DavidB66
Senior Member.
This may not be the best thread for what follows, but it does arise from discussions of the recent House committee hearing.
Mick West and Art Levine have both retweeted a comment on Twitter (X?) by a Dr Phil Metzger, who describes himself as a planetary scientist who has previously worked on radar analysis at NASA. His Twitter account is 'verified', which means very little, but a Florida Space Institute webpage does list a Dr Philip Metzger who meets the description in the Twitter account, so I will assume it is genuine.
Metzger's initial comment was that:
Amazingly, this provoked some disagreement! When not merely personal insults, the objections mostly boiled down to 'you're not an expert on Navy radars' and 'trust the highly trained pilots'. But in response to one comment Metzger gave one of the best skeptical summaries of the evidence as a whole that I have seen:
Mick West and Art Levine have both retweeted a comment on Twitter (X?) by a Dr Phil Metzger, who describes himself as a planetary scientist who has previously worked on radar analysis at NASA. His Twitter account is 'verified', which means very little, but a Florida Space Institute webpage does list a Dr Philip Metzger who meets the description in the Twitter account, so I will assume it is genuine.
Metzger's initial comment was that:
Lots of people are telling me that the radar observations make the aviator TicTac observations more likely an advanced vehicle, but tbh the radar observations are my biggest cause for doubt. (I used to be a radar/avionics engineer for NASA for many years chasing such anomalies.)
Amazingly, this provoked some disagreement! When not merely personal insults, the objections mostly boiled down to 'you're not an expert on Navy radars' and 'trust the highly trained pilots'. But in response to one comment Metzger gave one of the best skeptical summaries of the evidence as a whole that I have seen:
Thank you for sharing this. Apologies for the long reply. I just studied this and read it entirely. I have read some other material on these events, and this confirms what I had seen previously. I don't see anything compelling about an advanced aerial vehicle in this. It seems like
(1) random radar anomalies,
(2) Hawkeye saw nothing except maybe locked into waves at a much lower altitude than the Princeton reported (so likely unrelated).
(3) The first pilot only saw the water disturbance, nothing else.
(4) The next two aircraft confirmed the water disturbance but also saw an airborne object. The two crew members that descended for a closer look had a significant disagreement over what they saw. One thought it was stationary. The other thought it was flying at several hundred knots. This disagreement illustrates my point about the aviators possibly misjudging the distance. As they turned toward it, it seemed to move then they lost sight. This can be a symptom of misjudging its distance so doesn't seem that exciting.
(5) The Princeton then saw a radar object about 40-60 km away, possibly unrelated though the personnel made the leap to believing it was connected. This willingness to connect unrelated radar behaviors far away from each other may be the result of the excitement over all the events, causing them to be inflated [sic: does he mean 'conflated'?] unintentionally.
(6) A sub crew member who was retired at the time the report was written (like others mentioned; btw this indicates the report was written long after the events so memory is less reliable; also it cites Wikipedia for naval capabilities so I wonder who wrote it — certainly not the military) — this retired submariner says there were no sonar contacts, but the UAV observations spanned an area of 60 km and sonar range is 20-30 km so he was probably speaking in broad, non-precise terms.
(7) I should have included first, the whole thing started because of radar anomalies that one of the navy personnel said could have been upper altitude ice crystals with the radar having trouble tracking such a weak target so it seemed to dive faster than possible toward the ocean repeatedly. This is just a radar anomaly. They sent planes to look at it and they happened to see an unrelated water disturbance (a Chinese sub spying on the naval training, or a classified U.S. sub testing a capability the US won't talk about?) and possibly a balloon over the sub (?), in any case not at all the same thing the Princeton's radar saw. The Hawkeye had a lock at water level, much lower than what the Princeton saw, so maybe it was actually seeing the sub.
(8) The final aircraft went out hours later and at a different location and received input from an external radar that there was an object, but it was too weak for onboard radar to acquire. The onboard FLIR saw it, and it was a stationary object, probably a balloon. Maybe unrelated to the first balloon or maybe the same one. He saw nothing unusual about it.
(Summary) The observations all disagree and don't add up to anything interesting, IMO. I worked aviation radar for many years at NASA and it looks to me like this is all just normal radar behaviors that resulted in pilots being sent to investigate, and maybe they saw a balloon but the weird circumstances caused them to be misidentified. The report even says the intelligence officer was not interested (maybe he knew what it was but wasn't allowed to tell) and another officer said there was an anti-drug activity (a balloon?) operating in the area so he wasn't concerned.
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