It doesnt say anything about the radar readings recieved, or the pilots reactions. You dont think these navy pilots know what planes look like on their radar and thermals? Mutiple ship and aircraft radar picked up consistent readings, movements, speeds that simply weren't possible.

Personally, I think it's some black-budget government project that somebody wasn't supposed to reveal. It might be from us, it might be foreign. But I really dont believe its extraterrestrial.

>It doesnt say anything about the radar readings recieved, or the pilots reactions.

To be fair, for the last video which shows telemetry data on the screen, he does explain what it means and how it shows that the object being tracked is actually stationary or moving very slowly.

As for the highly trained professional pilot's reactions, check out this breakdown of that last video, in which the pilots are freaking out. It show from the visual data readouts that it's a small object slightly above ambient temperature that's about 1m across flying very slowly at about 2k altitude. Oh and if you look closely at the object, you can see slow rhythmic oscillations, known in the technical community as 'flapping'.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmb8hO2ilV9vRa8cilis88A

I do not think that was the [youtube] link you intended

So your idea is, that some YouTuber, who wasn't there, who doesn't have all the data, and who doesn't work with those advanced systems, somehow knows, from a low resolution video, how to correctly identify the objects, when the Pentagon, and the Navy, and the pilots, with all their experience and data, still are okay to call them unidentified?

That's a good one.

It's almost as if, the possibilities opened by it being unidentified are so scary (why?), you need to distort and pervert the normal faculties of reason and logic and kowtow to faith in a YouTube prophet who's gonna spin a nice story to make it all sound okay.

BTW, if you are feeling confident and like you can out-identify your defense forces, at least pick a theory that fits the data, rather than selectively ignoring inconvenient data.

I notice that all these prophets/conspiracy theorists, like Ms West and Mr Thunder, ignore that the aviators and radar tech have stated that there were fleets of these objects, coming in for days at a time, dropping from above 80kft to see level.

So fleets of weather balloons, space birds, or bird shit storms, that's really where you're going with this?

Good luck.

> Personally, I think it's some black-budget government project that somebody wasn't supposed to reveal.

That's exactly what they want their adversaries to think so adversaries are going invest a ridiculous amount of resources in achieving projected but non-existing capabilities.

Japan's FOMO reaction is proof this genius form of inception is working. The authority fallacy never fails at scale.

If our adversaries are that gullible and incapable of grasping even basic scientific principles, why should we be worried about them?

Well they wouldn't be the first nation state to invest an enormous amount of resources in trying to develop science fiction like capabilities.

Excluding a range of possibilities with a reasonable amount of certainty is a very expensive exploration quest. After concluding it was all a wild goose chase it is still superior to nudge your adversaries in a direction that doesn't exclude this specific range of opportunities.

I feel like the range of possibilities that appears to break the laws of physics entirely doesn't need resources to exclude, at least in the absence of harder evidence than some grainy video. If you're referring to Star Wars, at least that seemed physically possible.

The starting assumption was that the footage is showing things that are physically impossible. You do not actually need to find out the truth to disprove that statement. You just need to find a single counter example and that is exactly what the video is doing.

The radar and thermals are still electronic. It might have registered a glitch, that appeared to look like an unknown object on the displays.

Mick West's explanation of "Go Fast" seems highly plausible (the video could be reproduced by a weather balloon, with parallax producing the difficulty of getting a radar lock and the appearance of fast movement). But for the other two, even ignoring witness testimony, it seems like grasping at straws to fit a narrative to a predetermined conclusion.

The go fast parallax explanation exposes just how impressive the Navy tech is, whereas we’re asked to believe Mark 1 eyeballs with very fuzzy videos or radar claims.

Same group claims USAF officers showed up demanding the E-2 Hawkeye tapes before they could even be secured. Did they use teleports or HALO to board a carrier that quick?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and these aren’t it. Tell me where the AF or VQ (Navy) ELINT aircraft were or what direction the antennas on St. Nicholas island were pointed.

The parallax explanation for the gofast video seems less believable when you view the video and consider the beginning of the footage, when the camera seems near-fixed and the object is flying quickly by it, and the operator has to actively track and lock-on to the moving object.

The field of view of the camera is only 1.5x1.5 degrees[1], roughly 3x the size of the moon viewed from the ground.

[1] "NAR" in the upper left, and https://forums.vrsimulations.com/support/index.php/A/A_Forwa...

i dont understand how the background behind the 'balloon' could be moving so fast. I dont think it was a ufo, but I definitely do not think it was a balloon.

Imagine the balloon is 2km up and the plane is 8km up. The balloon is stationary and the plane moving fast. The plane centres a camera on the balloon and maintains the centre.

As the plane flies over the balloon it is going to need to move the camera to keep it centred. When it does this the balloon remains centered (stationary) whilst the ground appears to move under it. However its just that the angle the camera is at had to change to keep the balloon centered giving the allusion that the ground is moving relative to the balloon.

But in the moments when the camera is at rest while the operator is trying to focus, the ocean is moving slowly in the opposite direction as the object, meaning that the jet is flying in the same direction as the object. If the object were static, then upon lock-on, the ocean in the background would slow down or reverse direction. What we see instead is that the ocean background speeds up, meaning the object is traveling faster than the jet in the direction the jet is going.

I have a thread, too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22353309

Frankly, I don't think these videos alone are the highest quality evidence of this kind of thing, but they are interesting because it is difficult to dispute the credibility of the witnesses and the timeline of events described by them. Usually you get some tangible evidence (video) or solid witness testimony, not both at the same time.

I've never clearly seen anything with my own two eyes that I couldn't explain in prosaic terms. However, I know groups of people saner than I who have, and science suggests its highly improbable we are the only planet with life [0], let alone the first one to evolve a sophisticated civilization. People come up with Great Filter hypotheses and what not to compensate, but considering we may be less than a century from self sustaining space stations, that hypothesis is running out of air for its only known test trial.

It kind of sucks to think we don't really have manifest destiny with the universe, but the burden of proof is on the skeptics to prove there are some really damning parameters for the Drake Equation before saying it is so unlikely that there are aliens in our neighborhood.

[0] https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1350/are-we-alone-in-the-un...

> considering we may be less than a century from self sustaining space stations

The jump between space stations and interstellar travel is huge. I agree that it's improbable that we're the only planet with life, but being visited by aliens is as, if not more, improbable.

Consider the age of the universe, our (humanity, with the ability to apprehend the existence of alien life) existence in it is but a blip. What are the odds that one or several forms of life capable of interstellar travel exist during that same time period, not before or after. That alone, among myriad other reasons, makes me pessimistic.

If they are sending out probes how long do those probes remain active? Can they repair themselves or build more on their own? I assume that is what we would be seeing.

Wouldn't they have been easily observed by now, perhaps even making contact? Unless they are deliberately trying to remain unobserved, in which case being caught on video from an aircraft seems careless.

We should create message bots and probes who basically explore far reaches of space and categorize data, send it back to all other nodes and essentially make as detailed a 'map' of life/discoveries/etc so that not only we could use it benignly but so could other species who come after us. Assuming they could figure out and translate/understand how we categorize it.

“When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe (53%–99.6% and 39%–85% respectively). ’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

Done and done.

Did you even try to understand the paper? They rightfully point out the uncertainty in estimating even the order of magnitude in the Drake equation, then build a model on uncertain, if not completely speculative facts including the Kardashev civilization model, and the validity of the "Fermi observation," which is in fact being debated in this very thread.

Checks notes..yeah this works.. also checks notes.. nope this isn't reddit. (seems more like a reddit comment, an observation not a critique).

I think honestly humanity is being squandered by income inequality. Imagine if money wasn't an issue for anyone. Imagine that we had a HUGE appreciation of science so much so that 90% of kids grow up to be scientists and explorers.

Surely that would get us to have higher and better technologies and also get us further in space flight. But instead elites would rather the potential scientists of the future 'know their place' and remain there in poverty never getting a degree/etc...

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20019375

This is an amazing explanation.

If this is the explanation, why didn't the Pentagon just say so?

We’re in the middle of a national crisis 20x worse than 9/11, and they need something to distract the populace with?

But they don't need to distract the population from the coronavirus crisis.

I liked the optical distortion idea. It's not super fitting to me, but it was a nice thought.

If he's right about the Go Fast video, doesn't that call into question the others as well? They all come from the same organization; figuring out that one of the videos is obvious horseshit should have us extra suspicious of the others, no?

We don't know that he's right, and the Navy has officially verified the videos belong to them just last week -- these aren't a product of the organization that released them. However, the Go Fast video was not the interesting one from a witness testimony standpoint. See the Nimitz incident [0], in which the object was observed by dozens of witnesses from several vantage points, including three fighters (at two different times), the passive radar on the Nimitz (intermittently for over a week), and an AWACS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident

Whether we know anything at all is a matter I'll leave to philosophers. I'm sufficiently confident that he's right about the Go Fast video that I'd bet my left nut on it.

The Go Fast video being wrapped up in this matter leads me to conclude that the Navy didn't try very hard to figure out that video, which leaves me with no reason to believe they tried harder with the others.

Or that the Navy is happy with these pedestrian explanations, but realize that the public will claim "weather balloons again, another government cover-up" if they provide such an explanation. So they release them as "unexplained" without further comment.

So... we should be able to reproduce the phenomenon?

Another one released today by Thunderf00t:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs

Also, I could swear I saw the gimbal and flir videos few years earlier. The time of release also seems like this is an attempt to draw attention away from the disinfectant and UV light blunder, as this administration did many times before.

The fact that one of the videos is called gimbal and another FLIR Forward Looking InfraRed), tells us that Pentagon knows those are artifacts and most likely those are training videos on how to distinguish artifacts from a real thing.

As per Mick West’s vid, these were declassified in 2017 so it’s very possible you saw them earlier.

That's only the reminder in the sense of "I've made other videos before about that" of Mick West. The relevant playlist of Mick West with many videos with detailed analysis is:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-4ZqTjKmhn5Qr0tCHkCV...

For example

https://youtu.be/4Btns91W5J8

Explains how the camera's automatic tracking system contributes to the appearance of movements which aren't real at all.

Or:

https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M

how the appearance of the "fast movement" is actually due to the plane speed, not the speed of the object observed, which is almost certainly something simple like a weather balloon

...and much more details there.