Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty incentives to including imaging as part of black boxes. Nothing unreasonable about it. It would help elucidate several non-UFO normal life kind of incidents.
If there were, they'd do it, but it doesn't help their business, so they don't.
As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
351–360 of 978 posts
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#352In 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…
There are all the passive system “failure” modes, between optical (and infrared) focusing, sensor noise, radar synthesis, multi system combat data links passing in extra information the system is designed to integrate into targeting/tracking/tasking the sensors. There’s a lot that can go wrong… add active failures like the GP comment mentioned about the astronomical sensor saturation and lasers, and the picture is even messier, a military drone/vehicle could be using active countermeasures like dazzling lasers and phased array RF emitters to try and mess with the pilots, the sensors, and the data links…
At the end of the day I just want the stigma around investigating the root cause of this stuff to go away, it’s like the Hound of the Baskervilles, stuff can genuinely have all the trappings of being supernatural or aliens or whatever… and still turn out to have a mundane explanation when properly investigated. I want the systems engineers and the scientists and the researchers and anyone else who sees stuff like this to log the “bug report” and for people to get to the bottom of things, because as long as we live in a world where weapons like fighter jets and guided missile destroyers are needed and/or in use, I’d like to know the systems and people aiming them at targets are making as few mistakes as humanly possible… which won’t happen if people don’t rigorously investigate and dig out the root causes of stuff like these UAP incidents.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#353In 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…
Throughout my already 20 year IT career, I can't even count how many times I've come across extremely paranoid explanations, often in the verge of insanity, of regular computer behavior like basic non obvious algos or glitches. From people otherwise normal. What is interesting, almost never I could change person's mind, once toxic explanation is in. Recently, with all that internet marketing and real surveillance tec…
On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speeds").
On the other hand, we use sensationalism to dismiss accurate reports ("You said your radar showed extremely high velocity, therefore what are you reporting, a UFO?").
The new approach seems best: report, collect, and analyze the data, and see where it goes.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the source for the claim though... he said "engineers who actually knew how the sensors worked." And you linked a video by a video game dev.
Who cares what his credentials are? His arguments are rational and make more sense than any other explanation. It sure is weird how much UFO-ologists suddenly care about credentialism as soon as a video game developer starts shitting on their party.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#355Until we have physical evidence, these reports are just distractions with no useful purpose.
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#356In 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…
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#357I 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…
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 nucle…
This is the same basic error of reasoning where people say because the moon landing happened, faking the moon landing was also possible (it wasn't: video editing technology of sufficient capability did not exist - space flight and CGI are two entirely separate lines of technical problem solving).
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even one that the Navy itself patented.. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
Sure, why not, what are we looking at though, some kind of microwave propulsion for spacecraft? Was a prototype ever built?
Re: As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Nimitz Incident of 2004(?). The Tic Tac UFO? That's probably one of the best explained events (debunked). Short answer is that there was sense misreading and a gimbal lock. Some people even simulated it[0]. I wouldn't call this an elaborate hoax, but an optical illusion and an event that took some expertise to understand. Expertise that a pilot wouldn't have. I should add that finding that link was nontrivial.…
The Nimitz event is far from “debunked”. We have multiple naval aviator eye witnesses of the physical object, with testimony (fravor and the female wingman, I forget her name) We have testimony of the Princeton’s AEGIS radar operator that these things were “popping in at 80k feet and dropping to sea level in a few seconds”, that “they disappear on radar and the sub would get a ping in the same area tracking 200+ knot…
Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich