So what purpose does pursuing a belief in UFOs have? Are China and Russia gonna be like, what, UFOS?! Let's waste money studying something we have no evidence for!
The reason the government is interested is not because they think there are aliens, it's because their job is to know what is in the sky and understand their sensor readings.
It doesn't really matter if it's China, aliens, a lens flare, or a kid with a drone. The military should be able to know what is in the sky.
There is no strategic or actionable value in a broad judgement of "sucks" or "doesn't suck". The point of keeping details secret is to prevent someone from building mechanisms to specifically counter it. Information disparity in war is an advantage because it can cause an enemy to misjudge their allocation of resources. (either they underestimate and are out-powered, or they overestimate and waste resources)
It's like poker. You might choose to selectively give off some information with your expressions, but you'd easily lose if you showed your cards.
> they decided that they wanted to inject aliens into their strategy.
The US military has not entertained the idea of aliens.
However, I am going to hold off on the 'dismissing is the immediate jump to aliens' part as well, purely due to the position of this guy and the specifics of his claims - he was part of a team investigating the subject and so until he's proven unequivocally of lying I'll just assume there might be documentation he has access to that we don't. His credentials line up and it sounds as if the people who vouch for him are the same.
I'll think it's silly to discredit the fact the government wants to study what's being reported in the sky like some people are doing. Beyond that I'd rather not comment because it's safer to discuss the parts we are actually privy to rather than the parts we aren't, until the dude gets charged for lying to congress or some other official discrediting of his claims.
I am for keeping an open mind, scientifically speaking. Entertaining theories rooted in fictional fantasy is not that. There is zero scientific evidence of technologically advanced life outside of Earth. It is a hypothesis that is just as unsupported as anything anyone might make up on the spot. Just because it is a hypothesis people want to believe doesn't make it any more supported than a hypothesis that it is the flying spaghetti monster.
The "balloons" absolutely were referred to as objects, and you should question what was so special about them that they won't show anything.
Embarrassment at repeatedly scrambling F-22 Raptors to shoot missiles at a child's party balloon is not a good enough reason.
It was something. It wasn't nothing and it's just been brushed under the carpet as if it never happened.
That's nice, but you know what? If the object was "other", it'll be back.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-spy-balloon-ove...
One object was blamed on a hobby balloon club and I have questions about it because usually winds move west to east and their balloon allegedly travelled east to west. In any case, how about the other 2 that weren't blamed on anyone, especially the one over Alaska?
Nobody can answer the questions because it's all classified "National Security".
On a macro scale, and on average, yes, but on the scale of a balloon, there are many winds that blow west.
They did that with AARO's video of the metallic orb over the middle east. Made it blurry, and redacted out all data readouts. They could do the same thing with the F-18's footage.. show us that it's a balloon.
Yes. That’s exactly what happens. [1]
“In 1970 United States intelligence sources believed that the Soviet Union was spending 60 million roubles annually on "psychotronic" research. In response to claims that the Soviet program had produced results, the CIA initiated funding for a new program known as SCANATE ("scan by coordinate") in the same year.”
That program was funded until 1995.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Dutchman
With everyone handwringing about climate change clearly being our doom, has no one once wondered if it might be partly responsible for an upsurge in sightings of unexplained aerial phenomenon?
So for instance at 2:00 in the video you linked, he at least acknowledges that he's "not going to address" among other things that there were reported to be a fleet of the observed objects. He fails to acknowledge that he's also not addressing that the object was also observed from multiple sources. And the "SA" was also picking them up, which I can only assume is a sort of scanned array radar type system. In which case you have multiple forms of instrumentation picking the signals up, multiple trained pilots interpreting them as meaningful and distinct, and more. So in other words he's not going to address the countless things that effectively falsify everything else he's about to say.
Finally, this seems to be a newer video. In his past videos he went so far as to suggest that the glare caused by the exhaust of a jet, when one fighter jet was (apparently?) locking onto another jet, all without realizing it. I fully agree with the implied idea there of tossing appeals to authority in the trash, but.... like with all things, sometimes this can be overdone. It seems that part of his theory was removed, and now it seems he's just leaving it as glare from nowhere? Ah yes, that's also one of those things he's "not going to address" now.
He doesn't make any claims about the aircraft because he is saying it isn't visible... and the scope of his analysis is this single piece video evidence.
Could be (perhaps even likely to be) an unpiloted craft. It could be a craft no more technologically advanced than human tech; maybe it’s an alien Voyager 1.
Now in the case that they crashed due to a bug, then the programming profession is safe from program verification and AI, I like that option!
That this is a possibility doesn't make it a likely one, however. But just pointing out that there's possible explanations that counter this thinking.
Why go through the trouble to refute one unlikely and poorly supported hypothesis just to jump right into a new one? Has Occam taught us nothing? There are no successfully hidden "conspiracies" of that scale. Maybe someone can run a successful assassination once in a while and keep it under wraps for a decade or so, but that's as far as it goes. Lips are too loose and threads are too easy to pull, especially in the internet era.
They might as well also believe the fairy god-mother decides the outcome of battles and direct their ire at her.
This is The National Enquirer-level stuff.
True but that was before we started having idiot legislators in congress willing to throw a few tens of millions at "investigations" by the military. Nothing like easy budget and a cushy assignment for several years to encourage some motivated reasoning. "Hey, if you're payin', I'm investigatin.'"
This clearly goes well beyond someone simply being mistaken.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
My point wasn't that there's a reasonable factual argument here (there clearly isn't) it's that the "reasonable" people jumping in to re-interpret it were also engaging in unfounded conspiracy paranoia (albeit one with a much more plausible hypothesis).
just go on the internet and tell lies?
whether the original signal was generated by little grey men or at the behest of old white ones, there will be amplification by opportunists.
Seems like something a nation state might float if another nation state was (or was planning) ramping up some newfangled drone espionage missions.
OMG aliens -> nice advanced tech you got there
Intact -> would be a shame if someone ratcheted up tensions by reverse engineering it
Partial -> stay off my land
illegally withheld from Congress -> if mom and dad find out we're both in trouble
Much less commonly said, but still true, is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary trust. I do not trust the people saying these things. That I can not 100% guess their motivations for this is not particularly relevant. They have a long history of consistent and large lies. Failing to take that into account when they're making this sort of claim is foolishness.
In fact at this point they're really in a Catch-22... if they really do try to come out with "Yes! Aliens! Really!" then we have the question of, why then were you lying the up to this point then? Because if they are real you've been lying and lying and lying and lying beyond my capacity to express in a single sentence... why should I trust you now, then?
I mean, it isn't that hard to imagine how "alien threat!" will require us to, once again, give them more power. It's absolutely astonishing how no matter what the problem is, the solution is to give them more power.
Now there are multiple private teams who could actually pull it off. Or maybe not... I have no idea how hard it would be to make a signal source appear from Earth as if it came from a fixed star, but I suspect it would be extremely difficult to accomplish for any length of time. It's not as if you could just park it someplace. Then there's parallax to consider.
In any event, the message wouldn't be "Build a spaceship with technology no one has ever seen before." The message would be "Get your act together or we'll bulldoze your planet to make room for a hyperspace bypass," or "Take the red pill LOL" or "Get Amazon Prime today. The bargains are out of this world!"
The Iraq war?
It's a bit much to start an entire deductive reasoning based on such a blatant assumption.
What you say is true. But here's the problem. 99% of people in this world are people you don't know well and don't know personally and they aren't famous enough for you to trust them.
Thus by probability an extraordinary claim that is true is highly, highly likely to come from someone you will never have any form of "extraordinary" trust for. So your statement, which I quoted, is, from a practical standpoint, completely useless. By your logic all extraordinary claims in existence will all pretty much be mistrusted by you. It's a statement of complete denial of anything that sounds outlandish. It's the definition of being closed minded.
Being extremely closed minded tends to be better than being extremely open minded where you believe every freaking thing you hear. But the best place to be in is at neither extreme. Rather then deny all extraordinary claims you should be skeptical.
You need to search for techniques in which will help you determine whether you CAN or CANNOT trust someone you do not already have "extraordinary" trust for.
To which I throw this statement at you:
If someone makes a statement without any ulterior motive that results in net benefit to them, you can place more merit on the fact that they are telling you what they believe to be the truth.
So take for example a stranger tells you there's a bomb in the building and you have to get out. You get the hell out because that stranger had nothing to gain from telling there's a bomb.
If a person with a camera is recording you and he told you there's a bomb in the building. Well that's different right? The key difference here is that in one situation there's a clear ulterior motive. In the other situation there was no motive.
Follow the motive.
The person making the claim... what is his motive?
That's not how we gain extraordinary trust (remember, Kyrie Irving is pretty darn famous).
We expect all statements to be independently verified and attested by a bunch of experts, with eg. journalists verifying they are indeed experts (that's journalists' expertise). The more people who've you learned to trust in that chain of verifiers, the higher your trust.
When it comes to extraordinary claims like this, I usually go back to the "implementation": why and how did another civilization solve all of the physics problems of interstellar flight (if it did), how did they go undetected by other countries and amateurs, and why did they not simply reach out in an attempt to communicate?
At that point I can even buy that these "intelligence officers" believe what they are saying, but I still don't buy that their claims are true.
Nope. It is how you gain extraordinary trust. It really depends on what they are famous for. There are many famous people or scholars who you respect and trust due to their fame. You trust them, because others trust them.
Fame can also cause distrust too. But it does cause trust as well.
>When it comes to extraordinary claims like this, I usually go back to the "implementation": why and how did another civilization solve all of the physics problems of interstellar flight (if it did), how did they go undetected by other countries and amateurs, and why did they not simply reach out in an attempt to communicate?
This is too much speculation. There are an infinite number of explanations here. Better to follow the the chain of events from the anomalous claim and start piecing together things forwards rather then just claim it's impossible because you can't think of any valid way for it to happen.
Additionally the claim itself is "extraordinary" so basically there is likely no mundane explanation for it if the claim is true.
>At that point I can even buy that these "intelligence officers" believe what they are saying, but I still don't buy that their claims are true.
So that's the first step right? They believe what they are saying. So from their perspective they witnessed extraordinary evidence. So what made them believe it? What did they actually see? Are they correct? Even if following this thread leads to something different then their claim, one can still learn something interesting.
Closed mindedness often involves logic that works backwards. You need to move forwards. If you see a path, moving forwards means following the path. Moving backwards means ignoring the path because you made a guess that there's nothing at the end of the path.
I don't trust "famous" people. I trust that it's unlikely for a large group of "famous" (eg experts in relevant fields, which is a more specific interpretatiin of "famous"), unrelated people to not trust each other, and only once they reach a common ground, would my trust of their extraordinary claim rise.
Yes, I wouldn't trust Einstein proclaiming speed of light is finite, but when corroborated with independent claims of experiments from Michelson proving likewise, and others from 30 years ago, I would.
Basically, if it's too few people, I'd question how did others, unrelated people not see it: science mostly progresses these days when the body of knowledge is such that simply the next thing is in front of us, and multiple people simultaneously "discover" it. As it's many people making similar claims, I'd start considering it seriously.
This is how science works, and I am happy to follow that with media reports as well. It's not at all backwards IMO.
Sure, if I was working on a hypothesis, I would certainly venture into less trusty sources, but I would need to be ready to accept for my hypothesis to be disproven too.
I have answers, but discussing them would just be further excuses to try to dilute away this fundamental truth, so I decline. It's their responsibility to figure out how to be more trustworthy if they want it, not mine. (Helpful tip: They can start by not lying about everything, all the time.) It's my responsibility not to trust known, repeated, huge liars.
So it'll take a lot to convince me that this is real. But let's say for an instant that it is.
And you're the government, and you need to handle "announcing" this to the people without freaking them out. I guess you set the scene, monitor for a while what people do (decades of denial), then when it seems like the people are doing alright/don't care about it much, start to say you'll actually look into it (couple years ago with official release of documents). Then monitor the reaction... again people don't really care. Kind of exciting for some people for a day or two but still go work in the morning, life goes on. Then you start to drop the other shoe.
I guess? I'm skeptic but if there was a world in which there are alien UAPs, where the govt knows, where the govt hides it, I can construe this scenario as a good reason why govts would have gone about it in this way.
When speaking of the us government and its agencies we must remain ever cognizant that the official story is rarely truthful whether explicitly or by omission. Relatedly, we’ve seen extraordinary measures taken against individuals leaking pretty minor and generally suspected details like wholesale warrant less surveillance via direct taps on arterial comm lines. Thus, it is more likely that this guy has nothing and no power, else he’d be in an Ecuadorian embassy/Russia or an as of yet unknown black site instead of doing interviews.
What's going on is something like emergent disinformation. A combination of
* intentional withholding of facts (we don't report on how much we know about foreign spying and interfernce with aircraft, etc),
* incompetent reporting within the government (the person denying things is a low level public relations person who isn't told much and knows very little, forced to change stories when scraps of information come down)
* memes (UFOs go through waves of popularity of public interest)
* legitimate hallucinations
* hoaxes
* rare atmospheric phenomena
What is almost certainly happening is we've got foreign spies etc. with ordinary, unusual, and unfamiliar aircraft bothering us along with thrillseekers with drones etc. on an uptick because drones are cheaper and more possible these days. There might be some really interesting secret aircraft both foreign and domestic flying around, and generally the governments aren't showing their cards about what they can do and what they know... they benefit from the confusion and conspiracies keeping their adversaries off balance chasing the unknown.
In the end the people who do know everything know some interesting but still certainly rather mundane information. It's not a case of a grand conspiracy where somebody is trying actively to manipulate public opinion, just vague intentional lack of communication and keeping secrets by just not telling most people anything involved.
The simplest explanation are mental illness, shameless fame seekers and confused people who saw rocket debris or some supersonic fighter.
I want to believe. So I'll spend more time than is wise evaluating evidence. But, like, it's gotta be some really good evidence.
My only hope for human kind travelling interstellar distances is to figure something orthogonal out, as even speed of light is too slow (perhaps we extend our lifetimes to span millenia combined with teleportation? :).
It's been happening for some time before then.
https://listverse.com/2016/04/24/10-historic-divine-painting...
But the idea that the government is manipulating people to seize power goes back a long way too...
So basically it's the steps to building popular consensus despite missing or contrary facts.
Fascinating.
Snowden, 10 years on A decade ago, we published the Edward Snowden revelations that forever changed our relationship to our privacy and to our governments. Since then, we have defied the powerful by landing scoops on everything from Big Tech to surveillance, offshore banking to cellphone spyware. .. ..
And it's in this exact context that the Pentagon started to release UFO videos and the military was publicly patenting sci-fi level technology like a "craft using an inertial mass reduction device." [2] Not only does the patent read like it was written by a sci-fi jargon-generator LLM, but there's absolutely no point to it. Were something like this real, you would keep it beyond classified to not only maximize your national benefit from it, but to try to keep it out of the hands of peer nations for as long as possible. With it published, if e.g. China or Russia was going to make this, what now? Are you going to sue them? Maybe get the WTO to give them a stern talking to. Its one and only purpose is to publicize "secret" research from the military.
So why? Literally the only explanation I can see is it just being another ham-fisted recruitment effort. 'You can go make a living making software pushing ads on people who don't want them, or you can enlist in the military, travel the world, and perhaps even one day get clearance to see and start working where the "real" science is happening.'
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[1] - https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/to-receive-te...
[2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en?inventor=S...