With the recent news that The Pentagon and The US Navy are conducting studies on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), do you think it is more likely that these objects are of an extraterrestrial origin rather than some classified tech?
This question seems to ask for an opinion.
I doubt there is any alien activity on Earth or in its vicinity.
We haven’t seen any real intelligent extraterrestrial life yet.
All the videos they have released so far have plausible mundane explanations. I’m interested to know why the Pentagon and US Navy have not realised this yet.
Perhaps it is because they place too much trust in the capabilities of their equipment and in eye-witness reports? It must be hard to admit that pilots and radar operators can make such basic mistakes.
[Moderating]
Welcome to the Straight Dope, AlienBabble. We have different categories for different sorts of threads. The General Questions category is for questions with factual answers. Questions like “What do you think?” fit better in our IMHO area. I’ve moved his thread over here for you.
Recently they released three videos which they didn’t really have explanations for. If you’ve seen those videos and wonder what they are, you should go to YouTube and see the explanatory videos by Mick West. He does a really good job of explaining what was going on.
Spoiler: it almost certainly wasn’t aliens, or even some classified tech.
No. I think if you find an object on Earth the likeliest explanation is that it originated on Earth.
I highly recommend the book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record” by Leslie Kean. It’s very factual and lets you draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is that it’s aliens.
Interesting. The author doesn’t seem to draw that conclusion.
The author is a reporter and is focusing in presenting the facts rather than offering a conclusive analysis.
Clarification request: You think the Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials are aliens?
I think the most likely explanation is that they are highly classified experimental aircraft or spacecraft. Of terrestrial origin (foreign or domestic).
No problem. Happy to be here. 
A recent DOD statement denies any knowledge about the origin of these UAPs:
The full Pentagon statement is as follows:
The Department of Defense has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017. The U.S. Navy previously acknowledged that these videos circulating in the public domain were indeed Navy videos. After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena. DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as “unidentified.” The released videos can be found at the Naval Air Systems Command FOIA Reading Room:
https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents
Because these objects exhibit capabilities not currently found in any country’s inventory that we know of, should we at least consider the possibility that they are of ET origin?
A “Daria” episode once had her class speculating that they were infiltrated by alien. Someone asked “Why would anyone cross millions of light years of universe to go to high school?”
A far more likely explanation is that these clips show conventional aircraft and other mundane objects which have been misinterpreted by the pilots. Here’s Mick West’s analysis.
Flir1 (also called Nimitz, or TicTac) is a fuzzy blob in the distance. It does not move (although it jumps around when the camera changes zoom settings or does a gimbal lock correction). There’s what looks like a final “zipping away at high speed” at the end of the video, but it’s actually just the camera no-longer tracking the object, combined with a change in zoom that gives the illusion of speed.
Gimbal is a saucer-shaped infrared glare. It rotates because the camera is rotating to counter gimbal lock. We can prove this because there are other light patterns in the sky that rotate at the same time the glare rotates. The video is consistent with a jet engine several miles away. it does not have any sudden acceleration. See:
Go Fast is what looks like a cool object moving rapidly across the surface of the ocean. However, the angles and range on the screen allow us to triangulate the position and speed of the object. It turns out it’s actually moving quite slowly (under 50 knots) and is quite high (13,000 feet). It does not accelerate at all. In fact, it most closely resembles a balloon, or possibly even a large gliding bird.
The crafts seen on those videos are dropping from 28,000 ft to sea level in 0.7 seconds. That roughly equals to falling at 27,000 mph, with instantaneous acceleration and deceleration, as if inertia did not exist. And according to a new study, there could be more than 30 civilizations capable of long-distance communication here in the Milky Way!
The two clips known as ‘Gimbal’ and ‘Gofast’ are not even associated with any particular set of aircrew, and may not even be unexplained. The fact that someone has labeled the clip which is caused by gimbal rotation ‘Gimbal’ suggests someone knows more than they are saying.
None of the clips show anything “dropping from 28,000 ft to sea level in 0.7 seconds” That was an radar observation that happened at a different time, and was not filmed or recorded in any way. I suspect it may have been a meteor detected by the radar, which was still under test.
Note as well that the Gimbal and Gofast clips were made in 2015 by unknown aircrew, and the Flir1 clip was made in 2004, so there is no real connection between the two events.
However I think that the clip known as ‘Gofast’ may be of some value, since it seems to show something very similar to the object described by David Fravor in the 2004 event. The ‘Gofast’ clip shows the effects of parallax on an object where the distance has been poorly estimated, and I think this may be exactly what happened in Fravor’s sighting.
This Mick West video goes over the details of the sightings: