Flying Triangles

Mazulu

Quoting from this article: http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc473.htm
-30 groups of witnesses including police patrols
-observed for hours a strange triangular object nearly silent, maneuver- ing at low speed and very low altitude, without creating the least amount of turbulence.

At least 30 witnesses of slow moving and very quiet triangles (gliders?).

Two radar stations scanning a country side without prominent hills. Good weather. Investigators were aware of the possibility of false images.[/QUOTE]

Pilots are looking at radar images. Witnesses on the ground are looking at triangles. What ties radar images to the triangles? This...

The Belguim policemen observed both the F-16's and the Triangle. The question then becomes: are the Beguim police lying or conspiring? If so, then what were the pilots chasing?

I believe that the Belguin police are telling the truth. If so, then the Triangle and the radar images are linked.

If you want a terrestrial answer, then it has to be a very high tech air craft, probably an American fighter.

zoobyshoe

Hehe. This is half jabbering.

Let me put it this way: no thrust, no ground effects, no lift. Thrust comes from the prop, not the wheels.

Drakkith

To play devils advocate, there's no real way of knowing how accurate this is. Not in that the person who wrote it is incorrect or lying (which is still a possibility. I can't get to that site from here at work so I haven't had a chance to read it.), but in the accuracy of the eyewitnesses. It is extremely common for people to misunderstand something they see in the sky. And trying to explain something you don't even understand to someone else only compounds the issue.

Assuming that the pilots never had visual contact, that puts the object at least several miles if not more beyond the aircraft. I find it hard to believe that eyewitnesses saw both the F-16's and the object playing "hide and seek" at somewhere between 200-1000 mph and varying altitudes with any real accuracy. People can easily give incorrect times where something that took 10-15 seconds can be reported as "In just seconds". There are plenty of other things that can make the eyewitnesses information inaccurate.

Mazulu

I thought I was the one playing devil's advocate?

There might be some witness testimonial (translated) somewhere on the internet. I'm looking at some pictures, desperately trying to read the handwriting.


http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1167.htm

In any population of observers, there is a chance that you might get some UFO enthusiasts. In a larger sample, you'll get testimonial from people who don't believe in such things. You just have to sift through the reports (if you can find them). If 90% of the observer population sees the same feature (like a triangle) then that particular feature is probably reliable.

If all a triangle does is hover, then it acts like a balloon. If it moves slowly, then it might be a balloon or glider. If it moves fast, it might be a plane. If it follows the observer (pilot) it might be an optical illusion. If it glows, it might be lightning. But what if it has behavior that crosses multiple categories?

I'm hard pressed to agree with the assumption that the pilot isn't going to look (with his eyes) at what he's chasing, at least once; just to make sure they're not chasing a software bug, a weather front or a bogey (Russian fighter jet for example).

What constitutes the observation of an aerial chase? First the triangle goes by really fast (silently); and then two fighter jets go by really noisily in the same direction. Even if the "chase" is happening at 1000mph, an observer on the ground can still see them go by.

I thought this testimonial was very detailed and thoughtful.
So maybe the US military has an unmanned plane that can hover, and also reach velocities of 1800km/hr (without creating a sonic boom).
http://osdir.com/patents/Aeronautics...-06959896.html

Mazulu

I've been looking at the links that you provided. A lot of the material looks like junk. I found other articles that I liked. But what captivates my attention is your comment.
On the one hand there are people who see UFO's and are filled with wonder and joy about life; they are filled with awe that there is something out there. In the other hand, the scholarly community routinely ridicules these people and calls them stupid. I don't know how to reconcile this. If you're happy then you're stupid?

To avoid be accused of diverging from the topic, I contribute this debunky article. http://gmh.chez-alice.fr/RLT/BUW-RLT-10-2008.pdf
It's evidence that military crafts are being misidentified as UFO's. Enjoy.

Mazulu

Now here is a nice organized table that describes lots of weird things seen by pilots. No fluff or flaky observers, just the facts.
http://www.ufoevidence.org/newsite/f...lotCatalog.pdf
The table has light, balls, glowing cylinders, airfoils, foo fighters, pink spheres, even a green parallelogram. Maybe this is the mother-lode. By my count, there are about a thousand reports from pilots of UFO encounters. In a nutshell, they're lights, cylinders, spheres, glowing geometric shapes.

How long will it take you to debunk 1000 pilot reports?

Dotini

Yes, there is incontrovertibly a phenomenon of unidentified aerial objects.

With our best efforts over a period of decades, some 80-90% eventually can have prosaic explanations. There is a residuum of extremely well investigated but still puzzling unsolved cases.

From the late 1940's on, there have been some high profile US government investigations involving top physicists, astronomers and military folk. They have come to the conclusions that although the phenomenon is real, it poses no threat to national security. It is a nuisance so they don't bother investigating it anymore.

Institutions such as science and government having abandoned the problem leaves the field wide open for media and public speculation. Due to the many thousands of reports occurring daily for many decades, some even going back thousands of years, it makes more sense to think of it as terrestrial in origin rather extraterrestrial. It is absurd to think that nut-and-bolt objects from another planet can burn enough energy to come to Earth so often, cavort around doing essentially nothing, and remain resistant to our best efforts to confine even one, examine and understand it. It is a fool's errand to explain the UAP as a solid object.

Accordingly, the phenomenon must be almost purely energetic (lacking mass) so that after it manifests it vanishes leaving no traces, and can never be captured and confined in a laboratory any more than could a bolt of lightning be captured and examined.

We are dealing with electromagnetic fields organized into cellular structures by DLs.

According to the evidence, they can change speed, altitude, direction, shape, size and color without a problem.

Yet they don't attack and do usually run away when probed with radar.

There are baby-sized versions of UAP which occur regularly in particular places on Earth, such as Hessdalen, Norway and the Yakama Indian Reservation, Washington State, USA.

Professional scientists have studied these junior-grade versions of the phenomena for decades now. Some of their reports are posted in the "Electrical Eccentricity?" thread. It's pretty clear they have the idea they are studying an electromagnetic plasma phenomenon.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

DaveC426913

How did you get to this conclusion? We've got unexplained phenomena, what leads you to conclude that - categorically - they all come from the same phenom and that they cannot have mass?

I can see massless objects being one plausible explanation for many of the incidents, but I don't see how it's categorically true of all unexplained aerial phenomena.

There is a line between what we know and what we surmise.

Dotini

Dave, thanks for a very good post and question.

Yes, of course you are right and I have no basis for categorical statements of any kind. I do believe there is some small amount of mass involved in some cases, even if it is only dusty metallic particles.

Although there are a great variety of UAP phenomena manifested, I am looking for the common thread - in our favorite subject of physics - which unifies the problem and makes it more comprehensible. I want to drive out the mystery and BS which infects this UFO/UAP topic.

Respectfully,
Steve

zoobyshoe

A couple/three seconds:

People see a huge variety of unexplained things. Any automatic assumption they are extra-terrestrial is bunk.

Drakkith

There's nothing to debunk unless someone claims those UFO's are alien spacecraft or something similar.

Drakkith

The issue isn't that people see UFO's, it's that they see them and then believe that the most likely explanation is aliens. They are most likely incorrect, and in many people's eyes they are indeed "stupid". Most likely incorrect means that if you look at just the number of explainable phenomena compared to unexplained there is an overwhelming majority for the former.

FlexGunship

This is a fundamental misconception about knowledge. Just because an idea is appealing doesn't make it true... or even reasonable. It's amazingly common that people will defend most strongly, the falsehoods they find most appealing (or the truths that are most shaky).

If you're going to objectively review UFO reports, you must remove the awe and wonder of it. Otherwise the topic might as well be considered myth instead of a scientific conjecture.

On the plus side, it should be a huge consolation that the things we are currently learning about our universe are amazingly interesting and mind-boggling! Some of them clearly overshadow the idea of aliens mucking about in our airspace. If nothing else, the reports of faster-than-light neutrinos should be mind blowing! It might not be true (just like the UFOs=aliens idea), but the research is real and happening RIGHT NOW!

Mazulu

I really can't call anyone "stupid" for believing that these are aliens or (insert popular cultural/religious icon). The phenomena is literally messing with people's heads. Just read down the table from any page of
http://www.ufoevidence.org/newsite/f...lotCatalog.pdf
I picked page 8 at random: fast moving yellow-white basketball (approximate size estimate, not an actual basketball); red-hot metal spheres follow plane, orange spheres, pink spheres maneuvering around plane, fireballs follow plane... Aluminum disk object, lights making sharp turns. I have a bachelors degree in physics. I know what plasma is (a stream of charged particles). Plasma gives off light. But none of my physics professors ever said that plasma could make sharp turns and maneuver around without the aid of an electric field.

• three luminous spots followed the plane, the engine of which faltered
• a bright "shooting star" streaked downward without exploding then came back
• a white ball flying at 3,000 ft high
• one bright light split in two, moved towards the plane then disappeared
• a blue circular flame passed the plane, turned, then blinked

St. Elmos fire comes to mind, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Elmos_Fire
http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl...:429,r:17,s:24

Does plasma in the atmosphere explain all of the observations? What about,

• one light seemed to take off and moved at 300 mph, made a turn. No specific shape.
• one blimp-shaped object outdistanced the planes at high speed.
• two orange lights rotating about a common center which Maneuvered.
• one silver object moved off immediately when pilot made a bank turn to approach it.
• one object with several lights moving very slowly followed the plane for 20 miles and turned back.
• a red-orange light, hovered one hour, then crossed the sky rapidly

If there was a light (St.Elmos fire?) flashing prime numbers at the pilot, I must have missed it. Are there balls of plasma in the sky that are curious about planes and want to take a better look? Or is the plane sharing an electric field with the atmosphere? In either case, the atmospheric plasma phenomena must be truly dazzling and beautiful. That is, until the plasma gets sucked into the engines and causes the electrical systems to go haywire. I wonder if the flying disks, cylinders and saucers have this problem.

Mazulu

Most likely ... is another way of saying in my humble opinion. We still have silvery saucers, disks and cylinders to explain.

• one flying saucer at about 16,000 ft
• near-collision with a flying disc
• a red saucer flying very fast, dived, then made a 45° turn
• a shiny disc
• a saucer-shaped object (diameter: 30 meters)
• a luminous metallic-looking disc
• a disc (diameter: 30 meters) with 9-12 portholes and a light on the top
• an "aluminium"disc (diameter 40 ft) flew under the plane at 4,000 ft high.

Instead of making people feel stupid for telling you what they think they saw, why not ask them: how do you know it's an alien spaceship? Maybe something broke off the plane. Maybe it's St.Elmos fire on a sunny day.

FlexGunship

Wrong. "Most likely" is an expression of approximated probability.

It is a fact that, given our present understanding of the universe, alien visitation is probably the least likely hypothesis to explain UFO sightings of any flavor.

When you have two puncture wounds on your neck you should probably think of the vampire-hypothesis last. The prevalence of movies and books about vampires does not lend credence to the hypothesis itself. Likewise, the prevalence of movies and books about aliens visiting Earth does not lend credence to that particular hypothesis.

Mazulu

• a huge turtle-shaped object at 7,000 ft high.

I got this one! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamera