The UFO thread

[SoulMonster]

Just now, Kasanova King said:

These aren't conspiracy theorists, bud.   This time it is the US Military, scientists and astrophysicists who are reporting it and it's legitimate sources publishing it. (NY Times, Popular Mechanics).

I was directly commenting on you saying that somehow there is a leading theory that extraterrestrial vehicles could be "used by future time traveling human". Serious scientists don't usually formulate theories involving time travel. 

[Ace Nova]

2 minutes ago, SoulMonster said:

I was directly commenting on you saying that somehow there is a leading theory that extraterrestrial vehicles could be "used by future time traveling human". Serious scientists don't usually formulate theories involving time travel. 

Oh, that's just what I read on Twitter.   The article itself hasn't been released yet so I have no idea if that's even in it. 

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

1 minute ago, SoulMonster said:

I was directly commenting on you saying that somehow there is a leading theory that extraterrestrial vehicles could be "used by future time traveling human". Serious scientists don't usually formulate theories involving time travel. 

He's going off the reservation a bit. All I say is this, if these military eyewitness testimonies are close to what they are claiming, this appears to be a technology or phenomenon that goes beyond next generation aircraft developed by another country. Any theories beyond that is just guesswork. We need more data!

[soon]

2 minutes ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

I've always though the idea that 'governments won't disclose because the populace couldn't handle it' is a little overblown. I think governments are just desperate to get their hands on this technology and reverse engineer it so they can dominate the planet. Same geopolitics as always, just on steroids with alien tech. Does any government or governments have substantial alien tech? Maybe. And if they did, they'd be desperate to just quietly work on it behind the scenes and try to master it.

That makes sense. Im still hung up on "why now?" not to sound like a broken record. 

Like, they are powerful enough to keep it 'secret' this whole time (but an open secret). To me, it comes out when the MIC wants it to come out. But maybe thats not the case? Maybe these are rogue politicians and scientists speaking to a guy who, in his wisdom, thought to quit an internationally successful headlining rock band to go full Mulder? I say that in a phrasing to entertain myself, but I do mean that it is one real possibility. 

Where do you fall on this question?

[SoulMonster]

3 minutes ago, Kasanova King said:

Oh, that's just what I read on Twitter.   The article itself hasn't been released yet so I have no idea if that's even in it. 

Don't get too disappointed if it is a bit underwhelming

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

1 minute ago, soon said:

That makes sense. Im still hung up on "why now?" not to sound like a broken record. 

Like, they are powerful enough to keep it 'secret' this whole time (but an open secret). To me, it comes out when the MIC wants it to come out. But maybe thats not the case? Maybe these are rogue politicians and scientists speaking to a guy who, in his wisdom, thought to quit an internationally successful headlining rock band to go full Mulder? I say that in a phrasing to entertain myself, but I do mean that it is one real possibility. 

Where do you fall on this question?

Let me riif of that. Well there have been credible people going on the record about these sightings for decades. I honestly think there are factions in the government who want to open this up a little bit more (but not totally) to the public and other factions who want to keep the same policy of secrecy and ridicule going. You see it in real time with how the US Navy is handing this (more open) vs the US Air Force (same secrecy policy as always).

[Ace Nova]

4 minutes ago, SoulMonster said:

Don't get too disappointed if it is a bit underwhelming

I won't be.  I wasn't expecting anything to begin with, tbh.  It's pretty fascinating, regardless.

 

 

[Dazey]

22 minutes ago, Kasanova King said:

These aren't conspiracy theorists, bud.   This time it is The Pentagon, scientists and astrophysicists who are reporting it and it's legitimate sources publishing it. (NY Times, Popular Mechanics).

I see stuff like this all the time. Somebody on Twitter saying that the New York Times, Washington Post etc are going to be publishing a major story and then nothing happens. Is this actually in the NYT yet?

[Ace Nova]

4 minutes ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

Let me riif of that. Well there have been credible people going on the record about these sightings for decades. I honestly think there are factions in the government who want to open this up a little bit more (but not totally) to the public and other factions who want to keep the same policy of secrecy and ridicule going. You see it in real time with how the US Navy is handing this (more open) vs the US Air Force (same secrecy policy as always).

The more information that comes out, the more it leads to only a select few people knowing about it.  It's been classified to pretty much everyone, including congress, most of the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. 

And it's also pointing to the possibility that most of the information was held by Navy Intelligence, not the US Air Force (as was presumed in most conspiracy theories, movies, etc). 

[SoulMonster]

3 minutes ago, Dazey said:

I see stuff like this all the time. Somebody on Twitter saying that the New York Times, Washington Post etc are going to be publishing a major story and then nothing happens. Is this actually in the NYT yet?

NYT has of course written about this before, stating that someone believes extraterrestrial material had been collected but that this is disputed. 

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

1 minute ago, SoulMonster said:

NYT has of course written about this before, stating that someone believes extraterrestrial material had been collected but that this is disputed. 

What should be stated is that the people being quoted here, Eric Davis (has security clearances he has to hold to) and Lue Elizondo (who has a non disclosure agreement with the government). It seems like the strategy by people like Elizondo is to get politicians on board to force the government to release more of this underlying info. Now you have some getting on board such as Marco Rubio and Mark Warner.

[soon]

16 minutes ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

Let me riif of that. Well there have been credible people going on the record about these sightings for decades. I honestly think there are factions in the government who want to open this up a little bit more (but not totally) to the public and other factions who want to keep the same policy of secrecy and ridicule going. You see it in real time with how the US Navy is handing this (more open) vs the US Air Force (same secrecy policy as always).

Right on. In this moment I’m kinda picturing the Hegelian dialectical. As in, one one side

a) it’s likely impossible to keep secret and there’s also value in opening up the field of study.

The opposing side,

b) the military strategy to gain power via secret tech.

perhaps there’s the “third party” so to speak who will be able to craft the synthesis of a and b to their liking?

[Ace Nova]

17 minutes ago, Dazey said:

I see stuff like this all the time. Somebody on Twitter saying that the New York Times, Washington Post etc are going to be publishing a major story and then nothing happens. Is this actually in the NYT yet?

Yes, just yesterday...I wouldn't have brought it up, if it wasn't legitimate.  I've had an open mind about this stuff in the past but 99% of the time nothing comes out of it.  This time it appears to be different...

 

No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public

For over a decade, the program, now tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, has discussed mysterious events in classified briefings.

 

By Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean

Published July 23, 2020Updated July 24, 2020, 11:40 a.m. ET

 

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.

While retired officials involved with the effort — including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader — hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.

Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a CBS affiliate in Miami this month that he was primarily concerned about reports of unidentified aircraft over American military bases — and that it was in the government’s interest to find out who was responsible.

He expressed concerns that China or Russia or some other adversary had made “some technological leap” that “allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”

Mr. Rubio said some of the unidentified aerial vehicles over U.S. bases possibly exhibited technologies not in the American arsenal. But he also noted: “Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.”

 

In 2017, The New York Times disclosed the existence of a predecessor unit, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Defense Department officials said at the time that the unit and its $22 million in funding had lapsed after 2012.

People working with the program, however, said it was still in operation in 2017 and beyond, statements later confirmed by the Defense Department.

The program was begun in 2007 under the Defense Intelligence Agency and was then placed within the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, which remains responsible for its oversight. But its coordination with the intelligence community will be carried out by the Office of Naval Intelligence, as described in the Senate budget bill. The program never lapsed in those years, but little was disclosed about the post-2017 operations.

The Pentagon program’s previous director, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned in October 2017 after 10 years with the program, confirmed that the new task force evolved from the advanced aerospace program.

 

“It no longer has to hide in the shadows,” Mr. Elizondo said. “It will have a new transparency.”

Mr. Elizondo is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study.

For more than a decade, the Pentagon program has been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials, according to interviews with program participants and unclassified briefing documents.

In some cases, earthly explanations have been found for previously unexplained incidents. Even lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make an extraterrestrial one the most likely, astrophysicists say.

Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied.

“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Mr. Reid said in an interview.

 

 

Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”

The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied U.F.O.s in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence.

Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.

Committee staff members did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.

Public fascination with the topic of U.F.O.s has drawn in President Trump, who told his son Donald Trump Jr. in a June interview that he knew “very interesting” things about Roswell — a city in New Mexico that is central to speculation about the existence of U.F.O.s. The president demurred when asked if he would declassify any information on Roswell. “I’ll have to think about that one,” he said.

 

Either way, Mr. Reid said, more should be made public to clarify what is known and what is not. “It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out,” he said.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html

 

Edited July 24, 2020 by Kasanova King

[Ace Nova]

 

 

 

And.....

 

 

[Ace Nova]

Edited July 27, 2020 by Kasanova King

[Fitha_whiskey]

Has anyone watched the new Unsolved Mysteries series on Netflix? There is one episode about a UFO incident in the late 60s in the northeast- Vermont I think it was. Pretty wild story and many details that cannot be easily explained... many different people with no known connection to each other had similar encounters. I enjoyed that whole series.

[EvanG]

1 hour ago, Fitha_whiskey said:

Has anyone watched the new Unsolved Mysteries series on Netflix? There is one episode about a UFO incident in the late 60s in the northeast- Vermont I think it was. Pretty wild story and many details that cannot be easily explained... many different people with no known connection to each other had similar encounters. I enjoyed that whole series.

I only watched that episode, but it's interesting. I can't imagine all those people lying about the exact same thing, or they are the best liars in the world. No idea what happened to them, though.

[Fitha_whiskey]

1 hour ago, EvanG said:

I only watched that episode, but it's interesting. I can't imagine all those people lying about the exact same thing, or they are the best liars in the world. No idea what happened to them, though.

They seemed like ordinary believable people for the most part. 

[Ace Nova]

@SoulMonster

 

Have you heard of this article?

 

 

Edited July 27, 2020 by Kasanova King

[SoulMonster]

22 minutes ago, Kasanova King said:

@SoulMonster

 

Have you heard of this article?

 

 

Hilarious I have a great fondness for panspermia hypotheses but this is rather speculative from fringe scientists. 

https://www.sciencealert.com/hoyle-wickramasinghe-thesis-cometary-biology-octopus-alien-retroviruses/amp

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

On 7/24/2020 at 3:21 PM, Kasanova King said:

Yes, just yesterday...I wouldn't have brought it up, if it wasn't legitimate.  I've had an open mind about this stuff in the past but 99% of the time nothing comes out of it.  This time it appears to be different...

 

No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public

For over a decade, the program, now tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, has discussed mysterious events in classified briefings.

 

By Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean

Published July 23, 2020Updated July 24, 2020, 11:40 a.m. ET

 

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.

While retired officials involved with the effort — including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader — hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.

Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a CBS affiliate in Miami this month that he was primarily concerned about reports of unidentified aircraft over American military bases — and that it was in the government’s interest to find out who was responsible.

He expressed concerns that China or Russia or some other adversary had made “some technological leap” that “allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”

Mr. Rubio said some of the unidentified aerial vehicles over U.S. bases possibly exhibited technologies not in the American arsenal. But he also noted: “Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.”

 

In 2017, The New York Times disclosed the existence of a predecessor unit, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Defense Department officials said at the time that the unit and its $22 million in funding had lapsed after 2012.

People working with the program, however, said it was still in operation in 2017 and beyond, statements later confirmed by the Defense Department.

The program was begun in 2007 under the Defense Intelligence Agency and was then placed within the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, which remains responsible for its oversight. But its coordination with the intelligence community will be carried out by the Office of Naval Intelligence, as described in the Senate budget bill. The program never lapsed in those years, but little was disclosed about the post-2017 operations.

The Pentagon program’s previous director, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned in October 2017 after 10 years with the program, confirmed that the new task force evolved from the advanced aerospace program.

 

“It no longer has to hide in the shadows,” Mr. Elizondo said. “It will have a new transparency.”

Mr. Elizondo is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study.

For more than a decade, the Pentagon program has been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials, according to interviews with program participants and unclassified briefing documents.

In some cases, earthly explanations have been found for previously unexplained incidents. Even lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make an extraterrestrial one the most likely, astrophysicists say.

Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied.

“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Mr. Reid said in an interview.

 

 

Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”

The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied U.F.O.s in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence.

Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.

Committee staff members did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.

Public fascination with the topic of U.F.O.s has drawn in President Trump, who told his son Donald Trump Jr. in a June interview that he knew “very interesting” things about Roswell — a city in New Mexico that is central to speculation about the existence of U.F.O.s. The president demurred when asked if he would declassify any information on Roswell. “I’ll have to think about that one,” he said.

 

Either way, Mr. Reid said, more should be made public to clarify what is known and what is not. “It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out,” he said.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html

 

 

Here's an interview with the authors of the article. This has been vetted pretty carefully by multiple layers of editors. And they have more info and more sources that are not on the record yet.

[soon]

Seems like the gov bringing in private sector has lead to more leaks and the advancement of disclosure?

Having seen War Dogs it strikes me that the private sector can easily out maneuver the gov. It is just as likely to come to conclusions and to give reports to the gov to support its bottom line. Its duty is to the dollar, not discovery.

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

23 minutes ago, soon said:

Seems like the gov bringing in private sector has lead to more leaks and the advancement of disclosure?

Having seen War Dogs it strikes me that the private sector can easily out maneuver the gov. It is just as likely to come to conclusions and to give reports to the gov to support its bottom line. Its duty is to the dollar, not discovery.

It's somewhat of a mess from the citizen's perspective. We could get a partial disclosure where the government tells us they have had programs to study UFO's, admit they don't know exactly what they are, and have some meta-materials in their possession that they allow people to study. However, at the same time, anything more substantive (a full or partial alien craft) has been siphoned off into a private company and is hidden away and not discussed. Too early to tell yet how this plays out.

Edited July 27, 2020 by Basic_GnR_Fan

[Gibsonfender2323]

Can someone recommend the best ufo documentaries?

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

37 minutes ago, Gibsonfender2323 said:

Can someone recommend the best ufo documentaries?

Not just documentaries but here's some good stuff:

"UFO's & Nukes" - by Robert Hastings

"Unidentified" the show on the History Channel that focuses on guys like Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon's efforts to get the government's information on UAP's released

Joe Rogan interviews with Dave Fravor, George Knapp, and Bob Lazar (Lazar is controversial because we can't verify what he's saying)

Anything Jaqcues Vallee has done, not sure if he has any documentaries but he's been at this for a long time and has theories that this phenomenon goes beyond the nuts and bolts of craft.