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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

#481

Post by themagician »

_kbh_ wrote: post #469
themagician wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war in Ukraine is showing that the "superpowers" aren't so super. It's showing just how much of the military superiority is propaganda and nothing more. But we already knew that, because the US just went through what Russia is now going through. The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. You'd think…

> The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. To be fair the US left Afghanistan and the remaining Afghani army crumbled to the taliban pretty quickly. I’d say the two situations are very different, the US successfully occupied a country that was ~7000km from them. The Russians have so far failed to take…

To be even more fair, the US lost the War in Afghanistan. It's an unambiguous Taliban victory. That's how it will read in every history book that doesn't have an American flag and a bald eagle on it. 20 years there and all the US did was create a whole new generation of terrorists who will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge.

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

#482

Post by lend000 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #454
esbranson wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mick West should stick to Tony Hawk videogames and leave this to the pilots who say his explanations are idiotic.

When discussing something rationally what matters is the merits of the arguments, not the background of the speaker. Mick West's background as a video game developer don't detract from his arguments. Furthermore, Navy pilot are not assured against dishonesty or error; even US Navy pilots are humans. Spare me this "support the troops" style of rhetoric; you can't use patriotism to shame me into uncritically taking mil…

I agree we should avoid appeals to authority, but Mick West's argument is essentially saying all the secondary evidence, including witness testimony corresponding to the video he is trying to disprove is false (or ignores it altogether), so he unfortunately turns it into a he-said-she-said (where his credibility becomes relevant, since he doesn't have any, and the pilots have at least a little).

Mick West always starts with a conclusion and works backwards from there. He had a satisfying explanation re: parallax on the "GoFast" video, and developed a cult following from there, but the Gimbal one is really grasping at straws.

I've read about enough anomalies and see enough statistical patterns to develop an intuition that some percentage of them represent something really interesting, even without a smoking gun. We've had a lot of time to experiment with implanting experiences and studying mass hallucinations and they are no better understood than when people first tried using them to wish away inconvenient data. It just seems like a deus ex machina to ignore something frightening observed by someone credible (where frightening == worldview-changing).

Have you ever honestly considered, if you were a casual naturalist in Galileo's time, whether you with your present personality would side with the church or with Galileo?

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

#483

Post by vel0city »

kube-system wrote: post #245
jvanderbot wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I used to know a number of NASA programmers out of Houston. They did a lot of Java programming on some pretty hyper-optimized and specified JVMs. They liked it because it would be easier for them to run simulations on and could achieve good portability on higher level things.

That was like 20 years ago though. Things could easily be different now.

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

#484

Post by revscat »

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…

> This is a push by the DoD to make American's believe in US military and intelligence superiority

Do you have any evidence of this?

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

#485

Post by zeitgeistcowboy »

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…

While people in the 1850s probably would not have been able to fix or turn the iPad on they would have been able to examine it. They could have taken it apart and looked at the various materials and perform physical and chemical tests on them. They could open up some of the electronics and look at them with a microscope. The understanding of electricity, circuits, and electrical devices in the 1850s was developed enough to learn something from an iPad. Perhaps they could examine the glass face and learn about that. Perhaps they could learn about new manufacturing techniques by examining the way the device was assembled and formed. I think humans would be able to glean similar types of information from alien technology even if we weren't able to actual use it in its intended way.

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

#486

Post by alephnerd »

themagician wrote: post #459
echelon wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “You spend a lot, but you get the best!” sounds a lot better than “You spend a lot, but we still suck!” This argument doesn't make any sense. The US military is better than the next top three militaries combined. The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.

The war in Ukraine is showing that the "superpowers" aren't so super. It's showing just how much of the military superiority is propaganda and nothing more. But we already knew that, because the US just went through what Russia is now going through. The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. You'd think…

Tbf, it's hard to fight back when a portion of the Taliban was explicitly sheltered by a faction of a nuclear armed state's intelligence service.

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

#487

Post by TechBro8615 »

KineticLensman wrote: post #385
bloopernova wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to look at this solar system panopticon that you apparently have access to. We know vanishingly little about the day to day movements of the largest solar system objects. Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track.

> Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track Sorry, but we routinely track asteroids that are less than 100 metres in size [0]. We track objects in orbit down to a few cm in size [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_La... [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debr...

While we do successfully track many asteroids (for at least part of their orbital periods), this does not mean that we track every asteroid, or even anywhere close to it. In fact, the vast majority of detected asteroid impacts were not predicted by tracking systems before they collided with our planet.

This Wikipedia article [0] presents data measuring the (in)effectiveness of the current tracking systems ("the vast majority are still missed"), and describes flaws in the current approach, such as "blind spots" that exist for various reasons depending on tracking methodology, e.g.:

> all ground-based telescopes have a large blind spot for any asteroids coming from the direction of the Sun.... [but even] space-based telescopes which can observe a much larger region of the sky around Earth.... still cannot point directly towards the Sun.

From this perspective, not only do we fail to track every asteroid, but there are specific and predictable "blind spots" where we cannot track any objects. So if the argument is that aliens could park their ship where we can't see it, then it's not a sufficient counterargument to claim that we track a lot of asteroids, because (a) we still miss the vast majority of them, and (b) many of those we miss for predictable reasons that could be exploited by an adversary who wants to hide an object from our tracking systems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Eff...

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

#488

Post by nameforuser »

If you are interested in learning more about the history of UAPs and claims of NHI abductions I suggest checking out the YT channel Eyes on Cinema. Some of the hypnosis recall videos on there are terrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnCinema

"Barney Hill's highly disturbing hypnosis session regarding his alien abduction experience in 1961"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0er29WQITo

I also see a lot of interesting stuff on https://twitter.com/richgel999 He might even be on HN!

Additionally listen to some of the interviews with Professor Garry Nolan. There is a lot of nonsense and grifters in the UFO world, how do you know this or that isn't a disinformation campaign? It's hard to know what is genuine and who is just trying to sell their book or promote their podcast. Garry Nolan once said something like UFOlogy is not a science and to seriously study the UAP phenomenon it would need to become a serious field of scientific investigation i.e. creating a journal scientists can submit papers to for peer review. I would avoid people like Steven Greer or the History Channel's Ancient Aliens.

I have always been a "show me the evidence" type person. I was an atheist since I was really young. I hope this comment helps anyone who is curious about learning about this subject. I'm not trying to convince you aliens are coming to Earth or "make you a believer".

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

#489

Post by mysecretaccount »

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.

I think this is likely the correct theory too but to hand-wave it away as "discredited" and claim that it also downstream "discredits" anyone who refers to the video is rather mealy-mouthed. Which appears to be the same type of behavior you ascribe to Grusch & co.

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

#490

Post by revscat »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #177

> would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of “non-earth” or “exotic” origin. If that were going on (and I'm skeptical) why would you want to stop it? > Funding would also be cut for “the development of propulsion technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology, systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or inspi…

It would only be prohibited from receiving funding if it wasn’t reported to the relevant Congressional committees.
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