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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating getting a glimpse into modern tensions. It turns out that there was a guy that shot down like 8 MiG's back in the 40's, but they had to suppress all knowledge of it so that it didn't escalate anything between US and Russia. Makes you wonder how often stuff like this happens and we just never hear about it. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/20/asia/korean-war-fighter-pilot...

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> like 8 MiG's

"four Soviet MiGs" (from the linked headline)

> back in the 40's

"On a cold November day in 1952" (linked article, paragraph 2)

> a guy

"Royce Williams" (linked article, literally the first two words), Navy Cross recipient and former US Navy pilot, not 'some guy'.

What kind of hasty carelessness causes you to share a link to a story, embellish it with details, but just screw up on key facts? Including, I might add, the rather significant difference in implication between a US pilot shooting down MiGs in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was either an ally or a peacetime enemy, vs. the 1950s, when the Korean War happened.

Ok, I'll be more careful.

The answer is "I just woke up."

It was 70-80 years ago and you were off by about 2 years. Inconsequential. It makes zero difference to the meat of the story exactly how man Migs were shot down. The precise number is not the story. You didn't say 'some guy' you said 'a guy', which has a different connotation.

But getting this stuff wrong takes more effort than just copying the actual facts from the article you are providing a link to!

And just referring to a person who is named and credentialed in the article as 'a guy' just seems like throwing a layer of extra carelessness on top.

I just can't fathom how someone accomplishes this.

If there's one thing I try to encourage people to do in online discourse in general, it's to recognize that you don't have to guess. You have time to go look up the facts. Things are knowable, you don't have to vaguely gesture in the direction of the truth.

And in this case the op had the source right there! They must have googled up the link and opened the page and copied the URL! The facts were right there, in the next tab!

>I just can't fathom how someone accomplishes this.

Person wakes up and browses interesting stories, remembers semi-relevant story, decides to comment about the similarity and forgets specifics. Realizes right before posting "oh shit I have to cite my sources or else pedants will ratio me into being unable to participate in other conversations" and quickly searches for a recent link that mostly backs up their commentary. Does not think to fact check every detail. Backfires.

This is exactly right, down to the last detail. Impressive.

Three years make all the difference. 1949 would rogue pilot almost causing a war. 1952 is pilot bravely saving lives and being covered up so didn't expand war.

The numbers matter too. Shooting down MIGs happened all the time. Dogfighting seven solo and shooting down four is a huge thing.

If an American was shooting down Migs during WW2 and not during the Korean War, it totally makes sense why the Americans would want to keep it quiet.

2000 and 2002 were just two years apart, inconsequential [to world politics and the state of the world].

2018 and 2020 were just two years apart, and no significant difference in the world economy or health indicators took place across the interval. (/not)

Hum... Was 2001 so long ago that people already forgot it happened?

The GP is saying the same thing as you.

I suspect the HN cohort increasingly has people not born then.

I had a mortgage during the 17-27% interest years of the eighties. I think about that when people kibbitz about inflation these days.

It was during the Korean war, in the active warzone, and the Russian pilots were flying North Korean planes. It's a pretty important point, because this is dramatically different to a US pilot randomly shooting down Migs over Europe in 1949 and that being suppressed!

yeah 1940s lol... US and USSR were allies then. This is not Historian News.

"From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent"

That was 1946 and the start of the cold war

And if the US had started shooting down MiGs in the next couple of years after that the cold war would not have remained cold very long.

If you want to get particular, the Berlin Blockade/Airlift was in the 40s. The Cold War started in the late 40s.

This was my first thought as well. I'm kind of surprised the media is making such a big deal out of this. I would assume, considering how cheap it is to make a stratospheric balloon, it is either fairly common and the US has an equivalent program or its completely inferior to satellites.

The technology is pretty mature, Google ran a whole fleet of them with Project Loon back in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC

> The technology is pretty mature

Luckily with balloons, if you're just going for "somewhere over there" and you have reliable currents at steady elevations then you don't need to worry much about that. So yes the hardware and telemetry is mature.

Accurate navigation of such balloons however was never viable, which is why Alphabet shut down Loon two years ago. Navigation is achieved by inflating and deflating the balloon to rise or lower to catch favorable winds. But the navigational planning algorithms were never good enough.

Wasn't one theory about Roswell that it was some kind of test balloon with crash test dummies? Something about testing for radiation in the upper atmosphere back before everyone and their brother knew how to make a gun style nuclear device?

(Nowadays any idiot with some uranium could make a suitcase nuke, LMAO)

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