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Ask HN: What is the likely explanation about military UFO sightings?

by desertraven on 4/20/23, 4:00 AM with 19 comments

• by retrocryptid on 4/20/23, 4:14 AM

  Some of the UAPs/UFOs I saw in the Navy footage looked like internal reflections or lens flare to me. There was some context given about airspeed, turn rate, etc. that made that plausible.

  But not all of them seemed consistent, so maybe there are LGMs out there.

  As a physics student the axiomatic assertion that the universe is rational, observable and repeatable was hammered into my head. Maybe it's not. If the universe has some bits that aren't repeatable, it's interesting, but it's not physics. So who knows?

  Perhaps it's just Pere Ubu playing a joke on us all.

  But it is interesting that as soon as everyone was carrying cameras around in their pockets, the number of UFO and Cryptid sightings went waaaay down. I kind of miss Nessie, Sasquatch and the Little Green Men. Fie on you, mobile phones vendors, for making a world where camera-shy Fay and ABCs and aliens no longer show themselves to tripping teens and long-haul truckers on lonely stretches of I-80 under the inky black sky.

• by markus_zhang on 4/20/23, 3:14 PM

  My dream tells me they are ancient aliens exiled to earth and lived at bottom of ocean for millenials.

  They are basically stuck on Earth due to lack of a special fuel that allows them to jump start inter-galactic engine so they can only slip out of ocean once for a while and wander in the Sun system.

  They are using us as covers as it is difficult to do a remote scan from their galaxy and pinpoint a small colony under sea and surfaced by a sort of primitive Human society. And it is too costly and agianst the rule to send a fleet to do a close by investigation so their enemies either have not found them yet or decided to drop the issue.

  To make us better cover they periodically send dreams of wonders, usually scientific or religious information, to gifted humans during night. Most of the scientific "discoveries" throughout the history were injected by them.

• by awb on 4/20/23, 4:19 AM

  Probably not aliens. The idea of them traveling massive distances and being slightly observed but never fully observed defies the odds.

  Possible explanations: light, reflections, lasers, weather phenomenon, weather balloons, secret military tech, eye witness hallucinations (exhaustion, drugs, optical illusions, etc.), radar malfunctions, and hoaxes.

  I remember there was a pilot who observed the “tic tac” UFO that said him and his buddies used to fly at night and turn on their lights while making a rapid maneuver and laugh when the UFO reports came in. Because from certain angles and evasive maneuver looks completely stationary followed by an other worldly rapid acceleration. But it’s all optical illusion and observer perspective.

  You can believe whatever you wish, but I’m willing to remain skeptical until there’s more definitive evidence.

• by jemsot2 on 4/21/23, 12:09 PM

  I am surprised no one has mentioned Mick West - https://www.youtube.com/@MickWest.

  He was a video game developer that worked for Neversoft. He has the website https://www.metabunk.org/home/

  I think that he goes into great detail on what the most recent US Navy releases are, the pyramid shaped drowns are actually stars being affected by bokeh.

  The famous "gimbal" UFO is actually just another plane and the image is affected by lensing effects.

  Although I then have the additional question - if it was so quickly debunked by these debunkers - why does the US Navy think they are sighting pyramid shaped drones flying over the pacific ocean?

  Is it that they lack the knowledge to id these things - or is it a part of some physiological warfare?

• by tkiolp4 on 4/20/23, 8:11 PM

  They are playing the distraction game. So, something more important is happening now, but “they” want to shift the focus to somewhere else.

• by cratermoon on 4/21/23, 2:14 AM

  Military pilots are trained to interpret their instruments and sensors in very specific ways that relate to combat information. Those instruments and sensors are, in turn, designed to collect and present readings in very specific ways. Both the human pilots and the devices they use are imperfect and subject to both systematic and random errors. Much of the data in the purported sighting incidents falls into the area where both instrument and pilot are outside their designed regime. In those places, things with perfectly normal explanations are subject to mis-interpretation. One example I'm aware of is claims of a some object rolling and turning in what appear to physically extreme, if not impossible, ways, turns. out to be explained by noting that the artifacts like diffraction spikes follow the changes in the direction of the light source relative to the observer and instrument, as the device slews through its range of motion.

• by krapp on 4/20/23, 7:01 PM

  Basically as far as I can tell a group of UFO believers within the Pentagon has been gaslighting and grifting the government to divert funds and resources away from surveillance for mundane threats like drones and spy balloons, in order to search for alien spacecraft[0]. The media, being the media, conflated numerous disparate conspiracy theories and stories into a vague quasi-narrative about tic-tacs and anti-gravity patents[1]. The government UAP hearing[2] wasn't the "disclosure" UFO believers wanted it to be, but the hype and speculation fueled the craze nonetheless. Finally the arc culminated with the Chinese spy balloon incident which people believed was secretly some kind of war between the government and alien spacecraft[3], but which turned out to be... a Chinese spy balloon and a whole lot of nothing. I think they shot down some kid's science project or something.

  So yeah. It wasn't aliens. It's never aliens.

  (puts on sunglasses)

  or so they say.

  [0]https://nypost.com/2023/03/21/ufo-believing-pentagon-bosses-...

  [1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39012/the-navy-finally...

  [2]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/congresss-ufo-hearing-...

  [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident

• by Ekaros on 4/21/23, 12:17 PM

  It is in the name.

  Unidentified "Flying" "Object". Anything that cannot be identified is classified unidentified. It is flying, and it looks like object. Someone records it and enters the data as trained.

  Someone is paid to observe sky, they see something they can't explain, they log it as they are ordered or paid to do. It might be explained with further effort, or it is just artefact of some other phenomenon or activity.

• by turbojerry on 4/20/23, 6:26 PM

  Paul Krugman Explains His Alien Theory for Fixing the Economy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdgAwaM1V8w

• by qup on 4/20/23, 5:20 AM

  Stuff like this:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

• by hindsightbias on 4/20/23, 4:34 AM

  Pilots and radar operators report crazy things in the most highly intrumented _testing_ ranges the Navy operates…

  I’ve got nothing.

• by TechBro8615 on 4/20/23, 4:07 PM

  Government lies.