Senators receive classified briefing on UFO sightings

[Bolt]

Don’t you guys know Aliens have been communicating with us Via crop circles for years?

[Dynaman]

39 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Don’t you guys know Aliens have been communicating with us Via crop circles for years?

Yup, cause the guy on TV told us that is is impossible for any technology on Earth to make a crop circle.  He also told me Aliens on high gravity planets will be tall and thin due to the gravity and that the aliens also have large black eyes due to the planet being very close to their sun.  

 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

Yup, cause the guy on TV told us that is is impossible for any technology on Earth to make a crop circle.  He also told me Aliens on high gravity planets will be tall and thin due to the gravity and that the aliens also have large black eyes due to the planet being very close to their sun.  

Truly!  For who among us could even dream of understanding the advanced sciences and technologies these mighty visitors from beyond the stars bring?  We can do naught but tremble before the awesome sophistication of their amazing wooden planks, ropes, tennis shoes, and 7th grade geometry lessons!

Let us not speak of their incomprehensible ability to stack cut stones in such a way that they do not easily fall down, lest we quake uncontrollably in fear at the realization of our own insignifiance!

 

 

[DewPoint]

Explain this one!  I remember watching this live on cable way, way back in the day.  Watch the top center of this "high quality NASA" video.

 

[Nightbat]

The truly sad part is that our BS-ing might just end up on "Official" UFO-Hunter sites and taken as gospel

"From an unknown source we were informed about,...."

 

...I mean, they once did a mockumentary about the moonlanding, and we all know how that ended up

[DewPoint]

Like how some country may be hiding an alien spaceship that crashed landed on a island in the east pacific?

[Mazinger]

11 hours ago, DewPoint said:

Like how some country may be hiding an alien spaceship that crashed landed on a island in the east pacific?

Is it happening?  Is this how it begins?

So when Kamujin's ship crash lands in the jungle, there was a Quetzal that gets eaten by some sort of python. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzal

The Quetzal only exists in certain parts of Central America.

Should we all be trying to move to Guatemala to escape the coming Boldolza carpet bombing?

Because that would be ironic, no?

Also, will Minmei be played in real life in 2019 by Mari Ijima or one of Walkure singers?

[derex3592]

Hey man, alls I'm sayin is remember that "object" in space they found a few years back that pretty much looked EXACTLY like Breetai's Flagship..just sayin! It's coming! 

[grss1982]

On 6/25/2019 at 4:42 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

The US military has been actively monitoring and investigating reports of unidentified flying objects in US airspace since the 1940s.

The most famous study was the one undertaken from 1952-1969 called Project Blue Book, but there were others that preceded it like Project Sign (1947) and Project Grudge (1949).  The most recent was the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that ran from 2007 to 2012.

Long story short, UFO sightings are invariably people misidentifying natural phenomena or aircraft due to distance, lighting, prevailing atmospheric conditions, and/or the function of their camera equipment.  A fair few UFO sightings get reported when people accidentally spot aircraft that aren't public yet or aren't properly lit, like the slew of reports triggered by a collection of nuclear test detection balloons or the test flights of the Have Blue and Senior Trend prototypes of the F-117.  The U-2 spyplane was another craft frequently misidentified as a UFO due to its extreme operating altitudes.  The military naturally keeps an eye on these kind of reports to see if anything has leaked about secret programs or take action if they find something that might be an undetected foreign aircraft.

Where the conspiracy nuts come in is the theories about UFOs really being alien spacecraft come to do weird stuff like mutilate cattle or abduct people for anal probing... because a metal probe where the sun doesn't shine is a great way to meet and greet new species, right?  (The idea that there was a vast coverup of the existence of alien visitations has never looked sillier, given how bad our government is at keeping secrets nowadays.)

Fair enough.  I guess what I was trying to get at was the military was actually briefing politicians about this activity and it gets reported like any other news item.  IIRC, in the past did'nt the military not just outright deny the existence of this events?

On 7/1/2019 at 12:31 PM, DewPoint said:

Like how some country may be hiding an alien spaceship that crashed landed on a island in the east pacific?

If that happened then by this time the Unification Wars should have been over and we would be united under one banner, right?

https://macross.fandom.com/wiki/Unification_Wars

 

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, grss1982 said:

Fair enough.  I guess what I was trying to get at was the military was actually briefing politicians about this activity and it gets reported like any other news item.  IIRC, in the past did'nt the military not just outright deny the existence of this events?

The whole point of those previous reporting activities was to brief politicians about it.

The military would occasionally deny this kind of reporting activity was going on, but usually only if they were covering up for an ongoing secret project that kept getting reported like the Project Mogul, Project Moby Dick, and Project Genetrix high-altitude balloon programs that were used for detecting Soviet nuclear tests or conducting clandestine photography of Soviet territory.

(The infamous Roswell "UFO" debris is actually a Project Mogul nuclear test detection balloon's radar reflector.)

[M'Kyuun]

The RAF Woodbridge, i.e. Rendlesham Forest, Incident in 1980 bears some credence, as all players were active duty USAF, including two Security Forces individuals who came within contact proximity of the subject, and the Deputy Commander of the base, Lt. Col. Halt, who subsequently submitted an official memo to the UK Ministry of Defense.  Just to put it in perspective, the Lt. Col. was second in command of joint bases RAF Woodbridge and Bentwaters, which had A-10s assigned in 1980, but in his position, can be likened to the deputy mayor of a small city, which is essentially how most bases are organized, with everything from housing, commerce, civil engineering, munitions management, logistics agencies, aircraft maintenance and operations, etc. It's a position with a great deal of responsibility and accountability, especially during the Cold War when the majority of bases with aircraft assigned around the world had aircraft on 24/7 alert. To have submitted a memo like this could have been potential career suicide.  Col halt retired as a 'full bird' in 91. The cover story was that he saw the light from the nearby lighthouse. 

Read the memo and make up your own minds. Having served 20 years in aircraft maintenance in the Air Force, I can attest that the vast majority of majors and above are pretty buttoned up folks. I reported directly to a number of full bird  and Lt Col deputy group commanders in charge of maintenance operations. Most of them were pretty serious people, educated in any number of disciplines, and bringing at least 15 years of experience to the table. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.

From my own perspective, it's a very large universe out there, and NASA is discovering that it's even bigger than astronomers first thought, To discount that there could be intelligent life elsewhere is a bit short sighted. Moreover, to discount that that life could eclipse us by vast sums of time, and thereby, scientific and technological advancement, is also short-sighted. I think the probability of visitation exists, in the past, present, and by extension, the future. I'm joined in my belief by astronauts, scientists, military , and folks from all walks of life, past and present, who by experience, or by looking at the history of the phenomenon, have arrived at the conclusion that it's real. I've never seen a UFO myself, having traveled the world, and having even been stationed near Gulf Breeze, a renowned UFO hotspot, for five tears. I'm also a pragmatist; anytime you live near an airfield, especially an airfield, like Eglin, where experimental aircraft are tested, you're apt to see things flying at all hours, possibly doing strange things, like firing off flares. I'm quite familiar with aircraft and their flight characteristics (I have both fixed-wing and rotary aircraft flying over and around my house nearly every day, as I live two miles from an air base, and about five from a civilian airport). I hope someday to see something that completely defies my experience. Regardless, I keep my mind open to the possibility.

[Seto Kaiba]

14 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

The RAF Woodbridge, i.e. Rendlesham Forest, Incident in 1980 bears some credence, as all players were active duty USAF, including two Security Forces individuals who came within contact proximity of the subject, and the Deputy Commander of the base, Lt. Col. Halt, who subsequently submitted an official memo to the UK Ministry of Defense. 

[...]

Read the memo and make up your own minds. Having served 20 years in aircraft maintenance in the Air Force, I can attest that the vast majority of majors and above are pretty buttoned up folks. I reported directly to a number of full bird  and Lt Col deputy group commanders in charge of maintenance operations. Most of them were pretty serious people, educated in any number of disciplines, and bringing at least 15 years of experience to the table. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, many of the soldiers who are involved - however peripherally - in reports of alleged UFO activity are highly trained and disciplined personnel with their heads screwed on straight.  No amount of sheer straightlaced-ness makes the human eye any less of an unreliable tool or makes the brain on the backend run a less unreliable compression codec to stabilize the picture.  The very same kind of highly trained, highly disciplined personnel are responsible for goofs like launching nuclear bomb-equipped bombers from an airbase and very nearly starting World War III because they mistook a black bear on the periphery of an airbase for a human intruder or forgot to swap a training tape out of a NORAD defense computer and almost convinced the Strategic Air Command that World War III had begun.

Mr. Halt saw something... but given that the Halt memo was never classified, the supporting documentation indicates only the most cursory follow-up investigation was made, and a host of eyewitness statements not only failed to corroborate his account but outright refuted it with a thoroughly mundane explanation, it seems unlikely that he saw anything that was of extraterrestrial or even unusual origin.

The general consensus among eyewitnesses and the locals is that Mr. Halt saw the Orfordness lighthouse beacon distorted by prevailing conditions.  It's only natural that he wouldn't be punished for an honest mistake, since he acted in the name of preserving the security of the base to which he was assigned.

Like so many of these incidents, the lack of evidence to support claims of a coverup of UFO activity is itself taken as evidence of the efficacy of said coverup... which implies a belief that our governments are far, FAR more capable than they can be demonstrated to be when it comes to keeping secrets.

 

14 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

From my own perspective, it's a very large universe out there, and NASA is discovering that it's even bigger than astronomers first thought, To discount that there could be intelligent life elsewhere is a bit short sighted. Moreover, to discount that that life could eclipse us by vast sums of time, and thereby, scientific and technological advancement, is also short-sighted. I think the probability of visitation exists, in the past, present, and by extension, the future.

Unless we've got a real world verison of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged out there trolling rednecks for fun, odds are any visiting extraterrestrials (if they do in fact visit us at all) are substantially more discreet than the kind of nonsense that makes up the typical UFO report.  The mundane explanation is pretty much invariably the right one.  When or if we do finally confirm the existence of extraterrestrials, it'll be because we've found some mundane proof... like Glorg'nax locking himself out of the saucer and politely trying to explain his predicament to parking enforcement in the hopes of not getting a ticket.

This garish nonsense with every alleged alien spacecraft being covered in more flashing lights than the average Star Trek prop and shining like a spotlight is only explainable as alien activity if Earth is somehow a hotspot for showing off riced out starships with the tacky road effects and spinning rims.  

[M'Kyuun]

Well, Seto Kaiba, someday when you're out for a leisurely country drive, get abducted and systematically probed in all your available orifices, and perhaps some that aren't, I promise I won't say, "I told you so". 

I can't fault you for healthy skepticism.  I feel the same way towards religion, ghosts, the vast majority of cryptids, and other such 'unexplained' phenomenon. What makes UFOs more plausible is that we're a technological species who have achieved space travel and exploration, which makes it plausible for another society of similar or greater scientific knowledge. Moreover, there've been any number of sightings, like the those over Washington D.C. in '52, which were seen by numerous eyewitnesses, appeared on radar, and were subsequently met with futile attempts by fighters to engage.  This is a case where the visual sightings were backed by radar, military force was employed, and, subsequently, the Robertson Panel was convened to examine the Blue Book findings, turning it ultimately into a debunking platform. Ironically,  Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer and skeptic brought on board to head up Blue Book investigations, became a staunch believer. He's responsible for the alien contact classification system made famous by Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Shag Harbor incident in 1967 is another interesting UFO incident involving any number of eyewitnesses who watched , and heard in some instances, an object crash into the Atlantic around 900' offshore. Believing it to be a downed airplane, rescuers, both locals and Coast Guard, went out to the site where they found a lot of orange foam on the water, but no debris and no passengers. The Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax, after making inquiries, determined that nothing conventional had crashed, and subsequently sent a request to the Royal Canadian Air Force, who in turn contacted the Royal Canadian Navy. The Navy sent in divers, but found no downed aircraft. However, it's an interesting case for the large number of eyewitnesses, including airline pilots who saw the object several hours before the crash, fishing boat crews, Royal Mounted Canadian Police, as well as military resources brought to bear. The subsequent official report is unclassified and available for perusal, if one so desires.

I'll point out here that former Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer is a staunch believer in the UFO phenomenon.  Of course, like many believers, his claims come without concrete substantiation.

The Kecksburg Incident is also one that had multiple witnesses from Canada through several states until it crashed in southwestern PA in 1965. There were numerous people, including police and firefighters, who went to the crash site, describing the object as being a metallic craft with an acorn shape and symbols written around the protrusion. The US Army showed up soon after to take control of the scene and ward off onlookers. An Army flatbed truck with an object under a tarp was seen leaving the area some time after. A plausible theory is that it was a satellite, either ours or Russia's. In the more fantastic realm, the theory is that it was a German 'wonder weapon' called Die Glocke (The Bell), which was introduced by Polish author Igor Witkowski's Prawda o Wunderwaffe after he'd allegedly seen secret documents, which, of course, he conveniently wasn't able to copy or reproduce in any way.  The concept has gained popularity, both through Nick Cook's book on zero point energy, but greatly through sensationalized pseudo-science shows and the Ancient Aliens people, who purportedly believe that aliens are responsible for everything. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

25 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

Well, Seto Kaiba, someday when you're out for a leisurely country drive, get abducted and systematically probed in all your available orifices, and perhaps some that aren't, I promise I won't say, "I told you so". 

I'm pretty sure that, if it comes to that, it'd mean I'd been abducted by the Japanese porn industry... not aliens.  

Come to that, I've never understood why UFO believers are so convinced that an advanced alien species from another star system would come all this way to make contact by jamming a metal rod up some random yokel's backside.  Either they think humans have the most beautiful colons in the universe or they're into some seriously weird sh*t.

 

 

25 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

What makes UFOs more plausible is that we're a technological species who have achieved space travel and exploration, which makes it plausible for another society of similar or greater scientific knowledge. Moreover, there've been any number of sightings, like the those over Washington D.C. in '52, which were seen by numerous eyewitnesses, appeared on radar, and were subsequently met with futile attempts by fighters to engage.  This is a case where the visual sightings were backed by radar, military force was employed, and, subsequently, the Robertson Panel was convened to examine the Blue Book findings, turning it ultimately into a debunking platform.

As with all those other categories, the fantastical explanation should only ever be taken seriously when all logical and scientific paths of inquiry have been completely and thoroughly exhausted.  There's a reason the explanation for virtually all of these fantastical sightings turns out to be mundane, and often hopelessly boring.  The overwhelming majority of "UFO" sightings belong to the same category of credibility as "I saw Jesus on my cheese sandwich" and related phenomena have all proven to have thoroughly non-exotic explanations like cattle "mutilations".  I do have to admit it's rather convenient for the military that folks would rather believe the things they're seeing are space aliens instead of confidential military programs under test, like the Roswell incident.

An object that shows up on radar and moves at high speed can be a LOT of things besides an alien spacecraft... and, remember, these various UFO reports don't actually put any real stock in the notion of alien visitations.  This has always been all about figuring out if a foreign adversary got the drop on us technologically.

[Nightbat]

On 7/22/2019 at 11:03 PM, M'Kyuun said:

What makes UFOs more plausible is that we're a technological species who have achieved space travel and exploration, which makes it plausible for another society of similar or greater scientific knowledge.

 

Wait what?

We achieved space travel? When?

Last I checked, we can hardly even see what's beyond Neptune in any detail, and that's only a shoddy 2.5 billion miles away

Proxima Centauri, the nearest star is about 2500 trillion miles away

The scales are too vast to even speak of actual spacetravel, it's not even comparing the flight of a paper plane, off a mountain, wind in the back, to the distance that Voyager has traveled so far

Our space travel has advanced only an inch above flinging a turd into space

 

Look, I'm not all negative, they once said we'd never achieve flight, break the sound barrier, reach the moon, and all that

Now if, IF, IF we don't kill ourselves over time, I have high hopes that 1 day, we will fix this nasty FTL issue we need to be able to actually explore space, Scotty might just be proven wrong with "Ye Cannae Change The Laws of Physics" (Not much faith in Quantum Mechanics though, it's become the "God-Answer" for the scientific community)

It might as well be 100 times the time it took us from the first modern human to appear, to the year we achieved flight to even figure out how to reach 1/100th the speed of light

but Currently, I'm very sceptical of talking about "space travel" when the fastest thing we got took 13 years just to leave our heliosphere (and it's still up in the air if it actually went into 'outer' space yet)

 

I find intelligent life existing in the universe, hell, even in this galaxy, plausible, that this life has the ability to visit us? Not so much

and even if it has, I don't think circular spaceships loaded with gastroenterologic equipment are their required means to travel

[Dynaman]

17 minutes ago, Nightbat said:

Wait what?

We achieved space travel? When?

We did land people on the moon 50 years ago.  A number of probes to Mars and one of the Voyager craft has officially left the solar system (I think - I may have the term incorrect).  That counts as space travel - NONE of it counts for life from another star system making it to Earth.

[JB0]

Voyager 2 is officially in interstellar space. To me, though, travel means there's a living creature onboard. I'm not "travelling" when I kick a coke bottle across a parking lot.

 

Apollo is that one time humanity opened the front door and looked out at the world. Didn't step out onto the porch, though. We closed the door, went back to bed, and spent the next few decades shouting out the bedroom door about how we explored the world because we opened the door once.

[Seto Kaiba]

17 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Voyager 2 is officially in interstellar space.

https://xkcd.com/1189/

Yeah, but they keep changing the definition of "interstellar space" so the Voyager probes have left the solar system surprisingly often given that they're on a fixed course.

 

46 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

We did land people on the moon 50 years ago.  A number of probes to Mars and one of the Voyager craft has officially left the solar system (I think - I may have the term incorrect).  That counts as space travel - NONE of it counts for life from another star system making it to Earth.

"Travel" implies that a person is going... apart from our handful of trips to the moon and the semi-regular flights to and from our one functioning space station, we're not doing any space travel.  What we're doing is space exploration using remote probes that transmit data back to nice comfy planetside control stations because our engine technology is comically inefficient for anything more than the shortest possible flights and we can't go anywhere farther than the moon because our bodies start f*cking up in long-term zero-g living thanks to most of our anatomy being designed to work in a 1g environment.

When it comes to space travel, we're like a dog chained to its doghouse.  The best we can do is run to the end of our chain and bark.

[Bolt]

35 minutes ago, JB0 said:

I'm not "travelling" when I kick a coke bottle across a parking lot.

You traveled the coke can

10 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

When it comes to space travel, we're like a dog chained to its doghouse.  The best we can do is run to the end of our chain and bark.

We’re just getting out chops down (better late than never..) Hayabusa 2 has done some impressive stuff. Be prepared for a mass rare minerals grab..

[JB0]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, but they keep changing the definition of "interstellar space" so the Voyager probes have left the solar system surprisingly often given that they're on a fixed course.

Granted, and most of the data informing those decisions was being GATHERED by the V'gers. There was also the time the heliosheath caught back up with V'ger 2 due to an increase in solar wind activity. 

[renegadeleader1]

On 7/1/2019 at 12:31 AM, DewPoint said:

Like how some country may be hiding an alien spaceship that crashed landed on a island in the east pacific?

How do you know about the Roswell wreck being moved from Area 51 to Diego Garcia... Oooooooh Macross joke. Well then... This post never happened.

[Hikuro]

19 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

How do you know about the Roswell wreck being moved from Area 51 to Diego Garcia... Oooooooh Macross joke. Well then... This post never happened.

You mean S4 if Lazar is correct anyways.

Speaking of which has anyone seen the netflix documentary with him that came out? It didn't feel like they touched on anything new, didn't even really go in depths of what happened to him back in the 1980's. I'd say the only thing that came to light of relevance was the use of hand scanning technology that the military claimed never existed back then finally being revealed. I was like "wait, that's it?"

[RED WOLF]

4 hours ago, Hikuro said:

You mean S4 if Lazar is correct anyways.

Speaking of which has anyone seen the netflix documentary with him that came out? It didn't feel like they touched on anything new, didn't even really go in depths of what happened to him back in the 1980's. I'd say the only thing that came to light of relevance was the use of hand scanning technology that the military claimed never existed back then finally being revealed. I was like "wait, that's it?"

Netflix documentary was ok. Watch the interview Lazer does with Joe Rogan on YouTube.  Way better. 

[David Hingtgen]

Relevant, and still one of the oldest and funniest pics I know of from the 'net: