We spend trillions in military programs. If many pilots are saying they see something crazy in the sky, and are backed by other eye witnesses, on board radar, and supporting ships radars, the only reasonable response is investigations. There shouldn’t even be a discussion about that, it should be an immediate default.
As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
341–350 of 978 posts
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of them. My dad did accident investigation for the Air Force for a time. One time there was a crash into the sea, amply witnessed by many on board a Navy ship, including pilots. They all said the wings came off the airplane before it hit the water. (The airplane had a reputation for wings coming off.) These people honestly believed that's what they saw. Except for one Navy seaman, on his first trip on a boat. He…
This is one example using a minor observational discrepancy. Put it this way- All the observers agreed with the reality that the plane did hit the water. You're basically using this 1 example to prove that 10, 100, 1000 people all saying that the plane hit the water (with or without wings) is not evidence of anything hitting the water (assuming no aircraft was found).
It wasn't minor, it was crucial to determine the cause of the accident. The wings being on or off was not just a "discrepancy".
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#343Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need FTL travel to reach Earth from somewhere else in the Milky Way, if you don't mind waiting a long time to arrive. Which unmanned probes would not. Your confidence in your assertions just demonstrates you haven't thought about explanations that are less likely but still coherent with non-human technology being present in Earth's atmosphere.
So those aliens traveled for thousands of years (probably in multigenerational spaceship or deep anabiosis) from a place that close relatively speaking but somehow still undetectable for us despite thousands of years of interstellar technology development there just to be blips on our radars and visual smudge here and there. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and "we don't know what's that" is not an…
Why do you assume the UAPs have aliens in them, and why would you anthropomorphize aliens in any case to be anything like humans? Why do you assume the origin of such objects would be detectable? You're jumping to a lot of conclusions here, when the only core question being explored is the plausibility of physical objects in Earth's atmostphere demonstrating superhuman technology not created by humans.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is just a meaningless phrase by the way mostly used in discussions like these to try to signal that the person is somehow more "scientifically minded" than their interlocutor. There's no such thing as "extraordinary evidence", there's just evidence and the explanations which best explain that evidence.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#345In 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…
This comment - interesting though it is - has irked me. To me it's sometimes amazing the lengths people will go to in order to insist something they can't believe must be because another party is at best mistaken, or at worst lying. The article states that UAP were likely - in the view of the author who is speaking from personal experience and knowledge of incidents and people involved - witnessed by 50-60 people "ev…
Three Men Make a Tiger[1]
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This paper shows the tic tac video exhibited instantaneous acceleration to over 20,000 mph Would't it mean that the footage doesn't actually show real objects then? Maybe, but consider the context: even if the acceleration was more "reasonable", wouldn't you feel something's missing? I mean any indication of a propulsion system, like reaction gases or propellers. My point is: if we're watching something we have no…
Sure it could be a "field" that might as well be described as magic. But where's the craft's interaction with the atmosphere? Normally an object traveling thousands of miles an hour hits a fair amount of atmosphere. An object traveling fast enough actually turns atmospheric gases into a plasma. Plasma is not only hot but will reflect radio waves. Now you need to invent a second magic technology that explains the lack…
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" Arthur C. Clarke
To preface this, I agree with you, per our current scientific understanding, this isn't possible.
That being said, we would be fools to look at our level of technology and think we could grasp everything in the universe. I'm not saying what we saw in the video is real. I just think dismissing something because it doesn't fit our understanding of reality in the current moment, is not in our best interest.
Take almost any piece of advanced tech we use everyday back in time far enough, you will get a similar response.
Maybe seeing an object doing this in real life gives enough information to work backwards and realize we made some mistakes. When we adjust our understanding it not only seems possible but helps explain other things we couldn't before.
Maybe some other country is fucking with us, somehow, advanced hologram tech or something.
Who knows, I think being skeptical, but approaching it with an open mind is the best way to go about it.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#347In 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…
Frankly, I think the reality is even less interesting than that. US military aviators are trained to be proficient systems operators, but typically (and, I want to stress, very reasonably) have little or no education in EM/EO theory, and don't always understand the assumptions that engineers baked into these systems to optimize them for their primary use cases (which, in the case of targeting pods, is identification…
I’m reminded of Aeroperú Flight 603.
The pilots suspected their altitude indicator was wrong, so they asked air traffic control to confirm their altitude. They did and it agreed with their own readings so they ignored other indications that they were going to crash into the ocean, which is unfortunately what happened.
Neither the pilots nor air traffic control apparently knew that both readings were supplied by the same faulty source on the plane and sent via the plane’s transponder.
I often think of this when I hear people say that multiple sources indicate something strange. These systems are often intertwined and networked in unintuitive ways and just because something appears on multiple panes of glass does not necessarily mean it’s been independently confirmed.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#348In 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…
> 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…
How long did it take until we confrimed ball lightning and the weird things it does? And then how much longer until we have an explanation?
Weird shit exists. Shrug.
However, eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. We know and have proved this over and over and over.
The "problem" with pilots is that getting marked as "mentally unstable" can get you grounded. So, do you report every strange thing you think you see or not?
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Given what we’ve learned about the challenges of interstellar travel, it’s safe to assume that any civilization capable of visiting us would be thousands of years beyond our current understanding of physics.
If you compare our current understanding of physics to what humans knew thousands of years ago, it’s logical that the technology of an interstellar civilization would be as far beyond our understanding as a nuclear reactor would have been to the ancient Romans.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to understand the stigma of reporting UAPs as a military pilot, see Ryan Graves interview with Lex Fridman: https://youtu.be/qLDp-aYnR1Y > There isn't going to be a secret program that is so far advanced that it counters known physical laws. I think you've misread this part--parent is not saying these are ours, not at all. We're all in agreement that if what we're seeing is real, these would be non-human…
> 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 g…
If a foreign adversary had invented such tech, the West would have sanctioned the country into the ground to stop them producing more.
So it's either the US but they claim it's not them, and they keep doing more investigations, or they're not human. I don't buy the faulty sensor argument given multiple corroborating sources.