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.
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.
Real or not... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Real or not... (Score:4, Funny)
It's being used for child trafficking.
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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...
Re:Real or not... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh the howls as they got locked in the alien insane asylum.
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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.
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It's also because people here have been online since the dawn of the internet. Some of this stuff has been floating around since forever. Its also because something as stupendous as UFO/Gov't collusion, faked moon landing, 9/11 hoax/planned by US, NESARA, Q, medbeds, all flavors of plandemic, all the way to flat earth should have extraordinary evidence beyond some shaky videos (esp now where everyone has a HD camera in their pockets at all time) or on a long enough timescale some sort of mass leaks generally associated with thousands of people being told to keep an evil secret. And also the fact that typically when you go deep enough you always come full circle to 13th century blood libel aka "its the Jews!"
It's worth highlighting that as soon as everyone began carrying a HD camera in their pocket all the time, the rate of UFO sightings dropped dramatically. One would expect that the increasing ease of collecting high quality evidence would result in an increased flow of higher-quality evidence... but the exact opposite has occurred.
It's not a lack of intellectual curiosity that causes us to be extremely skeptical of UFO/alien reports. The most plausible explanation for the decrease is that the alleged sighti
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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
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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.
Re: Real or not... (Score:2)
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Same reply as to the other guy..
https://twitter.com/qikipedia/... [twitter.com]
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Say what? UFOs have been reported all over the world, including the American backyard of Mexico. And I don't mean some goat herder who was either drunk or ate a weird plant and claimed they saw something, I mean the average person on the street.
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It's only Americans that report UFOs. It doesn't happen in other places.
Say what? UFOs have been reported all over the world, including the American backyard of Mexico. And I don't mean some goat herder who was either drunk or ate a weird plant and claimed they saw something, I mean the average person on the street.
Look at a world map of UFO reporting density.
E.G. https://twitter.com/qikipedia/... [twitter.com]
Mostly the US, some UK and a scattering in Australia. So if anything it's speaking English that makes people report UFOs.
Plenty of non-USA sightings here (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Real or not... (Score:3)
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"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
Re:Real or not... (Score:5, Funny)
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."
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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 ?
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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
Re: Real or not... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Real or not... (Score:2)
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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)
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.
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Re:Let's be honest (Score:5, Funny)
I've heard of this Rubio guy. Isn't he some kind of moron?
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Now go and reread the original article (Score:2)
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.
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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
wow - and I thought I was cynical (Score:2)
Not 100% convinced, but an interesting set of arguments, thank you!
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"I wasn't suggesting that the island of Guam would literally tip over," said Johnson. "I was using a metaphor to say that with the addition of 8,000 Marines and their dependents - an additional 80,000 people during peak construction on the tiny island with a population of 180,000 - could be a tipping point which could adversely affect the island's fragile ecosystem and could overburden its stressed infrastructure. Having traveled to Guam last year, I saw firsthand how this beautiful - but vulnerable island - could easily become overburdened, and I was simply voicing my concerns - albeit with a dry sense of humor - that the addition of that many people could tip the delicate balance and do permanent harm to Guam."
You'd have to be an idiot to think he was serious.
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Or you could watch the footage [youtube.com] yourself, and make that determination. But hey, keep trying to gaslight people who've seen the footage.
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You'd have to be an idiot to think he was serious.
You'd have to be an idiot to believe he didn't mean exactly what he said. Watch the video for yourself.
https://youtu.be/X5dkqUy7mUk?t... [youtu.be]
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You'd have to be an idiot to defend that idiot.
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To the GP poster who asked the question with the comparison. Personally I don't find anything more stupid about a person asking a genuine question of a relative expert about something that seems painfully obvious to me if they learn from the
Misleading headline (again) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Misleading headline (again) (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
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Actually no, that isn't the end.
"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."
When you combine the grant of amnesty, additional whistleblower protections, and the block of funding the result is obvious. This isn't the end of these programs, it is the end of these programs without congressional oversight.
On another note since this is blockin
Re:Misleading headline (again) (Score:4, Funny)
but he is not himself Congress.
I feel that Congress these days are now collectively so stupid that Marco Rubio represents them quite well.
Re:Misleading headline (again) (Score:5, Insightful)
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Replying to undo moderation. Marked you as "Redundant" by accident. My apologies.
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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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
100% of the intelligence committee is in favour (Score:2)
So you're trolling without reading the OP. Do the Illuminati pay well? How does it compare with the FSB?
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To think this alien conspiracy nutter was once considered presidential material.
Only by the usual scumpects. The People never thought so.
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And yet The People voted for Trump.
That shows what a ridiculously worthless candidate Rubio was.
Re: Misleading headline (again) (Score:2)
2016 was won in a massive fraud. Voter disenfranchisement on a huge scale, disinformation campaigns coordinated by foreigners, collusion with Murdoch, Fox anchors, newspaper editors and shock jocks.
He'll never again garner more than 30% of the vote and if the Republicans can't jump back 8 years or reinvent themselves... It's the other bastards again. Choose your poison wisely.
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If turnout drops enough he could very well be elected again. Lower overall turnout means extremists have a bigger portion of the vote. The guys who are mainlining QAnon and taking up arms against the Bearded Lady are going to show up regardless of what happens. Normal people might find something else to do that day. You see the pattern in many banana republics: overall turnout craters into the single digits, but the people who do show up break 80% for Dear Leader. There's typically fraud involved, but often
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*Some* people voted for him, but he lost the popular vote by a 2.2% margin.
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Land doesn’t vote. People do.
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The claim was:
"The People voted for Trump"
They did not, The Electoral College did. "The People" voted for the other person by about 3 million votes.
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To think this alien conspiracy nutter was once considered presidential material.
Are you referring to Jimmy Carter?
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dude, where have you been? someone like trump actually made it to president.
populism on top of a failing education system, and it appears to be getting worse.
Congress deserves NOTHING these days (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what you get from having zero trust media (Score:2)
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
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Kinda like checking the hot sheets [youtube.com] in "Men in Black"?
Is this designed to distract us from the swamp (Score:3)
Re:Is this designed to distract us from the swamp (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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".
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Whistleblowers (Score:5, Insightful)
>>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)
"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.
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Who has been exiled? Self exile does not count.
Congressional I6t meme distractions sure sign (Score:2)
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The true believers in the former alleged president don't give a flying rat's ass that he took and concealed secret documents.
Re:Congressional I6t meme distractions sure sign (Score:4, Insightful)
All Doubt... (Score:2)
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
Not unexpected. (Score:2)
(Only) in the USofA (Score:2)
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?
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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.
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Politicians are always going on about American Exceptionalism :)
How in the fuck (Score:2)
Has anyone told O'Neil and Carter? (Score:2)
"Daniel Jackson will be happy" - T'eac
Explosive? More like "deranged"... (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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Well, the same is true for the researchers supposedly studying the UFO stuff. But, on the other hand, any good engineer got trained in something like only 20 years (including school). Hence not that much of a problem. Just look at other advances.
Why ban research? (Score:2)
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?
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For the sake of argument lets say you're a congressman who believes these efforts are going on, but without Congressional knowledge. You'd ban the activites to maintain civilian control of the military.
The sound of bolts on empty stables fills the land (Score:3)
FAR too late.
As this incident proved, the CIA is happy to ignore congress when it's inconvenient to them.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
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They're CONGRESS (Score:2)
Yes, I know we all have total contempt for politicians, but a different branch of government shouldn't presume on its status, and the fact that Brennan lied about it - before retracting - tells us all we really need to know about the real power balance here.
https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
Not illegal (Score:2)
A sad day in eastern europe... (Score:2)
Social failure (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Beam me up Scotty (Score:2)
Martian beans (Score:2, Funny)
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Part of me wants to believe (Score:2)
The other part of me thinks the CIA was experimenting on people with psychedelics again, and it got a little out of control.
Keep in mind ... (Score:2)
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.
Convenient misdirection (Score:2)
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.
Criminal charges for working on alien tech? (Score:2)
We need to be frightening the foot soldiers into blowing the whistle.
If you have ever wondered (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Put up or shutup! (Score:2)
OK, let's see the hardware. I'm sure MIT and Stanford would like to do an analysis.
Spirits (Score:2)
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.
Space Wreckage (Score:3)
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.
a judge might say this is legal ... (Score:2)
But that doesn't sound constitutional or moral to me.