https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-oversight-committee-congress-ufo-hearing-ceeceae6
Lawmakers push for transparency on UAP, or ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena.’
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You know, it's kind of like Bigfoot.
In the 60s I'd say you could almost slightly believe that just maybe there's a big gorilla somewhere that's so remote that nobody ever discovered it.
These days just about every frickin dirt road in the woods has a trail camera on it, lots of houses have surveillance cameras, drones, satellite images, all that stuff. And not these old Polaroids either, not film developed in a darkroom with a shoddy enlarger, HD digital is pretty much standard for all devices.
There's just no damn way this thing could be walking around without something catching it on 1080p video.
Well I imagine it's gotta be the same for the sky. Military's got a lot of eyes on the sky for a lot of reasons.
I mean, I'm no conspiracy nut or UFO true believer or anything, but the simple fact is that aerial photography is nowhere near that simple or easy.
I live directly under the flight path for the local airbase, and about twice a week I have F-35s fly overhead. I basically know the schedule, and I usually try to take a picture of them, but despite it being a routine occurrence that I know to prepare for, I've only managed to get a handful of pictures, and of those pictures, they're almost all small and blurry squintovision. They're better than bigfoot photos but not by much. With my naked eye, I'm close enough to pick out individual features on the airframe and see if the the gear is up or down, and if they have anything on wing pylons, etc. But my actual pictures? Usually come out something like this. Now imagine you're trying to do that for a target 5 miles distant rather than just a few hundred feet overhead, and it only gets worse.
And the thing is that yes, the military does have a lot of eyes on the sky, but as they pointed out in the hearings, there exists no mechanism for making reports of UAP, collating and collecting the relevant radar and sensor data, and then trying to figure out what it was. If you talk about UAPs, you're going to get laughed out of the room if not sidelined into a career dead end.
Like even ignoring the possibility of aliens, and assuming that this is just some unknown atmospheric effect (that shows up on multiple different radar systems, FLIR, and optics), it's still worth gathering that data so we can find out what's going on. Investigating odd phenomena is great for our scientific understanding of the world around us. Right now we don't have a mechanism for Pilot A to say "Hey, that blip on radar did strange behaviors X, Y, and Z" and then the relevant sensor data is collected into a format for use by meteorologists or whomever.
99.9 repeating % of the time, it's just going to be something innocuous like what all the civilian UFO reports are of "in these specific atmospheric conditions, we get an optical illusion of a cubical cloud" Locals in LA think that the borg are invading, but from other angles, the cloud just looks slightly funny rather than a cube. Or they mistake a drone formation for some impossible alien craft. But when we have trained military observers who are all saying the same thing and we're seeing data from our most advanced military sensors, it's a different matter entirely.
That's why I'm so mono-focussed on the tictac report, because in that example we have radar tracks from 4 seperate system types (AN/SPY on the USS Princeton, AN/SPS and AN/SPQ on the USS Nimitz, either APS-125 or APS-139 for an E-2 Hawkeye, and the AN/APG-73 on the F-18s) These were all cited as having been there and tracking the tictac, and reported that it descended from 80,000 feet to sea level in a matter of moments, and when the F-18s are sent out, that's when we get the encounter that David Fravor describes. Alex Dietrich, the pilot in the wingplane of Fravor's flight also described the same encounter, complete with "I don't consider myself a whistle blower ... I don't identify as a UFO person," but despite that disclaimer, she still ends up collaborating his story for how the tictac behaved.
So there we have no fewer than 6 separate radar sets, of which at least 4 sources are different models so we can pretty safely rule out operator error or code glitch, the eyes of 2 seperate F18s pilots, one at high elevation, one that moved to intercept and they all describe the behavior of the tictac as moving impossibly to how we understand physics. Later on in a followup flight, they stick the FLIR pod on one of the F18s and we get the video that doesn't show very much, and we know for a fact that what's shown on that video isn't the full duration of it.
Now let's throw UFOs out of the equation entirely. Assume that it's only some kind of atmospheric anomaly like ball lightning or something. Isn't that still something that's incredibly cool and worth investigation? If something can act like that, let's figure out what it is and how it does it. And if it is aliens, then congratulations, we have the most important discovery in the history of mankind on our hands. And if it isn't aliens, then we've merely done a lot of cool science and made both commercial and military aviation safer by explaining what these are and if/how they are a danger. And that's what this congressional meeting was about. Setting up official channels so that when pilots run into things like this they can report it and we can start to aggregate the data and figure out what's going on. And on the other side of the equation is investigating DoD black projects that may or may not be pretending to be aliens (we know they did this with the original stealth programs, complete with MIB suits visiting the local skywatchers and telling them very specifically that it WASN'T UFOs, and thus distracting attention away from the stealth planes.) and letting the American government know what the fuck is actually going on in our military that ostensibly works for us.
Here's the thing: your potato quality picture is 10x better than any picture of a flying saucer. You can clearly see what it is.
The problem with "unidentified" phenomena is that they aren't identified. You can't jump from "we don't know what this is" to "aliens" without proof. If you do, that's just faith not science.
In that way, aliens are just angels for atheists. They're a social phenomenon not a physical one. Notice how no one sees werewolves, vampires, zombies, etc. anymore. They didn't go away, people just stopped believing in them.
People in history have speculated about life in the rest of the universe, like on the moon and Jupiter. We even observed their "canals" on Mars. Things that we know now are almost impossible. Notice how "UFOs" didn't exist prior to about 1900. When humans gain the ability to fly, so do these aliens. Their ships somehow gained speed and maneuverability as ours did.
"But what if it really is aliens! That would be huge. We have to investigate each event in case they're real!"
This is how we know UFOs are just optical illusions: They change as we change, as society changes. It's like when you see your exact duplicate unexpectedly. You don't think "I have a clone who copies my every move!" You just guess there's a mirror there. But yeah, I guess you'll miss the 1 in a trillion times it's actually your clone.
Look, I've been pretty clear from the start that I'm not a UFO guy, I don't think that these are aliens, the odds are just too goddamn remote, but the fact is that it's something, and whatever it is is worth investigating.
Optical illusions don't just show up on radar, IR camera, visual light camera, and the human eye all at once.
Investigating the unknown is how we advance human science, and I believe that this is worth investigating. If it turns out to be nothing, then there's no great loss, but even something not-at-all obscure like ball lightning, which despite being known about for CENTURIES, is still not fully understood, or even well documented.
My potato quality F-35 picture is from only a couple hundred feet with the planes are on approach for landing. My house shakes when they go overhead. By contrast the tictac video we have was filmed at something like five miles distance. Even advanced military cameras don't get much resolution at that range, unless we're talking about the ones on a Keyhole satellite or something, and those aren't small enough to mount on a fighter jet. You really think some 2004 iphone is going to even see it at all, nevermind that flying a fighter plane doesn't leave much time for in-flight photography, and that carrying a camera into the plane's cockpit is an espionage violation.
LIke that's a big part of what these hearings were about before Grusch derailed things with his XCOM "downed alien craft and corpses" nonsense. The two professional pilots were talking about having some official mechanism for collating the data all in one place so it can be looked at seriously and scientifically. We just channel the energy of the crazy UFO nutters to actually accomplish some real science here.
Damn dude did you even read the comment you're replying to? The guy is literally saying "there's almost no way it's aliens, but we don't know what it is so we should figure out because science is good and we should be doing it." And you hit him back with "LMAO this dude thinks it's definitely aliens what an idiot!"
