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US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

theguardian.com

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Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#411
post #256

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Some speculations: To spook enemies of the US and create a mystical aura of superiority around the US military and its capabilities. They're literally creating the impression that the US military has technology beyond the "Clarke threshold." (The Clarke threshold refers to Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") To shake out moles, spies, and unreliable p…

All I can say is that IF there ever is an irrefutable visitation from an alien civilization in the future, it will be shit-show that will never end. I have zero confidence that any government or their populace will be able to handle that realization without going completely bonkers. We simply can't handle it as a civilization. For every sane person who is curious and wants to interact positively with the artifact/bei…

Realistically no one would care. I honestly think some of the 'if we meet aliens there will be moral panic' sentiment is the biggest psyop of all. Most humans realistically would not care unless there was a threat posed.

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#413

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Also people who don't understand what is or is not possible easily get confused about what is impossible / difficult versus possible / easy. My guess is that a substantial fraction of otherwise competent American adults don't realise VTOL jet aircraft are a thing we can and have built for example, and that if one of them saw a prototype like the Flying Bedstead (Rolls Royce experimental platform, which doesn't look a…

I am usually one to treat EVERYTHING with a very healthy dose of skepticism, but who are any of us to say what is possible or what is not? I'm sure that a century ago, space was just something we would never reach. The US Military released rather intriguing, yet unexplained videos of objects outmaneuvering our top jets. You should go check those out. I've yet to see an explanation that covers all the data those jets…

It’s incredibly hard for people to say “we dont have an explanation.” Either it’s unexplained therefore aliens or an equally speculative yet mundane dismissal.

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#414

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You're the fnord sensei so you ought to know best. ;) When I hear about this alien stuff or other "big government" conspiracies I'm always reminded of this saying, not sure where it's from. "Behind every vast conspiracy theory is a sincere hope that somewhere out there, someone knows what they're doing." (i.e., conspiracy nuts in a sense really want to believe in an all-powerful government because it would give them…

The military industrial complex is pretty powerful (arguably it's the most powerful organization on the planet), and is plenty capable of engaging in ongoing conspiracies and psyops. It's naive to believe that the same government who created nuclear bombs with the secret Manhattan Project, and that inserted intelligence agents into media companies in Project Mockingbird, is not continuing to conspire at levels of gra…

I can't imaging trying to hide a Manhattan project today. They hid an entire city containing tens of thousands of people and consuming a serious whole segments of the total US electrical grid and federal budget.

Modern civilian OSINT would have been adequate to deduce fission work was being performed, assuming no one posted centrifuge schematics on their gaming Discord.

And it still didn't succeed, the first world leader to learn that fission weapons work was Stalin.

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#415

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If I came across a planet of smart monkeys and one monkey state had the most baddest mfers with the most insane tech and research, I’d want to learn about them. Everyone’s already encountered the starting conditions in most other countries. US is the only one winning Civilization Earth. I’m a naturalized US citizen, for example. Could have ended up anywhere but it’s best here in terms of opportunity and making new st…

To an alien without our particular brand of 21st century capital ethics, I'm not sure that the US is winning Civilization Earth.

Advanced aliens may be even more capitalistic.

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#416

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If people in the DoD at that level exhibited such a degree of incompetence, wouldn't you want to find out before it's too late?

> If people in the DoD at that level exhibited such a degree of incompetence It is not incompetence - it is orthogonal. I worked with an excellent software engineer who was rather smart - way above average. However, he believed in "Overunity energy" and paid actual money to attend conferences and buy the books. Some folks are predeposed to believing conspiracies and seeing order where there's chaos.

Not to mention:

(1) the Google engineer who "knows" what sentience looks like when chatting with a low-grade AI chatbot (2) the articles by Kevin Roose and other professional reporters about AI chatbots, believing they witnessed authentic confessions from ChatGPT that it wanted to become skynet, evincing a stunning lack of understanding of the function of large language models. (3) NASA Astronaut Edgar Mitchell who came to believe in UFOs and became cited by conspiracy theorists for decades.

People at the centers of professional, institutional respectability who didn't have the wherewithal to step back and put thier impulses under the light of rational examination.

It's not without precedent, and we don't have anything other than second order interpertation of information that hasn't been revealed, but we do have a blizzard of breathless reporting enteratining presumptions that are way ahead of any actual established facts.

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#417

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Extend that too: a) An alien civilization has overcome the massive problems of interstellar travel and is able to visit in a manner that doesn't create a second sun in the sky Seriously people underestimate the ludicrous energies involved in near-c travel. Even with engines off at those speeds the interstellar dust undergoing nuclear fusion off your hull will give you away

But what if it's 0.5c travel? That's a massive difference from 0.99c travel

Agree, visitors may have traveled for millions of years to get here. We should not project human timescales on aliens.

Humans as we know them today will never visit other galaxies, but our AI descendants almost certainly will.

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#418

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To what end?

Why would the organization that would be expected to protect our skies want to make people believe there is something to protect our skies?

Why would they want to make people believe there are things they can’t protect us from?

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#419

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The US is winning (or has won and keeps on winning) the Conquer Victory, the Diplomacy Victory, and the Culture Victory. I think that's the main means of winning Civilization? Been years since I played one.

Is it that shocking that a computer game made in the USA has notions of "winning" which align with those which are dominant in American culture?

I can never understand the desire to pretend that human nature isn't the same around the world. I think it's the same instinct that causes people to pine for the good old days.

Re: US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

#420

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c) An alien civilization can trivial visit Earth and has been for thousands of years. You make a lot of assumptions how difficult it wouldv be to visit and even why they would be here.

I assume that interstellar travel is really difficult for any civilization. That assumption is based on my knowledge of physics (relativity in particular).

Why is it difficult? You just point and shoot. Will take a long time but you will get there in the end.
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