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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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