Hacker News Reader

Comment by CommieBobDole | Hacker News Reader

As much as I want to believe, I feel like this almost has to be some sort of disinformation campaign, either to cover up some sort of testing that the US military is doing and thinks someone else might have seen, or to make US adversaries think that we've made some sort of fundamental breakthrough and we're ineptly trying to cover it up by calling it a UFO. Probably the latter.

Would be interesting to read the article about this in 50 years or so once the political landscape has changed and it's safe to declassify, but I doubt I'll be around then.

View on HN

Here's my theory about the recent influx of UFO footages coming from high places. US military was working on advanced drones. Nothing fancy, think current best tech, add 15 years and billion in r&d, that kind of stuff. Then when it was ready for test they flew it secretly before their own pilots and waited for reports. And waited. And waited some more. Silence. They disabled stealth, added flashlights, nothing. Military pilots didn't reported it. Maybe Venus. Or moonlight bouncing off swamp gas, but not UFO. Why?

In past decades whenever military pilot reported UFO they were laughed at, sent to psychologist, evaluated, sent behind the desk. Other pilots knew and when they saw something really weird they have kept it for themselves.

Then the higher ups panicked. If they don't report our drones, they will not report Chinese or Russian drones either. We have hundreds and thousands of eyes in the sky but they will not report because they are afraid to speak.

So they came up with a campaign. They started to publish official UFO footage and started more openly talk about it to show pilots that it is now ok to talk about UFO. Don't be afraid pilots, if you see something strange jus tell us, we take it seriously now.

There are no aliens. Videos you saw are created or modified to look legit, and officially supported or confirmed.

Why would they wait for reports from their pilots in such a roundabout fashion?

Besides that it's the most compelling argument I've read so far, kinda killing the mood for me.

While this is probably wrong, it’s a fascinating theory.

Why do you think it's wrong?

wouldnt it be a lot simple to just announce "hey if you think you see a ufo, 'its probably us' and we would appreciate a report so we can correlate sightings with our various stealth tests."?

US pride regularly creates political theater in place of logical moves.

This is a trait that is pretty universal in my experience.

Very plausible explanation

One of the pilots in this incident was on Rogan saying how they used to fly silently without lights above remote campsites, then once they saw a campfire blast the lights and go straight up. They'd laugh as the UFO reports flowed in.

Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it.

It's not unrealistic to consider top secret tech as a possible explanation.

One counter point is usually: If we had tech this amazing, we'd be putting it to use commercially. However this tech might be autonomous and might need to be considering the G forces supposedly at play.

> Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it

First flew 1981, first official photo released 1988. And plenty of speculation in betwee..

I was camping with my father above Tuolumne Meadows near Yosemite in 1986. We just had sleeping bags, no tent.

As we bed down for the night, four tiny black diamonds silently flew overhead to the west. Absolutely creepy to see things so abstract and quiet.

Didn't make sense until the reveal in 1988, but it was four nighthawks heading from Nevada to the Pacific Ocean.

No, the stealth fighter was not in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it. The F-117 was delivered in 1982 and operational in 1983. It was 'declassified' in 1988 and displayed in 1990. And it wasn't even a fighter. It was for ground attack.

https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/f-117.htm

I thought maybe the poster was talking about the SR-71, but it too didn't stay classified for very long.

A-12 did stay classified for a while.

There were actually two A-12s. The Lockheed A12 was introduced in 1967 and retired in 1968. The McDonnell Douglass A12 was never built and finally cancelled in 1991.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_A-12_Avenger...

The SR71 succeeded the Lockheed A12. It was hard to keep secret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/keeping-the-sr-71...

> There were actually two A-12s. The Lockheed A12

I bet this was made on purpose. USA has learned some tricks from Soviets with their "fake patterns"

F-117 wasn't a fighter, and A-12 was not a CAS aircraft. Pretty much like Kirov was not really an "auxiliary craft," and Tu-22 M-1-2-3 were all nearly completely different aircraft

The F117 is also the USAF designation for an aircraft engine (Pratt & Whitney PW2000), used on the C-17.

Someone suggested to me a few years ago that might be the reason why the F-117 was designated that way.

Tanks are so named because during WWI, the British decided to conceal their true purpose by calling them 'water carriers.' 'W.C.' was deemed an inappropriate initialism though, so the name was changed to 'tank' as in "a tank of water."

It also wasn’t stealth, or an attack aircraft.

> The second operational aircraft[38] designed around a stealth aircraft shape and materials, after the Lockheed A-12,[38] the SR-71 had several features designed to reduce its radar signature. The SR-71 had a radar cross-section (RCS) around 110 sq ft (10 m2).[39] Drawing on early studies in radar stealth technology, which indicated that a shape with flattened, tapering sides would reflect most energy away from a radar beam's place of origin, engineers added chines and canted the vertical control surfaces inward. Special radar-absorbing materials were incorporated into sawtooth-shaped sections of the aircraft's skin. Cesium-based fuel additives were used to somewhat reduce exhaust plumes visibility to radar, although exhaust streams remained quite apparent. Kelly Johnson later conceded that Soviet radar technology advanced faster than the stealth technology employed against it.[40]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

To be clear, a 10m^2 radar cross section is enormous compared to the F-117 (0.001 m^2) The F-117 was in a completely different league than the SR-71, but the SR-71 was in fact designed to be stealthy.

Besides the SR-71/A-12, there were other stealth aircraft that preceded the F-117. The immediate predecessor was Lockheed's Have Blue[0] which was flying in the 70s. Related to Have Blue, there was also Senior Prom[1], which was apparently a scaled down unmanned "cruise missile" variant of Have Blue.

And beyond airplanes, the first stealth helicopters were developed in the late 60s to early 70s and saw limited service during Vietnam. Called The Quiet Ones[2], these helicopters were painted with radar absorbing paint and had several novel mechanisms to reduce their noise, making them stealthy not only to radar but also to ground observers. They were tested over Area 51 and apparently near LA as well, so it seems likely they may have spooked some civilians at one point or another. The infamous "black helicopter" conspiracies/stories started popping up in the 70s, which doesn't seem particularly coincidental when you consider that we now know the The Quiet Ones existed.

The original Quiet Ones are long gone, but it's evident they were replaced by newer stealth helicopters that we don't yet know the names of. We can be pretty sure of this because famously one crashed during the raid on bin Laden[3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Have_Blue

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vinh_wiretap#Planning_and_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Helic...

Have Blue was the POC for the F-117, it wasn't used in actual operations. It was a test platform to demonstrate the concept's stealth capabilities and its ability to fly despite its non-conventional shape.

Yeah but it's a discussion about the public seeing spooky strange aircraft and calling in UFO reports, so considering pre-production aircraft seems obvious.

I think the gp confused the stealth fighter with cruise missiles.

In the northeast, the Tomahawk missile’s terrain navigation was tested out of a few air bases in the region, for example.

> Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it.

Wouldn't it look just like an unusual plane to a naked eye observer?

Probably to most people, but some people have wild imaginations.

I don't think they would operate in areas where training is taking place without notifying the pilots in the area that they are also operating there. The risk of collision is too high (and there apparently was at least one very close call).

Why put it commercially if keeping it secret gives you a huge advantage over foreign powers?

Case in point the satellite photo Trump leaked - leading civilian experts were dumbfounded that such a clear image from a satellite was even possible, let alone already deployed and in use.

Commercial applications for that would be huge, yet it’s staying secret.

I've heard tales of the wink and a nod method of releasing capabilities without broadcasting that's what they were doing. Back in the early days of satellite with ground penetrating radar, there were detailed images released of river deltas. It was supposed to be a boon for geology, but it was also meant as a shot across the bow to the Russians that we could see their underground bunkers and what not. Sometimes the clandestine games were cool. I miss the spy novels/stories of the 80s.

No one was dumbfounded. Image clarity was consistent with expectations based on the known size of the KH-11 series. This is basic physics.

“The resolution is amazingly high,” Ankit Panda from the Federation of American Scientists told NPR, adding it was “much higher than anything I’ve ever seen.”

Tell it to Ankit Panda.

Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network at the One Earth Foundation, believes that the resolution is so high, it may be beyond the physical limits at which satellites can operate.

And this lady.

You have misunderstood. Ankit Panda was simply stating that the image resolution was higher than anything that had been publicly released so far. It wasn't anything unexpected.

Melissa Hanham is a policy specialist, not a physicist or optics engineer. She has no particular expertise in this area.

If you don't believe me then do the math yourself. It's easy enough to figure out the maximum diameter of a KH-11 based on the size of the available launch vehicles. And from that you can calculate the maximum resolving power. They can play some tricks with adaptive optics and digital image processing but that doesn't add much.

The minimum size of KH-11 mirrors has been common knowledge for many years now, since it influenced the Hubble telescope. From the book Power To Explore -- History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960-1990:

> "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."

PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170205104821/https://history.m...

They're 2.4 meters at their smallest, with later KH-11's possibly being larger. But even 2.4 meters is enough to get way better image quality than has been publicly released.

Yeah he admits how he is a prankster but then fully expects people to believe his explanation of a 60 second video clip without any other context than his interpretation?

It's one thing to confuse a civilian, it's not that hard. But your narrative doesn't explain actual fighter pilots observing objects flying orders of magnitude faster and making incredible maneuvers.

Honestly how many people have seen jet fighters do crazy movies at night. Not very many, they don't know what they are seeing. It is like a car accident. Happens every minute, how many people actually witness it? The aftermath maybe, but very few of the actual event.

There is definitely some sort of disinformation campaign, I guess its aimed at other nations. [0]

I'm guessing this is part of the campaign, or else maybe alien tech? [1] I'll assume its to make someone else think we have tech we may not have.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29232/navys-advanced-a...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjwkw/bob-lazar-says-the...

> aimed at other nations.

Does anyone have one of those world heat maps for "belief in UFOs" by country?

Why alien tech? It certainly fits the description of modern Russian or Chinese cruise missiles acting in a swarm.

But I'm baffled why they would they do this close to enemy territory. Loosing one of those would be the worst case.

Wouldn't the boring answer be they made something that can disrupt radar systems into creating fantom objects. Creating fake objects that are remarkable would be useful for when distractions are needed. The final QA would be a real in the field test where the observers are not aware of the experiment.

That really does seem like the simplest, most boring explanation to me — some kind of camouflage/countermeasures/stealth technology that makes it really hard to recognize something or to get a reliable indication of its bearing or distance.

I'm pretty sure the observers reported both radar sightings and visual sightings. It wasn't radar alone.

Four people saw it with their eyes. David Fravor has talked the most but there were two planes, each with two pilots.

Naval patents of far fetched sounding room temperature superconductors and similar things may indeed be part of a disinformation campaign, but that does not mean the sightings of tic-tac shaped objects and other radar and pilot observed anomalies are part of the campaign as well.

What could be the case is that the observed tic-tac UFO's are real alien craft, about which word is now leaking out, but the US military is now using the confusion surrounding them for their own purposes. Hey, why not use the confusion for our own advantage.

Any potential adversaries are smart enough to realize that if the US military had really invented a fundamental breakthrough they wouldn't be spending a fortune on the B-21 program.

This kind of thing is highly compartmentalized. The decision makers for the budget of the B-21 program probably aren't cleared to know about a program developing an engine that ignores inertia.

No that's incorrect. Decisions on programs the size of the B-21 are made by the USAF Chief of Staff, senior members of the Congressional Armed Services committees, and ultimately by the President. Those people are cleared for everything related to procurement. They couldn't do their jobs otherwise.

Maybe. Just plain politics is more likely. Decommissioning projects like this very likely touches upon various politicians' pork projects who don't want those to go away. The military brass tried to stop the production of the M1A1 once because they had better tanks, and wanted to buy those instead, but Congress didn't because too many of their districts relied on its production.

If spending a fortune on the B-21 program ensured no adversaries believed the US invented a fundamental breakthrough in aircraft design, that would be the best reason to do it.

This is a good point.

Dropping a program for no apparent reason can be a give away that there is something else...

The Boeing X-45 program is a good example:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3889/the-alarming-case...

Most UFO stories are fairly easily debunked. Even if the this particular story was an outlier in apparent credibility, why would any think that a UFO story would be an effective way to spread FUD among US adversaries?

bingo. another disinfo campaign. intelligent aliens are just another made up bullshit story to distract people from other more important storeis and justify huge ass budget increases that go on for multiple decades.

there are more than enough idiots and suckers to persuade. this is the problem with democrazy. it's just one method for securing good leadership and it often can be systemically hacked. one way is to dumb down the population and feeed them nonsense. it works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com