Estimating flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles
Kevin H. Knuth · Robert M. Powell · Peter A. Reali
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
Kevin Knuth of the University at Albany, with Robert Powell and Peter Reali of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, does the thing the subject had mostly skipped: arithmetic. They take a handful of well-documented encounters — a 1951 US Navy sighting, the 1986 Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 case, and the 2004 Nimitz carrier group encounters off California — and work out the smallest acceleration each observed manoeuvre could possibly have involved, assuming constant acceleration and assigning generous uncertainties throughout. The lower bounds run from about 68 g to well over 5000 g. For scale: a fighter airframe holds together to about 13.5 g, an air-defence missile to 50 g, and a human being to 45 g for a twentieth of a second. What makes those numbers remarkable is what is missing alongside them — no air disturbance, no sonic boom, no heat consistent with the hundreds of gigawatts implied, and nothing visible that looks like a wing or an engine.
Why it matters hereChapter 8 is about inertia as an adjustable quantity, and this is the paper that turns eyewitness adjectives into numbers: the interesting measurement is not the speed but the absent signature — the energy that should have been dumped into the air and was not.
What it claims
01Estimated lower bounds on the accelerations across the cases considered range from about 68 g to well over 5000 g: the 1951 Bethune encounter at about 1700 g, Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 in 1986 at 68 and 84 g under two kinematic models, and the 2004 Nimitz encounters at about 5370 g from the Princeton radar track, about 150 g from the pilot visual contact and about 76 g from the ATFLIR infrared video.Table 2, Summary of Considered Cases; Section 3, Discussion
Published and peer-reviewed02Those figures sit far above what any known airframe or occupant can take: a human can endure 45 g for 0.044 seconds and only 25 g beyond 0.2 seconds, the F-35 Lightning II has maintained structural integrity to 13.5 g, and the Crotale NG VT1 missile airframe withstands 50 g and remains manoeuvrable to 35 g — roughly half the lowest acceleration estimated here.Section 3, Discussion
Settled physics03The craft show no flight surfaces and no apparent propulsion mechanism, and produce no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms and no excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies — hundreds of gigawatts on the authors’ own estimate.Abstract; Section 3, Discussion; Figure 3C
Published and peer-reviewed04One worked example: the Tic-Tac object dropping from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds involves at least 4.3 times ten to the eleventh joules for an assumed mass of 1000 kilograms — about 100 tons of TNT, the yield of 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles, released in three quarters of a second, with none of the catastrophic effect on the surrounding environment that would be expected.Section 3, Discussion
Published and peer-reviewed05The method is deliberately conservative and the cross-checks hold: the estimates are lower bounds computed under constant acceleration with liberal uncertainties, the cases were selected for multiple trained observers in multiple modalities — pilot and passenger visual contact, radar and infrared video — and results from encounters spanning fifty years fall within two orders of magnitude of one another and of independent estimates such as the 17.9 to 450 g derived from 1968 Minot Air Force Base radar data.Section 2, Case Studies; Section 3, Discussion
Published and peer-reviewed06The authors state their own purpose plainly: not to prove any hypothesis about the origin of these objects, but to build a body of scientific evidence allowing a more precise understanding of their nature — and their conclusion is that these observations should be carefully studied by scientists.Section 3, Discussion; Section 4, Conclusions
What to watch
The way in
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939Open access in Entropy under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, so the full text may be freely read and redistributed; this page stays a summary and points to the publisher’s copy, which is also mirrored at Europe PMC as PMC7514271.
How to cite it
Kevin H. Knuth, Robert M. Powell, Peter A. Reali (2019) Estimating flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles. doi:10.3390/e21100939
Where it sits in the curriculum
Inertial mass reduction and transmedium craftThe evidence ladderThe Pais effect