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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Ezra Klein just did a long interview with Leslie Kean (a popular author and Coast to Coast AM guest) about her article in "The Debrief" --- where it went, after the Washington Post wouldn't run it on her time schedule --- about David Grusch:

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.

View on HN

> she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". (sic)

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.

By Mick West numerous times, for instance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

Mick West is very sure he is correct. I'm not sure that's enough.

You're right, Mick West simply insisting a thing wouldn't be enough. Luckily, Mick West presents rational arguments for you to evaluate.

This comment makes it seem like the video does not contain rational arguments. It very much does. If you're skeptical about them, why not address them.

Have you actually watched his video on the Gimbal craft? I thought that was a big piece of evidence myself, went into his video at the recommendation of someone here on HN with heavy skepticism, and came out sufficiently convinced it was not actually a UFO. He's also classy with his debunkings. To me that's a big bonus. Other YouTubers whose niche is debunking things seem to love being snarky, sarcastic, and condescending. Doesn't make his points any more/less valid though.

I'm not generally a fan of Mick West, particularly when he gets into specific debunkings of videos, because his argumentative framework depends on the same flawed approach as those he's debunking: he starts from the conclusion that the aliens are not here, and then claims any evidence offered against this conclusion is insufficient. He depends on the same fallacy as his opponents. The only difference is the conclusion from which he starts. And of course he has an inherent advantage of credibility because his conclusion doesn't require any extraordinary evidence. That's why it feels like he's just taking cheap shots - in many ways he's on the easier side of the debate (but ironically it's become the harder side because it's nearly impossible to deprogram his opponents out of their cult).

However, I did enjoy his recent video [0] on Grusch, where he focuses on the meta arguments against the narrative itself. He does a good job of describing the logical and dialectical flaws in the claims of the so-called "whistleblower" (who needs to get approval to speak publicly), and the reporting of the story itself (which was rushed and published by the same group of people with monetary and reputational incentives to uncritically promote the same narrative for which they've previously lost credibility).

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=AvhMMhW-JN0

> he starts from the conclusion that the aliens are not here

I'd say assumption not conclusion. It sounds like a good assumption to me.

It's called circular reasoning. Conclusion cites the premises, which in turn the premises cite the conclusion. Evidence (or lack of) is used to prove it self. When you start with a false or circular premise, anything that follows is technically true. It's a powerful (bullshitting) tool that can be used to prove or disprove anything.

It's bayesian reasoning. If I tell you that I predict the sun will explode tomorrow, you should consider the sun's track record of not exploding when evaluating my claim.

There's no bayesian reasoning here, just someone assuming something to be proved to be already true. Statements don't become self-evidently true just because someone assigned probabilities on them.

Also, using only past billion occurrences of the sun not blowing up, and then still concluding that the sun will not blow up despite of any recent indications of the sun showing anomalous activity seems a more accurate analogy.

Mick West presents rational reasons for why his assumptions are true, he's not simply asserting his assumptions as correct.

> despite of any recent indications of the sun showing anomalous activity

The whole point is that the videos are not in fact the indications of anomalous activity that they're made out to be. There are mundane explanations for all of them.

absence of <anything> is a better default than presence

> U.F.O. skeptics and experts in optics have long said many of the videos and sightings by naval aviators represent optical illusions that have made ordinary objects — weather balloons, commercial drones — appear to move faster than possible.

> Military officials have largely come to the same conclusion.

…

> Another video, known as Gimbal, shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning. Military officials now believe that is the optics of the classified image sensor, designed to help target weapons, make the object appear like it is moving in a strange way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/us/politics/ufo-military-...

I don’t know, define discredited. Define consensus. I really love that it’s a game developer who seems to be thinking outside the box enough to provide explanations for the public materials. I guess the expertise is not as valuable as it seems, in the narrow problem of explaining camera rendering, and indeed someone with a games background knows a lot about that.

Honestly, Mick West reaches hard for any way to debunk everything and his conclusions on certain subjects are just flat out ridiculous.

Ex: Suggesting that what kids saw at the Ariel school sighting were just puppeteers. Those kids are now adult professionals and have stuck to what they saw. Don't take my word, have an open mind and watch the past and recent interviews with them.

Was great to see him put in his place on the News Nation post-interview segment.

> Those kids are now adult professionals and have stuck to what they saw.

Knowing what we know about memory, that is not at all surprising.

I understood intellectually the problems with memory but I never felt them viscerally until I listened to The Coldest Case in Laramie, which is a podcast series about what it sounds like. There are interviews with various people who are utterly believable, but at some point the host gains access to the police reports and interview transcripts from when the crime took place, and she reacquaints these people with what they stated originally.

They are totally baffled. They literally cannot believe that what they remember happening in vivid detail never happened, that what they stated in reports from 20 or 30 years ago - which must be true - has little relation to their present day recollections. Hearing the disbelief and confusion in their voices really made the fallibility of memory real to me.

Too many eyeballs, how could that many people maintain a conspiracy to delude the public? Someone would crack.

> shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning.

In this particular case, the turning and spinning just looks like artifacting in my "expert" opinion. I guess it doesn't help that the flight crew audio states it is spinning, but both things can be true. I've seen artifacting like this on FLIR footage a number of times.

VFX artists react had a pretty good video where they're pretty sure the footage over the ocean is just a bird. The oddness is due to the camera optics and the vessel that's recording it traveling extremely fast.

Do you assume, US fighter pilots get stumped by birds often?

I find it really remarkable how far behind the curve HN is on this topic. It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all. Yet here people behave like their own grandfathers.

TheHill.com reports on Congress acting on the mounting evidence for ET craft crash retrieval programs illegally hidden from democratic oversight, people on HN discuss whether birds fly high.

> Do you assume, US fighter pilots get stumped by birds often?

No, that’s why it’s newsworthy. What’s your point?

The Hill is reporting on the shenanigans of opportunist or dumb as rocks congresspeople who figured out there’s some demographic of marginal voter who cares about this.

Exactly. That right wing grifters have piled onto the current UFO conspiracy push doesn't lend it any additional credibility. If anything, it detracts from it.

The Hill is not reporting at all; they only published someone else's op-ed (which they are famous for doing for almost anyone).

> It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all.

It's not avant-garde at all. It's the same old nonsense that comes around every 10-20 years with new lipstick on it. The "pilots are trained observers" canard is literally the same shtick from all the way back to Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers from 1947. After going around this hamster wheel a bunch of times, forgive me if I'm not excited by another round of "the evidence is about to be released any day now" chatter.

> Do you assume, US fighter pilots get stumped by birds often?

Planes specifically have cockpit warnings because U.S. fighter pilots get confused by the difference between sky and sea.

Just because you're good at something doesn't make you an expert at everything or your experience is infallible.

No we’re logical. Did a 20-30year old looking at a monitor screen maybe get stumped? Or it’s aliens. What’s more likely?

I find the gimbal one to be… really dumb. The navy releases a video called gimbal and doesn’t say anything. Later experts look at it and say, “looks like gimbal lock”.

And what… people don’t believe that the navy also concluded it was gimbal lock?

Based not on the video but on the testimony of the pilots.

Ok but like, wouldn’t it make more sense to believe the pilot saw something and it was not the thing captured on video?

One thing about the object flying over the ocean people often ignore was the setting was at black hot, meaning the object was significantly colder than the water below. I have some speculate that it could be a bird but I can't see how a bird could be so cold unless it was dead.

"Gimbal" is a speck of dust (or fly, or bird poo) on the lens of a gimbal-mounted heat-tracking camera. The entire video is predictable given the physics of such a device [1]. Not my idea, it's been around since this news first broke [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20019375

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15961848

Totally, Gimbal and Gofast were immediately discredited as Gimbal, well, being the gimbal of the sensor + contrast enhacement and Gofast being the parallax effect on a probably balloon moving at normal wind speeds. The last one I haven't seen conclusions, but if you squint it looks like an airliner at a distance. Finally the green tringle one also was discarded as a lens artifact.

How does one explain the eyewitness testimony of the 4 people involved?

>Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet (12 m) long.[7][4] 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.[8] 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos#Background

The history of UFO sightings is nothing but eyewitness testimony, often from groups of people. If there weren't a video this wouldn't have escaped the tabloids.

Adding a video which is a textbook demonstration of gimbal+heat tracking behavior does not lend weight to their testimony.

EDIT: The testimony you quoted isn't even associated with "Gimbal", it's associated with the decade-earlier "FLIR" video.

But according to Fravor's report, the 2 planes were sent there by their ship because the radar at picked up something. So it means that if it is made up, it involves the 2 pilots and their 2 weapons specialist, plus an undetermined number of radar operators, and their chain of command in the USS Princeton who dispatched them.

So from my understanding, it was picked up by at least one type of sensor.

There is still a probability, there was an artifact on the radar, AND the crew then decided to make up a story, but, Alex Dietrich, the second pilot had just started a few weeks earlier, and it was her first real world mission. I don't think that typical people tries to do a prank on one of their first assignments, on the spot, more so with colleagues they don't know very well.

But it is still possible I guess, even if I have hard time what could be the motivation of everyone involved.

I am not a military person, but I would assume that "radar picked up something" is a pretty common reason for planes to be in the air. This time, there just happened also to be something on the lens of the FLIR camera.

Mick West’s analysis involves the gimbal lock idea, which I am convinced of, but he claims that the infrared shadow is the shape that a two engine plane gives off when it is at an angle, and one engine is occluded by the plane’s body. This seems more plausible to me than dust on the dome, which I imagine those sensors must have some way of handling or they would be useless.

The gimbal video gets its name from the strange way the object appears to rotate in the footage, what some people have claimed is “the craft reconfiguring itself”.

Ive seen convincing analyses that this rotation effect is the objects infrared shadow changing shape as it moves relative to the observer. The shape change is almost exactly what we would expect if we were observing a two engine plane, and one engine became occluded behind the body of the plane, hiding its infrared signature from the observer.

That was a great podcast, and the entirety of Kean's journalistic research and integrity basically amounts to "I trust Grusch because he seems like a decent guy and I've been told he's trustworthy. But yeah, he's never seen any UFO, just reports and heard people talk about them, but since I trust him, I implicitly trust their words as well."

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.

The entire field of ufology is a paradox of distrusting the government (because they've engaged in a coverup for 70 years) but also trusting the government (because the only evidence offered that the government lied is appeal to authority of someone from the government - muh classified intel! muh Q clearance! - saying it lied). For me, any evidence of aliens needs to either resolve or sidestep this paradox.

Ideally that evidence would take the form of a personal experience with the aliens. Less ideally, maybe I could accept documented and consistently observable photographic or videographic evidence from non-government citizens. What I will not accept is evidence that comes in the form of second-hand hearsay from a government "whistleblower" who gets approval for what he speaks about publicly. That's not a whistleblower, it's a spokesperson - and his claims do not resolve the paradox because it's effectively one entity telling me "we lied to you, but now we're telling the truth" - either you're telling the truth but I can't believe you because you lied to me, or you're lying to me and I'm not surprised because you've always lied to me. In other words, this is institutional gaslighting.

For me to accept evidence from a government "whistleblower," I need to see them overcoming some form of institutional resistance. Snowden was a whistleblower. His claims were obviously credible because they made a lot of people very mad, and they chased him to the end of the earth trying to imprison or kill him. Bill Binney was not a whistleblower, despite his claims, because the NSA never prosecuted him and so obviously everything he says during his ongoing speaking tour is somewhat sanctioned by them.

For me to believe aliens are here, based on the words of a "whistleblower," he needs to release documents and photos and videos and scientific data about the craft, and the DoD needs to prosecute or at least ridicule him. But this current situation of passive acceptance by the DoD (or "soft disclosure" in the words of Lue Anon followers) is absolutely unconvincing, and just pisses me off because either my government thinks I'm stupid enough to fall for it, or too stupid to handle the full truth.

This thread is full of "I don't want to believe and/or can't".

If it's legit, could people itt put down their confirmation bias and handle that we're not the smartest around, not top of the food chain, that our governments have lied to us and kept it wrapped sealed through compartmentalization/removed from oversight through third party contractors for decades, have hidden clean energy tech from tax payers so private entities could profit, that people have been murdered to hide this tech/reality, among a long long list of other implications?

Of course if true, but from the looks of what's coming down the pipeline, it's no longer "haha little green men believing, xfiles wishing, tinfoil wearers", and more of "criminal acts have been committed out of greed and keeping control. Better get our heads out of the sand".

Pucker up, because this is likely going to flip all of our realities upside down in a weird, maybe even frightful, and extreme way within the next few years.

Or alternatively, not. It's not grand conspiracy, don't pucker up, do continue to think about applications of Hanlon's and Occam's razor.

A stoicism point of view here is that none of your wishful thinking of change would necessarily be good or bad, it's too early to say. And since this is a fantasy grab-basket of meme food, the most likely stoical outcome is that nothing to see here, move along is actually the best choice.

Not the parent, but how do you explain something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C.,_UFO_inc...

>Not the parent, but how do you explain something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C.,_UFO_inc...

I don't have to. Your link did so for me:

"At the request of the Air Force, the CAA's Technical Development and Evaluation Center did an analysis of the radar sightings. Their conclusion was that "a temperature inversion had been indicated in almost every instance when the unidentified radar targets or visual objects had been reported."[29] Project Blue Book would eventually label the unknown Washington radar blips as false images caused by temperature inversion, and the visual sightings as misidentified meteors, stars, and city lights.[30] In later years two prominent UFO skeptics, Donald Menzel, an astronomer at Harvard University, and Philip Klass, a senior editor for Aviation Week magazine, would also argue in favor of the temperature inversion/mirage hypothesis.[31] In 2002 Klass told a reporter that "radar technology in 1952 wasn't sophisticated enough to filter out many ordinary objects, such as flocks of birds, weather balloons, or temperature inversions."[7] The reporter added that "UFO proponents argue that even then seasoned controllers could differentiate between spurious targets and solid, metallic objects. Klass disagrees. It may be that 'we had two dumb controllers at National Airport on those nights'...[Klass] added that the introduction of digital filters in the 1970s led to a steep decline in UFO sightings on radar."[7]"

How does that explain the eyewitness accounts?

>Staff Sgt. Charles Davenport observed an orange-red light to the south; the light "would appear to stand still, then make an abrupt change in direction and altitude ... this happened several times."

>Nugent's superior, Harry Barnes, a senior air-traffic controller at the airport, watched the objects on Nugent's radarscope. He later wrote: We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed ... their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft.

>Barnes then called National Airport's radar-equipped control tower; the controllers there, Howard Cocklin and Joe Zacko, said that they also had unidentified blips on their radar screen, and saw a hovering "bright light" in the sky, which departed with incredible speed.

>Airman William Brady, who was in the tower, then saw an "object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail ... [it was] unlike anything I had ever seen before."[3][5] As Brady tried to alert the other personnel in the tower, the strange object "took off at an unbelievable speed.

>On one of National Airport's runways, S.C. Pierman, a Capital Airlines pilot, was waiting in the cockpit of his DC-4 for permission to take off. After spotting what he believed to be a meteor, he was told that the control tower's radar had detected unknown objects closing in on his position. Pierman observed six objects — "white, tailless, fast-moving lights" — over a 14-minute period.

>At one point both radar centers at National Airport and the radar at Andrews Air Force Base were tracking an object hovering over a radio beacon. The object vanished in all three radar centers at the same time.

A temperature inversion or another atmospheric phenomena would move at wind speed, not at an "unbelievable" speed.

Let me know what you think after the batch of upcoming congressional hearings, new legislation, and new batch of whistleblowers with firsthand knowledge come forward to the public and congress.

Word of advice, read up and keep an open mind. This is just the beginning of what's coming.

Our greedy, inept, inefficient government, but also our conniving, duplicitous, and machiavellian government that is able to keep aliens a closely guarded secret even from everyone for decades.

It's either one, or the other.

Government isn't a monolith.

Thank you for linking to that interview. I listened to most of it when it came out. I was already skeptical but willing to have an open mind, but I came away from it feeling very assured in my skepticism. These claims are utter nonsense! Give the interview a listen and try and tell me your bullshit meter doesn’t go off.

>the now-discredited "Gimball Video"

Source? I don't think there was ever a consensus that it was discredited. Googling "Gimbal Video discredited" doesn't give me anything definitive.

As I understand it, that video illustrates either a camera glare artifact, or alien technology very carefully tuned to replicate a camera glare artifact.

Well somehow the glare showed up on the aircraft carrier's instrumentation the pilot launched from as well as the jet itself and the jets of other pilots who can be heard on the video confirming the sighting on their own IR and radar.

There are other videos that reverse engineer from what we do know, the flight path of the "ufo" and that it matches the track of another plane 30mi away.

How does that explain the fact that an F-15 flying several times faster than any commercial or private jet was not able to catch up to it? Not to mention the rapid vertical ascent and mid air rotation. These are not idiots, folks. These pilots and carrier crew members know the difference between a 757 or private jet and something else.

yeah the person(Mick West) who did the debunking is a retired gaming software engineer who is also somewhat of a known troll and has zero background in the field of avionic systems used by the fighter pilots. Some of his debunking statements are borderline absurd, you have a sighting that is seen on FLIR, radar and has an eyewitness testimony along with video and his statement is the pilot who has flown for 10 years did not know what he saw, and all the electronic systems malfunctioned and the object clearly seen on video is a artifact of sun glare. The Gimball video has not been debunked by professionals currently.

Not to mention it's seen hundreds of times by hundreds of personnel and devices again and again over the years.

Here's my post in response to a comment in the "US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles" HN thread[1] from a few weeks ago that addresses this:

> Watch the introduction to the 4 hour UAP panel that NASA hosted a few days ago[2], they address this.

> According to NASA, even highly trained and experienced pilots can easily be fooled, and often reported UAPs are artifacts of the technology that detects them, or are indeed things like weather balloons. For example, NASA even used the example of Navy pilots being fooled by a procession of commercial airplanes queueing to land at an airport 40+ miles away from their base.

> They also emphasize that radar, detection systems, etc are not scientific instruments that are suitable for the detection or analysis of this phenomenon. They emphasize that the technology that the Navy et al. use are strictly optimized for defensive/offensive interception of conventional weapons. That's to say that they're calibrated for war and not for accurate scientific observation.

> Going back to the procession of airplanes waiting to land, according to the instruments available to pilots and their own observations, those airplanes were doing things that were impossible to do without bending the laws of physics. Yet all they were were just a bunch of airplanes doing what all airplanes do.

> > Due to the supposed feeds and eye witness accounts, it seems infeasible there is a 'weather balloon' type explanation

> Pilots and their systems are fallible, you'd have to assume some argument from authority to believe otherwise.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36216745

[2] Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Official NASA Broadcast): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQo08JRY0iM

Occam's razor tells us it's unlikely that all those unlikely failures happened at once.

Videos, multiple eyewitnesses and AEGIS military radars. Lol.

Now apply Occam’s razor to the following two choices:

1. Aliens have visited Earth. They crashed their spaceships or we shot them down. The US Government (and possibly other governments) retrieved and studied their technology and managed to keep it a secret for decades

2. Aliens have not visited Earth

And somehow these alien crafts are capable to cross interstellar distances but then crash at a rate higher than our airplanes, unless of course there's a shitload of them flying around here.

Scenario 1: the alien craft are piloted by teenagers and stolen from their parents to go on joyrides.

Scenario 2: the aliens are bumbling and incompetent, and stole their spacecraft tech from some more intelligent race. (You could call them "pacleds")

"Occam’s razor" is merely a heuristic, not some sort of law. Neither logical nor otherwise.

Here, you are even using it wrong. You present a false dichotomy and rely on top of that on the faulty, but commonly held assumption, one choice was vastly less probable than the other.

If the US government has covered up the topic for the last 80 years, you must assume your priors to be faulty.

Ok, let’s add a third scenario: aliens have visited Earth undetected. Hell, you can add as many scenarios as you like, I’m still going to go with ‘Aliens have not visited earth’ unless presented with overwhelmingly concrete evidence.

Anecdotes and eyewitness accounts from falliable humans and weird sensor readings from non-scientific sensors that are designed for war are not the least bit convincing to me.

Being visited by alien beings would be the most consequential event in human history, I’m personally fine with having an extremely high bar for any evidence or proof before I even entertain the possibility.

I do believe it’s probable that intelligent life exists in the universe, for what it’s worth.

You don't want evidence, you want someone important to say convincing evidence exists.

One is factual and scientific, the other is authoritarian.

There are decades of evidence of sightings and encounters, collected by government and military agencies in multiple countries.

It's nonsense to claim no evidence of anomalies exists when that's just not factually correct.

Evidence of what is a different question. But the scientific approach starts with "That's interesting and unexpected" and develops from there.

Not from "I can't imagine this is happening and it makes me anxious, so I'll just pretend there's nothing real to worry about."

> You don't want evidence, you want someone important to say convincing evidence exists. One is factual and scientific, the other is authoritarian. There are decades of evidence of sightings and encounters, collected by government and military agencies in multiple countries.

No, I want concrete evidence, not eyewitness testimony from pilots, ‘whistleblowers’ who report secondhand accounts of witnesses, videos, and sensor data. None of those things are concrete evidence of alien spacecraft visiting earth. There certainly are a lot of aerial anomalies, which makes sense as many nation states are flying all kinds of things all over the world and our vision, cameras and sensors are all fallible.

> It's nonsense to claim no evidence of anomalies exists when that's just not factually correct.

I am saying I don’t believe any of the alleged sightings are real alien spacecraft, not that there aren’t reports of anomalous aircraft.

> Not from "I can't imagine this is happening and it makes me anxious, so I'll just pretend there's nothing real to worry about."

I’m not anxious about aliens existing, I think the discovery of alien life would be the most exciting thing that has happened in human history. I’d be glad to be alive for that, regardless of the outcome. I just don’t think it’s happened yet.

People invoke Occam's razor too often that it has become pretty much a thought-terminating meme. Occam's razor only gets you the simple, convenient explanation, it says nothing about the truth. Epistemologists understand this very well. It's easy to find counter-examples where simple explanations reflects nothing of reality.

I implore you to watch the NASA UAP panel video, because not only do they explain that it's happened before, it's what they believe is the problem now.

Remind me, which law is it that someone who doesn't understand Occam's razor will cite Occam's razor?

You understand it wrong, this is a spurious and frankly absurd claim propagated by Mick West, which has been repeatedly debunked by _actual fighter pilots_.

Ex: https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc

West replied to that video here:

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/f-16-pilot-chris-lehto-anal...

Lehto makes some incorrect statements about optics in his videos, so I wouldn't rely on his views too heavily.

I think this is likely the correct theory too but to hand-wave it away as "discredited" and claim that it also downstream "discredits" anyone who refers to the video is rather mealy-mouthed. Which appears to be the same type of behavior you ascribe to Grusch & co.

tptacek could be referring to the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

This video does a good job at explaining how the "UFO" is probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.

No credible debunking of "Gimball" exists, despite Mick West proponents. Mick made himself look like a complete fool, and the response to his video by _actual_ fighter pilots is pretty embarrassing for him

https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc

https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0

Another part is that people don't realize how within the government, and especially the military, there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified. You do this because there are spies and they will steal shit. You want to make that process noisy. It's also beneficial because you may get your adversary to spend millions or billions studying a thing that isn't even possible. Sometimes they even have people "working" on these things (sometimes even unwitting fools that are true believers) because it makes it look more legitimate (and you can funnel money through these). See the ridiculousness of the US and Russian psychic programs.

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).

To add to this, I've noticed a lot of the material that gets declassified, that is purported to be evidence of aliens/psychics/magic/etc, is in the form of field notes or case studies that either contain full quotations or summaries of what someone else claims is true, but are not actually experiments or demonstrations of what is claimed.

For example, you might have a declassified CIA document that's being distributed as evidence of psychic phenomenon, but upon further inspection, you'll find isn't the case. What you instead see is documentation along the lines of "someone made a claim about X, here's what they say about X" where X can be "I can read minds" or whatever. At no point is there an actual scientific test of this, the document is just acknowledgment that someone said some outlandish things to government investigators. Then years later those notes are declassified and somehow become evidence that X really happened.

It's like reading a police report about someone who took too much methamphetamine and ran around claiming that they could fly, and then using that police report as evidence that the government knows people can fly.

When they first released the CIA psychic documents I clicked a few at random and my impressions were much different. The papers I read were very much "We're conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our procedures and results."

And the results were...

...that there's a guy who says some other people told him that it totally worked.

And great experiments like randomly dosing Americans with LSD and torturing war prisoners to death.

This is a different thing. The CIA's experiments were done with at least an attempt at doing science (and didn't work).

The parent is talking about field reports, not an experimental program.

The government threw a lot of money at that and did direct experimentation, but dig deeper into the weird claims some of those that were adjacent to remote viewing were making/continue to make outside of that and you start getting into that territory. Things like aliens, teleportation, levitation, pyrokinesis, etc.

I remember seeing one document that was about a person claiming to being able to do some kind of teleportation of objects through containers, so the investigators went to see them do it and it appeared that it happened. That's more of a magic show than a real experiment, but because the investigators described what they appeared to see on government letterhead, believers in the paranormal upgraded it to fact instead of field notes.

Same thing happens with reports of UFOs or aliens, their portrayal of evidence of conspiracy rely heavily on twisting testimony, descriptions and appearances in the text into "facts confirmed and approved of by the government."

I hope you've taken the time to read The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is definitely solidly in the "tax dollars went where?!" genre.

Interestingly, much of the stealth radar technology on the Skunkworks' stealth airplanes came from a Soviet research paper.

Personally, I would have thought such a paper was disinformation. Maybe the Soviets did, too!

"While working in Moscow, Ufimtsev became interested in describing the reflection of electromagnetic waves. He gained permission to publish his research results internationally because they were considered to be of no significant military or economic value."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ufimtsev

Looks like he's still publishing papers in this area: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37344722000

> they were considered to be of no significant military or economic value

Oops!

No one uses radio waves to detect things in the air! That's preposterous!

Well that's why disinformation works so well. You have to explore stolen material even if you think it might be misinformation.

But also military misinformation is so prolific that it even infiltrates public knowledge. Often on purpose. Many people still believe that eating carrots will help you see in the dark. It's definitely true that the vitamins in carrots can help eyesight, but they aren't _that_ good. Good disinformation has a mixture of truth in it for people to latch onto. Just a sprinkling can give something a lot of validity. Should also say something about how you take in information, especially from YouTube university.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propagand...

> there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified

Exactly this.

I saw a youtube video a while ago about a recently declassified document from the US Navy which says the USS Seawolf reported hearing signals from survivors on the USS Thresher more than a day after the Thresher went missing. The sonar operators on the Seawolf, no doubt well trained professionals, had themselves convinced they heard the Thresher and there were people still left alive. The guy who made the video about this document was very excited; "the US Navy hid this from from us! They told us the Thresher guys died instantly."

But the problem is the Thresher sank in about 2.6 km of water, far deeper than any military submarine can possibly withstand. Furthermore there is declassified video footage of the Thresher's hull on the sea floor, shattered into numerous pieces. There were no pings from the Thresher's sonar; the Seawolf crew were simply mistaken. The report was classified but that doesn't mean it was true.

[Video link deliberately omitted, but you can find it by searching "37 pings"]

The only way for the story to make sense is if they weren't resting on the sea floor, and were instead at or above crush depth with neither propulsion or spare ballast capacity to rise to the surface.

It's possible, I suppose. It seems pretty far-fetched.

> 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).

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.

https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc

Yeah it's more like been confirmed with the recent airspace intrusions? They're almost certainly all some kind of foreign spy drones which exploit the alien stigma by being designed to look as alien as possible. Any sightings would be instantly dismissed as nonsense, which is a real galaxy brain psyops move.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...

Are you promoting radical scepticism and believe we should abjure from pro or con cases or are you a believer? They're not the same. Do you apply the same criterion to all rebuttals or only rebuttals of this kind? How topic specific is your concern with credibility ? And, forgive me but why should we care about your opinion over others?

You are in some ways invoking appeal to authority but then... All debunking is at some level an appeal to authority. I am unquestionably promoting an appeal to authority above btw.

Since there's no point discussing this "evidence" with a believer, I ask what you would consider viable credible discrediting. My suspicion is, no discrediting would meet your standard and you are not actually prepared to accept any alternate basis, such as lens flare.

The stanford biologist- Garry Nolan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Nolan

Haven't some of the materials been found to be manufactured in a way that's not possible with our tech?

As opposed to somehow traveled here via a mechanism that's not possible by our current understanding of the laws of physics?

I think people have said that, but not in a way that means it's true, or unique, or helpful. Sufficiently advanced metallurgy is indistinguishable from magic.

    it's all people who heard something who heard something

People with direct access to such classified materials would not legally be able to divulge details and especially not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison.

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"

I don't know anything about Kean so I have no opinion on her.

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"

I honestly don't know how this works. Surely there is some line of specificity? I mean, you and I can talk about this and it's legal. At what point are you close enough to something classified to make it illegal?

It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with firsthand knowledge to disclose them. But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute evidence of the existence of ETA's. It would be illegal for me to disclose the existence of a +4 Wand of Magic Missile, too, if such a thing existed. But regardless of what I say I've heard about DoD custody of D&D items, we both know they don't exist.

The rest of this: I don't care, except that you have to work yourself into contortions to simultaneously argue that all firsthand reporting of ETA's has been stymied by legal threats from DoD, but Grusch's claims are true because they haven't been.

    But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute 
    evidence of the existence of ETA's

I said this. So... yeah, agreed.

    The rest of this: I don't care, except that you 
    have to work yourself into contortions to simultaneously 
    argue that all firsthand reporting of ETA's has been 
    stymied by legal threats from DoD

Your logic is incorrect.

First, the whistleblower protection is new. It hasn't been around very long. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistleblowers-wou...

It would definitely be illegal for anybody with firsthand knowledge via their security clearance to go public with classified stuff. That is 100% clear; probably the only 100% solid fact in this whole circus. They could, presumably, take it to the whistleblower channel in a non-public way, but I don't know the details there.

What Grusch has done is more of a legal limbo area. We can't say how legal or illegal it is without knowing exactly what the classified info is.

What's also clear is that there is a heavy price to pay in terms of career even when going through the whistleblower channel. There are all sorts of incentives to not do it. Just because others in his position does not necessarily mean he is lying.

Personally I don't believe it's aliens. I find it incredibly unlikely that alien races would send crewed ships here and then be clumsy enough to crash them or get shot down. I think it is far more likely to be some kind of camouflage for another more mundane program.

>Personally I don't believe it's aliens. I find it incredibly unlikely that alien races would send crewed ships here and then be clumsy enough to crash them or get shot down.

It's unlikely, but it's possible. Maybe the aliens are rather primitive technologically, and have weapons technology similar to cannons from sailing ships in the 1700s (and spacecraft technology otherwise resembling our early 1970s craft), but they somehow discovered a simple but somehow-overlooked portion of physics that allowed them to build spacecraft that could instantly teleport across the galaxy.

    a simple but somehow-overlooked portion of physics 
    that allowed them to build spacecraft that could instantly 
    teleport across the galaxy

Well, I certainly can't say you're wrong, lol.

But science is so iterative. I realize that not all hypothetical species would follow the same tech tree as humans, but "skipping steps" seems so unlikely.

But hey, there are a lot of planets out there. I suppose it can't be ruled out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_%28short_st...

Every time aliens come up on HN, someone brings up this idea, and then references that one sci fi story, and then the discourse “well that’s dumb as hell but the story was fun”.

My dude if there is some aspect of physics that would allow for teleportation by low tech people, the earth would be annihilated by some dudes whim or accident with a month

>My dude if there is some aspect of physics that would allow for teleportation by low tech people, the earth would be annihilated by some dudes whim or accident with a month

Maybe low tech aliens stumble upon the remnants of some (other) alien race and figure out how to salvage their warp drives, but can't get the rest working.

The universe is big. Maybe the warlike Pacleds just haven't found us yet. If they're low-tech (aside from FTL), they probably haven't figured out how to do long-range astronomy to look for habitable worlds either.

Obviously the whole idea is a big stretch, but damn this site sure seems to have a LOT of people who are completely and utterly lacking a sense of humor.

There’s no such thing as low tech aside from FTL. If you have FTL you have weapons of mass destruction orders more powerful than anything we have. And energy sources greater than anything we have.

It’s not humorous when people bring the same idea up every time and defend it sincerely.

False premise.

> It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with firsthand knowledge to disclose them.

This is not true. For people with knowledge of UAP or UAP-related programs Congress has instituted procedures for those people to come forward and be protected in doing so. Those mechanisms are what allowed Grusch to come forward without fear of legal reprisal.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that just gives people with UAP knowledge whistleblower protection when it comes to reporting those programs through designated channels.

Whistleblower protection != the right to publicly disclose classified material

Unless cleared to do so by DoD, which he apparently was.

> People with direct access to such classified materials would not legally be able to divulge details and especially not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison.

I believe this is no longer strictly true for UAP-related information [1]. Congress has gotten much more serious about offering legal protections to those who have knowledge about UAP programs.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistleblowers-wou...

Whatever else those protections might mean, they apply only to disclosures made through official DoD channels, not to interviews given to book authors.

> In accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose to us. His on-the-record statements were all “cleared for open publication” on April 4 and 6, 2023, in documents provided to us.

Source: https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-re...

Yes: we all agree that what he's saying is cleared for publication. Because it's nonsense and the DoD doesn't care.

> But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it

The conclusion here does not follow the premise.

> The conclusion here does not follow the premise.

Why? Are you saying politicians don't like pageantry? Or are you saying that specifically Rubio is more about pragmatism and uniquely not part of the Kabuki theater?

> Are you saying politicians don't like pageantry?

No, I am saying that their indulging in it, regardless of whether it is feeding into something popular in some segment is not, simply because of that popularity, beyond reproach.

> Or are you saying that specifically Rubio is more about pragmatism and uniquely not part of the Kabuki theater?

Oh, hell, no!

I don't think he means that you literally can't blame him for it, only that it is unsurprising.

Pretty sure she has mentioned that she's in touch with those with firsthand knowledge. For sure Ross Coulthart is.

I think Rubio stopped pretty short of endorsing it or saying the claims are credible, but just talked about how people with clearance were coming to the committee to report similar kinds of claims.

IMO this is a larger indictment of our clearance granting process than it is our handling of UFOs…

"so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it."

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 mental gymnastics is believing little green men, capable of sidesteping special relativity, travel X lightyears just to fly around San Diego and occasionally crash somewhere in the desert.

This is a very narrow perspective. We've only been around for ~200,000 years, only began to take flight 120 years ago, and flew to the moon around 60 years ago.

There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone, a good percentage likely harbor intelligent life, and that life could have easily established civilizations that go back millions of years. Should they have developed tech, even at our pace, they are cycles and cycles ahead of us.

What would stop them from throwing "shit at the wall to see what sticks" to survey surrounding systems, given that their costs of and ability to mass manufacture cheap space traveling drones would take little resources? Would they even care that much if what they built wasnt to perfection, as long as it got the job done? What if there are still anomalies that they just put up with and could careless about accounting for because the losses are so minimal? What if the ones piloting are throwaway biological drones that they can just rebuild or grow? What if their ethics forbid them from interacting or interfering with developing civilizations? What if there's are agreements/laws among a collection of civilizations?

Additionally, there have been attempts by people to get this info out for decades, and what's being brought to congress' attention is that people have been murdered by governments and private organizations to keep this under wraps and to continue public disinfo to keep the ridicule going.

Doesn’t just the idea of a craft - that’s either FTL or teleports - reaching Earth and them having engine trouble, seem a little silly?

I can imagine that if there is FTL or teleport technology, it could have trouble upon arrival at a planet, because at that point it has to switch to a different mode and deal with gravity and air.

If you're teleporting many lightyears, it would be difficult to hit the target exactly - for example, if your distance is off by 0.00001% of the total, you could end up inside the earth.

Not at all

Say we developed that tech, and travelled to another star system.

A technical or psychological malfunction occurs in a novel environment.

What about this scenario seems silly?

Do we really have to assume FTL? Why couldn't the aliens be from, say, Europa?

Hold on. We know the program exists (until very recently, it was a barely funded side hustle for a small group of enthusiasts inside the DoD). We know the DoD is investigating "unexplained aerial phenomenon" (a name they had to come up with because as soon as you use the term "UFO", everybody loses their shit and stops doing engineering and science, including scientists).

The claims being made here go far beyond the existence of these programs: they claim the US is in possession of technological artifacts of non-human origin (TAONHOs, must credit me for this coinage). That is a huge leap from "the DoD has records of an uptick of weird things that happened on cameras that just happens to correspond with a massive increase in the amount of video telemetry we collect".

People like Kean are counting on their audience to read the acknowledgement of these DoD groups as shocking admissions, which is then leveraged to add credibility to the claims of people like Grusch.

> mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials

It takes no mental gymnastics whatsoever to discredit them. They've done that themselves, time and time and time again. It takes mental gymnastics to retain trust in them.

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