I don't know what to make of this. It just seems so incredibly implausibly that extraterrestrials would have the technology or motive to come to Earth without widespread detection.
Part of the testimony was that there is widespread detection. The claim is that UAPs are often a part of briefings and debriefs. Its also been claimed during the recent UAP related testimonies that a large number of military and civilian pilots have seen stuff, but either had no clear path to report it, reported it and were ignored, or reported and were harassed, or chose to not report it out of fear of harassment.
There's nothing stopping the civilians from reporting it publicly AFAIK. There's enough cameras in the sky that we'd have footage of a few. Especially from all the commercial fights with passengers.
Part of the issue is the stigma. Commercial pilots are afraid to come forward, and that’s why Ryan Graves came to this meeting because his mission is to reduce the stigma so pilots feel safe reporting this issue.
I'd agree on some pilots, and sure they should post more unexplained things for analysis. But given how many people are eagerly into bigfoot or cryptids, it's not like every pilot with some kind of evidence would feel unsafe sharing it.
Pilots, both commercial and military, are constantly under scrutiny to maintain a healthy mental state for fear of their license being revoked. You can not be mentally unstable and be a pilot. For years it was generally well accepted that people who believed in UFOs are crazy, so pilots have kept this to themselves for fear of retribution. Go ask any pilot how they would feel reporting something moving in unexplainable ways right up against their aircraft.
That's why I said evidence. I'm not expecting them to tell tales of UFO sightings. Having a video of something does not reflect on your mental state (unless you faked it). This issue also doesn't apply to passengers and there's lots of people in the sky who don't have a pilot's licence to protect.
When I go out for a hike in the woods or a hike in a new state/country that isn’t my home. I don’t go out destroying the land around me. I observe and enjoy my time
Maybe these aliens are scientists. Documenting biological life across the galaxy. Maybe they’re VanCampers. Just bouncing from planet to planet for fun
If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy. Lots of empty planets with plenty of resources out there!
Not saying aliens/UFOs are real, but I think it’s very easy to imagine them existing and not being destructive. Or maybe they’re just scouting before the invasion :)
Seriously. There's nothing here that they can't find out in space in greater quantities and easier access. Except our animal and plant life. And no worries about harvesting us like in movies, it's way easier to grow meat or whatever than travel across the universe for it. We're most likely a curiosity.
Their opsec's way too good for scientists. If they're anything like our scientists, we'd have recovered one of the flying saucers when they tried to go through Arby's drive-through but didn't have enough clearance.
Maybe they're just fictional, and this guy has a Fox Mulder larping fetish.
> If a civilization has presumably reached FTL travel. I imagine many of their needs have been met and conquest/destruction isn’t required to maintain their supremacy.
If we ever achieve FTL travel, do you imagine that it will be available to frat bros doing road trips to Beta Reticuli VI, or will it be this horrendously expensive, economy-wrecking thing that we get to do once or twice and then have to stop because it is almost impossible to do?
We achieved a moon landing for fuck's sake, and the frat bro still hasn't duplicated that one yet (though I will concede he's not doing too shabby).
I think it’s a mistake to imagine how an alien species would behave based on our own tendencies.
A civilization that has achieved what their (supposed) presence here implies has clearly managed to move far beyond human capability, and our understanding of opsec seems irrelevant.
It could be that with sufficiently advanced technology, “opsec” is mostly irrelevant relative to a species like ours with the capabilities we have.
And that's fine and all, but it's been nearly a hundred years and they're still doing the same shit? Are we supposed to believe we are the equivalent of a tourist attraction? One where you seem to have a high likelihood of dying?
Not saying I believe this, but for sake of argument…
If these are scientific/observation missions, humanity is going through its most transformative stages of advancement, and the last 100 years have been quite interesting.
If we could go and observe a developing civilization secretly and over a long period of time, I suspect we would.
Right, like what would be their motivation for exclusively interacting with governments rather than, say, landing in Times Square?
I guess a counter thought would be that they haven't actually tried to interact with anyone at all, maybe only observe, but the armed forces/governments are the only element of our species with the ability to detect and retrieve them when they make mistakes.
1. They make exceptionally few mistakes overall anyway;
2. Perhaps it is the interaction between armed force technology and their vehicles which creates problems for them (whether intentional or not from our side);
3. The majority of our land surface area is not inhabited at any given moment. Maybe these drones, or whatever they are, do not even care about life here, and are not particularly attracted to cities or people, and are statistically more likely to fail out of reach of most populated areas just because that's what our geographic distribution is like.
He testified under oath. Every time he was asked for specifics, he said he had them, had already provided them, or in some cases would provide them immediately after because they were classified--which is the proper response if you don't want to go to jail.
If he's a nut, you'd expect evasion, contradiction, waffling and avoidance when asked for specifics. I didn't see any of that. He is already providing data that will be verifiable. An attention-seeking con would work hard to avoid providing anything he can be called out on. I have no idea what's going on, and this is all nuts, but that certainly didn't fit the mold I was expecting.
I can see where it might sound that way if you haven't watched the testimony.
"I provided this classified information under oath to the inspector general" is not an avoidance tactic but a direction where to locate classified info.
"I'll tell you later" on the surface might sound like an avoidance tactic, but when he was asked when he could provide it the answer was "immediately after today's session." In other words, no stalling at all, he just preferred not getting arrested for sharing top-secret info publicly.
Willing to get arrested would be a huge signal that he's an actual whistleblower and not full of shit!
There's almost no chance he'd face any consequences given the topic and the amount of support he'd have the from the public, and even then, Daniel Hale's sentence for disclosing dozens of classified documents to reporters was ~3.5yrs in jail. The LARPers pretending like he'd be sent to gitmo are completely in lala land.
We only have one life, nobody wants to sacrifice 3 years of it. Just because you and I consider potential alien life disclosures to be important doesn't mean we have the right to demand someone with that knowledge sacrifice their own life for us to have it.
If I had hardcore proof of definite alien life on earth but by revealing it I'd spend time in prison, would I do it? Or would I be content to know that in the 4-billion year scope of life on Earth, people will probably eventually figure it out without me anyway, and that I could let go of my particular contribution to the arc of history for a simple, peaceful life with family? Maybe the latter...
Huh? You’re telling me you think they can travel light years to get here but don’t have the tech to land without us detecting them? That’s an assumption.
Assuming FTL is off the table, anything sent here will have been designed and launched with no evidence the subject planet has radars or air combat hardware. One should expect probes to have no air combat capability, and may not even bother to dodge a missile, even if they (incidentally) have very good aerodynamic performance.
If they don't have FYL then it's ridiculous that they'd send what are effectively tiny scout ships that don't have stealth tech to avoid the Other Aliens and that crash at alarming rates With Living Pilots inside...
Really...
Just look at the claim objectively and it becomes obvious it's absurd.
You would send some probe complex that includes small scout aircraft. Literally, NASA has done this. From many vantage points, Earth is a water world with no intelligent life on it. Most operators would send an interstellar probe based on that assumption. Things like living organisms can be application-specific bio robots that are wholly unprepared for anything like contact. Really, sending a bunch of military hardware on a space probe is obviously absurd. We have examples of literal scientists building literal space probes and they literally don’t send them with weapons.
If things are such that aliens send probes to any such planet as ours they would be concerned about negative consequences and put great effort into ensuring they could not be discovered by _any_ potentially threatening species.
This precludes any of the forms you suggest, as any species capable of sending such would also be more than advanced enough to ensure we wouldn't discover them and that they wouldn't fail at the rates claimed.
Even if we presume many many species sending such, there's the issue that they wouldn't be bothering with us in this way and would either have already conquered us for the resources to fight each other etc. (And even if not fighting they would be aware of each other as a result of these supposed visits).
There's no reasonable explanation for subterfuge which is the only answer ever given for such questions of "why have they not made direct contact?" Right?
If you rephrase it as "a civilization that mastered interplanetary travel and can split the atom somehow keeps crashing on our planet" it makes me wonder.
What if bugs, suicidal or thrill-seeking pilots or overly confident bureaucracies remain a fixture in the next stages of life's evolution as well?
Or what if fixing those problems is harder than the technology?
Or, perhaps, that civilization is using found technology from UFOs that crashed on their planet and they haven't quite figured out where the brake pedal is, yet?
Maybe they are trying to subtly steer our planet out of the way of an extinction event meteor with ballistics - and we’ve accidentally steered the meteor back into a collision course!