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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31368 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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This week, a House Oversight subcommitte held a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs - or, in slightly more old-fashioned parlance, UFOs and aliens.

The star witness was David Grusch, former intelligence officer turned whistleblower who testified that the United States has been operating a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, which has recovered both technology of non-human origin as well as "non-human biologics" from various crash sites. Allegedly, these programs have been avoiding Congressional oversight and standard disclosure procedures by illegally appropriating funds that were allocated for other purposes. He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.

The UAP issue has slowly been gaining mainstream traction for several years now - see for example The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 sponsored by Chuck Schumer which was previously discussed on TheMotte. It's difficult to dismiss the whole thing as being merely Grusch's personal fantasy when you have Rep. Matt Gaetz saying the following:

"Several months ago my office received a protected disclosure from Eglin Air Force Base indicating that there was a UAP incident that required my attention. We asked to see any of the evidence that had been taken by flight crew in this endeavor, and to observe any radar signature, as well as to meet with the flight crew. Initially we were not afforded access [...] eventually we did see the image, and we did meet with one member of the flight crew who took the image. The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries, and I'm somewhat informed on the matter, having served on the Armed Services committee for seven years."

Rep. Tim Burchett, who has also seen classified evidence related to UAPs, had the following exchange in an interview prior to the hearing:

Interviewer: "From the videos you have seen, from the stories you have heard from people up in the sky, if that footage, if those videos come to light, publicly for the American people to see, what do you think people's reaction would be to it?"

Burchett: "I hope they're angry. That this government, both parties, have hid this from them."

When you have reputable government officials - not "former" anything, not "I know a guy who knows a guy", but actual, sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.

It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be. I don't find it very plausible that this is a test run of the government's disinfo capabilities. Modern information warfare is fought with internet memes anyway. If they really wanted to test their ability to influence culture and discourse, they would start with a social media campaign, not Congressional hearings.

At the same time though, I think Yudkowsky's argument against the presence of aliens on Earth is very convincing. He gives a rundown of what I would call the "basic argument" for skepticism: if aliens are here and they want to be known, then why don't they just show themselves? And if they don't want to be known, then they're doing a rather poor job of hiding themselves. Basically, their behavior just doesn't make sense.

Surely any species that's capable of building aircraft that are this advanced should be able to just hang out somewhere in space and get live 8K Ultra HD video of any location on the planet. If all they want to do is observe and study us, there shouldn't be any need to actually fly down here where they can be seen. Hanson's suggestion that this is all part of a convoluted show of dominance on their part is not very convincing.

The best rebuttal that I can come up with to Yudkowsky's argument is that the aliens are simply indifferent to whether we know about them or not. Think about humans who go on expeditions to observe sharks. Obviously we're not going to go right into the midst of the sharks and "announce" ourselves, because that would be silly. But neither do we make any special effort to hide ourselves. If one of the sharks goes and tells his friends about the strange cylindrical object he saw floating just above the water's surface, that's really of no concern to us one way or the other. But even this argument is not particularly convincing. If the aliens were truly indifferent, then one would expect that they would have revealed themselves in some more overt way by now, a UFO going on a joyride one day through the streets of Manhattan for example, anything that's more reputable and verifiable than "my cousin Ed from Nebraska swears that he was abducted one night when he was all alone and he conveniently forgot to charge his phone that day".

Ultimately, I think all possible explanations have their own serious problems. I could believe that UAPs are part of an advanced, non-alien weapons program that's been kept secret by the US government - but that would be pretty crazy in its own right.

then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.

I think you're dramatically underestimating the likelihood and causes of misidentification. Extremely smart domain experts misidentify the benign for the outlandish all the time. Michael Shermer's old TED talk 'Why people believe weird things' gets into this. Also, youtuber Thunderf00t has several videos debunking UFO stuff, including more recent claims, with lots of examples of people mistaking the benign for the outlandish.

Im going to reiterate what I've said the last couple times that this has come up.

My take on these sorts of guys, and Grusch in particular, is that they are highly intelligent but also kind of on the spectrum and don't realize when they are being messed with or otherwise nudged to mind thier own business.

When asked "where have you been for the last three days?" No one's ever gotten thier clearance yanked for telling thier girlfriend or some nosy dude in the office who hasn't been read in yet "I've been disecting aliens out at site 4"

I'm 99% convinced that the U.S. military or CIA has at least one fancy stealth aircraft that isn't public knowledge, because of course they do, it would be stupid if they didn't. And probably it has some components which are designed differently from typical aircraft, because it's advanced and experimental, and thus looks strange to people used to seeing typical aircraft. And I bet if you see it flying around, or especially if they deliberately put fancy lights on it, it would look strange and alien to someone who's not an expert.

Or rather, how could you even tell the difference in principal? If we assume the military's secret projects are at least 5-10 years ahead of public knowledge, then even things which aren't commonly known to be possible are still plausibly human. And then you take a fifty year old senator whose perceptions of even modern common knowledge are probably a few decades out of date. Have you seen China's drone shows? https://youtube.com/watch?v=VvemT96Rozc . They're fancy! In order for something to be demonstrably "non-human" it would have to be remarkably strange above and beyond this. Because humans are already capable of some pretty impressive stuff.

An actual expert with long-term firsthand experience dismantling an alien aircraft could reliably determine that it's non-human. But otherwise, you would need straight up teleportation or something to identify something as non-human from a distance: even hovering, laser beams, and sonic rays aren't out of the question for humans with billions of dollars and a slight scientific head start.

The star witness was David Grusch, former intelligence officer turned whistleblower who testified that the United States has been operating a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, which has recovered both technology of non-human origin as well as "non-human biologics" from various crash sites.

As was pointed out online elsewhere, he also says Mussolini and the Vatican acted to cover up evidence of aliens. So if you believe this guy, I am offering you all a one-time-only free offer to come aboard the Barque of Peter and convert to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church before our little green brethren return to whisk us all away to the heavens 🤣👽✝

He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.

What he’s saying is that we don’t have anything like Stargate Command or even Independence Day’s version of Area 51.

I still privately hope that Stargate was a controlled disclosure event.

Amanda Tapping remains my high-school crush and probably responsible for why I used to date older women.

He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.

in an appropriate classified setting

So, just cover it all up again but "officially" this time? Fuck no. Show us the aliens or it's bullshit.

The head of AARO, Pentagon's office for finding out about UAPs (and the office following the notorious UAPTF), is apparently unhappy with Grusch's testimony, accusing him misrepresenting whether he's speakin with AARO about his claims and also reiterating that nothing that AARO has seen "support[s] the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology".

Of course, one might say that he's expected to say that, but if Grusch has indeed misrepresented himself under oath about this, well, that just makes his testimony even more questionable than previously.

Yeah, I don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other. Grusch could be lying, Kirkpatrick could be lying, who knows.

I believe that Grusch said during his testimony that he did pass along classified evidence to Kirkpatrick, but it was before Kirkpatrick actually became the head of AARO, so technically Grusch could have spoken to Kirkpatrick and not have spoken to AARO - but I don't have the timestamp on hand.

This is getting spicy. Previously, many people explained away Kirkpatrick's denial of any knowledge of reverse-engineering programs by insisting he simply did not have the clearance necessary to check. But during the hearing, Grusch confirmed (though unfortunately he was cut off before he could finish by Congresswoman Foxx going on a mostly unrelated rant) that Kirkpatrick has interviewed some of the same alleged witnesses he has interviewed. Yet Kirkpatrick is on the record as stating that AARO has yet to uncover any verifiable evidence of these reverse-engineering programs. So somebody is lying.

Which raises the question of why is Grusch lying. Kirkpatrick would have obvious motivations to lie if it Grusch was telling the truth, but not the reverse. Of course if we are reverse engineering alien spaceships, you’d think room temperature superconductors would have come from the US and not from South Korea.

I don't think Grusch is lying but I do suspect that he's been had.

I haven't seen anything yet to adjust my priors that it's some combination of 1. Room-temperature IQ people who were UFO nerds back in the 90s or so who have now become military officers, congresspeople, etc nerding out, seeing what they want to see, misinterpreting ambiguous evidence, etc, and 2. Manipulation and leaks by some shadowy Government/elite group trying to misdirect attention from whatever is really going on. As others have said, nobody is acting like there's an actual secret being leaked here.

I don't put a lot of faith in, well we still don't have a shred of actual evidence, but this guy who supposedly saw some actual evidence is totally more believable than the last guy who made some outlandish claims with no evidence.

Yeah, regarding 1, one point that doesn't get that much discussion is that, while people are going "Well, they're trained pilots and intelligence officers! These are precisely the people to trust!", I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that it's precisely these professions that would be filled to brim with people whose career track started when they were around 10 and engaging in what I've called "Library paranormal shelf childhood"; an early fascination with all things weird and hidden leading them to precisely the career track where you would most likely be able to "meet the aliens", or at least be able to learn the truth about them.

This is exactly the sort of an environment where UFO lore would be sloshing around freely, people would hear random bits of UFOlogy from their peers and combine them to new grand narratives, and eventually these would also reach people like Grusch assigned from outside to find the truth. Grusch hearing the same stories from multiple people just serves to confirm that there's multiple people believing the same narrative; it doesn't mean that narrative is actually true.

Given that almost no one in congress has any training in either physics (beyond required freshman in college stuff) or aircraft observation, the fact that congress is impressed does not impress me. They’re lawyers, they have no expertise worth considering. It’s like, yeah, my lawyer believes in stuff that breaks physics.

This isn't a whistleblower, this is a sanctioned leaker. A strong indication of which is which by how the government treats them. Do they treat them like well-known whistleblowers who were telling the truth causing immense embarrassment (and brought the receipts), e.g., Gary Webb, Edward Snowden, Bradly Manning, and a long list of others, which entails them trying to destroy their lives, have them arrested, and have them imprisoned?

If the answer is no, I really struggle to believe it's anything other than a sanctioned, curated release of (mis)information for purposes we're left to speculate about.

I've watched the US government destroy the lives of low-level whistleblowers who cause slight embarrassment in small-scale criminal trials. This guy is allegedly revealing some super secret, incredibly dangerous information (this guy doesn't have specifics and of course doesn't bring any receipts), and the government treats him with kid-gloves? Yeah, this is a big red flag that this is nonsense.

There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not

this isn't large scale, it's a Congressional hearing with few people attending and only slightly more watching using very carefully chosen words; these sorts of things happen regularly on all sorts of topics and the only way anyone knows is if the media decides to tell everyone this is Important and Good People Care About This

the military and intel communities duping Congressmen isn't exactly a hard feat, it's basically just a Tuesday

But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be

one possible motivation is to convince foreigners of technology advances they don't have

another is to gin up fear to convince Congress to write another blank check for yet another government program

There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not

China is either observing physics-defying hypersonic craft with no control surfaces, etc. etc. etc., or they aren't. If they aren't then this dog and pony show isn't going to scare them very much.

another is to gin up fear to convince Congress to write another blank check for yet another government program

Having your fake whistleblower accuse you of misappropriating funds before Congress seems like a counterproductive move in this case.

There are enough weird circumstances, reports, photos, etc., from far more credible witnesses describing physics-defying craft. I'd bet the Chinese have seen something similar.

I haven't found Congress to really be concerned at all with misappropriated or wasted funds for at least a couple decades. You're right it's counterproductive, but it could also be an attempt to get credibility by admitting something which no one really cares about. I'll admit at some point in this sort of analysis you get into the "fossils were actually put in the ground by God as tests of faith" territory. I do not think making some low-level admission of wrongdoing in order to get a bigger prize is there yet, though.

Of the two things, known, experimentally verified physics or reports reports don’t mean much. The chances of mistakes, misunderstanding, or just plain lying are far above the point where it makes sense to take this stuff seriously.

"I heard", "I spoke to a guy", "I met someone who said", "single image of a sphere hovering above the water, and four diamond shaped lights from craft on a training mission", "the sensor array was switched off by the aliens" etc etc etc etc etc... Mountains upon mountains of bullshit.

I would have liked just one person to stand up before congress and describe alien physiology, say they met an alien, describe in detail and captured spaceship. Anything. Yes, that could (and almost certainly would) still be either schizo fantasy or outright fabrication, but at least it would be a concrete, real claim. Little green men, ET, flying saucers, weird sci fi computers.

Instead, the stories are always the same. Something heard, something rumored, bright lights, weird shapes spotted by fighter pilots in the distance, sensor arrays messing up. Always vague. Show me the aliens and I'll believe.

Yep.

We're literally half a step beyond bigfoot sightings here.

Oh you found footprints, or clumps of fur, or droppings or heard an unidentifiable animal call, or saw some vague shape staring at you from the woods under the moonlight at 2 a.m.?

Great. Call up NatGeo and see if they'll fund another expedition.

Kinda like you say, that one Bigfoot film is 'obviously' fake upon analysis, but at least they give you a complete view of the alleged creature that isn't solely secondhand evidence.

"Unexplained" phenomena is usually just the result of misinterpreting a rare but otherwise natural event, or possibly being fooled by intentional deceit. Give me something that isn't just explained by a failure of the human senses to accurately perceive something.

Note, I'm willing to save some (extremely low) probability for the existence of aliens on earth, but moving my priors on it would require appropriately spectacular evidence.

I had made a comment to a similar effect but it evidently didn't post. Basically, as soon as I saw that it was an image taken by a flight crew I lost interest. Another low res photo or video of a moving object taken from another moving object that's miles away. That's obviously also subject to various kinds of distortion and is being taken with equipment designed for another purpose. I wouldn't even go as far as "show me the aliens"; if someone can produce a photograph that's more than just some vague shape or form or light and actually has some detail I'd take interest. Show me a door, or a propulsion system, or some piece of mechanical equipment and I'll pay attention.

What used to be swamp gas and weather balloons seems most likely nowadays to be simply photoshop and other means of faking supposed proof. I don't mean to speculate on motives or causes here, but if all they have is imagery, then it being manipulated or fabricated for whatever reason seems a far simpler explanation than semi-hidden aliens.

It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be.

It has occurred to me the other day that the whole Bayesian rationality thing is actually a pretty good framework to look at the alien question. Specifically I mean the part about updating priors. Actual calculation doesn't matter, numbers would be pulled out of one's ass anyway – but the principle is important.

Let's say I have some beliefs – that there's 0.0001 probability of aliens being real, 0.5 probability for a random American official to be a honest source of info, 0.33 probability of a large well-hidden Deep State conspiracy with inscrutable goals expressing as psyops or coverups, 0.9 probability that, conditional on aliens being real, I'd see credible scientific research into their artifacts and biology and so on; the whole convoluted Bayesian network plus notions of credibility, what it means to be honest vs trustworthy… Then, a dozen officials swear up and down they've seen ayy lmao and the government hides the truth. And there's still zero scientific corroboration. Should that update my belief in aliens upwards? Slightly, perhaps. But more importantly, it should both tank my confidence in the good faith of American officials and update upwards my suspicion of a conspiracy, just not the one that hides ayys.
I notice a peculiar pattern – the belief in aliens that is supported by insistence of people tied to the American government and nothing else; it is uncorrelated with all other streams of evidence. This thing begs for an explanation. It could be, of course, that I'm very wrong about epistemology and they're very right. But it could be that this whole class of observers generates testimonies by a somewhat less trustworthy algorithm than I've assumed; that they're synchronized by something other than object-level knowledge about aliens. So their «signals» should be assigned lesser credence; and the more they diverge from the consilient world model inferred from other data streams, the less each new bit of their input weighs.

I observe that UAP believers don't actually go about it like this. They never propagate the signal of inconsistency back through the network. They just tally up these testimonies and say «so what now, skeptics, huh? We've got [ostensibly trustworthy name] here, it's no longer a joke!» But I've already reduced the weight of this whole class of names in my model; it is a negligible change at most.

There is an alternative theory, though. Perhaps these people don't delude themselves that they know enough to reason about the object level. For them, objective reality is functionally the same thing as consensus reality (much like for @fuckduck9000 objective morality is the thing that wins wars); human authority is a source of truth that needs no corroboration from mere physical feedback, so you can in principle just say «there's more officials pro than scientists contra» and be done with it; the whole reasoning that real aliens ought to have made a mark on anything other than testimonies of officials is moot. O'Brien really could fly, so long as it were confirmed by other Inner Party members. It's a matter of comparing the cumulative weight of authority on either side of the debate.

I find both those approaches alien.

And one more thought. There has been more rigorous, well-funded scientific investigation of xenobiology than of secret societies, conspiracies and psyops. This asymmetry is interesting. We have learned an awful lot about life and why it'd be hard for life to emerge outside Earth, and nothing in favor of such life. We have seen quite credible examples of conspiracies, and nothing to suggest that better-ran ones are impossible. However, the former remains viable, while interest in the latter has positively plummeted among the educated classes in the last 100+ years. «What if intelligent life beyond Earth, like silicon-based or something, dude, and flying saucers, imagine how it could work» is a respectable enough train of thought: why not indeed, and what's the harm anyway, it's deserving of patronage of eccentric billionaires, academic grants and place in peer-reviewed journals. «What if a well-organized cabal of malicious people manipulates public opinion without legible authority» is a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society. (Like many taboos (e.g not threatening to throw another party's candidate into jail), it's being violated nowadays, to an extent; the ayy guys say the government lies. The government is not the Cabal, of course; it is known that the government keeps some things secret. But I suppose this does blur the line). Most importantly, though, we do not have a serious theory of conspiracy.

Our sociology is on the level of surveys with Lizardman's Constant, shallow economic models, outright fraudulent papers claiming conspiracies can't work because a guy can multiply some numbers, and glib rules of thumb like Hanlon's razor. We don't know what exactly extraterrestial life is like if it exists; but we also don't know jack squat about our home turf. The illusion of familiarity is just that – human networks of power are too big and opaque to comprehend just by casual osmosis. One must be consistently skeptical. If we can't rule out aliens, we sure as hell cannot rule out that dozens or hundreds of high-ranking people in the state machine would lie for some reason we don't see.

After all, why couldn't lizards hide themselves among the human kin, secretly pulling the strings of our regimes and rewriting history? Wouldn't it be strange if we were the first and the only sentient race on Earth in all of 4.6 billion years? Anyone who came earlier would've had a massive first mover advantage…
Personally I do not see why this hypothesis is any more discredited than the one about extraterrestrial life.

That said. If there's a single parsimonious theory of a motive for this psyop that I can seriously propose… It's not my «overcapacity» thesis but rather the opposite. I mean the discrediting of the authority of the USG and army and American intelligence apparatus, through this very Bayesian logic, as @Hoffmeister25 demonstrates. The USG is the supreme secular power of the world, – and it's being reduced to some provincial slapstick comedy, instead of carrying itself with the dignity of the sovereign. It does not command respect, mostly just grudging support, on account of the vileness of its competitors. Give this 10 more years. 10 more years of AI shit torrent, 10 more years of long Covid and demented gerontocrats, 10 more years of Trump and Biden dog-faced-pony-soldier show and lurid, Jerry Springer tier gibberish in Congress. If at some point, say, CIA manages to report something truly ludicrous for Americans, physically plausible but shocking – who knows, maybe Mossad quietly installing backdoors into Deepmind and Anthropic AGI superclusters? – it will just be met with shrugs and condescending scowls. Whoever runs this, wants the legitimate authority of the US to end up in the position of the boy who cried wolf, and then collapse without popular support.

Just an idle thought.

Where’s the probability that they’re good-faith-stupid? The guy went to reasonable people about his alien theory, and they said ‘There’s literally a 0.0001 probability of aliens being real lmao’ – at this point, he could have admitted he was wrong, or he could have chosen to accuse “them” of lying to protect his ego. Starting from your “aliens are extremely unlikely” (correct) prior, this is the expected path. It’s why they are so much more focused on ‘the lies’ than the rather important fact that Aliens walk among us. No need to update anything about lizard people.

the belief in aliens that is supported by insistence of people tied to the American government and nothing else

It's not an exclusively America-centric phenomenon, for what it's worth.

«What if a well-organized cabal of malicious people manipulates public opinion without legible authority» is a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society.

Not really? Though we have seen from Panama Papers how it ends: story drops quite quickly, some involved people die in very suspicious circumstances.

(though yes, if you go "Jews are responsible for all evil" with evidence quality as usual, then you will get appropriate response)

Are you really saying these sorts of cabals are inevitably discovered?

Just hand waving away all the effort and risk involved in the Panama Papers? Come now. That sort of serious investigative journalism is difficult and becoming less and less popular/rewarding.

Are you really saying these sorts of cabals are inevitably discovered?

I am not claiming that. There were definitely many conspiracies that were never discovered, multiple running right now. Price collusion cartels are among boring ones and routinely discovered.

But claiming that all conspiracy claims are treated as "a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society" is a nonsense.

We have learned an awful lot about life and why it'd be hard for life to emerge outside Earth, and nothing in favor of such life.

Relative recently we learned that planets are typical, not unusual rarity.

That is significant point for plausibility of live existing elsewhere. Quite recently "maybe solar system is unique and no other planets exist" was considered as a possible scenario.

That said. If there's a single parsimonious theory of a motive for this psyop that I can seriously propose… It's not my «overcapacity» thesis but rather the opposite. I mean the discrediting of the authority of the USG and army and American intelligence apparatus,

Well, they are handily discrediting themselves without any outside help (or were the last 20+ years of great war on terror cabal securely in control, working as intended?)

through this very Bayesian logic, as @Hoffmeister25 demonstrates. The USG is the supreme secular power of the world, – and it's being reduced to some provincial slapstick comedy, instead of carrying itself with the dignity of the sovereign.

UFOs and ayys were big things 50 years ago, but since then, the normie citizen learned to treat aliens as something clownish and ridiculous and dismiss any alien talk without hearing. See near total public disinterest in all these bombshell UAP revelations from the last years - this attitude is hard baked now (perhaps only alien invaders destroying cities with hot plasma for real could change it).

Capable secret cabal would notice that this distraction is not discrediting and not distracting and try something else.

If this thing is about undermining public trust in world's greatest super power, sex scandals, as dirty and disgusting as possible, would do it far more efficiently than any ayy stuff. Sex always sells.

Imagine just one congressional hearing about Epstein case.

Then give us something to investigate. Evidence. A space ship. A body. A signal. A megastructure in deep space. Hell, I’d start taking this seriously if NASA or the Euro space agency were showing interest. I mean seriously, if there were evidence, the phds would be all over it because they’d be world famous and win the noble prize in physics hands down. Nobody wants it? Or it isn’t there?

Even what we know about physics seems to indicate that interstellar travel is likely a generational endeavor, and thus probably not done for trivial reasons. The ship itself would have to be a pretty complete ecosystem and probably pretty big, which means we could or should detect it as it enters the solar system.

physical ships, physical travel

There are so many possible explanations distinct from material "nuts and bolts".

https://twitter.com/Berlinghoff_R/status/1313171646828613632

Other than the psychological ones, most of them would produce no actual evidence, and thus they’re not really distinct from angels, demons and jinn. Which if that’s where we’re going, I don’t see how the discussion is in any way scientific.

But the Epstein thing is legitimate, there's there there. In this model you're supposed to investigate meaningless clown stuff that is established as meaningless and cringe, to undermine the legitimacy of possible future meaningful investigations. Every redneck knows UFOs were some chicken coop fraudulent stuff, it's the current consensus. People joke that Americans believe in aliens but I think almost no American would bet money on them being real.

I admit, however, that this logic is a bit tortured. They could also have gone after yeti (though that'd be too on the nose; aliens is a really good option, it's not openly childish).

Maybe there is no single motive, maybe it's really just an, ahem, a Cabal of aging UFO nerds and a cascade of independent silly mistakes.

We're past the point where innocent mistake is a plausible explanation. Either there are aliens, or there's a conspiracy to make us think there are, with fake video and servicemen lying under oath.

The latter is entirely possible and should be overwhelmingly certain, but damn some people are really reaching for motives. When I see theories like maybe the US wants to destroy its own credibility, or maybe it does things for literally no good reason at all, it just reinforces the idea for me that there's no good explanation.

If something is not found despite very deliberate search, it really might just not exist. It may be the case that there really is no reason. Preferring a model where big collectives of people don't consistently do something over and over for zero good reason is, of course, understandable. It's not impossible that this principle fails here. I don't have confidence in any hypothesis at this point.

But it must be acknowledged that we have not researched this very deliberately. Aliens – yes. Alien promoters around Washington DC – not really.

But the Epstein thing is legitimate, there's there there. In this model you're supposed to investigate meaningless clown stuff that is established as meaningless and cringe, to undermine the legitimacy of possible future meaningful investigations. Every redneck knows UFOs were some chicken coop fraudulent stuff, it's the current consensus. People joke that Americans believe in aliens but I think almost no American would bet money on them being real.

Are aliens real? People online don't seem to care either way

I admit, however, that this logic is a bit tortured. They could also have gone after yeti (though that'd be too on the nose; aliens is a really good option, it's not openly childish).

Yeti is dirty Chinese commie, no one cares about him. Bigfoot is native born American citizen whose Constitutional rights need to be protected. If American citizens are routinely kidnapped and murdered only for hairiness of their skin, it should be big deal.

Yes, it would be cool to see full Congressional investigation into Bigfoot.

(if you ask Bigfoot researchers why there is no physical evidence, they will tell you that government keeps existence of BF deep secret, that if you kill one or find a corpse or bones, feds in black helicopters instantly arrive and seize the remains at gun point.)

Maybe there is no single motive,

Even veteran UFO researchers are confused, bewildered, unsure what is really going on.

maybe it's really just an, ahem, a Cabal of aging UFO nerds and a cascade of independent silly mistakes.

The investigation itself seems to be well under control.

Maybe your proposed motive is lacking. In your model, the cabal controls US, it is theirs. Why should they deliberately undermine and demolish it?

I don’t care precisely because I don’t see anything to see. And I suspect this is why most people don’t care — this is hearsay on a topic that actual science is showing is not and probably cannot happen. If you get evidence for any life at all in deep space I’d update my priors to the point that I’d be interested in what these guys are telling Congress. As it stands, life that as far as we know doesn’t exist in space is almost certainly not coming to earth.

I’m more bothered by the implications that our elites are wasting time and money on a hearing like this, and that there are enough people scientifically illiterate that they are taking it seriously. That’s a big problem because we can’t move forward as a society so long as people are willing to believe just because they want to.

I’m more bothered by the implications that our elites are wasting time and money on a hearing like this, and that there are enough people scientifically illiterate that they are taking it seriously. That’s a big problem because we can’t move forward as a society so long as people are willing to believe just because they want to.

Yes. There are three options, none of them good.

1/ Aliens are real, and the government was deceiving the people at least for 70 years.

2/ Aliens are not real, and the government is deceiving the people now.

3/ Aliens are not real, and the government delusionary believes they are real.

Given that the government makes science policy and funds research, I’m most frightened by 3.

almost no American would bet money on them being real

I expect that at least 100 000 Americans sincerely believe aliens visiting Earth to be as real as they are themselves. Maybe more.

perhaps only alien invaders destroying cities with hot plasma for real could change it

If I would get live footage of or aliens razing major city I would STILL expect that it is faked/misattributed/hoax rather than actual alien invasion.

I think honestly that would be something I’d update on, simply because it’s hard to fake blowing up a city.

«What if a well-organized cabal of malicious people manipulates public opinion without legible authority»

Not only can you say this, but they'll even make you a professor emeritus.

is a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society.

It's definitely interesting to note that you are unable to even conceive abstractly of a cabal that is not жидомасонский in nature.

Give this 10 more years. 10 more years of AI shit torrent, 10 more years of long Covid and demented gerontocrats,

I know you don't live in the US but covid hasn't been a thing for like a year at this point. Happy to take the other side of the bet of imminent American demise, predicted for every year since 1776.

Not only can you say this, but they'll even make you a professor emeritus.

??? Chomsky is known for his disregard of conspiracy theories and theorists. It is Chomsky who dismisses all questions about 9/11, it is Chomsky who said that it does not matter who killed JFK and anyone who cares about it is wasting his time.

What Does Noam Chomsky Say About the JFK Assassination?

There’s just a huge amount of frittering away of energy on real absurdities. There are parts of the country, like California, where incredible amounts of energy go into things like trying to figure out exactly which Mafia figure might have been involved in killing John F. Kennedy or something — as if anybody should care. The energy and passion that goes into things like that is really extraordinary, and it’s very self–destructive.

If you mentioned Michael Parenti, Mark Lombardi or Peter Dale Scott (only few among many parapolitic researchers) you might have better case, but you cannot, because these are not household names.

It's definitely interesting to note that you are unable to even conceive abstractly of a cabal that is not жидомасонский in nature.

??? again? I do not remember Dasei saying anything about Masons (because he understands that we are not in 18th and 19th centuries any more, and even last flowering of the Freemasons, Italy of 1970's, is time and place far away)

Chomsky is a simple guy. He doesn't believe in right associated conspiracy theories. But if people don't like some leftist cause then the reason is "manufacture of consent", aka conspiracy by the government and media elites.

One of the things that the Maoist policies did was save a hundred million people. A hundred million people were saved from death and starvation, as compared with democratic, capitalist India in the same years... There’s no big secret about this. It’s discussed by some of the leading scholars like Amartya Sen, for example, a Nobel Laureate in Indian economics. This is one of his main specialties, hardly obscure, but you don’t hear about it. That’s manufacture of consent again.

??? again? I do not remember Dasei saying anything about Masons

It's merely a classic Russian manifestation of Jewish conspiracy. These days it's more жидо than масонский.

Perhaps of my favorite type of a commenter is one who keeps a poker face but is genuinely pissed and eager to cleverly snark so he just lunges and misses by a mile. No, I do not predict American demise. In some form or the other, the US will keep prospering. I have literally never bet against American success. Congrats on your American salary, you keep bringing it up so it must be really good.

Covid will ≈always be a thing if it leaves permanent damage (see "long Covid"). I am mostly convinced it's real, though evidence is conflicted and the mechanism is dubious.

The other two points are actually fruitful. The conspiracy of neocons/MIC is such a normalized theory I'm just perceiving it as part of the polite consensus. Of course, it also is concerned with «systemic» behavior of legitimate actors, unlike bona fide conspiracy theories.

But I believe it's more interesting how popular a trope Cabals are in discussions of American proles. There's Pizza Cabal and loosely associated Epstein Cabal, Alex Jones studied the Bohemian Grove cabal, and there are Round Earthers and secret CIA experiments, and the Cabal of people who force depopulation vaccines that respond to 5G, while Russian and Democratic Cabals are stealing elections left and right. Q is even about a positive Patriotic Cabal fighting the Globalists Cabal! Sure, in my opinion there are more plausible candidates (here's one that's not жидомасонский: an uncovered, clumsy Cabal of virologists who have been hoodwinking the whole of mass media for what, two years?) It's just not something that is valid to investigate systematically, except on a meta level, as a phenomenon of mass delusion – Paranoid Style in American Politics and all that.

Perhaps of my favorite type of a commenter is one who keeps a poker face but is genuinely pissed and eager to cleverly snark so he just lunges and misses by a mile.

What have I got to be pissed about? I'm not writing ten paragraph responses or digging through post histories. I'm on the toilet here.

No, I do not predict American demise.

But you do predict that the "legitimate authority of the US... [will] collapse without popular support."

Covid will ≈always be a thing if it leaves permanent damage (see "long Covid"). I am mostly convinced it's real, though evidence is conflicted and the mechanism is dubious.

It's not real in the sense that I don't remember the last time I heard someone say the word "covid" IRL. Nobody cares anymore.

It's just not something that is valid to investigate systematically, except on a meta level, as a phenomenon of mass delusion – Paranoid Style in American Politics and all that.

It's perfectly valid to investigate at least some conspiracy theories. The nyr has been publishing cautiously credulous articles about it since at least October 2021.

The problem is that many conspiracy enjoyers such as yourself really care about pinning stuff on the Jews rather than conspiracy qua conspiracy, which really is not permitted in polite society.

It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be.

My unfounded theory is that it's disinformation directed not at the public but the PRC. Convince them that the military is throwing up chaff to cover for in-development aircraft, and it might dissuade them from any military action until they pin down exactly what our capabilities are.

As a theory it doesn't make that much sense, but then again nothing does.

If you go for fun unverifiable theories: someone is pretending that they cover up amazing USA weapons - which does not actually exist. But some people want Xi et all to believe they exist.

Honestly, "trying to mislead foreign countries about what capabilities the US has" doesn't seem like a terrible explanation. It's certainly within the capability of the CIA to take whatever our most advanced technology is and recruit a few pilots and former spooks to exaggerate what they saw in front of Congress (or just lie). Maybe some of the Congresscritters are even in on it.

It would be pointless to involve any Congresscritters. Their incentives are heavily misaligned with maintaining a government conspiracy, and their knowledge of the conspiracy wouldn't help in furthering its aim.

The big issue with this explanation is... Why? If we have the capabilities and want them to act as a deterrent, it's better to just display them. Then there's no risk of miscommunication about them, and we accomplish our aims, at the expense of giving up information that would allow development of countermeasures. The only reason to invent capabilities and launder them through UFO stories to gullible legislators and media is if you don't actually have those capabilities, which would be immediately obvious to adversary intelligence.

That said, it doesn't have to be a good plan for it to be an explanation; it just needs to be a plan that some group of people in government would hear about and go "hey, that's brilliant!" That's a much lower bar. So I land on "it's a dumb group of government employees undermining social trust in pursuit of a plan that's completely counterproductive to its imagined goals." Human stupidity is a more parsimonious explanation for the entire affair than any kind of intelligence, human or otherwise.

Could be that they want to hide the exact capabilities we have and how we got them. Once everyone knows what's possible, they'll immediately try to replicate it? We have some super secret research lab but want the Chinese look for alien storage facilities instead?

It could be about hiding the program in plain sight.

If you’re testing something in the real world, given the ubiquitous cell phones with video capabilities and instant connection to the internet, it’s pretty much a given that such video would be online within fifteen minutes. Having such individuals believing it’s aliens means that it’s going to be tagged UAP/UFO not aircraft. Which in most social media and on YouTube is going to sort it into a large bucket of useless fake and blurry videos (and the new on is likely blurry as well) making it much more difficult for China to tell for sure which of these grainy blurry videos have intelligence and which ones are fake. They all look similar, especially if you don’t know what the craft looks like.

Just make some fake videos, put them online, and get some celebrities to retweet them. Don't drag Congress into it by having a patsy go there and accuse you of misappropriating funds.

The congressional theater helps to give it the veneer of credibility. When congress is involved in the the matter this isn’t just something retweeted, it becomes an official thing. Then those looking will at least know this story is what the Americans want the world to think.

Who cares? All you're trying to do is fill the infosphere surrounding the subject with bullshit. If you could somehow create a program where taking pictures of random airborne objects and posting them online earned people free tacos, that would pretty much do the trick.

The problem with this theory is it would seem to weaken the US significantly too. Everyone I know basically believes the government is lying to us. So if you fake this and it comes out then any trust in our government disappears.

Of course these conspiracies haven’t all been a bunch of people colluding in all of them. They’ve been a certain group like Anderson trying to push lab leak etc. So maybe it’s just pathological where every conspiracy thinks they won’t be found out but what they are doing is good so they will do it.

Traditionally, stories of UFOs were planted in the population by undercover members of the intelligence community [1], who needed to provide chaff to distract from civilian observations of advanced spy balloons [2], U-2s, SR-71s [3], and later stealth fighter/bombers. I see no reason to believe this is any different: USAF is researching drones, next-gen missiles, and maybe next-generation fighters/bombers, and needs to get the public excited about UFOs. We'll learn the truth about this in about 40 years.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men,

https://www.dailygrail.com/2021/06/ufo-disinfo-four-times-the-us-military-hoaxed-alien-contact-through-the-decades/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul#Roswell_incident,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_balloon#Skyhook_as_UFO,

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB7/nsaebb7.htm

[3] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517742.pdf : "According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. (45)"

I watched the bulk of this hearing and two things stuck out to me. The first was when Rep. Burchett entered this document into the record: Advanced Space Propulsion Based оп Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering. I found this interesting as it implies that the Congressman was lead to believe for whatever reason that energy for propulsion can be gathered from the vacuum of space. So either he has more info and this is relevant or he is buying a line of malarkey, but at least this document gives something to work off of to determine if it is malarkey.

The second was when Rep. Gaetz remarked after he had been informed of a UAP sighting from a source at Elgin AFB:

We were not afforded access to all of the flight crew, and initially, we were not afforded access to images and to radar. Thereafter, we had bit of a discussion about how authorities flow in the United States of America, and we did see the image, and we did meet with one member of the flight crew who took the image. The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries.

This indicates that (as long as one believes that Congress isn't in on a psyop), at minimum, powers within the DOD are trying to keep Congress out of the loop as much as possible when it comes to the UAP stuff.

I'll also note that members of the committee made it seem that they wanted to clear a path for commercial pilots to be able to report these phenomena without fear of any negative consequences; after hearing this I couldn't help but scour PPRuNe.org to see if any pilots had anonymously reported such phenomena, and didn't find much of anything before the past year (and the stuff from the past year appears to be sightings of flares from Starlink constellations).

There are perfectly good reasons not to let civilians examine radar on an airfield that have nothing to do with aliens.

There's a difference between your average civilian and one of the 59 people who are a sitting member of the House Armed Services Committee. Personally, I'm agnostic on the aliens explanation, but when parts of the military feel free to deny access to individuals responsible for its oversight, then something is not as it appears. Maybe civilian control of the military isn't as clear cut as it seems.

He’s still a civilian who is not trained in radar, has no idea how anything works and wouldn’t be able to tell what he’s looking at. I wouldn’t want him looking at radar either.

Advanced Space Propulsion Based оп Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering

Now I want to trawl your posts for more random non-Latin letters and find out what kind of secret messages you've been putting in there.

I’ve seen this testimony. I’ll believe the government has found the bodies of non-human intelligences when it, well, produces them, or at least detailed studies thereof that they allow neutral third parties(say, a group of international professors of something relevant) to verify. Likewise you’d assume that if the USG had massive amounts of alien tech, room temperature superconductors wouldn’t have been discovered in Korea.

I’ll believe the government has found the bodies of non-human intelligences

I believe that it happened already. As long as you consider apes as intelligent enough to qualify.

I don’t, sorry.

Well, it is enough that whoever made this report believed it.

There was a time in my life when I would have been absolutely riveted by these hearings. It’s honestly incredibly depressing to reflect on just how profoundly my trust in the U.S. government has collapsed, to the point where I am unable to react to this is any way other than an exasperated eye-roll and a “So, what is this meant to distract me from this time?” I can imagine that even twenty years ago, the vast majority of Americans would have found this incredibly compelling and it would have been the number-one news story in the country, if not globally. The dissolution and atomization of American society to the point where pretty much nobody seems to even be paying much attention to this is such a catastrophic civilizational loss in so many ways, and I say this as someone who is obviously convinced that the lack of trust is completely justified.

Imagine if these hearing were taking place in, say, the Japanese government instead. I have no real insight into how functional Japanese political life is - it seems dysfunctional in its own weird ways, but kept essentially on-track by the fundamentally high human capital of the population involved - but I have to think that not only do the Japanese people trust their own government enough that they would take something like this far more seriously; but most people around the world would trust the Japanese enough to take such a thing seriously.

There are probably other governments around the world who are broadly seen as run by serious people such that if they produced at least some bare-minimum level of evidence that they’d encountered aliens, people around the would would take notice. Singapore? Maybe like… Iceland? Of course even then, you have to worry that it’s a ploy to boost interest in tourism or to get your country mentioned in international headlines. I wonder what it would take for something like this to be seen as deadly-serious, even with roughly the same level of evidence provided.

/images/1690505260639784.webp

Edit: What the fuck is this image link at the bottom of my post? I did not add this link and do not understand how it got there.

Did you post this on a phone and do you chat in WhatsApp?

I did write it on a phone, but have not used WhatsApp in years.

“So, what is this meant to distract me from this time?”

Not much, apparently. Major news sources haven't given it much coverage. When Grusch first started grabbing headlines, people said it was a distraction from the Hunter Biden story, but ironically when we got to the actual day of the hearings, Hunter got much more coverage than the hearings.

What the fuck is this image link at the bottom of my post?

It was aliens.

Yeah, it's also kind of funny how the conspiracy theorists (at this point the general "anti-NWO" conspiracy theory crowd seems to be mostly on the side of UFOs being a fake and a psyop, precisely because they feel the government is pushing them) have ben screaming about how this is a distraction from X or setting up the stage for Project Blue Beam and one-world government created on the basis of fake aliens. You'd think that if that's the reason they'd be pushing this far harder and making sure it actually sticks - and in the one-world government case actually making sure it's also pushed abroad (can't tell about other countries, of course, but this shit is receiving essentially zero attention in Finland outside of (small) dedicated local ufologist circles).

My favorite sci-fi explanation for UFOs is that they're not aliens, they're time travelers from the far future. I don't think it's realistic, but it's fun to think about and avoid the whole "travelled millions of miles to get here and then just abduct some randos and mess with some cows" problem.

Of course, if you have time travel you certainly have FTL. (By the simple measure of "freeze everyone, drop back in time, fly there the slow way, get there five minutes after you departed if you still want to pretend like you give any hoot about causality.")

sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.

It makes hallucinations much less plausible, but I don't think it really does much about misidentified balloons, glare, something on the camera lens, camera image-sharpening algorithms combining with those others, etc. See the videos in this Metabunk thread for examples. I don't think congressmen have any special skills to distinguish whether a fast-moving blob on an aircraft camera is a spacecraft or a visual artifact. And while people like pilots and intelligence agents might be better, it isn't really their area of expertise either. They're focused on dealing with real planes, not every weird visual artifact that can happen. On the scale of a country you can cherrypick enough things that coincidentally seem alien-like to be convincing to many people, including many government officials. But if it's ultimately all formed out of random noise you'll never get that definitive piece of evidence, just lots of "that blob was crazy and we couldn't figure out another explanation", which is the pattern we've seen.

Probably the most compelling example of a UFO encounter, the Nimitz incident, has multiple corroborating sources of information (sensors and human visual identification) suggesting behavior outside the bounds of known technology. From Fravor's testimony:

The air controller on the ship also had no idea but had been observing these objects on their Aegis combat system for the previous 2 weeks. They had been descending from above 80,000ft and coming rapidly down to 20,000ft would stay for hours and then go straight back up...

As all 4 looked down we saw a small white Tic Tac shaped object with the longitudinal axis pointing N/S and moving very abruptly over the white water. There were no Rotors, No Rotor wash, or any visible flight control surfaces like wings. ... As we pulled nose onto the object at approximately ½ of a mile with the object just left of our nose, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared right in front of our aircraft. Our wingman, roughly 8,000ft above us, also lost visual.

As we turned back towards our CAP point, roughly 60 miles east, the air controller let us know that the object had reappeared on the Princeton’s Aegis SPY 1 radar at our CAP point. This Tic Tac Object had just traveled 60 miles in a very short period of time (less than a minute)...

We returned to Nimitz and mentioned what we had witnessed to one of my crews who were getting ready to launch. It was that crew that took the now famous approximately 90 second video that was released by the USG in 2017...

Here you have 4 people (the original crew, Fravor et al) and radar and the FLIR video the second flight crew took (after the object appeared to go 60 miles in under a minute), all indicating that something very strange is happening. Obviously that doesn't prove it's aliens, but I think it makes the sensor glitch/camera smudge theory untenable given the multiple independent systems that interacted with the object.

From Fravor's testimony:

Fravor has admitted to playing pranks with his F-18 to try to make people think they were seeing a UFO. It is beyond me why people would take any of his UFO reports seriously. It's negligent that most news reports don't mention this about him.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/commander-david-fravor-faking-ufo-encounters-in-california-desert.10947/

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ&t=2939s

The fact that he played pranks on people to make them think they saw UFOs seems like weak evidence for a long-term commitment to deceiving people about his own experience up to the point of committing perjury, backed up by other members of his squad and when someone else took a video of it after he had landed.

I think it makes the sensor glitch/camera smudge theory untenable given the multiple independent systems that interacted with the object.

Multiple glitches happening at the same time are entirely possible. Combine this with power of suggestion and so on and you can get amazing results.

Sensor glitches may be for example software bugs.

There are limits to how far I'm willing to bend over backward in order to find a boring explanation. I'm pretty sure they didn't pull up within half a mile of a software bug, check it with naked eyes, and watch it make them eat dust.

I am not sure what is going on but there are no aliens here.

actual, sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.

They still could be lied to/confused/lying/joking/misunderstanding. At any of several levels.

Give some sort of proof, not fifth hand eyewitnesses playing elaborate game of telephone.

The difference being that the faking of UFOs doesn’t require much technology. These are not even eyewitness accounts, they’re 3-4 people removed from anyone who might have had direct contact.

Well, consider this a marker. If it turns out they're real and they did keep it an unverified conspiracy theory for eighty years, I'll update massively on the competence of government.

Hanson also argues that the aliens would be incompetent in many ways, so even if they did want to hide, they wouldn't necessarily succeed at it. Another explanation he gives for why they might want to reveal themselves to us is that they're just experimenting and seeing how we react to them.

What if they just don't particularly care about making themselves known or being seen? A couple automated probes of some hyper advanced civilization can probably buzz the atomic ape men without worrying too much about things going wrong.

I guess it could be a slow reveal and they crash on purpose etc. still feels unlikely to me.

I feel like a parallel earth scenerio or worm holes that are relatively simple tech would make more sense within the laws of physics. It just seems like you would need a tech to travel here far easily than our current understanding of anything close to light speed travel.

incompetent in many ways

Yes, I definitely think that’s an open possibility. I disagree with Yudkowky’s assertion that they would have to be superintelligent gods who were beyond any and all mistakes.

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