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

nymag.com

191–200 of 208 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Take a look at the Bragg curve. This explains it: https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strang...

Thanks for an interesting read (and a blast from the past). As I mentioned in my post: the tech to pull that off would be extremely cool, terrestrial or otherwise!

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

#192
post #70

I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration. This is in the case if there is really no other way to traverse stars besides conventional rocketry. But in case if there is a way to trick any of the fundamental physics we know after all, then very likely the guy will come right at our porch, and they've pro…

Indeed, but take umbrage that no matter their level of technological sophistication, any race visiting us ij this manner would not only be very advanved, but also could not be hostile without violating or contradicting laws of the expanding universe, economics, and physics.

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

#193
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radar jamming is pretty well-known, isn’t it? For instance, you blast the target with noise across radar’s bandwidth, drowning out the return signal. There are various techniques and countermeasures, but it’s not alien technology.

Yes, it's well known. It's human technology, but it's also almost certainly alien technology if we operate under the assumption that an alien species built something capable of travelling across the stars. Regardless, I'm not even necessarily saying that it is evidence of aliens. Merely that it evidence against the idea that this is something which is naturally occurring.

Merely that it evidence against the idea that this is something which is naturally occurring.

Ah, yes that’s true!

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, positing the video is authentic, which seems likely, here's what we know: - This object, estimated to be 40 feet in largest dimension, exhibited flight performance beyond an F-18 - These objects exhibit long flight endurance, indicating a high density power source - The object was solid, as it was detected by the Aegis radar - According to the pilot involved, the object did not obey the laws of physics as we know…

Before we diagnose unicorns, why couldn't it have been a drone with cowling around its propellers/impellers, forced to be 40 foot long in order to carry an advanced miniaturized submarine fission reactor. That could give it range and enough acceleration to make it seem to defy physics.

For one thing it was detected (according to the unclassified releases) as high as 80,000 feet AGL.

There's no design of any type right now that can fly at 80,000 feet AND hover at low altitude, all without airfoils. That is also without accounting for the extremely high-G turns with no airfoils.

If it had been some kind of nuclear ramjet (which wouldn't work at low speeds) there would have been a visible plume of hot gas. There wasn't.

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we have rules about disturbing the tribes in the amazon or the Sentinelese. Maybe there are established rules about contacting primitive cultures? Maybe they are just watching for the Fermi Paradox to take care of us.

We tend to try to predict alien behavior basing it more or less on our own, 10000 year-long history. If intelligent life that travels the billion-old stars actually exists, I doubt we would be able to put their intentions and modus operandi into words with our constrained ideas and limited, lonely planet vocabulary.

Of course, for most of that history, the default result of a more technologically advanced culture meeting a more primitive one was the former immediately enslaving or committing genocide against the latter.

And let's be honest, if the Sentinelese were sitting on anything worth killing for, they would be long dead or "civilized" onto a reservation by now.

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

#196
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes they are not coming from some giant station on the other side of our sun, parked there for the last several hundred years. They could also be anywhere in our solar system, that our technology is not advanced enough to detect. We cant really keep track of all the space rocks floating near us and they aren't trying not to be seen.

If they're hiding from us on the other side of the sun, then that means they're probably on the same orbit as the Earth, but a full half orbit ahead. But then you'd think spacecraft like the Parker Solar Probe which has a perihelion of only 0.04 AU and a very eccentric orbit would be able to spot it. Hiding on the other side of the sun only hides them from direct observation from exactly Earth. https://en.wikipedia.o…

Wouldn't the same gravitational lensing that proved relativity also possibly reveal something hidden behind the sun, if it were massive enough?

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

#197
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration. I think that they will teleport here and be minuscule and invisible (at first).

That's the point. If you will ever see a martian on your porch, and you haven't seem a giant nuclear rocket on which he came here, it will be the most direct proof that we missed something really big in our physics theories, something on the level of 5th force, existence of negative mass, or quantum gravity being a thing.

Or magic.

At that point, if our physics models are that wrong, you might as well say a wizard could have done it.

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

#198
post #70

I think if we ever see an alien, he will either fly to us in a completely enormous nuclear rocket which we will spot years before his arrival and deceleration. This is in the case if there is really no other way to traverse stars besides conventional rocketry. But in case if there is a way to trick any of the fundamental physics we know after all, then very likely the guy will come right at our porch, and they've pro…

This assumes they are not coming from some giant station on the other side of our sun, parked there for the last several hundred years. They could also be anywhere in our solar system, that our technology is not advanced enough to detect. We cant really keep track of all the space rocks floating near us and they aren't trying not to be seen.

Hmm, it seems like we could see behind our sun with our space probes

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

#199

I wonder... Could you project an image into the atmosphere via satellite. Maybe this was just an image. It accelerated with apparently 0 mass. It left no exhaust plumes. It was invisible to radar EVEN as they got close. Fit's all the criteria for something that isn't really even there.

I'm thinking if you concentrate 10 powerful lasers at one point in the atmosphere it would be possible to generate a plasma that could be moved around at speeds that would be impossible for an aircraft. What I don't know is if that would be detectable via radar, which supposedly this phenomenon is.

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

#200
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the boring answer be they made something that can disrupt radar systems into creating fantom objects. Creating fake objects that are remarkable would be useful for when distractions are needed. The final QA would be a real in the field test where the observers are not aware of the experiment.

That really does seem like the simplest, most boring explanation to me — some kind of camouflage/countermeasures/stealth technology that makes it really hard to recognize something or to get a reliable indication of its bearing or distance.

I'm pretty sure the observers reported both radar sightings and visual sightings. It wasn't radar alone.
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