Where is all this evidence of UFOs?

OK, I will see an interview. My preregistered objections before I check out the interview:

it was moving too abruptly to be a vtol plane

In order to judge movement of a distant object, a human needs to see its motion relative to some background. If there were large visually salient waves, then a human would likely use the waves as a background, but if there were not, and there were a region of churned water under the object, a human would likely use the churned water as a reference. But, IMO, there is no strong reason to expect the visually apparent churned water to remain particularly centered around the object even if it is an X-32 or similar, as the visual appearance of the churn will be affected by the underlying waves even if not themselves visually salient, and the actual position and the resulting appearance will be affected by interaction with the wind and wind changes, and by turbulent flow within the air column between the object and the water. Therefore, I expect that Fravor will have seen relative motion between the object and the churned water, under conditions of low visual saliency of waves, and interpreted as a rapidly moving object over stationary churned water, when in fact the opposite is the case. (edit still before watching interview: if the object had been making small changes using conventional vtol capability, that would induce large changes in the underlying churn after a short delay for air travel time, due to thrust vectoring. This is now my main expectation here).

If the above is ruled out (e.g. by large visually salient waves, or there being clear visual reference points other than the churn) then I will still note the low reliability of human witnesses at judging things like speed, but it will in that case be slightly more convincing than the case where the waves are not visually salient. 

It's also pretty implausible that he wouldn't notice the cockpit or the wings when it flew past him.

My expectation going in is that it won't actually have been particularly close at any point, and I will be paying attention to anything regarding "flew past" or similar as to how close they would actually have been. If in fact it got very close, then it would be slightly more convincing. I do note that, in an airplane, it's common to underestimate the distance to another airplane, so I would not put too much stock in any particular number.

That being said, human perception is strongly shaped by our interpretations, and if Fravor got into a "aliens" mindset very early, I expect that he could then easily miss aspects or markings of the vehicle that he would easily have spotted if he had adopted a mindset of "human vehicle". I also expect that he will not have been able to put in his undivided attention if it flew past while he flying an airplane.

Human memory is also shaped by interpretations, as the incident is re-run in someone's mind, the memory is reconstructed based on the interpretation; this is an inevitable aspect of how humans work and not an aspersion on Fravor in particular.

Anyway, I will add edits below with my post- or during- interview observations, but will leave this part and above in for reference regardless of how watching the interview changes or doesn't change my mind.

Watching Joe Rogan Experience #1361:

~3:50 things seen at 80k feet, going down to ~20k feet, hanging around and going back up but only about a dozen seen in those two weeks (might lean slightly against glitch, but could be rare, ~once per-day glitch). This sounds slower and more persistent than I previously thought, leaning against a glitch if that impression is correct. Suddenly wondering about altitude-changing balloons (though I really should try to find out more about what was actually observed before proposing solutions...). Note that from the interview alone you could get the impression that they had reason to believe that what Fravor was vectored to was the same thing, but as I noted above, I do not believe that was the case; imo Fravor probably only heard about the glitch/(whatever it was) later and mentally connected it to what he was vectored to despite no real connection.

~8:55 "The water is perfectly calm, no whitecaps..." heh, heh, as I expected.

"737 sized" -  the churn is going to be bigger than the X-32 or whatever, not unexpected

"shaped like a cross" - hmm, not quite as I expected. Suddenly checking the wiki page on X-32. 

Wiki on X-32:

However, in the STOVL mode a butterfly valve diverted the core stream exhaust gases to a pair of thrust vectoring nozzles located close to the aircraft's center-of-gravity. Forward of these nozzles, a jet screen nozzle provided a sheet of cool bypass air to minimise hot gas recirculation. There was also a pair of ducts leading to roll nozzles near the wing tips. Two pairs of ducts fed the aft-pitch yaw nozzles and the forward-pitch nozzles.

Seems complicated enough not to rule out cross shape of resulting air. Open to someone showing that the actual airflow wouldn't create a cross shape. (also could be something else than X-32, though X-32 is my leading hypothesis).

"moving around the disturbance - the whitewater that we see" heh, heh, as I expected.

"about 40 feet long" X-32 length is 45 feet with 36 foot wingspan. Actually remarkably accurate for a human observer, if it was an X-32.

"couple miles lateral and 20 thousand feet" OK, it's not side on, but rather high up. If it's an X-32, it might look less distinctive as a human aircraft if seen from the rear, so that the tailfins were not silhouetted against the ocean. Something like:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e2/35/93/e23593310eb8460fc367dc899598b41d.jpg 

Note that the distance at this point is quite large - I do not trust him to correctly identify features on it. 

leading up to 12:34 - he circles around and descends, while the "tic-tac" is circling and rising

12:34 "and as I'm pulling up, it's kind of starting across my nose, and it starts to accelerate, and then about less than a second, as I start to pull nose on to it and it crosses right in front of me, it just goes 'poof' and it's gone"

I do not get the impression from this that it was ever closer than a mile or perhaps a mile and a half or so. Also, at this point it would likely have been viewed side-on. "'poof' and it's gone" just means to me that he and the other pilots lost sight of it - perhaps somewhere near that point it gained enough altitude that it was silhouetted against the sky instead of the water, and less visible.

After the object left they look at the water again:

"there's no whitewater, nothing, it's just blue." Of course.

13:30 "'That thing is back at your CAP point' - that was our original point where we were going to hold 4 miles south of the ship" 

OK, so now they detected something else at the cap point and attribute it to the same thing, when it's unrelated. Could be a glitch - the cap point will have special significance to their unboard equipment, but not to something external.

"And they didn't track it, it just appeared." Of course.

"We don't see it on our radar, we don't see it on our sensors" Meaning it was just a glitch or mistake on the ship.

14:52 "So he picks up a hit, and he goes to lock it up, because I watched all the tapes, he goes to lock it up, and immediately the radar can tell, like it signals back that it's being jammed, so - and technically jamming is an act of war - it starts jamming the radar"

OK, I don't know how common it is for radar equipment to falsely report jamming. But note that what happened later is caused by the operator's response to this jamming report, not due to an actual detection:

"well he's smart enough to castle to his targeting pod, and he takes a passive track, and that's the video that you see of the tic-tac, where it's just sitting in the middle of the screen real quiet"

I commented on this video before. See below "video shown..." for remarks on video.

I also take back what I said earlier of them possibly seeing a balloon or something. There is no good evidence up to here that anything at all was at the CAP point at any time!

~26 minutes discussion of different modes (doesn't matter if the glitch is in the camera), radar can't get range (Of course lol...there's nothing there)

video shown is actually the different one from what I mentioned before, but IIRC has also been debunked. 

"no rotors, no exhaust, no tailfin..." Of course. It's a glitch.

Now discussing the original visual observations (rather than these entirely separate FLIR videos) again:

"The other airplane's 8000 feet above me"

Still not impressed that they also couldn't see it, after Fravor lost track. Once it was out of VTOL mode it would have been pretty hard to spot - it's easy to lose track of a tiny speck. I note that there doesn't seem to be any indication to me that they lost track at the same time, only that the other's couldn't see it after Fravor asked them about it. They may have lost track before Fravor.

Now talking about entirely separate stuff unconnected to Fravor:

~35:25 "cube inside of a clear beachball"  - the kind of thing I was mentioning in an earlier comment as an oddly shaped balloon. Though in this case, the balloon is normal shaped, it just has something (obviously very lightweight) inside it.

"different stuff out there, that we don't know" Of course. Expected from my weirdness-tail-filter standpoint, unexpected from a common cause standpoint, whether aliens or exotic tech.

"no effect from the wind, so if you got 90 knots of wind, and they talk about it, these things are sitting there" Well, I don't know. How reliable is that observation? I would need to know the details.

"v-formation" - OK, my impression is that they are NOT talking about the Nimitz incidents (either visual our FLIR) but about something separate here. The video though is in fact the same one I embedded in an earlier comment, mistakenly attributing it to the Nimitz events. You can still get a glitch in FLIR while there is something real (birds?) in a v-formation in the pilot's visual field radar not seen in FLIR.

~49:43 Fravor talks about generating UFO sightings as a pilot flying near desert campsites. Heh, humans being humans. I imagine the X-32 pilot, if it was an X-32, might have felt the same way (perhaps after an initial scare if they didn't know Fravor's wing's planes were unarmed).

~57 minutes helicopter pilot sees dark mass coming out of the depths when he's trying to recover some kind of sensor torpedo, then goes back down - submarine or whale? - says pilot could tell it's not a submarine, I'm not convinced - are all submarines exactly the same? - in later incident, torpedo sucked down, cool, guess the sub got it. Or something else happened. Who knows?

1hr 1 min or so - going back to re-discuss original incident directly seen by Fravor. Not hearing anything contradicting what my original impressions. "The only reason we saw the tic tac [being the churned water]" - Of course. And that's why the people in the other plane (who were higher up) couldn't see the "tic-tac" after it left VTOL mode. 

Some mention of project Bluebook and some 1953 incident. Well, just because at one point they were trying to suppress UFO belief doesn't make it actually true that there are aliens (or whatever). Not sure what this 1953 incident was - they aren't giving a detailed account.

~1:11 Some old paintings of the moon and a comet which are allegedly UFOs. Also another painting with a black smudge that looks like some dirt on the painting, that a figure in the painting is allegedly looking at, when they could be looking at the comet behind it (or is that just more dirt)?

Also some "miracle of the sun". I haven't looked into whatever that was.

Joe Rogan: "looking for the holes in things instead of looking at it objectively" well, if there are holes in things, then looking at it objectively requires acknowledging those holes instead of dismissing them. Remember, filtered evidence - we should expect a lot of weird stuff when we filter for weirdness.

~1:15 mention that there was 4 who all saw the same thing. Well, yes, but it was all consistent with an X-32, in my view, and there's no good indication that it was connected to any other observations (such as the FLIR tapes), except the radar detection which led them to be vectored there - and note that this radar detection itself is not connected, in my understanding, to the claimed detections of things going between 80000 and 20000 feet.

A whole bunch of talk about implications. Well whatever. Sure, I would love to have a reactionless drive, but I don't expect it to be allowed by physics.

Some discussion of different "types" of UFO. 

~1:47 Brief mention again of the original incident, initial "motion" (which I have noted was not necessarily real) followed by mirroring of Fravor's aircraft's motion - which does not require exotic technology.

Mention of radar jamming, which as I noted above, was associated with the FLIR incident, not the visual incident Fravor observed directly (though it would be easy, if watching carelessly, to come to the wrong conclusion here).

Interview ends with Jeremy Corbell discussing area 51 crowd and speeches (recent one where people showed up, not original event).

Anyway, my overall impressions:

I had expected that Fravor would be honest, but mistaken and unreliable, due to the frame in which he perceived the events. On the whole, he not only seemed honest, but even assuming he was reliable, it does seem that this is fairly consistent with my picture of the events. So, I do not need to assume he was unreliable. Note, I don't necessarily trust the mile to mile and a half number I gave above for the closest approach - this is assuming that when the vehicles were circling they were about two miles apart horizontally, but it could easily have been larger.

As with pretty much everyone else's analysis of these events, it looks to me that Fravor is mixing together various observations and attributing them to a common cause, when there is not really any good reason to do so.

On the whole, this solidly confirms my impression that this is not outside the expected weirdness-distribution tail, or at least not so far outside it as to be strong evidence of something strange. (Surprising but not surprisingly surprising observations => nothing unexpected given filtered evidence; highly surprising but only slightly surprisingly surprising observations => slight evidence given filtered evidence).

If someone knows enough about X-32 VTOL thrust pattern to rule out a cross shape, I stand ready to bump up the weirdness level that I assign these observations a little bit, or more if someone could rule out that shape for conventional tech human VTOL craft in general.