Why don't commercial pilots report the same things? I believe they have far more time in the air.
It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability. Even ignoring the technological implications of interstellar flight or the ability to enter our atmosphere without being detected, these objects are apparently massively more capable than any kind of vehicle we have. To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna.
It seems very likely that fighter pilots and finely-tuned military equipment would be very eager to pick up false signals from background noise and interpret it as vehicles that stretch out understanding of physics.
See this NARCAP (civilian flight safety) report https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20 for a case where a FedEx flight crew documented an encounter with the commonly reported pulsating orb type anomaly. There is a video.
Observed behavior:
> The UAP/Light came from above and stopped/hovered near FL37, about the same altitude as the aircraft, shone a light on the 767 and briefly approached the aircraft. Then it instantly matched the speed, and heading of the aircraft and maintained a consistent separation.
a. The light descended vertically, stopped abruptly, and shone a light on the 767 causing the crew to believe that there was another airliner on a collision heading with its landing lights on.
b. It changed direction from vertical descent to a sudden stop/hover, to approaching the aircraft briefly, to taking the same heading and speed of the aircraft at about the same altitude and an estimated distance of 1-2k ft.
c. It matched the altitude, speed, and heading of the aircraft, 575mph and at 37,000ft for over 32 minutes.
d. The UAP/Light changed colors and turned away from the aircraft on a perpendicular heading, West, just inside the Mexico/US border.
e. The UAP/light did not have wings or running lights. It was a new and unique observation to the experienced air crew.
> It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability
And in fact, apparently they do here too. It's been documented these UAPs have an interest in our nuclear capabilities. There has been many testimonies from people in the military these UAPs buzz around nuclear silos and apparently are able to disable them. See this well researched video for information on Robert Hastings https://youtu.be/l4EXL7jgqns
Here’s the thing that gets me. A 767 costs hundreds of millions of dollars and yet I’ve filmed better videos with a potato. Why is the pilot filming with his smartphone? Why does the plane not have a sophisticated high-quality purpose-built camera system that can record phenomena like this?
I'm wondering why a multi-million dollar aircraft doesn't have a $10k imaging system when I put a $300 imaging system on my $30k car. If I'm willing to spend 1% to understand equipment damage then why would this logic not follow for a billion dollar fleet of aircraft?
Like-minded drivers have caught amazing videos of meteors. Planes could do the same for supposedly legitimate UAP sightings.
Well would you increase the budget of your production grade deliverables for maybe proving to internet forum visitors that your product sometimes is in the presence of weird phenomena?
They don't seem to think the camera resolution is a problem in taking these sightings seriously, as opposed to random person here I'm responding to. Seems to indicate something doesn't it?
Building a particle accelerator is not the same as adding 1% to the cost of an already costly machine for the off chance of proving some marginal phenomena visually.
Considering this goes up to congress and they think it might be a national security threat I don't think it's bad idea. It's also pretty doubtful this will even increase the cost by 1%.
Sure. Random internet forum person demands better evidence to be convinced, when a) we don't even have all data; b) no-one cares what random internet forum person thinks. We are watching from the sidelines jeering for irrelevant changes.
I'm not sure about all of that, but I know a lot of people are paid to count a lot of beans. There are lots of beans saved from diagnostics, especially where insurance is involved.
Indeed I have. It's pretty wild that modern FDRs don't include video. There isn't a good justification other than "it's too much effort to make any change", which is a sign of a dangerous system.
What purpose would adding an imaging system serve? The purpose is obvious for your car, cars crash all the time. Planes rarely do and it seems we already get all the data we need when they do crash to fix and prevent that reason from happening again.
Two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashed because they didn't have a backup angle-of-attack sensor. According to a former NTSB director, "this is a fairly simple external device that can get damaged on a regular basis."
I'm guessing the reason they didn't put a lifesaving backup sensor on the plane might be sorta similar to the reason they don't add high-definition cameras in case of UFOs.
It's unreasonable because installing and maintaining aviation qualified cameras is expensive. You can't just strap a consumer action camera to the wing and expect the FAA to approve. Airlines have no incentive to pay for extra cameras.
There are plenty incentives to including imaging as part of black boxes. Nothing unreasonable about it. It would help elucidate several non-UFO normal life kind of incidents.
They must be some kind of gods really. Anything they do is because it make perfect sense. If there's something they're not doing it's because of course it's not worth doing!
Imaging and storage used to be much more expensive, so if this decision was to be reviewed today, I am pretty sure regulators would start requiring it.
Just because things are as they are, doesn't mean that they couldn't be better.
Nah. External cameras wouldn't do anything significant to improve safety or help with crash investigations so there's no reason for the FAA to impose such a requirement. It's just a silly idea.
But regulators do revisit existing rules all the time. If you really want this then feel free to file a formal petition for rulemaking. If you do that then they'll have to at least look at it.
Yep. It’s the same reason why a lot of planes still have a “no smoking” light even though smoking hasn’t been allowed on planes for years. If they took them out, they’d have to recertify the electronics. It’s much easier and cheaper to have a useless light that always stays on than to go through that process to remove it.
That would be a policy violation at any major US airline. They don't want random objects in the cockpit which could come loose in severe turbulence or a crash, causing a safety hazard.
It would be pointless for this use case anyway. The field of view through the cockpit windows is very narrow and any UAP would only show up as a few blurry pixels.
Camera autofocus is commonly brought up but in this case the crewmen were able to attest to the pulsating with their eyeballs, in addition to the other strange behaviour as noted in their testimony.
I find the Alaska case to be the most interesting. As the visual report of an object was supported by detections from the Soviet facing long range radar that were state of the art at the time.
"To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna."
To play devil's advocate for a moment: they'd have to know the capabilities of these jets to make that determination, and observation of some sort would be required to do so.
"Artifacts" (anomalous errors) appear on flight systems' sensors all the time, and atmospheric distortions can easily appear to the naked eye as flying/moving objects. I don't buy either that other countries have such advanced technology or that extraterrestrial intelligences are visiting us: the simpler explanations I noted cover more or less every published UAP we have seen.
>> To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna
I always find it odd that we ascribe a human understanding of logic to an alien species. Seems to me we wouldn’t know jack shit about motivations, capabilities, approaches to decision making, etc…
From the descriptions, the aliens act like we would with a slightly better tech: they act like rangers in a national forest monitoring suspicious activity of smart beavers, but otherwise don't mess with the wildlife.
well we make some reasonable baze line assumptions for an intelligent life form -- they have self preservation instincts and as such likely operate on some base level of game theory.
An autonomous monitoring system for galactic-scale existential risk bearing technologies would def have probes that monitored the technological development of remote civilizations.
The point isn’t to derive useful conclusions. The fact that we have no idea about the probability of the existence of extraterrestial intelligence seems to make it inherently impossible to derive any conclusions from a formula where they play a vital part.
Correct - it never ceases to amaze me the degree of certainty of many of the so called “skeptics” when it comes to questions for which we have no way to really generate meaningful priors on.
On the navy video I remember one of the guys mentioning they think it is a drone.
It such hubris to believe those are alien craft and not foreign military drones. As if alien craft is the more probable explanation than another country having drones the US Navy does not.
you seriously claim this after we all witnessed russia - the supposed number 2 or 3 military power in the world loose a hundred thousand soldiers to ukraine in less than a year? the reality is that the USA has the most advanced military and no one else comes close... so yes, aliens are far more likely explanation than china having anti-gravity drones
Other incidents crashes, like Roswell. Obviously I cannot vouch for any of those :-) just wanted to point that air fighters at the time were much less sophisticated than today. Maybe people that travels between stars are not so interested in bringing state-of-the-art war machines with them. The technology to maneuver a drone or vehicle at incredible speed or angles might still be vulnerable to bullets or missiles.
It seems very, very unlikely aliens would have any interest in our military capability. Even ignoring the technological implications of interstellar flight or the ability to enter our atmosphere without being detected, these objects are apparently massively more capable than any kind of vehicle we have. To them a fighter jet might as well be a Cessna.
It seems very likely that fighter pilots and finely-tuned military equipment would be very eager to pick up false signals from background noise and interpret it as vehicles that stretch out understanding of physics.