I’m a huge skeptic, but I’ve been following this very closely over the past few months.
Fermi’s paradox has two good answers — we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already. They should be here already. The paradox is about why we don’t see them.
Being skeptical is different than doubt-by-default. A skeptic is curious and slow to judge. So with great curiosity, I’ve dug deep into the rabbit hole.
It appears that the vast majority of those in “ufology” are in it for the money. Many claims about extraterrestrials also veer off into the supernatural. Conspiracy theories have a funny attraction to one another, creating clumps of exuberant irrationality.
But the recent case of David Grusch and the rebranding of UFOs as UAPs and aliens as NHI (non human intelligence), are a sign that clear (but skeptical) thinking is growing on this topic.
Grusch isnt (yet) making money off this. He appears entirely trustworthy in a way that is off-color for this topic. Assuming he isn’t a world class con playing the long-game, his credibility suggests three possibilities:
1. He has bad data, by accident or incompetence 2. He has bad data, by purposeful deceit 3. He has good data.
The cool thing about Grusch is he doesn’t claim to have first-hand knowledge. He claims to have the names of people who do, and the locations associated with the “crash-retrieval” program.
What’s more likely, that there is no other intelligent life in the galaxy, or that an advanced civilization that has been around for eons isn’t all that interested in engaging with the local wildlife? The most credible UAP reports don’t involve the fantastic stories of abduction, crop-circles, ancient pyramids, etc. The credible reports have what appear to be reconnaissance craft with a strong interest in the military and nuclear weapons.
In short, it’s worth supporting Grusch and having his names and places checked out. The answer to Fermi’s paradox is an important one for humanity — as central as whether the sub revolves around the earth or the earth revolves around the sun.
At the very least, we should be curious skeptics.
As the head of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), Sean Kirkpatrick, said recently, “wouldn’t that be fun?” if we discovered evidence we were not alone.
> Fermi’s paradox has two good answers — we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already.
These are not "good" answers to the Fermi paradox, and definitely not the only answers. Much better answers (in my opinion) are things like: their signals haven't reached us yet; they haven't developed interstellar communications or travel yet; they haven't developed intelligent life yet.
I would think an alien spacecraft carrying the energy and resources needed for interstellar travel (including the return trip) would be pretty obvious and detectable even by amateur astronomers. Instead what we're doing here is chasing at shadows and grasping at straws. Credible reports deserve to be looked into, yes. But what is Grusch alleging here? Existence of a UFO crash retrieval program. Presence of non-human biologics. OK, experimental Soviet or Chinese military technology with dog or cat DNA counts. Of course the US military guards those in secrecy. When we ask, "did you find aliens?" they aren't going to reply with "sorry no aliens, and to prove it, here are the details of all the experimental Soviet/Chinese/US military tech we recovered."
PBS Space Time has a number of great episodes on the subject of aliens, including questions like how do we know whether humans are among the first spacefaring species: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTrFAY3LUNw
> I would think an alien spacecraft carrying the energy and resources needed for interstellar travel (including the return trip) would be pretty obvious and detectable even by amateur astronomers.
I don't think this is true. If an alien ship landed on the moon, we won't know about it. No equipment or resources put in to monitor something like that. Much less all the other planets, moons, and asteroids in the solar system.
Even if we couldn’t detect them, with tech as advanced as they would have to have, are they going to be crashing on our planet so often that we need a full on program for collecting them? If it happened once, maybe. Multiple times with that level of tech? No way.
Maybe they've been in space so long that atmospheric flight is problematic for them? That seems unlikely, though.
My personal, unsupported belief, is that if there are aliens, Earth is like a nature preserve, and all the crashed ships are idiot tourists who, despite being told not to touch the buffalo, desperately want to touch the buffalo.
Any craft coming from outside our solar system and trying to stop inside it would leave a huge energy signature as it slows from some significant fraction of c.
The presumption among all of this skepticism is that the speed of light is the ultimate limitation.
The problem with this stance for literally the past 20 years is that the Alcubierre drive, which has yet to be disproven in concept (despite requiring exotic matter and high amounts of energy) has been known about since the 90’s, and at least makes FTL travel, theoretically possible.
This is why I am skeptical about modern-day skeptics: Have they simply all collectively not read the Alcubierre paper, or the expert physicist responses to it, despite having had 20 years now to do so? Do they really think that simply not knowing how to implement it is an argument against it? How nearsighted would you have to be to assume that we’ve discovered all the loopholes already?
First of all, the Alcubierre drive only works if several things that have never been confirmed to exist do in fact exist. Secondly, even if it turns out that exotic matter and such exist somewhere in the universe, the Alcubierre drive only works in their presence. So, it can't be used to travel FTL to a place where they don't exist, such as the Earth.
When von Neumann probes were proposed, we did not have working AI or 3D printers. They were merely concepts with some proof of concept systems in various states.
We now have those technologies. It is trivial to extrapolate how effective they will be in say 10,000 years if we avoid blowing ourselves up. By then maybe we'll even have a sustainable Fusion reactor, general AI, and atomic matter deposition.
Do you accept that von Neumann probes are a realistic proposition and that they could have easily blanketed the galaxy by now?
> It has been theorized[3] that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
Half a million years. How long is that, really, in the grand scheme of things. And how close would we have to be to a civilization who released not one but millions of self-replicating probes for one to have visited us by now.
I am not saying this happened, but please consider it could have, it might have, and what if it did.
Obviously Von Neumann probes haven't blanketed the galaxy as if they had, it would be obvious. Not to belabor a point I made in another comment, but the Fermi Paradox is a harsh taskmaster.
So this leaves a few possibilities:
1) No intelligent, technologically advanced civilization exists in the universe other than ourselves, because any such civilization would have developed Von Neumann probes, which would mean the galaxy should be covered by them.
2) No intelligent, technologically advanced civilization has yet developed Von Neumann probes.
3) Von Neumann probes exist, but they haven't blanketed the galaxy. Since the math says it should be easy for them to do so, either they were developed relatively recently and simply haven't had the chance to do so, or else confounding factors exist which make the process of unbounded exponential growth more difficult than the math would suggest.
None of these possibilities lead to the conclusion that UFOs (assuming the narrative presented by Grusch and other UFO believers) as described are more likely to be Von Neumann probes than not.
Any nearby civilization that released millions of self-replicating probes should be noticeable. We've studied nearby stars, there's no evidence of any of the telltale signs of energy usage or heat that should accompany something on that scale.
Also, there's no evidence of replication on the part of these objects within the UFO narrative. What are they feeding on? Where? Exponential replication means if they're here they should have stripped our solar system clean by now. Why haven't they?
All of the behavior described resembles conventional, piloted craft rather than the expected behavior of swarms of Von Neumann probes.
The problem with all things like this is that they are simple mathematical models being used to argue for highly advanced physics and engineering. I find it extremely likely that the real world would quickly turn this half a million years into many billions of years once you add in various inefficiencies and limits. After all, life is a self-replicating machine and it has taken slightly longer than that to consume a fraction of the resources on this planet.
The most obvious argument against the validity of the Alcubierre drive (besides the exotic matter and energy requirements, and spacetime not working that way as far as we know, all of which which are substantial issues despite your handwaving them away) is the Fermi Paradox.
If, as you seem to be confidently asserting, the Alcubierre drive is feasible, has been built, and is what aliens are using to visit Earth, then given that even low estimates of the number of habitable planets in our galaxy runs into the millions (and there are more than trillions of galaxies in our observable universe) we must assume FTL travel is relatively commonplace. Even if only one species built a warp drive, they should have been able to colonize the entire observable universe by now. If one species has figured it out, it stands to reason that many more would have.
So where is the evidence? The Alcubierre Drive as theorized would give off an easily detectable signature. Where are these signatures? They should be everywhere. If the aliens visiting Earth are using Alcubierre drives, they should be particularly noticeable. But, of course, there is no sign of the effect of FTL travel anywhere in the observable universe, and even on Earth, the best anyone can come up with is conjecture and blurry photos.
Also, your mention of "expert physicist responses to it" fails to take into account the amount of criticism of the premise by the scientific community. You write as if the Alcubierre drive is proven science accepted by consensus and only engineering prevents us from building one, but of course that isn't remotely the case. As far as actual science is concerned, the Alcubierre might as well run on unicorn farts.
You're literally just taking one thing that doesn't exist, and "proving it" with another thing that doesn't exist. An argument that weak really doesn't merit the confidence you're putting out here. "But muh Alcubierre Drive" is not the slam dunk you seem to think it is.
Therein lies the rub. "As far as we know." Human knowledge only goes back, what, 2000 years? Industrialization started, what, only 150 years ago? The printing press is, eh, 500 years old? Ubiquitous computers began... literally an instant ago in cosmic timescales.
So while my argument might be summarized as "this one thing may be real because this other thing may be real but just 20 years ago wasn't even hypothetically conceived", your argument is basically "there's no way this one thing is real because this other thing is only distantly hypothetically real and still has flaws and besides, the whole concept is preposterous because there should either be aliens literally everywhere already or nowhere, because that makes about as much sense (maybe they're leaving our "incubator" mostly alone?), and because we simply don't understand how it's possible, despite the fact that we are basically 5 day old babies (and apparently VERY cocky ones) as far as science and human knowledge is concerned at cosmic timescales." LOL
You don't know what you don't know. I'd assume any significant timeline involves broadening our understanding of thermodynamics and material science. I don't think its far fetched to presume that another species is further along on the Kardashev scale.
> we don’t see aliens because they don’t exist, or we don’t see them because they are here already
imo most likely is they exist, but space is just so unimaginable huge, and also Aliens can at most go close to lightspeed. They didn't beat physics nor invented portals / wormholes?
> They should be here already.
Least likely for me out of the three options.. just our tinfoil hat love :)
Not being able to move faster than c is a pretty hard limit on everything in the universe. Unless our model of physics, the same one that predicted gravitational waves, black holes, time dilation, gravitational lending, etc. correctly is so fundamentally wrong that FTL travel is possible without things that probably don’t exist like negative mass aliens would need to spend at least decades to get to and from Earth. Frankly we’re not that important.
Theoretically, repositioning one's coordinates in 3 dimensions over a limited span in a fourth dimension (time) is limited by c. Same goes for repositioning the 4-dimensional coordinates for the apparent quantom waveform collapse into physical manifestation of any distinct "object". Assuming that alien physics only applies to these 4 dimensions, unmodified, is pure hubris. Multiple theories accommodate space travel by adjusting coefficients other than velocity. A "warp bubble" or "wormhole", for example, theorize the ability to cover large distances faster than light moves through vacuum over that same distance by, instead, changing the distance between interstellar objects, or changing the effective space-time properties of the craft, itself, in it's localized spacetime becoming non-equivalent to that "light through a vacuum" course. Even quantum entanglement describes spooky action at a distance which you might assume impossible if you assume c limits this superposition in space-time.
This c limit obviously does not apply to "everything" in the universe.
It's fundamentally wrong to assume that interstellar travel requires any velocity whatsoever.
Theoretically, there is no need for FTL. Ability to achieve relativistic speeds is enough for the space traveler to cross the galaxy in months or even hours (in his local time). Even flying to a different galaxy would be possible.
I mean there is one thing we can safely assume: their vehicles have to operate in the same universe as ours, at least when they are meant to be in ours at some point.
Now they might know some tricks around the limitations of our universes physics, but even those tricks must do something measurably.
They have to abide by the rules of the universe that WE know of. The universe is unbelievably big but also unfathomably OLD, so I'm sure there's been plenty of time for a number of civilizations to reach a technological level vastly larger than ours. Our latest technological revolution started just a hundred years ago. Imagine what just 10,000 more years can do. I mean, we thought (and our math said so) that the speed of sound was a physical barrier just a _few_ years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prandtl%E2%80%93Glauert_singul...)
Not necessarily, from what I heard humanity being alone is actually an extremely plausible solution to the Fermi paradox because we exist close to the beginning of the total lifespan of the universe.
The universe is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old. The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. I don't think humanity has even been around for 500k years.
There are other factors that stop the kind of life we see on earth from appearing earlier in the universe’s history. For example the first stars (the pure hydrogen ones) could not have had planets that supported life and they burned too hot and quick to reasonably do so.
Nope, I gave my opinion with probabilities I feel reasonable, given our current understanding of physics and the limits imposed - and I didn't exclude anything. So what is yours? You are an expert and certainly know they invented some way of FTL travel? Otherwise, see..
Yes, and I find multiple of its assumptions if not unreasonable at least with a huge flexibility that would void it, as have been discussed since it being stated and as one can even read on Wikipedia? There are dozens of similar feasible argumentations that can unparadox it..
It's convenient that he doesn't have first hand knowledge because that gives him an out when people ask for proof. Which there is none.
He still works for intelligence, obviously. Aliens and UFOs are a well-known and obvious cover story for experimental aircraft. It's his job to spread this story.
Note that I'm not suggesting most things people claim to be UFOs are actually experimental aircraft. A few may be. But often it's a hoax, a piece of dust, an ordinary aircraft, a weather balloon, an artifact of extreme zoom, etc.
"He still works for intelligence, obviously. Aliens and UFOs are a well-known and obvious cover story for experimental aircraft. It's his job to spread this story."
Without commenting on the likelihood of any hypothesis, I don't see how this makes sense. If we assume that it is a cover story for advanced tech programs, top secret programs in general are now going to have 10,000x more scrutiny by the media and Congress, and will be far more likely to have details leaked. Drawing attention like this is the exact opposite of what you'd do to keep something secret.
If "cover story" really is the explanation, it seems unlikely that Grusch is in on it--more likely would be that he was also fed the cover story, and that his going public really is resented by the military since it brings so much unwanted outside attention.
I don't get why no one ever throws out time travel as an explanation over extraterrestrial.
Given the limit of the speed of information and the expansion of the universe, there's a VERY small area that would even be aware of the signals we've started sending out over the past century to come looking.
But Earth would be an extremely interesting destination....for future Earth.
Though personally the most likely answer is that it's our own tech that the people sighting it don't have clearance to even know about which is why USINT is so against more attention to reports of sightings.
But if I had to put my money on outlandish claims, time traveling ships would get my best any day over extraterrestrial ones.
Since the earth, and the whole solar system, along with the galaxy are moving through space, I can imagine some clever scientist discovering time travel, firing up they time machine, only to then find themselves in vacuum of space in a place the earth had long passed by already.
Others try to calculate and predict the position. But they didn’t use enough floating point precision bits and ended up in the earth’s crust or somewhere in the ocean.
There's an Isaac Asimov story from the 50's that I wonder if you've read. It's called "Blank!"
In the story the scientist takes a friend forward 22 hours, but outside the time machine door there's nothing. Total darkness.
The friend asks if the scientist forgot the movement of the Earth and the galaxy, but the scientist assures him that no, that motion has been accounted for.
Instead it appears they've arrived between quantum periods, stuck forever out of phase with ordinary time like an elevator stuck between floors and frozen by the lack of momentum.
I ask because that's the first story I read that drew attention to needing to travel in space to keep up with the planet.
Thanks for the suggestion, I was not aware of "Blank!".
What inspired me to write the comment is was thinking about time travel and how people in movies and stories seems to always materialize on a nice level surface, somewhere in a building with the their feet exactly on the floor, in a nice meadow outside the city, on a sidewalk etc. Then, remembering how earth and galaxy move through space I thought how extremely hard would be to get a safe set of future spacetime coordinates to land on.
That aliens (specifically the "greys") are future versions of humanity who have traveled back in time for some reason (usually specified to be the recovery of "native" genetic material to re-engineer their ecosystem) is a well-worn narrative within UFO mythology.
No one on HN "throws it out" because this is ostensibly a rational community and time travel is an even more absurd, less scientifically plausible solution than FTL or interdimensional travel. At that point we're just discussing comic book plots. If you believe we live in a universe that runs by comic book rules that's fine - it seems a depressing number of people here do, but there isn't much viable, intellectually grounded discussion to be had about that. You either agree with it or you don't.
I mean hell, let's throw Jacques Valee onto the pile and say maybe UFOs/aliens are fae taking on a modern form in order to feed upon humanity's collective fear of the other. Makes about as much sense as time travel.
Time travel backwards is causality breaking, which is a far, far more important physical principle than relativity. Time travel forwards is quite simple though, but less exciting.
Time travel to the future is extremely exciting. Being able to pass a 1000 years in a year or two means you could observe the long term evolution of mankind over millennia. I’d much rather see that than the past if only one of the two were an option.
we can't rule out time travel forward on Earth.
There is geological evidence of civilization destroying events 12k years ago, possibly more. I've often thought about why it took 300-400k years to go from fire to agricultural-civilization, then tech takes off in under 5k years from that point. What if the time from fire to civilization was faster, but those civilizations were wiped out (by geological, astrological or self-inflicted reasons)?
There’s good evidence against that. All the easily mineable resources that a civilization needs to build more advanced technology will be used up by the first civilization. I’ve heard it said that if we destroy our current technology there will be no way to rebuild it because there’s no way to mine the resources to build it back up.
Yes, I've read that without easily accessible surface level coal, there is no industrial revolution. Maybe the advanced past civilizations were based in what is now called Africa or Indonesia, and the UK was some remote frozen place where it wasn't worth it to mine the surface coal?
Technology begets itself. As you're less pressured by environmental limitations, you have more time to advance instead of just survive, which brings even more time to advance further faster, etc. Additionally language is a pretty huge factor for spreading knowledge, written language another huge factor, mass printing again, remote communication yet again, and mass digital communication yet again on top. It makes sense that each next leap in our past came faster than the previous.
From what I’ve heard it’s completely plausible for pre industrial human civilizations to have existed and been wiped out in the past but anything past that point would leave things like heavy metals we could detect in the geological record.
yea, given the progress we've made in harnessing physics over the past few hundred years, extrapolating for the lifetime of our species, as long as we're around for long enough to figure out time travel...
we should be able to come back, which means we would already be doing so? as long as the preconditions remain true... either way we would probably have some sort of "butterfly effect/grandfather paradox" laws in place
that said, the value of future earth visiting past earth would likely be 'kitsch' at best :P
How about the option that aliens exist but are not here nor are detectable yet because we are the first and most technologically advanced form of life to arise…yet.
The Fermi paradox assumes intelligent life is common. However, perhaps its not. It certainly was not rare on the one planet we know for sure life exists. Biodiversity on earth right now nears 9 million forms, with probably at least that many now extinct. So out of all of those forms of life there is one that evolved the intelligence necessary to detect life outside of this planet.
So even with the age and size of the universe…and knowing the conditions necessary for life to evolve being somewhat rare, and the conditions necessary for intelligent life to evolve where life is being also some rare given our experience here on earth, it is not a huge leap to say that while life might be common in the universe, intelligent life could be uncommon, and if it is uncommon, we could be early enough to be one of few intelligent species out there. So we may not be detecting anybody because there is nobody out there to detect…just yet. Especially given distance and time and the fact that evidence we are capable of detecting is coming to us from an intelligent species may still be quite a time away since we are seeing their past.
At the same time multiplying enough small probabilities together we can also get a really small number quite quickly.
We can think or imagine whichever option is more fun and exciting. Without a single example of at least one confirmed alien life a lot of interesting possibilities are open.
not sure I agree, the universe could go on to be hundreds of billions or trillions of years old, against which 13 (or maybe 26) billion years is really the same scale as the first humans venturing out of Africa just a few tens of millenia ago.
I don't follow your reasoning at all. Unless intelligent life appeared everywhere in the universe spontaneously at the same instant, which seems rather unlikely, then someone has to be first.
If the universe has, on the scale of potentially uncountable trillions of years, just barely reached a stage where the probability of life appearing has risen above "infinitely small" then there's nothing chauvinistic or anthropocentric about speculating that we're it.
> Unless intelligent life appeared everywhere in the universe spontaneously at the same instant, which seems rather unlikely, then someone has to be first.
Yes, and for any given species, it is incredibly unlikely they are the first.
> If the universe has, on the scale of potentially uncountable trillions of years, just barely reached a stage where the probability of life appearing has risen above "infinitely small" then there's nothing chauvinistic or anthropocentric about speculating that we're it.
That is a humongous if that you have to prove, and it still would mean that it's very unlikely we are the first.
It's only unlikely that we are first if it's likely there are others. But we don't know that it's likely that there are others.
The argument "there's lots and lots of stars, therefore it's unlikely we are alone" is mathematically bogus. It presumes the chance that life arises at any given star can't be "too small". But there is little basis for making that assumption.
That quoted statement is weird, since it doesn't make any use of the "size and age of the universe". I was assuming it was a poorly worded way of saying the size and age of the universe implied it was likely other life exists.
I'm not sure what your problem with the statement is. If there is other life (as well in, through the whole lifespan of the universe life starts somewhere aside from earth) it is incredibly unlikely we are the first. If there is no other life, we are the first. What is weird about it?
It's weird because if there are others, it's unlikely we are first, regardless of the age of the universe. So why was the age mentioned? (And size also, unless the universe were so extremely small there couldn't be very many others.)
We don't need to be the first, we just need to be the first to survive and figure out some practical method of space travel. Space travel may even prove to be impossible for us.
"We don't need to be the first" to do what? We do need to be the first to be the first. If we're not the first, we're not the first, even if we figure out space travel.
"Pascal's Wager has two outcomes: 1) there are no angels 2) angels dance upon EVERY pinhead, sight-unseen. There are no other options. And we may dismiss the first one because of the unspoken axiom of the wager."
That's the argument I would like to make regarding the existence of angels and the coverup by the secularists to hide their involvement in humanity.
If these witnesses who have served and defended our country are lying under oath, Pentagon has all the means to prosecute them for misleading the congress, the senate and the public.
> or we don’t see them because they are here already.
If we expected to see them far away, how would them being here prevent us from doing that (and also from seeing other presumably existing alien species that are not here)?
So just to give everyone here a bit of context. This hearing was not for the UFO Believers to be used as official disclosure. This was not to convince any skeptics out there this is real. This is a political tool for the congressional oversight committee (who themselves may not have any evidence) to put into record what they need to follow up on using their power of the purse and oversight rights.
Is this an issue of national Security? Who has what information? Who is housing what artifacts? What funds are used to pay for these projects? Who has committed crimes to hide this information?
All those questions weren't asked because anyone expected Grush, Fravour or Graves to tell them: Yeah I've got a UFO in my garage. In fact all witnesses answered all those questions before. This had one specific goal: Get this into congressional testimony, under oath, from credible witnesses and thus give congress the means, information and constitutional duty to investigate further.
And for all those sceptics out there: this is unusually bipartisan and seeing Gaetz and AOC both laserfocused on investigating government misuse of money on such a historically fringe subject is most interesting.
I’ve never really believed in aliens/UFO sightings, but have been doing some online reading the last 6months. The forums are filled with 99% delusional people trying to connect made-up information to every other conspiracy theory out there. Most seem to detract from their cause
I watched the whole congressional forum today and those guys are probably the most well-spoken people I’ve ever heard discussing UAP/aliens/NHI. Also, one of the more bipartisan and civil congressional hearings I’ve witnessed in recent memory.
It’s definitely intriguing to say the least and I have a hard time doubting that these guys have not witnessed what they say they witnessed, both with their eyes and in terms of government programs/secrecy/misallocated funds. Now if those UAPs are NHI or government-created machines or something else, hopefully we will find out eventually.
Money is moving without the politics of Washington being involved, favors are being "gifted" to orgs for access to novel tech. If that can't get power brokers in Washington to force some change, nothing will.
The more persons who know about a secret, the less a secret it is. I'd say it's a good thing.
It should be easier to hack a congressman's personal email account than someone in a air gapped military compound, and easier to hack a scientist's (presumably) academic email.
> this is unusually bipartisan and seeing Gaetz and AOC both laserfocused on investigating government misuse of money on such a historically fringe subject is most interesting.
Indeed, there was very minimal political sniping. A little bit at Biden about the Chinese balloons, but that was it. I was very surprised - especially with those two in the same room.
It’s filled with grammatical, typographical, and logical mistakes. It’s disorganized. There are many sentence fragments and few whole thoughts. There is no thesis. One paragraph contains only sophomoric leading questions. The name Grusch - the subject himself - is misspelled.
What’s your metric for quality? Seems merely low-quality sophistry to me.
For those asking "Why now?" ... here's a couple wild takes:
The Interstellar Squid have arrived. They're hanging out around Saturn (cf "largest comet ever"). Even after a century of preparation and propaganda, there is a large fraction of humanity who refuses to conceive of intelligence other than human. This is the last gasp at preparing them.
That, or the political corruption has gotten so rank that they're scraping the bottom of the bin for "lookit the shiny!" distraction stories.
Well, have you ever tried navigating interstellar space? It's not exactly a walk in the park. Even for our sophisticated cephalopod friends, the Interstellar Squid, it's a bit of a pickle.
Oh, and let's not forget about the Squid's notoriously poor sense of direction. They've probably been circling Saturn for the past decade thinking it's Jupiter. I wouldn't be surprised if they show up in a few millennia, asking for directions to Earth.
So, let's cut our Squid friends some slack. Interstellar travel is hard, and they're doing their squid-best.
> It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
> He fished for Curious Squid, so called because, as well as being squid, they were curious. That is to say, their curiosity was the curious thing about them.
> Shortly after they got curious about the lantern that Solid had hung over the stern of his boat, they started to become curious about the way in which various of their number suddenly vanished skywards with a splash.
> Some of them even became curious – very briefly curious – about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly towards them.
> The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren't very good at making connections.
If their presence is revealed and approximately simultaneously we develop some new fantastically high Isp rocket-engine technology, I for one am going to start to wonder if this is evidence of some kind of squid pro quo.
You’re acting like you know everything about the universe, and this is the worst state of existence to be in. Do you think the only way to navigate space is the way we know it? That’s such a lack of imagination and such an arrogance of your scientific certainty It leads you to say things like this.
well, they invented the basic outline of eyes we have, so give them some cred (our eyes are flipped, I wonder how this relates to swimming in liquid in contrast with gas)
The government is not leaking anything. If you watched and knew about the people who testified today, they are whistleblowers. They are going against the government. And they have been administratively terrorized. That’s their word.
They can be whistleblowers and still part of the conspiracy without being in on it. I can buy the Pentagon working on some advanced technology outside the purview of Congress. I can also buy that it's so secret that the response to such first-hand accounts are "Nothing to see here; move along" and if people press too hard they're told "It's aliens. Don't tell anyone - for obvious reasons"
I honestly don't understand how someone can look at David Grusch speaking and come to any other conclusion than that he's crazy or lying. His whole demeanor reminds me of the infamous Tom cruise Scientology interview.
I feel similarly. It feels like a strategic distraction from many more important things at hand. Convenient way to bury some heads in sand while they get away with other things.
Not sure if you're missing something. Are you referring to the whole thing, the area I thought was interesting, or..? This isn't a very easy reply to parse.
Just the 15 minutes. He kept evading the questions, and the only "interesting" thing he said was pure science-fiction speculation.
For example, his description of the holographic principle is what you'd get if you asked a high school student to make up a cool sounding story based on the phrase alone. It reminded me of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion, where one of the Angels "projects" a 3D shadow.
To put it mildly: "That's not how any of that works, at all."
The holographic principle is an observation from theoretical physics that it's possible to reframe the laws of physics over a volume of space as a different set of mathematics on the surface. This is akin to the Fourier transform, it's just reprojecting the mathematics, not people! It's not a teleporter between parallel universes!
For anyone interested: the concept arose from how black holes grow. If a black hole grows twice as heavy, then instead of its volume becoming twice as big (like you'd expect), its surface area doubles instead. Holographic theory is based on this and says that everything in a volume of space can be simulated with a "hologram" on the surface of that space -- you don't need a x^3 simulation, an x^2 one will do. The idea is that there is a lot of redundancy in mostly empty space. Physics doesn't "allow" arbitrary things to go on in there, so the redundancy can be squeezed out by doing all of the maths on the surface, which is less redundant.
Black holes are maximally packed with physical information, so their surface is completely non-redundant, and hence must grow in proportion to their mass. As you add more stuff, you need more surface, and hence the event horizon expands outwards, providing more surface area.
That's exactly what I thought was interesting/weird! What a bizarre and almost nonsensical thing to get into in a congressional hearing... guy doesn't even have a PhD in physics, nor has he ever worked as a physicist let alone an astrophysicist, isn't a subject matter expert but decides to go into a conversation about holotheory of all things.
Many people from the government and from the military are putting their reputation and career (and maybe safety) on the line to bring these informations to the public.
Let’s at least recognize that before automatically casting doubt.
>putting their reputation and career (and maybe safety) on the line
They aren't because there is literally no new data, none. This isn't like Manning etc... where there was a materiel leak of classified data. So what would they be charged/fired for? Nothing. It's so much lazier, the claim is that being prevented access is somehow a proof of a coverup. All of the claims of harm were long before any of the publicity here.
All of the "whistleblowers" in these cases were not on any kind of career trajectory that this would have put in danger or even still serving in those roles.
They were all regular joes with uneventful military careers. They didn't bring new data to light like other whistleblowers - it's all rumors and speculation in this case, and literally a handful of shitty FLIR videos in others.
I'm baffled at the lack of epistemic consistency across truth claims. Nobody would accept this level of speculation for anything actually related to reality yet here we are wasting time on this. I've hurt myself today by being involved here at all. Totally irrational.
> They were all regular joes with uneventful military careers
Grusch was a GS15 NGA officer that was read into over 2000 special access programs and prepared/delivered the presidential daily briefing in 2021. He’s quite literally one of the most credentialed intelligence officers in the US.
Dave Fravor was second in command of the USS Nimitz and is recognized as one of the top fighter pilots to come out of Top Gun.
>Grusch was a GS15 NGA officer that was read into over 2000 special access programs and prepared/delivered the presidential daily briefing in 2021. He’s quite literally one of the most credentialed intelligence officers in the US.
This is way more common than you think it is and again, not special.
I prepped multiple PDBs from 2012-2015 while at DIA and then again while on the JS/J2 staff. Delivering a segment of the PDB is indeed noteworthy, but again, not particularly rare or an indication that you're somehow especially great or special.
This is the reality of the IC ... things that SEEM special to you are boring regular everyday events for us. Few people in the DoD/IC are exceptional and I can promise you that this guy wasn't one of them
What was your rank? How many SAPs were you read into?
Having Top Secret SCI clearance does not give you immediate access to every SAP you request to be read into. Most people are not read into more that a dozen SAPs.
I’ll also point out that if Grusch was an unexceptional IC officer, the pentagon would easily be able to discredit him as such. To date, the pentagon has not attempted to say anything about Grusch’s credibility. Many reporters have stated on the record that Grusch is very well regarded as a high level intelligence official.
What evidence do you have that this guy was not an exceptional officer, other than maybe you yourself were not exceptional?
I don't know you. I don't know how to look up your "record". Why obfuscate? If you came onto HN to spread awareness then help us understand. Otherwise you've come here to brag and you are not helpful.
I’m not looking up some random online comment’s credentials to try to prove their own point. Your comment doesn’t stand on its own and if you’re not willing to clarify your credentials further then your argument is moot.
Why wouldn’t you just go on to apply all the same criteria to whatever response they would provide to you? Looks like they made the right decision not to engage with your demands.
I haven’t asked anyone to look up anything. I’m just discussing what’s in the article and the sources the article is referencing. I’m happy to give people plenty of things to read or watch to catch up if you’d like - I won’t make you sleuth for it in my comment history.
I knew a guy who made “flag badge” that sat at his desk, smoked cigarettes, read the newspaper and drank tea for at least half of his workday. So I agree with your assessment.
Certainly to me, especially given he’s testified under oath to multiple congressional committees and the ICIG. He’s made some outrageous accusations that absolutely need to be investigated. Either he’s lying and we have crazy people in very high levels of government, or he’s not and we need to get this information into the public domain.
The existence of National Security Advisor General Mike Flynn would seem to support the thesis that we have crazy people who lie at the highest levels of government.
I used to think most politicians were cooks. Now I realize most of them are very smart and have very different private opinions from the ones they scream at their base. This topic is a good example of showing how intelligent some congressmen (who you thought were crazy) are. For example https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1684249806300905480?s=46&t=...
I understand the context, but what I'm asking is; do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice? Or is their expertise rather in acquiring, analyzing and compartmentalizing information.
> do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice?
No. Intel (especially counter intel) officers are, trained to give information to convince someone of a certain context. Whether that information is true depends on the situation.
But it’s certainly not common for anyone to lie under oath, especially when they are testifying that specific people and corporations are involved in illegal operations. He’s opened himself up to not only perjury, but also lawsuits of false accusations. I don’t think the billion dollar defense contractors would have any trouble suing David Grusch if he’s lying.
I think there is a pretty good record of high-level intelligence officials lying to Congress under oath, and a similar history of no consequences whatsoever when the lie was later revealed. WMDs in Irak and the inexistence of the PRISM program were both testified about in Congress, and later turned out to be lies. Which high-level intelligence officials were ever even investigated for perjury?
Even still, you’ve completely ignored the other half of my comment. Grusch is alleging specific people and corporations are involved in illegal activities. The corporations should have no trouble suing Grusch for false accusations and defamation, which in this case would be equivalent to jail time. So even if congress didn’t refer him to the justice department for perjury, those corporations absolutely will sue Grusch if he’s lying.
It's also a very different thing to lie to Congress with the backing of the IC (as happened with Clapper, WMDs, etc.) compared to lying to Congress against the IC's wishes. You are astronomically more likely to be prosecuted for the latter.
> Either he’s lying and we have crazy people in very high levels of government, or he’s not and we need to get this information into the public domain.
There are some other possibilities. My main theory for what Grusch specifically is talking about is that intelligence agencies probably deliberately sprinkle different fake programs into the lists that different people are given access to, so that when information leaks, they can track who is doing the leaking.
Someone probably had a little too much fun creating fake documentation of alien corpses and crashed spacecraft instead of something less world-changing, and some of the folks who ended up being assigned material from that set felt like that was getting into territory that the public really did deserve to know about, because it would change everything if it were true.
It would not only explain the entire Grusch side of this discussion, but the reactions it's gotten from different branches of government. Everyone who knew about the leak-detection mechanism would be tight-lipped because they wouldn't want to disclose its existence. So it would look like an attempted coverup, but it would be a coverup of a security mechanism, not space aliens.
I actually found the story more believable until some of the specific testimony today. A red cube with sides as long as a football field? Where would Boeing even hide such a thing from other countries' spy satellites? Three-dimensional shadows of hyperdimensional objects? That's a really neat idea, but I think it fails the test of Occam's Razor in this case.
Military pilots encountering strange phenomena is a separate bucket, IMO. The US military has some of the best pilots and equipment in the world. I trust that if a bunch of them say they saw something strange, especially with visual, radar, and thermal evidence, there was something strange out there. But OTOH, I think it's an enormous stretch to attribute it to space aliens. It's probably a mixture of rare natural phenomena, classified/experimental aircraft of one sort or another, and mundane objects behaving very oddly when they're far outside their normal context.
When I used to work in a skyscraper, I once looked out the window and saw what looked like some sort of tear in spacetime dancing around the sky. Absolutely black, but with a chaotic silhouette that would smoothly ripple, then suddenly jerk into a new shape. I watched it for several minutes, and it kept going. Eventually it got close enough for me to see that it was just a black garbage bag that had somehow ended up in the right air current to be whisked around almost endlessly. I never did see it land, or even get close to the ground.
I'd love for Grusch's story to be true, but at this point I'll believe it when I see it.
He’s testified under oath to the ICIG who found his claims “urgent and credible” (
which are legal terms. Credible meaning he’s corroborated some claims, and urgent meaning the ICIG had to forward the claims to the intelligence committees in both chambers of congress.
In the scenario I'm suggesting, if I understand you correctly, the ICIG talked to the same people that Grusch had. Those people said something to the effect of "yes, I have seen intelligence documents and other evidence that described alien spacecraft and biological material." I.e. Grusch and the people he talked to believe what they're saying because of documents intentionally made to appear legitimate.
A well-designed hypothetical leak-detection mechanism would include literally everyone in the organization, except maybe the most senior leadership. So even if the ICIG knew of its existence, if the system were designed well, they would have no way of knowing which documents were false.
If the ICIG were aware of the existence of the system, they'd also have to keep it secret, which would mean that even if they suspected Grusch was referring to intentionally false documents, they'd have to handle it as though the documents were genuine and forward it on to Congress just like you're describing, right?
I suspect what will happen is that the intelligence committees will meet with the involved parties in a SCIF. Someone will explain that the documents were intentionally false information. The committees will verify this discreetly. After that, I could see three main approaches for handling the situation:
* The committees make a vague statement that they've investigated the claims and there's actually nothing to worry about after all. They'll have Grusch support that claim, but not discuss specifics.
* Same as previous, but with the inclusion of some sort of excuse for the misunderstanding, like the Project Azorian "mining manganese nodules on the ocean floor".
* They'll decide that the amount of detail Grusch has disclosed publicly is too great to convincingly sweep under the rug, and decide to come clean about the leak-detection mechanism.
If they go with either of the first two, it will fuel decades of conspiracy theories about how the government covered up their secret captured alien spacecraft once again, but that's nothing new.
If I'm right about this kind of mechanism, the people running it might even encourage such things to create a pool of far-fetched lore in the fringes of the public. That way, they could randomly sprinkle in false documents related to those things specifically to catch people likely to leak fringe-related material early in their careers, before they're given access to really sensitive information.
You are 100% correct that this could be a giant psy-op constructed to convince people of something insane like aliens. From what I’ve heard, the ICIG has gotten testimony under oath from people purported to be apart of the reverse engineering programs, and they have provided locations and photo evidence. There’s also a report that one of these craft are [so large that it can’t be moved](0). Congress could send a special envoy to investigate this and find out right now if this is a ruse or not. Do you think they should?
I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not suggesting it's a giant psy-op. I'm suggesting that it could be sort of like putting unique watermarks on mp3s when customers download them, so that when those mp3s show up on file-sharing sites, the publisher can figure out who uploaded them and close their account or file a lawsuit. It wouldn't be enough to literally watermark the real secret material. One would want fake programmes as well, so that if someone were only feeding descriptipns to a foreign country, it would still be enough to see that hostile foreign country A was passed information including information about fake secret programmes 106, 782, and 18023, and only CIA analyst Jack Smith has access to all three.
I do absolutely think that Congress should follow the trail and see if there's physical evidence. I'm just saying that I think that what they'll find is that there was never real evidence, just intentionally fake documents and maybe faked artifacts.
Potentially, it could also be a mix of true details, but wrapped in a false backstory. e.g. if an intelligence agency captured a Russian weapon prototype in some underhanded way that would cause a political incident, and wanted to have people reverse-engineer it, they could remove any identifying markings, then let three people examine it separately. Reverse-engineer A would be told "it's from a vehicle of unknown origin that crashed in Colorado". Reverse-engineer B would be told "it's from a North Korean military satellite". Reverse-engineer C would be told "it's from a crash site in Wyoming". All three might be provided with different, faked photo evidence that matched the story as part of their documentation. If any of those stories showed up in counterintelligence records, the intelligence agency would know which engineer couldn't be trusted. Everything else I described for the simpler scenario applies there too.
Whatever it may end up being, I think it’s imperative that congress investigate this because of what you’re saying is true then this is not good for the American people to be led on like this.
Grusch has made the allegations that specific people and defense contractors are involved in illegal operations and are illegally withholding information from congress. So if you don’t think he will be tried for perjury as that article might claim, he can certainly be sued for false accusations. These are heavy allegations that go beyond just the standard lie
Probably somewhere along the specifying people and corporations that are conducting illegal activities - such as withholding information from congress and even killing people to protect this information. Even if congress doesn’t refer him to the justice department for perjury, the billion dollar defense contractors he’s making these allegations about should have no trouble suing him for defamation and false accusations.
They will go after him assuming he is not a part of an apparently nearly century-long, multi-state, multi-billion dollar conspiracy that they have been perpetrating in near secret. What I'm suggesting is that if you maintain a conspiracy that vast and for that long, why would an individual lying to congress be a bridge too far? Is public testimony about second-hand knowledge all that's been stopping this from coming out in the past?
Well, he’s alleged that whoever is apart of the conspiracy has killed to protect this secret. Perhaps people have been too afraid to whistleblower because their lives were at stake
GS15 is not that impressive. Don't get me wrong - it's a good rank and the pay is decent by DMV standards, but like there are thousands of people with GS15 ranks. Now if he was an SES level that might be more intriguing...
They aren't because there is literally no new data, none
Grusch cannot legally divulge classified information publicly. Nobody can. Instant jail time- see Manning, etc. So no, obviously, we couldn't possibly have seen data or proof today.
He can, however, discuss it with Congress and the whistleblower program in a secure setting and has done so (as he mentioned many dozens of times under oath today) and is willing to do so further.
truth claims
I think I see the disconnect here.
I don't see (credible) people claiming that anything was proven to be the "truth" today. Yet that seems to be what you're railing about. Well, hey, I agree with you a hundred percent about that. Nothing proved.
However, for reasons reiterated dozens of times here, his claims are very significant. If they are not true then he has duped a lot of members of Congress. Considering some of the congresspeople I saw up there today, it's not exactly the intellectual A-Team. But still.
> Grusch cannot legally divulge classified information publicly. Nobody can.
Congresspeople can. They can stand up and read classified information into the record. They can’t be prosecuted for it, because of the Speech and Debate Clause.
It's vanishingly rare, of course. Part of the problem is how does Congress get classified information from the Executive Branch? The latter has to turn it over. Cooperation between the two is necessary. If Congressfolk routinely read classified information into the record, cooperation would vanish. If Congressperson Blip made it a habit to run to the floor everytime s/he received anything with classification markings, Congressperson Blip would find that supply drying up faster than rain in a desert.
But it is an ultimate recourse Congresspeople have, should they come into possession of classified information they are afraid will be deposited into the memory hole, like Senator Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers.
This isn't like we're talking about the AF Chief of Staff or some major leader in a field. So there's nothing to put on the line, they were nobodies before this and once it dies off they will be nobodies again.
Said differently, this whole debacle will make them MORE famous and employable than they were previously. So the overall impact on their life is that they get more fame and attention for effectively no risk. People seeking fame and attention don't generally care what kind.
1. Grusch gave up his career in the intelligence community to whistleblow on this. He had everything to lose.
2. Grusch has testified under oath to the ICIG, both intelligence committees, and now to the house oversight committee. If he’s locking, they could lock him away indefinitely.
Your entire argument is moot and you are looking for any excuse to discredit what’s being said. If you think he’s lying, ask your congressmen to investigate his claims and jail him if he’s lying.
He’s made accusations against specific people and corporations saying they’ve been involved in illegal activities and withholding information from congress. People do go to jail for false accusations of this order
If they aren’t bringing evidence, it’s a waste of people’s time. Taking a big risk that is most likely a very bad decision shouldn’t provide any credibility at all. Do that when you can show evidence, and then you have credibility.
Grusch gave program names, people involved, and locations of these special access programs purported to be reverse engineering non human technology to the ICIG and both intelligence committees in congress. Call your congressman and ask if he is credible.
It would not matter if the most credible source alive said it, I would still ask this question: if what they are saying is true, then it's possible to prove it without needing to take what they or anyone else says on faith alone. If you remove what he or people in general from the question, to date I have not found the evidence in support of extraterrestrial visitation of earth very convincing. Plenty of plane-recorded footage capturing strange visuals, but an absolute lack of anything that does not also have a plausible non-alien explanation.
You're right to be skeptical of his claims. At the very least, you should support Congress investigating this issue. Because either there are some crazy people with access to the most sensitive state secrets we own, or they are telling the truth and there's been a major coverup for the last 90 years hiding non-human intelligence visiting this planet from elsewhere, and there's technology far beyond what we have created.
Another possible motivation may be that he doesn't believe that any of this is actually alien technology at all, and that it is in fact a skunk works program he either has stumbled into via some side channel, (and therefore doesn't have direct access to materials that with substantiate his testimony), or he may even know exactly what all this stuff is but can't speak frankly about it because it is protected by top secret protocols that trigger his immediate sanction if abridged, cutting off his only means to publicize them further.
In either of these cases if he has decided that these programs are an existential danger to the world and need to be discussed, one way to out maneuver both of the above constraints is to pose as someone who believes they have been convinced the government is concealing "alien" technology, and can use his credentials to push the story farther than any civilian could. He has found that this tactic has given him access to people he otherwise couldn't reach (outside the limited context of his position/rank etc.)
tl;dr talking candidly about actual top secret research because he suspects it may constitute an existential threat to humanity if it is developed much further (similar to some early physicists' speculation that testing the H bomb could trigger the earth's atmosphere to burn up as well), that could get him in serious trouble very quickly because he's clearly crossing a line that has been clearly drawn around that information. But revealing it in terms of alien tech, he'll either get dismissed as a crank after his 15 minutrs are up, or he'll have gained access to high ranking civilian legislators long enough (with whom he can discuss the actual details directly in private), until he can find enough sympathetic ears that he feels safe to dispense with the "omg alien tech" camouflage.
I’ll just say, he’s testified under oath to the ICIG who found his claims “urgent and credible” (which are legal terms). So with your idea, the ICIG is in on it too?
What can the average person do with program names, people involved and locations?
Program names mean nothing unless you can look up their details as they're usually fancy codenames that spark everyone's tin foil hats. Makes for a great news story and a conversation on HN about "what it might be" but apart from that its useless.
> What can the average person do with program names, people involved and locations?
What the average person can do with this information is not the point as far as I can tell. This information is being shared with people who are not the average person, and who do have the ability to investigate further.
Average person can’t do anything. Congress can investigate and subpoena any and all people involved and force them to disclose what they know. They can also use eminent domain to take the purported technology.
Call me skeptical, but if this stuff exists, it's been moved to another location already. A congressman isn't going to show up to some base and be given access to the hanger with the UFO in it.
Sounds like an urban legend to me. This guy supposedly knows "exactly where it is" yet isn't willing to reveal the location, except it is "outside the US." Has he seen it? Nope. Let me guess: even if you go to the building, you won't be able to find anything because it's in some secret below ground level a normal person can't access.
That’s why congress needs to send a special envoy to investigate, and from what I’ve read they are looking into doing so. Ross Coulthart likely did not get this information from David Grusch btw.
So there's been a half century of "reverse engineering", but there is no evidence of aerospace technology leaps in the half-century this has allegedly been going on. Rocket engines, materials engineering, etc, all pretty much have a well laid out public technological evolution, from theory to experimental engineering to productization, distributed across aerospace, materials engineering, etc in thousands of companies and universities and factories.
The technologies alleged would transform human existence, and would mean trillions or more commercially. Effortless exploitation of asteroid resources being the low hanging fruit. Even if it isn't an instantaneous interstellar drive, it would imply freedom from gravity wells and practical inter-system transportation.
And how is it that there is one pilot that sees UAPs on the regular? This is like the UFO abductee that has been abducted a dozen times. If a pilot is seeing regular UAPs, there will be a hundred pilots seeing this phenomena.
Put it to you this way. If we happened to have alien UFOs crashlanding on the planet, it would be of utterly paramount importance that the technological gap represented is closed as soon as possible, for the survival of the species. It would involve every engineer and scientist being read in to get as much reverse engineering probability as possible.
It would mean marshalling worldwide resources for exploitation and development of space resources and defenses.
I actually like the Robotech / Macross take on this, where the alien SDF-1 crashes on the Earth, and a world war is basically halted in shock. A world government is formed, and immediate worldwide financial reasources are poured into reverse engineering and immediate space-based capabilities developed. That is basically what would happen if the world was shocked by the arrival of technologically superior aliens and we got our hands on some of their technology.
As it turns out, the scale of defenses constructed in the ten years after the SDF-1 is a pittance compared to the 4.8 million space cruisers and likely 50+ billion alien soldiers available to the aliens when they arrive.
The only way there would be no usable technological reverse engineering is if the arriving UFOs specifically built landing craft with the technological base of the natives, or somehow the technology is black boxed in some way that it degrades/self-destructs if there is a crash.
You're acting as if normal people in the military aren't normal, flawed human beings. Christ we literally had a member of the military inexplicably run into North Korea after a few bits of discipline for misbehavior.
The tactic isn't about any one thing but rather just keeping a distractable and gullible voting bloc from paying attention to any one thing and forming a coherent ideology or reconsidering their faith in a politician for obvious nefarious things. The republicans are MUCH more effective at doing this than democrats, but they have no qualms about massaging how news gets disseminated in order to hush up bad things and emphasize stupid things.
But there are democrats joining republicans in investigating this. Senator Gillibrand and Chick Schumer have introduced legislation specifically targeting this.
Colleagues in PR who have contrived one scenario after another in the media to make events go viral at the expense of others
Are you seeing aliens all over? Sure is convenient they can travel time and space and just happen to crash on Earth … just like in TV shows!
There are models to refer to; how much attention we process on average. Gaming that with noise is not hard for mega billion dollar corps and politicians comfortable with never working
Agree. I used to work with a lot of people who were not entirely there when I was in the military. When I was a Lt, I used to know (dated…) someone who told me she saw ghosts everywhere. As in, she would literally stop what she was doing and tell me a ghost was standing behind me, with complete seriousness. She’s now a Lt Col in the Space Force. I find it entirely believable that you could assemble a fairly large contingent of them to stake their credibility in just about anything.
Consider that they may be being asked to do so as part of their job. Frequently in the past UFO hysteria was encouraged by the government to cover up their own advanced technology testing, or that of an adversary they are trying to catch up to. This could also be a limited hangout, wherein the material that would be released to the public could be an unknown to the public alloy but not enough to reveal the technology that's being worked on in secret by the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
That's like saying lying about the Iraq war or any other policy of national security or deep state priorities "puts their reputation and career on the line".
It is trivial to see that pushing a potentially desired position of the state/intel agencies could very well raise one's reputation and career prospects with these institutions.
The primary critique of this whole issue is that it is lies. So, why would lying in the interest of the state be bad for one's status within those circles?
Framed in this manner these people are risking absolutely nothing.
That used to be the case, but not in our modern world where “all publicity is good publicity”. IMO, this is a stunt from otherwise no-name government officials looking to get some media time.
Snowden spent quite a bit of time looking for UFO stuff since he had access to almost everything classified and never found any evidence.
I’m not saying this whistleblower is definitely lying, but if anyone was capable and willing to bring this forward with receipts, Snowden would’ve done so.
That proves nothing though. US Government data is so siloed it’s possible Snowden would not have access to UFO info even if he had access to essentially everything the NSA had access to.
The classified stuff wasn’t really that siloed. He had access to everything CIA, DIA, NSA, etc. He talked about this in his book. Searching for evidence of aliens was one of the first things he did when he got access.
Didn't he have a special PRIVACC designation that allowed him to bypass traditional "need to know" silo boundaries, under the auspices of being a sysadmin or whatever?
These systems are commonly air-gapped. Unless he physically went around to the various SCIFs, where the information would be, it doesn't matter what kind of access he had.
Do you have direct experience? Because this is contradictory to my own experience.
When I was in the Air Force we had access to various classified networks at levels up to and including TS. You often needed to be in a SCIF and/or have TEMPEST-rated equipment to log in, depending on the context, but the systems are networked nonetheless.
I worked in a SCIF for a short time for a defense contractor. It was a while ago, and I'm fuzzy about what I can and cannot say about how things worked in there, so I'd rather not say anything specific.
What I can say is that it's trivial to keep things you don't want leaving a SCIF in the SCIF.
Fair enough. My experience is fairly recent but it might also be a military vs intelligence agency thing.
All the classified/SCIF systems I used were networked, though the networks were physically segmented and most of the classified systems I used did not have internet access. Whether that counts as "air gapped" in your book I dunno, but I never came across anything like the room out of the original Mission Impossible film where the machine has no network access at all. In fact I question the utility of such a machine.
Air-gapped just means physical segmentation (as far as I'm aware). So you can consider the networks you're talking about to be air-gapped as well. Seems like the network I worked on was more isolated that what you're describing. I worked with a TS/SCI clearance though, and I know there are varying degrees of "C".
I’m definitely not military, so I can’t speak from experience here.
I just find it hard to believe that the military puts all of this information into decentralized air-gapped silos that are completely cut off from the outside world.
Information isn’t useful when it can’t be searched, cross-referenced and analyzed. How does data enter a SCIF? because it obviously doesn’t originate there. Do people walk in with thumb drives and load it into a computer? That sounds like a security nightmare to me
When I was there, it could only be brought in via read-only disc, and only via authorized parties. Any writable media was prohibited from entering as far as I was aware/concerned.
We weren't generating information though, we were generating products. Products (physical or non-physical) get "used" as opposed to "searched".
He leaked documents from British and Australian intelligence according to his wiki page, so he obviously had broad access. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s specifically talked in interviews that he had access to almost everything.
> He leaked documents from British and Australian intelligence according to his wiki page, so he obviously had broad access. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s specifically talked in interviews that he had access to almost everything.
Whilst this is true, he leaked only one document related to Australian intelligence, so if there was a lot of sharing between the two then Snowden clearly didn't have access to a lot of it.
For anything like this to stay a secret this long, it's obviously not discoverable by a keyboard jockey having root privileges across the network. You don't need to know more acronyms to infer such things.
Reminder that we live in the same universe where China has basically entirely pwned our government networks, Russia has done a good number, and a 20 year old desk worker had the ability to post insanely high level stuff to a discord server for quite some time before anyone even noticed.
Which should be considered surprising in the era of modern international communications, technology, and intel sharing.
The odds of evidence of a UFO hitting the wrong comms channel and then not being seen by someone before getting scrubbed are staggeringly low. So for someone to have wide access across multiple silos and then hear nothing, one must assume either the conspiracy to hide the evidence of UFOs is supernaturally good or the conspiracy is both still using off-grid solutions to coordinate internationally and is somehow suppressing information that should be in their silo from ever landing in the wrong silo.
Is there significance in the parent commenter saying "UFO" and the child comment saying "aliens"? Asking because they are not necessarily the same thing and searching for one may not yield results for the other. I suspect both terms would catch the eye, so this still seems like an interesting contradiction; probably just a difference between the comments that I noticed.
> The classified stuff wasn’t really that siloed. He had access to everything CIA, DIA, NSA, etc. He talked about this in his book. Searching for evidence of aliens was one of the first things he did when he got access.
Not to be pedantic but this isn't entirely true. There is a set of what the NSA call "core secrets" that were never leaked, these were all classified at ECI.
The best we got what was a list of digraphs, codenames and vague descriptions, you can actually workout that at least one them is likely Crypto AG (HISTORY / HST).
Yup. Not military, but have significantly researched the U.S. secret keeping system because I’ve long been enthralled by espionage. As I understand it, any classified document can be SCI, secure compartmentalize information(I think this is used for spy stuff, barely anyone needs to be able to link a spy’s real ID to their assumed ID, the less people who know the better), or be part of an SAP, Special Access Program(which is more about highly secret projects, it seems, like the 6th gen fighter we’re probably building/have built), both of which have access control which is granted on a need-to-know basis.
And, fyi, as I understand it, “I’m your superior”, is not a valid reason to need-to-know. Need-to-know is, as I understand it, at the discretion of the secret keepers.
It's almost unbelievable how little anyone knows of this and I can't entirely figure out why. Some small details of the system itself are classified, but not the broad strokes. The Intelligence Community (IC), i.e. the CIA, NSA, NGA, NRO all use the SCI system to compartmentalize top-secret data. Additionally, data can get distribution restrictions, usually FVEY or NOFORN, indicating they can be released to five eyes or to no foreigners at all, regardless of clearance. The compartments can get iffy, but the biggest ones are TK for satellite imagery data and SI for signals intelligence data.
After 9/11, for the most part, this data was shared as widely as possible. The IC networks are all able to connect to each other over JWICS, which is the military's top-secret network. Data only classified at the Secret level is shared over SIPRNet, the military's secret network. When you get an account on any agency network, you are issued an IC PKI identity, which includes a client certificate. Every time you attempt to access any system or even just a static site, your client cert is used to grab your clearance attributes from your agency's online database (as in, basic ABAC, something you almost never see on the regular Internet). Access to view is granted based on these attributes that give your clearance level and compartments. Sites have to be deployed in such a manner that they can be redacted element-by-element rather than denying an entire site.
The DoD, on the other hand, uses the SAP system to compartmentalize data. Any data generated by an SAP program is accessible only to members of that program (and to the president, who implicitly has clearance to see literally everything).
Other than the president, you're right that nobody can just pull rank to get clearance. SAP access is granted by the program office of each specific program. SCI compartments are granted by your agency. The clearance itself is granted by a government-wide cross-agency adjudication board based on recommendations from counterintel agents who receive data gathered from the OPM, by investigators who are typically contractors.
Why do I know all this? Because I was a cleared system administrator of a top-secret software environment. This was a IAM user with Administrator policy assigned in AWS, in this case C2S, the CIA's top-secret private version of AWS that is shared and used by the entire IC. It's the same as having Administrator access to an AWS commercial account. It doesn't grant you administrator rights to the entire Internet, just to the resources in your cloud account. Individual applications even still may or may not give you administrator access as well, depending on whether you need it, which has nothing to do with your clearance level. This is regular infosec "does this person actually need to be an admin" considerations. And it includes separation of duties. Typically, admins in one system can't be admins of another unless there is no one else who can do it.
Edward Snowden absolutely did not have access to anywhere near just about everything classified. Nobody has that access. Even the president can't just login into a terminal and grab anything. He can ask and his aides will find someone who can do that, but there is no such terminal that is physically capable of accessing everything, no matter who is logged into it.
Right, but somebody has to maintain those IT systems, and if the government is anything like other huge, data-hoarding corporations, then they deploy sysadmins who have an incredible amount of access because they have to in order to maintain the system. IT systems do not run themselves.
Why do you need IT systems for a program that has allegedly been running covertly since a decade before Bletchley Park started building Colossus?
Let’s just presume that the people running this are recruited both for their competence and their ability to keep a secret. Would they immediately commission an IT team?
NSA needs IT. It’s essential. These programs - if they exist - are all about avoiding recording anything or communicating anything other than face to face.
I vaguely remember someone from the USAF coming forward in the 1990's and disclosing that the USAF had been planting UFO stories to provide cover for experimental aircraft development.
This actually backs up what they said in the hearing. There's an extra level of security regarding UFO documents, and even people who are supposed to have access are stonewalled. The members of congress in the hearing appeared to confirm this.
This is a good point. Remember the time he revealed highly classified spy satellite capabilities by posting an extremely detailed photo of an Iranian nuclear site ON TWITTER [0]? He cannot help himself if there's a chance to show off.
Although, the nice thing about conspiracy theories is you can always just layer on another explanation. Obviously the Deep State didn't trust Trump with this dangerous knowledge, so they kept him in the dark. Some things not even the President is cleared to know. Duh.
I’d usually side with you and Hanlon‘s razor, but in this case… not trusting Trump with anything sharper than a children’s toy knife sounds pretty reasonable, no?
Is it really so far-fetched some agencies would do everything in their power to keep a low profile and The Menace out of their business?
Indeed. For the conspiracy to hold water, one must assume (among other things) the President is out of the loop (like in the movie Independence Day) because otherwise, one has to assume too many Presidents that leaked intel on other topics exhibited the self control to hold these secrets close.
But why keep UFO intel away from him while letting him have highly-sensitive military intel that he could parley or leak? That’s the other part of this conspiracy that I don’t understand.
Trump also would have weaponized things like FAA 702 against his political opponents and their staff, so it's likely that many in the IC simply refused to mention these possibilities to him, assuming he personally wouldn't take the initiative.
There is also the possibility they simply told him no (especially given the keyhole/iranian missile thing) the idea that the CiC is the highest practical authority in the IC is, well, somewhat naive.
Trump - like Johnson in the U.K. - likely did not have all the security clearances needed to access all “need to know” material.
A specific allegation made in these hearings is that there is a conspiracy to hide what is known from much of the government. Why people think that would exclude a President thought to be compromised by the Kremlin, I really can’t understand.
Snowden only released data on projects that were no longer active. He did that deliberately. I personally believe it's the reason he's still alive. A bit inconvenienced but still above-ground.
"Whistleblower tells Congress US is concealing 'multi-decade' UFO capture program"
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"Whistleblower is deluded"
There's no UFOs. Well let me clarify - there's no aliens. If there are UFOs then they are made right here on earth and just need close up, non fuzzy photos.
Also, why would it be a shock to have a program to retrieve and reverse engineer any secret aircraft. If it's unknown, it's probably foreign military, and to not have a program to respond to that kind of thing would be pretty negligent.
Because aliens would not go to the unbelievable effort of traveling between the stars and then carefully hide from detection on a planet brimming with human activity, somehow knowing how to make themselves invisible, and yet still being here for some reason.
The concept of "anonymous" alien visitation is self evidently silly.
But also, the concept of traveling between the stars is also so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. If you don't agree, then you don't really grasp the distance to the stars.
> Because aliens would not go to the unbelievable effort of traveling between the stars and then carefully hide from detection on a planet brimming with human activity, somehow knowing how to make themselves invisible, and yet still being here for some reason.
Why not? Walk me through your logic.
> The concept of "anonymous" alien visitation is self evidently silly.
I don't see the self-evident silliness. Can you explain?
> But also, the concept of traveling between the stars is also so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. If you don't agree, then you don't really grasp the distance to the stars.
Or if I don't agree I just don't assume that the only way to travel interstellar distances are rockets. We are slowly discovering alternative approaches that don't require incredible amounts of energy. How do you already know 100% they won't work out? Could you share your time machine with me?
You seem pretty experienced in the hypothetical motivations of hypothetical creatures with the hypothetical technology to travel between stars!
Or are you just assuming that the hypothetical aliens have minds and motivations that would be comprehensible by humans?
Hell, I bet you if I sat down I could come up with at least 10 motivations that might make sense for humans to do the same stealth thing in an inverted situation. I feel like you're not engaging in good faith.
Well the titular "whistleblower" of the article has claimed the U.S. recovered a saucer from World War II dictator Benito Mussolini on a tip from Pope Pius XII. Sorry but that's firmly in tinfoil-hat territory.
https://popculture.com/trending/news/vatican-helped-recover-...
You can split hairs all you want about the ruling class and the gov but the latter is the sock puppet of the former. That is, they are effectively one in the same. When that duo screws the proles - and it does, often - that IS good for China. aka Communist China.
Balloon = "new red scare" = "we need more DoD budget" = "we don't have money for X, Y, and Z" = "let them eat balloons"
It's a tired and known pattern. But proles being proles don't get it. FFS, most on HN don't get it.
The bourgeoisie in the US is the ruling class because they have state power. They use that power to exploit the proletariat of the US, but also to super-exploit the proletariat of the rest of the world.
In China, it's a bit different. The proletariat has won state power and is using it to constrain their national bourgeoisie. Part of why their bourgeoisie is tolerated for now is precisely because of western (US-led) imperialism, so China is allowed to trade with the rest of the (capitalist) world and so they don't get nuked by the US.
US war mongering hurts the proletariat of the US, but is far more dangerous for us proletarians of the rest of the world, including in China.
I hope I live to see the day when the people of China rise up and summarily execute every single member of the Communist party down to the lowest village functionary. That would be the best thing they could possibly do to ensure a positive future for their country, and the rest of the world.
I'm reminded of something my civics teacher mentioned in class about the difference between parties in communist countries and the US. The number of party members in the US is a rounding error. Almost no one is an actual member of the Democratic or Republican Parties.
> Imagine this...China loves to see us spend more and more on "defense", while they plan and execute things such as "The New Silk Road." While we're droning the fuck out of the Middle East, China is making friends in Africa.
if your conspiracy that the US is run by self-serving idiots then I don't know what to tell you
If anyone is interested in seeing rigorously analyzed video material, I recommend the YouTube channel of Mick West[1]. He is an experienced programmer that has written a software to combine available data into a 3D space. This makes it possible to recreate situations and validate/invalidate hypotheses by stepping through time and looking from different camera angles. He also analyzed the famous gimbal and flir videos (Spoiler: There is a straight-forward explanation for what they show) and deconstructed some of David Grusch’s statements[2].
The way you describe it it seems like Mick West is the quintessential HN poster; thinks his success as a software engineer makes him a supreme expert on other fields.
You are reading things into my comment I didn’t say. I said his programming capability allowed him to create a tool that lets anyone combine data into 3D space which makes it possible to verify hypotheses. Where others in the UFO community wave their hands and make bold claims about something supernatural, West checks if the observed phenomena can be explained in reality-based physical ways. Anyone can check the work he and many others did jointly. The data and simulations are free to download and assess. This process is much closer to science than anything I have seen from others in the UFO community.
If anything, your comment makes the impression of the quintessential HN poster that claims to know better / dismiss others without having checked the linked sources.
"The American public has a right to learn about..."
Reaction I: The concept/prospect of space aliens really mashes a lot of people's emotional buttons. And "having a right to learn about" is how such strong emotions are usually articulated.
Reaction II: So long as $Potential_Enemy_Nation is a bit unsure about whether you are really lying, about having a bunch of from-1000-years-in-the-future technology hidden away, that you could suddenly start using (against them) if sufficiently motivated...that's pretty cheap deterrence, eh?
The recent testimony says it started with the Italians and the Vatican helping out in the 1930s.
Your point stands though. If these things are crashing then surely they would have crashed on some Third World hell-hole where the population would happily collect the debris and sell it to whoever wants to pay. It would be hard to cover something like that up. The US likes to think they are everything, everywhere, all at once, but it's not entirely true.
Why does it just have to be America? RU/CN landmasses also huge for catching things, and if we aren't trying to talk about it openly they may not be either for similar reasons.
For entertainment, consider that the Cold War could have been about finding intact UAPs, at least in some of the scuffles.
They have a recovery team. There are very few countries in the world that would refuse a US demand for access to a crash site and for full rights of alien artifacts. The Brazil case testimonials support this, as does the Italian/Vatican case preceding Roswell.
If you need any further proof this country has a hard time innovating anymore, this UFO story push that coincides with the start of another Cold War is a great example.
I remember listening to Art Bell as a kid, fascinated with the stories of aliens, MIB, military coverups, etc… with former military men telling a lot of the stories.
Then I read Carl Sagan and realized how silly it all was. Then I learned how the government lies about so much. How they use current and former military and intelligence to further those lies.
Shame so many still buy into this at all. Highly suggest reading a demon haunted world if you haven’t. It makes these claims pure comedy.
Indeed, the military was already seeding misinformation around UFOs in the 1950s:
> When the Air Force finally made Special Report #14 public in October 1955, it was claimed that the report scientifically proved that UFOs did not exist. Critics of this claim note that the report actually proved that the "unknowns" were distinctly different from the "knowns" at a very high statistical significance level. The Air Force also incorrectly claimed that only 3% of the cases studied were unknowns, instead of the actual 22%. They further claimed that the residual 3% would probably disappear if more complete data were available. Critics counter that this ignored the fact that the analysts had already thrown such cases into the category of "insufficient information", whereas both "knowns" and "unknowns" were deemed to have sufficient information to make a determination. Also, the "unknowns" tended to represent the higher quality cases, q.e. reports that already had better information and witnesses. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book]
That said, this misinformation only highlights that the Air Force was trying to minimize UFOs, not increase their presence in the public consciousness.
I guess this is what people expect them to do? It's their job? Is he really a whistleblower or just revealing secrets? Where is the wrongdoing hes blowing the whistle on? Not giving congress enough details?
In theory, maybe possible. But honest-to-god critical thinking/sincere question: given that multiple countries have had satellites, deep space observation methods, giant telescopes etc how is that alien ingress have never been noticed? Aliens couldn't have known that US/UK were the preferred destinations - countries with large surface areas like Australia, Russia, Brazil and India don't report such activities in general.
Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decades - and no concerted & corroborative evidence exists from medieval or prehistoric times (apart from some cave paintings where imaginations have been at play of superior beings).
Human race always had a creative tone to recording our history - we borrow philosophy, allude to existence of supernatural, and of God almighty. When it is about non-planetary life, definitive evidence _must_ exist all over the planet that we were visited - not just one country. Or am I being too cynical?
> how is that alien ingress have never been noticed?
The US and the USSR had to collaborate on filtering out UAPs from radar early warning systems so we didn't nuke each other.
Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
> Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decade
UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
I haven't provided references here in the interest of my time, but all of what I stated here is readily verifiable with a few internet searches.
All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence. The issue today is provenance. With claims so large, even HD video of an object and creatures in real time wouldn't be enough. The only thing that would convince people is the word of the US (or some other major country) government itself providing evidence, which it has done in small doses, and is the only reason this hearing is happening.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence
Sorry, I haven’t seen a single decent photo or video—everything is always blurry, distant, or ambiguous. And this is after a decade where virtually everyone is constantly carrying a camera on their person.
That argument would be "where is the indisputable evidence", and I would point out that no evidence is indisputable, especially when it concerns something as ridiculous as UFOs.
I'll point out 2 things:
1) The videos released to the NY times for their 2017 story are compressed and downscaled version of much higher quality videos the US gov has in it possession. That is indisputable fact as the US gov itself freely admits that.
2) You probably haven't looked. I've seen many convincing photos and videos, but unless their from an F-XX aircraft and the D.O.D tells me it is what it is, I ignore them because pictures and video have been easy to fake for as long as picture and video have existed. Here is one I like: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13dmaif/black_triangl...
No way to know if it's legit or not, like I've said, but pretty cool either way.
> The US and the USSR had to collaborate on filtering out UAPs from radar early warning systems so we didn't nuke each other.
And as we know they're the only countries with radar and observation abilities.
> Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
> The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
> UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence.
No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist. Even a mild dive into the claims shows how absurd all of these are, and often very real explanations are given, verified, and ignored by the community that wants to believe. It's got all the rigor of pizzagate and is in fact less likely to be possible.
> And as we know they're the only countries with radar and observation abilities.
They're not? Are you implying that by pointing out one event I'm explicitly excluding the possibility of others? Not sure that follows.
> This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
Depends on who you ask, which was kin of my entire point. There is tons of evidence, what missing is provenance.
> We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
Again, the was my point. I wasn't saying "here is all the 100% proven evidence". I was saying "there is no evidence" is an inaccurate statement.
> No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist
There is plenty of material, with plenty of seals of approval, just not from the U.S. gov.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence.
We haven't seen a single clear evidence yet. The objects captured from fighter jet IR cameras discussed in the past have also had explanation of lens flares and focal aberrations. True color image corresponding of the same event do not exist. No two accounts of unidentified activities are also same with inconsistencies one observes when people extend stories based on tenuous observation/experience
> The objects captured from fighter jet IR cameras discussed in the past have also had explanation of lens flares and focal aberrations
One is a potential flare/focal aberration. The other two have no such explanation, and one of the three has radar tracking, followed by pilot interaction (David Fravor), then was videod by a second pilot on encounter (the video that was released.
Keep in mind also that all three are very low quality versions of the originals.
So, what stops the US government from making this an elaborate psyops activity. Why should it be aliens _only_?
In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge. Create an elaborate story around unexplained IR camera observation. Potentially drop breadcrumbs & leave it ambiguous to project existence of superior otherworldly technology.
I believe most of us agree at this point, whatever proof publicly exists isn't incontrovertible - but ambiguous enough to be an umbrella for other top secret projects. Aliens aren't selectively choosing US - if you pause & think. And if that should not happen, evidence of similar standing should pop up elsewhere as well. The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military, is somehow not matching up with critical reasoning. (And many of these militaries actually do have strong public outreach just like US af-mil)
Leaving aside the military, clear photos have not showed up from the regular citizenry despite us having astrophotography capabilities in phones since sometime. The evidence or lack of it, isn't adding up
> So, what stops the US government from making this an elaborate Psyops activity. Why should it be aliens _only_?
That just depends on what evidence you do, or do not believe. Depending on your selection, and number of explanations may make sense.
> In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge
Personally, I'd believe UFOs were all fake/mistakes before I believed it was real technology held by any government.
> The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military
It is. UFO reports come out of all of those countries. India has a religious tradition with very clear UFO references, and videos come out of China all the time (although they tend to be purposely faked 100% of the times I've seen).
> It is. UFO reports come out of all of those countries. India has a religious tradition with very clear UFO references, and videos come out of China all the time (although they tend to be purposely faked 100% of the times I've seen).
I have lived/ been a citizen/ married to someone from each of these listed places. UFO reference in Hinduism is zero. I am practicing Hindu - I can vouch with 100% certainty. My wife is devout Buddhist/ formerly Christian & she confirms there is nothing in their scripture. I cannot engage any of these answers in good faith of critical thinking, as whenever there is a question of evidence, it is either trust-me-bro or it-is-classified
> I literally pointed you to a kaggle file of reports from a major UFO reporting organization.
Kaggle competition is a supporting evidence for you?
> And with regard to Hindu UFOs, I was referring to Vimana.
Those were depicted as chariots mostly drawn by flying horses or elephants in Ramayana & Mahabharata. Unless you consider flying horses as aliens. Also, these were written as poetic verses with generous doses of imagination.
> Not sure what you expect me to present as far as evidence goes when my point is "there is a ton of dubious evidence, but evidence none-the-less".
Let me help by stating: There is a ton of dubious statements from many people which doesn't count as evidence (those testifying without shred of evidence to congress). More of he-said-she-said trust-me-bro. Hence why I asserted these aren't worth discussing anymore. And quoting them as support is not good faith in a scientific evidence-oriented discussion
There are conspiracy theories & then there are conspiracy dogmas group of people fall trap to & blindly propagate, much like religion. Then usual responses to reasonable scientific queries become topics of (1) our science isn't developed enough (2) godly metaphysics isn't known enough (3) reasons of alien presence/ absence/ ambiguity aren't clear enough - despite strong evidence to the contrarian opinion.
There are 22k+ rows, and scrolling through the first few hundred I see Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, and Peru.
I'm not sure why you're dedicated to the idea that no other countries having UFO sightings. Even if it was just clutter and balloons, it seems reasonable for people all over the world to make mistakes and thing something mundane is fantastic. It doesn't seem like a very useful point in either direction of the discussion.
> So, what stops the US government from making this an elaborate psyops activity
After watching the hearing today, I was starting to suspect that we're party to this psyops campaign. It's one of the most outlandish things I've seen in recent memory.
All of the guys are credentialed and I didn't get the impression that anyone was grifting anything.
They definitely think it's real. I suspect something is real, but I get the impression that the real thing is not what they think it is.
There’s a pretty good chance the Nimitz incident was an intentional decoy self-test by the Navy IMO. Clouds give a radar return, so a projected plasma target would probably also give a radar return.
I'd tend to agree, but the fact that we are inventing top secret technology and programs to explain a sighting is itself a sign of a problem worth investigating, no?
Like, if that's a reasonable conclusion, then by leaving pilots misinformed we've effectively broadcast the tech to our adversaries. Maybe that was the intent, but it seems like a senselessly roundabout method if so.
It seems to me that this stuff might be an intentional leak in order to distract from more earthy political issues, so they actually want it to get out into the news.
The DoD loves the myths. It's not about the existent of extraterrestrials. It's about a government so powerful that they would be able to cover it up and keep it secret. A government that can hide the existence of extraterrestrials, that can fake a moon landing, that can demolish skyscrapers in the middle of a city, is a powerful government and one that needs trillions of dollars a year. The amorphous "they" wants you to believe.
Worth noting that Russia does actually have similar myths, likely for the same reasons.
I just wrapped up Skunkworks and put the book down pretty impressed at what the DoD and Lockheed were able to keep secret. The author described Skunkworks' mission "again and again" as creating aircraft that were technologically unbelievable to America's enemies, so they would have no means to even reckon with a defense. The USSR spent hundreds of billions of rubles on an impenetrable anti-air defense network, Lockheed built a plane that could fly right through it and drop a bomb through a Kremlin chimney, and everyone kept it a secret for years. The author also repeatedly alluded to projects from throughout his career that remained classified at the time, one of these was the F-22.
My takeaway there is more that it's believable pilots have sighted unidentifiable aircraft exhibiting technologically implausible behavior because those craft are classified projects, rather than because they're extraterrestrial craft, but I don't think it's so plainly unbelievable that the government can't keep secret projects under wraps. The stealth modified helicopters used in the Bin Laden raid come to mind, and really, those are pretty boring as far as "top secret technology" goes, and were apparently in pretty regular use already.
Everything you wrote was addressed in the hearing today. There are many, many incidents and we would not be flying these things in training areas that jeopardize flight safety of our own pilots, for one.
> but I don't think it's so plainly unbelievable that the government can't keep secret projects under wraps.
Rare triple negation. Also, I couldn't follow the last bit. Were you saying that basically what we imply as dazzling mind boggling technology is a top secret projects waiting to be unveiled / discovered?
The human ability to deny to others and oneself is stronger than we think. There's a vast set of people that saw them in Phoenix, astronauts, there's evidence in many places that we tend to ignore.
I've met Travis Walton. He is one of the most genuine people I have ever met. We're just not listening (some people are but most are not capable of hearing it).
I understand. But out of curiosity: why is there no material evidence across the different civilizations. Surely all of humanity couldn't be duping themselves and only US is speaking up in 21st century.
I am _not_ a non-believer. It is just the lack of scientific historicity and diversity of evidence that bothers me. I cannot reconcile that mountain of contradiction with the current testimony. It is one Congressional account of definitive existence, versus the absence of conclusive proof or material evidence anywhere else.
Now, none of them are as clear and objective as "A being that was obvious not human spoke to me and told me about themselves. They are ..." - but that doesn't mean we don't have a ton of incidents reported over the centuries.
The celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg & Basel have been time & again discussed to be purported works of fiction. (This is also from a recent cursory literature review on the topic in JSTOR).
Summarily, many supernatural themed events were written by fantasy writers of those age to peddle to crowds outside their region. Those people have died, and the enigma forgotten - but these writings have found their way as proto-evidence of unusual activity from medieval times & now being used to support arguments.
Commercial airlines apparently experience crashes at a rate of 6 per 100,000,000 flights. I wasn't able to find a figure from the testimony as to how many craft are claimed to have been recovered. The best I could find was an anonymous quote from a Vox article of 12+. Applying the commercial airline stat to 12 crashes over 80 years results in almost 7,000 alien flights per day (just over the US). There are 25,000 flights per day (again in the US). A ratio of alien:commercial flights of 1:4 is really hard to buy. The alternative is that these alien craft are incredibly more advanced and yet somehow worse at flying than human aircraft. To play devil's advocate, maybe the government is intentionally shooting them down. But how? With what? Human knock-offs of their own weapons?
I'm asking if alien craft are a safer method of transport than air liners. Alternatively, if we replaced air liners with these craft, would fewer people die? If they are safer then the sky should be flooded with them to result in 12 crashes so far. This doesn't seem to be the case so there must instead be a smaller number of more dangerous craft to result in 12 crashes. So either the sky is flooded with invisible alien craft or their craft are a more dangerous method of travel than our air liners.
I mean sure. Cars, for example, are significantly more dangerous than airliners and people crash all the time. But if alien craft are as safe as cars then that just leads back to my original point that airliners are better at traveling safely through our atmosphere than physics-defying alien craft.
Your logic is based on the assumption that those alien crafts were intending to come to Earth. Perhaps they were intending to go somewhere else, and crashed into Earth mistakenly? Then the volume of total flights could be much larger, and the proportion of crashes could be much smaller.
So instead of thousands of craft flying daily over the US, there are potentially millions commuting past Earth? And those crashes still happen despite an abundance of help nearby?
I can't quite put my finger on why, but somehow these exchanges with fringe theorists strongly remind me of one-sided versions of those "who would win" arguments that people have between Star Trek technology versus Star Wars. The real objective seems to be to show off one's ability to creatively avoid being pinned down by argument from scientific knowledge while affecting that one's own claims are grounded in it.
I'm not sure if you're directing that at me, or the parent comment. But I'm not a fringe theorist, and I don't believe that aliens have been crashing into Earth either. I find the parent comment's argument very unconvincing.
It makes assumptions which don't seem reasonable in the context of the subject matter at hand. If aliens did exist, they could be much more numerous than humans. Their spacecraft could be more dangerous than airplanes to operate. Their method of travel could perhaps result in collisions with Earth even if it wasn't their intended destination.
My overall point is that we should minimize the assumptions we make here. There's no point in assuming various things and then proposing arguments based on those predicates.
We can't assume that getting "help" is trivial just due to the volume of travel. Commercial airplanes can't rescue each other, just as an example.
I don't believe that aliens are making contact with Earth. But I don't find your argument against that possibility convincing either.
In my mind, a much better argument would simply be that with 7 billion people on this planet, the likelihood of alien crashes staying secret seems miniscule. We would have solid conclusive evidence already if it had happened multiple times, like alledged.
> I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access
No it doesn’t. I don’t know, or particularly care, either way but this statement is something insufferable people throw around to seem smarter than everyone else. Military people don’t testify before congress about UFOs “everytime something big is about to happen” and people aren’t as stupid as you think that they can only care about one issue at once.
informed intentionally because someone picked him as the gullible fall guy to leak it, more likely… why would the military tell someone and also deny access
To test their ability to keep a secret while vetting them to handle actual secrets. If they leak it, that's fine because it's made up and is mostly harmless, if not, then they can be trusted to find out where Jimmy Hoffa actually buried JFK.
The whistleblower former intelligence official David Grusch says he faced “very brutal and very unfortunate” retaliation after he went public with his allegations.
Intelligence personnel swear to keep their mouths shut. He has no real evidence and no real compelling reason that I'm seeing for coming forward.
They take an oath to serve the United States. If they notice illegal activity that can't be resolved through the chain of command, they have a responsibility to speak up and resolve it through being a whistle blower. We also don't know what evidence he has. It could be bullshit or it could be actual evidence but people on hacker news won't know the truth.
Why this cynical attitude? Perhaps he did expect it and he is now clearly and publicly stating it in a congressional record so something might be done about other whistleblowers.
What's the timeline before real evidence is provided? Or is there none, and this is just the same as the last million times something extraordinary was claimed and nothing came of it?
I don't know what to make of this. It just seems so incredibly implausibly that extraterrestrials would have the technology or motive to come to Earth without widespread detection.
Part of the testimony was that there is widespread detection. The claim is that UAPs are often a part of briefings and debriefs. Its also been claimed during the recent UAP related testimonies that a large number of military and civilian pilots have seen stuff, but either had no clear path to report it, reported it and were ignored, or reported and were harassed, or chose to not report it out of fear of harassment.
There's nothing stopping the civilians from reporting it publicly AFAIK. There's enough cameras in the sky that we'd have footage of a few. Especially from all the commercial fights with passengers.
Part of the issue is the stigma. Commercial pilots are afraid to come forward, and that’s why Ryan Graves came to this meeting because his mission is to reduce the stigma so pilots feel safe reporting this issue.
I'd agree on some pilots, and sure they should post more unexplained things for analysis. But given how many people are eagerly into bigfoot or cryptids, it's not like every pilot with some kind of evidence would feel unsafe sharing it.
Pilots, both commercial and military, are constantly under scrutiny to maintain a healthy mental state for fear of their license being revoked. You can not be mentally unstable and be a pilot. For years it was generally well accepted that people who believed in UFOs are crazy, so pilots have kept this to themselves for fear of retribution. Go ask any pilot how they would feel reporting something moving in unexplainable ways right up against their aircraft.
That's why I said evidence. I'm not expecting them to tell tales of UFO sightings. Having a video of something does not reflect on your mental state (unless you faked it). This issue also doesn't apply to passengers and there's lots of people in the sky who don't have a pilot's licence to protect.
Most planes aren’t equipped with any camera systems. The videos commercial pilots and passengers use are their phones which have trouble focusing on objects half a mile away (which is very close for an aircraft to be next to another one but very far for your phone to focus on).
Military pilots do have camera systems like the ATFLIR pods on F-18s but the pentagon only declassifies those videos when it’s useful - like when the Chinese jet made an American military plan fly through its fumes recently
Blurry photos do not stop people from posting them in many other cases. Planes do not have to be equipped as such: there's so many people flying with GoPro-s and similar recording all the time that we'd get something popping up all the time.
And that's even if we ignore the claim that people repeatedly see something. If I was a pilot and spotted something weird more than once, I'd make sure I record every flight from then on - can't imagine not doing it.
I’ve done some basic research and can attest none of these are at least CGI made. Some of these predate photoshop. The issue with all of these videos are they are hard to prove definitively without corroborating sensor data. But they are interesting none the less.
Yup, that's exactly what I meant. Those are worth analysing and talking about. I'd be glad if there were even fewer barriers to reporting those. But it also proves the barriers are not that big and a bit of an excuse.
There is actually still a barrier both militarily and commercially until. The military still has mostly no formal structure for UAP reporting. AARO is working to set that up but only has a portion of the Naval Air Force set up and not any other branch. Commercially, there is nothing. I believe congressmen are writing a law that requires the reporting of UAP by commercial airliners but that won't go into effect until at least mid next year. So while pilots may have this data, they don't have a formal way to report it other than showing it to a buddy.
I hope this gets resolved soon, but I also hope this data doesn't become immediately classified.
When I go out for a hike in the woods or a hike in a new state/country that isn’t my home. I don’t go out destroying the land around me. I observe and enjoy my time
Maybe these aliens are scientists. Documenting biological life across the galaxy. Maybe they’re VanCampers. Just bouncing from planet to planet for fun
If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy. Lots of empty planets with plenty of resources out there!
Not saying aliens/UFOs are real, but I think it’s very easy to imagine them existing and not being destructive. Or maybe they’re just scouting before the invasion :)
Seriously. There's nothing here that they can't find out in space in greater quantities and easier access. Except our animal and plant life. And no worries about harvesting us like in movies, it's way easier to grow meat or whatever than travel across the universe for it. We're most likely a curiosity.
Their opsec's way too good for scientists. If they're anything like our scientists, we'd have recovered one of the flying saucers when they tried to go through Arby's drive-through but didn't have enough clearance.
Maybe they're just fictional, and this guy has a Fox Mulder larping fetish.
> If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy.
If we ever achieve FTL travel, do you imagine that it will be available to frat bros doing road trips to Beta Reticuli VI, or will it be this horrendously expensive, economy-wrecking thing that we get to do once or twice and then have to stop because it is almost impossible to do?
We achieved a moon landing for fuck's sake, and the frat bro still hasn't duplicated that one yet (though I will concede he's not doing too shabby).
I think it’s a mistake to imagine how an alien species would behave based on our own tendencies.
A civilization that has achieved what their (supposed) presence here implies has clearly managed to move far beyond human capability, and our understanding of opsec seems irrelevant.
It could be that with sufficiently advanced technology, “opsec” is mostly irrelevant relative to a species like ours with the capabilities we have.
And that's fine and all, but it's been nearly a hundred years and they're still doing the same shit? Are we supposed to believe we are the equivalent of a tourist attraction? One where you seem to have a high likelihood of dying?
Not saying I believe this, but for sake of argument…
If these are scientific/observation missions, humanity is going through its most transformative stages of advancement, and the last 100 years have been quite interesting.
If we could go and observe a developing civilization secretly and over a long period of time, I suspect we would.
Right, like what would be their motivation for exclusively interacting with governments rather than, say, landing in Times Square?
I guess a counter thought would be that they haven't actually tried to interact with anyone at all, maybe only observe, but the armed forces/governments are the only element of our species with the ability to detect and retrieve them when they make mistakes.
1. They make exceptionally few mistakes overall anyway;
2. Perhaps it is the interaction between armed force technology and their vehicles which creates problems for them (whether intentional or not from our side);
3. The majority of our land surface area is not inhabited at any given moment. Maybe these drones, or whatever they are, do not even care about life here, and are not particularly attracted to cities or people, and are statistically more likely to fail out of reach of most populated areas just because that's what our geographic distribution is like.
He testified under oath. Every time he was asked for specifics, he said he had them, had already provided them, or in some cases would provide them immediately after because they were classified--which is the proper response if you don't want to go to jail.
If he's a nut, you'd expect evasion, contradiction, waffling and avoidance when asked for specifics. I didn't see any of that. He is already providing data that will be verifiable. An attention-seeking con would work hard to avoid providing anything he can be called out on. I have no idea what's going on, and this is all nuts, but that certainly didn't fit the mold I was expecting.
I can see where it might sound that way if you haven't watched the testimony.
"I provided this classified information under oath to the inspector general" is not an avoidance tactic but a direction where to locate classified info.
"I'll tell you later" on the surface might sound like an avoidance tactic, but when he was asked when he could provide it the answer was "immediately after today's session." In other words, no stalling at all, he just preferred not getting arrested for sharing top-secret info publicly.
Willing to get arrested would be a huge signal that he's an actual whistleblower and not full of shit!
There's almost no chance he'd face any consequences given the topic and the amount of support he'd have the from the public, and even then, Daniel Hale's sentence for disclosing dozens of classified documents to reporters was ~3.5yrs in jail. The LARPers pretending like he'd be sent to gitmo are completely in lala land.
We only have one life, nobody wants to sacrifice 3 years of it. Just because you and I consider potential alien life disclosures to be important doesn't mean we have the right to demand someone with that knowledge sacrifice their own life for us to have it.
If I had hardcore proof of definite alien life on earth but by revealing it I'd spend time in prison, would I do it? Or would I be content to know that in the 4-billion year scope of life on Earth, people will probably eventually figure it out without me anyway, and that I could let go of my particular contribution to the arc of history for a simple, peaceful life with family? Maybe the latter...
If you wanted the latter, you wouldn't repeatedly go on national TV claiming a giant conspiracy and then testify in front of congress.. In any case, I'm not "demanding" that he do something that could result in jail time but rather pointing out that based on his own telling of his own story, he should be happy to do so. That he's not is strongly indicative that he's full of shit.
So far he's abiding by the law and not going to jail. What is in "his own telling of his own story" that suggests he should be happy to go to jail? It seems like he's trying hard not to.
"Call me a Boy Scout or whatever. It’s just when I saw the kind of wrongdoing I did … I don’t want to be 60 or 70 years old in the future and have that, you know, “could have, should have, would have” kind of feeling where I could have made a difference,” he said. “I did not want to live a life of regret."
This is all so dumb - the fact that there's more incredulousness to room temperature superconductors than this nonsense is a real shame. Listen to this tripe:
“It is a well-established fact, at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis, that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions,” he said. “And you can imagine, four and five-dimensional space where what we experience is linear time, ends up being a physical dimension in higher dimensional space where you were living there. You could translate across what we perceive as a linear flow. So there is a possibility that this is a theory here. I’m not saying this is 100% the case but it could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and it’s actually coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
So the President doesn't know about it, but this random FBI dork does -- and it's such a well-kept secret that we're willing to extrajudicially imprison Americans who reveal details about the program -- but only if they do so in open testimony and not in a SCIF?
And he'll go to Gitmo, but only if the details are specific, because the people who will extrajudicially imprison the whistleblower for revealing details of the program are following the laws we have about classification?
Huh? You’re telling me you think they can travel light years to get here but don’t have the tech to land without us detecting them? That’s an assumption.
Assuming FTL is off the table, anything sent here will have been designed and launched with no evidence the subject planet has radars or air combat hardware. One should expect probes to have no air combat capability, and may not even bother to dodge a missile, even if they (incidentally) have very good aerodynamic performance.
If they don't have FYL then it's ridiculous that they'd send what are effectively tiny scout ships that don't have stealth tech to avoid the Other Aliens and that crash at alarming rates With Living Pilots inside...
Really...
Just look at the claim objectively and it becomes obvious it's absurd.
You would send some probe complex that includes small scout aircraft. Literally, NASA has done this. From many vantage points, Earth is a water world with no intelligent life on it. Most operators would send an interstellar probe based on that assumption. Things like living organisms can be application-specific bio robots that are wholly unprepared for anything like contact. Really, sending a bunch of military hardware on a space probe is obviously absurd. We have examples of literal scientists building literal space probes and they literally don’t send them with weapons.
If things are such that aliens send probes to any such planet as ours they would be concerned about negative consequences and put great effort into ensuring they could not be discovered by _any_ potentially threatening species.
This precludes any of the forms you suggest, as any species capable of sending such would also be more than advanced enough to ensure we wouldn't discover them and that they wouldn't fail at the rates claimed.
Even if we presume many many species sending such, there's the issue that they wouldn't be bothering with us in this way and would either have already conquered us for the resources to fight each other etc. (And even if not fighting they would be aware of each other as a result of these supposed visits).
There's no reasonable explanation for subterfuge which is the only answer ever given for such questions of "why have they not made direct contact?" Right?
If you rephrase it as "a civilization that mastered interplanetary travel and can split the atom somehow keeps crashing on our planet" it makes me wonder.
What if bugs, suicidal or thrill-seeking pilots or overly confident bureaucracies remain a fixture in the next stages of life's evolution as well?
Or what if fixing those problems is harder than the technology?
Or, perhaps, that civilization is using found technology from UFOs that crashed on their planet and they haven't quite figured out where the brake pedal is, yet?
Maybe they are trying to subtly steer our planet out of the way of an extinction event meteor with ballistics - and we’ve accidentally steered the meteor back into a collision course!
If this is true (huge gigantic "if"), then all information on this topic should be immediately declassified. It is unacceptable to keep the biggest discovery in the history of the human race from the public. There is no justification for it.
Believing so suggests there's a purpose to deliberately wasting everyone's time in such a hearing.
Or a simpler answer, Grusch is plain lying. But somehow, the stakes seem pretty high for him to do so here, unless he's confident of the whistleblower book money he could someday make off of this.
The best part about this “whistleblower”? He’s entire testimony is hearsay.
> “I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access,”
He has no first hand evidence. Basically somebody pranked him by telling him they had access to super secret programs that he would not be allowed to ever see and now he thinks the govt is running experiments on aliens.
I agree. It sounds like an army private testifying before congress about hidden stocks of blinker fluid. Whoever originally played the prank on him must be rolling on the floor during this testimony.
He has provided classified photographs, videos, other records, _and his sources_ to both intelligence committees and the ICIG. I believe some of his sources have been directly questioned by those entities as well. And they have pressed forward with this hearing and the UAP Disclosure amendment in the Senate. That suggests this is not about blinker fluid.
It's not worth much because if there is a community that doesn't know about it, then of course they won't support it. If they do know about it, and haven't already disclosed it, then of course they won't support it.
So basically "take that for what it's worth" in both cases is 0.
Well, for one, he seems to be pretty liberal with the truth in a way that many spooks are good at. For example he claims:
> at the GS-15 civilian level, which is the military equivalent of a full-bird colonel
I was previously both a Major and later NH-IV (which in my case had equivalency with GS-15-10)and the only people making this claim would be ones that want to inflate their own importance.
They are completely different legally and fall under different legal codes - namely the GS system is not subject to UCMJ nor can they make certain legal decisions that an O6 can make and has a completely different promotion and evaluation.
He wants to portray himself as a battle hardened commander when he’s just another run of the mill PowerPoint slinger.
Can’t say for that for the intelligence community, but UFO people on podcasts claim his claims are being fed to him and are likely psyops misdirections.
He also has no direct knowledge it’s all stuff he heard from other people in the government.
Well, I've always thought that cloaking your secret government program in kooky-sounding UFO stuff might be a great way to keep your program hidden. Anybody uncovering evidence of your program will likely not be taken seriously, because UFOs.
And certainly, "a government lies and has secrets" ranks well above "aliens are in our skies" in terms of likelyhood. Occam's Razor and all.
But, I don't know if this sounds like a psyop to me.
One, Grush says that many (dozens?) of people (whose names he has provided to the whistleblower office) spoke to him about these alleged programs. Dozens or people push this psyop... why? The government wants to convince people that it is... even shadier than we thoughts? Or is this some thing they cooked up to ensnare Grusch specifically?
Is our government secretive and scary? Oh yeah. But if this is a psyop then I don't see how it helps them.
Please. If aliens were on earth there’d be lots of quality video and photos from people’s cellphones. Too many people with too many cellphones to not have any proof.
The F-117 nighthawk flew for years, all over the world, before there were any photos or videos.
The RQ-180 has been flying for years, all over the world, and has only been photographed twice, poorly, from far away.[0]
Not to say an unidentified flying object must be an alien, but it seems very obviously the case that there are aircraft flying around the globe today you and I haven't seen in photos and videos.
There was a pretty good set of videos of the family going into the yard, with some shadowy figures in the background, sitting in the tractor, etc. I particularly liked the analysis of the footage which shows what appears to be an alien hiding behind the fence as the family entered, and disappearing in an alien cloaking shield ..
Haven't watched the hearing, but when I've heard a breakdown of public comments over the past few months, what has struck me is how circuitous each statement has been. Person 1 high up in the food chain says that Person 2 told them there was something there, but Person 2 turns around and says either Person 1 or Person 3 told them. It feels like a lot of independent construction and circuitous logic, and the whole time I've found myself wondering about an end goal. Maybe this really is some gentle way of preparing the public, or maybe there are more incidents of things that the government can't explain so this is a PR campaign of sorts.
Right? Cmdr. Dave Fravor seemed like he didn't have anything to personally gain by giving his testimony. He told us what he experienced, said he was amazed, wished he could pilot the craft he personally saw, and didn't offer speculation where he didn't have experience.
I wonder who here has ever read the work of Jacques Vallee? I recommend it very much. There are two implicit and rather rigid views that I think need to be carefully scrutinized in many of the comments on this site for UFO-related posts:
The first of these is that whatever is happening on earth must either be a whole lot of nothing truly abnormal, or a case of aliens from other star systems having visited our planet, under the partial disqualifier that this seems unlikely as hell unless they have FTL travel capabilities.
What if it's neither of those things? What if something else, not normal as we know normal things of nature to be, but also not classically extraterrestrial or for that matter an outright case of hoaxes and mistaken identity is happening?
That last question leads into the second very common rigid point that should be scrutinized: the assumption that aliens have to be extrasolar visitors to be present on Earth. Since we known nothing about alien life, or any super-intelligent life anywhere at all, we can only guess at anything about its nature.
Because of this I think it's a bad idea to not consider the possibility of something entirely different from classical interpretations of extraterrestrials interacting with us already, and possibly in ways so strange (because of its own truly alien strangeness in a general sense) that they seem absurd and instead get written off as myths or hoaxes across decades and centuries of human history and reported events.
I don’t usually like to make evaluations like this but Grusch’s demeanor and the way he responds to questions sets off my BS detector big time. I to want to believe just as much as anyone else here, but I can’t take this guy seriously.
Imagine getting a congressional hearing and coming in with "never saw anything.. no aliens nor their crafts, just a bunch of rumors which I can't repeat here, soz all"
It’s a good call out - the ability of the government to keep secrets across decades.
But - tinfoil hat time - have they not demonstrated their ability to do this wrt the knowledge around nuclear weapons?
Edit: and considering the claimed abilities of UAP, might those technologies be on par (in terms of military
might) with the technology behind nuclear weapons?
Also, that bit about a spaceship needing a biological pilot was kind of dumb. I don’t know how you can see the advances in AI these days and not be able to extrapolate an advanced space faring species not needing a biological pilot on their spaceship.
You mean our nuclear weapons where the secrets were leaked[0] to other governments repeatedly?
Those secrets?
The secrets that we executed both of the Rosenbergs over?
No our government has not demonstrated their ability to keep secrets over the span of a few years, let alone decades.
I don't disagree with you, but you have to remind yourself of a potential bias: you only hear of the secrets they didn't successfully keep. The ones they kept successfully you obviously wouldn't have heard about, by definition. Who's to say this hearing isn't an example of them losing control over a secret?
Those designs aren’t even modern though are they? Plus there’s a whole host of logistics and operations knowledge at scale around nuclear weapons that are highly classified and not known.
It was a machine pilot keeping a pet plant in its ship.
Only half kidding, if we meet aliens they will be machines at least to some extent. Biological life has a lot of annoying limitations and continuously circumventing them is more expensive than just becoming machines.
It’s way more likely to encounter von Neumann probes than some beer drinking alien traveling across the galaxy in compression socks and with a neck pillow.
I wouldn't be so sure. They could have a much more advanced idea of what life is, and life could have deep meaning to them, they might seek to keep their biological selves in tact and use machines only as tools. I know that's how I would roll, and I'd raise my kids that way, a group of beings like that could spawn a nation down the road with a rule like that. Or with their understanding of life and computation and intelligence and the universe, it could just be self evident to them: your form follows your function, if you change your form you change your function and you're no longer you. Sending robots, sure, becoming robots, I think you're bound to meet at least as many that don't as that do.
> “I don’t want to oversimplify it, but how are you going to fly one [spaceship]? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple,” Burchett said.
“Simple” is not the word I’d use to describe this conclusion.
I don't think any military captains, and colonels will be testifying on oath to the existence of Bigfoot in front of Congress. So no, that's not next.
What's actually happening is pretty crazy and anyone who has a small amount of curiosity should give it some consideration. It seems foolish just to dismiss this with a scoff.
It might be if more details about the super solider program are leaked and they can be linked to non-earth origin DNA. I mean, for christ's sake there are literal hair samples.
The hearing is utterly bizarre and surreal. Like theater but everyone is keeping a straight face. (also, 'Mrs. Luna' is asking questions and her character name seems too on-the-nose.)
Former commander says he didn't believe in UFOs and defends himself with "I never watched history channel or anything like that" -- as though that's a source for UFOs rather than...history.
>as though that's a source for UFOs rather than...history
Maybe you haven't watched the History Channel recently, but there is indeed a lot of stuff about aliens on there. Possibly more stuff about aliens than about actual history.
Check out the History Channel's schedule today. Not a cherry-picked day, just a normal schedule for them: https://www.history.com/schedule
That's four hours of aliens nonsense, four hours of drug themed history documentaries (probably the same target demographic as the aliens stuff.) An hour of christian prophesy and preaching, 12 hours of reality TV, and some infomercials to make up the difference.
Is it any wonder that an ostensibly serious man such as a military commander thinks that the History Channel is trash? I'd be concerned if he didn't.
What is happening? Seriously we already know about Hunter Biden. What is happening today that wasn't happening yesterday that you think this is actually an attention distraction?
If they're going to be unable to come to consensus on it, then fine, maybe we should have 0 climate hearings this year. Maybe instead spend ALL YEAR on the UFO topic until someone comes forward with crashed saucers and guts.
If we find out they ARE here, maybe they can help with the climate?
Not really. There is good evidence that sightings of Big Foot are actually linked to the same department responsible for dealing with extraterrestrials on earth.
The hair samples with "non-earth origin" DNA, the fact that the FBI investigation suddenly got shut down and two of the agents literally disappeared. The countless whistleblowers over the decades that linked Big Foot to the super solider program. Even David Grush says it's more likely than not linked.
What is non-earth origin DNA that you mention in your reply to another post?
How would you know it was not from earth? Is it as simple as there being no evidence of any contamination by hair colorants, straighteners, shampoos, or any products sold by Proctor and Gamble?
I too would like to see actual links to any evidence or documentation of these events and products so I can see for myself.
Bigfoot is almost a cottage industry and is definitely a tourist bait in some areas.
I would start with the FBI files from the 70's and go from there. That's where it all begins. Apparently the hair had a structure that was not carbon based… the same kind of structure that Grusch talks about from the spaceship that crashed in Italy in 1933 which was covered up by the Five Eyes and the Vatican. Vatican vault apparently has samples as well.
Oh, the Vatican is involved! Of course they are, foolish me for not expecting it. No doubt the Knights Templar are somehow mixed up with this as well. It all seems very diabolical; tell me more, Abulafia.
I was hoping you would have live links to some supporting data. I did stumble into an article about an Italian crash in 1933 that is probably the support for your Vatican assertion though nothing that I read mentioned anything about a Bigfoot or a hair that wasn't from earth. It referenced Italian archives from a "secretive" unit of Mussolini's military that supposedly picked up the pieces of something that crashed and stashed them away for study. Those parts were supposed to have been the inspiration for one of the Italians who studied them to develop the first jet engine and some plans for a circular, jet-powered craft that to me sounded like it had lots of problems engineered into it so it was never gonna work. There was a lot in there to absorb involving documentation sent to the Nazis and post-war transfer of the pieces to the US.
Anyway, a link to something about the hair that isn't carbon-based so it can't be from around here would be great since you brought up that subject. It's still a "tits or GTFO" place here on the intertubes.
Let's assume he's not a nut job... So why is he bringing to light secrets which could negatively affect U.S. security? Especially as a career Air Force officer and intelligence services member. Whether you agree that this info should be public or not, there's something odd about this person's 180 degree flip. From swearing an oath to protect the country and its secrets, to insisting those secrets become public. Really?
Let's also assume his story is real: The tech could be nuclear weapon level science, so secrecy would nominally be a good thing. But he doesn't seem to know what it is, and has decided that it doesn't matter anyways. What would possess him to face public ridicule, criticism, career damage and all that to be a whistleblower for something that could potentially be dangerous if public knowledge?
It just doesn't add up.
Also, it seems to me the last president wouldn't have been able to keep it a secret had he known about it. Which leads to all sorts of "Independence Day" style conspiracy theories. Occam's Razor says it just isn't true.
> “I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access,” Grusch told the committee.
So he's got hearsay but no hands-on or eyes-on direct proof. Like Mulder, I want to believe. But if you're going to speak under oath, you've got to do better than this.
He had names of people willing to testify, names of people to investigate, and exact locations of where to look. All of which he offered in a scif in accordance with the requirements of his clearance level. As soon as they get approved for the scif, then they'll see very quickly if he was full of shit or not.
Are you seriously asking why they didn't immediately have every bit of information and then immediately act on it? These things take time. There are very specific procedures that have to be followed.
The Guardian had live reporting of the hearing. If you Google “uap hearing” pretty much every major outlet covered it. Doesn’t need to be a front page headline for it to add noise to the chaos of the world.
You have to know that the hearing was happening or even what a UAP was to google it in the first place.
I asked around all day today and no one knew anything about it. They didn’t even know what UAPs were. There are so many other things that are distractions and it’s just not is on the top of the list.
but the thing is, we had government and military officials saying that they were actually alien craft, and they said this under oath, and everyone’s acting like this is nothing.
I did not expect this at all at the hearing because they were under oath, so this is what surprised me so much. I can understand someone not believing anyone saying something on YouTube or a random podcast but they were under oath and they were military officers.
I just don’t understand how no one sees this as something as insane as it is.
I think folks conflate too many wild things at once and dismiss them all.
I think there are some interesting questions and folks with pretty good credentials that have came out and given some interesting answers to some of these.
* Are there craft that defy the laws of physics as we know them today?
* Do any governments or corporations have access to these crafts, partially or whole?
* Do those governments or corporations have control over those crafts?
* Were those crafts ever intelligently controlled?
* What type of intelligence controlled those crafts? Is it biological?
* If biological, what is the source or origin?
One of the witnesses at the hearing today, Cmdr. Dave Fravor (Retired), seems like a really normal guy, not some previous "UFO nut" out to confirm an existing bias.
He said what he saw was amazing, it defied anything he had ever saw, and as a pilot himself... he wished he could pilot it. He flew up next to the damn thing.
Now whether these are illusions or not, whether they defy the laws of physics as we currently know them, I don't know... but these folks have stated that there are up close photos as well as radar data that backs up their claims that should be released to the public.
I like to think that I still retain a chunk of that curiosity that I had as a kid. I can be a skeptic at work and professionally.. but I don't know how we can advance science past a stalemate if we can't suspend disbelief for a minute here or there and entertain the idea that there are some wilddddddd things we may not currently know about.
I think we should potentially waste some time and always follow these leads.
In the off chance that they were ever true, I wouldn't want to be in the group that just dismissed it because of my own ego.
If they're false, let them sell books and make YouTube videos for the rest of their lives. But we shouldn't just dismiss them outright... especially if they're willing to go under oath and have specific directions to point.
It was pretty amazing that CNN didn't seem to cover it at all online. I couldn't find any reference to the hearings on their web site while they were ongoing. It might (or might not) be bullshit, but it is still interesting to have congress talk about little green men, so I would have expected something. They were more interested in Biden's son's failed plea deal.
OTOH the BBC in the UK ran it as their headline and dedicated an entire live feed and various articles to it.
All I can say is that the archives of these threads/comments are going to be _highly_ entertaining to our future-selves (hello future people reading this!).
The amount of ignorance on display is overwhelming, and a lot of people who fancy themselves intelligent are going to struggle to come to terms with how they were so wrong for so long.
just want to point out that you just predicted future events to enable value judgement of present things. It's just like the people saying "You are on the wrong side of history", or "They will look so silly when people start dying off because of the vaccines." But don't feel too bad, everyone is doing it these days, even the educated ones.
This is wrong because no one knows how things will play out. How sure you are is not so important as everyone is sure with their prediction.
Right now UFO is still a 'strong' prediction, many scientists who are getting into bed with this and commenting on it being convincing are problematic to begin with, like michio kaku (a bestselling author who is still describing himself as a string theorist, still, a dead end and biggest waste of effort in physics). I'm gonna stick to the null hypothesis for now.
I found his wording weasley. "Non-human" at "non-earth vehicle crash sites" could have just meant they found a dead cat underneath a downed hot air balloon.
He never explicitly said anything about extra terrestrial beings, and this honestly just feels like a stupid spy joke.
If those objects are people at the southern border, then they're the first to throw some bullshit finger-wagging about a requirement to register at some country they passed while fleeing for their lives with some buggy app. Americans are shocked that the tax-dodging neoliberals in power don't differ significantly in policy from the previous administration who rounded up children in cages, separated from their parents, and lost them to abusive, exploitative foster care parents who sometimes made them work in dangerous factories below the legal age of work, e.g., effectively child slave labor.
Or if those objects are also people who have an AGI < $5 megabucks, they're down to audit records with a probe where the sun doesn't shine.
It's also problematic, a distraction, and a waste of resources to address mythological and conspiratorial topics, like having a flat earth research committee.
One thing I find amazing is the diversity of UAP vehicles.
It used to be saucers, then silvery orbs, tic tac pills, triangles with bright lights , and now during the hearing we learn about dark cubes in translucent spheres!
I mean... how many different alien races exactly are playing tourists over here?
it feels like the most unlikely number of ET races monitoring earth would be 1. If it's possibly _at all_ that there is intelligent life elsewhere and it has the capacity to reach across the galaxy / universe and monitor us, surely there'd be multitudes of them given the scale of the universe. so it's not that weird to observe this kind of diversity.
(not making a claim on the veracity of the reports)
It seems more likely that rumors of aliens is obfuscation of the military by the military to avoid rumors about secret programs. Non-human biologics are easy to fake and photograph and might pass if no close or detailed examination is made.
No need to fake 'non-human biologics' when a bird can poop on the wreckage and viola "'Non-human biologics' were found on crashed craft." Vague wording can be used to justify almost anything for people who are predisposed to believe it.
Weird with that many comments and votes that its on like page 5 of HN and this one quickly shot to front page. Maybe @dang can combine them in a hurry.
It does and it's quite annoying, given that controversy is often a source of insight. I think this guy is probably BSing and that these hearings are a sideshow, but I'm still interested in the nuggets that come out of these discussions and don't mind they fall short of being perfect examples of discourse.
Eric Weinstein has a reasonable voice here. Considering there is nobody that is a subject matter expert in these topics employed in these programs, this is just a wild goose chase from something more sinister they're doing with money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMJ4cbO88F4
The entire UFO congress interaction has seemed like a large distraction away from items like the fed raising interest rates again with the reasoning still to tackle inflation. I don't say this to trigger a debate on politics or flamebait , this seems like peak "hey look over here" material.
I wish we had events unfolding to hurl us into a new age of space progress, but the "non human biological" stuff was definitely actual dog shit or someone's lunch.
It is irresponsible to simply call this "hiding". It is more reasonable to assume this is psyops by an adversary, and as such releasing information without doing due diligence is just causing harm.
Overall, if such events are true I wonder what effect this will have on politics driven by religion-based agendas (many who drive such agenda are not even pious or adherents in any form of the word). Maybe this is finally bring an end to religion-driven politics.
If it is a psyop by an adversary why hasn't it been called out as one yet? It would be the easiest counter and the government continually calls out China on its use of TikTok as a cultural weapon with little to no consequences.
Since we are talking about something as fanciful as aliens, consider this perspective: There are no aliens because their existence runs counter to what the Bible says about God.
Assuming the only creation God engaged in was planet earth, how he is described (as never changing) means that his revelation of himself in Christ (who was both human and God, in order that his death would be like our deaths, ((wages of sin is death)), but whose divinity would allow him to rise from the dead ((thereby proving the penalty of sin - death - had been paid for _eternally_ {{being God}})) means that any other creation in the universe would need to be in a similar situation as humanity on earth...otherwise Christ as God/Human is totally senseless and useless on these other planets...which can not be since God does not change. Thus, no aliens, anywhere.
Now before ppl go off screeching about religion, this is in no way an attempt to convert. It is just a perspective made possible by someone who reads the Bible and likes to try to place any modern idea against it, and maybe the same might help someone else grapple with the immensity of It All. It also doesn't mean that there is no need for humanity to keep searching and exploring the stars.
The idea that God is unchanging, or "immutable," is a common literal interpretation, often derived from passages such as Malachi 3:6 ("For I the Lord do not change") and Hebrews 13:8 ("Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever"). However, the idea that these passages mean that God's actions or creations cannot change or vary is not the only possible interpretation.
It's possible to understand these passages as referring to God's nature and character, rather than His actions. In other words, God is consistent in His attributes — His love, justice, mercy, and so on — but this doesn't necessarily mean that His actions or creations are limited to a single pattern. After all, even within the Bible, we see God interacting with different people in different ways at different times.
So, to apply this to the topic at hand: God's immutability might not prevent Him from creating life elsewhere in the universe. The incarnation of Christ was a unique event in human history, but this doesn't necessarily mean that God couldn't or wouldn't interact with other life forms in a way that is appropriate to their nature and circumstances. God's consistency in character doesn't restrict Him to only one method of interaction or revelation.
It's worth noting that other interpretations exist which might allow for the possibility of extraterrestrial life without contradicting the idea of an unchanging God.
If you want to take an approach that is literally the opposite of the scientific method then, yeah, sure. This is HackerNews though, and we tend to stick to verifiable evidence here.
>otherwise Christ as God/Human is totally senseless and useless on these other planets...which can not be since God does not change
This doesn't even make sense. God being unchanging doesn't imply that the relationship of all created beings to God must be the same. Genesis makes it clear that humanity was created in a state of perfection and then fell from grace - and yet God didn't change, despite humanity's relationship to God changing. Therefore it is possible within Biblical canon for created beings to exist which do not need salvation through grace - humans are an exception, not the rule.
I mean, within the Bible, there are humans who just don't die and go straight to Heaven because God likes them and decides to waive the immutable stain of original sin like a parking ticket, because apparently even God's rules can have exceptions.
Also, your assumption that the only creation God engaged with was planet Earth is fallacious. Genesis clearly states that God created the Heavens and the Earth. He created the entire universe. The Bible doesn't mention the dinosaurs either (no, Leviathan doesn't count, file that under the common Indo-European motif of chaoskampf) but we know they existed.
I'm not even religious but I can see your point of view is a bit too limited even within Christendom. CS Lewis was writing about aliens within the framework of Christianity a century ago. Many religious people can square that circle quite easily, simply by assuming God is not strictly limited to what is contained within Biblical canon.
This doesn't sound convincing at all, and I'm struggling to follow your reasoning. I think it's an open question for Christians whether or not there are aliens.
People often joke about how the US should make aircraft that look like UFOs so that people don't take them seriously, but they don't consider the corollary: adversaries could make aircraft that look like UFOs, so that we don't take reported sightings of strange objects seriously.
If, as alleged, the government has been running a many decade disinformation campaign on the UAP issue, what are the odds that everyone in this thread is a legitimate commenter? To what level would comment threads such as this be manipulated in different ways in order to maintain/push the narrative the government wants? How do you even attempt to have conversations about something like this when such a powerful adversary could be secretly working against you, poisoning the conversation?
I don't want to be unfair because there are certainly lots of smart well informed people out there on many websites, but I suspect that intelligence agents would focus on sites with more users and users that generally have less discernment than in HN.
If you find the corpse of an unlucky coyote at a crash site, you've found 'non-human biologics' and the headline would factually apply. Those words strike me as so carefully chosen as to mean absolutely nothing.
Here we are, having the same arguments about this we did in 1950 or so. After decades and decades of the exact same story over and over and over, maybe it's time we started thinking about this differently. "UFOs are fake and everyone who says they saw one is a liar or crazy" is tiresome, you'd have to be a liar or crazy (or woefully uninformed) yourself to actually believe that without at least major doubt. "UFOs exist and I have personally seen their ship fly with my own eyes" and "I have personally seen alien bodies" also doesn't ring true. My conclusion is much stranger: There are UFOs, and they somehow defy our ability to capture them. Maybe they don't follow the laws of physics, and we can't actually contain them.
Travelling the whole Galaxy, just to crash ont tiny Earth. No wonder other species avoid this Planet. Earth must be the Vegas of galactic civilizations....
Why would you want them to shut up? They have given information to those who can actually do something with that information - e.g. get into military and commercial workspaces, subpoena government and private sector persons for questions, seek budgetary audits and clarifications, etc.
A person says "I swear under oath that there is so and so place. Visit for yourself and see". This person is not allowed to take pics at those places. But the official visitors definitely can go see for themselves. The motivation can be "get first hand knowledge of whether budget is being wasted and whether people are being killed", for starters.
This is more directed toward the (cultish) believers, the sensationalizers and those unable to document their statements without direct evidence (which the people in question may very well be unable to)
One explanation for this is that another country just has better military technology than the United States. And the cover-up/conspiracy is that the US government knows this, but just made up something about aliens because they knew that Americans were stupid enough to believe it. It exploits a very glaring blind spot in a lot of Americans' minds (that there is no way we couldn't be #1).
I am more convinced that modern radar and sensor technology is susceptible to accidental or even malicious interference. And if there is a cover-up, its more likely to prevent harm to the businesses of the contractors and technology providers and to prevent adversaries to learn possible exploits. I highly doubt that there was "visual contact" with those anomalies.
at least since the cold war the US had a lot of interest to capture any unknown flying objects and also not disclose much information about capabilities, scope etc. of such a program
Can this objects be strange? sure I mean it who knows what the Soviet Union invents. Just looking at some of the research Nazi Germany did (and which ended up in the hands of the US) they would be stupid not to do so just to be sure not to miss something.
But does that mean such a program had anything to do with aliens? Not really. But if you already have the program you already keep track of any unexplained aerial phenomena, so people speculating about aliens is basically guaranteed.
Why would you still disclose such things today?
Maybe you where responsible for some missing/crashed Soviet Aircraft or maybe some civilian casualties. Maybe by researching what causes what phenomena you develop some unusual plan which was never used (or build) but has successors which could be relevant if a WW3/Cold War2 starts. Who knows.
What I know is that all the examples about how supposedly we now have stuff based on alien tech seem nonsensical to me, as there is a long paper trail of how people invested that stuff it's parts it's non widely available predecessors etc.
Similar a program not related to aliens seems likely.
And people, including employees etc., coming up with all kind of "interesting" ideas what such a secret program actually does is also well in the area of what I would expect given my understanding of humans.
I don't know, I just have this idea that we aren't actually on the top of the food chain so to speak. Maybe it's farming for genetic diversity. Or maybe you start civilizations to get them to birth bespoke AI personalities, or some other wacky idea.
Yea, I feel like Aliens is not so far out of a possibility, and the theories are fun to play with... yet something grounds me and says there just are (and have been) some really smart people out there.
Grusch testified that UAP are observed everywhere the Navy operates across the globe. Additionally, allied and other military forces also admit the presence of UAP activity.
If we discovered alien planets filled with different "countries" and had some constraints on the time we could spend visiting each one for observation, wouldn't we likely choose the most militarily and economically powerful one to focus on? It wouldn't be 100% but it's plausible that it would be the main subject.
we've put dogs, monkeys, all sorts of other critters in to experimental aircraft.
also, the Russians (Soviets) / Chinese / Europe all have good air and space monitoring capabilities and satellites -- and there is an awful lot more land in Russia. Why aren't they confirming these things?
I'll say it again: this is a way for FedGov to burn media cycles as both Hunter Biden and Trump are facing indictments that have real teeth. Same story since the 90s and the Oklahoma City Bombing, a great way to keep the q-anon / rube demographic riled up.
What is most fascinating to me is I think that Blink-182 dude went and predicted all of this disclosure stuff was going to start happening on Rogan’s show like 5+ years ago
They claimed similarly spectacular things about about spiritual powers and psychics in the 60s and 70s, which turned out to be total bunk and most likely a funding scheme for the CIA.
If aliens are visiting us, why is the US the only nation to have any documentation? Are you telling me the collapse of communism, which caused everything from nuclear plans to biological weapon designs to leak, somehow left aliens untouched?
Clearly then they are also hiding the hollow earth and the lizardmen and the sentient troll drolls. But that argument doesn't work, right? Because just because they hid something previously doesn't mean they are guaranteed to be hiding what you want now.
Why are so many people here aggressively attacking the character of people who are open to non human intelligence and visitation? There's no reason for hostility and open-mindedness has minimal consequences, even on this issue.
I'm not attacking the person, I'm attacking the argument. I said nothing about the person. Was I dismissive of the argument? Absolutely, and I explained why. If they had a better argument for their position I'm open to it.
Those are all rather mundane things. Compared to intelligent life flying around in Earth, which, would presumably fly around many countries, not just the US, would require a coordinated, worldwide many year effort to keep secret.
Why do you think that the effort required would be significant? All they have to do is paint anyone claiming to have experienced it as a delusional crank and relegate those beliefs to the fringe. Even people like Michael Burry who had some level of insight into the GFC before it happened is these days often written off as a crank or is the subject of cliches like "even a broken clock is right twice a day". I don't think keeping it a secret is as important as keeping the idea in the domain of fantasy.
I find myself torn between my STEM-educated skeptic mind and my numerous DMT-induced visits to hyper-reality and communication with unfathomably advanced hyper-dimensional beings mind. I find it difficult to accept that these experiences were just the products of my own subconscious or imagination, as they were far beyond the capabilities of my wildest dreams and just felt too real, too alien, and too consistent. There has been some recent breakthroughs by Andrew Gallimore that have allowed researchers to extend the DMT experience indefinitely via the DMTx project, and the first trials have been completed by a group of serious researchers, all PhDs. They report extended contact with hyper-dimensional aliens/beings, on numerous sessions.
Now, I find it difficult to believe there isn't a plethora of intelligent life out there in the universe. There are just far too many star systems. I also find it difficult to believe that any have to come to visit. There is no evidence to support it, and think about it: the time, energy, and technology required to travel the vast expanse of space to reach Earth are unimaginably huge. And if they had that kind of technology, it would seem unlikely that they would routinely crash once they got here. Furthermore, we've only been producing radio waves for a short period of time, nowhere near long enough to signal a remote civilization that we're even here (I'm not sure our radio waves would even be detectable at those distances). And why would they even want to? At that level of sophistication, we would be nothing more than ants to them. Bacteria in a petri dish.
Yet, even we, as humans, spend a lot of effort researching ants. And bacteria, in petri dishes. And if the collective DMT community's experiences are to be believed, and we have contacted and communicated with advanced alien intelligences, they usually seem to be quite interested and curious about us too. This is a huge leap, but maybe the universe isn't what it seems. It could be data, data that could be manipulated from outside the confines of the simulation. Or, maybe there are higher dimensions of reality, that we are currently (mostly) incapable of detecting from our vantage point. Maybe the aliens exist in higher dimensions, and use these UFOs as lower dimension probes, that don't have to travel vast distances of space because they don't originate from other star systems. Maybe they crash because they're SUPPOSED to be found, maybe they want us to reverse engineer them to learn something, to accelerate our technological and scientific advancement.
Or maybe it's all poppycock. Maybe we're the first species that will possibly achieve interstellar transportation, and it will us that are the aliens visiting other primitive worlds. Only time will tell.
I identified a UFO yesterday. It was a UFO until I realized a finch flew past my camera too fast for it to focus. I suspect most UFO's are something like this. I would hope that all UFO investigations start with "Why were our sensors failing to do their job?" and/or "Why was someone able to trick/spoof our sensors?"
I can see why this would be classified. One should not leak to adversaries how miserably some of our sensors and cameras are failing. So that only leaves me with one question. Do governments stipulate in their vendor contracts that if {n} percent of objects can not be identified by some measurable means that they get a heavy discount on the improved sensors?
At least in the military, they have confirmed publicly that they routinely interact with UAP during training etc that are captured multiple ways: radar, FLIR, visual, cameras, etc. So it's not a sensor artifact. This resource is a good "just the facts" intro to the topic, as perceived by the US military and federal government: https://www.uap.guide/
I saw an unidentified object once, gave me a really cold feeling and scared the stuffing out of my wife. For about a minute we were really wondering what the hell this thing could be:
The simplest explanation I've come up with is that the politicians like Marco Rubio and Matt Gaetz are servicing the UFO conspiracy segment of their demographics by supporting and encouraging David Grusch to be a UAP whistleblower.
Grusch's extraordinary claims that the US has forced a global secrecy around the race to recover working and crashed non-human vehicles since 1930, that biological materials (aliens) and vehicles have been recovered multiple times, and that there is currently multiple countries in a "cold war" like race to recover these vehicles on an ongoing basis, seems fanciful.
A beneficial pragmatic outcome will be if there was more government transparency and removal of stigma around reporting UAP for civilian and military pilots.
Choice excerpt from Section 10a:
"The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good"
This is from Chuck Schumer, someone that hasn't been adjacent to this topic until now, out of nowhere.
- The late Harry Reid (Senator D-NV) was a huge proponent of pushing for more information on this topic, initiating the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) which was the precursor to a lot of these developments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Reid#UFOs
- Jared Moskowitz (Representative D-FL) was one of the three representatives pushing for this hearing
The U.S. should always have a program to study UAPs.
UAP is simply unidentified aerial phenomena. It’s in the US’s interests to study such phenomena in its airspace.
For example those Chinese balloons, until they were recognized as balloons, also were UAPs.
Supporting the study of UAPs, including potential alien UAPs, is a far cry from claiming the U.S. govt has found wreckage of alien technology and is driving a worldwide conspiracy along with many other govts to keep this information hidden from people.
The alien and ancient civilization stuff comes mostly from the gop. Rubio isn’t worried about ET - but bullshit like this is appealing to the nutjobs attracted to qanon, etc who vote.
UAPs aren’t little green men. A drone with AI controls fits the quotes description.
- The (democrat) senate majority leader mentioned "non human intelligence"
- Rubio _is_ worried about "ET", per multiple interviews where this is presented as a likely explanation for the observed behavior
- No, an "AI Controlled drone" does not "fit the quotes description", not in the slightest. You are either grossly misinformed about the claims, the capabilities of modern aircraft (black or otherwise), or intentionally misleading others.
If I were a congressional leader, I’d be more than a little concerned about swarms of unidentified drones flying around ships in US territorial waters.
The implication of aliens is a “Lucy with the football” play — a certain number of people always take the bait, and others laugh. It was done in the 50s, again in the 80s when Tomahawk missiles and stealth aircraft were tested, etc. Now the prospect of aliens is covering for some threat.
The general response in this discussion is skeptical, and I can understand the hesitation to broach the UFO/UAP topic, particularly when the topic has been vilified for literally decades. However, we are now in a legitimately different era of discussion of these topics, and you have to be willing to open your mind to the idea that these efforts are legitimate.
The bipartisanship at the hearing is to be commended, and the national security angle cannot be overstated. All three witnesses believe these UAP are genuine national security threats because they possess flight capabilities far exceeding anything beyond what we have. These UAP were documented on multiple military sensor platforms, some of which are still classified.
You must realize the USG has been and is engaged in an active disinformation campaign to deny existence of UAP, even to Congress. For example, multiple Subcommittee members mentioned that they wanted to meet in a SCIF with Grusch to receive a classified briefing but could not. A direct quote from the hearing: "Just so that the press knows and the people know, we [members of the Subcommittee] were even denied access to a classified briefing in a SCIF due to the amount of hoops we had to jump through to grant temporary clearance to witness Grusch, who has knowledge of classified information." Additionally, multiple members of Congress were initially denied access to data and personnel related to a UAP incident reported at Eglin AFB and in the end only received a portion of what was sought. Clear attempts to prevent elected officials from merely accessing relevant information is a genuine threat to national security because the military serves the people, not the other way around.
All three witnesses are trained and decorated military service members, each of which have since left the military. Their situational awareness and observational abilities are much better than you or me, particularly since we haven't been explicitly trained on such while they have. Additionally, Grusch is documented to have worked in both the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), two sensitive branches of the military intelligence community. As far as I'm aware, the NRO ships and provides military sensing platforms, and the NGA performs analysis from many different military data streams, including the NRO. Grusch even said in his opening statement that, at the NGA, he had a hand in making the Presidential Daily Briefing.
One commenter here says it's "more reasonable to assume this is psyops by an adversary", which is, by definition, a conspiracy theory, given that the commenter has no evidence of such occurring and would prefer to live in a world where three former US military service members are coerced to commit perjury to Congress about something which doesn't actually exist. Moreover, if an adversarial nation possesses craft with the capabilities described by the three witnesses, drawing any attention, even through an active disinformation campaign, to that strategic advantage is a clear breach of operational security with no clear, tangible benefit.
The preponderance of evidence in support of the existence of UAP should be overwhelming unless you've made the choice to not accept the premise: that intelligent life beyond humanity exists.
There is no physical evidence whatsoever. The only “evidence” is hearsay. Also, the members of the committee can lie without repercussions, so I don’t believe them. And the military lies to the public all the time.
You do know that you literally can't make that claim in good faith, right? That is simply your belief and, in fact, is contrary to the testimony of all three witnesses, all of which were personally invited to speak before Congress because of what they know. Clearly, you were not invited, though I suppose that itself is a belief.
All three witnesses claim that advanced military sensor platforms have gathered extensive information on UAP. Is that a piece of a craft? No. However, one of the witnesses testified under oath that he had direct knowledge of where such materials exist. You should want to see where his claims lead, if you truly believe in your closing statement.
>The only “evidence” is hearsay.
If that's your position, you didn't watch the hearing. One of the three witnesses is only there because he experienced a UAP while serving as a flight commander, and his former aviators reluctantly persuaded him to come forward. That individual is a primary source.
>Also, the members of the committee can lie without repercussions, so I don’t believe them. And the military lies to the public all the time.
Any person can dismiss extraordinary evidence as illegitimate if they reject the underlying premise. You can have video evidence of a person clearly committing murder, but that doesn't mean a family member won't still claim it's not them or it's fabricated. A piece of material from a craft could be brought out in a hearing, and some people will still claim that it's fake or impossible to prove that it wasn't made on Earth in a government lab. An alien could testify before Congress, and some people will claim it's an elaborate fake using rubber masks and advanced robotics.
In this case, we do have historically-extraordinary evidence (submitted as sworn Congressional testimony and personal statements) of the existence of UAP. You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises:
- Physics as is commonly accepted is incomplete.
- Military pilots are better observers than the average person.
- Life of equal or greater intelligence exists beyond humanity.
> In this case, we do have historically-extraordinary evidence (submitted as sworn Congressional testimony and personal statements) of the existence of UAP.
If mere words are your standard of evidence, then we are different. I need to see/sense/understand myself to believe - material/physical and photographic evidence, and expert, scientific, independently confirmed, reproducible analysis. If you don't, I have a bunch of stories to tell you.
> You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises [...]
I don’t want to argue about this, but I will say that I want this to be real. I want to believe. And I agree some people are too skeptical.
However I still need some kind of hard physical evidence to start going down that path. Hopefully it shows up eventually, but I’m not holding my breath.
Fair enough. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Having studied the "UFO phenomenon" with a rational, evidence-seeking mind for some years now (guess you'll just have to take my word on that) and trying to put myself in the shoes of a national government, it's hard to find significant fault with the military's actions regarding UAPs over the past 80 years. To a large degree, I get why they've done what they've done. Happy to explain more if you'd like, but the gist is, the world just wasn't ready.
We know that intel agencies and military routinely lie to Congress; many times historically and several major ones in just my lifetime:
- Iraq WMDs
- dragnet surveillance
- ANA will fight the Taliban
We also know they obscure the truth, eg Victoria Nuland responding to the question about “chemical or biological weapons” in Ukraine by nodding as she spoke about “research labs”.
We also know the CIA has previously hacked the computers of a congressional investigation into their misconduct.
The default assumption is that this is concocted narratives to raise military funding from an increasingly impoverished and war-weary public — sickened by the MIC waste and ineptitude (eg, we can’t repair ships and all of NATO manufactures fewer artillery shells than Russia alone).
This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
Yes, government and military officials have lied to Congress or, at the very least, obscure the truth. Consider that, in many cases, these officials are actively serving in their official capacity and have a sworn duty to protect the country. Preventing the disclosure of certain information is a major part of what they do.
Since you mention the "yellow-cake uranium," you should read the history of that situation. It wasn't a single person's word before Congress that Saddam Hussein had the uranium but the result of an elaborate document forgery which was proven as false within a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
However, each case you cite is either the justification or result of a highly-publicized event (Iraq invasion, Snowden investigation, Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine war). The UAP situation is quashed and remains a verboten subject in many circles, particularly in the media. As such, the UAP situation is distinct from those you mention.
You do suggest that this may be a way to raise military funding. If money was the end goal, they'd say that the US military could disable UAPs if we had more firepower or plowed more money into R&D to realize next-gen systems sooner. None of that was said, and both the witnesses and members of Congress directly contradict this theory. The witnesses admit that our existing military systems and any that we may build in the next "10-20 years" are inadequate to deal with the observed UAPs.
Some of my favorite questioning in the hearing came from AOC, who, when asking about increasing transparency in reporting UAP incidents, asked: "For the record, if you were me, where would you look? Titles? Programs? Departments? Regions? If you could just name...anything." Grusch responded he tell her "specifically" where to look but only in a classified briefing, which she took well enough.
>This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
They're individuals with verified and decorated military service records and have provided sworn testimony to Congress under penalty of perjury, which is far from zero credibility. As an anonymous individual posting on Hacker News, I have zero credibility beyond what anyone chooses to believe, and I suppose that's the main point: extraordinary claims require belief in extraordinary evidence.
This whole thing is just making me have less and less faith in society.
There's no fucking way this is remotely true, but everywhere I look, not matter the community, there's so much "what if" nonsense that reeks of the same ignorance those people screamed about when that was the argument for COVID conspiracies.
The energy required to travel through space is obscene.
The difficulty of traveling through space is obscene.
Finding ANYTHING in space is obscene.
IF somehow all of this was done, then the idea it's been kept a secret when there's soooo many ways of tracking and viewing these things is stupid (especially when you consider how much energy would need to be expended).
This is also assuming that for some reason they want to remain secret?
The whole thing is just so on it's face bs, but people so desperately want to believe they'll ignore all evidence. I can understand that, but I HATE the hypocrisy on display from those who are routinely critical of others for having such gaps in their logic.
I agree this is unlikely to be true, but I keep in mind what we know now and what we knew 1 million years ago. The energy to run a PC would seem obscene to people even thousands of years ago (let alone what a PC is and what it can do). Pull someone from earlier in this timeline and see what they think of airplanes.
2.6 million years ago: Stone tools
1.7 million years ago: Controlled fire
5,000 - 3,000 BC: Writing
3,000 BC: The wheel
1543: Nicolaus Copernicus publishes his heliocentric model of the solar system
1687: Newton publishes "Principia Mathematica"
1915: Albert Einstein publishes the general theory of relativity.
1969: Apollo 11 mission successfully lands the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon.
This is exactly my thought as well. There are a bunch of very interesting things in development: fusion energy is getting closer and closer, approaches for warp bubbles are being discovered without humongous energy requirements, possibly a room-temperature normal-pressure superconductor, etc.
It's hard to predict how much research all of these will take to fully harness, but given our previous rate of progress I'm still very hopeful that the world in 100 years will have technology we can't even dream of.
You provided an timeline of human evolution, but has fundamental physics changed at the core?
Unfortunately, we haven't found any drop-in replacement to Newton's first & second laws for e.g.; Conversely, more & more of physics is condensing towards established standard models proving that our model of universe is more definite. In the quantum space our research is mostly finding new interactions, not fundamental particles everyday. Energy & it transformations are the biggest truths eventually. To propel crafts capable of interstellar voyage, immense energy burst is needed for propulsion. We have seen no evidence of the kind of physics which will break relativistic models - and no material which can sustain the thermals in the process.
At the core of it, our chances to find another habitable world & intelligent species wherever they might be is rapidly reducing. Universe is expanding faster than previous estimated and probably double as old if you consider recent research. Our window of opportunity to establish contact passed probably before we came into existence.
It is like predicting we'll be able to detect God by advances one day. That supernatural being could exist - but most scientific evidence points to a hard no, given we already know it is a mental / emotional construction.
A laptop consumes energy at the same order of magnitude as a human body—not an “obscene” amount. The physics of accelerating an organism to the relativistic speeds required to make space travel feasible are in a completely different realm.
That's what this all boils down to. It's the exact same line of logic.
Sure there could be an omnipotent all powerful being that just chooses to stay hidden from us for no provable, observable, or obvious reason. It's just impossible to prove or disprove.
What if they don't need to accelerate? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy. What if they can teleport? Neat, it's STILL a shitton of energy. What if they can hop dimensions or bend the universe? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy.
What if it's not a shit ton of energy? Fuck it why not, how did they find us? They have tech for that? Fuck it why not, why aren't they showing themselves beyond these extremely rare sightings? They have a reason for that. Fuck it why not, why would every government hide these? Tech or war or something. Fuck it why not, why hasn't SETI or one of the thousand other independent science observatories or detectors not picked up any of this or reported on it?.....
and on and on and on.
So i can't prove that tomorrow the Sun God Ra won't descend from the heavens and sit atop the pyramids as if it was his throne and rule from on high, but I damn sure don't have any evidence that's why the sun is moving across the sky.
If I was the government exchequer and comfortably spending on the refrigeration of alien entrails & annually greasing their flying saucers, I wouldn't _additionally_ spend billions of dollars setting up space observatories like JWST, new radio wave telescopes & deep space probes to find evidence of life. At the least, experts from scientific community will be invited to investigate any material finds & that information will trickle out in tiny amounts. Scientific community deeply believes in replication at its core. It is impossible for everything to remain compartmental.
And acknowledging existence of alien technology only makes the position of a country more formidable, not less. Our global relationship is today less of muscle (like the past) & more posturing. By acknowledging otherworldly technology's existence but denying the details, US would be incredibly in advantageous position militarily. Why wouldn't they if they already possessed these technology?
We as human race may be spiteful to our brethren, but not stupid given the obscene expenditure of wealth and resources we dedicate annually in lieu of feeding & keeping everyone happy
You comment sound like a “know-it-all”. We don’t know what these crafts are, where they are from and how they came here. A little humble attitude is more aligned with reality: there’s so much we don’t know.
My comment is based on the current understanding of physics and the odds of some creature capable of defying that being able to even be hidden.
I would love for us to find evidence of life in the universe which is why I despise this charade which takes attention away from the scientists who are actually trying to do so. But apparently SETI is in on it too or some other nonsense.
I would suggest you consider the possibility that the current understanding of physics a thousand years from now will look very different from how it looks today.
Even more so a million years from now.
The reality is that we're not a particularly intelligent species - as shown by the fact that we're currently terraforming our own planet to make it less hospitable.
Our culture may well be extinct within a century. So I think it's optimistic to believe that we as a species have much of a clue about anything at all.
Now put that in the context of an extremely old universe, and it's not hard to understand that we're unlikely to be the smartest people in the room.
FWIW I'm agnostic about UFOs. The problem is that they conflate two issues - aerial phenomena, and alien visitation.
There's no reason those should be connected. Or that the latter would inevitably be responsible for the former.
The scientific thing to do is to collect evidence of the former before assuming the latter.
Who also somehow are aware of the location of earth, it having life, haven't made themselves known, and have only been seen in a way the governments can hush up (all of them).
People need to believe in something. Multiple things. Anything. It’s why thousands of religions exist.
Most people have mundane lives and are wage slaves. This gives people hope. People want to believe there is more to life. Americans in particular want to believe their government is all powerful.
It should not be so shocking how easy it is to get people to believe this, or the fake moon landing, or anything else. People desperately want to believe, and the government is happy to enable it because it provides stability.
I'm not sure which URL is best so not sure where to marge the threads, most of which aren't very good anyhow. This is a topic on which people mostly just repeat their priors.
Why would a bunch of republicans want to distract from something they’ve been desperately trying to use as an attack on Biden for years? This is a bipartisan hearing.
The Biden family’s corruption is so blatant and brazen, that if they really wanted to drag him through the mud they would.
I’m sure there’s a lot of this kind of corruption going on with Republicans in Congress as well so there’s a sort of mutually assured destruction protecting all of them.
The biggest question to ask is, why after 90 years of secrecy, coverups, and gaslighting the general public, have they started the disclosure process, specifically starting with that New York Times/Pentagon confirmed story in 2017.
“I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access,” Grusch told the committee.
Not sure if this is an insane person, a grifter looking for a book deal, or someone trying to trigger an investigation. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say we probably haven’t been studying a crashed alien spaceship for decades.
In theory, Congress should already know about the existence or not existence of aliens/UFOs, so what's the point here? To show that congress isn't being informed?
The point is program management & constitutionality:
1. Do programs exist over which Congress has no knowledge and/or oversight. If so, this is likely unconstitutional.
2. Do programs exist because Congressionally appropriated funds have been covertly redirected to those programs without Congressional knowledge. If so, likely unconstitutional.
3. Have whistleblowers been threatened or harmed to prevent disclosure and/or testimony. If so, likely a violation of US criminal statutes, and likely unconstitutional - particularly if those whistleblowers intended to provide Congressional testimony in accordance with Congress's oversight role.
The point is not disclosure, confirming existence or declassification - despite what you may hear. It could be one or more of those things occur, but likely not via these hearings.
Oversight can be as simple as notice to the "Gang of Eight" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence), or possibly the Intel/Defense committee ranking members, and need NOT to be to the entire Congress or even full committee membership. The accusations in these hearings seem to allege this minimal notice did not take place. The testimony also claims extra-governmental (possibly private sector) program management with no political accountability.
In sum... this appears to be a (necessary) power struggle over programs & information. At the same time - and depending on what the real truth may be - one can make a convincing argument little of this information should be public & these programs should remain off the books. Depends on your confidence in the body politic and Congress.
Perhaps, but as we've seen the law and the Constitution are subject to interpretation and to the extent that the law is enforced.
There are no aliens hidden by any government in the world. It's impossible to keep something like that under wraps. This whole thing is put on because it's a good way to distract the public and all politicians who are tough on aliens get political points and votes.
And just to be clear - you can't simultaneously think that the government has the capability to hide aliens but also discredit that the moon landings (for example) were faked. If you find yourself thinking "well they could be hiding aliens" ask yourself if you also find "they faked the moon landing" to be ridiculous - it's the same logic.
They do already know. They've already gotten a full briefing, and won't ask any questions that they don't know the answer to.
The purpose of the hearing is to do that again in public. In theory, the idea is to get the information distributed more widely. In practice, it's usually about grandstanding, so that the politicians get to make speeches on TV.
Incorrect. If you listen to the actual testimony or have been paying attention to the details you will learn Congress is being stonewalled and its ability to provide oversight and appropriation (its constitutional duties) appears to be nonexistent. These hearings are shining a very public light on this as a means of rallying support for real Congressional oversight and less "off the books" management of these programs. That's not to say this is a good idea. Congress is inept and a good argument can be made for the status quo ante.
This hearing really isn't about theory or based on your notions of what is likely. Instead, it stemmed from a whistleblower complaint regarding bureaucratic security layers to obfuscate projects from Congressional oversight. These projects are compartmentalized behind SAPs and misappropriation of government funds.
Presuming there was actually some aliens/UFOs to know about in the first place (I'm pretty confident there aren't any actual alien UFOs, but that doesn't mean there aren't secret programs dedicated to UFOs), it is likely that most of congress wouldn't know about it and only a few congressmen on the right committees would know. Not every member of congress is informed of all the secrets the American government has. Particularly, those 17 on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence know a lot more than the rest. And even they may be kept in the dark about some things.
I have always felt that given how far away they must be, and the challenge involved in crossing that space, the most ridiculous belief is that some extra-terrestrial intelligent life is simultaneously able to build ships that get here (meaning they're far more technologically advanced than us) and yet not able to hide them from us. Or that they get here and have a breakdown right over New Mexico. Or their drone couldn't just self-destruct before we got it. Etc.
While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere, the idea that it got here and then made a mistake seems strange to me.
And I've always thought the military didn't investigate these UFOs because they weren't unidentified to them. They're just FOs when you're the one who built them.
I really doubt we've been visited by aliens but one could have stolen a ship and took a ride here not knowing how to fully operate it. It's entirely possible their government is suppressing the existence of aliens and we've been visited by their whistleblowers/journalists.
I really hope that is the case because it’s a great story.
I also can’t imagine a species that has interstellar travel, but manually operated ships. I think we are not that far from humans not operating any forms of transportation anymore, and we are at best thousands of years from having the technology to visit anywhere life may exist.
Would you self destruct your broken down car so that ants couldn't get a hold of the technology? Would you care if the ants you are studying notice you?
I imagine it would be kind of similar to how we feel about those remote tribes in Brazil or India, or places like that where governments intentionally and prohibit contact, yes. I mean I can’t be sure of that by any means, but I think that if we discovered life on another planet, we would probably leave it alone, unless, of course, it had something we need. And it’s hard to imagine one planet having any resources that are important to somebody who already has faster than light travel.
> While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere
I disagree, it's pretty easy to make "Drake equations" go to zero, particularly if you limit the scope to just the Milky Way galaxy (only 10^11 stars.) The Rare Earth Hypothesis is consistent with all of our empirical observations of the universe thus-far.
I don’t think it’s easy to make the Drake equation go to zero, though it is within the relatively limited section of the universe from which of visitor could get here.
Two or three independent "one in a million" chances will push the Drake equation to near zero in the milky way. Such chances could be things like "chance of multicellular life developing from unicellular" (took billions of years on earth, maybe it was never likely to happen in the first place) or "chance for multicellular life to invent radios" (overwhelming majority of multicellular life on earth was never going to invent radios. Evolution isn't directed to create tool-inventing apes.)
Or it could be a few dozen 50/50 chances that need to be cleared, or some mix of the two. Drake equations only spit out "aliens likely" if you assume earth-like planets will inevitably create human-like life but that's a hell of an assumption. And then we look into the night sky and see/hear nothing from the aliens that supposedly must be up there and call it a paradox... well it's not a paradox if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true. If the empirical evidence is saying one thing and the speculative math is saying another thing, it's probably the speculative math that's wrong.
The various congressional committees are supposed to know everything the federal government is doing so they can provide oversight, AFAIK. Something big like UFOs should have come up I'd imagine
Supposed to know is not the same as know. If they learn from a whistleblower that a program exists and has been kept secret from them, the people that are supposed to know about it, what would you have them do? Publicly investigate the claims, right? That's what they're doing.
If they did reverse engineer these UFOs, they must have kept it very secret from the NASA SLS team, and EVERYONE at Boeing. If they secretly gave it all to spaceX then maybe we get a _slightly_ compelling argument…
They most likely haven't been able to reverse engineer much, if anything. But I suspect a profit motive was part of keeping it secret. If everyone knows, then other companies will compete to look at the materials and the contractors could lose out on a lot of money.
People don’t invent an amazing thing and then keep it secret to make a profit. they patent it and make a product or license it.
I am totally willing to believe they managed to keep something secret. Hell if it’s true it means they actually did a pretty shit job because everyone knows the word ‘Roswell’
But I don’t buy that after 50 years they haven’t made a single useful thing out of what they found. Where’s my flying saucer damn it? Where’s some new amazing power source that any craft getting here must have been using?
I'm saying that they weren't able to invent anything. Maybe they learned about new materials, but it's one thing to know the molecular composition of a material and another to actually make it. So, being selfish assholes, they want to keep it a secret. Government officials are more than happy to award sole source contracts when they're offered a cushy job after retirement.
