This is the premise of about half of I Think You Should Leave skits
Some of his claims, if you believe them, point towards coordinated activities.
For example, he claims that an intelligence official, who he had known and worked with for a long time and who he trusted, pulled him aside and confided in him about this project. This intelligence official mentioned a particular project name. He then claims that later a totally different intelligence agent independently confided in him the same details as well as the same project name. He claims that ultimately he was furnished documentation evidence of this project which he refuses to provide to media (due to national security issues) but which he has provided to congress.
I'm relating what he said in the interview. He could be making that all up. However, if he is relating actual events then there is a coordinated group of intelligence agents working towards the same goal.
But believing the US has a classified alien spaceship that was recovered in-tact is way more fun so let's go to go with that.
As a co-ordinated activity, sure.
Maybe he avoids getting charged under the Espionage Act this way, but history shows very clearly that the pre-Snowden whistleblowers all had their careers ruined and still faced criminal charges. Love him or hate him, but Snowden went for the jugular and brought receipts while preventing the most damaging intel to human life from being leaked.
Congress wouldn't protect him from retaliation anyway. Thomas Drake was raided by the FBI and indicted even though he didn't leak any intelligence. You're making yourself an enemy of the government the moment you open your mouth, regardless of whether or not you bring documentation.
As a strawman, a conspiracy which requires 10K people or more to pull it off gets assigned 0.0, while a single person conspiracy is assigned 1.0.
So anytime someone tells you about a conspiracy theory, ask them to estimate the conspiracy factor.
Examples of high conspiracy factor theory’s would be sports with a single, extremely important player (a goalie) for example since only one person needs to be corrupted.
An example of a low conspiracy factor theory would be the Moon landing as 1000s of people would need to be corrupted.
By definition a conspiracy involves more than one person.
Then the troller was embarrassed about how well it worked and told him to never talk about it.
A2: Lol yeah, you're right. I'm in, that sounds like fun.
A1: Okay so I told him that we've got some alien spacecraft in the broom closet under a project named meatball. I'm pretty sure he believes me, but if you tell him the same thing, I bet he'll really go nuts!
A2: Ahahaha awesome. Okay I'll take him aside next Tuesday. This is gonna be great! I haven't had this much fun at work since the time Brett got his had stuck in the vending machine.
One guy claims, might as well stop there.
I'm on the side of wanting to believe, it's just important to stay skeptical because if it were all true it would probably be one of the most important things to happen to humanity. We're not alone after all.
My guess is that a substantial fraction of otherwise competent American adults don't realise VTOL jet aircraft are a thing we can and have built for example, and that if one of them saw a prototype like the Flying Bedstead (Rolls Royce experimental platform, which doesn't look at all like an aeroplane since it doesn't need to) and was told (in jest) that's an alien spacecraft, they absolutely might believe that.
I doubt these people are lying. They actually saw something. Miracles are the easiest example to explain. Someone couldn't walk and then a saint said a prayer for them and they could walk again. It is pretty easy guess that it was a placebo effect or coincidence that the medical issue got better at the same time.
We have never seen someone with a X-Ray of a severed spine regain full walking ability after a prayer from a saint.
UFO's may exist, but it seems more likely that a combination of reflections, radar issues, tiredness/stress, "wanting to believe" caused them to see "something"
Let’s say some visual details are fuzzy. With a strong enough Bayesian prior (e.g. belief in UFOs), the human perceptual apparatus could subjectively see things that look like UFOs.
Mind bending, but this seems to me a credible and popular theory of brain functioning. I’m no expert and new to the theory. Please correct me if I’m butchering it.
P.S. Like anyone, I often detect motion in my peripheral vision without much detail. Maybe once a year (or less), I see weird things that seem implausible, but only for brief instant. When I look, there is nothing unusual. Yes, bring on the “what are you smoking?” comments… but I assure you the answer is “nothing”.
One of the prevailing hypotheses states that due to low inherent resolution of the retina these micromovements are used to create sort of sub-pixel resolution. Hence, visual cortex inherently works in predictive/generative mode with constant feedback correction. This hypothesis is sometimes used to explain phenomena like pareidolia and might as well be used to explain perception of UFOs.
Just think for a second, if such a thing was possible, why would it be restricted to "UFOs"?
Obviously, such an illness would be well known.
Who said it is? Tons of people report seeing all manner of nonsense.
The idea of whole departments in the US government being staffed with them is absurdist nonsense.
Most UFO reports fall into the Optical Illusion category rather than extreme schizophrenia.
Your allegation about UFO reports is accordingly simply incorrect.
So it seems strange that you have jumped to the conclusion that these must be real UFOs since most people do not hallucinate.
The whistleblower reports of the existence of a research program that he was briefed about. He testifies this program was stuying non-human technology, among that functioning craft, aka "flying saucers".
The determination of it being non-human in orgin was due to extensive material analysis, evident morphology and working characteistics of those devices.
I think I take your point: he doesn't have firsthand experience seeing the evidence.
That said, the quote "Someone claims that someone else told him material exists that is from aliens." doesn't by itself convey the significance of these other people being high ranking intelligence officials. A trained intelligence professional has much more analytical skill and credibility than a person randomly sampled from the U.S. population.
> The Debrief reported that Grusch’s knowledge of non-human materials and vehicles was based on “extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials”. He said he had reported the existence of a UFO material “recovery program” to Congress.
> “Grusch said that the craft recovery operations are ongoing at various levels of activity and that he knows the specific individuals, current and former, who are involved,” the Debrief reported.
> In the Debrief article, Grusch does not say he has personally seen alien vehicles, nor does he say where they may be being stored. He asked the Debrief to withhold details of retaliation by government officials due to an ongoing investigation.
Indeed. Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident you can listen to the audio recording of some soldiers investigating what happened at the site of a proposed UFO landing, where they observe weird lights and scorch marks on trees.
There's another page some guy set up where he posts photos he took himself at the site and even used screenshots from a TV interview of one of the witnesses of the event to clearly show that those lights were easily explain by surrounding structures (light house etc) and the marks on trees were probably left by lumberjacks.
I'm baffled how a bunch of trained soldiers investigating over several days can just "conclude" that it was all very mysterious stuff going on and that, despite it being clearly debunked, this event is still seen as THE UFO event in the UK.
Then again I have no idea how these latest videos of flying objects can be explained. To a lay person like myself it just seems completely crazy. How can a pilot claiming to see things fly at supersonic speeds doing impossible maneuvers be explained by a problem with the lens and / or "it's just a weather balloon". The "explanations" of it being ufos seem completely believable to me.
Or 20 UAPs zooming around, in and out from water, up and down from low Earth orbit in seconds.
You are not factoring in how many times he has tried to guess other people's pins. Or if some pins are more common than others.
Similarly here you are not factoring in how often an entire group of sensors has the same big and repots incorrect data at the same time in the same way. You are Cherry picking the one time the data looked like it might be a UFO. This is also a form of confirmation bias.
Someone who works in astrophysics for a govt entity in the US told me they have such massive budgets that it's not uncommon to throw some of it to some weird department just as a favor or to keep up the public's interest in "space stuff". Another person (working at ESA) confirmed it, they both rolled their eyes and claimed it was all BS.
NOT saying this is definitive truth.
Second, I will respond in terms of the charitable substance of your comment. I think there is some useful back-and-forth to be had.
Please be specific: part is “complete nonsense” to you; which of the following applies?
1. You reject the predictive processing theory? Why?
2. You reject my characterization of the theory?
3. You reject my application of the theory to the example of seeing UFOs? For the reason you gave? Is there more?
4. What research have you done to support your knowledge and claims?
5. Have you read “Hallucinations and Strong Priors” in Trends in Cognitive Science [1]? I referenced it in nearby comment as well.
Penultimate point: correctly or incorrectly, I am using facts and reasoning in my above comment; I don’t see how this qualifies as “hallucination” in terms of an AI or human phenomenon.
Final point: there is considerable nuance and skill required to criticize effectively. In asking questions 1 through 3, I’m offering an example of a better way.
As already stated, the whistleblower does not fall at all in the context you are discussing here, as he reports having been briefed on research programs that study non-human technology.
Now, in the case of those sightings by military pilots, you have multiple sensor systems and multiple pilots involved simultaneously. Clearly impossible to be explained by your idea here.
But even in cases of single eye-witnesses, their sightings are often over extended periods of time, entirely incompatible with your paper.
1. No. This interpretation of one HN Guideline is not accurate. Such a view would justify being non-charitable, which is incompatible with the guidelines more broadly.
Curious conversation should not stop because you think my comment is off-topic.
2. And as I explained at length in another comment, as conversations evolve in a tree of comments, there may be considerable distance (in terms of a topic vector space) from the root.
3. Each time you say “utter nonsense” or “bogus” (and the like) it comes across as insulting. Are you aware of this?
There are clearer phrases and terms to use that are not insulting. Depending on what you are trying to say, you might try:
- you could say you disagree (in the sense of a value judgment or a subjective matter)
- you could say that I’m making a logical or rational error
- you could say that something is not true, factually
- you could say that particular claim of mine is inconsistent with another claim
- you could say that I am not providing evidence or support for a claim
Onto a different point. You wrote:
> not on completely unrelated nonsense, that you are no expert on anyway (as you professed yourself).
4. Stating that I am not an expert in a particular cognitive science theory does not inherently disqualify the logic of my argument. It merely suggests an openness to learning if there are mistakes. Such an openness is indicative of humility and a tendency to not overreach.
As you can see in my other comments, I have recognized and agreed with some of your points. But these points have not contradicted or disproved what I wrote.
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136...
Trends in Cognitive Science
OPINION | VOLUME 23, ISSUE 2, P114-127, FEBRUARY 2019
Hallucinations and Strong Priors
Philip R. Corlett, Guillermo Horga, Paul C. Fletcher, Ben Alderson-Day, Katharina Schmack, Albert R. Powers III
Open Access
Published: December 21, 2018
Now, your idea of hallucinations being an explanation for such sightings, obviously impossible due to said sensors systems in the first place, is utter bogus since not only do you not have "strong priors" in such a situation, you also do not employ people suffering from hallucinations as pilots for mulit-million dollar fighter jets to begin with.
Your article finally describes an entirely different phenomenon than "seeing an object consistently for an extended period of time". Which is what is relevant here.
I’m sorry that you seem upset here and in your comments generally on this thread. I can relate to some degree; there is is a lot to be concerned about when it comes to the topics of evidence and people’s ability to evaluate truth claims.
Still, it is your responsibility to not take out on your frustrations on me or anyone else. Treat us with respect or your reputation will suffer.
Finally, you are making many assumptions which you then use to knock down straw men arguments. If you manage a civil tone, I will engage with you further. Otherwise, I don’t see it being productive enough to warrant the effort.
To be specific, I suggest reviewing the HN Guideliness. In particular, strive to ask charitable clarification questions and avoid emotionally charged claims; e.g. that what I’m saying is bogus.
I want to elaborate on one personal experience I alluded to above. I am curious if others have experienced anything similar.
While driving at about 20 mph across some train tracks, I noticed in my left peripheral vision a parked vehicle with its rear door open. For a tiny instant, I perceived it roughly like dirt was “flowing out” of the car. When I looked more closely — and again, this happened in a fraction of a second — it was clear that a dog, probably a golden retriever, was jumping out.
So my first fleeting perceptual experience got the motion roughly correct (movement out of a back seat onto the ground) and color (light brown) correct. It got the object wrong.
From what I can tell, this is a consistent subjective experience with the predictive processing model. It seems to me if one did not subscribe to the predictive processing model, one would expect the brain to only register a vague blur.
I think it is also worth mentioning that in the days leading up to that experience I had a DIY project where I dug a deep hole, and I put a bucket in the bottom which I filled before lifting it out and dumping it. (This was more efficient than doing one shovel load at a time.) This digging was not an expedient process which could have led my brain to spend energy processing better ways to do it.
“We need to increase tourism on the Town. Cowille business is booming since they had that Virgin Mary apparition. Anne-Marie, could that shape that you saw while tending the sheep be the Spirit of Saint Peter?”
Some people just like having the attention of other people, so it could still be an invented story just to have a great story to tell to the few that believe it.
Maybe he so desperately wants his $500,000 bail guarantors to remain anonymous because they're aliens!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/nyregion/george-santos-ba...
Yes. I was discussing something related to this with one of my young-adult children and I said something along the lines of "Some people don't actually like abstract or self-reflective thought. They prefer to just believe what they want to, or what's comforting to them, and not to think about it." I believe it hadn't really occurred to them so starkly before, and I felt kind of bad for that.
The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets. You should go check those out. I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets collected.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but instantly writing things off as 'tin foil hat' while the guy has an actual legit legal retaliation case going on seems a bit premature.
This is the tragic sentence which is letting the parade of carnival animals in through the back door. In some sense it's true that intellectual humility is necessary as we allow ourselves to be challanged by things we thought not possible. But it's true the way hallmark card quotes are true, as vague generalities.
It does no work as a specific response to a specific set of facts, which should be determined by all kinds of specific contextual examinations. In that setting, it's an open-ended, unrestricted invitation to completely suspend all disbelief without any restraint or distinctions.
Otherwise, it is certainly not impossible, but pointless to speculate. If you enjoy speculating about such things, fill your boots, but realize that you are only doing it for your own amusement.
Cats literally can't understand what the Internet is, and ants can't understand what a cat is.
It's astoundingly naive to assume we don't have equivalent cognitive limitations.
The argument the poster above is making is that human scientists may be cognitively limited, and our species objectively stupid. You can't really definitively argue against this in an essay, because if you are a stupid person who is a member of a stupid species, your reasoning skills can't be trusted. You might argue it pragmatically makes sense to assume your species is smart enough to understand the universe, but that's a different argument than Asimov is making.
Asimov seems to assume humans are objectively an intelligent species so his reasoning skills can be trusted, which of course may not be wrong, but is pretty hard to prove.
How could it be possible, well, you have to take a closer look to the probably underlying physics you can infer from the UFOs behavior. Probably the still secret videos from DoD have a lot more to offer than most of the currently available videos.
But for now we have these phenomena reported: - UFOs can go to full stop instantaneously, even if they are travelling at several times the speed of the sound - UFOs can go from fully static to several times the speed of the sound, instantaneously. - UFOs can remain fully stopped, seemingly unamovable, even under a hurricane. - UFOs can submerge almost instantaneously, almost with no "splash", even if they do at extraordinary velocities. - UFOs can travel underwater at the speed of the sound, or even more faster. - UFOs have been reported to go "into mountain bases", decades ago. - and the most important, UFOs have no apparent source of energy nor thrust, nor anything seeming usable as wings to remain in the air, or some rotors to move underwater.
Then, the physics? The UFOs are probably superdimensional entities / vehicles / vessels.
What we are seeing is maybe a fraction of the actual vessels, most of it located out of our three dimensional space, and you can see "here" is a small sphere of "metal". Maybe this spheres are just small arrays of sensors, from a way bigger unobservable vessel.
The evidence is empirical at most yet, maybe the still secret videos from DoD actually show clearly stuff or moves that reveal the superdimensional features, like a UFO "crashing" into solid rock, just to "re-emerge" from solid ground a couple of miles farther. Or maybe some time-related movements, like appearing / disappearing "from nothing".
If the UFOs are superdimensional capable vehicles, and our three dimensional universe actually has upper dimensions, maybe time itself is a physically traversable dimension, from a hypothetical 5th dimension. Hence, you could actually have FTL - Faster Than Light - travel, but without breaking any physics rules from the three dimensional space. You could be just "fastly walking" a couple of kilometers in maybe 15 minutes in the 5th dimensional space, and you could be displacing yourself several light years in the three dimensional space.
Then the energy required to do a multiple light year travel would be trivial, and the time required to displace yourself in the three dimensional space, too.
You could "jump" from star to star in maybe 5 minutes, using the energy from two AA batteries.
The consequences go far beyond that if the time is a physical dimension: you could go back and forward in time, just like you displace yourself in the three dimensional space. Hence the "time travel" thing remains impossible in three dimensions, but it is easily doable in 5 - or more - dimensions. Even closed loops are possible, because time as physical dimension would imply that "everything is happening at the same time", hence you could travel "backwards" in time and change something, and going back "forward" you'd find some things have changed.
What happens if you can also "travel" in time just as fastly, years in minutes, using just a pair of AA batteries? What if you can go back and change history? You could be changing stuff continously, improving at exponential pace. Maybe the aliens have done so, and they don't have "billions" of years of evolution, but have found a way to make the process faster.
Similarly, the implications of the existence of upper dimensions for the humans in its current level of technological evolution would be amazing. If you can displace solid matter like a plane, using an upper dimension, you could make traverse solid matter in the three dimensional space, maybe even not interacting at all with the solid matter: you could make vehicles capable of travelling throug solid rock mountains, or even traverse across the planet.
Some implications are just wow, if you can travel through solid matter in the three dimensional space or you can build vehicles capable of not interacting with mass in the three dimensional space, automagically most of the weapons and defense systems in the world became meaningless overnight. You could go inside any bank, any militar base, not worrying about missiles, bullets. You can't defend yourself by staying in three dimensional space, but in the upper dimensions you'd can't either: the enemy could travel in time and change its strategy to win this time, they'd just need some observer far away from the theather, assessing if the actions have had success or not, if not, go back, advise and repeat.
So, maybe the "first contact" isn't really the problem, but what happens if humanity suddenly realizes about new, radical advances in physics, available not only to super-powers and super-rich entities, but to anyone with a pair of AA batteries?
Almost no upper echelons of power in anywhere in the world would likely want the entire population know about as radically prone to sudden and profound changes in societies, as a discovery of the existence - and cheap accesibility - of upper dimensions, beyond the three dimensional space.
So you - maybe any super-power, nation states and private groups of powerful people - keep aliens out of sight from the general population, UFOs are psychological operations, not a thing like UFOs actually exist, whatever.
For that reason. You want nothing to change from what it is right now.
and the ants most probably think that we are highly advanced entities.
and it doesn't take the kids too much energy nor technological resources - for the human technological level - to play with ants, but ants probably would see the kid's resources as incredible advanced, well beyond its current technological capabilities.
So yeah it could be 5th dimensional kids playing with us (ants from their perspective).
You can always have a louder laughter...
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I'm thrilled about UFOs happily breaking several laws of physics in front of us, and we should be thinking about what are we missing, what's out of sight, beyond our current understanding of physics that the UFOs obviously manage and exploit.
The upper dimensions is just a - pretty obvious - hypothesis.
"How would these dimensions interact with the dimensions we know?"
I don't know, but whoever has built the UFOs, certainly knows.
Some ideas: because you should not be able to impact the ocean surface at mach 4 without obvious physical consequences, and not submerging almost with minimal to absent "splash", maybe those UFOs are just leaking some photons into our three dimensional space,
hence "submerging" could not be precisely what they are doing, maybe they are just re-locating the "output" of the vessel out of sight of the humans.
Also those "metallic orbes" look amazingly similar to some kind of "black hole" or singularity, maybe those things are not vessels at all, but just a hole opened to our three dimensional space, to watch us, study us. That would make sense about the "orbes" doing nothing but keep running from us, appearing aparently everywhere with some interesting stuff to look at.
If you said 1823 maybe I could sympathise, in 1823 they don't have everything together, they don't know about the Noble gases or dozens of other elements, they thought atoms were indivisible (hence the name), they don't have the First Network (the Universal Postal Union, yes, in 1823 you could not write a letter in say, Edinburgh, write an address in Berlin, and just post it, that idea hadn't been invented yet).
But by 1923 they're in a much better place. Their atomic model is still wrong but it's like the model you're probably picturing in your head, the one where electrons are little whizzy balls orbiting a nucleus. Wrong, but not wrong enough to cause big problems for everyday purposes. Kurt Gödel hasn't come up with his clever trick yet, but the problem is right there and people are thinking about it.
You say the videos are objects but I don't see evidence of objects. Just because you see a shape doesn't mean you saw an object. Did you know shadows can move faster than the speed of light? Because you see a shadow isn't a thing, it's just our mental model of events, and there are no limits on that model. We have plenty of ways to make a shape seem to move much faster than we can make an object move.
Later that same year, the hydrogen balloon was invented and that one was flown to an altitude of 3 km high.
And yes, the idea that you could write in Edinburgh and have it delivered to Berlin had already been invented much further back than after 1823. The Roman Empire had the Cursus Publicus which handled mail delivery between the Provinces and Italy.
Tsiolkovsky developed his rocket equation in 1903 and in 1928 he published The Will of Universe dedicated to space colonisation. He clearly new it’s within reach of human mind.
Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon and given that his works are some early examples of science fiction and not a pure fantasy, one could say even Verne envisioned space travels as possible.
Those people are called experts.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest. Mick has thoroughly investigated the most cited videos and shows them to be of entirely terrestrial origin - often atmospheric effects combined with optical lens, digital stabilization and thermal imaging artifacts. He even cites the technical documentation for the military camera equipment and often provides convincing demonstrations of the artifacts through recreations.
I suppose, having coded some "parallax effect" is sufficient in your book?
The video they called "Gimbal" shows an artifact caused by a gimbal mechanism, for example
In the case of the most-cited "Gimbal" video, all the military has officially said is they can't determine for sure what the object the glare shown in the video is from. But everyone already agrees on that point. No one can tell from the video whether the glare shown is caused by an airplane many miles distant or some other object. No one representing the U.S. government has ever said the video could NOT be a magnified thermal glare from a distant airplane. Remember, the pilot never saw the object with his own eyes, it was far too distant to see visually even as a spec on the horizon. All the pilot ever saw was the same auto-tracking thermal video we've all seen.
> I suppose, having coded some "parallax effect" is sufficient in your book?
I don't know what you're referring to but it doesn't sound like Mick West's analysis video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs. Also, Mick only assembled the video. He acknowledges the evidence shown in the video is the work of many independent researchers working collaboratively over many months while iteratively sharing their data for peer review. There are links to all the source data shown as well as the entire open analysis discussion and review. The summary video is concise and only 20 minutes long. I challenge you to watch all of it and respond specifically. Which of the four points evidenced from the on-screen camera do you think is incorrect and why?
IMHO, it's inarguable the detailed analysis provides conclusive and verifiable evidence the object is precisely consistent with a glare from an extremely distant object with a thermal imaging 'halo' artifact around it. The apparent rotation and erratic movement of the thermal glare observed in the highly-magnified video is a combined artifact of a) the Raytheon multi-axis camera tracking gimbal system used on that jet, b) the optical stabilization system, and c) the digital de-rotation system.
If you respond, please at least give a clear "yes" or "no" as to whether you agree the apparent rotation is created by the rotating camera gimbal (which was then automatically digitally de-rotated) vs actual rotation of the distant object. If not, how do you explain all the obvious signs of gimbal rotation in the on-screen numeric data and the rest of the video frame around the center glare (eg the background clouds and sky)?
It's usually not a 50/50 percent probability on whether something is possible or exists.
ECREE is a good rule to follow when trying to come up with probabilities lacking direct evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
For example imagine I told you I own a pencil. Would you ask me to prove it or doubt me? Even you don't know or trust me, probably not. Why? Because pencils exist, it's easy to get one, and I have no reason to lie (in this scenario).
Now what if I told you I have an invisibility cloak. You'd call me a liar and want proof, hell probably an in person demonstration. Think about why.
-------------- "I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach."
Whether or not aliens exist is not the same as not reaching space. Say it's the year 1876- 1. Aliens may or may not exist, it's unknown 2. it's a true fact that humans haven't gone to space.
I get that you mean the amount of technological advancment in the last 300 years has been crazy.
The reason the burden of proof is on whether something occurred or exists is because the number of events that haven't occured and what doesn't exist is infinite.
Finally you also ask about who is to say and I assume you also mean "why not". There's always a downside to believing false things, maybe it's small for some people or maybe a crazy person adds aliens to the pile of "government lies" then decides to shoot up some government agency.
The question is how you react when the answer is "No." If you keep insisting the government is lying, then you're more and more getting into 'tin foil hat' territory, especially if you're a government employee and have no evidence other than alleged hearsay. It depends on your strength of belief in the contrarian opinion. Saying that it's possible is one thing, saying "they're doing it but I don't have proof" is another.
They would be strategically obligued to deny everything, so the answer would "No, no such a thing like UFOs here".
i.e. what happened with the NSA programs, most were almost fully known for the "conspiracy wackos" except by the name of the program, even decades before Snowden. But just were confirmed to be real maybe 30 years after the first mentions in the 70s,80s,90s.
- the alien tech isn't really and/or fully available, they are half way in the reverse engineering efforts, and maybe other powers are in the race too
- the alien tech intrinsically reveals some currently hidden aspect of the universe/reality, if you present the technology publicly, it will be obvious that there's something new, and everybody will pursuit advances related to these new physics.
i.e. imagine discovering the eletricity in the XV century, it would have changed everything.
Some people are very open, some not at all.
I’m happy I’m open to things. God, Love, Art. Some people tell you it’s all make believe, there’s no free will, just machines acting out biological imperatives in a world that’s so well understood by science that we’ve reached the end of history. No way!
Those videos show no such thing. All the stuff about outmanoeuvring is a fantastic narration.
Videos show only dots which can be (and were) explained as a bird from above, plane from behind and glitchy camera mount with a bit of optical artifacts on top. Which is infinitely more plausible than aliens from another star or another dimension.
> but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not?
I feel like learning physics increased my ability to tell possible from impossible things tremendously. Second factor is learning as much as you can about scams and liers.
With those two foundations you should have a solid capacity to appreciate reality
Just unexplained, which means noone there bothered to explain them seriously enough to create an official document. Which was correct (lack of) action to take because those observations were irrelevant for anyone except the most keen ufologists.
> Let me point them, and the fighter jet pilots
Jet pilots are good at flying jets. It's kinda hard so they don't have much capacity left to be good at anything else. Like explaining visual glitches and unusual outputs of highly complicated machinery.
> to "Scotty79-from-the-internet"
That weren't my explanations. I was merely citing the ones given by a guy with doctorate in physics and expeirience with IR cameras. There are others. All infinitely more plausible than "it's aliens".
Even a $300 racing drone looks pretty alien if you have never seen one. A $3 million dollar one would absolutely look like it is from another planet.
Far from it! From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne was written in 1865, and was a reasonable attempt at hard sci-fi. More scientifically, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published "Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices" in 1903, some 6 years after deriving his famous rocket equation; it advanced the basic concept of the space rocket, that we all take for granted today. In 1923, exactly a century ago, Hermann Julius Oberth published his book "The Rocket in Interplanetary Space", a thoroughly practical treatment in which he argues that human-rated rocket-powered space flight was not just theoretically possible but feasible and maybe even profitable.[0]
So century ago, not only was space firmly established as a place we could go, but also enough groundwork had been done that it was known how we would get there.
[0] https://ia800304.us.archive.org/24/items/nasa_techdoc_197200...
It is not incompetence - it is orthogonal. I worked with an excellent software engineer who was rather smart - way above average. However, he believed in "Overunity energy" and paid actual money to attend conferences and buy the books. Some folks are predeposed to believing conspiracies and seeing order where there's chaos.
(1) the Google engineer who "knows" what sentience looks like when chatting with a low-grade AI chatbot (2) the articles by Kevin Roose and other professional reporters about AI chatbots, believing they witnessed authentic confessions from ChatGPT that it wanted to become skynet, evincing a stunning lack of understanding of the function of large language models. (3) NASA Astronaut Edgar Mitchell who came to believe in UFOs and became cited by conspiracy theorists for decades.
People at the centers of professional, institutional respectability who didn't have the wherewithal to step back and put thier impulses under the light of rational examination.
It's not without precedent, and we don't have anything other than second order interpertation of information that hasn't been revealed, but we do have a blizzard of breathless reporting enteratining presumptions that are way ahead of any actual established facts.
From his podcast, it is obvious that Roose knows exactly what he dealt with in the Sydney affair. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t unnerving.
Now, if on top of the solar energy, we assuem that we will have fusion energy available within a few 100 years, energy available may easily grow way more than 100x of today's production.
Also, if efficiency continues to increase, for instance due to AI development, nanotech, biotech, etc, we may be able to build almost any amount of infrastructure given the atoms we have available in the Earth's crust. Including multi-story farms, feeding electric lighting to power photosynthesis.
In fact, I'm not aware of any hard limits anywhere near this side of 1 billion people. As far as I know, there are billions of billions of kg of most critical elements available on earth, or in the order of 1+ billion kg per person, even if we're 1 billion people. Our ability to organize these atoms into whatever combination we want (including human bodies) is primarily limited by energy.
And even with 1 billion people, it will take a while before we run out of hydrogen for fusion power.
Humans are a species of animals. Recent environmental changes has caused a sharp decline in evolutionary fitness (=reproduction rate) for this population. This has happened to millions of species in the past, and in many (if not most) cases, the population adapted to the new environment, and the fitness grew back to or beyond replacement rate.
Also, this can happen quite a lot faster than some seem to imagine. While it takes a long time for completely new mutations to make it into the gene pool, the gene pool already contains a huge diversity of genes coding for different types of traits, including mental traits. Often, all that is needed to adapt to a new environment, is for the relative frequency of these genes to change.
For instance, many people seem to have a built-in oxytocin response when around young children. A boost in frequency to all genes promoting/strenghtening this mechanism may eventually make the need-to-have-baby emotion in most women stronger than the need-to-have-orgasm drive in the horniest of 18-year-olds.
And if these genes are already in the gene pool, just with a low frequency, they could easily become dominant over 10-40 generations.
In other words, if at some point the kinds of environmental change that cause population decline slows down, I don't think it's likely that the birth rate stays below replacement forever. (If it does, we'll go extinct, of course).
Also, I'm not making predictions about "forever". Rather, my prediction is that the reproduction rate is likely to come back above the replacement rate very quickly, compared to evolutionary time.
My guess is somewhere between 100 to 1000 years, if human societies go on approximately like today, and we don't have some kind of apocalypse, AI takeover or totalitarian world government.
Assuming of course: - We've "solved" fusion, and can produce near-unlimited amounts of electricity - Per person energy/resource consumption is cut to an absolute minimum. Most tools, machines etc are designed to last virtually forever, instead of having planned obsolescence - We build farming buildings that are 100 stories tall, and produce light from electricity instead of relying on sunlight to grow plants. - Recycling processes and other activities that are labor intensive today can be made 1-3 orders of magnitude more efficient by AI and better access to cheap energy. - We are able to handle the sociological aspects of such population density
Earth's population density is currently at 16/km^2, or 62500m^2/person. If we multiply the population by 100, that's still 625m^2/person.
We clearly have enough space, and probably enough atoms (of each type) to support one billion. So I think if we have enough energy, technology and organize it perfectly, it should be technically possible.
In fact, given the fact that each American already spends almost 100x more energy than most people did 500 years ago, it may be even easier than is assumed above, if we assume that resource consumption is cut to near subsistence levels.
Obviously, such a world would be quite dystopian, making the USSR seem positively cheerful. But impossible?
I mean anything is possible (for additional nightmares: look at factory farming of chickens).
Just not livable.
He was making the argument as a response to being triggered by "liberal" policies about climate change and human footprint.
1. People with mental illness.
2. People with low intelligence who are unable/don't understand logic, the scientific method, and concepts like ecree, They are easily fooled by others. They may also have a bias like hating or mistrusting the government.
3. People who are insecure. Being a conspiracy theorist makes you feel smarter than other people as you are part of a select group of who know the truth. The masses are stupid or as they say now "asleep" but you've figured it all out via Google.
This is why much of their talk is less about how they can prove their claims and more about the people who don't believe. They refer to them as "sheep" or "not awake. The focus for them is that they are right which may help with their insecurities.
4. People who don't feel they have a purpose in life and are looking for a meaning. Want to be a part of a group that is bound by something important and there's almost no effort to join? Bam, now your job is to get that information out there and covert the masses, a goal that will never be finished and thankfully take up your entire life.
5. People who were originally lured in because of the other reasons and no longer believe. Because they made it their life, maybe spent excess money, wrote books or made absolute claims they don't want to look stupid so they never admit their change. This is especially an issue on the internet where the whole world can fest on your failure.
That guy is very obviously not "mentally ill", he has likely a lot more speaking in favor of him than you (or anybody here) do.
Read the article.
We’re on like season eight or nine of this show and it’s the same plot every time around.
Until it's not.
And then someone says something, and they respond with: "If there was such a conspiracy, the government couldn't keep it under wraps, someone would say something"
One crank making headlines every few years with nothing that actually backs up their claims doesn’t cut it. By that metric you might as well believe the hundreds of “leakers” claiming the government is made of lizard people.
There is evidence however, things like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bt6_Potk5Q which are becoming more and more common as time goes on. There does seem to be an increasing willingness to disregard evidence all the while demanding more evidence. Recently the pentagon stated they had hundreds of documents/photographs/videos and what has been released publicly does make this appear legitimate.
Is it an alien spaceship? Probably not. Is it an object flying across a warzone that could potentially be a threat of some kind? Quite possibly.
> One crank making headlines every few years
The interesting part of this news is that this person is not "one crank", he's an actual expert in the field employed by organisations to research this exact phenomena. Recently we have had several such experts come along and make these claims. To dismiss that off-hand doesn't seem particularly reasonable these days.
> The interesting part of this news is that this person is not "one crank", he's an actual expert in the field employed by organisations to research this exact phenomena.
And yet here we are again with this one person’s word and nothing in the way of actual evidence.
At this point the earth is blanketed in radar and high definition cameras. Wake me up when there is evidence past a 240p out of focus video or something odd on an infrared sensor 100km away.
I want to believe. I read every book I could find about UFOs when I was a kid. But here we are 30 years later playing out the same tired storylines over and over again.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12165669/Military-w...
There are better sources of this than Daily Mail but I am short on time. Just google his name.
Perhaps the aliens are really diligent about avoiding leaving any artefacts behind in the sort of state where some mid ranking official would happily sell the evidence for the price of a new Mercedes or the military would turn up three weeks after international journalists, or the sort of state whose closely-guarded treasure chest full of alien artefacts would have been burst wide open when the government was overthrown.
But for some reason not only have shadowy government agencies been successful at preventing alien artefacts from circulating in India, France, Zimbabwe, the former USSR and multiple regimes whose demise was much more violent than the breakup of the USSR, those states and their descendant states have actually kept a better lid on their programmes!
[1]though I'm not sure your other cited sightings also involving English speakers immersed in Western culture exactly undermines the implication that its a cultural phenomenon driven by US media. But perhaps aliens can't communicate telepathically in Shona or Ndbele...
The veracity of the above are all suspect, but the fundamental claim that this is something only Americans think about or only happens here, just doesn't reflect reality.
That’s GP’s entire point. If this sort of thing were happening to the scale being claimed—worldwide, instead of magically being confined to the US—we’d be swimming in verifiable evidence of alien artifacts being found across the world.
Instead it’s the same grainy, out-of-focus footage, data from sensors out at past their maximum useful range, and substance-free “leaks” with nothing hard to back them up.
Whether aliens, not aliens, our own tech, whatever…there is value to the government creating deception, misinformation, and disinformation.
If there was evidence, there’d be evidence.
Because it implies essentially effortless arbitrary military and economic exploitation access to our planet. Craft that defy gravity, instantly accelerate in arbitrary directions? Presumably cross light years of distance? They could drop an asteroid on us at will. They could bring our civilization to its knees with simple smart rocks.
Sufficiently advanced technology is magic, and this would indicate that level of advanced technology that we find magical.
Either the civilization is rapacious, or, if they aren't, they will take one look at our history books and realize that we are rapacious.
No, we're not. You clearly haven't read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-... . One of the startling broad-reaching conclusions you will reach after reading this book is that cooperation even between entities or groups of disparate power is always better in the long run assuming future contact will occur. That last part is the tricky bit, and is why (for example) divorce proceedings are so acrimonious. So sure, if you enslave someone, or a bunch of people, you will get a quick fix. But in the long run you will both gain far more cooperating, because cooperation enables people to contribute more to each other.
IF these beings expect to deal with us for the foreseeable future, THE ONLY wise choice is cooperation. Period. And if that was NOT their goal, then I would submit that we'd already be 1) exploited for all we were worth already and then 2) killed or imprisoned by now.
UFO reports (of the disc-shaped, wingless, noiseless, impossibly-performing standard kind) have been occurring since WW2( "foo fighters"). We're clearly VERY interesting; possibly the newest kids on the block, as it were...
"The report followed a leak of military footage that showed apparently inexplicable happenings in the sky, while navy pilots testified that they had frequently had encounters with strange craft off the US coast."
I read it as, "We detected several times a military aircraft, that a country expected to be undetectable, flying over our territory, we send you the proof that such plane could have been knocked down; stop doing it" at same time they don't admit such other country violated the territory having to rise up a conflict.
The group of people who just off-hand deny this is happening is kind of staggering.
This (issuing a command to read the article) is even worse than the behavior discussed in guidelines from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
That's not how I read it. It seems to me that there are rather a lot of sane, intelligent people in the USG and especially the US military who believe in aliens with flying saucers, and alien abductions. From my perspective, it looks more like a "mass psychosis" than a conspiracy.
I suspect the abduction stories are related to evangelical beliefs in The Rapture.
QAnon tales of satanic pizza-parlour basements in a building with no basement seem to have many believers who are bright, and have no history of mental illness.
It's probably too an obvious question to ask but seeing how knowledge is continually expanded can that claim really be made with known unknowns and unknown unknows and all that? Or are we really at the edge of all knowledge of astro/physics?
In the particular case, the coverup would not be challenging (only a handful of people would be aware that it's "fake"), there would be motive (convincing China, Russia, etc. that new aircraft we experiment with might actually be extraterrestrial + convincing them to chase ghosts + generally messing with them), and there would be means (the theory that previous-commenter just expressed, where agents selected from psych test results and shown fake classified information). Not to mention US Intelligence's recorded history of doing some very outlandish and "conspiratorial" things.
Of course, no theory in particular (conspiracy or "grounded") is going to be anything more than speculation given limited the level of evidence that's actually on the table.
We're not talking about an Apache mechanic overhearing random conversations. He was on the team investigating UAPs for the gov, and people came to him with evidence regarding UAPs.
I believe this guy is probably acting out of a duty to root out what he believes is unlawful behavior (hiding activities from Congress). I don't believe the ET claims personally.
This is the same MO as Stephen Greer's grift about the same thing. Greer claims that he was given access to classified documents and information that say the government is hiding their knowledge of, and interactions with, aliens and UFOs.
Edit: found his expeditions
Procedure: If you have not been to an expedition before the tuition fee is $2500 – $3500 depending on facility costs. Each expedition is different.
https://siriusdisclosure.com/expeditions/expeditions-w-dr-gr...
I'm familiar with the hopelessness, there's really not much you can do but try to help nudge them into healthier directions without being overt enough for them to shut you out for denying their beliefs.
I've had some success with things like Mirage Men and Mick West's work in helping them understand that there's a lot of manipulation in that space and that not everything can be assumed to be aliens, and it's helped a little, but I've found that they just integrate that information into their belief system. Those people are lying about aliens/UFOs, and that UAP was just a weather balloon, but everything else is real. They've been more discerning about who they give their money to, though, which is a good thing.
I'm sure that at some point he became unhireable and needed to make money any way he could... and that's when the grifts began.
I think he's a mixed bag who unfortunately had to taint himself in order to actually make some money.
US adversaries can easily turn their drones into a panic when they fly in US airspace, and I believe that the instances where actual drones are involved, those are attempts at adversaries to surveil our military and government and to scare the populace. That's to say adversarial drones have an additional use as psyops weapons against civilians and military weapons. Being able to send whatever you want into US airspace and the US being unable to do anything about it can be perceived as being threatening and scary.
A counter narrative to that can involving some UFO/alien mystery can quell panic and instead foster wonder and distraction.
"... the conspiracy theory Project Blue Beam, which concerns an alleged plot to facilitate a totalitarian world government by destroying traditional religions and replacing them with a new-age belief system using NASA technology."
The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior perceived to be favorable to U.S. objectives.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...
To spook enemies of the US and create a mystical aura of superiority around the US military and its capabilities.
To shake out moles, spies, and unreliable people / leakers.
As a cover for very terrestrial extremely advanced technology such as hypersonic weapons, drones, laser and directed energy weapons, etc.
To repeatedly float the idea of "alien disclosure" and then dash everyone's hopes in order to discredit the idea of extraterrestrial life and visitation. Why? Maybe they're concerned that we will eventually detect aliens and they want to blunt the cultural impact by making the public skeptical. Maybe there's some ideological factor at work like religious fundamentalism. Who knows.
A lot of them are still fighting the Soviets
I have zero confidence that any government or their populace will be able to handle that realization without going completely bonkers. We simply can't handle it as a civilization. For every sane person who is curious and wants to interact positively with the artifact/being there will be a dozen different types of maniacs out to destroy whatever it is.
And if you believe that governments reflect the neurosis of their people, it fundamentally impossible for any government to deal with something like this rationally.
When I hear about this alien stuff or other "big government" conspiracies I'm always reminded of this saying, not sure where it's from.
"Behind every vast conspiracy theory is a sincere hope that somewhere out there, someone knows what they're doing."
(i.e., conspiracy nuts in a sense really want to believe in an all-powerful government because it would give them an assurance that someone really does know what's going on).
Modern civilian OSINT would have been adequate to deduce fission work was being performed, assuming no one posted centrifuge schematics on their gaming Discord.
And it still didn't succeed, the first world leader to learn that fission weapons work was Stalin.
In this case, I agree. I usually try to avoid conspiratorial thinking and conspiracy theories, but the DoD and related agencies have been putting out all kinds of information about UFOs in the past few years. My question is: why? The DoD isn’t known for their public relations.
My best speculative guess is that they’re claiming they’ve found alien craft and exotic alien materials because the US is testing aircraft that appear alien with exotic materials and don’t want other nation states to assume it is even terrestrial so they don’t attempt to replicate the technology.
There must be a reason behind the UFO media blitz that has happened lately, it’s not like they’re releasing the info to keep the public informed. Anyone have other ideas? It could be grifters looking to sell a story, mentally ill people misunderstanding jokes or inventing things out of whole cloth, etc.
P.S. I believe intelligent life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but that we’ve never been visited and will never be visited due to the distances involved.
Another is that maybe we are in something of a Cold War right now, as predicated by the weather balloon incident, but the USG wants to keep it secret. If people spot UAPs there is a counter narrative now about aliens that drowns out talk of war. It seems like knowing we were being spied on could cause reactions the government would rather not deal with.
et cetera...
Several reputable people have gone on record testifying for his (mental) integrity. Even some scientists actually.
The whole premise of that guy being easily discredited is absurd. Its lazy thinking plain and simple. Go read the actual article and corroborating information on 'The Debrief'.
If he is lying there is no conspirators to give a shit.
Neither of these point to whether or not hes lying though. Just saying.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43168/top-gun-2s-exten...
The DoD got Tom Cruise to pay them to make a 2hr 10m ad, and then audiences paid $1.5bn at the box office to watch it.
The DoD is amazing at PR.
Considering there is not another US Navy to lend them some jets for filming, I'd suggest the DoD had a pretty strong hand.
> In 2013, the life-cycle cost per operating day of a carrier strike group (including aircraft) was estimated at $6.5 million by the Center for New American Security.
This is just sad. I'll lay this on you, yes there is a classified crash
retrieval program, it's a SAP. It is about retrieving crashed UAVs from
adversarial countries and has nothing to do with aliens. Don't be a sucker
folks.
I suspect that at least one and perhaps many alien intelligences have been here on Earth for a very long time and are observing us, but they're very good at staying hidden so probably we have never observed them and never will.
In the unlikely event that they ever did accidentally reveal themselves, probably they would cover it up to the extent possible while continuing to remain hidden.
Since these aliens will never interact with us in any significant manner, for practical purposes it doesn't matter whether they exist or not, and therefore I don't care very much whether they exist or not. Nevertheless, if, hypothetically, I had to make a bet with equal odds, I'd bet they do exist.
They already told us exactly why. Because there are unexplained phenomena which may pose a risk to national security, and they want to know more. Their intent is to reduce the stigma so that pilots and others are less afraid to report unusual sightings for proper investigation.
You don't have to believe in aliens to see the sense in this.
Emotionally it is also slowly preparing humanity for the possibility of a confrontation with a power that we possibly can not resist and must obey. Aliens may turn out to have strong theological and sociological views that they want to share with us. This is more than just slowly boiling the constitutional frog in the cauldron of “national security”. Somewhat /g more far fetched but definitely one reason to have ex intelligence grandees from Mosad and CIA (and now this man) come and tell us all about aliens in our midst.
Not a believer myself, but it was an interesting deep dive.
This is all complete bollocks
The issue of having “major world religions” that are not in accord (per orthodox understanding of respective faithful) remains an issue for establishment of a uniform social order on the planet. It’s going to be difficult to have a world government without a unified world religion. “Aliens” can help with that.
So, assuming members of such a civilization is actually here, they're likely to be friendly, and any psyop similar to what you describe would be staged for our benefit.
Using X-files or Star Trek as representations of what the future is likely to be like, is just as obviously improbable as using The Lord of The Rings to understand Medieval Europe.
There is a very very simple explanation, which is that everything he says is true. There is a secret program, they did reverse engineer, they did withhold it from congress, and people did tell him that there is alien stuff.
Why make up silly make believe?
The guy isn't claiming 'oh i saw aliens'. He could simply be telling the absolute truth.
Why so many people told him there were aliens, I dunno, but who cares. Those people aren't the ones whistleblowing and so it doesn't really matter, does it?
I for one believe the guy, 100%
My only complaint is that perhaps he should probably be a bit more circumspect about what actually exists.
I’m not sure an explanation that presupposes FTL travel is very very simple
Our 300,000 year old species didn't even settle down until a mere 12,000 years ago, we didn't really develop proper government systems until 2-3,000 years ago and learnt flight only ~120 years ago.
Within the last 120 years we went to the Moon (!), developed the integrated microchip, the Internet, AR/VR and built deep space solar communications infrastructure, got smartphones, MRTs... you name it.
Even among all of these marvels, we still poop though.
Most likely, even overall technological development forms some kind of sigmoid function. It's likely to hit an absolute wall at some point.
Obviously, though, we have no idea if we're 0.0001% of the way or 10% of the way to that wall.
but if you want a list of hypothetical alternate origins, and don’t have access to the wealth of programming generated by Prometheus and made available on Discovery Networks, thanks to some of the minds of our time, this light summary might help…
* center of the earth is actually hollow, “aliens” are just inner earthlings * one of the other planets or otherwise within the solar system isn’t so dead after all * it’s just us - from the future * it’s just us - from the past * no space travel, no time travel, but parallel earths or dimensions or something * they have always been here, we just are too dumb to see them
I mean.. just accept it at face value. Stop reading into it.
Everything we know about the biology, chemistry, physics and astrophysics makes alien contact with the earth an extreme improbablity. Everything we know about government and intelligence agencies makes a global, mutli-national, multi-government, mass conspiracy to hide aliens an extreme improbability.
Against these mountainous-weights of incredibility one needs more than a retired 36 with a shiny badge who has "heard but not seen" some things.
The improbability of his claims is so vast that even "CIA psyop" becomes plausible against them -- not, least, since it's extremely likely the USA exploited the UFO mass hysteria to disguise its air force development programmes.
Nevertheless, the most probable explanation is that government employees in these agencies are often paranoid believers in the folk mythologies of these agencies --- and are able to maintain these superstitons because they never get senior enough to see they are false.
If other countries think there's a serious possibility that the US has alien technology then they'll be extra cautious. I doubt anyone buys it, personally.
But propaganda operations definitely have unintended consequences, I'd personally guess that experiments on the population's willingness to believe the government is at most a side effect. After all, there's wacky stuff like flat earth or refusing to believe in irrational numbers that has no meaningful international relations impact.
It’s not even the biggest country by land area. And it’s only a small percentage of the total land area of earth.
And while we’re at it, why do aliens always crash land where the number of witnesses is close to one?
It almost makes you think that all these phenomena are observer dependent.
Roswell was just a badly kept secret. Perhaps other countries are better at keeping secrets.
These are fantastic claims from a highly ranked and decorated member of the IC, released with official backing/DoD preAuth
Someone has some explaining to do
Wasn't he in charge of or in the higher end of the government led agency to investigate these things? He doesn't seem to be a nobody just saying he saw things, it was his job to investigate it for the government?
And if the Inspector General is involved, along with the dudes lengthy time in front of congress, surely it's likely that evidence was presented to higher levels of government that the public still can't see legally. I get that this may be a psyop kind of thing, but writing it off as 'he didn't see anything' seems like an incorrect position to hold.
They certainly can arrest you for fictional stories told under oath and in sworn statements (which is what this whistleblower gave).
Why incorrect? He specifically says he didn't see anything.
Ugh, I was 100% with you until this point. This is speculative, fantastical, and I think serves to discredit the sober and calm pushback of the type exhibited in the first half of your comment. And that is desperately needed in a moment like this.
So, the bayesian priors, given that in the course of humanity or even prehistorically there is no certain evidence of aliens, and plenty of evidence of weirdo government manipulation and innumerable examples of propaganda, should be skewed in the favor of any new fantastical governmental claim to be yet another silly operation by some three letter agency.
Until someone procures a body or craft of certain non human origin, this is the only reasonable course of action.
That’s true. And I would even say a CIA psyop is more likely than aliens. But its still purely speculative.
So mathematically its rare, but perhaps an experience of 1% of societies . And perhaps strongly correlated with one branch undergoing a rapid technological advance.
i think it’s perfectly rationale and not fantastical, as long as its kept in mind that its a low probability event.
The fanfiction writing serves to validate the manner of thinking that would motivate people to believe the most extreme possible interpretation of this reporting, effectively extending a vote of approval toward people inclined to look at this and put themselves in a headspace of entertaining speculative beliefs without evidence.
The “declassified” UAP videos so far are rote footage containing easily debunked garbage. Why would the military release lens flare videos and claim they’re UAP? They could be blithering idiots not knowing they’re looking at lens flare, which is probably less likely than knowing it’s BS and claiming it’s UAP with some ulterior motive. So, psyop.
A more mundane possibility: Someone thought, "Hey, you know, if there are aliens doing thing secretly, we'd want to know about it, right? And also, there are always going to be these stories, and if our answer is always, 'No that's probably lens flare', people are going to think we're trying to cover something up. So how about we just make a policy, that any time someone has unexplained phenomena, we log it properly? Either we'll get a long track record of nothing-burgers, or we'll actually find something. Or, maybe we'll have 50 years of nothing-burgers, followed by something actually different, and we'll have a solid 'baseline' from which to look into the new phenomenon."
> He left the government in April after a 14-year career in US intelligence.
A government pension requires 20 years IIRC. Grusch is only 36.
The formula: Tell the truth where possible, be vague but suggestive about the rest.
And of course there were secret UFO programs -- if something from Baikonur shows up here, wouldn't it be better if the Kremlin thought it might still remain secret? So sensing, reporting, collecting efforts would be classified.
Especially with all of those recent flaky gov videos people are eating up wholesale, without any concept of what it actually means to do interstellar travel while simultaneously having invisible motherships. And the only 'evidence' comes from US pilots in a particular height in the sky, never on the ground or visible in space via telescopes... Curious how that works. Just spacecraft zipping around at 30k feet all day in random directions and never going visibly above or below that.
Some guy misinterpreting documents about foreign or unknown materials or objects is probably par for the course here. It's also funny/predictable aliens would be discovered exclusively in the US and withheld from Congress by black suits.
Funny, how HN is/isn't reacting to "US in possession of non-human technology".
Why do you think non-human tech exists?
If they can’t grasp the obvious pattern here and determine that it requires far, far more than some random guy claiming some agency is lying to the rest of the entire US gov then there’s probably not much to dig into with OP. The rationale is always paper thin deep borderline conspiracy stuff aka “I’m just asking questions” and any further you find a poor (or unwilling) grasp of science and a naive perspective on how the world/governments work.
Surely this time is different. All the movie stereotypes about hidden black alien programs always-US run were really true!
Certainly much of the whole present "flat earth" popularity was driven by a bunch of people who thought it'd be funny.
I take just as seriously people who insist UFOs are aliens as those who insist the world is flat. I'm sure you can find somebody on youtube who has been "shown some documents" about how the world isn't round.
Is it me or is the internet really quick to reach this conclusion? It's definitely not the simplest one you can make.
"The US government" can hardly pass a budget but is somehow presumed to be super competent at psyops and/or concealing evidence of aliens.
Even the "true" conspiracies, like mkultra ... What did all that abuse accomplish? Not much. Unethical? Yes. Murderous? At times. Competent? No. Bumbling fools.
The term "military industrial complex" was meant as a warning about corruption, not that they'd manage to be good at it.
It is considered fake because the perceived difficulty of space travel combined with the complete lack of direct evidence despite the ongoing search for it.
Speculate away, I'm interested in what this community has to say.
Other than working for the US Government, this guy doesn't seem to have brought anything, so I'm amazed this story has gotten the traction it has. It's not like it's been a slow news week or anything.
They've been doing it since the 90s and the Oklahoma City Bombings.
Feels like someone started up the same government UFO psyop program that we had running during the cold war.
Maybe they're just trying to redirect all the Qanon crazies onto getting them chasing their tales looking for UFOs instead.
If this was some psyop, they certainly go all out.
Funny, how HN is/isn't reacting to "US in possession of non-human technology".
Method A: Extensive analysis if this is a first account of facts or hearsay (here is the latest anyway). Extensive analysis of evidence, specially with metadata correlation between evidence arriving from different sources and timelines.
Method B: Analysis of instinctive and immediate body language reactions to focused questions.
"How many?" -> . https://twitter.com/i/status/1665832644230402048 The instinctive eye reaction to this question gives it away...
"How to Tell If Someone Is Lying to You, According to Body Language Experts" - https://time.com/5443204/signs-lying-body-language-experts/
"Nonverbal communication and deception" - https://www.paulekman.com/blog/nonverbal-communication-and-d...
Body language across a lot of samples and people can show patterns between this body language and lying. A single instance of someone displaying body language in a given context says virtually nothing. "Tells" vary wildly between people for a million different reasons as this study shows, and unless you study a specific individual very carefully in a scientific way, there is nothing you can gather from their body language.
It’s not debunked, it’s just has to be used as a piece of the puzzle not the whole thing.
It's ironic to use a baseless conspiracy theory to accuse someone else of a disinformation conspiracy.
I feel sad to see that in the top post of an HN discussion.
All of this stuff reeks of some kind of psyop. My belief is that for some reason, the US government used psychology tests to identify a select few people who naturally "want to believe". These individuals would take vague evidence and through their own nature would exaggerate and fill in the blanks. They then nudged those individuals with carefully curated credible fake evidence. Then they just sat back and waited for a few of those guys to "leak" the information.