The author argues that the recent Congressional hearing on UFOs featured credible testimony from military witnesses that UFOs exist and the government has covered up information about them for decades. The author, a retired Navy admiral, vouches for the integrity of the witnesses. He believes society should demand that the government disclose what it knows about UFOs. This could lead to scientific advances that transform our understanding of physics and the universe. Studying UFOs could also improve international security and cooperation. The author contends that failing to study UFOs would be arrogant given how little we understand about the universe.

  • jonsnothere@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    What can be claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to boot. I have a very hard time believing any of this mess.

    • circularfish@beehaw.orgM
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      1 year ago

      Given how compartmentalized secret military programs are supposed to be, there is a good chance that there is some secret squirrel program out there about which a rumor gets circulated by those in government but OUT of the know, and it gets wilder and wilder in the retelling until … aliens.

  • shiveyarbles@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    That’s cool but I’m more concerned with real shit like climate change, the wealth gap, and the global rise of fascism.

    • ikiru@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      What if they are hiding and fighting a secret, ancient war with anarcho-aliens here to help us liberate ourselves from fascism and oppression?

      That would be a pretty cool plot twist.

      • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        Yes, but it would be almost more likely that the aliens are the ones trying to liberate us while the US goverment wants to maintain status quo lol.

  • DadWagonDriver@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The indictment of the most recent former president for attempting a coup is the biggest story of the century, and the timing of all the UFO news (which was all presented with NO ACTUAL EVIDENCE) is pretty suspicious, especially considering how hard young conservative men seem to be leaning into it. It’s almost like this is a publicity campaign to distract y’all from a very real issue.

  • HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    It sounds like BS to me. We’re asked to believe there is an alien civilization that is so advanced that it can travel the stars. So sure of their ability they would travel themselves. However they are also somehow incompetent enough that they crash a ship on our planet? So highly advanced we can’t even fathom how they could travel so far to us, but they don’t have redundant systems?

    This is political theater and a distraction. I believe there is life out there, but it’s out there, really really, REALLY far away.

    • stergro@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      This. If it was about robotic propes and landers I would give it a lot more attention. I can even imagine humanity sending unmanned propes to other stars in a century or so, but the first ones would probably be flyby missions. Space could also be full of low tec probes such as Voyager.

    • bermuda@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      And not only have they crashed, they have somehow yet to make their presence known on a large enough scale to enough people. They apparently always want to land in the desert or in the ocean, instead of where the artificial light emanates the brightest. Imagine if we somehow managed to travel the stars and stumbled upon an alien planet, and instead of landing where there were massive buildings and seas of artificial light, we landed miles away where there is nothing… it just doesn’t make logical sense.

      Like, devils tower is a really cool premise for close encounters of the third kind, but I think they’d be more interested in the burj khalifa (or the world trade center back when the movie came out)

      • millie@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Personally, I think this whole thing is likely a distraction. That said, why would they land in the middle of a city? You think they want to cause a riot? Hundreds of simultaneous heart attacks?

        If UFOs started showing up over major cities without some sort of prior contact and announcement, that’d be cause for concern. We consider it a huge breach of security to have unauthorized planes in our airspace, I’d imagine that they’d take it as good etiquette not to be zooming around highly populated areas.

        • bermuda@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          The problem with your comment is you’re using our logic, culture, and military tactics to describe a scenario in which an alien race comes to earth. How do you expect them to know about these? Do you think “breach of airspace” is a galactic doctrine?

          Imagine if we found large non-natural structures in say… Neptune. Why woudlnt we want to go analyze those and take samples and figure out what’s going on??

          • millie@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I would expect that we’d attempt to observe them as much as possible before interfering with them directly in order to avoid a disaster.

            There’s a big difference between seeing some weird looking stuff on Neptune that’s ambiguous at best and seeing a planet whose night side is lit up like a Christmas tree. Casual observation of our planet from anywhere remotely nearby makes it very obvious that it’s inhabited by a technologically advanced species.

            Idiotic as the guy in charge of them may be, we have a massive satellite network blanketing the globe at this point. There’s no way that gets missed by any species capable of interstellar travel unless it’s something capable of space travel without the accompanying technological advancement we associate with escaping a gravity well and surviving the vacuum, then having the means to cross the immense distances involved to get to even the closest stars.

            Major metropolitan areas look incredibly distinct from the surrounding wilderness, and all the lights are a dead giveaway.

            If you manage to fly all the way from another solar system to come take a look at Earth, you definitely know that it and especially its cities contain complex life. Any showing off will likely be intentional if it’s from anything more complex than something like the Voyager.

    • madkarlsson@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      But there are honestly a shit ton of assumptions in this statement. Who says they are traveling themselves? This might just be “scouts” or drones doing basic survey and mapping of the universe and might be automates.

      Don’t get me wrong, i beleive this is BS. But assuming they actually want to land, or that they need to, is a bit of a fallacy the we tend to get stuck on

      • HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I was under the impression that there were passengers. I recall from the testimony something about non-human-biologics being inside, or something like that.

        • madkarlsson@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          These hearings and there witnesses doesn’t really seem to cover one event just, but a continuous effort and knowledge from the military to keep it under wraps. Just 3 people with knowledge of talking to people that know about multiple events (sounds legit hrm). One event they have talked about is about an alleged landing with alleged biologics, but they are also referencing other video releases over the past few years from fighter jets

  • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    LOL, just distraction. Focus on getting the twice impeached, thrice idicted, idiot, grifting, racist, lying, thief of a former president behind bars before it’s too late.

  • 2ndtryagain@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Skunkworks doesn’t want you to know what they are cooking up; all this UFO business is funny to me. We have all kinds of research projects that never see the light of day and a few that won’t till major hostilities break out.

    What pisses me off is people needing to believe our technologies must come from aliens. Most things in both civilian and mil-tech have progressed the way everything in the past did. From playing with static electricity to the development of the first lightbulbs, from the telegraph led to wireless telegraph which then led to radio and TV. We don’t need aliens to explain our tech, we need people to understand the scientific method.

    • ChrisLicht@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      SR-71 wasn’t acknowledged for many years, then was decommissioned decades ago with no named replacement.

      And, today, I can sit down with a soldering gun and $800 worth of consumer-grade hardware and in a few hours make a quad camera drone that will do 85+ mph, with a flight envelope that would boggle the mind of an F-16 pilot in 1995.

      Of course, this alien horse shit is being spun up to distract from the multiple flight platforms we are running and/or testing, based on bleeding-edge human technologies.

    • Troy@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      “I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large out of focus monster roaming the countryside” ― Mitch Hedburg

    • ours@lemmy.film
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      1 year ago

      And pics that aren’t easily debunked as birds, normal stuff looking weird in FLIR, insects, or whatever all the random things the last “world-changing” declassified videos ended up being.

  • fades@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    It is interesting to me especially since as a kid I was fascinated with things like ancient aliens lol. I knew it was bullshit of course but it was fun and engaging.

    A part of me wishes it were true, another part tells me it’s a distraction (the only names that I see supporting it are people like Rubio and other fascist conservatives), and the last part of me hopes it’s all bull shit because I agree with Mr. Hawking:

    “If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced,” Hawking said at the time, noting that any superior forms of life “may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.”

  • bermuda@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    The witnesses were former officers in the U.S. military with stellar service records. Their message to Congress was that we are not alone, we possess technology unlike anything available in the public or private sectors, and the U.S. government has covered up this earth-shattering information for decades.

    I feel like this is just a “boy who cried wolf” scenario. UAP/UFO people have been saying these exact three things for decades now. Doesn’t matter if it’s in a documentary or in front of congress. It’s the same shit with zero evidence beyond “but they served our country!!111!”

    Even if they do end up being right, at the moment it’s really hard for me to be convinced because they aren’t actually saying anything new. UFO crash with “non human biologics”? Honey, let me introduce you to a good friend of mine called “Roswell”

    • SenorBolsa@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I feel like if it is real this would all be subterfuge to help keep the secret, unfortunately people just buy it now for some reason. It would be an insanely easy secret to keep this way because the public at large will never see any “leak” as credible whether it’s real or not, just due to the sheer volume of noise around the topic.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Last week, I had a front-row seat at the hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), also known as UFOs.

    The three witnesses provided extraordinary testimony on their observations of aerial craft with performance characteristics far beyond those of modern aircraft, as well as knowledge of a hidden U.S. government crash retrieval program of such vehicles and their nonhuman operators.

    To quote an assessment in Forbes, “the internet shrugged.” After some brief reporting by the major news networks, they returned their attention to nearly full-time coverage of the dismal legal landscapes surrounding Hunter Biden and Donald Trump.

    The House Select Committee that Reps. Tim Burchett, Matt Gaetz, Anna Paulina Luna, and Jared Moskowitz recently requested Speaker Kevin McCarthy establish can do this by further investigating the UAP cover-up described at the hearing and drafting legislation that directs disclosure.

    Based on the observed flight characteristics detailed in the hearing, the results of this endeavor could make the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries look like baby steps, with wide-ranging benefits in areas as diverse as transportation safety, agricultural productivity, energy efficiency, environmental stewardship and human health.


    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Chris Remington@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I agree that these testimonies are very compelling and fascinating. However, I try to take a more measured approach when it comes to UAP. Here is a great interview with Avi Loeb who studies UAP at an academic level.

    • cryball@sopuli.xyz
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      I like his approach of stating that these are big claims, but cannot be really evaluated in any meaningful way, as there is no useful public data to look at.

      In my opinion this is the main crux of the whole topic. One party (the US government) has a boatload of various quality sensor data that could be studied, but it’s classified. As a result nobody can believe anyone’s statements as they aren’t supported by anything.

  • socsa@lemmy.ml
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    I really don’t understand what people got out of that hearing. We’ve done this like a dozen times previously. It was literally just a guy and his hearsay. No evidence at all.