Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dfsegoat | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

dfsegoat

This is the footage from the 2004 Nimitz Incident that is one case study in the paper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY

This is another more compelling video, but was not covered in this paper (was from 2015):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVRg7LLaQA

The US Navy has certified that these videos are authentic, and were not for public release. [1]

1 - https://time.com/5680192/navy-confirms-ufo-videos-real/

View on HN

Having spent a few years in skeptic groups helping debunk aliens and yeti footage, I must say that these are refreshing documents: authenticated videos, sensors are specified, we even have original audio of one!

I would like to just ask something I may have missed: how did they shield themselves from the (very) classic error of mistaking something small and close, like a bird or a bug, for something big and distant? There is an abundance of footage of blurry insects close to a camera being mistaken for very fast alien ships.

I mean, this is supposedly locked by radars, why is the distance measured by those not given?

And I must say, reading the analysis of the Nimitz incident by this paper, it is a glorious case of over-analysis. They base themselves on an oral recollection of approximate values, add to it wild assumption ("Since we want a minimal power estimate, we took the acceleration as 5370 g and assumed that the UAV had a mass of 1000 kg.") and to unnecessarily complicated calculations to guess random things about this supposed vessel.

Also worthy of note is that this is part of a program [1] paid by a senator in the direction of a close friend, who is a UFO enthusiast, and had to justify spending 22 million USD with some things.

In such a case, I don't think they have an excuse for not having actual radar data as well. I suspect such data would dismiss cases as something easily identifiable like a meteorite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Iden...

We know for sure that at least the radar from E-2C Hawkeye plane in the area that had returned was confiscated by plainclothes officials who landed on the Nimitz via helicopter.

How do "we" know this?

Because the guy on the plane responsible for the data testified on camera that he was instructed to grab the the "bricks" (specialized hard drives) immediately upon landing and they were then confiscated and quickly flown off of the carrier rather than being stored in the safe as per usual.

Watch Histoy's Unidentified series.

Oh ok. I don't trust that story. Sounds like somebody is embellishing if not inventing things. It's unfortunate but this is my general experience with UFO events that get publicized. People confabulate stories that fit the alien origin and government conspiracy narrative.

Time to slink out now for me. I derive some entertainment from the puzzling over what a UFO might be. The ensuing unwarranted speculation into alien origins puts me off. And the people who posit a government conspiracy tend to assume just those origins.

In all of this, folks should just go back to this interview with one of the pilots (Commander Fravor) who was one of the 4 people who actually saw the tic-tac thing first hand. Even he calls BS on some of the claims others involved (radar and technicians) have made. So, I would be careful about accepting some of the less directly involved parts of the 2004 story at face value. This doesn't diminish the incident at all, just shows how incidents like this can become twisted over time.

This jumps to some of his comments about the other folks involved in the story: https://youtu.be/f7XJD_54aNk?t=549

Another part of what he says: https://youtu.be/f7XJD_54aNk?t=1868

Say what you will of Corbel, but the entire 2 hours of interview are worth watching, Fravor is about as solid of a person to report this as you can get.

> Also worthy of note is that this is part of a program [1] paid by a senator in the direction of a close friend, who is a UFO enthusiast, and had to justify spending 22 million USD with some things.

Per your link, the AATIP program you are mentioning only ran from 2007-2012, and was then dissolved. The new videos are from 2014/2015 etc. and with this all happening now, why do they have to justify anything for a program that no longer exists?

Further, I don't think $22M really needs to be justified "with some things" when compared to the remainder of defense spending:

- The Air Force is spending $850M to replace a $5 part in the W88 nuclear warheads currently in service. [1]

- A single F-35 aircraft in FY2019 is $85M. [2]

... compared to these, you can probably find dozens of small DOD programs that were laughable, but still ate $20-100M with zero accountability [3].

1 - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30039/u-s-to-spend-hun...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

3 - https://www.fbo.gov/index.php?_psort=current_set_aside_s-d-a...

I'm all for calling out BS where it exists, but lets get our facts straight. The program (AATIP) existed beyond 2012, they just changed how it was funded. Luis Elizondo, former lead investigator for AATIP, explains this here: https://youtu.be/D3r6SmrCUM0?t=706

I was not aware! Thanks for the education!

side note: Somebody should probably clarify this in the wiki article for AATIP:

> Although the official AATIP program has ended, a related group of interested professionals have extended the effort, founding a nonprofit organization called "To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science".

The 2004 video looks a times like it's something like dust in the detector: implausibly steady small scale features seemingly unconcerned with atmospheric noise.

I find it strange that the twisting motion at 2:04, is attributed to object acceleration instead of the telescope turning to avoid the pole of an alt-az mount.

The object turns on its end and the pilot saw it do this with his own eyes, it's an is aerodynamically unstable position.

If you want more info regarding the AtFlir system see the link in this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013316

I hope they release an HD version of the normal video feed at some point. There might be a mountain of potentially usable data that isn't being released at present.

Apparently during the Nimitz incident there was a brief period where there were hundreds of these UFOs that descended from the sky (upper bound that the radar picks up is 80,000 feet, and these were at picked up at that altitude) and were basically tracking the Nimitz Strike Group. Such a wild story.

I hope they release the raw footage with telemetry data. I'm not sure about ATFLIR specifically, but I know that these sorts of systems usually embed actual telemetry data in the feed (in a similar way to close captioning data) which is then rendered onto the video by the media player. All these copies of the footage are of the video after being rendered, with the data stripped out.

According to the Sr. Radar/EW officer on the USS Princeton which had all the radar tracks (Kevin Day I believe) - all of the data were wiped.

"Despite this, Day intended to write an after-action message about the encounter. When Day went to review the records from the previous day, all the data was gone. He never wrote the after-action message." [1]

[1] - http://entertainermag.com/blog/2019/08/30/exploring-the-unbe...

I can't help but notice that in the first video, the sensor switches from aimed to the right, to being aimed to the left as it tracks the object. Then, at the peak of left facing azimuth, the object coincidentally zooms off to the left in the direction of what I assume is airflow around the sensor. That sure sounds consistent with a piece of debris stuck to the lens cover, but I'm lacking a lot of critical information.

There were multiple jets scrambled, they all tracked the objects, with radar, infrared video, high-def video, and laser range finding. Why are people so stubborn about this?

Just like in that 2018 Gatwick Drone situation!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com