[HN Gopher] Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aer...
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Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles
(2019)
Author : sebg
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-03-07 18:39 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| oblib wrote:
| I won't venture to guess what these are but I did find it quite
| interesting that the old and more recent descriptions of
| sightings are very similar, and that we still do not know what
| they are or where they come from.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Makes me wonder what the psychology and politics of anti-
| extraterrestrial beliefs and rules are. It's very plausible other
| beings exist, but what necessary axioms disintegrate if a society
| comes to believe in aliens, and why is it important to isolate
| and shame people who suspect it?
|
| I can see how our dominant moral systems are rooted in the idea
| of human primacy and a single One supreme being. Recognition that
| we can appeal to super beings to intervene on our behalf could
| arrest our evolutionary intellectual development by causing our
| civilizations to optimize for pleasing said beings, instead of
| organizing ourselves to elevate human minds that enable a more
| natural and free evolution for our species. There may be some
| evolutionary rule about life where a species only evolves along
| degrees of freedom and our development becomes arrested when we
| optimize for the constraint of appealing to the discretion of
| super beings, sort of like domesticated animals vs. wild ones.
|
| To adapt to co-existing with a technologically advanced species,
| you would need a conceptual or moral degree of freedom and agency
| beyond them, which made peaceful and free co-existence possible,
| and provided some basis for principled equality of life. (an
| agreement on a One god whose will has been revealed them as well
| would go a long way, and as an idea, could secure our ability to
| evolve independently of our advanced co-habitants. This may be
| the rational evolutionary case for monotheism, as a necessary
| condition for moral agency across significant differences.) The
| most obvious consequence of introducing a new super being species
| would be how we would organize ourselves and relate to each other
| around them, and not just find increasingly subtle ways to murder
| each other to secure their favoured status.
|
| If humans forfeited our moral agency by optimizing for becoming
| subjects of these super beings, we would be putting
| responsibility on the super beings to govern us, and arrest our
| own evolutionary development.
|
| Maybe the anti-extraterrestrial people have a deeper
| understanding of this. Or they just recognize, maybe the arrival
| of such a species would irreconcilably polarize us all between
| those who could sustain their own moral agency in the face of a
| superior power, and those who give it up to optimize for material
| animal ingroup security, and the ensuing war would wipe us all
| out - or the aliens would do it for us. Maybe it will take
| another couple hundred years for them to really arrive as we're
| not quite fully baked from an evolutionary perspective, and we
| need to be on average more intelligent than we rather obviously
| are now.
|
| I'm sure they laugh at our nuclear energy use and social media as
| being the civilizational equivalent to trepanation though. I
| wonder what their jokes are like.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't know that such a thing as "anti extraterrestrial"
| belief exists.
|
| Here's two beliefs/points of view that are compatible:
|
| 1. There's a very high chance there's life out there in the
| universe. There may even be intelligent life, too.
|
| 2. It's unlikely extraterrestrial intelligent life will be able
| to reach Earth. Most reports of UFOs are either made up
| bullshit or the human brain finding patterns where there are
| none. Or simply classified military tech. Or people craving
| attention.
|
| Not one person that laughs at fake accounts of alien abduction
| and probing does this because they are afraid of coexisting
| with alien intelligence. Instead, they do it because fake
| accounts of alien abduction are hilarious.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > why is it important to isolate and shame people who suspect
| it
|
| I'd argue that humans are tribal creatures, and that we don't
| need a reason to "other" people. On the contrary - our need to
| "other" people drives the creation of reasons to do so if
| necessary.
| JALTU wrote:
| This article (linked) is a fun thought exploration of alien
| psychology/motivations as understood by us humans, given the
| history of our interactions ("known interactions" so to speak)
| with the aliens: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/03/social-
| ufo-stylized-f...
| smoyer wrote:
| Reaching relativistic speeds in minutes to hours and covering
| interstellar distances in days to weeks as proposed in the
| abstract seem to not be compatible - wouldn't a relativistic
| speed mean we'd need 4ish years to reach another star?
| netgusto wrote:
| The durations are expressed in 'ship time', ie the perceived
| duration from the pov of the ship. This is explicited further
| in the document.
| kmote00 wrote:
| Off topic comment: I'm pretty sure "explicited" is not a real
| word, but you've convinced me that it ought to be. Perfectly
| clear what you meant. Can somebody add this to the
| dictionary, please?
| jointpdf wrote:
| They probably meant:
|
| explicate -- to give a detailed explanation of
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explicate
|
| It seems like a relatively newer word in its usage: https:/
| /books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_e...
| shkkmo wrote:
| From the body of the paper:
|
| > Such a craft accelerating at a constant 1000g for half of the
| trip and decelerating at the same rate for the remaining half
| would reach Proxima Centuri within 5 days' ship time due to the
| fact that it would have been traveling at relativistic speeds
| for most of the trip (Figure 7B). However, for those of us on
| Earth, or anyone on Proxima Centuri b, the trip would take over
| four years.
| thfuran wrote:
| That depends whose clock you're using.
| hammock wrote:
| From the study:
|
| >Collectively, these observations strongly suggest that these
| UAVs should be carefully studied by scientists [9,10,11,12,13].
|
| >Unfortunately, the attitude that the study of UAVs (UFOs) is
| "unscientific" pervades the scientific community, including SETI
| (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) [34], which is
| surprising, especially since efforts are underway to search for
| extraterrestrial artifacts in the solar system [35,36,37,38,39],
| particularly, on the Moon, Mars, asteroids [40], and at Earth-
| associated Lagrange points. Ironically, such attitudes inhibit
| scientific study, perpetuating a state of ignorance about these
| phenomena that has persisted for well over 70 years, which is now
| especially detrimental, since answers are presently needed
| [41,42,43,44,45,46].
| mullingitover wrote:
| Right out of the gate, the paper is begging the question by
| stating that these are 'vehicles.'
| dvh wrote:
| Here's my most recent thought. Pilots spent years up there and
| the only thing they see are other planes. If they see something
| it must be a plane, from the size they can estimate the distance.
|
| But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain
| thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a plane,
| they think it must be far away. And when it flys same speed as
| plane, in "projected" large distance those speeds are enormous.
| And their agility is amplified in the same way.
|
| The result is that pilots see "planes" doing impossible
| manoeuvres at impossible speeds.
| 1shooner wrote:
| The study addresses this: the cases selected for analysis
| include multi-modal observation (e.g. visual + radar).
| zardo wrote:
| Even with the video evidence from the Nimitz incident, all the
| calculations rest on the pilot's estimate of the vehicle size.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > But when they suddenly see smaller drone, their pilot-brain
| thinks it's a plane, but because it is much smaller than a
| plane, they think it must be far away.
|
| I think this neglects the training and capability of the pilot
| to the point of being insulting. You're basically saying that a
| (let's say) 15 year veteran of the U.S. Air Force can't tell
| the difference between a small drone and a plane, doesn't
| understand basic physics / optics, and when uncertain, assumes
| that anything observed _must_ be a plane because "all we see
| are planes". Preposterous.
|
| Also, even if that were the case, it's pretty hard to explain
| away when the same object is being observed from multiple
| angles, with multiple humans, and multiple high precision
| sensors, with all observations confirming the same conclusions.
| cma wrote:
| When stabilized against the ocean some of the things the
| pilots said were pulling impossible G levels of acceleration
| were actually flying in a straight line:
|
| https://www.metabunk.org/data/MetaMirrorCache/49d95870dca331.
| ..
|
| Some of the other high g-force examples turned out to be an
| FOV change of the camera footage when toggling IR.
| runjake wrote:
| 1. (US) military pilots are trained to recognize the
| shortcomings of their sensory perceptions in this exact regard.
|
| 2. This doesn't explain the many, separate close-up encounters,
| such at the Nimitz and east coast/Atlantic Ocean encounters.
|
| PS: FWIW, I don't think these things are extra-terrestrial.
| zardo wrote:
| 1. They are trained to estimate the sizes of featureless
| flying tic-tacs?
| runjake wrote:
| They are trained in identifying aircraft and grok flight
| characteristics, and for the lack of better phrasing
| because I'm eating a taco at lunch, how one's senses can be
| wrong or skewed.
| cma wrote:
| But some of those pilots made critical mistakes
| describing the tic tac, things like FOV changes on the
| camera were interpreted by them publicly as velocity
| changes of the object.
| count wrote:
| The radar and FLIR aren't as easy to 'trick' though.
| runjake wrote:
| They could be, with RF and laser equipment running
| reasonably-advanced software to spoof such sensors _.
|
| _ There are a lot of gotchas to work out here, but it 's my
| best guess, aside from "craft that defy physics."
|
| Source: worked on such military equipment, back in the early
| 90s.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > They could be, with RF and laser equipment running
| reasonably-advanced software to spoof such sensors.
|
| How would such RF and laser equipment spoof sensors that
| are thousands of feet in the air and moving at hundreds of
| miles per hour and moving in unpredictable ways? Radar is
| off the table--that would presumably have been detected,
| right? How would our spoofer spoof multiple sensors,
| separated by significant distance? Remember that some of
| these events involved multiple aircraft and ships, all of
| which saw the same data on their sensors. How could the
| spoofer engage all of these targets without its physical
| presence being detected by the various players, with all
| their various systems constantly searching?
|
| Spoofing seems possible, but it seems like some kind of
| pre-planned hack would be the least offensive flavor of
| that particular theory. But even then, some of the pilots
| swear they saw these things with their own eyes (sometimes
| multiple people in a single aircraft, sometimes multiple
| people in different aircraft), which casts doubt on the
| whole 'spoofing' idea.
|
| Of course, the most likely answer is that these reports are
| some simply untrue. If someone has an impossible story that
| you can't independently verify, there's no good reason to
| believe them.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The analysis in this article is just plain bad; it came up in
| another UFO discussion about nine months ago. e.g. see here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27355333
|
| The article is published in a journal the subject matter of
| which has nothing to do with UFOs, or flight dynamics or
| anything similar. It does so happen that the principal author
| of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that journal however;
| and the publisher of the journal has been on-again-off-again
| the lists of predatory publishers for some years.
| danbruc wrote:
| At least those videos [1] are just birds, see for example this
| analysis [2]. Skip to the meat of it, if you dislike the style
| of the video.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkPn-YMp9vI
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| What kind of a freaking bird travels at fighter jet speeds
| and rotates like that?
|
| I'm a photographer who loves watching birds, taking photos, I
| watch other bird photographers. It's never anything like
| that.
| danbruc wrote:
| It isn't. The bird is between the sea and the jet and for
| all practically purposes stationary. When the camera pod on
| the jet tracks the bird and keeps it in the center of the
| field of view, what you are seeing is a parallax motion of
| the sea in the background due to the motion of the jet.
| This refers to the second clip in the linked video which
| also also the focus of the linked analysis.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| You need to listen to the interview with the pilots who
| filmed this. They were chasing it, and couldn't catch up.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Which is what you'd see of a bit of gum stuck to the
| sensor lens.
|
| I'm not saying that's what this is, I'm pointing out that
| what the pilots perceive is not to be taken at face
| value.
| billsmithwicks wrote:
| Quick, someone find a carpet to sweep this under!
|
| In all seriousness, I hope that the Galileo Project comes up with
| the goods in the next few years -
| https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Can anyone clue me in as to why this is on the NIH's website?
| sliken wrote:
| From another comment "The article is published in a journal the
| subject matter of which has nothing to do with UFOs, or flight
| dynamics or anything similar. It does so happen that the
| principal author of the paper is the editor-in-chief of that
| journal"
| nl wrote:
| It's published in a journal that PubMed[1] indexes. The journal
| itself is about "research on all aspects of entropy and
| information theory" [2] which is why the paper is about
| _estimation_.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(journal)
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Ah, thanks. That makes sense.
|
| Now I have to go back and re-read that paper with an eye
| toward the statistical techniques used.
| jaqalopes wrote:
| It was news to me that in the Nimitz event ballistic missile
| defense radar was actually observing the UAVs _in low Earth
| orbit_ days before the fighter jet encounter. Truly wild stuff.
| If I had to hazard a guess, these are unmanned (unaliened?)
| probes, the same ones that have been here for centuries or more.
| They may not even know or care what humans are or what we 're up
| to. Maybe they keep dipping to the water to take algae samples or
| something similarly banal. And the reason they "run away" when
| the fighter jets get too close is just their onboard flight AI
| following a generic self-preservation script. However, none of
| this comports with the report of the fleeing tic-tac "appearing"
| directly at the fighters' pre-determined, _secret_ CAP point.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I had not caught that bit before, either:
|
| > 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. 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.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Artifacts on sensors, or even active jamming could explain
| massive changes in speed for recorded videos
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