1) It was a reflection
2) It was an insect
3) It was a bird
4) It was a balloon
5) It was a meteor
6) It was a secret new kind of aircraft from a department the pilot didn't know about
7) It was a secret new kind of aircraft from a foreign country
8) The image/video was fake, for money
9) The image/video was fake, for lulz
10) The pilot was confused
11) The pilot was lying
(one for each season of The X-Files)
One of the three witnesses at the Congressional hearing was touting getting a bunch of observations from commercial pilots, and when he finally posted his first video it was... satellites. Starlink, to be precise.
Starlink is probably singlehandedly responsible for more sightings than any other source right now.
If I hadn't heard it described to me before, I might've worried it was a train of ICBMs or something. I've seen more satellites than I can count, I saw two of them that night before I spotted Starlink, but it was unlike anything I'd ever seen. There were so many of them, at first I thought it was a contrail.
A thought I had shortly after was, "if there ever is an alien invasion, it will look exactly like that."
Now consider viewing the Tic-Tac video footage (released by the Pentagon) along with with interview of the radar operator during that same mission and then the GIMBAL/GOFAST video footage (released by the Pentagon).
Finally, there is a CSPAN video where two former-fighter pilots and a former DoD intelligence director testified in front of Congress about these topics.
Then go down your list and see which of those 11 options fit the best.
4) The speed of movement is inconsistent with balloon
6,7) is possible but would require some fundamental physics breakthrough kept in secret
10) There were multiple jet pilots at the scene including top gun instructor. Their account is confirmed by video and radar from the ship.
You appear to be claiming that there's an infinite amount of explanations and we can't really know, while also claiming that more data points don't create greater certainty of correlation.
That's contrary to the basis of how science works.
For example, is having a simple mechanical explanation for something really evidence against some Devine intervention that is just done so that everything looks "normal"?
It is good to see the Pentagon releasing evidence even when it makes the government look silly.
NASA isn't the Pentagon fyi. The Pentagon is the headquarters of the Department of Defense, the US military. NASA is a civilian agency, they aren't in that.
Regardless of whatever Navy personnel think or say, neither of these videos shows an object moving in an abnormal way. The objects in these videos have mundane trajectories which are easily explained by extant earth technology (balloon or drone n the case of GOFAST, and another airplane in the case of GIMBAL.)
There is NO evidence of aliens, alien technology or even advanced human technology in these videos.
GOFAST has been conclusively shown to be a slow-moving object at about 13,000 feet. It's simple geometry. We don't know what it is, exactly, but it's probably a balloon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
So GOFAST is probably a 3 or 4, while GIMBAL probably is a 6 or 7 but even more pedestrian.
However, I'd add that the two figter pilots who testified in front of Congress would NOT agree with the balloon assessment. So, if you accept their opninions as SME and thus leaning towards legitimate then that leaves "a slow-moving object" before you add in the details about the acceleration patterns that also occurred.
Otherwise it makes me think it is a hoax.
We test aircraft and technology against other countries, why not test our own country unprepared for how they respond.
The vice article is decent for skeptical people. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wjzg/the-skeptics-guide-to...
The root of the problem is one of trust. Ask yourself: which person or institution do you trust enough that you would accept an image from them as proof of the NHI hypothesis?
Because I've been called a crackpot multiple times in this HN post and yet I don't trust any source enough to accept any image they could provide as proof of NHIs.
Is there consistency in the models of those objects or each detailed sighting is a different "model" of the vehicle (which may suggest that each may have been designed by a different artist)?
I can't, for several reasons.
First, if NHI UAPs did exist, we have no idea what they would look like. I may be able to tell you with some certainty whether a picture of an airplane is fake because I've seen many airplanes; no such luck with UAPs. We don't know what we don't know.
Second, there is the problem of trust. There are many people who claim having witnesseed UAPs in the sky over the decades, and among those sightings there are some shapes that appear frequently, such as dark equilateral triangles one whitish light on each corner and a fourth light (often red/amber) in the middle; no blinking lights like an airplane. But are these witnesses lying? Did they misidentify some ordinary phenomenon? Did they dream or hallucinate it? All plausible options.
But even when you are presented with an image of an object that matches this rather common description you have no way of knowing whether it is fake unless you really trust the source of that image, so much so that it overcomes your general disbelief of the nature of UAPs.
That hasn't remotely happened to me yet, so I remain neutral on the subject of UAPs.
Grabby Aliens concept by Robin Hanson is an interesting new take on UFOs. Start with “if they are UFOs, what could we reason about them from their behaviour?”.
See https://youtube.com/watch?v=cQq2pKNDgIs
“It might be unlikely but it’s not crazy unlikely”.
Like it.