[JKCalhoun]

I'm skeptical and so lean pragmatic on the issue.

Fighter pilots at risk? If the military believed that they would already be fully engaged in solving the problem. In which case there is little for me or any other civilian to do.

And you say fighter pilots at risk but, and this will sound callous, an actual incident that caused a loss of aircraft would be more compelling. It does away with the may be at risk proposition. And, again, I suspect the military would be fully engaged in understanding the issue. Doubly so.

I guess I also believe that things leak. There isn't going to be a secret program that is so far advanced that it counters known physical laws.

It sounds as though you are certain that it is military in nature so no need to speculate as to whether it is extraterrestrial in nature.

[likeabbas]

Like the other commenter said, there’s a huge stigma amongst military officials to not report these events because the stigma is a career ended. That’s why the government added legislation mandating the DoD create a channel for these events to be reported.

Diving a little deeper, if the military suspected these aircraft were foreign adversary then this would be big news. But they don’t. They believe it’s something else entirely, which is why it’s not been public headlines until recently.

[revscat]

Same in astronomy and cosmology. Your career will be over if you do not hold a very specific view, or at least hold it publicly.

[likeabbas]

Exactly. We need this stigma to stop. There should be no reason to not study interesting data, and the data is very interesting.

[stevenhuang]

If you want to understand the stigma of reporting UAPs as a military pilot, see Ryan Graves interview with Lex Fridman:

https://youtu.be/qLDp-aYnR1Y

> There isn't going to be a secret program that is so far advanced that it counters known physical laws.

I think you've misread this part--parent is not saying these are ours, not at all.

We're all in agreement that if what we're seeing is real, these would be non-human in origin.

[JKCalhoun]

If they're non-human in origin then the whole thing is even less actionable. We're not going to learn the secrets of hyper drive just because the military acknowledges that these are real phenomena.

[blep_]

I don't know. We would learn that some things are possible which we thought were impossible, which means physics took a wrong turn somewhere and we need to back up and keep looking. Even if it's not the secrets of hyper drive, that's probably going to lead to something interesting.

[nprateem]

If they are real and non human maybe we can communicate with them and they can tell us. Highly unlikely based on their interest in our nukes and our obvious penchant for war

[scotty79]

> these would be non-human in origin.

So they must be natural in origin. There's no other option.

[likeabbas]

The direct quote from former DoD officials is that these aircraft are most a likely non-human intelligence.

[nl]

> We're all in agreement that if what we're seeing is real, these would be non-human in origin

I don't agree with this at all.

Firstly I suspect it isn't real.

But if it is then I think it's most likely some human group has a technological breakthrough and it using it like this.

Say a US adversary wanted to give a "don't fuck with us" message to the US military. Outperforming state-of-the-art US fighters would be a good way to do it.

And just because the HN forum commentators don't know who it is doesn't mean the US intelligence community doesn't know. It might be broadly known that the Kamerians have access to this tech, and the knowledge is classified "to avoid broad panic".

There might be secret briefing to congress about it, which would explain perfectly why there is an apparent lack of action. All responses are classified.

[nprateem]

If a foreign adversary had invented such tech, the West would have sanctioned the country into the ground to stop them producing more.

So it's either the US but they claim it's not them, and they keep doing more investigations, or they're not human. I don't buy the faulty sensor argument given multiple corroborating sources.

[nl]

It's impossible to say with such certainty what the reaction would be.

What if the country that developed it was a Western-aligned country like Japan, Israel or France?

What if the country was a country like Russia or Cuba, and has had this tech since before the fall of the Berlin wall and the US intelligence community wanted to keep it secret?

What if the country was a country that is under Western sanctions for other reasons but those reasons were a pretext? For example, if the developer was Iran or North Korea how would you tell the difference without access to classified information?

What if the country was able to blackmail the US into not imposing sanctions? How would you distinguish between that an US foreign policy towards a country like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia?

What if the country was a historically neutral mid-power where there is significant downside in sanctioning them (for example Switzerland)?

What if some elements of the US intelligence community support working with the foreign power and others don't?

There are just too many possibilities to judge the veracity of a theory like this by looking at US foreign policy?

[nprateem]

I don't think so. These things can disable nukes according to testimony given to Congress. They're the basis of US supremacy.

In the above situations, it'd be imperative for the US to acquire the tech through war, economic pressure or espionage, or if that wasn't possible try to prevent them manufacturing more. If it was a friendly country they'd have to share the tech.

This tech is basically like developing 5th gen fighters in the Stone age. There's simply no way the world's largest superpower wouldn't acquire the tech by any means necessary, since it threatens its very existence

[nl]

> These things can disable nukes according to testimony given to Congress.

Citation required.

> In the above situations, it'd be imperative for the US to acquire the tech through war, economic pressure or espionage, or if that wasn't possible try to prevent them manufacturing more.

Perhaps this is exactly what the US is doing? Except the US knows it can't go to war because it'd lose.