Are there any plausible theories why this stuff is getting released right now? It looks like there is no immediate reason for action. And no real reason why they wouldn't have gone on for another decade denying it.
Our government expects visitors soon and this was a step towards preparing the public to what is about to come? xD
Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
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Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#32Next: A conspiracy theory that the government is covering up the fact that UFOs don't exist.
Contrary to popular opinion, UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, not Aliens From Another Galaxy Visiting Us For Some Damn Reason. Objects that fly and are not readily identifiable totally exist and are a concern for the military as they may be aircraft from another country violating our air space on a spy mission or some such.
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#33> In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings. Does this mean the objects emit RF energy of some sort?
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#34This seems awfully brief and doesn't have much detail. The tittle says it's a "preliminary" report. Is this the expected UAP report or just a preliminary document about it? I would want to see summary statistics for each reported incident and descriptions of the most compelling phenomenon. This document raises a lot of questions and answers few. The document says they have 21 reports of UAP that "appear to demonstrat…
I had that same thought - on first read this report seems to contain summary analysis of 144 UAP incidents. Not the sort of numbers that immediately make me think "I need ML to process those!"
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#35Are there any plausible theories why this stuff is getting released right now? It looks like there is no immediate reason for action. And no real reason why they wouldn't have gone on for another decade denying it.
To make them all stop, they basically said "okay, we're going to release these reports in some determined length of time"
Sounds fairly reasonable.
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#36The only thing they left out was swamp gas as a possible explanation (RIP Hynek). Seems like another whitewash, "it can't possibly be happening" report. If you spend some serious effort on this and stay away from the crazies you'll come to the opposite conclusion of this report. A good starting point is Vallee's books.
1) known US aircraft activity either simply misinterpreted or kept secret from the public or even most of the military apparatus, sometimes strongly denied either as a way to disseminate vague information to adversaries or misinformation
2) foreign or personal aircraft either known or unknown to the US.
3) rare weather phenomena, hallucinations, optical phenomena, or other miscellaneous things which might be rare but with mundane explanations
The thing to notice is cameras have become much more prevalent and much higher resolution, but "UFOs" in pictures haven't. The only things that aren't obviously something understandable are still fuzzy dots on screens despite screens and cameras getting enormously better.
Just look at this https://media.gvwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/28154540... and tell me that if you saw that you wouldn't think it was a spaceship. It was kept super secret for a quite a long time and surely was the source of plenty of UFO reports.
I'm not convinced or even particularly suspicious that anything that "isn't what it seems" is anything more than mundane.
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#37> "Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation." Yeah, if we could just get a copy of that data real quick, that'd be greeeaat.
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#38> "Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation." Yeah, if we could just get a copy of that data real quick, that'd be greeeaat.
[1] https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~scidemos/LightOptics/InfraRed...
[2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Advances_in_Radar_Techn...
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#39Next: A conspiracy theory that the government is covering up the fact that UFOs don't exist.
Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
#40It neither confirms nor denies popular ideas about aliens visiting earth.
In most cases, you can guess these are probably aircraft from other countries. In some cases, they may be experimental aircraft being developed in secret by some organization or other.
I am someone who thinks there likely is alien activity on earth, but government reports about unidentified flying objects aren't about efforts to prove or disprove that aliens from elsewhere visit earth. They are data on sightings in US air space of things we could not identify. That's all they are.
If you want to extrapolate "It's aliens!" Coolios. If you want to insist "Aliens don't exist! This is nonsense!" Equally coolios.
"Aliens" isn't why the US government tracks this stuff. National security is the goal and nothing more than that should be inferred in terms of what the US government "believes" in.