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Comment by sudden_dystopia | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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?”

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.

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…

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!

> 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.

"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 :)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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