US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by doctorpangloss » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

runjake wrote: post #376

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…

> she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". (sic) When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited? I’m especially curious because I’m somewhat of an “expert” in the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons of footage in a former life) and I think it’s a legitimate object of some sort [1]. Though I don’t believe it’s extraterrestrial. 1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right ov…

> U.F.O. skeptics and experts in optics have long said many of the videos and sightings by naval aviators represent optical illusions that have made ordinary objects — weather balloons, commercial drones — appear to move faster than possible.

> Military officials have largely come to the same conclusion.

…

> Another video, known as Gimbal, shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning. Military officials now believe that is the optics of the classified image sensor, designed to help target weapons, make the object appear like it is moving in a strange way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/us/politics/ufo-military-...

I don’t know, define discredited. Define consensus. I really love that it’s a game developer who seems to be thinking outside the box enough to provide explanations for the public materials. I guess the expertise is not as valuable as it seems, in the narrow problem of explaining camera rendering, and indeed someone with a games background knows a lot about that.

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

#392

Post by akiselev » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:21 PM UTC

mcpackieh wrote: post #390

akiselev wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've got a theoretical basis for warp drives [1]! Casimir effect-based propelentless propulsion! Nuclear engines in spaaaaace! How much more theoretical basis does your contrarianism demand? We've got a theoretical basis for almost any alien technology that comes short of violating the conservation of momentum or breaking the speed of light. Doesn't mean we're any closer to making an SSTO space ship. [1] https://en.…

> Alcubierre drive Relies on "exotic matter" that violates known laws of physics.

It actually doesn't violate the laws of physics. Matter with negative mass has never been observed before, making it purely theoretical. Theoretical basis!

Besides, exotic matter is a shortcut to the energy required, not a necessary part of the Alcubierre drive.

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

#393

Post by jandrewrogers » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:21 PM UTC

lend000 wrote: post #183

rdtsc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They typical pattern is they work for one of the government contractors L3 (now L3Harris), Northrop Grumman, etc. Of course it's a revolving door as well. > You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.

Yes I'm a bit skeptical of the parent's numbers, but if true, I imagine it's very much the exception, not the norm. Technical employees at the contractors did not do much better than the price ranges posted for government job boards (even distinguished/principal engineers capped out at what is probably around $300-350k today after inflation) except in management positions, in my experience. All the most talented engi…

It is an exception but specialized technical expertise can definitely bill out that high to the US government. (source: I've billed out higher)

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

#394

Post by at_a_remove » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:23 PM UTC

I like to consider just listing as many alternatives as I could manage, in order of decreasing likelihood (as per my personal estimation):

1) Some kind of psy-ops from within our own government, meant to mess with a different government or a branch of our own government. Maybe its own citizens. You can get eleven-dimensional chess with this pretty quickly.

2) We have grabbed someone else's UAVs. Maybe China, maybe Russia.

3) We have grabbed the UAVs of an unsuspected party which a surprise technological edge we would never expect: the Wakanda Hypothesis. We don't even know that we're in a game and that we're losing.

...

N-3) Aliens have emerged from local gas giants and are curious about us. Jupiter? Saturn? Neptune? And so on. Probably not Pluto.

N-2) Generation ships or "sleepers" from another solar system are on some sort of grand tour of the Orion Arm, working their way out. We've been noticed and the occupants awakened. Aliens? AI? Maybe there is no difference by then.

N-1) Aliens within a light sphere about 0.45 * (First UFO Year - 1895) heard our radio and really hustled to get here with a hefty blueshift.

N) The captured vessels are either FTL-capable or brought here on a larger ship with such capabilities. All bets are off.

There is another possibility which I think is often ignored, after #3. It's sci-fi, but it isn't physics-breaking the way FTL is. What if the craft are from a parallel earth? I dislike it, but not as much as I dislike FTL. It doesn't even require aliens. A parallel history where we got the ball rolling even a few decades earlier might end up with a civilization a hundred or a thousand years ahead of ours. I wouldn't bet money on anything higher than #2 on my list, but I still think that if we are going to conjecture about aliens, we might as well do parallel Earths, too.

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

#395

Post by dekhn » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:23 PM UTC

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #366

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 di…

The stanford biologist- Garry Nolan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Nolan

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

#396

Post by postmodest » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:23 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #348

tptacek wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well somehow the glare showed up on the aircraft carrier's instrumentation the pilot launched from as well as the jet itself and the jets of other pilots who can be heard on the video confirming the sighting on their own IR and radar.

There are other videos that reverse engineer from what we do know, the flight path of the "ufo" and that it matches the track of another plane 30mi away.

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

#397

Post by moffkalast » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #285

asdff wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are you smoking where there's a clear line from "this thing crashed in the desert 50 years ago, we still know basically nothing about it" to everyone becoming an atheist and tax evader? Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.

A real eye opener regarding this has been the ongoing war in Ukraine. For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.

But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.

Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.

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

#398

Post by tbrownaw » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:25 PM UTC

joshuahedlund wrote: post #278

simmanian wrote: post #194

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 neve…

> 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

One, rich humans sometimes like to go see exotic wildlife, why wouldn't aliens?

Two, how would we know if there were aliens looking around other places?

> and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way

"Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."

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

#399

Post by dekhn » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:29 PM UTC

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…

Are you really comparing China to the US in terms of military power?

China just finished their first domestic aircraft carrier, and the current military hasn't really been in any major war. In the meantime, the US has continually maintained a state of readiness and nearly constant wars while modernizing its fleet.

But you had to just go 9/11 Truther which means nobody here should really be paying attention to you.

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

#400

Post by kvetching » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

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…

"so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it."

He's got access to a lot more than us. This isn't just some congressman indulging it for the lulz. It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials. Even Rubio is having trouble believing it but he's now admitting to have talked to people with direct access to the program. Grusch is as credible as it gets. He said he spent four years investigating this before he came to the conclusions that these secretive exotic craft programs exist.