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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.
If we nuke everything, it's gonna be difficult for them to plunder our natural resources and turn us into sex slaves.
This is a press release written by some guys hawking their book, it was not written by a journalist.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
Clearly the aliens caught a broadcast of Independence Day and thought it was a war game simulation showing our defense strategy. Either that, or they saw Aliens and are worried that, if we ever do find aliens on another planet, we will just nuke them from orbit. Since, of course, it's the only way to be sure.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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..
I for one.... crap.
Get the foil out guys, it's gonna be a long night.
Captain Salas notes, "The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it."
This isn't news until they present their supposed "proof".
I get that we want to think that military officers are supposed to be more reliable than your average Joe Schmuckatellii, but come on.
I don't care who you are, if you can't show proof, I'm not gonna believe you. I mean, I don't believe what the pope says, and he has billions of people who think he's reliable.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
http://www.ufohqs.com/?page_id=108
Not saying I believe the premise of this submission, as it seems pretty far fetched, but...
Say I want to verify that some anti-nuke weapon system can disable nuclear weapons. Say I've tested it to every extent possible, and now I want to verify its effectiveness against real weapon systems. Do you test it against the enemy and risk an actual nuclear war? Nope, you test it on your own weapons. The US has plenty, so one or two missiles at a time being disabled isn't going to be much of a tactical disadvantage, and it could be well planned in advance such that a real nuclear launch is impossible (by placing "real deal" missiles into silos, while subtracting the fissile material) in the case of malfunction as a result of your anti-nuke weapon system.
Unlikely, sure. But much more likely than the combination of aliens having made contact with Earth, the government having kept it from us, and the aliens having an interest in our nuclear weapon systems, as presumably species which can travel such distances would already have the tech to wipe us away and then some.
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.
This is a PRESS RELEASE at this point. It's not a news article. I don't know Reuter's policy in picking up press releases, but based on the content of this release, I'm guessing they will publish whatever they get. The press release is short on details, but claims that there will be experts, and declassified documents that back up their assertions. And a dead body in a storage freezer, as well, for those of you who like hairy plastic suits draped over carcasses. Enjoy!
It's a TLA UAV if it's anything.
The aliens prefer severely-chaffed orifices. Something about the blood and chunks of tissue rubbing against their bladed tentacles really does it.
"Malfunction" and "Arm, Launch, Acquire Target, and Detonate" are hardly the same thing.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
What a relief! I was afraid we were going to actually have to discover all of physics and cosmology. You may not realize it, but you've saved us a vast sum of money and the productive lives of scientists who can now skip all that and play facebook games instead.
People really want there to be space aliens but the fact is space travel is impossible using current technology and with our current understanding of physics.
There you go. Carry on.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
"The weapons malfunctioned": How? they tried to launch them toward a target and they veered off course and detonated nearby causing a horrible but remarkably suppressed nuclear accident?
"A disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby": Wow, eerie. Oh, wait, that was just a mylar balloon on a string. I think it read "Happy Birthday"
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
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.
"If you were a responsible person in a position of power, perhaps in some covert US task force, or some other friendly but worried power, and saw an idiot like bush in control at the whitehouse... wouldn't you take it upon yourself organise a disarmament too?"
Uh, no. For one thing, despite your pandering, our former president was not an idiot, by definition. Second, he did not show nor was described as showing any inclination to use nuclear weapons that I am aware of, and since he was vilified by the press nonstop for 8 years for every imagined manner of atrocity, negligence, idiocy, and megalomania, this would not have escaped our attention.
Look, he's back at his ranch, out of office. You can let up now. No one cares.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This was a panel discussion held at the National Press Club.
Not a meeting of the National Press Club.
Big difference. They rented the room...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
UFO means unidentified flying object. The article makes no reference to aliens.
You'd think a slashdot summary would recognize such a distinction. This is not the National Inquirer.
If there were bogeys, they were almost certainly terrestrial.
Reuters publishes press releases on their site, which is fine. They should, however, do more to differentiate their appearance from the real news.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
I've been skeptically following a lot of this UFO traffic for a couple of years..because I really want to know. But I have a theory that these "aliens" aren't really aliens. Take for instance the increasing number of homosexuals in the world. If what they say is true, that homosexuality is a genetic inheritance, could it mean that the human race is slowly evolving to become hermaphrodites? How many alien sightings have said that the aliens had sexual organs? Anyways, say that in the future humans are hermaphroditic time travelers? And perhaps they are traveling back in time to prevent the inevitable? I don't know, but I sure am seeing an increase of lesbians on dating sites.
journalistic integrity...
You just made that up.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
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.
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
Newspapers used to have a position called a "fact-checker" .
As a matter of fact, they did not.
While newspapers conventionally have had editors who often checked facts, they weren't called fact-checkers, and their primary function usually was to fix bad writing (sometimes the job was more like translation) and to write headlines to fit layouts. The position was usually called "copy editor" or "copyreader" in the United States and "subeditor" in the UK. The primary responsibility for getting things right has always been placed on the reporter, whose job is to gather information and put it into something resembling the written word.
I've been in journalism for 40 years, and my dad was a newspaper editor before me. 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?" There''s no time for that in a daily newsroom.
Of course, the cited "story" is not journalism at all, but rather an announcement pushed out by PR Newswire, which is a publicity release distribution service. Reuters carries PR Newswire because often the "press releases" contain legitimate and useful information, but it fails to adequately label the content for what it really is.
So any perceived decline in the profession of journalism can't be blamed for this wacky crap.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just as ants have no concept of your foot squashing them being signs of an advanced intelligence (you), so would flying saucers be considered a sign of beings from another planet. If they exist, (a far more advanced intelligence on earth than humans) then they would be good at keeping themselves hidden and secret.
Maybe they don't understand how we function any more than we understand how ants function.
Maybe by messing with our nukes they are protecting themselves in the way that we brush away ants at our picnics.
Or more realistically, the people who are in-charge of keeping the Dr. Strangelove characters from burning the earth are creating a collective hallucination of flying saucers and destroying the rogue nukes themselves. Since there has never been any real physical evidence of flying saucers actually existing, this is the most likely scenario.
Anyway, we should thank these guys for protecting us from the psychopaths in the military who want to burn the world and rule the ashes.
Do the Soviets (no I don't accept them as 'Russians'), the Chinese, the French, and the British have the same 'problem' with flying saucers fucking around with the nuclear bombs that we do?
That is merely because Chief Justice Rehnquist was pretty much against individual freedom full stop.
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
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
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.
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.
So perhaps if the courts stuck to their original job of applying the law rather than writing the law then the legislators could go back to their job of writing laws and journalists could be made to return writing true stories to keep the courts and legislators honest....hmmm I think I see a flaw here.
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.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
If I wanted to use covert drones to monitor enemies' installations, I think I'd test them out on my own first. And I probably wouldn't tell people first (or even afterwards).
As someone famous once said, it's not the Little Green Men we have to worry about, it's the Large Green Motherfuckers.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's