I think that's the story here -- congress is trying to fix some serious corruption.
Replace UFOs with magic beans and it sounds like some folks in government seem to have been swindled into diverting money through multiple paths into "classified work" chasing after Jack and a giant stalk. That sounds like a potentially fantastic grift for whoever is running it.
This is why the bill says: no more money for anything related to these crazy beans, and anyone who is employed looking for them is freed from any bonds of secrecy to come tell us what's been being done.
Of course there's a tiny tiny possibility someone comes back with a giant's ring, so they include that you've got to show everything you actually found, but that provision also will make it clear later that despite a lot of money, no one has actually found anything meaningful, and thus the whole thing was a fraud.
This would be a stronger theory if the UFO triggers in congress weren’t also the most credulous / disingenuous believers in numerous other conspiracy theories, and only slightly further behind in their advocacy for corruption.
Maybe there is fraud and the wrong people are getting rich from it?
Marco Rubio? The same Marco Rubio whose own website[1] says:
> he’s secured funding and supported programmatic changes that have seen continued growth in Florida’s defense industrial base
> Since 2011, Rubio has secured more than $2 billion in military construction in the state.
> In 2021, Rubio’s many years of supporting the F-35 program reaped additional rewards in the Panhandle when the Air Force announced that Eglin Air Force Base would receive a second F-35A Squadron
That Marco Rubio is at odds with the military industrial complex?
If that were the case, wouldn't the "Sense of Congress" be that UAP programs are hiding corruption and fraud, rather than "to integrate any recovered exotic technology into the nation’s broader industrial base"?
I am surprised by how little takes on this seem to address the fact this is likely to be bureaucratic. There are many people or departments who would benefit from increased fundings in these areas.
Not seven saying its overt corruption. But if you work for the military in collecting sightings on unidentified objects and earnestly dont know what 10% of the sightings actually were, it behooves you to fan the rumors on it a bit.
I have heard these types of claims many times. The people making them seem more credible at first glance this time, but I am firmly in the camp of being deeply skeptical until I see concrete proof presented.
That being said, I don’t completely discount the possibility. One answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn’t one, and I can think of many reasons multiple governments would try to keep stuff like this secret.
The thing that bothers me is they supposedly have 12 or more craft that have crashed.
Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
I'd like to believe, and I think 1 or 2 might be reasonable but the claim is 12, which doesn't account for ships obtained by other nations as Grusch said I'd happening.
I still believe it's possible, and hope it is, however something feels staged about this, maybe to get more money for certain agencies, or some other motive.
Because nobody has figured out an autopilot that doesn't shit the bed once in a while? I'm betting on taking a nap in the backseat is just a universally bad idea when nobody is driving.
> Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
Multiple different sets of aliens, fighting over Earth. (I’m not saying that this is true, just that it is one scenario that explains crashes happening if there were aliens as described building craft capable of visiting Earth.)
Maybe they're crashing the crafts on purpose to ease the human race into accepting their presence. Maybe they're gifts. Maybe it's not DoD running psyops, but the aliens themselves...
(1) The probes, like ours, are not designed to return and have a limited life span. Maybe they just gather and transmit data until their power source runs out or something on them breaks and they crash.
(2) Maybe there are thousands of probes or even more (even from multiple sources!) and only a small percentage of them crash. Of course one would assume we'd be seeing them more often if this were true.
(3) We shot them down. That's not impossible, especially if they are just probes and were not designed to deal with something intelligent intentionally flinging high velocity chunks of metal at them.
The last could easily occur if we mistook them for e.g. Soviet/Russian or Chinese surveillance craft and they repeatedly refused to respond to orders to withdraw.
Why would someone send probes here? This planet has been broadcasting "possible biosphere right here!" for at least hundreds of millions of years to anyone capable of doing spectroscopy on the light it reflects. You wouldn't be able to see detail from another star but you could determine things like atmospheric makeup and conclude that there is very likely to be something interesting here. You'd see a ton of oxygen (which is hard to explain abiotically), water vapor, traces of hydrocarbons, and possibly evidence of sunlight being captured by something complex (photosynthesis) vs just reflecting off rocks or ice. Lastly the planet has a large moon and is not tide locked to its star, both characteristics that increase the odds of something complex evolving here (as far as we know).
What I find most fascinating about aliens and UFOs is that they always seem to be heading for America. If a UFO arrived from another galaxy it might choose any place to land, but talk is always America-centric. Do other countries feel so UFO special?
The country with the best fishing nets would probably catch more fish than countries with bad fishing nets, even if they have the same amount of fish in the oceans.
Generally UFO reportings increased with astronomy, radar, and surveillance technology development. Of which, the US has a lot of all three, which probably means we have a sufficiently complex system that we can notice anomalies but not sufficiently complex enough to identify them.
You could've googled this theory you had before putting it in text.
I've come across a number of low effort commentary recently that's easily googlable where folks themselves are inappropriate. In this case, there's amerocentricism heavily implied when that's obviously not the case. I think maybe what this suggests is that HN really isn't the place for me at the moment.
So not saying I necessarily believe (but "I want to believe") the argument could be the US has better airspace monitoring than other countries and more ability to publish and disseminate information.
If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to know or be aware. The other alternative if Russia which is similarly sized and equipped but they tend to be pretty cagey sharing information.
So it ends up being the US not because they only land there but because they have the combination of obsessively watching the skies with the ability to share their information and the freedom to do so.
The "US tech is light years ahead" is nonsense when this time around the story is that the US has an ultra secret UFO retrieval agency. How is it possible that no UFO has crashed outside the US jurisdiction, where they can't send their MIB in 2 hours?
Also, I'd like to remind Americans that we're not caveman here. We do have radar and jets flying and cameraphones.
The problem is that if you want to believe, you're ready to throw any kind of common sense and elementary logic out the window. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and this ain't it.
> On 16 September 1994, there was a UFO sighting outside Ruwa, Zimbabwe.[1] Sixty-two pupils at the Ariel School aged between six and twelve[1][2] said that they saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school.[1][2] One or more creatures dressed all in black then approached the children and telepathically communicated to them a message with an environmental theme, frightening the children and causing them to cry.
> The sightings at Ariel occurred at 10am on 16 September 1994, when pupils were outside on mid-morning break.[1] The adult faculty at the school were inside having a meeting at the time.
How convenient that all the adults were inside and only 6-12 year old children saw it. Anyone who believes this story is far too credulous.
When it comes to "strange lights in the sky" there is a fairly uniform body of observation around the world with some(typically dry or mountainous) regions being hotpots so there is definitely things happening in the skies we don't fully understand but that's not the same as extraterrestrial spaceships and could easily be unusual "weather patterns", or some other natural phenomena.
Where the us is alone however is in the reports of sightings/abductions of entities exiting those craft but then again most of those stories tend to either be "retrieved memories", straight up hoaxes or so vague in details that other explanations cannot be ruled out.
Assuming this isn’t just a big psyop trying to scare US adversaries, and that UFO’s are real… the US was the first to detonate nukes in 1945, and on its own territory, which might explain some of it. Maybe the UFO’s were investigating how scientifically and technologically advanced humanity was becoming, and naturally focused on nuclear tech as a leading indicator.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast might also have alerted them to humanity, and travel time of the broadcast plus travel time of UFO’s to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around when nukes were invented (if they’re from, say, Alpha Centauri which is 4 light-years away).
The US and Europe also have free press where things like this are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which in conjunction with the above may explain sightings maps like this one, where sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in Europe:
Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, look at what you get:
1-1943: 1566 sightings reports
1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports
Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia previously. Obviously we also had more robust and technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge discrepancy.
That data is slighty suspect. Not just the reliability of reporting between 1-1900, but also the data on the site - apparently there was a siting in Chicago Illinois in the year 600? There's a lot of reports for American locations even earlier than that.
I think most importantly we started watching the sky when humanity started to fly. Suddenly the heavens were a viable place for mankind to be, especially after we ourselves got to space. The post-WW2 era also had a whole culture that was used to watching the sky because there had been very plausible threats of death from that direction. We suddenly cared when we saw something weird in the night beyond just a passing curiosity.
All good points. I doubt the folks running that site have vetted every one of their hundreds of thousands of data points, so it's not an authoritative source, just a descriptive one at most.
And, when did science fiction literature start getting big and developing plots involving aliens, and might that have stimulated people's imaginations about UFOs and aliens (which then conversely stimulated more scifi about them)? Was this happening prior to the atomic age or space age, or did that kind of scifi really get started with the space race? If the latter, that might also explain the huge increase in imaginings... er, sightings.
I also can't help but wonder at the timing, with geopolitical tensions rising and China challenging US military and technological supremacy. It's quite a coincidence. Maybe it's the mother of all CIA mindfuck psyops, to introduce a new source of uncertainty and deterrence into the CCP and Russia's strategic calculations.
There's "whistleblowers" on TV claiming the US is in possession of "exotic materials", aka alien tech, since the 1940s. Just how much has been reverse engineered in that time, and deployed in super secret weapons systems that not even Congress knows about? Would the CCP really want to risk WWIII against the US when there's even a small possibility of that?
There's a great scene in "The Expanse" relevant to this situation, where UN Deputy Undersecretary Avasarala has a meeting considering the possibility of first contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYRLV-qm3Qs
"I have a file with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for war with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios for what to do if they develop an unexpected new technology. My file for what to do if an advanced alien species comes calling, is three pages long, and begins with 'Find God'".
This makes a lot of sense. To a sufficiently advanced civilization with the ability to detect large releases of energy elsewhere in the universe, the start of the atomic age could have sent an unmistakable signal - distinct from other patterns caused by natural phenomenon - that an advanced form of life must exist here.
Exactly. Humanity's first radio broadcast capable of detection from distant space was the 1936 Berlin Olympics broadcast. Then nukes nine years later were even more detectable, and discernible from natural sources. 4yrs travel time to Alpha Centauri, then 4 years back in a lightspeed craft, and voila - Roswell, sightings, abductions, coverups, etc.
The date that nukes were invented is also roughly the date when the intelligence community captured the military industrial complex and started running psychological warfare campaigns against american citizens...
Technically, all that's being claimed is that the USA has whistleblowers. Grutsch has said before that other countries also have UFO retrieval programmes. So if we suspend disbelief for a moment and assume there's real craft flying around, all it'd take for this current set of events is if the USA had a monopoly on whistleblowers.
Given that most famous whistleblowers in recent years have been American this doesn't seem unlikely. Five Eyes has five governments in it, but only the USA had someone who went to the press. The US Government is both very large so more people can leak things, and very well funded, so more chance of secret programmes, and (IMHO) has a civic-minded culture in which people are more inspired by things like the Constitution and stated cultural ideals than in other countries.
Actually one of the first 'known' UFOs supposedly crash landed in 1930's Italy, and Mussolini blabbed about it to the Pope, who warned the US. Allegedly. We're not the only country that's supposedly had contact.
There sure is a lot of UFO talk around the same time audio of a former president laughing about all the treason he’s committing. Probably just a coincidence.
As a non-American, let me ask you if you really think all the other high level American politicians are clean?
If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?
Uhhhh not OP but yes I believe only one president has shown off classified material for money and power and ego. Disliking the system doesn’t mean we should abandon all critiques of politicians while we wait for our personal utopia to come about.
That's a good point other than the fact that it sounds like you're saying he doesn't need to be held accountable in a court of law for his numerous crimes. No politician should be exempt from the law.
No, actually I want more accountability as ultimately the money politicians launder into their own pockets directly or indirectly comes from a power vested by citizens. Useful idiots who point fingers at one edge of the political spectrum are smokescreening the bigger issue.
I don't think it's an either or thing. Both situations are bad. We should both hold Trump accountable AND push against corruptions by all politicians. If Hunter Biden was influence peddling (no idea if he was)...that's a problem too and so is whatever I assume Jared and Ivanka were doing for 4 years (e.g. the $2B Jared reportedly got from Saudi Arabia).
I do agree that some of the culture war is likely manufactured to prevent a concentrated movement against a system that overly caters to the ultra wealthy.
> As a non-American, let me ask you if you really think all the other high level American politicians are clean?
No, a bunch of somewhat less high-level but still, in some cases, high-level ones are somewhat less flamboyant co-conspirators, co-principals, and/or accessories in Trump’s crimes, as well as having their own; most of the rest are comparatively if not absolutely clean.
> If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?
I don’t know about the person you’re responding to, but I’ve written more, over a longer time, about the structural problems of the American political system than about Trump’s personal crimes, and I’ve written specifically about how the culture of impunity fed by, inter alia, Ford’s pardon of Nixon fueled a series of subsequent executive abuses of which Trump’s are the most serious.
One can simultaneously recognize and discusss the forest and the unique, largest tree. The one does not, and should not, preclude discussion of the other, both are important.
You've got to act like most politicians are clean and investigate and prosecute the ones who reveal themselves otherwise, regardless of what the ground truth is.
The "all politicians are crooks" line of thinking just gives the crooks a free pass while making it more difficult for whatever actors are trying to hold them accountable, whether for virtue's sake or for base political gain. Occasionally punishing a crook -- even if it is only a fraction of those deserving of punishment -- will make a few politicians of the next generation act a little less boldly, while shrugging your shoulders and saying "everyone does it" will make them ask what else they can get away with.
Cynicism, even cynicism grounded in realism, doesn't make the world a better place.
It is. This article is about A) “ Senate Intelligence Committee’s [draft] legislation”, which is a democrat-run process that surely started before last weekend, and B) Marco Rubio describing facts everyone already knew, which idk seems like normal congress stuff.
I think you’re in a conspiratorial mood, haha. Ironic that your conspiracy is against the existence of UFOs!
If you believe the government is capable of covering this up for decades then you must also believe they're just as capable of lying about UFO's existing for some other reason.
I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
Honestly I don’t think the government is sufficiently competent to cover up something as big as intelligent aliens arriving on earth. That’s the most exciting news ever. There’s just no way in my mind they could keep that quiet successfully.
Aliens that are alternate dimensional / advanced technologically could control the release of their existence through various means, while still having some incentive to reveal themselves in stages that seem plausible to us. Imagining them only as meat-sacks-from-another-rock is lacking imagination.
And you might be the only truly conscious mind in a vast alien simulation. I don’t think just because something is possible it becomes worth considering - given our epistemological failings and the impossibility of induction, basically anything is possible…
In other words: I find the idea that aliens might be mind-controlling the US congress to slowly reveal their presence for the first time ever seems ridiculous. Personally :)
Many of the best physicists I guess argue for fairies as well. In the context of many US government military officers and senators confirming evidence of fairy like vehicles.
No, at best they say they see stuff they can't identify. Throughout all this there are claims that someone somewhere has real evidence but it never materializes. You're taking that credible observational claim and running with it until you end up with alternate dimension creatures. I'm just saying - if we're going to make a bunch of unsubstantiated sci-fi claims fairies seem just as likely.
I didn’t argue for it or make any claim, you’re way distorting what I said which is just that shooting down the simplest form of alien arguments doesn’t shoot them all down, and offered two.
The many-worlds quantum interpretations have many curious advocates within physics.
There are now multiple senators and high level military officers confirming this explicitly as well, so that’s also wrong on your part.
You offered science fiction and act like that makes it more plausible when the table stakes of "was what was observed outside of the realm of normal?" haven't even been satisfied. I think it's faeries. We're at an impasse.
Multiple senators and high level military officers are bringing in material evidence?
One of my scenarios was inter dimensional entities. The other was just sufficiently advanced tech. It’s funny you ad hominem the first one and ignore the second.
Just because it's plausible doesn't make it any less science fiction if we have no evidence it currently exists. We're right back to faeries, writing fiction without proof that anything super/para-normal has even occurred.
We're not co-authoring a scientific paper, we're chatting about potential explanations for a variety of disparate but strange reports from various branches of the govt about a variety of recent evidence on UFOs. There's multiple videos released, there's a variety of reports from people who had either first or second hand knowledge. The people are at least somewhat credible (much more than in the past). That's all. Your strong need to gatekeep the conversation is odd, I'm not even making any strong claim just throwing out far-out implausible options, acknowledging them as such. It shouldn't be hard to have informal conversation exploring new possibilities without a scientist pre-approving the topic. It's just an internet forum discussion thread on a weird UFO story.
Right they simultaneously believe the government is so incompetent they can't implement national healthcare that every other major nation on earth has figured out but are so competent they can get thousands of people to keep the most impactful secret in the history of mankind.
Not implementing national healthcare is a choice made to placate US corporations that contribute to politicians' campaigns. Like most "hard to solve" problems, it isn't a competency issue and isn't that hard to solve. The "problem" makes a lot of money for the right people, and it doesn't matter that it costs a lot of money for most people.
But what if all aliens are body snatchers? And the first people to use as hosts are our leaders? Conspiracy theorists can finish the rest of the story. Their fictions always have the right answers without the proof.
Well people have been leaking claims for decades (since roswell) so perhaps they haven't kept it secret but it didn't matter because no one believed it anyway.
I don't think they are capable of covering up the existence of other worldly craft visiting our planet. I DO think they are capable of covering up a program that was a huge money pit and didn't really produce anything of substance for years on end.
>I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
When did you hear this? perhaps after this person saw Childhood's End[0] (based on the 1953 novel[1], which is much better IMHO) and mistook it for a documentary?
No, the original poster is referencing, rightly or wrongly, the Hunter Biden receiving millions without seemingly performing work for a foreign national individual, then threatening the individual with retribution from both him and (potentially) his dad sitting next to him.
Really? Not the fake elector scheme? Or the attempt to overturn the results of the last election? Or the willful retention of classified documents and the attempts to evade returning them? Any one of those would be better candidates for watergate-squared.
The president's son allegedly committed quite a few crimes, including offering access to his father (The US President) for money. He has been charged for some of these crimes recently.
He was charged with not paying taxes and felony gun possession and plead guilty to the tax charges (the felony will go to trial later). I've read nothing about access for money.
But I don't think anyone is ignoring it. Everyone is aware Hunter has had a troubled life and made bad choices. Everyone I've spoken to about this, even the left leaning, is of the opinion that if he broke the law he should face punishment. No one is on the other side of the issue here. The truly newsworthy bit is that he's been charged and facing consequences which, if we look at past presidential children, is the outlier.
You mean the previous Prez's son in law who somehow got a Multibillion dollar investment from the Saudi's while he ostensibly worked directly in the white house? Yeah that should be investigated for sure.
There's no way that could be Watergate-squared. The defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes, so this has to be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes in, please" recording.
>There's no way that could be Watergate-squared. The defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes, so this has to be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes in, please" recording.
I have to disagree. The defining characteristic of Watergate was the illegal (break-ins to steal political opponents' strategies and psychiatrists files) activities by a political organization (CREEP[0]) that were then covered up by those at the highest levels of the executive branch.
The issue wasn't that there were recordings of such a cover up, it was the cover up that was the problem. Unless, of course, you'd like to argue that something isn't illegal/immoral if you don't get caught.
Even under that different defining characteristic, the analogue would be the same modern event: the recording that gives lie to the cover-up narrative that he had used his psychic declassification superpowers.
>Even under that different defining characteristic, the analogue would be the same modern event: the recording that gives lie to the cover-up narrative that he had used his psychic declassification superpowers.
My apologies. I wasn't clear that I was responding to this:
The defining characteristic of Watergate was the audio tapes, so this has to
be a reference to the "Bring some Cokes in, please" recording.
And not at all responding to this:
There's no way that could be Watergate-squared.
I don't claim that the former president's legal issues are "Watergate-squared."
While there are some similarities between Watergate and the current situation, specifically a lack of ethics, enormous hubris and that it involves a (former) US President among other things, the cases are quite different and should be treated as such.
>The president's son allegedly committed quite a few crimes, including offering access to his father (The US President) for money. He has been charged for some of these crimes recently.
It's certainly plausible that the junior Biden may well have offered "access to his father" as a lure to obtain pecuniary benefit.
And while the optics are terrible, I'd note that the current US president held no elective or appointed office in any government when the telegram message that's been cited to "corroborate" the "influence peddling" allegations.
As such, It's not clear to me what, if anything, the senior Biden could have done, at that time, in that context.
I'm not defending anyone here, nor am I trying to skewer anyone. Rather, the narrative presented just doesn't make sense to me given the time frames involved.
I'm surprised you're getting down-voted for this. His history of making wild claims and then accusing the archeology community of being against him speaks for itself.
I am wondering how much of this is fueled by the change in the word alien from simply meaning foreign to meaning extraterrestrial and people misreading the former for the latter.
The research into foreign weapon technology is in one of those gray areas where not only does some of those activities border really close to industrial espionage against companies in potentially allied countries, or might contradict stated US State Department positions on international law it's usually classified and spoken off in hushed tones
It's very likely that an alien(as in foreign) technology evaluation program exists without there being anything extra-terrestrial about it as legalese can trail popular changes to terms by several decades. And that mentions of those in wider circles might fuel some rumors and misconceptions among those "who wants to believe".
The US immigration services uses the term Alien, and the US State Department have historically used both.
Given how byzantine the US military industrial complex's paperwork and pretend regulation is someone might have been relying on legislation or paperwork predating the change in word usage, and that that influenced the naming of some program somewhere in the secretive world.
It's also worth noting that such a misconception definitely benefit's the military industrial complex as it draws focus towards something that is not there rather then towards what's actually happening, which again is a very common strategy within military intelligence.
Moreover, when it comes to corps/biz incorporation domestic is in-state, foreign is out of state, and alien is international. presumably if one day one could charter a corporation at an office on Mars it would be extraterrestrial.
The government has previously used UFOs to divert attention.
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
The B-21 is getting close to operational, the NGAD is in development, and god only knows what sort of experimental drone tech is being worked on in the dark. That adds up to a lot of test flights and more, and a lot of reasons to throw out the same old "UFO" chaff to cover it.
I have to say that X-44 does look similar in shape to some of the UFO pictures I've seen. Especially the one where the UFO flies past the plane window.
probably a good number of drunks/kooks and then probably a handful of unknown phenomena that would have a reasonable explanation if we had better photos/descriptions.
*edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in origin.
I will say my thoughts on the matter:
Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only planet with life)
Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low chance
Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united states? near 0% chance
This is a contradiction. Not that eye witness testimonies are completely without merit, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and eye-witness testimony alone does not meet that standard....no matter who the witness is.
I am not saying we know for a fact that extra terrestrials have landed on planet earth. I agree with you, there is still not enough evidence.
However I am tired of reading so called skeptics dismissing people who come forward claiming they have seen UFOs as kooks or drunkards.
There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Video recordings that can't be explained, radar observations etc. Please also realize that most of what has been recorded so far is classified as top secret, according to testimony from people with direct access to this evidence and like I said in my parent comment, we also have plenty of credible eye witness reports.
It's sad that people aren't more curious - not everything is about distracting from Donald Trumps misadventures with classified documents...
> There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Nah. I'd wager it's more likely to be earthlings from an alternate reality or that time travel turns out to be feasible and it's our descendants, than that it's space aliens ("but one of those is entirely based on speculative physics and both require our model of the universe to be pretty damn wrong, to allow such travel" yeah, I know—that's how incredible I find the space alien hypothesis). I don't think those are credible guesses, either, but I'd say they're more likely to be true than "it's aliens". That explanation's got a lot of things working against it.
There are also tons of people who have claimed to see ghosts, tons of medieval peasants that saw witches, tons of people accused of summoning the devil in the 80s.
There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.
that was covered by the second portion of my comment. There are a few that are legit we don't know what that was. If we had better details/pictures/video of them we might be able to say better.
In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems low though.
Dude, you can't even get a good picture of the moon on most phones without some AI assistance. How the hell are you going to snap a clear photo of something much smaller and dimmer?
A challenge for the incredulous, bring me some high quality cellphone pictures of airplanes at night without using any extra equipment like tripods, lenses or stabilizers.
smartphones are optimized for selfies thus the lens is super flat. Any photo I try to take at a distance looks awful, and moon photos are even worse. You'd be better off taking these pictures with a 1960's film camera with an actual lens. Not only did standard cameras have 4.5k resolution (35mm) but the lens allows you to zoom in!
Well, there are plenty of UFO recordings using iPhones.
I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S. military. Sadly most of it is classified.
Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
Isn't the paranoid atmosphere cold war and the increase in weapons testing, satellites, spy balloons, etc. a much simpler explanation?
I think the whole atmosphere around governments spying, covering things up, and generally engaged in a lot of sloppy covert action is bound to make UFOs seem more credible.
> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
No? Why would it, any more so than what came before? We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I guess (must not have limited resources, like, at all) all using physics we're not even on the verge of discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict what we have discovered, but also leave no to-us-detectable trace anywhere we can detect, in their visits or with their sensing equipment or their civilization itself, but also also be pretty bad at hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but also also also good enough that we can't quite prove they're real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away, instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.
"Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the rest still holds, too.
The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's not technically impossible that Russell's Teapot exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens" barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and does miracles sometimes".
> and yet sightings of UFOs (or any cryptid) have been at an all-time low.
Source? I see the opposite when I Google around for reports per year. There was a dip during COVID, buts it's easy to attribute that to people not being outside, and it's picked right back up since.
The other day while I was in the countryside I saw a military drone (I live near an airport doing military maintenance). It was the second time in a few months. I had my phone in my backpack, yet I didn't take any photos. Somehow the four seconds or so wasn't enough for me to make the decision.
The "flying triangles" seen from US naval vessels look like jet drones. [1] Those are commercial products, priced around $10,000. One of those zipping around looks like a UFO. Some versions can hover pointing upward; they have enough thrust.
There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and military UAVs.
Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
I'm surprised that congress finally wants to stop the gravy train, unless this is another refined misdirection scheme. Probably a lot of that money went into covert operations.
So are hostile countries using declassified nuclear blueprints to bomb our homeland. Alas, if you want the democratic experiment to succeed, you need to account for those who stand to lose everything from your success.
Official secrecy clearly failed to stop the very scenario you're talking about!
We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries. North Korea has them, for God's sake.
Nuclear weapons are simply a function of having a large enough industrial base to support their development. The "secret sauce" is officially secret, but it isn't actually secret.
> We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries. North Korea has them, for God's sake
> It’s not secrecy that has prevented proliferation, it’s carrots and sticks that has.
Secrecy increases the cost, so it is, in effect, part of the “stick” end of the carrots and sticks. If there hadn’t been secrecy, would the return to sanity that stopped the South American nuclear arms race been too late? Secrecy should not be dismissed.
There is secrecy, which is why the countries that haven’t found a shortcut around it (as in the nuclear arms race between Argentina and Brazil) have a harder road than those that do (like South Africa via Israel).
> Research the Nth Country Experiment
The Nth Country Experiment focused on paper design of a device, which, while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons, isn’t the whole or, in practice, the limiting factor.
>while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons, isn’t the whole or, in practice, the limiting factor.
Nukes are not a physics challenge, but an engineering challenge. That's why an experiment showing a bunch of physicists understand simple particle physics isn't a useful demonstration that building nukes doesn't require insane amounts of help from a willing sponsor.
People "knew" how to build the A bomb before World War 2 even started, yet even when several countries put energy into it to aid their war effort, only the US succeeded, and only because they dedicated around one tenth of the entire GDP to the process.
Merely getting enough enriched material is enough of a problem to stop most countries.
Anyway, Brazil has a working uranium enrichment facility, with public numbers, and as efficient as any modern one (what is way more efficient than anything from the time nuclear bombs were created).
What kind of secrecy are you stating that is stopping Brazil?
The comment doesn't really apply to that either. Germany and France were quite involved on that one, so it wasn't exactly secrecy that kept things slow. It was more due to the sheer unpopularity of the thing (on both sides) even between the people high-ranked enough to know about it.
I mean, by 85 Brazil had already a nuclear reactor in full activity. A reactor can get you enough plutonium for a bomb long before it's in full activity.
“Policy X is useless because it did not stop every single instance of the thing it was trying to reduce” is a fallacious argument. Seat belts did not halt deaths in auto accidents, etc.
Secrecy may or may not be warranted, but this is not a good argument against it.
I see your points, but the difference is we know about the existence of the silos and subs. They're protecting information about them, but not trying to mislead us into thinking submarines aren't a thing.
But.. The US Govt. has zero reasons to acknowledge existence of a non-human superior technology spacecraft. It would undermine their position as world super power and destabilize trust and security in the country and could lead to mass instability and a slow down of technological progress.
And if they are running a massive psyops deception campaign it would make the public lose the last vestige of trust left in the govt. Its a lose lose situation on both scenarios and I expect the US govt. to keep things of this nature locked down to a extreme state as it has been doing since WW2.
Also interesting note, the flood of credible pentagon UFO info is being brought up by a bunch of individuals who worked in(or currently for) the US intelligence community. This is 2017 and after when the NYtimes(Leslie Kean reporter) released the bombshell pentagon UFO tapes. These individuals are: Christoper Mellon(ex high ranking intelligence director), Luis Elizondo(Intelligence officer on and off), and currently David Grusch NGA, & NRO - the person who states that non human craft have been retrieved(OP article).
Would a US President have the necessary clearance to know of the existence of non-human superior technology spacecraft? A former US President is recorded on tape boasting about knowledge of US military plans to invade Iran.
I don't mean to make this political at all, just trying to reason on the basis of a personality and knowing that a president would boast about having knowledge of such trivial classified information - in comparison to the existence of non-human spacecraft; makes me believe that if he was briefed on it he likely would have boasted about it. (and so would I, just imagine what earth shaking news that is.)
The president would have the clearance, but the issue is knowing who to even ask who would have knowledge. Top Secret SCI is compartmentalized, so only the people who need to know get read in.
One great example of this is during the Bin Laden raid planning, after all plans were exhausted on how they could put boots on the ground, only then did a high ranking officer let the president and the rest of the team in the room know about the stealth helicopters that even the SEALs had never seen before.
This is exactly what I have been thinking since 2016. If Aliens/UFOs are real, we will hear about it soon. However, if it's true that parts of the government are secret from the president, even the last one, then that is a real problem.
Supposedly the President is deliberately kept in the dark. Bush Sr. denied President Carter access to that information, and I have no doubt other more recent Presidents were denied access or purposely fed misinformation.
Trump in particular never showed any interest in anything besides enriching himself and allowing the Saudis, Russians, and Chinese to feed his ego. I doubt he even thought about the aliens, let alone went through enough trouble to ask about them....because if he did, and was denied info, he would have fired the intelligence officer who denied him access and publicly blabbered about it on Twitter.
I think a large portion of the government, including Trump's very direct reports, know not to tell him anything that should be kept secret. I imagine other Presidents all know a ton of stuff that nobody happened to mention to Trump, you know, for some reason.
Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and draw attention away from several state supreme court rulings striking down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted and championed by republicans. If not that, then to draw attention away from the spectacle of republican cooperation during successful debt ceiling negotiations.
> Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and draw attention away from several state supreme court rulings striking down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted and championed by republicans.
Mostly, those have been federal trial courts (and some, like the Florida drag ban one, also preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement while the case proceeds, not final rulings striking them down) not state supreme courts issuing the rulings.
Rubio is a member of the "gang of eight" which means he's about as uniparty as they come - the letters next to the names of people on that committee do not mean anything. Their allegiance is to the military industrial complex. They've all got the stamp of approval of the US intel community, which has probably been spying on them and blackmailing them since they launched their first political campaigns.
I’m not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the interest of curiosity and for sake of argument…
Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades.
If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft).
Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.
That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.
It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.
So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s
I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.
I think that would all depend on how advanced this hypothetical tech is, and the timeframe in which someone wants it known to the public. DARPA may not provide enough cover for sufficiently advanced discoveries that cannot be explained without raising bigger questions.
It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more.
Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal.
And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.
There is also that fermi paradox resolution that basically says the same tech that unlocks infinite energy also unlocks the ability to destroy ourselves. So in theory there could be good reasons for avoiding commercialization of highly advanced technology, if it means that within a century some guy on the street could build an apparatus that destroys the planet in an industrial accident.
AI could unlock the ability to destroy ourselves and we've commercialized that highly advanced technology but it sure didn't stop the majority of people from wondering "should". :P
You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other tech in the least.
They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm.
The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.
Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it.
Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.
I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.
I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so reaching orbit was the next step in our progression. Even if you gave a modern rocket engine to someone in 1940 their society would understand almost all of what went into it. Go back further to 1840 and their engineers would be amazed at the strength of the materials but they would recognize a combustion chamber, valves, fuel tanks and even the wiring. In 1740 they would still probably have enough knowledge of fluid dynamics to deduce how it worked although the concept of combining oxidizers and fuel would be foreign to them, though only for another 30 years. Even as you push it back further and further people would still recognize that it was made of some type of metal and could understand that liquid or gas could flow through it and burn and they could probably build a very crude and simplified copy that used the basic principles. The point is that even bronze age civilization was far more advanced than people who had no metallurgy. There are incredibly difficult things you need to learn to go from zero to having any of the components that make up a gun and none of that knowledge is encoded in the gun itself. It's just not obvious to someone with no information about how gunpowder or iron are made how you would go about obtaining and processing the raw materials. It's probably even completely counter-intuitive that you would make something like iron from stone or that you have to burn the stone for a long time at a very high heat. Who would even think of that in a stone age society? The best guess as to how it was invented is by accident and observation. Having a chunk of metal won't give you that insight.
That being said and all, who knows what people could learn from say... the equivalent of the ashtrays, doorknobs, toilets (etc) in hypothetical alien vehicle(s).
Wouldn't have to be the biggest challenges getting solved right away. Alien "mundane, old crap" would probably turn out pretty useful too. :D
Sorry, I think I still just have to disagree. Look at what a car or modern ship is made of. Nothing in it could be reproduced by a stone age civilization. They could maybe make a wheel out of wood which would be a technology they didn't have but honestly I'm inclined to believe the reason why pre-animal-husbandry civilizations didn't use the wheel is because it's mostly useless with nothing to pull it. You really need the wheel plus draft animals plus roads to actually do anything otherwise the terrain is just too rough for a person to pull or push a small cart very far and it's easier to just use a frame pack or basket on your head or back.
If they had this technology I'd assume there would be no point of revealing it, since you'd lose the advantage of secrecy over it for no good reason. The US military is capable enough against other nations with conventional technology. I'd expect if this tech were employed in war it would be in defense of the planet itself.
Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is how it works?
This was my first thought as well, and I think there are a number of possible reasons:
- The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes
- They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding
- They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project
Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.
The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology.
There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
> If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.
A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.
Why would the chain be a problem? The Romans could make metal rods, rivets, and some of their finer metalwork is crafted with more precision than any bicycle chain.
The real difference is that it would take an army of ancient craftsmen to make one bike.
The real distinguishing factor with modernity is mass manufacturing and precision at scale.
Even moreso income inequality and competition with slavery.
Any roman who could afford a bicycle would rightly think it was rubbish compared to a horse. All this expense just to propel myself around?!
The same goes for most modern conveniences. Even the best modern dishwasher is less efficient than a human slave doing the same task, if you're indifferent to the suffering of the slave, as the Romans were.
> "They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project"
I would vote for this one, but this hypothesis doesn't need the ET part.
Supposedly a few pieces of technology that we use in military and everyday use were created using alien technology. Stealth fighters and holograms. But I have read the book about the engineering/creation of the f-117 stealth fighter at skunkworks and nothing in that airplane doesn't seem like it could be created using currently understood scientific principles. One thing that did stand out was the timeline from creation to delivery was very short, also the plane cannot fly using just human piloting, a advanced computer must make micro adjustments to the crafts trajectory every second or the plane crashes. This was done in the late 70s so that seems extremely advanced for back then so who knows.
There is not a single invention out in the world today that came from alien technology, that came out of left field, or has no paper trail of terrestrial origin. Holography for example has been a hot topic since the 1600s, combine holography with the invention of photography and you get holograms.
> Holography for example has been a hot topic since the 1600s
I can't figure out what you mean by this, unless you're referring to Pepper's ghost which is not a hologram at all. If you photograph a Pepper's ghost illusion you get a regular photograph, not a hologram.
It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't learn anything about it at all, and it wouldn't advance technology a bit, at least not for a hundred years or so.
If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?
Congress could pass a law requiring it to be revealed, the president could order it, leaking of additional information could cause public outcry leading to one of the above.
I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.
I don't think the people allegedly involved in this alleged coverup have shown any respect for laws or norms. They can just keep lying and obfuscating. The only way they would ever disclose anything is if they wanted to.
We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable, nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are responsible for a government program cloaked in so much secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.
The craft might also have had a contained self-destruct mechanism.
The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the remnants of one that had been vaporized.
While people in the 1850s probably would not have been able to fix or turn the iPad on they would have been able to examine it. They could have taken it apart and looked at the various materials and perform physical and chemical tests on them. They could open up some of the electronics and look at them with a microscope. The understanding of electricity, circuits, and electrical devices in the 1850s was developed enough to learn something from an iPad. Perhaps they could examine the glass face and learn about that. Perhaps they could learn about new manufacturing techniques by examining the way the device was assembled and formed. I think humans would be able to glean similar types of information from alien technology even if we weren't able to actual use it in its intended way.
Quite generous of you to assume the aliens are only (the equivalent of) ~150 years ahead of us. Would the ancient Egyptians have had as much success reverse engineering an iPad as some Victorian-era scientists?
It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components. And we similarly know how to enumerate all sorts of chemical and physical properties of any exotic materials and objects we might come across. But it's all based on our own patchwork model of the physical universe, which has plenty of gaps we know about, nevermind those we can't even imagine. We don't know what we don't know.
If we assume aliens are visiting then it's almost certain that their technology is thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours. And if we assume that follows an exponential curve (which may not be a valid assumption - we really only have ~200 years of history upon which we could base such a supposition), then it follows that their technology would be indecipherably complex for us to understand.
You're arguing for a sort of technology threshold beyond which we cannot see (presumably within a reasonable time frame). However, which side of said threshold we are on, even for technology from a civilization a million years older, isn't clear. I am not convinced it can be clear, since we'd be arguing about properties of a hypothetical craft.
A time-based argument is probably not useful. The difference between ourselves and ancient Egyptians is huge, but it isn't from exponential change in technology over time. That change in technology was driven by (and drives) both our different (from the Egyptians') model of the world, and our ability to sense the world.
Consider a recovered alien ship hull. If it crashed in ancient Egypt, they might make use of the metals and conclude the ship was a god or its vessel cast down from the heavens. If it crashed in the modern United States, we could figure out the chemical makeup of it, test its properties, hypothesize about how it works, and try to recreate it. All of that could wind up being incredibly valuable, even if we couldn't recreate the shell itself.
Any alien civilisation, unless it's within our very solar system and we've failed to detect it which seems thoroughly unlikely, has visited us from another star system. If not FTL, they have the means to travel across light years of distance and are capable of preserving themselves for the trip if it's a long one and folding space if it's a "short" trip. That kind of technology to do either is still beyond us despite all the advancements we've made in the last 100 years
I would posit it's not even Victorian era scientists looking at an iPad. It's like presenting an iPad to pre-agriculture humans. We might not even fathom how it works or what it's even supposed to do when our frame of reference is so far behind technologically
All of that is valid points. But if the USA has retrieved crashed spacecraft then what the hell are these guys doing crashing in the first place? Humans barely lose any important spacecraft to crashes and we've only been playing this game for about 50 years or so.
I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Especially if its a truth that has been kept secret for so long, that would be particularly damning for the legitimacy of current governments of the world in the eyes of most people, I would assume.
On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today.
This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.
> I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god?
Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.
You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.
The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.
I'm sorry, but this would be an entire paradigm shift of how we see ourselves as a species. To think people would show up to work on monday I think is uncertain. We would be going from a millenia of human primacy on this planet to having these unknown apex predators lurking with unknown intentions. It's so completely unprecedented that it would be hard to imagine there wouldn't be social unrest, and major dissatisfaction with governments that have chosen to lie to the people they allegedly serve and represent. You might start to question who really runs the world, if some secret cabal had been able to keep the greatest secret of all time a secret for decades, and make decisions for the entire planet independent of our supposed democratic process.
If any of that were true, this "secret cabal" that really runs the world wouldn't have allowed these things to be revealed in the first place. If they did, they're either inept because they couldn't see the scenario coming that you did or they don't actually control as much as you are suggesting they would (or don't exist at all).
This just comes across as conspiracy mongering. Yes, there will be people who think like that but those people already think like that. There wouldn't be some mass collapse in society or government. The most that would happen is people would be interested in the information released, acknowledge the government has secrets just like they did yesterday, and move on with life.
What are you smoking where there's a clear line from "this thing crashed in the desert 50 years ago, we still know basically nothing about it" to everyone becoming an atheist and tax evader?
Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.
A real eye opener regarding this has been the ongoing war in Ukraine. For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.
But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.
Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.
Their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis,
That's the thing - except for places very close to the front lines, only very tiny portion of the country is getting hit.
So no, it's not "the entire country, on a daily basis".
You are correct though that the media loves to paint it as a 24x7 apocalyptic hellscape (mostly via selective imagery, independent of what is actually said in the articles). That's how they get your anxiety molecules jumping, and thus make their money, after all.
> banal: so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.
People going to work every day while there are bombs dropping, in the middle of a war, trying to keep the exchange of goods going so they can pay for the war and to survive, is not banal. It's not obvious that people would go to work in a war zone, and it's not boring, and in many times in history people did not go to work during a war (except for farmers, whose lives depended on it)
They didn't say war is banal, they said life is - which it is. Going to work every day, going to the gym, making dinner, doing laundry. Most of it's boring, and a lot of it you have to do whether or not something 100 miles away is getting bombed.
>For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.
For cities actively under siege, that's exactly how it is though. Read about St. Petersburg or the battle of Vukovar.
I'm not smoking anything. I'm merely speculating on what I think is a rather interesting hypothetical situation. It's generally interesting enough to sell millions of copies of books and thousands of movie tickets on similar subjects, after all. I just think being told that you've been lied to for decades, your elected leaders don't really call the shots but some classified group does unilaterally for the entire planet, there's some unknown creature potentially at the top of the food chain prowling the planet for the first time ever, and now you have to just suck it up and go back to flipping burgers to be rent burdened, is a really hard pill to swallow. For reference, we've gotten close to civil unrest in the past, when it became clear with the Pentagon Papers to the public that they were lied to about Vietnam being winnable and the scope of the conflict, and public opposition eventually forced the war to end. People were facing conscription and burning their draft cards. To think the working public today, as squeezed as they are by the elites, might face extraterrestrial threat and the greatest lie of all time and just clock in the next morning like nothing has changed, I think, is a bit of a gamble.
If it is real, then there's probably a billion self-replicating alien robots in the oceans already converting the earth to paperclips without our realizing it. There will be a trillion before we notice, and then we'll just get wiped out. No actual aliens will ever visit earth, just autonomous drone swarms trying to keep us from becoming properly space faring. After all, if we ever get to be properly space faring, we might interfere with it's paperclip goal
> If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems.
What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.
One theory that would explain this pretty much perfectly is that Marco Rubio is an alien operating here under cover to get the government to stop trying to reverse engineer some technology that his people accidentally lost here.
I always thought there was something a bit off about Rubio...
My theory is that these spheres are spinning and move using the Magnus effect (the effect that causes a spinning soccer ball to curve). Theoretically, if you have gyroscopes inside the sphere, and you can find a way to transfer the gyroscopes' spin to the sphere, the sphere will spin in a controllable direction and move where you want it to. Lift can be achieved by filling it with helium.
The videos show the spheres moving quickly, often back and forth. Pilots have reported spheres hovering stationary over a spot during hurricane level winds. From all the reports it sounds like there is some kind of propulsion mechanism.
They’re sails in this configuration—nothing more. They harness existing force of wind. They get spun up and if they spin the right way they produce a force perpendicular to the wind.
The magnus effect is a byproduct of laminar flow of fluid/air around a spinning object. Without laminar flow there is no force. So that is to say if you spin a sphere really fast and it’s hovering in air without gravity and without wind it will not move because there will be no laminar flow to produce the magnus effect. So in order for your spherical craft to actually harness the magnus effect you would need a separate means of propulsion to drive you in the primary direction and harness the magnus effect for thrust in a secondary direction, ie turn.
Did some more research, you seem to be right. Although the design I proposed could still be viable--when the wind is still the sphere would simply hover, and when the wind is blowing the sphere could move controllably, just not against the wind. At 10k feet there should be sufficient wind to control the sphere most of the time.
We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with statements like the following, made by the former director of National Intelligence?
"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."
Ok, I changed the wording to "in my opinion". My main point is that it might be possible to build drones matching this description with existing technology. There is existing technology to induce controlled rotation in satellites, using control moment gyroscopes:
Perhaps if you placed a control moment gyroscope inside a helium-filled sphere, an operator could generate a controlled rapid spin. I'm not an expert by any means, was hoping someone more knowledgable can evaluate the idea.
While I understand and appreciate the aspects of the bill that offers protection for whistleblowers, I don't understand cutting all funding for reversing such technology.
If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we want to study potentially advanced technology?
I would assume the issue would be that a government agency is reversing UFO tech and congress doesn't know about it, not just that it's being done. A government agency going rogue in such a manner would be a big concern
Agreed. Many implications. If technology is reverse-engineered in secret while government funded and then patented to a private corporation, is this not theft from the people if they try to sell it for profit? Security threats are a concern as well, civilians are not allowed to possess weaponry more powerful than what the military has, etc.
Reverse engineering a UFO would be disassembling and studying it so that we can recreate it or repurpose the technologies in it. Presumably it would have some manner of exotic engine or power source or perhaps weapons, etc.
For an example of this from the early Cold War, see the Tupolev Tu-4. The Soviets took the wrecks of three downed US B-29s from WWII and spent huge amounts of money and manpower studying them and developing copies of them since US strategic bomber tech was so far ahead of their own. Supposedly (though I'd need to find a source again) there was a bullet hole in the wing of one of the recovered B-29s that the Soviets faithfully recreated in the Tu-4 thinking it was part of the actual design.
It sounds like a dramatic step without necessarily having any real impact. If as I suspect these UFO claims are largely BS, then it's an easy way to impress the disturbingly large sector of the public that lives in a conspiratorial fantasy land.
- Stick. Today a program that is doing "Advanced Propulsion Research" that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech would be perfectly legal. Cutting funding for this, unless explicitly authorized, opens up liability for anyone in the government and related contractors.
- Carrot. The amnesty is an opportunity to come forward without the liability.
We want the shiny tech, but if the studying shiny tech is a way to step around appropriations, then there are very powerful people who will want to stop that (Congress), since it threatens the very thing that makes them powerful. Sounds to be more about DC power politics than alien technology.
If there are indeed people that work on this stuff, are paid well, and this stops funding maybe disclosing it to congress is a way to get the gravy train turned back on.
This is a good thread to catalog red herring techniques.
* The government has previously used X to divert attention therefore there is no X.
* The person saying X is an accomplice of X and cannot be trusted.
* Demanding the answer to the question about X is dangerous because national security.
* X is a distraction from something bad Trump did.
* X is a distraction from something bad Biden did.
* X is a distraction from the recent Supreme Court decisions.
* X could never be covered up by the government - refuses to believe copious whistleblower testimony about X with no reason than it's impossible for the government to be able to cover X up.
- I debunked it from seeing this YouTube video because those Air Force pilots and those government whistleblowers definitely don’t know what they are talking about !
I am always surprised by the amount of confidence those « debunkers » radiate when what they mainly do is just express doubt with zero cost to them in terms of reputation or even work.
This is precisely why I've always been most fond of the explanation that "the UFO thing" is a training ground for US psychological warfare officers. We're target practice for US disinfo campaigns.
This is such a ludicrous idea that doesn’t pass even the most basic reality checks. It’s explicitly illegal for a start amongst a whole host of other problems where the incentives make zero sense.
The government lying to us and manipulating the population with psychological warfare is a much more germane, plausible, and historically aligned proposition than the suggestion that aliens are visiting earth. In fact if you assume aliens are visiting earth, then you must also assume the government has been lying to us about it. So either way, the government is lying.
> It’s explicitly illegal
Lol. When has this ever stopped any government agency, ever? The FBI conducted over a million illegal searches last year. The NSA lied for decades about its dragnet surveillance program. You think the DIA information office (Lue Elizondo's "former" workplace) is against fabricating some conspiracy theories in an effort to corral the people most susceptible to them? They could even justify it as a defensive maneuver against hostile forces who would otherwise propagandize the same people ("distract them with Lue Anon so the Russians can't target them with Q Anon").
Obviously nobody is going to convince you that you have a complete crackpot view of the world, that’s kind of the definition of the situation you find yourself in.
It’s just incredibly clear that you actually don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding about how the military or intelligence agencies work and you are left yelling about a world that exists in your mind. The entire comment is just Swiss cheese to anyone with even a passing familiarity on any of those topics.
Wow, very convincing argument, you must be a professional spy with all your more-than-passing familiarity with intelligence agencies, I bow down to your totally rational viewpoint on the world where government agencies follow all laws and aliens routinely crash their flying craft for our venerable government agencies to recover and (legally, of course!) keep secret from us for seven decades.
This whole narrative on UFO coming from US Gov at the exact same moment the fear around covid has faded is so suspicious.. It's really really hard not to see it as a pathetic attempt at keeping the population in a state of mass hysteria.
(yes i know this sound completely paranoïd, but i have absolutely no other idea why they would do that)
So it's just a feeling then. Although i talked to another friend who made exactly the same observation on its own, without concerting: all of the sudden, some very official sounding declarations from US "officials" making public statement suggesting there may be something real after all about UFOs.
I have no idea who "they" is, but i assume it's pretty easy for a small group of congressmen to spread rumors and declarations on a given topic in the media (from my understanding it is done regularely as a consequence of lobbyist work).
All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead. The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs paying 5-10x more since the late 90's.
And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it.
While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
That “government employee doesn’t get paid enough to attract talent” trope has to die. I work with many government employees that are not beholden to the government pay scales and get special exemptions to be compensated “at market rates.” You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k
They typical pattern is they work for one of the government contractors L3 (now L3Harris), Northrop Grumman, etc. Of course it's a revolving door as well.
> You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k
That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.
Yes I'm a bit skeptical of the parent's numbers, but if true, I imagine it's very much the exception, not the norm. Technical employees at the contractors did not do much better than the price ranges posted for government job boards (even distinguished/principal engineers capped out at what is probably around $300-350k today after inflation) except in management positions, in my experience. All the most talented engineers I knew were gone within a few years.
Not to mention the red-taped filled work environment does not exactly encourage innovation.
> That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do
This is the solo special contractor rate. You aren't paying a person a million bucks. You're paying a "company" that because that's what expertise in how carbon fibers set in a particular resin matrix subjected to a high-frequency supersonic detonation ring or something, an expertise that globally numbers maybe five, and within the U.S., three, is worth.
Also ignores the entire defense and aerospace industry. It's laughably ignorant to just write off the STEM talent at places like Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, etc because FAANG is a popular destination for CS grads. Also, people here (and in SV in general) doubt the capabilities and talent in the public sector until suddenly a Stuxnet is brought to light.
As a former government employee, I doubt they work directly for the government. The government loves to outsource everything remotely technical to contractors in my (dated) experience. The GS and even the SES pay scales they offer are laughable in comparison to what one can get in the private sector.
Correct, but if you do 5 years in the military, and 15 in FedGov, you can then retire at your GS-15 / SES grade and get a pension + guaranteed healthcare.
Then you start your 2nd career at GD or Lockheed or Microsoft, et al, and get 300k per annum.
I think you're really overstating it. I know guys that have done the military / fed / contractor shuffle. Getting above gs 12 damned near impossible, and when they figure that out, they go into contracting for ~100k+ positions, but it's not 300k. If you play it right, yeah you can fully retire at 55 with a small pension and (hugely important!) health insurance, but someone who went tech sector from the jump can easily retire at 40 if they really set their minds to it.
Yes and no. The military has lots of old tech because it's heavily field tested, well understood, and still does what it needs to do good enough.
They do use cutting edge stuff to, and silicon valley pays well, but really only if your a software guy. Contrary to contemporary beliefs, their still are smart engineers out their building cutting edge non-compute hardware.
The easiest way to improve cybersecurity is keeping your critical hardware off of the public internet or even keeping it air-gapped. Something that doesn't require leading edge tech but operational care. I suspect the military is pretty good at the latter, certainly much better than the typical SV company.
Not SV but there's a lot of aerospace companies in Cali and the rest of the SW. The guy[0] who invented the first modern UAV that became the basis of the military's entire drone program was running his company out of his garage in LA, literally a garage startup. This is why DARPA exists and funds companies outside of the direct purview of military R&D.
So you get it then. Military tech is developed by companies. They are coupled. All those secret jets and rockets aren't built by military engineers with no affiliation to any private entity, they are built through contractors who get paid way more than government salaries but are still given clearances and cannot sell their top of the line technologies to the public. I mean Lockheed built the SR71. That's how this works. I'm confused why so many people are confused. The problem is about the ridiculous price tags and maybe (or maybe not) that the military non-contractor salaries are rather low. But there is no shortage of contractors.
> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead
What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret military clearance?
Seriously. Oftentimes, though, it's not the government who is ahead in tech, it's the quasi-private sector that is decades ahead but due to secrecy laws cannot come forward and talk about it under any and every circumstance.
I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours.
When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech.
This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.
In most classified arenas, there is no private sector competition. No one in SV is building subs, SOSUS arrays or stealth a/c. So it's completely reasonable they're way ahead of some niche innovator building a sub out of carbon fiber. But it's not sci-fi tech.
People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so.
LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit.
I've worked with the government in the past. Their compute systems definitely are not decades behind. Though some are. They have the the top supercomputers and machines that haven't been updated since the 80's. That's a more realistic picture of the government. That it is this gigantic thing that is in no way remotely monolithic. It's more like The Blob, that it is an amorphis mixture of a lot of things. Neither this nor that. This is why people get into arguments when discussing the government, because it is a hodgepodge of conflicting things that with extreme differences in capacity and effectiveness. The same also goes for the military (and this should be more obvious to people if you know the joke about "military grade" and recognize that our military is the most powerful and modern one. It is the reason all those "more advanced" private sector things exist. Just because not bought in "bulk" and handed to every private doesn't mean it isn't in the system). So stop painting it with a broad brush because it is leading to conspiracy theories that are just silly (goes in both directions).
With the military (in addition to what I said) you have to be very aware that it, like most gov entities, outsources work. The private sector is coupled with the military. The US military doesn't build the secret jets on secret military bases, Lockheed and Boeing do. Lockheed built the SR71, which definitely led to many UFO stories.
> The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.
Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?
Well, the mars helicopter essentially uses a cell phone, so not really.
And it's not that low power.
But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements
Sure, but those COTS parts still underwent lots and lots of rad/ vac testing. There's a design-for-resilience vs test-for-resilience tradeoff at play. I'm saying that not all systems require design-for-resilience.
Well to nitpick, that's because the two are kinda the same. Testing is part of design and vise versa in these types of systems. But otherwise I agree with the points you've made (seems we've been responding in parallel lol)
Ingenuity is also running a very customized software stack to go along with the highly tested hardware. IIRC the OS can reboot in a some relatively small number milliseconds. It's meant to be able to crash in mid-air and reboot and recover before the probe loses lift and crashes in most flight envelopes. The software is also set up to crash and reboot rather than try to recover or operate in a compromised state.
Not sure if true, but I also recall reading that ICs made with larger processes are more resilient to cosmic ray strikes. So modern 7nm chips might have an inherent disadvantage in these applications.
This is true. You can think about this fairly simply as you just have to think about the amount of energy traveling within a transistor and what that energy's proportionate level is to a cosmic ray. Smaller IC's are more likely to be hit (cross-section is higher due to density AND that we operate in fields, no need for a direct physical interaction of the mass).
But that's not why they cost so much. Rad hardened ICs are built differently. They are built on a sapphire base: Silicon on Sapphire (SoS). Process is more complicated and expensive.
That said, there are more people looking at commercial off the shelf (COTS) and just building redundant systems because 2 COTS CPUs can be cheaper (and more powerful) and because ECC has gotten much better. But this is really only for LEO right now, but may be used in deeper space missions later on. Realistically it is just going to be dependent on how much your ride costs. LEO is cheap now, so risk of failure is dramatically reduced. Your ride is still most of your cost though.
Not everything needs to meet those specific standards, but essentially yes. My sibling comment mentioned Ingenuity (Mars Helicopter), but let's mention Curiosity. It often gets cited as costing $2.5 billion dollars. So that alone says why you wouldn't want to risk anything (see my other comments, especially about TRL[note]). But that also took almost a decade![other note] Time is also very expensive, so how much would you risk? On a 10 year project, that is going to operate for another 12+ years (still going, landed in 2011) with no way to repair or fix the product, you probably want that thing to be reliable as shit. Worth an extra year or two to make that happen.
[note] TRL 9 pretty much doesn't exist in these types of missions. We don't have decades of operation of specific devices on other planets. But you still use very robust and redundant systems.
[other note] People often cite this as a waste of money, but when we consider the time it is pittance in the government budget. Costs could definitely come down, but in government money can only exchange hands through leaky buckets. NASA politically prides itself as having parts from every state, which from an engineering perspective should sound like a logistic nightmare, and it is. But this is the type of people you are voting for, people that love pageantry over pragmatism. (pageantry gets votes, pragmatism doesn't)
Exactly. If anyone is going to work _with_ the government, you should be aware of the Technology Readiness Level (TRL)[0]. It's like the cornerstone of how everything operates. It takes decades to get to level 9 sometimes, and when reliability is critical that's what they use. Not only is it "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but "it ain't broke, and we understand every single component of this system and everything that can go wrong with it, don't 'fix' it."
It can also take a lot of time for something to get from TRL 6 to TRL 7, and from TRL 7 to TRL 8. Sometimes realistically impossible to get to TRL 9! The system could be more efficient for sure, and probably has broken down too much, but the idea itself is fine.
Fwiw, I've seen things that I 100% believe should be done today and that there's massive amounts of evidence for it, but aren't done because they aren't TRL 9. I don't want to start arguments, but there's a certain industry that gets hit with this all the time. Where they can do tons of complex and detailed models but aren't able to build the actual thing because it hasn't been physically demonstrated. Which leads to a weird self referential roadblock.
Spaceflight has an inherently different set of requirements from the types of applications people on here mostly build. NASA doesn't need to run 2GB of javascript dependencies on their rover. They have people who can write lean real-time code in a low level language. They need to be sure a bit flip doesn't turn a 3 billion dollar project into rubble. There is no 'fix it in the next sprint' in spaceflight; after you hit the red button, it must work. The RAD750 that Perseverance runs on has some impressive specs, they are just specs that don't matter in a datacenter.
It's quite amazing to see that the mars rover has what you'd call self-driving capabilities, complete with onboard mapping & localization, yet without GPS and any kind of reasonable computer.
However, they did create an FPGA to do the stereo vision in real time, which is pretty cool too.
Fun story about that. I knew the lead driver for Curiosity and he was sharing a story about how not long after they got off Mars time they were driving it up a slope. Before he left for work that day he quickly thought to add a stopping routine in case the rover slide down the hill because the ground wasn't stable. Came back in the morning and they were worried they crashed the rover because the camera was facing a rock. Was a terrifying 30 minutes-ish moving the camera and checking that everything was okay. The routine saving the rover. (I'm sure the story is a bit exaggerated, but still fun and does demonstrate the high risk these systems have. Even if they only move a 0.15km/hr)
I used to know a number of NASA programmers out of Houston. They did a lot of Java programming on some pretty hyper-optimized and specified JVMs. They liked it because it would be easier for them to run simulations on and could achieve good portability on higher level things.
That was like 20 years ago though. Things could easily be different now.
No, that's not the reason space computers are behind.
Space computers are behind because space technology is based on minimizing risk given the large cost of failure. Using older nodes with well-understood flaws that can be built using old chip equipment is much lower risk than trying to put Intel's latest into a communications satellite.
Few things in space truly would require anything state of the art. The best argument I can think of would be realtime image processing using DNNs- imagine you made a fleet of 1M identical exploration bots and you wanted them to filter out most of their imaging data before sending back the best candidates.
"But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."
> For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...
Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.
Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.
The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up.
And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
> Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.
He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about getting caught lying.
> And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was a helicopter with a searchlight.
hmm, he does say he was camping on a beach in Plymouth, MA. On the map I see a municipal airport not far inland and a bit to the south a coast guard air base. I could imagine a coast guard helicopter out patrolling the coastline taking a closer look at someone on the beach at 2am.
I can't read the full Boston Globe article due to the paywall and offer no opinion on the author's state of mind, but if you assume some small percent of outwardly functional people have "eccentric" personalities, it would not be surprising that you would occasionally hear about a college professor doing something eccentric. Why is any further explanation needed than "some humans have quirky personalities and do quirky things..."
It's not a lie if the author believes that it's true. People are way too trusting of their senses and memories when both have been shown to be extremely fallible under numerous different circumstances. Remember how suggestible victims had been convinced that they participated in satanic sex rituals during the satanic panic[1]? Why is it out of the realm of possibility that the author is recounting a particularly vivid dream or hallucination that became more "real" the more he thought about it?
Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of different aliens visiting us, or people are having experiences they can't rationally explain and their brain is filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.
Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone having a camera on them at any given moment is now approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens getting sneakier?
I agree that memories are not always reliable but I personally find it to be with smaller less significant details about a larger event. So I could believe that the author perhaps misremembers colors or sounds or size to some extent- but to have a completely false memory of an entire event? I suppose a helicopter could have hovered over him and trained a search light on him- but to remember it years later as a UFO, I don't know.
>I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson. When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories about how people's native languages impact the way the view the world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest thing their brains could come up with.
That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.
Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being nearly two decades old by that point.
> An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes. [1]
Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We just don't get to see the best in action because they're classified until they're almost pedestrian.
Absolutely the case. For example, the military requires all commercial satellite imagery to be scaled to 25 cm resolution (up until 2014 it was limited to 50 cm). The true resolution is classified.
Those mirrors aren't exotic technology. They're undoubtedly very expensive and difficult to produce but at the end of the day they're as mundane as any other first surface mirror. They don't evidence the government having some sort of new paradigm of technology kept secret, like antigravity instead of normal airplanes or something like that.
> they're as mundane as any other first surface mirror
This is a huge understatement. Like calling GPT4 "as mundane as any other transformer." Just because things have a high abstraction similarity doesn't mean the details aren't critical. Very expensive and difficult to produce __is__ exotic technology. There's also a large range of "paradigm shifting" technologies between here and antigravity. Don't listen to YouTube, get your hands dirty and work on the stuff if you want to get the expertise to know why this stuff is so impressive.
> Very expensive and difficult to produce __is__ exotic technology.
Not in the sense of antigravity. Enough money and time can buy you an arbitrarily nice mirror, it doesn't rely on presently unknown to the public attributes of the universe.
> Enough money and time can buy you an arbitrarily nice mirror
Yes and no. But I'm going to go with mostly no. The yes is only because over thousands of years we have in fact improved mirror quality, but if we're talking about building a perfect mirror within a 5-10 year time-frame from now, it is definitely no. No matter how much money you spend.
A lot of people like to make assumptions about our capacity to build and make things. The reason we don't live in a super futuristic society isn't just because we're not dumping enough money into such a goal (obviously that would help) but because even with infinite resources we don't have great paths towards those things right now. Nuance sucks, but is necessary. The truth is that there's no such thing as "simple" when we're talking about "arbitrary precision." Honestly, not even true long before that. There's a good reason you'll find books with thousands of pages dedicated to a seemingly simple thing e.gs: o-rings, screws, bolts, threading, and so on. Don't fall for the simplicity trap.
What does "a perfect mirror" even mean? The mirrors produced for the NRO were very good but they're not alien artifacts indicating some paradigm shifting technology gap between government and the private sector. They are roughly comparable to the mirrors produced for astronomical purposes in the same era. Better because they had better funding, but not so much better that anybody should deduce that aliens had anything to do with it.
That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because you've got a CPU from the 80s. The interesting part isn't the mirror but how they made it. They're obviously not mundane, otherwise NASA would have designed Hubble to use equivalent optics.
Any actually interesting technology would be under a Secrecy Order [1] and the patents wouldn't see the light of day, perhaps ever. The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines. Based on what little we know, the Secrecy Orders are very effective - some gaseous centrifuge technology used for enrichment in the 1940s and 1950s is still considered cutting edge and secret.
Antigravity is just fantasy land. All it would take is a factor of two improvement in any number of technologies to make something exotic.
> That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because you've got a CPU from the 80s.
Yes, exactly. Give a modern Apple CPU to some chip experts in the 80s and they'd no doubt be amazed and have many questions about the details, but they would have a theoretical basis for understanding the premise of the thing. Give the same chip to Isaac Newton or Archimedes and it would be a completely different story. To them, a CPU would be truly exotic technology.
Antigrav existing today would be like CPUs existing in Newton's day. You'd need completely new theories to even comprehend the most basic operating principles. Antigrav craft like those proposed by the people who don't believe Mick West's explanation of the Navy's "Go Fast" video would be further removed on a theoretical basis from the F-35 than the F-35 is from the Wright flier.
> The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines.
In both of these cases, the fundamental operating principles were widely known to relevant researchers in various countries before anybody developed one that worked. Japan and Germany both had nuclear weapons programs during WW2. Nuclear fission was known to researchers in all three nations, and more as well. In the case of jet engines, you had inventors in many countries taking stabs at implementing a practical one decades before they were adopted into military service. There was never a chance of any military getting jet engines while the rest of the world was left wondering what the hell it even was.
And with respect to gas centrifuges; those were considered but ultimately not employed by the Manhattan Project, which instead used gaseous diffusion. But the premise of gas centrifuges for isotope separation was first suggested in 1919, and the broader premise of any sort of centrifuge to separate things is much older. Gas centrifuges weren't exotic technology that game out of nowhere, the theoretical basis for them was clear before they were successfully created.
We've got a theoretical basis for warp drives [1]! Casimir effect-based propelentless propulsion! Nuclear engines in spaaaaace! How much more theoretical basis does your contrarianism demand?
We've got a theoretical basis for almost any alien technology that comes short of violating the conservation of momentum or breaking the speed of light. Doesn't mean we're any closer to making an SSTO space ship.
It actually doesn't violate the laws of physics. Matter with negative mass has never been observed before, making it purely theoretical. Theoretical basis!
Besides, exotic matter is a shortcut to the energy required, not a necessary part of the Alcubierre drive.
> Matter with negative mass has never been observed before, making it purely theoretical.
It's worse than merely theoretical because the theories we use to describe reality at present don't give us any reason to believe such exotic matter must exist, and there is no empirical evidence for such matter existing.
But slice it anyway you like, the Navy isn't operating these and there is no theoretical basis for explaining the sort of antigravity craft that UFOologists claim these Navy videos show. They aren't Alcubierre drives, that is simply absurd.
> not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors
Not only that, but that "the government" and "its contractors" are often impossible to distinguish and for all intents and purposes the same. Many times realistically a loophole to escape the GS pay.
I've worked in defense aerospace. Silicon Valley has no relevance to aerospace. Likewise dod computing systems / IT infrastructure has nothing to do with propulsion engineering at govt labs or in industry. You're mixing up a whole bunch of things to make a broad conclusion that old computers means that DoD still isn't funding advanced weaponry beyond which we have seen. See the stealth hawk used in the bin Laden raid.
> And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's
Exactly what has been going on since the 40s though? The Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the government. It was just a balloon that got blown up into an massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors about alien spacecraft.
The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology, contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far. There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either from the government or from space. The government doesn't have stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for such craft existing in the first place.
When discussing something rationally what matters is the merits of the arguments, not the background of the speaker. Mick West's background as a video game developer don't detract from his arguments. Furthermore, Navy pilot are not assured against dishonesty or error; even US Navy pilots are humans. Spare me this "support the troops" style of rhetoric; you can't use patriotism to shame me into uncritically taking military personnel at their word.
I agree we should avoid appeals to authority, but Mick West's argument is essentially saying all the secondary evidence, including witness testimony corresponding to the video he is trying to disprove is false (or ignores it altogether), so he unfortunately turns it into a he-said-she-said (where his credibility becomes relevant, since he doesn't have any, and the pilots have at least a little).
Mick West always starts with a conclusion and works backwards from there. He had a satisfying explanation re: parallax on the "GoFast" video, and developed a cult following from there, but the Gimbal one is really grasping at straws.
I've read about enough anomalies and see enough statistical patterns to develop an intuition that some percentage of them represent something really interesting, even without a smoking gun. We've had a lot of time to experiment with implanting experiences and studying mass hallucinations and they are no better understood than when people first tried using them to wish away inconvenient data. It just seems like a deus ex machina to ignore something frightening observed by someone credible (where frightening == worldview-changing).
Have you ever honestly considered, if you were a casual naturalist in Galileo's time, whether you with your present personality would side with the church or with Galileo?
> All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology
How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue:
Nothing in that catalogue provides evidence of the government having exotic technology, the fundamental principles of which were completely unknown to the public. Governments can commission custom software and microchips and keep the details of those secret, but those things still operate on principles already known to the public; electronics, exploiting software, etc.
When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes of the thing weren't utterly exotic.
Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of theory was already public years before they were brought into existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they must have worked.
But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical basis for such a technology known to the public right now. Nobody can say "well it could be done with XYZ but it would be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."
Do you think the jet engines being built at Pratt & Whitney to power the F-35 and developed for the NGAD fighter are behind the private sector?
Not like P&W is a government owned company, either - the private sector and the military are closely integrated, that's the military industrial complex.
> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology
This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just in obvious areas like cryptography but data structures and algorithms, as well as exotic hardware.
It doesn't explain UFOs, but the idea that the most advanced public computer tech is decades ahead of what elements of the US DoD have doesn't pass the smell test. At worst there is parity and in some areas there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of capability that should not be possible if you solely went on public computing literature. (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.)
Not everyone aspires to be a code monkey at Facebook for the money. There are extremely talented computer scientists working in US government, especially the secretive parts, that could instantly get a job at any FAANG company if they wanted to -- I've met many of them -- but they don't. The notion that the US DoD does not have access to "the best engineers and scientists" is dubious.
> (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.)
What's the government application here? AI? NSA analysis of metadata to figure out hidden connections between individuals?
656 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadReplace UFOs with magic beans and it sounds like some folks in government seem to have been swindled into diverting money through multiple paths into "classified work" chasing after Jack and a giant stalk. That sounds like a potentially fantastic grift for whoever is running it.
This is why the bill says: no more money for anything related to these crazy beans, and anyone who is employed looking for them is freed from any bonds of secrecy to come tell us what's been being done.
Of course there's a tiny tiny possibility someone comes back with a giant's ring, so they include that you've got to show everything you actually found, but that provision also will make it clear later that despite a lot of money, no one has actually found anything meaningful, and thus the whole thing was a fraud.
Maybe there is fraud and the wrong people are getting rich from it?
> he’s secured funding and supported programmatic changes that have seen continued growth in Florida’s defense industrial base
> Since 2011, Rubio has secured more than $2 billion in military construction in the state.
> In 2021, Rubio’s many years of supporting the F-35 program reaped additional rewards in the Panhandle when the Air Force announced that Eglin Air Force Base would receive a second F-35A Squadron
That Marco Rubio is at odds with the military industrial complex?
1. https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/fighting-for-f...
Not seven saying its overt corruption. But if you work for the military in collecting sightings on unidentified objects and earnestly dont know what 10% of the sightings actually were, it behooves you to fan the rumors on it a bit.
That being said, I don’t completely discount the possibility. One answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn’t one, and I can think of many reasons multiple governments would try to keep stuff like this secret.
Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
I'd like to believe, and I think 1 or 2 might be reasonable but the claim is 12, which doesn't account for ships obtained by other nations as Grusch said I'd happening.
I still believe it's possible, and hope it is, however something feels staged about this, maybe to get more money for certain agencies, or some other motive.
Selection bias. We don't know how many crafts fail to make it to Earth. Maybe the trip is extremely dangerous and only a percentage actually make it.
And/or, like most air & space travel, takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts.
Also, we have a very good handle on air travel, but planes still crash sometimes.
(I don't actually believe we have ET crafts coming to earth, but it's fun thinking it through).
Because nobody has figured out an autopilot that doesn't shit the bed once in a while? I'm betting on taking a nap in the backseat is just a universally bad idea when nobody is driving.
Multiple different sets of aliens, fighting over Earth. (I’m not saying that this is true, just that it is one scenario that explains crashes happening if there were aliens as described building craft capable of visiting Earth.)
(1) The probes, like ours, are not designed to return and have a limited life span. Maybe they just gather and transmit data until their power source runs out or something on them breaks and they crash.
(2) Maybe there are thousands of probes or even more (even from multiple sources!) and only a small percentage of them crash. Of course one would assume we'd be seeing them more often if this were true.
(3) We shot them down. That's not impossible, especially if they are just probes and were not designed to deal with something intelligent intentionally flinging high velocity chunks of metal at them.
The last could easily occur if we mistook them for e.g. Soviet/Russian or Chinese surveillance craft and they repeatedly refused to respond to orders to withdraw.
Why would someone send probes here? This planet has been broadcasting "possible biosphere right here!" for at least hundreds of millions of years to anyone capable of doing spectroscopy on the light it reflects. You wouldn't be able to see detail from another star but you could determine things like atmospheric makeup and conclude that there is very likely to be something interesting here. You'd see a ton of oxygen (which is hard to explain abiotically), water vapor, traces of hydrocarbons, and possibly evidence of sunlight being captured by something complex (photosynthesis) vs just reflecting off rocks or ice. Lastly the planet has a large moon and is not tide locked to its star, both characteristics that increase the odds of something complex evolving here (as far as we know).
Any evidence at all.
Anyone? Bueller?
The country with the best fishing nets would probably catch more fish than countries with bad fishing nets, even if they have the same amount of fish in the oceans.
Generally UFO reportings increased with astronomy, radar, and surveillance technology development. Of which, the US has a lot of all three, which probably means we have a sufficiently complex system that we can notice anomalies but not sufficiently complex enough to identify them.
You could've googled this theory you had before putting it in text.
If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to know or be aware. The other alternative if Russia which is similarly sized and equipped but they tend to be pretty cagey sharing information.
So it ends up being the US not because they only land there but because they have the combination of obsessively watching the skies with the ability to share their information and the freedom to do so.
People with smartphones and Meta/WhatsApp/TikTok accounts are all over the planet.
Also, I'd like to remind Americans that we're not caveman here. We do have radar and jets flying and cameraphones.
The problem is that if you want to believe, you're ready to throw any kind of common sense and elementary logic out the window. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and this ain't it.
> The sightings at Ariel occurred at 10am on 16 September 1994, when pupils were outside on mid-morning break.[1] The adult faculty at the school were inside having a meeting at the time.
How convenient that all the adults were inside and only 6-12 year old children saw it. Anyone who believes this story is far too credulous.
One evening on the news there were reports of an alien spaceship landing next to the village school complete with interviews with kids
A few years later I went to senior school with some of those kids and they told me they made it all up
Where the us is alone however is in the reports of sightings/abductions of entities exiting those craft but then again most of those stories tend to either be "retrieved memories", straight up hoaxes or so vague in details that other explanations cannot be ruled out.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast might also have alerted them to humanity, and travel time of the broadcast plus travel time of UFO’s to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around when nukes were invented (if they’re from, say, Alpha Centauri which is 4 light-years away).
The US and Europe also have free press where things like this are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which in conjunction with the above may explain sightings maps like this one, where sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in Europe:
https://updb.app/map?zoom=1.00&lon=149.0917&lat=37.3003
Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, look at what you get:
1-1943: 1566 sightings reports
1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports
Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia previously. Obviously we also had more robust and technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge discrepancy.
I think most importantly we started watching the sky when humanity started to fly. Suddenly the heavens were a viable place for mankind to be, especially after we ourselves got to space. The post-WW2 era also had a whole culture that was used to watching the sky because there had been very plausible threats of death from that direction. We suddenly cared when we saw something weird in the night beyond just a passing curiosity.
And, when did science fiction literature start getting big and developing plots involving aliens, and might that have stimulated people's imaginations about UFOs and aliens (which then conversely stimulated more scifi about them)? Was this happening prior to the atomic age or space age, or did that kind of scifi really get started with the space race? If the latter, that might also explain the huge increase in imaginings... er, sightings.
I also can't help but wonder at the timing, with geopolitical tensions rising and China challenging US military and technological supremacy. It's quite a coincidence. Maybe it's the mother of all CIA mindfuck psyops, to introduce a new source of uncertainty and deterrence into the CCP and Russia's strategic calculations.
There's "whistleblowers" on TV claiming the US is in possession of "exotic materials", aka alien tech, since the 1940s. Just how much has been reverse engineered in that time, and deployed in super secret weapons systems that not even Congress knows about? Would the CCP really want to risk WWIII against the US when there's even a small possibility of that?
There's a great scene in "The Expanse" relevant to this situation, where UN Deputy Undersecretary Avasarala has a meeting considering the possibility of first contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYRLV-qm3Qs
"I have a file with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for war with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios for what to do if they develop an unexpected new technology. My file for what to do if an advanced alien species comes calling, is three pages long, and begins with 'Find God'".
Given that most famous whistleblowers in recent years have been American this doesn't seem unlikely. Five Eyes has five governments in it, but only the USA had someone who went to the press. The US Government is both very large so more people can leak things, and very well funded, so more chance of secret programmes, and (IMHO) has a civic-minded culture in which people are more inspired by things like the Constitution and stated cultural ideals than in other countries.
If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?
I do agree that some of the culture war is likely manufactured to prevent a concentrated movement against a system that overly caters to the ultra wealthy.
No, a bunch of somewhat less high-level but still, in some cases, high-level ones are somewhat less flamboyant co-conspirators, co-principals, and/or accessories in Trump’s crimes, as well as having their own; most of the rest are comparatively if not absolutely clean.
> If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?
I don’t know about the person you’re responding to, but I’ve written more, over a longer time, about the structural problems of the American political system than about Trump’s personal crimes, and I’ve written specifically about how the culture of impunity fed by, inter alia, Ford’s pardon of Nixon fueled a series of subsequent executive abuses of which Trump’s are the most serious.
One can simultaneously recognize and discusss the forest and the unique, largest tree. The one does not, and should not, preclude discussion of the other, both are important.
The "all politicians are crooks" line of thinking just gives the crooks a free pass while making it more difficult for whatever actors are trying to hold them accountable, whether for virtue's sake or for base political gain. Occasionally punishing a crook -- even if it is only a fraction of those deserving of punishment -- will make a few politicians of the next generation act a little less boldly, while shrugging your shoulders and saying "everyone does it" will make them ask what else they can get away with.
Cynicism, even cynicism grounded in realism, doesn't make the world a better place.
I think you’re in a conspiratorial mood, haha. Ironic that your conspiracy is against the existence of UFOs!
I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
https://www.syfy.com/videos/childhoods-end
Either way, we will need to make great technological leaps to develop proper demonslaying equipment.
In other words: I find the idea that aliens might be mind-controlling the US congress to slowly reveal their presence for the first time ever seems ridiculous. Personally :)
The many-worlds quantum interpretations have many curious advocates within physics.
There are now multiple senators and high level military officers confirming this explicitly as well, so that’s also wrong on your part.
Multiple senators and high level military officers are bringing in material evidence?
Not to mention that there’s tons of really interesting explanations grounded in science that could explain either scenario.
When did you hear this? perhaps after this person saw Childhood's End[0] (based on the 1953 novel[1], which is much better IMHO) and mistook it for a documentary?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End_(miniseries)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End
Oceangate? Yeah it was front page for a week.
I was doing water/ocean wordplay to deflect from unnecessary politics lol
But I don't think anyone is ignoring it. Everyone is aware Hunter has had a troubled life and made bad choices. Everyone I've spoken to about this, even the left leaning, is of the opinion that if he broke the law he should face punishment. No one is on the other side of the issue here. The truly newsworthy bit is that he's been charged and facing consequences which, if we look at past presidential children, is the outlier.
He has also agreed to enter pre-trial diversion program related to the gun charges.
I have to disagree. The defining characteristic of Watergate was the illegal (break-ins to steal political opponents' strategies and psychiatrists files) activities by a political organization (CREEP[0]) that were then covered up by those at the highest levels of the executive branch.
The issue wasn't that there were recordings of such a cover up, it was the cover up that was the problem. Unless, of course, you'd like to argue that something isn't illegal/immoral if you don't get caught.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Re-Election_...
My apologies. I wasn't clear that I was responding to this:
And not at all responding to this: I don't claim that the former president's legal issues are "Watergate-squared."While there are some similarities between Watergate and the current situation, specifically a lack of ethics, enormous hubris and that it involves a (former) US President among other things, the cases are quite different and should be treated as such.
It's certainly plausible that the junior Biden may well have offered "access to his father" as a lure to obtain pecuniary benefit.
And while the optics are terrible, I'd note that the current US president held no elective or appointed office in any government when the telegram message that's been cited to "corroborate" the "influence peddling" allegations.
As such, It's not clear to me what, if anything, the senior Biden could have done, at that time, in that context.
I'm not defending anyone here, nor am I trying to skewer anyone. Rather, the narrative presented just doesn't make sense to me given the time frames involved.
Do I trust the government to tell me the truth about them at a time where institutional trust is at all time low?
No freaking way.
The research into foreign weapon technology is in one of those gray areas where not only does some of those activities border really close to industrial espionage against companies in potentially allied countries, or might contradict stated US State Department positions on international law it's usually classified and spoken off in hushed tones
It's very likely that an alien(as in foreign) technology evaluation program exists without there being anything extra-terrestrial about it as legalese can trail popular changes to terms by several decades. And that mentions of those in wider circles might fuel some rumors and misconceptions among those "who wants to believe".
Given how byzantine the US military industrial complex's paperwork and pretend regulation is someone might have been relying on legislation or paperwork predating the change in word usage, and that that influenced the naming of some program somewhere in the secretive world.
It's also worth noting that such a misconception definitely benefit's the military industrial complex as it draws focus towards something that is not there rather then towards what's actually happening, which again is a very common strategy within military intelligence.
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-...
I'd expect basically any semi-competent government to be monitoring those reports and increasing surveillance in the area.
*edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in origin.
I will say my thoughts on the matter:
Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only planet with life)
Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low chance
Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united states? near 0% chance
This is a contradiction. Not that eye witness testimonies are completely without merit, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and eye-witness testimony alone does not meet that standard....no matter who the witness is.
However I am tired of reading so called skeptics dismissing people who come forward claiming they have seen UFOs as kooks or drunkards.
There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.
Video recordings that can't be explained, radar observations etc. Please also realize that most of what has been recorded so far is classified as top secret, according to testimony from people with direct access to this evidence and like I said in my parent comment, we also have plenty of credible eye witness reports.
It's sad that people aren't more curious - not everything is about distracting from Donald Trumps misadventures with classified documents...
Nah. I'd wager it's more likely to be earthlings from an alternate reality or that time travel turns out to be feasible and it's our descendants, than that it's space aliens ("but one of those is entirely based on speculative physics and both require our model of the universe to be pretty damn wrong, to allow such travel" yeah, I know—that's how incredible I find the space alien hypothesis). I don't think those are credible guesses, either, but I'd say they're more likely to be true than "it's aliens". That explanation's got a lot of things working against it.
There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.
However combined with what has been otherwise documented, I consider it a possibility we are being visited by aliens.
In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems low though.
https://xkcd.com/1235/
A challenge for the incredulous, bring me some high quality cellphone pictures of airplanes at night without using any extra equipment like tripods, lenses or stabilizers.
And get this 70mm cameras are equivalent to 18k.
I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S. military. Sadly most of it is classified.
Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
Isn't the paranoid atmosphere cold war and the increase in weapons testing, satellites, spy balloons, etc. a much simpler explanation?
But I agree, it is a possible explanation.
No? Why would it, any more so than what came before? We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I guess (must not have limited resources, like, at all) all using physics we're not even on the verge of discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict what we have discovered, but also leave no to-us-detectable trace anywhere we can detect, in their visits or with their sensing equipment or their civilization itself, but also also be pretty bad at hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but also also also good enough that we can't quite prove they're real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away, instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.
"Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the rest still holds, too.
The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's not technically impossible that Russell's Teapot exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens" barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and does miracles sometimes".
Source? I see the opposite when I Google around for reports per year. There was a dip during COVID, buts it's easy to attribute that to people not being outside, and it's picked right back up since.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/05/20/global...
There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and military UAVs. Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k
https://reason.com/2022/11/15/the-military-ufo-complex/
I'm surprised that congress finally wants to stop the gravy train, unless this is another refined misdirection scheme. Probably a lot of that money went into covert operations.
If they're telling the truth, they have a moral obligation to declassify everything they know.
Official secrecy is fundamentally incompatible with the needs of an informed public capable of voting intelligently within a democratic republic.
We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries. North Korea has them, for God's sake.
Nuclear weapons are simply a function of having a large enough industrial base to support their development. The "secret sauce" is officially secret, but it isn't actually secret.
Nine countries as opposed to...
Treaties, sanctions etc. Not to mention the cost of a nuclear program.
Secrecy increases the cost, so it is, in effect, part of the “stick” end of the carrots and sticks. If there hadn’t been secrecy, would the return to sanity that stopped the South American nuclear arms race been too late? Secrecy should not be dismissed.
There is secrecy, which is why the countries that haven’t found a shortcut around it (as in the nuclear arms race between Argentina and Brazil) have a harder road than those that do (like South Africa via Israel).
> Research the Nth Country Experiment
The Nth Country Experiment focused on paper design of a device, which, while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons, isn’t the whole or, in practice, the limiting factor.
Nukes are not a physics challenge, but an engineering challenge. That's why an experiment showing a bunch of physicists understand simple particle physics isn't a useful demonstration that building nukes doesn't require insane amounts of help from a willing sponsor.
People "knew" how to build the A bomb before World War 2 even started, yet even when several countries put energy into it to aid their war effort, only the US succeeded, and only because they dedicated around one tenth of the entire GDP to the process.
Merely getting enough enriched material is enough of a problem to stop most countries.
Yeah, lol, the what now?
Anyway, Brazil has a working uranium enrichment facility, with public numbers, and as efficient as any modern one (what is way more efficient than anything from the time nuclear bombs were created).
What kind of secrecy are you stating that is stopping Brazil?
The late 1970s to early 1990s were an interesting time.
The comment doesn't really apply to that either. Germany and France were quite involved on that one, so it wasn't exactly secrecy that kept things slow. It was more due to the sheer unpopularity of the thing (on both sides) even between the people high-ranked enough to know about it.
I mean, by 85 Brazil had already a nuclear reactor in full activity. A reactor can get you enough plutonium for a bomb long before it's in full activity.
https://www.google.com/search?q=argentina%20brazil%20nuclear...
Secrecy may or may not be warranted, but this is not a good argument against it.
I'm generally in agreement with a transparent government, but there must be some limits.
We do [1][2]. Better analogy might be disclosing the present location of all nuclear submarines.
[1] https://uploads.fas.org/sites/4/NotebookMap.pdf
[2] https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/a-u-s-nuclear-wea...
The second does not show any silo locations at all, it shows support infra for the silos (e.g. uranium mines)
Yes. If the deterrent/protection factor of our nuclear weapons platforms are nullified by their location being exposed, then they are already useless.
And if they are running a massive psyops deception campaign it would make the public lose the last vestige of trust left in the govt. Its a lose lose situation on both scenarios and I expect the US govt. to keep things of this nature locked down to a extreme state as it has been doing since WW2.
Also interesting note, the flood of credible pentagon UFO info is being brought up by a bunch of individuals who worked in(or currently for) the US intelligence community. This is 2017 and after when the NYtimes(Leslie Kean reporter) released the bombshell pentagon UFO tapes. These individuals are: Christoper Mellon(ex high ranking intelligence director), Luis Elizondo(Intelligence officer on and off), and currently David Grusch NGA, & NRO - the person who states that non human craft have been retrieved(OP article).
I don't mean to make this political at all, just trying to reason on the basis of a personality and knowing that a president would boast about having knowledge of such trivial classified information - in comparison to the existence of non-human spacecraft; makes me believe that if he was briefed on it he likely would have boasted about it. (and so would I, just imagine what earth shaking news that is.)
One great example of this is during the Bin Laden raid planning, after all plans were exhausted on how they could put boots on the ground, only then did a high ranking officer let the president and the rest of the team in the room know about the stealth helicopters that even the SEALs had never seen before.
Clearance flows from the President who neither has nor needs it; it is a delegation of executive power of which the President is the source.
OTOH, just because the President is not unauthorized does not mean he will be briefed on it.
Trump in particular never showed any interest in anything besides enriching himself and allowing the Saudis, Russians, and Chinese to feed his ego. I doubt he even thought about the aliens, let alone went through enough trouble to ask about them....because if he did, and was denied info, he would have fired the intelligence officer who denied him access and publicly blabbered about it on Twitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and draw attention away from several state supreme court rulings striking down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted and championed by republicans. If not that, then to draw attention away from the spectacle of republican cooperation during successful debt ceiling negotiations.
Mostly, those have been federal trial courts (and some, like the Florida drag ban one, also preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement while the case proceeds, not final rulings striking them down) not state supreme courts issuing the rulings.
Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades.
If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft).
Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.
That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.
It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.
So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s
I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.
It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more.
Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal.
And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.
They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm.
The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.
Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.
Wouldn't have to be the biggest challenges getting solved right away. Alien "mundane, old crap" would probably turn out pretty useful too. :D
- The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes
- They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding
- They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project
Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.
The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology.
There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.
The real difference is that it would take an army of ancient craftsmen to make one bike.
The real distinguishing factor with modernity is mass manufacturing and precision at scale.
Even moreso income inequality and competition with slavery.
Any roman who could afford a bicycle would rightly think it was rubbish compared to a horse. All this expense just to propel myself around?!
The same goes for most modern conveniences. Even the best modern dishwasher is less efficient than a human slave doing the same task, if you're indifferent to the suffering of the slave, as the Romans were.
I would vote for this one, but this hypothesis doesn't need the ET part.
I can't figure out what you mean by this, unless you're referring to Pepper's ghost which is not a hologram at all. If you photograph a Pepper's ghost illusion you get a regular photograph, not a hologram.
Because the type of exotic field propulsion these things are using is so far beyond the current state of the art it wouldn't be remotely plausible.
It would be like going from vacuum tubes to 3nm EUV in a single step, no one would believe you.
If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?
I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.
We can't even hold some NIH administrators accountable for funding research that led to a pandemic. It's laughably naive to think that we could hold accountable, nevermind investigate, whatever faceless perpetrators are responsible for a government program cloaked in so much secrecy that not even presidents have been aware of it.
The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the remnants of one that had been vaporized.
It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components. And we similarly know how to enumerate all sorts of chemical and physical properties of any exotic materials and objects we might come across. But it's all based on our own patchwork model of the physical universe, which has plenty of gaps we know about, nevermind those we can't even imagine. We don't know what we don't know.
If we assume aliens are visiting then it's almost certain that their technology is thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours. And if we assume that follows an exponential curve (which may not be a valid assumption - we really only have ~200 years of history upon which we could base such a supposition), then it follows that their technology would be indecipherably complex for us to understand.
You're arguing for a sort of technology threshold beyond which we cannot see (presumably within a reasonable time frame). However, which side of said threshold we are on, even for technology from a civilization a million years older, isn't clear. I am not convinced it can be clear, since we'd be arguing about properties of a hypothetical craft.
A time-based argument is probably not useful. The difference between ourselves and ancient Egyptians is huge, but it isn't from exponential change in technology over time. That change in technology was driven by (and drives) both our different (from the Egyptians') model of the world, and our ability to sense the world.
Consider a recovered alien ship hull. If it crashed in ancient Egypt, they might make use of the metals and conclude the ship was a god or its vessel cast down from the heavens. If it crashed in the modern United States, we could figure out the chemical makeup of it, test its properties, hypothesize about how it works, and try to recreate it. All of that could wind up being incredibly valuable, even if we couldn't recreate the shell itself.
I would posit it's not even Victorian era scientists looking at an iPad. It's like presenting an iPad to pre-agriculture humans. We might not even fathom how it works or what it's even supposed to do when our frame of reference is so far behind technologically
On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today.
This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.
Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.
You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.
The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.
This just comes across as conspiracy mongering. Yes, there will be people who think like that but those people already think like that. There wouldn't be some mass collapse in society or government. The most that would happen is people would be interested in the information released, acknowledge the government has secrets just like they did yesterday, and move on with life.
Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.
But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.
Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.
That's the thing - except for places very close to the front lines, only very tiny portion of the country is getting hit.
So no, it's not "the entire country, on a daily basis".
You are correct though that the media loves to paint it as a 24x7 apocalyptic hellscape (mostly via selective imagery, independent of what is actually said in the articles). That's how they get your anxiety molecules jumping, and thus make their money, after all.
I wouldn't word it like that
People going to work every day while there are bombs dropping, in the middle of a war, trying to keep the exchange of goods going so they can pay for the war and to survive, is not banal. It's not obvious that people would go to work in a war zone, and it's not boring, and in many times in history people did not go to work during a war (except for farmers, whose lives depended on it)
For cities actively under siege, that's exactly how it is though. Read about St. Petersburg or the battle of Vukovar.
They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems.
What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.
I always thought there was something a bit off about Rubio...
Video of "UFO" over Poland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WZN0T_54xY
Pentagon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Wmap12xm0
Picture of crashed orb in Mexico: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmm7a/mysterious-metallic-o...
My theory is that these spheres are spinning and move using the Magnus effect (the effect that causes a spinning soccer ball to curve). Theoretically, if you have gyroscopes inside the sphere, and you can find a way to transfer the gyroscopes' spin to the sphere, the sphere will spin in a controllable direction and move where you want it to. Lift can be achieved by filling it with helium.
Spinning around, moving uncontrollably inside a storm, with very variable speed are exactly things that lost balloons do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship
The magnus effect is a byproduct of laminar flow of fluid/air around a spinning object. Without laminar flow there is no force. So that is to say if you spin a sphere really fast and it’s hovering in air without gravity and without wind it will not move because there will be no laminar flow to produce the magnus effect. So in order for your spherical craft to actually harness the magnus effect you would need a separate means of propulsion to drive you in the primary direction and harness the magnus effect for thrust in a secondary direction, ie turn.
We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with statements like the following, made by the former director of National Intelligence?
"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope
Perhaps if you placed a control moment gyroscope inside a helium-filled sphere, an operator could generate a controlled rapid spin. I'm not an expert by any means, was hoping someone more knowledgable can evaluate the idea.
If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we want to study potentially advanced technology?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4
There was a similar story: https://fstoppers.com/film/how-soviet-union-snapped-first-pi...
As I understand it, only "secret, unreported programs" would lose funding.
- Stick. Today a program that is doing "Advanced Propulsion Research" that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech would be perfectly legal. Cutting funding for this, unless explicitly authorized, opens up liability for anyone in the government and related contractors.
- Carrot. The amnesty is an opportunity to come forward without the liability.
Enter the intergalactic copyright lawyers...
- it was a reflection in the windshield
- I debunked it from seeing this YouTube video because those Air Force pilots and those government whistleblowers definitely don’t know what they are talking about !
I am always surprised by the amount of confidence those « debunkers » radiate when what they mainly do is just express doubt with zero cost to them in terms of reputation or even work.
> It’s explicitly illegal
Lol. When has this ever stopped any government agency, ever? The FBI conducted over a million illegal searches last year. The NSA lied for decades about its dragnet surveillance program. You think the DIA information office (Lue Elizondo's "former" workplace) is against fabricating some conspiracy theories in an effort to corral the people most susceptible to them? They could even justify it as a defensive maneuver against hostile forces who would otherwise propagandize the same people ("distract them with Lue Anon so the Russians can't target them with Q Anon").
It’s just incredibly clear that you actually don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding about how the military or intelligence agencies work and you are left yelling about a world that exists in your mind. The entire comment is just Swiss cheese to anyone with even a passing familiarity on any of those topics.
I'd like to hear your explanation for the subject of the article that doesn't involve the government lying or breaking the law in some capacity.
(yes i know this sound completely paranoïd, but i have absolutely no other idea why they would do that)
Marco Rubio is talking about UFOs now, but he played down covid and was against lockdowns and masking.
I have no idea who "they" is, but i assume it's pretty easy for a small group of congressmen to spread rumors and declarations on a given topic in the media (from my understanding it is done regularely as a consequence of lobbyist work).
And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it.
While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
> You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k
That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.
Not to mention the red-taped filled work environment does not exactly encourage innovation.
This is the solo special contractor rate. You aren't paying a person a million bucks. You're paying a "company" that because that's what expertise in how carbon fibers set in a particular resin matrix subjected to a high-frequency supersonic detonation ring or something, an expertise that globally numbers maybe five, and within the U.S., three, is worth.
Then you start your 2nd career at GD or Lockheed or Microsoft, et al, and get 300k per annum.
For other fields though, it can make sense.
They do use cutting edge stuff to, and silicon valley pays well, but really only if your a software guy. Contrary to contemporary beliefs, their still are smart engineers out their building cutting edge non-compute hardware.
the Verizon Disclosure Reports are still a thing, you can find the 2022 DBIR with breaches across the private sector. they get hit hard all the time.
hell, the biggest breach in FedGov history is cuz of SolarWinds, which pwnd a lot of private sector folks too, including M$
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Karem
What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret military clearance?
I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours.
When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech.
This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.
People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so.
LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit.
Lockheed doesn't do materials research?
Not necessarily. I once sold a Ferrari to a nuclear weapons tech from Los Alamos. His boss had a Countach.
With the military (in addition to what I said) you have to be very aware that it, like most gov entities, outsources work. The private sector is coupled with the military. The US military doesn't build the secret jets on secret military bases, Lockheed and Boeing do. Lockheed built the SR71, which definitely led to many UFO stories.
Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.
Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?
And it's not that low power.
But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements
But that's not why they cost so much. Rad hardened ICs are built differently. They are built on a sapphire base: Silicon on Sapphire (SoS). Process is more complicated and expensive.
That said, there are more people looking at commercial off the shelf (COTS) and just building redundant systems because 2 COTS CPUs can be cheaper (and more powerful) and because ECC has gotten much better. But this is really only for LEO right now, but may be used in deeper space missions later on. Realistically it is just going to be dependent on how much your ride costs. LEO is cheap now, so risk of failure is dramatically reduced. Your ride is still most of your cost though.
[note] TRL 9 pretty much doesn't exist in these types of missions. We don't have decades of operation of specific devices on other planets. But you still use very robust and redundant systems.
[other note] People often cite this as a waste of money, but when we consider the time it is pittance in the government budget. Costs could definitely come down, but in government money can only exchange hands through leaky buckets. NASA politically prides itself as having parts from every state, which from an engineering perspective should sound like a logistic nightmare, and it is. But this is the type of people you are voting for, people that love pageantry over pragmatism. (pageantry gets votes, pragmatism doesn't)
It can also take a lot of time for something to get from TRL 6 to TRL 7, and from TRL 7 to TRL 8. Sometimes realistically impossible to get to TRL 9! The system could be more efficient for sure, and probably has broken down too much, but the idea itself is fine.
Fwiw, I've seen things that I 100% believe should be done today and that there's massive amounts of evidence for it, but aren't done because they aren't TRL 9. I don't want to start arguments, but there's a certain industry that gets hit with this all the time. Where they can do tons of complex and detailed models but aren't able to build the actual thing because it hasn't been physically demonstrated. Which leads to a weird self referential roadblock.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
However, they did create an FPGA to do the stereo vision in real time, which is pretty cool too.
That was like 20 years ago though. Things could easily be different now.
High Performance Java is definetly a thing - it just takes a lot of tuning.
Space computers are behind because space technology is based on minimizing risk given the large cost of failure. Using older nodes with well-understood flaws that can be built using old chip equipment is much lower risk than trying to put Intel's latest into a communications satellite.
Few things in space truly would require anything state of the art. The best argument I can think of would be realtime image processing using DNNs- imagine you made a fleet of 1M identical exploration bots and you wanted them to filter out most of their imaging data before sending back the best candidates.
For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...
Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir" stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-w...).
"But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."
> For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...
Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.
The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up.
And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about getting caught lying.
> And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was a helicopter with a searchlight.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/206946740/m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effect
Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of different aliens visiting us, or people are having experiences they can't rationally explain and their brain is filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone having a camera on them at any given moment is now approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens getting sneakier?
There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson. When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories about how people's native languages impact the way the view the world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest thing their brains could come up with.
That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
I don't know if I'd call that a flying saucer- it was more of a hovering saucer.
> Corporate needs you to find the differences between these pictures.jpg: [military tech] [private sector tech] (they're the same picture)
> An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes. [1]
Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We just don't get to see the best in action because they're classified until they're almost pedestrian.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
This is a huge understatement. Like calling GPT4 "as mundane as any other transformer." Just because things have a high abstraction similarity doesn't mean the details aren't critical. Very expensive and difficult to produce __is__ exotic technology. There's also a large range of "paradigm shifting" technologies between here and antigravity. Don't listen to YouTube, get your hands dirty and work on the stuff if you want to get the expertise to know why this stuff is so impressive.
Not in the sense of antigravity. Enough money and time can buy you an arbitrarily nice mirror, it doesn't rely on presently unknown to the public attributes of the universe.
Yes and no. But I'm going to go with mostly no. The yes is only because over thousands of years we have in fact improved mirror quality, but if we're talking about building a perfect mirror within a 5-10 year time-frame from now, it is definitely no. No matter how much money you spend.
A lot of people like to make assumptions about our capacity to build and make things. The reason we don't live in a super futuristic society isn't just because we're not dumping enough money into such a goal (obviously that would help) but because even with infinite resources we don't have great paths towards those things right now. Nuance sucks, but is necessary. The truth is that there's no such thing as "simple" when we're talking about "arbitrary precision." Honestly, not even true long before that. There's a good reason you'll find books with thousands of pages dedicated to a seemingly simple thing e.gs: o-rings, screws, bolts, threading, and so on. Don't fall for the simplicity trap.
Any actually interesting technology would be under a Secrecy Order [1] and the patents wouldn't see the light of day, perhaps ever. The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines. Based on what little we know, the Secrecy Orders are very effective - some gaseous centrifuge technology used for enrichment in the 1940s and 1950s is still considered cutting edge and secret.
Antigravity is just fantasy land. All it would take is a factor of two improvement in any number of technologies to make something exotic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
Yes, exactly. Give a modern Apple CPU to some chip experts in the 80s and they'd no doubt be amazed and have many questions about the details, but they would have a theoretical basis for understanding the premise of the thing. Give the same chip to Isaac Newton or Archimedes and it would be a completely different story. To them, a CPU would be truly exotic technology.
Antigrav existing today would be like CPUs existing in Newton's day. You'd need completely new theories to even comprehend the most basic operating principles. Antigrav craft like those proposed by the people who don't believe Mick West's explanation of the Navy's "Go Fast" video would be further removed on a theoretical basis from the F-35 than the F-35 is from the Wright flier.
> The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines.
In both of these cases, the fundamental operating principles were widely known to relevant researchers in various countries before anybody developed one that worked. Japan and Germany both had nuclear weapons programs during WW2. Nuclear fission was known to researchers in all three nations, and more as well. In the case of jet engines, you had inventors in many countries taking stabs at implementing a practical one decades before they were adopted into military service. There was never a chance of any military getting jet engines while the rest of the world was left wondering what the hell it even was.
And with respect to gas centrifuges; those were considered but ultimately not employed by the Manhattan Project, which instead used gaseous diffusion. But the premise of gas centrifuges for isotope separation was first suggested in 1919, and the broader premise of any sort of centrifuge to separate things is much older. Gas centrifuges weren't exotic technology that game out of nowhere, the theoretical basis for them was clear before they were successfully created.
We've got a theoretical basis for almost any alien technology that comes short of violating the conservation of momentum or breaking the speed of light. Doesn't mean we're any closer to making an SSTO space ship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Relies on "exotic matter" that violates known laws of physics.
Besides, exotic matter is a shortcut to the energy required, not a necessary part of the Alcubierre drive.
It's worse than merely theoretical because the theories we use to describe reality at present don't give us any reason to believe such exotic matter must exist, and there is no empirical evidence for such matter existing.
But slice it anyway you like, the Navy isn't operating these and there is no theoretical basis for explaining the sort of antigravity craft that UFOologists claim these Navy videos show. They aren't Alcubierre drives, that is simply absurd.
Not only that, but that "the government" and "its contractors" are often impossible to distinguish and for all intents and purposes the same. Many times realistically a loophole to escape the GS pay.
Exactly what has been going on since the 40s though? The Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the government. It was just a balloon that got blown up into an massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors about alien spacecraft.
The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology, contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far. There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either from the government or from space. The government doesn't have stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for such craft existing in the first place.
Mick West always starts with a conclusion and works backwards from there. He had a satisfying explanation re: parallax on the "GoFast" video, and developed a cult following from there, but the Gimbal one is really grasping at straws.
I've read about enough anomalies and see enough statistical patterns to develop an intuition that some percentage of them represent something really interesting, even without a smoking gun. We've had a lot of time to experiment with implanting experiences and studying mass hallucinations and they are no better understood than when people first tried using them to wish away inconvenient data. It just seems like a deus ex machina to ignore something frightening observed by someone credible (where frightening == worldview-changing).
Have you ever honestly considered, if you were a casual naturalist in Galileo's time, whether you with your present personality would side with the church or with Galileo?
How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog#Content
When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes of the thing weren't utterly exotic.
Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of theory was already public years before they were brought into existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they must have worked.
But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical basis for such a technology known to the public right now. Nobody can say "well it could be done with XYZ but it would be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."
It doesn't have to, it was a counter-example to that "decades behind the private sector on computing technology" thesis.
Not like P&W is a government owned company, either - the private sector and the military are closely integrated, that's the military industrial complex.
This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just in obvious areas like cryptography but data structures and algorithms, as well as exotic hardware.
It doesn't explain UFOs, but the idea that the most advanced public computer tech is decades ahead of what elements of the US DoD have doesn't pass the smell test. At worst there is parity and in some areas there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of capability that should not be possible if you solely went on public computing literature. (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.)
Not everyone aspires to be a code monkey at Facebook for the money. There are extremely talented computer scientists working in US government, especially the secretive parts, that could instantly get a job at any FAANG company if they wanted to -- I've met many of them -- but they don't. The notion that the US DoD does not have access to "the best engineers and scientists" is dubious.
What's the government application here? AI? NSA analysis of metadata to figure out hidden connections between individuals?