In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
I'm not against the notion of exotic physics that would violate general relativity --I'm actually suspicious that general relativity is a fundamentally flawed theory, though I have the evidence to say with certainty that it absolutely is.

I mean, we have lots of evidence pointing to that being the case. That's why people have been searching for candidates of a theory of quantum gravity for decades. That said, the predictions of general relativity are so incredibly accurate that any theory of QG is going to have the same relationship is GR that GR has to Newtonian gravity: in a suitable limit, QG will reduce to GR.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
Multiverse, check out the Martin VBAT.

The V-BAT drone is a very slow example of a tail-sitter, which is a type of VTOL that requires tilting the entire aircraft. With a tail-sitter, the transition between vertical and horizontal flight is far too slow and obvious to explain many of these unidentified vehicles. It's far more likely that thrust-vectoring nozzles are used, similar to those found on the Harrier or F-35B.

BAE Systems MAGMA UAV is an experimental drone used to demonstrate maneuvering in the air without the use of any flight control surfaces. The flaps that it has are not technically required and are only used as a fail-safe.

The following is speculation, and I don't claim to have sufficient evidence to support this. These unidentified vehicles seem to be designed for the most covert activities, with evasion and deception being integral aspects of their design. I seriously doubt that these "vehicles" are capable of violating any physical laws. What is far more likely is that these "vehicles" are designed to make it appear that way. This could allow them to evade not just detection, but comprehension as well.

These "vehicles" may need something like a turboramjet to allow for both supersonic speeds as well as speeds low enough for hovering or vertical take-off and landing. Reaching hypersonic speeds would require an additional engine, such as a scramjet or even a rocket engine. Instead of obvious flight control surfaces, thrust-vectoring nozzles could be used to account for all aspects of stability and velocity. There might even need to be a second engine on the front end, reserved for deceleration. Alternatively, both ends could be virtually identical, and it might not make much of a difference whether the "vehicle" flies forwards or backwards. A rocket engine could be ignited just for the duration of a turboramjet spooling up or down, eliminating much of the actual acceleration time. However, if the rocket fuel capacity wouldn't be realistic for longer flights, a cold gas thruster could be used instead, with a tank of compressed air that is refilled by one of the jet engines during flight. This wouldn't allow for spaceflight, but it could provide the kind of burst needed for extremely fast acceleration, or even short pulses for stability, which could function like the thrusters used by the Multiple Kill Vehicle. All of the unpowered engines would add a whole lot of extra weight, but if thrust-vectoring could eliminate the need for any wings or stabilizers, then that might be less of a problem. This set of features would likely be far too dangerous for human pilots, suggesting that this would be a form of drone.

If some of these unidentified vehicles are drones in the form of double-ended lifting bodies with VTOL and hovering capabilities that also require no wings, stabilizers, or flaps, then the Tic Tac and lenticular shapes start to make sense, being equally aerodynamic both forwards and backwards.
I think the claims of "physics defying" UAPs are overblown. Too much layman speculation getting stirred into the broth. Hard quantifiable data on these encounters is almost always: "we sent out the guys with the cameras and never followed up on it."

The two videos in particular the navy dumped have both been identified previously as well. One object is believed to be a bird that was picked up on a new tracking system while the jet was at cruise speeds, and the other is believed to be an as yet unknown stealth drone.

These videos aren't new. they were all over the net years ago, and the claims the objects were traveling at supersonic speeds did not originate with the sources of the video. Theycame well after the release of the footage.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
These videos aren't new. they were all over the net years ago, and the claims the objects were traveling at supersonic speeds did not originate with the sources of the video. Theycame well after the release of the footage.

That's such a huge problem with a lot of Internet videos. You have to consider that they get passed around, re-uploaded, re-encoded with loss of quality, watermarked, de-watermarked, and often the originals are lost. Along the way you're gonna get armchair analysts who don't fully understand what they're talking about making incorrect calculations or even just guessing that "Whoa, that looks way too fast!" or "Nothing could explain that movement!" and those claims get propagated by anyone who picks them up. Some of the people making those guesses are doing it with a bit of cognitive bias toward wanting to see something extraordinary, and the people most apt to repeat them are even more biased.

With any video (not just unidentified phenomena, but literally any video) you'll also get people who will just make stuff up about its origins, either to troll others or to insert themselves into the narrative, like "That's my cousin's car on the left" when it absolutely wasn't.

It helps to think of misinformation and wildly wrong hypotheses on the Internet along the same lines as biological magnification of pollutants. There are inherent forces that cause toxins to be conserved by certain "organisms" rather than diluted and transformed into something harmless.
Forget everything you think you know. Then read this article. Then tell me it's a bird pulling 1,000 Gs. Or a drone. Or a fighter jet. Or anything even remotely within humanity's material science understanding.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/

There is nothing in this universe that we know of that can naturally, or artificially, explain the flight characteristics of these craft. No material we know of can survive those stresses intact.

It's not Russians. It's not the Red Chinese. It's not Black Ops. It's aliens.

Life exists in the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos beyond our pale blue dot. It is insane to consider that we're alone. It is arrogance of the highest order to limit the universe to only conforming to your limited understanding of physics.

No FTL? Why, because YOU can't see how it is possible, so it's flat out impossible? Absolute absurdism at its finest. Though, we've had this dance before.

It was impossible for man to fly, until he flew. It was impossible to breathe in a car beyond 25 MPH, until it was proven that it wasn't. It was impossible to break the sound barrier, but we did it anyways. It was impossible to touch the Moon, but then we did that too.

We will break the light speed barrier. We already have some good concepts that work, partially, on paper (stopping, turning, not so much). Give us, heck, not even another century, and we'll have it cracked.

We're toddlers in the cosmos, and even we can see glimpses of an FTL drive. Now tell me the adults aren't already using it. The civilizations that have been developing technology for millions of years before we even figured out how to use soap.
You're reading this wrong.

The study authors do not propose that these are objective flight patterns. They are analyzing the claims of witnesses mathematically, and stating that it is unlikely that the witnesses are fabricating the claims... Because they are consistent within two orders of magnitude, and the observers are SMEs.

None of their data is based on a single hard measurement.

There's also the unstated problem that the claims are not properly sourced to specific sightings that come with objective data attached other than human estimates, nor is the methodology for the data points used objective in any way other than pure math.

The paper isn't made up. The conclusion isn't made up. It's just resting on a giant wad of assumptions and unspecific claims.

Even the authors' conclusions more or less disagree with your own. They state that there is no evidence that these are extraterrestrial in origin, and that the data is too unclear to make further conjecture. More evidence and study is needed. Full stop.
Here is some information that I collected on the 2004 UAP incident involving the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group. I'm looking at this one because it has recently received a lot of attention. I don't claim that any of these sources qualify as sufficient evidence to prove or disprove anything about UAPs.

Also, some of these reports may use inadequate terms such as "Anomalous Aerial Vehicle" or "Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicle". Terms such as these are inadequate because they don't include any kind of reference to vehicles with submersible or aerospace capabilities. This is an extremely important distinction that needs to be made. A good term for such vehicles needs to be considered very carefully, in order to paint a more complete picture of what is being described.


Here you can find the official FLIR1 video of the incident, along with a few others:
https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents

Here is a basic explanation of what that video shows:
https://thevault.tothestarsacademy.com/ 2004-nimitz-flir1-video


Here is a lengthy video podcast interview with David Fravor, a former US Navy fighter pilot and squadron commander:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E

I am aware of the other interviews with him, but most are either too short or are formatted in a way that doesn't lend credibility to his firsthand account of a UAP that he encountered as part of the incident.


Here you can find a March 3, 2019, 270-page report on the incident as well as podcast interviews with witnesses other than the pilots:
https://www.explorescu.org/post/ 2004-uss-nimitz-strike-navy-group-incident-report

The authors of the two papers below, Kevin Knuth, Robert Powell, and Peter Reali, are associated with the SCU organization that released the above 270-page report. Information from said papers was presented at MaxEnt 2019 - The 39th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, near Munich, Germany.

Knuth, K. H., Powell, R. M., & Reali, P. A. (2019). Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles. Entropy, 21(10), 939. https://doi.org/10.3390/e21100939

Knuth, K. H., Powell, R. M., & Reali, P. A. (2019). Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles in the 2004 Nimitz Encounter. Proceedings, 33(1), 26. https://doi.org/10.3390/proceedings2019033026


Here is a 2009 report on the incident:
https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/ document_dev/2018/05/18/ TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ ver1.0.pdf

The 2009 report appears to have been released here:
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/ xclusive-confidential-report-analyzes-tic-tac-ufo-incidents/ 1187688105/


Miscellaneous:
http://knuthlab.org/pmwiki.php/UAP/UAPReferences


The following is speculation, and I don't claim to have sufficient evidence to support this. I have not thoroughly examined the above information. There is a lot of it, but that's a good thing. From what I can tell so far, there seems to be a mismatch between the "Tic Tac" UAP's speed and acceleration from the visual or video accounts and the radar accounts. The reports based upon the visual or video accounts seem to place the UAP in a more reasonable supersonic category. However, the reports based upon the radar accounts try to place the UAP in an extremely unreasonable category of impossibly fast. Perhaps this type of UAP has the capability of almost perfectly spoofing its location and perceived motion on radar. Just that alone would make these UAPs a very serious threat, and one that originates right here on Earth.
In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
No FTL? Why, because YOU can't see how it is possible, so it's flat out impossible? Absolute absurdism at its finest.

Because there are extremely strong theoretical reasons to believe it's impossible. Any type of superluminal motion (whether it's classical superluminal motion, or motion that is locally subluminal but still allows you to move "outside" your own light cone) results in causality violations. If such a thing were possible we should have seen evidence for it by now.

It was impossible for man to fly, until he flew. It was impossible to breathe in a car beyond 25 MPH, until it was proven that it wasn't. It was impossible to break the sound barrier, but we did it anyways. It was impossible to touch the Moon, but then we did that too.

These are all false equivalences, and again are a case of you being unable to distinguish between a word being used in two different ways: all the ones you stated mean impossible in the sense of being infeasible. There was never any physical reason (in the sense of any theoretical impediment based on our understanding of the laws of physics) that prevented these things. It was instead believed that there were insurmountable technological or resource barriers that prevented us from achieving those things. In point of fact, the physics we used to accomplish each of those are the exact same physics we've had since the early 19th century—none of our enormous advancements in physics over the 20th century had any impact at all on achieving those.

[I do call bollocks on the car example though, which sounds like some nonsense from pop culture or from some inane friend who insisted it was true because he heard it from a reliable source. Horses can travel faster than 25mph, and the fastest trains in the 1800s could exceed 100mph iirc. The average person from 120-130 years ago—or most educated persons at minimum—would not have believed such things.]

On the other hand, superluminal travel has extremely strong reasons based both on evidence and theory to believe it is impossible. In particular, Maxwell's equations imply that the speed of light is the same in ah reference frames. This observation is what lead Einstein to posit the existence of time dilation and length contraction—and the fact that we have detected time dilation (which is essentially the same thing as detecting length contraction!) is very strong evidence he's right. No matter how you move through space, you'll always measure light as going at c. This implies that you can never travel at c, because you would reach a contradiction that is simply unresolvable.

That only rules out locally superluminal motion, but "globally superluminal" has many of its own issues as I addressed above and will address below.

We will break the light speed barrier. We already have some good concepts that work, partially, on paper.

This is not even close to true.

And yes, I know you're probably referring to the Alcubierre metric or one of the related ideas out there, but if you think they work—even partially—on paper then you haven't really understood their mechanism. They work out about as well as, "I've got an algorithm that breaks Bitcoin, and all it needs is a hard drive loaded with every possible key pair" does on paper. Which is to say, the easy part has been worked out and all that is left is working out the actually impossible part.

Math is hard. Physics is hard. From what you've said here, it's obvious you have only engaged through it via pop culture and the internet and half-read, half-right memories of articles on these things. If you don't actually understand the physics behind these things though your speculation is less than useless. There's a reason that people who dedicate their lives to the study of these subjects agree, universally, that superluminal motion is impossible—and I assure you, it's not for a lack of creativity and it's not because Big Subluminal is keeping them down.
In response to Popisfizzy
One point worth adding about the Alcubierre drive is that parts of its design require a way of producing negative mass. So even though parts of the energy problems involved have been solved, it remains only a mathematically interesting idea.
I bet it's just fancy lasers than allows someone to bounce the light off of air particles just right to make them dense enough to appear on radar in addition to creating bright lighting effects.

Then they just move it around the airspace *really* fast, like someone teasing a cat with a laser pointer.

"Look at 'em chase it across the sky! Tee Hee!", says some Richard-Branson-slash-Bildiburger-level-philanthropist with too much time and money. "We been messing with people since the 1920's thanks to Tesla-era energy technology."

"But digi," you may cry, "what about all them abduction and anal probe stories???" Well, we got furries, fecal lovers, and leather bound big toe sucking fetishists. Humanity is often creative and just... weird.

We don't *need* aliens to explain what we don't know - it's just more fun that way.

If it *is* aliens, I'll reiterate what I said earlier - we ain't mature enough for them to come down and have a proper global chat with us. It's probably more entertaining to screw with our heads flying around at gods-awful speeds.

If we go with the 'aliens are here' explanation, my guess is that they are doing the old Star Trek-esque 'wait and see if they blow themselves up before we introduce ourselves' and any number of things could happen:

- we will get through some planetary-scale crisis and come out the other side with our Big Boy pants on and fresh adult diapers,

- or the aliens will step in at the right moment to 'save us', mostly because they don't want to miss the next season of Norway's Funniest Home Videos, or must know what happens to Abdul on the next Arabic episode of 'The Bachelor',

- or we go 'BOOM', the insects become the dominate species, mother nature resets for another go-around, and one alien will turn to his pod-mate, shrug and go "hey Blorg! I hear a planet near Betelgeuse has got a species that is *just* starting to figure out radio. Race you there!"
In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
... tell me it's a bird pulling 1,000 Gs...

no, no! it's really really rich people, or aliens, with high density laser pointers and we're the cats.

In response to digitalmouse
digitalmouse wrote:
...and we're the cats.

I knew it

In response to Lummox JR
I think this has matured enough to engage with again. You all make some fine points, and while I disagree on most of them, I can understand your unwillingness to imagine the unimaginable. Worldview shattering revelations are very upsetting to the sense of self identity. Nobody is comfortable finding that they were misled, deceived or even merely mistaken. You have made some good progress. At least you can acknowledge now that the possibility exists that aliens are visiting. You never would have a decade ago.

If it's all the same, I'll condense my reply here. Lummox touches on most of the main arguments, so it's a good jumping off point.


Lummox JR wrote:
The takeaway here is that unexplained phenomena exist and happen all the time, and that's what the government is basically saying.

But, the thing is, the unexplained phenomena appears to be intelligent, manufactured, and physically impossible in its operation. It violates not just assumptions, but everything we think we comprehend about matter and energy.

These aren't just blurry camera photos of lights anymore, these are tracked craft violating aerodynamics in the very same way that a brick does not. These pilots are using the most advanced tracking and sensor technology your tax money can buy, and they're getting shiny new upgraded sensors and cameras specifically to track these things more precisely. We have hard data now, not just anecdotes or witness reports. We have radar. We have weapons cameras on these things. We can see how they move, exactly, and it is impossible. Utterly.

Impossible. It's not a weird phenomena. It's not a ball of light bouncing at the treetops. It's metal. It's geometrically perfect. It's curious. It follows us, it runs from us. It interacts with us in intelligent ways. If it's not aliens, it's a god. Those are the only options given the facts.



Those unexplained phenomena can be, and by Occam's razor must be, a lot of unrelated things.

The things they could be has been drastically reduced in the past decade. It can not be ball lighting. It can not be weather balloons. It can not be foreign or domestic experimental technology. It can not be misidentified birds, planes, planets, stars, or swamp gas. It must be a manufactured, intelligent, device or machine life of some sort. That's all we have left now. That, or an actual god as in Jehovah.

Occam's Razor dictates it be aliens. That is now the most logical and simplest explanation possible. No other explanation fits the evidence. That explanation does not violate our understanding of physics. It is not only entirely possible that alien life exists in the galaxy, it's is a mathematical certainty. It's so certain, we have a paradox regarding their lack of apparent existence in the stars. Maybe you've heard of Fermi?

It's possible alien visitation could be one of those things, in the sense that we don't know what we don't know and have no way of gauging how possible it actually is.

That is actually untrue. We have a very good sense of what it would take us to colonize the galaxy, and we can do it with current technology in 10 millennium. It's surprisingly easy. Barely an inconvenience. Hence, the Fermi paradox.

We, in fact, do know what we don't know. Those are called known unknowns. You can thank Rumsfeld for that turn of phrase. We know that we are ignorant of the majority of the galaxy. The number of stars we have examined is insignificant to the whole. We know that our theories are incomplete, and most likely incorrect. Not in the big ways. We worked most of the big hole out, but in the small ways. And on the scale of the cosmos, small errors lead to big errors very quickly.

We know that life exists here, and there is no reason to assume it does not exist elsewhere. Assuming it does not is actually not an option. You would find very few in the scientific community who would make such a claim today. The haystack is far too large for our binary search, and the probabilities far too certain. We can debate intelligence, but life itself is practically a guarantee.


But the alien theory requires a lot of underlying things to be true and is such an extraordinary leap that it requires extraordinary amounts of supporting evidence (including, as Ter mentioned, strict attention to chain of custody).

The only thing the alien theory requires to be true is that aliens can exist. There is no distance barrier anymore. You can't claim vastness makes contact impossible. It does not. It is not possible for us in a human lifetime, but it's very very close. A generational ship absolutely could make the trip to any star in our galaxy sub-lightspeed in timeframes that would be a drop in the galactic bucket of time. We are infants in this galaxy. We barely became intelligent just yesterday, yet here we sit claiming to know what we can know and what we can't. What is possible and what is not.

If the galaxy were a MUD, we'd still be in the first room, admiring the ascii.

No other realm of scientific curiosity requires the level of proof that you demand of this. We can snap a fleeting glimpse of a tentacle and extrapolate the entire evolutionary history of a squid no one has ever captured, and it is accepted without question to be a real sea monster.

We can unearth a single hominid tooth and rebuild the entire skeletal structure, muscular system, diet, child rearing habits and so much more, and nobody cries foul. Well, christians do, but we don't pay them too much mind.

We can see a GEv signal in a collider and determine with near-certainty the existence of a whole new field of particles that fix some of the most glaring holes in our standard model, and it's adopted as canon with little fuss.

These are things equally as extraordinary as life on other planets, yet they are not put to the same rigorous standards that the evidence for aliens is. If it were, we would not be enjoying the technology we have today. You would still be denying the existence of atoms.


A better way to look at all this is that if a lot of data were to get dumped on the public, some really smart people could look at maybe 10-20% of the cases and figure out highly plausible explanations within established science.

I propose that they could not do that. This is an assumption you have based entirely on speculation of what the evidence could be. That is an error of logic. I know what the evidence shows. It does not show an easy explanation that fits within established science. What you imagine the evidence could show is not what it actually shows. It shows a very real, very solid, and very astonishing display of technological mastery. That can no longer be denied.


Bear in mind ball lightning is still mostly unsolved and that falls into the same category of unexplained phenomena.

No, actually, it does not. Not anymore. When all we had were lights in dark skies and reports of craft from hillbillies and hicks, sure. It could have been just about anything. Not anymore.

We see these things as very definite objects with mass, interacting with light, reflecting off the surface. They disturb the ocean as they descend into it, fully submerged with a boiling sea above it. No electrical discharge of any variety could do that.


There's still a lot we don't know, though it's possible we can learn a lot from data that, for understandable security reasons, has hitherto been kept under wraps.

What they did release is still sensational. The conclusions were uncertain, to be sure. This is the government, after all. However, certain conclusions could not be denied.

1.) Whatever it is, it is solid. It's not ephemeral or indistinct. These things have definite geometric shapes that do not occur in nature.

2.) Whatever they are, they appear to be intelligent. They display curiosity, caution, and self-preservation. They appear to be curious of aircraft, and are often sighted by pilots who are told never to report it. That has changed now. Now all pilots are told to report. Exciting times!

3.) It violates known laws of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics, and everything we think we know about gravity and inertial mass. They maneuver in such a way that no material we know of could survive the G forces. Not even the molecules could hang together under that amount of force. 12,000 MPH doing a right-hand turn at 90 degrees in the span of a millisecond. It's canon now. It's a known known.


And by security reasons, I mean stuff like: Support group 1443 was running operations at specific coordinates, and the video they captured can't be shared because it might show important information about tactical capabilities or where they were or what we know about hostile actors and their activities. Where OpSec is involved it's safer to redact or classify the crap out of everything.

Of course, and it would highly irresponsible of them to release such information publicly. I don't demand security be violated, only your assumptions.

When we set out to explore the galaxy, we will find life. We will be overwhelmingly curious about it, and will do everything in our power to learn as much as we can about it. It will consume the species for a time, investigating this new world of life, and we will gather every bit of data we can.

From a safe distance.

We will attempt to preserve the purity of the environment, so that we may study it in its unmolested habitat. We may never actually land there, for fear of contamination, or possible bio-hazards to the crew and the planet each may pose. We would be elusive, especially if we found primitive intelligence there.

We will not make contact, and may never contact that intelligence, for fear of what our culture would do to theirs. The only time I see us getting involved is in the case of impending extinction.


Why would it be any different for people visiting us? It would not. They would be just as elusive, for exactly the same reasons. Our proteins might fold the opposite to theirs, making contact lethal for both species. We may be (and likely are) culturally abhorrent to them. Our diseases and microbes may prevent them from interacting on a physical level with anything on the planet.

Our science can not be trusted to gauge what is possible with a more advanced understanding. As you say, it's impossible to know what we don't know. To claim that the distance is impossibly far or the technology impossible is no longer a reasonable position. We have working theories regarding advanced propulsion and communications that could drastically reduce our flight times to other stars, and that's not even warp tech, which I am convinced is impossible as Alcoubier envisioned it.

Fusion is not only possible, it is inevitable. It is inevitable for us and every other intelligent species orbiting a star. To not emulate the source of all life in the star system is willful ignorance of the reality you occupy. We will do it, and it will drive us to the stars in short time.

We will be the aliens one day. If they don't exist now, they will eventually, and we will never be able to deny them, for they will be us. We will behave the same exact way we perceive these craft behave today, because that is the most logical, secure, and most compassionate way to approach another biosphere.

I'm sorry, but your assumptions are obsolete. The only rational explanation for the craft we see (Yes. Craft.) is aliens. You will have to adopt a more open-minded position moving forward, or be left in the past with your assumptions and your certainty.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
I appreciate your conviction, Xoox. Welcome back.

Thanks.


EDIT: I remember the one about the moderators being nazis.

For which I offer no apology. I am nothing if not upright in my dealings, and if I suspect corruption, I will cry foul. I don't care if you're a moderator or god almighty himself. If I suspect malevolence, I will speak up.

You can take that to the bank. I may have lost friends, but I kept my self respect. I would hope, if things were reversed, you would be equally as diligent in your objections as I was.

Also, I believe that was a forum post in the place that shall not be named, not a post on my blog. I hope I had sense enough not to air that publicly. I can't imagine I would have.

[Edit] Ah, I see the thread in question. Huh. I guess I did air some stuff. It's not the particular incident I was thinking of, but even so. Wow. I was a douche.
In response to Lummox JR
Lummox JR wrote:
One point worth adding about the Alcubierre drive is that parts of its design require a way of producing negative mass. So even though parts of the energy problems involved have been solved, it remains only a mathematically interesting idea.

Negative energy is not my biggest issue with this drive. It's the threshold that would exist between the inner space and the rest of the galaxy outside the warped spacetime. The drive is effectively causally disconnected from the universe while in this warped state. If this did work, it would be a constant velocity that we could not steer. Nothing would cross the threshold, nor could anything cross. Stopping is a huge issue as well, as is the potential energy dump we may cause if we did manage to stop, effectively throwing the last 10,000 lightyears of accumulated dust particles caught in the bow of the wake to be hurled at whatever system we just arrived at, at near light speed. Dust or no, that is a huge potential impact.
In response to Xooxer
Xooxer wrote:
The only rational explanation for the craft we see (Yes. Craft.) is aliens.


Based on my own work in the field of AI drones, it might also be just some localized entity (country or corporation or Steve Wozniack-type person) who has developed a multi-vector high-velocity unmanned vehicle (ie drone) that can break - or at least bend - current known physics.

A project I worked on last year was focused around a car-sized multi-vectored jet-powered drone. It had to be unmanned because once in open airspace the aerial manoeuvres it was capable of doing would turn living pilots into goo almost immediately. We had to up our recording tech to keep up with it.

A plausible variant of the above could also be ancient-slash-alien tech that has been grokked and adapted by people to work as a drone, and the pilot footage earlier talked about was just someone showing off, or testing capabilities.

Alien at it's core perhaps, but it doesn't have to be aliens using it now. Could easily be some company or individual working on weird tech that was discovered and hacked in the last 50 years.

My point being is that "it's aliens" does not have to be the *only* rational explanation.
Personally, I think it is hubris to believe aliens care enough to have bothered to travel billions of kilometers just to study semi-evolved monkeys on a backwater planet in a distant arm of our galaxy.

In the last ten years alone, we've developed these high tech pocket cameras in our cell phones yet not a single clear HD 720p minimum quality video in clear focus - recorded *or* streamed live - of an alien aircraft or visitation is available on YouTube.

There are at least 10,000 aircraft in the air *every day* around the world, yet barely 3500 recorded 'sightings' by pilots across the entire span of powered flight history - roughly 115 years depending on your interpretation of the start of modern powered flight. If the aliens are flying around, there should be several magnitudes of order higher in the number of reports.

And don't discount all the telescopes pointed up into space and all the cameras pointed down towards the Earth. Yet all the people scouring Google Earth imagery and telescopic imagery on a daily basis haven't been coming forward with credible alien aircraft sightings on a regular basis.

So have there been UFOs? Absolutely. *Unidentified* Flying Objects are exactly that: unidentified. Unidentified != Aliens. If that were true, then they are no-longer UFOs. They are KFOs.

"The fact that you don't know what it is, is not evidence that you know what it is." - Neil deGrasse Tyson
In response to digitalmouse
digitalmouse wrote:
Personally, I think it is hubris to believe aliens care enough to have bothered to travel billions of kilometers just to study semi-evolved monkeys on a backwater planet in a distant arm of our galaxy.

Lets say we had proof, not knowing their intentions allows endless possibilities in what could be.

In the last ten years alone, we've developed these high tech pocket cameras in our cell phones yet not a single clear HD 720p minimum quality video in clear focus - recorded *or* streamed live - of an alien aircraft or visitation is available on YouTube.

Just like laws in place animals that forbids acquainting them to humans so that they aren't scared of us, I'd assume if they had come here it would be done under complete secrecy using technology that just nullifies our ways of detecting things.

Least tin foil hat Xooxer take
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