Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 978 posts

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

#361

Post by MrMan »

serf wrote: post #249
carlosjobim wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many were ridiculed for telling about their sights of giant squid until the day the first one was caught?

giant squid have a biological premise; they're just bigger squid. Their origin can be strongly guessed. You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean. we have yet to find a plethora of ocean-dwelling smaller mermaids and 'tic-tacs'. In fact, we've yet to discover solid evidence of the existence of either phenomena, regardless of size. Chances start to diminish in t…

mermaids are just women swimming in the ocean

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

#362

Post by jmyeet »

snickerbockers wrote: post #145

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…

> There's a real problem with people being close-minded towards anything that seems fantastical.

Two things:

1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and

2. The burden of proof belongs to the one making the claim, not on the other side to refute the claim.

Anything in the realm of "new physics" (eg claims such objects defy inertia and accelerate at a rate that would kill any person) or extraterrestial origin is certainly an extraodinary claim.

Extraterrestial origin is the easiest to dismiss because of just how extraorindary such claims are. An awful lot of hand-waving happens when you point out the fundamental problems and timelines with interstellar travel just because people want it to be true. Claims like "we once thought it impossible to go to the Moon" are no argument at all.

I've seen nothing that comes close to the standard of extraordinary evidence.

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

#363

Post by elevaet »

jerf wrote: post #254
NikolaNovak wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Go to your history and delete it. I assume this does little to nothing for ads, but it definitely does affect suggestions. I like the occasional "cute animal" video, but if you leave one in your history, YouTube becomes a cute animal machine.

Hah this is so true. I always watch stuff like this in an incognito mode browser.

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

#364

Post by nradov »

FpUser wrote: post #211
nradov wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have seen two satellites. The second one appeared to intersect the path of the first from your perspective just as the first one faded from view.

Total BS. What you described would've been very noticeable. Especially "fading" of visually slow moving satellite.

No, That's not how it works. From the perspective of an observer on the ground, a satellite can seem to suddenly disappear as it passes into the Earth’s shadow. It's entirely possible that you saw two different satellites.

https://www.space.com/6870-spot-satellites.html

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

#365

Post by crispyambulance »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #318
supernova87a wrote: post #147

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…

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…

> ...so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal".

Those videos are getting old now. If there was something to this stuff and it were really as commonplace as folks are saying we would be seeing much better imagery (at least) by now. Not to mention the fact that this stuff would not be limited to American military observers.

The fact is these are pilots who observe the things they're trained to observe with the very job-specific tools they've been trained to use. They don't have tools for arbitrary scientific observations. However, if it's sooo common, then yeah, we should expect that someone in some country will start properly taking measurements on these phenomena... but so far it's been crickets.

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

#366

Post by jasmer »

juskrey wrote: post #332
supernova87a wrote: post #147

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…

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…

Yes, good point, this is as much a 'psychological' phenom as anything else.

Particularly in the areas of populism and conspiracy theory.

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

#367

Post by carlosjobim »

serf wrote: post #249
carlosjobim wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many were ridiculed for telling about their sights of giant squid until the day the first one was caught?

giant squid have a biological premise; they're just bigger squid. Their origin can be strongly guessed. You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean. we have yet to find a plethora of ocean-dwelling smaller mermaids and 'tic-tacs'. In fact, we've yet to discover solid evidence of the existence of either phenomena, regardless of size. Chances start to diminish in t…

Giant squid was dismissed as tall tales for hundreds of years.

Would a mermaid creature be something improbable to an ancient mariner, who hadn't even heard of anything like a monkey before he saw them with his own eyes?

> You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.

Would you then say it is probable that species of giant shark exist to this day?

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

#368

Post by rgbrenner »

LarryMullins wrote: post #304
rgbrenner wrote: post #296

Earlier 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.

I’m just asking for the source that the original poster referenced. If you don’t want to provide the source referenced, that’s fine… but if you don’t have the source then I don’t know what you’re adding here with this reply.

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

#370

Post by deadbeeves »

nostromo wrote: post #347
scarier wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

That's amazing. So ATC didn't have the capability to measure the altitude of any plane themselves?
Post reply on HN