politics

I watched the hearings yesterday, and I was mostly left with the impression that we need more investigations, and to kick some asses in the aviation world so that encounters with UAPs can be safely reported without sacrificing the career of the pilot in question by even talking about it.

Mostly it's stuff we already know about, the tictac and a couple other similar events. The most interesting thing by far to me is the report of a UAP that "split" a flight of F-18s. That means that it physically passed between two jets. Hard to say that it was a balloon or sensor defect in that event. I bring up balloons because lot of the UFO craze is caused by people just not knowing what they're seeing or now having the knowledge to contextualize a relatively static object appearing to move via parallax against a static background due to the movement of the observer source. It certainly wasn't helped by the fact that back in the day, the Air Force was doing MIB psyops to the locals who reported to the air force base when stealth fighters were first being developed and tested. Civilians then started mass reporting about "triangle UFOs" which were just F-117s before anyone even knew that those existed, and you got the pile of of fraudsters and people who just wanted their moment in the limelight.

What we're getting in the Congressional hearing isn't that. These are our most trained and experienced fighter pilots operating multiple sensor systems, all of which are showing events that to our current knowledge of physics are basically impossible, and compounded by confirmation from the Mk 1 Eyeball. Fooling the human eye is pretty easy, but trained observers like fighter pilots are harder to fool, but still possible. Fooling trained human observers and multiple different sensor systesm (FLIR, RADAR, and optical cameras) all at once is still possible, but harder. But the more sensor systems in play, the harder it is to fool all of them, and the incidents in question had the full sensor suite of multiple AEGIS mounting surface warships, multiple fighter pilots and weapons officers and the sensor systems of those planes from multiple different angles all in general agreement about the impossible behaviors of the UAPs.

At the tail end of last year, we just got the reveal of the latest and greatest in US secret weapons development with the B-21 and that was pretty much an iteration on known physics and known systems. B-21 is miles better than B-2, but it isn't a tictac, and when we look at the development of these kind of systems in the past, they generally take about a decade to go from conceptualization to prototype, and about another decade to go from prototype to public reveal. In that timeframe, B-21s would have been around during the right era for the tictac event and the one off Virginia Beach, but again, B-21s aren't magical supertech vehicles that can ignore all known physics. B-21s could probably have spoofed some of the sensors on the ships and F-18s that intercepted the Tictacs, but they still are a visible plane, no MCU style invisibility/colorshifting panels to make it look like a grey cube inside a transparent sphere, or just the smooth countourless description of the tictac.

Now, all that being said, I don't think that it was "little green men" either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence after all, and what evidence we have is some combination of sparse, classified, and disorganized. I think that right now we have unexplained behaviors from unexplained objects and our best approach going forwards is going to be to try and collate data and coordinate the study of it to try and figure out what causes these events.

At the same time, I don't think that these events are the result of foreign actors either. If China had that kind of tech, we wouldn't have seen the pathetic excuse for balloons this year, and they probably would have made a play for Taiwan by now. If Russia had that kind of tech, they wouldn't be rolling out T-55 rustbuckets to fight in Ukraine. Clearly the answer is South Korea and the pro-Starcraft scene is there to train the pilots in microing such a highly versatile and responsive craft. I for one welcome our new Korean overlords. :p

The thing that stands out to me there is that it's multiple ships and planes tracking this and producing this data. If it was like a glitch in the AN/SPY radar on an AEGIS equipped ship like the Princeton, then that same glitch wouldn't also have shown up on the FLIR and optical cameras of an F-18 as well as the radar of the E2 and the non-AEGIS equipped ship like the Nimitz. Repeat down the list for possible sensors. There exists commonality, like all the F-18s would have had the same kind of radar, but that doesn't extend to the E2 nor the ships.

But as mentioned in the hearing, the only publicly available release of that data is the FLIR camera. What's shown on the video I've seen several different "debunkings" of, all of which with various explanations, although the most common is basically thermal lens flare, but that still doesn't explain the eyeball reports nor the radar tracks, but unfortunately we have none of that data available publicly. And this is all of course predicated on the idea of these eyewitnesses being credible. If the follow-up hearings happen and the DoD under congressional pressure releases the radar data from the Princeton and Nimitz that day and it doesn't track with what the people in the hearing today were saying, then that blows a giant hole in the story.

And that's assuming that it's not another misunderstanding that winds up easily explained. Like when we started doing manned space missions, the pilots reported "foo fighters" as dancing lights outside the Mercury spacecraft. Well, it turned out that the Mercury had an issue with condensation on the interior of the windows and that the light from the sun when coming in not diffused from the atmosphere would create an optical illusion of dancing lights. Similar thing with "flying dutchman" ships floating above the horizon where it is merely an optical illusion created by certain atmospheric conditions that create a false horizon. But it'd have to be one hell of a phenomena to show up on multiple sensor systems like that.

At the end of the day, I still don't know. The rational skeptic in me says it probably isn't aliens, but at the same time, unless these fighter pilots are lying under oath, (and Grusch was very clear to couch everything in terms of "this is the hearsay that others have told me, and everything else goes under SCIF") I don't have the imagination to postulate as to what it could be.

The "there is no good evidence" problem is why I want the radar tracks for Nimitz and Princeton released. They'd either confirm the tictac story, or just blow it away entirely, because a large part of what makes that one so compelling is that it was ostensibly tracked from so many different angles from so many different types and models of military radars. If David Fravor was lying about those radar tracks showing the impossible events he describes, then we can dismiss his claims entirely. If the radar tracks show a mostly consistent behavior, then it lends credence to the UAP, and we can discuss it in good faith without having to try and justify it constantly to skeptics. It's one thing when we just have the one FLIR clip. It's another if we have the radar returns from an E2 Sentry, the USS Nimitz, the USS Princeton, and the squadron of F-18s.

Besides, at this point, it's not like these are bleeding edge capabilities. These are all systems that have been around longer than I've been alive. The newer shit is all far and away superior, and so releasing a bit of the information for fighter and naval sensors developed in the fucking EIGHTIES isn't exactly going to be giving up the game to China.