The idea that there would be a single explanation
I get what you’re saying and agree. I should have phrased that as “a particular UAP / UFO” My point being that it could be an advanced drone and you may not get a second chance.
It could also be an instrument artifact or calibration issue. Which multiple people involved with the manufacture, design, and calibration of the systems for these particular data points have said repeatedly.
Or misidentification of something relatively common.
Counter to the implication military pilots and officers are not automatically experts in atmospheric phenomenon, and every single feature and quirk of their own equipment.
Neither are they any more immune to biases, assumptions, preference, or personal belief than any one else.
The idea of super advanced drones is a bit at odds with descriptions of these things as moving in way that are impossible for aircraft, and doesn’t really seem too plausible to me based on the videos I’ve seen. It all doesn’t look like physical objects to me.
The military has an obligation to check, for a whole host of different kinds reports. Just in case.
But it’s important to remember that that isn’t how these investigations or the focus on this particular kind of report came about.
It’s rooted in Harry Reid throwing some pork at his good buddies associated with Skinwalker Ranch and Tom Delonge. Which was originally revealed and reported as a scandal. And at one point (probably still) there were investigations into how that happened and where the money went.
That means it suffers from the same framing issue I mentioned before.
It starts from an assumption that there is something, somewhere indicating physical, flying objects or traditional UFOs.
It settles on these particular reports as the most likely to provide that, and to a certain extent the most publicly palatable.
Which is the exact opposite of how you’d properly go about this. It’s also an approach that tends to land on whatever incidents lack enough data/information to really make a determination or learn much.
The sort of thing where you can impose almost any interpretation, because there is so little information to draw on.
It’s also worth noting that our originators here are from a particular end of the UFO game. The interdimensional, psychic phenomenon wing of the movement. Lots of vortices, collective unconscious and tulpa sorts things. Including my good buddy interdimensional Big Foot. Particularly the Skinwalker Ranch guy. Who’s considered a pretty sketchy actor even in the main UFO circles.
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How DARE you doubt the infallibility of our superhuman American heroes. /s
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I should also apologize for silently thinking that police are not automatically credible witnesses.
I am ashamed.
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Yes, that’s all a given, and what I described as “background noise.”
What I’m specifically talking about is that buried in the reports there may be some evidence that something actually significant has happened in the development of unmanned drones. The rest is only interesting to maybe sociologists, sensor designers, and litigators. None of which are likely to kill me, most days. Although I once had a very heated argument with a sensor designer that I still regret (true story).
What I’m saying is that this is the wrong question to ask. And the wrong way to look things.
For any given event or claim. The question should be if there is anything to investigate there. If there is sufficient information to do so. If that information even points at something needing explanation.
For the military’s part this might include “Is this likely to be a threat?”.
Not even “what is it?” Or “what happened?”.
Cause there might not be enough data included to make any determination. And nothing may have happened.
Any discussion of drones or aircraft or Interdimensional Bigfoot should only follow if the information available points that direction.
I don’t see any indication that it does.
It seems very much like “drones” is coming out the assumptions that there is something in the air and evidence must exist. From the framing, and from the UFO crew that spurred this. More over there’s a very long history of that sort of grounded speculation being used as a fig leaf to make the search for Interdimensional Bigfoot sound less… Interdimensional Bigfoot.
I disagree. We’re talking about a particular release of government documents related to a topic with a history of use as a cold war active disinformation campaign. UFO reports have long been a common way to follow military secret aircraft development. You’re talking about what to think about when I see something. I’m talking about what I can learn when the US Government claims someone told them they saw something. Those are only vaguely related things.
edit: I should have put that in context. See the stealth program in the U.S. in the 70’s and 80’s and the active use of UFO reports to explain test flights.
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Ex. Threat or intimidation of first-hand witnesses; offering implausible prosaic hypothesis instead of furthering the investigation; lack of transparency; character assassination; highlighting questionable witnesses even when more credible are available.
I understood what you were talking about. I hope they review the evidence, not the human history.
We’re talking about a public release of a report from a public commission in response to speculation from a dodgey group of connected people.
Mostly filtered through those people. Who seem to have presented themselves falsely as officially involved and may have received improper pay outs of government contracts.
The videos and associated reports themselves at the center of the mess were never classified, access to them was never restricted, and they’ve been floating around for a long time. As have similar ones that haven’t garnered drone, misinformation or UFO speculation.
There really isn’t anything here than indicates the press, this report, this supposed investigation is anything but an outgrow of True Believers in influential positions and media excitement.
The real, confirmed misinformation campaigns we know the details of look nothing like this.
On the US side it was more officials not challenging speculation and press coverage because it was useful coverage. While the Soviets worked to spread and place such information in the western press to undermine confidence in government (familiar right)?
Closer is Project Bluebook. Which started as a legitimate attempt by the military to follow up on reports of aircraft in US airspace for threat assessment. And through press speculation and the UFO scene turned into a bit of a circus, in part as an attempt to tamp down misinformation.
I think from the military viewpoint, when they encounter some “sighting” of some type that they cannot immediately identify, they only bother to investigate further when/if they determine that a) something really was there, and b) it was something we might care about. eg, potential aircraft (whether something of ours, or something from one of our allies, or something from a potential enemy), or a possible equipment glitch that should be fixed, or something the pilots/monitoring persons should be trained to recognize. Then they go on rule out (and identify) if it may have been an aircraft, or a concerning equipment glitch. If its easy to identify the remaining things (atmospheric phenomenon, optical illusion, meteorite, weather balloon) they will identify it as such. But If they lack sufficient evidence (“pilot says he saw something, but we can’t confirm that”), once they’ve ruled out that there was something there that they should actually worry about, they just dump it in the “reported seeing something but we don’t know for sure what” bin, and stop investigating further. They more-or-less assume it was something along the lines of optical illusion or an atmospheric thing, or some other innocuous thing like that. Not worth their time to “prove” one way or the other. Or they simply were unable to collect enough evidence “pilot says he saw a dark/light spot for a few seconds, then it disappeared, but it didn’t show up on the instruments or radar”. So they got nothing to work with as far as “identifying” it. There may be cases where “radar showed something briefly”, but there are 100s of things it could have been, and not enough information to rule most of them out. Many of those might even remain in the “might have been an aircraft” or even “might have been an enemy aircraft” bins, but with so little evidence available it’s impossible to get a positive identification one way or the other. (and in many cases would remain classified, just in case it was one of our secret projects, or was an enemy thing they don’t want to talk about). Possibly it was even in some location that the military does not want to admit they were at the time (close to enemy territory, or one some mission and they don’t want to advertise their actions to the enemy), and all those would remain classified. (not because of the sighting, but because of who reported it, or where it was reported).
In many cases, I do not doubt that somewhere along the chain, some people said, “oh yeah, that was Project X on a test flight”, or “That was Russian Project Y doing an observation run over us”, and they made a point at not putting down an official explanation (leaving it officially “unknown”) because admitting they could identify it would expose either our project X, or that we were aware of the Russian’s project y.
When you’re driving down the road, and something flashes for a moment across the road in front of you, a large portion of the time you will have no clue what it was. Could have been a large leaf, or plastic bag blowing across the road. Could have been a bird or bat. Could have been some other animal running across. Could even have been a weird shadow from a plane or bird or weird cloud. You can even stop, drive back to where you saw it and investigate. Unless you actually find a plastic back stuck in the weeds on the side of the road where you saw it, or can see fresh animal tracks, you will be left forever not knowing what it was you saw. You saw a UFO.
It being “aliens” is the absolutely least likely possibility of all for any “unidentified” sighting. There are 1000’s of infinatly more likely things it could have been.
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When I was in college in the late 80’s I had a professor who liked to talk about the government projects he helped work on. One of those was, he said, in Florida, where he “created UFO sightings” (as he said with a laugh). He could not, he said, talk about what he actually worked on, other then to mention helicopters and lights were involved in some way, and that people could sometimes be so stupid.
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Threats or intimidation by whom? The Men in Black? What evidence do we have that such threats actually occurred? What lack of transparency? You mean the refusal to engage with cranks? What’s the difference for you between character assassination and credibility assessment? And who’s highlighting what questionable witnesses?
Your veering on tedious tangents there - some far better informed than me or you could debate the details of any specific cases.
Subject at hand are pentagon officers are saying we should investigate UFOs and offer a transparent report to our congressional representatives - and I agree.
Second spin on that is some of those officers believe the ETH is a valid possibility that could explain the sightings - and personnally I’m in favor that they explore that possibility, and hope for enough transparency that we have a better understanding of their conclusions whatever it may be.
Hope I’m not being unreasonable here.
Just so long as you’re prepared to be disappointed by what is finally released in June.
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F-Troop says they are balloons:
Source is as good as any, so I believe.
Mitch Hedberg would say that the alien ships are actually fuzzy, so the better the cameras the fuzzier the ships look.
This is why I mention Interdimensional Bigfoot. As that’s an actual claim that’s actually out there.
That these things are higher dimensional objects or creatures passing through our universe, such that we only perceive parts of them. And thus are actually blurry and that’s why you can’t photograph them or reliably observe or document them.
It seems to be an idea borrowed from Flatland, seems to have entered the field as an explanation for Rods.
Importantly the whole Skinwalker Ranch thing, and the people behind it (including former owner Robert Bigelow and current owner Brandon Fugal) are pretty involved with this end of the UFO scene. Along with a lot of psychic claims and vortex, ley line shit. They also seem to have been instrumental in kicking off the push this report is part of. Via Harry Reid, who seems to be closely connected to Bigelow.
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The sphere that visits Flatland does not appear blurry to the residents, just not stable in size.
I think the bigger problem is that Flatland is a social satire that also uses allegory to tech geometry, not a science text about how physics and different universes work.
None the less it seems to be where these movements picked up the concept that these phenomena behave in ways that violate physics because they’re from other/higher dimensions, just passing through, and we can’t perceive them fully.
It’s not neccisarily a common reference point in the active end of it, but I recall it coming up a lot with the really early extra-dimensional stuff.
I’m well aware, I was an RA on this project as a grad student.
It’s true, but the Flatland-inspired story Planiverse has things appear blurry when they’re out of the plane of the universe, like looking at a microscope slide. Which is something the author also did some work with. Unfortunately then he went on to be a 9/11 truther. 
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