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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

If the military has developed several breakthrough technologies, why in the world would they patent them, thereby making them public? Given a revolutionary new tech, no foreign government would respect a U.S. patent, nor would it be enforceable in the first place.

It's amazing to me that the ET/UFO cranks would take the publication of these patents at face value.

As others have posited, likely another explanation is warranted: 1) luring foreign militaries down blind alley's of expensive research, 2) putting out these patents to only later debunk them and thereby possibly muddying the waters for some legitimate revelations, 3) a simple prank, etc. etc.

Is it possible to verify that the filer is legitimately the U.S. Navy, or could anyone just file a patent and list the Navy as the assignee?

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I tend to agree over all, I think there is some kind of disinformation campaign behind it. There very well may be some nuggets of truth in there - I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn the US govt has tech that would blow us away today - but I think they're heavily exaggerating things at the least.

At the end of the day, they're either trying to convince other world powers that we have tech we don't, or they're warning others that we do. The only other possibility is, as you suggested, some kind of hoax or prank.

Who knows where the truth really is.

Let us not forget SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative - aka StarWars) from the Reagan era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

Which, with how it panned out, does fit: "1) luring foreign militaries down blind alleys of expensive research" most aptly, albeit not put into the wild via a patent and more case of funky CGI graphics pushing a dream as reality.

That is also a really good way to spin failing to achieve something you tried really hard at,

Yes, the spin rabbit hole goes to infinity and beyond. But certainly a plausible situation. We may never know and suspect that very few people ever knew in such secretive projects.

Remember this was still with the whole Moon landing era fresh in mind for so many, that was also a President's speech dream, that seemed equally as wild and fantasy at the time. Yet that happened. SDI was, given the media mindsets of that era, easily to latch onto as - it's going to happen.

Today, we are more cynical/pragmatic/realistic in mindset and with that, do question things and able to do so en-mass more easily with the internet than ever before.

Except much of the technology in SDI is scientifically feasible and much of it is either deployed today or in active development. The Patriot missiles that were used to shoot down Iraqi Scuds in the Gulf War were developed under SDI and are still in use for ballistic missile defense today. Even directed energy weapons are still in active development.

Worth watching the initial announcement by Reagan: https://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-reagan-announc... Starts with "American does possess NOW, the technologies..." tails into - hey scientists, show us something cool we can use to do this. So initially it was a big pot of money for ideas to achieve it. Then you had the big companies set the direction with space lasers, few CGI's (that cost loads to make) in a time that it was still very new for TV and suddenly you have the media and directional focus going with that - as a majority of people of that era will recall it due to media focus upon that, at the time -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smrZrimAuis "STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE STAR WARS RONALD REAGAN 33112"

But 30 years later, and only starting to see lasers deployed upon very large ships - shows how long it can take from feasible towards practical and dare say, still kinda in the flintlock stage of it's evolutionary cycle. But then, we may well see power generating inventions born out of the need to power these things, trickling down into consumer hands, which would tie in with the title most aptly.

It's not so out of character. Consider the recent disclosure that certain famous UFO video clips are genuine and show unidentified phenomena. Why would they disclose that when shutting up would work and was working?

The answer is they want to.

There are factions within the US government and it seems that the "tell them, but take it real slow" faction is presently in the ascendant.

The military verified that, yes, those were videos captured by the them. However, the videos themselves are inconclusive. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said (paraphrasing), "the 'O' in UFO is highly non-specific". Others have suggested explanations such as: equipment malfunction or misinterpretation, misinterpretation of known natural phenomena, or classified US gov tech. Further, these too could be an intentional ploy by the military/gov for unknown but rational and non-ET related motives. These are just a sampling of possible explanations.

You seem to be leaning toward an extraterrestrial explanation. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, but it seems like a very low probability explanation and one that defies the principle of parsimony.

The videos are subsets of what they have, supposedly (say people who have watched them) the full video has even more amazing things. It's not an accident that the inconclusive part is what got released. It was chosen.

They have been sitting on this stuff. They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption. They are choosing, deliberately, to gradually change attitudes. Part of the gradualness is maintaining intentional levels of ambiguity that can be slowly, slowly dialled down.

All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on. Doesn't have to be ET.

> (say people who have watched them) the full video has even more amazing things

Link? Who are these people? Are they credible? Do they seem rational, reasonable, and (highly) skeptical?

> They still are sitting on 99.9999% of it, is a reasonable assumption

There is nothing reasonable about this assumption.

> All of this is kind of orthogonal to what they are sitting on

Huh? How? Why?

This is all veering into conspiracy-theorist-cum-crackpot territory. You are doing some extreme extrapolation from very thin and inconclusive evidence.

The people in TTSA on their show Unidentified, said it, if my memory is correct. I forget exactly who but probably Luis Elizondo. TTSA is composed of ex-intelligence-insiders with clearances to see more than they are cleared to reveal.

Just so we're all clear, the TTSA you're referring to is "To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences", an org founded by former Blink-182 band member Tom DeLonge and staffed by kooks and wackadoos, right?

Given that the only people who would have found out about the verification of the videos are those already with an interest, I don't think it's a campaign to change the general public's attitudes.

The stories got into the NT Times. And Politico. Not by accident.

Ok, so what's the long term goal here? Reveal that aliens are real?

Reveal UFOs are real, slowly enough that it goes straight from "kook conspiracy theories" to "meh old news" without ever passing through "mass hysteria".

Decommission the internalized cover up ("If you see a UFO you are a kook and will lose your job"). This gets in the way of receiving useful intelligence reports.

(Partially) decommission the external cover up, at least enough that the public sees UFOs as a known but unexplained phenomenon. And as military business.

Paradoxically, cover up the cover up itself, by acting like all this stuff is new to them and hasn't been under observation since the 1940s.

Obtain funding due to the public not liking UFOs poking into their airspace without permission.

Bring technologies out into the mainstream, commercially or militarily. Looots of funding.

So why now? Considering Project Blue Book, and the rise and fall of UFO popularity with the decades, why only now - is this just the slowest dissemination of knowledge possible?

Could just be a matter of faction ascendancy. I've seen a report on how Tom DeLonge pushed the idea of TTSA, that suggested the convincing argument was: would you like to go back to being "respected all-American heroes dealing with a mysterious menace", as opposed to wasting effort sweeping things under the rug and looking like the bad guys off the X-files? Cover-ups are also wasteful of opportunity. Scientists can't collaborate. Intelligence sits un-analysed.

It feels looking in from outside, as if there are "pro continued cover up" and "pro managed disclosure" factions, and they are in a bit of a stand-off. The recent disclosure that the videos were genuine, for example, felt like the one faction had bought the release of that shocking information with the apologetic concession that "but they were never meant to be released to the public" which was included in the same statement.

At least in the context of the Nimitz incedent, Cmdr. David Fravor said on the Joe Rogan interview that there is no "full video" - this is something that was invented by people who have never seen the video, what we got is pretty much the entire thing.

That somebody on the internet (or an organization full of cranks like TTSA) can say they watched the "full video", and you don't even question it, is telling. Unfortunately this, like the entire recent narrative of some sort of a "disclosure", seems more like a fantasy invented by UFO enthusiasts that really wish it to be true, than something based on reality.

My working theory on that is the military are concerned about foreign surveillance UAVs.

And by reigniting the UFO narrative, they are more likely to receive reports and data from the public who may be looking for Aliens.

Interestingly, if this were true, it might imply that there is some pretty funky military tech out there, not owned by the US, that might have some interesting capabilities.

I'm sure UAV's, especially at night, would very much look like a UFO - you can't discern scale, and they'll move in all sorts of ways you wouldn't expect. If they are far enough away to mask the noise you'd just see a light doing extraordinary things, and without scale the speed and distances could potentially look vast.

Things drones can do that seem UFO like: turn sharp corners suddenly and stop on a dime, move in concert as if they were points of light attached to a solid object, disappear or hide by turning their LEDs off, appear by turning them on.

Things drones can't do: go fast enough to cross the sky in a blink, stop on a dime or turn sharp corners at jet speeds, travel at jet speeds at all - without an obvious and loud model jet engine, create slabs of light or opaque surfaces, block the stars behind them like a solid object, be eerily silent.

True to some of those (I think that some of the aerodynamic feats can be perspective and size) but I'm not saying "all UFO's are drones" - that'd be ridiculous, just as I'm sure you're not saying that all the claims are real, and the more extraordinary, the more reason to doubt the claim.

>Things drones can't do: go fast enough to cross the sky in a blink, stop on a dime or turn sharp corners at jet speeds, travel at jet speeds at all - without an obvious and loud model jet engine, create slabs of light or opaque surfaces, block the stars behind them like a solid object

Eh, if you have an LED screen in the sky, you can create the appearance of a lot of things.

But your example doesn't disclose anything at all - those cases have nothing to do with one another. The US loses nothing of any value by admitting that a bunch of leaked videos, confirmed by former pilots, are real. This isn't comparable at all to disclosing that the US military is in possession of a magical technology, not to mention details on how to build it.

* fwiw/fyi, the FLIR1 | Tic-Tac | Gimbal videos are fraudulent:

* https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-en...

* https://www.metabunk.org/are-the-navy-ufos-real-or-just-in-t...

* https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-en...

* https://www.metabunk.org/ttsa-videos-declassification-email-...

This echoes the 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP/USO incident:

* Aguadilla Infrared Footage of 'UFOs' - Hot Air Wedding Lanterns

https://www.metabunk.org/aguadilla-infrared-footage-of-ufos-...

... While "real," those videos in fact show (as the Navy must be well-aware) easily explained FLIR artefacts; e.g. distant jet fighter exhaust ports. Wittingly or unwittingly, the US Navy / TTSA / Elizondo et al. apparently are part of an elaborate, ongoing disinformation campaign.

----------------------------------------------------

* $21 Trillion Missing From US Federal Budget

https://www.globalresearch.ca/21-trillion-missing-from-us-fe...

Military-industrial complex / "threats" / USAP black budget funding:

Communism | Cold War >> asteroids (SDI) >> war on terror >> AATIP (Advanced Aerospace THREAT Identification Program): unexplained aerial phenomena? >> Oh no! ETI threat!! >> $$$$

I was watching Roe Rogan's podcast with one of the Tic-Tac incident jet pilot, in particular this part:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ&t=35m50s

[A cube floating into a spherical force field]

It made me thought of Salvatore Pais other patents on the subject.

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