Hacker News Reader

Comment by MikeTheRocker | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what to make of this. It just seems so incredibly implausibly that extraterrestrials would have the technology or motive to come to Earth without widespread detection.

View on HN

Part of the testimony was that there is widespread detection. The claim is that UAPs are often a part of briefings and debriefs. Its also been claimed during the recent UAP related testimonies that a large number of military and civilian pilots have seen stuff, but either had no clear path to report it, reported it and were ignored, or reported and were harassed, or chose to not report it out of fear of harassment.

There's nothing stopping the civilians from reporting it publicly AFAIK. There's enough cameras in the sky that we'd have footage of a few. Especially from all the commercial fights with passengers.

Part of the issue is the stigma. Commercial pilots are afraid to come forward, and that’s why Ryan Graves came to this meeting because his mission is to reduce the stigma so pilots feel safe reporting this issue.

I'd agree on some pilots, and sure they should post more unexplained things for analysis. But given how many people are eagerly into bigfoot or cryptids, it's not like every pilot with some kind of evidence would feel unsafe sharing it.

Pilots, both commercial and military, are constantly under scrutiny to maintain a healthy mental state for fear of their license being revoked. You can not be mentally unstable and be a pilot. For years it was generally well accepted that people who believed in UFOs are crazy, so pilots have kept this to themselves for fear of retribution. Go ask any pilot how they would feel reporting something moving in unexplainable ways right up against their aircraft.

That's why I said evidence. I'm not expecting them to tell tales of UFO sightings. Having a video of something does not reflect on your mental state (unless you faked it). This issue also doesn't apply to passengers and there's lots of people in the sky who don't have a pilot's licence to protect.

Most planes aren’t equipped with any camera systems. The videos commercial pilots and passengers use are their phones which have trouble focusing on objects half a mile away (which is very close for an aircraft to be next to another one but very far for your phone to focus on).

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

Blurry photos do not stop people from posting them in many other cases. Planes do not have to be equipped as such: there's so many people flying with GoPro-s and similar recording all the time that we'd get something popping up all the time.

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.

Well, here’s some of the most interesting videos I’ve seen taken by people.

* 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...

* https://imgur.io/a/seWVHB6

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.

Yup, that's exactly what I meant. Those are worth analysing and talking about. I'd be glad if there were even fewer barriers to reporting those. But it also proves the barriers are not that big and a bit of an excuse.

There is actually still a barrier both militarily and commercially until. The military still has mostly no formal structure for UAP reporting. AARO is working to set that up but only has a portion of the Naval Air Force set up and not any other branch. Commercially, there is nothing. I believe congressmen are writing a law that requires the reporting of UAP by commercial airliners but that won't go into effect until at least mid next year. So while pilots may have this data, they don't have a formal way to report it other than showing it to a buddy.

I hope this gets resolved soon, but I also hope this data doesn't become immediately classified.

Why would aliens have to destroy?

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 :)

Seriously. There's nothing here that they can't find out in space in greater quantities and easier access. Except our animal and plant life. And no worries about harvesting us like in movies, it's way easier to grow meat or whatever than travel across the universe for it. We're most likely a curiosity.

they said "detection" not "destruction"

> Maybe these aliens are scientists.

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).

> Their opsec's way too good for scientists.

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.

To me the most interesting aspect is that all of the alien discussions and reports spiked after we invented nuclear weapons.

At the same time that’s also when we got mass media, developed our own funky airplanes and got portable cameras etc.

And that's fine and all, but it's been nearly a hundred years and they're still doing the same shit? Are we supposed to believe we are the equivalent of a tourist attraction? One where you seem to have a high likelihood of dying?

Not saying I believe this, but for sake of argument…

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.

Rare, but sometimes people die going out on safari in sub-Saharan Africa reserves / game parks. no cite, just google away on this one.

Right, like what would be their motivation for exclusively interacting with governments rather than, say, landing in Times Square?

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.

But they never make mistakes above NYC or Berlin, or anywhere with a bunch of social media + phone users around.

Just somewhere in the desert conveniently close to AFBs and other restricted areas.

A good point. A couple thoughts here might be:

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.

Maybe our devices are easily hacked by their technology. E.g. the phones just don't see them or images of craft are removed from photos.

It's pretty obvious what to make of it. The guy is an attention seeking nut, and it's a huge waste of time.

Did you watch it?

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 already told you" and "I'll tell you later" are absolutely avoidance when asked for specifics.

I can see where it might sound that way if you haven't watched the testimony.

"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.

Willing to get arrested would be a huge signal that he's an actual whistleblower and not full of shit!

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.

We only have one life, nobody wants to sacrifice 3 years of it. Just because you and I consider potential alien life disclosures to be important doesn't mean we have the right to demand someone with that knowledge sacrifice their own life for us to have it.

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...

If you wanted the latter, you wouldn't repeatedly go on national TV claiming a giant conspiracy and then testify in front of congress.. In any case, I'm not "demanding" that he do something that could result in jail time but rather pointing out that based on his own telling of his own story, he should be happy to do so. That he's not is strongly indicative that he's full of shit.

So far he's abiding by the law and not going to jail. What is in "his own telling of his own story" that suggests he should be happy to go to jail? It seems like he's trying hard not to.

"Call me a Boy Scout or whatever. It’s just when I saw the kind of wrongdoing I did … I don’t want to be 60 or 70 years old in the future and have that, you know, “could have, should have, would have” kind of feeling where I could have made a difference,” he said. “I did not want to live a life of regret."

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.”

If a top secret UFO program exists and even the president doesn't know about it, then a place like gitmo is exactly where you can expect to go.

So the President doesn't know about it, but this random FBI dork does -- and it's such a well-kept secret that we're willing to extrajudicially imprison Americans who reveal details about the program -- but only if they do so in open testimony and not in a SCIF?

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...

He sure came off that way to me.

Body language, manner of speech, everything.

Just look at his eyes, they scream "I'm full of shit".

Huh? You’re telling me you think they can travel light years to get here but don’t have the tech to land without us detecting them? That’s an assumption.

I mean, we have stealth tech but I doubt the first instinct would be to put an F-117 on a one-way trip to Mars

Assuming FTL is off the table, anything sent here will have been designed and launched with no evidence the subject planet has radars or air combat hardware. One should expect probes to have no air combat capability, and may not even bother to dodge a missile, even if they (incidentally) have very good aerodynamic performance.

If they don't have FYL then it's ridiculous that they'd send what are effectively tiny scout ships that don't have stealth tech to avoid the Other Aliens and that crash at alarming rates With Living Pilots inside...

Really...

Just look at the claim objectively and it becomes obvious it's absurd.

You would send some probe complex that includes small scout aircraft. Literally, NASA has done this. From many vantage points, Earth is a water world with no intelligent life on it. Most operators would send an interstellar probe based on that assumption. Things like living organisms can be application-specific bio robots that are wholly unprepared for anything like contact. Really, sending a bunch of military hardware on a space probe is obviously absurd. We have examples of literal scientists building literal space probes and they literally don’t send them with weapons.

Dark forest...

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?

More precisely, a civilization that can master interstellar travel and navigation but somehow keeps crashing on our planet?

Maybe they are trying to subtly steer our planet out of the way of an extinction event meteor with ballistics - and we’ve accidentally steered the meteor back into a collision course!

It's a fair point.

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?

Or, perhaps, that civilization is using found technology from UFOs that crashed on their planet and they haven't quite figured out where the brake pedal is, yet?

And it's funny how they always crash in the USA, isn't it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com