[HN Gopher] The Calvine UFO photograph
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The Calvine UFO photograph
Author : lukeplato
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-08-12 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drdavidclarke.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (drdavidclarke.co.uk)
| h2odragon wrote:
| Lighter than air radar reflector / target? Looks like good shape
| for something like that.
| yarg wrote:
| The one thing that makes me think that there might be something
| there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar.
|
| Not because it worked, more because it really didn't (and they
| thought it would); it makes me feel like it was (very) loosely
| based on something else (something only seen).
|
| I'd be very interested to see what would happen if you
| incorporated some very fast very heavy gyros inside of a disc.
| miniwark wrote:
| I only see an small island with reflection on a Scottish lake or
| a large river a foggy day... And the "plane" is just a floating
| tree branch for me...
| night-rider wrote:
| My razor for filtering out any UFO/UAP photo is simply: unless I
| have physically seen the UFO in question, any attempt by others
| to persuade me they're real or operated by intelligences orders
| of magnitude higher than ours, is invalid. You can't audit these
| people's claims short of being physically with them when the
| photo was taken. For all I know, someone put a piece of cheese on
| the lens and then passed it off as a UFO.
|
| That said, I did witness something strange about a year ago when
| I looked up at the sky randomly. This object was darting really
| fast at quite a height. I dismissed it as a drone, but I didn't
| know drones could operate at such a height, and it done acute
| turns without slowing down, something drones can't do, no matter
| how many videos of drones turning acutely at speed you show me,
| because an object _has_ to slow down before it does that. It 's
| basic physics.
|
| Anyway, it was good to see, since I was physically present, so at
| least I can say these things could possibly fit the narrative of
| 'aliens' or 'watchers' who are doing recon on our planet.
| amerine wrote:
| I also saw what you described once in southern Oregon right
| along the California border, but it was in 1996 and I was a
| kid. None of the adults around believed I saw an object moving
| like that and were convinced I had noticed a satellite.
|
| Satellites don't turn at acute angles without losing momentum.
| They didn't believe me.
| libertine wrote:
| You might have seen a satellite, nowadays it's pretty common to
| see them, especially starlink ones.
|
| At least from a couple onward.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Satellites travel in straight lines. [1]
|
| [1] akshually, those are elliptical orbits, but you get what
| I mean
| tshaddox wrote:
| > and it done acute turns without slowing down, something
| drones can't do, no matter how many videos of drones turning
| acutely at speed you show me, because an object has to slow
| down before it does that.
|
| What you saw probably wasn't an expert flying a small RC
| helicopter, but those can do things that I believe would appear
| to some people as being almost impossible. It's not rare to see
| seemingly genuine online comments on these sorts of videos
| claiming they must be fake or sped up.
|
| https://youtu.be/KmPchrGW1TQ
|
| https://youtu.be/XlyxmqfTLxk
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Now I want some Gouda.
| [deleted]
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| I think a better way to phrase this is - extraordinary claims
| require extraordinary evidence. Being present myself is a good
| litmus test, but humans are pretty unreliable. Having multiple
| corroborated credible sources would be much better. E.G.
| multiple radars detecting an object approaching, many videos
| from different view points, governments (who have access to
| better data sources) scrambling interceptors, defcon level
| rising, etc..
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| > cheese on the lens
|
| Or a faulty stench coil.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > so at least I can say these things could possibly fit the
| narrative of 'aliens' or 'watchers' who are doing recon on our
| planet.
|
| Mandatory must-read: Backyard Starship. The writing isn't the
| best in the world, but the premise and story is pretty darn
| good.
| smallmouth wrote:
| Indeed. I second this recommendation.
|
| I also recommend John Keel's "Operation Trojan Horse". He's
| my favorite writer on the phenomenon and brings a skeptic's
| wit to the analysis while not discounting the volumes of
| testimony from highly credible witnesses.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Similar observation a few years ago in the sea sky: some ligh
| moving very high, with a strange flying pattern (like a very
| fast bee), for 20 minutes, above my head, then disapearing. No
| apparent light beam, support for light reflection, animal
| presence or mechanical vehicule. Clear weather conditions.
|
| It was, to my eyes, an object that was flying and that I
| couldn't identify. So UFO applies.
|
| The problem is not seing those.
|
| The problem is making interpretations out of those.
|
| Humans often prefer to create explanations than say they just
| don't know.
|
| Centuries ago, somebody spot lightning and said it was Thor. We
| are mocking them now, but we are doing the same.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I saw similar lights in the sky off the eastern coast of Sri
| Lanka back in 2017. I assumed it was military aircraft since
| that area is a hotbed of military activity.
|
| But then it abruptly turned almost 60 degrees at a sharp
| angle - like a cue ball bouncing off the walls of a billiards
| table.
|
| I don't know of anything that can move like that.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I've also seen 3 lights fly in formation then the two on
| the wings make instant 90 turns and fly off into the
| horizon.
| puchatek wrote:
| Search light hitting a cloud?
| 1-6 wrote:
| What ever happened to crop circles. Have we ever gotten to the
| bottom of those?
| spullara wrote:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/crop-circles-the...
| mikewarot wrote:
| Context -- You can build a "ufo" (ion wind lifter) yourself, many
| have[1]. The power to weight ratio is roughly equal to that of a
| helicopter, so it's not trivial, but it could in theory be scaled
| up to large enough to move battle tanks around on. You'd end up
| with a large dark craft that glows a bit around the edges.
|
| That's old physics, who knows what's been done since then.
| 1 - http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/liftbldr.htm
| yuan43 wrote:
| > The Calvine UFO photograph is in my opinion the best image of
| an unidentified flying object ever taken.
|
| And yet the no evidence for this is presented in the entire
| article. Government cover-up/friction is not evidence of
| authenticity.
|
| The person making the extraordinary claim is obligated to bring
| the extraordinary evidence. There is none, so the author is
| resorting to spinning conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, quite
| typical of UFO "research."
| [deleted]
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Ok so let's just say that the author is correct, and this thing,
| among other sightings, are actually US secret projects. I can
| believe that, but I would be much angrier if the government has
| been covering up some sort of wild capabilities for at least the
| past 30 years than if they have been covering up aliens for the
| past 80 years. If we have the ability to fly silently at high
| speeds, we have the ability to generate much more power at much
| lower cost than we do currently...which means the technology is a
| secret because releasing that tech into the world liberates the
| peasants from their rulers.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| If these are indeed secret government projects, you'd wonder
| why did taxpayers ever fund a trillion+ dollar F-35 program
| that keeps running into problems year after year.
|
| Surely these black ops operations couldn't have had a bigger
| budget than the F-35 (if they did, you'd ask how did they
| source the funds?). And if they didn't, how were they able to
| get these experimental aircraft to fly better and faster than
| the trillion dollar F-35 jets - decades ago? And if they were,
| why are we not funding these hypersonic gravity defying jets
| instead of an evolutionary upgrade to 4th gen fighter planes.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The F-35 ended up being a pretty impressive jet after all,
| but let's go with the old story that it way under-performed
| for the cost -- a possible explanation would be that most of
| that trillion+ budget actually went to secret projects like
| the hypersonic UFO stuff. (I don't actually believe this, but
| it is at least a self-consistent explanation under the
| assumption that the government is hyper-competent and has
| this sci-fi UFO technology).
| nine_k wrote:
| Same was said about the B-2 stealth bomber program: its
| cost was so high that a popular conspiracy story was that
| much of the funds go to something _really_ advanced and
| thus not even spoken of publicly.
| subsubzero wrote:
| I think the cost per fighter was something like $2B which
| to me seems absurd as once the initial research and test
| plane were created the other planes should be relatively
| cheap as they are making them off of well tested plans.
| So either major grift by the manufacturer or something
| else is getting that money. And the cost per plane keeps
| getting higher every year which doesn't make sense.
| tshaddox wrote:
| They only made 21 of them, which is probably hardly
| enough for marginal cost to even matter.
| somat wrote:
| The government tends to include operation costs. The 2
| billion per plane includes the cost to run the things
| over their lifespan. so the equation to get it is
| something like.
|
| stealth_bomber_design + stealth_bomber_r_and_d + ( 21 * (
| stealth_bomber_manufacturing +
| (stealth_bomber_operations_cost_per_year *
| years_of_operation ) )
| mywacaday wrote:
| I can understand the misappropriation of funds to explain
| what was done but what I can't understand is the depth and
| number of layers required for the cover up. The amount of
| people starting at the maintenance, cleaning etc all the
| way through engineering, logistics, support to maintain
| such a cover up just seems impossible to me.
| checker wrote:
| Alright, I'm no MAD game theory expert so I'll probably get
| ripped apart, but I'll appreciate the discussion.
|
| I've wondered if there's any MAD incentive to keep some major
| groundbreaking technology under complete wraps (beyond TS -
| see recent headlines). If MAD is disrupted by groundbreaking
| tech, and if this technology would significantly boost strike
| capabilities and possibly render nuclear weapons useless,
| then the rival nations would be forced to exercise a nuclear
| strike preemptively to ensure their security to prevent a war
| they would inevitably lose.
|
| So that's one theory that I've kicked around in my head as to
| why we might have such tech but keep it such a tight secret.
| It certainly could be complete fantasy or misunderstanding of
| MAD. Please tell me why I'm wrong so I can bury this line of
| thought!
| Jenk wrote:
| > trillion+ dollar F-35 program
|
| <tin-foil>It makes perfect sense that the trillion+ didn't
| actually go to the F-35 and was instead used for secret
| projects, and the F-35 was a token effort to look
| legit.</tin-foil>
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Pretty sure in the Cold War and so forth there were all
| sorts of paper tiger projects that were just for show,
| either to the public or for Soviet espionage.
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Cmdr. David Fravor in one of his interview mentioned, that he
| does not believe that it is a secret gov program - he was
| talking about tic tac, not this incident - because since that
| encounter it would have come to light by now, because the
| commercial value is just simply too great to stay secret. And
| that this is what typically happens to military tech.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think it is much more mundane. The mythology around secret
| aircraft makes them out to have super-performance or strange
| advanced characteristics, when these things probably weren't
| true at all.
|
| I would believe exactly the opposite. Things like "flying
| saucers" were attempts at secret advanced aircraft which
| worked, but not particularly well, and never really went on to
| be anything more than experimental aircraft. Leaks happened
| from time to time to prod adversaries to worry and try to
| develop competing technology to waste their time and resources.
|
| The F117 looks pretty alien, that one worked though.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk
|
| There are probably a handful of other examples, aircraft that
| were tried but never made to work very well, work on new
| principles of design that haven't been figured out yet, and are
| still on the drawing board with various attempts to make them
| work ongoing.
| subsubzero wrote:
| I would say the probability that the US has technology that was
| demonstrated in the pentagon UFO tapes would be more surprising
| to me than if these craft were actually made by non-humans.
|
| If the US had possession of such technology in a black project
| we would see some of the technology "bleed" into other
| projects, notably the air force and drone technology. And right
| now nothing the US possesses has those capabilities.
|
| An alternate theory is that this is ruse by the US or another
| foreign govt. projecting images into the sky and moving them
| like a person using a laser pointer does across a wall. I don't
| know of any technology that can project an image into the sky
| like that, and then there is the radar signatures seen on some
| of these things.
| krapp wrote:
| Technology wasn't demonstrated in the pentagon UFO tapes.
| People extrapolated hypothetical technological capabilities
| based on uncertain second or thirdhand evidence, sensational
| reporting and eyewitness testimony. Not all such evidence may
| be interpreted properly (certainly not by the internet
| commentariat that wants to believe) nor may all
| interpretations be valid. One "triangle UFO" video[0] has
| already been debunked as lens bokeh[1].
|
| Occam's Razor suggests that the vast majority of these
| sightings are hoaxes or misinterpretations, and the rest are
| conventional, albeit state of the art, aircraft whose actual
| capabilites are beyond what people may assume possible (as
| people in the 1960s might have assumed had they seen an SR-71
| Blackbird when most commercial aircraft were still using
| propellers) but still not physics-defying.
|
| [0]https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-confirms-ufo-
| video-...
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26838782
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Why? If we've got that capability then why telegraph it to
| everyone else, including peer (or near peer) air forces around
| the world.
|
| If it's ours, great, let's keep a tight lid on it until we need
| it. If it's not, let's discretely find out what it was. Period.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Because if we do have the capability to create lots of cheap
| energy, it could have been applied to various other sectors
| and improved the quality of life for billions of people.
| Instead of constraining us to the whims of oil barons.
| krapp wrote:
| Assuming this for the sake of argument, it might not be
| cheap. Maybe we're talking about small portable fusion
| engines that cost half a trillion dollars a piece to make,
| and have a very short, single-purpose shelf life.
|
| Remember the Area 51 lawsuit where workers sued over being
| exposed to toxic fumes and chemicals, and as a result the
| facility was exempted from all environmental laws? Maybe
| the byproducts of creating this energy are more toxic and
| dangerous than spent nuclear fuel, but it's the government
| and the government doesn't give a damn, but there's no
| feasible (much less legal) way to mass produce the
| technology.
| Flankk wrote:
| The thing that doesn't make much sense to me is the variety of
| shapes these things come in. Saucer, triangle, tic tac, pyramid,
| cube, etc. The triangles are probably just military, but where
| does that leave this other stuff? The military has had supersonic
| drones for a long time so that could explain many other
| sightings. The thing about aliens is it's exciting. The thing
| that makes me wary is that even if the military declassified
| hypersonic saucer drones people would just call it a psyop.
| huron wrote:
| That's totally an aircraft banked towards the camera. Turn the
| image 90deg and it looks like a testbed a/c that Boeing had that
| looked like something out of Batman. Brown from above makes sense
| as it would help to hide it from foreign satellites.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Stargazing and watching satellites in a very dark skies place, I
| noticed that some satellites zigzaged about, moving at right
| angles. I explain this by saccades of my eyes and the brain
| trying to work out the pattern based on a black featureless
| background.
|
| Would make sense for the brain to estimate it as "flying bug"
| with erratic flight than very smoothly straight flying mechanical
| thing.
| jcims wrote:
| Very plausible explanation, but fwiw the 'zigzag' behavior
| you're describing is also described by people out in places
| where they have high end night vision goggles and nothing to do
| all night but stare at the sky.
| jmyeet wrote:
| If you ever find yourself tempted to look down on or judge
| someone for getting roped up in a cult or simply spewing some
| dogma that you find ridiculous, please consider that UFOs (and a
| bunch of other conspiracy theories) are just religion for
| atheists.
|
| Humans have a deep need, a very egotistical need in some ways, to
| feel like there's a bigger plan, that they're part of something
| and even that they're in possession with some secret knowledge
| the masses aren't.
|
| It's not too dissimilar to those who jump on the trend of the
| latest fringe FTL technology idea. Warp drives, wormholes, space
| folding, whatever. Part of this comes from a genuine desire for
| some Star Trek or Star Wars future of visiting other stars
| without taking a lifetime to get there. But part of it is also
| some people realize that if the speed of light is a cosmic speed
| limit (my personal belief) then the idea of alien visitors and
| UFOs becomes truly ridiculous.
| jeremycw wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible this was an optical illusion. Seeing
| optical illusions where oil tankers are hovering in mid-air has
| changed my perception of what people could see and how it could
| be misinterpreted. [1] I'm not a physicist but it almost looks
| like the photo could be a mountain and it's reflection somehow
| projected up into the sky similar to how the oil tanker is
| projected in the sky.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-56286719
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Isn't this just a photo of something similar to the Boeing "Bird
| of Prey"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Bird_of_Prey
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