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US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

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

#221

Post by carabiner »

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 in defense aerospace. Silicon Valley has no relevance to aerospace. Likewise dod computing systems / IT infrastructure has nothing to do with propulsion engineering at govt labs or in industry. You're mixing up a whole bunch of things to make a broad conclusion that old computers means that DoD still isn't funding advanced weaponry beyond which we have seen. See the stealth hawk used in the bin Laden raid.

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

#222

Post by wing-_-nuts »

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

As a former government employee, I doubt they work directly for the government. The government loves to outsource everything remotely technical to contractors in my (dated) experience. The GS and even the SES pay scales they offer are laughable in comparison to what one can get in the private sector.

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

#223

Post by bamfly »

Gud wrote: post #167
shipman05 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"credible eye witnesses" This is a contradiction. Not that eye witness testimonies are completely without merit, but "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and eye-witness testimony alone does not meet that standard....no matter who the witness is.

I am not saying we know for a fact that extra terrestrials have landed on planet earth. I agree with you, there is still not enough evidence. However I am tired of reading so called skeptics dismissing people who come forward claiming they have seen UFOs as kooks or drunkards. There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence. Vide…

> There is enough evidence by now that in my opinion it is within the realm of possibility that we are being visited by alien intelligence.

Nah. I'd wager it's more likely to be earthlings from an alternate reality or that time travel turns out to be feasible and it's our descendants, than that it's space aliens ("but one of those is entirely based on speculative physics and both require our model of the universe to be pretty damn wrong, to allow such travel" yeah, I know—that's how incredible I find the space alien hypothesis). I don't think those are credible guesses, either, but I'd say they're more likely to be true than "it's aliens". That explanation's got a lot of things working against it.

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

#224

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

kneebonian wrote: post #14
Simulacra wrote: post #6

What I find most fascinating about aliens and UFOs is that they always seem to be heading for America. If a UFO arrived from another galaxy it might choose any place to land, but talk is always America-centric. Do other countries feel so UFO special?

So not saying I necessarily believe (but "I want to believe") the argument could be the US has better airspace monitoring than other countries and more ability to publish and disseminate information. If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to know or be aware. The other alternative if Russia which is similarly sized and equipped but they tend to be pretty cagey sharing information. So it ends up being t…

> If a UFO lands in the middle of.the Congo whose going to know or be aware.

People with smartphones and Meta/WhatsApp/TikTok accounts are all over the planet.

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

#225

Post by ceejayoz »

slg wrote: post #211
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…

Plus, silver flying saucers actually exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

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

#226

Post by jvanderbot »

ch4s3 wrote: post #218
jvanderbot wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, the mars helicopter essentially uses a cell phone, so not really.

And it's not that low power.

But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements

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

#227

Post by godelski »

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.

Exactly. If anyone is going to work _with_ the government, you should be aware of the Technology Readiness Level (TRL)[0]. It's like the cornerstone of how everything operates. It takes decades to get to level 9 sometimes, and when reliability is critical that's what they use. Not only is it "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but "it ain't broke, and we understand every single component of this system and everything that can go wrong with it, don't 'fix' it."

It can also take a lot of time for something to get from TRL 6 to TRL 7, and from TRL 7 to TRL 8. Sometimes realistically impossible to get to TRL 9! The system could be more efficient for sure, and probably has broken down too much, but the idea itself is fine.

Fwiw, I've seen things that I 100% believe should be done today and that there's massive amounts of evidence for it, but aren't done because they aren't TRL 9. I don't want to start arguments, but there's a certain industry that gets hit with this all the time. Where they can do tons of complex and detailed models but aren't able to build the actual thing because it hasn't been physically demonstrated. Which leads to a weird self referential roadblock.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

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

#228

Post by ender341341 »

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...

that was covered by the second portion of my comment. There are a few that are legit we don't know what that was. If we had better details/pictures/video of them we might be able to say better.

In my opinion the likelyhood that they're aliens seems low though.

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

#229

Post by nathancahill »

akiselev wrote: post #216
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…

Absolutely the case. For example, the military requires all commercial satellite imagery to be scaled to 25 cm resolution (up until 2014 it was limited to 50 cm). The true resolution is classified.

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

#230

Post by tomschlick »

botro wrote: post #208
subsubzero wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But.. The US Govt. has zero reasons to acknowledge existence of a non-human superior technology spacecraft. It would undermine their position as world super power and destabilize trust and security in the country and could lead to mass instability and a slow down of technological progress. And if they are running a massive psyops deception campaign it would make the public lose the last vestige of trust left in the g…

Would a US President have the necessary clearance to know of the existence of non-human superior technology spacecraft? A former US President is recorded on tape boasting about knowledge of US military plans to invade Iran. I don't mean to make this political at all, just trying to reason on the basis of a personality and knowing that a president would boast about having knowledge of such trivial classified informati…

The president would have the clearance, but the issue is knowing who to even ask who would have knowledge. Top Secret SCI is compartmentalized, so only the people who need to know get read in.

One great example of this is during the Bin Laden raid planning, after all plans were exhausted on how they could put boots on the ground, only then did a high ranking officer let the president and the rest of the team in the room know about the stealth helicopters that even the SEALs had never seen before.

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