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UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

bbc.com

61–70 of 151 posts

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video quality is terrible, so who knows, but I've never seen any UFO footage that had any kind of decent quality video. Hell, a 2004 camera phone would be almost as good as this video. Yes, yes, its in the dark and moving fast and whatnot, but I thought that the military would have had much better imaging tech, even back in 2004, than this grainy low res thing. May as well be someones camcorder. The only thing it…

They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data. I'm sure Congress has seen the original, and it's pretty startling that they still think the object is a legit UFO

> I'm sure Congress has seen the original, and it's pretty startling that they still think the object is a legit UFO

This is just conjecture though. Its pretty difficult for us to have a meaningful discussion about whether Congresses reaction is noteworthy without knowing for sure what they did or didn't see.

Based on what we have to work with, I'm not seeing anything noteworthy here besides some ATC/pilot folks conversation looking at a black smudge on a grainy sky. I guess unless we got to see the original video, its impossible to tell, really.

> They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data.

Do we know this for sure? Is there a source for that?

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#62
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there's stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar So, really, its likely that any UFO is military in nature, rather than extraterrestrial.

This is a common retort (in my view, to make people feel better and not have to consider the implications otherwise) -- here's the pentagon official in charge of the program stating unequivocally that these are almost certainly not related to any aircraft in any national inventory https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-t... The thing that makes these interesting is the fact that they exhibit aeron…

There's nothing that's not physically possible here, just bottlenecked by G forces limitations on human passengers. Given the fact that drone technology testing was extremely popular at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just experimental drone testing.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#63
post #59
post #37

Entertaining, almost convincing. I want to believe. However we know it is one of... * A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings. * One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify. * A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet. Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary clai…

Could also be a genuine error like a fly on the lens or a bug in the viewfinder software.

That's a thermal camera, so I'm a little bit doubtful it's a bug, plus there were apparently multiple witnesses and computers there.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#64
post #8

So where does the rubber hit the road? Oh, you saw a UFO flying around, great. Might as well be 1 million lightyears away if they aren't going to give us advanced technology. The first wheel the people of the interior of Papua New Guinea ever saw was on the bottom of a Japanese airplane flying overhead, so there's that. Seriously, we might as well be a primitive tribe in the Amazon seeing an airplane flying overhead…

There is a very deep soviet science-fiction novel by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic. It is relatively unknown in western world, which is very sad since in Russia it is considered one of the pinnacles of Soviet-Russian science fiction works. The plot is as follows:

One day, several strange zones appeared in the world, on a line that extends to a star Deneb. The brave 'stalkers' found all sorts of strange and miraculous objects there - artefacts (some people will remember a popular russian game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with similar things): they can kill and they can cure, but what we do know that the civilization that left them exists on an unfathomable scientific level to us and we can not even start to comprehend them, these objects are like magic to us.

And these strange zones, these strange objects were just a waste to this civilization. They just traveled through the cosmos and did not even notice us when they dumped them, like we, humans, do not notice ants that crawl under our feet while we take a picnic near a road.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#65
My only issue with this - and I can’t figure a way out - is that this was a program launched in secrecy, funded with soft money, officially shut down five years ago but by all accounts has continued to operate in the dark... yet we get all this info, military videos, and more from individuals that participated in said program all in public and without extreme anonymity, etc such that would be typical in such a case.

I just don’t see why if we had a “confirmed” ufo sighting on military video that was a product of such a program, would we really discussing this in such a manner?

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#66
post #37

Entertaining, almost convincing. I want to believe. However we know it is one of... * A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings. * One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify. * A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet. Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary clai…

There are additional reasonable explanations. Unknown rare physical phenomena for example Ball lightning.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#67
post #37

Entertaining, almost convincing. I want to believe. However we know it is one of... * A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings. * One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify. * A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet. Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary clai…

The whole point is because its from the military (which I hope the BBC verified), then it's supposed to rule out 1 or 2.

It's basically a filler story that the BBC news would put on at the end of the news along the lines of "little boy saves hamster".

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#68
post #59
post #37

Entertaining, almost convincing. I want to believe. However we know it is one of... * A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings. * One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify. * A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet. Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary clai…

Could also be a genuine error like a fly on the lens or a bug in the viewfinder software.

The pilot is witnessing it too

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#69
post #57
post #33

I'm sold on the whole UFO cover-up thing. If you peel back the social ridicule (very successfully induced by US government collaboration with Hollywood) and consider the huge number of circumstantial reports from across the military and non-military it seems pretty clear there's stuff in the skies of non-human origin. Historical art suggests they've been flying for centuries. There's also the publicly acknowledged re…

I’m open minded to what you’re saying, and I agree that dismissing alien contact due to popular zeitgeist is silly. But here’s my problem with what you’re saying: where did they come from then, and how did they get here? Why do we not have any evidence of their planet in any reasonable distance from Earth? Given what we understand about modern physics, we have three conclusions we can arrive at: 1. We fundamentally m…

Yeah #3 is certainly the most likely and is what I always assumed. But over time I've come to think that they are here. So probably the next most likely is #1. Maybe they just know more science than we do. Look how far we've come in the last 200 years. What if they have a few millennia on us?

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#70
post #33

I'm sold on the whole UFO cover-up thing. If you peel back the social ridicule (very successfully induced by US government collaboration with Hollywood) and consider the huge number of circumstantial reports from across the military and non-military it seems pretty clear there's stuff in the skies of non-human origin. Historical art suggests they've been flying for centuries. There's also the publicly acknowledged re…

Links to credible sources or GTFO.

That was rude, I know, but remember that the evidence required is proportional to the claim.

Extraterrestrial machines literally flying within our atmosphere is an extraordinary claim and requires more evidence than a huge number of circumstantial reports.

I imagine the claim like a hole in the ground that needs to be filled with nice clear evidence in order for people to swim in it comfortably. These circumstantial reports are like a bunch of 12oz cups and the hole you're trying to fill is more akin to a lake than a puddle.

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