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On an Express Elevator to Hell!!

Or UAPs (Unidentified aerial phenomenon) as they are now known!

This actually seems to get some serious traction in mainstream media and reporting over previous weeks (CBS ran an episode of 60 minutes on it) and a report is being made to congress next month I believe.
So this is going beyond the classic guy in a pick-up truck seeing some moving lights in the 'UFO belt' in the US (as Bill Hicks called it), to several ex-military and even former President Obama commenting that he had seen footage of UAPs that are not explainable.

I've seen some of the limited footage and it looks pretty difficult to explain - weird blobs with no notable control surfaces travelling at hyper-sonic speeds (don't know what the technical description of this is)
I don't also know if these also appeared on radar?

What are people's thoughts on this?

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First and foremost? Everything that flies is a UAP at some point.

After all, we’ll see a plane and albeit a fraction of a second, it takes time for us to recognise it.

I think the trouble for some is “I don’t know what I saw” kinda becomes “therefore it must be Aliens”. Which we know isn’t automatically the case.

With the advent of Drones, there’s even more opportunity for confusion, as what we might think to be high up and far away may be a lot lower down and closer to the observer. But in the right conditions (low light, tired brain) we fill in the gaps with the usual inaccurate mind doodles. Not explainable by the individual does not mean not explainable by anyone.

There’s always the chance it’s something military and top secret. Something your or my Government is aware of and does indeed recognise, but don’t want to reveal for any number of valid reasons.

Anyways. Preamble out the way? Got a link to the footage?

   
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https://globalnews.ca/news/7871671/ufo-video-water-san-diego-california-2019-omaha/

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/unidentified-aerial-phenomena-defense-department/index.html

because all the conspiracy is about vaccination most people missed that the US military was forced by covid-help law to talk about UFO's

first of all, being classed as unkown object just means that and nothing more (if it would be Aliens, it would not be an UFO any more as it is identified, kind of)

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I didn't get a photo, but a few months back (it might even have been pre-corona so a year or more back) I saw two strange shapes in the sky. We pulled the car over and paused to watch as these strange, angular black shapes got closer and closer. There was also, if I recall right, a third more regular aircraft with them.

Eventually they resolved into a pair of US Stealth Bombers who Trump had sent over, presumably to fly around the British to Russian airspace as part of the general dance of "ooh look I've got fancy fighter planes and bombers" that seems to be all the rage every so often along that boarder .


Thing is there was nothing mysterious about them, save that they are a very uncommon shape for an aircraft. If they'd been flying past rather than over and had not moved close enough to resolve them one could easily have thought they were something super strange or even alien.




Drones certainly opens the watergates for strange flying things; heck I've seen a few overbikes and bathtub creations which can fly now due to drone tech and, on a still day with the right setup, you can easily make a strange looking object and shove a drone engine into it.

I'm actually surprised we've not had a huge increase in UFO sightings as a result, but I put it down to the fact that UFOs were born of another generation and era. The same which birthed many spoon benders, mind readers and all the rest. When even "serious" TV shows would have at least one token alien/spiritual/mindreader/mysterious episode where a medium or such manages to use mysterious powers to solve things or such.


Its still there today, but my impression, at least in the UK; is its not really a thing like it was.

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I think this covers it nicely

https://xkcd.com/1235/

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/20 13:46:17


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 Flinty wrote:
I think this covers it nicely

Yep, and the Internet lets people check what they saw. For example the weird lights a few nights ago were Elon Musk's Satellites.
   
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I absolutely believe in UFOs! I just do not believe they are aliens.


I have to say though, it is much more fun to want to believe in the para-normal and follow it; even though I do not.

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The Star Link satellites definitely unnerved a lot of people, I did have a few moments of "WTF" before I twigged what they were.
Good point about the cameras, and I think that applies to some of this military-captured footage too. The one piece of footage was from a US Navy stealth boat, taken off the coast in the Atlantic in the dead of night (so if that same phenomenon had happened even a few decades ago it would have probably been missed).

One thing you don't get from the video is a sense of scale and also whether these UAP were captured on radar - I assume if they know the speed/heading etc. then they must have been? Specifically with the stealth boat the voice commenting says that they have the detail on where the UAP entered the water.

In terms of possibilities of what these could be, are there any scenarios other than the following for these specific videos?

1. Man-made experimental vehicle/drone from the US. No - expert commentators have said the lack of control surfaces/visible means of propulsion and immense hypersonic speed are far beyond current technologies. The Pentagon has apparently been involved in the enquiry which would indicate it is unknown to them also.

2. Man-made experimental vehicle/drone from an adversary nation (Russia or China). No - although some US researchers believe China has now at least equalled or even moved past Russia in some aspects of aviation technology this would be too much of a step. Also, some of the footage recently released was from 2004 which pre-dates China's very recent technological surge

3. Visual effect/hallucination on the part of the pilot or crew member. No - details were recorded on video by multiple individuals. Also radar record?

4. Meteorological phenomenon. Possible - what isn't clear from the video/commentary is any speed or direction changes by the objects? The videos shown so far appear to be near bodies of water. Could it be something propelled by deep-sea volcanic activity, a micro-meteorite that has 'skipped' on the ocean surface and still travelling at tremendous velocity? I have no idea

5. Naturally occurring/native organism - Unless the fish peoples of Atlantis are sending up probes think this one can be discounted..

6. Aliens Too many questions/guesses around this one

7. Fraud/viral deep-fake or similar - Possible - assume this would have to be one line of enquiry with the official investigation

I am not going to finish this with "therefore Aliens" though (although that has to be one of the possibilities). Have I missed anything else?

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 Flinty wrote:
I think this covers it nicely

https://xkcd.com/1235/



The trouble with that factoid is it makes no allowance for the fact that for basically half of that upswing they were still basically potato cameras, and even now with a few models featuring physical zoom functions they're still basically gak outside of a few dozen feet.

That aside, I'd be willing to bet that if one were to draw a graph of the amount of pictures and video purporting to be of "paranormal phenomena" over the same time period the graph would be near identical.

Throw the rise of easy post-processing into the mix casting doubt on even the most well shot and clearly focused footage and stills and the fact that your average phone pilot still doesn't even apparently understand to hold the phone in fething landscape when recording video and the increase in phone cameras has just generated a whole bunch of inconclusive noise.

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 Pacific wrote:
I've seen some of the limited footage and it looks pretty difficult to explain - weird blobs with no notable control surfaces travelling at hyper-sonic speeds (don't know what the technical description of this is)
I don't also know if these also appeared on radar?


Mechanical error and simple misattribution are big ones for a lot of the military-sourced UFO sightings. Here's a fun article about three of the more popularized clips.

There's a recurring theme here- something odd is observed, and then commentators try to explain the observation, rather than address why the observation might not be valid to start with. In the third example in the link above, it looks like an object is moving at incredibly high speed just over the water, but through parallax it could just be a stationary object closer to the viewer.

I've seen a number reports of strange phenomena that were ultimately traced to mechanical problems as well. While the conspiracy wonks are touting an object flying at Mach 8 and performing impossible maneuvers and confirmed by three different aircraft, a technician finds that a bug got into a rotating radar array and died, subsequently throwing anomalous readings during flight and propagating to the other two craft via datalink.

Stuff happens.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/20 16:51:43


   
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Sightings of aliens strongly coincide with the popularization of the concept of sightings of aliens.

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As I think I've shared here before, I saw something unusual once during a flying lesson. This story is 100% true. It was a silver reflective disk-shaped object that was darting around in the air, making maneuvers no plane could. Pointed it out to my instructor, who did a double-take on it.

At the same time, we said "balloon". It was a kid's mylar balloon that floated very high and was buffeting around in the breeze. Because it was against the sky, it was hard to tell at first if it was a small object close by or a large one far away. Sure fit the classic 'flying saucer' description, huh? And it was very illustrative to me how UFO sightings can happen.

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Eh... the simplest explanation is someone in DC wants money.

The tictocs are either a black project that's ready to debut or an impressive specimen of private development. Leaning towards the former given the talk about fuzzing Minuteman silos. The DoD does not ignore that.

Tell you why I think this way: China and Russia are ignoring UAPs. Doesn't appear in their native media. If there was something to it, would be an international concern.

Also, Chris Mellon. He would not be involved if there wasn't money on the table.

   
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 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Sightings of aliens strongly coincide with the popularization of the concept of sightings of aliens.


There’s also many commonalities between descriptions of abductions in the modern day, and abduction my faerie folk of yesteryear.

Suggests there may be an as yet uncategorised mental health thing going on.

   
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99.9% likelihood that UAVs and UAPs are neer peer adversary aircraft/drones/vehicles. The principle reason for the quiet change in classification from UAP to UFO is due principally to the stigma associated with the term "UFO" relating to its strong connection to aliens - many within the defense and national security community are taking these things more seriously than people realize, and it isn't because they think little green men are invading. This is true going back decades, by the way, hell we know that many reported UFO/UAP sightings through the Cold War were legitimately various types of aircraft/weather balloons designed explicitly to collect reconnaissance data, especially ELINT - no better way to get an adversary to light up their air defense radars and sensors than to present them with an unidentifiable target - the more mysterious and less threatening the target the better, because the longer they shine a flashlight on it the more data you can collect about the frequencies/wavelengths/waveforms/technologies they are using, etc. Both sides did this sort of thing, read about the US PALLADIUM and NEMESIS programs for examples.

The Drive has a great series of articles discussing the topic, especially this piece by Tyler Rogoway - which is also a convenient hub to jump through to other articles by Tyler ad other journalists covering the topic over the past several years with some interesting and in-depth reporting and coverage. There have been a lot of exaggerated and misreported claims about supposed out-of-this-world capabilities of these aircraft, some of the claims are unverifiable, others are blatantly false, and others are suspect and questionable. For the most part many of the supposed claims can be explained within the context of existing technology, in many cases by extrapolating the capabilities of existing consumer grade off the shelf drones out to what would be achievable with a military budget on a black project, or through the use of less commonly encountered technologies or "hybrid" designs (maybe the reason it doesn't have visible control surfaces is because its a balloon with an internal multi-axial ducted fan...).

Theres also the fact that for most of my life there have been claims published in magazines like PopSci and PopMech of Russian and Chinese engineers and scientists researching more "out there" capabilities (like electric jet thrusters and plasma engines) and making some unverifiable claims about cutting edge capabilities - many of those claims have been dismissed with large amounts of hubris and jingoistic chest-pounding (i.e. - we can't do that, so you must be lying since all Russian/Chinese, etc. tech is junk), but its entirely possible some of them are true. In general theres been some degree of "flanderization" (for lack of a better term)e with regards to the capabilities possesed by Russia, China, and some of our adversaries. While its true they are behind the curve compared to the US and some western european nations in some areas of tech and military capability, there are other areas where they are ahead of us. Its foolish to assume our adversaries are incapable of matching us and that any piece of military hardware developed by them is an inherently inferior hunk of junk held together by bubble gum and duct tape.

Tell you why I think this way: China and Russia are ignoring UAPs. Doesn't appear in their native media. If there was something to it, would be an international concern.


This is horrendously inaccurate.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/20 21:17:27


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I would much rather everyone have a half ass than no ass.


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I would prefer the Culture.


Ahh a man of culture I see..

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AngryAngel80 wrote:
I don't know, when I see awesome rules, I'm like " Baby, your rules looking so fine. Maybe I gotta add you to my first strike battalion eh ? "


 Eonfuzz wrote:


I would much rather everyone have a half ass than no ass.


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Sightings of aliens strongly coincide with the popularization of the concept of sightings of aliens.


There’s also many commonalities between descriptions of abductions in the modern day, and abduction my faerie folk of yesteryear.

Suggests there may be an as yet uncategorised mental health thing going on.


More like a sleep disorder. Sleep paralysis explains the old 'night hag' folklore and others, and a lot of its symptoms pop up in alien abduction stories too.


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There's a lot of things people can suffer or experience which they think are totally unique and might even appears so within family or friend circles; but once you study them at a population level you find they are far more commonplace.

I've certainly had the sensation of something dark being above me whilst being half awake and also had sleep paralysis a few times which is really horrible until you wake up just enough to work out what's going on and then do the only thing you can which is to go back to sleep.
Another common one is the dream of your teeth all falling out and the "falling down stairs/cliff or other high region" which then causes you to wake up with a start.






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chaos0xomega wrote:
Tell you why I think this way: China and Russia are ignoring UAPs. Doesn't appear in their native media. If there was something to it, would be an international concern.


This is horrendously inaccurate.


Then I'd be interested in learning more.

Specifically, I was saying this phenomenon doesn't appear in their media. That doesn't mean it's not taken seriously by their respective states.

Happy to be wrong on this.

   
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 Pacific wrote:


1. Man-made experimental vehicle/drone from the US. No - expert commentators have said the lack of control surfaces/visible means of propulsion and immense hypersonic speed are far beyond current technologies. The Pentagon has apparently been involved in the enquiry which would indicate it is unknown to them also.


Not necessarily. If you had a secret project that some civilian dumb dumb had captured a picture of and you wanted to deny any connection with it saying you are going to start an Inquiry about it would be a decent way of distracting from it. The "Pentagon" is also not some hivemind where everybody there knows everything that is going on. One group might genuinely be unaware of a secret project and make a genuine investigation into a sighting of something weird while someone on the other side of the building is keeping their mouth shut.

Let the dumb alien believers provide a smoke screen for your secret projects. It keeps the Russians from discovering what you are really doing.


3. Visual effect/hallucination on the part of the pilot or crew member. No - details were recorded on video by multiple individuals. Also radar record?


Recorded visual effects can still be distorted from what the object actually looks like. So just because no control surfaces or other specific details on the object can be seen doesn't mean they aren't there. They're just not visible because the images were taken at high speeds and thus blurry and distorted. You do a drive by of an F16 at Mach2 and try to pick out details.

4. Meteorological phenomenon. Possible - what isn't clear from the video/commentary is any speed or direction changes by the objects? The videos shown so far appear to be near bodies of water. Could it be something propelled by deep-sea volcanic activity, a micro-meteorite that has 'skipped' on the ocean surface and still travelling at tremendous velocity? I have no idea


This is also a possibility. Anything traveling at high speeds has its fine details blurred.


There are many weird aircraft designs that have been used over the years. Many of which would look a lot like a classic flying saucer.

Take the HO 229 that the Germans were testing in WW2.



Fly past any aircraft at high speed using a mono-wing design and it'll look like a flying saucer.

I'm sure there are many developers in the US and other national military RD units experimenting with weird stuff that bucks all current ideas of what aircraft look like.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2021/05/21 06:30:49


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I have to say reading some of the above and chaos0xomega's post in particular it seems like some kind of experimental tech has to be the highest likelihood.

Yes I know the ex-Navy guy on CBS was saying this was a hundred years beyond our capability, but he has come from a non-research role, not from top secret projects at the Skunkworks.

It's an interesting comment about the US defence agencies reaction to this; there is more of a focus on the fact that the Tictoc is penetrating US airspace and doing so generally unopposed, rather than 'OMG those must be Aliens' - it's therefore a national security risk, and the more it happens the more attention it will receive, more funding and efforts to find out what it actually is.

 techsoldaten wrote:
chaos0xomega wrote:
Tell you why I think this way: China and Russia are ignoring UAPs. Doesn't appear in their native media. If there was something to it, would be an international concern.


This is horrendously inaccurate.


Then I'd be interested in learning more.

Specifically, I was saying this phenomenon doesn't appear in their media. That doesn't mean it's not taken seriously by their respective states.

Happy to be wrong on this.


Well.. I think it's just knowing what we know about how 'open' the respective media of China and Russia are. (i.e. they aren't!)

The US media is far more open and not state-operated and these videos have only really appeared through happenstance and the actions of a few individuals, but there could well be footage like this in China and Russia but it would never get anywhere near an official media outlet. Think about the Chinese space agency activities, those involve tens of thousands of people and budgets that are probably into tens of billions but you only ever hear about them once they are done or a success (much to the chagrin of the rest of the space/science industries)

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/21 08:12:32


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 Pacific wrote:
I have to say reading some of the above and chaos0xomega's post in particular it seems like some kind of experimental tech has to be the highest likelihood.


does not even need to be that complicated, a large bird in the distance is enough
it won't be on the radar, making wired looking manouvers because of the big difference in speed
and because of there are no other objects nearby to get the distance right, the size is also impossible to get


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Also, with regards to RADAR, the appearance of any particular hit doesn't really mean anything. It's not some omniscient observer, it's much more like trying to conduct a complicated multivariate analysis by eyeball, with no quantitative means of checking success. They routinely return false positives, misinterpret the most mundane articles, and generally stress the operators out - and that's assuming that there's no software malfunction/hardware issue/dead bug in the unit.


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 Argive wrote:
 Flinty wrote:
I would prefer the Culture.


Ahh a man of culture I see..


Not yet, but I live in hope

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 Farseer Anath'lan wrote:
Also, with regards to RADAR, the appearance of any particular hit doesn't really mean anything. It's not some omniscient observer, it's much more like trying to conduct a complicated multivariate analysis by eyeball, with no quantitative means of checking success. They routinely return false positives, misinterpret the most mundane articles, and generally stress the operators out - and that's assuming that there's no software malfunction/hardware issue/dead bug in the unit.



RADAR can generate hits off clouds, flocks of birds, even just variations in atmospheric density. Thats actually how we track storms to predict the weather.

Even "stealth" aircraft still generate radar signatures. They aren't invisible to it, just a lot fainter. The idea being that you can fool the radar operator or computer tracking into thinking it was just a cloud or flock of birds or something else mundane. But if the operator knows there is a stealth aircraft in the area, they can still track it. That is how the soviets took out the blackbird spyplane back during the cold war. A heat tracking missile doesn't care about your radar signature, so once you are detected you can get tracked and shot down.

This is why modern stealth fighters are actually of limited use in the event of a war between major powers. Everybody knows you have stealth aircraft, so they will be looking for them. They are only useful if you are against an opponent with far inferior RADAR technology who is also unaware you are attempting to fly in their airspace.

Now on the other hand, if an aircraft was developed with a propulsion method that didn't generate a lot of heat and you combined that with RADAR absorbing plating you could have an aircraft that is very difficult to identify. It would probably look very weird depending on how it generates lift. Airplanes only look the way they do because of the way they generate thrust and lift. Something that generates those in some new and novel way could look totally different.

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 techsoldaten wrote:
chaos0xomega wrote:
Tell you why I think this way: China and Russia are ignoring UAPs. Doesn't appear in their native media. If there was something to it, would be an international concern.


This is horrendously inaccurate.


Then I'd be interested in learning more.

Specifically, I was saying this phenomenon doesn't appear in their media. That doesn't mean it's not taken seriously by their respective states.

Happy to be wrong on this.


On the subject of media I can't comment as I don't speak Russian and my comprehension of Chinese is poor at best, nor do I really watch Russian/Chinese media.

As far as their military tech development I can say that both Russia and China are and have been investing significant sums of money in drone development. They have generally been a bit slower to push widespread adoption than the US has, but in part our own adoption of drones has been grossly accelerated by real-time needs in combating insurgents overseas whereas Russia/China have been focusing on other concerns where drones were less immediately relevant. That being said, Russian and Chinese drone development has been largely focused explicitly on defeating the US, whereas our drone development has been largely focused on low-end threats. In some respects, Russian/Chinese drone capabilities are ahead of our own, specifically with regards to drone swarms and as electronic warfare platforms, and they can do some impressive stuff with them in terms of integrating them into the kill-chain of manned systems (artillery, ground attack aircraft, etc.) as a reconnaissance and target aquisition platform. By comparison the US hasn't had much need to use drones as a distributed electronic attack system, because they've mostly been used against guys riding in the back of a Toyota Hilux, and in large part we've been using drones to "self-spot" for fires carried on-board themselves (i.e. hellfire missiles, etc.) as opposed to using them to provide target data to a manned fighter flying alongside them.

China, and to a lesser extent Russia, are also major drone exporters which means there is a large financial interest for them to develop drone products, especially since the US has been somewhat reserved about who we are willing to sell drones to - its a large and growing market and Russia and China are making a killing addressing customer needs. The "loyal wingman" drone concept was also to some extent pioneered by Russia who are a bit further ahead than the US is, the US really only started taking the concept seriously with the skyborg/loyal wingman programs relatively recently in response to the advances that Russia has made over the past decade (we've very quickly closed the gaps by making the program a national priority and shoveling a lot of money into it). Russias own loyal wingman drone (called the Okhotnik-B) is massive though, its more of a light bomber in and of itself (something like a 10-15 thousand pound payload capacity, its the size of an F-15E) and seems designed more as a "bomb truck"/gun caddy to increase the arsenal of weapons available to a pilot, whereas the US is focusing on much smaller and more maneuverable loyal wingmen drones that are designed to be "semi-attritable" - i.e. they will fly between an air-to-air missile and a manned aircraft in order to take the hit for the piloted aircraft.

Yes I know the ex-Navy guy on CBS was saying this was a hundred years beyond our capability, but he has come from a non-research role, not from top secret projects at the Skunkworks.


Even then, it assumes that the Navy guys understood what they were seeing correctly. If its of a shape and design they are unfamiliar with then they can easily misjudge size and distance. If theres more than one of them flying around and they lose the one they are observing and another one is sighted 60 miles away a few moments later its easy to assume that they just witnessed something travel at hypersonic velocities when the truth is a bit more mundane. To some extent many of these claims, like the claim that one of these UFOs descended 80 thousand feet of altitude in the span of a second according to radar, are uncorroborated by any actual data or evidence that has been publicly presented thus far and based purely on hearsay - in this particular instance, IIRC, that information didn't come from the radar operator but a pilot who heard the story down the grapevine (we all know how the game of telephone works, right?) - even if it did come from the radar operator its entirely possible that he misread what he was seeing in that split second of activity and added an extra zero on.

That is how the soviets took out the blackbird spyplane back during the cold war. A heat tracking missile doesn't care about your radar signature, so once you are detected you can get tracked and shot down.


The Soviets never shotdown an SR-71. Nobody has. There were reports of one occuring but if you look you will find that to be an April Fools story. I think you're thinking of the Serbs shooting down an F-117 Nighthawk during Kosovo, which was shot-down by a radar-guided missile system. The reason the Serbs successfully shot down the F-117 is because the F-117s flew the same routes consistently during the Kosovo war (whereas during the Gulf War they never flew the same track twice), additionally the Serbs had military intelligence spotters in Italy and elsewhere in Europe who were reporting aircraft launches back. On the night in question, the spotters observed that the Prowlers that typically launched from Aviano, as well as other electronic warfare and SEAD aircraft that flew protection for strike packages, were grounded due to weather concerns, etc. In short it was understood that the F-117s were flying unprotected and that Serbian air search and anti-air targeting radars could be turned on without fear of immediate destruction. The F-117 has no radar of its own and only limited radar detection and warning capabilities utilizing a system that was not intended for that purpose - the antennas associated with that system were thus typically retracted on strike missions, rendering the plane blind to whether it was being targeted.

Do you see where this is going?

The Serbs set up their early warning radars along the known flight paths of the prior F-117 strike packages on non-standard settings to spot the F-117 - against a normal aircraft they could do this from ~200 miles away, against an F-117 they could only pick up the F-117 within 10-15 miles. These radars could only detect the presence of something, not that it was an F-117 (too stealthy) and couldn't provide a tracking fix - but when the radar operators spotted that there was a small object moving at high speeds (very obviously not a bird or whatever else that a radar return of that size could be). The operators then put in a radio/phone call to the SAM batteries that were pre-staged along the known flight tracks and provided whatever info they could about range/bearing of the return. The SAM sites used a combination of three different radar systems to acquire targets and guide missiles in on them:
-The target acquisition Radar could acquire a target out to 150 miles against a typical fighter, the F-117 was entirely invisible to it, even flying directly overhead.
-The fire control Radar could guide a missile in on a typical target out to 50 miles away depending on a variety of conditions and circumstances.
-The altitude-finder had a long range but was reliant on data fed in from the other two systems and thus was functionally useless on its own.

Because there was no threat of being blown up on this particular evening, the Serbian SAM operators were free to light up their targeting radars pointing in the direction they knew the target aircraft would be coming from with relative impunity for extended periods of time (like 20 second bursts because they were cautious, whereas they might only have a 5-10 second window in normal circumstances with the Prowlers out in the sky) and at a much faster time interval (usually they would have to go dark for extended periods to avoid drawing the Prowlers in with repeated flashes, on this night they lit up in extended bursts with very short intervals between them). Even still, none of the three targeting radar systems they were using were picking up anything, until by luck one of the Serb SAM sites lit up their fire control radar five miles in front of the oncoming F-117 just as one of the three F-117s opened its missile bay - the two other F-117s flying alongside it remained totally invisible, the only reason the one was detected was because an open weapons bay is basically a radar reflector which resulted in there being a *huge* radar return on the fire control radar system for it to launch and guide a missile against. The Serbs fired off two or three missiles against the return, and the F-117 pilot was totally clueless about this until he visually observed the contrails from the missiles coming at him which detonated in close enough proximity to bring down the plane.

This is why modern stealth fighters are actually of limited use in the event of a war between major powers. Everybody knows you have stealth aircraft, so they will be looking for them. They are only useful if you are against an opponent with far inferior RADAR technology who is also unaware you are attempting to fly in their airspace.


This isn't really accurate and not how it works. Knowing that your opponent has stealth aircraft and looking for them isn't really helpful. Stealth aircraft function by using shaping, materials, and other technologies to reduce their radar cross-section to be reflective of an object much smaller than they actually are. A common example is that of the various US stealth aircraft, which are anywhere from 50-70 feet long with a wingspan between 35-170 feet or so (the B-2 is short but wide lol), being described as having the same radar cross section as a small bird, a golf ball, a marble, an overweight bumble bee, or any other number of similarly small, common, and inconsequential objects. That means that on Radar these things show up alongside every other similarly small object out there, of which there is a lot because of all the random environmental noise and clutter resulting from reflections off of clouds, thermal layers, trees/geographic features backscattering signal, etc. which could easily occlude the stealth aircrafts return (essentially it gets filtered out as noise and clutter by the radars signal processing systems and doesn't even show up on scope). Even if it isn't occluded then its often impossible to tell that you're looking at a stealth aircraft vs any number of thousands or millions of other similarly sized returns.

Without going into a really technical description of how radar systems work, in most circumstances if you were to see the golf ball sized spot of an F-22 on a radar scope its still going to be surrounded by a lot of other golf-ball (and larger) sized spots on there. Determining which one is an actual target and which one is inconsequential isn't that easy - even if you know its coming and are trying to find it. Radar systems utilize a variety of techniques to try to filter out valid returns from various sources of noise and clutter, but a lot of that is dependent on signal resolution which is itself range dependent. In typical circumstances you would be able to track and target a non-stealth aircraft at very long range because through a series of algorithms you could identify the aircraft against noise/clutter on the basis of several factors, such as its movement in relation to everything else around it. A large cross section traveling at 600+ mph within typical flight parameters/capabilities (i.e. the thing isn't going to accelerate or deaccelerate at 20,000 gs or turn 180 degrees on a dime) is easy to identify because there are only so many places that things can go in between pulses (which defines the tracking window) and because there are only so many things out there that will have a comparable RCS, meaning there is less risk of misidentifying the thing you're tracking as being something else (like a really large cloud). When the thing you're tracking has a really tiny RCS it gets a lot harder, because your resolution often isn't good enough to pick out one golf ball from any of the others surrounding it at a distance and stealth aircraft golf balls basically get lost against the background golf balls. Even traveling at high speeds, there are so many other golf ball sized things out there that its hard to signal process to find the one golf ball you're looking for because many radar systems won't even realize that the one particular go while the majority of other golfballs are precisely .001m^2 larger or smaller,lf ball has moved relative to all the other golf balls present. Its only at closer ranges that tracking that golf ball becomes possible, because as the distance closes and resolution improves the system can process signals to notice that theres one particular golfball that is precisely .013m^2 and that golfball seems to be moving at consistent distance intervals (i.e. at a relatively constant velocity and direction), while the majority of other golfballs are precisely .001m^2 larger or smaller and seemingly moving randomly and inconsequentially.

In short, just because you know theres a stealth aircraft coming and you're staring intently at a radar screen doesn't mean you can track it or target it, because by the nature of the way radar functions the target you're looking for often won't even show up on theMore modern and expensive systems, as well as systems of varying frequency/bands have different capabilities relative to stealth features, but there are various limitations associated with them in terms of range, resolution, guidance capabilities, etc. and its not a panacea to the stealth problem to just throw money at more expensive radar systems.

As far as thermal detection, etc. - Yes, thats typically part of a stealth package, particularly with an aircraft designed under an "all-aspect" stealth concept. You don't need a sci-fi propulsion method to avoid being shot down by a heat-seeker, the capability to defeat them using existing fairly conventional propulsion technologies exists by way of some clever (but often expensive) design features. screen as a result of the radar system filtering it out as noise and clutter.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/21 19:12:12


CoALabaer wrote:
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Ok, the whole flying saucer thing didn;'t start in the like late 40's-early 50's. Theres a lot of historical artwork the shows things that look like them.

Here's a religious painting from 1710, i guess people just assumed it was some holy symbol for a long time.



Here's an image from 1350, again a religious theme.



Then there's this from about 13000 bc.




And I'm jot into 'ancient aliens', i know a lot of alien theories are pure trickle down economics. I never bought the idea our electronics came from aliens as there is a very long chain of evolution that can clearly be traced back to ben franklin showing how out electronics evolved from hand made components like franklin's glass jar batteries to hand wound electromagnets that made telegraphs possible, and the telegraph is a direct ancestor of the internet, sending data across vast distances in binary format thru electromagnetic means, up ton hand made condensers and relays that lead to the mas production of vacuum tubes that made widespread radios possible in the 1920's, the vacuum tube lead to the transistor, which was just a solid state semiconductor version of the vacuum tube, and the transistor lead to the microchip, which is just a vast and intricate array of microscopic transistors made by highly advanced manufacturing processes.

Also principles created in purely mechanical calculation devices like babbages difference engines were applies to electronics to create basic computers.

So no, i do not believe we got the internet from a ufo in roswell. I reject a lot of the ancient alien stuff, but i acknowledge the ancient paintings do show what looks like a modern 'flying saucer' image.I've heard some peopkle against the idea of ancient aliens try to explain it away and their explanations seem pretty lame, frankly.





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Somewhat hopefull that this may be true but life does not appear to be that interesting....

I AM A MARINE PLAYER

"Unimaginably ancient xenos artefact somewhere on the planet, hive fleet poised above our heads, hidden 'stealer broods making an early start....and now a bloody Chaos cult crawling out of the woodwork just in case we were bored. Welcome to my world, Ciaphas."
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"I will admit that some Primachs like Russ or Horus could have a chance against an unarmed 12 year old novice but, a full Battle Sister??!! One to one? In close combat? Perhaps three Primarchs fighting together... but just one Primarch?" da001

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