Today's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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#3036272 14-Feb-2023 09:33

Senior US General says they're not ruling out Aliens just yet:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ruling-out-aliens-senior-us-general-says-not-ruling-out-anything-yet-2023-02-13/

Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: "I'll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven't ruled out anything."

Handsome Dan Has Spoken.
Handsome Dan needs to stop adding three dots to every sentence...

Handsome Dan does not currently have a side hustle as the mascot for Yale

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elpenguino

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#3036279 14-Feb-2023 09:45

neb:
gzt: I expect it's a balloon with a different configuration. I heard a spokesperson more or less confirm that yesterday. I don't recall the channel I was watching. I was looking for weather news at the time.
Could also be one of the bazillion real weather balloons floating around up there. About a thousand-odd sites release two of these a day every day and only a fraction are recovered (there are groups who make it a hobby to go out and track them down), so you're looking at 2,000 new ones per day added to what's already floating around up there. Given the US' newfound enthusiasm for popping balloons I wouldn't be surprised if they were targeting a lot of these.

Nah, they go up then they pop. Life cycle of two hours or so.

You can watch any one of the 'I sent a XXX to space ' videos on YT to see what happens to them.

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

Tinkerisk

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#3036299 14-Feb-2023 10:33

Why do these idiots think they are so immensely important that they imagine truly intelligent extraterrestrial life would bother with us self-sinking dumbasses here on Earth for even a single second?

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kiwifidget

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#3036307 14-Feb-2023 10:51

Tinkerisk:

Why do these idiots think they are so immensely important that they imagine truly intelligent extraterrestrial life would bother with us self-sinking dumbasses here on Earth for even a single second?

ooh a Monty Python earworm!

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Tinkerisk

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#3036315 14-Feb-2023 11:44

kiwifidget:

ooh a Monty Python earworm!

“What did he say?”

“I think it was, ‘blessed are the cheesemakers’.”

kiwifidget

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#3036316 14-Feb-2023 11:47

I meant The Galaxy Song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk

"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!"

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neb

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#3036454 14-Feb-2023 16:19

kiwifidget:
Tinkerisk:

Why do these idiots think they are so immensely important that they imagine truly intelligent extraterrestrial life would bother with us self-sinking dumbasses here on Earth for even a single second?

ooh a Monty Python earworm!

That's probably the reason they come here, we have Monty Python, Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister, Open all Hours, Red Dwarf, Father Ted, Bottom... heck, even the US has probably produced something funny at some point although I can't think of anything at the moment.

neb

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#3036556 14-Feb-2023 18:30

SomeoneSomewhere: Weather balloons presumably are supposed to have ADS-B transponders or something similar on them, but I wouldn't be too surprised if one-in-10,000 had a failure, and it sounds like there's enough weather balloons that the occasional failure, if now being strictly investigated, will result in frequent shoot-downs.

Weather balloons are designed to be disposable, or at least there's no guarantee that they'll be returned, so they're as cheap and minimal as possible. In particular the payload is a small battery-powered radiosonde that sends pressure, temperature, and humidity readings down and is tracked from the ground to get wind speed and direction.

ezbee

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#3036592 14-Feb-2023 19:35

Quickie: Adventurous Recovery of a Weather Balloon
Andreas Spiess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgoKUCdGy_A

Tracking and Chasing Weather Balloons with TTGO LoRa Board and Raspberry Pi. Fun and Adventure
Andreas Spiess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQfztG60umI

Hunting the RadioSonde. 3000 to chase every day around the world.

Latex Balloons that burst about 30K meters.

Mehrts

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#3036702 14-Feb-2023 22:10

Since we're on the topic of weird balloons, check out these incendiary balloons that were launched by Japan to randomly land over the US during WW2.

They had worked out that wind currents could carry these balloons right over the US (with questionable accuracy) and the idea was that they'd start fires in random locations all over the place haphazardly.

Kyanar

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#3036710 14-Feb-2023 23:02

Mehrts:

Since we're on the topic of weird balloons, check out these incendiary balloons that were launched by Japan to randomly land over the US during WW2.

They had worked out that wind currents could carry these balloons right over the US (with questionable accuracy) and the idea was that they'd start fires in random locations all over the place haphazardly.

Who needs balloons? All you really need is Australian birds.

Rikkitic

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#3037496 16-Feb-2023 11:21

networkn:

If you've traveled this far (which is further than Humans can travel or see), you have the technology to make a broadcast or contact in some manner.

There you go thinking like a human again. For a true alien making contact in some manner might be an extremely painful experience. Or they are making contact but we just keep shooting it down.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos