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It's abundantly clear that there are plenty of loons walking among us, and that fame, wealth, and authority absolutely do not exclude a person from being a loon.
I'm not saying David Grusch is a loon. I'm saying that, between "there is a government conspiracy to hide the fact that actual intelligent extraterrestrial beings are visiting Earth, and the government is collecting their technology and reverse engineering it" and "the guy who truly believes that is a loon," one of those statements is far more likely to be true than the other one. One of those statements would require a huge number of people to be completely silent about such a thing for decades, and the other would require one loon to believe it.
I agree with your overall point.
That being said, there is a significantly substantial body of evidence involved in disclosure efforts up to this point. Many government officials have come forward with variations of this story - Grusch is just the latest and the one with the most stature. His accounts are also the least wide-ranging and in my humble opinion, some of the most credible. Secondly, disclosure has been in-process by whistleblowers in other governments as well for multiple decades - there's a lot of credible evidence to suggest this isn't a new phenomena.
Having witnessed a few UAP at a distance myself (including some before drones took over the skies), I think that it's pretty clear that something we don't understand is here, and has been here for awhile now. I think the jury is out on whether or not they are intelligent, alive,or a phenomena related to physics we don't understand, but there's simply too much evidence to deny their reality, and I gotta confess, especially after seeing them in the sky, I really want to find out.
Grusch's actions are the first step in really figuring out if the DoD knows anything. He went through the proper legal routes, and he's whistleblowing on obvious obstruction that prevented him from performing the Congressional mandate of his job. He has everything to lose here, and nothing to gain. I'm inclined to believe him.
If we have had access to technology that can manage the immense distances between livable planets in our galaxy for almost a hundred years and we cannot get a human to Mars, we are beyond hope.
If any of this has even the slightest grain of truth to it, you have to admit that we (humanity) are way to fucking dumb to ever explore the stars.
Fuck that’s a depressing thought. We have been looking at the tech for a century and we got nothing? I suppose that might be driving my bias on this. I am not asking for proof of the programs, I am asking why there is no evidence that humans have been looking at interstellar travel tech for a century. Either it’s horseshit, or we are hella dumb animals.
Yeah and if you look at humans in 1400 there's no way they'll ever invent the internet, right?
And yet the very fact you associate talking about UAPs with being a loon is the result of a dedicated effort by US intelligence.
After the front page news of sightings over Washington DC, it wasn't very long until Gene Pope, an MIT graduate and previously part of the CIA's psyops program, went and bought the National Enquirer and later the Weekly World News. Which made UFO news adjacent to batboy or gossip.
I happen to think the notion these are extraterrestrial is ludicrous and there's many more reasonable explanations short of that conclusion. But there is a significant story in how these sightings have been handled over the past century up to the present day.
While I think alien hopefuls will be disappointed, interesting things should come out of this if continued to be pursued.
I mean, in his shoes I would probably also feel compelled to call out the loons in my field too. I hear dumb shit on social media websites concerning my actual domain of expertise, and I get accused of whatever when I call it out. Don't get.in the way of a good outrage story, or conspiracy, unless you want to find out just how many loons are lurking out there.
That got me curious so I searched :
loon
noun1- Any of several fish-eating diving birds of the genus Gavia of northern regions, having a short tail, webbed feet, and a laughlike cry.
2- One who is crazy or deranged.
3- A stupid fellow; a clown: with various shades of intensity as an opprobrious epithet, like fool, dolt, etc.
lunatic
noun1- A person who is affected by lunacy; a mentally deranged person.
2- A very foolish person.
3- A person affected with lunacy; specifically, an insane person who has lucid intervals, or one whose unsoundness of mind is acquired, not congenital, as distinguished from an idiot.
Lunacy: the moooon made me do it
I bet the people who think the government is reverse engineering alien technology in perfect secrecy are also people who think the government is too incompetent to do anything right.
Legislative government and government-funded military aren't the same thing. If the United States had access to alien technology first, hoarding it in secrecy would be a textbook military move.
It wouldn't just be the US government. If alien artifacts are as common as some people make them out to be, every government in the world would have to not only be in on the conspiracy, but also doing their part masterfully in an age when everyone has a phone in their pocket capable of broadcasting to the whole world.
It's even worse if they're actually succeeding in reverse engineering alien technology, because they'd have to either never use it, or fake something like the Manhattan Project to explain where the technology came from.
Getting back to the idiocy of people who think governments can't do anything right, those same people are often big fans on the military and law enforcement, completely failing to acknowledge that those things are functions of the government, because that would mean admitting the government can, in fact, do some things really well.
Fair point
I'm saying it. He's a loon. He thinks the Pope helped smuggle a UFO out of Mussolini's Italy to the U.S.
The Pope and Mussolini were allies, by the way.
It wouldn't though. I'm not saying UAPs are extraterrestrial. I'm saying as long as each person who leaks is met with plenty of, "no, you're crazy." It would help contain it.
Both with pressure and delegitimization. Now... proof is the thing that's required. Not simply testimony.
If everyone who claims that is a loon (and they may be), then the leakers are auto-discredited.
Again and with clear emphasis because it looks like it was missed: I'm not saying UAPs are extraterrestrial. I'm making a meta-point.
If leakers are almost automatically easily classed as loons, then any inquiry isn't an inquiry. They may be off their rockers.
And even "super-advanced tech" need not have extraterrestrial origin. But UAPs happen. We all seem to have forgotten O'Hare. Whatever happened was in passenger jet airspace.
Regardless of what planetary origin, UAPs deserve inquiry.
This is a thought provoking book. The author was even interviewed by Colbert and presented very cogently. Which is why I bought and read it.
Before anyone knee-jerks, it attempts to only use the most credible UAP encounters and looks at them with skepticism and a scientific mind.
To add onto this, iirc the current US policy of, "discredit and ignore" was created during the cold war because they didn't want it to distract Americans from the red scare and possibility of nuclear war. They actually brought in a team of scientists to take all the project blue book cases and come up with a reason for what was happening, and if they couldn't think of anything, they were supposed to just make something up. It's why "swamp gas" and "weather balloons" are meme'd about. The result is that because the public stopped taking it seriously, the military stopped taking it seriously as well. Since then, I think I remember reading that some of the scientists have expressed regret for doing it because they saw reports that they couldn't explain or even imagine an explanation for; but they wouldn't have done it if they'd realized how strong of a chilling effect it'd have on the subject.
To be clear, I'm not saying that it is aliens either, but there was an effort made to discredit UFO reports and it worked extremely well.