[marshray]

It's as if somebody had been quoted saying "The UFO appeared to be surrounded by some type of brightly glowing plasma" and Scientific American were to go get the opinions of plasma physicists about whether or not this was possible with plasma.

[sgt101]

It really isn't.

What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interviewed would have been co-opted into joining said lab. Undergraduate education in Physics and Chemistry in the US would be grinding to a halt, NIST grants and DARPA grants would be zero for any other topic, publication and patent rates would be falling precipitously.

Why? Because such a find would be "all bets are off" everything would be up for grabs, not only would every scientist be scrambling to be involved - all the others would be encased in dark depression knowing that what they were up to was essentially worthless.

There would be questions in the UN, threats of violence against the US, allies would be sending worried missions and publicly begging for inclusion (unless they were included in which case they would be mouth shut deferential and smug in company..)

[adrianN]

Or the government would keep it hidden somewhere where nobody believes it's the real thing to avoid trouble in the UN and threats of violence...

[xenophonf]

The Bomb was a game changer, everyone working on the Manhattan Project knew it, and they _still_ had spies successfully infiltrating the project and exfiltrating above-top-secret data. Some supposedly alien material wouldn't change human nature. Something that big would leak.

[adrianN]

It did leak. Everybody "knows" the government has been experimenting on Aliens and alien technology since at least Roswell. There are even articles in the New York Times about warehouses storing alien artifacts!

[beamatronic]

That is a good point. If you were in possession of world-changing, society-breaking, panic-inducing information, how else would you prepare society for eventually hearing the full truth?

You would do it as a laughable joke over a long period of time.

[syshum]

That is why they stopped trying to outright hide projects like that, and instead mix the truth in tsunami of disinformation, sensationalize, crack pot theories, conspiracy, and the like so even if legitimate "Top Secret" info was leaked it could be safely dismissed as conspiracy, lies, or the newest term "fake news"

[armitron]

Obviously the narrative you put down makes no sense whatsoever, game theoretic and otherwise. For a better, much more realistic understanding of how intelligence agencies may react to something like this, I suggest you read Richard Heuer's psychology of intelligence analysis [1].

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...