Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Specifically: US military/intelligence/congress has historically treated UFO activity as highly classified. That’s now changed. Why is that? I don’t know. One candidate explanation:
1. Historically, some amount of “UFO” activity was actually classified, known US military/Intelligence programmes. Making the information public would compromise those programmes. So, in reality, the sightings related to identifiable flying objects. Just that they were identifiable by a small number of in-the-know people.
2. Things have changed. Some other actors - let’s guess Chinese/Russian - have stepped up their own secret programmes. Those items are now legitimately “unknown” to US authorities. If you’re from the US, that’s bad. Your putative enemies have something you lack knowledge of.
3. How to respond? In a world where the sightings are your own secrets then a strategy of silence makes sense. In a world where they’re not, the game is different. In this case, you want publicity: to cast them as unknown, (a) because it creates interest (/fear) and (b) tacitly lets your enemies know that you know they’re up to something.
That might be way off base. But the about-face in strategy is at least as interesting as the sightings themselves. I haven’t seen that covered elsewhere. Interested if anyone else has ideas/links.
Those sailors and airmen are intelligence assets.
Sam Harris, who I consider trustworthy, was given a heads up about what's to come:
"I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position of having to acknowledge that all the experts are on the same page, and there’s just this blanket declaration that we’re in the presence of alien technology, and we don’t know what to make of it. So prepare your brain for that and figure out what you’re going to do."
If anything, this official report is evidence to the contrary because what better place to start revealing this stuff if there was anything at all to it? But no, for the benefit of any exobiologists in the audience, it even goes out of its way to argue against the alien-origins theory for these phenomena.
That, and it making no sense for us to only see evidence for them on earth but not when looking at space, and that there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.) the mundane explanations are many times more likely from where I sit.
The problem with this argument is that we wouldn't know in the first place if they were also using these more covert means. At some level, we have to assume that if aliens exist and are making themselves visible to us, they're basically doing it for the lulz.
1. They are actually from Earth, hiding somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Probably Von Neumann probes which arrived millions of years ago, and not actually living things. They check our status periodically and send information to their origin system.
2. We are living in a simulation, and they are spectating us in a god mode with a visible side-effect.
there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.)
They may be doing more than just observing.
It is surprisingly convincing evidence of a peer state adversary with a huge tech advantage or... something else. I was moved from "no f'ing way do ufos exist", to "wtf.. it actually seems plausible" when reading up on it.
[1]https://youtu.be/sZoH5jr4P9I
[2]https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~scidemos/LightOptics/InfraRed...
[1]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Advances_in_Radar_Techn...
Most of these navy reports involve eye witness accounts of trained and credible pilots.
IOW, he isn't one of stereotypical, "frothing at the mouth", "true believer", "THEY ARE HERE" ufo cult types that might be fairly easy to dismiss for simple lack of credibility. He could still have been mistaken, or misjudged something, but he at least establishes a certain minimum level of credibility, to my way of thinking.
I am prone to think that this again some kind of gov mass psychology Rorschach experiment, where they say if we show you this image and if we say it is flying bunny how many times do we need to show and repeat the same until you start believing it is a flying bunny ...
By the way I am not saying other sentient being do not exist in the universe, I am just saying that with that technology you would not give a fork about what humans want/need/wish ... therefore it is more likely it is some kind of political hocus/pocus
There are four lights!
I personally didn't find any of the UFO stuff believable until the US Navy/Pentagon stuff came out which is very credible.
At this point it is almost undeniable that there is something strange going on in the skies. Whether it is aliens or not remains an open question.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3136078/chin...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29755919
[3] https://www.livescience.com/uk-ufo-reports-soon-released.htm...
Yes, I see the irony in saying this.
According to the article, the report will say:
"...the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs."
So what are they? I see skeptics saying these are radar errors etc., but the report apparently doesn't conclude that. I'd love to see a technical analysis of what's been recorded.
0: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truth-about-ufos-uaps-...
It's not like this is some fringe subject based on bullshit. There is concrete proof of something and it's a current topic of wide interest.
Personally I like reading what others here think about this. None of us "know" what's behind this but it's not a leap for me to think I can learn from what others here offer on it, or that someone here gets it right.
When I evaluate the places where I might find insight into this HN would come at the top of the list if the subject were allowed to run its course organically.
Kicking it to the 3rd page too fast may have prevented that.
unless you can complete that sentence with something more concrete than “something”, there isn’t concrete proof of anything.
Did all of a sudden the US government suddenly develop a sense of truth morality in 2021 regarding just this subject?
Yeah, call me skeptical.
He's also a pilot and has been focused on topics like this for two decades - but his arguments don't require taking anything on trust or his authority.
Additionally, he interviews experienced and relevant people, like his most recent video with Alex Dietrich (the second pilot present at the Nimitz "Tic-Tac" encounter).
> trained top gun pilots and the vast infrastructure of the US Navy/Pentagon who analyze this kind of stuff for a living. If they can't explain then I am sure they have considered and debunked trivial explanations that West purports
The filename "gimbal" suggests they might have the same suspicion as West on at least one encounter. Hopefully we'll get details of what they considered in the upcoming pentagon report.
But, even if we do prematurely assume that that the pentagon thinks there's no possible explanations, consider the analogous case of the Chilean Navy UFO video where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away (https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-chilean-navy-ufo-...). The pilots are experts but they aren't completely immune from making mistakes.
> in the NYTimes article they explicitly debunk the "weather balloon" hypothesis which has been proposed as a "rational" explanation for these ufos by some.
I assume you're talking about this quote (let me know if not): "One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases"
It's a refutation if someone believed that all cases were weather/research balloons (which I don't think anyone does). And on the flip side there's the implication that some of the UAPs are consistent with weather balloons.
"The problem is that the military don’t want to talk about this, partly because this is a classified system that these are recorded on. It’s called the Raytheon ATFLIR system. And it’s a fairly advanced targeting pod that straps on underneath the planes. And if you look for example videos shot with this on YouTube, you will find, basically, nothing—like a few really grainy ones, because even though I’m sure there’s tens of thousands of hours that have been shot with it, it’s all classified. So they don’t want to talk about it. And if they do analysis of it, that becomes classified by default. So they’re not going to release it. And they’ve actually explicitly said that they do not plan to release the results of the investigation into these videos."
Short of our government trying to hide tech they have, which still has to be near the top of the list, or a foreign adversary having developed some sort of tech that can either fool our tech into thinking it's seeing something, or having something that actually does perform as detected, which is also a possibility, there's not a lot of other explanations.
If it's not our tech I'd have to lean towards the Chinese having developed it first. The Russians would be a very distant next guess. There's just not many other plausible earthly explanations outside of those three. I highly doubt it's any other nation or somebody in their garage deploying that tech.
Maybe Ning Li was on to something. Her and other's work in the same general field seem, at the very least, a bit more plausible now.
Does anyone think it’s an accident the most public incident involved military training flights where the military was intercepted by this and beat them to their own rendezvous point for the mission?
It’s very obvious the tic-tac UFO was either a legitimate top secret military craft (manned or unmanned) that was being tested that day against the flight crews during their training mission, or possibly it was a military hoax serving two potential purposes: 1. Basis of increased funding, and/or 2. Misinformation to unfriendly nations/militaries around the world. None of that can be admitted and so here we are where everyone has to play dumb including top levels of the pentagon.
Further back than that, even. AFAIK, the earliest "UFO" reports by military pilots were the so called "foo fighters"[1] which were reported during WWII.
0: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secret...
Kinda like how because you ride an escalator people no one ever hears you climbing stairs.
But it was like the UAP was in its own bubble, separated from the environement.
so has the report been released? i would like to read it rather than continuous speculation about its contents. also, i'd love to see a leak of a more classified version of the report (if one exists), just to see what they consider sensitive information and not. the more info the better really.
It is also mathematically silly to assume that of all possible beings over current universe timeline that we are the most technically advanced. We have only existed for a minuscule sliver of that timespan.
That’s not to say that we are statistically likely to have been visited, however. But it is possible.
Why?
Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematically it doesn't really matter a lot.
Now look at the waves we've been sending out... a if we assume "the world ends" in 500 years, in a million years, there will be a 600 light-year "thin" shell of a 1mio light years sphere travelling away from earth, attenuated by the square law (twice the distance, 1/4 of the power).
What are the chances, that the thin shell of radiowaves hits some other culture, on some other world, in their "600 years of power", that are able to detect those waves, and actually come visit us (if we're still alive, which we're probably not).
Our world might be everything to us, but in a universal scale, our world compared to the universe is like an atom to our body... utterly insignificant.
Maybe they are prepping the battlefield to exterminate some pests?
And the Fermi Paradox says that if it did, we would see evidence of its effects... but we don't, which imples FTL isn't even remotely possible.
Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors.
Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.
I don't get the feeling that most educated people believe that "we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond". In fact, I'd wager that a significant portion, if not a majority, of such people believe that there likely is (or was, or will be) other such intelligent / sentient life in the universe.
But... what I think many (maybe most) educated people hold is that it is very unlikely that Earth is being routinely visited by alien intelligences. And I think the basis for that belief structure is rooted in the underlying physical reality of the universe, regarding distances between other worlds, and the speeds that can be attained to travel between worlds.
Simply put, it appears, based on what we know today, that even at light speed, (or a very, very large fraction of light speed), it would take around hundreds of years to travel back and forth to Earth from nearby planets that are suspected of being habitable. So even in the best case, where the aliens can travel at like 0.95 of c, and happen to be located on the very nearest habitable planet, it seems likely that they would have to be both very long-lived, and very tolerant of boredom, to travel back and forth between Earth and their world.
Impossible? No. Likely? Hmm...
OTOH, it seems like we do keep discovering more and more new "possibly habitable worlds" and the "best case" range to such a world keeps shrinking. And there's no particular reason I know of to think that "aliens" might not live dramatically longer lives than us, and maybe they are in fact fine with multiple hundred year jaunts around the universe. Or maybe they've invented the sci-fi trope "suspended animation". So never say never, I guess.
You can take the unexplainable part and do something useful with it - like making observations public and collecting more data.
The rest is a speculative hypothesis about the data.
This has always been one of the biggest problems with the reaction to these phenomena. You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."
That's very poor logic and equally poor science.
Agreed.
You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."
Also agreed. We need to be able to divorce analysis of the actual phenomena - whatever they actually are - from one specific speculative hypothesis.
The assertion of a high probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere is reasonable.
The presence of testimony is not evidence. People report things for many reasons. Most of the time, it is a silly bid for a moment of fame and/or it just sells news/gathers clicks in an untrustworthy economy on a slow day.
One day, we ourselves may advance our own intelligence sufficiently to achieve civilisation.
We ourselves owe our existence to a chance extinction of the dominant life form on Earth 65 million years ago. Without that, our mammal ancestors would not have been able to reproduce as frequently and plentifully, which would almost certainly have slowed the development of us if it didn't rule it out outright in the timescale the Earth has left.
There's no guarantee most worlds with life even ever develop multi-cellular life. It took Earth billions of years to go from single-cell to multicellular.
Yes, there has been a lot of time and a lot of star systems, but there are so many things that are required, I'm not at all confident that there is intelligent life out there. Earth is a sample size of 1, and we tend to treat it as if its the norm, but that's just a sometimes-useful assumption. The reality is we might have won the universal lottery.
You know those historical river boat cruises you can take in Europe where it's all tied into history lessons?
Imagine that but for more advanced civilizations and the "UFOs" are actually tourist pods for aliens/time travelers to witness what Earth was like in the years before The Disaster.
Perhaps the incidence of UFO sightings can be a bellwether for how close we are to the End....
The article doesn't say that. How can you be so sure from a still image?