The weird thing about UFO lore is the idea that a super-advanced civ would be roaming between the stars in large spinning hubcaps. Or weird glowing orbs.
I'm willing to believe it's a big galaxy and we have NFI what's going on out there.
But UFO mythology seems very human-scale and not so alien at all.
Alien civilizations almost certainly wouldn’t be traveling between the stars in ships. In the unlikely event that aliens are in our solar system, it would make tons more sense to assume they got here via a Bracewell-Von Neumann probe. At which point any “spinning hubcaps” would just be vehicles for exploring the planet and taking samples. (No I don’t believe there are aliens here, but I like my sci-fi to be realistic.)
Not necessarily, we don't observe UFOs in the solar system or beyond, they're almost always seen around earth. Besides the obvious explanation for this I always imagined that if they were alien they would be time machines or interdimensional machines given that people report meeting biological life from within.
But again, I think we see UFOs on earth more than in space because they're sadly not alien.
I think that maybe I get really worked up about this because I am still pissed off that Santa Claus wasn't real, or at least that I once believed he was. I am not being facetious.
It's always weirded me out how many ostensibly Christian households teach their children about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, etc, and let the kids think they are real. Do they not realize they are sewing the first seeds of doubt the children will have in their household religion?
Hmm, I wonder if it serves a societal purpose. As far as I can remember, catching my parents in "the big Santa lie" was the first time that I realized that adults are full of crap. This is a valuable lesson, right? But I felt so betrayed!
It was the beginning of my journey into fact-based reasoning, naturalism, etc. I distinctively remember thinking: I will never believe in magic again!
I started asking too many questions at catholic Sunday school, and the Sunday school teacher and I decided it was best that we part ways.
I am over 40 now, but this is such a strong and important memory. I am still a little pissed off about it. This is hilarious, and maybe a bit profound.
I think the "ostensibly" has a lot to do with it. I am Christian and never told my kids Santa Claus was real.
On the other hand there is no harm in stories. I also do not want my kids to believe something just because I believe it. They should think for themselves and to do otherwise it is dishonest.
I do agree it is sometimes odd. I found myself trying to explain to a bewildered Sikh guy on Twitter why British society gets upset when people tell kids that Santa Claus is not real but is fine with people telling kids that Jesus is not real.
And how deceiving children is normalized in society, together with even worse forms of mistreatment. Because children are low status and can't fight back, adults and society in general can get away with doing all sorts of unjustified nasty things to them. That no adult would ever tolerate.
It really is a dominance hierarchy there, something we expect from animals. People are supposed to be better than that.
That’s certainly what happened to me. I can’t recall ever believing in Santa whole-heartedly and the knowledge of it’s falseness was a foot in the door to question everything else.
Strangely my brother was far, far older when my mother and I had to convince him that Santa was not actually real. She was afraid that kids at school would make fun of him if we didn’t pop his bubble first. I’m not sure what to make of that difference in belief between my brother and I.
It's it really that though? Deism involves some god and worship normally. I'm happy to say "that's a cool theory and if we experimentally confirm some quantisation of our universe, that's not the most stupid explanation to think of", while still rejecting any idea of deism or thinking I need to "do anything" about that fact. I mean, the creator can be strictly just that, like I'm not a god of my breakfast every day.
There was no technology involved, only observation.
Did the Greeks believe their myths that literally? It is very hard to know how ancient people's interpreted stories like that unless you have an in-depth knowledge of the culture. I do not, but its a question worth asking - particularly about a culture that produced so many naturalistic explanations for things.
Even if you are right and they did believe it literally it is still the opposite of the simulation theory. It is accepting the first explanation that comes along, without applying doubt, whereas simulation theory is based on extensive doubt of even your immediate senses - exactly the same as Descarte's line of thought.
This doesn't even have to be a metaphor, there are literal cults based on literal aliens. Some of them are quite large and influential.
The non-organised ones though, I think make people feel good for themselves by either making them feel important(advanced civilisation came across the universe for me) or reassured (it's going to be alright, the universe works as expected - no funny business)
Don't be so quick to dismiss claims. In this case, it's very real, and you're doing yourself a disservice by asserting otherwise without searching.
I know for a fact that it's real. I spent about a year outside in Colorado, and saw several objects beyond explanation. Most are small and hard to see unless you know to look in the darkness of the sky between the stars. A couple put the fear of God into me - so big that they were the size of my two outstretched hands against the sky. Spheres cloaked against clouds in the night sky. Incomprehensibly large Y-shaped craft studded with what look like stars. Military-looking craft silently soaring directly above.
Who knows if they're alien or manmade.. but whether you believe it or not, they're in the sky every night.
I have seen slightly weird things in the sky. But to assume that they are an advanced technological species is not an assumption that I can jump to.
I always found a much more plausible explanation.
For 15 years, I lived near a NOAA station which launched balloons, but I didn't know that at first. They launch one right at sunset, every day. When it hits the sun at 1000 feet, it looks pretty darn crazy! Sometimes there were shadows from low clouds blocking the sunset, and the balloon would only get lit up at >10,000 feet, and it would "jump" in different directions due to high altitude wind sheers. I was very disappointed when I learned that truth.
I agree, assuming it's aliens is a huge stretch. I can only say that aerial vehicles hundreds of meters across are silently traversing the sky. I hesitate to say it's manmade or otherwise. I'd have to see it to believe it.
And while I'll concede that there are bizarre phenomenon of weather and lighting that can occur (google "crown flash"), the "Y" ship I saw was 5 full moons in width and absolutely, assuredly there.
On a side note, these objects also have the ability to "come out of" and "return to" the night sky. It's as if a spotlight were pointed at one area of the sky, and the craft unintentionally crossed the path. They come from nothing, and they return to nothing, within about 15 seconds. It's hard to explain.
Anyways, nothing personal if we don't agree on the matter. I know HN is based on hard evidence and logic, I can't provide either. But it's good to keep an open mind and keep looking for answers.
To be fair, if you're seeing vast, incomprehensibly large craft in the sky and no one else is, as something like that should have hundreds if not thousands of people to corroborate, as well as photos, video sightings,etc, that's a sign that what you're seeing is not objectively real.
Although it is quite a coincidence that the spinning hub cap ufo sightings seem to be much more common during time periods when things like the avrocar were being tested.
The avrocar never made it more than 5 feet from the ground though. I doubt it barely even left the base. I wonder if the project was inspired by UFO sightings though...
Before flying saucers became pop culture, people reported "phantom rocketships" or literal sailing ships in the sky. When people claimed to encounter the aliens in such craft, they would claim to be from Venus or Mars, until it became common knowledge that neither Venus nor Mars contain advanced life. Once the "greys" became popular, everyone reported greys. Before that, aliens were far more diverse in appearance (notwithstanding the common appearance of "space white people".)
If you study accounts of alien encounters and abduction, none of the technology abductees report seems extremely advanced, much less alien. Recognizable computers with buttons and dials. Levers. The aliens never bother to offer any equations or technical diagrams to prove their technology. In the whole centuries-long span of avowed alien encounters, no one has ever come away with anything we didn't already know. Of course, one could say the same thing about prophecies and Nostradamus. Encounters with angels, or demon summoning. Always just a hall of mirrors, always maddeningly subjective, never anything to hang one's hat on.
Even in the very first recorded modern abduction scenario, Betty and Barney Hill, the aliens gave Betty a book to take with her. Evidence! Oh, but later another alien just look it back. Womp womp. Oh but there's a star map. Oh wait, it turns out it doesn't stand up to actual scrutiny. It's just dots and circles on a piece of paper, and so simple one wonders why an advanced civilization would even find it useful.
And here we are in 2024 being told about city-sized craft and black pyramids and "non human biologics" and still not a damn bit of proof.
And even with the weird outliers like the Falcon Lake incident or the Phoenix lights or Shag Harbor, where there is evidence of something weird or multiple eyewitnesses (not that that necessarily means anything,) things still don't make sense. Tell me how the Falcon Lake UFO makes sense. The witness looks like he pressed a waffle-iron against his chest because the UFO (allegedly) hit him with its weird grid of exhaust ports before taking off. The technology being described is both advanced and ridiculously quaint, as it so often is.
The thing reported by Japan airlines 1628 - a weird spinning cylinder covered in flaming tubes and random lights. Obviously not Venus unless the pilot was deranged (which can't be taken off the table,) but if not, then what? You'd be surprised just how many UFOs seem to incorporate flames and rockets and that vanish in bursts of sulfur and flame as if they were demons returning to Hell. Almost as if they draw from the same subconscious archetypes.
None of it makes any sense if taken at face value, and so much of it is obviously folklore, as it follows the structure of folklore.
> If you study accounts of alien encounters and abduction
Ever find it strange how many abduction stories happen in people's bedrooms while they're lying down? It's because it's a hypnagogic hallucination during sleep paralysis.
Alternatively, they don't remember the abduction but recovered the memory under hypnosis. It's almost certainly the case that these were false memories.
A third options is that they are just legitimately insane. Schizophrenia does exist.
The problem is these stories while inconsistent in the ways you mention are also inexplicably consistent in other ways.
Imagine we have another small population of moderately more technologically advanced hominids right here on Earth. Say they want to fool us and make us think they are ET. Imagine they have technology we we have, like VR, drugs, and some we don’t like novel high energy hydroelectrodynamic atmospheric propulsion.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and if you experienced it, you would probably find yourself hallucinating details like the ones you mentioned to make it fit into some kind of coherent picture based on the technology and even physics you know.
We have observed exactly one sentient species, (ours) and it is sending probes already. There are 200 sextillion stars.
For the opposite position (they shouldn't be here) to make sense, there has to be either no other civilizations, or our probe-sending habits are so rare that no other civilizations do it, or we are the first.
Any of those other stances seem vastly more improbable, as they assume that our sample-of-one society just happens to be ludicrously different than all others.
I think the reason why it seems improbable is that we conceptualize interstellar travel with a mental model of travel and exploration based on our human history of exploration and travel on Earth. So we think-- if there were a civilization a thousand light years away of course they would come visit and study us.
What if the time it takes to travel between stars is longer than most civilizations exist? What if we aren't that interesting to alien species or aren't worth the time and energy to discover? We've never sent a functioning probe to any other star and probably won't in my lifetime. And life may not be at the nearest star, it may be thousands of light years away. We may never have the resources available to do it.
> What if the time it takes to travel between stars is longer than most civilizations exist?
The probe doesn't require its parent civilization to continue existing to keep working. It self-replicates. You don't have to "pick" where self-replicating probes go. Each can self-replicate, and you can get nigh-infinite probes for "free." A von Neuman probe finds its own resources.
We have never built anything complicated enough to self - replicate or self -repair that could last a hundred years. We have never built a biosphere that can exist in a self contained manner for a hundred years. I am not saying we won't but you are assuming we will figure out how to makes something that will maintain its message integrity for a hundred thousand years and then we will have the energy or the ability to shrink it enough to be able to send it off to some life supporting star.
We have only had complicated writing for a few thousand years. People have wondered if a technical civilization existed on earth a hundred million years ago would there be any thing around now as evidence. If it takes a million years of travel in the freezing, radioactive vacuum of space to reach another life form, you don't know that humans will be around long enough as a civilization to figure out how to actually build the thing that you are describing. I hope so, but I don't think its been proven to be possible yet.
Since we have only a sample of one, I can never make my mind up on about what is probable or improbable.
But I do believe it is technically possible in principle to construct and build von Neuman probes. Once they work inside a solar system, then work on making them withstand, say, a few million years in orbit and see if they still work, once they survive a few million years "inactive" (or constantly repairing themselves or whatever it takes), send them off to the stars. But it would take a patience and scale of industry we humans literally can only vaguely dream of.
They don't have to do that. The probe just has to make more "child probes" before it dies. You don't need a huge industry if they are self-replicating. You need only one working probe to start, the rest handles itself.
And it has to survive for millions of years until it reaches a new solar system without something to "feed" on. In many ways it seems easier to make a Neuman probe which can survive within a solar system than something which can travel to another.
it's only 75k to our nearest neighbor, and that's with current craft speeds, there's theoretical ideas for craft that's faster using solar sails and much smaller lower mass that might do it in a century.
We do know the motivations to some degree because they're constrained by physical reality, evolution, and game theory.
Von Nuemann probes are possible in this physical reality for a relatively cheap cost and small time frame.
It makes sense to put probes that can watch for threats anywhere you think that threats can be. Species that do this have a greater chance of survival than species that don't.
It makes sense to send them everywhere to have a sensor network wherever you go. The only reason why they may not be out there is because of Great Filter or because we are the first ones in our vicinity (would not be strange as our Universe is fairly young).
My issue with this thesis is it anthropomorphizes intentions and capabilities.
We're predicting the behavior of civilizations a lot more advanced than us. We need a level of humility to realize that this is a lost cause, and a lot of the paradigms we take for granted will be shown to be false.
So while everything you said makes sense, the space of unknown unknowns is so large that we should moderate our confidence in the underlying assumptions downwards.
The dinosaurs were dominant 250 million years ago.
If humans had come first instead of dinosaurs and built von Neumann probes at that time, our probes could be saturating scores other galaxies--not stars, galaxies by now. That's with only a 250 million year differential in technology emergence. It isn't hard to imagine the emergence of technology varying by even more than that.
Space is far, far larger than the mind can easily conceive. To "von Neuman probes should be here" is to fail to comprehend just how improbable it would be for a spacecraft to be aimed at Earth.
You don't aim a von Neuman probe anywhere. You use unbounded exponential math to send them everywhere as they are free. It seems like you might find the idea interesting if you look into the concept a bit closer.
Yes, but space is still vast. The chance of one hitting earth is infinitesimal. Also, "they are free" isn't strictly true. Where do they get the resources to reproduce? Using unbounded exponential math implies a sort of paperclip maximizer that would eat up everything in its path.
But the point of sending out Von Nuemann probes is to send them to every star in a galaxy, so that you can watch the goings on of all those stars. That means that any Von Neumann plan in the Milky Way will involve Earth.
> Where do they get the resources to reproduce?
From the the star systems that they reach. Stars provide the energy and whatever detritus in the form of an asteroid belt that orbits the star will provide the material to build new probes.
yes, but they travel slowly and have to somehow (never clearly stated how) communicate back to home. as they spread out, the comms stuff becomes more and more problematic.
If they work anything like any natural or artificial communications system we’ve built, each new “node” would immediately establish a connection to the nearest colonized star system. Light speed delays would still matter, but any important news and communications would get delivered.
A communications network that works with an average latency of five years (the average distance between stars), and an edge case of millions of years would be all but useless. The civilization that started it might not even be the civilization that receives the first message, or even the same species. And what does "important news and communications" even mean with that kind of latency?
Also there is signal degradation to consider. Depending on their broadcast strength, there is a limited range beyond which any signal they send will be indistinguishable from background noise. According to this quora post[0] that limit could be as little as four light years. It certainly would not work on any significantly pan-galactic scale. Lasers would fare little better, they would also diffuse and be absorbed by interstellar material.
Also, at that scale, whatever message gets sent may no longer be relevant, or factual, by the time it's received. A lot can happen in a million years. It's difficult for me to think of a message worth sending that also doesn't matter if it takes longer than the time it took humans to evolve to get from point to point.
I think a better way to think about this is: what would humans do if they had a few crucial pieces of technology? Assume you have computers advanced enough to self-replicate and carry out some pre-programmed set of goals creatively (this is essentially required for Von Neumann probes to work, and doesn’t seem wildly out of the ballpark for even humans in a few hundred years.)
My guess is that we would optimistically assume human survival and build a network capable of exploring the galaxy without us. Since lightspeed delays make real-time communication impossible, individual nodes would be programmed to replicate and explore, following a specific set of parameters. They would report their findings back to some central hub if they found anything interesting, which would probably be only rarely. No doubt for very surprising findings (eg advanced intelligent species) they’d have additional instructions to enter a holding pattern and observe until they received explicit commands. Which, as you point out, might never come.
I can’t speak to what aliens might do. humans would absolutely build this system the moment they had the technology to do it. The fact that we might not survive to use it would be acknowledged and then we’d do it anyway. If anything we’d see it as a fitting memorial to our existence.
once again, someone suggests that humans will develop (at probably staggering costs) probes that cannot report back to them for tens of thousands of years. how many human civilizations have lasted that long - zero? it is simply not in our interest to do so.
At the point where a civilization can build self-replicating intelligent probes, concepts like “staggering cost” probably aren’t as much of a barrier as you’d imagine.
That's a fair point. If they are autonomous and carrying out a mission on your behalf, perhaps they don't need to communicate back to be useful. Might still leave defense, advance scouting, resource location (a broad search), panspermia, or other possibilities.
Whatever the truth may be, we now have people testifying in Congress - under oath - that the UFO phenomenon is real. David Grusch has gone through the official whistleblower process in order to make this happen, and there have been private briefings with the ICIG and members of Congress, who have given credence to his claims [1].
So while it's difficult to know what the truth is at this point in time, it's either that aliens are real or there are a lot of nutjobs in the US government.
It’s actually a false dilemma. They’re real, but they’re non-human Earthlings living here in an environment we haven’t yet discovered or stumbled upon is the option few talk about, fits the full body of evidence better than any other explanation, and would prove most everyone wrong in different ways. So I bet that is what is going on.
Edit: it’s always funny that I get downvoted for just writing a theory out that is a pretty good one, as though you’re supposed to downvote people for this kind of post. People get really upset by this subject.
I don’t think anybody is upset by what you wrote, it just sounds like a nutty theory with no evidence, which doesn’t contribute to an informative discussion.
Lots of people in this thread are speculating about the plausibility of an ET hypothesis, which is far more nutty than what I wrote here. What I wrote here is unorthodox, but an ET hypothesis comparatively is absurd, particularly if you are going to entertain that based on the existing evidence. The existing evidence would not imply ET as much as another Earth species interacting with us. It also can imply that people are crazy or lying, of course, but I'm talking within the realm where we are going to speculate about ET.
I don't think it's a pretty good one. It sounds crazy. What do they eat? Where is any evidence of their existence and history? Where do they make their technology? Why is there no heat signature? Why not a single one ever tried to run away and expose them, or just got lost into our world?
Yeah I mean ultimately I can put forward falsifiable tests for most of these. My hypothesis is they are in a large void under one of the oceans, in physical pods. They don't eat solid food, but absorb a liquid diet. They probably do produce a heat signature, if we looked. I don't have a good explanation for the relative lack of evidence of their surface phase, but we do have some evidence that timelines around technological civilization are very off base. For your last point, I think most of them are not physically able to travel to the surface at all, and any instance of crashed manned UAPs (which imo, are no longer manned at all) may have explanations of the kind you state. But that's all been eliminated now - I would be surprised to find out we have any surface visitations by anything other than things which absolutely must be manned. (Of which I can speculate, but the null set is a possibility.)
In the sense of existence, sure. But it's pretty clear that one side has gone far, far further down the conspiracy hole. Can you think of anything in the dem side as widespread as, say, the ivermectin+antivax crap was?
This stuff isn't new, either, but the scale of it is. A major wing of the Republican party is effectively the John Birch Society, who were nuts mostly kept at arms length in a previous generation. And that's seemingly the way that many Republican voters want their party to behave.
'Can you think of anything in the dem side as widespread as, say, the ivermectin+antivax crap was?' Russian conspiracies. To be clear, I think the left and the right are bad.
> either that aliens are real or there are a lot of nutjobs in the US government
Well, they caught David Grusch in multiple factual lies he made during that congressional hearing and called him out on it immediately after[0]:
> Contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO.
> Further, some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to the office, Kirkpatrick said, “raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some Congressional elements.”
With his credibility already being questionable, those easy to disprove things don't make his credibility look any better at all. So I am heavily leaning towards the nutjob take on the situation. If we have presidents willing to perjure themselves during a trial, I can easily believe we have a bunch of random government employees willing to make up lies in congressional hearings.
P.S. It doesn't have to be all nutjobs either. All it takes is one nutjob and a good number of opportunistic grifters.
This UFO investigation stuff is just a giant bandwagon, which people get on to for money, influence and power.
I don't think there's any extra-terrestrial activity going on here on Earth, period. Maybe elsewhere in the Universe and probably not in our solar system either.
>I don't think there's any extra-terrestrial activity going on, period.
given that the universe is so large there's not a number that can accurately measure its true size or age, you mean to tell me you think that humans are the only intelligent lifeforms to exist currently, have existed, or will exist?
No one here is saying that. What so many are saying is that we're just not that interesting. Any highly advanced technological species that can build spaceships that can cross the vastness of space isn't going to take anything more than a passing interest, if even that, in a species that can't even get out of its own solar system.
To see so much conspiracy around here is sobering. This community loves to poke fun at things like religion while applying the same faulty logic to things like extraterrestrial UFOs.
I think that extraterrestrial UFO conspiracies are extra juicy because they also infer negative things about the US government.
> “What’s more likely?” asked Kirkpatrick. “The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that’s being commercialized down in Florida that you didn’t know about, or we have extraterrestrials?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them; here’s the company in Florida that builds exactly what you’ve described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, it’s gotta be extraterrestrials, and you’re covering it up.”
I'm fairly confident about it because I've seen this pattern before, with moral panics, fairy tales, witch hunts and other group/herd behavior in people throughout history (and modern times as well).
Yes, I think it's sociological in origin and the UFOs don't exist. There are probably a core group of "true believers" that are absolutely convinced that aliens exist.
Of course, you get utterly depraved individuals who do absolutely atrocious things, e.g. cannibalism. You might get a dozen of them over the decades. And cults that can be nasty and do terrible things.
But the moral panic is where we see it everywhere, in the thousands, when it isn't. It's like a form of mass paranoia. And it's harmful not just because of the innocent people falsely accused, but that people were not letting their children out to play, out of fear of predators, which likely damages their development somewhat.
It's very disappointing, but all evidence indicates that we (a technological species) are alone, in this area, at this time. It even seems possible that we might be the first technological species in our Local Group.[0]
If someone could prove me wrong, I would be so excited!
No they're on the surface they're just invisible. Also they drive invisible cars. Oh and they are made out of a different kind of matter that just passes through normal matter.
But I believe that alien theory, alien simulation theory, etc.. are all our modern form of deism. Humans have a great need to find order from a higher power.
I will believe in god(s), aliens, or any other higher power when I am shown irrefutable proof. Until then, we are on our own folks!
I mean I thought this too but this is the one area, particularly under recent events, that I think it’s reasonable to start trying to come up with good non-prosaic explanations. You’ll probably find an increasingly surprising number of people talking and thinking about this in a serious way, because events seem to be pointing to something that isn’t just smoke and mirrors the entire way down. It’s smoke and mirrors to be sure in many ways. But it’s sufficiently uniquely weird that it is looking increasingly likely there is a significant non-prosaic thing going on here.
Hah, this is the second time in the last half a year where I've heard the "underground civilization" theory. The previous person mentioning it to me was totally serious too...
beats me. some people have emotional reactions to hypotheses around the UAP phenomenon. it's not that surprising given the implications of if it is due to non-human intelligence, but it's annoying that speculative theorizing about this is treated the way it is compared to other mysteries.
There are many regions/nations that are either hostile to the current international order or ungoverned. There is no chance of such a global conspiracy working for many decades to cover this up. Besides, just think what hostile countries would do to get access to alien technology or just prevent their enemies from it. That would be very, very noticeable.
Grusch doesn't know anything, he only repeats what he's been told, and what he's been told comes from the same group of Skinwalker Ranch/UFO grifters that have been blowing smoke up the backsides of Schumer and other credulous dupes for years. There is no reason to believe aliens are real in this scenario, or that whatever goes on in private briefings involves "real evidence" of such, as opposed to just passing on more nonsense that happens to be classified (like a lot of the already debunked UAP videos.)
Just because someone says something under oath, doesn't mean it's true. Just because someone says something in a SCIF, doesn't mean it's true. Just because a video seems to show a weird light or an orb or a triangle and the government says it hasn't been tampered with, doesn't mean the government is admitting that it shows proof of actual extraterrestrial craft.
The scenario presented in TFA is the simplest explanation that makes the most sense, even more so than it all being a distraction or intentional psyop to fool the Chinese or Russians. Maybe at the core of everything, there is some exotic foreign drone activity the Navy wants people to feel free to report, but the stigma of "UFOs" has gotten in the way. I can see some of this being part of a campaign by the military to make the phenomenon credible for the sake of national security, but not because actual aliens are involved.
David Grusch is supposedly in the process of writing an op-ed in which he reveals more about his actual knowledge. He was not allowed to talk publicly about his actual involvement.
As to "for the sake of national security", I am really not buying this angle. There are plenty of scarecrows to use for increased spending - Russia, China, Middle East, North Korea. The media has not covered this topic at all. You would expect more engagement if this was really a push for more money.
> intentional psyop to fool the Chinese or Russians
It might be partly that, but I don't think it's only that. Because Grusch says that Russians and Chinese themselves have the tech and are considering disclosure. Russia and China will know that's false, making it self-defeating.
I work with a lot of DoD analysts. The vast majority are ex-military, having spent time at the Pentagon doing basically the same job they do at our company now. And they are all, to the last one, some version of nutty.
Kirkpatrick has misrepresented things in the past. His whole thing is very suspicious and weird. I wouldn’t put too much weight on what he is saying here.
Setting aside the credibility of the source, his claims align with the public facts. In this age of ubiquitous, high-res sensing tech, there has yet to be any credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence on Earth. And his statement that all of the accounts of government cover-up of extraterrestrials being secondhand also aligns with everything I've read. David Grusch's testimony is a great example of this.
The bottom line is, we have too many Mulders and not enough Scullys.
Presumably if we're dealing with a non-human intelligence that does not want to be identified then we're in the challenging situation of this being closer to an adversarial war than a natural phenomena. So, while absence of evidence doesn't prove anything about that being the case, absence of evidence would be expected if it was: if human civilization developed ubiquitious high-res sensing tech, then you'd expect the adversary to respond in kind.
In other words, if they're real, and they're trying to hide, then the fact we all have iPhones hasn't yielded more evidence doesn't prove anything, because if it was us, we'd change our tactics to avoid being detected by those things. As we do in war. It's very important to notice I'm not saying this tells us that is what is going on - we have to build up our priors in other ways to decide if that's true - but what I'm saying is that the claim that we all have cameras and yet not more UFO videos has absolutely zero epistemological effect, since it's smuggling in the assumption these objects are behaving like a natural phenomenon that will maintain their visible presence in spite of our own technological advancement. That's obviously not what one would expect if it's actually non-human intelligence.
That’s not actually true - we know for example the USS Nimitz TicTac incident happened and exists (not really a debate).
We have evidence of it happening from FLIR Camera of an F/18, an E2 Hawkeye Radar Plane, the SPY-1 Radar from the USS Princeton, the Ballistic Missile Defense system from when they were above 80,000ft
All of this data is corroborated and doesn’t appear to be up for debate - at the first UAP hearing Scott Bray the Deputy Director of Navy Intelligence said:
[Congressional staffer]: Can you provide us a specific
example of an object that can’t be explained as having
been human made or natural?
[Scott Bray]: I mean the example that I would say is
still unresolved, that I think everyone understands
quite well is the 2004 incident from [the USS] Nimitz
[aircraft carrier]. We have data on that, and it simply
remains unresolved…
At what point does sufficiently advanced technology become not human? I’d argue the TicTac displays that.
Otherwise you have to accept that there is a human organization with the capability of generating 10x the total sum of all Nuclear power generated in the United States in something the size of a 40ft TicTac 20 years ago
I mean - I guess it’s possible it’s human, it’s just that it’d make me incredibly sad if so considering whoever has it is letting the world burn.
Source on the power requirements:
Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles
I just can’t imagine this being weather personally as whatever it was, starts actively Jamming the F18 (technically an act of war). If you watch the TicTac video you’ll see it when it pops to 99.9 RNG on the display
I should note - a list of everyone that has said we have this data:
* Former President Obama
* House Intel Committee Member Adam Schiff
* Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer
* Senate Armed Services Committee Member Kirsten Gillibrand
* Former DNI John Ratcliff
* Deputy Director of Navy Intelligence Scott Bray
* Senator Mitt Romney
* Senator Marco Rubio
* Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley
* Former Senate Majority Member Harry Reid
And a bunch of other house members - is someone faking a bunch of data and showing it to them?
> We have evidence of it happening from FLIR Camera of an F/18, an E2 Hawkeye Radar Plane, the SPY-1 Radar from the USS Princeton, the Ballistic Missile Defense system from when they were above 80,000ft
We don’t. All we have is fuzzy videos and random statements about radars from ships operating in a naval test range right next door to San Clemente island, which is bristling with radars and antennas with a mission to develop countermeasures.
Not that that ever will raise an eyebrow in the conspiracy theory folks. 99.9% of them have never been curious to look.
> 99.9
If you don’t write code, ask a coder what they think when they see a number like that.
Why is this government officer, speaking just to a newspaper more reliable than the other government officer who spoke under oath?
There was legislation to bring transparency to the topic, and it was stripped at the last minute by 2 congressmen heavily funded by the defense industry. If this was all a rouse to get more funding, don't you think they would've loved the legislation?
frustrating, because on the one hand, the explanation that all the "UFO whistleblowing" is all just a self-cycling money generator scheme by cranks with government jobs is the most obvious explanation. On the other, if you were a government desperately trying to hide the aliens, this is exactly the kind of spokesperson / story you would come up with to throw everyone off the trail.
Nevertheless, reality prevails, ill go with choice A.
It's not frustrating. Your priors for the odds that aliens have visited earth should be extremely low, and the odds of cranks existing fairly high. Given that, it's not 50/50 cranks/coverup. Intuitively you know it's a tiny probability.
So Schumer proposed a major ammendment to the NDAA, and was willfully advised by a "crank" without vetting? And said ammendment was significantly watered down by reps who have big donors within the defense contractor world who have a lot to lose over such legislation, because there's nothing there?
Can't it be both? Can't some small subset of the gov want to cover up the presence of aliens, while others (without the clearance) and their deep-pocket'pocket'ed private industry relatives whip up stories that drive budget / business?
If there aliens the number of ppl in gov has to be small[1].
[1] And before someone mentions the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, that was different. No one was going to be a hero for leaking that. It was also different times when most had more faith and trust in the Fed gov.
> If there aliens the number of ppl in gov has to be small
Not trying to nitpick, but what was this supposed to mean? I am genuinely struggling to understand what you were trying to say, so here is the best possible interpretation I could come up with. Please correct me if I got it wrong.
Was it something like “If there [are] aliens [that the US government is aware of, then] the number of ppl in gov [who are in the know] has to be small”?
Funny, that exactly sums up one of the plot twists I completely forgot about in the X-Files: secretly set up UFO/UAP events and abductions, feed nutjobs with alien theories by having Mulder&al investigate and leak trickles of info to the likes of Lone Gunmen, all while denying UFO/aliens to further feed the UFO conspiracy theory, all that to divert attention from the actual, very earthly conspiracies (turns out one of them ends up being about actual aliens and The Project, but Smoking Man makes it quite clear how he's using Mulder and the X-Files to the above end and that even fewer conspiracists know about that, with the rest being conned into thinking they sit at the top conning everyone and that there are no aliens)
An alien visitation would be THE single most significant event to ever happen to humanity. The idea that it would be able to be kept secret is ridiculous.
Moreover, ridiculous is that aliens would be content with staying in the closet and at risk of be uncovered, like a lover in cheating wife's closet.
Whatever the USG wishes, the first contact will be on the arriving party's terms. This is unless they made some very strong agreement with local governments to keep things secret. Which would be a a sign of a very bad thing for us.
My theory is they are real but they’re not aliens. They are another hominid species who live here on Earth. My explanation is actually pretty good if you condition on the assumption that they are real - if you do that, ET is very unlikely comparatively. I can kind of explain everything you see in various ways, some hard to vary, some not.
No, it's another fish like species and they came from the inside of the moon. My explanation is actually pretty good if you condition on the assumption that they are real - if you do that, ET is very unlikely comparatively. I can kind of explain everything you see in various ways, some hard to vary, some not.
It is impossible that another hominid species will have their own tech. They sure have no factories. So it would be a non-issue to announce if they are at stone age of development, unless these hominids are obligatory Homo Sapiens social parasites.
The hypothesis is this all happened 10-20k years ago, and they virtualized their society into VR. They somehow managed to eliminate enough of the evidence of their development phase on the surface to the point where we have no conclusive evidence. There is glancing evidence that there were advanced civilizations quite a bit earlier than we thought.
Where's their datacenters and generation there? If they're in space, they've probably seeding these probes themselves for a long time. If they're on Earth, where would they hide these? Needless to say, any human government will go a great length to do whatever pleases them for peanuts of the knowledge that they have. The issue here is being that humans are catching up and eventually it will all be revealed.
Figure out what physics says about the physical footprint of say 10 million small hominids who want to remain alive but live life entirely in virtual reality pods. I think you’ll conclude that from first principles you can say very well hidden, have a sustained existence as long as you fix the population, if you solve the engineering problems of situating your hardware in a void in the ground. Particularly if you know a priori you only need to do it for a few millennia.
Light speed can’t be overcome and virtual reality can be made so you optimize for minimizing latency between minds and expanding into space strictly for scientific purposes or safety reasons. (Ie, to probe it for knowledge and danger.)
Virtual people don't die of old age so they can go from star to star in "just" thousand years and would now span a great chunk of spiral arm. Also, since they can be copied over (can they?) they will never have to split up, they will just fork() the whole colony and say themselves goodbye.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. I would never risk anything someone told me would move my consciousness into another machine since I would have no way to know a priori if the person on the other side would still be me. Ergo I think civilizations probably just take on the precautionary principle and maintain their minimal biological form to ensure a fully linked chain of confidence they will preserve their own consciousness, but that’s the threshold and they virtualize everything else like their incoming qualia.
Small humanoid sibling species living in VR pods adapted physically initially for subterranean life but eventually artifically selected for sensory override VR pods. (Hence the large eyes, grey skin, no reproductive organs, absorbitve digestion, and so on.)
There is 1 legitimate reason to keep it a secret. If the technology will guarantee our destruction. For example, if for some reason the technology makes it possible for anyone to create a nuclear bomb level device from their living room.
Why do people assume we'll get their technology? If there is an alien race capable of visiting us, it is them who will set the terms. I guess it's always human nature to overestimate ourselves; the aliens calling the shots creates a strong mental dissonance.
There's three hypotheses I've heard from UFO types. One is that UFOs are sort of like disposable probes, so them crashing isn't evidence of their incompetence. The second is that alien civilizations are giving us this technology as a gift for our advancement, and they otherwise don't interfere but are there to stop nuclear war. The third is that we are already actually integrated into a galactic civilization, we have a secret base on Mars where we collaborate with aliens, etc.
I remain fascinated by UFOs/UAPs. I have been this way since I was a child, although I went from "I want to believe" to "This is an example of people being stupid" and finally my current position.
UAPs are intermittent, non-reproducible phenomenon. Life is full of such experiences.
Sadly, when these experiences involve extraordinary experiences, they tend to make all of those involved look stupid. Turns out people and organizations don't like looking stupid.
The reason National Security is so tied up in this area is that when or if a new weapons system is deployed against the U.S., it's going to involve a lot of these exact kinds of reports. Any investigation into any of them is, in effect, an investigation into how the country learns from strange new things, like the Chinese joining the Korean War. These kinds of public investigations simply cannot occur.
I still love these stories, but I love them because they tell us what happens when a large organization comes across really weird stuff it has no labels or processes for.
There's no conspiracy here, that's my guess. Maybe a conspiracy of human nature.
The UFO/UAP story is going nowhere, and it says a lot more about us than it does about anything in nature that anybody might encounter.
ADD: I'm glad Kirkpatrick is getting some reputational payback here. I'll leave my opinions of his essay aside. I strongly support dragging out the Sagan response and banging on it again and again until folks finally focus on the real issues involved. Recommended reading: Hynek's biography, "The Close Encounters Man" https://www.amazon.com/Close-Encounters-Man-World-Believe/dp...
I assume the government always has a certain level of spending on UFOs just because it might be a foreign vessel. But this spending should definitely not increase because of LGM hysteria.
It’s good to document seeing things such as
A. They don’t respond to radio calls (spy planes)
B. Show up on radar (broken spy plane)
C. No IFF (identify friend or foe)
D. Have a team to investigate these occurrences when reported (tell spy agency their equipment is broke)
E. Close reports when it’s our own equipment
F. Document equipment issues which register faulty indications.
It fits a little better when UFO/UAP doesn’t immediately push your mind into tall grey beings in a unique ship or little green men in a flying saucer.
These programs have multiple agendas. Push for the interesting one, hide the real one. The amount of money these companies get keeps engineers busy and butts in seats.
This seems like just the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to hide something and discredit the whistleblowers. It could also be the truth. Or something in between. But there isn't any particular reason to trust him.
If there really was a conspiracy covering up UFOs and Alien activity there would be people and groups of power believing in this stuff.
If there were we would see massive, on the scale of percentages of GDP, activity in recovering this technology in most nations worldwide.
We dont see this kind of activity, so......
It is sad that out of all the things that happen in this space, this is the news article that gets to the front page.
Kirkpatrick has been contradicting himself for months now. Another recent Guardian article is more insightful. There has been a concerted effort to remove very specific parts from a new legislation about the disclosure of non-human intelligence and materials:
“If it is the case that there is no substance to the UFO/UAP issue beyond misperceptions, paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, gullibility and disinformation then the government, military and academic organisations need to openly and transparently look under every alleged rock in this topic,” says clinical psychologist Daniel Stubbings of Cardiff Metropolitan University. “But they have chosen to do the exact opposite, which increases the suspicion that there is something to hide.”
“They’re some of the same people that have been working behind the scenes with Congress to write legislation,” Kirkpatrick told the In the Room With Peter Bergen podcast.
There is no non-"conspiracy theory" option anymore. Either the aliens are real in some manner and there has been a massive cover-up conspiracy, or they are not, and there has been a pretty significant conspiracy to fake evidence and support for aliens existing. Either way, there is no "everyone's generally nice and is just trying to tell the public the truth and nobody would ever dream of deploying deception as a part of their strategy" that the non-conspiracy theory option seems to entail. A lot of people are lying and at least some of them absolutely know they are.
> A lot of people are lying and at least some of them absolutely know they are.
You're right.
Just a frustrating observation though: It is almost never the case that someone willfully lies, knowing they are fabricating everything. They may lie right now believing it will lead to the truth, or they may lie about their motivations in order to get closer to the truth, etc.
The "core group" TFA discusses almost certainly have been lying. But I bet they do believe they are getting closer to the truth, celebrate the wasted money as "progress and publicity" and I bet they don't believe they are lying outright. I bet they think the ends justify the means.
Unfortunately, nobody believes they are illogical, evil, or malicious. They are only by definition of opposing what someone else (or everyone else) feels is logical, good, or right.
I have met many people who pursue what I call “willful ignorance”. Such people refuse to accept new information that might change their beliefs. Even if they might appear to listen, anything that contradicts their world view will be discarded.
I would say such people are willfully lying when they promulgate theories that either lack any hard evidence or can be easily disproven. I think this includes a large number of politicians, judges, lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and anyone else whose livelihood depends on those lies. And that shit is evil.
There is a big difference between "humble ignorance" based in genuine willingness to learn and "willful ignorance" based in the unwillingness to change established views even after logically dismantling their beliefs or being shown mountains of contradictory evidence. Those latter people are lying liars, no matter how you try to rationalize it.
Depends on whether you consider someone relaying lies that they believe to be the truth a liar. In plain English usage most people use both senses of that pretty freely.
I don't know what's going on, but it's clear that there are vast sums of money going into illegal black programs beyond congressional oversight. I strongly suspect that Kirkpatrick's role is to deflect public interest and criticism in order to maintain the status quo. I don't trust a single word he says.
Regardless of whether or not there is alien life, our government should be forced to open up its secrets, whatever they may be. We don't need any of this to stay safe.
In 2009, the black budget was estimated to be over $50 billion [1]. It's so huge that the military industrial media complex designed, built, and operated an entire 100 jet wing of secret new fighters in the 1980's [2].
We can write anything; the differentiator is evidence. Certainly there are programs outside public oversight, but do we have evidence of the vast sums outside Congressional oversight? Where do they get the money if not from Congress? Do you have evidence of Kirkpatrick's role?
> our government should be forced to open up its secrets
That is generally the law (including the Freedom of Information Act), though there's overclassification by security agencies. Some things need to be classified, obviously, so what exactly are you advocating? How do we improve it?
We should repeal the National Security Act of 1947.
Nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine nations around the world since the passage of that act. The production of nuclear armaments is clearly limited by political will and industrial power, not knowledge.
The act protects a foreign policy establishment that has abused its power to conduct dirty tricks against other nations for decades in order to keep American elites rich and in power.
No one is going to invade the American homeland, given the vast oceans separating us from the rest of the world. Repealing that act and removing the foreign policy establishment from power would unwind our vast empire abroad and greatly improve our relations with other nations.
I would prefer that we do this cleanly, but unfortunately I think our empire will suffer a far messier fall from power over the coming decades. Empires at this stage flail wildly in their military adventures.
There's no need to "destroy" the entire foreign policy establishment. We just need to force them to operate without the secrecy and privileges they presently enjoy and exploit so they can be subject to the democratic process.
Surely this is better than to suffer more wars like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
EDIT (apparently my responses are being throttled): In response to wolverine876's question below, "How would secrecy be managed?"
We don't need any secrecy or statecraft. We're so large and established that we can do everything out in the open. Russia and China know where our missiles, bases, ships and submarines are, and we know where their are. The only people in the dark about everything are the citizens in both countries.
A similar argument was made against Linux when open-source was new. It turns out you don't need any closed source code at all to run a successful project.
Missile defense is a misnomer. The distinction between a defensive and offensive capability is meaningless in the context of arms races and mutually assured destruction. As we pour billions into shooting down ICBMs, China will pour billions into new delivery systems to evade that defense, and vice versa.
The net result is that money on all sides is taxed away from things that people actually need and want (food, shelter, medicine, schools, parks, the arts) and directed into things that either rust in silos and bases or kill us all.
The only way to stop an arms race is to increase transparency and to negotiate treaties with our peers.
Transparency is a double edged sword. You definitely want to hide some capability (ambiguity) otherwise the opponent can calculate what to do to win, and then just do that.
What we need is to minimize or eliminate the adversarial relationships between nations globally. The only winners of the present status quo are the elites in every nation.
That's heavily context dependent and it's a perspective that assumes that adversarial relationships emerge because both sides did something wrong. This naive appeasement mindset in the 1930s did more harm than good, for example. If you have a rival that's revisionist and aggressive, sometimes you need less cooperation and negotiation, and more war, in order to accelerate their demise. Of course, you usually don't want that, but as I said, it's context dependent.
I genuinely can't believe that you're doubling down on the idea that missile defense capability secrecy isn't necessary. Are you an actual spy? The secrecy is precisely what prevents the arms race.
Yes, I have also heard from my military friends that the creatures live on dihydrogen monoxide, a substance that kills thousands of people a year. The truth is out there
when the antenna on their butt wiggles it means they are transmitting positive messages about the human race to their homeworld. Stay on their good side and the earth remains safe
The essential question is, always, why? Why are they doing it?
Obviously, many people participate in the movement to create chaos and a sense of powerlessness through disinformation (the true aim of propaganda), so people don't know what to believe and quit. The Republican Party engages in a lot of it, I assume tactically - always stay on the offensive, keep the enemy reacting, etc. But what about the others? Are they organized? Are they sort-of lone wolves (or small packs) acting on the ideology they learned online?
And I think it's been highly effective: I think that two decades ago, taking it seriously would have discredited you for life. Now that we've destroyed institutions and values like science, evidence and rationality, and embraced post-truth, it's within the norm, even encouraged.
And almost nobody speaks up for science, evidence, truth. Nobody says it's ridiculous nonsense (for so many reasons); everyone just stands back, reinforcing the sense of chaos and powerlessness. Where are the adults?
Second, this narrative has been simmering for years and is largely an outgrowth of a former program at the DOD’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was heavily influenced by a group of individuals associated with businessman and longtime ufologist Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace. Inopen sources, particularly in records available on DIA’s electronic FOIA Reading Room. After the negative response by SECDEF, Senator Reid then enlisted the help of then senator Joseph Lieberman to request that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) set up an SAP for the same purpose. The administrative SAP proposal package was informed by the same individuals who had been associated with AATIP. AARO’s archival research has located the administrative proposal for the DHS SAP, complete with the participants, which has been declassified and is being reviewed for public release.
Finally, the key purveyors of this narrative have known one another for decades. In the early 2000s several members of this small group also participated in a study, erroneously characterized (by the same participants) as having been sponsored by the White House, on the possible societal impact of disclosing the existence of extraterrestrials to the public, with the authenticity of the abovementioned concealed government program taken as its baseline assumption. The think tank in question was a “futures” enterprise that often worked on fringe studies, and many of the individuals involved with the study also worked for Bigelow Aerospace in support of the AATIP program.
Please, that wasn't even close to a sneer. It was a statement of fact. Read any recent UFO or UAP thread and chances are its crawling with people defending the woo-woo nonsense and denouncing critics and skeptics with far more of a sneer than my comment had.
It's absolutely a sneer and lame meta and 'statements of fact' can be easily be sneering and lame meta. All comments are better without those and you've been here plenty long and know that as well as anyone. If you have something to say to other commenters, you can reply to, vote on or flag their comments.
I'm willing to believe it's a big galaxy and we have NFI what's going on out there.
But UFO mythology seems very human-scale and not so alien at all.