Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 102 posts

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#81

Post by egfx »

kubeflowbro wrote: post #77
egfx wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

That wouldn't explain why they could track it on radar

They could track most anything on radar including projections.

[1]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Advances_in_Radar_Techn...

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#82

Post by oblib »

This got buried too fast.

It's not like this is some fringe subject based on bullshit. There is concrete proof of something and it's a current topic of wide interest.

Personally I like reading what others here think about this. None of us "know" what's behind this but it's not a leap for me to think I can learn from what others here offer on it, or that someone here gets it right.

When I evaluate the places where I might find insight into this HN would come at the top of the list if the subject were allowed to run its course organically.

Kicking it to the 3rd page too fast may have prevented that.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

oblib wrote: post #82

This got buried too fast. It's not like this is some fringe subject based on bullshit. There is concrete proof of something and it's a current topic of wide interest. Personally I like reading what others here think about this. None of us "know" what's behind this but it's not a leap for me to think I can learn from what others here offer on it, or that someone here gets it right. When I evaluate the places where I m…

> There is concrete proof of something

unless you can complete that sentence with something more concrete than “something”, there isn’t concrete proof of anything.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#85

Post by joncrane »

misiti3780 wrote: post #35

So, what does everyone on HN make of these sightings?

Space/time tourists getting a front row seat to the demise of a civilization?

You know those historical river boat cruises you can take in Europe where it's all tied into history lessons?

Imagine that but for more advanced civilizations and the "UFOs" are actually tourist pods for aliens/time travelers to witness what Earth was like in the years before The Disaster.

Perhaps the incidence of UFO sightings can be a bellwether for how close we are to the End....

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#86

Post by bellyfullofbac »

edge17 wrote: post #60
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…

I'm probably going to get voted down for saying it, but Fox plays a lot of UFO/Bigfoot type of stuff. Clearly it gets rating, and the previous President got a lot of his ratings from the same audience as Fox so maybe there is some strategic play towards the Fox/Trump crowd.

Now that you say it... Yeah there seems to be a lot of "Your government is lying and hiding something from you, you can't trust it!" that they can conveniently extrapolate to cover other subjects, like "election fraud", or "lab leak theory".

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#87

Post by bostonsre »

soco wrote: post #64
bostonsre wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yea, I would think if it was a peer state, they wouldn't risk compromising their technology just to get a closer look at a fleet of US ships that have lesser tech. The only thing I can think of for another state risking compromise is to prep the battlefield. Not really sure how deep the water is in these locations, but some nukes hiding underwater where US fleets navigate consistently could be useful if a conflict erupts. But even in that case, I can't think of a reason why they would do it during the day and not night and risk visual identification from pilots.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#88

Post by treesprite82 »

avl999 wrote: post #43
scott_s wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "ratio…

> Mick West- a game developer is in no position to question observations of

He's also a pilot and has been focused on topics like this for two decades - but his arguments don't require taking anything on trust or his authority.

Additionally, he interviews experienced and relevant people, like his most recent video with Alex Dietrich (the second pilot present at the Nimitz "Tic-Tac" encounter).

> 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

The filename "gimbal" suggests they might have the same suspicion as West on at least one encounter. Hopefully we'll get details of what they considered in the upcoming pentagon report.

But, even if we do prematurely assume that that the pentagon thinks there's no possible explanations, consider the analogous case of the Chilean Navy UFO video where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away (https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-chilean-navy-ufo-...). The pilots are experts but they aren't completely immune from making mistakes.

> in the NYTimes article they explicitly debunk the "weather balloon" hypothesis which has been proposed as a "rational" explanation for these ufos by some.

I assume you're talking about this quote (let me know if not): "One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases"

It's a refutation if someone believed that all cases were weather/research balloons (which I don't think anyone does). And on the flip side there's the implication that some of the UAPs are consistent with weather balloons.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#89

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

avl999 wrote: post #55

One thing I would like to point out is that it's not just the US government that is paying attention to these things. Many countries like China[1], France[2], the UK[3] have been investigating UFOs and find them credible. I personally didn't find any of the UFO stuff believable until the US Navy/Pentagon stuff came out which is very credible. At this point it is almost undeniable that there is something strange going…

Every single country talking about it has had a populist spurg and political instability recently. It just seems like a psyop to distract people who trend towards conspiratorial thinking and prevent them from focusing on politics.

Yes, I see the irony in saying this.

Re: Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report

#90

Post by mindcrime »

grimgrin wrote: post #45
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

I'm more or less a skeptic when it comes to most of what gets said / reported about UFO's / UAP's, but I will say this: David Fravor comes across as intelligent, sane, reasonable, and credible, and makes a moderately compelling argument that something exceptional happened out there. Now even he stops short, as I recall, of saying "it was little green men", but his testimony at least supports the idea that there's something there that's worthy of further analysis.

IOW, he isn't one of stereotypical, "frothing at the mouth", "true believer", "THEY ARE HERE" ufo cult types that might be fairly easy to dismiss for simple lack of credibility. He could still have been mistaken, or misjudged something, but he at least establishes a certain minimum level of credibility, to my way of thinking.

Post reply on HN