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Sci-Fi Government The Media

Why Major Newspapers Didn't Publish 'UFO Retrieval' Story (vanityfair.com) 170

Monday U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said government workers with high security clearances had made UFO-related claims, leading to a bill's provision to halt any reverse-engineering of alien crafts. News stories at the time noted "allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs" by former intelligence official turned whistleblower, David Grusch, a story which Vanity Fair traced to a "little-known" site called The Debrief.

But that article's authors have some serious journalistic experience. Ralph Blumenthal spent more than 45 years on staff at The New York Times. Leslie Kean is an investigative science journalist known for her writing on UFOs. In 2017 they teamed up with a New York Times Pentagon correspondent for an "explosive 2017 UFO report," writes the Atlantic, "in which the journalists revealed a defunct secret Pentagon program — initially funded at the request of former Senate majority leader Harry Reid — to investigate 'unidentified flying objects.'" I've learned that Kean and Blumenthal did, in fact, bring the story to the Times, but the paper of record turned it down... The pair also pitched their story to Politico and The Washington Post. The Post had been trying to further report the story that the reporters had brought to the paper, but didn't think it was ready for publication; among its reservations, according to a source familiar, was that it was unclear what members of Congress made of Grusch's testimony... Politico — which, a source familiar noted, had the story for mere days, while the Post had the story for weeks — also wasn't able to turn around the story at the speed that Kean and Blumenthal wanted, Blumenthal said...

The writers' apparent time constraints have only raised more questions. "To be clear — the Washington Post did not pass on our story," Kean wrote on Facebook Monday. "Ralph and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly." Blumenthal told me that circumstances — including that Grusch's identity as the whistleblower had leaked out on the internet — pushed them to "publish sooner than we'd hoped." "If there had been no leaks, it might've been different," Blumenthal said. But "people on the internet were spreading stories Dave was getting harassing phone calls and we felt the only way to protect him was to get the story out...."

Now out in the world, the reporting process is raising even more eyebrows. During interviews on NewsNation with both Grusch and Kean, it became clear that neither had seen photos of the alleged craft. NewsNation's Brian Entin asked Kean about the lack of receipts: "He has the credentials, but there's no documents that he's handed over, there's no pictures, and as a journalist, you want to see documents; you want to see pictures." But Kean said the lack of documents or photographs did not raise red flags for her because "all of that information is classified." She believes it, she said, "because of all the sources I have who have told me the same thing... I don't think there's some conspiracy among all these people who don't know each other to make something like this up."

In response to the report, DoD spokesperson Sue Gough told NewsNation in a statement, "To date, AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.

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Why Major Newspapers Didn't Publish 'UFO Retrieval' Story

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  • U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said government workers with high security clearances had made UFO-related claims, leading to a bill's provision to halt any reverse-engineering of alien crafts.

    Doesn't make any sense. Then again, he's in Congress...

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GrahamJ ( 241784 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:03PM (#63651432)

      In another article it sounded like these claims were that there's a beyond-oversight agency of some kind whose purpose is to investigate such things. It would make sense to order that agency shut down if it's burning cash and not doing anything useful. I think that's what this is about.

      • beyond-oversight agency

        Thing is he's the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee so theres not much beyond his oversight nor is any agency beyond getting a limiting of funding from Congress at any point.

        I understand some stuff is classified but really he could be less vague about thing if this is a serious accusation, and it's probably once of the most serious and extraordinary accusations you could ever make.

        • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @05:31PM (#63651768)

          I understand some stuff is classified but really he could be less vague about thing if this is a serious accusation, and it's probably once of the most serious and extraordinary accusations you could ever make.

          He could be but my opinion is that transparency does not serve his interests. Being just vague enough so that no one could accuse him of lying would be better for him as people must fact check him due to his history of dishonesty. Like saying his family fled Cuba in 1959 due to Castro taking over was not quite the same as his family leaving Cuba in 1956 before Castro gained power.

      • It would make sense to order that agency shut down if it's burning cash and not doing anything useful.

        Like Congress?

        [ Holding my breath for Sen. Rubio to push for this too... Feeling faint... :-) ]

    • U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said government workers with high security clearances had made UFO-related claims

      Is this not a repeat of a story a few days ago with the title of "Congress doubles down . . ." but reading the article it was "Marco Rubio doubles down . . ."

    • ^^ right -- why would someone introduce a bill to halt any reverse engineering?

      It is incredibly stupid! What, we are going to jump to being a warp-capable species overnight? Yeah, right.

      • If congress has reasons to believe an agency is avoiding oversight by performing activities in secret using funds approved for other purposes, passing legislation to explicitly "halt all related activity" is one way to get career-conscious bureaucrats to be more candid to oversight committees in a classified briefing.

        Doesn't mean the same rep. would not approve it within a minute if its real, but they want to be in the loop.

        Doesn't mean they believe in Fox Mulder's crusade either - but if there is a chance

        • by lpq ( 583377 )

          I hear what you are saying, but adding laws to the books is a bad way to ensure being kept in a loop.

          What we really need is a sunshine clause on all laws -- after some period of time (5-10 years, maybe, typical, as a default), any law, not renewed, would be canceled and purged from the books.

          Who knows, maybe expirations could be handled via an AI Chatbot. :^/

  • The amount of public attention our Federal officials give to UFOs seems directly proportional to the trouble our country is in domestically

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by laxr5rs ( 2658895 )
      Do you have a measurement device for the, "trouble the country is in domestically?" do you think that the country has ever been, "not in trouble domestically?" We should be clear that our social explanations should not be a simple verifications of our confirmation bias. people with tech personalities put a high degree of importance on cleverness. clever tech thinkers shouldn't just be soothing their ideas just so they can congratulate themselves. but that's what we see all the freaking time. it gets tiring.
      • Yeah, it's life experience and shit is way more fucked now than it was in the recent past. Young and old people all seem to agree, at least the majority of them. I'll ask coworkers, they say it's worse. I'll ask my parents, they say it's worse.

        • Re:Distractions (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:33PM (#63651478)

          Yeah but that's a much more complex issue because the numbers don't exactly bear it out in a lot of ways. Crime overall is getting back to historic lowes, wages are up across the board, unemployment is low, the racial employment gap is closed for the first time in American history, the US is beating many other nations on both economic growth and inflation.

          But you are right, the perception and feeling that things are bad is pervasive and while a lot of that is sometimes true (things are expensive, alot of employment pays alright but is unsatisfying and miserable, starting a family is hard due to the wild real estate market etc) but a lot I imagine ahs to do with the collapse of community structures (no replacement for church, pervasiveness of suburban living, etc) and the internet making us all kinda fuckin crazy with 24/7 news and social media breeding a culutre of material competitiveness (grind and hustle culture, instagram and youtube influencers, etc)

          It also reveals the somewhat usefullness of both anecdotal and formal polling, especially at a nationwide level. Much like how Congress on a whole has sat at a 20% approval for like 2 decades but people will give their individual members high ranks. People are stupid, fearful and reckless so asking your "parents and coworkers" is about as useful as asking my cat how they think the country is doing.

          • One could find statistics to convince yourself in either direction. The main complaints I hear is that young people have no hope of achieving the American dream: owning a home, having a family, affording a good life basically. They're saddled with massive amounts of debt, housing is insanely expensive, and inflation and cost of living are sky-higher and climbing. Plus only a lucky few seem to get good jobs, if you happen to be in the right industry, and even then it seems to require two parents working full

          • by jythie ( 914043 )
            People believe that things are worse for the same reason people like bacon... advertising is REALLY effective when there is money to be made and can have some pretty creepy effects on our collective culture.

            Right now, the idea that things are going to hell is a huge money maker.. given how much of our economy is dependent on advertising dollars flowing.. people have found ways to shape the culture to meet their economic needs.
            • Right now, the idea that things are going to hell is a huge money maker.. given how much of our economy is dependent on advertising dollars flowing.. people have found ways to shape the culture to meet their economic needs.

              So... you think that everything is actually secretly awesome and people are living on the streets because of advertising?

          • Re:Distractions (Score:4, Insightful)

            by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @11:03PM (#63652314) Journal

            Much of the doom vibe is fueled by, not so much how things are today, but the trajectory. The destruction of the natural world, primarily through climate change but also other processes, is going to start really beating civilization's ass within the next few decades. It's easy to push that out of your conscious mind while conducting your day-to-day business, but it's something people have internalized at a deep level. I think even many of the professed deniers realize it as well - though their conscious thought processes and the way they project themselves socially will never allow them to admit to it.

            As far as the political situation, there's definitely trouble that's so obvious I don't feel like taking the time to discuss it, other than to say total paralysis is just as much trouble as a naked dictatorship or successful coup would be. And also that political problems are not happening in a vacuum. It makes the country powerless against the backsliding and the bigger crises still to come. Soon, ineffective government will no longer be something that disappears when you turn off the TV and log out of Facebook. The inept response to Covid shook some people out of this conception of politics as just entertainment. People can see that we're not prepared for the next disease outbreak, we're not trying to prepare, and there's no guarantee it will be as mild as Covid.

            I don't think the economy is in as good shape as you make it seem either. GDP is meaningless to regular people. The middle class hasn't stopped shrinking. Nominal wage gains are already eaten by inflation, and there won't be any more of them. The extraction of wealth from normal people continues unabated. In many ways the economy is a house of cards, never more than one crisis away from collapsing. And if there's one thing climate change guarantees, it's that crises will be coming at a quicker tempo and greater severity than ever. Remember what I said about trajectory.

            I've worked at several organizations over my life that were on a bad path. Way before the department got outsourced, the contracts got cancelled, or the firings started, people could tell, intuitively, that something was wrong. Oftentimes it went unspoken, unmeasured, but the vibe pervaded.

        • People have generally believed that things are worse now than they used to be for thousands of years, if not longer.

      • Re:Distractions (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Namarrgon ( 105036 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @11:23PM (#63652338) Homepage

        Do you have a measurement device for the, "trouble the country is in domestically?"

        Here's one [pewresearch.org] (and the source article [pewresearch.org]).

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      An effect that can be nicely observed in many 3rd world countries.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Bread and circuses Idiocracy. The fact that Sinema, Manchin, and Santos are still in office is insane. Nearly all US politicians, appointed judges, lobbyists, and billionaires, are corrupt, grafting criminals who must be imprisoned. It will take a mass mobilization of millions of people marching on DC for weeks to fix the system that cannot be fixed from within or by voting.
      • Some people are criminals so let's smash the state, rip down our institutions and ideals which have stood and served us for centuries and start again. Sounds like the rallying cry of someone who has never done anything.
  • "DoD spokesperson Sue Gough told NewsNation in a statement, "To date, AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently."

    This is the same crap they have been saying since the 1960s

    • They have also been saying water makes things wet since always. Just because they keep saying it doesn't make it untrue.

  • Belief in UFOs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @02:51PM (#63651398)
    Are a fetish. Pure and simple. It also gets a lot of clicks and hysterical reactions, so there's that. But anyone who understand the universe in terms of size and time will realize any lifeforms arriving to Earth will come in a large craft or fleet, because a single jet-fighter sized craft can not survive the journey with resources required to convey life forms this far. There is no physics, natural or otherwise for any other solution to be viable. Simply going that far, considering radiating entropy, will freeze any form of life and deplete energy from the craft long before it got here. No aliens have visited us in recorded history. We would all know, it would be an arrival as bright as the moon.
    • Re:Belief in UFOs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:06PM (#63651442) Journal

      Why would they need a pilot? None of our interplanetary probes have pilots.

      • Because it is not coming from this solar system, and that distance is too far for remotely operated control which would require communications. Any form of autonomy would require a certain amount of energy, which would require a larger ship.
        • Why would it need to be remotely operated? As far as transmitting data back, surely they have the patience to wait a few years. Even on Earth we have experiments that have been running for a century, and a good portion of people express some concern for what happens after their own lifetime. Not that we have any idea what an alien's lifetime would be.

        • If we sent a probe to Alpha Centauri it would be small and unmanned to be fast.
          Remotely operated would mean watching what the systems on board decided to hold the camera on.

    • Re:Belief in UFOs (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:38PM (#63651490) Journal

      Ignoring the veracity of the article for the moment, your reasoning is flawed because a "mother ship" can contain scout ships.

      For a few trillion dollars even we could make a multi-generational interstellar nuclear-powered ship. Store fuel, water, and waste in the outer shell as a radiation shield.

      Apple is said to be worth $3T. Let's sell them off and build one!

      • We've tried and found that, so far, we can't make completely independent biodomes work on Earth for two years despite having the benefits of sunlight, gravity and a non-lethal environment outside the shell. What makes you think we're capable of building a ship that would last for generations?

        And what makes you think that an alien race would give their lives, children's lives, grandchildren's lives, etc. up to go on a multi-generational ship in order to visit a bunch of hairless apes who, going by what we b

        • by jd ( 1658 )

          Biosphere II was too small and was constructed poorly. If it had been three times the size, it would have functioned just fine.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        The nearest star is a bit north of 4 light years from earth. Seeing as we cannot get even close to speed of light, any trip there would take a very long time. And there's probably nothing there worth seeing: duh, a star, hoopy! Then you probably want to come back...well, maybe as an old man. And assuming you haven't gone batty, you might even have something to say: duh, a star, hoopy!

        I know, you can cryogenically preserve yourself on the way out and the way back. Thing is, we haven't quite perfected the det

    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      You're ignoring a huge swath of (to us, largely theoretical) options:

      * they are the small landing craft for an in-orbit larger craft. Why would they waste fuel getting their large crafts into the gravity well?
      * They are interdimensional beings. CERN has effectively proven that this is possible now.
      * They are not 'extraterrestrials', they are inter-terrestrials. (No, I don't think this is particularly likely, personally.)
      * They are capable of using warp/wormhole technologies.

      There are simply too many account

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        So, millions of people claim to have seen dead persons come back to life. The thing is, these dead people are rarely reported to do anything concrete, say, putting on a Broadway show. Neither do the aliens. What's up with that? I'm sure we'd arrange financing if they wanted to put together a Broadway show.

    • by Shugart ( 598491 )
      I'm glad someone understands this Physics stuff!
    • Tooth fairy, Santa, religious deities, and ET: Occam's razor says "nope".
  • ..."I don't think there's some conspiracy among all these people who don't know each other to make something like this up."...

    Using logic as strong as that, we could say the same about unwell people who don't know each other to make up paranoid delusions of killer ghost clowns.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Even simpler: Look at all those religions with their fantastical zero-evidence stories and then look how mich they are really alike at the core.

  • Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @02:53PM (#63651410)
    Really? Really? Reeaalllyyy? These top-notch journalists didn’t see a red flag when their sources couldn’t produce a SINGLE IMAGE OR DOCUMENT to support their claims? And they accepted this because “all the info is probably highly classified?”

    I’m sorry, but we now live in an age where the government LEAKS LIKE A SIEVE. We hand out top-secret clearances to mentally-ill 20-somethings like they’re candy. Then we act all surprised and morally outraged when these kids flip out when they see their first incident of bad behavior or friendly fire and dump a terabyte of government files onto the internet.

    These reporters know this, or they’re no better than a second-year journalism student. Which leads me to wonder if they’re being played by our intelligence agencies. Maybe our government wants the debate to be churning at this point in time, for some reason or another.

    I dunno. But nowadays you can’t even trust video, let alone a piece of paper with some writing. You want me to believe there’s aliens zooming around in our atmosphere? You’re gonna have to demonstrate something completely beyond human capabilities, right in front of me and 10 of my trusted colleagues, and then reproduce the results 3 or 4 more times, before I believe it. Until that happens, it’s nothing but combination of grifter BS and people with malfunctioning brains hallucinating stuff. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
    • Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)

      by narcc ( 412956 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:04PM (#63651434) Journal

      Did you miss the headline?

      I'll emphasize the important part:

      Why Major Newspapers Didn't Publish 'UFO Retrieval' Story

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        The summary pretty much answers the question in the title. The journalists were rushing to get the story out because it was leaking out through the internet, and (reading between the lines) it was still half-baked.

    • Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:06PM (#63651440)

      Really? Really? Reeaalllyyy? These top-notch journalists didn’t see a red flag when their sources couldn’t produce a SINGLE IMAGE OR DOCUMENT to support their claims? And they accepted this because “all the info is probably highly classified?

      One of the two "top-notch journalists" is just a UFO conspiracy theorist. Looking through the other one's stories in the times: he seemed to largely cover art and antiquities - nothing wrong with that, but as far as I can tell he's not really an investigative journalist (except for some UFO stories he also has in the Times).

    • Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @04:05PM (#63651558)

      Really? Really? Reeaalllyyy? These top-notch journalists didn’t see a red flag when their sources couldn’t produce a SINGLE IMAGE OR DOCUMENT to support their claims? And they accepted this because “all the info is probably highly classified?”

      Considering a member of Congress has repeatedly said they have a massive bombshell which could bring down the current administration, yet has not produced a single piece of evidence and now claims they have lost the witness [salon.com] who supposedly knows all this, and there are people out there who swallow this lack of anything hook, line, sinker, anything is possible.

    • by rapjr ( 732628 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @08:10PM (#63652062)
      just not to the journalists. He provided them to Congress and a government investigator. Because they are classified. The story from the journalists perspective is not the documents, it's that Grusch has made a formal complaint as a whistleblower to Congress and the journalists DID investigate that and got verification it was true. They also found a bunch of reputable people willing to vouch for Grusch. Whether the material Grusch turned over is valid evidence and whether the public will ever get to see it is currently unknown. The story is not that "military has aliens and spacecraft", it is that something is being hidden from Congressional oversight and that's why they reported it.
    • "You’re gonna have to demonstrate something completely beyond human capabilities, right in front of me and 10 of my trusted colleagues, and then reproduce the results 3 or 4 more times, before I believe it." "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

      QFT. The human brain has too many failure modes.

  • Dunce magnet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @02:56PM (#63651414)

    Pics or it didn't happen. Same for any claim, no matter how sexy or how mundane. A lot of people with the "i want to believe" will make idiots of themselves pushing stories like this that lack any evidence beyond second-hand hearsay.

    I guess at this point, that's the only value of these stories: to let everyone know who has their head on straight and who believes in fairy tales.

    The EMdrive stuff serves the same purpose. You see Sonny White's group or anything Emdrive or Alcubierre Drive on an engineer's or a physicist's resume, you take a hard pass.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I think they found what caused the force on the EM drive, or at least one prototype of it. Some sort of measurement error from some thermal effect, if I remember correctly. Only classical Physics involved, but a lot of gullible idiots.

      These people are ones that look for deep meaning so hard they see it even when there is no sane reason to expect it. Basically the same as religious people, but with more SF-type fantastical stories instead of fantasy-type fantastical stories, but not fundamentally different.

      • I thought it was the power cable acting as a compass needle when energized. Or something like that.

        The thing that tipped me off was that the claimed magnitude of the effect was right around the expected size of the free-space photon momentum coming out of the cavity. Who the fuck knows what the radiation pressure is between one cavity inside a steel cylinder with a rat's nest of cables inside.

        Turned out I was wrong about the specifics but right about the degree of bullshit involved.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          I thought it was the power cable acting as a compass needle when energized. Or something like that.

          I think there are several now where some sane people could explain the effect after all. May be a different one.

    • Re:Dunce magnet (Score:4, Informative)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @04:11PM (#63651578)

      A lot of people with the "i want to believe" will make idiots of themselves pushing stories like this that lack any evidence beyond second-hand hearsay.

      There doesn't even have to be second-hand hearsay. People can make up whatever lie [theguardian.com] they want and someone will believe it [cnn.com].

    • And no grainy Bigfoot photos. I think cameras and phones need embedded cryptographic signatures in raw images to authenticate originals.
  • by laxr5rs ( 2658895 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @02:59PM (#63651420)
    The aliens appear to have technology that blurs every photograph taken of them. And now they appear to have technology that makes every story unclear.
  • by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:11PM (#63651452)

    If aliens have traveled hundreds of lightyears through interstellar space and could go anywhere in this part of the galaxy, what is it that draws them to always land in the same little arid region of the southwestern United States? Are they looking for a particular species of cactus?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. The UFO-nuts have fact-checking abilities on the level of flat-earthers or anti-vaxxers, i.e. none at all.

      • Conspiracy theories appear driven by a combination of ignorance, an inferiority complex, and a need to belong to something that seems special.
    • Simple, they are using the alien version of Apple Maps which always sends them to the same wrong spot. The dumb aliens aren't catching the error in time - so even if the government is covering it all up - they are researching the aliens named Karen..
    • They had a coupon for Carl's Jr.
    • You're almost there. Think it through. Consider the alternatives. There's a pink elephant in the room. Everybody is desperate not to see it, but it's there. You just have to consider the alternatives.

  • the reporters (Score:5, Informative)

    by gtall ( 79522 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @03:12PM (#63651454)

    These two are noted UFO nuts. And Leslie Kean also writes on the afterlife. Anyone who cannot get the gov. to parrot their own beliefs always claims there must be a conspiracy afoot.

    Anyhow, the aliens I know say they have never been here, so there.

  • I fully expect that it would be absolutely impossible for any human to *reverse engineer* any part of an alien spacecraft.

    Was it Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan who suggested that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic? I would also expect that any aliens who could actually build a spacecraft to travel from their star system to ours must have technology that is more than "sufficiently advanced" for the referred-to suggestion to apply.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Not even needed to be "magic". Reverse-engineering only works if you basically have the manufacturing processes needed to make something. Otherwise you may well be able to analyse it, but you cannot replicate anything. But this whole thing is nonsense anyways and there is a whole host of plausibility failures in these claims.

      • Reverse-engineering only works if you basically have the manufacturing processes needed to make something.

        Such as in Sagan's book Contact where we were literally, in the truest sense of the word, handed the instructions on how to make the device. Even then we still had to figure out how to manufacture some of the stuff.

  • The papers they asked did not want to look like complete idiots.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @04:28PM (#63651614) Journal
    Trump did not blurt it out and hang on to the documentation.
  • I'm not joking when I say this, but the proof that aliens aren't here is really simple. Short version - Donald Trump isn't trying to profit off them.

    So back when Obama was president, some elementary school kid asked him about aliens and UFOs. Obama told the kid that he wasn't allowed to answer that question, but he could say that as president he was in position to know the answer to that question. That is not surprising, but it is more than we ever had a president say before - the US president does know whether aliens and UFOs are really here or not.

    Look, if aliens and UFOs were here and the US government knows, then as president Trump would know it. He can't shut up about anything, so if aliens were really here, he would have already built Trump Spaceport and he'd be loudly demanding that all extraterrestrials use his person spaceport when they come to earth. The fact that this isn't happening means Trump doesn't think aliens come here, so by extension the US government has no proof of them coming here.
    • >Obama told the kid that he wasn't allowed to answer that question, but he could say that as president he was in position to know the answer to that question. That is not surprising

      Not surprising, but disappointing. I hope he was joking, but in text it appears to be a statement deliberately crafted to feed the tinfoil hat crowd's conspiracies.

      A flat, "so far as the US government is aware, no extraterrestrial beings or probes have visited Earth, and scientists currently consider it highly unlikely they w

  • And happy UFO day, the truth is out there https://www.genolve.com/design... [genolve.com]
  • I thought Mike Judgeâ(TM)s Dale Gribble character from King of the Hill was a farcical representation of some ignorant minority of Americans, but reading these articles and some of the comments from slashdotters are a painful reminder of the reality of the bell curve.

  • And they've lost each other in a dark warehouse and their flashlights aren't working. Seriously, there is absolutely no evidence of ETs. And the UFO conspiracy theory trope is a zombie story that just won't die because it's cheap money. Bread and butter of grocery store tabloids, along with grainy photoshopped celebrity pics with wildly-false captions. There are enough people who believe in delusions to make a business out of feeding them whatever they want.
  • There is no evidence or corroboration for Grusch's claims whatsoever, that would be a good reason. There is this one guy with a security clearance beating his gums making claims that he asserts are classified, yet he is not being pressured, arrested, or prosecuted. Here is an important fact about holding a high level security clearance - you sign a agreement to not disclose any classified information for 70 years or suffer severe enumerated criminal penalties and fines. The fact that he is suffering any con

  • Listen to Ross Colehardt on the Theories of Everything podcast for rational discussions of all these complaints.

    The story as presented here is special needs.

  • by Sique ( 173459 ) on Monday July 03, 2023 @02:50AM (#63652504) Homepage
    I really don't understand the U.S. obsession with alien spacecraft (and Atlantis and Ancient Apocalypse and similar topics). It seems as if there is a longing for the world to be different than it appears to be. I have to admit, that in the person of Erich von Däniken, Europe also has its fair share of the craze, but it was never that mainstream at the other side of the Atlantic.

    But I would wager a bet that 90% of all alien spacecrafts were sighted in the U.S. or by U.S. citizens abroad, 90% of the books on Atlantis are published in the U.S. and 90% of all Ancient Apocalypse documentaries are produced in the U.S..

  • by k2r ( 255754 )

    âoeWeâ have been reverse engineering alien tech for decades?
    Show me one scientific breakthrough in STEM or one invention where the shoulders of the giants the inventor is standing on canâ(TM)t be traced back using published papers and I may consider the idea.
    Ah, yes, international governments have been keeping it secret, collectively, and nobody did even try to make a profit of it? For sureâ¦

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