The Pentagon acknowledged a program has been running at least 2007 to 2012 investigating military and other reports of events in an attempt to determine the source of the technology or disturbance as it could be a threat to the country from foreign power or nature. This space is to discuss and debate information released or new reports to poke holes in theories and stay as skeptical as possible as well as being OK to think we don't have all the answers. Please keep this to as much fact as possible in the report and state when you start to speculate. Let's all be respectful of everyone and talk about what we don't know!
I am relocating this discussion from the political new story thread to here. I'll link to the main reporting around the Pentagon release of video and such. I will also put what facts I can find below and update if anything else major comes out.
NPR interview with ex-Pentagon director of the program Luis Elizondo
Vox story when the news broke of the program "one of the program’s aims was to determine whether a foreign power, such as the Chinese or the Russians, were behind the unexplained incidents."
Digg gathering of several stories and sources
USS Princeton was tracking radar anomalies off the southern Pacific coast for 2 weeks
Said anomalies appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.
F-18 jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz were sent to investigate the anomalies
After a brief observation encounter with the Navy pilots the anomalies, said tictac shaped ship accerated like nothing the F-18 pilot had seen before and disappeared.
Leaving to meet at the cap(meeting) point 60 miles away the USS Princeton notified the pilots that the object was already there when they were 40 miles out. When the Pilots arrived it was no where to be found.
Below are excerpts from the NYTimes piece reporting the Nimitz event as collected by the pro UFO To The Stars Academy(very biased towards UFO but compelling none the less) spoiler tagged to save room. As others have pointed out what makes this unique is everything below was offically released government reports of something no one on earth has technology for or is an incredibly unlikely weather event that skilled Navy pilots were unfamiliar with.
The 'Nimitz Incident' Involved A Mysterious Craft Hovering Over Churning Water Then Lurching Away
One of the videos that has been released was taken off the coast of San Diego in 2004 by two Navy fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz. In a detailed report of the Nimitz incident, the New York Times recounts how the pilots, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight, received unexpected instructions from an operations officer on the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser, regarding some mysterious objects.For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.
Fravor and Slaight approached the reported location of the mysterious craft, and they didn't see anything until they looked down toward the ocean.
It was calm that day, but the waves were breaking over something that was just below the surface. Whatever it was, it was big enough to cause the sea to churn.
Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Commander Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him...
Commander Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object.
But then the object peeled away. "It accelerated like nothing I've ever seen," he said in the interview. He was, he said, "pretty weirded out."
[The New York Times]At the instruction of the officer aboard the USS Princeton, Fravor and Slaight headed toward a meeting place (called a "cap point") 60 miles away. Then the Princeton officer radioed again to say that the mysterious object had somehow traveled to the meeting place at an unbelievable speed.
"Sir, you won't believe it," the radio operator said, "but that thing is at your cap point."
"We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point," Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.
By the time the two fighter jets arrived at the rendezvous point, the object had disappeared...
Fravor told the Times that shortly after the incident, he told a colleague that the object "had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s."
Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who is now involved with To the Stars, recently described the features that made the craft in the Nimitz incident so unusual.
At a recent press conference for To The Stars in Las Vegas, Mellon described one of the sightings reported by U.S. Navy pilots: "It is white, oblong, some 40 feet long and perhaps 12 feet thick … The pilots are astonished to see the object suddenly reorient itself toward the approaching F/A-18. In a series of discreet tumbling maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics, the object takes a position directly behind the approaching F/A-18. The pilots capture gun camera footage and infrared imagery of the object. They are outmatched by a technology they've never seen."
Most money in this $22 million program went to campaign contributor and UFO investigator Bob Bigelow in Nevada to store materials and research. I don't know enough about him yet to comment.
Harry Reid with a few others kicked off this black money program in 2007 with an earmarked bill and started the program in secret with only a few others in the defense department knowing. They sought to speak to those who have experienced things they couldn't ID. Harry Reid said John Glenn had pushed him to have the Government take a more serious look at unexplained events.
Feel free to correct any of the narrative above and I'll edit this.
I'm perfectly fine with the Pentagon spending a relatively small amount to investigate weird things we don't know the answer to. (It certainly beats shoveling even more money at the F-35.)
I do think that there is a high risk of the money going towards grifters or true-believers who already think they have an answer. You really need a skeptic in charge of this kind of thing. (Heck, even the Vatican appoints people to debunk miracles.)
Do I think they've demonstrated proof of aliens? No. Proof of weird stuff? Sure.
the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence's list of hotlines
Completely off topic, but that's not really a credit to them, the people they pick to do it are objectively terrible at it (on purpose).
SillyRabbit: I lol'd. Read it again and lol'd again.
Hobear: I laughed, now I feel guilty for laughing....
I also tend to agree that 'aliens' is the least likely explanation for this, however i get really uncomfortable idea at the assertion I've seen from a lot of people surrounding this sort of thing that basically amounts to "This looks weird, someone has suggested it might be aliens, therefore its a waste of time and we shouldn't investigate it at all and should in fact assume that every aspect of it is a fabrication"
SillyRabbit: I lol'd. Read it again and lol'd again.
Hobear: I laughed, now I feel guilty for laughing....
This seems like a good program in the past, when such phenomena were more likely to be the result of other State actors, and a program like this may be the best way to determine which sightings may have been an actual craft like that. For example, I would imagine that a USSR version of this program may have been in the best position to discover the U-2 reconnaissance flights.
I don't know how such a program could scale in the near future, however, when we have the potential of private drones making such sightings so much more frequent. That's one of like 5000 super hard problems with wide scale commercial drones though, which is why the FAA still hasn't released regulations for them
Another issue with this program, possibly a factor in it getting canceled, who knows, is that it could make testing of any really, really secret equipment much more difficult, when you have an organization specifically trying to correlate all that sort of info. That's not an issue with normal secret stuff, like the F35, just saying "hey, that's the F35, you can't release anything in that file" is fine. The issue is with the stuff that is more secret than that, like the F117 early on in its program, where even saying "oh, yeah, that's actually our super duper secret new thing" isn't the sort of thing you want to tell even to other people in the Air Force, even other people with clearance.
That's exactly how you get the situation the first article describes:
"Hey, is this one of our secret programs?"
"No."
"So I can release it publicly?"
"... No."
And that doesn't even have to mean that it was yours! If you know that China sent a drone our way, and then this other agency comes to show you the picture, you just quietly take the information and note that that is a location/instrument that may be able to record the next Chinese mission. You don't let them release it so that the Chinese see that mission was recorded, and from the angle of observation see exactly where the asset that recorded them was!
I actually really wonder how much the modern internet and ubiquitous cameras has had to change military testing procedure. I even wonder if we could actually have manned airframes that literally no one knows about. I grew up next to Edwards Air Force Base, where most of our super duper secret stuff was developed, and I heard a lot of stories about how some of those things were basically common knowledge in our area. One of my English teachers talked about listening to a radio interview where some General denied the existence of a craft (either the B2 or the F117, can't remember which). My English teacher knew that was bullsh*t because he had literally seen the plane flying with his own eyes the previous weekend.
You could get away with that sort of thing in the early 80s, you could have a community of 30 thousand people see a plane occasionally, and still keep it credibly secret nationwide. Do that today and it'd be on instagram/twitter/Reddit immediately (doesn't help that there are like fifteen times more people living in the Antelope Valley today).
Steam
Blizzard: Yonder#11589
Secrecy is a big deal in the Air Force, they do not play around even with the 'open secret' kind of stuff. My father was an AFSOC MC-130 pilot and later a SOCSouth commander. You wouldn't believe the hoops we had to jump through just to go visit him in the non-secure portion of his office.
SillyRabbit: I lol'd. Read it again and lol'd again.
Hobear: I laughed, now I feel guilty for laughing....
It's the claim in the NYT article that Bigelow Aerospace has physical samples of unknown materials that floored me. If that is verified, that's the game-changer right there.
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
So stuff?
Stuff from my attic, I reckon.
You've never known true joy until you've shaken a lich stick at someone.
Sway's attic, more likely.
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
Physical samples of unknown materials!
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
Nice! (We don’t know what the box was made of!)
If you rule like Megatron, you're going to raise Starscream.
I suspect the problem with revealing something like this is the general public presumes UFO=aliens when that's not necessarily nor likely the case. As mentioned upthread or in the previous discussion it's simply unidentified, ie natural phenomena, tech of another nation (or even secret tech from the same nation), etc.
The ending isn't any more important than any of the moments leading to it.
Twitter fodder:
NYT: hey guess what the US government maybe probably made contact with aliens
AMERICA: yeah sorry don't have the emotional bandwidth right now
I`m Artsy Partsy Gun For Hire
True.
Pentagon to release UAP and other findings every 6 months
Within the past year the Pentagon confirmed and officially released the previously foia released videos of Gimble, go fast, and the Nimitz. These are all confirmed armed forces encounters with crafts that can move at speeds we cannot replicate, maneuver beyond our current ability, and seemingly not refueling for days of observation. The videos released we're showing no heat signature that experts have been able to identify, no known craft currently fit the profile. When compared against the surface of the ocean behind the go fast video the craft is colder than the water beneath it.
I don't say this all to scream little green men but I do say it to try and open the conversation that something is flying around with technology no one seems to have. Italy has a case where a helicopter is documented chasing a craft and when attempting to engage it something was directed at the helicopter causing damage and I believe a crash. Fuzzy on the details as I learned about it last summer.
Do I really enjoy this topic...yes. Lol. I get it's still tin hat territory but we now have government confirmed reports and a method to report incidents experienced by our pilots in the armed forces. It's an exciting time. If you're interested in more going down the rabbit hole Joe Rogan did a podcast with George Knapp and another with Bob Lazar recently. I think he did one with the Navy pilot from the Nimitz incident David Fravor as well.
\[T]/
BadKen:Everyone else either hasn't seen their chat, ignored them, or pulled a Hobear.
Stenintendo: I always assumed that you were brothers called Robert and Hobert
Bighoppa: I'll try Hobear's suggestion now.
Oilypenguin: God dammit, Hobear
Lazar's lying about his degrees from MIT and CalTech, and his weird "stable element 115" crap, have permanently discredited him for me. Knapp is, unfortunately, one of his enablers. I will note that the government would have had very strong views on Lazar breaking his clearance agreements about something so important, and yet, they have not taken any steps against him in over 30 years of speaking about this stuff...
The Drive is a good, reliable source for info on the military UFO situation. They also are tracking the US Navy's weird patent applications for, shall we say, extremely advanced reactionless propulsion systems...
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
Also, the military probe of some of the unknown materials Robert Bigelow sent to them came back with nothing found (which if I recall is how TTSA got hold of them). Been a while since I looked at that, though.
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
I haven't been following this super closely, so I might be barking up the wrong tree, but the little I have seen always seems to be seeing the UFO through the aircraft's sensors, i.e. the "footage" is what the pilot would have seen on a cockpit screen, not with their eyes.
Which always makes me wonder about radar clutter, sensor artifacts, software glitches, optical effects and all the banal and entirely explainable practical explanations for how a blip could appear on the screen without anything actually existing.
Have they been ruled out?
You've never known true joy until you've shaken a lich stick at someone.
It should be pointed out that it's remarkably hard to record things that don't come in through electronic sensors of some kind.
I dunno, eye witness accounts from pilots are a thing which ignore my "sensor artifacts" explanation.
You've never known true joy until you've shaken a lich stick at someone.
Yeah, but you haven't seen those.
WHICH IS WHY I WAS ASKING IF THEY WERE A THING!!!
You've never known true joy until you've shaken a lich stick at someone.
You can't see them, because if they don't come through a sensor, they can't be recorded. You are asking for a literally impossible thing, recordings of things that don't come through electronic sensors.
edit: well, unless you're willing to settle for standard photography, which we've had plenty of and which proves almost nothing, or a movie camera that still works on film, but those aren't typically used on random sh*t in the sky.
Barring actual film equipment that just happens to be in the right place at the right time, all you can get is hearsay, like that Mexican pilot a few years ago. Were his observations accurate? Who knows?
*sigh*
I didn't ask for recordings, I asked if all of the evidence is from sensors (and thus potentially explainable by digital artifacts) or whether some is direct eyewitness testimony.
Which for some reason you think would be impervious to microphones and video cameras, but that's neither here nor there.
You've never known true joy until you've shaken a lich stick at someone.
recorded information that’s not being interpreted by software before it’s relayed to humans.
”History is a long series of surprises that seem inevitable in retrospect.“
No, pilots have not brought film-based movie cameras with them while flying, at least not in the context of UFO sightings.
JFC. He's asking if any of the records released were of pilots describing something they've seen with their own two eyes, not just relaying what their sensors told them.
The Konami Code taught me everything I need to know about sex.
This may be of interest, Jonman. Again, I recommend The Drive: War Zone for their deep knowledge of and contacts into the technical side of the military world. They have also produced several dozen articles on these and related topics (like the Navy patenting crazy "ufo technology" devices...).
(tl;dr - Some are, some are not Mk. 1 eyeball sourced.)
The two sides to every story are true and false, not yours and theirs. Facts are not political; lies are. - Deven Green (Mrs. Betty Bowers)
There is Commander David Fravor a first hand account that was later caught on the jet flair camera by a later flight.
That was a Pacific sighting of one.
Lt. Ryan Graves ran a load of missions on the east coast which I think is this one. He is commenting on the go fast video as he was in the air. He has testified in front of Congress of his sightings and helped develop the pilot reporting program for all the ufo encounters they were having.
Hope that helps give some accounts to the video and other readings from the incidents.
\[T]/
BadKen:Everyone else either hasn't seen their chat, ignored them, or pulled a Hobear.
Stenintendo: I always assumed that you were brothers called Robert and Hobert
Bighoppa: I'll try Hobear's suggestion now.
Oilypenguin: God dammit, Hobear