UFO hearing key takeaways: What a whistleblower told Congress about UAP
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cbsnews.com
A former military intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower told House lawmakers that Congress is being kept in the dark about unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Incredible if true. If evidence is declassified supporting this it seems we owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people who were written off as kooks. The implications for humanity seem potentially huge.
I'm surprised this isn't front page news.
No, not really. Aliens existing, even aliens having crashed on Earth, would not mean that all the conspiracy bullshit that people came up with is real. This is a really stupid take and makes you sound like those people in /r/conspiracy.
Because it, as it did before, still lacks any sort of evidence. This is literally the same message we've seen weeks ago and I did not care about it then either.
You seem intent on interpreting the quoted bit in the worst possible way. At a minimum proof of a crash or interaction, even if it was one time, even if it was 10000 years ago, would be enough to stop having to hear someone think they were the first person to bring up the Fermi Paradox every time the topic is discussed.
You can't even theorize lightly about scenarios where there might have been extraterrestrial interaction with Earth in most contexts without being pretty much branded a kook.
It would fundamentally change quite a lot I think, even if the immediate impact would be negligible.
What a bunch of bollocks. As a general space nerd I've discussed this topic plenty of times with people without issues. The only times this is an issue is when someone brings up his wild conspiracy garbage. You simply aren't branded as "kook" for talking about aliens, plenty of literal scientists did so, including very respected ones.
Avi Loeb is a high-profile example of this not holding true.
One of the topics they discussed during the hearings is the stigma and potential repercussions of reporting sightings, merely accounts of seeing a thing they can't explain, not inventing or citing, "wild conspiracy garbage." The fact that these were congressional hearings by people who can legally know things we don't, and they still thought it was of intertest to the public despite the stigma, security issues, and potential blowback, should mean something.
As a general space nerd you might benefit from entertaining the idea these accounts have veracity without accepting them as true.
Meh. If you think conclusive proof of even one single intentional extraterrestrial visit or verified crash at some point in our planet's history would not represent a sea change in the state of discourse on the topic of UFOs and alien interactions with earth, I don't really know what to tell you.
Yes, a good example of people jumping to conclusions without any evidence, which is very much anti-scientific.
I'll entertain ideas based on their likelihood to be actually true. His position is not enough to qualify for this. For this alone I can give you a good and very recent counter example: Michael Yeadon
He was a high ranking pharmacologist working for Pfizer, so one would think a well established and knowledgeable scientist, one we should be able to trust his words about topics like vaccines, right? Wrong. He spewed a plethora of false conspiracy bullshit about covid, medical advice and the vaccines. Guess who argued similarly about him as you do now? All the antivaxx "kooks" that cry about never being taken seriously.
That's simply not true. Loeb cited evidence for his outlandish claims, I don't find it to be very compelling evidence of his interpretation but he did cite evidence none the less.
Perhaps you have a point regarding Loeb, but if you operate on likelihood:
The reason the Fermi paradox, (@be_excellent_to_each_other thanks for bringing it up,) is a paradox is because our mathematical estimates regarding extraterrestrial life says it is likely, yet we have not conclusively observed any.
Grusch is documented as being in a position where he could have access to the sort of classified information he claims to, and his background suggests he could interpret said information reasonably as it pertains to this. He has been vetted by congress. Although it is certainly not conclusive, what we do know about him corroborates with what we've heard so far.
Yes, sometimes credible people turn out to be totally wrong. Does that mean we should not investigate and either vet or debunk their claims, should we not listen to credible people because they sometimes go nuts or are totally incorrect?
Yeadon sounds a lot like Dr. Wakefield, the other totally wrong discredited medical person with a minority opinion who they love to cite because he justifies their irrationality.
The Fermi Paradox is a thought experiment, it's not a physical law of the universe. There are big, essentially made-up assumptions that have to be plugged into the formula to end up with the answer of "there's probably lots of aliens out there". I think we probably both agree on those assumptions being reasonable, but they are not proven. For these reasons, I simply do not agree that it's relevant at all in this discussion.
Keep in mind that we're not talking about the existence of an alien civilization, or even specifically that aliens have visited Earth in modern times. Rather, the big question is about whether aliens are visiting Earth and some humans know about it, but are keeping it a secret. That is the core of what people like Grusch are claiming. To prove this we need both evidence of alien life existing (already a huge claim, one of the biggest questions science has yet to tackle) and evidence of a human conspiracy.
Theoretically this must be happening in other countries, too, right? If not, that means there's only been very limited incidents and not the hundreds to thousands of incidents over decades that UFO apologists claim. Except all of this is also tied into the UAP sightings which we now know are pretty widespread... looking at the full picture, things start to collapse under their own logic.
yeah anyone talking about aliens is full of shit as long as there is no evidence, also:
if aliens visited and crashed on earth they dont just visit the US lmao
this kind of conspiracy needs way too many people to STFU, which is just not realistic especially as this would be one of the most important discoveries ever
if there were aliens hidden in the US then fucking TRUMP would be talking about that non stop
Why should I spend any of my time or energy on an unproven claim? Should I also entertain the idea that an invisible pink teapot is orbiting earth until it's proven false? What if there is someone with "credibility" claiming they have (classified) photos of the teapot, is it worth considering then?
Probably for the same reason we dedicate energy and time to world matters of import. It's interesting, it's potentially very important, and even if we personally may not have a hand in the verification or outcome, this matter ultimately affects us all. It could literally change the way all humans think about intelligent life and the possibilities for humanity in the future.
Your Russel's teapot is pink? Neat.
Yes! I mean the analogy is rather breaking down here because the implications of a pink teapot in orbit around the earth today would probably point to someone launching it into orbit, and not something as consequential as the verification of non-human intelligent life, but yeah, we should investigate credible claims of things that matter in general.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110782298043858151
"If Trump knew about it, he would have told everyone, bragged about it, kept boxes of documents about it at Mar-A-Lago, etc. There would be a ketchup stained original photograph of an alien autopsy on the floor of his bathroom."