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Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

abcnews.go.com

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Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#91

Post by antihipocrat »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #80
hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #58

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34766703

Which has been taken off the front page remarkably quickly, given its large number of votes in a short time. Perhaps there’s some system where downvotes encourage a post to be taken off the front page quicker. But I suspect moderator involvement. Which is misguided if so: people will simply post dupes and continue to upvote them. Thus, the story is still on the front-page, but in a fragmented manner.

Until we get some more information about what these are, it just invites wild speculation.

Even just an image of the objects would help, but at the moment we have nothing and there is not much opportunity to provide insightful comments.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#92

Post by pyuser583 »

cududa wrote: post #61
akimball wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how democracy works. That's how sheep farming works.

No, that’s called immature ideological purity. Like it or not, state secrets are a necessary function of any civilization.

I’m pretty sure Dana Scully said the same thing in one of the early seasons of X-Files.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#96

Post by janoc »

mach1ne wrote: post #78
ALittleLight wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't understand the ambiguity from the government and military. They have to have pictures of these things. Show us what they look like. Tell us if they are balloons. Are they under power against the wind? What speed? All these details must be known, it's been days, why aren't they telling us?

Strongly suggests against balloons - mainly because they already shot one down and it was no biggie. Aliens are not impossible any more, but drones of some kind remain the vastly most probable option.

Drone at 40000 feet? That's higher than most airliners - that would need be one heck of a drone, especially given where they have shot it down and how far it would have had to fly.

Much more likely sounding/meteorological balloons - a lot of those are sent up every day, worldwide, with payloads that are roughly cylindrical in shape. And some of them can traverse huge distances, even across oceans, so such "UFO" doesn't need to originate locally at all.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#97

Post by jacquesm »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #81

All of a sudden balloons everywhere. Were they always there, and people are just now noticing it, or is this something new?

Likely the former because NORAD has made some statements about disabling filters on their radar data processing software that would have previously classified these as noise, effectively rendering them invisible.

Probably the best stealth there is: to be classed as noise.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#99

Post by bmitc »

zmanian wrote: post #52
kkielhofner wrote: post #43

Random question - anyone know how a sidewinder missile hits these objects (whatever they are)? My missile knowledge is non-existent but movies show me it has something to do with heat signature - which these don’t seem to have.

The AIM-9X is infrared imaging based rather than heat signature based. The pilot resolves that contrast between the object and sky before firing the missile and missile targets the object based on the image.

> The AIM-9X is infrared imaging based rather than heat signature based.

Isn't heat detected by infrared? What's the difference?

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#100

Post by jandrewrogers »

giantrobot wrote: post #60
kkielhofner wrote: post #43

Random question - anyone know how a sidewinder missile hits these objects (whatever they are)? My missile knowledge is non-existent but movies show me it has something to do with heat signature - which these don’t seem to have.

The missiles seek and track based on heat differences . To an IR sensor the sky is typically pretty "cold" and just about anything in the sky is relatively "hot". Once the missile is locked onto the relatively hot signature against the cold background the sensor stares at it and adjusts the missile's trajectory to intercept it (and blow up). Countermeasures like flares try to trick a missile's sensor into thinking th…

Some modern imaging-based guidance packages for anti-aircraft missiles use multiple spectra to defeat countermeasures like flares. While a flare and a plane sometimes look similar in IR, they are easy to discriminate in the UV spectrum.
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