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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Probably the most compelling example of a UFO encounter, the Nimitz incident, has multiple corroborating sources of information (sensors and human visual identification) suggesting behavior outside the bounds of known technology. From Fravor's testimony:

The air controller on the ship also had no idea but had been observing these objects on their Aegis combat system for the previous 2 weeks. They had been descending from above 80,000ft and coming rapidly down to 20,000ft would stay for hours and then go straight back up...

As all 4 looked down we saw a small white Tic Tac shaped object with the longitudinal axis pointing N/S and moving very abruptly over the white water. There were no Rotors, No Rotor wash, or any visible flight control surfaces like wings. ... As we pulled nose onto the object at approximately ½ of a mile with the object just left of our nose, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared right in front of our aircraft. Our wingman, roughly 8,000ft above us, also lost visual.

As we turned back towards our CAP point, roughly 60 miles east, the air controller let us know that the object had reappeared on the Princeton’s Aegis SPY 1 radar at our CAP point. This Tic Tac Object had just traveled 60 miles in a very short period of time (less than a minute)...

We returned to Nimitz and mentioned what we had witnessed to one of my crews who were getting ready to launch. It was that crew that took the now famous approximately 90 second video that was released by the USG in 2017...

Here you have 4 people (the original crew, Fravor et al) and radar and the FLIR video the second flight crew took (after the object appeared to go 60 miles in under a minute), all indicating that something very strange is happening. Obviously that doesn't prove it's aliens, but I think it makes the sensor glitch/camera smudge theory untenable given the multiple independent systems that interacted with the object.

From Fravor's testimony:

Fravor has admitted to playing pranks with his F-18 to try to make people think they were seeing a UFO. It is beyond me why people would take any of his UFO reports seriously. It's negligent that most news reports don't mention this about him.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/commander-david-fravor-faking-ufo-encounters-in-california-desert.10947/

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ&t=2939s

The fact that he played pranks on people to make them think they saw UFOs seems like weak evidence for a long-term commitment to deceiving people about his own experience up to the point of committing perjury, backed up by other members of his squad and when someone else took a video of it after he had landed.

I think it makes the sensor glitch/camera smudge theory untenable given the multiple independent systems that interacted with the object.

Multiple glitches happening at the same time are entirely possible. Combine this with power of suggestion and so on and you can get amazing results.

Sensor glitches may be for example software bugs.

There are limits to how far I'm willing to bend over backward in order to find a boring explanation. I'm pretty sure they didn't pull up within half a mile of a software bug, check it with naked eyes, and watch it make them eat dust.