Since any whistleblown sensor data would still leave room for doubt, this seems a rational step:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...o-s-not-wrong/

Blue book is a pointless discussion, unravelling decades old (non)/evidence and disinformation won't prove anything of use today unless you're a historian.

Interview with James Fox (The Phenomenon), goes to credibility / integrity background:
https://audioboom.com/posts/7914944-...e-51-james-fox

With the limited information we actually have today have you can speculate pretty wildly about how close our nearest intelligent neighbor capable of interstellar travel is likely to be, or at what speeds they're capable of travelling, or whether they can use or create wormhole-type shortcuts. But it's just as easy to speculate that physics may actually have some hard rules that you can't outsmart and that these aliens may be really, really far away. Distance as an issue when your nearest star is 4+ light-years away (fun fact, you can't see it with the naked eye as it's relatively dim).

What we do know is that we have a planet full of people capable of lying, misunderstanding information, and witnessing and believing in things that aren't real in spite of strong evidence. The "seems credible/I'd think I'd know if I was being lied to" is the same sort of thing you hear from people after finding out they'd been taken by their accountant or that their neighbor was a serial killer.

"Advanced Aerial Threats

The Committee supports the efforts of the Unidentified
Aerial Phenomenon Task Force at the Office of Naval
Intelligence to standardize collection and reporting on
unidentified aerial phenomenon, any links they have to
adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to
U.S. military assets and installations. However, the Committee
remains concerned that there is no unified, comprehensive
process within the Federal Government for collecting and
analyzing intelligence on unidentified aerial phenomena,
despite the potential threat. The Committee understands that
the relevant intelligence may be sensitive; nevertheless, the
Committee finds that the information sharing and coordination
across the Intelligence Community has been inconsistent, and
this issue has lacked attention from senior leaders..."

If this wasn't posted somewhere in all the pages of the thread, this was part of the language added to a Covid bill that mandated the release of the information. Not seeing much in the way of "people need answers on aliens" but as a security issue. Please correct me if I'm missing something else. I don't exactly see a psy-op here, and if it were couldn't have been much more ineffectual. I do see a reasonable excuse for media outlets to run some "I'm not saying it was aliens, but" articles for a while but that's about it.

Ordering soap can be classified information in the military, which makes sense once you ignore that it seems absurd, because quantity of soap and changes in how much soap you order can actually tell a foreign analyst a fair bit about a place and its activity.

Thus that something is classified doesn’t necessarily mean that it is some big saucy secret bombshell, merely that it might contain information an analyst somewhere could use to figure out something you don’t want them figure out just yet; where you had men, what equipment you had, what capacities you have, confirm other sources etc.

Believing everything authorities tell you or, conversely, making intricate conjectures about covert actions based on selective evidence, are two traps most people fall into. The way to avoid that is to employ institutional analysis. This will usually lead to the an explanation which can account for most all observations while preventing you from being easily manipulated by authorities, individuals, or the biases of your own mind.

Even corporations, unaccountable private power, are still institutions, as is most any force that can enact effective, large scale changes to the economic/social agenda.

Take some basic assumptions/observations:

- The observed flying phenomena are really existing.

- The tech is ours. Institutions are in no way behaving as if aliens are here. Knowledge that the technology on display was not ours (and given our budget it is either ours or alien) would be leaked with great alarm and our institutions and elites would be behaving in a completely different manner.

- The information on the UFOs was leaked in the interest of an institution and not for the benefit of the public.

- There is a multi trillion dollar hole in the defense budget that has never been formally explained.

A reasonable explanation that accounts for all this is that the leaks are a left hand/right hand issue in the government which has to do with, of course, money. If there was an ultra secret part of government working on this technology, the military, who has observations of this tech (which also conforms with the idea that the tech is ours since it is seen around our coastline in preferred training and testing areas), might use leaks to gain access to the tech. Of course, the military and congress people are largely representatives of other institutions which manufacture weapons systems. These institutions obviously want in on this tech as well and are probably directing their shills to do whatever they can to get access. So they trot Rubio out there basically as a threat to whatever institution is holding the tech.

Speculation about psyops is misguided. On the other hand, another aspect to institutional analysis overlooked throughout this forum and wherever people discuss politics, is that institutions are opportunistic. So now that it is out there, the prospect of an alien encounter might be used as a distraction at some critical point like if Biden starts bleeding out of his eyes again. But cut out of whole cloth? As Biden would say- come on man!?!? That's just the most inefficient way possible to achieve that result.

Maybe it's the writing, but this post is close to inscrutable (at least for me).

McDonald's forcing the pentagon to disclose secret tech so they can build a working soft serve machine.

Nice to see you posting again.

Where do you currently stand on the moon landing or even flat earth? Something that was once so shunned upon has gained surprising support from folks that you wouldn't expect - guess I was just curious.

Close. More like Raytheon leaning on politicians and other contacts to force the holders of the UFO tech (identity of holders maybe even secret to them) to cut them in on it. They know it exists, they know we developed it, and they probably have more reveals in store if they aren't given access. Or this was the reveal and it did or didn't have the intended effect.

The leaks are an institutional tactic against another institution, not some elaborate psyop on the American public. You actually had the correct description of what a psyop typically is earlier ITT LBR.

No offense but if you were a former enemy and are taking a shot I don't remember you. I'll assume you're not trolling me and answer you honestly.

Theories like flat earth or the moon landing being faked are so stupid that it makes me question the value I place on broad, liberal arts education for the masses. Like maybe we should just aim to deter a lot people from thinking at all if any appreciable percentage of people subscribe to such ideas after going through school. Libertarianism has the same effect on me to rethink whether elitism is actually the way to go.

Nice post Deuces.

I'm struggling to build a picture of the type of person who would have both the evidence and incentive to do that 'leak with alarm'. They would have to have visibility across all black ops to have that proof it is not ours, no? For someone that senior, with all that power, where is the incentive to leak? I was reading In Plain Sight (David Coulthard) which related how oversight committee members and presidents don't get close to a full picture so the number of people with that access could be vanishingly small.

If such a person knew it wasn't ours I would think they would be one of the last people to leak it.

I never fact checked this but I remember hearing that McDonald's in the US is tied to a contract with a particular brand of ice cream machine and that company reserves the right to make any repairs or modifications to the machines. Hence they have to wait for expensive repairs and some smaller franchises will avoid having it repaired at all while larger ones will drag their heels over it.

Whatever the truth of that, it's clear that something is happening regarding Americans and McFlurries and, as a wannabe professional debunker, I will not let it pass.

I snipped a lot of the post because I think it follows somewhat reasonably from the premises, but this is the premise I'm going to nitpick.

The reason there's been a switch to UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) over UFO (unidentified flying object) is because so many of these sightings are probably neither flying nor objects. It's a bit like saying a mirage "exists". Mirages are well studied optical illusions but searching for the oasis is a lost cause.

Equally, the ones that do appear to confirm a real object very often have mundane explanations. We've had at least one in this thread that very much appears to be a bird and yet people speculate endlessly on how it defies physics.

I take it to be quite a mundane claim that governments around the world are working on and testing out new aircraft. When it comes to UAPs/UFOs it seems to me that the claim is something quite different. Not that we've seen something that appears to be faster than known planes, not that it has a different heat signatures, but that they're physics defying super-ultra-hyper-sonic crafts with no propulsion that can't be explained by modern science.

I think we want to be very careful before we say things like the "phenomena are really existing".

Also, under the alien scenario, the aliens are leaving it to our government leader's discretion to disclose their presence. That seems like a hard assumption to justify. Why the U.S.? If they are hostile they sneak/surprise attack. If they are trying to help us they could probably figure out the embarrassingly incompetent level of our political organization and would not choose to interact with humanity through our politicians, literally the worst among us.

But you are saying, given a lot of other assumptions, secret aliens wouldn't be leaked by aware insiders because there is no incentive. Let's think that through. This would be the biggest news, by far, in the history of humanity with implications for everyone. That alone would be incentive itself. The greater incentive would be self preservation, preservation of family. Aliens with advanced technology would be seen as something like Gods. Chain of command and information security would probably break down instantly if they come, proximally out of self interest but mainly because the arrival would signal a new social order, the ultimate shakeup. And if our senior badass wanted to actually fight the aliens in order to preserve a social order he wants to keep in place, then he is also incented to let the information spread so we can all fight together (not his sons though, in keeping with the whole existing order thing, but definitely yours).

All that said, there are probably better ways to figure out that this doesn't involve aliens.

For sure. I believe the pilots and I assume that they know how distinguish some visual artifact from an aircraft, that they wouldn't risk sitting there are testifying to 60 minutes about something that had any decent chance of being a non aircraft. I think it's safe to assume the claims they are making have the technical endorsement of the military.

I am trying to put forward a process of analyzing things like this; frankly how to get to likely truths without being exploitable and without leading oneself into wild conspiracy theories. The premises I suggested, in which I happen to believe, aren't that important. The important thing is to focus on institutions, what those institutions are capable of, what their history of actions are, their modus operandi, their incentives, etc. instead of individuals or nonsensical, wide ranging networks that cross a dozen institutions. You put your observations and institutional analysis together and you can form some hypothesis that make sense. Then you can change the truth value of your premises as new information comes in and adjust your analysis.

So take the question of whether Michael Jordan was secretly suspended from the NBA during his baseball year. This is something a lot of people speculate about and many people believe to be true. It's not exactly super consequential in a material sense, but his retirement did send something of a shock wave.

Did David Stern suspend Jordan? Stern heads an institution called the NBA, essentially a collection of team owners. Was it in the interest of the NBA to take out a player who makes all the owners richer? Who generates interest in the NBA that translates into hundreds of millions of dollars? Obviously not. Obviously the NBA wouldn't intentionally cost itself a dumptruck brigade of cash for some secret execution of pointless punishment of an individual. There is no point in even reading about any speculation that considers something so counter to institutional aims.

The US is flavor of the month as the only one to have sightings out there supported by multiple modern sensors. They have the 'signal' amongst plenty of noise. Are aliens really waiting on goverment disclosure? I dont think so. I think, from their perspective, mankind has been laughably inept at accepting the obvious.

Look at Westall and Ariel. Look at the military contacts from numerous nations. Look at the nuclear site incidents. And mankind still turns a blind eye, what a joke. There is a scale of indifference and curiosity between the extremes of war and love. Thats what we are to them, for whatever reason. The sense of playfulness and boldness in Westall and Ariel, and here we are flinging poo to get a quarterly report put out 30 years later to establish whether we think this is manmade or not. How clueless is that? What could be gained from approaching the leaders of this demonstrably incredulous, warlike and inept race?

I can't come round on the leakers. Anyone without perfect information necessarily doesnt know the truth and is faced with the choice of gambling everything they have to become a UFO martyr and face treason charges, or shut up. And for sure that treason threat would be wrapped up very pretty with lies about the dire consequences of exposure to the US.

The problem I have is that this simply isn't true. The following article contains one of the "confirmed" videos and a breakdown of some simple trigonometry (in a YouTube) to determine that the object reported as going two thirds the speed of sound is actually moving at around wind speed and about the size of a weather balloon. In spite of that easy maths we have former military types insisting that it's doing all sorts of seemingly impossible things (I haven't found any calculations to back that side up).

https://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/tha...l-explanation/

These videos really haven't had technical endorsement. We get speculation, we get testimony, but never anything technical. And certainly nothing to back up the incredibly high claims of physics defying aircraft.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this approach in general except to say that a faulty assumption can take you a long way off. The confidence we have in any hypothesis can't exceed that of the weakest premise. My confidence that witnesses won't make mistakes, misremember, or exaggerate, is particularly low. And my evidence for that is what I said to Washoe: we have multiple such ex-military types claiming not simply that they saw something strange but that they saw literal physics defying technology. What we don't have is any waves in the scientific community looking at it and agreeing "Yup, that breaks our understanding of aerodynamics".

There's also an underdetermination problem that we'll end up with multiple competing hypotheses that equally explain the evidence. Which I don't think is a reason not to speculate, but it is a reason not to pin yourself to any specific explanation.

Lack of hard data makes debate fruitless, quickly. Putting a Mick West parallax debunk from April 2020 into the frame, well. Believe what you want.

Hard data doesn't need to be in 1s and 0s, watch out for the next NYT piece.

I don't really care about Mick West. All I'm saying is that the maths speaks for itself. And cards on the table I haven't checked the numbers, and I haven't looked up the camera specs, but I can follow along with the principles. And I even think I've seen another debunker come to a different conclusion about what it is that's being looked at. What I haven't seen is someone do a similar breakdown of the figures to show that this object is in fact something that defies any mundane explanation.

Not that I haven't forgotten how to do it, but I do know that back when I was in school doing AS level Physics that we learned these calculations.

What I'd like to see, and what I'd expect to see, if there really were anything interesting in that video is a whole lot of similar people crunching the numbers and going "Well, that's undeniable". We don't see that though. We don't see the numbers coming up with two thirds the speed of sound. Only ever speculation.

An interesting video Mick West did was the tic tac video where the object flies off suddenly to the left of the screen - I assume this would be evidence of unknown technology. As something going straight ahead at that speed and making a turn like that is obviously beyond our known capabilities.

Anyway Mick West said actually it was just a case of the tracker losing lock and the object did not in fact move from its trajectory... I like Mick West - good for a basic sense and sanity check:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1di0XIa9RQ

Haven't watched that one but at least one other video I mentioned earlier in the thread took the same view. Much the same way as a parachute appears to jump up when released is actually caused by the movement of the camera relative to it. As soon as the camera stops the lock-on (which you can see by the on screen display) it suddenly appears to jump.

Yeah, seems like a huge coincidence that it shoots off just when losing lock. I can't remember, but I think the object also jumps earlier in the video when it loses lock. Of course, what is needed is more data… the interviews with pilots, masters at arms, etc are IMO compelling, but without that multiple sensors data... Mick West is providing better evidence for a very ordinary explanation.

That's the thing, we can't show conclusively from what footage there is what the object was, but if the data doesn't actually show anything remarkable then that's kind of that. I'd love to see some trig showing the size of the object is much greater or that it's manoeuvres are anything beyond normal.

Grunching.

Do aliens exist yet?

My personal view is humanity will never meet any advanced alien civilization because there are no advanced alien civilizations because a trajectory of advancement always means advancements in the arms race, advancements which eventually will, with cosmic irony, halt all advancement. In the very attributes that make us human are the seeds of the destruction of the species. I don't think a civilization can advance technologically much further than we have without destroying itself.

Nukes have chilled people out a little. So now we kill the people who don't have nukes and Europe has stopped the constant chopping up of each other for the moment. But that's like a blip in time. If we somehow manage not to nuke each other we will destroy the environment, and a bunch of people banging on drums isn't going to stop it. A typical species lasts about 100K years. Our time is about up. Intelligence is probably the biggest bug disguised as a feature there ever was.