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

#211

Post by slg » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:33 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…

>I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.

There is a huge amount of ground between aliens are visiting Earth and your family is nuts. We don't understand a lot of things about our world, doubly so for your average layperson. When we encounter something we can't recognize, we look for patterns and aspects we do recognize. That impacts the way we view things and our memory. There are all sorts of stories about how people's native languages impact the way the view the world for example. Maybe your family saw a "a classic silver flying saucer" or maybe they just saw something they couldn't explain and a "classic silver flying saucer" was the closest thing their brains could come up with.

That is why the potential recovery part of this story is so important. It takes the fallibility of the human brain out of the equitation and would provide direct physical evidence beyond "I saw something that looked weird" level of evidence that we have previously lived in when it comes to UFOs.

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

#212

Post by kube-system » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:33 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…

You say this as if Silicon Valley was built on ad tech. Silicon Valley was born of the military industrial complex.

> Corporate needs you to find the differences between these pictures.jpg: [military tech] [private sector tech] (they're the same picture)

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

#213

Post by throwaway4aday » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:33 PM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #75

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…

> 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.

You're assuming they've been able to figure anything out and are just sitting on it. If tech from an interstellar craft is here on Earth it's so far beyond anything we can make that we probably don't have a chance of figuring it out. It'd be like the first Europeans to reach America giving the natives guns and asking them to duplicate them, they don't even have the ability to smelt iron so it's just not going to happen and just having a gun isn't going to advance any of their other tech in the least.

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

#214

Post by jvanderbot » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #198

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…

I've worked with the government in the past. Their compute systems definitely are not decades behind. Though some are. They have the the top supercomputers and machines that haven't been updated since the 80's. That's a more realistic picture of the government. That it is this gigantic thing that is in no way remotely monolithic. It's more like The Blob, that it is an amorphis mixture of a lot of things. Neither this…

To add, the reason most computers are behind is usually a mentality of "if it aint broke dont fix it"

Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.

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

#215

Post by theptip » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right? Folks on the committees are angry that China is trolling US Navy vessels with UAVs and this isn’t being publicized.

The “non-earth” origin is the smokescreen, “exotic” covers foreign secret research projects?

Something a bit convoluted like this is orders of magnitude more probable in my world model. (Basically, the prior “aliens exist and have been covered up” rounds to zero, so given we are observing this public action, even extremely unlikely explanations could explain it.)

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

#216

Post by akiselev » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:37 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…

Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being nearly two decades old by that point.

> An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have "state-of-the art optics" despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes. [1]

Bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (in)competence is not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors. We just don't get to see the best in action because they're classified until they're almost pedestrian.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

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

#217

Post by HideousKojima » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

thatguy0900 wrote: post #153

cubefox wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean to "reverse" UFO tech?

Reverse engineering a UFO would be disassembling and studying it so that we can recreate it or repurpose the technologies in it. Presumably it would have some manner of exotic engine or power source or perhaps weapons, etc.

For an example of this from the early Cold War, see the Tupolev Tu-4. The Soviets took the wrecks of three downed US B-29s from WWII and spent huge amounts of money and manpower studying them and developing copies of them since US strategic bomber tech was so far ahead of their own. Supposedly (though I'd need to find a source again) there was a bullet hole in the wing of one of the recovered B-29s that the Soviets faithfully recreated in the Tu-4 thinking it was part of the actual design.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4

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

#218

Post by ch4s3 » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #214

godelski wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with the government in the past. Their compute systems definitely are not decades behind. Though some are. They have the the top supercomputers and machines that haven't been updated since the 80's. That's a more realistic picture of the government. That it is this gigantic thing that is in no way remotely monolithic. It's more like The Blob, that it is an amorphis mixture of a lot of things. Neither this…

To add, the reason most computers are behind is usually a mentality of "if it aint broke dont fix it" Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.

> The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.

Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?

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

#219

Post by rndmwlk » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:40 PM UTC

treyfitty wrote: post #147

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

Also ignores the entire defense and aerospace industry. It's laughably ignorant to just write off the STEM talent at places like Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, etc because FAANG is a popular destination for CS grads. Also, people here (and in SV in general) doubt the capabilities and talent in the public sector until suddenly a Stuxnet is brought to light.

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

#220

Post by NickC25 » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

jklinger410 wrote: post #188

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…

> 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 What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have top secret military clearance?

Seriously. Oftentimes, though, it's not the government who is ahead in tech, it's the quasi-private sector that is decades ahead but due to secrecy laws cannot come forward and talk about it under any and every circumstance.

I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours.

When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech.

This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.