So I haven't been keeping up on the aliens story, but I've seen a lot of posts on reddit about it lately. I know there is a hearing today. Does anyone have a good summary that isn't a conspiracy website?
It should be understood that I am advocating for a particular interpretation of events that I think is most likely---and is markedly less spectacular than what you typically see in the media. I also haven't really taken on Grusch yet but will probably do so soon.
I've been hesitant to write on Grusch because I do not personally feel him to be credible, but only time will tell. there are far too many similarities between Grusch, Bob Lazar, and Luis Elizondo, which clearly illustrates the need to be skeptical of people with fantastical claims and supposed intelligence backgrounds. Like Lazar before him, Grusch seems to be positioning his claims in such a way that they are not verifiable. It will likely take a couple of years for journalists to provide any serious review of Grusch's claims, if they ever do. These congressional hearings are far more show than substance and were never likely to produce any new information, or to seriously evaluate Grusch's credibility.
We can hope that something will emerge in coming months that will offer a more definitive appraisal of Grusch but, in the meantime, I think it's by far safest to assume that he is another crank in a well-established line of cranks who have (claimed to) emerge from the shadows of the military to tell us that the government definitely has aliens hidden somewhere. The main difference is that the media is taking Grusch far more seriously than they have taken previous instances, but I think that's an artifact of specific events right now (e.g. the AARO) and not really related to the substance of Grusch or his claims. I don't think the congressional hearings should be interpreted as anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to the media situation, perhaps amplified by current political factors.
If sentient aliens are out there watching us, I would not be surprised if they're gathered around their equivalent of a TV with their equivalent of strong beer, watching our world and making bets on whether we survive this century or not.
How egocentric. Its just as likely, maybe more, that an interplanetary species would view us as we view ants.
Do you watch locusts multiply and consume all before them then zoom in and watch the drama unfold between the individuals in the swarm? Or do you stand back and think "stupid things, they'll be hungry soon enough".
I want to know how they apparently have advanced tech that allows them to travel the vast distances of space, and if certain people are to be believed, have crafts capable of astonishing maneuvers we can't match... Yet, they crash all the time...
No technology is 100% foolproof ; especially in a completely foreign environment ; and they don´t "crash all the time". According to Grusch I think they have recovered "in the double digits" which is less than a hundred. From the history of ufology we know about maybe 10-20 crashes which have lots of corroboration, thatś really not many.
edit: another pt to consider, if any of this turns out to be true - this is really insane, because most of us think "aliens" like one species.... but according to the many abductions and encounters in the past hundred years we may very well have been visited by TENS of different species... which may also explain the crashes, like it's not just one species/propulsion tech that is repeating their errors. Many different craft shapes too, point towards different tech, different points of failure.
> I'm gonna assume advanced aliens are at least an order of magnitude better.
I'm sure they are, at air travel. I think it would be reasonable to assume that some very complicated physics would be required, many orders of magnitude more complicated than air travel, which was first done with leg power, using some spare bicycle parts and various dead plants.
It might be that the feats we see are at the leading edge of their technology and that's why they crash. They might be reaching out to say hello at great risk to themselves. Earth is full of humans who would take the same kind of risk in the other direction.
Surely though, if you can take travel near light speed you need a detection and maneuverability system so advanced, because any impact is game over, that pottering around at non relativistic speeds should be an absolute doddle.
We have no idea how they could be traveling through space. They could be using something like the alcubierre drive which wouldn't be affecting by dust or microscopic things in space puncturing the craft, they'd just get warped around the craft with the rest of space.
Plus, space is so vast and lightspeed is so slow, I can't imagine plotting a trajectory to avoid stars/planets would be at all difficult for a society so advanced.
Have you ever seen those videos of someone getting their first fast car and immediately planting it in a building? Things that are made to handle well going very fast don't necessarily do well going very slow. It could be they normally depend on some guidance infrastructure for intra-stellar travel where they normally operate that isn't present here.
Hmmm, I don't know if that is a convincing argument. We have super advanced monitoring tools for web servers with armies of admins, yet websites go down all the time.
I know this is a joke, but can we for a second take a step back to marvel at how we're now watching US Congressional hearings about UAP's, where the word "Aliens" and "Extra-terrestrial life" was mentioned several times? I feel like I'm living through the beginning of a sci-fi movie.
More to the point, why is it always people in the US that have credible or semi credible (or for that matter ANY) evidence of UAP's, UFO's etc? The earth is a big place, why is it always the US they choose to visit? Is Botswana not good enough? Is Europe not technologically advanced enough? Does South America not send the right message?
I assume there is some particular combination of factors at play here:
The US has a very advanced military and intelligence apparatus which operates globally.
The US has an enormous area that it operates in domestically (large areas of both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans).
The US also has a relatively open culture and emphasizes free speech.
When you look at all of these factors it seems that by having all of them it makes it a lot more likely for people to detect UAPs and then talk about them. The other thing that might be at play here is that, as an American, I have no idea what a credible news source would be from Botswana and it is unlikely to be in English even if I would consume it in the first place.
Exactly but when you bring this up you get attacked. Sure there might be extraterrestrial life and no one is doubting this possibility but that they would focus on only the US and only get seen I the US is quite self centered.
Also don't forget how would we approach another planet if we had the tech to go there. The life forms on that planet may appear to us a monkeys or even ants and we would probably just ignore them.
> but that they would focus on only the US and only get seen I the US is quite self centered.
Because it isn't true. I started paying attention to UFO's after the 2017 new york times article on the subject, and yes, there is a perception that it's a US only phenomenon, but it's a misconception. I do not have a link to point you to, but UFO's are being reported world wide, and there have been some famous cases outside the US (as far as UFO cases get famous) such as the school, Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki
Ariel School UFO incident.
> More to the point, why is it always people in the US that have credible or semi credible (or for that matter ANY) evidence of UAP's, UFO's etc?
The US is one of the only countries with the resources to explore such things?
Or maybe because the US is the fourth largest country by land mass, and the only bigger ones are Russia, China, and Canada. China probably would keep it a secret, as would Russia. And we would probably process Canada's. And in fact you do hear about stuff over Russia all the time.
Being a kook and a congressman (or intelligence officer) are not mutually exclusive. I haven't really seen anything credible, have you? It's always some ambiguous statement like "I've been told by a high ranking official...", "It appears to be not of this planet..." which puts my bullshit detector on full blast.
Assuming this isn’t just a big psyop trying to scare US adversaries, and that UFO’s are real… the US was the first to detonate nukes in 1945, on its own territory, which might explain some of the UFO interest. Maybe the UFO’s were investigating how scientifically and technologically advanced humanity was becoming, and naturally focused on nuclear tech as a leading indicator.
Also, the 1936 Berlin Olympics TV broadcast was the first human signal capable of detection from distant space, and might have alerted them to humanity. Travel time of the broadcast plus travel time of UFO’s to Earth (assuming they have lightspeed capability) might have resulted in them arriving right around when nukes were invented (if they’re from, say, Alpha Centauri which is 4 light-years away).
Finally, the US and Europe have free press where things like this are more likely to be publicly reported than in say, the USSR back in the day, or China under the CCP. Which, in conjunction with the above, may explain sightings maps like this one, where sightings are most frequent in the US and secondarily in Europe:
Also, if you search number of reports by date ranges, and choose an arbitrary cutoff at, say, 1944, look at what you get (I would need to see all this data graphed to see when the real inflection point to cut at is, so I'm just guessing here):
1-1943: 1566 sightings reports
1944-2023: 294,641 sightings reports
Two orders of magnitude more sightings reports in the 80yrs since nukes were invented, vs in the almost two millennia previously. Obviously we also had more robust and technologically advanced media in the latter time frame, so that contributes much to the discrepancy. But still a huge discrepancy.
UAP sightings and encounters are a global phenomenon, documented by civilians and military/government individuals and declassified documents going back decades. If you begin even cursory research into the topic, you'll discover as much.
> The earth is a big place, why is it always the US they choose to visit?
Since almost all credible English-speaking UFO sightings (i.e. someone actually saw something strange in the sky and isn't delusional or lying) have been US military hardware, it stands to reason that the US has been the site of a lot of sightings reported in English. The only other really obvious places where you might see this kind of stuff is rural Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, or China, and I don't know what kind of things the locals have been primed to believe or say when they see strange lights in the sky.
It's not just the US, but the intelligence agencies who for some reason are the people that ET has chosen to reach out to and have the sole evidence and knowledge of the extraterrestrials. You know, the people who lied to the world about the presence of WMDs in Iraq 15 years ago. They have received communication with ET nobody else has and they have evidence if we just trust them.
Life feels more and more like a Sci Fi movie. Also consider that the US is one of the few nations with such advanced sensor technology, and also the one that likely flies the most training runs, patrols etc.
The hearing today, especially how much we didn't hear, was fascinating.
"Non-human" rather than "extra-terrestrial", I feel, was said a few times to try and tell us something. Perhaps they don't come from far away. Perhaps they come from outside, or perhaps they are from here.
When did they begin to show up?
What if nuclear blasts had an effect outside what we knew?
> What if nuclear blasts had an effect outside what we knew?
Wait, isn’t this the plot of Twin Peaks: The Return?
The news today is reporting that it was David Grusch, already not taken very seriously, who testified on the presence of “non-human” biological material found at crash sites. You know what that claim is compatible with? Putting an ape into an advanced drone in order to test the effect of its flight on life. You know, just like was done in the 1950s for space research.
If I were to make a sci-fi plot, I'd say the first nuclear blast in a US desert (Mohave?) spooked the aliens because they happen to live somewhere around that desert, in a "different dimension" so to say. To them the blast was a spike of hard radiation of unexplained origin. After digging into it, they've realized the relationship with us (to their astonishment) and developed an entire new branch of science about cross-dimension space travel. Now they can regularly send equivalents of bathyscaphes to our plane and observe us. They don't space travel as we imagine it, they rather submerge. The bathyscaphes protect their bodies from instant disintegration, but they already have a prototype of a space-suit that will let them leave the bathyscaphe. In the meantime they've been dropping some artifacts to steer our civilization in the desired direction. They really want us to develop an advanced machine civilization because they have means of directly connecting to a certain type of machines. As for their goals, it's the same goals that we have for Mars or Moon: explore and colonize because we can, perhaps find some minerals.
What I would like to see at these hearings aren't airmen or military officials giving their "opinion".
Instead I would like engineers from Raytheon and Northrop Grumman etc. who build these sensors system to tell congress what they are seeing. From a duck flying at mach whatever over the surface of the sea due to parallax to the triangular night vision system iris. Explain to the laymen who think they saw an UFO what they really saw.
> "Have we evolved naturally or was there intervention as a start or somewhere along the way?"
I loved the letter, but I just quibble on this sentence from my own perspective. It seems to me that concepts like "natural" and "intervention" are almost meaningless to ask. What is "unnatural" to an alien? What kind of matter/energy system can be explained as an "intervention"?
I'm not sure. Can we define alien spores as an agent with intent? Perhaps the sun can be viewed as an agent with intent since it displays an inherent ability to influence the solar system. The universe is swimming in alien interactions.
This may sound weird but I really don't understand the desire to seek and make contact with alien species.
Humanity is the alpha species on Earth and we slaughter billions of animals a year to feed our appetites, regardless of the animal's relative intelligence or ability to provide companionship to us.
Why do we expect a more intelligent alien species to look upon us any differently to how we look upon a cow/sheep/horse/dog/lobster/octopus and every other species eaten by humanity.
The likelihood that life on Earth will be compatible with the digestive processes of an independently evolved life form are exceedingly small. They probably wouldn't look at us like potential food in the same way that we try to eat just about everything, so I don't think we have to worry about becoming livestock.
And if they're capable of interstellar transport, they will have absolutely no need for our resources as they'll already have full mastery of energy/matter at their disposal.
No, if alien life finds us, they're primarily going to evaluate us as potential threats. Quite like how we treat common pests. Do we have the potential to threaten their convenience? If so, they may eliminate us. If not, the worst we have to fear is probably getting wrapped up in some interstellar pet market...
Maybe send down a landing party or two and hang out with humans for a bit incognito. Knowing about us isn't the same as interacting with us. At least that's what I think.
As for actual communication, it's a tough question. My first contact education is based on TV and movies. Hopefully they have a procedure based on actual previous first contact experiences.
Buy all our world leaders and make them say stupid shit and shoot things at each other for a few centuries. Then replace them all with some social website and gradually announce their presence and act like saviors.
Dear human. We know. All of it. Always have. The things you are concerned about are not yours to solve. Why are you asking for an energy source, do you not have enough energy, how are you writing your blog? Don't be silly. You want better propulsion fuels? That is what you came here to ask for? Or maybe your problem is that you have none?
Go with passive solar design and stop looking for the holy grail of clean energy. The truth is we are shopping for a new home because we long ago ruined our environment like you are doing to yours.
> However, we’re now in a situation where the total number of people on Earth, combined with our current economic systems, is seriously straining our resources and affecting the quality of life for most people.
This is true, but not in the way they mean it - it is affecting the quality of life way upward for most people.
If aliens do exist and are in our vicinity, they absolutely have access to every digitally-transcribed mote of data or communication, should they wish.
I kind of view this as a bit of a problem: If it is so, presumably they have orders of magnitude more capacity for control and amendment and could have very plausibly been editing every last bit of digital data we've relied upon over the last 70+ years. They could well have been re-writing our entire view of the universe.
We need an order of Analogue Eternally-watching Monks we rely upon to fact-check basic assumptions using entirely non-digital means. Which could get complicated.
I love Vernor Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky", where a very diminished force of humans arrives at an alien planet during the aliens' industrial revolution. The humans decide to go into cold sleep until the aliens are advanced enough to help rebuild their ship, and they spend hundreds of years subtly manipulating the aliens' social and technological development to their benefit.
Of course, among the aliens are a small faction of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists who are constantly trying to prove the existence of the aliens and their manipulation of the planet's information systems.
Huh? You think they're literally editing radio broadcasts, network transmissions, printed media, etc? And that nobody has noticed? I think your tinfoil is leaking!
I more meant they could be editing transmissions and inputs from all the digitally-based means we have analysing the universe - including Voyager, telescopes, gravity wave detectors... CERN.
It was an idea I pondered trying to turn into a short story, but I'm not a writer, so.. here we are.
These “Aliens” who have been hanging out in under and around Earth for 10,000 years would like for me to share a short account I have written.
Treachery divides us, friends. The Truth is Man is savage and beastial, when not meddlesome scamps. The consequences and when these catch up to us are the real mystery.
An account of the “greys” (and the secret war among Man.)
