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Comment by eth0up | Hacker News Reader

"The footage was released during a congressional hearing on Tuesday about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs.

It shows an MQ-9 Reaper drone tracking a glowing orb off the coast of Yemen before firing a Hellfire missile straight at it.

But instead of blowing the object to bits, the so-called “orb” appeared to shrug it off and keep flying.

The video was taken in October 2024, but has only just been released to the public. "

- https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/36642473/ufo-struck-by-us-mili...

Hearing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4nzlSz3rJBc

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> But instead of blowing the object to bits

Air to air missiles don't always explode in a fireball like in Hollywood movies. Often it's more like a shotgun blast that peppers the target with holes and relatively minor damage that then causes mechanical failure. The Dutch safety board's analysis video of the shootdown of MH17 has great animations and forensic photos.

Also if you look at the video, there's obvious debris coming of either the missile or the craft. Furthermore the craft does seem to be affected.

Aren’t they supposed to explode just prior to contact? I.e. they aren’t flying hammers? So was this missile not armed or what happened, it’s difficult for me to see on mobile.

The Hellfire AGM-114R-9X missiles have bladed bits that slice the target instead of blowing it up. (So, flying swords instead of flying hammers?)

After asking around some military friends suggested to me this could be a training exercise with an inert warhead.

It's not that simple. Some are designed to fly alongside the target and send a shrapnel ring blasting out. But the ballistics are a complex problem and they can sometimes physically impact the target in certain intercept geometries. You also may not be able to distinguish a direct hit from a shrapnel blast kill in a recording of a FLIR display from a distance, since the shrapnel may not show up well in the IR spectrum + the display is much lower resolution than the camera. (e.g. if you take a photo with a high end camera, but look at the photo on the LCD on the back of the camera, you won't see all the detail captured by the system.) Anecdotally I've heard that pilots can see their targets in far better detail using the debriefing tools after the flight than they can with the cockpit displays.

> It's not that simple. Some are designed to fly alongside the target and send a shrapnel ring blasting out

Yes many air target missiles do just that but this is a hellfire, normally used for ground targets. So there is no flying alongside its intended targets, it's just a big boom warhead.

Because it's meant for ground targets I could imagine the detonator needs something really firm to hit in order to detonate though. A drone might not suffice in all circumstances

Hellfires have a selection of available warheads. The newest ones have multi-purpose warheads that have different selectable explosive patterns for different types of target. Even physically twisting the missile to get better hit probability on an air target:

https://www.twz.com/usaf-testing-mutant-missiles-that-twist-...

This area of defense technology has been moving very quickly in the past few years, many assumptions the general public holds about military weapons and tactics are long obsolete.

Hmm cool but are these actually hanging under the wing of a drone or fighter yet? This all looks very experimental. Not daily bread & butter.

Yes, JAGM/Hellfire II/SPEAR are flying. The US military has started deploying weapons much more quickly as of late.

Congress has hearings about UFOs now?

What's next, flat earth hearings?

Dear bully,

The "U" stands for "unidentified". That's all. No need to be abusive

I'm sure if you could push that, you would. You probably push the elderly and children. You ought try pushing your intellect, for something other than money and ignorance.

PS: since a mod will see (and flag) this comment, please take a moment, if you have the necessary UI, to look at my downvote history. Almost every comment I make gets at least one downvote. I think I've made a friend or two here, but I don't requite. You guys enforce a lot of subtle things; is this encouraged?

it was a missle on missle test like iron dome.

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