IMO, the fishy part of the article is the cronyism involved in this program:
"The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space."
So... Harry Reid's friend is absolutely convinced there are aliens, gets Reid to convince congress to fund the program, and all the money goes back to his own company? Not fishy at all.
Say that you are interested in investigating puzzling phenomena, and you have the money. What more logical step is there than to approach your senate majority leader friend?
Such oddball connections are probably the only the way such a program would ever get funded.
Edit: well, obviously he didn't have the money. Misspoke. I meant the means (a company with the required infrastructure).
I’d rather my tax money go towards huntin aliens than fighting wars TBH. I mean yeah, there’s lot of other things I’d like to see funded but this seems like a drop in the bucket when we’re talking the grand scheme of things.
> No, the logical step is to stop and think whether or not you should use public money to do this.
People in first-world countries are usually OK with spending public money on science. So, if you consider it legit science (and he does), it makes perfect sense for him to lobby spending public money on it.
Legit science. More likely for the money to go to MIT than a politician's friend?
No really, show us the public tender and the evidence that the money was well spent by tender won on merit alone. Or we are going to assume it is totally corrupt. Onus of proof used to be the other way around but Washington, yeah, it really does stink like that. This is why outsider populists like Sanders and Trump are popular. Everyone has had enough of this garbage.
The merit is researching potentially existential threats against humanity. It's not testable science, but if it leads to the next manhatten project, we discover that another country has advanced tech, that we aren't alone, or get a null result I am OK with it.
For me, the logical next stop would be to pause and think very long and very hard about why the subject isn't treated as legitimate by mainstream science.
What’s there to think about? Scientists are not credulous people and that’s a very good thing. There are plenty of research projects dedicated to searching for other forms of intelligent life and none of them have yielded any evidence.
This is unexplained phenomena which could be the result of diminished mental acuity or other unexplained physical events. I’m not sure how these theories should be made anymore legitimate without more evidence?
I don't think that would be your logical next step as it doesn't logically follow from the earlier steps. My post started with "Say that you are interested in investigating puzzling phenomena, and you have the money.". So my post presupposes that interest. You don't have that interest (at least not in the same way) so your point is moot. You can't say "Say that you have an interest. Your next logical step would be not to have the interest".
Nothing really "logically follows" from what you said since you were speaking informally rather than proposing an airtight logical syllogism. And since this is a conversation, I don't have to choose to follow along with whatever premises you choose to stipulate if I don't think they adequately reflect the reality they're attempting to model, or if I don't agree with you that they presuppose the things you think they presuppose.
I think it's more to do with the those claiming things in the name of science that puts many people off.
Science is a process, a method by which we can answer certain types of questions. To often people hear things like settled science, or the science is crystal clear, not up for debate.. These are political posturing and have little to do with actual science. It's absurd, and some people realize this.
As with any science, data comes in late, or sometimes not at all. There are quite a few FDA prescription drugs that were approved and later recalled, some with devastating effects on their consumers.
The truth is, science is done by people, people who are infallible. People who make mistakes, who see things from a certain point of view, or who don't have all the data yet. Additionally, prediction models can be tweaked to say exactly what you want to, with devastating effect on our community.
You can't say anything though. Even in grad school labs, to make certain statements or even hint about things can lead to problems with your advisor, or research, or worse yet, peers.. Academia is a great place, at least it has been for me, as long as you keep your head down and focus on research.. i dont think it's the best place now if you truly want to question everything. I wouldn't even venture where you could go for that now.
I think this has led to a generalized mistrust, and it falls on all of us. The reality is that data is always changing, models change, etc.. People who put policies into legislation need to balance not only the aspect of the science, but the overall big picture; cultural, societal, expectations, desires etc. as well. That's politics. I think it was Russ Roberts who said you can engineer a bridge, but you can't engineer society in the same way. And i think that's right, too Often we miss that.
>>>Say that you are interested in investigating puzzling phenomena, and you have the money. What more logical step is there than to approach your senate majority leader friend?
You spend your own money rather than ask taxpayers to fund your fantasy. There is more than enough open source intel on atmospheric phenomena out there. And plenty of "UFO researchers" willing to work.
I guess that as a private citizen he would not have access to a lot of tech and information Pentagon has, no matter how much money he can spend. So spending money lobbying to get Pentagon create a program like this might be better approach rather then trying to carry out investigations on your own.
Or, say you are a major donor to your senate majority leader friend. What more logical step than the senate majority leader getting millions of taxpayer dollars funneled to your company to investigate puzzling phenomena. With your income increased, you're more able to keep donating to the friend in the senate.
Bob Bigalow actually is a hard core ufologist for the record. No need for cynicism here I think. He just wanted access to DoD information on the subject.
Robert Bigelow has been interested in aliens and UFOs for most of his life and has essentially dedicated his life to amassing the resources to start an aeronautical company.
Hiring him to do this is like hiring Robert Ballard to find the Titanic.
To deny that something unexplainable has been happening in the skies is really disingenuous. We have very expert, specialist organizations whose primary responsibility it is to know what's happening in our skies. You take these two things and remove the context of "UFOs" and suddenly it's not crazy that they're doing something about it, but crazy that they're not doing something about it. The context of "UFOs" is laden with plenty of bad rap, but that doesn't absolve these organizations from their responsibilities.
Robert Bigelow doesn't believe "something unexplainable" has been happening in our skies - he believes the explanation for those things is alien spacecraft. He isn't interested in seaching for truth, he has an agenda.
It's also disingenuous to skip over more plausible explanations, including hoaxes, the memetic effect of UFO culture, classified military aircraft and disinformation campaigns, and misidentification of other mundane aerial phenomena, to assume that anything unidentified in the sky is likely an alien spacecraft.
I can see where you might think I was asserting one way or the other whether Robert Bigelow was qualified for this work, and that's my fault. I have no opinion about this man specifically. I am just saying that I think this problem is worth further study by the organizations which exist for the purpose of knowing these kinds of things. That being said, according to the article, "Mr. Bigelow said he was 'absolutely convinced' that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth." And while on the surface that might seem to reveal his having an agenda and disqualify any of his analyses, do we feel the same way about physicists that believe God created the universe? Or do we just feel that way about people with out-group beliefs? I suppose a better analogy here would be the business owner of a company doing physics research, since he's not a scientist.
But beyond that, I think we can agree that the conversation elsewhere in this thread demonstrates there is a whole lot of negative context which serves to drive people away from taking it seriously.
> And while on the surface that might seem to reveal his having an agenda and disqualify any of his analyses, do we feel the same way about physicists that believe God created the universe?
I don't, but only so long as they don't ascribe magical or supernatural qualities to physical phenomena.
It's one thing to believe alien spacecraft as an extremely unlikely possibility, and another to consider it not only likely, but indisputably so. The lack of skepticism combined with unfalsifiable claims are what disqualify him, in my view.
There does seem to be a fringe of interesting events in the field worth studying. I'm not convinced that there aren't plausible explanations for them - after all, how many "black triangle" sightings are likely to have been classified stealth aircraft? But I also think the negativity serves a valuable purpose as long as it keeps people from entertaining flights of fancy.
I'll believe the Robert Bigelows and Bob Lazars and Whitley Streibers of the world when they can back their claims up with undeniable and irrefutable evidence. Given the nature of their claims, I don't believe that's an unreasonable bar to set. Even Einstein was doubted until someone proved him right.
I'm not saying it was an alien craft, but there are a limited number of plausible explanations for an event like this and none of what you listed is a plausible explanation.
And yet no surveillance cameras captured it? No cameras at the gate? No cameras near or around? This was 2006, well after the days when the idea of 24/7 eyes everywhere was considered a conspiracy, it was the days of bush and the Patriot Act and consistent airport watch. And we get... no actual real evidence?
I'm pretty sure that if there were really a giant unidentifiable craft hovering over an American airport terminal less than a decade after 9/11 someone would have found a way to point something at it.
I am inclined to agree with you, but on the other hand, according to that WikiPedia article the FAA concluded it was an unexplained weather phenomenon. That is easier to believe, but it makes it no easier to understand how no hard evidence was recorded.
Most do especially at flight control to record incoming planes along with steady snap cams that relay black and white feeds unless O’Hare is somehow less serious than Helsinki airport in 2005
>"The disc was visible for approximately five minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it."
It also apparently was not visible on radar or visually from the control tower. Who cares if it was 'aliens' or not, it's a damned interesting phenomena that should be studied for it's own sake.
To be fair, it was 2006, and "everybody's phone has a great camera" was several years off. The article does mention someone may have snagged it on a plain digital camera.
Well, faced with all this suspicion and negativity, what incentive would anybody have to present their photos to the public? And so let's just scrap this whole incident at the airport. No pictures, no video, no UFO. There is still a substantial body of photographic, video, expert reliable witness accounts of unexplained phenomena happening in our skies going back decades. The government's chief skeptic guy that headed up Blue Book eventually changed his mind over the years in the face of this relatively small but very reliable subset of witness accounts [0].
The vast majority of people are looking at Venus or the moon or streetlights or drunken hallucinations. But we don't care about those people. We care about the 0.0003% (or whatever) of people that check all the boxes on a long list of reliability factors. And yet, that still isn't good enough for some people, because of the hugely negative pseudoscience context that this carries with it. "It's folklore!" In fact, I'll assert that a strange enough advanced aircraft could fly nuclear weapons over this country, and until our pilots shot it out of the sky and spread the wreckage across three states, it would hardly get any attention because of the context this subject carries.
What incentive? Huge incentives, obviously. This entire thread is a promotion to help a former government official kickstart a business to "research" this phenomenon, where his partner is contractually obligated to get paid $100,000 a year.
Some did. Most were cheap and even the most expensive ones took 2MP pixel shots. Good luck capturing a fast moving object from a long distance with a Motorola Razr.
Because it totally makes sense that the military would fly highly-classified aircraft in full view of thousands of people, essentially giving away any element of surprise in the event the shit hits the fan (thinking Phoenix Lights here)
I completely agree that the Phoenix lights were weird. I don't know what they were, I don't think they were birds, but I also don't think they were a big black alien triangle.
Neverthless, the military does sometimes test classified aircraft in view of civilians. And they have been known to use or even encourage UFO sightings as misinformation to cover up their activity.
Fiction has to make sense, but reality doesn't always have to make sense.
And yet you're refusing to believe in the "reality" (hypothetical) of an alien ship visit, because it doesn't make sense (to you... and possibly to me). Probably because (among other things), we think FTL travel is impossible (... we think... cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) which makes any visitation from realistically far away essentially impossible or at least highly impractical ("cryosleep" for centuries, etc.)
And so a sensible person seeks (perhaps justifiably) prosaic explanations for everything and automatically excludes any hypothesis without a prosaic explanation (with the incredibly audacious conceit of assuming we already understand enough about the universe to make such assumptions), while the fantastical person, not as bound by the need for evidence, can wildly speculate (which would of course include nonhuman intelligences somehow visiting us over distances that are insurmountable to us currently, but might also include basically, well, anything, since without the hard-evidence requirement, you're free to get creative)
I think both of these points exist as extremes on a continuum and that they're both wrong in some capacity. I think pragmatism and reasoning and rationality are a good basis, however... just, limiting, as well.
We might advance a bit on the evidence front here if there was a scientific way to evaluate mass eyewitness testimony (individual eyewitness testimony has come under fire recently https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-..., but perhaps, if you multiply the number of witnesses, the errors will tend to cancel each other out and you might end up with something more like Evidence with a capital E. (This would be useful in far more areas than mere UFO observation, of course.)
This is a really cohesive statement of the opinion I have about it, thanks. It always surprises me to meet people that can't push their internal boundaries to even think about the possibility. The kind of thinking that if humans haven't done it before -- and taken plenty of pictures! -- it can't possibly happen. The same person that thinks, "Well, since nobody has eaten all the stars in the galaxy for computational power, aliens can't possibly exist," despite the fact that we can't even generate the kinds of radio signals that would be needed for our own receivers to pick them up beyond a handful of light years. I will go to my grave dying to know how and why people think this way.
I'm not refusing to believe in the hypothetical reality. Of all the hypothetical realities I can conceive, "actually aliens" is the one I want most to be real. I want to live in that world, and not just see it in fiction.
What I am refusing to do is believe that hypothetical reality to be more likely than it is, based on the evidence (or lack thereof) presented and what it does or doesn't actually prove. I'm slotting it in the rank it deserves, which is slightly ahead of demons in likelihood but still less likely than everything else.
But yeah, the likelihood that it's aliens is not entirely zero.
Actually, when I see the videos of the Phoenix Lights, I immediately recognize plane-dropped flares. Every video I've ever seen of those lights appear to me to be plane-dropped flares. I spent many years in the infantry and deployed four times and I can tell you with certainty that's what they are. I think even the Air Force came out and said they had dropped flares that night.
Yea, you can't fault the credentials across the board. Their new private organization, To the Stars Academy, seems to have lots of interesting people on board, including a former program director at Lockheed Martin's skunkworks.
There is a lack of transparency and obviously Bigelow has way more connections than a typical person, but it seems plausible to me that they really are sincere.
And 22 million to fund this program does sound somewhat reasonable, although granted we'll probably never see an audit of how the money was spent.
Are there numerous creditable sightings of unidentified animals that are consistent with unicorns? And if there are, are unidentified animals something the military has an interest in?
There are numerous creditable sightings of unidentified things in the air. Are they aliens? Almost surely not. But no matter what mundane phenomenon is responsible for unidentified things in the air, it is of interest to the military.
This completely. For example, if you approach the US government through a solicitation with really any half-reasonable suggestion for processing enormous amounts of data, and you'll get a contract. Go take a look through the US government's business solicitations: Every agency wants an AI because they're being buried by data they can't process. If you wanted to collude with elected officials and funnel government dollars into your business, these kinds of solicitations will get you the funding with few questions. And if you fail, well, so has almost every other business that's tried to solve this problem.
As someone who has put in well qualified bids with university consortiums for multiple US government research contracts, including DARPA and other similar groups I can confirm that this is completely false.
As someone who has put in well qualified bids with university consortiums for multiple US government research contracts, including DARPA and other similar groups I can confirm that this is completely false.
What is the size of your organization? How are you submitting bids, and where are you getting your solicitations? Does someone in your company network with the government liaisons beyond just the one you've submitted a bid to? Has your company hired someone to work this network for solicitations that aren't on FBO? Do your PIs have experience outside academia in contracting? I've been a part of several (successful) bids and -- operating under the assumption your claim was made in good faith and not just a lie -- I wonder at your approach. This is work that pretty much every organization in the US government needs.
For example, if you approach the US government through a solicitation with really any half-reasonable suggestion for processing enormous amounts of data, and you'll get a contract.
Your subsequent comment proves my point: it isn't that easy.
As it happens, we are well qualified, and we've won a number as well. My point is that your original statement is completely wrong (and ironically it appears you agree).
Nah. I mean in the context of finding solicitations and submitting bids for the US government generally, life's easier selling those services versus selling something like socks or transportation or something. I mean what I said: If you wanted to collude with elected officials and funnel government dollars into your business, you're not going to have as much scrutiny submitting bids for those kinds of solicitations than some of the people out there trying to submit bids to sell the Army a better rifle sling.
It's no surprise that successful business people and politicians know each other. There is no perfect world where every decision to spend government money is a transaction between complete strangers. If this situation constitutes corruption, then almost every venture between government and private business would also need to be considered corrupt.
Well that is why you have a public bidding process where you throughly document why the winning bid won.
If they had nothing to hide, that part of the equation would be perfectly transparent.
I work in the public sector in Scandinavia and while I realize our laws are a little different, I would be in jail if I did something similar. Getting contracts to friends/family is a huge issue in most countries, which is why you document the reasoning even harder to make sure its absolutely bulletproof legally when they happen to have the best bid.
Way I see it, the economy is failing to properly employ and provide society. So either society finds another way to provide for everyone or society needs government projects to employ people. Just because the economy doesn’t need every eligible worker doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to find something for them to do.
Also note the timing. The program began in 2007. What else happened in 2007? The Democrats got control of the Senate, turning Minority leader Harry Reid into Majority leader.
OP doesn't say it was part of the official 2007 budget, being a black program and all, and given how complicated US government & military budgeting is, I don't know what any dates involved really mean anyway. OP merely says it was started in 2007.
Bigelow is a billionaire. The contract was for $22 million, chump change -- not just for Bigelow, but for almost anything. Hang around Wall St and government for even a little bit and you'll realize how small 22 million is. The money is a non story.
It's been pretty clear for some time now for those who study the facts that there is a very good chance there are real objects in the sky that maneuver in ways that conventional aircraft are unable to and cannot be explained adequately as other observed phenomenon. The taboo around this subject due to the common hypothesis they are due to extraterrestrials is a shame because there's been plenty of documented evidence that not only has this been going on but that governments around the world take it seriously enough to investigate it.
I found this book to be a good take that avoids hyperbole and tries to stick to the evidence and facts:
If you were to ask me to guess, my bet is that current and past government programs to investigate these objects have concluded that a) they are non-threats to US national security and that b) performing further invasive means to investigate them past our current level of understanding is too risky to pursue. So (again if I had to guess) the consensus is, theories of their origin aside, "don't look into it further, and be assured that there will be no harm in not doing so," which is why you can see a program like this shut down without necessarily assuming that it was a waste or a wild goose chase.
People lack depth perception in the sky which makes it easy to wildly misunderstand things.
A great example shown by some UFO show was a side camera from the space shuttle. The footage has a nice curvature of the earth, with lot's of little specks that seem to be orbiting it way out in the distance. You see a maneuvering thruster fire then in slow motion a few heartbeats later these specks shoot off in a new direction.
Now, if you assume they where large objects far away they must have been moving incredibly quickly and have insane acceleration. However, if you realize they are flecks of paint etc/ near the shuttle pushed out of the way by the maneuvering thruster then they where not actually moving fast relative to the shuttle at any point.
That’s why the FA-18 footage is so compelling to me. This is not the easily fooled human eye we’re talking about: Radar tracking and thermal vision almost completely eliminates simple optical illusions from the list of natural explanations.
Even more bizarre is how the craft appears totally cold, while there is a warm thermal halo of some kind around the craft, with a pattern very reminiscent of high energy fields.
The object in the video is hot. Most military FLIR devices can be toggled between "white hot" and "black hot". If you look in the lower left corner of the video, there's an indicator that says "WHT" and the object appears white. At about 12 seconds into the footage, the coloring is inverted and the indicator changes to "BLK" because the pilot toggled it.
The halo is an artifact of the FLIR device. Every FLIR I've ever seen does that in areas where there's a high temperature contrast.
Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense! In that case I suppose the main strangeness of the video is the shape of the object. Makes you wonder if these might be some secret experimental military craft or drones that happen to be weirdly shaped.
Hot is consistent with artificial. The second law of thermodynamics says if you are using energy you must dissipate heat. As far as we know this would still apply even with some kind of hypothetical exotic propulsion system.
Your analysis is one of the more obvious explanations and as such it has been considered thoroughly before for the cases that remain unexplained. Typically these cases include radar signatures or other corroborating evidence.
If the F-18 HUD footage in OP is real, that would indicate the avionics picked it up, tracked it, and reported the heading and velocity. This is also interesting because the FLIR showed the object as mostly black: not emitting heat as a jet would.
The object is hot. Military FLIR devices can be toggled between "white hot" and "black hot" settings. You can see the BLK/WHT indicator in the lower left corner of the footage. The pilot/observer toggles it at about 12 seconds into the video.
Part of the problem is all the crazy mythology around the subject. But strip that off and it has always seemed to me that there is an interesting residue of facts. It's not enough to prove anything but it's enough to be intriguing.
One possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that they are here but are just not making overt obvious contact. If this were true we'd probably be talking about a "post-singularity" super intelligence. It would be nearly immortal and thus very patient. Contact protocols might take thousands of years.
After reading "The Dark Forest" I've leaned towards the idea that we are under pervasive observation (likely by hard-to-detect autonomous AI agents of some form, the origin of which is relatively inconsequential) and once the probability tilts towards a non-zero value that we are a threat beyond a certain blast radius we'll be wiped out.
If that were true, and the message of that being the case were delivered somehow to our governments, the general status quo around these phenomena and the propaganda steering people away from caring about them would be explainable. People have barely gotten used to the idea of mortality, but to know your race was doomed to extinction with certainty would almost certainly cause massive civil unrest and a major disruption to almost all human institutions and culture that assume our collective future is unbounded.
Perhaps this is too tinfoil but it's an internally consistent story, perhaps with the exception of how or why these agents would be detectable at all, when they surely could conceal themselves completely -- perhaps it's just probabilities though since there would not be much downside of detection by a primitive civilization such as ours.
> the message of that being the case were delivered somehow to our governments,
That would make a fun plot for a movie. But having worked with the government and then also having observed leaks of top secret information and tools coming out the supposedly most secretive government institutions, I cannot believe they would be competent enough to keep that information under a tight lid for long.
Someone, somehow would have ex-filtrated some proof by now.
What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.
>But having worked with the government and then also having observed leaks of top secret information and tools coming out the supposedly most secretive government institutions, I cannot believe they would be competent enough to keep that information under a tight lid for long.
What I find interesting is that certain government programs are very leaky and others we have not seen any leaks. For instance we know the NSA has cryptanalysis programs, yet no leaks of US cryptanalysis have occurred. The Snowden documents have very little information on these programs.
Large numbers of people knew about ULTRA across many nations on both sides of the iron curtain. ULTRA was kept secret for 42 years, well past the point that the main utility of keeping it secret has passed.
Why? What makes one program more leaky than another.
>What I can see happening the government not necessarily encouraging but perhaps not discouraging either these rumors from spreading in order to divert attention from say testing of experimental aircraft.
There so many motivations for a disinformation campaign here.
I loved the books but Dark Forest theory makes little sense to me because it more-or-less assumes aliens have no concept of morality (the Trisolarans in the book literally have no morality).
If we became super-advanced, it's hard to imagine given our past (including sci-fi like the series) that we'd just go head and decide to wipe out anyone we encounter, even if we did consider them lowly. Largely for the same reasons there exist animal rights groups, etc.
Morality is a human construct, tied to self-awareness which isn't necessary for (super)intelligence. There are theories that posit self-awareness as an evolutionary dead-end.
If the stars are teeming with "machinic" intelligence, something far more probable than any sort of biological intelligence, then anthropomorphizing is not going to lead you outside the maze.
Ever heard of antibiotics, pesticides, rat poison, cockroach sprays and mosquito mats?
Humanity is done playing the morality game a few thousands of years back. There were a few socio religious movements in India, which focussed on these things and they more or less concluded these things were beyond impractical.
And yes, even today rats and other animals are used for experiments in manufacturing drugs for humans.
I think this is the least tinfoil of theories in this thread. After I read Three Body Problem it's become impossible for me to see the Fermi paradox in any other way. In fact , every other theory about how aliens might be on earth all seem so charming now. As if they haven't read the 'news' about what really happened.
Obviously this isn't the case but I just feel the Cixin Liu layed out this theory so convincingly that, at least for me, it might as well be.
Why not wipe us out now though? Observing you risk missing the "danger" point in our evolution, wiping us out now eliminates that risk. I suspect there's more to it than that.
Why not just annihilate us now then? That would minimize risk, since there is always a non-zero probability that we might suddenly make some powerful discovery or other circumstances might change.
I never understand why we always assume that it's extra-terrestrial.
For example, let's say time travel will be possible at any given point in the future. Well, if it were possible in the future, we might expect to see it happening across time, including the past and present.
It would of course represent technology thousands of years more advanced than the observers of the phenomenon, but not millions of years away, as might well be the case for civilizations from planets evolving quite differently from our own. It would also represent technology that evolved from our own developmental progress.
It would also address the issue of spatial proximity - of course we don't detect life outside Earth, because the "extra-terrestrials" come from Earth.
I'm not suggesting it is absolutely time travelers, but I'm quite surprised I never see that suggested on a similar frequency with the whole aliens angle when discussing UFOs.
The ET speculation is the most popular because we know for a fact that other stars and other planets around those stars exist and we know for a fact that it's (theoretically) possible to travel between at least nearby stars with sufficient technology.
We do not know for a fact that time travel is possible and there are good physics-based reasons to think it isn't. We definitely don't know that there are parallel dimensions or universes that are actually inhabitable. Dimensions and parallel universes may be mathematical artifacts. In math a dimension is just a degree of freedom. A penny is five-dimensional if you count temperature and electrical charge as dimensions.
Another speculation you run into is the "ultra-terrestrial" idea-- that they might be from Earth itself. Maybe they live deep underground or under the ocean, etc. This one is pretty implausible too. I could believe that there are unknown species, sure, but not an unknown species with an industrial infrastructure capable of producing flying machines. No way. Even deep underground we'd detect its vibration and EM emissions.
So yeah, space aliens are the most reasonable hypothesis if these things were to actually be artificial and not made by humans. That's the big "if" of course. Like I said elsewhere there's some intriguing evidence out there but nowhere near enough to draw such a conclusion.
> One possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that they are here but are just not making overt obvious contact
Exactly.
There's simply no reason to, except maybe sheer curiosity or some legal issues. What would we want from an uncontacted Amazonian tribe?
But even if they wanted, from the political point of view, who would you even talk to? People of the planet Earth, bypassing their governments? Every government of every country?
Plus, what about the possible social upheaval? They would be guilty.
No matter how you spin it, it's more trouble than it's worth. It is, however, essential to keep a potential competitor under surveillance, especially when they are rapidly developing.
Being spotted though, that I find improbable. There are numerous ways we could eliminate signs of contact with a society at the level of, say, X century, and that's just one thousand years gap. With a greater gap, it would probably be like competing with wild baboons over a Nobel prize.
I'd imagine it just would try to maximize utility -- remaining undetected in all scenarios may come with its own costs and risks.
Alternatively, maximizing utility may require a certain minimal level of detection. It's hard to predict what cost function is being optimized.
Given what is now common knowledge about AI game theory, it's super hard or impossible to actually ascribe any form of motives, ethics, intent, etc to the underlying system or intelligence that is controlling these objects if they are not natural and have no association with human culture or intelligence.
> I'd imagine it just would try to maximize utility -- remaining undetected in all scenarios may come with its own costs and risks.
That's true, and there could be "rogue actors" who care less about the detection. But - again, borrowing the X century analogy - there's a lot of tools that can be employed to eliminate the witnesses and such.
When I first read the program or its funding had ended, I, like you, also concluded that this was an indication that the Pentagon saw no reason to take it further. But then I jumped into the deep end: who knows the program('s funding) has been discontinued? It could live on in more secrecy, with the discontinuation of its more public form as a decoy.
Am I being tinfoil hatted here? It's what I would probably do if I were the Pentagon and found out the program has merit.
Or more likely, if alien UFO visitation is real (a huuuuge IF), it’s more likely that programs like this have existed since the 1950s, and are now deeply entrenched within the government as “black programs” with unlimited “black budgets”, and likely some connection to the pentagon etc.
The countless stories and admissions of former military and intelligence officers blowing the whistle on deep shadow governments always sound so crazy, but the sheer number of them over time is... disturbing. As a skeptic to conspiracy theories, I don’t know what to make of it.
In any case: The pentagon shutting down a new independently started investigation group (in this hypothetical world where alien UFOs exist) would totally make sense, as it would be redundant to the extremely secret programs already in existence and only a liability for possible interference. They also wouldn’t be able to tell them why they’re shutting it down or cutting off funding, because th secrecy level of such a thing would go so much deeper.
It’s hard to believe this has any credibility at all, but if this NYT article is genuine and the claims of real progress made by a small and brief program are real, I don’t know what to think to be honest.
Well...they filed reports.
You go to your local PD and you can find someone pointing at file cabinets full of all kind of reports. You will also find someone there ranting about how he is not getting enough funding to do his job well.
This article was co-written by the author of that book.
I also recommend that book for those who are curious about evidence-based, well-researched accounts. Written by a journalist. It leaves aside the question of extraterrestrial origin as unprovable and only attempts to answer the question, "Is this phenomena real?"
In the early 90s in southern OH, me and my brother watched an object exactly like those in the article, while 4 (IIRC) fighter jets attempted to intercept it. Unlike in the article, they did fire on it, and the object moved and accelerated faster than the missiles. They missed several times, until it disappeared and the jets turned back.
I think how close they got in the article is the limits of our tech. We happen upon them randomly, and the crafts are so much more advanced than ours that it's impossible to knock one down to study it further.
This is highly unlikely. There have been no occurrences of US military aircraft firing missiles at unidentified threats over Ohio, ever. To put it clearly - this did not happen. You didn't see what you think you saw.
It’s pretty clear that people see UFOs all the time. The problem is when they are identified. My daughter sees one nearly every car ride, something in the sky that isn’t shaped like a plane, and certainly doesn’t move like one. Guess what? when we get closer it’s always an airliner, or a helicopter, or a balloon.
It’s easy to get mislead by the light, the perspective, the shadows, the distance, etc.
The really dumb part is the grandiose idea that aliens traveled immense distances to hide from us. The amount of energy needed to reach the a nearby star in any reasonable time is greater than the total of energy mankind has ever generated.
If they have the technology and power to travel here, they have nothing to fear from us. We are ants to them. They only question is whether they’d even deign to contact us at all?
When we (biologists) study other species, we travel long distances to examine them in their habitat. We try to hide so we can see them in their natural state, without our interference. If one suggested that this were 'dumb' or 'grandiose', then they would be ridiculed, as they would have exposed their own ignorance through that comment. The thought that a species might travel far to investigate another species in situ while attempting to avoid contamination is reasonable to a non-zero number of biologists.
Except that biologists always are seen when in the field. Now imagine a biologist traveling to view a species using a vehicle which uses more energy than humankind has ever created. How easy is that to hide, and why would they hide from their equivalent to ants?
It would be easy to hide such a vehicle. Just do your final deceleration burn in the outer solar system. The gravity of Jupiter or Saturn would be useful for an interstellar capture maneuver anyway. At that distance we'd be very unlikely to see anything, especially if it happened in 1940.
The little things sighted as "UFOs" would not be interstellar craft. They would be probes or local runabouts. The interstellar transport might resemble the craft depicted in the film Avatar (which was actually a realistic design), or maybe a hollowed out meteor. The latter would look natural when not executing a major engine burn.
As far as hiding: if they knew they were here to observe an intelligence with conceptual thinking ability and language (even one much less intelligent than they) they would know any overt contact would radically and permanently alter the subjects behavior.
This is all incredibly speculative. I'm just saying that it can't be ruled out by easy superficial arguments. It can't really be ruled out at all. We just don't have enough evidence to rule it in either.
Look up project Orion. How hard would it be to hide its deceleration from the system it’s entering. Any successful interstellar ship has to emit at least that much energy, if not far more.
In Zubrin's book Entering Space he says in general you should use the radiation pressure of the destination star or the solar wind to decelerate, and I believe published the work to demonstrate its feasibility.
If you assume that this alien race can generate impossible amounts of energy, isn't it also reasonable to assume that they use a propulsion technology outside of our current level of understanding? Even if they use unfathomable amounts of energy, it could be completely outside of our ability to detect it.
Plenty of wildlife biologists do hide from their subjects when they know their presence will disturb the subjects. Why wouldn't an alien race do the same when observing humans?
I find it quite silly when after having done science seriously for less than 200 years we think we understand all of physics, especially when our models clearly have gaping holes and contradictions.
Nevertheless you don't even need new physics for this line of speculation. Fusion rockets will do.
Only if we're looking that way. Space is called space for a reason, and radiation diminishes with the square of distance. Light the big candle out by Uranus and Saturn and we'd probably not see it.
Historically, Europe was decimated by something much smaller than an ant.
Additionally, in an unknown strategic situation, it is generally inadvisable to turn your situation with asymmetric information into one which informs the other players of your true state of play.
Now you might say, its would be pretty obvious that we're a comparatively primitive society. Maybe, maybe not. That makes a lot of simple assumptions about the nature of technology, instellar travel, and the possibilities of subterfuge and misdirection in a game with unknown players, unknown context, unknown goals, of unknown capability.
So from a purely theoretical perspective, I respectfully disagree.
The rational strategy is some function that trades off information-gathering directly against information-hiding on your own state of play.
Our species is arguably being the crazy ones sending out signals blindly into the ether without a care...
If they aren’t much more advanced they can’t Exeter the solar system without being detected. A project Orion vessel us easily detected from light years away.
We’d make a good case study of a civilisation negotiating a critical juncture. I’d dare say we’d be of interest to sociologists and historians, and given where we’re at there might even be something of a careless stampede to gather data before the idiot quadrupeds wipe themselves out. There can’t be that many civilisations going through the hockey stick/environmental catastrophe stage in this galactic neck of the woods at any given time.
As to contact - doubt it’s happened - it’d fuck up the data, and spoil the case study. So long as we keep on ignoring weird stuff because it’s weird the experiment is ok.
As to distances - well, that’s our perception of it - the best we can do is brute force through 3d space - and if they can manoeuvre as they appear to be able to, they may well have some means of travel that is, well, alien to us, such as some variety of extra dimensional travel.
How many species are at the hockey stick point is unknown...depends on what numbers you plug into the Drake equation variables. Could be rare or lots of us.
>Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.
>“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”
They claim to have physical evidence? Seems like a buried lede if even remotely true.
This sounds like a sponge operation to gauge how much experimental flight testing programs may impact the public, how secret it is being, collect debris that falls into public hands, etc. Obviously if it was done under the auspices of a military operation that would lead to questions. But no one questions the motives of people posing as UFO investigators.
But come on, if US intelligence agencies recovered metallurgy from Russian hypersonic missiles or something like that, why would they use UFO for cover? And why would they store it outside of AFRL? I think it's just a way to funnel taxpayer money, there is nothing real being investigated. Not extraterrestrial tech, not foreign tech, not even domestic tech.
They only spent $22 million on the whole program. Accounting errors in the Pentagon literally amount to trillions of dollars. $22 million is about 20% of the cost of a single F-35. They have much better ways to funnel taxpayer money - $22 million isn't even pocket change for the Pentagon.
My grandmother's sister was married to a man who served as Captain of the 1st rank on a nuclear submarine in the Soviet and maybe even Russian Navy (I don't know exactly when he retired). As I found out later in life, he was also one of the liquidators of Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the effects of which ultimately led to his early death in early 2000s. I know for sure he already retired from military by mid 90s when I was about 10 or 11. Right around that time, me and my pops used to visit them in Moscow on just about every summer break and I remember during one of our stays with his family my dad asked him about this particular subject. His response is something I still remember word-for-word which would translate roughly to "We know they exist. There are people (in the government) working on this. I don't know anything more and this is all i can tell you." I'm not trying to make any conclusions here or get ridiculed. Just sharing something that came from a man who must've had a pretty high clearance in Soviet military. Or maybe he was just trolling us lol
> Captain of the 1st rank on a nuclear submarine in the Soviet and maybe even Russian Navy
During the 70's or 80's Soviet subs were detecting these "quacking" sounds in the Antarctic. They were puzzling and many thought that it was the aliens or super secret Western technology.
There were other sounds like the "Bloop" which turned to be ice quakes.
> Or maybe he was just trolling us
I also had an uncle in the Soviet military and he did like to troll us. When rumors of aliens become popular in the tabloids, he convinced a good number of people from his village that aliens have landed in the woods. It was actually a lightning strike which caught some trees on fire but, but he got them to believe it was a landing zone for an alien spacecraft.
On a more serious note, I can't believe any government can keep a tight enough lid on something like that. Someone, somewhere is bound to defect or to leak it is somehow.
> On a more serious note, I can't believe any government can keep a tight enough lid on something like that. Someone, somewhere is bound to defect or to leak it is somehow.
Except that what you are swatting away with that comment is someone claiming to have heard that leak. One could also look at the NYT article as another leak, no?
I would think that if one had something top secret like this that one desperately wanted to keep under wraps despite the inevitable leak, the best strategy might well be to intentionally sow lots of bogus UFO sightings and create a subculture of UFO paranoia, so that when the true leaks eventually happen they are lost in the noise.
Which of course does not mean that is necessarily what has actually been happening.
> are swatting away with that comment is someone claiming to have heard that leak.
Yap. I'll swat a lot of online comments claiming someone heard there are aliens visiting earth from their uncle. I'll also swat away similar claims about contrail or lizard people. What would be the logical reason not to swat them away?
You can ask what would take not to swat them away? How about specific details about aliens, new technology example or some breakthrough in physics or other science possible from this alien technology. A clear video or these spaceships not some blurry shape moving on the screen.
> One could also look at the NYT article as another leak, no?
Is it? It's a leak of the existence of UFO. There is not doubt UFOs exist, I am not sure that's proof of aliens.
> I would think that if one had something top secret like this that one desperately wanted to keep under wraps despite the inevitable leak, the best strategy might well be to intentionally sow lots of bogus UFO sightings and create a subculture of UFO paranoia,
I would also intentionally sow bogus UFO sightings if I wanted to hide program to test experimental aircraft.
>On a more serious note, I can't believe any government can keep a tight enough lid on something like that. Someone, somewhere is bound to defect or to leak it is somehow.
This is something that I wonder about - the Disclosure Project assembled some people that seemed to be fairly plausible witnesses. Was this press club disclosure ultimately discredited?
>Was this press club disclosure ultimately discredited?
I haven't seen anything to discredit the message from the witnesses in the video, but the guy who organised the Disclosure Project (Steven Greer) is really convinced that ET are here.
When I was in submarine sonar school, one of my instructors claimed to have heard sounds under the sea that were not of this world. He said that they made him believe in alien visitation.
In the many years and countless thousands of miles of voyages that followed, I never heard a goddamned thing. Oh well.
I had a Captain while doing my service in Finland he was convinced he had seen a UFO while aboard in Europe during the late 70s, he stood by it even when he was showed the spirit and claimed we must have copied it.
The one guy featured in this article, Luis Elizondo, is apart of Tom Delonge's (guy from the rock band Blink 182) wacky new company To The Stars Academy https://tothestarsacademy.com.
So yeah, I'm not sure he can be taken very seriously. Just listen to Tom Delong on Joe Rogan's podcast and see how wacky this all is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_3mnJfHzY
It’s totally anecdotal, and I’m just some guy on the internet, but I’ve seen these, or at least something similar, twice - once above Bath, UK, in 2012 - the first hint something was up was a pair of sonic booms as two typhoons hurtled into the airspace over the city. Needless to say, ran out of the office to gawp, and the fighters were circling a thing hovering at about 20,000 feet - bulky ovular object with greebles and lumps, just sitting there in the sky. As they approached it moved sideways as though on rails, and after a few minutes, a cloud formed around it, which then dissipated over a minute - the thing was gone. This was written up in the press the next day as a helicopter pilot in distress. Here’s the story the press ran with - there was no helicopter, I swear it. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129133/Sonic-boom-r...
The other was at night in the Kazakh steppes, watching a triangle of lights dance in impossible fashion, before zooming up into the sky and disappearing - although given that I was near Baikonur, I give more credence to this one being man made.
But the thing over Bath was enough to break my mind. I still struggle to believe I saw anything. Others who saw it with me took the helicopter story and clung to it, because the alternatives are just too damn weird to process. I can understand why the pilot in the story you link was mocked - giving credence to something like this invokes painful cognitive dissonance.
Anyway. I’m just a guy on the internet, but I know I saw something.
Doesn't sound the same as yours, but I saw the "triangles in the sky" in the late 90s in Australia. I came home from work at about 1am, and noticed three lights up in the sky moving at the same slow speed in a triangle-ish formation (For a while I thought they were connected, but then seemed to move independently, and just looked... odd). I watched them for a couple of minutes go across the sky, then had to go and wake up my parents to show them and prove I wasn't imagining it. I tried to take a photo, but this was the 90s and my night-time SLR skills were bad ;)
20 years later someone described the exact same thing on /r/astronomy and I remembered it. I spent a weekend "researching" it and there were lots of article and sightings but no real info (I was pretty intrigued at that point!). Then someone replied on the astronomy post that it was "Maybe the NOSS satellites."... I looked them up, and yep - it was exactly what I remembered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxN2ieE8N9A
In 1996 (Around June I think), myself and around 200-odd people at the Karratha drive-in cinema witnessed a nearly identical phenomenon as you describe. It was about 9pm - 10pm, and I have fond memories of everyone around us staring straight up, instead of at the cinema screen.
Karratha?! I was south of Perth - maybe it was the same ones! I went to call the observatory, so I dialed the operator (remember operators?) and she said "You saw the lights too? If you find out what they are, call me back!"... I never got through to anyone though and just let it go.
It would be interesting if it was the same event.
Though unlike the formation you showed, I recall the three stars initially coming together from different locations in the sky to form the triangle - they weren't initially in formation. They stayed in formation then for a few minutes, before disappearing
1998 in Colorado Springs, same thing for me. (edit: should note that in my viewing, they did suddenly dash off to the South, which is what shocked my friend and I driving down the highway)
Because whatever it was it was big - hundreds of metres long, and reflecting oddly - as to the range, judged it from the apparent size of the typhoons as they circled it - used to fly, and judging range is one of those things you have to get used to.
Before you saw these incidents, what was your belief system in UFOs? I ask this because sometimes we can see what we want to see and sometimes we cannot see what we don't want to see.
You mean confirmation bias. I don’t have any belief systems whatsoever - I just tend to err towards “highly improbable until proven impossible” with all things.
And I didn’t want to see something that has made me question my sanity for five years...!
I'll share that I had an encounter that seemed unnatural/impossible and I wasn't alone at the time. It also was reported in our local paper the following day. I contentiously (regardless of the experience) have never and do not believe in aliens.
Would you mind to share what your impossible encounter was like? Did the paper report something else (like the Daily Mail reporting on a helicopter as the cause)?
> The other was at night in the Kazakh steppes, watching a triangle of lights dance in impossible fashion, before zooming up into the sky and disappearing - although given that I was near Baikonur, I give more credence to this one being man made.
I was struck by your account, as Thomas Pynchon mentions in Gravity's Rainbow a mysterious phenomenon called the Kirghiz Light, seen on the steppes.
Maybe a coincidence, but Pynchon drew a lot on real history and events, and I wonder if there was not something on the steppes people have been reporting for a while. I never could find anything on the Internet about it, but it makes me wonder.
Cmdr. Dave Fravor was one of the most squared away F/A-18 pilots in the Navy. He is not some conspiracy "nut" and if he says he saw something, I'd believe him. He is held in high regard by those who served with him.
Cmdr. Fravor was featured in the PBS Carrier series [0][1]
It doesn't say this in TFA, but Fravor was one of the airmen who reported the incident to the NYT, hence the relevance. As he was allegedly denigrated by some as a nut, the 2nd sentence fragment is relevant as well. Neither correlation nor implication are needed to understand neurotech1's message; however, it does reference facts outside the article that one could gather from a quick google search, if desired. http://www.google.com/search?q=fravor+ufo
Except the object is clearly visible on the F-18's IRST camera footage. It was also picked up on radar by a surface cruiser and a nearby E-2 Hawkeye. See: https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/
There were multiple contacts and the F-18s had telemetry on the objects, it wasn't just an optical trick. Also how do two different jets see the same insect stuck on a lens?
Is there video available from multiple jets? Maybe they didn't ever clearly see it. Maybe they kinda thought they saw something, and lead themselves to believe they did because the other jet was so sure of it.
About the radar comment: how often are there false positives on the radar? If they didn't see anything at all, would they have written off the radar results because they normally get that kind of noise? Maybe after thinking they saw something, they read too far into the radar noise.
Yeah, I know I'm proposing a couple coincidences, but we only hear about the situations where all the coincidences line up. And really, a couple mild coincidences lining up like this must happen often across the world, and seems more likely to describe this case than this being something extraordinary.
If they had telemetry then they had to have pretty good idea of what that thing is in order to decode said telemetry or even recognize its RF emissions as telemetry.
I wouldn't guess an insect, but it does seem to track too well to the heading change of the aircraft. There seems to be no independent movement other than an orientation change.
Is the pilot in the video talking to a wingman or his weapons officer? (I think F-18E's are single seaters, but F-18F has a backseat).
Does the infrared camera lens zoom or focus by rotating? It looks like it's doing that towards the end.
Something stuck to the front element probably wouldn't be so much in focus, it should be something deeper in the lens. For example a piece of paint can become dislodged (has happened to me with binoculars).
There's no doubt there's a kind of aura of ridicule around the subject of UFOs and I'm sure credible people don't want to be associated with it.
That being said, I think it's something worthy of exploration. My interest in the subject really began when I listen to people around me who saw and experienced things. It's one thing to read books or watch documentaries about UFOs, but it's another when normal "everyday people" who aren't interested in this kind of thing tell you their stories.
What’s worth exploring is space. Better telescopes, more monitoring, etc will actually tell us something about tye possibilities or existence of alien life.
Chasing down misidentified flying objects and hoaxes will not. The idea that numerous spaceships, each with more potential kinetic energy than mankind has created in its entire history, are just flying around our atmosphere without leaving massive and easily recordable emissions is ludicrous.
It’s ludicrous if you assume they’re using diesel engines and air screws or something.
If they can snap accelerate with essentially infinite jerk, as observations seem to suggest, then they’re not playing by the same rule book as us, and have fancy inertialess tech that’s beyond our ken.
I’m not some true believer in little green men, just a scientist who won’t rule out what seems impossible just because it seems so.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and all that.
For which case(s), specifically, and how does human error resolve the issue?
Or do you not know any specific credible cases of unexplained UFOs, and just dismiss the entire phenomenon because of its "low probability."
(I'm being facetious because many or all of the interesting cases easily rule out human error as the source of the phenomenon. Simultaneous human (and radar!) hallucination maybe, but not error.)
Clarkes law isn’t a scientific principle. The only way that UFOs can be alien technology is if it violates all known laws of physics. Which makes them just as likely to be caused by Jesus Christ as aliens. Yet somehow i never see believers rushing to church.
Otherwise you can only examine through the lens of the known physics, which makes them being alien spaceships impossible.
>Chasing down misidentified flying objects and hoaxes will not. The idea that numerous spaceships, each with more potential kinetic energy than mankind has created in its entire history, are just flying around our atmosphere without leaving massive and easily recordable emissions is ludicrous.
Identifying, understanding and explaining/eliminating exceptions is how science progresses. I know it causes discomfort to see something that defies expectations right in front of you. That does not mean we do not examine it. We should.
Examine what? There is no evidence that any UFO is an enormously powerful alien spacecraft, in fact all evidence suggests the opposite. Enormous amounts of power can be clearly detected through emissions and effects on surrounding matter.
UFO doesn't mean alien spacecraft. It means unidentified flying object. Bigelow might be convinced we're being visited by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the cosmos, but that's just a belief.
UFOs have been filmed and recorded by radars everywhere on earth. Something is going on. That doesn't mean it's ETs visiting us. On the other hand, it's a possibility. We don't know.
Now, does it mean we have to stop everything we're doing to investigate UFOs? Nope. All I'm saying is it's an interesting subject to explore.
The fact that the military is not concerned is the most telling sign. In many ways the military would rather you believe in flying saucers instead of looking for black projects and it's suspected that the original UFO myths were perpetrated by the government to cover up top secret aircraft development.
Had someone seen the SR-71 in the 70s, it would have been considered a UFO or "alien technology" because it was so ahead of its time.
Many maneuvers "impossible for a plane" are impossible due to the pilot being human, not due to the plane not being capable. The F35 is capable of flight that would legitimately kill the pilot. No pilot, and suddenly you have lots more room to try crazy stuff including extremely high G speeds and turns, wingless designs or just crazy ideas.
>”...largely funded at the request of Harry Reid...”
>”Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s”
I don’t know who these people are beyond the fact that one of them was apparently a US senator, but this comes across as capable of being perceived as a conflict of interest (whether true or not). And not necessarily a monetary conflict if the recipient was indeed a billionaire.
Where is the HD footage that actually shows features of the mysterious "unidentified objects"?
Why is all the evidence grainy and obscured?
The prospect that life from another star system traveled hundreds of trillions of kilometers, only to hide for the past few decades, peeking out briefly for low-quality photoshoots, is beyond absurd.
I once tried to take a picture of a deer, that I saw running away from me and hiding behind a tree. I knew perfectly well were it was, in which direction it would go, and had enough time to set my phone's camera properly. And yet, thanks to a slow auto-focus and low light, my pictures ended up a blurry, unrecognizable mess. Not even I would believe my story.
I gained a lot of respect that day for people who claim to have seen something and yet have no evidence other than blurry, shaky films. If I couldn't do it under perfect conditions, I don't expect a random guy to become all of a sudden a great photographer. In fact, if I wanted to get a picture of a plane right now, with the equipment I have at hand, it would be barely more than a small, dark spot.
I don't know whether UFOs are real (and, even if they are, if they really are aliens and not weird, unknown airplane prototypes). But the lack of HD footage would not be on my top list of reasons against it.
This could explain some (even many) cases of being unable to capture evidence, but it would not explain no one ever being able to capture any meaningful decisive evidence.
Intelligent Aliens aren’t deer, anyone who has mastered interstellar travel are closer to god’s in terms of the power they’d have over us. No need to hide, and probably impossible to hide their massive power sources.
I am quite skeptical of this having to do anything with aliens, but the "they wouldn't need to hide angle" confounds me. It acts like the only motivation in an interspecies relationship would be minimizing vulnerability. The more vulnerable species would need to hide, the less vulnerable one wouldn't.
Is this genuinely the only motivation possible? I'd say that's a lack of imagination.
Scientists exploring animal species also often don't want to disturb their research subject, to avoid changing their behavior. An alien species might have a nonintervention clause akin to Starfleet.
Perhaps even, a certain property of one of our technologies or our culture is somehow dangerous to another species, who might have a philosophical disinclination towards conflict and thus they do not want to disturb us.
Perhaps their gear doesn't have much of a defense system given someone decided to cut some budget somewhere.
Employ a little imagination! It's probably all bunk but it's way more fun to look at news like this that way.
They won't be afraid of us, they probably don't want us to do something crazy like trying to use the nuclear weapons against them and hurt earth(humans) in the process.
Imagine going back in time only 100 years and trying to explain to someone that you can hold all the world's knowledge on a little plastic gadget that you can hold in your hand and that the gadget is also a camera that can shoot and play high definition videos. Most would say that is beyond absurd. I find it beyond absurd to speculate about what is or isn't possible when we know so little.
I don't know if alien spacecraft have visited Earth or not, but nothing says they would have to be piloted by aliens. If they exist, they could just as easily be robotic drones.
> If they exist, they could just as easily be robotic drones.
While perhaps literally included in the group of "robotic drones", one interesting possibility would be craft piloted by highly-developed machine intelligence, what we might call sentient AI.
That's a good point. Of course, it's possible. I just think it should be the last explanation we consider, after definitively crossing everything else off the list.
Almost all of the UFO reports whose evidence consists entirely upon video evidence can be discarded immediately, so claims like those made in this thread that write off all unexplained UFOs as being optical illusions, bugs on lenses, are red herrings because the cases that are interesting are very easily ruled out as being visual artifacts or failures in human perception.
What remains are cases that usually involve multiple professional pilots, with witnesses on ground and in air, combined with radar signatures and ground control tracking to confirm the existence of the object's presence.
Do you think ants look up at us and say to themselves "We'll surely if they were highly intelligent they would contact the queen!"
The truth is, IF (big if) it is super advanced aliens, they would have more reason not to contact us. This notion that we deserve formal contact is whats absurd. What exactly would they have to gain that they couldn't glean from stealthy observation and even deception to keep us off thier track?
Since people are sharing their own anecdotes, I'll share mine. Rather my dad's and my sister's anecdote. They were driving home one summer evening near sunset in Wisconsin when they saw in the perfectly clear sky ahead of them what appeared to be something floating in the sky. They way they described it was it looked like how a school bus might look at night from a distance with it's lights on in the inside except just the upper half of the bus, like a row of closely placed lights on a horizontal object. They say it moved around a bit in the sky, clearly some distance away from them and then slowly shrank and disappeared. These two people are not the type of people to lie about something like this. My dad hates science fiction and has zero imagination. My sister is a goody two shoes who would be hard pressed to adamantly lie about this. They told my mom and I this as soon as they arrived home. They looked like they saw a ghost or something when they told us.
Adding to this, is that like a month or two later, we were talking to a friend of ours in the area and our friend also confirmed seeing the same object except they live about 10 miles east of us. The thing is, our friend just told us this without us bringing the subject up, so it wasn't like she was 'me too'ing our story. The friend was relieved a bit that someone else had seen what she had seen.
Keep in mind, this is the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. Moderately poor area. Just farms, very small towns, and forests for miles. No planes fly this low in the area. No airfields for at least 30 miles, and the nearest airfield is for very small planes only. The only planes you see in in our area are ones way up in the sky.
Googling the description of what they describe comes up with something that people refer to as a 'cigar' shaped ufo (the recent astroid sighting has muddied the google results of this a bit). So it seems at least some other people have seen something similar to this.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the video is that the thing rotates.
As others have noted, the camera is auto-centering the object. If you look at the object's movement relative to the clouds in the background, it seems that the object might be turning and exposing its broader side to the relative direction of travel as seen from the camera. And then slowing down in the plane as viewed from the camera.
Note, this movement is relative and it's very hard to get a sense of perspective. So rather than slowing down, this could be the object banking and changing direction to move towards or away from the camera?
Maybe it's just a foreign aircraft with some kind of wingless shape like the B-2 bomber? I can't find a good source, but it seems there are blogs talking about new foreign stealth drones that could look like this. (http://defence-blog.com/news/new-stealth-bomber-spotted-in-c... -- not sure if this source is legit)
P.S. This is all assuming that this is indeed some kind of flying thing and not some kind of mirage.
“The Pentagon quietly ran a $22 million program to study unidentified flying objects from 2008 to 2012 at the behest of former Senator Harry Reid, the New York Times reported on Saturday, after considering numerous accounts of unexplained phenomena that could involve advanced technology developed by foreign governments or even aliens dropping in to spy on our crapsack world. For years, this program had federal contractors scurrying around trying to identify unexplained phenomena like Mulder and Scully instead of developing new and innovative ways to kill people.
The unclassified but secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was funded $22 million from 2008 to 2011, with the vast majority of the funding going to Bigelow Airspace. That’s a company conveniently owned by one of Reid’s friends and donors, Robert Bigelow”
>A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.
Except that, if said technologies are of man-made origin, then the United States is—given its rich history with regards to black aerospace programs—the most likely operator.
Maybe Nick Cook was more right than I've been willing to admit:
How much do the various militaries and defense contractors communicate with one another? Is it possible that we end up spying on our own technology across departments/contractors?
I looks like the plane is making a left turn, and yet the object is dead center in the screen with barely any shake. And it's definitely not stabilized, because all the lines on the display are still.
So maybe the pilot has some crazy ability to track a flying object perfectly while turning, but try doing it in any game and I think you will fail.
I know nothing about the current state of military tech, but that looks like a targeting camera that has some sort of edge detection allowing it to track the object.
The vertical lines to the left and right of the object appear computer controlled, to me, especially because they track the left and right edges of the object and the vertical length changes in a way that seems reactive to the object on screen.
The brief moment where those lines don't have the object centered and then it just jumps back into place (at the very end of the video ~31-32s) screams computer assisted to me.
In short, I don't think that's manual tracking, because I'm pretty sure that even a Navy pilot would have trouble tracking it that perfectly by hand.
The pod is an AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR[0][1], a type of IRST (InfraRed Search & Tracking) system. The pod is either cued by the F/A-18 radar, or automatically tracked by pod itself. The ATFLIR has a computer assisted stabilization system.
"A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered"
Wait, what? What are the "technologies discovered"?
What concerns me about these things is the likelihood of it being an earthbound experimental aircraft. If it's not ours, and it looks like magic to us, we're losing our air superiority.
The video is from the FLIR camera, which is gyroscopically stabilized and locked onto the object. I don't think you can tell what the parent plane is doing unless part of it comes into the FLIR's view. News helicopters have the same tech.
You could make video tracker like this yourself for ~8 years now using free software, running in real time on cheap laptop/phone. Machine learning source code from 2010: https://github.com/evilsantabot/motld
Military loves funding. I wouldn't be surprised if military guys were fanning the flames of the UFO claims in front of the right legislators to get the funding they want.
Find out what a person truly believes in and you can rule them.
Does anyone have a link to the official government release of this information. I have been searching for sometime but only can find secondary news cites (and we all know they have there ways of messing with the facts).
And if they do exist, then what? Piss 'em off by trying to kill or capture one?(more likely) Send Richard Dreyfuss up for an extended visit to Wyoming?(less likely)
My guess is they send regular pilots up on training to see if they detect whatever latest stealth drone they are also testing. They obviously are not going to tell the pilots beforehand.
It's an Infrared camera video, taken from the Super Hornet's IRST system which can slave / gimbal independently of the aircraft's manoeuvring, hence why it's centred.
I also wonder why resolution mist always be this low, my cell phone ($250) can shoot 4K and a plane that costs millions can't shoot video that is detailed enough to investigate the phenomenon.
Avionics are always way behind consumer electronics due to safety and reliability certification requirements, as well as tiny production volumes. How well would your cell phone hold up to thousands of hours of intense vibrations, freezing temperatures, hard shocks, and hydraulic fluid leaks?
Because it's a FLIR (thermal) camera, which is a technology that has practically nothing in common with your phone's camera. You're comparing apples to oranges.
Harry Reid is as crooked as a dog's hind leg. In fact, that democrat putz is so crooked they'll have to screw him into the ground when he dies. Anyway, I hope his buddy Robert Bigelow the male gigolo finds something interesting and shares his wares because something's going on up there.
Please stop posting uncivil, unsubstantive comments to HN. You're welcome here, but comments like this are not, regardless of how bad some other people may be.
