"It moved in a way that defies the laws of physics. Couldn't possibly be man made..."

RedDoor said:
Apologies for what might be a pointless (first) post. But I've always thought of the following as a somewhat of a resource that I've over the years I've shown to many overly credulous people.
Thought it could be of value to others. UFO/UAP mysteries hardly ever even require such an explanation, but nonetheless it can be helpful to remind people that, well, THIS EXISTS:




Source: https://youtu.be/PptMrBFAO-A?si=rhvq8Tm_tm6iGYA3&t=26
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If I saw that thing at night I’d flip my stance and say it was aliens lol
 
This is having an uncanny valley effect on my brain - refuses to accept it as real.
Also - I would under no circumstances stand that close to the thing.
 
I've only seen that kind of manoeuverability in ornithopters before.

It's perhaps worth it to note that this kind of agility depends on the ratio of the rotor disk area to the weight of the device. The area scales with s² while the weight scales with s³, so this kind of agility does not scale to larger craft.

This means a sighting depends highly on a reliable estimate of size, which is impossible on a "light in the night" sighting, and given we've seen birds and bugs reported as spacecraft (and small UFO models on a string as successful hoaxes), hard to do from daylight images as well.

Also worth noting, reflection flashes from the otherwise almost invisible rotor disk ("no visible means of propulsion"). I wonder what this craft looks like in IR.
 
Now consider that that was nearly a decade old, and both motor tech and battery tech (and the ESCs that connect them) have improved since then. Composites are also cheaper now than they used to be too (heck, that bodywork looked plastic), so I'd expect a 2023 top-of-the-range equivalent to be even lighter and more manoeuvrable.

"Defies the laws of physics" typically just means "defies my understanding of the laws of physics", it's more a statement about self than about what was witnessed.

(Edit: but thanks for posting the link, it's well over a decade since my RC hobbiest workmates were sharing vids like that with me - and a fair few of those tricks were new, in particular the upside-down tap on the ground - wow!)
 
Whilst I do appreciate the awesome skill demonstrated by the remote control pilot in the video, I'm seriously considering reporting him to the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Aerospace devices).
 
PublicStranger said:
If I heard the sound of the rotor I'd definitely know it was a drone of some sort. Unless it was silent it would be very hard to think of this as UAP
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And they are clearly very small with low mass. When something 30 or 50 feet long flies like that, then you have my attention.
 
The sound from any drone might be masked by ambient sound near the witness, such as heavy traffic noise, noisy machinery, the sound of a ship's engines and the sounds of the sea in general (many apparent sightings of drones from ships have been made in recent years, all without any mention of sound from the drone); also wind noise, noise from wind-blown trees and other vegetation. The wind can also sometimes blow the sound of an aircraft of any type away from the witness.

Some significant fraction of sightings occur from inside vehicles and buildings, both of which could mask the sound of a drone. In short, the sound a drone makes is not always audible by any means.
 
grogpickle said:
drones can fly in flocks like birds, giving the illusion of mass.
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Three lights in a triangle (any triangle), and ufo believers will pronounce it an "equilateral triangle" and claim it's a UFO. (the post on reddit where I saw this has since been deleted)
 
The 2004 Nimitz encounter was described "as if the object was shot out of a rifle." Which is the way that I would describe the RC helicopter video.

However that UAP was also described 40-60 feet long, and traveling at speeds beyond mach 3. Which is not how I would describe this RC helicopter.

I love these kinds of examples as a check on my intuition about what is possible, but I'm also cautious about overly broad dismissal based on limited examples. ("This RC helicopter acts has surprisingly high acceleration, so we can't trust any reports of high acceleration.")
 
FatPhil said:
"Defies the laws of physics" typically just means "defies my understanding of the laws of physics", it's more a statement about self than about what was witnessed.
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Yep — without rigorous measurements (complete with error bars) and the math, it's just a fancy-sounding argument from incredulity. Exactly as useful as "It's impossible that what I saw was a plane."
 
FatPhil said:
"Defies the laws of physics" typically just means "defies my understanding of the laws of physics", it's more a statement about self than about what was witnessed.
Click to expand...
runner-up for what it means is "I overestimated size and distance", or, in the case of some "transmedium" sightings, underestimated it.

Kyle McDonald said:
The 2004 Nimitz encounter was described "as if the object was shot out of a rifle." Which is the way that I would describe the RC helicopter video.
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I wouldn't. I've seen rifles fired but never the bullets. It's "bang" and then there's a hole in the target. Which is how Fravor describes it: the tictac disappears, and then the radar operator tells him the radar contact appeared 60 miles away. (and of course it's an unwarranted conjecture that it's the same object.)

Missiles are visible but not as manoeuverable as that RC helicopter.
 
Mendel said:
I wouldn't. I've seen rifles fired but never the bullets. It's "bang" and then there's a hole in the target. Which is how Fravor describes it: the tictac disappears
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This is getting into a separate topic, but that's not the way I understood it.

Fravor said: "It starts to accelerate. It has an incredible rate of acceleration. And it takes off and it goes south. And it takes off like nothing I’ve ever seen. [...] This thing disappeared in a second; it was just gone." If Fravor had seen the tic-tac literally disappear, I doubt he would have described it as "accelerating", "taking off" or taking "a second".

Mick gets into this with Dietrich too, and in my opinion she describes it similarly. She uses her hands to indicate a direction that it traveled (rather than literally disappearing, which would not be accompanied by a direction), and she nods along when Mick says "instantaneous acceleration". I think it's a little confusing because Mick asks "did it vanish" and Dietrich says "it vanished, it disappeared, and then it was gone". But at this point she is making the same directional hand gesture, so it seems clear to me that she is using "vanished" and "disappeared" colloquially here the same way Fravor uses "disappeared" to mean that it sped off so fast that it was no longer visible in less than or around a second.

I would love to see Mick sit down with Fravor and Dietrich, along with a handful of different animated recreations of what they saw (based on different interpretations of what they have shared)—and just ask which one is most accurate to their experience. Instead we are here interpreting the nuances of language.
 
The 'instantaneous acceleration' aspect to the Tic-tac sighting sounds suspiciously like the instantaneous acceleration at the end of the FLIR1 video. Both Fravor and (presumably) Dietrich watched Underwood's film on the Nimitz, and they may have subconsciously conflated this behaviour with their memories of the Tic-tac. Since they do not seem to have been able to make sense of the characteristics of the Tic-tac when they saw it with their own eyes, the abrupt disappearance of the object in the FLIR1 video may have helped them to consolidate their memories.

However, it looks very likely that the abrupt disappearance of the FLIR1 object was almost certainly caused by the camera losing track of the object rather than any actual movement of the object itself, so this may have misled them somewhat.
 
I hate the phrase "instantaneous acceleration." It's practically meaningless. If you roll a ball off a table, I assure you that the ball will accelerate instantaneously (or, in an inertial reference frame, it will instantaneously go from accelerating to not accelerating). What they mean is high acceleration or extreme acceleration. Or possibly, infinite acceleration, if it's claimed that an object went from a velocity of 0 to a high velocity instantaneously or discontinuously. Which I don't believe is possible in this universe, so even if the object seemed to do that, it's just extreme acceleration.

If we're talking about physics — and this is high-school physics, stuff students learn in the first or second week — the terminology should be accurate.
 
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Edward Current said:
I hate the phrase "instantaneous acceleration." It's practically meaningless. If you roll a ball off a table, I assure you that the ball will accelerate instantaneously (or, in an inertial reference frame, it will instantaneously go from accelerating to not accelerating). What they mean is high acceleration or extreme acceleration. If we're talking about physics — and this is high-school physics, stuff students learn in the first or second week — the terminology should be accurate.
Click to expand...

It's a common shortcut. They mean "acquired a higher speed in a vanishingly short period of time", and "acquiring a higher speed" is accelerated" and "in a vanishingly short period of time" is "instantaneously", so it did accelerate instantaneously, so it must have undergone instantaneous acceleration. I don't think you'll ever fix this, as I don't think it's fixable. Of course, every time they say this, in order to understand what they're actually trying to say, we need to ask a follow-up question, which is a drag. This gives them the opportunitity of admitting they don't know a jerk when they see one (that's a technical term of the art), and then you can dismiss them as just babbling.
 
FatPhil said:
it's well over a decade since my RC hobbiest workmates were sharing vids like that with me
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This shows how fluffy my memory is. I stopped working with the RC nerds back in ~2008. However, whilst cleaning up my web area I came across this, from 2012:

That's the same family of stunt copter as the thing that absolute maestro was driving. Our dood did do some stunts, but nothing quite to the level of that Szabo guy. And clearly that 2012 experience was the thing that was sticking in my mind, not the earlier stuff from the workmates.
 
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