Skip to main content

What's going on with the US military and UFOs?

Ufologists have been going crazy during the past year or so because the United States military has been in the news announcing that they are investigating the UFO phenomenon, and whether there's something behind it, and whether it might be a threat to the security of the country. The motivation behind this is several pieces of surveillance and training footage that show (seemingly) flying objects of unknown origin seemingly defying all known laws of physics, doing impossible maneuvers, and which don't seem to have any natural explanation. They have published some of these videos, and they probably have a lot more of them.

Is there something behind this phenomenon? Perhaps ufologists are not as crazy as it seems? Maybe there is something there? After all, if the military is taking it dead-serious, and are going to spend a lot of resources investigating the phenomenon, something must be happening? This cannot just be birds, weather balloons and lens flares...

I suppose it's possible that the observed unknown phenomena are something we don't know and don't understand, possibly a sign of being visited by extraterrestrial intelligence. It's also possible that reptilians from Zeta Reticuli have infiltrated humanity and are posing as humans in all the upper echelons of government. It's also possible that unicorns and leprechauns exist, we just can't see them. Everything is possible, when we get down to it.

However, is it probable and plausible? Not really.

No, not even if the United States military is investigating the phenomenon in all seriousness.

The military probably has literally and without exaggeration millions of hours of footage. Some of this footage will invariably show all kinds of things that weren't explicitly being looked for, like birds, clouds, some floating debris flying in front of the camera, exhaust heat from a plane, lens flares and other camera artifacts, dust in the camera lens, unusual weather phenomena and so on and so forth. The list is endless.

In the vast majority of cases these features will just be dismissed for what they are, because they are either recognizable, or not very notable (eg. because it doesn't really look like a flying solid object). There are different degrees of recognizability. Some (and probably the majority) of these things are probably immediately obvious and apparent what they are. A lesser amount of them may be things that are a bit harder to recognize, but still don't look particularly unusual, strange, or curious (such as eg. strange smudges or streaks of light).

However, with the probably literally millions of hours of footage, much of which has been taken in rather unusual circumstances (such as infrared cameras mounted on the underbelly of a fighter jet flying at supersonic speeds, not necessarily the most optimal setup for image quality), and with such varying degrees of recognizability of strange phenomena caught by them, it's basically inevitable that some of them will look extremely strange and curious. With so much footage it would actually be strange if nothing at all looked strange.

One person might never win the lottery. However, when ten million people play lottery, at least a few of them are bound to win the jackpot. Likewise with millions of hours of footage, some of which is going to inevitably show unexpected phenomena, it's pretty much assured that at least a few of those instances will be so over the top that it will be completely inexplicable.

Quite ironically, military personnel, especially combat pilots, are some of the least qualified and competent people to recognize and explain these strange artifacts caught on video. This is because their education and training is, ironically, working against them. They have been trained to look for and recognize enemy aircraft. Therefore when they see something that looks like a strange flying object (either directly or through a camera), they will assume it's some kind of aircraft, even though it might not be.

What I believe is happening here is that the military is taking these few dozens or hundreds of pieces of footage that are the most strange, and drawing incorrect conclusions because they don't know what they are showing. It could perhaps be good to investigate what they actually are, but I doubt that can be deduced from the footage alone, so it will remain a mystery, so it will essentially be a waste of time and money.

In some cases, however, I believe that the released "ufo" footage is actually deliberately deceitful, for whatever reason. (Who knows, maybe it's some kind of misdirection. Or some kind of ploy to get funding, even though that sounds like a conspiracy theory. In this case I don't even think it's all that far-fetched.)

For example, many have analyzed this one particular video that has been released by the military, which seems to show a strange seeming object not only flying at very high speeds, but at times changing shape.


What these people are surmising, and I find it very plausible, is that what's being tracked here is another fighter jet, and what's being seen in the infrared camera here is the exhaust heat from that other plane. The reason why it changes shape at times is because as the infrared camera, which is in the underbelly of this fighter yet, needs to reorient itself to track the other plane, not only will it rotate to point at that other object, but will also rotate around its longitudinal axis, and it's precisely this rotation that causes the shape of the detail to change, due to the internal geometry of the camera. The white smudge is basically just over-exposed over-saturated, and thus looks much larger than it really is, and as the camera rotates along its longitudinal axis and thus its internal geometry rotates with it, the shape of this over-exposed blob will change as well.

I do not know the entire history of this video clip, nor whether the conversation that can be heard in it is genuine or added later. The conversation is apparently some people (maybe pilots, maybe people in some control center perhaps?) wondering what it is. Even if the conversation is genuine, it may simply be that it's people in the control center not being aware that the fighter jet is simply tracking another. It might also very well be that the audio track is staged and added later to the original video. It might simply be some routine training exercise video released by the military that somebody took the opportunity to create a fake ufo video from. (Or, as said previously, it might be misdirection from the military itself. Who knows.) It's also possible that we aren't actually getting the full context of the conversation (and that this is, for example, pretend communication between pilots during a flight exercise, where they pretend that other fighter jet to be an unknown enemy plane.) It's also not completely impossible that they are tracking an actual enemy (eg. Russian) fighter jet, although I think that's less likely. It's probably a training mission.

I find this significantly more plausible than it being something else.

Why would the military do this? Why would they announce this mission to investigate these things? As said, either because of their own ignorance, or because it's just a ploy to get funding. Wouldn't even sound so far-fetched.

Comments