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

US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 657 posts

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

#241

Post by ch4s3 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #226
ch4s3 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

From what I understand the helicopter was a special case and sort of a side mission meant to test off the shelf parts.

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

#242

Post by Gud »

ch4s3 wrote: post #238
Gud wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are plenty of UFO recordings using iPhones. I don't consider it credible evidence however. There is much better evidence out there, primarily from the U.S. military. Sadly most of it is classified. Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?

> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization? Isn't the paranoid atmosphere cold war and the increase in weapons testing, satellites, spy balloons, etc. a much simpler explanation?

If that were the case, wouldn’t that point the paranoia towards the USSR and not UFOs from space?

But I agree, it is a possible explanation.

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

#243

Post by tfandango »

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…

This is exactly what I have been thinking since 2016. If Aliens/UFOs are real, we will hear about it soon. However, if it's true that parts of the government are secret from the president, even the last one, then that is a real problem.

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

#244

Post by fn-mote »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #184
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…

It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't l…

> if the government is forced to reveal it

The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?

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

#245

Post by kube-system »

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.

Spaceflight has an inherently different set of requirements from the types of applications people on here mostly build. NASA doesn't need to run 2GB of javascript dependencies on their rover. They have people who can write lean real-time code in a low level language. They need to be sure a bit flip doesn't turn a 3 billion dollar project into rubble. There is no 'fix it in the next sprint' in spaceflight; after you hit the red button, it must work. The RAD750 that Perseverance runs on has some impressive specs, they are just specs that don't matter in a datacenter.

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

#246

Post by AlexandrB »

lend000 wrote: post #170
meroes wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades behind in ad networks and social graphs but miles ahead in their core competencies maybe?

Not if cybersecurity is supposed to be one of their core competencies.

The easiest way to improve cybersecurity is keeping your critical hardware off of the public internet or even keeping it air-gapped. Something that doesn't require leading edge tech but operational care. I suspect the military is pretty good at the latter, certainly much better than the typical SV company.

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

#247

Post by wing-_-nuts »

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?

Actually one of the first 'known' UFOs supposedly crash landed in 1930's Italy, and Mussolini blabbed about it to the Pope, who warned the US. Allegedly. We're not the only country that's supposedly had contact.

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

#248

Post by hindsightbias »

NickC25 wrote: post #220
jklinger410 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 questio…

In most classified arenas, there is no private sector competition. No one in SV is building subs, SOSUS arrays or stealth a/c. So it's completely reasonable they're way ahead of some niche innovator building a sub out of carbon fiber. But it's not sci-fi tech.

People talk about the SR-71 as an example, but the A-12 predecessor was only a secret for about 18 months. The P&W jewels were out by ~1978 or so.

LM, afaik, doesn't do propulsion so there's no place to hide an anti-grav unit.

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

#249

Post by nbaugh1 »

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…

Completely anecdotal counter-point - the smartest person I know is a physicist who subcontracts for the Army

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

#250

Post by ceejayoz »

uhtred wrote: post #206
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…

It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO. For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...

> It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO.

Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir" stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-w...).

"But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."

> For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...

Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.

Post reply on HN