Hm. I'm a skeptic and I typically hit all the standard checkmarks on dismissing nutjobs. It's almost a mental stamp worn down to the nubs. But this right here reminded me of the time I scratched my head.
Cue the weird release of the NYT pieces on Navy recordings of UFOs released over the past year. Did you happen to see that one? If not, look it up. There were basically two FLIR recordings of something pretty spooky and, wow, it was something else. The videos were followed up by a leaked NIMITZ carrier group report of the incident cataloging and verifying pretty much everything the pilots said in the interview. The pilots were made fun of by their peers. Means of propulsion in the video was nothing like I'd ever seen anywhere before. The Navy basically said "we don't know what this is" and "it demonstrated propulsion capabilities beyond any known means." One of the videos is downright spooky in places.
First thing skeptical me did was check the provenance of the videos themselves. They were directly provided to NYT by a weird organization headed by an ex band member from Blink 182. Nutjobs, check.
Second thing I checked was who the writers of the article were. One was a general assignment reporter (meh, they have to put someone on it and they were all out of stolen tomato plant stories that day), another was a has-been burnout whose name got used to elevate the story, and last author was a person who wrote books on ghosts and spirituality or some such. Cranks, check.
Then WaPo and other orgs released a bunch of regurgitated hashes of the same story. So I sifted through to see if there were any more details. Nope, they were all borrowed from NYT. Nothing original, lazy re-reporting, check.
Then just to be sure the guy was just lazy I reached out to a WaPo reporter. Nothing.
Then two weeks went by.
He got back to me and told me that they got caught with their pants down. They had been working on the story long before NYT published it - in cooperation with the bizarre group with the ex-Blink 182 guy, and WaPo were under the false impression that they had an exclusive story with them. So when NYT's came out, they felt betrayed and buried what work they had and scrambled to get their own GA reporter to finish the deal. Not lazy. They just cut their losses best they could.
Here's the kicker. The guy verified the provenance of the flight cameras. They WERE provided by the Pentagon under a FOIA act request. Despite the fact that NYT's videos were provided by the Blink 182 people, WaPo had an independent copy of it obtained from the military.
The part that made me scratch my head was that it wasn't just an empty boast. I was given a tip on making a very specific FOIA request to the Pentagon. Goes something like "query seeking cockpit videos cleared for release to Luis Elizondo in the Fall of 2017 (Sep-Oct)."
So what of it? Well, our high energy physics people are making discoveries, and while I don't know what to make any of this, for the first time in awhile I'm feeling like we're making some forward progress in science that might make its way to engineering, or our understanding of its limits. Just recently scientists identified 2-3 candidate anomalies as potential new particles (sigh, some reporters kept calling it a ghost particle). Maybe something will come of it, maybe not. But we're trying, and once these are eliminated there will be more observations, more research, more science. We still have a very poor understanding of gravity and how it relates to things we feel we know.
But for once in this horrible climate we find ourselves in, both political and social, I'm feeling optimistic that we're even looking.
For myself. I'm just a software engineer with an armchair understanding of physics. I knew my comment would be controversial, hence the down-votes. But I witnessed this phenomenon with my own eye's looking at constellations at night with my dad and my sister in 1996 or 97 in Orange County, CA. Judging distance, it must have been near the El Toro Marine Base which closed shortly after. I have no idea what I saw, but it was fast, I mean hyper fast. Maybe 5x to 10x faster then a humming bird. It did a figure 8 in the sky, stopped in mid-air, moved left to right and dissipated. The phenomenon lasted maybe 3 minutes and I had to make a decision to either go for the camcorder or stare at the thing.
I'm putting this together now because the most defining characteristic was that this was a white star shaped spec that was very clearly mechanical in nature.
What does this mean? Did it have metal plates and gears on it? Ailerons, flaps, and windows? You cannot identify something as mechanical on the basis of its motion.
>It did a figure 8 in the sky, stopped in mid-air,
You say 'stopped', but things moving far in the distance are insensitive to depth perception. Probably it was moving toward or away from you. Any idea how you would know the difference?
>I have no idea what I saw
Yet here you are saying it must be an antigravity device, and not some ball lightning. A rational conclusion, if ever there was one.
I was hoping someone would comment but it looks like you already dismissed it by down voting so that tells me you aren't really curious about my answer. As such this comment is meant for everyone else who is. But I'll directly answer all your questions.
When I say it was clearly mechanical. I don't mean that it looked mechanical. I said it was clearly mechanical in nature by the way it moved. My brain instantly went there. Maybe it's instinctual.
The object resembled a star or meteor. It was so small that if it was moving forward or backward, I wouldn't know it.
And finally. I think you all have to deduce. Am I trying to justify my original comment on a post that had nothing to do with UFO's with a wacky comment that I saw one in the 90's or did I see this object, saw this post and put it together that way.
Edit: sure, it could have been a supersonic spec of ball lightning. I'll give you that one. Except for the fact, my dad, a witness who actually saw ball lightning in the former Soviet Union said it looked nothing like that. He's sitting next to me and I just asked him about it.
Why would one expect ball lightning to look the same each time?
I shouldn't be asking these questions, you should be. But you'd rather say "oh, we all know these things about fundamental physics because they are necessary to power the alien spaceships I imagine must exist."
That's not a healthy or useful attitude. If it were, you'd have something to show for it.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but from my understanding ball lightning floats. What I saw wasn't floating. It was moving with force and propulsion. Plus it was a very clear day with no weather disturbance of any kind.
And what I have to show for it is a personal account from myself at 15 and two other members of my family. In retrospect, I went half-way to my parents room to grab the camera but ran back fearing I would miss it entirely. I'm glad, because I'm sure I would have missed it had I looked for the camera. And this phenomenon seems ubiquitous enough that I'm sure there is plenty of footage depicting the exact same thing at least in the private archive. I'm actually pretty disappointed because the footage in the public sphere is much more mild then what I saw. This object wasn't stationary, it was a white ball that moved like a zigzagging rocket; though it didn't look at all like it was out of control. It seemed to move very purposefully.
Around 27 seconds it starts rotating about one of its axes. Does not follow a fixed wing pattern, and it doesn't show any propulsion emissions on FLIR.
Hm. So again, my whole rant has to do with the fact that the videos (3-4 in total?) have been independently verified to have come from the Pentagon. That part has not, to my knowledge, been debunked as independent sources have FOIA'd copies of it. Heck, you could file a request as a private citizen and obtain the same, and I encourage you to.
So what does this really mean? If you draw it down to either the video being fake or real, I can only see four possibilities and reasons.
1. Fake: this is a product of a Pentagon psyop intended to leak out and cast doubt on our enemies's intelligence, implying that we have access to top secret propulsion technologies beyond their known capabilities.
2. Fake, but conducted by persons unknown and planted inside the Pentagon. It would have taken quite an effort to fabricate because it involved two-three radar tracking stations, an entire naval carrier group, senior pilots, military intelligence, record keeping personnel. Too many of these have issued reports corroborating the observations. Way too many disconnected people to manage for a conspiracy.
3. Real. One of our enemies has access to secret propulsion technologies beyond our capabilities to counter. Enemies, because our own military intelligence was unaware of anything like this and a threat, because it clearly had superior flight characteristics as described by the witnesses.
4. Real. Question is about its origin, however. Terrestrial: are these merely shy biologicals living under the sea we've never cataloged? Extra-terrestrial: automated probes from another place, another time? Other life in the universe?
Only one of these possibilities is bland to a point of ignoring it, that being #1. Rest of the possibilities have profound implications about ourselves, and none so much as #4. It means we're not alone in the universe. So while I agree that a broken clock can tell the right time twice a day, I don't bash what I used to call UFO nutjobs as much anymore.
I don't see why there can't be a fifth possibility.
Real: technology our own military (USA) has had access to for years, and what we see in the video is a test to see how our own pilots would react.
I'm personally leaning in this direction.
But just wanted to say. Reading through the document. The idea that these things cloak themselves when observed is something that I haven't heard and more mind blowing then anything. And the notion that these are technologically advanced beings from our oceans is under scrutinized.
Cue the weird release of the NYT pieces on Navy recordings of UFOs released over the past year. Did you happen to see that one? If not, look it up. There were basically two FLIR recordings of something pretty spooky and, wow, it was something else. The videos were followed up by a leaked NIMITZ carrier group report of the incident cataloging and verifying pretty much everything the pilots said in the interview. The pilots were made fun of by their peers. Means of propulsion in the video was nothing like I'd ever seen anywhere before. The Navy basically said "we don't know what this is" and "it demonstrated propulsion capabilities beyond any known means." One of the videos is downright spooky in places.
First thing skeptical me did was check the provenance of the videos themselves. They were directly provided to NYT by a weird organization headed by an ex band member from Blink 182. Nutjobs, check.
Second thing I checked was who the writers of the article were. One was a general assignment reporter (meh, they have to put someone on it and they were all out of stolen tomato plant stories that day), another was a has-been burnout whose name got used to elevate the story, and last author was a person who wrote books on ghosts and spirituality or some such. Cranks, check.
Then WaPo and other orgs released a bunch of regurgitated hashes of the same story. So I sifted through to see if there were any more details. Nope, they were all borrowed from NYT. Nothing original, lazy re-reporting, check.
Then just to be sure the guy was just lazy I reached out to a WaPo reporter. Nothing.
Then two weeks went by.
He got back to me and told me that they got caught with their pants down. They had been working on the story long before NYT published it - in cooperation with the bizarre group with the ex-Blink 182 guy, and WaPo were under the false impression that they had an exclusive story with them. So when NYT's came out, they felt betrayed and buried what work they had and scrambled to get their own GA reporter to finish the deal. Not lazy. They just cut their losses best they could.
Here's the kicker. The guy verified the provenance of the flight cameras. They WERE provided by the Pentagon under a FOIA act request. Despite the fact that NYT's videos were provided by the Blink 182 people, WaPo had an independent copy of it obtained from the military.
The part that made me scratch my head was that it wasn't just an empty boast. I was given a tip on making a very specific FOIA request to the Pentagon. Goes something like "query seeking cockpit videos cleared for release to Luis Elizondo in the Fall of 2017 (Sep-Oct)."
So what of it? Well, our high energy physics people are making discoveries, and while I don't know what to make any of this, for the first time in awhile I'm feeling like we're making some forward progress in science that might make its way to engineering, or our understanding of its limits. Just recently scientists identified 2-3 candidate anomalies as potential new particles (sigh, some reporters kept calling it a ghost particle). Maybe something will come of it, maybe not. But we're trying, and once these are eliminated there will be more observations, more research, more science. We still have a very poor understanding of gravity and how it relates to things we feel we know.
But for once in this horrible climate we find ourselves in, both political and social, I'm feeling optimistic that we're even looking.
[1] Interview with the pilot: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-... [2] Leaked NIMITZ report (PDF): https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...