We've seen a lot of the stuff that used to be classified from Skunk Works, none of them are supersonic orb prototypes or flying tic-tacs. I'm not saying they can't develop that technology and hide it from the public, but it's unclear how all of the puzzle pieces we have fit together to support "Lockheed sends flying orb to Syria without telling CENTCOM" in any way.
> But Syria et al would have have been the right kind of environment to test results of black projects, no?
Would it? Testing your billion-dollar taxpayer project in sparsely the populated Syrian countryside seems like a great way for ISIS to get their hands on it. Or the Druze, or the PKK, or the IRGC, or any number of other outfits that would sell a crashed interceptor to China in exchange for air defenses and RPGs.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that the US prefers to test it's billion-dollar black projects in places where they cannot be stolen, damaged or interrupted.
Sure, I'd bet a lot of "black triangle" sightings are exactly that. But if the "tic-tac" lore is to be taken at face value, the implication is that the US military has invented antigravity technology, or reverse engineered it from alien spacecraft. I really don't think that's plausible. If the US had that kind of technology we would be so far ahead of the rest of known science that there would be no value in keeping it secret.
The rest of my thoughts on it probably aren't as grounded for a HN discussion.
If everyone self-censors tabooed topics around here it’s not going to advance the tenor of the HN discourse.
For what it’s worth, I do endeavor to pepper oblique references to the phenomenon on HN when it seems relevant to, sometimes suffering downvotes for it but who cares.
And yeah I do like seeing the odd reference to the phenomenon here, I'm just quietly hoping that it doesn't all spill out with the current administration and we end up with an Iron Sky scenario lol