On 29th April, the Pentagon officially released footage of three unidentified arial phenomena, or what are colloquially known as UFOs. The three short video clips had been previously leaked and already widely reported and show various fuzzy blobs as seen from cameras mounted on military aircraft and taken between 2004 and 2015.
One eye witness, Commander David Fravor, has even appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and he certainly sounds compelling.
The FLIR video from 2004 shows an oval shape with no visible means of propulsion holding position for about a minute before accelerating out of frame to the left.
The Go Fast video from 2015 shows a smaller object (or a similar object at greater distance) traveling rapidly.
The Gimbal video shows another irregularly oval object holding position and rotating.
These videos and others can be downloaded direct from the website of the US Navy www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents
So what are these things? Are they evidence of extraterrestrial visitation or something more mundane?
Well, they are not called unidentified flying objects for nothing.
The truth is that we don't know what they are. They are all indistinct due to the distance at which the video was taken so we can't see much except for their overall shape and behavior and the reactions of pilots. And in a way, it is those reactions which are the most interesting parts of the videos. I'm not an expert at interpreting the output from military sensors, but the pilots and their Weapons Systems Operators (or WSOs) are and they can be heard several times during the videos saying, "What the f*** is that?" and other exclamations.
So... what could they be?
The truth is that we don't know what they are. They are all indistinct due to the distance at which the video was taken so we can't see much except for their overall shape and behavior and the reactions of pilots. And in a way, it is those reactions which are the most interesting parts of the videos. I'm not an expert at interpreting the output from military sensors, but the pilots and their Weapons Systems Operators (or WSOs) are and they can be heard several times during the videos saying, "What the f*** is that?" and other exclamations.
So... what could they be?
- First of all, it is extremely unlikely that they are of alien origin... sorry. Everything we know about physics tells us that the speed of light is a natural law throughout the universe. It is a speed limit that cannot be breached not even by light itself. A hundred years ago we had the Wright Flyer and now we have F22s and 747s, but it is not just a case of future, more advanced civilizations getting faster and faster ships until interstellar travel is possible. The speed of light is a natural law that will hamper interstellar travel for any civilization. It's very unlikely that some Tony Stark-like super-genius has developed an advanced arial vehicle in his bedroom, but even that one in a billion chance is more likely than interstellar travel.
- Are they weather balloons or pockets of swamp gas or distant lights refracted through a pocket of dense air or any of the usual excuses trotted out to explain these phenomena? I'm going to say no on that one too. It is true that the vast majority of UFO sightings reported by the general public are usually mundane. As a rule people are not used to looking up at the stars, and its easy for non-stargazers to misinterpret lights in teh sky. But these videos are taken by experienced aircrew who are presumably skilled in reading their instruments. Whatever these things are, they are certainly unusual.
- In my story, The Waking Dragon available in SNAFU: Black Ops I wrote about the first nation on earth to develop true artificial intelligence leveraging that knowledge to create fantastic new weapons of war.
Now that's pure speculative fiction, but again I'd put it a couple of notches above alien visitation
- Could they be products of malfunctioning equipment? Possibly. For example, the object in the FLIR video that appears to accelerate rapidly to the left, could be produced by the camera pod panning rapidly to the right. The azimuth shown on the video indicates that the camera has not moved, but again when put next to the incredibly small possibility of alien visitation, even a rare and confusingly specific malfunction like this is relatively much more likely.
- Another possibility is that these are real advanced vehicles, either of US origin or of some other nationality. This is unlikely, but still possible.
The frustrating truth is that, for the moment, these unidentified flying objects must remain just that... unidentified.
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