Friday, 11 June 2021
Wednesday, 9 June 2021
Shostak and SETI Staffers Are TERRIFIED of the Possibility of Alien Visitation
Shostak and his astronomer pals at SETI who have been churning out the same "they cant travel here!"/"Its not aliens" garbage for decades really deserve to lose their jobs.
No, You Gullible Fools. The UFOs Aren’t Aliens.
Yes, it appears fast-flying, maneuverable somethings have been buzzing the U.S. military’s ships and planes in recent years.
Right now, it’s impossible to say for sure what these Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as the Pentagon refers to them, actually are. But we can say with reasonable certainty what they’re not.
They’re not aliens.
There’s a long list of reasons why the UAPs aren’t extraterrestrial. Most of them hinge on a simple philosophical concept: Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony, named for 14th-century Franciscan friar and philosopher William of Occam.
In short, the simplest explanation is always the best. And in the case of the Pentagon’s mysterious aerial stalkers, the simplest explanations don’t include E.T.
“The amount of energy it would take to travel the interstellar void is enormous,” Michael Varnum, an Arizona State University psychologist who studies possible first-contact scenarios, told The Daily Beast. “You’d do all that to visit the Navy every few weeks?”
The current UFO hype took years to build up steam. It started back in 2004, when Navy Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were in the cockpit of their F/A-18F fighter flying a routine training mission 100 miles off the Southern California coast.
A radar operator on a nearby Navy warship radioed the aviators, directing Fravor and Slaight to investigate a mysterious object that had appeared on the ship’s screens.
Sensors showed the unidentified flying object speeding down toward the ocean from a lofty altitude of 80,000 feet, briefly hovering at 20,000 feet then descending to wavetop height. As the crew closed within visual range of the UFO, they were startled by what they saw.
It appeared to be an aircraft of some sort. Oval in shape. Around 40 feet long. It hovered over the water, churning up waves and foam. Fravor steered the F/A-18 directly at the object. Abruptly the UFO sped away, Fravor told The New York Times. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.” “I have no idea what I saw. It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s.”
Navy pilots on several other occasions in recent years had similar run-ins with UFOs. Cockpit videos of the encounters have racked up millions of views on social media. Amid a surge of interest in possible alien visitors, news broke that a trio of powerful U.S. senators for years channeled tens of millions of dollars into a military-run office that investigated UFO sightings.
The Pentagon has released more videos of UFOs—er, UAPs. And later this month the military plans to release to Congress an unclassified report on the mysterious objects. The report is inconclusive, according to The New York Times, which obtained a copy.
“The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology,” the Times explained. “That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret.”
“But that is about the only conclusive finding in the classified intelligence report,” the Times added. “Senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.”
Scientists who specialize in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, rolled their eyes. “The leaked report is just perfect,” Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the California-based SETI Institute, told The Daily Beast. “The skeptics will keep on being skeptical, and the believers will continue to believe—and hope for disclosure. Like vanilla ice cream, this report pleases everyone!”
But count scientists as skeptics. Not because they don’t believe in extraterrestrial life. In fact, it’s noncontroversial in the SETI discipline that Earth life isn’t the only life in the universe.
Space is vast. Earth-like planets are plentiful. The chemical building blocks of organic life are all over the place. “Why should we be the only ones?” Martin Dominik, an astronomer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, asked The Daily Beast.
But SETI experts, who have devoted their lives to finding alien life, expect first contact to come one of two ways. Either we dig up microbes in the soil of Mars or Venus or some moon, or our radio receivers finally detect signals emanating from some very far-away technological civilization.
They don’t expect aliens to announce themselves by secretly traveling galactic distances, plunging into Earth’s atmosphere then zeroing in on the U.S. Navy and flying loop-de-loops around its ships and planes before zipping away without making any effort to communicate.
“I have a hard time imagining the psyche or culture of an alien civilization that would invest so much in way of resources to see what the Navy is up to,” Arizona State University's Varnum said.
Avi Loeb, a Harvard physicist, warned against trusting too much in eyewitness accounts of UAPs by military personnel. It’s not that pilots and radar-operators are lying. But they’re not scientists. And their senses and memories can’t replace rigorous scientific study.
“It would be prudent to progress forward with our finest instruments, rather than examine past reports,” Loeb said. “Instead of declassifying documents that reflect decades-old technologies used by witnesses with no scientific expertise, it would be far better to deploy state-of-the-art recording devices, such as wide-field cameras on telescopes or audio sensors, at the sites where the reports came from and search for unusual signals.”
“A scientific expedition focused on reproducing old reports would be far more valuable in unraveling the mysteries behind them,” Loeb added. “Its most important purpose would be to inject scientific rigor and credibility into the discussion.”
If we apply Occam’s razor, there are much simpler explanations for what has been harassing the American fleet. There are two that stand out. Some of the UAPs could be high-performance drones that some foreign power—that is to say, Russia or China—is using to spy on U.S. forces.
There’s ample precedent. Consider Iran’s own UFO fever starting more than a decade ago. Repeated sightings of speedy, unidentified flying objects got the Iranian air force so worked up that it sent its best planes, American-made F-14s, to investigate.
Tragically, one of those F-14s crashed in January 2012, killing both crew. Many Iranians genuinely believed a UFO had shot it down.
Tehran came around to the idea that its UFOs were, in fact, American spy drones. It undoubtedly helped Iranian officials reach that conclusion when, in December 2011, a U.S. Air Force Sentinel drone—a flying wing that’s not unlike a small-scale, pilotless B-2 stealth bomber—crashed on the Iran-Afghanistan border, apparently while surveilling Iranian nuclear facilities.
Flash forward a decade. Drones are faster, more maneuverable and harder to detect than ever before. The Air Force has quietly deployed a scaled-up spy drone that’s similar to the Sentinel but even more sophisticated. The so-called RQ-180 might have broken cover late last year when a photographer in California spotted something flying high overhead.
It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that Russia or China, or both, possesses new spy drones of its own. It’s obvious why these countries would send their drones to snoop around American ships and planes. It’s less obvious how these drones could outfly the Navy’s supersonic fighters.
But then, the more elusive UAPs might not be drones. Or, for that matter, anything at all. The other most plausible explanation for UAPs is that they’re sensor artifacts. Weird blips on the screens of multi-million-dollar radars and infrared scanners whose fidelity is so great that they might sometimes manifest objects that aren’t really there.
Even if drones and sensor artifacts can’t account for all UAPs, there’s no good reason to leap to aliens as an explanation, Wade Roush, a science lecturer and author of the nonfiction book Extraterrestrials, told The Daily Beast.
“It might turn out that there's a tiny residue of truly unexplained cases,” Roush said. “For some of those cases the extraterrestrial hypothesis might be one of the last ones you're left with. But I predict that this residue will be vanishingly small. And even after investigators have ruled out a bunch of other explanations, ‘aliens’ is still so far-fetched that it's just about the last possibility you'd want to consider. It's only slightly more plausible than ‘time-travelers’ or ‘Atlanteans.’”
But Varnum for one said he appreciates why so many people are eager to see the UAPs as off-world visitors.
Life on Earth is hard. The more that climate change, a global fascist resurgence and the ongoing pandemic drag us down, the more we look to the stars for escape. “It creates some sense of mystery and excitement in the world,” Varnum said.
Just because we want to believe in UFOs doesn’t mean we should, however. If it’s aliens you want, try following the actual scientific discipline that is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI scientists truly believe they’re on the cusp of discovering alien life.
“Within 20 to 30 years we’ll have space telescopes… that are going to be able to detect biosignatures in the atmospheres of exo-planets,” Douglas Vakoch, who heads the METI International research organization in San Francisco, told The Daily Beast. METI stands for “Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”
An exo-planet is just a faraway planet. There are uncountable millions of them. Once we can efficiently scan them for life, the search for alien life could accelerate. A lot. “There’s no reason not to know by 2050, one way or another,” Vakoch said.
If and when we do know, it’ll be because of clear, verifiable evidence based on repeatable experimentation. No fleeting glimpses of odd objects on Navy radar screens. No breathless testimony from spooked pilots. No ambiguous government reports.
There’s probably life out there. But it’s almost certainly not taking joyrides around our aircraft carriers.
Thursday, 3 June 2021
I Do NOT Believe Luis Elizondo
These are just some quick notes.
First thing we need to mention is this UAP/UFO report going to Congress "in June". Quite honestly, when this was announced I got suspicious.
If you have to gather the case reports and then analyse the data to see whether there is a mundane explanation that can take weeks. If the report cannot be easily dismissed as "Explained" then you need to consult others in various fields and they all take time to check and double check their own opinions on a report and we are not talking one but perhaps 3-5 experts in their fields. You are looking at months of work there.
To this you then have to add your own opinion and analysis after editing and compiling the experts' opinions and discussing threat or other assessments. Even if you leave in the names of witnesses and technical breakdown that is, at speed a time frame of six months and that is before the said "final report" is assessed within the corridors of power and passed back down for release assessment.
A serious report is going to take at minimum around a year yet here we are told that one was ready within a couple of months. There's a funny smell there that makes me check the soles of my shoes.
Then we have all the "confirmed" UAP footage and stills that are 'leaked' and/or officially released BUT the officials will not give any other information meaning that these could be all explainable but when they were initially submitted they were classed as UAP/UFOs (then the explanation came but they are not telling you that).
George Knapp -now there is a source I have been suspicious of ever since the Skinwalker Ranch bunkum and book -hey, anyone remember Skinwalker was a "thing" before it became more You Tube/TV fake pop culture? More distortion of the truth and disinformation came from Knapp and his connections over that than any event before (excepting Roswell). Now here is Knapp, all pally with Luis Elizondo who conveniently became the focus for the whole AATIP and UAP/UFO investigation but of course, he can tell us no more because he "took the oath" but, gosh darn it, "elements within the Pentagon" are trying to discredit him and have even destroyed all of his emails and files (no -this never happens unless it can be used against someone and "bring them down" but let's look at that. "Yes, we did look at UFOs as a potential threat to our nation but we found no evidence of that so its as big a mystery to us as it is to everyone else" -that admission just tells people that the government did the right thing but ....mystery. Big deal. Is that going to bring down anyone? No.
Elizondo keeps using the same "I am sat here, humble and willing to tell you what I can" posture and positioning. This is all for domestic U.S. consumption anyway (they really do not care about outside the U.S. unless it helps them hide new tech testing from enemies). "I took an oath the serve the people and my country" / "I am a patriot and believe in our Constitution" / "Elected officials are there to serve the public and not the other way around" / "If they do not reveal the truth I goddam will armed with The Bill of Rights" / "I will stand for Congress and I will make each and every one of them accountable and I know the names" / "I served my country in and out of uniform" (wonderful how his absolutely hush-hush ultra top secret involvement in work against Al Qaeda keeps getting mentioned and it was only discovered (planted) after a lot of work on other subjects. "I served my country and I am on a Kill List -which did not go down well with my family".
Patriot, serving his country, fighting terrorist and getting put on a kill list, ready to take down the anonymous "power brokers" (while making sure that he tells us 99% of people at the Pentagon "are good people"). He wants the truth and the American people MUST have the truth.
To me, looking at all the interviews one thing strikes me and I spent 40 plus years investigating and talking to people; Elizondo's posture, the moves and little touches (deep breath, sit back, adjust baseball cap) is a con. He is gaslighting. Gaslighting is a little more complicated than this but a quick definition online: "Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment.
John Greenewald Jr of the Black Vault has twice now been praised for his work by Elizondo and the first time was a tad to watch but the latest was outright bull-shit and I could smell it all the way back here in the UK. He laid it on so thick; Greenewald and his work is mentioned in high circles and he scares some of these people. Greenewald thanks Elizondo for the words ("for those words") and that along with his expression shows that he is not buying it.
And the only person at the Pentagon who is allowed to speak on UFOs is obstructive and able to bend the truth...and also wrote a paper on how to use deception via information release (we used to call that "Grey Propaganda".
"Grey Propaganda"-a tad of truth but with twists and false bitsof info added to make even the sceptics believe but there is no one identifiable source or person at the core of it.
This is opposed to "Black Propaganda" - False or unverified propaganda, especially appearing to come from an enemy's own sources; disinformation. Including setting up (framing) of individuals such as child porn on their computer, lots of sudden unexplained money in their bank account, planting of evidence to show that they belonged to an illegal organisation and so on. Dirty work,
But what if there is an actual report? Well, the chances are that as we are dealing with persons versed in counter intelligences as well as deception and taking into account the "long con" it is very likely one prepared especially to look like the work was done and these are the findings but, you know, everyone has seen the video clips and images and when they were submitted as UAP they looked interesting but after some hard work it was found that one was a Batman helium balloon and .....so on and so forth.
But why? Most Americans are said to believe in UFO (extra terrestrial) visitors and it has become a big pop culture subject. Ahh, the American people have always been easy to manipulate on one thing, however; a threat. Look at wildlife programmes on US TV -THIS is out there and it is GOING TO KILL YOU. And "THAT is after your KIDS AND PETS!" and it moves into most areas and creates a paranoid that gets people asking "What is our government doing about this?!" From immigrants, to trade, to wildlife and even to Bigfoot the seeds of fear help authorities locally and nationally do what they want -with the support of the people.
So, are UAP/UFOs Russian? Chinese? Those are the "Big Two" and paranoia and fear of both have been worked into the American psyche -look at daily news stories (and "goddamit those Chinese have killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and YOU could be next!"). What if -and all citizens have seen the UFO TV programmes and heard friends or relatives talk about UFO sightings and abductions- this IS all alien? Or, we can't be sure but we "can rule out terrestrial governments" (so "Aliens" but without saying so) -"Remember Pearl Harbour -but this time it could be the Continental United States or our planet!"
Hmm. If only there could be some way to get more money -increase our "special" defence budget? We are talking billions in deals and side deals here. Here you are, Congressfolk -we are currently stumped and incapable of defending the United States based on current defence technology." Question: "How can we change that situation?" Response: "Well, we have technology development planned for but not the budget...."
Boom
Is this all just to get more funding? Is it that simple?
We'll need to wait and see.
When it comes down to it I do not believe Elizondo was in charge of a project. He is so obviously -facial expressions and body language not to mention what he says are all shouting out "FRAUD!" Give it a year or two and someone who is not brainwashed will come up with the truth....it won't be Elizondo.