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CIA on UFO Sightings: 'It Was Us'
mrflash818 sends word that the CIA has taken the blame for a majority of early UFO sightings. In a tweet, the agency said, "It was us," and linked to a document summarizing their use of U-2 spy planes from 1954-1974 (PDF).
"High-altitude testing of the U-2led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects," the CIA wrote in the document, which it wrote in 1998. "In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and [many] military aircraftoperated at altitudes below 40,000 feet. Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports." [T]he CIA cross-referenced UFO sightings to U-2 flight logs. "This enabled the investigators to eliminate the majority of the UFO reports," the CIA wrote, "although they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause of the UFO sightings."
If I was a Sleestak alien overlord, that's exactly what I would say.
But it was aliens.
(BTW, what happened to the other half?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Whenever the CIA admits to something, I wonder, what's the bigger lie they're trying to cover up? Or, am I just being paranoid?
Citizens of other countries might think you're being paranoid. To Americans, it's obvious that you are right.
However in this case it might not be so much of a "cover up" as it is an effort to get everyone's mind off of torture.
that would explain the anal probes
As someone who once worked for Project Senior Trend, the sibling post has it dead-on.
It was much preferable for the USAF to have folks think that ET stopped by, than to let them realize that what they were really seeing were F-117s flying overhead (mind you, nearly all sorties were done at night, but things happen, and dawn/dusk is kind of an awkward time, at least visually.) In profile (side or front/rear), the jet has a saucer-like shape, and definitely something that doesn't look like an ordinary civilian or military aircraft. Funny enough, the Soviets were more than happy to foster and even encourage alien conspiracy theories, if only to keep their own population from thinking that they saw some secret military project flying overhead.
Other notable examples of military aircraft that would cause confusion and optical illusions? The SR-71/A-12 in its early days, the B-47 flying wing, and its grandkid, the B-2 bomber.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Last time I checked, a U2 spyplane was not really capable of hovering motionless and then accelerating to the horizon in a moment. Nor were they gigantic triangular craft.
Last time I checked, people were incredibly bad at objectively reporting what they see, and other people were incredibly bad at relating what the first people said they saw, and then other people get what they heard from the second people confused with something they saw on TV, and then yet more people read books by Erich Von Daniken
What I find weird is that the kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices over the past few decades seems to have scared away all the UFOs. Why, a week hardly went by in the 1980s without a flap, but now...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
...and don't forget the SR-71...
F-117 and U2 were practically average looking compared to that thing. My father was in the air-force and got to see one land before they were declassified. He said his first reaction was ALIENS! But changed his after it landed like any normal aircraft.
Have you ever tried to record an aircraft from your cell phone? It really doesn't work.
By your logic, if cell phone recording was the only way to establish something's reality, commercial aircraft don't exist either.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The SR-71 - which moved about 3x as fast as almost all military aircraft at the time - was first tested around the early 1960's. Then there was suddenly a surge of sightings of triangle-shaped ufos blazing around at mach 3 speeds, which _obviously_ couldn't have been from a military jet because no military jet went that fast.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Yes military aircraft probably accounts for the majority of sightings, but not the ones that zip around faster than anything we have even today, stop on a dime and go another direction just as fast..
I've seen objects like this, multiple times, but I've always been able to explain in mundane terms after watching closely -- I'm the kind of guy who keeps binoculars in the car just in case the night skies are clear. I'd *love* to see an alien spaceship, but being a habitual sky watcher things that occasional sky watcher might take as a spacecraft look like ordinary phenomena to me.
And it's not because I only see what I'm told could be real. Decades ago I experienced something which science said was impossible: meteors shooting overhead with a rocket-like sound. The reason this is impossible is that meteors are fifty or a hundred miles up -- sound could not travel fast enough through the atmosphere. But I knew what I saw and heard, and in 2001 scientists actually observed this phenomenon, electrophonic meteors.
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