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Experts Cast Doubt on 'Alien Alloys' in the New York Times' UFO Story (scientificamerican.com)
What to make of a Las Vegas building full of unidentified alloys? The New York Times published a stunning story last week revealing that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) had, between 2007 and 2012, funded a $22 million program for investigating UFOs (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). The story included three revelations that were tailored to blow readers' minds: 1. Many high-ranking people in the federal government believe aliens have visited planet Earth. 2. Military pilots have recorded videos of UFOs with capabilities that seem to outstrip all known human aircraft, changing direction and accelerating in ways no fighter jet or helicopter could ever accomplish. 3. In a group of buildings in Las Vegas, the government stockpiles alloys and other materials believed to be associated with UFOs. From a Scientific American report: Points one and two are weird, but not all that compelling on their own: The world already knew that plenty of smart folks believe in alien visitors, and that pilots sometimes encounter strange phenomena in the upper atmosphere. Point No. 3, though -- those buildings full of alloys and other materials -- that's a little harder to hand wave away. Is there really a DOD cache full of materials from out of this world? Here's the thing, though: The chemists and metallurgists Live Science spoke to -- experts in identifying unusual alloys -- don't buy it. "I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science. "My opinion? That's quite impossible." Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals. They're very common -- in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are -- and very well understood.
Depends....will we be able to analyze the lemonade?
I think a lot of the issue with "UFO's" is that by definition it's something that's unidentified, yet the immediate go to for a number of people is "ohhh, it must be aliens!" I can guarantee the video i saw (i'm assuming we're talking about the one that made the news here the past couple days...not the Falcon rocket thing) is deffinately a UFO. I can't identify it, and clearly the pilot couldn't either. That doesn't make it an alien. Without a good frame of reference, you can't tell it's motion in difference to the aircraft nor it's size, and the picture isn't good enough to make out details either.... so, it's unidentified. Is it alien? No evidence of that.
And don't get me wrong.... i think the mathematical probability of their being sentient alien race out there, somewhere, is 100%. The universe is simply really big. We have, realistically, a single planet that's been somewhat explored (or perhaps somewhere between "somewhat" and "piss poorly"), and there's life on it....an exceptionally large variety of life. Some of that life lives in extreme (to us) conditions, and we know that some of that life can even live for years in the vacuum of space.
But that doesn't mean everything we can't identify in the air is aliens. For us to call it alien, yeh, we will need extraordinary evidence.
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"is deffinately a UFO. I can't identify it, "
If you could, it would be an IFO.
The least sensical one isn't point #2, but #1.
"1. Many high-ranking people in the federal government believe aliens have visited planet Earth." Well, many high-ranking people in the federal government have a religious belief in an alien they call "God", so that's a given.
I guess this is some meta-joke that I don't get?
Turboprop isn't primitive technology. It have advantages as well as disadvantages just like any other design choice. Compare the specifications of the TU-95 with the contemporary B-52, more similarities than differences.