“I am sure that if I saw a SR-71 in action (optical or via radar) in 1969 I would be SURE it was an other-wordly craft.”
I agree - I have a good friend who works for a defense contractor after a 23-year military career. He works with some pretty cool stuff and is very good about not saying much. We were have a few beers one night and he had just come back from a proving grounds in New Mexico. I told him I didn’t want to know anything classified, just wanted to know if our sh*t was better than their sh*t, he looked at me and said, “Oh, yeah...” He’s also spoken about how compartmentalized their work is in general - he works on one aspect of a military aircraft, but knows very little about any other aspect of the project as it’s all top secret.
As a scientist, it always kills me that people look at unidentified aircraft and slap on an ‘alien’ label...think about it, space is a vacuum, you can’t generate ‘lift’ - something aerodynamic looking would be ‘cool’ in space, but not needed...unless we’re dealing with some super-advanced aliens who know that, after traveling who-knows how many millions of light years through space, need an aerodynamic craft to navigate our atmosphere, anything you see in the sky is likely to be of terrestrial origin...
Yes, I’m also the guy in the theater who, when Hollywood portrays an explosion in space complete with thunderous booms, is yelling, “There’s no sound in space!!”
“..... I told him I didn’t want to know anything classified, just wanted to know if our sh*t was better than their sh*t, he looked at me and said, “Oh, yeah...†He’s also spoken about how compartmentalized their work is in general - he works on one aspect of a military aircraft, but knows very little about any other aspect of the project as it’s all top secret”.
A buddy who does similar things told me the same things.
I think that might depend upon how close you were to the explosion. The expanding gas particles of the exploded object just might impinge upon your hull before they dissipate and result in a discernible noise, perhaps a loud one. After all, the dissipation of the gas into the vacuum can be in the form of a dense wave front.
Vat you tink abot dat?