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UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

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Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#31

Post by maybelsyrup »

tomxor wrote: post #18

> and starts mirroring me, so as i'm coming down it's coming up... It's mimicking your moves?... yeah it was aware we were there... "he says it was about the size of his f18 with no markings"... it gets right in front of me and it just disappears. I keep having to check it's not April fools. Hard to suspect this is not an optical phenomena, I'm sure people found ships that appeared to hover way above the horizon simi…

You could be right of course, but how then are we explaining the appearance of these things on several different sensor platforms, all allegedly very sophisticated? Presumably the people who design these radar systems try and make them account for air density etc. I mean, look, military contractors aren't always the savviest geniuses (see e.g. the F-35 program for hilariously inept and expensive examples), but different sensors on the planes and the ships seeing these things ... dunno.

There's also the tidbit from the original NYT stories from a couple years ago, repeated elsewhere in other interviews with pilots, that the objects were doing things like speeding off and seconds later appearing on radar at the waypoints that the fighter jets had already planned. Allegedly, of course. I'm not one to believe the government uncritically, but it seems to me that the critical view on this can't just be "swamp gas"-style explanations anymore.

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#33

Post by wcoenen »

spenvo wrote: post #2

This is either a pretty elaborate disinformation campaign or … some pretty interesting stuff in terms of our understanding of physics. It's also interesting how these alleged observations seem to exclusively happen within restricted US airspace over oceans - but not over US land. Other UFO HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... My bet has to be on it being an elaborate disinformat…

Couldn't the "elaborate disinformation campaign" just be TV shows? The "ancient aliens" crap has been airing in the US for about 10 years now, it must have had some effect on the beliefs of the population by now.

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#34

Post by fogihujy »

graderjs wrote: post #22
judge2020 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _this_ blurry splotch is an alien spacecraft is really just annoying at this point. I don't think anyone taking themselves seriously is considering these alien spacecraft; 'UFO' simply means unidentified flying object, which very well might be some another world superpower testing their own tech or testing the U.S. military's reaction and response to these things, likely using simple drone tech with outer shells th…

I think you're taking yourself too seriously if you don't consider that it's alien. Or that it implies cooperation with aliens. I'm not saying decide that it's that, but at least open to consider it. It just seems too arrogant to consider: we're the only ones, what we know is the limit of possibility, and we're so special that even if they're out there they will never visit us. I know there are aliens, they visited u…

From a outside-US perspective, most UFO reports do seem to come from the US military, but there's also scattered reports from the rest of the world. If turns out to be a top secret US/Russian/Chinese/Moon nazi research program, this could be the beginning of a new arms race. However, since nobody seem to know what the hell these are, that leaves us with aliens or an unknown terrestrial party.

I'd feel better if it turned out to be extra-terrestrial; if the aliens are out there, watching and haven't annihilated us yet, then at least there's hope they're benevolent.

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#35

Post by dogma1138 »

wcoenen wrote: post #33
spenvo wrote: post #2

This is either a pretty elaborate disinformation campaign or … some pretty interesting stuff in terms of our understanding of physics. It's also interesting how these alleged observations seem to exclusively happen within restricted US airspace over oceans - but not over US land. Other UFO HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... My bet has to be on it being an elaborate disinformat…

Couldn't the "elaborate disinformation campaign" just be TV shows? The "ancient aliens" crap has been airing in the US for about 10 years now, it must have had some effect on the beliefs of the population by now.

Aliens were far more in in the 80’s and 90’s than they are today especially as far as the UFOs, abductions and other more fear inducing stuff goes...

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#36

Post by King-Aaron »

quintaindilemma wrote: post #23
etrabroline wrote: post #6

Any report that cites the navy videos from last year is not going to be very interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWWGmiZs4JA Videos of blurry splotches and eye witness testimony that repeats the word "technology" over and over to imply that unlike the last 6, _this_ blurry splotch is an alien spacecraft is really just annoying at this point. EDIT: Hey judge2020 did you watch Dr Mason's analysis I linked abov…

Got to agree. Something I haven't heard mentioned is the possibility that these might be artifacts of the sensors themselves or of the image processing software used: i.e., a bad Kalman filter that won't settle down properly or such. The pics are too fuzzy to be useful for judgment and the objects usually too small to discern shape and/or size. I am puzzled that the images appear so unclear yet the pilots verbal desc…

I do find it interesting that the artifacts of the sensors themselves seem to be very similar to the eyewitness accounts of these objects that have appeared throughout the last several hundred years of history.

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#37

Post by joshschreuder »

graderjs wrote: post #22
judge2020 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _this_ blurry splotch is an alien spacecraft is really just annoying at this point. I don't think anyone taking themselves seriously is considering these alien spacecraft; 'UFO' simply means unidentified flying object, which very well might be some another world superpower testing their own tech or testing the U.S. military's reaction and response to these things, likely using simple drone tech with outer shells th…

I think you're taking yourself too seriously if you don't consider that it's alien. Or that it implies cooperation with aliens. I'm not saying decide that it's that, but at least open to consider it. It just seems too arrogant to consider: we're the only ones, what we know is the limit of possibility, and we're so special that even if they're out there they will never visit us. I know there are aliens, they visited u…

> It just seems too arrogant to consider: we're the only ones, what we know is the limit of possibility, and we're so special that even if they're out there they will never visit us.

I think the alternate view is the opposite of arrogant or that we’re so special; either the zoo hypothesis, or that we are so simple that communicating with us would be akin to trying to communicate with an ant for example.

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#38

Post by me_me_me »

senortumnus wrote: post #3
spenvo wrote: post #2

This is either a pretty elaborate disinformation campaign or … some pretty interesting stuff in terms of our understanding of physics. It's also interesting how these alleged observations seem to exclusively happen within restricted US airspace over oceans - but not over US land. Other UFO HN threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... My bet has to be on it being an elaborate disinformat…

I've been pondering these reports as well, and my hunch is that the US is recognizing an increasing occurrence of drone or otherwise long distance, stealth aircraft that are regularly penetrating US airspace... and they want to know more. A regular feature of such articles is a well respected aviator stating, "if I'd seen it while alone, I might not have reported it." Even if it just gets US mil personnel to feel mor…

But then why would army, navy or air force be ok with unidentified things around their training grounds?

If it was a civilian drone they would go after it and people controlling it, a foreign spy plane would cause diplomatic turmoil.

Its either their misinformation campaign, testing of their next gen tech, or aliens. Listed by probability with first being in high 90s.

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#39

Post by krapp »

aryehof wrote: post #32

What I find interesting is the cultural reaction of the USA compared to others. Others see UFOs as phenomena to be observed and investigated, while the USA sees them as threats to national security.

The US sees UFOs as phenomena to be observed and investigated - there are tons of American UFO groups such as MUFON to that effect. Meanwhile the governments and militaries of many countries have considered UFOs a possible security threat. There's no real difference between the way Americans treat UFOs, culturally or officially, and anywhere else.

Re: UFOs regularly spotted in US airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

#40

Post by tomxor »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #31
tomxor wrote: post #18

> and starts mirroring me, so as i'm coming down it's coming up... It's mimicking your moves?... yeah it was aware we were there... "he says it was about the size of his f18 with no markings"... it gets right in front of me and it just disappears. I keep having to check it's not April fools. Hard to suspect this is not an optical phenomena, I'm sure people found ships that appeared to hover way above the horizon simi…

You could be right of course, but how then are we explaining the appearance of these things on several different sensor platforms, all allegedly very sophisticated? Presumably the people who design these radar systems try and make them account for air density etc. I mean, look, military contractors aren't always the savviest geniuses (see e.g. the F-35 program for hilariously inept and expensive examples), but differ…

> how then are we explaining the appearance of these things on several different sensor platforms

That would be trickier to explain, but we should be careful with the story telling here, they report instances of many visual anomalies, and slotted in only one story where there was a ground radar anomaly preceding the visual one that did not match exactly, i.e correlation with very low sample size is pretty meaningless.

...Knowing that, it's still interesting to seriously consider it anyway - visual systems use light, and radar uses radio, both are propagating electromagnetic waves of different frequency, they permeate solids (or not) differently, but they are all share similar basic behaviours i.e both are sensitive to density of the medium and can experience refraction and total internal reflection. So it's not unthinkable that a single event could explain both.

> Presumably the people who design these radar systems try and make them account for air density etc

I'm sure they do, but they cannot accommodate phenomena that they are not yet aware of. And even if we figured this out it's probably going to be difficult to tune those anomalies out in an automated way, in the same way that it takes a human to understand that a mirror is a mirror by analysing the behaviour of an image... perhaps with multiple radar from very different origins that do not concord they could be filtered out in a simpler way.

[EDIT]

Interesting section in the wiki on radar [0]:

> Clutter refers to radio frequency (RF) echoes returned from targets which are uninteresting to the radar operators. Such targets include natural objects such as ground, sea, and when not being tasked for meteorological purposes, precipitation (such as rain, snow or hail), sand storms, animals (especially birds), atmospheric turbulence, and other atmospheric effects, such as ionosphere reflections, meteor trails, and Hail spike. Clutter may also be returned from man-made objects such as buildings and, intentionally, by radar countermeasures such as chaff [1].

Perhaps a more likely explanation is perceived correlation between a short freak weather even in an area with lots of radar focused on it, e.g a super dense and short hail storm that suddenly drops like a stone. followed by these more common visual phenomena.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar#Clutter

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutter_(radar)

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