Pentagon’s UFO unit will make some findings public

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-pentagon-ufo-unit-20200723-b3akzzy44zdgxc3bmhgko6nkgm-story.html

by aww_dang • 6 years ago

33 36 6 years ago

baltimoresun.com

dencodev2• 6 years ago

Previous discussion on this made it seem pretty obvious that the UFO unit existing was largely (if not only) due to nepotism and they're not releasing anything if substance - just more speculation for more funding.

not_kurt_godel• 6 years ago

And distraction from other events.

ShamelessC• 6 years ago

Nepotism? Can you elaborate or link the previous discussion?

dencodev2• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23943441

seibelj2• 6 years ago

I recognize this sounds completely insane -

What if aliens are more of a psychiatric phenomena? Aliens have the ability to cross galaxies and stay undetectable to most of our instruments. They manipulate our senses to stay hidden to us, and have the ability to wipe our memory, which only gets better over time as they interact and experiment on us more. The amount of technology that an alien civilization amongst us has would be incomprehensible to us, using aspects of physics that we have no idea exist. Probably they are observing us now in detail, waiting to reveal at the correct moment - or more likely, they are revealed when we discover far more advanced technology and we learn how to see them.

OK, thanks for reading.

david-gpu• 6 years ago

Have you heard of the concept of falsifiability? Replace "aliens" with "leprechauns" and attempt to dispute this alternative hypothesis.

seibelj2• 6 years ago

I would think aliens are far more likely to occur in the universe than leprechauns. I would say its a certainty there is other life, whereas leprechauns are certainly non-existent.

peroporque2• 6 years ago

How was that a hypothesis? It was merely a thought experiment.

WhiteWestie• 6 years ago

This is straight out of Doctor Who https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_(Doctor_Who)

unnouinceput2• 6 years ago

unable to read from EU. Had to resort to a US proxy

lucb1e• 6 years ago

care to ctrl+c the text to here so we can read it without subjecting ourselves to the tracking it apparently wants to do?

unnouinceput2• 6 years ago

Long text, here it is:

-----------------------

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public every six months.

While retired officials involved with the effort — including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader — hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a CBS affiliate in Miami this month that he was primarily concerned about reports of unidentified aircraft over U.S. military bases — and that it was in the government’s interest to find out who was responsible.

He expressed concerns that China or Russia or some other adversary had made “some technological leap” that “allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”

Rubio said some of the unidentified aerial vehicles over U.S. bases possibly exhibited technologies not in the U.S. arsenal. But he also noted: “Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.”

In 2017, The New York Times disclosed the existence of a predecessor unit, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Defense Department officials said at the time that the unit and its $22 million in funding had lapsed after 2012.

People working with the program, however, said it was still in operation in 2017 and beyond, statements later confirmed by the Defense Department.

The program was begun in 2007 under the Defense Intelligence Agency and was then placed within the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, which remains responsible for its oversight. But its coordination with the intelligence community will be carried out by the Office of Naval Intelligence, as described in the Senate budget bill. The program never lapsed in those years, but little was disclosed about the post-2017 operations.

The Pentagon program’s previous director, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who resigned in October 2017 after 10 years with the program, confirmed that the new task force evolved from the advanced aerospace program.

“It no longer has to hide in the shadows,” Elizondo said. “It will have a new transparency.”

Elizondo is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on Earth with materials retrieved for study.

For more than a decade, the Pentagon program has been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials, according to interviews with program participants and unclassified briefing documents.

In some cases, earthly explanations have been found for previously unexplained incidents. Even lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make an extraterrestrial one the most likely, astrophysicists say.

Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier UFO program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.

“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Reid said in an interview.

No crash artifacts have been publicly produced for independent verification. Some retrieved objects, such as unusual metallic fragments, were later identified from laboratory studies as man-made.

Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon UFO program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”

The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied UFOs in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence.

Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corp., a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.

Committee staff members did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.

Public fascination with the topic of UFOs has drawn in President Donald Trump, who told his son Donald Trump Jr. in a June interview that he knew “very interesting” things about Roswell — a city in New Mexico that is central to speculation about the existence of UFOs. The president demurred when asked if he would declassify any information on Roswell. “I’ll have to think about that one,” he said.

Either way, Reid said, more should be made public to clarify what is known and what is not. “It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out,” he said.

c.2020 The New York Times Company

dilandau• 6 years ago

Personal theory: UFOs are not aliens "like people" but are somehow related to information/energy/consciousness.

kpsnow• 6 years ago

I’ve always found it hard to believe a super advanced alien species keeps crashing their space planes.

tux1968• 6 years ago

Maybe they've just recently managed to make the technology work and they're still operating at the edge of their capabilities. Earth is just the first zoo they've decided to visit before moving on to more important worlds.

aiyodev• 6 years ago

Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corp., a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.

TehCorwiz4• 6 years ago

So, I had a thought about the wording they've been using to describe some of the more incredulous parts of this story.

Specifically this one: “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

That feels like a crafted, or intentionally obtuse statement. Now there is something to be said for the clinical and dry phrasing of scientists or the military. But this doesn't read to me as "extraterrestrial" and certainly not aliens.

Combined with the assertion this week that Russia was testing a space-based weapon[1], this reads as "A foreign adversary has built a vehicle in space. And we might have captured one."

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/russia-space-weapon-twitter-hack...

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Specifically this one: “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
That feels like a crafted, or intentionally obtuse statement. Now there is something to be said for the clinical and dry phrasing of scientists or the military. But this doesn't read to me as "extraterrestrial"

“extraterrrestrial” is just a single polysyllabic latinate word for “not made on this earth”. The statements are literally equivalent.

The more significant part of that is that the quote is in reference to someone given a briefing on retrieval techniques, for which precautionary procedures would be developed if your mission included dealing with the potentiality, even if there were no concrete past or current examples.

TehCorwiz4• 6 years ago

Yes, I know "extraterrestrial" literally means "not of this earth" but colloquially in the US it's used to mean the equivalent of "not of human origins" or "alien".

The point I was trying to make is that it's unlikely that any revelations will be about encountering, either intentionally or unintentionally, another culture or technology from outside our own gravity well.

throwaway7432• 6 years ago

Another interview with the same guy, Eric Davis:

"These things don't look like anything that we can manufacture on earth so we don't have the manufacturing or industrial technology for it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2gjPRv4E7s

9oliYQjP• 6 years ago

I agree. Even releasing the original videos showing the UFOs being tracked was likely sending a signal to an adversary. The fact that the objects were being tracked by commodity Navy fighter jets and not something more advanced might send the message “Look, our basic radar can easily track this thing, not to mention our more exotic classified equipment. If we can track it we can shoot it down.” I think this is an attempt to de-escalate a space-based weaponry race that may be getting out of hand.

mekkkkkk2• 6 years ago

I don't know what's more unbelievable, Russia building vehicles in space or extraterrestrials.

TehCorwiz4• 6 years ago

I know [Russia|China|SpaceX] exists and could prove it if pressed.

I have no evidence that extraterrestrial aliens exist and do not know of anyone else who does either. I could not prove that they did if my life depended on it.

That kinda places it in the build-by-humans camp for me. Heck it might not be a country, SpaceX builds its own rockets and that's a private corporation. Musk isn't the only sickeningly-rich person with space on their mind.

merricksb• 6 years ago

Smallish discussion a couple days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23931960

HenryKissinger• 6 years ago

I miss the time when mainstream conspiracy theories were about aliens and governments spying on us. These ideas never harmed anyone. Now we have antivaxxers and the cult of Q.

Keyframe• 6 years ago

I’m afraid to even ask what the cult of Q is. Something tells me it’s not Star trek related.

krapp2• 6 years ago

QAnon is what happens when Pizzagate and Christian apocalyptic dominionism have a baby.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

mellosouls• 6 years ago

Currently being discussed here fwiw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942463

bitcurious• 6 years ago

My favorite (sort of sad) theory is that this is Martian/Venetian/etc. space junk. The people are long gone but there’s some stuff to out there to be found.

peroporque2• 6 years ago

Would be interesting to hear some new findings on the 2004 video from the US Navy.

The pilot was recently on the Joe Rogan podcast and talked about it.

I don't believe in anything "aliens", but I'm not really sure what to make of that story.

icey• 6 years ago

Has a timeline for the announcement been mentioned in any of these articles? So far it's only been that there will be some kind of announcement, but I can't find any suggestions of when.

Sometimes I wonder if these leaks are strategic as a way to say "hey, if this is you, last chance to come forward before we talk about this publicly"; maybe a little more "are you suuuuuuure these aren't your toys?" before someone finally comes out and says "We found this weirdly shaped hunk of metal and it seems cool but we don't know how to make it".

The conspiracy theorist in me hopes that we found something on Mars, and that's what's been causing all the expeditions out there recently.

philistine• 6 years ago

Let’s discuss this rationally and stick to the facts.

You have the US government being forced to be more open about its research on unidentified objects. The most credible reason those events exist is that Russia or China have stealth capabilities beyond what the US knows.

Having these reports out in the public also helps us understand the great mystery of this article: what is making Harry Reid, a senior Senator of great import, so convinced that his own government has access to alien artifacts?

throwaway7432• 6 years ago

Eric Davis, contractor quoted in the article, stated in another interview that the superpowers of the world have had their fair share of crashes and retrievals. The US isn't unique in this scenario.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2gjPRv4E7s

Pentagon’s UFO unit will make some findings public

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