Live data from Hacker News

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

thehill.com

641–650 of 978 posts

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

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well would you increase the budget of your production grade deliverables for maybe proving to internet forum visitors that your product sometimes is in the presence of weird phenomena?

Oh I dunno. Maybe because that's what people do? We put billions into explaining stuff we don't understand.

Building a particle accelerator is not the same as adding 1% to the cost of an already costly machine for the off chance of proving some marginal phenomena visually.

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

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well would you increase the budget of your production grade deliverables for maybe proving to internet forum visitors that your product sometimes is in the presence of weird phenomena?

Are you suggesting NARCAP is an internet forum?

They don't seem to think the camera resolution is a problem in taking these sightings seriously, as opposed to random person here I'm responding to. Seems to indicate something doesn't it?

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

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well would you increase the budget of your production grade deliverables for maybe proving to internet forum visitors that your product sometimes is in the presence of weird phenomena?

I'm not sure about all of that, but I know a lot of people are paid to count a lot of beans. There are lots of beans saved from diagnostics, especially where insurance is involved.

Have you heard of black boxes? I don't think dashboard cams are a limiting factor for airplanes here...

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

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The point is that you can make any number of stories about aliens trying to explain the phenomenon, and there would be some that would be way more believable then some object breaking pretty well established known physical laws with the only explanation that "aliens have ADVANCED SCIENCE"

For example, Aliens living among us for a while, undetected, and having the ability to place false memories in peoples heads because they mapped out how human brain works down to the neuron level (thanks to their massive compute clusters) is way more believable.

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

#645
post #596

Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665 These were supposed to be the smoking gun evidence. UFO believers inside the DoD and as high up as US Senators fought for years to get them declassified. As soon as they were public, they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective. More…

Mick West has one major problem. He takes a video, and works to create any sort of elaborate explanation with zero consideration given to probability or externalities. If he can create the same visual effect he then declares his concept as the "truth", and everything else "debunked." Zero effort is made to challenge his own conclusions or assess their probability.

As an example in the Gimbel video [1], he concludes the a pilot is unknowingly locked onto another ship and what's actually showing up is just the exhaust of that ship. Would the military be unable to determine the presence of another ship in their immediate vicinity? The pilots reference a fleet of such ships showing up on instrumentation, as well as implying unusual aerodynamic factors. These factors are all completely ignored. I would put the probability of aliens as something near 0, but I would assess even that probability as higher than 'another ship's exhaust', even if one may be able to create a similar effect through such. I think the best explanation is simply *shrugs*. It's okay to accept uncertainty.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKHg-vnTFsM

---

All that said I'm extremely skeptical of these videos and even testimony for a simple reason. All this stuff started coming out at the same time three other things also happened. There was a leak about a bunch of sci-level research supposedly being done by the military. Shortly thereafter the Navy publicly patented it. Here [2] is a patent on an inertial mass reduction tool. A web crawl for the author's name "Salvatore Pais" is an interesting and utterly bizarre. If we were researching e.g. alien technology, patenting it achieves nothing except advertising it to the world. And that's something you'd actually want to keep secret.

This was (and has been) happening also at the time that the US military has began failing to meet recruitment goals, and the endless absurd failures of technology (Zumwalt class destroyers, F-35, submarines running into rocks, ships running into each other, etc) seems to imply there's been a brain drain in the military. I think this is largely just a covert recruiting campaign to get more higher-brow types interested in the military. Come enlist, and build a Stargate! It sounds a whole lot more fun than "Come join us and push ads on people who don't want them." Unfortunately it's also probably completely fake.

[2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

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

#646
post #104
post #8

I worked on stealth aircraft that would occasionally cause civilian UFO reports. It was common for the reports to mention that these UFOs maneuvered unlike any man-made aircraft, which was always a good chuckle because they were usually just flying straight or banking normally. However when seasoned military pilots like Fravor speak on the matter, I listen. When a bunch of them speak about the same incident, I take t…

Fravor admitted to UFO pranks in the 90s (gliding over camp fires and then turning on afterburners). Some were found reported on UFO forums at the time.

I would not say he admitted it. More like told it as a funny anecdote in juxtaposition to what he experienced.

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

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they release the videos we will know! If they release the radar data we will know! If they release ...

The original article cites pilots, Congress-people, and members of the intelligence services saying there are hundreds of credible instances of apparently advanced technology documented by eyewitness testimony, video, radar, infrared, etc. Seems completely different than your parody here.

It really isn’t, it’s what’s happened. The recordings released a couple of years ago were also breathlessly reported to be classified smoking gun evidence, confirmed by analysts, that would change everything. Except when we got to actually see them, what we saw was video of pilots patently misreading the sensor data shown in the same recording, and some fuzzy lens flared blobs that could be anything.

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people realize how much of our understanding of physics needs to be broken for aliens to be visiting us. Or that these creatures are willing to spend decades or generations away from their planet/home/family. Space is a hell of a lot bigger than people really think. Even several times the speed of light is slow in terms of these interstellar distances.

Can you elaborate on that? As I see it. Let's say that human civilization does not turn Earth to a nuclear wasteland but rather resolves its social issues and proceeds with colonization of Solar System. We already sent probe out of our Solar System. It does not look for me to be impossible technology to build a probe with AI and robots smart enough to reach another star system, decelerate there, build some factories…

Sure, I actually wrote a longer comment here[0]. My understanding of what you're saying (no FTL) kinda falls under point 2 that I made. While I understand the mechanism you're discussing, is a civilization willing to spend a billion years waiting for the information to travel back home? I'd be under the impression that this would be a pure data collection pov and a quite risky one at that. You can't act on that information in a meaningful way since the life evolves drastically within that billion years (but you can study it!). Even in a thousand things change a lot, but at least not evolutionary. The risk is that if anything goes wrong (glitch, crash, etc) then you've kinda contaminated that life system (this includes the transmission of their data). But maybe they don't care and it is an acceptable risk to them. I'm not an alien, I don't know their ethics. Do also take into account that such a project would be a rather massive undertaking and the idea of mining planets left and right is quite noisy. We're about the at the point where we'd start detecting such stuff since we're looking at exo-planets on the regular now.

I'll bring up another point that I didn't in my longer post though. Maybe these lifeforms solved things like longevity and so such time constraints aren't meaningful to them. What's a few hundred years when you live millions?

> But billion of years at 0.1c is still huge chunk of universe. Are we sure that no civilization born within this radius billion years ago?

That's 1,000,000ly fwiw. That does cover the entire Milkey Way (but doesn't get us half way to Andromeda). But also consider that the Milkey Way is 13.6bn years old and life on Earth is 3.7bn.

I'm not saying that your idea is crazy, it is definitely possible (and has been proposed by others, in quite high detail). I just think there isn't any evidence for this and there's reason to believe that this would be quite difficult to pull off. But we'll see as time goes on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672241

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

#649
post #596

Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. https://youtu.be/Le7Fqbsrrm8?t=665 These were supposed to be the smoking gun evidence. UFO believers inside the DoD and as high up as US Senators fought for years to get them declassified. As soon as they were public, they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective. More…

> they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that. Mick West does good work, but he's not _neccesarily_ right on all accounts. Definitely good armchair expert porn though.

> False, congressional report shows not all of them can be attributed to that.

It says it, but does it actually show it? The videos released by the Pentagon that Mick West analysed were also supposed to have been checked by defence analysts.

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

#650
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

I don't think so. These things can disable nukes according to testimony given to Congress. They're the basis of US supremacy. In the above situations, it'd be imperative for the US to acquire the tech through war, economic pressure or espionage, or if that wasn't possible try to prevent them manufacturing more. If it was a friendly country they'd have to share the tech. This tech is basically like developing 5th gen…

> These things can disable nukes according to testimony given to Congress.

Citation required.

> In the above situations, it'd be imperative for the US to acquire the tech through war, economic pressure or espionage, or if that wasn't possible try to prevent them manufacturing more.

Perhaps this is exactly what the US is doing? Except the US knows it can't go to war because it'd lose.

Post reply on HN