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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

#541
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unreasonable because installing and maintaining aviation qualified cameras is expensive. You can't just strap a consumer action camera to the wing and expect the FAA to approve. Airlines have no incentive to pay for extra cameras.

I think a pilot could easily suction cup a GoPro on a mount to the back of the cockpit door, facing the whole cockpit.

That would be a policy violation at any major US airline. They don't want random objects in the cockpit which could come loose in severe turbulence or a crash, causing a safety hazard.

It would be pointless for this use case anyway. The field of view through the cockpit windows is very narrow and any UAP would only show up as a few blurry pixels.

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

#542
post #514

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

Antisemitic?

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

#543
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

400 mph is way off from 40000mph, which is one of the speed estimates from an encounter.

My pet theory is that the UAP footage we've seen from the last few year is actually sensor warfare, i.e. spoofing

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

#544
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…

It’s weird, given the premise of seeing something alien, that you would assume properties of their propulsion or which emmissions they are making.

Sure, if the thing is some new earth tech or natural phenomena there are plenty of assumptions you can make. But in the face of something else?

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

#545
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…

I’m also skeptical of these reports, but I think you’re being maybe a little smug here, and you’ve overextended yourself a bit as well in a few places. So I’m going to play devils advocate and nitpick a few points.

> 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...

Have you ever seen gun camera footage from a fighter jet? Or thermal camera footage in general? That’s what it all looks like, especially at high levels of zoom. Also, I don’t even know how the laser designator is supposed to improve the image quality.

This stuff isn’t designed to capture footage for a Top Gun movie, it’s designed to detect targets, primarily using parts of the spectrum that are invisible to the human eye.

> These UFO seem obsessed with the US military and the United States.

Setting aside the possibility that other countries might be keeping sightings secret….

The US Air Force is the biggest in the world. The second biggest air force in the world is the US Navy. And they are also two of the best trained air forces in the world, measured in flight hours per pilot. Which means the US is overwhelmingly in the lead when it comes to cumulative military flight hours.

As you pointed out, military aircraft tend to have sophisticated targeting sensors that aren’t installed aboard commercial airliners. Specifically, air superiority fighters have targeting sensors that are designed to detect and lock onto other targets that are in the air. Spy satellites are looking at the ground, while observatories and amateur astronomers are gazing into the stars, but fighter jets are uniquely positioned to look for flying objects in the air.

And when it comes to the ocean that covers about 2/3 of the earth’s surface, the US Navy is practically the only group of people flying fighter jets over that area. The US has eleven supercarriers; the most any other country has is one. Some countries have smaller aircraft carriers, but the US has some of those as well.

I don’t know what’s going on here, and I very much doubt that it’s aliens, but there are plenty of reasons that US Navy fighter pilots would notice this sort of thing and report it more than anyone else.

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

#546

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…

It’s unlikely a secret cabal runs the world. Too hard to keep such a thing airtight.

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'd add that in the last 20 years, we have increased by orders of magnitude people's ability to capture photos and video. Billions of people now have smartphones on their persons all the time. Billions! But the evidence we have is somehow the same quality as before. So it seems that either space aliens have coincidentally gotten orders of magnitude better at avoiding recordings, or the explanation is not about wh…

If Aliens can seemingly break all known laws of the physical universe to get to Earth, somehow I think they could probably evade as many mobile phone cameras as they want

I think if UAP's can evade active radars and somehow were caught doing crazy speeds by airforce equipment alone, its quite possible the 2$ phone camera won't capture a thing going at 5 mach.

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

#548
Excluding otherworldly forms of speculation about why possible aliens are visiting us, this subject really boils down to four tangible questions about how we arrived at this footage and the eyewitness accounts from Fravor et al:

- Is it aliens?

- If not, do these sightings represent real unexplainable technological phenomena (advanced propulsion technology)?

- If not, are the eyewitness accounts credible?

- In any case, why is the DoD letting eyewitnesses go public?

With the answers to these questions we can enumerate several interesting possible explanations:

1) It’s not aliens, sightings do not represent any real unexplainable physical phenomena, the eyewitnesses have collectively deluded themselves somehow and are not credible, the DoD has allowed them to go public seeing the matter as benign (the “lens glare” hypothesis)

2) It’s not aliens or any unexplainable phenomenon, the eyewitnesses are deluded, but the DoD has let them go public for some ulterior motive, possibly to sow confusion and provide cover for real technologies they are working on (the “useful idiots” hypothesis)

3) It’s not aliens or any advanced technology, maybe it’s even completely fabricated, and the eyewitnesses are involved in a PSYOP. Possibly to delude US adversaries into chasing their tails, or to provide cover for real technologies (the “PSYOP” hypothesis)

4) It’s not aliens, but it is an advanced technology being developed in secret by the US, the eyewitnesses are unaware of the providence of said technologies, and the DoD has let them go public as a PSYOP to sow confusion or to signal capabilities to adversaries (the “skunk works” hypothesis)

5) It is aliens, it is known by governments worldwide, and the DoD has let the eyewitnesses go public because they see it as a benign public good or are not willing or capable of stopping the flow of said information (the “UFO whistleblower” hypothesis)

6) It is aliens, it is unknown by some other governments, and the US wants to sound the alarm, possibly to signal other nations to come forward with their own information and start working on a global strategy for managing the situation (the “Earth defence” hypothesis)

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'd add that in the last 20 years, we have increased by orders of magnitude people's ability to capture photos and video. Billions of people now have smartphones on their persons all the time. Billions! But the evidence we have is somehow the same quality as before. So it seems that either space aliens have coincidentally gotten orders of magnitude better at avoiding recordings, or the explanation is not about wh…

If Aliens can seemingly break all known laws of the physical universe to get to Earth, somehow I think they could probably evade as many mobile phone cameras as they want

Sure, but that doesn't explain why they got better at the exact rate our technology did.

It's much easier to blame it on gods or angels or devils or whatever. Which is basically what "aliens" means when they're treated as having extra-magic technology.

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

#550
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any NATO countries reported these?

The military budget of the rest of NATO combined is much smaller than that of the US. ... Why would aliens be interested?

My guess is if there was aliens they would be so totally disinterested in us they wouldn’t even distinguish between military and civilian. Just zipping around taking their measurements of the mineral deposits.
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