Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report • Hacker News Board

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#61

Post by typeformer » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #15

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,…

But how would anyone find us? If we accept that the max speed in space is lightspeed, then we're basically hidden. Why? Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematicall…

Say the chance of developing FTL travel is totally minuscule but still inevitable given a long enough time horizon . Once that technology is developed by its very essence it spreads rapidly almost like the development of the wheel.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#62

Post by soco » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

Tenoke wrote: post #54

garden_hermit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Travelling for many, many, many years just to see a bit of the planet from the window (and not even things like cities) is something I'd consider unlikely as the primary objective of visiting aliens.

Maybe they have enough of their own cities, and missing forests, large amounts of water floating at high altitude, whatever...

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#63

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#64

Post by soco » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

bostonsre wrote: post #31

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?

There were naked eye visuals from multiple pilots, targeting pod identifications, and radar from ships were also picking up whatever it was. It is surprisingly convincing evidence of a peer state adversary with a huge tech advantage or... something else. I was moved from "no f'ing way do ufos exist", to "wtf.. it actually seems plausible" when reading up on it.

It would be a truly novel approach for any state to develop such a huge tech advantage and neither leaking it during development nor using it to gain something in some of the many existing conflicts (cold or hot).

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#65

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

throwkeep wrote: post #59

spinningslate wrote: post #44

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 program…

That's what I'm trying to figure out too. The narrative is the biggest change so far. Low quality videos and eye witness reports aren't exactly new. Sam Harris, who I consider trustworthy, was given a heads up about what's to come: "I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position…

Except that I'm not sure that there's any real mention of alien technology in the report. It's just the same old where we're seeing interesting reports about not-fully-understood optical phenomena, and people in the popular press are pattern-matching it to little green men from outer space.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#66

Post by throwawaycities » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

People forget these kinds of reports go back to the U2 spy plane in the 1950’s. When military members on Guam saw the U2 - while still top secret - take off at a 45 degree angle, the entire island was baffled and didn’t understand what they saw. It’s hard for anyone to wrap their minds around but once upon a time a plane taking off at a 45 degree angle would be as unimaginable as a craft with no heat signature (though I do think, even if true, their are many existing technologies that could explain that and we don’t need to imagine it’s an alien gravitational propulsion system.)

Does anyone think it’s an accident the most public incident involved military training flights where the military was intercepted by this and beat them to their own rendezvous point for the mission?

It’s very obvious the tic-tac UFO was either a legitimate top secret military craft (manned or unmanned) that was being tested that day against the flight crews during their training mission, or possibly it was a military hoax serving two potential purposes: 1. Basis of increased funding, and/or 2. Misinformation to unfriendly nations/militaries around the world. None of that can be admitted and so here we are where everyone has to play dumb including top levels of the pentagon.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#67

Post by postfacto » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

JaggerFoo wrote: post #37

If these UFO's are travelling at super speeds and making sudden direction changes, why do we never see any effects on the atmosphere surrounding the object?

One possible hypothesis is that spacetime itself is being warped in such a way that no significant forces caused by interaction with the atmosphere are being generated.

Kinda like how because you ride an escalator people no one ever hears you climbing stairs.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#68

Post by egfx » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

kubeflowbro wrote: post #32

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?

Both pilots called in the tic tac, their IR sensors picked it up, they were able to get a lock on with their onboard radar, and the ship picked it up on the their radar. They definitely ran into something

Yeah any time someone brings up the FLir argument I have to remind myself that even something that can exhibit IR can also be something that is not really there as a physical mass. What interested me is that David Fravor was specifically asked by Lex Fridman in his podcast if he thought these “objects” were projections and his answer was that he wasn’t a physicist and didn’t really know for sure but didn’t think so. As such the idea of a projection cannot yet be ruled out. I actually can’t believe that projections aren’t more closely scrutinized to explain this whole “phenomenon”.

[1]https://youtu.be/sZoH5jr4P9I

[2]https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~scidemos/LightOptics/InfraRed...

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#69

Post by cgriswald » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

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,…

I don't think you have to be particularly self-centered to entertain the idea that we might be first. Despite the 8 billion year head start an alien civilization could have if it developed at the same pace as we, just early on, we see no evidence of any aliens out there anywhere. (And, despite billions of cameras, there is no evidence of any aliens here.)

We ourselves owe our existence to a chance extinction of the dominant life form on Earth 65 million years ago. Without that, our mammal ancestors would not have been able to reproduce as frequently and plentifully, which would almost certainly have slowed the development of us if it didn't rule it out outright in the timescale the Earth has left.

There's no guarantee most worlds with life even ever develop multi-cellular life. It took Earth billions of years to go from single-cell to multicellular.

Yes, there has been a lot of time and a lot of star systems, but there are so many things that are required, I'm not at all confident that there is intelligent life out there. Earth is a sample size of 1, and we tend to treat it as if its the norm, but that's just a sometimes-useful assumption. The reality is we might have won the universal lottery.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#70

Post by Geee » Wed, Jun 16, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

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 think there are at least two plausible explanations:

1. They are actually from Earth, hiding somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Probably Von Neumann probes which arrived millions of years ago, and not actually living things. They check our status periodically and send information to their origin system.

2. We are living in a simulation, and they are spectating us in a god mode with a visible side-effect.