As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence etc. We should never underestimate human capacity for self delusion and fighter pilots are certainly not privileged in that regard.

It’s also worth considering why this seems to be a phenomenon that exclusively effects military aircraft. I can certainly imagine that the military would not mind if it was seen as the last line of defense against a mysterious, extremely powerful force, especially when we’re effectively in peacetime. Apparently the aliens didn’t pick up an interest in the tens of thousands of sorties flown over Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s also worth remembering that the CIA was recently extremely vocally concerned about a mysterious “sonic weapon” death ray that turned out to be either frog noises or simply non-existent. The US government has shown that its quite willing to completely fabulate or at least tacitly support bullshit if it serves their purposes.

I don't know. We would learn that some things are possible which we thought were impossible, which means physics took a wrong turn somewhere and we need to back up and keep looking. Even if it's not the secrets of hyper drive, that's probably going to lead to something interesting.

There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical. This includes scientists and other professionals who ought to know better.

Obviously it's unscientific to jump to conclusions and assume that anything that doesn't make sense must be aliens or magic or whatever but at the same time, it's also unscientific to ignore physical observations just because they seem like something that might support what fringe idiots believe.

In grad school in astronomy, there was a fellow grad student who was extremely excited after a night's observations that he'd discovered something remarkable -- it was a long hoped for distant galaxy that appeared in his images that night, and had all the right spectral signatures because it appeared in different filters, different exposures, and you could see it there in the image files, raw.

Turned out, it was noise / amplifier signal correlated with the adjacent chip dumping overexposed pixels on readout. He was embarrassed after a professor pointed out (after inspecting the files) that it always appeared on the same exact pixel coordinates on the array, but learned his lesson to try to disprove your own observations with independent tests.

I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. Were the pilots reporting things seen with their eyes, or looking at imaging displays that have been processed. And maybe... were recently illuminated with lasers... hm? There certainly seem to be a pathology of similar reports of "the object never moved in the viewfinder, and would imply the ability to move suddenly at supersonic speeds"

> We're all in agreement that if what we're seeing is real, these would be non-human in origin

I don't agree with this at all.

Firstly I suspect it isn't real.

But if it is then I think it's most likely some human group has a technological breakthrough and it using it like this.

Say a US adversary wanted to give a "don't fuck with us" message to the US military. Outperforming state-of-the-art US fighters would be a good way to do it.

And just because the HN forum commentators don't know who it is doesn't mean the US intelligence community doesn't know. It might be broadly known that the Kamerians have access to this tech, and the knowledge is classified "to avoid broad panic".

There might be secret briefing to congress about it, which would explain perfectly why there is an apparent lack of action. All responses are classified.