UFO over Hilo

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ATN_Pilot said:
I remember about five years ago there was a similar video purporting to show UFOs flying over Haiti. Clear video, sound of bystanders talking in the background that made it sound like it was being recorded live, etc. After everyone had been freaking out about it for a few weeks, claiming that it was the most definitive UFO video yet, the guy who made the video promised to provide a new "proof" video to the LA Times. When he did provide the video, it showed the same exact UFO as the Haiti video, but this time it was floating over a street in Paris. The camera pulled back slowly to reveal that the UFO was a miniature being flown by two old grandmas with a remote control, as they giggled. Turns out both videos were made with some of the newest computer animation technology available at the time, and it tricked virtually everyone. The conspiracy nuts at places like "Beyond Top Secret" were humiliated, and some of them still refused to believe it was faked, even after the creator admitted it was all part of demonstrating his computer animation skills to prepare for a movie project. Moral of the story is that these things are always fakes or misunderstandings about what we're seeing.

I saw something pretty strange fly over my house about a year ago. It freaked me out to the extent that I actually talked to one of the posters here with extensive military "top secret" experience to see what he thought about it. To this day, I can't really explain it. But do I think that it was an alien spacecraft? No, not really. Sure, I can't really rule it out, but it's far from the most likely explanation, and as a rational person, I can't jump to the most unlikely explanation when far more reasonable explanations could be found. To me, the idea that aliens are visiting our planet, trying to do it secretly apparently, but at the same time using crafts that are lit up like a Christmas tree, is just absurd. I can't accept it. Maybe there is other life out there. I actually kind of doubt it, but it's possible. But if they ever do visit Earth, I don't think it will be in a craft that just so happens to look exactly like what hollywood has devised for alien crafts, lit up bright so everyone can see it, while not telling anyone of their presence. Rather, I think they would make themselves known if they are peaceful. And if they aren't peaceful, I doubt their lack of peace will present itself as midnight cow mutilations and abductions of guys named Cleatus so they can "probe" them. It would more likely resemble complete annihilation of us in the time it would take us to blink. All of this conspiracy nonsense is just fantasy, dreamed up in the minds of hollywood storytellers, and then co-opted by the conspiracy theorists.
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How would you explain mass sightings (thousands of eye witnesses) like the Phoenix Lights?

I have my own beliefs about life outside of earth existing. And to me, they come from more credible sources than the conspiracy nuts you see on the internet. I doubt the public will ever be told the truth about such things though.
 
chrisreedrules said:
How would you explain mass sightings (thousands of eye witnesses) like the Phoenix Lights?
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The Phoenix Lights were explained many years ago. Nothing but a formation of military planes dropping flares. You can actually watch the flares disappear on the video with an overlay of the mountains as viewed from the exact location of the video and see without a doubt that the lights are flares falling behind the terrain. This is already settled. Other cases may not have been explained already, but if this case had a rational explanation, it's likely that those other cases do as well. The explanation just hasn't been discovered yet. I always prefer rational explanations over "it must be aliens just because I don't immediately know what it is."

And to me, they come from more credible sources than the conspiracy nuts you see on the internet. I doubt the public will ever be told the truth about such things though.
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This sounds very Qutch-like. "I know the truth, but it's hidden in secret backroom discussions on Gmail and PMs." If you have some evidence, go ahead and present it. If you have sources, tell us what they are.
 
SeanD said:
Although, UFO vids are neat on occasion, I will never understand why a superior species from another planet would use halogen bulbs on a space craft, or lights for that matter. "Hey look at us, shoot us down" Just sayin
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I always thought the same thing!
 
And yet there have been other credible experts who say that there is no possible way that what they saw were flares being dispensed by military aircraft. And this doesn't even begin to address the simple question of why the military would be dispensing flares over a populated area. Thousands of eye witness testimonies stated that a dark craft, several miles in diameter, passed directly overhead of them. The craft appeared over northern Arizona and gradually traveled south over nearly the entire length of the state, eventually passing south of Tucson and it was the apparently "wedge-shaped" object reported by the states governor, Governor Symington.
 
I'm not saying that I think aliens are visiting the earth on a regular basis... And I think 99% of UFO sightings have credible explanations. But what about that 1%? What about reports from F-106 drivers who were sent on UFO intercepts and saw balls of light speed away from them at incredible speeds? My dad was a project leader for DARPA and was chosen twice for SES. I won't tell you some of the things he has told me... But suffice it to say that there is much out there the public is not allowed to know.
 
chrisreedrules said:
How would you explain mass sightings (thousands of eye witnesses) like the Phoenix Lights?
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Much like the thousands of people who claim to have seen statues of the Virgin Mary crying, various "miracles", believe in various legends and myths, and so on. People don't know or understand what they are seeing and have to ascribe something to the "unknown" to have it make "sense" for them. It makes them more comfortable and they feel grounded in something they perceive as "real" to them, instead of something they can't accept or have no understanding, knowledge or experience of.

In all fields of science there is a residue of anomalies unexplained by the dominant theory. That does not mean the prevailing theory is wrong or that alternative theories are right. It just means that more work needs to be done to bring those anomalies into the accepted paradigm. In the meantime, it is okay to live with the uncertainty that not everything has an explanation, rather than to assign false conclusions and assumptions.

If roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained” as “weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planet Venus or Mars, dust, any number of different weather phenomena, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, ” and more and the entire extraterrestrial hypothesis is based on the residue of data after the above list has been exhausted......... what’s left? Not much.

Certainly there are UFO's out there, but but to jump from unidentified to identify it as alien craft is a big leap. I’m sure even the most ardent UFO believer will agree that a UFO does not equal a flying saucer with aliens in it. All of us have had first-hand experience of various aircraft, for example. Therefore, we can pretty easily identify one, even if it’s so far away as to be only a dot in the sky. But to say a UFO is an alien craft is based on WHAT knowledge of alien craft exactly?????

If one were to believe all the claimed sightings, then there are/have been just a mass of alien craft in the skies, in all kinds of shapes and sizes. To extrapolate, there would be an entire fleet up there with no two ships exactly alike. And not one curiously enough has landed, crashed or fallen victim to close-up inspection.

If there exists in probability, life outside our solar system, has it really traveled lights years to us just to hover and take a peek, have no communication, and then leave? What would be the point of this? Let's face it, aliens visiting the earth is an extraordinary claim and I think it requires extraordinary evidence to prove the claim. This is why science is the powerful and wonderful tool that it is....... the standards of proof are set very high.
 
Again, like I said, I personally saw something incredible that I can't explain. But I refuse to be the kind of person who jumps to a crazy conclusion like "it must be aliens." I simply don't find it credible that little green men are zooming around in our lower atmosphere in spacecraft shaped like hollywood creations of the 1950s lit up with aircraft-like lights and not making their presence officially known. It's just crazy.
 
I have a UFO story from my growing up days.

It was early fall on a Friday evening, late enough to see the stars. My friends and I were outside our yards, running around. We had recently learned about supernovas in school and I was, as I often did, looking up in the night sky.

I saw something red. I watched it for a few seconds and then looked down. The light drew me back up, as I've always been the curious type. "Hey guys- that star is red!!" Nobody really seemed as interested as I was. At this point, it was just a red "star" in the sky. It wasn't anything spectacular. Then it appeared to move in relation to us. "It's moving!!!" My friends commented on it but didn't seem to care much, until it developed a tail. THEN we ALL started following it with our eyes. We watched that thing for a few minutes, while it zig zagged slowly over the night sky, with what appeared to be a random route. I desperately tried to get my parents outside, but they were too busy with something in the kitchen.

The tail seemed to disappear but we could still track it for a while longer and eventually, everyone lost sight of it.

To this day, I haven't a clue what it was.
 
falconvalley said:
I have a UFO story from my growing up days.

It was early fall on a Friday evening, late enough to see the stars. My friends and I were outside our yards, running around. We had recently learned about supernovas in school and I was, as I often did, looking up in the night sky.

I saw something red. I watched it for a few seconds and then looked down. The light drew me back up, as I've always been the curious type. "Hey guys- that star is red!!" Nobody really seemed as interested as I was. At this point, it was just a red "star" in the sky. It wasn't anything spectacular. Then it appeared to move in relation to us. "It's moving!!!" My friends commented on it but didn't seem to care much, until it developed a tail. THEN we ALL started following it with our eyes. We watched that thing for a few minutes, while it zig zagged slowly over the night sky, with what appeared to be a random route. I desperately tried to get my parents outside, but they were too busy with something in the kitchen.

The tail seemed to disappear but we could still track it for a while longer and eventually, everyone lost sight of it.

To this day, I haven't a clue what it was.
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It was the Obama Meteor. It was sent to bring you phones :)
 
I have a little story if anyone is interested.... This is 100% true, and in no way exaggerated.

Back like 8-9 years ago, my little brother, dad and I took a huge road trip of the entire west. Started in Vegas, up to Montana, down through California and Nevada. We rented an SUV and one of our favorite things was to just take these dirt roads we saw on our old-school handheld GPS, it was awesome because dad let us drive when we were off road. Anyway, one night we were off on this dirt road near Tonopah, NV and saw a pretty big hill and decided to go up it because the name of it was Mount Diablo on the GPS (See the link below). One thing led to another, and the sky was awfully starry in the middle of the desert and we decided to camp out and build a small fire out of some old pallets and debris we found.

So it's about 1:30AM and we were just about to pack in for the night and out of the airport at the Tonopah Test Range that we could see with binoculars, we saw something take off. Now to preface, my dad now has 18 years with UAL so he's seen plenty of aircraft. This thing took off completely normally, maybe with a bit of a long takeoff roll, then came to directly over us, NO sound. None. We're watching it and it has lights but not normal Position and A/C lights. It flies over us, again, silently. Then bam. Accelerates like nobody's business, again, silently. We were a bit freaked out but camped there nevertheless.

Next morning we wake up at like 6-7AM to the sound of aircraft. Over the next hour, 5 737's, and 8 Greyhound size busses drive up to the compound/facility. We watched all of them through binoculars come in, drop people, then leave. About 20 minutes after this, we decide we better hit the road, and as we are packing up, my little brother spotted a Jeep driving out and toward us. It comes the whole way up. White Jeep with department of energy. Guy asks two questions(this is verbatim, has stuck with me since then): Are you leaving? (Yes) Did you see anything out of the ordinary since you got here at 7:38PM yesterday? (We obviously answer no). He didn't say a word more. Coolest/freakiest experience I've really ever had.

http://mapcarta.com/23351624 (Mount Diablo)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Test_Range (Tonopah Wiki)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(aircraft) (The only explanation we could come up with...still sounds like a conspiracy, I know)
 
Nah, secret aircraft aren't a "conspiracy." We have at least one member of this forum that used to fly aircraft that the government denied existed at the time. Something simply being a government secret doesn't make it a conspiracy. A conspiracy is generally defined as something unlawful, or at least harmful. A secret aircraft wouldn't apply.

But your story is a great example of something unexplained that most people would have thought was a "UFO." You saw it clearly take off from a military installation, so it was obvious that it wasn't extraterrestrial in origin. It even flew normally at first. It just displayed extraordinary characteristics later in the flight. It's hard to tell what sort of military technology is being tested right now. But it's safe to say that a lot of it is being mistaken for alien spacecraft.
 
Winnie and I saw a UFO near Hilo 10 years ago but at a much further distance....it looked the same as the video( the way the colors changed)
 
ATN_Pilot said:
Nah, secret aircraft aren't a "conspiracy." We have at least one member of this forum that used to fly aircraft that the government denied existed at the time. Something simply being a government secret doesn't make it a conspiracy. A conspiracy is generally defined as something unlawful, or at least harmful. A secret aircraft wouldn't apply.

But your story is a great example of something unexplained that most people would have thought was a "UFO." You saw it clearly take off from a military installation, so it was obvious that it wasn't extraterrestrial in origin. It even flew normally at first. It just displayed extraordinary characteristics later in the flight. It's hard to tell what sort of military technology is being tested right now. But it's safe to say that a lot of it is being mistaken for alien spacecraft.
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We never thought Alien when we saw our UFO haha. And I know it's not a conspiracy.... I kinda just wanted to share a story I've never really shared about a really cool aircraft I officially never saw haha.
 
I saw some weirdness one night. No clue what it could have been. It was at night, it was an odd looking oval shape, it was black withOUT lights and it was huge. It kind of had an occasional, very faint, orangish sparkle to it I thought might be reflections casting off from the street lights.. There is Nellis, Tonapah and Area 51 nearby so it could have been anything really.
 
chrisreedrules said:
And yet there have been other credible experts who say that there is no possible way that what they saw were flares being dispensed by military aircraft. And this doesn't even begin to address the simple question of why the military would be dispensing flares over a populated area. Thousands of eye witness testimonies stated that a dark craft, several miles in diameter, passed directly overhead of them. The craft appeared over northern Arizona and gradually traveled south over nearly the entire length of the state, eventually passing south of Tucson and it was the apparently "wedge-shaped" object reported by the states governor, Governor Symington.
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The Phoenix Lights event was actually two separate events: 1. The flares seen over the Estrella mountains, and 2. The wedge shaped craft.

In event 1, the line of lights were indeed flares dropped by A-10 jets on the East-Tactical portion of the Goldwater Bombing Range (R-2304), southeast of Gila Bend, AZ. Now these flares aren't the flares used by aircraft for defeating IR SAM missiles; as those only last a few seconds in burn time. These flares were the parachute type that are dropped to illuminate a battlefield below, and they can be overt flares (like these were) or covert flares (that appear to be a very dim glow to the naked eye). Each of these overt flares, known as LUU-2 (or LUU-19, if covert) flares, are carried in a pod known as a SUU-25 that's attached on station 2 or 10 of the A-10, with each pod containing 8 LUU-2s. They're dropped in strings in order maximize illumination of the ground below. When the parachute deploys, the attached flare burning actually provides lift to the parachute from underneath, giving the impression that the flare is "hovering", rather than descending, when actually the flare is descending slowly.

Referencing the Phoenix TAC map below, I'll orient you to where certain geo references are located, as well as where the eyewitnesses were who were filming, and what they were seeing. First off, at the far bottom left of the TAC chart, you'll see the outline of R-2304's northernmost corner, just southeast of Gila Bend AF Aux field. This is where the A-10s were operating. Now, look northeast from there towards Phoenix (center of the Class B) and look at the mountain range that's oriented northwest/southeast and located just to the southwest of the "Gila Crossing" VFR reporting point, and south of the PIR [raceway] VFR reporting point. This mountain range is the Sierra Estrella range, which is the mountain range seen in the video tapes. The vantage points of the witnesses were from two places: 1. Go to the north part of the Class B and find Phoenix-Deer Valley airport (KDVT). Look just south of it by 5 miles and see the mountain labled with the 2362 elevation; witness #1 [the most common video shown] was located there and filming to the southwest across the Sierra Estrellas and looking at the flares beind dropped at high altitude over R-2304. Witness #2 had the video with the "side" look of the string of flares. That witness was located in the Ahwatukee area southeast of KPHX and filming to the west/southwest. You can tell that the string of flares are dropped at a 5 or so second interval, which is normal in order to get a good spread for illumination purposes, and can see how they illuminate with that same delay between them. They "fall" at generally the same rate, and at the expiration of the flare burn time, which is 5 minutes, you'll notice that the flares begin to burn out in the same order they were dropped, at the same time interval. In the video from north Phoenix, the flares drop behind the Estrellas at about the same time (appearing to burn out) because they're at the same altitude. The Chandler video is where you see them actually burning out in order.

Im from PHX so Im fully familiar with the geography; Im familiar with the operations because I myself was often the "flare ship" over R-2304, dropping these same flares from a high orbit in order to provide battlefield illumination for other fighter jets to attack ground targets when I flew A-10s out of Tucson back in the day. The altitude and heading I dropped my flares at depended on a number of factors: amount of illumination desired, percentage of moon illumination already available, where the moon was located [for ground shadow reasons], and what the winds aloft were [for flare drift and the resultant integrity of my flare "string" to provide even illum of the ground].

Event #2 from that night was indeed what people described as the "V shaped formation" of lights that was seen from Kingman in the northwest part of the state, southwest over Prescott Valley, continuing over east Phoenix, and last seen over Casa Grande. I personally have no idea what that was. Some sources have said it was a formation of GA aircraft; but for what reason and why they weren't apparently talking to anyone, is unknown to me. So that one, I can't explain.

Insofar as UFOs themselves, I do believe that unknown things do fly in the air. Ask the crew of America West 564 from 1995; still unknown what they saw that night in the storm, and the USAF even diverted an F-117 jet to go check it out. Insofar as any kind of aliens or anything like that, do I know they exist? No. Do I know they don't exist? No. Is it possible they could exist? Well, anything is possible. Is it probable they exist? With what we currently know, it doesn't seem so. But who knows how much we don't know. I have no idea.

ATN_Pilot said:
But your story is a great example of something unexplained that most people would have thought was a "UFO." You saw it clearly take off from a military installation, so it was obvious that it wasn't extraterrestrial in origin. It even flew normally at first. It just displayed extraordinary characteristics later in the flight. It's hard to tell what sort of military technology is being tested right now. But it's safe to say that a lot of it is being mistaken for alien spacecraft.
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Happens often with people seeing developmental aircraft and mistaking them for something alien. They're UFOs yes, insofar a they're unknown and flying, but they're not UFOs in the 'classic' sense of the definition. Does make one wonder what we do have flying in black programs these days, considering what we had flying in these same programs 30+ years ago.

Attached: PHX TAC map
 
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