Fravor's Hypersonic UFO observation. Parallax Illusion? Comparing Accounts

Greene said:

FWIE the radar in question is the AN/SPY-1B (S Band) on the USS Princeton not those of the Superhornets.

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Oh, true. Actually, rereading Fravor's account makes me want to straight up say there was nothing there. If the Princeton can see the object 10s of miles away (I think at least 60 based on the vague directions I've seen), then the jets definitely would see it sub 1 mile.

"As we proceeded to the west and as the air controller counted down the range, we had nothing on our radars and were unaware of what we were going to see when we arrived."

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"When we arrived at the location at 20,000 ft, the controller called Merge Plot, which means that our radar blip was now in the same radar resolution cell as the contact."

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"As we looked around, we noticed some white water off our right side."

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(i.e. not where the radar was seeing an object.)

ideamug said:

The balloon theory squares with Fravor’s account but doesn’t quite square with the larger sequence.

Some surface difficulties:

First, where does the radar data fit into the picture?

What’s the probability that a radar glitch or clouds would coincidentally lead to a merge plot where a balloon was above the ocean surface 40 miles away? Are there enough balloons over the ocean for this to be probable? Seems like a stretch on its own.

If it were a balloon twenty feet across, what are the odds that it would evade Fravor’s radar?

In this scenario, are the Nimitz radar returns independent of the balloon? Or are they somehow related?

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Has anyone seen the radar data?
I see this radar data mentioned frequently, but where is it? Did the Navy release it?

Slow Joe said:

Has anyone seen the radar data?
I see this radar data mentioned frequently, but where is it? Did the Navy release it?

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Last I looked, we do not have the radar data and are extremely unlikely ever to get it. It was not preserved (if I'm wrong, anybody please correct me). To my mind, then, the radar data is not evidence of anything, beyond that the radar was said to have shown targets if some sort during this period. We don't have the data, just the testimony, so it is impossible to come up with ANY theory of what was observed that includes and is in accord with radar data which we do not have.

IF the radar data were to magically emerge at this late date, it MIGHT show that the radar was glitchy, or that the targets didn't in fact do much that was interesting, that targets were or were not in the same place as the observation (observations, plural, if we assume that the later video was the same object or at least the same sort of object), or that objects were zipping about at Ludicrous Speed in defiance of what that would have done to good old Air 1.0, etc.

With that range of options, trying to fit hypotheses about what was actually observed to the radar data seems futile, to me anyway. We can only work with data that we in fact have.

JMartJr said:

Last I looked, we do not have the radar data and are extremely unlikely ever to get it. It was not preserved (if I'm wrong, anybody please correct me).

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As far as I know, the statement that the data carriers were removed from the ship still applies, yet never could be substantiated. But didn't Sean Kirkpatrick say explicitly in the AARO report that his office had no hope of obtaining the Nimitz data or any further information?

Nemon said:

didn't Sean Kirkpatrick say explicitly in the AARO report that his office had no hope of obtaining the Nimitz data or any further information?

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I think he has said something like that in interviews, etc, but I don't recall it being explicit in the report (Historical Record, Volume I). By accident or design, the 'famous four' cases (Nimitz, FLIR1, Gofast, and Gimbal) seem to fall through cracks in the scope of the review, as no previous USG program of UAP investigation was active in the relevant periods. I find it entirely plausible that the raw radar data, if it existed, has been destroyed. Less plausible that there is no hope of obtaining any further information. Most of the relevant senior people in the Navy, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex (Raytheon etc) - the captains of the Nimitz and other ships, including the Louisville, the senior radar officers, the designers of the systems, etc - should still be alive and able to give some account of their recollections. To use an old British expression, we want to hear from the organ-grinder, not his monkey.

Incidentally, I notice that #1 in this thread gives a partial answer to a question I raised in # 331 : how quickly can Fravor have plausibly have descended from his starting altitude (over 20,000 feet) to his encounter with the tic-tac (at least 5,000 feet lower). In the statement quoted in #1 he refers to an 'easy descent' and 'nice and easy'. No suggestion of some aerobatic crash dive. Only when he got closer to the object and thought it was playing games with him did he try a more aggressive manouver. This supports my argument that the encounter must have lasted at least a few minutes, not the few seconds explicitly claimed by Alex Dietrich in her exchanges with Mick West.

DavidB66 said:

Less plausible that there is no hope of obtaining any further information. Most of the relevant senior people in the Navy, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex (Raytheon etc) - the captains of the Nimitz and other ships, including the Louisville, the senior radar officers, the designers of the systems, etc - should still be alive and able to give some account of their recollections.

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AARO is looking for data. More witness accounts just ends up as another Rendlesham, with conflicting statements and not enough evidence.

Mendel said:

AARO is looking for data. More witness accounts just ends up as another Rendlesham, with conflicting statements and not enough evidence.

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Perhaps, but not necessarily. For Rendlesham the problem is that the 'witnesses' were people unfamiliar with the area and literally stumbling around in the dark. The US Navy cases are rather different. For the Nimitz tic-tac case, one of the leading hypotheses is that the object was a secret test missile, perhaps malfunctioning or programmed to make erratic movements. The big objection to this is that the F-18 pilots were not aware of any such test, and Alex Dietrich was assured after the event that there was no such test in the area. But how robust is this objection? According to the 'Executive Summary',

There was a live fire exercise conducted by the USS Louisville during the period of and in the vicinity of the AAV sightings; however, the weapon in use did not match the flight profile or visible characteristics of the AAV. Additionally any live fire would have been coordinated throughout the CSG and all air traffic would have been well aware of the launch and operation of the weapon system. Aircraft would not have been vectored for the intercept of a US Weapon in flight

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The source of this information may be the former Captain of the Louisville, but this is not entirely clear. Nor is it clear whether it is an accurate report of the source's statements or whether the author of the ES has added any interpretation of their own. It doesn't seem to be true that there was no missile test in the area, whatever Dietrich may have been told. And since the 'flight profile and visible characteristics' of the tic-tac are themselves vague and ambiguous in the various witness accounts, how could anyone be sure that the weapon in use did not match it? Unless perhaps the missile was intended to go straight up and then self-destruct, though this might be interpreted as consistent with Fravor's claim that it 'went pouf'! As for the claim that all air traffic would have been well aware of the launch, none of the pilots seem to have known about it, though Dietrich's first suspicion was that the object may have been a test missile. Of course aircraft would not have been deliberately vectored for the intercept of a US weapon in flight, but by the time of the 'encounter' they were not actually where they were supposed to be.

This is still not to say that the hypothesis is without difficulties, but further questioning of the parties involved might come closer to eliminating it or supporting it. For example, if the time of launch of any missiles was clearly too early or too late to have been the tic-tac, that would come close to eliminating it, whereas a close match in the timing would be a promising coincidence.

These are not issues that are likely to be resolved by civilian investigators, but AARO or some other body with appropriate clearances might stand a chance.

DavidB66 said:

I think he has said something like that in interviews, etc, but I don't recall it being explicit in the report (Historical Record, Volume I). By accident or design, the 'famous four' cases (Nimitz, FLIR1, Gofast, and Gimbal) seem to fall through cracks in the scope of the review, as no previous USG program of UAP investigation was active in the relevant periods.

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I believe you are correct. Kirkpatrick said the following at a Hayden Center round-table on November 15, 2023 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcVi_3NTF0 timestamp 43:00):

Sean Kirkpatrick: I have things that are truly anomalous that we are analyzing down to the bit level of the data and the sensors that we have. [...]

Shane Harris: Does the so-called flying tic-tac fall into that category?

Kirkpatrick: Nope, because the flying tic-tac is 2004. Do you know how much data I have for that?

Harris: Probably not very much.

Kirkpatrick: I have what you have.

Harris: What's on YouTube.

Kirkpatrick: Right.

Harris: And the witness statements.

Kirkpatrick: And the witness statements. And once again, our pilots are the best pilots on the face of the planet. When they say I saw X, we believe they saw X. What they think they saw, and what the sensors saw, and what is reality, we then have to kind of work through. And we work it through with the pilots.

DavidB66 said:

As for the claim that all air traffic would have been well aware of the launch, none of the pilots seem to have known about it

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because it did not actually happen while the pilots were there
you're interpreting a statement to make it fit what you want
instead of making the statements fit each other
and because people do that, statements are useless without data