How Can Highly Trained Military Pilots Possibly Misinterpret Things They See?

Eburacum said:
As a passenger I once saw a 'white tic tac plane' far below me as we flew over a local airfield. The plane I was in was travelling at about 37,000 feet; the outline of the local airport far below could be seen quite easily, and so could a small, detail-less aircraft approaching the airfield as we passed. To my surprise the 'tic tac' flew along the length of the runway and left at the other end without landing.
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It's likely there were other aircraft around that you did not spot because your eye was drawn to the runway, so you noticed the pilot who did the runway overflight.
 
Ann K said:
I notice the video referenced by @Mick West was only posted a day ago, which suggests this may be a "bandwagon" study hoping to cash in on riding the coattails of the recent government hearings.
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It's from the Sol foundation conference in November 2023. Organized by Garry Nolan. I think it's based on actual belief.
 
From @Ann K summery in post #160:

External Quote:
It discusses experiments suggesting that human intention can affect physical systems, challenging notions of unbiased scientific observation.
That seems right out of the Institute Of Noetic Science (IONS):

External Quote:
Our premise: at the nexus of inner knowing (noetics) and outer investigation (science), we will discover entirely new ways of being and of doing that uplift humanity and advance thriving for all.
https://noetic.org/about/noetic-sciences/

Basically, blending science with subjective feelings and experiences to gain new knowledge, with there ultimate goal of mind over matter:

External Quote:
Our "moonshot" — a multidisciplinary effort to reliably and robustly demonstrate the mind's influence on a physical system.
https://noetic.org/science/hypothesis/

Something Whiteley seems to be into according to her faculty page from University Collage London (bold by me):

External Quote:
The curiosity about how we can perform in extreme circumstances and exceed our own expectations, lead Iya to learn how to fly, skydive, scuba and freedive among other hobbies; and to practice Martial Arts, Korean Medicine, Family Constellation, Regression practice; and study psychology and computer science – the cross disciplinary area now termed, Human Factors and Cognitive Engineering.
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/44848

So, we have (bold in original):

External Quote:
Family Constellations
External Quote:
, also known as Systemic Constellations and Systemic Family Constellations, is a pseudoscientific[1] therapeutic method which draws on elements of family systems therapy, existential phenomenology and Zulu beliefs and attitudes to family.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Constellations

And I'm guessing Regression practice means this:

External Quote:
Regression therapy
External Quote:
is a form of psychotherapy in which a therapist leads a person to remember events buried in the subconscious. The goal of regression therapy is to bring repressed emotions to a conscious state and then release them. Regression therapy can include hypnosis, a trancelike state in which a person is open to suggestions.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/regressive-hypnosis-therapy-5270347

As well as Han bang:

External Quote:
...Han bang, which is the broader umbrella of traditional Korean medicine that incorporates acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, and herbal remedies. It focuses on balancing the energies of the body and the elements of earth, fire, water, metal, and wood.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/hanyak

From Whiteley's LinkedIn page, she seems to have gotten 2 PhDs in the same field from 2 different institutions, unless there is something about how UK universities are named or affiliated:

1707844017064.png
 
MyMatesBrainwashed said:
> 2. The promotion of UAP-related research that is commercially and ecologically responsible.

a) What does that even mean?
b) What was the ecological footprint of the conference? Is that responsible?
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Personally, I'd happily throw petrol on almost everything they've come up with and set it alight. Which isn't very ecologically responsible. So clearly my input wouldn't be welcome.
 
Harabeck said:
Here's an interesting tidbit I found about Russian UFO research. Apparently in the 80's they implemented what the UAPTF and AARO have so far failed to do: establish a unified way to report UFOs and analyze the resulting reports. As a result, they got a lot of reports of balloons and rocket launches. Some of the cases even involved attempted aerial interceptions.

External Quote:
In January 1980, the Soviet Ministry of Defense issued a directive to all military forces to report
"any inexplicable, exotic, extraordinary phenomenon". Sokolov described how this essentially
converted millions of military personnel across one sixth of the Earth's surface into a sensory
network for UFOs. "It is not likely that anybody could organize such a large-scale research," he
boasted, "and practically with no financing."

Over the course of more than a decade, Platov's and Sokolov's teams together collected and
analyzed about 3,000 detailed messages, covering about 400 individual events.

A pattern soon emerged.

"Practically all the mass night observations of UFOs were unambiguously identified as the effects
accompanying the launches of rockets or tests of aerospace equipment," the report concludes.
These sightings were mainly associated with activity at the secret rocket base at Plesetsk, north
of Moscow.

In about 10-12 percent of the reports, they also identified another category of "flying objects," or
as they clarified it, "floating objects." These were meteorological and scientific balloons, which
sometimes acted in unexpected ways and were easily misperceived by ground personnel and by
pilots.

Specifically, Platov and Migulin describe events on June 3, 1982, near Chita in southern Siberia,
and on September 13, 1982, on the far-eastern Chukhotskiy Penninsula. In both cases, balloon
launches were recorded but the balloons reached a much greater altitude than usually before
bursting. Air defense units reacted in both cases by scrambling interceptors to attack the UFOs.

"The described episodes show that even experienced pilots are not immune against errors in the
evaluation of the size of observed objects, the distances to them, and their identification with
particular phenomena," the report observes.
(Emphasis mine)

http://www.jamesoberg.com/russian_report_says_most_ufos_are_rocket_launches.pdf

I'd love to read Platov's full report, but no luck finding it so far. I'll be doing some more digging into Platov's efforts, sounds like an interesting parallel to what the US is trying to do.
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I'd tread insanely carefully with this, Russian UAP narratives domestically are starkly different than what exists in foreign information environments, as are documented histories. With a lot of popular stories from over there, if you go to actual Russian sources, the stories are largely different.
Sokolov and his tales possibly rank among this. There's nothing for sure to call him out as a fake, but he exists among a crowd of Russian ufology TV stars that are never actually named or referenced in the wealth of uncovered information about Soviet parascience programs, unlike say Platov and Migulin. They make peripheral appearances like Platov and Sokolovs report on the history of Russian government-affiliated UFO research. What happened there is not entirely like what the US is trying to do. It is important to remember with the USSR, a lot of this research was government-affiliated on the merit of existing at research institutes, which, were almost entirely government controlled in that context, a lot of it wasn't actually directly interacting with the government like say Stolyarovs group (which debatably may not have had direct interactions either, he may have been there independently, tricky sourcing).
 
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I may need to re-listen to Alex Dietrich's chats with Mick to find quotes, but I could swear that she explained that the reason she supports the efforts of Ryan Graves is in large part because naval aviators like them and their colleagues are specifically not trained observers.
 
I'm not sure how that follows.

A pilot has good observation skills, but is trained to be aware of threats and potential dangers; this can lead to them misinterpreting stimuli as dangerous when they are not (meteors, batman balloons, starlink satellites, and so on).
 
Rum said:
supports the efforts of Ryan Graves
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The problem is the stated public goal of Ryan Graves and his "Americans for Safe Aerospace" organisation which is to improve air safety, seems to be largely a smokescreen for just being a UFO fan/personality and also to provide a route for him to use pilot sightings reported to his organisation in good faith to further the impression that UAP/UFOs are NHI craft etc.

The Starlink thing is a classic example of this, his organisations dismissal of the Starlink explanation and lack of any real investigation so far seems at odds with the stated goals.
 
jarlrmai said:
The problem is the stated public goal of Ryan Graves and his "Americans for Safe Aerospace" organisation which is to improve air safety,
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That's the name, but it's not their goal.
Article:
Who should get involved with Americans for Safe Aerospace?

Anyone who believes in the mission of Americans for Safe Aerospace and wants to join the fight for transparency about UAP is encouraged to get involved. We welcome everyone, from pilots and aerospace workers, to concerned citizens to scientists and academics and government officials.

This is 100% about "disclosure", ASA is lobbying for that. They exist to push this agenda to politicians.

They do state:
Article:
What is the mission of Americans for Safe Aerospace?
Our mission is to identify what's in our skies. We are dedicated to raising public awareness and educating policymakers on UAP as a matter of national security, aerospace safety, and scientific inquiry. Identifying domain awareness gaps is critical to U.S. national security. If UAP are foreign assets, we must respond appropriately. If UAP continue to defy conventional explanation — we must invest in scientific research. We support pilots, scientists, and politicians through education, advocacy, and political action.
But the implied claim, that unidentified UAP pose a risk ("potential risk", not even a potential danger), is the one they're connecting to disclosure as a rationale, though it's not sound reasoning. Especially if these are foreign assets, secrecy rather than transparency seems the wiser course of action.

That UAP claim is bolstered by their UAP guide:
Article:
How can I learn more about UAP?
UAP Guide offers a helpful introduction to UAP that has been endorsed by subject matter experts on the topic. UAP Guide covers significant reports and incidents from witnesses in their own words as well as statements from policymakers, military and intelligence officers, academics and journalists.

It's a collection of mostly out-of-context quotes that ought to be easy to debunk if there weren't so many of them.
 
It's a well-known fact that pilots have different eyes installed when they get their licenses, which make them immune to the typical failures of human vision. Thus, they never (or rarely) mistake something they see, nor are they confused by perspective. And they have an ability to gauge distance of single lights without other visual reference.
(Where'd I leave that sarcasm emoji?)

I think the notion that pilots (and military pilots in particular) have some superior ability that other humans do not possess comes from idolization. Nothing about being a pilot makes a difference in how your brain interprets visual stimuli. As with anyone and everyone, when we see something, our brain searches through memory to find a similar image in order to compare it to. Oftentimes this results in misidentification.

For example, a recent post on social media showed a close up picture of a hand - palm up - holding a sea urchin with a swimming pool in the immediate background. The caption read something to the effect of, "It took me X-long to figure out this wasn't a curly-haired woman living her best life."
It took me several minutes to figure out what it was, and from the comments I saw many people had to be told what it was. And this was with the prompt that it wasn't what it seemed.
In our brains we are trying to figure out what we see, and without enough information our brains are liable to fashion erroneous conclusions. This happens all the time, and pilots are not gifted with eyes and brains that fix that problem. And the most training can do is alert us to temper our trust in visual stimuli.
 
JAFO said:
Can confirm as former Intelligence Analyst trained to identify known friendly and hostile equipment. Beyond a particular degree of certainty it may be an unknown.
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Yes, I'd imagine 'trained observers' do get some training, and in relation to 'observing'. And as such very likely are more competent to judge an object.

BUT...I sense that is not really the duplicitous manner in which Nick Pope and others use 'trained observers'. The way Nick Pope uses it ( and he does so in relation to almost any authority figures such as police, or even commercial pilots ) is as if to imply that these people have some sort of special 'observing' powers in general. For example if a police officer had never done fishing and never even seen a fish then he...as a 'trained observer'....would have a better idea what fish it was than even some member of Joe Public who knew about fishing. Nick Pope is granting his 'trained observers' some sort of universal powers.
 
Scaramanga said:
Yes, I'd imagine 'trained observers' do get some training, and in relation to 'observing'. And as such very likely are more competent to judge an object.
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But we don't have to imagine that pilots get flying training.

Yet pilot error still occurs. Even in the military.

Despite those errors we still trust pilots to fly planes. We still learn how to fly planes from them. We understand that poop happens.

I'm beginning to wonder if that sol foundation video is gaslighting in some form.
 
Ann K said:
Birds, however, don't engender a lot of attention from Congress, and "likes" and money when portrayed in a YouTube video.
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You haven't done the work.
Take a decade to spread far and wide that the government knows things about birds they don't want you to know. Question why the DoD employs bird experts. Ask what your tax dollars are being spent on. And be shocked that they're still allowed to endanger mission-critical flights.
And then you can get your own rumor-whistleblower and go to Congress.

(First, though I suggest buying a ranch and getting government funding to observe birds there, an Advanced Avian Watch Special Access Program, if you will. Running it yourself means having certainty that there's a secret government bird program.)
dodpif_2018b-350x350.png
 
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I was out for my morning workout on the Indian River Lagoon early today in hard dark. I was going 12 kph in my kayak; simply going 5km south to turn around and paddle back for a total 10km paddle. There are a fair number of lights around; houses, cars going across the causeways, flashing channel markers, etc... I'm always on the lookout for vessels even though I've mostly got the place to myself in the early morning. There was a new white light that my brain interpreted as a mast light on a vessel in the ICW channel approaching from the south. Speed would have been around 20 kts. But there were no running lights which seemed odd.

Turns out it was a mooring buoy to which a light had been added. The buoy has been there as long as I've lived here but it wasn't lit. Instead of a vessel moving 20 kts with a mast light several meters above the water it was a stationary light no more than one meter above the water. So my brain was wrong on the distance to the object and the speed of the object by a large margin.

I'm on the water all the time for work and play day and night. Decades at it. Point lights without other contextual information are easy to mistake.
 
Slow Joe said:
How in the world can pilots not know what parallax is? Aren't pilots trained to fly by instruments alone because their eye's cannot tell the difference between the sky and sea in some weather conditions?
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As a "highly trained" former F14 fighter pilot I am often flattered yet surprised at the public perception that fighter pilots are somehow super human.
We have a bell curve of skill levels in aviation. Most pilots fall in the middle, a small percentage are amazing and a small percentage just aren't that great.
One thing all fighter pilots have in common is that we are human. We are susceptible to all the same misinterpretation of optical illusions as anyone else.
Yes, we get training and experience in understanding phenomenon that can effect our perception of reality but even the best pilots can be fooled, completely misunderstand what they are being presented with. Sometimes with fatal consequences.

The media often mentions the words, "Navy pilots are 'trained observers'."
After 22 years as a fighter pilot/Naval Aviator I have no idea what they mean by that. There is no observer training course for pilots that I am aware of. The term, while sounding important, is vague at best.

The other concept people need to be aware of is that military equipment is not magic. It has flaws and fails like any other high performance equipment.

Radars often present false targets or the software interprets performance incorrectly assigning wildly incorrect speeds, altitudes or movements. The operator needs to be familiar with their equipment to weed out bugus returns. You can have varying performance between two of the same piece of equipment or a subsystem could be glitching.
My point is, just because a piece of equipment says a target suddenly flew straight up to 80,000ft doesn't mean it actually happened. An operator would normally disregard such performance as a glitch or possible jamming/interference.(sometimes unintentional) interference from other equipment or the atmospherics of the day, including space weather.
 
scombrid said:
I was out for my morning workout on the Indian River Lagoon early today in hard dark. I was going 12 kph in my kayak; simply going 5km south to turn around and paddle back for a total 10km paddle. There are a fair number of lights around; houses, cars going across the causeways, flashing channel markers, etc... I'm always on the lookout for vessels even though I've mostly got the place to myself in the early morning. There was a new white light that my brain interpreted as a mast light on a vessel in the ICW channel approaching from the south. Speed would have been around 20 kts. But there were no running lights which seemed odd.

Turns out it was a mooring buoy to which a light had been added. The buoy has been there as long as I've lived here but it wasn't lit. Instead of a vessel moving 20 kts with a mast light several meters above the water it was a stationary light no more than one meter above the water. So my brain was wrong on the distance to the object and the speed of the object by a large margin.

I'm on the water all the time for work and play day and night. Decades at it. Point lights without other contextual information are easy to mistake.
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But you're not a USN Top Gun "trained observer," amirite?
 
Scaramanga said:
Yes, I'd imagine 'trained observers' do get some training, and in relation to 'observing'. And as such very likely are more competent to judge an object.

BUT...I sense that is not really the duplicitous manner in which Nick Pope and others use 'trained observers'. The way Nick Pope uses it ( and he does so in relation to almost any authority figures such as police, or even commercial pilots ) is as if to imply that these people have some sort of special 'observing' powers in general. For example if a police officer had never done fishing and never even seen a fish then he...as a 'trained observer'....would have a better idea what fish it was than even some member of Joe Public who knew about fishing. Nick Pope is granting his 'trained observers' some sort of universal powers.
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Concur with this.
As a former fighter pilot, commercial pilot, I was trained at the Naval Aviation Safety School as an accident investigator.
We were taught:
Eye witness testimony is often incorrect even with trained professionals.
"The pilot "trained observer" thing is ridiculous.
Yes, we were trained to recognize threat aircraft, their distance, weapons and energy state. That doesn't mean a pilot can estimate size and speed of a unfamiliar object without any other reference.
 
They probably are really good at knowing what's real and what's not. Normal person in same position would probably be much worse. But they make mistakes, then those mistakes become a narrative, but not a reliable statistic.
 
ideamug said:
They probably are really good at knowing what's real and what's not. Normal person in same position would probably be much worse. But they make mistakes, then those mistakes become a narrative, but not a reliable statistic.
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In aviation we call that "situational awareness". A term we use quite often during a debrief.

Our perception of reality vs actual reality.

Rarely is our situational awareness 100%. We use the comparison of multiple types of sensors and data analysis to constantly update our situational awareness.

In aviation your situational awareness can be the difference between success(survival) or loss.

We also have training on how personal bias can also effect our situational awareness and and subsequent actions/conclusions.
 
Leekster said:
In aviation your situational awareness can be the difference between success(survival) or loss.
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OT: During WWII my uncle's dog, given to him by a friend who had been stationed at heavily-bombed Portsmouth, could distinguish British aircraft from German aircraft by sound alone, and reacted strongly to the latter. His "situational awareness" was trusted to the point that when Goofy whined and headed for the basement, EVERYBODY in their five story building headed for the basement.
 
Ann K said:
OT: During WWII my uncle's dog, given to him by a friend who had been stationed at heavily-bombed Portsmouth, could distinguish British aircraft from German aircraft by sound alone, and reacted strongly to the latter. His "situational awareness" was trusted to the point that when Goofy whined and headed for the basement, EVERYBODY in their five story building headed for the basement.
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that was awareness of a single factor, trained into the dog who had the advantage of superhuman hearing

situational awareness is holistic, it means being aware of possible threats and pissible options you have. E.g. when you're about to land, knowing who's in front of you, who's behind you, how fast they are, what's happening on the runway, what the visibility is, how the wind is going, if there's an emergency being declared, all the while doing the work of preparing your own plane for the landing.

When something happens that doesn't fit the situation, then a pilot must figure out what caused it. E.g. if the indicated air speed drops, normally you'd pitch down to pick up speed, but if the situation is such that the aircraft shouldn't be slowing down, then it's better to check if the instrument is broken.
 
tobigtofool said:
So I find it hard to believe its easy for a fighter pilot like Fraver who has shown to me to be pretty competent in interviews to have been mistaken or a victim of parallax.
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It's probably not easy for a fighter pilot to make that mistake but from what he said on the JRE, Fravor most likely did make that mistake. His retelling of the incident to Rogan indicates his conclusion of what he thought was happening wasn't what was actually going on during the incident. His initial mistake is the catalyst for the errors in his judgment of what the UFO was actually doing throughout the entire incident. The mistake that he made was to assume to know the unknown. In this case, it was the size of the object. Upon first seeing the UFO, he assumed that its size was the same as the average fighter jets. Therefore, subconsciously, every mental calculation that he's making about the UFO resulted in being inaccurate. This means that his judgment on the distance of the object was inaccurate since knowing the size of an object, you can mentally calculate (still inaccurate) how far it is by comparing the actual size of the object to the size of what you're visually seeing. Using this inaccurate data, estimating the object's speed will also result in it being inaccurate.

You've also made a mistake here as well. The mistake that you made was, assuming that Fraver couldn't have made a mistake on the basis of him being competent in interviews. Being competent in interviews has no bearing on people making mistakes during an incident that happened in the past.
 
night912 said:
Upon first seeing the UFO, he assumed that its size was the same as the average fighter jets. Therefore, subconsciously, every mental calculation that he's making about the UFO resulted in being inaccurate. This means that his judgment on the distance of the object was inaccurate since knowing the size of an object, you can mentally calculate (still inaccurate) how far it is by comparing the actual size of the object to the size of what you're visually seeing.
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As soon as you get the distance wrong, you're victim to parallax error (unless you notice and correct it). It's not "easy" or "hard", it just is.
 
JMartJr said:
I think about it statistically: there is some small chance that any given pilot when faced with, say, a balloon, will misinterpret what is going on, misjudge size and thus distance and speed of what they are seeing, and fill in details in memory and create an incredible UFO report out of an odd balloon encounter. It is pretty unlikely, most of the times they'll see a balloon and recognize a balloon -- but not every single time. So from time to time some pilot, could be anybody it's not a reflection on their skills and training, makes this mistake and sees a hypersonic UFO doing impossible things. There are a LOT of pilots flying a LOT of missions, in airspace where a LOT of balloons escape, a lot of planes are flying out in the LIZ, a lot of drones are bopping about, etc. Some very tiny percentage of those lead to misconceptions and strange UAP reports.

To me, unless pilots are infallible, this would seem unavoidable if there are enough pilots, balloons, missions, drones, etc. And most pilots are good -- but not infallible.
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Since we're talking about this again, I'd like to take the opportunity to add one point to my earlier post, quoted above:

We will never hear much about the large number of times a pilot might see a balloon, a missile, a drone, a distant plane, and correctly identify them. And we are unlikely to hear about the cases where initial error created an impossible UFO, but further observation cleared it up and the pilot then recognized the object, said "Oh, ha, silly me, now I can see that's just a balloon," and went about his or her business. We only hear about the times when some observational error creates the illusion of a physics defying UFO doing incredible things and the error is not self-corrected on the spot.

This leaves the reports created by such errors standing without the context -- that context being that there are multiple thousands of opportunities every day for such errors to be made and lead to a UFO report, but the overwhelming majority of the time the pilot gets it right and we never hear anything about it.

Pointing out that pilots, like everybody, can make mistakes absent this context may create the impression that pilots are being charged with being poor observers. That is not the case. But they ARE being recognized as human and thus capable of error, from time to time.
 
Mendel said:
As soon as you get the distance wrong, you're victim to parallax error (unless you notice and correct it). It's not "easy" or "hard", it just is.
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I find that to be one of the more ironic aspects about many of these reports - they will contain multiple incorrectly-estimated values, where the correction of one would lead to the correction of another. Distance/speed/accelleration being the classic combination. Affinity to the wrong values seems to be stronger when you have more than one, even if it would only take one correction to fix them all together.
 
FatPhil said:
I find that to be one of the more ironic aspects about many of these reports - they will contain multiple incorrectly-estimated values, where the correction of one would lead to the correction of another. Distance/speed/accelleration being the classic combination. Affinity to the wrong values seems to be stronger when you have more than one, even if it would only take one correction to fix them all together.
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We have seen this before on one thread, and I apologize profusely for not remembering which of the several threads and who should get the credit for the computations. But it was shown that one distance was perfectly compatible with straight-line travel of an object, while a different distance gave rise to the breathless "UFO breaking all the laws of physics" claims.
 
Ann K said:
We have seen this before on one thread, and I apologize profusely for not remembering which of the several threads and who should get the credit for the computations. But it was shown that one distance was perfectly compatible with straight-line travel of an object, while a different distance gave rise to the breathless "UFO breaking all the laws of physics" claims.
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In one of the GIMBAL threads, I argue that the "J-hook" is most certainly a parallax effect.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/pe...-january-2015-“gimbal”-uap.12990/#post-313280 pp.
 
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