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Comment by moose_man | Hacker News Reader

"NORAD detected a radar anomaly and sent fighter aircraft to investigate. Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits. NORAD will continue to monitor the situation."

Interesting, maybe it was a stealth aircraft? NORAD could probably detect a stealth aircraft like the Serbs did in the 1990s, but getting a precise location would be difficult.

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Other articles have reported they've changed how they're filtering radar signals, which could partially explain why more real objects are being found now, but would also result in additional false positives.

> The incursions in the past week have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday, partly addressing a key question of why so many objects have recently surfaced.

> The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.

> “We basically opened the filters,” the official added

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/11/...

I wonder if this means that there is a greater concern over stealth aircraft flying into US airspace, hence the need for greater sensitivity at the cost of losing precision and/or specificity.

I suspect that when the Commander-in-Chief starts asking why things aren't being detected sooner than after penetrating the coastline, then any previous filtering for "quality", as in meeting certain velocity parameters, whether being not too slow, or not "too fast" - i.e. a momentary reflection in two spots now gets interpreted as a high velocity paint instead of the previous two indeterminate and fleeting radar returns that would have been ignored - well, that filter gets turned way down and we end up chasing a lot of ghosts.

Additionally it explains why a balloon made it as far as it did. Extra work, but we're on alert.

Do you have any evidence of a stealth aircraft? Is that just wild speculation? Who would fly a stealth aircraft over Montana (other than the US)? Where would it refuel without being noticed?

> NORAD could probably detect a stealth aircraft like the Serbs did in the 1990s

I'll bet NORAD has better sensors than the Serbs did 25 years ago.

>>other than the US

Would not be the first time that the US left hand did not know what the US right hand was doing with a Top Secret Test of some kind

When else has that happened?

Quite regularly. For top secret info / missions it’s strictly need to know. If you don’t need to know then you don’t know.

China has stealth aircraft.

They may but the GP question was, why would they fly them over Montana and where would they refuel them?

Why do you believe it needs to be refueled over the US? International waters ends 200 miles off the coast and China is less than 8000 miles away. There are jets with that range. Do you believe you’d know if Chinese refuelers were sitting off the coast?

There are military jets with a 16,000 mile range without refueling (assuming your 8,000 mile estimate is correct, and they need to fly back)? Which ones?

US stealth fighters have a ~500 mile range IIRC. I don't know about the B-2 bomber, but it isn't 16,000 miles!

Are you sure about that? Unclassified range of many is 8000 miles. Do you think they’ll tell us the actual range? There’s also in flight refueling. Which means that 8k range puts them right at the coast and just needing a refuel to go home.

More likely an anomaly mixed with an already cautious NORAD due to the past week of incidents.

> getting a precise location would be difficult.

(slightly tangent) and even more difficult to lock on the target. This is actually one of the primary purposes of stealth technologies: enemy can clearly see you on their radar but just can't instruct a SAM or air-to-air missile to shoot you down

More likely a small dense cloud or something.

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