We know barely anything about Oumuamua, clearly not enough to decide what kind of object it is, even less about the Nimitz encounter and yet, based on two nothings, you are feeling confident enough to say that the would be civilization that build 'Oumuamua' is less advanced than the would be civilization that built the Nimitz object.
Jumping the gun a little bit are we?
Of course if whatever got off wants to ever go home it would need to set up shop somewhere and build a new multistage interstellar rocket. You could probably do that in the outer solar system and not be noticed.
People who dismiss UFO sightings have among other points argued that the small craft sighted are too small to have the kind of crazy propulsion systems required for interstellar flight. That makes sense, but why assume those are interstellar? A staged fusion rocket or something would make more sense. The small craft would be interplanetary scale.
Surely something accelerating to Mach 25 in atmosphere in less than a second would have made a hell of a sound.
One thing that does happen to shadows is they get blurred at the edges (an aircraft won't completely cover the sun at a distance). An aircraft will tend to cast a vaguely "T" shaped shadow at a distance that's roughly the size of the aircraft. I can see a "t" shaped object in these images.
Here's a video of a test flight of the Vahana aircraft. https://youtu.be/S-5JeapSsbE?t=188
See the mysterious "t" shaped shadow it's casting? It moves erratically and doesn't match intuition of a shadow since shadows from the sun don't work the same way as indoors due to the parallel rays. You get these same shadows projected onto clouds as well.
The real kicker is that in these videos they both show and report that the shadow rotates when the aircraft turns! Like guys what the fuck do you think it is? Haha oh dear.
Notice the similarities? The halo and the matching of the recording planes movements which are explicitly mentioned in this.
Other remaining factors include that:
- Primary radars on both fighters in the initial pass were being jammed
- Passive radars on the Nimitz were what directed the planes to this spot initially
- It was approximately 9:30-10 PST, so any shadow from <40k feet would be coming from restricted airspace
- Multiple visual contacts from multiple angles, including from slightly below/ to the side
This one is pretty difficult to explain in conventional terms, unless you think it's all a hoax. Pretty fascinating stuff, huh?
"When the jet fighters arrived on site, the crew of four saw nothing in the air nor on their radar"
So there's some mysterious radar pickup on the boats but the pilots then chase their own shadow and record it.
The real kicker is this part
"As Fravor further descended, he reported that the object began ascending along a curved path, maintaining some distance from the F-18, mirroring its trajectory in opposite circles. Fravor then made a more aggressive maneuver, plunging his fighter to aim below the object, but at this point the UFO accelerated and went out of sight in less than two seconds, leaving the pilots "pretty weirded out"."
That's a literal shadow!
The pilot was saying that the ship had been picking up unknown objects on radar for a while before that experience.
A terrestrial foreign superpower's technology seems like a plausible explanation at first if we can assign probabilities to them being more advanced than us (probably low but non-negligible). That would be compelling if this were the first reliable sighting of its kind (or if it didn't already occur 15 years ago), but apparently such sightings have been actively studied by the US gov for a few decades before this, so it seems quite impossible they would have had the capability in the pogrom/hard labor days, assuming there is some relation between current sightings and those happening decades ago.
When you consider the, quite literally, astronomical distances involved in interstellar travel and the corresponding time and resources required, combined with having no data whatsoever to suggest that advanced intelligent life exists anywhere within our galactic neighborhood, aliens look like a pretty damned unlikely explanation.
Hell, it's more likely there's some Wakanda-like hidden advanced human civilization somewhere around here, or maybe a non-human one that inhabits our deep oceans or something. Even less likely than that is some form of time travel from future humans which, again, is still more likely than aliens because we know with certainty that human beings exist on Earth.
Sure, there are a lot of reasons one can imagine that make that untrue, but the point isn't that it is impossible, but rather that there are other explanations that are significantly more likely even though they themselves are unlikely.
We have 0 examples and 0 evidence of advanced alien intelligence. We have rock solid proof of human intelligence on earth, and several examples of magical-seeming technology in the hands of some of its people and not others.
And again, this argument is predicated on the rather debatable assumption that the phenomena in question is indeed a craft of some kind. We have a ludicrous number of examples of human beings ascribing natural phenomena to magic and/or aliens.
As you suggested, it is unlikely that a futurist from a newborn civilization would accurately predict what a million (or billion) years old advanced civilization would actually do, and I am also legitimately unaware of whether we have any reason to believe that such projects would be visible when we can barely make out the closest planets outside our solar system (and only indirectly via math). Or if someone blotted out an entire star, how would we know? We use a term called dark matter to fill in the 75% of the universe that we can't describe in conventional terms. As some people posit on this subject, do animals in a nature preserve know they are in a nature preserve? Doesn't look much different than their world did thousands of years ago aside from occasional ufo's flying overhead (planes) unless they stray toward the edges/out of the solar system.
Btw, I would have been one of the skeptics writing these comments three years ago pre-Nimitz release (in fact, if you go back far enough in my HN history I found some comments saying that if there was a greater intelligence it would just ignore us LOL https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lend000&next=1418634...). If you study this incident and a whole plethora of other phenomena with an open mind, you'll find some pretty damn fascinating things from various places with different agendas and levels of credibility (it is certainly not 0 evidence) with significant implications.
It is evidence of something going on that we do not understand. That does not immediately mean aliens any more than it immediately means magic or god.
Skepticism is important to keep discussion grounded, and I appreciate the level headed discussion. To me, finding something that breaks our understanding of reality is just as interesting and worth pursuing aggressively regardless of which of the above explanations is most correct.
The New York Post put together a great video highlighting "The Phenomenon." If Oumuamua is indeed an interstellar probe, it would seem to have come from a civilization far less advanced than whatever seems to have been observed by various militaries and analyzed by this New York Post special [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSY2Zc0goQ
Edit: I don't mean to shake up anyone's fragile worldview. Comment instead of downvote; it's a fascinating subject to debate.