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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

#281

Post by oxygen_crisis »

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…

> 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

How quickly we forget the entire NSA ANT catalogue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog#Content

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

#282

Post by mcpackieh »

akiselev wrote: post #216
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…

Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being nearly two decades old by that point. > An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst…

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.

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

#283

Post by godelski »

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…

Fun story about that. I knew the lead driver for Curiosity and he was sharing a story about how not long after they got off Mars time they were driving it up a slope. Before he left for work that day he quickly thought to add a stopping routine in case the rover slide down the hill because the ground wasn't stable. Came back in the morning and they were worried they crashed the rover because the camera was facing a rock. Was a terrifying 30 minutes-ish moving the camera and checking that everything was okay. The routine saving the rover. (I'm sure the story is a bit exaggerated, but still fun and does demonstrate the high risk these systems have. Even if they only move a 0.15km/hr)

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

#284

Post by heavyset_go »

jvanderbot wrote: post #226
ch4s3 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s. Isn't this because they need to be specified, texted, and certified to work under high levels of radiation, extreme temperature swings, and a tiny power envelope determined years in advance?

Well, the mars helicopter essentially uses a cell phone, so not really. And it's not that low power. But yeah, the mentality was: We know this works, it's too costly to guarantee a new one will work, and too risky to just try it. Same in the military. Imagine the military didn't have radiation, temperature, etc requirements

AFAIK the helicopter wasn't mission critical, it was a nice-to-have demo project that piggybacked on Perseverance's mission.

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

#285

Post by pc86 »

asdff wrote: post #257
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…

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.

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

#286

Post by jstarfish »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #213
justinclift wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no legal pathway to introduce to the public So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.

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 discovery of fireworks.

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

#287

Post by godelski »

akiselev wrote: post #216
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…

Counter-example: the obsolete space telescopes NRO donated to NASA in 2012 were better than what NASA had despite being nearly two decades old by that point. > An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst…

> not evenly distributed throughout the government and its contractors

Not only that, but that "the government" and "its contractors" are often impossible to distinguish and for all intents and purposes the same. Many times realistically a loophole to escape the GS pay.

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

#288

Post by uhtred »

AlexandrB wrote: post #262
uhtred wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem odd that people would put their reputation on the line by making up a story about seeing a UFO. For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/03/opinion/night-i-saw-u...

It's not a lie if the author believes that it's true. People are way too trusting of their senses and memories when both have been shown to be extremely fallible under numerous different circumstances. Remember how suggestible victims had been convinced that they participated in satanic sex rituals during the satanic panic[1]? Why is it out of the realm of possibility that the author is recounting a particularly vivi…

I agree that memories are not always reliable but I personally find it to be with smaller less significant details about a larger event. So I could believe that the author perhaps misremembers colors or sounds or size to some extent- but to have a completely false memory of an entire event? I suppose a helicopter could have hovered over him and trained a search light on him- but to remember it years later as a UFO, I don't know.

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

#289

Post by abliefern »

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 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"?

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

#290

Post by anon84873628 »

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. (…

Seems odd and counterproductive to include the "non-earth" and "exotic" language at all then. Why not refer to all "non-domestic aerospace material" instead? A group who provably knows they have Chinese hardware would be much harder to prosecute under the current language.
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