ALIENS

GameboyRMH said:

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.

I don't think we agree as much as you think we do, which is weird. Long story, massive side discussion, but my point is that the article was vague, and I'll bet anything that any decent material science guy could figure out what the "mysterious alloy" is. Nothing in that article tells me anything else.

Off-topic:

The belief that government is a "....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..." is very American view of things.  In the US its a self fulfilling prophecy because government is held in such low regard by so many.  The natural human reaction when you know your work will be E36 M3 on no matter what you do, is take government work when you don't have a lot of other options.

There are places in the world where government is high status gig and the private sector has to compete hard with it for the best and brightest.

I'll shut-up before I stir-up too much of a flounder feeding frenzy. 

Back to topic.

Ya'll do realize that virtually all university research and development work in this country is managed by the U.S. Government, right?  DARPA.  Even things as far from Defense as neuron research at a charity teaching hospital is run through (funded by) DARPA.

My last two years' working I heard Area 51 was relocated to  Dugway Utah, chemical testing took out a whole valley of sheep but keeps the oooh ahhh squad at bay.

tuna55 said:

I don't think we agree as much as you think we do, which is weird. Long story, massive side discussion, but my point is that the article was vague, and I'll bet anything that any decent material science guy could figure out what the "mysterious alloy" is. Nothing in that article tells me anything else.

It would be insane and hilariously incompetent to find a mysterious material that you're trying to investigate the source of, and simply put it on a shelf and declare that you don't know what it's made of. The sane and competent thing to do would be to take it to the best materials science guy US military budgets can buy. That's why this is big news, unless the story was just fabricated somewhere along the line.

If they really can't identify what it is, It almost certainly isn't the case that they literally don't know what it's made of, but more likely that they don't know how it could be produced. A structure big enough for a person to handle made of purposefully-oriented carbon nanotubes, or an apparently seamless structure made of sections of different known metals would be just as big news from a UFO-hunting perspective as if it were made of some new element.

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?

To Tuna: The smartest engineers I personally know all work at NASA. So I don't know I would completely agree with that.

To Gameboy: You really think the government can just throw people in a van and one it doesn't get leaked and two people don't notice?

93EXCivic said:

 

To Gameboy: You really think the government can just throw people in a van and one it doesn't get leaked and two people don't notice?

If they can successfully hide aliens from us, then... duh?

93EXCivic 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?

 

 

To Gameboy: You really think the government can just throw people in a van and one it doesn't get leaked and two people don't notice?

 

 

You really think they can't or wouldn't? Grab them, either kill or discredit the witnesses, and go on about business as usual. History has shown domestic and international law mean absolutely nothing if the government wants something. 

93EXCivic said:

To Gameboy: You really think the government can just throw people in a van and one it doesn't get leaked and two people don't notice?

Well usually it's done to people who could reasonably have disappeared on their own, for what they might consider to be a good reason, so it isn't leaked and there are only suspicions since nobody can be sure where that person is. But simply being thrown in a van is sometimes how suspected terrorists end up in black site prisons, and nobody knows for sure where they are. So if they really had to, I'm sure they could abduct someone and keep it quiet. Sometimes people disappear without a trace, and a government conspiracy isn't suspected.

But I'm sure nobody has ever had to be vanned to accept a lucrative government job before. Most people are easily persuaded by a big pile of money with some curiosity and patriotism sprinkled on top. It's also kind of ridiculous to think that any one expert could be so much more skilled than all the other options that vanning him or her could seem like a decent idea.

They were able to hide stealth, from the ECHO 1 computer program starting in 1974, through the HAVE BLUE prototypes, to the F-117, without so much as a leak or photograph for 15 years. It became known in 1989, because they wanted it to be known.

So, yeah, they can keep things quit if they want to.

In reply to Appleseed :

That was also before everything had an HD camera on it, images/messages could be sent across the globe instantly, and hackers weren't really a thing back then, at least not the numbers that we have today.

I'm not saying that something can't be kept quiet. I'm just saying it seems like it would've been much easier to keep something quiet 20+ years ago.

It would've been easier to keep things quiet back then, yes, but it's still very much possible today. Cell phones are commonly banned from military facilities. We didn't know about the existence of the "stealth hawk" until one crashed in the raid on Bin Laden's compound, and the tail failed to burn up completely.

From the government's perspective, an alien spaceship is no different from a foreign secret spyplane, and would be no harder to cover up.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

So, what's the motivation to let the cat out now if they've been able to keep it quiet previously?

I'm personally anxious to meet our alien overlords

STM317 said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

So, what's the motivation to let the cat out now if they've been able to keep it quiet previously?

Good question. Maybe something slipped out that shouldn't have...or maybe it's an appetizer to ease the population into the idea. That's a frightfully sensible possibility. If you think there are saucers with little green men in them flying around, wouldn't it be better to break that to the population gently than to wait until one crashes in a city, where a bunch of people will livestream video to YouTube and a bunch of other people will copy those videos to torrents and darknets?

93EXCivic 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?

To Tuna: The smartest engineers I personally know all work at NASA. So I don't know I would completely agree with that.

 

To Gameboy: You really think the government can just throw people in a van and one it doesn't get leaked and two people don't notice?

 

 

I worked closely with a businessman and project manager who was a 12 year project manager at NASA who literally couldn't give an effective PowerPoint presentation (I think the quote was "I want every single word we are going to say on the screen so that the PowerPoint can serve double use and also be the meeting notes"). He "led" a group of 6 people on a combined 100ish hour project over about 4 weeks to create a 200 page PowerPoint for a 3 hr board meeting (how many slides per minute is that?). The board was not impressed.

I want to believe that the best and brightest work at NASA (and I think a lot do), but there are successful idiots everywhere.

Robbie said:

He "led" a group of 6 people on a combined 100ish hour project over about 4 weeks to create a 200 page PowerPoint for a 3 hr board meeting (how many slides per minute is that?).

66.67 per hour, or just over 1 slide per minute...possibly doable...

In reply to NEALSMO :

Me too!

GameboyRMH said:

STM317 said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

So, what's the motivation to let the cat out now if they've been able to keep it quiet previously?

Good question. Maybe something slipped out that shouldn't have...or maybe it's an appetizer to ease the population into the idea. That's a frightfully sensible possibility. If you think there are saucers with little green men in them flying around, wouldn't it be better to break that to the population gently than to wait until one crashes in a city, where a bunch of people will livestream video to YouTube and a bunch of other people will copy those videos to torrents and darknets?

I'm not sure that slowly leaking out evidence that the government has been keeping UFOs under wraps for a very long time would be any more comforting than them continuing to deny, deny, deny and just acting totally shocked (like the rest of the planet would be) if a spaceship crashed in the middle of a city. Unless that spaceship is going to have a US Flag painted on the side, who would be upset with the government in that situation?

GameboyRMH said:

STM317 said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

So, what's the motivation to let the cat out now if they've been able to keep it quiet previously?

Good question. Maybe something slipped out that shouldn't have...or maybe it's an appetizer to ease the population into the idea. That's a frightfully sensible possibility. If you think there are saucers with little green men in them flying around, wouldn't it be better to break that to the population gently than to wait until one crashes in a city, where a bunch of people will livestream video to YouTube and a bunch of other people will copy those videos to torrents and darknets?

This was actually my thought as well.  We may be closer to having the MIB out in the open fairly soon.

If you think about it, the chances of us being alone in the near infinite universe are vanishingly small, and if Little Green Men are smart enough to travel hither and thither across that void, then they are clever enough to warm things up a bit before landing on the National Mall and proclaiming "take me to your leader."

There are 4 potential types of Aliens:

Benevolent - we are not their 1st encounter and they are smart enough not to get mixed up with any of our stupid little government shenanigans. They will know how to break it to us easy.

Hostile - pick your favorite invasion movie except for the part in the end where we somehow win.

Uncaring - homo sapiens = Native Americans circa 1500; aliens = European colonial empires.

Joe Dirt Aliens - the UFO's are just drunk redneck aliens out on a Friday night hunting possums and they occasionally crash land.

In reply to Sparkydog :

As ubiquitous as stupidity is on our planet......I'm gonna have to concede that the Jow Dirt possibility is the most likely. (sad)

STM317 said:

I'm not sure that slowly leaking out evidence that the government has been keeping UFOs under wraps for a very long time would be any more comforting than them continuing to deny, deny, deny and just acting totally shocked (like the rest of the planet would be) if a spaceship crashed in the middle of a city. Unless that spaceship is going to have a US Flag painted on the side, who would be upset with the government in that situation?

This isn't about people's relationship with the government. If they've been covering it up for any meaningful length of time, things can only get worse over time there. This is about unrest in society when suddenly hit with shocking news. If a flying saucer crashed in a city, the reaction of most people would be the same whether the government were genuinely shocked at a new development or if they knew exactly what it was. People might expect a fleet of technologically superior invaders to show up at any time. People would empty supermarket shelves to build a survival cache, then cause the stock market to eat E36 M3 as a side effect of emptying all the cash from ATMs, then they'd start looting, then some nutball would say they'd all be safe because he is the aliens' prophet so they should join his cult...all kinds of madness. It would be hard to imagine it all.

I wonder what the mesoamerican civilizations did when the conquistadors showed up on their horses and it appeared that they were being invaded by centaurs (not far off in that case). That might be the best model for the reaction that would result.

I have heard that Area 51 is just a distraction.  The true alien x-files E36 M3 happens under Las Vegas airport.  The flights that take area 51 employees from LV to the base are just a rouse.

That being said, why is just the US gov't in possession of alien technology?  Otherwise the implication is that multiple gov'ts are in cahoots to hide the evidence of UFOs.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

While people do love a good panic, I'm not sure that well thought out, preemptive strategies of admission are likely to come from Washington these days. The general climate seems inhospitable to that kind of forward thinking and acceptance, especially as it relates to science. I'll leave it at that before I'm at the bottom of the ocean with the rest of the flounder.