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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

If they did reverse engineer these UFOs, they must have kept it very secret from the NASA SLS team, and EVERYONE at Boeing. If they secretly gave it all to spaceX then maybe we get a _slightly_ compelling argument…

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They most likely haven't been able to reverse engineer much, if anything. But I suspect a profit motive was part of keeping it secret. If everyone knows, then other companies will compete to look at the materials and the contractors could lose out on a lot of money.

This makes no sense to me.

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?

Maybe they did make something useful from it. How would we know? Have you read "The Day After Roswell"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Roswell (Not saying I believe any of it.)

I'm saying that they weren't able to invent anything. Maybe they learned about new materials, but it's one thing to know the molecular composition of a material and another to actually make it. So, being selfish assholes, they want to keep it a secret. Government officials are more than happy to award sole source contracts when they're offered a cushy job after retirement.

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