As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by tshaddox » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:42 AM UTC

pyuser583 wrote: post #516

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…

Do what now? Those things you listed aren’t actually optical illusions, are they? Pretty sure the sky is actually blue.

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

#522

Post by nradov » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:44 AM UTC

llamaLord wrote: post #48

dilippkumar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aha! You’re the person I’ve been searching for. A person who has seen something that is incredible (literally) and has a hard time following up because of a complete absence of data/evidence to back up your claim. Going back to your experience, what tools do you wish we as a society had that would help us document your experience? Did you try to document your experience? What were the barriers you encountered? If you…

Can't tell if being sarcastic or not... But the vast majority of us carry an at least 12 megapixel camera in our pocket literally everywhere we go now...

Cell phone cameras generally have terrible dynamic range and have very little optical magnification. Even with a 12 megapixel sensor, when you take a picture of a distant object in the sky you typically end up with just a blurry dot.

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

#523

Post by majestic5762 » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:48 AM UTC

8note wrote: post #514

majestic5762 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's antisemitic from my words? But you're correct: people see patterns, like me or you, and they're often wrong, but not always. The truth lurks in there somewhere. But that was just my theory based on personal experience and observation. I'm not interested in political, religious or racial discussions.

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

#524

Post by spaceman_2020 » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:48 AM UTC

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…

Counterpoint: any civilization advanced enough for interplanetary travel is also smart enough to reveal itself when it WANTS to reveal itself. Cloaking and stealth are reasonably simpler technologies compared to traveling light years.

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

#525

Post by ShredKazoo » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:50 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #452

ShredKazoo wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean. And there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?

> Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once? This is absolutely ludicrous. It doesn't matter how many stars are in the sky or how likely life bearing planets are in the galaxy. There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

>There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".

The universe is 13 billion years old. The Milky Way is about 100K lightyears across. Suppose another species could travel at 90% of light speed. Then we're looking at maybe 110,000 years necessary to colonize the galaxy -- only a tiny fraction of 13 billion years.

I've been following this UAP stuff for a while, and as far as I can tell no one is claiming that the UAPs defy all known physical laws (i.e. I've seen no claims of violation of conservation of energy, 2nd law of thermodynamics, FTL travel, etc. -- though, someone should do the math on those transit times to check the FTL travel one). Just that the propulsion & cloaking work in ways we can't explain. Show Aristotle a jet fighter and he'll have a similar reaction.

Supposing that the UAPs arise from a civ that arose when the universe was about 12 billion years old, i.e. 1 billion years ago. That's about 1 billion years of technological development. Can we really put confident bounds on what could be achieved in terms of propulsion and cloaking with 1 billion years of research?

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

#526

Post by wpietri » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:51 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #229

WalterBright wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time one of those fantastic items gets explained, it's always mundane and boring, and never dampens the enthusiasm for the next one. I recall one about B+W photographs of "wood elves" taken around 1910 or so by a couple girls. The girls insisted it was genuine. Photographic experts declared the photos were genuine and could not have been faked. When the girls were in their 80's, they finally confessed that the…

And two more details; * Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes was one of the boosters of the photograph. This sounds weird but there's about an Arthur Conan Doyle book that relates to reality in messy detail. There's generally no deducible explanation of random events, they're just random. And so the method of "excluding all other explanation" is generally worthless in trying to look at single events -…

> I would claim that virtually anyone looking at the elf/fairy pictures today will see ... cardboard cutouts.

And this is such an important point. The UFO evidence is always the latest thing that can't be easily explained. But our skill at explaining keeps growing. There will always be things we can't explain yet. And some people insist on filling those gaps with aliens, gods, and monsters.

One tell for me here is that the paranormal/supernatural/space alien incidents don't get more confirmed over time. E.g., if there were an artifact like the Antikythera mechanism [1] that continued to become more exotic as science advanced, that'd be interesting to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

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

#527

Post by tstrimple » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:51 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #20

I think what bothers us most about incidents like this is that any country or human organization that had massive air superiority over everyone else would inevitably use it to their advantage. And yet, here are the reports, but no one is coming forward to say "yes, we Canadians actually never cancelled the Avro Arrow and have been decades ahead of the rest of you all this time- now please remove that Danish flag from…

The United States *does* have massive air superiority over everyone else and it's not even close. We have three times as many planes as Russia, our next closest "competitor" and we have more than the closest four (China, India and South Korea) combined. This doesn't touch on the fact that we also have the most technologically advanced air force by far and the carrier groups to support them anywhere in the world. It should surprise no one that these sightings almost exclusively happen by military personnel near military installations.

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

#528

Post by 8note » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:52 AM UTC

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…

You're sayihg that not only do aliens exist, but that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong? Or the universe is non local, and these aliens have developed ftl teleportation?

In order to get here, aliens have to have traveled here, and while traveling, and alive, they'll give off heat -- glowing brightly if they have to turn or accelerate to avoid crashing really hard into the earth.

An alien arriving before they traveled breaks a lot of things, and makes them much closer to magic than some single cell equivalents on a distant moon

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

#529

Post by Animats » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:55 AM UTC

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…

High-performance hobbyist drones are approaching UFO levels of performance.[1] Top speed of that one is well over 400MPH. One of those will cost you maybe US$8000. The triangular craft seen buzzing US Navy ships off the coast of California look a lot like those.

There's a huge range of remote controlled aerial vehicles you can buy now.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k

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

#530

Post by majestic5762 » Mon, Feb 06, 2023, 4:56 AM UTC

ccn0p wrote: post #513

majestic5762 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. [redacted, i was wrong]