Tag: UFOs

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government transparency national politics & policies

Identified?

UFO, UAP, aliens, US government, secrets, technology

The current UFO story is not a Big Nothing, but neither is it a Big Something.

Tucker Carlson addressed it on the first episode (6:43 mark) of Tucker on Twitter, his new show solely broadcast on the social media giant’s platform.

“A former Air Force officer, who worked for years in military intelligence, came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. Government has physical evidence of crashed, non-​human-​made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft,” Tucker explained. “The Pentagon has spent decades studying these other-​worldly remains in order to build more technologically-​advanced weapons systems. OK. That’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it’s clear he was telling the truth.”

Tucker’s conclusion? “UFOs are actually real and so, apparently, is extraterrestrial life.”

He may have gone a bit overboard. As “skeptic” science writer Michael Shermer notes, there is no real evidence here — at least in The Debrief’s  June 5 story, upon which most of the journalism is based — just very familiar rumors. Nothing whistleblower David Charles Grusch says is new; hundreds of other alleged whistleblowers have been saying similar things for decades.

What’s different? This time one of these whistleblowers has sworn under oath and given testimony to Congress.

Which is not insignificant. Grusch’s testimony also, allegedly, points to where in the Deep State the secrets lay hiding.

While the story hardly proves “UFOs are actually real” and so “is extraterrestrial life,” it suggests that the Government’s contradictory past press releases on the subject may (just may) be provably identified as the lies they’ve long seemed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder​.ai and DALL-E2

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defense & war government transparency international affairs

Why the Balloon Story Ballooned

UFO, military, weather balloon, defense

“Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet,” ran the Reuters headline. This was over the weekend, “after a series of shoot-​downs of unidentified objects,” Reuters explained, clarifying that for the real information, General Glen VanHerck would defer “to U.S. intelligence experts.”

You know, the people who start wars under false pretenses and hounded a sitting president with a fake dossier about bed-​wetting prostitutes.

While General VanHerck simultaneously up-​played and down-​played extra-​terrestrials, an unnamed source at the Pentagon denied any evidence for the crafts being anything but terrestrial. Sure. But remember the context: last week’s 200-​foot-​tall balloon episode.

“To be clear — The Chinese Balloon was an authentic UFO until it was identified,” tweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It then became an IFO.”

I riffed off that truism when I covered the balloon story, too. But does that explain how quickly a balloon panic became a UFO panic?

Ever since World War II’s foo fighters we’ve had hints that something was not completely “normal” in our skies. But the military has never before boasted of shooting down UFOs — though ufology lore is full of stories about just such events.

VanHerck offers a possible explanation: after the balloon brouhaha, the radar tracking systems were reset to include things less jet-​like and rocket-​like than normal. So other things in the skies that seem anomalous — foo-​fighter-​like? — all of a sudden become serious concerns.

This was one of the reasons given for the founding of modern Pentagon tracking of “UAP”: there may be more than one type of strange “phenomena” flying/​floating/​darting-​about in our skies, and the military should be able to distinguish one from another, especially from novel drone and other surveillance technology.

Especially in time of war.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Now A Straight Answer?

stars, sky, UFO, UAP

Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “America’s civil space program and the global leader in space exploration,” got in on the UFO disclosure racket.

Why that word, “racket”? 

UFO skeptics and mockers have been using that sort of word to describe the subject itself — unidentified advanced aerial phenomena on the planet — but now we hear UFO “nuts” useit to describe NASA’s announcement. 

“A crock,” says Tyler Glockner of the popular SecureTeam10 channel, reminding us of NASA’s nickname: “Never A Straight Answer.”

Many UFO researchers believe that NASA has been “in” on “the UFO cover-​up” from the beginning of its mission.

I know nothing about that, but I do know that we cannot trust government. 

While rumors about NASA programs to scrub photos of the Moon and Mars to get rid of alien structures on the surfaces of those two bodies, as well as alien craft, are outlandish, so to speak — it surely looks like something is going on regarding UFOs.

While NASA insists that it “is not part of the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force or its successor, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group,” which have so far dominated recent UFO news headlines, it does proclaim that it is coordinating with other agencies. 

More significantly, physicist Michio Kaku recently changed his tune on UFOs, and is talking of an independent research group that confirms the physical reality of UFOs darting about with advanced physical attributes.

Not new, I know: same thing French scientist Jacques Vallee wrote in the 1960s, and General Twining apparently memo’ed in the ’40s. 

In covering this issue for the last few years, my point has been: government transparency. Let’s remember the long history of government agencies stringing us opaquely along.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency progress responsibility

UFOs and Other Foes

invisible, invisibility cloak, UFO, defense, disclosure

Frivolous federal spending: you don’t approve; I don’t approve. Which is why I’m usually on Reason magazine’s side when it comes to government prodigality. But complaining about the money spent by the Pentagon to make sense of the UFO phenomenon misses the bigger story.

In “The Feds Spent $22 Million Researching Invisibility Cloaks, UFOs, and a Tunnel Through the Moon,” Fiona Harrigan sets up the problem: “The 2008 Defense Supplemental Appropriation Act included $10 million for the AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] and the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act allotted $12 million, amounting to $22 million over five years. It is unclear how much of that money went toward researching UFOs and how much went toward invisibility cloaks, because how the money was used has been shrouded in secrecy.”

If when I’ve talked about these programs before I didn’t much discuss invisibility cloaks or spintronics and other ancillary aspects of UFO disclosure, it’s because I knew little about them … and neither, I gather, does Ms. Harrigan.

What they all show is the first teensy bit of transparency … on the apparently non-​dismissible persistence of aerial phenomena that were dubbed UFOs* by Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt in his 1956 study, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

The military has apparently known about the puzzling reality of this phenomena for a long time. If we are to believe current reports, or past leaked documents like the Twining Memo, the objects observed by the military are (contrary to official statements) real objects intelligently controlled that do not behave according to the laws of physics that we were taught in school.

Ms. Harrigan warns us of a very different irregularity: how the research was contracted under the authorizing legislation.

That sure seems like the lesser story. 

The biggest story? Cover-​up. Investigation into UFOs couldn’t be done in-​house because of the layers of secrecy already in place. Non-​disclosure agreements’ and top-​level secrecy compartmentalization required outsourcing. We may have to accept some irregularities … the regular methods having led to secrecy of extreme sorts. 

The kind that makes the Deep State deep.

And as for invisibility cloaks: they are associated with UFOs, and would obviously be very useful for the military. Besides, cloaking technology is now in use, no longer a mere sci-​fi dream.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Ruppelt thought the initials should be pronounced as one word: YOU-​foe!

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Fravor’s Fake UFOs?

UFO, disclosure, conspiracy

In just weeks, the Pentagon will report to Congress on the matter of UFOs. 

Though the subject appears vast, beginning before World War II’s “foo fighters” and extending right up to Colorado’s ongoing (?) “drone” mystery, the impetus for much of the recent interest comes from one source: a declassified set of telemetry data and FLIR footage from an alleged UFO encounter off the coast of California on November 10, 2004.

Brought to the fore by former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, and backed up by the testimony of Navy fighter pilots who took the footage, Commander David Fravor, preeminently, these videos had been hacking around the Internet for years, and repeatedly “debunked.” 60 Minutes did a segment on the subject, recently, but ignored the debunkers. So a popular junk science debunker on YouTube, an engineer known as Thunderf00t, demonstrated how the technology used by pilot Fravor produces images of normal flying objects that can look … alien … to novices.

The problem with this debunking, as with previous ones, is that it deprecates the context. Specifically, the testimony. Thunderf00t dismisses the pilots as “UFO nuts.”

But he does not directly deal with the testimony. “This is not like we saw it and it was gone or I saw lights in the sky and it’s gone,” Commander Fravor explains — “we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers.” He also asserts that the “things” blocked radar and behaved as if they could read minds or instantaneously crack secure Navy communications.

If the debunkers are correct about the footage being grossly misinterpreted, the surrounding testimony amounts to lies. We novices might be fooled by FLIR, but not trained fighter jet personnel. And if they are lying, then the Pentagon should know and say. 

For decades, the military has been telling us, publicly, that UFOs aren’t a thing. Now it appears they are telling us they are.

Am I the only one who is curious?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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