seriously, everyone in this story is like coming *just* up to the edge of saying aliens have visited earth https://t.co/Qb4TavawUl
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) July 24, 2020
This is not a News of the World article in a supermarket aisle in 1998. It’s the @nytimes in 2020. This is truly the year that all science/dystopian fiction addicts have been preparing for. https://t.co/cjchKQ75ql pic.twitter.com/7vJtKx6gYW
— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) July 24, 2020
Let’s be honest — we all want to believe, but every s-f reader going back to the original foo-fighter days knows the real answer to the last several years is that the Aliens have been testing us… and we’ve failed. Horribly. The last few months in particular are evidence that we’ve been abandoned to work it out on our own. One more planet where an ‘intelligent’ species evolved to the pointed where it could destroy itself before it could learn to cooperate…
Also, Harry Reid is once again tweaking the skittery conspiracy theorists who flock to the Southwest to indulge their phantasies about Vast Gubmint Plots, and good for him getting the NYTimes to bite, too!
“No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public”…
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 within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.
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…
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…
Mr. 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…
Public fascination with the topic of U.F.O.s has drawn in President 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 U.F.O.s. 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, Mr. 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.
[*Sad trombone coda*]
Correction: July 24, 2020
An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades…
It’s standard counterintelligence work, as done by every country with the technological capability to do so. But whenever there’s a particularly bad news climate, the urge to find an outside savior (or, in the case of the Oval Office Occupant and his Media Village Idiot enablers, to shout Look! Over There!) overwhelms our mutual common sense, such as it is…
Leslie Kean, who co-bylines these NYT stories, has made a career of researching UFOs. She's also written a book about the afterlife, she's connected to a former researcher of mystic Uri Geller, & she's praised an otherworldly "academy" by former blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge. pic.twitter.com/CvdUsE6EbZ
— Dan Zak (@MrDanZak) July 24, 2020
HumboldtBlue
At this point, it appears Meghan McCain’s sole purpose on TV is to be repeatedly rhetorically punched in the face.
oops, thought this was open thread, please remove if off topic
AJ
Thank you Anne for all that you post
Much appreciated!
AJ
@HumboldtBlue: awesome clip, ty for that
Matt McIrvin
This stuff just always has a powerful reek of bullshit to me every time it comes up. Everything is always right on the edge of detectability, you know? There are always promises of slam-dunk revelations but they remain eternally just around the corner.
Emma
I saw John’s tweet about loving Mehdi Hasan and wanting him to get his own show. He has TWO shows! But they’re on Al Jazeera English, so you know, that makes him a terrorist or something. I like Head to Head in particular, because somehow, there are rich and powerful dumbasses out there who still don’t know how tough Mehdi is in interviews, so they go to Oxford to get owned in front of an audience. Erik Prince did it last year, you can watch the utter pwnage if you need a pick-me-up.
Hungry Joe
In one of my increasingly frequent forays into insomnia I made a list of the ten people who’ve done the most damage to our country/democracy in the last 50 years. The order shifts around a little, depending on my mood and level of exhaustion, but here’s what I’ve got right now:
1 — (tie) Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell
3 — Ronald Reagan
4 — George W. Bush
5 — Richard Nixon
6 — William Barr
7 — Dick Cheney
8 — Newt Gingrich
9 — John Roberts
10 — George H.W. Bush
Honorable (!) mention: John Scalia, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch
Major Major Major Major
So what’s everybody’s favorite solution to the Fermi Paradox? I like “every advanced civilization invents cryptocurrency and destroys their planet mining it.”
Mary G
Somehow this reminds of the dogs in “Up” who can easily be distracted with a shout of [Squirrel!].
Gvg
@Hungry Joe: Rudolph Murdock
Steve the Old
If there are other intelligent (well, in our case, sort of) civilizations in space, they have not reached us for the same reason we haven’t reached them: It’s too far.
Recently a planet that might be able to support liquid water was discovered only 100 light years away. On a scale where 100 light years is the distance from Paris to Moscow, how far along the road does Elon Musk’s BFR go? I did the arithmetic: it gets one micrometer away from where it starts.
Cathie from Canada
I guess we’re now finding out that the truth really IS out there.
Cathie from Canada
@Hungry Joe: And every one is an old white man.
I think I see a pattern here.
Sab
@Hungry Joe: Who is John Scalia? I have heard of Antonin amd Eugene, but not John.
Hungry Joe
@Sab: Oops. Tired. Antonin.
Major Major Major Major
lawnorder
Russia Times is pushing this. Trump is desperate for a change of topic
If it’s legit alien debris or not I don’t know but I do know they are so desperate they would do just about anything to change the subject
Has anyone seen Steve Miller’s SUV lately ? I don’t put it past those rat fuckers to just fake something out of thin air
Calouste
@Hungry Joe:
You only go back 50 years, but a little further back and Eisenhower would be a solid top 5 entry, for rehabilitating the Republican Party, which is where it all started. No Eisenhower, no Nixon. No Nixon, no Cheney.
lawnorder
Is that Tunch on the title image ?
I legit shed a tear. I lost my dog 2 years ago, and my cat that looked like Tunch 4 years ago.
How are the gal doggos and Tunch’s spiritual heir ? Well I hope, being spoiled rotten by John daily!
Carlo
Yeah, it’s going to take a lot more than this credulous horseshit to constitute evidence for this claim.
Look, the tech to visit other stars and do secret recon, etc. is in what I call ” Impossible, Category II”. Category I Impossible is “There’s no physical principle we know of that would allow this”. Think faster-than-light travel. Category II is “It could be done in principle, but you would bankrupt planet Earth and still fail if you tried”. That’s what we’re talking about here, and given the distance scales, times, and energies involved, we don’t have any reason to believe that will change in the next couple of centuries.
So to imagine that some civilization pulled of this amazing feat, then started playing hide-and-seek seek games with the AF while amusing themselves by making crop circles and administering recreational anal probes is about as fatuous as it would sound if an Earth mission did that and then tried to defend its activities before the committee that authorized the expenditure of 200 years of GPP (Gross Planetary Product). It would be entertaining, but would’t end well.
People are gullible idiots. Some of them serve in government and in the military. And, as we know from the Iraq debacle, it is easy to construe or manufacture evidence to please eager superiors with low intellectual standards. Really, there’s nothing to see here. Let’s get back to the Orange Baboon Show.
Hungry Joe
@Major Major Major Major: My guess is that everything is just too damn far away, and no matter how advanced the civilization, the speed of light is the max, can’t really be approached, and that’s that. Wormholes are theoretically real but beyond problematic, warp drive is fun science fiction but the keyword is “fiction” … and here we are. And there they are, way out yonder. Maybe not very many of them, either — Earth may be a super-Goldilocks because there aren’t many nearby stars (when they go supernova, there goes the neighborhood) and we’ve got a couple of gas giant planets hoovering up asteroids and comets that would otherwise hit a RESET button on life every few million years or so.
Major Major Major Major
@Hungry Joe: well you’re no fun.
dopey-o
If aliens are observing us, they are not coming here in ‘vehicles.’ That is a 20th century paradigm. IF they are observing us, they probably have technologies that are not only undetectable, but unimaginable to us.
Looking for aliens who are actively concealing themselves is a fool’s errand. Much better would be to look for any effects they are inducing in human culture.
(Spoiler: they aren’t. But we would be well-served to answer the question “What advice would a radically-advanced civilization give us?”)
Hungry Joe
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t like it, either. Never understood why supposed abductees always hate being taken aboard. In the words of the (if there is any justice, immoral) Dan Hicks, “Hell, I’d go.”
Sab
@Hungry Joe: Okay. Me too, hence my snarky tone, which I regret. Relieved there isn’t another Scalia out there doing worse.
Alison Rose
@dopey-o: If (and for me, it’s a BIG if) aliens are observing us, they probably just NOPE the fuck out after about 10 seconds. Whatever mode of transport they’re in, they’ll just turn around, head back to Planet Whatever, and tell the rest of their kind, “Okay, it’s a hell no on having anything to do with that bunch of fuckers.”
But, you know. In their language.
Hungry Joe
@Sab: … that we know of.
West of the Rockies
Foo fighters? Like the band? What are SF foo fighters? I Googled it but only find the band (which I don’t really follow). Can someone explain the reference?
Hungry Joe
@Alison Rose: Even after they’ve seen dogs? And cats? And “The Big Lebowski”?
Sab
Yeah. Antonin had a lot of kids.
HumboldtBlue
Brent Terhune isn’t an alien.
He may be otherwordly, though.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: I suspect that if intelligence is actually common enough for the Fermi Paradox to be a paradox, it’s too alien for us to really understand its motivations, or to be able to assume it would want to communicate or meet us. If we ever find an alien intelligence we’ll spend all our time debating whether it is actually intelligent or not. We have a hard enough time with animals and machines.
Major Major Major Major
@West of the Rockies: the band is named after an old term for unidentified aerial phenomena https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter
Kent
@Hungry Joe: Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg
Alison Rose
@Hungry Joe: They take a few dogs and cats back home with them. Lebowski might be a hard sell if they don’t have bowling where they come from.
trnc
Good, ’cause if they ever do show up and we have to take them to our “leader,” they’d be lugging the THX 1138 version of straightjackets and all the mining equipment they can fit in the back of the Falcon.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: I just assume everybody’s all spread out, as the main driver. Inscrutability being a close second!
Hungry Joe
@Kent: Hmmm … better make it a Top 20.
Hungry Joe
@Alison Rose: An advanced civilization without bowling alleys? Now you’re just messing with us.
Kent
UFOs
Bigfoot
Loch Ness Monster
Santa Claus
God
[Things for which zero credible evidence has ever been presented to demonstrate their existence]
Lacuna Synechdoche
Trump met with the aliens, and they stormed out of the room when Trump told them they were here illegally and he’d only work with them if they paid for rooms in his hotels – or if they had a hypnosis raygun he could use to hypnotize other people into paying for rooms in his hotels.
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major:
In all seriousness:
Fusion power is impractical for spaceships (including the possibility it’s impractical, period).
Without fusion power you can’t travel between stars or exist in interstellar space. So any civilization is trapped in its home system and just can’t make much of an impression on the universe. So, nobody else here, and not much to see unless you look *very* carefully to an extent we’re only just being able to get close to.
It’s highly plausible after 60 years of fusion power being 30 years in the future and doesn’t require some civilization-ending trap so powerful every one that ever existed (probably quite a few) got sucked in.
Alison Rose
@Hungry Joe: I don’t know, TV/movie aliens always have weird numbers of fingers, they’d need specialized bowling balls made. And where would they find the time, since they’re apparently doing constant fly-bys around Earth to see what the hell we’re up to now.
Hungry Joe
@Kent: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me.” — Mitch Hedberg
Hungry Joe
@Alison Rose: HoloDeck bowling. See, you’re not thinking this through.
Sab
An in-law of my in-laws wants to hold a family gathering, announced the day after Gov Mike deWine says don’t do that, they are super-spreader events. So my husband says NO! and his sisters are kind of irked. Sigh.
We have been hunkering down as if we don’t trust own family. Apparently right. Easy for me as I am an introvert. Hard for him since they are siblings and here and all extroverts.
Kent
I suppose it is possible that Trump is actually the alien. Some day his head will open up like in Men in Black and there will be little aliens inside driving and cackling with laughter at the run that they’ve had.
smike
@Major Major Major Major:
If they exist, they are so far advanced that they just take a look at us and say, “No, man. Just no.” We are far too primitive to be trusted with yet more power, and they know it.
Another Scott
Yeah, space is too big.
In other news, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2020/07/homeland-security-agency-delays-widespread-furloughs/167188/
(Emphasis added.)
They’re shameless. And incompetently so.
Grrr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Repatriated
“Take me to your leader.”
” Well… um… this isn’t a good time for us right now. Could you come back in six months?”
Ascap_scab
@Kent:
BatBoy
NotMax
If Uri Geller is a mystic, Anne Laurie is the Queen of Sheba.
Geller’s a fraud, a charlatan and a flim-flam man. He’s about as mystic as a cup of fruit cocktail.
Sister Golden Bear
Obligatory: Graham Parker, “Waiting for the UFOs”
NotMax
@Alison Rose
Even the USS Enterprise has a bowling alley. So vital the entire ship may have been built around it.
Friend and I once worked up a short routine about bowling leagues on Star Trek. The image of him in an open collared, untucked bowling shirt with “Spock” stitched above the pocket always brought a laugh.
:)
Lacuna Synechdoche
I’ve always been puzzled by the lack of other animals or plants on these UFO’s. I mean, seriously, if there’s anything to actually be learned from an anal probe, you’d think the alien scientists would want to, well, you know … probe … a variety of species anuses. Why stick with only humans?
It just seems like a very limited data set.
hervevillechaizelounge
@lawnorder:
This whole kerfuffle is just a scam to help insure Trump’s reelection. The truth about spacecraft will be like his taxes, where he claims he’ll reveal all but only if he’s given a second term. (“You know Senile Joe won’t tell you about the Martians but I will. And the evidence is tremendous, bigly beautiful, nobody can believe it.”)
Alternate scenario: he’ll claim Thetans from Uranus have been in contact and have pledged to nuke earth if their buddy Donny loses the election.
Either way, everything the weeping anal fissure says will be a lie. And the media will revomit his bullshit like truth, and his followers will believe every word.
artem1s
IMO the only alien spacecraft that has ever crash landed on earth is the B Ark.
I miss Douglas Adams so much. But I’m not particularly happy about having to live in one of his plot lines dammit.
NotMax
@hervevillechaizelounge
The ones from Uranus have no interest in the inner planets. They dedicate their energies to exploring the rim worlds.
;)
HumboldtBlue
Our streets
hervevillechaizelounge
@NotMax:
Taint that the truth;)
Jay
The new
Repatriated
@NotMax: The Probes of Uranus do visit Earth. They’ll examine homo sapiens, but they prefer Capridae as specimens.
It’s all about the goats, see?
mrmoshpotato
Gidney and Cloud need to scrooch some motherfuckers, and I want some Sprite.
James E Powell
@trnc:
Take us to your leader? Have you seen this?
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Damn that’s good, and it didn’t even include the phrase “Now look here, you trust fund baby!”
NotMax
@artem1s
But- but- what about the documentary?
:)
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: And their ship is powered by Fartasauruses!
mrmoshpotato
@mrmoshpotato: *Cloyd
Suck Uranus, autoincorrect!
joel hanes
[humorless pedantic plodding engineer]
There is not one shred of actual evidence for an extraterrestrial intelligent being or artifact presence on Earth, and good reasons from physics and cosmology to think that such a thing is very very very unlikely.
IMHO, there are good reasons to expect to find some forms of life on Europa, and perhaps on Ganymede.
lofgren
I’ve suspected for sometime that the gravitational anomalies we call dark matter are actually artifacts of the cloaking technologies the aliens are using to hide entire planets so that we leave them the hell out of our fuck ups.
lawnorder
@hervevillechaizelounge: Agreed!
lawnorder
@lofgren: That would be a LOT of aliens
NotMax
@joel hanes
Only serves to prove what clever little buggers they are. Recyclers extraordinaire.
:)
joel hanes
@Repatriated:
So you’re claiming that Mickey Kaus is actually an alien?
That would explain a lot …
lgerard
Alien: Take me to your leader
Pentagon: uh….let me explain first
lofgren
@lawnorder: There’s no way to know! If somebody is artificially messing with what we are observing in the sky, then we can’t even assume that our measurements of the missing matter are accurate.
But yes, I imagine there are a LOT of aliens who want absolutely nothing to do with us.
Geminid
Last year I camped near Roswell at Bottomless Lakes State Park. It’s a nice town, with a lot of pecan farms and the Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge nearby; that’s a big stopover for migratory birds. But the only alien I saw was a big green fiberglass one holding up a Dunkin Donuts sign.
sgrAstar
@Carlo: I always wonder why professional sky watchers, ie astronomers, never notice these visitations.
?
Amir Khalid
@sgrAstar:
Douglas Adams had this one covered: alien visitations are the work of bored space teenagers tormenting humans for amusement. It’s more fun to mess with some yokel out in the sticks, and easier not to get caught.
Croaker
Dark is the suede that mows like a harvest.
The unidentifiable stuff is easy – mice. Duh, like everyone knows these hyper intelligent pan dimensional beings created earth in search of the ultimate question.
Look at their latest experiment with the orange mind control ferret (Cov-Fefe-45).
Person Woman Man Camera TV
J R in WV
I used to spend a lot of time out there in nature, and along with companions we saw some fascinating things in the sky. Things I have never been able to explain to myself at all.
I once visited a nearby farmer to see his Brown Swiss cattle which were up on a high ridge above the road and farmyard. He wanted to get back to the house before very late, and when I asked him why, he told a story right out of a Close Encounter study!
So something very odd, at least, is going on outside!
Just One More Canuck
@dopey-o: “wear a fucking mask, you assholes”
Cermet
One researcher noticed that ionized effects that then cause air glow events often precede earthquakes – these often appear as glowing lights in the sky; just before the great quake in Japan a earth observing satellite saw these ‘lights’ in the sky from space over the ocean where the quake would start. So its aliens causing earthquakes – see?
The Pale Scot
@Steve the Old:
Nope, it’s not distance, it’s time.
Assume that race is smart enough to get past killing it self is also smart enough to extend lifespan indefinitely. Then it’s just a matter of having enough Playstation 9999999999999 games for the trip. ET’s must be cybernetic, enthusiastically melding tech with biology. The ones who go travel will not be like the relatives they left, spacefarers will be their own unique culture. Each ship after all that time would be culturally unique
The Pale Scot
@dopey-o:
Round up the Murdicks, make them dig their own graves, and shoot them in the head?
The Pale Scot
@West of the Rockies:
All of the WW2 AF have reports taken by post mission debriefers of pilots encountering craft with way beyond the performance envelopes of that time
Brachiator
@joel hanes:
I’m ancient. I remember when my science books sagely noted that all the experts had proven that ours was the only solar system with planets.
So, I am not looking for aliens and also doubt artifacts or visitations, but also note that while we are wisely bound by what our science tells us currently, the universe is full of surprises.
I suspect that while intelligent life may be rare, life in some form is widely scattered throughout the universe.
Ken
Iain M Banks kept getting letters from people who thought his Culture aliens were real, and were going to bring Earth into the Culture (which, depending on who you talk to, would either be the greatest or worst thing to ever happen).
So he wrote a Culture novella, The State of the Art, in which they do visit Earth but decide not to make contact, instead using us as a control group to see what happens when they don’t interfere with a society.
HarlequinGnoll
Sounds like this is the thread to shout-out to my favorite YouTube futurist Isaac Arthur. With such videos as why if it really was a super advanced ai it wouldn’t attack first, how to colonize every place in the solar system (including the sun) and many Fermi paradox videos.
J R in WV
@sgrAstar:
Astronomers don’t spend enough time just looking at sky
They mostly work with the space age hi-tech equiequipment and complex data output by the tools, plus they are totally for used on a tiny slice of the sky not anything outside the focus of the research.
So, if something was impossibly zooming around nextdoor, they might not notice, because focus on the project!
kindness
We aren’t alone in this universe. I’ve seen stuff in the night sky that can’t be explained by satellites or meteorites. We’re a toddler civilization where as those peoples that can actually get here and fly around observing us are ancient. They’ve figured out how to jump between points in space like the ships described in the Dune books. It isn’t speed that allows one to travel between stars or galaxies. Distances are still too far for that and Einstein’s theory is correct. Mass increases in size as an object approaches the speed of light. That effectively would kill biological entities and printed circuitry & chips.
We aren’t alone and they are smart not to touch us yet. We have to prove we’re capable and so far we haven’t.
Steve the Old
@Carlo: Exactly!
Steve the Old
AnotherBruce
If there are space aliens landing here, I hope they’re here to serve man.
Kropacetic
In fairness, old white men have had a lot more opportunity to do harm, what with having all the money and power and all.
lgerard
I had this weird dream last night.
trump was explaining to a couple of aliens about how he took this test………
WkatsMyNym
There’s a difference?
WhatsMyNym
In Moderation #96 – really can’t type today
Mart
Funny how people always imagine alien life forms could reach us from another plant, when it clearly would be A.I. R2D2, not ET. Not that I think either is possible.
Morzer
All I got:
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/daily-cartoon-051017-roswell-trump
ballerat
If these alien space vehicles are so advanced, why have so many of them crashed?
Let’s see:
Antigravity lightspeed drive: Check.
Quantum interstellar compass and starnav computer: Check.
Earth low-altitude bird strike auto-avoider: Oops! Shit! Forgot that.
Crash.
ballerat
@WkatsMyNym: The best comment.
True too.