Live data from Hacker News

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

arxiv.org

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#21

Funny enough I was just reading the book "In Plain Sight" [1] before I flipped over to hacker news. It's a book about the serious investigation into UAPs by various governments, and is heavily sourced, with often times a half dozen references per page, many official and declassified sources. It's hard to come out of reading it without being strongly convinced that these UAP are not of human or natural origin. [1] htt…

> really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale. Not downvoting, but I used to be a huge "UFO fan" around the ages of 8-11. I read book after book, all breathlessly outlining the "reams of evidence" available. I watched documentaries on television, saw UFO topics covered in the newspaper, and I had a shelf full of books all in agreement. Must be true, right? Except that even as young child I s…

Neither the comment your responding to nor the paper the submission is on deal with either cattle mutilation nor crop circles

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#22

Fun topic because the question of under what conditions would we as humans would contact another less advanced civilization in space opens up some pretty interesting but simple criteria. We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their surv…

One thing that sets humans and animals apart is language. The ability to transfer abstract thoughts and ideas between individuals.

Would you adopt an alien creature capable of reasoning and and expressing its thoughts as a pet? Or would you consider that enslavement?

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#23
I did some quick googling to put things in perspective:

Mach1 is ~ 0.3 km/s (+/- 0.1 varies with altitude) Artillery is ~ 1 km/s Earth orbital escape velocity is ~ 11 km/s

6km high is 20,000 ft, around low regional turboprop aircraft. 10km high is 32,000 ft, around airliner cruise altitude. 15km high is 50,000 ft, where Elon Musks private jet sits. 20km high is more where U2 and SR71 start to operate and require space suits.

ISS orbit is ~ 400 km Elon's Starlink is 550km

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale. Not downvoting, but I used to be a huge "UFO fan" around the ages of 8-11. I read book after book, all breathlessly outlining the "reams of evidence" available. I watched documentaries on television, saw UFO topics covered in the newspaper, and I had a shelf full of books all in agreement. Must be true, right? Except that even as young child I s…

Neither the comment your responding to nor the paper the submission is on deal with either cattle mutilation nor crop circles

The linked paper on arXiv[1] starts off with: " We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear. Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected" (emphasis mine)

The word "ships" is a bit of a stretch to say the least without some really good evidence.

What's their "scientific" evidence? In the synopsis they say: "Adobe colour system" which... umm... how can I put this politely... they looked at the pictures in Photoshop!

The calibrated scientific instrument that they used to quantitively gather evidence for visiting aliens is the eyedropper tool.[3]

This is what I'm talking about. There's no evidence, just people promoting themselves to make a buck, get published, make insurance claims, or just have a laugh. Call me when they have an in-focus picture that's not just a splotch a few pixels across.[2]

[1] There is no special requirement, peer review, or any of the actual scientific process required for publishing a pre-print on arXiv. It's just a dumping ground for students, and is about as authoritative as GitHub.

[2] They have their photos in the paper. Go have a look, they're hilarious! These could be anything, such as airliners, satellites, or whatever your imagination can come up with: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.11215.pdf

[3] This feels like kicking a puppy, but I have to point out that in all PC colour systems, including Adobe RGB are non-linear and require gamma correction to obtain scientifically-relevant linear light intensity levels. The Photoshop eyedropper tool specifically does not do this, returning the encoded non-linear values. The paper mentions none of this, yet they use the RGB values directly in formulas to estimate metrics like distance. They also mention "RGB spectrum" as if that means anything without the context of the camera filters, sensor response curves, etc...

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#25
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be covered by the zoo hypotheses[1] I think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis

not necessarily. UFOs might not hide intentionally; maybe they don't care but happen to rarely hang out in populated areas. for instance, maybe they just care about the sea floor, and only surface to beam data back. or they're preferentially attracted to fast-moving objects like fighter jets, or sources of unusual EM signatures. if UFOs are alien drones trying to hide, why do they suck at it?

Interesting points that I had completely overlooked!

By the way, without knowing how many there might be in total and how often they were seen/discovered, we can't really say if hiding from us is something they'd suck at :)

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#26

> The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere. To me this sends up a couple of thoughts: (1) this sounds like a way to spy on Russia and (2) quite possibly could be technology from Russia (such as hypersonic missiles). Then I read the speed: > An object contrast makes it possible to estimate the distance using colourimetric methods. Pha…

That's what I thought too. Why not create a bit of distance to a possible reputational damage and spy on Russia at the same time too?

Not many data points, but fig. 4 (page 3) is interesting: a linear relation between luminosity and speed. For meteors should be, as intuitively expected, proportional to kinetic energy, hence quadratic.

Does this relation holds for missiles too?

EDIT: they are not related to NASA, it's in the second sentence of the abstract (ops)

...The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of UAP also...

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#27
post #22

Fun topic because the question of under what conditions would we as humans would contact another less advanced civilization in space opens up some pretty interesting but simple criteria. We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their surv…

One thing that sets humans and animals apart is language. The ability to transfer abstract thoughts and ideas between individuals. Would you adopt an alien creature capable of reasoning and and expressing its thoughts as a pet? Or would you consider that enslavement?

It's all a matter of degrees. My cat certainly is able to communicate with me and there are smarter animals around that we keep in captivity (e.g. dolphins).

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#28

>Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected So they are now calling them literal ships, not ufo or uap Also, from their methodology and instrumentation (color cameras) it seems they could have done it in like 80s. Why coming out now?

> Also, from their methodology and instrumentation (color cameras) it seems they could have done it in like 80s. Why coming out now?

The 80s were mostly about DSLR cameras with film (whether colour or black and white).

These three are currently focused on what can be determined from CMOS cameras using more recent techniques.

eg:

Meteor colorimetry with CMOS cameras

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.07403.pdf

treats digital captures as a limited range spectrogram in the visible spectrum normalises values and attempts to determine estimates for "the characteristics of meteors such as temperature, chemical composition, and others".

As this approach is based upon "new algorithms for estimating temperature, heat radiation emitted by a fireball, and spectra of meteors containing emission lines using a new approach based on colourimetry" it seems they are publishing now as they had neither the cameras nor the algorithm some 40 years ago, and perhaps were not yet born.

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#29
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper is by three Ukranian astro photogrammetrypeople .. I was going to comment on "ships" for the bias but figured I can mark that down to non native English speakers and some translation issue. Nothing in the eight pages screams "we believe in aliens", it's essentially about not yet catogorised observed phenomona high up in the troposphere. With limited data on fast objects that appear in only a few frames they…

The crescent shape looks like it could be side view of the ionized part of a shock wave (maybe there’s a better word for it).

"moon"?

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the comment your responding to nor the paper the submission is on deal with either cattle mutilation nor crop circles

The linked paper on arXiv[1] starts off with: " We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear. Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected" (emphasis mine) The word "ships" is a bit of a stretch to say the least without some really good evidence. What's their "scientific" evidence? In the synopsis they say: "Adobe colour system" which... umm... how can I put this politely.…

What if UFOs blur images taken from them? We already have similar technology that blocks cameras using laser.
Post reply on HN