Let me rephrase that for you: NASA uses public obsession with conspiratorial nonsense to try and obtain more funding for real shit.
It would shock me if there wasn't life elsewhere in the universe, but space and time are stupid huge, and the credulous nonsense from UFO enthusiasts is incredibly annoying to me.
Like, sure - anything we don't understand should be investigated, and NASA is criminally under-resourced in all areas, but don't get annoyed when it still isn't aliens.
They have a $22 billion annual budget. SpaceX’s annual revenue this year is projected to be about $8 billion and profitable for the first time. SpaceX launch’s more rockets and puts more satellites into space than the rest of the world combined on revenue about 1/3rd of NASA’s budget.
NASA isn’t criminally underfunded they are criminally inefficient.
29.3%, as directed by Congress. Not all of this allocation goes to Artemis/SLS, it's for the totality of all the lunar projects for which these projects comprise the largest part.
Well I wouldn't entirely disagree - I should clarify that congressional projects like the SLS are wasteful nonsense. The parts of NASA that I think are under-resourced are planetary science, advanced propulsion etc. Research, in other words.
I have multiple anecdotes of incredibly narcissistic people that refuse to believe some conspiracies are totally plausible, and that pretty much everything is as it seems, and as we are told. While there may be some pattern to it, I'd be incorrect if I were to apply it personally.
It’s amazing how more and more organizations are stating this is a real thing and every time detractors have a spin because they don’t want to have been wrong claiming everyone who was interested in UFOs was a batshit conspiracy theorist.
Incorrect - I 100% believe that UAP are real phenomena, and that there are strong military and science cases for investigating them. I am annoyed at all the enthusiastic people actively presuming that it's aliens. Like... that's in no way a reasonable null assumption, and until strong evidence shows otherwise it's actively harmful and counterproductive. Meanwhile it's a substantial moneymaker for a lot of people, which is still more grating.
> It’s amazing how more and more organizations are stating this is a real thing
It's amazing how exaggerated claims like that are. When you try to track down these organizations saying "ayy lmaos are real" you actually come up with organizations saying things like "the video is real" (and incidentally, shows an airliner 30 miles away) or "there are UAP" (translation: "It's an areal phenomena that we can't identify because the video quality is shit, and we certainly don't have any reason to conclude that it's aliens but we're going to call it a UAP because that's literally what it is.")
The direct claims of it being aliens are all coming from obviously batshit kooks repeating things they claim they heard other people say. e.g. David Grusch.
I could possibly buy aliens visiting etc, on a long enough time scale humanity could colonize the galaxy without ftl drives. I want to believe but there's too many holes.
One of the biggest is Gruschs claim that there's 12 or more captured space craft that have crashed etc and we have alien specimens....
Are you telling me an advanced civ that builds hardy interstellar spacecraft made it here with 12 vehicles or many more but managed to crash 12 of them and not recover the wreckage?
Doesn't seem that well planned for a kardashev 2 to 3 civilization.
What no UFO believer seems to be able to answer is the very simple question of Why?
Why would an alien society advanced enough to travel here even bother to do so? If they would bother, why send a manned craft? Why send a craft big enough to be spotted by humans?
Eliezer Yudkowsky made a big post about this a while back, where he lays out the very sensible reasons that UFOs being explained by aliens makes no sense. (yes, i know, EY is annoying, I disclaim in advance all necessary disclaimers about him. He's right about this, at least).
> Why would an alien society advanced enough to travel here even bother to do so? If they would bother, why send a manned craft? Why send a craft big enough to be spotted by humans?
Imagine a chimpanzee in some remote jungle asking themselves the same question about "alien" humans.
There's probably other life in the universe (intelligent or not), but I doubt its ET visiting us in an FTL tractor.
Besides, the visiting methodology of these aliens wouldn't match their alleged level of advancement (unless they evolved beyond what we on Earth call common sense), if you think about it
> but I doubt its ET visiting us in an FTL tractor
I have no idea whether there are aliens, or whether they are visiting, or how they could be doing it. A little over a century ago we had no idea that matter bended spacetime, so who knows what we will know about FTL in another century.
> Besides, the visiting methodology of these aliens wouldn't match their alleged level of advancement (unless they evolved beyond what we on Earth call common sense), if you think about it
How so? It's always good to understand whst other people think.
>> Besides, the visiting methodology of these aliens wouldn't match their alleged level of advancement (unless they evolved beyond what we on Earth call common sense), if you think about it
> How so? It's always good to understand whst other people think.
The post I linked from Eliezer explains it better than I can, so I'll just quote him:
> Their technology would not be such that, having arrived here across interstellar distances and then remained hidden, they'd need to fly around in large visible vehicles
> I have enormously wide uncertainty over the possible range of alien technologies. But I can use current knowledge of physics and chemistry, and the advance analyses that others have done of what technological possibilities those imply, to put a lower bound under alien technology that's comfortably above "needs to use giant flying vehicles for travel or surveillance".
> I don't need to know exactly what aliens are trying to do, to know that only a few and unlikely goals would imply a best possible strategy of flying around in sightable UFOs while staying otherwise hidden.
Humans have considerably more ability to think through the logic of a decision. And as other commenters mentioned, the difference in the level of effort to go see a chimp in person versus the effort of sending a spacecraft across astronomical distances is huge.
I don't agree with the form of the argument here either - "the aliens are so advanced that you can't possibly fathom their reasons." Or even, more charitably - "the aliens are so advanced that a trip to see humans is trivial." In either case, stating "they're so advanced that we can't possibly make sense of them" doesn't mean the question's not valid.
This. If we deem them intelligent, using ourselves as a guide, then would they not pursue far planet exploration as we have ... unmanned?
Unless it was cheap and easy for (their version of Elon Musk anyway) them to travel, and what we are seeing is simply unscientific, ill advised tourism?
Grusch, and all of the numerous "whistleblowers" and "eyewitnesses" for one. The narrative is that UFOs are manned interdimensional craft, and that the US and other governments have recovered both "non human biologics" from the pilots and reverse engineered alien technology.
If you want to go in another direction - that UFOs are unmanned probes - you have to separate the UAP phenomenon from the greater UFO mythology, but that isn't really feasible when you've got people like Steven Greer and Lue Elizondo involved.
He's claimed far more than that. "Non-human origin technical vehicles, call them spacecraft if you will," from which "pilots" have been recovered. Some of these craft were apparently the size of football fields, made of unidentifiable materials. He's implied that he believes these craft don't come from other planets, but other dimensions, that secret agreements between the government and the intelligences behind these craft exist, and that people have been murdered to cover it up.
He's not talking about monkeys in drones, or anything even remotely terrestrial.
This reminds me of something I’ve never understood about the UFO conversation- especially about people who believe in it.
Shouldn’t the conversation primarily be about radar and sensor evidence? Not videos or (worse) eyewitness accounts, which should be the thing we talk about last.
Whenever there is a field which is too complicated or hard to track accurately by humans, we turn to computers. A good example: high frequency trading. Another example: the calculations and work machines do in all kinds of factories. It’s too fast for the human mind to do and also it would be inaccurate, so we design machines that can do it, and rely on them.
I think the UFO conversation should primarily be about conversations like this: “We have this radar data which we consider trustworthy (explain why). It doesn’t have any pictures to go along with it, but if you look at the numbers, it shows a vehicle accelerating at very high speed. It isn’t much for the senses, BUT because of the way the data is collected, we have very, very high confidence that this vehicle acted in exactly the way described. It’s definitely not a hallucination, which isn’t possible on a radar system, and here are the reasons why it’s not an error…”
It seems to me that this is where most “serious” UFO conversations of the type NASA is describing should start. Yet I can’t name a single one which fits this description.
I agree. Unfortunately military radars are classified systems, and civil radars do not currently publish any such information systematically either. So we are left with anecdotes.
If people started demanding such data to be collected systematically and published, then it could be researched. But for the most part the stigma around the subject makes people not bother asking for these sort of things.
If NASA puts their satellites in space with their new fancy UFO detectors, and they start detecting many UFOs in the absence of eye witness accounts, do you believe them? It is very dangerous to discredit human accounts and trust a process that cannot be verified.
Be skeptical of any claims that aliens are real, no matter who is making the claim.
That's already happened many times. It doesn't really lead anywhere because if radar tracks are all you have there's nothing to investigate. But for example US air traffic and military radar control has had a bunch of cases like that.
After the Grusch testimony in Congress, I've asked a few people what they thought about it. Across the board, no one even comes close to considering this possible to be real. Even those who I thought would be open minded to the idea. It's kind of fascinating. It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer. I've been surprised.
Extraordinary claims require corresponding evidence - simple as that. There wasn't anything that isn't simpler to explain through some combination of grift and delusion.
Edit: I am specifically talking about aliens, insinuation of aliens, hinting at aliens, waving one's hands vaguely at something that sounds like it might be aliens, and generally treating aliens as equally or nearly as probable as mundane explanations for various reports.
That's the core of it: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Mistakes can happen without grift or delusion. A fighter pilot who spends an entire career training against fighter-sized opponents might honestly mistake a small nearby slow-moving drone for a fighter-sized distant fast-moving drone. A radar tech might see returns that fly away at unearthly speeds because that's how jamming works (create fake bait return, fly it away).
But repeated, insistent refusal to engage with obvious dull alternative hypotheses? Yeah, that's delusion / grift.
On top of this, we already know the vast majority of people making claims about UFOs (and paranormal activity in general) are cranks and grifters, and that “ufologists” are people with poor judgement that get fooled by these folks. You can book UFO tours where people will give you nightvision goggle and show you all the UFOs that are flying around you right now. Now one should be surprised that most people will simply brush off yet more claims like this unless there’s actually evidence there.
There’s simply not enough time to run down every single crank rabbit hole.
It's infuriating. He talked to 40 people, some "very high level", which is ambigious sure but Grush himself was a Colonel equivlent when he was in the NGIA, but there is a significant amount of people inside the government who are directly telling Grusch we have this stuff. He gave the ISG all the evidence (documents etc) names, interviews etc. The ISG declared it an urgant concern (this is apparently seperate from the retaliation claims).
He goes and gives a summary of this stuff to congress, and random normal people say "oh there's no evidence", but he clearly HAD IT, AND gave it to the ISG. Congress asked to see it, and have been denied. Why are they being denied if there's nothing? How can congress properly perform their function of oversight if they keep getting denied requests?
What's frustrating is there's a sector of the government that seems happy to say "we haven't see any evidence, must be nothing" while at the same time the government is refusing to share the supposed evidence.
I think in 2017 I would have been one of the skeptical people, but the more I watch this play out, it's cystal clear there is something and there is a group of people in our government who want it out there, and a group of people in our government who absolutely do not.
Evidence of what though? My problem is with the unfounded claims/implications/hype/grift that it might be aliens. There are lots of interesting nonmagical explanations for the reported phenomena, that we should absolutely pin down. These distinctions matter.
The problem is that there's a whole conspiratorial ecosystem which has been thriving on the news/testimony.
It’s made out to be a big deal but nothing he said revealed anything new. It’s all been part of the lore for decades. He wasn’t a direct witness and all he gave was hearsay. He basically testified that some people he trusted told him things and showed him some documents. The only difference than all of the past revelations is that congress let him testify.
Honestly it was disappointing to me. Someone with his bonafides standing up, raising a hand, and testifying in congress that they have been inside one of these things, was part of the program revere engineering them, or gave an alien a handy would be an interesting development. Until that time, I chalk this up to simply more of the same blurry assumptive evidence that looks a little too much like a pie plate.
So either parts of the US government have been lying about for years about not having "alien" bodies and tech or parts of the US government are lying now about having "alien" bodies and tech.
In five years, a "conspiracy theorist" will be defined as someone who refuses to believe the propaganda from on high about UFOs/UAPs.
No sensible people should attach stigma to figuring out anomalous sensor reading or trying to classify unknown phenomena. Similarly, no sensible people immediately jump to AlIeNs as a plausible hypothesis, and that should continue to be the case unless and until the evidence actually starts to overcome the priors we have from our understanding of physics, sensor technology, optics, and psychology.
I've always found that saying dumb. It's basically stating that this is the null hypothesis, and you have to have p = 0.001 to convince me otherwise.
When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence".
On our journey through life, most people develop a fairly good sense of prior probabilities and that manifests through excitement. Actual aliens? Exciting. People misinterpreting noisy information? Dull. Telephone game stories getting out of hand? Dull. People lying for clout? Dull. Prestigious people doing all of the above? Dull, dull, dull.
Equal-weighting an arbitrary list of options is a terrible prior distribution that does not tap anyone's knowledge of how the world works. Weighting by excitement, however, does exactly this. To convincingly prove aliens you need to convincingly disprove the dull alternatives. It's easy to imagine extraordinary evidence that could do this -- but I don't see any extraordinary evidence here. I see a bunch of ordinary evidence and people who want to believe.
It’s nonsensical to claim that to prove something you have to disprove alternate explanations. In an information environment where confirmable facts are scarse, you get the clearest vision by operating on probability. And on black-swan-tier questions the ’wisdom of the crowd’ is worthless - too much noise caused by nobody willing to advocate the black swan event, and too little prior events for the crowd to be able to calibrate itself beyond this.
Your way of dealing with complex questions is also arbitrary.
In today's economy of attention, grifters are very common and extraordinary claims like "I know for a fact that Aliens have made it to Earth and they have technologies beyond our current understanding of physics. Also there is a conspiracy to hide this fact." can rationally be ignored in the absence of irrefutable proof. At most it's entertaining to hear.
> When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence".
That may be true, but I the case of interstellar travel, we have mountains of solid evidence to prove it's not possible (essentially all of physics for the last 100 years or so), and some vague claims with 0 evidence claiming it's actually happening. To convince us that all that physics is wrong you have to bring some extraordinary evidence, not claims that you heard someone knows someone who saw something.
Interstellar travel is possible even with the physics we know. A sub-light civilization could colonize the entirety of Milky Way in a million years or so.
The question is what the probability is for an intelligent species to evolve per solar system, and the more complex questions of how long they would survive etc. We only have a single datapoint (us) which only gives us the knowledge that intelligent life can evolve, but no direction whatsoever as to its probability.
I should say not feasible instead of not possible. And this million years number comes with some massive assumptions about societal stability, the possibility of mining resources from lifeless planets etc.
Notwithstanding that p-values precisely can't tell you about the relative probabilities of different events (they measure the probability of data under a given hypothesis, rather than in favor of a specific alternative), you have it precisely backwards. In this case, we have anomalous observations, but we have a current-best-understanding of the physical universe that makes us skeptical of supernatural claims (a bucket into which I include magic star hopping aliens that only allow us glimpses of them jetting around our atmosphere).
So either we have a strong prior that the data needs to overcome, or we have a sensible null position (e.g., UAPs are the result of natural phenomena or human technology - probably both) that would need to be overcome by strong evidence.
It's still worth getting more specific and learning more about the bucket of things that get lumped together into "UAP", but that doesn't change the fact that I think people are completely justified in dismissing all the alien BS.
Testimony is often wrong. The testimony for the Mormon religion is just as compelling (arguably more compelling) than any UFO incident, yet the vast majority of people don't convert to Mormonism.
Major difference being, you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who would call David Grusch "not trustworthy". Smith had already been convicted of "glass looking" to find buried treasure by the time he claimed to find these golden plates. Further, how many of the witnesses were not related? Lastly, how many of the witnesses later explained that their "vision" of the plates was in the spiritual realm, not the physical?
If David Grusch had showed up with a bunch of family members who claimed to have seen UAPs being dismantled with their "spiritual eyes", then perhaps I'd put his testimony on par with Joseph Smith (and Oliver Cowdrey and David Whitmer)
He's an intelligence official, so he is a priori untrustworthy, isn't he? There is 0 reason to take something an intelligence official tells you on trust.
People are not asking to "believe" his testimony. We are asking to investigate the very specific classified information he shared with the ICIG, such as locations, directors, first-hand witnesses and project names.
The poster above was claiming that "no one is claiming Grusch is untrustworthy". As an intelligence official, he is the epitome of untrustworthy-ness. To start detailed public investigations, you'd first have to believe that his words mean something.
Of course, I would expect some internal investigation into if and why he is claiming these things, if it's not already known. But I don't see why anyone should spend any significant resources (let alone the public at large) going by the words of someone who is payed to hide things from the public.
> But I don't see why anyone should spend any significant resources (let alone the public at large) going by the words of someone who is payed to hide things from the public.
If there is a conspiracy inside the DoD to hide reverse-engineering projects from congressional oversight, as Grusch claims, then there is a good chance that no investigations will actually be performed without significant pressure from the public.
That is why public engagement is important. Public apathy enables corruption.
And if there isn't, the investigation will be a massive waste of money and time, and it's only result would be to maybe send Grusch to jail. And given how vague and fact-free his public testimony was, even that is not guaranteed.
> It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer.
Really depends on what your priors are. For almost everyone, the existence of aliens has a much, much lower probability than the probability of someone lying about it or being mistaken about it.
As a sanity check, imagine a person with a similar background testified to congress that elves are real and have been kidnapping children and replacing them with changelings. How would you rate the relative probabilities of that being the truth or him being a liar or mistaken?
This isn't really arbitrary -- there are plenty of people in the world who deeply believe in the existence of elves and little people.
When you refuse rigorous research to be conducted in a subject, you can't act surprised when the existing evidence is lacking in rigor.
Your priors are that it is unlikely to be true, and I respect that. My priors on the existence of dark matter WIMPS is also fairly low yet I don't dismiss people who are trying to find them.
> When you refuse rigorous research to be conducted in a subject, you can't act surprised when the existing evidence is lacking in rigor.
Alien fans say stuff like this all the time, but where is the evidence that rigorous research on this is being blocked? We spent like a billion dollars on SETI. There are volumes and volumes of actual science looking for extraterrestrial life. _It's not out there_. It's not like the skepticism about aliens is based on a refusal to look at the evidence. If aliens were real and they were visiting earth, you'd expect all of the instruments we have scanning outer space constantly would find _some_ evidence of ships or communication or life or _anything_. There is _nothing_.
People don't take the supposed evidence of UFOs seriously because in the context of _everything else we know about outer space_, it's extraordinarily unlikely that our _only_ evidence of extraterrestrial life would be some grainy video of a lozenge shape object taken from an airplane.
(which isn't to say that there's no life anywhere else in the universe, maybe some level of microbial life is common, I don't know, but if there were civilizations capable of interstellar travel, it would be a lot more obvious)
Any scientist would dearly love to find any extraterrestrial life. It would be world fame and an instant nobel prize. It'd be one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind. The idea that scientists aren't looking for alien life is just silly.
> Alien fans say stuff like this all the time, but where is the evidence that rigorous research on this is being blocked?
Did I say that it is being blocked? I am saying that it is not being done. The SETI leadership is actively hostile to searching for UAPs in our vicinity like Avi Loeb is trying to do now. And this is no unique to SETI but rather it is a widespread stigma that affects academia in general.
> The idea that scientists aren't looking for alien life is just silly.
How many scientists can you name that are looking for signs of technologically advanced non-human craft in our atmosphere? How many grants are there to research this? Because I only know of one (Avi Loeb) and he was only able to start doing this sometime last year against massive opposition and stigma from his colleagues.
> How many scientists can you name that are looking for signs of technologically advanced non-human craft in our atmosphere?
The US government and, indeed, almost every government on earth, scans our atmosphere constantly for alien craft both from earth and using satellites (which is to say, they're looking for missiles and bombers) because it's sort of a core function of national security to control your own airspace. I'm not sure you need anything extra to find "non-human" spacecraft.
> The US government and, indeed, almost every government on earth, scans our atmosphere constantly for alien craft both from earth and using satellites (which is to say, they're looking for missiles and bombers) because it's sort of a core function of national security to control your own airspace. I'm not sure you need anything extra to find "non-human" spacecraft.
And do they systematically release that data for academic researchers to analyze? Or is it automatically classified? If it is classified (hint:it is) then how do we know what they have found?
If you were part of the military brass and your mission was thus the defense of your nation, what would you do if you received radar reports of objects behaving unlike anything else that your known technology could do? And if upon further research your experts determined beyond reasonable doubt that these anomalies are real craft, what would you do? Remember that your mission is to provide every possible military advantage to your country and to prevent other countries from gaining an advantage agsinst you.
Me? I would try to shoot them down to study them and keep the lid on the whole thing to prevent our adversaries from leapfrogging our current technology.
I'm not saying "we don't know have X data, so Y must be true/false, I am saying there is a perfectly plausible explanation for why if data from military sources did exist then it wouldn't automatically be known to the public. Because that is the argument that was being made by the comment I was replying to.
If you have a more detailed criticism I would be happy to address it.
Replace "true/false" with "probably/reasonable to consider" and you're doing exactly that. You're using uncertainty to elevate an implausible hypothesis for consideration.
The comment I replied to was stating that if alien vehicles visited Earth then the military would be aware of it, with the implicit assumption that if the military was aware of UAPs then the it would inform the public.
My counterargument is that if the military detected UAPs then they would have both a strong incentive not to inform the public and the means to keep it secret. Thus the (public) absence of (military) evidence is not evidence of absence.
My experience has been the same. While I find the publicly available evidence rather lacking, I don't feel comfortable dismissing the testimony of high-ranking intelligence officials and would like their claims to be investigated seriously.
As for the general public, their thinking appears to largely boil down to "if something as big as this was true, we would already know about it", together with the circular "there has never been any solid evidence, therefore everybody knows this is bullshit, therefore anybody who talks about it is a kook or a fraud, therefore it is not worth investigating".
I hope either Avi Loeb's Galileo project or the UAP Disclosure Act included in the NDAA 2024 bill will bring some clarity to the subject over the next couple of years.
There are rumors of witnesses coming out later this year with first-hand knowledge of reverse-engineering programs, but I doubt the general public will be swayed by testimony alone.
We have no credible evidence of aliens, and plenty of rock-solid evidence that high-level intelligence officials can lie to congress publicly with no repercussions (Iraq WMDs). The equation seems pretty simple.
Then why not have Congress investigate the very specific claims he made to the ICIG (locations, people, companies, projects) and send him to prison if he was lying? Why the passive "it must be false do let's refuse to do anything about it, including bringing him to justice" attitude?
> Then why not have Congress investigate his claims and send him to prison if he was lying?
Because Congress is neither the investigatory institution for things that may result in prison nor the entity that makes determinations of guilt in such cases, Constitutionally?
> Because Congress is neither the investigatory institution for things that may result in prison nor the entity that makes determinations of guilt in such cases, Constitutionally?
Lying to Congress under oath is a felony. Grusch testified under oath to Congress. He could be indicted and sent to prison.
I would appreciate a little bit of charity in the interest of having a friendly conversation.
Because his claims, at least the public ones, we're actually very vague, and an investigation is very likely to not find the things he's claiming, but also not be able to rule them out to a level where he could be indicted (beyond a reasonable doubt). So there is very little upside to the huge waste of money and time.
I also find peoples generatal non-response strange, though, I don't find Grusch's testimony that compelling: he didn't actually see anything, or really have any evidence. I find the US Navy pilot observations to be both more credible, and more interesting. Those I know who have looked into it, both IRl and online, both seem to take any debunking of the videos by Mick West to be the final word on the subject, but to me the videos are just short views into much longer encounters viewed by multiple people.
The response of the public at large seems both muted, and a bit off. US Navy pilots claim to see UFOs? The response largely seems to be "They're just Chinese spy balloons or something, who cares, yawn". But then actual Chinese spy balloons show up and the public/media loses their minds over it.
Navy pilot David Fravor, who has the most compelling story of any of them, has also admitted to perpetrating UFO hoaxes on people for shits and giggles. UFOlogists have decided to lean into America's "troop worship", holding up military personnel as paragons of virtue and honesty because respect muh troops, to turn these pilot witnesses into unimpeachable evidence. But David Fravor admitted on camera that he thought it was funny to create false UFO sightings with his plane. When this same man then starts making claims about UFOs "but totally for real this time", it takes serious credulity to take his claims at face value.
Fravors "Hoax" involved flying F/A-18E Super Hornets at low level, at night, over campfires they could see along their route and lighting their after burners. This was done in areas like Nellis where there are a lot of military jet activity. Anyone watching from the ground with any modicum of exposure to military jets would have immediately known from the site and sound exactly what it was. He was putting on a show. Did he otherwise publish videos, pictures, articles, or other media to try to otherwise "dupe" the public into believing that these were "UFOS"? No.
The context of the discussion in Fravors interview he was more jokingly describing some of the cowboy stunts that military pilots do that might be mistakingly interpreted as UFOs.
By his account he was deliberately creating fake UFO sightings.
> The context of the discussion in Fravors interview he was more jokingly describing some of the cowboy stunts that military pilots do that might be mistakingly interpreted as UFOs.
That may have been his intent in sharing the story, so what? Obviously he intended for the story to increase his credibility, but that doesn't mean it does. His story reveals that he thinks UFO hoaxing is funny. Or... he made up the story for some rhetorical reason or to impress Joe Rogan, which would make him a liar.
Imagine a used car salesman tells you "I know what you probably think about used car salesmen, and it's true that I've ripped some people off before. But in your case I'm going to be straight up and give you a great deal." This is a tactic taught in sales and persuasion books designed to make you trust the salesman; by admitting to some past transgressions they hope to make you feel as though they're being open and honest with you. But what does it actually tell you? Either the story of past transgressions is real, in which case the salesman has an admitted history of scamming people, or the story is made up and the salesman is lying to you to manipulate you. Either way you slice it, it's a huge red flag.
But, if Fravors story isn't credible because of that, to me it doesn't change much:
- The "tic tac" video recorded from that encounter wasn't recorded when Fravor was in the air, he was back at the carrier. It was a follow on flight that had their aircraft equipped with targetting pods.
- Fravor's aircraft had a backseat WSO who witnessed what Fravor saw, to my knowledge that officer hasn't spoken in public or denied Fravor's story
- There was a second aircraft in the air when Fravor had that encounter, also with a pilot and WSO. The pilot of that second aircraft has interviewed confirming Fravor's story.
- Radar operators from the Princeton operating the AEGIS radar have interviewed saying that they also saw the objects.
- To my knowledge no one, either in the air, on the carrier, or in the air wing has stepped forward and claimed that Fravor, or anyone else was lying, or making up stories.
It's always this same excuse. Fravor shared his UFO hoaxing story ostensibly to tell Joe Rogan that he knows how military jets might be misunderstood as UFOs, but that doesn't mean we're not allowed to draw any other conclusions from his story. His story, assuming it's real (assuming otherwise is even worse for Fravor's credibility), tells us that Fravor thinks that it's funny to deceive people about UFOs. I've seen the full video, I know the context. The context doesn't change anything.
> Distrust the car salesman? But the CONTEXT of him telling a story about scamming people was to tell me that he understands why people distrust car salesmen. The fact that he's being open about this tells me that he's being honest with me!
The ostensible context counts for shit, he admitted to being a UFO hoaxer in the past and he's either lying about that or telling the truth, but either way his word w.r.t. UFOs is now dogshit.
And the fact that his old colleagues haven't spoken out against him doesn't give me any confidence. There are a myriad of personal reasons that might be the case, including genuine affinity for the man who by all the accounts I've heard is very likeable in most if not all other respects. Mick West interviewed F-18 Pilot Brian Burke and Burke was gushing with praise of Farvor. Burke also said that he thinks Farvor would never perpetrate a UFO hoax himself, evidently unaware that Farvor already publicly admitted to doing so. So the professionals who worked with or adjacent to Farvor liked him, thinks he's trustworthy, and are apparently unaware or in denial of Farvor's prankster side. https://youtu.be/r3keF8rf7Ig?t=6300
It's also said in the JRE video, Fravor isn't the only military pilot to have done that stunt, and likely won't be the last. When pilots perform such flights, they aren't taking those jets out with the intention of performing a 'hoax'. They're going out on a normal night time low level qualification mission, where the parameters of the mission are to fly with lights off, at low level, along some routing, in a military range closed to other aviation traffic. Eventually, they have to climb up to elevation, and return to base, and there is some leeway in how that last part gets done, and they have chosen to do it close to campfires or other lights they see in their NVGs, while lighting the afterburner. Fravor also says in the JRE episode that they flew a lot of those missions, suggesting that there is a level of boredom and complacency. He also says that it was a restricted bombing range, so the campfires he sees are likely people who are tresspassing/sneaking into the range often with the intention of spotting/photographing fighter jets, so he wants to give them a bit of a show, also to let the campers know that the pilot know that they're there.
Fighter pilot culture wouldn't see such pranks as that big of a deal. That's why when people like Burke talk about Fravor they only see the decades of service to his country, about his conduct while commanding a fighter squadron, of leading other pilots into combat, or being a naval aviator. A simple prank at the end of a training mission that fighter pilots anywhere would chuckle over at the O'club doesn't rise to the level of needing to be mentioned, and wouldn't even stand out as being remarkable enough to even be remembered.
I also think when Burke is talking about a 'UFO Hoax', I think he is trying to say that he doesn't see Fravor perpetrating a false sighting, and then doing interview after interview about the Nimitz encounter and basically straight up lying with the intention of decieving the public. As I said above, the simple prank of lighting after burners over campfires over people likely trespassing on a restricted bombing range and along frequently used military training routes wouldn't rise to the level of being remarkable enough to be considered a 'hoax' in the eyes of a fellow fighter pilot. That is why Fravor doesn't bat an eye about telling the story, and that is why Burke doesn't mention it when discussing Fravors character or credibility. Also note that in Fravors campfire story, there is no lie, there is no deceit, there is no conspiracy and ongoing narrative to convince the public otherwise. To fighter pilots it's just a prank. Go to an airshow and you'll see the Blue Angles do basically the same thing. One fighter sneaks off low, and while the rest are doing acrobatics above, that one fighter comes in low over the crowd from out of sight and scares the daylights out of everyone. Fighter pilots love that stuff.
But, I take your point. I agree it doesn't help his credibility.
So, the sinister, diabolical, and self-admitted hoaxer Fravor, whos character has been compared to a sleezy used-car salesman online, somehow manages to get 60 nautical miles off the aircraft carrier during a training deployment without being spotted, deploy a drone/balloon, somehow gets back to the carrier in time to go on his training mission, spots his decoy, manages to convince another pilot that it's something strange, strange enough that they convince another pair of aircraft to go out and identify Fravors drone, and they manages to get it on their targetting pod... and then, in his vile deceitfulness, Fravor then does.... nothing, and basically tells no one.
That is until 13 years later, when the singer of Blink-182 goes on a fishing expedition with freedom of information requests, and somehow a short video segment of Fravors heinous hoax come to light.
I'd find it more concerning if it came from someone else close to Fravor that he'd trolled people before, but not from Fravor himself. He spoke about it on a public interview. Obviously it's not something he's worried about being known, and he's not worried about it hurting his credibility.
Sure, it seems unlikely that someone who has hoaxed UFOs in the past would be the one to have an actual encounter, but UFOs are pretty common in conversation and on peoples' minds, especially in the last couple decades. I'm sure many pilots have wondered what it might be like to encounter a UFO.
I am one of those, "I have no idea how I feel" types. Sadly I'm a bit apathetic. Perhaps there's life out there, perhaps each of these incidents has a rational, "it's a secret government project" explanation.
But, what I noticed about that whole exchange with congress, was how willing folks were to detail information in a SCIF and how that's where it ended.
Similarly with the NASA stuff, I'm hearing they were only willing to discuss public info and nothing that's classified. I'm not sure of the usefulness there.
> It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer.
Yes because intelligence officers would never lie to congress or to the public. They are established paragons of integrity and should trusted unquestionably.
You've misunderstood my point - I'm not saying he's trustworthy. I'm saying deciding whether or not he's trustworthy isn't such a black-and-white issue, and that I'm surprised at how black-and-white so many people are trying to make it. What if reality is more complicated and we're filtering out valuable information? What if he's not completely wrong, nor completely right? Just surprised at a lack of willingness to consider the grey areas.
Nobody is asking you to take Grusch's testimony as gospel. We are asking Congress to investigate the very specific claims he made to the ICIG, including locations, people and projects.
What I wonder, why would someone go out of their way and trying to discredit Grusch because he had PTS?
Is that all part of the game to make his testimony seem more plausible?
Or just a bad attempt at smearing his reputation?
Idk.
How can likelihood that another earth like planet exists be “a least a trillion”? Probability should be expressed as a scalar in the range 0-1. Do they mean there are at least a trillion other planets or probability is 1 in at least a trillion?
The Military-intelligence sector has a long history of pushing things out that are less than true, often for the benefit of the national security state.
This UFO/UAP guff is great cover for the advanced AI piloted aircraft/spacecraft sightings that will be inevitable in the coming years.
Bonus: The Controlled Disclosure Campaign Plan [0]
They also said that they are all for transparency right before keeping the name of their director of UAP Research secret; they thankfully recanted hours later.
And while they also insisted that the stigma around UAPs must be left behind, the head of NASA described people who want more information about Roswell as "kooks".
Therefore, I think it is fair to say that their messaging has been mixed, even within the confines of yesterday's presentation.
Roswell isn't known to be anything to the general public. The public has a similar fog-of-war on Roswell as it has on the modern unidentified aerial phenomena. Therefore stigmatizing one group unfortunately stigmatizes the other group as well.
The 'Roswell incident' is known to have been a Project Mogul balloon, covered up at the time for obvious reasons. Go look at the debris pictures that were published in newspapers and started the public obsession. It's a bunch of sticks and foil, obviously Mogul debris and obviously not a spacecraft. Anybody who still believes Roswell was anything extraterrestrial is either oblivious or a kook.
Not to the public but to internal agencies. They might know for a definitive fact that Roswell is bullshit, while UAPs continue to be an unknown variable.
Every generation for the last 80 years or so we seem to go through some "UFO phase" with agencies, politicians, etc. getting airtime or funding etc. - seems like it always needs rediscovering that there is nothing relevant there.
The perfect 3-letter-induced psy-op (or maybe even 4 letters, if we were to let NASA in on this). Interesting how alien life has only bothered presenting itself as UFOs over the territory of the United States, people from other parts of the world don’t seem to have the same obsession (and back when they had it was mostly via US media and movies anyway)
Non-scientific explanations of almost any phenomenon are going to be highly culturally dependent. It's not like it's new that people have seen unexplained things in the sky -- just prior to the modern understanding of the cosmos, people explained it as gods or spirits or omens or whatever. It used to be, in fact, that many more things in the sky were 'unexplained' (Comets, super novas, aurora, lightning, etc) and now we're reduced to a much smaller number of unexplained things.
It's a normal thing for people to look for the intentional action of some entity for anything that's unexplained, and in a lot a people it takes on a religious or spiritual character. For some people, aliens (and conspiracy theories in general) are their religious explanation for things they don't understand.
I think for us to have a scientific explanation for any of this stuff that _actually_ lands on aliens, you're going to have to systematically eliminate every other possible explanation, and the eventual theory would have to then go on to explain a large number of other phenomena in consistent ways.
If NASA cares about understanding UFOs so much, why don't they assemble a small team of people to do what Mick West does? Take videos of ostensible UFOs, figure out where and when they come from and cross reference them against flight logs from airplanes to rule out most of these videos. Why is one retired ex videogame developer able to do this while entire government organizations sit around on their asses for years saying "oh gee we just aren't sure what these videos show, but we know we need more funding!"
Data that is gathered informally with crappy handheld equipment will always be of very poor quality.
If you want to find out what, if anything, is out there then you need a systematic process of gathering data using calibrated equipment and a robust subsequent analysis of that data.
We don't do astronomy by pointing our iPhones at the sky either.
Interestingly, the top comment is nothing but stigmatizing UFO research and hand waving away this as NASA wanting to ride on the public’s current UFO curiosity for other motives.
This might be most plausible theory. Presumably going to US public also can leverage entire us population as a surveillance mechanism. Granted there would be a ton of noise. Timing also seems to make sense in that there has been heightened concern of surveillance by other countries. Could be simply fundraising.
UFOs are likely either hallucinations or top secret experimental DoD projects. Some of them might also be spying devices from foreign governments like that suspected Chinese spy balloon that the government shot down earlier this year. I can't blame NASA for using the obsessions of conspiracy kooks as a rationale to push for more funding for things that would actually be worth looking into. It is also obviously worthwhile for the government to know what is flying in its airspace.
I do think it's pretty much a certainty that alien life exists somewhere given how many earth-like planets exist but it clearly lacks either the technology to or the interest in contacting us. It is also plausible that faster than light travel might be flat out impossible which would make intergalactic travel more or less completely infeasible given how the nearest known galaxy is 25,000 light years away. Even light speed travel would mean over 4 years of travel just to get to Alpha Centauri (or to communicate with it) which is not feasible to maintain any kind of effective political control over colonies.[0]
If extraterrestrial life has developed faster than light travel and wishes to contact us, they will contact us and we will know about it. That isn't something the government will be able to cover up. They also aren't going to be able to determine which countries are the most powerful countries before they contact us because this would not be obvious to an outside observer with no preexisting knowledge of human society.
[0]: A perfect example of this being how the orders of European monarchs were routinely ignored in their American colonies when it took mere months to travel between Europe and America. A very significant portion of the abuses during colonial times happened in direct defiance of the relevant king's orders because there was virtually nothing his majesty could do to stop rogue colonial officials given the communications difficulties. Any interstellar colony would, without faster than life travel, be de facto completely independent and unaccountable to Earth. Even if there was a Hitler tier criminal running an Alpha Centauri colony who was genociding the native population and carrying out wars of aggression against other colonies, who would commit to an approximately 9 year or more round trip from Earth to defeat and arrest this criminal?
I've been following this, not seriously, since I was a teen, then on the internet in forums, on Winamp video, on ATS and then the disclosure project, when was it 2000, 2001?
Funny, I just tried a Google search, previously it was an easy result, now I have to specify Greer in the query and even then the results are bad, as if they were removed.
So after some specific searching, it was on May 9th, 2001.
There it was, a UFO press conference with military and ex-military people.
However it was always missing hard evidence.
And the best, access to further information required donations.
The more one donated, the more information one could access.
Fishy AF.
And soon it was more or less forgotten.
If they really wanted disclosure, they wouldn't had locked the information behind paywalls.
Meanwhile this group around Greer produces a new film ever 1-3 years and puts it on Amazon Video.
They have sessions and even a "CE5" app. Contact of the fifth kind. Of course you need to install an app to make contact...
Sus af.
He also has a YouTube channel. It's always, big announcements, breaking news.
This year, 2023, they did another press conference, 2 days after the pride parade (which was wild) in Washington DC.
Again, no hard evidence, drawings.
No fotos. Touching stories but no evidence.
It was either in this conference or in his YouTube videos that he said that there were various groups who wanted disclosure and that they'd make a move in the next 3 years.
That their patience was at an end.
But it's interesting what he says.
Essentially that all research into free energy and anti gravity was brutally ended and stolen by those "black projects" powers/groups/people.
Remember the Czech guy with the encryption that couldn't be broken, what was it called again? Truecrypt, right?
The project was halted under mysterious circumstances.
If you read between the lines, he was threatened.
Greer team claims the same has happened to those free energy and anti gravity projects.
And that it has been going on since around ww2.
On one hand I have wishful thinking that there really is free energy, Tesla is cited and his confiscated work. On the other hand...
Why is there always this secrecy?
Weird enough a few months after the 2023 disclosure project press conference, Grush and the other 2 (sorry forgot the names) testify under oath.
Reflecting, I'm at that point now that I doubt or let's say, that those testaments under oath are no big deal for me. Was that maybe Greer team's purpose? To make actually real testimonials seem implausible?
I don't know.
Fact is that this planet, that we're destroying our environment. That this will lead to death, wars.
And that we're still not stopping those cars to drive and we're still doing nothing against the freaking elephant in the room, cars and fossil fuel consumption by them. Day in day out.
As someone without influence all I can do is watch, helpless. And talk about it. But the powers that be are too intimidated by the oil mafia. Probably also in their pocket.
Imagine Germany without a car industry.
I fear there needs to be the big bang first before something changes.
How many floods this year alone?
Record sea temperatures.
A good lie always has some truth in it.
We're in this age where you can't believe anything anymore, I read that's also part of how KGB did disinformation. You just flood people with opposing information, so they can't determine what's true anymore.
All I know is, hard evidence is missing. And everything else is just entertainment.
Show us the evidence.
It would shock me if there wasn't life elsewhere in the universe, but space and time are stupid huge, and the credulous nonsense from UFO enthusiasts is incredibly annoying to me.
Like, sure - anything we don't understand should be investigated, and NASA is criminally under-resourced in all areas, but don't get annoyed when it still isn't aliens.