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Comment by avl999 | Hacker News Reader

At this point the existence of the UFO phenomenon is undeniable. The fact that congress attached to the covid relief bill that the intelligence services must present a report of everything they know about ufos within a 180 days tells you that something is up and they are trying to force the hand of the intelligence service. I also find it interesting that since retiring Harry Read has openly talked about the existence of UFOs.

Congress must force the government agency to immediately release all ufo related info to the public. The public has the right to know.

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Harry Reid funded the "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program" with 22$ millions per year from 2007 to 2012 to research UFOs.

And most of that money went to Robert Bigelow. Which happens to be friend of Harry Reid, is interested in UFOs and has donated money to Reid's campaigns (what a coincidence!)

But the program was secret. Because, you know, aliens. And national security. Until its existence was revealed in 2017 - the year Reid retired from politics.

I remember thinking how blatant and ingenious this corruption scheme was when I first heard of it. He gave money to his friends and even when it's publicly known nobody associates it with corruption because of "aliens"

If its that open-and-shut, why hasn't he been arrested?

There's no law against a member of Congress introducing or voting for legislation that benefits friends or donors. If there were, they'd all be in jail.

Because the legal system is designed and run by people in power and people in power aren't interested in prosecuting their own crimes.

I think we can pretty summarily dismiss all of this with, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Given that every inch of the developed world is now covered with high resolution cameras, and UFO sightings via these devices have suspiciously not exploded in number, it's pretty clear that these reports were misidentifications, lies, and counterintelligence operations.

Would it be cool if aliens were hanging out with us? Probably. Is it happening? Almost certainly not.

I challenge you to take one of these high resolution cameras and take a photo of the moon. Then take one and take a photo of a jetliner where the make of the jet is comprehensible.

Yes we all carry around cameras but the sensor and lens sizes are all so small they are next to useless at night without a huge helping hand of ML based photo retouching or similar.

And the finest in government scan-of-a-photocopy-of-a-photocopy documents such as the COMSECNAVGRU one definitely don’t count as extra-ordinary evidence... heck some of the documents are barely legible evidence at best!

You are confusing two crucial things: UFOs doesn't mean aliens, it's simply unidentified objects. Unless you really do want to speculate about aliens ...

> "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

The evidence gathered by David Fraser et al. is actually quite compelling. Definitly there seem to be natural phenomena that can't be explained by our current scientific understanding.

It's really not, its almost completely eyewitness based and regardless of their "expertise," eyewitnesses are almost completely worthless and certainly do not qualify as "compelling evidence" in the arena of Science.

> almost completely eyewitness

There was positive radar and flir data, along with multiple witnesses from their air group. Not 'almost completely eyewitness' accounts, which makes their observations rather compelling.

My moneys on some actor - US or another state - having some kind of exotic aircraft that aren't on the books.

>There was positive radar and flir data

Not sufficient it could easily be a flock of birds or something mundane.

Agree, you have the pentagon with its task force looking into ufos/uaps under a formerly secret program - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_Aerial_Phenomena_...

You have Commander Fravor and other decorated US fighter pilots with both eyewitness accounts, video evidence, and radar evidence on numerous encounters with unidentified craft(NYTimes reported on these videos as well) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

As for the 180 days to release everything about UFO's it is mentioned in this CNN article - https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/10/us/ufo-report-emergency-relie...

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

There's more in better info in the original USS Nimitz UFO Incident page. But Wikipedia authors scrubbed it when they merged the pages for whatever reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=USS_Nimitz_UFO_in...

Wikipedia editors have a clear stance against anything fringe, which is very wrong IMO. As an example, take this sentence from the intro for the Project Blue Book page [1]:

By the time Project Blue Book ended, it had collected 12,618 UFO reports, and concluded that most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft. According to the National Reconnaissance Office a number of the reports could be explained by flights of the formerly secret reconnaissance planes U-2 and A-12.[2] A small percentage of UFO reports were classified as unexplained, even after stringent analysis.

That "small percentage" is actually 22%, as indicated many paragraphs below. And if we only consider the "Highest quality reports" category, the reports deemed unidentified goes up to 35%. That's not a "small percentage".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book

It wasn't a covid relief bill, it was the yearly appropriations bill that included covid relief. It also included an update to the Intelligence Authorization act.

It doesn't require anyone to provide a report on everything they know about ufos, or report anything previously classified to the public. There is a broad change to reduce duplication and waste by sharing information on unidentified aerial phenomena between intelligence departments, and make a report on how this info is shared to the senate.

> The public has the right to know.

Why? Some of the UFOs are undoubtedly military projects. Making them public reveals their existence to other countries.

> congress attached to the covid relief bill

They did? Got a link? I tried a Google search but found nothing.

It can be found in the Committee Comments portion of the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021 (search for "unidentified aerial phenomena"): https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/intelligenc...