Anyone here ever see something similar?

The reality I see is several hundred thousand people can believe virtually anything, and all agree with each other. Look at the anti-vax movement, which today compared itself with the civil rights movement. Also, flat-earth and creation science come to mind. I can’t say if any of these are right or wrong about their respective claims, but their tactics and communications styles are largely similar. The group’s metaphorical center of gravity becomes so dense it manufactures its own credibility from within.

The first one was just me alone backpacking. I doubted it until I realized this was not an uncommon thing to see based on other accounts I soon learned about.

All the people there with me ruled out all the logical possibilities too, most of them were skeptics (including myself) before we saw them. We still joke about the ordeal when we see each other.

Not necessarily - they can be turned off, non-functional, or drowned out by a brighter light like the landing lights from a distance.

> One of them disappeared in a flash...

Or someone flipped the landing lights switch.

I saw a C-17 at night while staying near Fort Drum that I was completely baffled by until it got close enough to properly make out. Had it stayed away, I'd have had one of those "inexplicable" encounters people talk about too.

Does 'formation flying' involve craft flying around in random non-linear fashion?

There was a bunch of us and we discussed it for awhile, aircraft is the first thing we jumped to...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_flying

That you're asking that question really makes it hard to credit the claim that you successfully ruled out "all the logical possibilities".

edit: You edited in some additional, so:

> Does 'formation flying' involve craft flying around in random non-linear fashion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight

A distantly seen dogfight at night would involve afterburners (bright lights! and they'd wink on/off during maneuvering, when they're turned on/off, or when the plane turns to face towards you instead of away from you) and rapid random non-linear movements as described.

How close is "next to"? Aircraft tend to have multiple lights, many symmetrically positioned. And when it's closer than you think and maneuvering, it may look as if the lights are moving non-linearly. Disappearance of a light can be explained too - the plane maneuvered in a way that its wing or fuselage blocked your view of the light.

I’d make a correction though. It was not as fast as a super fast bird but more akin to a lightning fast game of laser tag or air hokey. The weirdest thing is that for some reason it immediately impressed on me that this was technology.

Far from improving the situation positing other dimensions which we have no proof exist, and beings that we have no proof even can exist seems to make the theory much weaker not stronger.

If you don't know what they were then you can't rule out these other things.

They moved around in a non-linear fashion at will, they were intelligently operated. One of them disappeared in a flash...

One of the people with me was from Columbia University and he is as 'rational' as they come, even he was baffled...

PS: One of the strangest things I saw in the nights sky tuned out to be one of these: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5J52MLXXUy4 My perspective of how large and fast it was ended up being completely wrong.

It was late at night and we were in the back of a pickup getting some shuteye, heading east on the 8 outside of San Diego - if I had to make a guess we were somewhere between SD and El Centro; I can't narrow it down more.

So we're going down the freeway, and above the mountains to the south we see this bright "dot" - yellowish. It sits there, hovering above the mountains. Then it moves slowly to the west, staying above the mountain line - and instantly stops. Stays still for a bit, then at a steep angle (or what appeared to be) it instantly accelerated (like in the blink of the eye) "up" and was gone.

My best guess after the fact? Somebody aiming or messing around with an artificial star (sodium laser):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_guide_star

At least - that's what I tell myself, because I have no other rational idea as to what could move like that...

They moved around in a non-linear fashion at will, they were intelligently operated. One of them disappeared in a flash...

Strange thing was during encounter #2, they appeared in the spot in the sky 2 nights in a row.

It's easy to dismiss these encounters as nothing and it's also easy to just jump to wild conclusions. I asked here to see if others have seen something like this and I got my answer, I'm not the only one. It's good that both of our encounters were in California too, where some of these leaked videos are from as well.

Strange thing was during encounter #2, they appeared in the spot in the sky 2 nights in a row.

Turns out like crap. I doubt even the best camera phone could catch meaningful video of an object at 20k ft

Still gives me chills remembering watching it.

Nobody who wasn't off their face on drugs or mentally ill probably, no.

"they were not weather balloons, satellites, planes, planets, stars, or meteors."

Other than little aliens in magic flying machines what do you think they could have been?

Yeah, we are both in the same place. I want to be a rational as possible but I also want to believe we are not alone in the universe. This is as human of a feeling as I know, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_...

Is anyone visiting? That's more far-fetched given the distances and such.

Any mundane explanation like that is so much more likely than it being alien or super secret technology.

There are things that people notice, empirical observations if you want to call them like this, that have a certain social stigma associated with them. And I feel that, precisely _because_ of this stigma, people rush to justifications and conclusions that fit our normal model. But how can we find out what they actually are if we try to wiggle things within our model, how can we tell if our model is somehow incomplete?

I will say that I am unconvinced by the explanations people have for these events. They feel forced, contorted and somehow touched by the spirit of the environment that gave birth to the explanations.

I would give this more time but I need to go to bed, I've spent more time in this thread than I thought I would.

We were driving through very rural Illinois at about 10 pm. I was just staring out of the window up at the sky.

Suddenly, I noticed a rather bright orb (not perfectly circular or anything, I just don't know how else to describe it) hovering in the air. I would guess maybe a quarter mile laterally, and only a couple hundred of feet up. I didn't think much of it at first; I thought it was a plane to be honest. But then it faded out -- more like shimmered out. When it shimmered back in, there were now several of them, 3 or so. They moved in very quick, defined spurts -- thirty feet left then stop, ten feet up then stop. Then these faded out, and faded back in again, but now there were 6-8 of them. More weirdly precise movements, moving separately but staying close as a group. Then they all went absolutely tearing off, directly up, in unison. Lost sight of them almost immediately.

I can't emphasize enough how close they seemed. These weren't far-off objects I had to squint to see. For those who have driven through rural farmland in USA, think about your typical interstate with a planted field off to your left. A big planted field, but still only field sized, with a line of trees marking the property boundary on the far edge. That's what these were by, and they were well within the boundaries of the field.

I was in the car with my parents, both of whom saw them. (I was getting ready to enter college, so I was probably 18.) They seemed very freaked out and refused to discuss it; I was just captivated and curious. To this day they won't discuss it and sometimes even pretend they don't know what I"m talking about.

Again, I'm not at all saying they were ETs, I firmly believe the properties of the Universe make it an infinitesimally small chance that a crossing-of-the-paths will ever occur for two intelligences, if multiple inhabited planets even exist. But I just don't know what these were. They were very close, very bright, very concrete (if that makes sense at all), and their movements were unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Very unnatural-seeming motions.

I've never seen anything like it since, either. It's not like I've suddenly started seeing lights everywhere I look.

[0] https://www.mufon.com/track-ufos.html

My husband was driving on a remote part of i-10 in Mississippi very late at night, and were the only ones on the road for a long time and it was pitch black - no overhead lights at all, no cars in either direction. We were traveling in the right lane when we both saw a car's tail lights ahead of us, starting to merge into our lane (it appeared to be driving forward, but slower than we were). I'm kinda a side seat driver subconsciously, so I did a little lean away from it, and my husband put his blinker on and got left to avoid an accident. We figured it had been stopped on the side for some reason, and was just merging back in. But as we drove past it, we realized we couldn't see the rest of the car. There was no reflection of our head lights against the body, no headlights or any light at all in our rear view mirror. There was no sound as we passed it. It just wasn't there. We even slowed down in the left lane for a bit, thinking it could catch up, but we didn't see any other cars until we exited to Biloxi. And besides, there was no way anyone could drive on that road with no headlights on a night like that.

I made note of the mile marker from where it happened (near Vancleave fwiw) and looked it up on google maps later. There wasn't a good margin or side road or something that would have made sense for someone to stop at.

We've driven across the country 4 times now, but nothing like that had happened before or since. I don't know whether to call it a ghost car, a multi-verse artifact, a shared delusion or what. But whatever it was, it was hard to reckon with.

I wonder if anyone else has seen that in the area as well. I'm not sure how one would find out. Besides looking it up on Google Maps, did you check Street View too?

I was thinking it might have been the red reflectors some people around my neighborhood have to mark the edges of their driveway entrance. They're on a scrawny metal pole and about taillight-height, and could be mistaken for a car's rear end from a distance, I guess, if there were a pair of them, and they caught the headlights just right. If an area is rural, no streetlights, I could definitely see someone having those.

Again, thanks for sharing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning perhaps?

We know how to build two kinds of rockets: high thrust rockets with low specific impulse (Merlin, Raptor, SSME, F-1, etc.) and low thrust rockets with high specific impulse (ion thrusters). Excluding crazy stuff like thermonuclear pulse propulsion, we do not know how to build a rocket that is both high specific impulse and high thrust.

There is no physical reason to believe that such a thing is impossible though. We just don't (at least in the declassified world?) know how to build one.

A rocket that's both high thrust and high specific impulse would have a thrust whose particles are traveling at probably near relativistic speeds. Think of it as using a high efficiency high throughput particle accelerator as a rocket.

The performance of such a thing would be simply awesome, especially in terms of "delta-V budget" as per the rocket equation. In physics terms it's a plain old reaction engine but to someone ignorant of the tech it would look almost like anti-gravity or some other kind of magic.

Now here's where it gets kind of neat. What would such a thing look like visually if it were operating in the atmosphere?

Those crazy high energy exhaust particles would immediately collide with the atmosphere and emit light. The light would be a mix of the emission spectra of whatever the exhaust is made of and atmospheric gases. If the exhaust contained heavier stuff like metal ions the colors could be vivid and bright. Brightness and possibly color could change based on thrust and thrust vectoring.

It would look like a flying orb or a neon light show.

It would also be dangerous if you were anywhere close to it since it would kick off quite a lot of heat and probably X-rays or worse. If it were truly near-relativistic it would probably ignite small amounts of nuclear fusion in the atmosphere and emit neutrons and gamma rays too. I imagine that might give it a little more power too, like an afterburner from hell. I imagine there would be RF emissions as well.

The craft itself would be hot as hell too since the power requirements would be at least in the hundreds of megawatts. Even if the power source and thrusters had really high efficiency, the second law of thermodynamics would require the craft to dump at least tens of megawatts of heat overboard somehow. It would light up brightly in the infrared and be really obvious to FLIR.

Small craft using a thruster like that might look like flying orbs or multicolored light shows. A much larger more powerful one could probably attain velocities that would allow interstellar travel in "reasonable" time frames... for something with a really long life span or non-biological that is.

Again just speculation, but AFAIK does not violate any known physics and would match quite a lot of UFO reports.

Just like the SR71 had a cover story during its development phase. "The wreckage was recovered in two days, and persons at the scene were identified and requested to sign secrecy agreements. A cover story for the press described the accident as occurring to a F-105, and it is still listed in this way on official records." - https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

I think the press articles we see about this are part of a broader information war campaign trying to plant red herrings to confuse other nation state actors.

Your diction says much about your point of view.

Unfortunately I can’t find the video right now, but there was a video I watched where the guy broke down the GoFast video using the angles and speed displayed screen, and made a very convincing argument that it’s not actually moving fast, but appears to be going fast do to parallax. Instead it’s basically going wind speed — like a balloon.

Similarly, as someone linked to elsewhere in this discussion, the images showing up as glowing ovals don’t actually mean anything. Everything shows up as ovals in FLIR artifacts.

I’m thinking these are just the most mundane of mundane items, that are only bringing detected because of ironically increased sensor fidelity.

https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M

That makes it look like you're trying to mislead/lie/coverup.

It's a good strategy to advertise new capabilities to adversaries and/or let them know you know about theirs or just to make them think rare atmospheric/sensor phenomena are scary new tech.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27185/f-35s-most-sinis...

1 = https://the-drive.imgix.net/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazo...

As long as you don't exceed the max speed for the gear, no problem.

Taken to the next level, anything coated with something like Vantablack [1] “looks phtotoshopped” based on our previous visual experiences with everyday materials.

[1] https://www.bmwblog.com/2019/08/27/bmw-vbx6-vantablack-the-w...

If the Navy had told the pilots, "You just experienced an advanced technology test. Nothing to worry about" then they would have undoubtedly kept their mouths shut and not talked to the media.

How are you going to keep the other pilots from figuring out they're test subjects?

Especially if any word about the experiment got out. Swearing another pilot to secrecy versus letting them think you're nuts for the rest of your lives, I think they're gonna pick door #1.

I guess what I'm saying is (whether real or fake) this could be a controlled leak for strategic benefit.

Because (1) need to know, and (2) fueling conspiracy theories to keep an appropriate background level helps when you want to dismiss actual conspiracy as a conspiracy theory, which the government periodically needs to do, and people can play their role in that best when they believe what they are saying.

That doesn't mean the laser pointer wielder is moving that fast.

The pilots claiming to have seen the large underwater craft and the tic-tac saw it visually only. The radar on their planes could not pick it up. They watched it for 5 mins and engaged it ( flew at it aggressively, they did not have active weapons). That is where they saw it acting erratically and stopping and starting as if you threw a ping pong ball inside an invisible box before “noticing” them, and mirroring their movements as fravor flew down in a large circle, before cutting across the circle at the tic-tac. It then flew past them as “incredible” speed.

That would be quite the laser pointer to make that scene.

I mean, what's more likely? A magic propulsion system ignoring known physics, or some component in the complex sensory system of the plane falling into oscillation?

Assuming those reports are credible, which I see no immediate reason to doubt, the most plausible explanation must include technology that is far more advanced than anything we have or can imagine having today or in the next few decades.

My current best theory is that pilots were seeing a reflection on the surface of water and got confused because FLIR had a possibly unrelated and buggy interaction between an internal reflection in optics and tracking software.

(As for the radar thing, I hear it being said that there was a radar that saw someting, but no concrete information is being presented.)

Now take it from the other way around. Say it's aliens, or supernatural beings. Then why on Earth would they behave in an exact way that makes the FLIR footage indistinguishable from a camera auto-tracking a reflection on its own optics? Why exactly this pattern?

Also, there are far more plausible scenarios than aliens or the supernatural that involve extremely advanced technology.

The evidence in this case is very weak. Someone saw something.

"must include technology that is far more advanced than anything we have"

Unless we get actual pieces of that "advanced technology", the most probable explanation is that the people got confused. The same way we all get confused about million other things; like miracles witnessed by thousands of people or cops chasing UFO that turned out to be Venus.

I will repeat - Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

There's another possibility, too; he's human, and humans frequently make mistakes. Eyewitness reports are incredibly unreliable.

And, again, the military lying to uncleared civilians is hardly without precedent.

I'm not saying that happened, just that it is a possibility. Personally I think it's aliens.

US is so not used to that!

now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008930

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008988

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997012

older:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828448

>[the Navy] designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena.

That is to say, the videos are "real" in that the source is genuine (captured by the U.S. Navy and not a doctored hoax), but the Navy is not making any other statement on what appears in the video.

Also, several politicians have made curious statements about 'releasing information to the public'. If there was just nothing there, I don't think they'd be talking about it.

Looking forward to the day (I think) when we all know what's out there.

Intelligent life that is too far away to ever encounter us.

Either it is completely fake, made up by the navy to hide something else that they wanted to cover up, and could also serve as a confusion tactic for other countries aerospace programs, some sort of fake internal thing to tease out a mole or another situation like that.

The other possibility is that it really is some sort of new propulsion device being tested by a top-secret government agency or some other private party, and somehow they made the fatal mistake of being sighted by the jet. I simply dont believe the us military would release this video if it was actually a new secret technology they were trying to hide.

If the thing behaves as though it has no inertia and does all these amazing movements, what else does? A reflection or otherwise illusory object can do all that easily, in fact thats the default behavior.

I consider the possibility of reflection high by default, especially with the properties this thing has (glow around it, seems to immediately react to camera movements, movements that appear to violate inertia)

But I'm definitely no authority on this, just sharing my perspective based on previous similar things I've read about.

My best money would be on something experimental of ours being tested against our own aircraft, like some kind of decoy or jamming device.

Also, that fits with the jammer hypothesis, too. People are experimenting with feeding malicious input to NN's. They've messed them up with tiniest changes to image. One could probably do something like that with these techs, too.

For some reason people in the military and government are trolling the public, perhaps as part of a campaign to discredit news agencies.

https://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/uap_atflir

This is an old tactic. It makes it hard for enemies to gather good data. It also makes it hard to know who and what to trust. You have pilots saying ridiculous things so can you trust every pilot? Makes vetting MUCH MUCH harder. All the major powers do this. But it is kinda like a placebo effect, even knowing about it doesn't make it less effective.

So I don't think it is so much to discredit news agencies but to make it harder for enemies to vet eye witness stories on experimental technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

Consider that we now have reasonably-cheap, high-quality cameras and feature-detection ASICs that we can plop into missiles. Oh, and wide-band software-defined radios, too, to cheaply range-find our targets all over the spectrum. (Remember, SDR radios are expensive for consumers, but that's an artificial supply-limit, precisely because of their military applications.) Consider what sort of decoys would be required to trick all that fancy sensor tech. Now consider what such decoy emissions would look like to human eyes, or any other sensor. If you can trick a Sufficiently-Advanced Missile, you can trick anything.

(For fun, also consider the modern menagerie of cheaply-available parts that you could shove into such a decoy: a laser rangefinder, a short-throw projector, an optical stabilization array, some negative-index metamaterial "scales" that can be flipped on and off—like those glittery pillows!—some more SDRs, a MIMO signal-shaping antenna array. Oh, and an ultrasonic humidifier, because emissions won't diffract off of thin, non-turbulent air.)

Presume you have a bunch of these mesh-networked together (or all slaved to a stealthed aircraft so far above that it's out of range of your instrumentation unless you know exactly where to look), and that they're built with hard real-time links to one-another such that they can execute perfectly-timed hand-offs of the emissions-signature they're working together to project.

In short, picture a bunch of projectors you can't find, working to create a moving multi-spectral hologram in the sky. Picture one of the projector-drones gliding into place "underneath" the projection, just in time to give off a sonar return—and then wandering away again.

None of this is impossible. None of this is even particularly challenging if you spend $100MM/yr on it. And this is just what someone who doesn't know about any of the classified stuff can imagine.

Seriously though, the pilots reported visual sighting as well. Projecting a hologram is one thing, projecting one while flying at 800km/hr is another.

I haven't; what was in the movie?

> Projecting a hologram is one thing, projecting one while flying at 800km/hr is another.

Like I was saying: short-throw laser projectors (or rather, in this case, long-throw projectors, but same diff, tech-wise.) Have a missile vanguard blow through the airspace first, making the air turbulent and perhaps "doping" it with some dyes so that the vapor-trail blends back into the sky. Then fly out your penaids, have them assume static positions around the diffractive "canvas", and then start throwing emissions at the "canvas." Reorient some lasers a tiny little bit, and now it looks like you've got something glowy accelerating at Mach 6 along your "canvas." But it's not a violation of the laws of physics—it's just light (and RF, and IR, and...)

But my real argument wasn't meant to be a constructive proof about what properties penaids should be able to have. My point was that, given the tech that's cheap enough for any nation on earth to put into each and every counter-missile, if certain nations (ahem) want to retain air supremacy, they're going to want to develop something that can fool that sensor tech. The result would be the EW equivalent of a "deepfake": a decoy that fools cameras better than our eyes, feeding AI more discriminant than our brains. What hope do we humans have of telling such a decoy apart from a real UFO?

Pretty much exactly what you're describing haha (with obviously a fair bit of artistic license).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4onAJ-3FAM

Not to mention the constant satellite and aerial radar coverage and other networked stuff they have for these big deployments.

This isn't in the middle of the Indian ocean like the missing Malaysian plane.

At the end of the day we're left with another single location, single perspective anecdote which there were already countless before.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/navy-pilots-ufo-reports-confirm...

> Lieutenant Graves still cannot explain what he saw. In the summer of 2014, he and Lt. Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a squadron, the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

> The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects, but ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks.

Note: new radar can suggest more than just better capabilities but possibly less experience and more complexity (harder bugs).

My question: where are the really smart people at NASA or w/e with deep understanding of spaceflight and theoretical physics? So I far I only see excited posts from military bloggers and a some guys who sell books about aliens.

This is the only way government is influenced. I know, I've worked there.

That is why things like all those Lochness Monster hotels go broke all the time. People start disbelieving that stuff quickly.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28640/could-some-of-th...

You have a top gun pilot and his WSO on record saying they saw it visually along with a huge underwater craft. It moved in ways that nothing using conventional propulsion can. Hovering for example is extremely difficult, made all the harder with no wings, blades or visible exhaust.

Long form interview: Part1: https://youtu.be/3L-XG1F_S7I Part2: https://youtu.be/f7XJD_54aNk

There are about 20+ interviews with him on cnn, Fox News, Boston herald, ny times, etc and he will be on joe Rogan soon.

I get the objections to the FLIR video or radar pings, but if you think it’s a new jet or misdirection you have to say he and his WSO and many others are liars or confused by our own tech. Our own tech means we have something well beyond standard jet engines and fighter jet tech.

There are plenty more videos with even more details like the tic tacs (there were many of them on radar) moving 20000+ mph, dropping in from 80000ft to close to the deck. The details of the carrier fleet redirecting the jets to the position of the tic-tac is very interesting as it wasn’t at their training position...until it showed up their later. The FLIR video is from another pilot who went after it, after captain fravor landed.

Well, shut my mouth.

If there is even slight doubt about credibility of a claim of extraterrestrial technology, then there is no extraordinary evidence.

Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Don't waste people time.

4 minutes in they are talking about how strange it is that the pilot was asked what ordinance he had on board. THEN he is given chase orders...

I'm going with Occam's Razor here.

So what I’ve done is accepted the fact that usually what people mean is an UNIDENTIFIABLE Flying Object, and it makes me feel a little bit better...

"What the [expletive] is that thing?" "Oh my gosh, dude"

>"Based on pilot accounts, encounters with these UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) often involved complex flight patterns and advanced maneuvering, which demand extreme advances in quantum mechanics, nuclear science, electromagnetics, and thermodynamics.” - Walker

> Republican representative Mark Walker of North Carolina

This is laughably stupid. QM and nuclear science? Can we call out politicians for just throwing in words that they don't know what they mean? Seriously, I think we should call these people out. I'll even laugh at the extreme part.

My bet is that these things are just some test drones. They might have advanced materials and so you can't trust a lot of the data coming into the FLIR sensor. I don't think it would surprise anyone here that the people making the "most advanced sensors on the market" 1) have more advanced sensors being researched/tested 2) don't perform adversarial attacks on those sensors during testing. As for the visuals, well drones can pull Gs that pilots can't. So if we can't trust the sensor readings (speed and size) and we just see something zipping around, it shouldn't surprise anyone that a drone _could_ be the culprit.

As to the article, this is clearly misdirection. But that's part of warfare. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE?t=1281

I see nothing stupid with using quantum mechanics and nuclear science in this context.

> Can we call out politicians for just throwing in words that they don't know what they mean?

I'm sure they know what those words mean on a surface level. They don't really need to understand them beyond that point, it's not their job.

Edit: unless you mean it's beyond the scope of his degree, then I can agree with that. Although even though I don't have a math degree either, but after watching a hundred or so Numberphile videos on YT, many on the cosmos and nuclear physics, I can see myself making similar statements in the future ;)

I read this as

> I watched a bunch of high level YouTube videos and now I'm an expert on quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

It is okay, you don't have to be an expert in everything. It is okay to not know. It is okay to be wrong. But please don't act like you know what you're an expert when you haven't done the perquisites. We're not in high school anymore, you can't write the book report without reading the book.

I'll also add that I encourage calling out the left as well. I'd name some specific examples but that would completely derail the thread. But if you ask I'll mention some.

why don't you?

Nothing in any of the examples show anything remotely related to either fields.

It's a brash leap to judgement to presume that something unexplained is using phenomena that we're well aware of -- and it's a brash leap to presume that given a video of flight dynamics that one can understand the technological progression of history required to do so.

Example : If it was an alien, how do we know they didn't purchase the technology? How do we know that another race didn't gift them something beyond their comprehension?

If we're making big leaping judgements given small amounts of evidence, why not write an entire history and lore for these aliens that must exist, given that we saw an unidentified aircraft?

It's ridiculous to jump to such lengths when a much more reliable and proven answer to the question of unidentified aircraft is : 'Military experiment'.

Why? Where would we even need QM or Nuke tech for these?

Metamaterials for tricking FLIR? That's the closest I can think and I'd call anyone out for calling that QM. We don't call carbon nanotubes quantum tech, because they're in the nano realm, which is FAR from the quantum regime. I'm not sure where else we could come even close. Quantum is sub atomic, we're really just at the birth of atomic tech right now too (It'd be fine to call some metameterials atomic tech). When we're talking quantum we're talking about things that require quantum effects; like teleportation. There's nothing here that is really demonstrating quantum effects.

Nukes? Where do we need them for this? Hot material is very heavy, and well... hot (radioactive). This isn't really good for stealth tech, since you have to provide a lot of extra shielding just so you don't fry the electronics, let alone hide the emissions in the radio, IR, X-ray, and gamma spectra. Then there's the fact that there's no current tech indicating that such a power source could be useful in this space. Unless you're thinking something other than a power source... which I can't think of any. For power sources there are a lot of other possible explanations that don't require generations of work (specifically in size, weight, and efficiency) to have been done in complete secret (because that's how advanced we're talking about if we want to use something nuclear here. Secret tech isn't ever even a generation ahead, though it is ahead). And I mean _generations_ of work. We're not even close.

If you're seeing something I'm not, I'm legitimately curious.

> I'm sure they know what those words mean on a surface level. They don't really need to understand them beyond that point, it's not their job.

I'd argue that the use cases more demonstrate that they know _the words_ but don't even know surface level meaning. I'm arguing that we should call people out for using buzzwords needlessly.

Note: I am fine with the uses of electromagnetics (I'll let that pass) and thermal-dynamics, even though I don't know why we would need to have extreme advancements in thermally efficient materials here. Not unless these things were hypersonic. These connections at least I can pass off as surface level knowledge, but QM and Nuke are just laughable.

why not?

I doubt any explanation is as simple as "aliens from somewhere else" though, and I definitely don't think the "government" knows any more about what exactly it is that we do, but I also doubt it tries to keep it a secret deliberately.

I don't think he has any idea what they mean beyond "sciencey stuff."

Looking at an impossibly advanced aircraft and assuming it's based on "extreme advances in quantum mechanics and nuclear science" makes as much sense as saying it's based on "extreme advances in organic chemistry and software design." No one with any grasp of engineering would jump straight to these fields that are not, so far as we know, associated in any way with aerospace propulsion. He's just grabbing the coolest science buzzwords he knows to make himself sound serious and professional.

What if the gentleman had said, "Based on pilot accounts, encounters with these UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) often involved complex flight patterns and advanced maneuvering, which demand extreme advances in CPU architecture including instructions we've never seen before, database consistency guarantees, and whitespace significance" would you see the problem with such claims?

If he had simply said, "These appear to use technology in advance of anything known to mankind" that would have been enough. To posit specific mechanisms of physics of a phenomenon we know next to nothing about is silly.

but more generally, what he's saying is that the sensors are not infallible, especially when dealing with advanced materials.