Case no. 7; Yourselves
- Thread starter Trapped
- Start date
I was once flying west back towards New York City along the south shore of Long Island. I was at about 1500 feet just off the coast of the beach. Below me I saw a vehicle with a red and blue light fly below me. I was quite aware of it since:
1) I was flying VFR and of course VFR pilots _have_ to be aware of what's around them.
2) It was flying approximately my course and speed, and these courses present the highest risk of collision for pilots.
3) Rather than the traditional red, green and white navigation lights/red beacon/anticollision strobes this vehicle just had red and blue lights.
He was about 500 feet below me (as best I could determine at night) and he followed my course for about 10 minutes. Just before my first reporting point for Republic (the Captree bridge) he turned sharply and descended. I watched him for a while because it looked like he was descending very dramatically and he was already low. I lost sight of him under my own fuselage, and when I turned North at Captree I couldn't see him any more. He never called into the Republic tower, they didn't see him on radar (I asked) and when I asked around at the FBO no one had seen a similar aircraft.
Trapped
The local zoo is a mile or two away, the nearest star is four light years away(most are much, much further away). There is no such thing as an interstellar day trip.
Grumpy
Obviously replace animals with humans, a day trip to a spacetime trip and you have all the same ingredients.
And did you get a visual of the craft itself?
I saw its lights. It was too dark to see anything else.
I can make some interesting ''observations'' about your case.
Though some UFO's are incredibly bright, some are described as flashing through an array of colors, it is rarer to find a UFO with just red and blue lights, which I gather from your testimony looked like lights that could have been found on a traditional craft. It could be a sign there is a terrestrial explanation - some kind of aircraft. What doesn't add up of course, is that the craft wasn't detected on radar. Not all objects in our skies get successful radar hits, so this could be for a number of reasons.
What determines what altitude a radar works at?
10 years ago there was no other know habitable planets they recently discovered over 1000 plausible planets and that's just what we can see. And what we can see is the equivalent of 16 oz of water in the ocean
I actually had this discussion a while ago at a different science site. We determined that there where some airports in which the effectiveness of radar systems become less and less below the 200 feet mark. One airport case failed to detect a plane at 500 feet - I can't remember what these cases where and most of the information came from someone who knew more about airports than me.
And more and more will be discovered. If we have only seen a small portion which has over 1000 possible habitable planets then it is likely the number is much larger.
Ivan Seeking
Registered Senior Member
Based on our current understanding of physics, that is true. How precisely do you calculate the odds for the limits of technology?
Ivan Seeking
It isn't the limits of technology, it's the limits set by spacetime and the unimaginable distances involved that will keep us(and any other advanced race)in their own solar system until they MUST leave to survive(not really a limit, there's a lot of solar system real estate available). And any interstellar trip will be one way, generations long and it will bankrupt the civilization that sends it out. Thus the ONLY logical motivation for interstellar travel(other than robot probes like Voyager)will have to be survival of the species. Otherwise, the only connection two civilizations could have are long distance ones punctuated by long wait times between responses. And even that is unlikely, given the fact that only solar systems within about 100 lys could possibly know we exist, and since Howdy Doody is what they will see first, they won't think we have any intelligent life here and an answer would take another 100 years to reach us, anyway. Space is huge, we are very, very small. Faster than light travel is a fantasy that Science Fiction needs to drive the narrative(though there have been accurate depictions of these limits, usually involving cryogenic sleep or other workarounds), the Universe says no in no uncertain terms(if a supermassive BH cannot accelerate a single proton faster than light, we won't either). It will be another 100,000 years before everyone in just this galaxy could know we are here(if we don't blow ourselves up in the intervening years).
Grumpy
It isn't the limits of technology, it's the limits set by spacetime and the unimaginable distances involved that will keep us(and any other advanced race)in their own solar system until they MUST leave to survive(not really a limit, there's a lot of solar system real estate available). And any interstellar trip will be one way, generations long and it will bankrupt the civilization that sends it out. Thus the ONLY logical motivation for interstellar travel(other than robot probes like Voyager)will have to be survival of the species. Otherwise, the only connection two civilizations could have are long distance ones punctuated by long wait times between responses. And even that is unlikely, given the fact that only solar systems within about 100 lys could possibly know we exist, and since Howdy Doody is what they will see first, they won't think we have any intelligent life here and an answer would take another 100 years to reach us, anyway. Space is huge, we are very, very small. Faster than light travel is a fantasy that Science Fiction needs to drive the narrative(though there have been accurate depictions of these limits, usually involving cryogenic sleep or other workarounds), the Universe says no in no uncertain terms(if a supermassive BH cannot accelerate a single proton faster than light, we won't either). It will be another 100,000 years before everyone in just this galaxy could know we are here(if we don't blow ourselves up in the intervening years).
Grumpy
Ivan Seeking
Registered Senior Member
It clear that you have made up your mind about the limits of physics without even having a complete model. So your position is a religious one - faith based. Given the hypotheses emerging from areas of study like M-Theory, there is no logical basis for absolute limits in this regard. Your position depends entirely on the current limits of knowledge.
Ivan Seeking
On the contrary, it is because I have spent the effort and obtained the education to understand our current knowledge of the Universe that I have a pretty good idea of just what IS going to be possible with our technology(and where we should apply our efforts to learn more)and what is just magical thinking. It is magical thinking to expect even thousands of years of technological advance will give us Star Trek like ability to break the laws that the Universe itself can not break with energy events equivalent to billions of times the output of our sun. "Man's got to know his limitations." could have been written to describe the situation. If a creator was trying to create the Universe so that the inhabitants of one solar system could never bother the residents of another, he's done an excellent(but not quite perfect)job. The fastest thing man has ever made, Voyager, just left our sun's outer shockwave and is in interstellar space(after 36 years of travel, it's radial velocity to the sun is 11 miles per second, or about 40,000 miles per hour, it's actual linear velocity about 1.5 times that(it left at an angle of about 35-40 degrees). At it's speed it would take about 10,000 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima, a red dwarf star that is the smallest of a three star system, Centauri, if it was aimed in the right direction(it isn't anywhere close). It will be millions of years before it gets to any star, maybe longer. Some day trip, huh?
Grumpy
On the contrary, it is because I have spent the effort and obtained the education to understand our current knowledge of the Universe that I have a pretty good idea of just what IS going to be possible with our technology(and where we should apply our efforts to learn more)and what is just magical thinking. It is magical thinking to expect even thousands of years of technological advance will give us Star Trek like ability to break the laws that the Universe itself can not break with energy events equivalent to billions of times the output of our sun. "Man's got to know his limitations." could have been written to describe the situation. If a creator was trying to create the Universe so that the inhabitants of one solar system could never bother the residents of another, he's done an excellent(but not quite perfect)job. The fastest thing man has ever made, Voyager, just left our sun's outer shockwave and is in interstellar space(after 36 years of travel, it's radial velocity to the sun is 11 miles per second, or about 40,000 miles per hour, it's actual linear velocity about 1.5 times that(it left at an angle of about 35-40 degrees). At it's speed it would take about 10,000 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima, a red dwarf star that is the smallest of a three star system, Centauri, if it was aimed in the right direction(it isn't anywhere close). It will be millions of years before it gets to any star, maybe longer. Some day trip, huh?
Grumpy
Ivan Seeking
Registered Senior Member
Ivan Seeking
On the contrary, it is because I have spent the effort and obtained the education to understand our current knowledge of the Universe that I have a pretty good idea of just what IS going to be possible with our technology(and where we should apply our efforts to learn more)and what is just magical thinking. It is magical thinking to expect even thousands of years of technological advance will give us Star Trek like ability to break the laws that the Universe itself can not break with energy events equivalent to billions of times the output of our sun. "Man's got to know his limitations." could have been written to describe the situation. If a creator was trying to create the Universe so that the inhabitants of one solar system could never bother the residents of another, he's done an excellent(but not quite perfect)job. The fastest thing man has ever made, Voyager, just left our sun's outer shockwave and is in interstellar space(after 36 years of travel, it's radial velocity to the sun is 11 miles per second, or about 40,000 miles per hour, it's actual linear velocity about 1.5 times that(it left at an angle of about 35-40 degrees). At it's speed it would take about 10,000 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima, a red dwarf star that is the smallest of a three star system, Centauri, if it was aimed in the right direction(it isn't anywhere close). It will be millions of years before it gets to any star, maybe longer. Some day trip, huh?
Grumpy
Your statement depends entirely on our current understanding of physics. You have added nothing to the discussion. Until we have a complete model for physics, we have no way to know what absolute limits exist. We can say what the current models say. But the inability to produce a unified theory suggests that we don't have a complete picture. And what we do know now only limits exotic conveyances as a practical matter. So the door has clearly not been shut. It is simple logic. Even time travel to the past has not been completely ruled out. In short, my statement is based on logic and yours is based on faith.
...And his understanding appears limited. He thinks that things take a long time, and therefore cannot be true. This is a false understanding of what aliens could be dealing with.
Grumpy doesn't understand three implications:
1) There are theoretical devices that could cut the time down dramatically close to the speed of light
2) We have theories about the metric in which we could theoretically create a device which could move even faster than light
3) The physics of an alien life might be so advanced, it might be a new technology altogether!
Agreed.
However, let me put on my UFO believer hat. (And yes, one guy I told about this later actually said some of these things.)
[believer hat on]
I can't believe you think that those lights "can be found on a traditional craft!" Required position lighting in the USA is RED AND GREEN. Not red and blue. Look it up; it's an official FAA law. 14 CFR 91.209 if you don't believe me. That's not just my opinion; that's the law. So it could not have been an aircraft.
And then they couldn't see him on radar! The craft must have been transparent to regular radar pulses. I asked when I was talking to the tower and they admitted they couldn't see him on radar. And then a few days later I saw men in dark suits coming out of the tower and getting into a jet! What were they telling the people in the tower?
And when I asked a controller about it several months later he claimed he couldn't even remember the incident. How much money were they offered to "forget about it?"
Then there's the speed issue. I lost sight of his previous position for only about 15 seconds - but when I turned back he was completely gone. The visibility was about 40 miles; I could see both Manhattan and the Hamptons. For him to have covered 40 miles in 15 seconds would require a speed of almost 10,000 MPH! Keep in mind that he started at my speed (about 100 knots) and then accelerated to 10,000 MPH in a few seconds. No Earth craft could do that - and more importantly no human could survive it if it did. Therefore it could not possibly have been a terrestrial vehicle.
Think I'm done? I'm just getting started!
This occurred right around the area that TWA flight 800 "accidentally" exploded in 1996, killing everyone on board. Investigators never found the cause of that explosion. They _guessed_ it was a fuel tank explosion, but a fuel tank explosion had never happened before on a 747 so it was, by definition, impossible for that to happen. And as Sherlock Holmes pointed out, once you eliminate the impossible, only the improbable remains.
Months after the investigation concluded a UFO site reported that a radar blip had been seen near the 747 before it exploded, but had not been reported due to a government cover-up. Several other people also came forward, saying they saw a streak of light just before it exploded. One witness described the streak as red! What are the odds that two different red vehicles, both suspicious, had red lights on them? It was clearly the same vehicle.
[believer hat off]
Yes, I actually had one guy claiming much of the above. He was a bit of a kook.
BTW I wouldn't put much on radar not being able to see a vehicle. The tower operators sometimes could not see ME at that reporting point. The Republic tower used the Islip radar feed at that time, and at 1500 feet over Captree they had trouble picking out aircraft skin returns from the ground clutter. (And since I was renting aircraft from a bargain-basement FBO at the time, their transponders did not work 100% of the time.)