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The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

nytimes.com

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Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#131

Post by pluto9 »

electrograv wrote: post #111
Retric wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People lack depth perception in the sky which makes it easy to wildly misunderstand things. A great example shown by some UFO show was a side camera from the space shuttle. The footage has a nice curvature of the earth, with lot's of little specks that seem to be orbiting it way out in the distance. You see a maneuvering thruster fire then in slow motion a few heartbeats later these specks shoot off in a new directio…

That’s why the FA-18 footage is so compelling to me. This is not the easily fooled human eye we’re talking about: Radar tracking and thermal vision almost completely eliminates simple optical illusions from the list of natural explanations. Even more bizarre is how the craft appears totally cold, while there is a warm thermal halo of some kind around the craft, with a pattern very reminiscent of high energy fields.

The object in the video is hot. Most military FLIR devices can be toggled between "white hot" and "black hot". If you look in the lower left corner of the video, there's an indicator that says "WHT" and the object appears white. At about 12 seconds into the footage, the coloring is inverted and the indicator changes to "BLK" because the pilot toggled it.

The halo is an artifact of the FLIR device. Every FLIR I've ever seen does that in areas where there's a high temperature contrast.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#132

Post by perseusprime11 »

staunch wrote: post #4

An F-18 pilot saying "there's a whole fleet of them" on radar is pretty incredible. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005607812/look-at-tha...

Most of the UFO sightings are simply balloons used to study weather. Take a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_balloon

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#133

Post by sigmar »

gwern wrote: post #94
volgo wrote: post #56

IMO, the fishy part of the article is the cronyism involved in this program: "The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entreprene…

Also note the timing. The program began in 2007. What else happened in 2007? The Democrats got control of the Senate, turning Minority leader Harry Reid into Majority leader.

2007 budget gets passed in 2006 though.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#134

Post by pluto9 »

imglorp wrote: post #108
gfodor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis is one of the more obvious explanations and as such it has been considered thoroughly before for the cases that remain unexplained. Typically these cases include radar signatures or other corroborating evidence.

If the F-18 HUD footage in OP is real, that would indicate the avionics picked it up, tracked it, and reported the heading and velocity. This is also interesting because the FLIR showed the object as mostly black: not emitting heat as a jet would.

The object is hot. Military FLIR devices can be toggled between "white hot" and "black hot" settings. You can see the BLK/WHT indicator in the lower left corner of the footage. The pilot/observer toggles it at about 12 seconds into the video.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#135

Post by pluto9 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #89
_gutd wrote: post #75

Interesting read that expands further on the Navy pilot encounter: https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/ Worth noting that the object was observed by a total of 3 F-18s, an E-2 Hawkeye, and a cruiser on the surface.

It’s totally anecdotal, and I’m just some guy on the internet, but I’ve seen these, or at least something similar, twice - once above Bath, UK, in 2012 - the first hint something was up was a pair of sonic booms as two typhoons hurtled into the airspace over the city. Needless to say, ran out of the office to gawp, and the fighters were circling a thing hovering at about 20,000 feet - bulky ovular object with greeble…

> the fighters were circling a thing hovering at about 20,000 feet - bulky ovular object with greebles and lumps

How were you able to see such details from 20,000 feet away?

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#136

Post by starrychloe »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #19

The most interesting part to me >Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological change…

Well how did they get it? Did they shoot one down? Did one crash? How can it travel light years yet run into a mountain?

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#137

Post by pluto9 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #9
pmx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

I don't know, the clouds don't look real to me. I also wonder why resolution mist always be this low, my cell phone ($250) can shoot 4K and a plane that costs millions can't shoot video that is detailed enough to investigate the phenomenon.

Because it's a FLIR (thermal) camera, which is a technology that has practically nothing in common with your phone's camera. You're comparing apples to oranges.

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#138

Post by haZard_OS »

madaxe_again wrote: post #93
valuearb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s worth exploring is space. Better telescopes, more monitoring, etc will actually tell us something about tye possibilities or existence of alien life. Chasing down misidentified flying objects and hoaxes will not. The idea that numerous spaceships, each with more potential kinetic energy than mankind has created in its entire history, are just flying around our atmosphere without leaving massive and easily reco…

It’s ludicrous if you assume they’re using diesel engines and air screws or something. If they can snap accelerate with essentially infinite jerk, as observations seem to suggest, then they’re not playing by the same rule book as us, and have fancy inertialess tech that’s beyond our ken. I’m not some true believer in little green men, just a scientist who won’t rule out what seems impossible just because it seems so.…

As a scientist myself, I don't care nearly as much about possibility as I do about probability.

At present and without extraordinary evidence to the contrary, I see human error as vastly more probably than "inertialess technology".

Re: The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program

#140

Post by gwern »

sigmar wrote: post #133
gwern wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note the timing. The program began in 2007. What else happened in 2007? The Democrats got control of the Senate, turning Minority leader Harry Reid into Majority leader.

2007 budget gets passed in 2006 though.

OP doesn't say it was part of the official 2007 budget, being a black program and all, and given how complicated US government & military budgeting is, I don't know what any dates involved really mean anyway. OP merely says it was started in 2007.
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