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 …
Perhaps that title should also apply to finding that the video provides evidence of intelligence within Mr Grusch's head[1]:
> A democratic process must be adhered to when evaluating the data
Run a poll to decide if this misshapen lump is made of a metal not of this Earth?
[1] waiting for proper morning, with coffee, before playing a video. But will it live up to expectations or has El Reg put all of the exciting bits into the trailer?!
“I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth. “ Stephen Hawking.
“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.” Bill Watterson
"Four reasons that I can think of:"
5) Slave labor
Everything else isn't hard to find and often easier to harvest from smaller moons/asteroids over getting down and up through Earth's gravity well.
Perhaps some aliens might stop to use Earth as a resource services base, but the curious monkeys would tear down anything they built if it wasn't guarded. Radioactives would be the high value target unless it turns out that a big rock like Ceres can supply them.
I think that any species that could crack travel over interstellar distances might also be able to produce robotic labour.
In the absence of (relativity and causality breaking) faster than light travel, it's a hell of a journey just to visit the closest star. The energies involved in acceleration and deceleration increase exponentially as you approach the speed of light, so practically anything is unlikely to be travelling faster than something like 0.1c.
The closet star to Sol is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.25 ly away. That journey alone at 0.1c would take 42.5 years, and that doesn't factor in time to accelerate and decelerate. If you kidnapped a bunch oif humans at birth and transported them there, they'd be in their mid-forties, and hardly great material for slave labour.
"The closet star to Sol is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.25 ly away. That journey alone at 0.1c would take 42.5 years, and that doesn't factor in time to accelerate and decelerate. If you kidnapped a bunch oif humans at birth and transported them there, they'd be in their mid-forties, and hardly great material for slave labour."
.1c isn't the fastest you can reasonably travel, and time dilation starts to kick in as you accelerate decently.
You just need to figure out a mechanism of acceleration that doesn't require (relatively) slowly throwing mass out of one end of a ship - radiation pressure / photon momentum are more likely, even if we can't yet make sensible use of them.
You do need to go considerably above 0.1c as the time dilation at that speed doesn't help that much. At 0.1c the relative journey time only drops from 42.5 years to 42.3 years. You need to get up to 0.866c to get a 2 to one dilation hence a relative time of 21.2 years. To be really impressive you might prefer something like LHC particle velocity which is 99.999999% of the speed of light. This gets a very "workable" relative journey time of 2 days though scaling from a machine with a 27km long track capable of accelerating sub atomic particles to something capable of transporting "slaves" would be a tough engineering challenge.
"Everything else isn't hard to find and often easier to harvest from smaller moons/asteroids over getting down and up through Earth's gravity well."
Not a lot of liquid water[0] or free oxygen[1] on the smaller moons & asteroids. Nor salt[2].
[0] Melting ice for transport is prohibitively expensive. As is cutting it into blocks and physically placing them in the hold. Water is used in almost every industrial plant in existence here on Earth, I see no reason why aliens would not find it as useful as we do. And ours is free for the pumping, thanks to the fluke of our location with respect to the Sun.
[1] Oxygen is a fairly dangerous chemical in it's free state, binding explosively with many other chemicals. For that reason, it's a very important industrial chemical. Our atmosphere is probably a rarity in the Universe, making it a treasure trove for visiting aliens. Probably.
[2] You don't need to be told how important a chemical salt is ... Again, I'm sure aliens will find it equally useful, even if it's not required for their metabolism.
"You are assuming a very earth-like biology for these aliens which requires oxygen, water, salt and animals as food."
Nope. The first three are important chemicals for industrial purposes. A creature's base metabolism does not alter their chemical properties.
I added the last one mostly for shock value (for small values of "shock", at least in this forum), but then again you never know until you know, and we just plain don't know.
"A democratic process must be adhered to when evaluating the data and it is our collective responsibility to ensure that public involvement is encouraged and respected."
Like the way UK politicians represented BREXIT?
Like US politicians kowtow to lobbists with fists of cash for their reelection funds?
Democracy, if not dead, is certainly in its death throes.
I remember reading a statement by someone, who said that if "They" have the technology for interstellar travel, and they choose to visit us, it's not to make friends, it's to conquer us. So perhaps we should stop trying to communicate with them.
// only reasonable icon
This I very much doubt. If you can travel through space that sort of distance what do you get from Earth? There are limitless sources of resources open to that level of tech. Which leaves religious or ideological idiocy. I rather hope that was something we had monopolised.
It depends what the aliens concerned already have, but there are two general options that science fiction provides:
1. Slaves with sufficient intelligence to do things they haven't automated, but not enough intelligence to design our own spacecraft after they smash up our basic ones.
2. Lunch, assuming that our protein is of use to them, although in that case I think they're better off removing humans and eating the animals we already farm.
There is an alternative: they might just not like the idea of having to deal with us later and figure that destroying us now would be an easier cleanup job than trying to remove us from multiple planets, the way that if there is one sample of Ebola in a lab that doesn't need it, it's usually time to completely wipe out that before it finds its way into any humans. Maybe the aliens will be nice enough to assume we won't be that harmful if we spread, but no guarantees.
3. Research? Human researchers travel all over the world to all sorts of piss holes to study nature. To a super advanced civilization we probably would look like insane little ants, pretending to be 'people'. There is no reason to assume other advanced civilizations would not engage in similar studies. That's a primary method to learn new things, you know?
It is, but if they're doing it, outside a relatively low-chance situation, they have no reason to choose here. If there is a lot of life, they will have seen a lot of it and had a chance to research many different versions, so why this one? If there is not a lot of life, then they'd have to get very lucky to end up in one of the few places that there is something to research. That's no guarantee that they wouldn't, because there's always a chance that we're relatively close to wherever they are so we're the first research-worthy place they've found, but if we're the 52nd planet with life, we might not prove to be an interesting research project.
Also, research might not end well for us. A lot of the organisms we've researched didn't enjoy the experience, and some of those were other humans. I've already covered what could happen if the result of the research is that they conclude that we're a problem and they don't want the pollution to spread.
3. Research? Human researchers travel all over the world ...
Or more likely: entertainment. Visiting Earth could be AKA a safari trip, something to do in a vacation. However for that to be attractive they would need to have FTL travel, a trip of centuries to a safari would be boring.
We're already struggling to find tasks that people are intelligent enough to do, but that can't be automated. This hypothetical advanced civilisation will presumably have progressed their own AI further. Hard to see how they could still have a viable niche for human slaves.
As for food, there have to be hundreds of planets they could terraform to support their own native nutrients, without the hassle of dealing with an organised indigenous species. Nope, not buying that either.
Research seems more likely, they'd want to study us for the same reason we study - well, everything: because we're here.
Evangelism is another possible motivation. And partnership is another - maybe they're feeling pretty lonely out there, and they'd like the support of another intelligent civilisation. Or, if they're "organised" on a similar basis to us, then their explorers will be motivated by profit, and we can look forward to multiple competing factions with mutually antagonistic plans for us.
"We're already struggling to find tasks that people are intelligent enough to do, but that can't be automated."
No, we're not. Haven't you seen all the people saying that they can't find workers for basically every job? Yes, they could probably do something to get them, but they're admitting that they could not automate that job yet and find it more efficient or better to have a human do it. We've been building robots for decades and we still don't have one that is as reliable at figuring out how to reproduce tasks that one human can do quickly. Of course, when a machine is needed to do one specialized set of things, we're quite good at building that, but humans still work pretty well for tasks where quickly interpreting a situation in a non-static way and responding quickly to unusual situations is a frequent situation.
Aliens might have improved on this. There's a reason to believe that they will prioritize it before interplanetary travel. However, that is not a guarantee of that. Different countries here haven't pursued every piece of technology in the same order because some of them had preferences on what was most important. For all we know, aliens could have preferred transportation technology to mechanization and AI, either for pragmatic reasons, for instance if they inhabit somewhere small and need transportation for sufficient space, or ideological ones, such as a belief that AI is unreliable or dangerous.
"As for food, there have to be hundreds of planets they could terraform to support their own native nutrients, without the hassle of dealing with an organised indigenous species. Nope, not buying that either."
And we could easily eat whatever can be grown outside our houses, but we often import things from elsewhere because we think it tastes better. I suggest that, if our nutrients are the same as theirs and they appreciate it, they either destroy us and try automated farming of our crops and livestock, or that they have the humans do that after eliminating threatening technology and organizations. This also assumes that they have terraforming abilities, which is not guaranteed. Possibly our planet is also livable for them and they find it easier to live here than to turn a place like Mars into a pleasant environment.
Thats a pretty flawed argument. Any Aliens with the technology to visit Earth, must by definition be at least 50 years ahead of us minimum, if not hundreds or thousands.
The level of automation AND more importantly the cost of that automation would be buttons to them.
Therefore is no technological reason they would need human slaves, they would WANT to keep slaves for a reason other than the cost of technology - ideological or religious AND be culturally blind enough to accept the risk of a slave uprising using their technology against them. they'd have to be 100% sure that their technology was unusable in any shape or form by us.
Not just the technology, but mastery of the amount of energy needed to travel such vast distances (assuming they're not exploiting some physics loophole we've not discovered yet). Would make our largest nuclear reactors seem like firecrackers.
When you have that much energy at your disposal, there's no need for conflict with less advanced species. Just go somewhere without any natives. There's nothing on Earth, or even in the Solar System, that cannot not be found on countless other planets, moons, asteroids and comets throughout the galaxy, or synthesized from base materials.
That leaves scientific curiosity, tourism (Earth as an interstellar safari), ideology (religious zeal, master race etc.). Sure, there are sci-fi tropes where humans are a food source that cannot be found, grown or synthesised anywhere else (e.g. Wraith in Stargate Atlantis) but those are just plot vehicles. Any race that's mastered interstellar travel can surely synthesize any nutrients they need.
Iain Banks (bafflingly no M in this one) had a good idea in "Transition": tourism. Specifically this: it is ludicrously unlikely that a planet has life. It is more unlikely that it has complex life. It is more unlikely that it has intelligent life. We tick all those boxes. But we tick another box: our planet, possibly uniquely in the entire galaxy, has a sun and moon that, temporarily but right now, subtend precisely the same angle when viewed from the surface. Thus, total solar eclipses are possible. This very well may be the only planet in the entire Milky Way where this is so. Thus: if you want to find visiting aliens, don't look in remote woodlands, don't look in secretive airbases... look on chartered yachts floating in the path of total eclipses, yachts whose charterers's cars have suspiciously darkened windows...
I wrote a couple of chapters before realising I'm not a particularly good writer but my story idea was while Earth has nothing offer in the way of technology or resources it does have art, specifically music for the sake of my story.
A better writer may be able to run with this - the idea that aliens are more interested in what we can create rather than anything tangible.
Human minds perceive art.
But outside the bias of that human mindset, it's just stuff arranged to physical parameters may or may not have utility if processed for resources.
Sure we have artifacts.
But art is a psychological experience dependent upon human neurology to invent within the mind and thus perceive
So perhaps for your story it turns out that these aliens and humans share an ancestor that allows them to glitch similarly and thus perceive art
Harmonics are universal, the relationship between notes of different multiples of the same frequency should always work. As for would an alien prefer Bach, AC/DC or Stravinsky is possibly where the fun starts.
With the visual arts unless there is some kind of pan-human form populating the galaxy (as in the Culture series) then I doubt if a Rembrandt picture would appeal to an alien, Picasso might and various abstract artists but even still that's a pretty remote chance.
The same for the written word, it's bad enough translating between different Earth languages where there are common concepts and experiences to draw on, translating something like Shakespeare into an alien tongue where there is unlikely to be much commonality is unlikely to do the bard any credit at all.
That's why I went for music
As a musician, I like the idea, but there are lots of ways it might not work. They might hear differently than we do; a piece written for human instruments and transposed into ultrasound might prove to be unpleasant due to differences in propagation and absorption in those higher frequencies. Or, a simpler thing, they have music themselves and find ours to be too different for their general liking. A lot of traditional music from one part of the world isn't very popular with those who have lived elsewhere and is interpreted quite differently.
Not to mention that there are differences between societies with the use of the standard musical components and, in some cases, those components themselves. For example, a lot of music is based on a 12-tone scale between notes that are octaves apart, but not every musical tradition on Earth uses this. There are some instruments that are designed for more than twelve notes between octaves, which sound kind of weird if you're not familiar with them. I think that an alien civilization that has music is likely to have more similarities between theirs and ours than in any other type of art, but that's no guarantee.
Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus all get total solar eclipses because the sun is relatively small when seen from them and they have big moons in the right orbits. For Jupiter, 5 of its moons (Amalthea, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) are big and close enough to cause total eclipses. Whilst these are total solar eclipses they do last longer that the fleeting ones on earth, but with an estimated 100 billion planets in our galaxy it is statistically very unlikely that ours is the only one where "instantaneous" total solar eclipses can occur.
I see some flaws in your argument as well. The ideas that, if one kind of technology is better, then all of them must be at the same level. This is not guaranteed here, so why should it be guaranteed elsewhere? Our technology is a function of our biology and our environment, and the common threads in that technology are common because all humans are roughly the same shape and live in roughly similar places. Even with that, some countries have specialized in certain technologies and not others. North Korea, for example, has spent a lot of time and money on pretty good weapons systems and can't make any computers; they import all the hardware from China and they run Linux on them. Some countries have had nuclear power for sixty years, and others have none and don't intend to build them, either because they have energy from other sources and don't see a need to build one or because they have fears about safety or something else that mean they refuse to build them.
Aliens could not only have these kind of beliefs or priorities that change what they choose to build, but they almost certainly have different forms and environments. Something that we consider normal because everyone finds it useful and it quickly spread could be almost entirely useless to a certain alien species. They might visit us and decide to adopt our version, or they might visit us and decide that they don't need ours either.
I did just post, but I had one more idea I want to wedge in. Another part of this problem is our assumption on what we'll have in the future. We do not have terraforming technology now. We have been talking about it in the past. A few people were stupid enough to suggest that nuclear weapons could be used as a terraforming tool, for example. We assume that we'll get that stuff at some point, but it might turn out to be more difficult than we thought, and there's no guarantee that we'd get it by the time we have transportation that can easily deliver it to another planet. For that matter, we don't have a guarantee that we'll be able to make interplanetary transport cheap enough for some uses; there's a possibility that it will eventually get cheap enough for more serious work, but that fast travel will take a very long time to be efficient enough for us to use it. We can only guess about which of those will come first and by how far, and it's likely that our ideas of what 2073's technology will look like are very different from what we'll actually have by then.
This also has a parallel in human technology. Five centuries ago, we had the transportation technology to go to almost anywhere on Earth. Some places hadn't been visited, and some would be dangerous to try, but it was not prohibitive to travel to the opposite side of the planet. What technology did the people have for doing things? Very little. They didn't have the power of communication with home, they didn't have the power to prevent themselves being infected by diseases, they didn't have safety equipment to survive or avoid storms, they didn't have the power to drift down and observe without notice, and they didn't have a lot of information about themselves or their world either. While space travel is a lot more complex than sea travel, and many technologies will be needed before anyone can have space ships, this is an indication of how disconnected some advances can be. Nothing intrinsically requires people to build navigation technology before they make advances in medicine; it could go in any order people want.
Terraforming in principle shouldn't be tremendously tricky, the problem is "how much of a hurry are you in?" If you can afford thousands of years then OK, if you want it done in a lifetime, forget it.
You need to build an atmosphere, stabilise the temperature, sort out a way to start or emulate a magnetosphere, get megatonnes of water from somewhere (Saturn's rings?) then kick-start a biosphere so the atmosphere is self regulating. All doable given unlimited time and resources. Shame that both time and resources are seriously limited (at the moment).
Haven't you seen all the people saying that they can't find workers for basically every job?
I think this is more a basic failure of capitalism. There are plenty of capable people out there who are prepared to do all sorts of jobs, they just require decent payment for it, whilst "free-market" capitalism demands ever-increasing profits (infinite growth with finite resources is the biggest piece of idiocy anyone has ever come up with IMHO). If resources are limited, and growth is deemed essential, the only way to achieve it is to pay the workers less, and the natural response to this from the workers is to go elsewhere.
I did acknowledge that there are things that could be done to find the workers, but that wasn't my point. Whether or not they can find the workers, they are preferring to use those workers over automation, even when they can't find them for the price they want to pay. This indicates that, for those jobs, automation is either infeasible or prohibitively expensive. This will improve as we get better robotic technology and if AI ever gets to a state that's more reliable than the recent fad, but there will be limitations on it that we aren't aware of.
Our discussions on the viability of certain automation demonstrates this point. Will we get self-driving cars that can be used and trusted? Some people say that we will within a year, but admittedly they said we'd get that seven years ago so we can discount them. Some people say it's impossible and will never happen. Some people say it will take decades, but will eventually exist. Some people are far more optimistic. Some people say that it will be technically possible quickly, but not socially accepted for much longer. I don't even know which one you think, but only one of those groups can be right and I don't know for certain which it will be. You can get even wider differences if you talk about AGI, as there are some people who have become convinced that large language models already demonstrate it (at least I can be sure that they're wrong) and some people who are entirely certain that a machine that executes deterministic logical operations can never demonstrate consciousness or understand and replicate the actions we do that require consciousness from us. We also have arguments about how wise it would be to attempt to create or use AGI if we could do it. That question is critical to understanding whether human labor could be made obsolete.
IIRC, the premise there was that there are planets in unstable orbits that meant that other planets were unsafe, so they were sent ahead to blow up the unstable ones, so the others could be settled.
Of course, scientifically speaking, it's nonsense; the mass in those planets would have to go somewhere, and if converted somehow to energy, would be like a supernova going off, which would be far worse for anything in the cosmic vicinity. In terms of impact, there's very little difference between being hit by one large object or a trillion smaller pieces of it, the energy involved is the same.
Dyson Sphere? If I recall correctly, the amount of metal/stuff that you would need to construct a full dyson sphere would likely exceed the available matter from planets/asteroids/etc. in a single "typical" (if there is such a thing) solar system. So to do it properly you might need to mine some other nearby ones.
Of course, in that situation, you are likely to be uninterested in whether those nearby ones actually contain life of any kind - excepting that it may attempt to resist your efforts!
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.
Distance is my go-to when talking to "believers" about us being visited by BEMs.
To get here they could [a] travel somehow using dark matter/energy (cos we've no clue WTF is going on there), [b] bend space and step instantly between origin and destination, [c] use FTL propulsion (y'aright) or [d] ?????.
I'm certain there are other intelligent[1] lifeforms sharing our universe (it's fookin massive!), but if they've got the ability to get to Earth, we'd be no more than amoeba to them. They almost certainly wouldn't give a toss about our species or observing us beyond our level of observations of amoeba. Communicate with us? Ha! If they come for resources, they'd just take them.
[1] Just for arguments sake!
[That's just reminded me of Married... With Aliens - awesome episode!]
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 ;)
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...?
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.
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.
Of course, but not to land your own here. Instead, to do some investigation, you could start having your drones retrieve some stuff that can be found on the surface and bringing it back. That way, you can experiment on that in peace, and if it turns out to be dangerous or unwanted, you can drop it into the sun. Quarantining possible sources of infection is a good protocol for investigating things you don't know about. Of course, if they are exploring, I'd expect to see their version of the rovers we've deployed when we wanted to explore another planet.
No, there really isn't, all that shit stirring didn't really convince anyone new.
But nice to see the paranoia extends to the republicans running this "investigation".
You know that they're the ones spreading the Hunter Biden story, yeah?
"well they are spreading lots of bullshit around to divert from the orange twat being a stoopid fucking criminal."
FTFY
Matches his so-called "base"[0] quite nicely, no?
[0]Base; adj., Of low value and having inferior properties.
"If we in fact have programs that possess this technology, it needs to have oversight from those people that the citizens of this great country elected to office to represent what is best for the United States and in the best interest of its citizens."
If, by oversight, you really mean they need to have remote absolutely fabulous fabless command and practical control .... Ye Gods! You cannot be serious, given how well everything is presently going with all that is well known and they have about everything freely enough available everywhere today for/from Earthly sources/forces.
They are not fit for future alien purpose, and it is just not going to ever happen for such would be an unmitigated disaster akin to letting a greedy gang of stupid hungry sickly kids loose in a sweet shop.
Furthermore, specifically alluding to the impact and potential dangers of a possible alien intelligence on Earth, is one best advised and respectfully encouraged in any public engagement to be non-confrontational and constructively acquiescent, lest, as may be rightly feared and as has been clearly and accurately enough stated, "Indeed, the future of our civilization and our comprehension of humanity's place on Earth and in the cosmos depends on the success of this very process,", for in deed, indeed it certainly does.
Don't look at the comments on youtube video's about this bullshit.
It's brought out all the fucking crazy nutters, at this point USA needs to be turned into a large padded cell.
(the religious nutters in USA GOV on the panel also don't seem to have realised if any of this is true it means their religions are all proved to be utter bollocks more than they already are bollocks. any sane persons head would have exploded with the cognitive dissonance)
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Modern metallurgists have no idea how our ancestors created alloys of such quality, and can barely manage equivalents themselves.
Must be aliens! Or, we've lost thousands of years of experience due to adopting tools that make that knowledge obsolete. Obsolete, that is, until we need it, but no one knows it any more.
> . We have thousands of years more experience than the pyramid builder - and probably more clever gadgets
And care a damn sight less about the quality of the final result: we plan our buildings to stand for decades, not centuries - certainly not hoping for them to last an eternity!
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Joking aside, I'm wondering why you think there was ever a need to move a 200 ton rock? Best estimates say the heaviest stone in the Great Pyramid is somewhere in the region of 80 tonnes. Large steam locomotives weigh nearly 100 tonnes, and people have been craning those around since they were first built.
The problem you have is that none of what you claim is as difficult as you make out. Plus current estimations are that each pyramid took 20 to 30 years to complete. That's literally a lifetimes work. It didn't happen quickly.
Modern day example. People were discussing the possibility of using the Saturn 5 to move large loads in to orbit once again. The problem? All the people who built, maintained and otherwise worked on them have long since retired so no-one now knows how they work. That doesn't mean they were built by aliens.
> All the people who built, maintained and otherwise worked on them have long since retired so no-one now knows how they work. That doesn't mean they were built by aliens.
Hmm. Have you seen the photos of von Braun before and after he'd been in the US for a while? Clearly it was getting harder to shapeshift back into the "original" version!
Exactly. So today, when there aren't any people on the planet who think they are gods (okay, there are some, but we don't think they're gods), we don't see a point in wasting a lot of time and effort building big, useless, stone structures for them. When the idea was that they are gods, and that they will kill lots of people if they're unhappy, and they control the sun, then it seemed like they could have whatever structures they wanted as long as they avoided doing it.
By the way, there is a good example of this. There is one family who have convinced some people to act like they're gods. I'm thinking here of the ruling family of North Korea, who have gotten the cult of personality system working much better than you'd imagine. One thing they've chosen to do with that system is to get a lot of people to go up large mountains and carve massive holes into them in the shape of sayings of one of the Kims, then paint them so they can be seen at a long distance. The paint won't last, but those carvings are going to be around for a really long time now, a shame given how terrible they are. People frequently died while carving those.
If we were going to carve slogans into some mountains, we might start asking questions like "why would we want to", "who is paying for this and should they really have a mountain", "will this cause environmental damage", and "will I die while doing this stupid thing for you". The answers to many of those questions would either make us refuse the task or add so many requirements to it that the person who wants it done finds that it's more trouble or expense than they can afford. Therefore, we don't do it. If we decided to do so, we would not only be capable of doing it, but we would eventually become more and more efficient at doing it as we gained experience and made process improvements.
This has to be one of the most ridiculous things I've heard lately. If we wanted to build a pyramid today, it would not be difficult. Slow? Yes. Expensive? Also yes. Difficult? Not really.
The reason people aren't building pyramids todays is because they don't want to.
Roller logs, earthen ramps, and enough manpower is all you need to move big rocks. Sure, it takes a long time (decades), you need a lot of grunts, and it probably killed a lot of the workers though injury and exhaustion, but the ancient Pharoahs didn't really care about worker safety. No cranes needed. Just some basic construction methods and a lot of human effort.
These were life long projects. Start when you become Pharoah, hope to survve long enough to see it complete. Some didn't outlive their ambitions.
If we wanted to build a pyramid today, it would not be difficult. Slow? Yes. Expensive? Also yes. Difficult? Not really.
Except that today it would probably be subcontracted to Crapita, and so would take 5x as long as planned at 10x the cost. And it would probably be built upside-down.
And we see paintings in stone-age caves that we say are just amateur images of people but maybe aliens have been visiting the Earth for the last 40,000 years? And then there are other things that we try to explain but fail ... how were the Egyptian pyramids built?....
Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I've been waiting for this one!
*Ahem*
They had massive whips, Rimmer. Massive, massive whips.
"And we see paintings in stone-age caves that we say are just amateur images of people but maybe aliens have been visiting the Earth for the last 40,000 years?"
My daughter, budding artist that she was at age 3, invented images that were the spitting image of stone-age petroglyphs and petrographs (including paint-spattered negatives of her hands). Later, at the ripe old age of 9 or 10, she created drawings of animals around here that were remarkably similar in style to those at Lascaux. I'm sure that other commentards who are parents can report similar.
"how were the Egyptian pyramids built? Can you pick up a few thousand 200 ton blocks of rock and start to build a pyramid perfectly aligned with the planet?"
My brother and I built a 360ftX240ft barn, the exterior walls of which are made of cinder blocks to a height of 16 feet. The four corners are plumb and level. It is perfectly aligned north/south. I could easily do it with larger blocks, given a supply of them. Give me the national budget of Khufu and the willing cooperation of the population of Egypt, and yes, I could in fact duplicate The Great Pyramid. Modern tools would make this almost easy, if expensive ... but doing it with hand tools could be done. Stacking Lego is a skill learned in childhood. (And has been noted elsewhere, the largest blocks in the Great Pyramid are nowhere near 200 ton. Long, short or metric.).
"And then create some images of "people" with long conical heads?"
Tom Davis and Dan Aykroyd somehow managed this incredible feat.
1st year engineering (at decent unis) they do a lot of the supposedly 'unknown' Mayan and Egyptian pyramid building techniques (the Egyptians also used a clever perspective trick with a pole and drawing on the ground which to the observer at the pole would see the vertical mirror image of the pyramid to be built.
And yes, the basic idea behind the block and tackle lifting allows lifting a weight far greater than you weigh, extend this principle out and you get all kinds of cool methods for lifting large stone.
Also btw, if you build it on the ground and make sure your widths & distances are right, it will be perfectly aligned with the local ground.
The conical heads is an easy one, cause along with those images were all the other images showing how they strapped the children's heads with cloth/leather straps and change these as they age, forming the skull up into the beehive shape. Literally right next to the some of the images u-fool-ogists post about. This has been known about since the 80's at least.
Ah, you puny mortal humans with only one manifestation! God made you in that shape because that is the shape in which God appears to you. But you can't assume that's the only shape in which an all-powerful God ever appears. If God made the inhabitants of some other planet a different shape, then that is simply the shape in which He appears to them. And if you cannot understand this, it is because you have not got the Holy Spirit in you.
It is easy when you are full of it.
I've just had a divine revelation! God is a mimic octopus!
[Got to have an xkcd somewhere.]
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"ever seen God directly? (said to be fatal to us) so how do you know what his image is?"
God and Abraham had a meal together in Genesis 18; Jacob (no relation) looked upon the face of God in Genesis 32:30; Moses saw the back of God in Exodus 33:23, and all survived to tell the tail.
And yet, years later, John 1:18 claims nobody has seen God. Apparently John never read the relevant bits of scripture. But that's OK, neither do modern xtians. Making it up as you go along is much, much more lucrative.
"And yet, years later, John 1:18 claims nobody has seen God. Apparently John never read the relevant bits of scripture. But that's OK, neither do modern xtians. Making it up as you go along is much, much more lucrative."
Ah, but you missed where when John was writing, there were many, many "books" about the Christian religion, primarily based on Jewish writings in the Old Testament and strongly influenced by Jewish religion in the New Testament, neither of which existed as "collections" back then until some Roman Emperor decided he'd had enough of all this conflicting information and defined his own Omnibus Edition and declared it The One Truth. I'm not sure he ever actually read those books or properly curated the reading order due to the many discrepancies still causing confusion to this day, despite further translations, refinements and editing, all inspired of course, by God Himself according to those doing the work. There's not even consensus that the Emperor was even a Christian doing Gods Work or just an opportunistic ruler seeing a good way to control his subjects by appearing to take on the peoples latest "fad religion" :-)
I really wish the media wouldn't hype this stuff up. There is an entire class of people for whom stories like this degrade their sense of reality and their trust in, well, anything, and as we've seen in recent years it's unfortunately not a small number and they have outsized influence. If you want to have fun with it that's fine, but this really shouldn't be treated as a real news story.
There is an entire class of people for whom stories like this degrade their sense of reality...
You're referring to the same group of people that create these stories - can't degrade their reality anymore! If the media didn't report it, we wouldn't know who they are, that is the news story.
[Icon: don't go there!]
You can protect some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't protect all of the people all of the time.
I'd suggest it's insanity to try to do so, and counterproductive - someone's always confused, resistant or trolling about <something>, nothing would ever done if we tried to pander to all.
Also, why are people here weirdly puritanical about how icons can be used?
Not really sure what you're on about here. They're there for some reason - might as well use 'em if there's some applicable-ish context! -->
"Also, why are people here weirdly puritanical about how icons can be used?"
Are they? They are commonly repurposed meanings based purely in the graphic, despite what the mouse-over text may say. On the other, sometimes they just mean what they show/say :-) ----------------->
The U.S. Government being able to keep such a historical event a secret defies belief. Every secret has leaked out in one form or another, mostly through rumors or journalistic investigation.
Also: why would aliens travel light-years to our planet just to play Tag with our Air Force?
I still believe there's life out there, but it may be too distant for us to communicate with or even detect.
I fully believe life is out there.
Sentient life? That's a different question. After all, look how long it took this planet to come up with President Trump.
Sentient life that has evolved technology to leave their planet? That would even want to? What's to say they aren't aquatic and literally cannot?
Life in space? Yes. Quite a lot I'd imagine.
Visitations by aliens? Uh, nope.
Sentient doesn't mean they have to have nuclear bombs or radio transmitters.
I'm convinced octopuses and primates are sentient, as are many species on our planet. I believe that sentience is a linear scale and that we kid ourselves to think we're the only ones contemplating our own existence.
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You know, people said MK Ultra, the Tuskegee Experiment etc was a load of bollocks too. Look what happened there.
You might not want to believe it and that's fair enough. But don't be a total fucking idiot and say that none of this has or can happen. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Let's just see what comes out and keep an open mind. That's the proper thing to do.
The Tuskagee syphilis experiment took 25 years to be exposed. Roswell was supposed to be in 1947, 76 years ago.
Seminal paper on conspiracies and how long they can be kept secret:
Grimes DR (2016). On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0147905.
Your refs are of programmes generated by the US gubmit internally, of its own volition. Interesting that the same can maintain this level of secrecy on the scale involving Beings Beyond Our Ken, Shirley with their own agenda. And all with such localisation [edit: to the US].
Interesting? I mean inconceivable. Otherwise, they must have convinced said aliens to play along with their programme, probably with the help of a Sicilian.
Plus, they only visited America? All the land on this lump of rock and that's the only place they went?
The idea that somebody/somebodies could sit on this and keep it secret for so long is inconceivable.
This is just a distraction from the depressing shit that passes for reality these days.
Why would aliens only choose UassSA for crash landings ? Cant they land smoothly given they have the tech to travel so far to an insignificant dot sized planet in the outer swirls of our Milky way?
Also, given that they are spending Billions on trying to find life on moon and mars (so far only), why would they want to hide alien life which came ready on a platter?
Perhaps they dont want to upset the rednecks in the bible belt, for votes.
"Why would aliens only choose UassSA for crash landings ?"
They landed at a few places in Europe, no problem; took off, tried Japan, all fine. Australia? Bit dry, but down and up again, not an issue. At each stop the examined the local culture.
Overflying the US, listening in to the local radio: pissed themselves laughing, knocked the transmission out of gear and promptly crashed.
For a perfect example of this look at the morons who claim that the earth is flat.
The only thing they are capable of presenting evidence for is their own stupidity/gullibility (or perhaps that they're just a grifter out to take advantage of the former) and not a single shred of any evidence for a flat earth, just conspiracy claims about how NASA, using CGI for the last 2,500 years, has been hiding "the truth", about how "they" as in every government ever existed that often violently don't get on have all collaborated on this as well as the explicit collaboration of many hundreds of thousands of people who work in aerospace, surveying, geology, etc. None of their "models" can even account for sunrises and sunsets, let alone anything further or more than one thing at a time, and their sole argument is to try to pick holes in existing proofs because they don't understand them. There's money to be made in this grifting though, which is why it happens.
Considering his rocket was only supposed to get to 5,000 feet and he could have got a plane flight at 30-40,000 feet for much less, I think he was mostly committed to getting gullible idiots to fund his eccentric hobby of building steam rockets.
You wouldn't get time zones on a Pizza Planet, because a Sun rising perpendicular to the horizon would illuminate the whole surface within the time it takes light to cross from one side to the other. And it only takes 500 seconds (= 8'20") for light from the Sun to reach the Earth.
So help me model this. I've got a pizza on a coffee table, with a Hula hoop passing between the table legs to represent the Sun's orbit: perpendicular to the plane of the Earth, rising in the East, passing overhead at midday (13:00 in Summer) and setting in the West. And I'm moving the Sun around the Hula hoop. At some point, the Sun is going to peek above the table and illuminate the pizza. Now before Dawn can break, the light has to travel through space before it hits the atmosphere (which is going to have a weird shape, because a pizza's gravitational field is not at all isotropic, but let's worry about this later); and *this* 150 000 000 km. leg of the journey is the bit where all the shenanigans must be happening, because we know for certain how light behaves in air -- and, for that matter, in a more perfect vacuum than the tiny part of space we have explored.
And any ray of light that enters this space between the Sun and the Earth slows down and changes direction, emerging several hours later (possibly even while the Sun is below the table) appearing to have come from somewhere else (since the Sun's orbital plane only runs due East-West along one diameter of the pizza; but we know by observation the Sun always rises in the East and sets in the West).
There just seems so much to go wrong with this setup, particularly considering how much simpler a football planet orbiting the Sun would make it. And we haven't even considered how the Sun's light is going to bounce off the Moon and go through this complicated distorting path ..... or that annoyingly-isotropic gravitational field .....
Well, if we take the 8 light minutes (quoted a few messages back) from the Sun to the disc, add in the flat Earth claim the the Sun is somewhere from 30 to 37 miles above the surface, I believe that gives us a speed of light around 215 miles per hour.
If the Sun also takes a mere 24 hours to circle the Equator then, um, something about the light not reaching the other side of the disc until the Sun has itself already got there (it might have gone around 1 1/2 times, the maths gets a little - odd).
If the light from "night" reaches the other side when the Sun is also there, it must be "day" light after all, not "night" light - so the night's *are* dark because the Sun isn't there and neither is the light.
Or something like that.
Don't forget that the moon radiates cold which is why it's colder at night. Except when it's just projection... by whom onto what doesn't matter as does the little fact that if it really was projected onto some surface (dome) then it'd still be visible from absolutely everywhere just a different size. Little details like the moon appearing to be almost exactly the same size from anywhere on earth are trivial matters easily explained by... um... er... flerfspective. Or magic. Or just changing the subject and hoping that we didn't notice.
Have always felt this was being used to cover up US black ops/skunkworks shenanigan's
I remember reading that back in the 1960's at a public briefing on UFO's a US government official claimed they didn't exist, immediately followed by a UFO "expert" who claimed they did (later to be revealed as someone from a US intelligence agency specialising in psychological warfare).
The SR71 Blackbird first flew in 1964, the first pilot to fly it was said to have walked into the hanger, looked at it, and then walked out and was said to be just shaking his head in wonder for a while just trying to believe what he had just seen.
The F117 Nighthawk first flew in 1981, both it and the SR71 have been cited as being responsible for some UFO sightings particularly those around Nevada.
Just try to imagine the technology the US Airforce may be playing with now, almost certainly drones at this point, which don't have so much problem with G forces that would kill a human pilot.
Why do these UFO's like to play around US military installations or aircraft?, (probably assessing personnel / pilots reactions).
How is it that spy satellite technology that allegedly can read car licence plates and recognise the faces of someone looking up hasn't translated to US Navy aircraft cameras that seem to generate footage of UFO's that's worse than that from WW2 fighter gun camera footage?
Sorry I just don't buy it, I think it's a good way to keep secrets secret, and maybe make potentially hostile foreign powers hesitate from shooting the latest toys down "Don't shoot Dimitry, do you want to start an interstellar war?!!"
Mitchell and Webb said it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTHB8iC1C0E
...also can you imagine if the US Airforce confessed that these were actually their aircraft/drones?, can see the government hearings now "So exactly how many billions were spent developing this Tic Tac Drone?", "How exactly does it work?".
Much better to go before Congress with a straight face and say "err yeah it's aliens"
How is it that spy satellite technology that allegedly can read car licence plates and recognise the faces of someone looking up hasn't translated to US Navy aircraft cameras that seem to generate footage of UFO's that's worse than that from WW2 fighter gun camera footage?
Same as the pictures of Bigfoot. All the decent pictures show what the picture is really of. It's only the fuzzy unclear ones that remain so those are the ones the nuts jump on as so-called evidence.
A fuzzy picture of a bear is still a bear, not Bigfoot, even if it's hard to tell. Same with poor pictures of weather baloons etc
You say Visitors, you mean the ones that are lizard people, in plastic skin suits, with a habit of swallowing small live mammals.
They also had a habit of deep packing larger mammals for shipping home, I guess the misogynists, racists, religious bigots, authoritarians, anti-science, and AGW deniers are just as tasty as the rest of us when on a bar-be-q.
Exactly. If the US wanted an expensive boondoggle multi-State pork barrelling employment project, why spend $billions on a throwaway rocket you can only launch once ever year or two if you have alien spacecraft to back-engineer? I'm sure they could have gone with something just as impressive and created more jobs, like, I dunno, trains capable of an astounding 100mph across the whole country, nationwide broadband for all that's faster than 25Mb/s
What I want to know is why Trump didn't release this information...? He leaked pretty much everything else and retained some of the most classified documents the US government has. So if Trump didn't leak it, it can only mean he, too, is part of the conspiracy.
Or it could be it's just a load of bollocks. But it's definitely one of those two.
If YOU were in the Top Secret Alien Technology Exploitation business, would YOU tell Trump about it? Surely there must still be a few people with a modicum of common sense in the government? .... Antron Argaiv
Possibly yes and probably no, Antron Argaiv, is a novel answer to those estranging questions.
A race capable of navigating interstellar travel should be capable of avoiding hitting a _big_ rock. They would have to be already damaged otherwise, maybe some space fender bender (with space junk), or carelessness (asleep at the stick)? Again a race that advanced should have ship safety redundancies, probably contact protocols, etc. to avoid exposure to inferior nutters who throw out reason and logic on a whim.
I haven't had chance to watch the thing yet, but didn't grusch say that other gubmints also had downed UFOs in his original statement? So it's not just the left pondians who are gifted with these things, if grusch is to be believed.
They seem to be avoiding words like alien and extraterrestrial. If they have non-human "biologics" that aren't alien, what does that leave? Trained monkeys? Some kind of wetware?
Back in the (apparently) real world, I'm still sceptical. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's impossible for them to have crashed UFO's + pilots, but it seems bloody unlikely to me. Show me some actual evidence, and I'll be happy to be wrong. But for now, I am not convinced.
Let me see if I've got this straight--
our extraterrestrial visitors are so much more intelligent than we are that they have mastered intergalactic travel, and yet they're too dumb to avoid a crash-landing? Given the current political climate in the USA, it sounds as though they'd fit right in with all the anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers...
is that in 1993(i think it was.. or '92) there was a huge surge in reported UFO sightings
By a strange coincidence, it was the same year that the 'X-files' was first broadcast.
Anyway.. must go... meeting a friend down the pub who says aliens are real.. at least thats what he heard from his brother's best friend's cousin's brother-in-law whos son is in the SAS
Anyway.. must go... meeting a friend down the pub who says aliens are real.. at least thats what he heard from his brother's best friend's cousin's brother-in-law whos son is in the SAS .... Boris the Cockroach
:-) ’Twas/'Tis ever the case, Boris the Cockroach, for whoever/whatever dares win wins never to fail whenever guaranteed secured provision of failsafe abilities for activities and self-actualisation .... Maslowian Greater IntelAIgent Game Play?
Quite whether though UKGBNI MoD Chiefs of Staff would be able to admit and recognise and command and control such as may be a TS/SCI SAS confidence, now that it has been clearly enough articulated, is an enigmatic quandary which swallows and threatens to render them as cuckolds to past corrupt and inept leaderships rather than rebirth them as armed and arming agents of Absolutely Fabulous Fabless Change and Great Virtually Augmented Resets?
The very near future of upcoming tomorrows will tell the full unadulterated truth of that surely to be highly documented trail and enlightening trial.
There's also a document instance where folk of a backwater US area reported definitely seeing aliens and lights in the sky and likely an increase in "probing". At exactly the same time that a new instate route was opened and cars drove along it at night with their headlights coming over a hill...
David Fravor recounted a similar story. In his case, however, he was training for combat in Iraq and flying over the sea in 2004 when he and his colleagues spotted "a small white Tic Tac-shaped object" with no visible rotors or wings.The object jammed the radar of the aircraft and did not emit any infrared radiation like normal propulsion systems.
So either the "Tic Tac" was at thermal equilibrium with the environment – like, oh, a lighter-than-air balloon – or it was running on stored mechanical energy, since it clearly didn't have any sort of heat engine. Or, far more likely, it was a hallucination or optical illusion. Or just made up. Hey, those explanations also cover the lack of a radar signature. How about that?
An "advanced technology" that doesn't obey thermodynamics is tantamount to magic. These aren't aliens, they're witches, and they've figured out that they can enclose their brooms for greater comfort.
Honestly, the amount of arrant nonsense and paucity of actual evidence in these accounts beggars belief.
Too late with your comment.
There are drones out there that do not emit heat from their electronics - by placing into a temporary store - can't say more.
Heat on the surface of the drone from air friction is another story and dealt with in another way - think Space Shuttle.
> think Space Shuttle
You do know that the outside of the Shuttle got, like, really really hot? Clearly visible in thermal imaging (thanks, "Tomorrow's World").
The Shuttle tiles were not about keeping the outside cold but about stopping the heat going into the body of the craft.
On your fanciful drone any heat (well, mild warmth) from the air would just stay on the outside and without being able to heat the mass of the drone would be hotter than otherwise?
I've just replied seriously to a nutter, haven't I? Sigh.
so the military has photos of this object and has certainly analyzed them, because radar-jamming flying objects that obviously exist are somewhat concerning in war zones and just in general. When it was a balloon, they took notice of it and people were pretty worried about what it was doing, resulting in a missile strike. No, according to this guy, nobody did any investigation and nobody got the camera feeds. That could mean that the military simply does not care about UFOs of any kind, which is already disproved but maybe they just don't care about them in the place where they're fighting wars next to multiple enemy countries who might have them as weapons or surveillance systems.
What evidence do you have to suggest they were caught on camera? So far, I'm hearing that something happened to the radar, which could be mechanical failure, software glitch, or nothing, and conveniently means there's no radar evidence, and something happening to infrared, which is compatible with there being nothing there and means there's no IR evidence. Why does there have to be visual evidence, and how do you know it ever existed?
Any life-form with the technology to undertake interstellar travel would be able to trivially observe our planet completely undetected.
Intelligent life in the universe is quite possible I believe (though there is the Fermi paradox). It's not however going to be wasting it's time giving Farmers in Idaho anal probes.
This guy Grusch is a krank.
Song for the article: I'm Praying to the Aliens, by Tubeway Army
Am I 71 years old. Back in the 50s,60s. and 70s I read everything I could get my hands on regarding UFOs (at the time), UAPs now. I even subscribed to a couple newsletters from UFO organizations.
My observation is nothing has really changed in all these years. Same kinds of stories. Same lack of any hard evidence. Same mystery metal of unknown origin that never proved to be anything unusual, if you ever saw an analysis or not, etc, ect.
There are lots of ways UAPs become that. Weather phenomena, aircraft seen in unusual circumstances, tricky reflections of windows, radar artifacts from unusual reflections and software faults and glitches. I have seen exactly 2 things in over 50 years that defied immediate identification. I stuck with observing both of them and was able to make IDs. In Both cases something observed under unusual conditions
On the other hand, I and some friends caused one UFO sighting. In high school I bought a weather balloon from Edmund Scientific. We than procured a tank of helium from the local blacksmith's shop. One night after my basketball game, the co-conspirators place a flashlight inside the balloon and inflated it. We flew it over a state highway between two small towns.... and then... nothing. No reports in the newspaper, radio, tv. We were crushed
Fastforward 20 years to a class reunion. That night two married classmates came clean about seeing a UFO as they drove north on the state highway. They thought everyone would think they were crazy and never said anything to anyone in all that time. The co-conspirators all fell out on the floor laughing. It only took 20 years for a practical joke to pay off.
quote: UAPs presented a national security threat.
There are people in America who think that drag acts and Harry Potter novels present a 'national security threat'.
If the US had reverse engineered UFO tech, Putin would be in prison on the Moon.
People walk around with highly advanced cameras on their phones, but all UFO footage appears to have been recorded on VHS several decades ago and stored in a shed.
quote: possible alien intelligence on Earth.
It will be lonely, given the limited amount of human intelligence.
quote: potential dangers.
I thought plastic, climate change, AI, and social media were going to end human civilisation. The aliens will need to pick a number and wait their turn.
Apparently Brazil and Chile are also popular.
The "Ancient Aliens" people believe that UFOs stop over at Chile for all their rare earths. I know that because I managed to sit through an episode : )
Meanwhile, here's a scientific response.
https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/messenger/archive/no.67-mar92/messenger-no67-56-57.pdf
For those saying "If the US had reverse engineered UFO tech....." who's to say they haven't and that the speed with which we have gone from having "desktop" computers the size of small filing cabinets to having computers in our pockets 'more powerful than the computers that put man on the moon' isn't the result?
Nah. Us humans came up with all that.
The incremental steps learning what we now call solid-state physics, starting in the early 1800s, are easy for anyone to research for themselves. There are absolutely zero huge jumps in knowledge, it's all micro-steps at a time. Yes, things have become smaller/faster quite quickly, but that's just scaling ... a transistor is still a transistor, regardless of size.
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