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

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

#201
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here we're talking about meeting a culture not made of human subjects. We know nothing. When they're able to cross interstellar space we're unlikely to have anything they'd want. They'd be so advanced technically we might not even detect them given our limited understanding of physics.

The thing I do see an alien species could want from us is our capability to understand a blueprint and to reassemble them physically from transmitted information. Because that is how they might travel between galaxies. Their assembly, I hasten to add, would be a rather stupid thing to do on our part. If we want to live. But we might do it anyway because we're curious.

How are the scenarios of brute predators, noble protectors, or imperial fleets any more worthwhile to consider than those of the incessant replicators? My answer: Because our culture likes that kind of tale. Because we project our predatory and social features onto an unknown.

So whenever somebody explains phenomena like blips on a radar with an alien species that happens to be eerily similar to us I think of how people made god in their image and either rail against the blatant human-centrism or just disengage.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the SR-71/A-12, there were other stealth aircraft that preceded the F-117. The immediate predecessor was Lockheed's Have Blue [0] which was flying in the 70s. Related to Have Blue , there was also Senior Prom [1], which was apparently a scaled down unmanned "cruise missile" variant of Have Blue . And beyond airplanes, the first stealth helicopters were developed in the late 60s to early 70s and saw limited se…

Have Blue was the POC for the F-117, it wasn't used in actual operations. It was a test platform to demonstrate the concept's stealth capabilities and its ability to fly despite its non-conventional shape.

Yeah but it's a discussion about the public seeing spooky strange aircraft and calling in UFO reports, so considering pre-production aircraft seems obvious.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought maybe the poster was talking about the SR-71, but it too didn't stay classified for very long.

It also wasn’t stealth, or an attack aircraft.

> The second operational aircraft[38] designed around a stealth aircraft shape and materials, after the Lockheed A-12,[38] the SR-71 had several features designed to reduce its radar signature. The SR-71 had a radar cross-section (RCS) around 110 sq ft (10 m2).[39] Drawing on early studies in radar stealth technology, which indicated that a shape with flattened, tapering sides would reflect most energy away from a radar beam's place of origin, engineers added chines and canted the vertical control surfaces inward. Special radar-absorbing materials were incorporated into sawtooth-shaped sections of the aircraft's skin. Cesium-based fuel additives were used to somewhat reduce exhaust plumes visibility to radar, although exhaust streams remained quite apparent. Kelly Johnson later conceded that Soviet radar technology advanced faster than the stealth technology employed against it.[40]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

To be clear, a 10m^2 radar cross section is enormous compared to the F-117 (0.001 m^2) The F-117 was in a completely different league than the SR-71, but the SR-71 was in fact designed to be stealthy.

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

#204
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the pilots in this incident was on Rogan saying how they used to fly silently without lights above remote campsites, then once they saw a campfire blast the lights and go straight up. They'd laugh as the UFO reports flowed in. Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it. It's not unrealistic to consider top secret tech as a possible explanation. One counter poin…

> Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it. Wouldn't it look just like an unusual plane to a naked eye observer?

Probably to most people, but some people have wild imaginations.

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

#205
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one was dumbfounded. Image clarity was consistent with expectations based on the known size of the KH-11 series. This is basic physics.

“The resolution is amazingly high,” Ankit Panda from the Federation of American Scientists told NPR, adding it was “much higher than anything I’ve ever seen.” Tell it to Ankit Panda. Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network at the One Earth Foundation, believes that the resolution is so high, it may be beyond the physical limits at which satellites can operate. And this lady.

The minimum size of KH-11 mirrors has been common knowledge for many years now, since it influenced the Hubble telescope. From the book Power To Explore -- History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960-1990:

> "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."

PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170205104821/https://history.m...

They're 2.4 meters at their smallest, with later KH-11's possibly being larger. But even 2.4 meters is enough to get way better image quality than has been publicly released.

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

#206
werner von braun said the military would invent any excuse including faking the existence of aliens to justify ever increasing budgets for scret military research projects in space.

space is the high ground. you cannot win withoit dominating it. you will definitely lose without some presence in it. there are 2 types of nations those with nukes and yhose without.

this applies to space as well.

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

#207
post #33

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 articl…

One of the pilots in this incident was on Rogan saying how they used to fly silently without lights above remote campsites, then once they saw a campfire blast the lights and go straight up. They'd laugh as the UFO reports flowed in. Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it. It's not unrealistic to consider top secret tech as a possible explanation. One counter poin…

Honestly how many people have seen jet fighters do crazy movies at night. Not very many, they don't know what they are seeing. It is like a car accident. Happens every minute, how many people actually witness it? The aftermath maybe, but very few of the actual event.

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

#208
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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