Yazata:
There's really nothing much new in your most recent post that I hadn't already addressed in posts #3023 and #3024, both of which you mostly ignored, as you did with posts #2986 and #2987.
I will respond to a few matters.
You haven't provided any provenance for the content of the assertions in this post of yours either. You appear to be quoting something, since your text contains American military jargon that an Australian like yourself wouldn't be expected to know. So what is your source?
My source for that was a blog post by UFO expert and (full disclosure!) skeptic Robert Sheaffer, here:
https://badufos.blogspot.com/2019/06/to-stars-cable-tv-series-unidentified.html
I apologise for not citing that source. I should have included the link.
As for your assumptions that I wouldn't understand certain US military jargon, you really shouldn't make such assumptions, especially where I refer to it or quote it explicitly in my posts. It would be stupid of me to quote something I didn't fully understand, don't you think?
The Navy recently acknowledged that the videos were authentic, and said that they were never intended to be released.
We need to be a bit careful here, because two different incidents, or sets of incidents are often conflated on many UFO sites. There's the thing with Fravor et al. in 2004, then there are the other FLIR videos from ... was it 2013? 2015? (I'd have to look it up.) I think in
both cases the Nimitz may have been involved, but again I'd need to check.
As I understand it, there is only
one FLIR video that has been released that supposedly relates to the 2004 incident.
That sounds like some unknown somebody's speculation.
Not entirely, because information on the camera zoom level appears in at least some of the video (i.e. it's actually there on screen in the video).
There are multiple movements and more than one adjustments of the view. They need to be better correlated if we are going to attribute all of the target movements to adjustments of the video camera.
Why haven't the UFO pushers done the necessary due diligence on this, then? You'd think they would be keen to show that the camera adjustment explanation can't account for the targets' movements. But apparently they aren't interested. Why is that?
And we would expect experienced aircrew to be fully aware that the video image changes when they change the zoom. I have more respect for our aviators than that. Besides, wasn't the pilot tracking the object visually and the video merely intended to record the encounter? (The jet carried no ordinance so the pod wouldn't have had its targeting function.)
The
air crew might have been well aware of when they were changing the zoom. The question is whether subsequent
viewers of the videos are well aware. I'm confident, for instance, that it never occurred to Magical Realist, before I brought it up. Maybe not to you, either.
As I understand it (I'm a civilian with no inside access to classified information) this CEC upgrade was less an upgrade to the radars themselves than an improved networking ability to feed data to and between aircraft, so that in effect what one knows, they all know. (That's why they call it 'Cooperative Engagement Capability'.)
I don't think that your source's assertion that the system had never been tested is very credible.
I didn't mean "never tested" as in this was alpha software, or whatever. I meant never tested in the situation of a real-world military training exercise like this one.
And lastly, if we are supposed to believe that the new data system was somehow responsible for the UFO sighting, we need better reason than some unknown somebody noting that it was new.
We have a better reason. The system was producing spurious data consistently in the days leading up to Fravor's sighting. Moreover, other aircraft, and indeed the fighter jets sent to intercept the supposed "UFO", detected precisely
nothing on their radars. That includes a special-purpose radar plane - you know, one of those ones with the big circular radar dish on top (a "seahawk", is it?)
If the data that it fed Fravor and the others led them to make visual and later video confirmation of the sighting, that's pretty good evidence that the contact wasn't spurious and that the radars were functioning as designed.
I already talked about this assumption of "confirmation" in the previous posts I've referred to here.
More anonymous speculation. Again, I don't imagine that the Navy would deploy a carrier battle group equipped with a fundamental air defense radar system so prone to errors that it can't distinguish contacts from noise.
Birds, ice crystals, small debris in the atmosphere and so on are not "errors" or "noise". They are just not objects the military is interested in detecting and would rather ignore. It has been suggested that the new radar system was, in a sense,
too sensitive, in that it perhaps picked up things that previous systems would not have spotted.
What "experts" were these?
You want names?
And "consistent with" (I'm not convinced that's even true) isn't exactly the same thing as "was".
Right. Just as "consistent with aliens from Mars" is not the same as "was". Although one of those two things is
a priori more likely than the other.
Do we even know whether there were any commercial airliners that close at that time to the Nimitz group and its air exercises? At that specific heading?
I don't know. Do you? Magical Realist doesn't.
And once again, going at this thing piecemeal, hoping to debunk the entire sighting by trying to cast doubt on particular aspects individually (merely by speculation), doesn't address the convergence of evidence.
I previously addressed this "problem" of convergence of evidence that you brought up earlier, in posts to which you did not respond (post numbers above).
The targeting pod video is further confirmation. It's possible to speculate that it was recording some kind of false image or that the imagery is being misinterpreted. But if it was recording something that was also being tracked visually by pilots and was showing up on the cruiser's Spy radar, then that's confirmation that the object in the video recording wasn't the product of a fault specific to the video system.
I agree with you that it is likely that the "objects" appearing the various FLIR images were real objects in the sky. I think they were probably jets of one kind or another. There's no good evidence that suggests anything else.
