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.
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.