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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2354 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 11, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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But that just moves the question back a step. Why did those specific images make their way to declassification and not others? No way to know until we actually see all the redacted images.

Well...

Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.

It wasn't clear what the "4 videos" was supposed to be referring to. If all the pics in what I linked were leaked before they were declassified then my bad, I was wrong.

The four leaked ones I was referring to were Gimbal (included in the FOIA release of the briefing), Flir/Tic-tac (included), GoFast (not included) and a fourth one that hasn't been declassified. However checking the Wikipedia page footage of the Pyramid one was actually recorded and leaked by Navy personnel as well, though I think that footage was different from the official footage of the same incident that was later officially released. So it turns out all 3 that are uncensored in that PDF were leaked and then later declassified years later.

My point, even before knowing that all 3 of those were leaked, was that internal pressures like people wanting to declassify the more compelling footage or people outright leaking it makes it pretty difficult for the government to deliberately only declassify unconvincing footage if they have anything dramatically better. So I think the declassified stuff is probably pretty representative, if not the cream of the crop that there was more pressure to declassify and more reason to leak.

So I think the declassified stuff is probably pretty representative, if not the cream of the crop that there was more pressure to declassify and more reason to leak.

I agree that in a vacuum, this is a sound argument. But people who have seen still-classified photos/videos claim they're more impressive than what's been publicly declassified so far.

Here's Matt Gaetz back in July 2023 on the Eglin incident, after he was shown a classified photo:

"The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries. And I'm somewhat informed on the matter, having served on the Armed Services Committee for seven years, having served on the committee that oversees DARPA and advanced technologies for several years."

AARO later released their own public report on the Eglin incident, but Gaetz claimed that AARO's report was incomplete, and that he thought it was important that the classified materials he was shown should be made public.

(Rep. Tim Burchett has made similar statements about classified photos as well, although I don't have the link handy.)

Now, it could be that Gaetz is simply not a very discerning individual. It could be that all he saw was just another blurry point of light, and he mistook this for "something beyond any human capability". Or it could just be a picture of a Chinese spy drone, or it could be that the image was just entirely fake. ...But we won't really know until we get to see it ourselves.

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