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chuckula
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I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Wed Dec 20, 2017 9:25 pm

OK, I'm not really much for people with crazy hair on the purported "History" channel spouting off about Aliens* but there's been a recently disclosed encounter from 2004 between something weird, a U.S. Navy Aegis Cruiser, and up to six F-18s off the coast of California that's definitely not normal.

Here's just one article about the incident that includes FLIR video.

This article includes more specifics about the incident.

This isn't some drunk guy who stumbled out of his trailer with a bad camera, this is an incident that involved radar and visual tracking of objects by both a ship and multiple highly trained F-18 pilots.
So I'm not saying it was aliens... but it sure wasn't normal.

* I'm pretty sure aliens didn't build the pyramids, but I think they might have redone the parking lot at my local Walmart! [rimshot]
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Welch
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Wed Dec 20, 2017 10:12 pm

Highly trained observer and weapons operators.

"Look at that thing Dude!"

I couldn't help but think of Dell Dude. It feels so wrong hearing an F18 pilot use those words lol.
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Redocbew
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Wed Dec 20, 2017 10:44 pm

They were probably just bored while being required to take part in this guys pet project.

He should be watching Tabby's star also if he's into aliens, but that'd be an even harder sell to the DOD than this. :P
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:28 am

I'm with the Defense Department on this one.. why *try* and deal with something you probably can't (or more likely: shouldn't)?

Anything that can get here from such a vast distance more than likely is at a technological level that is just beyond anything we can do - and likely will be for a very long time (..unless we undergo some sort of rapid technological change a'la massive well-developed "sentient" AI creating new tech. at a phenomenal rate.).


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gr ... e7c72ee56b



2 cent Defense Department protocol for UFO: don't mess with them. (..things you can't deal with - obviously still tracking other national tech..)
Last edited by CScottG on Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
 
just brew it!
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:31 am

Welch wrote:
Highly trained observer and weapons operators.

"Look at that thing Dude!"

I couldn't help but think of Dell Dude. It feels so wrong hearing an F18 pilot use those words lol.

Oh, c'mon. These are the guys who draw penises in the sky with their jet exhaust.
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:34 am

..and they are probably claiming its a selfie. :wink:
 
Kougar
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:42 am

Was surprised there wasn't a thread on this already. :lol:

Just listening to the pilots talking during the footage was particularly interesting... the thing easily outpaced an F-18, yet could also hover with visibly churning water under it. Multiple pilots saw it, and the radar techs had been tracking the object and similar profile targets near the Nimitz for days prior to the intercept order. Pretty crazy all the way around. I'd think the ability to fly that fast yet also hover in place rules out pretty much anything terrestrial in origin.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:52 am

Kougar wrote:
..I'd think the ability to fly that fast yet also hover in place rules out pretty much anything terrestrial in origin.


A certain recent movie quote sum's this up nicely:

(something like):

"I think (they) are tooling with you sir."
 
Welch
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 3:21 am

just brew it! wrote:
Welch wrote:
Highly trained observer and weapons operators.

"Look at that thing Dude!"

I couldn't help but think of Dell Dude. It feels so wrong hearing an F18 pilot use those words lol.

Oh, c'mon. These are the guys who draw penises in the sky with their jet exhaust.


Tru dat bro.
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 8:04 am

just brew it! wrote:
Welch wrote:
Highly trained observer and weapons operators.

"Look at that thing Dude!"

I couldn't help but think of Dell Dude. It feels so wrong hearing an F18 pilot use those words lol.

Oh, c'mon. These are the guys who draw penises in the sky with their jet exhaust.


Well, I don't know why anyone would be upset about that. It's a pretty good representation of America's maturity right now. :lol:
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 8:19 am

Half Life 3 confirmed.

FINALLY.
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 8:25 am

There's a long history of amazing and at times unrecognizable objects in the sky. It's only recently that events are being recorded with sensors that allow some to be categorized as non-natural in origin. Thing is, this trend towards observation was predicted long before we had the capability to do so.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 8:39 am

kvndoom wrote:
Half Life 3 confirmed.

FINALLY.


If that's what it takes, I BELIEVE!
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superjawes
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 9:17 am

I'm not saying it was aliens...but nothing. I'm saying it probably was not aliens.

So here's the thing. No matter what the Pentagon knows about these objects, they probably can't say anything. If this was a US DoD project, they would be protecting secrets about US capabilities. If it was a hostile power, the Pentagon doesn't want said power to know what we know (and they would be protecting HOW we know what we know). Heck, even if the Pentagon knows nothing about this object, they would still want to keep a good poker face.

Barring a revelation in interstellar travel methods, my gut says this object was terrestrial. We're seeing plenty of drones being deployed and developed for commercial and military use, and an unmanned vehicle will be able to accelerate much faster without emulsifying the pilot. Ideally, this was a deep, dark, "don't let ANYONE know about this" project backed by the Pentagon just to see what the limits of UAV technology are, and one test flight accidentally overlapped with a separate training exercise.
On second thought, let's not go to TechReport. It's infested by crypto bull****.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 1:11 pm

Not Hollywood aliens for sure. In all history, there have never been good observations of life beyond inhabited space. The reported performance - almost vertical descent ascent then transit at Mach 3+ from near sea level - is well beyond our present capability.

Brahmos-type ramjets cannot fly that profile, proposed hypersonic planes only use such speeds at the edge of space. If the 2004 incident involved an airframe, it maneuvered like Aladdin's carpet while thrusting as a missile and eating atmosphere.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 8:18 pm

superjawes wrote:
We're seeing plenty of drones being deployed and developed for commercial and military use, and an unmanned vehicle will be able to accelerate much faster without emulsifying the pilot. Ideally, this was a deep, dark, "don't let ANYONE know about this" project backed by the Pentagon just to see what the limits of UAV technology are, and one test flight accidentally overlapped with a separate training exercise.

But Occam's razor is soooooo boring.
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superjawes
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Thu Dec 21, 2017 8:56 pm

ludi wrote:
superjawes wrote:
We're seeing plenty of drones being deployed and developed for commercial and military use, and an unmanned vehicle will be able to accelerate much faster without emulsifying the pilot. Ideally, this was a deep, dark, "don't let ANYONE know about this" project backed by the Pentagon just to see what the limits of UAV technology are, and one test flight accidentally overlapped with a separate training exercise.

But Occam's razor is soooooo boring.

Hey. Discovering real, sentient aliens would be hella cool, and probably the most important even in human history. But I'd rather keep my expectations low and be pleasantly surprised when it really happens.
On second thought, let's not go to TechReport. It's infested by crypto bull****.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Dec 22, 2017 11:55 pm

CScottG wrote:
A certain recent movie quote sum's this up nicely:

(something like):

"I think (they) are tooling with you sir."


It is easy to dismiss the pilots of perpetuating a hoax, but what about the footage then? The radio transcripts with ship personnel also tracking the object? The Princeton had been tracking similar radar returns for two weeks prior before vectoring the F-18s over, which means probably all of the radar watch officers saw it.

As I see it to perpetuate this hoax would require tampering with Princeton's radar system , intercept footage tampering, and multiple officers plus both pilots to be in on it.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Sat Dec 23, 2017 12:44 am

So, you are saying it's aliens. :lol:

After I did a little googling it looks like the weirdly behaving star I mentioned in this thread earlier is slightly less weird now. A new theory of a cloud of dust orbiting the star helps to explain some of the weirdness. It's still weird, but "alien megastructure" is looking less and less likely, and most everyone would have told you it wasn't very like at all in the first place.
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Sat Dec 23, 2017 1:00 am

Kougar wrote:
CScottG wrote:
A certain recent movie quote sum's this up nicely:

(something like):

"I think (they) are tooling with you sir."


It is easy to dismiss the pilots of perpetuating a hoax, but what about the footage then? The radio transcripts with ship personnel also tracking the object? The Princeton had been tracking similar radar returns for two weeks prior before vectoring the F-18s over, which means probably all of the radar watch officers saw it.

As I see it to perpetuate this hoax would require tampering with Princeton's radar system , intercept footage tampering, and multiple officers plus both pilots to be in on it.



No.

The "pilots" of the UFO are tooling with the pilots of the F-18s. :wink:
 
chuckula
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 8:24 am

Here's a leak of the executive summary of the official incident report.

Pretty interesting read.
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:07 am

That was an interesting read for sure.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:16 am

I don't have experience in military stuff or whatever, but that doesn't strike me as convincingly authentic.

It's clearly written, down to literal wikipedia and regular layman websites footnotes, for a particular audience. Namely, us.

That's not a big deal in-and-of-itself, plenty of "declassified" reports are literally rewritten for intentional wide publication, but they are usually professionally prepared and repeatedly labeled as such.

This? Uhh, people who "found" it are claiming it is some internal military document that was leaked. Not only does this not read anything like (I don't think anyone in the military has to look up what a submarine is, nor do I have any idea what such a footnote even communicates for the ostensible purposes of the document), it doesn't look anything like the form of the usual internal government documents I've seen in other contexts. This has some mild (and inconsistent, by the way) redaction, but nothing else.

For instance, who or what prepared this report and who signed off on it? When was it written? For whom is it intended? If this is sensitive, why isn't it marked according to the security level? If it isn't actually sensitive (which the text indicates otherwise, repeatedly mentioning that various subjects "didn't sign an NDA"--the only NDAs in the military for servicemembers to my knowledge are the ones for classified info, and they are done proactively related to their service, not reactively related to an incident), where are the marks indicating that it is unclassified or the like?

There aren't any stamps, scribbles, strike-outs, filing numbers, heck, like there isn't anything. As I said, the redactions in it aren't even consistent, and they largely don't make sense. Why is David Fravor not redacted, but Jim Slaight is? That, from just a normal historical methodology, is a HUGE authenticity problem (I can regale you with tales of how we detect, strictly philologically, frauds & forgeries, "pious" or otherwise).

So, not very believable, at all.

And I don't even know the first thing about serving in the military. Someone who has might be able to say significantly more.
Last edited by Glorious on Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:20 am

Sure looks fake to me. :shrug:
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Glorious
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:36 am

Waco wrote:
Sure looks fake to me. :shrug:


My initial impression too.

Just the more I looked at it, the more I could say what was wrong with it.

---

A long time I ago I knew a editor for a vanity press. That is, one of those places where you pay THEM thousands of dollars and then YOU ARE NOW A PUBLISHED AUTHOR, HURRAY, LIFE-QUEST COMPLETED! (from an imprint that is sold nowhere, no one reads, and that if anyone even recognizes it's worse than having @aol.com address). Anyway this "editor" would let me borrow some of the more interesting examples, she knew I liked that stuff.

Part of the process of them convincing you to pay them thousands of dollars so you can annoyingly brag about your faux legitimacy as a writer was that they'd have an initial editor read it and present a bunch of notes, you know, to superficially make it more real. They'd publish it either way, of course, but you were encouraged to re-submit incorporating those (never even mildly harsh) notes for the enhancement of the experience.

ANYWAY, there were distinct categories you could informally classify the submissions into. Books about crazy political ideas. Memoirs about being in "the war" (always the ones I felt the worse about---those guys were trying to communicate the most meaningful experience of their life to the next generation, the problem is that we don't really *need* ten thousand accounts about guys moving boxes and fixing planes in the South Pacific and meeting the love of their life etc... Touching, yes, but essentially identical and unfortunately uniformly interminable). Books about how they were wronged by XYZ to exacting detail. Insanely bad attempts at Romance and Fairyland Fantasy. Obvious slash fiction with unchanged or inconsistently changed names (the few things the imprint would actually decline to publish, due to "after detailed legal consideration" i.e. a checkbox on the review form for the liberal arts-at-best editor being paid like ~25 bucks a book). etc...

ANYWAY (AGAIN), there was another submission type: Military/SciFi written by autistics. Sure, there were people in them, to operate those majestic machines described in INFINITE *%#&$%*# DETAIL FOR PAGE AFTER PAGE. Our Hero is, oh my, is flying a P-51 mustang. That's 20 pages of specifications, down to which SERIAL NUMBERS were in what model range and thus our hero had THIS much "War Emergency Power" available to escape the FW-190 (here come another 20 pages, I share the dreadful inevitability of our imperiled hero) chasing him. The same sort of submitter also tended to like aliens and starships, with a rather similar approach.

Guess what this "leaked document" is HEAVILY reminiscent of, albeit more mildly than the extreme approaches I characterize the category by? :wink:
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 10:55 am

So one story I'll pass on that may throw some water on this (not completely, just an interesting analog):

My father-in-law flew in the F4 Phantom II in Vietnam (and the Cold War). After his stint in Vietnam he and his wingman were flying CAP in West Germany when they got a radio call to intercept a high-speed inbound from East Germany. They vectored towards the approximate area the inbound was coming from and then they got some more details about the intercept - 90,000 feet at over Mach 3. He thought - no way we can reach, let alone hit, something at that altitude (and speed would have been an issue too). About a minute later they were called off. When they landed they inquired about it and they were essentially told that it was a radar mistake. Years later he figured out it was an SR-71 coming in from Eastern Europe, but they weren't told that at the time.
 
Glorious
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 12:31 pm

I just realized, this isn't even a forgery.

Why? Because nothing in it purports or even implies that it has anything to do with the government or military.

Anywhere. (OK, there are couple of references to "our" sensors, but that's pretty much literally it).

This could be a fifth grader's book-report.
 
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 12:40 pm

Glorious wrote:
This could be a fifth grader's book-report.

Hey, my 5th grade book reports sounded an awful lot like the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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chuckula
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 12:40 pm

In trying to dissect this paper you are forgetting the most important piece of information that proves it's likely authentic.

Ignore the actual report and look at the very end:
Admiral Peter Daly assumed command of the CSG in January 2005 after the intercept and had no knowledge or involvement in this incident.


A clearly political CYA statement at the end of the document? This is 100% real.
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Re: I'm not saying it was Aliens... BUT....

Fri Jun 01, 2018 12:49 pm

It looks like a hoax, smells like one and tastes awfully fake.

It is probably some silly prank done by bored ground crew and pilots. Krogoth
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