Recent revelations about UFOs*cough*UAPs from the military

[Bear]

So, the pentagon is *OFFICIALLY* reporting that, for years, pilots have been spotting "Unexplained Aerial Phenomena" - which bear an incredibly strong resemblance to the longstanding stories about "Unidentifed Flying Objects" but anyway it got a new name and acronym because military.

And, God DAMN it, the photos are as grainy and ambiguous as ever.  These planes are carrying optical cameras literally thousands of times better than the ones available a generation ago, and we still can't get a decent photo.  I think this is an enormous tell, indicating that this whole thing is somehow a fake.  This is 2021.  That camera is military hardware that can take an image of a whole city, sharp enough to identify every pedestrian crossing at the intersections if the angle allows their faces to be seen. There is absolutely no excuse for grainy, fuzzy, out-of-focus, ambiguous photos.  

I have not found or read an extensive, detailed brief on this.  If someone knows where it may be found, please respond with an appropriate reference.

I am quite skeptical that these are alien vehicles - though I guess I'd entertain the notion that they may be generated by a Bracewell probe in our solar system.  The fact is that I can't reconcile "We don't see anybody out there" with alien vehicles visiting us physically.  If they are alien vehicles they came from somewhere, and I'm going to insist on thinking that they must have come here at a speed less than the speed of light. 

Humans, as an anatomically modern species, has been around for only about 400K years.  As a species that does things indicating modern-type symbolic thought, only about 40K years.   As a species that has done anything detectable from more than a light year away... Probably 5K years.  Somebody with a telescope about a million miles wide to get a sharp enough focus, could have spotted some structures like early cities, the pyramids, etc.  So if this is a response to human activity, then it must be from somebody within 2K light years of us.  But we don't see any evidence of anybody living within 2K light years of us.  Do we imagine that they are out there, easily capable of space travel, but are not spreading, developing industry, and using resources on a scale we could detect?  I am ... skeptical.

What has been reported in details. 

   Objects moving in excess of 38K miles per hour, in atmosphere, without generating sonic booms.

   Observed accelerations, in atmosphere, in the range of 7K meters/second^2

   Course changes that ought to generate centripetal accelerations in the same range.

   Objects moving at high speeds entering the water, without splashing, and then leaving the water at distances ranging from a dozen to a hundred miles, without creating a surface wave.  The distance between entry and exit would have to be at speeds well in excess of the speed of sound in water - and because water is an incompressible medium, that is not any kind of joke.

    Objects flying 'in formation' with piloted aircraft, maintaining an exact relative position no matter what the pilot does.  "Clearly it was aware of us," says the reporting pilot.

[stevebowers]

We don't tend to talk about UFOs on this forum. For that reason, if this thread gets too contentious I will close it.

The official OA line is that xenosophonts exist, but UFOs are nothing to do with them. There will always be UFOs, due to the shortcomings of sensor equipment and human fallibility, and even 11K sensor arrays would not be infallible.

Personally I am extremely skeptical, and can point in the direction of very good explanations for each of the recent US Navy videos. The puzzling thing is that the US Navy seems to be giving these reports more credence than they seem to deserve. In June there should be a report on this subject that may have some relevant data, but somehow I doubt it will say much.

[selden]

I think many of the sightings (not all) might be optical effects. Also, don’t forget that many past sightings have turned out to be a bright planet (Venus) low in the sky. The movements of such distant objects seem to track the observer.

According to space.com at https://www.space.com/ufo-report-militar...next-month, an official report is due next month from the UAPTF https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Release...ask-force/

[stevebowers]

That's the report I am referring to.

Trouble is, there does seem to be a small but vocal contingent in US military and government circles who are particularly supportive of these claims, and this may skew the results somewhat.

Another factor is that drone technology is improving all the time, so that (even if these current UAP sightings have nothing to do with foreign drones, spying on US operations) there will be spy drones available in the (relatively near) future that could cause similar sightings. So the US military and government are right to be concerned.

[weirdspecter]

UAP/UFO sightings by the military are always very fun.

And, God DAMN it, the photos are as grainy and ambiguous as ever.  These planes are carrying optical cameras literally thousands of times better than the ones available a generation ago, and we still can't get a decent photo.  I think this is an enormous tell, indicating that this whole thing is somehow a fake.  This is 2021.  That camera is military hardware that can take an image of a whole city, sharp enough to identify every pedestrian crossing at the intersections if the angle allows their faces to be seen. There is absolutely no excuse for grainy, fuzzy, out-of-focus, ambiguous photos.  

While I can't speak to the specifics of Bear's claim here RE: cameras imaging whole cities at once, I do know that with previous releases of footage the claim was that these objects were being imaged through infrared cameras, producing less clear imagery. Not sure if that's the case with this newest slew of releases as I haven't actually taken the time to dig into them yet, but it is worth noting. Not to say that Bear's wrong -- one would hope that the Pentagon would start including at least 2006-flip-phone-quality footage in these releases, but still.

I like to keep an open mind about these sorts of things. I find it hard to believe that *large aircraft capable of the feats usually attributed to UAPs/UFOs* could have been developed by any given world power and not led to that power's supremacy. If these are vessels comparable to jets making the sorts of maneuvers claimed, I find it hard to believe that:

a) whoever could build such aircraft couldn't militarily dominate other nations, and;

b) whoever could build such aircraft couldn't find an incredibly lucrative application for the tech breakthroughs behind their performance to revolutionise their economy.

So, IF these UAPs/UFOs are really doing the things claimed of them and aren't, say, the product of sensor error, disinformation or the testing of misidentified military drones, then I'd find it hard to believe any earthbound nation could be behind their production. IF these are aircraft capable of 700gee acceleration, well... whoever can field those has such an overwhelming military and economic advantage that it makes no sense to me that they'd still be playing the diplomacy game. Which I guess could lend itself to these being aliens, or at least the autonomous drones of aliens. It does occur to me that this performance envelope is on par with OA's reactionless drives, so maybe we've got a cheeky S4 or 5 poking around.

All that being said, while I'm the one who checked the "Bracewell Probes" option in the poll (because who wouldn't? it's fun) I'm of the opinion that UAPs/UFOs are overwhelmingly more likely to be some sort of combat drone or else natural phenomena (something optical like ball lightning, perhaps) than alien intervention. There does seem to be genuine confusion among quite senior military figures about the nature of UAPs/UFOs, but it's hardly a shock that the left hand wouldn't know what the right hand was doing when it comes to the US military. And if you're going to test combat drones on anybody, well... doing it on your own ships might be sensible. I'm not sure.

~~~

Of course, as Steve says, there is a vocal contingent of the US government who are very much in favour of the aliens narrative. I've seen for myself interviews with the pilots who reportedly shot some of the older footage of these UAPs which sounds very convincing -- but ultimately that means very little, from an evidentiary perspective.

Still, maybe that's what they WANT you to think! +tinfoil hat intensifies+

Anyway, I'm glad this thread is staying open for the time being. I do always love watching serious-minded, science-oriented folks discuss this sort of thing.

Regards,

Lilly

[stevebowers]

I can go through each of the clips released so far, and give links to very competent analyses (usually by Mick West) that shows that there really are no 700 gee acceleration events in the released tapes.

The eye-witness accounts are somewhat different, and I can't explain them in quite the same way. For instance the 2004 Nimitz sighting was observed by several pilots and radar operators including the pilot David Fravor, but this first encounter was not filmed. Maybe half-an-hour or more later a film clip was made by Chad Underwood, and this is the famous FLIR1 clip. Underwood coined the name 'tic-tac' for the object he filmed, and this name has been adopted by Fravor and several other witnesses of the earlier incident; I suspect that they all watch Underwood's clip, and have retroactively assigned many of the behaviours of the object in the clip to their own sighting - human memory is fallible, that's why the film clip itself is much more valuable as evidence.

Here's Mick West's analysis of the FLIR1 tape. The apparent sudden movements are artefacts of the imaging system.

https://youtu.be/U1di0XIa9RQ

There will always be UFOs, even when we've got Y11K - level sensor capacity. But they will just be a lot further away.

[Bear]

I'm absolutely certain No Earthly Power has developed that level of technology - AND has not applied any fraction of it to advancing their economy and wealth, AND kept it completely secret.

Not applying any fraction of it to advancing your economy or wealth - the disincentives are absolutely enormous, and the upside nearly zero. And it's also extremely difficult, because you've got thousands or tens of thousands of people involved in developing the technology, plus presumably a cadre of military people actually using and training with it, and they ALL have to be held prisoner and kept silent - because of the enormous incentives for them to make STUPID amounts of money by taking the tech to another country.

And keeping it secret only starts there. Not only do you have tens of thousands of people with enormous incentives to make STUPID money by being the first to take the tech to another country, whom you can't just murder because you need the researchers to maintain and further develop it. But also sooner or later spies happen. And even if you have some tech that makes your entire nation spy-proof, that in itself is going to be sufficiently remarkable that other countries will definitely take notice.

So, no. It's clear to me that no Terrestrial power is responsible for these things.

Non-Terrestrial powers ... Again, I point to the Great Silence. There's no place they could have come from. And if it were a Non-Terrestrial power, it makes absolutely no sense to put a physical probe inside our atmosphere. I try not to anthropomorphize aliens too much when I speculate about motives, but what motive would there be to send physical probes down here instead of holding off to a safe distance -- like, say, the orbit of Sedna or so -- and discovering everything they need to know about us by remote sensing? If they really need to send physical probes, they'd be nanotech devices lodged in grains of sand or two-meter rocks etc, that look just like all the other grains of sand and two-meter rocks etc that come from the outer solar system, and they'd hit our atmosphere like all that other stuff does, and we'd never goddamn notice because that happens all the time. Nanotech devices, even just spreading on the wind, can get to see everything and hear everything and sample everything in fairly short order. So if they're doing research about our world, there's no reason for them to do anything we can see.

I can -- just barely -- entertain the notion of a local Bracewell Probe, but if so, time being what it is, the species that sent it is probably no longer even extant. If it still existed it would be another species - or another several species - by now, and when I say "if it still existed" I point at the Great Silence again. I think the odds aren't good. Also a Bracewell probe is an investment with a hundred-million-year breakeven, at best, and if their economies are anything like ours funding decisions would be weighed against investments with a thirty-year breakeven. Again anthropomorphizing our hypothetical aliens, spreading Bracewell probes just doesn't seem like a worthwhile pursuit.

So I'm eliminating human activities and alien activities. That leaves "These craft do not exist." And so I turn to the more logical question, "Why do these reports exist?" And I think,

(A) Pentagon brass duped by foreign power
(B) Pentagon brass duped by internal confusion and inter-branch secrets and rivalries, etc.
© Pentagon attempting psyop on public (my own choice in the poll).

Under (A), I've thought of one thing since posting the poll that seems the most plausible scenario, at least to me. It's just barely possible that some of the sensor/camera/etc hardware that our military is using has been compromised in the supply chain. That is, the chips or the ROMs may have been manufactured in a plant controlled by or infiltrated by an adversary, with undocumented behavior that can be triggered by software. In that case, what we're seeing now might be that adversary making a "test run" of its ability to make US military hardware see hallucinations.

I think that's probably more likely than anything I actually put on the poll.

[Bear]

I included the option of voting for 'visitors from another 'brane' or universe' because I think that's honestly more likely than aliens from another solar system.

We don't know if there are other 'branes' or universes. If there are, we have no indication. We've identified several reasons why a typical 'brane' would not be expected to be life-bearing. We don't have any idea how a journey or translation from one universe to another would be made, or if so, how difficult that would be.

But in light of the Great Silence, even that towering pile of ignorance is more plausible than visitors from another solar system.

Iit's actually easier to believe in interdimensional visitors than interstellar visitors.

[stevebowers]

(B) Pentagon brass duped by internal confusion and inter-branch secrets and rivalries, etc.

This is probably part of the answer. The witnesses seem to be entirely legitimate and honest in these cases, but they are misled by the shortcomings of the equipment, and by human psychology and fallibility.

However this fallibility is compounded by factions within the military and political hierarchy, people who have been misled by people like Elizondo, Reid, Bigelow, Davis and Puthoff, all of whom are encouraging the alien interpretation behind the scenes.

[weirdspecter]

Again, I point to the Great Silence. There's no place they could have come from.

While I do find the Great Silence a compelling notion, I'd hasten to bring up the fact that we've sampled comparatively very little of the observable universe, and we probably don't have the requisite sensitivity to see, say, a civilisation made up of Matrioshka Brains or likely even Dysons. Given modern data encoding and encryption, it's reasonable to assume that, without knowing what to look for, the transmissions and communications of alien civilisations are almost indistinguishable from radio noise. I appreciate your pessimism, but as you say, we shouldn't anthropomorphise nonhuman intelligence: there could be all sorts of reasons they aren't reaching out. Or we might be among the first civilisations to arise in our corner of the universe.

If they really need to send physical probes, they'd be nanotech devices lodged in grains of sand or two-meter rocks etc, that look just like all the other grains of sand and two-meter rocks etc that come from the outer solar system, and they'd hit our atmosphere like all that other stuff does, and we'd never goddamn notice because that happens all the time. Nanotech devices, even just spreading on the wind, can get to see everything and hear everything and sample everything in fairly short order.

This section of your response assumes rather a lot, in my opinion. If Drexleran nanotechnology isn't feasible, for example (or indeed simply more vulnerable to environmental factors than OA canon assumes) there could be good reasons to send macroscale probes from a purely pragmatic perspective. The scheme you propose -- nano- or micro-probes dropped via asteroid impacts -- might simply not be possible, or might be a limited part of their approach to studying our world. This, of course, all assumes there isn't some other motive for this -- which could range from human comprehensible (UFOs are a good soft way to prepare humanity for alien contact, or maybe our hypothetical extraterrestrials are embodied or something) all the way through to things we aren't equipped with the mental architecture to conceive. Or hell, maybe we're on the equivalent of an alien prank show, haha.

I can -- just barely -- entertain the notion of a local Bracewell Probe, but if so, time being what it is, the species that sent it is probably no longer even extant. If it still existed it would be another species - or another several species - by now, and when I say "if it still existed" I point at the Great Silence again. I think the odds aren't good. Also a Bracewell probe is an investment with a hundred-million-year breakeven, at best, and if their economies are anything like ours funding decisions would be weighed against investments with a thirty-year breakeven.

Again, there are a few assumptions here I'd dispute. Firstly, humans don't exclusively do things in accordance with economic timescales of a few decades -- look not only to the great Cathedrals of European history, but also to the acts of charities and even oddballs like the Long Now Foundation for examples of that. In a Sufficiently Advanced civilisation, it doesn't *take* huge investment to build Bracewell Probes. Hell, any Bracewell probes might be the product of a single Soph's garage 3D printer.

The other side of my critique here would be a lot more solid, I feel -- for any interstellar species operating in a Relativistic universe (i.e. assuming no FTL trickery) probably isn't working with Economics As We Know It. Interstellar travel is at best the work of decades, perhaps centuries or even millennia -- meanwhile, it's also likely that civilisations advanced enough to travel between the stars might also possess life extensions technology or even mind uploading, either of which could produce a civilisation very much divorced from five-to-thirty-year economic models. And this is assuming that our current model, primarily a capitalist one, is likely to develop independently among aliens who could, as you admit, be really very different from us. Given the range of economies humans have tried at various technology levels in the past, I'm not sure that that is a given.

In fact, Bracewell Probes' self-replicating abilities suggest an economic approach completely alien to our own. Aside from organic matter, we don't really have many examples of commercial products which can build more of themselves, after all. Any and all bets are off w/r/t feasibility of Bracewell Probes in my opinion. Could be that every other rock in the Asteroid Belt hides a fossilised Bracewell.

I included the option of voting for 'visitors from another 'brane' or universe' because I think that's honestly more likely than aliens from another solar system.

We don't know if there are other 'branes' or universes. If there are, we have no indication. We've identified several reasons why a typical 'brane' would not be expected to be life-bearing. We don't have any idea how a journey or translation from one universe to another would be made, or if so, how difficult that would be.

This is a good point, and one that's often neglected when it comes to discussions of UFOs and suchlike. I could believe such devices originate from elsewhere, in a rather literal sense. Of course, motives remain confusing.

Of course you missed the real Chad option -- that these UFOs are actually far-future post-humans meddling in their ancestors' development .

ROM chip shenanigans?

While I agree that (as much as I'd like to speculate otherwise) the overwhelmingly likely case is that these 'UFOs' are nothing supernatural, I think I actually disagree here. Not a cybersecurity expert, but my instinct is that building malware which can both evade detection *and* respond to some kind of external stimulus to make military-grade equipment hallucinate just seems vanishingly improbable. It also wouldn't explain those sightings where both visual contact has been made by humans, and where these FLIR cameras and whatnot have a reading -- and it would also fail to explain those instances where Radar pings tipped off naval assets to the presence of these UFOs.

My own instinct is that (at least some of) these phenomena are legitimately real, they're just not technological. Like I said, ball lightning, or something. Or if they are technological, they're the results of really quite competent pilots and aviators making some poor assumptions when it comes to their motion (700g accelerations and the like) and are in fact experimental drones of some kind.

Regards,

Lilly.