Ezra Klein just did a long interview with Leslie Kean (a popular author and Coast to Coast AM guest) about her article in "The Debrief" --- where it went, after the Washington Post wouldn't run it on her time schedule --- about David Grusch:
It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of things like psychic teleportation. Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts). No source she names has firsthand knowledge of "non-human origin" technology; it's all people who heard something who heard something. At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". There's no good answer to the question of "if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly" --- she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD classification rules allow Grusch to describe this stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a line of specificity, which, just, no.
But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it.
> she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". (sic)
When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited?
I’m especially curious because I’m somewhat of an “expert” in the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons of footage in a former life) and I think it’s a legitimate object of some sort [1]. Though I don’t believe it’s extraterrestrial.
1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right over the ocean looks just like a cruise missile flying low level.
> U.F.O. skeptics and experts in optics have long said many of the videos and sightings by naval aviators represent optical illusions that have made ordinary objects — weather balloons, commercial drones — appear to move faster than possible.
> Military officials have largely come to the same conclusion.
…
> Another video, known as Gimbal, shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning. Military officials now believe that is the optics of the classified image sensor, designed to help target weapons, make the object appear like it is moving in a strange way.
I don’t know, define discredited. Define consensus. I really love that it’s a game developer who seems to be thinking outside the box enough to provide explanations for the public materials. I guess the expertise is not as valuable as it seems, in the narrow problem of explaining camera rendering, and indeed someone with a games background knows a lot about that.
> shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning.
In this particular case, the turning and spinning just looks like artifacting in my "expert" opinion. I guess it doesn't help that the flight crew audio states it is spinning, but both things can be true. I've seen artifacting like this on FLIR footage a number of times.
Honestly, Mick West reaches hard for any way to debunk everything and his conclusions on certain subjects are just flat out ridiculous.
Ex: Suggesting that what kids saw at the Ariel school sighting were just puppeteers. Those kids are now adult professionals and have stuck to what they saw. Don't take my word, have an open mind and watch the past and recent interviews with them.
Was great to see him put in his place on the News Nation post-interview segment.
I understood intellectually the problems with memory but I never felt them viscerally until I listened to The Coldest Case in Laramie, which is a podcast series about what it sounds like. There are interviews with various people who are utterly believable, but at some point the host gains access to the police reports and interview transcripts from when the crime took place, and she reacquaints these people with what they stated originally.
They are totally baffled. They literally cannot believe that what they remember happening in vivid detail never happened, that what they stated in reports from 20 or 30 years ago - which must be true - has little relation to their present day recollections. Hearing the disbelief and confusion in their voices really made the fallibility of memory real to me.
"Gimbal" is a speck of dust (or fly, or bird poo) on the lens of a gimbal-mounted heat-tracking camera. The entire video is predictable given the physics of such a device [1]. Not my idea, it's been around since this news first broke [2].
Totally, Gimbal and Gofast were immediately discredited as Gimbal, well, being the gimbal of the sensor + contrast enhacement and Gofast being the parallax effect on a probably balloon moving at normal wind speeds. The last one I haven't seen conclusions, but if you squint it looks like an airliner at a distance. Finally the green tringle one also was discarded as a lens artifact.
Mick West’s analysis involves the gimbal lock idea, which I am convinced of, but he claims that the infrared shadow is the shape that a two engine plane gives off when it is at an angle, and one engine is occluded by the plane’s body. This seems more plausible to me than dust on the dome, which I imagine those sensors must have some way of handling or they would be useless.
How does one explain the eyewitness testimony of the 4 people involved?
>Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet (12 m) long.[7][4] Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes.[8] Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared.
The history of UFO sightings is nothing but eyewitness testimony, often from groups of people. If there weren't a video this wouldn't have escaped the tabloids.
Adding a video which is a textbook demonstration of gimbal+heat tracking behavior does not lend weight to their testimony.
EDIT: The testimony you quoted isn't even associated with "Gimbal", it's associated with the decade-earlier "FLIR" video.
But according to Fravor's report, the 2 planes were sent there by their ship because the radar at picked up something. So it means that if it is made up, it involves the 2 pilots and their 2 weapons specialist, plus an undetermined number of radar operators, and their chain of command in the USS Princeton who dispatched them.
So from my understanding, it was picked up by at least one type of sensor.
There is still a probability, there was an artifact on the radar, AND the crew then decided to make up a story, but, Alex Dietrich, the second pilot had just started a few weeks earlier, and it was her first real world mission. I don't think that typical people tries to do a prank on one of their first assignments, on the spot, more so with colleagues they don't know very well.
But it is still possible I guess, even if I have hard time what could be the motivation of everyone involved.
I am not a military person, but I would assume that "radar picked up something" is a pretty common reason for planes to be in the air. This time, there just happened also to be something on the lens of the FLIR camera.
VFX artists react had a pretty good video where they're pretty sure the footage over the ocean is just a bird. The oddness is due to the camera optics and the vessel that's recording it traveling extremely fast.
Do you assume, US fighter pilots get stumped by birds often?
I find it really remarkable how far behind the curve HN is on this topic. It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all. Yet here people behave like their own grandfathers.
TheHill.com reports on Congress acting on the mounting evidence for ET craft crash retrieval programs illegally hidden from democratic oversight, people on HN discuss whether birds fly high.
> It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all.
It's not avant-garde at all. It's the same old nonsense that comes around every 10-20 years with new lipstick on it. The "pilots are trained observers" canard is literally the same shtick from all the way back to Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers from 1947. After going around this hamster wheel a bunch of times, forgive me if I'm not excited by another round of "the evidence is about to be released any day now" chatter.
The Hill is reporting on the shenanigans of opportunist or dumb as rocks congresspeople who figured out there’s some demographic of marginal voter who cares about this.
Exactly. That right wing grifters have piled onto the current UFO conspiracy push doesn't lend it any additional credibility. If anything, it detracts from it.
Have you actually watched his video on the Gimbal craft? I thought that was a big piece of evidence myself, went into his video at the recommendation of someone here on HN with heavy skepticism, and came out sufficiently convinced it was not actually a UFO. He's also classy with his debunkings. To me that's a big bonus. Other YouTubers whose niche is debunking things seem to love being snarky, sarcastic, and condescending. Doesn't make his points any more/less valid though.
I'm not generally a fan of Mick West, particularly when he gets into specific debunkings of videos, because his argumentative framework depends on the same flawed approach as those he's debunking: he starts from the conclusion that the aliens are not here, and then claims any evidence offered against this conclusion is insufficient. He depends on the same fallacy as his opponents. The only difference is the conclusion from which he starts. And of course he has an inherent advantage of credibility because his conclusion doesn't require any extraordinary evidence. That's why it feels like he's just taking cheap shots - in many ways he's on the easier side of the debate (but ironically it's become the harder side because it's nearly impossible to deprogram his opponents out of their cult).
However, I did enjoy his recent video [0] on Grusch, where he focuses on the meta arguments against the narrative itself. He does a good job of describing the logical and dialectical flaws in the claims of the so-called "whistleblower" (who needs to get approval to speak publicly), and the reporting of the story itself (which was rushed and published by the same group of people with monetary and reputational incentives to uncritically promote the same narrative for which they've previously lost credibility).
It's called circular reasoning. Conclusion cites the premises, which in turn the premises cite the conclusion. Evidence (or lack of) is used to prove it self. When you start with a false or circular premise, anything that follows is technically true. It's a powerful (bullshitting) tool that can be used to prove or disprove anything.
It's bayesian reasoning. If I tell you that I predict the sun will explode tomorrow, you should consider the sun's track record of not exploding when evaluating my claim.
There's no bayesian reasoning here, just someone assuming something to be proved to be already true. Statements don't become self-evidently true just because someone assigned probabilities on them.
Also, using only past billion occurrences of the sun not blowing up, and then still concluding that the sun will not blow up despite of any recent indications of the sun showing anomalous activity seems a more accurate analogy.
Mick West presents rational reasons for why his assumptions are true, he's not simply asserting his assumptions as correct.
> despite of any recent indications of the sun showing anomalous activity
The whole point is that the videos are not in fact the indications of anomalous activity that they're made out to be. There are mundane explanations for all of them.
This comment makes it seem like the video does not contain rational arguments. It very much does. If you're skeptical about them, why not address them.
I find the gimbal one to be… really dumb. The navy releases a video called gimbal and doesn’t say anything. Later experts look at it and say, “looks like gimbal lock”.
And what… people don’t believe that the navy also concluded it was gimbal lock?
One thing about the object flying over the ocean people often ignore was the setting was at black hot, meaning the object was significantly colder than the water below. I have some speculate that it could be a bird but I can't see how a bird could be so cold unless it was dead.
The gimbal video gets its name from the strange way the object appears to rotate in the footage, what some people have claimed is “the craft reconfiguring itself”.
Ive seen convincing analyses that this rotation effect is the objects infrared shadow changing shape as it moves relative to the observer. The shape change is almost exactly what we would expect if we were observing a two engine plane, and one engine became occluded behind the body of the plane, hiding its infrared signature from the observer.
That was a great podcast, and the entirety of Kean's journalistic research and integrity basically amounts to "I trust Grusch because he seems like a decent guy and I've been told he's trustworthy. But yeah, he's never seen any UFO, just reports and heard people talk about them, but since I trust him, I implicitly trust their words as well."
I love how Ezra asks her obvious questions about her research like "how is it possible the Pentagon approves of people talking about UFO retrieval if it is such a close-guarded secret?" and she says "good question! I'm not entirely sure!". Seriously? You haven't asked yourself that question before?
This entire UFO saga comes from people with X-files' "I want to believe" poster in their office, and they don't let confirmation bias stop them.
The entire field of ufology is a paradox of distrusting the government (because they've engaged in a coverup for 70 years) but also trusting the government (because the only evidence offered that the government lied is appeal to authority of someone from the government - muh classified intel! muh Q clearance! - saying it lied). For me, any evidence of aliens needs to either resolve or sidestep this paradox.
Ideally that evidence would take the form of a personal experience with the aliens. Less ideally, maybe I could accept documented and consistently observable photographic or videographic evidence from non-government citizens. What I will not accept is evidence that comes in the form of second-hand hearsay from a government "whistleblower" who gets approval for what he speaks about publicly. That's not a whistleblower, it's a spokesperson - and his claims do not resolve the paradox because it's effectively one entity telling me "we lied to you, but now we're telling the truth" - either you're telling the truth but I can't believe you because you lied to me, or you're lying to me and I'm not surprised because you've always lied to me. In other words, this is institutional gaslighting.
For me to accept evidence from a government "whistleblower," I need to see them overcoming some form of institutional resistance. Snowden was a whistleblower. His claims were obviously credible because they made a lot of people very mad, and they chased him to the end of the earth trying to imprison or kill him. Bill Binney was not a whistleblower, despite his claims, because the NSA never prosecuted him and so obviously everything he says during his ongoing speaking tour is somewhat sanctioned by them.
For me to believe aliens are here, based on the words of a "whistleblower," he needs to release documents and photos and videos and scientific data about the craft, and the DoD needs to prosecute or at least ridicule him. But this current situation of passive acceptance by the DoD (or "soft disclosure" in the words of Lue Anon followers) is absolutely unconvincing, and just pisses me off because either my government thinks I'm stupid enough to fall for it, or too stupid to handle the full truth.
This thread is full of "I don't want to believe and/or can't".
If it's legit, could people itt put down their confirmation bias and handle that we're not the smartest around, not top of the food chain, that our governments have lied to us and kept it wrapped sealed through compartmentalization/removed from oversight through third party contractors for decades, have hidden clean energy tech from tax payers so private entities could profit, that people have been murdered to hide this tech/reality, among a long long list of other implications?
Of course if true, but from the looks of what's coming down the pipeline, it's no longer "haha little green men believing, xfiles wishing, tinfoil wearers", and more of "criminal acts have been committed out of greed and keeping control. Better get our heads out of the sand".
Pucker up, because this is likely going to flip all of our realities upside down in a weird, maybe even frightful, and extreme way within the next few years.
Or alternatively, not. It's not grand conspiracy, don't pucker up, do continue to think about applications of Hanlon's and Occam's razor.
A stoicism point of view here is that none of your wishful thinking of change would necessarily be good or bad, it's too early to say. And since this is a fantasy grab-basket of meme food, the most likely stoical outcome is that nothing to see here, move along is actually the best choice.
"At the request of the Air Force, the CAA's Technical Development and Evaluation Center did an analysis of the radar sightings. Their conclusion was that "a temperature inversion had been indicated in almost every instance when the unidentified radar targets or visual objects had been reported."[29] Project Blue Book would eventually label the unknown Washington radar blips as false images caused by temperature inversion, and the visual sightings as misidentified meteors, stars, and city lights.[30] In later years two prominent UFO skeptics, Donald Menzel, an astronomer at Harvard University, and Philip Klass, a senior editor for Aviation Week magazine, would also argue in favor of the temperature inversion/mirage hypothesis.[31] In 2002 Klass told a reporter that "radar technology in 1952 wasn't sophisticated enough to filter out many ordinary objects, such as flocks of birds, weather balloons, or temperature inversions."[7] The reporter added that "UFO proponents argue that even then seasoned controllers could differentiate between spurious targets and solid, metallic objects. Klass disagrees. It may be that 'we had two dumb controllers at National Airport on those nights'...[Klass] added that the introduction of digital filters in the 1970s led to a steep decline in UFO sightings on radar."[7]"
>Staff Sgt. Charles Davenport observed an orange-red light to the south; the light "would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude ... this happened several times."
>Nugent's superior, Harry Barnes, a senior air-traffic controller at the airport, watched the objects on Nugent's radarscope. He later wrote: We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed ... their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft.
>Barnes then called National Airport's radar-equipped control tower; the controllers there, Howard Cocklin and Joe Zacko, said that they also had unidentified blips on their radar screen, and saw a hovering "bright light" in the sky, which departed with incredible speed.
>Airman William Brady, who was in the tower, then saw an "object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail ... [it was] unlike anything I had ever seen before."[3][5] As Brady tried to alert the other personnel in the tower, the strange object "took off at an unbelievable speed.
>On one of National Airport's runways, S.C. Pierman, a Capital Airlines pilot, was waiting in the cockpit of his DC-4 for permission to take off. After spotting what he believed to be a meteor, he was told that the control tower's radar had detected unknown objects closing in on his position. Pierman observed six objects — "white, tailless, fast-moving lights" — over a 14-minute period.
>At one point both radar centers at National Airport and the radar at Andrews Air Force Base were tracking an object hovering over a radio beacon. The object vanished in all three radar centers at the same time.
Let me know what you think after the batch of upcoming congressional hearings, new legislation, and new batch of whistleblowers with firsthand knowledge come forward to the public and congress.
Word of advice, read up and keep an open mind. This is just the beginning of what's coming.
Our greedy, inept, inefficient government, but also our conniving, duplicitous, and machiavellian government that is able to keep aliens a closely guarded secret even from everyone for decades.
Thank you for linking to that interview. I listened to most of it when it came out. I was already skeptical but willing to have an open mind, but I came away from it feeling very assured in my skepticism. These claims are utter nonsense! Give the interview a listen and try and tell me your bullshit meter doesn’t go off.
As I understand it, that video illustrates either a camera glare artifact, or alien technology very carefully tuned to replicate a camera glare artifact.
Well somehow the glare showed up on the aircraft carrier's instrumentation the pilot launched from as well as the jet itself and the jets of other pilots who can be heard on the video confirming the sighting on their own IR and radar.
There are other videos that reverse engineer from what we do know, the flight path of the "ufo" and that it matches the track of another plane 30mi away.
How does that explain the fact that an F-15 flying several times faster than any commercial or private jet was not able to catch up to it? Not to mention the rapid vertical ascent and mid air rotation. These are not idiots, folks. These pilots and carrier crew members know the difference between a 757 or private jet and something else.
yeah the person(Mick West) who did the debunking is a retired gaming software engineer who is also somewhat of a known troll and has zero background in the field of avionic systems used by the fighter pilots. Some of his debunking statements are borderline absurd, you have a sighting that is seen on FLIR, radar and has an eyewitness testimony along with video and his statement is the pilot who has flown for 10 years did not know what he saw, and all the electronic systems malfunctioned and the object clearly seen on video is a artifact of sun glare. The Gimball video has not been debunked by professionals currently.
Here's my post in response to a comment in the "US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles" HN thread[1] from a few weeks ago that addresses this:
> Watch the introduction to the 4 hour UAP panel that NASA hosted a few days ago[2], they address this.
> According to NASA, even highly trained and experienced pilots can easily be fooled, and often reported UAPs are artifacts of the technology that detects them, or are indeed things like weather balloons. For example, NASA even used the example of Navy pilots being fooled by a procession of commercial airplanes queueing to land at an airport 40+ miles away from their base.
> They also emphasize that radar, detection systems, etc are not scientific instruments that are suitable for the detection or analysis of this phenomenon. They emphasize that the technology that the Navy et al. use are strictly optimized for defensive/offensive interception of conventional weapons. That's to say that they're calibrated for war and not for accurate scientific observation.
> Going back to the procession of airplanes waiting to land, according to the instruments available to pilots and their own observations, those airplanes were doing things that were impossible to do without bending the laws of physics. Yet all they were were just a bunch of airplanes doing what all airplanes do.
> > Due to the supposed feeds and eye witness accounts, it seems infeasible there is a 'weather balloon' type explanation
> Pilots and their systems are fallible, you'd have to assume some argument from authority to believe otherwise.
Now apply Occam’s razor to the following two choices:
1. Aliens have visited Earth. They crashed their spaceships or we shot them down. The US Government (and possibly other governments) retrieved and studied their technology and managed to keep it a secret for decades
"Occam’s razor" is merely a heuristic, not some sort of law. Neither logical nor otherwise.
Here, you are even using it wrong.
You present a false dichotomy and rely on top of that on the faulty, but commonly held assumption, one choice was vastly less probable than the other.
If the US government has covered up the topic for the last 80 years, you must assume your priors to be faulty.
Ok, let’s add a third scenario: aliens have visited Earth undetected. Hell, you can add as many scenarios as you like, I’m still going to go with ‘Aliens have not visited earth’ unless presented with overwhelmingly concrete evidence.
Anecdotes and eyewitness accounts from falliable humans and weird sensor readings from non-scientific sensors that are designed for war are not the least bit convincing to me.
Being visited by alien beings would be the most consequential event in human history, I’m personally fine with having an extremely high bar for any evidence or proof before I even entertain the possibility.
I do believe it’s probable that intelligent life exists in the universe, for what it’s worth.
> You don't want evidence, you want someone important to say convincing evidence exists.
One is factual and scientific, the other is authoritarian.
There are decades of evidence of sightings and encounters, collected by government and military agencies in multiple countries.
No, I want concrete evidence, not eyewitness testimony from pilots, ‘whistleblowers’ who report secondhand accounts of witnesses, videos, and sensor data. None of those things are concrete evidence of alien spacecraft visiting earth. There certainly are a lot of aerial anomalies, which makes sense as many nation states are flying all kinds of things all over the world and our vision, cameras and sensors are all fallible.
> It's nonsense to claim no evidence of anomalies exists when that's just not factually correct.
I am saying I don’t believe any of the alleged sightings are real alien spacecraft, not that there aren’t reports of anomalous aircraft.
> Not from "I can't imagine this is happening and it makes me anxious, so I'll just pretend there's nothing real to worry about."
I’m not anxious about aliens existing, I think the discovery of alien life would be the most exciting thing that has happened in human history. I’d be glad to be alive for that, regardless of the outcome. I just don’t think it’s happened yet.
And somehow these alien crafts are capable to cross interstellar distances but then crash at a rate higher than our airplanes, unless of course there's a shitload of them flying around here.
People invoke Occam's razor too often that it has become pretty much a thought-terminating meme. Occam's razor only gets you the simple, convenient explanation, it says nothing about the truth. Epistemologists understand this very well. It's easy to find counter-examples where simple explanations reflects nothing of reality.
I implore you to watch the NASA UAP panel video, because not only do they explain that it's happened before, it's what they believe is the problem now.
I think this is likely the correct theory too but to hand-wave it away as "discredited" and claim that it also downstream "discredits" anyone who refers to the video is rather mealy-mouthed. Which appears to be the same type of behavior you ascribe to Grusch & co.
You understand it wrong, this is a spurious and frankly absurd claim propagated by Mick West, which has been repeatedly debunked by _actual fighter pilots_.
This video does a good job at explaining how the "UFO" is probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.
No credible debunking of "Gimball" exists, despite Mick West proponents. Mick made himself look like a complete fool, and the response to his video by _actual_ fighter pilots is pretty embarrassing for him
Another part is that people don't realize how within the government, and especially the military, there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified. You do this because there are spies and they will steal shit. You want to make that process noisy. It's also beneficial because you may get your adversary to spend millions or billions studying a thing that isn't even possible. Sometimes they even have people "working" on these things (sometimes even unwitting fools that are true believers) because it makes it look more legitimate (and you can funnel money through these). See the ridiculousness of the US and Russian psychic programs.
There's a lot of disinformation as well as smoke and mirrors. It's annoying, but you can't take military documents at face value. It's like reading a scientific paper, you realistically can only judge the merit if you have some domain expertise or enough in an adjacent domain to understand the work itself. That's the whole reason disinformation works in the first place (which is specifically meant to fool experts, even if not all of them, just enough).
To add to this, I've noticed a lot of the material that gets declassified, that is purported to be evidence of aliens/psychics/magic/etc, is in the form of field notes or case studies that either contain full quotations or summaries of what someone else claims is true, but are not actually experiments or demonstrations of what is claimed.
For example, you might have a declassified CIA document that's being distributed as evidence of psychic phenomenon, but upon further inspection, you'll find isn't the case. What you instead see is documentation along the lines of "someone made a claim about X, here's what they say about X" where X can be "I can read minds" or whatever. At no point is there an actual scientific test of this, the document is just acknowledgment that someone said some outlandish things to government investigators. Then years later those notes are declassified and somehow become evidence that X really happened.
It's like reading a police report about someone who took too much methamphetamine and ran around claiming that they could fly, and then using that police report as evidence that the government knows people can fly.
When they first released the CIA psychic documents I clicked a few at random and my impressions were much different. The papers I read were very much "We're conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our procedures and results."
The government threw a lot of money at that and did direct experimentation, but dig deeper into the weird claims some of those that were adjacent to remote viewing were making/continue to make outside of that and you start getting into that territory. Things like aliens, teleportation, levitation, pyrokinesis, etc.
I remember seeing one document that was about a person claiming to being able to do some kind of teleportation of objects through containers, so the investigators went to see them do it and it appeared that it happened. That's more of a magic show than a real experiment, but because the investigators described what they appeared to see on government letterhead, believers in the paranormal upgraded it to fact instead of field notes.
Same thing happens with reports of UFOs or aliens, their portrayal of evidence of conspiracy rely heavily on twisting testimony, descriptions and appearances in the text into "facts confirmed and approved of by the government."
> there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified
Exactly this.
I saw a youtube video a while ago about a recently declassified document from the US Navy which says the USS Seawolf reported hearing signals from survivors on the USS Thresher more than a day after the Thresher went missing. The sonar operators on the Seawolf, no doubt well trained professionals, had themselves convinced they heard the Thresher and there were people still left alive. The guy who made the video about this document was very excited; "the US Navy hid this from from us! They told us the Thresher guys died instantly."
But the problem is the Thresher sank in about 2.6 km of water, far deeper than any military submarine can possibly withstand. Furthermore there is declassified video footage of the Thresher's hull on the sea floor, shattered into numerous pieces. There were no pings from the Thresher's sonar; the Seawolf crew were simply mistaken. The report was classified but that doesn't mean it was true.
[Video link deliberately omitted, but you can find it by searching "37 pings"]
The only way for the story to make sense is if they weren't resting on the sea floor, and were instead at or above crush depth with neither propulsion or spare ballast capacity to rise to the surface.
It's possible, I suppose. It seems pretty far-fetched.
"While working in Moscow, Ufimtsev became interested in describing the reflection of electromagnetic waves. He gained permission to publish his research results internationally because they were considered to be of no significant military or economic value."
Well that's why disinformation works so well. You have to explore stolen material even if you think it might be misinformation.
But also military misinformation is so prolific that it even infiltrates public knowledge. Often on purpose. Many people still believe that eating carrots will help you see in the dark. It's definitely true that the vitamins in carrots can help eyesight, but they aren't _that_ good. Good disinformation has a mixture of truth in it for people to latch onto. Just a sprinkling can give something a lot of validity. Should also say something about how you take in information, especially from YouTube university.
> Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts).
Source?
>At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video".
"Gimball" is not credibly discredited, calling it such highlights your bias and calls your other points into question.
EDIT: HN is a terrible website for having actual discussions because, inevitably, people reply to my comments and I end up typing a reply only to hit "you're doing that too fast". Occasionally I engage and inevitably am reminded of why this site sucks so much for anything more than a particularly unperformant RSS feed
So I don't know if this will even post, but I've posted up thread so hopefully you see it. (edit: it didn't post, so I edited it in to my original message)
Generally anyone who refers to "Gimball" as debunked/etc is referring to Mick West's preposterous video on the subject. It has been so thoroughly, repeatedly, taken apart by actual fighter pilots who have used these systems that _anyone_ still parroting the original claims of Mick West is either incredibly out of the loop or a straight-up denialist who is willing to accept even the most flimsy of arguments if it reenforces their prior beliefs.
I think people have said that, but not in a way that means it's true, or unique, or helpful. Sufficiently advanced metallurgy is indistinguishable from magic.
Yeah it's more like been confirmed with the recent airspace intrusions? They're almost certainly all some kind of foreign spy drones which exploit the alien stigma by being designed to look as alien as possible. Any sightings would be instantly dismissed as nonsense, which is a real galaxy brain psyops move.
Are you promoting radical scepticism and believe we should abjure from pro or con cases or are you a believer? They're not the same. Do you apply the same criterion to all rebuttals or only rebuttals of this kind? How topic specific is your concern with credibility ? And, forgive me but why should we care about your opinion over others?
You are in some ways invoking appeal to authority but then... All debunking is at some level an appeal to authority. I am unquestionably promoting an appeal to authority above btw.
Since there's no point discussing this "evidence" with a believer, I ask what you would consider viable credible discrediting. My suspicion is, no discrediting would meet your standard and you are not actually prepared to accept any alternate basis, such as lens flare.
it's all people who heard something who heard something
People with direct access to such classified materials would not legally be able to divulge details and especially not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison.
This doesn't directly prove the claims of Grusch or anybody else, of course. But it is a decently persausive explanation for why it's always "people who heard something who heard something" and not direct sources.
"if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly"
I don't know anything about Kean so I have no opinion on her.
One thing you have to say about Grusch is that he is really putting it all on the line. He is going through the official whistleblower channel and is triggering a major investigation.
If he is telling the truth, the DoD would more or less be admitting guilt by going after him.
(There is also a third possibility. Grusch is being truthful, but he and/or others have been deceived. I think wrapping a secret program under the cover of some UFO nonsense could be pretty effective camouflage, since UFO-related claims usually are instantly deemed noncredible in the eyes of many)
"she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD
classification rules allow Grusch to describe this
stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a
line of specificity, which, just, no"
I honestly don't know how this works. Surely there is some line of specificity? I mean, you and I can talk about this and it's legal. At what point are you close enough to something classified to make it illegal?
It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with firsthand knowledge to disclose them. But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute evidence of the existence of ETA's. It would be illegal for me to disclose the existence of a +4 Wand of Magic Missile, too, if such a thing existed. But regardless of what I say I've heard about DoD custody of D&D items, we both know they don't exist.
The rest of this: I don't care, except that you have to work yourself into contortions to simultaneously argue that all firsthand reporting of ETA's has been stymied by legal threats from DoD, but Grusch's claims are true because they haven't been.
But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute
evidence of the existence of ETA's
I said this. So... yeah, agreed.
The rest of this: I don't care, except that you
have to work yourself into contortions to simultaneously
argue that all firsthand reporting of ETA's has been
stymied by legal threats from DoD
It would definitely be illegal for anybody with firsthand knowledge via their security clearance to go public with classified stuff. That is 100% clear; probably the only 100% solid fact in this whole circus. They could, presumably, take it to the whistleblower channel in a non-public way, but I don't know the details there.
What Grusch has done is more of a legal limbo area. We can't say how legal or illegal it is without knowing exactly what the classified info is.
What's also clear is that there is a heavy price to pay in terms of career even when going through the whistleblower channel. There are all sorts of incentives to not do it. Just because others in his position does not necessarily mean he is lying.
Personally I don't believe it's aliens. I find it incredibly unlikely that alien races would send crewed ships here and then be clumsy enough to crash them or get shot down. I think it is far more likely to be some kind of camouflage for another more mundane program.
>Personally I don't believe it's aliens. I find it incredibly unlikely that alien races would send crewed ships here and then be clumsy enough to crash them or get shot down.
It's unlikely, but it's possible. Maybe the aliens are rather primitive technologically, and have weapons technology similar to cannons from sailing ships in the 1700s (and spacecraft technology otherwise resembling our early 1970s craft), but they somehow discovered a simple but somehow-overlooked portion of physics that allowed them to build spacecraft that could instantly teleport across the galaxy.
a simple but somehow-overlooked portion of physics
that allowed them to build spacecraft that could instantly
teleport across the galaxy
Well, I certainly can't say you're wrong, lol.
But science is so iterative. I realize that not all hypothetical species would follow the same tech tree as humans, but "skipping steps" seems so unlikely.
But hey, there are a lot of planets out there. I suppose it can't be ruled out.
Every time aliens come up on HN, someone brings up this idea, and then references that one sci fi story, and then the discourse “well that’s dumb as hell but the story was fun”.
My dude if there is some aspect of physics that would allow for teleportation by low tech people, the earth would be annihilated by some dudes whim or accident with a month
>My dude if there is some aspect of physics that would allow for teleportation by low tech people, the earth would be annihilated by some dudes whim or accident with a month
Maybe low tech aliens stumble upon the remnants of some (other) alien race and figure out how to salvage their warp drives, but can't get the rest working.
The universe is big. Maybe the warlike Pacleds just haven't found us yet. If they're low-tech (aside from FTL), they probably haven't figured out how to do long-range astronomy to look for habitable worlds either.
Obviously the whole idea is a big stretch, but damn this site sure seems to have a LOT of people who are completely and utterly lacking a sense of humor.
There’s no such thing as low tech aside from FTL. If you have FTL you have weapons of mass destruction orders more powerful than anything we have. And energy sources greater than anything we have.
It’s not humorous when people bring the same idea up every time and defend it sincerely.
> It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with firsthand knowledge to disclose them.
This is not true. For people with knowledge of UAP or UAP-related programs Congress has instituted procedures for those people to come forward and be protected in doing so. Those mechanisms are what allowed Grusch to come forward without fear of legal reprisal.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that just gives people with UAP knowledge whistleblower protection when it comes to reporting those programs through designated channels.
Whistleblower protection != the right to publicly disclose classified material
> People with direct access to such classified materials would not legally be able to divulge details and especially not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison.
I believe this is no longer strictly true for UAP-related information [1]. Congress has gotten much more serious about offering legal protections to those who have knowledge about UAP programs.
Whatever else those protections might mean, they apply only to disclosures made through official DoD channels, not to interviews given to book authors.
> In accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose to us. His on-the-record statements were all “cleared for open publication” on April 4 and 6, 2023, in documents provided to us.
> The conclusion here does not follow the premise.
Why? Are you saying politicians don't like pageantry? Or are you saying that specifically Rubio is more about pragmatism and uniquely not part of the Kabuki theater?
> Are you saying politicians don't like pageantry?
No, I am saying that their indulging in it, regardless of whether it is feeding into something popular in some segment is not, simply because of that popularity, beyond reproach.
> Or are you saying that specifically Rubio is more about pragmatism and uniquely not part of the Kabuki theater?
I think Rubio stopped pretty short of endorsing it or saying the claims are credible, but just talked about how people with clearance were coming to the committee to report similar kinds of claims.
He's got access to a lot more than us. This isn't just some congressman indulging it for the lulz. It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials. Even Rubio is having trouble believing it but he's now admitting to have talked to people with direct access to the program. Grusch is as credible as it gets. He said he spent four years investigating this before he came to the conclusions that these secretive exotic craft programs exist.
Hold on. We know the program exists (until very recently, it was a barely funded side hustle for a small group of enthusiasts inside the DoD). We know the DoD is investigating "unexplained aerial phenomenon" (a name they had to come up with because as soon as you use the term "UFO", everybody loses their shit and stops doing engineering and science, including scientists).
The claims being made here go far beyond the existence of these programs: they claim the US is in possession of technological artifacts of non-human origin (TAONHOs, must credit me for this coinage). That is a huge leap from "the DoD has records of an uptick of weird things that happened on cameras that just happens to correspond with a massive increase in the amount of video telemetry we collect".
People like Kean are counting on their audience to read the acknowledgement of these DoD groups as shocking admissions, which is then leveraged to add credibility to the claims of people like Grusch.
The mental gymnastics is believing little green men, capable of sidesteping special relativity, travel X lightyears just to fly around San Diego and occasionally crash somewhere in the desert.
This is a very narrow perspective. We've only been around for ~200,000 years, only began to take flight 120 years ago, and flew to the moon around 60 years ago.
There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone, a good percentage likely harbor intelligent life, and that life could have easily established civilizations that go back millions of years. Should they have developed tech, even at our pace, they are cycles and cycles ahead of us.
What would stop them from throwing "shit at the wall to see what sticks" to survey surrounding systems, given that their costs of and ability to mass manufacture cheap space traveling drones would take little resources? Would they even care that much if what they built wasnt to perfection, as long as it got the job done? What if there are still anomalies that they just put up with and could careless about accounting for because the losses are so minimal? What if the ones piloting are throwaway biological drones that they can just rebuild or grow? What if their ethics forbid them from interacting or interfering with developing civilizations? What if there's are agreements/laws among a collection of civilizations?
Additionally, there have been attempts by people to get this info out for decades, and what's being brought to congress' attention is that people have been murdered by governments and private organizations to keep this under wraps and to continue public disinfo to keep the ridicule going.
I can imagine that if there is FTL or teleport technology, it could have trouble upon arrival at a planet, because at that point it has to switch to a different mode and deal with gravity and air.
If you're teleporting many lightyears, it would be difficult to hit the target exactly - for example, if your distance is off by 0.00001% of the total, you could end up inside the earth.
> mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials
It takes no mental gymnastics whatsoever to discredit them. They've done that themselves, time and time and time again. It takes mental gymnastics to retain trust in them.
This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right? Folks on the committees are angry that China is trolling US Navy vessels with UAVs and this isn’t being publicized.
The “non-earth” origin is the smokescreen, “exotic” covers foreign secret research projects?
Something a bit convoluted like this is orders of magnitude more probable in my world model. (Basically, the prior “aliens exist and have been covered up” rounds to zero, so given we are observing this public action, even extremely unlikely explanations could explain it.)
One is that, while this is written like a straight news article (until the last paragraph), this is in The Hill's Opinion section. In the past, I have seen this publication allow people of questionable credibility to post in their Opinion section. I have no idea who this writer is, but they are not a news reporter (or they weren't acting as one when they wrote this piece).
The second is that the bill appears to be about Congress' authority to control funding and perform oversight. They are withdrawing funds from secret UFO projects and asking those involved to come forward, either with the greatest discovery in human history or (more likely) with a story about money being misappropriated and that misappropriation being hidden from the US Senate.
> "Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights" over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."
This is exactly what happened with the people and incidents that were exposed in the Mirage Men[1] documentary that covers how the government uses UFO and alien conspiracy theories to coverup information that they don't want the public to know.
Well-meaning people stumbled upon classified projects, did the right thing by reporting them to the government, and then the government went out of its way to construct situations and fake evidence to convince them that what they saw were really aliens.
In one incident, the government constructed a fake "alien crash landing" site in the mountains, and flew one of their victims to it and let them investigate it themselves in order to convince them that what they really saw were aliens.
In the process of deceiving these people, the government even significantly contributed to a veteran's mental breakdown and paranoia via agents' lies and extensive surveillance of the victim's life.
Every witness says there's not a chance in Hell that UFOs are human. But no one reports seeing aliens except abductees.
People desperately want to believe aliens aren't real, and some real mental gymnastics to get there. Like believing "debunking" videos from crackpots and videogame programmers (which real pilots say are nonsensical), or "this one time in the 60s the CIA".
I genuinely want aliens to be real and do believe that life in some form is out there.
However, I'm not going to believe that little green men from Mars visit the US government in flying saucers because of evidence so bad that "crackpots and videogame programmers" can debunk it.
I think you have it backwards. I think anybody who is remotely interested in this topic would love for proof of aliens to come out. It's just such an extraordinary claim, that their skepticism demands extraordinary proof. Eyewitness reports and low-res grainy videos are just never going to be enough, no matter who they come from. And that's how it should be. If there is real proof of aliens, it will be on the front page of every newspaper in the world, because it would be the most important discovery of all human history. It will be corroborated with physical evidence that has been examined by multiple experts and professionals. Until that happens, most people are going to be skeptical, and rightly so.
> think you have it backwards. I think anybody who is remotely interested in this topic would love for proof of aliens to come out. It's just such an extraordinary claim, that their skepticism demands extraordinary proof. Eyewitness reports and low-res grainy videos are just never going to be enough, no matter who they come from. And that's how it should be. If there is real proof of aliens, it will be on the front page of every newspaper in the world, because it would be the most important discovery of all human history. It will be corroborated with physical evidence that has been examined by multiple experts and professionals. Until that happens, most people are going to be skeptical, and rightly so.
Exactly. I firmly believe that extraterrestrial life exists. My belief comes from the abundance of CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) in the universe, combined with extremely long time scales and basic chemistry.
Simple/single-celled (or some analog) extraterrestrial life seems almost inevitable based on our understanding of how the universe works.
That said, such a belief doesn't include intelligent extraterrestrial life with technological civilizations that might create interstellar spacecraft which regularly visit our little corner of the galaxy. For me to believe that, I'd need a "Klaatu barads nicto"[0] moment.
I could be wrong, but there's no compelling evidence that I am. To channel Carl Sagan: "Claims require evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
I believe that there's very likely intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there are ~300 billion stars in just in our galaxy, and the number of stars in the universe are uncountable, one estimate is 7 x 10^22. Not all have planets, of course, and even fewer have planets in what is believed to be a habitable zone.
But still, it's just unfathomable that in billions of years across billions of trillions of star systems, that only one developed intelligent life. Even on earth, life was nearly destroyed 5 times, but still survived and evolved.
Of course, it's very likely that such life will be forever undetectable by us, and we'll be undetectable by them.
But still, it's just unfathomable that in billions
of years across billions of trillions of star systems,
that only one developed intelligent life
Only a vanishingly small portion of them will develop advanced tools, much less explore the universe. We have some pretty intelligent non-human life here on earth, but it doesn't seem like squids, elephants, or dolphins are on an upward intelligence trajectory and seem unlikely to explore the galaxy (apologies to Douglas Adams w.r.t. dolphines)
It's also important IMO to understand that advanced intelligence is not an inevitable goal of evolution. Evolution only "cares" about survival. That can result in intelligent life, but it can just as often result in horseshoe crabs -- creatures of low intelligence that fill a niche perfectly and resiliently.
Intelligence is a really tough way to survive. You need a metabolically expensiv and fragile brain (or brains)
I'm a believer of the notion of "great filter(s)."
I think most civilizations on a path to interstellar travel have to pass through a nuclear fission phase (how do you build advanced stuff without discovering this?) and I think a great % of civilizations will end/cripple themselves during this phase via nuclear war. This will filter out a lot of civilizations.
The next challenging filter would be making serious efforts at exploring/colonizing/exploiting other planets and solar systems before exhausting their own home planet's resources or making it unlivable. The human race is definitely on pace to lose this race.
You won't get much of an argument about that from me. Again, channeling Carl Sagan[0], "if there's no one else out there, that seems like a huge waste of space." That's a paraphrase but captures the essence of what he wrote. But that doesn't mean it's so.
We can be pretty confident that life as we know it has evolved elsewhere, given the chemistry involved, but intelligent, (and more importantly) life that develops technological civilizations is much less certain.
Detecting intelligent non-technological life is likely impossible unless we actually visit such a planet. Consider a world where creatures like dolphins or whales are the dominant species. No fire (okay, sodium reactions, but how do you create and store pure sodium ions?), so no metallurgy.
As I said, I'd need to see some pretty convincing evidence (even with the vast expanses of both space and time in the universe pushing in that direction) to claim that intelligent, technological life exists elsewhere. That doesn't mean such civilizations don't exist, but given we don't really understand how intelligence (as a prerequisite for a technologically advanced civilization) comes about, except in broad evolutionary terms, making such a claim is premature IMHO.
If you like thinking about this sort of thing, there are several (3-6) good episodes of the Lex Fridman podcast that talk about these issues. There's also one that discusses the development of life on earth, it's very interesting and makes it sound like a miracle that we ended up with complex multi-cellular lifeforms.
Seems odd and counterproductive to include the "non-earth" and "exotic" language at all then. Why not refer to all "non-domestic aerospace material" instead? A group who provably knows they have Chinese hardware would be much harder to prosecute under the current language.
What does the press get them? The Russians/Chinese or whomever are flying these theoretical UAVs know they aren't alien, the US government knows they aren't alien, and now not only us the US exposing its intelligence capabilities (or lack thereof,) they're making themselves look like fools in the process.
It's better for adversaries to think you're incompetent or dumb than it is to let them know that you're on to them and/or can defeat their latest measures if it comes down to it. They might try harder next time, and actually outclass you.
One aspect of such surveillance missions is to see how the US responds to these incidents, in order to learn about technology and methods that are used and that adversaries might not know about.
It still seems like a boneheaded and ridiculous way to go about it, when simply not saying anything and running counterintelligence would also work and not make us look like clowns.
The UFO and aliens narratives serve multiple functions domestically, as the government's history with them shows. I figure that's why they're going about it this way instead of just staying silent like they normally would have.
UFO narratives are convenient distractions from meaningful politics. IMO, what you're seeing is a legislative effort to avoid doing the jobs they were elected to do while appearing bipartisan and proactive.
Russia's documented strategy for foreign propaganda campaigns includes a few steps where you undermine people's trust in increasingly core pillars of society.
For example, they often start by undermining trust in media organizations, then elected leaders.
The current trajectory the US is on is indistinguishable from the successful outcome of a propaganda operation based on that playbook.
> This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right?
No. The USA has spent the last several decades putting most of its military budget into aircraft carriers, which will all be sunk within the first 24 hours of any conflict with China. This is just a last ditch effort to try to trick China into thinking we might have some kind of deterrent.
Washington Power Brokers are just mad that they can't trade favors for access to foreign "skunkworks" style projects. Tons of power and corruption they're missing out on for trading access to such tech.
> This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right? Folks on the committees are angry that China is trolling US Navy vessels with UAVs and this isn’t being publicized.
Why? They could just say "we have advanced but secret systems that can tell China is up to something".
There was just a balloon, and another round of em over Asia -- no one would be surprised.
This isn't about China, it's about Trump and the hard-right conspiracy types going ape-shit, esp. since those indictments have teeth. The DoD has been doing this since the 90s and Oklahoma City.
This is a push by the DoD to make American's believe in US military and intelligence superiority—only a supremely powerful government would be able to coverup the existence of extraterrestrial life for 50+ years.
World order is changing. China is a rising military power. People may even see foreign spy aircraft (e.g. Chinese weather balloons) over US airspace. The DoD would rather you believe it's aliens. This kind of propaganda works great on older boomers in particular because they've been conditioned to believe it all their life.
The US military is not able to coverup something like a crashed alien spacecraft. They couldn't even stop a dozen men with box cutters from crashing planes into buildings. I would not be surprised in the least to find out that the 9/11 conspiracies were funded by the DoD—probably by the same people doing this nonsense now. Again, "they" would rather you believe in a supremely powerful government with space lasers than have their true incompetence unmasked.
Are you really comparing China to the US in terms of military power?
China just finished their first domestic aircraft carrier, and the current military hasn't really been in any major war. In the meantime, the US has continually maintained a state of readiness and nearly constant wars while modernizing its fleet.
But you had to just go 9/11 Truther which means nobody here should really be paying attention to you.
A "9/11 Truther" is somebody who disputes the 9/11 Commission's Report. themagician is doing the opposite; men with box cutters crashing planes into buildings is precisely what the 9/11 Commission Report says. Will realizing this change how you feel about the merit of his comment, or will you still feel the same way even though your original reason for feeling this way was completely backwards?
It's likely because I misparsed the meaning of this sentence:
"I would not be surprised in the least to find out that the 9/11 conspiracies were funded by the DoD"
thinking that the person I was responding to was suggesting the DoD may have funded the terrorists (a "conspiracy" is a secret plan to do something unlawful).
After re-reading, I see now the claim is that the DoD may have funded the truthers- which I know nothing about.
By the way, you might be interested to know that recent reporting [0] (by Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Hettena on the Substack SpyTalk, the media project run by veteran former Newsweek national security reporter Jeff Stein), based on legal filings in Guantanamo Bay cases against 9/11 plotters, suggests that the FBI believes the CIA did fund some of the 9/11 terrorists, in the sense that they were cultivating them as intelligence sources. The mundane explanation is not that they sanctioned or even knew about the 9/11 plot, but rather that they failed to share intelligence with the rest of the intelligence community because they didn't want to compromise their source. But there is credible evidence to suggest that the terrorists were not only on the radar of the CIA, but were being actively developed as sources.
The CIA not sharing information was pretty much the conclusion of the 9/11 report. The CIA cultivating informers (and still not knowing the plans for 9/11) is a long way from what "9/11 Truthers" claim.
Is it really “9/11 truther” to believe the terrorists flew planes into buildings and the government was too incompetent to stop them? I believe that’s the most anti-truther take possible.
The moment the Rubicon is crossed, both the US and China would fall into an all out economic depression and that is exactly why that Rubicon will not be crossed in my lifetime.
This might be an issue at some point if you just graduated high school but for now we have mutually assured economic destruction.
I am far more worried about a debt bomb going off in China than a real bomb.
>only a supremely powerful government would be able to coverup the existence of extraterrestrial life for 50+ years.
The allegations by David Grusch that set all this off included that there's been a decades long competition between various nations to collect these craft.
From The Debrief Article
>“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.
My take away had been that most of the allegations are effectively some level all the stuff we've always heard about UFOs has been true this whole time (e.g. Roswell). Essentially one of the worst kept secrets, ignored largely because of the implausibility rather than secrecy.
Perhaps, but that isn't the point you or I were making.
You're saying this is surfacing to fabricate American excellence and relied on the assumption that these claims are being made because 1) Only a superior nation could hide this and 2) only a superior nation could find them. What has been claimed was that it's barely hidden and a bunch of nations have been finding them. Your argument is against a straw man.
This does not track for me at all. I'm sorry but why would anybody in the DOD have an incentive to "make Americans believe in US military and intelligence superiority"?
So many reasons. If you want unlimited funding, if you want people to join, if you want citizens to feel safe… you really want them to feel like the government is powerful. If people think their government is a joke they will treat it as a joke. You don't want people thinking that a dozen people with box cutters can fly planes into buildings. You don't want people thinking that "the greatest superpower in the world" can't defeat literal cave dwellers with ancient soviet era weaponry. You don't want people to know that China's military is much more advanced than the public is aware and they are routinely flying over US airspace undetected.
You want people to feel safe and pay their taxes. You want your citizens to believe that the $2 trillion spend on defense every year goes to good use, creating the kind of military and intelligence apparatus that Hollywood portrays.
We fund these types of propaganda campaigns for the same reasons we have military parades and air shows. We saw how well these kinds of "overwhelmingly powerful" government myths worked for both the Soviets and Axis powers in WW2 and we copied it. Every government chasing power and status wants its citizens to feel like they are the most powerful. China and Russia have similar kinds of myths.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Please, continue to believe that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division within the US government managed to retrieve them and keep it secret for 50+ years. Look past the failing state of our infrastructure and continue to believe that an alien species capable of interstellar travel is interested specifically in Americans, but "they" are keeping you from knowing the truth!
There's a vast gulf between "believing that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division..." and subscribing to your theory which is so far only supported by you insisting to us what "you want" as a theoretical deep state government apparatus. From my perspective, it would seem like the widespread belief that terrorists could crash planes into buildings resulted in a lot of public money, enlistment, and support flowing into the US Military over the early 2000s.
You're presenting a false choice between two conspiracy theories as the only ways to view this situation, which certainly doesn't make your particular conspiracy theory look any more credible.
Not really. I will admit that it's totally possible that there is no conspiracy. It's entirely possible that people are so naturally brainwashed that they conspire against themselves without the help of the government. Pride is a hell of a drug, so that is totally possible. I mean, people do it with religion so why not this.
> But you don't have to take my word for it. Please, continue to believe that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division within the US government managed to retrieve them and keep it secret for 50+ years. Look past the failing state of our infrastructure and continue to believe that an alien species capable of interstellar travel is interested specifically in Americans, but "they" are keeping you from knowing the truth!
China said they were going to shoot down the US balloon. They lost their lock and never got it back. Meanwhile the US is literally able to shoot down kites.
> “You spend a lot, but you get the best!” sounds a lot better than “You spend a lot, but we still suck!”
This argument doesn't make any sense. The US military is better than the next top three militaries combined. The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
It can show that the best still isn't good enough for some scenarios, including this scenario where unmanned aircraft are entering US airspace unimpeded.
The US military might be better than the rest, but they were still defeated by poor people in the desert with some Casio watches and decades' old AKs.
Similarly, it seems that small drones are another potential avenue of exploitation in asymmetric warfare.
> The US military is better than the next top three militaries combined.
Partially due to institutional experience and economies of scale (for certain capabilities). We probably still exceed what the next top 3 powers (China, Russia, India, BTW) are spending in PPP terms, so it shouldn't be that surprising.
> The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
For every video of HIMARS blowing up a Russian ammo depot, there's a video of Ka-52 helicopters popping M2 Bradleys from 5+ km away.[1] M777s were lauded for their accuracy....until they broke. [2] Ukrainian brigades have been lavishly equipped with Western armored vehicles and they've bounced off a brick wall of positively-ancient minefields and artillery, very similar to the defense-in-depth that the Soviets used to defeat the Germans at Kursk ...in 1943.[3]
This conflict is so complex in terms of difficult-to-measure soft factors that are influencing the battlefield (training, maintenance, corruption, NATO ISR support, information operations/propaganda, etc.), that drawing conclusions about the merits of individual technical systems or especially the overall tech base of the two main powers (Russia vs "the West") as a whole is....unwise.
The war in Ukraine is showing that the "superpowers" aren't so super. It's showing just how much of the military superiority is propaganda and nothing more. But we already knew that, because the US just went through what Russia is now going through.
The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. You'd think maybe they'd have busted out the ray guns or spaceships instead of taking the L.
The war is showing that Western superpower tech is far in advance of Soviet and post-Soviet tech (in most areas), but that tech can't win all wars. Russia buys drones from Iran which contain parts from many western companies (most of which were manufactured in China), which I think tells you a lot about the relative levels of technology. I doubt the Ukranians would have made it so far with so much relative success without US intelligence and materiel. if we gave them lots more air assets and they used them well, it would give them a huge advantage over Russia, which seems to have somehow lost its air force.
As for Afghanistan, well, of course never get involved in a land war in Asia. But that wasn't a conventional war, and our military is intended to fight conventional wars. Our forces really are not set up to respond to the Taliban.
> The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox.
To be fair the US left Afghanistan and the remaining Afghani army crumbled to the taliban pretty quickly.
I’d say the two situations are very different, the US successfully occupied a country that was ~7000km from them.
The Russians have so far failed to take a city that’s ~200km from their own border in about 1 and a half years.
To be even more fair, the US lost the War in Afghanistan. It's an unambiguous Taliban victory. That's how it will read in every history book that doesn't have an American flag and a bald eagle on it. 20 years there and all the US did was create a whole new generation of terrorists who will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge.
It was a military loss. When one military quits and runs away really fast that’s a loss. And it’s not the first time. When the US loses they hold a parade and say, “We left.” Such a joke. And American citizens never hold their government accountable. Instead they just believe the BS and do it all over again. Kind of amazing, really. No shame.
> This does not track for me at all. I'm sorry but why would anybody in the DOD have an incentive to "make Americans believe in US military and intelligence superiority"?
Especially when NATO hasn't fired a shot in Ukraine, but is supplying real-time intelligence to the AFU.
US cold war era surplus + EW helped break an entire Russian army, and may yet break a second.
Because one of the purposes of flying surveillance aircraft in US airspace is psychological warfare. It sends the message that China/Russia/whoever can send whatever they want into US airspace and there's nothing that anyone, including the military, can do about it. It sows fear, uncertainty and doubt in both the public and even members of the military who can recognize the advanced capabilities of the armies they might have to fight. It sends the message that you are not safe at home, and those who are supposed to protect you can't.
However, if people think they're aliens, that instead turns psychological warfare on its head and into something that inspires awe, wonder and possibility. No one is scared in the ways adversaries want them to be scared, and no one doubts the government is actually capable of handling threats from adversaries.
"Aliens" as an explanation quells the potential for panic, versus adversaries successfully inducing the panic responses they desire. It also gives the opportunity for those who care too much about this to be painted as quacks.
I don't understand your comment. Russia has no real capability to fly surveillance aircraft over US territory. They can barely manage to fly to Syria without breaking down.
As a placeholder for potential US adversaries who might have the motivation do something like this. If you don't like that I said Russia, ignore it and fill it in with China.
Come on, be serious. China can't even get the metallurgy right on turbine engines. Never mind flying saucers. If they are doing any airborne surveillance over the US homeland then it's either with spy balloons, or cheap little short-range drones launched by agents on the ground.
I don't think they're doing anything special other than sending incredibly cheap drones and balloons. Nobody is bending the laws of physics or doing anything advanced here.
If you think people are seeing real flying saucers that are defying the laws of physics, I don't know what to tell you.
>China/Russia/whoever can send whatever they want into US airspace and there's nothing that anyone, including the military, can do about it.
So it's not "whatever they want", it's cheap drones and balloons. You make China out to be some scary powerful Boogeyman (which requires the USG to invent alien stories as a cover) and then admit they don't have such capability.
I personally am not scared one iota about Chinese aircraft threatening US airspace. And I am very confident that if such a scenario did arise, the US military would address it in the most appropriate and effective way. Which could range anywhere from ignoring it, to neutralizing with extreme prejudice.
I’m not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the interest of curiosity and for sake of argument…
Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades.
If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft).
Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.
That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.
It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.
It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't learn anything about it at all, and it wouldn't advance technology a bit, at least not for a hundred years or so.
If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
While people in the 1850s probably would not have been able to fix or turn the iPad on they would have been able to examine it. They could have taken it apart and looked at the various materials and perform physical and chemical tests on them. They could open up some of the electronics and look at them with a microscope. The understanding of electricity, circuits, and electrical devices in the 1850s was developed enough to learn something from an iPad. Perhaps they could examine the glass face and learn about that. Perhaps they could learn about new manufacturing techniques by examining the way the device was assembled and formed. I think humans would be able to glean similar types of information from alien technology even if we weren't able to actual use it in its intended way.
Quite generous of you to assume the aliens are only (the equivalent of) ~150 years ahead of us. Would the ancient Egyptians have had as much success reverse engineering an iPad as some Victorian-era scientists?
It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components. And we similarly know how to enumerate all sorts of chemical and physical properties of any exotic materials and objects we might come across. But it's all based on our own patchwork model of the physical universe, which has plenty of gaps we know about, nevermind those we can't even imagine. We don't know what we don't know.
If we assume aliens are visiting then it's almost certain that their technology is thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours. And if we assume that follows an exponential curve (which may not be a valid assumption - we really only have ~200 years of history upon which we could base such a supposition), then it follows that their technology would be indecipherably complex for us to understand.
You're arguing for a sort of technology threshold beyond which we cannot see (presumably within a reasonable time frame). However, which side of said threshold we are on, even for technology from a civilization a million years older, isn't clear. I am not convinced it can be clear, since we'd be arguing about properties of a hypothetical craft.
A time-based argument is probably not useful. The difference between ourselves and ancient Egyptians is huge, but it isn't from exponential change in technology over time. That change in technology was driven by (and drives) both our different (from the Egyptians') model of the world, and our ability to sense the world.
Consider a recovered alien ship hull. If it crashed in ancient Egypt, they might make use of the metals and conclude the ship was a god or its vessel cast down from the heavens. If it crashed in the modern United States, we could figure out the chemical makeup of it, test its properties, hypothesize about how it works, and try to recreate it. All of that could wind up being incredibly valuable, even if we couldn't recreate the shell itself.
Any alien civilisation, unless it's within our very solar system and we've failed to detect it which seems thoroughly unlikely, has visited us from another star system. If not FTL, they have the means to travel across light years of distance and are capable of preserving themselves for the trip if it's a long one and folding space if it's a "short" trip. That kind of technology to do either is still beyond us despite all the advancements we've made in the last 100 years
I would posit it's not even Victorian era scientists looking at an iPad. It's like presenting an iPad to pre-agriculture humans. We might not even fathom how it works or what it's even supposed to do when our frame of reference is so far behind technologically
All of that is valid points. But if the USA has retrieved crashed spacecraft then what the hell are these guys doing crashing in the first place? Humans barely lose any important spacecraft to crashes and we've only been playing this game for about 50 years or so.
The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?
Congress could pass a law requiring it to be revealed, the president could order it, leaking of additional information could cause public outcry leading to one of the above.
I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.
I don't think the people allegedly involved in this alleged coverup have shown any respect for laws or norms. They can just keep lying and obfuscating. The only way they would ever disclose anything is if they wanted to.
We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable, nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are responsible for a government program cloaked in so much secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.
The craft might also have had a contained self-destruct mechanism.
The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the remnants of one that had been vaporized.
So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s
I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.
You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other tech in the least.
They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm.
The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.
Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it.
Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.
I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.
I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so reaching orbit was the next step in our progression. Even if you gave a modern rocket engine to someone in 1940 their society would understand almost all of what went into it. Go back further to 1840 and their engineers would be amazed at the strength of the materials but they would recognize a combustion chamber, valves, fuel tanks and even the wiring. In 1740 they would still probably have enough knowledge of fluid dynamics to deduce how it worked although the concept of combining oxidizers and fuel would be foreign to them, though only for another 30 years. Even as you push it back further and further people would still recognize that it was made of some type of metal and could understand that liquid or gas could flow through it and burn and they could probably build a very crude and simplified copy that used the basic principles. The point is that even bronze age civilization was far more advanced than people who had no metallurgy. There are incredibly difficult things you need to learn to go from zero to having any of the components that make up a gun and none of that knowledge is encoded in the gun itself. It's just not obvious to someone with no information about how gunpowder or iron are made how you would go about obtaining and processing the raw materials. It's probably even completely counter-intuitive that you would make something like iron from stone or that you have to burn the stone for a long time at a very high heat. Who would even think of that in a stone age society? The best guess as to how it was invented is by accident and observation. Having a chunk of metal won't give you that insight.
That being said and all, who knows what people could learn from say... the equivalent of the ashtrays, doorknobs, toilets (etc) in hypothetical alien vehicle(s).
Wouldn't have to be the biggest challenges getting solved right away. Alien "mundane, old crap" would probably turn out pretty useful too. :D
Sorry, I think I still just have to disagree. Look at what a car or modern ship is made of. Nothing in it could be reproduced by a stone age civilization. They could maybe make a wheel out of wood which would be a technology they didn't have but honestly I'm inclined to believe the reason why pre-animal-husbandry civilizations didn't use the wheel is because it's mostly useless with nothing to pull it. You really need the wheel plus draft animals plus roads to actually do anything otherwise the terrain is just too rough for a person to pull or push a small cart very far and it's easier to just use a frame pack or basket on your head or back.
I think that would all depend on how advanced this hypothetical tech is, and the timeframe in which someone wants it known to the public. DARPA may not provide enough cover for sufficiently advanced discoveries that cannot be explained without raising bigger questions.
It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more.
Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal.
And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.
There is also that fermi paradox resolution that basically says the same tech that unlocks infinite energy also unlocks the ability to destroy ourselves. So in theory there could be good reasons for avoiding commercialization of highly advanced technology, if it means that within a century some guy on the street could build an apparatus that destroys the planet in an industrial accident.
AI could unlock the ability to destroy ourselves and we've commercialized that highly advanced technology but it sure didn't stop the majority of people from wondering "should". :P
If they had this technology I'd assume there would be no point of revealing it, since you'd lose the advantage of secrecy over it for no good reason. The US military is capable enough against other nations with conventional technology. I'd expect if this tech were employed in war it would be in defense of the planet itself.
Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is how it works?
This was my first thought as well, and I think there are a number of possible reasons:
- The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes
- They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding
- They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project
Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.
The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology.
There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
> If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.
A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.
Why would the chain be a problem? The Romans could make metal rods, rivets, and some of their finer metalwork is crafted with more precision than any bicycle chain.
The real difference is that it would take an army of ancient craftsmen to make one bike.
The real distinguishing factor with modernity is mass manufacturing and precision at scale.
Even moreso income inequality and competition with slavery.
Any roman who could afford a bicycle would rightly think it was rubbish compared to a horse. All this expense just to propel myself around?!
The same goes for most modern conveniences. Even the best modern dishwasher is less efficient than a human slave doing the same task, if you're indifferent to the suffering of the slave, as the Romans were.
> "They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project"
I would vote for this one, but this hypothesis doesn't need the ET part.
Supposedly a few pieces of technology that we use in military and everyday use were created using alien technology. Stealth fighters and holograms. But I have read the book about the engineering/creation of the f-117 stealth fighter at skunkworks and nothing in that airplane doesn't seem like it could be created using currently understood scientific principles. One thing that did stand out was the timeline from creation to delivery was very short, also the plane cannot fly using just human piloting, a advanced computer must make micro adjustments to the crafts trajectory every second or the plane crashes. This was done in the late 70s so that seems extremely advanced for back then so who knows.
There is not a single invention out in the world today that came from alien technology, that came out of left field, or has no paper trail of terrestrial origin. Holography for example has been a hot topic since the 1600s, combine holography with the invention of photography and you get holograms.
> Holography for example has been a hot topic since the 1600s
I can't figure out what you mean by this, unless you're referring to Pepper's ghost which is not a hologram at all. If you photograph a Pepper's ghost illusion you get a regular photograph, not a hologram.
> If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems.
What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.
If it is real, then there's probably a billion self-replicating alien robots in the oceans already converting the earth to paperclips without our realizing it. There will be a trillion before we notice, and then we'll just get wiped out. No actual aliens will ever visit earth, just autonomous drone swarms trying to keep us from becoming properly space faring. After all, if we ever get to be properly space faring, we might interfere with it's paperclip goal
I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Especially if its a truth that has been kept secret for so long, that would be particularly damning for the legitimacy of current governments of the world in the eyes of most people, I would assume.
On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today.
This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.
> I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god?
Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.
You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.
The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.
I'm sorry, but this would be an entire paradigm shift of how we see ourselves as a species. To think people would show up to work on monday I think is uncertain. We would be going from a millenia of human primacy on this planet to having these unknown apex predators lurking with unknown intentions. It's so completely unprecedented that it would be hard to imagine there wouldn't be social unrest, and major dissatisfaction with governments that have chosen to lie to the people they allegedly serve and represent. You might start to question who really runs the world, if some secret cabal had been able to keep the greatest secret of all time a secret for decades, and make decisions for the entire planet independent of our supposed democratic process.
If any of that were true, this "secret cabal" that really runs the world wouldn't have allowed these things to be revealed in the first place. If they did, they're either inept because they couldn't see the scenario coming that you did or they don't actually control as much as you are suggesting they would (or don't exist at all).
This just comes across as conspiracy mongering. Yes, there will be people who think like that but those people already think like that. There wouldn't be some mass collapse in society or government. The most that would happen is people would be interested in the information released, acknowledge the government has secrets just like they did yesterday, and move on with life.
What are you smoking where there's a clear line from "this thing crashed in the desert 50 years ago, we still know basically nothing about it" to everyone becoming an atheist and tax evader?
Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.
A real eye opener regarding this has been the ongoing war in Ukraine. For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.
But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.
Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.
Their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis,
That's the thing - except for places very close to the front lines, only very tiny portion of the country is getting hit.
So no, it's not "the entire country, on a daily basis".
You are correct though that the media loves to paint it as a 24x7 apocalyptic hellscape (mostly via selective imagery, independent of what is actually said in the articles). That's how they get your anxiety molecules jumping, and thus make their money, after all.
>For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.
For cities actively under siege, that's exactly how it is though. Read about St. Petersburg or the battle of Vukovar.
> banal: so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.
People going to work every day while there are bombs dropping, in the middle of a war, trying to keep the exchange of goods going so they can pay for the war and to survive, is not banal. It's not obvious that people would go to work in a war zone, and it's not boring, and in many times in history people did not go to work during a war (except for farmers, whose lives depended on it)
They didn't say war is banal, they said life is - which it is. Going to work every day, going to the gym, making dinner, doing laundry. Most of it's boring, and a lot of it you have to do whether or not something 100 miles away is getting bombed.
I'm not smoking anything. I'm merely speculating on what I think is a rather interesting hypothetical situation. It's generally interesting enough to sell millions of copies of books and thousands of movie tickets on similar subjects, after all. I just think being told that you've been lied to for decades, your elected leaders don't really call the shots but some classified group does unilaterally for the entire planet, there's some unknown creature potentially at the top of the food chain prowling the planet for the first time ever, and now you have to just suck it up and go back to flipping burgers to be rent burdened, is a really hard pill to swallow. For reference, we've gotten close to civil unrest in the past, when it became clear with the Pentagon Papers to the public that they were lied to about Vietnam being winnable and the scope of the conflict, and public opposition eventually forced the war to end. People were facing conscription and burning their draft cards. To think the working public today, as squeezed as they are by the elites, might face extraterrestrial threat and the greatest lie of all time and just clock in the next morning like nothing has changed, I think, is a bit of a gamble.
The government has previously used UFOs to divert attention.
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
The "flying triangles" seen from US naval vessels look like jet drones. [1] Those are commercial products, priced around $10,000. One of those zipping around looks like a UFO. Some versions can hover pointing upward; they have enough thrust.
There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and military UAVs.
Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
The B-21 is getting close to operational, the NGAD is in development, and god only knows what sort of experimental drone tech is being worked on in the dark. That adds up to a lot of test flights and more, and a lot of reasons to throw out the same old "UFO" chaff to cover it.
I have to say that X-44 does look similar in shape to some of the UFO pictures I've seen. Especially the one where the UFO flies past the plane window.
Dude, you can't even get a good picture of the moon on most phones without some AI assistance. How the hell are you going to snap a clear photo of something much smaller and dimmer?
A challenge for the incredulous, bring me some high quality cellphone pictures of airplanes at night without using any extra equipment like tripods, lenses or stabilizers.
smartphones are optimized for selfies thus the lens is super flat. Any photo I try to take at a distance looks awful, and moon photos are even worse. You'd be better off taking these pictures with a 1960's film camera with an actual lens. Not only did standard cameras have 4.5k resolution (35mm) but the lens allows you to zoom in!
The other day while I was in the countryside I saw a military drone (I live near an airport doing military maintenance). It was the second time in a few months. I had my phone in my backpack, yet I didn't take any photos. Somehow the four seconds or so wasn't enough for me to make the decision.
> and yet sightings of UFOs (or any cryptid) have been at an all-time low.
Source? I see the opposite when I Google around for reports per year. There was a dip during COVID, buts it's easy to attribute that to people not being outside, and it's picked right back up since.
Well, there are plenty of UFO recordings using iPhones.
I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S. military. Sadly most of it is classified.
Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
No? Why would it, any more so than what came before? We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I guess (must not have limited resources, like, at all) all using physics we're not even on the verge of discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict what we have discovered, but also leave no to-us-detectable trace anywhere we can detect, in their visits or with their sensing equipment or their civilization itself, but also also be pretty bad at hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but also also also good enough that we can't quite prove they're real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away, instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.
"Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the rest still holds, too.
The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's not technically impossible that Russell's Teapot exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens" barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and does miracles sometimes".
> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
Isn't the paranoid atmosphere cold war and the increase in weapons testing, satellites, spy balloons, etc. a much simpler explanation?
I think the whole atmosphere around governments spying, covering things up, and generally engaged in a lot of sloppy covert action is bound to make UFOs seem more credible.
probably a good number of drunks/kooks and then probably a handful of unknown phenomena that would have a reasonable explanation if we had better photos/descriptions.
*edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in origin.
I will say my thoughts on the matter:
Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only planet with life)
Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low chance
Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united states? near 0% chance
This is a contradiction. Not that eye witness testimonies are completely without merit, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and eye-witness testimony alone does not meet that standard....no matter who the witness is.
I am not saying we know for a fact that extra terrestrials have landed on planet earth. I agree with you, there is still not enough evidence.
However I am tired of reading so called skeptics dismissing people who come forward claiming they have seen UFOs as kooks or drunkards.
There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Video recordings that can't be explained, radar observations etc. Please also realize that most of what has been recorded so far is classified as top secret, according to testimony from people with direct access to this evidence and like I said in my parent comment, we also have plenty of credible eye witness reports.
It's sad that people aren't more curious - not everything is about distracting from Donald Trumps misadventures with classified documents...
> There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Nah. I'd wager it's more likely to be earthlings from an alternate reality or that time travel turns out to be feasible and it's our descendants, than that it's space aliens ("but one of those is entirely based on speculative physics and both require our model of the universe to be pretty damn wrong, to allow such travel" yeah, I know—that's how incredible I find the space alien hypothesis). I don't think those are credible guesses, either, but I'd say they're more likely to be true than "it's aliens". That explanation's got a lot of things working against it.
There are also tons of people who have claimed to see ghosts, tons of medieval peasants that saw witches, tons of people accused of summoning the devil in the 80s.
There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.
that was covered by the second portion of my comment. There are a few that are legit we don't know what that was. If we had better details/pictures/video of them we might be able to say better.
In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems low though.
I like to entertain myself with the idea that perhaps what's driving the recent spotlight on UFOs is not that we are seeing/detecting them, but that we are detecting more and more of them.
Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. And that was fine because there are many natural causes that could explain these blips on radar. Many weather phenomena or man made objects could explain people "seeing" UFOs. Buzz Aldrin famously saw glowing objects flying around in space but he does not necessarily believe they have ET origin.
But recently, there's simply way more of these objects everywhere, and nobody knows for sure what these are. This worries some people because, well, what if they're Chinese spy balloons or drones? Remember when the US military shot down a couple balloons some time ago and it made the news?
This is a potential threat to the national security and it makes sense that they have put together teams for the retrieval of these objects. The government may not believe they have ET origin, but they now see them more as potential threat to the national security.
Of course, I would definitely find it enjoyable and exciting if there is some "otherworldly" intelligence behind these objects.
All entertaining to speculate, but it's classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from (in addition to their conveniently never appearing within clear view of regular citizens' phones or cameras and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way)
I'd love to look at this solar system panopticon that you apparently have access to.
We know vanishingly little about the day to day movements of the largest solar system objects. Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track.
While we do successfully track many asteroids (for at least part of their orbital periods), this does not mean that we track every asteroid, or even anywhere close to it. In fact, the vast majority of detected asteroid impacts were not predicted by tracking systems before they collided with our planet.
This Wikipedia article [0] presents data measuring the (in)effectiveness of the current tracking systems ("the vast majority are still missed"), and describes flaws in the current approach, such as "blind spots" that exist for various reasons depending on tracking methodology, e.g.:
> all ground-based telescopes have a large blind spot for any asteroids coming from the direction of the Sun.... [but even] space-based telescopes which can observe a much larger region of the sky around Earth.... still cannot point directly towards the Sun.
From this perspective, not only do we fail to track every asteroid, but there are specific and predictable "blind spots" where we cannot track any objects. So if the argument is that aliens could park their ship where we can't see it, then it's not a sufficient counterargument to claim that we track a lot of asteroids, because (a) we still miss the vast majority of them, and (b) many of those we miss for predictable reasons that could be exploited by an adversary who wants to hide an object from our tracking systems.
we can predict the forward trajectory of nearly every major solar system object using first principles math and experimental observations and it predicts for years into the future; every time we find another object in the solar system, we add its position and mass and the model gets slightyl more accurate.
"""As of DE421, perturbations from 343 asteroids, representing about 90% of the mass of the main asteroid belt, have been included in the dynamical model"""
Using polynomial interpolation you can get more or less 100meter level accuracy for any major object at any time. If there are remaining large masses that we haven't identified, they must be fairly small, far, and very dark.
(this is one of the most important achievements in human history and represents one of the longest scientific/religious activities; people have been predicting orbital paths for thousands of years.)
I've heard from some very well known and credible sources that there is a nice china teapot orbiting somewhere between the asteroid belt and mars. maybe the UFOs are investigating it's provenance.
No one has a monopoly on the sky. Amateur astronomers track active satellite missions, discover asteroids, mine public sky survey data to analyze stars, etc, etc. If there was anything out of the ordinary on the visible spectrum regularly showing up in our solar system (especially if it involved a lot of beelining towards Earth), it couldn't be hidden.
> rest of the billions of miles of our solar system
Which we have to send satellites out to see, which image minuscule windows of space. Here are some of the very best pictures from ground based telescopes: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-ground-based-images-planets-pi...
Entire continents of Earth would be missed with that sort of resolution. And, with the need to average over time, whatever massive structure would have to stay relatively still.
Most detection of distance objects is through occlusion of stars, not direct sensing. Good luck trying to find something something smaller moving at high/relativistic speeds, which would be a fairly reasonable requirement for not having to plan ahead for a multi thousands of years space trip.
I don't really believe that space ships are flying around in our solar system, but I don't think us not seeing them, with our limited sensing, acts as any sort of counter evidence.
> classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system
One, rich humans sometimes like to go see exotic wildlife, why wouldn't aliens?
Two, how would we know if there were aliens looking around other places?
> and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way
"Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."
“never appearing within clear view of cameras” - the signal to noise ratio is abysmal, but they have and do.
Thing is, accepting the idea of the extraordinary and inexplicable is rather difficult for humans. Doug Adams explained it pretty succinctly with his idea of the “somebody else’s problem” field, whereby you could paint a mountain bright pink, and it would become invisible to a majority of observers through its sheer jarring improbability and discontinuity with core beliefs about the nature of things.
My background is physics. I’m well versed in “weird but explicable stuff”, I don’t take anything on faith, and I have seen, with multiple witnesses, a truly inexplicable thing, without resorting to what a big part of me still regards as mummery. We all saw the same thing. We all talked about it, puzzled over it, frantically checked the news for an explanation.
The thing is, the people who I was with at the time, they all remember the incident, the sonic booms… and seeing a helicopter in distress, which was the story in the press later that day. The shift to “it was a helicopter” was amazingly quick.
It wasn’t a helicopter. I know what I saw - or rather, I know that I saw something that was absolutely not a helicopter, that fighter jets approached to then have disappear in a sudden cloud - and yet, a big, big part of me yearns to believe that I saw a helicopter, as the alternative is… well, posting stuff that you’ll read and will go “this guy is clearly nuts”, and me being inclined to agree, as again, it isn’t comforting in the slightest to hold in your mind the knowledge that things are not quite as they appear.
There’s even footage of the thing, freely available on YouTube, and there’s evidently no point in anyone removing it or so-forth, as anyone who thinks it’s real is clearly crazy.
It hung in the sky exactly like a brick wouldn’t, and had a weird, knobbly shape - and as the jets approached, it became clear it was pretty sizeable. It was also quite definitely what the typhoons were there to investigate, as they immediately flew towards it, and I would be prepared to write it off as a weather balloon were it not for the ensuing cock-and-bull story, and the cloud that materialised around it as they neared.
In this context, it actually makes sense to think in a human-centered way.
Consider how many planets are capable of supporting intelligent (as we know it).
Now suppose we detect evidence of industrial behavior (certain pollutants, nuclear detonation, etc).
Would we not laser focus on that one planet and observe it with everything we have - including sending reconnaissance drones?
Furthermore, would we not want to avoid detection where possible, in case life does exist on said planet and it turns out to be an existential threat to humanity?
Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.
> Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.
Feels like we're approaching a God of the gaps scenario here, but with aliens.
This parallel is no coincidence. As of yet, there is no empirical evidence for space aliens existing. What do you call it when people believe in things for which there is no empirical evidence?
Comparing "God-of-the-gaps" to the UAP/UFO Phenomenon only makes sense if there is abundant, first-hand evidence for God that goes back several generations at least, is seen in numerous, opposing human-cultures and only can be ignored by debunking paradigms that vacillate wildly between a smug misunderstanding of pop-epistemology and the deeply, irrationally conspiratorial.
> Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.
yet we have thousands of reports of UFO sightings (the vast majority seem to be in the US for some reason). So the aliens who can travel here in...assuming they come from a nearby solar system 4 light years away, and they are arriving as a result of observing "pollutants and nuclear detontations", meaning if they started traveling in 1950 (upon receiving the light from the first nuclear detontation in 1945) and UFO sightings picked up by the 1960s they traveled 4 light years in about 10-15 years, and can be "undetectable" except.... for thousands of non-confirmable sightings per year.
I think the aliens aren't going to visit us until Zefram Cochrane achieves his first warp flight.
> Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.
Still human-centric to assume they would know what we can detect.
All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead. The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs paying 5-10x more since the late 90's.
And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it.
While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
I've worked with the government in the past. Their compute systems definitely are not decades behind. Though some are. They have the the top supercomputers and machines that haven't been updated since the 80's. That's a more realistic picture of the government. That it is this gigantic thing that is in no way remotely monolithic. It's more like The Blob, that it is an amorphis mixture of a lot of things. Neither this nor that. This is why people get into arguments when discussing the government, because it is a hodgepodge of conflicting things that with extreme differences in capacity and effectiveness. The same also goes for the military (and this should be more obvious to people if you know the joke about "military grade" and recognize that our military is the most powerful and modern one. It is the reason all those "more advanced" private sector things exist. Just because not bought in "bulk" and handed to every private doesn't mean it isn't in the system). So stop painting it with a broad brush because it is leading to conspiracy theories that are just silly (goes in both directions).
With the military (in addition to what I said) you have to be very aware that it, like most gov entities, outsources work. The private sector is coupled with the military. The US military doesn't build the secret jets on secret military bases, Lockheed and Boeing do. Lockheed built the SR71, which definitely led to many UFO stories.
Spaceflight has an inherently different set of requirements from the types of applications people on here mostly build. NASA doesn't need to run 2GB of javascript dependencies on their rover. They have people who can write lean real-time code in a low level language. They need to be sure a bit flip doesn't turn a 3 billion dollar project into rubble. There is no 'fix it in the next sprint' in spaceflight; after you hit the red button, it must work. The RAD750 that Perseverance runs on has some impressive specs, they are just specs that don't matter in a datacenter.
Fun story about that. I knew the lead driver for Curiosity and he was sharing a story about how not long after they got off Mars time they were driving it up a slope. Before he left for work that day he quickly thought to add a stopping routine in case the rover slide down the hill because the ground wasn't stable. Came back in the morning and they were worried they crashed the rover because the camera was facing a rock. Was a terrifying 30 minutes-ish moving the camera and checking that everything was okay. The routine saving the rover. (I'm sure the story is a bit exaggerated, but still fun and does demonstrate the high risk these systems have. Even if they only move a 0.15km/hr)
It's quite amazing to see that the mars rover has what you'd call self-driving capabilities, complete with onboard mapping & localization, yet without GPS and any kind of reasonable computer.
However, they did create an FPGA to do the stereo vision in real time, which is pretty cool too.
I used to know a number of NASA programmers out of Houston. They did a lot of Java programming on some pretty hyper-optimized and specified JVMs. They liked it because it would be easier for them to run simulations on and could achieve good portability on higher level things.
That was like 20 years ago though. Things could easily be different now.
Exactly. If anyone is going to work _with_ the government, you should be aware of the Technology Readiness Level (TRL)[0]. It's like the cornerstone of how everything operates. It takes decades to get to level 9 sometimes, and when reliability is critical that's what they use. Not only is it "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but "it ain't broke, and we understand every single component of this system and everything that can go wrong with it, don't 'fix' it."
It can also take a lot of time for something to get from TRL 6 to TRL 7, and from TRL 7 to TRL 8. Sometimes realistically impossible to get to TRL 9! The system could be more efficient for sure, and probably has broken down too much, but the idea itself is fine.
Fwiw, I've seen things that I 100% believe should be done today and that there's massive amounts of evidence for it, but aren't done because they aren't TRL 9. I don't want to start arguments, but there's a certain industry that gets hit with this all the time. Where they can do tons of complex and detailed models but aren't able to build the actual thing because it hasn't been physically demonstrated. Which leads to a weird self referential roadblock.
> The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.
Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?
Not everything needs to meet those specific standards, but essentially yes. My sibling comment mentioned Ingenuity (Mars Helicopter), but let's mention Curiosity. It often gets cited as costing $2.5 billion dollars. So that alone says why you wouldn't want to risk anything (see my other comments, especially about TRL[note]). But that also took almost a decade![other note] Time is also very expensive, so how much would you risk? On a 10 year project, that is going to operate for another 12+ years (still going, landed in 2011) with no way to repair or fix the product, you probably want that thing to be reliable as shit. Worth an extra year or two to make that happen.
[note] TRL 9 pretty much doesn't exist in these types of missions. We don't have decades of operation of specific devices on other planets. But you still use very robust and redundant systems.
[other note] People often cite this as a waste of money, but when we consider the time it is pittance in the government budget. Costs could definitely come down, but in government money can only exchange hands through leaky buckets. NASA politically prides itself as having parts from every state, which from an engineering perspective should sound like a logistic nightmare, and it is. But this is the type of people you are voting for, people that love pageantry over pragmatism. (pageantry gets votes, pragmatism doesn't)
Not sure if true, but I also recall reading that ICs made with larger processes are more resilient to cosmic ray strikes. So modern 7nm chips might have an inherent disadvantage in these applications.
This is true. You can think about this fairly simply as you just have to think about the amount of energy traveling within a transistor and what that energy's proportionate level is to a cosmic ray. Smaller IC's are more likely to be hit (cross-section is higher due to density AND that we operate in fields, no need for a direct physical interaction of the mass).
But that's not why they cost so much. Rad hardened ICs are built differently. They are built on a sapphire base: Silicon on Sapphire (SoS). Process is more complicated and expensive.
That said, there are more people looking at commercial off the shelf (COTS) and just building redundant systems because 2 COTS CPUs can be cheaper (and more powerful) and because ECC has gotten much better. But this is really only for LEO right now, but may be used in deeper space missions later on. Realistically it is just going to be dependent on how much your ride costs. LEO is cheap now, so risk of failure is dramatically reduced. Your ride is still most of your cost though.
Well, the mars helicopter essentially uses a cell phone, so not really.
And it's not that low power.
But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements
Sure, but those COTS parts still underwent lots and lots of rad/ vac testing. There's a design-for-resilience vs test-for-resilience tradeoff at play. I'm saying that not all systems require design-for-resilience.
Ingenuity is also running a very customized software stack to go along with the highly tested hardware. IIRC the OS can reboot in a some relatively small number milliseconds. It's meant to be able to crash in mid-air and reboot and recover before the probe loses lift and crashes in most flight envelopes. The software is also set up to crash and reboot rather than try to recover or operate in a compromised state.
Well to nitpick, that's because the two are kinda the same. Testing is part of design and vise versa in these types of systems. But otherwise I agree with the points you've made (seems we've been responding in parallel lol)
No, that's not the reason space computers are behind.
Space computers are behind because space technology is based on minimizing risk given the large cost of failure. Using older nodes with well-understood flaws that can be built using old chip equipment is much lower risk than trying to put Intel's latest into a communications satellite.
Few things in space truly would require anything state of the art. The best argument I can think of would be realtime image processing using DNNs- imagine you made a fleet of 1M identical exploration bots and you wanted them to filter out most of their imaging data before sending back the best candidates.
Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being nearly two decades old by that point.
> An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes. [1]
Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We just don't get to see the best in action because they're classified until they're almost pedestrian.
Absolutely the case. For example, the military requires all commercial satellite imagery to be scaled to 25 cm resolution (up until 2014 it was limited to 50 cm). The true resolution is classified.
> not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors
Not only that, but that "the government" and "its contractors" are often impossible to distinguish and for all intents and purposes the same. Many times realistically a loophole to escape the GS pay.
Those mirrors aren't exotic technology. They're undoubtedly very expensive and difficult to produce but at the end of the day they're as mundane as any other first surface mirror. They don't evidence the government having some sort of new paradigm of technology kept secret, like antigravity instead of normal airplanes or something like that.
That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because you've got a CPU from the 80s. The interesting part isn't the mirror but how they made it. They're obviously not mundane, otherwise NASA would have designed Hubble to use equivalent optics.
Any actually interesting technology would be under a Secrecy Order [1] and the patents wouldn't see the light of day, perhaps ever. The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines. Based on what little we know, the Secrecy Orders are very effective - some gaseous centrifuge technology used for enrichment in the 1940s and 1950s is still considered cutting edge and secret.
Antigravity is just fantasy land. All it would take is a factor of two improvement in any number of technologies to make something exotic.
> That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because you've got a CPU from the 80s.
Yes, exactly. Give a modern Apple CPU to some chip experts in the 80s and they'd no doubt be amazed and have many questions about the details, but they would have a theoretical basis for understanding the premise of the thing. Give the same chip to Isaac Newton or Archimedes and it would be a completely different story. To them, a CPU would be truly exotic technology.
Antigrav existing today would be like CPUs existing in Newton's day. You'd need completely new theories to even comprehend the most basic operating principles. Antigrav craft like those proposed by the people who don't believe Mick West's explanation of the Navy's "Go Fast" video would be further removed on a theoretical basis from the F-35 than the F-35 is from the Wright flier.
> The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines.
In both of these cases, the fundamental operating principles were widely known to relevant researchers in various countries before anybody developed one that worked. Japan and Germany both had nuclear weapons programs during WW2. Nuclear fission was known to researchers in all three nations, and more as well. In the case of jet engines, you had inventors in many countries taking stabs at implementing a practical one decades before they were adopted into military service. There was never a chance of any military getting jet engines while the rest of the world was left wondering what the hell it even was.
And with respect to gas centrifuges; those were considered but ultimately not employed by the Manhattan Project, which instead used gaseous diffusion. But the premise of gas centrifuges for isotope separation was first suggested in 1919, and the broader premise of any sort of centrifuge to separate things is much older. Gas centrifuges weren't exotic technology that game out of nowhere, the theoretical basis for them was clear before they were successfully created.
We've got a theoretical basis for warp drives [1]! Casimir effect-based propelentless propulsion! Nuclear engines in spaaaaace! How much more theoretical basis does your contrarianism demand?
We've got a theoretical basis for almost any alien technology that comes short of violating the conservation of momentum or breaking the speed of light. Doesn't mean we're any closer to making an SSTO space ship.
It actually doesn't violate the laws of physics. Matter with negative mass has never been observed before, making it purely theoretical. Theoretical basis!
Besides, exotic matter is a shortcut to the energy required, not a necessary part of the Alcubierre drive.
> Matter with negative mass has never been observed before, making it purely theoretical.
It's worse than merely theoretical because the theories we use to describe reality at present don't give us any reason to believe such exotic matter must exist, and there is no empirical evidence for such matter existing.
But slice it anyway you like, the Navy isn't operating these and there is no theoretical basis for explaining the sort of antigravity craft that UFOologists claim these Navy videos show. They aren't Alcubierre drives, that is simply absurd.
> they're as mundane as any other first surface mirror
This is a huge understatement. Like calling GPT4 "as mundane as any other transformer." Just because things have a high abstraction similarity doesn't mean the details aren't critical. Very expensive and difficult to produce __is__ exotic technology. There's also a large range of "paradigm shifting" technologies between here and antigravity. Don't listen to YouTube, get your hands dirty and work on the stuff if you want to get the expertise to know why this stuff is so impressive.
> Very expensive and difficult to produce __is__ exotic technology.
Not in the sense of antigravity. Enough money and time can buy you an arbitrarily nice mirror, it doesn't rely on presently unknown to the public attributes of the universe.
> Enough money and time can buy you an arbitrarily nice mirror
Yes and no. But I'm going to go with mostly no. The yes is only because over thousands of years we have in fact improved mirror quality, but if we're talking about building a perfect mirror within a 5-10 year time-frame from now, it is definitely no. No matter how much money you spend.
A lot of people like to make assumptions about our capacity to build and make things. The reason we don't live in a super futuristic society isn't just because we're not dumping enough money into such a goal (obviously that would help) but because even with infinite resources we don't have great paths towards those things right now. Nuance sucks, but is necessary. The truth is that there's no such thing as "simple" when we're talking about "arbitrary precision." Honestly, not even true long before that. There's a good reason you'll find books with thousands of pages dedicated to a seemingly simple thing e.gs: o-rings, screws, bolts, threading, and so on. Don't fall for the simplicity trap.
What does "a perfect mirror" even mean? The mirrors produced for the NRO were very good but they're not alien artifacts indicating some paradigm shifting technology gap between government and the private sector. They are roughly comparable to the mirrors produced for astronomical purposes in the same era. Better because they had better funding, but not so much better that anybody should deduce that aliens had anything to do with it.
> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology
This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just in obvious areas like cryptography but data structures and algorithms, as well as exotic hardware.
It doesn't explain UFOs, but the idea that the most advanced public computer tech is decades ahead of what elements of the US DoD have doesn't pass the smell test. At worst there is parity and in some areas there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of capability that should not be possible if you solely went on public computing literature. (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.)
Not everyone aspires to be a code monkey at Facebook for the money. There are extremely talented computer scientists working in US government, especially the secretive parts, that could instantly get a job at any FAANG company if they wanted to -- I've met many of them -- but they don't. The notion that the US DoD does not have access to "the best engineers and scientists" is dubious.
> (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.)
What's the government application here? AI? NSA analysis of metadata to figure out hidden connections between individuals?
Yes and no. The military has lots of old tech because it's heavily field tested, well understood, and still does what it needs to do good enough.
They do use cutting edge stuff to, and silicon valley pays well, but really only if your a software guy. Contrary to contemporary beliefs, their still are smart engineers out their building cutting edge non-compute hardware.
I've worked in defense aerospace. Silicon Valley has no relevance to aerospace. Likewise dod computing systems / IT infrastructure has nothing to do with propulsion engineering at govt labs or in industry. You're mixing up a whole bunch of things to make a broad conclusion that old computers means that DoD still isn't funding advanced weaponry beyond which we have seen. See the stealth hawk used in the bin Laden raid.
That “government employee doesn’t get paid enough to attract talent” trope has to die. I work with many government employees that are not beholden to the government pay scales and get special exemptions to be compensated “at market rates.” You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k
Also ignores the entire defense and aerospace industry. It's laughably ignorant to just write off the STEM talent at places like Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, etc because FAANG is a popular destination for CS grads. Also, people here (and in SV in general) doubt the capabilities and talent in the public sector until suddenly a Stuxnet is brought to light.
As a former government employee, I doubt they work directly for the government. The government loves to outsource everything remotely technical to contractors in my (dated) experience. The GS and even the SES pay scales they offer are laughable in comparison to what one can get in the private sector.
Correct, but if you do 5 years in the military, and 15 in FedGov, you can then retire at your GS-15 / SES grade and get a pension + guaranteed healthcare.
Then you start your 2nd career at GD or Lockheed or Microsoft, et al, and get 300k per annum.
I think you're really overstating it. I know guys that have done the military / fed / contractor shuffle. Getting above gs 12 damned near impossible, and when they figure that out, they go into contracting for ~100k+ positions, but it's not 300k. If you play it right, yeah you can fully retire at 55 with a small pension and (hugely important!) health insurance, but someone who went tech sector from the jump can easily retire at 40 if they really set their minds to it.
They typical pattern is they work for one of the government contractors L3 (now L3Harris), Northrop Grumman, etc. Of course it's a revolving door as well.
> You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k
That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.
> That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do
This is the solo special contractor rate. You aren't paying a person a million bucks. You're paying a "company" that because that's what expertise in how carbon fibers set in a particular resin matrix subjected to a high-frequency supersonic detonation ring or something, an expertise that globally numbers maybe five, and within the U.S., three, is worth.
Yes I'm a bit skeptical of the parent's numbers, but if true, I imagine it's very much the exception, not the norm. Technical employees at the contractors did not do much better than the price ranges posted for government job boards (even distinguished/principal engineers capped out at what is probably around $300-350k today after inflation) except in management positions, in my experience. All the most talented engineers I knew were gone within a few years.
Not to mention the red-taped filled work environment does not exactly encourage innovation.
> All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology
How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue:
Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the government having exotic technology, the fundamental principles of which were completely unknown to the public. Governments can commission custom software and microchips and keep the details of those secret, but those things still operate on principles already known to the public; electronics, exploiting software, etc.
When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes of the thing weren't utterly exotic.
Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of theory was already public years before they were brought into existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they must have worked.
But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical basis for such a technology known to the public right now. Nobody can say "well it could be done with XYZ but it would be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."
> And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's
Exactly what has been going on since the 40s though? The Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the government. It was just a balloon that got blown up into an massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors about alien spacecraft.
The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology, contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far. There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either from the government or from space. The government doesn't have stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for such craft existing in the first place.
When discussing something rationally what matters is the merits of the arguments, not the background of the speaker. Mick West's background as a video game developer don't detract from his arguments. Furthermore, Navy pilot are not assured against dishonesty or error; even US Navy pilots are humans. Spare me this "support the troops" style of rhetoric; you can't use patriotism to shame me into uncritically taking military personnel at their word.
I agree we should avoid appeals to authority, but Mick West's argument is essentially saying all the secondary evidence, including witness testimony corresponding to the video he is trying to disprove is false (or ignores it altogether), so he unfortunately turns it into a he-said-she-said (where his credibility becomes relevant, since he doesn't have any, and the pilots have at least a little).
Mick West always starts with a conclusion and works backwards from there. He had a satisfying explanation re: parallax on the "GoFast" video, and developed a cult following from there, but the Gimbal one is really grasping at straws.
I've read about enough anomalies and see enough statistical patterns to develop an intuition that some percentage of them represent something really interesting, even without a smoking gun. We've had a lot of time to experiment with implanting experiences and studying mass hallucinations and they are no better understood than when people first tried using them to wish away inconvenient data. It just seems like a deus ex machina to ignore something frightening observed by someone credible (where frightening == worldview-changing).
Have you ever honestly considered, if you were a casual naturalist in Galileo's time, whether you with your present personality would side with the church or with Galileo?
Not SV but there's a lot of aerospace companies in Cali and the rest of the SW. The guy[0] who invented the first modern UAV that became the basis of the military's entire drone program was running his company out of his garage in LA, literally a garage startup. This is why DARPA exists and funds companies outside of the direct purview of military R&D.
So you get it then. Military tech is developed by companies. They are coupled. All those secret jets and rockets aren't built by military engineers with no affiliation to any private entity, they are built through contractors who get paid way more than government salaries but are still given clearances and cannot sell their top of the line technologies to the public. I mean Lockheed built the SR71. That's how this works. I'm confused why so many people are confused. The problem is about the ridiculous price tags and maybe (or maybe not) that the military non-contractor salaries are rather low. But there is no shortage of contractors.
> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead
What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret military clearance?
Seriously. Oftentimes, though, it's not the government who is ahead in tech, it's the quasi-private sector that is decades ahead but due to secrecy laws cannot come forward and talk about it under any and every circumstance.
I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours.
When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech.
This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.
In most classified arenas, there is no private sector competition. No one in SV is building subs, SOSUS arrays or stealth a/c. So it's completely reasonable they're way ahead of some niche innovator building a sub out of carbon fiber. But it's not sci-fi tech.
People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so.
LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit.
>I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson. When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories about how people's native languages impact the way the view the world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest thing their brains could come up with.
That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.
The easiest way to improve cybersecurity is keeping your critical hardware off of the public internet or even keeping it air-gapped. Something that doesn't require leading edge tech but operational care. I suspect the military is pretty good at the latter, certainly much better than the typical SV company.
Do you think the jet engines being built at Pratt & Whitney to power the F-35 and developed for the NGAD fighter are behind the private sector?
Not like P&W is a government owned company, either - the private sector and the military are closely integrated, that's the military industrial complex.
"But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."
> For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...
Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.
Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.
The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up.
And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
> Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.
He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about getting caught lying.
> And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was a helicopter with a searchlight.
hmm, he does say he was camping on a beach in Plymouth, MA. On the map I see a municipal airport not far inland and a bit to the south a coast guard air base. I could imagine a coast guard helicopter out patrolling the coastline taking a closer look at someone on the beach at 2am.
I can't read the full Boston Globe article due to the paywall and offer no opinion on the author's state of mind, but if you assume some small percent of outwardly functional people have "eccentric" personalities, it would not be surprising that you would occasionally hear about a college professor doing something eccentric. Why is any further explanation needed than "some humans have quirky personalities and do quirky things..."
It's not a lie if the author believes that it's true. People are way too trusting of their senses and memories when both have been shown to be extremely fallible under numerous different circumstances. Remember how suggestible victims had been convinced that they participated in satanic sex rituals during the satanic panic[1]? Why is it out of the realm of possibility that the author is recounting a particularly vivid dream or hallucination that became more "real" the more he thought about it?
Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of different aliens visiting us, or people are having experiences they can't rationally explain and their brain is filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.
Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone having a camera on them at any given moment is now approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens getting sneakier?
I agree that memories are not always reliable but I personally find it to be with smaller less significant details about a larger event. So I could believe that the author perhaps misremembers colors or sounds or size to some extent- but to have a completely false memory of an entire event? I suppose a helicopter could have hovered over him and trained a search light on him- but to remember it years later as a UFO, I don't know.
While I understand and appreciate the aspects of the bill that offers protection for whistleblowers, I don't understand cutting all funding for reversing such technology.
If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we want to study potentially advanced technology?
I would assume the issue would be that a government agency is reversing UFO tech and congress doesn't know about it, not just that it's being done. A government agency going rogue in such a manner would be a big concern
Agreed. Many implications. If technology is reverse-engineered in secret while government funded and then patented to a private corporation, is this not theft from the people if they try to sell it for profit? Security threats are a concern as well, civilians are not allowed to possess weaponry more powerful than what the military has, etc.
Reverse engineering a UFO would be disassembling and studying it so that we can recreate it or repurpose the technologies in it. Presumably it would have some manner of exotic engine or power source or perhaps weapons, etc.
For an example of this from the early Cold War, see the Tupolev Tu-4. The Soviets took the wrecks of three downed US B-29s from WWII and spent huge amounts of money and manpower studying them and developing copies of them since US strategic bomber tech was so far ahead of their own. Supposedly (though I'd need to find a source again) there was a bullet hole in the wing of one of the recovered B-29s that the Soviets faithfully recreated in the Tu-4 thinking it was part of the actual design.
It sounds like a dramatic step without necessarily having any real impact. If as I suspect these UFO claims are largely BS, then it's an easy way to impress the disturbingly large sector of the public that lives in a conspiratorial fantasy land.
- Stick. Today a program that is doing "Advanced Propulsion Research" that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech would be perfectly legal. Cutting funding for this, unless explicitly authorized, opens up liability for anyone in the government and related contractors.
- Carrot. The amnesty is an opportunity to come forward without the liability.
We want the shiny tech, but if the studying shiny tech is a way to step around appropriations, then there are very powerful people who will want to stop that (Congress), since it threatens the very thing that makes them powerful. Sounds to be more about DC power politics than alien technology.
If there are indeed people that work on this stuff, are paid well, and this stops funding maybe disclosing it to congress is a way to get the gravy train turned back on.
But.. The US Govt. has zero reasons to acknowledge existence of a non-human superior technology spacecraft. It would undermine their position as world super power and destabilize trust and security in the country and could lead to mass instability and a slow down of technological progress.
And if they are running a massive psyops deception campaign it would make the public lose the last vestige of trust left in the govt. Its a lose lose situation on both scenarios and I expect the US govt. to keep things of this nature locked down to a extreme state as it has been doing since WW2.
Also interesting note, the flood of credible pentagon UFO info is being brought up by a bunch of individuals who worked in(or currently for) the US intelligence community. This is 2017 and after when the NYtimes(Leslie Kean reporter) released the bombshell pentagon UFO tapes. These individuals are: Christoper Mellon(ex high ranking intelligence director), Luis Elizondo(Intelligence officer on and off), and currently David Grusch NGA, & NRO - the person who states that non human craft have been retrieved(OP article).
Would a US President have the necessary clearance to know of the existence of non-human superior technology spacecraft? A former US President is recorded on tape boasting about knowledge of US military plans to invade Iran.
I don't mean to make this political at all, just trying to reason on the basis of a personality and knowing that a president would boast about having knowledge of such trivial classified information - in comparison to the existence of non-human spacecraft; makes me believe that if he was briefed on it he likely would have boasted about it. (and so would I, just imagine what earth shaking news that is.)
The president would have the clearance, but the issue is knowing who to even ask who would have knowledge. Top Secret SCI is compartmentalized, so only the people who need to know get read in.
One great example of this is during the Bin Laden raid planning, after all plans were exhausted on how they could put boots on the ground, only then did a high ranking officer let the president and the rest of the team in the room know about the stealth helicopters that even the SEALs had never seen before.
This is exactly what I have been thinking since 2016. If Aliens/UFOs are real, we will hear about it soon. However, if it's true that parts of the government are secret from the president, even the last one, then that is a real problem.
I think a large portion of the government, including Trump's very direct reports, know not to tell him anything that should be kept secret. I imagine other Presidents all know a ton of stuff that nobody happened to mention to Trump, you know, for some reason.
Supposedly the President is deliberately kept in the dark. Bush Sr. denied President Carter access to that information, and I have no doubt other more recent Presidents were denied access or purposely fed misinformation.
Trump in particular never showed any interest in anything besides enriching himself and allowing the Saudis, Russians, and Chinese to feed his ego. I doubt he even thought about the aliens, let alone went through enough trouble to ask about them....because if he did, and was denied info, he would have fired the intelligence officer who denied him access and publicly blabbered about it on Twitter.
So are hostile countries using declassified nuclear blueprints to bomb our homeland. Alas, if you want the democratic experiment to succeed, you need to account for those who stand to lose everything from your success.
Official secrecy clearly failed to stop the very scenario you're talking about!
We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries. North Korea has them, for God's sake.
Nuclear weapons are simply a function of having a large enough industrial base to support their development. The "secret sauce" is officially secret, but it isn't actually secret.
“Policy X is useless because it did not stop every single instance of the thing it was trying to reduce” is a fallacious argument. Seat belts did not halt deaths in auto accidents, etc.
Secrecy may or may not be warranted, but this is not a good argument against it.
> We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries. North Korea has them, for God's sake
> It’s not secrecy that has prevented proliferation, it’s carrots and sticks that has.
Secrecy increases the cost, so it is, in effect, part of the “stick” end of the carrots and sticks. If there hadn’t been secrecy, would the return to sanity that stopped the South American nuclear arms race been too late? Secrecy should not be dismissed.
There is secrecy, which is why the countries that haven’t found a shortcut around it (as in the nuclear arms race between Argentina and Brazil) have a harder road than those that do (like South Africa via Israel).
> Research the Nth Country Experiment
The Nth Country Experiment focused on paper design of a device, which, while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons, isn’t the whole or, in practice, the limiting factor.
>while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons, isn’t the whole or, in practice, the limiting factor.
Nukes are not a physics challenge, but an engineering challenge. That's why an experiment showing a bunch of physicists understand simple particle physics isn't a useful demonstration that building nukes doesn't require insane amounts of help from a willing sponsor.
People "knew" how to build the A bomb before World War 2 even started, yet even when several countries put energy into it to aid their war effort, only the US succeeded, and only because they dedicated around one tenth of the entire GDP to the process.
Merely getting enough enriched material is enough of a problem to stop most countries.
Anyway, Brazil has a working uranium enrichment facility, with public numbers, and as efficient as any modern one (what is way more efficient than anything from the time nuclear bombs were created).
What kind of secrecy are you stating that is stopping Brazil?
The comment doesn't really apply to that either. Germany and France were quite involved on that one, so it wasn't exactly secrecy that kept things slow. It was more due to the sheer unpopularity of the thing (on both sides) even between the people high-ranked enough to know about it.
I mean, by 85 Brazil had already a nuclear reactor in full activity. A reactor can get you enough plutonium for a bomb long before it's in full activity.
I see your points, but the difference is we know about the existence of the silos and subs. They're protecting information about them, but not trying to mislead us into thinking submarines aren't a thing.
I have heard these types of claims many times. The people making them seem more credible at first glance this time, but I am firmly in the camp of being deeply skeptical until I see concrete proof presented.
That being said, I don’t completely discount the possibility. One answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn’t one, and I can think of many reasons multiple governments would try to keep stuff like this secret.
The thing that bothers me is they supposedly have 12 or more craft that have crashed.
Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
I'd like to believe, and I think 1 or 2 might be reasonable but the claim is 12, which doesn't account for ships obtained by other nations as Grusch said I'd happening.
I still believe it's possible, and hope it is, however something feels staged about this, maybe to get more money for certain agencies, or some other motive.
(1) The probes, like ours, are not designed to return and have a limited life span. Maybe they just gather and transmit data until their power source runs out or something on them breaks and they crash.
(2) Maybe there are thousands of probes or even more (even from multiple sources!) and only a small percentage of them crash. Of course one would assume we'd be seeing them more often if this were true.
(3) We shot them down. That's not impossible, especially if they are just probes and were not designed to deal with something intelligent intentionally flinging high velocity chunks of metal at them.
The last could easily occur if we mistook them for e.g. Soviet/Russian or Chinese surveillance craft and they repeatedly refused to respond to orders to withdraw.
Why would someone send probes here? This planet has been broadcasting "possible biosphere right here!" for at least hundreds of millions of years to anyone capable of doing spectroscopy on the light it reflects. You wouldn't be able to see detail from another star but you could determine things like atmospheric makeup and conclude that there is very likely to be something interesting here. You'd see a ton of oxygen (which is hard to explain abiotically), water vapor, traces of hydrocarbons, and possibly evidence of sunlight being captured by something complex (photosynthesis) vs just reflecting off rocks or ice. Lastly the planet has a large moon and is not tide locked to its star, both characteristics that increase the odds of something complex evolving here (as far as we know).
> Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
Multiple different sets of aliens, fighting over Earth. (I’m not saying that this is true, just that it is one scenario that explains crashes happening if there were aliens as described building craft capable of visiting Earth.)
Maybe they're crashing the crafts on purpose to ease the human race into accepting their presence. Maybe they're gifts. Maybe it's not DoD running psyops, but the aliens themselves...
Because nobody has figured out an autopilot that doesn't shit the bed once in a while? I'm betting on taking a nap in the backseat is just a universally bad idea when nobody is driving.
In terms of using support by Senators to influence one's priors on whether UFOs might be real: it's worth noting that Senator Rubio also harbors doubts about the certification of the election results in 2020.
One might wonder "Why is this Congress treating this topic seriously when previous Congresses did not" and conclude this Congress is more willing to treat outlandish claims as credible, not that the claims are more credible.
> would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of “non-earth” or “exotic” origin.
If that were going on (and I'm skeptical) why would you want to stop it?
> Funding would also be cut for “the development of propulsion technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology, systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or inspired by inspection, analysis, or reverse engineering of recovered [UFOs] or materials.”
Again, why the hell would you stop funding for development of propulsion tech that might be of alien origin? You can bet that if China or Russia had a craft like this they'd be trying to reverse engineer it.
Because you are being paid (or blackmailed) by the aliens.
Or because you don’t believe they exist, and think that “classified program to recover extraterrestrial craft and reverse engineer its technology” is used as itself a cover for outright corruption.
Likely because it's been going on since at least the 40s by private defense contractors, who don't have the same oversight as a gov agency and who are benefiting from the tech with tax payer dollars without the public knowing or benefiting.
I'm surprised that congress finally wants to stop the gravy train, unless this is another refined misdirection scheme. Probably a lot of that money went into covert operations.
My theory is that these spheres are spinning and move using the Magnus effect (the effect that causes a spinning soccer ball to curve). Theoretically, if you have gyroscopes inside the sphere, and you can find a way to transfer the gyroscopes' spin to the sphere, the sphere will spin in a controllable direction and move where you want it to. Lift can be achieved by filling it with helium.
We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with statements like the following, made by the former director of National Intelligence?
"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."
Ok, I changed the wording to "in my opinion". My main point is that it might be possible to build drones matching this description with existing technology. There is existing technology to induce controlled rotation in satellites, using control moment gyroscopes:
Perhaps if you placed a control moment gyroscope inside a helium-filled sphere, an operator could generate a controlled rapid spin. I'm not an expert by any means, was hoping someone more knowledgable can evaluate the idea.
The videos show the spheres moving quickly, often back and forth. Pilots have reported spheres hovering stationary over a spot during hurricane level winds. From all the reports it sounds like there is some kind of propulsion mechanism.
They’re sails in this configuration—nothing more. They harness existing force of wind. They get spun up and if they spin the right way they produce a force perpendicular to the wind.
The magnus effect is a byproduct of laminar flow of fluid/air around a spinning object. Without laminar flow there is no force. So that is to say if you spin a sphere really fast and it’s hovering in air without gravity and without wind it will not move because there will be no laminar flow to produce the magnus effect. So in order for your spherical craft to actually harness the magnus effect you would need a separate means of propulsion to drive you in the primary direction and harness the magnus effect for thrust in a secondary direction, ie turn.
Did some more research, you seem to be right. Although the design I proposed could still be viable--when the wind is still the sphere would simply hover, and when the wind is blowing the sphere could move controllably, just not against the wind. At 10k feet there should be sufficient wind to control the sphere most of the time.
This is a good thread to catalog red herring techniques.
* The government has previously used X to divert attention therefore there is no X.
* The person saying X is an accomplice of X and cannot be trusted.
* Demanding the answer to the question about X is dangerous because national security.
* X is a distraction from something bad Trump did.
* X is a distraction from something bad Biden did.
* X is a distraction from the recent Supreme Court decisions.
* X could never be covered up by the government - refuses to believe copious whistleblower testimony about X with no reason than it's impossible for the government to be able to cover X up.
- I debunked it from seeing this YouTube video because those Air Force pilots and those government whistleblowers definitely don’t know what they are talking about !
I am always surprised by the amount of confidence those « debunkers » radiate when what they mainly do is just express doubt with zero cost to them in terms of reputation or even work.
This is precisely why I've always been most fond of the explanation that "the UFO thing" is a training ground for US psychological warfare officers. We're target practice for US disinfo campaigns.
This is such a ludicrous idea that doesn’t pass even the most basic reality checks. It’s explicitly illegal for a start amongst a whole host of other problems where the incentives make zero sense.
The government lying to us and manipulating the population with psychological warfare is a much more germane, plausible, and historically aligned proposition than the suggestion that aliens are visiting earth. In fact if you assume aliens are visiting earth, then you must also assume the government has been lying to us about it. So either way, the government is lying.
> It’s explicitly illegal
Lol. When has this ever stopped any government agency, ever? The FBI conducted over a million illegal searches last year. The NSA lied for decades about its dragnet surveillance program. You think the DIA information office (Lue Elizondo's "former" workplace) is against fabricating some conspiracy theories in an effort to corral the people most susceptible to them? They could even justify it as a defensive maneuver against hostile forces who would otherwise propagandize the same people ("distract them with Lue Anon so the Russians can't target them with Q Anon").
Obviously nobody is going to convince you that you have a complete crackpot view of the world, that’s kind of the definition of the situation you find yourself in.
It’s just incredibly clear that you actually don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding about how the military or intelligence agencies work and you are left yelling about a world that exists in your mind. The entire comment is just Swiss cheese to anyone with even a passing familiarity on any of those topics.
Wow, very convincing argument, you must be a professional spy with all your more-than-passing familiarity with intelligence agencies, I bow down to your totally rational viewpoint on the world where government agencies follow all laws and aliens routinely crash their flying craft for our venerable government agencies to recover and (legally, of course!) keep secret from us for seven decades.
There sure is a lot of UFO talk around the same time audio of a former president laughing about all the treason he’s committing. Probably just a coincidence.
It is. This article is about A) “ Senate Intelligence Committee’s [draft] legislation”, which is a democrat-run process that surely started before last weekend, and B) Marco Rubio describing facts everyone already knew, which idk seems like normal congress stuff.
I think you’re in a conspiratorial mood, haha. Ironic that your conspiracy is against the existence of UFOs!
As a non-American, let me ask you if you really think all the other high level American politicians are clean?
If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?
You've got to act like most politicians are clean and investigate and prosecute the ones who reveal themselves otherwise, regardless of what the ground truth is.
The "all politicians are crooks" line of thinking just gives the crooks a free pass while making it more difficult for whatever actors are trying to hold them accountable, whether for virtue's sake or for base political gain. Occasionally punishing a crook -- even if it is only a fraction of those deserving of punishment -- will make a few politicians of the next generation act a little less boldly, while shrugging your shoulders and saying "everyone does it" will make them ask what else they can get away with.
Cynicism, even cynicism grounded in realism, doesn't make the world a better place.
That's a good point other than the fact that it sounds like you're saying he doesn't need to be held accountable in a court of law for his numerous crimes. No politician should be exempt from the law.
No, actually I want more accountability as ultimately the money politicians launder into their own pockets directly or indirectly comes from a power vested by citizens. Useful idiots who point fingers at one edge of the political spectrum are smokescreening the bigger issue.
I don't think it's an either or thing. Both situations are bad. We should both hold Trump accountable AND push against corruptions by all politicians. If Hunter Biden was influence peddling (no idea if he was)...that's a problem too and so is whatever I assume Jared and Ivanka were doing for 4 years (e.g. the $2B Jared reportedly got from Saudi Arabia).
I do agree that some of the culture war is likely manufactured to prevent a concentrated movement against a system that overly caters to the ultra wealthy.
Uhhhh not OP but yes I believe only one president has shown off classified material for money and power and ego. Disliking the system doesn’t mean we should abandon all critiques of politicians while we wait for our personal utopia to come about.
> As a non-American, let me ask you if you really think all the other high level American politicians are clean?
No, a bunch of somewhat less high-level but still, in some cases, high-level ones are somewhat less flamboyant co-conspirators, co-principals, and/or accessories in Trump’s crimes, as well as having their own; most of the rest are comparatively if not absolutely clean.
> If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?
I don’t know about the person you’re responding to, but I’ve written more, over a longer time, about the structural problems of the American political system than about Trump’s personal crimes, and I’ve written specifically about how the culture of impunity fed by, inter alia, Ford’s pardon of Nixon fueled a series of subsequent executive abuses of which Trump’s are the most serious.
One can simultaneously recognize and discusss the forest and the unique, largest tree. The one does not, and should not, preclude discussion of the other, both are important.
"It's aliens" is just about the least plausible explanation other than "god did it". I'm pretty sure several other sci-fi bullshit explanations are more likely than "aliens are real, have tech we couldn't dream of that relies on our model of reality being totally broken, give enough of a shit about us to visit but not enough to do anything else, and are extremely hard to detect except, for no good reason, in this one specific way that, coincidentally, often turns out to for-sure not be space aliens, but one of several other things".
I'd even argue that "breakaway human civilization living in underground bunkers on Earth" is more plausible than aliens, just because of the vast travel time required to move between star systems within the currently known laws of physics. Both situations - aliens and breakaway civilizations - are incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible. But at least one of them doesn't require breaking any laws of physics.
Warp drives and wormholes do not necessarily break the laws of physics.
Sabine Hossenfelder does a good job explaining why the limits imposed by special relativity are not valid arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw
As for a breakaway civilization, don't you think people would notice resources missing or the insane usage of resources by what would have to be a massive civilization be noticed?
If you take the claims at face value, that these things operate as if inertia does not apply already "breaks physics". And if that is the case ET would make more sense than mole people.
But it is also possible there is nothing to this at all. For me it's ET or a Psyop.
This dude seems credible.. What if his story exposes the gov using UFOs as a psyop internally? Someone posted about a doc called Mirage Men in which people allege that the gov has used this UFO story to keep people quiet about secret programs. Going to watch it later today. Even if just that is exposed it would be wild.
Is there anyone else that just doesn't believe any of this ufo stuff whatsoever? The whole thing seems like a massive waste of time and resources when we have real problems that need solving.
Well these are people who also firmly believe in nonsense conspiracy theories pushed by some nutjob on the internet, so this just seems completely in line with their lack of connection to reality.
Conspiracy theories have gone completely off the rails in this country. For the longest time I thought flat earthers were trolling like the birds aren't real meme but seeing this crap reach congress is sad.
Its gone past the point where people can just brush it off as the rantings of a crank. Congress are troubled about it. If there are organisations gathering alien tech without oversite and covertly, then imagine what they could do with it if they managed to activate or replicate it? They could sell it to enemies, use it for themselves, subvert governments. Congress have probably concluded that as well and are rightly alarmed.
I like to consider just listing as many alternatives as I could manage, in order of decreasing likelihood (as per my personal estimation):
1) Some kind of psy-ops from within our own government, meant to mess with a different government or a branch of our own government. Maybe its own citizens. You can get eleven-dimensional chess with this pretty quickly.
2) We have grabbed someone else's UAVs. Maybe China, maybe Russia.
3) We have grabbed the UAVs of an unsuspected party which a surprise technological edge we would never expect: the Wakanda Hypothesis. We don't even know that we're in a game and that we're losing.
...
N-3) Aliens have emerged from local gas giants and are curious about us. Jupiter? Saturn? Neptune? And so on. Probably not Pluto.
N-2) Generation ships or "sleepers" from another solar system are on some sort of grand tour of the Orion Arm, working their way out. We've been noticed and the occupants awakened. Aliens? AI? Maybe there is no difference by then.
N-1) Aliens within a light sphere about 0.45 * (First UFO Year - 1895) heard our radio and really hustled to get here with a hefty blueshift.
N) The captured vessels are either FTL-capable or brought here on a larger ship with such capabilities. All bets are off.
There is another possibility which I think is often ignored, after #3. It's sci-fi, but it isn't physics-breaking the way FTL is. What if the craft are from a parallel earth? I dislike it, but not as much as I dislike FTL. It doesn't even require aliens. A parallel history where we got the ball rolling even a few decades earlier might end up with a civilization a hundred or a thousand years ahead of ours. I wouldn't bet money on anything higher than #2 on my list, but I still think that if we are going to conjecture about aliens, we might as well do parallel Earths, too.
This is an opinion post, not news. Here is the author's twitter feed. Looks to have a serious fixation on UFOs dating back a long time: https://twitter.com/MvonRen/
What I find most fascinating about aliens and UFOs is that they always seem to be heading for America. If a UFO arrived from another galaxy it might choose any place to land, but talk is always America-centric. Do other countries feel so UFO special?
Assuming this isn’t just a big psyop trying to scare US adversaries, and that UFO’s are real… the US was the first to detonate nukes in 1945, and on its own territory, which might explain some of it. Maybe the UFO’s were investigating how scientifically and technologically advanced humanity was becoming, and naturally focused on nuclear tech as a leading indicator.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast might also have alerted them to humanity, and travel time of the broadcast plus travel time of UFO’s to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around when nukes were invented (if they’re from, say, Alpha Centauri which is 4 light-years away).
The US and Europe also have free press where things like this are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which in conjunction with the above may explain sightings maps like this one, where sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in Europe:
Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, look at what you get:
1-1943: 1566 sightings reports
1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports
Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia previously. Obviously we also had more robust and technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge discrepancy.
That data is slighty suspect. Not just the reliability of reporting between 1-1900, but also the data on the site - apparently there was a siting in Chicago Illinois in the year 600? There's a lot of reports for American locations even earlier than that.
I think most importantly we started watching the sky when humanity started to fly. Suddenly the heavens were a viable place for mankind to be, especially after we ourselves got to space. The post-WW2 era also had a whole culture that was used to watching the sky because there had been very plausible threats of death from that direction. We suddenly cared when we saw something weird in the night beyond just a passing curiosity.
All good points. I doubt the folks running that site have vetted every one of their hundreds of thousands of data points, so it's not an authoritative source, just a descriptive one at most.
And, when did science fiction literature start getting big and developing plots involving aliens, and might that have stimulated people's imaginations about UFOs and aliens (which then conversely stimulated more scifi about them)? Was this happening prior to the atomic age or space age, or did that kind of scifi really get started with the space race? If the latter, that might also explain the huge increase in imaginings... er, sightings.
I also can't help but wonder at the timing, with geopolitical tensions rising and China challenging US military and technological supremacy. It's quite a coincidence. Maybe it's the mother of all CIA mindfuck psyops, to introduce a new source of uncertainty and deterrence into the CCP and Russia's strategic calculations.
There's "whistleblowers" on TV claiming the US is in possession of "exotic materials", aka alien tech, since the 1940s. Just how much has been reverse engineered in that time, and deployed in super secret weapons systems that not even Congress knows about? Would the CCP really want to risk WWIII against the US when there's even a small possibility of that?
There's a great scene in "The Expanse" relevant to this situation, where UN Deputy Undersecretary Avasarala has a meeting considering the possibility of first contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYRLV-qm3Qs
"I have a file with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for war with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios for what to do if they develop an unexpected new technology. My file for what to do if an advanced alien species comes calling, is three pages long, and begins with 'Find God'".
This makes a lot of sense. To a sufficiently advanced civilization with the ability to detect large releases of energy elsewhere in the universe, the start of the atomic age could have sent an unmistakable signal - distinct from other patterns caused by natural phenomenon - that an advanced form of life must exist here.
Exactly. Humanity's first radio broadcast capable of detection from distant space was the 1936 Berlin Olympics broadcast. Then nukes nine years later were even more detectable, and discernible from natural sources. 4yrs travel time to Alpha Centauri, then 4 years back in a lightspeed craft, and voila - Roswell, sightings, abductions, coverups, etc.
The date that nukes were invented is also roughly the date when the intelligence community captured the military industrial complex and started running psychological warfare campaigns against american citizens...
Technically, all that's being claimed is that the USA has whistleblowers. Grutsch has said before that other countries also have UFO retrieval programmes. So if we suspend disbelief for a moment and assume there's real craft flying around, all it'd take for this current set of events is if the USA had a monopoly on whistleblowers.
Given that most famous whistleblowers in recent years have been American this doesn't seem unlikely. Five Eyes has five governments in it, but only the USA had someone who went to the press. The US Government is both very large so more people can leak things, and very well funded, so more chance of secret programmes, and (IMHO) has a civic-minded culture in which people are more inspired by things like the Constitution and stated cultural ideals than in other countries.
> On 16 September 1994, there was a UFO sighting outside Ruwa, Zimbabwe.[1] Sixty-two pupils at the Ariel School aged between six and twelve[1][2] said that they saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school.[1][2] One or more creatures dressed all in black then approached the children and telepathically communicated to them a message with an environmental theme, frightening the children and causing them to cry.
> The sightings at Ariel occurred at 10am on 16 September 1994, when pupils were outside on mid-morning break.[1] The adult faculty at the school were inside having a meeting at the time.
How convenient that all the adults were inside and only 6-12 year old children saw it. Anyone who believes this story is far too credulous.
When it comes to "strange lights in the sky" there is a fairly uniform body of observation around the world with some(typically dry or mountainous) regions being hotpots so there is definitely things happening in the skies we don't fully understand but that's not the same as extraterrestrial spaceships and could easily be unusual "weather patterns", or some other natural phenomena.
Where the us is alone however is in the reports of sightings/abductions of entities exiting those craft but then again most of those stories tend to either be "retrieved memories", straight up hoaxes or so vague in details that other explanations cannot be ruled out.
The country with the best fishing nets would probably catch more fish than countries with bad fishing nets, even if they have the same amount of fish in the oceans.
Actually one of the first 'known' UFOs supposedly crash landed in 1930's Italy, and Mussolini blabbed about it to the Pope, who warned the US. Allegedly. We're not the only country that's supposedly had contact.
Generally UFO reportings increased with astronomy, radar, and surveillance technology development. Of which, the US has a lot of all three, which probably means we have a sufficiently complex system that we can notice anomalies but not sufficiently complex enough to identify them.
You could've googled this theory you had before putting it in text.
I've come across a number of low effort commentary recently that's easily googlable where folks themselves are inappropriate. In this case, there's amerocentricism heavily implied when that's obviously not the case. I think maybe what this suggests is that HN really isn't the place for me at the moment.
So not saying I necessarily believe (but "I want to believe") the argument could be the US has better airspace monitoring than other countries and more ability to publish and disseminate information.
If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to know or be aware. The other alternative if Russia which is similarly sized and equipped but they tend to be pretty cagey sharing information.
So it ends up being the US not because they only land there but because they have the combination of obsessively watching the skies with the ability to share their information and the freedom to do so.
The "US tech is light years ahead" is nonsense when this time around the story is that the US has an ultra secret UFO retrieval agency. How is it possible that no UFO has crashed outside the US jurisdiction, where they can't send their MIB in 2 hours?
Also, I'd like to remind Americans that we're not caveman here. We do have radar and jets flying and cameraphones.
The problem is that if you want to believe, you're ready to throw any kind of common sense and elementary logic out the window. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and this ain't it.
I just realized why this is bullshit. If such crafts existed, they wouldn't only seem to appear in the USA, and somebody in some backwater somewhere on earth would have leaked proof about them by now.
But there's never clear pictures or videos or physical evidence provided. This is just another scam.
Really hope they produce something other than blurry videos with 8bit shadows(tall green man), blurry standard disc looking flying object, again on 70s vhs quality, and “riveting” interviews of space alien tech recoveries. It’s been a clown show so far this century.
I have reason to believe many of these UFO movement claims. What makes this possible is closely related to the results of supercooling helium to zero degrees. Figure out why the latter happens and you will figure out how the UFOs can move around so quickly.
If you are interested in learning more about the history of UAPs and claims of NHI abductions I suggest checking out the YT channel Eyes on Cinema. Some of the hypnosis recall videos on there are terrifying.
Additionally listen to some of the interviews with Professor Garry Nolan. There is a lot of nonsense and grifters in the UFO world, how do you know this or that isn't a disinformation campaign? It's hard to know what is genuine and who is just trying to sell their book or promote their podcast. Garry Nolan once said something like UFOlogy is not a science and to seriously study the UAP phenomenon it would need to become a serious field of scientific investigation i.e. creating a journal scientists can submit papers to for peer review. I would avoid people like Steven Greer or the History Channel's Ancient Aliens.
I have always been a "show me the evidence" type person. I was an atheist since I was really young. I hope this comment helps anyone who is curious about learning about this subject. I'm not trying to convince you aliens are coming to Earth or "make you a believer".
I am wondering how much of this is fueled by the change in the word alien from simply meaning foreign to meaning extraterrestrial and people misreading the former for the latter.
The research into foreign weapon technology is in one of those gray areas where not only does some of those activities border really close to industrial espionage against companies in potentially allied countries, or might contradict stated US State Department positions on international law it's usually classified and spoken off in hushed tones
It's very likely that an alien(as in foreign) technology evaluation program exists without there being anything extra-terrestrial about it as legalese can trail popular changes to terms by several decades. And that mentions of those in wider circles might fuel some rumors and misconceptions among those "who wants to believe".
The US immigration services uses the term Alien, and the US State Department have historically used both.
Given how byzantine the US military industrial complex's paperwork and pretend regulation is someone might have been relying on legislation or paperwork predating the change in word usage, and that that influenced the naming of some program somewhere in the secretive world.
It's also worth noting that such a misconception definitely benefit's the military industrial complex as it draws focus towards something that is not there rather then towards what's actually happening, which again is a very common strategy within military intelligence.
Moreover, when it comes to corps/biz incorporation domestic is in-state, foreign is out of state, and alien is international. presumably if one day one could charter a corporation at an office on Mars it would be extraterrestrial.
Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and draw attention away from several state supreme court rulings striking down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted and championed by republicans. If not that, then to draw attention away from the spectacle of republican cooperation during successful debt ceiling negotiations.
> Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and draw attention away from several state supreme court rulings striking down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted and championed by republicans.
Mostly, those have been federal trial courts (and some, like the Florida drag ban one, also preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement while the case proceeds, not final rulings striking them down) not state supreme courts issuing the rulings.
Rubio is a member of the "gang of eight" which means he's about as uniparty as they come - the letters next to the names of people on that committee do not mean anything. Their allegiance is to the military industrial complex. They've all got the stamp of approval of the US intel community, which has probably been spying on them and blackmailing them since they launched their first political campaigns.
While I may navigate a Willie Nelson-approvable nudist hippie Magic Mystery Machine, I'd prefer to inform these politicians to please fuck right off with the X-Files conspiracy theories. Even with the most wacky and fanciful personalities not totally fried by acid and weed, selling this disinformation with the transparent prospect of personal enrichment through books, paid speaking junkets, pressers, merchandizing, and other content products would be an insulting, disrespectful farce and abuse of office. I would recommend voters consider firing such grifting fools (including Rubio, Santos, Manchin, and Sinema) out of office because at least prostitutes provide an essential and honest service. A child could pick higher integrity, more informed, and less corrupt COTUS candidates by (random, unvetted) sortition of Baltimore city employees. This sort of institutional corruption unfortunately signals drift towards systemic empire decline and effective collapse long prognosticated (20+ years ago) by great philosophical historians such as Chalmers Johnson. When too many of the soldiers and police officers say "Fuck this bullshit, I'll be a farmer with fixed fortifications in a remote area on my own." that previous age has sailed and the Vikings and Conquistadors aren't far behind.
I don’t believe such projects actually exist, and my two theories are a bit whacky, but one of:
1. They’re actually used as ways of laundering money out of government pockets without congressional oversight. The whole “oh but it’s top top secret” excuse is an easy one.
2. The positive and negative attention are all part of a plan to convince enemy nations that the US has access to incredible technology. I mean, if I wanted to spook Putin, I’d probably also sign a bill condemning the work on the trillion megaton nuclear bomb. What trillion megaton nuclear bomb? The one we’re condemning!
But let’s pretend it is real.
What is the point of congress withdrawing such funding? Elon steps in, and then such tech is in the hands of a private company rather than the government. How is that a good thing for the US govt?
It sounds (to my naive British mind, which knows very little about congress or its stance on various things) that it’d have been preferable to give a timeline for these projects to present themselves to congress. Immediately condemning them and convincing whistleblowers to present them instead just seems like a backwards way of doing it.
I find it pretty wild that members of congress are having to draft bills to pull out any secrets that may be happening in government programs so secret that even they don't know about it. It speaks very loudly to how little accountability there is to where tax payer dollars are going.
Yes, how else are they supposed to make informed voting choices? It's literally their job to have access to secrets so they can represent the public at large that can't.
What ever China has, is because it stole it from US public/private companies. So if China is trolling us, its with our own tech. This puts US in a equally worse spot. Share that you have secret high tech items, at the expense of admitting CCP agents also brought it back home...
One theory that would explain this pretty much perfectly is that Marco Rubio is an alien operating here under cover to get the government to stop trying to reverse engineer some technology that his people accidentally lost here.
I always thought there was something a bit off about Rubio...
I'm surprised you're getting down-voted for this. His history of making wild claims and then accusing the archeology community of being against him speaks for itself.
People have been claiming to see UFOs for years, ever since the popularization in mass media with the start of "the war of the worlds". In nearly all cases, even (at the time) credible sightings were advanced weapons programs. Additionally, with the proliferation of everyone having access to relatively high quality cameras, the amount of "legitimate" sightings has dropped dramatically.
Now, what has changed? We have several videos, that are public knowledge, that show objects moving in ways that no level of technology we have now can demonstrate.
These objects were recorded as early as 2004. These objects were recorded not by a loony bin boy cried wolf UFO-ologist but by US Navy airmen.
Ok, maybe they are a camera issue? e.g. one can imagine it's a bird or a balloon or an object that shows up as moving much faster than reality, or something to do with parallax/tracking error with the IR (infrared)? That would be believable, especially if it's a single recording, solo pilot, new equipment. The issue with this is that in addition to the declassified IR videos, we saw this happen multiple times, in multiple locations, on different aircraft, with multiple pilots present in the aircraft at the same time making the same visual (with eyeballs) confirmation, radar confirmation, IR.
Ok, maybe it's an advanced hologram program/electronic warfare test/drill or something? Which was my next guess, but the visual confirmation rules out electronic warfare and in addition to visuals, IR, we also have radar bouncing off - not just recorded by the aircraft, but recorded by the entire USS Nimitz carrier group that was in the area at the time - hence real, physical objects. And, again, it wasn't just one signature, in fact the reason they were up there to begin with was because of the unidentified objects in the airspace.
Ok, maybe it's just a balloon or an experimental drone by the US or its rivals. The issue here is that the physics described are not just "next-gen" a la F35 but some sort of groundbreaking physics that would change the way we do anything.
"For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."
Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet long. Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes. Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared. Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said. Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object. But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.” 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.
Thus, they are able to move on their own, not just floating in the wind (balloon, birds, launched radar reflectors), they're quite large, and can move large distances in short amounts of time. Additionally, no exhaust ports, no exhaust fumes, no control surfaces of any kind were observed. If we actually break down and analyze the movement based on the recording, we get results that are beyond physics. From the University of Albany - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
Even the most conservative and minimum models for acceleration give us ~70g with maneuverability, which is more than double what we have, and only in a rocket-like manner. Not without exhaust, control surfaces, and non-linear movement.
"It is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions at this point regarding the nature and origin of these UAVs other than the fact that we have shown that these objects cannot be of any known aircraft or missiles using current technology. We have characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft."
Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about. The issue with this is that we'd see a ton of people "disappearing" from public life and essentially vanishing, similar to what happened during the Manhattan Project. Physicists, mathematicians, materials scientists would seemingly end their career, stop publishing, and go off the grid to live and work at some facility. Currently, we haven't seen an exodus/brain drain of any level in the fields we would expect towards "nothing" - if anything, everyone's going into finance and adtech. Not to mention, this kind of stuff would be "Theory of Relativity" tier, not just cutting edge stealth tech.
The only other thing I can imagine is that it's a coordinated government attempt to spread disinformation regarding our military capabilities to our adversaries. Even then, it doesn't explain what the objects were.
I really really don't want to be a "UFO guy" but maybe even this mindset is part of the problem. Given all of this information, I don't understand why so many are so quick to dismiss any sort of theory, because as far as I see it anything terrestrial is exponentially more likely than aliens, but I can't come up with any ideas for these objects to have originated on Earth.
> Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about.
The problem with this is that there is no evidence to support it. No one has ever leaked anything about a secret propulsion mechanism that can do 1000+ Gs. On the other hand, there have been those who have leaked information about secret UAP programs. Congress seems to be if the opinion that the latter is the more likely of the two, which makes sense when you think about it.
Congress has been briefed about secret weapons programs before. There are procedures in place to protect national secrets when they need to be discussed by the Legislative branch. If it were a secret propulsion mechanism then Congress would already know about it, and all this energy would not be being spent on holding hearings re: AARO, whistleblowers, etc.
I would put weight on this if it were to re-occur. The navy has done lots and lots and lots and lots of drills since 2004. Nothing like this has magically re-appeared.
'In September 2019, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed that the released videos were made by naval aviators, and that they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years".'
If we only want to go off of verified sources, of course it's all classified since we can only trust the military to provide us information on this as far as veracity goes. Based on the official, released, declassified videos from the Pentagon, it happened in 2004, 2014, and 2015 AT LEAST.
I totally understand the skepticism and want to reiterate that I am not nor do I want to be a "UFO guy". It is also especially hard to prove, because there are so many outs. One could ask for photos, and then if photos are provided, they're photoshopped/doctored/not high quality enough (which is the case 99.99999999% of the time), and then if they're provided from the government then it's not real because it's a one-off situation e.g. lone wolf, and if there's multiple then it's a psyop/disinformation, and then if they provide a witness or a whistleblower then they're crazy and a nutjob, but if they provide multiple it's just part of the conspiracy, etc etc.
I think that's the story here -- congress is trying to fix some serious corruption.
Replace UFOs with magic beans and it sounds like some folks in government seem to have been swindled into diverting money through multiple paths into "classified work" chasing after Jack and a giant stalk. That sounds like a potentially fantastic grift for whoever is running it.
This is why the bill says: no more money for anything related to these crazy beans, and anyone who is employed looking for them is freed from any bonds of secrecy to come tell us what's been being done.
Of course there's a tiny tiny possibility someone comes back with a giant's ring, so they include that you've got to show everything you actually found, but that provision also will make it clear later that despite a lot of money, no one has actually found anything meaningful, and thus the whole thing was a fraud.
If that were the case, wouldn't the "Sense of Congress" be that UAP programs are hiding corruption and fraud, rather than "to integrate any recovered exotic technology into the nation’s broader industrial base"?
This would be a stronger theory if the UFO triggers in congress weren’t also the most credulous / disingenuous believers in numerous other conspiracy theories, and only slightly further behind in their advocacy for corruption.
Maybe there is fraud and the wrong people are getting rich from it?
Marco Rubio? The same Marco Rubio whose own website[1] says:
> he’s secured funding and supported programmatic changes that have seen continued growth in Florida’s defense industrial base
> Since 2011, Rubio has secured more than $2 billion in military construction in the state.
> In 2021, Rubio’s many years of supporting the F-35 program reaped additional rewards in the Panhandle when the Air Force announced that Eglin Air Force Base would receive a second F-35A Squadron
That Marco Rubio is at odds with the military industrial complex?
I am surprised by how little takes on this seem to address the fact this is likely to be bureaucratic. There are many people or departments who would benefit from increased fundings in these areas.
Not seven saying its overt corruption. But if you work for the military in collecting sightings on unidentified objects and earnestly dont know what 10% of the sightings actually were, it behooves you to fan the rumors on it a bit.
If you believe the government is capable of covering this up for decades then you must also believe they're just as capable of lying about UFO's existing for some other reason.
I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
Honestly I don’t think the government is sufficiently competent to cover up something as big as intelligent aliens arriving on earth. That’s the most exciting news ever. There’s just no way in my mind they could keep that quiet successfully.
Aliens that are alternate dimensional / advanced technologically could control the release of their existence through various means, while still having some incentive to reveal themselves in stages that seem plausible to us. Imagining them only as meat-sacks-from-another-rock is lacking imagination.
Many of the best physicists I guess argue for fairies as well. In the context of many US government military officers and senators confirming evidence of fairy like vehicles.
No, at best they say they see stuff they can't identify. Throughout all this there are claims that someone somewhere has real evidence but it never materializes. You're taking that credible observational claim and running with it until you end up with alternate dimension creatures. I'm just saying - if we're going to make a bunch of unsubstantiated sci-fi claims fairies seem just as likely.
I didn’t argue for it or make any claim, you’re way distorting what I said which is just that shooting down the simplest form of alien arguments doesn’t shoot them all down, and offered two.
The many-worlds quantum interpretations have many curious advocates within physics.
There are now multiple senators and high level military officers confirming this explicitly as well, so that’s also wrong on your part.
You offered science fiction and act like that makes it more plausible when the table stakes of "was what was observed outside of the realm of normal?" haven't even been satisfied. I think it's faeries. We're at an impasse.
Multiple senators and high level military officers are bringing in material evidence?
One of my scenarios was inter dimensional entities. The other was just sufficiently advanced tech. It’s funny you ad hominem the first one and ignore the second.
Just because it's plausible doesn't make it any less science fiction if we have no evidence it currently exists. We're right back to faeries, writing fiction without proof that anything super/para-normal has even occurred.
We're not co-authoring a scientific paper, we're chatting about potential explanations for a variety of disparate but strange reports from various branches of the govt about a variety of recent evidence on UFOs. There's multiple videos released, there's a variety of reports from people who had either first or second hand knowledge. The people are at least somewhat credible (much more than in the past). That's all. Your strong need to gatekeep the conversation is odd, I'm not even making any strong claim just throwing out far-out implausible options, acknowledging them as such. It shouldn't be hard to have informal conversation exploring new possibilities without a scientist pre-approving the topic. It's just an internet forum discussion thread on a weird UFO story.
And you might be the only truly conscious mind in a vast alien simulation. I don’t think just because something is possible it becomes worth considering - given our epistemological failings and the impossibility of induction, basically anything is possible…
In other words: I find the idea that aliens might be mind-controlling the US congress to slowly reveal their presence for the first time ever seems ridiculous. Personally :)
Well people have been leaking claims for decades (since roswell) so perhaps they haven't kept it secret but it didn't matter because no one believed it anyway.
Right they simultaneously believe the government is so incompetent they can't implement national healthcare that every other major nation on earth has figured out but are so competent they can get thousands of people to keep the most impactful secret in the history of mankind.
Not implementing national healthcare is a choice made to placate US corporations that contribute to politicians' campaigns. Like most "hard to solve" problems, it isn't a competency issue and isn't that hard to solve. The "problem" makes a lot of money for the right people, and it doesn't matter that it costs a lot of money for most people.
But what if all aliens are body snatchers? And the first people to use as hosts are our leaders? Conspiracy theorists can finish the rest of the story. Their fictions always have the right answers without the proof.
>I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
When did you hear this? perhaps after this person saw Childhood's End[0] (based on the 1953 novel[1], which is much better IMHO) and mistook it for a documentary?
I don't think they are capable of covering up the existence of other worldly craft visiting our planet. I DO think they are capable of covering up a program that was a huge money pit and didn't really produce anything of substance for years on end.
No, the original poster is referencing, rightly or wrongly, the Hunter Biden receiving millions without seemingly performing work for a foreign national individual, then threatening the individual with retribution from both him and (potentially) his dad sitting next to him.
Really? Not the fake elector scheme? Or the attempt to overturn the results of the last election? Or the willful retention of classified documents and the attempts to evade returning them? Any one of those would be better candidates for watergate-squared.
The president's son allegedly committed quite a few crimes, including offering access to his father (The US President) for money. He has been charged for some of these crimes recently.
He was charged with not paying taxes and felony gun possession and plead guilty to the tax charges (the felony will go to trial later). I've read nothing about access for money.
But I don't think anyone is ignoring it. Everyone is aware Hunter has had a troubled life and made bad choices. Everyone I've spoken to about this, even the left leaning, is of the opinion that if he broke the law he should face punishment. No one is on the other side of the issue here. The truly newsworthy bit is that he's been charged and facing consequences which, if we look at past presidential children, is the outlier.
>The president's son allegedly committed quite a few crimes, including offering access to his father (The US President) for money. He has been charged for some of these crimes recently.
It's certainly plausible that the junior Biden may well have offered "access to his father" as a lure to obtain pecuniary benefit.
And while the optics are terrible, I'd note that the current US president held no elective or appointed office in any government when the telegram message that's been cited to "corroborate" the "influence peddling" allegations.
As such, It's not clear to me what, if anything, the senior Biden could have done, at that time, in that context.
I'm not defending anyone here, nor am I trying to skewer anyone. Rather, the narrative presented just doesn't make sense to me given the time frames involved.
You mean the previous Prez's son in law who somehow got a Multibillion dollar investment from the Saudi's while he ostensibly worked directly in the white house? Yeah that should be investigated for sure.
There's no way that could be Watergate-squared. The defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes, so this has to be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes in, please" recording.
>There's no way that could be Watergate-squared. The defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes, so this has to be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes in, please" recording.
I have to disagree. The defining characteristic of Watergate was the illegal (break-ins to steal political opponents' strategies and psychiatrists files) activities by a political organization (CREEP[0]) that were then covered up by those at the highest levels of the executive branch.
The issue wasn't that there were recordings of such a cover up, it was the cover up that was the problem. Unless, of course, you'd like to argue that something isn't illegal/immoral if you don't get caught.
Even under that different defining characteristic, the analogue would be the same modern event: the recording that gives lie to the cover-up narrative that he had used his psychic declassification superpowers.
>Even under that different defining characteristic, the analogue would be the same modern event: the recording that gives lie to the cover-up narrative that he had used his psychic declassification superpowers.
My apologies. I wasn't clear that I was responding to this:
The defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes, so this has to
be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes in, please" recording.
And not at all responding to this:
There's no way that could be Watergate-squared.
I don't claim that the former president's legal issues are "Watergate-squared."
While there are some similarities between Watergate and the current situation, specifically a lack of ethics, enormous hubris and that it involves a (former) US President among other things, the cases are quite different and should be treated as such.
This whole narrative on UFO coming from US Gov at the exact same moment the fear around covid has faded is so suspicious.. It's really really hard not to see it as a pathetic attempt at keeping the population in a state of mass hysteria.
(yes i know this sound completely paranoïd, but i have absolutely no other idea why they would do that)
So it's just a feeling then. Although i talked to another friend who made exactly the same observation on its own, without concerting: all of the sudden, some very official sounding declarations from US "officials" making public statement suggesting there may be something real after all about UFOs.
I have no idea who "they" is, but i assume it's pretty easy for a small group of congressmen to spread rumors and declarations on a given topic in the media (from my understanding it is done regularely as a consequence of lobbyist work).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of things like psychic teleportation. Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts). No source she names has firsthand knowledge of "non-human origin" technology; it's all people who heard something who heard something. At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". There's no good answer to the question of "if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly" --- she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD classification rules allow Grusch to describe this stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a line of specificity, which, just, no.
But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it.