I’d be floored if the radar data didn’t back this up. A carrier group would have scrambled fighters well before anything unidentified got within a hundred miles, much less ten.
Visual confirmation I don’t find remotely compelling. Besides the notorious general unreliability of human observers, humans simply cannot distinguish between small, nearby objects traveling slowly and large, far objects traveling quickly without additional contextual clues (e.g., a tiny plane-shaped object in the sky is probably the latter). Factor in that they were validating their observations against a sensor displaying a misleading image—in other words, providing incorrect contextual clues—and I think it’s not hard to call into question the accuracy of any visual claims.
It was picked up on radar over several different days and a training mission was scrubbed so that they could go investigate what they saw on radar.
You don't think humans could get better at judging distance of objects with practice? It seems like if any humans on earth could reliably do it, it would be seasoned fighter pilots that have thousands of hours of experience doing that exact thing.
I didn't think the radar track was at the same time was it? I thought the Tico's tracked it with the SPY-1 and they sent F-18s to investigate who then tracked it with the FLIR and visually.
Without a reference point you are unlikely to be able to guess the distance of an aircraft, especially an unknown one.
Here's a 4 hour interview with the pilot, David Fravor, on Lex Fridman's show where he goes into much more detail than you'll probably read elsewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E
This wasn't just a single radar. It was an AEGIS system compromised of multiple ships with state of the art radars, multiple plane radars, and visual confirmation by several pilots. They were tracking it for multiple days.
I think part of the problem here is that there are multiple incidents being conflated. For instance, people are saying that the pilots visually confirmed the incident with their own eyes, but (according to the article) that would not have been possible given the distance between the plane and the object.
Is there a source to indicate that in the specific incident being covered by this article, that there is any evidence beyond the video itself?
There are actually lots of different UAP incidents. In some there are supposedly objects that get really close to carriers, which are tracked by many different radar systems etc. The gimbal video one wasn't one of those, IIUC, it was just what you see in the video.