ALIENS

So there has been some big news on the topic of

A roundup of the issue, with NSFW language.
 

TL:DR version: The US military's opinion of UFOs has graduated from "we don't know what some of these things are" to "we don't know what some of these things are, but we know their capabilities are beyond human technology, and we can't figure out what these pieces of them we have are made of."

So apparently there's possible physical evidence in a building in Las Vegas that not all UFOs are misunderstood natural or manmade phenomena or secret military aircraft. That's a pretty big deal.

So it sounds like we need to go to Vegas and get our hands on these alloys, right?  Road trip?  

I love the idea that there are aliens flying around, and I wish I could see something to convince me that it's true, but that video or the NYT article certainly didn't do it.  You mean to tell me that with berkeleying awesome satellite networks, cameras everywhere, etc. this is the best publicly available evidence?  I think it's more likely that [tinfoil hat on] the government wants us to believe they're better at keeping things secret than they actually are.  A dude in a fighter jet drew a hootus in the sky not too long ago, but that's the best footage that anyone has managed to get out onto the internet?

I don't know, my favorite is that Harry Reid sent millions of dollars to a personal friend to investigate UFOs through black funding. That sounds legit.

I remain unconvinced. The government has no reason to withhold information like that, and they certainly do not hold the monopoly on talented materials guys to figure stuff out.

EDIT: wait, I have a new favorite from the article:  

"Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects"

I have encountered physical effects from encounters with objects many times. I often get cut and hurt by alloys in my own garage! Wow!

As far as secrets go, the knowledge of aliens would be kinda important. Such knowledge has the potential to disrupt society on the planet in ways that are hard to imagine.  Many cultures are centered around an exaggerated sense of self-importance.  Hard proof of aliens has the ability to destroy that. 

Yeah, if they are aliens, they must be trying to hide, and the government would very much have reasons to keep aliens hidden from us. Not just to keep society from panicking, but to maximize their chances of getting their hands on alien technology first.

The government does have access to all the most talented materials guys - if you don't work for them already, they can easily find you to ask you, or just pull you into an unmarked van if they think the work is too sensitive. And they have access to any classified manmade materials like RAM coating. If arguably the most powerful government in the world can't figure out what a thing is made of, who can?

Aliens can do whatever they want, as long as they stay off my berkeleying lawn.

Nobody's lawn is safe!

Disinformation. The fact that we know the government does it, especially in conjunction with ufos, cast doubt on all of this. 

Yet I remember a quote by the Skunk Works' Ben Rich, " There is stuff out in the desert that would make George Lucas drool..."

GameboyRMH said:

Yeah, if they are aliens, they must be trying to hide, and the government would very much have reasons to keep aliens hidden from us. Not just to keep society from panicking, but to maximize their chances of getting their hands on alien technology first.

The government does have access to all the most talented materials guys - if you don't work for them already, they can easily find you to ask you, or just pull you into an unmarked van if they think the work is too sensitive. And they have access to any classified manmade materials like RAM coating. If arguably the most powerful government in the world can't figure out what a thing is made of, who can?

I promise you're wrong about the last bit. The smartest folks go work in the private sector.

tuna55 said:

I promise you're wrong about the last bit. The smartest folks go work in the private sector.

Aaaand....the government can't find and hire/van them?

The alloys being "unidentifiable" just seems like they haven't put them through the right tests. They don't mention what tests they've done or who did those tests. You're telling me they did mass spectrography and the alloys showed what, a new element? Doubt it.

The video from the fighter jet is pretty weird. At first I assumed it was a solar effect - reflections and glare can be really confusing and can show up in camera just fine and they'll appear to fly away from you at inhuman speeds since they're, well, reflections. But then it turned out he was following it based on RADAR reports from a ship? Wow that's pretty weird. Reflections and glare do not show up on radar. So it's something that is visible and show up on radar - I think that means it's a physical object right? Still, it could be a drone, as one of the pilots suggests. A very advanced one but still a drone?

It being "beyond human technology" is a kind of irresponsible claim. There's no reason that's true. Beyond what that person knows maybe.

dculberson said:

It being "beyond human technology" is a kind of irresponsible claim. There's no reason that's true. Beyond what that person knows maybe.

I think it can be a reasonable claim to make, the only alternative is to imply another claim that seems to come from a sci-fi movie: that there are a group of humans hiding incredibly advanced technology.

GameboyRMH said:

tuna55 said:

I promise you're wrong about the last bit. The smartest folks go work in the private sector.

Aaaand....the government can't find and hire/van them?

Yes. Lots of smart people want to stay in the private sector, get paid more by the private sector, etc etc. I can safely that knowing some extremely talented engineers, some even in the field where they could identify strange alloys.

In the early 80's, I was sitting in my parent's living room looking out over the San Fernando Valley.  On a (rare) clear day, you could see over the whole valley from Glendale to the mountains on the west end, maybe 50+ miles out.  About over Burbank, there was an oval shaped metallic "something" more or less going rather slowly at about chopper speeds in a northward direction.  It then instantly made a 90 degree turn west and accelerated an an incredible speed.  And I mean instantly changed directions, not banked, etc, but instantly, and accelerated instantly like a bullet.  Years later, I told my dad and he said he once saw a cigar shaped object over Burbank, moving fast and it wasn't a blimp.

What's in Burbank?  Huh, smells kinda like SKUNK there.

tuna55 said:

GameboyRMH said:

tuna55 said:

I promise you're wrong about the last bit. The smartest folks go work in the private sector.

Aaaand....the government can't find and hire/van them?

Yes. Lots of smart people want to stay in the private sector, get paid more by the private sector, etc etc. I can safely that knowing some extremely talented engineers, some even in the field where they could identify strange alloys.

What Gameboy is saying is that when one of those extremely talented engineers retires suddenly, you should look for the black van driving to meet the black helicopter because he's in one of them with a bag over his head 

Where's the guy with the theory about WRC having been the battleground of an interstellar alien war eventually won by the Pleidians?

tuna55 said:

GameboyRMH said:

tuna55 said:

I promise you're wrong about the last bit. The smartest folks go work in the private sector.

Aaaand....the government can't find and hire/van them?

Yes. Lots of smart people want to stay in the private sector, get paid more by the private sector, etc etc. I can safely that knowing some extremely talented engineers, some even in the field where they could identify strange alloys.

Well the government could certainly van them if they wanted to, it's hard to deny that...but I find it hard to believe they'd all refuse to take on a side job from the government which could easily afford to pay them more handsomely than even a Silicon Valley megacorp. It's also hard to believe that they're all such mercenary capitalists that they'd have zero non-monetary interest when asked by the government to help identify a material that had presumably been sent to all the best government labs already...you'd think they might have some interest in materials, to become a top materials scientist.

These are the guys behind the Manhattan Project and the aforementioned invention of radar-absorbing materials, just off the top of my head, they're not a bunch of amateur goobers.

GameboyRMH said:

It's also hard to believe that they're all such mercenary capitalists that they'd have zero non-monetary interest when asked by the government to help identify a material that had presumably been sent to all the best government labs already...you'd think they might have some interest in materials, to become a top materials scientist.

 

That's just the thing - they certainly did not say the material had been sent to all the best government labs - they didn't even say it had been sent to one.

GameboyRMH said:

tuna55 said:

GameboyRMH said:

tuna55 said:

I promise you're wrong about the last bit. The smartest folks go work in the private sector.

Aaaand....the government can't find and hire/van them?

Yes. Lots of smart people want to stay in the private sector, get paid more by the private sector, etc etc. I can safely that knowing some extremely talented engineers, some even in the field where they could identify strange alloys.

Well the government could certainly van them if they wanted to, it's hard to deny that...but I find it hard to believe they'd all refuse to take on a side job from the government which could easily afford to pay them more handsomely than even a Silicon Valley megacorp. It's also hard to believe that they're all such mercenary capitalists that they'd have zero non-monetary interest when asked by the government to help identify a material that had presumably been sent to all the best government labs already...you'd think they might have some interest in materials, to become a top materials scientist.

These are the guys behind the Manhattan Project and the aforementioned invention of radar-absorbing materials, just off the top of my head, they're not a bunch of amateur goobers.

Instead of thinking of the government as an incredibly smart and well-funded group of people at the pointy end of the technological curve, think of them as the bumbling idiot which gets dragged along by the private sector, and sucks off such an incredible amount of money to produce basically nothing of value. You can point at things like the SR-71 and F117 and other amazing marvels, but those guys developing that were in the private sector working off of that same cashflow. I promise I have seen zero evidence of any form of what you speak of.

And no, if some CIA dude threw me in a van tomorrow and brought me to some undisclosed place to do some undisclosed thing, I'd refuse, and I suspect most people would. We're going to disagree here, but I doubt you can prove me wrong. I do work with people at the very pointy end of that curve, and they have no intention of leaving the private sector.

tuna55 said:

You can point at things like the SR-71 and F117 and other amazing marvels, but those guys developing that were in the private sector working off of that same cashflow. I promise I have seen zero evidence of any form of what you speak of.

Excellent, I think we've finally reached an agreement. Yes those people technically were employed by Lockheed, Raytheon etc, but they were working for the government, through a contractor, on a secret project, and they were among the best in their field. I didn't mean to derail into an accounting/payroll argument if that's what I did.

What city did they design and build that SR-71 thing in, tuna?

I love distraction theater.

In reply to Dr. Hess :

Burbank, Ca. Right near LA.