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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

#261

Post by ch4s3 »

Gud wrote: post #242
ch4s3 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the whole atmosphere around governments spying, covering things up, and generally engaged in a lot of sloppy covert action is bound to make UFOs seem more credible.

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

#262

Post by AlexandrB »

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's not a lie if the author believes that it's true. People are way too trusting of their senses and memories when both have been shown to be extremely fallible under numerous different circumstances. Remember how suggestible victims had been convinced that they participated in satanic sex rituals during the satanic panic[1]? Why is it out of the realm of possibility that the author is recounting a particularly vivid dream or hallucination that became more "real" the more he thought about it?

Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of different aliens visiting us, or people are having experiences they can't rationally explain and their brain is filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers

Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone having a camera on them at any given moment is now approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens getting sneakier?

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

#263

Post by wsintra2022 »

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?

I’m wondering if you have ever been to Australia. I went once and noticed there were a lot of Astra aliens, then I understood how it got its name!

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

#265

Post by bamfly »

Gud wrote: post #202
aredox wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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?

No? Why would it, any more so than what came before? We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I guess (must not have limited resources, like, at all) all using physics we're not even on the verge of discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict what we have discovered, but also leave no to-us-detectable trace anywhere we can detect, in their visits or with their sensing equipment or their civilization itself, but also also be pretty bad at hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but also also also good enough that we can't quite prove they're real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away, instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.

"Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the rest still holds, too.

The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's not technically impossible that Russell's Teapot exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens" barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and does miracles sometimes".

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

#266

Post by uhtred »

ceejayoz wrote: post #250
uhtred wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mac…

Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.

The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up.

And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?

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

#267

Post by marcosdumay »

gregw134 wrote: post #209
marcosdumay wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't move a sphere around by spinning it. You can only change your direction. Spinning around, moving uncontrollably inside a storm, with very variable speed are exactly things that lost balloons do.

There are whole ships powered by the magnus effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

None of what are an sphere.

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

#268

Post by godelski »

AlexandrB wrote: post #239
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?

Not sure if true, but I also recall reading that ICs made with larger processes are more resilient to cosmic ray strikes. So modern 7nm chips might have an inherent disadvantage in these applications.

This is true. You can think about this fairly simply as you just have to think about the amount of energy traveling within a transistor and what that energy's proportionate level is to a cosmic ray. Smaller IC's are more likely to be hit (cross-section is higher due to density AND that we operate in fields, no need for a direct physical interaction of the mass).

But that's not why they cost so much. Rad hardened ICs are built differently. They are built on a sapphire base: Silicon on Sapphire (SoS). Process is more complicated and expensive.

That said, there are more people looking at commercial off the shelf (COTS) and just building redundant systems because 2 COTS CPUs can be cheaper (and more powerful) and because ECC has gotten much better. But this is really only for LEO right now, but may be used in deeper space missions later on. Realistically it is just going to be dependent on how much your ride costs. LEO is cheap now, so risk of failure is dramatically reduced. Your ride is still most of your cost though.

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

#269

Post by Seattle3503 »

nathancahill wrote: post #229
akiselev wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely it isn't the military that requires this? I couldn't find anything on a 25 cm limit, but I don't the military is a regulatory agency.

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

#270

Post by heavyset_go »

theptip wrote: post #215

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. (…

UFO narratives are convenient distractions from meaningful politics. IMO, what you're seeing is a legislative effort to avoid doing the jobs they were elected to do while appearing bipartisan and proactive.
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