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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

There is far more interesting evidence of potential advanced intelligence in our system, such as the Nimitz encounter [0].

The New York Post put together a great video highlighting "The Phenomenon." If Oumuamua is indeed an interstellar probe, it would seem to have come from a civilization far less advanced than whatever seems to have been observed by various militaries and analyzed by this New York Post special [1].

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

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSY2Zc0goQ

Edit: I don't mean to shake up anyone's fragile worldview. Comment instead of downvote; it's a fascinating subject to debate.

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> If Oumuamua is indeed an interstellar probe, it would seem to have come from a civilization far less advanced than whatever seems to have been observed by various militaries and analyzed by this New York Post special .

We know barely anything about Oumuamua, clearly not enough to decide what kind of object it is, even less about the Nimitz encounter and yet, based on two nothings, you are feeling confident enough to say that the would be civilization that build 'Oumuamua' is less advanced than the would be civilization that built the Nimitz object.

Jumping the gun a little bit are we?

Isn't this all speculation by everyone? My reason for such speculation is that if the Oumuamua was actually a probe, the little information which we can observe from it (speed, size, trajectory changes) is plausible in terms of our current technology and understanding of physics. What was seen by the Nimitz is not.

Maybe Oumuamua was a carrier and something got off. It would make sense. It could also have been a spent deceleration stage. All speculation of course, since we just didn't get a good look.

Of course if whatever got off wants to ever go home it would need to set up shop somewhere and build a new multistage interstellar rocket. You could probably do that in the outer solar system and not be noticed.

People who dismiss UFO sightings have among other points argued that the small craft sighted are too small to have the kind of crazy propulsion systems required for interstellar flight. That makes sense, but why assume those are interstellar? A staged fusion rocket or something would make more sense. The small craft would be interplanetary scale.

> it was noticed that the object had now dropped from 28,000 feet to near sea level in less than a second.

Surely something accelerating to Mach 25 in atmosphere in less than a second would have made a hell of a sound.

On the Southern California West Coast, especially, in the 80s and 90s, sonic booms were quite regular.

In all seriousness it sounds like a shadow projected onto a stratus cloud. It's somewhat non-intuitive to people that shadows do not grow in size with distance in the air. A 747 casts a 747 sized shadow onto clouds since the sun is so far away its light rays are all effectively parallel.

One thing that does happen to shadows is they get blurred at the edges (an aircraft won't completely cover the sun at a distance). An aircraft will tend to cast a vaguely "T" shaped shadow at a distance that's roughly the size of the aircraft. I can see a "t" shaped object in these images.

Here's a video of a test flight of the Vahana aircraft. https://youtu.be/S-5JeapSsbE?t=188

See the mysterious "t" shaped shadow it's casting? It moves erratically and doesn't match intuition of a shadow since shadows from the sun don't work the same way as indoors due to the parallel rays. You get these same shadows projected onto clouds as well.

The real kicker is that in these videos they both show and report that the shadow rotates when the aircraft turns! Like guys what the fuck do you think it is? Haha oh dear.

These were IR videos, and the whole area was restricted airspace.

Yes and all light casts shadows IR included. Take a look at any video of a plane casting a shadow onto clouds. eg. https://youtu.be/Vr_kYmUaykw?t=7

Notice the similarities? The halo and the matching of the recording planes movements which are explicitly mentioned in this.

Yes but the IR locked onto a higher temperature source, not cooler. My understanding is that a shadow would be cooler.

Other remaining factors include that:

- Primary radars on both fighters in the initial pass were being jammed

- Passive radars on the Nimitz were what directed the planes to this spot initially

- It was approximately 9:30-10 PST, so any shadow from <40k feet would be coming from restricted airspace

- Multiple visual contacts from multiple angles, including from slightly below/ to the side

This one is pretty difficult to explain in conventional terms, unless you think it's all a hoax. Pretty fascinating stuff, huh?

Apparently they were being picked up on radar as well tho.

It explicitly says they were not picking up the recorded object in that linked Wikipedia article.

"When the jet fighters arrived on site, the crew of four saw nothing in the air nor on their radar"

So there's some mysterious radar pickup on the boats but the pilots then chase their own shadow and record it.

The real kicker is this part

"As Fravor further descended, he reported that the object began ascending along a curved path, maintaining some distance from the F-18, mirroring its trajectory in opposite circles. Fravor then made a more aggressive maneuver, plunging his fighter to aim below the object, but at this point the UFO accelerated and went out of sight in less than two seconds, leaving the pilots "pretty weirded out"."

That's a literal shadow!

A slow reply... but I didn't read that article, I was assuming it was the same one from this pilot's testimony on joe rogen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ

The pilot was saying that the ship had been picking up unknown objects on radar for a while before that experience.

I'm definitely extremely skeptical about whether or not its true, but the theory being argued for the nimitz sighting is that it bends space in front of and behind the craft for propulsion, but not sure what that would mean for sonic booms. It's kind of like putting a bowling ball on a bed and pushing your hand down in front of the ball and pulling up on the bed behind it to move the ball. Again, I'm very skeptical about it.. but it seems potentially plausible. This joe rogan episode where he interviews a navy pilot was pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ

Even if one were to assume the phenomenon in question was an advanced craft of some kind, an extraterrestrial origin is still among the least likely explanations.

How did you come up with probabilities? It seems to me that probability becomes unhelpful and it's either 0 or 1, once we've ruled out everything for which we have reliable known probabilities.

A terrestrial foreign superpower's technology seems like a plausible explanation at first if we can assign probabilities to them being more advanced than us (probably low but non-negligible). That would be compelling if this were the first reliable sighting of its kind (or if it didn't already occur 15 years ago), but apparently such sightings have been actively studied by the US gov for a few decades before this, so it seems quite impossible they would have had the capability in the pogrom/hard labor days, assuming there is some relation between current sightings and those happening decades ago.

Even considering the most improbable scenarios, terrestrial explanations have one incredibly significant advantage: we know that intelligent life already exists here.

When you consider the, quite literally, astronomical distances involved in interstellar travel and the corresponding time and resources required, combined with having no data whatsoever to suggest that advanced intelligent life exists anywhere within our galactic neighborhood, aliens look like a pretty damned unlikely explanation.

Hell, it's more likely there's some Wakanda-like hidden advanced human civilization somewhere around here, or maybe a non-human one that inhabits our deep oceans or something. Even less likely than that is some form of time travel from future humans which, again, is still more likely than aliens because we know with certainty that human beings exist on Earth.

I don't think you can compare two completely unknown probabilities and make those conclusions. We also know that life has evolved on ~20% of well-known planets in the "habitable zone," are there are believed to be about 4e10 such planets in our galaxy. Even with a proper equation improving on the Drake equation and taking into account more factors about the composition of such planets and stars, can we really believe there is no life? Furthermore, as a relatively young planet and an extremely young civilization on a cosmic timeframe, could we really be the most advanced in our galaxy? Even with near-current technology, a civilization could traverse galactic distances on a reasonable cosmic timeframe. Given these points and the strange evidence we are trying to make sense of, it seems like the most logical conclusion to me.

I did not say no life, but rather no advanced intelligent life. Life itself may not be detectable at this distance, but the kind of civilization that can manage to cross interstellar space? Given the timescales involved, any civilization more advanced than our own is likely to have been so for millions of years. It seems very unlikely that such a civilization could exist throughout that period and not leave evidence of it. Where are the Dyson swarms? Resource mining probes? Grey-goo planets from failed nano-tech experiments? Such incredible engineers over so much time would have attempted some kind of extreme-scale projects that we'd see.

Sure, there are a lot of reasons one can imagine that make that untrue, but the point isn't that it is impossible, but rather that there are other explanations that are significantly more likely even though they themselves are unlikely.

We have 0 examples and 0 evidence of advanced alien intelligence. We have rock solid proof of human intelligence on earth, and several examples of magical-seeming technology in the hands of some of its people and not others.

And again, this argument is predicated on the rather debatable assumption that the phenomena in question is indeed a craft of some kind. We have a ludicrous number of examples of human beings ascribing natural phenomena to magic and/or aliens.

Technically that 20% applies to both life and intelligent life. Of course I'm just playing devil's advocate -- there would certainly be fewer instances of intelligent life than life. We believe it took >4 billion years for intelligent life to evolve whereas life took hold pretty much immediately upon planet cooling. But it did happen, and we have a number of species of different Orders that are somewhat intelligent and able to use tools (crows, octopi, primates, dolphins), and it only took us ~5 million years, the ability to free our hands to manipulate things, and some natural disasters to get from where they are to where we are.

As you suggested, it is unlikely that a futurist from a newborn civilization would accurately predict what a million (or billion) years old advanced civilization would actually do, and I am also legitimately unaware of whether we have any reason to believe that such projects would be visible when we can barely make out the closest planets outside our solar system (and only indirectly via math). Or if someone blotted out an entire star, how would we know? We use a term called dark matter to fill in the 75% of the universe that we can't describe in conventional terms. As some people posit on this subject, do animals in a nature preserve know they are in a nature preserve? Doesn't look much different than their world did thousands of years ago aside from occasional ufo's flying overhead (planes) unless they stray toward the edges/out of the solar system.

Btw, I would have been one of the skeptics writing these comments three years ago pre-Nimitz release (in fact, if you go back far enough in my HN history I found some comments saying that if there was a greater intelligence it would just ignore us LOL https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lend000&next=1418634...). If you study this incident and a whole plethora of other phenomena with an open mind, you'll find some pretty damn fascinating things from various places with different agendas and levels of credibility (it is certainly not 0 evidence) with significant implications.

> it is certainly not 0 evidence

It is evidence of something going on that we do not understand. That does not immediately mean aliens any more than it immediately means magic or god.

Perhaps they are all the same thing ;)

Skepticism is important to keep discussion grounded, and I appreciate the level headed discussion. To me, finding something that breaks our understanding of reality is just as interesting and worth pursuing aggressively regardless of which of the above explanations is most correct.

On that point I would agree, and the speculation is fun, but it is useful to keep in mind that explanations for mysterious events are almost always boring and mundane.

The most likely explanation for me is a disinformation campaign on the part of the US government, and that these events never actually happened.

Must be the case that

p(two independent alien visits) >> p(single alien visit)^2

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