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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

#571

Post by TMWNN »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #378
lend000 wrote: post #139

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…

> Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology This assertion embeds many assumptions not in evidence. Closed source computer science R&D, not only to which the US defense establishment have access but in many cases funded, is decades ahead of open source and academia in many key areas, not just in obvious areas like cryptography but data structur…

> (As a well-known example, there is empirical evidence that graph analysis capabilities exist that are vastly more scalable than is explainable by literature.)

What's the government application here? AI? NSA analysis of metadata to figure out hidden connections between individuals?

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

#572

Post by tptacek »

revscat wrote: post #473
JohnBooty wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's all people who heard something who heard something People with direct access to such classified materials would not legally be able to divulge details and especially not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison. This doesn't directly prove the claims of Grusch or anybody else, of course. But it is a decently persausive explanation for why it's always "people who heard something who heard something" an…

> People with direct access to such classified materials would not legally be able to divulge details and especially not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison. I believe this is no longer strictly true for UAP-related information [1]. Congress has gotten much more serious about offering legal protections to those who have knowledge about UAP programs. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistl…

Whatever else those protections might mean, they apply only to disclosures made through official DoD channels, not to interviews given to book authors.

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

#573

Post by chihuahua »

Johnny555 wrote: post #514
nobody9999 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sys…

If you like thinking about this sort of thing, there are several (3-6) good episodes of the Lex Fridman podcast that talk about these issues. There's also one that discusses the development of life on earth, it's very interesting and makes it sound like a miracle that we ended up with complex multi-cellular lifeforms.

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

#574

Post by chrisco255 »

postmodest wrote: post #396
chrisco255 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that explain the fact that an F-15 flying several times faster than any commercial or private jet was not able to catch up to it? Not to mention the rapid vertical ascent and mid air rotation. These are not idiots, folks. These pilots and carrier crew members know the difference between a 757 or private jet and something else.

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

#575

Post by colanderman »

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…

"Gimbal" is a speck of dust (or fly, or bird poo) on the lens of a gimbal-mounted heat-tracking camera. The entire video is predictable given the physics of such a device [1]. Not my idea, it's been around since this news first broke [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20019375

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15961848

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

#576

Post by runjake »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #391
runjake wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning.

In this particular case, the turning and spinning just looks like artifacting in my "expert" opinion. I guess it doesn't help that the flight crew audio states it is spinning, but both things can be true. I've seen artifacting like this on FLIR footage a number of times.

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

#577

Post by chihuahua »

optimalsolver wrote: post #502
Alex3917 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right? No. The USA has spent the last several decades putting most of its military budget into aircraft carriers, which will all be sunk within the first 24 hours of any conflict with China. This is just a last ditch effort to try to trick China into thinking we might have some kind of deterrent.

Out of curiosity, what happens after China sinks the carriers?

It goes like this:

1. sink carriers

2. ???

3. profit

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

#578

Post by halfcat »

tiahura wrote: post #557
throwaway743 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very narrow perspective. We've only been around for ~200,000 years, only began to take flight 120 years ago, and flew to the moon around 60 years ago. There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone, a good percentage likely harbor intelligent life, and that life could have easily established civilizations that go back millions of years. Should they have developed tech, even at our pace, they ar…

Doesn’t just the idea of a craft - that’s either FTL or teleports - reaching Earth and them having engine trouble, seem a little silly?

Say we developed that tech, and travelled to another star system.

A technical or psychological malfunction occurs in a novel environment.

What about this scenario seems silly?

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

#579

Post by JohnBooty »

midoridensha wrote: post #553
JohnBooty wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute evidence of the existence of ETA's I said this. So... yeah, agreed. The rest of this: I don't care, except that you have to work yourself into contortions to simultaneously argue that all firsthand reporting of ETA's has been stymied by legal threats from DoD Your logic is incorrect. First, the whistleblower protection is new. It hasn't been around very long…

>Personally I don't believe it's aliens. I find it incredibly unlikely that alien races would send crewed ships here and then be clumsy enough to crash them or get shot down. It's unlikely, but it's possible. Maybe the aliens are rather primitive technologically, and have weapons technology similar to cannons from sailing ships in the 1700s (and spacecraft technology otherwise resembling our early 1970s craft), but t…

    a simple but somehow-overlooked portion of physics 
    that allowed them to build spacecraft that could instantly 
    teleport across the galaxy
Well, I certainly can't say you're wrong, lol.

But science is so iterative. I realize that not all hypothetical species would follow the same tech tree as humans, but "skipping steps" seems so unlikely.

But hey, there are a lot of planets out there. I suppose it can't be ruled out.

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

#580

Post by JohnBooty »

revscat wrote: post #543
tptacek wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with firsthand knowledge to disclose them. But lack of firsthand evidence of ETA's does not constitute evidence of the existence of ETA's. It would be illegal for me to disclose the existence of a +4 Wand of Magic Missile, too, if such a thing exis…

False premise. > It's absolutely true that, if the USG were in possession of extraterrestrial technologic artifacts (ETA's, must credit me for this coinage), it would be illegal for people with firsthand knowledge to disclose them. This is not true. For people with knowledge of UAP or UAP-related programs Congress has instituted procedures for those people to come forward and be protected in doing so. Those mechanism…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that just gives people with UAP knowledge whistleblower protection when it comes to reporting those programs through designated channels.

Whistleblower protection != the right to publicly disclose classified material

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