Live data from Hacker News

UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

nymag.com

21–30 of 208 posts

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#21

What about the patent based on this observation filed and granted to the Secretary of the Navy? https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

I think Occam's Razor says a good lawyer convinced the patent office to make a bad decision. Could be wrong, but this is easily explained by incompetence.

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He explained that. > No. I was more concentrated on looking at the FLIR. It was inside of 20 miles. You’re not going to see it with your own eyes until probably 10 miles, and then you’re not going to be able to visually track it until you’re probably inside of five miles, which is where Dave Fravor said he saw it. These are trained military pilots. Our eyes can’t see an object like that twenty miles out. If the syste…

This is why I believe what they saw was some sort of test of a FLIR defeating tech. Like an IR laser projection from a sub launched drone. It explains why it could move so fast and have no propulsion, it was just a laser dot moving around the sky and he was the cat chasing it around.

[deleted]

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#23
Anytime I try to pursue the UFO question I feel like I’m being intentionally gaslighted by government agencies. The public-ish analysis of UFOs, AATIP is an incredible farce. They focused on star trek warp drives and after the funding dried up they started hanging out with Blink 182 to smoke weed and pat each other on the back for being crazy alien believers. These aren’t sound scientific minds that are capable of analyzing the evidence available. Those people exist and I’m certain their analyses do as well, but no one gets to see them.

I struggle to even come up with narratives as to why this specific case would be made public. Perhaps the intelligence agencies knew it wouldn’t be possible to cover up so the best they can do is release the evidence that was expected to make its way to the public and say nothing about it officially. If I put on a tinfoil hat I could say that the AATIP’s purpose was to instill doubt that aliens exist, but that would imply that they do exist. It seems that the intelligence agencies are behaving like they want to give as little information as possible about it. I can’t imagine the AATIP was made top-down. It appears to just be a congressman’s publicity stunt.

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#24

Aliens would be cool but I highly doubt it. In my opinion from all I heard and read it really sounds like an unknown weather phenomenon.

> Aliens would be cool ... Wouldn't that depend on capabilities and intentions?

They'd still be cool even if they were here to strip mine our planet, anally probe us, and then enslave our species... it would just be a kind of shitty situation all in all though.

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He explained that. > No. I was more concentrated on looking at the FLIR. It was inside of 20 miles. You’re not going to see it with your own eyes until probably 10 miles, and then you’re not going to be able to visually track it until you’re probably inside of five miles, which is where Dave Fravor said he saw it. These are trained military pilots. Our eyes can’t see an object like that twenty miles out. If the syste…

This is why I believe what they saw was some sort of test of a FLIR defeating tech. Like an IR laser projection from a sub launched drone. It explains why it could move so fast and have no propulsion, it was just a laser dot moving around the sky and he was the cat chasing it around.

Or simply some FOD on the FLIR lens or sensor that bounced around a bit as the plane was moving.

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He explained that. > No. I was more concentrated on looking at the FLIR. It was inside of 20 miles. You’re not going to see it with your own eyes until probably 10 miles, and then you’re not going to be able to visually track it until you’re probably inside of five miles, which is where Dave Fravor said he saw it. These are trained military pilots. Our eyes can’t see an object like that twenty miles out. If the syste…

This is why I believe what they saw was some sort of test of a FLIR defeating tech. Like an IR laser projection from a sub launched drone. It explains why it could move so fast and have no propulsion, it was just a laser dot moving around the sky and he was the cat chasing it around.

I’m not sure how you can project anything into space that would be seen with continuity by both man and machine to look and act the same (keep in mind IR and visible light have different properties). If you’ve ever played with a laser pointer you’ll know what I mean: it drives the cat crazy when it jumps/skips/disappears because now it’s being projected on a different plane of surface (in the air: a different cloud or haze). It’s the continuity of movement (rather than many other “UFO” sightings reporting an object “suddenly appearing somewhere else in the sky”) that makes this all the more intriguing. An explanation Must take all this into account, and whatever it is, alien or terrestrial, it’s really cool tech, much more exciting than what you describe.

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#28
As much as I want to believe, I feel like this almost has to be some sort of disinformation campaign, either to cover up some sort of testing that the US military is doing and thinks someone else might have seen, or to make US adversaries think that we've made some sort of fundamental breakthrough and we're ineptly trying to cover it up by calling it a UFO. Probably the latter.

Would be interesting to read the article about this in 50 years or so once the political landscape has changed and it's safe to declassify, but I doubt I'll be around then.

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#29

What about the patent based on this observation filed and granted to the Secretary of the Navy? https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

I think Occam's Razor says a good lawyer convinced the patent office to make a bad decision. Could be wrong, but this is easily explained by incompetence.

That sounds like Hanlon's Razor.

Re: UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

#30

Anytime I try to pursue the UFO question I feel like I’m being intentionally gaslighted by government agencies. The public-ish analysis of UFOs, AATIP is an incredible farce. They focused on star trek warp drives and after the funding dried up they started hanging out with Blink 182 to smoke weed and pat each other on the back for being crazy alien believers. These aren’t sound scientific minds that are capable of an…

Sometimes it has an easy explanation given typical information asymmetries and incentive structures. For example, you don't give away any of your external intel during a war (i.e. cold war) in the case that you are identifying something by your enemy that might be trying to hide from you. Letting them know you can detect them would be stupid. Also, for similar reasons, record and catalogue every strange phenomenon in case it could be something.

The natural correlate from a citizen perspective is that the government is hiding something (i.e. UFOs). Of course it is, that's the point. But then the point becomes less of a point the less justification there is for wartime behavior, which then leads to increased speculation that the government is hiding something which at some points boils over into widespread public sentiment.

Then at that point there is both incentive to do selective release and for the media to cover it since they know readers want to read about UFOs, etc.

I think that's the Ockham's razor here.

Post reply on HN