[HN Gopher] The More You Look for Spy Balloons, the More UFOs Yo...
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The More You Look for Spy Balloons, the More UFOs You'll Find
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 71 points
Date : 2023-02-14 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| georgeg23 wrote:
| In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense began investing in the
| military use of balloons under its COLD STAR (Covert Long Dwell
| Stratospheric Architecture) program.[27]
|
| The Pentagon began incorporating high-altitude balloons into the
| military kill chain with a focus on hypersonic weapons, in line
| with the Space Development Agency program for commercial
| satellite constellations.[28]
|
| Balloons could be preferred as a platform for their low cost,
| lower altitude, and less predictable trajectories compared with
| satellites."
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident#His...
| paulpauper wrote:
| Confirmation bias is huge. If you're looking for something, you
| will generally find more of it.
| peepeepoopoo3 wrote:
| This article [1] was written two years ago about the US
| government trying to pass off chinese spy balloons as UFOs in
| order to save face. It's shocking how quickly the public took up
| the UFO narrative, given that there were multiple confirmed spy
| balloons just 24 hours earlier. The same people wringing their
| hands over "disinformation" are the ones telling you that it's
| alien flying saucers and not enemy spy aircraft.
|
| [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-
| drones...
| [deleted]
| rcostin2k2 wrote:
| Sometimes it's easier to accept an "out-of-the-box" idea than
| to accept that your defence has failed.
| isp wrote:
| HN comments on this article (7 days ago, 127 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683545
| DrOrangeGrove wrote:
| The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien craft
| is slightly concerning.
|
| But the more concerning aspect for the US government is that
| foreign spies see UFO believers as easily exploitable marks. Thus
| the justification is counterintelligence people must sometimes
| lie to organize the security threats in an open network. This
| combined with an occasional Air Force psyop explains 99.99% of
| UFO sightings.
|
| Sure there's something *else* going on too, evident by the
| elasticity of true love, psychedelics and the general mystery of
| life's existence. But for now, reality seems hard coded to
| prevent the explanation.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| While I generally agree, this is an assumption based on aliens
| being extraterrestrials which would require absurd technology
| to transverse vast distances, perhaps they are "aliens" from
| much closer. Also, perhaps they wanted us to shoot it down. We
| do seem to be stumbling into WW3 so maybe it's just a sign of
| sorts that we need to look at the bigger picture. I'm just
| spitballing, but my point is we far too little info to be
| ruling anything out or attributing motives to hypothetical
| creatures.
|
| It also didn't seem like it was _that_ easy as it took two
| missiles.
|
| I have no answers, I have no real guesses, but I am not ruling
| anything out.
| 3pac wrote:
| UFOs as such are as American as Elvis. Foreign spies can waste
| their time figuring out how much somebody has read into The
| X-Files. In our society, we can openly wonder about these
| things with a sense of humor. Imagine flying from another
| dimension and hundreds of light years, only to be shot down by
| missile-wielding primates over a misunderstanding.
| meremortals wrote:
| > The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien
| craft is slightly concerning.
|
| https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
| ars wrote:
| That story has a sequel BTW. Not as good as the original
| though.
| moremetadata wrote:
| >This combined with an occasional Air Force psyop explains
| 99.99% of UFO sightings.
|
| Military or State psyops usually include drugs of sorts. For
| example, there are many sightings of Orange Orbs, these are
| flares being used on military training grounds which the public
| see and phone in or talk about on social media. Some of the
| Police are in on this.
|
| UFO's and aliens are for those who dont believe in the
| religious psychological warfare programs using God.
|
| Religions were invented about 6000 years ago, history tells you
| that shadowy people have been either using drugs typically
| hallucinogens or drugging people with hallucinogens in order to
| create something supernatural.
|
| When watching ghost hunters or clairvoyants, with talking
| spirits from hundreds of years ago, what these people forget is
| how language has changed, some of todays vocabulary (words)
| simply did not exist a few hundred years ago, and yet people
| keep buying into it on places like Youtube and elsewhere.
|
| Superstition & religion is a psychological coping mechanism for
| some and a way of psychologically harming people if someone
| claims to have a put a curse on someone. Some state employees
| play along with this, the medical profession give many people a
| religious or demonic like experience. Too many anti-histamines
| reportedly give people a hallucinogenic experience seeing a
| black shadow man, other types of hallucinogens give people
| psychedelic blocky Minecraft-like experiences, like Sativa
| giving people machine elf like visuals.
|
| Humans and other animals biggest weakness from "hacking" by
| other humans is the use of drugs.
|
| I think adrenaline can also cause hallucinations if the claims
| of people consuming large amounts of speed and tripping out is
| anything to go by, so its quite likely a fearful situation
| which spikes adrenaline is making people trip out.
|
| Dimethyltryptamine is the main drug we make and release which
| gives us our dreams.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Sativa just means cultivated.[0] I am still looking for the
| cultivar of cannabis sativa sativa that shows me machine
| elves.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryza_sativa
| moremetadata wrote:
| Salvia, sorry get them mixed up. https://www.shroomery.org/
| forums/showflat.php/Number/1810920...
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > This combined with an occasional Air Force psyop explains
| 99.99% of UFO sightings.
|
| Is this a measurement from a study you conducted?
|
| Asking because it seems like a hand wave, and 99.999% of those
| kinds of hand waves fail to account for important details that
| don't fit the dismissal narrative...
|
| And I mean that's five nines right there... :-)
| mrtksn wrote:
| > The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien
| craft is slightly concerning.
|
| What's wrong with that? If there were Martians, they would not
| have problem destroying our craft we sent on Mars so far.
| infogulch wrote:
| Aliens originating in the solar system is pretty unlikely at
| this point, so we can infer that any advanced alien activity
| will come from outside the solar system. Aliens that can
| visit from other solar systems are virtually guaranteed to
| have a big technology advantage on us, given that we can
| scarcely even imagine traveling to other solar systems
| ourselves.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| You are correct but there are other possibilities like
| aliens from other dimensions. That sounds like it would
| also require high technological ingenuity, but not
| necessarily. For example, maybe going from their dimension
| to our dimension is trivial compared to us trying go to
| their dimension. Perhaps when they trip on something like
| the dimensional equivalent of DMT they show up on our
| planet?
|
| Or maybe it's a simulation and aliens are simply users of
| the program.
|
| Or it's just more psychological warfare.
|
| I have no idea what is going on and these are just random
| ideas, my point is simply that we have been seeing similar
| stuff for a long while now. We say it's not us or china. If
| it's not us or china, I don't see it being another
| countries. If it's private companies, what are they doing
| and why? Flying without transponders is highly illegal and
| unethical so maybe some sort of massive criminal
| organization that is highly technical and super secretive
| but that seems improbable. It's not extraterrestrials
| exceeding the speed of light or extraterrestrials from the
| solar system because those are also improbable. So WTF is
| it then?
| uhtred wrote:
| Think how simple minded that would make them seem though:
| "Ugg ugg me see me no understand me attack"
|
| As much as I want ETs to exist, I really hope we wouldn't
| shoot them down if they were just observing.
| uhtred wrote:
| It's hilarious that people down voted my comment- did I
| offend some Americans?
| [deleted]
| lovecg wrote:
| If they're so smart, they better figure out the complex
| geopolitical realities we have to deal with!
| morelinks wrote:
| I imagine they're resolve those realities the same way we
| do: "Start negotiating or prepare to lose
| thousands/millions"
| ianburrell wrote:
| I think people make the assumption that aliens will be super
| advanced and super advanced means invincible. This comes from
| assuming that they will be advanced everywhere and that
| interstellar travel means magical tech. It ignores that there
| are physical limits to realistic travel or may be limits to
| magic ones. Finally, they can have blindspots like using
| cheap drones and assuming they can escape their attackers.
|
| I was thinking of scenario where sailboat drone washes up on
| North Sentinel Island. Our civilization is much more
| advanced, they can't touch our airplanes or spacecraft. The
| drone is advanced, with solar panels, computers, and plastic,
| but is cheap and disposable. The islanders could row out in
| canoes and defeat it with stones and sticks.
| crotho wrote:
| [dead]
| msm_ wrote:
| > The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien
| craft is slightly concerning.
|
| The same people are laughing at primitive tribes shooting
| arrows at planes flying above their island. Surely there's a
| huge technological gap between anything we have now, and alien
| spaceships capable of interstellar travel?
| aflag wrote:
| Except that are actually able to kill people who come too
| close. If they just orbit around from a distance I'm sure we
| wouldn't be able to take them down. Not so sure about it if
| they actually enter our atmosphere
| tzs wrote:
| > The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien
| craft is slightly concerning.
|
| It's not obvious that aliens who reach Earth must be much more
| technologically advanced than we are. They could have come here
| in a generation ship, which probably only requires builders who
| are a little ahead of us, and that only in fields like
| bioengineering.
|
| For most of what they'd need for a generation ship our current
| level of technology is fine. In particular there is no reason
| they would have to be better than us at aircraft or weapons
| technology, so whatever vehicles they bring along to use when
| they want to enter a planet's atmosphere might be no better
| than what our current air forces have.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > It's not obvious that aliens who reach Earth must be much
| more technologically advanced than we are.
|
| The odds of bumping into an alien civ that is anywhere near
| technological parity with us are vanishingly small. Given
| that the universe has been capable of hosting habitable
| planets for ~10 billion years, the median age of alien
| civilizations could easily be billions of years old.
| Meanwhile our civilization is a paltry .00001 billion years
| old.
| krapp wrote:
| Except we should have noticed a generation ship. Particularly
| if we're assuming aliens not much more advanced than we are.
| It would be big and it would give off a lot of heat and it
| would have to be in orbit. I think you're underestimating the
| technological complexity of building what is essentially a
| sealed, self-sustaining biosphere capable of running for tens
| of thousands if not millions of years. Maybe on a napkin
| we're anywhere near able to do something like that.
|
| Plus this goes against the common narrative that these craft
| display propulsion capabilities that appear to defy physics,
| which (if we're assuming aliens) implies anti-gravity at a
| minimum. No one is claiming to encounter UAPs or UFOs with
| wings and conventional rockets. Again, that's something we
| only kind of know how to do on a napkin, and even then only
| if we fudge the numbers.
|
| At the very least, I would want to assume any civilization
| capable of interstellar travel to be at least 1000 years
| ahead of us, technologically. Even with generation ships and
| no space magic. It's just a big stupid round number but I
| intend it to mean generally as far ahead of us now, in terms
| of scientific knowledge and technological progress, and
| assuming a few paradigm shifts ahead, as we are ahead of the
| Middle Ages.
| wizeman wrote:
| > At the very least, I would want to assume any
| civilization capable of interstellar travel to be at least
| 1000 years ahead of us, technologically.
|
| My guess is that we'll be able to develop human-level
| artificial intelligence a lot sooner than 1000 years from
| now.
|
| At which point it would be a lot easier to send AI probes
| to explore the galaxy and/or make first contact with
| another civilization than to build a generation ship.
| tonetheman wrote:
| [dead]
| blamazon wrote:
| https://archive.ph/tta5M
| mikece wrote:
| And the more photos pop up the more people question real
| photographs versus AI fakes. Ironic.
| xnx wrote:
| I spotted an almost stationary balloon over NYC last year that I
| was never able to Google an explanation for.
| https://imgur.com/Z7iPPKp
| ttul wrote:
| I stabilized it - somewhat: https://youtu.be/FBFVpSf_Qgk
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| It's less stable than before
| mkr-hn wrote:
| It looks like two ordinary but partially deflated heart-shaped
| balloons tied together.
| xnx wrote:
| It does. It's very hard to tell from the video, but these
| were very high up, and must have been much larger. Looked a
| lot like all-white inflatable ribbed wind-surfing wings.
| rhacker wrote:
| I REALLY hate the news now. Last month was pres documents, now
| this idiotic story on weather balloons. March is going to be 5x
| dumber.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Whatever it takes to stop you from thinking/asking about:
|
| Origins of covid and the Eco Health Alliance interference
|
| Source of the Epstein fortune
|
| Paper mask mandate efficacy
|
| Money supply changes effect on CPI
|
| Vaccine effectiveness and health effects on the young
|
| FBI, DHS, GEC, CISA asking private companies to censor
| information on tech platforms
|
| Election interference via federal suppression of journalism
|
| Projected impact of vinyl chloride in expected deaths and
| morbidity
|
| Why Congressional leadership is capable of consistenly beating
| markets
|
| To whom Maxwell and Epstein trafficked
|
| Whether Maxwell and/or Epstein were in any way involved with
| our intelligence community
|
| Why we pulled out of Bagram the way we did
|
| What limits we should put, if any, on our willingness to
| escalate Ukraine
| colpabar wrote:
| I ask this question in good faith and out of pure ignorance - how
| do we know the first one we shot down was chinese?
| gsdofthewoods wrote:
| China's government said it originated in China, but it denied
| that it intentionally flew over the US for surveillance
| purposes: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/03/china-tells-us-to-
| remain-coo...
| blamazon wrote:
| I saw an analysis by a meteorologist on Twitter that used a
| NOAA wind model and the publicly known position of the balloon
| (when it was above Montana) to backtrack a likely path, which
| ended up with an origin in China:
|
| https://twitter.com/wildweatherdan/status/162132105562836582...
|
| The same person posted a similar analysis of an object shot
| down over Alaska that suggested it could have been a National
| Weather Service balloon: (or trying hard to pretend to be one)
|
| https://twitter.com/wildweatherdan/status/162416175081471182...
| [deleted]
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| The New York Times is reporting:
|
| >In a sign of how closely the United States had been monitoring
| the balloon surveillance program directed by the Chinese
| military recently, U.S. officials said in interviews that they
| began tracking the spy balloon as it lifted off from Hainan
| Island in southern China in late January.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/us/politics/ufo-spy-ballo...
| sys32768 wrote:
| I would assume our government has the ability to get detailed
| photos of these objects, once they realize they are in our
| airspace.
|
| It seems right now the narrative is nobody knows what these were,
| and that the debris may never be located.
|
| This is a conspiracy theorist's dream.
| giobox wrote:
| I'm sure there are, but one issue the F16 pilots noted in radio
| transcripts from one of the recent shoot downs is that the
| difference in airspeed between a stationary or slow moving
| arial object and the speeds the F16 need to maintain to stay in
| the air make it surprisingly hard for pilots themselves to
| accurately describe the objects.
|
| These objects are small, to get a good view requires flying a
| very fast jet very close to a small relatively stationary
| object of which you may only get a split second glance.
|
| In the transcript I saw, the two F16 pilots can't really agree
| if the object they are dealing with is a balloon or not (this
| wasn't from the first shootdown of the Chinese balloon which
| was much larger and easier to identify), eventually one pilot
| just assumes it is as a best guess.
| ianburrell wrote:
| This could explain much what is going on. The later objects
| have confusing descriptions which make hard to figure out
| what they were. But they could easily be small to medium
| balloons with the payload not visible. Spherical becomes
| cylindrical or octagonal, balloons become floating.
|
| This could explain why we haven't gotten more info from
| government. They don't want to admit that shot down weather
| or scientific balloons. Smaller balloons are likely to not be
| Chinese. It could also be that government is equally confused
| and are waiting to find the wreckage.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| why can't such a spy plane release shell with parachute, to
| slow down the shell, containing a self-inflating balloon?
| possibly with some thrusters?
| LanceH wrote:
| > I would assume our government has the ability to get detailed
| photos of these objects
|
| For any territory that a camera can get detailed photos of
| something, there is much greater area (volume) which over which
| it can get poor photos. So the more cameras you have getting
| better photos, the (many times) more bad photos you'll have.
| localplume wrote:
| I still don't understand why people think that the level of
| information that the public is aware of is somehow the exact
| same as the USG has. Not to mention, knowledge of what truly
| when on is heavily compartmentalized within the USG and IC as a
| whole. Whatever narrative the people are being told is the same
| narrative that our adversaries are being fed, so a fine line
| needs to be tread between putting the public at ease and giving
| away information about our capabilities.
|
| This obviously does leave room for speculation and thus
| conspiracy theorists, but what justification do conspiracy
| theorists need anyway? The crux of most conspiracy theories is
| making a mountain out of a mole hill.
| vkou wrote:
| > so a fine line needs to be tread between putting the public
| at ease
|
| Also, there's no reason to assume that the goal of revealing
| all this information is to put the public at ease. Maybe the
| goal is to drum up public support for war, or at least, some
| adventure in brinksmanship. Or to make the administration
| look more hawkish than it is. Or there's some weird
| funding/ego/prestige power struggle between departments and
| generals. Or someone is playing a public game of cover-your-
| ass. Or is making his enemies in the organization look bad,
| by airing the dirty laundry.
|
| Figuring out which is which when it comes to the military
| leaking secret information is an exercise in Kremlinology.
| sys32768 wrote:
| Speaking of conspiracy theorists and conspiracies, Edward
| Snowden thinks these shoot downs are an engineered
| distraction to stop the public from believing the story that
| America blew up the Nordstream Pipelines:
|
| https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1625241477642088454
| [deleted]
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Snowden can pound sand for repeatedly regurgitating Kremlin
| propaganda that they weren't going to invade Ukraine, that
| it was all US government scaremongering.
|
| https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1493641714363478016
|
| He doesn't know shit when it comes to this topic.
| krapp wrote:
| Regardless of what these object are, there's no reason for the
| government to make photos of them public unless they need them
| for propaganda purposes.
| michaelteter wrote:
| > the ability to get detailed photos of these objects
|
| I imagine there could be methods of confusing cameras,
| especially when there are no points of reference in the sky
| other than the object itself. Maybe some human tech cloaking
| methods are sufficient to obscure an object.
|
| As for locating the debris, you would think that would be
| easy... but we're still finding bits of the Columbia space
| shuttle here and there.
| bmacho wrote:
| > I imagine there could be methods of confusing cameras,
|
| Huh? Cameras turn lights into rgb, you can't confuse them, if
| not paint your balloons blue.
| michaelteter wrote:
| And mirrors reflect light. What happens when the reflection
| is toward sky and clouds?
| stetrain wrote:
| Taking high quality photos of small objects far away is pretty
| difficult.
|
| See also how we can get crisp images of distant galaxies, but
| getting images of the equipment at the Apollo landing sites is
| elusive from anywhere farther away than lunar orbit.
|
| I definitely wouldn't assume we can immediately get detailed
| photos of a drone-sized object flying at high altitude.
| kurthr wrote:
| I suppose, but it's not really that hard to resolve things at
| 30-60k feet.
|
| The big Chinese balloon was ~300ft across (and the equipment
| ~100ft) at 60kft would be almost half the size of the moon...
| 0.25deg or easily visible by eye. And you can get shots of
| that with a hand held mobile phone at night. Any amateur
| astronomical camera set up is capable of 1-4 arc sec (better
| than 0.0001deg) and daytime exposures would be <10msec.
|
| So it's pretty easy to get 1ft resolution at that altitude.
| Getting 1inch is harder, but doable especially with multiple
| images, which is possible now even for amateurs. If it was
| moving at 100mph (closer to 30-50) that's only <1ft during
| the exposure time (still 50x faster than the moon). The gov
| can do much better, but I wouldn't count on mm resolution.
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