UFO information to be released by the Pentagon

[Kryton]

https://nypost.com/2020/07/23/pentagon-ufo-unit-to-publicly-release-some-findings/?fbclid=IwAR3FZldNTtkVuAApDk5evsz1OTkO1a6KahmQ-0lUf25XFb9l24zoeZxvzoY

Eric Davis, one of the former officials from the Pentagon UFO program, said while he worked there, the team found objects he believed "we couldn't make ... ourselves," he told the Times.

Davis also said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency this March during which he elaborated on "off-world vehicles not made on this Earth."

It is not immediately clear what will be detailed in the force's reports to the Senate, though the goal is to determine whether other nations have made advancements in aviation engineering beyond the US's knowledge.

It seems the main concern in studying these 'vehicles' is that the Yanks are worried that they might be advanced Russian/Chinese technology.

"We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises and we don't know what it is — and it isn't ours," Rubio said.

"Frankly, that if it's something from outside this planet — that might actually be better than the fact that we've seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this activity."

https://nationalpost.com/news/newly-transparent-pentagon-program-may-shed-light-on-ufos

A U.S. government program known as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, previously thought disbanded, has caused a stir after re-appeared in a Senate committee report last month.

The Pentagon, the Times reports, will not discuss the program in question. But the report said the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force — falling under the Office of Naval Intelligence — is set to begin making public at least some findings on unidentified aerial vehicles, every six months.

[H-O-W-L]

I imagine most UFOs are super-advanced Chinese/Russian planes... that then turn out to be stupidly expensive, so they go back to the simpler and more detectable designs. Sort of like how Area 51 is 100% just a black hole for Boeing money rather than an actual alien hideaway.

[evilcommiedictator]

most UFOs are light planes or flocks of birds, enjoy the distraction

[Sin Agog]

most UFOs are light planes or flocks of birds, enjoy the distraction

That's true, but the rest are UFOs.

[Blumf]

Every few years, another "Pentagon to release UFO files" story, and nothing ever comes of it, especially not sexy three-titted green space ladies.

Sick of it!

[Wonderful Butternut]

There'll be one where the report will amount to: "Well on this one we're only 98% sure it was a misidentified weather balloon cos of some minor anomaly that was probably caused by dust in the radar tower."

And everyone will be "OMG GREYS/REPTILIANS/KLINGONS!!"

[Hand Solo]

The last Pentagon UFO video dump was just for the birds.

[BlodwynPig]

UFOheads are dull, duller than their beloved "greys". A total lack of imagination, so boring. If I saw an alien or a UFO and they looked like the conventional understanding, I'd yawn and go home.

[touchingcloth]

I had one of those alien lasses with six tits in my cab last week.

[beanheadmcginty]

I hope you were whistling the Norwegian national anthem.

[Bence Fekete]

Having met some of these bastards in my own genre-defying hallucinations all I can think is, sure, giant physical shiny bowling balls from out of space does sound particularly silly and human-centric. But then so does the idea that we're definitely alone, sequestered and yet somehow de facto more advanced than any other intelligence out there.

I watched an interview with Max Tegmark the other day blithely dismissing the possibility of extraterrestrials given all our current understanding of physics points to earth as a cosmic fluke. Another 'professor' so married to his own ego and material understanding of reality he cannot countenance, even in the abstract, that out of the 250 billion stars he looks up at in the night sky (just our neighbourhood) we are NOT THE CHOSEN ONES.

Smart people can be stupid.

[Bence Fekete]

The last Pentagon UFO video dump was just for the birds.

I can't watch that, it appears to be made by an adolescent. Can you précis it for me? Specifically why we should completely discount the extensive eye-witness testimony of Commander David Fravor et al.

[BlodwynPig]

Having met some of these bastards in my own genre-defying hallucinations all I can think is, sure, giant physical shiny bowling balls from out of space does sound particularly silly and human-centric. But then so does the idea that we're definitely alone, sequestered and yet somehow de facto more advanced than any other intelligence out there.

I watched an interview with Max Tegmark the other day blithely dismissing the possibility of extraterrestrials given all our current understanding of physics points to earth as a cosmic fluke. Another 'professor' so married to his own ego and material understanding of reality he cannot countenance, even in the abstract, that out of the 250 billion stars he looks up at in the night sky (just our neighbourhood) we are NOT THE CHOSEN ONES.

Smart people can be stupid.

or right

what is life?

[beanheadmcginty]

If the aliens landed now we're definitely in some sort of computer game aren't we?

[Bence Fekete]

or right

what is life?

Well precisely. To say there is definitively none is the same as saying 'I know what life is and it is this'.

It's like people who say 'there is no purpose to nature', which is the same as saying 'I know what nature is and it is not X'.

[Bazooka]

I wanna kiss a Martian lady, I wanna lay her down in the stars.

[Blumf]

I wanna kiss a Martian lady, I wanna lay her down in the stars.

I bet you do, yer dirty old bollocks!

[El Unicornio, mang]

Stephen Hawking and other top boffins have said that we're better off not being contacted by superior alien life forms as they'll undoubtedly start harvesting us for resources/turning us into blocks of food after they've got the initial pleasantries out of the way.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Crop circles were a great wheeze, they should make a comeback.

[Kryton]

they'll undoubtedly start harvesting us for resources/turning us into blocks of food after they've got the initial pleasantries out of the way.

I'm sure he was talking about the Conservative party there mate.

[Hand Solo]

I can't watch that, it appears to be made by an adolescent. Can you précis it for me? Specifically why we should completely discount the extensive eye-witness testimony of Commander David Fravor et al.

He debunks a lot of stuff through being the self-appointed Hierophant for !SCIENCE! if you know the type. But yeah, he's not funny and keeps trying to be and has a desperately annoying smug voice. The long and short of it is it's just videos of misidentified birds that the US military have 'leaked' to the public in some kind of attempt to flex the girth of their surveillance technology to other forces on the sly.

[JaDanketies]

Having met some of these bastards in my own genre-defying hallucinations all I can think is, sure, giant physical shiny bowling balls from out of space does sound particularly silly and human-centric. But then so does the idea that we're definitely alone, sequestered and yet somehow de facto more advanced than any other intelligence out there.

I watched an interview with Max Tegmark the other day blithely dismissing the possibility of extraterrestrials given all our current understanding of physics points to earth as a cosmic fluke. Another 'professor' so married to his own ego and material understanding of reality he cannot countenance, even in the abstract, that out of the 250 billion stars he looks up at in the night sky (just our neighbourhood) we are NOT THE CHOSEN ONES.

Smart people can be stupid.

It is entirely possible that we are the only intelligent lifeform out there. It's possible that Earth is the only place with lifeforms, although I think that's pretty unlikely in this big ol' universe. If you consider life to merely be some self-replicating compounds, it'd be amazing if it only ever existed on Earth - especially since it started to exist on Earth pretty early on in Earth's history.

It may well be that there's a 'great filter' that means that technologically-advanced life exists for too short a timeframe to ever come close to interstellar travel. It's only about 70 years since we dropped the first nuclear bomb and 'conquered the atom'. In the 4.5 billion years Earth has been about, that's nothing - and I think there's more than an outside chance that civilisation as we know it won't survive for another 70 years. Why would this not be the case for aliens? Technology advances, demand for resources grows, the number of resources accessible remains the same, and eventually we all blow each-other up with nukes for the last puddle of dirty water.  That is, even if intelligent life ever even developed outside of this Earth - a question I'm agnostic about.

And I've met the space pixies that hold all the atoms together in the universe, and I've spoken to and annoyed a number of interdimensional creatures, yet I still remain unconvinced.

[Captain Z]

Probably just a ghost or something.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

Swamp gas from a weather balloon reflecting the light from Venus. Nothing to be alarmed about.[nb]I 100% believe there is evidence of non-terrestrial advanced intelligence somewhere in a top secret archive[/nb]

[Mister Six]

Stephen Hawking and other top boffins have said that we're better off not being contacted by superior alien life forms as they'll undoubtedly start harvesting us for resources/turning us into blocks of food after they've got the initial pleasantries out of the way.

Honestly, though, why listen to Stephen Hawking? Being brilliant at understanding physics doesn't give you any insight into the thought processes of hypothetical alien beings from a completely different evolutionary tree.

I do think any contact with aliens would be ultimately fruitless, though, because they would be so, well, alien. Totally different environment for natural selection, totally different evolutionary pressures - they might not think like us in any way we could conceivable. It would be like trying to have a conversation with a jellyfish - for us and them.

[Hand Solo]

Honestly, though, why listen to Stephen Hawking? Being brilliant at understanding physics doesn't give you any insight into the thought processes of hypothetical alien beings from a completely different evolutionary tree.

Didn't Stephen Hawking throw a highly publicised Champagne party for Time Travelers and nobody turned up, smugly proving his point that time travel is not physically possible?

Though, by pure coincidence nobody turned up to all his other parties either..

[El Unicornio, mang]

Honestly, though, why listen to Stephen Hawking? Being brilliant at understanding physics doesn't give you any insight into the thought processes of hypothetical alien beings from a completely different evolutionary tree.

I think it's more based on the history of humans treating those less powerful than them, human and animal, a certain way time and again. But, that maybe a more evolved species would do better than us.

[Bence Fekete]

It may well be that there's a 'great filter' that means that technologically-advanced life exists for too short a timeframe to ever come close to interstellar travel. It's only about 70 years since we dropped the first nuclear bomb and 'conquered the atom'. In the 4.5 billion years Earth has been about, that's nothing - and I think there's more than an outside chance that civilisation as we know it won't survive for another 70 years. Why would this not be the case for aliens? Technology advances, demand for resources grows, the number of resources accessible remains the same, and eventually we all blow each-other up with nukes for the last puddle of dirty water.  That is, even if intelligent life ever even developed outside of this Earth - a question I'm agnostic about.

My main gripe with the great filter theory is that from what we know about evolution - albeit from a sample size of one - is that it prioritises survival of the genome.

So the idea that most/all runtimes of carbon based lifeforms inevitably march into their own hubristic planet immolation before they traverse the stars or evolve beyond our current intelligence runs counter-intuitive to what we already know about the process that produced us. Now, sapiens might well not be the endgame of nature by a long-shot and there could certainly be something already profoundly corrupted in our biological software that sends us all into dinosaur land. But there could also still, and likely would, be genetic iterations after that/us which improve on our destructive nature. Just as we're better equipped to survive acid rain than a stegosaurus. And that's just this particular 'earth'.

I''m also unconvinced by this automatic assumption that lifeforms naturally evolve to populate the universe (I realise this runs counter to my original support for Nimitz). It's more likely imo we evolve smaller and stealthier and beyond light/electromagnetic wave detection so as not to freak out our intergalatic cousins. 

And to drift a little further into la la land, for all we know the apparently lifeless stars or gas giants are indeed 'alive' in some way that we have yet to detect or decode. I'm a fan of the theory that we, evolution, have survived in a way purely adapted to time and space, whilst remaining deeply ignorant of several other extremely significant dimensions that interact so weakly with our own we could've remained none-the-wiser had we not, ahem, *discovered* quantum physics, string theory and the like.

So for me just about anything is still on the table. Including giant metallic confectionery from Zeta Reticuli. I'm a flip-flopping, flat, holographic universe cosmic fence-sitter.

[spaghetamine]

My main gripe with the great filter theory is that from what we know about evolution - albeit from a sample size of one - is that it prioritises survival of the genome.

So the idea that most/all runtimes of carbon based lifeforms inevitably march into their own hubristic planet immolation before they traverse the stars or evolve beyond our current intelligence runs counter-intuitive to what we already know about the process that produced us. Now, sapiens might well not be the endgame of nature by a long-shot and there could certainly be something already profoundly corrupted in our biological software that sends us all into dinosaur land. But there could also still, and likely would, be genetic iterations after that/us which improve on our destructive nature. Just as we're better equipped to survive acid rain than a stegosaurus. And that's just this particular 'earth'.

I''m also unconvinced by this automatic assumption that lifeforms naturally evolve to populate the universe (I realise this runs counter to my original support for Nimitz). It's more likely imo we evolve smaller and stealthier and beyond light/electromagnetic wave detection so as not to freak out our intergalatic cousins. 

And to drift a little further into la la land, for all we know the apparently lifeless stars or gas giants are indeed 'alive' in some way that we have yet to detect or decode. I'm a fan of the theory that we, evolution, have survived in a way purely adapted to time and space, whilst remaining deeply ignorant of several other extremely significant dimensions that interact so weakly with our own we could've remained none-the-wiser had we not, ahem, *discovered* quantum physics, string theory and the like.

So for me just about anything is still on the table. Including giant metallic confectionery from Zeta Reticuli. I'm a flip-flopping, flat, holographic universe cosmic fence-sitter.

good post +1

[the hum]

My main gripe with the great filter theory is that from what we know about evolution - albeit from a sample size of one - is that it prioritises survival of the genome.

So the idea that most/all runtimes of carbon based lifeforms inevitably march into their own hubristic planet immolation before they traverse the stars or evolve beyond our current intelligence runs counter-intuitive to what we already know about the process that produced us. Now, sapiens might well not be the endgame of nature by a long-shot and there could certainly be something already profoundly corrupted in our biological software that sends us all into dinosaur land. But there could also still, and likely would, be genetic iterations after that/us which improve on our destructive nature. Just as we're better equipped to survive acid rain than a stegosaurus. And that's just this particular 'earth'.

I''m also unconvinced by this automatic assumption that lifeforms naturally evolve to populate the universe (I realise this runs counter to my original support for Nimitz). It's more likely imo we evolve smaller and stealthier and beyond light/electromagnetic wave detection so as not to freak out our intergalatic cousins. 

And to drift a little further into la la land, for all we know the apparently lifeless stars or gas giants are indeed 'alive' in some way that we have yet to detect or decode. I'm a fan of the theory that we, evolution, have survived in a way purely adapted to time and space, whilst remaining deeply ignorant of several other extremely significant dimensions that interact so weakly with our own we could've remained none-the-wiser had we not, ahem, *discovered* quantum physics, string theory and the like.

So for me just about anything is still on the table. Including giant metallic confectionery from Zeta Reticuli. I'm a flip-flopping, flat, holographic universe cosmic fence-sitter.

Yeah there's a good deal, possibly too much, of anthropomorphism going on in theories like the Great Filter and Fermi's Paradox. It may depend on whether life boils down to a competition for resources in all cases, or if life elsewhere has somehow (purely accidentally) managed to evolve in a more cooperative fashion.