One is that, while this is written like a straight news article (until the last paragraph), this is in The Hill's Opinion section. In the past, I have seen this publication allow people of questionable credibility to post in their Opinion section. I have no idea who this writer is, but they are not a news reporter (or they weren't acting as one when they wrote this piece).
The second is that the bill appears to be about Congress' authority to control funding and perform oversight. They are withdrawing funds from secret UFO projects and asking those involved to come forward, either with the greatest discovery in human history or (more likely) with a story about money being misappropriated and that misappropriation being hidden from the US Senate.
World order is changing. China is a rising military power. People may even see foreign spy aircraft (e.g. Chinese weather balloons) over US airspace. The DoD would rather you believe it's aliens. This kind of propaganda works great on older boomers in particular because they've been conditioned to believe it all their life.
The US military is not able to coverup something like a crashed alien spacecraft. They couldn't even stop a dozen men with box cutters from crashing planes into buildings. I would not be surprised in the least to find out that the 9/11 conspiracies were funded by the DoD—probably by the same people doing this nonsense now. Again, "they" would rather you believe in a supremely powerful government with space lasers than have their true incompetence unmasked.
“You spend a lot, but you get the best!” sounds a lot better than “You spend a lot, but we still suck!”
This argument doesn't make any sense. The US military is better than the next top three militaries combined. The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
The US military might be better than the rest, but they were still defeated by poor people in the desert with some Casio watches and decades' old AKs.
Similarly, it seems that small drones are another potential avenue of exploitation in asymmetric warfare.
Partially due to institutional experience and economies of scale (for certain capabilities). We probably still exceed what the next top 3 powers (China, Russia, India, BTW) are spending in PPP terms, so it shouldn't be that surprising.
> The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
For every video of HIMARS blowing up a Russian ammo depot, there's a video of Ka-52 helicopters popping M2 Bradleys from 5+ km away.[1] M777s were lauded for their accuracy....until they broke. [2] Ukrainian brigades have been lavishly equipped with Western armored vehicles and they've bounced off a brick wall of positively-ancient minefields and artillery, very similar to the defense-in-depth that the Soviets used to defeat the Germans at Kursk ...in 1943.[3]
This conflict is so complex in terms of difficult-to-measure soft factors that are influencing the battlefield (training, maintenance, corruption, NATO ISR support, information operations/propaganda, etc.), that drawing conclusions about the merits of individual technical systems or especially the overall tech base of the two main powers (Russia vs "the West") as a whole is....unwise.
[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-armor-appears...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/us/ukraine-artillery-brea...
[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/world/europe/ukraine-coun...
The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. You'd think maybe they'd have busted out the ray guns or spaceships instead of taking the L.
To be fair the US left Afghanistan and the remaining Afghani army crumbled to the taliban pretty quickly.
I’d say the two situations are very different, the US successfully occupied a country that was ~7000km from them.
The Russians have so far failed to take a city that’s ~200km from their own border in about 1 and a half years.
We had control for a long time.
If you have control of an area and mismanage it for years, that's not a military loss. Failure at that point is something different.
But it’s still not comparable to Ukraine.
The sheer scale involved is completely different and really shows the ability of the US to project force.
Whereas Russia is currently struggling to get 200km from their own border.
The causalities scales are also hugely different. The Russians have taken likely close to 5x the causalities in about 1/4 the time.
Russia is clearly not a super power but that doesn’t mean other countries like America aren’t.
As for Afghanistan, well, of course never get involved in a land war in Asia. But that wasn't a conventional war, and our military is intended to fight conventional wars. Our forces really are not set up to respond to the Taliban.
However, if people think they're aliens, that instead turns psychological warfare on its head and into something that inspires awe, wonder and possibility. No one is scared in the ways adversaries want them to be scared, and no one doubts the government is actually capable of handling threats from adversaries.
"Aliens" as an explanation quells the potential for panic, versus adversaries successfully inducing the panic responses they desire. It also gives the opportunity for those who care too much about this to be painted as quacks.
> China/Russia/whoever
As a placeholder for potential US adversaries who might have the motivation do something like this. If you don't like that I said Russia, ignore it and fill it in with China.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/china-air-force-may-take-a...
If you think people are seeing real flying saucers that are defying the laws of physics, I don't know what to tell you.
>China/Russia/whoever can send whatever they want into US airspace and there's nothing that anyone, including the military, can do about it.
So it's not "whatever they want", it's cheap drones and balloons. You make China out to be some scary powerful Boogeyman (which requires the USG to invent alien stories as a cover) and then admit they don't have such capability.
I personally am not scared one iota about Chinese aircraft threatening US airspace. And I am very confident that if such a scenario did arise, the US military would address it in the most appropriate and effective way. Which could range anywhere from ignoring it, to neutralizing with extreme prejudice.
You want people to feel safe and pay their taxes. You want your citizens to believe that the $2 trillion spend on defense every year goes to good use, creating the kind of military and intelligence apparatus that Hollywood portrays.
We fund these types of propaganda campaigns for the same reasons we have military parades and air shows. We saw how well these kinds of "overwhelmingly powerful" government myths worked for both the Soviets and Axis powers in WW2 and we copied it. Every government chasing power and status wants its citizens to feel like they are the most powerful. China and Russia have similar kinds of myths.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Please, continue to believe that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division within the US government managed to retrieve them and keep it secret for 50+ years. Look past the failing state of our infrastructure and continue to believe that an alien species capable of interstellar travel is interested specifically in Americans.
You're presenting a false choice between two conspiracy theories as the only ways to view this situation, which certainly doesn't make your particular conspiracy theory look any more credible.
I don't believe any such thing.
Especially when NATO hasn't fired a shot in Ukraine, but is supplying real-time intelligence to the AFU.
US cold war era surplus + EW helped break an entire Russian army, and may yet break a second.
The allegations by David Grusch that set all this off included that there's been a decades long competition between various nations to collect these craft.
From The Debrief Article
>“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.
My take away had been that most of the allegations are effectively some level all the stuff we've always heard about UFOs has been true this whole time (e.g. Roswell). Essentially one of the worst kept secrets, ignored largely because of the implausibility rather than secrecy.
You're saying this is surfacing to fabricate American excellence and relied on the assumption that these claims are being made because 1) Only a superior nation could hide this and 2) only a superior nation could find them. What has been claimed was that it's barely hidden and a bunch of nations have been finding them. Your argument is against a straw man.
China just finished their first domestic aircraft carrier, and the current military hasn't really been in any major war. In the meantime, the US has continually maintained a state of readiness and nearly constant wars while modernizing its fleet.
But you had to just go 9/11 Truther which means nobody here should really be paying attention to you.
thinking that the person I was responding to was suggesting the DoD may have funded the terrorists (a "conspiracy" is a secret plan to do something unlawful).
After re-reading, I see now the claim is that the DoD may have funded the truthers- which I know nothing about.
[0] https://www.spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fbi-agents-accuse-cia-of
The moment the Rubicon is crossed, both the US and China would fall into an all out economic depression and that is exactly why that Rubicon will not be crossed in my lifetime.
This might be an issue at some point if you just graduated high school but for now we have mutually assured economic destruction.
I am far more worried about a debt bomb going off in China than a real bomb.
Do you have any evidence of this?
> "Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights" over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."
This is exactly what happened with the people and incidents that were exposed in the Mirage Men[1] documentary that covers how the government uses UFO and alien conspiracy theories to coverup information that they don't want the public to know.
Well-meaning people stumbled upon classified projects, did the right thing by reporting them to the government, and then the government went out of its way to construct situations and fake evidence to convince them that what they saw were really aliens.
In one incident, the government constructed a fake "alien crash landing" site in the mountains, and flew one of their victims to it and let them investigate it themselves in order to convince them that what they really saw were aliens.
In the process of deceiving these people, the government even significantly contributed to a veteran's mental breakdown and paranoia via agents' lies and extensive surveillance of the victim's life.
People desperately want to believe aliens aren't real, and some real mental gymnastics to get there. Like believing "debunking" videos from crackpots and videogame programmers (which real pilots say are nonsensical), or "this one time in the 60s the CIA".
Anti-vaxxers show us there is no such thing.
Exactly. I firmly believe that extraterrestrial life exists. My belief comes from the abundance of CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) in the universe, combined with extremely long time scales and basic chemistry.
Simple/single-celled (or some analog) extraterrestrial life seems almost inevitable based on our understanding of how the universe works.
That said, such a belief doesn't include intelligent extraterrestrial life with technological civilizations that might create interstellar spacecraft which regularly visit our little corner of the galaxy. For me to believe that, I'd need a "Klaatu barads nicto"[0] moment.
I could be wrong, but there's no compelling evidence that I am. To channel Carl Sagan: "Claims require evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still
But still, it's just unfathomable that in billions of years across billions of trillions of star systems, that only one developed intelligent life. Even on earth, life was nearly destroyed 5 times, but still survived and evolved.
Of course, it's very likely that such life will be forever undetectable by us, and we'll be undetectable by them.
We can be pretty confident that life as we know it has evolved elsewhere, given the chemistry involved, but intelligent, (and more importantly) life that develops technological civilizations is much less certain.
Detecting intelligent non-technological life is likely impossible unless we actually visit such a planet. Consider a world where creatures like dolphins or whales are the dominant species. No fire (okay, sodium reactions, but how do you create and store pure sodium ions?), so no metallurgy.
As I said, I'd need to see some pretty convincing evidence (even with the vast expanses of both space and time in the universe pushing in that direction) to claim that intelligent, technological life exists elsewhere. That doesn't mean such civilizations don't exist, but given we don't really understand how intelligence (as a prerequisite for a technologically advanced civilization) comes about, except in broad evolutionary terms, making such a claim is premature IMHO.
But still, it's just unfathomable that in billions
of years across billions of trillions of star systems,
that only one developed intelligent life
It's also important IMO to understand that advanced intelligence is not an inevitable goal of evolution. Evolution only "cares" about survival. That can result in intelligent life, but it can just as often result in horseshoe crabs -- creatures of low intelligence that fill a niche perfectly and resiliently.
Intelligence is a really tough way to survive. You need a metabolically expensiv and fragile brain (or brains)
I'm a believer of the notion of "great filter(s)."
I think most civilizations on a path to interstellar travel have to pass through a nuclear fission phase (how do you build advanced stuff without discovering this?) and I think a great % of civilizations will end/cripple themselves during this phase via nuclear war. This will filter out a lot of civilizations.
The next challenging filter would be making serious efforts at exploring/colonizing/exploiting other planets and solar systems before exhausting their own home planet's resources or making it unlivable. The human race is definitely on pace to lose this race.
However, I'm not going to believe that little green men from Mars visit the US government in flying saucers because of evidence so bad that "crackpots and videogame programmers" can debunk it.
One aspect of such surveillance missions is to see how the US responds to these incidents, in order to learn about technology and methods that are used and that adversaries might not know about.
If you view “the US government” add some monolithic entity with a single set of objectives then sure, the above makes no sense.
Or, is the credulity in the US at such a high point that any sort of conspiracy idea has currency?
For example, they often start by undermining trust in media organizations, then elected leaders.
The current trajectory the US is on is indistinguishable from the successful outcome of a propaganda operation based on that playbook.
Why? They could just say "we have advanced but secret systems that can tell China is up to something".
There was just a balloon, and another round of em over Asia -- no one would be surprised.
This isn't about China, it's about Trump and the hard-right conspiracy types going ape-shit, esp. since those indictments have teeth. The DoD has been doing this since the 90s and Oklahoma City.
No. The USA has spent the last several decades putting most of its military budget into aircraft carriers, which will all be sunk within the first 24 hours of any conflict with China. This is just a last ditch effort to try to trick China into thinking we might have some kind of deterrent.
1. sink carriers
2. ???
3. profit
Consider updating your priors on this topic
The “non-earth” origin is the smokescreen, “exotic” covers foreign secret research projects?
Something a bit convoluted like this is orders of magnitude more probable in my world model. (Basically, the prior “aliens exist and have been covered up” rounds to zero, so given we are observing this public action, even extremely unlikely explanations could explain it.)