Went through the CIA one as well, and it's almost designed to be opaque and vague. UFO's create interesting ethical questions and can be useful thought experiments for contemporary issues.
A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them?
Second, if you do intervene, does their new knowledge of the intervention of an intermediate power harm their social and ethical development, given their entire political economy and ethics will switch from discovered principles, to merely competing to appeal to the most powerful force they can? (I think this would make them impossible to trust.) Could it recover and develop on its own if you arrived and chose some of them for benefits but not others? Do you pick the most dominant, or the species with the most suitability to become part of the space faring community.
It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. I don't think these are dumb questions at all, and they resemble ones that state dept's make very day, so I don't dismiss people interested in UFOs as they are interested in some pretty useful questions.
They're not, but they're also somewhat orthogonal to "UFO culture." You're describing a philosophical/sociopolitical discussion that isn't really informed by a blip on a grainy video frame.
The question that's more relevant to UFOs, in my opinion, is "Why would these aliens, with their unimaginably superior technology, travel all the way here and reveal themselves in such asinine ways?" Did they intend to come all this way to do some cryptic and spooky display for a small number of people? Did they simply slip up and briefly drop their cover?
I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).
Your last point is a good one, but there are a many ways that you could be wrong. To name one:
The Von Neumann probe is a compelling model and it is more likely that we would see something fitting that description rather than the original form of an extraterrestrial intelligence.
We have no good reason to think that such an advanced civilization would have mastered faster than light communication either. So the behavior of these cylinders, assuming they are VN probes, may only be simplistic surveying routines which have been running for tens of thousands of years and were not at all designed for interacting with humans. There may also be resource constraint issues present in the construction of self replicating Von Neumann probes that make the type of interaction you are hoping for infeasible, in terms of compute, agenda, or something else we aren’t aware of.
I’ve been looking through these ufo threads and haven’t seen anyone address the third explanation. I’m somewhat impulsively replying to you as your might receive this well. Most of the credible ufo phenomenon is likely a psyop. I won’t get into why the cia or other would put forth such efforts beyond reciting the quote “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”. It’s “controversial” if William Casey actually said that, but this fills in the gaps that can’t be explained away by witness confusion or delusion, without requiring a belief in some unseen technology that’s always conveniently dangled out of sight. The cia also says they’ve been doing telepathy, astral projection, and the like. The disinformation program is definitely real.
> I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).
After having read Roadside Picnic, I'm inclined to disagree. If sufficiently advanced aliens ever happened upon us they might treat us as we treat ants in our backyards—that is, they don't really notice or care for us at all.
I think this is a bit like us diving into the ocean to observe algae. We don't do it because we're concerned about its imminent sentience and potential to "cause trouble". We just do it because we're curious; we want a better understanding of our world and universe.
We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". Us being a threat is unlikely to be even a single virtual particle of thought in their intragalactic quantum brains.
> We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors".
What's feeding your intuition here? I wouldnt have thought they'd likely be _that_ advanced. But I'm not sure where tens of thousands of orders of magnitude puts them on e.g. the Kardashev scale, and I'm sure being a huge Star Trek fan has affected my own intuitions :)
>A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them?
Seems a strange position to take. Look at our own case. Do we evaluate "un-contacted/lost" tribes in the Amazon to see if they may pose a risk to the current Global Order? No, because that would be absurd. They are so far behind technologically that they pose about as much of a threat as a troop of chimps do. For galactic scale civilizations the difference in capabilities is probably at least as extreme as that.
You'd think, but we subvert and bomb Iran every time they get close to enriching uranium, so there are precedents, if perhaps not on the same relative scale.
The other question is why not just domesticate us and what kind of evolutionary impact does domestication have on a species? As someone who "educates," horses and dogs to live in an inescapable human dominion, in doing so, I shape them into something other than what they are. They have good lives and find joy, but there is a responsibility I have they will almost never see. The best I can personally do is evolve my own understanding and various virtues and to relieve their suffering where I comprehend it. I would hope an alien species would be a little further along than most of us on that front, but I'd say the analogies are useful.
I don't mean to be a pedant, but you mean when you say 'UFOs' you mean extra-terrestrial visitors, don't you? It's an important distinction because even if you assume any given UFO sighting was not just a hallucination or misinterpretation but something real and unprecedented, assuming it's aliens from space is still a wild leap. A leap people tend to make because we're so primed to think "aliens" when we hear "UFO".
Bear in mind that intervention doesn't have to be obvious. In our current networked world, there's a lot which a more-advanced-than-us group or civilisation could do without needing to reveal themselves as such. ;)
how many of us have met a congressmen, senator, media personality in person?
How hard would it be for a super advanced society to insert a media network that's all basically ai-generated people? We already have deep fakes, imagine the tech they might have that's deep fakes after 50 generations...
They could control us from a small satellite without needing to come anywhere near us,just by controlling what we see, think, or hear on the television.
Oh, I love these ideas! I'm sure advanced civilizations have AIs, suoercomputers, lots of experience with this situation and some heuristics to help them decide, but i love doing the thought experiments with you :)
I agree the mere appearance of an advanced civilization could be a corrupting influence on the soon-to-be space faring savages, but then again the brutes might have other more pressing character flaws. At the same time maybe it would make sense for the advanced civilization to contact them in a covert manner so that there is sort of plausible deniability or non-verifiability to seed the ideas and create some sort of influence but limit the impact, which itself is a strategy which could create a sort of corrupt back channel between the terrestrial population and the advanced influencers.
But judging from the way that state departments handle these things it seems that early and persistent outreach, both covert and overt, and infiltration, and a mix of carrots (advanced tech, trade?) and sticks (erasure?) is the preferred method of maintaining some sort of control and relationship to manage the emerging threat or at least try to guide the development in a manner which the advance civilization sees as promoting whatever values are interests that it has.
Following the track your ideas lay out, seems if there were others out there that we're civic minded in a cosmic sense, they wouldn't adopt a hands off approach
We don't stop the lion from eating the gazelle. Maybe exploiting our planet to the point of our extinction is the natural order of things. We could pollute all we want and while life as we know it will change, life on earth will continue as it has all these billions of years. This is a planet that gets shaken by asteroids and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that make the entire industrial revolution look like a cigarette idling in an ash tray in comparison.
If anything, we live in a galactic nature preserve.
It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc.
Perhaps the world is highly valued in terms of its bio-diversity and life-supporting resources. There's a possibility that native civilization like us are being monitored and on some level "protected" from conquests if they show they're responsible and take care of their own world.
But if the native civilization continue to destroy their own world, then all bets are off. More responsible and structured civilizations could be granted the right to intervene and potentially take over.
In other words, the more self-sufficient, ecologically responsible and wise we are, the more a civilization like us would be able to avoid this intervention.
My pet theory is they're already here and don't care at all about environmental issues. Planets like this are a dime-a-dozen to them.
However, nowhere else in the universe have they come across music like ours. They are madly obsessed with it and dare not intervene in our affairs, lest they taint the source.
I have absolutely no evidence for this. I just like the idea that Freddie Mercury just might have been an intergalactic superstar.
It's dangerous to go alone. Take this [1] and this [2] and especially this [3].
Area 51 was a radar testing site due to the unique properties of the salt on the ground. And they just tested a "silver shiny UFO" which was the prototype for the SR-71. And yes, this was exactly the same date when people first called radio stations and the police for UFO sightings.
The Skunkworks A-12 OXCART research project led to the final SR-71 design for the CIA's spy planes. More details on this on the CIA website for the Archangel project in the web archive [4].
For context, this book covers history on the development of these UFOs and was written by Ben Rich, who worked at and eventually led the Lockheed division that developed these planes. If nothing else, it's a fascinating account of many historical events from a totally different vantage point.
> Area 51 was a radar testing site due to the unique properties of the salt on the ground. And they just tested a "silver shiny UFO" which was the prototype for the SR-71. And yes, this was exactly the same date when people first called radio stations and the police for UFO sightings.
Assuming Area 51 was just that, you can't disregard the whole UFO phenomenon (which has been taken place all over the globe for decades) as "the observers didn't know they were looking at an Skunk Works aircraft". That implies you haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg.
These reports not only often come from highly trained fighter pilots and engineers, but it also leaves imaging (radar, infrared, etc.) records that show that these things, whatever they are, can move too fast (and too slow) to be any USA/China/Russia/Israel super secret aircraft.
I've always thought that an interesting theory is that some of what people have seen out there is the result of particle beam weapon testing. I have no idea how probable that is, but it sounded plausible. Here is a gem from the old web [0] laying out the argument.
None of those planes look like UFOs and they wouldn't move in the same reported ways, either. I don't agree that it makes someone stupid to be open minded.
> None of those planes look like UFOs and they wouldn't move in the same reported ways, either.
Yet today's pop culture conspiracy theorists tried to raid Area 51 for their beliefs.
Don't get me wrong: I believe in alien life. But I don't believe in conspiracy theorists that are blind to the obvious in correlations of evidence.
Scientific theory is about bayesian reasoning, not about proving to yourself that you're right; which is a likely phenomenon in the thinking nature of conspiracy theorists.
Those planes have very unusual forms by the standards the public was accustomed to decades ago. In the time since, those planes and ones even more exotic have appeared countless times in popular media, changing the public's perception of what airplanes might look like.
I have to admit that as a youngster when an SR-71 surprise buzzed Vancouver BC circa 1986 that my first thought was that it was a UFO (flying saucer). Edge on they look very saucer like! It was only when they banked almost vertical that I could see the true silhouette.
The next to last was the most interesting to me... it's gotta be an old April Fools in the NSA Technical Journal. It flatly states we've received signals from outer space, and posits a decoding of them....
I know exactly what this is though I can't remember where to find the source. It was an exercise they gave to a bunch of scientists and mathematicians to see if it was plausible that they could even decode the meaning behind an alien message, if one were ever found. (And also probably to provide some credentials for candidate experts to consult in such a scenario.) They did quite well. That said, the code itself was created by a human, so I'm not sure it has the value they think it does. One thing higher education in STEM taught me was that human thinking is actually really easy to spot. We, for the most part, really just use the same tired old tricks again and again in different contexts.
Intelligence agencies have internal decoding competitions and trainings. This sounds like one of them, simply framed around an alien transmission, and you're just looking at the answer key where it's assumed the reader is familiar with the frame.
The entire "transmission" is at the end. To be honest, of all the things we could receive from an alien source, "They transmitted basic set theory and a periodic table at us... and that's it..." would almost be the weirdest possible outcome.
Why would that be the weirdest possible outcome? This provides a demonstration of intelligence, intent and understanding that starting with objective, science-based fundamentals which can be deduced (set theory) and observed (elements) seems like an _awesome_ wide net to cast if you're trying to communicate.
It's not like they could compress a JPG and beam it over here in a way that wouldn't look like garbage.
It's obviously a crypto challenge to anyone who has ever played them. It maps way too nicely to human concepts. This is what every amateur putting together an "alien challenge" without attempting to be scientific about it ends up doing, and it's easy to tell. That's fine if you're doing it for fun, but it's obviously not real.
I've been here solved that. ACM tried to run an challenge about an "alien computer" that was obviously not alien, but ended up being very real. I was part of the team that reverse engineered it first, but the whole contest collapsed and all interest waned after we ended up finding the very-much-not-alien chip involved by accident. We did cover the initial process, but unfortunately never got around to writing the follow-up posts.
If aliens were actually found, it definitely wouldn't be announced in an unclassified document shared with everyone at NSA. Although I don't think it's a prank per se, just someone who wrote a cryptography puzzle and wanted to frame it in a cute way.
Just a wild stab in the dark here but those redactions might have to do with SIGINT. Or in other words, how the UFO report came to be.
Because when I saw this headline "NSA UFO Documents Index" hosted on nsa.gov, I realized why I don't care about UFO theories. Because even the NSA has given up. No sane person cares about this stuff. They will readily index it on their website to shut those lunatics up.
Agreed; that said, there's an Ancient Aliens tv series that acts serious but, I think, is mostly recognized for being hilarious...so frivolous I've actually watched it because it's just so laughable.
I don't know how you can't at least find this document interesting. It's a first hand account of what was basically a dogfight between a US pilot and a UFO over Iran.
I liked your take on the redactions (and your crazy ass username, hehe). But, we're not lunatics, tho maybe your are for living in a fantasy of denial rather than facing the reality of the huge amounts of data on this. It seems crazier these days to deny the realities suggested by the Himalayas of reports and testimony. And this new index, well, it doesn't seem to be shutting anyone up now, tho, does it, hmm?
One of my brothers thinks the world is 6,000 years old and intelligent design and so forth. I still have no idea how to respond, because he feels I have to learn this truth too, if at all.
I'm a bit surprised by the loss of nuance in this and the CIA HN thread.
UFOs doesn't mean aliens, and equating the two limits fruitful discussions about the actual phenomena behind them, which in my opinion are much more interesting, and, based on your prior, also much more likely, e.g.
* yet unexplained physical/weather phenomena (see David Fraser et al. evidence)
* secret military technology (see SR-71 sightings)
Readit News
A good one is where, say you are checking in on a civilization to see whether it's about to become space faring, and given the amount of energy required for it, the tech is dangerous to any other civilization these recent space arrivers might find. The question is whether they're going to pose a threat to the regional galactic order, and if they haven't got their cultural act together, do you let them?
Second, if you do intervene, does their new knowledge of the intervention of an intermediate power harm their social and ethical development, given their entire political economy and ethics will switch from discovered principles, to merely competing to appeal to the most powerful force they can? (I think this would make them impossible to trust.) Could it recover and develop on its own if you arrived and chose some of them for benefits but not others? Do you pick the most dominant, or the species with the most suitability to become part of the space faring community.
It costs them nothing to wipe us out and spare the universe the trouble, so what must they believe about life, the universe, and everything to not do so. Economics may be universal, etc. I don't think these are dumb questions at all, and they resemble ones that state dept's make very day, so I don't dismiss people interested in UFOs as they are interested in some pretty useful questions.
They're not, but they're also somewhat orthogonal to "UFO culture." You're describing a philosophical/sociopolitical discussion that isn't really informed by a blip on a grainy video frame.
The question that's more relevant to UFOs, in my opinion, is "Why would these aliens, with their unimaginably superior technology, travel all the way here and reveal themselves in such asinine ways?" Did they intend to come all this way to do some cryptic and spooky display for a small number of people? Did they simply slip up and briefly drop their cover?
I just don't see it. I fully believe that, if there were aliens out there with such capabilities, and they came to earth, they would either conceal themselves fully or reveal themselves intentionally (and not just to a handful of people in a remote area).
After having read Roadside Picnic, I'm inclined to disagree. If sufficiently advanced aliens ever happened upon us they might treat us as we treat ants in our backyards—that is, they don't really notice or care for us at all.
We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". Us being a threat is unlikely to be even a single virtual particle of thought in their intragalactic quantum brains.
What's feeding your intuition here? I wouldnt have thought they'd likely be _that_ advanced. But I'm not sure where tens of thousands of orders of magnitude puts them on e.g. the Kardashev scale, and I'm sure being a huge Star Trek fan has affected my own intuitions :)
Seems a strange position to take. Look at our own case. Do we evaluate "un-contacted/lost" tribes in the Amazon to see if they may pose a risk to the current Global Order? No, because that would be absurd. They are so far behind technologically that they pose about as much of a threat as a troop of chimps do. For galactic scale civilizations the difference in capabilities is probably at least as extreme as that.
The other question is why not just domesticate us and what kind of evolutionary impact does domestication have on a species? As someone who "educates," horses and dogs to live in an inescapable human dominion, in doing so, I shape them into something other than what they are. They have good lives and find joy, but there is a responsibility I have they will almost never see. The best I can personally do is evolve my own understanding and various virtues and to relieve their suffering where I comprehend it. I would hope an alien species would be a little further along than most of us on that front, but I'd say the analogies are useful.
Bear in mind that intervention doesn't have to be obvious. In our current networked world, there's a lot which a more-advanced-than-us group or civilisation could do without needing to reveal themselves as such. ;)
How hard would it be for a super advanced society to insert a media network that's all basically ai-generated people? We already have deep fakes, imagine the tech they might have that's deep fakes after 50 generations...
They could control us from a small satellite without needing to come anywhere near us,just by controlling what we see, think, or hear on the television.
I agree the mere appearance of an advanced civilization could be a corrupting influence on the soon-to-be space faring savages, but then again the brutes might have other more pressing character flaws. At the same time maybe it would make sense for the advanced civilization to contact them in a covert manner so that there is sort of plausible deniability or non-verifiability to seed the ideas and create some sort of influence but limit the impact, which itself is a strategy which could create a sort of corrupt back channel between the terrestrial population and the advanced influencers.
But judging from the way that state departments handle these things it seems that early and persistent outreach, both covert and overt, and infiltration, and a mix of carrots (advanced tech, trade?) and sticks (erasure?) is the preferred method of maintaining some sort of control and relationship to manage the emerging threat or at least try to guide the development in a manner which the advance civilization sees as promoting whatever values are interests that it has.
Following the track your ideas lay out, seems if there were others out there that we're civic minded in a cosmic sense, they wouldn't adopt a hands off approach
If anything, we live in a galactic nature preserve.
Perhaps the world is highly valued in terms of its bio-diversity and life-supporting resources. There's a possibility that native civilization like us are being monitored and on some level "protected" from conquests if they show they're responsible and take care of their own world.
But if the native civilization continue to destroy their own world, then all bets are off. More responsible and structured civilizations could be granted the right to intervene and potentially take over.
In other words, the more self-sufficient, ecologically responsible and wise we are, the more a civilization like us would be able to avoid this intervention.
However, nowhere else in the universe have they come across music like ours. They are madly obsessed with it and dare not intervene in our affairs, lest they taint the source.
I have absolutely no evidence for this. I just like the idea that Freddie Mercury just might have been an intergalactic superstar.
Area 51 was a radar testing site due to the unique properties of the salt on the ground. And they just tested a "silver shiny UFO" which was the prototype for the SR-71. And yes, this was exactly the same date when people first called radio stations and the police for UFO sightings.
The Skunkworks A-12 OXCART research project led to the final SR-71 design for the CIA's spy planes. More details on this on the CIA website for the Archangel project in the web archive [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A12radartesting.jpg
[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20201112000409/https://www.cia.go...
https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...
For context, this book covers history on the development of these UFOs and was written by Ben Rich, who worked at and eventually led the Lockheed division that developed these planes. If nothing else, it's a fascinating account of many historical events from a totally different vantage point.
Assuming Area 51 was just that, you can't disregard the whole UFO phenomenon (which has been taken place all over the globe for decades) as "the observers didn't know they were looking at an Skunk Works aircraft". That implies you haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg.
These reports not only often come from highly trained fighter pilots and engineers, but it also leaves imaging (radar, infrared, etc.) records that show that these things, whatever they are, can move too fast (and too slow) to be any USA/China/Russia/Israel super secret aircraft.
[0] https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strang...
Yet today's pop culture conspiracy theorists tried to raid Area 51 for their beliefs.
Don't get me wrong: I believe in alien life. But I don't believe in conspiracy theorists that are blind to the obvious in correlations of evidence.
Scientific theory is about bayesian reasoning, not about proving to yourself that you're right; which is a likely phenomenon in the thinking nature of conspiracy theorists.
It's not stupid to be open minded, but it is stupid to ignore plausible explanations of phenomenon because you are hoping to find something new.
I couldn't even start to imagine what incredible stuff is currently classified and being worked on!
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...
The entire "transmission" is at the end. To be honest, of all the things we could receive from an alien source, "They transmitted basic set theory and a periodic table at us... and that's it..." would almost be the weirdest possible outcome.
It's not like they could compress a JPG and beam it over here in a way that wouldn't look like garbage.
They've done similar as recruitment initiatives as well, I remember one on Twitter.
Deleted Comment
And that is confirmed:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19257/nsa-key-to-ext...
I've been here solved that. ACM tried to run an challenge about an "alien computer" that was obviously not alien, but ended up being very real. I was part of the team that reverse engineered it first, but the whole contest collapsed and all interest waned after we ended up finding the very-much-not-alien chip involved by accident. We did cover the initial process, but unfortunately never got around to writing the follow-up posts.
https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2012/unprogramming-intro/https://web.archive.org/web/20160304030848/http://queue.acm....
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/tec...
> Key to The Extraterrestrial Messages - Winter 1969 - Vol. XIV, No. 1
Additionally, that same link above also contains this from the Winter 1966 journal, "Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence":
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...
Dead Comment
What is the point for releasing documents in a state that leaves them completely useless.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766074
Where'd the objects go or what happened to them? Why'd the F-4 drop the chase and why didn't they try to scramble more jets?
Because when I saw this headline "NSA UFO Documents Index" hosted on nsa.gov, I realized why I don't care about UFO theories. Because even the NSA has given up. No sane person cares about this stuff. They will readily index it on their website to shut those lunatics up.
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...
Even if you assume that whatever he encountered was made on Earth, its hard not to have questions or be interested in the account.
Does that work?
One of my brothers thinks the world is 6,000 years old and intelligent design and so forth. I still have no idea how to respond, because he feels I have to learn this truth too, if at all.
Its pure bureaucracy at work.
You can still infer some info from the context or meta to build some kind of picture.
eg A "War of the Worlds" style announcement probably isn't something to hope for ;)
UFOs doesn't mean aliens, and equating the two limits fruitful discussions about the actual phenomena behind them, which in my opinion are much more interesting, and, based on your prior, also much more likely, e.g.
* yet unexplained physical/weather phenomena (see David Fraser et al. evidence)
* secret military technology (see SR-71 sightings)
* ... ?
Dead Comment