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Former Military Personnel Claim Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters "Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby. Six former US Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality." I won't worry until Gort shows up.

20 of 498 comments (clear)

  1. Correlation by iONiUM · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, one thing I noticed on the reuters article is that many of the witnesses are nuclear missile , as in, they worked closely on or near the nuclear weapons. Isn't there a chance that, considering almost all were in close contact with nuclear weapons, the radiation was screwing with their head? Or, possibly, whatever they use on nuclear missile bases were?

    I'm not discounting the fact that maybe aliens are indeed screwing with nuclear weapons for whatever reason, but it just seems more likely that all these people have something in common, and that commonality is causing them to believe what they saw..

    1. Re:Correlation by AbbyNormal · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Maybe something to do with the God Helmet?

      --
      Sig it.
    2. Re:Correlation by iamghetto · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There was a major series of incidents at RAF Bentwaters installation (a base in the UK, ran by the US). Numerous people, including the base commander are on record saying that they've seen. Recorded audio of the objects being observed by the tower. Radar pings of the object. Photos of the landed object. Sketches done immediately after the landing.

      I believe their are 13 people from the base who have gone on record speaking about the incidents that happened over a number of days.

      To assume that all military personnel on the base, including the base commander are someone mistaken or crazy seems irrational.

  2. NASA astronauts admit on video UFOs are real by macfanboy · · Score: 5, Interesting
  3. credible disclosure by irving47 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    roll your eyes and mock all you want, but don't forget that a lot of these guys had Top Secret SCI clearances they don't exactly hand out to every random Jethro.
    There was a Disclosure Project event at the National Press Club in early 2001 that had well over a hundred witnesses that were pilots, former military officers, etc... that were willing to break their oaths and testify in front of congress if called about these events.
    Some people think 9/11 was a reaction/distraction. I'm NOT going that far, but it still makes me wonder.

    --
    I had a sucky sig.
  4. Re:Don't Eat That! by Renraku · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I, for one, am interested in hearing what they have to say. Sure, it'll probably turn out to be something simple, but what if it really IS UFOs? We can't disregard every crazy-sounding theory.

    Remember, the earth isn't flat, the earth isn't the center of the universe, AND things smaller than they eye can see actually exist.

    --
    Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
  5. my beef with these claims by khallow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The fundamental problem I have with these claims is that:

    a) There's no physical evidence. You would expect these sorts of tall tales surrounding such a large scale secret operation. So merely having a lot of people, even experienced observers, detail unknown activity don't tell you whether the "UFOs" are truly unidentified or not. My view is that the intelligence services would actually encourage these sorts of tales precisely because they generate a lot of disinformation for free.

    b) If they're aliens, beings from the future, etc then why are they playing their hand? Why tell us, "We can screw with your nuclear weapons"? That'd be something like the US deliberately and frivolously overflying some country for decades. All it does is give the other guys a variety of ideas for shooting down your planes/UFOs, especially if you crash some planes.

    c) Where are the countermeasures? If the US has a UFO problem, then they should have some sort of countermeasures. I'd think there'd be some tools that would be kept secret and some tools, more decoys, which would be deliberately leaked. You know, just like the US did a lot of its Cold War strategy. But we should be hearing about weird missiles or other things, even if (perhaps especially if) they don't work.

    As it stands, if these reports reflect a true phenomena, let's say, Greys conducting covert reconnaissance of the Earth for some reason, then why screw around with the most militarily sensitive spots on the planet? What do they gain from that activity over decades which balances the risk of getting caught? The thing is that there's a certain sloppiness to the UFOs in these stories. They're visible, they do stuff that's likely to get powerful organizations riled up, and there's the risk of technology falling into relatively capable hands.

    Let's give an example, suppose the US was overflying a bunch of cavemen and a plane crashed. From our experience with cavemen, they wouldn't be able to make anything of the crash. Perhaps pieces would be grabbed and used for relics or decoration.

    Now suppose these cavemen were bright and far enough ahead in philosophy and organization that they knew the scientific method and could throw the resources of hundreds of tribes cooperatively for generations at figuring out this strange vehicle from the air. You might find them flying jets in a century. They might even have known the principles of flight, industrialization, etc already, but not have incentive to use that knowledge before the sky gods came.

    That's the risk aliens take by doing these sorts of activities. Sure humanity can't use UFO technology now, but getting some could greatly hasten our progress towards UFO technology.

  6. Re:Not a Reuters story by spun · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Read some of the other replies to my post. We've got some libertarian arguing that facts are just opinions and it is some kind of jack booted fascism to insist that there is one true reality that can be verified.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  7. Re:Umm by feidaykin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I get that we want to think that military officers are supposed to be more reliable than your average Joe Schmuckatellii, but come on.

    Everyone thinks that because it sounds like a "common sense" notion, right? But guess what actual, scientific studies on the subject of eyewitness testimony has shown? The answer: It does not matter who you are or what you do for a living, your brain is subject to the same logical fallacies as anyone else, and eyewitness testimony from air force pilots is statistically on equal footing as the testimony from cab drivers.

    Here's a big problem that comes from interviewing eyewitnesses. If you interview them more than once, you get more data. However that data is almost always unintentionally fabricated. The human mind likes to subconsciously add details that fit a particular cognitive narrative. For example, say you witness a flock of geese but are convinced they are alien spacecraft. Your mind will then add subtle details to your recollections in an effort to more closely fit that narrative.

    And herein lies the problem with most UFO "researchers" when it comes to eyewitness testimony. They do not attempt to filter out the cognitive bias at all. The typical "research" consists of 1) listen to fantastic story of UFO sighting and 2) believe story. That's not research.

    UFO proponents always gripe that science doesn't take UFOs seriously, but that's exactly what the scientific community does when it applies harsh critiques to eyewitness testimony. Should we not apply the same techniques to filter out unreliable eyewitness accounts that we apply to aircraft accidents or murder trials? So really, when the UFO crowd says science isn't taking it seriously, what they mean is, we're applying too harsh a standard - a scientific standard - to their fantasies. They would rather we lower the bar so that speculation, supposition and circular reasoning all substitute for real science.

    In the 50 odd years since modern UFO proponents have been trying to prove their case they have come no closer to proving anything. In that same time human beings have landed men on the Moon, remotely explored the outer solar system, and unraveled the history of the universe to its infant stages. And it didn't require a lower standard of proof to do any of those things. So why apply it to UFOs?

    --

    "To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking

  8. Re:Not a Reuters story by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Total bullshit. There never was such a position in the first place, it is a myth that journalists tell about themselves, to fulfil their own fantasies as Myrmidons of The Truth.

    A job I had a long time ago as a temp in a government office involved sending faxes out to the media. I got the list of phone numbers, and I typed up the fax on WordPerfect. I then sat by the fax machine and sent out fax after fax. To my great surprise, my words appeared in the newspaper the next day, verbatim (or edited for length, which omitted crucial information). My office phone was listed at the bottom of the fax. I never, ever received so much as a single call to verify the information. As the job went on, I sent out more and more of these faxes, and saw them in the newspaper the next day, and NOBODY EVER CALLED TO CHECK IF THE INFORMATION WAS CORRECT. Therefore, I call bullshit on this whole "fact-checking" myth, as it obviously never existed, according to my own personal experience. Obviously, I must be lying, otherwise this entire myth of "journalistic integrity" could not exist (file this phrase right next to "military intelligence" or "jumbo shrimp" in the list of oxymorons.)

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  9. Re:Umm by Gary+Perkins · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ever seen the press conference by Disclosure Project? Ignore the actor (don't think I've ever even seen him before) introducing at the beginning. I think it's the first witness, who was a high ranking FAA official, who at the end of his testimony hauls out two or three really good pieces of evidence for anyone to go over, right there at the podium. Radar tapes, audio transcripts, etc. Nice stuff. http://www.youtube.com/user/csetiweb#p/a/u/0/lkswXVmG4xM

  10. Journalism used to be a profession by Infonaut · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Fact checking has one single purpose: it means that the newspaper can't be sued for printing falsehoods.

    There's more to it than that. As journalism became a profession in the middle of the last century, news organizations would actually compete to be seen as the most factual and least biased sources of news. I know, it sounds incredible, but there were actual market forces at work compelling news organizations to check facts before publishing them.

    The impact of libel law on news organizations has remained relatively constant, even in the era of Fox News and The Random Angry Blogger. While many "news" organizations are happy to cannibalize the profession of journalism in their race for the bottom, there are still media outlets both old and new that are holding on to journalistic ethics because they know there are still readers who will pay for the privilege of reading news that has actual facts in it.

    Tilting libel in favor of plaintiffs would surely create more fact-checking, but I wouldn't bet on that happening any time in the near future. The Roberts Court is very pro-First Amendment. They love it so much they'll guarantee it for entities like corporations that aren't even human.

    I wouldn't be surprised, though, if in a decade we find a small, robust core of truly journalistic organizations thriving in the face of widespread devaluation of news. They'll survive not because of the law, but because there will always be people who value straightforward reporting and will pay for it (not necessarily directly, but in some fashion).

    --
    Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
  11. Re:Not a Reuters story by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 2, Interesting
  12. Re:This has happened many times since the late 60s by avatar139 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This has happened many times since the late 60s and possibly before.

    These people are credible enough to handle launching nuclear ICBMs, including one who was a base commander at a foreign base where nuclear weapons were stored, yet some people still doubt their credibility?

    It's not just unidentified objects showing up at silos, they've been able to take all of the independent missile systems offline in a very particular way, which shouldn't be possible...In some cases when fighters have been scrambled the objects will lead the fighters many, many miles away then shoot back to where they were in an instant.

    I realize that a lot of people like to ridicule this stuff, because they're not used to credible people coming clean about this stuff. But UFOs are a reality, and these events did happen... Back in the 50s UFOs were in the press all of the time, without the added ridicule, there were days in July of 1952 where the capital was swarming with them.

    What the UFOs are and where they came from, who knows - but there is something to these reports, so why don't you get all of the facts before you make up your mind. Contempt prior to investigation is a sure way to remain ignorant.

    Sure, people will dismiss this and think it's about making money, but there are many, many crews that have stated this going back to the 60s, they're not selling books or anything else.

    Actually instances of UFOs monitoring military activities occurred even before the 50s as Foo Fighters were a fairly well documented phenomena during World War II and interestingly enough several of those accompanied at least one of the two flights that dropped the nuclear bombs on the Japanese (I'm not sure about the second flight off the top of my head though)...

    --
    I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
  13. Actually, it's... by the_rajah · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The National Enquirer, spelled starting with an E. I know a couple of people that have written for them. The Enquirer has an army of fact checkers since they've been sued so often in the past. Their stock in trade is, of course, celebrity gossip, but the stories are accurate. Each is checked to within an inch of it's life before it hits the press.

    --


    "Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
  14. Re:And the surprise is about what ? by Black+Parrot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    and NO accident of any sort happened up till this day

    There have actually been lots of accidents involving nukes. But none that exploded, that I know of.

    no madmen, no terrorists, no psychopaths

    Partly because so far they've only been affordable by stable nation states, partly because we've been lucky that none of those states or their militaries have been governed by sufficiently whack whackjobs.

    However, it's hard to doubt that Hitler would have launched his entire arsenal just before committing suicide. MAD is only as stable as the people playing the game.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  15. Re:As a matter of fact: Nope, no fact-checkers by lawpoop · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The only time I've encountered a "fact checker" has been in connection with a magazine article. Magazine articles often are outsourced to freelancers, whose butts are not necessarily available for kicking the next morning if something is wrong, so fact-checkers are employed to verify information before it's published. Typically they'll call a news source: "Is your name really Heywood Jablome?"

    I was on an eco-tour in Peru and one of the guys in the trip was a freelance journalist writing a piece about the experience. About a month after the trip,I got a call from his editor, who went through the most mundane details of the story, bit by bit, to confirm them with me. It was all basically correct, but I was really reaching to recall basic facts. Were the mats we slept on on the riverboat foam? Probably. Did that local guide say exactly that to the writer? I was only half-paying attention.

    It was pretty thorough, and this wasn't an investigative piece or anything, just entertainment/travelogue. So at least for those kinds of pieces, editors do check up. Or at least one did for one story.

    --
    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
    -- Pablo Picasso
  16. So long and thanks for all the fish. by MikeFM · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Way back in college I had an electrical engineering professor that told us that when he worked for the military part of his job was maintaining the control systems for nukes. He said that a big problem they've repeatedly fought with is that the insulation used in many of the nukes breaks down with time so you'll get a bit of crossover and shorting. So the nukes will suddenly arm themselves and fun things like that. It wasn't just single nukes either - whole locations would go into launch mode all on their own. I think the point was to be careful how you built things because what is fine under normal conditions might end up being used harder and longer than you expect.

    I keep waiting for Armeggedon by glitch. The end of humanity because we insist on keeping around aging weapons that only an idiot would ever use anyway.

    --
    At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
  17. Re:Don't Eat That! by guyminuslife · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'll make my standard, flamewar-ish response to those three points. 1) Maybe as big as a chihuahua. And with a lot of ground cover. But you're right---there likely are a lot of species that haven't been discovered yet that aren't bugs and microbes. 2) Well, the Neaderthals, to our best knowledge, were already dead, and the hobbits from Indonesia aren't exactly Bigfoot. It's hardly a silly notion--the evidence we have indicates that it didn't happen. 3) Zoos started breeding orangutans in the 1920s, but there had been orangutans in captivity, in the West, for quite some time by then. In any case, I'll admit that the Bigfoot claims aren't as preposterous as government conspiracies about flying saucers and mind-reading---they're at least plausible, if ill-conceived.

    And there's nothing wrong with the "we would have found it" argument, not when so many dedicated people have been looking. Montana isn't exactly the Amazon. I was looking for my scientific calculator a few days ago, I was sure that it was in my living room, so I looked around for about fifteen minutes and didn't find it. So I reasonably concluded that it was actually somewhere else.

    The difference between myself and the cryptozoologist is that the cryptozoologist concludes that the calculator must just be really good at hiding from people who are looking for calculators, and starts looking for clues that may lead to the ultimate discovery of the calculator in my living room. Since the existence of Bigfoot can be verified, but never falsified, they keep on going no matter how bleak the prospects. The argument: who knows? The calculator might be under the futon or something.

    --
    I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
  18. Antarctic Nazis by Darkman,+Walkin+Dude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Indeed, there are some interesting tidbits floating around out there:

    Operation Highjump:
    Operation Highjump (OpHjp), officially titled The United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, 1946-47, was a United States Navy operation organized by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd in Antarctica under the command of Richard Cruzen, which was launched on 26 August 1946 and ended abruptly in late February 1947, six months earlier than planned. The massive Antarctic task force included 4,700 men, 13 ships, and multiple aircraft.

    The next bit is mostly reputed:
    On March 5, 1947 the "El Mercurio" newspaper of Santiago, Chile, had a headline article "On Board the Mount Olympus on the High Seas" which quoted Byrd in an interview with Lee van Atta: "Adm. Byrd declared today that it was imperative for the United States to initiate immediate defense measures against hostile regions.

    The admiral further stated that he didn't want to frighten anyone unduly but that it was a bitter reality that in case of a new war the continental United States would be attacked by flying objects which could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds. [Earlier he had recommended defense bases AT the NORTH Pole.] Admiral Byrd repeated the above points of view, resulting from his personal knowledge gathered both at the north and south poles, before a news conference held for International News Service." When Byrd returned to the States, he was hospitalized and was not allowed to hold any more press conferences. In March 1955, he was placed in charge of Operation Deepfreeze which was part of the International Geophysical Year [1957-1958] exploration of the Antarctic.

    There's a lot more than that, including Nazi submarines surrendering months after the war to Argentina, an incident a couple of decades after about unidentified submarines easily evading the entire Argentinian navy for a month, and the verifiable fact that Nazis were working on disc shaped aircraft. During the Nuremberg Trials, Dönitz spoke of "an invisible fortification, in midst of the eternal ice." The we have a reputed British flotilla commander who encountered a massive u-boat fleet heading south, can't find the reference now.

    I personally give little credence to any of the above, but it is fascinating.