Quick, someone find a carpet to sweep this under!
In all seriousness, I hope that the Galileo Project comes up with the goods in the next few years - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
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Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#12Here's my most recent thought. Pilots spent years up there and the only thing they see are other planes. If they see something it must be a plane, from the size they can estimate the distance. But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a plane, they think it must be far away. And when it flys same speed as plane, in "projected" large distance t…
1. (US) military pilots are trained to recognize the shortcomings of their sensory perceptions in this exact regard.
2. This doesn't explain the many, separate close-up encounters, such at the Nimitz and east coast/Atlantic Ocean encounters.
PS: FWIW, I don't think these things are extra-terrestrial.
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#13Artifacts on sensors, or even active jamming could explain massive changes in speed for recorded videos
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#14Here's my most recent thought. Pilots spent years up there and the only thing they see are other planes. If they see something it must be a plane, from the size they can estimate the distance. But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a plane, they think it must be far away. And when it flys same speed as plane, in "projected" large distance t…
The radar and FLIR aren't as easy to 'trick' though.
They could be, with RF and laser equipment running reasonably-advanced software to spoof such sensors.
There are a lot of gotchas to work out here, but it's my best guess, aside from "craft that defy physics."
Source: worked on such military equipment, back in the early 90s.
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#15I won't venture to guess what these are but I did find it quite interesting that the old and more recent descriptions of sightings are very similar, and that we still do not know what they are or where they come from.
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#16Here's my most recent thought. Pilots spent years up there and the only thing they see are other planes. If they see something it must be a plane, from the size they can estimate the distance. But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a plane, they think it must be far away. And when it flys same speed as plane, in "projected" large distance t…
1. (US) military pilots are trained to recognize the shortcomings of their sensory perceptions in this exact regard. 2. This doesn't explain the many, separate close-up encounters, such at the Nimitz and east coast/Atlantic Ocean encounters. PS: FWIW, I don't think these things are extra-terrestrial.
1. They are trained to estimate the sizes of featureless flying tic-tacs?
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#17Makes me wonder what the psychology and politics of anti-extraterrestrial beliefs and rules are. It's very plausible other beings exist, but what necessary axioms disintegrate if a society comes to believe in aliens, and why is it important to isolate and shame people who suspect it?
I can see how our dominant moral systems are rooted in the idea of human primacy and a single One supreme being. Recognition that we can appeal to super beings to intervene on our behalf could arrest our evolutionary intellectual development by causing our civilizations to optimize for pleasing said beings, instead of organizing ourselves to elevate human minds that enable a more natural and free evolution for our species. There may be some evolutionary rule about life where a species only evolves along degrees of freedom and our development becomes arrested when we optimize for the constraint of appealing to the discretion of super beings, sort of like domesticated animals vs. wild ones.
To adapt to co-existing with a technologically advanced species, you would need a conceptual or moral degree of freedom and agency beyond them, which made peaceful and free co-existence possible, and provided some basis for principled equality of life. (an agreement on a One god whose will has been revealed them as well would go a long way, and as an idea, could secure our ability to evolve independently of our advanced co-habitants. This may be the rational evolutionary case for monotheism, as a necessary condition for moral agency across significant differences.) The most obvious consequence of introducing a new super being species would be how we would organize ourselves and relate to each other around them, and not just find increasingly subtle ways to murder each other to secure their favoured status.
If humans forfeited our moral agency by optimizing for becoming subjects of these super beings, we would be putting responsibility on the super beings to govern us, and arrest our own evolutionary development.
Maybe the anti-extraterrestrial people have a deeper understanding of this. Or they just recognize, maybe the arrival of such a species would irreconcilably polarize us all between those who could sustain their own moral agency in the face of a superior power, and those who give it up to optimize for material animal ingroup security, and the ensuing war would wipe us all out - or the aliens would do it for us. Maybe it will take another couple hundred years for them to really arrive as we're not quite fully baked from an evolutionary perspective, and we need to be on average more intelligent than we rather obviously are now.
I'm sure they laugh at our nuclear energy use and social media as being the civilizational equivalent to trepanation though. I wonder what their jokes are like.
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#18Here's my most recent thought. Pilots spent years up there and the only thing they see are other planes. If they see something it must be a plane, from the size they can estimate the distance. But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a plane, they think it must be far away. And when it flys same speed as plane, in "projected" large distance t…
At least those videos [1] are just birds, see for example this analysis [2]. Skip to the meat of it, if you dislike the style of the video. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPn-YMp9vI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs
What kind of a freaking bird travels at fighter jet speeds and rotates like that?
I'm a photographer who loves watching birds, taking photos, I watch other bird photographers. It's never anything like that.
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. (US) military pilots are trained to recognize the shortcomings of their sensory perceptions in this exact regard. 2. This doesn't explain the many, separate close-up encounters, such at the Nimitz and east coast/Atlantic Ocean encounters. PS: FWIW, I don't think these things are extra-terrestrial.
1. They are trained to estimate the sizes of featureless flying tic-tacs?
They are trained in identifying aircraft and grok flight characteristics, and for the lack of better phrasing because I'm eating a taco at lunch, how one's senses can be wrong or skewed.
Re: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least those videos [1] are just birds, see for example this analysis [2]. Skip to the meat of it, if you dislike the style of the video. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPn-YMp9vI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs
What kind of a freaking bird travels at fighter jet speeds and rotates like that? I'm a photographer who loves watching birds, taking photos, I watch other bird photographers. It's never anything like that.
It isn't. The bird is between the sea and the jet and for all practically purposes stationary. When the camera pod on the jet tracks the bird and keeps it in the center of the field of view, what you are seeing is a parallax motion of the sea in the background due to the motion of the jet. This refers to the second clip in the linked video which also also the focus of the linked analysis.