US Congress doubles down on claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

Why? Are you saying politicians don't like pageantry? Or are you saying that specifically Rubio is more about pragmatism and uniquely not part of the Kabuki theater?

This video does a good job at explaining how the "UFO" is probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.

https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc

https://youtu.be/vNjB3LxBw_0

For example, you might have a declassified CIA document that's being distributed as evidence of psychic phenomenon, but upon further inspection, you'll find isn't the case. What you instead see is documentation along the lines of "someone made a claim about X, here's what they say about X" where X can be "I can read minds" or whatever. At no point is there an actual scientific test of this, the document is just acknowledgment that someone said some outlandish things to government investigators. Then years later those notes are declassified and somehow become evidence that X really happened.

It's like reading a police report about someone who took too much methamphetamine and ran around claiming that they could fly, and then using that police report as evidence that the government knows people can fly.

Personally, I would have thought such a paper was disinformation. Maybe the Soviets did, too!

Exactly this.

I saw a youtube video a while ago about a recently declassified document from the US Navy which says the USS Seawolf reported hearing signals from survivors on the USS Thresher more than a day after the Thresher went missing. The sonar operators on the Seawolf, no doubt well trained professionals, had themselves convinced they heard the Thresher and there were people still left alive. The guy who made the video about this document was very excited; "the US Navy hid this from from us! They told us the Thresher guys died instantly."

But the problem is the Thresher sank in about 2.6 km of water, far deeper than any military submarine can possibly withstand. Furthermore there is declassified video footage of the Thresher's hull on the sea floor, shattered into numerous pieces. There were no pings from the Thresher's sonar; the Seawolf crew were simply mistaken. The report was classified but that doesn't mean it was true.

[Video link deliberately omitted, but you can find it by searching "37 pings"]

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...

You are in some ways invoking appeal to authority but then... All debunking is at some level an appeal to authority. I am unquestionably promoting an appeal to authority above btw.

Since there's no point discussing this "evidence" with a believer, I ask what you would consider viable credible discrediting. My suspicion is, no discrediting would meet your standard and you are not actually prepared to accept any alternate basis, such as lens flare.

> 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 believe that is the optics of the classified image sensor, designed to help target weapons, make the object appear like it is moving in a strange way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/us/politics/ufo-military-...

I don’t know, define discredited. Define consensus. I really love that it’s a game developer who seems to be thinking outside the box enough to provide explanations for the public materials. I guess the expertise is not as valuable as it seems, in the narrow problem of explaining camera rendering, and indeed someone with a games background knows a lot about that.

And what… people don’t believe that the navy also concluded it was gimbal lock?

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

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

Ive seen convincing analyses that this rotation effect is the objects infrared shadow changing shape as it moves relative to the observer. The shape change is almost exactly what we would expect if we were observing a two engine plane, and one engine became occluded behind the body of the plane, hiding its infrared signature from the observer.

The claims being made here go far beyond the existence of these programs: they claim the US is in possession of technological artifacts of non-human origin (TAONHOs, must credit me for this coinage). That is a huge leap from "the DoD has records of an uptick of weird things that happened on cameras that just happens to correspond with a massive increase in the amount of video telemetry we collect".

People like Kean are counting on their audience to read the acknowledgement of these DoD groups as shocking admissions, which is then leveraged to add credibility to the claims of people like Grusch.

It takes no mental gymnastics whatsoever to discredit them. They've done that themselves, time and time and time again. It takes mental gymnastics to retain trust in them.

Ideally that evidence would take the form of a personal experience with the aliens. Less ideally, maybe I could accept documented and consistently observable photographic or videographic evidence from non-government citizens. What I will not accept is evidence that comes in the form of second-hand hearsay from a government "whistleblower" who gets approval for what he speaks about publicly. That's not a whistleblower, it's a spokesperson - and his claims do not resolve the paradox because it's effectively one entity telling me "we lied to you, but now we're telling the truth" - either you're telling the truth but I can't believe you because you lied to me, or you're lying to me and I'm not surprised because you've always lied to me. In other words, this is institutional gaslighting.

For me to accept evidence from a government "whistleblower," I need to see them overcoming some form of institutional resistance. Snowden was a whistleblower. His claims were obviously credible because they made a lot of people very mad, and they chased him to the end of the earth trying to imprison or kill him. Bill Binney was not a whistleblower, despite his claims, because the NSA never prosecuted him and so obviously everything he says during his ongoing speaking tour is somewhat sanctioned by them.

For me to believe aliens are here, based on the words of a "whistleblower," he needs to release documents and photos and videos and scientific data about the craft, and the DoD needs to prosecute or at least ridicule him. But this current situation of passive acceptance by the DoD (or "soft disclosure" in the words of Lue Anon followers) is absolutely unconvincing, and just pisses me off because either my government thinks I'm stupid enough to fall for it, or too stupid to handle the full truth.

If it's legit, could people itt put down their confirmation bias and handle that we're not the smartest around, not top of the food chain, that our governments have lied to us and kept it wrapped sealed through compartmentalization/removed from oversight through third party contractors for decades, have hidden clean energy tech from tax payers so private entities could profit, that people have been murdered to hide this tech/reality, among a long long list of other implications?

Of course if true, but from the looks of what's coming down the pipeline, it's no longer "haha little green men believing, xfiles wishing, tinfoil wearers", and more of "criminal acts have been committed out of greed and keeping control. Better get our heads out of the sand".

Pucker up, because this is likely going to flip all of our realities upside down in a weird, maybe even frightful, and extreme way within the next few years.

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, but Grusch's claims are true because they haven't been.

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-whistleblowers-wou...

https://muckrack.com/marik-von-rennenkampff/articles

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 on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.

My take away had been that most of the allegations are effectively some level all the stuff we've always heard about UFOs has been true this whole time (e.g. Roswell). Essentially one of the worst kept secrets, ignored largely because of the implausibility rather than secrecy.

China just finished their first domestic aircraft carrier, and the current military hasn't really been in any major war. In the meantime, the US has continually maintained a state of readiness and nearly constant wars while modernizing its fleet.

But you had to just go 9/11 Truther which means nobody here should really be paying attention to you.

Do you have any evidence of this?

> "Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights" over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."

This is exactly what happened with the people and incidents that were exposed in the Mirage Men[1] documentary that covers how the government uses UFO and alien conspiracy theories to coverup information that they don't want the public to know.

Well-meaning people stumbled upon classified projects, did the right thing by reporting them to the government, and then the government went out of its way to construct situations and fake evidence to convince them that what they saw were really aliens.

In one incident, the government constructed a fake "alien crash landing" site in the mountains, and flew one of their victims to it and let them investigate it themselves in order to convince them that what they really saw were aliens.

In the process of deceiving these people, the government even significantly contributed to a veteran's mental breakdown and paranoia via agents' lies and extensive surveillance of the victim's life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srtrRbt77AE

It could also be a misinformation campaign meant for adversaries to make it appear that these hypothetical discoveries are backed by a source that may potentially yield more.

Beyond this, perhaps we now have evidence that adversaries reverse engineering the same tech are ahead of us, and enlisting the broader scientific community is now the primary goal.

And again, I’m not saying these are likely explanations. But in the unlikely event that we’re really talking about alien tech, they seem plausible.

- The tech is so far beyond our own that it would be unreasonable to claim it was developed in secret labs within plausible timeframes

- They know it exists, but don’t know how it works, and there are growing concerns about adversaries beating us to that understanding

- They believe adversaries have already figured things out or have surpassed our progress, and there is growing urgency to drum up public support for another space race type of research project

Because the type of exotic field propulsion these things are using is so far beyond the current state of the art it wouldn't be remotely plausible.

It would be like going from vacuum tubes to 3nm EUV in a single step, no one would believe you.

The government isn't even revealing the existence of search-warrant-type documents. Who do you imagine would have the ability to compel the revelation of a secret of this magnitude?

The mid-19th century would make eventual headway with an iPad, but not much if all they were left with was the remnants of one that had been vaporized.

Maybe I'm being naive, but unless there was an imminent invasion, I don't think it would change most lives at all in any significant way.

You go to work because you need to eat and in order to eat you need money from working. You pay your taxes because there are penalties for not doing so. Generals and politicians already lie to everyone, so you keep fighting their wars regardless. None of these change for anyone unless there's some breakdown in society from some external cause, such as an invasion or war.

The only one of those that has any real merit in my mind is that it would probably cause some people to question religion. But the opposite could also be true and the religious types might herald it as evidence that there is a god because only a god could conceive of such technology.

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.

I'd expect basically any semi-competent government to be monitoring those reports and increasing surveillance in the area.

*edit: I don't mean to imply that anyone claiming to have seen something they couldn't identify in the sky is a kook/drunk, I do strongly believe that there are credible observations of unknown flying objects, just that they are unlikely to be alien in origin.

I will say my thoughts on the matter:

Are there aliens out there? near 100% chance (given the size of the universe it seems insanely unlikely we're the only planet with life)

Are aliens within visiting distance of earth? pretty low chance

Are aliens visiting earth mainly focused on the rural united states? near 0% chance

https://xkcd.com/1235/

How would you or anyone else know this?

Consider how many planets are capable of supporting intelligent (as we know it).

Now suppose we detect evidence of industrial behavior (certain pollutants, nuclear detonation, etc).

Would we not laser focus on that one planet and observe it with everything we have - including sending reconnaissance drones?

Furthermore, would we not want to avoid detection where possible, in case life does exist on said planet and it turns out to be an existential threat to humanity?

Also, it would be trivial to avoid detection in our own solar system. Duck behind a moon or planet, or just quietly float in the blackness of space, and no earthling will ever see you.

We know vanishingly little about the day to day movements of the largest solar system objects. Anything smaller than a medium city is incredibly difficult to find and track.

One, rich humans sometimes like to go see exotic wildlife, why wouldn't aliens?

Two, how would we know if there were aliens looking around other places?

> and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way

"Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints."

Thing is, accepting the idea of the extraordinary and inexplicable is rather difficult for humans. Doug Adams explained it pretty succinctly with his idea of the “somebody else’s problem” field, whereby you could paint a mountain bright pink, and it would become invisible to a majority of observers through its sheer jarring improbability and discontinuity with core beliefs about the nature of things.

My background is physics. I’m well versed in “weird but explicable stuff”, I don’t take anything on faith, and I have seen, with multiple witnesses, a truly inexplicable thing, without resorting to what a big part of me still regards as mummery. We all saw the same thing. We all talked about it, puzzled over it, frantically checked the news for an explanation.

The thing is, the people who I was with at the time, they all remember the incident, the sonic booms… and seeing a helicopter in distress, which was the story in the press later that day. The shift to “it was a helicopter” was amazingly quick.

It wasn’t a helicopter. I know what I saw - or rather, I know that I saw something that was absolutely not a helicopter, that fighter jets approached to then have disappear in a sudden cloud - and yet, a big, big part of me yearns to believe that I saw a helicopter, as the alternative is… well, posting stuff that you’ll read and will go “this guy is clearly nuts”, and me being inclined to agree, as again, it isn’t comforting in the slightest to hold in your mind the knowledge that things are not quite as they appear.

There’s even footage of the thing, freely available on YouTube, and there’s evidently no point in anyone removing it or so-forth, as anyone who thinks it’s real is clearly crazy.

I haven’t been quite the same since.

> You’d be surprised how many tech employees inside government clear $750k

That does sound a little high. But it seems you have more recent info than I do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Karem

I have a relative who recently retired after 40+ years at Lockheed Martin, a great majority of those years were spent within the Skunkworks umbrella. I had the chance to ask him a similar question a few years back. The response was "in the non-top-secret areas, stuff that we're getting ready to roll out into pre-production, we're about 5-10 years ahead of current tech". Which makes sense, because their focus is very narrow. They've been working on a project for a while and have had unlimited money to work on it with, so it would make sense that their tech is a few years ahead of ours.

When asked about more classified research areas the response was "a much, much larger number". And that was it. There's no doubt he knows or knew a lot more but due to having clearance and taking it very seriously, he wouldn't talk about it other than to acknowledge that yes, contractors who are effectively the R&D arm of the military and have huge budgets are probably decades ahead of modern tech.

This lines up pretty well with the theory that when a UFO is recovered by the government, it goes straight to contractors who can do better research with a substantially wider breadth, and also add a layer of plausible deniability to the folks at the top of the government.

Same thing in spaceflight. The most recent mars rover uses, essentially, a half-speed imac processor from 1990s.

Why does this seem odd? People embellish or make shit up all the time. Trump loved to tell transparently goofy "sir" stories (https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/sir-trump-telltale-w...).

"But no genre of Trump story is more reliably sir-heavy than his collection of suspiciously similar tales about macho men breaking into tears of gratitude in his presence."

> For example, why would this guy lie about it publicly...

Might not be a lie. False memories exist, and misidentifying things in the sky at night is hardly uncommon. I was once in the Adirondacks and observed what could only be described as a UFO - a bright, silent, slow moving light in the sky - until a minute or two later that C-5 flew loudly over the lake we were staying in, presumably to land at Fort Drum. Size, shape, speed, etc. were all impossible to accurately identify.

Then consider how closely the form of alien sightings matches depictions in popular media. In the 60 it's "little green men", in the 90s it's "greys". Either we have waves of different aliens visiting us, or people are having experiences they can't rationally explain and their brain is filling in the gaps with stuff they've seen in the media.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers

Edit: Another question to ponder: The chances of someone having a camera on them at any given moment is now approaching 100%, but the volume of convincing footage of UFO/alien sighting is as small as it was in 1990. Are people just not filming this stuff for some reason or are the aliens getting sneakier?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

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.

When has this ever not been the case? Maybe gunpowder in the middle ages, when it was best understood by secretive alchemists and utter magic to everybody else. But in the modern scientific era, what are some examples? Even wacky shit like cavity magnetrons don't fit the bill; the basic premise of EM radiation and even radar was already public knowledge by the time these technologies became militarily relevant. The devil was in the details but the broad strokes of the thing weren't utterly exotic.

Even in the case of nuclear weapons, the broad foundation of theory was already public years before they were brought into existence. A great many details were kept secret, but the broad strokes of the thing wasn't secret. When Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues, now in Allied captivity, first heard of the atomic bombings of Japan their first reaction was disbelief.. because they thought such bombs weren't practical to build. But they knew most of the theoretical basis for such bombs already and once they became convinced the bombs were real they had a pretty good idea of how they must have worked.

But then you have alleged antigrav. There's no theoretical basis for such a technology known to the public right now. Nobody can say "well it could be done with XYZ but it would be very tricky to design and expensive to build.."

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

Enter the intergalactic copyright lawyers...

We have had nuclear secrecy for nearly 80 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine countries. North Korea has them, for God's sake.

Nuclear weapons are simply a function of having a large enough industrial base to support their development. The "secret sauce" is officially secret, but it isn't actually secret.

We do [1][2]. Better analogy might be disclosing the present location of all nuclear submarines.

[1] https://uploads.fas.org/sites/4/NotebookMap.pdf

[2] https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/a-u-s-nuclear-wea...

Yes. If the deterrent/protection factor of our nuclear weapons platforms are nullified by their location being exposed, then they are already useless.

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 information - in comparison to the existence of non-human spacecraft; makes me believe that if he was briefed on it he likely would have boasted about it. (and so would I, just imagine what earth shaking news that is.)

Selection bias. We don't know how many crafts fail to make it to Earth. Maybe the trip is extremely dangerous and only a percentage actually make it.

And/or, like most air & space travel, takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts.

Also, we have a very good handle on air travel, but planes still crash sometimes.

(I don't actually believe we have ET crafts coming to earth, but it's fun thinking it through).

Because nobody has figured out an autopilot that doesn't shit the bed once in a while? I'm betting on taking a nap in the backseat is just a universally bad idea when nobody is driving.

Multiple different sets of aliens, fighting over Earth. (I’m not saying that this is true, just that it is one scenario that explains crashes happening if there were aliens as described building craft capable of visiting Earth.)

(1) The probes, like ours, are not designed to return and have a limited life span. Maybe they just gather and transmit data until their power source runs out or something on them breaks and they crash.

(2) Maybe there are thousands of probes or even more (even from multiple sources!) and only a small percentage of them crash. Of course one would assume we'd be seeing them more often if this were true.

(3) We shot them down. That's not impossible, especially if they are just probes and were not designed to deal with something intelligent intentionally flinging high velocity chunks of metal at them.

The last could easily occur if we mistook them for e.g. Soviet/Russian or Chinese surveillance craft and they repeatedly refused to respond to orders to withdraw.

Why would someone send probes here? This planet has been broadcasting "possible biosphere right here!" for at least hundreds of millions of years to anyone capable of doing spectroscopy on the light it reflects. You wouldn't be able to see detail from another star but you could determine things like atmospheric makeup and conclude that there is very likely to be something interesting here. You'd see a ton of oxygen (which is hard to explain abiotically), water vapor, traces of hydrocarbons, and possibly evidence of sunlight being captured by something complex (photosynthesis) vs just reflecting off rocks or ice. Lastly the planet has a large moon and is not tide locked to its star, both characteristics that increase the odds of something complex evolving here (as far as we know).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope

Perhaps if you placed a control moment gyroscope inside a helium-filled sphere, an operator could generate a controlled rapid spin. I'm not an expert by any means, was hoping someone more knowledgable can evaluate the idea.

No, a bunch of somewhat less high-level but still, in some cases, high-level ones are somewhat less flamboyant co-conspirators, co-principals, and/or accessories in Trump’s crimes, as well as having their own; most of the rest are comparatively if not absolutely clean.

> If not, would you be better positioned to scrutinize the current political system as inherently flawed instead of barking at current political candidate X or Y?

I don’t know about the person you’re responding to, but I’ve written more, over a longer time, about the structural problems of the American political system than about Trump’s personal crimes, and I’ve written specifically about how the culture of impunity fed by, inter alia, Ford’s pardon of Nixon fueled a series of subsequent executive abuses of which Trump’s are the most serious.

One can simultaneously recognize and discusss the forest and the unique, largest tree. The one does not, and should not, preclude discussion of the other, both are important.

The "all politicians are crooks" line of thinking just gives the crooks a free pass while making it more difficult for whatever actors are trying to hold them accountable, whether for virtue's sake or for base political gain. Occasionally punishing a crook -- even if it is only a fraction of those deserving of punishment -- will make a few politicians of the next generation act a little less boldly, while shrugging your shoulders and saying "everyone does it" will make them ask what else they can get away with.

Cynicism, even cynicism grounded in realism, doesn't make the world a better place.

People with smartphones and Meta/WhatsApp/TikTok accounts are all over the planet.

Also, I'd like to remind Americans that we're not caveman here. We do have radar and jets flying and cameraphones.

The problem is that if you want to believe, you're ready to throw any kind of common sense and elementary logic out the window. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and this ain't it.

I think most importantly we started watching the sky when humanity started to fly. Suddenly the heavens were a viable place for mankind to be, especially after we ourselves got to space. The post-WW2 era also had a whole culture that was used to watching the sky because there had been very plausible threats of death from that direction. We suddenly cared when we saw something weird in the night beyond just a passing curiosity.

Given how byzantine the US military industrial complex's paperwork and pretend regulation is someone might have been relying on legislation or paperwork predating the change in word usage, and that that influenced the naming of some program somewhere in the secretive world.

It's also worth noting that such a misconception definitely benefit's the military industrial complex as it draws focus towards something that is not there rather then towards what's actually happening, which again is a very common strategy within military intelligence.

These objects are being picked up by navy pilots all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

I totally understand the skepticism and want to reiterate that I am not nor do I want to be a "UFO guy". It is also especially hard to prove, because there are so many outs. One could ask for photos, and then if photos are provided, they're photoshopped/doctored/not high quality enough (which is the case 99.99999999% of the time), and then if they're provided from the government then it's not real because it's a one-off situation e.g. lone wolf, and if there's multiple then it's a psyop/disinformation, and then if they provide a witness or a whistleblower then they're crazy and a nutjob, but if they provide multiple it's just part of the conspiracy, etc etc.

Maybe there is fraud and the wrong people are getting rich from it?

I have no idea who "they" is, but i assume it's pretty easy for a small group of congressmen to spread rumors and declarations on a given topic in the media (from my understanding it is done regularely as a consequence of lobbyist work).