> The men in the crew decided not to report what they had seen, because they had entered a restricted area and could have been arrested for the violation.
Some classic conspiracy theory quotes: "we met with alien life for the first time, but did not report for fear of disciplinary action".
Also, what are the real odds that the first guy would've been ordered to not shoot a helicopter snooping on nuclear arsenal for three nights in a row? I imagine you'd get shot down immediately if you as much as tried to enter the vicinity of a military zone.
Yeah the lack of a shoot-down makes this already unbelievable story even less likely. A helicopter hovering 150 feet above a stockpile of nuclear weapons? Please. This place would have had a 10 mile restricted airspace around it with a no-questions-asked shoot-down policy.
I want to believe just like anyone else, but I’m not willing to ignore my gut instincts to get there. I think this entire thing is a perfect storm of group thought, suggestion and paranoia.
A plausible explanation could be that the chain of command already knew about these and they were scared to start a fight. Would you start a fight with someone who had a gun and you only had a rock?
A more plausible explanation is that they were testing the security of a base; the higher ups were fully aware of what the "mystery helicopter" was, because they sent it in to gauge the base's response.
I was wondering that exact thing, especially after the command to not shoot it down unless it attempted to land. Seems to me that if I had a facility this sensitive, I’d want to see how the people running it reacted to someone—especially several skilled someones—attempting to break in.
I’ll admit I lean towards the skeptical end as far as UFOs having an extraterrestrial origin, although I’d say anything that doesn’t violate the laws of physics is technically possible. I can’t explain the accounts of aircraft maneuvering in ways that seem impossible for a physical aircraft to do, but one of the more interesting explanations I’ve heard is that, at least as far as the ones observed over Groom Lake, they might not have been physical aircraft at all:
A big thing to consider, especially with aircraft, is that your brain is bad at judging distances and speeds. What may look like a crazy maneuver may be a sane one if you understood the distances and angles involved. It isn't like we're hearing stories about people flying within 200 feet of a craft, waving at aliens, and then they just turn 90 degrees at mach 2.
As fo Groom Lake, it would make a lot of sense for high performance unmanned vehicles to be trained out there. You could also confuse a small aircraft close up for a large air craft being far away (this is actually quite common and applies outside of UFOs). I wouldn't be surprised if they had drones all the way from the size of your hand to the size of a F16. That's the kind of things those people work on out there. It isn't like we're talking about a technology that is extremely advanced, just something that's 20 years ahead of the commercial space (which we saw that stuff like laptops were invented 20 years before it became a public item. Same with many inventions. Moving from proof of concept to viable mass product takes time). I'm not sure why people think it is a far reach for a secret facility that works on advanced aircraft to produce aircraft (manned and unmanned) that can do things that no aircraft today could possibly do. Really, if they aren't accomplishing those feats then where the fuck is my taxpayer money going?
There are indeed reports of exactly that, and some of them from professional aerial observers like pilots, reporting on objects in the sky performing what are to us physically impossible maneuvers of sharp turns at supersonic speeds, or accelerations from full stop to hypersonic in absurdly quick times. The 2004 Air Force encounters alone were absolutely bizarre:
Oh please. His conclusions are awful and especially his conclusion on the 2004 video. I actually emailed the guy to clarify a few points just to see if i'd misunderstood something he'd said and no, as per our email exchange, he essentially bases his entire debunk on the video itself while totally ignoring the wealth of eyewitness accounts from all the days prior to it being recorded.
With that, he arrives at the conclusion that this was a plane (in the 2004 video), despite the pilots and radar operators involved emphatically stating very, very different observations about what they saw during the 2 weeks or so of these events.
Rational, analytical debunking is good, so long as it forms reasonable and grounded conclusions. In this case though, Mick West essentially seems to fall into the trap of: I'm a debunker, so I have to debunk, no matter the contortions and deliberate disregards involved.
Indeed. And to reduce the number of US personnel that knew such a test was happening, the higher ups could have arranged for their allies in the RCAF to be the ones executing the test.
The whole two man patrol over the area with 10 guys on standby as it repeatedly happened? The response does not appear at all proportional to the paranoia of that era.
> I imagine you'd get shot down immediately if you as much as tried to enter the vicinity of a military zone.
Having been detected, yes. Delayed detection begets delayed response. The implication is this craft was not immediately detectable electronically. I don't think any ground-based security force (e.g. some folks standing guard or patrolling in vehicles) are under standing orders to just shoot at something they see in the sky.
If you can get your mini-drone past the radar, you've got a chance at getting some good video and stills and getting your drone back.
> Also, what are the real odds that the first guy would've been ordered to not shoot a helicopter snooping on nuclear arsenal for three nights in a row?
Could be a friendly running a test for some jamming technology with orders to fly specific patterns on top of a real installation to gather data in the form of radar and witness reports.
>I imagine you'd get shot down immediately if you as much as tried to enter the vicinity of a military zone.
I don't think that is the protocol when the military encounters an object they can't identify. It would seem that decision would need to fulfill a set of requirements. I'm pretty sure that if they were able to say it was Chinese or Russian, etc, it would get shot down, but something that doesn't even register to the senses probably gets a pass. When you think about it, what are they going to shoot at, a elongated football the length of 3-4 cars that seems to be in a temporal zone it created?
> When you think about it, what are they going to shoot at, a elongated football the length of 3-4 cars that seems to be in a temporal zone it created?
How about the first description of the aircraft, which appeared to be a helicopter with red and white strobing lights?
Did they confirm it? or was that what it looked like to them? Without reading the article again, I was under the assumption they later said there was no noise coming from it.
Before I realised how dangerous and ecologically unsound they are, I flew a number of backyard 'hot air balloons'.
These often presented amazing shows from the ground - flying in a 'formation', strobing, changing direction and speed as they hit different wind patterns, 'disappearing' as the fuel went out, sometimes dropping burning wax.
Once launched it was so hard to see how far away they were on a dark night or even that they were fire balloons.
Some classic conspiracy theory quotes: "we met with alien life for the first time, but did not report for fear of disciplinary action".
Also, what are the real odds that the first guy would've been ordered to not shoot a helicopter snooping on nuclear arsenal for three nights in a row? I imagine you'd get shot down immediately if you as much as tried to enter the vicinity of a military zone.