I think many would agree that there are unidentified flying objects beyond a reasonable doubt.
My guess is that just as it's hard to identify something in the distance, most of these experiences are from distance with poor resolution for the simple reason that if you were to get close enough you'd be able to tell what it was which is probably something other than an extraterrestrial spaceship.
To save people some time: "The existence of UFOs had been “proved beyond reasonable doubt,” according the head of the secret Pentagon program that analyzed the mysterious aircrafts." and given that UFOs by definition exist (because we needed a term for Unidentified Flying Objects): no, actually, the title and this article are drivel. Thanks for the clickbait.
Yes, but the Pentagon official they interviewed is saying he believes that extraterrestrial UFOs exist:
> I hate to use the term UFO but that’s what we’re looking at,” he added. “I think it’s pretty clear this is not us, and it’s not anyone else, so no one has to ask questions where they’re from.
So it's not really misleading. I think he believes that aliens exist and have visited Earth.
> In his resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, he asked, “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue? There remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation."
Well I suppose it's significant that the Pentagon confirms that these are actually flying objects and not swamp gas from a weather balloon trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
UFO literally stands for unidentified flying object. So meaning these weren't optical illusions or visual hallucinations.
People are saying that UFO just means an unidentified flying object (not alien spacecraft as in the popular meaning) and so this is a non-story. My joke is that even if UFOs just turn out to be flocks of birds or unreported aircraft, it's still at least a little significant, because it means something's up there.
If this object indeed exists, it being a covert US government agency project is highly likely.
So, in my opinion, one arm of the government is being funded to investigate the covert operations of another, without the former knowing about it.
Like in many narcotics themed movies and TV series inspired by real events, the DEA spends considerable time and effort, only to find the CIA masterminding an operation
1. Multiple corroborating observations - radar contact, two sets of aircraft crews visual observations, one set of FLIR footage
2. Very high acceleration and deceleration - powered descent from 80K feet to 20 feet in a matter of seconds; high G turns and acceleration, BUT with no visible high temperature engine exhaust visible on FLIR footage. It's possible to mask engine exhaust and it's possible to achieve very high G's, but I can't imagine how to achieve both simultaneously.
Theories:
Assuming that there is no lying involved, based on (1) we can safely assume that there _were_ actual physical flying objects in the area. However, before we go off-Earth, I think we should look at propulsion systems that do not rely on thermal expansion of gases.
1. What if it's just an extremely powerful electric propellor based drone?
2. What if it can achieve burst acceleration by releasing compressed gases (which actually reduces temperature)?
Here is another UFO incident from another country (Belgium) with multiple corroborating observations and very high acceleration/deceleration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave
The evidence includes:
1. Statements by thirty different groups of witnesses, three separate groups of police officers, documenting the sight of a large object flying at low altitude. An estimated 13,500 people on the ground saw the object, of which 2,600 filed written statements describing in detail what they saw.
2. Detection on radar of the object from two F-16 Fighter jets scrambled to intercept the object
3. Secondary detection of the object from ground radar at a nearby military airfield
4. Data from the F-16s suggesting near impossible maneuvers. Quoting wikipedia:
"During the first radar lock, the target accelerated from 240 km/h to over 1,770 km/h while changing altitude from 2,700 m to 1,500 m, then up to 3,350 m before descending to almost ground level – the first descent of more than 900 m taking less than two seconds. Similar maneuvers were observed during both subsequent radar locks. On no occasion were the F-16 pilots able to make visual contact with the targets [NB: it was around midnight hence poor visibility] and at no point, despite the speeds involved, was there any indication of a sonic boom."
5. A low quality photo, which may have been faked.
With regards to the evidence presented, I find it very difficult to come up with a convincing explanation of this incident.
Sounds like a cluster of balloons with directional radar reflectors on it? So what you're seeing is not a single rapidly moving source, but multiple stationary point sources each being detected intermittently?
Explanation yes. Convincing explanation no. It could have been caused by balloons. Balloons can't fly at 2000km/h, nor accelerate at 100g, so for the ballon hypothesis to work you'd have to assume there was also a major malfunction in the two F-16 lock-on systems. You'd also have to assume there was a major failure in the military ground radar system.
However, when you make those assumptions, that opens up a can of worms for other possible explanations. Assuming there was sensor system malfunction, the incident could also be explained though a flock of helicopters flying around. Or it could have been several NSA spy planes flying around. I've seen both those explanations put forth as an explanation for what happened in Belgium.
I don't believe it's possible to disprove either your balloon hypothesis nor the helicopter hypothesis. There's just not enough evidence to make any convincing explanation.
Its also a little hard to believe the systems malfunction theory.
How is it that the systems from various departments of the government. Each of which are totally independent of each other, suddenly all malfunction at once at the same time, and the event happens, and then again the systems get back to functioning perfectly fine?
Troublingly, the skeptical explanations section does not resolve the thousands of eyewitness reports from people claiming to see the UFOs. The reports describe a low flying object visible before the F-16s took flight. The helicopter explanation put forth in the section hypothesizes the eyewitnesses mistook at least 3 different models of helicopters as UFOs. While possible, I don't believe it likely that a fleet of helicopters could be flying in the area without the air traffic control nor the Belgian military being aware of it.
> Troublingly, the skeptical explanations section does not resolve the thousands of eyewitness reports from people claiming to see the UFOs
Actually, that section contains a very reasonable explanation:
Hallet's thesis is that the Belgian UFO wave was mostly a mass delusion, boosted by the work done by the SOBEPS. This mass delusion would have followed Philip J. Klass's law: Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs. This situation feeds upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subject, and then the « flap » quickly runs out of steam..
Trouble is, mass hysteria is a rather terrible explanation, as it is a logical explanation for nearly any observable phenomena. It can be adapted to retort practically any eyewitness account. For example, it's possible to argue for and against the hypothesis that the earth is flat using the retort that the other side is suffering from mass delusion. Furthermore, a mass hysteria explanation needs to be coupled with the an explanation of the unidentified objects detected on both the ground and F-16 radars.
I worked at a planetarium for a while. On nights when one of the naked-eye planets were low in the sky, we would get dozens of calls from people either wanting to know what they saw, or trying to report a UFO.
Often, these reports would claim that the light was flashing and jumping around - an effect from seeing it through a thick layer of atmosphere between the observer and the horizon.
> "The collision of the meteoroid with atmospheric particles causes ablation, and thereby ionization, of both atmospheric and meteoroid constituents. While most of these excited states exist for about 10^-8 seconds only, there are also some atomic states which may persist for times exceeding several seconds (metastable levels). The emissions from such levels may be visible for variable amounts of time, and are designated as persistent trains (see Baggaley, 1980). They appear bright in the night sky after the meteor itself has disappeared. A large meteoroid entering the atmosphere leaves a substantial amount of material in its wake which is distributed along its trajectory."
The kinds of visual effects this can produce are affected by where the trail is relative to the observer - again, looking through more atmosphere tends to create additional effects.
And of course, planets and meteors are not the only causes of relatively uncommon visual effects. Clouds, refracted sunlight or moonlight, smoke, jet trails, etc. are all capable of producing effects whose true cause may either not be apparent to a casual observer or even not without careful study by trained observers.
In short, large numbers of eyewitnesses to something unexplained is most likely to demonstrate the limitations of untrained observers seeing some unusual but perfectly ordinary phenomenon.
This reminds me of a quote from the movie Prometheus - "God doesn't build in straight lines"
Meaning, if you see intelligent stuff being done. Objects moving up and down, left and right in perfect angles. Or if some one wrote up "Hello, World" on the skies its very unlikely its a natural phenomenon.
I'm not aware of anyone having observed hello world being written in the sky by a UFO.
Other than that, the point is not that these are just natural phenomena, but rather natural phenomena filtered through imperfect observing conditions and observation mechanisms, including radar and the human eye & mind.
Radar signals need software to be interpreted. Need I say more than that?
Some team did their utmost best to write the code that's running in those F16s. They really were excellent engineers, with no doubt huge budgets. And they got it kind of running and after a few years of debugging got the most obvious crashes and other bugs fixed.
I think it rather likely that some disparate echoes got interpreted as reflecting from a single object, and that's how you get things travelling at incredible speeds.
This. I work with state of the art radar systems and automated target recognition / tracking. It's common to have false tracks jumping out of the noise. These tracks can accelerate zero to thousands, jump positions and altitides, whatever you imagine. If you build a machine to track jitters in electromagnetic returns and let it run wild, it'll show you all kinds of amazing things.
I am a massive skeptic when it comes to UFOs / the supernatural, but must relate one story. A friend of mine, who is now deployed with the UN, used to work as a fighter controller with the air force of a certain country. He is a sober and reliable person, but also made mention one time that it was 'common' to see unexplained objects on radar, and that it was policy to simply ignore them. These objects had characteristics (speed, change of direction) that made it impossible for them to be any kind of 'known' aircraft.
I know, I know - it's hearsay, and - again - I am a huge sceptic. Still, it was a bit of a disturbing conversation to have with someone I know and respect, and who was highly trained and in a position of authority.
Radar operators see odd returns all the time due to temporary atmospheric conditions, interference, birds, etc. I'm not trying to dismiss your friend's claims but just because a blip appears on a radar screen doesn't necessarily mean there's a real object.
>I am a massive skeptic when it comes to UFOs / the supernatural
Interestingly UFOs and supernatural events have been clumped together, but afaik these UFO claims typically don't require rewriting the laws of physics. If a UFO's existence was proven, and in the public domain, it would go from -100 to +100 in terms of people's attitudes of "that's all just a bunch of balogna" to "of course, we have always known it is very unlikely we are alone." However, a supernatural event would fundamentally shake up our scientific understanding of the universe. I think they're completely different types of possibilities.
> supernatural event would fundamentally shake up our scientific understanding
Surely we're due for one of these soon. Given our infantile understanding of quantum mechanics and physics, it's a matter of time before we observe something that defies modern science.
I know what you mean, but I guess it depends on how we define such an event? The difference between Newtonian physics failing to be accurate at relativistic speeds and the stuff of supernatural fiction coming to life seems pretty significant.
For most people, quantum theory is just as shocking as anything out of supernatural fiction. It's quite common to deny that it's real and to hope a traditional explanation will replace/modify it.
That hope has always been grounded in a fear of it's "supernatural" qualities and is becoming less likely as theorists find proofs limiting it's flexibility while keeping agreement with experiments.
I think a personal god who performs miracles, raises the dead, created the universe, knows everything, cares about whom you have sex with and in what position, etc, carries a lot more "baggage" than quantum weirdness.
Far more people are the opposite, though, accepting the existence of a personal god and the supernatural without question, while assuming science and quantum weirdness to be nonsense or outright lies.
>Interestingly UFOs and supernatural events have been clumped together, but afaik these UFO claims typically don't require rewriting the laws of physics.
Antigravity and FTL travel require rewriting the laws of physics AFAIK, or at least amending them. There are possibilites that only seem to work on paper, assuming the existence of fudge factors like negative mass.
The "UFO claims" mentioned by wallace_f above often describe objects that appear to defy conventional physics and aerodynamics, and the nature of those claims are what's being discussed, not UFOs in general. Specifically the link between the claims being made and the claims also made by adherents of the supernatural, neither of which can coexist with a universe that operates under known physical laws.
Assuming that UFOs behave as described, and are actual physical craft which can hover silently over a point with no visible or audible engines, propellers or exhaust, which can make arbitrary breakneck maneuvers or suddenly vanish over the horizon in seconds, as is often described, then you need an unconventional explanation for their means of propulsion. It's either antigravity or magic, but it probably can't be, say, VTOL or just really good rockets.
The energy available in compressed gasses is very small. Even if you compress to the limit where it turns into a liquid you're not going to get enough thrust to significantly accelerate a real aircraft. Some spacecraft use cold gas thrusters for attitude control but not for really moving around.
1) You're talking about something that would be hard to achieve with rockets, let alone propellers regardless of the drive technology.
2) Now you're talking about /bottle rockets/. There's a reason we don't use those for any serious purpose: They're worse than basically anything else in terms of both power and specific thrust.
My immediate reaction (not being a physicist or an aeronautical engineer) is that I think it's unlikely you're going to see those kinds of performance characteristics in something "propulsion" based.
The first line of business would be the power source. The intuition would be that you need a mobile high energy power source. The counter-intuitive idea would be that the necessary power source would be so giant that it could never be mobile (like a dyson sphere), but there may be some method of linking a stationary power source with a mobile ship across vast distances. This offers control convenience if an advanced race still needs an authority structure and the possibility of remote monitoring. That also brings up the question of un"manned" exploration drone fleets bouncing between star systems and reporting back.
As for movement, I would like to think that something with the observed extreme acceleration and the assumed interstellar capability is using a highly performant computer to calculate adjustments to an inside-out standing wave solution that the ship's outer shell is built for. Imagine shifting waveforms and your ship just kind of repositions yet it feels like you're completely still. Any space debris or other objects encountered while repositioning might get trapped outside the ship so that whenever you arrive at your destination you have to shed the debris. I'm sure a physicist will chime in and say this can never work, but at least from a naive perspective I like the idea of it.
I've seen this video several times before, and it's usually explained as an FLIR artifact (I believe the pod has a steerable lens systen, so possibly the cause of the rotation seen in the video).
As to why the audio corroboates the video? Well, not everything you hear on the internet is true....
So let's assume this is real for a moment. It's either the "breakaway civilization"[1], otherwise known as the secret space program or it must be the Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic"[2] scenario.
In support of "Roadside Picnic", if they've been hanging around all these years and just making the ocassional look-around and flybys without landing on the white house lawn and asking us to join the Interstellar Federation, we must be extremely unimpressive. Basically, life is common in the universe. We are a somewhat interesting tourist attraction and pit stop on the way to alpha centauri or whatever, but not really that special. They get here, pick up water and air maybe, take some pictures, some dna samples and fly off to wherever they were on their way to. Everything we have here they have in a million other places all around the galaxy.
The breakaway civilization seems more plausible if one assumes that travelling interstellar distances is flat out impossible though. However, there could be a mix of the two...
Now if this is all just a bug on the windshield "swamp gas", I understand the downvotes, but otherwise please tell me how it's not one or the other given the evidence.
Option 3, intelligent life that builds a civilization is not common in the universe, so they want to study us. Much the same way we study great apes or dolphins.
In that case, they might want to observe us without interfering to see how we behave naturally. Or maybe they have a sort of prime directive. Or maybe they realize that if they interact with us and expose us to their level of technology, we might destroy ourselves given the level of conflict and violence we're still prone to.
Maybe they are waiting for/helping us to evolve enough for us to be able to have a conversation with them. Even 50 years ago almost everyone would have found this idea very difficult, as time goes on it gets better.
We also have no idea of being able to relate to their culture which may be radically different than our own. It might be far far more right wing for example and they might see us as a slave race or supremely inferior, which we will probably be.
>In that case, they might want to observe us without interfering to see how we behave naturally. Or maybe they have a sort of prime directive
The thing is, assuming this scenario to be true, "they" seem to be interfering with us all the time. Humans have developed an entire subculture, complete with religious overtones, around the belief in interference by UFOs. One would assume the quarantine was breached a long, long time ago.
If I had to guess, I'd subscribe to the "Random Voyager" theory. That is, there are tons of somewhat sophisticated civilizations in the galaxy. For the ones that don't self-destruct or entertain themselves into extinction, it's quite common to create long-lived interstellar probes. These probes would be as intelligent or more intelligent than people, be able to move much better than anything we have, and not interested in being detected or having any interaction at all with the flora and fauna of a planet aside from refueling and making recordings.
Contact like that would be intermittant, difficult to document, and perplexing to a species that wants to talk to everybody it runs into. Which kinda describes where we are with some of this odd aerial phenomenae we've been documenting for decades now.
Imagine a world where everyone's consciousness has been uploaded to computers. People play sports, knit sweaters, whatever- all in virtual reality. It's much safer and cheaper than maintaining a physical body, after all. Now each person might have some real human friends, but they're more likely to have AI friends who are smarter, more charming, more interesting. Or maybe there's just a lot more of them. You may not even know which of your friends are "real." It might be considered insulting to ask. You spend more and more time playing alone or tittering with a circle of sycophantic AIs.
Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide, or overdose on data-drugs, or get squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources, or whatever. And so the species gradually dies out until you just have some AI routines running in a hot server room on a dead planet. The last human might not even realize that she's the last.
The same situation could occur without mind uploads if you could build very realistic androids, but I like the mind upload scenario.
And of course this is all very chauvinistically assuming that those AI routines slash robots don't qualify as human even though they're indistinguishable. The AIs could be conscious, or not, I suppose, depending on how they're implemented.
No, I just cobbled that together from other SF I've read. If you want more of that, try:
- Permutation City by Greg Egan (Imagine a world where everyone's consciousness has been uploaded to computers.)
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (People play sports, knit sweaters, whatever- all in virtual reality.) Note: this book is corny as hell and borderline YA but still fun
- Blindsight by Peter Watts (You spend more and more time playing alone or tittering with a circle of sycophantic AIs. ... squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources)
- https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football (Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide) Just for the impact of functional immortality on common people
There are other options, if you're talking about the latest UFO video:
3) equipment failure
4) mass delusion
5) error in judgement
6) the creator of the matrix messing / debugging
7) government or private company testing a new type of propulsion
Now look at all these options rationally, which ones are more likely?
The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.
> The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.
> The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.
Try taking a picture of a plane at a height > 3000ft with equipment available at hand (during the night) see how it looks like
> The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time.
Of course it is. The greater the clarity of the footage, the lower the probability that the filmed object will remain unidentified (as in Unidentified Flying Object).
If you’re on the look for unidentified things, how could anything but unclear evidence be useful?
That's not entirely true. Cameras are starting to introduce video signing. At least there's a chance to prove the source was filmed with camera X, if its public key is known. It would be cool if camera manufacturers had a public API for that too.
> At least there's a chance to prove the source was filmed with camera X, if its public key is known.
To be fair, the only thing that can be proven is that it was either filmed with that camera, or someone has extracted the private key from the device (or just tricked the signing chip to sign a custom data packet).
I think it's entirely reasonable they don't want to come down and chat since they don't want to end up having to give us their tech. After all, how will they know they've given it to the 'right' side, especially with all the hostility they must have observed between us.
I think any moral species would wait until we've made sufficient progress on our own then meet us at our level instead of rocking the boat by coming down demoing all their advanced tech.
Our universe could exist in a higher dimensional space, and these events could be cases where higher dimensional objects are intersecting with our 3 spatial dimensions.
This would explain the strange changes of shape, high speed, hovering without apparent means of support, and disappearances so often reported for these objects.
It does require that the higher dimensional space we occupy be relatively empty in our vicinity, otherwise we would expect far more of these events. Perhaps we're in a 5-D alien lab, being studied in a tank.
But it's far more likely to be a consequence of more mundane human perceptual limitations - tricks of the light, etc.
Yeah, Flatland came to mind when I first saw the videos...but as you said, that is considerably less likely than some other more mundane phenomena at work.
While both the incident and the program are interesting enough to warrant further inquiry (let alone declassification), the kind of organisations that Elizondo is associated with, do not make him sound credible.
This is "To The Stars" association, cofounded by him and Tom DeLonge: https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/#how-we-work. A promise to invent "beamed energy propulsion" and "advanced electrogravitic propulsion" already makes me scratch my head. I see that there are lots of retired top brass there, like the former head of Skunk Works. There is Gary Nolan, who diligently analysed the so-called "Starchild" skull to conclude that it's probably nothing special. But then, there is Hal Puthoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff), of the Stargate ("Men who stare at goats")
and "zero-point energy" fame. Finally, while there is nothing wrong with DeLonge as a musician, the pairing of a UFO enthusiast musician and former DC functionaries does not make a lot of sense.
I mean... at this point Elizondo is offering one short video with the clarity of a Rorschach test, and extraordinary claims.
The figures at the top of the To The Stars page guarantee there will be more coverage on the topic.
I really wanted to believe this was real until I went to the 'to the stars academy' website. Luis Elizondo is on their board.
This 'academy' and all its directors have a huge financial incentive to convince others that they're onto something.
The top of their front page has a large 'invest' button. You can purchase shares in this 'academy'.
This reeks of a scam, or at least a bunch of psuedo-scientific conspiracy fueled 'research' that will never amount to anything other than begging for more funds and blaming shortcomings on gov coverups.
What are people going to do with their UFO research shares?...
I'm not concerned about aliens, as much as I am concerned about all the hype we are experiencing recently related to extra-terrestrials.
For decades government came short of making fun of people who believed in "green man from outer space" ... now all of sudden all this hype in media makes me wonder... is someone in gov capable of pulling strings on taxpayers' dollars are preparing some huge tax bill to shove in peoples faces, [call it for example AARA (Affordable Alien Research Act)] just to find another reason to take more from tax payers pockets? Otherwise I don't get all this fear-mongering... anyone?
It could well be propaganda aimed at securing funding for pie in the sky military spending. But consider what would be the logical course of action if you're a government who comes across evidence of extraterrestrials, especially in decades past.
First, you have to weigh whether telling the general public will cause panic. I don't know that if the US govt told people aliens were visiting in the 1960's, people would've taken it well.
Then think about how your adversaries might respond. It stands to reason that if any country were able to gain control of alien technology either by making contact, observation or recovering crashed spacecraft, it could dramatically alter the balance of power for the next century or more. Imagine alien technology that allowed a Nation to build aircraft/spacecraft that could out accelerate and out maneuver any ballistic missile. All of a sudden mutually assured destruction falls apart and nuclear weapons are rendered obsolete by anyone without alien tech.
So if you're a Nation state that knows about aliens, you'd probably want to keep it under wraps and one way you'd do that is discredit any public reports while quietly trying to figure out everything you could.
I have an inkling that these press releases are aimed at ramping up to the news of existence of Aliens by the governments. Sort of delivering the news slowly.
I am not trusting the source, though. The Pentagon has a history of nutjob projects and fishy research results (in addition to some solid stuff from DARPA).
The program involved seems to have been a way to divert a few millions of dollars to a politician's friend, and it's not terribly hard to find earnest, believing people who are still basically cranks and put them in charge of it so that the reports coming out sound like it's genuinely important work.
I'm seeing a lot of comments here beginning with something to the effect of, "assuming there's no lying involved."
Well, assuming there's no lying involved, the NSA never tracked us, Iraq had WMDs, and Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman.
There's a broader epistemological problem afoot here: the NSA could easily design a flawed zero-knowledge proof mechanism that I would never see a flaw in. Likewise, it's always going to be easier to fake a video of magitek than it will be to invent it for real. As a result it's essentially impossible to believe these stories under any circumstances short of an actual leak of the magitek.
Iraqi WMDs are an interesting case against broad government conspiracies. Before the invasion, the evidence was weak and fragmentary. After the invasion, it would have been a lot easier (and less embarrassing) to fake the WMDs if they had the capability. The fact that they couldn’t tells me that they aren’t good at high profile hoaxes of physical evidence with lots of witnesses.
Similarly the Gulf of Tonkin incident was lied about and also resulted in LBJ being granted war powers without congressional approval--even though the incident was also easily dismissed as false. If anything, it served as a blueprint that these two easy tricks could be used again--like in Iraq. And in both cases, they got everything they wanted and no one held them accountable. Why would they need to cover anything up if no one holds them accountable? Focusing on a cover up might have a Streissand effect. So I do think there are broad government conspiracies... The NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory until recently.
> The NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory until recently.
NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory “until recently”? Really? Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace came out in 1982. We have known about the NSA (known, not ‘suspected’) since before Edward Snowden was born. People in the crypto and infosec community have considered them the top threat for decades. Actual techniques and processes are news when verified, but please do not try to suggest that either the existence of nor extent of NSA activity were in any way surprising or considered a conspiracy theory.
Some parts of it were a genuine surprise. In he 90’s we learned of differential cryptanalysis and that the NSA’s involvement in DES strengthened it, not backdoored it as everyone thought. Turns out that was the exception not the rule.
Likewise although certainly some people in tech knew the extant of PRISM, I think all but he most paranoid infosec people presumed they nevertheless obeyed the law and didn’t dragnet snoop on Americans. I’d heard stories of the backbone interconnects that were routing all traffic through NSA servers. I presumed that was just to get access for when they needed it (with a warrant) or to mask what specific data stream they were interested in. I didn’t take as seriously as I should have the possibility that they were in fact simply recording everything.
In my opinion this is like me saying: Greider's The Secrets of the Temple came out in '87. People have similarly considered the central bank a top threat for hundreds of years. It's so laughably obviously a tool of the plutocracy, but just as Clapper testified before congress and other reputable sources had claimed the NSA was not conducting domestic surveillance, as is the case with the Fed's missdeeds. Just have a look at the Fed's website yourself(1). They always try to say, in roundabout ways, that they are not creating money out of thin air, but that is exactly what they do: when the Fed's balance sheet ballooned after 2008 by over 4 trillion dollars--where do people think they got 4 trillion dollars from? That's 4 actual trillion dollars--not being snarky here.
So while I can somewhat agree with you, but I hope you can see my point about what gets labelled as a conspiracy doesn't matter if a lot of reputable people like Bernie Sanders, JFK, Ron Paul, Aaron Swartz, etc have already called foul.
By acquiring whatever backs the money and printing money that represents it. In other words, the treasury would buy gold from somewhere else, and create money representing that value. This is how our monetary system worked when it was gold- & silver-backed. Now it's a fiat system, where there is no reserve of some asset held to back the currency ("out of thin air").
That "backing" is nonsensical. A currency is a proxy for the wealth in an economy. All that using gold or silver to "back" it does is cause the price of that commodity to rise to reflect the size of the entire economy.
As such, the "intrinsic" value of the commodity is irrelevant - it may as well be paper. Which is why that's what it now is.
That people will be more trusting of the next lie. Otherwise, we lose a bit of trust in the government. But then again, our memories are pretty short, so it probably doesn't matter...
That's a bit different in that manufacturing physical evidence, especially large stockpiles of WMD, and planting it in a foreign country is harder to do undetected than making a blurry video or asking a few pilots to repeat a story about an UFO encounter that wasn't 100% true.
If anything, it was an effective conspiracy by the Iraqi government to make foreign intelligence agencies believe that Iraq had nuclear weapons or was close to having them. It's entirely rational for someone in Saddam's position to want foreign governments (and not just western ones but Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran as well) to believe he possesses nuclear weapons. Israel plays this game too, with its policy of strategic ambiguity. Saddam miscalculated how U.S. and U.K. policy makers would re-evaluate this ambiguity in the wake of September 11th. In the wake of that miscalculation, North Korea's leadership has been pursuing an upgraded version of his strategy, with unambiguous demonstrations of actual nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Time will tell whether that clarity will prevent a war on the Korean Peninsula or precipitate it.
At any rate the existence of WMD, in general, rather than nuclear weapons in particular, was never in doubt, and stockpiles were found in Iraq and disabled or destroyed. You may remember some of the hand-wringing about Isis overrunning some of the chemical weapons facilities containing sealed bunkers of damaged sarin and mustard gas shells.
The chemical weapon remnants uncovered were from before the first Gulf War (1991). FTA:
The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.
AND
American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.
The justification for the invasion was an active weapons program, which didn't exist. When people refer to the "WMDs" they refer to this non-existent program, rather than rusty old munitions.
One doesn't have to seek analogies in other areas to find a recent precedent for US government agents spreading disinformation about UFO incidents: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/mirage-men . I think the first question that the latest reports should prompt is: who in the US government might want a new and very high-profile round of UFO disinformation right now, and why?
The title was rewritten in a misleading way ("'UFO Existence Proven Beyond a Resonable Doubt' – Pentagon"). We've restored the original title, or rather a shortened version of it to fit the 80 char limit while preserving its meaning.
I am obviously very skeptical about these kinds of claims, especially if extraterrastiality is claimed. There is nothing in the article supporting this and there are so many extraordinary events that have had to occur for this to hold. From breaking our understanding of physical speedlimits, to motifs for hiding and appearing on very specific sites.
Let's do a first principles analysis.
If alien's were present here in biological form, having superior intelligence capabilities, they would have already taken control of us. Given the stupid amount of pollution we keep outputting to the planet, this is definitely not the case. There's no intelligent alien life here because it's still us in control.
Could it be an alien drone though? Yes.
If it was it means it came here either by a lightsail, or some other sub-lightspeed travel technology. Or it was dropped through blackwhole or something and it just showed up.
If it teleported here, then it probably has next level quantum tech and whatever. It could've teleported back a signal, taken over all communications and they would have already physically taken over our planet. So that's not likely the case, unless the drone is just capable of surviving faster than light travel but is still limited by the same physical problems in integrated circuits and power generations that we already know.
Okay.Now, if it traveled at sub-lightspeed it's likely to have taken at least a few thousand light years at minimum ( given by our observation of what planets are close to us ) to get here. More likely a few hundred thousand.
That means another few hundred thousand to send a signal back.
In that case that they would try to colonize us before we get too powerful, by sending a colony ship or something, which would take even more time. We're likely to go extinct on our own before that happens so there's no point worrying about aliens.
This is assuming that they've reached the same physical limits in technology that we have. Those being the speed of travel limit, and quantum computing not being Turing complete. Meaning this drone can not break cryptography, or run an overpowering AI that takes over all our communications and controls us.
Think of it this way, if us humans were technologically capable of taking over their planet, we would very likely do so. Unless we completely edit out past warmongering from our gene pool.
Therefore their only logical choice would be to stop us from getting capable enough to do that. Right?
Why are some people obsessed with aliens conquering Earth?
If you have the technology to do interstellar flight, surely you have advanced refining/processing tech, and you can get raw materials anywhere - the other planets and asteroid belt nearby are full of everything. You probably have robots to do all your work, too.
There's no need to enslave some species to make them work for you or risk losing anything in a potential fight (pretty sure even advanced aliens would be wary of nuclear weapons) or deal with gravity/atmospheric/natural conditions of this planet for some resources that can be found elsewhere.
If anything (as we kind of learned by now), dealing via peaceful means would be way more productive. Just provide some high tech or rare minerals and we'll gladly mine the shit out of the planet ourselves.
If they study our past signals they will see that we've knowingly caused the extinctions of other living beings and frequently make even our species suffer. Which means, in the event that we get technologically capable enough to reach another planet with intelligent life, we're very likely to do the same thing to them.
Therefore the only logical choice for that alien civilization are to either try and take control of our planet or just outright wipe us out. No?
Which does beg the question, assuming UFOs are aliens, why do they seem to only be here? Why aren't they also mining Jupiter and Titan, or colonizing Mars or something?
If life is common in the universe they'd be pretty busy. Maybe resources are plentiful and there's no need or they have no desire to conquer us. Your "first principle" is a complete assumption.
Even if it is common, it's very likely that nearly all intelligent life is heavily limited to sub-lightspeed travel, therefore most civilizations won't be able to expand that much, therefore having livable planets close-by is a precious commodity.
Unless everyone involved with this is lying, something very strange is going on.
I mean, just let it sink in. We have high level government recognition that objects with incredibly advanced flight capabilities exist and we have no idea what they are or where they come from.
How do you dismiss this? When the encounter in the recently released video involved multiple military assets monitoring the UFO with a high level of precision that pretty much rules out explanations that rely on illusions or other misleading sensory phenomena?
I’m skeptical of the ET hypothesis, or even the advanced Air Force research tech hypothesis, but one thing has puzzled me about the released video. It only shows the object rotating and then is cut off - what happened after?
From bufferoverflow's comment: The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.
the same situation with loch ness monsters, Sasquatch, etc.
It makes sense to me that all UFO evidence would have shitty quality. UFOs are unidentified flying objects; once the image quality is good enough to identify what it is, it's no longer an UFO. So all that's left in the "UFO" category are the ones where the image quality was not good enough to make an identification.
The odds we encounter aliens are remarkably low, but what are the odds we encounter aliens with a similar evolution pattern, that is, reproductive-driven intelligence and similar somatic senses?
We could stumble upon some weird aseuxal amoeba type beings who don't even have a personal ego or concept of private property, they just float around on organic ships and communicate through flows of slimy alien-goo. Whew, what a bummer would that be.
I see some talk about radar measurements, and i find myself wondering how some early stealth tests would look on such equipment.
Could perhaps the speed or altitude readings shift drastically as the vehicle banked and thus exposed more or less reflective surfaces to the radar source?
The existence of unidentified flying objects—observed aerial phenomena without a contemporaneous clear explanation—has never been in even the slightest bit of doubt.
What has been (and remains) in considerable doubt is particular proposed identifications for some subsets of UFOs, particularly, the explanation that some are extraterrestrial spacecraft.
And the ET explanation has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt; it is, at best, for some UFO incidents among the explanations which cannot be unequivocally rejected based on existing evidence.
Even if I personally saw a green little man flying around my living room, my mind would more likely assume it was government technology masquerading as an alien.
It'd take something pretty incredible, orders of magnitude more advanced than I could phathom humans creating, to convince me of legit alien intelligent life.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadI think many would agree that there are unidentified flying objects beyond a reasonable doubt.
My guess is that just as it's hard to identify something in the distance, most of these experiences are from distance with poor resolution for the simple reason that if you were to get close enough you'd be able to tell what it was which is probably something other than an extraterrestrial spaceship.
> I hate to use the term UFO but that’s what we’re looking at,” he added. “I think it’s pretty clear this is not us, and it’s not anyone else, so no one has to ask questions where they’re from.
So it's not really misleading. I think he believes that aliens exist and have visited Earth.
I might take this more seriously if the guy said "It's not any humans."
Its fair to say that some flying objects would be unidentified after all
I stopped reading after that.
People are saying that UFO just means an unidentified flying object (not alien spacecraft as in the popular meaning) and so this is a non-story. My joke is that even if UFOs just turn out to be flocks of birds or unreported aircraft, it's still at least a little significant, because it means something's up there.
So, in my opinion, one arm of the government is being funded to investigate the covert operations of another, without the former knowing about it.
Like in many narcotics themed movies and TV series inspired by real events, the DEA spends considerable time and effort, only to find the CIA masterminding an operation
1. https://theaviationist.com/2017/12/17/u-s-department-of-defe...
2. https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/
The difficulties:
1. Multiple corroborating observations - radar contact, two sets of aircraft crews visual observations, one set of FLIR footage
2. Very high acceleration and deceleration - powered descent from 80K feet to 20 feet in a matter of seconds; high G turns and acceleration, BUT with no visible high temperature engine exhaust visible on FLIR footage. It's possible to mask engine exhaust and it's possible to achieve very high G's, but I can't imagine how to achieve both simultaneously.
Theories:
Assuming that there is no lying involved, based on (1) we can safely assume that there _were_ actual physical flying objects in the area. However, before we go off-Earth, I think we should look at propulsion systems that do not rely on thermal expansion of gases.
1. What if it's just an extremely powerful electric propellor based drone?
2. What if it can achieve burst acceleration by releasing compressed gases (which actually reduces temperature)?
The evidence includes:
1. Statements by thirty different groups of witnesses, three separate groups of police officers, documenting the sight of a large object flying at low altitude. An estimated 13,500 people on the ground saw the object, of which 2,600 filed written statements describing in detail what they saw.
2. Detection on radar of the object from two F-16 Fighter jets scrambled to intercept the object
3. Secondary detection of the object from ground radar at a nearby military airfield
4. Data from the F-16s suggesting near impossible maneuvers. Quoting wikipedia:
"During the first radar lock, the target accelerated from 240 km/h to over 1,770 km/h while changing altitude from 2,700 m to 1,500 m, then up to 3,350 m before descending to almost ground level – the first descent of more than 900 m taking less than two seconds. Similar maneuvers were observed during both subsequent radar locks. On no occasion were the F-16 pilots able to make visual contact with the targets [NB: it was around midnight hence poor visibility] and at no point, despite the speeds involved, was there any indication of a sonic boom."
5. A low quality photo, which may have been faked.
With regards to the evidence presented, I find it very difficult to come up with a convincing explanation of this incident.
However, when you make those assumptions, that opens up a can of worms for other possible explanations. Assuming there was sensor system malfunction, the incident could also be explained though a flock of helicopters flying around. Or it could have been several NSA spy planes flying around. I've seen both those explanations put forth as an explanation for what happened in Belgium.
I don't believe it's possible to disprove either your balloon hypothesis nor the helicopter hypothesis. There's just not enough evidence to make any convincing explanation.
How is it that the systems from various departments of the government. Each of which are totally independent of each other, suddenly all malfunction at once at the same time, and the event happens, and then again the systems get back to functioning perfectly fine?
I highly recommend reading the Skeptical explanations section of that article.
Among other things:
[...] but the Belgian military only reported three such locks, and upon analyzing the data, all three radar locks were on each other.
Actually, that section contains a very reasonable explanation:
Hallet's thesis is that the Belgian UFO wave was mostly a mass delusion, boosted by the work done by the SOBEPS. This mass delusion would have followed Philip J. Klass's law: Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs. This situation feeds upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subject, and then the « flap » quickly runs out of steam..
Often, these reports would claim that the light was flashing and jumping around - an effect from seeing it through a thick layer of atmosphere between the observer and the horizon.
Meteor showers or individual meteorites were another rich source of these reports. The variations that can occur here are enormous - see e.g. "Observation of Fireballs" and "Fireballs and Meteorite Falls": https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/observations/, https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/meteorites/
The first link above points out:
> "The collision of the meteoroid with atmospheric particles causes ablation, and thereby ionization, of both atmospheric and meteoroid constituents. While most of these excited states exist for about 10^-8 seconds only, there are also some atomic states which may persist for times exceeding several seconds (metastable levels). The emissions from such levels may be visible for variable amounts of time, and are designated as persistent trains (see Baggaley, 1980). They appear bright in the night sky after the meteor itself has disappeared. A large meteoroid entering the atmosphere leaves a substantial amount of material in its wake which is distributed along its trajectory."
The kinds of visual effects this can produce are affected by where the trail is relative to the observer - again, looking through more atmosphere tends to create additional effects.
And of course, planets and meteors are not the only causes of relatively uncommon visual effects. Clouds, refracted sunlight or moonlight, smoke, jet trails, etc. are all capable of producing effects whose true cause may either not be apparent to a casual observer or even not without careful study by trained observers.
In short, large numbers of eyewitnesses to something unexplained is most likely to demonstrate the limitations of untrained observers seeing some unusual but perfectly ordinary phenomenon.
Meaning, if you see intelligent stuff being done. Objects moving up and down, left and right in perfect angles. Or if some one wrote up "Hello, World" on the skies its very unlikely its a natural phenomenon.
Other than that, the point is not that these are just natural phenomena, but rather natural phenomena filtered through imperfect observing conditions and observation mechanisms, including radar and the human eye & mind.
Some team did their utmost best to write the code that's running in those F16s. They really were excellent engineers, with no doubt huge budgets. And they got it kind of running and after a few years of debugging got the most obvious crashes and other bugs fixed.
I think it rather likely that some disparate echoes got interpreted as reflecting from a single object, and that's how you get things travelling at incredible speeds.
I know, I know - it's hearsay, and - again - I am a huge sceptic. Still, it was a bit of a disturbing conversation to have with someone I know and respect, and who was highly trained and in a position of authority.
Interestingly UFOs and supernatural events have been clumped together, but afaik these UFO claims typically don't require rewriting the laws of physics. If a UFO's existence was proven, and in the public domain, it would go from -100 to +100 in terms of people's attitudes of "that's all just a bunch of balogna" to "of course, we have always known it is very unlikely we are alone." However, a supernatural event would fundamentally shake up our scientific understanding of the universe. I think they're completely different types of possibilities.
Surely we're due for one of these soon. Given our infantile understanding of quantum mechanics and physics, it's a matter of time before we observe something that defies modern science.
That hope has always been grounded in a fear of it's "supernatural" qualities and is becoming less likely as theorists find proofs limiting it's flexibility while keeping agreement with experiments.
Antigravity and FTL travel require rewriting the laws of physics AFAIK, or at least amending them. There are possibilites that only seem to work on paper, assuming the existence of fudge factors like negative mass.
Assuming that UFOs behave as described, and are actual physical craft which can hover silently over a point with no visible or audible engines, propellers or exhaust, which can make arbitrary breakneck maneuvers or suddenly vanish over the horizon in seconds, as is often described, then you need an unconventional explanation for their means of propulsion. It's either antigravity or magic, but it probably can't be, say, VTOL or just really good rockets.
2) Now you're talking about /bottle rockets/. There's a reason we don't use those for any serious purpose: They're worse than basically anything else in terms of both power and specific thrust.
The first line of business would be the power source. The intuition would be that you need a mobile high energy power source. The counter-intuitive idea would be that the necessary power source would be so giant that it could never be mobile (like a dyson sphere), but there may be some method of linking a stationary power source with a mobile ship across vast distances. This offers control convenience if an advanced race still needs an authority structure and the possibility of remote monitoring. That also brings up the question of un"manned" exploration drone fleets bouncing between star systems and reporting back.
As for movement, I would like to think that something with the observed extreme acceleration and the assumed interstellar capability is using a highly performant computer to calculate adjustments to an inside-out standing wave solution that the ship's outer shell is built for. Imagine shifting waveforms and your ship just kind of repositions yet it feels like you're completely still. Any space debris or other objects encountered while repositioning might get trapped outside the ship so that whenever you arrive at your destination you have to shed the debris. I'm sure a physicist will chime in and say this can never work, but at least from a naive perspective I like the idea of it.
I've seen this video several times before, and it's usually explained as an FLIR artifact (I believe the pod has a steerable lens systen, so possibly the cause of the rotation seen in the video).
As to why the audio corroboates the video? Well, not everything you hear on the internet is true....
Why not some kind of an advanced hologram combined with an electromagnetic disturbance? If it were possible, it could be used as a great decoy.
In support of "Roadside Picnic", if they've been hanging around all these years and just making the ocassional look-around and flybys without landing on the white house lawn and asking us to join the Interstellar Federation, we must be extremely unimpressive. Basically, life is common in the universe. We are a somewhat interesting tourist attraction and pit stop on the way to alpha centauri or whatever, but not really that special. They get here, pick up water and air maybe, take some pictures, some dna samples and fly off to wherever they were on their way to. Everything we have here they have in a million other places all around the galaxy.
The breakaway civilization seems more plausible if one assumes that travelling interstellar distances is flat out impossible though. However, there could be a mix of the two...
Now if this is all just a bug on the windshield "swamp gas", I understand the downvotes, but otherwise please tell me how it's not one or the other given the evidence.
1.http://www.theeventchronicle.com/study/breakaway-civilizatio...
2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
In that case, they might want to observe us without interfering to see how we behave naturally. Or maybe they have a sort of prime directive. Or maybe they realize that if they interact with us and expose us to their level of technology, we might destroy ourselves given the level of conflict and violence we're still prone to.
Unfortunately, humans are known to study other species by locking them in cages and cutting them open. :(
We also have no idea of being able to relate to their culture which may be radically different than our own. It might be far far more right wing for example and they might see us as a slave race or supremely inferior, which we will probably be.
The thing is, assuming this scenario to be true, "they" seem to be interfering with us all the time. Humans have developed an entire subculture, complete with religious overtones, around the belief in interference by UFOs. One would assume the quarantine was breached a long, long time ago.
Contact like that would be intermittant, difficult to document, and perplexing to a species that wants to talk to everybody it runs into. Which kinda describes where we are with some of this odd aerial phenomenae we've been documenting for decades now.
Do you think this is an actual possibility? For ours or any other sort of civilization?
Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide, or overdose on data-drugs, or get squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources, or whatever. And so the species gradually dies out until you just have some AI routines running in a hot server room on a dead planet. The last human might not even realize that she's the last.
The same situation could occur without mind uploads if you could build very realistic androids, but I like the mind upload scenario.
And of course this is all very chauvinistically assuming that those AI routines slash robots don't qualify as human even though they're indistinguishable. The AIs could be conscious, or not, I suppose, depending on how they're implemented.
- Permutation City by Greg Egan (Imagine a world where everyone's consciousness has been uploaded to computers.)
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (People play sports, knit sweaters, whatever- all in virtual reality.) Note: this book is corny as hell and borderline YA but still fun
- Blindsight by Peter Watts (You spend more and more time playing alone or tittering with a circle of sycophantic AIs. ... squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources)
- https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football (Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide) Just for the impact of functional immortality on common people
3) equipment failure
4) mass delusion
5) error in judgement
6) the creator of the matrix messing / debugging
7) government or private company testing a new type of propulsion
Now look at all these options rationally, which ones are more likely?
The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.
Ding ding ding.
Try taking a picture of a plane at a height > 3000ft with equipment available at hand (during the night) see how it looks like
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=zoom+airplane&q=zoo...
Of course it is. The greater the clarity of the footage, the lower the probability that the filmed object will remain unidentified (as in Unidentified Flying Object).
If you’re on the look for unidentified things, how could anything but unclear evidence be useful?
Example:
http://www.urbanalarm.com/knowledge-base/2016/digital-chain-...
To be fair, the only thing that can be proven is that it was either filmed with that camera, or someone has extracted the private key from the device (or just tricked the signing chip to sign a custom data packet).
Also this is the only declassified video, I would assume better video exist but this will help ease us into acceptance.
Maybe, like Bigfoot, UFOs are actually intrinsically fuzzy.
i'm reminded of a short story by Stephen Baxter, "The Invasion of Venus".
I think any moral species would wait until we've made sufficient progress on our own then meet us at our level instead of rocking the boat by coming down demoing all their advanced tech.
This would explain the strange changes of shape, high speed, hovering without apparent means of support, and disappearances so often reported for these objects.
It does require that the higher dimensional space we occupy be relatively empty in our vicinity, otherwise we would expect far more of these events. Perhaps we're in a 5-D alien lab, being studied in a tank.
But it's far more likely to be a consequence of more mundane human perceptual limitations - tricks of the light, etc.
This is "To The Stars" association, cofounded by him and Tom DeLonge: https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/#how-we-work. A promise to invent "beamed energy propulsion" and "advanced electrogravitic propulsion" already makes me scratch my head. I see that there are lots of retired top brass there, like the former head of Skunk Works. There is Gary Nolan, who diligently analysed the so-called "Starchild" skull to conclude that it's probably nothing special. But then, there is Hal Puthoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff), of the Stargate ("Men who stare at goats") and "zero-point energy" fame. Finally, while there is nothing wrong with DeLonge as a musician, the pairing of a UFO enthusiast musician and former DC functionaries does not make a lot of sense.
I mean... at this point Elizondo is offering one short video with the clarity of a Rorschach test, and extraordinary claims.
The figures at the top of the To The Stars page guarantee there will be more coverage on the topic.
This 'academy' and all its directors have a huge financial incentive to convince others that they're onto something.
The top of their front page has a large 'invest' button. You can purchase shares in this 'academy'.
This reeks of a scam, or at least a bunch of psuedo-scientific conspiracy fueled 'research' that will never amount to anything other than begging for more funds and blaming shortcomings on gov coverups.
What are people going to do with their UFO research shares?...
For decades government came short of making fun of people who believed in "green man from outer space" ... now all of sudden all this hype in media makes me wonder... is someone in gov capable of pulling strings on taxpayers' dollars are preparing some huge tax bill to shove in peoples faces, [call it for example AARA (Affordable Alien Research Act)] just to find another reason to take more from tax payers pockets? Otherwise I don't get all this fear-mongering... anyone?
First, you have to weigh whether telling the general public will cause panic. I don't know that if the US govt told people aliens were visiting in the 1960's, people would've taken it well.
Then think about how your adversaries might respond. It stands to reason that if any country were able to gain control of alien technology either by making contact, observation or recovering crashed spacecraft, it could dramatically alter the balance of power for the next century or more. Imagine alien technology that allowed a Nation to build aircraft/spacecraft that could out accelerate and out maneuver any ballistic missile. All of a sudden mutually assured destruction falls apart and nuclear weapons are rendered obsolete by anyone without alien tech.
So if you're a Nation state that knows about aliens, you'd probably want to keep it under wraps and one way you'd do that is discredit any public reports while quietly trying to figure out everything you could.
Well, assuming there's no lying involved, the NSA never tracked us, Iraq had WMDs, and Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman.
There's a broader epistemological problem afoot here: the NSA could easily design a flawed zero-knowledge proof mechanism that I would never see a flaw in. Likewise, it's always going to be easier to fake a video of magitek than it will be to invent it for real. As a result it's essentially impossible to believe these stories under any circumstances short of an actual leak of the magitek.
NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory “until recently”? Really? Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace came out in 1982. We have known about the NSA (known, not ‘suspected’) since before Edward Snowden was born. People in the crypto and infosec community have considered them the top threat for decades. Actual techniques and processes are news when verified, but please do not try to suggest that either the existence of nor extent of NSA activity were in any way surprising or considered a conspiracy theory.
Likewise although certainly some people in tech knew the extant of PRISM, I think all but he most paranoid infosec people presumed they nevertheless obeyed the law and didn’t dragnet snoop on Americans. I’d heard stories of the backbone interconnects that were routing all traffic through NSA servers. I presumed that was just to get access for when they needed it (with a warrant) or to mask what specific data stream they were interested in. I didn’t take as seriously as I should have the possibility that they were in fact simply recording everything.
So while I can somewhat agree with you, but I hope you can see my point about what gets labelled as a conspiracy doesn't matter if a lot of reputable people like Bernie Sanders, JFK, Ron Paul, Aaron Swartz, etc have already called foul.
Anyways the EFF has a useful timeline for NSA spying: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline
1 - https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12853.htm
How else would one create money?
As such, the "intrinsic" value of the commodity is irrelevant - it may as well be paper. Which is why that's what it now is.
The goal had already been achieved. Why bother covering up the fact it was based on a lie? Where's the benefit in that?
At any rate the existence of WMD, in general, rather than nuclear weapons in particular, was never in doubt, and stockpiles were found in Iraq and disabled or destroyed. You may remember some of the hand-wringing about Isis overrunning some of the chemical weapons facilities containing sealed bunkers of damaged sarin and mustard gas shells.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...
The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.
AND
American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.
The justification for the invasion was an active weapons program, which didn't exist. When people refer to the "WMDs" they refer to this non-existent program, rather than rusty old munitions.
I always love the Mitchell and Webb sketches that show the absurdity of these kind of claims: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=59zLZ6PpeSA
Could it be an alien drone though? Yes.
If it was it means it came here either by a lightsail, or some other sub-lightspeed travel technology. Or it was dropped through blackwhole or something and it just showed up.
If it teleported here, then it probably has next level quantum tech and whatever. It could've teleported back a signal, taken over all communications and they would have already physically taken over our planet. So that's not likely the case, unless the drone is just capable of surviving faster than light travel but is still limited by the same physical problems in integrated circuits and power generations that we already know.
Okay.Now, if it traveled at sub-lightspeed it's likely to have taken at least a few thousand light years at minimum ( given by our observation of what planets are close to us ) to get here. More likely a few hundred thousand. That means another few hundred thousand to send a signal back. In that case that they would try to colonize us before we get too powerful, by sending a colony ship or something, which would take even more time. We're likely to go extinct on our own before that happens so there's no point worrying about aliens. This is assuming that they've reached the same physical limits in technology that we have. Those being the speed of travel limit, and quantum computing not being Turing complete. Meaning this drone can not break cryptography, or run an overpowering AI that takes over all our communications and controls us.
This assumes that they would be just like humans, and only the rapacious ones at that.
If you have the technology to do interstellar flight, surely you have advanced refining/processing tech, and you can get raw materials anywhere - the other planets and asteroid belt nearby are full of everything. You probably have robots to do all your work, too.
There's no need to enslave some species to make them work for you or risk losing anything in a potential fight (pretty sure even advanced aliens would be wary of nuclear weapons) or deal with gravity/atmospheric/natural conditions of this planet for some resources that can be found elsewhere.
If anything (as we kind of learned by now), dealing via peaceful means would be way more productive. Just provide some high tech or rare minerals and we'll gladly mine the shit out of the planet ourselves.
So you can't just assume that they have plenty of other livable planets to just throw around.
I mean, just let it sink in. We have high level government recognition that objects with incredibly advanced flight capabilities exist and we have no idea what they are or where they come from.
How do you dismiss this? When the encounter in the recently released video involved multiple military assets monitoring the UFO with a high level of precision that pretty much rules out explanations that rely on illusions or other misleading sensory phenomena?
You don't. But you also don't have to accept their baseless implications of extraterrestrial origin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vmGcngRA24
the same situation with loch ness monsters, Sasquatch, etc.
It's not perfect, but shows the same object from multiple angles.
We could stumble upon some weird aseuxal amoeba type beings who don't even have a personal ego or concept of private property, they just float around on organic ships and communicate through flows of slimy alien-goo. Whew, what a bummer would that be.
Could perhaps the speed or altitude readings shift drastically as the vehicle banked and thus exposed more or less reflective surfaces to the radar source?
What has been (and remains) in considerable doubt is particular proposed identifications for some subsets of UFOs, particularly, the explanation that some are extraterrestrial spacecraft.
And the ET explanation has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt; it is, at best, for some UFO incidents among the explanations which cannot be unequivocally rejected based on existing evidence.
It'd take something pretty incredible, orders of magnitude more advanced than I could phathom humans creating, to convince me of legit alien intelligent life.