come on, man. at some point, after enough of these reports, toeing the line you're toeing starts to look ludicrous. these are trained observers, pilots who know what to expect in the sky. and do not take lightly that there is still a certain amount of embarrassment (a social cost) to even coming forward, so to even make this claim is still a brave act at this point.
At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY
(I made the mistake of clicking and now YouTube thinks I want to see "this man shows evidence usa possesses exotic matter", "real photos of JFK killer" and "Chilling alien messages encoded in ancient tombs". That's not the bubble I want to be in!! :-D)
I like the occasional "cute animal" video, but if you leave one in your history, YouTube becomes a cute animal machine.
The actual clip is 13 minutes.
*Because I know it's coming, yes, they aren't perfect; but considering they've been going 55 years they're far better than most. I found they were pretty balanced in this clip - skeptical but not dismissive.
it's literally a 13 minute video, man. The SHOW is named "60 Minutes" and it's rather legendary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes and it usually features a number of stories in that timeframe, not just 1. I hate predictability too, such as assuming I'm one of "those people forcing you to watch a whole hour of BS" just because you like being a debunker.
It's also dealing with US Military folks, which are an honorable lot (I served 4 years in the USAF, so I take these people seriously... integrity is HIGHLY HIGHLY encouraged)
Also, when you're dealing with eyewitness testimony in particular, video evidence is natural because the delivery of this type of communication is best done with the entire presentation of the person doing it, because words on paper alone are distorting.
Also 60 minutes has a lot of credibility issues. And is not generally looked upon as a rigorous journalism source.
The article is right we need to destigmatize reporting and collect data: Because whether the origin of the issue is earthly or not, we need to understand it.
we have yet to find a plethora of ocean-dwelling smaller mermaids and 'tic-tacs'. In fact, we've yet to discover solid evidence of the existence of either phenomena, regardless of size.
Chances start to diminish in the guessing game when you're trying to forecast the completely novel/unknown/under-witnessed.
'human effects' start to cloud things a lot more when we start talking about religion/ghouls/goblins/time-travelers/bainshees/sirens/etc.
Would a mermaid creature be something improbable to an ancient mariner, who hadn't even heard of anything like a monkey before he saw them with his own eyes?
> You would be smart to guess that there are bigger copies of nearly any remote species in the ocean.
Would you then say it is probable that species of giant shark exist to this day?
And there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Is it so unreasonable to guess that intelligent life arose more than once?
This is absolutely ludicrous. It doesn't matter how many stars are in the sky or how likely life bearing planets are in the galaxy. There's a vast gulf between "life exists on multiple planets in the galaxy" and "that life is flying around Earth in little metal spaceships that defy all known physical laws".
The universe is 13 billion years old. The Milky Way is about 100K lightyears across. Suppose another species could travel at 90% of light speed. Then we're looking at maybe 110,000 years necessary to colonize the galaxy -- only a tiny fraction of 13 billion years.
I've been following this UAP stuff for a while, and as far as I can tell no one is claiming that the UAPs defy all known physical laws (i.e. I've seen no claims of violation of conservation of energy, 2nd law of thermodynamics, FTL travel, etc. -- though, someone should do the math on those transit times to check the FTL travel one). Just that the propulsion & cloaking work in ways we can't explain. Show Aristotle a jet fighter and he'll have a similar reaction.
Supposing that the UAPs arise from a civ that arose when the universe was about 12 billion years old, i.e. 1 billion years ago. That's about 1 billion years of technological development. Can we really put confident bounds on what could be achieved in terms of propulsion and cloaking with 1 billion years of research?
Professional sailors do.
> big foot
Professional park rangers do.
They're all full of shit by the way. Self-deluding or purposely tricking the public for laughs.
Were the sailor/ranger claims treated as credible by a source at least as good as 60 Minutes?
Weird shit exists. Shrug.
However, eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. We know and have proved this over and over and over.
The "problem" with pilots is that getting marked as "mentally unstable" can get you grounded. So, do you report every strange thing you think you see or not?
We still don't have direct evidence of ball lightning, but it's taken seriously nonetheless. The comparison is apt here.
I could be wrong, though, as I don't follow it scientifically.
Perhaps I should have chosen "rogue waves" instead as something weird that we had lots of eyewitness testimony of yet took us ages to finally confirm.
There is no explanation that could ever get this guy to admit he was wrong. He's trapped.
And both revealed that several pilots we mislead by the same simple phenomena. And it wasn't a pilot who explained it but engineers who actually knew how the sensors worked.
You should also put Ryan Grave's response to that video - https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0
If the pilots see the same thing with their eyes then that significantly undermines West's theory, because human eyes wouldn't have the same visual artifacts as these sensors. It would have to be an extreme coincidence for this all to line up just right across multiple sensor systems and human eyes as well. No impossible, but very implausible.
And you linked a video by a video game dev.
You should also put Ryan Grave's response to that video - https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0
Mick West has reported on this all over the place.
It's possible that this entire endeavour (the military witnesses and the release of the videos by the pentagon) is one huge psyop, but given the number of years, the number of individuals involved, that quickly starts getting into conspiracy theory territory itself.
> During a routine training mission in 2004, Dietrich and her then-commanding officer had noticed an unusual "churning" of the ocean surface before seeing "a smooth, white oblong object resembling a large Tic Tac breath mint flying at high speed over the water."
- by multiple fighter jet pilots (in different planes)
- picked up by the fighter jet's radar
- picked up by the USS Nimitz's radar.
So yeah...
If he built the software that automatically rejects such mistaken identifications, he also knows in which situations you'll get a false positive reading, and can tell his friend the perfect timing for the prank.
For an example of this kind of prankster game see Woz’s short videos about how he sources (actually real, but he intentionally does not say that) two dollar bills in pads from a local printer “who gets them from another very high quality printer.” He knows some people get what he’s doing and others don’t, and that’s part of the fun.
And some people transition during the exposition from being people who are being duped, to people who realize they were temporarily duped. That’s another part of the fun.
I can't speak for the radar data, as I've never seen even leaked radar page footage from these events, but for those of you out there who think that what you see on the scope is a perfect analog of the real world, boy do I have some bad news for you...
It's also interesting to me that every single one of these videos I'm aware of has come from what's generally regarded as the least capable and most error-prone targeting pod currently in US service.
The pilots suspected their altitude indicator was wrong, so they asked air traffic control to confirm their altitude. They did and it agreed with their own readings so they ignored the subsequent indications that they were going to crash into the ocean, which is unfortunately what happened.
Neither the pilots nor air traffic control apparently knew that both readings were supplied by the same source: the plane’s transponder.
I often think of this when I hear people say that multiple sources indicate something strange. These systems are often intertwined and networked in unintuitive ways and just because something appears on multiple panes of glass does not necessarily mean it’s been independently confirmed.
The manufacturer tried using two instruments to measure the shape of the mirror. One instrument said that the mirror had unacceptable error. The other said it was perfect. The latter instrument was designed to be more precise, so they went with that and ignored the measurements from the other null corrector which disagreed.
The problem was, the more precise null corrector was the same one that was used to help construct the mirror originally. All it could verify was that the mirror was built to the same specs as the null corrector. No one realized that the "better" null corrector itself was off until it was too late.
Thinking about it more, I've never tried asking ATC for an altitude check specifically from primary radar. It may well be that the system isn't set up for it, even if it's technically computable to some degree. When I'm talking coarse, I mean an altitude spread at range that may be measured in miles.
Surveillance radars have narrow beam widths in azimuth, but broad in altitude to allow them to quickly survey around them and get good enough awareness of where everyone is. There's always a trade-off between resolution and volume--some military tactical and approach radars have very precise azimuth and altitude capability, at the cost of scan volume/time. Mode C (and now, arguably, ADS-B) was the solution to this problem, allowing ATC radar to have both good position and altitude precision with an acceptable refresh rate, at a non-prohibitive cost.
You'd be surprised--unless your hypothetical binocular observer was really handy with stadiametric ranging, I imagine they'd be nowhere near a mile. They might be able to get a decent azimuth and elevation on a single aircraft, but that's a much different problem than determining position near-simultaneously for a hundred.
In the case of this flight, maintenance tape covered the static ports, rendering all instruments that use the static pressure system, significantly in error. Although there's more than one port, and thus redundancy, the maintenance operation covered all of the ports.
There are all the passive system “failure” modes, between optical (and infrared) focusing, sensor noise, radar synthesis, multi system combat data links passing in extra information the system is designed to integrate into targeting/tracking/tasking the sensors. There’s a lot that can go wrong… add active failures like the GP comment mentioned about the astronomical sensor saturation and lasers, and the picture is even messier, a military drone/vehicle could be using active countermeasures like dazzling lasers and phased array RF emitters to try and mess with the pilots, the sensors, and the data links…
At the end of the day I just want the stigma around investigating the root cause of this stuff to go away, it’s like the Hound of the Baskervilles, stuff can genuinely have all the trappings of being supernatural or aliens or whatever… and still turn out to have a mundane explanation when properly investigated. I want the systems engineers and the scientists and the researchers and anyone else who sees stuff like this to log the “bug report” and for people to get to the bottom of things, because as long as we live in a world where weapons like fighter jets and guided missile destroyers are needed and/or in use, I’d like to know the systems and people aiming them at targets are making as few mistakes as humanly possible… which won’t happen if people don’t rigorously investigate and dig out the root causes of stuff like these UAP incidents.
Ofc, once you#ve done that you may not want third parties to know. Something as banal as 'we made air glow a few miles away' can expose capabilities of some vital systems that you don't want third parties to know. Edit: I mean, with that information, someone could do some napkin math on what can still be seen and what can't (by e.g. a naval radar suite, focusing on a spot in the air using a phased array).
Maybe a long time ago you could attend OCS as prior enlisted, but I think we’re way past those days: All service branches have their pick of officers with degrees to send for pilot or navigator/RIO training.
Based on the videos and reports I've seen, most or all of these cases involve sensor operation outside of typical A/A and A/G workflows, where the type of detailed technical knowledge that the system designers have could be more useful than years of practical experience. I've heard (and told) enough sea stories to be skeptical of eyewitness testimony (not that I think the aircrew who reported seeing this stuff are lying, but I've been humbled often enough by my own fallible recollections), and none of the publicly available footage I've seen of these events strikes me as anything more than a confluence of sensor limitations and (very understandable) human factors.
There are a number of reasons I'm glad the government is running these kinds of reports to ground, but I think wildly credulous reporting (particularly the "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens" interviews by a handful of aviators, but even presenting advanced adversary technology as the sane middle ground) is blowing this way out of proportion. We're already taking it way more seriously than it deserves, and there are plenty of other alligators closer to the boat.
To me it's sometimes amazing the lengths people will go to in order to insist something they can't believe must be because another party is at best mistaken, or at worst lying.
The article states that UAP were likely - in the view of the author who is speaking from personal experience and knowledge of incidents and people involved - witnessed by 50-60 people "every day".
The unclassified material records UAP from multiple sources including naked eye and two completely different sensor technologies - radar and infrared.
And yet, here we are. "Maybe there was just a glitch with the sensors".
No. No glitch. No sensor malfunction. No lone guy on weird meds.
Every day, UAP are being witnessed by credible, trained witnesses from multiple sources, and are not being mitigated because people fail to take them entirely seriously.
The article states that this is a major national security problem for the US. Too true. If these start appearing near a Russian ICBM silo, do we entirely trust - without figuring out what they are - that they aren't going to trigger a nuclear war?
It needs to be taken seriously. Hand-waving it away as mistaken people or flawed equipment despite professional men and women insisting they have already discounted those factors is an embarrassment to their professionalism and candour. It takes guts to talk about this.
And let's just remember these aren't tinfoil hat wearing stoners: they're service people sworn to protect their country screaming out "hey, you need to look at this, because we can't mitigate for this, and it's dangerous".
However, this isn't new, it's been culturally normal for decades.
If I told you that one USAAF officer who had served at Roswell Army Air Field at the time of "the incident" in 1947 had since come forward and said "Look, I was scared about losing my pension so I didn't say anything at the time, but the truth is there was a cover-up, and we couldn't really identify what that thing that crashed was but it wasn't ours and it didn't seem Soviet. People were scared because that base was the largest base for the Strategic Air Command, and admitting that weird unidentified objects could just get into airspace around there and we couldn't do anything about it would have terrified the public", you'd think about it and go "sure, one guy, not buying it entirely".
What if I told you ten individuals had all come forward - some with death bed confessions - and without evidence of collusion and for no payment or reward (not even a TV interview), had said similar things? What if they categorically insisted the updated explanation - not a weather balloon but an early warning radar system - was also not viable, because they were familiar with all those systems and this wasn't that?
What about a hundred ex-service people? A hundred accounts like that, some of them notarised statements to be released after their death? Or made shortly before last rites when they knew the pension couldn't be withdrawn? Would a hundred people doing that make you think "glitch" or "human error"?
The actual number is just over 600 right now. Seriously, _six hundred_ people have insisted that there was a significant security threat that never really got resolved, and about a dozen of them attest to life forms they couldn't really describe as human being present at the site.
Perhaps that's all too much for you, so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal".
It's taken 70 years to get to the point where we can start talking about this a little more openly. Let's not close this debate down again now.
Is any of it ET in origin? Probably not. Tic-tacs might be drone tech. Roswell might have been Soviet after all. But we'll never know if we don't start showing a bit more curiosity rather than reflexing to "probably not real".
This isn’t an example of cognitive bias if the information is from independent “readings”, from sources that are not motivated to deceive.
Those videos are getting old now. If there was something to this stuff and it were really as commonplace as folks are saying we would be seeing much better imagery (at least) by now. Not to mention the fact that this stuff would not be limited to American military observers.
The fact is these are pilots who observe the things they're trained to observe with the very job-specific tools they've been trained to use. They don't have tools for arbitrary scientific observations. However, if it's sooo common, then yeah, we should expect that someone in some country will start properly taking measurements on these phenomena... but so far it's been crickets.
And it being “old” does not mean we should increase or lower our expectations of one explanation or another.
This article is telling you people are trying to properly take and report measurements but there is a stigma to doing so. The whole point of the article is that science is being denied a chance to explain something that could have very serious consequences because of attitudes like, well, frankly, yours.
If you don't understand a phenomenon then you have basis upon which to speculate under what conditions you will or will not see it, and thus make any statistical guesses about the probability of detecting it. Ball lightning still has no direct evidence but plenty of indirect evidence.
> Not to mention the fact that this stuff would not be limited to American military observers.
You mean like these:
* https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34061578...
* https://www.the-sun.com/news/3048770/ufos-china-un-beijing-p...
Recently, with all that internet marketing and real surveillance tech, this worsened a lot. Some humans are just wired differently.
On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speeds").
On the other hand, we use sensationalism to dismiss accurate reports ("You said your radar showed extremely high velocity, therefore what are you reporting, a UFO?").
The new approach seems best: report, collect, and analyze the data, and see where it goes.
If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful?
The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security.
Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.
Yes, the military should investigate all reports of UFOs in the strict sense to see if they've found some new piece of equipment from a foreign nation. I assume they've done that before releasing the footage to the public after figuring out what it is they actually detected.
They had (a) no centralized collection point or widely used reporting mechanism, (b) no staffed office tasked with investigations (afaik, only the Navy had an office, and it was ~3 bodies with other duties), & (c) no periodic review.
They essentially ignored it as a potential problem. So Indiana Jones, "top men" type stuff.
Unfortunately, a lot of the public debate is "aliens", because media and idiots. But there's a serious underlying problem.
Getting some people to even admit that much is a struggle, even after 70+ years of it happening.
My personal guess is that there probably are extraterrestrials on the earth observing us but they are competently remaining hidded and have nothing to do with any UFO observation by a human. Of course I don't have any good evidence for that: it's just a hunch.
I'll see your pedantry and raise you my own pedantry. The fact that a hypothetical craft flies around in an atmosphere does not imply that it's not a spaceship. A vessel could conceivably be capable of flying through some fluid at one time and through the vacuum of space at another, and would thus be called a spaceship. For example, the Space Shuttle was a spaceship even when it was operating under aerodynamic forces. Since we're talking about alien ships, they would have to be alien spaceships, because otherwise we would have to accept that these aliens have the necessary infrastructure and facilities to land their spaceships somewhere (some kind of alien spaceport on Earth?), disembark, and board their alien aircraft to fly around Earth's atmosphere, which is an even more ridiculous idea.
Why? It costs almost nothing to just collect data. How do you know they're not witnessing advanced tech from another nation? Or maybe it's a pervasive flaw in our sensors. Seems like those are both well within the military's mandate. Even if it's just an interesting new physical phenomenon, it would be great to have some evidence.
Particularly in the areas of populism and conspiracy theory.
There are cases where multiple pilots are seeing an object with their eyes, while ship radar is picking it up, and also aircraft infra-red is picking it up at the same time. Multiple aircraft, multiple sensors, multiple sets of eyes.
Not only that, there is at least one case where a pilot engaged with the object, and the object responded with evasive maneuvers.
Yes, glitches exist, but don't yet account for all cases. One can read the congressional reports that say the same.
I’m also curious to know if there are reports similar to these coming from civilian or commercial pilots. I mean, it doesn’t take a too gun pilot to observe a tic tac shaped flying object but it seems to me that it’s all coming from the us military who share similar technology.
There is one other group of UAP sightings I’m aware of and it’s from civilians and it seems to come almost strictly from civilians in North America.
But yes, to be fair, there is a selection bias here in a sense.
For all their powerfullness and funding, I expect something better than 240p imagery. Particularly when it happens all the time in one of the most heavily instrumented naval test ranges on earth.
But that’s just me.
Turned out, it was noise / amplifier signal correlated with the adjacent chip dumping overexposed pixels on readout. He was embarrassed after a professor pointed out (after inspecting the files) that it always appeared on the same exact pixel coordinates on the array, but learned his lesson to try to disprove your own observations with independent tests.
I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. After all, these pilots aren't reporting things seen with their eyes, they're looking at imaging displays that have been processed. And maybe... were recently illuminated with lasers... hm? There certainly seem to be a pathology of similar reports of "the object never moved in the viewfinder, and would imply the ability to move suddenly at supersonic speeds"