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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft

I really do not know what to make of this, and the recent Pentagon announcement of the US tracking roughly 600 UAP's.

Seems a bit more creditable information is coming out with each passing week.

I strongly doubt that these are extraterrestrials, as the vastness of space is just too large to feasible make contact with anything out there... yet, there seem to be unknown things in our air.

Crazy times.

Yeah, I don't really know what to think either. Feels credible enough to give me a nagging little voice in the back of my head saying 'oh gak' at the very least...

 stonehorse wrote:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft

I really do not know what to make of this, and the recent Pentagon announcement of the US tracking roughly 600 UAP's.

Seems a bit more creditable with each passing week.

I strongly doubt that these are extraterrestrials, as the vastness of space is just too large to feasible make contact with anything out there... yet, there seem to be unknown things in our air.

Crazy times.

'Former intelligence official spouts nonsense' is basically its own genre of comedy, i don't think there's any more to this than there was to the literally dozens of times similar things around UFOs and such had been claimed. As long as nobody shows tangible proof it's just another old man going off the deep end.

Let's hope that IF we got company that they don't play by the dark forest book and are hopefully more reasonable than our own species.

Tsagualsa wrote:

 stonehorse wrote:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft

I really do not know what to make of this, and the recent Pentagon announcement of the US tracking roughly 600 UAP's.

Seems a bit more creditable with each passing week.

I strongly doubt that these are extraterrestrials, as the vastness of space is just too large to feasible make contact with anything out there... yet, there seem to be unknown things in our air.

Crazy times.

'Former intelligence official spouts nonsense' is basically its own genre of comedy, i don't think there's any more to this than there was to the literally dozens of times similar things around UFOs and such had been claimed. As long as nobody shows tangible proof it's just another old man going off the deep end.

That was my initial response, but seeing that this is in the Guardian news, along side with what the pentagon have recently admitted, and then there was the NASA panel about UAP's only a few days ago.

This all seems a bit too coincidental.

I laughed at the UFO/Greys craze in the 90's, and think it is all a load of hogwash... but, this feels a little bit different, as it is coning from government officials, and not some mad lad who thinks he can telepathic talk to fish.

Eh we've heard similar for decades and it never comes to anything. The closest you get is that UFOs - Unidentified Flying Objects - do exist, but that's all they are. Not identified.

There's a myriad of things they can be from technical glitches all the way to natural anomalies; animals/creatures being miss interpreted and likely more than a few "top secret test of some aircraft"

Perhaps also very likely to be a few which are from foreign powers and so aren't on any in-country list or such.



Heck I suspect we will see a whole lot more now that drones are a thing and have been for a while.





Personally until there's actual proof I remain of the belief that its not Aliens. In 30years we've never had proof, just wild claims, stories and all born of that age of bending spoons with the power of your mind and letter boards talking to the dead. All things that snuck their way into TV and into the minds of people en-mass; but which have been proven time and again to be nothing more than hoaxes and fakery. Heck many of them circus tricks and magicians tricks; some of which have been around for generations or adaptions thereof.




We also had this same thing during the pandemic 1st year and, nothing came of it beyond a few news articles.

 Overread wrote:
Eh we've heard similar for decades and it never comes to anything. The closest you get is that UFOs - Unidentified Flying Objects - do exist, but that's all they are. Not identified.

There's a myriad of things they can be from technical glitches all the way to natural anomalies; animals/creatures being miss interpreted and likely more than a few "top secret test of some aircraft"

Perhaps also very likely to be a few which are from foreign powers and so aren't on any in-country list or such.



Heck I suspect we will see a whole lot more now that drones are a thing and have been for a while.





Personally until there's actual proof I remain of the belief that its not Aliens. In 30years we've never had proof, just wild claims, stories and all born of that age of bending spoons with the power of your mind and letter boards talking to the dead. All things that snuck their way into TV and into the minds of people en-mass; but which have been proven time and again to be nothing more than hoaxes and fakery. Heck many of them circus tricks and magicians tricks; some of which have been around for generations or adaptions thereof.




We also had this same thing during the pandemic 1st year and, nothing came of it beyond a few news articles.

The big smoking gun, or rather lack thereof, for me, is that we have released a couple of billion good-quality cameras into the wild in the last two decades, in the form of smartphones and surveillance cameras, but also on private or commercial drones, webcams and so on. Even in regions with less infrastructure, people are seldom without their phones, and a lot of automatic cameras are recording all the time. And while they pick up all sorts of weird stuff, like rare, or even thought extinct, animals, weather phenomena, one-in-a-million events like meteor strikes or other astrophysical stuff, from time to time, a proof of unquestionably alien crafts remains curiously absent. This alleged whistleblower, again, is only saying that such proof exists, but is not actually providing any. And his supporters do the same: they say he's a upstanding dude, has good character, that they saw or heard about that proof as well, that they know it exists and so on, but ultimately it's all hearsay and reputation circlejerking. If they really had proof, they could show some.

IMHO, such stories are either launched to cover up actual problems, scandals and scoops that intelligence agencies do not want the public to know about, or are picked up as 'filler' whenever there is a 'slow news week'.

As others have said “it was definitely flying, definitely an object, and we can’t tell what it is/was” does not therefore mean “zomg aeilns!”.

To make that leap is just a sci-fi God of the Gaps type fallacy, where the observer is simply inserting their preferred answer to a gap in knowledge, claiming it’s just that binary. That sort of intellectual dishonesty leads to guff like Ancient Aliens and indeed Ancient Apocalypse, where anything not currently well understood, or deliberately misrepresented becomes proof of whatever nonsense the snake oil salesmen is peddling.

As for UFO abductions or alien encounters? We can have corroborated absences, where a person went missing. And they may have the tale of butt stuff done by little grey men etc. But much like above, one part of a tale being verifiable doesn’t make the whole of the thing true. For instance, just because I can evidence my name, address and date of birth, wouldn’t make my claim of having a 2’ Wanger and being the inventor of a secret Time Machine powered by a Ferret called Colin true, would it? Of course not. The Ferret is called Kevin.

But getting a bit more Willing Disbeliever, or Fortean? I once read a fascinating article pointing out the similarities between alien and fairy abduction stores. Now, either it’s the same method of attention seeking/not wanting the wife to know you went on a bender, or something is happening, perhaps some form of psychotic break, perhaps a genuine alien or fairy abduction, or any number of things. I’ll see if I can find an online copy for anyone interested in reading it. Not presenting it as evidence or owt (I’m singularly ill equipped to test its claims), but simply because it’s an interesting read.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh yeah. I need to answer the question….

Are we alone? I think it’s a supreme vanity, given the age of the universe and what we know about life on our own planet, and it’s many iterations, to say no to this.

Is there intelligent life? Again I’d have to say almost certainly. Possibly more advanced than us, possibly not,

Are they coming over here, probing out cows and abducting our local odd’uns? Almost. Certainly. Not.

Though I must admit to being tickled by the idea that the UFOs aren’t exactly the cream of the alien crop, but the equivalent of teenagers in clapped out cars who get a kick out of bothering wildlife.

Drink, Drugs and chemical imbalances in the brain can do insane things to a persons mental state. Heck even if you're perfectly normal you can easily have a waking dream and such which can feel very real.

There's a lot of ways that a person can interpret memories that they've got of a period of time and to interpret them incorrectly; all because of an altered mental state which impeded their ability to function at the time and/or recall that period of time correctly.


Brains can make stuff up to fill in gaps. Heck there's a whole slew of visual tricks that work purely on the fact that our brains interpret information, they don't just process it.

For example, the image below is black and white with the image broken up with a coloured grid and it tricks our brain into seeing the image as a whole (or at least tricks most peoples brains) as coloured.






With a mind that's interpreting information based on what it understands its very readily possible to have experiences that the brain makes stuff up for to fill in the blanks and gaps or such.






I'd also say, and this is sadly a more sinister and sad aspect, I suspect there's more than few "alien abductions" which are actual abductions. Or other extreme situations where one person is abused by another(or others).
Much like how some people develop a "split personality" to shield their mental state; I would not be surprised if some peoples minds lean on alien abduction to try and come to terms with real traumatic experiences.

Following on from Tsagualsa



Also reminds me of the week that my daughter spent regularly freaking out asa 2 year old because she kept seeing chickens that wouldn’t leave her alone! The brain is a weird and wonderful thing!

I’m also a great believer in the theory that governments would be unable to keep such a secret because they just aren’t that competent.

Not only that but the idea that they can all work together and agree on that.

They can't get peace or sort out finances or anything; but they CAN hide aliens from everyone else.

stonehorse wrote:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft

I really do not know what to make of this, and the recent Pentagon announcement of the US tracking roughly 600 UAP's.

Seems a bit more creditable information is coming out with each passing week.

I strongly doubt that these are extraterrestrials, as the vastness of space is just too large to feasible make contact with anything out there... yet, there seem to be unknown things in our air.

Crazy times.

I don't strongly doubt anything when it comes to what we don't know. I also tend not to put anything past time for which there's been quite a bit of past, before we opened our eyes and took a breath.

Flinty wrote:Following on from Tsagualsa



Also reminds me of the week that my daughter spent regularly freaking out asa 2 year old because she kept seeing chickens that wouldn’t leave her alone! The brain is a weird and wonderful thing!

I’m also a great believer in the theory that governments would be unable to keep such a secret because they just aren’t that competent.

I'm proof that graph is incorrect, and further for having sightings of unexplainable anomolies in the skies. I feel like at this point each one of you should have seen something you can't explain or know someone close to you that has.

The graph isn't showing that we no longer see things we cannot explain. It's showing that things like aliens, saucers, lake monsters and bigfoot haven't been photographed with increasing regularity despite having a vast increase in camera access.

If bigfoot were real you'd expect to have seen a massive uptick in photos. Same for many others; even if you argue "aliens are hiding better because of it" things like lake monsters wouldn't.

So yes we still see things we don't understand at the time; we still have UFOs. However many of those earlier ideas are simply not standing up to the increase in potential evidence.


Cameras are no longer a rare item that only professionals use and amateurs might only have a hobby pinhole camera. They aren't slow to take photos on or only work in the dark - heck in the last 10 or so years the sensor technology has advanced to an insane degree. A lot of cameras can take photos, without flash, in very dark conditions.

Yes cameras are slow. Particularly for the type of sightings that come and go quick. There's no grabbing your camera, making sure you're focused on the target, and by then it's over.

Other things not so much, and as far as instruments. I believe it was stated during the hearing back in 2022? That we' received pretty much 5 minutes of footage relating to only 2 or 3 sightings.

There's hours of footage and hundreds more incidents we've not seen. Presently I hear there's 800 new cases.

Now I never thought I would see anything out of the orindary, but when you do it makes an impression, at least for me. I have an opinion about it, but I also don't need to impose it on any of you.

 Adeptekon wrote:
Yes cameras are slow. Particularly for the type of sightings that come and go quick. There's no grabbing your camera, making sure you're focused on the target, and by then it's over.

Other things not so much, and as far as instruments. I believe it was stated during the hearing back in 2022? That we' received pretty much 5 minutes of footage relating to only 2 or 3 sightings.

There's hours of footage and hundreds more incidents we've not seen. Presently I hear there's 800 new cases.

Now I never thought I would see anything out of the orindary, but when you do it makes an impression, at least for me. I have an opinion about it, but I also don't need to impose it on any of you.

We have automatic camera's on work all the time. No need to grab camera when one is recording all the time.

And if there were aliens they wouldn'' be hidden. They would be here for fuel to continue their thousands of year travel or colonize this planet at which point they could do that. Either just settling or if want to get rid of us press button and kill us all.

They wouldn't skulk around as they would have no need.

Re: cameras

Mobile phone cameras are calibrated to take pictures of your family at a birthday party, not a distant object floating in the sky or a creature on the far side of a mountain pass. Telephoto lenses remain a rare and limited feature, and rarely go anything more powerful than 2x.

That aside, the overwhelming majority of people still can't reliably hold their phone in landscape to record video, expecting them to take good quality evedntiary images or video is unrealistic.

There's also vastly more material out there these days than there was prior to the advent of cameraphones. Back in the 80s and 90s, if you bought any book on the subject you'd nearly always find a selection from the same few dozen well known examples, because the sample of images that weren't discredited or explained was tiny.

These days there's YouTube channels and even broadcast TV shows full of new stuff. Of course, the majority is explicable or manufactured, but that's never really been any different.

As to the topic? I'm confident we're not the only planet with life on it. I'm reasonably convinced that life is intelligent, I'm open-minded to the possibility that they can travel either interstellar or interdimensional. There's enough bonkers science out there that's a matter of undisputed fact that I find the idea that a civilization that may predate ours by epochs might have cracked that particular problem at least plausible.

Well NASA have annouced that there are military pilots and recording devices submitting images and testimony of things that NASA can not currently explain when they have been analysied.

Beyond that....it would be cool if it was.....

Its quite amusing that there is a lot of talk about getting the alien tech but is it all that good if they keep crashing....

I suggest yall read the original reporting that broke the story:

https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-non-human-craft/

The Debrief also has a 3 part q&a about the fact check. Draw your own conclusions.

Some of you may recall that when we last discussed UAPs on dakka here some years back I was firmly in the "this is all explainable by human technology and people misunderstanding what they are witnessing" camp. When I first saw this report I dismissed it out of hand, but the more I think about it the more I believe there's more to this story.

Edit: Having done some independent "research" (ie fallen down the ufo conspiracy theory rabbit hole), I came across what's known as the "Wilson/Davis memo". It's a document that leaked in 2019, allegedly written by Dr. Eric Davis (senior intelligence official) in 2002 about an alleged meeting he had with Admiral Thomas Wilson (former Director of the DIA) tegsrding events that occurred in 1997. The document came to light when it was found in the personal files of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell after his passing. In it, Adm. Wilson, who was then serving in a role which gave him oversight over all US black budget programs, discovered a hidden program being undertaken by an unnamed defense contractor (implied to be Lockheed Martin/Skunk Works) to study and reverse engineer recovered non-human technology. He was blocked access to it because of convoluted bureaucratic maneuvering. The memo basically corroborated what Grusch is now claiming. You can read that memo here:

https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114761/documents/HHRG-117-IG05-20220517-SD001.pdf

Wilson denies ever having met with Davis, whereas Miller has only made carefully worded non-denials regarding the document and the details therein. Mitchell, Interestingly, went on Larry King in 2008 and talked about how he had met with an admiral who basically told him the same thing contained in the memo - Wilson denies that too, whether or not I actually happened or Mitchell was referring to the memo is a bit unclear.

I suppose it's possible this is a decades long practical joke or ufo research is being used as a cover story for something more down to earth (pun intended), but it's interesting to see what seems to be a 25 year long chain of events playing out with some consistency.

2nd Edit: The Wilson/Davis memo is not the only such example of corroborating evidence, there's also the matter of Jacques Vallee and General John Sheehan and Charles Bowsher who basically said the same exact thing, in a rush so I'll reference you the Cliff notes version nested towards the bottom of this daily mail article - iirc the mails a bit of a tabloid rag, yes? No matter, you can use this to hunt down better sources:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11996773/amp/Six-whistleblowers-spill-UFO-secrets-congress.html

All of these events seem to be kind of connected and cross-referential (implication is that Bowsher is the individual mentioned in the Davis memo as having almost exposed the undercover program), despite not on the service being something that was coordinated by these individuals which implies some degree of veracity. That the underlying thesis essentially matches what Grusch is now saying gives all these stories extra layers of validity.

The Daily Mail is not the most reliable of sources

In fact it’s a wonder that the headline is ‘t complaining about those damn aliens coming here to steal our jobs and freeload off the state.

Like others have said the sums suggest there should be other life out there but as St Douglas observed "“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” meaning even with magic levels of FTL getting any meaningful distance is a massive PITA

Yeah even if the Universe is full of life it can still be insanely spread out to the point where contact is rare or very difficult. Or we could just be in a very quiet pocket of space and everywhere else is teaming with spaceships and teleporters and such.


I think one other thing that rears its head as abnormal is if we know there are aliens or if there have been found crashed ships and such - why have we seen zero tech advance from that? If the governments really did have alien tech and we assume that to cross the gulf of space the Aliens would be considerably more advanced than us; where is the tech that derives from that?

We've never seen a government release any machine or device that defies current scientific thinking; or which is so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even conceive how they got there. There's no massive leap happening.
Which is what you'd fully expect unless you have something like the MIB supressing everything.



Which when you pause and think of it is actually really sinister. Whilst they are in general up-beat films; when you pause and realise how much technology they have and how much it could advance things like food production, medical research and so-forth - you realise that the MIB are really rather nasty in keeping it all locked up and hidden.



Also if there really are aliens and the USA really does know about them - can we really believe that Trump wouldn't have tweeted everyone within about 5-10seconds of being shown the secret documents. Or are we also having shadow-governments and shadow-militaries and Pyramids with eyes on the top?
Once you start to consider the multiple layers of secrecy required and the interconnected relations you start to head down the rabbithole of a lot of other conspiracies to support one conspiracy.

On reverse engineering, I guess one counter argument would be any sufficiently advanced tech is just too advanced.

For instance, if we took my iPad, wot I’m typing on right now, back in time say, 600 years. We put in into the hands of Henry VI, or his court.

What could they practically do with it? It’s so far beyond their level of technology, none of the principles behind it would be familiar.

I've no idea why everyone is going for the "aliens" explanation, time-travelling pterosaurs are just as likely.

Now that's even less likely. One way travel & colonize traveling is at least theoretically possible and something humans eventually need to do to survive assuming we haven't killed each other before that.

tneva82 wrote:
Now that's even less likely. One way travel & colonize traveling is at least theoretically possible and something humans eventually need to do to survive assuming we haven't killed each other before that.

I’d imagine our first, and possibly last, step is to further colonise our solar system.

Right now, food and water are of course the biggest issues there, because we’ve but a single source World for such things.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On reverse engineering, I guess one counter argument would be any sufficiently advanced tech is just too advanced.

For instance, if we took my iPad, wot I’m typing on right now, back in time say, 600 years. We put in into the hands of Henry VI, or his court.

What could they practically do with it? It’s so far beyond their level of technology, none of the principles behind it would be familiar.

You could take your Ipad and deliver it to Apple, ca. 2003, and they could not replicate it even if they understood it perfectly. Understanding how something works is very different from having the processes needed for e.g. manufacturing chips with a given performance at a small enough scale, for example. You can conclude, from examining the future-Ipad, that it is physically possible and at some point economically viable to do it, but that does not grow you a hyper-advanced manufacturing plant that churns these things out.

That's something that Star Trek IV got right, or did at least show, with Scotty sauntering up to a manufacturing plant and showing them how to make the raw materials the crew needed for their heist

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
Now that's even less likely. One way travel & colonize traveling is at least theoretically possible and something humans eventually need to do to survive assuming we haven't killed each other before that.

I’d imagine our first, and possibly last, step is to further colonise our solar system.

Right now, food and water are of course the biggest issues there, because we’ve but a single source World for such things.

That won't last us forever. Well technically nothing will but by leaving this star system and colonizing other systems final death of mankind can be postponed.

Of course timeline for this solar system not being livable anymore is silly long but any alien travelers that might come here are most likely on similar mission. Colonize new planet so their race won't die when their sun dies.

It also raises the question of whether any other species, at least comparable to our own, survived and developed sufficient technology to get off its own rock in the first place.

Biology may wildly vary, but Physics am Physics. No matter how clever you are, you can only jump so high. And technology then needs to pick up the slack.

If we are really lucky it will be someone like the Culture and thats most of life's problems on a amacro and micro scale fixed immediately.

I imagine it will be no different than when some native populations of the Americas allied with the Europeans against their neighbors.

Our goverments will do the same.