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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

#701
post #478
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fighter jet pilot is a self-avowed prankster and “class clown” (his words). One of the people who wrote the software for that radar system is his good buddy, best man at his wedding, and was on duty nearby on that day. It could all be a big prank. Some of the eyewitnesses saw what they saw on, wait for it, a radar screen. Well technically it was another technology not exactly radar but I forget the name. [edit: FLIR,…

Wait, how do the logistics of this prank work? His buddy patched the plane's software on the fly (ha!) without anyone else noticing? Or he inserted some "prank" code into the main codebase, got it past what I'm sure is ton of code review hurdles without anyone noticing, then got it deployed to the plane before his pilot friend took flight that day?

If you build a system, you'll know its flaws. A common flaw with radar systems is them detecting something that's not a plane as a plane - e.g., the sun over the horizon.

If he built the software that automatically rejects such mistaken identifications, he also knows in which situations you'll get a false positive reading, and can tell his friend the perfect timing for the prank.

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

#702

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…

The Cottingley Fairies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies Even Arthur Conan Doyle wrote an article about the Photos. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies,_pag...

The first 4 photographs look quite obviously like paper cutouts to me, not sure why the examiners believed they must be real.

Also interesting, both of the sisters claimed that they were the one who took the final photograph with Elsie saying it was a fake and Frances claiming that that one was real. Perhaps a false memory?

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

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I'll read it. I was quite precise in my wording and didn't say what you are responding to. My opinion (and it's just that, I'm unprepared to defend it) is that we've always been [less and less] wrong on everything. And since we can't know what the boundaries of knowledge are, and it could easily be some insane unbounded fractal existence, it seems rash to me to decide that we know enough to say that there can…

Problem is that this technology breaks our understanding of causality. So it isn't a "less wrong" type of situation so much as we have to rewrite everything. Specifically it means things that happen in the future can affect things in the past (communication past the light cone). The discoveries of quantum and relativity didn't break classical mechanics so much as extend it. But to rewrite how a sequence of events hap…

The first hit on Google, from a reputable site, suggests that this isn't proven to be impossible to solve by adapting the current frameworks, as we've done before. It's unsettled science, which is imo working as expected:

https://www.sciencealert.com/study-shows-how-the-universe-wo...

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

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I'll read it. I was quite precise in my wording and didn't say what you are responding to. My opinion (and it's just that, I'm unprepared to defend it) is that we've always been [less and less] wrong on everything. And since we can't know what the boundaries of knowledge are, and it could easily be some insane unbounded fractal existence, it seems rash to me to decide that we know enough to say that there can…

A lot of things would be demonstratively broken if Special Relativity is wrong.

It doesn't need to be too wrong, just incomplete. Much like Newton's laws.

See my comment in the sibling subthread.

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

#705
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…

Its speculation that it was sensor glare, boke etc. Hardly convincing at all considering its some YouTuber basing his research on grainy video. Speculation that also does not factor in multi eye witness accounts and radar measurements.

Bokeh and sensor glare doesn't automatically discount the observations

It could be a plane (or something else) and reflecting light in a way that causes bokeh/glare

Looks like for every ten "I want to believe" person there's also another 'skeptic' that will discard a video for unrelated reasons

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

#706
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…

Its speculation that it was sensor glare, boke etc. Hardly convincing at all considering its some YouTuber basing his research on grainy video. Speculation that also does not factor in multi eye witness accounts and radar measurements.

I know of eye witnesses that have seen a pig fly, and I have data that shows pigs can fly. Clearly this means pigs can fly.

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

#707
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So those aliens traveled for thousands of years (probably in multigenerational spaceship or deep anabiosis) from a place that close relatively speaking but somehow still undetectable for us despite thousands of years of interstellar technology development there just to be blips on our radars and visual smudge here and there. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and "we don't know what's that" is not an…

Why do you assume the UAPs have aliens in them, and why would you anthropomorphize aliens in any case to be anything like humans? Why do you assume the origin of such objects would be detectable? You're jumping to a lot of conclusions here, when the only core question being explored is the plausibility of physical objects in Earth's atmostphere demonstrating superhuman technology not created by humans. "Extraordinary…

Why do you assume aliens are here (or their tech) ?

The evidence against aliens here is just the entirety of physics and history. I consider it to be extraordinary.

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

#708
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deeply hate the laziness that is behind those arguments and the people that follow. Here are some claims of something extraordinary. We have multiple High End sensors Witness this. Your Government is not even recording this data, let alone give it to you. They don't want you to investigate it, they don't want to investigate it themselves yet multiple independent people on different ships and official documentation…

Have you read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World book from 1996? Because this kind of crap always turns out to be garbage. We live on a rock circling a star. The only thing that makes the world more interesting than it really is is our brains that love to make crap up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.™

When the US Government tells the world that North Korea has exploded a nuclear weapon than i can neither directly measure that myself nor do I have access to the data where and how the US Government knows that happens. Yet we all collectively believe that to be true.

The Nimitz incident falls under the same category. I don't know what that was but the "debunking" by Mick West simply ignores most of the little evidence we have. And so, at least 3 People (2 Pilots, 1 Radar Operator) have come forward and told a consistent story of what happened. No one has come forward and claimed they were lying (which would be the most likely explanation). The US Government is spending at least a few bucks investigating this as a result and changes their policies on reporting UFOs. During his presidency Obama himself gathered thousands of documents on Ufos[0] and told us straight up there's stuff out there we can't explain[1].

Is it possible that is all explainable? Sure, for all I know everyone is lying and North Korea doesn't have Nukes. Is it possible that we stumbled upon something extraordinary? Yes. My Argument is simply: Mick Wests "explanations" ignore a lot of the facts out there to give an answer. Any answer. And that answer will do for the people that google $topic+debunk and stop thinking there. The fact that his explanations require you to ignore evidence, believe in really, really weird coincidences and believe that all our modern sensors on f16s and radar boats fail to account for our own planes and pilots can't distinguish our own planes from flying container sized tictacs that they stare at from multiple angles for 5 minutes on a clear day.

Even if there is a very ordinary explanation for what happened, Mick West doesn't have it but his bad explanation is enough for those that don't really care and just want to reflexively debunk anything that doesn't fit their world view. If you really care, you can watch him talk with alex dietrich one of the pilots[2]. She explains to him quite well that his "explanations" for what they saw are complete nonesense. But that doesn't get you the headlines as the great debunker.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmnqd/obamas-presidential-l... [1] https://youtu.be/u1hNYs55sqs?t=5 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZU6RiTEAw

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

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Nimitz Incident of 2004(?). The Tic Tac UFO? That's probably one of the best explained events (debunked). Short answer is that there was sense misreading and a gimbal lock. Some people even simulated it[0]. I wouldn't call this an elaborate hoax, but an optical illusion and an event that took some expertise to understand. Expertise that a pilot wouldn't have. I should add that finding that link was nontrivial.…

The Nimitz event is far from “debunked”. We have multiple naval aviator eye witnesses of the physical object, with testimony (fravor and the female wingman, I forget her name) We have testimony of the Princeton’s AEGIS radar operator that these things were “popping in at 80k feet and dropping to sea level in a few seconds”, that “they disappear on radar and the sub would get a ping in the same area tracking 200+ knot…

> The Nimitz event is far from “debunked”.

But he googled $Event + Debunked and watched 2 minutes of the first explanation that came up. Mick West said it's debunked so it must be so, after all, any good skeptic will click the first link and believe any debunk instantly because that's the science way^tm

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

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quality of the individuals This is just appeal to authority. And wrong authority at that. When you are debunking a supernatural claim you don't ask a scientist to do it (let alone a general). Because scientists are honest thus easily mislead because they assume honesty. You should ask a magician because they know myriad of ways how it could be done to fool you. As for the patent ... Do you know how many versions of…

I honesty have no clue what you're trying to say with your statement from scientists. Science is the way forward with our understanding of phenomenon. Scientists are not so easily fooled, and there are several scientists with pedigrees far higher than you or any magician you'd hire that are studying this subject. Dr. Gary Nolan of Stanford, Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard, Dr. Eric Davis a theoretical physicist. IMO you are…

I'm basically saying this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopathy.shtml

There's a history of scientists being fooled by supernatural claims.

There are even some Nobel laureates that after success in science as they get older they go straight to cookooland. Heck, even Newton who achieved much in his youth when he got older he went completely bananas.

Being a scientist doesn't guard you against getting fooled and fooling yourself.

This is not a serious subject. It's a form of modern religion and local one at that. Most prominent in USA. Believing that in our lifetime we discovered signs of advanced alien tech on Earth is not very different than believing that in your lifetime you'll experience second coming of Christ. A belief that was shared by a lot of people for last 2 millenia.

Don't get me wrong. I love science fiction. I just don't need to pretend it might be real to enjoy it.

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