I sure hope this isn’t a distraction to get us to look up while something goes down under the sea.
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Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
321–330 of 593 posts
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#322Couple of interesting twitter threads on this from Tyler (The Drive). He suggests this has been coming/happening for some time. https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162414986417840128... Also that we are seeing a lot more now because we have turned down/off the filters on the radars. Which means also we can expect a lot more false positives. https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162461466198661120...
His article on the matter from 2021 is quiet helpful in understanding what’s (probably) going on here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...
Ok the fact that they found an actual patent for the cube in the sphere UFO is just hilarious.
This whole thing is just genius on so many levels. Exploit the stigma about aliens by constructing small drones and make them appear wacky beyond belief to guarantee they'll go unreported. Exploit the radar filters for small and slow moving craft with motionless soft balloons. And it worked brilliantly.
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#323One missing information about all other objects after the 1st balloon is their nature and speed. Why should they keep this information classified? It's like the objects were a lot more complex than a balloon (propelled drones?), with varying attitude and speed and telling what they were doing when they were detected would reveal what they were doing while still undetected, that is, giving information on military capa…
Letting the enemy keep guessing about how much you know, and how much you recovered, forces them to waste time and resources trying to figure it out. It's likely to promote additional missions which in turn will give you an indication of how valuable they consider whatever it was, and if you have intelligence on who's contacting who, it also tells you who the operation might have been under and thus the overall disposition of their government.
There's endless good reasons in the intelligence business to keep things secret.
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#324Have aliens invaded and we just don’t know about it, the government holding them off lowkey? Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...
People need to understand that if you’re being attacked by a FTL capable alien invader, you are so incredibly f**ed that it just does not matter. People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.
There was an amusing short story called "The Road Not Taken" about that. In it gravity manipulation technology turns out to be really simple. It is something every civilization (except one) discovers early, like before they reach what on Earth would have been medieval technology level, and then all their technological development is focused on their gravity technology.
The one civilization that somehow missed gravity manipulation is Earth. Having missed that we developed a bunch of other technology which everyone else does not have.
So when the alien invaders arrive with the FTL ships and release their conquering armies...our automatic machine guns and missiles and tanks and bazookas and such totally outmatch the aliens troops who have flintlock rifles and black powder.
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surveillance satellites are very different to directly flying this equipment into US airspace, including the fact that this equipment could hold paylods other than ISR. Not to mention this comment implies China does not have equivalent spy satellites, which it does. Also the UN is an absolute joke. That article links has China and Russia complaining about the West being aggressors so honestly its kinda BS. Also forge…
>>Also the UN is an absolute joke UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
I just went on a ride about how the UN UN-Nazi'd the world
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#326If an agitator puts up a balloon and payload, one of which contains a potentially dangerous substance, and a nation in question shoots it down, thus releasing and activating that substance, who is responsible? And who does the public deem responsible? (I don't think this is realistic, just musing about other schemes that could be going on.)
You might be interested in this installment of LegalEagle.
I won't elaborate as the topic is complicated.
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#327Do we have international agreement about what constitutes sovereign space in the sky and what doesn’t? I mean at what height does it make it not okay to shoot down an object another country sent up? Is it at the height of the low orbit satellites? Should it be out of the earth’s gravitational pull? Or can China shoot down one of US’ low orbit satellites saying it flew over its airspace?
You might be interested in this installment of LegalEagle.
I won't elaborate as the topic is complicated.
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#328On the one hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_balloon >Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily. On the other hand, weather balloons are not silver-gray and cylindrical. A Google image search shows them almost always white and spherical to teardrop shape and pretty much unmistakably a balloon.
Interestingly drones are likely to replace weather balloons, they have several advantages like reusability as well as more control over data collection density on ascent.
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/drones-may-replace-wea...
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UN is certainly something more than that, and not literally just a forum. They have an active duty peacekeeping force of approximately 81K people. While that's similar in size to the active duty forces from a nation like a Peru or Chile, the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history in places like Central Africa. For example: "Consi…
> Consider a small sample of heinous cases I can cite henious cases committed by London Police force. Just a couple months ago we've convicted 'bastard dave'. He was a cop and used his position to become a serial rapist and a murderer, and he had a nickname, which strongly suggests some of his colleagues knew something. You have to assess three points to understand if the entire organisation is responsoble. Have they…
It's not about citing heinous cases. You're solving for a different aspect of the problem. Bastard Dave was convicted via an existing enforcement mechanism that in that case was at least arguably functional. The point is if Bastard Dave were a UN peacekeeper in central Africa, the host nation would be unable to try the case, and the UN itself mostly grants its own people blanket immunity and wouldn't prosecute it, either.
The rest is a different conversation.
Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
China could do the same thing if they wanted. That isn't a good excuse to violate national airspace. Maybe they want to intercept cell phone data.
And try to compete with Starship? US can always launch more and for these LEO constellations it's all about numbers.
The simple was to counter this is through polluting that space with debris. Sure, it clears out in a couple of years, but then you can just put up more of it. Getting into a arms race in orbit is a bad idea for everyone.