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The U.S. military is growing concerned about UFOs. Should we worry?

61 points by superb-owl 4y ago

skywal_l 4y ago
- chaxor 4y ago
  Didn't the major story hit while he was president? No one paid as much attention to the story because he was doing too many idiotic things simultaneously.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mmastrac 4y ago
  This is how I personally assure myself there's been no alien visitors. He would have sold the tapes online or to Fox and made a bundle for himself.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  That's not how the deep state works. :P
- wincy 4y ago
  - krapp 4y ago
    I don't think they bothered with a skinsuit. I think they just spray-painted a reptoid orange and gave it a hairpiece.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      Apparently Trump is one of the only people you can blatanly trash on HN and not trigger a warning about breaking HN rules heh
      - krapp 4y ago
        Oh don't worry, I get downvoted and flagged all the time for insulting him.
      - acheron 4y ago
        That user is one of the Very Important Posters who is allowed to break the rules with impunity. Occasionally dang will chide him but he obviously will never be banned so there’s no reason for him to stop.
        krapp 4y ago
        >That user is one of the Very Important Posters who is allowed to break the rules with impunity. Are you kidding? Dang and I have gotten into arguments on several occasions because I criticize this community too much, I've lost vouching permissions because I vouch for "controversial" comments, I'm not entirely certain my votes or flags work anymore, and my account has been rate limited for months. The kind of poster you're talking about has a CV and lots of interesting stories to pull out of their pocket to balance out their sins, and the mods will beg and plead with them time and time again to follow the rules because they don't want to lose the quality of their content, regardless of how egregious their conduct is - but I'm definitely not that person.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  implying they'd let him anywhere near those beans
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
No. They're here to help us save our planet. But honestly, UFOs are a cover for the US military trying out Black projects on their own forces. If they can't figure out what it is, the Black project is working.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  > If they can't figure out what it is, the Black project is working. I was thinking the opposite. If the military cannot identify something (truly can't, not just saying they can't) then there is a serious gap in our sensor capabilities. If any entity needs to be able to identify objects, it's the military.
  - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    That's a good point too. I guess it depends on the objectives of the Black ops project.
  - jmvoodoo 4y ago
    That sounds like two victories for the black project. 1) our last project was successful in evading existing sensor technologies, 2) our next project will address the gaps in our sensor capabilities. Funding secured.
  - hindsightbias 4y ago
    Believers seem to be completely uncurious about where these sitings occurred. Which coincidentally happen to be the two most highly intrumented naval test ranges in the world. Ranges exist for two reasons: safely testing and monitoring shit. There’s a reason Capt. Obvious was a sailor.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  The idea of the US government having that level of technology and keeping it totally hidden doesn’t jive with all the missteps and human level errors we have seen so many politicians and military officials make. Looking at something like MK Ultra it is just a bunch of dudes doing shit by intuition and making massively dumb misstep’s. Unless things like that are just false flags to distract us from some hyper advanced and nefarious shadow govt we don’t know about.
dataflow 4y ago
> To summarize the above, if we were to take each of them at their word: > - They are extremely technologically advanced No, that's not what the quotes say. None of the quotes I see says anything about the "technology" of UAPs. Only one of the quotes even uses the word "technology" and even that one is merely saying that "this isn't technology from foreign adversaries". That quote even leaves open the possibility that we're dealing with (say) natural weather phenomena, instrument problems, etc., let alone anything artificial.
kevinventullo 4y ago
My personal theory is it’s just another boogeyman that can be used to justify funding.
- mberning 4y ago
  Certainly one of the possibilities. It could also be disinfo to send enemy states down a path to nowhere. The UAP phenomenon is not going to boil down to a single thing. There will be a spectrum of explanations, most of which are banal.
COGlory 4y ago
Surely this is an obvious misdirection, right?
- winrid 4y ago
  Yep. The military will do all kinds of misdirections and even research just to confuse or make enemies spend money on useless research.
- zardo 4y ago
  This reminds me of someone arguing on this topic, "What do you think the Pentagon would just lie?" If they think that lie will give the US military some sort of advantage against an adversary, of course they lie.
- PKop 4y ago
  Yes because they refuse to release the videos they have. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-videos-classified-releasing-them-will-harm-national-security https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-vid...
LorenPechtel 4y ago
Of course the military is concerned. UFO is commonly interpreted as alien spaceship but it really only means unidentified--and that could be a recon drone from China or the like.
- wavefunction 4y ago
  This is why I tell my friend who is passionate about extraterrestrials visiting Earth that I believe in UFOs but not flying saucers or alien spacecraft. Hard to argue with true-believers though.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  It might even be a CIA/etc drone, using the unwitting USN for testing.
  - Victerius 4y ago
    The CIA is the spy bureau, not an engineering firm. Why would James Bond prove more competent at building drones than Q?
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      The CIA has operated spy aircraft before, built by aircraft manufacturers obviously. The U-2 and A-12 (immediate predecessor to the SR-71) have both been operated by the CIA.
      - garren 4y ago
        Not to mention the Glomar Explorer [0],[1]. The CIA might not be in the engineering business itself, but definitely has the money and the resources to fund those who are. [0] https://interestingengineering.com/culture/glomar-explorer-the-cia-and-howard-hughes-attempt-to-raise-a-sunken-russian-submarine https://interestingengineering.com/culture/glomar-explorer-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
    - 4y ago
kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
> I also like citing politicians because, in discussing UAP, they have little to gain (they’re already famous, UAP are not a wedge issue) and much to lose (looking foolish). And they have access to far more information than the general public, especially former presidents and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And at that point, I realized I had forgotten my waders, so I had to stop reading.
imafish 4y ago
If you have an interest in increasing military spending, a little UFO fear mongering probably won’t hurt.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
At the risk of being pedantic, UFO does not imply extraterrestrial origin.
- dataflow 4y ago
  And now UAP doesn't imply the existence of an object, or the ability to fly!
tptacek 4y ago
Previously, on The X-Files, Reality Edition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702319
brobdingnagians 4y ago
Well, while we are on the topic, it could be a PR move leading to a future geopolitical move [1] to justify things like banning bitcoin, encryption, and toilets that flush correctly. It would be impressive technology to do such a thing, but so are the current surveillance and military programs that we know about. [1] https://josephsansone.substack.com/p/the-fake-alien-invasion-of-2024 https://josephsansone.substack.com/p/the-fake-alien-invasion...
- mmastrac 4y ago
  This should be an entertaining one to steel-man: - You'd need a way to send an "alien ship" into space, which would most likely involve Elon Musk and SpaceX - This would be an absolutely massive operation. You'd need to keep it quiet. So either you're doing the vast amount of work with a super-AI that hasn't been announced yet (OpenAI, perhaps), or you'd have to figure out how to keep thousands of people from leaking the details. This would require a massive army of people, completely loyal to the cause. - As there will be a bunch of people who don't believe the story, you'd need the willpower and inhumanity to kill them. But I imagine that someone invested in this story believes there is an army out there willing to do this for "the cause". - The bitcoin thing is a bit out-of-left-field, but I guess that they want to ban Bitcoin because it's decentralized, and not Ethereum because it is "controlled" by Vitalik (who is in on this conspiracy?). They'd be doing this under the guise of energy savings, but instead just taking control of a traceable cryptocurrency. This explains why so many conspiracy-minded folk are anti-mask and anti-vax. They likely see it as "conditioning" to do whatever is necessary for the world to survive (gradually escalating compliance?). So perhaps we are part of this army that is being raised to improve the world. It's amusing to think about what would be required for this conspiracy, but alas I have not been sent my invitation to join the secret WEF army yet. Or is that what someone who _was_ invited would say?
  - majewsky 4y ago
    > but alas I have not been sent my invitation to join the secret WEF army yet I'm getting e-mails every week that invite me to join the Illuminati. Maybe I should not be sending them to spam? :)
krapp 4y ago
As I see it, there are basically two possibilities: - There is a society of technologically advanced individuals on earth, whether human, alien, or something else. - Each individual UAP encounter has some mundane explanation, and a large chunk of humanity has projected fantastical ideas onto them, to the point of full-blown hallucinations. The second is obviously either mostly or entirely true, given the viral nature of the subject matter, the internet and UFO culture. It's unavoidable, really. Occam's Razor suggests that the remainder, if it exists, can be explained by cutting edge, top secret but still entirely human technology.
sennight 4y ago
Counter-intelligence operation. It blows my mind that nobody else seems to have noticed the fact that as soon as executive orders were signed, banning military disinformation campaigns aimed at citizens, all the aliens disappeared! And then after Obama got rid of the last of those protections - on his way out the door, supposedly in the interest of combatting Russian disinformation (seriously, that was the excuse), the aliens suddenly reappeared! I understand the utilitarian logic of it, but it still strikes me as pretty disgusting... there are people who actually believe this crap, and I don't think they're mentally better off for it.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Interesting theory but there's no way various government agencies stopped and started lying because of some signed orders. Perhaps very public facing transparent agencies like the department of transportation or the like, but the CIA and pentagon never stopped lying.
  - sennight 4y ago
    > ...pentagon never stopped lying. Yes it did, I've actually seen a CI op get blown after being picked up by domestic media - months of hard work abandoned the instant Popular Science decided to write, at length, about some gee-wiz military tech - without actually doing any kind of investigation. Say what you will about the CIA and the rest of the USG, but the DoD actually makes a pretty serious effort to follow not only the letter of the law - but the spirit of the law.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      I don't even know how to respond to this. The idea that the intelligence and military apparatuses follow the law to the T is absurd to me. Perhaps some facts to the contrary: * The CIA and NSA conduct mass surveillance of the American public, contrary to the law [1] [2] * The CIA maintains illegal black sites with systematic torture [3] * The CIA made a request to execute a false flag against american citizens to start war with Cuba [4] * The CIA executes illegal assassinations and other covert operations [5] * The Pentagon has presided over many illegal wars and war crimes [6] [7] [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-cia-acting-outside-law-spy-americans https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM [3] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/guantanamo-transcripts-give-firsthand-accounts-cia-torture https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/guantanamo-transcripts-g... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods [5] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/21/do-we-need-the-cia/end-cia-covert-operations https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/21/do-we-need-... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes [7] https://www.resistance.org/illegal-us-wars https://www.resistance.org/illegal-us-wars
roberto2016 4y ago
More questions than answers.
JackFr 4y ago
My theory is that Russia/China/other-US-military-adversaries certainly cannot rewrite the laws of physics. But they might have gotten awful good at spoofing advanced sensors.
- rolph 4y ago
  yes, one could work miracles with a couple of ultra high power IR lasers producing constructive interference with each other, yielding an optical phenomenon, perhaps even some thermal and RF signature.
  - jbay808 4y ago
    If you have a sufficiently powerful laser, you can create a spark that floats in mid-air. The air at the focal point gets ionized by the strong electric fields and looks quite dazzling (and dangerous). That spark, in turn, can be moved around freely and emits all sorts of RF noise.
    - rolph 4y ago
      yes you have it right on, now if we can infer the effective range of such a technique it may be apparent that the real target is about twenty miles removed from the visual manifestation of the phenomenon.
    - dogma1138 4y ago
      Any laser that’s powerful enough to do that would leave an IR trail back to the source which would be visible with FLIR and most likely even with the naked eye due to the atmospheric effects of heating up the air.
      - jbay808 4y ago
        Not necessarily. If it's a femtosecond pulse laser, the instantaneous power is extremely high and creates a sufficiently intense field, but the time-average power is low enough that it wouldn't create much heat away from the focus. Source: worked in a femtosecond laser lab
perlgeek 4y ago
We should worry. Not about alien spacecraft, but about the inability of the public to deal with blurry photos. There will always be some blurry / ambiguous photos. The fact that no sharp pictures show alien spacecraft means that blurriness is the phenomenon. As long as there are slow news days, media outlets make a big deal out of blotches and blobs, and we as a public continue to fall for that.
- colordrops 4y ago
  It's not just blurry photos. There are also military pilot sightings corroborated with radar and FLIR, and the vehicles move in ways not possible with currently available human technology and science.
  - space_fountain 4y ago
    But only at extreme range and sort of hard to make out. Like idk we live in a big world and fly a lot of military aircraft. It would be a bit surprising if we didn’t sometimes encounter edge cases in all of that that can’t quite be explained. And remember these things are just barely unexplainable, the vast majority of these types of sightings are explained we’re just left with literally a handful that are too tough
  - simonh 4y ago
    A whole bunch of those have since been positively confirmed as operator error or calibration issues. Also these cases are often from new kit the operators were unfamiliar with, I don’t see how that can be a coincidence. The fact is we should expect a certain amount of false positives. So the real question is do we see more of these cases than we’d probably get anyway.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Yeah it is still "blurry photos" in principle. But people see things like "FLIR" and they assume that the technology is perfect.
  - pshc 4y ago
kennend3 4y ago
Call me a cynic, but this reads like the US military-industrial complex is looking for a new "enemy" that needs vast amounts of money to "contain"? While the "war on terror" seems to be dying down, what about the good old standby enemies (Russia and China)? They just sold 1.2 billion dollars in military hardware to Taiwan, they can milk this for another 5 years at a minimum. I cant wait for the news stories in the future. The UFO's have a "interstellar space ship gap" or some other real or imagined "gap" we need to close.
- mike_hock 4y ago
  They're delivering weapons to Ukraine as we speak. Some other lucrative proxy wars might be coming up soon.
  - erdos4d 4y ago
    I'm sure they have something cooking, there's too much money at stake to just close up shop.
- krapp 4y ago
  That would make sense if the US military-industrial complex had any problems whatsoever with funding. As far as I can see, the military and black-budget initiatives in the US already have an infinite, no questions asked credit line from the taxpayers and Congress. They don't need to resort to something this ridiculous, and even if they did, as you mentioned Russia and China are already effective boogeymen.
  - LexGray 4y ago
    Not like greed has a limit. When a measurable percentage of congress is invested in conspiracy theories seems like a good time to get a bigger cut of an even darker black box.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      There are some real nuts in Congress, but the ones they would really need to convince are the twenty or so on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Most of the real wackjobs are in the House of Reps, and I have a feeling the members of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense are kept on a shorter leash than most of the rest. At least insofar as being well informed about defense matters is concerned.
thrill 4y ago
No.
wikitopian 4y ago
I'm surprised that "combating UFOs" hasn't joined quantum computing, the metaverse, machine learning, self-driving cars, and crypto among the bullshit investment bubbles. I bet there's a market in consulting with corporate executives to help them future-proof their enterprises against alien invasions.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Literally none of the things you’ve mentioned are bullshit investment bubbles.
  - wikitopian 4y ago
    Not even NFTs, where people were aggressively bidding against one another for a database entry confirming their ownership of a cartoon monkey on drugs? Not even quantum computing, where wall street is investing billions in quirky (quorky?) transistors that might maybe potentially crack a limited subset of cryptographic algorithms within the next several decades? Not even with self-driving cars, which are taking on the ultimate life-or-death task before machine learning can even reliably outperform a minimum wage laborer at heavily constrained and scripted tech support tasks? You're all in on all that?
    - bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
      Self driving cars are just a little early. They won’t work until gradually they will, which is a threshold we’re arguably already crossing. So it doesn’t really belong on the list. And machine learning is massively successful and growing. Otherwise it’s a pretty good list of bullshit.
      - wikitopian 4y ago
        Self-driving cars are the least obvious scam on the list, for sure. The reason we appear so close is that well over 90% of driving is incredibly easy and can be performed without a sentient human being. This creates the impression that we're 90% there when we're nowhere near that close. We have decades of research to borrow from on this matter from drunk drivers, who are a perfect proxy for artificially intelligent machines attempting to drive automobiles without a sober human's fuzzy logic reasoning skills. Both Big Tech and drunk drivers are very emboldened by that 90% of driving that doesn't require thinking and that 99% of driving that's not a life-or-death test of fuzzy logic reasoning skills.
romanhn 4y ago
I wouldn't put too much stock in politicians' quotes. Based on some of the congressional hearings, it's clear these folks don't understand even basic smartphone operations, I suspect most modern technology is unidentified phenomena for them. And looking foolish has never stopped them either.
newaccount2021 4y ago
m3kw9 4y ago
Also, just because is unidentified doesn’t mean it’s from outside earth or intelligent life forms.
erdos4d 4y ago
This board is the most skeptic place I know of, so I have a question. How do the ones that accelerate at like 600 G's work? What's the power source and how is that energy being translated into propulsion? Also, why does the object not light up like meteor when it moves like this? I have doubts about the skeptic position when I hear these sorts of things.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  More than likely some sort of lens (IR/visual) optical effect.
  - erdos4d 4y ago
    Same reply as to the other answer, the guys in the Nimitz case saw the thing move with their eyes.
    - mmastrac 4y ago
      I don't trust eyewitness accounts as there's literally no chain of evidence. We have highdef cameras in every pocket now - let's see a real 4k video of one.
      - erdos4d 4y ago
        What chain of evidence is needed if the actual people involved say they saw something? Their testimony is not open to dispute, you either believe they saw it or you believe they are liars. How would that account be tampered with? Anyway, according to all involved, there is infrared and radar that corroborates the eyewitness accounts. Of course the Navy has that classified, but interestingly, there is no official denial to say otherwise. I think I will believe these people until the service shows me a real reason not to.
        JoeAltmaier 4y ago
        Of course it's because eyewitness reports of even ordinary events are highly variable. They saw something; that can be true even as it's also true it wasn't what they reported. Nobody is lying. In fact that 'false dilemma' is not a real argument at all. "You're either with us or against us!" "She criticised Capitalism; she must be a Communist!" "Marriage or career, a woman can't choose both!"
PKop 4y ago
It's all a grift unless they release the videos to the public. Why not assume it's all made up bs for funding? https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-videos-classified-releasing-them-will-harm-national-security https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-vid...
chadlavi 4y ago
No?
WalterBright 4y ago
> Should we worry? No.
kube-system 4y ago
The military is concerned but not for the reason everyone assumes. It’s simply the military’s job to detect, identify, and appropriately respond to anything that might by flying around them. If they can’t do that, they’re not doing their job as well as they should.
Geee 4y ago
AI-controlled extraterrestrial probes should be quite likely. There are many purposes for such spacecrafts, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft Actual grey people flying from another star system in a tin can; not very likely.
- garren 4y ago
  "should be quite likely" seems to make some rather large assumptions, doesn't it? There remains zero evidence for extraterrestrials at all (so far), let alone those that have evolved into space faring/exploring civilizations, to say nothing of those actually interested in visiting our little dirt ball (physically, robotically, or otherwise.) Boring as it is, it seems way more likely that people are mistaking some natural phenomenon for extraterrestrial visitation. If you haven't heard of Mick West, check him out. He does a pretty convincing job explaining away quite a bit of the UFO stuff that's been "leaked" out of the military or reported on breathlessly by the media these days. My favorite recently was his breakdown of the "triangle UFOs" that were "swarming" a Navy ship off the California coast.
  - Geee 4y ago
    Well, assuming that there is or has been intelligent life somewhere in this galaxy, then the most likely sighting would be some kind of probe, I think.
    - zikzak 4y ago
      A von Neumann probe, to be more specific: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
I'm into: looking for aliens through advanced telescopes Not into: looking for aliens through word of mouth and blurry photos
joshuaheard 4y ago
Should WE worry? No. Should the military worry? Yes. It's their job to worry. The government recently released a report on UAP. Here's what the report concluded about certain unexplained observations: - These are real objects (not some weather phenomena or camera effect) - They have been observed behaving in a way that exceeds our known physics (acceleration, no means of propulsion, multi-modal transport (going from air to water)) - They are not Russian or Chinese tech - They appear intelligently controlled - They come and go from our militarily controlled airspace at will - We don't know what they are. The only conclusion I can draw from this data is aliens.
- simonh 4y ago
  You could also conclude that whoever wrote that was in error. Several of the ‘inexplicable’ recordings they released have already been convincingly demonstrated to be ordinary phenomena, so it’s not looking good for the reliability of whoever wrote that report.
blooalien 4y ago
Should we worry? Well, are we about to find ourselves embroiled in an interstellar war with advanced space-faring beings? If "yes" then no, we shouldn't worry. We should just kiss our butts "goodbye" and prepare ourselves for the planet-wide "death ray" from orbit. If it's anything more "mundane" then whether we should worry or not will depend mostly on whether they're natural phenomena or of human origin.
Kukumber 4y ago
I am always right somehow :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714831
sys_64738 4y ago
Are these just weather balloons?
sdssdfsdf1 4y ago
pts_ 4y ago
The forming of a religion around it is something it has resembled to me often.

61 points by superb-owl 4y ago

chaxor 4y ago
Didn't the major story hit while he was president? No one paid as much attention to the story because he was doing too many idiotic things simultaneously.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mmastrac 4y ago
This is how I personally assure myself there's been no alien visitors. He would have sold the tapes online or to Fox and made a bundle for himself.
gonzo41 4y ago
That's not how the deep state works. :P
wincy 4y ago
- krapp 4y ago
  I don't think they bothered with a skinsuit. I think they just spray-painted a reptoid orange and gave it a hairpiece.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Apparently Trump is one of the only people you can blatanly trash on HN and not trigger a warning about breaking HN rules heh
    - krapp 4y ago
      Oh don't worry, I get downvoted and flagged all the time for insulting him.
    - acheron 4y ago
      That user is one of the Very Important Posters who is allowed to break the rules with impunity. Occasionally dang will chide him but he obviously will never be banned so there’s no reason for him to stop.
      - krapp 4y ago
        >That user is one of the Very Important Posters who is allowed to break the rules with impunity. Are you kidding? Dang and I have gotten into arguments on several occasions because I criticize this community too much, I've lost vouching permissions because I vouch for "controversial" comments, I'm not entirely certain my votes or flags work anymore, and my account has been rate limited for months. The kind of poster you're talking about has a CV and lots of interesting stories to pull out of their pocket to balance out their sins, and the mods will beg and plead with them time and time again to follow the rules because they don't want to lose the quality of their content, regardless of how egregious their conduct is - but I'm definitely not that person.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
implying they'd let him anywhere near those beans

No. They're here to help us save our planet. But honestly, UFOs are a cover for the US military trying out Black projects on their own forces. If they can't figure out what it is, the Black project is working.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> If they can't figure out what it is, the Black project is working. I was thinking the opposite. If the military cannot identify something (truly can't, not just saying they can't) then there is a serious gap in our sensor capabilities. If any entity needs to be able to identify objects, it's the military.
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  That's a good point too. I guess it depends on the objectives of the Black ops project.
- jmvoodoo 4y ago
  That sounds like two victories for the black project. 1) our last project was successful in evading existing sensor technologies, 2) our next project will address the gaps in our sensor capabilities. Funding secured.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Believers seem to be completely uncurious about where these sitings occurred. Which coincidentally happen to be the two most highly intrumented naval test ranges in the world. Ranges exist for two reasons: safely testing and monitoring shit. There’s a reason Capt. Obvious was a sailor.
ericmcer 4y ago
The idea of the US government having that level of technology and keeping it totally hidden doesn’t jive with all the missteps and human level errors we have seen so many politicians and military officials make. Looking at something like MK Ultra it is just a bunch of dudes doing shit by intuition and making massively dumb misstep’s. Unless things like that are just false flags to distract us from some hyper advanced and nefarious shadow govt we don’t know about.

dataflow 4y ago

> To summarize the above, if we were to take each of them at their word: > - They are extremely technologically advanced No, that's not what the quotes say. None of the quotes I see says anything about the "technology" of UAPs. Only one of the quotes even uses the word "technology" and even that one is merely saying that "this isn't technology from foreign adversaries". That quote even leaves open the possibility that we're dealing with (say) natural weather phenomena, instrument problems, etc., let alone anything artificial.

kevinventullo 4y ago

My personal theory is it’s just another boogeyman that can be used to justify funding.

mberning 4y ago
Certainly one of the possibilities. It could also be disinfo to send enemy states down a path to nowhere. The UAP phenomenon is not going to boil down to a single thing. There will be a spectrum of explanations, most of which are banal.

COGlory 4y ago

Surely this is an obvious misdirection, right?

winrid 4y ago
Yep. The military will do all kinds of misdirections and even research just to confuse or make enemies spend money on useless research.
zardo 4y ago
This reminds me of someone arguing on this topic, "What do you think the Pentagon would just lie?" If they think that lie will give the US military some sort of advantage against an adversary, of course they lie.
PKop 4y ago
Yes because they refuse to release the videos they have. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-videos-classified-releasing-them-will-harm-national-security https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-vid...

LorenPechtel 4y ago

Of course the military is concerned. UFO is commonly interpreted as alien spaceship but it really only means unidentified--and that could be a recon drone from China or the like.

wavefunction 4y ago
This is why I tell my friend who is passionate about extraterrestrials visiting Earth that I believe in UFOs but not flying saucers or alien spacecraft. Hard to argue with true-believers though.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
It might even be a CIA/etc drone, using the unwitting USN for testing.
- Victerius 4y ago
  The CIA is the spy bureau, not an engineering firm. Why would James Bond prove more competent at building drones than Q?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    The CIA has operated spy aircraft before, built by aircraft manufacturers obviously. The U-2 and A-12 (immediate predecessor to the SR-71) have both been operated by the CIA.
    - garren 4y ago
      Not to mention the Glomar Explorer [0],[1]. The CIA might not be in the engineering business itself, but definitely has the money and the resources to fund those who are. [0] https://interestingengineering.com/culture/glomar-explorer-the-cia-and-howard-hughes-attempt-to-raise-a-sunken-russian-submarine https://interestingengineering.com/culture/glomar-explorer-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
  - 4y ago

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago

> I also like citing politicians because, in discussing UAP, they have little to gain (they’re already famous, UAP are not a wedge issue) and much to lose (looking foolish). And they have access to far more information than the general public, especially former presidents and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And at that point, I realized I had forgotten my waders, so I had to stop reading.

imafish 4y ago

If you have an interest in increasing military spending, a little UFO fear mongering probably won’t hurt.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

At the risk of being pedantic, UFO does not imply extraterrestrial origin.

dataflow 4y ago
And now UAP doesn't imply the existence of an object, or the ability to fly!

tptacek 4y ago

Previously, on The X-Files, Reality Edition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702319

brobdingnagians 4y ago

Well, while we are on the topic, it could be a PR move leading to a future geopolitical move [1] to justify things like banning bitcoin, encryption, and toilets that flush correctly. It would be impressive technology to do such a thing, but so are the current surveillance and military programs that we know about. [1] https://josephsansone.substack.com/p/the-fake-alien-invasion-of-2024 https://josephsansone.substack.com/p/the-fake-alien-invasion...

mmastrac 4y ago
This should be an entertaining one to steel-man: - You'd need a way to send an "alien ship" into space, which would most likely involve Elon Musk and SpaceX - This would be an absolutely massive operation. You'd need to keep it quiet. So either you're doing the vast amount of work with a super-AI that hasn't been announced yet (OpenAI, perhaps), or you'd have to figure out how to keep thousands of people from leaking the details. This would require a massive army of people, completely loyal to the cause. - As there will be a bunch of people who don't believe the story, you'd need the willpower and inhumanity to kill them. But I imagine that someone invested in this story believes there is an army out there willing to do this for "the cause". - The bitcoin thing is a bit out-of-left-field, but I guess that they want to ban Bitcoin because it's decentralized, and not Ethereum because it is "controlled" by Vitalik (who is in on this conspiracy?). They'd be doing this under the guise of energy savings, but instead just taking control of a traceable cryptocurrency. This explains why so many conspiracy-minded folk are anti-mask and anti-vax. They likely see it as "conditioning" to do whatever is necessary for the world to survive (gradually escalating compliance?). So perhaps we are part of this army that is being raised to improve the world. It's amusing to think about what would be required for this conspiracy, but alas I have not been sent my invitation to join the secret WEF army yet. Or is that what someone who _was_ invited would say?
- majewsky 4y ago
  > but alas I have not been sent my invitation to join the secret WEF army yet I'm getting e-mails every week that invite me to join the Illuminati. Maybe I should not be sending them to spam? :)

krapp 4y ago

As I see it, there are basically two possibilities: - There is a society of technologically advanced individuals on earth, whether human, alien, or something else. - Each individual UAP encounter has some mundane explanation, and a large chunk of humanity has projected fantastical ideas onto them, to the point of full-blown hallucinations. The second is obviously either mostly or entirely true, given the viral nature of the subject matter, the internet and UFO culture. It's unavoidable, really. Occam's Razor suggests that the remainder, if it exists, can be explained by cutting edge, top secret but still entirely human technology.

sennight 4y ago

Counter-intelligence operation. It blows my mind that nobody else seems to have noticed the fact that as soon as executive orders were signed, banning military disinformation campaigns aimed at citizens, all the aliens disappeared! And then after Obama got rid of the last of those protections - on his way out the door, supposedly in the interest of combatting Russian disinformation (seriously, that was the excuse), the aliens suddenly reappeared! I understand the utilitarian logic of it, but it still strikes me as pretty disgusting... there are people who actually believe this crap, and I don't think they're mentally better off for it.

colordrops 4y ago
Interesting theory but there's no way various government agencies stopped and started lying because of some signed orders. Perhaps very public facing transparent agencies like the department of transportation or the like, but the CIA and pentagon never stopped lying.
- sennight 4y ago
  > ...pentagon never stopped lying. Yes it did, I've actually seen a CI op get blown after being picked up by domestic media - months of hard work abandoned the instant Popular Science decided to write, at length, about some gee-wiz military tech - without actually doing any kind of investigation. Say what you will about the CIA and the rest of the USG, but the DoD actually makes a pretty serious effort to follow not only the letter of the law - but the spirit of the law.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    I don't even know how to respond to this. The idea that the intelligence and military apparatuses follow the law to the T is absurd to me. Perhaps some facts to the contrary: * The CIA and NSA conduct mass surveillance of the American public, contrary to the law [1] [2] * The CIA maintains illegal black sites with systematic torture [3] * The CIA made a request to execute a false flag against american citizens to start war with Cuba [4] * The CIA executes illegal assassinations and other covert operations [5] * The Pentagon has presided over many illegal wars and war crimes [6] [7] [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-cia-acting-outside-law-spy-americans https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM [3] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/guantanamo-transcripts-give-firsthand-accounts-cia-torture https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/guantanamo-transcripts-g... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods [5] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/21/do-we-need-the-cia/end-cia-covert-operations https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/21/do-we-need-... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes [7] https://www.resistance.org/illegal-us-wars https://www.resistance.org/illegal-us-wars

roberto2016 4y ago

More questions than answers.

JackFr 4y ago

My theory is that Russia/China/other-US-military-adversaries certainly cannot rewrite the laws of physics. But they might have gotten awful good at spoofing advanced sensors.

rolph 4y ago
yes, one could work miracles with a couple of ultra high power IR lasers producing constructive interference with each other, yielding an optical phenomenon, perhaps even some thermal and RF signature.
- jbay808 4y ago
  If you have a sufficiently powerful laser, you can create a spark that floats in mid-air. The air at the focal point gets ionized by the strong electric fields and looks quite dazzling (and dangerous). That spark, in turn, can be moved around freely and emits all sorts of RF noise.
  - rolph 4y ago
    yes you have it right on, now if we can infer the effective range of such a technique it may be apparent that the real target is about twenty miles removed from the visual manifestation of the phenomenon.
  - dogma1138 4y ago
    Any laser that’s powerful enough to do that would leave an IR trail back to the source which would be visible with FLIR and most likely even with the naked eye due to the atmospheric effects of heating up the air.
    - jbay808 4y ago
      Not necessarily. If it's a femtosecond pulse laser, the instantaneous power is extremely high and creates a sufficiently intense field, but the time-average power is low enough that it wouldn't create much heat away from the focus. Source: worked in a femtosecond laser lab

perlgeek 4y ago

We should worry. Not about alien spacecraft, but about the inability of the public to deal with blurry photos. There will always be some blurry / ambiguous photos. The fact that no sharp pictures show alien spacecraft means that blurriness is the phenomenon. As long as there are slow news days, media outlets make a big deal out of blotches and blobs, and we as a public continue to fall for that.

colordrops 4y ago
It's not just blurry photos. There are also military pilot sightings corroborated with radar and FLIR, and the vehicles move in ways not possible with currently available human technology and science.
- space_fountain 4y ago
  But only at extreme range and sort of hard to make out. Like idk we live in a big world and fly a lot of military aircraft. It would be a bit surprising if we didn’t sometimes encounter edge cases in all of that that can’t quite be explained. And remember these things are just barely unexplainable, the vast majority of these types of sightings are explained we’re just left with literally a handful that are too tough
- simonh 4y ago
  A whole bunch of those have since been positively confirmed as operator error or calibration issues. Also these cases are often from new kit the operators were unfamiliar with, I don’t see how that can be a coincidence. The fact is we should expect a certain amount of false positives. So the real question is do we see more of these cases than we’d probably get anyway.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Yeah it is still "blurry photos" in principle. But people see things like "FLIR" and they assume that the technology is perfect.
- pshc 4y ago

kennend3 4y ago

Call me a cynic, but this reads like the US military-industrial complex is looking for a new "enemy" that needs vast amounts of money to "contain"? While the "war on terror" seems to be dying down, what about the good old standby enemies (Russia and China)? They just sold 1.2 billion dollars in military hardware to Taiwan, they can milk this for another 5 years at a minimum. I cant wait for the news stories in the future. The UFO's have a "interstellar space ship gap" or some other real or imagined "gap" we need to close.

mike_hock 4y ago
They're delivering weapons to Ukraine as we speak. Some other lucrative proxy wars might be coming up soon.
- erdos4d 4y ago
  I'm sure they have something cooking, there's too much money at stake to just close up shop.
krapp 4y ago
That would make sense if the US military-industrial complex had any problems whatsoever with funding. As far as I can see, the military and black-budget initiatives in the US already have an infinite, no questions asked credit line from the taxpayers and Congress. They don't need to resort to something this ridiculous, and even if they did, as you mentioned Russia and China are already effective boogeymen.
- LexGray 4y ago
  Not like greed has a limit. When a measurable percentage of congress is invested in conspiracy theories seems like a good time to get a bigger cut of an even darker black box.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    There are some real nuts in Congress, but the ones they would really need to convince are the twenty or so on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Most of the real wackjobs are in the House of Reps, and I have a feeling the members of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense are kept on a shorter leash than most of the rest. At least insofar as being well informed about defense matters is concerned.

thrill 4y ago

No.

wikitopian 4y ago

I'm surprised that "combating UFOs" hasn't joined quantum computing, the metaverse, machine learning, self-driving cars, and crypto among the bullshit investment bubbles. I bet there's a market in consulting with corporate executives to help them future-proof their enterprises against alien invasions.

bergenty 4y ago
Literally none of the things you’ve mentioned are bullshit investment bubbles.
- wikitopian 4y ago
  Not even NFTs, where people were aggressively bidding against one another for a database entry confirming their ownership of a cartoon monkey on drugs? Not even quantum computing, where wall street is investing billions in quirky (quorky?) transistors that might maybe potentially crack a limited subset of cryptographic algorithms within the next several decades? Not even with self-driving cars, which are taking on the ultimate life-or-death task before machine learning can even reliably outperform a minimum wage laborer at heavily constrained and scripted tech support tasks? You're all in on all that?
  - bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
    Self driving cars are just a little early. They won’t work until gradually they will, which is a threshold we’re arguably already crossing. So it doesn’t really belong on the list. And machine learning is massively successful and growing. Otherwise it’s a pretty good list of bullshit.
    - wikitopian 4y ago
      Self-driving cars are the least obvious scam on the list, for sure. The reason we appear so close is that well over 90% of driving is incredibly easy and can be performed without a sentient human being. This creates the impression that we're 90% there when we're nowhere near that close. We have decades of research to borrow from on this matter from drunk drivers, who are a perfect proxy for artificially intelligent machines attempting to drive automobiles without a sober human's fuzzy logic reasoning skills. Both Big Tech and drunk drivers are very emboldened by that 90% of driving that doesn't require thinking and that 99% of driving that's not a life-or-death test of fuzzy logic reasoning skills.

romanhn 4y ago

I wouldn't put too much stock in politicians' quotes. Based on some of the congressional hearings, it's clear these folks don't understand even basic smartphone operations, I suspect most modern technology is unidentified phenomena for them. And looking foolish has never stopped them either.

newaccount2021 4y ago

m3kw9 4y ago

Also, just because is unidentified doesn’t mean it’s from outside earth or intelligent life forms.

erdos4d 4y ago

This board is the most skeptic place I know of, so I have a question. How do the ones that accelerate at like 600 G's work? What's the power source and how is that energy being translated into propulsion? Also, why does the object not light up like meteor when it moves like this? I have doubts about the skeptic position when I hear these sorts of things.

mmastrac 4y ago
More than likely some sort of lens (IR/visual) optical effect.
- erdos4d 4y ago
  Same reply as to the other answer, the guys in the Nimitz case saw the thing move with their eyes.
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    I don't trust eyewitness accounts as there's literally no chain of evidence. We have highdef cameras in every pocket now - let's see a real 4k video of one.
    - erdos4d 4y ago
      What chain of evidence is needed if the actual people involved say they saw something? Their testimony is not open to dispute, you either believe they saw it or you believe they are liars. How would that account be tampered with? Anyway, according to all involved, there is infrared and radar that corroborates the eyewitness accounts. Of course the Navy has that classified, but interestingly, there is no official denial to say otherwise. I think I will believe these people until the service shows me a real reason not to.
      - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
        Of course it's because eyewitness reports of even ordinary events are highly variable. They saw something; that can be true even as it's also true it wasn't what they reported. Nobody is lying. In fact that 'false dilemma' is not a real argument at all. "You're either with us or against us!" "She criticised Capitalism; she must be a Communist!" "Marriage or career, a woman can't choose both!"

PKop 4y ago

It's all a grift unless they release the videos to the public. Why not assume it's all made up bs for funding? https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-videos-classified-releasing-them-will-harm-national-security https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axn8p/navy-says-all-ufo-vid...

chadlavi 4y ago

No?

WalterBright 4y ago

> Should we worry? No.

kube-system 4y ago

The military is concerned but not for the reason everyone assumes. It’s simply the military’s job to detect, identify, and appropriately respond to anything that might by flying around them. If they can’t do that, they’re not doing their job as well as they should.

Geee 4y ago

AI-controlled extraterrestrial probes should be quite likely. There are many purposes for such spacecrafts, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft Actual grey people flying from another star system in a tin can; not very likely.

garren 4y ago
"should be quite likely" seems to make some rather large assumptions, doesn't it? There remains zero evidence for extraterrestrials at all (so far), let alone those that have evolved into space faring/exploring civilizations, to say nothing of those actually interested in visiting our little dirt ball (physically, robotically, or otherwise.) Boring as it is, it seems way more likely that people are mistaking some natural phenomenon for extraterrestrial visitation. If you haven't heard of Mick West, check him out. He does a pretty convincing job explaining away quite a bit of the UFO stuff that's been "leaked" out of the military or reported on breathlessly by the media these days. My favorite recently was his breakdown of the "triangle UFOs" that were "swarming" a Navy ship off the California coast.
- Geee 4y ago
  Well, assuming that there is or has been intelligent life somewhere in this galaxy, then the most likely sighting would be some kind of probe, I think.
  - zikzak 4y ago
    A von Neumann probe, to be more specific: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

I'm into: looking for aliens through advanced telescopes Not into: looking for aliens through word of mouth and blurry photos

joshuaheard 4y ago

Should WE worry? No. Should the military worry? Yes. It's their job to worry. The government recently released a report on UAP. Here's what the report concluded about certain unexplained observations: - These are real objects (not some weather phenomena or camera effect) - They have been observed behaving in a way that exceeds our known physics (acceleration, no means of propulsion, multi-modal transport (going from air to water)) - They are not Russian or Chinese tech - They appear intelligently controlled - They come and go from our militarily controlled airspace at will - We don't know what they are. The only conclusion I can draw from this data is aliens.

simonh 4y ago
You could also conclude that whoever wrote that was in error. Several of the ‘inexplicable’ recordings they released have already been convincingly demonstrated to be ordinary phenomena, so it’s not looking good for the reliability of whoever wrote that report.

blooalien 4y ago

Should we worry? Well, are we about to find ourselves embroiled in an interstellar war with advanced space-faring beings? If "yes" then no, we shouldn't worry. We should just kiss our butts "goodbye" and prepare ourselves for the planet-wide "death ray" from orbit. If it's anything more "mundane" then whether we should worry or not will depend mostly on whether they're natural phenomena or of human origin.

Kukumber 4y ago

I am always right somehow :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714831

sys_64738 4y ago

Are these just weather balloons?

sdssdfsdf1 4y ago

pts_ 4y ago

The forming of a religion around it is something it has resembled to me often.