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).

No, the logical step is to stop and think whether or not you should use public money to do this.

If he raised some VC funding, he can go hunt Minotaur for all I care. But this is my money he's using to do this. No thanks

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.

Hunt Minotaur lol

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".

What we often fail to realize -- esp. in our tech bubble -- is that science is now mistrusted by the mainstream in society.

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.

FYI, you meant "fallible". "Infallible" means they don't make mistakes.

I think that when many people here think of science then it is the science, the methodology.

What you are describing is the science, the institution and this is perhaps also how wider public perceives it.

Using "science" makes your statement too broad.

Fallacious appeals to shame, in all likelihood

>>>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.

Or it's a giant graft program.

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.

>Hiring him to do this is like hiring Robert Ballard to find the Titanic.

No, because the Titanic could be proven to have existed before Robert Ballard tried to find it.

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.

This is not a hoax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Ai...

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?

Pretty sure they don’t have security cameras pointed at the sky

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

This was over a gate (C-17 iirc) and thus may have been out of view for any flight control cams.

Too bad no one at an entire airport had a camera or took a picture.

Also, it wasn't seen by 'everyone at the airport'

>"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.

Not taking a side, just pointing that out.

Phones had cameras back then. Disposable Cameras were available at every airport shop.

And Someone allegedly photographed it, but no one bothered to examine or release the photos?

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek#Change_of_opini...

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.

You do? I don't know if I want to live in that world. Depends on how friendly the aliens are I suppose?

Fair enough!

Also, this came out moments ago. Timely? https://twitter.com/cnn/status/943105094345723904

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.

I doubt it was a no-bid contract. And there are far more lucrative programs which raise far less eyebrows than this.

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.

I was responding to your statement:

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.

Not as much if you do open bidding which is pretty common in local and state government

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.

2007 budget gets passed in 2006 though.

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.

This.

Also, may I add, what was the aerospace research company paid for exactly? Wasn't the project just filing reports and talking to people?

it was pretty funny how the article had only passing mention of that part.

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.