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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

No, it is not overwhelming.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

First is likely true but of limited practicality as we are unlikely to ever interact, for second we have no strong evidence for that.

We have evidence that they observed UFOs. This is entirely normal as in "it is normal to fail to identify some flying objects". But software bug, visual artefact, commercial plane are all more likely than literal aliens. Widespread conspiracy is more likely than aliens.

Show me investigation(s) by say USA, China, Germany, Russia (feel free to switch Germany to UK, France or something, and Russia for Iran or similar) and then I will treat it seriously. Or at least official announcement by USA president about aliens, not mumbling by some faction. Then I can treat it seriously.

Sure, this is fairly easy – the USA has run a number of investigations, most (in)famously Project BlueBook, back in the day. See also Project Grudge, Project Sign. There is a lot of controversy/smoke over what exactly the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was doing, but it certainly seems to have involved research into UFOs.

When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein, but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life" and the current and former Director of National Intelligence have suggested there is some form of advanced technology that does not have a prosaic origin being detected by US sensors. As far as Presidents go, Obama hasn't gone quite that far, but he does seem to take the issue seriously.

France has a very small official UFO group called GEIPAN.

The USSR had a UFO investigation unit during the Cold War. I think it's worth taking this with a grain of salt since from what I can tell the popular reporting on this is basely largely on hearsay, whereas in the United States there are a lot of now-declassified documents indicating at least some legitimate government interest (such as by e.g. Edgar Hoover). I believe there are also Soviet documents "smuggled out of Russia" after the Cold War ended, but I'm not sure how confident one should be in their legitimacy.

China seems to have a UFO investigation unit currently, although there is little known about it from what I have seen, and it seems plausible that it is doing it to keep up with the United States/get a handle on prosaic atmospheric clutter.

I don't think any of this makes the jump to "aliens" but it does suggest powerful and presumably rational actors take the issue of UFOs/UAP seriously, or have reasons to pretend to.

(I realize this is a very weird comment to drag one out of perpetually lurking, but, uh, in my defense it's not all that often that it's comparatively easy to make someone take anything seriously?)

To repeat:

We have evidence that they observed UFOs. This is entirely normal as in "it is normal to fail to identify some flying objects". I observe UFOs in that sense on basically any nigh in dark woods outside city.

And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)

When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein

Then I will wait. If acting president will make official announcement amount aliens then I will consider investigating why it is untrue.

but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life"

For start "might ... constitute a different form of life." is suspiciously clipped and I agree with him. But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible". And it is entirely distinct from "we fully confirmed this to be aliens".

To be clear, my position isn't "do_something should agree that aliens exist." It is "if research into UFOs by other countries is a good reason to take UFOs seriously, then do_something should take UFOs seriously." Apologies if that was unclear; I was responding to a limited portion of your post, not endorsing OP's position. I think you can make an argument for taking UFOs seriously without leaping to the assumption that they are aliens.

And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)

Perhaps. The specific definition of UAP in US law, enacted by Congress, makes reference to "transmedium devices" which are defined as not immediately identifiable objects that are "observed to transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water." It seems like if people in positions of power are seeing blurry dots, they are seeing them do some pretty unusual things. Or, as you allude to, there is a widespread conspiracy to make it seem that way (as has been suggested in The Motte in the past).

But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible".

It's funny you should say that – the current claims by whistleblowers like Grusch et. al. (and what seems to be the current consensus of the "UFO community," if that loose conglomeration of individuals can be said to have such a consensus) looks much closer to "angels as described in the Bible" than it does to (say) "aliens as described in War of the Worlds or Footfall."

Given that "UFO" simply means "Unidentified Flying Object" and not "alien spacecraft" it makes sense that major governments would investigate them. Not because of aliens, but because UFOs most likely mean "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about."

or "dammit, someone recorded out advanced aerospace tech, lets ensure they think it is aliens rather than something relevant to national security"

If I would be responsible for taking care that super-advanced-plane is secret I would prefer than anyone who managed observe it is talking about alien kidnappings. Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.

That's basically the plot of an episode of the X-Files. Mulder swaps bodies with a guy whose job it is to make up alien and other conspiracy theories to distract from advanced military tech.

That's basically the plot of an episode of the X-Files.

That's basically recent history, declassified and documented by respectable mainstream media.

“There might be a number of reasons for a coverup,” Mark Pilkington, author of Mirage Men: A journey into disinformation, paranoia and UFOs, told me. “They might be covering up secret advanced aircraft such as the U-2 and SR-71, and no doubt other things.”

For example, the forerunners of the U-2 high-altitude spy plane, developed for the CIA by the Air Force, caused similar confusion when they flew from Groom Lake (the celebrated Area 51) in the mid-1950s. These aircraft had a silver finish, and at 60,000 feet – far above other aircraft of the time – the U-2 looked like a bright metallic blob and was repeatedly reported as a flying saucer. A similar situation arose with the SR-71 Blackbird, which, at Mach 3, was far too fast and too high to be any known aircraft and was assumed to be Something Else. Some 50% of U.S.UFO reports at the time might have been caused by sightings of these two aircraft.

The Truth Behind UFO Sightings and the U.S. Air Force

How long has this been going on?

Much of it dates to the first flights of the U2 spy plane back in the 1950s. The CIA's in-house journal had a story about 10 years ago that said that one of the functions of Project Blue Book [the official Air Force investigation into UFOs] was to monitor how visible the U2 was to people on the ground. Someone would see what they thought was a UFO and then the Air Force would send someone around to talk with them. Of course, the Air Force would have a schedule of the U2 flights and be able to tell if what the person saw was indeed a U2. By talking to all these supposed UFO witnesses, the CIA could assess how visible the U2 was.

COLD WAR UFO COVERUP SHIELDED SPY PLANES

For decades, a cottage industry of UFO buffs has thrived on the belief that the U.S. government covered up crucial information about mysterious flying objects.

Turns out that in thousands of cases the suspicions were right, a CIA historian has documented for the first time.

At the height of the Cold War, the Air Force and CIA willfully misled the public by claiming that thousands of sightings of unidentified flying objects were caused by ice crystals, temperature inversions and other tricks of nature, when in fact they were produced by the flight of high-flying, super-secret spy planes, according to historian Gerald K. Haines.

A study by Haines published this spring in the declassified version of Studies of Intelligence, a secret CIA journal, found that the government concocted the explanations both to calm fears about UFOs and to maintain secrecy about its most advanced espionage aircraft at the time, the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird.

The article concludes that "over half of all U.F.O." sightings in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s "were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights."

That doesn't quite work, since in the show aliens do exist, and the advanced military tech may have very well come from them.

Well the series was never particularly consistent about it's lore/mythology, as much as I love it

Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.

Worth pointing out for the record that something that seems to be exactly this has in fact happened. At least twice.

Yes, absolutely, although I would expect such work to be integrated into the typical air defense network or bumped into a classified program (which might dovetail into all the rumors about SECRET UFO PROGRAMS – yes probably we don't want our enemies to know what we do and don't know about their classified programs). Setting up a public-facing program like BlueBook or Geipan makes more sense as a PR effort than a secret project to spy on enemy spy craft, and I think is a more parsimonious explanation, especially considering that, despite contemporary concerns, there almost certainly weren't Soviet spy aircraft buzzing our nuclear installations in the late 1940s but there were enough UFO reports that defense officials worried they would overwhelm defense channels.

If you follow the link-trail I threw out, though, you can see DNI Ratcliffe alleging that there are objects that

  1. Don't fit the profile of "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about," and
  2. are picked up on multiple sensors, including satellites, at the same time, which is interesting in the context of long-running rumors US satellites have detected objects entering the atmosphere from outer space.

We know, from declassified NRO documents, that the NRO's satellites have detected at least one small object that "did not match the visual signature of typical aircraft detections" and seemed to resemble the "tic-tac" UAP (although alternative possibilities are discussed and the sighting is considered "low confidence") and that the NRO's "Sentient" image processing software may have a "UAP detection" mode.

I don't think anyone should consider that a slam dunk for extraterrestrial life but I do think it's noteworthy that the intelligence community appears to have internal conversations around things like "can we use our image analysis program to look for UAPs."

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