US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:41 AM UTC

Aerbil313 wrote: post #377

subsubzero wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah the person(Mick West) who did the debunking is a retired gaming software engineer who is also somewhat of a known troll and has zero background in the field of avionic systems used by the fighter pilots. Some of his debunking statements are borderline absurd, you have a sighting that is seen on FLIR, radar and has an eyewitness testimony along with video and his statement is the pilot who has flown for 10 years…

Not to mention it's seen hundreds of times by hundreds of personnel and devices again and again over the years.

[deleted]

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

#532

Post by throwaway4aday » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:42 AM UTC

jstarfish wrote: post #388

throwaway4aday wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing what gunpowder is, can you discover how to make it just by looking at a sample if you are a stone age tribe? The only part of it you'll be able to identify is the charcoal. The other components are going to be unknown to you and besides that they are so finely milled into the powder that they are inseparable without techniques for decanting and knowing that you had to evaporate the water to get the sa…

I agree, but that's the point-- they're going to try a lot of things to achieve those ends. They may not create a single component of a functional firearm, but they're going to develop a lot of unrelated technology in trying. Even if we never made it to space, the attempt would still have given us Velcro.

I don't think that would be the case for being presented with such a big discontinuity. Comparing it to the space race isn't accurate because while we hadn't achieved spaceflight before we had pretty much mastered atmospheric flight and were using turbojet engines and rocket powered planes to reach the stratosphere and even the mesosphere before the first man reached orbit. We were steadily going higher and higher so reaching orbit was the next step in our progression. Even if you gave a modern rocket engine to someone in 1940 their society would understand almost all of what went into it. Go back further to 1840 and their engineers would be amazed at the strength of the materials but they would recognize a combustion chamber, valves, fuel tanks and even the wiring. In 1740 they would still probably have enough knowledge of fluid dynamics to deduce how it worked although the concept of combining oxidizers and fuel would be foreign to them, though only for another 30 years. Even as you push it back further and further people would still recognize that it was made of some type of metal and could understand that liquid or gas could flow through it and burn and they could probably build a very crude and simplified copy that used the basic principles. The point is that even bronze age civilization was far more advanced than people who had no metallurgy. There are incredibly difficult things you need to learn to go from zero to having any of the components that make up a gun and none of that knowledge is encoded in the gun itself. It's just not obvious to someone with no information about how gunpowder or iron are made how you would go about obtaining and processing the raw materials. It's probably even completely counter-intuitive that you would make something like iron from stone or that you have to burn the stone for a long time at a very high heat. Who would even think of that in a stone age society? The best guess as to how it was invented is by accident and observation. Having a chunk of metal won't give you that insight.

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

#533

Post by mhoad » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:45 AM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #528

mhoad wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The government lying to us and manipulating the population with psychological warfare is a much more germane, plausible, and historically aligned proposition than the suggestion that aliens are visiting earth. In fact if you assume aliens are visiting earth, then you must also assume the government has been lying to us about it. So either way, the government is lying. > It’s explicitly illegal Lol. When has this ever…

Obviously nobody is going to convince you that you have a complete crackpot view of the world, that’s kind of the definition of the situation you find yourself in.

It’s just incredibly clear that you actually don’t have any kind of meaningful understanding about how the military or intelligence agencies work and you are left yelling about a world that exists in your mind. The entire comment is just Swiss cheese to anyone with even a passing familiarity on any of those topics.

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

#534

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:47 AM UTC

botro wrote: post #208

subsubzero wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But.. The US Govt. has zero reasons to acknowledge existence of a non-human superior technology spacecraft. It would undermine their position as world super power and destabilize trust and security in the country and could lead to mass instability and a slow down of technological progress. And if they are running a massive psyops deception campaign it would make the public lose the last vestige of trust left in the g…

Would a US President have the necessary clearance to know of the existence of non-human superior technology spacecraft? A former US President is recorded on tape boasting about knowledge of US military plans to invade Iran. I don't mean to make this political at all, just trying to reason on the basis of a personality and knowing that a president would boast about having knowledge of such trivial classified informati…

I think a large portion of the government, including Trump's very direct reports, know not to tell him anything that should be kept secret. I imagine other Presidents all know a ton of stuff that nobody happened to mention to Trump, you know, for some reason.

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

#535

Post by sacnoradhq » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:50 AM UTC

While I may navigate a Willie Nelson-approvable nudist hippie Magic Mystery Machine, I'd prefer to inform these politicians to please fuck right off with the X-Files conspiracy theories. Even with the most wacky and fanciful personalities not totally fried by acid and weed, selling this disinformation with the transparent prospect of personal enrichment through books, paid speaking junkets, pressers, merchandizing, and other content products would be an insulting, disrespectful farce and abuse of office. I would recommend voters consider firing such grifting fools (including Rubio, Santos, Manchin, and Sinema) out of office because at least prostitutes provide an essential and honest service. A child could pick higher integrity, more informed, and less corrupt COTUS candidates by (random, unvetted) sortition of Baltimore city employees. This sort of institutional corruption unfortunately signals drift towards systemic empire decline and effective collapse long prognosticated (20+ years ago) by great philosophical historians such as Chalmers Johnson. When too many of the soldiers and police officers say "Fuck this bullshit, I'll be a farmer with fixed fortifications in a remote area on my own." that previous age has sailed and the Vikings and Conquistadors aren't far behind.

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

#536

Post by jvanderbot » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:52 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #319

jvanderbot wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but those COTS parts still underwent lots and lots of rad/ vac testing. There's a design-for-resilience vs test-for-resilience tradeoff at play. I'm saying that not all systems require design-for-resilience.

Ingenuity is also running a very customized software stack to go along with the highly tested hardware. IIRC the OS can reboot in a some relatively small number milliseconds. It's meant to be able to crash in mid-air and reboot and recover before the probe loses lift and crashes in most flight envelopes. The software is also set up to crash and reboot rather than try to recover or operate in a compromised state.

Yeah, I suspect we were both in or close to 347 at the time this was getting made.

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

#537

Post by adriand » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:53 AM UTC

parineum wrote: post #529

throwaway743 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, Mick West reaches hard for any way to debunk everything and his conclusions on certain subjects are just flat out ridiculous. Ex: Suggesting that what kids saw at the Ariel school sighting were just puppeteers. Those kids are now adult professionals and have stuck to what they saw. Don't take my word, have an open mind and watch the past and recent interviews with them. Was great to see him put in his place…

> Those kids are now adult professionals and have stuck to what they saw. Knowing what we know about memory, that is not at all surprising.

I understood intellectually the problems with memory but I never felt them viscerally until I listened to The Coldest Case in Laramie, which is a podcast series about what it sounds like. There are interviews with various people who are utterly believable, but at some point the host gains access to the police reports and interview transcripts from when the crime took place, and she reacquaints these people with what they stated originally.

They are totally baffled. They literally cannot believe that what they remember happening in vivid detail never happened, that what they stated in reports from 20 or 30 years ago - which must be true - has little relation to their present day recollections. Hearing the disbelief and confusion in their voices really made the fallibility of memory real to me.

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

#538

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 1:03 AM UTC

quickthrowman wrote: post #527

Loquebantur wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Ok, let’s add a third scenario: aliens have visited Earth undetected. Hell, you can add as many scenarios as you like, I’m still going to go with ‘Aliens have not visited earth’ unless presented with overwhelmingly concrete evidence. Anecdotes and eyewitness accounts from falliable humans and weird sensor readings from non-scientific sensors that are designed for war are not the least bit convincing to me. Being visi…

You don't want evidence, you want someone important to say convincing evidence exists.

One is factual and scientific, the other is authoritarian.

There are decades of evidence of sightings and encounters, collected by government and military agencies in multiple countries.

It's nonsense to claim no evidence of anomalies exists when that's just not factually correct.

Evidence of what is a different question. But the scientific approach starts with "That's interesting and unexpected" and develops from there.

Not from "I can't imagine this is happening and it makes me anxious, so I'll just pretend there's nothing real to worry about."

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

#539

Post by JohnBooty » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 1:12 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #472

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…

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…

    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. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistleblowers-wou...

It would definitely be illegal for anybody with firsthand knowledge via their security clearance to go public with classified stuff. That is 100% clear; probably the only 100% solid fact in this whole circus. They could, presumably, take it to the whistleblower channel in a non-public way, but I don't know the details there.

What Grusch has done is more of a legal limbo area. We can't say how legal or illegal it is without knowing exactly what the classified info is.

What's also clear is that there is a heavy price to pay in terms of career even when going through the whistleblower channel. There are all sorts of incentives to not do it. Just because others in his position does not necessarily mean he is lying.

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. I think it is far more likely to be some kind of camouflage for another more mundane program.

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

#540

Post by ribosometronome » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

themagician wrote: post #433

ribosometronome wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>only a supremely powerful government would be able to coverup the existence of extraterrestrial life for 50+ years. The allegations by David Grusch that set all this off included that there's been a decades long competition between various nations to collect these craft. From The Debrief Article >“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused…

It’s largely ignored because it’s not true. It’s shocking how many people believe in “Rosewell”. I mean… really? Really?! Only in America.

Perhaps, but that isn't the point you or I were making.

You're saying this is surfacing to fabricate American excellence and relied on the assumption that these claims are being made because 1) Only a superior nation could hide this and 2) only a superior nation could find them. What has been claimed was that it's barely hidden and a bunch of nations have been finding them. Your argument is against a straw man.