Huh, interesting - it would explain some things. (Also, I would imagine that the organizational need to justify its own existence ends up having an impact, too. It encourages people to frame anomalies as significant when they’re not, so they have something to do.)
2 Likes
2 Likes
Hilarious that the UFO-spotter codename for this video is “Gimbal” which is in fact the source of the sensor artifact we’ve been looking at. Did some Navy tech who IDed this instantly decide to troll them?
1 Like
One reason West’s explanation is compelling is that the alternative explanations require extraordinary evidence. He might be correct that there’s a different physical phenomenon, mechanical artifact, or equipment behavior that caused the “unexplained” motion; however, none of the engineering based explanations require belief in the paranormal, supernatural, or visitors from another world.
Another thing that’s important is that he’s not claiming anything that someone who has worked with cameras, machines, computer vision, trigonometry, IR photography, etc., hasn’t seen before. And ultimately his background becomes irrelevant if and when engineers in the field agree with his analysis. No collection of aerospace engineers has stepped forward and said “this explanation is inaccurate for the following reasons.”
COVID hoaxers don’t follow either of these. Their claims require extraordinary evidence: that there’s a global coverup, that vaccines cause health problems worse than COVID, that COVID doesn’t exist, that hospitals want people to get sick and die so they make more money, that the vaccines contain 5G chips, that ivermectin or other substances are somehow now acting as antiviral drugs, etc. Worse, they press forward despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, wearing out anyone who presents rational arguments against them to the point where medical professionals who do know better stop wasting their time on the pointless arguments. The hoaxers literally don’t argue in good faith; they argue as a part of a trolling strategy.
3 Likes
What are you talking about?
It’s probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right. This does not mean it’s not a “UAP”, or that it’s not unidentified, or that it’s not an amazing craft – it just means it’s not actually exhibiting any incredible behavior, and so this opens the door to more mundane possibilities, like a distant small jet, just flying away, the heat of the engines (viewed up the exhaust) creating a large glare in the thermal camera.
This video absolutely does not claim that whatever was recorded was not a real object. It in fact comes to the conclusion that it most likely is a real object. However, it’s a real object that is not rotating as it appears in the video, due to how the gimbal system makes the IR flare move without corresponding movement from the actual object. That means that whatever the camera is seeing could potentially be a mundane object, and as such, that’s likely what it is. But that’s not the same thing as it not existing at all.
No, but multiple people came to the same conclusion. I’ve seen a lot of analysis that essentially says, “It’s actively embarrassing that anyone on the government side is acting like there’s anything interesting here.”
Fair enough. Certainly when this specific video and GOFAST seem pretty easy to demonstrate as likely to be well-understood objects/phenomena, I would hope that the relatively small selection of incidents identified by the DIA are not similarly easy to explain, because that’s absolutely embarrassing.
Problem is, what they’re seeing is a) from instruments, or b) not reliable anyways. I’m constantly reminded, in these situations, of pilots who reported being “chased” by a light that turned out to be… the Moon (or Mars, etc.). What the instruments recorded is a big nothingburger, disappointingly.
The “tic-tac” encounter from the Nimitz is, reportedly, a direct visual sighting in daytime. That certainly doesn’t mean that it wasn’t just a weird reflection in the cockpit. It doesn’t mean that the pilot didn’t misconstrue its performance characteristics due to an optical illusion. And even if everything that the pilot reported was accurate, that doesn’t mean that the only explanation remaining is space aliens.
But while I’m absolutely on board with the idea that we should take eye-witness accounts with a big grain of salt, I’m not a fan of automatically dismissing them, especially when there are multiple witnesses and/or when other sensor systems provide complementary data. To me, that’s interesting and worth investigating further, and I think the outcome is worth learning about, even if it’s something entirely mundane.
1 Like
Lights in the sky are always problematic (lack of reference, scale, inability to tell where the light is actually originating, information being reduced to single points, etc.), but it seems doubly problematic for pilots, as they’ve got this other layer of mediating/intervening elements (cockpit glass that’s reflecting and distorting external and interior lights, instruments that might be incorrectly telling them something is there and making them more susceptible to “seeing” something that isn’t…). At best, saying the pilots actually saw something is just admitting that a spot of light entered their eyes that could have come from anywhere. It doesn’t mean automatically dismissing them, but (somewhat ironically) it means there’s a higher burden of proof required to show there actually was something there at all, than with the average eye-witness.
It’s still worth investigating, of course, but you end up with a lot of junk to shift through (and when some of the less obvious junk gets people excited, it makes it even harder to shift through).
4 Likes
The “eyewitnesses” of the Nimitz affair had inconsistent stories early on, which became more congruent only after many years had passed to confabulate and conflate their memories of the incident and align their narratives (not necessarily consciously). Nothing they say about it should be taken at face value. And AFAIK, no actual sensor data from this case has ever turned up, so we must rely on the faulty recollections of radar technicians years and years later.
(ETA: Also, we should be careful to note that the accounts of Fravor et al and the GIMBAL video are from two totally different cases, separated by years. This distinction is often lost in these discussions, with attempts to use arguments for/against one as arguments for/against the other, confusing the issue.)
2 Likes
Absolutely agreed.
1 Like
The simulation on metabunk is impressive.
1 Like
The Navy has strong incentives to not engage with the public (especially the UFO public) on the topics of the precise limits of their sensor systems or instances of sailors lacking the training to understand what they’re looking at.
It’s one of those issues, like medicine and law, where the only people discussing specific cases online are the ones without a career to risk.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
