There's plenty out there on the internet from fairly trustworthy sources, including the article above, which backs up everything I stated and you quoted. The terms 'rapid drop', 'hypersonic speed', and 'impossible manoevrability' were those used by the pilots and radar operators who observed the event. All of whom would be very familiar with what current technology was capable of.
For info, you didn't see a Typoon stop above you at an airshow, you saw it appear to do so, simply because a Typoon is not capable of such a manoeuvre. It was an optical illusion caused by the aspect you were viewing the aircraft and the way it was being flown, designed to wow crowds at airshows.
And just to quote the article above and the F18 pilot who was involved, when asked about it by a colleague.
'"I have no idea what I saw,” Commander Fravor replied to the pilot. “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s. But, he added, “I want to fly one.”'
I have no idea what he saw either but if what he says is true then it could represent a technology far in advance of ours.
Internet cookie for you sir! Yes, the Typhoon was slowly travelling above me across my field of vision from left to right nose pointing upwards, but also beginning to level out, move away from me and manoeuvre back to the left. It did appear to stop in mid-air from my perspective, but isn't that the whole point of eyewitness testimonies in situations like this? A lack of context, incorrect terminology, failure to disclose relevant details, etc, all make a mundane event much more mysterious. It stopped in mid-air
for me (and only for a fraction of a second), but as you've shown there is a perfectly rational explanation that doesn't involve alien technology.
Let's look at this bit from the report:
The two fighter jets then conferred with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point, in aviation parlance.
They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange aircraft.
“Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is at your cap point.”
“We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.
Even a cursory glance at wiki reveals some interesting points:
Subsequently, the two fighter jets began a new course to the
combat air patrol (CAP) rendezvous point. "Within seconds"
Princeton radioed the jets that the radar target had reappeared 60 miles (97 km) away at this predetermined rendezvous point. According to
Popular Mechanics, a physical object would have had to move greater than 2,400 miles per hour (3,900 km/h) to cover that distance in the reported time.
2,400 mph is well within the realms of current technology.
The X-15 hit 4,500 mph and the SR-71 around 2,300 mph, both of these were made on the back of 1960s technology. Just because you, or these pilots, can't imagine technology that can explain the objects movements, doesn't mean such technology hasn't already been developed and tested - maybe the cost of running these craft was so prohibitively expensive or dangerous that they've been put on hold until future innovations make them more feasible? No one here is privy to the top secret goings-on inside NASA, JPL, DARPA or a whole host of other organisations that operate well above our security clearance level, yet somehow "no current aviation technology" is cited as a plausible reason for believing "alien tech" exists.
Science journalist
Dennis Overbye argued a "stubborn residue" of unexplained aerial phenomena remain after review. Overbye highlighted that some of these accounts are obtained from respected observers such as military pilots. However, he cautioned, "as modern psychology and neuroscience have established, the senses are an unreliable portal to reality, whatever that is."
Luckily, we don't have to rely on personal testimony, we can use the evidence from the infra-red sensors....oh....
According to Steve Cummings of
Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, the video images captured by a Raytheon-made Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) sensor are not definitive proof that the jet pilots were chasing an actual UFO. Cummings noted, "To really be sure, we would need the raw data. Visual displays alone are not the best evidence".
And the raw data tells us....oh, seems it wasn't worthy of any further analysis.
...and that "one video image showing an object suddenly zooming off screen was likely caused by the plane’s banking while the camera was stopped at the end of its sweep".
This is the sort of mistake a pilot might make if it were his first military assignment in an F-18, but luckily he-....oh, hang on....
Nickell further explains that this was Fravor's first military assignment with the U.S. Navy’s F-18 Super Hornet, and as a result, the experience "obviously rattled him."
