Former Air Force Pilot Breaks Down UFO Footage | WIRED

Key Takeaways

the pentagon's report on ufos or uaps unidentified aerial phenomena was released to congress and a big takeaway is many of the anomalous objects that appear in the report remain unidentified to understand why experts and pilots remain baffled we spoke to veteran pilot andrea finley i am currently a pilot for major airlines flying 737s and i was previously a colonel in the air force i flew the f-15c eagle the t-38 talon and the t6 texan ii and i was an instructor in all three of those airframes ultimately pilots seem to be the ones who are seeing a lot of these objects because they are out over the ocean flying i can't imagine being in their shoes and seeing what they saw i think it would be terrifying to not know what this object was colonel then is going to walk us through videos of unidentified aerial phenomena and explain the traits that make them unidentifiable from a physics and aerodynamics perspective let's unpack the first trait anti-gravity the acorn shape pyramid shape and the spherical shape they seem to overcome gravity without any visible propulsion or any airfoils that provide lift or what we would traditionally call a wing since the dawn of aviation on earth which has been about 120 years now normally lift is produced when an aircraft increases speed the air goes over the top of the wing and the bottom of the wing and meets at the end of the wing at the same time but because the top of the wing is a different size than the bottom it's going to create a negative pressure because it's traveling faster and it essentially sucks the wing and the rest of the aircraft into that negative pressure area and that's what we refer to as lift okay so the unidentified aerial phenomena don't appear to have recognizable wings for lyft but what about their propulsion i'm watching the gimbal video this was filmed in 2015 and as you can see at the top it's using the infrared sensor and that is depicted by the ir at the top of the screen there the pod has multiple sensors it has both an electro optical sensor and an infrared sensor to detect targets what's noticeable is that there's no visible infrared exhaust plume coming from this object and that indicates no source of propulsion as we know it where you see wht which stands for white hot so the cooler heat signatures will appear as black and the hottest targets are going to be displayed as white a normal fighter size target will have a heat signature that can be detected approximately 10 nautical miles away with an infrared sensor the skin friction of an aircraft enough flying through the air is going to be able to give a heat signature so that a targeting pot will be able to detect it these objects don't seem to generate exhaust so it's difficult to understand how they're creating propulsion this leads to the second unidentifiable trait they fly at hyper speed at 180 knots right now that is the actual closing velocity of that target to the post-owned ship the f-18 that's carrying the pod from the bottom there on the left-hand side you see the f-18s air speed 258 nautical miles per hour or mach 0.62 and you can roughly tell if you do some rough math that that object is going approximately 500 miles per hour without any visible propulsion or any airfoils that provide lift that's fast but not supersonic fast so let's consider the video taken during the 2004 uss nimitz encounter you can see at the very end the video here this aircraft just scoots off the screen very quickly based on that and based on the testimony of the uss princeton operators that found that object 60 miles away several seconds later it's clear that this object was traveling at very high rates of speed with a lot of acceleration according to the calculations of the uss princeton radar team the so-called tic-tac-uap would have reached a maximum speed of about 46 000 miles per hour during a descent or 60 times the speed of sound as a point of comparison the fastest manned aircraft that the us air force has ever operationally produced is the lockheed sr-71 blackbird which flew at mach 3.2 or three times the speed of sound the experimental north american x-15 which flew about mach 6.7 or 4500 miles per hour in 1967 but what about present-day tech it's no secret that the united states as well as multiple other countries are working on hypersonic technology and hypersonic means anywhere from five times the speed of sound to ten times the speed of sound it's pretty quick so the boeing x51 wave rider is one of those such vehicles this is an unmanned vehicle that's capable of flying up to 70 000 feet and up to mach 5. other countries that have this technology or are working on it include india russia and china for example another attribute of uaps that make them tricky to observe is stealth most of these images are infrared sensors that are just capturing the heat signature of the aircraft this video is using night vision video on the deck of a u.s navy destroyer and the shape itself is unusual it's similar to our b2 which has stealth technology but it's not quite the same shape it's possible that the pyramid shape is flat regular surfaces that would deflect radar energy and not let it return to the host it's possible that that is a stealth technology and that's why operators have had trouble capturing this on their radars stealth crafts work to scramble radar in two ways first with irregular flat surfaces like the b2 bomber that will not easily return the radar beam and second by using radar absorbing materials on the craft's exterior it's unclear why it is flashing but some of it might have to do with the quality of the camera or the night vision video that they have it's really tough to tell what the actual colors are or if it is metallic or silver and yet the us doesn't have a monopoly on planes that confuse radar the chinese have the j-20 the russians fly the su-57 and then japan south korea indonesia they all have fairly advanced stealth technology programs another anomalous trait uaps seem to have is that they are transmitting splash transmedium just means that these objects are moving easily between different environments such as space our atmosphere and even underwater this video was taken from off the coast of san diego and the most notable feature is the ability to fly both in air and underwater as soon as the object nears the water they are waiting to mark the accordance the bearing and range of where this object went down and they are i don't know i'm not sure this video i was like i don't know that i can really because there's nothing we have that's even remotely close to this so i i don't even really know what to say about it it looks like it did go into the water you think that the object has crashed however when submarines went to go look for the object there was no trace of its remains what's significant about that is that it probably has a capability to also travel under the water we have nothing here in the united states anyway that can operate as both an aircraft and a submarine a recently leaked video of what is allegedly the radar screen aboard the uss omaha might support the jaw-dropping assertion that this uap dropped into the water and swam away as investigators sift through the mountain of data connected to the uap report colonel themly will keep an open mind and her eyes on the sky there are possibilities that some of these aircraft could be foreign adversarial aircraft that are coming here to collect intelligence there's possibilities that there are individuals within the united states that are creating this technology we don't know what this is and there are a lot of unanswered questions still they seem to defy every law of physics and aerodynamics that we know i'm excited that these questions are going to start being answered again i'm a skeptic i want proof i want to be able to see and believe something so i'm glad that the pentagon is doing investigation so we can actually figure out what these objects are