4 ms·

While i have no objections to the discrete drive, a conspiracy of the world's militaries seems a little far-fetched to me.

keepamovin 3y ago
> a conspiracy of the world's militaries seems a little far-fetched to me Really? Well one way to think of it is no military will reveal tracks only accessible to their most classified radar systems, because all militaries wish to protect the secret capabilities of those systems. If that doesn't suffice for you, we can go a bit deeper haha! :) Perhaps you don't need to use the word "conspiracy" if that makes it hard for you to think about. I know that word has become loaded (CIA invented the term 'conspiracy theorist' apparently as a term of abuse to discredit any who threatened to reveal their secrets), and it's meant to (and indeed seems it can!) cloud thought, but all 'conspiracy' really means is "breathing together": con-spire. But perhaps you can think of it rather like a loosely coordinated mutual self-interest, rather than the tighter collaboration suggested by conspiracy. Whatever the reality may be beyond the classified veil, which may nevertheless surprise your priors, there's precedent for loosely coordinated mutual self-interest in a number of areas, that will also explain the lack of transparency the world's militaries seem to share around discussing and revealing plentiful data about the UFO topic: - there's a classified but revealed international system in place for atomic test notifications between enemy nations, as well as rocket launches, to inadvertently avoid trigger global thermonuclear war. - all nuclear states already 'conspire' to keep the technical and engineering secrets of atomic weapons out of public awareness, to preserve their own advantage (to, erm, annihilate each other ha! :S) - sworn enemy special services / intelligence services often collaborate / interface together at a high level, in secret, in ways that would seem surprising to their populations who only have the picture of spy-vs-spy and enemy-nation Given these pertinent existing realities, it's rather less hard to consider how all militaries would share a common goal of projecting strength and capability (for that is what they are required to do to accomplish their mission of protecting their populations), and that, if all Earth's militaries were confronted with a global threat, which well outpaced their own capabilities, and against which they had no effective defense, and had the choice to be able to A) tell their populations they were outmatched and essentially no longer 'fit for service', or B) keep that embarassing truth secret by any means necessary while continuing to pretend everything was fine, I think you'd likely agree with me that this 'conspiracy of the world's militaries' would rather choose A than admit to B. Would you not? Haha! :) Secondly I think you'd agree that no 'conspiracy' was required in order to keep that so. :) hahaha :)
- defrost 3y ago
  > there's a classified but revealed international system in place for atomic test notifications between enemy nations, as well as rocket launches, to inadvertently avoid trigger global thermonuclear war. Really? How well did that work out in practice though? https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-570.html https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-570.html https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB187/index.htm https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB187/index.htm Two countries conducted a series of tests with no prior notification in 1998.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Interesting. I didn't know that. Thanks. We would expect our resident nuclear expert / historian to know such things. I suppose it worked out in the sense that we didn't have global thermonuclear war (at least in this timeline!) but not in the sense that it seems to work as, or as consistently as, expected. We can see the same adhoc ranks-breaking and partial lack of coordination despite overall alignment in the attitude of release of UFO data by the world's militaries. There have been instances of violation of this policy, even while overall the dam has not broken. Some instances: Belgian UFO wave military officials talking to media and releasing radar and other data, Mexican navy/airforce data, leak of Japan airlines radar tracks after confiscation, US Navy data (the famous videos from 2017, and a drip of subsequent videos), possibly the French CNES data (although as their policy has always been to release, not classified radar tracks but other, data such as reports, it may not be seen as a violation rather a persistent bucking of la trend). I just skimmed the docs you listed. In the Indian case it's hard to be conclusive from the released docs without having the full classified picture, but I consider a possible (tho by no means firm) alternative hypothesis that CIA decided it would "turn a blind eye" to 1 nuclear test, because it recognized both: the utility of an Indian nuclear deterrent (perhaps strategically important as within striking distance between middle east and east asia); as well as the good will they would earn with their Indian partners by not be being seen to try to "hold India back", or embarrass them. In addition, strategic considerations could have included not revealing the full extent of their classified detection capabilities to merely prevent something so (relatively) unimportant as a test, electing instead to feign incompetence and reserve acting on knowledge for future -- with the subsequent release of classified docs supporting this feint. Or, plausibly, a combination of such things. Of course, it may simply have been incompetence, misjudgement, lack of preparation and lack of capability, as the made public docs may sketch. All this highlights I suppose is how slippery history is, particularly when concerned with the activities of secretive organizations.

keepamovin 3y ago

> a conspiracy of the world's militaries seems a little far-fetched to me Really? Well one way to think of it is no military will reveal tracks only accessible to their most classified radar systems, because all militaries wish to protect the secret capabilities of those systems. If that doesn't suffice for you, we can go a bit deeper haha! :) Perhaps you don't need to use the word "conspiracy" if that makes it hard for you to think about. I know that word has become loaded (CIA invented the term 'conspiracy theorist' apparently as a term of abuse to discredit any who threatened to reveal their secrets), and it's meant to (and indeed seems it can!) cloud thought, but all 'conspiracy' really means is "breathing together": con-spire. But perhaps you can think of it rather like a loosely coordinated mutual self-interest, rather than the tighter collaboration suggested by conspiracy. Whatever the reality may be beyond the classified veil, which may nevertheless surprise your priors, there's precedent for loosely coordinated mutual self-interest in a number of areas, that will also explain the lack of transparency the world's militaries seem to share around discussing and revealing plentiful data about the UFO topic: - there's a classified but revealed international system in place for atomic test notifications between enemy nations, as well as rocket launches, to inadvertently avoid trigger global thermonuclear war. - all nuclear states already 'conspire' to keep the technical and engineering secrets of atomic weapons out of public awareness, to preserve their own advantage (to, erm, annihilate each other ha! :S) - sworn enemy special services / intelligence services often collaborate / interface together at a high level, in secret, in ways that would seem surprising to their populations who only have the picture of spy-vs-spy and enemy-nation Given these pertinent existing realities, it's rather less hard to consider how all militaries would share a common goal of projecting strength and capability (for that is what they are required to do to accomplish their mission of protecting their populations), and that, if all Earth's militaries were confronted with a global threat, which well outpaced their own capabilities, and against which they had no effective defense, and had the choice to be able to A) tell their populations they were outmatched and essentially no longer 'fit for service', or B) keep that embarassing truth secret by any means necessary while continuing to pretend everything was fine, I think you'd likely agree with me that this 'conspiracy of the world's militaries' would rather choose A than admit to B. Would you not? Haha! :) Secondly I think you'd agree that no 'conspiracy' was required in order to keep that so. :) hahaha :)

defrost 3y ago
> there's a classified but revealed international system in place for atomic test notifications between enemy nations, as well as rocket launches, to inadvertently avoid trigger global thermonuclear war. Really? How well did that work out in practice though? https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-570.html https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-570.html https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB187/index.htm https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB187/index.htm Two countries conducted a series of tests with no prior notification in 1998.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Interesting. I didn't know that. Thanks. We would expect our resident nuclear expert / historian to know such things. I suppose it worked out in the sense that we didn't have global thermonuclear war (at least in this timeline!) but not in the sense that it seems to work as, or as consistently as, expected. We can see the same adhoc ranks-breaking and partial lack of coordination despite overall alignment in the attitude of release of UFO data by the world's militaries. There have been instances of violation of this policy, even while overall the dam has not broken. Some instances: Belgian UFO wave military officials talking to media and releasing radar and other data, Mexican navy/airforce data, leak of Japan airlines radar tracks after confiscation, US Navy data (the famous videos from 2017, and a drip of subsequent videos), possibly the French CNES data (although as their policy has always been to release, not classified radar tracks but other, data such as reports, it may not be seen as a violation rather a persistent bucking of la trend). I just skimmed the docs you listed. In the Indian case it's hard to be conclusive from the released docs without having the full classified picture, but I consider a possible (tho by no means firm) alternative hypothesis that CIA decided it would "turn a blind eye" to 1 nuclear test, because it recognized both: the utility of an Indian nuclear deterrent (perhaps strategically important as within striking distance between middle east and east asia); as well as the good will they would earn with their Indian partners by not be being seen to try to "hold India back", or embarrass them. In addition, strategic considerations could have included not revealing the full extent of their classified detection capabilities to merely prevent something so (relatively) unimportant as a test, electing instead to feign incompetence and reserve acting on knowledge for future -- with the subsequent release of classified docs supporting this feint. Or, plausibly, a combination of such things. Of course, it may simply have been incompetence, misjudgement, lack of preparation and lack of capability, as the made public docs may sketch. All this highlights I suppose is how slippery history is, particularly when concerned with the activities of secretive organizations.