>"We know a little more about the UFO itself. It is described as “wingless, white, and shaped like an oblong pill. It was 24-30 (40 in the NYT article) feet long and had no visible markings or glass. The USS Princeton was able to faintly track the “capsule” via its SPY-1B radar system, but the fighters were not able to get a radar lock on the object. The “capsule” was not only more maneuverable than the Hornets but also much faster —for it to have reached the CAP point ahead of the Navy fighters it would have had to have flown in excess of 2,400 miles an hour. According to FighterSweep.com, which published a detailed chronicle of the event in 2015, the object did not emit hot jet exhaust typical of ordinary aircraft."
I mentioned another possibility in one of my other comments; a UV laser on a satellite (or some other suitable platform with a view of the entire flight volume, or multiple overlapping platforms) being focused to create a movable plasmaball.
True, it does seem pretty unlikely. But if the reports are in any way accurate, then the explanation will be probably something that seems pretty unlikely.
I think you misunderstood. I was asking if you're looking at infrared view, would you be able to tell a difference between a jet's exhaust and a plasma ball (of a similar size) in a long distance.
I always think to myself that the technology we see and know about now, the spy planes and such, are ~50 years old, so what is operating now that we won't know about until some of us are 70 or 80 years old?
In some cases for things like stealth tech, sure. In most cases though, where there's an obvious commercial aspect to successful research, we see things fast. When there's a military invention that could lead to something like a microwave or nylon the company behind it want to reap billions from selling to the public as soon as possible.
This is one reason why I find stories like this one unlikely. If we assume this object is, say, a Chinese spy drone, why would the Chinese use this amazing new tech for something as mundane and boring as a spy drone? They could turn it in to a commercial engine, mount it on some aircraft, and completely dominate the air travel and air freight. As far as using technology to crush your enemies goes that would have a much greater impact on the US than watching what the country is up to from a drone.
>They could turn it in to a commercial engine, mount it on some aircraft, and completely dominate the air travel and air freight.
It's entirely possible that some novel propulsion technology would only work with extremely light craft under specific conditions, and either couldn't scale to the size of a commercial aircraft, or would be less efficient or cost effective at that scale than existing technology.
Ion propulsion is only useful in space, for instance.
You appear to be making a number of assumptions here which don't actually prove anything, you're just preaching to the choir of UFO believers.
First, that all UFO reports accurately describe craft that defy known physical laws (discarding the likelihood of hoaxes or misidentifications of conventional craft or other phenomena.) The significance of the fraction, in this case, is irrelevant.
Second, that people are able to accurately gauge the size of objects in the sky (they aren't, see phenomenon like the moon illusion as an example of how difficult it is, and how biased human perception can be.) Just because people see a roughly triangular formation of lights in the night sky, doesn't mean there's a vast, football-field sized black triangle hovering over the city.
And you should have said "A significant fraction of reported UFOs appear much, much larger," for your actual comment to be true, we would need examples of actual UFOs to test against the size of conventional jets.
Third, that the phenomenon on the video in the posted article shows a craft which uses the same or a similar form of technology as "much larger" UFOs, and that this somehow invalidates the premise that novel forms of propulsion exist which cannot arbitrarily scale.
Seems unlikely that foreign governments could develop flying craft that violate most of the laws of physics as we understand them as far as momentum, propulsion and a variety other factors are concerned.
Well the Indian Army was very eager to claim they found a Yeti yesterday. People in the military clearly aren't immune to the bullshit propagation syndrome effecting everyone thanks to the news media and social media making Seeking Attention the basis of individual or group relevance.
Expect more bullshit and expect believers in bullshit to be propped up all over the place until the like/upvote/view/click count feedback loop has done enough damage and is dismantled.
I said operating from a submarine because of the reported disturbance in the water. The witnesses said it wasn't one, but if they were seeing other strange things, and not expecting a submarine to be there, then IMO they could easily have been mistaken.
Alternatively, it's all lies. Both those scenarios are IMO more likely that natural phenomena, because there is no other known natural phenomena that moves in any way similar to the reported UFO.
I'm skeptical of the part where it went to the CAP point. First, it was apparently only detected at the CAP point by the USS Princeton, it was gone by the time the jets arrived so we don't have multiple confirmation. But more importantly, how did the craft know to go to the CAP point? Even if the jets were bearing in that direction at the time (and I don't think they were) how would it know the distance to travel? Was it listening in on radio chatter, meaning they have reverse engineered our communications protocols, broken our encryption, and understand enough of our language and technical jargon to determine where to go? Were the exact coordinates of the CAP point even discussed over the radio while in the presence of the craft?
And the whole thing just seems weird to me. If you're an alien vessel visiting our planet, it seems like you're either going to try to make contact, or ignore people and just gather samples. But this? Just sort of bothering the US Navy? You could argue it was gathering samples of ocean water or something. But then why go to the CAP point? That can't be to collect scientific data. And that doesn't make sense as their attempt to contact us. As I mentioned above, they'd have to have a lot of knowledge of our language and communication to know where that point is, which means they know enough to simply make radio contact.
Why though? If you're an advanced race that built a thought-extracting brain scanner specifically for a random race they encountered on a random planet (which it would have to be), is reading waypoints off a random pilot's brain really the best use of that technology?
Why not? Bearing in mind that telepathy is a highly recurrent feature of UFO reports, it seems they already have that capacity (probably not via a gadget either), and it's a case of "if you have a hammer..."
Presumably some or many ufo sightings are highly classified military tests that any random military pilot or radar operator is not ever going know about or even be told about after they sighted it.
Its even possible tests are done knowing other military pilots are in vicinity to guage their reaction to it.
To me this is the simplest explanation (if weather balloons and drones are ruled out).
It would make sense that secretive military aviation projects would purposefully fly near unsecretive unsuspecting military aircraft to determine how detectable they are. It also makes sense that the military would publicly embrace the UFO narrative as a way to continue concealing their secretive projects.
Its also reasonable to understand the desire for people to describe these events in human terms, and ignore the possibility that we are not alone in the universe - especially since their technology appears to be far, far superior to anything we have at our disposal.
However, no such conclusions can be made - either pro- or anti- the "But its Aliens" argument - since the entire subject is couched in dire secrecy, with a lot of people whose lives would change, drastically, if it were the case that these UFO's turn out to be non-human in origin.
The assumption that people's lives would change requires scrutiny. For most I think it would be a promotion of Enquirer headlines to premiere news, but little else. SpaceX would soon become a public company. But what else? Life goes on, unaffected. People still would need to pay their taxes.
Certainly, the rationale for spending $21Trillion on military superiority instead of investing it in a healthy society, would be minimised.
If it turns out that aliens are on the planet and have advanced technology that could ruin us all, maybe the Pentagon and the Kremlin would find a reason to stop starving their own people for the sake of assumed dominance over the planet, and instead unite to either befriend, or defeat, the common alien friend/foe.
One can imagine the reason all of these events are couched in such secrecy might be, indeed, militaristic hubris. Or, in other words, FOMO at a grand scale ..
I don't know if faster-than-light travel would necessarily accompany other technologies indistinguishable from magic.
The Romans were arguably a flash of insight away from the hot air balloon, they had good uses for it and all the prerequisite techs. Analogously, we might be one really good flash of insight away from technology we'll just actually get a thousand years from now. So the aliens could be otherwise on our tech level, but they just figured out warp drive.
Very interesting thought. Imagine optical telegraph relay stations, or scouting with moored hot air balloons. Nothing could probably shoot them down, either.
The need to “defend from aliens” would become the rationale to spend $60T. Oh, and after the money is gone it would turn out there are no aliens after all. Similar to what happened in Iraq.
If intelligent aliens get to our planet and have any kind of aggressive intentions no amount of spending would save us. It means they already have capabilities far beyond what we could achieve in a generation and proved them by just getting to us.
> It means they already have capabilities far beyond what we could achieve
It certainly means that they have those capabilities as pertains to travel, but it is not a given that they would have those capabilities in a military sense. Of course the argument can be made that you can convert that kind of power into a weapon, but I'd hazard to say that a haphazard conversion does not in fact impart upon you a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do.
I'm definitely not arguing that this means we should increase military spending. I think that is fundamentally not a great idea for us in the first place. Instead, I am arguing that while the things you are talking about are widely used as sci-fi tropes and held as beliefs by a lot of people, I do not think they stand on their own merits.
The most deadly terrorist attack on the US used civilian passenger planes. A UFO doesn't need weapons to be massively destructive. E = 0.5 * m * v^2, and UFOs reportedly go a lot faster than a 767. And if they're too agile to shoot down, and never need to land or refuel, that's "a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do".
If you can project an object to another planet in any reasonable span of time, you already have vast military capabilities against that planet. All you have to do is not decelerate.
I think the magnitude of the difference between the opposing parties is a lot greater when it comes to comparing humans to an alien civilization capable of projecting some force light years away from their home in a reasonable amount of time.
It's more like neolithic man meets nuclear submarine... but worse. We have 0 tools at our disposal to fight anything that's farther away than the edge of the atmosphere. "They" can take a few decades to accelerate a really massive "civilization ending" object and slam it into us. It's not like we can go anywhere to avoid it.
Why do you assume these UFOs reached the Earth in a "reasonable" amount of time? The possibility that they were roaming the space for hundreds or even thousands of years before reaching our planet is as reasonable as any other.
Even if an alien civilization finds our planet, I don't see why that would imply we are inside their logistic operational range.
If they're real, and if they have their claimed technology level, why do they only reveal themselves in such a bizarre way? The argument that it's to gradually condition humanity into accepting extraterrestrial life is implausible, because there has been no significant change in their alleged activities for many decades. Why wouldn't they instead plant microbes on Mars, or something like that? They could gradually increase the surprise level until they can reveal themselves openly.
Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense. They're something more like this story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
They could just be making observations and taking measurements. Maybe they don't want to interfere and are more interested in studying our development.
Or maybe they are scouts that were sent all over the cosmos for the purpose of exploration and they will report back their findings to their home eventually.
There are plenty of rational explanations for their behavior, especially if we are extremely far behind them in our technological development.
You make valid points. For a long time I was looking for such answers. Unfortunately, there aren't many clever arguments like yours anywhere outside of HN.
>> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense.
This. If - and that's a big if - we assume previous bizarre aerial activities observed by humans were in fact of ET origin, then it's only natural to think of those ETs more like AI (robots) that don't necessarily share our goal-oriented intelligence, but rather possess higher levels of intelligence and their own agenda. As a result, you're right; we wouldn't even begin to understand their purpose cause theirs just has no counterpart in humans.
Even humans don't always behave in clearly goal-oriented activities. Consider how hard it is to explain practical jokes, religious ritual, or modern performance art. ET intelligence would presumably have equally inscrutable motivations.
Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.
> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
You're assuming that an alien race isn't partisan. Any intelligent alien species intent on harming humans would probably seek to exploit existing weaknesses and increase division. Who's to say they wouldn't ally with the worst humans imaginable in order to prevent humanity coming together in the first place?
So we're using an imaginary alien threat to justify massive military spending while literally destroying billions of dollars by just eliminating it from the economy through stock buybacks.
Fictional times indeed. Just don't think too hard about the money.
I think it would change a lot of people's belief systems in a major way.
E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)
Not just us Catholics; I think the real big takeaway from that article is this: “Three years ago, a paper for the Royal Society found that roughly 90% of believers did not think they would suffer a crisis of faith should intelligent extraterrestrial life be discovered, though two-thirds of them believed other religions would have a crisis.”
Nearly everyone is fine with this idea, but most everyone also thinks people with religious views different than their own will have trouble with it.
> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
The major religions have already shown how they deal with evidence of outside of the garden of Eden. Several don't care, because the garden isn't part of their belief system to start with, and most of the rest have no problem with it (because they don't view the garden as literal), and the remainder just dismiss the evidence and distrust the entire field of science associated with it.
I don't think expanding that to off Earth is likely to change a thing about those responses, though the details of exactly which groups have each response might be a little different (though I suspect not much.)
Expanding on this idea, it is unlikely that another inconsistency between a belief system and reality is going to change a believers mind when there are so many inconsistencies (in every belief system) explained away already. This is the nature of belief - it persists despite all evidence to the contrary, because it is belief, not reason. E.g. belief in flat earth persists, despite all evidence to the contrary.
> For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset.
I don't think it would change anything for them. We're living in a golden age of science, and that did not change anything for them. The existence of aliens would just be one more thing to either reject or literally bedevil.
Or, accept in a greater sense. Like, "God is so great, he created all these planets, and the Garden of Eden is representative of that creation everywhere." That's what I would hope for, anyway. Certainly in the event that the aliens turn out to be ones that do sexual reproduction.
The garden of Eden story isn't even consistent with the other creation story in Genesis, though; if a literalist can accept it as true on faith despite that, they can do so despite any inconsistency with mere sense data, which unlike the conflicting text in the Bible they don't hold to be infallibly accurate as a matter of religious doctrine.
> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
Like they've dealt with every other scientific advancement that killed their beliefs. They will deny it as much and as long as they can until they will be forced to admit it, at which point "god" will shrink to an even meaningful pocket of scientific ignorance. Some of them will keep denying it forever
Occam's Razor. It is likely not aliens and more likely man made because it isn't that advanced compared to what we can currently do. It is like 5 to 10 years ahead of publiclt disclosed tech.
It is either US or Chinese skunkworks and given it was in US airspace I doubt the Chinese would do this. Also it has to be US because otherwise military brass would be freaking out the Chinese are penitrating us airspace with advanced tech.
Thus it is a us skunkworks project.
It is probably just advanced drone techonology. Probably really cool tech.
How is that Occam's Razor? This is the same guesswork as aliens or foreign countries. I just see a lot of people using "Occam's Razor" with their subjective theories and the term is giving me a headache.
It being aliens would require completely rewriting physics as we understand it, because physics as we understand it does not allow for gravity manipulation or FTL.
Occaam's Razor claims that terrestrial technology is more likely than extraterrestrial because it relies on fewer unproven assumptions, namely the existence of extraterrestrial life, its presence on Earth, and everything we know about physics being wrong, despite the math somehow working out to describe the universe incredibly well.
Occam's Razor: postulate as few as possible new entities to explain an event. Aliens causing UFOs not only postulates that aliens exist, but that they're intelligent, and have visited Earth. That's a lot of new entities we have to consider. On the other hand we know foreign governments exist. We know foreign governments test new aircraft. So the only entity we have to assume here is that an aircraft with these properties exists.
That said I think there are other alternatives that are even more likely: that these sightings are sensor malfunctions or natural phenomena that have been blown out of proportion by popular myth and deliberate disinformation -- (which is certainly the case with all other UFO sightings).
If I didn't read the report, I would have thought malfunctioning is the most likely explanation. But an active duty warship's SPY-1 radar, and 6 super hornet's IR sensor pods all malfunctioning at the same time? Unless it's a very sophisticated cyber or electronic attack or really some physical (not just optical illusion) natural phenomenon, that is very, very unlikely to happen. This sophisticated attack or natural phenomenon that let observation on Unidentified Swimming Object and UFO is also unlikely. So, by Occam's Razor, which I still insist is not appropriate assuming the reports are true, that the reports are false, hoax, or disinformation.
The UFOs display fantastical properties that are lightyears ahead of state of the art fighters. I find it a bit hard to believe that some secret project can be that much better than what the public knows without the knowledge leaking somehow.
Fighters are all designed to carry humans. Humans fall unconscious under high G-forces. Imagine a drone fighter. It could turn tighter and accelerate drastically faster than a human-carrying fighter.
The US has lots of boring drones, but perhaps there is a secret drone fighter program. It would surprise me somewhat if the US weren't working on something like this, perhaps with a goal of keeping it secret until it needs to be deployed operationally. Plenty of military technologies have been kept secret for decades, such as the SR-71 and the spy satellites on which the Hubble Space Telescope was based. On that note, did you know that the Hubble was basically an extra spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the US had a fleet of them pointed downwards toward earth? For more on this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
So, consider: what kind of reconnaissance satellites does the US have today, that resulted in the retirement of the "Crystal" series? (Obviously something digital) Did the US's investment in supersonic spycraft end with the SR-71? If the US were going to design such a craft today, would it have a pilot or would it be autonomous?
On the other hand, if this were a top secret US technology, then I suspect all of the people who observed these phenomena would simply have been sworn to secrecy. I doubt it would be treated as a UFO and I doubt these officers would be speaking publicly about it. Unless this is all some kind of cover for the program. Who knows!
The predecessor of the SR-71 first flew in April on 1962, the public announcement was July of 1964. Given how much trouble we've had with our hypersonic research programs over the decades, and the lack of need for it given stealth is more affordable, there might have been some cool stuff, but it's not a practical or likely operational tool.
The first launch of a KH-11 was mid-seventies and subject to a lot of media coverage during the spy trials a few years later. Imagery was leaked during the Reagan admin. We don't need better resolution, we need more coverage.
So IMO our secrets are less about silver-bullet platforms and more about exploits. Exploiting their radars, sensors, communications systems, networks and computers. We don't really need a Mach 5 platform or 1" resolution for anything. It would be neat, but it would be unaffordable to buy and maintain.
It's encouraging that this tech exists, no matter who has it. It's obviously tech--not magic--which means it's based on laws of nature, which means we have some learning to do. I'm confident we'll do that some day soon and that's exciting.
I certainly hope so. A black budget allocation syphoning from a legitimate project of dubious progress is actually more comforting than the alternative of financial malfeasance and design/engineering/fabrication management incompetence.
You reminded me of a quote my father once told me: "I fully expect to see UFOs in the future, and they'll be real. They'll also have USAF emblems on the side."
For decades, he worked as a civil servant in the DoD as an instrumentation and test engineer on a few well known weapons programs (and some not so much). I think he based his comment on the trajectory military technology was taking, as he commented similarly to you (referring to Pyxl101) regarding the human problem. i.e. if you remove the humans, you can save weight on life support, and you can do things you otherwise can't when you're limited to keeping the pilot alive and (mostly) functioning.
Part of me wants to believe he might've seen what we'd now call UFOs, but I'm confident that's wishful thinking. His remarks were offered based on his own experiences, and I'm sure he extrapolated from there. Regardless, I wouldn't be surprised if some of your predictions did turn out to be true in the near future.
Your last statement also reminded me of Project Mogul[1] and the use of UFOs as a cover story (or rather not, as the case might be). In all likelihood, the Roswell "UFO crash" was an errant Mogul balloon--a project shrouded in secrecy to some degree or another, mostly because we knew the Soviets had stolen our technology but we didn't want them to know we had ways of detecting their tests. I don't believe the USAF instigated the UFO theory, and neither do I believe the air force particularly cared. After all, if I understand the timeline correctly, it wasn't until the mid/late 1970s when the UFO researcher Stanton Friedman began perpetuating the myth, long after the actual event in 1947. As a cover story, that would've come far too late to be useful enough to cover for Project Mogul. To an extent--at least in the early days--I suspect early UFO "research" was largely the outcome of a means to pursue fame or money via book sales and speaking engagements more than a theory perpetuated by the government.
Now, that's not to say that the government isn't using it now that UFOs have long been established in popular culture. That may very well be a strong possibility.
Aside: I once attended a talk with my father that Mr. Friedman gave in the 1990s on UFOs. I also recall Friedman was made somewhat uncomfortable with the fact my father was not only aware of Project Blue Book but had access to the archives when he was at the air force academy. The brief exchange between the two was made when Mr. Friedman asked the audience if anyone had heard of the project and were familiar with (IIRC) volume 13.
Friedman quickly changed subjects away from "government cover up" for reasons that escape me. :)
That's a little misleading. Acceleration hasn't any effects on human body. You can't sense gravity: free fall is the same as ingravity. What you can feel is forces being transmitted by matter contact.
If you can create a field that transmits a force similar to gravity uniformly, there would be no pressure.
It's not misleading. The high G-forces are transmitted by matter contact. Can you think of a way to accelerate a person at greater than 1G without contact with something made of matter?
Could you submerse a human in a tank of water? I've heard that acceleration in water will be experienced as water pressure.
That would be pretty bulky and costly to include in an aircraft cockpit, but I wonder if it would solve the G-force problem.
I'm not sure if this would actually be better, though. 7 Gs of acceleration would be experienced as 7 bar pressure, equivalent to water pressure at 60 meters underwater, which is quite deep. Rapid changes in pressure between 1 bar and let's say 7 bar would probably be more uncomfortable to experience than regular G-forces.
I try not to assume bad faith in your responses, but you're making it very difficult. My original comment was very clear that it was assuming a technology that we don't currently own. And then you put arbitrary restrictions to the conjecture to force it wrong.
Now you're moving again goal posts just "to be right". That's incredibly childish.
Of course you haven't adressed my core point, possibly because you can't understand it.
Edit: try stating my point and we'll see what's on your mind.
I don't mind being wrong (I like learning!), and "winning" is not my goal here. I don't believe that I'm moving goal posts or being childish, and so it seems like we're inadvertently talking past each other.
I believe your core point is that humans can't detect a force which acts identically on their whole body. Have I understood? This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context, as it seems to ignore all but the one sentence you quoted, which itself is true in its own context. I don't consider Pyxl101's ignoring of magical-seeming hypothetical technology to be misleading.
Pyxl101's comment [1], which you replied to, is all about practical technology. In that context, your comment seems like an irrelevant technicality (I think this is why you got downvoted), as no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact, which transfers force unevenly (just to the parts of the body in contact with the vehicle).
I believe your core point is that humans can't detect a force which acts identically on their whole body.
More than "detect", a uniform force simply doesn't affect us.
This statement is true, of course, but does not seem relevant in context...
On the contrary, the thread was started discussing if we could be facing a far superior technology, continued by Pyxl101 speculating UFOs could be drones because enormous accelerations prevent manned ships, and then I pointed that, if it's really a futurist technology, acceleration in itself could not be a problem.
... no practical mode of transport can move someone without physical contact
The "practical" thing has been inserted by yourself. Also it's not about "practical" it's about "known by us".
The kickoff point for your comment was about G-forces. In that context, "acceleration" is clearly felt acceleration in your local reference frame, not a free-falling acceleration relative to an outside observer. The scenario of falling into the Sun is clearly irrelevant. Then you want to accuse mkl of moving the goalposts and adding arbitrary conditions? You're the one running around with the goalposts.
well the alcubierre drive (which is purely speculative math around negative energy, not something that can be engineered) should move mass without accelerating it.
Exactly. This was a reasonable explanation for the first major wave of sightings in 1947, or even the WW2 foo fighters, but by now it would require such secret advanced technology to have remained black and un-reproduced for several decades.
This is the simplest explanation, indeed. In fact UFO sightings sharply increased starting in the 1940s which corresponds exactly to the period when military aviation research and experimentation took off.
Though of course a lot of those sightings also consisted of objects which supposedly resembled saucers, which matched media mischaracterisations of a particularly famous UFO sighting and an older trend in pulp sci-fi...
(I quite like the idea of aliens drawing ideas from their spacecraft from our popular culture as a storyline, but not as an explanation for the phenomena!)
And, prior to the meme of the "flying saucer," UFO sightings often involved airships[0].
And stories of abduction by aliens often involved those aliens claiming to be from Mars or Venus before it was commonly known that those planets didn't harbor life, much less advanced civilizations.
And the archetypal "grey alien" didn't really become the template for modern alien abduction stories until Whitley Strieber popularized them in a book - many descriptions of alien encounters until that point were of "Nordic" human type aliens.
So yeah, either aliens are being careful not to appear more advanced than popular culture would allow (maybe to the point of appearing as angels and demons to humans when their view of reality was entirely dominated by religion and not science) or much of the UFO phenomenon is basically a meme.
It seems much more likely that these assumed acts of God were a misunderstood natural phenomenon rather than extraterrestrial beings who we have yet to capture on camera. Considering how closely the depictions of the event match pictures of sun dogs leaves it as the most reasonable solution.
Another explanation, which would fit with current developments, might be that these are computer-generated artifacts.
Increasingly, the picture we are being shown is generated by processing raw sensor data - for example, just compare raw (or partially processed) weather radar data to the processed maps you see in forecasts. Two recent trends -- the synthesis of views from multiple sensors of different types, and their presentation as virtual reality -- have come together in devices such as the F-35 Helmet-Mounted Display [1]. I would guess that this level of interpretation of data and synthesis of images presents an increased scope for artifact generation, and the presentation makes it seem more real.
IIRC, some SR-71 crews had a hobby of local newspapers on towns they usually flew over, to see which ones reported UFO sightings the day after the missions.
This is probably due to the rise of automated vehicles but not for the reasons you'd think. I've dealt with the problem of automated contact aquisition and tracking, esp with Radar, and let me tell you: fast tracks moving at insane speeds with sometimes-faint signatures are the norm. a perfectly calm sea, esp near shore, can create 100s or a 1000 spurious tracks if automated tools are trusted. The incorrect association of signatures to hypothesized contacts can produce "jumps" in their location, altitude that makes it look like inhuman maneuverability.
Second, the proliferation of small aircraft does bias operators (and algorithms) to assume a real contact from small signatures, esp at low altitudes where noise is greatest.
In a well integrated, multi-vehilce sensor network, a small false positive rate for each individual recognition and classication module produces enough bullshit to trick automated trackers into labelling targets. If we cant assume common sense filtering like "aircraft cant go from hover to mach 3 in one sweep", then the possible associations of sensor data to hypotheses is astronomical, and bullshit propegates.
Its a mess when you integrate so many sensors and systems and try to make sense of the resulting noise.
Thought experiment. If we assume that "alien intelligence is here" in some form like UFO sightings, why not also assume they are on the internet?
I believe someone would learn so much more about us from reading wikipedia, than flying a UFO above north carolina at 90k feet. No?
And if they mastered long-distance space flight and life discovery, what stops them from reverse-engineering how to connect to an unprotected starbucks guest wifi. Or even posting here like you and me sometimes do.
Do you think they would be more perplexed by the stuff we do to each other in real life (micro; prisons, crime, violence. and macro; governments, military, borders). Or with the way we treat each other on line? (scams, trolls, harassment, narcissism, mistreating privacy data)
Not many people assume they're "here" to begin with, but yes, if anyone is here it makes sense to scour the internet. Evaluating the data might be more difficult for them than we think though. Physically connecting to the net may be the easiest problem to overcome. Depending on how they perceive time, and how fast their cognition and data mining is, distilling meaningful information could be a long and arduous process.
How perplexing of an experience it is would depend on their own history and value systems. If they think we're nice, we're in trouble.
Per UFOlogy, they also have telepathy. Internet connection would pale in comparison, they can just scoop an understanding of us en-masse straight out of our heads. Technology wouldn't take long to interpret. Secrets and motivations would be an open book. Figuring how to do anything useful with the resulting mess would probably be the biggest problem.
I'm actually sort of interested in what it's like to be a human in entirely different circumstances and culture, such that one's mindset is dictated every minute by considerations completely foreign to me.
But realistically, once the novelty wears off, it's probably back to ‘how do get through this day.’ History and old art tend to illustrate that people's everyday nature wasn't much strange to ours.
No, it's the thought most people have about having all of their email scanned whether that's a govt or a corp, "nothing interesting here, so feel free wasting your time".
If we were ever to intercept an alien television signal (or some version of that), I wonder if we would be able to discern what's entertainment and what's a news broadcast/documentary on their world? Perhaps they may mistake some of our SciFi films as reality on Earth?
Well the thing with flying overhead is that you see reality without interpretation, mindset filters or other kinds of viral intellectual memes that could jump from Earth cognitive Sphere to alien cognitive space.
Now when you talk to humans or worse connect to the internet, you get directly dirty with high bandwidth meme transfers. That's really really dangerous for aliens.
I definitely buy the core the thesis of HyperNormalisation, but I find it equally likely the CIA/deepstate would push a narrative that all those UFOs that started popping up right around the time we were getting nuclear off the ground was totally just the super awesome USA government's super secret technology.
Yeah--that after discarding the alien theory people gravitate to US technological tests is pretty flattering to a government that spent record-setting amounts of money on the F-35.
Is this video legit? Why are they turning the same direction constantly?
Are most of these UFO sightings witnessed by a pilot and co-pilot? Is radar data recorded so it can be replayed later?
The skeptic in me thinks these experiences might seem ‘real’ but aren’t. If there is some measurable and documented proof then there can be an investigation.
Many wrongly think UFOs being equivalent to alien flying saucers. No, it is an unidentified object, which means that they can be a bird or a plane, until it's identified.
I know this won't satisfy anyone, but I've followed this subject for years with varying degrees of interest / belief.
Someone close to me is former military whose position required a top secret clearance. The work that they did involved analyzing various forms of SIGINT.
After years of me prying, this person admitted to me:
1. Within the Navy (and presumably other armed forces) the UFO stuff is an open secret.
2. The 'official line' used internally is that the craft are extraterrestrial (or at least origin unknown), and ...
3. They're official labelled drones, i.e., there is no reason to believe that they're "manned"
In other words, it's fairly well known within the military (at least where people are likely to encounter them) and the official position is somewhere along the lines of "they're here but not here".
Personally I've never seen anything I'd label a UFO. But the prevailing narrative -- uptick in UFO sightings following the Manhattan Project, interest in our weapons / energy capabilities -- I'm 100% comfortable with.
If it is a military psy-op, it's one playing out on a massive scale over a vast timeframe. That in and of itself is mind boggling.
Am a former military intelligence officer of an MNNA nation, had SIGINT and VISINT postings during my career including in the aerospace command which is integrated with the national air and strategic missile defence systems and while we could track loose bird flocks with OTH Radar probably as far as the Indian subcontinent we've never seen aliens.
Don't get me wrong some of these are really fucked up and can't be dismissed as a weather balloon or a sensor error easily, but saying that UFOs are an open secret is simply wrong.
So either the US is unique in the of attention they get or that UFOs ignore the area between the Straights of Gibraltar and the Straights of Aden like a plague which would also contradict the first assumption given the sheer number of US assets in the area.
Having people confirm or deny such allegations doesn't really mean anything anymore.
If "they" do exist, have enough technology to travel to this planet, control somewhat stealthy drones in our atmosphere which are detected every so often,
And don't want to interfer publicly with humanity as proven by their lack of public appearances...
Honestly, it's just beyond unlikely. But if they did exist: what does it matter? We wouldn't be able to do anything about it so worrying about them is pointless
It's not about denying that UFOs exists or that they are non-terrestrial in origin but rather about the notion that UFOs are an open secret in the military which is simply laughable, getting security clearance isn't particularly difficult in the US military if you serve long enough you'll likely to get it.
However simply having a clearance isn't the same as being read into a specific program, security clearance just means you can be trusted with secret information it does not grant you access to all classified information matching your clearance.
There are 100,000's of radio and radar operators and while a lot of them seen some shit in their life they aren't come out in droves saying yeah the USAF or NAVY thinks knows about UFOs and they are definitely real.
Like seriously just think about how many sailors have rotated in and out of CIC duty on say an Arleigh Burke class missile destroyer each of which has probably some of the most advanced tracking radar and sensors developed and they aren't tracking UFOs periodically and when they do they sure as hell aren't treating them as LGM.
It's not a psy-op, we have strange videos recorded by military cameras.
I'm quite skeptical about alien-natured UFOs, but some videos are just too crazy. Like that tracking video of an object flying really fast and then going under water without slowing down.
I feel like a lot of the people commenting on this thread would really benefit from reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan (who was himself once a UFO believer).
He has a really good section on UFO sightings, which he compares to stories about abduction by demons from Medieval times.
His main explanation for the increase in UFO stories in the second half of the 20th century is the decline in other forms of abduction myths, like the demon one. People report seeing what they're expecting to see based on the stories they've been exposed to.
The massive increase in aircraft obviously helped too.
Look it’s the greatest reality show ever. Sometime in the future we invent time travel and we send drones back to look at stuff. People have found them and decided, “hey, this obviously works let’s ‘invent’ it.”
So of course they cover it up, they don’t want competition, for the idea they stole, from the future.
Just assume time travel is possible, what makes more sense, traveling back to our own planet or some other super advanced civilization inventing FTL, finding us, and giving a shit to buzz around and mess with us?
Who doesn’t want a sweet 21st century photo to post on future Instagram!
I would really like to believe in alien spacecraft. But so far the only "evidence" I've ever seen has been incredibly poor quality images and video that could be pretty much anything as far as I can tell.
Anyway I believe that people may sometimes see something, but its much more likely its secret military aircraft. But if there was a good recording of something really fantastical then maybe.
Also, Newsweek is the kind of publication that happily publishes whatever the military asks them to.
There are few very high profile UFO cranks, Sen. Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow, who give support for these narratives in the US and are able to lobby government money for UFO issues.
That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story that nobody else in the scene saw the same way. It was not seen as worth of report or anything. One airman in the videos even says "It's a drone".
>That whole 2004 incident with a video is just one man's story
This Newsweek article quotes Gary Voorhis, whereas the pilot in previous reports was Dave Fravor.
“At a certain point, there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking,” Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, stationed aboard the Princeton missile cruiser escorting the USS Nimitz, testified. “They all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”
I've seen this and similar videos before. They're presented usually without any context or commentary. In particular I've only ever seen heard people describing what they see live on the infrared camera display, not via eyeballs or other sensors.
By my eyeballs this looks like a CMOS or whatever sensor clipping or processing artifact caused by sunlight glint on the camera housing dome. Google "blackmagic black sun" for a visible light example -- it happens and looks like an issue fixable (or caused) in software.
The white extensions beyond the black blob are where the glinting is below the over-powering threshold. The "rotation" is where the camera and/or dome are rotating relative to the sun as the aircraft orientation changes and cleaning/buffing streaks in the dome are picking up the glint. The camera is clearly not pointing directly forward/aft during the footage, but I'm not sure where it is pointing.
Note how the object stays dead-center below the tracking annotations -- autotracking is good, but I'm not sure it is that good, which again makes me think that the location is determined by camera geometry and is not something flying outside the aircraft.
"@$^#& Glar you were seen by one of their primitive aircraft! Quick, get on thier communication network and claim it's lens flairs and cmos artifacts!"
I feel like a caveman looking at a modern aircraft. There's no reference whatsoever to associate to with that UFO's observed maneuvers... or it could be a distortion of infrared spectrum due to something else.
They are so blatantly trespassing US airspace is very unnerving. It means either doesn't care about being shot down, or simply doesn't think it would happen. For the god sake, we couldn't even identify what this thing is.
I won't believe they are real aliens until they post in Hacker News.
In reality how would we even know they are aliens? If you are an advanced race, you would have the technology to either hide your presence or affect the human identification in some way. If you didn't care if humans saw you, why not show up in Times Square? Why would you only show up in the US and only in ways no one but the military or government can see?
Have you seen Star Trek? The federation exploration missions usually seek to speak first with the leaders and minimize their involvement with civilizations that haven’t matured enough. Not that they don’t still screw it up sometimes.
Too many variables for Occam’s razor to be applied to that question.
They could be as fallible as an emotional being might be and yet generally with benign, exploratory and diplomatic intentions as the federation in Star Trek.
They’re merely adhering to the “most powerful” government’s diplomatic requirements. You know, because they met the US first by chance.
Maybe they operate on a different time scale, fully intend to make contact but experience tells them that it’s better to take it slow. There could be any number of reasons.
The space nerd in me says, yes, maybe it's time. Maybe the Fermi paradox is about to be resolved. Maybe we're "just" seeing drones, but at least we're seeing something.
However, the realist in me has lots of reasons to doubt all aspects of this reporting - and it's a good default strategy, especially when things seem too "good" or to spectacular to be true.
In any case, there is not really a lot to go on. Even if this went properly public, what exactly does the data say?
And coming back to the space nerd perspective, if these sightings are indeed extraterrestrial, they don't seem to bode well. Why would someone show off like that but don't leave a message? It's because they either don't care that we see them or because they want us to know that they're more advanced.
I just hope our civilization hasn't yet reached a threshold of development where another civilization considers rubbing us out as a preventative measure.
Yikes, we'd be so screwed. Although from the reasons outlined in the book, I think it makes it very unlikely that actual aliens would come to the planet and look around before doing anything. They would probably just kill us from light years away.
Something massless (like the dot of a laser pointer against the wall). Something slinking around the laws of relativity / inertia by moving the grid, not the object on the grid, Alcubierre warp style.
Or the textbooks are wrong (it wouldn't be the first time).
Before you ask why something appears to break the laws of physics, you should first ask whether it's likely you truly understand what classified, cutting edge military technology is capable of. Remember that the SR-71 Blackbird was developed in the 1960s, and it seems advanced even today.
Is it only the US that’s detecting this stuff? That’s a very important question IMO because it might provide some insight into its origin (terrestrial or otherwise) depending on the answer.
I'm too lazy for citations, but these are detected around the world. There's been military footage released from South America (Brazil I think?), Russia and many others. I've also heard that other militaries don't have the same stigma against UFOs that the US does, given our tangled history with Project Blue Book, experimental aircraft testing and the cold war.
A side note to this is the flak the Indian army got this week for proclaiming they found evidence of a Yeti in the discovery of giant tracks through the mountain snow.
Too simplistic reasoning here,if aliens are actually here, motivation and drive could also be completely alien to us. Toying with hardware near some primitive military infrastructure could be just about anything, tests for an invasion or maybe they are just collecting samples from the jets exhaust or anything
For people who don't believe in UFOs - surely you've got to admit that there's something pretty odd about detailed descriptions of flying machines ("Vimanas") being written about thousands of years ago by the Indians in the Mahabarata?
If these things are real, and they aren't a secret US Military/R&D project, it sounds like American air superiority has come to an end and things are going to get real interesting in the next major conflict.
Americans can still have their air superiority over other humans - maybe the aliens will just stand by and watch while we destroy each other in the next conflict. With such technology one can imagine they'd have the best seat in the house for such a show...
The US spends more on defence than the next 10 countries combined and hosts many of the brightest aerospace engineers in the world. I’m not saying what you’re suggesting isn’t possible, but with those numbers stacked against them, it would be a very lucky innovation. And how kind of them to test their technology on US military instead of their own military in private...
likely earthlights...little understood plasma/ball lightning phenomenon...they can move very fast at times...my aunt (a former bank VP) saw one in san antonio decades ago...in her kitchen...
Are we saying that the military can't shoot down some prototype that some company is trying to show off? If so, then I would suggest the demo was a success.
What if some of these are optical effects? Like sunlight glinting off water or windshield? The "bright spot" can move from one position in the field of view to another with enormous apparent velocity, because there is no large distant physical object moving about.
I wouldn't discount atmospheric effects that we haven't seen much yet. Or at least not with high enough frequency to understand their origins and behavior.
I'm thinking of some form of ball-lightning, a self-contained plasma. It's still an unexplained phenomenon with a history of observation (or multiple phenomena classified under one label).
A self-contained plasma could very much be opaque/reflective for radar (depending on the plasma frequency) and also emit light. Maybe it'll even be absorptive to some of the active radars trying to paint it, making some of the involved airplane and ship radars actually stabilize and guide the phenomenon (e.g. it 'escaping' as soon as a painting radar gets closer).
Lots of maybes but infrequent natural phenomena that cannot be easily observed with human senses and where humans usually don't go are still a valid hypothesis in my opinion.
IDK, but whenI hear "moves with ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories, with no visible means of propulsion"; then my first thought is that seems more akin to lens flare than it seems like an aeroplane.
Which is more likely in Occam's razor: a new source of refracted light, or a new kind of aircraft?
This has been going on for a very long time. Peter Jennings did a famous UFO documentary in 2005 that's worth watching. It goes into decades worth of reports.
Until a UFO crash lands on my front garden, I'm going to continue worrying about; weird weather, extinction of species, privacy and data leaks, increasing restrictions of freedom by western governments and the price of a loaf of bread.
I would vote for you to worry about increasing restrictions of freedom by governments outside of the west, since the overton window for acceptable policy proposals will be pushed on by what other nations get away with.
If China succeeds in monitoring all of their citizens and manipulating them into an easy to govern mass of conformity and subservience through their social credit system, it seems highly likely that that will at least make people in the west slightly more willing to move in that direction than if the whole world would just agree that it was far beyond the pale.
If that social credit bullshit makes its way here, they'll be prying the last bit of freedom out of my cold, dead hands. I don't give a fuck about China or what those clowns believe in, and if I'll have to risk never visiting their cement and plastic factory of a shit hole country, it'll be just fine. I'm never going there with their social credit system, and I bet you all the world's money isn't either. No one is giving up that much freedom when they're getting so little in return. It's absurd to anyone that doesn't understand why it's in place, and once the generations that originated it based on the ugliness of the recent past, the truth is that it'll go away over and over again. That, combined with the fact that it's such a fragile system to begin with (i.e., it takes quite a bit of human involvement to run all aspects of it including policing and interrogation and incarceration) means that the system can't survive a generational divide.
That would be a straightforward way to know the truth. But it can take a long time until a UFO would crash in someones front garden, if they are real.
An alternative path is to use the inductive research process. In this process, we assume that testimonies are reports of real encounters with Unconventional Flying Objects. These objects flying in our atmosphere must respect the law of physics that we know very well. Could we deduce their propulsion mechanism from the collected data ?
This is the research path followed by the physic professor Auguste Meessen since 1972. The result is the pulsed electromagnetic propulsion system (PEMP) that requires an intense alternating magnetic field. He also suggest a new type of oscillator that can produce this intense field. The outer shell of the UFO must be supraconductive at room temperature and above. The side effect is that it isolate the object and the passegers from the intense field. This theory still needs experimental validation.
Since humans don’t master supraconductivity at room temperature, it would be a strong hint that UFOs are from ET origin.
This is just to remind that ufology can be matter of scientific research and that we don’t have to captured a UFO to start studying it.
Maybe at the level of viruses/bacteria, but even something like Dutch elm disease (fungus) or something macro like an insect that finds itself accidentally over-adapted compared to native species could be devastating.
It's always a good time. I am honestly suprised there is not a remake. But with the cape-fest spewing from hollywood right now, perhaps it should wait a bit longer.
1) Stuff recorded on people's phones is going to have poor resolution, particularly at night when anything but the most cutting edge phone cameras produce a grainy mess.
2) The military is not going to give you full-resolution video, they keep secrets like that reflexively.
If UFO's were "real" (as in actual aliens or other amazing things) then I would have expected a vast increase in footage and photos over the last five years as cameraphones and dash cams became pervasive. This has happened for "fireballs" and meteors - lots of amazing dashcam footage from Siberia and Canada and so on.
There are an absolute heap of videos. Mostly of lights at night when phone cameras are weak, or dots high in the sky, but still. Go look on the MUFON site.
Meteors have the showmanship advantage of being big, bright, high, and visible from a very large area.
Both meteors and UFOs have the problem of "whoa what was that, didn't have time to get my camera out". UFOs additionally have the problem of "too amazed to act".
Expecting life on other planets can be justified that way. Expecting intelligent life can be weakly justified, it only happened once here and seems to involve a lot of fluke. Expecting UFOs can't rest on that argument alone - you'd need new physics to get from any A to any B at an interstellar level and even more new physics to pull right-angle turns at high mach numbers in an atmosphere.
You don't know that. Maybe there were super intelligent lizards before us. Lets not be ridiculous. We can't even know if it is a current situation because anthropomorphic ideas and agendas (or even timeframe) do not necessarily reflect other life forms - maybe fungi is already connected to other dimensions like in recent star track episodes ?
There is also thinking that merging pre-mitochondria with bacteria into more complex cell giving birth to complex multicelular life was singular event on this planet and so must be very rare, but its unpprovable really and even if true just lowers the odds.
> you'd need new physics to get from any A to any B at an interstellar level and even more new physics to pull right-angle turns at high mach numbers in an atmosphere.
Really ? Aliens having totally different understanding on universe and tech then us sounds amazing ? Just if you had a time machine and get back lousy couple centuries would make us look like aliens.
>> Intelligent life happened here, it must happen again somewhere else. This should be made axiom really. You/we/whatever is not unique in the universe.
We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis (let alone artifacts from that process leading to intelligent life). If it is sufficiently improbable -- 1 / 10^22 per star[0] -- it may very well be that we are the only ones in the observable universe.
The universe is pretty darn big, but life is also pretty darn complex, and its emergence from amino acids and "simple" organic chemistry is not very well understood. Unless the factors of abiogenesis are sufficiently well known, we shouldn't make such predictions either...
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[0]: once per (100 * 10^9 stars in the galaxy times 100 * 10^9 galaxies per hubble volume).
Yah, cell machinery is also complex yet it emerged number of times independently on this planet alone (convergent evolution).
> We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis
Abiogenesis is only one way to look at it. What about intelligent design ? Probability it is relevant is 100%, given that humans are one of those IDs already (created polio virus).
So again, most are having tunnel vision about this topic given our constraints and limitations on this planet.
Ah, I see, abiogenesis is "tunnel vision", but unjustified belief in a deus ex machina which designed life is somehow enlightened...? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence of god, therefore I don't have any confidence in the flying spaghetti monster.
>> Yah, cell machinery is also complex yet it emerged number of times independently on this planet alone
That's not even wrong. I don't even know where to begin refuting this claim -- so I just leave it there.
Sometimes it would do us some good to accept the fact that we just don't know it (yet). Yet alone considering the philosophical consequences of ID: who designed the designers? How did the first designers emerge? What were they made of (considering that the chemical abundance of the galactical environment was heavily skewerd towards lighter elements 4.5 Gy ago)?
In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution.
You are confusing ID with creationism. The later is one foolish and easily refutable variant of ID akin to Santa and other fairy tails.
> There is no evidence of god, therefore I don't have any confidence in the flying spaghetti monster.
Comparing life to another life is not the same as comparing life to superbeings.
> who designed the designers?
That is irrelevant for this topic. It didn't stop people researching big bang, did it ?
> In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution
In the meantime, understand it doesn't have to be allmighty :) It can simply be another advanced enough life (remember that one about advanced tech compared to magic?). The topic is about UFOs, not about origin of life or origin of origin of origin ... of life.
It's possible foreign drones might be speedy. It's implausible for them to be speedy with no visible Stonking Big Flame out the back. It's also implausible for them to accelerate really suddenly or submerge underwater without harm.
What if it’s a hack? Get the enemy to think they’re seeing UFOs and maybe they’ll slip up on “mundane” foreign planes? Not a huge effect but it might only need to work once.
But the news of water ice on titan - and a huge band of it - makes me wonder if life hasn’t spawned twice (at least) in the solar system.
Well a nuclear sub might have the power needed. Still insane though. :) Probably you would need several lasers too, intersecting where you want to have the plasma ball.
The femtosecond mini plasma holograms are cold enough (on average) to touch - Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Aerial and Volumetric Graphics Rendered by Focused Femtosecond Laser Combined with Computational Holographic Fields - https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06668
Decide for yourself what you think is being shown there. Okay, ready? This is what the picture I just linked actually shows: I googled "grainy photo" and then "first photo ever taken" to get the grainiest one ever. I don't know if it's the first one ever taken, but this photo is one of the oldest ones we have. "Taken in 1824, it shows the view outside of a window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes France."
I expected UFO buffs to fill in the picture with their own narrative. In reality I selected the picture literally only for its graininess. I was showing that you can read a great deal into tiny grainy images.
Pareidolia is a thing and so is its modern cousin "over-zoomed pixels that seem to make a shape".
The Nimitz videos are a relatively rare category, though, instrument-first observation. Most UFOs are observed with human eyes. Which have good resolution and good light level compensation.
Come on. How is USS Princeton video not already debunked and classified as optical effect in camera? If you look at it, you can see how the "UFO" rotates at rate ~2x faster than the camera, which implies some reflection is happening. If it was an actual object, why would its rotation be coupled to the sensor recording the video?
Through the meshed radar, conceivably. You wouldn't expect it to affect the FLIR (which is displaying a sensor's input, not a tactical view) or to have an effective "position" in space.
If it's an image from a radar sensor then it still could be a software bug because the raw data has to be processed somehow and an image generated from it.
Complex software systems can have quite bizarre bugs when they interact with each other.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a14456936/that-tim...