Re: Alien UFOs
Flesh Gordon lives! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_Gordon
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 …
It's actually very common for people witnessing something outside of expected context to have glitchy perceptions/memories regarding it.
Memory is a reimagining every time something is remembered.
And so every time something is remembered it gets a little more off like that and game of social telephone ready a bus we're taught to demonstrate the invalidation of the rumor mill as a source of information.
The way visual processing and final interpreted rendering by the brain to the conscious person within that brain...
Well you put it shortly it's not a camera.
It's a heuristically interpretive rendering.
This is very true, no idea why you got a downvote. Modern research suggests that when we recall a memory, we have to rewrite it back immediately afterwards, and there is no guarantee that the rewrite is identical to the original. Thus, memories drift over time. I have to agree, mine certainly do. There was even a song about it once - "Ah yes, I remember it well" or something.
All of which kinda undermines claims that such sightings can "prove" the wild and wacky beliefs of the self-deluded.
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I'd be inclined to take such things with less salt if the eyewitness reports were ever anything more than that. "We saw it on radar" is emphatically NOT the same as "here is the recording of some anomalous radar signals we picked up," and whenever you drill further into these things, the actual physical evidence becomes ever more nebulous. Literally anyone can say, "I saw a UFO and recorded solid evidence of it, and the MiBs came and took it away," which neatly explains why all sorts of people have said this sort of things in the past, their testimony always differs, and pretty much always has a strong social context to it.
The same goes for all sorts of "paranormal" reports; in the US, people constantly seem to be experiencing "demons" all over the place, whilst reports of hauntings in the British Isles are always determined to be variants of ghosts or "little folk" (such as poltergeists, pookas, and so on). Even weird ones like Gef the Talking Mongoose don't get the immediate "it's a demon" response on the Isle of Man that they would get in Texas.
The obvious explanation here, is of course, not that demons like to terrorise Americans, but that the fundamentalist Christian belief systems that are common in the US, with a strong belief in demons is projected onto anomalous experiences when people have them; and people have anomalous experiences all the time. People do, of course, forget that our senses are deeply unreliable, the visual cortex actually invents half the information that it integrates (what? you can't see those big blind spots in your field of vision? whodathunkit?), hallucinatory experiences are much more common than people think (stress, tiredness, illness, drugs, and so on are all causes), and the brain likes to try to interpret anything anomalous as something to be paid attention to, due to evolutionary threat responses.
"Strange that these sightings occur almost always in the US, Land of Neurosis. Could there be a connection?"
And have you listened to the recorded commentary of pilots seeing "something strange"? They are almost invariably cool, calm and professional at all times. Then you get these two "surfer doods" flying multi-million dollar US fighter jets screaming about "UFOs" and sounding like university football jocks at a toga party from Animal House, ie the so-called "tic-tac" video :-)
Strange that these sightings occur almost always in the US, Land of Neurosis. Could there be a connection?
The connection is there in the lede:
the government is concealing important knowledge from lawmakers and the public.
Recent revelations like the Snowden affair confirm what Americans think is standard government practice, but the UFO conspiracy theories date from the time when, after accidental sightings, men in black would routinely meet aircraft passengers and tell them not to report seeing new/secret/research aircraft that had flown past.
Funny how not a single one of the (presumably hundreds, if not thousands) of US military grunts involved in the so-called recovery operations has actually managed to "collect" a small bit of the supposed material. They can mail home spoils of war (confiscated weapons, mainly), but can't pocket a small shaving from a crashed "UFO"?
And then there is the impossibility of keeping it secret for any length of time. Have you SEEN the shit that people babble about on antisocial media these days? Especially the former idiot-in-chief, who as Commander of the Armed Forces would presumably have had to have been briefed (and don't quote some dumb-ass movie script at me, this is Real Life).
"People are convinced that the gubmint is completely inept, and at the same time they are sure they can keep secrets indefinitely, even through parties in power constantly change."
More importantly, what is the probability of any military organization keeping secret something that would otherwise be likely to open up massive funding opportunities to them?
"Have you SEEN the shit that people babble about on antisocial media these days?"
And who would believe them? I'm not saying the claims about aliens are true but we have seen multiple times in the past where self declared critical thinkers and sceptics have 'debunked' a leak about some government program which has later turned out to be true.
"Unless it's a flip-card digital clock showing the time in VCR notation ....."
Not sure about VCR notation[0], but I have a flip-card digital clock radio (with stereo cassette player!) here in the office that hasn't been plugged in since we moved in. It has shown the correct time twice per day that entire time ...
I set it to 4:04, as I do all my non-running analog clocks. That way one can tell at a glance that time was not found.
[0] Blinking 88:88 wouldn't be a time ... but blinking 12:00 would. Except flip-cards don't blink ... )
"4:04? Why not set it to 5:00, so it can be 5 o'clock somewhere?"
Because this is not "somewhere", it's "here". Also, because it's always 5 o'clock somewhere there is no need to set a reminder.
Oh, is that the time? Have a beer :-)
That, and because explaining jokes takes the edge off them ... even when I can see that joke from where I type.
And then there is the impossibility of keeping it secret for any length of time. Have you SEEN the shit that people babble about on antisocial media these days?
Indeed. Any sufficiently advanced technology would have been posted to War Thunder or Star Citizen reddits by now.
I wouldn't know. I barely have enough spare time to waste here on ElReg. The likes of Reddit are right out.
Sensible. War Thunder is a popular game. Trolling on Reddit is also a popular game. This lead to situations like people arguing about whether the BV* on a Challenger 2 was welded or riveted. Then someone posting the workshop manuals in an "I win" kinda way... Which often meant winning a lengthy jail term because the manuals are, of course, classified. But that hasn't stopped idiots over the years posting a lot of classified performance data to win points.
And thus it became something of a meme. Or forced poor intelligence types to have to trawl that swamp looking for stuff that shouldn't be on there.
*BV= Boiling Vessel. Tea, for the making of. Tankies are likely to throw stuff at you if you metion brew up though.
What makes hié think there isn't oversight ?
So this bullshit has now reached Congress. The army has alien corpses recovered from crashed UFOs, yet, in this age of smartphones, there isn't a single picture of proof floating around.
I wonder how many other governments are hiding UFO stuff, and why nobody else in the world is talking about it.
Oh, by the way, apart from their good word, I don't suppose they've actually produced anything in the way of proof ?
this bullshit has now reached Congress
It's the logical culmination of all the other bullshit that's been accumulating there. US politics is now concerned with very little else than conspiracy theories. I suppose it's a convenient distraction from a burning world.
"US politics is now concerned with very little else than conspiracy theories."
To be fair, most of the nutjobs, wackos, outright loonies and complete idiots are confined to Congress. The Senate is still relatively sane, being composed mostly of professional shameless liars who actually know they are lying and can sometimes be convinced to change their minds, if it'll get them votes or money.
Probably because, in the world where TV show logic applies, they buy into the secret US agency that has technology the rest of us could only dream of which is used to intercept all of the UFOs over every country and bring them back to the US, because if you have a secret organization that cannot get help from anyone else for fear of breaking your secrets, you would want all the potentially dangerous stuff in one place where it can all blow up simultaneously. They're entertaining shows sometimes, but not so much when you find people who think they actually happened.
You're right, in this age of smartphones how can there be <secret laws we aren't allowed to know>? Someone would have photo'd and posted it on reddit, shurely! Your argument is stillborn. We have secret courts to go with the secret laws, and those accused can't even get a lawyer.
They did not report aliens bodies.
They reported nonhuman biologicals.
Probably a test craft using animals as crash dummies and simple trained operators.
We all remember the nasa spacecraft designed for and operated by chimps don't we?
Is less than a hundred years ago so virtually yesterday.
"They reported nonhuman biologicals."
In other words, the drone crashed into a tree and got splinters.
More likely, the "vehicle" was a drug smuggling submarine, any "alien pilots" were from one of the drug cartels, and the "non-human biologicals" were cocaine, fentanyl and/or pot. Throw in the military rumo(u)r mill (kind of like the kid's game of Telephone[0], but on steroids), and Bob's yer Auntie.
Perhaps appropriately, my spall chucker wants me to change fentanyl to entangle.
[0] That's "Chinese Whispers" to you Brits.
Shhhh. Stop talking sense.
Don't even think about bringing up mind numbing distances to travel, almost certain biocontamination and that using drones is routine for humans now... for some reason aliens must visit in person but to largely only do so in country areas of the US where the only locals are stone drunk and it's just US military who can get there.
Any alien technology that could make it to our solar system would have very good satellite technology so could watch for as long as they wanted. They'd only need to drop down for biological samples which just in the interests of variety wouldn't solely be in the US wilderness, but there's no way that any sane intelligence would risk actual meat sacks on such a task.
well we know that the "senators" (or whatever they are in USA parlence) are fucking idiots as they are all "god" believers, who at this point haven't realised if any of the shit the "idiot" is telling them is true totally negates their holy books, and god goes out the window with force.
"must visit in person but to largely only do so in country areas of the US"
People keep saying this. It's not true.
Rather, apparently they only visit (and crash) in areas completely under the control of the US military, in sooper sekrit locations out of view of civilians and where the grunts picking up the pieces don't carry cell phone cameras.