Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 526 posts

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#301

Post by cookiengineer »

graderjs wrote: post #206
Waterluvian wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or does this sound unremarkable? If we take one question mark from each event, we can construct a very spooky narrative. But none of the question marks, on their own, seem all that peculiar.

HN vibe when ET life is finally acknowledged by government: “ is it just me or does this sound unremarkable? I mean think about it the universe is so big. We’ve always welcomed open minded scientific inquiry on this forum, I don’t think any of us ever seriously doubted we’d eventually find ET life. Why is this on front page? Let’s get back to bickering over the latest shiny tech fad.” Hehe

Just because you found a branch of wood in front of you doesn't imply that you must be living in the forest.

Just because we found metallic balls doesn't mean it must be alien. It's far more likely an SCO state that's spying on the US.

Additionally, the last fictious alien event series around Roswell turned out to be the A12 prototype (aka SR-71 Blackbird) that was being tested for its radar stealth capabilities.

Yet none of those tinfoil hats ever realized that...so...here we are, with "aliens" supposedly using a crappy technology like a balloon instead of warp-drive capable space ships. Because you know, space can be travelled in a balloon and there must be oxygen of identical density on every single habitable planet /s

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#303

Post by doodlebugging »

I was curious about part of the description given by the pilots who shot down the object off the coast of Alaska. It was described as being at about 40000' altitude (12192 m) and moving about 40 mph (64 kph) with no visible means of propulsion.

To me, that implies that it was drifting in the wind at that altitude since it had no visible means of propulsion.

I took a look at Ventusky (ventusky.com) to try to get an idea of the wind speed at that altitude so that I could know whether 40 mph (64 kph) made any sense.

Ventusky gives wind information at various altitudes though I have no idea how accurate the information may be. I checked the available altitudes for one close to 40000 feet and found a listing for 12000 m (39370 feet). That's close enough for the girls we go with as the old-timers always said.

For several days before the reported shoot-down (use the day selector at the bottom of the screen to see data for each day and the slider for time of day) the reported wind speeds were in the range of 20-35 mph (32-56 kph). As they say, close enough for the girls we go with especially when you consider the likely observational error associated with estimations made from a moving jet.

The first reported sighting of that object was over Nome, Alaska and it was tracked across Alaska until the shoot-down just off the north coast in the Prudhoe Bay area or just east of it.

Backtracking along the jet stream into China, the most likely source for the object, I decided that there was probably a balloon launch facility in north-eastern China, possibly near Harbin since a launch in that city will carry an object along that general route. It was just a guess and someone in one of those twitter threads actually found a balloon launch facility to the southwest of Harbin, near Hohhot that is a much better candidate for the origination point of these objects.

Anyway. It was fun looking at all this stuff but to me, these last two cylindrical things are balloons. The question about whether the balloons serve some intelligence gathering function for the Chinese will likely be answered in the coming days.

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#304

Post by Invictus0 »

ErikCorry wrote: post #290
graphe wrote: post #253

UFOs are just spy drones with sensor jammers and detectors that are designed to look strange and unnerving to pilots so they will scope them out. Pilots are trained NOT to go by them or engage with them for fear of secrets leaking.

That seems like the best explanation. See https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones... for a fleshed out version of that argument. I think what changed is that the US decided to stop ignoring the "UFO"s. The Ukraine war has shown how important drones are and it's obvious that drones and balloons will play a huge role in any Taiwanese war.

FYI: this article has nearly 10k words and a 35 min estimated reading time.

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#305

Post by dylan604 »

Pxtl wrote: post #277
mc32 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can see these with the naked eye (or with cameras). If our sophisticated defense systems are failing to match the naked eye... something is wrong.

Most of Canada is unoccupied wilderness. It's a crapload of ground to cover and no naked eyes to be found.

Then what's the point of surveilling that?

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#306

Post by dylan604 »

crayboff wrote: post #268
AlbertCory wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think that's it. Detecting a balloon doesn't take any exotic technology. Now a hypersonic missile, or a stealth plane -- that would be a test. But losing one of those would be pretty expensive.

I suspect finding a small balloon in the mind-boggling huge space that is American airspace is, can be surprisingly challenging. My understanding is that these UAFs are much smaller than that first Chinese balloon last week. It probably also costs a lot more money to shoot down a balloon than it costs China to put a balloon in the air.

Then stop using expensive missiles to pop a balloon. Are we so scared of a balloon to get into gun range? A short burst of 20mm would be pretty cheap compared to an AIM-9

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#308

Post by JohnBooty »

AlbertCory wrote: post #283
crayboff wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect finding a small balloon in the mind-boggling huge space that is American airspace is, can be surprisingly challenging. My understanding is that these UAFs are much smaller than that first Chinese balloon last week. It probably also costs a lot more money to shoot down a balloon than it costs China to put a balloon in the air.

I'm not a radar expert, but maybe someone who is can enlighten us? They can detect an incoming missile, so I don't see the problem. Maybe the one today IS a lot smaller; I don't think we're getting a whole lot of details on that. As for the money: definitely. The same would be true of drones.

The USAF (and any functional air force) has lots of flight time budgeted for its pilots: for training, patrols, etc.

Active duty pilots must fly X number of hours per month to maintain their fight status. Essentially, they practice like athletes (because they are literally athletes, among other things)

So intercepts like these, and even silly stuff like sports event flyovers, come out of their existing budgets.

To actually cost us money in some meaningful way they'd have to send over extremely large quantities of drones that absolutely blow out the existing budgets for our bases.

The missiles are expensive, of course: $400K a pop for those AIM-9X. But the budget for the USAF is ~$160B/year, so again, drop in the bucket.

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#309

Post by dylan604 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #283
crayboff wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect finding a small balloon in the mind-boggling huge space that is American airspace is, can be surprisingly challenging. My understanding is that these UAFs are much smaller than that first Chinese balloon last week. It probably also costs a lot more money to shoot down a balloon than it costs China to put a balloon in the air.

I'm not a radar expert, but maybe someone who is can enlighten us? They can detect an incoming missile, so I don't see the problem. Maybe the one today IS a lot smaller; I don't think we're getting a whole lot of details on that. As for the money: definitely. The same would be true of drones.

From someone that has done a much smaller balloon launch, it's not the balloon that gets detected as much as the payload. Our civilian weather balloon launch had a metallic reflector in line specifically to make it more visible on radar. The images I've seen of the payload under the large balloon from last week didn't look all that stealthy in shape, but I have no idea what it was made from? If it was made of plastic, would that reflect radar?

Re: US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada

#310

Post by w4ffl35 »

doodlebugging wrote: post #303

I was curious about part of the description given by the pilots who shot down the object off the coast of Alaska. It was described as being at about 40000' altitude (12192 m) and moving about 40 mph (64 kph) with no visible means of propulsion. To me, that implies that it was drifting in the wind at that altitude since it had no visible means of propulsion. I took a look at Ventusky (ventusky.com) to try to get an id…

the chinese have been spying on us navy ships for a long time with drones. the public is just becoming aware because there was a big ufo awareness campaign that ran online for a few years and now we are shooting down their spy crafts.
Post reply on HN