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US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

thehill.com

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

#271
post #257
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…

I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god? Especially if its a truth that has been kept secret for so long, that would be particularly damning for the legitimacy of current governments of the world in the eyes of most people…

> I would think that knowledge of ETs would be very destabilizing for our society. Why go into work the next day if there are literal ETs visiting our planet? Why pay taxes? Why fight for generals who have lied to you? Why worship your god?

Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.

You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.

The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.

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

#272

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. (…

This is a push by the DoD to make American's believe in US military and intelligence superiority—only a supremely powerful government would be able to coverup the existence of extraterrestrial life for 50+ years.

World order is changing. China is a rising military power. People may even see foreign spy aircraft (e.g. Chinese weather balloons) over US airspace. The DoD would rather you believe it's aliens. This kind of propaganda works great on older boomers in particular because they've been conditioned to believe it all their life.

The US military is not able to coverup something like a crashed alien spacecraft. They couldn't even stop a dozen men with box cutters from crashing planes into buildings. I would not be surprised in the least to find out that the 9/11 conspiracies were funded by the DoD—probably by the same people doing this nonsense now. Again, "they" would rather you believe in a supremely powerful government with space lasers than have their true incompetence unmasked.

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

#273

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…

> And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's

Exactly what has been going on since the 40s though? The Roswell Incident in 1947 was a balloon. There was no evidenced advanced propulsion technology, neither from aliens or the government. It was just a balloon that got blown up into an massive bizarre cultural phenomena of people whispering rumors about alien spacecraft.

The recent infamous Navy videos also show mundane technology, contrary to popular claims. Mick West has shown that mundane explanations exist for everything shown to the public so far. There's no good evidence for any 'exotic' technology, either from the government or from space. The government doesn't have stuff like antigrav craft, but there's no good evidence for such craft existing in the first place.

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

#274

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.

Classified, but inferrable from the size of launch vehicles and basic optical properties. Still incredibly impressive.

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

#275
post #259

Still seems most likely this is a bunch of people feeding off each others’ hype and speculation. There are a dozen explanations more plausible than aliens.

"It's aliens" is just about the least plausible explanation other than "god did it". I'm pretty sure several other sci-fi bullshit explanations are more likely than "aliens are real, have tech we couldn't dream of that relies on our model of reality being totally broken, give enough of a shit about us to visit but not enough to do anything else, and are extremely hard to detect except, for no good reason, in this one specific way that, coincidentally, often turns out to for-sure not be space aliens, but one of several other things".

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

#276
post #205
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds more nonsensical than anything. Why would "they" want to do this? Who is "they"? Marco Rubio is talking about UFOs now, but he played down covid and was against lockdowns and masking.

So it's just a feeling then. Although i talked to another friend who made exactly the same observation on its own, without concerting: all of the sudden, some very official sounding declarations from US "officials" making public statement suggesting there may be something real after all about UFOs. I have no idea who "they" is, but i assume it's pretty easy for a small group of congressmen to spread rumors and declar…

I think it's much more likely that there's nothing to this, rather than it being part of a secret ongoing conspiracy to manipulate the public.

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

#277
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but those COTS parts still underwent lots and lots of rad/ vac testing. There's a design-for-resilience vs test-for-resilience tradeoff at play. I'm saying that not all systems require design-for-resilience.

Well to nitpick, that's because the two are kinda the same. Testing is part of design and vise versa in these types of systems. But otherwise I agree with the points you've made (seems we've been responding in parallel lol)

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

#278

I like to entertain myself with the idea that perhaps what's driving the recent spotlight on UFOs is not that we are seeing/detecting them, but that we are detecting more and more of them. Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. And that was fine because there are many natural causes that could explain these blips on radar. Many weather phenomena or man made objects…

All entertaining to speculate, but it's classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from (in addition to their conveniently never appearing within clear view of regular citizens' phones or cameras and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way)

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

#279

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. (…

This wouldn't even be the first time the CIA has done something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20230611032246/https://www.nytim...

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

#280
post #266

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. 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?

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

He's a perfect example of how not everyone cares about getting caught lying.

> 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?

Shit, it could've been a realistic dream; I've had dreams I was certain were real. Or, more mundanely, maybe it was a helicopter with a searchlight.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/07/30/206946740/m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp%E2%80%93Etchells_effect

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