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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

#411

Post by revscat »

natch wrote: post #384
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was seen - by multiple fighter jet pilots (in different planes) - picked up by the fighter jet's radar - picked up by the USS Nimitz's radar. So yeah...

Fighter jet pilot is a self-avowed prankster and “class clown” (his words). One of the people who wrote the software for that radar system is his good buddy, best man at his wedding, and was on duty nearby on that day. It could all be a big prank. Some of the eyewitnesses saw what they saw on, wait for it, a radar screen. Well technically it was another technology not exactly radar but I forget the name. [edit: FLIR,…

Nor do you that there were any embellishments whatsoever.

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

#412

Post by csomar »

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…

I am not. However, I do not accept a closed-minded alien. The alien is interested in particular US military installations but not in me? Okay, maybe not me, but wouldn't the pyramids be more interesting?

This makes it boils down to 1. sensors artifacts, 2. US military program not shared with all pilots or 3. another country collecting data on US.

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

#413

Post by fidgewidge »

XorNot wrote: post #339
SquareWheel wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number is infinity. There is a reason that data is not the plural of anecdote. Once scrutinized, these phenomena are almost always explained by humans misinterpreting their instruments (either machine readout, or their own eyes). Honestly, you wouldn't believe how many people report _the moon_ as a UFO because it shows up in an odd place, gets distorted by unique atmospheric conditions, and can appear in differen…

Also the other essential problem: you never stop being afraid of the dark. This is evolutionarily sensible: we're a tribal species with a group-collective survival strategy, but few natural defenses: no fur, poor night vision. We're almost entirely dependent on tool-using to exist in the wild, it's our edge but it makes us very vulnerable. UFO reports disproportionately occur at night, and also from relatively isolat…

But if I were an alien trying to monitor earth from space ships, and I had some sort of radar stealth technology, I'd also fly at night to avoid visual detection.

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

#414

Post by belter »

- 40,000 to 70,000 Amateur Astronomers, scan the skies every night, with precision instruments capable to distinguish Jupiter atmosphere bands. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena...

- About 500 observatories in the world, most of which are located in the Northern hemisphere study nightly stars, galaxies, planets and other celestial objects. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena...

- By some rough estimate, it's likely that there are anywhere between 6,000 to 8,000 commercial planes in the air on average at any given time. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena...other than the usual meteors, lights and commonly explained images.

- At least 140 Countries in the World have sophisticated Air Forces with optical sensors. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena... What a conspiracy would bring together from Italian to French to Brazilians to Norwegians?

- The military have sensors capable to read a bus ticket on the floor of Moscow streets. We even know the Hubble Space Telescope is a copy of spy satellites pointed at Earth. Not much reported from those teams...

- The F-18 have boxes like the AN/ASQ-228. A multi-sensor, electro-optical targeting pod with thermographic camera, low-light television camera, target laser rangefinder/laser designator, and laser spot tracker with a range of 40 miles. But all images we get from these UFO look they were taken with a cheap grainy amateur camera...

- These UFO seem obsessed with the US military and the United States. Have they heard about the great military capabilities of the Swiss, Luxembourg, North Korean Armies? :-)

These are most likely local US Top Secret Skunk works projects. Maybe the Chinese Balloon was an attempt to trigger them.

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

#415

Post by ericmay »

belter wrote: post #414

- 40,000 to 70,000 Amateur Astronomers, scan the skies every night, with precision instruments capable to distinguish Jupiter atmosphere bands. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena... - About 500 observatories in the world, most of which are located in the Northern hemisphere study nightly stars, galaxies, planets and other celestial objects. Hardly any noticed these anomalous phenomena... - By some rough est…

> Maybe the Chinese Balloon was an attempt to trigger them.

Now this is the game-behind-the-game “conspiracy” stuff I can get behind. Great idea/thread to pull on there. Much better than aliens. It seems “obvious” to me that the extraterrestrial thing is a coordinated effort. Likely the US is testing its capabilities against itself.

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

#416

Post by NikolaNovak »

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.

Fascinating! I assumed it wouldn't work - sure they'd take it away from history view, but keep it as a data point regardless of deletion

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

#417

Post by teawrecks »

nonethewiser wrote: post #273
smiley1437 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (Sagan Standard)

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (Sagan Standard) This response doesn't make sense because there wasn't an extraordinary claim being made. He just said we don't know what it is and shouldn't assume it's uninteresting.

Have you ever been unable to find your keys? Did you consider it reasonable to explore the possibility that you might have small elves living in your walls who stole them? Why not?

The observed phenomenon is literally being referred to as "possibly aliens or magic". Obviously something was observed, and obviously you can (and people certainly do) analyze them to come to a rational conclusions. But to even mention the possibility of aliens or magic as within the realm of possibilities to be considered is an extraordinary claim.

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

#418

Post by graderjs »

nscalf wrote: post #341

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.

Yeah! It’s only our fear that it is legitimately something revolutionary that causes us to ‘protect ourselves’ by not looking at it… and it’s that same fear that causes us to pretend it is not legitimate, only because we’re afraid that it is. Which then causes us to not just do the rational thing of facing it and investigating it. We’re basically denying our first highly-informative impression because we don’t want it to be true. Humans are wack

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

#419

Post by revscat »

deadbeeves wrote: post #375
ethbr0 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This speaks to both sides of the problem in getting to the truth. 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 appro…

You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted. Why is it that alien spaceships (let's call them what people actually think is being discussed, and not just any random flying thing that we don't know what it is) only show up on equipment when you can barely tell what you're looking at, and never clearly and unambiguously from multiple places?

In my experience the only people using the word “alien” are people like you: the dismissers. My belief is that there is something strange going on, but we do not know what.

Getting some people to even admit that much is a struggle, even after 70+ years of it happening.

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

#420

Post by revscat »

psychphysic wrote: post #213
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…

It's worth mentioning also the infamous go fast and swivel videos have been explained. And both revealed that several pilots we mislead by the same simple phenomena. And it wasn't a pilot who explained it but engineers who actually knew how the sensors worked.

This is untrue.
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