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The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

nytimes.com

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Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#111

Post by electrograv »

Retric wrote: post #70
gfodor wrote: post #50

It's been pretty clear for some time now for those who study the facts that there is a very good chance there are real objects in the sky that maneuver in ways that conventional aircraft are unable to and cannot be explained adequately as other observed phenomenon. The taboo around this subject due to the common hypothesis they are due to extraterrestrials is a shame because there's been plenty of documented evidence…

People lack depth perception in the sky which makes it easy to wildly misunderstand things. A great example shown by some UFO show was a side camera from the space shuttle. The footage has a nice curvature of the earth, with lot's of little specks that seem to be orbiting it way out in the distance. You see a maneuvering thruster fire then in slow motion a few heartbeats later these specks shoot off in a new directio…

That’s why the FA-18 footage is so compelling to me. This is not the easily fooled human eye we’re talking about: Radar tracking and thermal vision almost completely eliminates simple optical illusions from the list of natural explanations.

Even more bizarre is how the craft appears totally cold, while there is a warm thermal halo of some kind around the craft, with a pattern very reminiscent of high energy fields.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#112

Post by electrograv »

frankquist wrote: post #58
gfodor wrote: post #50

It's been pretty clear for some time now for those who study the facts that there is a very good chance there are real objects in the sky that maneuver in ways that conventional aircraft are unable to and cannot be explained adequately as other observed phenomenon. The taboo around this subject due to the common hypothesis they are due to extraterrestrials is a shame because there's been plenty of documented evidence…

When I first read the program or its funding had ended, I, like you, also concluded that this was an indication that the Pentagon saw no reason to take it further. But then I jumped into the deep end: who knows the program('s funding) has been discontinued? It could live on in more secrecy, with the discontinuation of its more public form as a decoy. Am I being tinfoil hatted here? It's what I would probably do if I…

Or more likely, if alien UFO visitation is real (a huuuuge IF), it’s more likely that programs like this have existed since the 1950s, and are now deeply entrenched within the government as “black programs” with unlimited “black budgets”, and likely some connection to the pentagon etc.

The countless stories and admissions of former military and intelligence officers blowing the whistle on deep shadow governments always sound so crazy, but the sheer number of them over time is... disturbing. As a skeptic to conspiracy theories, I don’t know what to make of it.

In any case: The pentagon shutting down a new independently started investigation group (in this hypothetical world where alien UFOs exist) would totally make sense, as it would be redundant to the extremely secret programs already in existence and only a liability for possible interference. They also wouldn’t be able to tell them why they’re shutting it down or cutting off funding, because th secrecy level of such a thing would go so much deeper.

It’s hard to believe this has any credibility at all, but if this NYT article is genuine and the claims of real progress made by a small and brief program are real, I don’t know what to think to be honest.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#113

Post by fapjacks »

openasocket wrote: post #72
volgo wrote: post #56

IMO, the fishy part of the article is the cronyism involved in this program: "The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entreprene…

I doubt it was a no-bid contract. And there are far more lucrative programs which raise far less eyebrows than this.

This completely. For example, if you approach the US government through a solicitation with really any half-reasonable suggestion for processing enormous amounts of data, and you'll get a contract. Go take a look through the US government's business solicitations: Every agency wants an AI because they're being buried by data they can't process. If you wanted to collude with elected officials and funnel government dollars into your business, these kinds of solicitations will get you the funding with few questions. And if you fail, well, so has almost every other business that's tried to solve this problem.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#114

Post by dfox »

jboggan wrote: post #14
magnat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like an insect stuck on the camera lens.

There were multiple contacts and the F-18s had telemetry on the objects, it wasn't just an optical trick. Also how do two different jets see the same insect stuck on a lens?

If they had telemetry then they had to have pretty good idea of what that thing is in order to decode said telemetry or even recognize its RF emissions as telemetry.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#115

Post by krapp »

fapjacks wrote: post #110
krapp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hiring him to do this is like hiring Robert Ballard to find the Titanic. No, because the Titanic could be proven to have existed before Robert Ballard tried to find it.

To deny that something unexplainable has been happening in the skies is really disingenuous. We have very expert, specialist organizations whose primary responsibility it is to know what's happening in our skies. You take these two things and remove the context of "UFOs" and suddenly it's not crazy that they're doing something about it, but crazy that they're not doing something about it. The context of "UFOs" is lad…

Robert Bigelow doesn't believe "something unexplainable" has been happening in our skies - he believes the explanation for those things is alien spacecraft. He isn't interested in seaching for truth, he has an agenda.

It's also disingenuous to skip over more plausible explanations, including hoaxes, the memetic effect of UFO culture, classified military aircraft and disinformation campaigns, and misidentification of other mundane aerial phenomena, to assume that anything unidentified in the sky is likely an alien spacecraft.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#116

Post by mrspeaker »

madaxe_again wrote: post #89
_gutd wrote: post #75

Interesting read that expands further on the Navy pilot encounter: https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/ Worth noting that the object was observed by a total of 3 F-18s, an E-2 Hawkeye, and a cruiser on the surface.

It’s totally anecdotal, and I’m just some guy on the internet, but I’ve seen these, or at least something similar, twice - once above Bath, UK, in 2012 - the first hint something was up was a pair of sonic booms as two typhoons hurtled into the airspace over the city. Needless to say, ran out of the office to gawp, and the fighters were circling a thing hovering at about 20,000 feet - bulky ovular object with greeble…

Doesn't sound the same as yours, but I saw the "triangles in the sky" in the late 90s in Australia. I came home from work at about 1am, and noticed three lights up in the sky moving at the same slow speed in a triangle-ish formation (For a while I thought they were connected, but then seemed to move independently, and just looked... odd). I watched them for a couple of minutes go across the sky, then had to go and wake up my parents to show them and prove I wasn't imagining it. I tried to take a photo, but this was the 90s and my night-time SLR skills were bad ;)

20 years later someone described the exact same thing on /r/astronomy and I remembered it. I spent a weekend "researching" it and there were lots of article and sightings but no real info (I was pretty intrigued at that point!). Then someone replied on the astronomy post that it was "Maybe the NOSS satellites."... I looked them up, and yep - it was exactly what I remembered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxN2ieE8N9A

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#117

Post by StanislavPetrov »

dwaltrip wrote: post #40

Where is the HD footage that actually shows features of the mysterious "unidentified objects"? Why is all the evidence grainy and obscured? The prospect that life from another star system traveled hundreds of trillions of kilometers, only to hide for the past few decades, peeking out briefly for low-quality photoshoots, is beyond absurd.

Imagine going back in time only 100 years and trying to explain to someone that you can hold all the world's knowledge on a little plastic gadget that you can hold in your hand and that the gadget is also a camera that can shoot and play high definition videos. Most would say that is beyond absurd. I find it beyond absurd to speculate about what is or isn't possible when we know so little.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#118

Post by ceejayoz »

phkahler wrote: post #104

I find the video a little odd. The pilot is tracking the object in his center of view but is not turning aggressively to intercept it.

The video is from the FLIR camera, which is gyroscopically stabilized and locked onto the object. I don't think you can tell what the parent plane is doing unless part of it comes into the FLIR's view. News helicopters have the same tech.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#119

Post by [deleted] »

imglorp wrote: post #108
gfodor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis is one of the more obvious explanations and as such it has been considered thoroughly before for the cases that remain unexplained. Typically these cases include radar signatures or other corroborating evidence.

If the F-18 HUD footage in OP is real, that would indicate the avionics picked it up, tracked it, and reported the heading and velocity. This is also interesting because the FLIR showed the object as mostly black: not emitting heat as a jet would.

[deleted]

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#120

Post by valuearb »

sumedh wrote: post #85
valuearb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligent Aliens aren’t deer, anyone who has mastered interstellar travel are closer to god’s in terms of the power they’d have over us. No need to hide, and probably impossible to hide their massive power sources.

> No need to hide Maybe they dont want make contact with a primitive species?

Why would they care? We don’t hide from ants.
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