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

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

#321
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The close-minded approach is to accept someone’s fantastical claim because you want to, or just because the claim is being made, when the claim is contrary to mountains and centuries of evidence. The open-minded take incorporates all the possible evidence to reach the most likely conclusion. And the conclusion is never, so far, either aliens or magic. It’s just silly to conclude that an observation that has no immedi…

I don’t think aliens and magic belong in the same category though. Magic/supernatural by definition is contrary to physical laws and scientific understanding. But the existence of aliens would in no way contradict any physical laws or scientific consensus. It would be a shock, obviously, just like it was a shock when we discovered that other galaxies exist, or black holes, or that nuclear fission is possible. If inte…

Aliens isn't being thrown out a priori, because the hypothesis isn't just "it's aliens".

The hypothesis, to fit the evidence is: "it's aliens, using technology advanced enough that it can do things nothing else on Earth can do, without generating the normally expected physical effects, and are also mostly but not entirely undetectable".

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

#322

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 nois…

Reminds me of the mid 00's "flying rods" that were simply insects being captured in flight by digital cameras. The camera whould capture what looked like a semi-transparent corkscrew zipping through the air.

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

#323
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they're observed over military facilities because that's the only location with a rigorous surveillance system.

Have any NATO countries reported these?

The military budget of the rest of NATO combined is much smaller than that of the US. ... Why would aliens be interested?

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

#324
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

It's completely disingenuous to just link that video as an authoritative source (when it's not... in any way). You should also put Ryan Grave's response to that video - https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0

And his response is not providing any confidence what so ever, if only he had build simulator to explain what people seen.

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly how many eyewitness accounts, devoid of good physical evidence, constitute "Evidence" with a capital "E"? If this number is "infinity" for you, that is unreasonable.

It would require an extraordinary number

OK so assuming all the witnesses' accounts are in reasonable concordance (the broad strokes are fairly identical in account), what is that number?

I had a funny showerthought the other day- Imagine that orgasms never existed, but a human had one one day and had to explain to others what it was and that it was real and how it felt. This person would be ENTIRELY not believed. Now let's assume this 1 person became 10, 100, 1000. At what point do you reasonably have to start to wonder if orgasms are, in fact, real?

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

#326
post #214

> Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence. Occams Razor suggests that if these objects appear almost exclusively over US military facilities and US military training ranges, they're most likely operated by the US military. (Sorry to the Navy pilot whose security clearance is too…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul#Roswell_incident

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

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xkcd.com/1235/

The mystery of the lack of good footage in the age of smartphones is less mysterious when one considers that perhaps the phenomenon itself is intelligent. And in fact if one considers witness testimony, that's what it seems to be.

[deleted]

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

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like any guiding principle in science, "it's never aliens" is a rule of thumb. Obviously no scientist rules out legitimate possibilities, but it's similar to math being riddled with singularities. It's a sign that more work is likely needed.

More work is absolutely needed. But in this case, let me quote the former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence with regards to the data he's seen on UAPs: "Currently, the extraterrestrial hypothesis best fits the facts".

From my perspective it doesn't pass muster. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and we simply don't have that evidence. "Trust us, we have the evidence, no you can't see it." is not good enough.

I have looked at the publicly available evidence, read the analyses, and thought long about this (as have many others). In my best estimate there is either a concerted effort by eccentric military leaders to trickle UAP sightings with a sprinkling of psyops. The US military is intentionally very opaque and slow, but that does not make it also all-seeing or wise.

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. come on, man. at some point, after enough of these reports, toeing the line you're toeing starts to look ludicrous. these are trained observers, pilots who know what to expect in the sky. and do not take lightly that there is still a certain amount of embarrassment (a social cost) to even coming forward, so to even mak…

Darn it, I hate predictability. Why is it always, always, always "just watch this 'short' hour-long video of random people talking with fake authority and undeserved confidence", and never "here just check out this Cochrane meta study and review data & evidence linked" (I made the mistake of clicking and now YouTube thinks I want to see "this man shows evidence usa possesses exotic matter", "real photos of JFK killer…

> just watch this 'short' hour-long video

it's literally a 13 minute video, man. The SHOW is named "60 Minutes" and it's rather legendary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes and it usually features a number of stories in that timeframe, not just 1. I hate predictability too, such as assuming I'm one of "those people forcing you to watch a whole hour of BS" just because you like being a debunker.

It's also dealing with US Military folks, which are an honorable lot (I served 4 years in the USAF, so I take these people seriously... integrity is HIGHLY HIGHLY encouraged)

Also, when you're dealing with eyewitness testimony in particular, video evidence is natural because the delivery of this type of communication is best done with the entire presentation of the person doing it, because words on paper alone are distorting.

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

#330
post #80
post #20

I think what bothers us most about incidents like this is that any country or human organization that had massive air superiority over everyone else would inevitably use it to their advantage. And yet, here are the reports, but no one is coming forward to say "yes, we Canadians actually never cancelled the Avro Arrow and have been decades ahead of the rest of you all this time- now please remove that Danish flag from…

This assumes the advancements can give a significant military advantage, through cost of production and overall military effectiveness. And that the behaviour of other countries could be a problem to the manufacturing country--trade and cooperation etc. And if the advancements are used for spying then of course they'll be kept quiet for as long as possible. Showing your cards early, even if you think they're good, ma…

They say on the nimitz video there's a whole fleet of them.

This kind of tech could only come from a superpower, and you really think they wouldn't brag about it?

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