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Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#41

Post by garden_hermit »

Tenoke wrote: post #19

Given that people (and governments/military) have believed in many phenomena that were later found to have a mundane explanation I'd expect reports like this in a world where there aren't aliens flying around. That, and it making no sense for us to only see evidence for them on earth but not when looking at space, and that there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades…

I like to imagine that if aliens have visited us, its for a kind of tourism or safari. Us seeing them is the pilot (some underpaid, overworked tour guide) making a mistake.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#42

Post by lovetocode »

deadA1ias wrote: post #13
black6 wrote: post #7

Why is it mostly Navy pilots reporting the phenomena and there are not any data in the visible spectrum? Because the Navy has Project NEMESIS[0] in the works whose goal is to spoof instrumentation. 0: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secret...

I think Occam's razor leads me to the same conclusion. The only part that still has me questioning are the large number of reported visual sightings by the very same pilots reporting radar contact.

That would make sense if they didn’t also see it with their own eyes.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#43

Post by avl999 »

scott_s wrote: post #29
tiahura wrote: post #10

Can anyone suggest an analysis by a sensor engineer with their best guess as to what we're seeing?

Mick West over at metabunk.org has covered a lot of these. He has a background in video game programming, which he uses when trying to reconstruct three dimensional spatial relationships from two dimensional videos.

Mick West- a game developer is in no position to question observations of trained top gun pilots and the vast infrastructure of the US Navy/Pentagon who analyze this kind of stuff for a living. If they can't explain then I am sure they have considered and debunked trivial explanations that West purports- in the NYTimes article they explicitly debunk the "weather balloon" hypothesis which has been proposed as a "rational" explanation for these ufos by some.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#44

Post by spinningslate »

It’s interesting to understand the motivation behind all this.

Specifically: US military/intelligence/congress has historically treated UFO activity as highly classified. That’s now changed. Why is that? I don’t know. One candidate explanation:

1. Historically, some amount of “UFO” activity was actually classified, known US military/Intelligence programmes. Making the information public would compromise those programmes. So, in reality, the sightings related to identifiable flying objects. Just that they were identifiable by a small number of in-the-know people.

2. Things have changed. Some other actors - let’s guess Chinese/Russian - have stepped up their own secret programmes. Those items are now legitimately “unknown” to US authorities. If you’re from the US, that’s bad. Your putative enemies have something you lack knowledge of.

3. How to respond? In a world where the sightings are your own secrets then a strategy of silence makes sense. In a world where they’re not, the game is different. In this case, you want publicity: to cast them as unknown, (a) because it creates interest (/fear) and (b) tacitly lets your enemies know that you know they’re up to something.

That might be way off base. But the about-face in strategy is at least as interesting as the sightings themselves. I haven’t seen that covered elsewhere. Interested if anyone else has ideas/links.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#45

Post by grimgrin »

davidhyde wrote: post #12

The media appears to miss that fact that something that happens in physical reality can become corrupted by the time it gets rendered to a computer screen. The complicated military systems are hallucinating now. Or am I missing something? Did multiple pilots see this thing with their own eyes from different angles without any technology in between?

Here's a _long_ conversation with one of the pilots with eye visibility that day, David Fravor, though I'm linking you to the start of that specific topic:

https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4265

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#46

Post by zozbot234 »

Tenoke wrote: post #19

Given that people (and governments/military) have believed in many phenomena that were later found to have a mundane explanation I'd expect reports like this in a world where there aren't aliens flying around. That, and it making no sense for us to only see evidence for them on earth but not when looking at space, and that there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades…

> there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades

The problem with this argument is that we wouldn't know in the first place if they were also using these more covert means. At some level, we have to assume that if aliens exist and are making themselves visible to us, they're basically doing it for the lulz.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#47

Post by typeformer »

wavefunction wrote: post #27
typeformer wrote: post #17

The classified version of the UAPTF (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force) report on government knowledge of real UFO events is being given to select members of the Senate ahead of the unclassified version likely to come next week. The narrative seems to be “soft disclosure” with descriptions of the public report by officials confirming that there are numerous real UFO events, that defy conventional explanations…

Does anyone argue that UFO events are not real? And a UFO is different than an interstellar space craft.

The argument is why is the US military with a 700 billion dollar annual budget stating that they are not sure what these real objects are despite the amount of data they have collected on them. Either they are lying or they are incompetent, in either instance it’s a massive story.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#50

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

mindcrime wrote: post #18
blunte wrote: post #6

It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond. It is also mathematically silly to assume that of all possible beings over current universe timeline that we are the most technically advanced. We have only existed for a minuscule sliver of that timespan. That’s not to say that we are statistically likely to have been visited,…

It is typical human self-centeredness to assume we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond. I don't get the feeling that most educated people believe that "we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond". In fact, I'd wager that a significant portion, if not a majority, of such people believe that there likely is (or was, or…

It's a huge, huge leap from "Unexplainable things are happening" to "These are alien spacecraft."

You can take the unexplainable part and do something useful with it - like making observations public and collecting more data.

The rest is a speculative hypothesis about the data.

This has always been one of the biggest problems with the reaction to these phenomena. You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."

That's very poor logic and equally poor science.

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