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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

#461

Post by doodlebugging »

driggs wrote: post #214

> Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence. Occams Razor suggests that if these objects appear almost exclusively over US military facilities and US military training ranges, they're most likely operated by the US military. (Sorry to the Navy pilot whose security clearance is too…

I'll take the other side of this argument since Occams Razor may not be the tool for the job of understanding or characterizing these phenomena.

Since there are numerous reports spanning decades and even dating to the 19th century, before manned flight, and these reports come from all over the globe and the descriptions involve similar events and very similar observations between widely spaced events then it follows that these "UAPs" are not all likely to be related to a project operated by the US military.

I keep an open mind about everything that I don't understand until I have the data needed to form an opinion. I am not convinced that decades of reports from educated and uneducated people living in widely separated regions that all describe similar situations can all be related to secret operations carried out by one nation's military. I have a hard time branding all these people as delusional or as liars when I have never met them. I am also not qualified to assign any of this to any category except "unexplained and interesting enough to study".

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

#462

Post by Slighted »

isaacg wrote: post #76

These videos just look like optical artifacts of the lenses of the cameras, as discussed here: https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw Is there any evidence that there's more to these videos than that?

What an extremely annoying, pompous video. Doesn't inspire confidence in their ability to be neutral and factual in the slightest, assuming that its what they're actually striving for and not just a "dumb conspiracy theorists" propaganda piece.

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

#463

Post by throwaway4aday »

kypro wrote: post #246

I don't get it. In recent years a number of people who I know and I view to be very intelligent have started talk to me about how they believe reports of aliens trolling US fighter pilots and that the US government is covering this up. And I'm aware that "trolling" might be viewed as an uncharitable way of looking at it, but I actually think that's the most accurate description of what's being reported in these sight…

The trolling hypothesis makes the most sense to me. If these are non-terrestrial that means that getting here is relatively simple given the sheer number and variety that are reported. If that's the case and these things have no interest in colonization, resource extraction, or elimination of a competitor i.e. we are thoroughly beneath them in every way that makes me think the zoo hypothesis is the most likely, though I would rename it the natural park hypothesis. There's probably a big hyperspace sign above us that says "Don't feed the humans, please remain in your vehicle at all times, this area supervised for unauthorized contact attempts" and the trolling we see is the occasional harebrained tourist who wanted to tease the monkeys.

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

#464

Post by throwaway4aday »

itronitron wrote: post #112
robbiex88 wrote: post #32

If you haven't listened to it yet, highly recommend the Ryan Graves episode on the Joe Rogan Experience.

I used to occasionally watch JRE and at the time found some of the episodes to be interesting thought experiments. But then I watched one episode where the guest expert was talking about a topic in which I had enough familiarity to recognize that they were completely bullshitting their way through the interview and attempting to sound mysterious in order to avoid providing any factual information. Recalling the Gell-…

A good reason to not read the papers either.

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

#465

Post by giardini »

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…

The article is alarmist but we have no sign of malevolent (or even intentional) behavior. We need to wait for more information.

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

#466

Post by likeabbas »

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…

Here is a recent paper by Ukrainian astronomers about UAP caught by their two major telescopes going Mach 15+ and doing an instantaneous u turn https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17085

Most likely other astronomers have picked up events like this but discarded the data since it wasn’t matching what they were looking for, or the stigma pressured them to ignore it.

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

#467

Post by nl »

nprateem wrote: post #350
nl wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's impossible to say with such certainty what the reaction would be.

What if the country that developed it was a Western-aligned country like Japan, Israel or France?

What if the country was a country like Russia or Cuba, and has had this tech since before the fall of the Berlin wall and the US intelligence community wanted to keep it secret?

What if the country was a country that is under Western sanctions for other reasons but those reasons were a pretext? For example, if the developer was Iran or North Korea how would you tell the difference without access to classified information?

What if the country was able to blackmail the US into not imposing sanctions? How would you distinguish between that an US foreign policy towards a country like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia?

What if the country was a historically neutral mid-power where there is significant downside in sanctioning them (for example Switzerland)?

What if some elements of the US intelligence community support working with the foreign power and others don't?

There are just too many possibilities to judge the veracity of a theory like this by looking at US foreign policy?

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

#468

Post by jack_pp »

danenania wrote: post #265
Fezzik wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The close-minded approach is to accept someone’s fantastical claim because you want to, or just because the claim is being made, when the claim is contrary to mountains and centuries of evidence. The open-minded take incorporates all the possible evidence to reach the most likely conclusion. And the conclusion is never, so far, either aliens or magic. It’s just silly to conclude that an observation that has no immedi…

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…

Magic/ supernatural isn't unscientific by definition. We don't believe in it because there isn't anyone able to do those things for all of us to see. Science is defined by the scientific method and our curiosity to apply it not by our scepticism.

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

#469

Post by ethbr0 »

deadbeeves wrote: post #424
ethbr0 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at it from the opposite perspective. If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful? The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security. Gear is going…

You're talking about a different interpretation of the word "UFO" than I used above. Ever since those reports came out some years ago of pilots reporting UFOs, the implication has been very strong that "UFO" doesn't just mean "here's something that showed up on the sensors that we don't know what it is". Yes, the military should investigate all reports of UFOs in the strict sense to see if they've found some new piec…

The current furore, from the more reasonable heads in Congress, is that the military has historically not done that.

They had (a) no centralized collection point or widely used reporting mechanism, (b) no staffed office tasked with investigations (afaik, only the Navy had an office, and it was ~3 bodies with other duties), & (c) no periodic review.

They essentially ignored it as a potential problem. So Indiana Jones, "top men" type stuff.

Unfortunately, a lot of the public debate is "aliens", because media and idiots. But there's a serious underlying problem.

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

#470

Post by doodlebugging »

nradov wrote: post #123
3pac wrote: post #3

I saw a UFO maybe 12-13 years ago. It did not look like anything a human would design, even with advanced technology. It looked something like the oblong silver blob in The Flight of the Navigator, just hanging there, "much in the way that a brick doesn't." It must have been 5 km away so it would have been pretty large. It was a breezy overcast day with low clouds, and the moving clouds obscured but never completely…

Could it have been a large mylar balloon?

Until we have a positive ID that it was not it will be difficult to rule this out.
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