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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

#731

Post by sbaiddn »

radus wrote: post #450
sbaiddn wrote: post #401

If civilian claims he saw UFOs, I assume they are in a different set of mind. If a military aviator claims he saw UFOs, I assume they're helping cover TS stuff If I witness a UFO myself among countless others with no doubt about our sanity, I will more readily believe that C.S Lewis' "space trilogy" daemons have been sent by Lucifer himself than I'll believe in super-luminous travel.

So you’re saying there’s a chance?

Sure. Except for something that is mathematically proven, never assign 1 or 0 probability.

I just don't believe aliens are likely generally given the universe's density vs the speed of light

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

#732

Post by zopa »

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…

The trouble with the aliens is that it’s too good an explanation. Inscrutable beings with tech we don’t don’t understand works as an explanation of just about anything, so if we allow that in our explanatory toolbox we’ll end up crying “aliens” for all sorts of hard-to-explain phenomena. In most of those cases we’d have found a mundane explanation if we looked longer and thought harder. Non-falsifiable, broad spectrum theories like aliens and magic need to go last on the list, down below “we don’t know yet, let’s gather more data,” or we’ll end up fooling ourselves.

If there really are aliens, eventually we should have enough evidence that we can build specific, falsifiable theories about particular, well-defined entities with at least rough bounds on capabilities. But we’re not close to that point yet.

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

#733

Post by mbnull »

harimau777 wrote: post #73
mbnull wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do remember the comment thread on the 2017 time article here on hn. Opinions already have changed considerably in the last 5 years. It also appears as if the process of disseminating information still accelerates (with promis coming out as experiencers and so on). I can only advise everyone to consider C.G. Jung and read Jaques Vallee. This situation is very complicated, but not at all bad in the end. As far as I c…

Could you expand on how Jung is related? I think of him as a researcher in psychology which doesn't seem connected? I may be missing what you are getting at.

Plato's Cave, Jungian Archetypes, Valee's Control System all hint at the same insight, that founders of many religions also try to communicate: We live in a symbolic consensus reality, made up of individual dreams, if you will, that is quite malleable if we all agree.

The new AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has a Marcus Aurelius quote in Latin on the proposed Logo, used in the presentation slides by the director: "The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it".

Maybe they understand more than I thought after all?

Edit: added symbolic

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

#734

Post by 4bpp »

ALittleLight wrote: post #638
KingOfCoders wrote: post #611

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's not clear how many independent sources this actually reflects. All that we, as members of the general public, have to go by is a low-quality video, and a bunch of "soandso said that soandso said that soandso saw..."-type reports that involve a chain of "soandso"s not selected for critical thinking (news media, congresspeople) and ending in people that all belong to the same command structure (the US military), which could have any number of reasons, some enumerated downthread, to order them to report independently having seen something - or, even more straightforwardly, to have standing orders that prevent individual personnel from coming forward and saying that to their knowledge no such thing happened if whoever the higher-ups tasked with talking to the media pulled the statement that hundreds of members of the crew independently saw the UFO out of their rear end.

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

#735

Post by simonh »

Loquebantur wrote: post #730
simonh wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why then do you believe Mick West over those professionals?

Because I watched his review analysis, I saw the instrument readings in the video that the pilots were talking about. I've listened to the explanation of what the instrument readings show, including explanatory diagrams, which has been confirmed by other experts on those systems.

It's perfectly obvious in the bird video that the pilots are mistaken, their recorded statements are obvious misreadings of the instrument data actually shown in the video. You can go and watch it yourself. This material is in the public domain now.

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

#736

Post by Luc »

yokoprime wrote: post #720
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #713

To me this sounds like if I was saying "as an owner of a bank account, I witnessed decisions of the French budget that I do not understand. It must be secret money". He is a pilot, and saw stuff. Since there are not always data driven evidence (we just do not know, it could have been this or that) it is easier to say UFO. Maybe this is incompetence of the ones who monitor the sky, and they want to hide it. Maybe we c…

What is OVNI? Is this French for UFO?

Yes.

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

#737

Post by Loquebantur »

simonh wrote: post #678
ALittleLight wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what's in the article. I could quote it, but I'd basically just be copying and pasting the whole thing. Every element of my previous comment is in the original article. Either the pilots, Senators, and intelligence officials are lying (or absurdly incompetent) or it is as they say.

They don’t have to be lying, just mistaken, like the pilots on some if the video we do have. Sometimes people make mistakes, it happens.

The idea of multiple military pilots, radar operators, analysts, etc. being mistaken simultaneously in the same way over the course of extended periods of time on multiple occasions is rather concerning.

Maybe they should build in a third seat on those planes and staff it with some intellectually adequate people from hacker news?

The point isn't pilots and other professionals being perfect, it is about the probability of them being wrong (should be slim). Independent probabilities multiply, making such a confluence of mishaps exceedingly unlikely.

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

#738

Post by doodlebugging »

runesofdoom wrote: post #578
doodlebugging wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take the other side of this argument since Occams Razor may not be the tool for the job of understanding or characterizing these phenomena. Since there are numerous reports spanning decades and even dating to the 19th century, before manned flight, and these reports come from all over the globe and the descriptions involve similar events and very similar observations between widely spaced events then it follows…

> Since there are numerous reports spanning decades and even dating to the 19th century, before manned flight, Manned flight dates to 1783, and engine-powered flight to 1851. Did you mean heavier-than-air flight?

Yes. Heavier than air flight. Thanks for that correction. Basically any report before Kitty Hawk of a vehicle flying under its own power through the air that was witnessed by more than one person. There are several on record. It's a long interesting history that likely will never be explained to anyone's satisfaction since some of the reports from the late 19th century described airships that were operating low enough that observers could plainly see people through the windows of the airship. It seems to me that large, multi-passenger airships would've been loudly announced and advertised by those who built them since people even then were inclined to line up shouting "take my money" for the opportunity to be one of the first to have a ride.

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

#739

Post by poulpy123 »

dtx1 wrote: post #708
nirvgorilla wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evidenc…

> When the US Government tells the world that North Korea has exploded a nuclear weapon

We do have the proof that North Korea and nuclear weapons exists. The US government could be lying about the tests like it lied about iraqis WMD but 1/ there are other sources 2/ its in the domain of plausability anyway.

At the reverse, alien origin of UFO relies on unproved and impossible facts: 1/ the existence of life outside earth, 2/ the existence of technology outside earth, 3/ the possibility of FTL travel, 4/ the regulat visit of alien on earth, 5/ having a technology good enough to be almost undetected but not completely 6/ having an irresistible urge to crash in the US

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

#740

Post by dustfinger »

On the one hand, there are those whom favour the phenomenal over the mundane. On the other, there are those too quick to dismiss the phenomenal for the comforting familiarity of the mundane. Yet, the truth cannot be found unless both are dismissed out of hand until the root cause is known. I think the military should take these scenarios seriously and investigate them objectively.
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