Not really. There is good evidence that sightings of Big Foot are actually linked to the same department responsible for dealing with extraterrestrials on earth.
The hair samples with "non-earth origin" DNA, the fact that the FBI investigation suddenly got shut down and two of the agents literally disappeared. The countless whistleblowers over the decades that linked Big Foot to the super solider program. Even David Grush says it's more likely than not linked.
What is non-earth origin DNA that you mention in your reply to another post?
How would you know it was not from earth? Is it as simple as there being no evidence of any contamination by hair colorants, straighteners, shampoos, or any products sold by Proctor and Gamble?
I too would like to see actual links to any evidence or documentation of these events and products so I can see for myself.
Bigfoot is almost a cottage industry and is definitely a tourist bait in some areas.
I would start with the FBI files from the 70's and go from there. That's where it all begins. Apparently the hair had a structure that was not carbon based… the same kind of structure that Grusch talks about from the spaceship that crashed in Italy in 1933 which was covered up by the Five Eyes and the Vatican. Vatican vault apparently has samples as well.
Oh, the Vatican is involved! Of course they are, foolish me for not expecting it. No doubt the Knights Templar are somehow mixed up with this as well. It all seems very diabolical; tell me more, Abulafia.
I was hoping you would have live links to some supporting data. I did stumble into an article about an Italian crash in 1933 that is probably the support for your Vatican assertion though nothing that I read mentioned anything about a Bigfoot or a hair that wasn't from earth. It referenced Italian archives from a "secretive" unit of Mussolini's military that supposedly picked up the pieces of something that crashed and stashed them away for study. Those parts were supposed to have been the inspiration for one of the Italians who studied them to develop the first jet engine and some plans for a circular, jet-powered craft that to me sounded like it had lots of problems engineered into it so it was never gonna work. There was a lot in there to absorb involving documentation sent to the Nazis and post-war transfer of the pieces to the US.
Anyway, a link to something about the hair that isn't carbon-based so it can't be from around here would be great since you brought up that subject. It's still a "tits or GTFO" place here on the intertubes.
The hearing is utterly bizarre and surreal. Like theater but everyone is keeping a straight face. (also, 'Mrs. Luna' is asking questions and her character name seems too on-the-nose.)
Former commander says he didn't believe in UFOs and defends himself with "I never watched history channel or anything like that" -- as though that's a source for UFOs rather than...history.
>as though that's a source for UFOs rather than...history
Maybe you haven't watched the History Channel recently, but there is indeed a lot of stuff about aliens on there. Possibly more stuff about aliens than about actual history.
Check out the History Channel's schedule today. Not a cherry-picked day, just a normal schedule for them: https://www.history.com/schedule
That's four hours of aliens nonsense, four hours of drug themed history documentaries (probably the same target demographic as the aliens stuff.) An hour of christian prophesy and preaching, 12 hours of reality TV, and some infomercials to make up the difference.
Is it any wonder that an ostensibly serious man such as a military commander thinks that the History Channel is trash? I'd be concerned if he didn't.
I don't think any military captains, and colonels will be testifying on oath to the existence of Bigfoot in front of Congress. So no, that's not next.
What's actually happening is pretty crazy and anyone who has a small amount of curiosity should give it some consideration. It seems foolish just to dismiss this with a scoff.
It might be if more details about the super solider program are leaked and they can be linked to non-earth origin DNA. I mean, for christ's sake there are literal hair samples.
What is happening? Seriously we already know about Hunter Biden. What is happening today that wasn't happening yesterday that you think this is actually an attention distraction?
If they're going to be unable to come to consensus on it, then fine, maybe we should have 0 climate hearings this year. Maybe instead spend ALL YEAR on the UFO topic until someone comes forward with crashed saucers and guts.
If we find out they ARE here, maybe they can help with the climate?
In theory, Congress should already know about the existence or not existence of aliens/UFOs, so what's the point here? To show that congress isn't being informed?
The various congressional committees are supposed to know everything the federal government is doing so they can provide oversight, AFAIK. Something big like UFOs should have come up I'd imagine
Supposed to know is not the same as know. If they learn from a whistleblower that a program exists and has been kept secret from them, the people that are supposed to know about it, what would you have them do? Publicly investigate the claims, right? That's what they're doing.
This hearing really isn't about theory or based on your notions of what is likely. Instead, it stemmed from a whistleblower complaint regarding bureaucratic security layers to obfuscate projects from Congressional oversight. These projects are compartmentalized behind SAPs and misappropriation of government funds.
Presuming there was actually some aliens/UFOs to know about in the first place (I'm pretty confident there aren't any actual alien UFOs, but that doesn't mean there aren't secret programs dedicated to UFOs), it is likely that most of congress wouldn't know about it and only a few congressmen on the right committees would know. Not every member of congress is informed of all the secrets the American government has. Particularly, those 17 on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence know a lot more than the rest. And even they may be kept in the dark about some things.
I have always felt that given how far away they must be, and the challenge involved in crossing that space, the most ridiculous belief is that some extra-terrestrial intelligent life is simultaneously able to build ships that get here (meaning they're far more technologically advanced than us) and yet not able to hide them from us. Or that they get here and have a breakdown right over New Mexico. Or their drone couldn't just self-destruct before we got it. Etc.
While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere, the idea that it got here and then made a mistake seems strange to me.
And I've always thought the military didn't investigate these UFOs because they weren't unidentified to them. They're just FOs when you're the one who built them.
Would you self destruct your broken down car so that ants couldn't get a hold of the technology? Would you care if the ants you are studying notice you?
I imagine it would be kind of similar to how we feel about those remote tribes in Brazil or India, or places like that where governments intentionally and prohibit contact, yes. I mean I can’t be sure of that by any means, but I think that if we discovered life on another planet, we would probably leave it alone, unless, of course, it had something we need. And it’s hard to imagine one planet having any resources that are important to somebody who already has faster than light travel.
I really doubt we've been visited by aliens but one could have stolen a ship and took a ride here not knowing how to fully operate it. It's entirely possible their government is suppressing the existence of aliens and we've been visited by their whistleblowers/journalists.
I really hope that is the case because it’s a great story.
I also can’t imagine a species that has interstellar travel, but manually operated ships. I think we are not that far from humans not operating any forms of transportation anymore, and we are at best thousands of years from having the technology to visit anywhere life may exist.
> While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere
I disagree, it's pretty easy to make "Drake equations" go to zero, particularly if you limit the scope to just the Milky Way galaxy (only 10^11 stars.) The Rare Earth Hypothesis is consistent with all of our empirical observations of the universe thus-far.
I don’t think it’s easy to make the Drake equation go to zero, though it is within the relatively limited section of the universe from which of visitor could get here.
Two or three independent "one in a million" chances will push the Drake equation to near zero in the milky way. Such chances could be things like "chance of multicellular life developing from unicellular" (took billions of years on earth, maybe it was never likely to happen in the first place) or "chance for multicellular life to invent radios" (overwhelming majority of multicellular life on earth was never going to invent radios. Evolution isn't directed to create tool-inventing apes.)
Or it could be a few dozen 50/50 chances that need to be cleared, or some mix of the two. Drake equations only spit out "aliens likely" if you assume earth-like planets will inevitably create human-like life but that's a hell of an assumption. And then we look into the night sky and see/hear nothing from the aliens that supposedly must be up there and call it a paradox... well it's not a paradox if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true. If the empirical evidence is saying one thing and the speculative math is saying another thing, it's probably the speculative math that's wrong.
The point is program management & constitutionality:
1. Do programs exist over which Congress has no knowledge and/or oversight. If so, this is likely unconstitutional.
2. Do programs exist because Congressionally appropriated funds have been covertly redirected to those programs without Congressional knowledge. If so, likely unconstitutional.
3. Have whistleblowers been threatened or harmed to prevent disclosure and/or testimony. If so, likely a violation of US criminal statutes, and likely unconstitutional - particularly if those whistleblowers intended to provide Congressional testimony in accordance with Congress's oversight role.
The point is not disclosure, confirming existence or declassification - despite what you may hear. It could be one or more of those things occur, but likely not via these hearings.
Oversight can be as simple as notice to the "Gang of Eight" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence), or possibly the Intel/Defense committee ranking members, and need NOT to be to the entire Congress or even full committee membership. The accusations in these hearings seem to allege this minimal notice did not take place. The testimony also claims extra-governmental (possibly private sector) program management with no political accountability.
In sum... this appears to be a (necessary) power struggle over programs & information. At the same time - and depending on what the real truth may be - one can make a convincing argument little of this information should be public & these programs should remain off the books. Depends on your confidence in the body politic and Congress.
Perhaps, but as we've seen the law and the Constitution are subject to interpretation and to the extent that the law is enforced.
There are no aliens hidden by any government in the world. It's impossible to keep something like that under wraps. This whole thing is put on because it's a good way to distract the public and all politicians who are tough on aliens get political points and votes.
And just to be clear - you can't simultaneously think that the government has the capability to hide aliens but also discredit that the moon landings (for example) were faked. If you find yourself thinking "well they could be hiding aliens" ask yourself if you also find "they faked the moon landing" to be ridiculous - it's the same logic.
They do already know. They've already gotten a full briefing, and won't ask any questions that they don't know the answer to.
The purpose of the hearing is to do that again in public. In theory, the idea is to get the information distributed more widely. In practice, it's usually about grandstanding, so that the politicians get to make speeches on TV.
Incorrect. If you listen to the actual testimony or have been paying attention to the details you will learn Congress is being stonewalled and its ability to provide oversight and appropriation (its constitutional duties) appears to be nonexistent. These hearings are shining a very public light on this as a means of rallying support for real Congressional oversight and less "off the books" management of these programs. That's not to say this is a good idea. Congress is inept and a good argument can be made for the status quo ante.
Well, for one, he seems to be pretty liberal with the truth in a way that many spooks are good at. For example he claims:
> at the GS-15 civilian level, which is the military equivalent of a full-bird colonel
I was previously both a Major and later NH-IV (which in my case had equivalency with GS-15-10)and the only people making this claim would be ones that want to inflate their own importance.
They are completely different legally and fall under different legal codes - namely the GS system is not subject to UCMJ nor can they make certain legal decisions that an O6 can make and has a completely different promotion and evaluation.
He wants to portray himself as a battle hardened commander when he’s just another run of the mill PowerPoint slinger.
Can’t say for that for the intelligence community, but UFO people on podcasts claim his claims are being fed to him and are likely psyops misdirections.
He also has no direct knowledge it’s all stuff he heard from other people in the government.
Well, I've always thought that cloaking your secret government program in kooky-sounding UFO stuff might be a great way to keep your program hidden. Anybody uncovering evidence of your program will likely not be taken seriously, because UFOs.
And certainly, "a government lies and has secrets" ranks well above "aliens are in our skies" in terms of likelyhood. Occam's Razor and all.
But, I don't know if this sounds like a psyop to me.
One, Grush says that many (dozens?) of people (whose names he has provided to the whistleblower office) spoke to him about these alleged programs. Dozens or people push this psyop... why? The government wants to convince people that it is... even shadier than we thoughts? Or is this some thing they cooked up to ensnare Grusch specifically?
Is our government secretive and scary? Oh yeah. But if this is a psyop then I don't see how it helps them.
It's not worth much because if there is a community that doesn't know about it, then of course they won't support it. If they do know about it, and haven't already disclosed it, then of course they won't support it.
So basically "take that for what it's worth" in both cases is 0.
Weird with that many comments and votes that its on like page 5 of HN and this one quickly shot to front page. Maybe @dang can combine them in a hurry.
It does and it's quite annoying, given that controversy is often a source of insight. I think this guy is probably BSing and that these hearings are a sideshow, but I'm still interested in the nuggets that come out of these discussions and don't mind they fall short of being perfect examples of discourse.
Why would a bunch of republicans want to distract from something they’ve been desperately trying to use as an attack on Biden for years? This is a bipartisan hearing.
The Biden family’s corruption is so blatant and brazen, that if they really wanted to drag him through the mud they would.
I’m sure there’s a lot of this kind of corruption going on with Republicans in Congress as well so there’s a sort of mutually assured destruction protecting all of them.
The whistleblower former intelligence official David Grusch says he faced “very brutal and very unfortunate” retaliation after he went public with his allegations.
Intelligence personnel swear to keep their mouths shut. He has no real evidence and no real compelling reason that I'm seeing for coming forward.
Why this cynical attitude? Perhaps he did expect it and he is now clearly and publicly stating it in a congressional record so something might be done about other whistleblowers.
They take an oath to serve the United States. If they notice illegal activity that can't be resolved through the chain of command, they have a responsibility to speak up and resolve it through being a whistle blower. We also don't know what evidence he has. It could be bullshit or it could be actual evidence but people on hacker news won't know the truth.
In theory, maybe possible. But honest-to-god critical thinking/sincere question: given that multiple countries have had satellites, deep space observation methods, giant telescopes etc how is that alien ingress have never been noticed? Aliens couldn't have known that US/UK were the preferred destinations - countries with large surface areas like Australia, Russia, Brazil and India don't report such activities in general.
Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decades - and no concerted & corroborative evidence exists from medieval or prehistoric times (apart from some cave paintings where imaginations have been at play of superior beings).
Human race always had a creative tone to recording our history - we borrow philosophy, allude to existence of supernatural, and of God almighty. When it is about non-planetary life, definitive evidence _must_ exist all over the planet that we were visited - not just one country. Or am I being too cynical?
The human ability to deny to others and oneself is stronger than we think. There's a vast set of people that saw them in Phoenix, astronauts, there's evidence in many places that we tend to ignore.
I've met Travis Walton. He is one of the most genuine people I have ever met. We're just not listening (some people are but most are not capable of hearing it).
I understand. But out of curiosity: why is there no material evidence across the different civilizations. Surely all of humanity couldn't be duping themselves and only US is speaking up in 21st century.
I am _not_ a non-believer. It is just the lack of scientific historicity and diversity of evidence that bothers me. I cannot reconcile that mountain of contradiction with the current testimony. It is one Congressional account of definitive existence, versus the absence of conclusive proof or material evidence anywhere else.
Now, none of them are as clear and objective as "A being that was obvious not human spoke to me and told me about themselves. They are ..." - but that doesn't mean we don't have a ton of incidents reported over the centuries.
The celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg & Basel have been time & again discussed to be purported works of fiction. (This is also from a recent cursory literature review on the topic in JSTOR).
Summarily, many supernatural themed events were written by fantasy writers of those age to peddle to crowds outside their region. Those people have died, and the enigma forgotten - but these writings have found their way as proto-evidence of unusual activity from medieval times & now being used to support arguments.
The DoD loves the myths. It's not about the existent of extraterrestrials. It's about a government so powerful that they would be able to cover it up and keep it secret. A government that can hide the existence of extraterrestrials, that can fake a moon landing, that can demolish skyscrapers in the middle of a city, is a powerful government and one that needs trillions of dollars a year. The amorphous "they" wants you to believe.
Worth noting that Russia does actually have similar myths, likely for the same reasons.
I just wrapped up Skunkworks and put the book down pretty impressed at what the DoD and Lockheed were able to keep secret. The author described Skunkworks' mission "again and again" as creating aircraft that were technologically unbelievable to America's enemies, so they would have no means to even reckon with a defense. The USSR spent hundreds of billions of rubles on an impenetrable anti-air defense network, Lockheed built a plane that could fly right through it and drop a bomb through a Kremlin chimney, and everyone kept it a secret for years. The author also repeatedly alluded to projects from throughout his career that remained classified at the time, one of these was the F-22.
My takeaway there is more that it's believable pilots have sighted unidentifiable aircraft exhibiting technologically implausible behavior because those craft are classified projects, rather than because they're extraterrestrial craft, but I don't think it's so plainly unbelievable that the government can't keep secret projects under wraps. The stealth modified helicopters used in the Bin Laden raid come to mind, and really, those are pretty boring as far as "top secret technology" goes, and were apparently in pretty regular use already.
> but I don't think it's so plainly unbelievable that the government can't keep secret projects under wraps.
Rare triple negation. Also, I couldn't follow the last bit. Were you saying that basically what we imply as dazzling mind boggling technology is a top secret projects waiting to be unveiled / discovered?
Everything you wrote was addressed in the hearing today. There are many, many incidents and we would not be flying these things in training areas that jeopardize flight safety of our own pilots, for one.
> how is that alien ingress have never been noticed?
The US and the USSR had to collaborate on filtering out UAPs from radar early warning systems so we didn't nuke each other.
Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
> Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decade
UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
I haven't provided references here in the interest of my time, but all of what I stated here is readily verifiable with a few internet searches.
All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence. The issue today is provenance. With claims so large, even HD video of an object and creatures in real time wouldn't be enough. The only thing that would convince people is the word of the US (or some other major country) government itself providing evidence, which it has done in small doses, and is the only reason this hearing is happening.
> The US and the USSR had to collaborate on filtering out UAPs from radar early warning systems so we didn't nuke each other.
And as we know they're the only countries with radar and observation abilities.
> Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
> The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
> UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence.
No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist. Even a mild dive into the claims shows how absurd all of these are, and often very real explanations are given, verified, and ignored by the community that wants to believe. It's got all the rigor of pizzagate and is in fact less likely to be possible.
> And as we know they're the only countries with radar and observation abilities.
They're not? Are you implying that by pointing out one event I'm explicitly excluding the possibility of others? Not sure that follows.
> This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
Depends on who you ask, which was kin of my entire point. There is tons of evidence, what missing is provenance.
> We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
Again, the was my point. I wasn't saying "here is all the 100% proven evidence". I was saying "there is no evidence" is an inaccurate statement.
> No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist
There is plenty of material, with plenty of seals of approval, just not from the U.S. gov.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence
Sorry, I haven’t seen a single decent photo or video—everything is always blurry, distant, or ambiguous. And this is after a decade where virtually everyone is constantly carrying a camera on their person.
That argument would be "where is the indisputable evidence", and I would point out that no evidence is indisputable, especially when it concerns something as ridiculous as UFOs.
I'll point out 2 things:
1) The videos released to the NY times for their 2017 story are compressed and downscaled version of much higher quality videos the US gov has in it possession. That is indisputable fact as the US gov itself freely admits that.
2) You probably haven't looked. I've seen many convincing photos and videos, but unless their from an F-XX aircraft and the D.O.D tells me it is what it is, I ignore them because pictures and video have been easy to fake for as long as picture and video have existed. Here is one I like: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13dmaif/black_triangl...
No way to know if it's legit or not, like I've said, but pretty cool either way.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence.
We haven't seen a single clear evidence yet. The objects captured from fighter jet IR cameras discussed in the past have also had explanation of lens flares and focal aberrations. True color image corresponding of the same event do not exist. No two accounts of unidentified activities are also same with inconsistencies one observes when people extend stories based on tenuous observation/experience
> The objects captured from fighter jet IR cameras discussed in the past have also had explanation of lens flares and focal aberrations
One is a potential flare/focal aberration. The other two have no such explanation, and one of the three has radar tracking, followed by pilot interaction (David Fravor), then was videod by a second pilot on encounter (the video that was released.
Keep in mind also that all three are very low quality versions of the originals.
So, what stops the US government from making this an elaborate psyops activity. Why should it be aliens _only_?
In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge. Create an elaborate story around unexplained IR camera observation. Potentially drop breadcrumbs & leave it ambiguous to project existence of superior otherworldly technology.
I believe most of us agree at this point, whatever proof publicly exists isn't incontrovertible - but ambiguous enough to be an umbrella for other top secret projects. Aliens aren't selectively choosing US - if you pause & think. And if that should not happen, evidence of similar standing should pop up elsewhere as well. The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military, is somehow not matching up with critical reasoning. (And many of these militaries actually do have strong public outreach just like US af-mil)
Leaving aside the military, clear photos have not showed up from the regular citizenry despite us having astrophotography capabilities in phones since sometime. The evidence or lack of it, isn't adding up
> So, what stops the US government from making this an elaborate Psyops activity. Why should it be aliens _only_?
That just depends on what evidence you do, or do not believe. Depending on your selection, and number of explanations may make sense.
> In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge
Personally, I'd believe UFOs were all fake/mistakes before I believed it was real technology held by any government.
> The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military
It is. UFO reports come out of all of those countries. India has a religious tradition with very clear UFO references, and videos come out of China all the time (although they tend to be purposely faked 100% of the times I've seen).
> It is. UFO reports come out of all of those countries. India has a religious tradition with very clear UFO references, and videos come out of China all the time (although they tend to be purposely faked 100% of the times I've seen).
I have lived/ been a citizen/ married to someone from each of these listed places. UFO reference in Hinduism is zero. I am practicing Hindu - I can vouch with 100% certainty. My wife is devout Buddhist/ formerly Christian & she confirms there is nothing in their scripture. I cannot engage any of these answers in good faith of critical thinking, as whenever there is a question of evidence, it is either trust-me-bro or it-is-classified
> I literally pointed you to a kaggle file of reports from a major UFO reporting organization.
Kaggle competition is a supporting evidence for you?
> And with regard to Hindu UFOs, I was referring to Vimana.
Those were depicted as chariots mostly drawn by flying horses or elephants in Ramayana & Mahabharata. Unless you consider flying horses as aliens. Also, these were written as poetic verses with generous doses of imagination.
> Not sure what you expect me to present as far as evidence goes when my point is "there is a ton of dubious evidence, but evidence none-the-less".
Let me help by stating: There is a ton of dubious statements from many people which doesn't count as evidence (those testifying without shred of evidence to congress). More of he-said-she-said trust-me-bro. Hence why I asserted these aren't worth discussing anymore. And quoting them as support is not good faith in a scientific evidence-oriented discussion
There are conspiracy theories & then there are conspiracy dogmas group of people fall trap to & blindly propagate, much like religion. Then usual responses to reasonable scientific queries become topics of (1) our science isn't developed enough (2) godly metaphysics isn't known enough (3) reasons of alien presence/ absence/ ambiguity aren't clear enough - despite strong evidence to the contrarian opinion.
There are 22k+ rows, and scrolling through the first few hundred I see Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, and Peru.
I'm not sure why you're dedicated to the idea that no other countries having UFO sightings. Even if it was just clutter and balloons, it seems reasonable for people all over the world to make mistakes and thing something mundane is fantastic. It doesn't seem like a very useful point in either direction of the discussion.
> So, what stops the US government from making this an elaborate psyops activity
After watching the hearing today, I was starting to suspect that we're party to this psyops campaign. It's one of the most outlandish things I've seen in recent memory.
All of the guys are credentialed and I didn't get the impression that anyone was grifting anything.
They definitely think it's real. I suspect something is real, but I get the impression that the real thing is not what they think it is.
There’s a pretty good chance the Nimitz incident was an intentional decoy self-test by the Navy IMO. Clouds give a radar return, so a projected plasma target would probably also give a radar return.
I'd tend to agree, but the fact that we are inventing top secret technology and programs to explain a sighting is itself a sign of a problem worth investigating, no?
Like, if that's a reasonable conclusion, then by leaving pilots misinformed we've effectively broadcast the tech to our adversaries. Maybe that was the intent, but it seems like a senselessly roundabout method if so.
It seems to me that this stuff might be an intentional leak in order to distract from more earthy political issues, so they actually want it to get out into the news.
If this is true (huge gigantic "if"), then all information on this topic should be immediately declassified. It is unacceptable to keep the biggest discovery in the history of the human race from the public. There is no justification for it.
Believing so suggests there's a purpose to deliberately wasting everyone's time in such a hearing.
Or a simpler answer, Grusch is plain lying. But somehow, the stakes seem pretty high for him to do so here, unless he's confident of the whistleblower book money he could someday make off of this.
This whole thing is just making me have less and less faith in society.
There's no fucking way this is remotely true, but everywhere I look, not matter the community, there's so much "what if" nonsense that reeks of the same ignorance those people screamed about when that was the argument for COVID conspiracies.
The energy required to travel through space is obscene.
The difficulty of traveling through space is obscene.
Finding ANYTHING in space is obscene.
IF somehow all of this was done, then the idea it's been kept a secret when there's soooo many ways of tracking and viewing these things is stupid (especially when you consider how much energy would need to be expended).
This is also assuming that for some reason they want to remain secret?
The whole thing is just so on it's face bs, but people so desperately want to believe they'll ignore all evidence. I can understand that, but I HATE the hypocrisy on display from those who are routinely critical of others for having such gaps in their logic.
You comment sound like a “know-it-all”. We don’t know what these crafts are, where they are from and how they came here. A little humble attitude is more aligned with reality: there’s so much we don’t know.
My comment is based on the current understanding of physics and the odds of some creature capable of defying that being able to even be hidden.
I would love for us to find evidence of life in the universe which is why I despise this charade which takes attention away from the scientists who are actually trying to do so. But apparently SETI is in on it too or some other nonsense.
I would suggest you consider the possibility that the current understanding of physics a thousand years from now will look very different from how it looks today.
Even more so a million years from now.
The reality is that we're not a particularly intelligent species - as shown by the fact that we're currently terraforming our own planet to make it less hospitable.
Our culture may well be extinct within a century. So I think it's optimistic to believe that we as a species have much of a clue about anything at all.
Now put that in the context of an extremely old universe, and it's not hard to understand that we're unlikely to be the smartest people in the room.
FWIW I'm agnostic about UFOs. The problem is that they conflate two issues - aerial phenomena, and alien visitation.
There's no reason those should be connected. Or that the latter would inevitably be responsible for the former.
The scientific thing to do is to collect evidence of the former before assuming the latter.
Who also somehow are aware of the location of earth, it having life, haven't made themselves known, and have only been seen in a way the governments can hush up (all of them).
I agree this is unlikely to be true, but I keep in mind what we know now and what we knew 1 million years ago. The energy to run a PC would seem obscene to people even thousands of years ago (let alone what a PC is and what it can do). Pull someone from earlier in this timeline and see what they think of airplanes.
2.6 million years ago: Stone tools
1.7 million years ago: Controlled fire
5,000 - 3,000 BC: Writing
3,000 BC: The wheel
1543: Nicolaus Copernicus publishes his heliocentric model of the solar system
1687: Newton publishes "Principia Mathematica"
1915: Albert Einstein publishes the general theory of relativity.
1969: Apollo 11 mission successfully lands the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon.
This is exactly my thought as well. There are a bunch of very interesting things in development: fusion energy is getting closer and closer, approaches for warp bubbles are being discovered without humongous energy requirements, possibly a room-temperature normal-pressure superconductor, etc.
It's hard to predict how much research all of these will take to fully harness, but given our previous rate of progress I'm still very hopeful that the world in 100 years will have technology we can't even dream of.
A laptop consumes energy at the same order of magnitude as a human body—not an “obscene” amount. The physics of accelerating an organism to the relativistic speeds required to make space travel feasible are in a completely different realm.
That's what this all boils down to. It's the exact same line of logic.
Sure there could be an omnipotent all powerful being that just chooses to stay hidden from us for no provable, observable, or obvious reason. It's just impossible to prove or disprove.
What if they don't need to accelerate? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy. What if they can teleport? Neat, it's STILL a shitton of energy. What if they can hop dimensions or bend the universe? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy.
What if it's not a shit ton of energy? Fuck it why not, how did they find us? They have tech for that? Fuck it why not, why aren't they showing themselves beyond these extremely rare sightings? They have a reason for that. Fuck it why not, why would every government hide these? Tech or war or something. Fuck it why not, why hasn't SETI or one of the thousand other independent science observatories or detectors not picked up any of this or reported on it?.....
and on and on and on.
So i can't prove that tomorrow the Sun God Ra won't descend from the heavens and sit atop the pyramids as if it was his throne and rule from on high, but I damn sure don't have any evidence that's why the sun is moving across the sky.
You provided an timeline of human evolution, but has fundamental physics changed at the core?
Unfortunately, we haven't found any drop-in replacement to Newton's first & second laws for e.g.; Conversely, more & more of physics is condensing towards established standard models proving that our model of universe is more definite. In the quantum space our research is mostly finding new interactions, not fundamental particles everyday. Energy & it transformations are the biggest truths eventually. To propel crafts capable of interstellar voyage, immense energy burst is needed for propulsion. We have seen no evidence of the kind of physics which will break relativistic models - and no material which can sustain the thermals in the process.
At the core of it, our chances to find another habitable world & intelligent species wherever they might be is rapidly reducing. Universe is expanding faster than previous estimated and probably double as old if you consider recent research. Our window of opportunity to establish contact passed probably before we came into existence.
It is like predicting we'll be able to detect God by advances one day. That supernatural being could exist - but most scientific evidence points to a hard no, given we already know it is a mental / emotional construction.
People need to believe in something. Multiple things. Anything. It’s why thousands of religions exist.
Most people have mundane lives and are wage slaves. This gives people hope. People want to believe there is more to life. Americans in particular want to believe their government is all powerful.
It should not be so shocking how easy it is to get people to believe this, or the fake moon landing, or anything else. People desperately want to believe, and the government is happy to enable it because it provides stability.
If I was the government exchequer and comfortably spending on the refrigeration of alien entrails & annually greasing their flying saucers, I wouldn't _additionally_ spend billions of dollars setting up space observatories like JWST, new radio wave telescopes & deep space probes to find evidence of life. At the least, experts from scientific community will be invited to investigate any material finds & that information will trickle out in tiny amounts. Scientific community deeply believes in replication at its core. It is impossible for everything to remain compartmental.
And acknowledging existence of alien technology only makes the position of a country more formidable, not less. Our global relationship is today less of muscle (like the past) & more posturing. By acknowledging otherworldly technology's existence but denying the details, US would be incredibly in advantageous position militarily. Why wouldn't they if they already possessed these technology?
We as human race may be spiteful to our brethren, but not stupid given the obscene expenditure of wealth and resources we dedicate annually in lieu of feeding & keeping everyone happy
I don’t usually like to make evaluations like this but Grusch’s demeanor and the way he responds to questions sets off my BS detector big time. I to want to believe just as much as anyone else here, but I can’t take this guy seriously.
It is irresponsible to simply call this "hiding". It is more reasonable to assume this is psyops by an adversary, and as such releasing information without doing due diligence is just causing harm.
Overall, if such events are true I wonder what effect this will have on politics driven by religion-based agendas (many who drive such agenda are not even pious or adherents in any form of the word). Maybe this is finally bring an end to religion-driven politics.
If it is a psyop by an adversary why hasn't it been called out as one yet? It would be the easiest counter and the government continually calls out China on its use of TikTok as a cultural weapon with little to no consequences.
If you need any further proof this country has a hard time innovating anymore, this UFO story push that coincides with the start of another Cold War is a great example.
I remember listening to Art Bell as a kid, fascinated with the stories of aliens, MIB, military coverups, etc… with former military men telling a lot of the stories.
Then I read Carl Sagan and realized how silly it all was. Then I learned how the government lies about so much. How they use current and former military and intelligence to further those lies.
Shame so many still buy into this at all. Highly suggest reading a demon haunted world if you haven’t. It makes these claims pure comedy.
Indeed, the military was already seeding misinformation around UFOs in the 1950s:
> When the Air Force finally made Special Report #14 public in October 1955, it was claimed that the report scientifically proved that UFOs did not exist. Critics of this claim note that the report actually proved that the "unknowns" were distinctly different from the "knowns" at a very high statistical significance level. The Air Force also incorrectly claimed that only 3% of the cases studied were unknowns, instead of the actual 22%. They further claimed that the residual 3% would probably disappear if more complete data were available. Critics counter that this ignored the fact that the analysts had already thrown such cases into the category of "insufficient information", whereas both "knowns" and "unknowns" were deemed to have sufficient information to make a determination. Also, the "unknowns" tended to represent the higher quality cases, q.e. reports that already had better information and witnesses. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book]
That said, this misinformation only highlights that the Air Force was trying to minimize UFOs, not increase their presence in the public consciousness.
"The American public has a right to learn about..."
Reaction I: The concept/prospect of space aliens really mashes a lot of people's emotional buttons. And "having a right to learn about" is how such strong emotions are usually articulated.
Reaction II: So long as $Potential_Enemy_Nation is a bit unsure about whether you are really lying, about having a bunch of from-1000-years-in-the-future technology hidden away, that you could suddenly start using (against them) if sufficiently motivated...that's pretty cheap deterrence, eh?
Imagine getting a congressional hearing and coming in with "never saw anything.. no aliens nor their crafts, just a bunch of rumors which I can't repeat here, soz all"
The general response in this discussion is skeptical, and I can understand the hesitation to broach the UFO/UAP topic, particularly when the topic has been vilified for literally decades. However, we are now in a legitimately different era of discussion of these topics, and you have to be willing to open your mind to the idea that these efforts are legitimate.
The bipartisanship at the hearing is to be commended, and the national security angle cannot be overstated. All three witnesses believe these UAP are genuine national security threats because they possess flight capabilities far exceeding anything beyond what we have. These UAP were documented on multiple military sensor platforms, some of which are still classified.
You must realize the USG has been and is engaged in an active disinformation campaign to deny existence of UAP, even to Congress. For example, multiple Subcommittee members mentioned that they wanted to meet in a SCIF with Grusch to receive a classified briefing but could not. A direct quote from the hearing: "Just so that the press knows and the people know, we [members of the Subcommittee] were even denied access to a classified briefing in a SCIF due to the amount of hoops we had to jump through to grant temporary clearance to witness Grusch, who has knowledge of classified information." Additionally, multiple members of Congress were initially denied access to data and personnel related to a UAP incident reported at Eglin AFB and in the end only received a portion of what was sought. Clear attempts to prevent elected officials from merely accessing relevant information is a genuine threat to national security because the military serves the people, not the other way around.
All three witnesses are trained and decorated military service members, each of which have since left the military. Their situational awareness and observational abilities are much better than you or me, particularly since we haven't been explicitly trained on such while they have. Additionally, Grusch is documented to have worked in both the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), two sensitive branches of the military intelligence community. As far as I'm aware, the NRO ships and provides military sensing platforms, and the NGA performs analysis from many different military data streams, including the NRO. Grusch even said in his opening statement that, at the NGA, he had a hand in making the Presidential Daily Briefing.
One commenter here says it's "more reasonable to assume this is psyops by an adversary", which is, by definition, a conspiracy theory, given that the commenter has no evidence of such occurring and would prefer to live in a world where three former US military service members are coerced to commit perjury to Congress about something which doesn't actually exist. Moreover, if an adversarial nation possesses craft with the capabilities described by the three witnesses, drawing any attention, even through an active disinformation campaign, to that strategic advantage is a clear breach of operational security with no clear, tangible benefit.
The preponderance of evidence in support of the existence of UAP should be overwhelming unless you've made the choice to not accept the premise: that intelligent life beyond humanity exists.
There is no physical evidence whatsoever. The only “evidence” is hearsay. Also, the members of the committee can lie without repercussions, so I don’t believe them. And the military lies to the public all the time.
You do know that you literally can't make that claim in good faith, right? That is simply your belief and, in fact, is contrary to the testimony of all three witnesses, all of which were personally invited to speak before Congress because of what they know. Clearly, you were not invited, though I suppose that itself is a belief.
All three witnesses claim that advanced military sensor platforms have gathered extensive information on UAP. Is that a piece of a craft? No. However, one of the witnesses testified under oath that he had direct knowledge of where such materials exist. You should want to see where his claims lead, if you truly believe in your closing statement.
>The only “evidence” is hearsay.
If that's your position, you didn't watch the hearing. One of the three witnesses is only there because he experienced a UAP while serving as a flight commander, and his former aviators reluctantly persuaded him to come forward. That individual is a primary source.
>Also, the members of the committee can lie without repercussions, so I don’t believe them. And the military lies to the public all the time.
Any person can dismiss extraordinary evidence as illegitimate if they reject the underlying premise. You can have video evidence of a person clearly committing murder, but that doesn't mean a family member won't still claim it's not them or it's fabricated. A piece of material from a craft could be brought out in a hearing, and some people will still claim that it's fake or impossible to prove that it wasn't made on Earth in a government lab. An alien could testify before Congress, and some people will claim it's an elaborate fake using rubber masks and advanced robotics.
In this case, we do have historically-extraordinary evidence (submitted as sworn Congressional testimony and personal statements) of the existence of UAP. You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises:
- Physics as is commonly accepted is incomplete.
- Military pilots are better observers than the average person.
- Life of equal or greater intelligence exists beyond humanity.
I don’t want to argue about this, but I will say that I want this to be real. I want to believe. And I agree some people are too skeptical.
However I still need some kind of hard physical evidence to start going down that path. Hopefully it shows up eventually, but I’m not holding my breath.
Fair enough. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Having studied the "UFO phenomenon" with a rational, evidence-seeking mind for some years now (guess you'll just have to take my word on that) and trying to put myself in the shoes of a national government, it's hard to find significant fault with the military's actions regarding UAPs over the past 80 years. To a large degree, I get why they've done what they've done. Happy to explain more if you'd like, but the gist is, the world just wasn't ready.
> In this case, we do have historically-extraordinary evidence (submitted as sworn Congressional testimony and personal statements) of the existence of UAP.
If mere words are your standard of evidence, then we are different. I need to see/sense/understand myself to believe - material/physical and photographic evidence, and expert, scientific, independently confirmed, reproducible analysis. If you don't, I have a bunch of stories to tell you.
> You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises [...]
We know that intel agencies and military routinely lie to Congress; many times historically and several major ones in just my lifetime:
- Iraq WMDs
- dragnet surveillance
- ANA will fight the Taliban
We also know they obscure the truth, eg Victoria Nuland responding to the question about “chemical or biological weapons” in Ukraine by nodding as she spoke about “research labs”.
We also know the CIA has previously hacked the computers of a congressional investigation into their misconduct.
The default assumption is that this is concocted narratives to raise military funding from an increasingly impoverished and war-weary public — sickened by the MIC waste and ineptitude (eg, we can’t repair ships and all of NATO manufactures fewer artillery shells than Russia alone).
This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
Yes, government and military officials have lied to Congress or, at the very least, obscure the truth. Consider that, in many cases, these officials are actively serving in their official capacity and have a sworn duty to protect the country. Preventing the disclosure of certain information is a major part of what they do.
Since you mention the "yellow-cake uranium," you should read the history of that situation. It wasn't a single person's word before Congress that Saddam Hussein had the uranium but the result of an elaborate document forgery which was proven as false within a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
However, each case you cite is either the justification or result of a highly-publicized event (Iraq invasion, Snowden investigation, Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine war). The UAP situation is quashed and remains a verboten subject in many circles, particularly in the media. As such, the UAP situation is distinct from those you mention.
You do suggest that this may be a way to raise military funding. If money was the end goal, they'd say that the US military could disable UAPs if we had more firepower or plowed more money into R&D to realize next-gen systems sooner. None of that was said, and both the witnesses and members of Congress directly contradict this theory. The witnesses admit that our existing military systems and any that we may build in the next "10-20 years" are inadequate to deal with the observed UAPs.
Some of my favorite questioning in the hearing came from AOC, who, when asking about increasing transparency in reporting UAP incidents, asked: "For the record, if you were me, where would you look? Titles? Programs? Departments? Regions? If you could just name...anything." Grusch responded he tell her "specifically" where to look but only in a classified briefing, which she took well enough.
>This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
They're individuals with verified and decorated military service records and have provided sworn testimony to Congress under penalty of perjury, which is far from zero credibility. As an anonymous individual posting on Hacker News, I have zero credibility beyond what anyone chooses to believe, and I suppose that's the main point: extraordinary claims require belief in extraordinary evidence.
I don't know what to make of this. It just seems so incredibly implausibly that extraterrestrials would have the technology or motive to come to Earth without widespread detection.
Right, like what would be their motivation for exclusively interacting with governments rather than, say, landing in Times Square?
I guess a counter thought would be that they haven't actually tried to interact with anyone at all, maybe only observe, but the armed forces/governments are the only element of our species with the ability to detect and retrieve them when they make mistakes.
1. They make exceptionally few mistakes overall anyway;
2. Perhaps it is the interaction between armed force technology and their vehicles which creates problems for them (whether intentional or not from our side);
3. The majority of our land surface area is not inhabited at any given moment. Maybe these drones, or whatever they are, do not even care about life here, and are not particularly attracted to cities or people, and are statistically more likely to fail out of reach of most populated areas just because that's what our geographic distribution is like.
He testified under oath. Every time he was asked for specifics, he said he had them, had already provided them, or in some cases would provide them immediately after because they were classified--which is the proper response if you don't want to go to jail.
If he's a nut, you'd expect evasion, contradiction, waffling and avoidance when asked for specifics. I didn't see any of that. He is already providing data that will be verifiable. An attention-seeking con would work hard to avoid providing anything he can be called out on. I have no idea what's going on, and this is all nuts, but that certainly didn't fit the mold I was expecting.
I can see where it might sound that way if you haven't watched the testimony.
"I provided this classified information under oath to the inspector general" is not an avoidance tactic but a direction where to locate classified info.
"I'll tell you later" on the surface might sound like an avoidance tactic, but when he was asked when he could provide it the answer was "immediately after today's session." In other words, no stalling at all, he just preferred not getting arrested for sharing top-secret info publicly.
Willing to get arrested would be a huge signal that he's an actual whistleblower and not full of shit!
There's almost no chance he'd face any consequences given the topic and the amount of support he'd have the from the public, and even then, Daniel Hale's sentence for disclosing dozens of classified documents to reporters was ~3.5yrs in jail. The LARPers pretending like he'd be sent to gitmo are completely in lala land.
We only have one life, nobody wants to sacrifice 3 years of it. Just because you and I consider potential alien life disclosures to be important doesn't mean we have the right to demand someone with that knowledge sacrifice their own life for us to have it.
If I had hardcore proof of definite alien life on earth but by revealing it I'd spend time in prison, would I do it? Or would I be content to know that in the 4-billion year scope of life on Earth, people will probably eventually figure it out without me anyway, and that I could let go of my particular contribution to the arc of history for a simple, peaceful life with family? Maybe the latter...
If you wanted the latter, you wouldn't repeatedly go on national TV claiming a giant conspiracy and then testify in front of congress.. In any case, I'm not "demanding" that he do something that could result in jail time but rather pointing out that based on his own telling of his own story, he should be happy to do so. That he's not is strongly indicative that he's full of shit.
So far he's abiding by the law and not going to jail. What is in "his own telling of his own story" that suggests he should be happy to go to jail? It seems like he's trying hard not to.
"Call me a Boy Scout or whatever. It’s just when I saw the kind of wrongdoing I did … I don’t want to be 60 or 70 years old in the future and have that, you know, “could have, should have, would have” kind of feeling where I could have made a difference,” he said. “I did not want to live a life of regret."
This is all so dumb - the fact that there's more incredulousness to room temperature superconductors than this nonsense is a real shame. Listen to this tripe:
“It is a well-established fact, at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis, that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions,” he said. “And you can imagine, four and five-dimensional space where what we experience is linear time, ends up being a physical dimension in higher dimensional space where you were living there. You could translate across what we perceive as a linear flow. So there is a possibility that this is a theory here. I’m not saying this is 100% the case but it could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and it’s actually coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
So the President doesn't know about it, but this random FBI dork does -- and it's such a well-kept secret that we're willing to extrajudicially imprison Americans who reveal details about the program -- but only if they do so in open testimony and not in a SCIF?
And he'll go to Gitmo, but only if the details are specific, because the people who will extrajudicially imprison the whistleblower for revealing details of the program are following the laws we have about classification?
Part of the testimony was that there is widespread detection. The claim is that UAPs are often a part of briefings and debriefs. Its also been claimed during the recent UAP related testimonies that a large number of military and civilian pilots have seen stuff, but either had no clear path to report it, reported it and were ignored, or reported and were harassed, or chose to not report it out of fear of harassment.
There's nothing stopping the civilians from reporting it publicly AFAIK. There's enough cameras in the sky that we'd have footage of a few. Especially from all the commercial fights with passengers.
Part of the issue is the stigma. Commercial pilots are afraid to come forward, and that’s why Ryan Graves came to this meeting because his mission is to reduce the stigma so pilots feel safe reporting this issue.
I'd agree on some pilots, and sure they should post more unexplained things for analysis. But given how many people are eagerly into bigfoot or cryptids, it's not like every pilot with some kind of evidence would feel unsafe sharing it.
Pilots, both commercial and military, are constantly under scrutiny to maintain a healthy mental state for fear of their license being revoked. You can not be mentally unstable and be a pilot. For years it was generally well accepted that people who believed in UFOs are crazy, so pilots have kept this to themselves for fear of retribution. Go ask any pilot how they would feel reporting something moving in unexplainable ways right up against their aircraft.
That's why I said evidence. I'm not expecting them to tell tales of UFO sightings. Having a video of something does not reflect on your mental state (unless you faked it). This issue also doesn't apply to passengers and there's lots of people in the sky who don't have a pilot's licence to protect.
Most planes aren’t equipped with any camera systems. The videos commercial pilots and passengers use are their phones which have trouble focusing on objects half a mile away (which is very close for an aircraft to be next to another one but very far for your phone to focus on).
Military pilots do have camera systems like the ATFLIR pods on F-18s but the pentagon only declassifies those videos when it’s useful - like when the Chinese jet made an American military plan fly through its fumes recently
Blurry photos do not stop people from posting them in many other cases. Planes do not have to be equipped as such: there's so many people flying with GoPro-s and similar recording all the time that we'd get something popping up all the time.
And that's even if we ignore the claim that people repeatedly see something. If I was a pilot and spotted something weird more than once, I'd make sure I record every flight from then on - can't imagine not doing it.
I’ve done some basic research and can attest none of these are at least CGI made. Some of these predate photoshop. The issue with all of these videos are they are hard to prove definitively without corroborating sensor data. But they are interesting none the less.
Yup, that's exactly what I meant. Those are worth analysing and talking about. I'd be glad if there were even fewer barriers to reporting those. But it also proves the barriers are not that big and a bit of an excuse.
There is actually still a barrier both militarily and commercially until. The military still has mostly no formal structure for UAP reporting. AARO is working to set that up but only has a portion of the Naval Air Force set up and not any other branch. Commercially, there is nothing. I believe congressmen are writing a law that requires the reporting of UAP by commercial airliners but that won't go into effect until at least mid next year. So while pilots may have this data, they don't have a formal way to report it other than showing it to a buddy.
I hope this gets resolved soon, but I also hope this data doesn't become immediately classified.
When I go out for a hike in the woods or a hike in a new state/country that isn’t my home. I don’t go out destroying the land around me. I observe and enjoy my time
Maybe these aliens are scientists. Documenting biological life across the galaxy. Maybe they’re VanCampers. Just bouncing from planet to planet for fun
If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy. Lots of empty planets with plenty of resources out there!
Not saying aliens/UFOs are real, but I think it’s very easy to imagine them existing and not being destructive. Or maybe they’re just scouting before the invasion :)
Seriously. There's nothing here that they can't find out in space in greater quantities and easier access. Except our animal and plant life. And no worries about harvesting us like in movies, it's way easier to grow meat or whatever than travel across the universe for it. We're most likely a curiosity.
Their opsec's way too good for scientists. If they're anything like our scientists, we'd have recovered one of the flying saucers when they tried to go through Arby's drive-through but didn't have enough clearance.
Maybe they're just fictional, and this guy has a Fox Mulder larping fetish.
> If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy.
If we ever achieve FTL travel, do you imagine that it will be available to frat bros doing road trips to Beta Reticuli VI, or will it be this horrendously expensive, economy-wrecking thing that we get to do once or twice and then have to stop because it is almost impossible to do?
We achieved a moon landing for fuck's sake, and the frat bro still hasn't duplicated that one yet (though I will concede he's not doing too shabby).
I think it’s a mistake to imagine how an alien species would behave based on our own tendencies.
A civilization that has achieved what their (supposed) presence here implies has clearly managed to move far beyond human capability, and our understanding of opsec seems irrelevant.
It could be that with sufficiently advanced technology, “opsec” is mostly irrelevant relative to a species like ours with the capabilities we have.
And that's fine and all, but it's been nearly a hundred years and they're still doing the same shit? Are we supposed to believe we are the equivalent of a tourist attraction? One where you seem to have a high likelihood of dying?
Not saying I believe this, but for sake of argument…
If these are scientific/observation missions, humanity is going through its most transformative stages of advancement, and the last 100 years have been quite interesting.
If we could go and observe a developing civilization secretly and over a long period of time, I suspect we would.
Maybe they are trying to subtly steer our planet out of the way of an extinction event meteor with ballistics - and we’ve accidentally steered the meteor back into a collision course!
If you rephrase it as "a civilization that mastered interplanetary travel and can split the atom somehow keeps crashing on our planet" it makes me wonder.
What if bugs, suicidal or thrill-seeking pilots or overly confident bureaucracies remain a fixture in the next stages of life's evolution as well?
Or what if fixing those problems is harder than the technology?
Or, perhaps, that civilization is using found technology from UFOs that crashed on their planet and they haven't quite figured out where the brake pedal is, yet?
Huh? You’re telling me you think they can travel light years to get here but don’t have the tech to land without us detecting them? That’s an assumption.
Assuming FTL is off the table, anything sent here will have been designed and launched with no evidence the subject planet has radars or air combat hardware. One should expect probes to have no air combat capability, and may not even bother to dodge a missile, even if they (incidentally) have very good aerodynamic performance.
If they don't have FYL then it's ridiculous that they'd send what are effectively tiny scout ships that don't have stealth tech to avoid the Other Aliens and that crash at alarming rates With Living Pilots inside...
Really...
Just look at the claim objectively and it becomes obvious it's absurd.
You would send some probe complex that includes small scout aircraft. Literally, NASA has done this. From many vantage points, Earth is a water world with no intelligent life on it. Most operators would send an interstellar probe based on that assumption. Things like living organisms can be application-specific bio robots that are wholly unprepared for anything like contact. Really, sending a bunch of military hardware on a space probe is obviously absurd. We have examples of literal scientists building literal space probes and they literally don’t send them with weapons.
If things are such that aliens send probes to any such planet as ours they would be concerned about negative consequences and put great effort into ensuring they could not be discovered by _any_ potentially threatening species.
This precludes any of the forms you suggest, as any species capable of sending such would also be more than advanced enough to ensure we wouldn't discover them and that they wouldn't fail at the rates claimed.
Even if we presume many many species sending such, there's the issue that they wouldn't be bothering with us in this way and would either have already conquered us for the resources to fight each other etc. (And even if not fighting they would be aware of each other as a result of these supposed visits).
There's no reasonable explanation for subterfuge which is the only answer ever given for such questions of "why have they not made direct contact?" Right?
It’s a good call out - the ability of the government to keep secrets across decades.
But - tinfoil hat time - have they not demonstrated their ability to do this wrt the knowledge around nuclear weapons?
Edit: and considering the claimed abilities of UAP, might those technologies be on par (in terms of military
might) with the technology behind nuclear weapons?
Also, that bit about a spaceship needing a biological pilot was kind of dumb. I don’t know how you can see the advances in AI these days and not be able to extrapolate an advanced space faring species not needing a biological pilot on their spaceship.
Those designs aren’t even modern though are they? Plus there’s a whole host of logistics and operations knowledge at scale around nuclear weapons that are highly classified and not known.
> “I don’t want to oversimplify it, but how are you going to fly one [spaceship]? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple,” Burchett said.
“Simple” is not the word I’d use to describe this conclusion.
It was a machine pilot keeping a pet plant in its ship.
Only half kidding, if we meet aliens they will be machines at least to some extent. Biological life has a lot of annoying limitations and continuously circumventing them is more expensive than just becoming machines.
It’s way more likely to encounter von Neumann probes than some beer drinking alien traveling across the galaxy in compression socks and with a neck pillow.
I wouldn't be so sure. They could have a much more advanced idea of what life is, and life could have deep meaning to them, they might seek to keep their biological selves in tact and use machines only as tools. I know that's how I would roll, and I'd raise my kids that way, a group of beings like that could spawn a nation down the road with a rule like that. Or with their understanding of life and computation and intelligence and the universe, it could just be self evident to them: your form follows your function, if you change your form you change your function and you're no longer you. Sending robots, sure, becoming robots, I think you're bound to meet at least as many that don't as that do.
You mean our nuclear weapons where the secrets were leaked[0] to other governments repeatedly?
Those secrets?
The secrets that we executed both of the Rosenbergs over?
No our government has not demonstrated their ability to keep secrets over the span of a few years, let alone decades.
I don't disagree with you, but you have to remind yourself of a potential bias: you only hear of the secrets they didn't successfully keep. The ones they kept successfully you obviously wouldn't have heard about, by definition. Who's to say this hearing isn't an example of them losing control over a secret?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadWhat next, hearings on Big Foot :)
How would you know it was not from earth? Is it as simple as there being no evidence of any contamination by hair colorants, straighteners, shampoos, or any products sold by Proctor and Gamble?
I too would like to see actual links to any evidence or documentation of these events and products so I can see for myself.
Bigfoot is almost a cottage industry and is definitely a tourist bait in some areas.
Oh, the Vatican is involved! Of course they are, foolish me for not expecting it. No doubt the Knights Templar are somehow mixed up with this as well. It all seems very diabolical; tell me more, Abulafia.
Anyway, a link to something about the hair that isn't carbon-based so it can't be from around here would be great since you brought up that subject. It's still a "tits or GTFO" place here on the intertubes.
Thanks, pardner.
Former commander says he didn't believe in UFOs and defends himself with "I never watched history channel or anything like that" -- as though that's a source for UFOs rather than...history.
Maybe you haven't watched the History Channel recently, but there is indeed a lot of stuff about aliens on there. Possibly more stuff about aliens than about actual history.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/memes/ancient-aliens/
That's four hours of aliens nonsense, four hours of drug themed history documentaries (probably the same target demographic as the aliens stuff.) An hour of christian prophesy and preaching, 12 hours of reality TV, and some infomercials to make up the difference.
Is it any wonder that an ostensibly serious man such as a military commander thinks that the History Channel is trash? I'd be concerned if he didn't.
What's actually happening is pretty crazy and anyone who has a small amount of curiosity should give it some consideration. It seems foolish just to dismiss this with a scoff.
There were 138 congressional hearings on climate change in 2022 alone.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/on-the-hill-in-2022-a-bre...
https://www.eesi.org/files/EESI_s_2022_Climate,_Environmenta...
Seems Congress is doing all it can to ignore Issues that really need to be fixed.
>There were 138 congressional hearings on climate change in 2022 alone.
And what came of this ? Just denial, finger pointing and "fund raisers" to get more bribes from the fossil fuel industry :)
If we find out they ARE here, maybe they can help with the climate?
While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere, the idea that it got here and then made a mistake seems strange to me.
And I've always thought the military didn't investigate these UFOs because they weren't unidentified to them. They're just FOs when you're the one who built them.
I also can’t imagine a species that has interstellar travel, but manually operated ships. I think we are not that far from humans not operating any forms of transportation anymore, and we are at best thousands of years from having the technology to visit anywhere life may exist.
I disagree, it's pretty easy to make "Drake equations" go to zero, particularly if you limit the scope to just the Milky Way galaxy (only 10^11 stars.) The Rare Earth Hypothesis is consistent with all of our empirical observations of the universe thus-far.
Or it could be a few dozen 50/50 chances that need to be cleared, or some mix of the two. Drake equations only spit out "aliens likely" if you assume earth-like planets will inevitably create human-like life but that's a hell of an assumption. And then we look into the night sky and see/hear nothing from the aliens that supposedly must be up there and call it a paradox... well it's not a paradox if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true. If the empirical evidence is saying one thing and the speculative math is saying another thing, it's probably the speculative math that's wrong.
1. Do programs exist over which Congress has no knowledge and/or oversight. If so, this is likely unconstitutional.
2. Do programs exist because Congressionally appropriated funds have been covertly redirected to those programs without Congressional knowledge. If so, likely unconstitutional.
3. Have whistleblowers been threatened or harmed to prevent disclosure and/or testimony. If so, likely a violation of US criminal statutes, and likely unconstitutional - particularly if those whistleblowers intended to provide Congressional testimony in accordance with Congress's oversight role.
The point is not disclosure, confirming existence or declassification - despite what you may hear. It could be one or more of those things occur, but likely not via these hearings.
Oversight can be as simple as notice to the "Gang of Eight" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence), or possibly the Intel/Defense committee ranking members, and need NOT to be to the entire Congress or even full committee membership. The accusations in these hearings seem to allege this minimal notice did not take place. The testimony also claims extra-governmental (possibly private sector) program management with no political accountability.
In sum... this appears to be a (necessary) power struggle over programs & information. At the same time - and depending on what the real truth may be - one can make a convincing argument little of this information should be public & these programs should remain off the books. Depends on your confidence in the body politic and Congress.
Perhaps, but as we've seen the law and the Constitution are subject to interpretation and to the extent that the law is enforced.
There are no aliens hidden by any government in the world. It's impossible to keep something like that under wraps. This whole thing is put on because it's a good way to distract the public and all politicians who are tough on aliens get political points and votes.
And just to be clear - you can't simultaneously think that the government has the capability to hide aliens but also discredit that the moon landings (for example) were faked. If you find yourself thinking "well they could be hiding aliens" ask yourself if you also find "they faked the moon landing" to be ridiculous - it's the same logic.
The purpose of the hearing is to do that again in public. In theory, the idea is to get the information distributed more widely. In practice, it's usually about grandstanding, so that the politicians get to make speeches on TV.
Take that for what it's worth
> at the GS-15 civilian level, which is the military equivalent of a full-bird colonel
I was previously both a Major and later NH-IV (which in my case had equivalency with GS-15-10)and the only people making this claim would be ones that want to inflate their own importance.
They are completely different legally and fall under different legal codes - namely the GS system is not subject to UCMJ nor can they make certain legal decisions that an O6 can make and has a completely different promotion and evaluation.
He wants to portray himself as a battle hardened commander when he’s just another run of the mill PowerPoint slinger.
He also has no direct knowledge it’s all stuff he heard from other people in the government.
And certainly, "a government lies and has secrets" ranks well above "aliens are in our skies" in terms of likelyhood. Occam's Razor and all.
But, I don't know if this sounds like a psyop to me.
One, Grush says that many (dozens?) of people (whose names he has provided to the whistleblower office) spoke to him about these alleged programs. Dozens or people push this psyop... why? The government wants to convince people that it is... even shadier than we thoughts? Or is this some thing they cooked up to ensnare Grusch specifically?
Is our government secretive and scary? Oh yeah. But if this is a psyop then I don't see how it helps them.
Or are you expecting him to just pull a Snowden, leak everything and be charged with espionage?
So basically "take that for what it's worth" in both cases is 0.
Now it’s on you to disprove my teapot theory.
In case you didn't pick it up, the evidentiary proof is on the claimant not the interrogator.
(RIP Trevor Moore.)
I think it’s all the Hunter Biden stuff:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/hunter-b...
I’m sure there’s a lot of this kind of corruption going on with Republicans in Congress as well so there’s a sort of mutually assured destruction protecting all of them.
Intelligence personnel swear to keep their mouths shut. He has no real evidence and no real compelling reason that I'm seeing for coming forward.
What did he expect?
Why this cynical attitude? Perhaps he did expect it and he is now clearly and publicly stating it in a congressional record so something might be done about other whistleblowers.
Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decades - and no concerted & corroborative evidence exists from medieval or prehistoric times (apart from some cave paintings where imaginations have been at play of superior beings).
Human race always had a creative tone to recording our history - we borrow philosophy, allude to existence of supernatural, and of God almighty. When it is about non-planetary life, definitive evidence _must_ exist all over the planet that we were visited - not just one country. Or am I being too cynical?
I've met Travis Walton. He is one of the most genuine people I have ever met. We're just not listening (some people are but most are not capable of hearing it).
I am _not_ a non-believer. It is just the lack of scientific historicity and diversity of evidence that bothers me. I cannot reconcile that mountain of contradiction with the current testimony. It is one Congressional account of definitive existence, versus the absence of conclusive proof or material evidence anywhere else.
There are.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over...
Now, none of them are as clear and objective as "A being that was obvious not human spoke to me and told me about themselves. They are ..." - but that doesn't mean we don't have a ton of incidents reported over the centuries.
Summarily, many supernatural themed events were written by fantasy writers of those age to peddle to crowds outside their region. Those people have died, and the enigma forgotten - but these writings have found their way as proto-evidence of unusual activity from medieval times & now being used to support arguments.
Worth noting that Russia does actually have similar myths, likely for the same reasons.
My takeaway there is more that it's believable pilots have sighted unidentifiable aircraft exhibiting technologically implausible behavior because those craft are classified projects, rather than because they're extraterrestrial craft, but I don't think it's so plainly unbelievable that the government can't keep secret projects under wraps. The stealth modified helicopters used in the Bin Laden raid come to mind, and really, those are pretty boring as far as "top secret technology" goes, and were apparently in pretty regular use already.
Rare triple negation. Also, I couldn't follow the last bit. Were you saying that basically what we imply as dazzling mind boggling technology is a top secret projects waiting to be unveiled / discovered?
And yeah, I mean after reading the book I feel:
- it is plausible witnesses have seen aircraft behaving in ways they believed were technologically or physically impossible
- it is much much more likely those craft were classified projects than extraterrestrials
- the USA has previously created, and kept secret, aircraft levering technological innovations that had recently seemed impossible
The US and the USSR had to collaborate on filtering out UAPs from radar early warning systems so we didn't nuke each other.
Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
> Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decade
UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
I haven't provided references here in the interest of my time, but all of what I stated here is readily verifiable with a few internet searches.
All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence. The issue today is provenance. With claims so large, even HD video of an object and creatures in real time wouldn't be enough. The only thing that would convince people is the word of the US (or some other major country) government itself providing evidence, which it has done in small doses, and is the only reason this hearing is happening.
And as we know they're the only countries with radar and observation abilities.
> Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
> The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
> UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence.
No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist. Even a mild dive into the claims shows how absurd all of these are, and often very real explanations are given, verified, and ignored by the community that wants to believe. It's got all the rigor of pizzagate and is in fact less likely to be possible.
They're not? Are you implying that by pointing out one event I'm explicitly excluding the possibility of others? Not sure that follows.
> This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
Depends on who you ask, which was kin of my entire point. There is tons of evidence, what missing is provenance.
> We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
Again, the was my point. I wasn't saying "here is all the 100% proven evidence". I was saying "there is no evidence" is an inaccurate statement.
> No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist
There is plenty of material, with plenty of seals of approval, just not from the U.S. gov.
Sorry, I haven’t seen a single decent photo or video—everything is always blurry, distant, or ambiguous. And this is after a decade where virtually everyone is constantly carrying a camera on their person.
I'll point out 2 things:
1) The videos released to the NY times for their 2017 story are compressed and downscaled version of much higher quality videos the US gov has in it possession. That is indisputable fact as the US gov itself freely admits that.
2) You probably haven't looked. I've seen many convincing photos and videos, but unless their from an F-XX aircraft and the D.O.D tells me it is what it is, I ignore them because pictures and video have been easy to fake for as long as picture and video have existed. Here is one I like: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13dmaif/black_triangl... No way to know if it's legit or not, like I've said, but pretty cool either way.
We haven't seen a single clear evidence yet. The objects captured from fighter jet IR cameras discussed in the past have also had explanation of lens flares and focal aberrations. True color image corresponding of the same event do not exist. No two accounts of unidentified activities are also same with inconsistencies one observes when people extend stories based on tenuous observation/experience
One is a potential flare/focal aberration. The other two have no such explanation, and one of the three has radar tracking, followed by pilot interaction (David Fravor), then was videod by a second pilot on encounter (the video that was released.
Keep in mind also that all three are very low quality versions of the originals.
In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge. Create an elaborate story around unexplained IR camera observation. Potentially drop breadcrumbs & leave it ambiguous to project existence of superior otherworldly technology.
I believe most of us agree at this point, whatever proof publicly exists isn't incontrovertible - but ambiguous enough to be an umbrella for other top secret projects. Aliens aren't selectively choosing US - if you pause & think. And if that should not happen, evidence of similar standing should pop up elsewhere as well. The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military, is somehow not matching up with critical reasoning. (And many of these militaries actually do have strong public outreach just like US af-mil)
Leaving aside the military, clear photos have not showed up from the regular citizenry despite us having astrophotography capabilities in phones since sometime. The evidence or lack of it, isn't adding up
That just depends on what evidence you do, or do not believe. Depending on your selection, and number of explanations may make sense.
> In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge
Personally, I'd believe UFOs were all fake/mistakes before I believed it was real technology held by any government.
> The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military
It is. UFO reports come out of all of those countries. India has a religious tradition with very clear UFO references, and videos come out of China all the time (although they tend to be purposely faked 100% of the times I've seen).
NUFORC has a kaggle dataset in fact: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/NUFORC/ufo-sightings
I have lived/ been a citizen/ married to someone from each of these listed places. UFO reference in Hinduism is zero. I am practicing Hindu - I can vouch with 100% certainty. My wife is devout Buddhist/ formerly Christian & she confirms there is nothing in their scripture. I cannot engage any of these answers in good faith of critical thinking, as whenever there is a question of evidence, it is either trust-me-bro or it-is-classified
Not sure what you expect me to present as far as evidence goes when my point is "there is a ton of dubious evidence, but evidence none-the-less".
Kaggle competition is a supporting evidence for you?
> And with regard to Hindu UFOs, I was referring to Vimana.
Those were depicted as chariots mostly drawn by flying horses or elephants in Ramayana & Mahabharata. Unless you consider flying horses as aliens. Also, these were written as poetic verses with generous doses of imagination.
> Not sure what you expect me to present as far as evidence goes when my point is "there is a ton of dubious evidence, but evidence none-the-less".
Let me help by stating: There is a ton of dubious statements from many people which doesn't count as evidence (those testifying without shred of evidence to congress). More of he-said-she-said trust-me-bro. Hence why I asserted these aren't worth discussing anymore. And quoting them as support is not good faith in a scientific evidence-oriented discussion
There are conspiracy theories & then there are conspiracy dogmas group of people fall trap to & blindly propagate, much like religion. Then usual responses to reasonable scientific queries become topics of (1) our science isn't developed enough (2) godly metaphysics isn't known enough (3) reasons of alien presence/ absence/ ambiguity aren't clear enough - despite strong evidence to the contrarian opinion.
No, but NUFORC is?
> More of he-said-she-said trust-me-bro. Hence why I asserted these aren't worth discussing anymore
You're more than welcome to stop discussing it then?
I'm not sure why you're dedicated to the idea that no other countries having UFO sightings. Even if it was just clutter and balloons, it seems reasonable for people all over the world to make mistakes and thing something mundane is fantastic. It doesn't seem like a very useful point in either direction of the discussion.
After watching the hearing today, I was starting to suspect that we're party to this psyops campaign. It's one of the most outlandish things I've seen in recent memory.
All of the guys are credentialed and I didn't get the impression that anyone was grifting anything.
They definitely think it's real. I suspect something is real, but I get the impression that the real thing is not what they think it is.
Like, if that's a reasonable conclusion, then by leaving pilots misinformed we've effectively broadcast the tech to our adversaries. Maybe that was the intent, but it seems like a senselessly roundabout method if so.
Rep Nancy Mace, a North Carolina Republican, tried to get Grusch to elaborate on what he knew about non-terrestrial bodies.
She asks him if "biologics" were recovered from any crashed crafts.
Referencing his previous media interviews, Grusch responds that "biologics came with some of these recoveries".
Were they human or non-human? Mace asks.
"Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the programme I talked to," Grusch responds.ike this."
Believing so suggests there's a purpose to deliberately wasting everyone's time in such a hearing.
Or a simpler answer, Grusch is plain lying. But somehow, the stakes seem pretty high for him to do so here, unless he's confident of the whistleblower book money he could someday make off of this.
There's no fucking way this is remotely true, but everywhere I look, not matter the community, there's so much "what if" nonsense that reeks of the same ignorance those people screamed about when that was the argument for COVID conspiracies.
The energy required to travel through space is obscene.
The difficulty of traveling through space is obscene.
Finding ANYTHING in space is obscene.
IF somehow all of this was done, then the idea it's been kept a secret when there's soooo many ways of tracking and viewing these things is stupid (especially when you consider how much energy would need to be expended).
This is also assuming that for some reason they want to remain secret?
The whole thing is just so on it's face bs, but people so desperately want to believe they'll ignore all evidence. I can understand that, but I HATE the hypocrisy on display from those who are routinely critical of others for having such gaps in their logic.
I would love for us to find evidence of life in the universe which is why I despise this charade which takes attention away from the scientists who are actually trying to do so. But apparently SETI is in on it too or some other nonsense.
Even more so a million years from now.
The reality is that we're not a particularly intelligent species - as shown by the fact that we're currently terraforming our own planet to make it less hospitable.
Our culture may well be extinct within a century. So I think it's optimistic to believe that we as a species have much of a clue about anything at all.
Now put that in the context of an extremely old universe, and it's not hard to understand that we're unlikely to be the smartest people in the room.
FWIW I'm agnostic about UFOs. The problem is that they conflate two issues - aerial phenomena, and alien visitation.
There's no reason those should be connected. Or that the latter would inevitably be responsible for the former.
The scientific thing to do is to collect evidence of the former before assuming the latter.
2.6 million years ago: Stone tools
1.7 million years ago: Controlled fire
5,000 - 3,000 BC: Writing
3,000 BC: The wheel
1543: Nicolaus Copernicus publishes his heliocentric model of the solar system
1687: Newton publishes "Principia Mathematica"
1915: Albert Einstein publishes the general theory of relativity.
1969: Apollo 11 mission successfully lands the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon.
It's hard to predict how much research all of these will take to fully harness, but given our previous rate of progress I'm still very hopeful that the world in 100 years will have technology we can't even dream of.
That's what this all boils down to. It's the exact same line of logic.
Sure there could be an omnipotent all powerful being that just chooses to stay hidden from us for no provable, observable, or obvious reason. It's just impossible to prove or disprove.
What if they don't need to accelerate? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy. What if they can teleport? Neat, it's STILL a shitton of energy. What if they can hop dimensions or bend the universe? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy.
What if it's not a shit ton of energy? Fuck it why not, how did they find us? They have tech for that? Fuck it why not, why aren't they showing themselves beyond these extremely rare sightings? They have a reason for that. Fuck it why not, why would every government hide these? Tech or war or something. Fuck it why not, why hasn't SETI or one of the thousand other independent science observatories or detectors not picked up any of this or reported on it?.....
and on and on and on.
So i can't prove that tomorrow the Sun God Ra won't descend from the heavens and sit atop the pyramids as if it was his throne and rule from on high, but I damn sure don't have any evidence that's why the sun is moving across the sky.
But this green men circus makes me really uncomfortable at this point. I kinda want to believe.
Unfortunately, we haven't found any drop-in replacement to Newton's first & second laws for e.g.; Conversely, more & more of physics is condensing towards established standard models proving that our model of universe is more definite. In the quantum space our research is mostly finding new interactions, not fundamental particles everyday. Energy & it transformations are the biggest truths eventually. To propel crafts capable of interstellar voyage, immense energy burst is needed for propulsion. We have seen no evidence of the kind of physics which will break relativistic models - and no material which can sustain the thermals in the process.
At the core of it, our chances to find another habitable world & intelligent species wherever they might be is rapidly reducing. Universe is expanding faster than previous estimated and probably double as old if you consider recent research. Our window of opportunity to establish contact passed probably before we came into existence.
It is like predicting we'll be able to detect God by advances one day. That supernatural being could exist - but most scientific evidence points to a hard no, given we already know it is a mental / emotional construction.
People need to believe in something. Multiple things. Anything. It’s why thousands of religions exist.
Most people have mundane lives and are wage slaves. This gives people hope. People want to believe there is more to life. Americans in particular want to believe their government is all powerful.
It should not be so shocking how easy it is to get people to believe this, or the fake moon landing, or anything else. People desperately want to believe, and the government is happy to enable it because it provides stability.
If I was the government exchequer and comfortably spending on the refrigeration of alien entrails & annually greasing their flying saucers, I wouldn't _additionally_ spend billions of dollars setting up space observatories like JWST, new radio wave telescopes & deep space probes to find evidence of life. At the least, experts from scientific community will be invited to investigate any material finds & that information will trickle out in tiny amounts. Scientific community deeply believes in replication at its core. It is impossible for everything to remain compartmental.
And acknowledging existence of alien technology only makes the position of a country more formidable, not less. Our global relationship is today less of muscle (like the past) & more posturing. By acknowledging otherworldly technology's existence but denying the details, US would be incredibly in advantageous position militarily. Why wouldn't they if they already possessed these technology?
We as human race may be spiteful to our brethren, but not stupid given the obscene expenditure of wealth and resources we dedicate annually in lieu of feeding & keeping everyone happy
BBC with the appropriate level of snark for the continual lack of details and evidence.
Overall, if such events are true I wonder what effect this will have on politics driven by religion-based agendas (many who drive such agenda are not even pious or adherents in any form of the word). Maybe this is finally bring an end to religion-driven politics.
I remember listening to Art Bell as a kid, fascinated with the stories of aliens, MIB, military coverups, etc… with former military men telling a lot of the stories.
Then I read Carl Sagan and realized how silly it all was. Then I learned how the government lies about so much. How they use current and former military and intelligence to further those lies.
Shame so many still buy into this at all. Highly suggest reading a demon haunted world if you haven’t. It makes these claims pure comedy.
> When the Air Force finally made Special Report #14 public in October 1955, it was claimed that the report scientifically proved that UFOs did not exist. Critics of this claim note that the report actually proved that the "unknowns" were distinctly different from the "knowns" at a very high statistical significance level. The Air Force also incorrectly claimed that only 3% of the cases studied were unknowns, instead of the actual 22%. They further claimed that the residual 3% would probably disappear if more complete data were available. Critics counter that this ignored the fact that the analysts had already thrown such cases into the category of "insufficient information", whereas both "knowns" and "unknowns" were deemed to have sufficient information to make a determination. Also, the "unknowns" tended to represent the higher quality cases, q.e. reports that already had better information and witnesses. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book]
That said, this misinformation only highlights that the Air Force was trying to minimize UFOs, not increase their presence in the public consciousness.
Reaction I: The concept/prospect of space aliens really mashes a lot of people's emotional buttons. And "having a right to learn about" is how such strong emotions are usually articulated.
Reaction II: So long as $Potential_Enemy_Nation is a bit unsure about whether you are really lying, about having a bunch of from-1000-years-in-the-future technology hidden away, that you could suddenly start using (against them) if sufficiently motivated...that's pretty cheap deterrence, eh?
How people believe this shit will always be amazing to me.
That was a complete waste of everyones time.
The bipartisanship at the hearing is to be commended, and the national security angle cannot be overstated. All three witnesses believe these UAP are genuine national security threats because they possess flight capabilities far exceeding anything beyond what we have. These UAP were documented on multiple military sensor platforms, some of which are still classified.
You must realize the USG has been and is engaged in an active disinformation campaign to deny existence of UAP, even to Congress. For example, multiple Subcommittee members mentioned that they wanted to meet in a SCIF with Grusch to receive a classified briefing but could not. A direct quote from the hearing: "Just so that the press knows and the people know, we [members of the Subcommittee] were even denied access to a classified briefing in a SCIF due to the amount of hoops we had to jump through to grant temporary clearance to witness Grusch, who has knowledge of classified information." Additionally, multiple members of Congress were initially denied access to data and personnel related to a UAP incident reported at Eglin AFB and in the end only received a portion of what was sought. Clear attempts to prevent elected officials from merely accessing relevant information is a genuine threat to national security because the military serves the people, not the other way around.
All three witnesses are trained and decorated military service members, each of which have since left the military. Their situational awareness and observational abilities are much better than you or me, particularly since we haven't been explicitly trained on such while they have. Additionally, Grusch is documented to have worked in both the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), two sensitive branches of the military intelligence community. As far as I'm aware, the NRO ships and provides military sensing platforms, and the NGA performs analysis from many different military data streams, including the NRO. Grusch even said in his opening statement that, at the NGA, he had a hand in making the Presidential Daily Briefing.
One commenter here says it's "more reasonable to assume this is psyops by an adversary", which is, by definition, a conspiracy theory, given that the commenter has no evidence of such occurring and would prefer to live in a world where three former US military service members are coerced to commit perjury to Congress about something which doesn't actually exist. Moreover, if an adversarial nation possesses craft with the capabilities described by the three witnesses, drawing any attention, even through an active disinformation campaign, to that strategic advantage is a clear breach of operational security with no clear, tangible benefit.
The preponderance of evidence in support of the existence of UAP should be overwhelming unless you've made the choice to not accept the premise: that intelligent life beyond humanity exists.
Here's a link to the full hearing recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ7Dw-739VY
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You do know that you literally can't make that claim in good faith, right? That is simply your belief and, in fact, is contrary to the testimony of all three witnesses, all of which were personally invited to speak before Congress because of what they know. Clearly, you were not invited, though I suppose that itself is a belief.
All three witnesses claim that advanced military sensor platforms have gathered extensive information on UAP. Is that a piece of a craft? No. However, one of the witnesses testified under oath that he had direct knowledge of where such materials exist. You should want to see where his claims lead, if you truly believe in your closing statement.
>The only “evidence” is hearsay.
If that's your position, you didn't watch the hearing. One of the three witnesses is only there because he experienced a UAP while serving as a flight commander, and his former aviators reluctantly persuaded him to come forward. That individual is a primary source.
>Also, the members of the committee can lie without repercussions, so I don’t believe them. And the military lies to the public all the time.
Ah, so you're a conspiracy theorist. /s
>Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Any person can dismiss extraordinary evidence as illegitimate if they reject the underlying premise. You can have video evidence of a person clearly committing murder, but that doesn't mean a family member won't still claim it's not them or it's fabricated. A piece of material from a craft could be brought out in a hearing, and some people will still claim that it's fake or impossible to prove that it wasn't made on Earth in a government lab. An alien could testify before Congress, and some people will claim it's an elaborate fake using rubber masks and advanced robotics.
In this case, we do have historically-extraordinary evidence (submitted as sworn Congressional testimony and personal statements) of the existence of UAP. You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises:
- Physics as is commonly accepted is incomplete.
- Military pilots are better observers than the average person.
- Life of equal or greater intelligence exists beyond humanity.
However I still need some kind of hard physical evidence to start going down that path. Hopefully it shows up eventually, but I’m not holding my breath.
If mere words are your standard of evidence, then we are different. I need to see/sense/understand myself to believe - material/physical and photographic evidence, and expert, scientific, independently confirmed, reproducible analysis. If you don't, I have a bunch of stories to tell you.
> You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises [...]
Really weird to presume this
- Iraq WMDs
- dragnet surveillance
- ANA will fight the Taliban
We also know they obscure the truth, eg Victoria Nuland responding to the question about “chemical or biological weapons” in Ukraine by nodding as she spoke about “research labs”.
We also know the CIA has previously hacked the computers of a congressional investigation into their misconduct.
The default assumption is that this is concocted narratives to raise military funding from an increasingly impoverished and war-weary public — sickened by the MIC waste and ineptitude (eg, we can’t repair ships and all of NATO manufactures fewer artillery shells than Russia alone).
This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
Since you mention the "yellow-cake uranium," you should read the history of that situation. It wasn't a single person's word before Congress that Saddam Hussein had the uranium but the result of an elaborate document forgery which was proven as false within a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
However, each case you cite is either the justification or result of a highly-publicized event (Iraq invasion, Snowden investigation, Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine war). The UAP situation is quashed and remains a verboten subject in many circles, particularly in the media. As such, the UAP situation is distinct from those you mention.
You do suggest that this may be a way to raise military funding. If money was the end goal, they'd say that the US military could disable UAPs if we had more firepower or plowed more money into R&D to realize next-gen systems sooner. None of that was said, and both the witnesses and members of Congress directly contradict this theory. The witnesses admit that our existing military systems and any that we may build in the next "10-20 years" are inadequate to deal with the observed UAPs.
Some of my favorite questioning in the hearing came from AOC, who, when asking about increasing transparency in reporting UAP incidents, asked: "For the record, if you were me, where would you look? Titles? Programs? Departments? Regions? If you could just name...anything." Grusch responded he tell her "specifically" where to look but only in a classified briefing, which she took well enough.
>This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
They're individuals with verified and decorated military service records and have provided sworn testimony to Congress under penalty of perjury, which is far from zero credibility. As an anonymous individual posting on Hacker News, I have zero credibility beyond what anyone chooses to believe, and I suppose that's the main point: extraordinary claims require belief in extraordinary evidence.
On Dave Grusch and his claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grusch_UFO_whistleblower...
On David Fravor and his incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
I guess a counter thought would be that they haven't actually tried to interact with anyone at all, maybe only observe, but the armed forces/governments are the only element of our species with the ability to detect and retrieve them when they make mistakes.
Just somewhere in the desert conveniently close to AFBs and other restricted areas.
1. They make exceptionally few mistakes overall anyway;
2. Perhaps it is the interaction between armed force technology and their vehicles which creates problems for them (whether intentional or not from our side);
3. The majority of our land surface area is not inhabited at any given moment. Maybe these drones, or whatever they are, do not even care about life here, and are not particularly attracted to cities or people, and are statistically more likely to fail out of reach of most populated areas just because that's what our geographic distribution is like.
He doesn't come off that way.
He testified under oath. Every time he was asked for specifics, he said he had them, had already provided them, or in some cases would provide them immediately after because they were classified--which is the proper response if you don't want to go to jail.
If he's a nut, you'd expect evasion, contradiction, waffling and avoidance when asked for specifics. I didn't see any of that. He is already providing data that will be verifiable. An attention-seeking con would work hard to avoid providing anything he can be called out on. I have no idea what's going on, and this is all nuts, but that certainly didn't fit the mold I was expecting.
"I provided this classified information under oath to the inspector general" is not an avoidance tactic but a direction where to locate classified info.
"I'll tell you later" on the surface might sound like an avoidance tactic, but when he was asked when he could provide it the answer was "immediately after today's session." In other words, no stalling at all, he just preferred not getting arrested for sharing top-secret info publicly.
There's almost no chance he'd face any consequences given the topic and the amount of support he'd have the from the public, and even then, Daniel Hale's sentence for disclosing dozens of classified documents to reporters was ~3.5yrs in jail. The LARPers pretending like he'd be sent to gitmo are completely in lala land.
If I had hardcore proof of definite alien life on earth but by revealing it I'd spend time in prison, would I do it? Or would I be content to know that in the 4-billion year scope of life on Earth, people will probably eventually figure it out without me anyway, and that I could let go of my particular contribution to the arc of history for a simple, peaceful life with family? Maybe the latter...
This is all so dumb - the fact that there's more incredulousness to room temperature superconductors than this nonsense is a real shame. Listen to this tripe:
“It is a well-established fact, at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis, that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions,” he said. “And you can imagine, four and five-dimensional space where what we experience is linear time, ends up being a physical dimension in higher dimensional space where you were living there. You could translate across what we perceive as a linear flow. So there is a possibility that this is a theory here. I’m not saying this is 100% the case but it could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and it’s actually coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
And he'll go to Gitmo, but only if the details are specific, because the people who will extrajudicially imprison the whistleblower for revealing details of the program are following the laws we have about classification?
Yeah...
Body language, manner of speech, everything.
Just look at his eyes, they scream "I'm full of shit".
Military pilots do have camera systems like the ATFLIR pods on F-18s but the pentagon only declassifies those videos when it’s useful - like when the Chinese jet made an American military plan fly through its fumes recently
And that's even if we ignore the claim that people repeatedly see something. If I was a pilot and spotted something weird more than once, I'd make sure I record every flight from then on - can't imagine not doing it.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13dmaif/black_triangl...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/12kaed7/2010_ufo_that...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/t4smpl/flyby_uap_foot...
* https://imgur.io/a/seWVHB6
I’ve done some basic research and can attest none of these are at least CGI made. Some of these predate photoshop. The issue with all of these videos are they are hard to prove definitively without corroborating sensor data. But they are interesting none the less.
I hope this gets resolved soon, but I also hope this data doesn't become immediately classified.
When I go out for a hike in the woods or a hike in a new state/country that isn’t my home. I don’t go out destroying the land around me. I observe and enjoy my time
Maybe these aliens are scientists. Documenting biological life across the galaxy. Maybe they’re VanCampers. Just bouncing from planet to planet for fun
If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy. Lots of empty planets with plenty of resources out there!
Not saying aliens/UFOs are real, but I think it’s very easy to imagine them existing and not being destructive. Or maybe they’re just scouting before the invasion :)
Their opsec's way too good for scientists. If they're anything like our scientists, we'd have recovered one of the flying saucers when they tried to go through Arby's drive-through but didn't have enough clearance.
Maybe they're just fictional, and this guy has a Fox Mulder larping fetish.
> If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy.
If we ever achieve FTL travel, do you imagine that it will be available to frat bros doing road trips to Beta Reticuli VI, or will it be this horrendously expensive, economy-wrecking thing that we get to do once or twice and then have to stop because it is almost impossible to do?
We achieved a moon landing for fuck's sake, and the frat bro still hasn't duplicated that one yet (though I will concede he's not doing too shabby).
I think it’s a mistake to imagine how an alien species would behave based on our own tendencies.
A civilization that has achieved what their (supposed) presence here implies has clearly managed to move far beyond human capability, and our understanding of opsec seems irrelevant.
It could be that with sufficiently advanced technology, “opsec” is mostly irrelevant relative to a species like ours with the capabilities we have.
At the same time that’s also when we got mass media, developed our own funky airplanes and got portable cameras etc.
If these are scientific/observation missions, humanity is going through its most transformative stages of advancement, and the last 100 years have been quite interesting.
If we could go and observe a developing civilization secretly and over a long period of time, I suspect we would.
If you rephrase it as "a civilization that mastered interplanetary travel and can split the atom somehow keeps crashing on our planet" it makes me wonder.
What if bugs, suicidal or thrill-seeking pilots or overly confident bureaucracies remain a fixture in the next stages of life's evolution as well?
Or what if fixing those problems is harder than the technology?
Really...
Just look at the claim objectively and it becomes obvious it's absurd.
Do I need to say more?
If things are such that aliens send probes to any such planet as ours they would be concerned about negative consequences and put great effort into ensuring they could not be discovered by _any_ potentially threatening species.
This precludes any of the forms you suggest, as any species capable of sending such would also be more than advanced enough to ensure we wouldn't discover them and that they wouldn't fail at the rates claimed.
Even if we presume many many species sending such, there's the issue that they wouldn't be bothering with us in this way and would either have already conquered us for the resources to fight each other etc. (And even if not fighting they would be aware of each other as a result of these supposed visits).
There's no reasonable explanation for subterfuge which is the only answer ever given for such questions of "why have they not made direct contact?" Right?
But - tinfoil hat time - have they not demonstrated their ability to do this wrt the knowledge around nuclear weapons?
Edit: and considering the claimed abilities of UAP, might those technologies be on par (in terms of military might) with the technology behind nuclear weapons?
Also, that bit about a spaceship needing a biological pilot was kind of dumb. I don’t know how you can see the advances in AI these days and not be able to extrapolate an advanced space faring species not needing a biological pilot on their spaceship.
I think I've only ever seen one quantitative book that deals with the minutiae of a nuclear bomb (in a book about explosives, will link it)
“Simple” is not the word I’d use to describe this conclusion.
Only half kidding, if we meet aliens they will be machines at least to some extent. Biological life has a lot of annoying limitations and continuously circumventing them is more expensive than just becoming machines.
It’s way more likely to encounter von Neumann probes than some beer drinking alien traveling across the galaxy in compression socks and with a neck pillow.
No our government has not demonstrated their ability to keep secrets over the span of a few years, let alone decades.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies