A flying saucer is quite flat though.

Funny enough, in the Navy's released footage of the "tic-tac" [1] this appears to be exactly what it does - it orients it's flat side towards the direction of intended movement then propels forward at (seemingly impossible) speeds. I'm not sure I have an opinion yet about if this tech is real, but it'd be interesting to hear (if these videos are fake) whether or not research went into "optimal" shape for breakthrough propulsion techniques which were then reproduced in a video.

https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents

I'm fairly sure these videos were debunked as being trickery/illusion with parallax, rather than objects traveling at impossible speeds.

I think (If you're referring to Mick West's explanation) that's actually a pretty convincing argument for the "Go Fast" video. I'm not as convinced the Gimbal video can be explained as easily. Combined with witness testimony and the Pentagon explicitly claiming it's unidentified, I would love to hear a more convincing argument than "it's a plane and exhaust jet that the Navy's state of the art sensors, pilots, etc. misidentified"

The Pentagon (or Navy I think you mean) has never made any statement on the content of the videos other than validating that they are real videos (by releasing them).

What is unconvincing about the gimbal explanation?

Debunked, by whom? Where is a trustworthy place I read about this?

I posted a youtube link in a sibling comment.

By skeptics!

I was pretty sure (from reading on hn) that the videos were validated (that the debunking was debunked...).

The navy confirmed they were real recordings, but AFAIK did not validate anything about the contents of the recordings.

Source? Here's mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus

I truly don't understand why everybody keeps referencing the Mick West debunking video of this UFO footage. I actually corresponded on the guy about inconsistencies in his own debunking claims and he gave no satisfactory justification for his extremely superficial arguments, which essentially focus on his own perceptions of inconsistencies in the footage itself and simply disregard weeks of repeated sightings, radar tracking and up-close eye-witness encounters between trained, professional pilots and the objects themselves in the air. These are pilots who on at least a couple of these occasions observed the objects from fairly close range, in broad daylight and had their observations at least partially confirmed at the same time by also professional operators of sophisticated tracking systems (radar etc) onboard the Navy's ships. In the case of the Nimitz "tic-tac" UFO events from late 2014 this happened especially, during weeks leading up to the brief video that was finally captured. Mick West simply disregards all of this and in an email I wrote to him even claims that the weeks of incidents previous to the video being captured were "separate" events from the video because they didn't concretely, confirmably show the same thing.... What? An absurd conclusion.

Debunking with a critical eye is good and necessary but sometimes one gets the feeling that certain internet debunkers feel a need to debunk at all costs because that's their label, even if their own "rational" interpretations make leaps of logic much worse than simply admitting that something inexplicable was observed.

My own view on this is that the only thing that is worth discussing here is the actual physical evidence that we have. Specifically, the 3 IR videos. Mick and others on youtube that I have seen give a very reasonable account of those videos. That is all the actual data we have. Everything else is just something somebody said and to me that is worth nothing. Trying to evaluate those accounts leads to very unproductive internet arguments. If somebody says there is other actual physical evidence, then lets see it and examine it. Until then the case is closed.

Perhaps, they meant Lex Friedman's follow-up to the interview

wow, I didn't think of that... it's interesting that a lot (but not all) of sf has flying saucers moving in a "horizontal" direction" where the GR solution suggests moving in the "vertical" direction, which some science fiction does do.

Fascinating. After all these years only now we know why Flying Saucers are saucer-shaped.

secondary propulsion system for maneuvering out of warp- and how goofy would it be to walk around in a vertically standing ship in gravity?

If they are moving on what we imagine as "up" or "down" directions. If it's moving on any direction people actually expect them to move, they are not very flat.

You're not gonna want to go speeding through a thick atmosphere like Earth's at Warp 9. They probably adopt a more flattened stance when traveling between star systems and rely on smaller engines while in-atmosphere.

It seems like the US Navy has a patent on a space bending space craft.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

It looks like the secret US navy TR-3B. The language here is oddly specific. Is this real?

I didn't read the paper, but Sabine's summary specifically notes that the drive requires energy and momentum to accelerate. While the mechanism behind providing momentum could be varied, some form of reaction drive would almost certainly be required.