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Alien motherships: Pentagon official floats a theory for unexplained sightings

38 points by madspindel 4y ago

jmclnx 4y ago
sounds like someone wants to be the expert Science Advisor on a Hollywood blockbuster. "Seeds from Space" :)
widowlark 4y ago
I'm very disappointed in Avi Loeb's recent work. The lack of scientific rigor he's put into these extraterrestrial theories overshadow his many years of being a rigorous physicist. for shame.
- ProAm 4y ago
  He's doing this for funding and I think he is accomplishing the task as for everyone knows about Avi Loeb's recent work.
- snapetom 4y ago
  The drama is pretty amusing. Even Sabine Hossenfelder is essentially calling him an attention whore these days.
- rhyme-boss 4y ago
  how so? he wrote an entire book about oumuamua, did you read it?
1970-01-01 4y ago
Terrible headline. This is a hypothesis. Everything about alien life remains hypothetical. This paper the article cites not once uses the word "theory".
rolph 4y ago
i would place a larger degree of probability toward hollow asteroid type extraterrestrials, than the overt 100ton beryllium construction variety, just out of materials efficiency.
- vkasdfsf 4y ago
  Giant comets would be GREAT exploratory starships, you just rehuse frozen water for reorient the thing, somehow attach an habitat ontop / inside the comet, then you take off right to the inner solar system, or outer solar system regions. You could send a relatively small probe to the Oort cloud, look briefly for a comet falling to Sun's gravity well, a plug it with hardware, then the thing would approach Earth as stealthy as some giant alien starship can get, you look at it, just seing some, another giant comet just doing its usual business around the system. No fuss.
Sunspark 4y ago
The reason we know there is no mothership is because there is no increased funding to defense contractors, no reallocation of military resources, no perceived panic from politicians, etc. NASA tracks debris floating around in Earth orbit. If there were objects entering and leaving orbit they would have been observed. It is possible all the UFO noise in recent years is the emerging stage of a mass hysteria.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  I think people really forget that UFOs and aliens are only related because science fiction and pop culture. We have two separate problems: 1) We are seeing a lot more things that we can’t identify (reasonable thing to believe to be true in 2023). 2) We aren’t being serious enough about identifying the humans that make and control them because “lol aliens man”
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    The lack of seriousness seems more along the lines of "lol China/Russia man" than "lol aliens man". It's rather refreshing to see the DoD entertain explanations beyond "our geopolitical rivals are doing it" - and that includes not making presumptions around humans making and controlling these objects, because if we did know that with any degree of certainty then they probably wouldn't be unidentified flying objects.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > 2) We aren’t being serious enough about identifying the humans that make and control them because “lol aliens man” The public, maybe. People with the resources and access to investigate this stuff, I would bet money they're putting a whole lot more resources into "let's figure out who's building & operating these" than "find the little green men". Further complicating matters, any messaging in the area of unidentified aircraft is highly likely to be psyops of one form or another. You can't really trust any of it until we're years and years out and have a better idea of what was actually going on. Including things like whether any of this stuff is actually unidentified, for those with better access to information. UFO stuff's so tied up with aerospace tech development and spying that there often is a "conspiracy" going on, it just has nothing to do with aliens.
dweinus 4y ago
Yep, definitely aliens. Not new military drone vehicles we have been developing, no sir. Sincerely, The Pentagon
- startupsfail 4y ago
  People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.
  - startupsfail 4y ago
    People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. The demolition plan had been abandoned as the construction permit was withdrawn. Please continue your computation as if nothing had happened. Thank you.
- 4rt 4y ago
  It could also be a men-who-stare-at-goats style psyop against a foreign power.
renewiltord 4y ago
Well, there's some level of long tailness that you have to get into in defence. Otherwise you're just always holding the Maginot Line. I don't think it's immediately wrong that some number of their ideas are outlandish. If zero were, then I'd assume we'd lose the next war. If 100% were, I'd also assume we'd lose the next war.
simple10 4y ago
Andrew Bustamante, the Everyday Spy guy and former CIA operative, has an interesting breakdown of increased UAP phenomena. A confluence of open loop thinking and innate fear of death exacerbated by DoD acknowledgement of UAP activity. Andrew has a new TV show in development where he investigates UAP and admits he doesn't yet have a rational theory for many of the sightings. Interviews like these [1] add fuel to the alien origin theories. My hope is that this will start opening up proper academic research funding for UAP before this all escalates into false flag conspiracy theories and one world government hysteria. Otherwise, the next presidential election cycle in the USA is likely to go completely off the rails like it started to with QAnon nonsense. Feels like we're entering a similar environment to the late 1930's where stunts like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast can easily spark mass hysteria. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccTi-RTMg1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccTi-RTMg1s
beders 4y ago
UFO hysteria happens basically every decade. A new somehow always blurry video. Pilots reporting lights they can't explain etc. When serious UFO researchers look at the presented evidence, the U in FO is in almost all cases replaced by things like planes,weather balloons, venus, meterorites, light reflections, dirt on camera lens etc. etc. It is a multi-disciplinary effort to debunk those things and whatever a pilot is reporting to have seen, means very very little. So another nothing burger. Which begs the question: Who benefits from reporting like this? (other than it being politico click bait?)
- yowzadave 4y ago
  Bingo. If you want to convince me that a UFO photo is an alien, show me a non-blurry photo! Otherwise we’re just dealing with selection bias, where the clear photos are identified as mundane objects, and the UFOs are just blurry photos of mundane objects.

38 points by madspindel 4y ago

sounds like someone wants to be the expert Science Advisor on a Hollywood blockbuster. "Seeds from Space" :)

I'm very disappointed in Avi Loeb's recent work. The lack of scientific rigor he's put into these extraterrestrial theories overshadow his many years of being a rigorous physicist. for shame.

ProAm 4y ago
He's doing this for funding and I think he is accomplishing the task as for everyone knows about Avi Loeb's recent work.
snapetom 4y ago
The drama is pretty amusing. Even Sabine Hossenfelder is essentially calling him an attention whore these days.
rhyme-boss 4y ago
how so? he wrote an entire book about oumuamua, did you read it?

1970-01-01 4y ago

Terrible headline. This is a hypothesis. Everything about alien life remains hypothetical. This paper the article cites not once uses the word "theory".

rolph 4y ago

i would place a larger degree of probability toward hollow asteroid type extraterrestrials, than the overt 100ton beryllium construction variety, just out of materials efficiency.

vkasdfsf 4y ago
Giant comets would be GREAT exploratory starships, you just rehuse frozen water for reorient the thing, somehow attach an habitat ontop / inside the comet, then you take off right to the inner solar system, or outer solar system regions. You could send a relatively small probe to the Oort cloud, look briefly for a comet falling to Sun's gravity well, a plug it with hardware, then the thing would approach Earth as stealthy as some giant alien starship can get, you look at it, just seing some, another giant comet just doing its usual business around the system. No fuss.

Sunspark 4y ago

The reason we know there is no mothership is because there is no increased funding to defense contractors, no reallocation of military resources, no perceived panic from politicians, etc. NASA tracks debris floating around in Earth orbit. If there were objects entering and leaving orbit they would have been observed. It is possible all the UFO noise in recent years is the emerging stage of a mass hysteria.

RC_ITR 4y ago
I think people really forget that UFOs and aliens are only related because science fiction and pop culture. We have two separate problems: 1) We are seeing a lot more things that we can’t identify (reasonable thing to believe to be true in 2023). 2) We aren’t being serious enough about identifying the humans that make and control them because “lol aliens man”
- yellowapple 4y ago
  The lack of seriousness seems more along the lines of "lol China/Russia man" than "lol aliens man". It's rather refreshing to see the DoD entertain explanations beyond "our geopolitical rivals are doing it" - and that includes not making presumptions around humans making and controlling these objects, because if we did know that with any degree of certainty then they probably wouldn't be unidentified flying objects.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > 2) We aren’t being serious enough about identifying the humans that make and control them because “lol aliens man” The public, maybe. People with the resources and access to investigate this stuff, I would bet money they're putting a whole lot more resources into "let's figure out who's building & operating these" than "find the little green men". Further complicating matters, any messaging in the area of unidentified aircraft is highly likely to be psyops of one form or another. You can't really trust any of it until we're years and years out and have a better idea of what was actually going on. Including things like whether any of this stuff is actually unidentified, for those with better access to information. UFO stuff's so tied up with aerospace tech development and spying that there often is a "conspiracy" going on, it just has nothing to do with aliens.

dweinus 4y ago

Yep, definitely aliens. Not new military drone vehicles we have been developing, no sir. Sincerely, The Pentagon

startupsfail 4y ago
People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.
- startupsfail 4y ago
  People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. The demolition plan had been abandoned as the construction permit was withdrawn. Please continue your computation as if nothing had happened. Thank you.
4rt 4y ago
It could also be a men-who-stare-at-goats style psyop against a foreign power.

renewiltord 4y ago

Well, there's some level of long tailness that you have to get into in defence. Otherwise you're just always holding the Maginot Line. I don't think it's immediately wrong that some number of their ideas are outlandish. If zero were, then I'd assume we'd lose the next war. If 100% were, I'd also assume we'd lose the next war.

simple10 4y ago

Andrew Bustamante, the Everyday Spy guy and former CIA operative, has an interesting breakdown of increased UAP phenomena. A confluence of open loop thinking and innate fear of death exacerbated by DoD acknowledgement of UAP activity. Andrew has a new TV show in development where he investigates UAP and admits he doesn't yet have a rational theory for many of the sightings. Interviews like these [1] add fuel to the alien origin theories. My hope is that this will start opening up proper academic research funding for UAP before this all escalates into false flag conspiracy theories and one world government hysteria. Otherwise, the next presidential election cycle in the USA is likely to go completely off the rails like it started to with QAnon nonsense. Feels like we're entering a similar environment to the late 1930's where stunts like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast can easily spark mass hysteria. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccTi-RTMg1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccTi-RTMg1s

beders 4y ago

UFO hysteria happens basically every decade. A new somehow always blurry video. Pilots reporting lights they can't explain etc. When serious UFO researchers look at the presented evidence, the U in FO is in almost all cases replaced by things like planes,weather balloons, venus, meterorites, light reflections, dirt on camera lens etc. etc. It is a multi-disciplinary effort to debunk those things and whatever a pilot is reporting to have seen, means very very little. So another nothing burger. Which begs the question: Who benefits from reporting like this? (other than it being politico click bait?)

yowzadave 4y ago
Bingo. If you want to convince me that a UFO photo is an alien, show me a non-blurry photo! Otherwise we’re just dealing with selection bias, where the clear photos are identified as mundane objects, and the UFOs are just blurry photos of mundane objects.