"2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’"

[Sky Captain]

One more thing asociated with UFO sightings are lack of sonic boom despite many cases of UFO going supersonic or even hypersonic. Fighters sent to intercept, UFO accelerating to very high speed and disapearing are fairly common theme in UFO reports. Yet no sonic booms. If those were real physical craft a sonic boom would be present. They often have wrong shape for supersonic flight. With enough power anything can go supersonic, but then it should be even louder as more power is used to force a way through the air.

[JI_Joe84]

One more thing asociated with UFO sightings are lack of sonic boom despite many cases of UFO going supersonic or even hypersonic. Fighters sent to intercept, UFO accelerating to very high speed and disapearing are fairly common theme in UFO reports. Yet no sonic booms. If those were real physical craft a sonic boom would be present. They often have wrong shape for supersonic flight. With enough power anything can go supersonic, but then it should be even louder as more power is used to force a way through the air.

Or a dead give away, seeing as that would be impossible.

[AniThyng]

The thing is that not all strange phenomenon has to be proven to be mundane. Non-mundane stuff could potentially happen or can be a matter of perspective. Ball lightning was one, as Skimmer mentions. Even more exotic stuff like the introduction of foreign or irregular vehicles either from a different factions of the same country's military or from an-other's. Also, rocks do fall from space sometimes and do strange things.

Every pilot with four-digit plus hours up in the sky probably saw stuff they couldn't explain. It's part of the job, heck, almost most jobs that include lots of traveling. Strange, inexplicable stuff happening.

The fallacy is the idea that "we can't readily explain it, it must be aliens!". That's where the crazy begins and where you need a mounting number of increasingly absurd assumptions for it to work. Where you stop trying to analyze the event and instead start creating an elaborate system of justification for a preconceived notion.

By mundane I really meant "rational and not paranormal", sorry is that wasn't clear. Whatever is on the FLIR is clearly something, after all.

[Zixinus]

The thing is that not all strange phenomenon has to be proven to be mundane. Non-mundane stuff could potentially happen or can be a matter of perspective. Ball lightning was one, as Skimmer mentions. Even more exotic stuff like the introduction of foreign or irregular vehicles either from a different factions of the same country's military or from an-other's. Also, rocks do fall from space sometimes and do strange things.

Every pilot with four-digit plus hours up in the sky probably saw stuff they couldn't explain. It's part of the job, heck, almost most jobs that include lots of traveling. Strange, inexplicable stuff happening.

The fallacy is the idea that "we can't readily explain it, it must be aliens!". That's where the crazy begins and where you need a mounting number of increasingly absurd assumptions for it to work. Where you stop trying to analyze the event and instead start creating an elaborate system of justification for a preconceived notion.

By mundane I really meant "rational and not paranormal", sorry is that wasn't clear. Whatever is on the FLIR is clearly something, after all.

The point wasn't so much as aimed at, but that "mundane" has a matter of perspective. Ball lightning is mundane now but wasn't always so. We will always see things that our current physics couldn't quite explain or understand.

Also, the fallacy is that there IS such a thing as "paranormal" as a choice in the first place.

[Simon_Jester]

Zixinus, there is a very profound, fundamental difference between the groupings we call 'normal' and 'paranormal.'

Ball lightning is something we can't quite explain in detail, but we know what it is in broad. We know that it is clearly an electromagnetic effect, involving electric charges and electric forces. It behaves in ways consistent with known scientific laws. Adding ball lightning to our picture of what is physically possible in the universe causes very limited changes to our understanding of how the universe works.

If aliens came to us in a spaceship that looked and performed like, say, the Space Shuttle, this would ALSO not cause major changes to our understanding of how the universe works.* You can make a good case that this would be 'normal' and not 'paranormal.' Yes, aliens existing would be weird, but the aliens (metaphorically) put their pants on one leg at a time the same as everyone else, they play by the same universal rules. Fair enough.

But if aliens show up in a flying saucer that can travel at Mach 4 through the atmosphere without showing any sign of skin heating and sonic booms, and which can make ninety-degree turns sharp enough to expose the crew to hundreds or thousands of gravities of acceleration... that is not, for lack of a better term, "normal." That is mysterious ultratech, and if it actually existed it would radically alter our notions of what is and is not physically possible. This is where the term 'paranormal' comes from. Whereas aliens in space shuttles and ball lightning are inside the envelope of "normal" possibilities we can reasonably extrapolate from what we already know to be possible, aliens in flying saucers are firmly outside that envelope.

This is the key to understanding the difference.

The things we describe loosely as "paranormal" such as ghosts, psychic powers, magic, and UFOs with uncanny special abilities? Their common feature is that they are outside the envelope of what we would normally consider possible. To be sure, if they exist they are part of the universe by tautological definition, but when one says this, one is not advancing a meaningful argument. One is merely repeating the definition of "universe" because one objects to having a word for "things that exist but are not part of the picture of the universe as presently understood by science."
_______________

*If you think this statement is false because of the social or philosophical implications of alien life, consider that these are not questions of 'how the universe works,' they are questions of 'how we feel about how the universe works,' which is a very different thing.

[JI_Joe84]

Are we still talking about this? Like really? Its just a funny shaped spy balloon, planes were sent to see why its fucking around Santa Monica or where ever it was instead of painting Kim jong un with a laser for a giant "fuck u, sit down and shut up" missile to find. That's it.

[Sea Skimmer]

Are we still talking about this? Like really? Its just a funny shaped spy balloon, planes were sent to see why its fucking around Santa Monica or where ever it was instead of painting Kim jong un with a laser for a giant "fuck u, sit down and shut up" missile to find. That's it.

Umm, what funny shaped balloon do you think you can do mach .58 into a 120 knot headwind, while having no visible exhaust on FLIR? Please do tell how that would ever work. One of the biggest reasons why airships stopped getting built was they were helpless in the face of that kind of weather, the drag area is far too large. The fastest one ever only did 75mph in the calm. Even if it were some kind of spy craft it would have to represent a major departure from the known state of the art. That insn't impossible but I'm not convinced Area 51 is doing anything that radical. A lot of it scale comes not from aircraft tests now, but being the actual manufacturing site for many stealth materials used on known projects.

Actually though I'm now fairly convinced that video probably is just an object on the FLIR lens, barring some kind of formal transcript of the pilot saying they also cited this object with the mk1 eyeball or radar. But the article about the F/A-18-Princeton incident, which is not the source of the video, remains unexplainable in any ready terms.

[K. A. Pital]

Anyway, both sides of the iron curtain experienced events like this, studied them to death and always found that a minority, but non trivial number could not be explained by any known mechanic. But at the same time both sides also found that you could never get close. That doesn't sound like aliens to me.

Might not be aliens, but then if it was aliens *laughs* well, if it was aliens, imagine this. You are ultra-advanced exploration probe studying some apes. Maybe for your level it is like studying, say, crocodiles for us.

Why’d you want to give an opportunity to get close?

[Sky Captain]

I found another interesting case of UFO caught on IR camera by Chilean Navy. However it apparently can be explained fairly well as a sighting of a distant airliner. It's weird that official investigation failed to check for all airplanes that could potentially be somewhere near. It seems to be the first thing to do when investigating UFO case.

[Simon_Jester]

It's pretty easy to overlook things, especially when "nearby" can mean "fifty miles away."

[Titan Uranus]

Are we still talking about this? Like really? Its just a funny shaped spy balloon, planes were sent to see why its fucking around Santa Monica or where ever it was instead of painting Kim jong un with a laser for a giant "fuck u, sit down and shut up" missile to find. That's it.

Umm, what funny shaped balloon do you think you can do mach .58 into a 120 knot headwind, while having no visible exhaust on FLIR? Please do tell how that would ever work. One of the biggest reasons why airships stopped getting built was they were helpless in the face of that kind of weather, the drag area is far too large. The fastest one ever only did 75mph in the calm. Even if it were some kind of spy craft it would have to represent a major departure from the known state of the art. That insn't impossible but I'm not convinced Area 51 is doing anything that radical. A lot of it scale comes not from aircraft tests now, but being the actual manufacturing site for many stealth materials used on known projects.

Actually though I'm now fairly convinced that video probably is just an object on the FLIR lens, barring some kind of formal transcript of the pilot saying they also cited this object with the mk1 eyeball or radar. But the article about the F/A-18-Princeton incident, which is not the source of the video, remains unexplainable in any ready terms.

It’s not fully explainable, but the basic story of “The USS Princeton had a radar glitch, vectored two unarmed fighters in to find out what it was. The pilots/WOs of these fighters went looking for anomalies, and sure enough, they found some.” sounds pretty plausible to me. If it were an actual aircraft you would expect the F/A-18s to see it on radar, which they explicitly did not. You could argue that the object was outside of the cone of detection, but that doesn’t explain why noone else picked it up, nor why it was not at the height that the Princeton saw it at.