Where is UFOlogy at in 2015?

[stickdog99]

hat tip to Minstrel Boy

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

Yeah, I guess they're distracting the masses from Nord Stream sabotage, train derailments and twitter testimony.

[Harvey]

Yeah, I guess they're distracting the masses from Nord Stream sabotage, train derailments and twitter testimony.

If so, it doesn't say anything at all about UFO phenomena except to delineate what the powerful must do with it. They must use it to extend their power as far as they can, along with everything else they can use to that end. What the phenomena actually is, is something else entirely.

[semper occultus]

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/p ... be-chinese

Pentagon UFO Czar Says Nothing Indicates Objects Are ET, Some May Be Chinese
Sean Kirkpatrick has “concerning indicators” that adversary technology may account for some of these unknown objects.

BY HOWARD ALTMAN | PUBLISHED APR 19, 2023 8:19 PM EDT

There is no "credible evidence" that unidentified objects - observed largely by U.S. military pilots - are examples of extraterrestrial technology or have unexplainable abilities, the Pentagon’s UFO Csar told a Senate hearing on Wednesday. But there are “concerning indicators,” he said, that some of these sightings could be of Chinese origin.

“I should also state clearly for the record,” said Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), “that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”

Referring to the Pentagon-speak phrase of “unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)” now being used to replace the term UFO in the public lexicon, Kirkpatrick added that “if the significant scientific data were ever attained that a UAP encounter can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform U.S. government leadership of its findings.”

So what could these objects be? February's incidents of U.S. fighter jets shooting down four high-flying aerial objects in American and Canadian airspace - including one identified as a Chinese government surveillance balloon - were top of mind during the open portion of Wednesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities hearing.

Committee Vice Chair Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) asked Kirkpatrick if there are “any Chinese or Russia technical advancements to surveil or attack U.S. interests.”

“Part of what we have to do as we go through these - especially the ones that show signatures of advanced technical capabilities - is determine if there is a foreign nexus,” Kirkpatrick testified. “That's really hard if what we observe doesn't have a Chinese or Russian flag on the side of it.”

However, “of the cases that are showing you some sort of enhanced technical signature - of which we're talking single percentages of the entire population of cases we have - I am concerned about what that nexus is, and I have indicators that some are related to foreign capabilities. We have to investigate that with our IC (intelligence community) partners. And as we get evidence to support that, that gets then handed off to the appropriate IC agency to investigate.”

AARO head Sean Kirkpatrick said there are "indicators that some [UAPs] are related to foreign capabilities." (U.S. Senate screencap)
Ernst further pushed Kirkpatrick on the issue, asking him “if Chinese or Russian advanced technologies could be causing some of these anomalous behaviors.”

Kirkpatrick did not rule that out, saying that Beijing especially has been quicker to attempt tech breakthroughs than the U.S.

The Chinese in particular “are less risk averse at technical advancement than we are. They are just willing to try things and see if it works. Are there capabilities that could be employed against us in both an ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] and weapons fashion? Absolutely. Do I have evidence that they're doing it in these cases? No, but I have concerning indicators.”

He did not elaborate.

While Kirkpatrick had no evidence that Chinese or Russian technology accounts for some of these sightings, The War Zone has spent the past several years suggesting that many of these observations are actually foreign adversaries harnessing advances in lower-end unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and even simpler platforms, to gather intelligence of extreme fidelity on some of America's most sensitive warfighting capabilities. You can read more about that in our deep dive here.

The shootdown of the Chinese balloon in particular is the most recent manifestation of that capability.

And even AARO’s own numbers indicate that balloons or balloon-like objects make up the bulk of these sightings.

In January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a 12-page report saying that AARO was investigating 510 incidents and that its “initial analysis and characterization” of 366 newly-identified reports showed that more than half exhibited “unremarkable characteristics."

Of those, 26 were characterized as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or UAS-like entities; 163 were characterized as balloon or balloon-like entities; and six were attributed to “clutter,” which ODNI identifies as "birds, weather events, or airborne debris like plastic bags."

Kirkpatrick on Wednesday told senators that AARO is now investigating about 650 sightings, of which about half are of “anomalous, interesting value.”

AARO’s next quarterly report “will be coming out here pretty soon,” he said. The next annual report will be released in June or July. There are about 20 to 30 new UAP sighting reports that are “about halfway through that analytic process” while “a handful” have been completed, with several case closure reports done.

Kirkpatrick also shared AARO data collected about the most common characteristics of the UAPs sighted.

“What you'll notice is that there is a heavy what we call collection bias both in altitude and in geographic location,” he said. “That's where all of our sensors exist. That's where our training ranges are. That's where our operational ranges are. That's where all of our platforms are.”

UAPs, he said, are “mostly round, mostly one to four meters, white, silver, translucent metallic.” They are observed “at between 10,000 to 30,000 feet with apparent velocities from stationary to Mach 2 (about 1,535mph). No thermal exhausts [are] usually detected. We get intermittent radar returns. We get intermittent radio returns and we get their thermal signatures. That's what we're looking for. And trying to understand what that is.”

AARO head Sean Kirkpatrick shared this slide showing the nature of UAPs with senators on Wednesday. (AARO)
He also provided two case studies - one a still-unresolved incident in the Middle East and one in South Asia that turned out to be a commercial aircraft - to showcase the challenges of investigating these sightings.

The case of this "metallic orb" seen over the Middle East is still being investigated. (AARO)

This object turned out to be a commercial aircraft. (AARO)
That work included time-consuming frame-by-frame analysis of videos taken by U.S. drones.

“This is the kind of data that we have to work with, the type of analysis that we have to do which can be quite extensive when you have to pull these apart, frame by frame,” Kirkpatrick testified. “Further, we're now matching all of this with the models of all of those imaging sensors so that I can actually show how their sensors are going to respond. All of these sensors don't necessarily respond the way you think they do. Especially out in the world and in the field.”

The issue of funding for AARO, as well as its role in investigating the balloon and other object sightings in February, was also addressed Wednesday. Concerns about AARO being left out of the loop during the balloon saga were something we raised in February, which you can read more about here.

“It took a letter to Secretary Austin from Senator [Marco] Rubio and me and 14 other senators to get the office temporary relief for the current fiscal year,” subcommittee chairwoman Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said in her opening remarks.

Senators reached out to the Pentagon in February to seek more funding for AARO. (The office of Kirsten Gillibrand)
“This year, I intend to probe a series of specific issues and the recent incidents where multiple objects were shot down over North America. It seems that Pentagon leadership did not turn to AARO’s office to play a leading role in advising the combatant commander. We need to know whether this will continue. We need to know whether the leadership at DOD will bring AARO into the decision-making processes and we need to know what role AARO will play in interagency coordination after the NSC Working Group disbands.”

Kirkpatrick explained that when “the objects were first detected I got a call from Joint Staff leadership to come in late one night to review events as they were unfolding and to give them an assessment based on what we knew at that time.”

He said he worked with the director of the Joint Staff, as well as the heads of its intelligence and operations directorates “that night and over a couple of following days on what are the types of things that we are tracking from an unidentified object perspective” and “what databases do we use” to track known objects.

Kirkpatrick said the senators should reach out to the White House “for the decision on how they did the response. We did not play a role…other than that initial advice on what we are seeing and how we are seeing.”

In addition to its existing classified web portal, AARO is also working on a public-facing portal for people to use to contact it about UAPs.

"So I would like to first say thank you all very much for referring the witnesses that you have thus far to us," said Kirkpatrick. "I appreciate that. We've brought in nearly two dozen so far. It's been very helpful. I'd ask that you continue to do that until we have an approved plan."

The process, however, is still underway, he added.

"We have a multi-phase approach for doing that, that we've been socializing and have submitted for approval. Once that happens, then we should be able to push all that out and get this a little more automated. What I would ask though, is as you all continue to refer to us and refer witnesses to us, please try to prioritize the ones that you want to do because we do research staff dealing with that."

And while Kirkpatrick on Wednesday downplayed any link between these objects and extraterrestrial technology, it’s not as if he is a complete UFO denier.

Last month, he and Abraham Loeb, head of the Galileo Project, Astronomy Department, Harvard University, co-authored a draft of a paper suggesting that “an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions.”

They were inspired to write the paper by the 2017 appearance of a mysterious space object dubbed "Oumuamua."

Artist's concept of interstellar object1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua) as it passed through the solar system after its discovery in October 2017. (Image Credit: European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser)
Earth in particular could be an attractive option for wayfaring aliens, they added.

“Within a close range to a star, extraterrestrial technological probes could use starlight to charge their batteries and liquid water as their fuel. This would explain why they would target the habitable region around stars, where liquid water may exist on the surface of rocky planets with an atmosphere, like the Earth. Habitable planets would be particularly appealing to trans-medium probes, capable of moving between space, air and water. From a large distance, Venus, Earth or Mars would be equally attractive for probes. But upon closer inspection, Earth would show spectral signatures of liquid water (through reflection of blue light) and vegetation (through its red edge) that might attract selective attention.”

Despite that, Kirkpatrick’s testimony today is likely to disappoint those who insist that these sightings are alien life forms or from another dimension. But it also raises further questions about the likelihood, as we have suggested many times in the past, that adversaries could be behind some of these objects.

Whether the upcoming reports will shed any more light on this remains to be seen. We will certainly keep you informed when they are made public.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Obligatory inclusion of this recent news here:

@SecretSunBlog
·
KNOWLES' LAW ON UFOS: "The probability that a UFO story is a deliberate hoax is correlative to the amount of mainstream media coverage it receives."

Follow the law. It will never steer you wrong.

Steven Greenstreet
@MiddleOfMayhem

Was UFO "Whistleblower" David Grusch "groomed" by deceitful UFO activists?

David Grusch claims the US government is in possession of crashed alien spacecraft and alien bodies. This story is going viral right now.

Bryan Bender, former defense writer for Politico who covered UFOs for years, tweeted his opinion that Grusch was "groomed" by dubious UFO activist Lue Elizondo "for several years".

In 2017, Elizondo briefly reached C-list celebrity status after claiming he was once the director of a Pentagon UFO program. He claimed otherwordly UFOs were real and that "We may not be alone." This kicked off 5+ years of UFO mania.

But that was all wrong.

My exclusive reporting for @nypost exposes Elizondo as untruthful with his UFO claims. There is no evidence at all to support his stories. And available evidence actually contradicts his entire narrative.

My report: https://nypost.com/2023/03/21/ufo-belie ... for-years/

While at Politico, Bryan Bender was one of the first to credulously report Elizondo's story in 2017, but later admitted he was "purposely misled".

And this new story was written by the SAME UFO activists (Leslie Kean & Ralph Blumenthal) who wrote the original false and deceptive 2017 Elizondo story in the NY Times.

Now that Elizondo's claims have been proven false, he has mostly disappeared from the public eye.

But now his "friend" and "close ally" is allegedly "groomed" and then rolled out on the world stage for a soft reboot of the Elizondo Franchise.



12:19 PM · Jun 6, 2023

https://twitter.com/SecretSunBlog/statu ... 06056?s=20

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Related to the above

Multi-pronged efforts now being implemented, across topics/issues.
What is the end-goal, and why so aggressive? We can only speculate.

US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

Whistleblower former intelligence official says government possesses ‘intact and partially intact’ craft of non-human origin

The US has been urged to disclose evidence of UFOs after a whistleblower former intelligence official said the government has possession of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles.

The former intelligence official David Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency, has alleged that the US has craft of non-human origin.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... are_btn_tw

[8bitagent]

Just a few mainstream articles from the past few days...

Canada attends first-of-its-kind UFO briefing at the Pentagon

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/five-eyes ... -1.6868907

House of Representatives to hold hearing on whistleblower’s UFO claims

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... estigation

US military has been observing ‘metallic orbs’ making extraordinary ‘maneuvers’

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-se ... maneuvers/

NASA and Pentagon working together to gather data on UFO

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/us/p ... C-h1NGzbng

And now today, UFO alien stuff in suburban Las Vegas...

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Perhaps we should update the thread/OP title to reflect the current year?

In any event, with respect to the last link 8bit shared above, here's our landlord's take:

@JeffWellsRigInt
·
The more bizarre the story and more ordinary the witnesses the more I'm inclined to believe it. So this is way more credible to me than any Pentagon whistleblower.


https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/ ... -from-sky/

https://twitter.com/JeffWellsRigInt/sta ... 12544?s=20

Interesting though that in an era where everyone uses a mobile phone camera to capture all manner of mundane (or other) activity, no one was able to do the same here. So far.

[Luther Blissett]

Anyone watching this hearing live?
https://thehill.com/video/4120312-watch ... -security/

[Wombaticus Rex]

Been an interesting couple of weeks and a very interesting Wednesday. Mitch and Hunter both doing their part, too.

Surprisingly on-point summary of the state of play from a rando mutual:
https://hackthesim.substack.com/p/i-inf ... mmunity-so

Today is a landmark in UFO history, as whistleblower David Grusch is scheduled to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee. Despite his impeccable résumé, Grusch has gone on record with grandiose claims of a coverup that until recently would have made even many UFO diehards blush. After 60+ years of denials, then 5 or so years of schizophrenic plausible deniability, the US government may now be poised to enter the ‘craft and bodies’ phase of disclosure. Meanwhile, 99% of humanity will treat today as just another day.

In 2020, I was among those 99%. But I noticed the dissonance between the prevailing wisdom that UFOs aren’t real, and the increasing lip service senior government officials were paying the subject (e.g. DNI Ratcliffe, former CIA Director Brennan). With a background in the finance industry, I sensed a market ‘mispricing’. Revelation of alien visitation (or more) would be a ‘black swan’ event with a profound effect on society. So with that justification in hand, I took a deep dive down the rabbit hole, placing myself in the mindset of both wide-eyed believer and later, cynical skeptic to better understand the perspectives of each.

The following are my biggest takeaways on the fraught ufology landscape.


Serious people take it seriously

The strongest evidence for UFOs is the serious way disclosure/transparency is now being championed in Congress. Tectonic shifts are occurring with little fanfare or publicity.

UFOs carry a lot of stigma, and politicians run away from stigma. Yet since about 2020, both Democrats (Gillibrand, Schumer) and Republicans (Rubio, Burchett) have overtly leaned into the issue. Each year brings more legislation that raises the stakes.

The DoD and intel community hate talking about UFOs, but they study it. AAWSAP was a DIA program and was probably just the tip of the iceberg.

There is serious talk of ‘legacy programs’, engaged in reverse engineering of alien material. The so-called ‘Wilson-Davis memo’ holds up to scrutiny, and a handful of other credible, tightly-held stories have circulated among insiders for years.

Among insiders, interest is proportional to the degree of access to classified data.

Since Lue Elizondo went public in 2017, skeptics have been flailing trying to explain what is behind the upsurge in UFO interest. First they thought it was a ‘technoscam’, then it was to increase defense spending, then it was a psyop to fool China, then it was incompetence and a string of unfortunate misidentifications, then it was a small cadre of true believers who through sheer persuasive force, sent Congress on a multi-year wild goose chase.


Don’t dismiss psychic phenomena

Virtually all UFO insiders also believe in psychic phenomena. In fact, it probably has more evidence than do UFOs.

The government funded classified operational Remote Viewing programs, from the 1970s through the 1990s. A 1995 evaluation (the AIR report) deemed RV to be insufficiently reliable for use in intelligence operations and on that basis, the program was cancelled. Nevertheless, the study found the data showed a statistically significant effect.

As an experiment, I hired an RVer to try to RV me. He described my physical location via text message, to a degree of accuracy that could not be just chance.

If RV is real, then why aren’t the best RVers all fabulously rich and successful? Why aren’t hedge funds hiring RVers? Perhaps RV skill is too rare or unreliable, which essentially is Kit Green’s take.

Promising research from Garry Nolan correlates those who claim radiation injury from a UFO with having an enlarged Caudate-Putamen region of the brain. This region is known to be where ‘intuition’ originates. RVers within the study had especially large CP’s.


There is an absurd amount of misinformation

Most UFO buffs don’t have the patience or inclination to sift out the good from the bad, and default to whatever their initial biases were.

In the absence of verifiable data, lore has built up over the decades in an evolutionary process.

Most cases don’t hold up on close scrutiny. The stuff I gave credence to early on would now make me laugh, as I’ve become better calibrated.

The government has intentionally seeded disinformation (e.g. Doty).

Groups of credentialed witnesses can still make misidentifications (see the recent Twenty-Nine Palms debacle).

People lie. Never wonder, “But what motive could so-and-so have to lie?” People lie for all sorts of pathological reasons.

Mental illness and delusion are overrepresented in the UFO community. 'Experiencers’ enable each other because they all want to believe and don’t want a critical eye turned on them. This doesn’t mean all experiencers are inauthentic or deluded. But many (majority?) probably are. This is a touchy subject.

Even authentic experiencers probably have a lower barrier for accepting others’ claims as true, since they are already convinced a real phenomenon exists. This explains why otherwise-reputable people might entertain dubious claims.


You will never find ground truth

The UFO topic is hopelessly complex. That’s why journalists suck at it and for the most part don’t even try. Keeping up with the factions and efforts to study the phenomenon are hard enough. Actually uncovering the truth behind UFOs is impossible.

Every UFO video/photo is worthless. If any smoking-gun evidence exists, it’s classified and out of reach. Thus, the strength of a case must be assessed by the credibility of the witnesses, and the credibility of the people (insiders) who believe those witnesses.

The biggest struggle is filtering out the misinformation. Good luck finding the 5% of real cases that a priori are just as credible as the other 95%.

The strongest cases don’t add up to a coherent whole. You’ll end up with a smorgasbord of UFO types and alien types, psychic phenomena, near-death experiences, etc. The range of scenarios doesn’t converge; it only expands, requiring ever more degrees of freedom.

Even the insiders can’t form a consensus. This realization convinced me that cracking the UFO mystery is probably a lost cause. That could change if/when more information becomes available, but now I think that while the government knows more than me, it still doesn’t know very much.


Best guess?

UFOs are real, but I have no idea what they are.

The US government has covered it up, possibly illegally.

The Disclosure pressure will continue to build, culminating in an official confirmation. (Either that, or we’re on the verge of exposing a UFO mind virus infecting otherwise-serious DoD, intel, and political leadership.)

Reality is weirder than we can appreciate. Consciousness and psychic phenomena tie in. Solve the mystery of consciousness and maybe you solve it all.

Related: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs ... 74.epcn216

Our perceptual capacities are products of evolution and have been shaped by natural selection. It is often assumed that natural selection favors veridical perceptions, namely, perceptions that accurately describe those aspects of the environment that are crucial to survival and reproductive fitness. However, analysis of perceptual evolution using evolutionary game theory reveals that veridical perceptions are generically driven to extinction by equally complex nonveridical perceptions that are tuned to the relevant fitness functions. Veridical perceptions are not, in general, favored by natural selection. This result requires a comprehensive reframing of perceptual theory, including new accounts of illusions and hallucinations. This is the intent of the interface theory of perception, which proposes that our perceptions have been shaped by natural selection to hide objective reality and instead to give us species-specific symbols that guide adaptive behavior in our niche.

Anyway. Current wave looks more like the 50's than the 90's, to my surprise, because I was definitely expecting a re-run of the John Lear era of florid new age horseshit and EBE paranoia. This is much more interesting.

Am I crazy or was James Fucking Clapper sitting in the front row during the Grusch testimony?

[Belligerent Savant]

^^^^

quality content/observations -- thanks for the drive-by share. With all the items flying around of late it's tough to keep track of the latest news in this 'space'.

Interesting -- or not -- that there were memes or expressions over the last few years predicting blatant and obvious UFO landings (or events that are presented to appear as UFO landings) as one of the final steps of the current era of sequential 'paradigm shifts'.

The presumed operation of our senses have been challenged mightily lately, and it seems it's only just beginning.

[liminalOyster]

Related: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs ... 74.epcn216

Our perceptual capacities are products of evolution and have been shaped by natural selection. It is often assumed that natural selection favors veridical perceptions, namely, perceptions that accurately describe those aspects of the environment that are crucial to survival and reproductive fitness. However, analysis of perceptual evolution using evolutionary game theory reveals that veridical perceptions are generically driven to extinction by equally complex nonveridical perceptions that are tuned to the relevant fitness functions. Veridical perceptions are not, in general, favored by natural selection. This result requires a comprehensive reframing of perceptual theory, including new accounts of illusions and hallucinations. This is the intent of the interface theory of perception, which proposes that our perceptions have been shaped by natural selection to hide objective reality and instead to give us species-specific symbols that guide adaptive behavior in our niche.

[/b]

Damn. Glad to have dropped by. Thank you for sharing this potential firestarter.

[Joe Hillshoist]

HP Lovecraft - "The Unnameable".

Its the same idea as Hoffman I reckon, just from the pov of HP Lovecraft. So its pretty fucked up psychologically.

[Joe Hillshoist]

So anyway...

Why now?

Why is this so public now? And I don't buy the argument that its a distraction from all the stuff that has been invoked to be something worthy of it distracting.

Its not a distraction from Covid, various Hunter Bidens, Alien contact, East Palestine, Ukrainian nazis or whatever else.

I hear less about this than all that other shit.

Is it just because people with something to say kept pushing and pushing till they got their way?

like most people would assume...

[drstrangelove]

seems like the start of an effort to establish some formal govt authority for a new numbers based mysticism only our greatest experts can tell us about using their advanced sensor technology and advanced math. so nasa, but for earth. which means it could become as dangerous as the WHO. a lot of the hearing was just validating eye witness accounts using radar data etc. the new authority being introduced is govt data. the eye witness accounts have always been there.

when they start showing the marvelous new technology or lifeforms they've discovered i'll start paying attention. until then it's better to prophylactically pretend it's not real.