UFOs Are a Common Sight, Former Military Official Tells Congress (Non Paywall in comments)
UFOs Are a Common Sight, Former Military Official Tells Congress (Non Paywall in comments)
Lawmakers push for transparency on UAP, or ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena.’
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I watched the hearings yesterday, and I was mostly left with the impression that we need more investigations, and to kick some asses in the aviation world so that encounters with UAPs can be safely reported without sacrificing the career of the pilot in question by even talking about it.
Mostly it's stuff we already know about, the tictac and a couple other similar events. The most interesting thing by far to me is the report of a UAP that "split" a flight of F-18s. That means that it physically passed between two jets. Hard to say that it was a balloon or sensor defect in that event. I bring up balloons because lot of the UFO craze is caused by people just not knowing what they're seeing or now having the knowledge to contextualize a relatively static object appearing to move via parallax against a static background due to the movement of the observer source. It certainly wasn't helped by the fact that back in the day, the Air Force was doing MIB psyops to the locals who reported to the air force base when stealth fighters were first being developed and tested. Civilians then started mass reporting about "triangle UFOs" which were just F-117s before anyone even knew that those existed, and you got the pile of of fraudsters and people who just wanted their moment in the limelight.
What we're getting in the Congressional hearing isn't that. These are our most trained and experienced fighter pilots operating multiple sensor systems, all of which are showing events that to our current knowledge of physics are basically impossible, and compounded by confirmation from the Mk 1 Eyeball. Fooling the human eye is pretty easy, but trained observers like fighter pilots are harder to fool, but still possible. Fooling trained human observers and multiple different sensor systesm (FLIR, RADAR, and optical cameras) all at once is still possible, but harder. But the more sensor systems in play, the harder it is to fool all of them, and the incidents in question had the full sensor suite of multiple AEGIS mounting surface warships, multiple fighter pilots and weapons officers and the sensor systems of those planes from multiple different angles all in general agreement about the impossible behaviors of the UAPs.
At the tail end of last year, we just got the reveal of the latest and greatest in US secret weapons development with the B-21 and that was pretty much an iteration on known physics and known systems. B-21 is miles better than B-2, but it isn't a tictac, and when we look at the development of these kind of systems in the past, they generally take about a decade to go from conceptualization to prototype, and about another decade to go from prototype to public reveal. In that timeframe, B-21s would have been around during the right era for the tictac event and the one off Virginia Beach, but again, B-21s aren't magical supertech vehicles that can ignore all known physics. B-21s could probably have spoofed some of the sensors on the ships and F-18s that intercepted the Tictacs, but they still are a visible plane, no MCU style invisibility/colorshifting panels to make it look like a grey cube inside a transparent sphere, or just the smooth countourless description of the tictac.
Now, all that being said, I don't think that it was "little green men" either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence after all, and what evidence we have is some combination of sparse, classified, and disorganized. I think that right now we have unexplained behaviors from unexplained objects and our best approach going forwards is going to be to try and collate data and coordinate the study of it to try and figure out what causes these events.
At the same time, I don't think that these events are the result of foreign actors either. If China had that kind of tech, we wouldn't have seen the pathetic excuse for balloons this year, and they probably would have made a play for Taiwan by now. If Russia had that kind of tech, they wouldn't be rolling out T-55 rustbuckets to fight in Ukraine. Clearly the answer is South Korea and the pro-Starcraft scene is there to train the pilots in microing such a highly versatile and responsive craft. I for one welcome our new Korean overlords. :p
The thing that stands out to me there is that it's multiple ships and planes tracking this and producing this data. If it was like a glitch in the AN/SPY radar on an AEGIS equipped ship like the Princeton, then that same glitch wouldn't also have shown up on the FLIR and optical cameras of an F-18 as well as the radar of the E2 and the non-AEGIS equipped ship like the Nimitz. Repeat down the list for possible sensors. There exists commonality, like all the F-18s would have had the same kind of radar, but that doesn't extend to the E2 nor the ships.
But as mentioned in the hearing, the only publicly available release of that data is the FLIR camera. What's shown on the video I've seen several different "debunkings" of, all of which with various explanations, although the most common is basically thermal lens flare, but that still doesn't explain the eyeball reports nor the radar tracks, but unfortunately we have none of that data available publicly. And this is all of course predicated on the idea of these eyewitnesses being credible. If the follow-up hearings happen and the DoD under congressional pressure releases the radar data from the Princeton and Nimitz that day and it doesn't track with what the people in the hearing today were saying, then that blows a giant hole in the story.
And that's assuming that it's not another misunderstanding that winds up easily explained. Like when we started doing manned space missions, the pilots reported "foo fighters" as dancing lights outside the Mercury spacecraft. Well, it turned out that the Mercury had an issue with condensation on the interior of the windows and that the light from the sun when coming in not diffused from the atmosphere would create an optical illusion of dancing lights. Similar thing with "flying dutchman" ships floating above the horizon where it is merely an optical illusion created by certain atmospheric conditions that create a false horizon. But it'd have to be one hell of a phenomena to show up on multiple sensor systems like that.
At the end of the day, I still don't know. The rational skeptic in me says it probably isn't aliens, but at the same time, unless these fighter pilots are lying under oath, (and Grusch was very clear to couch everything in terms of "this is the hearsay that others have told me, and everything else goes under SCIF") I don't have the imagination to postulate as to what it could be.
The "there is no good evidence" problem is why I want the radar tracks for Nimitz and Princeton released. They'd either confirm the tictac story, or just blow it away entirely, because a large part of what makes that one so compelling is that it was ostensibly tracked from so many different angles from so many different types and models of military radars. If David Fravor was lying about those radar tracks showing the impossible events he describes, then we can dismiss his claims entirely. If the radar tracks show a mostly consistent behavior, then it lends credence to the UAP, and we can discuss it in good faith without having to try and justify it constantly to skeptics. It's one thing when we just have the one FLIR clip. It's another if we have the radar returns from an E2 Sentry, the USS Nimitz, the USS Princeton, and the squadron of F-18s.
Besides, at this point, it's not like these are bleeding edge capabilities. These are all systems that have been around longer than I've been alive. The newer shit is all far and away superior, and so releasing a bit of the information for fighter and naval sensors developed in the fucking EIGHTIES isn't exactly going to be giving up the game to China.
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!"
The military does not have a good track record of being transparent to the public.
At the end of yesterdays hearing one of the congresspeople asked them if they thought the UAP's were probing our defenses or after our nukes.
The witnesses all said yes.Now they were being asked to speculate about the unknown, but it is ridiculous to think that a non human probe that has presumably broken the light speed limit wants anything from us. Uranium isn't special. Jets running on dead dinosaurs are not special. If a non human probe is here it is just to study us, it doesn't give a single shit about human tech and resources. The universe is vast and getting resources out of a gravity well is expensive.
Now we could say that they were playing it up for congress and they are likely to get more funding if they pose it as a us vs them problem, but they lost all credibility to me at that point.
That wasn't my take on it. Maybe we are thinking of different scenes in the movie - sorry, different points in the hearing - but I understood the question was "is it POSSIBLE they are a threat" not "do you actively think they are a threat" or whatever. Subtle but super important difference.
We still study chimpanzees, ants, coral, bees, prarie dogs and any number of other social animals.
If you're working from the assumption that the tictacs are aliens then "the Earth and humans aren't interesting" isn't the best of places to stake your claim.
I've been pretty clear over my various posts on this topic that I don't think that this is actual aliens, but whatever it is is something that is worth investigating to improve our understand of science and the universe. And Fravor's main point was that there isn't a good way for pilots to say "I saw weird thing X midflight" without getting exiled to career Siberia over UFO alarmism. So the hope is to set up a centralized data collection and collation center so that the reports can be assembled together, the data looked at with scientific rigor and the science advanced.
Grusch was the one who went full XCOM "they're here and we have the crashed ships and bodies" conspiracy theorist. Without the extraordinary proof that his extraordinary claims require, we can safely ignore him, save for maybe using the UFO nuts to shine some light on the corruption and waste on the black projects he alleges exist outside of congressional control. Yanno, get some of our sprawling secret projects back under command of the actual civilian government like they're ostensibly supposed to be.
Yeah my main takeaway is that there isn't a good method of reporting anomalies. Fravor said on 60 minutes they were ridiculed and the ship played Independence Day, Men in Black, and Signs. To me that's like a navy boat driver running into some weird debris in the water, reporting it, and everyone laughs at them and makes Cthulhu jokes. If there's weird shit out there flying around or floating around friggin report it and investigate, what's the big deal?
Mate if these "whistleblowers" were actually doing any whistleblowing they would be getting treated the same way the US always treats whistleblowers, prison, blacksites, mysterious death, or fleeing to a non-extradition country.
This most basic of critical thinking is all you need to do to realise that this shit stinks and that everything occurring is something the US gov and military wants to occur.
Not to put too fine a point on it, while I don't believe Grusch, I think he's a full on conspiracy nut, I will acknowledge that he was exceedingly careful to not break any laws with how he came forward and reported this. Edward Snowden and other similar whistleblowers got criminalized by doing so in an illegal fashion. When you whistleblow legally, (see: Lt Colonel Vindman in the Trump trial) you don't get exiled to Russia.
Lmao I can't fucking believe how deeply propagandised americans are. Memes like "The CIA award for excellence in journalism" exist for a god damn reason, and yet you people still parrot this shite. It's emblematic of just how deeply engrained the civic religion is. Even doing so on the topic of bloody aliens.
It's completely fucking absurd. Go ahead and tell Julian Assange that you can legally do things the US military doesn't want you to do and nothing will happen to you. Fuck me socialist youtube influencers like Second Thought get their doors knocked by armed goons from homeland security asking about their "unamerican activities".
If the CIA was the cartoon supervillains you seem to think that they are, then Assange would have been hacked to pieces with bonesaws or drank some polonium tea ages ago.
He's been imprisoned for over a decade why the fuck would they do that? They got what they wanted the day he was forced into house arrest hidden within an embassy.
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I also don't know what to make of this. I err on the side of, it's all bullshit. But i do find it all very interested. Extraterrestrial aliens is almost a thought terminating cliche because of how extraordinarily improbable it is. The thing that i find lights my imagination on fire. Is that Grusch has said the crafts are "terrestrial non-human". Which is just as unlikely but atleast its something kind of new.
I'll be honest, I think that Grusch is a UFO nut who managed to work his way up the ranks and eventually get into power in a govt agency that is nominally supposed to be investigating spooky stuff like the tictacs and got mad that the rest of the agency wasn't onboard with his conspiracy theory nuttyness and is basically trying to weaponize a congressional investigation against his former colleagues because they wouldn't believe him. I err on the side of believing Commander Fravor, as his tale has been verified by the other pilot in the flight, and apparently has like 6 seperate radar tracks backing it up. It's Grusch who's going full conspiracy theory.
It's super interesting to me that there are so many people who find it more believable that aliens invented hyperdrives or 4d space folding or wormholes or whatever and came over here to buzz our fighter jets...rather than believe that these guys are nuts, lol. Your paragraph is BY FAR the most plausible explanation I've heard. Although I do find this whole thing real interesting and in general I support more investigations into Weird Shit.
I want to make a few points.
First, the appeal to experts is bad. Doctors misdiagnose things all the time and they're dealing with much less complex systems than literally all airspace. They also have more training and experience. We expect them to make mistakes on occasion, and we should expect the same from pilots.
Second, what reason would aliens have for flying in our atmosphere? We can observe what's happening on earth from space and our tech is not even close to capable for what would be needed to travel to other habitable planets.
Third, assuming it is aliens flying in the atmosphere for whatever reason, how would their tech not not be advanced enough to avoid detection? They are obviously trying to avoid detection (assuming it's aliens, which it isn't), so how are they so incompetent yet so advanced?
Fourth, if you include the UFO crash stuff, how would they be so incompetent to crash? We have extremely few crashes of our aircraft with our relatively simple technology. There is no way they'd be that bad to crash if they can create the technology to visit earth.
I don't know why I keep needing to repeat this, but I DON'T THINK IT WAS SPACE ALIENS.
I've been pretty clear about that from the start here, although I guess after re-reading my first post in the thread, it was a little less explicit about that fact than it could have been. Maybe I should have put it at the top rather than in the middle, and also written it in 100' tall letters of fire.
We don't know what happened in the tictac event, and of the other two, Grusch went full on conspiracy theorist nutjob and the other pilot had a similar but less credible story, mostly in that he wasn't backed up after the fact by other pilots. David Fravor's account was backed up by other pilots, and the other pilot to back him up explicitly disavowed herself from being a UFO person, while still backing what Fravor said.
I also focus on that event because it's the one that had six separate sets of radar on it, so out of all of them, it undoubtedly has the best sensor readings of any of the ones we know. The radar tracks that Fravor describes, with the tictacs descending from 80'000 feet down to sea level in a matter of moments, if released, would either immediately validate or discredit his claims, and the fact that it happened across so many different sensor types and systems also means that in the astronomically more likely event of it being some weird atmospheric phenomena that we've never scientifically documented or validated, also would have much more data to begin preliminary investigations with.
Like that's the real benefit here, is the scientific research that can be done, and the collation and collection of the data about these events under a single roof where it can be looked and expand the boundaries of human knowledge. If these phenomena are as common as the two pilots allege, then it's something we need to know about, for the simple purpose of making air traffic safer if nothing else, and if they are lying through their teeth, then releasing the radar tracks proves it. Either way, it should be done.
