Chad Drone - Viral UFO Hoax?

goobermaster — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:16:11 -0500

Have any of you seen this or heard of it yet? In the crypto/unexplained forums, it's been taking the headlines recently. I have to admit that it's a finely crafted tale. The attention to detail is phenomenal. It all started when "Chad" wrote into AM Sci-fi broadcast, Coast to Coast, with his tale of a UFO accompanied with incredibly detailed photos back in early May. Since then, numerous other sightings of remarkably similar "crafts" have been seen. This alone was enough to spark a wild debate in the believers -vs- skeptics circles in the forums of the unexplained. Then to add a cherry to the cake, "Isaac" wrote into the same radio station to provide clues to what the objects are. He even made up a cryptic website to provide his story and another incredibly detailed set of blueprints if you will of the "language" seen in the photos. In one of the more popular forums, great amounts of time and thought have produced numerous theories that have scant evidence. These range from extraterrestrial in nature, to unmanned drones used by power companies to monitor high wire power lines. Some people are convinced of clever CGI or photoshop tricks, and the other half are convinced that it's a real anti-gravity craft of some sort. I -- being the eternal skeptic -- will not buy into any theories that defer from the natural laws of physics and common sense, but one has to admit that whatever the root cause is, the tale is spun in a mightily crafty manner. First off, the craft(s) are incredibly detailed and seem at least plausible to high technology. They're completely original and although many comparisons have been made, the only one that I can agree with are similarities in crop circle shapes. (Always been a fan of this unexplained mystery.) I'm intrigued enough with this whole "UFO" thing to have wasted some time making my own 3D CAD model in Solidworks. Go ahead, download it in STEP format. Let's see how many wanna-be's start having sightings of their own. [insert evil laugh] The neatest part of this and most elaborate, I think, is the various crypto-letters that appear on the crafts and correspond to Isaac's language primer from his site. Although I'm sure his tale of language/code/energy/etc is complete bullshit, it's an incredibly complex and detailed language/diagram that invites all sorts of inquiry. It has provided the necessary fodder to keep massive amounts of interest from the UFO communities in coming up with letter theories and trying to discover the cypher, or at least similarities to other fonts and alphabets. I've taken the liberty of piecing the Isaac documents into a single high-res jpg of the diagram. (Click the image to the left to enlarge or download the high-res version here.) At the very least it's a very cool looking vector-ish diagram with alien letters and elements. As noted before, the similarities between the language map and some of the "real" crop circles are really remarkable. It's fun to see what the latest developments in this case are day to day. One of the best is the afore-mentioned forum, but you may find others. It's been on the front page of Digg and has lots of other publicity by now. I've no doubt that we'll eventually learn what's behind all of this. And in the mean time, the game is a fun mental riddle. And then again -- maybe this will maintain the mysterious air of crop circles and keep us all guessing. Like a well-crafted movie that doesn't provide a climax. The ignorant tend to be irritated by this -- works like a good filter to the educated and truly interested.