Back in December there were some news stories about money the US was spending to investigate UFOs, and around the same time there was a reputed 2004 video showing the IR camera on an F/A-18 locking on to something the crew couldn’t identify. We had a thread about it: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=844959.
This morning, I see reports of another clip, again reputedly showing the IR camera on an F/A-18 locking on to some unidentified object:
I think both videos have been released by something called the “To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science” (https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/), which perhaps not surprisingly is looking for investors. It’s not clear to me if the origin of these videos has been researched by any of the news media that reported on them. I don’t know if they have been confirmed to have come from unaltered F/A-18 IR camera footage, or if this “To the Stars Academy” just magically produced them.
I don’t know what these videos show, but I’m pretty sure they don’t show alien spacecraft. What are they, then? Hoaxes? Some weird artifact of the camera? An advanced weapon or drone of some kind? Some natural phenomenon being wildly misinterpreted?
I didn’t revive the older thread, because that one seemed to be more about why the US government was spending money researching this stuff. I’d like to focus here on the question of what these videos actually show, or if they’re just flat out hoaxes.
Yeah? My husband is in the Air Force, and we know several pilots. They’re just regular young guys. Not that I feel like this video proves much of anything, but the chatter seemed normal to me.
I remember reading of this same sort of thing in a Reader’s Digest article in the late 50s. A man said to be a military pilot (don’t remember if Air Force or Navy) said he and another pilot came upon an unidentified object whose behavior defied the laws of physics, making sharp and instantaneous 90-degree turns without banking or slowing down and demonstrating incredible acceleration. Then, after a toying with them for a few moments the craft shot off out of sight in the blink of an eye.
Even as a child I found all this dubious, but at the same time the pilot’s credentials seemed legit and that lent an air of legitimacy to his claims.
So, kind of like now. The info seems to come from genuine pilots but the government is mum.
Here is a Washington Post editorial by Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and incidentially a private equity investor and an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science.
I don’t know what those video show or how they have been validated but I’d place my bets on advanced technology demonstrators or someone playing a not-so-innocent prank by altering footage over alien craft which are only seen by a handful of military pilots. Of course, any alien civilization with the technology to travel between star systems could probably infiltrate human society without detection but then why would they be so sloppy as to be occasionally pictured but so capable as to never leave any definitive evidence? I suppose the other side of that coin is that there is a massive international extragovernmental conspiracy to conceal all evidence and silence witnesses (except for that curiously declassified footage) but that is all very X-Files, and what a mess that show turned out to be.
I give the video three ‘grey’ aliens and a plasma torpedo.
You know, every method we know of that might work for a starship leaves a big flare of gamma rays during the phase of flight when the starship is decelerating.
Obviously the ship could have been accelerated with a particle beam or light sail or some other method that relies on infrastructure in the system it started from. (all those methods have the advantage of bypassing the rocket equation)
This would probably take place over years to decades, since the starship would have to shed the waste heat from it’s engine and yet can’t have a very large radiator or it would add too much mass.
Fusion ramscoop braking engines obviously flare gamma rays. Antimatter pion or antimatter catalyzed fusion would both give off very high energy antiproton annihilation rays. Even the exotic black hole engine is emitting almost exclusively gamma from the hawking radiation.
So what I wonder is - do we have sensitive enough telescopes to detect incoming starships today? It obviously would be an incredibly bright flare just a few lightyears away at most.
But yeah, once the aliens got here they could just sprinkle us with nanotech fairy dust. Nanoscale sensors that look like dust mites or something on an electron microscope unless you try to disassemble them. Presumably if you sprinkled enough of them on something or someone they could gang together and produce high resolution camera images (each dust mite is only a single photon detector but enough of them…) and everything else.
Now that 2nd one is just good, common sense - if you read the article, you’ll read that the social stigma of reporting a UFO still existed and, realizing that was inhibiting the Navy from identifying new, unseen threats, rules have been drafted to combat this prejudice - the Navy now wants its pilots to note when they see something weird. So there really is nothing Twilight Zoney about this.
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