Reusing a response I made to a previous UFO story, on a mailing list, lightly edited because the same logic still applies.
There’s one core truth that you need to understand, and then all the talk of UFOs, videos, and the reactions to them make sense.
The US military has secret aircraft. Other militaries also have secret aircraft. These are kept in reserve for high-stakes operations. For example, in 2011, a previously-unseen model of stealth helicopter crashed in the middle of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Rumor is that the Chinese military got to inspect the wreckage; if true, this would be a pretty major fuckup, since it would enable them to plan around its capabilities, to design radars to detect it, and to attribute any operations using it to the United States.
The performance characteristics of secret military aircraft are military secrets. They are highly prototypical military secrets. That means the secrecy radiates a few conceptual steps outward: our own country’s aircraft are secret, what we know about other countries’ aircraft is secret, what we know that other countries know about our aircraft is secret, and so on. Deliberate disinformation is expected; if you look far back enough in time for things to be declassified, you’ll find publicly-reported examples of the US putting out fake aircraft mockups for Soviet satellites to photograph, and similar tricks. There are a few videos taken from fighter-jet sensor packages floating around; these require some expertise to interpret, or else you’ll wind up thinking that the sharpen filter is a glowing aura, or that the parallax is a fast movement speed, or that image-stabilization problems are fast accelerations. As it happens, the characteristics of fighter-jet sensor packages are *also* military secrets (perhaps a bit less well kept), which means that 100% of the people who are qualified to interpret those videos, are also legally forbidden from talking publicly about them.
With that as background, there’s nothing left to explain. Given a specific video, it can be hard to tell whether it’s an aircraft with a surprising capability, or a fake video, or a sensor issue. That’s the point; foreign military strategists will also look at those videos, and encounter the same problems. Dispelling the confusion would mean accepting a substantial handicap in future military operations, and there’s no reason to do that.
There are a few videos taken from fighter-jet sensor packages floating around
The military released some videos but there’s plenty of reporting that it didn’t released their best-quality videos precisely for the reasons you listed. Having the best quality videos that are taking by fighter jets would reveal information about the fighter jets that the US military does not want out on the open so those high-quality videos are classified in a way the videos we have aren’t.
The kind of people who are in the know and who are qualified to interpret those videos are military personnel. People like David Charles Grusch.
There’s no good reason why someone like David Grusch should falsely tell Congress under oath that the military has intact vehicles “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures”.
Lying to congress that way would be a way to confuse the Chinese but it results people in Congress trying to engage with secret military programs in a way that the military doesn’t like. While some lies to Congress don’t get prosecuted, incorrectly telling Congress that the US military has intact vehicles of exotic origin seems like the kind of lie that Congressmen would want to see punished. It seems to me like a very strange conspiracy theory that the US military would purposefully mislead congress in this way.
based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures
That only sounds impressive if you don’t think too hard about what it means. It’s saying that the fragments are made of a fancy alloy that they can’t identify. But every military contractor has materials scientists, and being made of fancy new alloys is completely expected for cutting edge military aircraft.
The thing that has to be explained is why serious intelligence professionals speak of likely non-human origin.
It’s either:
(1) The US military/intelligence community is made up of people who are really crazy.
(2) There are actual aliens
(3) It’s a strange disinformation campaign that seems to go counter to the core interests of the military/intelligence community. It’s damaging to public and congressional trust in the military and invites oversight.
(4) There are some really strange turf wars going on in the military/intelligence community.
(5) There’s some other secret that’s even more strange to be covered up like psychic powers being responsible for the observed objects.
I don’t recall the source, but I do recall having seen a public source saying: The US air force had a problem with pilots getting buzzed by foreign drones, and not reporting the incidents because of stigma around UFOs. An executive decision was made to solve the problem by removing the stigma.
That seems to be a public justification for why the AATIP was started in 2007. It’s worth noting that the US air force didn’t want AATIP. Harry Reid forced them to do it because Robert Bigelow encouraged him to do so.
AATIP seems to come up with the term UAP to remove the stigma associated with the term UFO. That does not explain why AATIP reported having found the strange incidents that it found.
It certainly does not explain the reporting of a 90-year coverup of programs to retrieve UFOs. That’s not the kind of news you would want to produce if you want to reduce stigma.
Sure, but suppose you have a flying saucer that you would like to be able to use for some missions. If you release a fragment of the flying saucer and say “it’s aliens guys”, this maybe means that when other people see a flying saucer later they don’t know it’s you.
[Or the part of your organization that found the flying saucer fragments, which isn’t cleared to know about the flying saucer, releases it to the public with “WTF is this?” which the part which is cleared to know about them is barred from responding to, and part A didn’t know about the existence of part B to clear it with them first.]
Sure, but suppose you have a flying saucer that you would like to be able to use for some missions. If you release a fragment of the flying saucer and say “it’s aliens guys”, this maybe means that when other people see a flying saucer later they don’t know it’s you.
Press X to doubt. First, the details on flying saucer fragments have not been disclosed (as far as we know), so this strategy was not attempted. Second, though this is not a knockdown argument given that we’re dealing with the U.S. government, it would be an incredibly dumb strategy to build a new jet and then claim it’s a UFO in order to trick the Chinese government into thinking you’re not running missions in their airspace. The Chinese might not know about it, and the chances that the equipment you possess are U.S. made are higher from the Chinese perspective than if you had said nothing. It strikes me as conspiratorial thinking that the intel community would disclose its own equipment to the world, with such a preposterous explanation, as a sort of “feint”.
It strikes me as conspiratorial thinking that the intel community would disclose its own equipment to the world, with such a preposterous explanation, as a sort of “feint”.
So, I think “conspiratorial thinking” is a weird thing to say here. The existence of a conspiracy is not in doubt, and their willingness to lie to the public shouldn’t be either. If you’re not willing to engage with conspiratorial thinking when considering a literal conspiracy, how are you going to track reality?
That said, is this a tactical or strategic error, and thus unlikely? Sure, that seems like a plausible position to have, but then it’s at “mistake” levels of plausibility instead of “impossibile” levels of plausibility.
It just does not seem like something that the U.S. government would be willing to do. When we want to feed an enemy a mix of information and disinformation, we do it by using a double agent, not by publishing genuine classified info about our capabilities in the media with an asterisk that it’s alien technology. The intel bureaucracy would not OK something both this stupid and unusual/complicated.
A steelman might be that, since they didn’t actually publish the tech, this is an elaborate and historically funny scam to make UAF personnel in other countries believe they might be dealing with alien craft instead of NATO craft, whenever they come across something. But then the update would be about how complicated a lie the U.S. is willing to feed its own media, with all the different people apparently involved in confirming this story.
I think an important aspect is also that the last thing that the Intelligence Community wants is Congress trying to investigate what secret programs it has.
They don’t want congressmen asking “You don’t manage to give us a financial audit for the money we give you and it seems you are funding strange programs outside our purview.”
I’m wondering whether people within or on the peripheries of these recovery and reverse engineering programs have decided that convincing people that they’re UFO recovery programs is beneficial on net. I’ve seen some people dismiss this possibility, but it seems like they’re presuming to know a lot about the strategic landscape that they’re not players in.
Reusing a response I made to a previous UFO story, on a mailing list, lightly edited because the same logic still applies.
There’s one core truth that you need to understand, and then all the talk of UFOs, videos, and the reactions to them make sense.
The US military has secret aircraft. Other militaries also have secret aircraft. These are kept in reserve for high-stakes operations. For example, in 2011, a previously-unseen model of stealth helicopter crashed in the middle of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Rumor is that the Chinese military got to inspect the wreckage; if true, this would be a pretty major fuckup, since it would enable them to plan around its capabilities, to design radars to detect it, and to attribute any operations using it to the United States.
The performance characteristics of secret military aircraft are military secrets. They are highly prototypical military secrets. That means the secrecy radiates a few conceptual steps outward: our own country’s aircraft are secret, what we know about other countries’ aircraft is secret, what we know that other countries know about our aircraft is secret, and so on. Deliberate disinformation is expected; if you look far back enough in time for things to be declassified, you’ll find publicly-reported examples of the US putting out fake aircraft mockups for Soviet satellites to photograph, and similar tricks. There are a few videos taken from fighter-jet sensor packages floating around; these require some expertise to interpret, or else you’ll wind up thinking that the sharpen filter is a glowing aura, or that the parallax is a fast movement speed, or that image-stabilization problems are fast accelerations. As it happens, the characteristics of fighter-jet sensor packages are *also* military secrets (perhaps a bit less well kept), which means that 100% of the people who are qualified to interpret those videos, are also legally forbidden from talking publicly about them.
With that as background, there’s nothing left to explain. Given a specific video, it can be hard to tell whether it’s an aircraft with a surprising capability, or a fake video, or a sensor issue. That’s the point; foreign military strategists will also look at those videos, and encounter the same problems. Dispelling the confusion would mean accepting a substantial handicap in future military operations, and there’s no reason to do that.
The military released some videos but there’s plenty of reporting that it didn’t released their best-quality videos precisely for the reasons you listed. Having the best quality videos that are taking by fighter jets would reveal information about the fighter jets that the US military does not want out on the open so those high-quality videos are classified in a way the videos we have aren’t.
The kind of people who are in the know and who are qualified to interpret those videos are military personnel. People like David Charles Grusch.
There’s no good reason why someone like David Grusch should falsely tell Congress under oath that the military has intact vehicles “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures”.
Lying to congress that way would be a way to confuse the Chinese but it results people in Congress trying to engage with secret military programs in a way that the military doesn’t like. While some lies to Congress don’t get prosecuted, incorrectly telling Congress that the US military has intact vehicles of exotic origin seems like the kind of lie that Congressmen would want to see punished. It seems to me like a very strange conspiracy theory that the US military would purposefully mislead congress in this way.
That only sounds impressive if you don’t think too hard about what it means. It’s saying that the fragments are made of a fancy alloy that they can’t identify. But every military contractor has materials scientists, and being made of fancy new alloys is completely expected for cutting edge military aircraft.
The thing that has to be explained is why serious intelligence professionals speak of likely non-human origin.
It’s either:
(1) The US military/intelligence community is made up of people who are really crazy.
(2) There are actual aliens
(3) It’s a strange disinformation campaign that seems to go counter to the core interests of the military/intelligence community. It’s damaging to public and congressional trust in the military and invites oversight.
(4) There are some really strange turf wars going on in the military/intelligence community.
(5) There’s some other secret that’s even more strange to be covered up like psychic powers being responsible for the observed objects.
None of the explanations passes the smell test.
I don’t recall the source, but I do recall having seen a public source saying: The US air force had a problem with pilots getting buzzed by foreign drones, and not reporting the incidents because of stigma around UFOs. An executive decision was made to solve the problem by removing the stigma.
That seems to be a public justification for why the AATIP was started in 2007. It’s worth noting that the US air force didn’t want AATIP. Harry Reid forced them to do it because Robert Bigelow encouraged him to do so.
AATIP seems to come up with the term UAP to remove the stigma associated with the term UFO. That does not explain why AATIP reported having found the strange incidents that it found.
It certainly does not explain the reporting of a 90-year coverup of programs to retrieve UFOs. That’s not the kind of news you would want to produce if you want to reduce stigma.
According to the article, the evidence comes not in the form of video or sensor data, but in recovered portions of whole aircraft.
Sure, but suppose you have a flying saucer that you would like to be able to use for some missions. If you release a fragment of the flying saucer and say “it’s aliens guys”, this maybe means that when other people see a flying saucer later they don’t know it’s you.
[Or the part of your organization that found the flying saucer fragments, which isn’t cleared to know about the flying saucer, releases it to the public with “WTF is this?” which the part which is cleared to know about them is barred from responding to, and part A didn’t know about the existence of part B to clear it with them first.]
Press X to doubt. First, the details on flying saucer fragments have not been disclosed (as far as we know), so this strategy was not attempted. Second, though this is not a knockdown argument given that we’re dealing with the U.S. government, it would be an incredibly dumb strategy to build a new jet and then claim it’s a UFO in order to trick the Chinese government into thinking you’re not running missions in their airspace. The Chinese might not know about it, and the chances that the equipment you possess are U.S. made are higher from the Chinese perspective than if you had said nothing. It strikes me as conspiratorial thinking that the intel community would disclose its own equipment to the world, with such a preposterous explanation, as a sort of “feint”.
So, I think “conspiratorial thinking” is a weird thing to say here. The existence of a conspiracy is not in doubt, and their willingness to lie to the public shouldn’t be either. If you’re not willing to engage with conspiratorial thinking when considering a literal conspiracy, how are you going to track reality?
That said, is this a tactical or strategic error, and thus unlikely? Sure, that seems like a plausible position to have, but then it’s at “mistake” levels of plausibility instead of “impossibile” levels of plausibility.
It just does not seem like something that the U.S. government would be willing to do. When we want to feed an enemy a mix of information and disinformation, we do it by using a double agent, not by publishing genuine classified info about our capabilities in the media with an asterisk that it’s alien technology. The intel bureaucracy would not OK something both this stupid and unusual/complicated.
A steelman might be that, since they didn’t actually publish the tech, this is an elaborate and historically funny scam to make UAF personnel in other countries believe they might be dealing with alien craft instead of NATO craft, whenever they come across something. But then the update would be about how complicated a lie the U.S. is willing to feed its own media, with all the different people apparently involved in confirming this story.
I think an important aspect is also that the last thing that the Intelligence Community wants is Congress trying to investigate what secret programs it has.
They don’t want congressmen asking “You don’t manage to give us a financial audit for the money we give you and it seems you are funding strange programs outside our purview.”
I’m wondering whether people within or on the peripheries of these recovery and reverse engineering programs have decided that convincing people that they’re UFO recovery programs is beneficial on net. I’ve seen some people dismiss this possibility, but it seems like they’re presuming to know a lot about the strategic landscape that they’re not players in.