UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Discussion in 'UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters' started by Magical Realist, Oct 10, 2017.

  1. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    I'm not particular interested in your conspiracy theories, unless you have some evidence for them.
     
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  3. river

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    Some .

    Some are German from world war II , some are alien craft and some are advanced air craft the from military complex .
     
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  5. river

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    For goodness sake man , the area 51 secrecy has been going on for 70yrs at least . Get informed .
     
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  7. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Which countries apart from Germany do you think have these anti-gravity spaceships?

    Do you think the technology was developed by the German scientists you mentioned, or did they get it from aliens? You weren't were clear on that.

    Given that we have these advanced anti-gravity aircraft, why are they never used in military actions? And why haven't we used them to chase the aliens, or to go to Mars, or whatever? Or do you think we have, and that's a secret too?

    How did you get informed? Where does all your information on the secrets of Area 51 come from?
     
  8. river

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    I was clear T.TBrown and Tesla .
     
  9. river

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    Get informed about the secrecy of area 51 .
     
  10. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    You mean this guy:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Townsend_Brown

    Do you still think his "lifters" are powered by anti-gravity? Or do you believe he developed real anti-gravity? And, if so, why do you think that? Where's the evidence?

    I'm trying. You won't tell me where you got all your information about the secret activities at Area 51.
     
  11. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Not sure about anti gravity existing

    I have known about neutral gravity for over 50 years

    Gravity is a property of mass and the further away from mass the weaker that mass affects you

    Find the most remote place in the Cosmos and that will be the place where in essence you will be the only gravitational mass you will have to worry about

    I'm guessing for anti gravity to exist you should extract any mass (other than yourself) from about say 10 light years around

    Then keep removing the nothingness remaining until the desired strength of anti gravity is obtained

    Then remove yourself VOLIA

    A 10 light year bubble of anti gravity ready for shipping

    Simple really

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  12. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    River, do you know anything that has happened in Area 51?
     
  13. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Elvis lives there

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  14. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Somebody has to keep JFK quiet.
     
  15. sweetpea Valued Senior Member

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    I and quite a few others have been trying to penetrate Area 51 for years with our 'remote viewing sense' (RVS), the area is even shielded from these.
    River may be 'one of them', that is, he may be under the same gagging restrictions as Krash661.
     
  16. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Turn off his life support and send the pretty nurses back to hospital wards

    That will quieten him down

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  17. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    James, are you just playing games? You're capable of reading the thing yourself.

    From the 'executive report'

    "On 14 November 2004, after again detecting an AAV took the opportunity of two F/A-18's airborne in the vicinity to task them for airborne reconaissance of the AAV."

    From the same report, regarding the E-2C Hawkeye

    LT [redacted] was flying as the Air Control Officer (ACO) on the mission where the AAV was observed by the flight of F/A-18's. He was controlling the F/A-18's that were flying as part of their work ups prior to deployment. He did not see the object on his radar (raw video) until the USS Princeton directed the contact and gave the E-2 the general direction to steer its radar.

    Regarding the Marine jet that confirmed the water disturbance

    Lt. Col. [redacted] Commanding Officer VMFA-232, was flying a single-seat F/A-18C that launched from the USS Nimitz at approximately 1030L to conduct a Functional Check Flight of an aircraft that had recently completed significant maintenance... After 30 minutes into his flight he received a radio call from his air controller asking him to investigate an unidentified airborne contact...The controller provided vectors to the vicinity of figure 1.

    Regarding Commander Fravor and his flight:

    CDR Fravor, Commanding Officer VFA-41, was the pilot of FastEagle 01... They completed their departure from the USS Nimitz and flew to the working area to conduct the training portion of the flight. After they completed their training, the E-2C controller handed them off to the USS Princeton callsign 'Poison' where they received vectors via Bearing Range Altitude Aspect (BRAA) to an unknown contact flying into the working area from the south... CDR Fravor and LT [redacted] were attempting to acquire the object visually as they heard "merge plot" from Poison. Situational awareness to the object was initially received via sporadic Link-16 tracks (Link-16 is a time division multiple access data-link) via an off-board sensor. Lt [redacted] assumed that the sensor providing the information was the USS Princeton's SPY-1 radar.

    This, btw, accounts for the new female voice suddenly giving them directions. Their previous controller in the airborne E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft had handed them off to a new controller on the cruiser. (No, not a ghost.) Women do serve in the United States Navy, so it isn't anything remarkable.

    True, but a single object moving around is probably the simplest inference. It's certainly conceivable that there were multiple unknown contacts out there. In one of the videos, one of the pilots exclaims that there's "a whole fleet of them". (I think that was the subsequent 2015 'tic-tac' event over the Atlantic though.)

    The Marine pilot said that it looked like a large object had just submerged. That's why the report includes information from a nuclear submarine that had been operating in the area as part of the carrier group that detected nothing out of the ordinary on its sonar. The same pilot also said that it also resembled shoal water (which probably wouldn't be possible at that deep water location where large ships and submarines were operating).

    "The disturbance appeared to be 50 to 100 meters in diameter and close to round. It was the only area and type of whitwater activity that could be seen and reminded him of images of something rapidly submerging from the surface like a submarine or ship sinking, It also looked like a possible area of shoal water where the swell was breaking over a barely submerged reef or island....He overflew the disturbance and turned back to the northwest.... He did not see any object or vessel associated with the disturbance either above the surface, on the surface or below the surface. He also never made visual contact with the other fighter aircraft that were vectored to the location of the AAV.

    I just presented it as a possible explanatory hypothesis for what caused the water agitation and I clearly labeled it as hypothetical and speculative.

    If proposing possible explanatory hypotheses for reports like these is out-of-line, then where does that leave the "skeptics", who do it all the time? (Venus, swamp gas...) Is hypothesizing fine when it serves the purpose of dismissing an unwelcome report, but somehow misleading when it doesn't appear serve a dismissive purpose?

    But the obervations weren't just visual, there were radar contacts as well. (That's one of the things that makes this report so interesting.) All of the observations were presumably made by technically competent observers. Radar operators on an Aegis missile cruiser can be expected to be good at what they do and the fighter pilots were about to be sent on operational deployments. These included two squadron commanders (Fravor and the Marine).

    Not in the sense of formal proof. But life, including science, rarely if ever provides us with that.

    I don't recall that they ever did that. They noted anomalous radar contacts over several days. When the anomalous contacts returned on this particular day, when the carrier group had aircraft in the air, they (or more likely the officer in charge of the radar room) took the opportunity of tasking several of those aircraft to checking out and trying to identify the contact. There's a safety aspect with unidentified aircraft entering airspace where military aircraft areoperating. And there's a security aspect, since I expect that unidentified aircraft aren't allowed to approach a carrier battle group too closely. And given the anomalous nature of these contacts, there was doubtless a curiosity aspect.

    I'm glad that you are willing to concede that. I agree entirely and my own position on this is agnostic, as I've written repeatedly.

    'UAV' was a proposed explanatory hypothesis that I simply threw out there. I'm doubtful about it based on what appears to be the AAV's extraordinary performance. But it does kind of fit a pattern, since there are secret never-publicly-disclosed Navy R&D activities in the area, stealthy designs might feature blended-wing aerodynamics, the Navy might have some motivation to test them against a carrier battle group without warning it first, and this hypothesis would explain the military's failure to raise an alarm at the report. Too much investigation, and they would risk 'outing' their own 'black' program.

    If we are going to reject all attempts to concoct explanatory hypotheses for what appear to be extraordinary events, then we will have to dismiss virtually everything that any "skeptic" says. It's typically nothing more than speculative hypotheses. ('Venus!' 'Swamp-gas!') Rarely any "proof" (or more realistically, convincing evidence) that any of those 'mundane' explanations were really responsible, just speculations about how they might have been. Combined with lots of closed-minded sarcasm and snarkiness of the sort we see here on Sciforums. (That's you Gawdzilla.)

    And as I've written repeatedly, I think that 'likely alien spaceships' is getting way out in front of the evidence. I'm not ready to make that leap. So that's not a thesis that I want to defend.

    The point that I want to make is that Sciforums' often repeated '70 years, no evidence' is not only false, but disingenuous. This 'tic-tac' report is evidence. Fascinating evidence, I might add. (Even if you disagree. That disagreement just indicates that we have different 'fascination' thresholds.)
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2018
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  18. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Seventy years, no good evidence.
     
  19. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    I live in area 52. The neighbours are noisy sometimes but they don't have any secrets.
     
  20. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    The government was deeply grateful for the gullibility of the loonies who hung out around the base so many nights, pimping the cover story at no cost to the tax payers.
     
  21. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Yazata,

    I appreciate that the reported events all occurred in the same general vicinity. There's no need to labour the point.

    Of course I know that women serve in the military, and I don't think there's anything particularly unusual about a woman on the radio. I was just picking up something in one of the reports that referred to the woman being unidentified, that's all. It would be relatively easy, I would have thought, for the military investigators to identify here. The relevance is that you and I don't have access to the full investigation, if one was carried out by the military.

    The first thing that came to my mind when I read that was that it sounds like a large whale coming to the surface, breathing, then submerging again. Or, as I said before, it could be a pod of dolphins driving fish to the surface to feed, or other fishy activity (literally!).

    Obviously, I can't rule out the submarine hypothesis, either.

    My point is not that speculation is bad, but more of a cautionary note, not to read more into a report than is actually there.

    In any investigation (of anything), it is dangerous to jump to conclusions too early, or to investigate with only one or a few possibly scenarios already in mind, because that kind of thinking encourages confirmation bias. You start looking only for evidence that tends to confirm your initial hypothesis, and you tend to ignore or downplay evidence that doesn't fit. Good investigators of crime are well aware of this.

    There are radar contacts and there are radar contacts. Radar in practice isn't exactly like the radar you see in Hollywood movies, where everything is a crisp bright dot on the display. On a typical radar, there's lot of mess, due to all kinds of things.

    In this particular case, it is reported that radar systems often couldn't "lock on" to the UFO targets. That suggests to me that the radar returns were not very good from whatever was being observed. It follows that the objects were perhaps not as big as they were assumed to be from visual sightings, or even that the radar was not spotting objects, as such, but was perhaps getting spurious echos for some other reason, such as atmospheric effects (to take one example).

    Of course.

    That is possible, of course.

    It's important to note, though, that there's no more evidence here of secret stealth aircraft than there is of alien spaceships.

    The thing I try to avoid is going off on flights of fancy, based on flimsy evidence. I mean, suppose we go down the secret stealth aircraft track. We have to start by imagining that the military has these unknown craft. Then we imagine what their performance capabilities might be. Then we fit those imagined capabilities to what was reported for the UFOs. Then we proceed to invent motives and aims for the pilots and controllers of those imagined aircraft. Before we know it, we have a full-blown conspiracy theory that is founded on dubious assumption after dubious assumption. It's not that it's not possible; it's just that the available evidence doesn't support all the suppositions.
     
  22. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    (continued...)

    This is where Occam's razor and other rules of thumb come into play. If two competing hypotheses are equally evidenced, then chances are that the one that is more straightforward is more likely.

    We know that Venus is often mistaken for a UFO. If there's no way, based on evidence, to distinguish a sighting of Venus from a sighting of an alien spaceship, and both are possible, then provisionally I'd willing to run with the idea that Venus was what was most probably seen. That would in no way close the case, of course. It would just be the most plausible explanation, pending the appearance of any disconfirming evidence.

    It really comes back to this: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

    Before we say something like "This tic-tac was most likely not a human aircraft, but was instead an intelligently-controlled craft from somewhere else", we'd need much better evidence than what we have available to us here.

    I think we're on the same page on this, which is good.

    Regarding the 70 year thing, wouldn't we expect the evidence of alien visitation, if it was happening, to be a lot better than what the UFO nuts have offered up over 70 years? There's are patterns in the UFO evidence that we see. Photos are fuzzy. Eyewitness accounts are suspicious. Radar contacts are seldom confirmed. Physical evidence is mostly absent and otherwise unconvincing. And then there's the profligate fakery. Meanwhile, there are no visible impacts on our world of the deluge of alien visitation that the UFO nuts assure us is happening all the time. No new technology. No high-level diplomacy. No unequivocal messages to humanity.

    Add to all this that the likelihood of alien visitation is very low for starters, given what we know so far about intelligent life elsewhere, combined with what we know about the challenges of interstellar travel and the size of the galaxy.

    I agree that the "tic tac" report is evidence of a UFO sighting. But it does not in any way count as evidence for extraterrestrial craft, or even as evidence for secret human military craft. The quality of the available data is just not good enough for us to draw any such conclusion.

    There are many cases a lot like this one. There are immense archives of this stuff available on the internet. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a big job that most UFO nuts aren't even interested in. For them, collecting this stuff is like collecting stamps. Mostly, when you start digging around on any of these things, you find an dearth of analysis and a lot of credulous cheer-leading of the kind of that MR indulges himself in.

    I find this stuff interesting, although mostly disappointingly superficial. It is very rare to find a case with enough evidence available to really get your teeth into it. The best-publicised cases are usually driven, in the end, by stories told by just one or two witnesses. For example, in this case, it looks like Fravor has been doing the media rounds, while we've barely heard from any of the other people who supposedly saw or detected these UFOs. It would not surprise me to learn that Fravor has embellished his initial story in themany times he has re-told it (I am not saying that is the case, by the way).

    My fascination level for this stuff has decreased over the years. I was a real enthusiast when I was a child. But as I learned more about real science and how it is done, and then learned how to think critically, I realised that mostly these incidents are over-hyped and that, in the end, they do not convince.

    I'm willing to take a little time to discuss specific cases, and I'm willing to do a little digging on occasion when I get into a debate on this forum. But I usually find that the effort I put in goes above and beyond anything the average UFO nut puts into examining the evidence, and that they aren't interesting in what I have to say to them about the evidence.

    There's a mindset that is common among people who are True Believers in this stuff. It's one in which fantasy is valued far more highly than the less fascinating reality.
     
  23. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Regarding stealthy UAVs, another puzzle piece would be the termination of the UCLASS program. UCLASS stood for 'Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike'. This was a Navy specification for a stealthy unmanned robot aircraft that could conduct reconnaissance and armed strike missions. Seed money was spread around several aerospace companies to produce prototypes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_Carrier-Launched_Airborne_Surveillance_and_Strike

    But apparently the Navy wasn't tremendously impressed with any of them. Some emphasized stealth and were good at reconaissance, others were less stealthy but better at carrying bombs and performing strike missions. But none of the prototypes was satisfactory across the whole range of specifications.

    So the Navy terminated the program and opted instead for something entirely different called CBARS (for Carrier Based Air Refueling System). This calls for robot air refueling tankers.

    But... many observers find it hard to imagine that the US military has given up on UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles) which was the original purpose of the whole exercise. Especially given that half the countries on Earth are working on developing their own.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_combat_aerial_vehicle

    Even Australia, which has teamed up with the UK and BAE with the Taranis, which is being tested at Australia's huge Woomera test range in South Australia (Australia's 'Area 51').

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Taranis

    So, speculation goes (that's all it is) that when UCLASS was terminated, American UCAV efforts didn't cease (UCAVs are the inevitable wave of the future), but instead were shifted into one or more far more secret 'black' programs. (Programs that aren't publicly acknowledged.) That's especially likely if they have new technologies that they want to explore that they hope will give us big advantages over potential adversaries. I fully expect that extreme cutting-edge UCAV developments are a big part of what they are currently doing out there at 'Area 51'. (Probably nothing to do with aliens though.)

    And assuming that they might have developed some new technology, they might be itching to test it out. So technology demonstrators and prototypes might occasionally pop up here and there, especially in more controlled sorts of environments like a naval force at sea.

    It's all speculation, but it makes sense.

    Nevertheless, having said all that, the performance of these 'tic-tacs' sounds like a dramatic leap beyond anything that's publicly known to be possible. Such a big leap, that it just sounds inherently unlikely to me. (I'd love it to be true though.)
     

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