America’s government comes clean on UFOs
economist.com
economist.com
An unclassified report on UAPs does in no way confirm that some subset of these sightings aren’t advanced military aircraft of some kind, or even something else. Like I’m sure the majority of it is anything from sprites, balloons, sensor artifacts, sensor spoofing, foreign drones, etc. But the idea that the USAF et al don’t have any secrets to keep here is naive.
Mmhmm. Sure.
For my part, I find it best practice not to trust government any further than I can (over)throw them.
Sorry I'm always a bit mind boggled the way people both don't trust government and want more government.
The problem is that most universal programs are not truly universal.
Ideally the fed only does unconditional universal (I shouldn’t have to prefix this with unconditional since that’s redundant), and leaves everything else to the state and below.
Either you have market pricing (existed before Medicaid), shortages of care with rationing (talk to old people from Canada and the UK if you don't think their health care is rationed), or some gross hybrid (the current American system)
Imagine admitting an unidentified object flying over your soil and your defence system not being able to force it down, what consequences that would have for your military, intelligence agencies and your government in general should the object belong to a foreign military. Unless someone has actually seen an alien fly one of these things, it's safe to assume that the unidentified objects are likely to be part of covert operations of either one of the competing powers or the United States military itself. Either that or the aliens really do perceive the entire world to be United States.
It is my perception that most people know that UFO doesn't mean alien but willfully suspend disbelief, similar to when watching a fictional movie, in regards to them because they enjoy the mystery of the whole deal.
>Either that or the aliens really do perceive the entire world to be United States.
There have been UFOs over the years all over the world. South American countries have also had a lot of reports. The United States has a lot of reports but after filtering the outlandish stories its probably similar to other countries.
Now if only people would stop saying this like anyone hasn't heard it :-)
> Either that or the aliens really do perceive the entire world to be United States.
Alternatively, detecting/tracking/intercepting these alien craft may virtually require the capabilities of a fully modernized nuclear aircraft carrier strike group. Not a lot of these just floating around...
In line with the provisions of Senate Report 116-233, accompanying the IAA for FY 2021, the UAPTF’s long-term goal is to widen the scope of its work to include additional UAP events documented by a broader swath of USG personnel and technical systems in its analysis. As the dataset increases, the UAPTF’s ability to employ data analytics to detect trends will also improve. The initial focus will be to employ artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms to cluster and recognize similarities and patterns in features of the data points.
If I'm going to speculate though, I think the most likely scenario is there is some really advanced capabilities in the US arsenal, and this is a pre-emptive measure to anticipate adversaries playing catch up. If you have craft that can do what is being asserted, or even just a healthy fraction of those capabilities, it really becomes an information and surveillance game.
A shrug literally means "I don't know". If the evidence is "largely inconclusive" that literally means "we don't know".
Where on earth are you finding bias in that?
Just prior to "The report amounts to a giant shrug" the article said, "Few in the Pentagon seem worried about extraterrestrial invaders." It is just as likely, if not more so, that the writer meant indifference and not "we don't know". We'll never know, however, since the word isn't clear from the context.
I'm thinking most analysis you might do has already been done, and probably wouldn't be too costly anyway? Basically showing it to experts and asking what they think?
The behavior of the top brass in regard to the Navy incidents seems to suggest they knew what the UFOs were, and weren't overly concerned as a result.
[Edit] The Proximity Fuze was screwed on to the front of artillery shells, and had to deal with 20,000 G of acceleration. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze
It seems to me that the situation, rather than being either "sensor glitches" or extremely advanced tech, could be a combination. Tech that's a few years ahead, observed under poor conditions.
Given how ossified the upper echelons of the military typically are, this is not an unlikely scenario.
Which is why the recent moves to (1) mandate reporting, (2) centralize investigation in a single, funded, and persistent group with a clear mission, (3) that's authorized with access and has lines of communication to actually clear incidents as classified-known or not... is encouraging.
The sort of apparent movements of many UAPs would cause extreme heating of the air. They'd leave trails of hot ionized gas in their wake and cause sonic booms. The trails would show up on radar and infrared. The FLIR cameras many UAPs are captured on would easily detect their wakes if they were in fact physical objects. When those wakes cooled they'd also form condensation trails.
Being that we don't ever see any of those things with UAPs it should be apparent they're sensor artifacts or detection of mundane objects from weird perspectives. No drone or alien spaceship is going to emit visible and infrared light detectable on a camera yet not physically interact with the atmosphere.
Of all the possibilities for UAPs, super magic propulsion drives are the among the least likely of a number of unlikely explanations.
Cameras are weird and lenses have a lot of weird properties. Autofocus and aperture adjustment add more weirdness. Image sensors have their own weird properties and behaviors. Cameras on stabilized gimbals on a moving aircraft compound all of those properties and effects. That's all on top of the unintuitive nature of looking at things in the sky which often lacks a helpful visual perspective.
So sensor artifacts and co fusing perspective is far far more likely than magic space warp drives.
Either the pilots are telling the truth or they're lying. Sensor artifacts are totally implausible in both cases.
Even for a trained pilot the reference-free venue that is the sky is a bit mind bending. Even something the size of an airliner looks like an indistinct pill from a few km away. Atmospheric ducting [0] can make a plane too distant to pick up on radar visible to the eye or an EO/FLIR sensor.
There's also the pesky habit of "eyewitness" accounts being absolutely terrible. Someone can claim to have "seen" an object while they only did so through their plane's cameras. They think they remember "seeing" the thing so that's their story.
https://youtu.be/ZBtMbBPzqHY?t=459
If you have more to say that you'd also want me to address, it better be directly relevant to the events described in this video.
Anyway, I had that assumption, too. I’ve been seeing lots of photos and vids of UAP (because I frequent a forum that shares this stuff). And they’re always low quality!
Drones have introduced a new era of fake UAPs, and just a general increased skepticism of what’s staged or “legit.”
Anything that is well resolved by sensors can be identified. Anything that cannot be resolved at all goes unobserved altogether. What remains is the set of items that cannot be clearly identified.
I think I'm done browsing websites that gate content this way. While I appreciate that these other services exist to let me still read the content, I think this friction is a personal compromise that I should cut back on and evaluate whether this is content worth paying for or if I am better served just passing it up.
I am assuming the paywalled sites are using analytics to justify the paywalls to their executives and investors.... visits blocked by the paywall counted as a future revenue source, and visits that circumvent the paywall counted as a 'reader'.
That's blatantly incorrect for a very large number of websites in 2021.
Amazing.
Their position is roughly "it has been seen by competent people, and mechanisms speculated about by competent people, so it exists, so there must be holes in our understanding of physics / future tech which makes it possible to exist, just imagine what they might be". My position is "I as a layperson can't imagine how it could work, therefore it can't work even though I have no qualifications to declare that. Instead just imagine the ways qualified people are wrong about things all the time".
That is the only reasonable thing to do IMO.
Besides some of them are verified by multiple independent sensor systems.
Does this mean I think we are visited by extraterrestrials?
No. Edit: Or rather, I don't have any strong opinion on it but I that would not be my best guess.
Only that I find some "debunking" claims as convincing as the end of a Scooby-Doo episode: The monster on chicken legs turns out to be not the prime suspect but someone else and there is no way he could have fit into that costume.
I would be interested in any counter-debunking that specifically addresses the arguments of the debunkers.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/05/26/ufo-sightin...
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/202...
Not really possible to remove 100% of doubt, and I don't know if there are some cases buried in this latest stuff that are more compelling.
The video named "FLIR1" shows pixel blooming effects common on FLIR infrared cameras.
The video named "Go Fast" shows the effects of imaging a slow-moving balloon from a very fast-moving sensor.
I suspect there are a few Navy pilots sitting around a break room having a good laugh at all this.
1. Some kind of alien probes have been visiting Earth for millions of years.
2. These probes are very hard to detect/track/capture on camera, leading to lots of unconfirmed rumors since the dawn of modern aviation in the 1940s.
3. U.S. DoD advances over the last ~15 years have made it possible to regularly detect/track/capture them on camera, at least to some degree.
4. Stigma around reporting/acknowledging these craft as alien has stifled the ability of the DoD to investigate them properly, and they're not really sure what they are.
5. Or the DoD has identified them as likely being alien probes of some kind, but have no ability to interact/interdict/intercept them, and so are struggling with the how/when of explaining this fact to the public.
Of course, it's more likely that there are no alien probes visiting Earth. This could be next-gen submarine-launched drone technology with radar spoofing and whatever else.
The UAP report itself seems to be written by people without without sufficient access to classified information, rendering it totally insufficient.
Of course, it's more likely that there are no alien probes visiting Earth.
No it's not. An alien civilization that can travel across galaxies to send probes to observe humanity is already hugely more advanced than ours. Modern civilization is only a couple thousand years old depending on your definition. A random alien civilization that is more advanced than us is likely to be thousands of years more advanced. Are they really going to develop new tech that beats our advancements that they didn't already have, over the course of 50 years, that they didn't capture in the 3,000 year headstart? Sounds doubtful.
It doesn't really matter. The difference in human technology over the past 100 years is night and day. Even a thousand years is likely to be incomprehensibly advanced relative to where we sit.
If you choose a random point in time to start a civilization, the likelihood of choosing a point in time within 1,000 years is 1,000 / ~14,000,000,000 for the timescale of the universe or 1,000 in 4 billion by the age of the earth for a more conservative estimate. Naively, you would expect a random space civ to have a couple billion years head start on earth. Do we really think there's going to be noteworthy technological advancements between years 2,000,000,000 and 2,000,000,005? I think not.
Civs habitually going extinct could avoid this, but this becomes much harder for civs with intergalactic travel.
s/thousands/millions/Regarding one of the phenomena,
> So the options are this object has the ability to warp the space around it, which admittedly would be really cool, or the camera rotated.
In this book[0] it details the Tehran incident[1] where one of the pilots describes the UFO moving almost 'telepathically' out of the way of his sites. Gives me hope that it's an autonomous control system America developed. If it's still 'people-in-the-loop' I might as well shoot myself; I seriously think my only hope for a better life (and for a lot of others who complain about psychotronic things) depends on a nation-state artilect having either pity for me or curiosity about the sorbid motives of others.
[0]: UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Tehran_UFO_incident
That's not a great thing to share with your adversary.
My own hypothesis is that until I get evidence otherwise I’m going to assume that this is U.S. military capability being shown off to other world powers.
I would say if I could take what you said and what I said, it's most likely to me to be some kind of operation by the U.S. military to some end. Possibilities include (but not limited to) self-testing, maybe a bluff, maybe a psy-op, or maybe an advanced capability demo.
It’s just unreasonable to guess intentions here without the full picture (which we don’t have).
But nobody at the Pentagon actually believes their aliens and they all know they're some kind of drones from China or another adversary that are actually more technologically capable than current US drones.
They just want more data on them so they can start building their own.
In reality, all of this is because it was a weird line-item added to a COVID-19 relief bill that nobody was going to bother fighting about at the time [1].
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/10/us/ufo-report-emergency-r...
> “probably do represent physical objects”
I simply do not believe this. I'm happy to believe the one case of a balloon was true, I believe there could be a few other cases like plastic bags.
But it's almost always optical illusions with stars and man made lights.
There's no other secret aircraft, there's mostly no X-Files 'weather balloons', there's no St. Elmo's fire or drones. It's stars and satellites and ship lights and far away aircraft lights and house lights and car lights.
We will have to see if they release the data claiming they have 'multiple' sources confirming physical objects. If you want to 'believe' the government they are 'physical objects' I guess that is more fun.
Report - https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...
Are they planning to use drones to kill their own citizens and then blame it on aliens?
Or they want to blame COVID on alien bioweapons to shift blame?
I can't figure out what the point is but it's retarded. Clearly there is no intelligent life in the universe.
I mean... where's the bad news here?
Crime at all time highs. Homeless people. Rampant inflation. Censorship.
I'm consuming multiple US media sources. My acquaintances in the US seem to support this narrative.
Even squinting and spinning as hard as you can, you'd say that current inflation might be as high as 5% at this very moment. Which while higher than it's been in a decade or two is hardly a historical outlier. But then you have to conveniently forget that over the pandemic we experienced quite high deflationary pressure which is merely being eaten up. So in fact CPI and similar metrics are up about... 2.5% per year since 2019. Which is to say, business as usual.
I'll ask again: which specific US media sources are telling you there is "rampant inflation"? They're lying to you.
There is almost always something "wrong" about the US economy or some political or military crisis at large, so any story related to UFOs that crops up will likely coincide with some greater issue related to the economy or politics or what have you, and appear to be a distraction from it.
I also don't know what story from 20 years or so ago you're talking about, the details are so vague. But the media doesn't "claim" things, it reports things other people claim. Two incidents don't make a pattern, and correlation isn't connection.
>Are they planning to use drones to kill their own citizens and then blame it on aliens? WTF? I can't figure it out.
It's very simple - the US government was directed to release a report about UFOs, the internet (mostly thedrive) turned that into a viral story involving tic-tacs and secret patents and other unrelated nonsense, and the media is covering it because it's newsworthy. There isn't some darker, nefarious secret purpose behind all of it.
I asked my dad if it was true and he said something like "Haha no, American media always talks about UFOs to distract their citizens."
My dad implied that he had seen this trick before. Now seeing this as an adult over 20 years later, I'm getting flashbacks. That's all.
It just feels like UFO news keep coming up out of nowhere and it's so boring and distracting because you know it's fake. It's a weather baloon or it's a toy helicopter or it's a spy drone or it's a trick of the light or it's a damn bird. We're been there before. Nothing new at all. Why would the government have hidden evidence of aliens, why tell everyone now releasing all evidence at once? Clearly there is an element of timing. But why choose this particular time when there are so many more important news to discuss? Two years ago there was nothing happening at all. That would have been a great time. It doesn't make any sense. I can't believe I have to explain this. Am I a genius? It's so obvious to me.
No matter when a UFO story comes out, you could always point to some recent event that powers don't want to talk about. But that makes it a non-falsifiable argument, just as much a conspiracy theory as any other UFO explanation.
Because a line item was added to the defense authorization bill, which contained COVID-19 relief funding, requiring the government to report on what it knew about UAPs as a potential security threat within 180 days of authorization.
Nowhere, and at no time, has the government ever claimed that aliens exist, that UFOs (or UAPs) are alien spacecraft, or that the government has hidden, or intends to reveal, such evidence. All of that is part of the BS woowoo viral hype cycle spun around this story by clickbait-driven websites and UFO believers who have been waiting for "disclosure" for decades.
And all of that more important news to discuss is still being discussed. This story hasn't distracted anyone, or stopped the media from reporting on anything else, including the economy.
If the government wanted to use the media to distract people from a bad economy, first it obviously wouldn't work because people don't need the media to tell them when the economy is bad, and second, it would be easier and more effective to just propagandize economic reporting rather than hoping for a second-order effect from an entirely unrelated story.