Funny enough I was just reading the book "In Plain Sight" [1] before I flipped over to hacker news. It's a book about the serious investigation into UAPs by various governments, and is heavily sourced, with often times a half dozen references per page, many official and declassified sources. It's hard to come out of reading it without being strongly convinced that these UAP are not of human or natural origin.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57734614</a><p>Edit: really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.
> The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere.<p>To me this sends up a couple of thoughts: (1) this sounds like a way to spy on Russia and (2) quite possibly could be technology from Russia (such as hypersonic missiles).<p>Then I read the speed:<p>> An object contrast makes it possible to estimate the distance using colourimetric methods. Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 - 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s.<p>... that's 33,500 mph ... Re-entry speed from something out of the atmosphere is something like 8km/s; or 19,000 mph. Of course that generates an insane amount of heat and is still half the reportedly measured speed.<p>TBH it seems like a possible sampling error for the speed calculations. If we assume that to be the case, then it seems likely (if real) that these are some sort of hypersonic test craft / missile system.
I was listening to a fun podcast episode about a couple of folks who founded a UFO-related political third party:<p><a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the-campaign-from-alpha-centauri" rel="nofollow">https://www.buzzsprout.com/760511/11204787-gabriel-green-the...</a><p>And it mentioned there was a flying saucer craze in 1947- Roswell wasn't even the most interesting story then.<p>It made me think, these myths and legends are highly historically and culturally contextual. Alien UFOs replaced phantom airships replaced fairies and so forth. Perhaps in just a century, the idea of anthropomorphic aliens will be as dated and quaint as changelings are to us now. Wonder what will be the future myth then? Simulation glitches?
There are a few interesting documentaries online. Check out unacknowledged, disclosure and close encounters of the fifth kind.<p>What's interesting to me is that the ce5 protocol meditation is almost identical to some Taoist meditation I learnt 20 years ago.<p>Of course there's also loads of bullshit too, but for me the UFO question was answered years ago. They're here.<p>The AATIP/UAP angle is a good one to rebrand the subject and make it more palatable to the mainstream after decades of mockery, allowing governments a way to research it seriously too.
Fun topic because the question of under what conditions would <i>we</i> as humans would contact another less advanced civilization in space opens up some pretty interesting but simple criteria.<p>We would need for that civilization to not be a danger to us, not only from a technology angle, but from an ontological perspective. When you look at how insane other creatures in nature are and the biological economics of their survival, we wouldn't adopt them into our own societies, and the ones we do are cats and dogs and other pets. This is how much we can trust another being we can only share a small part of our experience with by keeping them confined or on leashes. We probably don't want rich aliens to breed us in captivity and buy us as pets for their kids to ride. So there's a bar we would need to meet to not become that.<p>The question I have would be, what would we as a species need to demonstrate to be allowed "off leash," in a community of other spacefaring civilizations? What consistent understanding would each person as a random human need to have to be able to be relied upon to interact safely with a spacefaring being?<p>What would we equip a civilization with to evolve with those tools before arranging to meet them without destroying the equillibrium of their societies as they compete for our favour and become dependent on us? Reciprocity of respect for life and the ability to apprehend some universal shared truth seems like the only thing that would separate an animal from another conscious being capable of reason.<p>I would wonder what that prerequisites or criteria for us as humans encountering a new civilization would be.
>Flights of single, group and squadrons of the <i>ships</i> were detected<p>So they are now calling them literal ships, not ufo or uap<p>Also, from their methodology and instrumentation (color cameras) it seems they could have done it in like 80s. Why coming out now?
Reason to be skeptical:<p>For the last 10 years (?) or so most everybody has a mobile phone with high-quality camera in it and most people carry their phone with them all the time.<p>Shouldn't that mean that the quality and quantity of UFO evidence should have exploded since about 10-15 years ago? But I haven't seen any articles about how much more and how much better quality UFO evidence we have now that anybody whose sees a UFO can take a snapshot or video of it. Further when a group of people see a UFO, they could each take their own video of it taken with their different cameras.<p>If I saw a UFO I would certainly try to take a video of it.
"Our astronomical work is daytime observations of meteors and
space invasions."<p>Is something being lost in translation? They can't literally mean that...
"Our astronomical work is daytime observations of meteors and space invasions."<p>Just a day in the life. Watching for falling rocks and space invaders.
I did some quick googling to put things in perspective:<p>Mach1 is ~ 0.3 km/s (+/- 0.1 varies with altitude)
Artillery is ~ 1 km/s
Earth orbital escape velocity is ~ 11 km/s<p>6km high is 20,000 ft, around low regional turboprop aircraft.
10km high is 32,000 ft, around airliner cruise altitude.
15km high is 50,000 ft, where Elon Musks private jet sits.
20km high is more where U2 and SR71 start to operate and require space suits.<p>ISS orbit is ~ 400 km
Elon's Starlink is 550km