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UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

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Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#111
post #106
post #33

I'm sold on the whole UFO cover-up thing. If you peel back the social ridicule (very successfully induced by US government collaboration with Hollywood) and consider the huge number of circumstantial reports from across the military and non-military it seems pretty clear there's stuff in the skies of non-human origin. Historical art suggests they've been flying for centuries. There's also the publicly acknowledged re…

Why though? Why would an alien species just do atmosphere drive-bys? Why wouldn’t they pop down and say hello? Why on earth would NASA, SETI, SpaceX, etc cover up the biggest scoop (biggest FUNDING scoop) of Earth’s history? Why wouldn’t any of the other LEO piercing countries in the world grass it up? Thousands of people working in each of the space-faring countries, all keeping quiet about it. Why would the US, Rus…

When we send scientists to document and study the penguins in Antarctica and their march to lay and sit on eggs, do we have the scientists go walk down to where they are, measure them, interact with them, etc? Or do we spot them from a distance, as discretely as possible, so that we don't disturb the subjects, and don't bias the study of their interactions?

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#112

Hey meta question here, why do dupes not link to the thing they're a duplicate of. Kinda sounds like it would make navigating to dupes a lot less of a pain. Not meta comment, aren't all flying objects UFOs until you've identified them?

Meta Answer: HN eschews all modern UI affordances as a form of status signalling. It's like how millionaire startup founders like to wear cargo shorts and hoodies. It's Y Combinator's way of saying, "we're so fucking successful we can afford to have a site that eclipses even Craigslist in un-usability."

Alternative view: "We're successful because we have a site that works simply, without much unneeded complexity, and choose to keep it simple for the sake of our users."

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#113
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common retort (in my view, to make people feel better and not have to consider the implications otherwise) -- here's the pentagon official in charge of the program stating unequivocally that these are almost certainly not related to any aircraft in any national inventory https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-t... The thing that makes these interesting is the fact that they exhibit aeron…

There's nothing that's not physically possible here, just bottlenecked by G forces limitations on human passengers. Given the fact that drone technology testing was extremely popular at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just experimental drone testing.

There are no exhaust trails or visible jet engines in the footage, so I'd say those UFOs are outside the limits of the physically possible as we understand it.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#114
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common retort (in my view, to make people feel better and not have to consider the implications otherwise) -- here's the pentagon official in charge of the program stating unequivocally that these are almost certainly not related to any aircraft in any national inventory https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571868263/secret-program-at-t... The thing that makes these interesting is the fact that they exhibit aeron…

There's nothing that's not physically possible here, just bottlenecked by G forces limitations on human passengers. Given the fact that drone technology testing was extremely popular at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just experimental drone testing.

How can you possibly make this claim?

The director of this program is on record saying that after deploying extensive analytical resources at the Pentagon onto all the evidence (cross referencing radar signatures, satellite feeds, etc) and leveraging internal expertise to rule out alternatives there remain cases for which there remains no explanation consistent with the idea that these are aircraft in any government's inventory or any other natural phenomena.

Either this person is lying, or somehow otherwise should be given no credibility, or the government has decided to reveal that there are in fact objects in the sky whose origin are, to the best of our country's ability to analyze them, unknown. This person specifically ruled out the idea in their NPR interview that these objects are part of some hidden government advanced aircraft program.

You can believe what you want to sleep better at night, such as that there is in fact some hyper-advanced tech the government has that this program was kept in the dark about, but there's not much wiggle room at this point other than to accept that the level of public acknowledgement of the UFO phenomena by the federal government (and particularly, the department of defense) has changed significantly now and that there is a very high prior that there are objects in the sky whose origins are a mystery.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#115
post #57
post #33

I'm sold on the whole UFO cover-up thing. If you peel back the social ridicule (very successfully induced by US government collaboration with Hollywood) and consider the huge number of circumstantial reports from across the military and non-military it seems pretty clear there's stuff in the skies of non-human origin. Historical art suggests they've been flying for centuries. There's also the publicly acknowledged re…

I’m open minded to what you’re saying, and I agree that dismissing alien contact due to popular zeitgeist is silly. But here’s my problem with what you’re saying: where did they come from then, and how did they get here? Why do we not have any evidence of their planet in any reasonable distance from Earth? Given what we understand about modern physics, we have three conclusions we can arrive at: 1. We fundamentally m…

There's a perfectly consistent explanation that doesn't really break Occam's razor unless you have huge assumptions about AI takeoff and the drake equation:

- These are really old things

- They are autonomous and are driven by some computing system/AI

- They have the ability to harvest, store, and leverage an immense amount of energy and convert it into propulsion (or more specifically, allows the repositioning of the object's atoms in spacetime) in a way we don't understand but doesn't break the laws of thermodynamics and allows travel at near light speed for long periods of time.

- Their purpose isn't to communicate back to the origin (since the speed of light) but to autonomously take interventional action at their destination upon arrival based upon observation (this is the part that should scare you and if I were to go out on a limb is the reason these things aren't disclosed)

That's it. Speculation about their original origin is irrelevant with regards to assuming it's an extremely unlikely thing for unmanned autonomous agents to exist with (a relatively incremental) post-human level of technological capability.

If anything, there are many variants of resolving the drake equation which would make it surprising to not see such things, since it would imply there was never AI takeoff anywhere or any mechanism to deploy long-lived, self sufficient, autonomous probes. I'd expect us to be able to construct primitive versions of this within 100 years.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#116
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a totally unrelated comment, I want to say, one reason why I find the UFO thing interested is in hypothetical situation if we can have proofs of existence of aliens, all those nonsense, ridiculous religions (like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc) would be horseshit to common people. With a simple question of : “Why your God only sent his prophet to earth?”

> Why your God only sent his prophet to earth? The main schools of thought are that Jesus is unique to Earth (there are explanations as to why, such as Earth being the only sinful planet), Jesus has existed in one way or another on every planet with sapient life (this is viewed as heretical by the church) or that the same Jesus visits multiple planets. Some of these religions do not believe that the messiah (there ha…

> The main schools of thought are that Jesus is unique to Earth

Citation needed.

The Roman Catholic Church (certainly a "main school of thought") is on record as saying it's certainly possible that Jesus visited other planets, if there is life on those planets.

The Catholic Church's astronomers, philosophers, and theologians have been on the record for more than half a century as saying that intelligent life on other planets is not heretical.

But the sort of people who learn everything they know about religion from Family Guy continue to perpetuate long-dead stereotypes on the internet.

Also, the fact that you use the phrase "the church" to describe all of Christianity shows your information level about religion is pretty low.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#117
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing that's not physically possible here, just bottlenecked by G forces limitations on human passengers. Given the fact that drone technology testing was extremely popular at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just experimental drone testing.

How can you possibly make this claim? The director of this program is on record saying that after deploying extensive analytical resources at the Pentagon onto all the evidence (cross referencing radar signatures, satellite feeds, etc) and leveraging internal expertise to rule out alternatives there remain cases for which there remains no explanation consistent with the idea that these are aircraft in any government'…

Indeed. I’m as skeptical as it gets re: UFOs—and in general, really—and I have no idea how to process these videos without coming to the conclusion that something significantly outside of all current human understanding is going on.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#118

I once saw something I can't explain. Two spots on the night sky a bit larger than a star and of the color of an incandescent light about a half thumb on an outstreched arm apart. They were slowly moving across the sky, however with a swinging movement forward and backwards about a thumb with a period of two seconds. Like two people side by side walking together two steps ahead then a step back the whole time, just i…

I know a family friend, ~ 80-year-old woman, told me that she one day looked out of the window and saw a really dark, saucer-like object, far, hovering over the woods, she said she blinked, rubbed her eyes, walked outside and it was still there, yelled for her kids to wake up and look out of the window but when her kids woke up it was too late, the object just vanished. She got visibly annoyed when her kids started chuckling at the story.

Rational me doesn't want to believe me, but well, what if it was something.

Re: UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

#120
post #69
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m open minded to what you’re saying, and I agree that dismissing alien contact due to popular zeitgeist is silly. But here’s my problem with what you’re saying: where did they come from then, and how did they get here? Why do we not have any evidence of their planet in any reasonable distance from Earth? Given what we understand about modern physics, we have three conclusions we can arrive at: 1. We fundamentally m…

Yeah #3 is certainly the most likely and is what I always assumed. But over time I've come to think that they are here. So probably the next most likely is #1. Maybe they just know more science than we do. Look how far we've come in the last 200 years. What if they have a few millennia on us?

What if it's some sort of psychological phenomenon, but one which has a physical manifestation?

Yes, I know that that idea is pretty out there, but we're already talking about ideas that bend or break the known physical laws, so why not consider it? I honestly don't see it as being any less absurd than the idea that the speed of light is not a universal constant, an that is required for almost all hypotheticals involved extra-solar intelligence.

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