US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs
thehill.com
thehill.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of things like psychic teleportation. Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts). No source she names has firsthand knowledge of "non-human origin" technology; it's all people who heard something who heard something. At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". There's no good answer to the question of "if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly" --- she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD classification rules allow Grusch to describe this stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a line of specificity, which, just, no.
But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it.
When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited?
I’m especially curious because I’m somewhat of an “expert” in the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons of footage in a former life) and I think it’s a legitimate object of some sort [1]. Though I don’t believe it’s extraterrestrial.
1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right over the ocean looks just like a cruise missile flying low level.
I love how Ezra asks her obvious questions about her research like "how is it possible the Pentagon approves of people talking about UFO retrieval if it is such a close-guarded secret?" and she says "good question! I'm not entirely sure!". Seriously? You haven't asked yourself that question before?
This entire UFO saga comes from people with X-files' "I want to believe" poster in their office, and they don't let confirmation bias stop them.
Source? I don't think there was ever a consensus that it was discredited. Googling "Gimbal Video discredited" doesn't give me anything definitive.
There's a lot of disinformation as well as smoke and mirrors. It's annoying, but you can't take military documents at face value. It's like reading a scientific paper, you realistically can only judge the merit if you have some domain expertise or enough in an adjacent domain to understand the work itself. That's the whole reason disinformation works in the first place (which is specifically meant to fool experts, even if not all of them, just enough).
Source?
>At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video".
"Gimball" is not credibly discredited, calling it such highlights your bias and calls your other points into question.
EDIT: HN is a terrible website for having actual discussions because, inevitably, people reply to my comments and I end up typing a reply only to hit "you're doing that too fast". Occasionally I engage and inevitably am reminded of why this site sucks so much for anything more than a particularly unperformant RSS feed
So I don't know if this will even post, but I've posted up thread so hopefully you see it. (edit: it didn't post, so I edited it in to my original message)
Generally anyone who refers to "Gimball" as debunked/etc is referring to Mick West's preposterous video on the subject. It has been so thoroughly, repeatedly, taken apart by actual fighter pilots who have used these systems that _anyone_ still parroting the original claims of Mick West is either incredibly out of the loop or a straight-up denialist who is willing to accept even the most flimsy of arguments if it reenforces their prior beliefs.
it's all people who heard something who heard something
This doesn't directly prove the claims of Grusch or anybody else, of course. But it is a decently persausive explanation for why it's always "people who heard something who heard something" and not direct sources.
"if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly"
One thing you have to say about Grusch is that he is really putting it all on the line. He is going through the official whistleblower channel and is triggering a major investigation.
If he is telling the truth, the DoD would more or less be admitting guilt by going after him.
(There is also a third possibility. Grusch is being truthful, but he and/or others have been deceived. I think wrapping a secret program under the cover of some UFO nonsense could be pretty effective camouflage, since UFO-related claims usually are instantly deemed noncredible in the eyes of many)
"she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD
classification rules allow Grusch to describe this
stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a
line of specificity, which, just, no"
The conclusion here does not follow the premise.
He's got access to a lot more than us. This isn't just some congressman indulging it for the lulz. It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials. Even Rubio is having trouble believing it but he's now admitting to have talked to people with direct access to the program. Grusch is as credible as it gets. He said he spent four years investigating this before he came to the conclusions that these secretive exotic craft programs exist.
The “non-earth” origin is the smokescreen, “exotic” covers foreign secret research projects?
Something a bit convoluted like this is orders of magnitude more probable in my world model. (Basically, the prior “aliens exist and have been covered up” rounds to zero, so given we are observing this public action, even extremely unlikely explanations could explain it.)
One is that, while this is written like a straight news article (until the last paragraph), this is in The Hill's Opinion section. In the past, I have seen this publication allow people of questionable credibility to post in their Opinion section. I have no idea who this writer is, but they are not a news reporter (or they weren't acting as one when they wrote this piece).
The second is that the bill appears to be about Congress' authority to control funding and perform oversight. They are withdrawing funds from secret UFO projects and asking those involved to come forward, either with the greatest discovery in human history or (more likely) with a story about money being misappropriated and that misappropriation being hidden from the US Senate.
> "Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights" over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."
This is exactly what happened with the people and incidents that were exposed in the Mirage Men[1] documentary that covers how the government uses UFO and alien conspiracy theories to coverup information that they don't want the public to know.
Well-meaning people stumbled upon classified projects, did the right thing by reporting them to the government, and then the government went out of its way to construct situations and fake evidence to convince them that what they saw were really aliens.
In one incident, the government constructed a fake "alien crash landing" site in the mountains, and flew one of their victims to it and let them investigate it themselves in order to convince them that what they really saw were aliens.
In the process of deceiving these people, the government even significantly contributed to a veteran's mental breakdown and paranoia via agents' lies and extensive surveillance of the victim's life.
People desperately want to believe aliens aren't real, and some real mental gymnastics to get there. Like believing "debunking" videos from crackpots and videogame programmers (which real pilots say are nonsensical), or "this one time in the 60s the CIA".
Or, is the credulity in the US at such a high point that any sort of conspiracy idea has currency?
For example, they often start by undermining trust in media organizations, then elected leaders.
The current trajectory the US is on is indistinguishable from the successful outcome of a propaganda operation based on that playbook.
No. The USA has spent the last several decades putting most of its military budget into aircraft carriers, which will all be sunk within the first 24 hours of any conflict with China. This is just a last ditch effort to try to trick China into thinking we might have some kind of deterrent.
1. sink carriers
2. ???
3. profit
Why? They could just say "we have advanced but secret systems that can tell China is up to something".
There was just a balloon, and another round of em over Asia -- no one would be surprised.
This isn't about China, it's about Trump and the hard-right conspiracy types going ape-shit, esp. since those indictments have teeth. The DoD has been doing this since the 90s and Oklahoma City.
Consider updating your priors on this topic
World order is changing. China is a rising military power. People may even see foreign spy aircraft (e.g. Chinese weather balloons) over US airspace. The DoD would rather you believe it's aliens. This kind of propaganda works great on older boomers in particular because they've been conditioned to believe it all their life.
The US military is not able to coverup something like a crashed alien spacecraft. They couldn't even stop a dozen men with box cutters from crashing planes into buildings. I would not be surprised in the least to find out that the 9/11 conspiracies were funded by the DoD—probably by the same people doing this nonsense now. Again, "they" would rather you believe in a supremely powerful government with space lasers than have their true incompetence unmasked.
China just finished their first domestic aircraft carrier, and the current military hasn't really been in any major war. In the meantime, the US has continually maintained a state of readiness and nearly constant wars while modernizing its fleet.
But you had to just go 9/11 Truther which means nobody here should really be paying attention to you.
The moment the Rubicon is crossed, both the US and China would fall into an all out economic depression and that is exactly why that Rubicon will not be crossed in my lifetime.
This might be an issue at some point if you just graduated high school but for now we have mutually assured economic destruction.
I am far more worried about a debt bomb going off in China than a real bomb.
The allegations by David Grusch that set all this off included that there's been a decades long competition between various nations to collect these craft.
From The Debrief Article
>“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.
My take away had been that most of the allegations are effectively some level all the stuff we've always heard about UFOs has been true this whole time (e.g. Roswell). Essentially one of the worst kept secrets, ignored largely because of the implausibility rather than secrecy.
You want people to feel safe and pay their taxes. You want your citizens to believe that the $2 trillion spend on defense every year goes to good use, creating the kind of military and intelligence apparatus that Hollywood portrays.
We fund these types of propaganda campaigns for the same reasons we have military parades and air shows. We saw how well these kinds of "overwhelmingly powerful" government myths worked for both the Soviets and Axis powers in WW2 and we copied it. Every government chasing power and status wants its citizens to feel like they are the most powerful. China and Russia have similar kinds of myths.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Please, continue to believe that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division within the US government managed to retrieve them and keep it secret for 50+ years. Look past the failing state of our infrastructure and continue to believe that an alien species capable of interstellar travel is interested specifically in Americans, but "they" are keeping you from knowing the truth!
“You spend a lot, but you get the best!” sounds a lot better than “You spend a lot, but we still suck!”
Especially when NATO hasn't fired a shot in Ukraine, but is supplying real-time intelligence to the AFU.
US cold war era surplus + EW helped break an entire Russian army, and may yet break a second.
However, if people think they're aliens, that instead turns psychological warfare on its head and into something that inspires awe, wonder and possibility. No one is scared in the ways adversaries want them to be scared, and no one doubts the government is actually capable of handling threats from adversaries.
"Aliens" as an explanation quells the potential for panic, versus adversaries successfully inducing the panic responses they desire. It also gives the opportunity for those who care too much about this to be painted as quacks.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades.
If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft).
Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.
That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.
It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.
If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
It seems the crucial element (pardon the pun) is that they wouldn't know what to look for. The Victorians knew enough about chemistry that they could figure out the material composition of various components. And we similarly know how to enumerate all sorts of chemical and physical properties of any exotic materials and objects we might come across. But it's all based on our own patchwork model of the physical universe, which has plenty of gaps we know about, nevermind those we can't even imagine. We don't know what we don't know.
If we assume aliens are visiting then it's almost certain that their technology is thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours. And if we assume that follows an exponential curve (which may not be a valid assumption - we really only have ~200 years of history upon which we could base such a supposition), then it follows that their technology would be indecipherably complex for us to understand.
The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?
I'm using 'forced' in the sense of 'circumstances cause it to become necessary to do', not 'some more powerful entity will make them do it'.
The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the remnants of one that had been vaporized.
So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s
I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.
They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm.
The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discovery of fireworks.
It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more.
Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal.
And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.
- The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes
- They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding
- They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project
Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.
The technological baseline needed to rollout any wildly advanced technology would necessarily lead to an incremental advancement before we got to the end result, and each step would be a plausibly "natural" advancement on current technology.
There doesn't seem to be any particular place where a bunch of wild advancements are emerging from, which leads to a few likely possibilities: we haven't found alien technology; we have, but it's so advanced that we haven't cracked the surface yet; or we have, and have cracked the surface, and are replicating it, but they're doing a very good job keeping it secret. I don't think it's possible to keep the lid on something that big, and space is so big that I'm very inclined towards the first one.
I would vote for this one, but this hypothesis doesn't need the ET part.
Because the type of exotic field propulsion these things are using is so far beyond the current state of the art it wouldn't be remotely plausible.
It would be like going from vacuum tubes to 3nm EUV in a single step, no one would believe you.
They would just release it and come clean. No one would be mad that we suddenly have near-magical solutions to energy problems.
What you're describing is essentially what happened with the Manhattan Project, which was a tightly guarded military secret. But once it became clear there were civilian applications, they stood up the Atomic Energy Commission and helped the rest of the country get to work on nuclear energy.
On the other hand, if we have our hands on ET craft, you'd have to imagine there are some capitalists who would like to profit hand over fist over whatever this technology might offer, people who aren't well leveraged for this revolution be damned and left to fight amongst themselves while your cabal maintains the largest technological advantage relative to other groups in human history. We have plenty of examples of capitalists profiteering at the expense of humans and the earth today.
This is all speculation of course, who knows what is happening.
Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.
You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.
The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.
Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.
But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.
Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-...
There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and military UAVs. Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
I'd expect basically any semi-competent government to be monitoring those reports and increasing surveillance in the area.
A challenge for the incredulous, bring me some high quality cellphone pictures of airplanes at night without using any extra equipment like tripods, lenses or stabilizers.
Source? I see the opposite when I Google around for reports per year. There was a dip during COVID, buts it's easy to attribute that to people not being outside, and it's picked right back up since.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/05/20/global...
I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S. military. Sadly most of it is classified.
Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?
*edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in origin.
I will say my thoughts on the matter:
Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only planet with life)
Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low chance
Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united states? near 0% chance
Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. And that was fine because there are many natural causes that could explain these blips on radar. Many weather phenomena or man made objects could explain people "seeing" UFOs. Buzz Aldrin famously saw glowing objects flying around in space but he does not necessarily believe they have ET origin.
But recently, there's simply way more of these objects everywhere, and nobody knows for sure what these are. This worries some people because, well, what if they're Chinese spy balloons or drones? Remember when the US military shot down a couple balloons some time ago and it made the news?
This is a potential threat to the national security and it makes sense that they have put together teams for the retrieval of these objects. The government may not believe they have ET origin, but they now see them more as potential threat to the national security.
Of course, I would definitely find it enjoyable and exciting if there is some "otherworldly" intelligence behind these objects.
We know vanishingly little about the day to day movements of the largest solar system objects. Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track.
Sorry, but we routinely track asteroids that are less than 100 metres in size [0]. We track objects in orbit down to a few cm in size [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_La...
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debr...
"""As of DE421, perturbations from 343 asteroids, representing about 90% of the mass of the main asteroid belt, have been included in the dynamical model"""
Using polynomial interpolation you can get more or less 100meter level accuracy for any major object at any time. If there are remaining large masses that we haven't identified, they must be fairly small, far, and very dark.
(this is one of the most important achievements in human history and represents one of the longest scientific/religious activities; people have been predicting orbital paths for thousands of years.)
How would you or anyone else know this?
One, rich humans sometimes like to go see exotic wildlife, why wouldn't aliens?
Two, how would we know if there were aliens looking around other places?
> and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way
"Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."
Thing is, accepting the idea of the extraordinary and inexplicable is rather difficult for humans. Doug Adams explained it pretty succinctly with his idea of the “somebody else’s problem” field, whereby you could paint a mountain bright pink, and it would become invisible to a majority of observers through its sheer jarring improbability and discontinuity with core beliefs about the nature of things.
My background is physics. I’m well versed in “weird but explicable stuff”, I don’t take anything on faith, and I have seen, with multiple witnesses, a truly inexplicable thing, without resorting to what a big part of me still regards as mummery. We all saw the same thing. We all talked about it, puzzled over it, frantically checked the news for an explanation.
The thing is, the people who I was with at the time, they all remember the incident, the sonic booms… and seeing a helicopter in distress, which was the story in the press later that day. The shift to “it was a helicopter” was amazingly quick.
It wasn’t a helicopter. I know what I saw - or rather, I know that I saw something that was absolutely not a helicopter, that fighter jets approached to then have disappear in a sudden cloud - and yet, a big, big part of me yearns to believe that I saw a helicopter, as the alternative is… well, posting stuff that you’ll read and will go “this guy is clearly nuts”, and me being inclined to agree, as again, it isn’t comforting in the slightest to hold in your mind the knowledge that things are not quite as they appear.
There’s even footage of the thing, freely available on YouTube, and there’s evidently no point in anyone removing it or so-forth, as anyone who thinks it’s real is clearly crazy.
I haven’t been quite the same since.
Consider how many planets are capable of supporting intelligent (as we know it).
Now suppose we detect evidence of industrial behavior (certain pollutants, nuclear detonation, etc).
Would we not laser focus on that one planet and observe it with everything we have - including sending reconnaissance drones?
Furthermore, would we not want to avoid detection where possible, in case life does exist on said planet and it turns out to be an existential threat to humanity?
Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.
Feels like we're approaching a God of the gaps scenario here, but with aliens.
yet we have thousands of reports of UFO sightings (the vast majority seem to be in the US for some reason). So the aliens who can travel here in...assuming they come from a nearby solar system 4 light years away, and they are arriving as a result of observing "pollutants and nuclear detontations", meaning if they started traveling in 1950 (upon receiving the light from the first nuclear detontation in 1945) and UFO sightings picked up by the 1960s they traveled 4 light years in about 10-15 years, and can be "undetectable" except.... for thousands of non-confirmable sightings per year.
I think the aliens aren't going to visit us until Zefram Cochrane achieves his first warp flight.
Still human-centric to assume they would know what we can detect.
David Grusch talks about this in one of his interviews: https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the...
And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it.
While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
With the military (in addition to what I said) you have to be very aware that it, like most gov entities, outsources work. The private sector is coupled with the military. The US military doesn't build the secret jets on secret military bases, Lockheed and Boeing do. Lockheed built the SR71, which definitely led to many UFO stories.
Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.
It can also take a lot of time for something to get from TRL 6 to TRL 7, and from TRL 7 to TRL 8. Sometimes realistically impossible to get to TRL 9! The system could be more efficient for sure, and probably has broken down too much, but the idea itself is fine.
Fwiw, I've seen things that I 100% believe should be done today and that there's massive amounts of evidence for it, but aren't done because they aren't TRL 9. I don't want to start arguments, but there's a certain industry that gets hit with this all the time. Where they can do tons of complex and detailed models but aren't able to build the actual thing because it hasn't been physically demonstrated. Which leads to a weird self referential roadblock.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?
Space computers are behind because space technology is based on minimizing risk given the large cost of failure. Using older nodes with well-understood flaws that can be built using old chip equipment is much lower risk than trying to put Intel's latest into a communications satellite.
Few things in space truly would require anything state of the art. The best argument I can think of would be realtime image processing using DNNs- imagine you made a fleet of 1M identical exploration bots and you wanted them to filter out most of their imaging data before sending back the best candidates.
> An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes. [1]
Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We just don't get to see the best in action because they're classified until they're almost pedestrian.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
Not only that, but that "the government" and "its contractors" are often impossible to distinguish and for all intents and purposes the same. Many times realistically a loophole to escape the GS pay.
Any actually interesting technology would be under a Secrecy Order [1] and the patents wouldn't see the light of day, perhaps ever. The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines. Based on what little we know, the Secrecy Orders are very effective - some gaseous centrifuge technology used for enrichment in the 1940s and 1950s is still considered cutting edge and secret.
Antigravity is just fantasy land. All it would take is a factor of two improvement in any number of technologies to make something exotic.
This is a huge understatement. Like calling GPT4 "as mundane as any other transformer." Just because things have a high abstraction similarity doesn't mean the details aren't critical. Very expensive and difficult to produce __is__ exotic technology. There's also a large range of "paradigm shifting" technologies between here and antigravity. Don't listen to YouTube, get your hands dirty and work on the stuff if you want to get the expertise to know why this stuff is so impressive.
This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just in obvious areas like cryptography but data structures and algorithms, as well as exotic hardware.
It doesn't explain UFOs, but the idea that the most advanced public computer tech is decades ahead of what elements of the US DoD have doesn't pass the smell test. At worst there is parity and in some areas there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of capability that should not be possible if you solely went on public computing literature. (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.)
Not everyone aspires to be a code monkey at Facebook for the money. There are extremely talented computer scientists working in US government, especially the secretive parts, that could instantly get a job at any FAANG company if they wanted to -- I've met many of them -- but they don't. The notion that the US DoD does not have access to "the best engineers and scientists" is dubious.
What's the government application here? AI? NSA analysis of metadata to figure out hidden connections between individuals?
They do use cutting edge stuff to, and silicon valley pays well, but really only if your a software guy. Contrary to contemporary beliefs, their still are smart engineers out their building cutting edge non-compute hardware.
Then you start your 2nd career at GD or Lockheed or Microsoft, et al, and get 300k per annum.
> You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k
That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.
This is the solo special contractor rate. You aren't paying a person a million bucks. You're paying a "company" that because that's what expertise in how carbon fibers set in a particular resin matrix subjected to a high-frequency supersonic detonation ring or something, an expertise that globally numbers maybe five, and within the U.S., three, is worth.
Not to mention the red-taped filled work environment does not exactly encourage innovation.
How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue:
When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes of the thing weren't utterly exotic.
Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of theory was already public years before they were brought into existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they must have worked.
But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical basis for such a technology known to the public right now. Nobody can say "well it could be done with XYZ but it would be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."
It doesn't have to, it was a counter-example to that "decades behind the private sector on computing technology" thesis.
Exactly what has been going on since the 40s though? The Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the government. It was just a balloon that got blown up into an massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors about alien spacecraft.
The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology, contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far. There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either from the government or from space. The government doesn't have stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for such craft existing in the first place.
What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret military clearance?
I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours.
When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech.
This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.
People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so.
LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit.
There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson. When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories about how people's native languages impact the way the view the world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest thing their brains could come up with.
That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.
I don't know if I'd call that a flying saucer- it was more of a hovering saucer.
Not like P&W is a government owned company, either - the private sector and the military are closely integrated, that's the military industrial complex.
Not necessarily. I once sold a Ferrari to a nuclear weapons tech from Los Alamos. His boss had a Countach.
> Corporate needs you to find the differences between these pictures.jpg: [military tech] [private sector tech] (they're the same picture)
For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...
Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir" stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-w...).
"But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."
> For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...
Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.
Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of different aliens visiting us, or people are having experiences they can't rationally explain and their brain is filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone having a camera on them at any given moment is now approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens getting sneakier?
If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we want to study potentially advanced technology?
As I understand it, only "secret, unreported programs" would lose funding.
- Stick. Today a program that is doing "Advanced Propulsion Research" that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech would be perfectly legal. Cutting funding for this, unless explicitly authorized, opens up liability for anyone in the government and related contractors.
- Carrot. The amnesty is an opportunity to come forward without the liability.
Enter the intergalactic copyright lawyers...
If they're telling the truth, they have a moral obligation to declassify everything they know.
Official secrecy is fundamentally incompatible with the needs of an informed public capable of voting intelligently within a democratic republic.
And if they are running a massive psyops deception campaign it would make the public lose the last vestige of trust left in the govt. Its a lose lose situation on both scenarios and I expect the US govt. to keep things of this nature locked down to a extreme state as it has been doing since WW2.
Also interesting note, the flood of credible pentagon UFO info is being brought up by a bunch of individuals who worked in(or currently for) the US intelligence community. This is 2017 and after when the NYtimes(Leslie Kean reporter) released the bombshell pentagon UFO tapes. These individuals are: Christoper Mellon(ex high ranking intelligence director), Luis Elizondo(Intelligence officer on and off), and currently David Grusch NGA, & NRO - the person who states that non human craft have been retrieved(OP article).
I don't mean to make this political at all, just trying to reason on the basis of a personality and knowing that a president would boast about having knowledge of such trivial classified information - in comparison to the existence of non-human spacecraft; makes me believe that if he was briefed on it he likely would have boasted about it. (and so would I, just imagine what earth shaking news that is.)
We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries. North Korea has them, for God's sake.
Nuclear weapons are simply a function of having a large enough industrial base to support their development. The "secret sauce" is officially secret, but it isn't actually secret.
Secrecy may or may not be warranted, but this is not a good argument against it.
Nine countries as opposed to...
I'm generally in agreement with a transparent government, but there must be some limits.
We do [1][2]. Better analogy might be disclosing the present location of all nuclear submarines.
[1] https://uploads.fas.org/sites/4/NotebookMap.pdf
[2] https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/a-u-s-nuclear-wea...
Yes. If the deterrent/protection factor of our nuclear weapons platforms are nullified by their location being exposed, then they are already useless.
That being said, I don’t completely discount the possibility. One answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn’t one, and I can think of many reasons multiple governments would try to keep stuff like this secret.
Aliens have super sophisticated tech that is hardy enough to travel millions of light years through space but it crashes so easy on earth? What caused them to crash?
I'd like to believe, and I think 1 or 2 might be reasonable but the claim is 12, which doesn't account for ships obtained by other nations as Grusch said I'd happening.
I still believe it's possible, and hope it is, however something feels staged about this, maybe to get more money for certain agencies, or some other motive.
Selection bias. We don't know how many crafts fail to make it to Earth. Maybe the trip is extremely dangerous and only a percentage actually make it.
And/or, like most air & space travel, takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts.
Also, we have a very good handle on air travel, but planes still crash sometimes.
(I don't actually believe we have ET crafts coming to earth, but it's fun thinking it through).
(1) The probes, like ours, are not designed to return and have a limited life span. Maybe they just gather and transmit data until their power source runs out or something on them breaks and they crash.
(2) Maybe there are thousands of probes or even more (even from multiple sources!) and only a small percentage of them crash. Of course one would assume we'd be seeing them more often if this were true.
(3) We shot them down. That's not impossible, especially if they are just probes and were not designed to deal with something intelligent intentionally flinging high velocity chunks of metal at them.
The last could easily occur if we mistook them for e.g. Soviet/Russian or Chinese surveillance craft and they repeatedly refused to respond to orders to withdraw.
Why would someone send probes here? This planet has been broadcasting "possible biosphere right here!" for at least hundreds of millions of years to anyone capable of doing spectroscopy on the light it reflects. You wouldn't be able to see detail from another star but you could determine things like atmospheric makeup and conclude that there is very likely to be something interesting here. You'd see a ton of oxygen (which is hard to explain abiotically), water vapor, traces of hydrocarbons, and possibly evidence of sunlight being captured by something complex (photosynthesis) vs just reflecting off rocks or ice. Lastly the planet has a large moon and is not tide locked to its star, both characteristics that increase the odds of something complex evolving here (as far as we know).
Multiple different sets of aliens, fighting over Earth. (I’m not saying that this is true, just that it is one scenario that explains crashes happening if there were aliens as described building craft capable of visiting Earth.)
Because nobody has figured out an autopilot that doesn't shit the bed once in a while? I'm betting on taking a nap in the backseat is just a universally bad idea when nobody is driving.
One might wonder "Why is this Congress treating this topic seriously when previous Congresses did not" and conclude this Congress is more willing to treat outlandish claims as credible, not that the claims are more credible.
If that were going on (and I'm skeptical) why would you want to stop it?
> Funding would also be cut for “the development of propulsion technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology, systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or inspired by inspection, analysis, or reverse engineering of recovered [UFOs] or materials.”
Again, why the hell would you stop funding for development of propulsion tech that might be of alien origin? You can bet that if China or Russia had a craft like this they'd be trying to reverse engineer it.
Or because you don’t believe they exist, and think that “classified program to recover extraterrestrial craft and reverse engineer its technology” is used as itself a cover for outright corruption.
https://reason.com/2022/11/15/the-military-ufo-complex/
I'm surprised that congress finally wants to stop the gravy train, unless this is another refined misdirection scheme. Probably a lot of that money went into covert operations.
Video of "UFO" over Poland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WZN0T_54xY
Pentagon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Wmap12xm0
Picture of crashed orb in Mexico: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmm7a/mysterious-metallic-o...
My theory is that these spheres are spinning and move using the Magnus effect (the effect that causes a spinning soccer ball to curve). Theoretically, if you have gyroscopes inside the sphere, and you can find a way to transfer the gyroscopes' spin to the sphere, the sphere will spin in a controllable direction and move where you want it to. Lift can be achieved by filling it with helium.
We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with statements like the following, made by the former director of National Intelligence?
"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."
Spinning around, moving uncontrollably inside a storm, with very variable speed are exactly things that lost balloons do.
Any evidence at all.
Anyone? Bueller?
* The government has previously used X to divert attention therefore there is no X.
* The person saying X is an accomplice of X and cannot be trusted.
* Demanding the answer to the question about X is dangerous because national security.
* X is a distraction from something bad Trump did.
* X is a distraction from something bad Biden did.
* X is a distraction from the recent Supreme Court decisions.
* X could never be covered up by the government - refuses to believe copious whistleblower testimony about X with no reason than it's impossible for the government to be able to cover X up.- it was a reflection in the windshield
- I debunked it from seeing this YouTube video because those Air Force pilots and those government whistleblowers definitely don’t know what they are talking about !
I am always surprised by the amount of confidence those « debunkers » radiate when what they mainly do is just express doubt with zero cost to them in terms of reputation or even work.
I think you’re in a conspiratorial mood, haha. Ironic that your conspiracy is against the existence of UFOs!
If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?
There are a dozen explanations more plausible than aliens.
Where is the evidence of any of this stuff?
1) Some kind of psy-ops from within our own government, meant to mess with a different government or a branch of our own government. Maybe its own citizens. You can get eleven-dimensional chess with this pretty quickly.
2) We have grabbed someone else's UAVs. Maybe China, maybe Russia.
3) We have grabbed the UAVs of an unsuspected party which a surprise technological edge we would never expect: the Wakanda Hypothesis. We don't even know that we're in a game and that we're losing.
...
N-3) Aliens have emerged from local gas giants and are curious about us. Jupiter? Saturn? Neptune? And so on. Probably not Pluto.
N-2) Generation ships or "sleepers" from another solar system are on some sort of grand tour of the Orion Arm, working their way out. We've been noticed and the occupants awakened. Aliens? AI? Maybe there is no difference by then.
N-1) Aliens within a light sphere about 0.45 * (First UFO Year - 1895) heard our radio and really hustled to get here with a hefty blueshift.
N) The captured vessels are either FTL-capable or brought here on a larger ship with such capabilities. All bets are off.
There is another possibility which I think is often ignored, after #3. It's sci-fi, but it isn't physics-breaking the way FTL is. What if the craft are from a parallel earth? I dislike it, but not as much as I dislike FTL. It doesn't even require aliens. A parallel history where we got the ball rolling even a few decades earlier might end up with a civilization a hundred or a thousand years ahead of ours. I wouldn't bet money on anything higher than #2 on my list, but I still think that if we are going to conjecture about aliens, we might as well do parallel Earths, too.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast might also have alerted them to humanity, and travel time of the broadcast plus travel time of UFO’s to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around when nukes were invented (if they’re from, say, Alpha Centauri which is 4 light-years away).
The US and Europe also have free press where things like this are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which in conjunction with the above may explain sightings maps like this one, where sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in Europe:
https://updb.app/map?zoom=1.00&lon=149.0917&lat=37.3003
Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, look at what you get:
1-1943: 1566 sightings reports
1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports
Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia previously. Obviously we also had more robust and technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge discrepancy.
Given that most famous whistleblowers in recent years have been American this doesn't seem unlikely. Five Eyes has five governments in it, but only the USA had someone who went to the press. The US Government is both very large so more people can leak things, and very well funded, so more chance of secret programmes, and (IMHO) has a civic-minded culture in which people are more inspired by things like the Constitution and stated cultural ideals than in other countries.
Where the us is alone however is in the reports of sightings/abductions of entities exiting those craft but then again most of those stories tend to either be "retrieved memories", straight up hoaxes or so vague in details that other explanations cannot be ruled out.
The country with the best fishing nets would probably catch more fish than countries with bad fishing nets, even if they have the same amount of fish in the oceans.
Generally UFO reportings increased with astronomy, radar, and surveillance technology development. Of which, the US has a lot of all three, which probably means we have a sufficiently complex system that we can notice anomalies but not sufficiently complex enough to identify them.
You could've googled this theory you had before putting it in text.
If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to know or be aware. The other alternative if Russia which is similarly sized and equipped but they tend to be pretty cagey sharing information.
So it ends up being the US not because they only land there but because they have the combination of obsessively watching the skies with the ability to share their information and the freedom to do so.
Like Chinese bioweapons spreading worldwide and the Cheeto having his election "stolen". He's a real fact checker that guy...
(of course, if you want to consider naturally spreading infections, the flu has been an annual chinese bioweapon for hiundreds of years)
But there's never clear pictures or videos or physical evidence provided. This is just another scam.
https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnCinema
"Barney Hill's highly disturbing hypnosis session regarding his alien abduction experience in 1961"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0er29WQITo
I also see a lot of interesting stuff on https://twitter.com/richgel999 He might even be on HN!
Additionally listen to some of the interviews with Professor Garry Nolan. There is a lot of nonsense and grifters in the UFO world, how do you know this or that isn't a disinformation campaign? It's hard to know what is genuine and who is just trying to sell their book or promote their podcast. Garry Nolan once said something like UFOlogy is not a science and to seriously study the UAP phenomenon it would need to become a serious field of scientific investigation i.e. creating a journal scientists can submit papers to for peer review. I would avoid people like Steven Greer or the History Channel's Ancient Aliens.
I have always been a "show me the evidence" type person. I was an atheist since I was really young. I hope this comment helps anyone who is curious about learning about this subject. I'm not trying to convince you aliens are coming to Earth or "make you a believer".
The research into foreign weapon technology is in one of those gray areas where not only does some of those activities border really close to industrial espionage against companies in potentially allied countries, or might contradict stated US State Department positions on international law it's usually classified and spoken off in hushed tones
It's very likely that an alien(as in foreign) technology evaluation program exists without there being anything extra-terrestrial about it as legalese can trail popular changes to terms by several decades. And that mentions of those in wider circles might fuel some rumors and misconceptions among those "who wants to believe".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
Chances are excellent Rubio might be doing this to try and draw attention away from several state supreme court rulings striking down bans on transgender care and drag shows incepted and championed by republicans. If not that, then to draw attention away from the spectacle of republican cooperation during successful debt ceiling negotiations.
Mostly, those have been federal trial courts (and some, like the Florida drag ban one, also preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement while the case proceeds, not final rulings striking them down) not state supreme courts issuing the rulings.
(If they are ET, Congress will miss them anyhow.)
1. They’re actually used as ways of laundering money out of government pockets without congressional oversight. The whole “oh but it’s top top secret” excuse is an easy one.
2. The positive and negative attention are all part of a plan to convince enemy nations that the US has access to incredible technology. I mean, if I wanted to spook Putin, I’d probably also sign a bill condemning the work on the trillion megaton nuclear bomb. What trillion megaton nuclear bomb? The one we’re condemning!
But let’s pretend it is real.
What is the point of congress withdrawing such funding? Elon steps in, and then such tech is in the hands of a private company rather than the government. How is that a good thing for the US govt?
It sounds (to my naive British mind, which knows very little about congress or its stance on various things) that it’d have been preferable to give a timeline for these projects to present themselves to congress. Immediately condemning them and convincing whistleblowers to present them instead just seems like a backwards way of doing it.
I always thought there was something a bit off about Rubio...
Do I trust the government to tell me the truth about them at a time where institutional trust is at all time low?
No freaking way.
Kind of curious.
People have been claiming to see UFOs for years, ever since the popularization in mass media with the start of "the war of the worlds". In nearly all cases, even (at the time) credible sightings were advanced weapons programs. Additionally, with the proliferation of everyone having access to relatively high quality cameras, the amount of "legitimate" sightings has dropped dramatically.
Now, what has changed? We have several videos, that are public knowledge, that show objects moving in ways that no level of technology we have now can demonstrate.
This video and the other two related are the only official videos we currently have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWLZgnmRDs4
These objects were recorded as early as 2004. These objects were recorded not by a loony bin boy cried wolf UFO-ologist but by US Navy airmen.
Ok, maybe they are a camera issue? e.g. one can imagine it's a bird or a balloon or an object that shows up as moving much faster than reality, or something to do with parallax/tracking error with the IR (infrared)? That would be believable, especially if it's a single recording, solo pilot, new equipment. The issue with this is that in addition to the declassified IR videos, we saw this happen multiple times, in multiple locations, on different aircraft, with multiple pilots present in the aircraft at the same time making the same visual (with eyeballs) confirmation, radar confirmation, IR.
Ok, maybe it's an advanced hologram program/electronic warfare test/drill or something? Which was my next guess, but the visual confirmation rules out electronic warfare and in addition to visuals, IR, we also have radar bouncing off - not just recorded by the aircraft, but recorded by the entire USS Nimitz carrier group that was in the area at the time - hence real, physical objects. And, again, it wasn't just one signature, in fact the reason they were up there to begin with was because of the unidentified objects in the airspace.
Ok, maybe it's just a balloon or an experimental drone by the US or its rivals. The issue here is that the physics described are not just "next-gen" a la F35 but some sort of groundbreaking physics that would change the way we do anything.
From The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...
"For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."
Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet long. Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes. Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared. Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said. Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object. But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.” The two fighter jets then conferred with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point, in aviation parlance. They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange aircraft. “Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is at your cap point.” “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.
Thus, they are able to move on their own, not just floating in the wind (balloon, birds, launched radar reflectors), they're quite large, and can move large distances in short amounts of time. Additionally, no exhaust ports, no exhaust fumes, no control surfaces of any kind were observed. If we actually break down and analyze the movement based on the recording, we get results that are beyond physics. From the University of Albany - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
Even the most conservative and minimum models for acceleration give us ~70g with maneuverability, which is more than double what we have, and only in a rocket-like manner. Not without exhaust, control surfaces, and non-linear movement.
"It is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions at this point regarding the nature and origin of these UAVs other than the fact that we have shown that these objects cannot be of any known aircraft or missiles using current technology. We have characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft."
Ok, maybe it's a secret weapons program we don't know about. The issue with this is that we'd see a ton of people "disappearing" from public life and essentially vanishing, similar to what happened during the Manhattan Project. Physicists, mathematicians, materials scientists would seemingly end their career, stop publishing, and go off the grid to live and work at some facility. Currently, we haven't seen an exodus/brain drain of any level in the fields we would expect towards "nothing" - if anything, everyone's going into finance and adtech. Not to mention, this kind of stuff would be "Theory of Relativity" tier, not just cutting edge stealth tech.
The only other thing I can imagine is that it's a coordinated government attempt to spread disinformation regarding our military capabilities to our adversaries. Even then, it doesn't explain what the objects were.
I really really don't want to be a "UFO guy" but maybe even this mindset is part of the problem. Given all of this information, I don't understand why so many are so quick to dismiss any sort of theory, because as far as I see it anything terrestrial is exponentially more likely than aliens, but I can't come up with any ideas for these objects to have originated on Earth.
PS. there's also the the whistleblower which the article references: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/ex-intel-official-go... and a 2017 NYT article describing the program itself: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog...
The problem with this is that there is no evidence to support it. No one has ever leaked anything about a secret propulsion mechanism that can do 1000+ Gs. On the other hand, there have been those who have leaked information about secret UAP programs. Congress seems to be if the opinion that the latter is the more likely of the two, which makes sense when you think about it.
Congress has been briefed about secret weapons programs before. There are procedures in place to protect national secrets when they need to be discussed by the Legislative branch. If it were a secret propulsion mechanism then Congress would already know about it, and all this energy would not be being spent on holding hearings re: AARO, whistleblowers, etc.
Replace UFOs with magic beans and it sounds like some folks in government seem to have been swindled into diverting money through multiple paths into "classified work" chasing after Jack and a giant stalk. That sounds like a potentially fantastic grift for whoever is running it.
This is why the bill says: no more money for anything related to these crazy beans, and anyone who is employed looking for them is freed from any bonds of secrecy to come tell us what's been being done.
Of course there's a tiny tiny possibility someone comes back with a giant's ring, so they include that you've got to show everything you actually found, but that provision also will make it clear later that despite a lot of money, no one has actually found anything meaningful, and thus the whole thing was a fraud.
Not seven saying its overt corruption. But if you work for the military in collecting sightings on unidentified objects and earnestly dont know what 10% of the sightings actually were, it behooves you to fan the rumors on it a bit.
I heard some guy saying they were actually demons, which I found quite funny/entertaining. Supposedly these aliens smell like sulfur badly. Maybe aliens/demons are the same thing? I guess we're gonna need the Doom Slayer.
When did you hear this? perhaps after this person saw Childhood's End[0] (based on the 1953 novel[1], which is much better IMHO) and mistook it for a documentary?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End_(miniseries)
Either way, we will need to make great technological leaps to develop proper demonslaying equipment.
Oceangate? Yeah it was front page for a week.
(yes i know this sound completely paranoïd, but i have absolutely no other idea why they would do that)
Marco Rubio is talking about UFOs now, but he played down covid and was against lockdowns and masking.