
Aliens...
To (mis)quote prof. Brian Cox... "It's ALWAYS never aliens"
Unidentified flying objects said to be the size of sports utility vehicles have been spotted flying over parts of the northeastern US, prompting investigations by law enforcement and the FBI as elected officials urge the public not to panic. The Federal Aviation Administration, meanwhile, has temporarily banned drone flights …
'The Register welcomes our new alien overlords and would like to remind them that as a trusted tech news website, our staff could be helpful in rounding up others to toil at whatever tasks they require.'
Please include me in this group and would just like to add I already have a pre prepared list of suitable candidates for 'gang probing'!
Salutations!
"I'd probably turn off the external lights"
I dunno - Stealth can backfire if not thought through properly.
Back in the days when getting home at 3:00am would incur the wrath of parents, a friend of mine had the bright idea of killing the car engine whilst still on the approach to the house, intending to just coast into the driveway, minus engine noise and lights.
Unfortunately he was also minus power steering, made an unholy mess of the lawn and hedge, and woke everyone up in the process.
Most sane vacuum-assist braking systems have a vacuum bell of one kind or another, so you have a bit of a vacuum reserve. Essentially just enough to easily halt the vehicle in an emergency. Note that even without the vacuum, the vehicle can still be halted, it just takes quite a bit more foot pressure.
Commander Fravor - the fighter pilot that filmed the tictac ufo video - told a similar story. He said they used to fly with infrared googles and could see heat sources miles away. One time over the desert he could see a campfire 10mi away so he killed the engines and turned off all the lights and just glided in until he was 100yds directly above the campsite and made the plane point straight up. He’d then start the engines and put on full afterburners and fly away vertically.
Seems completely made up now I’m thinking about it.
During the tralfalger 200 thing here a tornado pilot was'nt told about the above 500 feet and no afterburners rule while over the city.
Needless to say he flew over at about 500 on full afterburners.
Tornados are LOUD when during that.
Only thing louder I've heard was the Washington national air guard reserve or whatever they're called playing with a pair of F-15s at 8am on a sunday morning.... I think they were calling the faithful to prayer..... and everyone else to the base commander's phone.....
That tornado would have been loud……
The loudest one I heard and saw was at a Mildemhall airshow but it was a Harrier howevering about 10 feet off the ground, that thing is loud with all the sound reflecting off the runway, can’t remember how far it was away but it wasn’t that far (this would have been in the 80s so not so much health and safety).
The other one (heard not seen) was about 10-15years ago when a eurofighter went supersonic over Peterborough due to needing to intercept an unresponsive aircraft over the North Sea. Only time I have felt a sonic boom, even with growing up on the RAF Wittering flight path so we had the harriers going over multiple times a day.
Back in the late '60s I was taking an early morning golf lesson at Sunnyvale Municipal. I was getting ready to tee off on the 10th when four Marine Corps. Phantoms screamed into view from roughly the south east, at about tree-top level. Mid-runway, they pointed their noses straight up & kicked in the afterburners and kept going up until out of view ... in perfect finger-four. They repeated the maneuver eight or ten times over the next couple hours. Practicing for the Moffett Field Air Show the following weekend. (I found out later they were refueling off the coast.)
Now keep in mind, Sunnyvale Muni is right at the end of Moffett's runway, so most of us were used to aircraft flying low overhead on a regular basis ... usually it was Orions (P-3) practicing takeoffs & landings, occasional small trainers and cargo planes, and sometimes even a couple of F4s would grace us with an overflight. But four of the things, about 150 feet up, at roughly 650 MPH just as I was addressing my ball was somewhat surprising to say the least :-)
No, this wasn't the Navy's Blue Angels ... they were still flying F11s at the time, and practiced later in the same day.
Late one night I was on the freeway headed toward Phoenix from San Diego when Nature began calling quite insistently. There were no service stations, or, indeed, "services" for at least 50 miles, so I pulled off the highway at the first overcrossing I could find to have a word with Nature.
Just as I finished, a fighter jet passed overhead, "on the deck" as I believe it's called, with a roar and thunderclap that nearly caused Nature to come calling again.
I'm not sure what lesson there is to be learned from the experience other than "always go when you have the chance."
When I was in college, I successfully did this with my dad's pickup truck. Rolling down the highway, then clutch in, engine off, lights off, left turn off the highway, straight, left, right, left, and barely enough kinetic energy to make it to Dad's parking spot in our driveway.
I never tried this with our car because, (a) it was a heavy, full-sized sedan, which we called, "Tuna-Boat"; (b) I'd once had the experience of having to drive it with a power steering failure -- it was okay-ish when I was rolling at speed, but very-tough when moving slowly; and, (c) I still would have had to raise our noisy, jointed garage door, then push the car up the slight hill into the garage. Tuna-Boat had a curb weight of 4000+ pounds!
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
there are a few of our contemporary 'Great and Good' they might preserve for posterity preferably until the end of the Universe (and don't bother to reboot it.)
I always imagined SUV stood for urban assault vehicle in some language other than English but thanks to the possibly unintentional educational value of the Vulture I now know SUV stands for sports utility vehicle which given the US national sport appears to be whacking fellows americans basically amounts to the same thing.
When one considers whom the US constituency have elected it is quite easy to believe these deluded souls imagining armadas of Great Wall Motors SUVs (Havals?) suspended from balloons ready to be dumped on the US market (and heads) just as the orange floridan predicted.
Space aliens might not be a bad outcome if we can convince them the US citizen is finest on hoof comestible the planet can offer to the discerning extraterrestrial palate. After wolfing down 300 million head of the finest I shouldn't be surprised if the diners all perished from some alien lifestyle disease or at least retreated without a thought of seconds.
Collaborateurs! Quislings! Or just vutures?
"our staff could be helpful in rounding up others to toil at whatever tasks they require"
I am certain the commentard vulturatii would gladly scour their "little lists" (of those who would never be missed) and donate names to a rota of those others requiring rounding up.
If they flew over Texas, Louisiana, or Florida, we'd be finding their carcasses scattered all over the place.
Easy to get rid of: Just declare "open season" on the things, and let Bubba and Bo get out there with shotguns and blow 'em away!!!
[and STOP acting like a bunch of drenched female cats]
Jersey War Tunnels – Temporarily Closed. But I heard NATO chief, Mark Rutte, making war talk yesterday. So maybe the tunnels will be open for business again soon.
To be honest I will be relieved if these are in fact ETI 'vehicles'.
Anything able to go Mach >10 and move from air to water and back in an eyeblink is already well beyond state of the art and the fact that we are still here suggests that they are benevolent or more than likely not even aware of our existence.
in an eyeblink
It's far more likely that there was a glitch in the radar tracking software when some combination of circumstances triggered an unhandled edge case. It's the machine equivalent of an optical illusion being generated in a human brain.
There's prior art: Lawnchair Larry.