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[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
Some nice developments this week ahead of the hearings scheduled for November 17th.
Sitting Congressman Matt Gaetz said in a recent interview "The CIA has a program around craft recovery. It's not a question anymore. And so, that's probably where I would start, the craft recovery, and the biologics that have been taken from those craft". In decades past, this probably would have been sufficient enough by itself to be considered disclosure. But unfortunately, we're in a scenario where only certain government officials have become outspoken about their belief in UFOs, while the top brass at the DoD remains reticent. The smoking gun evidence / Big Announcement remains elusive.
A FOIA request has brought to light a heavily redacted briefing on UAPs given to NASA by the DoD's UAP Task Force. The briefing acknowledges that the UAPTF collected multiple reports of UAP sightings and that "over half" of these reports were validated by "multiple sensors", but the items in the list of "Potential Explanations" are redacted, as well as almost all of the included photographs (but for some reason they chose not to redact a photograph of a giant glowing green triangle).
A common criticism of the UAP disclosure movement is that their belief in aliens is fundamentally unfalsifiable and there's no reason for their demands to ever cease. They won't be satisfied that the military's not hiding anything until they've declassified every last document in their position. And I agree that this is a possible failure mode, which is why it's important to focus on concrete, actionable items rather than generalized demands for transparency. There are many classified documents regarding UAPs that we know, for a fact, to exist. Their existence, and the fact that they explicitly deal with UAPs, is not in question - we just don't know their exact contents. This includes the aforementioned NASA briefing, the photograph and other materials that Gaetz was shown at Eglin AFB, the multiple SCIF briefings that Congressmen have been given over the past year on UAPs, etc. Advocating for the full declassification of these materials is a reasonable goal, while also being limited in scope.
Until the alien is shown (in person, in a traveling exhibition, where I can maybe touch it or at least see it being touched), there is no reason to believe and every reason to disbelieve. That even the DoD and/or congress have people autistic/schizo/gullible enough to believe the US government (and NOBODY else) has been secretly keeping little green men on ice for 50 years is unsurprising. That otherwise smart people here might believe it is sad.
It just seems very unbelievable that beings that master energies enough to make to Earth from where-ever they came - and it can't be close because we'd notice them somehow already - get here, leave no footprint except some weird artifacts in US govt secret storage and then never show up again in any way. You mean if you look at human exploration, it's not really how it worked, is it? If somebody found some new land, soon tenfold of people would show up, then twentyfold, then hundredfold. Even if the original explorer died without relaying any message, soon somebody would follow their path, and then another somebody, and so on. I could find only two situations compatible with government holding any alien artifacts - a) aliens are very rare and very very far away, and they are essentially launching expendable exploratory probes (biorobots maybe?) at random directions, and one of the random directions intersected Earth but by some malfunction failed to call back so this direction is considered empty for the next N thousands of years until the next random probe arrives; and b) our vicinity is somehow marked in Common Galactese as "exclusion area, do not approach!" - either because we are under-developed, or too weird, or too dangerous, or any other reason - and would remain so basically until the aliens decide otherwise or we develop independent means of discovering them.
The situation even worse for the scenario where they show up, but only as vague images in blurry photos. I mean, a civilization which uses energies several orders of magnitude stronger than we do, dances around among us, and we notice nothing? It's like ants not noticing somebody trying to build a residential neighborhood on top of their ant pile. I think they'd notice pretty soon. They might not understand what is going on but they'd notice.
A variation: They did indeed signal back, but light-speed delay means that the signal itself, nevermind any follow-up-action, will not arrive for a very long time yet.
I'd expect anybody who mastered FTL travel also master FTL messaging. Though indeed it's not a given (I think Bujold universe had FTL travel but no FTL messaging, leading to passing messages with couriers). Without FTL, there's no point to even bother to send probes out.
Ah, sorry, I didn't realize FTL was implied but assumed that the aliens had slow-boated to Earth.
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