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UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

bbc.com

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Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#81

Post by Waterluvian »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #6
sddfd wrote: post #2

Meh, is this getting picked up by every news outlet? What important news is getting buried? ;)

I assume because there is a feeling that the footage is not faked (as footage of UFO's tend to be), and because the military's incentives to fake a UFO video are usually very much in the opposite direction (i.e. nothing to see here, carry on).

I actually think it's perfect. Imagine they have future tech that absolutely crushes any current or next-gen competitors. The public is nosey and every year becoming more and more able to record high quality footage.

So let's drum up the "crazy" about UFOs. So when real UFOs are seen (the ones we created and want to keep secret) nobody can get a serious dialogue going because the UFO signal-to-noise ratio is awful. Everyone will focus on how crazy anyone sounds when they claim they have UFO footage. Especially when one of our military partners or adversaries manage to snag some airborne or satellite imagery of it.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#83

Post by thrill »

slg wrote: post #51

Was this how the video was released? It seems edited specifically in a way to cause the most mystery. The video starts and ends with it in sight of the camera. There is obviously more to the encounter which raises the question, why was it edited out?

The video is either edited for stabilization or that is the smoothest tracking while banked of another flying object that I've seen - or it's something in the camera system.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#84

Post by garmaine »

dkersten wrote: post #24
benjohnson wrote: post #11

Keep in mind one branch of the military was successfully flying this in 1977: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Ha... (a picture of Have Blue - the precursor to the stealth fighter. It defiantly looks like something out of this world to the eyes of someone in 1977)

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.

Reading about the Avrocar, I am surprised the design was not taking up more recently. It’s kind of the jet equivalent of the quadracopter, in terms of its operating envelope. It seems like all the problems that Frost had back in the 50s could’ve been fixed with modern design tools and competitions fluid dynamics. Except for the inability to achieve high speed flight let alone Mach 3.3 which military was interested in. But I wonder about using the flying saucer design has more efficient drone or regional delivery system, as it has the efficiency of jet power with the mobility of a helicopter, and its short range and low speeds are not a concern in those applications.

I hope some enterprising aeronautical engineering student at Calpoly parters with some compsci engineers at Stanford to take this up...

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#85

Post by [deleted] »

alexsb92 wrote: post #21
kristaps wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Camera could be gimbal mounted, behind a fixed glass dome - if the speck is on the dome and the camera gimbal moves, it would appear like "the UFO" rotating.

I thought so too, but I think in that case it would simply change position in the image and it wouldn't be in the center.

[deleted]

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#86

Post by 0xFFC »

ohyes wrote: post #71
brango wrote: 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…

Ok. If it’s an extraterrestrial, how did it get here? There’s no evidence that FTL is possible and even if it were it would probably require huge amounts of power. We’d notice it being used. We may as well be saying that these are angels from heaven, I guess is my point. There are tons of reports of ‘divine’ stuff happening as well, but jumping to God existing being a likelihood is not something an objective observer…

In a totally unrelated comment, I want to say, one reason why I find the UFO thing interested is in hypothetical situation if we can have proofs of existence of aliens, all those nonsense, ridiculous religions (like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc) would be horseshit to common people. With a simple question of : “Why your God only sent his prophet to earth?”

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#87

Post by zamalek »

dsacco wrote: post #57
brango wrote: 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…

> fundamentally misunderstand physics

Keep in mind that we think we know how to reach a destination faster than light (although not travel faster than light). We just don't know how [edit: to build the engine] or even if it's a practical approach. What it shows is that physics does allow us to reach a distant star and return in a single lifetime.

> inconceivably long lived

I'm not sure about this one. That species would have had to evolve somehow, unless they solved the mortality problem or unless Earth-like evolution is not universal. Even if they could, given the timeframes, why would they visit?

My point is that, yes, we don't have enough evidence to abandon possibility #3. We also don't have enough knowledge to abandon possibility #1 and #2.

That being said, I'd wager that if ET has visited Earth less than 1% of the sightings are authentic - we aren't that interesting.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#88

Post by narrator »

FeistyOtter wrote: post #64
narrator wrote: 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 o…

I read that book. It was the most deeply pessimistic sci-fi book I have ever read. Lots and lots of smoking and drinking too. I liked it though.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#89

Post by ansible »

dsacco wrote: post #57
brango wrote: 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…

I used to be fascinated with the UFO reports and such as a kid.

However, I grew up, and learned physics. And then later I learned about things like Molecular Nanotechnology.

Aliens, as popularly conceived, have not been here, and will not be coming here.

Why? I'll explain.

Space is big. Like, really big. The distance to the nearest star system is 4 light-years away. Even for a small object, it takes an enormous amount of energy to get going at a "reasonable" speed, like at some fraction of the speed of light. For an example of a more reasonably-sized object, Voyager 1 would take 70k years to get to the closest star system (4LY away) if it was headed in the right direction.

But then you have to stop! If you accelerate up to 0.1c (very fast), you have to decelerate to arrive at your destination. This is where the rocket equation kills you. Even with super-mass efficient ion drives (which with our current technology provide very low thrust), accelerating your spaceship to a reasonable speed, and then have enough delta-V to stop at the destination requires an even more crazy amount of energy.

If any aliens are headed to our solar system, we'd see their drive flairs from a long way out.

The most efficient system is to use a light sail (really, a laser sail). This is so you don't have to carry all that reaction mass with you, thus bypassing the rocket equation. And then there's a trick where you detach most of your sail, allowing it to reflect light back towards the ship for the deceleration half of the trip.

But again, even for a small (like 1kg) payload, this requires a stupendous amount of energy. And we'd see them coming because they'd be shining a big, big laser in our direction.

There are also Bussard ramjet drives, and other speculated technology, but these would all likely be slower because of the mass required to build it.

Now simply flinging out a bunch of von Neumann replicators out in every direction would be much less obvious (though very slow), until the space dust starts building infrastructure in our solar system... but that's a talk for another day.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#90

Post by forgotpassagan »

dkersten wrote: post #61
forgotpassagan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conv…

It's been precedent for a long time. For example, we could have much better satellite photos but it's illegal to sell footage with resolution better than 1 pixel/meter. If they're doing it publicly for commercial satellite imagery I have zero doubts similar secret restrictions for video quality exist for military footage taken with optics
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