The Pentagon acknowledged a program has been running at least 2007 to 2012 investigating military and other reports of events in an attempt to determine the source of the technology or disturbance as it could be a threat to the country from foreign power or nature. This space is to discuss and debate information released or new reports to poke holes in theories and stay as skeptical as possible as well as being OK to think we don't have all the answers. Please keep this to as much fact as possible in the report and state when you start to speculate. Let's all be respectful of everyone and talk about what we don't know!
While I want to believe (tm) I don’t find Grusch’s claims particularly convincing since it’s mostly hearsay and second- or third-hand accounts without any hard evidence, which you’d think would have been trivially easy for him to obtain given the scope of his claims.
No one’s immune to the conspiracism brainworms, even high-ranking military officials. You’d think people would have kept that in mind with Gen. Flynn spouting Qanon nonsense for the last four years.
His credibility does come from his role he played, investigations, and known whereabouts of items at hand that he has shared with the IG & will share with the committee based on security clearance.
There is plenty that needs vetting but he went and put this all on blast which considering the possible team of people that had been threatening his whistle blowing efforts is fairly evident. If this is a façade it has gone entirely too far.
Yeah, if half of what he's said was true, we'd have numerous leaks/deathbed confessions over the last 50 years.
En masse, people are really bad at keeping secrets.
Decades-long conspiracies involving thousands of people aren't a thing in the real world.
…and as the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far all he’s bringing to the table is the equivalent of “I saw a video then interviewed a guy whose brother works with a guy who saw another video.”
En masse, people are really bad at keeping secrets.
Decades-long conspiracies involving thousands of people aren't a thing in the real world.
"If you want to keep a secret, first you must hide it from yourself."
-George Orwell, "1984"
…and as the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far all he’s bringing to the table is the equivalent of “I saw a video then interviewed a guy whose brother works with a guy who saw another video.”
One of the reporters from The NY Times who reported on Grusch was interviewed on The Ezra Klein Show and honestly it didn't sound much different from an episode of Art Bell. The reporter couldn't give the names of corroborating sources. She wouldn't say why she trusted Grusch. So it all comes back to 1 person and a bunch of hearsay.
Interesting hearing. I watched the entire thing. I was surprised by the lack of infighting. There was some but most of them seem to take this seriously.
I have been following the UAP scene for a bit lately and actually switched from being total skeptic to a believer although... A believer who doesnt exactly know WHAT to believe.
Starting with the very first UFO incidents, there has actually been a steady drip of "deathbed confessions" and late-life admissions of coverups from military personnel. However, the stigma of UFOs has always automatically pushed those to the ridiculed shelf of news, something thats taken seriously only by cheap ass xerox rags.
Just as a hypothetical...lets entertain the idea that there has been a sort of compact core of intelligence and airforce operators with massive authority who have appropriated UFO field as their own. How many people would you realistically need to be in the core conspiracy group? Keep in mind that we are talking about environment that by default is highly secretive, obeys rank authority and is highly fragmented. Add to that ridicule stigma, suspicion that "it's our own supersecret projects" etc.
You dont need to cover up that much, most of the time a "you dont have the clearance, bud" would work well enough.
Interestingly, it'd make sense that stuff is starting to leak out now in an explosive fashion. Because such a setup would really depend of key personalities in various departments/agencies/companies. But it also would make continuity of the conspiracy problematic. By now the original conspirators would have started dieing of old age and the whole setup becomes shakey.
And frankly, the whole transparency push seems more like a takeover attempt by a younger generation. All those Mellons, Luizandos etc seem to me just playing a set of roles in a gambit where the transparency is just a lever to position themselves where they want to be. A hostile takeover of sorts. It's just a feeling, of course, I'm just a dude pretending to divine a shape of the fish just by the ripples it has sent through the pond.
So hypothetically, which do you find more plausible, that aliens are regularly visiting earth but are apparently really incompetent and keep crashing and/or getting captured, and multiple world governments have proof but have unanimously decided to hide it despite basically all of them being in direct competition with each other for most of recent history and not agreeing on anything else beside the fact that they are competing with each other.
or
Military and intelligence agencies occasionally have people rise through the ranks that are prone to conspiracism and belief in the supernatural and once they get enough power that it’s difficult for others to curtail them they use that power to search for aliens and ghosts and psychics, etc- and while they don’t really find anything meaningful, they leave behind paper trails and out-of-context “evidence” that inadvertently convinces other people who have been ordered to search for this stuff by their own high-ranking nutjobs.
Porque no Los dos?
Is that what it is? Paper trail of scifi nerds cult in the intelligence services?
I guess you hit the common sense jackpot there.
All I ever wanted was to be part of a sci-fi nerd cult in an intelligence service. 
Fun fact: Occam's razor was made of a metal not found on Earth.
OK, real talk: The Mothman Prophecies, both the book and the movie, suggest an interesting possibility.
Didnt want to sound so snappy, really. Apologies. As I said, I dont know what to believe, especially with such a noise to signal ratio as this topic.
I do, however, think that we tend to gravitate too much to our comfort zone when it comes to new and weird stuff. When imagining aliens, we just knee jerk into Star Wars territory, where everyone is on the same technological, motivational and emotional level. Traders, soldiers, pirates, lovers kinda stuff.
It might be that , for example, Annihilation or Strugacki brothers Roadside Picnic, the source material for Stalker games is a much better example of alien contact. Just...totally incomprehensible and weird. The motivation vectors truly alien.
If I drop my iPhone on an anthill, ants will have no realistic way to comprehend what this smooth, alien surface is. Why it vibrates sometimes, causing equivalent of earthquakes. What those symbols mean, that sometimes flash on its surface. What is Instagram and why the follower counts mean so much to that alien race of giants. Their senses would not even register us as beings, just seismic presence that thunders through their little world time to time.
Ants might try to devise some theories about all of this, using analogies from their world...all hilariously wrong in all the ways possible.
Now allow for a moment that it's us.
The issue with that is the whole antpile sees the surface and feels the tremors. For us, a planet with billions of cell phones and computers in our hands and there is not really much in regards to a lot of concrete evidence. So far, like stated above, it is a lot of people talking and fuzzy pictures.
Meh. You are attaching way too much to the analogy. Does all the anthill see Ant 8893451 being picked up and dropped again by a curious kid? Getting stuck in a bubble gum? Burnt burnt by magnifying glass? Perhaps the anthill is in fact an ant farm. All faulty analogies by default because it's me, Ant 465033 from remote region ants call "latvia" just making analogies based on what I can imagine.
This is why I personally am not making any theories or building coherent narratives about it all, it's unknown turtles all the way down. However, I do not pretend that there is nothing there if I dont understand it.
There have been enough mass sightings with hundreds of witnesses, who dont seem to be lieing, would have no reason to and certainly would not be able to coordinate a consistent lie over decades for no apparent gain.
Terry Pratchett's concept of substition as being opposite or superstition kinda made a big impression on me at one point. When 71-Hour Ahmed saw something unexplainable in the water, he didnt dismiss it because he couldnt explain it and neither did he try to fit it into some religious, esoteric or superstitious construct.
It's all physics, even if you dont know those rules yet, dont know the dynamics of alien Insta likes, concept of communication via vocal cords, alphabet of those weird 2D signs on flat surfaces, based on sound (what a marvel concept, communicating with sound vibrations, what will they come up with next).
I just file those things under "weird, probably real".
What I do despise though, is looking at everything through the prism of humans. Space pirates, space rebels, first contact people like us, just green skinned.
When a researcher puts an artificial ant in the anthill, they are not making first contact with ants. They are just looking at the reactions of the rest of the ants, putting down notes and then going out for Starbucks, then going on a date and then Netflixing and chilling with Maggy from accounting. Try and explain all that to the anthill elders.
Robot humans placed here as a science experiment would explain so much.
Life is so varied on our own planets history I just can’t imagine that hasn’t happen thousands of times over in the last several billion years.
For all we know the Mayans bugged out and gtf off the planet.
Life is so varied on our own planets history I just can’t imagine that hasn’t happen thousands of times over in the last several billion years.
For all we know the Mayans bugged out and gtf off the planet.
I'd guess all the Mayans in Mexico, Guatemala and the US might be surprised to hear this
TheGameguru wrote:Life is so varied on our own planets history I just can’t imagine that hasn’t happen thousands of times over in the last several billion years.
For all we know the Mayans bugged out and gtf off the planet.
I'd guess all the Mayans in Mexico, Guatemala and the US might be surprised to hear this
Those are skrulls.
Life is so varied on our own planets history I just can’t imagine that hasn’t happen thousands of times over in the last several billion years.
For all we know the Mayans bugged out and gtf off the planet.
I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the Fermi paradox, which is what you’re alluding to here. The response to that is “okay so where is everyone?” It took 4ish billion years to make humans, and the universe is at least three times that old. So where is everyone?
This thought exercise leads to the Great Filter, which could be behind us but is probably climate change, imo. A planet may not be capable of storing the energy required to be extracted to develop a spacefaring species without destroying itself.
"Where is everyone?" is quite a human-centric question, though.
It assumes that:
- No one has visited us. Which is a suspect statement, especially in the wake of this week's congressional hearing and decades of reports.
- Earth and mankind is Incredibly Important and Interesting and everyone should come here and introduce themselves to us. Which is...weird train of thought, to say the least.
- We have uber clear view of the rest of the Universe when we can barely make out stars and ssssome planets and speculate on their chemical compositions, judging by the color of some pixels. Our sensor capabilities are frankly laughable at this stage. Unless some godlike species make a neon sign, consisting of dancing pulsars, just for sh*ts and giggles, we assume we are alone.
- Aliens must follow the same technological vectors as us, chattering podcasts on radio waves, so that we could hear Alien Rogans millions of years ago. Perhaps sending some golden plates with icons scratched on them, addressed "to earthlings, millions of years in da future". Cuz we so mportant, once again.
Huh. I thought this week’s hearings really cemented that we haven’t ever been visited. I was profoundly disappointed with that abject lack of a shred of evidence despite having the credulous ear of the government of the deadliest country on the planet.
Either way, if you’re going by evidence, there is none that we’ve been contacted. And we’ve been searching for as long as we’ve had the technology to do so.
It’s also not really weird to assume that other spacefaring species would be naturally curious like we are. We’re the only spacefaring species (and we barely count) we know of, so naturally we would approach this from an anthrocentric point of view. That said, one of the potential explanations for the Fermi paradox is indeed the “backwater hypothesis,” which does posit that our arm of the Milky Way is boring and nobody cares we’re here.
(Another theory is that we’re in a zoo, being held here for observation. Still another theory is that there’s a race of super evil aliens that kills any species attempting extraterrestrial contact. Yet another is that we don’t know how to contact them, like you said. And also, light may actually be the absolute speed limit in the universe, and FTL is just impossible, whether through wormholesnof black holes or whatever. There’s lots of theories!)
But - assuming we don’t kill ourselves before the sun explodes in a few billion years - extrapolate what we’ve accomplished in one century over the course of a million centuries. If there was a single creature that fits our definition of “intelligent and spacefaring” out there, one with well over a million centuries’ evolutionary head start, isn’t it really f*cking weird that not a single one has been credibly discovered?
I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the Fermi paradox, which is what you’re alluding to here. The response to that is “okay so where is everyone?” It took 4ish billion years to make humans, and the universe is at least three times that old. So where is everyone?
The problem with this line of thinking is that we've only even barely started looking for everyone else for 60 of those 4 billion years.
The real question isn't WHERE is everyone else, but WHEN is everyone else. Because absent that giant neon alien sign that lasts epochs, an easy answer to the Fermi paradox is "all over the place, just not now."
That only explains why we haven’t seen them, though. It doesn’t explain why they haven’t reached out to us. (Unless lightspeed really is a universal speed limit)
That only explains why we haven’t seen them, though. It doesn’t explain why they haven’t reached out to us. (Unless lightspeed really is a universal speed limit)
Same answer. Prior to the invention of radio, we weren't observable either. And currently we're only observable within a ~100 light-year radius (i.e. the light cone of our first radio emissions). You have to postulate not only an intelligent alien species, but one that is in that light cone that constitutes a tiny, almost infinitesimal proportion of the universe, AND has capability, resources and motive to bother checking us out, AND does in it in a way that's observable to us.
The Fermi paradox is very easily explainable by simple probability.
Assuming there's anyone out there to reach out to us, they'd have to be within 200ish lightyears of Earth to notice us in the first place, as that's as far as Earth based signals have reached. They'd also have to have equipment capable of picking up our primitive signals, and actually have it set to pick them up.
The need to communicate is a human trait that has developed out of how our environment and biology has shaped our cultures. An alien intelligence would have by definition arisen out of different circumstances and would almost certainly think differently than us. It might not feel compelled to try to reach out to other life in the universe, or it might not even recognize other life as being able to communicate. Maybe it’s content to just chill in it’s own solar system and has no interest in anything beyond it.
It’s one possible explanation, sure. But we’re talking about Level 3 civilizations here: creatures that are capable of harnessing all of the energy in their entire galaxy. Civilizations who have been comfortable with quantum computing since before our sun was a sun. It seems vanishingly unlikely that not a single one of them, if they exist, wouldn’t have found us by now.
Unless they don’t exist, or are terrified of something else, or we’re in a zoo, etc.
It’s one possible explanation, sure. But we’re talking about Level 3 civilizations here: creatures that are capable of harnessing all of the energy in their entire galaxy. Civilizations who have been comfortable with quantum computing since before our sun was a sun. It seems vanishingly unlikely that not a single one of them, if they exist, wouldn’t have found us by now.
Unless they don’t exist, or are terrified of something else, or we’re in a zoo, etc.
They not only have to exist, they have to exist in a tiny proportion of the universe during a tiny period of time, in order to have found us.
Never mind the fact that level 3 civs are entirely a made-up human-imagined concept. We have no reason to think they're realistically feasible, and every reason to think they're not common at all in our teeny temporal and spatial corner of our universe (as we're not seeing artifacts of cosmic engineering out there in the night sky).
Right so what level advancement alien would be needed to visit this planet?
Based on the evidence, it looks like molecules organizing themselves into something we would recognize as life seems common, even inevitable. Personally I suspect there may be examples of single celled life on mars, Europa, even Venus.
But something seems to have happened where no species has advanced far enough to contact us, even given a 9-20 billion year head start. Not a single exoplanet developed life more than a billion years before we did and survived? Seems unlikely, unless we’re the only ones who made it this far.
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