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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

#511

Post by joeyjojo »

m3kw9 wrote: post #285
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…

Same here it’s always always like that as if the ufo has an earth camera detector, I fathom it may still be technically feasible if they are advanced enough. This would explain why nobody has had a clear picture taken of an UFO. /sarcasm

I have wondered if the UFOs specifically exist in a plane that will always be at the edge of our awareness. They aren't so much moving through physical space, but though our collective consciousness. Similar to how a physical person may temporarily exist in your mind, a UFO may temporarily exist in the physical space, and attempting to "capture" them is like trying to control a dream.

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

#512

Post by wpietri »

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.

Is there? I doubt it.

Think about the time and money costs of all the "seems fantastical" stuff that turned out to be bunk. Then compare it with the losses from "seems fantastical" stuff dismissed too soon. I'd bet the former is orders of magnitude larger.

Or just think about it from an individual perspective. People have lives to lead, things to do. I could spend the rest of my life looking at reports of psychic phenomena, for example. Or I could look back at the literal century of people investigating the claims and finding nothing but charlatans and fools, say, "good enough", and get on with my life. If the kooks actually find something good, I say it's their job to demonstrate it clearly, not mine to debunk all their failures.

Should society devote some small fraction of its energies to investigating fringe stuff? Sure. You never know when you'll strike gold. But I'm happy to argue that time and money sucked up by it currently is well over any sort of demonstrable ROI.

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

#513

Post by ccn0p »

majestic5762 wrote: post #445
ericmay wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fundi…

Yep, because fear is the key to control and compliance. It's the oldest trick in the book. There has to be a kernel of truth in order to be effective.

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

#514

Post by 8note »

majestic5762 wrote: post #445
ericmay wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fundi…

Rather than repeating antisemitic talking points, you can instead point at a weakness in human pattern recognition -- it's bad wrt to false positives. People see patterns that aren't there

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

#515

Post by wpietri »

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…

>But the existence of aliens would in no way contradict any physical laws or scientific consensus.

The existence of aliens, sure. But the presence of aliens on Earth pretty much does. There's no reason to think FTL travel is possible, and it's economically unreasonable to think some species is going to invest in generation ships to cross the great interstellar gulfs just so that they can fuck around with pilots and anally probe hayseeds.

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

#516

Post by pyuser583 »

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…

Some of these objections are so broad the exclude the possibility of a legit optical illusion.

Most of the stuff we see in space isn’t there. The day sky isn’t blue, the night sky isn’t black, stars don’t twinkle, etc.

Our military sensors are specifically trained to exclude most phenomena.

Is it so much to believe that optical illusion are common at high altitudes?

And that militaries don’t like their pilots “seeing things?”

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

#517

Post by scarier »

gateorade wrote: post #421
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…

Anecdotal obviously but I’m in the industry (I’m assuming you are as well from the nature of your comment) and I work with many current and former pilots and I think this characterization is a little unfair. Many military pilots do come from engineering backgrounds since a degree is generally a requirement for pilot training, and an engineering degree is often viewed as a good qualifier for becoming a pilot. Military…

Fair--we've both seen different parts of the elephant. I agree that military flight training is extremely rigorous, but I'd argue that it's so broad it has to gloss over a lot of technical detail in order to focus on developing the skills and instincts that matter in combat.

Based on the videos and reports I've seen, most or all of these cases involve sensor operation outside of typical A/A and A/G workflows, where the type of detailed technical knowledge that the system designers have could be more useful than years of practical experience. I've heard (and told) enough sea stories to be skeptical of eyewitness testimony (not that I think the aircrew who reported seeing this stuff are lying, but I've been humbled often enough by my own fallible recollections), and none of the publicly available footage I've seen of these events strikes me as anything more than a confluence of sensor limitations and (very understandable) human factors.

There are a number of reasons I'm glad the government is running these kinds of reports to ground, but I think wildly credulous reporting (particularly the "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens" interviews by a handful of aviators, but even presenting advanced adversary technology as the sane middle ground) is blowing this way out of proportion. We're already taking it way more seriously than it deserves, and there are plenty of other alligators closer to the boat.

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

#518

Post by scarier »

deadbeeves wrote: post #491
scarier wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATC probably thought they were giving a different measurement. Especially in older planes, systems aren't particularly well integrated, and most of the time you ask them what they're seeing because you can't check your own Mode C altitude in the cockpit and want to compare it to your barometric altimeter (and yes, they generally do use the same static source, but it isn't atypical for them to read differently). Think…

That sounds kind of worrying. It sounds like if a pilot has a malfunctioning altitude meter they can only check it visually or have a completely independent GPS on hand. I don't see what else the crew or the ATC could have done in that instance, given their equipment. I also don't understand why a radar of all things can't give a more precise measurement of altitude. Even a person with binoculars could probably be mo…

For what it's worth, I'm not particularly worried. My understanding is that the accident was caused by a combination of poor maintenance practices, inadequate preflight procedures, and possibly poor ground procedures by the pilots that led to them taking off with an inoperative pitot-static system. Modern aircraft can also get altitude data from GPS (as you noted), as well as inertial navigation systems and radio altimeters, and generally have redundant pitot-static systems (at least an alternate static air source) for these kinds of contingencies.

Surveillance radars have narrow beam widths in azimuth, but broad in altitude to allow them to quickly survey around them and get good enough awareness of where everyone is. There's always a trade-off between resolution and volume--some military tactical and approach radars have very precise azimuth and altitude capability, at the cost of scan volume/time. Mode C (and now, arguably, ADS-B) was the solution to this problem, allowing ATC radar to have both good position and altitude precision with an acceptable refresh rate, at a non-prohibitive cost.

You'd be surprised--unless your hypothetical binocular observer was really handy with stadiametric ranging, I imagine they'd be nowhere near a mile. They might be able to get a decent azimuth and elevation on a single aircraft, but that's a much different problem than determining position near-simultaneously for a hundred.

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

#519

Post by tstrimple »

likeabbas wrote: post #197
traverseda wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume if they got to this point they're pretty sure it's not endangering anyone, and there's no reason to believe those pilots immediate CO wasn't informed. Live tests on unaware aircraft are an obvious thing to do with your super cool new sensor blinding technology. I'd presume that there are other pilots or are aware and that this was a limited test with someone not in the know.

Lue Elizondo did far more than run AATIP. His primary job at the DoD was to prevent leaks from the Special Access Programs that contained the classified technology that would be working on what you claim UFOs are. I can link you to his IG complaint where it contains his performance report that outlined his official duties at the DoD if you'd like. Edit: here it is https://imgur.com/a/y0X1eoo His full IG report which…

If his job was to prevent leaks from the Special Access Programs, wouldn't he absolutely say that these "objects" weren't classified tech? Like, it's literally his job to say it's not us!

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

#520

Post by jliptzin »

ActorNightly wrote: post #493
runjake wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nimitz Incident of 2004(?). Extremely detailed visual and sensor events. Tons of human witnesses. Tons of activity. There was a detailed Reddit thread on the incident from a Seaman many, many years ago long before news of the Tic Tac came out. I’m on mobile but perhaps someone else can paste the thread URL. Could be an elaborate hoax but that’s one heck of a long con game.

The issue with all these reports is that there is a distinct lack of detail surrounding the sighting. At most its visual reports and very blurry IR footage. Zero mention of anything else. Lets take an example of the Tic Tac from the incident, that was supposedly moving very fast. If it had a physical presence, ie could interact with the world, it would seem very likely that pilots would describe the resultant shockwa…

Maybe they are normally fully invisible, but even alien spaceships can have malfunctions every now and then. Perhaps they didn't realize the cloak system was off.
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