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'Wow, What Is That?' Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects:
The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
"These things would be out there all day," said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. "Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we'd expect."
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane's camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.
"Wow, what is that, man?" one exclaims. "Look at it fly!"
No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.
But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.
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See also: 2 Navy Airmen and an Object That 'Accelerated Like Nothing I've Ever Seen'.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:34PM (2 children)
I haven't been able to load any pictures or video to see what the fuss is all about.
But ...
If I had a satellite that mounted a powerful, say, weapons-grade laser system, and I pointed that laser system at the Earth, below, and moved the focus ... I could make the far end of the beam move pretty fast.
Of course, the turbulence - from the rapidly heating air - would describe a trail, upwards, back to the satellite. That's no good.
So my Version Two satellite system would synchronize several satellites to focus their hypothetical laser beams on the same precise location in the atmosphere, at the same time. This would allow the several contributing beams to create a strictly local hot spot - revealed by the vortex of turbulence it created as a side effect - without any one beam contributing enough energy to provide a visual clue as to its source (a satellite).
That may sound kind of science-fictional, but not too long ago I saw a weather map that displayed a disturbingly precise set of dots describing a Cartesian coordinate system, where each dot was the result of local turbulence. The image was presented as evidence of weather modification; it seemed to suggest that someone had the ability to modify the weather by strategically creating pockets of turbulence, presumably with lasers.
Food for thought.
~childo
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:22AM
Interesting idea except for one thing
Fighter jets have IR and thermal targeting systems, if the object was caused by super heated air the pilots would have been able to detect something.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:34PM
Not sure about the feasibility but your comment made me think of it being something like a macro-scale optical tweezer [wikipedia.org] system. Basically a multi-laser tractor beam. Focus on an ultralight and/or low density object or the area surrounding it and moving that pocket/focal point around like a warp bubble carrying the object around with it. Wouldn't need an engine or leave exhaust, right?