Basically, some EO sensors, some radar systems, RF spectrum monitoring and some ADS-B to calibrate against identifiable aircraft.
This is OK.
It can probably tell you "that's definitely something we understand". It can count things where it can't, and give you a little data to help you understand if it's something understandable, but rare enough to not be already in your system taxonomy.
It isn't enough to establish what a UAP is, but will give you an idea of the frequency of things you should probably spend more time and money and effort into identifying.
Interesting thing is, if you identify some hot spots of UAP activity through this, you can then start to collect more data, and then perhaps we can figure out what is going on: UAP are real, we know that thanks to the more honest, open and frank disclosures made in recent years. You don't need to believe they're of ET origin to believe they are a potential threat to [inter-]national security infrastructure. It's astonishing to me its taking this long to get this far, to be honest.
I highly recommend Mick West's work on reconstructing the situations in each of the released videos so far: https://www.youtube.com/@MickWest
His reconstructions make it clear that these phenomena result from properties of the optical system used in the sensors as well as diffusion of infrared light through miles of atmosphere.
I feel like people will take the "UAP are real" comment completely out of context. They're only saying that "things exist that we can't (yet) explain", which we already knew to be the case. And if there were in fact footage from a short enough distance to see things clearly, then we'd already know what it is.
In other words, nobody (credible) is claiming that aliens or anything of the sort exist.
Do you mean tictac and go fast videos ? Many military personnel, ex f35 pilots and other researchers had validated Ryan Graves and David Fravor claims and the footage - they aren't part of US technology. They had debunked Mick west skewed analysis and they are more credible than him . He never had flied a fighter jet he is a game programmer totally different areas of expertise
You’re going to need a lot more than video analysis and a handful of unverifiable eyewitness testimony (humans are famously fallible) to claim discovery of extra-terrestrial life.
Being a retired pilot doesn't make you an expert on quirks in very high tech camera systems either or provide some natural credibility that blurry phenomenon in the sky are credible evidence of anything.
Every single data point in isolation can be ridiculated and twisted in many ways and this is what Mick West is doing. it is another story when you have series of multiple data points through long timeline with recurring patterns and have to make sense of them. UAPs are raported since at least WWII (foo figters), some accounts are traced even to ancient times.
Annie Jacobsen Book "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military has an interesting take on UFOs. The government actively perpetuated rumors about sightings to keep people from thinking top secret projects flying around the bases were real.
One telling thing about UFO sightings is the government's change in attitude compared to the last half of the last century.
It used to be that the government was trying to discourage reports. They would explain away everything that did get reported--usually reasonably because most sighting were just ordinary things that were misidentified but there were some that they never publicly had good explanations for.
They encouraged treating people who said they saw UFOs as kooks, and were successful enough that when pilots saw something they could not explain they would usually not report it because that could affect their career.
Lately that has flipped. Now they want reports.
The explanation that best fits the facts is that in the past what the people who weren't just misidentifying some normal thing were seeing were secret government projects that had accidentally been flown where they should not have been.
The government didn't want people to talk about those sightings because if too many people did talk about them it might be possible to piece together details about the program.
Now there are some sightings that don't fit with misidentification of normal things and that the government can't match up with any of their secret projects and they want to know what the heck is going on. They almost certainly don't think it could be extraterrestrials--foreign spies is what they are probably worried about.
They need more data, and so now they want people who see things to report it.
My belief is that their shift in attitude is because the cat is out of the bag... we know there is unusual stuff in the sky, so their best defense now is to pretend they don't know what they are, and asking for reports makes it more believable that it's not theirs.
I don't doubt people are skeptical about my opinion, and I don't blame them. But, keep in mind that many of the sightings are from Navy pilots, during planned Navy training missions. Oh, and the Navy has patents on some technologies that would explain some of these UAP sightings (if the technology in the patents works). Here are the patents:
I'm pretty skeptical. UFO believers and the Ancient Aliens crowd don't typically adhere to the scientific method, and so news like this doesn't sway me much.
I usually ignore this stuff, but it is pretty wild to see congressional documents talking about "non-human intelligences" intercepting F-22s and forcing them to abort missions. Seems pretty fanciful.
One thing that bugs me about the UFO/UAP disclosure folks is that they assume all military secrecy is part of some sort of coverup and not just normal military protocols.
Disclosing things that the military deemed anomalous reveals a lot about military capabilities. Simple things like where groups were, but… imagine you were an adversary doing a drone exercise and you see the US reporting it as UFOs. That would tell you a lot about limitations in US sensors AND that US drone tech was so far behind that they concluded it wasn’t a drone. The military will always err on the side of not oversharing.
So of course the military isn’t going to disclose. If we want to take this seriously, we need a non-military org that will monitor and report that is designed from the ground up for transparency. Seems like something a scientific agency like NASA could be well suited for
> One thing that bugs me about the UFO/UAP disclosure folks is that they assume all military secrecy is part of some sort of coverup and not just normal military protocols.
Who? This feels like a straw man argument. I am not aware of anyone who takes such a (ridiculous) position, and I follow this subject fairly closely.
> scientific agency like NASA could be suited for.
That agency was created a couple of years ago. It is called AARO. They just released their FY 2024 report:
From the hearing last week my main takeaway was that there is a program that nobody in Congress has oversight of. That alone is alarming but not entirely surprising given the abdication of Congressional authority to Executive agencies. I want to believe that the rumors of advanced craft recovery starting in the 40s are real. But, the reality is that UAPs are likely secret advanced human technology. The one thing that irks me about that conclusion is that historically acquisition/discovery of superior technology has been used for domination by the discoverer. Nobody has done that. None of the reported UAPs have been hostile. That alone seems to go against human nature. So, I'm left with a conclusion that doesn't make sense in human behavior terms.
The hearing just made me feel like "Independence Day" may have had it right. People in government know but don't tell the president for plausible deniability and non-permanence of the position.
This is so incredibly valuable that many are trying and failing. If it was possible, there would be at least one independent researcher who puts it on YouTube. These patents are not hiding in plain sight, everybody interested in advanced propulsion knows about them and knew about the research even before the patents.
Possibly. Given the era that this started it is more believable. If a small group secreted it away in the 40s it wouldn't be that difficult to keep it secret. I think that is where all the UFO reporter discrediting came in handy. Anybody that was in the know didn't share and outside reporters were painted as kooks which discouraged others from speaking up. Throw in a few "disappearances" of credible reporters and nobody wants to talk about it.
Fortunately we can all talk to millions of strangers around the world in an instant now. Even the kooks can find a community to share to that might be able to coorberate their story.
Pinnacle of intelligence within the solar system is still pretty likely, even if not in the universe. People forget how brutally hard star flight is if you're not using scifi cheats.
In the 600 million years that our planet has had complex multicellular life, only about 130 of those years has any species here been able to communicate outside the planet. That's .00002% of the time, on a planet with multicellular life.
Maybe the norm is that intelligent life lasts a long time and we just happen to be born in the first tiny fraction of humanity.
But the observational evidence is that even given multicellular life, intelligence is extremely rare, and there is no evidence at all that it is likely to last very long.
Sumerian and early Mesopotamian mythology is very interesting reading. I won't say it's ''aliens'' but there are some strong hints of more going on at the rise of civilization then just neolithic people coming together and inventing writing.
I have this idea that sedentary agrarian urban civilization was something created by nomadic peoples to farm slaves. Hunter gatherers and pastoral peoples would be very hard to control. But if they took children, and raised them to be sedentary and dependent on agriculture they could have a stable of slaves.
> Considering the size and age of the universe, it would be very very weird if earth apes were the pinnacle of intelligence.
It might depend on the origin of the universe. One theory involves an exponentially expanding spacetime driven by a quantum field. Fluctuations in that field can case a region of that expanding spacetime to greatly slow down its expansion and that region becomes a universe.
If that's how it happened our universe would just be one in a very very large collection of universes. In particular the rate of universe creation would grow exponentially and so the fraction of old universes would be exponentially smaller than the fraction of young universes.
If it takes a few billion years for the first human level intelligence to develop in a given universe and then hundreds of millions more years for the second intelligence to develop then of all the universes with at least one intelligence only a very very very small fraction of them would have more than one intelligence.
> In fact I think the most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we are kept isolated from other civilizations within range.
Another interesting possibility is that civilizations isolate themselves. It seems very unlikely that neighboring civilizations would be at the same level of technological development--there is just too much luck involved in becoming a civilization and in developing technology.
That suggests that first meetings between civilizations are very likely to involve civilizations with vastly different technology levels. They also are likely to have vastly different cultures and vastly different ethics and vastly different philosophies.
Maybe the more advanced will see it as their duty to help the other progress. Or maybe they they will view them like Europeans viewed the occupants of the Americas in the 16th century. Or maybe they will see them as animals and give them about as much consideration as we give the animals on a patch of wilderness that we want to use for something.
You can model how civilizations should behave when they learn of other civilizations using game theory. When a civilization learns of another than hasn't yet learned of them their choices are: (1) try to keep themselves secret from the other, (2) try to contact the other, and (3) try to destroy the other.
(We would not be able to choose #3 because we aren't technologically advanced enough, but we know ways to do #3 that we'll probably be capable of in a few hundred to a couple thousand years from now).
Assuming that a civilization puts much much much more value on its own survival than on the survival of other civilizations #3 is the option with the highest expected value. If you aren't to the point where #3 is possible than #1 gives the highest expected value.
In short, we could be in a galaxy full of civilizations but they are all avoiding doing anything that would let others detect them because they don't want to be the target of someone else's option #3.
You can also consider the possibility that the intelligent civilizations of the universe don't even consider us a life form. I think about that a lot. "Maybe god and its creatures are not even aware we're here."
Moist pebble apes might be a short lived fluke. Our civilization has existed for an insignificant amount of time and even primates could be just a flare in the pan.
It's been a while since I read it, so I can't promise it holds up, but I remember quite enjoying this novel with a similar premise (the solar system is quarantined in a giant bubble for unclear reasons, with a side of nanotechnology-driven apps for your brain).
Three times doesn't exactly seem like a lot, right?
And for UFOs-as-ETs, these intelligences would have had to spawn pretty near our solar system, and their existence overlap in time with mankind's tiny fraction of existence (truly a blip in the lifespan of the universe), and detect our existence (or at least our system as a worthwhile destination), and develop tech to take them here, and be interested in this undertaking, and have the resources for it, and not wipe themselves out in an accident, ecological disaster or global war, and after all of this choose to just do mysterious flybys and abductions and no formal contact with Earth.
I doubt any kind of lifeform can exist for that long, but even if it did, the rest of the objections apply. If it's in the other side of the universe, we will never meet. So it would have to be near, and [rest of my objections].
Usually when UAP-related news items like this make
it to the HN front page they don’t last very long. If this lasts even two hours I’ll be (pleasantly) surprised.
Most HN readers, it seems, feel the subject to be abjectly ridiculous and downvote accordingly.
It seems to me that the document was pretty demonstrably proven to be a hoax. You can find the arguments and evidence online, I'm not really in a mood to hash it out here.
But anyone will believe anything they like. If you want to believe it isn't a hoax you have to contend with the typographic and other anomalies that seem to show otherwise.
Yes, documents are online but how you can prove that those are hoax? The last analysis I know the guy made cross reference checks using modern search engines and newspaper databases and things where matching. I don't want to say that documents are real but for sure I never saw any argument that would definatly say that it was hoax.
I said I believe it's a hoax. I never claimed to be able to prove anything. I believe the evidence that purports to show that the documents aren't genuine, which you can refer to. Even a lot of people in the UFO community don't find the Majestic 12 documents credible.
You can't prove they're real, either, although you might believe they are. On balance however there seems to be more evidence against them than for them.
To force our enemies to question whether there’s a chance we could have been in touch with aliens and received some of their technology. That seriously changes the calculus when deciding whether to launch in a MAD scenario.
I think some country has developed some very cool drones with non-traditional propulsion. I'm imagining gyroscopes inside mounted on gimbals, and when pressure is applied to the gyroscopes they cause the spheres to spin and bend through the air like a ping pong ball, but in a controlled fashion. The spheres are supposed to be 3-6m wide, so filled with helium could have enough lift to counterbalance 50 pounds of equipment.
Is it just me or does the architecture diagram at the top of the page from the “DOD Document” leaves a lot to be desired? It almost gives you no information about the actual system at all
It's a blowup from this document.[1] That's worth reading.
- Drone activity is up, and drone overflights of nuclear plants are being detected. One drone crashed and was turned over to cops.
- The most common report (63%) is one of lights in the sky, no additional data. Most unresolved cases are in that category.
- The next biggest category is spherical objects. Most of those turn out to be balloons.
- Starlink satellites generate a fair number of reports.
- MIT Lincoln Labs is apparently integrating the Gremlin system.
What's needed, and what Gremlin is supposed to provide, is telescopic cameras at multiple locations that can be quickly focused on a single target. Lights in the sky seen from one point don't tell you much, but if you have three separated cameras pointed at the thing, you know where it is.
The old GEODSS system, from the 1980s and still operating at a few locations, was similar, but aimed at near-space objects. The Ground-Based Optical Deep Space Surveillance System was a set of about eight telescope pairs worldwide. This was the beginning of automated astronomy. Each station surveilled the whole sky, and checked off all lights against a star map. Anything unknown got looked at. Both telescopes would point to the same object, and the telescopes were far enough apart to triangulate low-orbit satellites. Three sites are still running, and have been upgraded several times.[2]
GEODSS was tied into various USAF and NORAD radar systems, so items of interest seen on radar could be looked at, too.
GREMLIN sounds like a mini version of GEODSS. More local, and intended for in-atmosphere objects.
Basically, some EO sensors, some radar systems, RF spectrum monitoring and some ADS-B to calibrate against identifiable aircraft.
This is OK.
It can probably tell you "that's definitely something we understand". It can count things where it can't, and give you a little data to help you understand if it's something understandable, but rare enough to not be already in your system taxonomy.
It isn't enough to establish what a UAP is, but will give you an idea of the frequency of things you should probably spend more time and money and effort into identifying.
Interesting thing is, if you identify some hot spots of UAP activity through this, you can then start to collect more data, and then perhaps we can figure out what is going on: UAP are real, we know that thanks to the more honest, open and frank disclosures made in recent years. You don't need to believe they're of ET origin to believe they are a potential threat to [inter-]national security infrastructure. It's astonishing to me its taking this long to get this far, to be honest.
> UAP are real
I highly recommend Mick West's work on reconstructing the situations in each of the released videos so far: https://www.youtube.com/@MickWest
His reconstructions make it clear that these phenomena result from properties of the optical system used in the sensors as well as diffusion of infrared light through miles of atmosphere.
I feel like people will take the "UAP are real" comment completely out of context. They're only saying that "things exist that we can't (yet) explain", which we already knew to be the case. And if there were in fact footage from a short enough distance to see things clearly, then we'd already know what it is.
In other words, nobody (credible) is claiming that aliens or anything of the sort exist.
Do you mean tictac and go fast videos ? Many military personnel, ex f35 pilots and other researchers had validated Ryan Graves and David Fravor claims and the footage - they aren't part of US technology. They had debunked Mick west skewed analysis and they are more credible than him . He never had flied a fighter jet he is a game programmer totally different areas of expertise
You’re going to need a lot more than video analysis and a handful of unverifiable eyewitness testimony (humans are famously fallible) to claim discovery of extra-terrestrial life.
Being a retired pilot doesn't make you an expert on quirks in very high tech camera systems either or provide some natural credibility that blurry phenomenon in the sky are credible evidence of anything.
Every single data point in isolation can be ridiculated and twisted in many ways and this is what Mick West is doing. it is another story when you have series of multiple data points through long timeline with recurring patterns and have to make sense of them. UAPs are raported since at least WWII (foo figters), some accounts are traced even to ancient times.
Annie Jacobsen Book "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military has an interesting take on UFOs. The government actively perpetuated rumors about sightings to keep people from thinking top secret projects flying around the bases were real.
One telling thing about UFO sightings is the government's change in attitude compared to the last half of the last century.
It used to be that the government was trying to discourage reports. They would explain away everything that did get reported--usually reasonably because most sighting were just ordinary things that were misidentified but there were some that they never publicly had good explanations for.
They encouraged treating people who said they saw UFOs as kooks, and were successful enough that when pilots saw something they could not explain they would usually not report it because that could affect their career.
Lately that has flipped. Now they want reports.
The explanation that best fits the facts is that in the past what the people who weren't just misidentifying some normal thing were seeing were secret government projects that had accidentally been flown where they should not have been.
The government didn't want people to talk about those sightings because if too many people did talk about them it might be possible to piece together details about the program.
Now there are some sightings that don't fit with misidentification of normal things and that the government can't match up with any of their secret projects and they want to know what the heck is going on. They almost certainly don't think it could be extraterrestrials--foreign spies is what they are probably worried about.
They need more data, and so now they want people who see things to report it.
My belief is that their shift in attitude is because the cat is out of the bag... we know there is unusual stuff in the sky, so their best defense now is to pretend they don't know what they are, and asking for reports makes it more believable that it's not theirs.
I don't doubt people are skeptical about my opinion, and I don't blame them. But, keep in mind that many of the sightings are from Navy pilots, during planned Navy training missions. Oh, and the Navy has patents on some technologies that would explain some of these UAP sightings (if the technology in the patents works). Here are the patents:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10322827B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190348597A1/en
Also high-performance quadcopters are much cheaper to make and if someone is flying one around that shouldn’t be, it’s worth knowing about.
The chances that a UFO is actually a nefarious drone have gone up a lot over the past 20 years.
What's HN's take on "Immaculate Constellation"?
I'm pretty skeptical. UFO believers and the Ancient Aliens crowd don't typically adhere to the scientific method, and so news like this doesn't sway me much.
I usually ignore this stuff, but it is pretty wild to see congressional documents talking about "non-human intelligences" intercepting F-22s and forcing them to abort missions. Seems pretty fanciful.
What does HN think about this?
One thing that bugs me about the UFO/UAP disclosure folks is that they assume all military secrecy is part of some sort of coverup and not just normal military protocols.
Disclosing things that the military deemed anomalous reveals a lot about military capabilities. Simple things like where groups were, but… imagine you were an adversary doing a drone exercise and you see the US reporting it as UFOs. That would tell you a lot about limitations in US sensors AND that US drone tech was so far behind that they concluded it wasn’t a drone. The military will always err on the side of not oversharing.
So of course the military isn’t going to disclose. If we want to take this seriously, we need a non-military org that will monitor and report that is designed from the ground up for transparency. Seems like something a scientific agency like NASA could be well suited for
> One thing that bugs me about the UFO/UAP disclosure folks is that they assume all military secrecy is part of some sort of coverup and not just normal military protocols.
Who? This feels like a straw man argument. I am not aware of anyone who takes such a (ridiculous) position, and I follow this subject fairly closely.
> scientific agency like NASA could be suited for.
That agency was created a couple of years ago. It is called AARO. They just released their FY 2024 report:
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Nov/14/2003583603/-1/-1/0/FY2...
But AARO is still in the department of defense. We need an agency that has nothing to do with the military
From the hearing last week my main takeaway was that there is a program that nobody in Congress has oversight of. That alone is alarming but not entirely surprising given the abdication of Congressional authority to Executive agencies. I want to believe that the rumors of advanced craft recovery starting in the 40s are real. But, the reality is that UAPs are likely secret advanced human technology. The one thing that irks me about that conclusion is that historically acquisition/discovery of superior technology has been used for domination by the discoverer. Nobody has done that. None of the reported UAPs have been hostile. That alone seems to go against human nature. So, I'm left with a conclusion that doesn't make sense in human behavior terms.
The hearing just made me feel like "Independence Day" may have had it right. People in government know but don't tell the president for plausible deniability and non-permanence of the position.
“advanced human technology”. The idea that we’ve kept some advanced propulsion technology “secret” for decades seems farfetched
What if the Navy is hiding this technology in plain sight at the patent office?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10322827B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190348597A1/en
A lot of experts think these patents are BS, but I guess there is the possibility that they're not.
This is so incredibly valuable that many are trying and failing. If it was possible, there would be at least one independent researcher who puts it on YouTube. These patents are not hiding in plain sight, everybody interested in advanced propulsion knows about them and knew about the research even before the patents.
Yes everybody following UAPs knows about them, but I would imagine a lot of people reading this thread are not aware of them.
Possibly. Given the era that this started it is more believable. If a small group secreted it away in the 40s it wouldn't be that difficult to keep it secret. I think that is where all the UFO reporter discrediting came in handy. Anybody that was in the know didn't share and outside reporters were painted as kooks which discouraged others from speaking up. Throw in a few "disappearances" of credible reporters and nobody wants to talk about it.
Fortunately we can all talk to millions of strangers around the world in an instant now. Even the kooks can find a community to share to that might be able to coorberate their story.
Considering the size and age of the universe, it would be very very weird if earth apes were the pinnacle of intelligence.
In fact I think the most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we are kept isolated from other civilizations within range.
Pinnacle of intelligence within the solar system is still pretty likely, even if not in the universe. People forget how brutally hard star flight is if you're not using scifi cheats.
In the 600 million years that our planet has had complex multicellular life, only about 130 of those years has any species here been able to communicate outside the planet. That's .00002% of the time, on a planet with multicellular life.
Maybe the norm is that intelligent life lasts a long time and we just happen to be born in the first tiny fraction of humanity.
But the observational evidence is that even given multicellular life, intelligence is extremely rare, and there is no evidence at all that it is likely to last very long.
That does kinda fit with stories of the Anunnaki creating humans as an experiment. Keep the science project contained to see what they do.
Sumerian and early Mesopotamian mythology is very interesting reading. I won't say it's ''aliens'' but there are some strong hints of more going on at the rise of civilization then just neolithic people coming together and inventing writing.
I have this idea that sedentary agrarian urban civilization was something created by nomadic peoples to farm slaves. Hunter gatherers and pastoral peoples would be very hard to control. But if they took children, and raised them to be sedentary and dependent on agriculture they could have a stable of slaves.
> Considering the size and age of the universe, it would be very very weird if earth apes were the pinnacle of intelligence.
It might depend on the origin of the universe. One theory involves an exponentially expanding spacetime driven by a quantum field. Fluctuations in that field can case a region of that expanding spacetime to greatly slow down its expansion and that region becomes a universe.
If that's how it happened our universe would just be one in a very very large collection of universes. In particular the rate of universe creation would grow exponentially and so the fraction of old universes would be exponentially smaller than the fraction of young universes.
If it takes a few billion years for the first human level intelligence to develop in a given universe and then hundreds of millions more years for the second intelligence to develop then of all the universes with at least one intelligence only a very very very small fraction of them would have more than one intelligence.
> In fact I think the most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we are kept isolated from other civilizations within range.
Another interesting possibility is that civilizations isolate themselves. It seems very unlikely that neighboring civilizations would be at the same level of technological development--there is just too much luck involved in becoming a civilization and in developing technology.
That suggests that first meetings between civilizations are very likely to involve civilizations with vastly different technology levels. They also are likely to have vastly different cultures and vastly different ethics and vastly different philosophies.
Maybe the more advanced will see it as their duty to help the other progress. Or maybe they they will view them like Europeans viewed the occupants of the Americas in the 16th century. Or maybe they will see them as animals and give them about as much consideration as we give the animals on a patch of wilderness that we want to use for something.
You can model how civilizations should behave when they learn of other civilizations using game theory. When a civilization learns of another than hasn't yet learned of them their choices are: (1) try to keep themselves secret from the other, (2) try to contact the other, and (3) try to destroy the other.
(We would not be able to choose #3 because we aren't technologically advanced enough, but we know ways to do #3 that we'll probably be capable of in a few hundred to a couple thousand years from now).
Assuming that a civilization puts much much much more value on its own survival than on the survival of other civilizations #3 is the option with the highest expected value. If you aren't to the point where #3 is possible than #1 gives the highest expected value.
In short, we could be in a galaxy full of civilizations but they are all avoiding doing anything that would let others detect them because they don't want to be the target of someone else's option #3.
A few months ago there was a PBS Space Time episode on this so called "Dark Forest" scenario, which you might enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXYf47euE3U
I watch PBS spacetime assiduously.
You can also consider the possibility that the intelligent civilizations of the universe don't even consider us a life form. I think about that a lot. "Maybe god and its creatures are not even aware we're here."
Moist pebble apes might be a short lived fluke. Our civilization has existed for an insignificant amount of time and even primates could be just a flare in the pan.
Given how ridiculously long it took intelligence to develop on earth, I'm not so sure. Intelligence might be the hardest hard step.
I do like your idea that we're in a quarantine though.
It's been a while since I read it, so I can't promise it holds up, but I remember quite enjoying this novel with a similar premise (the solar system is quarantined in a giant bubble for unclear reasons, with a side of nanotechnology-driven apps for your brain).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(Egan_novel)
That's still enough time for it to have happened 3 times over in this universe.
Three times doesn't exactly seem like a lot, right?
And for UFOs-as-ETs, these intelligences would have had to spawn pretty near our solar system, and their existence overlap in time with mankind's tiny fraction of existence (truly a blip in the lifespan of the universe), and detect our existence (or at least our system as a worthwhile destination), and develop tech to take them here, and be interested in this undertaking, and have the resources for it, and not wipe themselves out in an accident, ecological disaster or global war, and after all of this choose to just do mysterious flybys and abductions and no formal contact with Earth.
Too many "and"s for me...
It might be like a lot if there could have been intelligent civilizations 8 billion years older then us.
I doubt any kind of lifeform can exist for that long, but even if it did, the rest of the objections apply. If it's in the other side of the universe, we will never meet. So it would have to be near, and [rest of my objections].
Seems very unlikely to me.
We're are extremely unlikely by any available measure.
> What’s HN’s take
Usually when UAP-related news items like this make it to the HN front page they don’t last very long. If this lasts even two hours I’ll be (pleasantly) surprised.
Most HN readers, it seems, feel the subject to be abjectly ridiculous and downvote accordingly.
[delayed]
I get strong "Majestic 12" vibes from it.
Which is to say, I assume by default it's a hoax. The name alone just seems too on the nose.
And what if "Majestic 12" was not a hoax...?
It seems to me that the document was pretty demonstrably proven to be a hoax. You can find the arguments and evidence online, I'm not really in a mood to hash it out here.
But anyone will believe anything they like. If you want to believe it isn't a hoax you have to contend with the typographic and other anomalies that seem to show otherwise.
Yes, documents are online but how you can prove that those are hoax? The last analysis I know the guy made cross reference checks using modern search engines and newspaper databases and things where matching. I don't want to say that documents are real but for sure I never saw any argument that would definatly say that it was hoax.
I said I believe it's a hoax. I never claimed to be able to prove anything. I believe the evidence that purports to show that the documents aren't genuine, which you can refer to. Even a lot of people in the UFO community don't find the Majestic 12 documents credible.
You can't prove they're real, either, although you might believe they are. On balance however there seems to be more evidence against them than for them.
What would be the purpose of a hoax like that?
To force our enemies to question whether there’s a chance we could have been in touch with aliens and received some of their technology. That seriously changes the calculus when deciding whether to launch in a MAD scenario.
I'd say that nuclear bombs themselves already change that calculus, which the US obviously has. No need to account for aliens.
Misinformation? I don't know. I'm not basing my opinion on anything but vibes.
So is everyone else (myself included). At least you're honest about it.
I think some country has developed some very cool drones with non-traditional propulsion. I'm imagining gyroscopes inside mounted on gimbals, and when pressure is applied to the gyroscopes they cause the spheres to spin and bend through the air like a ping pong ball, but in a controlled fashion. The spheres are supposed to be 3-6m wide, so filled with helium could have enough lift to counterbalance 50 pounds of equipment.
Possibly for some of the reports. Does that explain foo fighters from WW2? How about the "F-22 escort" report?
Is it just me or does the architecture diagram at the top of the page from the “DOD Document” leaves a lot to be desired? It almost gives you no information about the actual system at all
It's a blowup from this document.[1] That's worth reading.
- Drone activity is up, and drone overflights of nuclear plants are being detected. One drone crashed and was turned over to cops.
- The most common report (63%) is one of lights in the sky, no additional data. Most unresolved cases are in that category.
- The next biggest category is spherical objects. Most of those turn out to be balloons.
- Starlink satellites generate a fair number of reports.
- MIT Lincoln Labs is apparently integrating the Gremlin system.
What's needed, and what Gremlin is supposed to provide, is telescopic cameras at multiple locations that can be quickly focused on a single target. Lights in the sky seen from one point don't tell you much, but if you have three separated cameras pointed at the thing, you know where it is.
The old GEODSS system, from the 1980s and still operating at a few locations, was similar, but aimed at near-space objects. The Ground-Based Optical Deep Space Surveillance System was a set of about eight telescope pairs worldwide. This was the beginning of automated astronomy. Each station surveilled the whole sky, and checked off all lights against a star map. Anything unknown got looked at. Both telescopes would point to the same object, and the telescopes were far enough apart to triangulate low-orbit satellites. Three sites are still running, and have been upgraded several times.[2] GEODSS was tied into various USAF and NORAD radar systems, so items of interest seen on radar could be looked at, too.
GREMLIN sounds like a mini version of GEODSS. More local, and intended for in-atmosphere objects.
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2024/Nov/14/2003583603/-1/-1/0/FY2...
[2] https://www.spaceforce.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/2197...
That seems likely to be intentional.