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> Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as Mar

> Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.” > Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-...

dogma1138 6y ago
The weirdest part to me isn’t the concept of an advanced alien civilization visiting earth but rather the notion that they crash so god damn often which kinda undermines the whole “advanced” part or means that visitations are so ubiquitous that the law of large numbers comes into play that would make crashes actually likely. Our own aircrafts crash quite rarely, and space craft accidents especially for manned flight are even rarer and arguably we are still newbies that have no idea what we are doing compared to a space faring civilization capable of interplanetary travel not to mention interstellar travel. If these crafts are so damn common then they would also be commonly tracked, stealth in space is hard, stealth during re-entry is near impossible. We currently track objects as small as 5cm and under in orbit regularly with systems like the SSN and the US isn’t the only one with tracking systems capable of tracking 1-5cm objects, orbital tracking is actually easier than tracking objects at lower altitudes due to the horizon.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  As a counterpoint haven’t a lot of our mars probes crashed?
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    Some, but we aren't sending probes to other solar systems.
    - mrfusion 6y ago
      This says half of all missions to Mars have failed. https://astronomy.com/news/2018/11/a-brief-history-of-failed-mars-missions https://astronomy.com/news/2018/11/a-brief-history-of-failed... I guess my point is off world missions could have a lot of unknowns and a lot of failures. But no one really knows.
- erik_landerholm 6y ago
  define often? You would have to know how often they visit to say they crash often. What if they have been operating here for thousands of years and we have a crash or two. Would that be often? Stealth? How do you know anything we have can track them very well? What if they have to let us track them, or there are certain operating modes where they are susceptible to radar and other times they are totally invisible. Making any conclusions about why they would not be tracked or wouldn't is pure speculation and worse based on our own capabilities. 'Stealth' from radar might be incredibly easy for them.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    Stealth doesn't work like you think it does, stealth doesn't makes aircraft invisible to radar, it makes them practically invisible to radar targeting systems as in it lowers and changes their RCS enough to not be considered an aircraft by the system that tracks them. And while their stealth tech might be much more advanced than ours, and provide true EMF absorption (as long as they have some sort of internal heatsinks because you can't break laws of thermodynamics) that tech wouldn't do you any good when you enter the earth's atmosphere you'll be lit like a christmas tree.
    - jefb 6y ago
      A craft able to manipulate gravitational fields as a means of propulsion would likely not need to airbrake through the atmosphere to slow down.
- anon_cow1111 6y ago
  >The weirdest part to me isn’t the concept of an advanced alien civilization visiting earth but rather the notion that they crash so god damn often which kinda undermines the whole “advanced” part or means that visitations are so ubiquitous that the law of large numbers comes into play that would make crashes actually likely. ...Maybe the uncomfortable truth is, after interstellar travel is achieved we'll just default back to fixing bugs in production. But more on topic, I haven't heard anything that might be interpreted as a "manned" craft crashing since rosswell, so maybe a more fair comparison would be "how often do we crash random drones?" Also, being easy to track assumes that whoever built it hasn't figured out any more advanced stealth tech given a 1000+ year head start on us. I think some of the pilot accounts reported active radar jamming when the objects were pinged, so I'll ignore arguments related to tracking until some new data surfaces.
- LyndsySimon 6y ago
  > rather the notion that they crash so god damn often Perhaps they aren't crashing on accident, but are shot down? I'm not saying I believe that, of course, but "crash" != "accident".
- dylan604 6y ago
  From a Martian's perspective, we crash quite regularly.
- doodlebugging 6y ago
  How about we consider that the earth has been visited by beings from a more advanced planet for a long time and that these visits are likely to continue as we are a subject of one of their scientific studies? Long ago on a planet far away advances were made that allowed one group to escape their own planet and initiate exploration of worlds far displaced from their own. These advances happened simply because the inhabitants of that far-away world looked up from their lives and saw things they didn't understand and this absence of understanding spurred them to seek out answers. Maybe someone there looked into their own night sky and wondered about what they would find if they could only visit those distant lights in the sky. Perhaps like us, they created stories about how all the stars in their sky came to exist, they grouped them into recognizable shapes and gave them names and created stories about them so that the long nights could be passed comforting their children and regaling visitors with the recitation of ancient tales of conquest and heroes now enshrined in their own heavens. Once the announcement about their successful effort to escape their own planet was made to the citizens of that planet there was much pride in the accomplishment and, in some societies, jealousy reared its ugly head. Fearing that their own local citizens could be dominated by those of their more scientifically successful neighbors, a space race began much like our own with multiple societies striving to outdo the accomplishments of the other and thus claim superiority. Over time, their probes pushed farther past boundaries than our own scientific advances have allowed and they eventually discovered our planet and all of our ancestors bumping around down here trying to make sense of our own place in the world. The challenges faced by these alien visitors are much the same as our own when we send probes to Mars or other planets. Like our own efforts, sometimes we are wildly successful and other times our probes miss the mark or crash or never make it out of our atmosphere. They face similar challenges to our own. Do we know enough about the target to be able to insert ourselves into orbit so that we can use our stripped-down instrumentation to glean anything useful about the world we are visiting that may allow us to eventually send and land a probe on the surface, if it has a detectable hard surface? Imagine that the first successful insertion of a probe into orbit around an alien (to them) world would be greeted with a lot of enthusiasm back home. Competition between societies heats up over time to see who can successfully land a probe on the surface and transmit environmental data back to their home planet? Which society will be the first to send live citizens to visit the distant planet and then later, to return them successfully to their homes? Assume if you will that all this occurred in the context of a space race on their own home planet and that some groups were less successful than others - due to funding, lack of data, etc. That means that some of their own visits would not end well for the probe or for the pilots or other personnel. Assume that the personnel involved in those efforts were trapped here on this planet with no way to return. Do you not think that they would attempt to survive and, as a survival mechanism, would eventually come to ally themselves with inhabitants of the planet they became stranded on so that their own knowledge of processes and techniques and materials, etc could be conveyed in a way that both groups benefit from the knowledge transfer? Perhaps on that far-away planet the competing groups are locked in a competition that has resulted in them discovering our own world and that each time one of their vessels returns to their home planet with a new collection of plant, rock, and liquid samples to add to their gallery of cattle tongues, hearts, and anuses they are greeted as heroes and feted with parades and that these celebrations only drive further exploration as the thirst for knowledge in their societies is strong. Maybe they mourn as we do when a probe with a crew of their heroes, some of their most accomplished citizens, doesn't return as planned. Maybe they compose songs to help their own descendants remember the glorious heroes who dared to explore distant worlds. Perhaps they send additional missions to attempt to ascertain why their crews never returned and whether they are still alive and only need rescue. Maybe over a long enough period of time they see the inhabitants of that distant world, a science project for them, become more and more technologically advanced with each visit and they begin to worry that situations they find could spiral out of control and bad things could happen to their study subjects. And then, out of a sense of moral obligation, if such a thing could be postulated for a group far away from our own planet, they attempt to warn those less advanced people that there are lines that should not be crossed, that some behaviors can be very detrimental to survival, that some things that seem to be monumental achievements are in fact a collection of Pandora's boxes that should be left on the shelf, unopened forever. What about it? All speculation. Who really knows?
- DNied 6y ago
  > Our own aircrafts crash quite rarely Except maybe when they are experimental...

dogma1138 6y ago

The weirdest part to me isn’t the concept of an advanced alien civilization visiting earth but rather the notion that they crash so god damn often which kinda undermines the whole “advanced” part or means that visitations are so ubiquitous that the law of large numbers comes into play that would make crashes actually likely. Our own aircrafts crash quite rarely, and space craft accidents especially for manned flight are even rarer and arguably we are still newbies that have no idea what we are doing compared to a space faring civilization capable of interplanetary travel not to mention interstellar travel. If these crafts are so damn common then they would also be commonly tracked, stealth in space is hard, stealth during re-entry is near impossible. We currently track objects as small as 5cm and under in orbit regularly with systems like the SSN and the US isn’t the only one with tracking systems capable of tracking 1-5cm objects, orbital tracking is actually easier than tracking objects at lower altitudes due to the horizon.

mrfusion 6y ago
As a counterpoint haven’t a lot of our mars probes crashed?
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Some, but we aren't sending probes to other solar systems.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    This says half of all missions to Mars have failed. https://astronomy.com/news/2018/11/a-brief-history-of-failed-mars-missions https://astronomy.com/news/2018/11/a-brief-history-of-failed... I guess my point is off world missions could have a lot of unknowns and a lot of failures. But no one really knows.
erik_landerholm 6y ago
define often? You would have to know how often they visit to say they crash often. What if they have been operating here for thousands of years and we have a crash or two. Would that be often? Stealth? How do you know anything we have can track them very well? What if they have to let us track them, or there are certain operating modes where they are susceptible to radar and other times they are totally invisible. Making any conclusions about why they would not be tracked or wouldn't is pure speculation and worse based on our own capabilities. 'Stealth' from radar might be incredibly easy for them.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Stealth doesn't work like you think it does, stealth doesn't makes aircraft invisible to radar, it makes them practically invisible to radar targeting systems as in it lowers and changes their RCS enough to not be considered an aircraft by the system that tracks them. And while their stealth tech might be much more advanced than ours, and provide true EMF absorption (as long as they have some sort of internal heatsinks because you can't break laws of thermodynamics) that tech wouldn't do you any good when you enter the earth's atmosphere you'll be lit like a christmas tree.
  - jefb 6y ago
    A craft able to manipulate gravitational fields as a means of propulsion would likely not need to airbrake through the atmosphere to slow down.
anon_cow1111 6y ago
>The weirdest part to me isn’t the concept of an advanced alien civilization visiting earth but rather the notion that they crash so god damn often which kinda undermines the whole “advanced” part or means that visitations are so ubiquitous that the law of large numbers comes into play that would make crashes actually likely. ...Maybe the uncomfortable truth is, after interstellar travel is achieved we'll just default back to fixing bugs in production. But more on topic, I haven't heard anything that might be interpreted as a "manned" craft crashing since rosswell, so maybe a more fair comparison would be "how often do we crash random drones?" Also, being easy to track assumes that whoever built it hasn't figured out any more advanced stealth tech given a 1000+ year head start on us. I think some of the pilot accounts reported active radar jamming when the objects were pinged, so I'll ignore arguments related to tracking until some new data surfaces.
LyndsySimon 6y ago
> rather the notion that they crash so god damn often Perhaps they aren't crashing on accident, but are shot down? I'm not saying I believe that, of course, but "crash" != "accident".
dylan604 6y ago
From a Martian's perspective, we crash quite regularly.
doodlebugging 6y ago
How about we consider that the earth has been visited by beings from a more advanced planet for a long time and that these visits are likely to continue as we are a subject of one of their scientific studies? Long ago on a planet far away advances were made that allowed one group to escape their own planet and initiate exploration of worlds far displaced from their own. These advances happened simply because the inhabitants of that far-away world looked up from their lives and saw things they didn't understand and this absence of understanding spurred them to seek out answers. Maybe someone there looked into their own night sky and wondered about what they would find if they could only visit those distant lights in the sky. Perhaps like us, they created stories about how all the stars in their sky came to exist, they grouped them into recognizable shapes and gave them names and created stories about them so that the long nights could be passed comforting their children and regaling visitors with the recitation of ancient tales of conquest and heroes now enshrined in their own heavens. Once the announcement about their successful effort to escape their own planet was made to the citizens of that planet there was much pride in the accomplishment and, in some societies, jealousy reared its ugly head. Fearing that their own local citizens could be dominated by those of their more scientifically successful neighbors, a space race began much like our own with multiple societies striving to outdo the accomplishments of the other and thus claim superiority. Over time, their probes pushed farther past boundaries than our own scientific advances have allowed and they eventually discovered our planet and all of our ancestors bumping around down here trying to make sense of our own place in the world. The challenges faced by these alien visitors are much the same as our own when we send probes to Mars or other planets. Like our own efforts, sometimes we are wildly successful and other times our probes miss the mark or crash or never make it out of our atmosphere. They face similar challenges to our own. Do we know enough about the target to be able to insert ourselves into orbit so that we can use our stripped-down instrumentation to glean anything useful about the world we are visiting that may allow us to eventually send and land a probe on the surface, if it has a detectable hard surface? Imagine that the first successful insertion of a probe into orbit around an alien (to them) world would be greeted with a lot of enthusiasm back home. Competition between societies heats up over time to see who can successfully land a probe on the surface and transmit environmental data back to their home planet? Which society will be the first to send live citizens to visit the distant planet and then later, to return them successfully to their homes? Assume if you will that all this occurred in the context of a space race on their own home planet and that some groups were less successful than others - due to funding, lack of data, etc. That means that some of their own visits would not end well for the probe or for the pilots or other personnel. Assume that the personnel involved in those efforts were trapped here on this planet with no way to return. Do you not think that they would attempt to survive and, as a survival mechanism, would eventually come to ally themselves with inhabitants of the planet they became stranded on so that their own knowledge of processes and techniques and materials, etc could be conveyed in a way that both groups benefit from the knowledge transfer? Perhaps on that far-away planet the competing groups are locked in a competition that has resulted in them discovering our own world and that each time one of their vessels returns to their home planet with a new collection of plant, rock, and liquid samples to add to their gallery of cattle tongues, hearts, and anuses they are greeted as heroes and feted with parades and that these celebrations only drive further exploration as the thirst for knowledge in their societies is strong. Maybe they mourn as we do when a probe with a crew of their heroes, some of their most accomplished citizens, doesn't return as planned. Maybe they compose songs to help their own descendants remember the glorious heroes who dared to explore distant worlds. Perhaps they send additional missions to attempt to ascertain why their crews never returned and whether they are still alive and only need rescue. Maybe over a long enough period of time they see the inhabitants of that distant world, a science project for them, become more and more technologically advanced with each visit and they begin to worry that situations they find could spiral out of control and bad things could happen to their study subjects. And then, out of a sense of moral obligation, if such a thing could be postulated for a group far away from our own planet, they attempt to warn those less advanced people that there are lines that should not be crossed, that some behaviors can be very detrimental to survival, that some things that seem to be monumental achievements are in fact a collection of Pandora's boxes that should be left on the shelf, unopened forever. What about it? All speculation. Who really knows?
DNied 6y ago
> Our own aircrafts crash quite rarely Except maybe when they are experimental...