Peer-reviewed paper on UFOs. 80k feet to sea level in 0.79 sec (50,000+ mph!)

It's quite simple. The linked document does NOT substantiate your repeated claim of "objects appearing at an altitude of 80,000 feet which fell to an altitude of 50 feet in less than one second".
Learn to read.

 

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The paper simply starts from the assumption that the sightings and recall accurately reflect the reality of what was there. It doesn't actually demonstrate that assumption to be true. So we're just left with a technical exercise of doing the maths.

File under "Meh" and let's move on.

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Forgive me for seeming blunt here, but have you actually read the document?

Here is a snippet of it. I'll bold the relevant portions.

''The main incident occurred on 14 November 2004, but several days earlier, radar operators on the USS Princeton were detecting UAPs appearing on radar at about 80,000+ feet altitude to the north of CSG11 in the vicinity of Santa Catalina and San Clemente Islands. Senior Chief Kevin Day informed us that the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) radar systems had detected the UAPs in low Earth orbit before they dropped down to 80,000 feet [23]. The objects would arrive in groups of 10 to 20 and subsequently drop down to 28,000 feet with a several hundred foot variation, and track south at a speed of about 100 knots [23]. Periodically, the UAPs would drop from 28,000 feet to sea level (estimated to be 50 feet), or under the surface, in 0.78 s. ''

The paper is in reference to Kevin Day's experience as a radar operator in late 2004. Kevin Day's recollection of the day has some inconsistencies but he has stated that he saw the UAPs on radar descend from 80,000 feet to 50 feet in less than one second, before shooting up to 28,000 feet (or 25,000 feet). In other tellings, he says that the UAPs were detected at an altitude of -500 feet, or underwater, while travelling underwater at a speed of 100 knots.

My post is merely an aggregation of claims made by Kevin Day alongside the paper.

I think you're nitpicking here, and it does not contribute to the overall discussion on this topic.

 

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Why would Kevin Day, the radar operator, and the two pilots called to intercept the UAP (Alex Dietrich and David Fravor) who confirmed a visual on a 'tic tac' when getting to merge point lie about such a thing?

There's video footage of the Nimitz tic-tac, so there's no debate that a physical object was there on that day. https://www.metabunk.org/threads/2004-uss-nimitz-tic-tac-ufo-flir-footage-flir1.9190/

 

Nobody has suggested this individual lied. Stop twisting things to fit your agenda.

And your link accounts for that incident without resorting to anything novel.

 

Rather than nitpicking everything I say, why don't you talk about the Nimitz UAP sighting which is the overall topic of this post? I don't want to have to report users for making off-topic/derailing posts but if I have to, so be it.

 

I was just responding to a question you asked. If you don't want the answer, don't ask the question.

 

Yes, but unlike you I understood it.

I'll use what you quoted.

What it ACTUALLY states is that the drop was 80 kft to 28 kft. And THEN from 28,000 to 50 in approx 0.78 sec.
There is no time given for the drop from 80 kft to 28 kft.
(Nor is there any mention of "shooting up to 28 kft").

Rather than "aggregation" you should substitute"misrepresentation".

It's not so much "nitpicking" as pointing out that either your comprehension is flawed or that you have few qualms about inventing your own "data".

 

K. What kind of object do you think is capable of going from 28,000 feet to 50 in approx 0.78 seconds?

 

A meteroid. 45,000 mph is typical.

 

Who said they were lying? Being mistaken in interpretation is somewhat different than the deliberate telling of falsehoods. There are many reasons one may not give a true account of reality, and lying is just one.

Have I said otherwise. Again, it's all in the interpretation of what was observed. The paper you offered up in the OP starts with the unchallenged assumption that the interpretations are accurate.

 

You haven't demonstrated that an object actually did do that. Maybe start with that?

 

It was an object since Alex Dietrich and Fravor were called to intercept the UAP tracked on radar and both Dietrich and Fravor made visual contact with a tic-tac shaped object moving erratically at the merge point.

 

That's 66,000 feet/ second by the way. But they slow down when they hit the atmosphere.

 

Which doesn't prove that the object did what is claimed. At best you have the assumption that their interpretation of it is correct. The paper starts with that assumption. You can't support the assumption by using that assumption as evidence.

As said, the paper is a technical exercise of a hypothetical, hypothetical based on unproven assumptions.

 

Rather than hurling insults and sarcasm at fellow Sciforums participants, perhaps it would be more productive to actually engage with the text of the paper.

This is copied from the abstract:

"We consider a handful of well-documented encounters, including the 2004 encounters with the Nimitz carrier group off the coast of California, and estimate lower bounds on the accelerations exhibited by the craft during the observed maneuvers. Estimated accelerations range from almost 100 g to 1000s of gs with no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies. In accordance with observations, the estimated parameters describing the behavior of these craft are both anomalous and surprising. The extreme estimated flight characteristics reveal that these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth. In many cases, the number and quality of witnesses, the variety of roles they played in the encounters, and the equipment used to track and record the craft favor the latter hypothesis that these are indeed technologically advanced craft. The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel, i.e., if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time."

My initial comments:

"We consider a handful of well-documented encounters..." probably not well-documented enough for everyone's satisfaction, but certainly enough to make some initial observations. If we wait for a scientific observation to become immune from all possibility of error, we will never have any scientific observations. Though we don't have access to it, I expect that the government has radar recordings to corroborate the USS Princeton radar operators' accounts of what they saw. We are just getting a fraction of what they presumably have.

"Estimated accelerations range from almost 100 g to 1000s of gs with no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies..." which if accurate, far exceeds the current aeronautical engineering state of the art. It's possible to form science-fiction hypotheses about what might be happening with 1000G accelerations, but it's entirely speculative. (Robot vehicles resistant to high G-loads, inertial dampening fields, ability to slip through the atmosphere without air resistance... all of which suggest engineering prowess for in advance of our own.)

"The extreme estimated flight characteristics reveal that these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth..." Yes. The gap between this performance described and the aeronautical engineering state of the art is such a huge chasm that the 'secret aircraft prototype' hypothesis becomes unlikely on its face.

"In many cases, the number and quality of witnesses, the variety of roles they played in the encounters, and the equipment used to track and record the craft favor the latter hypothesis that these are indeed technologically advanced craft..." My own view is that the error or fabrication hypotheses must still be treated as open possibilities. But the corroboration between multiple witnesses and between different detection modalities (radar, visual, photographic) reduces their likelihood. Certainly to the level that they can't just be assumed to be true in knee-jerk fashion because the alternative is believed to be unacceptable. The error hypotheses and the reality of what was observed hypotheses need to both be pursued, without insult and ridicule towards the 'other side'.

I'll conclude by saying that to anyone with a science-fiction sensibility, there are other possibilities (apart from nonexistence as errors or fabrications) as to what these things might hypothetically be apart from "craft". (Calling them "craft" is just reading our own cultural expectations into them. Machnes!) One might speculate (entirely hypothetically) that perhaps they are space animals of some sort. Some hypothetical kind of self-propelled organisms that live out there in the vastness of space. occasionally visiting stellar-systems to supply themselves with chemicals they need to live. My point being that if these things are physically real, we shouldn't prejudge the nature of what they are.

 

And just keep referring to it as a form, generic object, or ambiguous feature of interest. It's the history of using certain adjectives and the unwarranted [precise] conclusions of pop culture that have mitigated or undermined (via stigma) what should be practical national security concerns.

For instance, during his Joe Rogan interview 3 years ago, Fravor wandered into speculating that there was something maybe shaped like a large craft (cross-like) beneath the surface, causing the whitewater disturbance (which groupies then could have started construing and spreading as one of the "facts"...)

Fravor: In my heart I think there was something under the water. I don't you know what it was doing there... [Because of when you saw the X, the cross looking thing?] Yep ... like I described it as it's about the size of a 737. So I just think if you submerge the 737, pointing it to the east, underwater by like you know -- 10 to 15 feet, so as these waves are coming across, when they hit that object they're gonna break on top, just like you would with a submerged like a sea mount.

[...] The only reason we saw the tic-tac, what drew our eyes down there... is we see this whitewater, when it's a perfectly clear day with no whitecaps. And you go whoa, what's that, and then you see the tic-tac. [...] There's no white water [elsewhere], it's just blue as far as you can see. So at that point. ... it could have been communicating with or whatever was there [causing the whitewater]. ​

Link to the different video embedded at the bottom of this post: David Fravor interview, and also Sarah Scoles, Luis Elizondo input

EXCERPTS:

David Fravor (usual anecdote, which does feature the "disappearance act" metaphor that the paper avoided): It's coming up, I'm coming down, so it literally is aware of me. There's no doubt, because it mirrored me. So here it is, I cut across, and I get to about half a mile of it [...] I'm about halfway across the circle. As it gets in front of me it just goes poof, and it's gone. It's gone like that fast [...] like it's one minute there and the next second it's like a magic trick. So I asked the other airplane, I said 'Hey do you guys see that?' And they're like 'It's gone, it just disappeared.'

- - - - - - - -

Sarah Scoles: To me the most interesting thing about the videos is how little information is in them. All we have are these 30 seconds or a minute of something totally decontextualized. And so everybody kind of gets to think whatever they want to think about them, because we don't actually have enough information to form any kind of conclusion. Which is the UFO community's favorite space to live, in the muddy fuzzy space.

If the UFO field wants to be taken more seriously by scientists, I think they will kind of have to move away from the types of evidence that that has historically been held up as adequate. Like individual sightings, because the scientists can't really do anything with those stories -- they need data.

- - - - - - -

Luis Elizondo (former director of Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program): You mention UFO, immediately what comes to mind are little green men, tin foil hats -- that's not at all what we're dealing with.

[...] If there is a foreign adversary -- let's say Russia or China, or anybody else, who happens to have this technology, and they've had it for decades... Then we in the United States have somehow been strategically leapfrogged in our technology. We've got a big problem on our hands.

[...] the bottom line here is that over the past several decades we in the department of defense and the intelligence community have been noticing things in our airspace that don't have wings, they don't have cockpits, they don't have even an obvious sign of propulsion like an engine. And yet still they're able to defy the natural effects of earth's gravity [...] other countries have made similar public disclosures...

[...] These are probably some of the least compelling videos [TicTac, GoFast, and Gimbal]. In some cases, we've seen these things 50 feet away from the cockpit. And when you're talking about something that is 50 feet away, I mean, what could they tell from being 50 feet away?

[...] Look, I'm not a UFO guy. My background: I'm a former counterintelligence special agent. I was asked to do a job which I did. However, it was my understanding, and the conclusions that I came to -- and by the way, every other person in the program unanimously came to -- the realization that these things are indeed real. It's getting increasingly harder to keep the cat in the bag.​

David Fravor interview, and also Sarah Scoles, Luis Elizondo input

 

Well, as others have mentioned, a meteor.

But that's unlikely. What you are likely seeing is a radar artifact.

Radars don't watch things continuously. Military naval radars do a scan; they spin the antenna in azimuth to scan different sections of the sky. It's the big spinning thing you see on older ships, or the big radome on newer ships, or phased-array antennas on the newest ships. But they all work basically the same way - they divide the sky up into segments and scan them one at a time. The mechanically scanned ones do a full sweep about once a second.

That means that the radar CANNOT see it descend from 28,000 feet to 50 feet. On the first sweep it saw something at 28,000 feet, and on the next sweep it saw it at 50 feet. And those two scans would be about a second apart (or in this case, .78 seconds.) So it could easily have been two completely separate returns - but the operator interpreted it as the same return.

In addition, EM signal strength falls off at the ratio of 1/R2, which means if you are twice the distance away, you see 1/4 of the energy. Radar returns fall off at a ratio of 1/R4, which means at twice the distance you see one SIXTEENTH of the energy. So for example:

The radar gets a weak return from something 12 miles away at 28,000 feet. (This is 10 miles across the ocean and 5 miles up.) Then on the next pass it gets a return from 10 miles away at 50 feet. This return is going to be twice as strong as the return from 28,000 feet even if the objects are just as reflective. And if they are in fact at similar ranges (10 vs 12 miles) then the stronger return will tend to swamp the weaker return. So from the operator's perspective, that thing that was at 28,000 feet suddenly jumped to 50 feet. If the lower return then goes away (say, the ship that produced it is now in the trough of a wave) the 28,000 return will seem to reappear.

That does not mean that something went from 28,0000 feet to 50 feet and back to 28,000 feet in 2 seconds. It meant the operator saw two different returns.

 

You mean as opposed to the skeptics' assumption that the eyewitnesses (pilots) and the radar and the FLIR video all erred at the same time resulting in an erroneous account? Yes...it is more likely that these sources confirm each other to be accurate than that they were all in error all at the same time. There is no reason to assume such a comedy of errors unless you have an agenda to debunk the incident.

 

That is an excellent radar primer.