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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

The Nimitz Incident of 2004(?).

Extremely detailed visual and sensor events.

Tons of human witnesses. Tons of activity.

There was a detailed Reddit thread on the incident from a Seaman many, many years ago long before news of the Tic Tac came out.

I’m on mobile but perhaps someone else can paste the thread URL.

Could be an elaborate hoax but that’s one heck of a long con game.

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The issue with all these reports is that there is a distinct lack of detail surrounding the sighting. At most its visual reports and very blurry IR footage. Zero mention of anything else.

Lets take an example of the Tic Tac from the incident, that was supposedly moving very fast.

If it had a physical presence, ie could interact with the world, it would seem very likely that pilots would describe the resultant shockwave. Depending on the possibilities of the propulsion system, its highly likely that you would get EM interference, possibly even some physical disturbance if the craft came close to the observing plane.

If it didn't have a physical presence, like it was folding space or something and traveling in a bubble, then it seems very, very strange that an advanced civilization can fold space to effectively travel without any impact on the world, but let the EM radiation that is light/heat leak out. You would think they could just be fully invisible.

Maybe they are normally fully invisible, but even alien spaceships can have malfunctions every now and then. Perhaps they didn't realize the cloak system was off.

It’s weird, given the premise of seeing something alien, that you would assume properties of their propulsion or which emmissions they are making.

Sure, if the thing is some new earth tech or natural phenomena there are plenty of assumptions you can make. But in the face of something else?

The point is that you can make any number of stories about aliens trying to explain the phenomenon, and there would be some that would be way more believable then some object breaking pretty well established known physical laws with the only explanation that "aliens have ADVANCED SCIENCE"

For example, Aliens living among us for a while, undetected, and having the ability to place false memories in peoples heads because they mapped out how human brain works down to the neuron level (thanks to their massive compute clusters) is way more believable.

Why does it have to be off world tech? Take a smartphone back enough years and people are going to be similarly blown away.

Also you act like the science and the laws are settled but we all know science doesn't work like that. New discoveries happen all the time its that for the laws of physics those changes don't happen often.

What laws of physics revelations will the next Newton or Einstein offer us?

For a smartphone to be fundamentally unexplainable by relevant experts one would have to go back more than 100-200 years, I think. The first trans Atlantic radio transmission was in 1902, for example. Though I guess even the experts of the day might struggle to believe that the device is practically realizable, since it probably would defy many a conception of what is doable (if not theorically possible). There are some things now that seem impossible, which in 200 years might be commonplace. Idk, maybe residential grade or even portable nuclear power.

> There are some things now that seem impossible, which in 200 years might be commonplace.

Like flying very fast without producing a shockwave and only leaking some residual light and heat?

Man how awesome would a home reactor be.

The most plausible explanation that they could be fully invisible but chose not to be I've heard so far is from Robin Hanson, but there are several parts and that alone lowers its probability. Still, fun to think about, and also addresses things like how they could be here/find us at all, why are they here, what do they want to achieve. I'll risk a summary rather than just linking out... First they would be pan-spermia siblings from our stellar nursery, so they evolved in the same galaxy and could find their stellar siblings among all other stars. They're many years more advanced than us but for some reason they have a strong norm against expanding and rearranging our galaxy and beyond to their desires. We're still around so they don't want to wipe us out without reason, but we can guess that if we get ideas and capabilities of becoming grabby, they're here to nip it in the bud. Being sort of impressive but also mysterious can eventually let us know they are there without revealing too much since we could easily collectively find something out about them to hate and think of them as enemies. If we admire them instead we're more likely to try emulation including adopting a norm against spreading out to the stars as fast as we can before even more matter becomes unreachable or some other aliens from farther away galaxies arrive here in several hundred million years.

One benefit of this explanation is it predicts we'll see more of these strange phenomena even as our technology gets better and the possibility of simply being mistaken is driven way further down. If we stop seeing them suspiciously around the same time as big advances in sensor and sensor integration tech, all the more reason to bet on old observations being mistaken/hoaxes/conspiracies than actually aliens.

To your last point of seeing them less with more advanced sensors, wouldn’t you be able to say otherwise as well? Given that we have the higher capability to detect it would behoove a sufficiently advanced intelligence to stray away from that region. So I don’t think you can conclude with higher probability that it implies a hoax.

> If it didn't have a physical presence, like it was folding space or something and traveling in a bubble, then it seems very, very strange that an advanced civilization can fold space to effectively travel without any impact on the world, but let the EM radiation that is light/heat leak out.

I'm not sure why you're speculating on unknowable alien motives. The only thing that matters is agreeing on whether there is something unusual here that requires an explanation. If it turns out to be aliens, then you can speculate on their motives.

Weren't there only four witnesses? The pilots were the only ones who saw anything with their own eyes. And there's been no release of sensor data or video, so it's hard to judge its quality. (The 'FLIR1' video was taken later, by different pilots who did not see their object visually, and simply shows a distant hot object slowly moving left, with no inexplicable manoeuvers.) That the ship radar was purportedly bouncing between maximum altitude and reasonable altitude suggests a software or hardware issue, or electronic interference.

The original appears to have been deleted, but you may be referring to https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1qyu5i/my_ufo_encount...

It starts by saying..."...I am relaying information and supporting circumstances, I did not see a UFO personally. However, it is an interesting story."

This one? https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1qyu5i/my_ufo_encount...

Check out Joe Rogan episode 1361 with Commander David Fravor (who witnessed the UFO first-hand). They show the footage and Cmdr. Fravor talks through it around the 24 minute mark. Pretty fascinating stuff.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/16If5PVe6ouxeDwNbtu0iC?si=8...

> The Nimitz Incident of 2004(?).

The Tic Tac UFO? That's probably one of the best explained events (debunked). Short answer is that there was sense misreading and a gimbal lock. Some people even simulated it[0]. I wouldn't call this an elaborate hoax, but an optical illusion and an event that took some expertise to understand. Expertise that a pilot wouldn't have.

I should add that finding that link was nontrivial. Faster through Google but searching through YouTube just came up with UFO videos and no debunking. This is probably part of the problem.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

And how does a gimbal lock simultaneously show up on multiple sensor systems across warships?

Your retort is phrased poorly, but I don’t understand the downvotes here - the footage from this episode was made by fighter jets who were dispatched to investigate a radar signal, and the pilot said they had visual contact. That’s three distinct records and/or a whole lot of marines fucking with us.

I mean there is no denial that SOMETHING was out there. The debunking refers to the performance of the target which is being shown to be safely within the capabilities of contemporary human technology and not requiring "aliens" or "unknown technology" to achieve.

This is the guy who headed up the AATIP (UAP) task force for the Pentagon.

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

He lists some pretty amazing capabilities around 2:10.

Before speaking authoritatively as a debunker, you should be careful about accuracy. The video you linked is not of the alleged Tic Tac, it is a completely separate incident known as GIMBAL. The only public data on the Tic Tac UFO is the FLIR video.

The Nimitz event is far from “debunked”.

We have multiple naval aviator eye witnesses of the physical object, with testimony (fravor and the female wingman, I forget her name)

We have testimony of the Princeton’s AEGIS radar operator that these things were “popping in at 80k feet and dropping to sea level in a few seconds”, that “they disappear on radar and the sub would get a ping in the same area tracking 200+ knots underwater”

We have the intentionally degraded video of the same object from another intercept (the people who went out after fravor, his jet didn’t have recording capability). This is the video a certain washed up video game developer claims to have debunked by pointing a flashlight at a webcam.

This operation was testing a new version of the navy’s most advanced radar/integrated tracking system at that time (2004) that was substantially more powerful/sensitive than anything that came before it. Make of that what you will.

> the female wingman, I forget her name

Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich

That’s it, thanks!

> The Nimitz event is far from “debunked”.

But he googled $Event + Debunked and watched 2 minutes of the first explanation that came up. Mick West said it's debunked so it must be so, after all, any good skeptic will click the first link and believe any debunk instantly because that's the science way^tm

It is rather ironic

i love military footage debunk videos, where the debunker makes layman assumptions about how a particular highly classified sensor works and the idiot pilots just don't know how to use it properly

Mick West is a layman; a former software engineer. Not sure why you would trust his "expertise" over one of America's top pilots. Also I strongly question West's biases. His whole schtick is saying everything is a hoax and heres why; this leads to confirmation bias when your conclusion is that it is an optical illusion from the onset of the investigation.

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