3 ms·

Fascinating. More examples of large organizations encountering unknown and non-reproducible phenomena. Like everybody else, I have no idea what this is. I have

Fascinating. More examples of large organizations encountering unknown and non-reproducible phenomena. Like everybody else, I have no idea what this is. I have, however, consumed scads of stories about military organizations encountering things they can't deal with. Some of these are quite prosaic for their situation, such as UN forces figuring out that the Chinese were entering the Koran War. I _think_ I have enough of these examples to reach a tentative conclusion: for many organizations, the information that they've had incursions and are stumped is extremely important. If there's a known weakness, other competing powers might take advantage of it. What actually happened is besides the point. The mission is to control information, access to information, and the larger narrative. You layer on half-remembered (and perhaps exaggerated) stories from fifty years ago and you get articles like this. My best guess is that this is very similar to what happened to the US Navy recently, only in this case the military has managed to confuse the issue enough that investigators will be debating details for decades to come. Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof. If we can't observe or manipulate something, there's no way for us to scientifically reason about it. That's tough for a lot of folks to deal with.

bfieidhbrjr 6y ago
It happens to the Navy all the time, what happened recently was some public acknowledgement. Also there's a non-zero chance that all the Lazar stories are true, and there is a body of knowledge, just kept from the wider military.
andrewflnr 6y ago
> Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof. Yep, this comes up with quantum superdeterminism, too.
gus_massa 6y ago
> Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof. If we can't observe or manipulate something, there's no way for us to scientifically reason about it. That's tough for a lot of folks to deal with. The standards of scientific proof are rules to avoid error that we made in the past. For example with 'Oumuamua, one guy think it is a solar sail, another guy thinks it is made of Hydrogen ice and another one thinks that it is made of very low density dust. We know that two of them are wrong, at least. With a low enough standard, someone can claim that one of the answers is the correct. For another examples think about low temperature fission or high temperature superconductivity. Well we have strong proof of the later now.
Spooky23 6y ago
I know from my own experience that even with normal news stories, most miss the point at some level because the journalists have incomplete information or cherry pick to reach a desired conclusion. In these scenarios with the military, you’re guaranteed that anyone who knows what is going on isn’t talking. Especially on a SAC base. And it’s highly probable that anyone who is talking has no clue or is delivering BS information. Just after this time period, there were a number of UFO sightings in the northeast, especially around Plattsburgh AFB, Rome AFB and Fort Drum. The UFO aspect was widely reported, and later the “sightings” were attributed to flight testing of terrain comparison navigation systems for cruise missiles. I’d look more at that type of explanation than anything else.

bfieidhbrjr 6y ago

It happens to the Navy all the time, what happened recently was some public acknowledgement. Also there's a non-zero chance that all the Lazar stories are true, and there is a body of knowledge, just kept from the wider military.

andrewflnr 6y ago

> Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof. Yep, this comes up with quantum superdeterminism, too.

gus_massa 6y ago

> Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof. If we can't observe or manipulate something, there's no way for us to scientifically reason about it. That's tough for a lot of folks to deal with. The standards of scientific proof are rules to avoid error that we made in the past. For example with 'Oumuamua, one guy think it is a solar sail, another guy thinks it is made of Hydrogen ice and another one thinks that it is made of very low density dust. We know that two of them are wrong, at least. With a low enough standard, someone can claim that one of the answers is the correct. For another examples think about low temperature fission or high temperature superconductivity. Well we have strong proof of the later now.

Spooky23 6y ago

I know from my own experience that even with normal news stories, most miss the point at some level because the journalists have incomplete information or cherry pick to reach a desired conclusion. In these scenarios with the military, you’re guaranteed that anyone who knows what is going on isn’t talking. Especially on a SAC base. And it’s highly probable that anyone who is talking has no clue or is delivering BS information. Just after this time period, there were a number of UFO sightings in the northeast, especially around Plattsburgh AFB, Rome AFB and Fort Drum. The UFO aspect was widely reported, and later the “sightings” were attributed to flight testing of terrain comparison navigation systems for cruise missiles. I’d look more at that type of explanation than anything else.