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No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#201

Post by userulluipeste »

generalizations wrote: post #118
swader999 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government." Feels like we are being primed for something new to be afraid of and give our treasure to in defense of. Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I hope the script doesn't go that way.

> Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.

Yes, we are resource hungry, and yes we inadvertently wiped out species, but as resource pressured as we are, we also managed to intentionally allocate some to prevent that undesired effect in the future. We did some bad stuff when we were younger (as a species), but we grew since then. We're more considerative now (or at least that's what we'd like to convince ourselves of). Maybe, in the same line of thought, we'll get the same benefit from others even more mature than us?

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#202

Post by swader999 »

userulluipeste wrote: post #199
md_ wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disputing that intelligence agencies would lie to justify a foreign war. It's happened multiple times before. I'm disputing that lying about aliens would be an effective or preferred strategy for doing so. Like, a war against...whom? Is the voting public going to buy it? Cut me a break!

Not necessarily a war. It may be useful to justify increased research budget(s) and a general shift to something else substantiated by the new fears.

It'll keep the MIC funded and justify the further weoponization of space.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#203

Post by swader999 »

generalizations wrote: post #118
swader999 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Those descriptions are a tectonic shift on the topic from the US government." Feels like we are being primed for something new to be afraid of and give our treasure to in defense of. Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I hope the script doesn't go that way.

> Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.

If a species can master interstellar travel, then they can probably harness enough energy to change elements at the atomic level - alchemy. They won't need us for our resources or even earth. And if they did, they would have taken us already.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#204

Post by vlovich123 »

savanaly wrote: post #58
vlovich123 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason all the news reporting I’ve seen about it breathlessly insinuates aliens without actually saying that because they’d be legitimately ridiculed. Alluding to it though brings in more viewers. Kind of disgusting.

It feels a bit like the lab-virus theory felt last year. If you entertain the notion of it you're supposed to be ridiculed and possibly kicked out of polite society, but does it really deserve to be set alongside flat earth theory and intelligent design? I'm not so sure we won't look differently at it years from now.

No, it’s not science violating like flat earth or unscientific like intelligent design. So from that perspective, it obviously shouldn’t be dismissed out-of-hand. It’s still so far out there in terms of an actual possibility that there’s no point speculating. Mundane reasons are far more likely, especially since extraterrestrials on our planet would imply extraterrestrials with a significant technological advantage - likely extrasolar (implying FTL) & able to evade all sorts of detection methods. Even if you think there’s a massive government conspiracy to conceal their detection, you’d be claiming this conspiracy is effective at hiding it from all sorts of academic telescopes/satellites/radars (these are extraterrestrials so they’d have to live off-earth).

In essence, the claim of “aliens” (particularly intelligent ones) is outlandish given our current understanding of the universe. Of course that could change in the future but speculating wildly about it now & reporting on it similarly is irresponsible.

And as for the lab virus theory, that’s a bad analogy. The zoonotic origin is more plausible but it’s probably like 2:1 or 10:1 odds against it being a lab escape. For aliens you’re looking at like 1000000:1 odds against.

Heck, humans from parallel dimensions seem more likely at the point where we’re wildly speculating without any evidence. Why is aliens the dominant theory?

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#205

Post by userulluipeste »

yumraj wrote: post #125
generalizations wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.

> Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence. Not only that, but the moment that peaceful species encounters a non-peaceful species it would be wiped out, as evidenced by numerous extinct, or in the verge of being extinct, species on planet Earth. So peaceful species are goin…

The history in this case may not be the best teacher. The previous instances of wiped species happened when self control was not part of the setting. Space travel has a high bar to enter and is forcing any contender to achieve a high degree of self control. Any further action from someone like that will have to have either deliberate or unnoticed consequences.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#206

Post by lukebitts »

DennisP wrote: post #183
lukebitts wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a fun answer: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/HowToInvad... Just the "Motivation and Planning" category will reveal several reasons. My favorite is that there is almost no reason to go through the trouble of colonizing our planet, if you need any of our resources you can mine asteroids and no one will fight back. Unless of course the aliens are Evil.

That sounds like ants reasoning "there's no reason for humans to mess with our ant hill. There's all that land right over there, and they won't have to fight us for it." If the aliens are millions of years ahead of us, it's pretty optimistic to think they'll take us into account at all, unless maybe as a mildly interesting subject of nature documentaries.

I guess beings so strong and powerful that they would destroy us without a second thought, like we do to ants, would fall into the "Evil" category in my comment above.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#207

Post by krapp »

swader999 wrote: post #203
generalizations wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.

If a species can master interstellar travel, then they can probably harness enough energy to change elements at the atomic level - alchemy. They won't need us for our resources or even earth. And if they did, they would have taken us already.

>If a species can master interstellar travel, then they can probably harness enough energy to change elements at the atomic level - alchemy

Not even advanced aliens can get around the laws of thermodynamics - that would take far more energy than any resource it creates could possibly be worth.

But, they wouldn't even need to, because they can find abundant supplies of whatever resources they wanted anywhere. Even in our own solar system, they would be far better off mining our asteroid belt and Jovian planets and not even acknowledging our existence.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#208

Post by krapp »

ryandvm wrote: post #192
generalizations wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though. I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.

Maybe it's a Great Filter kind of thing. Most civilizations probably continually decimate themselves in a never-ending series of self-inflicted cataclysms every time they build up their energy capability. If you've mastered enough energy to arrive at another solar system in force, you already had to figure out how to live peacefully with many billions of individuals.

Billions of individuals of their own species.

There's no reason to assume they would feel empathy towards other intelligent species. We coexist with intelligent animal species on Earth, and at best we consider their intelligence a novelty. If other apes began to speak and reason as we do, do you think we'd grant them property rights and a vote? No, we'd probably just slaughter them.

It seems more likely to me that an advanced alien species would see us the way we see animals, rather than as like themselves.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#209

Post by WalterBright »

gfodor wrote: post #188
WalterBright wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has failed to hold any predictive properties And so has the UFOs are aliens theory. CNN isn't just reporting it, they're reporting it as credible . In fact, a "sizable chunk of the public" being interested in this is precisely because CNN (and some others) are reporting it as credible. Welcome to CNN creating news, not just reporting it.

You do realize that CNN has been ridiculing this stuff for its entire history, right? This isn't really a "fake news" type of situation, since arguably the fake news was the ridicule.

Not lately, they are not ridiculing it. They are treating it as a credible theory. CNN used to actually run news, too.

Re: No evidence UFOs are alien craft, unclassified US intelligence report to reveal

#210

Post by simonsarris »

All the mealy UFO chatter (months of it!) makes me wonder if its just a big PR campaign to convince military people to actually report oddities. Maybe they [military] don't want to be seen as dumb for seeing something they can't explain, so they don't report possible foreign spy drones enough. So now the gov has to literally to psyop everyone into caring so the troops finally report sightings they can't explain.

Imagine the latest US military drone tech testing their drones by sending them over other US bases and doing weird stuff, flashing lights, making crazy patterns, etc, hoping for a funny report. But then: The base never reports anything. So the drone team has to go "oh crap, what else don't they notice?"

So to save face the gov launches a huge PR campaign saying "GUYS UFOS ARE REAL AND WE TAKE THEM VERY SERIOUSLY [so if you're in the air force please report when you see a weird light, thanks]"

(I have absolutely no evidence that this is remotely true)

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