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FastFourierTransform
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03 Jun 2019 17:36

This has been all over the news around here

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/p ... ilots.html


Experts were careful to note that there are many non-alien explanations for these unexplained sightings. Still, this isn’t the first major report on UFOs in recent years.
There is a very interesting thread in Metabunk that, in my opinion, has done an amazing job at debunking these kind of observations. Two of the pentagon videos are discussed (the Nimitz incident video and the Gimbal video).

All these incidents can be explained. It looks like some are missidentified fighter jets and others are just balloons. The errors come from the inhability of the pilots to interpret 1) the shape of a an infrarred source when it saturates the sensor, 2) the difraction patterns that change in response to the rotation of the camera system and 3) the apparent motion generated by simple parallax when using a large magnification optical system.

I don't really think these are different. One should expect more pilots in the future missinterpreting the output of sensors by projecting their preconceived notions of how things "should look" on optical devices that will be more and more complex as time passes. Bare that in mind, they are watching a screen onboard with the same images you see in the video, they didn't see anything with their own eyes, they watched the output of a telescopic infrared camera, and they were unable to interpret correctly what they were seeing (yeah, even if they are trained pilots they don't really need to be aware of any technical details and optical engineering of an instrument). Their surprise in the videos is no more revealing that your surprise when you see the video for the first time.
 
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03 Jun 2019 17:42

The weird thing is they repeatedly talk about hypersonic flight and the objects coming to a sudden stop and turning on a dime.,  It was shocking to hear and see the Secy of Defense saying that the only two possibilities being extra terrestrial or another nation having developed more advanced technology.  Is the latter a possibility?  Or how about a third possibility- since we have found creatures with alternate biologies at the deepest depths of the oceans, so how about some kind of creature that exists high up in the atmosphere?

They mention these possibilities in that thread you linked me to- I'm on page 7 now :)

https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-encounter-with-unknown-object.t9333/page-7

I like this quote too lol


Science journalist Dennis Overbye argued a "stubborn residue" of unexplained aerial phenomenon remain after review. Overbye highlighted that some of these accounts are obtained from respected observers such as military pilots. However, he cautioned, "as modern psychology and neuroscience have established, the senses are an unreliable portal to reality, whatever that is."[23]

"The senses are an unreliable portal to reality, whatever that is."
[sup]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident#cite_note-overbye-23[/sup]
 
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03 Jun 2019 18:43

The weird thing is they repeatedly talk about hypersonic flight and the objects coming to a sudden stop and turning on a dime.,  It was shocking to hear and see the Secy of Defense saying that the only two possibilities being extra terrestrial or another nation having developed more advanced technology.  Is the latter a possibility?  Or how about a third possibility- since we have found creatures with alternate biologies at the deepest depths of the oceans, so how about some kind of creature that exists high up in the atmosphere?
I mean, sure, in the land of hypothesis anything is possible. But the thing is that the motion is just part of the speculation; to establish the actual motion of an object in 3D space you need at least 3 variables measured over time. The pilots only had 2 measurements (the two axis of the screen to locate the object or maybe the 2D coordinates of the point on the surface of Earth just behind the object as seen from the pilot perspective). You need to know another variable (it could be the distance to the object or it could be the altitude of the object over the surface of Earth) to correctly study the trajectory.
In the Gimbal video, for example, the object appears to move extremely fast. This is also commented by some "authorities". The object also seems to slow down quickly, so quickly as to appear to have superhuman resistance to accelleration. But this is just appearence. The object could be moving slowly but beeing much closer than expected. The object could be even very far away and still move slowly if our pilot is moving fast (this is not because the pilot might have move faster than human experience allows but rather the fact that even at moderate speed when there is enought parallax things look as if they where moving strangely). In fact, in the Metabunk discussion (that I recommend as a read again) they show that the object could have even been completely still in the air and even then the Gimbal video would make it look like it was moving at non-conventional speeds.

I know that this is one of the impressive cases, where there is some reliable data, and there are even some "authorities" that express the UFO view-point. But it has been shown that 1) the data is insufficient to actually establish the "weirdness of the movements", 2) that there are other more conventional phenomena that show exactly the same behaviour (so, believing is something else is just a leap of faith), 3) that authority does not matter in science (even if the head of the Pentagon stated that he saw an UFO, an investigation would be needed and the evidence should be as public as that statement is) and 4) even if we believe in authority, these people are not scientists, nor they are supporting their view on the expertise of any research team, their authority is not even in the field they are making statements on.

Finally, suppose we are really in front of undisputable evidence of non-conventional aircraft movements. I totally agree with you that assuming it must be aliens is just unimaginative and shows the lack of creativity of some persons when it comes to formulate hypothesis. They could be visitors from another time, not from another place. It could be a secret military operation of another country or one performed by the same country but a different agency or even performed by the same agency but so secret that only a small team in that agency has been allowed to that level of secrecy. Maybe is a new creature we haven't heard of that lives in the atmosphere as you said. It might be a vehicle created by a submarine civilization that is always hiding from us, or some intelligent species living in the depths of Earth's crust that have only their gate to the surface in a remote part of the world and then they fly around. Why aliens? Is it really aliens more probable than the time-travelers? "Oh they are in the sky so they must come from space! a region of reality that I associate with the sky because I'm a superficial monkey (I live in the surface)". The fact that we all think in aliens when confronted to these stories probes the lanscape of our pop culture and folklore, stimulated by cinema, TV, radio and press. UFOlogist tend to think of themselves as "out-of-the-box" thinkers and see scientists as cold, uncreative and arrogant, when the thing is that they are the strongest adherents of mainstream views and socially constructed views as to how an alien must behave and what an UFO really has to be, while scientists are always searching ways to blow our minds, to destroy preconceived notions about everything around us and would be the first ones to encourage the analysis of non-conventional data results.

These UFOs are just planes sadly. But even if they were not, humanity has shown again how less we are willing to actually know and explore different possibilites. If we were visited by something trully strange these people would actually do the worst analysis of the situation, not the skeptic-minded scientists at all.
 
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03 Jun 2019 18:53

Yes, I quite agree with you and like Carl Sagan once said, "Exceptional theories require exceptional evidence."  I think we will need evidence akin to when ball lightning was finally acknowledged (we still cant quite replicate it in the lab).  But ball lightning has shown us that there are some parts of nature that still evade scientific understanding.

The distance/time factor you mentioned is fascinating and that occurred to me too.  Remember when the extreme red shift of quasars was first discovered we were wondering if they were within our galaxy and there was some other explanation to explain the redshift.  They became much more explainable when we realized they weren't point sources but the nuclei of active galaxies that were far away!

The other creature hypothesis occurred to me because I remember reading the Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle and remembered the foo fighters seen during WW2.  Just in that moment, i also saw two dragon flies outside my window moving similarly to what was happening in the video- weird coincidence lol.
 
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13 Jun 2019 06:32

Norway's national broadcaster ran a story yesterday on a possible (presented as likely) meteorite impact in Norway discovered on 11 June.  The image, however, doesn't make it very credible.  It seems to be a common misconception that meteorites hit the ground as flaming objects exploding in a big fireball.  However, unless they weight many tonnes, they lose all cosmic speed and fall to the ground as if dropped from an aircraft.  They are cold as ice when they hit the atmosphere, and whilst the deceleration through the atmosphere causes enough heat to melt away much of the original rock, the interior remains cold, and during the free-fall lasting perhaps a couple of minutes, the crust cools down quite a bit making it likely just warm to touch just after impact.

In this case I lean towards snow simply getting soaked in muddy water.  Or, if actually an impact into muddy terrain, a lightning strike is many thousand times more likely statistically than a meteorite, though for any impact I would expect lumps of dirt and mud being scattered around, which doesn't seem to be the case here.
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23 Jun 2019 07:09

Yes, I quite agree with you and like Carl Sagan once said, "Exceptional theories require exceptional evidence."
Today this video was uploaded to youtube

[youtube]PLyEO0jNt6M[/youtube]
In my opinion this is a very consistent way of analyzing the problem. The most clear "UFO evidence" is probably just a balloon. But I guess it is too late and entire documentaries have been made by now, lots of money that can't be thrown away. These documentaries will reach many times more people than this short and reasonable analisis ever will, and thus the idea will persist, and the idea no scientist want to talk about it will prevail.
 
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24 Jun 2019 15:25

Yes, many UFO videos with apparently oddly moving objects are clearly due to parallax effects, shaking camera or misinterpretation of distance and size.  Granted, it may not always be immediately obvious, but when the possibility is pointed out, there can be no doubt.
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24 Jun 2019 18:10

I've seen many odd moving objects when I stay out all night to star gaze, I took them to be satellites or slow moving meteors.
 
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25 Jun 2019 01:36

FFT is absolutely right, misidentification can be largely attributed to a issue of perspective. Often the angle of view for an object relative to the observer can play all manner of tricks, giving the observer a deceptive perception of speed, momentum or arc of movement. I have had this effect trick me many times when observing a far-off object or landmark.

Furthermore, it is indeed sad that the UFOlogy community is so mired in a stringent sense of alienation from the scientific establishment and have such feelings of grandiose alacrity towards their own theories. A little dose of self-awareness would really help them.
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25 Jun 2019 14:08

You probably see this with a lot of mass sightings by thousands of people, including trained observers like police officers too!
I think the alienation goes both ways though, as you've probably noticed, some scientists have some massive egos.  I've even read that it ticks off other scientists who develop new theories because they get treated poorly by the older generation who thinks they 'know it all.'

The wisest humans are those who realize they know nothing.
 
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25 Jun 2019 14:27

The wisest humans are those who realize they know nothing.
But the ones who are at least fairly confident in their sense of knowledge have an advantage, they have the strength to get somewhere in the advancement of science, and for me? I am not one of those people, and therefore do not have this advantage... :|
 
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25 Jun 2019 14:33

I think it is a matter of realizing that the more one learns, the more one realizes they have yet to learn.  I've found that to be true in scientific advancements that, although we know more than we used to know, that knowledge opens up a whole new plane and direction of learning where it makes us realize we have much much more yet to learn.

That philosophy will keep you humble and open to more knowledge and learning so no matter how much you learn, you never become a 'know it all' because all your knowledge makes you realize how insignificant we all are compared to the vastness of existence and the many different paths our knowledge and learning can take, which may never come to an end.
 
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25 Jun 2019 14:37

I think it is a matter of realizing that the more one learns the more one realizes they have yet to learn.  I've found that to be true in scientific advancements that, although we know more than we used to know, that knowledge opens up a whole new plane and direction of learning where it makes us realize we have much much more yet to learn.
Yes I totally agree, I'm just saying that if you are to ever reach a conclusion you have to be content with what you can learn during your entire lifetime, otherwise you will keep thinking you missed something important and never make your contribution, but it is even more important that you open yourself up to all the knowledge that you can and try to bring confidence for said contibution, this I have learned this from experience. But, we're getting off topic, so if you want to continue this discussion, please move it to a different thread. 
 
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15 Jul 2019 01:12

Apparently the Milky Way's disk is much bigger than we thought it was, and its mass is comparable to Andromeda's if we include galactic halos. Possibly something to alter in SE? Or maybe I'm getting taken in by clickbait.
 
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28 Jul 2019 06:45

I remember posting that news bit about the extended disk size last year here, either on the forum or on the Discord (I cant remember exactly which I posted it on atm)
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