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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

In grad school in astronomy, there was a fellow grad student who was extremely excited after a night's observations that he'd discovered something remarkable -- it was a long hoped for distant galaxy that appeared in his images that night, and had all the right spectral signatures because it appeared in different filters, different exposures, and you could see it there in the image files, raw.

Turned out, it was noise / amplifier signal correlated with the adjacent chip dumping overexposed pixels on readout. He was embarrassed after a professor pointed out (after inspecting the files) that it always appeared on the same exact pixel coordinates on the array, but learned his lesson to try to disprove your own observations with independent tests.

I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. Were the pilots reporting things seen with their eyes, or looking at imaging displays that have been processed. And maybe... were recently illuminated with lasers... hm? There certainly seem to be a pathology of similar reports of "the object never moved in the viewfinder, and would imply the ability to move suddenly at supersonic speeds"

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Frankly, I think the reality is even less interesting than that. US military aviators are trained to be proficient systems operators, but typically (and, I want to stress, very reasonably) have little or no education in EM/EO theory, and don't always understand the assumptions that engineers baked into these systems to optimize them for their primary use cases (which, in the case of targeting pods, is identification and targeting of surface objects--air-to-air capability was something of an afterthought). Knowing a little bit about how these systems work, I think it's pretty obvious why targeting pods wouldn't be able to focus properly in these kinds of circumstances, and how their built-in tracking heuristics could lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions even by well-intentioned operators and analysts.

I can't speak for the radar data, as I've never seen even leaked radar page footage from these events, but for those of you out there who think that what you see on the scope is a perfect analog of the real world, boy do I have some bad news for you...

It's also interesting to me that every single one of these videos I'm aware of has come from what's generally regarded as the least capable and most error-prone targeting pod currently in US service.

I’m reminded of Aeroperú Flight 603.

The pilots suspected their altitude indicator was wrong, so they asked air traffic control to confirm their altitude. They did and it agreed with their own readings so they ignored other indications that they were going to crash into the ocean, which is unfortunately what happened.

Neither the pilots nor air traffic control apparently knew that both readings were supplied by the same faulty source on the plane and sent via the plane’s transponder.

I often think of this when I hear people say that multiple sources indicate something strange. These systems are often intertwined and networked in unintuitive ways and just because something appears on multiple panes of glass does not necessarily mean it’s been independently confirmed.

That's amazing. So ATC didn't have the capability to measure the altitude of any plane themselves?

They can via primary radar, but the default displays secondary radar information (the transponder interrogation) as it tends to be significantly more precise. Surveillance radar has very coarse altitude resolution.

Isn't it a given that if a plane is requesting a read that they want to check their measurement against a different one, though?

ATC probably thought they were giving a different measurement. Especially in older planes, systems aren't particularly well integrated, and most of the time you ask them what they're seeing because you can't check your own Mode C altitude in the cockpit and want to compare it to your barometric altimeter (and yes, they generally do use the same static source, but it isn't atypical for them to read differently).

Thinking about it more, I've never tried asking ATC for an altitude check specifically from primary radar. It may well be that the system isn't set up for it, even if it's technically computable to some degree. When I'm talking coarse, I mean an altitude spread at range that may be measured in miles.

That sounds kind of worrying. It sounds like if a pilot has a malfunctioning altitude meter they can only check it visually or have a completely independent GPS on hand. I don't see what else the crew or the ATC could have done in that instance, given their equipment. I also don't understand why a radar of all things can't give a more precise measurement of altitude. Even a person with binoculars could probably be more precise than +/- 1 mile.

For what it's worth, I'm not particularly worried. My understanding is that the accident was caused by a combination of poor maintenance practices, inadequate preflight procedures, and possibly poor ground procedures by the pilots that led to them taking off with an inoperative pitot-static system. Modern aircraft can also get altitude data from GPS (as you noted), as well as inertial navigation systems and radio altimeters, and generally have redundant pitot-static systems (at least an alternate static air source) for these kinds of contingencies.

Surveillance radars have narrow beam widths in azimuth, but broad in altitude to allow them to quickly survey around them and get good enough awareness of where everyone is. There's always a trade-off between resolution and volume--some military tactical and approach radars have very precise azimuth and altitude capability, at the cost of scan volume/time. Mode C (and now, arguably, ADS-B) was the solution to this problem, allowing ATC radar to have both good position and altitude precision with an acceptable refresh rate, at a non-prohibitive cost.

You'd be surprised--unless your hypothetical binocular observer was really handy with stadiametric ranging, I imagine they'd be nowhere near a mile. They might be able to get a decent azimuth and elevation on a single aircraft, but that's a much different problem than determining position near-simultaneously for a hundred.

Something similar happened with the Hubble telescope's infamous blurry mirror

The manufacturer tried using two instruments to measure the shape of the mirror. One instrument said that the mirror had unacceptable error. The other said it was perfect. The latter instrument was designed to be more precise, so they went with that and ignored the measurements from the other null corrector which disagreed.

The problem was, the more precise null corrector was the same one that was used to help construct the mirror originally. All it could verify was that the mirror was built to the same specs as the null corrector. No one realized that the "better" null corrector itself was off until it was too late.

A barometric altimeter and altitude reporting transponder are self contained units with separate determination of altitude based on pressure. The source in common they share is the static (pressure) system.

In the case of this flight, maintenance tape covered the static ports, rendering all instruments that use the static pressure system, significantly in error. Although there's more than one port, and thus redundancy, the maintenance operation covered all of the ports.

Sensor fusion glitches are high on my personal list of “what could this be explained by”.

There are all the passive system “failure” modes, between optical (and infrared) focusing, sensor noise, radar synthesis, multi system combat data links passing in extra information the system is designed to integrate into targeting/tracking/tasking the sensors. There’s a lot that can go wrong… add active failures like the GP comment mentioned about the astronomical sensor saturation and lasers, and the picture is even messier, a military drone/vehicle could be using active countermeasures like dazzling lasers and phased array RF emitters to try and mess with the pilots, the sensors, and the data links…

At the end of the day I just want the stigma around investigating the root cause of this stuff to go away, it’s like the Hound of the Baskervilles, stuff can genuinely have all the trappings of being supernatural or aliens or whatever… and still turn out to have a mundane explanation when properly investigated. I want the systems engineers and the scientists and the researchers and anyone else who sees stuff like this to log the “bug report” and for people to get to the bottom of things, because as long as we live in a world where weapons like fighter jets and guided missile destroyers are needed and/or in use, I’d like to know the systems and people aiming them at targets are making as few mistakes as humanly possible… which won’t happen if people don’t rigorously investigate and dig out the root causes of stuff like these UAP incidents.

> but for those of you out there who think that what you see on the scope is a perfect analog of the real world, boy do I have some bad news for you...

What about when the radar data, the pilot's own eyes, and the targeting pod data all complement each other? What about when the Navy has a patent for craft that can fly the way these 3 data sources described? What about when the "unidentified" craft is coming from San Clemente Island (a private Navy island near the training theater)? Why did the most compelling event occur during a Navy training mission where the purpose was to test new radar equipment?

I could dismiss any one, maybe even two of these, as a coincidence. But trying to write off all of these simultaneous events as errors and coincidences, that's harder to believe than the conspiracy theory. It seems obvious, that in at least one of these reports, it is an undisclosed Navy craft.

Or an undisclosed radar/laser capability. Plasma can reflect radar and it emits light - a focused phased array could create local plasma somewhere that other craft pick up.

Ofc, once you#ve done that you may not want third parties to know. Something as banal as 'we made air glow a few miles away' can expose capabilities of some vital systems that you don't want third parties to know. Edit: I mean, with that information, someone could do some napkin math on what can still be seen and what can't (by e.g. a naval radar suite, focusing on a spot in the air using a phased array).

Anecdotal obviously but I’m in the industry (I’m assuming you are as well from the nature of your comment) and I work with many current and former pilots and I think this characterization is a little unfair. Many military pilots do come from engineering backgrounds since a degree is generally a requirement for pilot training, and an engineering degree is often viewed as a good qualifier for becoming a pilot. Military pilot training is also highly technical in nature and involves rigorous classroom learning on the underlying physics and systems of tactical aircraft. But aside from this, my experience is that technically competent (not necessarily a given) pilots can have a better practical understanding of these sensor systems than the engineers that designed them because the designers very rarely get a comprehensive picture about what it’s actually like to use them in combat scenarios, simulated or otherwise. The problem in my mind with simply writing off the TICTAC and GIMBLE incidents as a bad reading of noise on the scope is that, from multiple pilot testimonies, dozens of tracks were observed via radar, ir/eo, and visually (like just the eyeballs). I’m not saying that these are craft that are violating the known laws of physics, I personally have other theories, but I’m not sure it’s just noisy sensors either.

You’d be hard pressed to be a naval aviator without a degree. Even if you’re prior enlisted, you’re going to go back to school to get some kind of 4 year degree before getting a commission.

Maybe a long time ago you could attend OCS as prior enlisted, but I think we’re way past those days: All service branches have their pick of officers with degrees to send for pilot or navigator/RIO training.

Fair--we've both seen different parts of the elephant. I agree that military flight training is extremely rigorous, but I'd argue that it's so broad it has to gloss over a lot of technical detail in order to focus on developing the skills and instincts that matter in combat.

Based on the videos and reports I've seen, most or all of these cases involve sensor operation outside of typical A/A and A/G workflows, where the type of detailed technical knowledge that the system designers have could be more useful than years of practical experience. I've heard (and told) enough sea stories to be skeptical of eyewitness testimony (not that I think the aircrew who reported seeing this stuff are lying, but I've been humbled often enough by my own fallible recollections), and none of the publicly available footage I've seen of these events strikes me as anything more than a confluence of sensor limitations and (very understandable) human factors.

There are a number of reasons I'm glad the government is running these kinds of reports to ground, but I think wildly credulous reporting (particularly the "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens" interviews by a handful of aviators, but even presenting advanced adversary technology as the sane middle ground) is blowing this way out of proportion. We're already taking it way more seriously than it deserves, and there are plenty of other alligators closer to the boat.

Throughout my already 20 year IT career, I can't even count how many times I've come across extremely paranoid explanations, often in the verge of insanity, of regular computer behavior like basic non obvious algos or glitches. From people otherwise normal. What is interesting, almost never I could change person's mind, once toxic explanation is in.

Recently, with all that internet marketing and real surveillance tech, this worsened a lot. Some humans are just wired differently.

This speaks to both sides of the problem in getting to the truth.

On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speeds").

On the other hand, we use sensationalism to dismiss accurate reports ("You said your radar showed extremely high velocity, therefore what are you reporting, a UFO?").

The new approach seems best: report, collect, and analyze the data, and see where it goes.

You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted. Why is it that alien spaceships (let's call them what people actually think is being discussed, and not just any random flying thing that we don't know what it is) only show up on equipment when you can barely tell what you're looking at, and never clearly and unambiguously from multiple places?

I look at it from the opposite perspective.

If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful?

The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security.

Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.

You're talking about a different interpretation of the word "UFO" than I used above. Ever since those reports came out some years ago of pilots reporting UFOs, the implication has been very strong that "UFO" doesn't just mean "here's something that showed up on the sensors that we don't know what it is".

Yes, the military should investigate all reports of UFOs in the strict sense to see if they've found some new piece of equipment from a foreign nation. I assume they've done that before releasing the footage to the public after figuring out what it is they actually detected.

The current furore, from the more reasonable heads in Congress, is that the military has historically not done that.

They had (a) no centralized collection point or widely used reporting mechanism, (b) no staffed office tasked with investigations (afaik, only the Navy had an office, and it was ~3 bodies with other duties), & (c) no periodic review.

They essentially ignored it as a potential problem. So Indiana Jones, "top men" type stuff.

Unfortunately, a lot of the public debate is "aliens", because media and idiots. But there's a serious underlying problem.

Fair enough. That is pretty dumb and rather a major oversight IMO.

We went from UFO to UAP and it feels like the former has become a dysphemism (forgive me, it’s my first time using the word) or a pejorative. And now here you are going straight for the”A” word :D

In my experience the only people using the word “alien” are people like you: the dismissers. My belief is that there is something strange going on, but we do not know what.

Getting some people to even admit that much is a struggle, even after 70+ years of it happening.

To me, just saying that it's something "strange" would be a hard sell, because I would have to agree that it's definitely nothing mundane shot such that I can't recognize it for what it is. I could agree that we don't know what some of these things are, as long our degree of ignorance is properly bounded. I don't think there's equal chance that they're, say, bigfoots on hoverboards or birds. "Look, this thing here looks like it might be some kind of secret Chinese UAV because it moves like human aircraft move but is too small to fit a person" is something that I think is worth looking into. "This looks like it could be a tear in spacetime" isn't. Nor is "we have no idea whatsoever what this is".

Sorry for the pedantry, but if they are flying around in the earth's atmosphere then they are not "spaceships" even if they are being operated by extraterrestrials. Likewise, NASA's Mars Helicopter is not a spacesheep even though it is operated by extramartians. I think it's good to get that terminology right so as not to confuse naive readers into assuming that the things that are putatively observed as UFOs crossed space to get here: they may have been constructed on earth by aliens that arrived 500 years ago, or whatever.

My personal guess is that there probably are extraterrestrials on the earth observing us but they are competently remaining hidded and have nothing to do with any UFO observation by a human. Of course I don't have any good evidence for that: it's just a hunch.

>Sorry for the pedantry, but if they are flying around in the earth's atmosphere then they are not "spaceships" even if they are being operated by extraterrestrials.

I'll see your pedantry and raise you my own pedantry. The fact that a hypothetical craft flies around in an atmosphere does not imply that it's not a spaceship. A vessel could conceivably be capable of flying through some fluid at one time and through the vacuum of space at another, and would thus be called a spaceship. For example, the Space Shuttle was a spaceship even when it was operating under aerodynamic forces. Since we're talking about alien ships, they would have to be alien spaceships, because otherwise we would have to accept that these aliens have the necessary infrastructure and facilities to land their spaceships somewhere (some kind of alien spaceport on Earth?), disembark, and board their alien aircraft to fly around Earth's atmosphere, which is an even more ridiculous idea.

> You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted.

Why? It costs almost nothing to just collect data. How do you know they're not witnessing advanced tech from another nation? Or maybe it's a pervasive flaw in our sensors. Seems like those are both well within the military's mandate. Even if it's just an interesting new physical phenomenon, it would be great to have some evidence.

Yes, good point, this is as much a 'psychological' phenom as anything else.

Particularly in the areas of populism and conspiracy theory.

I would love to hear what some of these explanations were

Mostly "Someone did it on purpose". Usually person they don't like, or rival department, or government, overall situation ranging from light computer illiteracy to full blown X-Files scenario.

The article is alarmist but we have no sign of malevolent (or even intentional) behavior. We need to wait for more information.

The tic tac was seen by naked eye though:

> During a routine training mission in 2004, Dietrich and her then-commanding officer had noticed an unusual "churning" of the ocean surface before seeing "a smooth, white oblong object resembling a large Tic Tac breath mint flying at high speed over the water."

It was seen

- by multiple fighter jet pilots (in different planes)

- picked up by the fighter jet's radar

- picked up by the USS Nimitz's radar.

So yeah...

Fighter jet pilot is a self-avowed prankster and “class clown” (his words). One of the people who wrote the software for that radar system is his good buddy, best man at his wedding, and was on duty nearby on that day.

It could all be a big prank.

Some of the eyewitnesses saw what they saw on, wait for it, a radar screen. Well technically it was another technology not exactly radar but I forget the name. [edit: FLIR, which may or may not be a type of radar… I know as much about this as I know about little green men.] But color me unconvinced.

And sure there are other embellishments to the story but we really don’t know what’s real here and what’s not.

Case dismissed, natch figured it out. Everyone go home and stop asking questions.

Coincidence theory at its finest.

I know, right? Just by coincidence the little green men decided to single out some pranksters to reveal themselves to.

Definitely the most likely explanation. /s

Sure, so the best idea is clearly to just chalk it up to a prank and ignore it rather than try to prove it.

Nor do you that there were any embellishments whatsoever.

Wait, how do the logistics of this prank work? His buddy patched the plane's software on the fly (ha!) without anyone else noticing? Or he inserted some "prank" code into the main codebase, got it past what I'm sure is ton of code review hurdles without anyone noticing, then got it deployed to the plane before his pilot friend took flight that day?

If you build a system, you'll know its flaws. A common flaw with radar systems is them detecting something that's not a plane as a plane - e.g., the sun over the horizon.

If he built the software that automatically rejects such mistaken identifications, he also knows in which situations you'll get a false positive reading, and can tell his friend the perfect timing for the prank.

One might think such an elaborate prankster would keep his benign pranks to himself when going on a podcast tour to protect appearances.

Going on a podcast tour to protect appearances? One would think he went on the podcast tour to seek attention, as pranksters are wont to do.

I meant he probably wouldn't publicly talk about his pranking history on his podcast tour if he wants to con everyone.

I think there’s some subtlety there you’re missing, and that is that there’s is a kind of pleasure and prankster humor in revealing to the more perceptive subset of the audience that you pulled an epic con, while still keeping the con alive for another less perceptive subset.

For an example of this kind of prankster game see Woz’s short videos about how he sources (actually real, but he intentionally does not say that) two dollar bills in pads from a local printer “who gets them from another very high quality printer.” He knows some people get what he’s doing and others don’t, and that’s part of the fun.

And some people transition during the exposition from being people who are being duped, to people who realize they were temporarily duped. That’s another part of the fun.

> Were the pilots reporting things seen with their eyes, or looking at imaging displays that have been processed

There are cases where multiple pilots are seeing an object with their eyes, while ship radar is picking it up, and also aircraft infra-red is picking it up at the same time. Multiple aircraft, multiple sensors, multiple sets of eyes.

Not only that, there is at least one case where a pilot engaged with the object, and the object responded with evasive maneuvers.

It's worth mentioning also the infamous go fast and swivel videos have been explained.

And both revealed that several pilots we mislead by the same simple phenomena. And it wasn't a pilot who explained it but engineers who actually knew how the sensors worked.

Absolutely they have not, no credible debunking of those videos exist.

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

It's completely disingenuous to just link that video as an authoritative source (when it's not... in any way).

You should also put Ryan Grave's response to that video - https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0

Except for that the reply doesn't actual counter any of the analysis made in the sceptic video, but instead criticises Mike for taking a sceptic approach and disregarding the audio from the pilots (because they essentially see the same thing as we see in the video). This is the typical approach one sees over and over again from most people invested in some sort of conspiracy theory, they never reply to technical criticism, but instead either switch to some other "evidence" or criticise the sceptic for "not taking an open minded approach".

> because they essentially see the same thing as we see in the video

If the pilots see the same thing with their eyes then that significantly undermines West's theory, because human eyes wouldn't have the same visual artifacts as these sensors. It would have to be an extreme coincidence for this all to line up just right across multiple sensor systems and human eyes as well. No impossible, but very implausible.

But they couldn't the video was incredibly zoomed in, it is too far to see with the naked eye. The video actually explains this.

It could be like a lens flare / bokeh that rotates with the camera, but that doesn't change the fact that it originated from a flying object. A camera artifact doesn't rule out that the camera was still tracking something, even if the remarks about it "rolling" and maneuvering were off base. Just as you'll see lens flare when you film the sun - the sun is real even though the flare streaks on video are artifacts.

You're right, the camera was tracking something: an airplane.

stfu

Interesting. Source?

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

It's completely disingenuous to just link that video as an authoritative source (when it's not... in any way).

You should also put Ryan Grave's response to that video - https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0

And his response is not providing any confidence what so ever, if only he had build simulator to explain what people seen.

That's not the source for the claim though... he said "engineers who actually knew how the sensors worked."

And you linked a video by a video game dev.

Who cares what his credentials are? His arguments are rational and make more sense than any other explanation. It sure is weird how much UFO-ologists suddenly care about credentialism as soon as a video game developer starts shitting on their party.

It is not even verbal argument, he (and others) did the math (open source), so only way to dispute his argument is by math too, irrespective how he is, or even what language he speaks. (aliens probably use math too)

I’m just asking for the source that the original poster referenced. If you don’t want to provide the source referenced, that’s fine… but if you don’t have the source then I don’t know what you’re adding here with this reply.

Please provide references to this analysis. There are plenty of folks here who'd love to read this.

Gofast, FLIR and Gimbal all have very compelling explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8

Mick West has reported on this all over the place.

Interesting, yet I find David Fravor's response to the points that Mick makes (on the Lex Fridman podcast) quite compelling.

It's possible that this entire endeavour (the military witnesses and the release of the videos by the pentagon) is one huge psyop, but given the number of years, the number of individuals involved, that quickly starts getting into conspiracy theory territory itself.

This is untrue.

It's incredible that armchair experts can dismiss something as a glitch from corroborated observations from some of the best aerial operators of the most powerful and well funded military on earth.

Yes, glitches exist, but don't yet account for all cases. One can read the congressional reports that say the same.

I thought the whole point of this article is that those reports are uninteresting because so much information is withheld.

I’m also curious to know if there are reports similar to these coming from civilian or commercial pilots. I mean, it doesn’t take a too gun pilot to observe a tic tac shaped flying object but it seems to me that it’s all coming from the us military who share similar technology.

There is one other group of UAP sightings I’m aware of and it’s from civilians and it seems to come almost strictly from civilians in North America.

The tic-tacs in particular are observed around military areas which I presume has a civilian no-fly zone.

But yes, to be fair, there is a selection bias here in a sense.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

For all their powerfullness and funding, I expect something better than 240p imagery. Particularly when it happens all the time in one of the most heavily instrumented naval test ranges on earth.

But that’s just me.

What claim is being made? It's just a matter of taking these observations seriously.

Reminds me of the mid 00's "flying rods" that were simply insects being captured in flight by digital cameras. The camera whould capture what looked like a semi-transparent corkscrew zipping through the air.

Not at all. The tic-tac was recorded by radars; infrared from the plane; and seen by two experienced USAF pilots.

> I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects.

come on, man. at some point, after enough of these reports, toeing the line you're toeing starts to look ludicrous. these are trained observers, pilots who know what to expect in the sky. and do not take lightly that there is still a certain amount of embarrassment (a social cost) to even coming forward, so to even make this claim is still a brave act at this point.

At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece (NOTE: literally only 13 minutes of your time, not "an hour", although admittedly, the show's name might suggest otherwise) about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY

Darn it, I hate predictability. Why is it always, always, always "just watch this 'short' hour-long video of random people talking with fake authority and undeserved confidence", and never "here just check out this Cochrane meta study and review data & evidence linked"

(I made the mistake of clicking and now YouTube thinks I want to see "this man shows evidence usa possesses exotic matter", "real photos of JFK killer" and "Chilling alien messages encoded in ancient tombs". That's not the bubble I want to be in!! :-D)

Go to your history and delete it. I assume this does little to nothing for ads, but it definitely does affect suggestions.

I like the occasional "cute animal" video, but if you leave one in your history, YouTube becomes a cute animal machine.

Hah this is so true. I always watch stuff like this in an incognito mode browser.

Fascinating! I assumed it wouldn't work - sure they'd take it away from history view, but keep it as a data point regardless of deletion

The name of the show is 60 Minutes, a popular and generally reputable* US news program.

The actual clip is 13 minutes.

*Because I know it's coming, yes, they aren't perfect; but considering they've been going 55 years they're far better than most. I found they were pretty balanced in this clip - skeptical but not dismissive.

> just watch this 'short' hour-long video

it's literally a 13 minute video, man. The SHOW is named "60 Minutes" and it's rather legendary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes and it usually features a number of stories in that timeframe, not just 1. I hate predictability too, such as assuming I'm one of "those people forcing you to watch a whole hour of BS" just because you like being a debunker.

It's also dealing with US Military folks, which are an honorable lot (I served 4 years in the USAF, so I take these people seriously... integrity is HIGHLY HIGHLY encouraged)

Also, when you're dealing with eyewitness testimony in particular, video evidence is natural because the delivery of this type of communication is best done with the entire presentation of the person doing it, because words on paper alone are distorting.

Well said. In another comment thread there are two people slinging links to YouTube videos and criticizing legitimacy of the others’ linked video. I’m looking at both of the videos and I don’t recognize any of the people talking as experts of anything.

Also 60 minutes has a lot of credibility issues. And is not generally looked upon as a rigorous journalism source.

People will downvote because they don’t have any leg to stand on and when someone doesn’t agree with them they feel personally attacked. So they result to downvoting as a way of winning.

Apparently it's extremely hard for most people to land somewhere between "completely accepting" something and "completely dismissing" something. No one's asking you to "completely accept" a claim based only on this 60 Minutes piece, but let's suppose it has pushed the needle a little further away from "completely dismissing" for a bunch of people.

> At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this

https://youtu.be/VCH7BWGpl5s

How many experienced sailors once reported seeing mermaids? Until we understand the source of these sightings, it's entirely plausible pilots are all seeing something that doesn't actually exist for some reason or another. We won't know why until the phenomena is no longer mysterious, but there's always a high likelihood a given unknown is mundane, as opposed to fantastical or extraterrestrial.

The article is right we need to destigmatize reporting and collect data: Because whether the origin of the issue is earthly or not, we need to understand it.

How many were ridiculed for telling about their sights of giant squid until the day the first one was caught?

giant squid have a biological premise; they're just bigger squid. Their origin can be strongly guessed. You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

we have yet to find a plethora of ocean-dwelling smaller mermaids and 'tic-tacs'. In fact, we've yet to discover solid evidence of the existence of either phenomena, regardless of size.

Chances start to diminish in the guessing game when you're trying to forecast the completely novel/unknown/under-witnessed.

'human effects' start to cloud things a lot more when we start talking about religion/ghouls/goblins/time-travelers/bainshees/sirens/etc.

mermaids are just women swimming in the ocean

Giant squid was dismissed as tall tales for hundreds of years.

Would a mermaid creature be something improbable to an ancient mariner, who hadn't even heard of anything like a monkey before he saw them with his own eyes?

> You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

Would you then say it is probable that species of giant shark exist to this day?

When mariners tell tails of giant squid so huge they can devour ships, they are rightly dismissed as tall tales. When they tell a story about a squid that was "about as big as a person but with really long tentacles", I don't think that ever got nearly as much ridicule.

They are much larger than a man, both in size and weight. And that's using those who have been caught. They are large enough to attack whales and small ships. I think there's more mythical creatures to be found in the ocean, specifically giant sharks.

>You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

And there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?

> Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?

This is absolutely ludicrous. It doesn't matter how many stars are in the sky or how likely life bearing planets are in the galaxy. There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

>There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

The universe is 13 billion years old. The Milky Way is about 100K lightyears across. Suppose another species could travel at 90% of light speed. Then we're looking at maybe 110,000 years necessary to colonize the galaxy -- only a tiny fraction of 13 billion years.

I've been following this UAP stuff for a while, and as far as I can tell no one is claiming that the UAPs defy all known physical laws (i.e. I've seen no claims of violation of conservation of energy, 2nd law of thermodynamics, FTL travel, etc. -- though, someone should do the math on those transit times to check the FTL travel one). Just that the propulsion & cloaking work in ways we can't explain. Show Aristotle a jet fighter and he'll have a similar reaction.

Supposing that the UAPs arise from a civ that arose when the universe was about 12 billion years old, i.e. 1 billion years ago. That's about 1 billion years of technological development. Can we really put confident bounds on what could be achieved in terms of propulsion and cloaking with 1 billion years of research?

Not to mention, "that life is appearing to deliberately be almost completely elusive for no clear reason, in a way that's eerily similar to other superstitions like mermaids, fairies, Santa Claus, and Big foot."

Do active duty jet pilots report seeing mermaids, fairies, Santa Claus, or Big foot on a regular basis?

> mermaids

Professional sailors do.

> big foot

Professional park rangers do.

They're all full of shit by the way. Self-deluding or purposely tricking the public for laughs.

We've got defense bigwigs backing the jet pilots up. Are there corresponding bigwigs backing up the sailors/rangers?

Were the sailor/ranger claims treated as credible by a source at least as good as 60 Minutes?

Well they are seeing something There is video evidence which makes the mermaid analogue a bad one.

What the huh? Have you never seen Splash? Or the little mermaid? We have all sorts of video evidence. /s

I believe the generally accepted theory is sailors may have seen manatees. Which is to say, they saw something, just not what they thought they saw.

How long did it take until we confrimed ball lightning and the weird things it does? And then how much longer until we have an explanation?

Weird shit exists. Shrug.

However, eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. We know and have proved this over and over and over.

The "problem" with pilots is that getting marked as "mentally unstable" can get you grounded. So, do you report every strange thing you think you see or not?

> How long did it take until we confrimed ball lightning and the weird things it does?

We still don't have direct evidence of ball lightning, but it's taken seriously nonetheless. The comparison is apt here.

I thought we finally captured real pictures of lightning doing weird "ball lightning-like" things given how many scientific monitoring cameras there now are.

I could be wrong, though, as I don't follow it scientifically.

Perhaps I should have chosen "rogue waves" instead as something weird that we had lots of eyewitness testimony of yet took us ages to finally confirm.

Wikipedia page lists one possible direct detection a few years ago, but that's still being debated. We have lab generated plasma phenomena that are similar to ball lightning but those conditions seem unlikely to exist in our natural environment.

You know what takes literally infinite more courage? Being able to walk it back when absolutely spot on explanations are given by outside sources after you spend years on the conspiracy circut making your experience the central point of your entire identity.

There is no explanation that could ever get this guy to admit he was wrong. He's trapped.

This comment - interesting though it is - has irked me.

To me it's sometimes amazing the lengths people will go to in order to insist something they can't believe must be because another party is at best mistaken, or at worst lying.

The article states that UAP were likely - in the view of the author who is speaking from personal experience and knowledge of incidents and people involved - witnessed by 50-60 people "every day".

The unclassified material records UAP from multiple sources including naked eye and two completely different sensor technologies - radar and infrared.

And yet, here we are. "Maybe there was just a glitch with the sensors".

No. No glitch. No sensor malfunction. No lone guy on weird meds.

Every day, UAP are being witnessed by credible, trained witnesses from multiple sources, and are not being mitigated because people fail to take them entirely seriously.

The article states that this is a major national security problem for the US. Too true. If these start appearing near a Russian ICBM silo, do we entirely trust - without figuring out what they are - that they aren't going to trigger a nuclear war?

It needs to be taken seriously. Hand-waving it away as mistaken people or flawed equipment despite professional men and women insisting they have already discounted those factors is an embarrassment to their professionalism and candour. It takes guts to talk about this.

And let's just remember these aren't tinfoil hat wearing stoners: they're service people sworn to protect their country screaming out "hey, you need to look at this, because we can't mitigate for this, and it's dangerous".

However, this isn't new, it's been culturally normal for decades.

If I told you that one USAAF officer who had served at Roswell Army Air Field at the time of "the incident" in 1947 had since come forward and said "Look, I was scared about losing my pension so I didn't say anything at the time, but the truth is there was a cover-up, and we couldn't really identify what that thing that crashed was but it wasn't ours and it didn't seem Soviet. People were scared because that base was the largest base for the Strategic Air Command, and admitting that weird unidentified objects could just get into airspace around there and we couldn't do anything about it would have terrified the public", you'd think about it and go "sure, one guy, not buying it entirely".

What if I told you ten individuals had all come forward - some with death bed confessions - and without evidence of collusion and for no payment or reward (not even a TV interview), had said similar things? What if they categorically insisted the updated explanation - not a weather balloon but an early warning radar system - was also not viable, because they were familiar with all those systems and this wasn't that?

What about a hundred ex-service people? A hundred accounts like that, some of them notarised statements to be released after their death? Or made shortly before last rites when they knew the pension couldn't be withdrawn? Would a hundred people doing that make you think "glitch" or "human error"?

The actual number is just over 600 right now. Seriously, _six hundred_ people have insisted that there was a significant security threat that never really got resolved, and about a dozen of them attest to life forms they couldn't really describe as human being present at the site.

Perhaps that's all too much for you, so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal".

It's taken 70 years to get to the point where we can start talking about this a little more openly. Let's not close this debate down again now.

Is any of it ET in origin? Probably not. Tic-tacs might be drone tech. Roswell might have been Soviet after all. But we'll never know if we don't start showing a bit more curiosity rather than reflexing to "probably not real".

Three Men Make a Tiger[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger

I’ll counter this story with the entire foundation of Bayesian statistics.

This isn’t an example of cognitive bias if the information is from independent “readings”, from sources that are not motivated to deceive.

> ...so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal".

Those videos are getting old now. If there was something to this stuff and it were really as commonplace as folks are saying we would be seeing much better imagery (at least) by now. Not to mention the fact that this stuff would not be limited to American military observers.

The fact is these are pilots who observe the things they're trained to observe with the very job-specific tools they've been trained to use. They don't have tools for arbitrary scientific observations. However, if it's sooo common, then yeah, we should expect that someone in some country will start properly taking measurements on these phenomena... but so far it's been crickets.

You do know UAP being reported by military pilots is not a solely US thing, right?

And it being “old” does not mean we should increase or lower our expectations of one explanation or another.

This article is telling you people are trying to properly take and report measurements but there is a stigma to doing so. The whole point of the article is that science is being denied a chance to explain something that could have very serious consequences because of attitudes like, well, frankly, yours.

> If there was something to this stuff and it were really as commonplace as folks are saying we would be seeing much better imagery (at least) by now.

If you don't understand a phenomenon then you have basis upon which to speculate under what conditions you will or will not see it, and thus make any statistical guesses about the probability of detecting it. Ball lightning still has no direct evidence but plenty of indirect evidence.

> Not to mention the fact that this stuff would not be limited to American military observers.

You mean like these:

* https://www.the-sun.com/news/3048770/ufos-china-un-beijing-p...

600? Twice that many people attended my Berenstein Bears convention.

It just seems to be the same guy going on the podcast circuit talking about the Tic Tacs, and all I see is a video with a black blob in the centre. Have you got any links to back up your claims about all these people telling their stories?

The explainable ones are boring. The unexplainable 1% are the exciting ones.

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