I'm an extreme sceptic, but the Tic Tac encounter of 2004 was memorable, and the most recent significant one to hit the news after it gained real traction in 2017.
It seems like really intriguing stuff. But I just need something more to go off of. How are some encounters with odd looking and acting things that otherwise never interact with us supposed to be treated? If all they ever do is accelerate and maneuver in ways we can’t, well, my cat does the same thing all the time. He also makes me look like an idiot at all yoga. But that doesn’t do anything for my joints and circulation.
I've seen a lot of comments on this one being a probable experimental plane, most-likely nuclear-powered, which would explain its incredible performances.
It would still be a good takedown of the questionable parts of the NYT article, but no, I don't think it's "100% certainty" about the actual event, despite his YouTube title. It just has the benefit of having a strong prior than the UFO theory
seems like this video mainly just shows that it wasnt rotating as much as it looks like in the video, not sure how it proves/disproves anything else about the UFO
> In the exclusive report, The New York Times detailed how the mysterious government program began in 2007 with support from then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid. The allotted budget reportedly went to an aerospace research entity run by a Robert Bigelow, billionaire businessman and a longtime friend to the senator.
I would love if there was something exciting and real behind it, but what is more likely:
- plain old corruption, or
- plain old corruption + alien or alien-like technology?
Been following this for years. This is pretty much it.
Bigelow has been a ufo crank for ages, and as he's a billionaire that's buddies with a senator was able to arrange for pentagon funding for some of his crank friends. That went about as well as expected. After they lost that revenue source, they befriended the blink182 guy to keep going. They're just hoping they'll get another pentagon handout. For all their bluster when asked to put up or shut up they've got nothing.
The actual footage and pilot accounts are consistent with submarine launched weather balloons, halo artifacts on IRST systems, and similar banal explanations.
> The actual footage and pilot accounts are consistent with submarine launched weather balloons, halo artifacts on IRST systems, and similar banal explanations.
This is totally incorrect. There is nothing balloon like or halo artifact like about the tic-tac and Fravor's description. It's just not true.
I agree that many of the people around the ufo phenomenon are cranks and liars, but that doesn't mean everyone is or that all sightings and eye witness testimony are fake or lies or misunderstandings.
What fravor and people on the nimitz described is nothing like what you lumped everything under, it's just not. If you want to call them all liars too, that's fine, but if not, what they described, the eyewitness accounts are not what you described.
> The actual footage and pilot accounts are consistent with submarine launched weather balloons, halo artifacts on IRST systems, and similar banal explanations.
Consistent according to whom? And is that already a forgone conclusion?
It's always possible it's something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik, or some secret skunk works type project by China or Russia. If they've announced the nuclear cruise missile, maybe this is the next generation still-secret thing?
Also, keeping in mind this incident:
"A MiG-25 was tracked flying over the Sinai Peninsula at Mach 3.2 in the early 1970s, but the flight led to the engines being damaged beyond repair"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25
It could even be stretching next-generation technology beyond its sustainable limits. Maybe even as an intentional psy-op. Intentionally use some weird materials and some weird technologies that would look unfamiliar.
but using a nuclear powered jet engine? (Like the Burevestnik linked above)
Sounds crazy, but if it were done, and if it were a drone that is 90% engine and fuel (no pilot, no life support), I could imagine getting something that performs similarly to what we have seen in these videos.
If we add on top of being 90% engine and fuel, even a slight improvement in engine performance, or a willingness to let the engine destroy itself after each use, it would have better performance than human-containing sustainable-flying aircraft.
The 'off world vehicle' comment was made by Eric Davis, a man who has been talking about UFOs for several years and has ties to parapsychologists and the like. I hate to shoot the messenger, but I take his claim with a good pinch of salt
This all feels so off to me. Why would the pentagon just openly admit that they have no idea what this is?
If it was a foreign military's advanced aircraft, this is them admitting that, yep, your stealth/whatever technology works great, and we are baffled by it.
Why would the pentagon do that? It seems much more reasonable to keep it a mystery and imply that we have an even more advanced tech that they don't know about.
Okay and then to engage the 14 year old in me who used to watch alien shows on TLC: wouldn't this be a great strategy for disclosure about alien life?
1: No aliens do not exist, and you are crazy for it!
2: Well there are some technologies which are just really advanced
3: Well there are just some technology which is really advanced and we don't know what it is.
4: Well there have been a bunch of encounters our pilots have been having with something.
5: Well maybe that something is very unexplainable.
6: We might have some materials from another world, but the only people saying so are crazy!
If I was in charge of disclosing to the world that there were aliens, this is how I'd be doing it. Extremely slow drip, people argue about the details of it (well yeah it's alien tech but they haven't been here for 3000 years, and will probably never come back vs no I think the aliens visit all the time vs no THIS is all the conspiracy there are no aliens etc.) until it's finally just an accepted fact that aliens exist and have visited earth or are actively visiting earth.
I've read conjecture that it is likely one of two things. Either the US is wanting to hint to its enemies new advanced technology that we have, or the US military found that pilots weren't announcing mid-flight UFOs so are working to change the culture to allow such announcements without fear of reprisal.
These types of stories seem to pop up around major election years. I've begun to see them as requests for more funding or justification for current funding.
I'm waiting to see if they release a dossier of the Chupacabras when things get direr. Maybe also dossiers on ghosts and paranormal activities for better effect.
Yeah we had to self-confine for super long and it exacerbated all our societal problems, but at least it made the US government admit there were aliens!
>If I was in charge of disclosing to the world that there were aliens, this is how I'd be doing it.
The way I would do it is a slow drip of indoctrination through decades of science fiction pop culture, books, movies, television, and spreading rumors about alien abductions and UFO sightings so that the public is already at least subconsciously comfortable with the premise. By the time they start a flash-mob to raid area 51 and rescue the anime girls then humanity might be ready.
The transition from that to actual disclosure might still be a bit of an existential shock.
> If it was a foreign military's advanced aircraft, this is them admitting that, yep, your stealth/whatever technology works great, and we are baffled by it.
Or you want foreign military leaders to think you are baffled by their stealth tech when you can actually detect it just fine.
De rigeur disclosure: I am related to one of the authors :)
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A different angle: one of the more interesting perspectives on UFO phenomena comes form Jacque Vallée, VC and real-life model for Lacombe, the civilian expert played by François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
He has hypothesized that whatever the ultimate nature of UFO phenomena, it is consistent with a very slow period (think Long Now-scale) inoculation/inculcation of–for lack of a better word–contact.
Between humanity and what exactly he does not claim to have any answer.
>Think about some highly intelligent reptile predator species, with a taste for mamal meat.
I mean, let's be realistic, we could still do business in that scenario. Maybe trade a few million tasty human popplers for a stargate or zero-point engine or something.
We probably would've already been taken out in that case. If this is about aliens, maybe they're chill dudes just observing. Maybe they're on vacation or doing research on the evolution of various civilizations across the galaxy/universe. Who knows? I just hope the reptilian scenario isn't the reality we face.
In any case, whatever we find out will likely be interesting, extraterrestrials or not.
> If it was a foreign military's advanced aircraft, this is them admitting that, yep, your stealth/whatever technology works great, and we are baffled by it.
I have an alternative explanation that also matches with history. They know what it is but don't want to tell the public. They can also feed bad information to adversaries like China and Russia who may interpret this is over confidence in their technologies.
Here's a simple analogy. My cat is really dumb and will step right in front of me in the middle of the night when it is dark because she thinks I can see her (because she can see me). So at night I over exaggerate my inability to see in the dark. Now she thinks she is super sneaky (she's not) but also gets out of my way at night.
All wars (especially cold wars, like the one we're in) are about information control. There is lots of propaganda, misdirection, lying, etc. An adversary having over confidence in their technology means that they will use it with that confidence. Think about WW2 and when the Enigma encryption was broken by Turing's team. They didn't reveal that they broke the encryption and let some people be attacked and prevented others (this led to some of the big foundations in game theory as well).
Now we know this is a possibility, so do the Russians and Chinese. But the pentagon could also be telling the truth. These videos could also be complete fabrications or lucky shots that are natural phenomena that fool instruments. If Russia has the tech and doesn't tell the Chinese and the Chinese think we don't know what it is then China gets more afraid of Russia (and vise versa). Because sometimes the pentagon says the truth, sometimes they lie, sometimes they misdirect. By doing all of these it makes it very difficult to tell which is happening, and that is exactly the point. So my alternative is just a potential alternative that needs to be added to your list. There's also a bunch more, complicating matters even more. This is an information campaign.
The simple and likely answer is that it isn't aliens.
There's also strange examples, like how this video[0] is actually a weapon and Dustin became a semi-knowing participant (and you could gather that others are unknowing participants in information campaigns).
Edit: I wanted to add another alternative. The military knows what it is and aren't trying to trick Russia and China, but garner support for weapons development from the public and politicians. "We don't know what this is but we do know it is spying on us" is a great way to get people to freak out and throw money at the problem. Or they don't know and it still has the same result.
My personal bet for the "UFO phenomenon" are in this theory since like, decades ago.
I think in the next century or maybe in 200 years, this stuff would be like the hunt of witches in the medieval europe.
A precise advanced for that time, disinformation campaign targetting an interest for several actors (like kings, the church at that time), and eventually triggering a justification to embrace some nation-state sponsored actions.
Coud be probably a not military interest, like further advance the space career, to try to get to asteroid resources first (like in the 22 century). Long term thinking, ala Bezos.
> Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
> Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.
The weirdest part to me isn’t the concept of an advanced alien civilization visiting earth but rather the notion that they crash so god damn often which kinda undermines the whole “advanced” part or means that visitations are so ubiquitous that the law of large numbers comes into play that would make crashes actually likely.
Our own aircrafts crash quite rarely, and space craft accidents especially for manned flight are even rarer and arguably we are still newbies that have no idea what we are doing compared to a space faring civilization capable of interplanetary travel not to mention interstellar travel.
If these crafts are so damn common then they would also be commonly tracked, stealth in space is hard, stealth during re-entry is near impossible. We currently track objects as small as 5cm and under in orbit regularly with systems like the SSN and the US isn’t the only one with tracking systems capable of tracking 1-5cm objects, orbital tracking is actually easier than tracking objects at lower altitudes due to the horizon.
define often? You would have to know how often they visit to say they crash often. What if they have been operating here for thousands of years and we have a crash or two. Would that be often?
Stealth? How do you know anything we have can track them very well? What if they have to let us track them, or there are certain operating modes where they are susceptible to radar and other times they are totally invisible.
Making any conclusions about why they would not be tracked or wouldn't is pure speculation and worse based on our own capabilities. 'Stealth' from radar might be incredibly easy for them.
Stealth doesn't work like you think it does, stealth doesn't makes aircraft invisible to radar, it makes them practically invisible to radar targeting systems as in it lowers and changes their RCS enough to not be considered an aircraft by the system that tracks them.
And while their stealth tech might be much more advanced than ours, and provide true EMF absorption (as long as they have some sort of internal heatsinks because you can't break laws of thermodynamics) that tech wouldn't do you any good when you enter the earth's atmosphere you'll be lit like a christmas tree.
>The weirdest part to me isn’t the concept of an advanced alien civilization visiting earth but rather the notion that they crash so god damn often which kinda undermines the whole “advanced” part or means that visitations are so ubiquitous that the law of large numbers comes into play that would make crashes actually likely.
...Maybe the uncomfortable truth is, after interstellar travel is achieved we'll just default back to fixing bugs in production.
But more on topic, I haven't heard anything that might be interpreted as a "manned" craft crashing since rosswell, so maybe a more fair comparison would be "how often do we crash random drones?"
Also, being easy to track assumes that whoever built it hasn't figured out any more advanced stealth tech given a 1000+ year head start on us. I think some of the pilot accounts reported active radar jamming when the objects were pinged, so I'll ignore arguments related to tracking until some new data surfaces.
How about we consider that the earth has been visited by beings from a more advanced planet for a long time and that these visits are likely to continue as we are a subject of one of their scientific studies?
Long ago on a planet far away advances were made that allowed one group to escape their own planet and initiate exploration of worlds far displaced from their own. These advances happened simply because the inhabitants of that far-away world looked up from their lives and saw things they didn't understand and this absence of understanding spurred them to seek out answers. Maybe someone there looked into their own night sky and wondered about what they would find if they could only visit those distant lights in the sky. Perhaps like us, they created stories about how all the stars in their sky came to exist, they grouped them into recognizable shapes and gave them names and created stories about them so that the long nights could be passed comforting their children and regaling visitors with the recitation of ancient tales of conquest and heroes now enshrined in their own heavens.
Once the announcement about their successful effort to escape their own planet was made to the citizens of that planet there was much pride in the accomplishment and, in some societies, jealousy reared its ugly head. Fearing that their own local citizens could be dominated by those of their more scientifically successful neighbors, a space race began much like our own with multiple societies striving to outdo the accomplishments of the other and thus claim superiority.
Over time, their probes pushed farther past boundaries than our own scientific advances have allowed and they eventually discovered our planet and all of our ancestors bumping around down here trying to make sense of our own place in the world.
The challenges faced by these alien visitors are much the same as our own when we send probes to Mars or other planets. Like our own efforts, sometimes we are wildly successful and other times our probes miss the mark or crash or never make it out of our atmosphere.
They face similar challenges to our own. Do we know enough about the target to be able to insert ourselves into orbit so that we can use our stripped-down instrumentation to glean anything useful about the world we are visiting that may allow us to eventually send and land a probe on the surface, if it has a detectable hard surface? Imagine that the first successful insertion of a probe into orbit around an alien (to them) world would be greeted with a lot of enthusiasm back home. Competition between societies heats up over time to see who can successfully land a probe on the surface and transmit environmental data back to their home planet? Which society will be the first to send live citizens to visit the distant planet and then later, to return them successfully to their homes?
Assume if you will that all this occurred in the context of a space race on their own home planet and that some groups were less successful than others - due to funding, lack of data, etc. That means that some of their own visits would not end well for the probe or for the pilots or other personnel. Assume that the personnel involved in those efforts were trapped here on this planet with no way to return.
Do you not think that they would attempt to survive and, as a survival mechanism, would eventually come to ally themselves with inhabitants of the planet they became stranded on so that their own knowledge of processes and techniques and materials, etc could be conveyed in a way that both groups benefit from the knowledge transfer?
Perhaps on that far-away planet the competing groups are locked in a competition that has resulted in them discovering our own world and that each time one of their vessels returns to their home planet with a new collection of plant, rock, and liquid samples to add to their gallery of cattle tongues, hearts, and anuses they are greeted as heroes and feted with parades and that these celebrations only drive further exploration as the thirst for k...
The most intriguing aspect of these recent developments has been the POTUS being briefed about the sightings.
The current POTUS isn’t clever enough to conceal the truth. So his explanation that the military doesn’t know what these are, but does know they exist, is very close to confirmation that aliens are visiting earth.
Other plausible explanations are a cover story, but that would rely on inferior officers lying to the head of the military which is probably illegal and very unlikely.
Or it’s foreign governments creating tech that is a generation or more beyond USA tech which is almost certainly not the case.
It’s entirely possible that the USA government has definitive evidence that aliens are visiting. It also seems more than likely that they know almost nothing beyond that.
>The current POTUS isn’t clever enough to conceal the truth.
I'm surprised this characterization is so widely held. So far he's survived a special council prosector, an impeachment, and his own personal lawyer testifying against him. I mean, how else do you describe that other than clever?
Interesting to note that the NYT article (linked below and in a few places in the comments here) was amended a few hours after being posted. It originally made a strong claim that Harry Reid said that crashes had occurred and materials were possessed. Instead, it was revised to say:
> An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades.
This is pure speculation but Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean seem to be the main NYT staff members reporting on this topic and they have proven to be detail-oriented enough and rather limited in their speculation. I wonder if they truly 'misreported' this or if instead the article was asked to be amended because of security reasons.
It's almost certainly a misstatement. Reid is a believer and would certainly speculate. If he had hard evidence he would have been keeping it secret or shouting from the rooftops, not casually slipping it into one conversation.
Pure speculation like everyone else, but I imagine that they're slowly disclosing some huge tech jump (akin to splitting the atom in the '40s), but they don't want everyone to know about it. Drawing similarities to the Manhattan Project, no one really knew what was going on until the moment the bombs dropped.
What's more likely? That some advanced species has jumped across space and then crash landed in the American desert?
Or that we have figured out how to manipulate gravity in some way, and people have been seeing some weird stuff going on in the American Southwest, which is a known area for military experiments.
... or rather than dogfooding the tech, maybe they're testing if their pilots will talk about it overmuch or have the discretion to join the true "space corps"?
If we have anti-gravity technology and they are holding back on it, then I'll be pissed, personally. It would be the most transformative technology since the light bulb or the combustion engine, and slow walking it just to hold a military edge over your opponents is ridiculous.
According to Bob Lazar (Google him), we recovered a crashed UFO that uses anti-gravity technology, but we can't figure it out. The theory is one reason they are releasing it is so that they want to see if we can at least make some scientific progress on it.
> most transformative technology since the light bulb
Assuming it doesn't require huge energies like 1MW/lb. If it did, it would be incredible for space travel, but fairly useless and incredibly inefficient for anyones every day life.
Maybe they are working out technical problems like that.
I remember having read some stories about the Manhattan Project, how there were countless of hard practical problems to solve before to get the bomb blowing up in the dessert.
Now what it seems like a fast technological jump sprint in the 40s, was actually the lifework for dozen of persons, scientists, engineers, even some layperson giving inspiration to someone trying to solve an equation.
I think they had a working bomb design almost from the beginning, but they didn't have a functional practical technique to (fastly) enrich the uranium (S-50 project and the other two).
I think these years feel "fast" for many people (young specially), but the research of radical change technology remains hard as it was always.
If you want a "public" example of how hard is, take a look at the CERN work.
I think there are several historic precedents of advanced technology having a huge impact in sustaining or further advancing nation-states policies.
Think about Spanish and Portuguese caravels, english longbows, etc.
If your country somehow discovers something akin to electricity, probably fastly reproducible by other nations, you will probably want some extra time developing technology over the discovery, just to have maybe, 10-30 years edge over the rest. The more, the better.
This is not any news, US has done it already with the stealth technology (and they still have and edge on it, even if they're not making it public), nuclear technology (most of it are still closely guarded secrets, think hydrogen bombs), even most of the optical technologies related to satellites are highly guarded secrets.
>What's more likely? That some advanced species has jumped across space and then crash landed in the American desert?
>Or that we have figured out how to manipulate gravity in some way (...)
Actually, between these two, aliens would be the more likely scenario. And by "more likely" I mean "infinitesimally likely, versus (given what we know,) absolutely impossible."
Of course that's assuming "what we know" is valid enough to judge likelihood. In an "everything we know is wrong and it turns out Einstein has been superseded by new physics that allow gravity manipulation and FTL after all" scenario, all bets are off the table.
That's kind of what I was getting at, but you put it more succinctly.
Either Einstein didn't know everything, and maybe part of his theory was a bit off. Or, there's an alien species visiting us with advanced craft that crash often enough that we find them.
Of course, this is all assuming everyone on record is telling the truth, which is a pretty big assumption.
> Either Einstein didn't know everything, and maybe part of his theory was a bit off. Or, there's an alien species visiting us with advanced craft that crash often enough that we find them.
To me this sounds like either Einstein was wrong, or Einstein was wrong and there's also aliens. I don't see how they would be able to visit us without ftl technology.
I think it's possible that it's both. Consider the possibility that clandestine aliens are here and can mess with us and our defences and abduct us with impunity, their intentions are not great, and the manhattan project part is the reverse-engineering of their technology in order to stand a chance in the long run.
There's no way to not make it sound like you're insane when speculating this topic, but it's one that far too many credible people have gone on the record with both experiences and beliefs about, for there to be nothing to it. Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon and believed that the aliens are here.
The NY Times article referenced in the article (published yesterday) is more interesting. An official admits the U.S. possesses a craft "not of this earth". This all confirms an article I read last year that said the U.S. government was slowly prepping the public for the announcement of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
If the US military has game changing, society shocking technology it's not going to freaking patent it and make it public. It serves no purpose to do so.
Because the patent is probably meaningless, just like 99% of patents filed these days. But it costs so little to patent stuff so they just throw literally everything at the wall. There's endless patents on technology that doesn't exist or can't exist or makes no sense.
There are no aliens. Pentagon is trying to convince pilots to report ufo sightings because it may be Chinese drone. Don't worry pilots, your license is safe even when you report ufo.
I've seen that suggested a couple of times, but it doesn't make sense. They could literally just order pilots to report possible drones or UFOs when they see them, and not put up an obvious signal to the Chinese (or whoever) that the US military has a cultural blind spot WRT reporting foreign drones in its airspace.
Another possibility: There will be events/actions (or have been) the US doesn't want attributed to it's military that could start a war. The audience could be domestic, foreign, or both. The message could well be true.
Russia has suffered a string of military mishaps that defy coincidence. China tensions are at an historic high.
(posted in another thread before realizing this was the active one)
Has a timeline for the announcement been mentioned in any of these articles? So far it's only been that there will be some kind of announcement, but I can't find any suggestions of when.
Sometimes I wonder if these leaks are strategic as a way to say "hey, if this is you, last chance to come forward before we talk about this publicly"; maybe a little more "are you suuuuuuure these aren't your toys?" before someone finally comes out and says "We found this weirdly shaped hunk of metal and it seems cool but we don't know how to make it".
The conspiracy theorist in me hopes that we found something on Mars, and that's what's been causing all the expeditions out there recently.
This video argues that the object was probably just a bird, and the apparent speed was a result of parallax. Seems more plausible than the alternatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfhAC2YiYHs
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadAn interview with one of the pilots:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-...
His colleague, Cmdr Fravor memorably said:
I don't know what it is. I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast - and I would like to fly it.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/navy-pilot-recalls-encounter-ufo-u...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Btns91W5J8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus
> In the exclusive report, The New York Times detailed how the mysterious government program began in 2007 with support from then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid. The allotted budget reportedly went to an aerospace research entity run by a Robert Bigelow, billionaire businessman and a longtime friend to the senator.
I would love if there was something exciting and real behind it, but what is more likely:
- plain old corruption, or
- plain old corruption + alien or alien-like technology?
Bigelow has been a ufo crank for ages, and as he's a billionaire that's buddies with a senator was able to arrange for pentagon funding for some of his crank friends. That went about as well as expected. After they lost that revenue source, they befriended the blink182 guy to keep going. They're just hoping they'll get another pentagon handout. For all their bluster when asked to put up or shut up they've got nothing.
The actual footage and pilot accounts are consistent with submarine launched weather balloons, halo artifacts on IRST systems, and similar banal explanations.
Edit:
An example video of how the tic tac's motion is consistent with gimbal motion, not an actual object rotating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Btns91W5J8
And Tyler is sometimes problematic, but here he mentions his sources: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28640/could-some-of-th...
This is totally incorrect. There is nothing balloon like or halo artifact like about the tic-tac and Fravor's description. It's just not true.
I agree that many of the people around the ufo phenomenon are cranks and liars, but that doesn't mean everyone is or that all sightings and eye witness testimony are fake or lies or misunderstandings.
What fravor and people on the nimitz described is nothing like what you lumped everything under, it's just not. If you want to call them all liars too, that's fine, but if not, what they described, the eyewitness accounts are not what you described.
See the links in my edit for what I'm referring to.
Consistent according to whom? And is that already a forgone conclusion?
This article suggests some believe a crashed vehicle has been recovered. I'm not holding my breath, but as they say..
..I want to believe.
Also, keeping in mind this incident: "A MiG-25 was tracked flying over the Sinai Peninsula at Mach 3.2 in the early 1970s, but the flight led to the engines being damaged beyond repair" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25
It could even be stretching next-generation technology beyond its sustainable limits. Maybe even as an intentional psy-op. Intentionally use some weird materials and some weird technologies that would look unfamiliar.
an omnidirectional thrust vector https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-2875-5_...
but using a nuclear powered jet engine? (Like the Burevestnik linked above)
Sounds crazy, but if it were done, and if it were a drone that is 90% engine and fuel (no pilot, no life support), I could imagine getting something that performs similarly to what we have seen in these videos.
If we add on top of being 90% engine and fuel, even a slight improvement in engine performance, or a willingness to let the engine destroy itself after each use, it would have better performance than human-containing sustainable-flying aircraft.
If it was a foreign military's advanced aircraft, this is them admitting that, yep, your stealth/whatever technology works great, and we are baffled by it.
Why would the pentagon do that? It seems much more reasonable to keep it a mystery and imply that we have an even more advanced tech that they don't know about.
Okay and then to engage the 14 year old in me who used to watch alien shows on TLC: wouldn't this be a great strategy for disclosure about alien life?
1: No aliens do not exist, and you are crazy for it!
2: Well there are some technologies which are just really advanced
3: Well there are just some technology which is really advanced and we don't know what it is.
4: Well there have been a bunch of encounters our pilots have been having with something.
5: Well maybe that something is very unexplainable.
6: We might have some materials from another world, but the only people saying so are crazy!
If I was in charge of disclosing to the world that there were aliens, this is how I'd be doing it. Extremely slow drip, people argue about the details of it (well yeah it's alien tech but they haven't been here for 3000 years, and will probably never come back vs no I think the aliens visit all the time vs no THIS is all the conspiracy there are no aliens etc.) until it's finally just an accepted fact that aliens exist and have visited earth or are actively visiting earth.
Very strange.
Who knows what the truth is though.
Yeah we had to self-confine for super long and it exacerbated all our societal problems, but at least it made the US government admit there were aliens!
The way I would do it is a slow drip of indoctrination through decades of science fiction pop culture, books, movies, television, and spreading rumors about alien abductions and UFO sightings so that the public is already at least subconsciously comfortable with the premise. By the time they start a flash-mob to raid area 51 and rescue the anime girls then humanity might be ready.
The transition from that to actual disclosure might still be a bit of an existential shock.
Or you want foreign military leaders to think you are baffled by their stealth tech when you can actually detect it just fine.
That doesn't seem conducive to that mutual deterrence which is usually desirable.
This perspective is a good one: what would a slow-drip/evolving story be good for? What might its objectives be?
That is a useful question, regardless of whether we ever get ground truth.
To wit: our government has a very long (now 70 year) history of exploiting UFO reporting for various ends and for murky reasons.
Recommended sober account: https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Government-Historical-Michael-Sw...
De rigeur disclosure: I am related to one of the authors :)
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A different angle: one of the more interesting perspectives on UFO phenomena comes form Jacque Vallée, VC and real-life model for Lacombe, the civilian expert played by François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
He has hypothesized that whatever the ultimate nature of UFO phenomena, it is consistent with a very slow period (think Long Now-scale) inoculation/inculcation of–for lack of a better word–contact.
Between humanity and what exactly he does not claim to have any answer.
Think about some highly intelligent reptile predator species, with a taste for mamal meat.
Yeah, the creeps are there.
I think not everyone - not anyone - would be kind of having much of fun discovering we are not alone, in that case.
I mean, let's be realistic, we could still do business in that scenario. Maybe trade a few million tasty human popplers for a stargate or zero-point engine or something.
In any case, whatever we find out will likely be interesting, extraterrestrials or not.
I have an alternative explanation that also matches with history. They know what it is but don't want to tell the public. They can also feed bad information to adversaries like China and Russia who may interpret this is over confidence in their technologies.
Here's a simple analogy. My cat is really dumb and will step right in front of me in the middle of the night when it is dark because she thinks I can see her (because she can see me). So at night I over exaggerate my inability to see in the dark. Now she thinks she is super sneaky (she's not) but also gets out of my way at night.
All wars (especially cold wars, like the one we're in) are about information control. There is lots of propaganda, misdirection, lying, etc. An adversary having over confidence in their technology means that they will use it with that confidence. Think about WW2 and when the Enigma encryption was broken by Turing's team. They didn't reveal that they broke the encryption and let some people be attacked and prevented others (this led to some of the big foundations in game theory as well).
Now we know this is a possibility, so do the Russians and Chinese. But the pentagon could also be telling the truth. These videos could also be complete fabrications or lucky shots that are natural phenomena that fool instruments. If Russia has the tech and doesn't tell the Chinese and the Chinese think we don't know what it is then China gets more afraid of Russia (and vise versa). Because sometimes the pentagon says the truth, sometimes they lie, sometimes they misdirect. By doing all of these it makes it very difficult to tell which is happening, and that is exactly the point. So my alternative is just a potential alternative that needs to be added to your list. There's also a bunch more, complicating matters even more. This is an information campaign.
The simple and likely answer is that it isn't aliens.
There's also strange examples, like how this video[0] is actually a weapon and Dustin became a semi-knowing participant (and you could gather that others are unknowing participants in information campaigns).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE
Edit: I wanted to add another alternative. The military knows what it is and aren't trying to trick Russia and China, but garner support for weapons development from the public and politicians. "We don't know what this is but we do know it is spying on us" is a great way to get people to freak out and throw money at the problem. Or they don't know and it still has the same result.
I think in the next century or maybe in 200 years, this stuff would be like the hunt of witches in the medieval europe.
A precise advanced for that time, disinformation campaign targetting an interest for several actors (like kings, the church at that time), and eventually triggering a justification to embrace some nation-state sponsored actions.
Coud be probably a not military interest, like further advance the space career, to try to get to asteroid resources first (like in the 22 century). Long term thinking, ala Bezos.
> Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-...
Our own aircrafts crash quite rarely, and space craft accidents especially for manned flight are even rarer and arguably we are still newbies that have no idea what we are doing compared to a space faring civilization capable of interplanetary travel not to mention interstellar travel.
If these crafts are so damn common then they would also be commonly tracked, stealth in space is hard, stealth during re-entry is near impossible. We currently track objects as small as 5cm and under in orbit regularly with systems like the SSN and the US isn’t the only one with tracking systems capable of tracking 1-5cm objects, orbital tracking is actually easier than tracking objects at lower altitudes due to the horizon.
https://astronomy.com/news/2018/11/a-brief-history-of-failed...
I guess my point is off world missions could have a lot of unknowns and a lot of failures. But no one really knows.
Stealth? How do you know anything we have can track them very well? What if they have to let us track them, or there are certain operating modes where they are susceptible to radar and other times they are totally invisible.
Making any conclusions about why they would not be tracked or wouldn't is pure speculation and worse based on our own capabilities. 'Stealth' from radar might be incredibly easy for them.
And while their stealth tech might be much more advanced than ours, and provide true EMF absorption (as long as they have some sort of internal heatsinks because you can't break laws of thermodynamics) that tech wouldn't do you any good when you enter the earth's atmosphere you'll be lit like a christmas tree.
...Maybe the uncomfortable truth is, after interstellar travel is achieved we'll just default back to fixing bugs in production.
But more on topic, I haven't heard anything that might be interpreted as a "manned" craft crashing since rosswell, so maybe a more fair comparison would be "how often do we crash random drones?"
Also, being easy to track assumes that whoever built it hasn't figured out any more advanced stealth tech given a 1000+ year head start on us. I think some of the pilot accounts reported active radar jamming when the objects were pinged, so I'll ignore arguments related to tracking until some new data surfaces.
Perhaps they aren't crashing on accident, but are shot down?
I'm not saying I believe that, of course, but "crash" != "accident".
Long ago on a planet far away advances were made that allowed one group to escape their own planet and initiate exploration of worlds far displaced from their own. These advances happened simply because the inhabitants of that far-away world looked up from their lives and saw things they didn't understand and this absence of understanding spurred them to seek out answers. Maybe someone there looked into their own night sky and wondered about what they would find if they could only visit those distant lights in the sky. Perhaps like us, they created stories about how all the stars in their sky came to exist, they grouped them into recognizable shapes and gave them names and created stories about them so that the long nights could be passed comforting their children and regaling visitors with the recitation of ancient tales of conquest and heroes now enshrined in their own heavens.
Once the announcement about their successful effort to escape their own planet was made to the citizens of that planet there was much pride in the accomplishment and, in some societies, jealousy reared its ugly head. Fearing that their own local citizens could be dominated by those of their more scientifically successful neighbors, a space race began much like our own with multiple societies striving to outdo the accomplishments of the other and thus claim superiority.
Over time, their probes pushed farther past boundaries than our own scientific advances have allowed and they eventually discovered our planet and all of our ancestors bumping around down here trying to make sense of our own place in the world.
The challenges faced by these alien visitors are much the same as our own when we send probes to Mars or other planets. Like our own efforts, sometimes we are wildly successful and other times our probes miss the mark or crash or never make it out of our atmosphere.
They face similar challenges to our own. Do we know enough about the target to be able to insert ourselves into orbit so that we can use our stripped-down instrumentation to glean anything useful about the world we are visiting that may allow us to eventually send and land a probe on the surface, if it has a detectable hard surface? Imagine that the first successful insertion of a probe into orbit around an alien (to them) world would be greeted with a lot of enthusiasm back home. Competition between societies heats up over time to see who can successfully land a probe on the surface and transmit environmental data back to their home planet? Which society will be the first to send live citizens to visit the distant planet and then later, to return them successfully to their homes?
Assume if you will that all this occurred in the context of a space race on their own home planet and that some groups were less successful than others - due to funding, lack of data, etc. That means that some of their own visits would not end well for the probe or for the pilots or other personnel. Assume that the personnel involved in those efforts were trapped here on this planet with no way to return.
Do you not think that they would attempt to survive and, as a survival mechanism, would eventually come to ally themselves with inhabitants of the planet they became stranded on so that their own knowledge of processes and techniques and materials, etc could be conveyed in a way that both groups benefit from the knowledge transfer?
Perhaps on that far-away planet the competing groups are locked in a competition that has resulted in them discovering our own world and that each time one of their vessels returns to their home planet with a new collection of plant, rock, and liquid samples to add to their gallery of cattle tongues, hearts, and anuses they are greeted as heroes and feted with parades and that these celebrations only drive further exploration as the thirst for k...
Except maybe when they are experimental...
The current POTUS isn’t clever enough to conceal the truth. So his explanation that the military doesn’t know what these are, but does know they exist, is very close to confirmation that aliens are visiting earth.
Other plausible explanations are a cover story, but that would rely on inferior officers lying to the head of the military which is probably illegal and very unlikely.
Or it’s foreign governments creating tech that is a generation or more beyond USA tech which is almost certainly not the case.
It’s entirely possible that the USA government has definitive evidence that aliens are visiting. It also seems more than likely that they know almost nothing beyond that.
I'm surprised this characterization is so widely held. So far he's survived a special council prosector, an impeachment, and his own personal lawyer testifying against him. I mean, how else do you describe that other than clever?
Connected.
> An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades.
This is pure speculation but Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean seem to be the main NYT staff members reporting on this topic and they have proven to be detail-oriented enough and rather limited in their speculation. I wonder if they truly 'misreported' this or if instead the article was asked to be amended because of security reasons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-...
Pure speculation like everyone else, but I imagine that they're slowly disclosing some huge tech jump (akin to splitting the atom in the '40s), but they don't want everyone to know about it. Drawing similarities to the Manhattan Project, no one really knew what was going on until the moment the bombs dropped.
What's more likely? That some advanced species has jumped across space and then crash landed in the American desert?
Or that we have figured out how to manipulate gravity in some way, and people have been seeing some weird stuff going on in the American Southwest, which is a known area for military experiments.
Edit: As another commenter mentioned, the Navy already has a patent on a craft that manipulates gravity: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g...
Anti-gravity/electrogravitics would make all kinds of sci-fi stuff possible. It would be a much, much bigger deal.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/boeing-x-37b-space-plane
So they put 3d printer on x-37b plane and print some gadgets in space and dropped them from orbit.
Perhaps they're dogfooding the product and seeing if their own pilots can catch it. So far, no one has been able to.
Assuming it doesn't require huge energies like 1MW/lb. If it did, it would be incredible for space travel, but fairly useless and incredibly inefficient for anyones every day life.
I remember having read some stories about the Manhattan Project, how there were countless of hard practical problems to solve before to get the bomb blowing up in the dessert.
Now what it seems like a fast technological jump sprint in the 40s, was actually the lifework for dozen of persons, scientists, engineers, even some layperson giving inspiration to someone trying to solve an equation.
I think they had a working bomb design almost from the beginning, but they didn't have a functional practical technique to (fastly) enrich the uranium (S-50 project and the other two).
I think these years feel "fast" for many people (young specially), but the research of radical change technology remains hard as it was always.
If you want a "public" example of how hard is, take a look at the CERN work.
Yes, but sometimes "technical problems" are "physical laws".
Think about Spanish and Portuguese caravels, english longbows, etc.
If your country somehow discovers something akin to electricity, probably fastly reproducible by other nations, you will probably want some extra time developing technology over the discovery, just to have maybe, 10-30 years edge over the rest. The more, the better.
This is not any news, US has done it already with the stealth technology (and they still have and edge on it, even if they're not making it public), nuclear technology (most of it are still closely guarded secrets, think hydrogen bombs), even most of the optical technologies related to satellites are highly guarded secrets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret
>Or that we have figured out how to manipulate gravity in some way (...)
Actually, between these two, aliens would be the more likely scenario. And by "more likely" I mean "infinitesimally likely, versus (given what we know,) absolutely impossible."
Of course that's assuming "what we know" is valid enough to judge likelihood. In an "everything we know is wrong and it turns out Einstein has been superseded by new physics that allow gravity manipulation and FTL after all" scenario, all bets are off the table.
Either Einstein didn't know everything, and maybe part of his theory was a bit off. Or, there's an alien species visiting us with advanced craft that crash often enough that we find them.
Of course, this is all assuming everyone on record is telling the truth, which is a pretty big assumption.
To me this sounds like either Einstein was wrong, or Einstein was wrong and there's also aliens. I don't see how they would be able to visit us without ftl technology.
There's no way to not make it sound like you're insane when speculating this topic, but it's one that far too many credible people have gone on the record with both experiences and beliefs about, for there to be nothing to it. Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon and believed that the aliens are here.
1. The creation and chartering of Space Force as a branch of the military.
2. The declassification of existing UFO sightings, as well as a general stance towards future transparency[1].
3. The infamous "UFO patent"[2] that was granted to the Navy in 2016, describing some pretty bizarre technology.
Who knows? Maybe there's been a breakthrough. That would be really awesome if it were the case.
If you are to believe the patent then it suggests that our rivals (China) are also investing heavily into these types of technologies.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g...
See: CDC patents on vaccines/treatments.
Russia has suffered a string of military mishaps that defy coincidence. China tensions are at an historic high.
This is no time for misattribution.
The pilot was recently on the Joe Rogan podcast and talked about it.
I don't believe in anything "aliens", but I'm not really sure what to make of that story.
Has a timeline for the announcement been mentioned in any of these articles? So far it's only been that there will be some kind of announcement, but I can't find any suggestions of when. Sometimes I wonder if these leaks are strategic as a way to say "hey, if this is you, last chance to come forward before we talk about this publicly"; maybe a little more "are you suuuuuuure these aren't your toys?" before someone finally comes out and says "We found this weirdly shaped hunk of metal and it seems cool but we don't know how to make it".
The conspiracy theorist in me hopes that we found something on Mars, and that's what's been causing all the expeditions out there recently.
2) Chinese spies in Houston
3) UFOs
Could be confirmation bias but I see a pattern