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A non-trivial faction of our government has been teasing knowledge of some sort of non-human intelligent lifeform (that word isn't considered precisely accurate

A non-trivial faction of our government has been teasing knowledge of some sort of non-human intelligent lifeform (that word isn't considered precisely accurate) on EARTH. This isn't some crackpot theory, they've been having congressional hearings about it and congresspeople say it's real. You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to, but, if congresspeople are part of or victims of some sort of psy-op with vague parameters and goals, our entire system of government is basically forfeit. I realize this is difficult to deal with but it's a pretty well-established fact at this point. We don't need to go anywhere for this information.

fwip 1y ago
Making the analysis harder is the fact that those politicians are either exceedingly stupid or brazen liars, or both.
- catigula 1y ago
  Credible non-politicians, people in sensitive CIA or senior military leadership have consistently made these claims. They may all be liars, but none seem particularly stupid. One problem is that we haven't gotten a "UAP Snowden". Such a person has seen a serious chilling effect.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    Or maybe there's been "no UAP Snowden" because there's actually nothing to leak.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      By that logic there was nothing to leak before snowden
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        By that logic, you're also hiding the truth that you are actually seven sentient potatoes in a wetsuit. It just hasn't been revealed yet. Except there is no "logic" to thinking a leak just hasn't happened "yet". There's no "logic" to thinking that the absence of a leak implies there is information to be leaked.
    - catigula 1y ago
      No, that isn't possible. Note that my post was designed to be agnostic. Leaking a psy-op, or leaking the extensive, close-up details of UAP phenomena which we do have (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic), is still a Snowden style leak, especially if they continue to do this dog and pony show in congress and elsewhere. There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        > There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak? There might be, but even if there was, a leak in those fields would still have no bearing on whether or not there are actual things to leak regarding UAPs. Maybe the info is simply not public because publishing it would let the very likely other humans responsible for said UAPs know that we do and don't know what they're up to. And it could also be that that info on UAPs isn't leaked because (unlike the Snowden leaks), they aren't actually relevant to Americans and to their liberties, and so the people who have access to that info see no point in leaking it.
        catigula 1y ago
        I'm going to address your hypothesis of "unknown technologies". It's something that widely seems credible but really isn't. These phenomena have been documented, in-depth, for many, many decades. Credible sources note that certain materials and devices (I don't want to use the term 'craft') have been in government possession for going on 90 years, since the end of WW2. The notion that some country had achieved technical supremacy such that we still find their technology unidentifiable for 90 years isn't tenable. Everyone involved in what the public knows about this are largely credible people who have undergone a classification briefing of what information they have, carefully vetting what they're able to share. They seem to feel that this topic is relevant to Americans and their civil liberties, they simply don't want to go to jail. I would tend to agree with these people. Now, the government can actually just say whatever Dave Grusch knows about these entities can be declassified. Just say, "Dave is not bound by classification for any claims relating to contact with entities, deals with entities, specific information about entities, etc." This would instantly discredit his claims, because he'd be free to make outlandish and absurd claims without being able to hide behind the veil of "it's classified, we have to discuss this in a SCIF". If they don't exist, what's the problem? This is a man we know was at the highest levels of the actual stuff he's talking about. He's a credible source. If he's making outlandish claims, just lift the veil of secrecy. Of course they don't do that because it is classified.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Isn’t David Grusch just that?
Dilettante_ 1y ago
>if congresspeople are part of or victims of some sort of psy-op [...] our entire system of government is basically forfeit. And you're asserting that this cannot possibly be the case? "For that which must not be, cannot be"?
- catigula 1y ago
  No, I'm just asserting that I don't find that theory tenable. I'd love to know more (even your mundane explanation of "there's a psy-op on congresspeople for some reason" - if so, why?) but it's been decided that we're not allowed.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    One needn't posit a "psy-op". We already know major GOP leaders court votes by pushing absurd ideas that are rejected by the scientific establishment. "Injecting bleach can cure Covid" is one from the highest-ranking GOP elected official. "No vaccines are safe" is from a top health official.
  - Dilettante_ 1y ago
    If we take "psy-ops exist"(In my head, "propaganda" is a type of psy-op, but I would not disagree if you drew the circle tighter than that) as a prior, I would have to ask why in the world congresspeople would not be subject to them, both to those that target a broader population, which they are still undeniably part of, and to those that target policy-makers specifically, because if you had the power to influence people, it seems obvious to me that you would target those that gave you great leverage.
crackrook 1y ago
> You can think they [...] aren't credible I think I'd pick this one as being the simplest and most likely explanation if my other options are "psy-op[s] with vague parameters" and non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us. Congress people believing falsehoods is nothing new.
- catigula 1y ago
  Non-human intelligence sharing the planet with us is a mundane explanation. It's a completely trivial possibility in the vastly expansive fields of biology and physics. Earth is known to host extremely complex life and is the only known planet to do so. To look for unknown forms of life one need only look at their feet. Bacteria was a previously unknown, extremely expansive form of life on Earth. We unlocked the secrets of the atom and gained within it the capability of ending all life on earth trivially. Other secrets being locked behind physics isn't a radical speculation. In fact, it's surprising that we haven't really seen any since.
  - crackrook 1y ago
    Before we had the instruments to observe them directly we could theorize about the existence of bacteria because we could indirectly observe them through their effects on our biology and even their macroscopic effects on populations, effects that had no better explanations. I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence", whether they supposedly dwell in the depths of the ocean, the Earth's crust, Titan, or anywhere else in the universe. SETI has been listening for ~60 years and hasn't heard a peep from any of the billions (trillions?) exoplanet's worth of radio signals that could have reached us in that time. The available-to-me evidence suggests that technologically advanced species are exceedingly rare, and the only such species we're aware of emits an overwhelming number of artifacts that would serve as evidence for its existence, so it would be very much not mundane to discover that another one has been living under our noses this whole time. I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.
IAmBroom 1y ago
> This isn't some crackpot theory, they've been having congressional hearings about it and congresspeople say it's real. Congresspeople also say Jewish space lasers are a thing. > You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to Yes, I do. The current GOP party is not interested in any way in scientific fact.
- catigula 1y ago
  You've immunized yourself from any possibility of entertaining this information. Many people sharing it aren't republicans, including senators.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    Senators are humans, and the selection process prioritizes charm over knowledge. Many people share all sorts of silly ideas. I'm very prepared to look at evidence of aliens visiting Earth, but it better be damned good evidence.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      Where do you draw the line for sufficient evidence? Are congressional hearings on recordings from US armed forces insufficient? It isn’t like the videos lack provenance like something random from youtube.
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        I draw the line at "we have conclusive evidence that it is extra terrestrial", not at "we don't know what it is", and I would say they are categorically not the same.
        catigula 1y ago
        Nobody definitively says it's extra-terrestrial. In fact, the common thread seems to be that the entities are from Earth or from a dimensional space where that concept is potentially invalid. Other people speculate that they may come from the ocean. Regardless, I don't see much interest in the "they came from outer space" hypothesis, which makes sense, as it is very big out there and we already know a planet/region that sustains life and it's the closest planet of them all. What isn't in contention is that there are unexplained phenomena to varying levels of description (president Obama confirmed the lowest level of description, i.e. that they exist and that they cannot be definitively explained). A common additive to this contention is that these phenomena have intelligence and motives. You needent accept this, in fact I encourage you to not trivially accept it, but there is growing evidence that it is true. Is this a complete mind-fuck? Yes. Does that 'matter' in any real sense of the term? No, not really. An additionally common follow-on from here is that the motives of the aforementioned intelligence aren't good and we cannot counter them using our technology, and this justifies the veil of secrecy. A lot of people seem very convinced by this. I can plausibly come up with some scenarios where this might be true, i.e. scenarios where knowledge would completely collapse the government, but I still think I'd prefer to have the information than not. Anyways, the very concept you're highlighting is actually what is in the accepted UAP record. Theories, inconclusive evidence as to origin. I have a feeling that the actual phenomenon relates to physics and the mystery of dark matter, and it's also probably a still very very small part of an even infinitely more complex, "higher" noumenal world, but I'm just speculating.
GolfPopper 1y ago
>our entire system of government is basically forfeit. <looks at America's current government> Yep, that seems accurate. Like it or not, the current US government is full of crackpot theories. The "evidence" of "aliens" inevitably turns out to be blurry footage where people with bias tell you what you're supposed to think it is. As for the U.S. Congress, you're talking about a body that has been avoiding it's own responsibilities for decades, particularly so right now. Invoking "Congressional hearings" here is an appeal to an unqualified authority. (Congressional representatives presumably has some experience with laws. I do not believe they are qualified for video forensics.)
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Have you seen the footage? It isn’t blurry cell phone videos. It is quite clear thermal imagery from aircraft and drones. The most recent video going around shows a reaper drone tracking one of these objects that does not change its vector much after being hit with a kinetic missile.
  - GolfPopper 1y ago
    >thermal imagery I have seen that one, as it happens. I am not an expert, but it looks to me like the asserted Hellfire hits a cruise missile and knocks some pieces off as the Hellfire fails to detonate, and the cruise missile then course corrects from getting knocked around. The best way to determine that would be to have a number of experts independently assess the footage without being primed as to its provenance. A presentation by someone who is already convinced it's aliens to some congresscritters in need of a distraction is hardly that.
    - catigula 1y ago
      The information you claim to want isn't accessible to you. The US government has "platforms" with vast arrays of sensors and data collection capability - redundant, multiplicative platforms measuring things you and I might not even know about - and they use this data to get a pretty good idea of what they're looking at. You're seeing a grainy video for a reason. It would be trivial for you to have every piece of data related to an incident but if you did, that might be problematic for multiple reasons, one of them being it would expose capability. Usually, multi-million dollar missiles aren't used on unknown targets with unknown capabilities for unknown reasons. Thus, more information is required. So, where are we left? With you demanding inaccessible information to draw a conclusion. Given that you can't have it, you're essentially just throwing your hands up and saying "well, I guess we can't know". Fine, but untrue, as we can simply demand to know. That is what people are doing. If you're at all concerned by any of this, you should be in this camp as well. Regarding "distraction", how is this a "good" distraction if it's not a widely credibly held position and can clearly damage your reputation? This is just a nonsense idea. There's no reason to believe these people are lying.

fwip 1y ago

Making the analysis harder is the fact that those politicians are either exceedingly stupid or brazen liars, or both.

catigula 1y ago
Credible non-politicians, people in sensitive CIA or senior military leadership have consistently made these claims. They may all be liars, but none seem particularly stupid. One problem is that we haven't gotten a "UAP Snowden". Such a person has seen a serious chilling effect.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  Or maybe there's been "no UAP Snowden" because there's actually nothing to leak.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    By that logic there was nothing to leak before snowden
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      By that logic, you're also hiding the truth that you are actually seven sentient potatoes in a wetsuit. It just hasn't been revealed yet. Except there is no "logic" to thinking a leak just hasn't happened "yet". There's no "logic" to thinking that the absence of a leak implies there is information to be leaked.
  - catigula 1y ago
    No, that isn't possible. Note that my post was designed to be agnostic. Leaking a psy-op, or leaking the extensive, close-up details of UAP phenomena which we do have (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic), is still a Snowden style leak, especially if they continue to do this dog and pony show in congress and elsewhere. There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      > There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak? There might be, but even if there was, a leak in those fields would still have no bearing on whether or not there are actual things to leak regarding UAPs. Maybe the info is simply not public because publishing it would let the very likely other humans responsible for said UAPs know that we do and don't know what they're up to. And it could also be that that info on UAPs isn't leaked because (unlike the Snowden leaks), they aren't actually relevant to Americans and to their liberties, and so the people who have access to that info see no point in leaking it.
      - catigula 1y ago
        I'm going to address your hypothesis of "unknown technologies". It's something that widely seems credible but really isn't. These phenomena have been documented, in-depth, for many, many decades. Credible sources note that certain materials and devices (I don't want to use the term 'craft') have been in government possession for going on 90 years, since the end of WW2. The notion that some country had achieved technical supremacy such that we still find their technology unidentifiable for 90 years isn't tenable. Everyone involved in what the public knows about this are largely credible people who have undergone a classification briefing of what information they have, carefully vetting what they're able to share. They seem to feel that this topic is relevant to Americans and their civil liberties, they simply don't want to go to jail. I would tend to agree with these people. Now, the government can actually just say whatever Dave Grusch knows about these entities can be declassified. Just say, "Dave is not bound by classification for any claims relating to contact with entities, deals with entities, specific information about entities, etc." This would instantly discredit his claims, because he'd be free to make outlandish and absurd claims without being able to hide behind the veil of "it's classified, we have to discuss this in a SCIF". If they don't exist, what's the problem? This is a man we know was at the highest levels of the actual stuff he's talking about. He's a credible source. If he's making outlandish claims, just lift the veil of secrecy. Of course they don't do that because it is classified.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Isn’t David Grusch just that?

Dilettante_ 1y ago

>if congresspeople are part of or victims of some sort of psy-op [...] our entire system of government is basically forfeit. And you're asserting that this cannot possibly be the case? "For that which must not be, cannot be"?

catigula 1y ago
No, I'm just asserting that I don't find that theory tenable. I'd love to know more (even your mundane explanation of "there's a psy-op on congresspeople for some reason" - if so, why?) but it's been decided that we're not allowed.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  One needn't posit a "psy-op". We already know major GOP leaders court votes by pushing absurd ideas that are rejected by the scientific establishment. "Injecting bleach can cure Covid" is one from the highest-ranking GOP elected official. "No vaccines are safe" is from a top health official.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  If we take "psy-ops exist"(In my head, "propaganda" is a type of psy-op, but I would not disagree if you drew the circle tighter than that) as a prior, I would have to ask why in the world congresspeople would not be subject to them, both to those that target a broader population, which they are still undeniably part of, and to those that target policy-makers specifically, because if you had the power to influence people, it seems obvious to me that you would target those that gave you great leverage.

crackrook 1y ago

> You can think they [...] aren't credible I think I'd pick this one as being the simplest and most likely explanation if my other options are "psy-op[s] with vague parameters" and non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us. Congress people believing falsehoods is nothing new.

catigula 1y ago
Non-human intelligence sharing the planet with us is a mundane explanation. It's a completely trivial possibility in the vastly expansive fields of biology and physics. Earth is known to host extremely complex life and is the only known planet to do so. To look for unknown forms of life one need only look at their feet. Bacteria was a previously unknown, extremely expansive form of life on Earth. We unlocked the secrets of the atom and gained within it the capability of ending all life on earth trivially. Other secrets being locked behind physics isn't a radical speculation. In fact, it's surprising that we haven't really seen any since.
- crackrook 1y ago
  Before we had the instruments to observe them directly we could theorize about the existence of bacteria because we could indirectly observe them through their effects on our biology and even their macroscopic effects on populations, effects that had no better explanations. I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence", whether they supposedly dwell in the depths of the ocean, the Earth's crust, Titan, or anywhere else in the universe. SETI has been listening for ~60 years and hasn't heard a peep from any of the billions (trillions?) exoplanet's worth of radio signals that could have reached us in that time. The available-to-me evidence suggests that technologically advanced species are exceedingly rare, and the only such species we're aware of emits an overwhelming number of artifacts that would serve as evidence for its existence, so it would be very much not mundane to discover that another one has been living under our noses this whole time. I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.

IAmBroom 1y ago

> This isn't some crackpot theory, they've been having congressional hearings about it and congresspeople say it's real. Congresspeople also say Jewish space lasers are a thing. > You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to Yes, I do. The current GOP party is not interested in any way in scientific fact.

catigula 1y ago
You've immunized yourself from any possibility of entertaining this information. Many people sharing it aren't republicans, including senators.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Senators are humans, and the selection process prioritizes charm over knowledge. Many people share all sorts of silly ideas. I'm very prepared to look at evidence of aliens visiting Earth, but it better be damned good evidence.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Where do you draw the line for sufficient evidence? Are congressional hearings on recordings from US armed forces insufficient? It isn’t like the videos lack provenance like something random from youtube.
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      I draw the line at "we have conclusive evidence that it is extra terrestrial", not at "we don't know what it is", and I would say they are categorically not the same.
      - catigula 1y ago
        Nobody definitively says it's extra-terrestrial. In fact, the common thread seems to be that the entities are from Earth or from a dimensional space where that concept is potentially invalid. Other people speculate that they may come from the ocean. Regardless, I don't see much interest in the "they came from outer space" hypothesis, which makes sense, as it is very big out there and we already know a planet/region that sustains life and it's the closest planet of them all. What isn't in contention is that there are unexplained phenomena to varying levels of description (president Obama confirmed the lowest level of description, i.e. that they exist and that they cannot be definitively explained). A common additive to this contention is that these phenomena have intelligence and motives. You needent accept this, in fact I encourage you to not trivially accept it, but there is growing evidence that it is true. Is this a complete mind-fuck? Yes. Does that 'matter' in any real sense of the term? No, not really. An additionally common follow-on from here is that the motives of the aforementioned intelligence aren't good and we cannot counter them using our technology, and this justifies the veil of secrecy. A lot of people seem very convinced by this. I can plausibly come up with some scenarios where this might be true, i.e. scenarios where knowledge would completely collapse the government, but I still think I'd prefer to have the information than not. Anyways, the very concept you're highlighting is actually what is in the accepted UAP record. Theories, inconclusive evidence as to origin. I have a feeling that the actual phenomenon relates to physics and the mystery of dark matter, and it's also probably a still very very small part of an even infinitely more complex, "higher" noumenal world, but I'm just speculating.

GolfPopper 1y ago

>our entire system of government is basically forfeit. <looks at America's current government> Yep, that seems accurate. Like it or not, the current US government is full of crackpot theories. The "evidence" of "aliens" inevitably turns out to be blurry footage where people with bias tell you what you're supposed to think it is. As for the U.S. Congress, you're talking about a body that has been avoiding it's own responsibilities for decades, particularly so right now. Invoking "Congressional hearings" here is an appeal to an unqualified authority. (Congressional representatives presumably has some experience with laws. I do not believe they are qualified for video forensics.)

kjkjadksj 1y ago
Have you seen the footage? It isn’t blurry cell phone videos. It is quite clear thermal imagery from aircraft and drones. The most recent video going around shows a reaper drone tracking one of these objects that does not change its vector much after being hit with a kinetic missile.
- GolfPopper 1y ago
  >thermal imagery I have seen that one, as it happens. I am not an expert, but it looks to me like the asserted Hellfire hits a cruise missile and knocks some pieces off as the Hellfire fails to detonate, and the cruise missile then course corrects from getting knocked around. The best way to determine that would be to have a number of experts independently assess the footage without being primed as to its provenance. A presentation by someone who is already convinced it's aliens to some congresscritters in need of a distraction is hardly that.
  - catigula 1y ago
    The information you claim to want isn't accessible to you. The US government has "platforms" with vast arrays of sensors and data collection capability - redundant, multiplicative platforms measuring things you and I might not even know about - and they use this data to get a pretty good idea of what they're looking at. You're seeing a grainy video for a reason. It would be trivial for you to have every piece of data related to an incident but if you did, that might be problematic for multiple reasons, one of them being it would expose capability. Usually, multi-million dollar missiles aren't used on unknown targets with unknown capabilities for unknown reasons. Thus, more information is required. So, where are we left? With you demanding inaccessible information to draw a conclusion. Given that you can't have it, you're essentially just throwing your hands up and saying "well, I guess we can't know". Fine, but untrue, as we can simply demand to know. That is what people are doing. If you're at all concerned by any of this, you should be in this camp as well. Regarding "distraction", how is this a "good" distraction if it's not a widely credibly held position and can clearly damage your reputation? This is just a nonsense idea. There's no reason to believe these people are lying.