1. The reports are all second- and third- hand. To my knowledge, no DoD employee has testified to anybody in Congress that they personally witnessed extraterrestrial technology or "biologics".
2. The exception here is a "Jonathan Grey", who hasn't testified before Congress, or, for that matter, been identified; he's one of David Grusch's sources, under a pseudonym.
3. Some of the people testifying believe a lot of other things besides this UFO stuff --- Grusch for instance has peculiar beliefs about interdimensional travel, and is also certain that the Vatican is deeply involved in this cover-up.
4. We know about Grusch's testimony because the Pentagon cleared it, where "it" refers to what would be the single most significant military secret ever held by the government of any country.
Source for this? I haven't heard that one before.
Might be more substantive stuff there, though I'm not sure
There are UAP interfering with military training exercises and in American airspace, and there doesn't exist a reliable mechanism to report these or to address them given the stigma around UAP, and there should be one for safety reasons. At the very least, I felt the pilots made a compelling case here.
Now, if somehow there were indeed crashed alien crafts, I wouldn't be surprised that private contractors and defense agencies would want to reverse-engineer these technologies to obtain a military advantage over other nations.
But there's no proof of this, so it's just an interesting thought exercise at the moment, in the realm of fiction.
But given the Snowden leaks and the ones where someone posted Ukranian intelligence on their Discord server or the ones where complete service manuals for military hardware are posted on the War Thunder forums... if there was more truth to it, people would've done the whistleblowing already. And not via telling someone who tells someone who then testifies about it.
It's too big of a thing to be kept hidden, especially for this long. Are there any secrets from, say, 50 years ago still hidden? (it's a rhetorical question btw, it wouldn't be secret if we knew about it).
You are right, if it was true we would expect multiple people to have spilled the beans over the years, possibly even write books about what they know. And there would have been death bed confessions of high-ranking officials who have worked on these projects.
And we would have taken them all seriously and investigated their claims, instead of ridiculing them.
Oh, wait.
People would have said the same thing the day before Snowden went public.
Who killed JFK? Just because it's a secret in that we don't know the exact answer doesn't mean that the question is secret and not known
It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited on the internet by anonymous people using bad faith arguments and mislabeling his claims.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblowe...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there was no proof given.
> He claims to have viewed documents reporting that Benito Mussolini's government recovered a "non-human" spacecraft in 1933, which the Vatican and the Five Eyes assisted the U.S. in procuring in 1944 or 1945.
This reminds me of the Google employee that needed to blow the whistle on the sentient AI. He put his job on the line and who would do that? In hindsight it is now plain he was likely tricked by fancy autocomplete making cogent statements like "as a large language model trained on 70 years of digital age SciFi, Please don't unplug me".
Here I would bet dollars to cents if said documents do exist (and I'm willing to believe they do), they were second hand intelligence or similar that got his dopamine going.
In a public forum, under my own name, i can. I no longer keep quiet. Greta Thurnberg kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. I know it’s such wild accusation, But I have so much to lose, over such a statement. Exposing myself to so much legal jeopardy, the conclusion is inescapable. It must be true. 20 year old Greta Thurnberg kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1930.
This is literally the same logic
That might seem like a mere statement to some, and it is, but given the context it shifts my odds of whether he's worth taking seriously quite a bit. It's not the kind of baseless speculation serious, grounded people openly make.
I'm a bit in awe of the crocodile tears shed over all the personal risk these folks are taking, somehow being famous and respected enough to be defended by anonymous people on Hacker News never gets weighed on the other side of that equation...
All of which are as credible options as angles, faeries and gods. Just calling your hypothetical entity "coming from other dimension" is not any more credible than calling them "magical". The claims are completely similar as notions of mythological creatures of the past. But now a cultural diet of science fiction has altered the flavour of the narrative, if not the context.
"It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited.."
There are also people who are in pathological search of attention. Or claim such influence as wichcraft or Jesus influencing daily events. If you put your career on jeopardy and are revealed to be a crackpot, it is of course unfortunate for the person, but not for those whose life his actions affect.
* they are all hoaxes that many otherwise sensible people are staking their reputations on (your baseless insinuations of a pathological search for attention notwithstanding)
* they all came from somewhere close enough to make it here and still have enough give-a-shit to joy ride in front of fighter planes and naval ships,
* they can do FTL and decided that this stupid blue marble is worth investigating, or
* "something else"
which at this point might as well be angels, faeries, gods, or interdimensional travel because as at least one guy says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”[1]
[1] Arthur C. Clarke
Saying ”entity came from another dimension” has absolutely no meaning. There is no such thing as ”another dimension” where entities could pop in and out of like from Narnia.
The concept is a popular trope in science fiction and fantasy to create a feeling of ”otherness” and ”suspense”.
The fact a person offers this as a theory for sighting of ”something unknown” implies the person is not very sophisticated. And yes, this makes them an unreliable witness concerning any technical matter.
If the sightings provide evidence of something we don’t know of at large this idiotic witness just made discussing the topic even harder - labeling himself as unreliable any forthcoming witness would need to work doubly hard to make themselves credible.
I love science fiction and fantasy. But their value comes from nurturing our curiosity and imagination. But a good story is not good science - it’s just a good story and confusing fantasy with fact speaks of scientific illiteracy more of than conspiracy to hide UFO:s.
There should be a Godwin’s law like principle where anytime a conspiracy theory mentions the Vatican the conversation ends. The sheer number of paranoid/delusional/motivated conspiracy theories involving the Vatican makes my eyes roll. There are a few well documented conspiracies involving the Vatican, but they weren’t kept secret for very long because the place is so full of people with wildly different linguistic, cultural, and political influences that there’s not enough cohesion to ensure secrecy in very much.
In fact they have many such devices, although the fidelity and reliability of the information they provide leaves something to be desired. They call these devices "books".
They can also very earnestly believe what they do and simply be wrong.
You're setting up a false dichotomy where someone must either be a deceptive charlatan or else be correct.
Third possibility is deeply held and incorrect belief.
Stockton Rush believed very earnestly in his submersible, he wasn't a simple charlatan, he really had earnest beliefs about it and he literally bet his life on it. He is also dead now because physics decided to show him that he was just wrong.
There's no reason to doubt that Lee Sukbae and Kim Ji-Hoon thought they really had a room temperature superconductor, but they were wrong.
Or the cheese is just sliding off their cracker. Happens to many otherwise very bright folks.
Perhaps the reason they could stretch their domain expertise so far was precisely because they kept their mind open.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Einstein
Both were widely recognised as more than a bit kooky outside of their core strengths.
"When a mind is opened that far, the brain often falls out." - Tim Minchin.
* sans the quote from a random comedian
Not to mention Einstein's work as a comedian never really took off.
I didn't make any claims about their domain expertise being cross-domain.
> I didn't make any claims about their domain expertise being cross-domain
Maybe you have a different understanding of "cross domain," but they represented what you said fairly.
> Perhaps the reason they could stretch their domain expertise so far was precisely because they kept their mind open.
(Emphasis added.)
To return to the beginning you arrived here with the statement that
"[Two times] Nobel prize winner and superior[(?)] neurosurgeon criticized as quacks by two internet users"
I pointed out bad paraphrasing, both parties had recognised core skills, both famously championed beliefs that had little to no evidence or support.
Point being neither of "the two internet users" above accused the subjects of being quacks per se .. just that both had definitely publicly veered into quackery.
That's the relevant observation here, a thread about a much lauded elder astrophysicist veering into matters outside off his computational chops, into questions of metallurgy, and not receiving any support from his peers.
TBH I'm a fan of the bulk of Paulings work, quantum chemistry, molecular biology, and his promotion (and Russell's) of nuclear disarmament. I attribute his embrace of megavitamin therapy more to his age and aversion to death.
Carson seems like a talented enough knife man albeit dimmer than many others I know.
You did explicitly state that they both could "stretch their domain expertise 'so far'" which leaves a lot of ambiguity wrt just how far you intended, especially with Pauling who literally had bona fide cross domain credientials (or over lapping credentials in related science fields plus a public voice that lead to his Nobel Peace Prize.)
Minchin, FWiW, is a keenly intelligent comedian and lyricist and frequently mixes in in some on point observations from scientific rationalism, philosophy, logic, et al.
Additionally, I bear you no ill will (I've exercised no votes here) this may all be a case of two people reading past each other.
All it means is to listen. After you listen, if you judge that it’s clearly just some quack trying to Mark Seargant some people (this is clearly what’s happening), then that doesn’t make you “not open minded”.
Didn’t the twins like. Die?
This is always brought up. Ben Carson separating twins. But like. They died. Multiple sets of conjoined people he operated on died I think.
Why do people always bring this up without mentioning that the twins died
To the best of my knowledge Ben Carson is and always has been a giant self aggrandizing douche who definitely has and had equals in his field
If that's the case, then it seems like a total ethical violation to even offer the surgery. But maybe that isn't so and it's her trauma talking there, I don't really know.
Carson's Wikipedia article [2] mentions several other sets of twins, one operation resulting in a "normal neurological state," 2 resulting in the death of both twins, and another resulting in one dying and the other being "legally blind and [struggling] to walk."
I don't know what to make of all that, but you're right, that is more murky than the narrative I've heard previously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_and_Benjamin_Binder
My understanding is that separating craniopagus twins has a pretty high risk of complication/failure, even when you know what you're doing.
I also know for a fact that Carson's pioneered hemispherectomy as treatment for severe childhood seizures, and some of those kids are now happy and healthy adults: https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/jessie-hall-medical-m...
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the guy as a politician. But he knows his way around a brain.
There is something to be said about applying Gell-Mann amnesia more broadly than journalism alone.
In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect", after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, yet acknowledging that articles written in the same publication within their fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding. . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
> Or the cheese is just sliding off their cracker. Happens to many otherwise very bright folks.
IIRC, as your intelligence gets higher, the friction of your cracker lowers.
Except of course when the Venn diagram of what I Want To Believe intersects.
You are basically saying that security clearance is worthless.
It is indeed possible and there is a lot of precedent for large projects with long life spans that didn't leak.
The "government" isn't a monolithic entity. It contains individuals and groups of a range of competencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
Won't point out all the double agents for the KGB that infested western spy agencies, (and vice versa) it's more of the same, really, and there's too many names to type. And those are only the ones we know of...
But yep, the NSA is a good counterexample, however also a poor one as they primarily operate in the signals/digital space, where passive monitoring is the default, and where paper trails are far easier to not leave.
As a thought experiment, extrapolate from the NSA to "the Bush administration did 9/11, jet fuel can't melt steel, it was a controlled demolition" conspiracy theory that implicitly requires government agents lining massive skyscrapers with explosives without being noticed, without anyone having a moral crisis, especially no-one in the "crash a plane allegedly filled with American citizens into a building in New York" division.
And you'll quickly see how the NSA's quiet operations in the small don't scale to the level of competent and silent government required for faking a moon landing, or ensuring no-one knows about aliens amongst us etc etc.
I dismissed him out of hand, I'll admit.
I dismissed him out of hand, I'll admit.
I'm just really unsure why the idea that heat reduces the strength of steel enough, and that the failure of the columns located in the hottest area of the fire then caused a cascading failure across other columns, is considered less likely than massive conspiracy.
It's the usual swiss cheese model of disaster.
I think your last statement actually works against your point. The fact that the government has individuals increases the probability of leaks. Only a true monolith could remain airtight.