That's fair, but I was also trying to address the individuals who are of the understanding that the United States government, and some other world governments, are sitting on secret information pertaining to extraterrestrials. Do you think every world government has evidence of this kind, including places like North Korea, Iran, and Uganda? Would these governments be able to maintain a coverup, given their general lack of resources (North Korea has trouble keeping any secrets, in general)? If they don't have evidence, why would you think not?
Do only governments with alleged crashes have this type of evidence?
I have no idea. And I’m not being dismissive, that’s just the truth. Many of the members here at the forums are very well-informed on the intricacies of ufology, and I’m just not one of them. I’ve seen enough to conclude, at least tentatively, that extraterrestrial devices sometimes appear in our airspace. And the primary if not sole focus of my interest is to understand the physical propulsion principle that makes them go.
Why is that unreasonable? [re: demanding proof in the form of a working alien device or dead alien body before accepting the ETH]
As I explained, we wouldn’t leave our technology or our dead among a far less advanced alien species, for a host of reasons. So I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect an advanced alien species to do any differently here.
If we look at most of the anecdotal and less solid evidence that exists for the phenomena (which would be basically all of it), the vast majority takes place in well populated areas of civilized nations. In fact, most of the evidence suggests that, were there to be extraterrestrials piloting UFO's and/or visiting Earth, the phenomena is centered around human civilization, seemingly as the focus of study, abduction, assimilation, and/or education.
With so many sightings taking place in well populated cities, large suburbs, populated towns, and well traveled swathe of wilderness, it seems more likely, to me, that crashes and accidental alien deaths would take place in those types of areas than they would on military bases, in the ocean, and deep within secluded regions -- or at least just as likely. Why do you (seemingly) disagree, given the general trend of sighting and experience evidence?
I assume that sightings are reported over populated areas because there’s nobody to report them in the unpopulated areas. Incidents over densely populated areas, like the Phoenix Lights case, appear to be the exception (and may be a simple case of misperception – I haven’t delved in deeply enough to that case to make an informed determination).
I don’t know what to make of abduction cases. There are some interesting anecdotal reports, but unlike ufo sighting reports, I’ve never heard of any credible radar confirmations or trace evidence, or multiple independent eyewitness confirmations. So it’s in my grey box, no pun intended.
Regardless, there's a lot of evidence that Snowden, for example, actually did retrieve military intelligence when he was getting the information he ultimately leaked about the NSA. There's also a lot of evidence that he didn't. Fair enough.
All the same, it's also a pretty big assumption that alien visitation would immediately be considered an exclusively military situation, and wouldn't include several more relevant departments of government, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, NASA, EPA, Department of Interiors, local police, local fire departments, etc. That being the case, this type of information, if hidden, would exist in several locations containing relevant information to the respective departments and organizations.
That's just how everything works.
No, that’s not how it works. The low-level classified leaks that we’ve seen are one thing, special compartmentalized intelligence is another beast altogether. I can’t think of a single leak of special access program (SAP) intelligence, can you? That data only exists on government servers, which are carefully isolated and protected (until someone like Hillary Clinton decides to transfer a bunch of it to her private basement server that's not even encrypted).
And then there’s unacknowledged special access program (USAP) intelligence – those programs aren’t even allowed to keep records of their activities, so there’s nothing to leak.
Almost every department of government have protocols that cover extraterrestrial visitation. It's not just a military issue, and never would be if such an event occurred. The military doesn't step into a situation and kick everyone else out.
People who are intimately familiar with this issue have found differently. John Greenwald (
The Black Vault) discovered, in the course of his FOIA research, that all ufo reports get funneled to a single defense intelligence agency, which denies the existence of the data they collect (it’s policy to deny the existence of classified data, and when it can be cited explicitly, the policy is to claim that it’s been destroyed). But he found that our agency had an agreement with a Canadian agency assigned with the same responsibility to collect such reports, and they were more forthcoming, which is how he got some of his best documents released to the public.
Airplanes crashing into buildings during a secretly conspired attack is certainly a military issue, but dozens of departments and organizations were involved in the response, the resulting investigation, and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The military is a very particular branch of government, they aren't equipt to handle every aspect of every situation, including UFO crashes or extraterrestrial visitation -- there's no reason for them to be.
Yes, there is – a single agency handling all of the relevant data is the best way to secure that data. Ergo, the “compartmentalized” in “special compartmentalized intelligence.” Sure, occasionally some confidential or secret documents get leaked. But highly classified data is another matter altogether. At levels like SAP intelligence and above, for example, the interest of national security (as deemed by the PTB) takes precedence over all other considerations, including your life. That kind of data doesn’t get leaked. Consider the atomic bomb, for example – we’ve had that data for over 70 years, but the key secrets for the production of nuclear warheads have never leaked. Pieces have been stolen occasionally by hostile foreign actors and their minions, but it’s never been leaked to the public. Some researchers say that the ufo subject is even more highly classified than that. I can’t confirm that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Here's why:
Imagine the peril that the world would be in if Russia learned, as one possibility, that the US was about to replicate the field propulsion mechanism employed by the most interesting high-performance ufos. They’d have a terrible choice to make: strike now, before we acquire the capability to defeat all of their air defenses and deliver nuclear payloads over every city and military installation in a matter of seconds, or allow the US to totally dominate the globe militarily (which is apparently our favorite national past time). The stakes would be global human extinction. Data that potentially sensitive doesn’t leak.
What specific instances are you referencing? That's not a challenge, I'm just not sure how you mean that.
Just look at the recent release of ufo-related documents in the UK, and what Nick Cook has to say (and not say) about them, in recent interviews. They have a lot of evidence. And not all of it is released, because some unknown percentage of it is still classified. France has also collected data and published studies about ufos – and they’ve concluded that some sightings are extraterrestrial in nature. Canada is a similar example, and they’re one of the most forthcoming nations on the subject (which apparently explains the public acceptance of ufos in Canadian culture – people who report sightings in Canada aren’t mocked, ridiculed and demoted for reporting their sightings…must be nice).
What evidence suggests they're uninterested? Isn't there evidence because they're constantly hanging out where people are?
I said elusive, not uninterested. Obviously they’d have to be interested to some extent, to send craft to our planet.
And as I said before, we can only get reports from people, so it only looks as if ufos appear over inhabited areas: we wouldn’t hear about them otherwise. But we almost never hear about a sighting over a major city.
What else might they be doing?
How should I know? Apparently our position is similar to an aboriginal pygmy observing a stealth bomber flying overhead. What is it, where is it going, and why? A human observing another human just one hundred years in the future, going about their routine daily activities, would be utterly perplexed by much of that activity. Inferring the motives of an alien species that may be 100,000 or millions of years more advanced than we are, is a hopelessly insoluble problem.
The main reason is the lack of any other evidence to support his claim. But I understand your position.
Well, we know that he worked there on that date, and that he was in the position to see the footage, as he stated. I don’t know what other supporting facts we can expect to get. But sure, to some extent it comes down to trust.
To be a hardened skeptic on this subject, one would have to conclude that every single eyewitness (including professional military aircraft designers and the like), without exception, is either a liar, or they can’t describe their sighting with any accuracy or reliability. And we’d have to extend that postulate to every independent witness who reported the exact same physical and behavioral characteristics of the same sighting from an entirely different position and viewing angle.
If one can do that, and brush aside all of the radar confirmation cases, and trace evidence cases as well, then one can enjoy a content level of self-assurance that the universe is basically devoid of intelligent life, and none of it, if it exists, is more advanced than we are, and therefore we’ve never been visited by any advanced and elusive species of alien being.
But I can’t bring myself to be that much of an asshole. People I’ve known and loved have confided very compelling reports to me with complete sincerity. Some of our finest American heroes have reported their own sightings earnestly and with consummate clarity (Kenneth Arnold timed the objects that he observed as they passed over one mountain to another one - 102 seconds - so he could calculate the speed later when he got the exact distance between those mountains). Radar confirmation has supported a slew of such accounts with high precision. Trace evidence cases have been documented and studied. And I’ve personally seen a pair of objects execute astonishing zig-zag maneuvers in perfect formation at thousands of mph with five of my neighbors on a bright cloudless summer afternoon. So I don’t have the luxury of dismissing all of this as nonsense.
Per the question, "who said anything about governments being in contact. . .," if a spacecraft landed in an airfare base -- which many people claim they've personally witnessed, filmed, or video recorded -- isn't that an indication that the inhabitants of the craft probably have contact with the people in those bases? There are as many reports of crafts in hangars as there are crafts landing or taking off from military bases. Wouldn't this indicate some kind of relationship?
Oh sure, if that stuff actually happened. But I tend to assume that such instances involve experimental human technology, and like I said, I’m not a ufologist so I don’t study specific cases anymore, and I never ran across a compelling case like that back when I did research this subject (as well as I could at my local library, anyway).
Why [would they take an interest in humans detonating over 2000 nuclear warheads upon our planet], specifically?
When you ask questions like this I feel like you’re being intentionally obtuse.
The short answer: because if we detected on-going nuclear detonations on a nearby exosolar planet, and we had the capability to investigate, we would. Any civilization would be remiss to ignore the development of other intelligent species in their galactic vicinity. And undoubtedly, the advent of the nuclear era on any world is a landmark moment.
Perhaps they know that the time span between the first nuclear detonations and the capability of rapid interstellar spacecraft is typically only a couple of hundred years. Perhaps they know some other statistical fact that we don’t, like “half of the species that detonate nuclear warheads in an act of war destroy themselves within X number of years.” So perhaps they’d like to collect some record of such a species before it goes extinct. Or perhaps they want to see if we’re likely to self-annihilate, so they can populate the Earth with their own people, or simply plunder our natural resources once the radiation dies down. Who knows? What seems irrational and illogical is the notion that a nearby advanced species would *ignore* nuclear detonations on a neighboring planet.
Again, nothing I say is meant as a challenge of your beliefs or understanding. I'm trying to completely understand how your thinking on the subjects works.
I don’t have any beliefs, and I enjoy challenges to my understanding, so don’t sweat it. I place a lot of confidence in repeatable and well-vetted scientific observations, but nearly everything else is contingent on the breadth of my data set.
I think the ETH is internally consistent and supported by many lines of evidence and reasoning, so I favor it as an explanation for the types of sightings that most interest me. But I have no emotional or psychological investment in it. If the Air Force releases declassified footage of an experimental aircraft from the 1950s that can levitate and make extreme and virtually instantaneous accelerations at thousands of miles per hour, then I’ll probably throw the ETH out the window without a moment’s hesitation.
We have drones the size of baseballs, and we've had a worthwhile civilization for about 6,000 years. Why would extraterrestrials ever even need to get close enough to the planet to be seen?
I’ve given this a lot of thought because of my own sighting.
A sighting *is* contact: visual contact, specifically. If they can travel between stars with ease, then they can probably get all of the information they’d want from a distance, or by using invisibility-cloaked stealth vehicles (we’re already making progress in this direction via metamaterials).
So why appear to us, shining bright lights in many cases, and performing very exotic aerial maneuvers far beyond our own capability?
I’ve only been able to come up with one reasonable hypothesis: to make contact. They want us to know that they exist, and/or they want to provoke us to discover the amazing field propulsion mechanism that they utilize. My sighting definitely appeared to be a deliberate aerial demonstration of that propulsion mechanism. Usual Suspect had a similar experience, in that its maneuvers seemed intentionally exotic - like a signature: "Hi there, I'm not from around here, and here's the proof .../executes bewildering maneuvers while emitting bright light."
Honestly I marvel at the subtlety and sophistication of this approach, if it was indeed intentional. In less than a minute, I got the message loud and clear that we’re not alone, and was also inspired to attempt an understanding of the gravitational field propulsion principle that these craft utilized. And I’m grateful for both of these enormous revelations. Plus, it was all done in a manner that didn’t frighten or confuse me. Frankly, that’s the kind of elegant and very effective contact strategy that I’d expect from a highly advanced form of spacefaring intelligent species.
It only takes a few moments of consideration to understand why an advanced species wouldn’t land on the White House lawn and announce their presence officially that way, as some people demand. It would be an enormous shock to the whole world, with potentially catastrophic consequences. The fact that they haven’t done that, demonstrates a level of responsibility that I find very assuring. And if they were, instead, completely apathetic about us, I don’t think they’d reveal themselves at all, and they certainly wouldn’t defy inertia with their maneuvers, which is a clear indication of a vastly superior form of propulsion to anything that we know about in the public.
But by doing both of these things, it’s like waving their hands from a safe distance, which simply says “hi there, you’re not alone in the universe, and hey – try to figure out how our propulsion system works so that one day you too can come explore the universe (and probably solve the global energy crisis as well).”
That’s all speculation of course. But it seems to make sense. And it’s preferable to alternative interpretations like “let’s confuse the crap out of these primitive savages and make them ridiculed outcasts when they tell their neighbors about seeing us zig-zagging through the sky – then we can go blow up some stars for kicks before heading back to our own galaxy for dinner."
