It doesnt say anything about the radar readings recieved, or the pilots reactions. You dont think these navy pilots know what planes look like on their radar and thermals? Mutiple ship and aircraft radar picked up consistent readings, movements, speeds that simply weren't possible.
Personally, I think it's some black-budget government project that somebody wasn't supposed to reveal. It might be from us, it might be foreign. But I really dont believe its extraterrestrial.
>It doesnt say anything about the radar readings recieved, or the pilots reactions.
To be fair, for the last video which shows telemetry data on the screen, he does explain what it means and how it shows that the object being tracked is actually stationary or moving very slowly.
As for the highly trained professional pilot's reactions, check out this breakdown of that last video, in which the pilots are freaking out. It show from the visual data readouts that it's a small object slightly above ambient temperature that's about 1m across flying very slowly at about 2k altitude. Oh and if you look closely at the object, you can see slow rhythmic oscillations, known in the technical community as 'flapping'.
So your idea is, that some YouTuber, who wasn't there, who doesn't have all the data, and who doesn't work with those advanced systems, somehow knows, from a low resolution video, how to correctly identify the objects, when the Pentagon, and the Navy, and the pilots, with all their experience and data, still are okay to call them unidentified?
That's a good one.
It's almost as if, the possibilities opened by it being unidentified are so scary (why?), you need to distort and pervert the normal faculties of reason and logic and kowtow to faith in a YouTube prophet who's gonna spin a nice story to make it all sound okay.
BTW, if you are feeling confident and like you can out-identify your defense forces, at least pick a theory that fits the data, rather than selectively ignoring inconvenient data.
I notice that all these prophets/conspiracy theorists, like Ms West and Mr Thunder, ignore that the aviators and radar tech have stated that there were fleets of these objects, coming in for days at a time, dropping from above 80kft to see level.
So fleets of weather balloons, space birds, or bird shit storms, that's really where you're going with this?
> Personally, I think it's some black-budget government project that somebody wasn't supposed to reveal.
That's exactly what they want their adversaries to think so adversaries are going invest a ridiculous amount of resources in achieving projected but non-existing capabilities.
Japan's FOMO reaction is proof this genius form of inception is working. The authority fallacy never fails at scale.
Well they wouldn't be the first nation state to invest an enormous amount of resources in trying to develop science fiction like capabilities.
Excluding a range of possibilities with a reasonable amount of certainty is a very expensive exploration quest. After concluding it was all a wild goose chase it is still superior to nudge your adversaries in a direction that doesn't exclude this specific range of opportunities.
I feel like the range of possibilities that appears to break the laws of physics entirely doesn't need resources to exclude, at least in the absence of harder evidence than some grainy video. If you're referring to Star Wars, at least that seemed physically possible.
The starting assumption was that the footage is showing things that are physically impossible. You do not actually need to find out the truth to disprove that statement. You just need to find a single counter example and that is exactly what the video is doing.
Mick West's explanation of "Go Fast" seems highly plausible (the video could be reproduced by a weather balloon, with parallax producing the difficulty of getting a radar lock and the appearance of fast movement). But for the other two, even ignoring witness testimony, it seems like grasping at straws to fit a narrative to a predetermined conclusion.
The go fast parallax explanation exposes just how impressive the Navy tech is, whereas we’re asked to believe Mark 1 eyeballs with very fuzzy videos or radar claims.
Same group claims USAF officers showed up demanding the E-2 Hawkeye tapes before they could even be secured. Did they use teleports or HALO to board a carrier that quick?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and these aren’t it. Tell me where the AF or VQ (Navy) ELINT aircraft were or what direction the antennas on St. Nicholas island were pointed.
The parallax explanation for the gofast video seems less believable when you view the video and consider the beginning of the footage, when the camera seems near-fixed and the object is flying quickly by it, and the operator has to actively track and lock-on to the moving object.
i dont understand how the background behind the 'balloon' could be moving so fast. I dont think it was a ufo, but I definitely do not think it was a balloon.
Imagine the balloon is 2km up and the plane is 8km up. The balloon is stationary and the plane moving fast. The plane centres a camera on the balloon and maintains the centre.
As the plane flies over the balloon it is going to need to move the camera to keep it centred. When it does this the balloon remains centered (stationary) whilst the ground appears to move under it. However its just that the angle the camera is at had to change to keep the balloon centered giving the allusion that the ground is moving relative to the balloon.
But in the moments when the camera is at rest while the operator is trying to focus, the ocean is moving slowly in the opposite direction as the object, meaning that the jet is flying in the same direction as the object. If the object were static, then upon lock-on, the ocean in the background would slow down or reverse direction. What we see instead is that the ocean background speeds up, meaning the object is traveling faster than the jet in the direction the jet is going.
Frankly, I don't think these videos alone are the highest quality evidence of this kind of thing, but they are interesting because it is difficult to dispute the credibility of the witnesses and the timeline of events described by them. Usually you get some tangible evidence (video) or solid witness testimony, not both at the same time.
I've never clearly seen anything with my own two eyes that I couldn't explain in prosaic terms. However, I know groups of people saner than I who have, and science suggests its highly improbable we are the only planet with life [0], let alone the first one to evolve a sophisticated civilization. People come up with Great Filter hypotheses and what not to compensate, but considering we may be less than a century from self sustaining space stations, that hypothesis is running out of air for its only known test trial.
It kind of sucks to think we don't really have manifest destiny with the universe, but the burden of proof is on the skeptics to prove there are some really damning parameters for the Drake Equation before saying it is so unlikely that there are aliens in our neighborhood.
> considering we may be less than a century from self sustaining space stations
The jump between space stations and interstellar travel is huge. I agree that it's improbable that we're the only planet with life, but being visited by aliens is as, if not more, improbable.
Consider the age of the universe, our (humanity, with the ability to apprehend the existence of alien life) existence in it is but a blip. What are the odds that one or several forms of life capable of interstellar travel exist during that same time period, not before or after. That alone, among myriad other reasons, makes me pessimistic.
If they are sending out probes how long do those probes remain active? Can they repair themselves or build more on their own? I assume that is what we would be seeing.
Wouldn't they have been easily observed by now, perhaps even making contact? Unless they are deliberately trying to remain unobserved, in which case being caught on video from an aircraft seems careless.
We should create message bots and probes who basically explore far reaches of space and categorize data, send it back to all other nodes and essentially make as detailed a 'map' of life/discoveries/etc so that not only we could use it benignly but so could other species who come after us. Assuming they could figure out and translate/understand how we categorize it.
“When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.”
Did you even try to understand the paper? They rightfully point out the uncertainty in estimating even the order of magnitude in the Drake equation, then build a model on uncertain, if not completely speculative facts including the Kardashev civilization model, and the validity of the "Fermi observation," which is in fact being debated in this very thread.
Checks notes..yeah this works.. also checks notes.. nope this isn't reddit. (seems more like a reddit comment, an observation not a critique).
I think honestly humanity is being squandered by income inequality. Imagine if money wasn't an issue for anyone. Imagine that we had a HUGE appreciation of science so much so that 90% of kids grow up to be scientists and explorers.
Surely that would get us to have higher and better technologies and also get us further in space flight. But instead elites would rather the potential scientists of the future 'know their place' and remain there in poverty never getting a degree/etc...
If he's right about the Go Fast video, doesn't that call into question the others as well? They all come from the same organization; figuring out that one of the videos is obvious horseshit should have us extra suspicious of the others, no?
We don't know that he's right, and the Navy has officially verified the videos belong to them just last week -- these aren't a product of the organization that released them. However, the Go Fast video was not the interesting one from a witness testimony standpoint. See the Nimitz incident [0], in which the object was observed by dozens of witnesses from several vantage points, including three fighters (at two different times), the passive radar on the Nimitz (intermittently for over a week), and an AWACS.
Whether we know anything at all is a matter I'll leave to philosophers. I'm sufficiently confident that he's right about the Go Fast video that I'd bet my left nut on it.
The Go Fast video being wrapped up in this matter leads me to conclude that the Navy didn't try very hard to figure out that video, which leaves me with no reason to believe they tried harder with the others.
Or that the Navy is happy with these pedestrian explanations, but realize that the public will claim "weather balloons again, another government cover-up" if they provide such an explanation. So they release them as "unexplained" without further comment.
Also, I could swear I saw the gimbal and flir videos few years earlier. The time of release also seems like this is an attempt to draw attention away from the disinfectant and UV light blunder, as this administration did many times before.
The fact that one of the videos is called gimbal and another FLIR Forward Looking InfraRed), tells us that Pentagon knows those are artifacts and most likely those are training videos on how to distinguish artifacts from a real thing.
That's only the reminder in the sense of "I've made other videos before about that" of Mick West. The relevant playlist of Mick West with many videos with detailed analysis is:
how the appearance of the "fast movement" is actually due to the plane speed, not the speed of the object observed, which is almost certainly something simple like a weather balloon
It occurs to me that, should extraterrestrial life exist - we might be more likely to be visited first by rules-flouting rogue individuals than by an official mission.
This also neatly explains problems like the "aliens have interstellar travel, but not spectroscopy and can be stopped by wooden doors" mentioned elsewhere in the comments --
A couple of good ol' boys off to deface a nature preserve (Earth to our aliens, the Nazca lines to our GOB's) by driving circles in it could do so today in a truck with active-torque differentials, wireless radiofrequency entry and activation, catalytic conversion of exhausts, an on-board diagnostic computer, turbocharging engine, liquid crystal display and a cmos camera, radar-based cruise control, lidar detector, GPS navigation relying on atomic-clock level timing precision..... without needing to know a thing about how even a single one of those components actually worked, and could be stopped by simple stone bollards.
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”
“Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.
“Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
Michael Crichton's Sphere has a good section about the "anthropomorphic problem", about how we imagine extraterrestrial life as essentially human. Regardless of how they look, they still act human in our imagination.
Why apply concepts like "rogue", "mission", "rules", or even "individuals"? There's no guarantee such ideas mean anything to these things. For all we know, the UFOs themselves are not actual artificial spacecraft, but "biological" entities. Or autonomous drones.
Or they're not even extraterrestrial, but visitors from the future. Or some sort of interdimensional phenomenon. Or they're some sort of mythological being out of human religion- perhaps Abrahamic entities like the Angels of Mons. Or that they're the manifestation of mankind's collective unconsciousness, a sort of high-level tulpa. Or they're just some kind of weird unknown cosmic particle, a high-altitude form of quantum ball lightning.
Those possibilities are tongue-in-cheek, but my point is that if you're going to start assuming that UFOs are just spacecraft from an unknown alien race... then you start making assumptions upon assumptions and the whole thing just devolves into science fiction tropes. And honestly, those tropes are no more probable than the crazy Fortean explanations I've offered. It's fun to talk about, but why take these thought experiments seriously?
I haven’t stopped thinking about this since the American missionary was killed by the uncontacted Sentinelese people. What if Earth is the uncontacted & protected community of the galaxy?
That supposes Earth is special and deserves a particular treatment.
It seems likelier that we are too far from interstellar civilisations to be visited by them, or that there's no interstellar civilisations because of a Great Filter, or even simply that earth is not interesting enough for them to visit. Or worse, they do visit, but the human race is not interesting enough for them to make their presence known to it.
True. We haven't confirmed a single other one yet, which is why actually finding one will be probably the most significant discovery humans ever make.
But I would imagine that an interstellar civilization that has discovered thousands of life-bearing planets would start to develop some criteria about what type of life is interesting or not. It could just be that nothing on Earth meets the criteria to be interesting.
I wonder if we're just too uninteresting to be visited by extraterrestrial life. Maybe there is a part of the universe that's teeming with life and resources that extraterrestrials prefer to visit instead.
Going by our own immediate galactical neighborhood, we're a veritable oasis in a desert as far as life is concerned.
So maybe they've mapped out the galaxies, discovered our little planet, and decided that it's too little reward for too much travel.
With our current technology, yes. But we're talking about an alien race capable of traveling light year distances. I'm sure their planet searching capabilities would be far ahead of us as well.
Gimme a break. The "problems" you mention in "other comments" come from someone talking about a fiction: War of the Worlds.
But if you're going to discuss the hypotheticals, like why they might visit or reveal themselves or not, I think it's interesting.
Why assume they would just show themselves openly?
Sure, people use the lack of "public open mass contact" to dispute that ETs exist. But that's only 1 theory that fits that data point (but doesn't fit the centuries of accounts, and now video evidence of sky vehicles).
I think it's interesting to consider many other reasons why we have not had "mass open contact":
- humans are idiots and we're not worth the effort. Has a representative of any country ever gone to an ant hill and done an official representation species-to-species? But actually ants are pretty clever, so it does not do them justice.
- maybe they're private and sensitive, and scared of our germs.
- maybe they're just not very sociable. They prefer to stick with their own kind.
- maybe they don't care that it would be a "big thing" for Earth/humanity. To them, using portals to travel the universe is not a big thing.
- maybe they are doing "secret surveillance" to observe the Earth lifeforms and they don't want to distort the data by interacting
- It would mess us up to much. Prime directive.
- Our world government thinks it would mess us up/ mess up the status quo too much, and they negotiated a "stay" on open contact.
- The ETs have no interest in suppressing nor promoting us, they just use Earth/Moon/Solar system as some sort of transit point, and openly revealing themselves would complicate their goals.
- There has been mass contact, in small stages, but it's been so muddied by disinfo and shaming that people think there hasn't been.
You can spend all day thinking about reasons for and against. It's fun, but it doesn't address the video evidence and "contact" accounts. Why not a #"Me Too" moment for UFO contactees? Doesn't everyone have a right to be heard and believed before being subjected to further scrutiny and investigation in order to establish believability?
It’s hard to believe that every nation with an airforce doesn’t already have some sort of protocol in place about what to do if you see a flying object not flying any known colors that you cannot hail on radio.
Edit: unless they all do dating back to the Cold War, and it’s “shoot first, ask questions later.”
There is a protocol. It's called "Shut the fuck up or they will think you are smoking dope and you will lose your wings."
Seriously, that's been the way of handling these sorts of things for the past 50+ years.
Perhaps these are truly unidentified objects but you can’t ignore the sophistication of the scams associated with UFOs. There are elaborate hoaxes that require a serious amount of work, sometimes allegedly leaking classified information to mix into it.
For example, Project Serpo, some conspiracy theory about a secret space mission in the 1960-1970s. Somehow decades later this convinced a well known former CIA employee. Who later claimed he was naive to be associated with them.
This led to an unusual case of a current CIA employee leaking emails denying that the former DDI and Chairman of the NIC was involved with the Serpo hoax or the other CIA employee.
That employee quit the CIA in 1982 but was later affiliated with the DDI through medical research.
In the emails, described a meeting at CIA that occurred after the 1988 NBC broadcast of UFO: Cover-Up Live. Mentioned with two Colonels and the dubious AFOSI character who allegedly ran the original Serpo hoax for the Air Force. This person is the focus of the documentary Mirage Men. He also worked for Robert Bigelow and employed the chief scientist to Tom DeLonge’s company.
That scientist was introduced to DeLonge by the former CIA employee who fell for the later Serpo hoax.
The story is confusing but who would spend all this time on this? If you look closely, all the scientists involved even the Stanford guy, are kind of true believers. The rest are con-artists or deceived by a quest to uncover a great secret or technology.
Here is the 1988 broadcast, Falcon and Condor are around 1h10m. Falcon is the Serpo hoaxer AFOSI agent and Condor is a retired Air Force captain. There’s no covert conspiracy here, just a bunch of weird people who claims fantastic things. There’s no prime mover just human nature (ie disinformation, intelligence traps and scams)-
Do you know of any good resources (documentaries, books, etc) on this sort of thing? (Particularly anything about government spending on pseudoscience.)
After those Navy UFO videos were released and I learned that the crank Harold Puthoff was involved, it became a much more interesting story. I'm surprised there isn't a book about the whole weird saga.
If they’re not another nation’s tech, and not ours, my pet theory is the us government has no idea what they are beyond they exist and are spooky.
They cover it up / stigmatize for a banal reason: admitting there’s something they neither understand nor can control is not something governments like to do.
If there are aliens flying around, it would be nice if at least one country made high quality evidence public.
The U.S. Navy videos are intriguing but very far from conclusive. And yet they are likely withholding a ton more data that citizens should have access to.
If it's all a cover story for top secret stuff, then it's likely an unnecessary deception. I doubt any U.S. military project is actually safe from Chinese and Russian spies. So all they're doing is increasing the sense of distrust between U.S. citizens and their own government.
Modern people don't want to live in the Cold War secrecy paranoia of the last century. The U.S. military should focus on what really matters and leave that toxic cold war culture behind.
> I doubt any U.S. military project is actually safe from Chinese and Russian spies.
Your doubt is reasonable, based on the string of mishaps this past decade, but likely not the case given the nature of compartmentalization. Also, appearing weak when actually strong is a strategy. It’s quite possible the USG has amassed futuristic tech in secret, while playing the fool.
Given https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/zombie/index.htm - nothing surprises me, though I would of thought this would of been something all country air forces would have - procedures in encountering unknown flying craft! Certainly would have a friend or foe identification procedure and with that, the ability to also identify neutral/civilian/..... and other avenues grown into that procedure over time.
The zombie page is an educational tool, not a serious plan for dealing with the living dead. It sets up a scary (but clearly fictional) threat to teach people to make plans, have supplies, and prepare evac bags that would also apply to actual threats.
It is 1999 and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) have started appearing with disturbing regularity in the night skies. Reports of violent human abductions and horrific experimentation struck terror into the hearts of millions. The mass public hysteria has only served to expose Earth's impotence against a vastly superior technology.
Many countries initially attempted to deal independently with the aliens. In August 1998, Japan established an anti-alien combat force; the Kiryu-Kai. Equipped with Japanese-made fighter aircraft, the Kiryu-Kai certainly looked like a powerful force. However, after 5 months of expensive operations they had yet to intercept their first UFO. The lesson was clear: this was a worldwide problem which could not be dealt with by individual countries.
On December 11, 1998, representatives from the worlds most economically powerful countries gathered secretly in Geneva. After much debate, the decision was made to establish a covert independent body to combat, investigate and defeat the alien threat. This organization would be equipped with the world's finest pilots, soldiers, scientists and engineers, working together as one multi-national force. This organization was named the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit."
Currently, the human race has several billion cameras readily available to take footage of rare occurrences. Not just mobile phones, but think also of CCTV security cameras, dash cams, etc...
The simple logical conclusion is that footage of rare but real events ought to be more readily available.
And in fact, that's exactly what's observed! There is now a wide variety of high quality videos to choose from, if what you want to see is things like bright meteors. They're real, in the sky, fleeting, and rare. We now have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of full colour, high resolution, in-focus videos of them.
Well, camera phones, even really good ones, suck for filming anything more than 50+ yards away. Try to film a Jet with it that is clearly visible to your eye.
Secondly, meteors aren't rare. Go anywhere with a clear sky and you can see shooting stars many times pretty much every night of the week.
Thirdly, there are plenty of pictures and videos of flying saucers, balls, lights, etc. out there, but everyone's response is "that's fake". I mean, that's the correct response, but your argument is wrong in light of that.
On the contrary, there are rare but real phenomena that have no good videos. Meteors aren't that rare, try ball lightning instead. The only videos we have are blurry unclear blobs of pixels, totally unconvincing. Here's the "highest quality" video ever made of one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXm3zDM_v80
Sadly we are living in the very short window in which a decent resolution video of events is worth anything. Soon enough video synthesis will forever render that option useless.
In the years to come people will forget that during this time we saw no reliable proof, and fall for bullshti clickbait fake videos.
Which is IR. I think the IR videos are the most promising, since high quality IR tech is restricted and optical camo could explain why sightings happen infrequently
Also, the interviews about Navy/5gon UFO videos have stated that the original footage was much higher resolution and showed some "protuberances" coming from the TicTac, like landing struts or whatever. The also said that the released footage was much lower resolution and also that it was unlikely the radar data would ever be released (but in other cases, JAL, Belgium, there have been radar data of anomalous objects released).
I don't think it's surprising that it's hard to get great quality footage of high tech things like this.
For the following reasons:
- the large number of cameras you mention are mostly low quality cameras
- the objects are supposed to be very fast
- the objects are often very far away
- the object might use optical camo
For example, if you are sitting on the ground in high visibility day with bright sunlight and you see a 737 in the sky at 10km it will look like a mostly translucent white speck. The obvious thing will be the contrail.
If you have an object smaller than that, faster than that, and even higher than that, you'll have a worse image.
Section bias seems like a misnomer for this situation. It'd be selection bias if grainy blurry alien videos were more likely to get popular than high-def ones. There doesn't seem to be any kind of "selection" to be biased here.
The selection occurs when hi-res videos depict so clearly what is actually going on that it's revealed to be some mundane event, and doesn't even qualify as a UFO any more (even if it were positively identified as an alien spacecraft, in which case afawk it remains classified)
The reverse argument is that if blurry evidence of aliens exists and aliens are real then there is also lots of extremely clear evidence of aliens that has never been released to the public. I find it unlikely that we haven't had a leak yet. The reality is that this extremely clear evidence and the aliens that it is supposedly depicting simply does not exist.
Also, if it were the case that the intelligence community had very clear evidence of aliens, they would be extra cautious about the blurry evidence they release. Also, it would be a huge statistical anomaly that either civilians didn't catch some of that clear evidence, o that intelligence are actually that proficient in doing global cover ups.
Not only that, but apparently the point of having super strength and agility is to stand menacingly against the night sky, scare some farmers, and not actually do anything.
Hacker News is fine with jokes that are actually clever. Cheap plays on stereotypes, not so much. HN has problems, but this is generally not one of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus