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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

#361

Post by scrlk »

WalterBright wrote: post #356
godelski wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another part is that people don't realize how within the government, and especially the military, there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified. You do this because there are spies and they will steal shit. You want to make that process noisy. It's also beneficial because you may get your adversary to spend millions or billions studying a thing that isn't even possible.…

Interestingly, much of the stealth radar technology on the Skunkworks' stealth airplanes came from a Soviet research paper. Personally, I would have thought such a paper was disinformation. Maybe the Soviets did, too!

"While working in Moscow, Ufimtsev became interested in describing the reflection of electromagnetic waves. He gained permission to publish his research results internationally because they were considered to be of no significant military or economic value."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ufimtsev

Looks like he's still publishing papers in this area: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37344722000

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

#362

Post by subsubzero »

tptacek wrote: post #306
vadansky wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the now-discredited "Gimball Video" Source? I don't think there was ever a consensus that it was discredited. Googling "Gimbal Video discredited" doesn't give me anything definitive.

As I understand it, that video illustrates either a camera glare artifact, or alien technology very carefully tuned to replicate a camera glare artifact.

yeah the person(Mick West) who did the debunking is a retired gaming software engineer who is also somewhat of a known troll and has zero background in the field of avionic systems used by the fighter pilots. Some of his debunking statements are borderline absurd, you have a sighting that is seen on FLIR, radar and has an eyewitness testimony along with video and his statement is the pilot who has flown for 10 years did not know what he saw, and all the electronic systems malfunctioned and the object clearly seen on video is a artifact of sun glare. The Gimball video has not been debunked by professionals currently.

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

#363

Post by throwaway4aday »

jstarfish wrote: post #286
throwaway4aday wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happ…

Whoa, that's far from true. They would not be able to duplicate an AK-47 as-is, no. Their reverse-engineering efforts of its components would absolutely advance all of their other tech, even if none of it ever produced a working firearm. The gun is inspiration-- an outcome to work towards. Producing gunpowder and trying to create a musket out of reeds may not work out, but would have led to their independent discover…

Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the salt out of it.

Same with the steel, they'd have to identify that it was a type of iron but before that they'd have to know what iron was. They had no metallurgy so the chances of that happening are extremely slim. Iron ore looks nothing like iron metal. They'd probably need to discover other metals like copper first to develop smelting techniques and nothing in the gun is going to teach them how to find, mine and smelt copper or iron.

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

#364

Post by heavyset_go »

krapp wrote: post #350
theptip wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting way more press this way? Doesn’t seem counterproductive at all to me.

What does the press get them? The Russians/Chinese or whomever are flying these theoretical UAVs know they aren't alien, the US government knows they aren't alien, and now not only us the US exposing its intelligence capabilities (or lack thereof,) they're making themselves look like fools in the process.

It's better for adversaries to think you're incompetent or dumb than it is to let them know that you're on to them and/or can defeat their latest measures if it comes down to it. They might try harder next time, and actually outclass you.

One aspect of such surveillance missions is to see how the US responds to these incidents, in order to learn about technology and methods that are used and that adversaries might not know about.

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

#365

Post by adriand »

tptacek wrote: post #292

Ezra Klein just did a long interview with Leslie Kean (a popular author and Coast to Coast AM guest) about her article in "The Debrief" --- where it went, after the Washington Post wouldn't run it on her time schedule --- about David Grusch: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of thin…

Thank you for linking to that interview. I listened to most of it when it came out. I was already skeptical but willing to have an open mind, but I came away from it feeling very assured in my skepticism. These claims are utter nonsense! Give the interview a listen and try and tell me your bullshit meter doesn’t go off.

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

#366

Post by RetpolineDrama »

tptacek wrote: post #292

Ezra Klein just did a long interview with Leslie Kean (a popular author and Coast to Coast AM guest) about her article in "The Debrief" --- where it went, after the Washington Post wouldn't run it on her time schedule --- about David Grusch: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of thin…

> Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts).

Source?

>At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video".

"Gimball" is not credibly discredited, calling it such highlights your bias and calls your other points into question.

EDIT: HN is a terrible website for having actual discussions because, inevitably, people reply to my comments and I end up typing a reply only to hit "you're doing that too fast". Occasionally I engage and inevitably am reminded of why this site sucks so much for anything more than a particularly unperformant RSS feed

So I don't know if this will even post, but I've posted up thread so hopefully you see it. (edit: it didn't post, so I edited it in to my original message)

Generally anyone who refers to "Gimball" as debunked/etc is referring to Mick West's preposterous video on the subject. It has been so thoroughly, repeatedly, taken apart by actual fighter pilots who have used these systems that _anyone_ still parroting the original claims of Mick West is either incredibly out of the loop or a straight-up denialist who is willing to accept even the most flimsy of arguments if it reenforces their prior beliefs.

https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc

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

#367

Post by mcpackieh »

akiselev wrote: post #345
mcpackieh wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those mirrors aren't exotic technology. They're undoubtedly very expensive and difficult to produce but at the end of the day they're as mundane as any other first surface mirror. They don't evidence the government having some sort of new paradigm of technology kept secret, like antigravity instead of normal airplanes or something like that.

That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because you've got a CPU from the 80s. The interesting part isn't the mirror but how they made it. They're obviously not mundane, otherwise NASA would have designed Hubble to use equivalent optics. Any actually interesting technology would be under a Secrecy Order [1] and the patents wouldn't see the light of day, perhaps ever. The few examples we know of were definitely c…

> That's like saying a Apple M2 Max is mundane because you've got a CPU from the 80s.

Yes, exactly. Give a modern Apple CPU to some chip experts in the 80s and they'd no doubt be amazed and have many questions about the details, but they would have a theoretical basis for understanding the premise of the thing. Give the same chip to Isaac Newton or Archimedes and it would be a completely different story. To them, a CPU would be truly exotic technology.

Antigrav existing today would be like CPUs existing in Newton's day. You'd need completely new theories to even comprehend the most basic operating principles. Antigrav craft like those proposed by the people who don't believe Mick West's explanation of the Navy's "Go Fast" video would be further removed on a theoretical basis from the F-35 than the F-35 is from the Wright flier.

> The few examples we know of were definitely cutting edge exotic technology at the time they were classified including the Manhattan project and the development of jet engines.

In both of these cases, the fundamental operating principles were widely known to relevant researchers in various countries before anybody developed one that worked. Japan and Germany both had nuclear weapons programs during WW2. Nuclear fission was known to researchers in all three nations, and more as well. In the case of jet engines, you had inventors in many countries taking stabs at implementing a practical one decades before they were adopted into military service. There was never a chance of any military getting jet engines while the rest of the world was left wondering what the hell it even was.

And with respect to gas centrifuges; those were considered but ultimately not employed by the Manhattan Project, which instead used gaseous diffusion. But the premise of gas centrifuges for isotope separation was first suggested in 1919, and the broader premise of any sort of centrifuge to separate things is much older. Gas centrifuges weren't exotic technology that game out of nowhere, the theoretical basis for them was clear before they were successfully created.

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

#368

Post by mustacheemperor »

themagician wrote: post #352
abliefern wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not track for me at all. I'm sorry but why would anybody in the DOD have an incentive to "make Americans believe in US military and intelligence superiority"?

So many reasons. If you want unlimited funding, if you want people to join, if you want citizens to feel safe… you really want them to feel like the government is powerful. If people think their government is a joke they will treat it as a joke. You don't want people thinking that a dozen people with box cutters can fly planes into buildings. You don't want people thinking that "the greatest superpower in the world"…

There's a vast gulf between "believing that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division..." and subscribing to your theory which is so far only supported by you insisting to us what "you want" as a theoretical deep state government apparatus. From my perspective, it would seem like the widespread belief that terrorists could crash planes into buildings resulted in a lot of public money, enlistment, and support flowing into the US Military over the early 2000s.

You're presenting a false choice between two conspiracy theories as the only ways to view this situation, which certainly doesn't make your particular conspiracy theory look any more credible.

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

#369

Post by ribosometronome »

themagician wrote: post #272
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. (…

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 o…

>only a supremely powerful government would be able to coverup the existence of extraterrestrial life for 50+ years.

The allegations by David Grusch that set all this off included that there's been a decades long competition between various nations to collect these craft.

From The Debrief Article

>“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.

My take away had been that most of the allegations are effectively some level all the stuff we've always heard about UFOs has been true this whole time (e.g. Roswell). Essentially one of the worst kept secrets, ignored largely because of the implausibility rather than secrecy.

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

#370

Post by zapataband1 »

jl6 wrote: 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.

This dude seems credible.. What if his story exposes the gov using UFOs as a psyop internally? Someone posted about a doc called Mirage Men in which people allege that the gov has used this UFO story to keep people quiet about secret programs. Going to watch it later today. Even if just that is exposed it would be wild.
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