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from the that's-not-entirely-true-Mr.-President dept.
Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program
In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find. Which was how the Pentagon wanted it. For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's C Ring, deep within the building's maze.
The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.
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, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space. On CBS's "60 Minutes" in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was "absolutely convinced" that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.
Working with Mr. Bigelow's Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
[...] Under Mr. Bigelow's direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.
Article comes with attached 34s (with audio) and 1m16s (no audio) videos.
Politico's coverage of this story was published nearly simultaneously with the New York Times.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @06:56PM (2 children)
one always assumes that a whole gigantic socio-economic conglomeration of humanoids is required to get off this stinking rock.
but maybe this stinking rock is contaminated by a gigantic pile of lies, deception and regular puss that has accumulated
more then all great wonders constructed by human kind over the eons.
the "great ball of puss" is thus actually a contamination of the regular human brain and thus we all live in a glorified world of
"would be", with people-representation, required taxes and a military.
so once in a while a daughter or son is born, that is magically shield from this contamination, discovers duct-tap, welding, copper, magnets and some other cool stuff and basically, in the backyard, from scrap, build a interstellar spaceship.
thus the UFOs observed are mere normal humans leaving the planet, or in seldem cases, returning for the left behind teddy-bear, or book or some other trinket.
the whole UFO conspiracy is just the "pussy filled" and contaminated population being angry about losing so much innocence (to think straight) with financing a socio-happiness-supressing-and-regular-puss-multiplying department to understand the simple life of nature of how to cruise thru the outer spaces?
example: the latest pencil shaped rock "skirting" earth was a rock shield captured via a "higgs-field" and accelerated by a warp-bubble all emitted by a tiny spacecraft made from some auto-part scrap metal yard ...non?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 18 2017, @07:29PM (1 child)
Sure. Since the dawn of aviation, or even centuries prior, lone individuals have been building Bean-with-Bacon megarockets in their spare time, coming up with more advances independently across a variety of disciplines than someone like Galileo did, and bringing them to fruition in the form of usable personal space transportation. All without being killed by chemicals, radiation, launch failure, the vacuum of space, etc.
The better explanation is that aliens who may have developed space travel hundreds of thousands or millions of years before us have sent probes to check out any planet within a thousand light years of them that might look habitable. Or every planet, including the hot and cold ones. They just spam the probes, and the probes can autonomously check out the situation on Earth-like planets. They could even send spacecraft capable of replicating themselves using the materials in the dusty outskirts of our solar system, in order to regularly spawn more probes that only have to travel a relatively short distance to reach Earth. None of this requires faster-than-light travel, although it may require patience and reliable hardware.
Throwing in some time travel would make your scenario more plausible. Time-traveling tourists are just popping themselves into existence in our timeline, skewing everything. But we don't live in the timeline in which someone traveled back and co-opted an existing empire, installing themselves as a never aging god-emperor with advanced technologies. Or someone did do that but got their clock cleaned by time travelers from the resulting future.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @09:52PM
Berenstein? Berenstain?
WHAT IS REALITY?