Hacker News Reader

Comment by heyflyguy | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was more clarity on if these are balloons or not.

Yeah, I don't understand the ambiguity from the government and military. They have to have pictures of these things. Show us what they look like. Tell us if they are balloons. Are they under power against the wind? What speed? All these details must be known, it's been days, why aren't they telling us?

Strongly suggests against balloons - mainly because they already shot one down and it was no biggie. Aliens are not impossible any more, but drones of some kind remain the vastly most probable option.

Drone at 40000 feet? That's higher than most airliners - that would need be one heck of a drone, especially given where they have shot it down and how far it would have had to fly.

Much more likely sounding/meteorological balloons - a lot of those are sent up every day, worldwide, with payloads that are roughly cylindrical in shape. And some of them can traverse huge distances, even across oceans, so such "UFO" doesn't need to originate locally at all.

To my understanding the latest object traversed from Montana to Lake Huron in less than 24 hours. Can any such balloon really travel that fast?

The jet stream currently has a strong west to east north east component from Montana to the Great lakes. The winds peed varies greatly depending on altitude, but a floating object can easily be pushed along at speeds in excess of 120mph.

A strong jet stream can exceed 250mph.

NASA’s XL-Calibur travelled over 4,000 km between Sweden and Nunavut in 5-7 days[1]. Montana to Huron is less then half the distance. 24 hours is a bit fast, but not impossible.

https://twitter.com/markp8183/status/1546936037112393728

EDIT: To give a more clear example. It took XL-Calibur a little more then 30 hour to travel from Hudson Bay to Yellowknife. That is not much shorter then some distance between Montana and Huron

It sounded like they are hovering at altitude which is hard to do. And they came from great distance. It would make more sense if they were triangle shaped and flying. Also, there was no balloon, they should be stealthed and not show up on radar.

My suspicion is that the descriptions have been of the payloads. They sound like balloon payloads. Maybe the balloon is low visibility. But doesn't explain why government doesn't mention balloons.

The outside possibility that isn't aliens is anti-gravity. I would strange that anyone who developed anti-gravity would keep secret and use it like this.

I would imagine that if these are small and hard to detect, you may not want everyone to understand the exact extent of your capability to detect them.

The first balloon didn’t have this consideration because it could be seen from the ground.

This seems like an argument to not shoot them down. If we can identify and track them then obviously we can determine their speed. If we can fly by with fighter planes then we can get a visual look. I don't see how we'd be giving anything away about our capabilities by sharing these things.

Yes, although the actions reveal different things. Shooting it down establishes that your capabilities are good enough to do so. But sharing more detail about how you detected or observed it may reveal the limits of your capability. Or it may reveal advanced capability that an adversary is heavily relies on you not being capable of.

Your enemy only needs to be slightly better than your capabilities to beat you. If they can judge it accurately, they can more efficiently spend resources to counter your ability. If they misjudge, they either waste a ton of time and money, or they end up outmatched.

It’s like a game of poker. Those who are good at strategically releasing partial information are at an advantage.

There's a good chance they aren't making that determination before blowing them up (instead checking whether it is known, communicating, etc).

So they call it an object because that's what they know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com