Pentagon ex-UFO chief says conspiracy theorists in government drive spending
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm willing to believe it's a big galaxy and we have NFI what's going on out there.
But UFO mythology seems very human-scale and not so alien at all.
see my previous rant:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33580896
I think that maybe I get really worked up about this because I am still pissed off that Santa Claus wasn't real, or at least that I once believed he was. I am not being facetious.
It was the beginning of my journey into fact-based reasoning, naturalism, etc. I distinctively remember thinking: I will never believe in magic again!
I started asking too many questions at catholic Sunday school, and the Sunday school teacher and I decided it was best that we part ways.
I am over 40 now, but this is such a strong and important memory. I am still a little pissed off about it. This is hilarious, and maybe a bit profound.
On the other hand there is no harm in stories. I also do not want my kids to believe something just because I believe it. They should think for themselves and to do otherwise it is dishonest.
I do agree it is sometimes odd. I found myself trying to explain to a bewildered Sikh guy on Twitter why British society gets upset when people tell kids that Santa Claus is not real but is fine with people telling kids that Jesus is not real.
It really is a dominance hierarchy there, something we expect from animals. People are supposed to be better than that.
Strangely my brother was far, far older when my mother and I had to convince him that Santa was not actually real. She was afraid that kids at school would make fun of him if we didn’t pop his bubble first. I’m not sure what to make of that difference in belief between my brother and I.
I would say Descartes is a better parallel. In fact it is just a recasting of his ideas.
It is not science, but it is perfectly respectable philosophy.
Did the Greeks believe their myths that literally? It is very hard to know how ancient people's interpreted stories like that unless you have an in-depth knowledge of the culture. I do not, but its a question worth asking - particularly about a culture that produced so many naturalistic explanations for things.
Even if you are right and they did believe it literally it is still the opposite of the simulation theory. It is accepting the first explanation that comes along, without applying doubt, whereas simulation theory is based on extensive doubt of even your immediate senses - exactly the same as Descarte's line of thought.
As a husband of a Sami woman , I wonder when my kids will make the connection that the elves look oddly like the people from the old country .
The non-organised ones though, I think make people feel good for themselves by either making them feel important(advanced civilisation came across the universe for me) or reassured (it's going to be alright, the universe works as expected - no funny business)
I know for a fact that it's real. I spent about a year outside in Colorado, and saw several objects beyond explanation. Most are small and hard to see unless you know to look in the darkness of the sky between the stars. A couple put the fear of God into me - so big that they were the size of my two outstretched hands against the sky. Spheres cloaked against clouds in the night sky. Incomprehensibly large Y-shaped craft studded with what look like stars. Military-looking craft silently soaring directly above.
Who knows if they're alien or manmade.. but whether you believe it or not, they're in the sky every night.
I always found a much more plausible explanation.
For 15 years, I lived near a NOAA station which launched balloons, but I didn't know that at first. They launch one right at sunset, every day. When it hits the sun at 1000 feet, it looks pretty darn crazy! Sometimes there were shadows from low clouds blocking the sunset, and the balloon would only get lit up at >10,000 feet, and it would "jump" in different directions due to high altitude wind sheers. I was very disappointed when I learned that truth.
And while I'll concede that there are bizarre phenomenon of weather and lighting that can occur (google "crown flash"), the "Y" ship I saw was 5 full moons in width and absolutely, assuredly there.
On a side note, these objects also have the ability to "come out of" and "return to" the night sky. It's as if a spotlight were pointed at one area of the sky, and the craft unintentionally crossed the path. They come from nothing, and they return to nothing, within about 15 seconds. It's hard to explain.
Anyways, nothing personal if we don't agree on the matter. I know HN is based on hard evidence and logic, I can't provide either. But it's good to keep an open mind and keep looking for answers.
Although it is quite a coincidence that the spinning hub cap ufo sightings seem to be much more common during time periods when things like the avrocar were being tested.
I also wonder how many "prophets" in religion were actually suffering from paranoid schizophrenia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health_of_Jesus
And if you criticized this ridiculous mythology, you were persecuted and shunned.
Do you have any thoughts on some outliers as far as mythology goes?
Still lots of people-sized interactions.
If you study accounts of alien encounters and abduction, none of the technology abductees report seems extremely advanced, much less alien. Recognizable computers with buttons and dials. Levers. The aliens never bother to offer any equations or technical diagrams to prove their technology. In the whole centuries-long span of avowed alien encounters, no one has ever come away with anything we didn't already know. Of course, one could say the same thing about prophecies and Nostradamus. Encounters with angels, or demon summoning. Always just a hall of mirrors, always maddeningly subjective, never anything to hang one's hat on.
Even in the very first recorded modern abduction scenario, Betty and Barney Hill, the aliens gave Betty a book to take with her. Evidence! Oh, but later another alien just look it back. Womp womp. Oh but there's a star map. Oh wait, it turns out it doesn't stand up to actual scrutiny. It's just dots and circles on a piece of paper, and so simple one wonders why an advanced civilization would even find it useful.
And here we are in 2024 being told about city-sized craft and black pyramids and "non human biologics" and still not a damn bit of proof.
And even with the weird outliers like the Falcon Lake incident or the Phoenix lights or Shag Harbor, where there is evidence of something weird or multiple eyewitnesses (not that that necessarily means anything,) things still don't make sense. Tell me how the Falcon Lake UFO makes sense. The witness looks like he pressed a waffle-iron against his chest because the UFO (allegedly) hit him with its weird grid of exhaust ports before taking off. The technology being described is both advanced and ridiculously quaint, as it so often is.
The thing reported by Japan airlines 1628 - a weird spinning cylinder covered in flaming tubes and random lights. Obviously not Venus unless the pilot was deranged (which can't be taken off the table,) but if not, then what? You'd be surprised just how many UFOs seem to incorporate flames and rockets and that vanish in bursts of sulfur and flame as if they were demons returning to Hell. Almost as if they draw from the same subconscious archetypes.
None of it makes any sense if taken at face value, and so much of it is obviously folklore, as it follows the structure of folklore.
Ever find it strange how many abduction stories happen in people's bedrooms while they're lying down? It's because it's a hypnagogic hallucination during sleep paralysis.
Alternatively, they don't remember the abduction but recovered the memory under hypnosis. It's almost certainly the case that these were false memories.
A third options is that they are just legitimately insane. Schizophrenia does exist.
Imagine we have another small population of moderately more technologically advanced hominids right here on Earth. Say they want to fool us and make us think they are ET. Imagine they have technology we we have, like VR, drugs, and some we don’t like novel high energy hydroelectrodynamic atmospheric propulsion.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and if you experienced it, you would probably find yourself hallucinating details like the ones you mentioned to make it fit into some kind of coherent picture based on the technology and even physics you know.
until demonstrated otherwise, it's indistinguishable from magic or religion.
But again, I think we see UFOs on earth more than in space because they're sadly not alien.
von Neuman probes solve the travel time, cost, and distance objections for ETI even if light speed is the absolute limit.
For the opposite position (they shouldn't be here) to make sense, there has to be either no other civilizations, or our probe-sending habits are so rare that no other civilizations do it, or we are the first.
Any of those other stances seem vastly more improbable, as they assume that our sample-of-one society just happens to be ludicrously different than all others.
But I do believe it is technically possible in principle to construct and build von Neuman probes. Once they work inside a solar system, then work on making them withstand, say, a few million years in orbit and see if they still work, once they survive a few million years "inactive" (or constantly repairing themselves or whatever it takes), send them off to the stars. But it would take a patience and scale of industry we humans literally can only vaguely dream of.
> ...scale of industry
They don't have to do that. The probe just has to make more "child probes" before it dies. You don't need a huge industry if they are self-replicating. You need only one working probe to start, the rest handles itself.
And it has to survive for millions of years until it reaches a new solar system without something to "feed" on. In many ways it seems easier to make a Neuman probe which can survive within a solar system than something which can travel to another.
This is a fascinating talk that goes into the details of such an endeavor.
What if the time it takes to travel between stars is longer than most civilizations exist? What if we aren't that interesting to alien species or aren't worth the time and energy to discover? We've never sent a functioning probe to any other star and probably won't in my lifetime. And life may not be at the nearest star, it may be thousands of light years away. We may never have the resources available to do it.
The probe doesn't require its parent civilization to continue existing to keep working. It self-replicates. You don't have to "pick" where self-replicating probes go. Each can self-replicate, and you can get nigh-infinite probes for "free." A von Neuman probe finds its own resources.
We have only had complicated writing for a few thousand years. People have wondered if a technical civilization existed on earth a hundred million years ago would there be any thing around now as evidence. If it takes a million years of travel in the freezing, radioactive vacuum of space to reach another life form, you don't know that humans will be around long enough as a civilization to figure out how to actually build the thing that you are describing. I hope so, but I don't think its been proven to be possible yet.
Von Nuemann probes are possible in this physical reality for a relatively cheap cost and small time frame.
It makes sense to put probes that can watch for threats anywhere you think that threats can be. Species that do this have a greater chance of survival than species that don't.
> Where do they get the resources to reproduce?
From the the star systems that they reach. Stars provide the energy and whatever detritus in the form of an asteroid belt that orbits the star will provide the material to build new probes.
If humans had come first instead of dinosaurs and built von Neumann probes at that time, our probes could be saturating scores other galaxies--not stars, galaxies by now. That's with only a 250 million year differential in technology emergence. It isn't hard to imagine the emergence of technology varying by even more than that.
We're already sending probes to Mars, so I imagine we would send VN probes if we had them, so it doesn't seem like much of a stretch.
Also there is signal degradation to consider. Depending on their broadcast strength, there is a limited range beyond which any signal they send will be indistinguishable from background noise. According to this quora post[0] that limit could be as little as four light years. It certainly would not work on any significantly pan-galactic scale. Lasers would fare little better, they would also diffuse and be absorbed by interstellar material.
Also, at that scale, whatever message gets sent may no longer be relevant, or factual, by the time it's received. A lot can happen in a million years. It's difficult for me to think of a message worth sending that also doesn't matter if it takes longer than the time it took humans to evolve to get from point to point.
[0]https://www.quora.com/How-far-do-radio-signals-travel-into-s...
My guess is that we would optimistically assume human survival and build a network capable of exploring the galaxy without us. Since lightspeed delays make real-time communication impossible, individual nodes would be programmed to replicate and explore, following a specific set of parameters. They would report their findings back to some central hub if they found anything interesting, which would probably be only rarely. No doubt for very surprising findings (eg advanced intelligent species) they’d have additional instructions to enter a holding pattern and observe until they received explicit commands. Which, as you point out, might never come.
I can’t speak to what aliens might do. humans would absolutely build this system the moment they had the technology to do it. The fact that we might not survive to use it would be acknowledged and then we’d do it anyway. If anything we’d see it as a fitting memorial to our existence.
That's the most bizarre statement I have seen in the context of VN probes.
We're predicting the behavior of civilizations a lot more advanced than us. We need a level of humility to realize that this is a lost cause, and a lot of the paradigms we take for granted will be shown to be false.
So while everything you said makes sense, the space of unknown unknowns is so large that we should moderate our confidence in the underlying assumptions downwards.
So while it's difficult to know what the truth is at this point in time, it's either that aliens are real or there are a lot of nutjobs in the US government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grusch_UFO_whistleblower...
I know that at least one of these things is true. I can prove it. I wish it wasn't the boring one.
Edit: it’s always funny that I get downvoted for just writing a theory out that is a pretty good one, as though you’re supposed to downvote people for this kind of post. People get really upset by this subject.
Consider that many on the left avoid jobs in the military, where most of the UFO stuff is coming from.
I'm on team 'lots of nut jobs.'
This stuff isn't new, either, but the scale of it is. A major wing of the Republican party is effectively the John Birch Society, who were nuts mostly kept at arms length in a previous generation. And that's seemingly the way that many Republican voters want their party to behave.
Well, they caught David Grusch in multiple factual lies he made during that congressional hearing and called him out on it immediately after[0]:
> Contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO.
> Further, some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to the office, Kirkpatrick said, “raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some Congressional elements.”
With his credibility already being questionable, those easy to disprove things don't make his credibility look any better at all. So I am heavily leaning towards the nutjob take on the situation. If we have presidents willing to perjure themselves during a trial, I can easily believe we have a bunch of random government employees willing to make up lies in congressional hearings.
P.S. It doesn't have to be all nutjobs either. All it takes is one nutjob and a good number of opportunistic grifters.
0. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/pentagon-ufo-boss-c...
I don't think there's any extra-terrestrial activity going on here on Earth, period. Maybe elsewhere in the Universe and probably not in our solar system either.
I think that extraterrestrial UFO conspiracies are extra juicy because they also infer negative things about the US government.
From https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/26/opinions/ufos-actual-truth-b...
> “What’s more likely?” asked Kirkpatrick. “The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that’s being commercialized down in Florida that you didn’t know about, or we have extraterrestrials?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them; here’s the company in Florida that builds exactly what you’ve described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, it’s gotta be extraterrestrials, and you’re covering it up.”
So quite unlikely, though possible if they take a multi generational approach.
given that the universe is so large there's not a number that can accurately measure its true size or age, you mean to tell me you think that humans are the only intelligent lifeforms to exist currently, have existed, or will exist?
Come on now.
The bottom line is, we have too many Mulders and not enough Scullys.
We have evidence of it happening from FLIR Camera of an F/18, an E2 Hawkeye Radar Plane, the SPY-1 Radar from the USS Princeton, the Ballistic Missile Defense system from when they were above 80,000ft
All of this data is corroborated and doesn’t appear to be up for debate - at the first UAP hearing Scott Bray the Deputy Director of Navy Intelligence said:
[Congressional staffer]: Can you provide us a specific example of an object that can’t be explained as having been human made or natural?
[Scott Bray]: I mean the example that I would say is still unresolved, that I think everyone understands quite well is the 2004 incident from [the USS] Nimitz [aircraft carrier]. We have data on that, and it simply remains unresolved…
At what point does sufficiently advanced technology become not human? I’d argue the TicTac displays that.
Otherwise you have to accept that there is a human organization with the capability of generating 10x the total sum of all Nuclear power generated in the United States in something the size of a 40ft TicTac 20 years ago
I mean - I guess it’s possible it’s human, it’s just that it’d make me incredibly sad if so considering whoever has it is letting the world burn.
Source on the power requirements:
Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7514271/
I just can’t imagine this being weather personally as whatever it was, starts actively Jamming the F18 (technically an act of war). If you watch the TicTac video you’ll see it when it pops to 99.9 RNG on the display
I should note - a list of everyone that has said we have this data:
* Former President Obama
* House Intel Committee Member Adam Schiff
* Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer
* Senate Armed Services Committee Member Kirsten Gillibrand
* Former DNI John Ratcliff
* Deputy Director of Navy Intelligence Scott Bray
* Senator Mitt Romney
* Senator Marco Rubio
* Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley
* Former Senate Majority Member Harry Reid
And a bunch of other house members - is someone faking a bunch of data and showing it to them?
When it's not obviously just an airplane.
We don’t. All we have is fuzzy videos and random statements about radars from ships operating in a naval test range right next door to San Clemente island, which is bristling with radars and antennas with a mission to develop countermeasures.
Not that that ever will raise an eyebrow in the conspiracy theory folks. 99.9% of them have never been curious to look.
> 99.9
If you don’t write code, ask a coder what they think when they see a number like that.
Capt. Obvious has left the building.
In other words, if they're real, and they're trying to hide, then the fact we all have iPhones hasn't yielded more evidence doesn't prove anything, because if it was us, we'd change our tactics to avoid being detected by those things. As we do in war. It's very important to notice I'm not saying this tells us that is what is going on - we have to build up our priors in other ways to decide if that's true - but what I'm saying is that the claim that we all have cameras and yet not more UFO videos has absolutely zero epistemological effect, since it's smuggling in the assumption these objects are behaving like a natural phenomenon that will maintain their visible presence in spite of our own technological advancement. That's obviously not what one would expect if it's actually non-human intelligence.
There was legislation to bring transparency to the topic, and it was stripped at the last minute by 2 congressmen heavily funded by the defense industry. If this was all a rouse to get more funding, don't you think they would've loved the legislation?
Nevertheless, reality prevails, ill go with choice A.
If there aliens the number of ppl in gov has to be small[1].
[1] And before someone mentions the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, that was different. No one was going to be a hero for leaking that. It was also different times when most had more faith and trust in the Fed gov.
Not trying to nitpick, but what was this supposed to mean? I am genuinely struggling to understand what you were trying to say, so here is the best possible interpretation I could come up with. Please correct me if I got it wrong.
Was it something like “If there [are] aliens [that the US government is aware of, then] the number of ppl in gov [who are in the know] has to be small”?
Whatever the USG wishes, the first contact will be on the arriving party's terms. This is unless they made some very strong agreement with local governments to keep things secret. Which would be a a sign of a very bad thing for us.
UAPs are intermittent, non-reproducible phenomenon. Life is full of such experiences.
Sadly, when these experiences involve extraordinary experiences, they tend to make all of those involved look stupid. Turns out people and organizations don't like looking stupid.
The reason National Security is so tied up in this area is that when or if a new weapons system is deployed against the U.S., it's going to involve a lot of these exact kinds of reports. Any investigation into any of them is, in effect, an investigation into how the country learns from strange new things, like the Chinese joining the Korean War. These kinds of public investigations simply cannot occur.
I still love these stories, but I love them because they tell us what happens when a large organization comes across really weird stuff it has no labels or processes for.
There's no conspiracy here, that's my guess. Maybe a conspiracy of human nature.
The UFO/UAP story is going nowhere, and it says a lot more about us than it does about anything in nature that anybody might encounter.
ADD: I'm glad Kirkpatrick is getting some reputational payback here. I'll leave my opinions of his essay aside. I strongly support dragging out the Sagan response and banging on it again and again until folks finally focus on the real issues involved. Recommended reading: Hynek's biography, "The Close Encounters Man" https://www.amazon.com/Close-Encounters-Man-World-Believe/dp...
It fits a little better when UFO/UAP doesn’t immediately push your mind into tall grey beings in a unique ship or little green men in a flying saucer.
These programs have multiple agendas. Push for the interesting one, hide the real one. The amount of money these companies get keeps engineers busy and butts in seats.
Look at a few contracts from DIA 2022. https://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract/Article/3148...
Kirkpatrick has been contradicting himself for months now. Another recent Guardian article is more insightful. There has been a concerted effort to remove very specific parts from a new legislation about the disclosure of non-human intelligence and materials:
“If it is the case that there is no substance to the UFO/UAP issue beyond misperceptions, paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, gullibility and disinformation then the government, military and academic organisations need to openly and transparently look under every alleged rock in this topic,” says clinical psychologist Daniel Stubbings of Cardiff Metropolitan University. “But they have chosen to do the exact opposite, which increases the suspicion that there is something to hide.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/14/what-happens...
>> Isn't this a conspiracy theory ?
You're right.
Just a frustrating observation though: It is almost never the case that someone willfully lies, knowing they are fabricating everything. They may lie right now believing it will lead to the truth, or they may lie about their motivations in order to get closer to the truth, etc.
The "core group" TFA discusses almost certainly have been lying. But I bet they do believe they are getting closer to the truth, celebrate the wasted money as "progress and publicity" and I bet they don't believe they are lying outright. I bet they think the ends justify the means.
Unfortunately, nobody believes they are illogical, evil, or malicious. They are only by definition of opposing what someone else (or everyone else) feels is logical, good, or right.
I would say such people are willfully lying when they promulgate theories that either lack any hard evidence or can be easily disproven. I think this includes a large number of politicians, judges, lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and anyone else whose livelihood depends on those lies. And that shit is evil.
Essentially, they aren't lying. In fact, they're responding rationally because:
1. Anyone can construct a logical sequence of arguments (see: Everyone thinks they are logical)
2. Blindly accepting logical sequence of arguments will get you a lot of incorrect results
3. Therefore, being initially skeptical of even logical-seeming things that contradict what you "know" is rational.
"Words? Anyone can say anything with those - why should I believe those?"
Regardless of whether or not there is alien life, our government should be forced to open up its secrets, whatever they may be. We don't need any of this to stay safe.
> our government should be forced to open up its secrets
That is generally the law (including the Freedom of Information Act), though there's overclassification by security agencies. Some things need to be classified, obviously, so what exactly are you advocating? How do we improve it?
Nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine nations around the world since the passage of that act. The production of nuclear armaments is clearly limited by political will and industrial power, not knowledge.
The act protects a foreign policy establishment that has abused its power to conduct dirty tricks against other nations for decades in order to keep American elites rich and in power.
No one is going to invade the American homeland, given the vast oceans separating us from the rest of the world. Repealing that act and removing the foreign policy establishment from power would unwind our vast empire abroad and greatly improve our relations with other nations.
I would prefer that we do this cleanly, but unfortunately I think our empire will suffer a far messier fall from power over the coming decades. Empires at this stage flail wildly in their military adventures.
Also, back to our topic, how do you handle secrecy? Again, obviously some things must be secret, some things public.
Absolute answers are too easy - nothing, everything, destroy the entire foreign policy establishment, etc. We need real ideas and answers.
Surely this is better than to suffer more wars like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
EDIT (apparently my responses are being throttled): In response to wolverine876's question below, "How would secrecy be managed?"
We don't need any secrecy or statecraft. We're so large and established that we can do everything out in the open. Russia and China know where our missiles, bases, ships and submarines are, and we know where their are. The only people in the dark about everything are the citizens in both countries.
A similar argument was made against Linux when open-source was new. It turns out you don't need any closed source code at all to run a successful project.
The net result is that money on all sides is taxed away from things that people actually need and want (food, shelter, medicine, schools, parks, the arts) and directed into things that either rust in silos and bases or kill us all.
The only way to stop an arms race is to increase transparency and to negotiate treaties with our peers.
1. https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagons-black-bud...
I have heard from military friends that they have seen and interacted with non-human creatures on US military bases.
These creatures even have a star associated with them.
They are referred to by scientists as Canis familiaris
Coincidence? I think not!
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOHAr9wR86E&list=PL83DE505F4...>
Obviously, many people participate in the movement to create chaos and a sense of powerlessness through disinformation (the true aim of propaganda), so people don't know what to believe and quit. The Republican Party engages in a lot of it, I assume tactically - always stay on the offensive, keep the enemy reacting, etc. But what about the others? Are they organized? Are they sort-of lone wolves (or small packs) acting on the ideology they learned online?
And I think it's been highly effective: I think that two decades ago, taking it seriously would have discredited you for life. Now that we've destroyed institutions and values like science, evidence and rationality, and embraced post-truth, it's within the norm, even encouraged.
And almost nobody speaks up for science, evidence, truth. Nobody says it's ridiculous nonsense (for so many reasons); everyone just stands back, reinforcing the sense of chaos and powerlessness. Where are the adults?
Second, this narrative has been simmering for years and is largely an outgrowth of a former program at the DOD’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was heavily influenced by a group of individuals associated with businessman and longtime ufologist Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace. Inopen sources, particularly in records available on DIA’s electronic FOIA Reading Room. After the negative response by SECDEF, Senator Reid then enlisted the help of then senator Joseph Lieberman to request that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) set up an SAP for the same purpose. The administrative SAP proposal package was informed by the same individuals who had been associated with AATIP. AARO’s archival research has located the administrative proposal for the DHS SAP, complete with the participants, which has been declassified and is being reviewed for public release.
Finally, the key purveyors of this narrative have known one another for decades. In the early 2000s several members of this small group also participated in a study, erroneously characterized (by the same participants) as having been sponsored by the White House, on the possible societal impact of disclosing the existence of extraterrestrials to the public, with the authenticity of the abovementioned concealed government program taken as its baseline assumption. The think tank in question was a “futures” enterprise that often worked on fringe studies, and many of the individuals involved with the study also worked for Bigelow Aerospace in support of the AATIP program.