Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA UFO Documents Index

nsa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 167 posts

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#31

Post by edge17 »

cookiengineer wrote: post #8

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this [1] and this [2] and especially this [3]. Area 51 was a radar testing site due to the unique properties of the salt on the ground. And they just tested a "silver shiny UFO" which was the prototype for the SR-71. And yes, this was exactly the same date when people first called radio stations and the police for UFO sightings. The Skunkworks A-12 OXCART research project led to the f…

I'm just going to plug this book because it's so good and adds a lot more color to these comments -

https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...

For context, this book covers history on the development of these UFOs and was written by Ben Rich, who worked at and eventually led the Lockheed division that developed these planes. If nothing else, it's a fascinating account of many historical events from a totally different vantage point.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#33

Post by vntok »

searine wrote: post #20
uhtred wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those planes look like UFOs and they wouldn't move in the same reported ways, either. I don't agree that it makes someone stupid to be open minded.

Most of the reports of "UFOs" and their characteristics in flight come from untrained, and unreliable sources. It's not stupid to be open minded, but it is stupid to ignore plausible explanations of phenomenon because you are hoping to find something new.

> It's not stupid to be open minded, but it is stupid to ignore plausible explanations of phenomenon because you are hoping to find something new.

This sentence reads like you are casually dismissing all of science..

Surely "The Earth is flat", "Rain spirits make the rain fall from the sky" and "We are at the center of the universe, being created by God and all" were plausible explanations of phenomena that were eventually ignored by scientists hoping to find something new.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#34

Post by heyitsguay »

at_a_remove wrote: post #23
anewaccount2021 wrote: post #18

If you say there are civilizations thriving somewhere in the galaxy, you're Carl Sagan. If you say our solar system may have had aliens pass by, you're an eccentric. If you say aliens landed on earth, you're a crank. Why is the sanity of the claimant inversely proportional to the distance of aliens from Earth?

Briefly put: the speed of light. It takes a long, long time to get anywhere, because light moves at a relative crawl compared to the distances between stars, so it would be a long and energy-intensive process to visit another planet, especially given how hard it would be to detect a civilization there before you departed. The Earth didn't emit much of a signal on radio waves until about 1900, so even if the aliens we…

Agreed but to be fair - mass-energy is not conserved across intergalactic scales.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#35

Post by motohagiography »

Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues.

A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them?

Second, if you do intervene, does their new knowledge of the intervention of an intermediate power harm their social and ethical development, given their entire political economy and ethics will switch from discovered principles, to merely competing to appeal to the most powerful force they can? (I think this would make them impossible to trust.) Could it recover and develop on its own if you arrived and chose some of them for benefits but not others? Do you pick the most dominant, or the species with the most suitability to become part of the space faring community.

It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. I don't think these are dumb questions at all, and they resemble ones that state dept's make very day, so I don't dismiss people interested in UFOs as they are interested in some pretty useful questions.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#36

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #30
mikewarot wrote: post #11

The next to last was the most interesting to me... it's gotta be an old April Fools in the NSA Technical Journal. It flatly states we've received signals from outer space, and posits a decoding of them.... https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...

Intelligence agencies have internal decoding competitions and trainings. This sounds like one of them, simply framed around an alien transmission, and you're just looking at the answer key where it's assumed the reader is familiar with the frame. The entire "transmission" is at the end. To be honest, of all the things we could receive from an alien source, "They transmitted basic set theory and a periodic table at us…

[deleted]

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#37

Post by marcan_42 »

seanyesmunt wrote: post #15
mikewarot wrote: post #11

The next to last was the most interesting to me... it's gotta be an old April Fools in the NSA Technical Journal. It flatly states we've received signals from outer space, and posits a decoding of them.... https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...

Why do you think it is an April Fools prank?

It's obviously a crypto challenge to anyone who has ever played them. It maps way too nicely to human concepts. This is what every amateur putting together an "alien challenge" without attempting to be scientific about it ends up doing, and it's easy to tell. That's fine if you're doing it for fun, but it's obviously not real.

And that is confirmed:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19257/nsa-key-to-ext...

I've been here solved that. ACM tried to run an challenge about an "alien computer" that was obviously not alien, but ended up being very real. I was part of the team that reverse engineered it first, but the whole contest collapsed and all interest waned after we ended up finding the very-much-not-alien chip involved by accident. We did cover the initial process, but unfortunately never got around to writing the follow-up posts.

https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2012/unprogramming-intro/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160304030848/http://queue.acm....

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#38

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

avl999 wrote: post #14

At this point the existence of the UFO phenomenon is undeniable. The fact that congress attached to the covid relief bill that the intelligence services must present a report of everything they know about ufos within a 180 days tells you that something is up and they are trying to force the hand of the intelligence service. I also find it interesting that since retiring Harry Read has openly talked about the existenc…

> I also find it interesting that since retiring Harry Read has openly talked about the existence of UFOs.

This is the truly interesting point, you can question the material presented in document releases, but this is strange and obviously a clearly stated belief from someone well-aware of things behind the scenes beyond the knowledge of the general public.

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#39

Post by brianskarda »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #27
avl999 wrote: post #14

At this point the existence of the UFO phenomenon is undeniable. The fact that congress attached to the covid relief bill that the intelligence services must present a report of everything they know about ufos within a 180 days tells you that something is up and they are trying to force the hand of the intelligence service. I also find it interesting that since retiring Harry Read has openly talked about the existenc…

> congress attached to the covid relief bill They did? Got a link? I tried a Google search but found nothing.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/10/us/ufo-report-emergency-relie...

Re: NSA UFO Documents Index

#40

Post by franksvalli »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #27
avl999 wrote: post #14

At this point the existence of the UFO phenomenon is undeniable. The fact that congress attached to the covid relief bill that the intelligence services must present a report of everything they know about ufos within a 180 days tells you that something is up and they are trying to force the hand of the intelligence service. I also find it interesting that since retiring Harry Read has openly talked about the existenc…

> congress attached to the covid relief bill They did? Got a link? I tried a Google search but found nothing.

It can be found in the Committee Comments portion of the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021 (search for "unidentified aerial phenomena"): https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/intelligenc...

Via Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/180-day-countdown-ufo/

Post reply on HN