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The Turn-on-a-Dime’s Difference

Over two out of five. The first articles I saw put the ratio at “nearly 50 percent,” but the percentage is, more accurately, “nearly 41.” What’s significant is we would expect that figure to be much, much lower.

I’m talking about UFOs. Or “UAP” — as it is now trendy to say. I’m going to stick with the old term, just to rub the long history of the subject into smug, refined noses.

The story is this: in an upcoming-any-day-now report to Congress on UFOs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence claims that there were 366 military-reported Unidentified Aerial … er … Flying Objects, last year, and 150 of them remain unexplained and not likely to be explained, since they behaved extremely oddly. That is, they acted in classic “flying saucer” manner. 

“The unexplained ones they just have no clue,” says Daily Mail reporter Josh Boswell, “because these things are moving in ways that we just don’t understand. At hypersonic speeds, and then they just turn on a dime. I mean, it’s incredible.”

The bad news is that it appears these things “exist.” The good news, one can hope, is that now the military has protocols in place to handle such reports rather than turn each UFO/pilot interaction into a case fraught with secrecy and suppression, fear and consternation. The UFO reports now go to the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

It is worth mentioning that many of the stories in this upcoming report toe the old government line, insisting that these sightings are in theory explainable as enemy drones, etc. If true, drone tech has made serious advances!

And the world is even more dangerous than previously thought.

Or weirder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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4 replies on “The Turn-on-a-Dime’s Difference”

Wisdom is a function of understanding just how much we do not know, whether it is about about ourselves, our adversary’s or this spec of dust in the universe we all inhabit.
That we have phenomena we cannot explain is simply an invitation, our being tasked, with a humble seeking of the explanation.
To admit a reality is the much better course than burying the observable under a shroud of governmental secrecy. We, the general public and electorate, can (and must) handle the truth, regardless of the elites’ belief to the contrary.

I liked “UAP” and adopted that years before the recent official U-turn, because the words “flying” and “object” carry with them potentially misleading associations. And, in my case, I picked-up the term from The Fortean Times, whose writers were trying to engage in reasonable study of UAP in an era when the mainstream response was a sneer.

For what it’s worth, I thought that some of the theorizing about UAP in The Fortean Times was, while highly speculative, scientifically competent and intriguing.

There is an explanation for some of these sightings: If one looks at their “behavior,” which violates the laws of physics, one has to conclude that the thing sighted has no mass. So what might it actually be? First, it helps to know where, when, and under what circumstances it was sighted. Then one can ascertain what it might actually be. Concluding at the start that it was a craft of some sort is the same sort of thing as ghost sightings and odd phenomena during seances. So what might some of these things be? The commonest mineral on earth is quartz, and it is piezoelectric. That is, it generates an electrical charge upon application of physical stress. Think of the “object” in terms of being caused by stress on quartz, and one concludes that it is a limited volume of air excited by high-frequency electric charges, and what moves is NOT an object, but merely the part of atmosphere being ionized. Other explanations include ball lightning and parhelic circles.

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