Ezra Klein just did a long interview with Leslie Kean (a popular author and Coast to Coast AM guest) about her article in "The Debrief" --- where it went, after the Washington Post wouldn't run it on her time schedule --- about David Grusch:
It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of things like psychic teleportation. Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts). No source she names has firsthand knowledge of "non-human origin" technology; it's all people who heard something who heard something. At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". There's no good answer to the question of "if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly" --- she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD classification rules allow Grusch to describe this stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a line of specificity, which, just, no.
But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it.
> she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". (sic)
When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited?
I’m especially curious because I’m somewhat of an “expert” in the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons of footage in a former life) and I think it’s a legitimate object of some sort [1]. Though I don’t believe it’s extraterrestrial.
1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right over the ocean looks just like a cruise missile flying low level.
That was a great podcast, and the entirety of Kean's journalistic research and integrity basically amounts to "I trust Grusch because he seems like a decent guy and I've been told he's trustworthy. But yeah, he's never seen any UFO, just reports and heard people talk about them, but since I trust him, I implicitly trust their words as well."
I love how Ezra asks her obvious questions about her research like "how is it possible the Pentagon approves of people talking about UFO retrieval if it is such a close-guarded secret?" and she says "good question! I'm not entirely sure!". Seriously? You haven't asked yourself that question before?
This entire UFO saga comes from people with X-files' "I want to believe" poster in their office, and they don't let confirmation bias stop them.
Thank you for linking to that interview. I listened to most of it when it came out. I was already skeptical but willing to have an open mind, but I came away from it feeling very assured in my skepticism. These claims are utter nonsense! Give the interview a listen and try and tell me your bullshit meter doesn’t go off.
Another part is that people don't realize how within the government, and especially the military, there are a lot of false documents and reports that are sitting around AND highly classified. You do this because there are spies and they will steal shit. You want to make that process noisy. It's also beneficial because you may get your adversary to spend millions or billions studying a thing that isn't even possible. Sometimes they even have people "working" on these things (sometimes even unwitting fools that are true believers) because it makes it look more legitimate (and you can funnel money through these). See the ridiculousness of the US and Russian psychic programs.
There's a lot of disinformation as well as smoke and mirrors. It's annoying, but you can't take military documents at face value. It's like reading a scientific paper, you realistically can only judge the merit if you have some domain expertise or enough in an adjacent domain to understand the work itself. That's the whole reason disinformation works in the first place (which is specifically meant to fool experts, even if not all of them, just enough).
> Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts).
Source?
>At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video".
"Gimball" is not credibly discredited, calling it such highlights your bias and calls your other points into question.
EDIT: HN is a terrible website for having actual discussions because, inevitably, people reply to my comments and I end up typing a reply only to hit "you're doing that too fast". Occasionally I engage and inevitably am reminded of why this site sucks so much for anything more than a particularly unperformant RSS feed
So I don't know if this will even post, but I've posted up thread so hopefully you see it. (edit: it didn't post, so I edited it in to my original message)
Generally anyone who refers to "Gimball" as debunked/etc is referring to Mick West's preposterous video on the subject. It has been so thoroughly, repeatedly, taken apart by actual fighter pilots who have used these systems that _anyone_ still parroting the original claims of Mick West is either incredibly out of the loop or a straight-up denialist who is willing to accept even the most flimsy of arguments if it reenforces their prior beliefs.
it's all people who heard something who heard something
People with direct access to such classified materials would not legally be able to divulge details and especially not publicly. It would be a fairly quick trip to prison.
This doesn't directly prove the claims of Grusch or anybody else, of course. But it is a decently persausive explanation for why it's always "people who heard something who heard something" and not direct sources.
"if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly"
I don't know anything about Kean so I have no opinion on her.
One thing you have to say about Grusch is that he is really putting it all on the line. He is going through the official whistleblower channel and is triggering a major investigation.
If he is telling the truth, the DoD would more or less be admitting guilt by going after him.
(There is also a third possibility. Grusch is being truthful, but he and/or others have been deceived. I think wrapping a secret program under the cover of some UFO nonsense could be pretty effective camouflage, since UFO-related claims usually are instantly deemed noncredible in the eyes of many)
"she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD
classification rules allow Grusch to describe this
stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a
line of specificity, which, just, no"
I honestly don't know how this works. Surely there is some line of specificity? I mean, you and I can talk about this and it's legal. At what point are you close enough to something classified to make it illegal?
I think Rubio stopped pretty short of endorsing it or saying the claims are credible, but just talked about how people with clearance were coming to the committee to report similar kinds of claims.
He's got access to a lot more than us. This isn't just some congressman indulging it for the lulz. It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials. Even Rubio is having trouble believing it but he's now admitting to have talked to people with direct access to the program. Grusch is as credible as it gets. He said he spent four years investigating this before he came to the conclusions that these secretive exotic craft programs exist.
This is a push from Congress to force programs into the open that are secretly capturing Russian/Chinese UAVs right? Folks on the committees are angry that China is trolling US Navy vessels with UAVs and this isn’t being publicized.
The “non-earth” origin is the smokescreen, “exotic” covers foreign secret research projects?
Something a bit convoluted like this is orders of magnitude more probable in my world model. (Basically, the prior “aliens exist and have been covered up” rounds to zero, so given we are observing this public action, even extremely unlikely explanations could explain it.)
I’m not saying that I buy into these narratives, but in the interest of curiosity and for sake of argument…
Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades.
If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft).
Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.
That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.
It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.
It's possible as well that the technology used in such a device would be entirely indecipherable to us due to not just being more advanced, but due to being on the other side of a technological 'leap' that we're nowhere near making ourselves. If you gave a broken iPad to the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and they expended all the resources at the world's disposal to study it, it's likely that they wouldn't learn anything about it at all, and it wouldn't advance technology a bit, at least not for a hundred years or so.
If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s
I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.
Why wouldn't the government just announce that the new tech was created in any of 1000 labs? I am sure there is a scientist somewhere willing to take credit can get a nobel prize. Or just say it was discovered by Darpa, don't ask questions but here is how it works?
The government has previously used UFOs to divert attention.
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
The "flying triangles" seen from US naval vessels look like jet drones. [1] Those are commercial products, priced around $10,000. One of those zipping around looks like a UFO. Some versions can hover pointing upward; they have enough thrust.
There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and military UAVs.
Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
The B-21 is getting close to operational, the NGAD is in development, and god only knows what sort of experimental drone tech is being worked on in the dark. That adds up to a lot of test flights and more, and a lot of reasons to throw out the same old "UFO" chaff to cover it.
I like to entertain myself with the idea that perhaps what's driving the recent spotlight on UFOs is not that we are seeing/detecting them, but that we are detecting more and more of them.
Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. And that was fine because there are many natural causes that could explain these blips on radar. Many weather phenomena or man made objects could explain people "seeing" UFOs. Buzz Aldrin famously saw glowing objects flying around in space but he does not necessarily believe they have ET origin.
But recently, there's simply way more of these objects everywhere, and nobody knows for sure what these are. This worries some people because, well, what if they're Chinese spy balloons or drones? Remember when the US military shot down a couple balloons some time ago and it made the news?
This is a potential threat to the national security and it makes sense that they have put together teams for the retrieval of these objects. The government may not believe they have ET origin, but they now see them more as potential threat to the national security.
Of course, I would definitely find it enjoyable and exciting if there is some "otherworldly" intelligence behind these objects.
All entertaining to speculate, but it's classic human-centered thinking to suppose that aliens would be regularly appearing a few thousand feet or so from us, but never ever anywhere in the rest of the billions of miles of our solar system and everywhere else in between here and wherever they came from (in addition to their conveniently never appearing within clear view of regular citizens' phones or cameras and never clearly interacting with our physical world in any way)
All the people here claiming new types of drones and secret programs dating back decades have clearly never worked in defense. Most of the US military, the best funded in the world, is decades behind the private sector on computing technology -- it's honestly unthinkable to me that their propulsion technology would be decades (or centuries) ahead. The best engineers and scientists have taken Silicon Valley jobs paying 5-10x more since the late 90's.
And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it.
While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
While I understand and appreciate the aspects of the bill that offers protection for whistleblowers, I don't understand cutting all funding for reversing such technology.
If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we want to study potentially advanced technology?
I would assume the issue would be that a government agency is reversing UFO tech and congress doesn't know about it, not just that it's being done. A government agency going rogue in such a manner would be a big concern
It sounds like a dramatic step without necessarily having any real impact. If as I suspect these UFO claims are largely BS, then it's an easy way to impress the disturbingly large sector of the public that lives in a conspiratorial fantasy land.
- Stick. Today a program that is doing "Advanced Propulsion Research" that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech would be perfectly legal. Cutting funding for this, unless explicitly authorized, opens up liability for anyone in the government and related contractors.
- Carrot. The amnesty is an opportunity to come forward without the liability.
We want the shiny tech, but if the studying shiny tech is a way to step around appropriations, then there are very powerful people who will want to stop that (Congress), since it threatens the very thing that makes them powerful. Sounds to be more about DC power politics than alien technology.
If there are indeed people that work on this stuff, are paid well, and this stops funding maybe disclosing it to congress is a way to get the gravy train turned back on.
I have heard these types of claims many times. The people making them seem more credible at first glance this time, but I am firmly in the camp of being deeply skeptical until I see concrete proof presented.
That being said, I don’t completely discount the possibility. One answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn’t one, and I can think of many reasons multiple governments would try to keep stuff like this secret.
In terms of using support by Senators to influence one's priors on whether UFOs might be real: it's worth noting that Senator Rubio also harbors doubts about the certification of the election results in 2020.
One might wonder "Why is this Congress treating this topic seriously when previous Congresses did not" and conclude this Congress is more willing to treat outlandish claims as credible, not that the claims are more credible.
> would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of “non-earth” or “exotic” origin.
If that were going on (and I'm skeptical) why would you want to stop it?
> Funding would also be cut for “the development of propulsion technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology, systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or inspired by inspection, analysis, or reverse engineering of recovered [UFOs] or materials.”
Again, why the hell would you stop funding for development of propulsion tech that might be of alien origin? You can bet that if China or Russia had a craft like this they'd be trying to reverse engineer it.
I'm surprised that congress finally wants to stop the gravy train, unless this is another refined misdirection scheme. Probably a lot of that money went into covert operations.
My theory is that these spheres are spinning and move using the Magnus effect (the effect that causes a spinning soccer ball to curve). Theoretically, if you have gyroscopes inside the sphere, and you can find a way to transfer the gyroscopes' spin to the sphere, the sphere will spin in a controllable direction and move where you want it to. Lift can be achieved by filling it with helium.
We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with statements like the following, made by the former director of National Intelligence?
"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."
This is a good thread to catalog red herring techniques.
* The government has previously used X to divert attention therefore there is no X.
* The person saying X is an accomplice of X and cannot be trusted.
* Demanding the answer to the question about X is dangerous because national security.
* X is a distraction from something bad Trump did.
* X is a distraction from something bad Biden did.
* X is a distraction from the recent Supreme Court decisions.
* X could never be covered up by the government - refuses to believe copious whistleblower testimony about X with no reason than it's impossible for the government to be able to cover X up.
There sure is a lot of UFO talk around the same time audio of a former president laughing about all the treason he’s committing. Probably just a coincidence.
Is there anyone else that just doesn't believe any of this ufo stuff whatsoever? The whole thing seems like a massive waste of time and resources when we have real problems that need solving.
Conspiracy theories have gone completely off the rails in this country. For the longest time I thought flat earthers were trolling like the birds aren't real meme but seeing this crap reach congress is sad.
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
It does not make Kean and Grusch's claims sound a lot more credible. Some of Kean's sources are proponents of things like psychic teleportation. Another is a Stanford biologist who started producing debunked materials science papers about allegedly alien artifacts (that turn out to look a lot like ordinary machine parts). No source she names has firsthand knowledge of "non-human origin" technology; it's all people who heard something who heard something. At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". There's no good answer to the question of "if Grusch is right about any of this, why did the DoD allow him to say it publicly" --- she has a particularly harebrained theory that DoD classification rules allow Grusch to describe this stuff in generalities as long as he doesn't cross a line of specificity, which, just, no.
But people love talking about this stuff, so you can't blame Rubio for indulging it.
[+] [-] runjake|2 years ago|reply
When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited?
I’m especially curious because I’m somewhat of an “expert” in the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons of footage in a former life) and I think it’s a legitimate object of some sort [1]. Though I don’t believe it’s extraterrestrial.
1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right over the ocean looks just like a cruise missile flying low level.
[+] [-] sph|2 years ago|reply
I love how Ezra asks her obvious questions about her research like "how is it possible the Pentagon approves of people talking about UFO retrieval if it is such a close-guarded secret?" and she says "good question! I'm not entirely sure!". Seriously? You haven't asked yourself that question before?
This entire UFO saga comes from people with X-files' "I want to believe" poster in their office, and they don't let confirmation bias stop them.
[+] [-] adriand|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vadansky|2 years ago|reply
Source? I don't think there was ever a consensus that it was discredited. Googling "Gimbal Video discredited" doesn't give me anything definitive.
[+] [-] godelski|2 years ago|reply
There's a lot of disinformation as well as smoke and mirrors. It's annoying, but you can't take military documents at face value. It's like reading a scientific paper, you realistically can only judge the merit if you have some domain expertise or enough in an adjacent domain to understand the work itself. That's the whole reason disinformation works in the first place (which is specifically meant to fool experts, even if not all of them, just enough).
[+] [-] RetpolineDrama|2 years ago|reply
Source?
>At one point she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video".
"Gimball" is not credibly discredited, calling it such highlights your bias and calls your other points into question.
EDIT: HN is a terrible website for having actual discussions because, inevitably, people reply to my comments and I end up typing a reply only to hit "you're doing that too fast". Occasionally I engage and inevitably am reminded of why this site sucks so much for anything more than a particularly unperformant RSS feed
So I don't know if this will even post, but I've posted up thread so hopefully you see it. (edit: it didn't post, so I edited it in to my original message)
Generally anyone who refers to "Gimball" as debunked/etc is referring to Mick West's preposterous video on the subject. It has been so thoroughly, repeatedly, taken apart by actual fighter pilots who have used these systems that _anyone_ still parroting the original claims of Mick West is either incredibly out of the loop or a straight-up denialist who is willing to accept even the most flimsy of arguments if it reenforces their prior beliefs.
https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc
[+] [-] JohnBooty|2 years ago|reply
This doesn't directly prove the claims of Grusch or anybody else, of course. But it is a decently persausive explanation for why it's always "people who heard something who heard something" and not direct sources.
I don't know anything about Kean so I have no opinion on her.One thing you have to say about Grusch is that he is really putting it all on the line. He is going through the official whistleblower channel and is triggering a major investigation.
If he is telling the truth, the DoD would more or less be admitting guilt by going after him.
(There is also a third possibility. Grusch is being truthful, but he and/or others have been deceived. I think wrapping a secret program under the cover of some UFO nonsense could be pretty effective camouflage, since UFO-related claims usually are instantly deemed noncredible in the eyes of many)
I honestly don't know how this works. Surely there is some line of specificity? I mean, you and I can talk about this and it's legal. At what point are you close enough to something classified to make it illegal?[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
The conclusion here does not follow the premise.
[+] [-] throwaway743|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagels|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvetching|2 years ago|reply
He's got access to a lot more than us. This isn't just some congressman indulging it for the lulz. It's so funny to see the mental gymnastics people here make to discredit some of our most elite intelligence officials. Even Rubio is having trouble believing it but he's now admitting to have talked to people with direct access to the program. Grusch is as credible as it gets. He said he spent four years investigating this before he came to the conclusions that these secretive exotic craft programs exist.
[+] [-] iosono88|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] theptip|2 years ago|reply
The “non-earth” origin is the smokescreen, “exotic” covers foreign secret research projects?
Something a bit convoluted like this is orders of magnitude more probable in my world model. (Basically, the prior “aliens exist and have been covered up” rounds to zero, so given we are observing this public action, even extremely unlikely explanations could explain it.)
[+] [-] haswell|2 years ago|reply
Let’s say that there are real ET craft, and let’s say that the US government has indeed been retrieving and studying them for decades.
If such analysis unlocks technology breakthroughs of the kind that would solve say, energy problems, the government now has the problem of sitting on secrets that it has no legal pathway to introduce to the public, and no way to explain without somehow coming clean.
If any of this is real, the kind of legislation described in the article seems like one of the few ways they can start to introduce this information to the public. This makes it sound like they know what this is and they need to establish the channels and narratives to discuss it publicly (even if “this” is all a cover for misuse of funds that has nothing to do with ET craft).
Everyone is focused on “what is this distracting us from?”, and maybe that’s all that this is, but even if this is misdirection, there’s something going on that’s making elected officials and reputable military types speak publicly about UAPs.
That by itself is a pretty interesting signal if nothing else.
It could also all be bullshit, and either way, I’m pretty curious to see where this goes.
[+] [-] CommieBobDole|2 years ago|reply
If there's anything to this (and I don't really think there is), it's entirely possible that if the government is forced to reveal it, they're going to say, "We've had this thing since 1946, we've spent billions of dollars researching it, and all we can figure out is it's made of some sort of titanium-osmium metal foam that appears to be completely undifferentiated with no structures or power sources at all, but we know it used to work because we shot it down after it vaporized a Jeep".
[+] [-] justinclift|2 years ago|reply
So, DARPA doesn't exist, and it can't put out calls for things it'd like developed in certain areas? /s
I mean, it doesn't really take much thinking at all to figure out ways to introduce "future generation" technology that's not going to raise many eyebrows.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MoSattler|2 years ago|reply
> Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-...
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
There's not much distinction left between hobbyist drones and military UAVs. Ukraine is going through about 10,000 drones a month. They start with hobbyist parts and add weapons.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k
[+] [-] EA-3167|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gud|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simmanian|2 years ago|reply
Maybe governments around the world have always known about objects flying/floating around. And that was fine because there are many natural causes that could explain these blips on radar. Many weather phenomena or man made objects could explain people "seeing" UFOs. Buzz Aldrin famously saw glowing objects flying around in space but he does not necessarily believe they have ET origin.
But recently, there's simply way more of these objects everywhere, and nobody knows for sure what these are. This worries some people because, well, what if they're Chinese spy balloons or drones? Remember when the US military shot down a couple balloons some time ago and it made the news?
This is a potential threat to the national security and it makes sense that they have put together teams for the retrieval of these objects. The government may not believe they have ET origin, but they now see them more as potential threat to the national security.
Of course, I would definitely find it enjoyable and exciting if there is some "otherworldly" intelligence behind these objects.
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanillax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nomel|2 years ago|reply
David Grusch talks about this in one of his interviews: https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the...
[+] [-] lend000|2 years ago|reply
And why are we acting like this is a new phenomenon? It's been going on since at least the 1940's, when there should be little doubt that we didn't have technology to explain it.
While I've never seen anything personally, and my anecdote is meaningless to others, I have a family story dating back to ~1969-1970 that either means a bunch of sane family members are completely nuts, or that (in their case, a classic silver "flying saucer") are real, prevalent, and not things that can be prosaically explained.
[+] [-] nickelcitymario|2 years ago|reply
If it exists, don't we want to understand it ASAP? Regardless of whether it's alien in origin or not, why in the world wouldn't we want to study potentially advanced technology?
[+] [-] ellisv|2 years ago|reply
As I understand it, only "secret, unreported programs" would lose funding.
[+] [-] thatguy0900|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|2 years ago|reply
- Stick. Today a program that is doing "Advanced Propulsion Research" that happened to be reverse engineering UFO tech would be perfectly legal. Cutting funding for this, unless explicitly authorized, opens up liability for anyone in the government and related contractors.
- Carrot. The amnesty is an opportunity to come forward without the liability.
[+] [-] ElevenLathe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bostonsre|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taraharris|2 years ago|reply
If they're telling the truth, they have a moral obligation to declassify everything they know.
Official secrecy is fundamentally incompatible with the needs of an informed public capable of voting intelligently within a democratic republic.
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
That being said, I don’t completely discount the possibility. One answer to the Fermi paradox is that there isn’t one, and I can think of many reasons multiple governments would try to keep stuff like this secret.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|2 years ago|reply
One might wonder "Why is this Congress treating this topic seriously when previous Congresses did not" and conclude this Congress is more willing to treat outlandish claims as credible, not that the claims are more credible.
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
If that were going on (and I'm skeptical) why would you want to stop it?
> Funding would also be cut for “the development of propulsion technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology, systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or inspired by inspection, analysis, or reverse engineering of recovered [UFOs] or materials.”
Again, why the hell would you stop funding for development of propulsion tech that might be of alien origin? You can bet that if China or Russia had a craft like this they'd be trying to reverse engineer it.
[+] [-] rtlxcv|2 years ago|reply
https://reason.com/2022/11/15/the-military-ufo-complex/
I'm surprised that congress finally wants to stop the gravy train, unless this is another refined misdirection scheme. Probably a lot of that money went into covert operations.
[+] [-] gregw134|2 years ago|reply
Video of "UFO" over Poland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WZN0T_54xY
Pentagon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Wmap12xm0
Picture of crashed orb in Mexico: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmm7a/mysterious-metallic-o...
My theory is that these spheres are spinning and move using the Magnus effect (the effect that causes a spinning soccer ball to curve). Theoretically, if you have gyroscopes inside the sphere, and you can find a way to transfer the gyroscopes' spin to the sphere, the sphere will spin in a controllable direction and move where you want it to. Lift can be achieved by filling it with helium.
[+] [-] newt_slowly|2 years ago|reply
We all have our hypotheses, and by all means promote yours, but do you really feel you have enough evidence to assign such a high confidence to yours? How do you reconcile it with statements like the following, made by the former director of National Intelligence?
"There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."
[+] [-] dvh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|2 years ago|reply
Spinning around, moving uncontrollably inside a storm, with very variable speed are exactly things that lost balloons do.
[+] [-] kwertyoowiyop|2 years ago|reply
Any evidence at all.
Anyone? Bueller?
[+] [-] narrator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conception|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|2 years ago|reply
There are a dozen explanations more plausible than aliens.
[+] [-] booleandilemma|2 years ago|reply
Where is the evidence of any of this stuff?
[+] [-] wnevets|2 years ago|reply