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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Okay, so the full claim from tucker is, from the transcript

over a hundred servicemen killed by UFOs

servicemen have approached them like what is this thing there's this like giant glowing thing on the base and they approach and they get traumatic brain injury like they are rendered they get brain damage or they're killed and he studied their brains and they have this is all totally real this is not this is the Department of Defense dude and they've all had this damage from some kind of powerful energy that we cannot identify

This is a hundred times less plausible than havana syndrome. Giant glowing things that remotely kill people that approach them? "some kind of powerful energy that we cannot identify" - what? We understand physics very well, it has to be one of the recognized kinds of radiation if it's acting remotely, or maybe a ... fast-acting gas?? And if this has invaded military bases and killed someone, let alone killed a hundred servicemen, I can't believe at all the 'military' believing it's 'some powerful energy we cannot identify'.

There's probably a combination of telephone game retelling andcombining a bunch of different stories into a big narrative - like (hypothetical!) 100 soldiers killed by 'unidentified flying objects', when that includes 'hobby drones' and 'our planes we didn't identify correctly during training accidents', plus someone filed a dumb lawsuit about UFO brain injuries that the person was asked to consult on, plus some internal UFO believers in the military (which there have to be, given how many people generally are into UFO stuff). [preceding was written before I looked up gary nolan, and not edited afterwards, so you can compare my vague illustration to what happened]

Apparently, he's referring to Gary Nolan -

He was later approached by officials and an aerospace corporation to "help them understand the medical harm that had come to some individuals, related to supposed interactions with an anomalous craft." He was chosen primarily for the types of blood analysis his lab can perform.[27] Initially via CyTOF blood analysis, he helped investigate the brains of around 100 patients, mostly "defense or governmental personnel or people working in the aerospace industry", of which a subset claimed to have seen unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP). The majority exhibited symptoms that were "basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome" and had their brains scanned via MRI.

So, most of the individuals weren't dead! And the claimed brain damage ... from a vice interview of nolan

That ended up bringing me to the attention of some people associated with the CIA and some aeronautics corporations. At the time, they had been investigating a number of cases of pilots who'd gotten close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them, as was claimed by the people who showed up at my office unannounced one day. ... Then they started showing the MRIs of some of these pilots and ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been damaged. The MRIs were clear. You didn't even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem. Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged. And so that's what kind of got me involved.

There's then a detour into how some of what they thought was 'damage' was really natural physiological variation in caudate-putamen density, or something, which was more common in their patients due to selection for competence among military personnel. Which ... doesn't seem that plausible, but is mostly irrelevant.

Did the people who claimed that they'd had an encounter, especially the pilots, describe any perceivable decrease in neurological capacity? Of the 100 or so patients that we looked at, about a quarter of them died from their injuries. The majority of these patients had symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. We think amongst this bucket list of cases, we had the first Havana syndrome patients. Once this turned into a national security problem with the Havana syndrome I was locked out of all of the access to the files because it's now a serious potential international incident if they ever figured out who's been doing it.

He's also "analyzed inanimate materials like alleged UAP fragments".

What are the circumstances in some of these cases? For instance, in some cases the witnesses state that the observed objects appeared unstable, or in some kind of distress. Then, it spits out 'a bunch of stuff.' Now the object appears it's stable and it moves off. It looks like it fixed itself

Not buying it.

(And he is certainly tucker's guy: "Nolan appeared on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight[32] show on August 1st 2022, during which he discussed his UAP related research in an hour long interview." This goes )

Of the 100 or so patients that we looked at, about a quarter of them died from their injuries.

From your own source, 25% fatality rate. This is surely separate from Havana syndrome, which didn't kill anyone. I think so at least, his pronoun game isn't great. 'The majority of these patients?' The dead ones or the full 100?

Anyway, they picked up these guys and the Havana syndrome people as part of the same process but it doesn't follow that they're from the same cause.

And then he talks about the weird isotopes of magnesium and the inhomogenously mixed materials, which is a very strange thing to find. You can choose to flatly reject this guy but his credentials are pretty impressive.

His robust resume—300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford’s top 25 inventors—makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs.

And then he talks about the weird isotopes of magnesium and the inhomogenously mixed materials, which is a very strange thing to find

Yeah, but it's an entirely separate strange thing from the military havana syndrome. There are a lot of strange things, on a planet with 57 million square miles of land area and eight billion people Both because strange things happen, magnesium isotope fractionation gets some results, idk if this matches his thing. Or maybe something was measured incorrectly.

You can choose to flatly reject this guy but his credentials are pretty impressive

People with credentials are wrong all the time, and 95% of other people with credentials would dispute UFOs generally, as well as many with credentials disputing any of these allegations. So the credentials shouldn't make you lean towards his view. And his evidence is not great.

Meanwhile, the other one was just way off. Like 30 percent off the ratios. The problem is there's no good reason humans have for altering the isotope ratios of a simple metal like magnesium. There's no different properties of the different isotopes, that anybody, at least in any of the literature that is public of the hundreds of thousands of papers published, that says this is why you would do that. Now you can do it. It's a little expensive to do, but you'd have no reason for doing it.

Why would anyone irradiate magnesium to make these weird isotopes and drop it off for people to find? Surely this could only happen artificially. Are we proposing that some freak natural occurrence leaves behind some irradiated magnesium right next to a 'UAP', which in your mind is a completely separate bizarre natural occurrence?

It's like the theory that Epstein managed to kill himself in an anti-suicide room AND that the camera failed just when he did so. Two connected simultaneous unexplained events? Surely it is more plausible that there's an orchestrating party involved.

Furthermore, 25 people are dead! Either Havana Syndrome was real or there's another kind of energy that's killing people, or the professor is lying.

People with credentials are wrong all the time, and 95% of other people with credentials would dispute UFOs generally

Well they weren't with him in the lab, measuring the isotopes or examining the brains. I'm confident that 95% of people with credentials would opt out of disputing people who had seen the evidence, when they themselves have not.

Are we proposing that some freak natural occurrence leaves behind some irradiated magnesium right next to a 'UAP', which in your mind is a completely separate bizarre natural occurrence?

yeah, because 'UFO sightings' happen all the time, and in lots of places, which is a lot of opportunities for a second coincidence. A paper about that magnesium notes

There is undisputed evidence that an aircraft crashed in that area in April 1957. There is strong evidence that a meteorite, or an object resembling a meteorite, crashed or exploded in the area in the early 1930's, and that a piece of strange light-weight material was caught in a fishing net at about that time. There is weaker evidence (mainly from one witness) that a very large object disintegrated, with a silent explosion, near Ubatuba in or about 1957. There is some evidence that, in or about 1957, one or more metal specimens were brought for analysis to an Air Force research center near S¼o Paulo and found to be magnesium.

So maybe it was from a meteorite, which would ... well, it's an "unidentified aerial phenomena" to the viewer, but not in the sense of 'unexplainable' or 'aliens'. You can google things too, btw!

Furthermore, 25 people are dead! Either Havana Syndrome was real or there's another kind of energy that's killing people, or the professor is lying.

He claims they died from these strange injuries. That might not be true, though. These people were

almost all defense or governmental personnel or people working in the aerospace industry

Government + defense + aerospace is a very large group of people to start from!

You have a smorgasbord of patients, some of whom had heard weird noises buzzing in their head, got sick, etc. A reasonable subset of them had claimed to have seen UAPs and some claimed to be close to things that got them sick

So some of them saw UAPs, some of them were sick ... but if you put normal people who claim to see UAPs in a group with people who have unrelated brain issues, or maybe allow enough time for some to die of old age, and you can have a group that's partially 'UAP injured people' where '25 died' without the UAPs causing it.

I'm confident that 95% of people with credentials would opt out of disputing people who had seen the evidence, when they themselves have not.

... when the evidence is for UFOs zapping peoples brains by "emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body"? Or for isotopic magnesium that's part of an alien craft? A lot more than 5% of 'people with credentials' would dispute it.

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