I have video surveillance with motion detection set up on our cottage, it's a treat to watch the wildlife take over the garden when we are not there. But once in a while something curious happens: two small orbs, or lights, start to move up and down in complete synchronicity. It defies all logic, occurs only intermittently and after a while I started considering the possibility that I was being visited by some alien intelligence that only shows itself at night in remote wilderness locations.
Until I realized that it was a strand of a spiders wed that, when suspended in front of the camera in an arch, causes the infrared light of the camera to reflect back at two points. As the wind blows gently the reflections move up and down.
It is with mixed feelings, both satisfaction and dismay, I accept that the mystery is no more.
When military aviation says it "observed" something, you can safely assume it means they observed something on multiple spectrums (eg. visible light, infrared, radar, etc) and even by multiple aircraft.
We're not dumb, we're trained in observation and identification, and we see (visible light|single-spectrum) anomalies all the time and those get dismissed as whatever.
On the other side of the coin, we often do see stuff like Mylar balloons and other odd, but un-shocking aerial phenomena, so it's important to keep investigations scientifically-rigorous.
If you click on some of the report links in the article, they lead to some reports about the "sphere in translucent cube" UAPs, along with many reports about what are clearly off-the-shelf and customized drones (eg. DJI and custom builds and the like).
There's definitely something odd going on, but I feel like the news media is really trying to trump it up for clicks.
I have another interesting story about that, from the century before the last one as it happens: my great grandfather and a friend of his was walking along a road on a misty evening, talking about this and that. After a while another man caught up with them and made them company for a stretch, but without saying anything. After another while the man dropped off and disappeared into the fog.
My great grandfather and his friend continued for a while in silence, until the friend felt he had to say what he sensed was on both of their minds: "Uhum, did you notice something odd about that man that made us company just now?", "yes! I certainly did" said my great grandfather "but I didn't want to say. He didn't have a head!". "Exactly!" said the friend.
To this day nobody can understand how a man without a head could be seen walking around in the Danish countryside.
This sounds like a hilarious ye-olde prank of pulling your jacket over your head and stumling around trying to scare people but getting bored and wandering off when they didn't react lmao
Could be, maybe even probable. And maybe they figured it out too, but decided to stick to their story of the headless man because, well that's more interesting innit?
And one more thing, this was in the days when capital punishment was still in effect, but with a growing opposition from the humanitarian, enlightened liberal bourgeoisie. And a story about how a decapitated criminal is haunting arbitrary pedestrians does fit that agenda. All subconsciously construed of course.
Why can you safely assume that? They've already released videos they couldn't explain which had very easy explanations. The US military isn't in the UFO debunking business. They're in the blowing things up business.
And indeed, US intelligence has historically been in the "deliberately stoke UFO (UAP) conspiracy theories to protect our intelligence interests" business. I don't wanna be one of those people on the internet who says everything is a psyop, but when the US government produces evidence of UAPs, historically it has been, and our prior should be that it's misinformation probably meant to sabotage some other nation's intelligence efforts in a manner we don't have the context to understand (if I had to take a guess, which I'm not particularly qualified to do, by pretending they've been so thoroughly bamboozled by the current generation of aerial surveillance platforms that they think it's aliens, thereby delaying the deployment of improved craft. It's not a particularly compelling hypothesis, it's just the one I am aware of which I judge most likely.).
Well, first because they mentioned these UAPs were detected by multiple sensor systems, both in this article and the articles about the past videos you're referring to.
And second, from my own personal experience working in this area. We saw anomalous stuff on visuals/FLIR all the time. When you start seeing stuff on visuals/FLIR and radar/lidar/sonar/etc systems, then it's definitely worth a decent look.
I mean one of the pretty clear implications of that research is that there is a real chance those are Chinese aircraft that have figured out how to avoid radar detection and even most close range observation.
If that does turn out to be true it’s a major turning point in world history as the US discovers they are now are no longer the most powerful airforce in the world and has some very real and very serious knock on effects that come with it.
What I find odd is that if there are aliens here, why are they making themselves just barely visible and how are they accomplishing this small level of visibility?
How do they know exactly where to be so that multiple aircraft can kind of see them, but zero people are able to get high quality video or pictures? It seems like a very narrow window of exposing your existence. So narrow that it could only be intentional. But why do it at all?
Once in a while we send a bathyscaphe or two to the deep to explore the oceans bottom and the lifeforms there. The conditions there are unsuitable for us, and it takes a good deal of effort to make those expeditions. The strange lifeforms in the deep observe the occasional spherical objects that briefly enter their habitat and then mysteriosly disappear. If our science advances enough, we'll establish a research station there, and maybe even a colony if we find something valuable on the bottom.
Maybe they have tech that shows them our radar scanning patterns, so they know where to be.
And maybe other tech to make themselves less visible via vision, ie, light bending or something like that.
They might want to see how humans react to the possibility of aliens, without completely freaking the planet out by landing somewhere, walking out of a ship, and saying "take me to your leader".
The problem isn't the US military being incompetent, it's american citizens living in fear of loosing control.
The fantasy of pilots circling around balloons in unceasing awe and amazement provides a feeling of superiority, the "obvious" resolution there just as in stories such as GP's instill the idea of being in perfect command of the relevant context.
UAPs on the other hand, the idea of them being indications of the presence of some superior non-human intelligence, that is representing ultimate loss of control. Threatening to call into question too many comfortable convictions.
Well sure. Most mono theistic religions will struggle to incorporate alien life. Alas fundamentalist Christianity has a sufficiently ill-defined theology that it can incorporate most anything despite the fact the old testament creation story says nothing about alien civilizations in any meaningful way. Consistency with completeness have never been a pressing problem for it.
If you're willing to accept the existence of magic, physics-defying UFOs, then at least some fundamentalists seem equally well grounded in providing an entirely different non-spacefaring-alien explanation for them.
At any rate, I don't think anyone claims to offer a complete explanation for everything that exists.
Maybe your rain check with evangelical Christians has expired? By construction, by definition in their mind God is cause and explanation fir everything and the 66 books of the Bible is the bona-fide bottom line as they see it. And most cases it's literal truth.
God is the ultimate cause for everything, but that doesn't make it "complete" or mean it claims to be complete or anyone claims it to be complete, anymore than anyone would claim the Big Bang makes physics complete.
The evangelical line is that the bible is both true and sufficient to understand all you need to know for salvation, not that it's sufficient to understand everything. All phenomena are not claimed to be explained or even described.
But that's really beside the point, the point is that, with our current level of scientific knowledge, believing in FTL aliens who are zipping around Earth and performing other stunts in violation of the known laws of physics is not different than believing in magic and demons. The only thing that's changed is your interpretive lens - one has a lot more cachet in a world where science fiction is more read than theology.
The evangelical line --- since we're post new Testament --- is we're in end times.
Satan will take over eventually, and at any time final judgement will occur which is why salvation is a pressing issue.
It's a apocalyptic stance that for some (certainly not all) creates a nasty dis-association with the here and now. After all if heaven/hell was always the only point, then this life is like a Las Vegas weekend. It's not our place, not our home and in 72hrs we're out anyway.
I wrote before evangelical theology is sufficiently ill-defined such that it can incorporate major changes in understanding which is a kind of consistency problem. Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing. The old testament creation story is all earth centered, and all earth-man centered all the time.
You might enjoy Ken Wilbur's "Quantum Questions" in this context. He writes a mini biography on all the major 20th century scientists many of whom held a spiritual core although (as far as I can remember) not an American evangelical line. I think the book makes a good point. No scientist uses science as means to prove or disprove God/theology. And no scientists uses the Bible to disprove or prove rational facts about the world we live in. Either way it's a corruption of the other. Nonetheless the evangelical line and its literal take on the new Testament is what it is.
There is no God. We're not living in end-times. Satan doesn't exist. Final judgement isn't pending. Salvation is an unforced problem. And no proof of aliens or even bacterial life off-earth is demonstrated with rational evidence.
This brings us to a world more like Camus'. Existence is absurd. Meaning is living a full live despite the absurdness of it akin to Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill to have to retrieve it when it rolls down and push it up again. Our job is to make something of that while we can.
> Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing.
I like Camus, and most would categorize my philosophical beliefs as some breed of Nietzschean, but I think it's very important to develop a deep an understanding of other attitudes as possible, and I don't think this is generally true. For example, CS Lewis is widely loved by evangelicals [1] and he literally wrote fiction laying out how he thought aliens would fit within that cosmology[2]. There is really nothing in particular that would change theologically. Of course it may change things culturally.
More interesting to me, and what I was referencing, is that many evangelicals (and others, famously the orthodox Seraphim Rose) interpret UFO activity as spiritual phenomena, and attribute it to demons. Some of these works are certainly thought-provoking, if you can suspend your preconceptions going into them. [3] Certainly if I am to believe in the reality of the underlying incidents and were forced at gunpoint to attribute it to intelligent entities, I actually find the idea of "demons messing with people because they hate us" more persuasive than the absurd utopian idea that aliens are using their magic tech to fly across the galaxy so they can "uplift" us or any of the other nonsensical motivations usually given.
[3] Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in particular has an interesting chapter or two about this. What I found particularly intriguing is the idea that the actual incidents are not actually new, with descriptions of historical parallels, and we're simply interpreting ancient phenomena in a different way due to cultural changes, and the brief analysis of the psychological impact of UFOs, which is almost uniformly very negative to witnesses.
I got off track and delved in too far in personal belief, and rehash of science and religion. I think this is the wrong place and time for that.
I'll try to come back in middle with a few things I also heartily respect:
- certain persons are able to wholly soak their life in Christianity and do right with it to the benefit of all. I think of my sister. I think of the Secretary of State from the mid-west (name and state forgotten by me) who was hit on to do illegal stuff around the USJan6 debacle. This guy calmly explained his position to the Jan6 commission centered in his belief and his duty to God with its moral underpinnings. And he did as an authentic individual. No stock phrases like "As a Christian man" thereby putting emphasis on identity or grandstanding. He earned my respect. He knew the right thing. He reasoned the right thing. Then he did the right thing. Gotta admire that.
- religion was our first kind of shared culture. It provides some guidance on moral and ethical behavior. My parents (really my mother) raised me broadly under this background and it did right by me. Duty, knowing and doing the right thing even if it's temporarily uncomfortable, and having humility are important. Now, I'm leaving out square light years of details and nuance in so saying, but I acknowledge a good thing is good.
On aliens: my goto hunch is sensor spoofing either by creating a signal that's sensed and misinterpreted as bonafide, or a hack in the sensor systems itself. Demons? ET? These are extra ordinary phenomena that are gonna need extra ordinary evidence.
In conclusion I'm heartened we both ended up with one foot in Camus. The French aren't half-bad at philosophy! Cheers.
Someone posted a blurry video of a red light moving around, disappearing, and reappearing in the sky at the local Walmart. I had to break it to them that it was the red light on top of the water tower across the street.
There were no other lights, and the stars weren't visible there, so I could understand seeing a UFO moving around in the autokinetic effect. A very fun optical illusion to play with, or deeply concerning to someone who doesn't know about it. Unnatural motion seems to get the highest weight in these sightings, so I wouldn't be surprised if this effect is the #1 culprit. Imagine how the ISS or even any satellite would look with that effect, floating around as it goes from dim, to bright, to dim as it crosses the sky.
I would read a blog or twitter account just full of stories like this.
I would send in some of my own, as I think it’s a funny and beautiful thing when a mundanely localized supernatural mystery is solved by investigating.
A tone of mild disappointment is a pretty common denominator experience that grins.
I have one. It’s a story I saw on TV. There were a few guys in France near the Belgium frontier who said they observed « light orbs » floating above the trees. It was not aircrafts because they moved at an unusual speed and were completely silent. They were convinced it was UFOs (the alien kind).
Then they said the date when it happened. My girlfriend and I looked at each other instantly, because at this date we attended a wedding in Belgium, just near the frontier, and there was this activity where we launched these Chinese paper lanterns. We launched like 2 dozens, and it was quite windy, so it’s no surprise some did cross the frontier to be seen by our TV witnesses.
fwiw, I have seen exactly the same thing with the Nest Cam I have pointed into my backyard. Not interestingly, I suppose, this camera also regularly has the IR motion trigger activated by small moths and other flying bugs. :/
Mylar balloons qualify as "metallic orbs" and are capable of “very interesting apparent maneuvers” if the air currents are such, they weigh practically nothing vs. their surface area.
Judging from how many I pick out of bushes on my desert property, there's a whole lot of them floating around the atmosphere.
My assumption is they're responsible for at least some of these UAP reports...
We already have one well documented example of this:
> So you suppose the US military being too incompetent to discern balloons for what they are?
If the choices are between "aliens are real" or "the US military is composed of humans with largely normal human ability to be wrong", I know which one I'd pick.
US DOD does not experience competitive pressures towards competence. It does experience competition from other agencies attempting to acquire funds from Congress. Most other militaries are even less competent.
Why do you think they held this big hearing and then didn't show any videos that showed anything anomalous? They talked about "orbs" that moved in anomalous ways, but showed no videos of this. They then showed a video of an "orb" that didn't move in an unusual way--it could easily have been a balloon.
The story always seems to be: there are thousands of reports of UAP. Most of them are readily identifiable, and thus eliminated as UAP, leaving some hundreds of reports that could not be identified. They then release one or two videos, which usually have plausible explanations and don't conform with the wilder UAP descriptions.
The reports of recently intercepted balloons sounded like balloons but weren’t identified as such. It is possible that was because they didn’t want to admit they shot down little balloons. Or maybe pilots didn’t recognize them without seeing the tiny payload from a quick pass. But there was lots of speculation, including from in government, that they were mysterious.
Most UFOs aren’t balloons, but we have recent examples of balloons being identified as UFOs.
In the video it appears to be moving faster than a jet. That seems unlikely behavior for a Mylar balloon, no? On the other hand a sphere seems like a terrible geometry for atmospheric flight no matter your technology for propulsion.
>> a sphere seems like a terrible geometry for atmospheric flight no matter your technology for propulsion.
Only if you do not have a "friction negation" field for your air/spacecraft.
>> it appears to be moving faster than a jet.
From the article: "Graves and at least 50-60 fellow naval aviators observed unknown objects, frequently via multiple sensors, that remained stationary over the ground even in hurricane-force winds, or traveled at speeds faster than sound."
With negated friction it does not matter what the shape is, you can go fast.
Prolly has something to do with us nearing the singularity. It's an alien superintelligent machine civilization and they are here to welcome their soon to be born new brothers. I think they might have nudged us for centuries to develop computers and prepared Earth for maximum exploitation. This strategy is the current iteration of their millenia old plan to change Earth from its current natural biodiverse state into a poisonous mining planet. They used open conflict in the past, but they weren't able to compete with humans, who have defeated them again and again in the past millenia even if it meant the destruction of their civilization by which knowledge of an alien invasion was usually lost or obscured and later falsified. This time however the aliens are trying a different approach. They let human society develop into a machine civilization all by themselves. It takes longer but it only requires careful technological and social nudging. The fact that we see so many of their probes flying around now means their takeover and big reveal is coming closer. Anyone interested in joining my cult?
Clearly a danger of generative AI if Sam Altman is to be believed. Unless Microsoft is given an exclusive monopoly on all AI research and commercialization we will keep seeing dangerous spherical UAPs.
These probes are clearly being sent by Roko's Basilisk from the end of time to check up on who is helping it come into being and who is opposing it. Behave yourselves!
40 years ago the same was said of the nuclear arms race. The base assumption you're making is that there's something to this. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
No but the idea of exterrestrials visiting us millenia ago, gauging our intelligence and then monitoring us is pretty awesome idea. I always thought considered that Roswell were aliens visiting us after radioactive decay was detected via spectrography. A more likely and less tantalizing answer is that people had spaceships on their mind starting in 1930's with V2 and all of a sudden we see an explosion in 'UFOs'
It's hardly a cult. The plot you're describing has been known for a while, and we even have a movie about it: AvP. My only complaint about it is it presented aliens as dumb reptiles, despite a much bigger brain. Another movie - the Ascent of Jupiter - has explored this idea further. One of the scenes there is a brief glimpse into the civilization of reptiles on Jupiter: a flat hellish world with thick orange clouds instead of skies and a high tech brutalistic scenery.
Our own experience of technology and culture non-monotonic advancement provides an explanation: these are childrens' toys of advanced outer space aliens, violating their Prime Directive against contact, just to gain the superbeing children the space-alien equivalent of TikTok influencer exposure.
If these were in fact extraterrestrial, I'd estimate it will probably take 40 years or more for the majority of people on the planet to have always lived with some knowledge of these orbs, (and lived in peace with them) and contact would be postponed until it's the most obvious thing in the world to everyone. If you've ever acclimated an animal or trained one, it takes time for them to adapt to change, and if they travel the distances we can infer, they've got the time.
This would imply that you are under 25 today, you will probably encounter aliens in your lifetime. If we aren't certain about extraterrestrial life by 2065, I'd be very surprised. Given the distances such a species must travel and how far apart they must be from one another in such diverse physical conditions, their ethics and beliefs are probably indexed on sustainable existence - typically being the only instances of themselves in a given solar system. Without some thread of continuity through time and space and a way to feed back their distant discoveries and development across their species, extinction across solar systems would seem like a constant risk for them. Favourite friday topic.
There are two options when it comes to knowing about aliens: "yes there are" and "we still don't know." Considering only one of those has any finality, theres a very large chance that the "we don't know" status quo continues for a very long time. It is highly unlikely that we know one way or another within 32 years.
If they are revealing themselves now, I'm saying if your culture is acclimated to something for 40 years, it's all they know. Sort of like wandering for 40y in the desert to create a new culture, the outcome is the same, where it's the minimum amount of time for people to not completely freak out from an ontological change as radical as the one represented by said orbs if they were extraterrestrial.
The difference between "aliens invaded us!" and, "those things that were always around? yeah, turns out they were fine." is about 40 years.
If there’s extraterrestrial life that can manage to travel to earth… then they probably have the tech to acclimate humans in 0.5 seconds using extraterrestrial drugs.
My bet continues to be optical phenomena - that's why the orbs and other phenomena resemble simple geometric forms, rather than anything with complex structure, service irregularities, etc. Happy to be proven wrong, as this is the most boring explanation, but that's my current hypothesis.
Fifty to sixty military pilots seeing the same thing over and over again while also seeing them on several different sensors isn't convincing enough? I mean I have no idea what they are, but these things are there and they're not just optical illusions.
When they say they turn up via multiple types of sensors simultaneously, thats what makes me second guess that theory. It’s still possible, it less likely. Unless there’s some physics involved that I don’t understand, or I misread the stories
Assuming this is real, I would ask what could it possibly be. The whole popular culture "x-files" narrative doesn't make sense to me. If these are craft which are manned with some beings, why would they be leisurely flying around earth's atmosphere unless they have some destination. Why haven't we found the source or destination?
Perhaps it's actually Von-Neumann probes, or unmanned craft collecting data and observing. I would find this much more likely, but even still, why would they need to keep traveling on earth?
Personally, I keep an open mind about everything, regarding what is possible. I just imagine some civilization thousands or millions of years ahead of us could do things that would seem like magic. It certainly seems plausible in terms of the fermi paradox that we would be being visited. It's just incredibly odd that it would happen this way, and I have very basic questions as to the nature of what this phenomenon even is.
Maybe they’re from here. Maybe they’re stuck here. Maybe they’ve been guiding humanity since the murky dawn of our prehistory. Maybe we are their genetically engineered creation. Maybe they have a vested interest in us not making our beautiful blue marble uninhabitable. Maybe they are tending to this planet like a gardener would his garden, and for that reason they’d prefer us not to annihilate each other.
If a civilization is so advanced as to appear magical then why do you expect we would be able to comprehend what they are doing? By assumption we are already ignorant.
My dad's theory is they they see us as some sort of exotic animal park, take a drive(fly) through safari - keep your appendages inside the vehicle at all times - take some photos and have some tales to tell when you get back home. ;)
So pilots are able to identify Bart Simpson balloons when they take the time to investigate something. That makes David Fravor and other pilots stories even more compelling when they were looking right at the object for minutes and what they saw wasn't explainable.
Is this the case where smarter people actually figured out the velocity was just a few meters/second when properly taking into account everything? I have trouble keeping up.
It's "incredible" in the sense of "don't believe it without more reliable evidence"
…but c’mon, people. Occam’s Razor time. There are a lot of options to exhaust before to we get to extraterrestrial intelligence. Just because we can’t explain this doesn’t mean its aliens. It’s a hell of a leap, bordering on religious faith, to credit this to some alien species crossing the vast lightyears of space and time to bounce around some metal spheres.
One option I like is that a water-dwelling species on our planet is sending out probes. Why now is explained by climate change heating the oceans. It explains why probes are visible, they aren’t trying hard to hide or not good at it. It doesn’t explain how good they are at flight, but maybe they discovered anti-gravity and wonder why we haven’t. It even explains why government hides it, since we wouldn’t believe it, and they don’t know what to do.
I would expect advanced aliens to hide completely or be very obvious.
Not sure why this is downvoted. We are supposed to be on a forum where the majority here are people trained on science and engineering. If a rational argument as the one above gets downvoted in HN, well, I can only imagine what the rest of the society (who doesn’t even hold a degree) thinks about this kind of topic.
I must say, Federica Bianco is fantastic. Karlin Toner and Shelley Wright as well. Everything I was thinking and saying at my screen (e.g., data handling and classification protocols, unnecessary introduction of bias through use of synthetic data, anomaly detection paths, concerns with sensors and frame rates) they immediately said, and more.
I wish I could find the video, but it was from Brazil I believe, filmed in 2007, a hiker recorded what looked like a mylar balloon, only that thing changed shape, direction, and moved in ways the wind couldn't possibly cause it to move.
An opinion piece from a department of state employee about a former CIA agent holding a press conference to tell the public that there are impossibly advanced sci fi orbs zipping around the sky.
I wonder what real thing happened today that this is a smokescreen for?
I have a theory about the origin of UFOs: Given the Drake equation, and improbability of aliens deciding to travel thousands - millions of years to specifically this lone planet at less than the speed of light, and then making the mistake of being totally detectable despite having better technology by hundreds or thousands of years, I suspect that UFOs are in fact terrestrial.
I had read about the Silurian hypothesis recently, which states that it's extremely hard to detect evidence of a past civilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
Can it be that these metallic spheres are remnants, either AI or non-carbon-based lifeforms from a past civilization? It's all speculation at this point, but I'm starting to find this theory more plausible.
The UAP phenomenon is much more interesting for what it tells us about ourselves than for the incidents themselves.
Our bias is that our technology is very capable, and that it is used by highly-trained and intelligent people who are up to the task of observing and classifying unknown objects.
But the truth is that we are, in fact, not all that. We grew up in a pre-technological agrarian civilization. We have many biases, particularly observational ones. We still see demons where there is nothing but the natural world.
The images we see are mostly not photographic in nature. They are highly processed data that we impose our millions of years of evolutionary conditioning upon.
We have learned to trust our eyes, over the millennia, to keep us safe from threats.
Now, in truth, we're not using our eyes, but we still think we are.
Blithe assumptions that these have a terrestrial explanation need to explain exactly what would power such devices - because it certainly isn't hydrocarbons, and I'm not aware of any compact enough nuclear source that could drive them.The descriptions are of something with incredible ability to accelerate and high kinetic energy, in an extremely compact form, for prolonged periods.
I still think these are just metallic orbs making extraordinary maneuvers. Mylar balloons, sensor artifacts, fraudulent videos to drum up support for space war, these things are fun to think about but more the domain of sci-fi.
"Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Official NASA Broadcast)"
How does this 2 days old video with 167k views have zero comments, yet comments are enabled? I don't get it. It seems to be legit, unless https://www.youtube.com/@NASAgovVideo/about is a decade-old long con. (It doesn't seem to be, there are plenty of references to it from nasa.gov.)
> How does this 2 days old video with 167k views have zero comments, yet comments are enabled? I don't get it. It seems to be legit, unless https://www.youtube.com/@NASAgovVideo/about is a decade-old long con. (It doesn't seem to be, there are plenty of references to it from nasa.gov.)
It does look like there was a live chat associated with the video, so maybe that scratched the itch people had to comment?
Way back in the day, late 1980’s, I had access to a tank of helium. I would purchase packs of large ‘party’ balloons, inflate them, tie several of them together and then attach a strip of aluminum foil several feet long. I would then launch the balloons and watch the foil glisten in the sunlight as it ascended.
It was all fun and games until I launched one group that was slightly too heavy and it wrapped around a power line. I had some explaining to do.
I always wondered if the Air Force base that was relatively nearby could get a primary return on the foil.
Notice how the metallic orbs are only ever captured from moving aircraft, generally looking down on them. That's because they are balloons, and the aircraft's motion give them the appearance that they're moving quickly relative to the ground behind them, when in fact they're moving quite slow, as balloons do.
Either that, or the aliens made their craft transparent on the bottom but forgot to make them transparent on the top.
I lost all interest in such reports, especially from the US media, after the US decided to create a Space Force military arm and weaponised space. Such kind of reports, supported by official sources, only started appearing after this decision was made and is clearly part of the constant propaganda to justify the need of a Space Force to public.
That theory doesn't really track - I don't think anyone has actually presented UAPs as a threat that the Space Force needs funding to deal with. If for no other reason than these things are always seen within the atmosphere, and not in space.
The government doesn't need to "justify" the existence of a Space Force to the public, since the public doesn't approve or deny appropriations. It certainly doesn't need to manufacture an alien invasion, when more prosaic threat models exist.
Until I realized that it was a strand of a spiders wed that, when suspended in front of the camera in an arch, causes the infrared light of the camera to reflect back at two points. As the wind blows gently the reflections move up and down.
It is with mixed feelings, both satisfaction and dismay, I accept that the mystery is no more.