Are these sightings the same as the foo fighters of WWII? If they were aliens they probably would have crushed us or said “Hi” by now.
Doppler radar can “see” the conditions for rainbows, i.e. water droplets in the air, at the right place & time relative to the potential observer.
The radar sets in military planes are more designed to “see” stuff to shoot at. Or run away from, depending.
[…]
Just as you can chase tornados in the U.S. Midwest, you can chase rainbows in Hawaii. […] With a combination of weather satellite and radar loops, a rainbow hunter can discern likely places for rainbow sightings.
[…]
One can imagine that a smartphone app with access to Doppler radar data and geostationary high-resolution satellite data could be designed to alert users when nearby conditions become conducive for rainbow sightings, with directions to the nearest location for optimal viewing. Users could then share photos with other users and machine learning could be applied to improve user experience. Such an app, called RainbowChase, is now in the design phase.
[…]
Also, this is a very thorough paper on rainbows and the physics’n’math behind them, from Newton and Descartes to today, with lots of links to other papers. I’d say it’s everything you’ll ever need to know about rainbows (unless you want to enter the field yourself.)
6 Likes
isnt it the latter? cause im pretty sure i learned from watching the xfiles that the government stages fake ufo events to cover for the real ones.
( i mean, we don’t have any evidence that they don’t… )
[eta]
but can we taste the rainbow? that’s what i want to know. ( with apologies to skittles )
2 Likes
I thought NORAD were fully aware of Santa’s whereabouts at all times?
5 Likes
I think most of the time, the military experts look at these blurry video processing artifacts, and can immediately determine “it looks like it’s some sort of video processing artifact, like we’ve see 100s of times before, it would be a waste of our time to look further into it”. So, they never bother to try to conclusively prove it as being something specific, and leave them marked as “unidentified”. As in “not worth our time to investigate”.
Rest assured, when they have something which is not a blurry video processing artifact, they damn well investigate and find out exactly what it is (or isn’t). And those reports remain classified, because they don’t want to advertise “it’s our secret Project X” or “we know it’s the Russian’s Project Y that we don’t want to admit we know about” or “we were flying a mission in this location we don’t want anyone to know we were flying missions in”.
3 Likes
LOL, but I was saying that these can’t be solely tricks of visible light. I’ve never heard of any artifact of visible light appearing on radar.
They are!
1 Like
Oh I wouldn’t know…I’d rather make sure that other Rudolph is properly tracked.
The X-Files went back and forth about whether the aliens were real or fake
so many contradictions I’m sure they were doing it on purpose, telling a kind of paranoid anti-story
2 Likes
The point of bringing up rainbows and searchlights on clouds is that I don’t see why people would assume characteristics that don’t match the sensory equipment we have. Nothing about the assumption that these things are cylindrical or pyramid-shaped solid aircraft makes any of this easier to explain.
Perhaps ordinary drones with really great camouflage. Easily done I think.
I think those probably violate the bit where the objects apparently accelerate from zero to 3,600 miles per hour nearly instantaneously.
2 Likes
So how many decades will the Intelligence Agencies stall their conclusion to “Unidentified”?
Can’t they establish some classification criterias to eliminate some possibilities and advance the discussion?
I don’t think they care. They were forced by law to create this report, but I’m guessing most of them see it as being an entirely off-mission waste of time and resources to attempt to mollify civilians with explanations. I can see their point.
4 Likes
Lack of motivation… for decades long incompetence on a national security issue? Doesn’t make sense to me
I’m not buying any hype on this disclosure.
In 20 years there are only 120 incidents, that seems like a good accuracy rate.
“no evidence but can’t be disproven” is pretty standard and technically correct language. It’s very, very hard to disprove a negative. And if the data set they’re using just doesn’t have the information needed to give a definitive answer or examine it properly “i don’t know” is an appropriate answer.
You see that framing in science and other academic fields all the time. It’s not really an Intelligence Agency or Military thing.
The problem is as far as public messaging goes people read too much into it.
5 Likes
It’s not really incompetence. There will always be marginal observations at the limits of instrumental or biological perception, no matter how good the observation systems are. I think the ones that have been saddled with having to produce this report are aware that it’s a nothingburger, a waste of their time, and outside the scope of their mission, especially for an organization that values secrecy.
4 Likes
People read into it because they fail to share enough details to explain their lack of conclusion, and they fail to include an unaffiliated party to contribute in the identification effort.
I’m guessing they just don’t want to publicly disclose known vulnerabilities in their equipment."
“Oh yeah, if they’ve been in the air running continuously for X hours and haven’t rebooted, and they end up running perpendicular to the sun, this effect shows up. It’s not a big deal right now, but we’d prefer our enemies don’t know about this blindspot.”
3 Likes
