back to article Pentagon seeks government gossips to dish dirt on UFOs

The Pentagon's UFO hunters have set up an online form to collect first-hand information about secret US government programs involving unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published the form this week, but it isn't just for anyone to fill out. The team is looking for reports from …

  1. Ian Johnston Silver badge

    So all we have to believe is that (a) there are aliens buzzing around here who (b) only ever show themselves to representatives of the US government which (c) has managed to hush it all up for decades.

    Of these, (a) is the most credible, and that's not saying much.

    1. James O'Shea

      Calling Commander Straker

      It ain't the US Gov. It's all of NATO. (And possibly the Sovs, too.) And the HQ for anti-alien operations in underneath a film studio in England. Ops on the Moon, in Canada, the US, most of Europe, at sea in the Atlantic and the Pacific...

      Interceptors, immediate launch!

      I liked that show. Pity that it only lasted one season. Worse pity that it morphed into (gag) Space:1999. (ick).

    2. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge
      Alien

      Not that I'm a believer, but there have been sightings around the globe.

      Winston Churchill was a huge believer in "foo fighters" based on the many reports he received from RAF* pilots.

      The Russian and Chinese governments also had (have?) their own UFO investigators.

      * Was it called the RAF then? or the Army Flying Corps or something?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        winston drunk rather a lot.

      2. Lee D Silver badge

        "Not that I'm a believer, but there have been sightings around the globe."

        And yet not one single credible photograph, video, recording or corroboration in a planet of 7.8 billion people with over 6.5 billion smartphones.

        There are *definitely* 100% UFOs. Things we can't identify. Because the evidence is so terribly poor. It's like holding up a blurry, badly processed photo of a blob and going "See, evidence!" and expecting the world to believe you have caught an alien/ghost//bigfoot/honest politician on camera.

        Most of those UFOs will be nothing at all. Specks on the camera, sunlight, out-of-focus ordinary object confusing scale.

        Some of those UFOs might even be aircraft... foreign, spies, drones, *cough* Chinese weather balloons *cough* etc. etc. etc. That's what the Pentagon are actually interested in.

        None of them are aliens.

        And yet: There are absolutely *definitely* 100% aliens out there. Just nowhere (and no-when) we will even encounter each other even blasting signals out into space 24/7 at the maximum power we can muster from the second we discovered radio/lasers/whatever to the second our civilisations collapse.

        And if you haven't noticed, humans - all humans, from all walks of life - are absolutely unreliable witnesses. RAF or not. Politician or not. Scientist or not. There are cranks, crackpots, people with mental health issues, people who age, get dementia, make up stories, lie, turn to conspiracy theories, join cults, or even outright believe in things that simply don't exist (like, hey, gods and ghosts and things). Even among top-tier PhDs and Nobel Prize winners to the highest general in the land.

        Saying there have been sightings around the globe doesn't mean a damn thing, until one vaguely credible person (hell, even a journalist!) stands up with one good photograph or video that clearly shows something we absolutely can attribute to non-human creation, ever, in the history of the world.

        Strangely, the more CCTV, cameras, smartphones, selfies and cloud-connected automatic uploads we have in the world, the fewer UFO sightings we actually get per person. It's almost like having lots of good quality, easy-to-operate cameras in the hands of every ordinary person isn't actually making any difference to our detection of these mystical beings that are crashing into Earth, flying around populated locations, and posing a massive threat to the world's militaries if they were to exist. But find a blue/gold dress photo and we're all poring over it trying to analyse it.

        It's a nonsense, and while aliens will exist (just by sheer weight of numbers of galaxies), I'm a far, far, far greater believer in the Drake equation than I am in some guy who say something briefly once while pulling 8Gs shortly because being discharged on mental health grounds after suffering immense shellshock.

        1. illiad

          I know of one series that took almost 10 episodes to reach a vague conclusion of strange happenings in Utah... AFAICS some kind of radioactive/volcanic action.. but of course they call it ufo..

          I think many of these series are a good moneymaker for many companies, that is why it carries on!! :/

        2. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge

          My point, which you seem to have missed, is that not only Americans see things in the night sky and say "aliens", which was the OP's ridiculous claim.

          1. illiad

            well of course, and many thinking 'national security' for all their secret projects they are worried about... its all the same with 'simple folk' who think 'hollywood robots' will take over the world .. when in reality it takes a whole team of animators to make it look real, and 5 to make the robot move about!!

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            your point is hard to find.

            you seemed to disclaim believing, then made claims for believing.

            your rather confusing or confused.

      3. Nik 2

        RAF since April Fool's day in 1918

        Royal Flying Corps and Royal Navy Air Service prior to that.

  2. James O'Shea

    Out there

    Yeah, the Truth Is Out There. And ll this UFO crap is really Out There. Far Out There.

  3. Tron Silver badge

    BS, distraction politics and prolefeed.

    Despite phones having cameras that can take photos of the surface of the moon on a clear night, all this 'evidence' still appears to be being captured on a 1980s camcorder by a drunk.

    Just get 'The X-Files' box set, enjoy your weekend, and get back to grim, crappy reality on Monday morning.

    1. illiad

      Re: BS, distraction politics and prolefeed.

      'photos of the surface of the moon on a clear night' I think that claim was exposed - photos were downloaded to replace the fuzzy photo!!

      even my 64M phone camera cannot cannot take a clear enough photo to read a sign 100metres away, so not much hope for a flying object.. send your pics of airplanes that are clear enough to read the name on them!!

  4. david 12 Silver badge

    In the 60s and 70s, Men in Black used to routinely meet passengers from planes that had been buzzed by super-secret development aircraft (spy planes, stealth bombers, etc), and explain that the existence of super-secret aircraft development programs was super-secret and not to be disclosed or discussed.

    So very few people knew much about the super-secret aircraft development programs, but lots and lots of people knew that the government was hiding something.

    1. Rich 11
      Thumb Down

      Really? Then you have to wonder why the pilots of all those spy planes and stealth bombers didn't have the nous to stay well away from known passenger flight lanes, nor spot any straying commercial or private aircraft first and avoid them. Wouldn't that precise behaviour form a significant part of their mission profiles in a hot war?

  5. Grunchy Silver badge

    No extraterrestrials.

    You can’t even get out of the solar system in a reasonable time frame, let alone to another star system. Even just getting to the sun takes no less than 8 minutes — no matter who you think you are!

    Any alien that’s gonna travel for centuries to get here, when they do show up they’re going to be real “slow talkers.” As in, not very stimulating…

  6. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    A Systemic Bug in the AI Works Leaves Competitors Leading for Light Years Ahead ‽

    I hope for their sake, the Pentagon's UFO hunters online form is more worthy than the one presently provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency Office of the Inspector General for its current Director, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, for it is a dire abomination of a novel informative and noble communicative link for peer networking, frontier population and SMARTR overarching general education.

    Follow now this tale of an honest account of an action from yesterday which makes the above pronouncement perfectly valid. And I'll try to keep it brief and succinct.

    After reading the article, JUST IN: DIA Transitioning to AI-Enabled Intel Database, a few short searches in internetworked databases later easily lands one on https://www.dia.mil/About/Contact-Us/ where one is led to assume/presume/believe one can easily choose to post an appropriate message to a provided menu recipient .... which in this particular case was chosen to be OFFICE OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL with/for an alien amanfromMars 1 testing of suitable drivers for AIMaster Pilots and co-pilots bobbing about in and taming choppy waters.

    Fill out Your Name and Your Email Address [easy, yes, no problems there] and now onto Subject ... The Future According to Mars and Minerva ‽ and Message ...... Please be advised via this informative public thread ...... https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/01/uk_ai_summit/ ...... of available alienating parallels likely enabling and enabled to be able to eclipse and render DIA MARSystems suddenly discredited and virtually practically obsolete and a waste of infinite time and crushingly expensive finite resources.

    To be so forewarned allows for the possibility of one to be suitably forearmed with next generation iterations.

    Everything so far still working perfectly and just as one would reasonably expect of a government body awash with oodles of fast cash until ...Send Message ..... delivers a flash crash.

    To have a Send Message button push then immediately return a [The captcha information does not appear to be valid. Please try again.] reply ....is not a very helpful or novel plausible deniability measure whenever no captcha information/security protocol is provided on the website whenever providing comment and advising systems of a massive vulnerability.

    What would that immediately tell you about that which and/or those whom you were contacting ..... apart from nothing good and great? How is anyone ever to know they need outside foreign help if the in-house home services and intelligence they use appear to so readily refuse receipt and acknowledgement of news of valuable easily exportable and importable exploitable vulnerabilities of catastrophically damaging potential?

  7. pgn

    Long Live Gerry Anderson

    SHADO had that job...?

    https://media.tenor.com/kPt3KpiaQ9IAAAAC/shado-ufo-teleprinter.gif

    1. M7S

      Re: Long Live Gerry Anderson

      I wish I could purchase one of those that would work if connected to a modern pc, are any readers aware if such a thing is made and where to buy?

      Just for printing “normal” letters in the office it would be a hoot, or if connected to some device that generated alerts that really do require prompt attention

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