• SulaymanF@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    138
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    Going just on headline (paywall) this isn’t a surprise. Even astronomers will tell you they see things they can’t identify right away. Some are birds, some are balloons etc. it doesn’t always mean every UFO is an alien.

    • Skua@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      88
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Shout out to that time in 1998 when the world-leading astrophysicists at CSIRO solved the 17-year-old mystery of the signals they were picking up and couldn’t explain. Turns out they were caused by the office microwave whenever it was opened before it was finished.

      • DBT@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        34
        ·
        1 year ago

        Shout out to that time in 1998 when

        I thought I was in for the worlds worst u/shittymorph attempt for a second.

    • BitingChaos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      28
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      it doesn’t always mean every UFO is an alien.

      The size & age of the universe pretty much tells us that it’s never an alien.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        13
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        I disagree. If things went the way we think they should have gone humanity shouldn’t even exist. Billions of years ago some alien race should have mined out this entire solar system.

        The fact that we are here and we have no solid evidence of aliens shows that something is very wrong with our understanding. Distances mean nothing when you have billions of years even without magical FTL travel.

        Put some basic numbers to it. The oldest piece of metal (shapes by humans) we have found is about 7,000 years. I am going to make it worse and assume that there is metal we didn’t find 10k years ago. With nuclear propulsion ship the nearest star is reachable. Let’s assume it takes us with travel time 5,000 years to do this. Humanity goes from copper to two star systems in 15k years.

        Now earth is going to be lazy and wait another 15k years before doing this feat again. Our new colony needs to grow so I am going to give them 15k years as well. We got a pace now. The star systems we have will double every 15k years.

        Let’s round down assuming some colonies fail and it makes the numbers easier. In 150k years humanity has 1k star systems. As a point of reference that is about the time difference between us and the first homo sapiens sapiens. In 300k years we have hit a million. At 450k years a billion. About 550k years, depending on how many stars there are in the galaxy, every star is now populated. 1/1000th of the time required from the Cambrian explosion until now.

        From our understanding life was possible in our galaxy many billions of years ago. On average stars have 1.2 planets. There are about 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy. Of those about .2% are candidates for life. Based on our solar system there is about a 20% chance of life given the right conditions. From our dataset of 1 it takes 4 billion years to get sentient tool making social animals. Low end estimates of the number of aliens like us number in the thousands AT THIS MOMENT.

        Again. We should not exist. Something is very wrong with our models. I am positive we will find the answer one day and I am betting it is going to break a whole bunch of theories.

        • BitingChaos@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          16
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’m not doubting that something is out there.

          It’s just the MASSIVE amount of where and when that something exists makes it incredibly unlikely that something just happens to be right next to us at the same time that we exist.

          There might be “people” out there with near-light speed travel that could possibly reach us. But when did they exist? We won’t be seeing them if they lived and died out a billion years ago.

          Space (crazy huge) times Time (crazy huge) is just an incomprehensibly big number. What are the chances that aliens are visiting a planet at the exact moment that the planet just so happens to be full of crazy people that claim to see aliens and make movies of aliens and seem obsessed with aliens?

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’m not sure why aliens that are going around the galaxy taking resources from various systems would exploit the resources of a system with life on it when there are probably trillions of exploitable systems that have no life.

          I also am not sure why aliens who have technology so advanced they can achieve practical interstellar travel would need to mine entire solar systems for resources.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            Because growth eats everything. Even if your economy only grew at .1% per year that would still mean a doubling every 720 years. For our 15k doubling species that would be a bit over 20x. About a million fold increase.

            Secondly we don’t see evidence that they did mine out uninhabited systems. There are over 5,000 exoplanets found that are terrible candidates for life. Yet they are there. Not used.

            Third our system alone. Life would have been fine without Saturn. Even if our aliens are nice they still could have snagged that and not really impacted us.

        • hoodatninja@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          Again. We should not exist. Something is very wrong with our models.

          I get why you feel this way but that’s not really how stats works.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Ok can you please point to the part that I was factually wrong about? I did take the time and energy to use real numbers and the probabilities that people in this field use.

            • hoodatninja@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              The numbers aren’t the issue. You can’t say “something happened that was very unlikely therefore the number saying it’s unlikely was wrong.”

                • hoodatninja@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Ok so it is likely?

                  No but to be blunt it has little to no bearing on the discussion to decide if it is or isn’t likely. Whether it’s likely or not is immaterial unless you’re gambling or building policy/making decisions around it. It doesn’t impact the results.

                • hoodatninja@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Thinking about this discussion some more, and I would like to share an example with you.

                  If I roll a D100 there is a 1% chance it’ll land on any given number. What I want it to land on, such as a 100, does not change the likelihood. Yet we have this natural inclination to see 100 as “impossible on the first try,” but not say, 34. Because 34 is not a number we generally care about when rolling a D100. We usually want a 100, we usually don’t want a 1. But they’re as likely as anything else and our feelings on the issue, as well as the result, will never change the fact that it’s 1% every single time for every single result, so each result is equally “special.” This goes for a coin flip, a D100, or a D1000000000. Every result is equally likely and special. We had an insanely unlikely chance of being here, but stats says “whelp it can happen so shrug.”

                • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  We are. We are the winner. The chances of someone winning the cosmic lottery is astronomically low. The chances that there is another winner nearby is (astronomically low)2.

                • hoodatninja@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  I am not sure the issue is clear here but I’ll put it another way.

                  If I roll a D100 and get a number - any number - there was a 1% chance I’d get that number. Whether that number has value to me, such as rolling a 100 for a good outcome or a 1 for a terrible one, is immaterial. Every single outcome is 1% likely to happen.

                  Should I discount the 1% chance outcome just because i got the exact outcome I did or didn’t want?

        • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Something is very wrong with our models.

          I think the problem might be sociological. It may be impossible for a very large interstellar civilization to be stable let alone expand beyond a certain point.

          More and more people are talking about Earth’s population declining. The demographics curve may not be an exponential increase as civilization develops, but the planetary population may decrease as technology and wealth improves.

          Aging populations may not have the resources to spend on interstellar travel, regardless of their relative wealth.

          And these tendencies may be universal. The galaxy may be full of old, aging and slowly dying advanced civilizations and have few upstarts such as ours.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            5
            ·
            1 year ago

            Sure and you know what? Three generations ago what you just said would be nonsense. The typical fertility rate of an American women prior to 1955 was 5!

            Culture is fast. Demographics can spin on a dime. One decade everyone has kids and the next no one has them. All it takes is for a single culture on earth to push for growth and you get growth. We have about 190 countries. Pretend only one figures out the way to keep their population above replacement levels indefinitely. Given enough time what will happen to the other 189? Adapt or die. In order to stop growth you have to stop it fully. Even if there are alien species thst collectively decided to point a gun at their reproductive organs and butcher anyone who decides to make a better life for themselves, it still wouldn’t explain what we see.

            As I said, at any given moment there should be thousands and that has been true for Billions with a B years. Go ahead and play with the numbers. Make 99.9% of them act like pandas. That .1% will still Dyson sphere up everything.

            Our models are wrong. Some step(s) in the process is/are basically impossible.

            • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Our models are wrong

              Well, your models are wrong. In both examples, you assume exponential growth will continue forever. Resource limits are a thing in the real world, as evidenced by every population in history (humans or animals).

              • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                I assumed linear growth and I assumed a frankly absurdly low growth rate. Under this model earth is only sending out a colony ship once every 15,000 years. Does that seem likely? We made 6 trips to the moon and about 50 years later are now planning more. Is there a single thing you can mention that humanity would only bother doing once every 15k years?

                What is far far more likely is waves of ships, pauses of a century or less, more waves of ships…

                Additionally I didn’t assume forever. I assumed a malthusian growth pattern where by aliens keep growing until nothing is left.

                • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, you assumed no catastrophic failures. On long timelines there are going to be world or civilization ending events.

                  There are so many species that were wiped out through their actions or just naturally. That’s the point of the Drake equation; the sky should be full of other civilizations, but it isn’t.

                  The common answer is that there may be a “great filter”, some event that all advanced species encounter. Maybe it’s ahead of us, or maybe it’s behind us. It could be something simple like “walking upright is rare” or it could be some powerful weapon everyone discovers.

    • distantsounds@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      26
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’d suggest reading the article. It’s here in the comments several times. The video of the hearing is well worth watching and pretty significant. That video is also here in the comments.

        • mpa92643@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          41
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          But this guy says another guy told him he knows guys that have worked on the UFOs! That’s practically proof of aliens!

        • distantsounds@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          arrow-down
          14
          ·
          1 year ago

          The hearing was never about presenting evidence. It is about creating a safe and transparent process for reporting unidentified flying objects. Then and only then could we have an actual discussion on anything further regarding the potential of extraterrestrials if credible evidence exists.

              • PM_me_your_vagina_thanks@kbin.social
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                5
                ·
                1 year ago

                The republicans organised the whole thing, AOC was just there, doing her job. But yes, for her part in this I do view her as more of a moron than I used to.

                • SCB@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Hey you’re definitely ignorant of the hearing, and making a take based on a headline, but at least you’re consistent.

        • SCB@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yes a person specifically employed to find information who then reports said information is 100% the same as dumb shit you said on a playground.

          Exactly the same.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              4
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              You have definitely not seen the hearing and it is beyond weird that you’d pretend otherwise on the internet.

                • SCB@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  The evidence and witness info provided have the committee members calling for a select committee with subpoena powers.

                  When Grusch said “I can’t say that here” that was never going to be the end of that discussion

  • EnderWi99in@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    54
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    Floating balloons are also a common sight and they account for the vast majority of these UFO videos. It’s really not that great of a mystery that tens of thousands of balloons are let go of on a daily basis and just floating around. When looking at a fixed object while in a fast moving object you end up with some interesting illusions. UFOs are seen regularly because a lot of things out there are unidentifiable, but that doesn’t mean they are aliens. Shit loads of balloons though. 🎈

  • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Anyone that thinks these “whistleblowers” are real should take a look at the track record of america on its treatment of real whistleblowers.

    Real whistleblowers in the US go to prison, mysteriously die or flee the country to non-extradition countries.

    This shit doesn’t even stand up to the most basic level of critical thinking. If they were actually blowing the lid of some grand conspiracy that the US military doesn’t want you to know they would be treated like that’s what they’re doing.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Not to mention, the term isn’t “alien aircraft”. It’s unidentified flying objects (i.e. aircraft). Those balloons from China were originally UFOs too. All a UFO is, is unidentified. It’s a gigantic logical leap to presume that an object is alien just because it’s unidentified. It’s the exact same sort of thinking that leads to religion and attributions to God. Lack of information or understanding doesn’t mean the banal explanation is impossible.

      Plus, no government program on this scale is ever going to remain secret. We know the moon landing isn’t faked because of just how many people would’ve had to agree to keep it a lie and stick to a careful narrative. The same is 100% true of aliens.

      • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        People still bring up the ““spy”” balloons despite the fact the US gov has basically pulled back on everything it said about them, it’s so fucking weird, they were just boring weather balloons but they were used to cause such a ridiculous amount of drama.

        Everyone’s standard for evidence is basically crap. No evidence required just need some guys to say “yeaaaah totally, trust me bro” and that’s that. This lack of any standards for evidence is leads to people believing made up bullshit like Iraq having WMDs as a justification for war. It allows them to put testimonies of things out there and people will just believe them on testimony with no actual material evidence required.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          You’re more spot on than you may know. The assessment by the CIA and American intelligence was that Saddam may have had WMDs. They had no certainty, but the Bush administration presented it that way regardless.

          • Asafum@feddit.nl
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            That and every media outlet went nuts with breakdowns of what the facilities could be, what bunker busters could achieve, what kinds of weapons and how fast they could be made, all so we could invade a country we had no business invading (Well, Haliburton and Raytheon had business), kill tons of innocents, and bomb a baby formula factory…

            Mission accomplished!

            • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              It was masterful, if absolutely damnable, politics. People were agitated because of 9/11. If you could successfully tie any group to the attack, you’d have popular support for attacking the group.

              Never let a crisis go to waste, as they say.

        • hoodatninja@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          It’s because people so badly want to believe the government spends every day threading its fingers going “yes…yes…how shall we dupe the public today?”

          99% of what the government does is incredibly boring and does not revolve around you. It’s important. But boring.

  • Ret2libsanity@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    67
    arrow-down
    33
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    The claims are much bigger and much more serious. It’s not just that we see UFOs.

    Under oath - the ranking intelligence officials claim that there is a SAP (top secret program) dedicated to recovering and reverse engineering non-human intelligence aircraft.

    That non human bodies have been recovered.

    The intelligence officials / contractors read into these programs have harmed and potentially even murdered people to keep the secret under wraps.

    That the programs have no congressional oversight of actions or funds. That funds are being diverted in criminal ways - likely a fraction of the missing DOD money that cannot be accounted for.

    This is all very serious before even considering the repercussions of non-human entities present on earth.

    • trafficnab@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      96
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I just have trouble believing that the probably thousands of people both government and private involved in such programs that no doubt exist across every major power on earth (unless for whatever reason UFOs choose to only fly around and crash into the continental US) have all managed to stay quiet about something of this magnitude for decades (or damn near 100 years if his claim of it starting in the 1930s is to be believed)

      Not to mention that, simultaneously, the government(s) is powerful enough to successfully suppress this information for a hundred years, while some how also failing to keep somebody from testifying about it in a publicly televised congressional hearing

      • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        83
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve been watching a really good documentary about this and the entire situation is very complex. There’s a combination of active government coverups and false information to confuse the situation. Anyone who finds out too much is at risk of being discredited or killed. You should look it up, it’s very high quality. It’s called the X-Files.

      • mpa92643@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        37
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        They apparently always manage to get to crash sites before the locals do and manage to somehow quickly and quietly extract every little piece of debris spread across several square miles without anyone noticing.

        It’s just not realistic.

        • dotMonkey@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          26
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          They actually don’t get there first. When they do get there, they have a mind wiping pen they use to wipe the minds of those who found the crash site before them.

        • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          17
          ·
          1 year ago

          AND the fact that an alien species that has the technology to come all the way to earth is so inept that they crash for whatever reason and can’t handle the US government?

          Come on, it’s ridiculous.

      • Cows Look Like Maps@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        27
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        On top of that, every country in the world would have to be collaborating in keeping it a secret since the US of A isn’t some special place where they uniquely occur.

        Occam’s Razor leads me to believe its yet another conspiracy theory.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            13
            ·
            1 year ago

            Think of how many governments don’t have the capability to do anything with a crashed alien spacecraft, know that richer countries are making money off this stuff, know that they gain nothing for handing it over, and just do it.

            Can you imagine Hugo Chavez, or Fidel Castro, or Nassor, or the Kim family just calling up the US and being like “hey aliens are here, want to go get them and cover it up? No of course I don’t want any money”?

            All these pompous dictators just begging for a chance to go on CNN and brag how they stuck it to the US of A. All it would take is one. A single one of them to not play ball. Even democracies would do it.

            190 countries. Most of them hating each other. All of them rivals. With every sorta government you can imagine. And not a single one of them has decided to not play ball. Hell we can’t even get them all to agree on vaccinations.

            • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              9
              ·
              1 year ago

              Literally fucking Somalia. Would Somalia do it? What about Momar Gaddafi? The man was a lunatic who ruled a geographically massive country for decades. I don’t know how he’d spill the beans, but he certainly wouldn’t’ve kept quiet. How many coups have happened in the dense jungles of central africa and Southeast Asia as well as the Amazon?

              Then there’s the unwilling pariah states. South Africa and Zimbabwe aren’t small countries. If the US government had been keeping all this hush hush apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia would’ve traded silence and compliance for aid and the arms to suppress the indigenous rebellion.

              Like yeah it’s absurd to imagine all these wildly different countries doing the same thing about this. Like no of course they wouldn’t. And many couldn’t.

              • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Imagine if North Korea had a crashed saucer. They’d be parading it out in the streets for the world to see and claiming it could destroy the US with one hit.

                There’s plenty of other countries that would do similar. Hell imagine how much money you could get for scraps? It would be all over the world and everyone would know.

                • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Are you really sticking up for apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia? You’re allowed to do that I guess but yikes nonetheless.

        • BlinkAndItsGone@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          On top of that, every country in the world would have to be collaborating in keeping it a secret

          And that’s why conspiracy beliefs always end up including a global conspiracy. It’s like solipsism; the whole world has to be in on the deception or it doesn’t work.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          On that front, Grusch actually claims that the Pope helped smuggle a crashed UFO out of Mussolini’s Italy to the United States. Never mind that the Pope and Mussolini were allies…

        • Kilamaos@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I don’t know why you would think that. I don’t think they said how many crashed thing they retrieved, but if they did thousands, hundreds of thousands of flights, there will be accident. Sure, they are way more advanced, but I don’t believe that a 100% success rate can be achieved.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            Grusch has claimed there have been many crashes all over the world and the U.S. recovers them and keeps it all secret.

      • GroovinChip@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        My question is, if any of this is true, why haven’t we been able to observe any such activity in space? You’d think if there were regular occurrences of “alien” activity on Earth, that all of our planet’s considerable astronomical observational power would observe corresponding activity in the area around the planet.

      • Kilamaos@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Which he seemed eager to present if he could get in a scif with them.

        Will we ever know those info ? We might only know in a couple of weeks, or a couple of decades. But if he was flat lying and then gets into a scif, tells more lies to congress, his ass gonna end up in jail real soon.

        • Abuses_Commas@ttrpg.network
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          People are acting like he’s going to get into the SCIF then tell the committee “I was lying lol, I have no names or other info” like they wouldn’t drag him out onto the main floor and Charles Summer his ass

      • GONADS125@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Putting all the focus on Grusch is a mistake when there was verifiable video footage and radar to match multiple eyewitness accounts for the Nimitz/Tic Tac event. There was a good foundation established for the need to address the near-misses between the UAP and airforce as well as commercial aircraft. People can just pocket or dismiss Grusch’s claims, but that’s not all there is to this subject…

        What do you make of Comander Fravor’s testimony on the Nimitz/Tic Tac event, in which there were multiple eyes on the object, video footage, and radar that was all in line with the reported event? (The radar data was seized by high-ranking Navy officials, if you believe the words of the Cheif Radar Operator on the Nimitz that day)

        Seems unreasonable to totally dismiss the possibility of non-human intelligent life, especially when scientists/organizations like UAPx are taking it seriously and have been analyzing the Nimitz videos. There’s also the Galileo Project at Harvard, which believes they may have recovered manufactured material from an interstellar object (believed to have been aided by propulsion) from the ocean floor off Papua New Guinea. Scientists and physicists are starting to give this subject credence (not necessarily Grusch’s claims, but all of the other information and evidence) and I disagree with the literal anti-intellectual rejection of all information because of one man’s claims.

        This National Geographic docuseries on Hulu really made me confront the notion that there may be some truth to the idea that there are more advanced non-humans out there. This documentary isn’t like the big-haired History Channel nonsense… It is based off of declassified reports, credible former government officials, military, airforce, etc. Highly recommend at least just giving that first episode free on YouTube a shot.

        Here is The Falcon Lake incident, in which there was physical evidence corroborating the eyewitness report. Included in the physical evidence was irradiated scrap metal melted into a rock at the claimed landing site, and an irradiated coin. He also had physical wounds from the event that corroborated his claims, and he fell very ill immediately after.

        Unless you think we had a nuclear-powered aircraft like that in 1967, a simpler explanation really might be that hyper-advanced nonhuman entities may exist. Now, that doesn’t mean all or any of Grusch’s claims are true. I’m not even touching on that when there is already so much compelling information out there.

        I’m not going to pretend we’re anywhere close to having all the answers as a species. We’re just hairless apes that are too smart for are own good, but not as smart as we think we are. Healthy criticism is a good thing, but dismissing everything outright is not. I consider myself a very skeptical person. But it’s not up for debate whether or not our government had a UAP monitoring program. That has been established, having been created by Harry Reid. That’s been established fact since 2017.

        Whether or not they are of human-origin, UAP do exist and therefore should be studied. Here is some declassified UAP footage other than the widely covered Nimitz encounter.

        Here is a very compelling photograph that a National Geographic mapping plane captured in 1971, during a project funded by the Costa Rican Electricity Institute. They believed they captured a flying disc at the moment of entry or exit of the water, as the camera captured a photo about every 13 seconds. It was estimated to be about 160ft in diameter.

        These metalic orbs have been observed all over the world, they have no obvious signs of propulsion, and our government has admitted this is not our tech, and that it’s beyond our capabilities.

        There is a YouTube channel with years worth of apparent footage of these orbs tagging and being pursued by aircraft (from the Navy to the Sherrif’s department choppers equipped with infrared cameras). I don’t agree with all of this individual’s views, but his footage is in line with the accounts of pilots and some of the declassified footage. It’s definitely not verified, but it’s there for the people who ask “Why isn’t anyone capturing these things on film?” This guy has been allegedly recording these around Marina Del Rey since 2017.

        Let’s not forget project Blue Book, General John Samford’s address, the Congressional UFO hearings 50+ years ago, and the information available in the national archivesHere is a French government/military/civilian scientific collaborative study on the subject from 1978 (PDF warning), which determined the most reasonable explanation for the objects was the E.T. hypothesis (their conclusion). Not to mention this tidbit from Canada recently:

        “A Manitoba member of Parliament wrote Canada’s minister of defence this spring suggesting the country has participated in a secret multi-nation program devoted to “the recovery and exploitation” of material from unidentified aerial phenomenon, more commonly known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs.”

        In the face of all this information, I now am at this impasse in which I’m forced to consider that it’s actually more reasonable to believe there are other, more intelligent species in the universe. It’s one thing to argue this is secret human tech we’re seeing right now, but it’s outlandish to me to consider the notion that we had tech like this going back to the 40s… or even just dating back to the Falcon Lake incident.

        There were mass sightings across the US to the point that our Airforce openly acknowledged their existence and initiated Project Blue Book. There’s just no way that was our tech back then, right around the time in which we first discovered the power of the atom. There’s no way we had atomic flying aircraft without any obvious signs of propulsion, rapid acceleration, and moving at enormous speeds without breaking the sound barrier dating back earlier than the 50s…

        I personally reached the tipping point in which I genuinely believe it’s less reasonable to deny the existence of UAP. Characteristics of these UAP have remained consistent across decades, our government has admitted they exist, secret black projects have been uncovered, many documents have been declassified and leaked… I find it much harder to believe that all of this consistency across decades is merely coincidence.

        If anyone reading this truly considers themselves a rational skeptic, please at least watch the first episode of the documentary I linked and read the information from my comment before responding to me.

    • SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      32
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      According to a guy who straight up says he wasn’t actually read into said program, and has no actual firsthand knowledge or evidence. Might as well stuff Alex Jones in a uniform and put him up there.

      • Sightline@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        19
        ·
        1 year ago

        “But how could the government keep it a secret!”

        Your post is exactly how.

        Instead of saying “ok let’s see if this guy is telling the truth” we have “pfftt, aliens aren’t real, take off the tinfoil hat.”

        Ridiculously effective.

    • Silverseren@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      1 year ago

      So, who are these harmed and murdered people exactly? And how do you differentiate between these claims of alien spacecraft and general top secret aircraft engineering that would also have such strict security?

      • Cows Look Like Maps@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        And all of these harmed and murdered people conveniently have no relatives speaking up about it either lol. It’s always hand wavey and lacking evidence.

        • Jay212127@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          You’re asking for people who claim that their missing relatives were abducted by aliens and the government is trying to cover it up?

          Pretty sure we’ve all heard those stories.

          • hoodatninja@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            This comment feels pretty tongue in cheek to be honest. If your goal is for people to take the question of UFOs/aliens seriously, then I would suggest being a little more sincere/productive with your responses. Just my two cents.

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      The funds being diverted is the real news. I bet they are being diverted to a secret “alien program” that is just someone’s pocket. Slap some rumors and top secretness on there, and you are able to grift for decades.

      • Abuses_Commas@ttrpg.network
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        So you don’t think Congress should look into funds being diverted into some black operation then someone’s pocket with 0 oversight?

  • iyaerP@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    33
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I watched the hearings yesterday, and I was mostly left with the impression that we need more investigations, and to kick some asses in the aviation world so that encounters with UAPs can be safely reported without sacrificing the career of the pilot in question by even talking about it.

    Mostly it’s stuff we already know about, the tictac and a couple other similar events. The most interesting thing by far to me is the report of a UAP that “split” a flight of F-18s. That means that it physically passed between two jets. Hard to say that it was a balloon or sensor defect in that event. I bring up balloons because lot of the UFO craze is caused by people just not knowing what they’re seeing or now having the knowledge to contextualize a relatively static object appearing to move via parallax against a static background due to the movement of the observer source. It certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that back in the day, the Air Force was doing MIB psyops to the locals who reported to the air force base when stealth fighters were first being developed and tested. Civilians then started mass reporting about “triangle UFOs” which were just F-117s before anyone even knew that those existed, and you got the pile of of fraudsters and people who just wanted their moment in the limelight.

    What we’re getting in the Congressional hearing isn’t that. These are our most trained and experienced fighter pilots operating multiple sensor systems, all of which are showing events that to our current knowledge of physics are basically impossible, and compounded by confirmation from the Mk 1 Eyeball. Fooling the human eye is pretty easy, but trained observers like fighter pilots are harder to fool, but still possible. Fooling trained human observers and multiple different sensor systesm (FLIR, RADAR, and optical cameras) all at once is still possible, but harder. But the more sensor systems in play, the harder it is to fool all of them, and the incidents in question had the full sensor suite of multiple AEGIS mounting surface warships, multiple fighter pilots and weapons officers and the sensor systems of those planes from multiple different angles all in general agreement about the impossible behaviors of the UAPs.

    At the tail end of last year, we just got the reveal of the latest and greatest in US secret weapons development with the B-21 and that was pretty much an iteration on known physics and known systems. B-21 is miles better than B-2, but it isn’t a tictac, and when we look at the development of these kind of systems in the past, they generally take about a decade to go from conceptualization to prototype, and about another decade to go from prototype to public reveal. In that timeframe, B-21s would have been around during the right era for the tictac event and the one off Virginia Beach, but again, B-21s aren’t magical supertech vehicles that can ignore all known physics. B-21s could probably have spoofed some of the sensors on the ships and F-18s that intercepted the Tictacs, but they still are a visible plane, no MCU style invisibility/colorshifting panels to make it look like a grey cube inside a transparent sphere, or just the smooth countourless description of the tictac.

    Now, all that being said, I don’t think that it was “little green men” either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence after all, and what evidence we have is some combination of sparse, classified, and disorganized. I think that right now we have unexplained behaviors from unexplained objects and our best approach going forwards is going to be to try and collate data and coordinate the study of it to try and figure out what causes these events.

    At the same time, I don’t think that these events are the result of foreign actors either. If China had that kind of tech, we wouldn’t have seen the pathetic excuse for balloons this year, and they probably would have made a play for Taiwan by now. If Russia had that kind of tech, they wouldn’t be rolling out T-55 rustbuckets to fight in Ukraine. Clearly the answer is South Korea and the pro-Starcraft scene is there to train the pilots in microing such a highly versatile and responsive craft. I for one welcome our new Korean overlords. :p

    The thing that stands out to me there is that it’s multiple ships and planes tracking this and producing this data. If it was like a glitch in the AN/SPY radar on an AEGIS equipped ship like the Princeton, then that same glitch wouldn’t also have shown up on the FLIR and optical cameras of an F-18 as well as the radar of the E2 and the non-AEGIS equipped ship like the Nimitz. Repeat down the list for possible sensors. There exists commonality, like all the F-18s would have had the same kind of radar, but that doesn’t extend to the E2 nor the ships.

    But as mentioned in the hearing, the only publicly available release of that data is the FLIR camera. What’s shown on the video I’ve seen several different “debunkings” of, all of which with various explanations, although the most common is basically thermal lens flare, but that still doesn’t explain the eyeball reports nor the radar tracks, but unfortunately we have none of that data available publicly. And this is all of course predicated on the idea of these eyewitnesses being credible. If the follow-up hearings happen and the DoD under congressional pressure releases the radar data from the Princeton and Nimitz that day and it doesn’t track with what the people in the hearing today were saying, then that blows a giant hole in the story.

    And that’s assuming that it’s not another misunderstanding that winds up easily explained. Like when we started doing manned space missions, the pilots reported “foo fighters” as dancing lights outside the Mercury spacecraft. Well, it turned out that the Mercury had an issue with condensation on the interior of the windows and that the light from the sun when coming in not diffused from the atmosphere would create an optical illusion of dancing lights. Similar thing with “flying dutchman” ships floating above the horizon where it is merely an optical illusion created by certain atmospheric conditions that create a false horizon. But it’d have to be one hell of a phenomena to show up on multiple sensor systems like that.

    At the end of the day, I still don’t know. The rational skeptic in me says it probably isn’t aliens, but at the same time, unless these fighter pilots are lying under oath, (and Grusch was very clear to couch everything in terms of “this is the hearsay that others have told me, and everything else goes under SCIF”) I don’t have the imagination to postulate as to what it could be.

    The “there is no good evidence” problem is why I want the radar tracks for Nimitz and Princeton released. They’d either confirm the tictac story, or just blow it away entirely, because a large part of what makes that one so compelling is that it was ostensibly tracked from so many different angles from so many different types and models of military radars. If David Fravor was lying about those radar tracks showing the impossible events he describes, then we can dismiss his claims entirely. If the radar tracks show a mostly consistent behavior, then it lends credence to the UAP, and we can discuss it in good faith without having to try and justify it constantly to skeptics. It’s one thing when we just have the one FLIR clip. It’s another if we have the radar returns from an E2 Sentry, the USS Nimitz, the USS Princeton, and the squadron of F-18s.

    Besides, at this point, it’s not like these are bleeding edge capabilities. These are all systems that have been around longer than I’ve been alive. The newer shit is all far and away superior, and so releasing a bit of the information for fighter and naval sensors developed in the fucking EIGHTIES isn’t exactly going to be giving up the game to China.

    • catshit_dogfart@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      You know, it’s kind of like Bigfoot.

      In the 60s I’d say you could almost slightly believe that just maybe there’s a big gorilla somewhere that’s so remote that nobody ever discovered it.

      These days just about every frickin dirt road in the woods has a trail camera on it, lots of houses have surveillance cameras, drones, satellite images, all that stuff. And not these old Polaroids either, not film developed in a darkroom with a shoddy enlarger, HD digital is pretty much standard for all devices.

      There’s just no damn way this thing could be walking around without something catching it on 1080p video.

       

      Well I imagine it’s gotta be the same for the sky. Military’s got a lot of eyes on the sky for a lot of reasons.

      • iyaerP@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I mean, I’m no conspiracy nut or UFO true believer or anything, but the simple fact is that aerial photography is nowhere near that simple or easy.

        I live directly under the flight path for the local airbase, and about twice a week I have F-35s fly overhead. I basically know the schedule, and I usually try to take a picture of them, but despite it being a routine occurrence that I know to prepare for, I’ve only managed to get a handful of pictures, and of those pictures, they’re almost all small and blurry squintovision. They’re better than bigfoot photos but not by much. With my naked eye, I’m close enough to pick out individual features on the airframe and see if the the gear is up or down, and if they have anything on wing pylons, etc. But my actual pictures? Usually come out something like this. Now imagine you’re trying to do that for a target 5 miles distant rather than just a few hundred feet overhead, and it only gets worse.

        And the thing is that yes, the military does have a lot of eyes on the sky, but as they pointed out in the hearings, there exists no mechanism for making reports of UAP, collating and collecting the relevant radar and sensor data, and then trying to figure out what it was. If you talk about UAPs, you’re going to get laughed out of the room if not sidelined into a career dead end.

        Like even ignoring the possibility of aliens, and assuming that this is just some unknown atmospheric effect (that shows up on multiple different radar systems, FLIR, and optics), it’s still worth gathering that data so we can find out what’s going on. Investigating odd phenomena is great for our scientific understanding of the world around us. Right now we don’t have a mechanism for Pilot A to say “Hey, that blip on radar did strange behaviors X, Y, and Z” and then the relevant sensor data is collected into a format for use by meteorologists or whomever.

        99.9 repeating % of the time, it’s just going to be something innocuous like what all the civilian UFO reports are of “in these specific atmospheric conditions, we get an optical illusion of a cubical cloud” Locals in LA think that the borg are invading, but from other angles, the cloud just looks slightly funny rather than a cube. Or they mistake a drone formation for some impossible alien craft. But when we have trained military observers who are all saying the same thing and we’re seeing data from our most advanced military sensors, it’s a different matter entirely.

        That’s why I’m so mono-focussed on the tictac report, because in that example we have radar tracks from 4 seperate system types (AN/SPY on the USS Princeton, AN/SPS and AN/SPQ on the USS Nimitz, either APS-125 or APS-139 for an E-2 Hawkeye, and the AN/APG-73 on the F-18s) These were all cited as having been there and tracking the tictac, and reported that it descended from 80,000 feet to sea level in a matter of moments, and when the F-18s are sent out, that’s when we get the encounter that David Fravor describes. Alex Dietrich, the pilot in the wingplane of Fravor’s flight also described the same encounter, complete with “I don’t consider myself a whistle blower … I don’t identify as a UFO person,” but despite that disclaimer, she still ends up collaborating his story for how the tictac behaved.

        So there we have no fewer than 6 separate radar sets, of which at least 4 sources are different models so we can pretty safely rule out operator error or code glitch, the eyes of 2 seperate F18s pilots, one at high elevation, one that moved to intercept and they all describe the behavior of the tictac as moving impossibly to how we understand physics. Later on in a followup flight, they stick the FLIR pod on one of the F18s and we get the video that doesn’t show very much, and we know for a fact that what’s shown on that video isn’t the full duration of it.

        Now let’s throw UFOs out of the equation entirely. Assume that it’s only some kind of atmospheric anomaly like ball lightning or something. Isn’t that still something that’s incredibly cool and worth investigation? If something can act like that, let’s figure out what it is and how it does it. And if it is aliens, then congratulations, we have the most important discovery in the history of mankind on our hands. And if it isn’t aliens, then we’ve merely done a lot of cool science and made both commercial and military aviation safer by explaining what these are and if/how they are a danger. And that’s what this congressional meeting was about. Setting up official channels so that when pilots run into things like this they can report it and we can start to aggregate the data and figure out what’s going on. And on the other side of the equation is investigating DoD black projects that may or may not be pretending to be aliens (we know they did this with the original stealth programs, complete with MIB suits visiting the local skywatchers and telling them very specifically that it WASN’T UFOs, and thus distracting attention away from the stealth planes.) and letting the American government know what the fuck is actually going on in our military that ostensibly works for us.

        • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Here’s the thing: your potato quality picture is 10x better than any picture of a flying saucer. You can clearly see what it is.

          The problem with “unidentified” phenomena is that they aren’t identified. You can’t jump from “we don’t know what this is” to “aliens” without proof. If you do, that’s just faith not science.

          In that way, aliens are just angels for atheists. They’re a social phenomenon not a physical one. Notice how no one sees werewolves, vampires, zombies, etc. anymore. They didn’t go away, people just stopped believing in them.

          People in history have speculated about life in the rest of the universe, like on the moon and Jupiter. We even observed their “canals” on Mars. Things that we know now are almost impossible. Notice how “UFOs” didn’t exist prior to about 1900. When humans gain the ability to fly, so do these aliens. Their ships somehow gained speed and maneuverability as ours did.

          “But what if it really is aliens! That would be huge. We have to investigate each event in case they’re real!”

          This is how we know UFOs are just optical illusions: They change as we change, as society changes. It’s like when you see your exact duplicate unexpectedly. You don’t think “I have a clone who copies my every move!” You just guess there’s a mirror there. But yeah, I guess you’ll miss the 1 in a trillion times it’s actually your clone.

          • iyaerP@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 year ago

            Look, I’ve been pretty clear from the start that I’m not a UFO guy, I don’t think that these are aliens, the odds are just too goddamn remote, but the fact is that it’s something, and whatever it is is worth investigating.

            Optical illusions don’t just show up on radar, IR camera, visual light camera, and the human eye all at once.

            Investigating the unknown is how we advance human science, and I believe that this is worth investigating. If it turns out to be nothing, then there’s no great loss, but even something not-at-all obscure like ball lightning, which despite being known about for CENTURIES, is still not fully understood, or even well documented.

            My potato quality F-35 picture is from only a couple hundred feet with the planes are on approach for landing. My house shakes when they go overhead. By contrast the tictac video we have was filmed at something like five miles distance. Even advanced military cameras don’t get much resolution at that range, unless we’re talking about the ones on a Keyhole satellite or something, and those aren’t small enough to mount on a fighter jet. You really think some 2004 iphone is going to even see it at all, nevermind that flying a fighter plane doesn’t leave much time for in-flight photography, and that carrying a camera into the plane’s cockpit is an espionage violation.

            LIke that’s a big part of what these hearings were about before Grusch derailed things with his XCOM “downed alien craft and corpses” nonsense. The two professional pilots were talking about having some official mechanism for collating the data all in one place so it can be looked at seriously and scientifically. We just channel the energy of the crazy UFO nutters to actually accomplish some real science here.

          • PoopingCough@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            Damn dude did you even read the comment you’re replying to? The guy is literally saying “there’s almost no way it’s aliens, but we don’t know what it is so we should figure out because science is good and we should be doing it.” And you hit him back with “LMAO this dude thinks it’s definitely aliens what an idiot!”

    • Chocrates@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      At the end of yesterdays hearing one of the congresspeople asked them if they thought the UAP’s were probing our defenses or after our nukes.
      The witnesses all said yes.

      Now they were being asked to speculate about the unknown, but it is ridiculous to think that a non human probe that has presumably broken the light speed limit wants anything from us. Uranium isn’t special. Jets running on dead dinosaurs are not special. If a non human probe is here it is just to study us, it doesn’t give a single shit about human tech and resources. The universe is vast and getting resources out of a gravity well is expensive.

      Now we could say that they were playing it up for congress and they are likely to get more funding if they pose it as a us vs them problem, but they lost all credibility to me at that point.

      • iyaerP@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        We still study chimpanzees, ants, coral, bees, prarie dogs and any number of other social animals.

        If you’re working from the assumption that the tictacs are aliens then “the Earth and humans aren’t interesting” isn’t the best of places to stake your claim.

        I’ve been pretty clear over my various posts on this topic that I don’t think that this is actual aliens, but whatever it is is something that is worth investigating to improve our understand of science and the universe. And Fravor’s main point was that there isn’t a good way for pilots to say “I saw weird thing X midflight” without getting exiled to career Siberia over UFO alarmism. So the hope is to set up a centralized data collection and collation center so that the reports can be assembled together, the data looked at with scientific rigor and the science advanced.

        Grusch was the one who went full XCOM “they’re here and we have the crashed ships and bodies” conspiracy theorist. Without the extraordinary proof that his extraordinary claims require, we can safely ignore him, save for maybe using the UFO nuts to shine some light on the corruption and waste on the black projects he alleges exist outside of congressional control. Yanno, get some of our sprawling secret projects back under command of the actual civilian government like they’re ostensibly supposed to be.

        • solstice@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah my main takeaway is that there isn’t a good method of reporting anomalies. Fravor said on 60 minutes they were ridiculed and the ship played Independence Day, Men in Black, and Signs. To me that’s like a navy boat driver running into some weird debris in the water, reporting it, and everyone laughs at them and makes Cthulhu jokes. If there’s weird shit out there flying around or floating around friggin report it and investigate, what’s the big deal?

      • solstice@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        That wasn’t my take on it. Maybe we are thinking of different scenes in the movie - sorry, different points in the hearing - but I understood the question was “is it POSSIBLE they are a threat” not “do you actively think they are a threat” or whatever. Subtle but super important difference.

    • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Mate if these “whistleblowers” were actually doing any whistleblowing they would be getting treated the same way the US always treats whistleblowers, prison, blacksites, mysterious death, or fleeing to a non-extradition country.

      This most basic of critical thinking is all you need to do to realise that this shit stinks and that everything occurring is something the US gov and military wants to occur.

      • iyaerP@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Not to put too fine a point on it, while I don’t believe Grusch, I think he’s a full on conspiracy nut, I will acknowledge that he was exceedingly careful to not break any laws with how he came forward and reported this. Edward Snowden and other similar whistleblowers got criminalized by doing so in an illegal fashion. When you whistleblow legally, (see: Lt Colonel Vindman in the Trump trial) you don’t get exiled to Russia.

        • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Lmao I can’t fucking believe how deeply propagandised americans are. Memes like “The CIA award for excellence in journalism” exist for a god damn reason, and yet you people still parrot this shite. It’s emblematic of just how deeply engrained the civic religion is. Even doing so on the topic of bloody aliens.

          It’s completely fucking absurd. Go ahead and tell Julian Assange that you can legally do things the US military doesn’t want you to do and nothing will happen to you. Fuck me socialist youtube influencers like Second Thought get their doors knocked by armed goons from homeland security asking about their “unamerican activities”.

          • iyaerP@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            If the CIA was the cartoon supervillains you seem to think that they are, then Assange would have been hacked to pieces with bonesaws or drank some polonium tea ages ago.

            • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              He’s been imprisoned for over a decade why the fuck would they do that? They got what they wanted the day he was forced into house arrest hidden within an embassy.

    • Cmot_Dibbler@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      I also don’t know what to make of this. I err on the side of, it’s all bullshit. But i do find it all very interested. Extraterrestrial aliens is almost a thought terminating cliche because of how extraordinarily improbable it is. The thing that i find lights my imagination on fire. Is that Grusch has said the crafts are “terrestrial non-human”. Which is just as unlikely but atleast its something kind of new.

      • iyaerP@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ll be honest, I think that Grusch is a UFO nut who managed to work his way up the ranks and eventually get into power in a govt agency that is nominally supposed to be investigating spooky stuff like the tictacs and got mad that the rest of the agency wasn’t onboard with his conspiracy theory nuttyness and is basically trying to weaponize a congressional investigation against his former colleagues because they wouldn’t believe him. I err on the side of believing Commander Fravor, as his tale has been verified by the other pilot in the flight, and apparently has like 6 seperate radar tracks backing it up. It’s Grusch who’s going full conspiracy theory.

        • solstice@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s super interesting to me that there are so many people who find it more believable that aliens invented hyperdrives or 4d space folding or wormholes or whatever and came over here to buzz our fighter jets…rather than believe that these guys are nuts, lol. Your paragraph is BY FAR the most plausible explanation I’ve heard. Although I do find this whole thing real interesting and in general I support more investigations into Weird Shit.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      I want to make a few points.

      First, the appeal to experts is bad. Doctors misdiagnose things all the time and they’re dealing with much less complex systems than literally all airspace. They also have more training and experience. We expect them to make mistakes on occasion, and we should expect the same from pilots.

      Second, what reason would aliens have for flying in our atmosphere? We can observe what’s happening on earth from space and our tech is not even close to capable for what would be needed to travel to other habitable planets.

      Third, assuming it is aliens flying in the atmosphere for whatever reason, how would their tech not not be advanced enough to avoid detection? They are obviously trying to avoid detection (assuming it’s aliens, which it isn’t), so how are they so incompetent yet so advanced?

      Fourth, if you include the UFO crash stuff, how would they be so incompetent to crash? We have extremely few crashes of our aircraft with our relatively simple technology. There is no way they’d be that bad to crash if they can create the technology to visit earth.

      • iyaerP@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t know why I keep needing to repeat this, but I DON’T THINK IT WAS SPACE ALIENS.

        I’ve been pretty clear about that from the start here, although I guess after re-reading my first post in the thread, it was a little less explicit about that fact than it could have been. Maybe I should have put it at the top rather than in the middle, and also written it in 100’ tall letters of fire.

        We don’t know what happened in the tictac event, and of the other two, Grusch went full on conspiracy theorist nutjob and the other pilot had a similar but less credible story, mostly in that he wasn’t backed up after the fact by other pilots. David Fravor’s account was backed up by other pilots, and the other pilot to back him up explicitly disavowed herself from being a UFO person, while still backing what Fravor said.

        I also focus on that event because it’s the one that had six separate sets of radar on it, so out of all of them, it undoubtedly has the best sensor readings of any of the ones we know. The radar tracks that Fravor describes, with the tictacs descending from 80’000 feet down to sea level in a matter of moments, if released, would either immediately validate or discredit his claims, and the fact that it happened across so many different sensor types and systems also means that in the astronomically more likely event of it being some weird atmospheric phenomena that we’ve never scientifically documented or validated, also would have much more data to begin preliminary investigations with.

        Like that’s the real benefit here, is the scientific research that can be done, and the collation and collection of the data about these events under a single roof where it can be looked and expand the boundaries of human knowledge. If these phenomena are as common as the two pilots allege, then it’s something we need to know about, for the simple purpose of making air traffic safer if nothing else, and if they are lying through their teeth, then releasing the radar tracks proves it. Either way, it should be done.

  • genoxidedev1@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    arrow-down
    13
    ·
    1 year ago

    source: trust me bro

    or whatever, I won’t waste my time with this bs. “Alien” UFOs would never exist on this planet

    1. Why should Aliens care about us specifically? We are seriously not that important in the grand scheme of things
    2. We have no evidence of lifeforms intelligent enough to build spacecraft
    3. We have no evidence of lifeforms intelligent enough to build spacecraft fast enough to arrive here from a place that we weren’t able to observe yet
    4. “Anyone capable of traveling interstellar distances would not be “captured” by us.
      It’s like saying a caveman could capture an F-15” - quoting someone from a Reddit post about this bs story

    I will actually human centipede myself if the stories about “aliens”, that y’all want so much to be true, were true in the slightest.

    • Sightline@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

    • style99@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      I will actually human centipede myself if the stories about “aliens”, that y’all want so much to be true, were true in the slightest.

      Hard to argue with “logic” like that.

    • GONADS125@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Set aside David Grusch’s claims for a minute.

      What do you make of Comander Fravor’s testimony on the Nimitz/Tic Tac event, in which there were multiple eyes on the object, video footage, and radar that was all in line with the reported event? (The radar data was seized by high-ranking Navy officials, if you believe the words of the Cheif radar operator on the Nimitz that day)

      Seems unreasonable to totally dismiss that when scientists/organizations like UAPx are taking it seriously and have been analyzing the Nimitz videos.

      This National Geographic docuseries on Hulu really made me confront the notion that there may be some truth to the idea that there are more advanced non-humans out there. This documentary isn’t like the big-haired History Channel nonsense… It is based off of declassified reports, credible former government officials, military, airforce, etc. Highly recommend at least just giving that first episode free on YouTube a shot.

      Here’s a story in which there was physical evidence corroborating the eyewitness report. Included in the physical evidence was irradiated scrap metal melted into a rock, and an irradiated coin.

      Unless you think we had a nuclear-powered craft like that in 1967, a simpler explanation really might be that hyper-advanced nonhuman entities may exist. Now, that doesn’t mean all of Grusch’s claims are true. I’m not even touching on that when there is already so much compelling information out there.

      I’m not going to pretend we’re anywhere close to having all the answers as a species. We’re just hairless apes that are too smart for are own good, but not as smart as we think we are. Healthy criticism is a good thing, but dismissing everything outright is not. I’m just wanting to share this because I find it interesting/exciting. I’m going to bed and not planning on debating.

    • Weirdfish@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      37
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      People want weird crazy mysteries in life, though personally I don’t understand it.

      I agree, when all this comes to light its just going to be new tech, or glitches in the existing tech.

      We’ve hidden advanced development behind alien stories plenty times before.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        You should definitely watch today’s hearings. They were bonkers.

        • Weirdfish@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          Just sat through the 2 hr hearing, and yes, that was bonkers.

          Would love to be a fly on the wall when Grush reports in a SCIF.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Some of the UFO footage, if it were physical objects, break basic rules we have of how air works. Do whatever you want but if you move thru air fast enough you will get a plasma. And yet we don’t see that.

      So either physics is broken or those objects are sensor figments. I am going to assume physics still works.

      • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Sensor glitches, reflections on cockpit glass, small close up things that seem far away and large. There are so many explanations that make more sense than physics defying aliens that are naturally blurry.

  • FluffyPotato@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yea, once there is any video evidence that doesn’t look like the worse camera in history held up by a parkinson’s patient I’ll actually consider believing in UFOs. Like cmon folks, all cameras are 1080p now at least with auto stabilisation and they are literally everywhere, if there are any aliens on earth there would be an actual proper video at this point.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      I did this to trick a friend that was all about alien UFOs, I only feel like a little bit of a jerk for it lol

      I went for a walk on a clear day when you could see the moon and just used my camera to film the moon as I wiggled my hands around so it looked like the moon was just a white object darting around lol

      • Platomus@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Good thing phone cameras aren’t the only cameras.

        The world is constantly under monitoring from hundreds of different groups. At least one of them would have produced a video is it existed.

        • paraphrand@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Well, yes, but your point and the OPs point are very common and it’s almost always paired with the fact most people have cameras in their pocket now.

          Also, most security cameras are small sensors too.

          I do agree that it’s strange not much has been captured. But I also feel like this is a valid plausible reason.

          • Platomus@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            Security cameras and phones aren’t the only cameras. It doesn’t matter how many “bad” forms of camera you list - there are still thousands of good cameras pointing up at the sky day and night 24/7.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        They maybe aren’t ideal, but they’d be good enough that we’d have thousands of videos by now. You might not be able to tell exactly what’s there, but you would be able to correlate them all and have pretty definitive proof. That hasn’t happened yet though, so clearly there’s an issue with the initial hypothesis. Maybe something like it being aliens makes no damn sense. How would they be able to get here but also need to fly aircraft around. We can watch what’s happening on earth from space with fairly high detail and we have trouble just leaving our atmosphere.

  • GONADS125@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    I see so many people discounting the subject of UAP entirely, all because of one man’s hearsay. I’m putting this response to a user I made here as a response to this post:

    Putting all the focus on Grusch is a mistake when there was verifiable video footage and radar to match multiple eyewitness accounts for the Nimitz/Tic Tac event. There was a good foundation established for the need to address the near-misses between the UAP and airforce as well as commercial aircraft. People can just pocket or dismiss Grusch’s claims, but that’s not all there is to this subject…

    What do you make of Comander Fravor’s testimony on the Nimitz/Tic Tac event, in which there were multiple eyes on the object, video footage, and radar that was all in line with the reported event? (The radar data was seized by high-ranking Navy officials, if you believe the words of the Cheif Radar Operator on the Nimitz that day)

    Seems unreasonable to totally dismiss the possibility of non-human intelligent life, especially when scientists/organizations like UAPx are taking it seriously and have been analyzing the Nimitz videos. There’s also the Galileo Project at Harvard, which believes they may have recovered manufactured material from an interstellar object (believed to have been aided by propulsion) from the ocean floor off Papua New Guinea. Scientists and physicists are starting to give this subject credence (not necessarily Grusch’s claims, but all of the other information and evidence) and I disagree with the literal anti-intellectual rejection of all information because of one man’s claims.

    This National Geographic docuseries on Hulu really made me confront the notion that there may be some truth to the idea that there are more advanced non-humans out there. This documentary isn’t like the big-haired History Channel nonsense… It is based off of declassified reports, credible former government officials, military, airforce, etc. Highly recommend at least just giving that first episode free on YouTube a shot.

    Here is The Falcon Lake incident, in which there was physical evidence corroborating the eyewitness report. Included in the physical evidence was irradiated scrap metal melted into a rock at the claimed landing site, and an irradiated coin. He also had physical wounds from the event that corroborated his claims, and he fell very ill immediately after.

    Unless you think we had a nuclear-powered aircraft like that in 1967, a simpler explanation really might be that hyper-advanced nonhuman entities may exist. Now, that doesn’t mean all or any of Grusch’s claims are true. I’m not even touching on that when there is already so much compelling information out there.

    I’m not going to pretend we’re anywhere close to having all the answers as a species. We’re just hairless apes that are too smart for are own good, but not as smart as we think we are. Healthy criticism is a good thing, but dismissing everything outright is not. I consider myself a very skeptical person. But it’s not up for debate whether or not our government had a UAP monitoring program. That has been established, having been created by Harry Reid. That’s been established fact since 2017.

    Whether or not they are of human-origin, UAP do exist and therefore should be studied. Here is some declassified UAP footage other than the widely covered Nimitz encounter.

    Here is a very compelling photograph that a National Geographic mapping plane captured in 1971, during a project funded by the Costa Rican Electricity Institute. They believed they captured a flying disc at the moment of entry or exit of the water, as the camera captured a photo about every 13 seconds. It was estimated to be about 160ft in diameter.

    These metalic orbs have been observed all over the world, they have no obvious signs of propulsion, and our government has admitted this is not our tech, and that it’s beyond our capabilities.

    There is a YouTube channel with years worth of apparent footage of these orbs tagging and being pursued by aircraft (from the Navy to the Sherrif’s department choppers equipped with infrared cameras). I don’t agree with all of this individual’s views, but his footage is in line with the accounts of pilots and some of the declassified footage. It’s definitely not verified, but it’s there for the people who ask “Why isn’t anyone capturing these things on film?” This guy has been allegedly recording these around Marina Del Rey since 2017.

    Let’s not forget project Blue Book, General John Samford’s address, the Congressional UFO hearings 50+ years ago, and the information available in the national archivesHere is a French government/military/civilian scientific collaborative study on the subject from 1978 (PDF warning), which determined the most reasonable explanation for the objects was the E.T. hypothesis (their conclusion). Not to mention this tidbit from Canada recently:

    “A Manitoba member of Parliament wrote Canada’s minister of defence this spring suggesting the country has participated in a secret multi-nation program devoted to “the recovery and exploitation” of material from unidentified aerial phenomenon, more commonly known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs.”

    In the face of all this information, I now am at this impasse in which I’m forced to consider that it’s actually more reasonable to believe there are other, more intelligent species in the universe. It’s one thing to argue this is secret human tech we’re seeing right now, but it’s outlandish to me to consider the notion that we had tech like this going back to the 40s… or even just dating back to the Falcon Lake incident.

    There were mass sightings across the US to the point that our Airforce openly acknowledged their existence and initiated Project Blue Book. There’s just no way that was our tech back then, right around the time in which we first discovered the power of the atom. There’s no way we had atomic flying aircraft without any obvious signs of propulsion, rapid acceleration, and moving at enormous speeds without breaking the sound barrier dating back earlier than the 50s…

    I personally reached the tipping point in which I genuinely believe it’s less reasonable to deny the existence of UAP. Characteristics of these UAP have remained consistent across decades, our government has admitted they exist, secret black projects have been uncovered, many documents have been declassified and leaked… I find it much harder to believe that all of this consistency across decades is merely coincidence.

    If anyone reading this truly considers themselves a rational skeptic, please at least watch the first episode of the documentary I linked and read the information from my comment before responding to me.

      • OtakuAltair@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Hmm maybe this should start adding in the associated link text from the comment too

    • kromem@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      The only thing I’ll point out is that there’s sometimes a false dichotomy presented with this topic of either extraterrestrial tech more advanced than us or secret terrestrial tech much more advanced than what’s known.

      But the same theory of wormholes brought up in the hearing for FTL travel as a possibility would be the exact same foundation that would allow for travel through time.

      The idea that this is terrestrial tech that just hasn’t occurred yet should remain one of the possible variables on the table.

      Yes, to us right now that would be completely impossible or require the energy of an entire star to power. But we enjoy a number of technologies today that were thought to be impossible until intermediate progress was made to pull them out of the realm of impossibility.

      One of my issues with an extraterrestrial explanation is that from a signals standpoint we’re incredibly uninteresting or detectable across effectively the entire universe. That intelligent life exists here seems unlikely to be evidenced in any way outside a small radius around us. But present Earth will, moving forward, arguably be the most interesting spatial destination for an advanced technological civilization in the Earth’s future capable of traveling through time.

      So if this really is technology well beyond present capabilities that’s so commonly seen, we should make sure not to ignore the possibility that it is our technology well beyond present capabilities with the same self-absorption that governs us today.

      Humans have historically overestimated the prevalence of extraterrestrial life beyond what it has turned out to be, and routinely underestimated what we would ourselves one day be capable of.

  • invaderborgus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    The one time I saw a “UFO”, a little digging turned out to be a known training drone from the Army training center down the road.

    • catshit_dogfart@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Thought I saw a UFO one time too, took video and posted it on a message board and everything.

      They explained it was probably one of those paper lanterns that people let up at parties, which upon description completely made sense. Looked strange though, red light in the sky that was definitely way up there, not like an airplane but maybe where a low-flying one would be, too small to be an airplane though, irregular flickering, irregular movement.

      Yeah, fully explained it.

  • TemporaryBoyfriend@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, full stop.

    There’s nothing saying that this isn’t something of our own creation.

    The Roswell incident exposed the existence of Mylar – something human-made, classified, but other-worldly in appearance and texture to anyone who might have seen it at that time… Now something mundane enough to be used as potato chip bags.

  • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’ll believe that “unidentified flying objects” are a common sight. I’ll believe that some of those look like they could be alien spacecraft. That doesn’t mean we’ve actually encountered aliens.

    • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      They are drones, we just don’t know what they look like or whose they are. Well, at least no one is saying whose they are.