Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 657 posts

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

#511

Post by heavyset_go »

ALittleLight wrote: post #440
heavyset_go wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, I've noticed a lot of the material that gets declassified, that is purported to be evidence of aliens/psychics/magic/etc, is in the form of field notes or case studies that either contain full quotations or summaries of what someone else claims is true, but are not actually experiments or demonstrations of what is claimed. For example, you might have a declassified CIA document that's being distribute…

When they first released the CIA psychic documents I clicked a few at random and my impressions were much different. The papers I read were very much "We're conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our procedures and results."

The government threw a lot of money at that and did direct experimentation, but dig deeper into the weird claims some of those that were adjacent to remote viewing were making/continue to make outside of that and you start getting into that territory. Things like aliens, teleportation, levitation, pyrokinesis, etc.

I remember seeing one document that was about a person claiming to being able to do some kind of teleportation of objects through containers, so the investigators went to see them do it and it appeared that it happened. That's more of a magic show than a real experiment, but because the investigators described what they appeared to see on government letterhead, believers in the paranormal upgraded it to fact instead of field notes.

Same thing happens with reports of UFOs or aliens, their portrayal of evidence of conspiracy rely heavily on twisting testimony, descriptions and appearances in the text into "facts confirmed and approved of by the government."

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

#512

Post by heavyset_go »

nradov wrote: post #387
heavyset_go wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said: > China/Russia/whoever As a placeholder for potential US adversaries who might have the motivation do something like this. If you don't like that I said Russia, ignore it and fill it in with China.

Come on, be serious. China can't even get the metallurgy right on turbine engines. Never mind flying saucers. If they are doing any airborne surveillance over the US homeland then it's either with spy balloons, or cheap little short-range drones launched by agents on the ground. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/china-air-force-may-take-a...

I don't think they're doing anything special other than sending incredibly cheap drones and balloons. Nobody is bending the laws of physics or doing anything advanced here.

If you think people are seeing real flying saucers that are defying the laws of physics, I don't know what to tell you.

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

#513

Post by Hikikomori »

quickthrowman wrote: post #467
esbranson wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor tells us it's unlikely that all those unlikely failures happened at once. Videos, multiple eyewitnesses and AEGIS military radars. Lol.

Now apply Occam’s razor to the following two choices: 1. Aliens have visited Earth. They crashed their spaceships or we shot them down. The US Government (and possibly other governments) retrieved and studied their technology and managed to keep it a secret for decades 2. Aliens have not visited Earth

And somehow these alien crafts are capable to cross interstellar distances but then crash at a rate higher than our airplanes, unless of course there's a shitload of them flying around here.

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

#514

Post by Johnny555 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #476
mitchdoogle wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have it backwards. I think anybody who is remotely interested in this topic would love for proof of aliens to come out. It's just such an extraordinary claim, that their skepticism demands extraordinary proof. Eyewitness reports and low-res grainy videos are just never going to be enough, no matter who they come from. And that's how it should be. If there is real proof of aliens, it will be on the front p…

> think you have it backwards. I think anybody who is remotely interested in this topic would love for proof of aliens to come out. It's just such an extraordinary claim, that their skepticism demands extraordinary proof. Eyewitness reports and low-res grainy videos are just never going to be enough, no matter who they come from. And that's how it should be. If there is real proof of aliens, it will be on the front p…

I believe that there's very likely intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there are ~300 billion stars in just in our galaxy, and the number of stars in the universe are uncountable, one estimate is 7 x 10^22. Not all have planets, of course, and even fewer have planets in what is believed to be a habitable zone.

But still, it's just unfathomable that in billions of years across billions of trillions of star systems, that only one developed intelligent life. Even on earth, life was nearly destroyed 5 times, but still survived and evolved.

Of course, it's very likely that such life will be forever undetectable by us, and we'll be undetectable by them.

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

#515

Post by theptip »

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.

In the theory above, this is one government faction (some group in congress) trying to force the hand of another (pentagon? CIA?).

If you view “the US government” add some monolithic entity with a single set of objectives then sure, the above makes no sense.

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

#516

Post by havnagiggle »

esbranson wrote: post #421
heavyset_go wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my post in response to a comment in the "US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles" HN thread[1] from a few weeks ago that addresses this: > Watch the introduction to the 4 hour UAP panel that NASA hosted a few days ago[2], they address this. > According to NASA, even highly trained and experienced pilots can easily be fooled, and often reported UAPs are artifacts of the tec…

Occam's razor tells us it's unlikely that all those unlikely failures happened at once. Videos, multiple eyewitnesses and AEGIS military radars. Lol.

Remind me, which law is it that someone who doesn't understand Occam's razor will cite Occam's razor?

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

#517

Post by themagician »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #507
themagician wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We lost, but it wasn't a military loss, it was a catastrophic failure of diplomacy. We had control for a long time.

It was a military loss. When one military quits and runs away really fast that’s a loss. And it’s not the first time. When the US loses they hold a parade and say, “We left.” Such a joke. And American citizens never hold their government accountable. Instead they just believe the BS and do it all over again. Kind of amazing, really. No shame.

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

#518

Post by Loquebantur »

quickthrowman wrote: post #467
esbranson wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor tells us it's unlikely that all those unlikely failures happened at once. Videos, multiple eyewitnesses and AEGIS military radars. Lol.

Now apply Occam’s razor to the following two choices: 1. Aliens have visited Earth. They crashed their spaceships or we shot them down. The US Government (and possibly other governments) retrieved and studied their technology and managed to keep it a secret for decades 2. Aliens have not visited Earth

"Occam’s razor" is merely a heuristic, not some sort of law. Neither logical nor otherwise.

Here, you are even using it wrong. You present a false dichotomy and rely on top of that on the faulty, but commonly held assumption, one choice was vastly less probable than the other.

If the US government has covered up the topic for the last 80 years, you must assume your priors to be faulty.

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

#519

Post by mhoad »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #342
narrator wrote: post #123

This is a good thread to catalog red herring techniques. * The government has previously used X to divert attention therefore there is no X. * The person saying X is an accomplice of X and cannot be trusted. * Demanding the answer to the question about X is dangerous because national security. * X is a distraction from something bad Trump did. * X is a distraction from something bad Biden did. * X is a distraction fr…

This is precisely why I've always been most fond of the explanation that "the UFO thing" is a training ground for US psychological warfare officers. We're target practice for US disinfo campaigns.

This is such a ludicrous idea that doesn’t pass even the most basic reality checks. It’s explicitly illegal for a start amongst a whole host of other problems where the incentives make zero sense.

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

#520

Post by i-use-nixos-btw »

I don’t believe such projects actually exist, and my two theories are a bit whacky, but one of:

1. They’re actually used as ways of laundering money out of government pockets without congressional oversight. The whole “oh but it’s top top secret” excuse is an easy one.

2. The positive and negative attention are all part of a plan to convince enemy nations that the US has access to incredible technology. I mean, if I wanted to spook Putin, I’d probably also sign a bill condemning the work on the trillion megaton nuclear bomb. What trillion megaton nuclear bomb? The one we’re condemning!

But let’s pretend it is real.

What is the point of congress withdrawing such funding? Elon steps in, and then such tech is in the hands of a private company rather than the government. How is that a good thing for the US govt?

It sounds (to my naive British mind, which knows very little about congress or its stance on various things) that it’d have been preferable to give a timeline for these projects to present themselves to congress. Immediately condemning them and convincing whistleblowers to present them instead just seems like a backwards way of doing it.

Post reply on HN