UFO

Posthip Scott sent me a webpage about a UFO encounter. It mentions that some F-15's were scrambled out of PDX last October. Hey, wait a minute, didn't I see some F-15's taking off from PDX? I did, and when was it? It was the same date!

While we were waiting at the traffic light at the corner of 82nd and Air Cargo Road, four F-15's took off, one after another in quick succession. That was pretty cool. I've seen them parked at the airport before, but I've never seen them in motion. While we are marveling at seeing these aircraft take off, four F-16's take off in quick succession. That's the most jet fighters I have seen flying all at one time.

So that's what was happening. Cool. A visit to YouTube turns up video of the fighters taking off:


Four "US Air National Guard" F-15's takeoff from Portland International Airport PDX

Four F-16A Fighting Falcons Take Off From KPDX On Runway 10R
I am not a big fan of UFO's. They make for some good entertainment, but nothing you can really hang your hat on. But sometimes I wonder if there isn't some kind of quantum neurological mass hypnosis phenomena going on. Like everyone is projecting very faint brainwaves, but occasionally enough of them sync up and reinforce each other and then they start causing observable effects, like inducing hallucinations or possibly even physical manifestations, like changing the refractive index of a ball of air so it looks like something.

This is one of the things some of the old time philosophers were going on about, how the world is an illusion and what we see and experience is only a shadow of the real world. The philosophers were talking about it ancient Greece, and Ibn Sina was talking about it more recently (about a thousand years ago). I don't buy it, mostly on account of the Arab world falling down into a rathole of philisophical debate which ignored much of what was going on in the 'real' world.

But we really don't know how the universe works. We have a much better idea now than we did in Ibn Cenna's time, but mostly what we've learned is that the world is infinitely more complicated that we ever imagined. So I am willing to allow that quantum neurological mass hypnosis phenomena might actually be a real thing. I am not going to try and hang my hat on it though.

Update February 25, 2018. My current theory is that is was a business jet being flown by a drunk pilot who just didn't give a shit about rules and regulations. Or it could have been a smuggler who was counting on being just one of the flock, or a Russian, seeing how far they could stick their nose in without getting caught. Australian news site news.com.au has the story. So does Popular Mechanics.

Update July 2019 replaced 2nd video with similar one from 2013. Why was the one from 2017 taken down? Enquiring Minds want to know.