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Sci-Fi Government United States

Congress Doubles Down On Explosive Claims of Illegal UFO Retrieval Programs (thehill.com) 223

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Asked June 26 about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made several stunning statements. In an exclusive interview, Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil that multiple individuals with "very high clearances and high positions within our government" "have come forward to share" "first-hand" UFO-related claims "beyond the realm of what [the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with."

Rubio's comments provide context for a bipartisan provision adopted unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of "non-earth" or "exotic" origin. This extraordinary language added to the Senate version of the Intelligence authorization bill mirrors and adds significant credibility to a whistleblower's recent, stunning allegations that a clandestine, decades-long effort to recover, analyze and exploit objects of "non-human" origin has been operating illegally without congressional oversight.

Additionally, the bill instructs individuals with knowledge of such activities to disclose all relevant information and grants legal immunity if the information is reported appropriately within a defined timeframe. Moreover, nearly 20 pages of the legislation appear to directly address recent events by enhancing a raft of legal protections for whistleblowers while also permitting such individuals to contact Congress directly. Researcher and congressional expert Douglas Johnson first reported on and analyzed the remarkable bill language, which, if it passes the House, could become law this calendar year.

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Congress Doubles Down On Explosive Claims of Illegal UFO Retrieval Programs

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  • Real or not... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by coofercat ( 719737 )

    Whether any of this is real or not doesn't make much difference. It strikes me that it's the responsible thing for (any) government to do in this situation - that is, have an "amnesty" on information, collect it all and then assess if it's a load of crack pots or is something to deal with further. I doubt this is a trigger for anything to be made public, but it seems like a useful first step.

    On a different tack, if the US government has got some alien technology, what are they doing with it? Maybe it's all

    • by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:20AM (#63639666) Homepage

      It's being used for child trafficking.

    • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      collect it all and then assess if it's a load of crack pots or is something to deal with further.

      If? You sure diverge from the average Slashdot user! Here, the average user would definitely say "crack pots". I have always wondered why since aliens is kind of nerdy. Maybe it's because of all those charlatans who make a living with those theories, I don't know...

      • by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:28AM (#63639926)
        Seems like 99% of users here, an alien could smack them in the face with a tentacle, beam them up to a space ship, relocate them to an alien planet, and they'd still be screaming it was some mundane human technology and they were still on earth being tricked. "This isn't a replicator, you just used a drug to make me forget I was standing here an hour while someone went and grabbed what I asked for before your mirror trick with swamp gas made it seem to materialize in front of me!"
        Oh the howls as they got locked in the alien insane asylum.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I agree- it has always surprised me how little intellectual curiosity is on display (here in the Slashdot comments) when this topic comes up. The Slashdot community is awash with individuals who routinely dismiss valid observations of unexplained phenomena. These dismissals are executed with an incredibly dull arrogance that reveals a misplaced sense of omnipotence. On a more cheerful note, the classified discussion forums on this topic within the U.S. Intelligence Community are much more constructive, o
          • I agree- it has always surprised me how little intellectual curiosity is on display (here in the Slashdot comments) when this topic comes up.

            Maybe we're old enough to need more than insinuation and shaky videos before we devote any more brain cells to it.

            Right now there's more evidence for the Easter Bunny than there is for alien visitations. This is despite nearly everybody on the planet carrying around a high definition recording device with them 24/7.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        the average user would definitely say "crack pots". I have always wondered why since aliens is kind of nerdy.

        Because "they're crackpots" is the nerdy response.

        If there's a conspiracy to keep UFOs a secret, I think it would require millions of people, all in different jurisdictions across all the world's governments, to keep a big secret and never break character once.

        A UFO conspiracy is right up there with a "COVID-19 isn't real" conspiracy where all healthcare workers in all countries are lying about the c

      • collect it all and then assess if it's a load of crack pots or is something to deal with further.

        If? You sure diverge from the average Slashdot user! Here, the average user would definitely say "crack pots". I have always wondered why since aliens is kind of nerdy. Maybe it's because of all those charlatans who make a living with those theories, I don't know...

        It's only Americans that report UFOs. It doesn't happen in other places. It's crackpots. The alternative is that aliens give two shits about national borders on Earth.

    • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      "On a different tack, if the US government has got some alien technology, what are they doing with it?"

      In the hypothetical world where they really have such technology, they might have reached the practical limits on what they can do with it while needing to keep it so secret. Maybe that is what this is about... even just making it known this kind of thing does exist while keeping everything else secret opens up new possibilities. You are going to have a much larger recruitment pool for scientists with the

      • by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:42AM (#63639980)

        if the US government has got some alien technology

        We are all going to be mightily disappointed when we find out they do have alien technology and it is "astronaut ice cream," "velcro," and "space shuttle pens that write upside-down."

      • by trenien ( 974611 )
        Well, assuming the story is true, it may be the reason why we've heard nothing about this decades after is that our science and technology are just not up to snuff here and none of those who had access could figure out anything useful (except for velcro :p)

        Realisticaly, what exactly could an isolated native tribe in the middle of the Amazon forest do to figure out / replicate a modern fighter jet that happened to crash nearby ?

        • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          These secret researchers may have reached their limits explaining what they have their hands on while at the same time sitting on proof we've obviously boxed ourselves in with one or more major assumptions somewhere. It certainly wouldn't be the first time the scientific community and especially the physics community has thought they pretty much knew how everything worked aside from a couple small pieces and then had everything changed. Maybe there is a fundamental flaw in the way we are doing our maths tha

    • by fermion ( 181285 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:08AM (#63639868) Homepage Journal
      This is the basis of conspiracy theories. Real or not they give congress the tools to attack political enemies. I have in my hand a list of 205 space aliens that have infiltrated the federal government
    • What are they doing with it? Most likely finding a weaponized application or new ways to detect and shoot down. The pentagon is not in the business of researching how to build better bridges. They have 4 fields of research 1) energy 2) weapons 3) defense 4) communication. Im sure any or all of these are studied to build a better war machine. If they find anything useful outside of this they will spin up a private corporation owned by the top managers and have a monopoly on the tech for a few years.
      • by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

        The pentagon is not in the business of researching how to build better bridges.

        The US Army Corps of Engineers would likely disagree with you.

  • Let's be honest (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:09AM (#63639620)

    Our congress members have given up listening to anyone with any real knowledge and they now get 90% of their information from random idiots on Facebook.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Targon ( 17348 )
      It is worse, they actually listen to proven idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene in the US Congress.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:32AM (#63639942) Homepage Journal

        I've heard of this Rubio guy. Isn't he some kind of moron?

      • Rubio is claiming the committee has been given the information by people with high clearance

        There is 100% support from the committee.

        So no, we're not dealing with a cabal of conspiracy theorists like MTG or others, this has far more authority to it.

        • Rubio is claiming the committee has been given the information by people with high clearance

          Because people with high clearance sometimes want attention too, and that shouldn't be surprising. We have a lot of people with high clearance, you really expect 0 of them to be crackpots?

          There is 100% support from the committee.

          Of course there is. Denying funding for a program that doesn't exist changes nothing, so there are no actual consequences to the provision, so you do no damage by voting yes. On the other hand, voting no will get you accused of being part of the conspiracy hiding aliens, which is a political can of worms.

          So no, we're not dealing with a cabal of conspiracy theorists like MTG or others, this has far more authority to it.

          We're absolutely d

      • by sinij ( 911942 )
        No, it is worse, they actually listen to proven liars [wikipedia.org] that actively spread disinformation [politico.com] designed [nypost.com] to mislead [businessinsider.com] and shape public opinion.
  • by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:15AM (#63639640) Homepage

    Headline says "Congress Doubles Down On Explosive Claims...", but the summary says "Marco Rubio."

    Marco Rubio is a member of Congress, but he is not himself Congress.

    • by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:39AM (#63639738)

      "Rubio's comments provide context for a bipartisan provision adopted unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of "non-earth" or "exotic" origin."

      A unanimous bipartisan vote of the senate intelligence committee still isn't the entire congress but it is significantly closer than just Rubio.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:45AM (#63639770)

      but he is not himself Congress.

      I feel that Congress these days are now collectively so stupid that Marco Rubio represents them quite well.

    • Replying to undo moderation. Marked you as "Redundant" by accident. My apologies.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      This demonstrates he is unfit for congress. Along with the jewish space lasers woman, the divorced 35 year old grandmother with a GED, and the drag queen under arrest for being a “welfare queen” as some say.

    • So you're trolling without reading the OP. Do the Illuminati pay well? How does it compare with the FSB?

  • by Targon ( 17348 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:17AM (#63639646)
    When they validate idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene and even support them, that shows that Republicans in the US Congress really don't have the intelligence to know what to do with ANYTHING. Congress wants to be put in charge or have oversight, they better figure out how to regain the respect of others first, because I wouldn't trust those idiots to run water.
  • The whole world is the Weekly World News. [wikipedia.org]

    The ironic part is that it didn't even work for the purposes intended. The media 'juggernauts' are mostly going bankrupt anyway, The endless wars are all failing. Getting Trump well, isn't playing out really well in practice. The pendulum is even swinging on the social causes the zero trust media advocates.

    Hardly seems worth it in the end. It's almost like no one cracked open a history book to see how this worked out in the past. Even the Germans didn't believe

  • by takionya ( 7833802 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:20AM (#63639664)
    Is this designed to distract us from the hishow that is the Washington political establishment.
    • by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:33AM (#63639710)

      Is this designed to distract us from the hishow that is the Washington political establishment.

      No. I think it's designed to increase the appearance of it being a shit-show so they can shoe-horn more egregious shit under our noses without us even noticing. We'll all be busy pointing and laughing at the absolute idiocy, they'll slip by some "give more money to giant corporations, increase taxes on the middle class to pay for it" bullshit and we won't even notice until we're fucked on next years tax returns.

    • Is this designed to distract us from the hishow that is the Washington political establishment.

      Exactly. This is all some alphabet agency horseshit misdirection play so that we're looking in one direction and not in the direction of things that they REALLY want to hide. Those things are dirty, and corrupt, and they have jack shit to do with aliens or spaceships. We know bits and pieces of what those things are. Things like the Pentagon suddenly finding billions because of an "accounting error".

    • the distraction trope is tiresome. If this was designed to dstract you from X, then you wouldn't be thinking this very thought.
  • Whistleblowers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:32AM (#63639706)

    >>the bill instructs individuals with knowledge of such activities to disclose all relevant information and grants legal immunity if the information is reported appropriately within a defined timeframe

    So if you reveal that the US government is spying on it's own citizens (and lying about it), you get to spend the rest of your life in exile, but if you reveal top secret UFO information, all is forgiven?

    • Re:Whistleblowers (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:43AM (#63639760)

      "but if you reveal top secret UFO information [is being kept secret from congress]"

      Fixed that for you. They *want* the government spying on people and digging up leverage/blackmail material but it damn well better be understood that *they* are the government and get the resulting material or they are close up the purse of *our* money used to pay for it.

    • by Holi ( 250190 )

      Who has been exiled? Self exile does not count.

  • That things are not going well for Trump. Just another example of R's being willing to shed any semblance of decency to change the conversation. This is something Fox news can whip the crazies up with while avoiding mentioning Trump's admission to having classified documents on tape. This is classic glasnost -- the real meaning of glasnost. This, the Biden Impeachment, the what-abouts (other stupid investigations e.g. Hunter Biden) are all spaghetti on the wall trying to see what sticks with the base.
  • Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.

  • This is just another way of getting people to report illegal aliens.
  • Now we should all know the US has great technical skills and the money to pay for outlandish projects.
    But that does not explain why the majority of the worlds UFO's/ extraterrestrials is sighted in the US and by US citizens.
    Maybe it has something to do with an influential portion of the populations, at least on Sundays, believing in this other extraterrestrial?
    • But that does not explain why the majority of the worlds UFO's/ extraterrestrials is sighted in the US and by US citizens. /quote> California is #1. #2 is Chile. Do not speak absolutely about things you know not.

    • by necro81 ( 917438 )

      But that does not explain why the majority of the worlds UFO's/ extraterrestrials is sighted in the US and by US citizens.

      Politicians are always going on about American Exceptionalism :)

  • Did Rubio get a seat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He has no intelligence to share.
  • "Daniel Jackson will be happy" - T'eac

  • If there were anything to it, we would have had some very unexpected engineering advances. We do not have those. The only non-incremental ones we have were made by people by far smart enough to have the ideas themselves independently of any "alien" information. I even made a few (small) ones myself, as basically any reasonable engineering PhD thesis does.

    The whole thing is not credible at all on every level and just shows some of the stooges in government are more stupid than expected.

    • The only advances you'd expect would be in TS/SCI black ops programs. No way they'd let that kind of tech filter down to the masses. Can you imagine how much it would suck for them if technology revolutionized society so much 95% of the population weren't wage slaves?
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        There is really no way to keep something like this under wraps. Too many people involved and hence you need to do controlled leaking of the info or you are screwed and lose control completely.

  • Why in the *fuck* would they do this:

    which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of "non-earth" or "exotic" origin.

    In the extraordinarily unlikely case such an eventuality actually arose, why in the name of all things holy would they want the military banned from retrieving and reverse engineering such a craft? Because they're mad people with the most explosive knowledge conceivable allegedly weren't sharing it with the idiotic political nutjobs in Congress?

  • How is it illegal if we dont have laws governing matters of space aliens?
  • ... when your top security guarantor GOES OFF THEIR RAILS.
  • Social failure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:34AM (#63639948)

    You're seeing the inmates running the asylum and for some reason the average response is effectively "OK, whatever".

    That this behaviour isn't the immediate end of the career and social life of the people engaging in it - they're federal legislators, after all - and that this behaviour is cheered on by a significant chunk of the population is a serious indicator of major cultural issues.

  • There is no intelligent life on this planet!
  • The existence of Taco Bell is substantial proof that aliens are present on earth. Who else could eat that stuff and not die after explosive diarrhea?
  • The other part of me thinks the CIA was experimenting on people with psychedelics again, and it got a little out of control.

  • Rubio [said] that multiple individuals with "very high clearances and high positions within our government" "have come forward to share" ...

    Some people in Congress have very high clearances and high positions in government, so ... /s

    For example, it's possible that George Santos could meet that criteria at some point.

  • There's a giant overlap in the venn diagram showing ufologists and conspiracy theorists. The more meat you can push at them in one direction, the less time they have to pursue the other. I have universally despised the go-to argument that the government uses mundane distraction techniques like this... but I'm slowly being convinced.

  • We need to be frightening the foot soldiers into blowing the whistle.

  • by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @10:20AM (#63640150) Homepage Journal

    If you have ever wondered why alien abduction stories don't appear credible, remember that when a fisherman goes fishing, he doesn't throw back the keepers.

  • OK, let's see the hardware. I'm sure MIT and Stanford would like to do an analysis.

  • CIA and Pentagon have for many decades had programs where they spirit away crashed aircraft and probably spacecraft of US adversaries. Hell, they even spirited away a Soviet sub one time. All this nonsense about UFOs in the possession of US agencies is no doubt related to these items. The US needs to keep it secret so the adversaries do not know that the US knows how their thingie works, and therefore how to defeat it.

  • by deKernel ( 65640 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @11:32AM (#63640432)

    Here is my issue with crashed space craft. We know for certain that the tech needed to traverse the large distances is crazy advanced compared to what we have today. Now are people telling me that such an advanced society doesn't have their shit together any better than Boeing when it comes to quality and durability. If that is the case, there is no hope for humanity.

  • In theory a judge could say you are obligated by law to disclose findings about aliens ...

    But that doesn't sound constitutional or moral to me.

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