Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
Anyone that thinks these "whistleblowers" are real should take a look at the track record of america on its treatment of real whistleblowers.
Real whistleblowers in the US go to prison, mysteriously die or flee the country to non-extradition countries.
This shit doesn't even stand up to the most basic level of critical thinking. If they were actually blowing the lid of some grand conspiracy that the US military doesn't want you to know they would be treated like that's what they're doing.
Not to mention, the term isn't "alien aircraft". It's unidentified flying objects (i.e. aircraft). Those balloons from China were originally UFOs too. All a UFO is, is unidentified. It's a gigantic logical leap to presume that an object is alien just because it's unidentified. It's the exact same sort of thinking that leads to religion and attributions to God. Lack of information or understanding doesn't mean the banal explanation is impossible.
Plus, no government program on this scale is ever going to remain secret. We know the moon landing isn't faked because of just how many people would've had to agree to keep it a lie and stick to a careful narrative. The same is 100% true of aliens.
People still bring up the ""spy"" balloons despite the fact the US gov has basically pulled back on everything it said about them, it's so fucking weird, they were just boring weather balloons but they were used to cause such a ridiculous amount of drama.
Everyone's standard for evidence is basically crap. No evidence required just need some guys to say "yeaaaah totally, trust me bro" and that's that. This lack of any standards for evidence is leads to people believing made up bullshit like Iraq having WMDs as a justification for war. It allows them to put testimonies of things out there and people will just believe them on testimony with no actual material evidence required.
Yea, once there is any video evidence that doesn't look like the worse camera in history held up by a parkinson's patient I'll actually consider believing in UFOs. Like cmon folks, all cameras are 1080p now at least with auto stabilisation and they are literally everywhere, if there are any aliens on earth there would be an actual proper video at this point.
I did this to trick a friend that was all about alien UFOs, I only feel like a little bit of a jerk for it lol
I went for a walk on a clear day when you could see the moon and just used my camera to film the moon as I wiggled my hands around so it looked like the moon was just a white object darting around lol
I watched the hearings yesterday, and I was mostly left with the impression that we need more investigations, and to kick some asses in the aviation world so that encounters with UAPs can be safely reported without sacrificing the career of the pilot in question by even talking about it.
Mostly it's stuff we already know about, the tictac and a couple other similar events. The most interesting thing by far to me is the report of a UAP that "split" a flight of F-18s. That means that it physically passed between two jets. Hard to say that it was a balloon or sensor defect in that event. I bring up balloons because lot of the UFO craze is caused by people just not knowing what they're seeing or now having the knowledge to contextualize a relatively static object appearing to move via parallax against a static background due to the movement of the observer source. It certainly wasn't helped by the fact that back in the day, the Air Force was doing MIB psyops to the locals who reported to the air force base when stealth fighters were first being developed and tested. Civilians then started mass reporting about "triangle UFOs" which were just F-117s before anyone even knew that those existed, and you got the pile of of fraudsters and people who just wanted their moment in the limelight.
What we're getting in the Congressional hearing isn't that. These are our most trained and experienced fighter pilots operating multiple sensor systems, all of which are showing events that to our current knowledge of physics are basically impossible, and compounded by confirmation from the Mk 1 Eyeball. Fooling the human eye is pretty easy, but trained observers like fighter pilots are harder to fool, but still possible. Fooling trained human observers and multiple different sensor systesm (FLIR, RADAR, and optical cameras) all at once is still possible, but harder. But the more sensor systems in play, the harder it is to fool all of them, and the incidents in question had the full sensor suite of multiple AEGIS mounting surface warships, multiple fighter pilots and weapons officers and the sensor systems of those planes from multiple different angles all in general agreement about the impossible behaviors of the UAPs.
At the tail end of last year, we just got the reveal of the latest and greatest in US secret weapons development with the B-21 and that was pretty much an iteration on known physics and known systems. B-21 is miles better than B-2, but it isn't a tictac, and when we look at the development of these kind of systems in the past, they generally take about a decade to go from conceptualization to prototype, and about another decade to go from prototype to public reveal. In that timeframe, B-21s would have been around during the right era for the tictac event and the one off Virginia Beach, but again, B-21s aren't magical supertech vehicles that can ignore all known physics. B-21s could probably have spoofed some of the sensors on the ships and F-18s that intercepted the Tictacs, but they still are a visible plane, no MCU style invisibility/colorshifting panels to make it look like a grey cube inside a transparent sphere, or just the smooth countourless description of the tictac.
Now, all that being said, I don't think that it was "little green men" either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence after all, and what evidence we have is some combination of sparse, classified, and disorganized. I think that right now we have unexplained behaviors from unexplained objects and our best approach going forwards is going to be to try and collate data and coordinate the study of it to try and figure out what causes these events.
At the same time, I don't think that these events are the result of foreign actors either. If China had that kind of tech, we wouldn't have seen the pathetic excuse for balloons this year, and they probably would have made a play for Taiwan by now. If Russia had that kind of tech, they wouldn't be rolling out T-55 rustbuckets to fight in Ukraine. Clearly the answer is South Korea and the pro-Starcraft scene is there to train the pilots in microing such a highly versatile and responsive craft. I for one welcome our new Korean overlords. :p
The thing that stands out to me there is that it's multiple ships and planes tracking this and producing this data. If it was like a glitch in the AN/SPY radar on an AEGIS equipped ship like the Princeton, then that same glitch wouldn't also have shown up on the FLIR and optical cameras of an F-18 as well as the radar of the E2 and the non-AEGIS equipped ship like the Nimitz. Repeat down the list for possible sensors. There exists commonality, like all the F-18s would have had the same kind of radar, but that doesn't extend to the E2 nor the ships.
But as mentioned in the hearing, the only publicly available release of that data is the FLIR camera. What's shown on the video I've seen several different "debunkings" of, all of which with various explanations, although the most common is basically thermal lens flare, but that still doesn't explain the eyeball reports nor the radar tracks, but unfortunately we have none of that data available publicly. And this is all of course predicated on the idea of these eyewitnesses being credible. If the follow-up hearings happen and the DoD under congressional pressure releases the radar data from the Princeton and Nimitz that day and it doesn't track with what the people in the hearing today were saying, then that blows a giant hole in the story.
And that's assuming that it's not another misunderstanding that winds up easily explained. Like when we started doing manned space missions, the pilots reported "foo fighters" as dancing lights outside the Mercury spacecraft. Well, it turned out that the Mercury had an issue with condensation on the interior of the windows and that the light from the sun when coming in not diffused from the atmosphere would create an optical illusion of dancing lights. Similar thing with "flying dutchman" ships floating above the horizon where it is merely an optical illusion created by certain atmospheric conditions that create a false horizon. But it'd have to be one hell of a phenomena to show up on multiple sensor systems like that.
At the end of the day, I still don't know. The rational skeptic in me says it probably isn't aliens, but at the same time, unless these fighter pilots are lying under oath, (and Grusch was very clear to couch everything in terms of "this is the hearsay that others have told me, and everything else goes under SCIF") I don't have the imagination to postulate as to what it could be.
The "there is no good evidence" problem is why I want the radar tracks for Nimitz and Princeton released. They'd either confirm the tictac story, or just blow it away entirely, because a large part of what makes that one so compelling is that it was ostensibly tracked from so many different angles from so many different types and models of military radars. If David Fravor was lying about those radar tracks showing the impossible events he describes, then we can dismiss his claims entirely. If the radar tracks show a mostly consistent behavior, then it lends credence to the UAP, and we can discuss it in good faith without having to try and justify it constantly to skeptics. It's one thing when we just have the one FLIR clip. It's another if we have the radar returns from an E2 Sentry, the USS Nimitz, the USS Princeton, and the squadron of F-18s.
Besides, at this point, it's not like these are bleeding edge capabilities. These are all systems that have been around longer than I've been alive. The newer shit is all far and away superior, and so releasing a bit of the information for fighter and naval sensors developed in the fucking EIGHTIES isn't exactly going to be giving up the game to China.
At the end of yesterdays hearing one of the congresspeople asked them if they thought the UAP's were probing our defenses or after our nukes.
The witnesses all said yes.
Now they were being asked to speculate about the unknown, but it is ridiculous to think that a non human probe that has presumably broken the light speed limit wants anything from us. Uranium isn't special. Jets running on dead dinosaurs are not special. If a non human probe is here it is just to study us, it doesn't give a single shit about human tech and resources. The universe is vast and getting resources out of a gravity well is expensive.
Now we could say that they were playing it up for congress and they are likely to get more funding if they pose it as a us vs them problem, but they lost all credibility to me at that point.
Mate if these "whistleblowers" were actually doing any whistleblowing they would be getting treated the same way the US always treats whistleblowers, prison, blacksites, mysterious death, or fleeing to a non-extradition country.
This most basic of critical thinking is all you need to do to realise that this shit stinks and that everything occurring is something the US gov and military wants to occur.
Not to put too fine a point on it, while I don't believe Grusch, I think he's a full on conspiracy nut, I will acknowledge that he was exceedingly careful to not break any laws with how he came forward and reported this. Edward Snowden and other similar whistleblowers got criminalized by doing so in an illegal fashion. When you whistleblow legally, (see: Lt Colonel Vindman in the Trump trial) you don't get exiled to Russia.
Lmao I can't fucking believe how deeply propagandised americans are. Memes like "The CIA award for excellence in journalism" exist for a god damn reason, and yet you people still parrot this shite. It's emblematic of just how deeply engrained the civic religion is. Even doing so on the topic of bloody aliens.
It's completely fucking absurd. Go ahead and tell Julian Assange that you can legally do things the US military doesn't want you to do and nothing will happen to you. Fuck me socialist youtube influencers like Second Thought get their doors knocked by armed goons from homeland security asking about their "unamerican activities".
You know, it's kind of like Bigfoot.
In the 60s I'd say you could almost slightly believe that just maybe there's a big gorilla somewhere that's so remote that nobody ever discovered it.
These days just about every frickin dirt road in the woods has a trail camera on it, lots of houses have surveillance cameras, drones, satellite images, all that stuff. And not these old Polaroids either, not film developed in a darkroom with a shoddy enlarger, HD digital is pretty much standard for all devices.
There's just no damn way this thing could be walking around without something catching it on 1080p video.
Well I imagine it's gotta be the same for the sky. Military's got a lot of eyes on the sky for a lot of reasons.
I mean, I'm no conspiracy nut or UFO true believer or anything, but the simple fact is that aerial photography is nowhere near that simple or easy.
I live directly under the flight path for the local airbase, and about twice a week I have F-35s fly overhead. I basically know the schedule, and I usually try to take a picture of them, but despite it being a routine occurrence that I know to prepare for, I've only managed to get a handful of pictures, and of those pictures, they're almost all small and blurry squintovision. They're better than bigfoot photos but not by much. With my naked eye, I'm close enough to pick out individual features on the airframe and see if the the gear is up or down, and if they have anything on wing pylons, etc. But my actual pictures? Usually come out something like this. Now imagine you're trying to do that for a target 5 miles distant rather than just a few hundred feet overhead, and it only gets worse.
And the thing is that yes, the military does have a lot of eyes on the sky, but as they pointed out in the hearings, there exists no mechanism for making reports of UAP, collating and collecting the relevant radar and sensor data, and then trying to figure out what it was. If you talk about UAPs, you're going to get laughed out of the room if not sidelined into a career dead end.
Like even ignoring the possibility of aliens, and assuming that this is just some unknown atmospheric effect (that shows up on multiple different radar systems, FLIR, and optics), it's still worth gathering that data so we can find out what's going on. Investigating odd phenomena is great for our scientific understanding of the world around us. Right now we don't have a mechanism for Pilot A to say "Hey, that blip on radar did strange behaviors X, Y, and Z" and then the relevant sensor data is collected into a format for use by meteorologists or whomever.
99.9 repeating % of the time, it's just going to be something innocuous like what all the civilian UFO reports are of "in these specific atmospheric conditions, we get an optical illusion of a cubical cloud" Locals in LA think that the borg are invading, but from other angles, the cloud just looks slightly funny rather than a cube. Or they mistake a drone formation for some impossible alien craft. But when we have trained military observers who are all saying the same thing and we're seeing data from our most advanced military sensors, it's a different matter entirely.
That's why I'm so mono-focussed on the tictac report, because in that example we have radar tracks from 4 seperate system types (AN/SPY on the USS Princeton, AN/SPS and AN/SPQ on the USS Nimitz, either APS-125 or APS-139 for an E-2 Hawkeye, and the AN/APG-73 on the F-18s) These were all cited as having been there and tracking the tictac, and reported that it descended from 80,000 feet to sea level in a matter of moments, and when the F-18s are sent out, that's when we get the encounter that David Fravor describes. Alex Dietrich, the pilot in the wingplane of Fravor's flight also described the same encounter, complete with "I don't consider myself a whistle blower ... I don't identify as a UFO person," but despite that disclaimer, she still ends up collaborating his story for how the tictac behaved.
So there we have no fewer than 6 separate radar sets, of which at least 4 sources are different models so we can pretty safely rule out operator error or code glitch, the eyes of 2 seperate F18s pilots, one at high elevation, one that moved to intercept and they all describe the behavior of the tictac as moving impossibly to how we understand physics. Later on in a followup flight, they stick the FLIR pod on one of the F18s and we get the video that doesn't show very much, and we know for a fact that what's shown on that video isn't the full duration of it.
Now let's throw UFOs out of the equation entirely. Assume that it's only some kind of atmospheric anomaly like ball lightning or something. Isn't that still something that's incredibly cool and worth investigation? If something can act like that, let's figure out what it is and how it does it. And if it is aliens, then congratulations, we have the most important discovery in the history of mankind on our hands. And if it isn't aliens, then we've merely done a lot of cool science and made both commercial and military aviation safer by explaining what these are and if/how they are a danger. And that's what this congressional meeting was about. Setting up official channels so that when pilots run into things like this they can report it and we can start to aggregate the data and figure out what's going on. And on the other side of the equation is investigating DoD black projects that may or may not be pretending to be aliens (we know they did this with the original stealth programs, complete with MIB suits visiting the local skywatchers and telling them very specifically that it WASN'T UFOs, and thus distracting attention away from the stealth planes.) and letting the American government know what the fuck is actually going on in our military that ostensibly works for us.
Going just on headline (paywall) this isn’t a surprise. Even astronomers will tell you they see things they can’t identify right away. Some are birds, some are balloons etc. it doesn’t always mean every UFO is an alien.
Shout out to that time in 1998 when the world-leading astrophysicists at CSIRO solved the 17-year-old mystery of the signals they were picking up and couldn't explain. Turns out they were caused by the office microwave whenever it was opened before it was finished.
Shout out to that time in 1998 when
I thought I was in for the worlds worst u/shittymorph attempt for a second.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, full stop.
There's nothing saying that this isn't something of our own creation.
The Roswell incident exposed the existence of Mylar -- something human-made, classified, but other-worldly in appearance and texture to anyone who might have seen it at that time... Now something mundane enough to be used as potato chip bags.
I'll believe that "unidentified flying objects" are a common sight. I'll believe that some of those look like they could be alien spacecraft. That doesn't mean we've actually encountered aliens.
If UFOs are a common sight, then why have we not seen a good picture of them? Wtf is going on with all this hype over UFOs, when there's not a single image. Almost everybody nowadays has a camera
The one time I saw a "UFO", a little digging turned out to be a known training drone from the Army training center down the road.
source: trust me bro
or whatever, I won't waste my time with this bs. "Alien" UFOs would never exist on this planet
I will actually human centipede myself if the stories about "aliens", that y'all want so much to be true, were true in the slightest.
Floating balloons are also a common sight and they account for the vast majority of these UFO videos. It's really not that great of a mystery that tens of thousands of balloons are let go of on a daily basis and just floating around. When looking at a fixed object while in a fast moving object you end up with some interesting illusions. UFOs are seen regularly because a lot of things out there are unidentifiable, but that doesn't mean they are aliens. Shit loads of balloons though. 🎈
These days propaganda and lies spread by the government to cover up things they shouldn't do is also a common sight
The claims are much bigger and much more serious. It’s not just that we see UFOs.
Under oath - the ranking intelligence officials claim that there is a SAP (top secret program) dedicated to recovering and reverse engineering non-human intelligence aircraft.
That non human bodies have been recovered.
The intelligence officials / contractors read into these programs have harmed and potentially even murdered people to keep the secret under wraps.
That the programs have no congressional oversight of actions or funds. That funds are being diverted in criminal ways - likely a fraction of the missing DOD money that cannot be accounted for.
This is all very serious before even considering the repercussions of non-human entities present on earth.
I just have trouble believing that the probably thousands of people both government and private involved in such programs that no doubt exist across every major power on earth (unless for whatever reason UFOs choose to only fly around and crash into the continental US) have all managed to stay quiet about something of this magnitude for decades (or damn near 100 years if his claim of it starting in the 1930s is to be believed)
Not to mention that, simultaneously, the government(s) is powerful enough to successfully suppress this information for a hundred years, while some how also failing to keep somebody from testifying about it in a publicly televised congressional hearing
I've been watching a really good documentary about this and the entire situation is very complex. There's a combination of active government coverups and false information to confuse the situation. Anyone who finds out too much is at risk of being discredited or killed. You should look it up, it's very high quality. It's called the X-Files.
Jesus Christ I never say you had me in the first half, but...
Damn you! 😆
My question is, if any of this is true, why haven’t we been able to observe any such activity in space? You’d think if there were regular occurrences of “alien” activity on Earth, that all of our planet’s considerable astronomical observational power would observe corresponding activity in the area around the planet.
On top of that, every country in the world would have to be collaborating in keeping it a secret since the US of A isn't some special place where they uniquely occur.
Occam's Razor leads me to believe its yet another conspiracy theory.
They apparently always manage to get to crash sites before the locals do and manage to somehow quickly and quietly extract every little piece of debris spread across several square miles without anyone noticing.
It's just not realistic.
The funds being diverted is the real news. I bet they are being diverted to a secret "alien program" that is just someone's pocket. Slap some rumors and top secretness on there, and you are able to grift for decades.
