Former intel officer says 'non-human biologics’ found at alleged UFO crash sites
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
If we expected to see them far away, how would them being here prevent us from doing that (and also from seeing other presumably existing alien species that are not here)?
If the universe has, on the scale of potentially uncountable trillions of years, just barely reached a stage where the probability of life appearing has risen above "infinitely small" then there's nothing chauvinistic or anthropocentric about speculating that we're it.
Yes, and for any given species, it is incredibly unlikely they are the first.
> If the universe has, on the scale of potentially uncountable trillions of years, just barely reached a stage where the probability of life appearing has risen above "infinitely small" then there's nothing chauvinistic or anthropocentric about speculating that we're it.
That is a humongous if that you have to prove, and it still would mean that it's very unlikely we are the first.
The argument "there's lots and lots of stars, therefore it's unlikely we are alone" is mathematically bogus. It presumes the chance that life arises at any given star can't be "too small". But there is little basis for making that assumption.
> if other life exists, the chances of us being first would be really low given the size and age of the universe
I assumed that I didn't have to re-state the assumption that other life exists as the basis for my argument.
We can think or imagine whichever option is more fun and exciting. Without a single example of at least one confirmed alien life a lot of interesting possibilities are open.
The Fermi paradox assumes intelligent life is common. However, perhaps its not. It certainly was not rare on the one planet we know for sure life exists. Biodiversity on earth right now nears 9 million forms, with probably at least that many now extinct. So out of all of those forms of life there is one that evolved the intelligence necessary to detect life outside of this planet.
So even with the age and size of the universe…and knowing the conditions necessary for life to evolve being somewhat rare, and the conditions necessary for intelligent life to evolve where life is being also some rare given our experience here on earth, it is not a huge leap to say that while life might be common in the universe, intelligent life could be uncommon, and if it is uncommon, we could be early enough to be one of few intelligent species out there. So we may not be detecting anybody because there is nobody out there to detect…just yet. Especially given distance and time and the fact that evidence we are capable of detecting is coming to us from an intelligent species may still be quite a time away since we are seeing their past.
Given the limit of the speed of information and the expansion of the universe, there's a VERY small area that would even be aware of the signals we've started sending out over the past century to come looking.
But Earth would be an extremely interesting destination....for future Earth.
Though personally the most likely answer is that it's our own tech that the people sighting it don't have clearance to even know about which is why USINT is so against more attention to reports of sightings.
But if I had to put my money on outlandish claims, time traveling ships would get my best any day over extraterrestrial ones.
we should be able to come back, which means we would already be doing so? as long as the preconditions remain true... either way we would probably have some sort of "butterfly effect/grandfather paradox" laws in place
that said, the value of future earth visiting past earth would likely be 'kitsch' at best :P
Time travel (backwards) is not possible, only inter-universe travel.
What has happened has always happened and will always have happened.
Please tell us more about it!
If both events have occurred at the same time then that means they can't exist in the same timeliness.
Pretty freaking simple ain't it?
No one on HN "throws it out" because this is ostensibly a rational community and time travel is an even more absurd, less scientifically plausible solution than FTL or interdimensional travel. At that point we're just discussing comic book plots. If you believe we live in a universe that runs by comic book rules that's fine - it seems a depressing number of people here do, but there isn't much viable, intellectually grounded discussion to be had about that. You either agree with it or you don't.
I mean hell, let's throw Jacques Valee onto the pile and say maybe UFOs/aliens are fae taking on a modern form in order to feed upon humanity's collective fear of the other. Makes about as much sense as time travel.
So simple, in fact, that all of us are already doing it.
Others try to calculate and predict the position. But they didn’t use enough floating point precision bits and ended up in the earth’s crust or somewhere in the ocean.
In the story the scientist takes a friend forward 22 hours, but outside the time machine door there's nothing. Total darkness.
The friend asks if the scientist forgot the movement of the Earth and the galaxy, but the scientist assures him that no, that motion has been accounted for.
Instead it appears they've arrived between quantum periods, stuck forever out of phase with ordinary time like an elevator stuck between floors and frozen by the lack of momentum.
I ask because that's the first story I read that drew attention to needing to travel in space to keep up with the planet.
What inspired me to write the comment is was thinking about time travel and how people in movies and stories seems to always materialize on a nice level surface, somewhere in a building with the their feet exactly on the floor, in a nice meadow outside the city, on a sidewalk etc. Then, remembering how earth and galaxy move through space I thought how extremely hard would be to get a safe set of future spacetime coordinates to land on.
imo most likely is they exist, but space is just so unimaginable huge, and also Aliens can at most go close to lightspeed. They didn't beat physics nor invented portals / wormholes?
> They should be here already.
Least likely for me out of the three options.. just our tinfoil hat love :)
You're an expert in alien technology and civilizations far more technologically advanced than we are?
Now they might know some tricks around the limitations of our universes physics, but even those tricks must do something measurably.
Hard to know for sure.
He still works for intelligence, obviously. Aliens and UFOs are a well-known and obvious cover story for experimental aircraft. It's his job to spread this story.
Note that I'm not suggesting most things people claim to be UFOs are actually experimental aircraft. A few may be. But often it's a hoax, a piece of dust, an ordinary aircraft, a weather balloon, an artifact of extreme zoom, etc.
Without commenting on the likelihood of any hypothesis, I don't see how this makes sense. If we assume that it is a cover story for advanced tech programs, top secret programs in general are now going to have 10,000x more scrutiny by the media and Congress, and will be far more likely to have details leaked. Drawing attention like this is the exact opposite of what you'd do to keep something secret.
If "cover story" really is the explanation, it seems unlikely that Grusch is in on it--more likely would be that he was also fed the cover story, and that his going public really is resented by the military since it brings so much unwanted outside attention.
These are not "good" answers to the Fermi paradox, and definitely not the only answers. Much better answers (in my opinion) are things like: their signals haven't reached us yet; they haven't developed interstellar communications or travel yet; they haven't developed intelligent life yet.
I would think an alien spacecraft carrying the energy and resources needed for interstellar travel (including the return trip) would be pretty obvious and detectable even by amateur astronomers. Instead what we're doing here is chasing at shadows and grasping at straws. Credible reports deserve to be looked into, yes. But what is Grusch alleging here? Existence of a UFO crash retrieval program. Presence of non-human biologics. OK, experimental Soviet or Chinese military technology with dog or cat DNA counts. Of course the US military guards those in secrecy. When we ask, "did you find aliens?" they aren't going to reply with "sorry no aliens, and to prove it, here are the details of all the experimental Soviet/Chinese/US military tech we recovered."
PBS Space Time has a number of great episodes on the subject of aliens, including questions like how do we know whether humans are among the first spacefaring species: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTrFAY3LUNw
I don't think this is true. If an alien ship landed on the moon, we won't know about it. No equipment or resources put in to monitor something like that. Much less all the other planets, moons, and asteroids in the solar system.
My personal, unsupported belief, is that if there are aliens, Earth is like a nature preserve, and all the crashed ships are idiot tourists who, despite being told not to touch the buffalo, desperately want to touch the buffalo.
The problem with this stance for literally the past 20 years is that the Alcubierre drive, which has yet to be disproven in concept (despite requiring exotic matter and high amounts of energy) has been known about since the 90’s, and at least makes FTL travel, theoretically possible.
This is why I am skeptical about modern-day skeptics: Have they simply all collectively not read the Alcubierre paper, or the expert physicist responses to it, despite having had 20 years now to do so? Do they really think that simply not knowing how to implement it is an argument against it? How nearsighted would you have to be to assume that we’ve discovered all the loopholes already?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-treks-warp-d...
If, as you seem to be confidently asserting, the Alcubierre drive is feasible, has been built, and is what aliens are using to visit Earth, then given that even low estimates of the number of habitable planets in our galaxy runs into the millions (and there are more than trillions of galaxies in our observable universe) we must assume FTL travel is relatively commonplace. Even if only one species built a warp drive, they should have been able to colonize the entire observable universe by now. If one species has figured it out, it stands to reason that many more would have.
So where is the evidence? The Alcubierre Drive as theorized would give off an easily detectable signature. Where are these signatures? They should be everywhere. If the aliens visiting Earth are using Alcubierre drives, they should be particularly noticeable. But, of course, there is no sign of the effect of FTL travel anywhere in the observable universe, and even on Earth, the best anyone can come up with is conjecture and blurry photos.
Also, your mention of "expert physicist responses to it" fails to take into account the amount of criticism of the premise by the scientific community. You write as if the Alcubierre drive is proven science accepted by consensus and only engineering prevents us from building one, but of course that isn't remotely the case. As far as actual science is concerned, the Alcubierre might as well run on unicorn farts.
You're literally just taking one thing that doesn't exist, and "proving it" with another thing that doesn't exist. An argument that weak really doesn't merit the confidence you're putting out here. "But muh Alcubierre Drive" is not the slam dunk you seem to think it is.
Therein lies the rub. "As far as we know." Human knowledge only goes back, what, 2000 years? Industrialization started, what, only 150 years ago? The printing press is, eh, 500 years old? Ubiquitous computers began... literally an instant ago in cosmic timescales.
So while my argument might be summarized as "this one thing may be real because this other thing may be real but just 20 years ago wasn't even hypothetically conceived", your argument is basically "there's no way this one thing is real because this other thing is only distantly hypothetically real and still has flaws and besides, the whole concept is preposterous because there should either be aliens literally everywhere already or nowhere, because that makes about as much sense (maybe they're leaving our "incubator" mostly alone?), and because we simply don't understand how it's possible, despite the fact that we are basically 5 day old babies (and apparently VERY cocky ones) as far as science and human knowledge is concerned at cosmic timescales." LOL
We now have those technologies. It is trivial to extrapolate how effective they will be in say 10,000 years if we avoid blowing ourselves up. By then maybe we'll even have a sustainable Fusion reactor, general AI, and atomic matter deposition.
Do you accept that von Neumann probes are a realistic proposition and that they could have easily blanketed the galaxy by now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
> It has been theorized[3] that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
Half a million years. How long is that, really, in the grand scheme of things. And how close would we have to be to a civilization who released not one but millions of self-replicating probes for one to have visited us by now.
I am not saying this happened, but please consider it could have, it might have, and what if it did.
What if we are seeing these right now?
So this leaves a few possibilities:
1) No intelligent, technologically advanced civilization exists in the universe other than ourselves, because any such civilization would have developed Von Neumann probes, which would mean the galaxy should be covered by them.
2) No intelligent, technologically advanced civilization has yet developed Von Neumann probes.
3) Von Neumann probes exist, but they haven't blanketed the galaxy. Since the math says it should be easy for them to do so, either they were developed relatively recently and simply haven't had the chance to do so, or else confounding factors exist which make the process of unbounded exponential growth more difficult than the math would suggest.
None of these possibilities lead to the conclusion that UFOs (assuming the narrative presented by Grusch and other UFO believers) as described are more likely to be Von Neumann probes than not.
Any nearby civilization that released millions of self-replicating probes should be noticeable. We've studied nearby stars, there's no evidence of any of the telltale signs of energy usage or heat that should accompany something on that scale.
Also, there's no evidence of replication on the part of these objects within the UFO narrative. What are they feeding on? Where? Exponential replication means if they're here they should have stripped our solar system clean by now. Why haven't they?
All of the behavior described resembles conventional, piloted craft rather than the expected behavior of swarms of Von Neumann probes.
Without evidence, that's a really reasonable position that I can respect.
Edit - I wanted to point out that the probes need not strip the system of resources. They might exist to observe, document, and relay data.
Thank you for your response.
How could you possibly know that?
That's the argument I would like to make regarding the existence of angels and the coverup by the secularists to hide their involvement in humanity.
Watch this 5 min clip for additional context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FrloSlst1A
Is this an issue of national Security? Who has what information? Who is housing what artifacts? What funds are used to pay for these projects? Who has committed crimes to hide this information?
All those questions weren't asked because anyone expected Grush, Fravour or Graves to tell them: Yeah I've got a UFO in my garage. In fact all witnesses answered all those questions before. This had one specific goal: Get this into congressional testimony, under oath, from credible witnesses and thus give congress the means, information and constitutional duty to investigate further.
And for all those sceptics out there: this is unusually bipartisan and seeing Gaetz and AOC both laserfocused on investigating government misuse of money on such a historically fringe subject is most interesting.
Indeed, there was very minimal political sniping. A little bit at Biden about the Chinese balloons, but that was it. I was very surprised - especially with those two in the same room.
What’s your metric for quality? Seems merely low-quality sophistry to me.
It should be easier to hack a congressman's personal email account than someone in a air gapped military compound, and easier to hack a scientist's (presumably) academic email.
I watched the whole congressional forum today and those guys are probably the most well-spoken people I’ve ever heard discussing UAP/aliens/NHI. Also, one of the more bipartisan and civil congressional hearings I’ve witnessed in recent memory.
It’s definitely intriguing to say the least and I have a hard time doubting that these guys have not witnessed what they say they witnessed, both with their eyes and in terms of government programs/secrecy/misallocated funds. Now if those UAPs are NHI or government-created machines or something else, hopefully we will find out eventually.
The Interstellar Squid have arrived. They're hanging out around Saturn (cf "largest comet ever"). Even after a century of preparation and propaganda, there is a large fraction of humanity who refuses to conceive of intelligence other than human. This is the last gasp at preparing them.
That, or the political corruption has gotten so rank that they're scraping the bottom of the bin for "lookit the shiny!" distraction stories.
Oh, and let's not forget about the Squid's notoriously poor sense of direction. They've probably been circling Saturn for the past decade thinking it's Jupiter. I wouldn't be surprised if they show up in a few millennia, asking for directions to Earth.
So, let's cut our Squid friends some slack. Interstellar travel is hard, and they're doing their squid-best.
if anything, scalar interstellar travel is SLOW
Technically, yes.
With very little success, alas. Pesky gravity.
> He fished for Curious Squid, so called because, as well as being squid, they were curious. That is to say, their curiosity was the curious thing about them.
> Shortly after they got curious about the lantern that Solid had hung over the stern of his boat, they started to become curious about the way in which various of their number suddenly vanished skywards with a splash.
> Some of them even became curious – very briefly curious – about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly towards them.
> The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren't very good at making connections.
-- Jingo by Terry Pratchett
the russians called them "useful idiots".
The simplest answer is the most probable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL_HYG3uXQg
I watched it, pretty weird. Particularly interesting: 1:45:00 through 2:00:00
Am I missing something?
For example, his description of the holographic principle is what you'd get if you asked a high school student to make up a cool sounding story based on the phrase alone. It reminded me of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion, where one of the Angels "projects" a 3D shadow.
To put it mildly: "That's not how any of that works, at all."
The holographic principle is an observation from theoretical physics that it's possible to reframe the laws of physics over a volume of space as a different set of mathematics on the surface. This is akin to the Fourier transform, it's just reprojecting the mathematics, not people! It's not a teleporter between parallel universes!
For anyone interested: the concept arose from how black holes grow. If a black hole grows twice as heavy, then instead of its volume becoming twice as big (like you'd expect), its surface area doubles instead. Holographic theory is based on this and says that everything in a volume of space can be simulated with a "hologram" on the surface of that space -- you don't need a x^3 simulation, an x^2 one will do. The idea is that there is a lot of redundancy in mostly empty space. Physics doesn't "allow" arbitrary things to go on in there, so the redundancy can be squeezed out by doing all of the maths on the surface, which is less redundant.
Black holes are maximally packed with physical information, so their surface is completely non-redundant, and hence must grow in proportion to their mass. As you add more stuff, you need more surface, and hence the event horizon expands outwards, providing more surface area.
Super weird, but imo pretty interesting to see.
Let’s at least recognize that before automatically casting doubt.
It would not matter if the most credible source alive said it, I would still ask this question: if what they are saying is true, then it's possible to prove it without needing to take what they or anyone else says on faith alone. If you remove what he or people in general from the question, to date I have not found the evidence in support of extraterrestrial visitation of earth very convincing. Plenty of plane-recorded footage capturing strange visuals, but an absolute lack of anything that does not also have a plausible non-alien explanation.
In either of these cases if he has decided that these programs are an existential danger to the world and need to be discussed, one way to out maneuver both of the above constraints is to pose as someone who believes they have been convinced the government is concealing "alien" technology, and can use his credentials to push the story farther than any civilian could. He has found that this tactic has given him access to people he otherwise couldn't reach (outside the limited context of his position/rank etc.)
tl;dr talking candidly about actual top secret research because he suspects it may constitute an existential threat to humanity if it is developed much further (similar to some early physicists' speculation that testing the H bomb could trigger the earth's atmosphere to burn up as well), that could get him in serious trouble very quickly because he's clearly crossing a line that has been clearly drawn around that information. But revealing it in terms of alien tech, he'll either get dismissed as a crank after his 15 minutrs are up, or he'll have gained access to high ranking civilian legislators long enough (with whom he can discuss the actual details directly in private), until he can find enough sympathetic ears that he feels safe to dispense with the "omg alien tech" camouflage.
Program names mean nothing unless you can look up their details as they're usually fancy codenames that spark everyone's tin foil hats. Makes for a great news story and a conversation on HN about "what it might be" but apart from that its useless.
What the average person can do with this information is not the point as far as I can tell. This information is being shared with people who are not the average person, and who do have the ability to investigate further.
The technologies alleged would transform human existence, and would mean trillions or more commercially. Effortless exploitation of asteroid resources being the low hanging fruit. Even if it isn't an instantaneous interstellar drive, it would imply freedom from gravity wells and practical inter-system transportation.
And how is it that there is one pilot that sees UAPs on the regular? This is like the UFO abductee that has been abducted a dozen times. If a pilot is seeing regular UAPs, there will be a hundred pilots seeing this phenomena.
Put it to you this way. If we happened to have alien UFOs crashlanding on the planet, it would be of utterly paramount importance that the technological gap represented is closed as soon as possible, for the survival of the species. It would involve every engineer and scientist being read in to get as much reverse engineering probability as possible.
It would mean marshalling worldwide resources for exploitation and development of space resources and defenses.
I actually like the Robotech / Macross take on this, where the alien SDF-1 crashes on the Earth, and a world war is basically halted in shock. A world government is formed, and immediate worldwide financial reasources are poured into reverse engineering and immediate space-based capabilities developed. That is basically what would happen if the world was shocked by the arrival of technologically superior aliens and we got our hands on some of their technology.
As it turns out, the scale of defenses constructed in the ten years after the SDF-1 is a pittance compared to the 4.8 million space cruisers and likely 50+ billion alien soldiers available to the aliens when they arrive.
The only way there would be no usable technological reverse engineering is if the arriving UFOs specifically built landing craft with the technological base of the natives, or somehow the technology is black boxed in some way that it degrades/self-destructs if there is a crash.
I'll trade my good name for a few million bucks too.
They need performative theatre of such dramatic potential they can distract from the Senates bill about banning Congress owning stocks
Edit: I don’t mean just the stock bill. They need to keep Overton window where it is.
But cover for not banning congress from stock trading? Really? What is your basis?
Are you seeing aliens all over? Sure is convenient they can travel time and space and just happen to crash on Earth … just like in TV shows!
There are models to refer to; how much attention we process on average. Gaming that with noise is not hard for mega billion dollar corps and politicians comfortable with never working
They aren't because there is literally no new data, none. This isn't like Manning etc... where there was a materiel leak of classified data. So what would they be charged/fired for? Nothing. It's so much lazier, the claim is that being prevented access is somehow a proof of a coverup. All of the claims of harm were long before any of the publicity here.
All of the "whistleblowers" in these cases were not on any kind of career trajectory that this would have put in danger or even still serving in those roles.
They were all regular joes with uneventful military careers. They didn't bring new data to light like other whistleblowers - it's all rumors and speculation in this case, and literally a handful of shitty FLIR videos in others.
I'm baffled at the lack of epistemic consistency across truth claims. Nobody would accept this level of speculation for anything actually related to reality yet here we are wasting time on this. I've hurt myself today by being involved here at all. Totally irrational.
> They aren't...
> Totally irrational.
Ok you just proved why they're putting their reputation and career on the line... people calling it irrational.
1. They have no reputations to put on the line
2. They didn't do anything risky
This isn't like we're talking about the AF Chief of Staff or some major leader in a field. So there's nothing to put on the line, they were nobodies before this and once it dies off they will be nobodies again.
Said differently, this whole debacle will make them MORE famous and employable than they were previously. So the overall impact on their life is that they get more fame and attention for effectively no risk. People seeking fame and attention don't generally care what kind.
2. Grusch has testified under oath to the ICIG, both intelligence committees, and now to the house oversight committee. If he’s locking, they could lock him away indefinitely.
Your entire argument is moot and you are looking for any excuse to discredit what’s being said. If you think he’s lying, ask your congressmen to investigate his claims and jail him if he’s lying.
Grusch was a GS15 NGA officer that was read into over 2000 special access programs and prepared/delivered the presidential daily briefing in 2021. He’s quite literally one of the most credentialed intelligence officers in the US.
Dave Fravor was second in command of the USS Nimitz and is recognized as one of the top fighter pilots to come out of Top Gun.
This is way more common than you think it is and again, not special.
I prepped multiple PDBs from 2012-2015 while at DIA and then again while on the JS/J2 staff. Delivering a segment of the PDB is indeed noteworthy, but again, not particularly rare or an indication that you're somehow especially great or special.
This is the reality of the IC ... things that SEEM special to you are boring regular everyday events for us. Few people in the DoD/IC are exceptional and I can promise you that this guy wasn't one of them
Having Top Secret SCI clearance does not give you immediate access to every SAP you request to be read into. Most people are not read into more that a dozen SAPs.
I’ll also point out that if Grusch was an unexceptional IC officer, the pentagon would easily be able to discredit him as such. To date, the pentagon has not attempted to say anything about Grusch’s credibility. Many reporters have stated on the record that Grusch is very well regarded as a high level intelligence official.
What evidence do you have that this guy was not an exceptional officer, other than maybe you yourself were not exceptional?
My record is public so you can verify by yourself
What’s your rank? How many did you have access to? Citations please.
> Many reporters
Given the fundamental disregard HN has towards the MSM, this would be an appeal to authority.
When I was a sophmore the CIA recruiter said he knew coops who had done pdbs. I guess he was disreputable.
No. Intel (especially counter intel) officers are, trained to give information to convince someone of a certain context. Whether that information is true depends on the situation.
But it’s certainly not common for anyone to lie under oath, especially when they are testifying that specific people and corporations are involved in illegal operations. He’s opened himself up to not only perjury, but also lawsuits of false accusations. I don’t think the billion dollar defense contractors would have any trouble suing David Grusch if he’s lying.
There are some other possibilities. My main theory for what Grusch specifically is talking about is that intelligence agencies probably deliberately sprinkle different fake programs into the lists that different people are given access to, so that when information leaks, they can track who is doing the leaking.
Someone probably had a little too much fun creating fake documentation of alien corpses and crashed spacecraft instead of something less world-changing, and some of the folks who ended up being assigned material from that set felt like that was getting into territory that the public really did deserve to know about, because it would change everything if it were true.
It would not only explain the entire Grusch side of this discussion, but the reactions it's gotten from different branches of government. Everyone who knew about the leak-detection mechanism would be tight-lipped because they wouldn't want to disclose its existence. So it would look like an attempted coverup, but it would be a coverup of a security mechanism, not space aliens.
I actually found the story more believable until some of the specific testimony today. A red cube with sides as long as a football field? Where would Boeing even hide such a thing from other countries' spy satellites? Three-dimensional shadows of hyperdimensional objects? That's a really neat idea, but I think it fails the test of Occam's Razor in this case.
Military pilots encountering strange phenomena is a separate bucket, IMO. The US military has some of the best pilots and equipment in the world. I trust that if a bunch of them say they saw something strange, especially with visual, radar, and thermal evidence, there was something strange out there. But OTOH, I think it's an enormous stretch to attribute it to space aliens. It's probably a mixture of rare natural phenomena, classified/experimental aircraft of one sort or another, and mundane objects behaving very oddly when they're far outside their normal context.
When I used to work in a skyscraper, I once looked out the window and saw what looked like some sort of tear in spacetime dancing around the sky. Absolutely black, but with a chaotic silhouette that would smoothly ripple, then suddenly jerk into a new shape. I watched it for several minutes, and it kept going. Eventually it got close enough for me to see that it was just a black garbage bag that had somehow ended up in the right air current to be whisked around almost endlessly. I never did see it land, or even get close to the ground.
I'd love for Grusch's story to be true, but at this point I'll believe it when I see it.
So with your idea, the ICIG is in on it too?
A well-designed hypothetical leak-detection mechanism would include literally everyone in the organization, except maybe the most senior leadership. So even if the ICIG knew of its existence, if the system were designed well, they would have no way of knowing which documents were false.
If the ICIG were aware of the existence of the system, they'd also have to keep it secret, which would mean that even if they suspected Grusch was referring to intentionally false documents, they'd have to handle it as though the documents were genuine and forward it on to Congress just like you're describing, right?
I suspect what will happen is that the intelligence committees will meet with the involved parties in a SCIF. Someone will explain that the documents were intentionally false information. The committees will verify this discreetly. After that, I could see three main approaches for handling the situation:
* The committees make a vague statement that they've investigated the claims and there's actually nothing to worry about after all. They'll have Grusch support that claim, but not discuss specifics.
* Same as previous, but with the inclusion of some sort of excuse for the misunderstanding, like the Project Azorian "mining manganese nodules on the ocean floor".
* They'll decide that the amount of detail Grusch has disclosed publicly is too great to convincingly sweep under the rug, and decide to come clean about the leak-detection mechanism.
If they go with either of the first two, it will fuel decades of conspiracy theories about how the government covered up their secret captured alien spacecraft once again, but that's nothing new.
If I'm right about this kind of mechanism, the people running it might even encourage such things to create a pool of far-fetched lore in the fringes of the public. That way, they could randomly sprinkle in false documents related to those things specifically to catch people likely to leak fringe-related material early in their careers, before they're given access to really sensitive information.
I do absolutely think that Congress should follow the trail and see if there's physical evidence. I'm just saying that I think that what they'll find is that there was never real evidence, just intentionally fake documents and maybe faked artifacts.
Potentially, it could also be a mix of true details, but wrapped in a false backstory. e.g. if an intelligence agency captured a Russian weapon prototype in some underhanded way that would cause a political incident, and wanted to have people reverse-engineer it, they could remove any identifying markings, then let three people examine it separately. Reverse-engineer A would be told "it's from a vehicle of unknown origin that crashed in Colorado". Reverse-engineer B would be told "it's from a North Korean military satellite". Reverse-engineer C would be told "it's from a crash site in Wyoming". All three might be provided with different, faked photo evidence that matched the story as part of their documentation. If any of those stories showed up in counterintelligence records, the intelligence agency would know which engineer couldn't be trusted. Everything else I described for the simpler scenario applies there too.
They aren't because there is literally no new data, none
He can, however, discuss it with Congress and the whistleblower program in a secure setting and has done so (as he mentioned many dozens of times under oath today) and is willing to do so further.
truth claims
I don't see (credible) people claiming that anything was proven to be the "truth" today. Yet that seems to be what you're railing about. Well, hey, I agree with you a hundred percent about that. Nothing proved.
However, for reasons reiterated dozens of times here, his claims are very significant. If they are not true then he has duped a lot of members of Congress. Considering some of the congresspeople I saw up there today, it's not exactly the intellectual A-Team. But still.
Congresspeople can. They can stand up and read classified information into the record. They can’t be prosecuted for it, because of the Speech and Debate Clause.
I'm overwhelmingly in favor of transparency and disclosure, but there are pretty big national current security concerns here.
But it is an ultimate recourse Congresspeople have, should they come into possession of classified information they are afraid will be deposited into the memory hole, like Senator Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers.
It is trivial to see that pushing a potentially desired position of the state/intel agencies could very well raise one's reputation and career prospects with these institutions.
The primary critique of this whole issue is that it is lies. So, why would lying in the interest of the state be bad for one's status within those circles?
Framed in this manner these people are risking absolutely nothing.
If you're going to put your career and reputation on the line, actually show or leak something that makes people believe you.
Otherwise, themselves and their titles only seek to perpetuate an average news story or cover up for something else the government is doing.
That used to be the case, but not in our modern world where “all publicity is good publicity”. IMO, this is a stunt from otherwise no-name government officials looking to get some media time.
We also did have flying saucers in the 50s, but they kind of sucked compared to helicopters.
I’m not saying this whistleblower is definitely lying, but if anyone was capable and willing to bring this forward with receipts, Snowden would’ve done so.
The classified stuff wasn’t really that siloed. He had access to everything CIA, DIA, NSA, etc. He talked about this in his book. Searching for evidence of aliens was one of the first things he did when he got access.
Whilst this is true, he leaked only one document related to Australian intelligence, so if there was a lot of sharing between the two then Snowden clearly didn't have access to a lot of it.
Do you have direct experience? Because this is contradictory to my own experience.
When I was in the Air Force we had access to various classified networks at levels up to and including TS. You often needed to be in a SCIF and/or have TEMPEST-rated equipment to log in, depending on the context, but the systems are networked nonetheless.
What I can say is that it's trivial to keep things you don't want leaving a SCIF in the SCIF.
I just find it hard to believe that the military puts all of this information into decentralized air-gapped silos that are completely cut off from the outside world.
Information isn’t useful when it can’t be searched, cross-referenced and analyzed. How does data enter a SCIF? because it obviously doesn’t originate there. Do people walk in with thumb drives and load it into a computer? That sounds like a security nightmare to me
We weren't generating information though, we were generating products. Products (physical or non-physical) get "used" as opposed to "searched".
All the classified/SCIF systems I used were networked, though the networks were physically segmented and most of the classified systems I used did not have internet access. Whether that counts as "air gapped" in your book I dunno, but I never came across anything like the room out of the original Mission Impossible film where the machine has no network access at all. In fact I question the utility of such a machine.
The odds of evidence of a UFO hitting the wrong comms channel and then not being seen by someone before getting scrubbed are staggeringly low. So for someone to have wide access across multiple silos and then hear nothing, one must assume either the conspiracy to hide the evidence of UFOs is supernaturally good or the conspiracy is both still using off-grid solutions to coordinate internationally and is somehow suppressing information that should be in their silo from ever landing in the wrong silo.
Not to be pedantic but this isn't entirely true. There is a set of what the NSA call "core secrets" that were never leaked, these were all classified at ECI.
https://robert.sesek.com/2014/10/nsa_s_eci_compartments.html
The best we got what was a list of digraphs, codenames and vague descriptions, you can actually workout that at least one them is likely Crypto AG (HISTORY / HST).
And, fyi, as I understand it, “I’m your superior”, is not a valid reason to need-to-know. Need-to-know is, as I understand it, at the discretion of the secret keepers.
Let’s just presume that the people running this are recruited both for their competence and their ability to keep a secret. Would they immediately commission an IT team?
NSA needs IT. It’s essential. These programs - if they exist - are all about avoiding recording anything or communicating anything other than face to face.
I'm not sure I follow. You would almost certainly need IT. Just because the program (allegedly) dates back to 1930 doesn't mean it has no use for IT.
The IRS dates back to before 1930 and it has IT.
It is more efficient for a covert program of a few hundred (dozen?), people who have perfected their mechanisms over 90 years to not have IT.
After 9/11, for the most part, this data was shared as widely as possible. The IC networks are all able to connect to each other over JWICS, which is the military's top-secret network. Data only classified at the Secret level is shared over SIPRNet, the military's secret network. When you get an account on any agency network, you are issued an IC PKI identity, which includes a client certificate. Every time you attempt to access any system or even just a static site, your client cert is used to grab your clearance attributes from your agency's online database (as in, basic ABAC, something you almost never see on the regular Internet). Access to view is granted based on these attributes that give your clearance level and compartments. Sites have to be deployed in such a manner that they can be redacted element-by-element rather than denying an entire site.
The DoD, on the other hand, uses the SAP system to compartmentalize data. Any data generated by an SAP program is accessible only to members of that program (and to the president, who implicitly has clearance to see literally everything).
Other than the president, you're right that nobody can just pull rank to get clearance. SAP access is granted by the program office of each specific program. SCI compartments are granted by your agency. The clearance itself is granted by a government-wide cross-agency adjudication board based on recommendations from counterintel agents who receive data gathered from the OPM, by investigators who are typically contractors.
Why do I know all this? Because I was a cleared system administrator of a top-secret software environment. This was a IAM user with Administrator policy assigned in AWS, in this case C2S, the CIA's top-secret private version of AWS that is shared and used by the entire IC. It's the same as having Administrator access to an AWS commercial account. It doesn't grant you administrator rights to the entire Internet, just to the resources in your cloud account. Individual applications even still may or may not give you administrator access as well, depending on whether you need it, which has nothing to do with your clearance level. This is regular infosec "does this person actually need to be an admin" considerations. And it includes separation of duties. Typically, admins in one system can't be admins of another unless there is no one else who can do it.
Edward Snowden absolutely did not have access to anywhere near just about everything classified. Nobody has that access. Even the president can't just login into a terminal and grab anything. He can ask and his aides will find someone who can do that, but there is no such terminal that is physically capable of accessing everything, no matter who is logged into it.
When Trump ended his term without once mentioning aliens, that’s when I was certain all of this was hogwash.
Are there maybe very advanced aircraft out there we should be aware of? Certainly. But it’s definitely not aliens without hard af evidence.
Although, the nice thing about conspiracy theories is you can always just layer on another explanation. Obviously the Deep State didn't trust Trump with this dangerous knowledge, so they kept him in the dark. Some things not even the President is cleared to know. Duh.
0: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137474748/trump-tweeted-an-i...
There is also the possibility they simply told him no (especially given the keyhole/iranian missile thing) the idea that the CiC is the highest practical authority in the IC is, well, somewhat naive.
We should ask saudi arabia, they probably bought it from him if it exists. Elon has the connections to do that.
A specific allegation made in these hearings is that there is a conspiracy to hide what is known from much of the government. Why people think that would exclude a President thought to be compromised by the Kremlin, I really can’t understand.
Here is a NYT article from 1997 on the the CIA coverup. https://web.archive.org/web/20230726002122/https://www.nytim...
But I also seem to remember an airforce person coming forward with similar stories that were more recent. This article talks about the 1950s-60s.
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"Whistleblower is deluded"
There's no UFOs. Well let me clarify - there's no aliens. If there are UFOs then they are made right here on earth and just need close up, non fuzzy photos.
Our priors should reflect no radio transmissions from aliens, no non-blurry pictures of UFOs, etc etc
The concept of "anonymous" alien visitation is self evidently silly.
But also, the concept of traveling between the stars is also so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. If you don't agree, then you don't really grasp the distance to the stars.
Why not? Walk me through your logic.
> The concept of "anonymous" alien visitation is self evidently silly.
I don't see the self-evident silliness. Can you explain?
> But also, the concept of traveling between the stars is also so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. If you don't agree, then you don't really grasp the distance to the stars.
Or if I don't agree I just don't assume that the only way to travel interstellar distances are rockets. We are slowly discovering alternative approaches that don't require incredible amounts of energy. How do you already know 100% they won't work out? Could you share your time machine with me?
Or are you just assuming that the hypothetical aliens have minds and motivations that would be comprehensible by humans?
Hell, I bet you if I sat down I could come up with at least 10 motivations that might make sense for humans to do the same stealth thing in an inverted situation. I feel like you're not engaging in good faith.
1. Many questions about the US response to aerial devices like the “Chinese ballon” and the public’s right to knowledge about those events.
2. Calls for removing career stigma around pilots reporting UAPs.
3. Calls for additional funding and policies surrounding research and reporting of unidentified aerial phenomenon.
It was a combination of pragmatic process improvements, defense funding requests and unsubstantiated non-human intelligence claims.
If anything, your comment makes the impression of the quintessential HN poster that claims to know better / dismiss others without having checked the linked sources.
Reaction I: The concept/prospect of space aliens really mashes a lot of people's emotional buttons. And "having a right to learn about" is how such strong emotions are usually articulated.
Reaction II: So long as $Potential_Enemy_Nation is a bit unsure about whether you are really lying, about having a bunch of from-1000-years-in-the-future technology hidden away, that you could suddenly start using (against them) if sufficiently motivated...that's pretty cheap deterrence, eh?
Your point stands though. If these things are crashing then surely they would have crashed on some Third World hell-hole where the population would happily collect the debris and sell it to whoever wants to pay. It would be hard to cover something like that up. The US likes to think they are everything, everywhere, all at once, but it's not entirely true.
For entertainment, consider that the Cold War could have been about finding intact UAPs, at least in some of the scuffles.
I remember listening to Art Bell as a kid, fascinated with the stories of aliens, MIB, military coverups, etc… with former military men telling a lot of the stories.
Then I read Carl Sagan and realized how silly it all was. Then I learned how the government lies about so much. How they use current and former military and intelligence to further those lies.
Shame so many still buy into this at all. Highly suggest reading a demon haunted world if you haven’t. It makes these claims pure comedy.
> When the Air Force finally made Special Report #14 public in October 1955, it was claimed that the report scientifically proved that UFOs did not exist. Critics of this claim note that the report actually proved that the "unknowns" were distinctly different from the "knowns" at a very high statistical significance level. The Air Force also incorrectly claimed that only 3% of the cases studied were unknowns, instead of the actual 22%. They further claimed that the residual 3% would probably disappear if more complete data were available. Critics counter that this ignored the fact that the analysts had already thrown such cases into the category of "insufficient information", whereas both "knowns" and "unknowns" were deemed to have sufficient information to make a determination. Also, the "unknowns" tended to represent the higher quality cases, q.e. reports that already had better information and witnesses. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book]
That said, this misinformation only highlights that the Air Force was trying to minimize UFOs, not increase their presence in the public consciousness.
I’m still suspicious of claims about actual aliens until things get declassified.
Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decades - and no concerted & corroborative evidence exists from medieval or prehistoric times (apart from some cave paintings where imaginations have been at play of superior beings).
Human race always had a creative tone to recording our history - we borrow philosophy, allude to existence of supernatural, and of God almighty. When it is about non-planetary life, definitive evidence _must_ exist all over the planet that we were visited - not just one country. Or am I being too cynical?
I've met Travis Walton. He is one of the most genuine people I have ever met. We're just not listening (some people are but most are not capable of hearing it).
I am _not_ a non-believer. It is just the lack of scientific historicity and diversity of evidence that bothers me. I cannot reconcile that mountain of contradiction with the current testimony. It is one Congressional account of definitive existence, versus the absence of conclusive proof or material evidence anywhere else.
There are.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over...
Now, none of them are as clear and objective as "A being that was obvious not human spoke to me and told me about themselves. They are ..." - but that doesn't mean we don't have a ton of incidents reported over the centuries.
Summarily, many supernatural themed events were written by fantasy writers of those age to peddle to crowds outside their region. Those people have died, and the enigma forgotten - but these writings have found their way as proto-evidence of unusual activity from medieval times & now being used to support arguments.
Worth noting that Russia does actually have similar myths, likely for the same reasons.
My takeaway there is more that it's believable pilots have sighted unidentifiable aircraft exhibiting technologically implausible behavior because those craft are classified projects, rather than because they're extraterrestrial craft, but I don't think it's so plainly unbelievable that the government can't keep secret projects under wraps. The stealth modified helicopters used in the Bin Laden raid come to mind, and really, those are pretty boring as far as "top secret technology" goes, and were apparently in pretty regular use already.
Rare triple negation. Also, I couldn't follow the last bit. Were you saying that basically what we imply as dazzling mind boggling technology is a top secret projects waiting to be unveiled / discovered?
And yeah, I mean after reading the book I feel:
- it is plausible witnesses have seen aircraft behaving in ways they believed were technologically or physically impossible
- it is much much more likely those craft were classified projects than extraterrestrials
- the USA has previously created, and kept secret, aircraft levering technological innovations that had recently seemed impossible
The US and the USSR had to collaborate on filtering out UAPs from radar early warning systems so we didn't nuke each other.
Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
> Why is that UFOs are coming up as pop culture topic just now in last few decade
UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
I haven't provided references here in the interest of my time, but all of what I stated here is readily verifiable with a few internet searches.
All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence. The issue today is provenance. With claims so large, even HD video of an object and creatures in real time wouldn't be enough. The only thing that would convince people is the word of the US (or some other major country) government itself providing evidence, which it has done in small doses, and is the only reason this hearing is happening.
And as we know they're the only countries with radar and observation abilities.
> Two of the people testifying in front of Congress are ex military pilots noting that they saw, and logged on radar, objects.
> The third has stated specifically that we do have satellite data and imagery displaying UAPs.
This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
> UFO reports from the middle ages exist, both in paintings and in writings. Ship captains have reports in their logs from the 16 and 1700s. Reports from within the U.S. in the 1800s exist.
We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
> All arguments of the form "where is the evidence" are moot at this point, as there is a mountain of evidence.
No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist. Even a mild dive into the claims shows how absurd all of these are, and often very real explanations are given, verified, and ignored by the community that wants to believe. It's got all the rigor of pizzagate and is in fact less likely to be possible.
They're not? Are you implying that by pointing out one event I'm explicitly excluding the possibility of others? Not sure that follows.
> This is nothing new. There's plenty of "stuff" that can get tagged as a UAP/UFO/Whatever. None of it has turned out to be aliens.
Depends on who you ask, which was kin of my entire point. There is tons of evidence, what missing is provenance.
> We've also got reports of dragons, krakens, bigfoot, the lochness, ghosts, psychic powers, and magic. Hell there's a couple of rather popular books talking about all sorts of phenomena like talking burning bushes, parting the sea, and walking on water.
Again, the was my point. I wasn't saying "here is all the 100% proven evidence". I was saying "there is no evidence" is an inaccurate statement.
> No, it just isn't. HARD EVIDENCE does not exist
There is plenty of material, with plenty of seals of approval, just not from the U.S. gov.
Sorry, I haven’t seen a single decent photo or video—everything is always blurry, distant, or ambiguous. And this is after a decade where virtually everyone is constantly carrying a camera on their person.
I'll point out 2 things:
1) The videos released to the NY times for their 2017 story are compressed and downscaled version of much higher quality videos the US gov has in it possession. That is indisputable fact as the US gov itself freely admits that.
2) You probably haven't looked. I've seen many convincing photos and videos, but unless their from an F-XX aircraft and the D.O.D tells me it is what it is, I ignore them because pictures and video have been easy to fake for as long as picture and video have existed. Here is one I like: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13dmaif/black_triangl... No way to know if it's legit or not, like I've said, but pretty cool either way.
We haven't seen a single clear evidence yet. The objects captured from fighter jet IR cameras discussed in the past have also had explanation of lens flares and focal aberrations. True color image corresponding of the same event do not exist. No two accounts of unidentified activities are also same with inconsistencies one observes when people extend stories based on tenuous observation/experience
One is a potential flare/focal aberration. The other two have no such explanation, and one of the three has radar tracking, followed by pilot interaction (David Fravor), then was videod by a second pilot on encounter (the video that was released.
Keep in mind also that all three are very low quality versions of the originals.
In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge. Create an elaborate story around unexplained IR camera observation. Potentially drop breadcrumbs & leave it ambiguous to project existence of superior otherworldly technology.
I believe most of us agree at this point, whatever proof publicly exists isn't incontrovertible - but ambiguous enough to be an umbrella for other top secret projects. Aliens aren't selectively choosing US - if you pause & think. And if that should not happen, evidence of similar standing should pop up elsewhere as well. The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military, is somehow not matching up with critical reasoning. (And many of these militaries actually do have strong public outreach just like US af-mil)
Leaving aside the military, clear photos have not showed up from the regular citizenry despite us having astrophotography capabilities in phones since sometime. The evidence or lack of it, isn't adding up
That just depends on what evidence you do, or do not believe. Depending on your selection, and number of explanations may make sense.
> In an unstable world, where power projection is necessary & inevitable, it is a tactical move to neither confirm or deny existence of unparalleled technological edge
Personally, I'd believe UFOs were all fake/mistakes before I believed it was real technology held by any government.
> The fact it isn't seen by India China Turkey Japan or any other sufficiently advanced military
It is. UFO reports come out of all of those countries. India has a religious tradition with very clear UFO references, and videos come out of China all the time (although they tend to be purposely faked 100% of the times I've seen).
NUFORC has a kaggle dataset in fact: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/NUFORC/ufo-sightings
I have lived/ been a citizen/ married to someone from each of these listed places. UFO reference in Hinduism is zero. I am practicing Hindu - I can vouch with 100% certainty. My wife is devout Buddhist/ formerly Christian & she confirms there is nothing in their scripture. I cannot engage any of these answers in good faith of critical thinking, as whenever there is a question of evidence, it is either trust-me-bro or it-is-classified
Not sure what you expect me to present as far as evidence goes when my point is "there is a ton of dubious evidence, but evidence none-the-less".
Kaggle competition is a supporting evidence for you?
> And with regard to Hindu UFOs, I was referring to Vimana.
Those were depicted as chariots mostly drawn by flying horses or elephants in Ramayana & Mahabharata. Unless you consider flying horses as aliens. Also, these were written as poetic verses with generous doses of imagination.
> Not sure what you expect me to present as far as evidence goes when my point is "there is a ton of dubious evidence, but evidence none-the-less".
Let me help by stating: There is a ton of dubious statements from many people which doesn't count as evidence (those testifying without shred of evidence to congress). More of he-said-she-said trust-me-bro. Hence why I asserted these aren't worth discussing anymore. And quoting them as support is not good faith in a scientific evidence-oriented discussion
There are conspiracy theories & then there are conspiracy dogmas group of people fall trap to & blindly propagate, much like religion. Then usual responses to reasonable scientific queries become topics of (1) our science isn't developed enough (2) godly metaphysics isn't known enough (3) reasons of alien presence/ absence/ ambiguity aren't clear enough - despite strong evidence to the contrarian opinion.
No, but NUFORC is?
> More of he-said-she-said trust-me-bro. Hence why I asserted these aren't worth discussing anymore
You're more than welcome to stop discussing it then?
I'm not sure why you're dedicated to the idea that no other countries having UFO sightings. Even if it was just clutter and balloons, it seems reasonable for people all over the world to make mistakes and thing something mundane is fantastic. It doesn't seem like a very useful point in either direction of the discussion.
After watching the hearing today, I was starting to suspect that we're party to this psyops campaign. It's one of the most outlandish things I've seen in recent memory.
All of the guys are credentialed and I didn't get the impression that anyone was grifting anything.
They definitely think it's real. I suspect something is real, but I get the impression that the real thing is not what they think it is.
Like, if that's a reasonable conclusion, then by leaving pilots misinformed we've effectively broadcast the tech to our adversaries. Maybe that was the intent, but it seems like a senselessly roundabout method if so.
A duck!
who are you, so wise in the ways of science?
It makes assumptions which don't seem reasonable in the context of the subject matter at hand. If aliens did exist, they could be much more numerous than humans. Their spacecraft could be more dangerous than airplanes to operate. Their method of travel could perhaps result in collisions with Earth even if it wasn't their intended destination.
My overall point is that we should minimize the assumptions we make here. There's no point in assuming various things and then proposing arguments based on those predicates.
We can't assume that getting "help" is trivial just due to the volume of travel. Commercial airplanes can't rescue each other, just as an example.
I don't believe that aliens are making contact with Earth. But I don't find your argument against that possibility convincing either.
In my mind, a much better argument would simply be that with 7 billion people on this planet, the likelihood of alien crashes staying secret seems miniscule. We would have solid conclusive evidence already if it had happened multiple times, like alledged.
that’s bullshit, but i’ll believe it.
for a site with the demographics that it has, one might expect an acknowledgement that thou shalt not deploy on friday.
Intelligence personnel swear to keep their mouths shut. He has no real evidence and no real compelling reason that I'm seeing for coming forward.
What did he expect?
Why this cynical attitude? Perhaps he did expect it and he is now clearly and publicly stating it in a congressional record so something might be done about other whistleblowers.
I guess a counter thought would be that they haven't actually tried to interact with anyone at all, maybe only observe, but the armed forces/governments are the only element of our species with the ability to detect and retrieve them when they make mistakes.
Just somewhere in the desert conveniently close to AFBs and other restricted areas.
1. They make exceptionally few mistakes overall anyway;
2. Perhaps it is the interaction between armed force technology and their vehicles which creates problems for them (whether intentional or not from our side);
3. The majority of our land surface area is not inhabited at any given moment. Maybe these drones, or whatever they are, do not even care about life here, and are not particularly attracted to cities or people, and are statistically more likely to fail out of reach of most populated areas just because that's what our geographic distribution is like.
He doesn't come off that way.
He testified under oath. Every time he was asked for specifics, he said he had them, had already provided them, or in some cases would provide them immediately after because they were classified--which is the proper response if you don't want to go to jail.
If he's a nut, you'd expect evasion, contradiction, waffling and avoidance when asked for specifics. I didn't see any of that. He is already providing data that will be verifiable. An attention-seeking con would work hard to avoid providing anything he can be called out on. I have no idea what's going on, and this is all nuts, but that certainly didn't fit the mold I was expecting.
"I provided this classified information under oath to the inspector general" is not an avoidance tactic but a direction where to locate classified info.
"I'll tell you later" on the surface might sound like an avoidance tactic, but when he was asked when he could provide it the answer was "immediately after today's session." In other words, no stalling at all, he just preferred not getting arrested for sharing top-secret info publicly.
There's almost no chance he'd face any consequences given the topic and the amount of support he'd have the from the public, and even then, Daniel Hale's sentence for disclosing dozens of classified documents to reporters was ~3.5yrs in jail. The LARPers pretending like he'd be sent to gitmo are completely in lala land.
If I had hardcore proof of definite alien life on earth but by revealing it I'd spend time in prison, would I do it? Or would I be content to know that in the 4-billion year scope of life on Earth, people will probably eventually figure it out without me anyway, and that I could let go of my particular contribution to the arc of history for a simple, peaceful life with family? Maybe the latter...
This is all so dumb - the fact that there's more incredulousness to room temperature superconductors than this nonsense is a real shame. Listen to this tripe:
“It is a well-established fact, at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis, that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions,” he said. “And you can imagine, four and five-dimensional space where what we experience is linear time, ends up being a physical dimension in higher dimensional space where you were living there. You could translate across what we perceive as a linear flow. So there is a possibility that this is a theory here. I’m not saying this is 100% the case but it could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and it’s actually coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
And he'll go to Gitmo, but only if the details are specific, because the people who will extrajudicially imprison the whistleblower for revealing details of the program are following the laws we have about classification?
Yeah...
Body language, manner of speech, everything.
Just look at his eyes, they scream "I'm full of shit".
Military pilots do have camera systems like the ATFLIR pods on F-18s but the pentagon only declassifies those videos when it’s useful - like when the Chinese jet made an American military plan fly through its fumes recently
And that's even if we ignore the claim that people repeatedly see something. If I was a pilot and spotted something weird more than once, I'd make sure I record every flight from then on - can't imagine not doing it.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13dmaif/black_triangl...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/12kaed7/2010_ufo_that...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/t4smpl/flyby_uap_foot...
I’ve done some basic research and can attest none of these are at least CGI made. Some of these predate photoshop. The issue with all of these videos are they are hard to prove definitively without corroborating sensor data. But they are interesting none the less.
I hope this gets resolved soon, but I also hope this data doesn't become immediately classified.
When I go out for a hike in the woods or a hike in a new state/country that isn’t my home. I don’t go out destroying the land around me. I observe and enjoy my time
Maybe these aliens are scientists. Documenting biological life across the galaxy. Maybe they’re VanCampers. Just bouncing from planet to planet for fun
If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy. Lots of empty planets with plenty of resources out there!
Not saying aliens/UFOs are real, but I think it’s very easy to imagine them existing and not being destructive. Or maybe they’re just scouting before the invasion :)
Their opsec's way too good for scientists. If they're anything like our scientists, we'd have recovered one of the flying saucers when they tried to go through Arby's drive-through but didn't have enough clearance.
Maybe they're just fictional, and this guy has a Fox Mulder larping fetish.
> If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy.
If we ever achieve FTL travel, do you imagine that it will be available to frat bros doing road trips to Beta Reticuli VI, or will it be this horrendously expensive, economy-wrecking thing that we get to do once or twice and then have to stop because it is almost impossible to do?
We achieved a moon landing for fuck's sake, and the frat bro still hasn't duplicated that one yet (though I will concede he's not doing too shabby).
I think it’s a mistake to imagine how an alien species would behave based on our own tendencies.
A civilization that has achieved what their (supposed) presence here implies has clearly managed to move far beyond human capability, and our understanding of opsec seems irrelevant.
It could be that with sufficiently advanced technology, “opsec” is mostly irrelevant relative to a species like ours with the capabilities we have.
At the same time that’s also when we got mass media, developed our own funky airplanes and got portable cameras etc.
If these are scientific/observation missions, humanity is going through its most transformative stages of advancement, and the last 100 years have been quite interesting.
If we could go and observe a developing civilization secretly and over a long period of time, I suspect we would.
If you rephrase it as "a civilization that mastered interplanetary travel and can split the atom somehow keeps crashing on our planet" it makes me wonder.
What if bugs, suicidal or thrill-seeking pilots or overly confident bureaucracies remain a fixture in the next stages of life's evolution as well?
Or what if fixing those problems is harder than the technology?
Really...
Just look at the claim objectively and it becomes obvious it's absurd.
Do I need to say more?
If things are such that aliens send probes to any such planet as ours they would be concerned about negative consequences and put great effort into ensuring they could not be discovered by _any_ potentially threatening species.
This precludes any of the forms you suggest, as any species capable of sending such would also be more than advanced enough to ensure we wouldn't discover them and that they wouldn't fail at the rates claimed.
Even if we presume many many species sending such, there's the issue that they wouldn't be bothering with us in this way and would either have already conquered us for the resources to fight each other etc. (And even if not fighting they would be aware of each other as a result of these supposed visits).
There's no reasonable explanation for subterfuge which is the only answer ever given for such questions of "why have they not made direct contact?" Right?
Rep Nancy Mace, a North Carolina Republican, tried to get Grusch to elaborate on what he knew about non-terrestrial bodies.
She asks him if "biologics" were recovered from any crashed crafts.
Referencing his previous media interviews, Grusch responds that "biologics came with some of these recoveries".
Were they human or non-human? Mace asks.
"Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the programme I talked to," Grusch responds.ike this."
Believing so suggests there's a purpose to deliberately wasting everyone's time in such a hearing.
Or a simpler answer, Grusch is plain lying. But somehow, the stakes seem pretty high for him to do so here, unless he's confident of the whistleblower book money he could someday make off of this.
> “I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access,”
He has no first hand evidence. Basically somebody pranked him by telling him they had access to super secret programs that he would not be allowed to ever see and now he thinks the govt is running experiments on aliens.
Take that for what it's worth
> at the GS-15 civilian level, which is the military equivalent of a full-bird colonel
I was previously both a Major and later NH-IV (which in my case had equivalency with GS-15-10)and the only people making this claim would be ones that want to inflate their own importance.
They are completely different legally and fall under different legal codes - namely the GS system is not subject to UCMJ nor can they make certain legal decisions that an O6 can make and has a completely different promotion and evaluation.
He wants to portray himself as a battle hardened commander when he’s just another run of the mill PowerPoint slinger.
He also has no direct knowledge it’s all stuff he heard from other people in the government.
And certainly, "a government lies and has secrets" ranks well above "aliens are in our skies" in terms of likelyhood. Occam's Razor and all.
But, I don't know if this sounds like a psyop to me.
One, Grush says that many (dozens?) of people (whose names he has provided to the whistleblower office) spoke to him about these alleged programs. Dozens or people push this psyop... why? The government wants to convince people that it is... even shadier than we thoughts? Or is this some thing they cooked up to ensnare Grusch specifically?
Is our government secretive and scary? Oh yeah. But if this is a psyop then I don't see how it helps them.
Or are you expecting him to just pull a Snowden, leak everything and be charged with espionage?
So basically "take that for what it's worth" in both cases is 0.
Now it’s on you to disprove my teapot theory.
In case you didn't pick it up, the evidentiary proof is on the claimant not the interrogator.
Sounds like utter nonsense.
I want to believe!
The RQ-180 has been flying for years, all over the world, and has only been photographed twice, poorly, from far away.[0]
Not to say an unidentified flying object must be an alien, but it seems very obviously the case that there are aircraft flying around the globe today you and I haven't seen in photos and videos.
[0]https://theaviationist.com/2021/09/05/mystery-aircraft-phili...
What if it's neither of those things? What if something else, not normal as we know normal things of nature to be, but also not classically extraterrestrial or for that matter an outright case of hoaxes and mistaken identity is happening?
That last question leads into the second very common rigid point that should be scrutinized: the assumption that aliens have to be extrasolar visitors to be present on Earth. Since we known nothing about alien life, or any super-intelligent life anywhere at all, we can only guess at anything about its nature.
Because of this I think it's a bad idea to not consider the possibility of something entirely different from classical interpretations of extraterrestrials interacting with us already, and possibly in ways so strange (because of its own truly alien strangeness in a general sense) that they seem absurd and instead get written off as myths or hoaxes across decades and centuries of human history and reported events.
That was a complete waste of everyones time.
But - tinfoil hat time - have they not demonstrated their ability to do this wrt the knowledge around nuclear weapons?
Edit: and considering the claimed abilities of UAP, might those technologies be on par (in terms of military might) with the technology behind nuclear weapons?
Also, that bit about a spaceship needing a biological pilot was kind of dumb. I don’t know how you can see the advances in AI these days and not be able to extrapolate an advanced space faring species not needing a biological pilot on their spaceship.
I think I've only ever seen one quantitative book that deals with the minutiae of a nuclear bomb (in a book about explosives, will link it)
“Simple” is not the word I’d use to describe this conclusion.
Only half kidding, if we meet aliens they will be machines at least to some extent. Biological life has a lot of annoying limitations and continuously circumventing them is more expensive than just becoming machines.
It’s way more likely to encounter von Neumann probes than some beer drinking alien traveling across the galaxy in compression socks and with a neck pillow.
No our government has not demonstrated their ability to keep secrets over the span of a few years, let alone decades.
What next, hearings on Big Foot :)
How would you know it was not from earth? Is it as simple as there being no evidence of any contamination by hair colorants, straighteners, shampoos, or any products sold by Proctor and Gamble?
I too would like to see actual links to any evidence or documentation of these events and products so I can see for myself.
Bigfoot is almost a cottage industry and is definitely a tourist bait in some areas.
Oh, the Vatican is involved! Of course they are, foolish me for not expecting it. No doubt the Knights Templar are somehow mixed up with this as well. It all seems very diabolical; tell me more, Abulafia.
Anyway, a link to something about the hair that isn't carbon-based so it can't be from around here would be great since you brought up that subject. It's still a "tits or GTFO" place here on the intertubes.
Thanks, pardner.
Former commander says he didn't believe in UFOs and defends himself with "I never watched history channel or anything like that" -- as though that's a source for UFOs rather than...history.
Maybe you haven't watched the History Channel recently, but there is indeed a lot of stuff about aliens on there. Possibly more stuff about aliens than about actual history.
That's four hours of aliens nonsense, four hours of drug themed history documentaries (probably the same target demographic as the aliens stuff.) An hour of christian prophesy and preaching, 12 hours of reality TV, and some infomercials to make up the difference.
Is it any wonder that an ostensibly serious man such as a military commander thinks that the History Channel is trash? I'd be concerned if he didn't.
What's actually happening is pretty crazy and anyone who has a small amount of curiosity should give it some consideration. It seems foolish just to dismiss this with a scoff.
There were 138 congressional hearings on climate change in 2022 alone.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/on-the-hill-in-2022-a-bre...
https://www.eesi.org/files/EESI_s_2022_Climate,_Environmenta...
Seems Congress is doing all it can to ignore Issues that really need to be fixed.
>There were 138 congressional hearings on climate change in 2022 alone.
And what came of this ? Just denial, finger pointing and "fund raisers" to get more bribes from the fossil fuel industry :)
If we find out they ARE here, maybe they can help with the climate?
Let's assume he's not a nut job... So why is he bringing to light secrets which could negatively affect U.S. security? Especially as a career Air Force officer and intelligence services member. Whether you agree that this info should be public or not, there's something odd about this person's 180 degree flip. From swearing an oath to protect the country and its secrets, to insisting those secrets become public. Really?
Let's also assume his story is real: The tech could be nuclear weapon level science, so secrecy would nominally be a good thing. But he doesn't seem to know what it is, and has decided that it doesn't matter anyways. What would possess him to face public ridicule, criticism, career damage and all that to be a whistleblower for something that could potentially be dangerous if public knowledge?
It just doesn't add up.
Also, it seems to me the last president wouldn't have been able to keep it a secret had he known about it. Which leads to all sorts of "Independence Day" style conspiracy theories. Occam's Razor says it just isn't true.
Maybe some ultra-big intelligence calling us to get killed for a higher (deeper) purpose (pocket).
So he's got hearsay but no hands-on or eyes-on direct proof. Like Mulder, I want to believe. But if you're going to speak under oath, you've got to do better than this.
My brothers and some of my friends had them twice when we were kids in New York.
You all are calling us a distraction, but it is absolutely nowhere in the news. If it was this distraction, it would be headline on CNN. But it’s not.
I literally know no one that knew this hearing was going on today.
I asked around all day today and no one knew anything about it. They didn’t even know what UAPs were. There are so many other things that are distractions and it’s just not is on the top of the list.
but the thing is, we had government and military officials saying that they were actually alien craft, and they said this under oath, and everyone’s acting like this is nothing.
I did not expect this at all at the hearing because they were under oath, so this is what surprised me so much. I can understand someone not believing anyone saying something on YouTube or a random podcast but they were under oath and they were military officers.
I just don’t understand how no one sees this as something as insane as it is.
I think there are some interesting questions and folks with pretty good credentials that have came out and given some interesting answers to some of these.
* Are there craft that defy the laws of physics as we know them today?
* Do any governments or corporations have access to these crafts, partially or whole?
* Do those governments or corporations have control over those crafts?
* Were those crafts ever intelligently controlled?
* What type of intelligence controlled those crafts? Is it biological?
* If biological, what is the source or origin?
One of the witnesses at the hearing today, Cmdr. Dave Fravor (Retired), seems like a really normal guy, not some previous "UFO nut" out to confirm an existing bias.
He said what he saw was amazing, it defied anything he had ever saw, and as a pilot himself... he wished he could pilot it. He flew up next to the damn thing.
Now whether these are illusions or not, whether they defy the laws of physics as we currently know them, I don't know... but these folks have stated that there are up close photos as well as radar data that backs up their claims that should be released to the public.
I like to think that I still retain a chunk of that curiosity that I had as a kid. I can be a skeptic at work and professionally.. but I don't know how we can advance science past a stalemate if we can't suspend disbelief for a minute here or there and entertain the idea that there are some wilddddddd things we may not currently know about.
I think we should potentially waste some time and always follow these leads.
In the off chance that they were ever true, I wouldn't want to be in the group that just dismissed it because of my own ego.
If they're false, let them sell books and make YouTube videos for the rest of their lives. But we shouldn't just dismiss them outright... especially if they're willing to go under oath and have specific directions to point.
OTOH the BBC in the UK ran it as their headline and dedicated an entire live feed and various articles to it.
The amount of ignorance on display is overwhelming, and a lot of people who fancy themselves intelligent are going to struggle to come to terms with how they were so wrong for so long.
Signed, The past
He never explicitly said anything about extra terrestrial beings, and this honestly just feels like a stupid spy joke.
Or if those objects are also people who have an AGI < $5 megabucks, they're down to audit records with a probe where the sun doesn't shine.
It's also problematic, a distraction, and a waste of resources to address mythological and conspiratorial topics, like having a flat earth research committee.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/sunday-review/tax-rich-ir... https://archive.is/lNEng
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/17/super-wealthy-irs-tax-audits...
It used to be saucers, then silvery orbs, tic tac pills, triangles with bright lights , and now during the hearing we learn about dark cubes in translucent spheres!
I mean... how many different alien races exactly are playing tourists over here?
(not making a claim on the veracity of the reports)
[0]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28640/could-some-of-th...
BBC with the appropriate level of snark for the continual lack of details and evidence.
I wish we had events unfolding to hurl us into a new age of space progress, but the "non human biological" stuff was definitely actual dog shit or someone's lunch.
How people believe this shit will always be amazing to me.
When do we get a horse senator?
Overall, if such events are true I wonder what effect this will have on politics driven by religion-based agendas (many who drive such agenda are not even pious or adherents in any form of the word). Maybe this is finally bring an end to religion-driven politics.
Assuming the only creation God engaged in was planet earth, how he is described (as never changing) means that his revelation of himself in Christ (who was both human and God, in order that his death would be like our deaths, ((wages of sin is death)), but whose divinity would allow him to rise from the dead ((thereby proving the penalty of sin - death - had been paid for _eternally_ {{being God}})) means that any other creation in the universe would need to be in a similar situation as humanity on earth...otherwise Christ as God/Human is totally senseless and useless on these other planets...which can not be since God does not change. Thus, no aliens, anywhere.
Now before ppl go off screeching about religion, this is in no way an attempt to convert. It is just a perspective made possible by someone who reads the Bible and likes to try to place any modern idea against it, and maybe the same might help someone else grapple with the immensity of It All. It also doesn't mean that there is no need for humanity to keep searching and exploring the stars.
This doesn't even make sense. God being unchanging doesn't imply that the relationship of all created beings to God must be the same. Genesis makes it clear that humanity was created in a state of perfection and then fell from grace - and yet God didn't change, despite humanity's relationship to God changing. Therefore it is possible within Biblical canon for created beings to exist which do not need salvation through grace - humans are an exception, not the rule.
I mean, within the Bible, there are humans who just don't die and go straight to Heaven because God likes them and decides to waive the immutable stain of original sin like a parking ticket, because apparently even God's rules can have exceptions.
Also, your assumption that the only creation God engaged with was planet Earth is fallacious. Genesis clearly states that God created the Heavens and the Earth. He created the entire universe. The Bible doesn't mention the dinosaurs either (no, Leviathan doesn't count, file that under the common Indo-European motif of chaoskampf) but we know they existed.
I'm not even religious but I can see your point of view is a bit too limited even within Christendom. CS Lewis was writing about aliens within the framework of Christianity a century ago. Many religious people can square that circle quite easily, simply by assuming God is not strictly limited to what is contained within Biblical canon.
It's possible to understand these passages as referring to God's nature and character, rather than His actions. In other words, God is consistent in His attributes — His love, justice, mercy, and so on — but this doesn't necessarily mean that His actions or creations are limited to a single pattern. After all, even within the Bible, we see God interacting with different people in different ways at different times.
So, to apply this to the topic at hand: God's immutability might not prevent Him from creating life elsewhere in the universe. The incarnation of Christ was a unique event in human history, but this doesn't necessarily mean that God couldn't or wouldn't interact with other life forms in a way that is appropriate to their nature and circumstances. God's consistency in character doesn't restrict Him to only one method of interaction or revelation.
It's worth noting that other interpretations exist which might allow for the possibility of extraterrestrial life without contradicting the idea of an unchanging God.
Reason: it's never aliens
Funny that "UFOs" used to look like cigars ... you know, back when dirigibles were a thing of the popular imagination.
Public US hearing on UFOs [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880454 - July 2023 (199 comments)
A person says "I swear under oath that there is so and so place. Visit for yourself and see". This person is not allowed to take pics at those places. But the official visitors definitely can go see for themselves. The motivation can be "get first hand knowledge of whether budget is being wasted and whether people are being killed", for starters.
This was further expanded upon in the hearing
UFO == Unknown Flying Object
at least since the cold war the US had a lot of interest to capture any unknown flying objects and also not disclose much information about capabilities, scope etc. of such a program
Can this objects be strange? sure I mean it who knows what the Soviet Union invents. Just looking at some of the research Nazi Germany did (and which ended up in the hands of the US) they would be stupid not to do so just to be sure not to miss something.
But does that mean such a program had anything to do with aliens? Not really. But if you already have the program you already keep track of any unexplained aerial phenomena, so people speculating about aliens is basically guaranteed.
Why would you still disclose such things today?
Maybe you where responsible for some missing/crashed Soviet Aircraft or maybe some civilian casualties. Maybe by researching what causes what phenomena you develop some unusual plan which was never used (or build) but has successors which could be relevant if a WW3/Cold War2 starts. Who knows.
What I know is that all the examples about how supposedly we now have stuff based on alien tech seem nonsensical to me, as there is a long paper trail of how people invested that stuff it's parts it's non widely available predecessors etc.
Similar a program not related to aliens seems likely.
And people, including employees etc., coming up with all kind of "interesting" ideas what such a secret program actually does is also well in the area of what I would expect given my understanding of humans.
The US landmass (9.834.000 km²) is exactly 1.93% of the earth landmass (510.100.000 km²), and we can assume everybody can see the differences.
I call it bullshit
okay, so? they didn't say non-terrestrial.
we've put dogs, monkeys, all sorts of other critters in to experimental aircraft.
also, the Russians (Soviets) / Chinese / Europe all have good air and space monitoring capabilities and satellites -- and there is an awful lot more land in Russia. Why aren't they confirming these things?
I'll say it again: this is a way for FedGov to burn media cycles as both Hunter Biden and Trump are facing indictments that have real teeth. Same story since the 90s and the Oklahoma City Bombing, a great way to keep the q-anon / rube demographic riled up.
If aliens are visiting us, why is the US the only nation to have any documentation? Are you telling me the collapse of communism, which caused everything from nuclear plans to biological weapon designs to leak, somehow left aliens untouched?
Not even a little bit the same ballpark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myq_Hc_39aI&t=1898s
Now, I find it difficult to believe there isn't a plethora of intelligent life out there in the universe. There are just far too many star systems. I also find it difficult to believe that any have to come to visit. There is no evidence to support it, and think about it: the time, energy, and technology required to travel the vast expanse of space to reach Earth are unimaginably huge. And if they had that kind of technology, it would seem unlikely that they would routinely crash once they got here. Furthermore, we've only been producing radio waves for a short period of time, nowhere near long enough to signal a remote civilization that we're even here (I'm not sure our radio waves would even be detectable at those distances). And why would they even want to? At that level of sophistication, we would be nothing more than ants to them. Bacteria in a petri dish.
Yet, even we, as humans, spend a lot of effort researching ants. And bacteria, in petri dishes. And if the collective DMT community's experiences are to be believed, and we have contacted and communicated with advanced alien intelligences, they usually seem to be quite interested and curious about us too. This is a huge leap, but maybe the universe isn't what it seems. It could be data, data that could be manipulated from outside the confines of the simulation. Or, maybe there are higher dimensions of reality, that we are currently (mostly) incapable of detecting from our vantage point. Maybe the aliens exist in higher dimensions, and use these UFOs as lower dimension probes, that don't have to travel vast distances of space because they don't originate from other star systems. Maybe they crash because they're SUPPOSED to be found, maybe they want us to reverse engineer them to learn something, to accelerate our technological and scientific advancement.
Or maybe it's all poppycock. Maybe we're the first species that will possibly achieve interstellar transportation, and it will us that are the aliens visiting other primitive worlds. Only time will tell.
I can see why this would be classified. One should not leak to adversaries how miserably some of our sensors and cameras are failing. So that only leaves me with one question. Do governments stipulate in their vendor contracts that if {n} percent of objects can not be identified by some measurable means that they get a heavy discount on the improved sensors?
Grusch's extraordinary claims that the US has forced a global secrecy around the race to recover working and crashed non-human vehicles since 1930, that biological materials (aliens) and vehicles have been recovered multiple times, and that there is currently multiple countries in a "cold war" like race to recover these vehicles on an ongoing basis, seems fanciful.
A beneficial pragmatic outcome will be if there was more government transparency and removal of stigma around reporting UAP for civilian and military pilots.
This is an explicitly bipartisan effort. Most recently:
- Kirsten Gillibrand (Senator D-NY) most recently secured funding for UAP Office, and for years now has been writing legislation on the topic which has been passed: https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/news/press/release/gillibr...
- Chuck Schumer (Senator D-NY) in the past few days pushed an amendment for UAP disclosure, with language including things like eminent domain over any recovered UAP craft. It is unlikely this would've been pushed without consulting the white house. https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment... See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/us/politics/ufo-records-s...
Choice excerpt from Section 10a:
"The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good"
This is from Chuck Schumer, someone that hasn't been adjacent to this topic until now, out of nowhere.
- Jared Moskowitz (Representative D-FL) was one of the three representatives pushing for this hearing
UAPs aren’t little green men. A drone with AI controls fits the quotes description.
- The (democrat) senate majority leader mentioned "non human intelligence"
- Rubio _is_ worried about "ET", per multiple interviews where this is presented as a likely explanation for the observed behavior
- No, an "AI Controlled drone" does not "fit the quotes description", not in the slightest. You are either grossly misinformed about the claims, the capabilities of modern aircraft (black or otherwise), or intentionally misleading others.
If I were a congressional leader, I’d be more than a little concerned about swarms of unidentified drones flying around ships in US territorial waters.
The implication of aliens is a “Lucy with the football” play — a certain number of people always take the bait, and others laugh. It was done in the 50s, again in the 80s when Tomahawk missiles and stealth aircraft were tested, etc. Now the prospect of aliens is covering for some threat.
UAP is simply unidentified aerial phenomena. It’s in the US’s interests to study such phenomena in its airspace.
For example those Chinese balloons, until they were recognized as balloons, also were UAPs.
Supporting the study of UAPs, including potential alien UAPs, is a far cry from claiming the U.S. govt has found wreckage of alien technology and is driving a worldwide conspiracy along with many other govts to keep this information hidden from people.
The bipartisanship at the hearing is to be commended, and the national security angle cannot be overstated. All three witnesses believe these UAP are genuine national security threats because they possess flight capabilities far exceeding anything beyond what we have. These UAP were documented on multiple military sensor platforms, some of which are still classified.
You must realize the USG has been and is engaged in an active disinformation campaign to deny existence of UAP, even to Congress. For example, multiple Subcommittee members mentioned that they wanted to meet in a SCIF with Grusch to receive a classified briefing but could not. A direct quote from the hearing: "Just so that the press knows and the people know, we [members of the Subcommittee] were even denied access to a classified briefing in a SCIF due to the amount of hoops we had to jump through to grant temporary clearance to witness Grusch, who has knowledge of classified information." Additionally, multiple members of Congress were initially denied access to data and personnel related to a UAP incident reported at Eglin AFB and in the end only received a portion of what was sought. Clear attempts to prevent elected officials from merely accessing relevant information is a genuine threat to national security because the military serves the people, not the other way around.
All three witnesses are trained and decorated military service members, each of which have since left the military. Their situational awareness and observational abilities are much better than you or me, particularly since we haven't been explicitly trained on such while they have. Additionally, Grusch is documented to have worked in both the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), two sensitive branches of the military intelligence community. As far as I'm aware, the NRO ships and provides military sensing platforms, and the NGA performs analysis from many different military data streams, including the NRO. Grusch even said in his opening statement that, at the NGA, he had a hand in making the Presidential Daily Briefing.
One commenter here says it's "more reasonable to assume this is psyops by an adversary", which is, by definition, a conspiracy theory, given that the commenter has no evidence of such occurring and would prefer to live in a world where three former US military service members are coerced to commit perjury to Congress about something which doesn't actually exist. Moreover, if an adversarial nation possesses craft with the capabilities described by the three witnesses, drawing any attention, even through an active disinformation campaign, to that strategic advantage is a clear breach of operational security with no clear, tangible benefit.
The preponderance of evidence in support of the existence of UAP should be overwhelming unless you've made the choice to not accept the premise: that intelligent life beyond humanity exists.
Here's a link to the full hearing recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ7Dw-739VY
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You do know that you literally can't make that claim in good faith, right? That is simply your belief and, in fact, is contrary to the testimony of all three witnesses, all of which were personally invited to speak before Congress because of what they know. Clearly, you were not invited, though I suppose that itself is a belief.
All three witnesses claim that advanced military sensor platforms have gathered extensive information on UAP. Is that a piece of a craft? No. However, one of the witnesses testified under oath that he had direct knowledge of where such materials exist. You should want to see where his claims lead, if you truly believe in your closing statement.
>The only “evidence” is hearsay.
If that's your position, you didn't watch the hearing. One of the three witnesses is only there because he experienced a UAP while serving as a flight commander, and his former aviators reluctantly persuaded him to come forward. That individual is a primary source.
>Also, the members of the committee can lie without repercussions, so I don’t believe them. And the military lies to the public all the time.
Ah, so you're a conspiracy theorist. /s
>Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Any person can dismiss extraordinary evidence as illegitimate if they reject the underlying premise. You can have video evidence of a person clearly committing murder, but that doesn't mean a family member won't still claim it's not them or it's fabricated. A piece of material from a craft could be brought out in a hearing, and some people will still claim that it's fake or impossible to prove that it wasn't made on Earth in a government lab. An alien could testify before Congress, and some people will claim it's an elaborate fake using rubber masks and advanced robotics.
In this case, we do have historically-extraordinary evidence (submitted as sworn Congressional testimony and personal statements) of the existence of UAP. You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises:
- Physics as is commonly accepted is incomplete.
- Military pilots are better observers than the average person.
- Life of equal or greater intelligence exists beyond humanity.
However I still need some kind of hard physical evidence to start going down that path. Hopefully it shows up eventually, but I’m not holding my breath.
If mere words are your standard of evidence, then we are different. I need to see/sense/understand myself to believe - material/physical and photographic evidence, and expert, scientific, independently confirmed, reproducible analysis. If you don't, I have a bunch of stories to tell you.
> You just don't accept one or more of the following underlying premises [...]
Really weird to presume this
- Iraq WMDs
- dragnet surveillance
- ANA will fight the Taliban
We also know they obscure the truth, eg Victoria Nuland responding to the question about “chemical or biological weapons” in Ukraine by nodding as she spoke about “research labs”.
We also know the CIA has previously hacked the computers of a congressional investigation into their misconduct.
The default assumption is that this is concocted narratives to raise military funding from an increasingly impoverished and war-weary public — sickened by the MIC waste and ineptitude (eg, we can’t repair ships and all of NATO manufactures fewer artillery shells than Russia alone).
This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
Since you mention the "yellow-cake uranium," you should read the history of that situation. It wasn't a single person's word before Congress that Saddam Hussein had the uranium but the result of an elaborate document forgery which was proven as false within a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
However, each case you cite is either the justification or result of a highly-publicized event (Iraq invasion, Snowden investigation, Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine war). The UAP situation is quashed and remains a verboten subject in many circles, particularly in the media. As such, the UAP situation is distinct from those you mention.
You do suggest that this may be a way to raise military funding. If money was the end goal, they'd say that the US military could disable UAPs if we had more firepower or plowed more money into R&D to realize next-gen systems sooner. None of that was said, and both the witnesses and members of Congress directly contradict this theory. The witnesses admit that our existing military systems and any that we may build in the next "10-20 years" are inadequate to deal with the observed UAPs.
Some of my favorite questioning in the hearing came from AOC, who, when asking about increasing transparency in reporting UAP incidents, asked: "For the record, if you were me, where would you look? Titles? Programs? Departments? Regions? If you could just name...anything." Grusch responded he tell her "specifically" where to look but only in a classified briefing, which she took well enough.
>This is FUD until there’s evidence — these people have zero credibility.
They're individuals with verified and decorated military service records and have provided sworn testimony to Congress under penalty of perjury, which is far from zero credibility. As an anonymous individual posting on Hacker News, I have zero credibility beyond what anyone chooses to believe, and I suppose that's the main point: extraordinary claims require belief in extraordinary evidence.
On Dave Grusch and his claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grusch_UFO_whistleblower...
On David Fravor and his incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
There's no fucking way this is remotely true, but everywhere I look, not matter the community, there's so much "what if" nonsense that reeks of the same ignorance those people screamed about when that was the argument for COVID conspiracies.
The energy required to travel through space is obscene.
The difficulty of traveling through space is obscene.
Finding ANYTHING in space is obscene.
IF somehow all of this was done, then the idea it's been kept a secret when there's soooo many ways of tracking and viewing these things is stupid (especially when you consider how much energy would need to be expended).
This is also assuming that for some reason they want to remain secret?
The whole thing is just so on it's face bs, but people so desperately want to believe they'll ignore all evidence. I can understand that, but I HATE the hypocrisy on display from those who are routinely critical of others for having such gaps in their logic.
I would love for us to find evidence of life in the universe which is why I despise this charade which takes attention away from the scientists who are actually trying to do so. But apparently SETI is in on it too or some other nonsense.
Even more so a million years from now.
The reality is that we're not a particularly intelligent species - as shown by the fact that we're currently terraforming our own planet to make it less hospitable.
Our culture may well be extinct within a century. So I think it's optimistic to believe that we as a species have much of a clue about anything at all.
Now put that in the context of an extremely old universe, and it's not hard to understand that we're unlikely to be the smartest people in the room.
FWIW I'm agnostic about UFOs. The problem is that they conflate two issues - aerial phenomena, and alien visitation.
There's no reason those should be connected. Or that the latter would inevitably be responsible for the former.
The scientific thing to do is to collect evidence of the former before assuming the latter.
2.6 million years ago: Stone tools
1.7 million years ago: Controlled fire
5,000 - 3,000 BC: Writing
3,000 BC: The wheel
1543: Nicolaus Copernicus publishes his heliocentric model of the solar system
1687: Newton publishes "Principia Mathematica"
1915: Albert Einstein publishes the general theory of relativity.
1969: Apollo 11 mission successfully lands the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon.
It's hard to predict how much research all of these will take to fully harness, but given our previous rate of progress I'm still very hopeful that the world in 100 years will have technology we can't even dream of.
That's what this all boils down to. It's the exact same line of logic.
Sure there could be an omnipotent all powerful being that just chooses to stay hidden from us for no provable, observable, or obvious reason. It's just impossible to prove or disprove.
What if they don't need to accelerate? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy. What if they can teleport? Neat, it's STILL a shitton of energy. What if they can hop dimensions or bend the universe? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy.
What if it's not a shit ton of energy? Fuck it why not, how did they find us? They have tech for that? Fuck it why not, why aren't they showing themselves beyond these extremely rare sightings? They have a reason for that. Fuck it why not, why would every government hide these? Tech or war or something. Fuck it why not, why hasn't SETI or one of the thousand other independent science observatories or detectors not picked up any of this or reported on it?.....
and on and on and on.
So i can't prove that tomorrow the Sun God Ra won't descend from the heavens and sit atop the pyramids as if it was his throne and rule from on high, but I damn sure don't have any evidence that's why the sun is moving across the sky.
But this green men circus makes me really uncomfortable at this point. I kinda want to believe.
Unfortunately, we haven't found any drop-in replacement to Newton's first & second laws for e.g.; Conversely, more & more of physics is condensing towards established standard models proving that our model of universe is more definite. In the quantum space our research is mostly finding new interactions, not fundamental particles everyday. Energy & it transformations are the biggest truths eventually. To propel crafts capable of interstellar voyage, immense energy burst is needed for propulsion. We have seen no evidence of the kind of physics which will break relativistic models - and no material which can sustain the thermals in the process.
At the core of it, our chances to find another habitable world & intelligent species wherever they might be is rapidly reducing. Universe is expanding faster than previous estimated and probably double as old if you consider recent research. Our window of opportunity to establish contact passed probably before we came into existence.
It is like predicting we'll be able to detect God by advances one day. That supernatural being could exist - but most scientific evidence points to a hard no, given we already know it is a mental / emotional construction.
People need to believe in something. Multiple things. Anything. It’s why thousands of religions exist.
Most people have mundane lives and are wage slaves. This gives people hope. People want to believe there is more to life. Americans in particular want to believe their government is all powerful.
It should not be so shocking how easy it is to get people to believe this, or the fake moon landing, or anything else. People desperately want to believe, and the government is happy to enable it because it provides stability.
If I was the government exchequer and comfortably spending on the refrigeration of alien entrails & annually greasing their flying saucers, I wouldn't _additionally_ spend billions of dollars setting up space observatories like JWST, new radio wave telescopes & deep space probes to find evidence of life. At the least, experts from scientific community will be invited to investigate any material finds & that information will trickle out in tiny amounts. Scientific community deeply believes in replication at its core. It is impossible for everything to remain compartmental.
And acknowledging existence of alien technology only makes the position of a country more formidable, not less. Our global relationship is today less of muscle (like the past) & more posturing. By acknowledging otherworldly technology's existence but denying the details, US would be incredibly in advantageous position militarily. Why wouldn't they if they already possessed these technology?
We as human race may be spiteful to our brethren, but not stupid given the obscene expenditure of wealth and resources we dedicate annually in lieu of feeding & keeping everyone happy
Whistleblower tells Congress: US Gov't hides 'non-human intelligence' evidence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882051 - July 2023 (1 comment)
Former intel officer says 'non-human biologics’ found at alleged UFO crash sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880471 - July 2023 (13 comments)
Public US hearing on UFOs [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880454 - July 2023 (55 comments)
Live: UFO/UAP Congressional Hearings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36879441 - July 2023 (95 comments)
House UFO hearing livestream [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36877774 - July 2023 (121 comments)
I'm not sure which URL is best so not sure where to marge the threads, most of which aren't very good anyhow. This is a topic on which people mostly just repeat their priors.
Best article link - Former intel officer says 'non-human biologics’ found at alleged UFO crash sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880471 - July 2023 (13 comments)
(RIP Trevor Moore.)
I think it’s all the Hunter Biden stuff:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/hunter-b...
I’m sure there’s a lot of this kind of corruption going on with Republicans in Congress as well so there’s a sort of mutually assured destruction protecting all of them.
Not sure if this is an insane person, a grifter looking for a book deal, or someone trying to trigger an investigation. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say we probably haven’t been studying a crashed alien spaceship for decades.
While the odds are almost 100% that there's intelligent life somewhere, the idea that it got here and then made a mistake seems strange to me.
And I've always thought the military didn't investigate these UFOs because they weren't unidentified to them. They're just FOs when you're the one who built them.
I also can’t imagine a species that has interstellar travel, but manually operated ships. I think we are not that far from humans not operating any forms of transportation anymore, and we are at best thousands of years from having the technology to visit anywhere life may exist.
I disagree, it's pretty easy to make "Drake equations" go to zero, particularly if you limit the scope to just the Milky Way galaxy (only 10^11 stars.) The Rare Earth Hypothesis is consistent with all of our empirical observations of the universe thus-far.
Or it could be a few dozen 50/50 chances that need to be cleared, or some mix of the two. Drake equations only spit out "aliens likely" if you assume earth-like planets will inevitably create human-like life but that's a hell of an assumption. And then we look into the night sky and see/hear nothing from the aliens that supposedly must be up there and call it a paradox... well it's not a paradox if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true. If the empirical evidence is saying one thing and the speculative math is saying another thing, it's probably the speculative math that's wrong.
1. Do programs exist over which Congress has no knowledge and/or oversight. If so, this is likely unconstitutional.
2. Do programs exist because Congressionally appropriated funds have been covertly redirected to those programs without Congressional knowledge. If so, likely unconstitutional.
3. Have whistleblowers been threatened or harmed to prevent disclosure and/or testimony. If so, likely a violation of US criminal statutes, and likely unconstitutional - particularly if those whistleblowers intended to provide Congressional testimony in accordance with Congress's oversight role.
The point is not disclosure, confirming existence or declassification - despite what you may hear. It could be one or more of those things occur, but likely not via these hearings.
Oversight can be as simple as notice to the "Gang of Eight" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence), or possibly the Intel/Defense committee ranking members, and need NOT to be to the entire Congress or even full committee membership. The accusations in these hearings seem to allege this minimal notice did not take place. The testimony also claims extra-governmental (possibly private sector) program management with no political accountability.
In sum... this appears to be a (necessary) power struggle over programs & information. At the same time - and depending on what the real truth may be - one can make a convincing argument little of this information should be public & these programs should remain off the books. Depends on your confidence in the body politic and Congress.
Perhaps, but as we've seen the law and the Constitution are subject to interpretation and to the extent that the law is enforced.
There are no aliens hidden by any government in the world. It's impossible to keep something like that under wraps. This whole thing is put on because it's a good way to distract the public and all politicians who are tough on aliens get political points and votes.
And just to be clear - you can't simultaneously think that the government has the capability to hide aliens but also discredit that the moon landings (for example) were faked. If you find yourself thinking "well they could be hiding aliens" ask yourself if you also find "they faked the moon landing" to be ridiculous - it's the same logic.
The purpose of the hearing is to do that again in public. In theory, the idea is to get the information distributed more widely. In practice, it's usually about grandstanding, so that the politicians get to make speeches on TV.
People don’t invent an amazing thing and then keep it secret to make a profit. they patent it and make a product or license it.
I am totally willing to believe they managed to keep something secret. Hell if it’s true it means they actually did a pretty shit job because everyone knows the word ‘Roswell’
But I don’t buy that after 50 years they haven’t made a single useful thing out of what they found. Where’s my flying saucer damn it? Where’s some new amazing power source that any craft getting here must have been using?