I think there's far too much cultural baggage attached to the term "UFO", and now a lot of people seem to immediately jump to assuming it's implying some kind of unknown technology, aliens, etc....
I think there's far too much cultural baggage attached to the term "UFO", and now a lot of people seem to immediately jump to assuming it's implying some kind of unknown technology, aliens, etc. All it means is literally what it says: unidentified. They don't know what it is. It's almost certainly something totally normal that got picked up in a weird way on camera or other instruments, exactly like it has been every single previous time.
It's appropriate that the first video is called "gimbal", because that's exactly what it is.
Watch the angle readout at the top of the video. The rotation of the object happens exactly around the time that the angle passes 0°. Why is this?
Have you ever watched a PTZ security camera rotate up and over the vertical axis and down the other side? It will tilt up until it nears the vertical axis, at which point it will rotate around that axis, and then tilt back down, now facing the other way. It does this to avoid gimbal lock, a state in which it would lose a degree of freedom of rotation. (In this case, it's not the vertical axis, but the forward axis.)
Why doesn't the image rotate then? [shallow speculation] The video software keeps it oriented so that it matches the plane's orientation. (Note that the feed is square, making it easier to make full use of the sensor regardless of rotation.)
Why does the object rotate? This should give you a clue where the object is. If the background is not rotating while the camera is rotating, but the object is, the object is on the camera. It will appear to rotate as the video software rotates the image to compensate for the camera rotation about the forward axis.
So why is the object moving? Well, it's not moving, not if it's on the camera. But whenever the camera moves, it would look like it's moving relative to the background.
So why is the camera moving? It's tracking the object. But the object isn't moving! Well, the camera doesn't track movement. It tracks position. The object is slightly offset from the center of the frame, so the tracking software slightly moves the camera to compensate. This of course does not change the situation, so the tracking software repeats its compensation. This constant camera movement in a single direction gives the appearance that the object is moving.
Why does the object show up on an infrared camera in the first place? It must be warm.
So… what is this warm object, which is stuck on the camera, slightly off-center, causing the tracking software to follow it, through and around the camera's axis, giving the appearance that the object is moving and then rotating?
Well, it's the same thing as this article in the NY Times, which, in service of securing funding from the UFO & Hitler Channel (as floatrock astutely noted), decided to lend its gravitas to an easily-explainable video glitch which has been paraded by conspiracy theorists as incontrovertible validation of their deepest-held beliefs that extraterrestrials, against all probability, regularly visit Earth.
This explanation requires you to believe that the military that built and operates these radar devices every day doesn't understand how to use them or how to tell a 'glitch' in the system from...
This explanation requires you to believe that the military that built and operates these radar devices every day doesn't understand how to use them or how to tell a 'glitch' in the system from something that's real. Not just that, but they've been duped by their own systems multiple times over the years, and the pilots are all lying about seeing these craft up close during flybys.
I think what makes this particular chapter of the 'ufo' craze so interesting is that no matter what explanation we look at, it fails a reality check.
I'll never hesitate to believe in a combination of errors, incompetence, and lying to cover up that incompetence. That's the explanation behind a whole lot of situations, and the military...
I'll never hesitate to believe in a combination of errors, incompetence, and lying to cover up that incompetence. That's the explanation behind a whole lot of situations, and the military definitely isn't an exception (and even has a long history of major examples of it).
That's where Occam's razor takes me as well. Balance of probability is this is some kind of short lived mass hysteria, we've got plenty of examples of that happening in the past. I'm confused as...
That's where Occam's razor takes me as well. Balance of probability is this is some kind of short lived mass hysteria, we've got plenty of examples of that happening in the past.
I'm confused as to why the military even bothered to comment on this stuff on the public record. There'd be a lot less interest in this if they'd just gone with the usual 'no comment' line.
The Department of Defense has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017. The U.S. Navy previously acknowledged that these videos circulating in the public domain were indeed Navy videos. After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena. DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as "unidentified." The released videos can be found at the Naval Air Systems Command FOIA Reading Room: https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents.
This is old news, no idea why CBS is pushing it now. If you want the full story, there's an episode of Rogan where he interviews Cmdr. David Fravor and talks about this stuff for over an hour....
This is old news, no idea why CBS is pushing it now. If you want the full story, there's an episode of Rogan where he interviews Cmdr. David Fravor and talks about this stuff for over an hour. Good interview imo. If you want to go off the deep end with this particular conspiracy, his interview with Bob Lazar gets into the old Area 51 stuff, where Bob allegedly worked for a time and saw a few things.
The upshot of this is pretty simple. We have at least some credible video of aircraft that defy the laws of physics as we understand them, accompanied by multiple counts of eyewitness testimony from military officers confirming it's real, and from multiple incidents over several years. That much is hard to dispute without claiming these videos are fake and all of these military officers are lying on the record.
What interests me is the apparent lack of fuel-based propulsion. These craft appear to warp spacetime around them and seem to be little more than drones - it's hard to imagine how a living thing could fit inside the tic-tac, for example.
The only physics I am aware of that holds out an explanation for this sort of flight is quantized inertia, possibly leading to propulsion via unruh radiation. The power system of those craft would be based on some kind of ultra-dense rotating core that is effectively warping spacetime around them. That would explain why they have to essentially point their 'belly' in the direction they want to travel before experiencing near-instant acceleration which would turn anyone on the inside into paste instantly.
If Bob Lazar's story is to be believed, an attempt to cut into one of these cores resulted in an explosion that had to be explained away as an underground nuclear weapons test. The craft are also (according to Lazar) clearly products of nanotech fabrication, possibly even femtotech if they've found a way to harness the electroweak/strong nuclear forces to stabilize heavy elements for use in engineering and power systems. That puts these aliens so far ahead of us in technology that there is literally nothing we could do to counter them.
Is it our shy neighbors, or has someone in the military industrial complex leaped ahead into star-trek territory? Is the CIA/some three-letter agency playing a game with everyone? If so, why does this stuff show up in 15th century paintings from before flying machines or these agencies existed?
It's fun to think about. Personally I have a hard time dismissing the testimony of officers who had plenty of time flying in proximity to these craft. That's my main reluctance to declare the whole thing a total hoax.
I remain totally skeptical. How do we know from a video what we are actually seeing? How do we know this is not a shadow, optical aberration, or some other visual artifact? Do we have other...
I remain totally skeptical. How do we know from a video what we are actually seeing? How do we know this is not a shadow, optical aberration, or some other visual artifact? Do we have other signals that confirm what we’re looking at is really a physical object? Like radar, or lidar, or some other information to corroborate the video? There are all sorts of illusions that can explain all sorts of UFO videos. Occam’s razor suggests we explore those before we start assuming our physics models are wrong or that there is super advanced technology being deployed in scenarios where it would be detected by people who aren’t supposed to know about it. If your capabilities are so advanced, don’t you think you could also hide it?
What was the radar signature, though? Having RADAR contact with something just means that radio signals bounced off it, so it was made of matter that reflects radio waves. What did the signature...
What was the radar signature, though? Having RADAR contact with something just means that radio signals bounced off it, so it was made of matter that reflects radio waves. What did the signature look like? Did it make sense with respect to what was captured on video? There are so many more plausible explanations for these kinds of sightings than super advanced terrestrial or extraterrestrial technology.
Raytheon has confirmed those videos have been captured by one of their ATFLIR targeting pods mounted on the fighter jets. They stated that "video images are not definitive proof that the jet pilots were chasing an actual UFO." Steve Cummings, vice president of Technology Development and Execution, stated that "To really be sure, we would need the raw data", "visual displays alone are not the best evidence" and that one way to exclude any anomaly would be to observe "the same target, behaving the same way on multiple sensors." Aaron Maestas, director of engineering and chief engineer for Surveillance and Targeting Systems at Raytheon stated: "We might be the system that caught the first evidence of E.T. out there."
That last quote is pretty stupid, IMO, but the rest of this paragraph sums up my thoughts precisely. If we have no other data, I see no reason to believe anything interesting was encountered.
So what are the explanations? I haven't found any that take into account the existence of RADAR contact (so it must be some sort of physical object), credible eyewitness accounts (so it can't be a...
There are so many more plausible explanations for these kinds of sightings than super advanced terrestrial or extraterrestrial technology.
So what are the explanations? I haven't found any that take into account the existence of RADAR contact (so it must be some sort of physical object), credible eyewitness accounts (so it can't be a technical malfunction), as well as the footage. There is also the fact that this is not an isolated event (the footage is of two separate incidents).
We know it because of the testimony of multiple officers who flew alongside these craft while recording the video and saw them with their own eyes. See the interview I linked with Fravor above....
We know it because of the testimony of multiple officers who flew alongside these craft while recording the video and saw them with their own eyes. See the interview I linked with Fravor above. These are all sworn military officers on the record, not crackpots, and not easy to dismiss. They are our pilots, they fly every day. That's expert testimony.
I’m sorry eye witness testimony is not reliable. I don’t base my beliefs on what other people claim to have seen. You have to be more scientific about these things if you want to be take seriously.
We know it because of the testimony of multiple officers who flew alongside these craft while recording the video and saw them with their own eyes. See the interview I linked with Fravor above. These are all sworn military officers on the record, not crackpots, and not easy to dismiss. They are our pilots, they fly every day. That's expert testimony.
I’m sorry eye witness testimony is not reliable. I don’t base my beliefs on what other people claim to have seen. You have to be more scientific about these things if you want to be take seriously.
Good thing we've got the video and multiple military agencies also confirming it's real on the record, then. Wouldn't want to depend just on the eyewitnesses.
Good thing we've got the video and multiple military agencies also confirming it's real on the record, then. Wouldn't want to depend just on the eyewitnesses.
The eyewitness testimony is much more elaborate than what is depicted in the video. The military agencies have just confirmed that the video exists, they haven’t claimed the eyewitness testimony...
Good thing we've got the video and multiple military agencies also confirming it's real on the record, then. Wouldn't want to depend just on the eyewitnesses.
The eyewitness testimony is much more elaborate than what is depicted in the video. The military agencies have just confirmed that the video exists, they haven’t claimed the eyewitness testimony is accurate. If they wanted to confirm something more substantive, they’d have unclassified something more substantive, like additional sensor data, but I assume they can’t do that without revealing the sensor capabilities that would rather remain classified.
I seriously can’t understand why otherwise rational people get so bent out of shape about this stuff. Most of the shit flying through the air is unidentifiable. Just because it is visible in some video frames and someone claimed it defied known physics/propulsion capabilities doesn’t make it true. Basing your beliefs on such paltry evidence will inevitably lead you to believe all kinds of bullshit.
Why does everyone assume that every conversation requires belief? This whole thing reeks to high heaven of bullshit and miscommunication and I'm not even sure I believe it. It's just a fun thing...
Why does everyone assume that every conversation requires belief? This whole thing reeks to high heaven of bullshit and miscommunication and I'm not even sure I believe it. It's just a fun thing to think about.
Not every conversation has to have every fact validated by a panel of biased fact checkers and cross referenced with a thousand sources.
Because we assume that people sharing information are adhering to the cooperative principal, specifically, the maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
Why does everyone assume that every conversation requires belief?
Because we assume that people sharing information are adhering to the cooperative principal, specifically, the maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
Which truth? Personal, objective, or something else? Philosophy is still struggling with truth after thousands of years. I suppose we could lock down sites so that only experts can comment and vet...
Which truth? Personal, objective, or something else? Philosophy is still struggling with truth after thousands of years.
I suppose we could lock down sites so that only experts can comment and vet everyone. Of course, then no one will bother to comment because it's too much work jumping through all the hoops, and the conversation would be pretty banal since it'll all come back to arguments from authority eventually.
Personal truth. Share what you believe to be true. If you are repeating eyewitness testimony from sources that you don’t believe yourself, you’re flouting the maxim of quality, so you better have...
Personal truth. Share what you believe to be true. If you are repeating eyewitness testimony from sources that you don’t believe yourself, you’re flouting the maxim of quality, so you better have some pragmatic reason for doing so, or I’m going to treat you as an uncooperative communicator.
What I believe is that so far, I have not seen any satisfactory explanations of the phenomena shown in these videos. I could believe any single incident was some sort of anomaly, but that gets...
What I believe is that so far, I have not seen any satisfactory explanations of the phenomena shown in these videos. I could believe any single incident was some sort of anomaly, but that gets harder with multiple incidents and different people involved in different places each time. I'm quite sure 99.98% of the 'ufo' evidence out there is a fabrication or has satisfactory natural explanations. These particular videos carry more weight than that, though, coming from official sources and with official testimony.
My only fact-based conclusion is to believe everyone involved is lying and/or grossly incompetent. That's a hard sell, I need a better explanation as to why they'd all engage in a coordinated campaign to back this hoax.
I don’t believe that it is a coordinated hoax, I just know from personal experience that I’ve seen things with my eyes that I can’t explain. I don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that what I...
I don’t believe that it is a coordinated hoax, I just know from personal experience that I’ve seen things with my eyes that I can’t explain. I don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that what I saw as inexplicable, but merely conclude that I am missing the appropriate context/understanding to explain it. If you’ve ever looked at an optical illusion, you know that even your own eyes are unreliable. If you’ve ever used any piece of human-made technology you know it is never 100% reliable.
My only fact-based conclusion is to believe everyone involved is lying and/or grossly incompetent.
That isn’t based on facts, though. There is a much softer position to take on this, and all other UFO sightings, which is just that we don’t have the appropriate context/understanding to explain the observations. I believe that these observations were made. I don’t believe that these observations are evidence of anything extraordinary.
I'm with you there, every apparently paranormal thing I've ever witnessed had a perfectly rational explanation upon a little investigation. Where I get hung up is when pilots tell a different...
I'm with you there, every apparently paranormal thing I've ever witnessed had a perfectly rational explanation upon a little investigation.
Where I get hung up is when pilots tell a different story. They do believe this was extraordinary - that these craft flew like nothing they had ever flown/seen before, and they had fourty minutes of contact chasing them around the ocean. They were outclassed completely and unable to keep up, and one of the smaller craft even came up to check them out and see who was following them before the craft bugged out. That's intelligent behavior, not a natural phenomenon. They were within a mile of the craft looking at it right outside the cockpit with their own eyes. There are also multiple events years apart in different places on the record.
We have radar contact, we have video, we have eyewitnesses (more than a dozen for the Nimitz encounter). That's enough for any court in the world.
We have video of the craft entering the ocean and never changing speed while doing it, also confirmed by eyewitnesses. These craft changed direction instantly and displayed no visible means of propulsion. Those are all behaviors no modern aircraft can hope to match.
So what the hell really happened? The explanations that the radar was flaky don't make sense, as that'd be clear on review up the chain by multiple new eyes. The explanation that the pilots are lying or crazy also doesn't make sense, because that means our air force is flown by crazy people, rather than steel-nerved military veterans all with solid records and top tier eyesight. The events on the video don't make sense as there is no physical explanation for how those craft could do those things. There's also no candidate natural phenomenon for whatever it was that buzzed the pilots in their jets. Things don't fall upwards, meteors don't change direction to go backwards in the blink of an eye and they splash when they hit water. Swamp gas doesn't show up on radar.
Then you have to take all three together and discount them all at the same time. The only way that works is if this is some sort of intentional hoax, which is could be, but what's the point of that hoax then? Scare the rest of the world into thinking the US military has star trek ships? I think they are scared enough of our existing air force. This is the most plausible explanation.
I'll just have to wait for more evidence because this is a mess. Good luck trying to find anything useful online to help, the ufo craze has blended this topic well past the point of being able to find useful search results. UFO memes are a moneymaker. Fabricated videos are published every day for millions of views. The entire evidence pool is contaminated and we're now entering the era of flawless digital fakes being done on a pocket sized device.
People blowing it off seems a little reckless. If there are ships capable of this in the hands of someone on earth, that means they have achieved untouchable air (and possibly space) superiority and can deliver an attack anywhere with impunity. If that's in China's hands, how do you think it'll play out? It also means they are holding back tech that could move humanity forward. I find it pretty hard to believe someone would be able to develop this in a vacuum without the input of the broader scientific community, but it's technically possible. We've been giving the US military trillions in funding for decades, it would be nice to know something special came out of all that money.
The behaviors of the craft don't make a lot of sense, either. What the hell is so interesting about our oceans that these craft are obsessed with it? There's nothing on earth barring human culture and genetic code they can't get far easier elsewhere if they are aliens. If they are local, it makes even less sense. The last thing a foreign military is going to do is expose their ace up the sleeve joyriding around the coast and buzzing around Navy pilots for fun.
This entire situation is intractable to a logical analysis. I probably wouldn't fixate on it if I wasn't writing scifi - propulsion systems are becoming an interest of mine.
Did you actually watch the videos? All of those maneuvers you are describing are testimonial. The video evidence doesn’t depict any of that—it just shows grey dots in the middle of grey backgrounds.
Did you actually watch the videos? All of those maneuvers you are describing are testimonial. The video evidence doesn’t depict any of that—it just shows grey dots in the middle of grey backgrounds.
Yep. The accounts of the pilots and crew and radar operators are what really take this over the top. The video we have is only a small portion of what they report.
Yep. The accounts of the pilots and crew and radar operators are what really take this over the top. The video we have is only a small portion of what they report.
This is where I strongly disagree. Epistemologically, I think it’s incredibly dangerous to believe a verbal or written account of something, even if multiple people corroborate it. It may be fun...
The accounts of the pilots and crew and radar operators are what really take this over the top.
This is where I strongly disagree. Epistemologically, I think it’s incredibly dangerous to believe a verbal or written account of something, even if multiple people corroborate it. It may be fun to entertain these ideas, but to actually put epistemological weight behind them is going too far.
Multiple people corroborate it independently with no chance to sync up their stories, no less - including navy pilots, which if you look into their job/recruitment/training are a cut above average...
Multiple people corroborate it independently with no chance to sync up their stories, no less - including navy pilots, which if you look into their job/recruitment/training are a cut above average just like astronauts. This is hardly ten random guys on the street. Even so, embellishment is inevitable and more likely when something is making you popular, so it's a fair criticism.
I don't know what you mean by this. If you were able to extract more energy than you put in from the unruh effect that'd mean the engine causing the initial acceleration was doing something...
propulsion via unruh radiation.
I don't know what you mean by this. If you were able to extract more energy than you put in from the unruh effect that'd mean the engine causing the initial acceleration was doing something impossible, not that the unruh effect was the key.
The quantized inertia thing looks to be an attempt to explain why you need to add energy to maintain acceleration, and it's not widely accepted.
I assume the "ultradense rotating core" you're kinda just throwing things together hoping to cheat physics. "Ultradense" wouldn't help, and "rotating" wouldn't help. If you're trying to do something using black holes, remember you have to keep putting stuff into a black hole to keep it running.
That said, I don't see anything violating physics in that video. Everything's moving really slow, so it's not the velocity that's the problem, and it's not exactly a clear picture, so there's no indication that it's not expelling solid fuel. Even if it WERE clear, it could expel any number of things that wouldn't show up visually or on radar. There's no indication of what it's made of, so even if it isn't expelling fuel it could still be something not made of matter.
It could also generate exhaust we can't easily detect, such as neutrinos. Here's some more information on Darpa's recent foray into testing quantized inertia. It goes into more detail about the...
It could also generate exhaust we can't easily detect, such as neutrinos.
I think the real question is why the Pentagon is pushing this now. All things considered, this doesn't really appear to be very important considering we are in the midst of a pandemic, especially...
This is old news, no idea why CBS is pushing it now.
I think the real question is why the Pentagon is pushing this now. All things considered, this doesn't really appear to be very important considering we are in the midst of a pandemic, especially since the Navy already confirmed that the videos are real a few months ago.
Assuming the footage and the eyewitness accounts are viable, do we have to remake physics to explain an aircraft of unknown origin and propulsion? Occam's Razor would imply it's an experimental...
Assuming the footage and the eyewitness accounts are viable, do we have to remake physics to explain an aircraft of unknown origin and propulsion? Occam's Razor would imply it's an experimental version of something we already have.
It would, however as far as I know (and I've looked) there are no candidates for propellant-less propulsion in physics other than extreme fringe theories like quantized inertia and the Em-drive...
It would, however as far as I know (and I've looked) there are no candidates for propellant-less propulsion in physics other than extreme fringe theories like quantized inertia and the Em-drive (which has been busted in the lab). There's also the alcubierre drive which I'm sure everyone here is already familiar with.
Maybe Eric Laithwaite was right after all. Edit: I was reviewing his wiki bio. This is a pretty funny coincidence. The name of the man who originally contacted him about an invention which lead to...
Maybe Eric Laithwaite was right after all.
Edit: I was reviewing his wiki bio. This is a pretty funny coincidence. The name of the man who originally contacted him about an invention which lead to Laithwaite's fascination with gyroscopes and humiliation at the Royal Institution lecture: Alex Jones. Obviously not the same Alex Jones but it is amusing.
Either US government or someone else's government. Or in many other cases, people misinterpreting natural phenomenon. It's seems unlikely that given the size of our galaxy, let alone the entire...
Either US government or someone else's government. Or in many other cases, people misinterpreting natural phenomenon. It's seems unlikely that given the size of our galaxy, let alone the entire universe, that we're the only intelligent life out there. But in no way at all do I believe we're being visited by it. Nor do I believe the government would be competent enough to keep that under wraps for decades. Keeping military projects a secret is one thing, but something as world-changing as proof of intelligent life visiting us from afar...no way.
If these are military craft, that means someone is holding back advances in technology and physics that would make access to space trivial in the extreme, and revolutionize multiple industries....
If these are military craft, that means someone is holding back advances in technology and physics that would make access to space trivial in the extreme, and revolutionize multiple industries. More than that, it means there's been an Einstein-level breakthrough in physics and that revelation is being classified as secret, leaving the entire physics community twisting in the wind and wasting their time.
Even today, top-secret aircraft definitely would not have been acknowledged by the government. They're still very hush-hush about this sort of stuff, and the people who leaked the footage would...
Even today, top-secret aircraft definitely would not have been acknowledged by the government. They're still very hush-hush about this sort of stuff, and the people who leaked the footage would likely have disappeared.
But why would they even acknowledge the video's existence? Much better to let the veracity of it all remain ambiguous. And if they had to for whatever reason, why not forge a study showing it's a...
But why would they even acknowledge the video's existence? Much better to let the veracity of it all remain ambiguous. And if they had to for whatever reason, why not forge a study showing it's a camera malfunction or something? I don't think secret military technology is necessarily a bad theory, but IMO it's much more likely to be that of a foreign government.
have you guys heard any rationale for releasing these now? what does the Pentagon benefit from dissuading rumours that the leaked videos are fake? other than the possibility that Trump just said...
have you guys heard any rationale for releasing these now? what does the Pentagon benefit from dissuading rumours that the leaked videos are fake? other than the possibility that Trump just said "do it"?
I think there's far too much cultural baggage attached to the term "UFO", and now a lot of people seem to immediately jump to assuming it's implying some kind of unknown technology, aliens, etc. All it means is literally what it says: unidentified. They don't know what it is. It's almost certainly something totally normal that got picked up in a weird way on camera or other instruments, exactly like it has been every single previous time.
I don't know why these videos were officially released now, but they were leaked about 3 years ago and there's been a lot of discussion about them already, including plenty of possible explanations. I really haven't spent much time on them, but here's a short video that seems to have some decent possible explanations, and a year ago I mentioned a great explanation for the "gimbal" one that I read on Hacker News:
This explanation requires you to believe that the military that built and operates these radar devices every day doesn't understand how to use them or how to tell a 'glitch' in the system from something that's real. Not just that, but they've been duped by their own systems multiple times over the years, and the pilots are all lying about seeing these craft up close during flybys.
I think what makes this particular chapter of the 'ufo' craze so interesting is that no matter what explanation we look at, it fails a reality check.
I'll never hesitate to believe in a combination of errors, incompetence, and lying to cover up that incompetence. That's the explanation behind a whole lot of situations, and the military definitely isn't an exception (and even has a long history of major examples of it).
That's where Occam's razor takes me as well. Balance of probability is this is some kind of short lived mass hysteria, we've got plenty of examples of that happening in the past.
I'm confused as to why the military even bothered to comment on this stuff on the public record. There'd be a lot less interest in this if they'd just gone with the usual 'no comment' line.
Official statement from the DoD:
This is old news, no idea why CBS is pushing it now. If you want the full story, there's an episode of Rogan where he interviews Cmdr. David Fravor and talks about this stuff for over an hour. Good interview imo. If you want to go off the deep end with this particular conspiracy, his interview with Bob Lazar gets into the old Area 51 stuff, where Bob allegedly worked for a time and saw a few things.
The upshot of this is pretty simple. We have at least some credible video of aircraft that defy the laws of physics as we understand them, accompanied by multiple counts of eyewitness testimony from military officers confirming it's real, and from multiple incidents over several years. That much is hard to dispute without claiming these videos are fake and all of these military officers are lying on the record.
What interests me is the apparent lack of fuel-based propulsion. These craft appear to warp spacetime around them and seem to be little more than drones - it's hard to imagine how a living thing could fit inside the tic-tac, for example.
The only physics I am aware of that holds out an explanation for this sort of flight is quantized inertia, possibly leading to propulsion via unruh radiation. The power system of those craft would be based on some kind of ultra-dense rotating core that is effectively warping spacetime around them. That would explain why they have to essentially point their 'belly' in the direction they want to travel before experiencing near-instant acceleration which would turn anyone on the inside into paste instantly.
If Bob Lazar's story is to be believed, an attempt to cut into one of these cores resulted in an explosion that had to be explained away as an underground nuclear weapons test. The craft are also (according to Lazar) clearly products of nanotech fabrication, possibly even femtotech if they've found a way to harness the electroweak/strong nuclear forces to stabilize heavy elements for use in engineering and power systems. That puts these aliens so far ahead of us in technology that there is literally nothing we could do to counter them.
Is it our shy neighbors, or has someone in the military industrial complex leaped ahead into star-trek territory? Is the CIA/some three-letter agency playing a game with everyone? If so, why does this stuff show up in 15th century paintings from before flying machines or these agencies existed?
It's fun to think about. Personally I have a hard time dismissing the testimony of officers who had plenty of time flying in proximity to these craft. That's my main reluctance to declare the whole thing a total hoax.
I remain totally skeptical. How do we know from a video what we are actually seeing? How do we know this is not a shadow, optical aberration, or some other visual artifact? Do we have other signals that confirm what we’re looking at is really a physical object? Like radar, or lidar, or some other information to corroborate the video? There are all sorts of illusions that can explain all sorts of UFO videos. Occam’s razor suggests we explore those before we start assuming our physics models are wrong or that there is super advanced technology being deployed in scenarios where it would be detected by people who aren’t supposed to know about it. If your capabilities are so advanced, don’t you think you could also hide it?
Here's the wiki article on the incident. Both visual and RADAR contact was made with the object.
What was the radar signature, though? Having RADAR contact with something just means that radio signals bounced off it, so it was made of matter that reflects radio waves. What did the signature look like? Did it make sense with respect to what was captured on video? There are so many more plausible explanations for these kinds of sightings than super advanced terrestrial or extraterrestrial technology.
That last quote is pretty stupid, IMO, but the rest of this paragraph sums up my thoughts precisely. If we have no other data, I see no reason to believe anything interesting was encountered.
So what are the explanations? I haven't found any that take into account the existence of RADAR contact (so it must be some sort of physical object), credible eyewitness accounts (so it can't be a technical malfunction), as well as the footage. There is also the fact that this is not an isolated event (the footage is of two separate incidents).
Weather balloons? Clouds/precipitation? Some other military exercise that the Navy wasn’t privy to?
There are no explanations. The Navy is conducting an ongoing investigation into these sightings, so at least they take it seriously.
We know it because of the testimony of multiple officers who flew alongside these craft while recording the video and saw them with their own eyes. See the interview I linked with Fravor above. These are all sworn military officers on the record, not crackpots, and not easy to dismiss. They are our pilots, they fly every day. That's expert testimony.
I’m sorry eye witness testimony is not reliable. I don’t base my beliefs on what other people claim to have seen. You have to be more scientific about these things if you want to be take seriously.
Good thing we've got the video and multiple military agencies also confirming it's real on the record, then. Wouldn't want to depend just on the eyewitnesses.
The eyewitness testimony is much more elaborate than what is depicted in the video. The military agencies have just confirmed that the video exists, they haven’t claimed the eyewitness testimony is accurate. If they wanted to confirm something more substantive, they’d have unclassified something more substantive, like additional sensor data, but I assume they can’t do that without revealing the sensor capabilities that would rather remain classified.
I seriously can’t understand why otherwise rational people get so bent out of shape about this stuff. Most of the shit flying through the air is unidentifiable. Just because it is visible in some video frames and someone claimed it defied known physics/propulsion capabilities doesn’t make it true. Basing your beliefs on such paltry evidence will inevitably lead you to believe all kinds of bullshit.
Why does everyone assume that every conversation requires belief? This whole thing reeks to high heaven of bullshit and miscommunication and I'm not even sure I believe it. It's just a fun thing to think about.
Not every conversation has to have every fact validated by a panel of biased fact checkers and cross referenced with a thousand sources.
Because we assume that people sharing information are adhering to the cooperative principal, specifically, the maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
Which truth? Personal, objective, or something else? Philosophy is still struggling with truth after thousands of years.
I suppose we could lock down sites so that only experts can comment and vet everyone. Of course, then no one will bother to comment because it's too much work jumping through all the hoops, and the conversation would be pretty banal since it'll all come back to arguments from authority eventually.
Personal truth. Share what you believe to be true. If you are repeating eyewitness testimony from sources that you don’t believe yourself, you’re flouting the maxim of quality, so you better have some pragmatic reason for doing so, or I’m going to treat you as an uncooperative communicator.
What I believe is that so far, I have not seen any satisfactory explanations of the phenomena shown in these videos. I could believe any single incident was some sort of anomaly, but that gets harder with multiple incidents and different people involved in different places each time. I'm quite sure 99.98% of the 'ufo' evidence out there is a fabrication or has satisfactory natural explanations. These particular videos carry more weight than that, though, coming from official sources and with official testimony.
My only fact-based conclusion is to believe everyone involved is lying and/or grossly incompetent. That's a hard sell, I need a better explanation as to why they'd all engage in a coordinated campaign to back this hoax.
I don’t believe that it is a coordinated hoax, I just know from personal experience that I’ve seen things with my eyes that I can’t explain. I don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that what I saw as inexplicable, but merely conclude that I am missing the appropriate context/understanding to explain it. If you’ve ever looked at an optical illusion, you know that even your own eyes are unreliable. If you’ve ever used any piece of human-made technology you know it is never 100% reliable.
That isn’t based on facts, though. There is a much softer position to take on this, and all other UFO sightings, which is just that we don’t have the appropriate context/understanding to explain the observations. I believe that these observations were made. I don’t believe that these observations are evidence of anything extraordinary.
I'm with you there, every apparently paranormal thing I've ever witnessed had a perfectly rational explanation upon a little investigation.
Where I get hung up is when pilots tell a different story. They do believe this was extraordinary - that these craft flew like nothing they had ever flown/seen before, and they had fourty minutes of contact chasing them around the ocean. They were outclassed completely and unable to keep up, and one of the smaller craft even came up to check them out and see who was following them before the craft bugged out. That's intelligent behavior, not a natural phenomenon. They were within a mile of the craft looking at it right outside the cockpit with their own eyes. There are also multiple events years apart in different places on the record.
We have radar contact, we have video, we have eyewitnesses (more than a dozen for the Nimitz encounter). That's enough for any court in the world.
We have video of the craft entering the ocean and never changing speed while doing it, also confirmed by eyewitnesses. These craft changed direction instantly and displayed no visible means of propulsion. Those are all behaviors no modern aircraft can hope to match.
So what the hell really happened? The explanations that the radar was flaky don't make sense, as that'd be clear on review up the chain by multiple new eyes. The explanation that the pilots are lying or crazy also doesn't make sense, because that means our air force is flown by crazy people, rather than steel-nerved military veterans all with solid records and top tier eyesight. The events on the video don't make sense as there is no physical explanation for how those craft could do those things. There's also no candidate natural phenomenon for whatever it was that buzzed the pilots in their jets. Things don't fall upwards, meteors don't change direction to go backwards in the blink of an eye and they splash when they hit water. Swamp gas doesn't show up on radar.
Then you have to take all three together and discount them all at the same time. The only way that works is if this is some sort of intentional hoax, which is could be, but what's the point of that hoax then? Scare the rest of the world into thinking the US military has star trek ships? I think they are scared enough of our existing air force. This is the most plausible explanation.
I'll just have to wait for more evidence because this is a mess. Good luck trying to find anything useful online to help, the ufo craze has blended this topic well past the point of being able to find useful search results. UFO memes are a moneymaker. Fabricated videos are published every day for millions of views. The entire evidence pool is contaminated and we're now entering the era of flawless digital fakes being done on a pocket sized device.
People blowing it off seems a little reckless. If there are ships capable of this in the hands of someone on earth, that means they have achieved untouchable air (and possibly space) superiority and can deliver an attack anywhere with impunity. If that's in China's hands, how do you think it'll play out? It also means they are holding back tech that could move humanity forward. I find it pretty hard to believe someone would be able to develop this in a vacuum without the input of the broader scientific community, but it's technically possible. We've been giving the US military trillions in funding for decades, it would be nice to know something special came out of all that money.
The behaviors of the craft don't make a lot of sense, either. What the hell is so interesting about our oceans that these craft are obsessed with it? There's nothing on earth barring human culture and genetic code they can't get far easier elsewhere if they are aliens. If they are local, it makes even less sense. The last thing a foreign military is going to do is expose their ace up the sleeve joyriding around the coast and buzzing around Navy pilots for fun.
This entire situation is intractable to a logical analysis. I probably wouldn't fixate on it if I wasn't writing scifi - propulsion systems are becoming an interest of mine.
Did you actually watch the videos? All of those maneuvers you are describing are testimonial. The video evidence doesn’t depict any of that—it just shows grey dots in the middle of grey backgrounds.
Yep. The accounts of the pilots and crew and radar operators are what really take this over the top. The video we have is only a small portion of what they report.
This is where I strongly disagree. Epistemologically, I think it’s incredibly dangerous to believe a verbal or written account of something, even if multiple people corroborate it. It may be fun to entertain these ideas, but to actually put epistemological weight behind them is going too far.
Multiple people corroborate it independently with no chance to sync up their stories, no less - including navy pilots, which if you look into their job/recruitment/training are a cut above average just like astronauts. This is hardly ten random guys on the street. Even so, embellishment is inevitable and more likely when something is making you popular, so it's a fair criticism.
I don't know what you mean by this. If you were able to extract more energy than you put in from the unruh effect that'd mean the engine causing the initial acceleration was doing something impossible, not that the unruh effect was the key.
The quantized inertia thing looks to be an attempt to explain why you need to add energy to maintain acceleration, and it's not widely accepted.
I assume the "ultradense rotating core" you're kinda just throwing things together hoping to cheat physics. "Ultradense" wouldn't help, and "rotating" wouldn't help. If you're trying to do something using black holes, remember you have to keep putting stuff into a black hole to keep it running.
That said, I don't see anything violating physics in that video. Everything's moving really slow, so it's not the velocity that's the problem, and it's not exactly a clear picture, so there's no indication that it's not expelling solid fuel. Even if it WERE clear, it could expel any number of things that wouldn't show up visually or on radar. There's no indication of what it's made of, so even if it isn't expelling fuel it could still be something not made of matter.
It could also generate exhaust we can't easily detect, such as neutrinos.
Here's some more information on Darpa's recent foray into testing quantized inertia. It goes into more detail about the proposed theory and how to build engines from it.
I think the real question is why the Pentagon is pushing this now. All things considered, this doesn't really appear to be very important considering we are in the midst of a pandemic, especially since the Navy already confirmed that the videos are real a few months ago.
Yeah, that's true, this is the pentagon affirming the legitimacy of the source. I suppose that's new news on this front, though it's not unexpected.
Assuming the footage and the eyewitness accounts are viable, do we have to remake physics to explain an aircraft of unknown origin and propulsion? Occam's Razor would imply it's an experimental version of something we already have.
It would, however as far as I know (and I've looked) there are no candidates for propellant-less propulsion in physics other than extreme fringe theories like quantized inertia and the Em-drive (which has been busted in the lab). There's also the alcubierre drive which I'm sure everyone here is already familiar with.
Maybe Eric Laithwaite was right after all.
Edit: I was reviewing his wiki bio. This is a pretty funny coincidence. The name of the man who originally contacted him about an invention which lead to Laithwaite's fascination with gyroscopes and humiliation at the Royal Institution lecture: Alex Jones. Obviously not the same Alex Jones but it is amusing.
Well this is certainly missing a lot of context.
Well, it is 27 days too late to be an April Fool's joke.
I've always just assumed any "UFO"'s seen were black budget projects by the US government. Does anybody else think the same?
Either US government or someone else's government. Or in many other cases, people misinterpreting natural phenomenon. It's seems unlikely that given the size of our galaxy, let alone the entire universe, that we're the only intelligent life out there. But in no way at all do I believe we're being visited by it. Nor do I believe the government would be competent enough to keep that under wraps for decades. Keeping military projects a secret is one thing, but something as world-changing as proof of intelligent life visiting us from afar...no way.
If these are military craft, that means someone is holding back advances in technology and physics that would make access to space trivial in the extreme, and revolutionize multiple industries. More than that, it means there's been an Einstein-level breakthrough in physics and that revelation is being classified as secret, leaving the entire physics community twisting in the wind and wasting their time.
That should not be permitted.
Even today, top-secret aircraft definitely would not have been acknowledged by the government. They're still very hush-hush about this sort of stuff, and the people who leaked the footage would likely have disappeared.
But why would they even acknowledge the video's existence? Much better to let the veracity of it all remain ambiguous. And if they had to for whatever reason, why not forge a study showing it's a camera malfunction or something? I don't think secret military technology is necessarily a bad theory, but IMO it's much more likely to be that of a foreign government.
have you guys heard any rationale for releasing these now? what does the Pentagon benefit from dissuading rumours that the leaked videos are fake? other than the possibility that Trump just said "do it"?
Trump wants to bleach the news cycle?