Pentagon Says Reaper Drone Spotted 'Metallic Orb' UFO in Middle East | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Says Reaper Drone Spotted 'Metallic Orb' UFO in Middle East

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17 pointsgraderjs15 comments

Feels like half the news is only barely qualifying as news if you are strongly prone to misread "UFO" as "Aliens!" and "AI" as "Terminators!".

Reaper drone spotted Aliens!

Reaper drone spots something, we don't know what.

We put a Terminator! in charge of a fighter jet.

We used some code as a fancy autopilot in a plane.

etc.

This doesn't reflect well on society or the media.

Yeah, or like the SpaceX test flight was actually a success and they secretly happy about it haha

> One of the slides that Kirkpatrick used in his testimony showed the geographic areas where UAP sightings happen the most, which coincided with locations around the world where there are known to be U.S. military installations.

Had a good chuckle at that one. I assume it was the journalist who added the ominous "coincides with military installations". You don't get sightings where you have no presence!

Actually that makes me want to play a round of UFO Enemy Unknown! Great game.

Reaper drone spots detonated missile fuel tank falling to ground... video is immediately misinterpreted by UFO "enthusiasts" as a flying metallic orb.

That’s a cool interpretation. Very creative. But I think you might be misinterpreting because apparently the Pentagon has dozens of similar videos and they all look like spheres and they’re all kind of navigating around that area. Also, if it’s a missile fuel tank wouldn’t have some thermal coming off it? but apparently there’s no thermal on most of these.

Mylar balloon.

Instant assumption based on former pattern recognition.

No assumption, just stating what it looks like and most probably is.

Drone is high and moving while focused on fixed point on ground, balloon drifts thru field of view in opposite direction and so looks faster than it really is. The geometry is visually deceptive though really quite simple.

How to explain the lack perspective change of ground features? Without it drone movement seems small, so hard to explain the giant speed in your balloon theory.

People don't understand that the vast majority of UFO behaviour is actually just the camera being unstable and jerking around a bit or a parallax effect caused by a moving and rotating camera pointing at a static object.

The famous "GIMBAL" UFO video on YouTube is just the backside of a jet and you are seeing the engine exhaust including glare.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/gimbal-ufo-a-new-analysis.1...

OK, but how to explain the lack perspective change of ground features in this vid?

Without it drone movement seems small, so hard to explain the giant speed in your balloon or camera theory.

> "OK, but how to explain the lack perspective change of ground features in this vid?"

I guess it is explained by the "or a parallax effect caused by a moving and rotating camera pointing at a static object." part of GP post.

No, but how can you explain the magnitude of it? I don’t think it accounts for that.

Wouldn't the people at the Pentagon already have thought of this?

Right! And haven’t the aliens at pentagon city thought of this too?

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