
Pentagon’s UFO unit will make some findings public - aww_dang
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-pentagon-ufo-unit-20200723-b3akzzy44zdgxc3bmhgko6nkgm-story.html
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mellosouls
Currently being discussed here fwiw:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942463)

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TehCorwiz
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...](https://www.wired.com/story/russia-space-weapon-twitter-hack-emotet-
botnet-security-news/)

~~~
dragonwriter
>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.

~~~
TehCorwiz
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.

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icey
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.

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

~~~
seibelj
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.

~~~
krapp
The claim to be falsified isn't that aliens exist anywhere in the universe,
which is likely, but specifically that they are on Earth, and by extension,
that stories of UFO phenomena (sightings, abductions, etc.) are accurate and
correct.

Conflating the two is a common misdirection tactic of UFO believers, meant to
imply that it's as reasonable to believe in the former as the latter, or that
the general scientific consensus that alien life probably exists somewhere in
the universe lends credence to UFO mythology.

The truth is, without some evidence that everything we know about physics is
wrong, the universe could be teeming with life and it would still be about as
reasonable to believe in the presence of extraterrestrial life on Earth as to
believe in leprechauns.

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

~~~
tux1968
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.

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aiyodev
> 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.

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dencodev
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.

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ShamelessC
Nepotism? Can you elaborate or link the previous discussion?

~~~
dencodev
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23943441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23943441)

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philistine
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?

~~~
throwaway743
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2gjPRv4E7s)

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peroporque
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.

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merricksb
Smallish discussion a couple days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23931960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23931960)

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bitcurious
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.

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

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lucb1e
care to ctrl+c the text to here so we can read it without subjecting ourselves
to the tracking it apparently wants to do?

~~~
unnouinceput
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

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

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

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

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

