I'm not a radar operator per se but I did study weapons engineering at the NL naval college and spent several years of my military career specifying specs for advanced naval radar systems)
So an intact jet fighter will show up as a big dot, while falling debris might look like many small dots, or be too small for the resolution of the radar display.
There's also numerous sources of interference and background noise, including from weather. So on a stormy night it might not be apparent what is debris vs water.
The article is really more of an advertisement for a TV show than journalism and doesn't give a very clear account, but it sound plausible that two dots converging and disappearing from radar could represent an in-air collision. And if over the great lakes during a storm, investigators would be looking underwater for hundreds of pieces of non-magnetic aluminum spread over many square miles.
From the few firsthand wartime accounts I've read of planes being shot down, from the perspective of radar operators they just abruptly disappear.
Also keep in mind this would have been 1953 tech.
The problem with UFOs is not the aliens part, and only to a certain extent the government conspiracy part - it's mainly the absurdity of the central claim: that aliens pop in on earth every so often to probe random people, blow up the occasional aircraft, and appear as shining lights in the sky every so often.
Well, why? Why would doing any of that make any sense to an alien species that must (with our best understanding of our local interstellar geography) travel several light years just to get here?
It's like if Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, and decides "huh, okay, we've got to this place, but let's not actually interact with the locals or claim any of the resources, or really do anything that would make this trip worthwhile; we'll just float just off the coastline and stare at them through our telescopes for several decades instead".
And they turn some nukes off, but leave the rest?
yeah, alcubierre drive at least theoretically possible, if no known way of implementing it yet exists... and it would also leave no emissions or traces, since it would work by literally bending spacetime and not via propulsion of any sort. Emissions depend on ejecting mass behind you, and all that, which probably looks pretty retro if you can just make the ground you're on go downhill (in the spacetime sense) in order to accelerate your craft
> yet they let themselves get seen by random Joes
maybe visual stealth is either tough, or they actually want to desensitize us to themselves? the best known treatment of desensitization in phobias is through neutral repeated exposure.
> and they turn some off but leave the rest
given that there's likely many more of us than there are them, and also that they probably don't really want the job of being Sky Nannies, but also that they want to neutralize the most egregiously dangerous situations (a whole bunch of missiles on standby might satisfy that) or at least try to teach a lesson ("stop that!" lol)... I'm already wildly speculating but if they're fallible intelligences that do not have omnipotence but meet our criteria for "good actors", then this is an entirely plausible scenario
The problem with all this stuff is that you can come to with explanations for everything, but at a certain point the explanations require so many further explanations that the whole situation becomes absurd. For example, sure, maybe they're trying to desensitise us to their existence, except alien sightings come in all sorts of different shapes and formats. Okay, well maybe it's not just one group of aliens, maybe there's multiple different groups, except now we've got to imagine some sort of alien council acting together in this plan with little-to-no disagreement.
Each little step down this path is somewhat plausible, but if you step back and view the claim as a whole (their is an intergalactic council of aliens with incredible travel and cloaking abilities (outside of visible wavelengths), doing undercover excitements on humans, possibly with the knowledge of our governments, in order to desensitise us to their existence), it becomes absurd.
This sort of thing is the problem for which Occam's Razor was invented: given a problem with two solutions, one of which requires fewer assumptions than the other, take the solution with the fewest assumptions. So: do we accept the various mundane explanations for these events, or do we imagine some incredibly specific untestable scenario involving aliens that come to earth with nonsensical motives behaving in ways that even we as humans would describe as illogical?
As an aside, this idea that we need to be desensitised to aliens seems kind of weird to me. Humans are really good at dealing with weird events. We're living through a climate catastrophe, a pandemic on a scale unknown to previous generations living in less connected worlds, we live our lives perpetually attached to a world knowledge centre, and all of this in the last few decades. I mean, aliens would definitely be something else entirely, but I can't imagine that it wouldn't very quickly become just another part of our lives.
> Humans are really good at dealing with weird events. We're living through a climate catastrophe, a pandemic on a scale unknown to previous generations living in less connected worlds
last I checked, we are NOT dealing well with these things: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., and the psychological impact: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-imp...
> I can't imagine that it wouldn't very quickly become just another part of our lives
There are so many people driven by fear and paranoia right now (see: many conservatives, if you'll permit the stereotype for a minute, but there IS some science to back that up at least) that the paranoia itself would be dangerous. It's like how the Khwarazmian Empire got completely wiped out because they were deeply suspicious (without basis in fact) of Genghis Khan's multiple trade envoys, who they simply assumed were spies, and who they managed to send back missing most of their heads (gravely upsetting the Genghis, and the rest is history). All it would take is for a few rogue states to send nukes up at some "monitoring" mother ships (just look at Russia with its pre-emptive "NATO-fearing" war) and that might be the end of that...
I'm in Australia. Don't think I've ever had this problem with history.com before.