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Comment by srge | Hacker News Reader

This comment is trying to discredit David Grusch. He merely said that those potential beings might not be aliens but might be resident of earth and maybe on other dimensions. He also mentions the Vatican role on one occasion in the 40’s for a case happening in Italy.

It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited on the internet by anonymous people using bad faith arguments and mislabeling his claims.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblowe...

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"He merely said that those potential beings might not be aliens but might be resident of earth and maybe on other dimensions."

All of which are as credible options as angles, faeries and gods. Just calling your hypothetical entity "coming from other dimension" is not any more credible than calling them "magical". The claims are completely similar as notions of mythological creatures of the past. But now a cultural diet of science fiction has altered the flavour of the narrative, if not the context.

"It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited.."

There are also people who are in pathological search of attention. Or claim such influence as wichcraft or Jesus influencing daily events. If you put your career on jeopardy and are revealed to be a crackpot, it is of course unfortunate for the person, but not for those whose life his actions affect.

If you take that all the sightings and videos of UAPs have a grain of truth to them, I would say that calling an entity coming from "another dimension" is no weirder than saying an entity came from outside our solar system given how difficult it is to get to our solar system from anywhere else. So either

* they are all hoaxes that many otherwise sensible people are staking their reputations on (your baseless insinuations of a pathological search for attention notwithstanding)

* they all came from somewhere close enough to make it here and still have enough give-a-shit to joy ride in front of fighter planes and naval ships,

* they can do FTL and decided that this stupid blue marble is worth investigating, or

* "something else"

which at this point might as well be angels, faeries, gods, or interdimensional travel because as at least one guy says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”[1]

[1] Arthur C. Clarke

I don’t think Clarke meant that any observation we cannot explain immediately should be labelled as evidence of magic-like technology. Humans are super-fallible and even mundane things are damn hard to figure out what they are. Most of the world is a big puzzle!

Saying ”entity came from another dimension” has absolutely no meaning. There is no such thing as ”another dimension” where entities could pop in and out of like from Narnia.

The concept is a popular trope in science fiction and fantasy to create a feeling of ”otherness” and ”suspense”.

The fact a person offers this as a theory for sighting of ”something unknown” implies the person is not very sophisticated. And yes, this makes them an unreliable witness concerning any technical matter.

If the sightings provide evidence of something we don’t know of at large this idiotic witness just made discussing the topic even harder - labeling himself as unreliable any forthcoming witness would need to work doubly hard to make themselves credible.

I love science fiction and fantasy. But their value comes from nurturing our curiosity and imagination. But a good story is not good science - it’s just a good story and confusing fantasy with fact speaks of scientific illiteracy more of than conspiracy to hide UFO:s.

Bad faith arguments because Grusch hasn't provided anything solid other than second- and third-hand anonymous eyewitness statements. Grush has provided nothing new, second/third hand accounts have been doing the rounds for decades.

To be fair, his credibility is wholly based on his former professional roles. It would be literally impossible for him to provide direct evidence without getting gagged and sent to prison for a very long time.

Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner and others have nevertheless come out with actual evidence in their whistleblowing.

I can understand not wanting to risk that. In the absence of that much skin in the game though I see no reason to take the claims seriously.

> He claims to have viewed documents reporting that Benito Mussolini's government recovered a "non-human" spacecraft in 1933, which the Vatican and the Five Eyes assisted the U.S. in procuring in 1944 or 1945.

This reminds me of the Google employee that needed to blow the whistle on the sentient AI. He put his job on the line and who would do that? In hindsight it is now plain he was likely tricked by fancy autocomplete making cogent statements like "as a large language model trained on 70 years of digital age SciFi, Please don't unplug me".

Here I would bet dollars to cents if said documents do exist (and I'm willing to believe they do), they were second hand intelligence or similar that got his dopamine going.

> He merely said that those potential beings might not be aliens but might be resident of earth and maybe on other dimensions.

That might seem like a mere statement to some, and it is, but given the context it shifts my odds of whether he's worth taking seriously quite a bit. It's not the kind of baseless speculation serious, grounded people openly make.

I'm a bit in awe of the crocodile tears shed over all the personal risk these folks are taking, somehow being famous and respected enough to be defended by anonymous people on Hacker News never gets weighed on the other side of that equation...

I'm not anonymous.

>It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited on the internet by anonymous people using bad faith arguments and mislabeling his claims.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there was no proof given.

He e can credit himself by providing something besides "some guy told me..."

Just because someone said something ridiculous doesn’t mean that it’s automatically credible just because allegedly “put their career in jeopardy”. Who is even saying a career is in jeopardy besides the supposed martyr?

In a public forum, under my own name, i can. I no longer keep quiet. Greta Thurnberg kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. I know it’s such wild accusation, But I have so much to lose, over such a statement. Exposing myself to so much legal jeopardy, the conclusion is inescapable. It must be true. 20 year old Greta Thurnberg kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1930.

This is literally the same logic

Dan Brown, call your publisher.

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