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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38163 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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What does the Motte think about UFOs/UAPs? I ask because there was a relatively big instance of "disclosure" today within the UFO community. A former senior US intelligence figure (who allegedly had enough high level classifications to report directly to the president) has apparently stated to Congress and journalists that the US has recovered "non-human technology."

From the article:

"A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.

...

Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures,” he said.

In filing his complaint, Grusch is represented by a lawyer who served as the original Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG).

“We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities,” Grusch said, referencing information he provided Congress and the current ICIG. “The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles.”

...

"Jonathan Grey is a generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), where the analysis of UAP has been his focus. Previously he had experience serving Private Aerospace and Department of Defense Special Directive Task Forces.

“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”

...

"Grusch left the government on April 7, 2023, in order, he said, to advance government accountability through public awareness. He remains well-supported within intelligence circles, and numerous sources have vouched for his credibility.

“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.

...

Jonathan Grey says secrets have been necessary. “Though a tough nut to crack, potential technological advancements may be gleaned from non-human intelligence/UAP retrievals by any sufficiently advanced nation and then used to wage asymmetrical warfare, so, therefore, some secrecy must remain,” he says. “However, it is no longer necessary to continue to deny that these advanced technologies derived from non-human intelligence exist at all or to deny that these technologies have landed, crashed, or fallen into the hands of human beings.”

Grey noted that the hypothesis that the United States alone has bullied the other nations into maintaining this secrecy for nearly a century continues to prevail as the primary consensus amongst the public at large. “My hope is to dissuade the global populace from this archaic and preposterous notion, and to potentially pave the way for a much broader discussion,” he said.

Grusch said it was dangerous for this “eighty-year arms race” to continue in secrecy because it “further inhibits the world populace to be prepared for an unexpected, non-human intelligence contact scenario.”

“I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically and provides a generally uniting issue for nations of the world to re-assess their priorities,” Grusch said."

I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand. Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all? What would?

For those who, like me, think this (in conjunction with the massive amount of other evidence for UFOs/UAPs/etc.) is fairly good evidence that this phenomenon is real, what might be the social and political implications of this? It's kind of hard for me to imagine anything changing our current political stalemate and trajectory, and I can definitely imagine a situation where the US completely admits to the existence of "non-human intelligences" only for the story to be overtaken the next day when Trump says something allegedly racist, or whatever. And unless reverse-engineered non-human technology starts seeping into consumer electronics or something, it's hard to see it affecting people that much on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine news that could be more important.

I think if aliens were on Earth and leaving evidence like that, it makes no sense. Why would aliens with such advanced technology drop by, leave a couple vehicles but only for top secret departments and show up blurrily on bad cameras, and do nothing else? I would expect aliens to either be totally undetected, or to show clear evidence of their existence. Not some weird thing where they leave just enough evidence to get some people to believe and expose themselves to the best militaries but only them.

Robin Hanson has a theory to explain this. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/our-alien-stalkers

And I think that theory is still silly. If it was true, aliens would be less discreet. They would conclusively show their existence so we could figure out the "message" Robin hypothesizes they have. Especially since, even if some UFOs really were aliens, I'm sure a lot of others were not aliens, and any possible message being communicated would be garbled by us not knowing which appearances were part of the message and which were faulty sensors/weather balloons/whatever.

But why not just land on the White House lawn, meet with our leaders, and explain their agenda? Because once they start talking to us, we will have a lot of questions. Such as on their nature, practices, history, and future plans. And many of us would surely hate some of their answers. They are complete aliens after all, and we are often offended by humans from slightly different cultures. They reasonably guess that we are just not as open-minded as we like to think.

Sure, maybe if they understood us really well they could just say “no comment” when a discussion got near something likely to offend us. But we’d then reasonably infer that they were hiding bad news near there, make a guess at what it is, and get somewhat offended at that. Far simpler and more robust to not talk at all, except in dire emergencies.

Does this not answer that criticism?

They don't have to answer questions, just do a fly by over the Superbowl, or hover above Times Square for five minutes. Instead they only ever appear to us in ways that could potentially be sensor malfunctions or people lying.

Aliens make no sense because the stars still shine. I would not expect the greatest visible evidence for aliens to be on Earth, I would expect it to be humanity surrounded by Dyson spheres. (If I was a civilization that got post-singularity, I would totally eat every sun.) The idea that the strongest visible evidence for alien life is found in Earth's atmosphere simply does not pass any smell test.

Aliens make no sense because the stars still shine.

Belief in aliens can survive this narrow point. Forests are making a comeback in North America because post-industrial economies don't bother burning wood for heat except as a nostalgia larp. It's plausible Kardashev Type II civilizations pass through their dyson sphere phase fairly quickly and then stop bothering with that low density energy source.

If you generalize the point to them being totally invisible, yeah, that's the Fermi Paradox.

I take it you haven't heard of pellet stoves.

We're at an unusual point in our history because of having only recently industrialized and so we haven't yet adapted yet to our enormous wealth. Given enough time, we would certainly return to a state in which we exploit every available energy source.

“I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically and provides a generally uniting issue for nations of the world to re-assess their priorities,” Grusch said."

This makes it sound like he's doing a one-man pro-bono psyop to try to unite humanity or something.

A real life Adrian Veidt?

I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand. Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all? What would?

I've raised this issue before and gotten a bombardment of scepticism. The issue is that people set base rates too low and then use that to explain why they won't accept evidence that would raise their base rate. Cameras? We have decades of recordings from radar and military jets! We have 'Foo Fighters' from WW2, we have the Wow signal.

And why should the base rate for alien civilizations be so low? We really don't know what we're dealing with - we are not an ancient civilization. We haven't reached the highest levels of technological attainment. Our understanding of the universe is very limited. What is 'dark' matter and energy (95% of the universe's matter/energy)? How does gravity work with the rest of physics? We don't have stellar-scale particle accelerators or superintelligences, we don't even have controlled fusion.

We don't have the knowledge necessary to model advanced civilizations. Would they be building Dyson Spheres en masse or are Dyson Spheres pleb-tier megastructures? Are there far better ways to acquire resources that we just don't know about? Would this have some relation to dark matter and dark energy, which make stars look rather small and ineffectual?

Even based upon what we do know, interstellar travel is trivial for a powerful civilization. According to wikipedia it would only take half a million years for Von Neumann probes to proliferate throughout the galaxy at 0.1c. Even if there are 10x more unexpected difficulties, 5 million years is peanuts. If we remove the 'UFO's definitely aren't aliens' firewall, then we get to solve the Great Silence mystery as well.

Sure, the 1561 sighting could be some combination of 'a very unusual sundog' and excessive religiosity. Radar does have glitches. People get drunk and make mistakes. Fakes are not unknown. But what couldn't be explained away in such a fashion? Everything short of a gigantic Independence Day style battleship! If there are any extraterrestrials that use even a modicum of subtlety, this approach would miss them. We need a more targeted, precise epistemology (without all the people who airily pronounce that interstellar travel is extremely unlikely, they've disqualified themselves).

Furthermore, I dislike the attitude of the skeptics. CuriousCA goes on about how highly credentialed experts in the field are fabulists (or some proportion of them). Wouldn't this wipe out Newton or Galileo? Our understanding of the universe improves when a small number of experts disagree with the crowd. Most critically, we advance by assessing evidence, not smearing people as quacks if they dare swim against the current. The people best equipped to assess evidence are those at the National Reconnaisance Office like Grusch or 'I founded eight biotech companies' tier biologists as in the last time this came up. I reckon we'd have a lot more such whistleblowers without the universal derision field for the whole topic, as with HBD or other matters.

We have radar, pilot testimony, aircraft cameras, testimony from high-ranking officials (from many different nations). What more is needed apart from little green men waddling around on the White House Lawn? If that is what you need to update, going from 0.0001 to 1 in a moment, then you're not a good rationalist.

If the US couldn't cover up its torture chambers in Iraq, fake Russiagate stories or spying on the public for more than a few years, how can they cover up a massive psy-op lasting since the Nimitz sightings in 2004, if not longer?

What makes me highly skeptical of the "totally aliens" take is, according to all currently known physics, it's impossible to travel between stars in a remotely reasonable timeframe without an engine with such massively powerful output that it'll be obvious to everyone, especially considering it would pretty much have to be pointed directly at the Earth.

This means that either 1. There are no aliens because it would be blindingly obvious, or 2. Any existing aliens that have made it here have technology capable of bypassing this apparent requirement, which would be so far beyond anything we can conceive of that we would probably be effectively primitive apes to them. And if they're that advanced, why are they spending their time zipping around the Earth in weirdo semi-invisible craft that can only occasionally be seen but never really interact with us. They'd be perfectly capable of taking whatever they want.

If aliens want minerals or lebensraum, there's no shortage out there. They would only be here for observation or fun. There's nothing to take, only sights to see or cheap laughs from messing with the locals.

You could definitely make a Von Neumann probe with only our known physics, that's enough to get a presence in every star system in the galaxy.

One could also conceive of stealthy engines with obscenely high exhaust velocities, directed in a tight beam so they're hard to see. Or perhaps some gigantic coilgun that accelerates a package to relativistic speeds. What do we know about high-speed space travel, we've got no experience at all!

What you're missing is that they have to slow down. They can't just go fast and stay that way, then they crash fast.

And slowing down requires exhaust pointed back vaguely in earth's direction, I would think.

Two beams of cold exhaust (more efficient that way, even), each angled epsilon radians off center in opposite ways, would be basically invisible but would still be 100% minus epsilon squared as efficient.

The bigger reason there's said to be No Stealth In Space is heat - your power plant will have to radiate a ton of waste heat, your life support will be warm, etc. But the catch is that your radiators don't have to be omnidirectional. A peer doesn't care; they can have a network of sensors in every direction ... but hiding from 21st century Earth would be easier.

I still don't believe in alien visitors. You can't hide the Dyson cloud they came from. If their tech can't get a Dyson cloud (enough orbital colonies to occlude their star noticably) operational they probably can't get here either; if their science is so advanced they don't need a Dyson cloud then they probably won't screw up and be seen while they're here. If their tech is still in flux ... why? the Universe is billions of years old; it would require a huge coincidence for the most advanced alien intelligence in our galaxy to be mere millenia ahead of us rather than eons ahead or behind.

And slowing down requires exhaust pointed back vaguely in earth's direction, I would think.

The UFOs we observe seem to have no problems with inertia or producing enormous plumes of exhaust. Maybe there's a physics breakthrough they've made that we aren't aware of.

Alternately, one could pulse the engine in other directions than directly towards Earth. Move the angle up 1 arcsecond and you're still decelerating but the particles will go past the Moon. Or use some planet as cover for your burn. Or use any technology or tactic that a peak-superintelligence could come up with, given stellar-scale resources. I can't stress enough how much we don't know about post-singularitarian civilizations, we are not in a position to define their capabilities and limits.

Maybe the probes arrived a million years ago - it seems overly convenient that we should reach technological civilization within 100 years of aliens first arriving. If they're out there, they ought to meet us in the distant past or distant future.

But what couldn't be explained away in such a fashion? Everything short of a gigantic Independence Day style battleship

When we detect a difference one part in one thousand between (something like) the mass of an electron and a theoretical prediction, we put thousands of (amortized) man hours, many from the smartest people in the world, into figuring out if it's experimental error or new physics. We probe the bottoms of the ocean for new species of life smaller than a single cell of your body. We accelerate protons to within a hundred millionth of the speed of light, or build experiments the size of football fields / tanks of a billion liters of water to detect microscopic events with a frequency of one in 10^34.

And yet the evidence for UFOs remains "fuzzy pictures and videos" or "rumors from experts". Where are the international collaborations between top scientists here? Why haven't the 30cm/pixel imaging satellites gotten good images? Why aren't we blowing the UFOs out of the sky with lasers or something and putting the debris in a mass spec? Imaging technologies have improved by, maybe, ten orders of magnitude over the past century, yet modern UFO evidence is recognizable to someone familiar with UFO sightings in the 1950s.

Electrons and protons are replicable things that we control, UFOs are the equivalent of an old-timey safari. The big game might not show up when you want it too.

"fuzzy pictures and videos"

What do you expect, military-grade video is always grainy. Apache gunships produce only grainy black and white videos of the people they gun down. And the Nimitz footage is pretty clear:

He said the phenomena committed an 'act of war' by jamming the military's radar when they tried to trace it.

'This is not like we saw it and it was gone or I saw lights in the sky and it's gone – we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers,'

Why haven't the 30cm/pixel imaging satellites gotten good images?

I don't know, were they looking at the right place at the right time? 30cm/pixel imaging satellites could render the entire category of stealth aircraft obsolete, if they're looking in the right place at the right time. Yet the world's governments are investing trillions in stealth aircraft, they probably know a thing or two about the limits of our real-time satellite surveillance techniques.

Why aren't we blowing the UFOs out of the sky with lasers or something

Lasers are only good for short-range missile defence right now, they're an experimental technology, not even fully deployed. Whenever we tried shooting these things down (and we've been trying for decades) our interceptors disappear or the UFOs outrun them, sometimes both. Lake Superior 1953, for instance: https://www.history.com/news/ufo-fighter-jet-disappears-over-lake-superior-kinross-incident

The issue is that people set base rates too low and then use that to explain why they won't accept evidence that would raise their base rate.

I will accept a recording on par with amateurish Youtube mockumentaries and somebody with a name and no known history of crankery credibly committing to lose reputation should it be revealed as fake. Have any previous bullshitters been socially annihilated?

Cameras? We have decades of recordings from radar and military jets!

None conclusive or even suggestive enough to interpret as anything other than pareidolia. Too many cases eventually revealed as nothingburgers to not suspect the rest are the same.

And why should the base rate for alien civilizations be so low?

I've replied to this again and again: because evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle. No, saying «you don't get to assert such a low prior, gotta be a mistake in the math somewhere» doesn't cut it if you haven't got a more rigorous one. I have not yet received any response on this point. I believe there straight up is no other life in the Universe because life does not work period. This of course also neatly solves – or dissolves – the Fermi «paradox».

We don't have the knowledge necessary to model advanced civilizations.

No matter how little we know, we know that this behavior over decades is ridiculous for what we know about civilizations in general but consistent with human delusions.

If there are any extraterrestrials that use even a modicum of subtlety, this approach would miss them.

Obviously by the same token they'd have been able to evade all our observations, even those conducted by the US Air Force of today – not to mention decades ago, when Americans had tech on par with modern Iran; it'd be really dumb if they kept upgrading stealth to keep up with our recent meteoric progress but no faster. Clumsily getting caught in barely legible records is pretty poor for a spacefaring civilization. Unless they're screwing with us I guess.

Or not with us but with our digital successors. Maybe ASI will decode those perplexing behaviors and respond appropriately.

evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle

This is also my view. Drake's original rough guesstimates (100% of life-capable planets develop life, 100% of life-hosting planets evolve intelligence) are almost comical in failure to account for observation bias. Our existence tells us nothing about these probabilities except that they're not literally zero. It's like a government inspector going to different factories and noting that 100% have a government inspector in them, himself. Mechanically, the probability of amino acids coming together to form a protein should inform our highest plausible estimate for fl.

Realistically, the vast majority of abiogenic proteins would just die. Said protein must also have energy-seeking and self-replication capabilities from the jump. And that's not getting into evolving intelligence.

It's also possible that fl⋅fi⋅fc comes out to something like 10-24, in which case we're not literally alone, but our handful of fellow travellers did not manage to metastasize across the cosmos.

100% of life-hosting planets evolve intelligence) are almost comical in failure to account for observation bias. Our existence tells us nothing about these probabilities except that they're not literally zero.

It seems like we can make a very rough guess at the probabilities here based on the IQ gap between chimps and the dumbest human populations, the time distance between the human-chimp divergence and the evolution of intelligence, and how long life lasted on earth without this happening.

I don’t have the math for this, and I don’t claim it gives anything closer than an order of magnitude guess.

Have any previous bullshitters been socially annihilated?

This is a fully general argument against anything. Nobody gets annihilated for lying on a huge scale!

I've replied to this again and again: because evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle. No, saying «you don't get to assert such a low prior, gotta be a mistake in the math somewhere» doesn't cut it if you haven't got a more rigorous one.

Have we swept 200 billion galaxies for life? We barely even have a probe outside our solar system. We do not know what we are looking at, we cannot even categorize 95% of the content. 'For all we know' is totally and completely worthless. Blind children do not get to pontificate on the world of art, they've never even experienced it.

I believe there straight up is no other life in the Universe because life does not work period.

Common sense says that if life works on Earth, it can work elsewhere too. Hanson has a more advanced theory on the basis that we emerged quite early as a civilization, compared to all the times when earth-based life might emerge - this implies that advanced civilizations will make it hard for civilizations to emerge later. Besides, you haven't checked 200 billion galaxies, you have no idea what's there.

The burden of proof weighs overwhelmingly more heavily on your claim than mine! I say that there may be alien life somewhere that has come here (based upon various observations) but that we don't know enough to be sure of anything. You say there is no life at all in the entire universe except here without a shred of evidence.

because evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely

We've checked... how many planets? We can't even be sure there's no other life in our own solar system. Europa's oceans for instance, there could be life there. We don't know if there is life there, we don't know what advanced stellar civilizations look like. We don't know.

No matter how little we know, we know that this behavior over decades is ridiculous for what we know about civilizations in general

We know nothing about civilizations in general, especially not advanced civilizations. With a sample size of one, we can't differentiate between civilizations in general and human civilization. All we know is that something is part of a civilization, they have some kind of energy-processing, manufacturing, knowledge base. Defining a civilization is different to understanding them.

Obviously by the same token they'd have been able to evade all our observations, even those conducted by the US Air Force of today

The phenomena we're talking about here has never been stealthy in that we're not capable of seeing it. These things are perfectly visible, we just can't interact with them since they shoot around at immense speeds.

Edit: for the recording you can have the Nimitz clips and the testimony of Commander Fravor

We've checked... how many planets? We can't even be sure there's no other life in our own solar system. Europa's oceans for instance, there could be life there. We don't know if there is life there, we don't know what advanced stellar civilizations look like. We don't know.

What I'm reading @DaseindustriesLtd as saying is that, if you do the math, life should be extraordinarily rare. That is, abiogenesis should happen statistically never, and the only reason that we happen to be in a place where life exists, out of all the places in the cosmos, is because we are ourselves the product of that nigh impossibly rare thing.

This cannot have been on the basis of an analysis of the narrow segment of the cosmos that we have been able to see, such an evaluation would have to have been based on an analysis of what life is like and of the preconditions for that to exist.

Well, we don't really know how life came into existence either. It happened over 3 billion years ago! We can't know what the conditions were back then that resulted in life, so how can we rule it to be statistically impossible? The math is just made-up numbers.

The math is just made-up numbers

But testimonies of American military are evidence about reality?

I think we've found our fundamental disagreement. I take this to be no more evidence than claims of some peculiar Indian sect about the conspiracy of Naga People – complete with grainy photos. It has pretty much zero weight in comparison to priors from natural sciences. And our uncertainty about American sanity or honesty absolutely dwarfs our uncertainty about relevant scientific conjectures.

If the US couldn't cover up its torture chambers in Iraq, fake Russiagate stories or spying on the public for more than a few years, how can they cover up a massive psy-op lasting since the Nimitz sightings in 2004, if not longer?

The US military is routinely insane and dishonest but they're not sufficiently skilled at keeping secrets to get away with this.

I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand. Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all? What would?

Out of hand? No. But I'd need to actually see something. Finding out that there are aliens that have been here would be such a massive revelation with such widespread implications that I need more than hearsay. My mind is open and I've never fully ruled it out but the wolf cries have been numerous and my perception remains entirely devoid of wolves.

Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all?

Infinitesimally. The probability of the observation at hand being induced by any mechanism other than aliens - 8D chess psyops, crankery, attention seeking combined with amused indifference from the military - continues dwarfing the probability of it being induced by aliens.

What would?

For starters, any footage that is not conveniently just situated around the boundary of the relevant detection process's confidence range. The 'aliens' signal continues to get more elusive in a way that neatly tracks our civilisational advances in detection and analysis, and more people signalling respectability and status claiming that it's actually the real deal does little to me since their respectability and status signals seem to be geared towards a different demographic than mine.

Yeah, there's a very relevant xkcd. There are thousands of times more cameras at hand to the general public than there were 50 years ago. If 9/11 happened today we'd have hundreds of videos of the FIRST plane impact - which happened with only seconds of warning - instead of just one. Only 12 years later, there was a huge amount of footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor. Even tsunamis - a relatively more common event with more warning - hadn't really been captured on video much before Japan's in 2011.

Real phenomena, even rare ones, get easier and easier to find footage of as technology increases. "Aliens flitting around the skies in spaceships" does not fit this profile at all.

So where are the parent civilisation of this non-human tech? Why aren't they showing up going "You have our stuff, we'd like it back please" or even looking for their lost crewmembers. Unless this is all unmanned (unpersonned? unaliened?) craft, but even then I'd expect - if we have enough of it for eighty years worth of research - that they'd try and find out what happened their probes.

I'll believe it when the little green men show up.

Would you bother tracking down a paper plane that you tossed on a whim?

based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures

These statements would be way more compelling with some more detailed examples that would indicate that anyone with some degree of scientific literacy is in the loop. I'm not quite clear on if "Unique Atomic arrangements" are referring to novel chemicals or novel elements or novel isotopes of elements. I'd love examples of what kind of vehicle morphology would prove non-human intelligence. A fucking rough sketch from this guy of what vehicles he's seen isn't even forthcoming. Any of this stuff would massively change human understanding of physics and materials tech, the fields there haven't been real theoretical breakthroughs in in forever.

Yeah, that’s some thin gruel from a leaker.

I am sure there’s some elaborate game theoretical reasoning as to why he wouldn’t reveal in-depth details right now, but really, nothing on that materials science thing? Not even one truly specific claim? Nothing like…

  • Stable transuranic elements

  • Novel stable isotopes of known elements

  • Exotic baryonic matter/“strange” matter with some weird configuration of quarks

  • New metamaterials. Hell, just claim “novel metamaterials”, which sounds super-scifi but then also plausible enough to make skeptics look up with interest

But no specific claims? Hmmmmm, Occam’s Razor time: we are being visited by alien intelligences across the vast reaches of space, or the guy is a nutter.

I am sure there’s some elaborate game theoretical reasoning as to why he wouldn’t reveal in-depth details right now

Don't get me wrong it could be 100% bullshit, but he's still not authorized to provide specific details if they're classified right?

...but he's authorized to provide generic, wishy-washy details? If what he said did not violate any confidentiality agreements then I would expect it to be corroborated far more widely, including by numerous current government workers. If he did, then why didn't they already arrest him and why would any reasons for not arresting him yet not also apply if he also said something more concrete? If he was explicitly authorised to release what he said so far and nothing more, then either this is a psyop or I would have to update my understanding of how the US government does good-faith information disclosure.

I mean, there’s downthread details about whistleblower protection’s specifically for UFOs. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that he would have said ‘unique atomic arrangements’ rather than baryonic matter or whatever on the advice of a lawyer or based on his personal risk tolerance.

If he can't provide specific details, there's no reason to examine the question further.

I'm not quite clear on if "Unique Atomic arrangements" are referring to novel chemicals or novel elements or novel isotopes of elements.

I expect that I am the worst educated regular poster on the motte and those sound kind of not like something you’d see on a space probe? My understanding is that any element which is stable enough to do anything with has already been discovered and the kinds of advancements in materials science you’d expect to see on a space probe aren’t normally described as ‘unique atomic arrangements’.

My understanding is that any element which is stable enough to do anything with has already been discovered

There's a hypothesized island of stability wherein certain isotopes of heavier elements would be stable enough to exist for long times. Synthesis of these materials is currently beyond our capabilities, but is probably easier than superluminal travel.

I took "unique atomic arrangements" to mean a novel molecular structure (y'know, because the atoms are in a different arrangement). Possibly some sort of polymer or alloy we're not aware of (or don't know how to mass produce).

Which is exactly what I'd expect on an extra-terrestrial space probe. Mostly because our space probes are kinda shitty and I expect them to get quite a bit better before someone else finds one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I still don't buy it, but this wasn't the weird part for me.

It had every red flag of someone who's watched too much star trek, didn't it?

The last time we discussed UFOs was here in response to Tucker positively mentioning UFO speculation, and my critical response was here and in subthreads.

What's happening here is, essentially - there are several million people employed in, or as contractors for, the US military and intelligence community. The number who hold positions like 'generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center' are smaller, but (if we're allowed to lump together all kinds of quackery, instead of just aliens) at least 1 in 100. And any time you have ten thousand people, a few dozen of them are going to be, variously - gullible, insane, stupid, have committed to several important intellectual mistakes, intentionally lying for media attention, or are just of average intelligence when actually understanding whether a radar signature shows aliens or noise requires being above average + got sucked into 'exposing aliens' because they genuinely believe it's important. This is how you get things like "the CIA investigated astral projection" or "nobel prize-winning scientist believes in homeopathy" or the fake "bomb detector" that was just a dowsing rod used by 20 different countries' militaries (but, again, that doesn't mean their whole militaries endorsed/used them, just some people in them). It's not surprising that one in a thousand military people believes in aliens if one in a hundred 'normal' people believe in aliens. Yet 999 in 1000 don't believe in aliens. (edit: it's probably significantly above 1 in 1k even among those who are high iq / work in technical fields)

Additionally - there have been dozens of supposed firsthand accounts of interactions with aliens like this one, and all of their details are both incompatible with verifiable history and incompatible with each other. E.g. "arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally" - which technologies? All of the biggest scientific and engineering discoveries have very legible and sensible histories. The progress of science and engineering over the past hundred years hasn't been a secret thing, it occurs in public. Maybe everyone's been tricked, but that should require more evidence than one guy asserting it.

I friend of mine knows lots of high ranking people in the military. He says many of them take UFOs seriously.

I’ve known lots of former special forces guys and they all believe in some kind of exotic conspiracy theory, aliens is a common one. I always wrote it off as the usual tendency for high functioning blue collar men who aren’t either fundies or some kind of truly radical political extremist to embrace weird fringe beliefs straight out of the daytime history channel and assumed military men preferred aliens over Albanian Atlantis theory because tech appeals to them or something.

My point is, I wouldn’t write it off that the military just has an unusual number of people holding ideas about aliens because of some weird cultural quirk.

I’ve known lots of former special forces guys and they all believe in some kind of exotic conspiracy theory, aliens is a common one.

Wonder if that's because they deal with compartmentalized information for so long, and their brain starts painting in the parts they don't have.

Can you elaborate on what 'take UFOs seriously' means? Presumably it's somewhere in between 'are confident aliens are real and actively use alien technology' and 'think that Unidentified Flying Objects exist and they're either natural debris or man-made objects'

Objects being observed/recorded accelerating in manners way beyond the technical capacity of anything the US military knows about. They are spooked.

  1. This article was written by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the same people who wrote the big bombshell 2017 NYT UFO exposé. This, if true, would be even bigger, in fact one of the biggest stories in human history. The fact that it's appearing in The Debrief and not the NYT is, IMO, a major strike against its credibility. If there was something here I have no doubt the NYT would have jumped on it again. This is not me saying "the MSM would never refuse to break an important story" but I can't think of any reason they would fail to break this particular story.

  2. A few weeks ago at the senate UAP hearing AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick said that they have yet to find any evidence of non-human intelligence or technology. This despite the fact that Grusch and others supposedly gave their testimony months ago. Now you could always say, perhaps plausibly, "the government is lying to Kirkpatrick's office" or "the government is telling Kirkpatrick's office to lie." But I don't think it's plausible that the federal government would allow AARO to misinform congress on this and then allow this Grusch guy to come forward through The Debrief.

  3. Maybe this is just me not knowing how clearances work but the fact that Grusch can say any of this stuff without immediately being thrown into prison means it's not classified info, right? And how could top-secret black projects working with alien tech not be classified?

So color me skeptical, apparently like most people here.

EDIT:

Apparently AARO has again publicly denied they have any evidence of any such black programs ("they would say that, wouldn't they?).

Over the past couple of years I've become sympathetic to, though not totally convinced of, Steven Greenstreet's idea that most of this comes down to a small but well-organized and well-financed group of true believing high strangeness fanatics in and outside of the halls of government.

This article was written by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the same people who wrote the big bombshell 2017 NYT UFO exposé. This, if true, would be even bigger, in fact one of the biggest stories in human history. The fact that it's appearing in The Debrief and not the NYT is, IMO, a major strike against its credibility. If there was something here I have no doubt the NYT would have jumped on it again. This is not me saying "the MSM would never refuse to break an important story" but I can't think of any reason they would fail to break this particular story.

The NYT might not have liked the reaction they got from the last article. Even if it pulled a lot of readers in, they might not have liked the demographics of those readers. Or Kean or Blumenthal might have ticked someone off during their last article, someone who fundamentally refuses to believe in aliens and considers the story kitschy human interest shit at best, probably closer to pure bullshit - and so they nixed it after a quick glance for pictures of Biden shaking hands with a little grey guy (which would make it worth running).

  1. I agree that this becomes more credible if the MSM picks it up, and the fact that Kean and Blumenthal couldn't get it reported in the NYT/WaPo initially is disappointing, and if they don't pick it up eventually that would be a strike to the story's credibility.

  2. A fair point.

  3. My understanding is that he now feels more comfortable saying things because in some appropriations bill from 2022 Senators Rubio and Gillibrand added language providing some whistleblower protection for UAP information. From the article: Grusch "helped draft the language on UAP for the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act, spearheaded by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio and signed into law by President Biden in December 2022. The provision states that any person with relevant UAP information can inform Congress without retaliation, regardless of any previous non-disclosure agreements."

Also, apparently he got clearance to say these things from the DoD? Article says "his statements [were] cleared for publication by the Pentagon in April," and then also Ross Coulthart (Australian journalist) says the same here.

Also, apparently he got clearance to say these things from the DoD? Article says "his statements [were] cleared for publication by the Pentagon in April," and then also Ross Coulthart (Australian journalist) says the same here.

If so, I want to ask the DoD why they're giving people clearance to say untrue things. And if it is true, why have all these groundshaking scientific discoveries been kept secret from all the people who could have done something useful with it?

As presented, it makes the deep state sound like they've been doing absolutely nothing for decades and letting this stuff rot in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant; 10 years after getting a hold of something, it shouldn't still be made of Unknown Elements.

If so, I want to ask the DoD why they're giving people clearance to say untrue things.

For some categories of folks, I wouldn't be surprised if pre-publication review is mandatory. The DOD probably has to at least proofread any book by certain folks, even if they decide to write historical fiction. A memoir or anything close to their specialty could actually inadvertently disclose something classified. It's quite possible the folks here charged with "giving clearance" only care about a very narrow set of facts (names, places, dates) appearing.

Although I suppose claiming any degree of official statement or backing might be its own concern. But it's unclear to me this is actually claimed here: "the censors didn't censor my ramblings" isn't alone an endorsement.

According to this FAQ accompaniment to the story,

But it does speak to the fact that Grusch really tried to take the exact, appropriate path, the exact official channels. He’s tried to do everything right throughout this process. He hasn’t gone willy-nilly. And so, when he decided he wanted to come forward with his story, he put the information he wanted to share through DOPSR, and they cleared it. That doesn’t mean that the Department of Defense is stamping off on what he’s saying and saying, “Okay, yeah, it’s all true.” They’re just saying, “Okay, we’ll let you say that because it’s not going to reveal any secrets.”

So...top-secret bases full of alien hardware aren't state secrets? What?

To me what this reads as is, like you say, this guy was a real intelligence officer, which means his statements have to be screened by the DOD to make sure he doesn't actually leak something sensitive, and the censors looked it over and said, "okay there's nothing serious in here, it's just a bunch of whacky alien stuff, go ahead and publish it."

Surely it wouldn’t be that hard for an adversary like Russia or China to repurpose a few uranium centrifuges to generate material samples with weird isotope ratios. If they then used those samples to build strange aircraft and flew them over the United States they could potentially cause a good bit of chaos.

Lobbing samples of radioactive materials into your main geopolitical opponents airspace seems like the sort of thing that violates more treaties than technically exist.

It doesn’t have to be radioactive. It just has to freak out the guys running the mass spectrometer and you’ll end up with official reports saying things like “atomic analysis unlike all known terrestrial samples, possible extraterrestrial origin.”

and they could land their crafts in the White house and soldiers dressed as little green men (better use midgets for these ones, or north koreans) assasinate Biden and maybe Kamala Harris. Yeah, that would be a very chaotic situation.

I have to say that I really, really want all this UFO stuff to be true, mostly because this implies that there's an "adult in the neighborhood" who won't let a super-intelligence be created, it would imply that we'd have to share the cosmic endowment with aliens, but I'll take the certainty of getting a thousand bucks over the impossibility a billion.

However, If the US has had alien technology for decades and kept it a secret, this implies that the US has essentially sacrificed unbelievable amounts of economic and technological growth for the sake of... what, exactly? Preventing itself from having asymmetric warfare capabilities?! Isn't asymmetric warfare the entire goal of the US military? The rationale for maintaining this unbelievable level of secrecy for 8 decades, through democrat and republican presidents, through wars and economic crises, just doesn't seem that strong to me.

So therefore, barring actual physical evidence, it seems that the US intelligence apparatus is trying to make us believe that alien tech exists, and I have no clue why. This is obviously a fairly complicated operation given all the high-level people who keep coming forward, but I can't see what is to be gained here. So overall, my impression at the whole UFO phenomenon is massive confusion, I can't come up with a single coherent model of the world which makes sense of everything I'm seeing.

This honestly makes more sense than anything else- might it be an attempt to safeguard US hegemony by convincing eg Saudi Arabia that massive American technological advances are just around the corner? After all, Saudi Arabia believes lots of crazy things and the US intelligence apparatus does not seem very good at modeling their behavior.

Yeah, the only way I can make sense of this (apart from the guy being a UFO nut and there have been plenty of them) is if it's all some big disinformation campaign aimed at China/Russia/take your pick from Turkey to Europe to whomever: "Oh yes, we have secret UFO tech, don't you?"

Then get Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un turning the house upside-down demanding "Where's our secret UFO tech, then? If the dumb round-eyes have it, why don't we???"

Seems more likely that it’s aimed at Turkey/Saudi/India or another strategically important but somewhat backwards country trying to convince it to align with USA than a strategic enemy- China and Russia can’t really be expected to change their behavior on the basis of just how superior to them the US is.

However, If the US has had alien technology for decades and kept it a secret, this implies that the US has essentially sacrificed unbelievable amounts of economic and technological growth for the sake of... what, exactly? Preventing itself from having asymmetric warfare capabilities?!

that is of course if reverse engineering the technology is at all possible. It could be the case as described by Bob Lazar of Scientists of past centuries in possession of an atomic reactor.

Bob Lazar is a lying hack, but that particular point of his is true, it's just that in that case, there's no downside to revealing the secret. Other countries won't do much better at deciphering the hidden tech, so we might as well use the US's dominance in science to make as much progress as possible with this.

that would be incredible risky, as from the get go you don't know how feasible to reverse engineer the technology is. Maybe after revealing it to the world a stroke of luck in a Chinese lab allows them to do what the US couldn't do in 80 years. That would put the west in a very bad situation.

Yeah, I certainly agree about the confusion. I'd add that it doesn't seem totally unbelievable to me that the US military would want to keep potentially powerful military tech secret given that a good chunk of those 80 years occurred during the Cold War.

This continues to be in the same category of data as almost all ufology evidence: a guy says a thing, with apparently nothing concrete to show for it.

Maybe he’s a fabulist, or mixing up info from some terrestrial sources project - by American or other government - with the massive amounts of UFO lore swirling about in America, even in the highest circles. Maybe he’s engaging in some spook project, like what I theoretized about here.

Without anything more concrete to show for it than in previous ’high-level whistleblower’ cases, little need to adjust priors.

“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said

Hmm

Jokes aside, I find these claims to be grossly insufficient for meeting the burden of proof something as momentous as extraterrestrial contact would be.

I am hard pressed to think of any convincing reason for aliens to cross the gaping void of space and fuck around like an incompetent Nat Geo crew sending uncanny valley robot penguins into the colony.

I strongly suspect that the whole thing is a mildly out of control psyop run by the USINT, that's metastasized to the extent that it fools even a few dumb but well meaning spooks into whistleblowing.

Now, one can well assert that America is the most important nation in the world, but isn't it odd how little of this bullshit happens in the rest of the world, including gigantic countries like India and China? It strikes me as even more incredulous that they're all keeping mum on the matter.

What would it take to convince me that they're real? Something along these lines:

  1. Outright official first contact.

  2. Some kind of alien artifact or wreck being revealed and demonstrating technology decades ahead of our own that can't be plausibly faked.

It better be really fucking good, because in a few years the smart money on something like that is the work of human created AGI, which while likely alien in cognition, doesn't count.

  1. A massive trove of information and technology if not a physical artifact, subject to the same constraints.

  2. Several large countries coming together to announce their findings, ideally with evidence in hand.

Show me something of that order of magnitude, and I'll take it.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean about this "bullshit" only happening in the USA. Do you mean claims about the government being in possession of non-human tech, or just UFO incidents/etc. in general? Because there are plenty of the latter in other countries, including ones reported by foreign military officials.

The volume of such complaints is absolutely nowhere near that in the States, several OOM lower if I had to guess.

Certainly I can't think of a single UFO incident that was attributed to aliens in India, leaving aside even more questionable events like abductions.

Nobody is recording grainy footage of aliens, and is it not interesting how, now that everyone in the world has an HD camera in their pocket and can plausibly upload data that is nigh impossible to fully censor on the internet, we still don't get any conclusive high quality footage? And the odd military stuff that comes out is hardly overwhelming.

I also can't think of any UFO incidents in India either, but I know of ones (I believe all involving gov't personnel too) in the USSR, Iran, Brazil, France, Belgium, UK (happy to provide links if requested).

Can't speak to the the volume in the US vs. the rest of the world, you may be right about that, but that could also simply be due to US cultural hegemony making it harder to gather info from non-English language sources.

The USSR, at least, had as much scifi in its pop culture as the US did, at least since Stanislaw Lem.

In general, I will not believe humans have captured an alien spaceship unless someone is willing to show me the spaceship that has been captured.

I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand.

Sort of?

I have to conserve a little bit of probability for the fact that it is possible that some nonhuman intelligence

A) Exists in the galaxy; and

B) Was able to send probes to our planet.

A) is just the Fermi paradox, I have little to add to that discourse. If we consider B), though, any intelligence that was able to send probes out to other planets can probably design them to be extremely difficult for a sub-Kardashev 1 civilization to detect, much less capture.

So I am actually willing to believe that we are being observed by aliens who are so extremely good at psyops and stealth and misinformation that they can make it impossible to verify their existence and what little evidence we have is simply so inconclusive that only the most conspiracy-minded would jump to the conclusion of alien interlopers.

The question of why they would simply observe us and never visibly interfere or attempt contact is an open one, but hardly a full refutation.

End of the day the idea isn't inherently more loopy than the simulation hypothesis. But in both instances there's not much for a good rationalist to DO with this information and thus it kind of just falls out of the equation pending further evidence.

And of course, this doesn't lend any credence to any particular person's account of alien encounters or conspiracies of alien overlords. I'm not saying I believe any particular theory or story.

I think it will turn out to be nothing. Either the guy is lying or misunderstood something or is speculating. I think the videos and pilot stories are some combination of optical illusions, getting confused about the distance and speed of objects at night with no reference points, or equipment malfunctions. If the US government was digging up alien space ships left and right then someone else would have stumbled on them by now, either amateurs or another government.

retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin

“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said.

Though a tough nut to crack

Calling it now: half a coconut a tool-using octopus swam in from one island to another.

I am always amused and puzzled when American spooks begin this stuff. It's one of the great mysteries of life why they do it at all and yet always end it as a nothingburger. I used to have a conspiratorial theory about psyop overcapacity, but at this point I'm allowing that it's some running gag, a nostalgic tradition born of ancient superstition nobody seriously believes in. Maybe we should create a holiday.

I think there's probably a huge amount of UFO folklore going around in aerospace and intelligence communities.

One of the things about UFO debates that has surprised me is to many Americans seem to give absolute credence to intelligence officials, pilots etc. about this stuff; simply the fact that some pilot says that he saw a craft making impossible maneuvers and zooming at ludicrous speeds is sufficient evidence about alien activity, since this is an AMERICAN HERO PILOT, he couldn't possibly be making stuff up or misinterpreting what he saw, can he?

I would assume that aerospace and intelligence communities would be expectionally likely to be true believers about UFO matters and have a very light standard for accepting evidence on this field, simply because these fields would draw in the types that specifically want to become an astronaut and/or a spy to "learn the truth" about aliens, and even the others would be affected by the general culture and folklore created by these types, especially since intelligence types, in particular, already sort of live in a paranoid X-files world and are probably privy to the idea that the intelligence community possesses secret info that normies can't be allowed to know/wouldn't understand.

One of the pilots who has claimed to see UFOs is David "Sex" Fravor. (Who, incidentally, was already a bit famous from being in a documentary aboard an aircraft carrier in the 2000's.)

On the Joe Rogan podcast not too long ago, he admitted to pranking people into thinking they had seen UFOs. He said he would spot campers by their campfires, put his fighter jet's engines to idle and glide in quietly and invisibly until he was over top of them. Then he would pull up sharply, kick in the afterburners and climb vertically away from them. So, the campers would see lights appear in the sky out of nowhere and then shoot straight up and disappear. I don't recall if he was able to verify that it worked and people actually reported UFOs or not.

So, he had admitted to deliberately trying to trick people into thinking they had seen aliens, as a joke, but for some reason people still believe him when he tells other UFO stories.

It certainly is funny and endearing.

I have a few more conspiratorial theories but at the core that makes them plausible lies the endlessly productive American combination of credulity and paranoia. There are conspiracies, but childish horror story ones – ayy lmaos in the basement, a pizza pedo ring in another, yeat fear not citizen – patriots are in control…

One of my theories is that this low-IQ myth saturation serves to prevent Americans from developing anything like nuanced national mythos or new political movements (say, founded on some more credible conspiracy theory); sap the crazy power from potential dissidents and discredit the idea of dissidence as a whole for smarter constituents.

I think conspiracies exist and they are not goofy at all.

relevant.

RIP Trevor.

Look, if you’re telling the truth and if the media doesn’t successfully bury it under stories about kardashians, hunter biden, and trump, then Elon musk will demand access to the technology, half the population will start sharing 40k exterminate the xeno scum memes, half the population will demanding Star Trek now, and the church of Scientology will claim credit.

I largely agree with you except for the fact there have been people who have said things (including this current leaker!) over the years and been dismissed. If you think a few leakers aren't enough evidence, fair enough, but then I don't think it's fair to base your skepticism on the fact that there haven't been leakers when in fact there have.

Yeah, I agree with this for the most part. Hoping the fact that the article claims he has been reporting to Congress means that they will get their hands on some documents/hard evidence soon.

For those who, like me, think this (in conjunction with the massive amount of other evidence for UFOs/UAPs/etc.) is fairly good evidence that this phenomenon is real, what might be the social and political implications of this?

Your first link was a 500 error, and your second link was to a youtube channel of a dude talking to another dude. People "saying things to congress" is not evidence. People can tell lies.

If there's chunks of non-human tech in government hands, evidence of that would be an announcement by the government, and public display of the tech. Actual evidence of alien tech will not need to be debated; it will be overwhelmingly persuasive and inescapably prominent by its very nature. Absent such an unquestionable reveal, there is no reason to entertain lesser "reveals", because they have never, ever panned out. If alien tech were here, the world would look different than it does in very noticeable ways, and all arguments to the contrary are unfalsifiable.

The site is being pounded right now. Link works for me, you might need to try it again.

I found it by general search. The article was what I expected: assertions, no actual evidence. People say, no actual evidence. Multiple people confirm, no actual evidence. Apparently some documents have been cleared for release by the DoD: okay, what's the evidence in the documents that brings this all home?

It's implications all the way down. I'm not buying it.

Indeed, assertions by a former high level member of the US intelligence services. You must admit that's not no evidence, especially when considered in light of things like the videos that have been released by the military.

It is too close to "no evidence" for the difference to matter.

Evidence that would change my mind would be actual, baseline impacts on my life. This stuff never, ever changes the world we actually live in to any perceptible degree. If that changes, if novel alloys or materials enter production, or novel power sources, radical advances in computing or weapons or transportation or engineering actually arrive, I'll change my mind. Until that happens, the prior that it's bogus is overwhelming.

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