The Calvine UFO photograph | Hacker News Reader

The Calvine UFO photograph

drdavidclarke.co.uk

88 pointslukeplato94 comments

Ok so let’s just say that the author is correct, and this thing, among other sightings, are actually US secret projects. I can believe that, but I would be much angrier if the government has been covering up some sort of wild capabilities for at least the past 30 years than if they have been covering up aliens for the past 80 years. If we have the ability to fly silently at high speeds, we have the ability to generate much more power at much lower cost than we do currently…which means the technology is a secret because releasing that tech into the world liberates the peasants from their rulers.

Why? If we've got that capability then why telegraph it to everyone else, including peer (or near peer) air forces around the world.

If it's ours, great, let's keep a tight lid on it until we need it. If it's not, let's discretely find out what it was. Period.

Because if we do have the capability to create lots of cheap energy, it could have been applied to various other sectors and improved the quality of life for billions of people. Instead of constraining us to the whims of oil barons.

Assuming this for the sake of argument, it might not be cheap. Maybe we're talking about small portable fusion engines that cost half a trillion dollars a piece to make, and have a very short, single-purpose shelf life.

Remember the Area 51 lawsuit where workers sued over being exposed to toxic fumes and chemicals, and as a result the facility was exempted from all environmental laws? Maybe the byproducts of creating this energy are more toxic and dangerous than spent nuclear fuel, but it's the government and the government doesn't give a damn, but there's no feasible (much less legal) way to mass produce the technology.

I totally get it, the way in which these objects manoeuvre may suggest a high capacity, portable power supply. And this may in turn let us generate lots of energy, which may also be cheap.

However, say all these suppositions are true, that there is a technology in existence now that can solve our energy generation and environmental difficulties. Someone will rightly ask whether making that technology public, and hence available, to near-peer militaries would be worth the risk of it being turned against us. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but that's the assessment that may happen.

Our military are very risk adverse, and very twitchy when it comes to credible foreign military threats - see the missile gap in the 60's when we had 10x the Soviet capability but still felt vulnerable. Unlike the UK government in the 50's who actually gave jet engine designs to the Soviets that were used against them, our military and government would by nature play that particular clean-limitless energy card very close to our chest.

Think what would happen to those tin-pot dictatorships that are propped up by oil sales. Their revenue streams would collapse immediately, and they themselves would undoubtedly be swept away in the aftermath, potentially to the detriment of our foreign policy aims. That's not even thinking about the impact on the markets when the big oil and gas suppliers are put out of business overnight.

I'm not arguing against releasing this technology, if it's within our purvue to do so, but to think long and hard before doing it.

What if this cheap energy also made it very easy to make, or even store a PetaJoule in a briefcase sized package?

I could see very strong national security reasons to keep that very tightly controlled.

Imagine a 1,000,000 Farad capacitor charged to 50kv

If these are indeed secret government projects, you’d wonder why did taxpayers ever fund a trillion+ dollar F-35 program that keeps running into problems year after year.

Surely these black ops operations couldn’t have had a bigger budget than the F-35 (if they did, you’d ask how did they source the funds?). And if they didn’t, how were they able to get these experimental aircraft to fly better and faster than the trillion dollar F-35 jets - decades ago? And if they were, why are we not funding these hypersonic gravity defying jets instead of an evolutionary upgrade to 4th gen fighter planes.

The F-35 ended up being a pretty impressive jet after all, but let's go with the old story that it way under-performed for the cost -- a possible explanation would be that most of that trillion+ budget actually went to secret projects like the hypersonic UFO stuff. (I don't actually believe this, but it is at least a self-consistent explanation under the assumption that the government is hyper-competent and has this sci-fi UFO technology).

Same was said about the B-2 stealth bomber program: its cost was so high that a popular conspiracy story was that much of the funds go to something really advanced and thus not even spoken of publicly.

I think the cost per fighter was something like $2B which to me seems absurd as once the initial research and test plane were created the other planes should be relatively cheap as they are making them off of well tested plans. So either major grift by the manufacturer or something else is getting that money. And the cost per plane keeps getting higher every year which doesn't make sense.

They only made 21 of them, which is probably hardly enough for marginal cost to even matter.

The government tends to include operation costs. The 2 billion per plane includes the cost to run the things over their lifespan. so the equation to get it is something like.

stealth_bomber_design + stealth_bomber_r_and_d + ( 21 * ( stealth_bomber_manufacturing + (stealth_bomber_operations_cost_per_year * years_of_operation ) )

I'd be surprised if some of that stealth_bomber_r_and_d didn't go into the f-22 and f-35. So really a full accounting would probably make it look a little cheaper, and give the R&D cost a chance to amortized across the more numerous fighters.

It’s also a case of not really a cost for the B2 (or F35, or F22). What you’re really paying for is “if we have a war, will we own the sky?”

I can understand the misappropriation of funds to explain what was done but what I can't understand is the depth and number of layers required for the cover up. The amount of people starting at the maintenance, cleaning etc all the way through engineering, logistics, support to maintain such a cover up just seems impossible to me.

On September 10th 2001 Donald Rumsfeld testified to Congress that the department of defense had misplaced 1 trillion dollars. Somehow the public reaction didn't last for a full 24 hour news cycle.

> Somehow the public reaction didn't last for a full 24 hour news cycle.

That "somehow" is doing a lot of work.

Really?! The day before? I’m not a conspiracy theorist but…

The price is insane, but that's what you get when you ask for something that's a fighter, a bomber, a close-air support aircraft, a carrier-capable aircraft, a VTOL, and stealthed. The amazing thing is that the F-35 actually can do all that.

Whether combining all that functionality was a good idea is questionable. Because there aren't enough F-35s for a serious war, like Ukraine or Taiwan.

> trillion+ dollar F-35 program

<tin-foil>It makes perfect sense that the trillion+ didn't actually go to the F-35 and was instead used for secret projects, and the F-35 was a token effort to look legit.</tin-foil>

Pretty sure in the Cold War and so forth there were all sorts of paper tiger projects that were just for show, either to the public or for Soviet espionage.

Alright, I'm no MAD game theory expert so I'll probably get ripped apart, but I'll appreciate the discussion.

I've wondered if there's any MAD incentive to keep some major groundbreaking technology under complete wraps (beyond TS - see recent headlines). If MAD is disrupted by groundbreaking tech, and if this technology would significantly boost strike capabilities and possibly render nuclear weapons useless, then the rival nations would be forced to exercise a nuclear strike preemptively to ensure their security to prevent a war they would inevitably lose.

So that's one theory that I've kicked around in my head as to why we might have such tech but keep it such a tight secret. It certainly could be complete fantasy or misunderstanding of MAD. Please tell me why I'm wrong so I can bury this line of thought!

"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world?"

But what if it is not a Doomsday machine. What if it is something that can give you first strike capability while also destroying any enemy attempt at retaliation. In that case, it might make sense to keep it close to the vest, lest you destabilize MAD.

Or what if it’s a kite, or a piece of trash blowing in the wind, or a paper airplane, or…

One group of aliens uses a craft the exact shape of a trashcan lid. They said this is no accident, it looks precisely the way it should look. There are pictures of it but I wont bother :)

> If MAD is disrupted by groundbreaking tech, and if this technology would significantly boost strike capabilities and possibly render nuclear weapons useless, then the rival nations would be forced to exercise a nuclear strike preemptively to ensure their security to prevent a war they would inevitably lose.

As of now, a nuclear war would result in two losers anyway, that's the whole point of MAD. Doing a preemptive strike would just create a massive problem where there might never be one. The only reason to attack would be if you already plan on kamikaze-by-nuke.

Tbh I think US conventional weaponry is pretty close to cancelling MAD anyway.

US weapons actually work.

And they actually seem to have enough of them. Russia seems to have three prototypes and zero inventory.

It's been suspected that these money hole defense projects like the F-35 are siphoning off the money for these alleged skunk works secret projects and that's really where the money is going. That or just plain old corruption.

> why did taxpayers ever fund a trillion+ dollar F-35 program that keeps running into problems year after year.

These problems and that budget are the feature they have been seeking.

It’s not clean, limitless energy.

With a fully parallel secret tech tree, you could in theory mine raw material, process them, and manufacture anything without money. You could have a closed system where resource allocation is done differently.

The budgets were not actually going to the F-35 or the mythical $50 hammers etc. They were going to projects that work.

I would say the probability that the US has technology that was demonstrated in the pentagon UFO tapes would be more surprising to me than if these craft were actually made by non-humans.

If the US had possession of such technology in a black project we would see some of the technology "bleed" into other projects, notably the air force and drone technology. And right now nothing the US possesses has those capabilities.

An alternate theory is that this is ruse by the US or another foreign govt. projecting images into the sky and moving them like a person using a laser pointer does across a wall. I don't know of any technology that can project an image into the sky like that, and then there is the radar signatures seen on some of these things.

Technology wasn't demonstrated in the pentagon UFO tapes. People extrapolated hypothetical technological capabilities based on uncertain second or thirdhand evidence, sensational reporting and eyewitness testimony. Not all such evidence may be interpreted properly (certainly not by the internet commentariat that wants to believe) nor may all interpretations be valid. One "triangle UFO" video[0] has already been debunked as lens bokeh[1].

Occam's Razor suggests that the vast majority of these sightings are hoaxes or misinterpretations, and the rest are conventional, albeit state of the art, aircraft whose actual capabilites are beyond what people may assume possible (as people in the 1960s might have assumed had they seen an SR-71 Blackbird when most commercial aircraft were still using propellers) but still not physics-defying.

[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-confirms-ufo-video-...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26838782

> I don't know of any technology that can project an image into the sky like that, and then there is the radar signatures seen on some of these things.

Here’s a cool little read, from 2015.

“Plasma Fairies: Femtosecond Laser Holograms

Imagine a three-dimensional aerial hologram that you can feel.“

https://www.physicscentral.com/explore/action/femtosecond-ho...

I am not an expert but can imagine this technology evolving to projected images in the sky or even hologram projectiles, which sounds sci-fi af.

I think it is much more mundane. The mythology around secret aircraft makes them out to have super-performance or strange advanced characteristics, when these things probably weren't true at all.

I would believe exactly the opposite. Things like "flying saucers" were attempts at secret advanced aircraft which worked, but not particularly well, and never really went on to be anything more than experimental aircraft. Leaks happened from time to time to prod adversaries to worry and try to develop competing technology to waste their time and resources.

The F117 looks pretty alien, that one worked though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk

There are probably a handful of other examples, aircraft that were tried but never made to work very well, work on new principles of design that haven't been figured out yet, and are still on the drawing board with various attempts to make them work ongoing.

Cmdr. David Fravor in one of his interview mentioned, that he does not believe that it is a secret gov program – he was talking about tic tac, not this incident – because since that encounter it would have come to light by now, because the commercial value is just simply too great to stay secret. And that this is what typically happens to military tech.

If you believe any of what Bob Lazar described, the government may know enough to get craft to liftoff and maneuver but not actually understand the power source yet. Like dropping an electric car into the Middle Ages. Someone will press the power button eventually, and even drive it, but they won’t actually be able to re-use that technology for a long time. Again, if you believe.

Whether it is true or false doesn't really depend strongly on whether or not I believe it.

> If you believe any of what Bob Lazar described…

Bob Lazar’s stories are not credible. His claims about his education are false, those about his work history seem extremely exaggerated, and his claims about element 115 have been experimentally proven wrong.

That is almost certainly a mirage of the mountains in the background. Look at the "UFO" image and then look at the more recent image of the location down the page a bit. There is a particular peak that looks suspiciously similar to the UFO.

Have a look at this mirage image, taken in Namibia: https://i.imgur.com/D21xgfy.jpg

Mirages often feature a mirror image of the object, as if it's sitting in a body of water with a reflection. That is exactly how the UFO appears.

I would be much more inclined to believe this is something strange if the entire area weren't made up of mountains which have peaks that look exactly like the object in this photograph, but alas...I am a man of logic. I would be willing to bet this is nothing more than an illusion and the most interesting thing is the atmospheric conditions that made this photo possible.

You may well be right. I wonder if the nearby airplane would be victim to the same optical illusion though?

Either way, your explanation is more likely than aliens, agree.

This idea reminds me of the "floating ship" mirage phenomenon. A spectacular example of this made the rounds a couple of years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-56286719

My razor for filtering out any UFO/UAP photo is simply: unless I have physically seen the UFO in question, any attempt by others to persuade me they're real or operated by intelligences orders of magnitude higher than ours, is invalid. You can't audit these people's claims short of being physically with them when the photo was taken. For all I know, someone put a piece of cheese on the lens and then passed it off as a UFO.

That said, I did witness something strange about a year ago when I looked up at the sky randomly. This object was darting really fast at quite a height. I dismissed it as a drone, but I didn't know drones could operate at such a height, and it done acute turns without slowing down, something drones can't do, no matter how many videos of drones turning acutely at speed you show me, because an object has to slow down before it does that. It's basic physics.

Anyway, it was good to see, since I was physically present, so at least I can say these things could possibly fit the narrative of 'aliens' or 'watchers' who are doing recon on our planet.

You might have seen a satellite, nowadays it's pretty common to see them, especially starlink ones.

At least from a couple onward.

Satellites travel in straight lines. [1]

[1] akshually, those are elliptical orbits, but you get what I mean

> so at least I can say these things could possibly fit the narrative of 'aliens' or 'watchers' who are doing recon on our planet.

Mandatory must-read: Backyard Starship. The writing isn't the best in the world, but the premise and story is pretty darn good.

Indeed. I second this recommendation.

I also recommend John Keel's "Operation Trojan Horse". He's my favorite writer on the phenomenon and brings a skeptic's wit to the analysis while not discounting the volumes of testimony from highly credible witnesses.

Similar observation a few years ago in the sea sky: some ligh moving very high, with a strange flying pattern (like a very fast bee), for 20 minutes, above my head, then disapearing. No apparent light beam, support for light reflection, animal presence or mechanical vehicule. Clear weather conditions.

It was, to my eyes, an object that was flying and that I couldn't identify. So UFO applies.

The problem is not seing those.

The problem is making interpretations out of those.

Humans often prefer to create explanations than say they just don't know.

Centuries ago, somebody spot lightning and said it was Thor. We are mocking them now, but we are doing the same.

I saw similar lights in the sky off the eastern coast of Sri Lanka back in 2017. I assumed it was military aircraft since that area is a hotbed of military activity.

But then it abruptly turned almost 60 degrees at a sharp angle - like a cue ball bouncing off the walls of a billiards table.

I don’t know of anything that can move like that.

Search light hitting a cloud?

I've also seen 3 lights fly in formation then the two on the wings make instant 90 turns and fly off into the horizon.

were you looking out into the sea? don’t know if you realize, but without good horizon references you lose sense of scale (relevant: supermoon is now) and you also can’t easily distinguish 3 dimensions. contrails going mostly horizontal can look quite vertical, for example.

so this abrupt impossible 60* turn might just be the projection of a normal maneuver

No, it was right overhead in the sky. Small enough that it appeared like a star

My observation seems very close to yours then.

Nice to know it might be a repeating occurrence.

I think a better way to phrase this is - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Being present myself is a good litmus test, but humans are pretty unreliable. Having multiple corroborated credible sources would be much better. E.G. multiple radars detecting an object approaching, many videos from different view points, governments (who have access to better data sources) scrambling interceptors, defcon level rising, etc..

I also saw what you described once in southern Oregon right along the California border, but it was in 1996 and I was a kid. None of the adults around believed I saw an object moving like that and were convinced I had noticed a satellite.

Satellites don’t turn at acute angles without losing momentum. They didn’t believe me.

Now I want some Gouda.

> and it done acute turns without slowing down, something drones can't do, no matter how many videos of drones turning acutely at speed you show me, because an object has to slow down before it does that.

What you saw probably wasn’t an expert flying a small RC helicopter, but those can do things that I believe would appear to some people as being almost impossible. It’s not rare to see seemingly genuine online comments on these sorts of videos claiming they must be fake or sped up.

https://youtu.be/KmPchrGW1TQ

https://youtu.be/XlyxmqfTLxk

> cheese on the lens

Or a faulty stench coil.

Maybe cheese or a piece of chorizo

A bit of undigested beef. A blob of mustard.

There are so many security cameras and smartphone users that we are flooded with videos of everyday and not so everyday experiences: funny pets and kids, surprising weather events, accidents, crimes, etc. Why are there no better videos of UFOs. We have great videos of people, birds, cars, and tornados, but the videos of UFOs are always grainy, blurry, and out of focus.

I have been asking this very same question for the last few years. The quality and amount of video evidence should be increasing as the number of cameras in everyday life are increasing (literally exponentially) but doesn’t seem to be.

To me it underscores an already healthy skepticism towards the subject.

The one thing that makes me think that there might be something there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar.

Not because it worked, more because it really didn't (and they thought it would); it makes me feel like it was (very) loosely based on something else (something only seen).

I'd be very interested to see what would happen if you incorporated some very fast very heavy gyros inside of a disc.

The thing that doesn't make much sense to me is the variety of shapes these things come in. Saucer, triangle, tic tac, pyramid, cube, etc. The triangles are probably just military, but where does that leave this other stuff? The military has had supersonic drones for a long time so that could explain many other sightings. The thing about aliens is it's exciting. The thing that makes me wary is that even if the military declassified hypersonic saucer drones people would just call it a psyop.

The Boeing Bird of Prey (first flight, 1996) has about that cross section in a bank. The Pegasus X-47A [1](first flight, 2003) looks almost exactly like that in a bank - diamond shaped with a dark engine bell at the rear. But it first flew a few years after that photo. I wonder if there was a UK prototype of that era which didn't get publicized.

The XB-47A led to the XB-47B, an armed semi-autonomous stealth attack aircraft demonstrator. Not quite as diamond-shaped, it was considered a success. It's not clear if a production version was built. One was definitely designed.

After the Have Blue "hopeless diamond", the original stealth-first aircraft, there was a lot of work in the diamond-shaped aircraft space. It's not too surprising to see a photo of one.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGDYwP--I4s

I wonder if it's possible this was an optical illusion. Seeing optical illusions where oil tankers are hovering in mid-air has changed my perception of what people could see and how it could be misinterpreted. [1] I'm not a physicist but it almost looks like the photo could be a mountain and it's reflection somehow projected up into the sky similar to how the oil tanker is projected in the sky.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-56286719

Stargazing and watching satellites in a very dark skies place, I noticed that some satellites zigzaged about, moving at right angles. I explain this by saccades of my eyes and the brain trying to work out the pattern based on a black featureless background.

Would make sense for the brain to estimate it as "flying bug" with erratic flight than very smoothly straight flying mechanical thing.

Very plausible explanation, but fwiw the 'zigzag' behavior you're describing is also described by people out in places where they have high end night vision goggles and nothing to do all night but stare at the sky.

If you ever find yourself tempted to look down on or judge someone for getting roped up in a cult or simply spewing some dogma that you find ridiculous, please consider that UFOs (and a bunch of other conspiracy theories) are just religion for atheists.

Humans have a deep need, a very egotistical need in some ways, to feel like there's a bigger plan, that they're part of something and even that they're in possession with some secret knowledge the masses aren't.

It's not too dissimilar to those who jump on the trend of the latest fringe FTL technology idea. Warp drives, wormholes, space folding, whatever. Part of this comes from a genuine desire for some Star Trek or Star Wars future of visiting other stars without taking a lifetime to get there. But part of it is also some people realize that if the speed of light is a cosmic speed limit (my personal belief) then the idea of alien visitors and UFOs becomes truly ridiculous.

There may be ways around the speed of light though, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Please don't psychoanalyze me for telling you this :)

Your comment is misinformed.

There are religions for atheists, such as Satanism.

UFOlogy is not a religion, and certainly neither are "UFO". Unidentified Flying Objects could hardly be considered a religion. That's like saying a car is a religion to a gearhead.

Furthermore, insinuating that people who are into UFO are atheist and UFO are their religion is asinine. Many are atheist, but the majority I know are "spiritual", in pagan religions etc.

Additionally there are UFO religions, such as Scientology. There is also the Starseed movement.

Seems like the early 90s were interesting times for the MoD. [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37371/the-boscombe-dow...]

For some reason Calvine isn't notable for WPedia - but it does have a little on this story. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_the_United_Ki...] and links to this article in Scotsman: [https://www.scotsman.com/news/close-encounters-pitlochry-kin...]

I only see an small island with reflection on a Scottish lake or a large river a foggy day... And the "plane" is just a floating tree branch for me...

That was my first thought as well (island and reflection) and was looking through the comments to see if any others posted. The plane could just be a shadow itself

Now that there are a billion cel phones out there with high resolution video capability, I guess we ought to see some pretty amazing new UFO videos. Or not?

Depends on the technological advancement rate of our guests. Maybe they already figured out proper cloaking?

If I was to break down what it was, kind of decision tree style, I'd guess it's

- Hoax 50%

- Non-Hoax 50%

  - Optical Illusion 80%

  - Unidentified/Secret Military Tech 19%

  - Other 1% (a generous 1%, probably fairer to be 0.000000001%)

    - ET 33%

    - Future human 33%

    - Interdimensional 33%

    - Other (though manifestation, spiritual/religious, trickster) 1%

Lighter than air radar reflector / target? Looks like good shape for something like that.

That’s totally an aircraft banked towards the camera. Turn the image 90deg and it looks like a testbed a/c that Boeing had that looked like something out of Batman. Brown from above makes sense as it would help to hide it from foreign satellites.

Isn’t this just a photo of something similar to the Boeing “Bird of Prey”

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

Hmm. Could this actually be the peak of one of those distant mountains or hills peaking through low blankets of fog and clouds? The jet could be flying closer to the ground than it appears. Or it could be a bird.

I'm wondering about that too. The object looks remarkably similar to some photos of the Cairngorms I've seen, but I don't know if there's a way for the geography and atmospheric conditions to create such an illusion in this case.

Context -- You can build a "ufo" (ion wind lifter) yourself, many have[1]. The power to weight ratio is roughly equal to that of a helicopter, so it's not trivial, but it could in theory be scaled up to large enough to move battle tanks around on. You'd end up with a large dark craft that glows a bit around the edges.

That's old physics, who knows what's been done since then.

  1 - http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/liftbldr.htm

> The Calvine UFO photograph is in my opinion the best image of an unidentified flying object ever taken.

And yet the no evidence for this is presented in the entire article. Government cover-up/friction is not evidence of authenticity.

The person making the extraordinary claim is obligated to bring the extraordinary evidence. There is none, so the author is resorting to spinning conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, quite typical of UFO "research."

Uploading the photograph to dalle and masking a bunch of it creates some pretty cool dogfights :)

What ever happened to crop circles. Have we ever gotten to the bottom of those?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/crop-circles-the...

Probably a hoax. But then you have footage such as this[0] that makes anyone go "wtf?" People would call them drones nowadays but that footage is from the 90s, so, yeah... That first clip especially always captivated my imagination.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu-b2wAmM6U

They keep happening. Not much press now though.

Sorry, I want to believe ;) but it is a complete hoax. Read this: https://www.amazon.com/Round-Circles-Poltergeists-Pranksters... I do have enormous respect for the art though.

Note to the author. Thanks for the invite but I will never intentionally click on a link for the Daily Mail.

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