In defence of space aliens

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The official account is whatever the eyewitnesses say happened backed up by video and/or technology. That's just the way it is. It's one of the rewards of actually being there when it happens. You get your name and story in the paper.

 

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Yep..like I said it's whatever the eyewitnesses say happened. Everytime.

 

No..they just know what actually happened better than anyone else.

 

That's not the official report. First time you needed to make up a definition for that?

 

So did Moses.
I guess you'll be recanting your views on God?

 

You haven't provided any provenance for the content of the assertions in this post of yours either. You appear to be quoting something, since your text contains American military jargon that an Australian like yourself wouldn't be expected to know. So what is your source?

The Navy recently acknowledged that the videos were authentic, and said that they were never intended to be released.

That sounds like some unknown somebody's speculation. There are multiple movements and more than one adjustments of the view. They need to be better correlated if we are going to attribute all of the target movements to adjustments of the video camera. And we would expect experienced aircrew to be fully aware that the video image changes when they change the zoom. I have more respect for our aviators than that. Besides, wasn't the pilot tracking the object visually and the video merely intended to record the encounter? (The jet carried no ordinance so the pod wouldn't have had its targeting function.)

As I understand it (I'm a civilian with no inside access to classified information) this CEC upgrade was less an upgrade to the radars themselves than an improved networking ability to feed data to and between aircraft, so that in effect what one knows, they all know. (That's why they call it 'Cooperative Engagement Capability'.)

I don't think that your source's assertion that the system had never been tested is very credible. The Nimitz battle group was undergoing a pre-deployment exercise. Common sense suggests that they wouldn't place major systems that had never been tested on ships that they are planning to operationally deploy. Particularly if the new system involves an aircraft carrier battle group's fundamental air defense radar system. Most likely these new systems underwent aggressive testing before they ever saw an operational warship.

And lastly, if we are supposed to believe that the new data system was somehow responsible for the UFO sighting, we need better reason than some unknown somebody noting that it was new. If the data that it fed Fravor and the others led them to make visual and later video confirmation of the sighting, that's pretty good evidence that the contact wasn't spurious and that the radars were functioning as designed.

More anonymous speculation. Again, I don't imagine that the Navy would deploy a carrier battle group equipped with a fundamental air defense radar system so prone to errors that it can't distinguish contacts from noise.

True. It was recorded by pilots subsequently launched from the Nimitz. I don't see that as any kind of weakness in the sighting. If anything, it's additional confirmation, suggesting that the sighting was objective and not anything peculiar to Fravor and his original flight.

What "experts" were these? And "consistent with" (I'm not convinced that's even true) isn't exactly the same thing as "was". Do we even know whether there were any commercial airliners that close at that time to the Nimitz group and its air exercises? At that specific heading?

And once again, going at this thing piecemeal, hoping to debunk the entire sighting by trying to cast doubt on particular aspects individually (merely by speculation), doesn't address the convergence of evidence. Radar may (purely speculatively) have been producing false contacts. But if pilots directed to the location of those supposedly false contacts visually saw something, then that constitutes confirmation of the radar sighting. A pilot may (purely speculatively) have been making perceptual or cognitive errors (misidentifying or misremembering something). But if multiple pilots report roughly the same thing, then the likelihood of subjective error goes down. (It's why confirmation is considered important in science and why it's considered an indication of objectivity.) The targeting pod video is further confirmation. It's possible to speculate that it was recording some kind of false image or that the imagery is being misinterpreted. But if it was recording something that was also being tracked visually by pilots and was showing up on the cruiser's Spy radar, then that's confirmation that the object in the video recording wasn't the product of a fault specific to the video system.

It all coheres in a way that a single perceptual or technical fault wouldn't.

 

From post #2946 highlighting by me:

Navy Pilot’s 2004 UFO: A Comedy of Errors

by Joe Nickell

....
To recap, we suggest that several things were going on during what was, after all, a training mission of the USS Nimitz carrier strike group. We believe the churning water Fravor first saw was caused by a submerging sub; that the sightings of a UFO above the water (variously reported)—which hovered, then came toward one pilot—could have been those of a reconnaissance drone...



​

 

It's always good to determine if a "UFO video" is authentic, but that doesn't mean it's video of an alien spacecraft, just that the usual shenanigans haven't happened to that footage.

 

What is more likely? That this was an amazing coincidence of errors and things seeming to be other things all converging into an appearance of one object? Or that this was one unexplained object that was seen by 2 pilots, picked up on radar, and caught on FLIR camera. The pilots on the east coast even confirm seeing these same sorts of objects. I think the conclusion is clear: this is a case of a real ufo that we have no clue as to it's origin but which shows all the attributes of something beyond our present technological capability. There is no a priori knowledge of what happened. There is only the evidence.

I recall another time you speculated that a ufo was really an amazing convergence of things mistaken to be other things--the Portage county ufo:
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/portage-county-ravenna-ufo-chase-1966.158484/

In that case you concluded that what the eyewitnesses all saw was, in succession, a meteor, the planet Venus, and then a weather balloon at dawn. Again, another highly unlikely collusion of errors resulting in the illusion of them all being one thing. Is this a common strategy for you--this invoking of the improbable to support your foregone conclusion that it wasn't a real ufo?

 

I was a radar technician in the Navy. Every morning at 4 AM on our base I would go out to the Precision Approach Radar on the airfield and perform preventive maintenance on it before the tower opened. This is the standard procedure in the Navy. All equipment is checked out by trained technicians every day to eliminate the possibility of error. Also, the official account says that the radar operators had been seeing these objects on their radar for a week, initially around 10 of them flying at slow speeds near Catalina Island.

"Navy Chief Petty Officer (NCO, E-7) Kevin Day, stationed on Princeton, recalls that he first noticed the clear radar traces of eight to ten objects around 10 November. They were travelling southwards in a loose though fixed formation at 28,000 feet (8,500 m) in the immediate vicinity of Catalina Island. He was startled by their slow speed of 100 knots (190 km/h; 120 mph), but received confirmation of their presence from radar operators on other vessels. Regular observations were made of a similar number of objects over the following six days.[11] The objects were also faintly detected by an E-2C Hawkeye plane after Princeton sent them coordinates."--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident

Later on these same objects were suddenly spotted on radar by operators dropping down from and rising back up to an elevation of 80,000 ft at speeds exceeding any known craft. They described it as snowing ufos.

"In the 2004 incident, according to The New York Times, the objects "appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."--- https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a29073804/navy-ufo-videos-real/


The radar during this time would have been checked out many times by the technicians to rule out equipment error. There was nothing wrong with the radar. It's mysterious targets were confirmed with other ships' radars and a Hawkeye plane as well as by Fravor's own encounter. And "birds, small balloons, insect clouds, ice crystals, windborne debris," don't fly at an elevation of 80,000 ft. and suddenly drop down and rise up at supersonic speeds.

 

No..I'm not going back thru your long ass posts to find your answer to my question. If you can't answer a question, just say so. It isn't my job to go back and find it somewhere else.