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The Man Behind the 'Tic-Tac' UFO Videos Claim They've Been Here Since the 1950s (gq-magazine.co.uk) 139

alaskana98 writes: In a recent GQ magazine interview with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense's "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)," he claims that the much publicized "Tic-Tac" UAPs observed by the U.S. Navy have been flying in our skies for many decades: "I have in my possession official U.S. government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory."

He then goes on to state that he's even heard from pilots who suffered real-world health issues as a consequence of getting too close to the objects: "I've got to be careful, I can't speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, "Lue, it's really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days." Well, that's a sign of radiation. That's not a sunburn; it's a radiation burn."

Perhaps most bizarre is a revelation that those who got closest to the UAPs experienced a form of time dilation: "'You know, Lue, it's really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes' worth of fuel. How is that possible?' Well, there's a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment."

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but if these claims can be corroborated with evidence it would suggest that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of information that has yet to be revealed on these things. Perhaps the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) will drive future efforts to get a better idea (PDF) of what this phenomenon actually is.

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The Man Behind the 'Tic-Tac' UFO Videos Claim They've Been Here Since the 1950s

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  • by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @03:20AM (#61983631)
    To troll halfwits like these. "Haha, let's fuck with that primitive thing on that stupid planet. Oooh look we've got technology and showing it off in front of you, oooh. Stupid apes."
    • Just assuming any of this shit actually happened, a bunch of tictac shaped smallish objects which hover around and then fuck off would likely be probes.

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      Remember, the 1950s was when psychedelic drugs like LSD were the rage, the Beat Generation. Even real psychologists who also believed being gay was a mental illness and removing part of the brain was a valid therapeutic procedure used and recommended them. These kids then grew up to make TV shows like the banana splits and scooby Doo.
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      If one assumes the data correct, I would think you are misframing the scenario.

      The more conservative assumption would be that there are lots of them doing something (mining the moons of Saturn?), and that we're seeing either a few anthropologists conducting some research or a bunch of teenagers joyriding. To me this would imply as likely MacroLife, i.e. a mobile habitat that moves from solar system to solar system, occasionally stopping to collect sufficient resources to build a second copy so the colony c

    • To troll halfwits like these. "Haha, let's fuck with that primitive thing on that stupid planet. Oooh look we've got technology and showing it off in front of you, oooh. Stupid apes."

      No silly, it's US! It's our future selves come back to mess with our heads, kinda like big brother teasing little brother. Call it "Future to the Back"!

  • by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @03:20AM (#61983633) Homepage Journal

    ..you would think the watch to work with same spacetime physics as the fuel.

    Why is this even an article, is slashdot fox now? Breatharians next? "Open mind"?? Scientology as "possibly true"?

    • by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @03:27AM (#61983635) Journal

      Just came to say the same thing about the warping business. Nonsensical anecdote.

      Gotta remember that this guy is no longer government, and last I knew, worked for a company that wants to make money doing CGI for films about UFOs. The company is room by that Blink 182 guy, a UFO enthusiast. So consider the source...

      • Honestly the first time I heard Luis story, I think he was on Lex Fridman podcast, he sounded down to earth, no woo-hoo. But now, what a bag of bs! I would understand if is building this crazy narrative just to make money. And he will find a lot of people buying into this. Thinking about it, these aliens have been using the same tech for 70 years!?! Who are primitive then? Us or them?!
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by SirCowMan ( 1309199 )
        It does seem ridiculous, but there are ways it could be plausible. If you have a watch that is set without intervention to an external reference - WWVB, or GPS, cell tower, or sundial - then time warping everything except the watch becomes explainable, perhaps expected.

        I get the sense that is not the scenario being portrayed here though.
        • Wait .... would it make a difference here if the watch synchronized itself automatically with an external time source like cellular or GPS? I mean, my Apple watches all do that. As long ago as this supposedly happened, I'm not sure what a wristwatch was typically capable of in that regard -- but we had plenty of digital wall clocks that synchronized with the atomic clock time broadcasts by the early 2000's.

    • by colinwb ( 827584 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @05:13AM (#61983727)
      I was wondering when did Slashdot become a subsidiary of the National Enquirer?
    • It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes' worth of fuel. How is that possible?

      I'd guess you didn't really know what time it was before the incident.

    • ... Breatharians next? "Open mind"?? Scientology as "possibly true"?

      If we're going down that road, I vote for Pastafarianism!

    • by Qwertie ( 797303 )

      "As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but if these claims can be corroborated with evidence..."

      Yeah I'm going to stop you right there.

      We've got a few anecdotes and a couple of US Navy videos where it is not even clear what characteristics of the unidentified aircraft are unusual.

      Come back when you've got an article about the evidence itself instead of phrases like "he is not able to say what the work involves", "details are under wraps" and "one might imagine that

    • The pilot's arm is really, really, really, really long. The pilot and fuel were much closer to the UFO than the wristwatch at the end of his 65-mile-long arm flailing behind him. So of course his watch experienced less dilation. Duh!
  • more nonsense (Score:5, Informative)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @03:29AM (#61983639) Homepage Journal

    These videos are not showing aliens, they are all sorts of things, ducks, airplanes...

    https://youtu.be/mfhAC2YiYHs [youtu.be]

    https://youtu.be/3viYcYPRdu4 [youtu.be]

    https://youtu.be/jWWGmiZs4JA [youtu.be]

    https://youtu.be/Th4VlqQyVr4 [youtu.be]

    • At last one commenter with head and able to use it. Weirdly enough with a -1. I am wondering, why some kind of military people have started to popularize this nonsense lately. They are spewing out same level of fantasy as flatearthers. All of those videos have been debunked multiple times with real explanations.
    • Given how difficult interstellar travel is, even the most far-fetched explanations are more plausible than aliens from another solar system. You would expect that any vehicles capable of making the trip would be huge, and very hard to miss entering the solar system.

      I have no idea what the UAP's might be, but given the huge obstacles presented by interstellar travel, space aliens are way down at the bottom of my list of possible explanations.

    • Ducks are very hard to identify in the air, I tend to agree that most of them are going to unidentified flying objects.

  • A few decades? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by brunoblack ( 7829338 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @03:33AM (#61983645)

    "Tic-Tac" UAPs observed by the U.S. Navy have been flying in our skies for many decades:

    If confirmed as real in the end, they probably have been flying in our skies for much, much longer than "a few decades".

    It's not like if we had any abilities to monitor our skies for many centuries or millennia, none that are documented nowadays anyway.

    • They would be invisible to radar if they had magical time dilation fields that affected watches differently to brain to engines too.

      The kind of time dilation experienced as described happens only because of drugs or brain malfunctions.

      • The kind of time dilation experienced as described happens only because of drugs or brain malfunctions.

        And as it turns out, the US military has been handing out drugs to pilots for many a year. And not just to pilots, either. My dad couldn't stop telling me (perhaps literally) about how great the drugs they gave him in Korea as a Marine air traffic controller were.

    • Except those videos have been thoroughly debunked.

  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @03:55AM (#61983661)

    Finally! It's aliens! It's aliens! They're here! It's aliens!

    I've been waiting to say this my whole life.
    --
    I'm not a player; I'm an alien. - Metta World Peace

  • by Teun ( 17872 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @04:25AM (#61983671)
    Luckily for the rest of the world this mainly happens in the USofA.
    • Similar thing happened with Toyota Corollas suddenly accelerating on their own and going berserk on the highway. That also happened only in the US in significant severity and frequency. Since Toyota used the same hardware and software in the US as they did in other export countries, I suspect some kind of mild mass hysteria/psychosis among Americans. Perhaps a Hollywood-induced primal fear of out-of-control aliens/machines that want to enslave mankind or something.
      • by robbak ( 775424 )
        What could it be about American drivers that they are more likely to not realize that they have their foot on the accelerator instead of brake? The cars are similar, are they not? You don't have a strange regulation that requires manufacturers to use different pedal shapes? Maybe differing driver training techniques?

        Because, like it or not, that is the cause of practically all 'unintended acceleration' events, and all dangerous ones. Because in all cars, brakes trump engines. If you use the brakes, you stop
      • Re:Only in the USofA (Score:5, Informative)

        by Pimpy ( 143938 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @07:34AM (#61983899)

        If you read the follow up NHTSA report, the floor mat thing was actually tracked back to an individual dealer who decided to stack floor mats for some unknown reason. This brought the stack to a height higher than the design specification using a single mat, and on top of that, he failed to secure them, creating the condition for the upper mat to slip and apply pressure to the accelerator pedal. The media then basically took this story, surmised that it must apply to all vehicles, and ran with it.

        • The plastic mat cover that I use will do the same thing I don't frequently move it. I mean, "the same" except that I can feel when I touch the pedal that it is impeded.

      • Doesn't need to be hysteria when it comes to the car thing and Americans, remember that the US is among the few countries where you can sue to get millions of dollars in compensation.
    • Luckily for us in the continental USA, this mainly happens over the ocean.
  • by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @04:27AM (#61983673)
    So only the human body or even the brain slowed down? The plane kept in the normal time realm? That's not how time dillatation works. Sounds more like an excited pilot running on adrenaline to me.
    • by robbak ( 775424 )
      Weirder than that. The only thing affected was the pilot's watch. Perception and fuel burn matched.

      If I had to guess, and if the report is accurate, I'd say that the plane was flying at high speed under afterburner. The pilot blacked out after reducing thrust. When he came to, he had short term memory loss that meant he did not remember throttling back. 30 minutes had passed - his watch was accurate - and the engines at low throttle so the fuel burn was about the same as about 5 minutes of high thrust.
      • Or maybe he didn't really know what time it was before the incident.

        PS: Don't aircraft have their own clocks so that pilots don't have to rely on wristwatches?

        • They generally have one connected to the flight and avionics systems, and one fully independent mechanical clock (for if all systems start failing). The wrist watch is second backup.

  • by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @04:31AM (#61983675) Journal

    Next one will add big headed aliens looking through a window. If that is believed, then abduction to perform sexual experiments (in a time dilated environment of course so the flight does not take forever). Then a real conversation with an alien where "it" explains that the reason of the interest in our planet is because it's the only flat planet in the Universe, and so a great tourist attraction. The sky is the limit, quite literally in this case since apparently they never come near solid ground.

  • These old videos have been debunked. They have simple explanations of ordinary phenomoenon. There are no little green men around trolling the Navy with hyper performing craft. Get over it everyone.

    • What is the explanation for this one? Occam's razor says it's not aliens, but I have no idea what it is.

      • I haven't seen any scientific explanation debunking theses, but. I suspect the parallax effect on something like a hot air balloon on one of them. Like how a slower moving car going the opposite direction of a faster moving aircraft can make the aircraft appear to be hanging in air (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/1042232/flight-optical-illusion-stuck-mid-air-viral-video/amp). I think the slow moving object fat away from the aircraft but close to the water can make things l

      • Debunked mostly in the minds of the vocal anti-UFO crowd. I mean, none of them were there and I'm real sure none of them have flown high performance fighter planes or are highly trained fighter pilots with hundreds of hours of flight time. The Navy did not provide them with high-quality vidoes or data or let them examine the systems on these aircraft.

        I'm not buying the aliens part of this, but I'm not buying the "swamp gas" grade debunking either.

        My best guess is one of two things:

        Most likely: a force-on

        • No, but most of them know how optics work and are trained in it, which fighter pilots aren't.

          The majority of them are out of focus artifacts. They do not even reach the level of swamp gas.

        • Debunked mostly in the minds of the vocal anti-UFO crowd. I mean, none of them were there and I'm real sure none of them have flown high performance fighter planes or are highly trained fighter pilots with hundreds of hours of flight time. The Navy did not provide them with high-quality vidoes or data or let them examine the systems on these aircraft.

          So you're going with an anecdote over any possible interpretation of the available evidence, even if the pilot is contradicted by the airplane's instruments?

          I'm not buying the aliens part of this, but I'm not buying the "swamp gas" grade debunking either.

          I don't know what purported debunkings you've seen of this, but I would recommend Mick West's videos on this event, as he's polite and explains his analysis well:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (5 min) why he thinks the evidence best fits a jetliner
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (5 min) further explanation why the object's purported sudden moveme

        • To your point, a technology that spoofs radar and even infrared systems is more likely than aliens. Havenâ(TM)t foreign powers already caused collisions involving US Navy ships by spoofing GPS?
      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        The tic tac? It's a balloon or something similar. There's enough information in the text on the video to reconstruct the relative angles and speeds. It's something slow and low which looks like it's zooming along because of the parallax from the jet.

  • Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense's "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP),"

    Apparently the DoD selected the most lunatic guy they could find for the job, in an effort to ensure the program would identify all the threats.

  • by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @05:11AM (#61983719)

    I'm just so sceptical about this phenomena being related to a space time warp or aliens.
    So, if the US government has been observing this since the 1950's, why is there no hi-definition footage?
    All of the videos in the public domain, are blurry low definition ones and many can be explained by optical aberrations.

    Sure, that doesn't mean there isn't high definition footage - but you'd expect something to leak out if there was.

    Perhaps I just don't understand the complexity of getting hi-def footage from very distant objects when travelling at Jet Fighter speed?
    However, you would expect the powers that be, to do their upmost to actually get high quality video imagery, right?

    Although, if it happened, it would fall right into the realm of "that video is faked - even a teenager on a home PC could render stuff that realistic" - so, perhaps the blurry videos lend themselves to more believability?

    • by skoskav ( 1551805 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @10:25AM (#61984099)
      There's likely a form of publication bias going on, where high-quality recordings are less likely to show something ambiguous. So the remaining videos that end up as purported alien footage is either low-resolution, unfocused, or shaky.
    • I'm just so sceptical about this phenomena being related to a space time warp or aliens. So, if the US government has been observing this since the 1950's, why is there no hi-definition footage?

      There's plenty of high-def footage and photographs of these things. You can do a Google Images search for "cloud", "lens flare", "balloon" to find plenty. Same thing for Big Foot... just search for "bear", "dear", "tree", and "smudge on lens".

      The issue with "unidentified" flying objects is that the images - by definition - have to be so crappy that you can't identify what they are of. If they were any better, they'd have been identified... as mundane.

  • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @05:23AM (#61983741)
    ... oh wait ...
    • by noodler ( 724788 )

      That was exactly the first thing that went through my head. And lo and behold, he has a forthcoming book.

  • by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @06:45AM (#61983837)

    So huge area is affected by time alternating field. Do you realize what that would do to the planet?

    Let's isolate a piece of the Earth's surface From time. Well the earth is spinning and rotating 10,000km/per hour. A slight time dilation like you are talking about would tear the surface of the earth apart.

    While the ufo ship may or may not have such ability projecting onto the planet would be devasting.

    People always forget the earth is spinning and moving through space. Any "time machine" also has to move through space as well. Doing something like slowing down time in just this spot has significant stellar issues.

    • So huge area is affected by time alternating field. Do you realize what that would do to the planet?

      ...

      Forget the planet. How would the plane (and pilot) not be ripped apart by tidal forces?

    • 10,000km/hr is nothing, earth moves around 2,100,000km/hr with respect to the cosmic microwave background if we are talking absolute reference frames.
  • history.com redirects to historytv.eu, wrong https cert, error message, hello?

    • by Misagon ( 1135 )

      That's the fault of the history.com website. I viewed the page in the WayBack machine [archive.org], but it could obviously not play the video. The caption reads:

      USS Nimitz âTic Tacâ(TM) UFO: Declassified Video (2m 45s) TV-PG
      Official U.S. government video of a 2004 UFO encounter, taken aboard a Navy fighter jet from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

  • Story Moderation. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @08:17AM (#61983945)

    Why can't we moderate story submissions?

    "Bullshit, Dupe, Not Science, Advertisement" would be good starts.

    This one would fit all except Dupe (and we'll just have to wait a few days for that one).

    • If it’s not low information, poorly written advertising hiding behind a paywall posted several days late we demand our money back!
  • Claims without evidence are opinions
  • If they come out as aliens pretty soon we won't even be allowed to assume someone's species.
  • Seriously. Every report you read pretty much reports:

    1) Flying in formation (e.g. schooling or flocking).

    2) Darting away suddenly.

    3) Cruising fast while rotating as if pointing an eye looking for food.

    4) Hang out around places with lots of yummy metal and perhaps some radioactive material.

    These things, whatever they are, may have evolved in space, but so far, I see no evidence that they're any smarter than the average guppy.

  • There are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of security cameras and car cams running 24/7/365 that give us unprecedented glimpses or transitory events in the sky. It’s amazing to have a single meteor captured by dozens if not hundreds of cameras all at different places and angles providing us humans with evidence of just how these events occur.

    Yet with billions of cameras and soon every single human will carry a camera 24/7/365 we have exactly ZERO footage of actual aliens. Had they been real
  • Jet airliners came into popularity in the 1950s. They are tic-tac-shaped with a few extra fins. Their radar and infrared profiles look like glowing tic-tacs.

    As with most of our UFO incidents documented by armed forces, these are misidentified jet airliners. For fuckssake, this isn't rocket science.

  • Iron Sky was a documentary.
  • Here is a video of a tic-tac object that gets debunked by Mick West [youtube.com]. His channel is highly recommended for this topic.

    And remember the motto it is never aliens [youtube.com] ...

    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof ...

    • If I may be pedantic (and I will be), the quote from Carl Sagan is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

      The important distinction is that evidence is observable phenomena, e.g. instruments recording color video, infra-red video, measured radar distance, airspeed and angle-of-attack sensor readings. These evidence sources should be of high fidelity and corroborate each other to be classed as "extraordinary."

      On the other hand, proof is a logical construct typically reserved for philosoph

  • ... to have developed feasible FTL travel or have reached an evolutionary stage where traveling through space thousands of years is a thing that isn't that much of a big deal, we're probably as interesting to them as a culture of common bacteria is to us.

    I'm not saying there are no aliens visiting us, but if they are, it's most likely some artificial evolutionary stage of them with these Tictac robots being a sort of sentient droid or actual individuals of a distant alien civilization with artificial bodies

  • If it was indeed his watch, which assume all pilots wear on their arm, it should've also slowed down. So I call BS

  • Unfortunately, scammers can hide behind "it's classified." This makes it extremely difficult to evaluate this guys claims. Any time he is pushed for details he can just say that he can't answer the question because it is classified. That could be true, or it could just be a convenient way to avoid giving out enough information for anyone to check up on the story.

    On the other hand, it does seem that SOMETHING has recently changed in the military with respect to UFO reporting. So I continue to watch and try t

  • Assuming it is a UFO that's been around for decades... who cares? Are you really going to change your life just because once in a while a pilot gets spooked by a UFO?

  • Luis Elizondo would have been a great guest on Coast to Coast am.

  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @02:30PM (#61984573)

    The explanations for the unexplained usually fall into 3 categories:

    1. God
    2. Aliens
    3. Don't know yet

    1 and 2 are pretty much the same thing and attract charlatans.

  • Those aliens are betting on when we kill ourselves.

  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Saturday November 13, 2021 @04:39PM (#61984903)
    Until he produce credible, independently-verifiable supporting evidence, he might just as well be talking through his asshole.

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