I heard about this program on the NYT daily podcast and found myself a bit shaken. I had always dismissed the likelihood of visitors from outer space as negligible. But this sounded serious.
It seems like the government is inching closer by the year to lower the shock value. With individual companies doing space work, it is becoming harder by the year to pull the wool over our eyes.
Are they out there? Not sure, my guess is yes, but the real action might be with USO’s, Unidentified Submerged Objects in the oceans, UFO’s in the artic, and Ufos in the mountains.
Is it just me, or does that footage have a remarkable resemblance to “object close to the camera”-artifacts like the “orbs” and “rods” of paranormal claims? Of course I don’t know enough of the technical setup, or what the pilots saw with their own eyes, but either that camera has perfect tracking, or whatever that is it’s stuck inside the camera dome.
If we had go-pros that were small enough, we could explore ant society from the inside by strapping a camera to an ant’s thorax and letting it wander back to the colony. Therefore, aliens wouldn’t be using anal probes to monitor human society. All they would see is flowing feces.
Maybe the term “anal probe” is actually a cynical metaphor for how human society tends to evaluate itself. See shit, and assume it’s progress.
Yea, that was my city. And despite all the happy hooey surrounding it, they were almost assuredly 5 planes, not one alien spacecraft. The day it happened, there was one person that said he viewed the lights with his telescope or binoculars, and, seeing that it was just planes, went back to what he was doing. No one talks about that witness anymore.
My theory was it was five military planes that decided to prank everyone by flying in formation with their landing lights on during a routine flight. Probably never told anyone, either. “UFOs? No, we didn’t see anything. ;)”
Uh huh. What they didn’t mention was exactly what he went back to doing. I have it on good authority that he was tweaking on his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
The lights were obstructing his view of Venus.
But Arizona has a lot of wascially wabbits that made a wrong turn at Albiqoikee. Don’t try your earth shattering kaboom experiments here.
Old report given new weight by the imprimatur of the the US government. Harry Reid had a friend who was a big donor and had an interest in UFOs. So he gave his friend 22 million dollars of the pentagon budget to look into UFOs. Simple pork barrel politics.
Makes sense. Plus, look at the cost. $22 million spent by the government? Over five years? If my math is right, 22 million / 300 million (conservative, there are over 310 million Americans, but I'm rounding off to make the point) = .07 spent for each American over the course of the investigation. Divide that by 5 years, and you get just over one cent per American per year.
According to this article from the NY Times (2014, but bear with me…just making a point), both the House and Senate combined cost each American $7 to run (federal budget, 2014). The same article lists Amtrak grants at $4 for each American.
So one cent per American per year for five years looks to me like a conciliatory gesture, and if cost is any measure, wasn’t meant to prove anything.
Not that the search by the US government is wasted, it’s always possible, though unlikely, that ET will visit Earth. It’s just more likely that a hostile Earth government will try to get the better of us, or there may be some natural catastrophe (asteroid) we need to be aware of.
Sorry about that - it is particularly appropriate to be whooshed when talking about jet fighters, though. 
But we don’t know that what the pilots saw was an extraterrestrial vehicle. Even if made by aliens, the aliens could presumably have some separate vehicle that carries the smaller vehicles, refuels them, perhaps builds them out of local materials - something I might call a mamaship. If we ever do encounter extraterrestrial vehicles, I suspect we’re more likely to encounter the smaller equivalent of a Space Segway first, as it would be scouting and/or there would be more of them.
I see. I dunno - I’m not sure that the Phoenix Lights are in the same category as the video released. I had to look it up to find out what it was, and I don’t really have any useful thoughts about it at the moment.
I agree, corruption is a bigger threat here than unexplained sightings. We know for sure that people like Alain de Villegas exist, but we don’t know for sure what, if anything, was recorded over the Pacific. But psyops can have another meaning - psychological operations to disorient or misinform an adversary. It might be in someone’s interest to have the Pentagon wasting time and money trying to figure out what happened over the Pacific rather than on other efforts - in which case, the people involved in the program wouldn’t be the ones pulling off the scam here.
But what if it wasn’t built in Seattle, but in Komsomolsk-on-Amur or Chengdu? It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that a foreign power could build drones that could test US air defense or detection capabilities. Over and above that, even the US produces some aircraft that are well-kept secrets, but that seems inconsistent with the story as reported in the Times and Politico.
But more to the point, what’s the best explanation for the video? Is it possible there was no physical object there at all, and radar ghosts and IR images were errors? Or is it more likely there was some physical object present, but with a relatively prosaic explanation like a Chinese test of US naval sensors and interception capability?
I read another article that provided some additional detail:
and
From War Is Boring
It seems to me that the combination of showing up on the ship’s radar, but not on the Hawkeye’s radar, and the seeming defiance of the laws of physics makes it more likely this was some sort of ephemeral phenomenon rather than a physical object that was detected, although the pilot seems to think it was an actual object (although he describes it as featureless.)
I hope these mysterious sightings do, in fact, turn out to be simply terrestrial vehicles or atmospheric illusions, rather than visiting aliens. Green alien chicks with big boobs and tentacles? Eww!
My dad was driving in an unfamiliar town one dark night and saw a UFO that scared the everliving piss out of him. It was bright white and near-spherical, just floating there right over the horizon, hovering. Then he came around a bend and realized it was a water tower.
:smack: 
That’s hilarious!
In the early 1990s, I had a pen pal who had been in the military, and she said that when she saw a Harrier jet after it was declassified, she knew immediately that it accounted for a huge percentage of UFO sightings near military bases. She also said that years earlier, she and a friend had been driving from Terre Haute to Indianapolis at dusk on Memorial Day weekend, and they saw a cigar-shaped object floating in the sky. They were apprehensive enough to pull the car over, and at that point, it lit up and the word “GOODYEAR” appeared on its side. :o They resumed their journey and didn’t discuss it further.
The one and only time I’ve had that alarmed feeling of something weird in the sky it was equally stupid.
On a drizzly foggy night I stepped out of a suburban restaurant where I often ate dinner. And there in the indeterminate distance was a couple of slender lights almost touching at an odd angle just hanging there in space. WTF? Emotions sound the alarm, intellect says it’s nothing unusual, but what is it? Think think think. Looks nothing like an airplane. I try taking a step to each side and it appears to move with me. Whatever it is, it must be nearby! :eek:
A moment later I recognize it. It was one of the parking lot lights on a tall pole. :smack:
There are 15-20 of them in the parking lot, same as every other night I’d been there. It was just drizzly and foggy enough the pole and most of the fixture was hidden, so all I saw was the lamp. No sooner did I recognize it than suddenly I saw all the others. Somehow I’d fixated on just that one.
Yup. An Unidentified Street Light. USL.
I blame the margaritas; that place’s bartender was generous.
I would say equipment malfunction combined with tricks of perception. Ghosts used to be immaterial but corporeal-looking creatures. Now everybody’s got a cellphone camera and “orbs” are supernatural creatures, i.e. willingness to believe combined with a lens flaw or light trick. No ghosthunter ever tries to peddle a picture of Jacob Marley wearing the chains he forged in life.
Anecdote: I worked on a ghosthunting pilot once. The ghosthunters were super excited because their E-meters or whatever we’re going crazy. I realized pretty quickly that I could goose the needles by keying my walkie talkie if things ever got slow.
Wow. Thanks for the link, as depressing as it is. How could we be so short-sighted?