UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt', Says Former Head of Pentagon Alien Program (newsweek.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Newsweek report: The existence of UFOs had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt," according the head of the secret Pentagon program that analyzed the mysterious aircrafts. In an interview with British broadsheet The Telegraph published on Saturday, Luis Elizondo told the newspaper of the sightings, "In my opinion, if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of 'beyond reasonable doubt.'" "I hate to use the term UFO but that's what we're looking at," he added. "I think it's pretty clear this is not us, and it's not anyone else, so no one has to ask questions where they're from." Elizondo led the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, investigating evidence of UFOs and alien life, from 2007 to 2012, when it was shuttered. Its existence was first reported by The New York Times this month.
The existence of UFOs had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt," according the head of the secret Pentagon program that analyzed the mysterious aircrafts.
LOL, no. As much as I'd prefer that there were starfaring alien civilization(s) that have been visiting us (it would irrevocably change the entire paradigm of the human species, hopefully in a positive way), before I'm willing to 'believe' in the Fox Mulder-sort of way, I'll need to see actual alien hardware of some sort: an actual ship, or some piece of tech that absolutely can't have been of human manufacture, or some other hard evidence (like, say, an actual, live, walking-and-talking member of an alien species). Pictures, still or moving, just don't cut it, especially in a day and age where we've got the technology to fake just about anything like that. I can't believe that someone who was allegedly that high up the food chain would say something like this.
I certainly have doubt, and I consider myself quite reasonable.
I suspect this fellow has a rather distorted opinion of who a "reasonable person" is, or is grossly over-estimating opinions.
Maybe he's including "life in the universe we will never encounter"? That I think I can buy into. The universe is just too big for there not to be life elsewhere, probably a lot of elsewheres. But be it in the past, present, or future, the tense doesn't really matter because our current understanding of physics prevents us from ever being able to even discover evidence of their existence, and the problem just grows more difficult as the universe continues to expand.
I love Kurz's videos, and he did a wonderful (2 part) video on the subject, The Fermi Paradox. It's both educational and enlightening - a "must watch" for anyone pondering aliens.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Of course they exists. Does not mean they are extraterrestrials.
Remember they recruited Howard Hughes, floating a cock and bull story about mining sea floor "noudles" for rare metals, as a cover story to hunt for the lost Russian submarine.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Enough said.
It was proven beyond reasonable doubt that we haven't identified all flying objects?
That's really shocking. Never expected that.
> 'll need to see actual alien hardware
He said "UFOs are proven beyond a reasonable doubt". You jumped STRAIGHT to "alien". Why didn't you jump straight to "mole men"? Or the "COBRA" organization from "GI Joe"?
His point is, no one knows where these flying machines are coming from, or who controls them. Extraterrestrial aliens is a pleasing theory for a lot of reasons, but with space being so vast, it barely gives us any information at all- and it tends to blindside other options, such as some tech by a known nation being very advanced and well kept as a secret, or there being unknown human actors with some kind of aeronautical agenda.
He's stating that they've proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they're 'unidentified' and 'flying'. All you need for that is for no governmental bodies to claim them.
A UFO can simply be a plane with a broken radio. So, yes, beyond reasonable doubt, UFOs are legit.
Every so often I'll make the mistake of starting to watch one, because the idea is intriguing. And every time I do that, every single time it pisses me off.
These things piss me off because I really, really want it to be true. I want to believe we can make contact with alien civilizations; that FTL travel is not only possible, but practical. That we might someday look on the galaxy as sixteenth century explorers looked at our planet.
Consequently stupid, credulous bullshit really pisses me off. I can't even abide unwarranted leaps of faith. All I ask for is one incident, just one, thoroughly and critically investigated, in which nobody is able to come up with a terrestrial explanation good enough for skeptic.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
has the frequency of UFO reports declined dramatically since the widespread presence of cell phones with cameras? Shouldn't we expect just the opposite if they were real? Eye witnesses are well known to be unreliable. Our brains are not as "mechanical" as the recording devices we have created. There are enough recording devices pointed skywards so that we can completely discount human testimony as unreliable (for a variety of reasons) and study only the physical records. I wonder what they'd tell us? I wonder what a skeptic would conclude? (The obvious first questions are about calibration and standardization). The human brain gets neither.
Every day I see tons of flying objects that I can‘t identify. They could be passenger planes, but since I can‘t identify them, they are UFOs to me.
Whoosh? Moron.
> As much as I'd prefer that there were starfaring alien civilization...
Elizondo didn't say they were aliens; he said they were UFOs. I've heard a few Air Force pilots opine on this same topic: they believe there's definitely some strange phenomenon that we don't understand. Not necessarily aliens, but something.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
Wrong. The rational approach is to defer a decision until one actually has some evidence upon which to base a decision.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's a bit more than that.
He's asserting flight characteristics that are simply not possible with any known tech.
It's been a common dismissal to say, "well these things could be secret next-gen military craft". He's basically saying "no, they're really not".
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson