Military unable to determine how the objects were kept aloft | Hacker News Reader

Military unable to determine how the objects were kept aloft

reuters.com

51 pointsmach1ne55 comments

I've seen the phrase "moving at wind speeds" in a few of the word salads tossed by the press. That does strongly suggest, given our current knowledge, that the objects were kept aloft by buoyancy, being lighter than the air around them.

This feels like early days of COVID, when common sense evaporated like spit on a hot griddle and the Narrative became the goal of itself.

>This feels like early days of COVID, when common sense evaporated like spit on a hot griddle and the Narrative became the goal of itself.

What is the narrative obfuscating?

A valid question. It could be obfuscation, ignorance, incompetence or confusion.

It's possible we won't know "who knew what, when" for 1~3 decades.

Its a distraction. There are far worse catastrophic events happening right now than a few stray kids' toys being blown away by multi-million dollar death machines.

The Ohio catastrophe, Epsteins client list, the Pfizer revelations .. all of these things are more important than trash falling over the USA.

It must be fun being a General and messing with the media when they ask stupid questions.

General: "We don't know the origin of these objects."

Reporter: "So they are ships sent by aliens?"

General: "Well we don't know the origin of these objects, they could come from anywhere."

BREAKING NEWS: MILITARY SHOOTS DOWN SUSPECTED ALIEN SHIP.

Chinese balloons ANTHRAX DISPENSERS

Looks like the current news cycle is mostly pushing fanfare; everybody loves a good Alien story. It seems like the pentagon and US officials are also eager to hint that it's extra terrestrial activity - In reality it's most likely US-China relations going sour and each country shooting down the others super-secret not-so-secret-now spy drones. In a couple of decades when we have the declassified info available we'll be marvelling at how the second cold war was going on right under our noses and the pentagon convinced us it was aliens.

Others have mentioned this too but it would be funny in a sad clown sort of way if an alien species showed up to invade but were completely outmatched with respect to weapons. Like they never anticipated encountering life that spent all of its evolutionary budget on perfecting the means to destroy life.

Wait until they meet wolves.

Or the hippopotamuses.

Or literally anything living in Australia.

hah! touche

We should start by assuming that the military is even more evasive than Bill Belichick in press conferences.

If we understand that a football coach doesn’t always say exactly what he thinks, then certainly the military PR person will be at least as coy.

The guy said “I’m not ready to rule anything out.” They could have asked him if he thought these drones were manufactured by John F Kennnedy and he would’ve said the same thing.

Some articles don’t belong on HN.

Seems like the next step will be to figure out a way to bring these objects down with out destroying them.

My understanding is that very few winged aircraft are able to operate at 60k feet. The ones that do fly super fast and are not able to deploy a gun, missile, or other package. I suspect this is why the military is shooting them down with missiles which can be deployed by an aircraft flying at lower altitude or an aircraft on a high arc.

Perhaps a missile could be modified to deploy a weighted net like this https://netgun.com/netgun-info/ultranet-hd-large-animal-targ... to bring these balloons down to a more convenient altitude where a non-destructive forced landing can be organized?

Perhaps this is a project for #Steve Jurvetson?

yeah, they need to be able to capture these with some type of net or harpoon. Maybe a combination of a net around the base and then some type of dart to take out the balloon.

That said, the debris is just hitting, probably slowed by the remaining balloon fabric, and thus likely quite recoverable. It shouldn't be burned out or exploded I suspect if they are targeting the balloon rather than the instruments?

Even with a net or harpoon, how do they bring these "city-bus size" things down safely and intact from 60,000 feet when they weigh so much?

I think the "city sized bus" includes the balloon? Or is that just the payload?

If it is just the payload, I guess you need to board it and either hijack it, or attach a parachute to it? Then I guess the adversary will start to add self-destruct mechanisms to them or some other type of arms race will occur.

Unlikely to board something at 60,000 feet. I guess you'd have to harpoon it down to a reasonable altitude first, then board it.

But does anybody have the capability to harpoon something at 60,000 feet? Hitting it with a missile is much simpler.

They are just balloons. Please try to keep the aluminum foil hats out of Hackernews.

Either a Government Façade(conspiracy) or Extraterrestrials. Now the "reasonable" people are in a conundrum.

This is the interesting thing about the current situation. A tinfoil hat seems appropriate regardless of the direction you point your tinfoilery.

I think the truth is far more likely to involve the government keeping secrets than aliens, but in both cases, something is up.

When it concerns this kind of stuff, government secrecy is very important. Anything the military says gives intelligence to anyone listening.

The implication that "reasonable people" deny the existence of conspiracies altogether is incorrect. Obviously conspiracies exist, it's just a matter of belief versus proof, and probability.

Reasonable people are willing to accept the likelihood that these are Chinese spy balloons or other mundane (not extraterrestrial) objects, and even that the government is pulling some kind of bullshit act with it in the media for the sake of politics or optics. It isn't the case that any conspiracy afoot is equally as likely as aliens. It isn't going to be aliens.

They're probably just balloons. However, this is someone directly saying that they aren't sure they're just balloons. They're obviously very different from the first balloon.

Things can exist in the technologically fascinating middle ground between completely boring and aluminum foil hat alien invasion. If governments are investing into developing stealth balloons then I guarantee there is fascinating technology that we don't know about that I am excited to know more about. This is an ideal place to discuss it.

Or it's clickbait.

Journalist: "Can you prove beyond all doubt the moon isn't made of cheese? Have you confirmed it firsthand? Have you stood on the moon and tried to take a bite of it yourself?"

General: "What??? Uh, I haven't been to the moon, so I guess I'd have to answer no."

Journalist: "Moon made of cheese? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet"

The difference is in how sure the officials are about what they can rule out. That's what's very different here.

'We're not sure what it might be', is very different from the usual 'No comment' that we'd been so accustomed to.

You'd wonder whether that's because of:

A: Misdirection B: Genuine uncertainty C: A new policy with which to address social media

But you know, just the need to shoot something down, disclose that fact publicly, but not reveal exactly what it is (even if it is just a terrestrial source), is pretty freaky.

How about if the headline ends with a question mark, or begins with a click bait phrase like "It could be" or "We may have just witnessed", or says something about what someone is "unable to confirm", and is in any way shape or form related to aliens, we just assume it's a soap opera and let the folks that specialize in that, like cnn or whatever, handle it?

If cnn says something like "Pentagon has officially confirmed aliens are here." or "Pentagon has officially confirmed China has new stealth tech." then we can take a look.

Having lost contact with their second Earth probe, the Trisolaran fleet prepares for the jump to the strange planet to eliminate all hostile forces.

A year later: All crustaceans on earth have been killed.

The invaders, living in their own "bubble", don't even look anywhere but under water and don't recognize land based life forms or land based anything, and since they themselves are crustaceans they don't think any other species could ever be a threat.

Again we survived another alien attack thanks to living organisms brains limited abilities of perception. The last serious invasion killed off all silicon based life forms two billion years ago by an intelligent rock species.

s/crustaceans/rustaceans

Now our build tools reverted to being slower than molasses.

"Another U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the military had seen no evidence suggesting any of the objects in question were of extraterrestrial origin."

Interesting that anonymity is required for such a banal issue. But lots of funding hinges on perpetuating the scare for as long as possible, so I guess that explains it.

No, I think they've been conditioned to be extraordinarily careful in their wording, lest they be occasionally wrong and get rained on for being technically wrong on something minor. So instead of having a rubric of "be cautious if it could incite war" it's "be cautious everywhere because we do not trust your judgement on anything"

And so we have "object" being the most generic and useless way to refer to something.

I mean phenomenon was pretty generic. Though I suppose they could get childish and start calling them "things" or "stuff" like small children do.

Maybe the military is about to degenerate into Munro's limit of 1000 basic words to describe everything.

If you’re not authorized to speak even mentioning the lunch menu is enough to get you, your neighbors, and your neighbors friends in a lot of trouble. It gets a little ridiculous.

The military was happy to reveal the providence of the so called spy balloon. Not sure what the reason for the current course of action is, but if they're shooting stuff down, then perhaps it's not that banal.

Even it ends up being a pair of teenagers pulling off an elaborate hoax.

Will we see any pictures of these crafts before or after being hit by the missiles?

I guess if they are previously unseen tech from China, thus a military secret, we would not likely get to see any pictures, which would be a shame...

China seems to be having issues with these objects as well - https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...

Might be their own that they didn't tell their military about, might be US ones, might be aliens (it's not)!

That's some random bloke with an enthusiasm for keto diets writing as a contributor on Forbes, not an actual Forbes journalist, just in case anyone was wondering

States have shared photos publicly when there was a PR angle to do so. If the US finds it is in its interest to point a finger at another nation I suspect the photos will roll out.

Given that there are, like a billion cameras in the U.S.? There aren't many (any?) photos of these things.

Art Bell lives!

Either:

- These objects are ours

- Or the military is lying

- Or our understanding of the world is about to change drastically

If these are not ours, and we truly do not understand how they are able to fly, and they’re made by a state actor/adversary, that implies a shift in technological dominance.

If they are not made by humans, worldviews shift for obvious reasons.

I tend to believe there’s a simpler explanation for all of this, but when I do indulge my imagination, my extremely unlikely-to-be-true theory goes something like:

An ancient human civilization figured out that the development of certain technologies was responsible for their downfall, and instituted measures to prevent such a downfall from recurring. And so these things have always been here, waiting for humanity to once again trigger the conditions of such a downfall, at which point they emerge. The sudden explosion of AI tech - both in the tech community and the public consciousness - seems like a trigger event as good as any.

I really hope we get the real story about these soon

Edit: I don't really believe we're dealing with aliens or ancient civilizations, but whether you like or dislike wacky theories about this, they're going to emerge one way or another when the military says they're stumped, and they're more fun to think about than the alternatives.

I think you had something there in the first half but took a turn into fantasy at the end.

To be fair, I fully agree with you.

Or there wasn't much left after being shot by 20mm Gatling rounds and falling from considerable height.

They use missiles according to the news stories.

If they're balloons, they probably cost way less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars a missile costs.

> An ancient human civilization figured out that the development of certain technologies was responsible for their downfall, and instituted measures to prevent such a downfall from recurring.

Sounds like the plot of Dune

That’s extremely far fetched.

You don’t need to go that far to find a plaisible explanation. Realistically if I was part of a country army and I had just picked up a foreign object to study, I would want to give its originator the least information possible about what I know and what I’m doing.

Telling the media the object was fully destroyed and we don’t know anything about it is both a convenient and easy way to do just that.

Yes, I agree and alluded to that. The only reason to bring the far fetched theories into these conversations is because most of the standard (and more likely) explanations have been beaten to death.

> The sudden explosion of AI tech - both in the tech community and the public consciousness - seems like a trigger event as good as any.

Aliens when humanity comes up with the atom bomb

* shrugs *

Aliens when humanity invents a chatbot that can semi coherently talk about stuff

"Oh my god this is a paradigm shift, singularity is so close, quick deploy the BALLOONS"

Setting aside the obviously far-fetched notion of aliens, I think it is unwise to downplay the potential future impact of recent AI advances and the progress that is sure to follow.

Nuclear weapons just make bigger and more hazardous explosions. That’s obviously a big deal.

But the doomsday scenarios for AI are arguably scarier because of the current climate of unrestricted proliferation, and the potential impact on human cognition and future forms of warfare in the long term.

That also doesn’t make those doomsday scenarios likely, but the impact of such scenarios is

Isn’t it more plausible that these are simply technologies that are classified/not acknowledged by either side? If the military were to identify the technology employed by an adversary, then they’d get the question of do they possess the same capability, which is a conversation they’d probably not want to have

Yes, I agree that this is far more plausible.

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