Live data from Hacker News

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

thehill.com

441–450 of 978 posts

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, 1…

>I had a funny showerthought the other day

Haha. Okay. That's a great lead-in.

>At what point do you reasonably have to start to wonder if orgasms are, in fact, real?

Is your audience male or female? Going by anecdotal tales, for some it could be an experience akin to an alien encounter.

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

#442

ITT: Multiple fighter pilots (whose sole job is to understand aerial objects by eye and sensors), radar, camera and infrared have seen these. “It’s a glitch, lens flare and/or the pilots are stupid, but me a programmer is an expert in this.”

This is most threads on topics outside of the CS sphere

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

#443

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…

>what fringe idiots believe.

You just contradicted the rest of your post.

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

#444

What's the consensus on the most plausible rationale interpretation for these sightings?

The most rational statement would be that we don't know what they are so we should take some time and effort to find out.

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

#445
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.

My theory is that the wealthy and secret fraternities who put their men in government and politics always need controversial subjects so that they can push hidden agendas behind them. Orchestration can be easy: just a handful of people know the truth, some execute knowingly, the rest are unknowingly part of the story. It could be useful to think why they need this UFO story to resurface. Better weapons and more funding? The aliens are the masters who ask for peace and a global government? The Overton Window has already widened. Once people accept the idea of UFOs/aliens, they will start accepting more crazy ideas. Not implying there is an evil plan. Maybe there is a good plan for a better world, and the only instruments are these kind of stories that keep us in a state of wonder. They've been cooking this UFO stuff for decades. Curios to see where it ends or what's born out of it.

But it seems there are evidence and trustworthy people talking about these UFO sightings. Maybe they're true. Let's not forget that the Covid story was also true, but way more convincing that it should've been. What did they gain? More money and control. Who benefited? Everybody who joined the dance silently but knowingly: from Pfizer, WHO, to local governments, businessmen, medical staff, politicians, etc, to name a few. The whole Covid story is riddled with corruption, from top to bottom, in every country of this world. But everybody's happy: the elite at the top ruled out their plan, those at the middle executed and made a profit, while those at the bottom paid the price and are glad to be alive. 3 years ago this sounded like a crazy conspiracy, but the reality of today is that they managed to pull it off in public! What's even more perverse is that even those people who feel there is something wrong, now they feel hopeless and will accept whatever life throws at them. Anyway they're always busy working to afford existence or that expensive and instagramable M6 BMW they want so much. Educated, domesticated, but sophisticated cattle.

Today we have deadly viruses, WW3, UFOs, draught and famine, climate change, economic crises. Too many things happening at once, no time to find the needle in the haystack, let's just trust the government and press when they start screaming at us again.

I'd love the truth that aliens are visiting us, that there is more to science than we know, but life taught me that humans are always behind any kind of story. Either fabricate, or use some real truths, but always leverage a backdoor to exploit the human mind. The backdoor is our reaction to fear and the exploit is the story. Fear is primal and many other feelings eventually boil down to fear, even love. Fear of loneliness, of hunger, of failure, of an unfulfilling life, of reject, of pain. Fear of the unknown.

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

#446

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…

The explainable ones are boring. The unexplainable 1% are the exciting ones.

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

#447
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 not remotely a safe assumption. We know interstellar travel is resource intensive, but it's within the capabilities of todays technology. It was probably doable with some effort with 1960s technology. 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…

It’s not within today’s technology to actually visit an extrasolar planet. We could possibly do a flyby with a solar sail but we don’t have a way to slow down and enter the planet’s atmosphere. And even that only gets us to the relatively small number of stars that are in our immediate vicinity in any kind of human-civilization-scale timeframe.

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

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were, they'd do it, but it doesn't help their business, so they don't.

They must be some kind of gods really. Anything they do is because it make perfect sense. If there's something they're not doing it's because of course it's not worth doing!

Yeah, who'd think a business would try and not spend money on something they don't need in a cut-throat industry.

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

#449

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…

> 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…

You know what takes literally infinite more courage? Being able to walk it back when absolutely spot on explanations are given by outside sources after you spend years on the conspiracy circut making your experience the central point of your entire identity.

There is no explanation that could ever get this guy to admit he was wrong. He's trapped.

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

#450

If civilian claims he saw UFOs, I assume they are in a different set of mind. If a military aviator claims he saw UFOs, I assume they're helping cover TS stuff If I witness a UFO myself among countless others with no doubt about our sanity, I will more readily believe that C.S Lewis' "space trilogy" daemons have been sent by Lucifer himself than I'll believe in super-luminous travel.

So you’re saying there’s a chance?
Post reply on HN