The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space."
So... Harry Reid's friend is absolutely convinced there are aliens, gets Reid to convince congress to fund the program, and all the money goes back to his own company? Not fishy at all.
Such oddball connections are probably the only the way such a program would ever get funded.
Edit: well, obviously he didn't have the money. Misspoke. I meant the means (a company with the required infrastructure).
This is unexplained phenomena which could be the result of diminished mental acuity or other unexplained physical events. I’m not sure how these theories should be made anymore legitimate without more evidence?
Science is a process, a method by which we can answer certain types of questions. To often people hear things like settled science, or the science is crystal clear, not up for debate.. These are political posturing and have little to do with actual science. It's absurd, and some people realize this.
As with any science, data comes in late, or sometimes not at all. There are quite a few FDA prescription drugs that were approved and later recalled, some with devastating effects on their consumers.
The truth is, science is done by people, people who are infallible. People who make mistakes, who see things from a certain point of view, or who don't have all the data yet. Additionally, prediction models can be tweaked to say exactly what you want to, with devastating effect on our community.
You can't say anything though. Even in grad school labs, to make certain statements or even hint about things can lead to problems with your advisor, or research, or worse yet, peers.. Academia is a great place, at least it has been for me, as long as you keep your head down and focus on research.. i dont think it's the best place now if you truly want to question everything. I wouldn't even venture where you could go for that now.
I think this has led to a generalized mistrust, and it falls on all of us. The reality is that data is always changing, models change, etc.. People who put policies into legislation need to balance not only the aspect of the science, but the overall big picture; cultural, societal, expectations, desires etc. as well. That's politics. I think it was Russ Roberts who said you can engineer a bridge, but you can't engineer society in the same way. And i think that's right, too Often we miss that.
What you are describing is the science, the institution and this is perhaps also how wider public perceives it.
You spend your own money rather than ask taxpayers to fund your fantasy. There is more than enough open source intel on atmospheric phenomena out there. And plenty of "UFO researchers" willing to work.
If he raised some VC funding, he can go hunt Minotaur for all I care. But this is my money he's using to do this. No thanks
People in first-world countries are usually OK with spending public money on science. So, if you consider it legit science (and he does), it makes perfect sense for him to lobby spending public money on it.
No really, show us the public tender and the evidence that the money was well spent by tender won on merit alone. Or we are going to assume it is totally corrupt. Onus of proof used to be the other way around but Washington, yeah, it really does stink like that. This is why outsider populists like Sanders and Trump are popular. Everyone has had enough of this garbage.
What is the size of your organization? How are you submitting bids, and where are you getting your solicitations? Does someone in your company network with the government liaisons beyond just the one you've submitted a bid to? Has your company hired someone to work this network for solicitations that aren't on FBO? Do your PIs have experience outside academia in contracting? I've been a part of several (successful) bids and -- operating under the assumption your claim was made in good faith and not just a lie -- I wonder at your approach. This is work that pretty much every organization in the US government needs.
For example, if you approach the US government through a solicitation with really any half-reasonable suggestion for processing enormous amounts of data, and you'll get a contract.
Your subsequent comment proves my point: it isn't that easy.
As it happens, we are well qualified, and we've won a number as well. My point is that your original statement is completely wrong (and ironically it appears you agree).
Hiring him to do this is like hiring Robert Ballard to find the Titanic.
No, because the Titanic could be proven to have existed before Robert Ballard tried to find it.
It's also disingenuous to skip over more plausible explanations, including hoaxes, the memetic effect of UFO culture, classified military aircraft and disinformation campaigns, and misidentification of other mundane aerial phenomena, to assume that anything unidentified in the sky is likely an alien spacecraft.
I'm not saying it was an alien craft, but there are a limited number of plausible explanations for an event like this and none of what you listed is a plausible explanation.
Not taking a side, just pointing that out.
And Someone allegedly photographed it, but no one bothered to examine or release the photos?
The vast majority of people are looking at Venus or the moon or streetlights or drunken hallucinations. But we don't care about those people. We care about the 0.0003% (or whatever) of people that check all the boxes on a long list of reliability factors. And yet, that still isn't good enough for some people, because of the hugely negative pseudoscience context that this carries with it. "It's folklore!" In fact, I'll assert that a strange enough advanced aircraft could fly nuclear weapons over this country, and until our pilots shot it out of the sky and spread the wreckage across three states, it would hardly get any attention because of the context this subject carries.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek#Change_of_opini...
>"The disc was visible for approximately five minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it."
It also apparently was not visible on radar or visually from the control tower. Who cares if it was 'aliens' or not, it's a damned interesting phenomena that should be studied for it's own sake.
But beyond that, I think we can agree that the conversation elsewhere in this thread demonstrates there is a whole lot of negative context which serves to drive people away from taking it seriously.
I don't, but only so long as they don't ascribe magical or supernatural qualities to physical phenomena.
It's one thing to believe alien spacecraft as an extremely unlikely possibility, and another to consider it not only likely, but indisputably so. The lack of skepticism combined with unfalsifiable claims are what disqualify him, in my view.
There does seem to be a fringe of interesting events in the field worth studying. I'm not convinced that there aren't plausible explanations for them - after all, how many "black triangle" sightings are likely to have been classified stealth aircraft? But I also think the negativity serves a valuable purpose as long as it keeps people from entertaining flights of fancy.
I'll believe the Robert Bigelows and Bob Lazars and Whitley Streibers of the world when they can back their claims up with undeniable and irrefutable evidence. Given the nature of their claims, I don't believe that's an unreasonable bar to set. Even Einstein was doubted until someone proved him right.
Neverthless, the military does sometimes test classified aircraft in view of civilians. And they have been known to use or even encourage UFO sightings as misinformation to cover up their activity.
Fiction has to make sense, but reality doesn't always have to make sense.
And so a sensible person seeks (perhaps justifiably) prosaic explanations for everything and automatically excludes any hypothesis without a prosaic explanation (with the incredibly audacious conceit of assuming we already understand enough about the universe to make such assumptions), while the fantastical person, not as bound by the need for evidence, can wildly speculate (which would of course include nonhuman intelligences somehow visiting us over distances that are insurmountable to us currently, but might also include basically, well, anything, since without the hard-evidence requirement, you're free to get creative)
I think both of these points exist as extremes on a continuum and that they're both wrong in some capacity. I think pragmatism and reasoning and rationality are a good basis, however... just, limiting, as well.
We might advance a bit on the evidence front here if there was a scientific way to evaluate mass eyewitness testimony (individual eyewitness testimony has come under fire recently https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-..., but perhaps, if you multiply the number of witnesses, the errors will tend to cancel each other out and you might end up with something more like Evidence with a capital E. (This would be useful in far more areas than mere UFO observation, of course.)
What I am refusing to do is believe that hypothetical reality to be more likely than it is, based on the evidence (or lack thereof) presented and what it does or doesn't actually prove. I'm slotting it in the rank it deserves, which is slightly ahead of demons in likelihood but still less likely than everything else.
But yeah, the likelihood that it's aliens is not entirely zero.
Also, this came out moments ago. Timely? https://twitter.com/cnn/status/943105094345723904
There is a lack of transparency and obviously Bigelow has way more connections than a typical person, but it seems plausible to me that they really are sincere.
And 22 million to fund this program does sound somewhat reasonable, although granted we'll probably never see an audit of how the money was spent.
If they had nothing to hide, that part of the equation would be perfectly transparent.
I work in the public sector in Scandinavia and while I realize our laws are a little different, I would be in jail if I did something similar. Getting contracts to friends/family is a huge issue in most countries, which is why you document the reasoning even harder to make sure its absolutely bulletproof legally when they happen to have the best bid.
Also, may I add, what was the aerospace research company paid for exactly? Wasn't the project just filing reports and talking to people?
I found this book to be a good take that avoids hyperbole and tries to stick to the evidence and facts:
https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Offic...
If you were to ask me to guess, my bet is that current and past government programs to investigate these objects have concluded that a) they are non-threats to US national security and that b) performing further invasive means to investigate them past our current level of understanding is too risky to pursue. So (again if I had to guess) the consensus is, theories of their origin aside, "don't look into it further, and be assured that there will be no harm in not doing so," which is why you can see a program like this shut down without necessarily assuming that it was a waste or a wild goose chase.
I also recommend that book for those who are curious about evidence-based, well-researched accounts. Written by a journalist. It leaves aside the question of extraterrestrial origin as unprovable and only attempts to answer the question, "Is this phenomena real?"
Am I being tinfoil hatted here? It's what I would probably do if I were the Pentagon and found out the program has merit.
The countless stories and admissions of former military and intelligence officers blowing the whistle on deep shadow governments always sound so crazy, but the sheer number of them over time is... disturbing. As a skeptic to conspiracy theories, I don’t know what to make of it.
In any case: The pentagon shutting down a new independently started investigation group (in this hypothetical world where alien UFOs exist) would totally make sense, as it would be redundant to the extremely secret programs already in existence and only a liability for possible interference. They also wouldn’t be able to tell them why they’re shutting it down or cutting off funding, because th secrecy level of such a thing would go so much deeper.
It’s hard to believe this has any credibility at all, but if this NYT article is genuine and the claims of real progress made by a small and brief program are real, I don’t know what to think to be honest.
It’s easy to get mislead by the light, the perspective, the shadows, the distance, etc.
The really dumb part is the grandiose idea that aliens traveled immense distances to hide from us. The amount of energy needed to reach the a nearby star in any reasonable time is greater than the total of energy mankind has ever generated.
If they have the technology and power to travel here, they have nothing to fear from us. We are ants to them. They only question is whether they’d even deign to contact us at all?
As to contact - doubt it’s happened - it’d fuck up the data, and spoil the case study. So long as we keep on ignoring weird stuff because it’s weird the experiment is ok.
As to distances - well, that’s our perception of it - the best we can do is brute force through 3d space - and if they can manoeuvre as they appear to be able to, they may well have some means of travel that is, well, alien to us, such as some variety of extra dimensional travel.
I think the rest of your comment is plausible.
The little things sighted as "UFOs" would not be interstellar craft. They would be probes or local runabouts. The interstellar transport might resemble the craft depicted in the film Avatar (which was actually a realistic design), or maybe a hollowed out meteor. The latter would look natural when not executing a major engine burn.
As far as hiding: if they knew they were here to observe an intelligence with conceptual thinking ability and language (even one much less intelligent than they) they would know any overt contact would radically and permanently alter the subjects behavior.
This is all incredibly speculative. I'm just saying that it can't be ruled out by easy superficial arguments. It can't really be ruled out at all. We just don't have enough evidence to rule it in either.
Plenty of wildlife biologists do hide from their subjects when they know their presence will disturb the subjects. Why wouldn't an alien race do the same when observing humans?
Nevertheless you don't even need new physics for this line of speculation. Fusion rockets will do.
Additionally, in an unknown strategic situation, it is generally inadvisable to turn your situation with asymmetric information into one which informs the other players of your true state of play.
Now you might say, its would be pretty obvious that we're a comparatively primitive society. Maybe, maybe not. That makes a lot of simple assumptions about the nature of technology, instellar travel, and the possibilities of subterfuge and misdirection in a game with unknown players, unknown context, unknown goals, of unknown capability.
So from a purely theoretical perspective, I respectfully disagree.
The rational strategy is some function that trades off information-gathering directly against information-hiding on your own state of play.
Our species is arguably being the crazy ones sending out signals blindly into the ether without a care...
A great example shown by some UFO show was a side camera from the space shuttle. The footage has a nice curvature of the earth, with lot's of little specks that seem to be orbiting it way out in the distance. You see a maneuvering thruster fire then in slow motion a few heartbeats later these specks shoot off in a new direction.
Now, if you assume they where large objects far away they must have been moving incredibly quickly and have insane acceleration. However, if you realize they are flecks of paint etc/ near the shuttle pushed out of the way by the maneuvering thruster then they where not actually moving fast relative to the shuttle at any point.
Even more bizarre is how the craft appears totally cold, while there is a warm thermal halo of some kind around the craft, with a pattern very reminiscent of high energy fields.
The halo is an artifact of the FLIR device. Every FLIR I've ever seen does that in areas where there's a high temperature contrast.
I never said it wasn't.
I too place little stock in random untrained people seeing lights in the sky or lenticular clouds or taking videos of such with cell phone cameras.
One possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that they are here but are just not making overt obvious contact. If this were true we'd probably be talking about a "post-singularity" super intelligence. It would be nearly immortal and thus very patient. Contact protocols might take thousands of years.
If that were true, and the message of that being the case were delivered somehow to our governments, the general status quo around these phenomena and the propaganda steering people away from caring about them would be explainable. People have barely gotten used to the idea of mortality, but to know your race was doomed to extinction with certainty would almost certainly cause massive civil unrest and a major disruption to almost all human institutions and culture that assume our collective future is unbounded.
Perhaps this is too tinfoil but it's an internally consistent story, perhaps with the exception of how or why these agents would be detectable at all, when they surely could conceal themselves completely -- perhaps it's just probabilities though since there would not be much downside of detection by a primitive civilization such as ours.
Obviously this isn't the case but I just feel the Cixin Liu layed out this theory so convincingly that, at least for me, it might as well be.
That would make a fun plot for a movie. But having worked with the government and then also having observed leaks of top secret information and tools coming out the supposedly most secretive government institutions, I cannot believe they would be competent enough to keep that information under a tight lid for long.
Someone, somehow would have ex-filtrated some proof by now.
What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.
What I find interesting is that certain government programs are very leaky and others we have not seen any leaks. For instance we know the NSA has cryptanalysis programs, yet no leaks of US cryptanalysis have occurred. The Snowden documents have very little information on these programs.
Large numbers of people knew about ULTRA across many nations on both sides of the iron curtain. ULTRA was kept secret for 42 years, well past the point that the main utility of keeping it secret has passed.
Why? What makes one program more leaky than another.
>What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.
There so many motivations for a disinformation campaign here.
I seem to remember reading a story that was more similar to what you were describing, but can't remember the name or much about it.
If we became super-advanced, it's hard to imagine given our past (including sci-fi like the series) that we'd just go head and decide to wipe out anyone we encounter, even if we did consider them lowly. Largely for the same reasons there exist animal rights groups, etc.
If the stars are teeming with "machinic" intelligence, something far more probable than any sort of biological intelligence, then anthropomorphizing is not going to lead you outside the maze.
Humanity is done playing the morality game a few thousands of years back. There were a few socio religious movements in India, which focussed on these things and they more or less concluded these things were beyond impractical.
And yes, even today rats and other animals are used for experiments in manufacturing drugs for humans.
What is to say they don't see as rats?
Exactly.
There's simply no reason to, except maybe sheer curiosity or some legal issues. What would we want from an uncontacted Amazonian tribe?
But even if they wanted, from the political point of view, who would you even talk to? People of the planet Earth, bypassing their governments? Every government of every country?
Plus, what about the possible social upheaval? They would be guilty.
No matter how you spin it, it's more trouble than it's worth. It is, however, essential to keep a potential competitor under surveillance, especially when they are rapidly developing.
Being spotted though, that I find improbable. There are numerous ways we could eliminate signs of contact with a society at the level of, say, X century, and that's just one thousand years gap. With a greater gap, it would probably be like competing with wild baboons over a Nobel prize.
Alternatively, maximizing utility may require a certain minimal level of detection. It's hard to predict what cost function is being optimized.
Given what is now common knowledge about AI game theory, it's super hard or impossible to actually ascribe any form of motives, ethics, intent, etc to the underlying system or intelligence that is controlling these objects if they are not natural and have no association with human culture or intelligence.
That's true, and there could be "rogue actors" who care less about the detection. But - again, borrowing the X century analogy - there's a lot of tools that can be employed to eliminate the witnesses and such.
For example, let's say time travel will be possible at any given point in the future. Well, if it were possible in the future, we might expect to see it happening across time, including the past and present.
It would of course represent technology thousands of years more advanced than the observers of the phenomenon, but not millions of years away, as might well be the case for civilizations from planets evolving quite differently from our own. It would also represent technology that evolved from our own developmental progress.
It would also address the issue of spatial proximity - of course we don't detect life outside Earth, because the "extra-terrestrials" come from Earth.
I'm not suggesting it is absolutely time travelers, but I'm quite surprised I never see that suggested on a similar frequency with the whole aliens angle when discussing UFOs.
We do not know for a fact that time travel is possible and there are good physics-based reasons to think it isn't. We definitely don't know that there are parallel dimensions or universes that are actually inhabitable. Dimensions and parallel universes may be mathematical artifacts. In math a dimension is just a degree of freedom. A penny is five-dimensional if you count temperature and electrical charge as dimensions.
Another speculation you run into is the "ultra-terrestrial" idea-- that they might be from Earth itself. Maybe they live deep underground or under the ocean, etc. This one is pretty implausible too. I could believe that there are unknown species, sure, but not an unknown species with an industrial infrastructure capable of producing flying machines. No way. Even deep underground we'd detect its vibration and EM emissions.
So yeah, space aliens are the most reasonable hypothesis if these things were to actually be artificial and not made by humans. That's the big "if" of course. Like I said elsewhere there's some intriguing evidence out there but nowhere near enough to draw such a conclusion.
I think how close they got in the article is the limits of our tech. We happen upon them randomly, and the crafts are so much more advanced than ours that it's impossible to knock one down to study it further.
>Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.
>“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”
They claim to have physical evidence? Seems like a buried lede if even remotely true.
They only spent $22 million on the whole program. Accounting errors in the Pentagon literally amount to trillions of dollars. $22 million is about 20% of the cost of a single F-35. They have much better ways to funnel taxpayer money - $22 million isn't even pocket change for the Pentagon.
This.
In the many years and countless thousands of miles of voyages that followed, I never heard a goddamned thing. Oh well.
During the 70's or 80's Soviet subs were detecting these "quacking" sounds in the Antarctic. They were puzzling and many thought that it was the aliens or super secret Western technology.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
It turned out to be whales.
There were other sounds like the "Bloop" which turned to be ice quakes.
> Or maybe he was just trolling us
I also had an uncle in the Soviet military and he did like to troll us. When rumors of aliens become popular in the tabloids, he convinced a good number of people from his village that aliens have landed in the woods. It was actually a lightning strike which caught some trees on fire but, but he got them to believe it was a landing zone for an alien spacecraft.
On a more serious note, I can't believe any government can keep a tight enough lid on something like that. Someone, somewhere is bound to defect or to leak it is somehow.
Except that what you are swatting away with that comment is someone claiming to have heard that leak. One could also look at the NYT article as another leak, no?
I would think that if one had something top secret like this that one desperately wanted to keep under wraps despite the inevitable leak, the best strategy might well be to intentionally sow lots of bogus UFO sightings and create a subculture of UFO paranoia, so that when the true leaks eventually happen they are lost in the noise.
Which of course does not mean that is necessarily what has actually been happening.
Yap. I'll swat a lot of online comments claiming someone heard there are aliens visiting earth from their uncle. I'll also swat away similar claims about contrail or lizard people. What would be the logical reason not to swat them away?
You can ask what would take not to swat them away? How about specific details about aliens, new technology example or some breakthrough in physics or other science possible from this alien technology. A clear video or these spaceships not some blurry shape moving on the screen.
> One could also look at the NYT article as another leak, no?
Is it? It's a leak of the existence of UFO. There is not doubt UFOs exist, I am not sure that's proof of aliens.
> I would think that if one had something top secret like this that one desperately wanted to keep under wraps despite the inevitable leak, the best strategy might well be to intentionally sow lots of bogus UFO sightings and create a subculture of UFO paranoia,
I would also intentionally sow bogus UFO sightings if I wanted to hide program to test experimental aircraft.
I haven't seen anything to discredit the message from the witnesses in the video, but the guy who organised the Disclosure Project (Steven Greer) is really convinced that ET are here.
So yeah, I'm not sure he can be taken very seriously. Just listen to Tom Delong on Joe Rogan's podcast and see how wacky this all is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_3mnJfHzY
Worth noting that the object was observed by a total of 3 F-18s, an E-2 Hawkeye, and a cruiser on the surface.
The other was at night in the Kazakh steppes, watching a triangle of lights dance in impossible fashion, before zooming up into the sky and disappearing - although given that I was near Baikonur, I give more credence to this one being man made.
But the thing over Bath was enough to break my mind. I still struggle to believe I saw anything. Others who saw it with me took the helicopter story and clung to it, because the alternatives are just too damn weird to process. I can understand why the pilot in the story you link was mocked - giving credence to something like this invokes painful cognitive dissonance.
Anyway. I’m just a guy on the internet, but I know I saw something.
Also, don’t forget Foo Fighters - pilots have been seeing odd things since at least WWII. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter
Oh, and there was this peculiar sighting a few years ago - not by me, but credible and bizarre - but again, maybe mundane. https://jpcvanheijst.com/red-lights-over-the-pacific-ocean-a...
20 years later someone described the exact same thing on /r/astronomy and I remembered it. I spent a weekend "researching" it and there were lots of article and sightings but no real info (I was pretty intrigued at that point!). Then someone replied on the astronomy post that it was "Maybe the NOSS satellites."... I looked them up, and yep - it was exactly what I remembered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxN2ieE8N9A
And I didn’t want to see something that has made me question my sanity for five years...!
How were you able to see such details from 20,000 feet away?
I was struck by your account, as Thomas Pynchon mentions in Gravity's Rainbow a mysterious phenomenon called the Kirghiz Light, seen on the steppes.
https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?titl...
Maybe a coincidence, but Pynchon drew a lot on real history and events, and I wonder if there was not something on the steppes people have been reporting for a while. I never could find anything on the Internet about it, but it makes me wonder.
Cmdr. Fravor was featured in the PBS Carrier series [0][1]
I see no correlation, implication, or relevance between these 2 statements.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005607812/look-at-tha...
Is the pilot in the video talking to a wingman or his weapons officer? (I think F-18E's are single seaters, but F-18F has a backseat).
About the radar comment: how often are there false positives on the radar? If they didn't see anything at all, would they have written off the radar results because they normally get that kind of noise? Maybe after thinking they saw something, they read too far into the radar noise.
Yeah, I know I'm proposing a couple coincidences, but we only hear about the situations where all the coincidences line up. And really, a couple mild coincidences lining up like this must happen often across the world, and seems more likely to describe this case than this being something extraordinary.
Something stuck to the front element probably wouldn't be so much in focus, it should be something deeper in the lens. For example a piece of paint can become dislodged (has happened to me with binoculars).
That being said, I think it's something worthy of exploration. My interest in the subject really began when I listen to people around me who saw and experienced things. It's one thing to read books or watch documentaries about UFOs, but it's another when normal "everyday people" who aren't interested in this kind of thing tell you their stories.
Chasing down misidentified flying objects and hoaxes will not. The idea that numerous spaceships, each with more potential kinetic energy than mankind has created in its entire history, are just flying around our atmosphere without leaving massive and easily recordable emissions is ludicrous.
If they can snap accelerate with essentially infinite jerk, as observations seem to suggest, then they’re not playing by the same rule book as us, and have fancy inertialess tech that’s beyond our ken.
I’m not some true believer in little green men, just a scientist who won’t rule out what seems impossible just because it seems so.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and all that.
At present and without extraordinary evidence to the contrary, I see human error as vastly more probably than "inertialess technology".
Or do you not know any specific credible cases of unexplained UFOs, and just dismiss the entire phenomenon because of its "low probability."
(I'm being facetious because many or all of the interesting cases easily rule out human error as the source of the phenomenon. Simultaneous human (and radar!) hallucination maybe, but not error.)
Otherwise you can only examine through the lens of the known physics, which makes them being alien spaceships impossible.
Identifying, understanding and explaining/eliminating exceptions is how science progresses. I know it causes discomfort to see something that defies expectations right in front of you. That does not mean we do not examine it. We should.
UFOs have been filmed and recorded by radars everywhere on earth. Something is going on. That doesn't mean it's ETs visiting us. On the other hand, it's a possibility. We don't know.
Now, does it mean we have to stop everything we're doing to investigate UFOs? Nope. All I'm saying is it's an interesting subject to explore.
Had someone seen the SR-71 in the 70s, it would have been considered a UFO or "alien technology" because it was so ahead of its time.
Many maneuvers "impossible for a plane" are impossible due to the pilot being human, not due to the plane not being capable. The F35 is capable of flight that would legitimately kill the pilot. No pilot, and suddenly you have lots more room to try crazy stuff including extremely high G speeds and turns, wingless designs or just crazy ideas.
>”Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s”
I don’t know who these people are beyond the fact that one of them was apparently a US senator, but this comes across as capable of being perceived as a conflict of interest (whether true or not). And not necessarily a monetary conflict if the recipient was indeed a billionaire.
I have never heard of a billionaire who said, he has enough money ...
Why is all the evidence grainy and obscured?
The prospect that life from another star system traveled hundreds of trillions of kilometers, only to hide for the past few decades, peeking out briefly for low-quality photoshoots, is beyond absurd.
While perhaps literally included in the group of "robotic drones", one interesting possibility would be craft piloted by highly-developed machine intelligence, what we might call sentient AI.
I gained a lot of respect that day for people who claim to have seen something and yet have no evidence other than blurry, shaky films. If I couldn't do it under perfect conditions, I don't expect a random guy to become all of a sudden a great photographer. In fact, if I wanted to get a picture of a plane right now, with the equipment I have at hand, it would be barely more than a small, dark spot.
I don't know whether UFOs are real (and, even if they are, if they really are aliens and not weird, unknown airplane prototypes). But the lack of HD footage would not be on my top list of reasons against it.
Is this genuinely the only motivation possible? I'd say that's a lack of imagination.
Scientists exploring animal species also often don't want to disturb their research subject, to avoid changing their behavior. An alien species might have a nonintervention clause akin to Starfleet.
Perhaps even, a certain property of one of our technologies or our culture is somehow dangerous to another species, who might have a philosophical disinclination towards conflict and thus they do not want to disturb us.
Perhaps their gear doesn't have much of a defense system given someone decided to cut some budget somewhere.
Employ a little imagination! It's probably all bunk but it's way more fun to look at news like this that way.
Maybe they dont want make contact with a primitive species?
It would be like us being afraid of a civilization that had just discovered gunpowder.
What remains are cases that usually involve multiple professional pilots, with witnesses on ground and in air, combined with radar signatures and ground control tracking to confirm the existence of the object's presence.
The truth is, IF (big if) it is super advanced aliens, they would have more reason not to contact us. This notion that we deserve formal contact is whats absurd. What exactly would they have to gain that they couldn't glean from stealthy observation and even deception to keep us off thier track?
Adding to this, is that like a month or two later, we were talking to a friend of ours in the area and our friend also confirmed seeing the same object except they live about 10 miles east of us. The thing is, our friend just told us this without us bringing the subject up, so it wasn't like she was 'me too'ing our story. The friend was relieved a bit that someone else had seen what she had seen.
Keep in mind, this is the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. Moderately poor area. Just farms, very small towns, and forests for miles. No planes fly this low in the area. No airfields for at least 30 miles, and the nearest airfield is for very small planes only. The only planes you see in in our area are ones way up in the sky.
Googling the description of what they describe comes up with something that people refer to as a 'cigar' shaped ufo (the recent astroid sighting has muddied the google results of this a bit). So it seems at least some other people have seen something similar to this.
As others have noted, the camera is auto-centering the object. If you look at the object's movement relative to the clouds in the background, it seems that the object might be turning and exposing its broader side to the relative direction of travel as seen from the camera. And then slowing down in the plane as viewed from the camera.
Note, this movement is relative and it's very hard to get a sense of perspective. So rather than slowing down, this could be the object banking and changing direction to move towards or away from the camera?
Maybe it's just a foreign aircraft with some kind of wingless shape like the B-2 bomber? I can't find a good source, but it seems there are blogs talking about new foreign stealth drones that could look like this. (http://defence-blog.com/news/new-stealth-bomber-spotted-in-c... -- not sure if this source is legit)
P.S. This is all assuming that this is indeed some kind of flying thing and not some kind of mirage.
The unclassified but secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was funded $22 million from 2008 to 2011, with the vast majority of the funding going to Bigelow Airspace. That’s a company conveniently owned by one of Reid’s friends and donors, Robert Bigelow”
Except that, if said technologies are of man-made origin, then the United States is—given its rich history with regards to black aerospace programs—the most likely operator.
Maybe Nick Cook was more right than I've been willing to admit:
So maybe the pilot has some crazy ability to track a flying object perfectly while turning, but try doing it in any game and I think you will fail.
The vertical lines to the left and right of the object appear computer controlled, to me, especially because they track the left and right edges of the object and the vertical length changes in a way that seems reactive to the object on screen.
The brief moment where those lines don't have the object centered and then it just jumps back into place (at the very end of the video ~31-32s) screams computer assisted to me.
In short, I don't think that's manual tracking, because I'm pretty sure that even a Navy pilot would have trouble tracking it that perfectly by hand.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/ASQ-228_ATFLIR [1] https://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/atflir/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi9d8bstWsE&t=80
The stability seems to be about the same as in the NYT video.
"A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered"
Wait, what? What are the "technologies discovered"?
Find out what a person truly believes in and you can rule them.
or any of these other sightings really.
I also wonder why resolution mist always be this low, my cell phone ($250) can shoot 4K and a plane that costs millions can't shoot video that is detailed enough to investigate the phenomenon.
"I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. " -Mitch Hedberg
Not saying it’s ET, but that seems like a bit unreasonable beef.
There was a question mark, I'm not stating a fact.
I guess I'm just kind of disappointed that never seem to be a good-quality video to look at when we're talking about UFOs.
1) Chemtrails.
2) 9/11 conspiracies.
3) JFK assassination conspiracy.
4) Vaccines cause autism.
5) Cell phones cause cancer. etc, etc.
The only theory less believable than UFOs being Aliens is flat earth.