Senator trying to force Uncle Sam to share everything it knows about UFOs US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been pulling some strings to force the government to spill what it knows about UFOs. With the frenzy around "unidentified anomalous/aerial phenomena" – the slightly less hysterical term – reaching unusual heights of late, the New York senator aims to introduce an amendment to the …
...then fire it at us to disrupt scientific progress...
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
D Adams.
Rather than carping and whining about the efforts of others, please extend us the incomparable benefits of your offerings.
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” ― Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle
"The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about."--Wayne Dyer
Ring any bells?
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...and..I almost forgot. Just for you--
"I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it."---Douglas Adams
The math behind neural nets that underpins our current LLMs was developed throughout the 1920s and made adaptive in the 1970s. By the 80s it was considered passe, a dead end, and it has only recently awoke (and barring additional breakthroughs it return to) hibernation.
The public's notion UFO's were a symptom of the golden age of sci-fi and the desire of the government to put useful idiots to work covering up their R&D efforts in the post war period.
No credible evidence of an extraterrestrial UFO has ever been presented. Much like the modern conservative movement, they often SAY they have evidence, but they never produce anything that stands under scrutiny. And both the government and the media play it up for cheap clickbait.
However, while some dismissed this as cute and harmless, these idiots are superspreaders of viral stupidity. And they are easy targets for every crank, con-man and cult to recruit off of. Sincere belief in this garbage should be treated like an infectious disease. Instead the media plays to the foil hat set, and the government plays along because they can easily use it to push the buttons of both the public and the media.
"veni vidi vici"
Or as Sellar and Yeatman put it so beautifully "weeny, weedy and weaky"
For any leftpondians or youngsters, please check the great history textbook "1066 And All That" by the aforementioned authors. The example exam questions are a lesson in themselves.
Aaagh, flashbacks to my first Latin lesson, taken by the headmaster (who didn't much care for me, bit on the unkempt side - me, not him).
I'd only been taught the "vee" pronunciation and, having read "1066.." many times before, there was this one joke at the start I'd never quite understood.*
Come the day, headmaster writes out the phrase, explains that 'v' is spoken as a 'w', reads it out - and promptly turns to fling the chalk at the oik who was apparently laughing at him!
* However, wheeling their dead around in barrows never got old!
If they find Earth animal protein as nutritious or tasty as humans do, it would make more sense to remove us and simply automate the process of livestock production. Unless they have a particular appetite for human, other animals are more efficient at turning things into protein while not fighting back or wasting time trying to build things on top of the input material.
Re: our desires to make physical contact with (extraterrestrial) aliens, Carl Sagan observed that perhaps we need to temper those desires somewhat, because...based on what we should have learned from evolution, it is a fact that the life-form which rises to the top of the food-chain is the one which is the most intelligent. (Question: what is the deadliest, most rapacious, species-eliminating predator to have ever inhabited this planet?)
If a life-form is de facto more intelligent than we are by virtue of mastering inter-stellar travel, we are, de facto, lower on the food-chain. And the conclusion is...?
This simple fact was (perhaps unwittingly) understood by HG Wells who, in his famous War of the Worlds, has the invaders consider us only, and use us as, food. Read the book.
More likely, utterly ignore.
The energy requirements of coming down a gravity well are pretty huge, so why bother?
There's probably nothing down here that's not more easily accessible from a comet or asteroid - except perhaps fissile material, perhaps.
On the other hand, bored alien billionaires...
"Do not enter: spoiled by idiots"
Can't really improve on this...
Although, I heard the theory put forth that, some gubbermint leaders know for sure the extraterrestrials are real, and think if we ever got our shit together they would visit us en mass and bring their Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, and that is unacceptable to the status quo, so they continue to waste resources and wage war just because they think it will keep the aliens away.
I was in a place full of cages that had big locks, with a mandatory "2nd person" in tow and I quipped "which one do you keep the alien in?"
He was not amused.
Mind you I was in another place discussing new software and one of the blokes said "we're legally obliged to inform you that we test using rabbits" to which I replied "I've never seen a rabbit use a computer before".
He was not amused either.
The phrase "involuntary suicide" springs to mind.
"The thinking is that a more comprehensive data dump of government documents on the matter will push back against conspiracy theories and the perception that Uncle Sam is purposefully holding back information from the public."
I suspect the inverse would be true.... release of the info would increase the paranoia and conspiracy theories. Appropriate icon of course.
"release of the info would increase the paranoia and conspiracy theories"
Of course. Because the .gov will be so stupid as to admit that some stuff has been left out of the release "for security reasons", which is obviously where they are hiding the stuff about the aliens.
It couldn't possibly be because releasing the info would give China and Russia information on capabilities of hardware that is currently undergoing test and labeled "top secret" and/or our own capability of seeing what the bad guys are doing ... Nope, it must be aliens, innit.
It doesn't even have to be that close to plausible. The people who want every UAP to be aliens are not very smart, but they are extremely dedicated for no reason, and one thing they've made very clear is that whatever goes against their theory will not be considered. If an object in the air was photographed, then it was aliens. If the mock object has been found, the camera tricks explained, the motivation for the trick completely understood, and the original creator who is the figurehead of the story confessed on tape to making up a hoax, they'll still say it was aliens. They will mostly not talk about all of those things, and if questioned, they'll spend about five seconds coming up with their explanation, which will always be that someone (government/aliens/somebody bad) has made the evidence or forced this person to lie for some reason they won't explain.
If the declassified reports say that a pilot in a secret spy plane was flying above North Korea and saw some unidentified lights, and thirty minutes later the pilot and ground control and everybody identified it as a reflection of an explicable light source off an explicable atmospheric phenomenon, it will still be aliens as far as they're concerned. There might be less of a stigma to those who report UAP sightings if the field hadn't polluted by a bunch of people who insist on ignoring a lot of the ones that became identified and still talk about long-debunked events. Not that they'd be convincing if they only talked about inconclusive sightings, but at least it wouldn't be so obvious they're not even trying for accuracy.
That, and most people are SO easily influenced and lead astray ...
Remember those triangular UFOs that were all the rage a few years ago, from the early '80s thru' the early 2000s?
I created one of those triangles in a campground in the Sierra by stringing three little dim lights about 40 feet up, in an open space between some pine trees. Come later in the evening, we were all telling tall tales around the camp fire, as is typical in such situations. I told a story about my supposed encounter, on Priest's Grade/Coulterville Road (one of the many back doors into Yosemite), and at the opportune moment had my Wife turn on the lights and point up with a "Just like that one?".
The lights were just bright enough to fool the eye into thinking that there were no stars showing between them .... Presto, huge dark triangular shaped "craft" over our camp fire. When the wife shut them off after about 5 seconds, I yelled "Shit! Did you see how FAST that thing was?". One of the guys not in on the trick commented that it made it over the next ridge (about four miles away) in under a second. Strangely enough, almost everybody agreed with him. At this point, some people were claiming they thought it was redish. They got quite inventive about what they thought they had seen.
The oddest thing is that when I collected my wire and lights the next morning, several people asked what I was doing. I told them. They did not believe me! So I told everybody the truth about the hoax over breakfast. Most of them refused to listen, and today many of them still tell the story of the huge triangle craft hovering over our camp that disappeared like a bat out of hell when we all looked up at it.
I never messed with that kind of mass illusion again. Too much room for error.
"I created one of those triangles in a campground in the Sierra by stringing three little dim lights about 40 feet up, in an open space between some pine trees."
You can also get that effect by using an old lens with only a few aperture blades and throwing off the focus. A small aperture works best as you get more interesting diffraction effects.
But you have to get everyone around the campfire totally newted before they'll all agree to hold an old lens up to their eye. Although you could then try to convince them the next morning that the strange thudding noise and weirdly bright dawn was alien encounter residue.
Hmm, jake's approach seems easier (and cheaper! Have you seen how much Old Red Eye those guys can sink?!)
Because the .gov will be so stupid as to admit that some stuff has been left out of the release "for security reasons"
The phrase "two people can only keep a secret if one of them is dead" springs to mind..
For me, the sheer mass of people who must have been involved in these supposed projects yet have never let any of it slip is telling. See phrase above..
If you take this copy of the video of that last StarShip flight (it is a very small file so that we can easily copy it around the truth-hunting brotherhood) and zoom from its original size of 640x480 pixels to full HD, you can *clearly* see the alien's *real* version of StarShip phasing in and out of visibility around the so-called "rocket".
After the dummy craft starts to tumble through its own cloud, you can't see the alien craft any more, PROOF that it accelerated away into space by ion thrusters.
The Senate doesn't have as many loons, though formerly respectable senators like Grassley and Graham have gone full MAGA. Really not sure why Grassley did, surely he isn't planning on running for yet another term when he would turn over 100 in office!
The House though, yeah that small margin has put the kooks like MTG fully in charge.
2 countries with first letters C and R will certainly be very interested.
The West has completely messed up their priorities. Online media does not talk about what is important, and talks about what is not. There was not a single day that I have not head about transgender online, as if this was the most important issue of all times.
It is time for all non-experts to shut up.
YouTube happily serves the following 0.7 billion views political channel full of LGBT topics: https://www.youtube.com/@VALUETAINMENT/videos
Then you have Russell Brand with 1 billion views. He is a British somehow knowing better what is good for Americans: https://www.youtube.com/@RussellBrand/videos
Both by some magic are experts on US war issues and have back links from http://sputnik-magazin.de, which gives some idea on who is the actual beneficiary of those destructive anti-western channels (Russia).
You can check back links yourself at https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker. Then paste there https://www.youtube.com/@VALUETAINMENT and https://www.youtube.com/@RussellBrand
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LOL, I only watch it because I loved Catatonia singing "Mulder and Scully" which keeps me laughing! I wonder if the people thinking that the X-files was a documentary ever watched Burnistoun and thought that was a documentary too? So many great performances years ago!
Iain Connell: E-le-ven.
Elevator: I’m sorry. Could you please repeat that ?
Iain Connell: Eleven. If you don’t underston the lingo, away back hame yer ain country.
Robert Florence: Oh, s’tha talk nae is it ? “Away back tae yer ain country” ?
Iain Connell: Oh, don’t start Mr Bleeding Heart – how can ye be racist tae a lift?
Elevator: Please speak slowly and clearly.
Chuck Schumer is a self-serving liar whose interests extend to the top surface of his skin.
If he's promising something, it is guaranteed to be for his personal benefit, and rife with fraud.
The question is, what's his real angle? He just wants access to the higher technology being hidden by these declarations, or access to the influence these "Revelations" produce. One thing is sure, these aren't actual aliens, and aren't extradimensional.
It doesn't take more than first year physics at uni to make a first approximation at what sort of time and energy would be required to get from the nearest habitable solar system to Sol/3. If there is another way to make the trip that we haven't sorted yet, there's no reason to worry about it. Granted, if something does land, an alien gets out and plants a flag, we can start the hand wringing then. Bombardment from orbit rather than a landing would be a concern as well.
For me, I'm far more concerned with how to keep the damn chipmunks from killing off my sunflower starts, short of genocide, but my patience is getting thin.
"I'm far more concerned with how to keep the damn chipmunks from killing off my sunflower starts"
Sunflower starts are tasty, I grow 'em as micro greens, but the varmints like 'em too. Quarter inch galvanized steel mesh "hardware cloth" low tunnel keeps all manor of critters out. No need for supports, just dig six inch trenchs to bury the sides and Bob's yer auntie. Flatten and wrap the ends to seal, minor cutting helps. Use a cutting wheel on an angle grinder for easiest/fastest results. When the plants are big enough to fend for themselves, roll it up and save it for next year. Mine are seven or eight years old now. Might need to stake it every three or four feet if you have a particularly mischievous puppy.
"short of genocide"
My first suggestion was to get a whippet or two ... assuming you're in a jurisdiction where a garden gun[0] isn't an option.
[0] Small smoothbore gun, designed to fire .22 LR shot shells (AKA "rat shot"). Useful to about 10 yards/meters, or a bit more.
Famous adage: "Nothing is illegal if you can get away with it".
I wouldn't hesitate to use a 'garden gun'. Make sure your neighbors can't get any pictures.
If you're thinking of a weapon you can conceal easier than a rifle, know that you can't use 'ratshot' or 'snakeshot' in just any handgun, though (or just any shotgun / rifle, for that matter); check first.
"Quarter inch galvanized steel mesh "hardware cloth" low tunnel keeps all manor of critters out."
When I put the starts out in the garden, I put a 100mm diameter x 100mm tall piece of PVC pipe around the plant and then a ring of chicken wire (the hardware cloth was more money). Until the plants get tall enough, I have a piece of chicken wire over the top to keep critters out (a short length of rebar weighs everything down). The other day I found a couple tossed about. I think something tried to get in, got hung up and thrashed about until they got free and ran off. What I'd really like to do it build an entire cage around the tastier plants. Nothing seems to go after the onions and garlic. A few other things are attacked until the get to a certain height and then nothing seems to find them too enticing after that. I also need to get a camera with a long lens pointed at the garden so I can see what happens when I'm not out there. The trail cam on the watering hole I put in gets lots of visitors I've never spotted with my own eyes.
with how to keep the damn chipmunks from killing off my sunflower starts, short of genocide
Big dog?
Big [1] cat with attitude?
Ultrasonics?
[1] Not a "big cat" big cat. That would, I suspect be counterproducive when it tries to eat *you*. I mean 7kg of quite annoyed [2] felis domesticus.
[2] We had a big cat like that. Normally quite laid back but, on given access to catnip, tended to go all slashy/bitey psycopathic.
There are bobcats in the area that I've captured on my watering hole trial cam, but they aren't around when I need them. There is a mangy old tom that lives around the house, but last time I saw him, he wasn't looking good. There is a husky that drops by from time to time, but I think I seen it with a collar on before and might just be getting out of his yard since he's very friendly and not too skittish.
I'm having issues getting catnip to stay healthy. It's not happy growing around my house in summer. I tried it out this year to see if local ferrel cats would be interested.
"Given how badly they covered up Hunter Biden's cocaine being found in the Whitehouse, I think it's unlikely they could keep the existence of extraterrestrial visitors secret for more than an afternoon."
Whether it was Hunter's or not, it's funny that word snuck out that this was far from the first time drugs were found lying about in the White House. I also find if very disturbing that They are covering all of this up after letting the information go public. The US Federal government considers all drugs very naughty and the White House has (or should have) layer upon layer of security so to not be able to name the person (or a scapegoat) just screams "coverup".
But the chances of physical visitation are way beyond minuscule.
The distances, the timeframes, the technologies required are literally astronomical.
Why come all this way just to remain aloof?
Like religion, it’s possible but there’s no proof.
Calvin, talking to Hobbes, on a romp through the woods...
“I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man’s destruction of forests.
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has ever contacted us.” © 8/11/1989 Bill Watterson
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