In the history of humanity our research efforts, hence our advancement, has always been bound by the dreams of visionaries and hampered by the dead ends of failed/wrong ideas. To actually have a working piece of highly advanced technology paraded through our best attempt at a floating radar range is the greatest advantage that we have ever come upon. This is a technological goalpost for us, it shows us what is actually possible, and informs our research efforts as to which directions are likely fruitful. Such a guiding hand in our development has never been extended before and I feel we are profoundly stupid to ignore it.
I ask the members of this community who also feels that this evidence is sufficient to apply their excess brainpower towards extracting knowledge from these events. We need to figure out everything we can from this and start the conversation within the scientific and technological communities about how we can gain from it. Also, I argue that any knowledge gained needs to be open sourced and that this will only happen if more IQ outside of government is thinking about it than inside. This community could easily ensure that. What can we learn from this?
The public has very little insight into both what is "possible" to achieve by military aircraft, and more importantly in this context, their observational capability.
If the navy says that they spotted an unidentified flying object moving mach X at a distance of Y km, that tells geopolitical adversaries things like "they can monitor our railgun fire under these conditions."
Every piece of information we get from the military that isn't through investigation needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt, since it's always been released under the pretenses of information warfare and the tactical consequences of it being public.
And as an aside, not only does the public have very little insight into what the military and its contractors can do, the military itself has little insight into what other parts of the military are doing. It's entirely possible that one observation from one unit was entirely unaware of another unit doing another thing.
I suspect, sadly, that 'what we can learn' from this is close to nothing without firmer evidence.
For instance, the Cdr. Fravor account published in the NYT a couple of years ago regarding the 2004 incident is extremely difficult to explain without considering otherwordly technology. For example, the instant acceleration/deceleration witnessed directly by several pilots and on multiple radar systems corresponds with exactly ZERO technology known to mankind. That type of acceleration has the same effect as smashing into a mountain at hyper-mach velocity. There is no mapping of the reported events to our current understanding of physics; it simply cannot be explained, so forget the idea that something we built could achieve those maneuvers.
Also the idea that Cdr. Fravor and other pilots who've come forward with their testimony are all lying or are somehow mistaking what they saw for atmospheric light tricks is ridiculous. Similarly, the Navy UFO cases that have more recently surfaced provide yet more of the same level of evidence -- Multiple pilots, multiple radar, infrared, and other tracking systems, etc. To put forward the idea that all these people are lying or are mentally unwell or are somehow sharing a group hallucination is to suggest a far more unlikely event than the ones they reported.
Publishing these as 'unidentified' might be a good way to putyour own branch into the news cycle and acquire more money through political channels. Also, keeping enough of the environment/state in which the phenomena occured classified prevents any foreign actors from precisely identifiying weaknesses in the systems in use.
1) Given the performance observed, what sort of power generation technology could or could not be inside of these craft?
2) Is it even possible to build a 30ft - 40ft physical craft that can endure g-forces in the 10,000's? If not, does this force us to conclude it is some sort of warp drive and the craft isn't actually experiencing the forces the performance data would indicate?
I think that logical reasoning along these lines by experts might yield un-escapable conclusions that could inform us how they might work and how they can't possibly work, a start towards what we need to learn and might ignore along the way.