It’s interesting to understand the motivation behind all this.
Specifically: US military/intelligence/congress has historically treated UFO activity as highly classified. That’s now changed. Why is that? I don’t know. One candidate explanation:
1. Historically, some amount of “UFO” activity was actually classified, known US military/Intelligence programmes. Making the information public would compromise those programmes. So, in reality, the sightings related to identifiable flying objects. Just that they were identifiable by a small number of in-the-know people.
2. Things have changed. Some other actors - let’s guess Chinese/Russian - have stepped up their own secret programmes. Those items are now legitimately “unknown” to US authorities. If you’re from the US, that’s bad. Your putative enemies have something you lack knowledge of.
3. How to respond? In a world where the sightings are your own secrets then a strategy of silence makes sense. In a world where they’re not, the game is different. In this case, you want publicity: to cast them as unknown, (a) because it creates interest (/fear) and (b) tacitly lets your enemies know that you know they’re up to something.
That might be way off base. But the about-face in strategy is at least as interesting as the sightings themselves. I haven’t seen that covered elsewhere. Interested if anyone else has ideas/links.
Combine #2 and #3 and a culture of reticence amongst military and civilian aviation observers to report strange things, it makes sense to laugh less at them and be more encouraging.
That's what I'm trying to figure out too. The narrative is the biggest change so far. Low quality videos and eye witness reports aren't exactly new.
Sam Harris, who I consider trustworthy, was given a heads up about what's to come:
"I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position of having to acknowledge that all the experts are on the same page, and there’s just this blanket declaration that we’re in the presence of alien technology, and we don’t know what to make of it. So prepare your brain for that and figure out what you’re going to do."
Except that I'm not sure that there's any real mention of alien technology in the report. It's just the same old where we're seeing interesting reports about not-fully-understood optical phenomena, and people in the popular press are pattern-matching it to little green men from outer space.
I'm probably going to get voted down for saying it, but Fox plays a lot of UFO/Bigfoot type of stuff. Clearly it gets rating, and the previous President got a lot of his ratings from the same audience as Fox so maybe there is some strategic play towards the Fox/Trump crowd.
Now that you say it... Yeah there seems to be a lot of "Your government is lying and hiding something from you, you can't trust it!" that they can conveniently extrapolate to cover other subjects, like "election fraud", or "lab leak theory".
Given that people (and governments/military) have believed in many phenomena that were later found to have a mundane explanation I'd expect reports like this in a world where there aren't aliens flying around.
That, and it making no sense for us to only see evidence for them on earth but not when looking at space, and that there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.) the mundane explanations are many times more likely from where I sit.
I think there are at least two plausible explanations:
1. They are actually from Earth, hiding somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Probably Von Neumann probes which arrived millions of years ago, and not actually living things. They check our status periodically and send information to their origin system.
2. We are living in a simulation, and they are spectating us in a god mode with a visible side-effect.
I like to imagine that if aliens have visited us, its for a kind of tourism or safari. Us seeing them is the pilot (some underpaid, overworked tour guide) making a mistake.
Travelling for many, many, many years just to see a bit of the planet from the window (and not even things like cities) is something I'd consider unlikely as the primary objective of visiting aliens.
Teleport? Wormhole? Advanced tech that makes them pop up in our space? I doubt it. But not sure how else we have those things caught on military radars and pilot cameras that are not always explainable by optical phenomenon related to orbital objects or natural atmospheric phenomenon.
People thought there's no explanations for all the ghost ship reports until we figured out Fata Morgana, too. The space of mundane explanations is large even if unknown.
> there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades
The problem with this argument is that we wouldn't know in the first place if they were also using these more covert means. At some level, we have to assume that if aliens exist and are making themselves visible to us, they're basically doing it for the lulz.
There has been secrecy for decades regarding UFOs/UAPs flying on Earth, I think it's fair to say this secrecy extends to outer space as well.
there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.)
The media appears to miss that fact that something that happens in physical reality can become corrupted by the time it gets rendered to a computer screen. The complicated military systems are hallucinating now. Or am I missing something? Did multiple pilots see this thing with their own eyes from different angles without any technology in between?
There were naked eye visuals from multiple pilots, targeting pod identifications, and radar from ships were also picking up whatever it was.
It is surprisingly convincing evidence of a peer state adversary with a huge tech advantage or... something else. I was moved from "no f'ing way do ufos exist", to "wtf.. it actually seems plausible" when reading up on it.
It would be a truly novel approach for any state to develop such a huge tech advantage and neither leaking it during development nor using it to gain something in some of the many existing conflicts (cold or hot).
In the tic-tac incident, yes. In the 60 minutes interview two pilots in separate planes reported seeing something causing a disturbance in the ocean, and a "tic-tac" like object about the size of their jets that seemed to notice them and matched one of the planes in a turn.
The tic-tac ufo and the USS Nimitz incidents are eye witness accounts of pilots observing these crafts while them also being registered on the radar. It would be one hell of a coincidence for machinery and multiple humans to malfunction in the same way at the same time.
Most of these navy reports involve eye witness accounts of trained and credible pilots.
Both pilots called in the tic tac, their IR sensors picked it up, they were able to get a lock on with their onboard radar, and the ship picked it up on the their radar. They definitely ran into something
Yeah any time someone brings up the FLir argument I have to remind myself that even something that can exhibit IR can also be something that is not really there as a physical mass. What interested me is that David Fravor was specifically asked by Lex Fridman in his podcast if he thought these “objects” were projections and his answer was that he wasn’t a physicist and didn’t really know for sure but didn’t think so. As such the idea of a projection cannot yet be ruled out. I actually can’t believe that projections aren’t more closely scrutinized to explain this whole “phenomenon”.
Here's a _long_ conversation with one of the pilots with eye visibility that day, David Fravor, though I'm linking you to the start of that specific topic:
I'm more or less a skeptic when it comes to most of what gets said / reported about UFO's / UAP's, but I will say this: David Fravor comes across as intelligent, sane, reasonable, and credible, and makes a moderately compelling argument that something exceptional happened out there. Now even he stops short, as I recall, of saying "it was little green men", but his testimony at least supports the idea that there's something there that's worthy of further analysis.
IOW, he isn't one of stereotypical, "frothing at the mouth", "true believer", "THEY ARE HERE" ufo cult types that might be fairly easy to dismiss for simple lack of credibility. He could still have been mistaken, or misjudged something, but he at least establishes a certain minimum level of credibility, to my way of thinking.
Sometimes they were visible, sometimes not, since distance was at play. The ATFLIR camera pods can see a lot farther than the human eye but these were also witnessed with human eyes by multiple Navy pilots from different angles.
This reminds me to The X-files quote/theme/leitmotif "I want to believe".
I am prone to think that this again some kind of gov mass psychology Rorschach experiment, where they say if we show you this image and if we say it is flying bunny how many times do we need to show and repeat the same until you start believing it is a flying bunny ...
By the way I am not saying other sentient being do not exist in the universe, I am just saying that with that technology you would not give a fork about what humans want/need/wish ... therefore it is more likely it is some kind of political hocus/pocus
One thing I would like to point out is that it's not just the US government that is paying attention to these things. Many countries like China[1], France[2], the UK[3] have been investigating UFOs and find them credible.
I personally didn't find any of the UFO stuff believable until the US Navy/Pentagon stuff came out which is very credible.
At this point it is almost undeniable that there is something strange going on in the skies. Whether it is aliens or not remains an open question.
I am kind of on the same page as you. Before the Pentagon stuff came out, my adjacency to UFO's was really liking the X-Files. I casually started digging into this stuff and it's clearly a global phenomenon; but when you look at comment sections like this one, a lot of the conversation is centered on explanations centered around the United States or it's rivals (China/Russia).
Every single country talking about it has had a populist spurg and political instability recently. It just seems like a psyop to distract people who trend towards conspiratorial thinking and prevent them from focusing on politics.
The classified version of the UAPTF (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force) report on government knowledge of real UFO events is being given to select members of the Senate ahead of the unclassified version likely to come next week. The narrative seems to be “soft disclosure” with descriptions of the public report by officials confirming that there are numerous real UFO events, that defy conventional explanations (and sometimes known physics), and do not represent secret US black projects, or even technological leaps from US adversaries. Basically, the ET hypothesis and US involvement with the phenomenon going back decades is being put on the table in a serious manner. The next step after more public pressure and interest will be a potential deeper disclosure and the government justifying its need for secrecy regarding UFOS and ET’s with national security claims in order to win back trust and faith in government and the military. Credible military witnesses, pilots, civil servants, researchers and finally whistleblowers deserve the public’s praise for these new developments.
The argument is why is the US military with a 700 billion dollar annual budget stating that they are not sure what these real objects are despite the amount of data they have collected on them. Either they are lying or they are incompetent, in either instance it’s a massive story.
The latest episode of the Megyn Kelly Show interviews Lue Elizondo, who headed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program.[0]
According to the article, the report will say:
"...the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs."
So what are they? I see skeptics saying these are radar errors etc., but the report apparently doesn't conclude that. I'd love to see a technical analysis of what's been recorded.
It's not like this is some fringe subject based on bullshit. There is concrete proof of something and it's a current topic of wide interest.
Personally I like reading what others here think about this. None of us "know" what's behind this but it's not a leap for me to think I can learn from what others here offer on it, or that someone here gets it right.
When I evaluate the places where I might find insight into this HN would come at the top of the list if the subject were allowed to run its course organically.
Kicking it to the 3rd page too fast may have prevented that.
There is concrete proof that trained fighter pilots saw and tracked something, and their ship's radar did too, and our gov says they don't know what it is.
Readit News
Specifically: US military/intelligence/congress has historically treated UFO activity as highly classified. That’s now changed. Why is that? I don’t know. One candidate explanation:
1. Historically, some amount of “UFO” activity was actually classified, known US military/Intelligence programmes. Making the information public would compromise those programmes. So, in reality, the sightings related to identifiable flying objects. Just that they were identifiable by a small number of in-the-know people.
2. Things have changed. Some other actors - let’s guess Chinese/Russian - have stepped up their own secret programmes. Those items are now legitimately “unknown” to US authorities. If you’re from the US, that’s bad. Your putative enemies have something you lack knowledge of.
3. How to respond? In a world where the sightings are your own secrets then a strategy of silence makes sense. In a world where they’re not, the game is different. In this case, you want publicity: to cast them as unknown, (a) because it creates interest (/fear) and (b) tacitly lets your enemies know that you know they’re up to something.
That might be way off base. But the about-face in strategy is at least as interesting as the sightings themselves. I haven’t seen that covered elsewhere. Interested if anyone else has ideas/links.
Those sailors and airmen are intelligence assets.
Sam Harris, who I consider trustworthy, was given a heads up about what's to come:
"I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position of having to acknowledge that all the experts are on the same page, and there’s just this blanket declaration that we’re in the presence of alien technology, and we don’t know what to make of it. So prepare your brain for that and figure out what you’re going to do."
https://samharris.org/podcasts/252-alone-universe/
That, and it making no sense for us to only see evidence for them on earth but not when looking at space, and that there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.) the mundane explanations are many times more likely from where I sit.
1. They are actually from Earth, hiding somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. Probably Von Neumann probes which arrived millions of years ago, and not actually living things. They check our status periodically and send information to their origin system.
2. We are living in a simulation, and they are spectating us in a god mode with a visible side-effect.
The problem with this argument is that we wouldn't know in the first place if they were also using these more covert means. At some level, we have to assume that if aliens exist and are making themselves visible to us, they're basically doing it for the lulz.
there's very few objectives they can be achieving with big ships flying around here for decades (observation can be achieved with tiny machines, communication can be more direct etc.)
They may be doing more than just observing.
It is surprisingly convincing evidence of a peer state adversary with a huge tech advantage or... something else. I was moved from "no f'ing way do ufos exist", to "wtf.. it actually seems plausible" when reading up on it.
Most of these navy reports involve eye witness accounts of trained and credible pilots.
[1]https://youtu.be/sZoH5jr4P9I
[2]https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~scidemos/LightOptics/InfraRed...
https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4265
IOW, he isn't one of stereotypical, "frothing at the mouth", "true believer", "THEY ARE HERE" ufo cult types that might be fairly easy to dismiss for simple lack of credibility. He could still have been mistaken, or misjudged something, but he at least establishes a certain minimum level of credibility, to my way of thinking.
I am prone to think that this again some kind of gov mass psychology Rorschach experiment, where they say if we show you this image and if we say it is flying bunny how many times do we need to show and repeat the same until you start believing it is a flying bunny ...
By the way I am not saying other sentient being do not exist in the universe, I am just saying that with that technology you would not give a fork about what humans want/need/wish ... therefore it is more likely it is some kind of political hocus/pocus
There are four lights!
I personally didn't find any of the UFO stuff believable until the US Navy/Pentagon stuff came out which is very credible.
At this point it is almost undeniable that there is something strange going on in the skies. Whether it is aliens or not remains an open question.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3136078/chin...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29755919
[3] https://www.livescience.com/uk-ufo-reports-soon-released.htm...
Yes, I see the irony in saying this.
According to the article, the report will say:
"...the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs."
So what are they? I see skeptics saying these are radar errors etc., but the report apparently doesn't conclude that. I'd love to see a technical analysis of what's been recorded.
0: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truth-about-ufos-uaps-...
It's not like this is some fringe subject based on bullshit. There is concrete proof of something and it's a current topic of wide interest.
Personally I like reading what others here think about this. None of us "know" what's behind this but it's not a leap for me to think I can learn from what others here offer on it, or that someone here gets it right.
When I evaluate the places where I might find insight into this HN would come at the top of the list if the subject were allowed to run its course organically.
Kicking it to the 3rd page too fast may have prevented that.
unless you can complete that sentence with something more concrete than “something”, there isn’t concrete proof of anything.