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Comment by jaqalopes | Hacker News Reader

It was news to me that in the Nimitz event ballistic missile defense radar was actually observing the UAVs in low Earth orbit days before the fighter jet encounter. Truly wild stuff. If I had to hazard a guess, these are unmanned (unaliened?) probes, the same ones that have been here for centuries or more. They may not even know or care what humans are or what we're up to. Maybe they keep dipping to the water to take algae samples or something similarly banal. And the reason they "run away" when the fighter jets get too close is just their onboard flight AI following a generic self-preservation script. However, none of this comports with the report of the fleeing tic-tac "appearing" directly at the fighters' pre-determined, secret CAP point.

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I can't get my head around why the govt. is now talking openly about this subject after casting it into the "basement" after project blue book. You have these patents the Navy recently applied for and received that indicate(if believed)[1] that the govt. now has craft that can also achieve stuff like what was described by OP. So for me it really comes down to 3 scenarios:

1 - The crafts are non-human technology, the US knows what they are(non-human technology) and at first ridiculed anyone who confirmed a sighting, and now is putting out phony patents to save face.

2 - The US or some other earthly government created these objects and is running dis-info by stating they are unknown, and now talking about these patents to scare other countries about this technology.

3 - The US has no idea what they are and hence why they shelved project blue book as the idea of a craft that can penetrate the US's defenses at any time is uncomfortable, they are now playing statecraft games by these patents and now getting interested in UAPs.

1 - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g...

1 - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

I came across an interesting theory on why the gov’t is being more open about UAV observations in a HN comment a while back - paraphrasing:

Pilots may be under-reporting UAV sitings due to the fear of being labeled as crackpots and or dismissed. By speaking more openly about the subject the gov’t is signaling that it’s okay to talk about and shouldn’t be ridiculed.

Assuming this is all true, I wonder if this is how wild dolphins feel when they have an encounter with friendly human beings? It almost feels like playful behavior. Like the UAPs are flying alongside the fighters the way we might swim with dolphins. Tweaking our noses a bit too. "Look how much faster than you we are. Look how we know your secret little patrol point." It would be sinister and deeply threatening if paired with any demonstration of ill-intent, and perhaps it should be read as such. But it doesn't feel that way to me. It feels very much like the brief fun little games people play during incidental encounters with non-dangerous wild animals sometimes. Imagine a man hiking along a trail in a line with a dozen friends, who notices an interesting lizard on a log and stops to look as his friends continue on without him. The man pokes the lizard a little, to see how it reacts, and it predictably scurries off. He then follows his friends, soon disappearing into what is an impossible-to-reach distance from the lizard's perspective, and he never gives the little lizard another thought. We are lizards compared to any intelligence capable of achieving these levels of power output (1100GW in seconds!), if this study's estimates are correct. Maybe we just got poked in passing.

My favorite theory comes from Douglas Adams where the UFO sightings are the alien equivalent of teenagers going for a joy ride making fun of the weird animals.

There's a good twilight zone episode where some alien kids come to earth to go camping. They get discovered, hunted to their death by humans and in their last move they activate a distress beacon. The closing shot is a alien craft dwarfing earth.

The Navy pilots report being jammed by the silver tic tac's, so one day there may be an escalation.

Or it could all be lens flare.

Lens flares are a possibility, but my favorite is swamp gas. If it's not aliens, then it might as well be swamp gas.

I had not caught that bit before, either:

> The main incident occurred on 14 November 2004, but several days earlier, radar operators on the USS Princeton were detecting UAPs appearing on radar at about 80,000+ feet altitude to the north of CSG11 in the vicinity of Santa Catalina and San Clemente Islands. Senior Chief Kevin Day informed us that the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) radar systems had detected the UAPs in low Earth orbit before they dropped down to 80,000 feet. The objects would arrive in groups of 10 to 20 and subsequently drop down to 28,000 feet with a several hundred foot variation, and track south at a speed of about 100 knots.

What a coincidence:

https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/navbas...

One of the primary military function of San Clemente Island has been to support research and development of many of the Navy's weapon systems

…

This integrated set of ranges and operational areas covers approximately 2,620 square nautical miles (nm). The SCIRC consists of more than six dozen ranges and operational areas. The extent of these areas range from the ocean floor to an altitude of 80,000 feet.

In the "GIMBAL" video the second operator mentions something similar, "there's a whole fleet of them, look on the ASA"

There are a lot of radars tracking objects in low earth orbit. If there were objects the Nimitz radar could see in orbit "for centuries or more" we'd have seen them a very long time ago.

Radars are probabilistic systems, and with military radars these days the processing is quite complex and sophisticated. There's a going on to reject clutter. This sometimes goes haywire for perfectly banal natural reasons. Assuming alien probes should be item 10 thousand something on your list of likely causes, if not way lower.

> There are a lot of radars tracking objects in low earth orbit. If there were objects the Nimitz radar could see in orbit "for centuries or more" we'd have seen them a very long time ago.

I'm struggling to make sense of your argument here. People have reported seeing them for a very long time. The core elements of the "ufo phenomenon" appear to be pretty well-conserved across space and time.

>Radars are probabilistic systems, and with military radars these days the processing is quite complex and sophisticated. There's a going on to reject clutter. This sometimes goes haywire for perfectly banal natural reasons.

you are ignoring the fact that the pilots saw these objects with their eyes. Unless the radar systems on multiple planes and the eye-brain systems of multiple humans all failed exactly at the same time and in the same way?

"Unaliened" probes are far more likely than EBEs given the extreme distances between stars. Hundreds to thousands of years flight time is a problem for any biology even close to ours but an AI can just turn itself off during the trip.

It could be programmed to just observe and occasionally sample interesting biology and stream data back to home base.

The study addresses this. If the objects can maintain their observed performance in space, then they could reach relativistic speeds so quickly that shipboard transit time between here and Alpha Centauri would be in the range of days to weeks.

> the same ones that have been here for centuries or more

HN. Shark. Jumping now..

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