UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
In support of "Roadside Picnic", if they've been hanging around all these years and just making the ocassional look-around and flybys without landing on the white house lawn and asking us to join the Interstellar Federation, we must be extremely unimpressive. Basically, life is common in the universe. We are a somewhat interesting tourist attraction and pit stop on the way to alpha centauri or whatever, but not really that special. They get here, pick up water and air maybe, take some pictures, some dna samples and fly off to wherever they were on their way to. Everything we have here they have in a million other places all around the galaxy.
The breakaway civilization seems more plausible if one assumes that travelling interstellar distances is flat out impossible though. However, there could be a mix of the two...
Now if this is all just a bug on the windshield "swamp gas", I understand the downvotes, but otherwise please tell me how it's not one or the other given the evidence.
1.http://www.theeventchronicle.com/study/breakaway-civilizatio...
3) equipment failure
4) mass delusion
5) error in judgement
6) the creator of the matrix messing / debugging
7) government or private company testing a new type of propulsion
Now look at all these options rationally, which ones are more likely?
The problem with the UFO evidence is, it's shitty every single time. With 4K cameras in cheap smartphones, 50x optical zoom cheap consumer cameras, cheap telescopes widely available, our UFO videos haven't gotten any better.
Of course it is. The greater the clarity of the footage, the lower the probability that the filmed object will remain unidentified (as in Unidentified Flying Object).
If you’re on the look for unidentified things, how could anything but unclear evidence be useful?
Example:
http://www.urbanalarm.com/knowledge-base/2016/digital-chain-...
To be fair, the only thing that can be proven is that it was either filmed with that camera, or someone has extracted the private key from the device (or just tricked the signing chip to sign a custom data packet).
Ding ding ding.
Try taking a picture of a plane at a height > 3000ft with equipment available at hand (during the night) see how it looks like
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=zoom+airplane&q=zoo...
Also this is the only declassified video, I would assume better video exist but this will help ease us into acceptance.
Maybe, like Bigfoot, UFOs are actually intrinsically fuzzy.
In that case, they might want to observe us without interfering to see how we behave naturally. Or maybe they have a sort of prime directive. Or maybe they realize that if they interact with us and expose us to their level of technology, we might destroy ourselves given the level of conflict and violence we're still prone to.
Unfortunately, humans are known to study other species by locking them in cages and cutting them open. :(
The thing is, assuming this scenario to be true, "they" seem to be interfering with us all the time. Humans have developed an entire subculture, complete with religious overtones, around the belief in interference by UFOs. One would assume the quarantine was breached a long, long time ago.
We also have no idea of being able to relate to their culture which may be radically different than our own. It might be far far more right wing for example and they might see us as a slave race or supremely inferior, which we will probably be.
This would explain the strange changes of shape, high speed, hovering without apparent means of support, and disappearances so often reported for these objects.
It does require that the higher dimensional space we occupy be relatively empty in our vicinity, otherwise we would expect far more of these events. Perhaps we're in a 5-D alien lab, being studied in a tank.
But it's far more likely to be a consequence of more mundane human perceptual limitations - tricks of the light, etc.
Contact like that would be intermittant, difficult to document, and perplexing to a species that wants to talk to everybody it runs into. Which kinda describes where we are with some of this odd aerial phenomenae we've been documenting for decades now.
Do you think this is an actual possibility? For ours or any other sort of civilization?
Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide, or overdose on data-drugs, or get squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources, or whatever. And so the species gradually dies out until you just have some AI routines running in a hot server room on a dead planet. The last human might not even realize that she's the last.
The same situation could occur without mind uploads if you could build very realistic androids, but I like the mind upload scenario.
And of course this is all very chauvinistically assuming that those AI routines slash robots don't qualify as human even though they're indistinguishable. The AIs could be conscious, or not, I suppose, depending on how they're implemented.
- Permutation City by Greg Egan (Imagine a world where everyone's consciousness has been uploaded to computers.)
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (People play sports, knit sweaters, whatever- all in virtual reality.) Note: this book is corny as hell and borderline YA but still fun
- Blindsight by Peter Watts (You spend more and more time playing alone or tittering with a circle of sycophantic AIs. ... squeezed out by increasing scarcity of computing resources)
- https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football (Over time people decide to pass on by ritualistically committing data-suicide) Just for the impact of functional immortality on common people
i'm reminded of a short story by Stephen Baxter, "The Invasion of Venus".
I think any moral species would wait until we've made sufficient progress on our own then meet us at our level instead of rocking the boat by coming down demoing all their advanced tech.
1. https://theaviationist.com/2017/12/17/u-s-department-of-defe...
2. https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/
The difficulties:
1. Multiple corroborating observations - radar contact, two sets of aircraft crews visual observations, one set of FLIR footage
2. Very high acceleration and deceleration - powered descent from 80K feet to 20 feet in a matter of seconds; high G turns and acceleration, BUT with no visible high temperature engine exhaust visible on FLIR footage. It's possible to mask engine exhaust and it's possible to achieve very high G's, but I can't imagine how to achieve both simultaneously.
Theories:
Assuming that there is no lying involved, based on (1) we can safely assume that there _were_ actual physical flying objects in the area. However, before we go off-Earth, I think we should look at propulsion systems that do not rely on thermal expansion of gases.
1. What if it's just an extremely powerful electric propellor based drone?
2. What if it can achieve burst acceleration by releasing compressed gases (which actually reduces temperature)?
The evidence includes:
1. Statements by thirty different groups of witnesses, three separate groups of police officers, documenting the sight of a large object flying at low altitude. An estimated 13,500 people on the ground saw the object, of which 2,600 filed written statements describing in detail what they saw.
2. Detection on radar of the object from two F-16 Fighter jets scrambled to intercept the object
3. Secondary detection of the object from ground radar at a nearby military airfield
4. Data from the F-16s suggesting near impossible maneuvers. Quoting wikipedia:
"During the first radar lock, the target accelerated from 240 km/h to over 1,770 km/h while changing altitude from 2,700 m to 1,500 m, then up to 3,350 m before descending to almost ground level – the first descent of more than 900 m taking less than two seconds. Similar maneuvers were observed during both subsequent radar locks. On no occasion were the F-16 pilots able to make visual contact with the targets [NB: it was around midnight hence poor visibility] and at no point, despite the speeds involved, was there any indication of a sonic boom."
5. A low quality photo, which may have been faked.
With regards to the evidence presented, I find it very difficult to come up with a convincing explanation of this incident.
I highly recommend reading the Skeptical explanations section of that article.
Among other things:
[...] but the Belgian military only reported three such locks, and upon analyzing the data, all three radar locks were on each other.
Often, these reports would claim that the light was flashing and jumping around - an effect from seeing it through a thick layer of atmosphere between the observer and the horizon.
Meteor showers or individual meteorites were another rich source of these reports. The variations that can occur here are enormous - see e.g. "Observation of Fireballs" and "Fireballs and Meteorite Falls": https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/observations/, https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/meteorites/
The first link above points out:
> "The collision of the meteoroid with atmospheric particles causes ablation, and thereby ionization, of both atmospheric and meteoroid constituents. While most of these excited states exist for about 10^-8 seconds only, there are also some atomic states which may persist for times exceeding several seconds (metastable levels). The emissions from such levels may be visible for variable amounts of time, and are designated as persistent trains (see Baggaley, 1980). They appear bright in the night sky after the meteor itself has disappeared. A large meteoroid entering the atmosphere leaves a substantial amount of material in its wake which is distributed along its trajectory."
The kinds of visual effects this can produce are affected by where the trail is relative to the observer - again, looking through more atmosphere tends to create additional effects.
And of course, planets and meteors are not the only causes of relatively uncommon visual effects. Clouds, refracted sunlight or moonlight, smoke, jet trails, etc. are all capable of producing effects whose true cause may either not be apparent to a casual observer or even not without careful study by trained observers.
In short, large numbers of eyewitnesses to something unexplained is most likely to demonstrate the limitations of untrained observers seeing some unusual but perfectly ordinary phenomenon.
Meaning, if you see intelligent stuff being done. Objects moving up and down, left and right in perfect angles. Or if some one wrote up "Hello, World" on the skies its very unlikely its a natural phenomenon.
Other than that, the point is not that these are just natural phenomena, but rather natural phenomena filtered through imperfect observing conditions and observation mechanisms, including radar and the human eye & mind.
Actually, that section contains a very reasonable explanation:
Hallet's thesis is that the Belgian UFO wave was mostly a mass delusion, boosted by the work done by the SOBEPS. This mass delusion would have followed Philip J. Klass's law: Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs. This situation feeds upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subject, and then the « flap » quickly runs out of steam..
Some team did their utmost best to write the code that's running in those F16s. They really were excellent engineers, with no doubt huge budgets. And they got it kind of running and after a few years of debugging got the most obvious crashes and other bugs fixed.
I think it rather likely that some disparate echoes got interpreted as reflecting from a single object, and that's how you get things travelling at incredible speeds.
However, when you make those assumptions, that opens up a can of worms for other possible explanations. Assuming there was sensor system malfunction, the incident could also be explained though a flock of helicopters flying around. Or it could have been several NSA spy planes flying around. I've seen both those explanations put forth as an explanation for what happened in Belgium.
I don't believe it's possible to disprove either your balloon hypothesis nor the helicopter hypothesis. There's just not enough evidence to make any convincing explanation.
How is it that the systems from various departments of the government. Each of which are totally independent of each other, suddenly all malfunction at once at the same time, and the event happens, and then again the systems get back to functioning perfectly fine?
I know, I know - it's hearsay, and - again - I am a huge sceptic. Still, it was a bit of a disturbing conversation to have with someone I know and respect, and who was highly trained and in a position of authority.
Interestingly UFOs and supernatural events have been clumped together, but afaik these UFO claims typically don't require rewriting the laws of physics. If a UFO's existence was proven, and in the public domain, it would go from -100 to +100 in terms of people's attitudes of "that's all just a bunch of balogna" to "of course, we have always known it is very unlikely we are alone." However, a supernatural event would fundamentally shake up our scientific understanding of the universe. I think they're completely different types of possibilities.
Antigravity and FTL travel require rewriting the laws of physics AFAIK, or at least amending them. There are possibilites that only seem to work on paper, assuming the existence of fudge factors like negative mass.
Assuming that UFOs behave as described, and are actual physical craft which can hover silently over a point with no visible or audible engines, propellers or exhaust, which can make arbitrary breakneck maneuvers or suddenly vanish over the horizon in seconds, as is often described, then you need an unconventional explanation for their means of propulsion. It's either antigravity or magic, but it probably can't be, say, VTOL or just really good rockets.
Surely we're due for one of these soon. Given our infantile understanding of quantum mechanics and physics, it's a matter of time before we observe something that defies modern science.
That hope has always been grounded in a fear of it's "supernatural" qualities and is becoming less likely as theorists find proofs limiting it's flexibility while keeping agreement with experiments.
2) Now you're talking about /bottle rockets/. There's a reason we don't use those for any serious purpose: They're worse than basically anything else in terms of both power and specific thrust.
I've seen this video several times before, and it's usually explained as an FLIR artifact (I believe the pod has a steerable lens systen, so possibly the cause of the rotation seen in the video).
As to why the audio corroboates the video? Well, not everything you hear on the internet is true....
The first line of business would be the power source. The intuition would be that you need a mobile high energy power source. The counter-intuitive idea would be that the necessary power source would be so giant that it could never be mobile (like a dyson sphere), but there may be some method of linking a stationary power source with a mobile ship across vast distances. This offers control convenience if an advanced race still needs an authority structure and the possibility of remote monitoring. That also brings up the question of un"manned" exploration drone fleets bouncing between star systems and reporting back.
As for movement, I would like to think that something with the observed extreme acceleration and the assumed interstellar capability is using a highly performant computer to calculate adjustments to an inside-out standing wave solution that the ship's outer shell is built for. Imagine shifting waveforms and your ship just kind of repositions yet it feels like you're completely still. Any space debris or other objects encountered while repositioning might get trapped outside the ship so that whenever you arrive at your destination you have to shed the debris. I'm sure a physicist will chime in and say this can never work, but at least from a naive perspective I like the idea of it.
Why not some kind of an advanced hologram combined with an electromagnetic disturbance? If it were possible, it could be used as a great decoy.
Well, assuming there's no lying involved, the NSA never tracked us, Iraq had WMDs, and Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman.
There's a broader epistemological problem afoot here: the NSA could easily design a flawed zero-knowledge proof mechanism that I would never see a flaw in. Likewise, it's always going to be easier to fake a video of magitek than it will be to invent it for real. As a result it's essentially impossible to believe these stories under any circumstances short of an actual leak of the magitek.
NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory “until recently”? Really? Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace came out in 1982. We have known about the NSA (known, not ‘suspected’) since before Edward Snowden was born. People in the crypto and infosec community have considered them the top threat for decades. Actual techniques and processes are news when verified, but please do not try to suggest that either the existence of nor extent of NSA activity were in any way surprising or considered a conspiracy theory.
Likewise although certainly some people in tech knew the extant of PRISM, I think all but he most paranoid infosec people presumed they nevertheless obeyed the law and didn’t dragnet snoop on Americans. I’d heard stories of the backbone interconnects that were routing all traffic through NSA servers. I presumed that was just to get access for when they needed it (with a warrant) or to mask what specific data stream they were interested in. I didn’t take as seriously as I should have the possibility that they were in fact simply recording everything.
So while I can somewhat agree with you, but I hope you can see my point about what gets labelled as a conspiracy doesn't matter if a lot of reputable people like Bernie Sanders, JFK, Ron Paul, Aaron Swartz, etc have already called foul.
Anyways the EFF has a useful timeline for NSA spying: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline
How else would one create money?
As such, the "intrinsic" value of the commodity is irrelevant - it may as well be paper. Which is why that's what it now is.
At any rate the existence of WMD, in general, rather than nuclear weapons in particular, was never in doubt, and stockpiles were found in Iraq and disabled or destroyed. You may remember some of the hand-wringing about Isis overrunning some of the chemical weapons facilities containing sealed bunkers of damaged sarin and mustard gas shells.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...
The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.
AND
American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.
The justification for the invasion was an active weapons program, which didn't exist. When people refer to the "WMDs" they refer to this non-existent program, rather than rusty old munitions.
The goal had already been achieved. Why bother covering up the fact it was based on a lie? Where's the benefit in that?
What has been (and remains) in considerable doubt is particular proposed identifications for some subsets of UFOs, particularly, the explanation that some are extraterrestrial spacecraft.
And the ET explanation has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt; it is, at best, for some UFO incidents among the explanations which cannot be unequivocally rejected based on existing evidence.
It'd take something pretty incredible, orders of magnitude more advanced than I could phathom humans creating, to convince me of legit alien intelligent life.
This is "To The Stars" association, cofounded by him and Tom DeLonge: https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/#how-we-work. A promise to invent "beamed energy propulsion" and "advanced electrogravitic propulsion" already makes me scratch my head. I see that there are lots of retired top brass there, like the former head of Skunk Works. There is Gary Nolan, who diligently analysed the so-called "Starchild" skull to conclude that it's probably nothing special. But then, there is Hal Puthoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff), of the Stargate ("Men who stare at goats") and "zero-point energy" fame. Finally, while there is nothing wrong with DeLonge as a musician, the pairing of a UFO enthusiast musician and former DC functionaries does not make a lot of sense.
I mean... at this point Elizondo is offering one short video with the clarity of a Rorschach test, and extraordinary claims.
The figures at the top of the To The Stars page guarantee there will be more coverage on the topic.
This 'academy' and all its directors have a huge financial incentive to convince others that they're onto something.
The top of their front page has a large 'invest' button. You can purchase shares in this 'academy'.
This reeks of a scam, or at least a bunch of psuedo-scientific conspiracy fueled 'research' that will never amount to anything other than begging for more funds and blaming shortcomings on gov coverups.
What are people going to do with their UFO research shares?...
Also, usually when something real happens, like a meteor falling in Russia, it’s caught by multiple, independent cameras. Show me a UFO video filmed by different people from different angles.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobil...
I think many would agree that there are unidentified flying objects beyond a reasonable doubt.
My guess is that just as it's hard to identify something in the distance, most of these experiences are from distance with poor resolution for the simple reason that if you were to get close enough you'd be able to tell what it was which is probably something other than an extraterrestrial spaceship.
People are saying that UFO just means an unidentified flying object (not alien spacecraft as in the popular meaning) and so this is a non-story. My joke is that even if UFOs just turn out to be flocks of birds or unreported aircraft, it's still at least a little significant, because it means something's up there.
the same situation with loch ness monsters, Sasquatch, etc.
It's not perfect, but shows the same object from multiple angles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar
The interviews with him about this are on Youtube.
So either, the US government knew about them but didn't tell the Pentagon; or the Pentagon had no such program; this program was meant to spread misinformation; neither the US gov nor the Pentagon ever had any evidence of UFOs.
Could perhaps the speed or altitude readings shift drastically as the vehicle banked and thus exposed more or less reflective surfaces to the radar source?
Its fair to say that some flying objects would be unidentified after all
For decades government came short of making fun of people who believed in "green man from outer space" ... now all of sudden all this hype in media makes me wonder... is someone in gov capable of pulling strings on taxpayers' dollars are preparing some huge tax bill to shove in peoples faces, [call it for example AARA (Affordable Alien Research Act)] just to find another reason to take more from tax payers pockets? Otherwise I don't get all this fear-mongering... anyone?
First, you have to weigh whether telling the general public will cause panic. I don't know that if the US govt told people aliens were visiting in the 1960's, people would've taken it well.
Then think about how your adversaries might respond. It stands to reason that if any country were able to gain control of alien technology either by making contact, observation or recovering crashed spacecraft, it could dramatically alter the balance of power for the next century or more. Imagine alien technology that allowed a Nation to build aircraft/spacecraft that could out accelerate and out maneuver any ballistic missile. All of a sudden mutually assured destruction falls apart and nuclear weapons are rendered obsolete by anyone without alien tech.
So if you're a Nation state that knows about aliens, you'd probably want to keep it under wraps and one way you'd do that is discredit any public reports while quietly trying to figure out everything you could.
I always love the Mitchell and Webb sketches that show the absurdity of these kind of claims: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=59zLZ6PpeSA
I mean, just let it sink in. We have high level government recognition that objects with incredibly advanced flight capabilities exist and we have no idea what they are or where they come from.
How do you dismiss this? When the encounter in the recently released video involved multiple military assets monitoring the UFO with a high level of precision that pretty much rules out explanations that rely on illusions or other misleading sensory phenomena?
You don't. But you also don't have to accept their baseless implications of extraterrestrial origin.
1) Someone or some people have the technology to build these. We simply don't know who they are and what they represent
2) It's a natural phenomenon that can be explained but needs proper investigation
3) They are drones from our planet but maybe built at a different time remnants or an old civilisation. Do we understand the entire history of earth and it's past civilisations? Maybe yes but also maybe we are missing something
4) Theory of multiverses and other dimensions could be something to think about
5) Or they are simply projections to our brains sophisticated enough to make us think these things actually exist
It could be none of the above and just governments messing around with us in order to see how we react but this has to be one of the most complex and long term projects any government has got into. Point is more people need to look at this scientifically rather than dismiss all the evidence straight away.
But lifeforms capable of bridging light-years would look nothing like us. Why assume they would enjoy a ride in our atmosphere?
Would like to see international confirmation - Russia and China admitting that there are flying objects that can’t be identified to rule out some advanced esrthly technology.
But assuming for the sake of argument that some of these observations are actually founded in somthing real, then where on earth does the idea of aliens enter the picture? Bugs or vira in the metaprogram sound no more farfetched, nor does my personal favourite, that it's just our great^n grandchildren visiting from a more or less distant future.
also I mean this shouldn't this be more compelling than some grainy video or is it so WTF that we just auto-NO.
Let me add this comment that I made to a dupe on this UFO thing a little while back:
"I can give my own example of an utterly astonishing gob-smacking sight which turned out to have a fairly simple explanation. I invite people to speculate on what it was... About 7am I was travelling in a ferry on Sydney Harbour about 400m east of the bridge. I saw a giant (50m diameter?) golden glowing ball hover on the other (west) side of the bridge. It was definitely not on the bridge. It maintained its position for over 30 seconds.
Then it changed and the actuality was revealed."
Follow this link for the discussion and explanation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15948600
They spent their entire first budget on a warehouse near Las Vegas to store such potential material evidence. Without any convincing material evidence. So what else does he want?
...which, if true, should make us weep about state of US justice system.
> I hate to use the term UFO but that’s what we’re looking at,” he added. “I think it’s pretty clear this is not us, and it’s not anyone else, so no one has to ask questions where they’re from.
So it's not really misleading. I think he believes that aliens exist and have visited Earth.
I might take this more seriously if the guy said "It's not any humans."
So, in my opinion, one arm of the government is being funded to investigate the covert operations of another, without the former knowing about it.
Like in many narcotics themed movies and TV series inspired by real events, the DEA spends considerable time and effort, only to find the CIA masterminding an operation
We could stumble upon some weird aseuxal amoeba type beings who don't even have a personal ego or concept of private property, they just float around on organic ships and communicate through flows of slimy alien-goo. Whew, what a bummer would that be.
Could it be an alien drone though? Yes.
If it was it means it came here either by a lightsail, or some other sub-lightspeed travel technology. Or it was dropped through blackwhole or something and it just showed up.
If it teleported here, then it probably has next level quantum tech and whatever. It could've teleported back a signal, taken over all communications and they would have already physically taken over our planet. So that's not likely the case, unless the drone is just capable of surviving faster than light travel but is still limited by the same physical problems in integrated circuits and power generations that we already know.
Okay.Now, if it traveled at sub-lightspeed it's likely to have taken at least a few thousand light years at minimum ( given by our observation of what planets are close to us ) to get here. More likely a few hundred thousand. That means another few hundred thousand to send a signal back. In that case that they would try to colonize us before we get too powerful, by sending a colony ship or something, which would take even more time. We're likely to go extinct on our own before that happens so there's no point worrying about aliens. This is assuming that they've reached the same physical limits in technology that we have. Those being the speed of travel limit, and quantum computing not being Turing complete. Meaning this drone can not break cryptography, or run an overpowering AI that takes over all our communications and controls us.
If you have the technology to do interstellar flight, surely you have advanced refining/processing tech, and you can get raw materials anywhere - the other planets and asteroid belt nearby are full of everything. You probably have robots to do all your work, too.
There's no need to enslave some species to make them work for you or risk losing anything in a potential fight (pretty sure even advanced aliens would be wary of nuclear weapons) or deal with gravity/atmospheric/natural conditions of this planet for some resources that can be found elsewhere.
If anything (as we kind of learned by now), dealing via peaceful means would be way more productive. Just provide some high tech or rare minerals and we'll gladly mine the shit out of the planet ourselves.
This assumes that they would be just like humans, and only the rapacious ones at that.
So you can't just assume that they have plenty of other livable planets to just throw around.
I stopped reading after that.