[HN Gopher] US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO re...
___________________________________________________________________
US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval
programs
Author : fork-bomber
Score : 221 points
Date : 2023-06-28 13:08 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thehill.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehill.com)
| haswell wrote:
| I'm not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the
| interest of curiosity and for sake of argument...
|
| Let's say that there are real ET craft, and let's say that the US
| government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for
| decades.
|
| If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind
| that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the
| problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to
| introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow
| coming clean.
|
| If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the
| article seems like one of the few ways they can start to
| introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound
| like they know what this is and they need to establish the
| channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if "this" is
| all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET
| craft).
|
| Everyone is focused on "what is this distracting us from?", and
| maybe that's all that this is, but even if this is misdirection,
| there's something going on that's making elected officials and
| reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.
|
| That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.
|
| It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I'm pretty curious
| to see where this goes.
| asdff wrote:
| I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing
| for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are
| literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for
| generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Especially
| if its a truth that has been kept secret for so long, that
| would be particularly damning for the legitimacy of current
| governments of the world in the eyes of most people, I would
| assume.
|
| On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have
| to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit
| hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer,
| people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned
| and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains
| the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in
| human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists
| profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today.
|
| This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| > I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very
| destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day
| if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes?
| Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your
| god?
|
| Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent
| invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in
| any significant way.
|
| You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat
| you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there
| are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians
| already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars
| regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's
| some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as
| an invasion or war.
|
| The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is
| that it would probably cause some people to question
| religion. But the opposite could also be true and the
| religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a
| god because only a god could conceive of such technology.
| pc86 wrote:
| What are you smoking where there's a clear line from "this
| thing crashed in the desert 50 years ago, we still know
| basically nothing about it" to everyone becoming an atheist
| and tax evader?
|
| Alien intelligence would be one of the most important
| discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the
| next morning and go to work.
| moffkalast wrote:
| A real eye opener regarding this has been the ongoing war
| in Ukraine. For some reason I always had this picture of
| war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and
| stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way,
| whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock,
| that sort of thing.
|
| But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily
| basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets
| being shelled and people just go to work and school or
| whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end,
| what else can you really do? Life is banal.
|
| Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get
| people to stop living in a society then literally nothing
| else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus,
| not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok
| that last one might do it.
| lisasays wrote:
| _Their entire country is being blown up on a daily
| basis,_
|
| That's the thing - except for places very close to the
| front lines, only very tiny portion of the country is
| getting hit.
|
| So no, it's not "the entire country, on a daily basis".
|
| You are correct though that the media loves to paint it
| as a 24x7 apocalyptic hellscape (mostly via selective
| imagery, independent of what is actually said in the
| articles). That's how they get your anxiety molecules
| jumping, and thus make their money, after all.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was
| created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist
| somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just
| say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is
| how it works?
| haswell wrote:
| This was my first thought as well, and I think there are a
| number of possible reasons:
|
| - The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be
| unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within
| plausible timeframes
|
| - They know it exists, but don't know how it works, and there
| are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that
| understanding
|
| - They believe adversaries have already figured things out or
| have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to
| drum up public support for another space race type of
| research project
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > " _They believe adversaries have already figured things
| out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing
| urgency to drum up public support for another space race
| type of research project_ "
|
| I would vote for this one, but this hypothesis doesn't need
| the ET part.
| delecti wrote:
| That's an interesting thought experiment.
|
| Any technology that much more advanced than our own would
| require intermediary technologies before we could replicate
| it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't
| be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood
| it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy,
| manufacturing precision, etc.
|
| The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly
| advanced technology would necessarily lead to an
| incremental advancement before we got to the end result,
| and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on
| current technology.
|
| There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch
| of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a
| few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien
| technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't
| cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the
| surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very
| good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to
| keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big
| that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
| Sunspark wrote:
| > If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't
| be able to replicate it in one step even if they
| understood it, because you need sufficiently refined
| fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.
|
| A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100%
| understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching,
| but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it
| looks. The chain alone is a problem.
| avar wrote:
| Why would the chain be a problem? The Romans could make
| metal rods, rivets, and some of their finer metalwork is
| crafted with more precision than any bicycle chain.
|
| The real difference is that it would take an army of
| ancient craftsmen to make one bike.
|
| The real distinguishing factor with modernity is mass
| manufacturing and precision at scale.
|
| Even moreso income inequality and competition with
| slavery.
|
| Any roman who could afford a bicycle would rightly think
| it was rubbish compared to a horse. All this expense just
| to propel myself around?!
|
| The same goes for most modern conveniences. Even the best
| modern dishwasher is less efficient than a human slave
| doing the same task, if you're indifferent to the
| suffering of the slave, as the Romans were.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| >Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech
| was created in any of 1000 labs?
|
| Because the type of exotic field propulsion these things are
| using is so far beyond the current state of the art it
| wouldn't be remotely plausible.
|
| It would be like going from vacuum tubes to 3nm EUV in a
| single step, no one would believe you.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Supposedly a few pieces of technology that we use in military
| and everyday use were created using alien technology. Stealth
| fighters and holograms. But I have read the book about the
| engineering/creation of the f-117 stealth fighter at
| skunkworks and nothing in that airplane doesn't seem like it
| could be created using currently understood scientific
| principles. One thing that did stand out was the timeline
| from creation to delivery was very short, also the plane
| cannot fly using just human piloting, a advanced computer
| must make micro adjustments to the crafts trajectory every
| second or the plane crashes. This was done in the late 70s so
| that seems extremely advanced for back then so who knows.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| There is not a single invention out in the world today that
| came from alien technology, that came out of left field, or
| has no paper trail of terrestrial origin. Holography for
| example has been a hot topic since the 1600s, combine
| holography with the invention of photography and you get
| holograms.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device
| would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being
| more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a
| technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves.
| If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th
| century and they expended all the resources at the world's
| disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't learn
| anything about it at all, and it wouldn't advance technology a
| bit, at least not for a hundred years or so.
|
| If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there
| is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to
| reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since
| 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all
| we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium
| metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with
| no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to
| work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
| avar wrote:
| The craft might also have had a contained self-destruct
| mechanism.
|
| The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an
| iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the
| remnants of one that had been vaporized.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > if the government is forced to reveal it
|
| The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-
| warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the
| ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this
| magnitude?
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| Congress could pass a law requiring it to be revealed, the
| president could order it, leaking of additional information
| could cause public outcry leading to one of the above.
|
| I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it
| to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity
| will make them do it'.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I don't think the people allegedly involved in this
| alleged coverup have shown any respect for laws or norms.
| They can just keep lying and obfuscating. The only way
| they would ever disclose anything is if they wanted to.
|
| We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable
| for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's
| laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable,
| nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are
| responsible for a government program cloaked in so much
| secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.
| justinclift wrote:
| > no legal pathway to introduce to the public
|
| So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things
| it'd like developed in certain areas? /s
|
| I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure
| out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not
| going to raise many eyebrows.
| haswell wrote:
| I think that would all depend on how advanced this
| hypothetical tech is, and the timeframe in which someone
| wants it known to the public. DARPA may not provide enough
| cover for sufficiently advanced discoveries that cannot be
| explained without raising bigger questions.
|
| It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for
| adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical
| discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield
| more.
|
| Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries
| reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and
| enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary
| goal.
|
| And again, I'm not saying these are _likely_ explanations.
| But in the unlikely event that we're really talking about
| alien tech, they seem plausible.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| There is also that fermi paradox resolution that basically
| says the same tech that unlocks infinite energy also
| unlocks the ability to destroy ourselves. So in theory
| there could be good reasons for avoiding commercialization
| of highly advanced technology, if it means that within a
| century some guy on the street could build an apparatus
| that destroys the planet in an industrial accident.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and
| are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is
| here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we
| probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like
| the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns
| and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the
| ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and
| just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other
| tech in the least.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Whoa, that's far from true.
|
| They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no.
| Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would
| absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of
| it ever produced a working firearm.
|
| The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards.
| Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of
| reeds may not work out, but would have led to their
| independent discovery of fireworks.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how
| to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone
| age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify
| is the charcoal. The other components are going to be
| unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled
| into the powder that they are inseparable without
| techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to
| evaporate the water to get the salt out of it.
|
| Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was
| a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what
| iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that
| happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like
| iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals
| like copper first to develop smelting techniques and
| nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find,
| mine and smelt copper or iron.
| jstarfish wrote:
| I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a
| lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create
| a single component of a functional firearm, but they're
| going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying.
| Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would
| still have given us Velcro.
| asdff wrote:
| If they had this technology I'd assume there would be no
| point of revealing it, since you'd lose the advantage of
| secrecy over it for no good reason. The US military is
| capable enough against other nations with conventional
| technology. I'd expect if this tech were employed in war it
| would be in defense of the planet itself.
| nimbius wrote:
| So to temper expectations, the article only cites Republican
| Marco Rubio has having any real inquisitive drive to unearth
| clandestine UFO knowledge.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
|
| Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and draw
| attention away from several state supreme court rulings striking
| down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted and
| championed by republicans. If not that, then to draw attention
| away from the spectacle of republican cooperation during
| successful debt ceiling negotiations.
| DrThunder wrote:
| [flagged]
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Rubio is a member of the "gang of eight" which means he's about
| as uniparty as they come - the letters next to the names of
| people on that committee do not mean anything. Their allegiance
| is to the military industrial complex. They've all got the
| stamp of approval of the US intel community, which has probably
| been spying on them and blackmailing them since they launched
| their first political campaigns.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and
| draw attention away from several state supreme court rulings
| striking down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted
| and championed by republicans.
|
| Mostly, those have been federal trial courts (and some, like
| the Florida drag ban one, also preliminary injunctions
| preventing enforcement while the case proceeds, not final
| rulings striking them down) not state supreme courts issuing
| the rulings.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| Senator Gillibrand (D) has been working on this with as much
| interest and conviction as Rubio for several years now.
| [deleted]
| bsaul wrote:
| This whole narrative on UFO coming from US Gov at the exact same
| moment the fear around covid has faded is so suspicious.. It's
| really really hard not to see it as a pathetic attempt at keeping
| the population in a state of mass hysteria.
|
| (yes i know this sound completely paranoid, but i have absolutely
| no other idea why they would do that)
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| These inquiries predate covid (UAPTF started in 2017).
| eli wrote:
| Sounds more nonsensical than anything. Why would "they" want to
| do this? Who is "they"?
|
| Marco Rubio is talking about UFOs now, but he played down covid
| and was against lockdowns and masking.
| bsaul wrote:
| So it's just a feeling then. Although i talked to another
| friend who made exactly the same observation on its own,
| without concerting: all of the sudden, some very official
| sounding declarations from US "officials" making public
| statement suggesting there may be something real after all
| about UFOs.
|
| I have no idea who "they" is, but i assume it's pretty easy
| for a small group of congressmen to spread rumors and
| declarations on a given topic in the media (from my
| understanding it is done regularely as a consequence of
| lobbyist work).
| eli wrote:
| I think it's much more likely that there's nothing to this,
| rather than it being part of a secret ongoing conspiracy to
| manipulate the public.
| vanillax wrote:
| What ever China has, is because it stole it from US
| public/private companies. So if China is trolling us, its with
| our own tech. This puts US in a equally worse spot. Share that
| you have secret high tech items, at the expense of admitting CCP
| agents also brought it back home...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I like to consider just listing as many alternatives as I could
| manage, in order of decreasing likelihood (as per my personal
| estimation):
|
| 1) Some kind of psy-ops from within our own government, meant to
| mess with a different government or a branch of our own
| government. Maybe its own citizens. You can get eleven-
| dimensional chess with this pretty quickly.
|
| 2) We have grabbed someone else's UAVs. Maybe China, maybe
| Russia.
|
| 3) We have grabbed the UAVs of an unsuspected party which a
| surprise technological edge we would never expect: the Wakanda
| Hypothesis. We don't even know that we're in a game and that
| we're losing.
|
| ...
|
| N-3) Aliens have emerged from local gas giants and are curious
| about us. Jupiter? Saturn? Neptune? And so on. Probably not
| Pluto.
|
| N-2) Generation ships or "sleepers" from another solar system are
| on some sort of grand tour of the Orion Arm, working their way
| out. We've been noticed and the occupants awakened. Aliens? AI?
| Maybe there is no difference by then.
|
| N-1) Aliens within a light sphere about 0.45 * (First UFO Year -
| 1895) heard our radio and really hustled to get here with a hefty
| blueshift.
|
| N) The captured vessels are either FTL-capable or brought here on
| a larger ship with such capabilities. All bets are off.
|
| There is another possibility which I think is often ignored,
| after #3. It's sci-fi, but it isn't physics-breaking the way FTL
| is. What if the craft are from a parallel earth? I dislike it,
| but not as much as I dislike FTL. It doesn't even require aliens.
| A parallel history where we got the ball rolling even a few
| decades earlier might end up with a civilization a hundred or a
| thousand years ahead of ours. I wouldn't bet money on anything
| higher than #2 on my list, but I still think that if we are going
| to conjecture about aliens, we might as well do parallel Earths,
| too.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Call me when we other countries supposedly find such UFOs.
| RadixDLT wrote:
| Aliens watching the US Congress like... 'Wow, even we didn't
| think they'd go this far with the cover-ups!'
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd rather Congress indulged in this fantasy than the fantasy
| budgets Biden gets passed.
| api wrote:
| I have heard these types of claims many times. The people making
| them seem more credible at first glance this time, but I am
| firmly in the camp of being deeply skeptical until I see concrete
| proof presented.
|
| That being said, I don't completely discount the possibility. One
| answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn't one, and I can
| think of many reasons multiple governments would try to keep
| stuff like this secret.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| The thing that bothers me is they supposedly have 12 or more
| craft that have crashed.
|
| Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to
| travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so
| easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
|
| I'd like to believe, and I think 1 or 2 might be reasonable but
| the claim is 12, which doesn't account for ships obtained by
| other nations as Grusch said I'd happening.
|
| I still believe it's possible, and hope it is, however
| something feels staged about this, maybe to get more money for
| certain agencies, or some other motive.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough
| to travel millions of light years through space but it
| crashes so easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
|
| Multiple different sets of aliens, fighting over Earth. (I'm
| not saying that this is true, just that it is one scenario
| that explains crashes happening if there were aliens as
| described building craft capable of visiting Earth.)
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Maybe they're crashing the crafts on purpose to ease the
| human race into accepting their presence. Maybe they're
| gifts. Maybe it's not DoD running psyops, but the aliens
| themselves...
| sidfthec wrote:
| > Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough
| to travel millions of light years through space but it
| crashes so easy on earth?
|
| Selection bias. We don't know how many crafts fail to make it
| to Earth. Maybe the trip is extremely dangerous and only a
| percentage actually make it.
|
| And/or, like most air & space travel, takeoff and landing are
| the most dangerous parts.
|
| Also, we have a very good handle on air travel, but planes
| still crash sometimes.
|
| (I don't actually believe we have ET crafts coming to earth,
| but it's fun thinking it through).
| Sunspark wrote:
| They aren't necessarily designed to return. All our probes to
| Mars, etc. are one-way.
| [deleted]
| api wrote:
| If this were actually true, I'd guess one of:
|
| (1) The probes, like ours, are not designed to return and
| have a limited life span. Maybe they just gather and transmit
| data until their power source runs out or something on them
| breaks and they crash.
|
| (2) Maybe there are _thousands_ of probes or even more (even
| from multiple sources!) and only a small percentage of them
| crash. Of course one would assume we 'd be seeing them more
| often if this were true.
|
| (3) We shot them down. That's not impossible, especially if
| they are just probes and were not designed to deal with
| something intelligent intentionally flinging high velocity
| chunks of metal at them.
|
| The last could easily occur if we mistook them for e.g.
| Soviet/Russian or Chinese surveillance craft and they
| repeatedly refused to respond to orders to withdraw.
|
| Why would someone send probes here? This planet has been
| broadcasting "possible biosphere right here!" for at least
| hundreds of millions of years to anyone capable of doing
| spectroscopy on the light it reflects. You wouldn't be able
| to see detail from another star but you could determine
| things like atmospheric makeup and conclude that there is
| very likely to be something interesting here. You'd see a ton
| of oxygen (which is hard to explain abiotically), water
| vapor, traces of hydrocarbons, and possibly evidence of
| sunlight being captured by something complex (photosynthesis)
| vs just reflecting off rocks or ice. Lastly the planet has a
| large moon and is not tide locked to its star, both
| characteristics that increase the odds of something complex
| evolving here (as far as we know).
| whinenot wrote:
| > What caused them to crash?
|
| Because nobody has figured out an autopilot that doesn't shit
| the bed once in a while? I'm betting on taking a nap in the
| backseat is just a universally bad idea when nobody is
| driving.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| I believe in aliens/ufos/"something else out there" thanks to
| Graham Hancock's interesting book Visionary.
|
| Do I trust the government to tell me the truth about them at a
| time where institutional trust is at all time low?
|
| No freaking way.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Hancock is clearly a kook.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'm surprised you're getting down-voted for this. His history
| of making wild claims and then accusing the archeology
| community of being against him speaks for itself.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Some people just want to believe.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| I am wondering how much of this is fueled by the change in the
| word alien from simply meaning foreign to meaning
| extraterrestrial and people misreading the former for the latter.
|
| The research into foreign weapon technology is in one of those
| gray areas where not only does some of those activities border
| really close to industrial espionage against companies in
| potentially allied countries, or might contradict stated US State
| Department positions on international law it's usually classified
| and spoken off in hushed tones
|
| It's very likely that an alien(as in foreign) technology
| evaluation program exists without there being anything extra-
| terrestrial about it as legalese can trail popular changes to
| terms by several decades. And that mentions of those in wider
| circles might fuel some rumors and misconceptions among those
| "who wants to believe".
| jwestbury wrote:
| "Foreign" is quite common in intelligence contexts, though, and
| "alien" is not.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| The US immigration services uses the term Alien, and the US
| State Department have historically used both.
|
| Given how byzantine the US military industrial complex's
| paperwork and pretend regulation is someone might have been
| relying on legislation or paperwork predating the change in
| word usage, and that that influenced the naming of some
| program somewhere in the secretive world.
|
| It's also worth noting that such a misconception definitely
| benefit's the military industrial complex as it draws focus
| towards something that is not there rather then towards
| what's actually happening, which again is a very common
| strategy within military intelligence.
| mc32 wrote:
| Moreover, when it comes to corps/biz incorporation domestic
| is in-state, foreign is out of state, and alien is
| international. presumably if one day one could charter a
| corporation at an office on Mars it would be
| extraterrestrial.
| tptacek wrote:
| Ezra Klein just did a long interview with Leslie Kean (a popular
| author and Coast to Coast AM guest) about her article in "The
| Debrief" --- where it went, after the Washington Post wouldn't
| run it on her time schedule --- about David Grusch:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
|
| It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more
| credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of things like
| psychic teleportation. Another is a Stanford biologist who
| started producing debunked materials science papers about
| allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like
| ordinary machine parts). No source she names has firsthand
| knowledge of "non-human origin" technology; it's all people who
| heard something who heard something. At one point she cites the
| now-discredited "Gimball Video". There's no good answer to the
| question of "if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the
| DoD allow him to say it publicly" --- she has a particularly
| harebrained theory that DoD classification rules allow Grusch to
| describe this stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a
| line of specificity, which, just, no.
|
| But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame
| Rubio for indulging it.
| runjake wrote:
| _> she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video"._ (sic)
|
| When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited?
|
| I'm especially curious because I'm somewhat of an "expert" in
| the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons
| of footage in a former life) and I think it's a legitimate
| object of some sort [1]. Though I don't believe it's
| extraterrestrial.
|
| 1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right over
| the ocean looks just like a cruise missile flying low level.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| By Mick West numerous times, for instance here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
| binbag wrote:
| Mick West is very sure he is correct. I'm not sure that's
| enough.
| MyThoughts100 wrote:
| This comment makes it seem like the video does not
| contain rational arguments. It very much does. If you're
| skeptical about them, why not address them.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Have you actually watched his video on the Gimbal craft?
| I thought that was a big piece of evidence myself, went
| into his video at the recommendation of someone here on
| HN with heavy skepticism, and came out sufficiently
| convinced it was not actually a UFO. He's also classy
| with his debunkings. To me that's a big bonus. Other
| YouTubers whose niche is debunking things seem to love
| being snarky, sarcastic, and condescending. Doesn't make
| his points any more/less valid though.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I'm not generally a fan of Mick West, particularly when
| he gets into specific debunkings of videos, because his
| argumentative framework depends on the same flawed
| approach as those he's debunking: he starts from the
| conclusion that the aliens are not here, and then claims
| any evidence offered against this conclusion is
| insufficient. He depends on the same fallacy as his
| opponents. The only difference is the conclusion from
| which he starts. And of course he has an inherent
| advantage of credibility because his conclusion doesn't
| require any extraordinary evidence. That's why it feels
| like he's just taking cheap shots - in many ways he's on
| the easier side of the debate (but ironically it's become
| the harder side because it's nearly impossible to
| deprogram his opponents out of their cult).
|
| However, I did enjoy his recent video [0] on Grusch,
| where he focuses on the meta arguments against the
| narrative itself. He does a good job of describing the
| logical and dialectical flaws in the claims of the so-
| called "whistleblower" (who needs to get approval to
| speak publicly), and the reporting of the story itself
| (which was rushed and published by the same group of
| people with monetary and reputational incentives to
| uncritically promote the same narrative for which they've
| previously lost credibility).
|
| [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=AvhMMhW-JN0
| mcpackieh wrote:
| You're right, Mick West simply insisting a thing wouldn't
| be enough. Luckily, Mick West presents rational arguments
| for you to evaluate.
| tashoecraft wrote:
| VFX artists react had a pretty good video where they're
| pretty sure the footage over the ocean is just a bird. The
| oddness is due to the camera optics and the vessel that's
| recording it traveling extremely fast.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > U.F.O. skeptics and experts in optics have long said many
| of the videos and sightings by naval aviators represent
| optical illusions that have made ordinary objects -- weather
| balloons, commercial drones -- appear to move faster than
| possible.
|
| > Military officials have largely come to the same
| conclusion.
|
| ...
|
| > Another video, known as Gimbal, shows an object that
| appears to be turning or spinning. Military officials now
| believe that is the optics of the classified image sensor,
| designed to help target weapons, make the object appear like
| it is moving in a strange way.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/us/politics/ufo-
| military-...
|
| I don't know, define discredited. Define consensus. I really
| love that it's a game developer who seems to be thinking
| outside the box enough to provide explanations for the public
| materials. I guess the expertise is not as valuable as it
| seems, in the narrow problem of explaining camera rendering,
| and indeed someone with a games background knows a lot about
| that.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Honestly, Mick West reaches hard for any way to debunk
| everything and his conclusions on certain subjects are just
| flat out ridiculous.
|
| Ex: Suggesting that what kids saw at the Ariel school
| sighting were just puppeteers. Those kids are now adult
| professionals and have stuck to what they saw. Don't take
| my word, have an open mind and watch the past and recent
| interviews with them.
|
| Was great to see him put in his place on the News Nation
| post-interview segment.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame
| Rubio for indulging it
|
| The conclusion here does not follow the premise.
| godelski wrote:
| > The conclusion here does not follow the premise.
|
| Why? Are you saying politicians don't like pageantry? Or are
| you saying that specifically Rubio is more about pragmatism
| and uniquely not part of the Kabuki theater?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Are you saying politicians don't like pageantry?
|
| No, I am saying that their indulging in it, regardless of
| whether it is feeding into something popular in some
| segment is not, simply because of that popularity, beyond
| reproach.
|
| > Or are you saying that specifically Rubio is more about
| pragmatism and uniquely not part of the Kabuki theater?
|
| Oh, _hell_ , no!
| verall wrote:
| I don't think he means that you literally can't blame him for
| it, only that it is unsurprising.
| sph wrote:
| That was a great podcast, and the entirety of Kean's
| journalistic research and integrity basically amounts to _" I
| trust Grusch because he seems like a decent guy and I've been
| told he's trustworthy. But yeah, he's never seen any UFO, just
| reports and heard people talk about them, but since I trust
| him, I implicitly trust their words as well."_
|
| I love how Ezra asks her obvious questions about her research
| like _" how is it possible the Pentagon approves of people
| talking about UFO retrieval if it is such a close-guarded
| secret?"_ and she says _" good question! I'm not entirely
| sure!"_. Seriously? You haven't asked yourself that question
| before?
|
| This entire UFO saga comes from people with X-files' "I want to
| believe" poster in their office, and they don't let
| confirmation bias stop them.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| This thread is full of "I don't want to believe and/or
| can't".
|
| If it's legit, could people itt put down their confirmation
| bias and handle that we're not the smartest around, not top
| of the food chain, that our governments have lied to us and
| kept it wrapped sealed through compartmentalization/removed
| from oversight through third party contractors for decades,
| have hidden clean energy tech from tax payers so private
| entities could profit, that people have been murdered to hide
| this tech/reality, among a long long list of other
| implications?
|
| Of course if true, but from the looks of what's coming down
| the pipeline, it's no longer "haha little green men
| believing, xfiles wishing, tinfoil wearers", and more of
| "criminal acts have been committed out of greed and keeping
| control. Better get our heads out of the sand".
|
| Pucker up, because this is likely going to flip all of our
| realities upside down in a weird, maybe even frightful, and
| extreme way within the next few years.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| The entire field of ufology is a paradox of distrusting the
| government (because they've engaged in a coverup for 70
| years) but also trusting the government (because the only
| evidence offered that the government lied is appeal to
| authority of someone from the government - muh classified
| intel! muh Q clearance! - saying it lied). For me, any
| evidence of aliens needs to either resolve or sidestep this
| paradox.
|
| Ideally that evidence would take the form of a personal
| experience with the aliens. Less ideally, maybe I could
| accept documented and consistently observable photographic or
| videographic evidence from non-government citizens. What I
| will not accept is evidence that comes in the form of second-
| hand hearsay from a government "whistleblower" who gets
| approval for what he speaks about publicly. That's not a
| whistleblower, it's a spokesperson - and his claims do not
| resolve the paradox because it's effectively one entity
| telling me "we lied to you, but now we're telling the truth"
| - either you're telling the truth but I can't believe you
| because you lied to me, or you're lying to me and I'm not
| surprised because you've always lied to me. In other words,
| this is institutional gaslighting.
|
| For me to accept evidence from a government "whistleblower,"
| I need to see them overcoming some form of institutional
| resistance. Snowden was a whistleblower. His claims were
| obviously credible because they made a lot of people very
| mad, and they chased him to the end of the earth trying to
| imprison or kill him. Bill Binney was not a whistleblower,
| despite his claims, because the NSA never prosecuted him and
| so obviously everything he says during his ongoing speaking
| tour is somewhat sanctioned by them.
|
| For me to believe aliens are here, based on the words of a
| "whistleblower," he needs to release documents and photos and
| videos and scientific data about the craft, and the DoD needs
| to prosecute or at least ridicule him. But this current
| situation of passive acceptance by the DoD (or "soft
| disclosure" in the words of Lue Anon followers) is absolutely
| unconvincing, and just pisses me off because either my
| government thinks I'm stupid enough to fall for it, or too
| stupid to handle the full truth.
| kvetching wrote:
| "so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it."
|
| He's got access to a lot more than us. This isn't just some
| congressman indulging it for the lulz. It's so funny to see the
| mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our
| most elite intelligence officials. Even Rubio is having trouble
| believing it but he's now admitting to have talked to people
| with direct access to the program. Grusch is as credible as it
| gets. He said he spent four years investigating this before he
| came to the conclusions that these secretive exotic craft
| programs exist.
| tiahura wrote:
| The mental gymnastics is believing little green men, capable
| of sidesteping special relativity, travel X lightyears just
| to fly around San Diego and occasionally crash somewhere in
| the desert.
| vadansky wrote:
| >the now-discredited "Gimball Video"
|
| Source? I don't think there was ever a consensus that it was
| discredited. Googling "Gimbal Video discredited" doesn't give
| me anything definitive.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| No credible debunking of "Gimball" exists, despite Mick West
| proponents. Mick made himself look like a complete fool, and
| the response to his video by _actual_ fighter pilots is
| pretty embarrassing for him
|
| https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc
|
| https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0
| tptacek wrote:
| As I understand it, that video illustrates either a camera
| glare artifact, or alien technology very carefully tuned to
| replicate a camera glare artifact.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| You understand it wrong, this is a spurious and frankly
| absurd claim propagated by Mick West, which has been
| repeatedly debunked by _actual fighter pilots_.
|
| Ex: https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc
| subsubzero wrote:
| yeah the person(Mick West) who did the debunking is a
| retired gaming software engineer who is also somewhat of a
| known troll and has zero background in the field of avionic
| systems used by the fighter pilots. Some of his debunking
| statements are borderline absurd, you have a sighting that
| is seen on FLIR, radar and has an eyewitness testimony
| along with video and his statement is the pilot who has
| flown for 10 years did not know what he saw, and all the
| electronic systems malfunctioned and the object clearly
| seen on video is a artifact of sun glare. The Gimball video
| has not been debunked by professionals currently.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Not to mention it's seen hundreds of times by hundreds of
| personnel and devices again and again over the years.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Here's my post in response to a comment in the "US urged
| to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact
| alien vehicles" HN thread[1] from a few weeks ago that
| addresses this:
|
| > _Watch the introduction to the 4 hour UAP panel that
| NASA hosted a few days ago[2], they address this._
|
| > _According to NASA, even highly trained and experienced
| pilots can easily be fooled, and often reported UAPs are
| artifacts of the technology that detects them, or are
| indeed things like weather balloons. For example, NASA
| even used the example of Navy pilots being fooled by a
| procession of commercial airplanes queueing to land at an
| airport 40+ miles away from their base._
|
| > _They also emphasize that radar, detection systems, etc
| are not scientific instruments that are suitable for the
| detection or analysis of this phenomenon. They emphasize
| that the technology that the Navy et al. use are strictly
| optimized for defensive /offensive interception of
| conventional weapons. That's to say that they're
| calibrated for war and not for accurate scientific
| observation._
|
| > _Going back to the procession of airplanes waiting to
| land, according to the instruments available to pilots
| and their own observations, those airplanes were doing
| things that were impossible to do without bending the
| laws of physics. Yet all they were were just a bunch of
| airplanes doing what all airplanes do._
|
| > > _Due to the supposed feeds and eye witness accounts,
| it seems infeasible there is a 'weather balloon' type
| explanation_
|
| > _Pilots and their systems are fallible, you 'd have to
| assume some argument from authority to believe
| otherwise._
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36216745
|
| [2] Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
| (Official NASA Broadcast):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQo08JRY0iM
| esbranson wrote:
| Occam's razor tells us it's unlikely that all those
| unlikely failures happened at once.
|
| Videos, multiple eyewitnesses and AEGIS military radars.
| Lol.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Now apply Occam's razor to the following two choices:
|
| 1. Aliens have visited Earth. They crashed their
| spaceships or we shot them down. The US Government (and
| possibly other governments) retrieved and studied their
| technology and managed to keep it a secret for decades
|
| 2. Aliens have not visited Earth
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Well somehow the glare showed up on the aircraft carrier's
| instrumentation the pilot launched from as well as the jet
| itself and the jets of other pilots who can be heard on the
| video confirming the sighting on their own IR and radar.
| postmodest wrote:
| There are other videos that reverse engineer from what we
| do know, the flight path of the "ufo" and that it matches
| the track of another plane 30mi away.
| Triesault wrote:
| tptacek could be referring to the following video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
|
| This video does a good job at explaining how the "UFO" is
| probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it,
| and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking
| the target from left to right.
| adriand wrote:
| Thank you for linking to that interview. I listened to most of
| it when it came out. I was already skeptical but willing to
| have an open mind, but I came away from it feeling very assured
| in my skepticism. These claims are utter nonsense! Give the
| interview a listen and try and tell me your bullshit meter
| doesn't go off.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| > Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing
| debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien
| artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine
| parts).
|
| Source?
|
| >At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video".
|
| "Gimball" is not credibly discredited, calling it such
| highlights your bias and calls your other points into question.
|
| EDIT: HN is a terrible website for having actual discussions
| because, inevitably, people reply to my comments and I end up
| typing a reply only to hit "you're doing that too fast".
| Occasionally I engage and inevitably am reminded of why this
| site sucks so much for anything more than a particularly
| unperformant RSS feed
|
| So I don't know if this will even post, but I've posted up
| thread so hopefully you see it. (edit: it didn't post, so I
| edited it in to my original message)
|
| Generally anyone who refers to "Gimball" as debunked/etc is
| referring to Mick West's preposterous video on the subject. It
| has been so thoroughly, repeatedly, taken apart by actual
| fighter pilots who have used these systems that _anyone_ still
| parroting the original claims of Mick West is either incredibly
| out of the loop or a straight-up denialist who is willing to
| accept even the most flimsy of arguments if it reenforces their
| prior beliefs.
|
| https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah it's more like been confirmed with the recent airspace
| intrusions? They're almost certainly all some kind of foreign
| spy drones which exploit the alien stigma by being designed
| to look as alien as possible. Any sightings would be
| instantly dismissed as nonsense, which is a real galaxy brain
| psyops move.
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-
| drones...
| dekhn wrote:
| The stanford biologist- Garry Nolan.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Nolan
| ggm wrote:
| Are you promoting radical scepticism and believe we should
| abjure from pro or con cases or are you a believer? They're
| not the same. Do you apply the same criterion to all
| rebuttals or only rebuttals of this kind? How topic specific
| is your concern with credibility ? And, forgive me but why
| should we care about your opinion over others?
|
| You are in some ways invoking appeal to authority but then...
| All debunking is at some level an appeal to authority. I am
| unquestionably promoting an appeal to authority above btw.
|
| Since there's no point discussing this "evidence" with a
| believer, I ask what you would consider viable credible
| discrediting. My suspicion is, no discrediting would meet
| your standard and you are not actually prepared to accept any
| alternate basis, such as lens flare.
| iosono88 wrote:
| [dead]
| godelski wrote:
| Another part is that people don't realize how within the
| government, and especially the military, there are a lot of
| false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly
| classified. You do this because there are spies and they will
| steal shit. You want to make that process noisy. It's also
| beneficial because you may get your adversary to spend millions
| or billions studying a thing that isn't even possible.
| Sometimes they even have people "working" on these things
| (sometimes even unwitting fools that are true believers)
| because it makes it look more legitimate (and you can funnel
| money through these). See the ridiculousness of the US and
| Russian psychic programs.
|
| There's a lot of disinformation as well as smoke and mirrors.
| It's annoying, but you can't take military documents at face
| value. It's like reading a scientific paper, you realistically
| can only judge the merit if you have some domain expertise or
| enough in an adjacent domain to understand the work itself.
| That's the whole reason disinformation works in the first place
| (which is specifically meant to fool experts, even if not all
| of them, just enough).
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _there are a lot of false documents and reports that are
| sitting around AND highly classified_
|
| Exactly this.
|
| I saw a youtube video a while ago about a recently
| declassified document from the US Navy which says the USS
| Seawolf reported hearing signals from survivors on the USS
| Thresher _more than a day_ after the Thresher went missing.
| The sonar operators on the Seawolf, no doubt well trained
| professionals, had themselves convinced they heard the
| Thresher and there were people still left alive. The guy who
| made the video about this document was very excited; _" the
| US Navy hid this from from us! They told us the Thresher guys
| died instantly."_
|
| But the problem is the Thresher sank in about 2.6 km of
| water, _far_ deeper than any military submarine can possibly
| withstand. Furthermore there is declassified video footage of
| the Thresher 's hull on the sea floor, shattered into
| numerous pieces. There were no pings from the Thresher's
| sonar; the Seawolf crew were simply mistaken. The report was
| classified but that doesn't mean it was true.
|
| [Video link deliberately omitted, but you can find it by
| searching "37 pings"]
| WalterBright wrote:
| Interestingly, much of the stealth radar technology on the
| Skunkworks' stealth airplanes came from a Soviet research
| paper.
|
| Personally, I would have thought such a paper was
| disinformation. Maybe the Soviets did, too!
| godelski wrote:
| Well that's why disinformation works so well. You have to
| explore stolen material even if you think it might be
| misinformation.
|
| But also military misinformation is so prolific that it
| even infiltrates public knowledge. Often on purpose. Many
| people still believe that eating carrots will help you see
| in the dark. It's definitely true that the vitamins in
| carrots can help eyesight, but they aren't _that_ good.
| Good disinformation has a mixture of truth in it for people
| to latch onto. Just a sprinkling can give something a lot
| of validity. Should also say something about how you take
| in information, especially from YouTube university.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-
| propagand...
| scrlk wrote:
| "While working in Moscow, Ufimtsev became interested in
| describing the reflection of electromagnetic waves. He
| gained permission to publish his research results
| internationally because they were considered to be of no
| significant military or economic value."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ufimtsev
|
| Looks like he's still publishing papers in this area:
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37344722000
| WalterBright wrote:
| > they were considered to be of no significant military
| or economic value
|
| Oops!
| giantrobot wrote:
| No one uses radio waves to detect things in the air!
| That's preposterous!
| heavyset_go wrote:
| To add to this, I've noticed a lot of the material that gets
| declassified, that is purported to be evidence of
| aliens/psychics/magic/etc, is in the form of field notes or
| case studies that either contain full quotations or summaries
| of what someone else claims is true, but are not actually
| experiments or demonstrations of what is claimed.
|
| For example, you might have a declassified CIA document
| that's being distributed as evidence of psychic phenomenon,
| but upon further inspection, you'll find isn't the case. What
| you instead see is documentation along the lines of "someone
| made a claim about X, here's what they say about X" where X
| can be "I can read minds" or whatever. At no point is there
| an actual scientific test of this, the document is just
| acknowledgment that someone said some outlandish things to
| government investigators. Then years later those notes are
| declassified and somehow become evidence that X really
| happened.
|
| It's like reading a police report about someone who took too
| much methamphetamine and ran around claiming that they could
| fly, and then using that police report as evidence that the
| government knows people can fly.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| When they first released the CIA psychic documents I
| clicked a few at random and my impressions were much
| different. The papers I read were very much "We're
| conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our
| procedures and results."
| godelski wrote:
| And the results were...
| Hikikomori wrote:
| And great experiments like randomly dosing Americans with
| LSD and torturing war prisoners to death.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| it's all people who heard something who heard something
|
| People with direct access to such classified materials _would
| not legally be able to divulge details_ and especially not
| publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison.
|
| This doesn't directly prove the claims of Grusch or anybody
| else, of course. But it is a decently persausive explanation
| for why it's always "people who heard something who heard
| something" and not direct sources. "if Grusch
| is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it
| publicly"
|
| I don't know anything about Kean so I have no opinion on her.
|
| One thing you have to say about Grusch is that he is _really_
| putting it all on the line. He is going through the official
| whistleblower channel and is triggering a major investigation.
|
| If he is telling the truth, the DoD would more or less be
| admitting guilt by going after him.
|
| (There is also a third possibility. Grusch is being truthful,
| but _he_ and /or others have been deceived. I think wrapping a
| secret program under the cover of some UFO nonsense could be
| pretty effective camouflage, since UFO-related claims usually
| are instantly deemed noncredible in the eyes of many)
| "she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD
| classification rules allow Grusch to describe this
| stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a
| line of specificity, which, just, no"
|
| I honestly don't know how this works. Surely there _is_ some
| line of specificity? I mean, you and I can talk about this and
| it 's legal. At what point are you close enough to something
| classified to make it illegal?
| tptacek wrote:
| It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of
| extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me
| for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with
| firsthand knowledge to disclose them. But lack of firsthand
| evidence of ETA's does not constitute evidence of the
| existence of ETA's. It would be illegal for me to disclose
| the existence of a +4 Wand of Magic Missile, too, if such a
| thing existed. But regardless of what I say I've heard about
| DoD custody of D&D items, we both know they don't exist.
|
| The rest of this: I don't care, except that you have to work
| yourself into contortions to simultaneously argue that all
| firsthand reporting of ETA's has been stymied by legal
| threats from DoD, but Grusch's claims are true because they
| haven't been.
| revscat wrote:
| > People with direct access to such classified materials
| would not legally be able to divulge details and especially
| not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison.
|
| I believe this is no longer strictly true for UAP-related
| information [1]. Congress has gotten much more serious about
| offering legal protections to those who have knowledge about
| UAP programs.
|
| [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistleblowers-
| wou...
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| I believe in UFOs, because a UFO is believing in me somewhere out
| there
| wnevets wrote:
| Conspiracy theories have gone completely off the rails in this
| country. For the longest time I thought flat earthers were
| trolling like the birds aren't real meme but seeing this crap
| reach congress is sad.
| tzs wrote:
| One theory that would explain this pretty much perfectly is that
| Marco Rubio is an alien operating here under cover to get the
| government to stop trying to reverse engineer some technology
| that his people accidentally lost here.
|
| I always thought there was something a bit off about Rubio...
| petesergeant wrote:
| He's not the only one...
| https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/
| [deleted]
| throwaway743 wrote:
| News Nation follow up on Rubio interview with Ross Coulthart.
| Discussion of implications.
|
| https://youtu.be/4uY62OmDfLg
| MoSattler wrote:
| The government has previously used UFOs to divert attention.
|
| > Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through
| the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights''
| over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air
| Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public
| in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily
| sensitive national security project.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-...
| EA-3167 wrote:
| The B-21 is getting close to operational, the NGAD is in
| development, and god only knows what sort of experimental drone
| tech is being worked on in the dark. That adds up to a lot of
| test flights and more, and a lot of reasons to throw out the
| same old "UFO" chaff to cover it.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean... seems pretty easy to correlate previous UFO
| sightings with aerial vehicle testing.
|
| I'd expect basically any semi-competent government to be
| monitoring those reports and increasing surveillance in the
| area.
| uhtred wrote:
| I have to say that X-44 does look similar in shape to some of
| the UFO pictures I've seen. Especially the one where the UFO
| flies past the plane window.
| Animats wrote:
| The "flying triangles" seen from US naval vessels look like jet
| drones. [1] Those are commercial products, priced around
| $10,000. One of those zipping around looks like a UFO. Some
| versions can hover pointing upward; they have enough thrust.
|
| There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and
| military UAVs. Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a
| month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k
| Gud wrote:
| What about the other half?
| ender341341 wrote:
| probably a good number of drunks/kooks and then probably a
| handful of unknown phenomena that would have a reasonable
| explanation if we had better photos/descriptions.
|
| *edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have
| seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a
| kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible
| observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are
| unlikely to be alien in origin.
|
| I will say my thoughts on the matter:
|
| Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size
| of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only
| planet with life)
|
| Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low
| chance
|
| Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united
| states? near 0% chance
| Gud wrote:
| What about the countless credible eye witnesses? Not
| everyone who claims they have witnessed a UFO is a kook...
| shipman05 wrote:
| "credible eye witnesses"
|
| This is a contradiction. Not that eye witness testimonies
| are completely without merit, but "extraordinary claims
| require extraordinary evidence" and eye-witness testimony
| alone does not meet that standard....no matter who the
| witness is.
| Gud wrote:
| I am not saying we know for a fact that extra
| terrestrials have landed on planet earth. I agree with
| you, there is still not enough evidence.
|
| However I am tired of reading so called skeptics
| dismissing people who come forward claiming they have
| seen UFOs as kooks or drunkards.
|
| There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is
| within the realm of possibility that we are being visited
| by alien intelligence.
|
| Video recordings that can't be explained, radar
| observations etc. Please also realize that most of what
| has been recorded so far is classified as top secret,
| according to testimony from people with direct access to
| this evidence and like I said in my parent comment, we
| also have plenty of credible eye witness reports.
|
| It's sad that people aren't more curious - not everything
| is about distracting from Donald Trumps misadventures
| with classified documents...
| bamfly wrote:
| > There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it
| is within the realm of possibility that we are being
| visited by alien intelligence.
|
| Nah. I'd wager it's more likely to be earthlings from an
| alternate reality or that time travel turns out to be
| feasible and it's our descendants, than that it's space
| aliens ("but one of those is entirely based on
| speculative physics and both require our model of the
| universe to be pretty damn wrong, to allow such travel"
| yeah, I know-- _that 's_ how incredible I find the space
| alien hypothesis). I don't think those are credible
| guesses, either, but I'd say they're more likely to be
| true than "it's aliens". That explanation's got a _lot_
| of things working against it.
| ender341341 wrote:
| that was covered by the second portion of my comment.
| There are a few that are legit we don't know what that
| was. If we had better details/pictures/video of them we
| might be able to say better.
|
| In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems
| low though.
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| There are also tons of people who have claimed to see
| ghosts, tons of medieval peasants that saw witches, tons
| of people accused of summoning the devil in the 80s.
|
| There are tons of people, the chances they misread
| something (kook or not) is high.
| Gud wrote:
| You make a valid point and which is why eye witness
| evidence is not sufficient.
|
| However combined with what has been otherwise documented,
| I consider it a possibility we are being visited by
| aliens.
| aredox wrote:
| Almost all of Earth's population carries a camera (with their
| phones), and yet sightings of UFOs (or any cryptid) have been
| at an all-time low.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1235/
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Dude, you can't even get a good picture of the moon on most
| phones without some AI assistance. How the hell are you
| going to snap a clear photo of something much smaller and
| dimmer?
|
| A challenge for the incredulous, bring me some high quality
| cellphone pictures of airplanes at night without using any
| extra equipment like tripods, lenses or stabilizers.
| baja_blast wrote:
| smartphones are optimized for selfies thus the lens is
| super flat. Any photo I try to take at a distance looks
| awful, and moon photos are even worse. You'd be better
| off taking these pictures with a 1960's film camera with
| an actual lens. Not only did standard cameras have 4.5k
| resolution (35mm) but the lens allows you to zoom in!
|
| And get this 70mm cameras are equivalent to 18k.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| The other day while I was in the countryside I saw a
| military drone (I live near an airport doing military
| maintenance). It was the second time in a few months. I had
| my phone in my backpack, yet I didn't take any photos.
| Somehow the four seconds or so wasn't enough for me to make
| the decision.
| Gud wrote:
| Well, there are plenty of UFO recordings using iPhones.
|
| I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is
| much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S.
| military. Sadly most of it is classified.
|
| Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off
| right after the United States developed the atomic bomb -
| wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced
| civilization?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off
| right after the United States developed the atomic bomb -
| wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced
| civilization?
|
| Isn't the paranoid atmosphere cold war and the increase
| in weapons testing, satellites, spy balloons, etc. a much
| simpler explanation?
| Gud wrote:
| If that were the case, wouldn't that point the paranoia
| towards the USSR and not UFOs from space?
|
| But I agree, it is a possible explanation.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think the whole atmosphere around governments spying,
| covering things up, and generally engaged in a lot of
| sloppy covert action is bound to make UFOs seem more
| credible.
| bamfly wrote:
| > Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off
| right after the United States developed the atomic bomb -
| wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced
| civilization?
|
| No? Why would it, any more so than what came before?
| We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to
| detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light
| years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a
| universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then
| make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I
| guess (must not have limited resources, like, _at all_ )
| all using physics we're not even on the verge of
| discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict
| what we _have_ discovered, but also leave no to-us-
| detectable trace anywhere _we_ can detect, in their
| visits or with their sensing equipment or their
| civilization itself, but _also_ also be pretty bad at
| hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but _also
| also_ also good enough that we can 't quite prove they're
| real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not
| much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough
| stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on
| purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined
| to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over
| (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away,
| instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But
| not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.
|
| "Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing
| the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same
| "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific
| ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a
| civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the
| rest still holds, too.
|
| The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to
| me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible
| things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's
| not _technically_ impossible that Russell 's Teapot
| exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens"
| barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and
| does miracles sometimes".
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > and yet sightings of UFOs (or any cryptid) have been at
| an all-time low.
|
| Source? I see the opposite when I Google around for reports
| per year. There was a dip during COVID, buts it's easy to
| attribute that to people not being outside, and it's picked
| right back up since.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/05/20/globa
| l...
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Is there anyone else that just doesn't believe any of this ufo
| stuff whatsoever? The whole thing seems like a massive waste of
| time and resources when we have real problems that need solving.
|
| Where is the evidence of any of this stuff?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| In terms of using support by Senators to influence one's priors
| on whether UFOs might be real: it's worth noting that Senator
| Rubio also harbors doubts about the certification of the election
| results in 2020.
|
| One might wonder "Why is this Congress treating this topic
| seriously when previous Congresses did not" and conclude this
| Congress is more willing to treat outlandish claims as credible,
| not that the claims are more credible.
| jl6 wrote:
| Still seems most likely this is a bunch of people feeding off
| each others' hype and speculation.
|
| There are a dozen explanations more plausible than aliens.
| bamfly wrote:
| "It's aliens" is just about the _least_ plausible explanation
| other than "god did it". I'm pretty sure several other sci-fi
| bullshit explanations are more likely than "aliens are real,
| have tech we couldn't dream of that relies on our model of
| reality being totally broken, give enough of a shit about us to
| visit but not enough to do anything else, and are _extremely_
| hard to detect except, for no good reason, in this one specific
| way that, coincidentally, often turns out to for-sure not be
| space aliens, but one of several other things ".
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I'd even argue that "breakaway human civilization living in
| underground bunkers on Earth" is more plausible than aliens,
| just because of the vast travel time required to move between
| star systems within the currently known laws of physics. Both
| situations - aliens and breakaway civilizations - are
| incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible. But at least one
| of them doesn't require breaking any laws of physics.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Warp drives and wormholes do not necessarily break the laws
| of physics. Sabine Hossenfelder does a good job explaining
| why the limits imposed by special relativity are not valid
| arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw
|
| As for a breakaway civilization, don't you think people
| would notice resources missing or the insane usage of
| resources by what would have to be a massive civilization
| be noticed?
|
| If you take the claims at face value, that these things
| operate as if inertia does not apply already "breaks
| physics". And if that is the case ET would make more sense
| than mole people.
|
| But it is also possible there is nothing to this at all.
| For me it's ET or a Psyop.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| This dude seems credible.. What if his story exposes the gov
| using UFOs as a psyop internally? Someone posted about a doc
| called Mirage Men in which people allege that the gov has used
| this UFO story to keep people quiet about secret programs.
| Going to watch it later today. Even if just that is exposed it
| would be wild.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This sounds more like the discovery of a money pit than anything
| extraterrestrial.
| zadler wrote:
| It's how the pentagon will pass its first audit.
| infamouscow wrote:
| We'll sooner see it disbanded and replaced than pass an
| audit.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| While I understand and appreciate the aspects of the bill that
| offers protection for whistleblowers, I don't understand cutting
| all funding for reversing such technology.
|
| If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of
| whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we
| want to study potentially advanced technology?
| ellisv wrote:
| > I don't understand cutting all funding for reversing such
| technology.
|
| As I understand it, only "secret, unreported programs" would
| lose funding.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It _sounds_ like a dramatic step without necessarily having any
| real impact. If as I suspect these UFO claims are largely BS,
| then it 's an easy way to impress the disturbingly large sector
| of the public that lives in a conspiratorial fantasy land.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| We want the shiny tech, but if the studying shiny tech is a way
| to step around appropriations, then there are very powerful
| people who will want to stop that (Congress), since it
| threatens the very thing that makes them powerful. Sounds to be
| more about DC power politics than alien technology.
| bostonsre wrote:
| If there are indeed people that work on this stuff, are paid
| well, and this stops funding maybe disclosing it to congress is
| a way to get the gravy train turned back on.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I would assume the issue would be that a government agency is
| reversing UFO tech and congress doesn't know about it, not just
| that it's being done. A government agency going rogue in such a
| manner would be a big concern
| throwaway743 wrote:
| The claims are not that it's so much a rogue gov agency, but
| that it's buried by contractors who aren't tied to the
| requirements agencies have.
| Sunspark wrote:
| Agreed. Many implications. If technology is reverse-
| engineered in secret while government funded and then
| patented to a private corporation, is this not theft from the
| people if they try to sell it for profit? Security threats
| are a concern as well, civilians are not allowed to possess
| weaponry more powerful than what the military has, etc.
| cubefox wrote:
| What does it mean to "reverse" UFO tech?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Reverse engineering
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Reverse engineering a UFO would be disassembling and
| studying it so that we can recreate it or repurpose the
| technologies in it. Presumably it would have some manner of
| exotic engine or power source or perhaps weapons, etc.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| For an example of this from the early Cold War, see the
| Tupolev Tu-4. The Soviets took the wrecks of three downed
| US B-29s from WWII and spent huge amounts of money and
| manpower studying them and developing copies of them
| since US strategic bomber tech was so far ahead of their
| own. Supposedly (though I'd need to find a source again)
| there was a bullet hole in the wing of one of the
| recovered B-29s that the Soviets faithfully recreated in
| the Tu-4 thinking it was part of the actual design.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4
| cubefox wrote:
| Interesting, though the B-29s were IFOs (identified
| flying objects). And very much not of extra terrestrial
| origin...
|
| There was a similar story:
| https://fstoppers.com/film/how-soviet-union-snapped-
| first-pi...
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| It's the carrot and the stick:
|
| - Stick. Today a program that is doing "Advanced Propulsion
| Research" that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech
| would be perfectly legal. Cutting funding for this, unless
| explicitly authorized, opens up liability for anyone in the
| government and related contractors.
|
| - Carrot. The amnesty is an opportunity to come forward without
| the liability.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| > that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech would be
| perfectly legal.
|
| Enter the intergalactic copyright lawyers...
| narrator wrote:
| This is a good thread to catalog red herring techniques.
| * The government has previously used X to divert attention
| therefore there is no X. * The person saying X is an
| accomplice of X and cannot be trusted. * Demanding the
| answer to the question about X is dangerous because national
| security. * X is a distraction from something bad Trump
| did. * X is a distraction from something bad Biden did.
| * X is a distraction from the recent Supreme Court decisions.
| * X could never be covered up by the government - refuses to
| believe copious whistleblower testimony about X with no reason
| than it's impossible for the government to be able to cover X up.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This is precisely why I've always been most fond of the
| explanation that "the UFO thing" is a training ground for US
| psychological warfare officers. We're target practice for US
| disinfo campaigns.
| srge wrote:
| - it was swamp gas
|
| - it was a reflection in the windshield
|
| - I debunked it from seeing this YouTube video because those
| Air Force pilots and those government whistleblowers definitely
| don't know what they are talking about !
|
| I am always surprised by the amount of confidence those <<
| debunkers >> radiate when what they mainly do is just express
| doubt with zero cost to them in terms of reputation or even
| work.
| rtlxcv wrote:
| For me, this article does not make Rubio's position clear.
| Previously, he had been involved in the UFO industrial complex:
|
| https://reason.com/2022/11/15/the-military-ufo-complex/
|
| I'm surprised that congress finally wants to stop the gravy
| train, unless this is another refined misdirection scheme.
| Probably a lot of that money went into covert operations.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Still looking for evidence.
|
| Any evidence at all.
|
| Anyone? Bueller?
| davisr wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/ufos-are-real-1979
| taraharris wrote:
| If they're lying, they have a moral obligation to declassify
| everything they know.
|
| If they're telling the truth, they have a moral obligation to
| declassify everything they know.
|
| Official secrecy is fundamentally incompatible with the needs of
| an informed public capable of voting intelligently within a
| democratic republic.
| subsubzero wrote:
| But.. The US Govt. has zero reasons to acknowledge existence of
| a non-human superior technology spacecraft. It would undermine
| their position as world super power and destabilize trust and
| security in the country and could lead to mass instability and
| a slow down of technological progress.
|
| And if they are running a massive psyops deception campaign it
| would make the public lose the last vestige of trust left in
| the govt. Its a lose lose situation on both scenarios and I
| expect the US govt. to keep things of this nature locked down
| to a extreme state as it has been doing since WW2.
|
| Also interesting note, the flood of credible pentagon UFO info
| is being brought up by a bunch of individuals who worked in(or
| currently for) the US intelligence community. This is 2017 and
| after when the NYtimes(Leslie Kean reporter) released the
| bombshell pentagon UFO tapes. These individuals are: Christoper
| Mellon(ex high ranking intelligence director), Luis
| Elizondo(Intelligence officer on and off), and currently David
| Grusch NGA, & NRO - the person who states that non human craft
| have been retrieved(OP article).
| throwaway743 wrote:
| The allegations aren't that it's only the US.
| botro wrote:
| Would a US President have the necessary clearance to know of
| the existence of non-human superior technology spacecraft? A
| former US President is recorded on tape boasting about
| knowledge of US military plans to invade Iran.
|
| I don't mean to make this political at all, just trying to
| reason on the basis of a personality and knowing that a
| president would boast about having knowledge of such trivial
| classified information - in comparison to the existence of
| non-human spacecraft; makes me believe that if he was briefed
| on it he likely would have boasted about it. (and so would I,
| just imagine what earth shaking news that is.)
| NickC25 wrote:
| Supposedly the President is deliberately kept in the dark.
| Bush Sr. denied President Carter access to that
| information, and I have no doubt other more recent
| Presidents were denied access or purposely fed
| misinformation.
|
| Trump in particular never showed any interest in anything
| besides enriching himself and allowing the Saudis,
| Russians, and Chinese to feed his ego. I doubt he even
| thought about the aliens, let alone went through enough
| trouble to ask about them....because if he did, and was
| denied info, he would have fired the intelligence officer
| who denied him access and publicly blabbered about it on
| Twitter.
| tomschlick wrote:
| The president would have the clearance, but the issue is
| knowing who to even ask who would have knowledge. Top
| Secret SCI is compartmentalized, so only the people who
| need to know get read in.
|
| One great example of this is during the Bin Laden raid
| planning, after all plans were exhausted on how they could
| put boots on the ground, only then did a high ranking
| officer let the president and the rest of the team in the
| room know about the stealth helicopters that even the SEALs
| had never seen before.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Would a US President have the necessary clearance to know
| of the existence of non-human superior technology
| spacecraft?
|
| Clearance flows from the President who neither has nor
| needs it; it is a _delegation_ of executive power of which
| the President is the source.
|
| OTOH, just because the President is not unauthorized does
| not mean he will be briefed on it.
| tfandango wrote:
| This is exactly what I have been thinking since 2016. If
| Aliens/UFOs are real, we will hear about it soon. However,
| if it's true that parts of the government are secret from
| the president, even the last one, then that is a real
| problem.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| And, regardless, these need to be included as an enemy and plot
| point in the next major installment of _Call of Duty._
| dgrin91 wrote:
| Should they also disclose the location of all the nuclear
| missile silos in the US?
|
| I'm generally in agreement with a transparent government, but
| there must be some limits.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Should they also disclose the location of all the nuclear
| missile silos in the US_
|
| We do [1][2]. Better analogy might be disclosing the present
| location of all nuclear submarines.
|
| [1] https://uploads.fas.org/sites/4/NotebookMap.pdf
|
| [2] https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/a-u-s-nuclear-
| wea...
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I see your points, but the difference is we know about the
| existence of the silos and subs. They're protecting
| information about them, but not trying to mislead us into
| thinking submarines aren't a thing.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| >Should they also disclose the location of all the nuclear
| missile silos in the US?
|
| Yes. If the deterrent/protection factor of our nuclear
| weapons platforms are nullified by their location being
| exposed, then they are already useless.
| eganist wrote:
| So are hostile countries using declassified nuclear blueprints
| to bomb our homeland. Alas, if you want the democratic
| experiment to succeed, you need to account for those who stand
| to lose everything from your success.
| taraharris wrote:
| Official secrecy clearly failed to stop the very scenario
| you're talking about!
|
| We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that
| time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries.
| North Korea has them, for God's sake.
|
| Nuclear weapons are simply a function of having a large
| enough industrial base to support their development. The
| "secret sauce" is officially secret, but it isn't actually
| secret.
| eganist wrote:
| > We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that
| time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries.
| North Korea has them, for God's sake
|
| Nine countries as opposed to...
| kasey_junk wrote:
| It's not secrecy that has prevented proliferation, it's
| carrots and sticks that has.
|
| Treaties, sanctions etc. Not to mention the cost of a
| nuclear program.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's not secrecy that has prevented proliferation, it's
| carrots and sticks that has.
|
| Secrecy increases the cost, so it is, in effect, _part
| of_ the "stick" end of the carrots and sticks. If there
| hadn't been secrecy, would the return to sanity that
| stopped the South American nuclear arms race been too
| late? Secrecy should not be dismissed.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| There is essentially no secrecy. Research the Nth Country
| Experiment
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There is essentially no secrecy.
|
| There is secrecy, which is why the countries that haven't
| found a shortcut around it (as in the nuclear arms race
| between Argentina and Brazil) have a harder road than
| those that do (like South Africa via Israel).
|
| > Research the Nth Country Experiment
|
| The Nth Country Experiment focused on paper design of a
| device, which, while _a_ requirement to getting to
| functional nuclear weapons, isn't the whole or, in
| practice, the limiting factor.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > nuclear arms race between Argentina and Brazil
|
| Yeah, lol, the what now?
|
| Anyway, Brazil has a working uranium enrichment facility,
| with public numbers, and as efficient as any modern one
| (what is _way_ more efficient than anything from the time
| nuclear bombs were created).
|
| What kind of secrecy are you stating that is stopping
| Brazil?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yeah, lol, the what now?
|
| The late 1970s to early 1990s were an interesting time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, ok, that.
|
| The comment doesn't really apply to that either. Germany
| and France were quite involved on that one, so it wasn't
| exactly secrecy that kept things slow. It was more due to
| the sheer unpopularity of the thing (on both sides) even
| between the people high-ranked enough to know about it.
|
| I mean, by 85 Brazil had already a nuclear reactor in
| full activity. A reactor can get you enough plutonium for
| a bomb long before it's in full activity.
| eganist wrote:
| > Yeah, lol, the what now?
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=argentina%20brazil%20nucl
| ear...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear
| weapons, isn't the whole or, in practice, the limiting
| factor.
|
| Nukes are not a physics challenge, but an engineering
| challenge. That's why an experiment showing a bunch of
| physicists understand simple particle physics isn't a
| useful demonstration that building nukes doesn't require
| insane amounts of help from a willing sponsor.
|
| People "knew" how to build the A bomb before World War 2
| even started, yet even when several countries put energy
| into it to aid their war effort, only the US succeeded,
| and only because they dedicated around one tenth of the
| entire GDP to the process.
|
| Merely getting enough enriched material is enough of a
| problem to stop most countries.
| brookst wrote:
| "Policy X is useless because it did not stop every single
| instance of the thing it was trying to reduce" is a
| fallacious argument. Seat belts did not halt deaths in auto
| accidents, etc.
|
| Secrecy may or may not be warranted, but this is not a good
| argument against it.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| we should ban all Chinese people from the country because
| we certainly cannot stop all exhilaration of secrets, but
| better to stop some than none.
| brookst wrote:
| What a strange non sequitur. Are you OK?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > would immediately halt funding for any secret government or
| contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of
| "non-earth" or "exotic" origin.
|
| If that were going on (and I'm skeptical) why would you want to
| stop it?
|
| > _Funding would also be cut for "the development of propulsion
| technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology,
| systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or
| inspired by inspection, analysis, or reverse engineering of
| recovered [UFOs] or materials."_
|
| Again, why the hell would you stop funding for development of
| propulsion tech that might be of alien origin? You can bet that
| if China or Russia had a craft like this they'd be trying to
| reverse engineer it.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Likely because it's been going on since at least the 40s by
| private defense contractors, who don't have the same oversight
| as a gov agency and who are benefiting from the tech with tax
| payer dollars without the public knowing or benefiting.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Because you are being paid (or blackmailed) by the aliens.
|
| Or because you don't believe they exist, and think that
| "classified program to recover extraterrestrial craft and
| reverse engineer its technology" is used as itself a cover for
| outright corruption.
| Simulacra wrote:
| What I find most fascinating about aliens and UFOs is that they
| always seem to be heading for America. If a UFO arrived from
| another galaxy it might choose any place to land, but talk is
| always America-centric. Do other countries feel so UFO special?
| kneebonian wrote:
| So not saying I necessarily believe (but "I want to believe")
| the argument could be the US has better airspace monitoring
| than other countries and more ability to publish and
| disseminate information.
|
| If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to know
| or be aware. The other alternative if Russia which is similarly
| sized and equipped but they tend to be pretty cagey sharing
| information.
|
| So it ends up being the US not because they only land there but
| because they have the combination of obsessively watching the
| skies with the ability to share their information and the
| freedom to do so.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to
| know or be aware.
|
| People with smartphones and Meta/WhatsApp/TikTok accounts are
| all over the planet.
| sph wrote:
| The "US tech is light years ahead" is nonsense when this time
| around the story is that the US has an ultra secret UFO
| retrieval agency. How is it possible that no UFO has crashed
| outside the US jurisdiction, where they can't send their MIB
| in 2 hours?
|
| Also, I'd like to remind Americans that we're not caveman
| here. We do have radar and jets flying and cameraphones.
|
| The problem is that if you want to believe, you're ready to
| throw any kind of common sense and elementary logic out the
| window. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and
| this ain't it.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Actually one of the first 'known' UFOs supposedly crash landed
| in 1930's Italy, and Mussolini blabbed about it to the Pope,
| who warned the US. Allegedly. We're not the only country that's
| supposedly had contact.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Why did Jesus allegedly air travel to America after being
| resurrected according to Mormons? It's American exceptionalism,
| duh.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| He allegedly spent his teenage years wandering around
| Glastonbury in England as well and we get plenty of UFO
| sightings!
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| One of the most notable UAP/UFO encounters ever took place in
| South Africa at an elementary school.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Did you mean Zimbabwe?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| I did, thank you for the correction.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > On 16 September 1994, there was a UFO sighting outside
| Ruwa, Zimbabwe.[1] Sixty-two pupils at the Ariel School
| aged between six and twelve[1][2] said that they saw one or
| more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field
| near their school.[1][2] One or more creatures dressed all
| in black then approached the children and telepathically
| communicated to them a message with an environmental theme,
| frightening the children and causing them to cry.
|
| > The sightings at Ariel occurred at 10am on 16 September
| 1994, when pupils were outside on mid-morning break.[1] The
| adult faculty at the school were inside having a meeting at
| the time.
|
| How convenient that all the adults were inside and only
| 6-12 year old children saw it. Anyone who believes this
| story is far too credulous.
| youngtaff wrote:
| When I was a kid there was something known as the 'Broad
| Haven Triangle' in West Wales, UK
|
| One evening on the news there were reports of an alien
| spaceship landing next to the village school complete
| with interviews with kids
|
| A few years later I went to senior school with some of
| those kids and they told me they made it all up
| DANmode wrote:
| Imagine throwing away the value of your word for such
| little gain.
| sph wrote:
| And 90% of all other UFO stories come from USA.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Assuming this isn't just a big psyop trying to scare US
| adversaries, and that UFO's are real... the US was the first to
| detonate nukes in 1945, and on its own territory, which might
| explain some of it. Maybe the UFO's were investigating how
| scientifically and technologically advanced humanity was
| becoming, and naturally focused on nuclear tech as a leading
| indicator.
|
| The 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast might also have alerted
| them to humanity, and travel time of the broadcast plus travel
| time of UFO's to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed
| capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around
| when nukes were invented (if they're from, say, Alpha Centauri
| which is 4 light-years away).
|
| The US and Europe also have free press where things like this
| are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR
| back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which in conjunction
| with the above may explain sightings maps like this one, where
| sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in
| Europe:
|
| https://updb.app/map?zoom=1.00&lon=149.0917&lat=37.3003
|
| Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, look at
| what you get:
|
| 1-1943: 1566 sightings reports
|
| 1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports
|
| Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs
| since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia
| previously. Obviously we also had more robust and
| technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so
| that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge
| discrepancy.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense. To a sufficiently advanced
| civilization with the ability to detect large releases of
| energy elsewhere in the universe, the start of the atomic age
| could have sent an unmistakable signal - distinct from other
| patterns caused by natural phenomenon - that an advanced form
| of life must exist here.
| encoderer wrote:
| Kardashev would approve
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Exactly. Humanity's first radio broadcast capable of
| detection from distant space was the 1936 Berlin Olympics
| broadcast. Then nukes nine years later were even more
| detectable, and discernible from natural sources. 4yrs
| travel time to Alpha Centauri, then 4 years back in a
| lightspeed craft, and voila - Roswell, sightings,
| abductions, coverups, etc.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| The date that nukes were invented is also roughly the date
| when the intelligence community captured the military
| industrial complex and started running psychological warfare
| campaigns against american citizens...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That data is _slighty_ suspect. Not just the reliability of
| reporting between 1-1900, but also the data on the site -
| apparently there was a siting in Chicago Illinois in the year
| 600? There 's a lot of reports for American locations even
| earlier than that.
|
| I think most importantly we started watching the sky when
| humanity started to fly. Suddenly the heavens were a viable
| place for mankind to be, especially after we ourselves got to
| space. The post-WW2 era also had a whole culture that was
| used to watching the sky because there had been very
| plausible threats of death from that direction. We suddenly
| cared when we saw something weird in the night beyond just a
| passing curiosity.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| All good points. I doubt the folks running that site have
| vetted every one of their hundreds of thousands of data
| points, so it's not an authoritative source, just a
| descriptive one at most.
|
| And, when did science fiction literature start getting big
| and developing plots involving aliens, and might that have
| stimulated people's imaginations about UFOs and aliens
| (which then conversely stimulated more scifi about them)?
| Was this happening prior to the atomic age or space age, or
| did that kind of scifi really get started with the space
| race? If the latter, that might also explain the huge
| increase in imaginings... er, sightings.
|
| I also can't help but wonder at the timing, with
| geopolitical tensions rising and China challenging US
| military and technological supremacy. It's quite a
| coincidence. Maybe it's the mother of all CIA mindfuck
| psyops, to introduce a new source of uncertainty and
| deterrence into the CCP and Russia's strategic
| calculations.
|
| There's "whistleblowers" on TV claiming the US is in
| possession of "exotic materials", aka alien tech, since the
| 1940s. Just how much has been reverse engineered in that
| time, and deployed in super secret weapons systems that not
| even Congress knows about? Would the CCP really want to
| risk WWIII against the US when there's even a small
| possibility of that?
|
| There's a great scene in "The Expanse" relevant to this
| situation, where UN Deputy Undersecretary Avasarala has a
| meeting considering the possibility of first contact:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYRLV-qm3Qs
|
| _" I have a file with nine hundred pages of analysis and
| contingency plans for war with Mars, including fourteen
| different scenarios for what to do if they develop an
| unexpected new technology. My file for what to do if an
| advanced alien species comes calling, is three pages long,
| and begins with 'Find God'"._
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Not true. Many other nations have had their own crashes. You're
| just hearing american sources of info.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Technically, all that's being claimed is that the USA has
| whistleblowers. Grutsch has said before that other countries
| also have UFO retrieval programmes. So if we suspend disbelief
| for a moment and assume there's real craft flying around, all
| it'd take for this current set of events is if the USA had a
| monopoly on whistleblowers.
|
| Given that most famous whistleblowers in recent years have been
| American this doesn't seem unlikely. Five Eyes has five
| governments in it, but only the USA had someone who went to the
| press. The US Government is both very large so more people can
| leak things, and very well funded, so more chance of secret
| programmes, and (IMHO) has a civic-minded culture in which
| people are more inspired by things like the Constitution and
| stated cultural ideals than in other countries.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| I'm wondering if you have ever been to Australia. I went once
| and noticed there were a lot of Astra aliens, then I understood
| how it got its name!
| madspindel wrote:
| Ghost rockets in Sweden, 1946?
|
| The country with the best fishing nets would probably catch
| more fish than countries with bad fishing nets, even if they
| have the same amount of fish in the oceans.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The US may have the best electronic "nets". Other places have
| a lot more eyeballs per square mile/km, though.
| kodah wrote:
| America is hardly special in their belief in UFOs:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightin...
|
| Generally UFO reportings increased with astronomy, radar, and
| surveillance technology development. Of which, the US has a lot
| of all three, which probably means we have a sufficiently
| complex system that we can notice anomalies but not
| sufficiently complex enough to identify them.
|
| You could've googled this theory you had before putting it in
| text.
| bbor wrote:
| They did end their comment with a question mark - no need to
| get snippy :)
| kodah wrote:
| I've come across a number of low effort commentary recently
| that's easily googlable where folks themselves are
| inappropriate. In this case, there's amerocentricism
| heavily implied when that's obviously not the case. I think
| maybe what this suggests is that HN really isn't the place
| for me at the moment.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| You still trust Google to give good results? That (air)ship
| has long sailed...
| Stranger43 wrote:
| When it comes to "strange lights in the sky" there is a fairly
| uniform body of observation around the world with
| some(typically dry or mountainous) regions being hotpots so
| there is definitely things happening in the skies we don't
| fully understand but that's not the same as extraterrestrial
| spaceships and could easily be unusual "weather patterns", or
| some other natural phenomena.
|
| Where the us is alone however is in the reports of
| sightings/abductions of entities exiting those craft but then
| again most of those stories tend to either be "retrieved
| memories", straight up hoaxes or so vague in details that other
| explanations cannot be ruled out.
| fsn4dN69ey wrote:
| Let's look at this as rationally as possible:
|
| People have been claiming to see UFOs for years, ever since the
| popularization in mass media with the start of "the war of the
| worlds". In nearly all cases, even (at the time) credible
| sightings were advanced weapons programs. Additionally, with the
| proliferation of everyone having access to relatively high
| quality cameras, the amount of "legitimate" sightings has dropped
| dramatically.
|
| Now, what has changed? We have several videos, that are public
| knowledge, that show objects moving in ways that no level of
| technology we have now can demonstrate.
|
| This video and the other two related are the only official videos
| we currently have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWLZgnmRDs4
|
| These objects were recorded as early as 2004. These objects were
| recorded not by a loony bin boy cried wolf UFO-ologist but by US
| Navy airmen.
|
| Ok, maybe they are a camera issue? e.g. one can imagine it's a
| bird or a balloon or an object that shows up as moving much
| faster than reality, or something to do with parallax/tracking
| error with the IR (infrared)? That would be believable,
| especially if it's a single recording, solo pilot, new equipment.
| The issue with this is that in addition to the declassified IR
| videos, we saw this happen multiple times, in multiple locations,
| on different aircraft, with multiple pilots present in the
| aircraft at the same time making the same visual (with eyeballs)
| confirmation, radar confirmation, IR.
|
| Ok, maybe it's an advanced hologram program/electronic warfare
| test/drill or something? Which was my next guess, but the visual
| confirmation rules out electronic warfare and in addition to
| visuals, IR, we also have radar bouncing off - not just recorded
| by the aircraft, but recorded by the entire USS Nimitz carrier
| group that was in the area at the time - hence real, physical
| objects. And, again, it wasn't just one signature, in fact the
| reason they were up there to begin with was because of the
| unidentified objects in the airspace.
|
| Ok, maybe it's just a balloon or an experimental drone by the US
| or its rivals. The issue here is that the physics described are
| not just "next-gen" a la F35 but some sort of groundbreaking
| physics that would change the way we do anything.
|
| From The New York Times:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...
|
| "For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been
| tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at
| 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping
| at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of
| radar range or shot straight back up."
|
| Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering
| above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was
| about 40 feet long. Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said
| in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two
| weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes)
| witnessed the object for about 5 minutes. Fravor says that as he
| spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended,
| mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object
| disappeared. Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of
| some kind -- whitish -- that was around 40 feet long and oval in
| shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the
| wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction,
| Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves
| and foam, as if the water were boiling.
|
| Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he
| got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost
| as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said. Fravor
| abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the
| object. But then the object peeled away. "It accelerated like
| nothing I've ever seen," he said in the interview. He was, he
| said, "pretty weirded out." The two fighter jets then conferred
| with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to
| head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point,
| in aviation parlance. They were en route and closing in when the
| Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange
| aircraft. "Sir, you won't believe it," the radio operator said,
| "but that thing is at your cap point." "We were at least 40 miles
| away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap
| point," Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy,
| said in the interview.
|
| Thus, they are able to move on their own, not just floating in
| the wind (balloon, birds, launched radar reflectors), they're
| quite large, and can move large distances in short amounts of
| time. Additionally, no exhaust ports, no exhaust fumes, no
| control surfaces of any kind were observed. If we actually break
| down and analyze the movement based on the recording, we get
| results that are beyond physics. From the University of Albany -
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
|
| Even the most conservative and minimum models for acceleration
| give us ~70g with maneuverability, which is more than double what
| we have, and only in a rocket-like manner. Not without exhaust,
| control surfaces, and non-linear movement.
|
| "It is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions at this point
| regarding the nature and origin of these UAVs other than the fact
| that we have shown that these objects cannot be of any known
| aircraft or missiles using current technology. We have
| characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have
| demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed
| anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those
| of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft."
|
| Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about. The
| issue with this is that we'd see a ton of people "disappearing"
| from public life and essentially vanishing, similar to what
| happened during the Manhattan Project. Physicists,
| mathematicians, materials scientists would seemingly end their
| career, stop publishing, and go off the grid to live and work at
| some facility. Currently, we haven't seen an exodus/brain drain
| of any level in the fields we would expect towards "nothing" - if
| anything, everyone's going into finance and adtech. Not to
| mention, this kind of stuff would be "Theory of Relativity" tier,
| not just cutting edge stealth tech.
|
| The only other thing I can imagine is that it's a coordinated
| government attempt to spread disinformation regarding our
| military capabilities to our adversaries. Even then, it doesn't
| explain what the objects were.
|
| I really really don't want to be a "UFO guy" but maybe even this
| mindset is part of the problem. Given all of this information, I
| don't understand why so many are so quick to dismiss any sort of
| theory, because as far as I see it anything terrestrial is
| exponentially more likely than aliens, but I can't come up with
| any ideas for these objects to have originated on Earth.
|
| PS. there's also the the whistleblower which the article
| references: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/ex-intel-
| official-go... and a 2017 NYT article describing the program
| itself: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-
| prog...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I would put weight on this if it were to re-occur. The navy has
| done lots and lots and lots and lots of drills since 2004.
| Nothing like this has magically re-appeared.
| Gud wrote:
| More recent videos exist - but they are classified.
|
| These objects are being picked up by navy pilots all the
| time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >More recent videos exist - but they are classified.
|
| Aliens exist, but its classified. We're going in a circle.
| Gud wrote:
| ?
|
| 'In September 2019, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed that
| the released videos were made by naval aviators, and that
| they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number
| of training range incursions by unidentified aerial
| phenomena in recent years".'
|
| From the wikipedia article I linked to.
|
| Further,
|
| https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/597039-how-
| governmen...
| fsn4dN69ey wrote:
| If we only want to go off of verified sources, of course it's
| all classified since we can only trust the military to
| provide us information on this as far as veracity goes. Based
| on the official, released, declassified videos from the
| Pentagon, it happened in 2004, 2014, and 2015 AT LEAST.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
|
| I totally understand the skepticism and want to reiterate
| that I am not nor do I want to be a "UFO guy". It is also
| especially hard to prove, because there are so many outs. One
| could ask for photos, and then if photos are provided,
| they're photoshopped/doctored/not high quality enough (which
| is the case 99.99999999% of the time), and then if they're
| provided from the government then it's not real because it's
| a one-off situation e.g. lone wolf, and if there's multiple
| then it's a psyop/disinformation, and then if they provide a
| witness or a whistleblower then they're crazy and a nutjob,
| but if they provide multiple it's just part of the
| conspiracy, etc etc.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| "Hey look over there". Nothing but politics of distraction from
| grave corruption.
| lend000 wrote:
| All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret
| programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in
| defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world,
| is _decades_ behind the private sector on computing technology --
| it 's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology
| would be decades (or centuries) ahead. The best engineers and
| scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs paying 5-10x more since
| the late 90's.
|
| And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been
| going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little
| doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it.
|
| While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is
| meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to
| ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are
| completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying
| saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be
| prosaically explained.
| godelski wrote:
| I've worked with the government in the past. Their compute
| systems definitely are not decades behind. Though some are.
| They have the the top supercomputers and machines that haven't
| been updated since the 80's. That's a more realistic picture of
| the government. That it is this gigantic thing that is in no
| way remotely monolithic. It's more like The Blob, that it is an
| amorphis mixture of a lot of things. Neither this nor that.
| This is why people get into arguments when discussing the
| government, because it is a hodgepodge of conflicting things
| that with extreme differences in capacity and effectiveness.
| The same also goes for the military (and this should be more
| obvious to people if you know the joke about "military grade"
| and recognize that our military is the most powerful and modern
| one. It is the reason all those "more advanced" private sector
| things exist. Just because not bought in "bulk" and handed to
| every private doesn't mean it isn't in the system). So stop
| painting it with a broad brush because it is leading to
| conspiracy theories that are just silly (goes in both
| directions).
|
| With the military (in addition to what I said) you have to be
| very aware that it, like most gov entities, outsources work.
| The private sector is coupled with the military. The US
| military doesn't build the secret jets on secret military
| bases, Lockheed and Boeing do. Lockheed built the SR71, which
| definitely led to many UFO stories.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| To add, the reason most computers are behind is usually a
| mentality of "if it aint broke dont fix it"
|
| Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses,
| essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.
| kube-system wrote:
| Spaceflight has an inherently different set of requirements
| from the types of applications people on here mostly build.
| NASA doesn't need to run 2GB of javascript dependencies on
| their rover. They have people who can write lean real-time
| code in a low level language. They need to be sure a bit
| flip doesn't turn a 3 billion dollar project into rubble.
| There is no 'fix it in the next sprint' in spaceflight;
| after you hit the red button, it must work. The RAD750 that
| Perseverance runs on has some impressive specs, they are
| just specs that don't matter in a datacenter.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's quite amazing to see that the mars rover has what
| you'd call self-driving capabilities, complete with
| onboard mapping & localization, yet without GPS and any
| kind of reasonable computer.
|
| However, they did create an FPGA to do the stereo vision
| in real time, which is pretty cool too.
| godelski wrote:
| Fun story about that. I knew the lead driver for
| Curiosity and he was sharing a story about how not long
| after they got off Mars time they were driving it up a
| slope. Before he left for work that day he quickly
| thought to add a stopping routine in case the rover slide
| down the hill because the ground wasn't stable. Came back
| in the morning and they were worried they crashed the
| rover because the camera was facing a rock. Was a
| terrifying 30 minutes-ish moving the camera and checking
| that everything was okay. The routine saving the rover.
| (I'm sure the story is a bit exaggerated, but still fun
| and does demonstrate the high risk these systems have.
| Even if they only move a 0.15km/hr)
| dekhn wrote:
| No, that's not the reason space computers are behind.
|
| Space computers are behind because space technology is
| based on minimizing risk given the large cost of failure.
| Using older nodes with well-understood flaws that can be
| built using old chip equipment is much lower risk than
| trying to put Intel's latest into a communications
| satellite.
|
| Few things in space truly would require anything state of
| the art. The best argument I can think of would be realtime
| image processing using DNNs- imagine you made a fleet of 1M
| identical exploration bots and you wanted them to filter
| out most of their imaging data before sending back the best
| candidates.
| godelski wrote:
| Exactly. If anyone is going to work _with_ the government,
| you should be aware of the Technology Readiness Level
| (TRL)[0]. It's like the cornerstone of how everything
| operates. It takes decades to get to level 9 sometimes, and
| when reliability is critical that's what they use. Not only
| is it "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but "it ain't
| broke, and we understand every single component of this
| system and everything that can go wrong with it, don't
| 'fix' it."
|
| It can also take a lot of time for something to get from
| TRL 6 to TRL 7, and from TRL 7 to TRL 8. Sometimes
| realistically impossible to get to TRL 9! The system could
| be more efficient for sure, and probably has broken down
| too much, but the idea itself is fine.
|
| Fwiw, I've seen things that I 100% believe should be done
| today and that there's massive amounts of evidence for it,
| but aren't done because they aren't TRL 9. I don't want to
| start arguments, but there's a certain industry that gets
| hit with this all the time. Where they can do tons of
| complex and detailed models but aren't able to build the
| actual thing because it hasn't been physically
| demonstrated. Which leads to a weird self referential
| roadblock.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-
| speed imac processor from 1990s.
|
| Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and
| certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme
| temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined
| years in advance?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well, the mars helicopter essentially uses a cell phone,
| so not really.
|
| And it's not _that_ low power.
|
| But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too
| costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to
| just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military
| didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements
| heavyset_go wrote:
| AFAIK the helicopter wasn't mission critical, it was a
| nice-to-have demo project that piggybacked on
| Perseverance's mission.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| From what I understand the helicopter was a special case
| and sort of a side mission meant to test off the shelf
| parts.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Sure, but those COTS parts still underwent lots and lots
| of rad/ vac testing. There's a design-for-resilience vs
| test-for-resilience tradeoff at play. I'm saying that not
| all systems require design-for-resilience.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Ingenuity is also running a very customized software
| stack to go along with the highly tested hardware. IIRC
| the OS can reboot in a some relatively small number
| milliseconds. It's meant to be able to crash in mid-air
| and reboot and recover before the probe loses lift and
| crashes in most flight envelopes. The software is also
| set up to crash and reboot rather than try to recover or
| operate in a compromised state.
| [deleted]
| godelski wrote:
| Well to nitpick, that's because the two are kinda the
| same. Testing is part of design and vise versa in these
| types of systems. But otherwise I agree with the points
| you've made (seems we've been responding in parallel lol)
| godelski wrote:
| Not everything needs to meet those specific standards,
| but essentially yes. My sibling comment mentioned
| Ingenuity (Mars Helicopter), but let's mention Curiosity.
| It often gets cited as costing $2.5 billion dollars. So
| that alone says why you wouldn't want to risk anything
| (see my other comments, especially about TRL[note]). But
| that also took almost a decade![other note] Time is also
| very expensive, so how much would you risk? On a 10 year
| project, that is going to operate for another 12+ years
| (still going, landed in 2011) with no way to repair or
| fix the product, you probably want that thing to be
| reliable as shit. Worth an extra year or two to make that
| happen.
|
| [note] TRL 9 pretty much doesn't exist in these types of
| missions. We don't have decades of operation of specific
| devices on other planets. But you still use very robust
| and redundant systems.
|
| [other note] People often cite this as a waste of money,
| but when we consider the time it is pittance in the
| government budget. Costs could definitely come down, but
| in government money can only exchange hands through leaky
| buckets. NASA politically prides itself as having parts
| from every state, which from an engineering perspective
| should sound like a logistic nightmare, and it is. But
| this is the type of people you are voting for, people
| that love pageantry over pragmatism. (pageantry gets
| votes, pragmatism doesn't)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Not sure if true, but I also recall reading that ICs made
| with larger processes are more resilient to cosmic ray
| strikes. So modern 7nm chips might have an inherent
| disadvantage in these applications.
| godelski wrote:
| This is true. You can think about this fairly simply as
| you just have to think about the amount of energy
| traveling within a transistor and what that energy's
| proportionate level is to a cosmic ray. Smaller IC's are
| more likely to be hit (cross-section is higher due to
| density AND that we operate in fields, no need for a
| direct physical interaction of the mass).
|
| But that's not why they cost so much. Rad hardened ICs
| are built differently. They are built on a sapphire base:
| Silicon on Sapphire (SoS). Process is more complicated
| and expensive.
|
| That said, there are more people looking at commercial
| off the shelf (COTS) and just building redundant systems
| because 2 COTS CPUs can be cheaper (and more powerful)
| and because ECC has gotten much better. But this is
| really only for LEO right now, but may be used in deeper
| space missions later on. Realistically it is just going
| to be dependent on how much your ride costs. LEO is cheap
| now, so risk of failure is dramatically reduced. Your
| ride is still most of your cost though.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Do you think the jet engines being built at Pratt & Whitney to
| power the F-35 and developed for the NGAD fighter are behind
| the private sector?
|
| Not like P&W is a government owned company, either - the
| private sector and the military are closely integrated, that's
| the military industrial complex.
| meroes wrote:
| Decades behind in ad networks and social graphs but miles ahead
| in their core competencies maybe?
| lend000 wrote:
| Not if cybersecurity is supposed to be one of their core
| competencies.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The easiest way to improve cybersecurity is keeping your
| critical hardware off of the public internet or even
| keeping it air-gapped. Something that doesn't require
| leading edge tech but operational care. I suspect the
| military is pretty good at the latter, certainly much
| better than the typical SV company.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| compared to the private sector? lol
|
| the Verizon Disclosure Reports are still a thing, you can
| find the 2022 DBIR with breaches across the private sector.
| they get hit hard all the time.
|
| hell, the biggest breach in FedGov history is cuz of
| SolarWinds, which pwnd a lot of private sector folks too,
| including M$
| nbaugh1 wrote:
| Completely anecdotal counter-point - the smartest person I know
| is a physicist who subcontracts for the Army
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is
| decades behind the private sector on computing technology
|
| This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed
| source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense
| establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades
| ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just
| in obvious areas like cryptography but data structures and
| algorithms, as well as exotic hardware.
|
| It doesn't explain UFOs, but the idea that the most advanced
| public computer tech is decades ahead of what elements of the
| US DoD have doesn't pass the smell test. At worst there is
| parity and in some areas there is quite a bit of anecdotal
| evidence of capability that should not be possible if you
| solely went on public computing literature. (As a well-known
| example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis
| capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is
| explainable by literature.)
|
| Not everyone aspires to be a code monkey at Facebook for the
| money. There are extremely talented computer scientists working
| in US government, especially the secretive parts, that could
| instantly get a job at any FAANG company if they wanted to --
| I've met many of them -- but they don't. The notion that the US
| DoD does not have access to "the best engineers and scientists"
| is dubious.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It 's
| been going on since at least the 1940's_
|
| Exactly _what_ has been going on since the 40s though? The
| Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced
| advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the
| government. It was just a balloon that got _blown up_ into an
| massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors
| about alien spacecraft.
|
| The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology,
| contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane
| explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far.
| There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either
| from the government or from space. The government doesn't have
| stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for
| such craft existing in the first place.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I think thou protest too much.
| esbranson wrote:
| Mick West should stick to Tony Hawk videogames and leave this
| to the pilots who say his explanations are idiotic.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| When discussing something rationally what matters is the
| merits of the arguments, not the background of the speaker.
| Mick West's background as a video game developer don't
| detract from his arguments. Furthermore, Navy pilot are not
| assured against dishonesty or error; even US Navy pilots
| are humans. Spare me this "support the troops" style of
| rhetoric; you can't use patriotism to shame me into
| uncritically taking military personnel at their word.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Ehh, what's the SV state of the art in low-observability, or
| railguns, or high-precision fuzing? I'm thinking "not very
| much".
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Exactly. The government is quite competitive in fields that
| are not printing SAAS levels of money
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Not SV but there's a lot of aerospace companies in Cali and
| the rest of the SW. The guy[0] who invented the first modern
| UAV that became the basis of the military's entire drone
| program was running his company out of his garage in LA,
| literally a garage startup. This is why DARPA exists and
| funds companies outside of the direct purview of military
| R&D.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Karem
| godelski wrote:
| So you get it then. Military tech is developed by
| companies. They are coupled. All those secret jets and
| rockets aren't built by military engineers with no
| affiliation to any private entity, they are built through
| contractors who get paid way more than government salaries
| but are still given clearances and cannot sell their top of
| the line technologies to the public. I mean Lockheed built
| the SR71. That's how this works. I'm confused why so many
| people are confused. The problem is about the ridiculous
| price tags and maybe (or maybe not) that the military non-
| contractor salaries are rather low. But there is no
| shortage of contractors.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| We make one helluva juice pouch squeezer!
| uhtred wrote:
| It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the
| line by making up a story about seeing a UFO.
|
| For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly:
| https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on
| the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO.
|
| Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all
| the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir"
| stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-
| telltale-w...).
|
| "But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than
| his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men
| breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."
|
| > For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...
|
| Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying
| things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in
| the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as
| a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky -
| until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the
| lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum.
| Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately
| identify.
| uhtred wrote:
| Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example
| personally.
|
| The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a
| professor of philosophy and director of the Hong
| Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it
| wouldn't be worth him making this up.
|
| And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky,
| but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on
| him- what could he be misidentifying?
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I can't read the full Boston Globe article due to the
| paywall and offer no opinion on the author's state of
| mind, but if you assume some small percent of outwardly
| functional people have "eccentric" personalities, it
| would not be surprising that you would occasionally hear
| about a college professor doing something eccentric. Why
| is any further explanation needed than "some humans have
| quirky personalities and do quirky things..."
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example
| personally.
|
| He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about
| getting caught lying.
|
| > And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the
| sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a
| light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
|
| Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams
| I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was
| a helicopter with a searchlight.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/20694674
| 0/m...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effec
| t
| uhtred wrote:
| hmm, he does say he was camping on a beach in Plymouth,
| MA. On the map I see a municipal airport not far inland
| and a bit to the south a coast guard air base. I could
| imagine a coast guard helicopter out patrolling the
| coastline taking a closer look at someone on the beach at
| 2am.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's not a lie if the author believes that it's true. People
| are way too trusting of their senses and memories when both
| have been shown to be extremely fallible under numerous
| different circumstances. Remember how suggestible victims had
| been convinced that they participated in satanic sex rituals
| during the satanic panic[1]? Why is it out of the realm of
| possibility that the author is recounting a particularly
| vivid dream or hallucination that became more "real" the more
| he thought about it?
|
| Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches
| depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green
| men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of
| different aliens visiting us, _or_ people are having
| experiences they can 't rationally explain and their brain is
| filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
|
| Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone
| having a camera on them at any given moment is now
| approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of
| UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people
| just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens
| getting sneakier?
| uhtred wrote:
| I agree that memories are not always reliable but I
| personally find it to be with smaller less significant
| details about a larger event. So I could believe that the
| author perhaps misremembers colors or sounds or size to
| some extent- but to have a completely false memory of an
| entire event? I suppose a helicopter could have hovered
| over him and trained a search light on him- but to remember
| it years later as a UFO, I don't know.
| slg wrote:
| >I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either
| means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or
| that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are
| real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically
| explained.
|
| There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting
| Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of
| things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson.
| When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for
| patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we
| view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories
| about how people's native languages impact the way the view the
| world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver
| flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't
| explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest
| thing their brains could come up with.
|
| That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so
| important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of
| the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence
| beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence
| that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Plus, silver flying saucers _actually exist_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
| tedivm wrote:
| >Service ceiling: 10,000 ft (3,000 m) (estimated), 3 ft
| (0.91 m) (actual)
|
| I don't know if I'd call that a flying saucer- it was more
| of a hovering saucer.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Low-altitude ground-effect flight is still flight, I
| guess.
| kube-system wrote:
| You say this as if Silicon Valley was built on ad tech. Silicon
| Valley was born of the military industrial complex.
|
| > Corporate needs you to find the differences between these
| pictures.jpg: [military tech] [private sector tech] (they're
| the same picture)
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| > All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret
| programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in
| defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world,
| is decades behind the private sector on computing technology
|
| How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog#Content
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the government
| having exotic technology, the fundamental principles of which
| were completely unknown to the public. Governments can
| commission custom software and microchips and keep the
| details of those secret, but those things still operate on
| principles already known to the public; electronics,
| exploiting software, etc.
|
| When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the
| middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive
| alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the
| modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky
| shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic
| premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public
| knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily
| relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes
| of the thing weren't utterly exotic.
|
| Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of
| theory was already public years before they were brought into
| existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the
| broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner
| Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first
| heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction
| was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't
| practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical
| basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced
| the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they
| must have worked.
|
| But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical
| basis for such a technology known to the public right now.
| Nobody can say _" well it could be done with XYZ but it would
| be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."_
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| > Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the
| government having exotic technology
|
| It doesn't have to, it was a counter-example to that
| "decades behind the private sector on computing technology"
| thesis.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Okay fair enough. My comment is geared towards the larger
| context of people claiming the government has secret
| antigravity UFOs.
| akiselev wrote:
| Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to
| NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being
| nearly two decades old by that point.
|
| _> An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be
| a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been
| launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded
| by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11.
| The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-
| of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for
| reconnaissance purposes._ [1]
|
| Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly
| distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We
| just don't get to see the best in action because they're
| classified until they're almost pedestrian.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
| nathancahill wrote:
| Absolutely the case. For example, the military requires all
| commercial satellite imagery to be scaled to 25 cm resolution
| (up until 2014 it was limited to 50 cm). The true resolution
| is classified.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Surely it isn't the military that requires this? I couldn't
| find anything on a 25 cm limit, but I don't the military is
| a regulatory agency.
| avar wrote:
| An overview of it: https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-
| government-controls-sens...
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| Classified, but inferrable from the size of launch vehicles
| and basic optical properties. Still incredibly impressive.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Those mirrors aren't exotic technology. They're undoubtedly
| very expensive and difficult to produce but at the end of the
| day they're as mundane as any other first surface mirror.
| They don't evidence the government having some sort of new
| paradigm of technology kept secret, like antigravity instead
| of normal airplanes or something like that.
| akiselev wrote:
| That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because you've
| got a CPU from the 80s. The interesting part isn't the
| mirror but how they _made it._ They 're obviously not
| mundane, otherwise NASA would have designed Hubble to use
| equivalent optics.
|
| Any actually interesting technology would be under a
| Secrecy Order [1] and the patents wouldn't see the light of
| day, perhaps ever. The few examples we know of were
| definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they
| were classified including the Manhattan project and the
| development of jet engines. Based on what little we know,
| the Secrecy Orders are very effective - some gaseous
| centrifuge technology used for enrichment in the 1940s and
| 1950s is _still_ considered cutting edge and secret.
|
| Antigravity is just fantasy land. All it would take is a
| factor of two improvement in any number of technologies to
| make something exotic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because
| you've got a CPU from the 80s.
|
| Yes, exactly. Give a modern Apple CPU to some chip
| experts in the 80s and they'd no doubt be amazed and have
| many questions about the details, but they would have a
| theoretical basis for understanding the premise of the
| thing. Give the same chip to Isaac Newton or Archimedes
| and it would be a completely different story. To them, a
| CPU would be truly exotic technology.
|
| Antigrav existing today would be like CPUs existing in
| Newton's day. You'd need completely new theories to even
| comprehend the most basic operating principles. Antigrav
| craft like those proposed by the people who don't believe
| Mick West's explanation of the Navy's "Go Fast" video
| would be further removed on a theoretical basis from the
| F-35 than the F-35 is from the Wright flier.
|
| > _The few examples we know of were definitely cutting
| edge exotic technology at the time they were classified
| including the Manhattan project and the development of
| jet engines._
|
| In both of these cases, the fundamental operating
| principles were widely known to relevant researchers in
| various countries before anybody developed one that
| worked. Japan and Germany both had nuclear weapons
| programs during WW2. Nuclear fission was known to
| researchers in all three nations, and more as well. In
| the case of jet engines, you had inventors in many
| countries taking stabs at implementing a practical one
| decades before they were adopted into military service.
| There was never a chance of any military getting jet
| engines while the rest of the world was left wondering
| what the hell it even was.
|
| And with respect to gas centrifuges; those were
| considered but ultimately not employed by the Manhattan
| Project, which instead used gaseous diffusion. But the
| premise of gas centrifuges for isotope separation was
| first suggested in 1919, and the broader premise of any
| sort of centrifuge to separate things is much older. Gas
| centrifuges weren't exotic technology that game out of
| nowhere, the theoretical basis for them was clear before
| they were successfully created.
| akiselev wrote:
| We've got a theoretical basis for _warp drives_ [1]!
| Casimir effect-based propelentless propulsion! Nuclear
| engines in spaaaaace! How much more theoretical basis
| does your contrarianism demand?
|
| We've got a theoretical basis for almost any alien
| technology that comes short of violating the conservation
| of momentum or breaking the speed of light. Doesn't mean
| we're any closer to making an SSTO space ship.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > Alcubierre drive
|
| Relies on "exotic matter" that violates known laws of
| physics.
| akiselev wrote:
| It actually doesn't violate the laws of physics. Matter
| with negative mass has never been observed before, making
| it purely theoretical. Theoretical basis!
|
| Besides, exotic matter is a shortcut to the energy
| required, not a necessary part of the Alcubierre drive.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > Matter with negative mass has never been observed
| before, making it purely theoretical.
|
| It's worse than merely theoretical because the theories
| we use to describe reality at present don't give us any
| reason to believe such exotic matter must exist, and
| there is no empirical evidence for such matter existing.
|
| But slice it anyway you like, the Navy isn't operating
| these and there is no theoretical basis for explaining
| the sort of antigravity craft that UFOologists claim
| these Navy videos show. They aren't Alcubierre drives,
| that is simply absurd.
| godelski wrote:
| > they're as mundane as any other first surface mirror
|
| This is a huge understatement. Like calling GPT4 "as
| mundane as any other transformer." Just because things have
| a high abstraction similarity doesn't mean the details
| aren't critical. Very expensive and difficult to produce
| __is__ exotic technology. There's also a large range of
| "paradigm shifting" technologies between here and
| antigravity. Don't listen to YouTube, get your hands dirty
| and work on the stuff if you want to get the expertise to
| know why this stuff is so impressive.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _Very expensive and difficult to produce __is__ exotic
| technology._
|
| Not in the sense of antigravity. Enough money and time
| can buy you an arbitrarily nice mirror, it doesn't rely
| on presently unknown to the public attributes of the
| universe.
| godelski wrote:
| > Enough money and time can buy you an arbitrarily nice
| mirror
|
| Yes and no. But I'm going to go with mostly no. The yes
| is only because over thousands of years we have in fact
| improved mirror quality, but if we're talking about
| building a perfect mirror within a 5-10 year time-frame
| from now, it is definitely no. No matter how much money
| you spend.
|
| A lot of people like to make assumptions about our
| capacity to build and make things. The reason we don't
| live in a super futuristic society isn't just because
| we're not dumping enough money into such a goal
| (obviously that would help) but because even with
| infinite resources we don't have great paths towards
| those things right now. Nuance sucks, but is necessary.
| The truth is that there's no such thing as "simple" when
| we're talking about "arbitrary precision." Honestly, not
| even true long before that. There's a good reason you'll
| find books with thousands of pages dedicated to a
| seemingly simple thing e.gs: o-rings, screws, bolts,
| threading, and so on. Don't fall for the simplicity trap.
| godelski wrote:
| > not evenly distributed throughout the government and its
| contractors
|
| Not only that, but that "the government" and "its
| contractors" are often impossible to distinguish and for all
| intents and purposes the same. Many times realistically a
| loophole to escape the GS pay.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is
| decades behind the private sector on computing technology --
| it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion
| technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead
|
| What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret
| military clearance?
| NickC25 wrote:
| Seriously. Oftentimes, though, it's not the government who is
| ahead in tech, it's the quasi-private sector that is decades
| ahead but due to secrecy laws cannot come forward and talk
| about it under any and every circumstance.
|
| I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at
| Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent
| within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a
| similar question a few years back. The response was "in the
| non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll
| out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of
| current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very
| narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and
| have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make
| sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours.
|
| When asked about more classified research areas the response
| was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no
| doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance
| and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other
| than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively
| the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are
| probably decades ahead of modern tech.
|
| This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is
| recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors
| who can do better research with a substantially wider
| breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the
| folks at the top of the government.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| In most classified arenas, there is no private sector
| competition. No one in SV is building subs, SOSUS arrays or
| stealth a/c. So it's completely reasonable they're way
| ahead of some niche innovator building a sub out of carbon
| fiber. But it's not sci-fi tech.
|
| People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12
| predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W
| jewels were out by ~1978 or so.
|
| LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to
| hide an anti-grav unit.
| treyfitty wrote:
| That "government employee doesn't get paid enough to attract
| talent" trope has to die. I work with many government employees
| that are not beholden to the government pay scales and get
| special exemptions to be compensated "at market rates." You'd
| be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear
| $750k
| rdtsc wrote:
| They typical pattern is they work for one of the government
| contractors L3 (now L3Harris), Northrop Grumman, etc. Of
| course it's a revolving door as well.
|
| > You'd be surprised how many tech employees inside
| government clear $750k
|
| That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more
| recent info than I do.
| lend000 wrote:
| Yes I'm a bit skeptical of the parent's numbers, but if
| true, I imagine it's very much the exception, not the norm.
| Technical employees at the contractors did not do much
| better than the price ranges posted for government job
| boards (even distinguished/principal engineers capped out
| at what is probably around $300-350k today after inflation)
| except in management positions, in my experience. All the
| most talented engineers I knew were gone within a few
| years.
|
| Not to mention the red-taped filled work environment does
| not exactly encourage innovation.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It is an exception but specialized technical expertise
| can definitely bill out that high to the US government.
| (source: I've billed out higher)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _That does sound a little high. But it seems you have
| more recent info than I do_
|
| This is the solo special contractor rate. You aren't paying
| a person a million bucks. You're paying a "company" that
| because that's what expertise in how carbon fibers set in a
| particular resin matrix subjected to a high-frequency
| supersonic detonation ring or something, an expertise that
| globally numbers maybe five, and within the U.S., three, is
| worth.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Agree, for the solo special contractor rate that is quite
| plausible.
| esaym wrote:
| Then how do I join?
| rndmwlk wrote:
| Also ignores the entire defense and aerospace industry. It's
| laughably ignorant to just write off the STEM talent at
| places like Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, etc because FAANG is
| a popular destination for CS grads. Also, people here (and in
| SV in general) doubt the capabilities and talent in the
| public sector until suddenly a Stuxnet is brought to light.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| As a former government employee, I doubt they work directly
| _for_ the government. The government _loves_ to outsource
| everything remotely technical to contractors in my (dated)
| experience. The GS and even the SES pay scales they offer are
| laughable in comparison to what one can get in the private
| sector.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Correct, but if you do 5 years in the military, and 15 in
| FedGov, you can then retire at your GS-15 / SES grade and
| get a pension + guaranteed healthcare.
|
| Then you start your 2nd career at GD or Lockheed or
| Microsoft, et al, and get 300k per annum.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I think you're really overstating it. I know guys that
| have done the military / fed / contractor shuffle.
| Getting above gs 12 damned near impossible, and when they
| figure that out, they go into contracting for ~100k+
| positions, but it's not 300k. If you play it right, yeah
| you can fully retire at 55 with a small pension and
| (hugely important!) health insurance, but someone who
| went tech sector from the jump can _easily_ retire at 40
| if they really set their minds to it.
|
| For other fields though, it can make sense.
| carabiner wrote:
| I've worked in defense aerospace. Silicon Valley has no
| relevance to aerospace. Likewise dod computing systems / IT
| infrastructure has nothing to do with propulsion engineering at
| govt labs or in industry. You're mixing up a whole bunch of
| things to make a broad conclusion that old computers means that
| DoD still isn't funding advanced weaponry beyond which we have
| seen. See the stealth hawk used in the bin Laden raid.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley
| jobs paying 5-10x more since the late 90 's._
|
| Not necessarily. I once sold a Ferrari to a nuclear weapons
| tech from Los Alamos. His boss had a Countach.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Yes and no. The military has lots of old tech because it's
| heavily field tested, well understood, and still does what it
| needs to do good enough.
|
| They do use cutting edge stuff to, and silicon valley pays
| well, but really only if your a software guy. Contrary to
| contemporary beliefs, their still are smart engineers out their
| building cutting edge non-compute hardware.
| dingusdew wrote:
| [dead]
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| And there is still no physical evidence of them. These UFOs must
| be made of pure dark matter.
| theptip wrote:
| This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open that
| are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right? Folks on the
| committees are angry that China is trolling US Navy vessels with
| UAVs and this isn't being publicized.
|
| The "non-earth" origin is the smokescreen, "exotic" covers
| foreign secret research projects?
|
| Something a bit convoluted like this is orders of magnitude more
| probable in my world model. (Basically, the prior "aliens exist
| and have been covered up" rounds to zero, so given we are
| observing this public action, even extremely unlikely
| explanations could explain it.)
| gfodor wrote:
| No, it's a push from Congress to determine if the US has been
| storing retrieved non-human spacecraft. Hope that helps.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| UFO narratives are convenient distractions from meaningful
| politics. IMO, what you're seeing is a legislative effort to
| avoid doing the jobs they were elected to do while appearing
| bipartisan and proactive.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Seems odd and counterproductive to include the "non-earth" and
| "exotic" language at all then. Why not refer to all "non-
| domestic aerospace material" instead? A group who provably
| knows they have Chinese hardware would be much harder to
| prosecute under the current language.
| theptip wrote:
| They are getting way more press this way? Doesn't seem
| counterproductive at all to me.
| krapp wrote:
| What does the press get them? The Russians/Chinese or
| whomever are flying these theoretical UAVs know they aren't
| alien, the US government knows they aren't alien, and now
| not only us the US exposing its intelligence capabilities
| (or lack thereof,) they're making themselves look like
| fools in the process.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's better for adversaries to think you're incompetent
| or dumb than it is to let them know that you're on to
| them and/or can defeat their latest measures if it comes
| down to it. They might try harder next time, and actually
| outclass you.
|
| One aspect of such surveillance missions is to see how
| the US responds to these incidents, in order to learn
| about technology and methods that are used and that
| adversaries might not know about.
| krapp wrote:
| It still seems like a boneheaded and ridiculous way to go
| about it, when simply not saying anything and running
| counterintelligence would also work and not make us look
| like clowns.
| themagician wrote:
| This is a push by the DoD to make American's believe in US
| military and intelligence superiority--only a supremely
| powerful government would be able to coverup the existence of
| extraterrestrial life for 50+ years.
|
| World order is changing. China is a rising military power.
| People may even see foreign spy aircraft (e.g. Chinese weather
| balloons) over US airspace. The DoD would rather you believe
| it's aliens. This kind of propaganda works great on older
| boomers in particular because they've been conditioned to
| believe it all their life.
|
| The US military is not able to coverup something like a crashed
| alien spacecraft. They couldn't even stop a dozen men with box
| cutters from crashing planes into buildings. I would not be
| surprised in the least to find out that the 9/11 conspiracies
| were funded by the DoD--probably by the same people doing this
| nonsense now. Again, "they" would rather you believe in a
| supremely powerful government with space lasers than have their
| true incompetence unmasked.
| abliefern wrote:
| This does not track for me at all. I'm sorry but why would
| anybody in the DOD have an incentive to "make Americans
| believe in US military and intelligence superiority"?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Because one of the purposes of flying surveillance aircraft
| in US airspace is psychological warfare. It sends the
| message that China/Russia/whoever can send whatever they
| want into US airspace and there's nothing that anyone,
| including the military, can do about it. It sows fear,
| uncertainty and doubt in both the public and even members
| of the military who can recognize the advanced capabilities
| of the armies they might have to fight. It sends the
| message that you are not safe at home, and those who are
| supposed to protect you can't.
|
| However, if people think they're aliens, that instead turns
| psychological warfare on its head and into something that
| inspires awe, wonder and possibility. No one is scared in
| the ways adversaries want them to be scared, and no one
| doubts the government is actually capable of handling
| threats from adversaries.
|
| "Aliens" as an explanation quells the potential for panic,
| versus adversaries successfully inducing the panic
| responses they desire. It also gives the opportunity for
| those who care too much about this to be painted as quacks.
| nradov wrote:
| I don't understand your comment. Russia has no real
| capability to fly surveillance aircraft over US
| territory. They can barely manage to fly to Syria without
| breaking down.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I said:
|
| > _China /Russia/whoever_
|
| As a placeholder for potential US adversaries who might
| have the motivation do something like this. If you don't
| like that I said Russia, ignore it and fill it in with
| China.
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| Come on, be serious. China can't even get the metallurgy
| right on turbine engines. Never mind flying saucers. If
| they are doing any airborne surveillance over the US
| homeland then it's either with spy balloons, or cheap
| little short-range drones launched by agents on the
| ground.
|
| https://www.airandspaceforces.com/china-air-force-may-
| take-a...
| sokoloff wrote:
| To keep Americans happy about the over 3/4 Trillion dollars
| we spend on defense every year?
|
| "You spend a lot, but you get the best!" sounds a lot
| better than "You spend a lot, but we still suck!"
| echelon wrote:
| > "You spend a lot, but you get the best!" sounds a lot
| better than "You spend a lot, but we still suck!"
|
| This argument doesn't make any sense. The US military is
| better than the next top three militaries combined. The
| Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old
| Western tech.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That doesn't stop the DoD from wanting Americans to know
| that fact, because that's how they're funded.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It can show that the best still isn't good enough for
| some scenarios, including this scenario where unmanned
| aircraft are entering US airspace unimpeded.
|
| The US military might be better than the rest, but they
| were still defeated by poor people in the desert with
| some Casio watches and decades' old AKs.
|
| Similarly, it seems that small drones are another
| potential avenue of exploitation in asymmetric warfare.
| themagician wrote:
| The war in Ukraine is showing that the "superpowers"
| aren't so super. It's showing just how much of the
| military superiority is propaganda and nothing more. But
| we already knew that, because the US just went through
| what Russia is now going through.
|
| The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against
| cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives
| and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. You'd think
| maybe they'd have busted out the ray guns or spaceships
| instead of taking the L.
| _kbh_ wrote:
| > The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against
| cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives
| and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox.
|
| To be fair the US left Afghanistan and the remaining
| Afghani army crumbled to the taliban pretty quickly.
|
| I'd say the two situations are very different, the US
| successfully occupied a country that was ~7000km from
| them.
|
| The Russians have so far failed to take a city that's
| ~200km from their own border in about 1 and a half years.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| > The US military is better than the next top three
| militaries combined.
|
| Partially due to institutional experience and economies
| of scale (for certain capabilities). We probably still
| exceed what the next top 3 powers (China, Russia, India,
| BTW) are spending in PPP terms, so it shouldn't be that
| surprising.
|
| > The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades
| old Western tech.
|
| For every video of HIMARS blowing up a Russian ammo
| depot, there's a video of Ka-52 helicopters popping M2
| Bradleys from 5+ km away.[1] M777s were lauded for their
| accuracy....until they broke. [2] Ukrainian brigades have
| been lavishly equipped with Western armored vehicles and
| they've bounced off a brick wall of positively-ancient
| minefields and artillery, very similar to the defense-in-
| depth that the Soviets used to defeat the Germans at
| Kursk ...in 1943.[3]
|
| This conflict is so complex in terms of difficult-to-
| measure soft factors that are influencing the battlefield
| (training, maintenance, corruption, NATO ISR support,
| information operations/propaganda, etc.), that drawing
| conclusions about the merits of individual technical
| systems or especially the overall tech base of the two
| main powers (Russia vs "the West") as a whole
| is....unwise.
|
| [1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-armor-
| appears...
|
| [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/us/ukraine-
| artillery-brea...
|
| [3]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/world/europe/ukrain
| e-coun...
| themagician wrote:
| So many reasons. If you want unlimited funding, if you want
| people to join, if you want citizens to feel safe... you
| really want them to feel like the government is powerful.
| If people think their government is a joke they will treat
| it as a joke. You don't want people thinking that a dozen
| people with box cutters can fly planes into buildings. You
| don't want people thinking that "the greatest superpower in
| the world" can't defeat literal cave dwellers with ancient
| soviet era weaponry. You don't want people to know that
| China's military is much more advanced than the public is
| aware and they are routinely flying over US airspace
| undetected.
|
| You want people to feel safe and pay their taxes. You want
| your citizens to believe that the $2 trillion spend on
| defense every year goes to good use, creating the kind of
| military and intelligence apparatus that Hollywood
| portrays.
|
| We fund these types of propaganda campaigns for the same
| reasons we have military parades and air shows. We saw how
| well these kinds of "overwhelmingly powerful" government
| myths worked for both the Soviets and Axis powers in WW2
| and we copied it. Every government chasing power and status
| wants its citizens to feel like they are the most powerful.
| China and Russia have similar kinds of myths.
|
| But you don't have to take my word for it. Please, continue
| to believe that spaceships from other planets have crashed
| and some elite division within the US government managed to
| retrieve them and keep it secret for 50+ years. Look past
| the failing state of our infrastructure and continue to
| _believe_ that an alien species capable of interstellar
| travel is interested specifically in Americans, but "they"
| are keeping you from knowing the truth!
| NLPaep wrote:
| China said they were going to shoot down the US balloon.
| They lost their lock and never got it back. Meanwhile the
| US is literally able to shoot down kites.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| There's a vast gulf between "believing that spaceships
| from other planets have crashed and some elite
| division..." and subscribing to your theory which is so
| far only supported by you insisting to us what "you want"
| as a theoretical deep state government apparatus. From my
| perspective, it would seem like the widespread belief
| that terrorists could crash planes into buildings
| resulted in a lot of public money, enlistment, and
| support flowing into the US Military over the early
| 2000s.
|
| You're presenting a false choice between two conspiracy
| theories as the only ways to view this situation, which
| certainly doesn't make your particular conspiracy theory
| look any more credible.
| themagician wrote:
| Not really. I will admit that it's totally possible that
| there is no conspiracy. It's entirely possible that
| people are so naturally brainwashed that they conspire
| against themselves without the help of the government.
| Pride is a hell of a drug, so that is totally possible. I
| mean, people do it with religion so why not this.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > This does not track for me at all. I'm sorry but why
| would anybody in the DOD have an incentive to "make
| Americans believe in US military and intelligence
| superiority"?
|
| Especially when NATO hasn't fired a shot in Ukraine, but is
| supplying real-time intelligence to the AFU.
|
| US cold war era surplus + EW helped break an entire Russian
| army, and may yet break a second.
| dekhn wrote:
| Are you really comparing China to the US in terms of military
| power?
|
| China just finished their first domestic aircraft carrier,
| and the current military hasn't really been in any major war.
| In the meantime, the US has continually maintained a state of
| readiness and nearly constant wars while modernizing its
| fleet.
|
| But you had to just go 9/11 Truther which means nobody here
| should really be paying attention to you.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| A "9/11 Truther" is somebody who disputes the 9/11
| Commission's Report. themagician is doing the opposite; men
| with box cutters crashing planes into buildings is
| precisely what the 9/11 Commission Report says. Will
| realizing this change how you feel about the merit of his
| comment, or will you still feel the same way even though
| your original reason for feeling this way was completely
| backwards?
| dekhn wrote:
| It's likely because I misparsed the meaning of this
| sentence: "I would not be surprised in the least to find
| out that the 9/11 conspiracies were funded by the DoD"
|
| thinking that the person I was responding to was
| suggesting the DoD may have funded the terrorists (a
| "conspiracy" is a secret plan to do something unlawful).
|
| After re-reading, I see now the claim is that the DoD may
| have funded the truthers- which I know nothing about.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| By the way, you might be interested to know that recent
| reporting [0], by _Rolling Stone_ contributing editor
| Seth Hettena on the Substack _SpyTalk_ , the media
| project run by veteran former Newsweek national security
| reporter Jeff Stein, and based on legal filings in
| Guantanamo Bay cases against 9/11 plotters, suggests that
| the FBI believes the CIA _did_ fund the 9 /11 terrorists,
| in the sense that they were cultivating them as
| intelligence sources. The mundane explanation is not that
| they sanctioned or even knew about the 9/11 plot, but
| rather that they failed to share intelligence with the
| rest of the intelligence community because they didn't
| want to compromise their source. But there is credible
| evidence to suggest that the terrorists were not only on
| the radar of the CIA, but were being actively developed
| as sources.
|
| [0] https://www.spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fbi-agents-accuse-
| cia-of
| themagician wrote:
| Is it really "9/11 truther" to believe the terrorists flew
| planes into buildings and the government was too
| incompetent to stop them? I believe that's the most anti-
| truther take possible.
| dekhn wrote:
| I misread your comment.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >only a supremely powerful government would be able to
| coverup the existence of extraterrestrial life for 50+ years.
|
| The allegations by David Grusch that set all this off
| included that there's been a decades long competition between
| various nations to collect these craft.
|
| From The Debrief Article
|
| >"His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial
| arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years
| focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin
| is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization
| that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin
| derive from non-human intelligence," said Karl Nell, the
| retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task
| Force.
|
| My take away had been that most of the allegations are
| effectively some level all the stuff we've always heard about
| UFOs has been true this whole time (e.g. Roswell).
| Essentially one of the worst kept secrets, ignored largely
| because of the implausibility rather than secrecy.
| themagician wrote:
| It's largely ignored because it's not true. It's shocking
| how many people believe in "Rosewell". I mean... really?
| Really?! Only in America.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open
| that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right?
|
| No. The USA has spent the last several decades putting most of
| its military budget into aircraft carriers, which will all be
| sunk within the first 24 hours of any conflict with China. This
| is just a last ditch effort to try to trick China into thinking
| we might have some kind of deterrent.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I'd like to point out a couple of things.
|
| One is that, while this is written like a straight news article
| (until the last paragraph), this is in The Hill's Opinion
| section. In the past, I have seen this publication allow people
| of questionable credibility to post in their Opinion section. I
| have no idea who this writer is, but they are not a news
| reporter (or they weren't acting as one when they wrote this
| piece).
|
| The second is that the bill appears to be about Congress'
| authority to control funding and perform oversight. They are
| withdrawing funds from secret UFO projects and asking those
| involved to come forward, either with the greatest discovery in
| human history or (more likely) with a story about money being
| misappropriated and that misappropriation being hidden from the
| US Senate.
| gpm wrote:
| It seems like all the author has written about in the past 10
| months (at least that muckrack knows about) is UFOs
|
| https://muckrack.com/marik-von-rennenkampff/articles
| ezekg wrote:
| This wouldn't even be the first time the CIA has done something
| like this:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230611032246/https://www.nytim...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| From the NY Times article:
|
| > _" Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's
| through the 1960's were accounted for by manned
| reconnaissance flights" over the United States, the C.I.A.
| study says. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and
| deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public
| fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national
| security project."_
|
| This is exactly what happened with the people and incidents
| that were exposed in the _Mirage Men_ [1] documentary that
| covers how the government uses UFO and alien conspiracy
| theories to coverup information that they don't want the
| public to know.
|
| Well-meaning people stumbled upon classified projects, did
| the right thing by reporting them to the government, and then
| the government went out of its way to construct situations
| and fake evidence to convince them that what they saw were
| really aliens.
|
| In one incident, the government constructed a fake "alien
| crash landing" site in the mountains, and flew one of their
| victims to it and let them investigate it themselves in order
| to convince them that what they really saw were aliens.
|
| In the process of deceiving these people, the government even
| significantly contributed to a veteran's mental breakdown and
| paranoia via agents' lies and extensive surveillance of the
| victim's life.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srtrRbt77AE
| esbranson wrote:
| Every witness says there's not a chance in Hell that UFOs
| are human. But no one reports seeing aliens except
| abductees.
|
| People desperately want to believe aliens aren't real, and
| some real mental gymnastics to get there. Like believing
| "debunking" videos from crackpots and videogame programmers
| (which real pilots say are nonsensical), or "this one time
| in the 60s the CIA".
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. I think anybody who is
| remotely interested in this topic would love for proof of
| aliens to come out. It's just such an extraordinary
| claim, that their skepticism demands extraordinary proof.
| Eyewitness reports and low-res grainy videos are just
| never going to be enough, no matter who they come from.
| And that's how it should be. If there is real proof of
| aliens, it will be on the front page of every newspaper
| in the world, because it would be the most important
| discovery of all human history. It will be corroborated
| with physical evidence that has been examined by multiple
| experts and professionals. Until that happens, most
| people are going to be skeptical, and rightly so.
| esbranson wrote:
| > extraordinary proof
|
| Anti-vaxxers show us there is no such thing.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| > think you have it backwards. I think anybody who is
| remotely interested in this topic would love for proof of
| aliens to come out. It's just such an extraordinary
| claim, that their skepticism demands extraordinary proof.
| Eyewitness reports and low-res grainy videos are just
| never going to be enough, no matter who they come from.
| And that's how it should be. If there is real proof of
| aliens, it will be on the front page of every newspaper
| in the world, because it would be the most important
| discovery of all human history. It will be corroborated
| with physical evidence that has been examined by multiple
| experts and professionals. Until that happens, most
| people are going to be skeptical, and rightly so.
|
| Exactly. I firmly _believe_ that extraterrestrial life
| exists. My belief comes from the abundance of CHON
| (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) in the universe,
| combined with extremely long time scales and basic
| chemistry.
|
| Simple/single-celled (or some analog) extraterrestrial
| life seems almost inevitable based on our understanding
| of how the universe works.
|
| That said, such a belief doesn't include _intelligent_
| extraterrestrial life with technological civilizations
| that might create interstellar spacecraft which
| _regularly_ visit our little corner of the galaxy. For me
| to believe _that_ , I'd need a "Klaatu barads nicto"[0]
| moment.
|
| I _could_ be wrong, but there 's no compelling evidence
| that I am. To channel Carl Sagan: "Claims require
| evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary
| evidence."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood
| _Still
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open
| that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right? Folks
| on the committees are angry that China is trolling US Navy
| vessels with UAVs and this isn't being publicized.
|
| Why? They could just say "we have advanced but secret systems
| that can tell China is up to something".
|
| There was just a balloon, and another round of em over Asia --
| no one would be surprised.
|
| This isn't about China, it's about Trump and the hard-right
| conspiracy types going ape-shit, esp. since those indictments
| have teeth. The DoD has been doing this since the 90s and
| Oklahoma City.
| noarchy wrote:
| >The "non-earth" origin is the smokescreen
|
| Or, is the credulity in the US at such a high point that any
| sort of conspiracy idea has currency?
| hedora wrote:
| Russia's documented strategy for foreign propaganda campaigns
| includes a few steps where you undermine people's trust in
| increasingly core pillars of society.
|
| For example, they often start by undermining trust in media
| organizations, then elected leaders.
|
| The current trajectory the US is on is indistinguishable from
| the successful outcome of a propaganda operation based on that
| playbook.
| rekttrader wrote:
| FAA tells you to report UFOs to BAASS a private company.
| conception wrote:
| There sure is a lot of UFO talk around the same time audio of a
| former president laughing about all the treason he's committing.
| Probably just a coincidence.
| waihtis wrote:
| As a non-American, let me ask you if you really think all the
| other high level American politicians are clean?
|
| If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the
| current political system as inherently flawed instead of
| barking at current political candidate X or Y?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > As a non-American, let me ask you if you really think all
| the other high level American politicians are clean?
|
| No, a bunch of somewhat less high-level but still, in some
| cases, high-level ones are somewhat less flamboyant co-
| conspirators, co-principals, and/or accessories in Trump's
| crimes, as well as having their own; most of the rest are
| _comparatively_ if not _absolutely_ clean.
|
| > If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the
| current political system as inherently flawed instead of
| barking at current political candidate X or Y?
|
| I don't know about the person you're responding to, but I've
| written more, over a longer time, about the structural
| problems of the American political system than about Trump's
| personal crimes, and I've written specifically about how the
| culture of impunity fed by, _inter alia_ , Ford's pardon of
| Nixon fueled a series of subsequent executive abuses of which
| Trump's are the most serious.
|
| One can simultaneously recognize and discusss the forest and
| the unique, largest tree. The one does not, and should not,
| preclude discussion of the other, both are important.
| saalweachter wrote:
| You've got to act like most politicians are clean and
| investigate and prosecute the ones who reveal themselves
| otherwise, regardless of what the ground truth is.
|
| The "all politicians are crooks" line of thinking just gives
| the crooks a free pass while making it more difficult for
| whatever actors are trying to hold them accountable, whether
| for virtue's sake or for base political gain. Occasionally
| punishing a crook -- even if it is only a fraction of those
| deserving of punishment -- will make a few politicians of the
| next generation act a little less boldly, while shrugging
| your shoulders and saying "everyone does it" will make them
| ask what else they can get away with.
|
| Cynicism, even cynicism grounded in realism, doesn't make the
| world a better place.
| bbor wrote:
| Uhhhh not OP but yes I believe only one president has shown
| off classified material for money and power and ego.
| Disliking the system doesn't mean we should abandon all
| critiques of politicians while we wait for our personal
| utopia to come about.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| That's a good point other than the fact that it sounds like
| you're saying he doesn't need to be held accountable in a
| court of law for his numerous crimes. No politician should be
| exempt from the law.
| waihtis wrote:
| No, actually I want more accountability as ultimately the
| money politicians launder into their own pockets directly
| or indirectly comes from a power vested by citizens. Useful
| idiots who point fingers at one edge of the political
| spectrum are smokescreening the bigger issue.
| bbor wrote:
| It is. This article is about A) " Senate Intelligence
| Committee's [draft] legislation", which is a democrat-run
| process that surely started before last weekend, and B) Marco
| Rubio describing facts everyone already knew, which idk seems
| like normal congress stuff.
|
| I think you're in a conspiratorial mood, haha. Ironic that your
| conspiracy is _against_ the existence of UFOs!
| edgyquant wrote:
| No you don't get it. Nothing ever happens, all news is just a
| distraction /s
| 93po wrote:
| I find it pretty wild that members of congress are having to
| draft bills to pull out any secrets that may be happening in
| government programs so secret that even they don't know about it.
| It speaks very loudly to how little accountability there is to
| where tax payer dollars are going.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Is it? We have over 500 members of congress -- do we want all
| of them to have access to any secrets they want?
| 93po wrote:
| Yes, how else are they supposed to make informed voting
| choices? It's literally their job to have access to secrets
| so they can represent the public at large that can't.
| gregw134 wrote:
| These "UFOs" are in my opinion probably new type of drone.
|
| Video of "UFO" over Poland:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WZN0T_54xY
|
| Pentagon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Wmap12xm0
|
| Picture of crashed orb in Mexico:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmm7a/mysterious-metallic-o...
|
| My theory is that these spheres are spinning and move using the
| Magnus effect (the effect that causes a spinning soccer ball to
| curve). Theoretically, if you have gyroscopes inside the sphere,
| and you can find a way to transfer the gyroscopes' spin to the
| sphere, the sphere will spin in a controllable direction and move
| where you want it to. Lift can be achieved by filling it with
| helium.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You can't move a sphere around by spinning it. You can only
| change your direction.
|
| Spinning around, moving uncontrollably inside a storm, with
| very variable speed are exactly things that lost balloons do.
| gregw134 wrote:
| There are whole ships powered by the magnus effect:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship
| marcosdumay wrote:
| None of what are an sphere.
| dvh wrote:
| I have counter theory. It's a balloon.
| gregw134 wrote:
| The videos show the spheres moving quickly, often back and
| forth. Pilots have reported spheres hovering stationary over
| a spot during hurricane level winds. From all the reports it
| sounds like there is some kind of propulsion mechanism.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Wind?
| weego wrote:
| Do you have any sources explaining this so called 'wind'?
| olyjohn wrote:
| Sources for what? The wind in a video that we don't even
| have a link to and can't watch?
| newt_slowly wrote:
| "Almost certainly"?
|
| We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but
| do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a
| high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with
| statements like the following, made by the former director of
| National Intelligence?
|
| "There are a lot more sightings than have been made public.
| Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about
| sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy
| or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite
| imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to
| explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don't
| have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the
| sound barrier without a sonic boom."
| gregw134 wrote:
| Ok, I changed the wording to "in my opinion". My main point
| is that it might be possible to build drones matching this
| description with existing technology. There is existing
| technology to induce controlled rotation in satellites, using
| control moment gyroscopes:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope
|
| Perhaps if you placed a control moment gyroscope inside a
| helium-filled sphere, an operator could generate a controlled
| rapid spin. I'm not an expert by any means, was hoping
| someone more knowledgable can evaluate the idea.
| DrThunder wrote:
| If you believe the government is capable of covering this up for
| decades then you must also believe they're just as capable of
| lying about UFO's existing for some other reason.
|
| I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found
| quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like
| sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess
| we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
| curtis3389 wrote:
| I gotta re-read Childhood's End, just in case they also have
| horns.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Shor's stone! So the Plane of Oblivion does exist.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| That sounds like a reference to Childhood's End:
|
| https://www.syfy.com/videos/childhoods-end
| waihtis wrote:
| Religion was born based on primitive humans observing aliens,
| which were interpreted as "angels" and "demons". It's as good
| of an explanation as any.
|
| Either way, we will need to make great technological leaps to
| develop proper demonslaying equipment.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I too am a fan of the Stargate franchise.
| slashdev wrote:
| Honestly I don't think the government is sufficiently competent
| to cover up something as big as intelligent aliens arriving on
| earth. That's the most exciting news ever. There's just no way
| in my mind they could keep that quiet successfully.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| Well people have been leaking claims for decades (since
| roswell) so perhaps they haven't kept it secret but it didn't
| matter because no one believed it anyway.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Exciting or terrifying? Seems like it would be highly
| dependent on context and how minor details get interpreted.
| nwienert wrote:
| Aliens that are alternate dimensional / advanced
| technologically could control the release of their existence
| through various means, while still having some incentive to
| reveal themselves in stages that seem plausible to us.
| Imagining them only as meat-sacks-from-another-rock is
| lacking imagination.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| But at this point you're also arguing for the existence of
| fairies.
| nwienert wrote:
| Many of the best physicists I guess argue for fairies as
| well. In the context of many US government military
| officers and senators confirming evidence of fairy like
| vehicles.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| No, at best they say they see stuff they can't identify.
| Throughout all this there are claims that someone
| somewhere has real evidence but it never materializes.
| You're taking that credible observational claim and
| running with it until you end up with alternate dimension
| creatures. I'm just saying - if we're going to make a
| bunch of unsubstantiated sci-fi claims fairies seem just
| as likely.
| nwienert wrote:
| I didn't argue for it or make any claim, you're way
| distorting what I said which is just that shooting down
| the simplest form of alien arguments doesn't shoot them
| all down, and offered two.
|
| The many-worlds quantum interpretations have many curious
| advocates within physics.
|
| There are now multiple senators and high level military
| officers confirming this explicitly as well, so that's
| also wrong on your part.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| You offered science fiction and act like that makes it
| more plausible when the table stakes of "was what was
| observed outside of the realm of normal?" haven't even
| been satisfied. I think it's faeries. We're at an
| impasse.
|
| Multiple senators and high level military officers are
| bringing in material evidence?
| nwienert wrote:
| One of my scenarios was inter dimensional entities. The
| other was just sufficiently advanced tech. It's funny you
| ad hominem the first one and ignore the second.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Well, because imaging sufficiently advanced tech without
| evidence that it exists or is even plausible is literally
| science fiction.
| nwienert wrote:
| And yet we don't know everything, so shooting anything
| not currently explainable down as implausible is even
| less plausibly right!
|
| Not to mention that there's tons of really interesting
| explanations grounded in science that could explain
| either scenario.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Just because it's plausible doesn't make it any less
| science fiction if we have no evidence it currently
| exists. We're right back to faeries, writing fiction
| without proof that anything super/para-normal has even
| occurred.
| nwienert wrote:
| We're not co-authoring a scientific paper, we're chatting
| about potential explanations for a variety of disparate
| but strange reports from various branches of the govt
| about a variety of recent evidence on UFOs. There's
| multiple videos released, there's a variety of reports
| from people who had either first or second hand
| knowledge. The people are at least somewhat credible
| (much more than in the past). That's all. Your strong
| need to gatekeep the conversation is odd, I'm not even
| making any strong claim just throwing out far-out
| implausible options, acknowledging them as such. It
| shouldn't be hard to have informal conversation exploring
| new possibilities without a scientist pre-approving the
| topic. It's just an internet forum discussion thread on a
| weird UFO story.
| bbor wrote:
| And you might be the only truly conscious mind in a vast
| alien simulation. I don't think just because something is
| possible it becomes worth considering - given our
| epistemological failings and the impossibility of
| induction, basically _anything_ is possible...
|
| In other words: I find the idea that aliens might be mind-
| controlling the US congress to slowly reveal their presence
| for the first time ever seems ridiculous. Personally :)
| nwienert wrote:
| It definitely would have seemed ridiculous to me before I
| took a heroic dose of psychedelics. Now, it seems
| ridiculous to rule it out.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Right they simultaneously believe the government is so
| incompetent they can't implement national healthcare that
| every other major nation on earth has figured out but are so
| competent they can get thousands of people to keep the most
| impactful secret in the history of mankind.
| prirun wrote:
| Not implementing national healthcare is a _choice_ made to
| placate US corporations that contribute to politicians '
| campaigns. Like most "hard to solve" problems, it isn't a
| competency issue and isn't that hard to solve. The
| "problem" makes a lot of money for the right people, and it
| doesn't matter that it _costs_ a lot of money for most
| people.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| But what if all aliens are body snatchers? And the first
| people to use as hosts are our leaders? Conspiracy theorists
| can finish the rest of the story. Their fictions always have
| the right answers without the proof.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I
| found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell
| like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I
| guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
|
| When did you hear this? perhaps after this person saw
| Childhood's End[0] (based on the 1953 novel[1], which is much
| better IMHO) and mistook it for a documentary?
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End_(miniseries)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End
| deelowe wrote:
| I don't think they are capable of covering up the existence of
| other worldly craft visiting our planet. I DO think they are
| capable of covering up a program that was a huge money pit and
| didn't really produce anything of substance for years on end.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| My concern is that such research may fall into private funding,
| i.e. completely dark to citizens.
| pixel3234 wrote:
| Anything to distract public from important things! Last week it
| was sub, now UFO. Did anyone even noticed Watergate^2?
| eganist wrote:
| > Watergate^2
|
| Oceangate? Yeah it was front page for a week.
| trdtaylor1 wrote:
| No, the original poster is referencing, rightly or wrongly,
| the Hunter Biden receiving millions without seemingly
| performing work for a foreign national individual, then
| threatening the individual with retribution from both him and
| (potentially) his dad sitting next to him.
| eganist wrote:
| No, I gathered.
|
| I was doing water/ocean wordplay to deflect from
| unnecessary politics lol
| pohl wrote:
| Really? Not the fake elector scheme? Or the attempt to
| overturn the results of the last election? Or the willful
| retention of classified documents and the attempts to evade
| returning them? Any one of those would be better candidates
| for watergate-squared.
| bbor wrote:
| What scandal are you referring to...?
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| The president's son allegedly committed quite a few crimes,
| including offering access to his father (The US President)
| for money. He has been charged for some of these crimes
| recently.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >The president's son allegedly committed quite a few
| crimes, including offering access to his father (The US
| President) for money. He has been charged for some of these
| crimes recently.
|
| It's certainly plausible that the junior Biden may well
| have offered "access to his father" as a lure to obtain
| pecuniary benefit.
|
| And while the optics are terrible, I'd note that the
| current US president held no elective or appointed office
| in _any_ government when the telegram message that 's been
| cited to "corroborate" the "influence peddling"
| allegations.
|
| As such, It's not clear to me what, if anything, the senior
| Biden _could_ have done, at that time, in that context.
|
| I'm not defending _anyone_ here, nor am I trying to skewer
| anyone. Rather, the narrative presented just doesn 't make
| sense to me given the time frames involved.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| You mean the previous Prez's son in law who somehow got a
| Multibillion dollar investment from the Saudi's while he
| ostensibly worked directly in the white house? Yeah that
| should be investigated for sure.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| He was charged with not paying taxes and felony gun
| possession and plead guilty to the tax charges (the felony
| will go to trial later). I've read nothing about access for
| money.
|
| But I don't think anyone is ignoring it. Everyone is aware
| Hunter has had a troubled life and made bad choices.
| Everyone I've spoken to about this, even the left leaning,
| is of the opinion that if he broke the law he should face
| punishment. No one is on the other side of the issue here.
| The truly newsworthy bit is that he's been charged and
| facing consequences which, if we look at past presidential
| children, is the outlier.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > and felony gun possession and plead guilty to the tax
| charges (the felony will go to trial later).
|
| He has also agreed to enter pre-trial diversion program
| related to the gun charges.
| pohl wrote:
| There's no way that could be Watergate-squared. The
| defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes,
| so this has to be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes in,
| please" recording.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >There's no way that could be Watergate-squared. The
| defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes,
| so this has to be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes
| in, please" recording.
|
| I have to disagree. The defining characteristic of
| Watergate was the illegal (break-ins to steal political
| opponents' strategies and psychiatrists files) activities
| by a political organization (CREEP[0]) that were then
| covered up by those at the highest levels of the
| executive branch.
|
| The issue wasn't that there were _recordings_ of such a
| cover up, it was the cover up that was the problem.
| Unless, of course, you 'd like to argue that something
| isn't illegal/immoral if you don't get caught.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Re-
| Election_...
| tedunangst wrote:
| I don't need to believe in UFOs to believe the government would
| spend tons of money trying to retrieve one.
| complianceowl wrote:
| Your comment is both hilarious and so true.
| hnboredhn wrote:
| I am surprised by how little takes on this seem to address the
| fact this is likely to be bureaucratic. There are many people
| or departments who would benefit from increased fundings in
| these areas.
|
| Not seven saying its overt corruption. But if you work for the
| military in collecting sightings on unidentified objects and
| earnestly dont know what 10% of the sightings actually were, it
| behooves you to fan the rumors on it a bit.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| You should believe in UFOs, they're definitely real. I see them
| every few days, I simply look up in the sky and see something
| that I can't identify.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| those are birds
| wcarss wrote:
| I think that's the story here -- congress is trying to fix some
| serious corruption.
|
| Replace UFOs with magic beans and it sounds like some folks in
| government seem to have been swindled into diverting money
| through multiple paths into "classified work" chasing after
| Jack and a giant stalk. That sounds like a potentially
| fantastic grift for whoever is running it.
|
| This is why the bill says: no more money for anything related
| to these crazy beans, and anyone who is employed looking for
| them is freed from any bonds of secrecy to come tell us what's
| been being done.
|
| Of course there's a tiny tiny possibility someone comes back
| with a giant's ring, so they include that you've got to show
| everything you actually found, but that provision also will
| make it clear later that despite a lot of money, no one has
| actually found anything meaningful, and thus the whole thing
| was a fraud.
| brookst wrote:
| This would be a stronger theory if the UFO triggers in
| congress weren't also the most credulous / disingenuous
| believers in numerous other conspiracy theories, and only
| slightly further behind in their advocacy _for_ corruption.
|
| Maybe there is fraud and the wrong people are getting rich
| from it?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| These people are at odds with the military industrial
| complex.
| brookst wrote:
| Marco Rubio? The same Marco Rubio whose own website[1]
| says:
|
| > he's secured funding and supported programmatic changes
| that have seen continued growth in Florida's defense
| industrial base
|
| > Since 2011, Rubio has secured more than $2 billion in
| military construction in the state.
|
| > In 2021, Rubio's many years of supporting the F-35
| program reaped additional rewards in the Panhandle when
| the Air Force announced that Eglin Air Force Base would
| receive a second F-35A Squadron
|
| _That_ Marco Rubio is at odds with the military
| industrial complex?
|
| 1.
| https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/fighting-
| for-f...
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| If that were the case, wouldn't the "Sense of Congress" be
| that UAP programs are hiding corruption and fraud, rather
| than "to integrate any recovered exotic technology into the
| nation's broader industrial base"?
| simmanian wrote:
| I like to entertain myself with the idea that perhaps what's
| driving the recent spotlight on UFOs is not that we are
| seeing/detecting them, but that we are detecting more and more of
| them.
|
| Maybe governments around the world have always known about
| objects flying/floating around. And that was fine because there
| are many natural causes that could explain these blips on radar.
| Many weather phenomena or man made objects could explain people
| "seeing" UFOs. Buzz Aldrin famously saw glowing objects flying
| around in space but he does not necessarily believe they have ET
| origin.
|
| But recently, there's simply way more of these objects
| everywhere, and nobody knows for sure what these are. This
| worries some people because, well, what if they're Chinese spy
| balloons or drones? Remember when the US military shot down a
| couple balloons some time ago and it made the news?
|
| This is a potential threat to the national security and it makes
| sense that they have put together teams for the retrieval of
| these objects. The government may not believe they have ET
| origin, but they now see them more as potential threat to the
| national security.
|
| Of course, I would definitely find it enjoyable and exciting if
| there is some "otherworldly" intelligence behind these objects.
| nomel wrote:
| > Maybe governments around the world have always known about
| objects flying/floating around.
|
| David Grusch talks about this in one of his interviews:
| https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the...
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| All entertaining to speculate, but it's classic human-centered
| thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a
| few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the
| rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and
| everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from (in
| addition to their conveniently never appearing within clear
| view of regular citizens' phones or cameras and never clearly
| interacting with our physical world in any way)
| prirun wrote:
| > but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of
| miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here
| and wherever they came from
|
| How would you or anyone else know this?
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| No one has a monopoly on the sky. Amateur astronomers track
| active satellite missions, discover asteroids, mine public
| sky survey data to analyze stars, etc, etc. If there was
| anything out of the ordinary on the visible spectrum
| regularly showing up in our solar system (especially if it
| involved a lot of beelining towards Earth), it couldn't be
| hidden.
| nomel wrote:
| This simply isn't true, when whole asteroids sneak up on
| us: https://www.livescience.com/surprise-asteroid-
| flyby#:~:text=....
|
| > rest of the billions of miles of our solar system
|
| Which we have to send satellites out to see, which image
| minuscule windows of space. Here are some of the very
| best pictures from ground based telescopes:
| https://phys.org/news/2017-07-ground-based-images-
| planets-pi... Entire continents of Earth would be missed
| with that sort of resolution. And, with the need to
| average over time, whatever massive structure would have
| to stay relatively still.
|
| Most detection of distance objects is through _occlusion_
| of stars, not direct sensing. Good luck trying to find
| something something smaller moving at high /relativistic
| speeds, which would be a fairly reasonable requirement
| for not having to plan ahead for a multi thousands of
| years space trip.
|
| I don't really believe that space ships are flying around
| in our solar system, but I don't think us not seeing
| them, with our limited sensing, acts as any sort of
| counter evidence.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens
| would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from
| us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of
| miles of our solar system_
|
| One, rich humans sometimes like to go see exotic wildlife,
| why wouldn't aliens?
|
| Two, how would we _know_ if there were aliens looking around
| other places?
|
| > _and never clearly interacting with our physical world in
| any way_
|
| "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."
| 100721 wrote:
| In this context, it actually makes sense to think in a human-
| centered way.
|
| Consider how many planets are capable of supporting
| intelligent (as we know it).
|
| Now suppose we detect evidence of industrial behavior
| (certain pollutants, nuclear detonation, etc).
|
| Would we not laser focus on that one planet and observe it
| with everything we have - including sending reconnaissance
| drones?
|
| Furthermore, would we not want to avoid detection where
| possible, in case life does exist on said planet and it turns
| out to be an existential threat to humanity?
|
| Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar
| system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float
| in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see
| you.
| zzzeek wrote:
| > Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own
| solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly
| float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever
| see you.
|
| yet we have thousands of reports of UFO sightings (the vast
| majority seem to be in the US for some reason). So the
| aliens who can travel here in...assuming they come from a
| nearby solar system 4 light years away, and they are
| arriving as a result of observing "pollutants and nuclear
| detontations", meaning if they started traveling in 1950
| (upon receiving the light from the first nuclear
| detontation in 1945) and UFO sightings picked up by the
| 1960s they traveled 4 light years in about 10-15 years, and
| can be "undetectable" except.... for thousands of non-
| confirmable sightings per year.
|
| I think the aliens aren't going to visit us until Zefram
| Cochrane achieves his first warp flight.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| > Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own
| solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly
| float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever
| see you.
|
| Still human-centric to assume they would know what we can
| detect.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own
| solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly
| float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever
| see you._
|
| Feels like we're approaching a God of the gaps scenario
| here, but with aliens.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| This parallel is no coincidence. As of yet, there is no
| empirical evidence for space aliens existing. What do you
| call it when people believe in things for which there is
| no empirical evidence?
| NotSuspicious wrote:
| Comparing "God-of-the-gaps" to the UAP/UFO Phenomenon
| only makes sense if there is abundant, first-hand
| evidence for God that goes back several generations at
| least, is seen in numerous, opposing human-cultures and
| only can be ignored by debunking paradigms that vacillate
| wildly between a smug misunderstanding of pop-
| epistemology and the deeply, irrationally conspiratorial.
|
| Actually, now that you mention it . . .
|
| https://www.ufohastings.com/
|
| https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/
|
| https://www.uaptheory.com/
| bloopernova wrote:
| I'd love to look at this solar system panopticon that you
| apparently have access to.
|
| We know vanishingly little about the day to day movements of
| the largest solar system objects. Anything smaller than a
| medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly
| difficult to find and track
|
| Sorry, but we routinely track asteroids that are less than
| 100 metres in size [0]. We track objects in orbit down to a
| few cm in size [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-
| impact_La...
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital
| _debr...
| dekhn wrote:
| we can predict the forward trajectory of nearly every major
| solar system object using first principles math and
| experimental observations and it predicts for years into
| the future; every time we find another object in the solar
| system, we add its position and mass and the model gets
| slightyl more accurate.
|
| """As of DE421, perturbations from 343 asteroids,
| representing about 90% of the mass of the main asteroid
| belt, have been included in the dynamical model"""
|
| Using polynomial interpolation you can get more or less
| 100meter level accuracy for any major object at any time.
| If there are remaining large masses that we haven't
| identified, they must be fairly small, far, and very dark.
|
| (this is one of the most important achievements in human
| history and represents one of the longest
| scientific/religious activities; people have been
| predicting orbital paths for thousands of years.)
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| I've heard from some very well known and credible sources
| that there is a nice china teapot orbiting somewhere
| between the asteroid belt and mars. maybe the UFOs are
| investigating it's provenance.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| "never appearing within clear view of cameras" - the signal
| to noise ratio is abysmal, but they have and do.
|
| Thing is, accepting the idea of the extraordinary and
| inexplicable is rather difficult for humans. Doug Adams
| explained it pretty succinctly with his idea of the "somebody
| else's problem" field, whereby you could paint a mountain
| bright pink, and it would become invisible to a majority of
| observers through its sheer jarring improbability and
| discontinuity with core beliefs about the nature of things.
|
| My background is physics. I'm well versed in "weird but
| explicable stuff", I don't take anything on faith, and I have
| seen, _with multiple witnesses_ , a truly inexplicable thing,
| without resorting to what a big part of me still regards as
| mummery. We all saw the same thing. We all talked about it,
| puzzled over it, frantically checked the news for an
| explanation.
|
| The thing is, the people who I was with at the time, they all
| remember the incident, the sonic booms... and seeing a
| helicopter in distress, which was the story in the press
| later that day. The shift to "it was a helicopter" was
| amazingly quick.
|
| It wasn't a helicopter. I _know_ what I saw - or rather, I
| know that I saw something that was absolutely not a
| helicopter, that fighter jets approached to then have
| disappear in a sudden cloud - and yet, a big, big part of me
| yearns to believe that I saw a helicopter, as the alternative
| is... well, posting stuff that you'll read and will go "this
| guy is clearly nuts", and me being inclined to agree, as
| again, it isn't comforting in the slightest to hold in your
| mind the knowledge that things are not quite as they appear.
|
| There's even footage of the thing, freely available on
| YouTube, and there's evidently no point in anyone removing it
| or so-forth, as anyone who thinks it's real is clearly crazy.
|
| I haven't been quite the same since.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| You should link the YouTube footage!
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Just went looking - it's gone, it seems - the only videos
| I can find are from "believers" and aren't of what I saw.
|
| There is, however, a still from it in this article with
| the heading "Unexplained:"
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/amp/Soni
| c-b...
|
| It hung in the sky exactly like a brick wouldn't, and had
| a weird, knobbly shape - and as the jets approached, it
| became clear it was pretty sizeable. It was also quite
| definitely what the typhoons were there to investigate,
| as they immediately flew towards it, and I would be
| prepared to write it off as a weather balloon were it not
| for the ensuing cock-and-bull story, and the cloud that
| materialised around it as they neared.
| vanillax wrote:
| Defense is contracted out. So private mil-tech companies can
| develop high tech items with high paid engineers and sell it to
| the military...
| drumhead wrote:
| Its gone past the point where people can just brush it off as the
| rantings of a crank. Congress are troubled about it. If there are
| organisations gathering alien tech without oversite and covertly,
| then imagine what they could do with it if they managed to
| activate or replicate it? They could sell it to enemies, use it
| for themselves, subvert governments. Congress have probably
| concluded that as well and are rightly alarmed.
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