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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.
and Trump's hair.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
There are legitimate reasons to disagree with the President on certain policy issues, but you must admit, his hair is magnificent.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> '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.
What you have here is a political/administrator/lawyer type, bringing out the court of law example illustrates it perfectly. In court of law a witness testimony actually counts for something, whereas an engineer would remain skeptical and a scientist would outright laugh at such a "proof".
And yet, all we ever get is "trust me".
Not even making an attempt to disprove. Jes' waitin' around for some evidence. Got some you can share?
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.
I've come to expect the totally unexpected.
For example, if you had described GNOME 3 and systemd to me in 2005, I would have laughed in your face. Yet here we are, only about a decade later, and GNOME 3 and systemd have managed to destroy even Debian GNU/Linux.
Another example is JavaScript. Again, if you had told me in 2005 that people would consider JavaScript to be a good programming language, and would even be using it for server-side programming, I would have laughed in your face. Yet here we are, only about a decade later, and there are fools who actually do try to seriously use JavaScript!
Then there's Rust. If you had told me in 2005 that parts of Firefox would be written in a systems programming language whose community is more focused on things like pronouns and diversity than on anything technical, I would have laughed in your face. Yet here we are, only about a decade later, and there really are programming language communities that care more about "social justice" than they do about technical matters.
So extraterrestrial life doesn't seem so implausible after what I've seen happen with things like systemd, GNOME 3, Debian, JavaScript, Rust and Firefox. In fact, extraterrestrial life would be the sanest of all of those things!
This is such an absurd excerpt from a much more intelligent discussion. The guy is actually entirely stable, and he's 100% right. Flying Objects that have not been identified are 100% real. At no point did he ever imply that they were aliens poking around, but rather that it was "unidentified" it was "flying" and presumably it was an "object." If he were not in the news, his job would be called "intelligence." You know, the identification of unidentified things.
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.
Hope it doesn't end up like this tho... https://www.amazon.com/Three-B...
I thoroughly enjoyed The Three Body Problem and its sequels.
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.
So they just come here and fly around? Why have they not colonized? 83k claimed sightings this year alone...and they just come and fly around.
Of course UFO's (Unidentified Flying Objects) exist! It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt! However, there is absolutely no proof of Extra-Terrestrials piloting them.
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.
And Stalin was a left-wing commie, of course.
Don't forget Huy Brasil and Lemuria.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Not a chance, his skin is too thin for upholstery.
When we catch a UFO on the ground occupied by extra-earth aliens, UFOs proven to contain intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe is not proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Roswell.
You simply don't have "Majestic" security clearance.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Again, if you had told me in 2005 that people would consider JavaScript to be a good programming language, and would even be using it for server-side programming, I would have laughed in your face.
And if you'd asked me in 2005, I could have saved you some embarrassment about a dozen years later by informing you that JavaScript had by that time already been in use on the server for about ten years.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Would you want this person on your jury if you are being tried for capital crimes?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Assuming UFO's are aliens, why do we see so many? *We* can see enough from orbit that we don't need to fly through the atmosphere to look around. They're giving themselves away for nothing.
Declining to contact us makes sense: if they're advanced enough to get here, they're probably figured out the cultural problems that are destroying us; we'd look like a particularly poor, insane, and violent slum, and unlike us they'd know better than to try to "help." Most of our governments represent the absolute worst of us, so no mystery there.
I can't see how taking over and exploiting Earth makes sense either: if they can get here, they can get to our unexplored moons, plus the asteroid belt, which are much better for that purpose, assuming they're not after fossil fuels or agriculture. If they can get here so easily that colonization makes any sense at all they wouldn't need to wonder about us, they'd just use pesticide.
Maybe they're trying to help us survive by giving us hope? Let's hope it works, and also that they plan shoot down any armed ICBM's they see.
Really? This is hard to understand? The great white elephant that is national security has been ridden as far as it can go; it now is facing backlash (I mean, when the people you hire are unaware that the 'D.C.' abbreviation stands for 'District of Columbia,' you, as a Federal Senator / Representative / Lobbyist / etc., are on some really shaky, and potentially dangerous (to yourself) ground).
So, they are going for a new (and potentially safer, longer lasting) white elephant: space defense / security. Defense contracts that will employ hundreds of millions of people for 'threats' that may or may not exist...like certain forms of 'terrorism'...except without the accidental identification of human beings as potential targets (gotta make sure the aliens are alien enough). NASA will, no doubt, get a giant shot in the arm, to upgrade their observatories, to keep their eyes peeled for any 'strange' asteroids and what not.
Provided we don't actually encounter any aliens, or have encountered any, we are relatively safe from annihilation / self-annihilation for probably the next century. Which by then we will have a working fusion reactor, and a warp engine, and can focus on space colonization, instead of weaponization.
UFO existence has been an incredibly powerful and useful disinformation weapon used by the USA for over 50 years. Why on earth stop now? Elizondo is obviously in PSYOP, and he is correct - there's still some legs to the UFO game, even though xkcd demonstrated the fact that UFO's just aren't there with https://xkcd.com/1235/
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a little googling and I found 'After his resignation, Elizondo joined To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a for-profit company that raises money for UFO research and studies UFO sightings. Elizondo is listed as director of global security and special programs. The company officially launched in October.'
> 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."
The article in the Telegraph (whose journalists interviewed Elizondo) states: “Luis Elizondo said the existence of supremely advanced unidentified aircraft, using technology that did not belong to any nation, had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt".” That seems rather unambiguous to me.
He also said “I’d say bolster the [UFO research] program. We want NASA to find life on different planets, but we have highly educated pilots here, and they’re seeing something they can't understand”. I can’t imagine why he’d place a reference to NASA and extraterrestrial life in the middle of his statement unless he wanted to imply that sightings made on Earth are likely to have a similar origin.
This story is getting flogged to death by click bait sites and nutters trying to turn a scam, with multiple scammers, into "Aliens!"
But let's look at what the news reports really show.
That secret "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program" first reported in the New York Times? Here is what that NYT says:
The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow.
So, this program existed because a powerful politician - wanting to channel millions of dollars to a rich friend - 'requested' that it be created.
Meanwhile the Mr. Elizondo who led this program just retired and is now talking about it openly. This even though "Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.", in other words he is talking openly about an on-going program that he is supposedly highly classified. What is Mr. Elizondo up to now? Why this:
Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.
So now he is making (err, raising) money off of his claims in a private commercial venture!
I looked at the video released to support his claims and is posted on-line (the only one available last I checked, although he is claiming to have released three). The image in the cockpit display (assuming it is authentic and not doctored in any way) stays dead center the whole time in the display as it moves in the sky. We never see (as the Washington Post story would have it): "The strange aircraft ... appear to hover briefly before sprinting away at speeds that elicit gasps and shouts from the pilots." That is not on the video. Why not, if they have this amazing evidence?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
He took over from Obama because orange is the new black.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
In fact, extraterrestrial life would be the sanest of all of those things!
Probably because it uses Lisp?
Ezekiel 23:20
Personally, I don't find it that hard to believe that we've been visited before by other life forms? If nothing else, all of our radio and TV broadcasts we've got zipping around all over the planet probably attract some attention, if intelligent life is looking.
But back when I took enough interest in UFOs to read a lot of books and watch a lot of supposed "documentaries" on the subject? I realized that time and time again, you had people who stood to make a decent amount of money and who enjoyed the fame and attention in certain circles by telling these stories. All the fakery pollutes things to the point where someone telling a true story just gets drowned out in all the nonsense.
Some of the more interesting claims come from former military or airline pilots who were far more often in situations where they'd be able to see a UFO than the average person. (When "farmer Fred" tells you some tale of a flying saucer coming down over his field and scaring the cows - it's not quite as credible as a jet fighter pilot in the Air Force who spent thousands of hours in the sky with a plane equipped with radar systems, etc.)
But government also has a different motivation for investigating UFOs than the general public does. The government is interested in finding any military flying machines that a foreign government might be testing out as part of a secret project. If it can get people to report strange sightings in the sky, hoping to find aliens? It's going to promote that if it helps them find the next Russian spy plane or what-not.
It could turn out, in fact, that any alien life that actually visited/visits us is nothing like what we tend to expect. Maybe FTL travel isn't even something they're doing to reach us? Perhaps they're some sort of creature that lives an incredibly long time and doesn't require an atmosphere to breathe in, or even a space ship to travel in? Maybe it just floats through the vast universe like a gas until it finds something like us?
We don't know WHAT these are and there is ZERO proof that they are "aliens". The man is full of bovine fecal matter.
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
To believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe is arrogance of the highest order.
To believe that faster than light travel is not possible is putting yourself into the same boat as primitives who didn't believe man could fly.
Do we know HOW to travel faster than light? Nope. But the primitives didn't know how to build a plane either.
Can we travel faster than light? Not according to what we know. And what do we know about ourselves? That we don't know very much.
Of course there will only proof beyond reasonable doubt when an actual alien spaceship lands on the Pentagon Lawn and they come out, laughing their asses off at how stupid and primitive we are.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I have two theories:
1) He meant that these objects were Unidentified Flying Objects until they were identified. For example, I saw a UFO once. It had the stereotypical alien ship saucer shape. Then, I realized it was a plane taking off. The tail was hidden from my viewpoint, the wings made the saucer, and the front made the top. Once I realized what it was, it went from a UFO to an IFO (Identified Flying Object). No aliens, just a normal everyday occurrence, albeit from a weird angle that made me question what I was seeing for a second.
2) He needs for UFOs to be real because, without them, his department gets no funding. Imagine if the guy in charge of researching UFOs proves conclusively that there are no UFOs? Mystery solved. Close the department. Last one out turn off the lights. Who knows if we'll have jobs the next day. However, if he proves that UFOs ARE real, he can parlay that small department into a larger staff with more funding to look into them. Are they threats? Where do they come from? Is there technology we can take advantage of? It turns from "mission accomplished, now close shop" to "let's' pour money into here to find out more."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.