US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs • Hacker News Board

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#141

Post by Sunspark » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #125

haswell wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my first thought as well, and I think there are a number of possible reasons: - The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes - They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding - They believe adversaries have already figured things out or ha…

That's an interesting thought experiment. Any technology that much more advanced than our own would require intermediary technologies before we could replicate it. If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc. The technological baseline needed to rollout any wil…

> If you took a car back to ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to replicate it in one step even if they understood it, because you need sufficiently refined fuel, metallurgy, manufacturing precision, etc.

A bicycle is an even better example. It is 100% understandable to a Roman just via looking and touching, but replicating a bicycle in Rome isn't as easy as it looks. The chain alone is a problem.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#142

Post by cubefox » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

thatguy0900 wrote: post #127

nickelcitymario wrote: post #121

While I understand and appreciate the aspects of the bill that offers protection for whistleblowers, I don't understand cutting all funding for reversing such technology. If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we want to study potentially advanced technology?

I would assume the issue would be that a government agency is reversing UFO tech and congress doesn't know about it, not just that it's being done. A government agency going rogue in such a manner would be a big concern

What does it mean to "reverse" UFO tech?

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#143

Post by mr_00ff00 » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

Gud wrote: post #113

ender341341 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably a good number of drunks/kooks and then probably a handful of unknown phenomena that would have a reasonable explanation if we had better photos/descriptions. *edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in…

What about the countless credible eye witnesses? Not everyone who claims they have witnessed a UFO is a kook...

There are also tons of people who have claimed to see ghosts, tons of medieval peasants that saw witches, tons of people accused of summoning the devil in the 80s.

There are tons of people, the chances they misread something (kook or not) is high.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#144

Post by pohl » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

trdtaylor1 wrote: post #46

eganist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watergate^2 Oceangate? Yeah it was front page for a week.

No, the original poster is referencing, rightly or wrongly, the Hunter Biden receiving millions without seemingly performing work for a foreign national individual, then threatening the individual with retribution from both him and (potentially) his dad sitting next to him.

Really? Not the fake elector scheme? Or the attempt to overturn the results of the last election? Or the willful retention of classified documents and the attempts to evade returning them? Any one of those would be better candidates for watergate-squared.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#145

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #128

vdqtp3 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is essentially no secrecy. Research the Nth Country Experiment

> There is essentially no secrecy. There is secrecy, which is why the countries that haven’t found a shortcut around it (as in the nuclear arms race between Argentina and Brazil) have a harder road than those that do (like South Africa via Israel). > Research the Nth Country Experiment The Nth Country Experiment focused on paper design of a device, which, while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons,…

>while a requirement to getting to functional nuclear weapons, isn’t the whole or, in practice, the limiting factor.

Nukes are not a physics challenge, but an engineering challenge. That's why an experiment showing a bunch of physicists understand simple particle physics isn't a useful demonstration that building nukes doesn't require insane amounts of help from a willing sponsor.

People "knew" how to build the A bomb before World War 2 even started, yet even when several countries put energy into it to aid their war effort, only the US succeeded, and only because they dedicated around one tenth of the entire GDP to the process.

Merely getting enough enriched material is enough of a problem to stop most countries.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#146

Post by SkyMarshal » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #74

SkyMarshal wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this isn’t just a big psyop trying to scare US adversaries, and that UFO’s are real… the US was the first to detonate nukes in 1945, and on its own territory, which might explain some of it. Maybe the UFO’s were investigating how scientifically and technologically advanced humanity was becoming, and naturally focused on nuclear tech as a leading indicator. The 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast might also hav…

That data is slighty suspect. Not just the reliability of reporting between 1-1900, but also the data on the site - apparently there was a siting in Chicago Illinois in the year 600? There's a lot of reports for American locations even earlier than that. I think most importantly we started watching the sky when humanity started to fly. Suddenly the heavens were a viable place for mankind to be, especially after we ou…

All good points. I doubt the folks running that site have vetted every one of their hundreds of thousands of data points, so it's not an authoritative source, just a descriptive one at most.

And, when did science fiction literature start getting big and developing plots involving aliens, and might that have stimulated people's imaginations about UFOs and aliens (which then conversely stimulated more scifi about them)? Was this happening prior to the atomic age or space age, or did that kind of scifi really get started with the space race? If the latter, that might also explain the huge increase in imaginings... er, sightings.

I also can't help but wonder at the timing, with geopolitical tensions rising and China challenging US military and technological supremacy. It's quite a coincidence. Maybe it's the mother of all CIA mindfuck psyops, to introduce a new source of uncertainty and deterrence into the CCP and Russia's strategic calculations.

There's "whistleblowers" on TV claiming the US is in possession of "exotic materials", aka alien tech, since the 1940s. Just how much has been reverse engineered in that time, and deployed in super secret weapons systems that not even Congress knows about? Would the CCP really want to risk WWIII against the US when there's even a small possibility of that?

There's a great scene in "The Expanse" relevant to this situation, where UN Deputy Undersecretary Avasarala has a meeting considering the possibility of first contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYRLV-qm3Qs

"I have a file with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for war with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios for what to do if they develop an unexpected new technology. My file for what to do if an advanced alien species comes calling, is three pages long, and begins with 'Find God'".

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#147

Post by treyfitty » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

lend000 wrote: post #139

All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead. The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs payin…

That “government employee doesn’t get paid enough to attract talent” trope has to die. I work with many government employees that are not beholden to the government pay scales and get special exemptions to be compensated “at market rates.” You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#148

Post by TechBro8615 » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

haswell wrote: post #81

justinclift wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no legal pathway to introduce to the public So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.

I think that would all depend on how advanced this hypothetical tech is, and the timeframe in which someone wants it known to the public. DARPA may not provide enough cover for sufficiently advanced discoveries that cannot be explained without raising bigger questions. It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may…

There is also that fermi paradox resolution that basically says the same tech that unlocks infinite energy also unlocks the ability to destroy ourselves. So in theory there could be good reasons for avoiding commercialization of highly advanced technology, if it means that within a century some guy on the street could build an apparatus that destroys the planet in an industrial accident.

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#149

Post by aredox » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

Gud wrote: post #103

MoSattler wrote: post #30

The government has previously used UFOs to divert attention. > Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.…

What about the other half?

Almost all of Earth's population carries a camera (with their phones), and yet sightings of UFOs (or any cryptid) have been at an all-time low.

https://xkcd.com/1235/

Re: US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

#150

Post by subsubzero » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #78

haswell wrote: post #63

I’m not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the interest of curiosity and for sake of argument… Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades. If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no lega…

Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is how it works?

Supposedly a few pieces of technology that we use in military and everyday use were created using alien technology. Stealth fighters and holograms. But I have read the book about the engineering/creation of the f-117 stealth fighter at skunkworks and nothing in that airplane doesn't seem like it could be created using currently understood scientific principles. One thing that did stand out was the timeline from creation to delivery was very short, also the plane cannot fly using just human piloting, a advanced computer must make micro adjustments to the crafts trajectory every second or the plane crashes. This was done in the late 70s so that seems extremely advanced for back then so who knows.