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White House Responds to ET/UFO Petitions
An anonymous reader writes "The White House has responded to two more We the People petitions. These new inquiries ask the government to acknowledge formally that aliens have visited Earth. The response from Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology is: 'The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.'" I'm glad that's cleared up. Now our government can get back to important work like developing caffeinated jerky.
I bet if the government was asked about any other super high security classified information, they would similarly deny it.
There Can Be Only One...
They could be made of water.
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Kind of off topic - I was buddies with a guy in the air force that worked on the caffeinated stuff. He came to visit one time and brought some caffeine pudding with him. Hell of a drug.
It's just the probe speaking.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Mmmmmmm, Jerky.
People are bothering the White House with this type of bullshit and Congress is voting to reaffirm our national motto. Can we just call a do-over and kick everybody out of office and start over?
We warmly welcome any further inquiries concerning matters distant from pressing issues that make the questioner look slightly insane for doubting us!
In fact, just in the spirit of openness, we voluntarily announce that neither we, nor the British royal family, are Pod People, or Reptoids from Delta Reticulon Minus. If you have any further requests for information or policy change that we can easily dismiss as being outside the window of political consideration, please let us know.
This is one place government officials do not discuss, do not acknowledge it exists, etc. Yet there is this immense desire by people wanting to know what's going on at this place. This gives opportunity for creative people to say there are space aliens freeze-dried from the Roswell crash. OK, prove them wrong. You can't, only thing that can be done is debate among different groups. Unless US govt declassify the area, permit tours, photos, etc. but until then Area 51 remains a good place for conspiracies, movie plots, whatever.
mfwright@batnet.com
14% of Americans think they've seen a UFO. An additional 20% haven't seen one, but believe they exist.
Somewhere around 10% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing.
This says something about the United States, although I'm not sure exactly what.
I am officially gone from
"The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet"
The U.S. government does have some evidence life exists on Mars. There are the fossils in the Martian meteorites, and the controversial results of the Viking life detection experiments plus our understanding of how quickly life appeared on Earth and its ability to adapt to conditions like Mars currently has, by living in the rocks.
While I won't claim there is enough evidence yet to concluded that there is life on Mars, there is more then "no evidence".
Because I've certainly seen a UFO. I mean, it was probably just a plane or a helicopter and sometimes just a refraction of insects in the light from my glasses, but I seens thems, I'm sure.
The idea the government would keep aliens secret is incredibly stupid. Their reasons were:
a. Keeping secrets is fun.
b. To avoid having the government get blamed for something they are not responsible for - by doing something bad that would actually make them responsible.
c. It's the sort of thing that governments generally do.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet
I think we spent huge piles of tax dollars in order to get all excited that there was evidence of both water and bateria on Mars?
If the White House can't get basic facts strait about recent and very public scientific develops, why should we take the rest of their response seriously. Its not like this is Slashdot we are talking about here with its lack of editing, these are professional publicity people who don't make mistakes and obvious omissions.
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78,32% of Americans believe any made up numbers.
After hand-waiving away the cannabis legalization and the software patent petitions, it would have been amazing to see the White House answers this one candidly. "After seeing such public pressure on the matter over decades, this administration has decided to come clean with the Martians and our contacts with them."
You want proof there are no ETs on earth?
Look at the defense budget.
Now look at NASAs budget.
NASA's budget is tiny in comparison. Clearly the US sees other countries as much bigger threat than the anal-probers from outta space. Either that or they feel that a little humiliation for the drunk rednecks that spot them is acceptable.
If we had discovered aliens do you really think we'd be slashing science spending and space exploration costs?
Do you really think the US would be the only country to know about them and that all 200+ nations on earth are collaborating together to keep us in the dark.
It is ludicrous. The one way you know that aliens have been found and secretly being kept away from the public is when the government starts putting higher priority on space funding and NASA's budget starts rocketing upwards instead of getting cut further and further each year.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
To sum up TFA:
1. Aliens are almost certainly real. Those who refuse to believe in the likely existence of extraterrestrial life either refuse to acknowledge or cannot comprehend the vastness of space and (especially) the vastness of time.
2. UFOs are absolutely real. There are lots of instances where people legitimately see objects in the sky that they cannot identify/classify.
3. UFOs are absolutely not aliens. Those who believe that aliens have visited earth either refuse to acknowledge or cannot comprehend the vastness of space and (especially) the vastness of time.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Gotta say it takes some cahones for the administration to maintain a site like this. On the first page of open petitions are "We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition." and "Stop Lying." I give Obama points for efforts like this, even though some of the petitions I see there are valid enough to make me detract even more points. I highly doubt this site will continue to exist in future administrations.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Now the White House firmly denies it.
Regardless of the actual issue of aliens, whether they exist or not the government's use of the topic appears to be to keep the citizenry fascinated by ooh-and-aah topics and distracted from overhauling their political system into something more functional. "They exist... They exist not... They exist... Wait, who's Britney dating now?"
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There are folks who think the technology of microwave ovens was given to us by aliens. But then, esp. in the US, we have the worst math and science ed among the general populace of any industrialized nation.
The reason I know there's been no contact is that there have been *zero* amazing breakthroughs in the last century. We can look at every bit of original research that led to all technological advances.
Had we actually had contact with aliens, even if they didn't give us technology, there would have been scientists (and every form known of observation) aimed at them, and just knowing that something (say, anti-gravity, or force fields) existed, would lead a very strong line of rapid development, to where we'd have something that did something like it, if it wasn't the same.
mark
I saw a UFO while staring at the sky one day several years ago. That is to say, I saw something, and I don't know what it was. Given apparent distance, size, and motion characteristics, I can't match it to any known technology, physical effect, or biological creature. In fact, its behavior was unreal enough to make me doubt it was anything mundane. That doesn't prove that it's otherwise, and any suspicions I have that it could have been something alien are just that, suspicions.
Skepticism can coexist with unknown phenomena. One data point doesn't convince me. Rumors of other data points doesn't convince me. However, in absence of an explanation of all such events, it would be naive to trust people who say "It CANNOT be alien, as Aliens don't exist." Those are the words of True Believers, not skeptics.
And anyway, there's less evidence that Congress is on the side of the people than that there's aliens, so I don't know what you're trying to say. /snark
Because we elect new figureheads who appoint new staffers largely picked from within or by corporations (lobbyists,) duh!
Naturally the temp guys who get in are going to be given access to everything and the civil servants will cooperate 110%.... except for that 1 time when the head of the CIA said there was a "need to know" or something of that sort to a President's information request; resulting in him being fired (along with an army worth of CIA agents) and then appointed somebody out of the loop... about 40 years ago.
FYI, Clinton declassified the JFK stuff which "didn't exist" showing there was no magic bullet; and plenty of proof of a coverup. So it DOES sometimes work; when the documents are held to be released in 60 years you can get your elected executive to let them out early. I leave it to the reader to find the medical reports and other evidence which directly contradicted official report and that is why they were classified.
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Honestly, they're lying from the get go on this. Haven't we established without a doubt that there is life outside of Earth in our own solar system, in the very least, with one celled organisms?
All they had to do was say "no evidence of intelligent life" and they would be good to go.
http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/on_assignment/old-cattle-mutilation-stumped-feds
Seriously, if there were aliens so advanced they invented rapid interstellar travel technology, what could they possibly want with Earth? Maybe just to observe us to document our evolution and culture? Sort of alien anthropologists/zoologists?
There's seriously nothing of value on earth, resource wise, which they shouldn't be able to collect a billion other places in the Universe. No, they don't want slave labor - high technology manufacturing, even here on earth, is far better than slave labor, and we are positing that their technology is far advanced of our own, so I have to reject the "Stargate SG-1" hypothesis - advanced aliens need no slaves, need no resources they can't get elsewhere, need no oil, coal or other hydrocarbon fuels, and they certainly wouldn't want our technology.
I know that the answer to the UFO question is that we, as a country, have never had any real contact with aliens in America.
There is no possible way that a government as inefficient, inept and corrupt as ours could have kept alien encounters secret for nigh on 60 years. Records get hacked. People talk. Politicians use secrets to leverage each other. Opportunists leak information and sell out what they know. People make death bed confessions. There is absolutely no way that something as significant as contact with aliens could remain secret for so long if it were actually true. There would just be no way the government could keep a lid on it for so long. A few years, probably. A decade or two? Sure. 60 years? No freaking way.
No, no. What this proves is that the aliens (or possibly the Illuminati - but trust me, I have proof) are so much in control of our government that they have taken all the evidence out of our government's hands. WHEN ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING TO WAKE UP AND SEE THE TRUTH?! They Live was a documentary!
All they have to do is pick the wackiest petitions to respond to. They issue polite rejections or denials of the petitions. From there they make petitioners all look like wacka-dos. From their they can issue rejections of reasonable petitions that refer to serious issues with the same tone that implies insanity of the petitioners.
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The probes we've sent did originate here... and life here seems to have a way of being quite pervasive and resilient... surviving extremes that have, prior to the last century, thought to be wholly impossible for anything living to live in.
I would be quite surprised if the rovers and other apparatus that we've sent there are not home to many types of microbial life... and are now engaging in the long and slow process of adapting to a Martian environment.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"And if there were any credible information that beings of extraterrestrial origin, such information would be classified as secret"
The wrong question was asked. The right question to ask the White House is what the procedure and government position concerning how evidence of extraterrestrial visitation would be handled. You ask if the government would consider such information too dangerous to release.
Are there any petitions where the WH has said "yes", "sure", "ok", "we'll work on that"? Everything Ive seen has been canned "No" go away you insignificant twerps.
I've always loved the theory that Aliens can travel hundreds of light-years through space, but New Mexico was just too god damned complicated for them.
Every time you see something in the sky you cannot identify it is an Unidentified Flying Object. The problem is that people jump to to the conclusion UFO=Alien star craft. It is not ! It just means what the word say : something was flying and was unidentified. I saw UFO, you probably saw UFO, we all did probably for all those which look up the sky, and lacks knowledge on what's flying up. Blimp were UFO'd , satellite, planet, weather phenomena , fiefly and other various insect etc....
You have to udnerstand that UFO *do* exists. UFO only means the person did not recognize what's up in the sky. That does not mean at all that there were *ever* alien craft visiting us : there is no evidence of that. But UFO do exists because none of us have pefect sight and perfect knowledge.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Politicians have their role in the society, but truth is not one of them. Searching for truth from politicians is wrong by definition. Why are people doing these wearethepeople crap? Why would we expect anything remotely useful out of this?
Its like going to a hooker for relationship, family and career advice.
Three people can keep a secret if, and only if, two of them are dead. This basic insight escapes most conspiracy nuts. Don't know why.
The government is incompetent, it simply doesn't have the skills that conspiracy nuts attribute to it.
...were the actual words of the Alien High Commander when the government told them of the request. ;-)