politics

I mean, I'm no conspiracy nut or UFO true believer or anything, but the simple fact is that aerial photography is nowhere near that simple or easy.

I live directly under the flight path for the local airbase, and about twice a week I have F-35s fly overhead. I basically know the schedule, and I usually try to take a picture of them, but despite it being a routine occurrence that I know to prepare for, I've only managed to get a handful of pictures, and of those pictures, they're almost all small and blurry squintovision. They're better than bigfoot photos but not by much. With my naked eye, I'm close enough to pick out individual features on the airframe and see if the the gear is up or down, and if they have anything on wing pylons, etc. But my actual pictures? Usually come out something like this. Now imagine you're trying to do that for a target 5 miles distant rather than just a few hundred feet overhead, and it only gets worse.

And the thing is that yes, the military does have a lot of eyes on the sky, but as they pointed out in the hearings, there exists no mechanism for making reports of UAP, collating and collecting the relevant radar and sensor data, and then trying to figure out what it was. If you talk about UAPs, you're going to get laughed out of the room if not sidelined into a career dead end.

Like even ignoring the possibility of aliens, and assuming that this is just some unknown atmospheric effect (that shows up on multiple different radar systems, FLIR, and optics), it's still worth gathering that data so we can find out what's going on. Investigating odd phenomena is great for our scientific understanding of the world around us. Right now we don't have a mechanism for Pilot A to say "Hey, that blip on radar did strange behaviors X, Y, and Z" and then the relevant sensor data is collected into a format for use by meteorologists or whomever.

99.9 repeating % of the time, it's just going to be something innocuous like what all the civilian UFO reports are of "in these specific atmospheric conditions, we get an optical illusion of a cubical cloud" Locals in LA think that the borg are invading, but from other angles, the cloud just looks slightly funny rather than a cube. Or they mistake a drone formation for some impossible alien craft. But when we have trained military observers who are all saying the same thing and we're seeing data from our most advanced military sensors, it's a different matter entirely.

That's why I'm so mono-focussed on the tictac report, because in that example we have radar tracks from 4 seperate system types (AN/SPY on the USS Princeton, AN/SPS and AN/SPQ on the USS Nimitz, either APS-125 or APS-139 for an E-2 Hawkeye, and the AN/APG-73 on the F-18s) These were all cited as having been there and tracking the tictac, and reported that it descended from 80,000 feet to sea level in a matter of moments, and when the F-18s are sent out, that's when we get the encounter that David Fravor describes. Alex Dietrich, the pilot in the wingplane of Fravor's flight also described the same encounter, complete with "I don't consider myself a whistle blower ... I don't identify as a UFO person," but despite that disclaimer, she still ends up collaborating his story for how the tictac behaved.

So there we have no fewer than 6 separate radar sets, of which at least 4 sources are different models so we can pretty safely rule out operator error or code glitch, the eyes of 2 seperate F18s pilots, one at high elevation, one that moved to intercept and they all describe the behavior of the tictac as moving impossibly to how we understand physics. Later on in a followup flight, they stick the FLIR pod on one of the F18s and we get the video that doesn't show very much, and we know for a fact that what's shown on that video isn't the full duration of it.

Now let's throw UFOs out of the equation entirely. Assume that it's only some kind of atmospheric anomaly like ball lightning or something. Isn't that still something that's incredibly cool and worth investigation? If something can act like that, let's figure out what it is and how it does it. And if it is aliens, then congratulations, we have the most important discovery in the history of mankind on our hands. And if it isn't aliens, then we've merely done a lot of cool science and made both commercial and military aviation safer by explaining what these are and if/how they are a danger. And that's what this congressional meeting was about. Setting up official channels so that when pilots run into things like this they can report it and we can start to aggregate the data and figure out what's going on. And on the other side of the equation is investigating DoD black projects that may or may not be pretending to be aliens (we know they did this with the original stealth programs, complete with MIB suits visiting the local skywatchers and telling them very specifically that it WASN'T UFOs, and thus distracting attention away from the stealth planes.) and letting the American government know what the fuck is actually going on in our military that ostensibly works for us.