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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   26658 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Vegas VBIED and NJ Drone Crossover Event

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xglaXVtQcis?si=ysIxFOPjPZdtHVOG

Nothing is better than a good crossover episode and it appears that the latest twist in the Las Vegas Trump Hotel bombing continues from last years cliffhanger NJ Drones episode.

The Shawn Ryan Show (B list independent media podcast) released an episode today that was an interview with Sam Shoemate (D List Instagram account that highlights military corruption and malfeasance). Between Jan 29-30, Sam was contacted by someone alleging to be Matt Berg with an urgent request to pass along his info to Shawn Ryan, Pete Hegseth, and Fox News. Sam was in contact with the alleged Mr. Berg on signal and ultimately received an email claiming that Mr Berg was on the run, escaping to Mexico, and that the USG was hot on his trail and potentially trying to kill him. Fortunately for Mr Berg, he had a Vehicle Bourne Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED) which apparently had held them off. This email also made at least two explosive claims.

  • The drones spotted over NJ in December were Chinese kit equipped with gravitic propulsion systems. They were a “show of force” by China, tasked with SIGINT and ISR, similar to the spy balloons from a few years ago. Mr Berg alleges that the US and China are the only countries that have this tech and that its an extremely dangerous situation, for obvious reasons. The implications being that we both have this future-tech that presents a MAD scenario.
  • That the USG committed some war crimes in Afghanistan in 2019 where we bombed obvious civilian targets and then covered it up. There is some link to the CIA, DEA, and DOD and the US covered this up and got away scott free. There are lots of other details about this but this is the jist of it.

Its unclear to me which of the two claims were the bigger deal to Mr Berg. He’s obviously distressed about the China drones, but he spends a lot of time on the war crimes as well.

Back to the story – Sam, the recipient of the email, writes this off as an unverifiable crackpot and sits on it. Until the news breaks on Jan 2 that Mr Berg blew himself up under very strange circumstances at a Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. It appears from what I am seeing right now that the mainstream media and Las Vegas sheriff has confirmed that email that Shawn Ryan published is from Matt Livelsberger. Even if they didn’t, there are plenty of details that made this seem to be extremely likely.

I think we can table the war crimes issues for the moment and just focus on the China drones.

This email, in an of itself, certainly doesn’t prove anything about the origins of the drones, but it certainly is a curious claim. Mr Bergs military MOS would potentially put him in a position to be read in on advanced US drone programs. There are a number of people in the independent media world who have made the case that the USG has been running black physics programs and cracked gravity 70 years ago. People usually respond to this with ridicule and note that something like this could never be kept secret. Personally, I just add this to the growing list of leakers and dot connectors that indicate that the UAP phenomenon is at least in part, terrestrial black projects that have access to what we would otherwise call science fiction technology.

If gravity has been cracked, it potentially means that other wild stuff like zero point energy is also on the table. What other energy sources would be able to explain UAPs the size of small cars that fly with anti-gravity drives. Tech like this would be extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. Reasons that would explain the secrecy. This would also explain why the USG changed their stance on this topic in the last 5-10 years. China has caught up with whatever we’ve been doing for a long time.

What do you all think of this? Hoax? Crazy person? Legit whistleblower? There are ton of threads to pull here. Is Mr Berg even dead? Did he fake his death in order to get a big spotlight on this?

The thing that sticks out to me about the 'gravitic drive' drone claim is just... why?

The claim that it's China is fine in and of itself, though it could be any number of other actors who have a motive. It's the claim that these specific drones have super-special high-tech propulsion.

Even if you believe this is a secret technology hidden by both the US and PRC governments, and thus the US 'has' the tech, the US civilian sector does not, and that's where you start getting into a risk-vs-reward of how it's not just a risk if the US government captures an drone to steal the tech, but if anyone else in the US happens to knock down a drone to steal the tech. Which, given the characterization of many of the actual drones, would totally be possible with... a non-gravitic drive drone.

Moreover, the gravity drive claim is totally unnecessary because, again, other drones. You don't need a special high-tech Chinese drone to fly over sites and do a show of force to insinuate what you could do if you wanted. You could use a low, commercial-off-the-shelf Chinese drone, like they do in Ukraine. Not only would this be far cheaper, it's also be far safer (negating risk of tech loss) and increase your attribution defense (if only the PRC could do a grivitic drone, it lowers down the possible culprits).

The gravitic drive claim is an element that weakens rather than strengthens whatever other points might be had. Literally removing it entirely would make the China claims more credible, since it adds on additional credibility requirements (that the PRC could use secret tech in such a way, and that the PRC would use secret tech in such a way) for no real benefit.

Two things:

  1. The email clearly says that the US already has the technology, and that China only recently attained it. So no risk of the US knocking down a drone and stealing the tech.

  2. The entire point of the "show of force" in this case would be a demonstration that China has this novel propulsion system and can successfully deploy it over the US. "Why drop nukes on Japan, it would so much cheaper to just drop conventional bombs?"

The email clearly says that the US already has the technology, and that China only recently attained it. So no risk of the US knocking down a drone and stealing the tech.

No.

Unlike a strategy game, technology is not universally shared across a country the moment any part of the country gets access to it. If [insert technology here] is a highly-sensitive, advanced, and secret technology, it means that technology is not being used in the commercial sector. If it was being used commercially, it (a) wouldn't be a secret, and (b) wouldn't a monopoly possession for long. Everyone would be aware of it and stealing it immediately and incorporating it itself, unless you start inventing unobtanium requirements to allow a monopolgy.

If the drones are a state secret- regardless of whether they are an American state secret as well or not- then any risk of anyone in the US knocking down the drone is a risk of the American corporate sector stealing the tech, regardless of whether some other US government lab had something similar already.

The entire point of the "show of force" in this case would be a demonstration that China has this novel propulsion system and can successfully deploy it over the US. "Why drop nukes on Japan, it would so much cheaper to just drop conventional bombs?"

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's a bad demonstration concept for such a point. For a demonstration to work, it needs to be clearly identified as a demonstration as opposed to something more banal and normal, and it needs to be clearly attributed to someone in particular.

The drone swarms were not a self-evident demonstration of technological capability because unknown drone incursions can be done by literally anyone with the budget for commercial off the shelf drones. There is no technological need for 'gravity drive' drones. Somone may have been yesteryear years old when they learned that governments have a hard time tracking such things, but it's been discussed for over a decade at this point. This wasn't even the first media cycle about unknown drones over locations.

Nor are the drone swarms self-evidently Chinese in origin. Precisely because the drones are in the technological capacity of any commercial UAS producer, the drones would need to signal a characteristic / capacity that only the intended signaller could do. Otherwise, anyone could claim credit, or mis-attribute. While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities. In fact, more immediate suspects- not yet disproven either- include Russia, due to the far more proximal and relevant deterrence issue of the Ukrainian arms issues of the time.

If the Chinese wanted to send an unambiguous, exclusive signal that they had a unique capability able to reach the US, they could literally just upload a video of it on TikTok.

Instead, the attribution of the Chinese plan hinges on... the credibility of a hostile and possibly mentally unwell dude.

Your first (threat of non-gov entities getting the tech) is a good one, though imo not conclusive. Perhaps they made the bet that no one would shoot one down? Perhaps something about the tech makes them particularly hard to shoot down (this would align with the email's bit about "fly one over the white house").

Re your second: No, China could simply send a private communication to the US saying "FYI the thing that's about to happen over NJ is us", do something with the drones that would require the spooky tech (e.g. depending on what the tech actually is it could be to fly one into controlled airspace without being detected, to do otherwise impossible maneuvers, etc) and voila, effective show of force. You have to remember that we are not the intended audience, the US government is. This played out over and over during the cold war, there is lots of precedent for it.

While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities.

You emphatically do not know this. We know there were classified congressional briefings about the drones, so there is clearly information about these drones that is not public. It seems pretty obvious that if there were evidence of a classified technology being used, the government would prefer to keep that from the public.

You are right that the only evidence that we have that the drones were chinese is this one potentially mentally unwell guy. My point is simply that that theory does seem to fit all of the available facts and is possible.

Your first (threat of non-gov entities getting the tech) is a good one, though imo not conclusive. Perhaps they made the bet that no one would shoot one down? Perhaps something about the tech makes them particularly hard to shoot down (this would align with the email's bit about "fly one over the white house").

This is inventing justifications to rationalize continuing to assume the conclusion that there is a novel tech-based reasoning, as opposed for considering alternative hypothesis that don't require the assumption in the first place.

Simply as a matter of risk-management, there is no reason to have secret test flights within the continental US in risk of other actors the first place.

Re your second: No, China could simply send a private communication to the US saying "FYI the thing that's about to happen over NJ is us", do something with the drones that would require the spooky tech (e.g. depending on what the tech actually is it could be to fly one into controlled airspace without being detected, to do otherwise impossible maneuvers, etc) and voila, effective show of force. You have to remember that we are not the intended audience, the US government is. This played out over and over during the cold war, there is lots of precedent for it.

Again, this is a bad signaling scheme. If the US government rather than the US public were the intended audience, the demonstration would have been in places for special US government attention rather than US population attention.

Note, also, that you are interjecting new theories that the originator didn't claim to support the originator's theory. The dude who killed himself did not claim China sent a private communication, and he happened to (somehow) be privy to it. Instead, we are evolving the conspiracy theory where the guy not only had knowledge of secret technology, but also had access to secret lines of communication between the American and Chinese governments, while his means of knowing either weren't important enough for his suicide note.

Again- Drones intruding in places they are not supposed to be is not new, novel, nor does it require exceptional technology. A super-secret-high-tech drone that acts within the spectrum of commercial-off-the-shelf drones is indistinguishable to a government from the typical variances (benign and malign) of commercial-off-the-shelf drones. What made last quarter's drone reports notable wasn't the mechanics of them happening, but the unusual amount of media attention about them from three different media news cycles, none of which were from the same impetus (or which claimed novel technologies).

If the goal is to have a secret-awareness with only the US government of a new super-capable Chinese UAV, however, there is much simpler- and safer- locations to do so. Namely, Guam in the Pacific (a critical US strategic site for any US-China conflict), or any US carrier group in the Pacific. Not only would these have far greater signalling potential of military penetration capabilities, but they'd have the benefits of securing Chinese technology capabilities/limits by hiding from the Americans what the Chinese 'equivalent' can/cannot do.

Instead, what happened returns to the point that there is no clear public signal, despite having allegedly been done in public places for signaling purposes, revealing no obvious new technological capability despite significant public demonstrations, with no clear attribution beyond the requisite assumption of one of various potential actors.

While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities.

You emphatically do not know this. We know there were classified congressional briefings about the drones, so there is clearly information about these drones that is not public. It seems pretty obvious that if there were evidence of a classified technology being used, the government would prefer to keep that from the public.

This is reversing the burden of proof to assume secret evidence to assume a conclusion.

'The drone is made of classified technology' is just one of many basis for a classified briefing. Other reasons include not knowing the technology of the drones and wanting to keep that limitation secret, knowing the technology of the drones but the means of knowing being secret, whether drones and/or purpetrators have been identified/caught being secret regardless of technology secrecy, the briefings revealing the secret capabilities or vulnerabilities of air defense capabilities in north america best kept secret lest copy-cat terrorists want to emulate, etc. etc. etc. The evidence of classified information is not proof of evidence of the conspiracy of the hour- if the contents of classified briefingers were so easily determinable, there would be no use.

Until evidence is provided, there is no evidence. If you simply want to quibble over the semantic need for 'that we know of,' sure, but the premise remains the same: until you have evidence that a unique technology was used, you do not have evidence that a unique technology was used.

Similarly- and by extension- in the absence of evidence by the departed that the claimed unique technology exists, he has not provided evidence to back his claim. A claim is not evidence any more than an accusation is proof.

You are right that the only evidence that we have that the drones were chinese is this one potentially mentally unwell guy. My point is simply that that theory does seem to fit all of the available facts and is possible.

The potentially mentally unwell guy provided no facts not explained by commercial off the shelf technology and his own probable mental state that made suicide on new years eve seem like a compelling message strategy.

On the other hand, there is no available facts indicating gravitic drives, novel technologies, or sudden changes in Chinese threat campaigns to start flying top-secret world-super-power-only technologies over some American metropolitan areas in a country with over a million lawful drones and who knows how many more unregistered drones.

This email, in an of itself, certainly doesn’t prove anything about the origins of the drones, but it certainly is a curious claim. Mr Bergs military MOS would potentially put him in a position to be read in on advanced US drone programs. There are a number of people in the independent media world who have made the case that the USG has been running black physics programs and cracked gravity 70 years ago. People usually respond to this with ridicule and note that something like this could never be kept secret. Personally, I just add this to the growing list of leakers and dot connectors that indicate that the UAP phenomenon is at least in part, terrestrial black projects that have access to what we would otherwise call science fiction technology.

I am personally acquainted with a former special ops soldier with PTSD from committing war crimes in Afghanistan who makes identical claims about UFOs and science fiction technology, although he believes the USG obtained this stuff from aliens in exchange for 'letting them eat us like squirrels'. It's possible that this explains increasing obesity rates through the government fattening us up for the grey aliens to serve at the golden corral in a flying saucer. But the more likely hypothesis is that special ops soldiers have very high rates of PTSD and believe all sorts of strange things, perhaps by using psychedelics as a coping mechanism.

he believes the USG obtained this stuff from aliens in exchange for 'letting them eat us like squirrels'.

Did the aliens have a book titled To Serve Man?

No, there was actually just some dust on the cover.

PTSD doesn't make you believe in aliens.

Okay let's start with schizophrenia. Well known disease, somewhat understood etiology and biological mechanisms. Makes people believe weird shit, be psychotic. Relatively easy.

Then gets harder. Schizotypal personality disorder. Weird people....with magical thinking? Makes people believe weird shit. Maybe look kinda psychotic but not actually be psychotic? Might have schizophrenia as a complication. Okay that's kinda complicated. People in military have it? Well no probably not, it would be hard to get through basic but maybe?

What if it seems more personality driven - are SJWs psychotic? Religious people? Some people will say they are absolutely untethered from reality and psychotic and believing weird shit. Plenty people will say "no this is the state of the world."

Okay then so what if you are traumatized, you are looking for answers or your world view is knocked over. You try and fill it with something and find something online. Pizzagate, SJ, UAPs, whatever.

Maybe then you're kinda psychotic (well....a little delusional) but you don't have hallucinations or negative symptoms. Now other people think you have weird beliefs (but others don't!).

Or you end up with straight up schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder because of stress/trauma or resulting substance abuse.

Special forces guys get pretty intense psychological assessments when they join and periodically during their service. So presumably he didn’t have any really obvious psychosis disorders in his youth or during his service.

Schizophrenia and other typical psychotic disorders most commonly manifest in young adulthood but can occur later randomly or because of some medical or substance induced insult - or acute stress.

True psychosis doesn't need to be the cause here - consider born again Christian or woke/anti-woke converts. Can have really really strongly held beliefs that others may feel are not reality based.

A veteran can also seek solace from their experiences and trauma and end up with odd or way too strongly anchored beliefs, even without something that meets formal diagnostic criteria.

Guy may have met criteria for major depression with psychotic features but based off the information available so far he doesn't really "look" like that.

No, but treating it with shrooms and LSD might.

What if you got the PTSD from being abducted and experimented on?

No, but there is definitely a correlation because it makes you hyper vigilant, and hyper vigilance plus a constantly gaslighting establishment and stock standard pareidolia makes you more prone to conspiracies and significantly less likely to trust authorities. Of the guys from my old support group who I still keep in touch with, every single one of them has brought up the uap thing except the guy who still thinks the establishment are lizard people harvesting adrenochrome. And I'm no different, I've believed plenty of crazy shit.

The crazy person explanation doesn't really require any extra steps or additional information. He may well have believed that he needed to get this information to Pete Hegseth and that he was staving off the feds by carrying explosives in a rented Cybertruck if he'd had a bad break with reality. I think the simple crazy person explanation more or less puts a bow on a lot of questions along the lines of, "why the hell would he do X?" that I'd had about the choice of hotel, choice of Cybertruck, incompetent bombmaking, and so on. The answers are all that his reasoning had broken from reality and could not reasonably be expected to remain consistent from one moment to the next.

I don't really believe that gravity can just be beaten. I'm pretty sure this is a hoax, psy-op, misunderstanding or such.

And with that said - why can't those mystery drones just use boring old rotors, jets or rocket thrusters to fly? What exactly makes people believe in some fantastical negation of gravity here?

And yes, this is me asking for a spoonfeed because I don't want to wade through a million words of crazy talk.

To spoon-feed you:

  1. The fantastical negation of gravity claim in this instance comes about because of the word "antigravity" in the email, which as far as I am concerned could mean anything that looks like "antigravity" in the movies (and of course there's still the whole question of "was this guy sane" and "did this guy even send this email"?)

  2. This pattern-matches to weird UAP that have been interfering with US Navy flights off of the coast. People's minds start to think "antigravity" because the reported characteristics of the drones are "long-duration, high altitude, supersonic speeds" and their designs are not aerodynamic, but "antigravity propulsion" isn't part of the reported characteristics of those objects – "no visible means of propulsion" is.

But you don't need to believe in "antigravity" to believe that those UAP are real, and you don't need to believe the email mentioning "antigravity" is anything other than somebody making stuff up to believe in...well, antigravity. It's just pattern-matching.

From a certain point of view, helicopters and airplanes are antigravity machines.

My wife, upon telling her very excitedly about all of this: "antigravity is just flying, we already have that."

I don’t really believe that gravity can just be beaten.

The universe lets you do some very strange things, if you’re able to pay the appropriate cost.

Where appropriate is usually somewhere in between prohibitive and practically impossible.

The idea that the huge uptick in UFO sightings in the last ~5 years is due to china catching up to the US in whatever this secret "antigravity" propulsion system is holds some water with me. Something has definitely been happening. To quote the email:

What we have been seeing with "drones" is the operational use of gravitic propulsion systems powered aircraft by most recently China in the east coast, but throughout history, the US.

There have been a lot of military sightings of UFOs in the last five years and it really appears like they really are a mystery to the military, or at least the military people who see them. Among people who assume the craft are terrestrial (they obviously are) the prevailing theory has been that they are American tech being used on unknowing American military assets, both as a test of the capabilities and perhaps as a show of force with an "FYI that's us" note quietly slipped to the Chinese. I think that might explain some (most notable the USS Nimitz Tic Tacs), but not all the encounters, and I think that there's an American-centric bias that precludes a lot of people considering they might be somebody else's tech.

This is a particularly crazy example, and is exactly what I'd expect a chinese show of force of drones with secret propulsion tech to look like: https://www.twz.com/43561/mysterious-drone-swarms-over-navy-destroyers-off-california-went-on-for-weeks

The idea that the huge uptick in UFO sightings in the last ~5 years is due to china catching up to the US in whatever this secret "antigravity" propulsion system is holds some water with me.

The contrary question is this – why were their UFO flaps well before China was a military power at all? "China sending antigravity drones over the White House as a show of force" tracks, but in 1952? I think the contrary position is that sometimes there are UFO flaps, and if there are other things (US government testing, lots of drone use, balloons/drones as a use-of-force/recon assets) happening at the same time, they get mixed in with the reporting.

(With that being said, though, it kinda seems like Mr. Berg may have been [intentionally?] pattern-matching with a specific "'leak'" alleging Chinese reverse-engineered antigravity tech that came out on the world's only reliable website back in 2023. I don't think I buy it, but certainly that would make neat narrative work of both the "Chinese antigravity drones" and the Cold War flaps.)

"UFO" in the traditional sense (ostensibly alien spacecraft) has been used as a disinformation tactic since the late 40s. It worked at Roswell (which was, in fact, a crashed secret American balloon) so it got rolled into the strategies used to cover up secret military projects. I'm making up these percentages, but I'd say 75% of UFO sightings are totally banal misidentifications, 10% of them are outright fakes, 9% of them are unknown-to-the-public aircraft or other tech, and 1% are legitimately weird shit that nobody understands.

This may be a very long-winded way of saying "I agree with you," but I suppose we'll see:

I agree that UFOs are or have been used to cover other sensitive programs, but if you read US released government correspondence from the 1940s, it seems that there was a bottom-up aspect to this (coming through reporting channels, including official ones) and legitimate concern in official circles. For instance, in a July 1947 FBI memo (post-Roswell), we learn that General Schulgen reached out to the FBI to take initial reports of UFOs from citizens. Mr. Fitch, writing the memo for D.M. Ladd, head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, says that he was told by Schulgen that research was underway to see if UFOs were celestial objects, mechanical objects, or hysteria, possibly spread by "individuals of Communist sympathies". Fitch adds his personal note, saying that a lot of the alleged sightings are pranks and that it would, essentially, accomplish nothing to sic the Bureau on this.

There are several handwritten notes on the memo. One of them, possibly from Clyde Tolson, reads "I think we should do this." The other, believed to be from Hoover himself (although I can't read handwriting so I can't personally vouch for that) concurs, but says that "before agreeing...we must insist upon full access to discs recovered...in the ?? case the Army grabbed it & would not let us share[?] it for cursory examination"

Possibly the US disinformation apparatus is so advanced that it creates breadcrumbs in private documents that aren't likely to be released until after the death of the authors, but that seems unlikely to me. More likely is that J. Edgar Hoover was having the wool pulled over his eyes by General Schulgen. But Schulgen wrote a memo in October of 1947 (again, post-Roswell) expressing concern that the flying saucers were real – and were Soviet. He articulated the characteristics of flying saucers as seen by observers and requested technical data on the characteristics of a flying disk. He was particularly interested in the possibility that the disks had an ancestry in the Horten designs developed for Nazi Germany during World War Two and mentions a report indicating the Russians were "planning to build a fleet of 1,8000 Horten VIII (six engine pusher) type flying wing aircraft" (needless to say, the Russians never did this).

Now, interestingly (and to your point) a fake version of this document was circulated that was altered to play up a potential extraterrestrial explanation and downplay or remove the Russian angle – make of that what you will. But it seems clear that if there was an alien psyop shortly after Roswell then not only did Schulgen not get the memo but he didn't even get the intended message about the flying saucers being aliens.

But the evidence I've seen suggests strongly that, in the 1940s, either USAF general staff were hoisted by their own disinformation petard, or they were legitimately concerned about the reported characteristics of "flying discs" and the geopolitical implications. I think it's more likely that there were reported genuinely anomalous UFO phenomena, which were reported during the Second World War and in years prior. In fact there's some surviving evidence from alleged Italian government correspondence that not only were they sighted in the 1930s, but one crashed in Italy in 1933; unfortunately I am not familiar enough with things like "the norms of Italian government telegrams in the 1930s" to have a strong opinion about this. To the extent that it's a US/USAF psyop (which I agree is more than 0%) I suspect they are piggybacking on an existing, genuine phenomena (which may not be "real" but was real enough to be a genuine cause for concern).

very interesting, thanks.

Knowing nothing about this but your comment, it occurs to me that a combination of compartmentalization and Shulgen just being a kooky general could be sufficient. But also, you are right, there is a lot of unexplained weirdness that is insufficiently captured by "it's just disinfo."

Yeah, sufficient compartmentalization can lead to very weird results (and I think does explain some of the weirdness we see around the UFO topic). But on the other hand, at a certain point it's much easier for me to believe that the weirdness around UFOs is because they're "real" than some 18D chess by omnicompetent Air Force counterintelligence nerds. Particularly when the military – which has a direct financial incentive to tell Congress that everyone and their mother is some sort of a threat – settles on something like "well okay sure fine UAP are 'real' and we don't know what they are but it's probably not a big deal."

I don’t think so. The military isn’t going to let it out of the bag that they’re testing new technology. It would be silly in an age of global communication to say “hey, everybody, these aren’t UFOs. They’re super top secret military technology that we’re testing and calibrating our detection systems to recognize. Stop asking if it’s Spock.” And it’s also not inconceivable that military people might pretend to the public that they don’t know what’s going on. The lack of these things appearing anywhere other than US naval bases is rather odd, as it would seem like if I wanted to scare American military people, I’d want to go as deep into American territory and be over the most valuable military bases (which are probably Air Force and Space Force, not Navy). Furthermore, if they aren’t ours, I think our tolerance for them buzzing about our assets is probably pretty low, even if we didn’t shoot one down, we’d likely have a drone or two of our own pushing these things away.

Anti gravity seems a bit far fetched. It’s overkill for the purpose of getting these things airborne. If such a thing exists, it’s likely several million dollars a drone. There are dozens of these things. That’s not including fuel or power cells to support it.

The military isn’t going to let it out of the bag that they’re testing new technology.

I mostly agree, very risky to reveal new military tech before it's fully tested. But I personally think these are mature technologies being used in a show of force, not prototypes being tested.

The lack of these things appearing anywhere other than US naval bases is rather odd

They have appeared in very many places; the article I linked is about them appearing out to sea off the coast of California. That is a very difficult place to deploy anything, especially for American adversaries. It sends a very strong message about naval capability and threat.

I think our tolerance for them buzzing about our assets is probably pretty low, even if we didn’t shoot one down, we’d likely have a drone or two of our own pushing these things away.

The article I link talks about the ships trying to shoot them down. Did you read it?

Anti gravity seems a bit far fetched.

Don't get too fixated on "antigravity" as meaning anything technically specific. "Novel propulsion system" is probably how you should think of it.

That is the claim made by the guy who blew up the cybertruck, not a claim made by OP.

The drones spotted over NJ in December were Chinese kit equipped with gravitic propulsion systems.

No. Pulse detonation I'd believe. Nuclear I'd believe. Antimatter I'd be dubious about, but the stuff you'd need to fuel it isn't impossible to hide. Gravitic, no. Not even if you count "total conversion via black hole" as "gravitic"; an accelerator big enough to make one of those is too big to hide, and if they'd been in use for decades one of them would have gone boom (with a force greater than every nuclear weapon on Earth put together).

Tech like this would be extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. Reasons that would explain the secrecy.

I'm sorry, if you're talking about straight-up antigravity, they're not obvious to me.

If gravity has been cracked, it potentially means that other wild stuff like zero point energy is also on the table.

I'm sorry, but somebody's been filling your head with nonsense.

Zero-point energy is not a type of energy. It's just any energy that can't be extracted, and thus is part of the effective "zero point" of your scale. "Extracting zero-point energy" literally means "extracting energy that can't be extracted", which is by definition impossible - either you can extract it or you can't.

Any time somebody talks about "zero-point energy" as a power source, that's an immediate "this guy has been suckered by pseudoscience".

Hey, maybe they were fueled by red mercury.

Now you're reminding me of this little gem.

I won’t pretend to have any technical background. But I’d speculate that decades of black physics carried out by the USG would have dangerous implications along the lines of thermonuclear weapons or worse. If only for the fact that small drones with no heat/em/noise emissions would make conventional weapons even more dangerous. That’s the profile of many of the drone sightings.

Thanks for engaging. I’m always fascinated with the intensely negative reaction certain groups of people have with this topic.

It seems clear at this point that there is some phenomenon that the UAP people are observing and documenting, be it the nj drones, tic tac, gofast/gimble, pilots, whistleblowers, or any of the other stories we’ve heard for quite a while now. Government developed weapons or surveillance platforms seem like a fairly reasonable assumption here.

It seems clear at this point that there is some phenomenon that the UAP people are observing and documenting, be it the nj drones, tic tac, gofast/gimble, pilots, whistleblowers, or any of the other stories we’ve heard for quite a while now. Government developed weapons or surveillance platforms seem like a fairly reasonable assumption here.

Oh yes, obviously. My personal assumption is "Chinese balloon drones intended to gather intelligence". I'm only sceptical of the "and therefore it's aliens or Clarketech!" explanation.

There are a couple of pretty boring "anti-gravity" explanations that don't violate "the laws of physics," - I don't think negative mass does, but more prosaically propulsion utilizing the Meissner effect is quite possible.

Of course, that isn't technically anti-gravity in the sense that there's no spacetime manipulation, but they would function like "antigravity" does in the movies (and wouldn't get picked up by e.g. LIGO). The released email doesn't go into specifics, so it's hard to tell if it's antigravity or "antigravity."

The war crimes claims seem at least somewhat founded, which in my mind enhances the credibility of the report, but OTOH if the guy had a break with reality he might mix fact with fiction. Or maybe he was upset about the war crimes and decided to mix it in with the UAP stuff he had read about on the news or 4chan, knowing that would get the war crimes story more traction.

There are a couple of pretty boring "anti-gravity" explanations that don't violate "the laws of physics," - I don't think negative mass does, but more prosaically propulsion utilizing the Meissner effect is quite possible.

There's something hinky going on in that article.

I don't think the superconducting plates can "know" that they are on the outside of a sphere, and therefore direct their force outwards. Sure, they can know the difference between inside (insulated from the Earth's magnetic field) and outside (exposed to it), but that asymmetry breaks once you turn off the top half of the sphere and attempt to create lift: instead of changing from a full sphere (top half pushing up, bottom half pushing down, net zero force) to a half sphere (top half missing, bottom half pushing up, net upwards force) as the article claims, it has changed into a hemisphere (top flat surface pushing down, bottom curved surface pushing up, net zero force).

You definitely might be right about the article, but I'm not following your analysis (probably a me problem!)

Perhaps a simpler objection: He is proposing a perpetual motion machine.

An ideal superconductor does not require any energy input. Our superconductors need energy-intensive cooling setups, but that's just a quirk of our technology and environment. If you could produce lift with the mere presence of superconductors (in a hemispherical shape), then you could lift something for free, drop it to generate energy, and repeat forever with no inputs.

The standard model of physics doesn't allow for perpetual motion machines, therefore it doesn't allow for his proposed machine.

The Meisner effect occurs at the time the superconductor is cooled. So there's no perpetual motion... but also not more than a momentary thrust.

But he's not proposing lifting anything for free - he's proposing power in using beamed power, right?

The power goes in, then...? The only power expenditure he laid out is cooling the material. That deals with the inefficiency in our technology, but it is still generating free energy at its heart.

Assuming the combination of very high cooling power, an enhanced magnetic field, and a lightning-fast computer to control the superconducting plates, this system can go from hover to high subsonic speeds and stop and turn at 90-degree angles. But crossing the transonic barrier and dealing with a bow shock wave requires a very different type of technology like plasma actuators that we will save for another time.

I read three power expenditures:

  1. Very high cooling power
  2. An enhanced magnetic field [I think he's just describing using the superconductors to create magnetic fields by running current through the superconductors, this...isn't controversial, I don't think?]
  3. A lightning-fast computer

I mean, actual negative mass might be physical. But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.

The first link seems very dubious in a lot of ways. You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect. I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions; tacking is a thing (although not as much of a thing as in water), but a sphere has no keel to tack with. When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".

NB: I say that antimatter production wouldn't be impossible to hide because a purpose-built antimatter-making accelerator (which would be far more efficient than current accelerators) wouldn't actually need to be all that big, and because the van Allen belts have antimatter in them which could possibly be tapped without being world news.

But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.

This is the core claim, that the USG has sequestered an elite cadre of physicists and kept their discoveries under wraps. One observation in favor of this claim: the dearth of fundamental breakthroughs in physics for the past fifty years.

I think Eric Weinstein alluded to certain branches of physics possibly being forbidden by the government due to their potential weaponisation.

You don't just need to sequester the physicists; you need to sequester their equipment, too. Notice the sheer scale of facilities used for fundamental physics work these days; you're not hiding a 500-kilometre synchrotron. And a lot of the facilities that are built aren't even in the USA.

The necessary co-ordination to keep this straight quickly approaches Illuminati-complete.

That assumes that you need to smash particles together at higher and higher energies to test your hypotheses.

If you're on the hunt for gravitons and antigravitons, would that even be part of the research? Can gravitons even collide?

If you're starting fresh with an unexplored branch of physics you'll not have gotten to the point where testing hypotheses is so far along the curve of diminishing returns that the next advancement requires billions of dollars of capital. The first particle accelerator had a diameter of 4.5 inches. The first one that managed to split an atom was about 2 meters wide.

What of all the secretive Space Force X-37B missions? If you're looking for graviton signals it would be helpful to be in an environment where there are fewer of them.

Note- you need to sequester their equipment, and you need to get the skilled technicians turning wrenches to put it together to keep their mouths shut. Veteran and/or skilled trades circles would be abuzz with rumors of secret hidden technology- what we actually see is engineering school dropouts who find out their hair isn't weird enough for the ancient aliens grifting circuit.

Perhaps there is some physics research that doesn't require a 500 kilometre synchrotron.

Sure, but in a lot of cases this leads to "random scientists not part of the conspiracy could find it". Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA. And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.

Secret engineering projects are substantially easier to conceal than secret basic science, due to basic science being universal and thus independently discoverable.

And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.

Given the collective institutional support for transgenderism and the failure to call out the absurd state of the science behind it, I'd say either it's not isomorphic to the Illuminati, or the Illuminati must exist.

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And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.

I don't think you really need to make that conspiracy isomorphic to the illuminati. The heredity of intelligence and other mental characteristics is nakedly obvious to everyone who even takes a cursory look, but research on the topic has been pretty effectively suppressed without the need for any kind of HBD illuminati.

Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA.

Playing devil's advocate here- are any of them built in countries that aren't core western allies(NATO+ANZAC+Japan+SK)?

And yet, history is replete with nations making fundamental scientific discoveries before anyone else and using those to their advantage militarily before their competitors catch up. One way we know that this has happened in the US is that a scientist makes a breakthrough that could be militarily useful, that breakthrough is then immediately classified, and then other scientists are briefed in and conduct classified research and development based on the breakthrough. That can give you a significant first mover advantage because everyone else is still at the starting line, waiting to discover the fundamental breakthrough, and you're racing forward.

Also the entire premise of this situation is that it wasn't successfully concealed and China now has it as well.

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You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect.

Right – the article postulates charged superconductors to repel the magnetic field as needed. (It specifically doesn't postulate room-temperature superconductors, which I find interesting. I'd be surprised if the US government was mining antimatter in the Van Allen belts and storing it in Area 51, but not if they had stumbled on a room-temp superconductor. Maybe I'm out of touch?)

I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions

Presumably you could just thrust against the magnetic field at an angle, yeah?

When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".

And when you see "balloon holding still in 120 knot winds" what do you think?

I'd be surprised if the US government was mining antimatter in the Van Allen belts and storing it in Area 51, but not if they had stumbled on a room-temp superconductor. Maybe I'm out of touch?

These are both fairly plausible. We're not that far from a room-temperature superconductor; there are materials currently thought to do it under diamond-anvil-cell pressure, and then it's just a matter of engineering to build something that can sustain that pressure while letting current in (i.e. fabricating large diamonds enclosing the stuff while doping part of it enough to conduct). And that's worst-case; there might be something better. As for antimatter, I'm not sure you can get high enough with balloons, but military orbital launches aren't that rare.

I'd be somewhat surprised by either, but there's no obvious reason either'd be a Can't Happen.

Presumably you could just thrust against the magnetic field at an angle, yeah?

Nope. Meissner effect always pushes from stronger field to weaker field, and at any point on the Earth's surface that direction is fixed. Ferromagnets pull in the opposite direction.

As I noted, tacking is a thing; you can sail in (almost) any direction despite the fixed wind direction at any given time, because you can use a boat's keel to prevent movement in one direction (sideways) while allowing it in another (forward/back). But a sphere specifically can't do this, because it's symmetrical; it offers the same drag in all directions. Also, now that I think of it, the ability to tack into the wind is also reliant on being able to angle the sails, and I don't think you could do that here.

And when you see "balloon holding still in 120 knot winds" what do you think?

Tether(s). Or engine(s), I suppose, although technically that would make it an airship and not a balloon. Again, though, you really want ground-crew observations to rule out optical illusions regarding movement (even then there are still some possible ones).

military orbital launches aren't that rare.

Come to think of it, this is a great use for the X-37!

Meissner effect always pushes from stronger field to weaker field, and at any point on the Earth's surface that direction is fixed.

Okay. But (and bear with me, it's a long time since I've been in college physics) – you can use magnetic fields for both suspension and propulsion – this is how maglevs work, using linear induction motors – right? The difference here would be that Earth's gravity field isn't an alternating set of magnetic polar forces, but but if you were activating electromagnets on different ends of a sphere, wouldn't that generate linear motion just the same?

I guess this wouldn't technically only be using the Meissner effect. But then again, granting you can pump enough power remotely to a bundle of superconductors to keep it afloat (which maybe we shouldn't grant, for several reasons, but I like pushing these ideas to see how far they will go) perhaps it might be simpler to turn to ionic thrust, which another poster mentioned.

Tether(s). Or engine(s), I suppose, although technically that would make it an airship and not a balloon. Again, though, you really want ground-crew observations to rule out optical illusions regarding movement (even then there are still some possible ones).

Presumably it would be the engines, as the lil guys were clocked going supersonic. (Graves doesn't specify, but I assume he's making that judgment off of radar data and not Mk 1 eyeball observation.)

Come to think of it, this is a great use for the X-37!

It was definitely doing something up there for 900+ days, but the antimatter mining thing is probably not it. There are only ten kilowatt hours worth of antimatter in the entire van allen belts.

Yeah, I don't literally think the X-37 is mining antimatter. But if you were trying to mine antimatter in the Van Allen belts, the X-37 would be the platform to do it.

Of course if it was me, I would mine antimatter from bananas under the cover of being a zoo.

Oh, sure, there are ways and means to thrust. Like I said at the start, I'd totally believe pulse detonation and nuclear-thermal jets (for the latter, basically take a jet engine - turboprop, turbofan, turbojet, ramjet - and replace the combustion chamber heating the air with a small air-cooled nuclear reactor; now you have a jet that doesn't need refueling for months). They built one of the latter in the Cold War (Project Pluto).

Ion thrusters and magsails should be physically plausible, too, although I'd assign lower probability simply because TTBOMK they've got inferior performance to more-conventional propulsion (in atmosphere, at least; space is a whole different kettle of fish).

The reason "sphere" makes me think "balloon" is because balloons are one of the few cases where spherical shape makes sense, although I suppose if you wanted to troll people you might choose a suboptimal shape to confuse.

The reason "sphere" makes me think "balloon" is because balloons are one of the few cases where spherical shape makes sense, although I suppose if you wanted to troll people you might choose a suboptimal shape to confuse.

There are some interesting drone designs ("SpICED" and "ZeRONE") that are propelled balloons that greatly resemble the reported "metallic orbs," and from what I understand (besides using the spherical balloon shape because they are balloons) they use the spherical balloon shape because it gives them a lot of maneuverability when fitted with thrusters. But it seems like these are mostly designed for indoor use, although I wouldn't be surprised if designs along those lines are responsible for more-than-zero "UAP" sightings.

Reading the first half of your post it seemed like a message from a mentally ill person. Learning that he later killed himself in a car bomb did not increase my assessment of his sanity.

I tend to find schizophrenic or similarly disordered modes of thinking very recognizable, so it's always weird to me when other people see them and don't immediately realize what's going on. You also have to consider the base rates here: mental illness is much more common than the number of people who know about "secret physics-revolutionizing propulsion systems" level information, or indeed information considerably less earth-shattering than that. And what percentage of people who know about the latter would react by messaging an obscure Instagram account, mixing in unrelated stuff about war crimes, and then bombing themselves in front of Trump Tower?

I can understand your POV, but perhaps consider that there is more to this than a 300 word half a post that was written a bit tongue-in-cheek.

To your last point, some spec ops whistleblower contacting various military/spec ops independent journalists before putting on an impossible-to-ignore fireworks show sounds reasonable to me. How else would it go?

The thing is that most of these theories cannot help but run right into “movie physics” — things actual physicists and engineers generally know to be implausible if not to violate known physical laws. And they’re always discovered by people with almost zero known domain expertise (which makes sense as they seem to be making rather elementary mistakes) and so shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the stuff they’re talking about or have access to information about these systems. It’s like the cook thinks he’s found a super secret beoring warp drive. No, that’s not how classified information works even in civilian stuff. If I’m not actually working on the project I don’t have access to anything.

By contacting more journalists, including more prominent ones. By providing evidence such as documentation (sure it's plausible that he didn't manage to copy any - but if someone like him knew about it there should be a huge number of people in a position to leak it). By providing specifics about how exactly he learned about it, some of which could lead to collaborating evidence. Not by combining it with other grievances ranging from war crimes to personal issues and generic stuff about how the country is "headed towards collapse". That's a common tendency with delusions/lies/exaggerations, where something that should be a huge deal is treated as a side note because the chain of causation doesn't begin with learning about it but with his general state of mind manufacturing it. (See also: MeToo accusations that treat claims like "committed rape" as secondary to "was a bad boyfriend who hurt my feelings".) Not by committing suicide at all: mentally healthy people rarely commit suicide and it's a bad way to leak information compared to just staying alive and telling people all the specifics of what he learned and when/why he learned it.

Absolute raging bullshit. The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny. The chance that furthermore the engineering work to scale up the discovery happened without it being leaked massively is zero.

I am embarrassed that the responses here so far are giving this any credence at all. It's always nice to be reminded of how wrong I must be about areas I know little about given that when people comment on my areas, they're often confidently hilariously wrong.

The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny

Do you know who Ning Li is? Mike McCullough? Both of those people might be/have been full of it/wrong, but their work wasn't exactly secret (until it was, anyway). If Ning Li made an anti-gravity breakthrough, you probably read about it on Wired before it went into a special access program.

But secondly, I don't think what you're describing is as far-fetched as you might thing. Apparently, during the late unpleasantness (World War Two), the Soviets and perhaps others deduced that the United States was working on nuclear weapons specifically because we stopped publishing on nuclear weapons research.

Any future classified research into fundamental physics would need to be more than suppressed, it would need to be overlaid with a misleading theory that was nevertheless embraced by most scientific gatekeepers, and the actual line of research or any breakthroughs would need to be kept carefully out of the realm of respectable science by ridicule and gatekeeping. And I don't think this would be as hard as it sounds: in the United States, the research world is very beholden to the US government, and universities did lots of classified and sometimes shady research on behalf of the US government. I'm not sure it would be hard to keep the lid on something, for a while, particularly if you had an alternative hypothesis that was unfalsifiable or elusive but made the math work (I'm looking at you, dark matter!)

String theory and dark matter being scientific dead ends but great cover stories for gravitics? I love it.

It's particularly interesting when you realize that the implications of (e.g.) quantized inertia are something similar to "gravetics."

Unfortunately I don't have the credentials to evaluate the relative merits of string theory and dark matter in a way that's particularly persuasive, but I do think that they (or at least dark matter, I know even less about string theory) are the sort of wild goose chase you'd want to send everyone on if you were trying to cover up physics breakthroughs. "Just build another multi-billion dollar supercollider, maybe you'll find dark matter THIS time!"

I have no training in physics, but just considering what an odd duck dark matter seems to be, my guess would be that a different theory is developed to explain it and gains consensus by 2100. I'd say I have confidence in this because dark matter exists to balance equations, but I've heard that enough of Einstein's "I just threw this in to make the numbers add up" things have turned out to be empirically verifiable to give me a certain faith that the math is on to something.

Absolute raging bullshit. The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny. The chance that furthermore the engineering work to scale up the discovery happened without it being leaked massively is zero.

It’s almost as dumb as that sci-fi movie with Cillian Murphy that came out two years ago. That one about an entire city being built in the New Mexico desert for physicists to construct a world-ending super weapon in complete and total secrecy. How a film with such a ridiculous premise could win so many Oscars is beyond me.

Nuclear fission was published in a journal four years before the Manhattan project was started. Szilard described a fission chain reaction in a patent six years before the project. The fundamental building blocks for the atomic bomb were publicly known, accepted physics already - where are the accepted fundamental building blocks of antigravity technology?

“The Unobservable Universe: A Paradox-Free Framework for Understanding the Universe” by Scott M. Tyson, self-published and universally shunned.

I was his friend for nearly a decade. The man was a materials scientist and helped solve cosmic ray errors in satellite electronics. Whip-smart but distractible, he was looking for a funder who wouldn’t look at his proposed experiments and think “oh God, another perpetual motion nut.”

His theories start from the concept that we got gravity wrong: instead of masses having gravity, he believes it’s more accurate to say gravities have mass. From there, he explains the Casimir effect, propulsionless motion, and free energy, but doesn’t mention in the book the possibility of gravity bombs more terrible than the Tsar Bomba.

Indeed, there's plenty of crackpots with all kinds of theories. The key difference with fission bombs is that fission itself was already published in Nature years before the Manhattan project began. Fission was emphatically not a crackpot theory.

Plate tectonics and continental drift were very explicitly a crackpot theory for quite a while, even though a lot of the evidence had actually been shared already. Sometimes the individual crackpots are right and the entire rest of the field is wrong - just ask Alfred Wegener (assuming you have a Ouija board on hand).

I don't really know much about the history of plate tectonics. Wikipedia says:

His hypothesis was not accepted by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics.[4][5]

So it sounds like there was some more evidence that was required for everything to really fit together (heh).

Of course crackpots can sometimes be right. However, the hard part is to figure out a priori which crackpots are right. Since I haven't taken physics since college and I don't have the time to comprehensively evaluate every crackpot physics claim I come across, going with the base rate of ~0% seems to be the most reasonable approach.

The one that remained a secret for a few years, rather than a few decades?

The reason it was only a few years was because Truman decided to drop two of them on Japan and announce it to the entire world. If the US government had decided it was in their strategic interest to not use them on Japan and keep it a secret, it could have very well been decades. You’d probably have a handful of scientists leak about it over the years, but the government and skeptics would declare those scientists to be obvious schitzos and bullshit artists. The “adults in the room” would industriously gaslight everyone about how the weaponization of fusion is scientifically preposterous.

If the US government had decided it was in their strategic interest to not use them on Japan and keep it a secret, it could have very well been decades.

No, it wouldn't have been. the science was already public. That's how the US government became aware of it in the first place. Scientists were studying radiation since Curie discovered it, and they would have continued to do so, within America or without it. In fairly short order, they would have broken the science wide open.

Sure, if you’re a physicist you might quietly believe that there’s something fishy about the denial. Plenty of virologists found the claim that COVID was a natural phenomenon fishy, but they mostly kept their mouths shut and went with the party line. The ones that didn’t were mocked and their work was suppressed. John Q. Public who’s a machinist in Iowa would just believe what he’s told.

It remained secret until it was unavoidably revealed because its result needed to be used and was impossible to hide.

We know that other secret military planes have remained secret for decades before being revealed.

Eh, there's like two posters further down giving it some amount of credence. We've had bigger threads about the Tic Tac at the time, and my sense was that the vast majority do not buy either the UFO or the classified scifi tech theory. It's just less exciting to argue the same thing over and over again when the evidence for the theories is always of the same shape (US military whistleblower full of red flags, blurry or unclear video, lots of reported sightings surely must mean they can't all be wrong, friend-of-a-friend who is very smart and has access believes it), especially when the UFO/scifi believers aren't really anyone's outgroup.

(Though with the Tic Tac, I did actually have a favourite classified scifi tech sort of theory: US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings. Intended audience was China and/or funding agencies. Efficacy demonstrated by showing that even muggle US military were completely overwhelmed by it.)

Kind of related, I lean strongly towards the skeptical side, and found in support this video showing that one of those famous videos of supposedly impossible aircraft maneuvering and looking weird actually corresponds pretty well to being a perfectly normal jet aircraft being shot in infrared through a sophisticated aircraft tracking camera that we're looking at the raw feed of.

US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings.

The US government [almost certainly] developed a way to generate plasma balls using a particle beam and tested it at Groom Lake back in the day as an electronic warfare weapon. This is why you might have heard of Bob Lazar.

I think there's something to the UFO weirdness (in part because of how the US security state moves around it) but my best guess for a "prosaic" explanation for the Tic-Tac is laser holography deployed from a submarine (recall the pilots mention a water disturbance). Since plasmas can reflect radar waves, this would be a great electronic warfare asset that would also be visible with the naked eye.

Probably in unrelated news, the US Navy started putting lasers on their submarine masts a few years ago.

So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.

Either way, even if we commit to the proton beam story, I don't quite buy it. Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard. There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.

Putting the focal point at a distance of hundreds of meters or even some kilometers from the emitter, rather than centimeters, would get you plasma foci that are either extremely stretched/washed out in the direction of the beam (especially considering atmospheric scattering and everything, the energy density at the focus will not be terribly different from the energy density a meter up or down the beam from it), or you would require massive emitters (so the incoming beams converge at a wide angle), which I doubt they would place at sea and would be very far beyond civilian technology levels for any sort of coherent beam, or you would require multiple distributed emitters with perfect stabilisation to have a strongly lit up intersection point of beams that are individually too weak to induce plasma, which I could maybe believe on land (but then military anti-air beam weapons would be much further along than they appear to be) but not on sea.

Based on this line of thought and the circumstance that the Tic Tac video had obvious and much-commented-on camera effects (features/"hair" that seemed to track sensor orientation rather than that of the putative object in the real world), I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR. Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes) can be just as easily chalked up to either metaphorical water-muddying by involved military (like, what if your superior orders you to add this detail when talking to the press?) or the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).

So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.

Correct, but either can produce a plasma field in the atmosphere.

Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard.

That's the thing about proton beams - the accelerated particles will lose velocity and at a certain point they will release their remaining energy. If you're using the proton beam for cancer treatment, it releases that energy into the cancer cells. If you aim it at the sky, it will create an ionized patch of plasma. Tom Mahood goes into the numbers here.

There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of tech I'm thinking of. Look, if you're telling me you don't think this sort of tech was sufficient to create a Tic-Tac event, I am not going to argue with you! I'm not convinced that it was responsible. I just find it interesting that the tech exists, if even in a modest form, and that the US military has been doing research on particle beams and radar decoys for decades (and thus might be ahead of civilian technology in this area) and that they started putting lasers on submarines at a time which would make sense if the Tic-Tac was an IOC/prototype test. Am I convinced? No. Do I think it makes a certain amount of sense? Sure.

I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR.

I think this makes sense, but wouldn't account for the eyewitness reports unless there was something visible to the naked eye. (Obviously ECM could account for the radar detection.)

Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes)

Fravor, the pilot who reported the water disturbance, wasn't able to capture any footage of the Tic Tac as I understand it. That was captured by a subsequent jet.

To expand on this a bit, I'll add that I don't think this is a good assumption, nor do I think it tracks how the military uses its sensors. The military prefers IR sensors, and the Tic-Tac footage was from an ATFLIR pod (YMMV on whether this counts as visible-light). But as far as I know, the F-18 has no feature to continuously record all of its surroundings. The ATFLIR pod would need to be pointed at a specific target (in this case, the Tic-Tac), and not all aircraft carry ATFLIR pods, nor does the ATFLIR pod necessarily always function. I believe the F-18 also has a "gun camera" that captures, essentially, the view of the HUD - very far from a 360 degree recording, and I do not know if those are even routinely turned on. Likewise for any other in-cockpit cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. In short, as far as I know, there's no particular reason to believe that any given event would be captured visually on any equipment besides the HUD camera by a Navy fighter unless it was especially equipped with a reconnaissance/sensor pod. And to catch something in the HUD, you'd need to "pull it into the HUD" (point your aircraft at it) and have the HUD recorder on.

the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).

From what I've seen of the accounts, the water was what Fravor noticed first - then the Tic-Tac. I doubt the adrenaline kicked in just from seeing an ocean disturbance. But as long as we're postulating extra details manifesting from stress, I'd say that cuts towards the "plasma holography" theory, as one could just as easily assume that the pilot's brain "filled in" a blobby shape with solid details, and then contaminated other aircrew's perceptions by describing it, causing them to report the same thing. Not saying I think this is what happened, but I think it's more parsimonious an explanation than Fravor stress-hallucinating an ambiguous water feature.

Seconded, see the latter bit of my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/1322/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/283449?context=8#context

Great minds!

This is why you might have heard of Bob Lazar.

This is the biggest cope I have ever heard about Lazar, he doesn't even address all his proven lies and fabrications about his own personal history.

I dunno if you read the linked article, but it goes into depth about Lazar's many and varied lies.

I figure the whole 'military technology is so far advanced!' thing is only in areas where the military has far more of an interest than civilian scientists, like radar stealth/detection. The US military probably isn't hiding super-iphones. Gravity manipulation certainly isn't in their wheelhouse.

I figure the whole 'military technology is so far advanced!' thing is only in areas where the military has far more of an interest than civilian scientists, like radar stealth/detection.

I agree with you, but "antigravity" is very much one of those things where the military has a definite if apparently pointless interest, to the point that you can read about its exploits (or lack thereof) on Wikipedia – which now also mentions the Las Vegas bombing.

I think that during the Cold War various agencies threw cash at a variety of off-the-wall projects. If there was a Road Not Taken lying around for bizarre experimentation to detect, it doesn't seem insane to think they might have found it. However, conversely, just because the US military/CIA researched something during the Cold War doesn't mean it was real. If someone had written an op-ed to say that beating Communism required imagining a dozen impossible things before breakfast, you can bet the CIA, DIA, and J. Edgar Hoover would have all had their best and brightest in a pilot program within the month.

If it's real, then it would likely be a fancy sounding name for something more mundane than sci-fi anti-gravity.

If the US has gravitic secret technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?

In the 1970s Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber program because he was keen on the upcoming development of stealth bombers. Republicans hammered him for being weak on defence and eventually reinstated it... Anyway, if the US had an incredible gamechanging technology like this, they wouldn't be spending so much on conventional aircraft. There would be signals and portents.

Why does the Air Force still use B-52s when the B-2 exists? Because it would be too expensive to use a two billion dollar bleeding-edge technology top of the line stealth aircraft for every single job.

That's exactly what the F-35 was supposed to be, only it turned into another super-expensive fighter which needs the F-15 EX to handle more everyday missions...

If the US has unmanned fighter technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?

Pilot mafia. Top Gun Maverick is a great film, that's what USAF officers want to be doing. They don't want nerds sitting at a desk stealing their glory.

Hahaha, pilot mafia throttling the antigravity program so they can still buzz the control tower is...not one of the craziest theories I've seen.

(The truth is though that I don't think unmanned aircraft are yet in a position to replace manned aircraft, and I'm not sure they will be able to fully barring, basically, AGI.)

I'm not singling you out here because I hear this a lot and I wonder... what is it that pilots do that an AI can't that compensates for the training expense and kinematics costs of having a pilot? The pilot can't do damage-control on the plane mid-flight. They don't pick out targets, the sensors achieve lock on. They're not tactically superior, that's been proven with dogfighting simulations even between equally performing jets. It's all fly-by-wire these days, their muscles aren't necessary.

I guess a human might be better at the ethics of 'do we bomb this truck or not, given how close it is to civilians?' But again humans have high variance and it's not clear that this is so.

what is it that pilots do that an AI can't that compensates for the training expense and kinematics costs of having a pilot?

Here is what I think the answer is: recognizing jamming and adapting immediately to new uncatalogued threats or situations. You're correct that at this point modern fighters are basically fusing a human with "AI" so the question of what can humans do better anyway? is a very valid one.

Modern jamming is extremely good. It's hard for human pilots to tell when they are being jammed. [Edit: or at least that's the point of modern jamming/EW/deception programs such a NEMESIS as I understand it, but, to be clear I've never been in a position to personally test this, so take all of this with a grain of salt, bearing in mind that I just read about this stuff for fun.] In fact I think there is a decent chance that it's over for the radar-only bros in the Next Big War, both because of jamming and because using your radar makes you a big ole' target. (F-22 hardest hit!) But I think a human has at least a chance to recognize and understand that he is being jammed even if his fancy computer and his radar does not. That's not really true if you just have the fancy computer and the radar: if the 200 radar targets that appear on your screen suddenly already passed your hardware and software's anti-jamming features, your computer is going to think they are real. A pilot will know that they aren't. Now, as AI gets better and better, this will be less of a problem - maybe you can do deep learning on jamming, maybe you can put Claude in the cockpit and he would realize the 200 targets are fake.

TLDR; we already have AI in the cockpit now and it can almost certainly get fooled by modern jamming/ECM, it's good to have another set of eyeballs in the cockpit.

Secondly, new threats or situations. You touched on this a bit inasmuch as a human might be able to parse an ambiguous ethical situation better than an AI (although I agree, high variance) but consider a situation where the trained tactics fail. Let's take a hypothetical: air war with China, four planes leave the carrier, one comes back. It turns out that towed decoys aren't effective against the latest Chinese air-to-air missile, and the only reason one guy came back was because he goofed up the decoy deployment like an idiot and ended up maneuvering radically to survive the engagement. Now if you had had AIs, none of the planes would have come back. And, worse, you would have had no idea what happened to them, because you were operating on a mission and in an environment without any communication ability over the combat zone. (This is something else that is nice about pilots: they eject from the plane, and they float, so you can recover them a bit more easily than you can a black box at the bottom of the sea).

Now you have to tell all of your pilots "don't deploy decoys, you're going to have to make some very specific maneuvers to defeat the Chinese A2A missile threats." Said and done. And if you have ~AGI computers, you can tell them the same thing too. But if you have anything a bit dumber, you're going to have to rewrite their software on the fly to defeat the new threat. And it's going to suck if all of your software engineers aren't on the boat. (It would also suck if your adversaries got a hold of your codebase, or reverse-engineered it with their own AI, and used it to instruct their AI fighters on how to pwn your AI fighters every single time. Not exactly possible with high-variance humans!)

TLDR; it's not good to have new functionality gated behind civilian software engineers stateside during a time of war. (To be fair, I think the Pentagon recognizes this and is working on in-housing more coders.)

Now, imho, none of this means that AI is useless or that drone aircraft are useless in a peer war. But I suspect that this (and the fighter mafia) is why you're seeing things like the "unmanned wingman" approach being adopted (and not only in the States). The "unmanned wingman" approach basically lets you build aircraft with cutting edge AI and launch them right into combat, but because you aren't taking pilots out of the loop entirely, you'll still retain the flexibility and benefits of having an actual human person in the combat environment.

Maybe that won't be necessary - maybe everything will all go according to plan. But I don't think the AI is quite there yet.

Interesting points. In the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe AI aircraft would be more tactically flexible since you can change up their training in a quick update though I can see how it would also be bad if you had software leaks. But the F-35 software has already been leaked to China half a dozen times, they even have gotten some Chinese made parts into the supply chain.

Also one hopes that they'd put visual cameras on the plane. They already do I think, F-35 pilots have AR that lets them see through the plane I believe.

Even then, I still expect that the unmanned aircraft's advantages in price, quality and scale would be enormous. It wouldn't be 4 fighters going out on that mission, you could have 12 or 16 because training fighter pilots is inherently costly and slow. You would have smaller, faster and more agile aircraft, without human limitations. Whatever crazy dodging a human could do, the machine would easily surpass in terms of g-forces. Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.

You could afford to lose those jets on risky missions - even suicide missions if you decided the gains were worth it.

But the F-35 software has already been leaked to China half a dozen times, they even have gotten some Chinese made parts into the supply chain.

YEP! And an additional concern is that if you had any backdoors in a an AI aircraft to enable it to be remotely controlled, it would be vulnerable to a cyberattack...that could impact 100% of the airborne fleet at once. But I'd be surprised if (on the flip side) we put a fleet of drone aircraft up that couldn't be manned remotely, in case the AI went wonky for whatever reason.

Even then, I still expect that the unmanned aircraft's advantages in price, quality and scale would be enormous. It wouldn't be 4 fighters going out on that mission, you could have 12 or 16 because training fighter pilots is inherently costly and slow. You would have smaller, faster and more agile aircraft, without human limitations. Whatever crazy dodging a human could do, the machine would easily surpass in terms of g-forces. Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.

Well, this sounds good, but it's worth considering a few things:

  1. I am open to correction on this, but airframes and associated costs, not pilots, are the constraining factor in aviation. (Easy sanity check: do squadrons have more pilots than airframes? Yes. Do airframes require more maintenance and downtime? Also yes ...probably, Air Force guys gotta hit the golf course I guess...) Removing pilots doesn't remove the logistics footprint, and it doesn't make aircraft dramatically cheaper, which is the pain point. Fighter aircraft are sexy and lots of people want to fly them. I agree that in a high-attrition war training pilots could be a bottleneck, but even then we're likely also hitting aircraft production bottlenecks. If all of our aircraft get shot down, we will still have spare pilots left over. Now, at the point where we start getting robotic logistics, I agree that those advantages start to scale.
  2. Humans don't actually weigh all that much relative to an aircraft. The F-35 is 29,300 pounds empty and nearly 66,000 at max takeoff. Figure 200 pounds for a human operator, 200 pounds for an ejection seat, however much else you want for life support – even if you estimate a human adds a whole ton to the equation, you're looking at, what, 6% dry weight and 3% fully loaded weight? Sure, every little bit counts. I'm just saying it's probably not a miracle.
  3. It's true that robots won't black out from high-G maneuvers, and this will give them an edge. But it's also true that pilots are capable of doing things that they aren't supposed to do, like "flying the aircraft in such a way to do warp the airframe." There are structural limitations to these things, and human pilots are very capable of surpassing them (much to the chagrin of everyone else in the logistical chain.) Removing pilots from the aircraft won't magically make them capable of doing sick dogfighting skills; they still have worry about things like "will this snap my wings off." This, incidentally, raises another point in favor of human pilots – robots presumably will not violate NATOPS to gain an important advantage in a dogfight.
  4. Missiles (which are basically AI-enabled suicide drones) already surpass manned fighter aircraft in terms of ability to pull Gs, but manned fighter aircraft are still capable of defeating them kinematically. Replacing pilots with computers won't likely change this, either.
  5. The expensive parts of an aircraft aren't things like "the ejection seat," it's things like the radar or extremely bespoke metallurgy research for high-performance engines that presumably a purely unnamed force will still need to procure.

Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.

Sure. My concern about this is in part because I don't think it will produce high variance. If you make your machines really deterministic, then I think outcomes become more binary, which means you have less opportunities for feedback if those outcomes are binary in a way that you don't like. Machines are extremely predictable and this is not necessarily a good thing. [And if you read the stuff about AI beating pilots in a dogfight it was, IIRC, because it was willing to take head-on gun shots, which aren't preferred by human pilots because it's risky to be nose-on to another fighter aircraft for collision-avoidance purposes. That's interesting – and particularly very relevant, for what is expected to be a small portion of future air combat – but if they've tested them without a human in the loop in a complex "realistic" air combat scenario I haven't heard. Doesn't mean it hasn't happened, though!]

The other thing – and honestly, this might be more relevant than the technical capabilities – is that there will be political resistance to outsourcing decision-making entirely to a machine. At what point do you want a machine to be making decisions about whether to shoot an aircraft with a civilian transponder? Even if machines can make those decisions, people will feel more comfortable knowing the important decisions are being made by someone who can be held accountable (and also that a software glitch won't result in all aircraft with civilian transponders being targeted.)

One of the concerns I have about any program that is predicated on being able to communicate with base is that that may be risky or prohibited in a future hostile air environment. This applies to loyal wingman programs and to any sort of drone that's supposed to be able to call back home. This is an entire tangent I could make a lot of ill-informed speculation on. But the TLDR is that if you think you might operate in an environment where you can't call home and there are certain decisions you think your pilots might need to make that you don't want drones to have to make, you'll be needing pilots.

(To be fair, in real life the pilots would typically get ground control sign-off on these sorts of decisions if possible. But if your plan is to let ground control make important decisions, imho you're looking at a fancy remotely-piloted aircraft. And I think that's the direction we are going, at least in part – humans make important engagement decisions, the loyal wingmen will carry them out.)

You could afford to lose those jets on risky missions - even suicide missions if you decided the gains were worth it.

Yep! That's the point of stuff like the loyal wingman program, the jets are "attritable." Same with the optionally-manned aircraft, where you can remove pilots if you assess the mission is very risky. And I think this is a good idea: it hedges bets against weaknesses in AI while opening the door to utilizing them to their fullest potential. I'm not anti-drone, I just don't think the AI is ready for the quantum leap that removing humans from the picture entirely would represent, and it might never be entirely barring AGI-like capabilities.

Previously I said that I didn't think unmanned aircraft were ready to replace manned aircraft, but let me add a bit more nuance – I do think that unmanned aircraft are ready to supplement manned aircraft. I think moving to a world where perhaps we have fewer manned fighters makes sense in the future, possibly now. I think loyal wingman programs are, at a minimum, worth experimenting with. Perhaps in a future generation, we'll be able to take humans out of anything resembling fighter aircraft and move them back to manned control centers, perhaps flying or perhaps on the ground (or perhaps we'll replace aircraft with munitions entirely – there's a point where cheap enough cruise and ballistic missiles make a lot of aircraft pointless). My guess (again, as per loyal wingman) is that we'll see pilots moved back from the frontlines of air combat where possible. I suspect part of the move to this will be precipitated or accelerated, not by AI technology, but by laser technology. New technology may end up making fighter aircraft as we know them obsolete as a class in the future.

But unless we're able to incorporate a pretty intelligent AI into an aircraft, I think that replacing aircraft with AI will look a lot more like "replacing all aircraft with missiles" – which, again, may make sense at a certain point. But it will probably mean that the aircraft we will be employing – again, barring ~AGI – won't be a 1:1 replacement for the capabilities of modern fighters, they will be employed in a different way. Maybe we'll see manned fighter aircraft retained for politically sensitive things like air policing missions, but not for relatively straightforward (and risky!) tasks such as deep penetration strikes on set targets.

If you're curious enough about this I can try to run down an actual pilot of my acquaintance and ask him for his thoughts on our exchange.

More comments

Welfare/jobs. I can certainly imagine a set of institutional and political incentives of politicians and military bureaucrats that would result in billions of dollars being spent on something pointless. And people making spending decisions might not even know about the program. (Not making the claim that that's what's happening here.)

There's also a keeping up appearances factor, though I suspect usually nations would want to publicize the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant weapon.

These weapons do have very large political constituencies. But the F-35 alone is supposed to cost over $2 trillion in lifecycle costs. Then there's NGAD and the B-21. NGAD was so expensive they're trying to cut it up and repackage it as a family of systems, that'll probably balloon costs out even further.

In the new report to lawmakers, GAO said the Defense Department now plans to fly the F-35 through 2088, 11 years longer than services most recently anticipated.

2088 is already an insanely long time. I doubt it'll be flying in 2060 in any serious combat role. But surely you wouldn't make such a big bet on a plane if you have technology this promising coming up? Unmanned aviation is the future but surely gravitic propulsion (maybe opening up casual spaceflight/suborbital bombing runs) would render traditional aerospace obsolete.

But surely you wouldn't make such a big bet on a plane if you have technology this promising coming up?

You'd absolutely make this big of a bet even if you knew the planes were barely functional dogshit, especially if you were betting with other people's money and had an incredibly comfortable job lined up with the manufacturer that will be paid for by the bet you just made.

The B-21 almost certainly employs classified "novel propulsion systems", just like the B-2 did.

For what it's worth:

I was told several years ago by someone I trust that there is a US military aircraft that has an alternative propulsion system that allows it to disable it's conventional engines and cruise at speed totally "dark", no heat signatures and no noise, and that the method of propulsion involved something like applying a significant electrical charge to the leading and trailling edges of the aircraft. I know this guy had a job in the military that would have exposed him to this information in the course of his work, and he was a smart, level headed person.

I've always been interested in secret government projects, especially planes, and the coincidental evidence I've dug up over the years seems to point to electro-gravitics or something similar being a well-developed and classified technology.

I'm leaning towards the drone thing being true.

Incidentally, while we're talking about it, I think that some of the most high-profile UFO sightings of the past and also recently (most notably the USS Nimitz "tic tac" videos) are this technology: https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/bluefire-main/bluefire/particle-beams-and-saucer-dreams/

Publicly acknowledged (though in a different scope) here: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/07/19/pentagon-scientists-are-making-talking-plasma-laser-balls-for-use-as-non-lethal-weapons/

Applying a significant electrical charge to leading and trailing edges of a wing can get you silent thrust, but it's not antigravity, it's just a form of ion thruster that uses the atmosphere itself as reaction mass:

https://hackaday.com/2016/07/13/expanding-horizons-with-the-ion-propelled-lifter/

And it's hard to make useful, because the catch is that you'd need about a million times more thust if you even wanted to lift your own power supply rather than be tethered to it. I suppose maybe you could combine the idea with beamed power, but you'd still need line-of-sight to a powerful ground station, and regardless your craft wouldn't resemble an airplane so much as a spiderweb.

You'll notice I didn't use the word "antigravity" in my post, and in general I think the posters here missing the forest for that specific tree and getting a little fixated on it as a literal term.

I think that the tech being public in a more rudimentary form makes it much more likely that it exists in a more capable form on classified projects.

Check out this video that discusses how an early versions of this tech is potentially used on the B2.

B2 chapter about 30 min in.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTEWLSTyUic?si=qczONxEQgg6XfIiP

I'm going to check this out, thanks for posting. FWIW I once straight-up asked a B-2 engineer in a casual setting about this, and he denied it. But perhaps he misunderstood, or was doing his job.

Bingo.

Did he have any evidence? I would think if you were going to blow yourself up to reveal some information you would bring the receipts. Just reads like typical schizo stuff including the paranoia of people trying to kill him. Given the incompetence of his explosive device I think we should have a low estimate of his credibility. And after all that the entity you want entrusted with it is Fox News?

Sergeant Livelsberger...had written in a notes app on his phone that the country was “headed toward collapse.”

“This was not a terrorist attack,” the note said. “It was a wake-up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/us/las-vegas-tesla-explosion-soldier-ptsd-notes.html

Or he was intentionally making an explosive that would not cause a lot of damage but get a lot of media attention.

Meanwhile: “The FBI said there is no evidence linking the Las Vegas attack to the New Orleans incident, noting only coincidental use of rental cars, Airbnbs, and military service.”

And you know, the fact that the two attacks happened at almost the exact same time. This all stinks like hell.

TO BE FAIR, New Year's Day is the one day that you would expect people to inadvertently coordinate violent action. But how close were the attacks, are we talking hours or minutes?

I think about 7 and a half hours

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