Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress The US government has recovered alien spacecraft and bodies from crash landings on Earth, and is keeping the whole thing covered up, Congress was told on Wednesday. Ryan Graves, a former F-18 pilot who served in the US Navy for over a decade, retired US Navy commander David Fravor, and David Grusch, an intelligence officer who …
Mining other planetary systems--regardless of whether they already supported intelligent life--for the materials needed to build a Dyson sphere was the McGuffin for a series of sci fi books. Unfortunately I can't remember the name (or author) of the series, which IIRC I heard as book-on-CD.
"Mining other planetary systems--regardless of whether they already supported intelligent life--for the materials needed to build a Dyson sphere was the McGuffin for a series of sci fi books. Unfortunately I can't remember the name (or author) of the series, which IIRC I heard as book-on-CD."
Dennis E. Taylor Bobiverse series? (We are Bob).
Maybe their thought processes are sufficiently-different than ours that they haven't yet figured out our language. If they do figure it out, we'll probably learn that they just want to sell us stuff. C'mon: what computer geek wouldn't want a real alien control stick for Flight Simulator?
Mercantilism has been a common basis for human exploration and migration.
They might want to take our stuff, but I don't see what we have which they couldn't get more easily elsewhere.
Strangely enough, as a pilot I can see the crashing happening more than you might think.
First of all, any intelligence that can manage interstellar travel would have long ago given up on the idea of computerized auto-pilots as a bad idea in confined areas such as a planet's airspace. They will in all likelihood be under manual control. If the people [0] doing the flying are used to maneuvering in the vacuum of space, or in a very tenuous atmosphere like that of Mars, perhaps an atmosphere as dense as Earth's would cause trouble, especially with their reflexes.
One of many thingies that make one go "hmmmmmm ... ".
I mean, seriously, aliens come from who knows how many millions of parsecs away, and somehow they manage to ONLY crash-land on property controlled by the US military, completely out of view of civilians (and grunts with cell phone cameras in their pockets).
Yeah, sure, right. Pull the other one.
Maybe they're DARTS, aimed to deflect Earth from reaching the rich galactic civilization...and spoiling it. Or Teasers, drunk rich alien kids who override the safety systems in their ships so they can buzz humans.
There may be aliens out there, but it seems unlikely they would leave evidence.
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Well nothing's infinitely improbable.
That's the entire reason that an infinite probability generator or engine was such a feat of attainment.
Don't you remember how to make an infinitely improbable machine?
You have to plot the exact improbability factor and feed it to a finite improbability generator, if you get your math right then the infinite probability generator pops into existence.
Mmmm… at the moment we think that, but only because our current calculations are based on c being constant - and we’ve used that to define time. Which is why it’s confusing if you only change half the equation… now, I’m definitely not saying that is not correct, Einstein was pretty clever and I got a 1st in General Relativity at Uni so hope I understand the maths…. But you can’t say causality itself is broken by FTL, especially when that same argument was attempted with the “twins paradox” and Special Relativity. We’re only talking about maths, and it may be that General Relativity is to (the next thing) as Newtonian Mechanics is to General Relativity… That is, a more precise calculation. It would be a bit sad if Einstein has nailed it and all we’ve got left to learn is biology ;)
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Craft for non-human biological life?
Perhaps like a test vehicle with with a test animal inside, as a bio crash dummy.
Only a few decades ago animal testing was used by US In building experimental spacecraft and gathering data.
So if it wasn't one of ours that it's probably from someone else's test somewhere else on the planet.
I believe the US is the only country where top-secret X-planes are a national sport and a national agency, in this case the CIA, has openly confessed to stirring the UFO pot in order to create an atmosphere of plausible deniability.
If the big fuss did not centre on the US, the CIA would not have been doing its job properly.
Senator to witness: "Who did you say you worked for, again?"
It's the cloud of crayon eaters that fawn over the one crank and any given moment that looked semi credible until they started howling about secret programs and alien autopsies.
Here's a hint, the military has crackpots in it too. Military staff are no less prone to go crazy, hold delusional beliefs, and lie for publicity. If only one person is saying this stuff and is passing it off without credible evidence, your willingness to believe them marks you as part of the same tribe.
To be fair, this is true for scientists and most other areas of culture as well. But weirdly that seems to be the kryptonite of our era, a large pool of foolish people who would rather believe one loud crank with a pile of made up stories, instead of looking at a larger pile of hard facts backed by most of the global population of informed people. Never have a seen an era so in love with lies and self deception.
Also strange that "witnesses" never agree on one shape: The UFOs they describe are all of wildly different shapes and looks, and before somebody says "different craft for different purposes", please have a look at our planes: They all have a similar look, it's always a body with wings, and they all fly more or less the same way. Any plane looks like a plane.
UFOs are of all kind of (very simplified) shapes, and there aren't two which have similar flight characteristics -- well, except the "they fly much better than our gear" part...
If aliens did indeed arrive, and even if after that long and costly trip they only chose to play hide & seek with (always!) isolated persons, they still would only have brought one type of vessel, maybe two, not dozens of totally different ones. What is this, an intergalactic aerial meeting?...
A blimp doesn't look like a helicopter, or the ubiquitous Cessna. The F117 looked so whacky it was the cause of UFO reports for a decade before the authorities went public with it. The UFO fan community were asking questions about how come the saucer was suddenly obsolete.
Not that I've been a believer in the last, oh, 45 years or so.
> A blimp doesn't look like a helicopter, or the ubiquitous Cessna.
That might be true, but I somehow doubt a mission to some faraway star system would bother lugging those along! Maybe the helicopter (or rather a small drone), but that's all. Payload is at a premium, so you won't bring anything you don't absolutely need. Definitely not a dozen wildly different vehicles just to confuse the locals...
Besides, the F117 might be a little angular, but it's still a central body with wings on both sides, totally plane-like, even the Northrop B-2 "flying wing" bomber is just a central body with (huge) wings on each side: For an alien having no preconception about what a plane should look like, they must all follow the same schema, besides they also all fly the same way (horizontally, wings level, in the direction of the central body).
I agree balloons (helium or hot air) would be different, but then again those are very low-tech devices any halfway civilized alien would probably recognize.
Funny how those shapes track the latest technology. Back in the day it was flying chariots. Victorian UFOs were airships, with people claiming to see the crew clambering up and down the rigging like the old windjammers. Then somebody low on oxygen describes a flaw in the corner of his canopy as "skipping like a saucer", it gets picked up by a journo... Then Area Whatever starts flying stealth triangles and a new shape emerges onto the UFO scene.
Were I Elon Musk, I would be building hypersonic penises, docking them with donut shaped airships, and pretending I wasn't. Hey, Elon, are you by any chance...?
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