The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14875177
RhetoricThug wrote:I agree, but what does it all mean? Are we not ready for 'full-frontal' disclosure? Why so secretive?


On some other board lately, there was a guy, very knowledgable about physics, UFOs and means of interstellar travel. But he indicated he'd freak out if he encountered some of the alien entities reported. If someone like that isn't ready, I doubt the public is. While I think progress has been made in getting people to be more accepting of the possibility, even reality of ET, we still have a ways to go.
#14875183
I wonder why he would freak out? Because of their presence or because of their capabilities?

I couldn’t bear it if they looked like some cliche alien sci-fi movie :hmm:
#14875243
Beren wrote:Civilisation was sustainable most of the time, but it doesn't mean it's not been alien all along, it's become unsustainable exactly because it's always been innately alien to this planet.
The rise of capitalism has alienated humanity from its traditional values

'Alienated from its traditional values,' sounds like folklore. Define traditional values. People throw this term around, and it usually describes situational discomfort or some kind of value judgement.

Is it actually 'alien,' or are we making poor choices?

Maybe we can make it sustainable and adapt to Earth again, otherwise we face extinction or a huge cataclysm at least.
Sure, there's hope. War doesn't just 'happen,' history is a compilation of political conspiracy colliding with political conspiracy. Or, as George Bernard Shaw stated: "All professions are conspiracies against the laity" In short, people need to stop organizing civilization around lies.

I don't think this planet produced us on its own, we should have gone extinct in the Savannah as polar bears seem to go extinct in the Arctic now, although they show such abilities to survive as we've never thought they had. No other ape survived, and no ape lives there today, so how did we? :?:
See, that is why creationists or genetic interventionists say that our general interpretation of evolution is a flawed theory (or conclusion). Ancient aliens or not, humans seem to be biological outliers. Our intelligence (and ignorance) is unfounded.

Also, in my opinion everyone on this planet "knows" we're aliens, except ourselves.
Remember, our mathematical abstractions gave us the exception. :lol:

starman2003 wrote:On some other board lately, there was a guy, very knowledgable about physics, UFOs and means of interstellar travel. But he indicated he'd freak out if he encountered some of the alien entities reported. If someone like that isn't ready, I doubt the public is. While I think progress has been made in getting people to be more accepting of the possibility, even reality of ET, we still have a ways to go.
Anecdotal information.

"These aren't the droids you're looking for..."

ness31 wrote:Well if anyone was gonna be down with aliens it would have been the Egyptians.

They are rather imposing figures with an almost non human presence so I understand why you would think that.
You know, most of the mystery school teachings come from Egypt, China, and India. I could go on and on about it, but I'll just say this- If you play a game of telephone, the original information gets diluted. ;)
#14875394
ness31 wrote:I wonder why he would freak out? Because of their presence or because of their capabilities?

I couldn’t bear it if they looked like some cliche alien sci-fi movie :hmm:


Because of the appearance and knowledge of its capabilities. You could just say fear of the unknown.
#14875399
Well that’s just the thing isn’t it. I’m not really afraid of the unknown. I’m afraid of preconceived notions of the unknown. ;)
#14875642
^Stop posting photoshop images? Thanks. :roll:

U.F.O.s: Is This All There Is?

Hey, Mr. Spaceman,

Won’t you please take me along?

I won’t do anything wrong.

Hey, Mr. Spaceman,

Won’t you please take me along for a ride?

So sang the Byrds in 1966, after strange radio bursts from distant galaxies called quasars had excited people about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.

I recalled those words recently when reading the account of a pair of Navy pilots who were outmaneuvered and outrun by a U.F.O. off the coast of San Diego back in 2004. Cmdr. David Fravor said later that he had no idea what he had seen.

“But,” he added, “I want to fly one.”

His story was part of a bundle of material released recently about a supersecret $22 million Pentagon project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, aimed at investigating U.F.O.s. The project was officially killed in 2012, but now it’s being resurrected as a nonprofit organization.

Disgruntled that the government wasn’t taking the possibility of alien visitors seriously, a group of former defense officials, aerospace engineers and other space fans have set up their own group, To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science. One of its founders is Tom DeLonge, a former punk musician, record producer and entrepreneur, who is also the head of the group’s entertainment division.

For a minimum of $200, you can join and help finance their research into how U.F.O.s do whatever it is they do, as well as telepathy and “a point-to-point transportation craft that will erase the current travel limits of distance and time” by using a drive that “alters the space-time metric” — that is, a warp drive going faster than the speed of light, Einstein’s old cosmic speed limit.

“We believe there are transformative discoveries within our reach that will revolutionize the human experience, but they can only be accomplished through the unrestricted support of breakthrough research, discovery and innovation,” says the group’s website.

I’m not holding my breath waiting for progress on telepathy or warp drive, but I agree with at least one thing that one official with the group said. That was Steve Justice, a former engineer at Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works, where advanced aircraft like the SR-71 high-altitude super-fast spy plane were designed.

“How dare we think that the physics we have today is all that there is,” he said in an interview published recently in HuffPost.

I could hardly agree more, having spent my professional life in the company of physicists and astronomers trying to poke out of the cocoon of present knowledge into the unknown, to overturn Einstein and what passes for contemporary science. Lately, they haven’t gotten anywhere.

The last time physicists had to deal with faster-than-light travel was six years ago, when a group of Italy-based physicists announced that they had seen the subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than light. It turned out they had wired up their equipment wrong.

So far Einstein is still the champ. But surely there is so much more to learn. A lot of surprises lie ahead, but many of the most popular ideas on how to transcend Einstein and his peers are on the verge of being ruled out. Transforming science is harder than it looks.

While there is a lot we don’t know, there is also a lot we do know. We know how to turn on our computers and let gadgets in our pocket navigate the world. We know that when physical objects zig and zag through a medium like air, as U.F.O.s are said to do, they produce turbulence and shock waves. NASA engineers predicted to the minute when the Cassini spacecraft would dwindle to a wisp of smoke in Saturn’s atmosphere last fall.

In moments like this, I take comfort in what the great Russian physicist and cosmologist Yakov Zeldovich, one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, once told me. “What science has already taken, it will not give back,” he said.

Scientists are not the killjoys in all this.

In the astronomical world, the border between science fact and science fiction can be very permeable, perhaps because many scientists grew up reading science fiction. And astronomers forever have their noses pressed up against the window of the unknown. They want to believe more than anybody, and I count myself among them.

But they are also trained to look at nature with ruthless rigor and skepticism. For astronomers, the biggest problem with E.T. is not the occasional claim of a mysterious light in the sky, but the fact that we are not constantly overwhelmed with them.

Half a century ago, the legendary physicist Enrico Fermi concluded from a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation that even without warp drive, a single civilization could visit and colonize all the planets in the galaxy in a fraction of the 10-billion-year age of the Milky Way.

“Where are they?” he asked.

Proponents of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have been debating ever since. One answer I like is the “zoo hypothesis,” according to which we have been placed off-limits, a cosmic wildlife refuge.

Another answer came from Jill Tarter, formerly the director of research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “We haven’t looked hard enough,” she said when I asked her recently.

If there was an iPhone sitting under a rock on the Moon or Mars, for example, we would not have found it yet. Our own latest ideas for interstellar exploration involve launching probes the size of postage stamps to Alpha Centauri.

In the next generation, they might be the size of mosquitoes. By contrast, the dreams of some U.F.O. enthusiasts are stuck in 1950s technology.

Still, we keep trying.

Last fall when a strange object — an interstellar asteroid now named Oumuamua — was found cruising through the solar system, astronomers’ thoughts raced to the Arthur C. Clarke novel “Rendezvous With Rama,” in which the object was an alien spaceship. Two groups have been monitoring Oumuamua for alien radio signals, so far to no avail.

Meanwhile, some astronomers have speculated that the erratic dimming of a star known as “Boyajian’s star” or “Tabby’s star,” after the astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, could be caused by some gigantic construction project orbiting the star. So far that has not worked out, but none of the other explanations — dust or a fleet of comets — have, either.

A pair of Harvard astronomers suggested last spring that mysterious sporadic flashes of energy known as fast radio bursts coming from far far away are alien transmitters powering interstellar spacecraft carrying light sails. “Science isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence,” the astronomer Avi Loeb said in a news release from Harvard. “Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It’s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”

U.F.O. investigations are nothing new. The most famous was the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1970 and examined more than 12,000 sightings.

Most U.F.O. sightings turn out to be swamp gas and other atmospheric anomalies, Venus, weird reflections or just plain hoaxes. But there is a stubborn residue, a few percent that resist easy explication, including now Commander Fravor’s story. But that’s a far cry from proving they are alien or interstellar.

I don’t know what to think about these stories, often told by sober, respected and professional observers — police officers, pilots, military officials — in indelible detail. I always wish I could have been there to see it for myself.

Then I wonder how much good it would do to see it anyway.

Recently I ran into my friend Mark Mitton, a professional magician, in a restaurant. He came over to the table and started doing tricks. At one point he fanned the card deck, asked my daughter to pick one, and then asked her to shuffle the deck, which she did expertly.

Mr. Mitton grabbed the deck and sprayed the cards in the air. There was my daughter’s card stuck to a mirror about five feet away. How did it get there? Not by any new physics. Seeing didn’t really help.

As modern psychology and neuroscience have established, the senses are an unreliable portal to reality, whatever that is.

Something might be happening, but we don’t know what it is. E.T., if you’re reading this, I’m still waiting to take my ride.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/scie ... ravel.html


Great article. Thoughts on Zoo theory?
#14875906
I do believe Beren, that RT was imputing your motivations were less than wholesome :excited:
I enjoyed your diversion immensely ;)

Zoo theory might be right. Thinking retrospectively about the vaccine thread, at times I don’t see that many differences between myself and a domesticated animal -just scale.
#14876010
discussing your theories
Nah, it's about staying on-topic in a news thread, capeesh!?

ness31 wrote:Zoo theory might be right. Thinking retrospectively about the vaccine thread, at times I don’t see that many differences between myself and a domesticated animal -just scale.
... I guess you need time to think about it. 'Not many differences between myself and a domesticated animal,' sounds like a self-esteem issue, Smashing bumpkins style- "Now I'm naked, nothing but an animal. Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage" Nonetheless, you have the power to create and destroy. Humans have yet to fully comprehend the whole 'create' aspect as one unified tribe.


If you take the Fermi Paradox, and the mathematical formulas...

Scientists have explored this question for years. In 1961 physicist Frank Drake developed a mathematical equation to help solve it:

N = R*fpneflfifcL

The equation aimed to find the number (N) of intelligent civilizations within the boundaries held by the subsequent factors—in our case, the Milky Way Galaxy. R* is the rate of formation of stars that could potentially allow for the development of intelligent life on planets nearby; fp is the fraction of said stars that actually have planetary systems; ne is the number of planets in a solar system with an environment that could sustain life; fl is the fraction of said planets that do sustain life; fi is the fraction of life-sustaining planets on which there is intelligent life; fc is the fraction of intelligent civilizations that have survived long enough to develop communication technology to send signals of their existence into space; and L is the length of time that these civilizations emit these signals before ceasing to exist. The commonly cited numbers for these variables simplify the equation to N = 10 × 0.5 × 2 × 1 × 0.1 × 0.1 × L, which simplifies even further to N = L/10. We as a civilization have been broadcasting into space since 1974, so, according to this equation, even if we cease to exist as a species in 2074, there would be 10 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone.

To break these numbers down further, scientists use the Kardashev scale, which splits intelligent life into three categories. Type I civilizations are able to use all the energy available on their home planet (we are approaching this; most scientists agree that we are currently at a 0.7 on the Kardashev scale, with a full Type I being about a century off). Type II civilizations can control and channel all the energy of their host star, and Type III civilizations have access to power equivalent to that of their host galaxy.

Even before the Drake equation and the Kardashev scale, many scientists were convinced that there must be a plethora of intelligent civilizations sprinkled across the galaxy. It wasn’t until a lunchtime conversation between astrophysicists that doubt was cast upon the old theories, and the outcome of that conversation continues to challenge even contemporary mind-sets. The story goes that in 1950 Enrico Fermi and his colleagues were discussing the existence of alien life over lunch. The question that Fermi asked the table became infamous in its simplicity: “Where is everybody?” The room fell silent because, well, nobody had an answer. Originally, the question was meant to attack the idea of interstellar travel, the possibility of which Fermi wasn’t confident in. But the question remains: if there were civilizations scattered across the stars by the billions, why haven’t we heard from them? It is from these questions, the Drake equation, and the Kardashev scale that the true paradox was born. The Milky Way is about 10 billion years old and 100,000 light-years across. If aliens had spaceships that could travel at 1 percent of the speed of light, the galaxy could have already been colonized 1,000 times. Why haven’t we heard from any other life?

That very question is the Fermi paradox. It has sparked numerous explanations for the silence we’ve been experiencing. Some scientists think that the silence is the product of something they’ve coined the Great Filter, an evolutionary wall impermeable to most life. For these scientists, there are two basic possibilities regarding the Great Filter: it’s either behind us or in front of us. If it’s behind us, scientists have speculated that it may have occurred at the creation of life itself or at the jump from single-cell prokaryotes to multicell eukaryotes. Either way, it implies that we are a rare case and that communication isn’t happening because we’re one of very few, if any, survivors. If the Great Filter is ahead of us, on the other hand, then we’re not receiving communication because advanced civilizations have hit the wall and ceased to exist—implying that we too will hit that wall eventually. Other scientists have come up with other explanations for this literal radio silence. Perhaps most of the universe is colonized and communicating, but we’re stuck in a desolate area far from the action. Or maybe Type III civilizations simply don’t care about communicating with inferior life like us. If they have all the power of an entire galaxy, maybe they can’t be bothered by us and our handheld cell phones. Some scientists even think that the lack of communication might be due to the existence of a predator species of which intelligent civilizations are afraid, and thus they refrain from transmitting so as not to reveal their location. The general consensus, however, is that if there are others out there transmitting signals, we’re probably just listening wrong: we don’t have the appropriate technology or understanding of the universe to receive or decode any messages just yet.

However, there’s still a chance it’s just us. According to the Drake equation, if a civilization could live at least a century after developing transmission technology, there could be 10 civilizations in our galaxy alone. But what if they couldn’t live for 100 years after developing this technology? As we begin to develop our own transmission technology, we also develop nuclear power, advance the warming of the climate, and exhaust our food sources with overpopulation. Is it such a stretch to say that perhaps an intelligent civilization cannot live for 100 years after developing space-penetrating transmission technology? If so, we can rework the Drake equation, and the answer changes drastically. If civilizations can typically survive for only 10 years after developing this technology, then N = 1, meaning that we may be the only intelligent life in our galaxy—or even the entire universe.


https://www.britannica.com/story/the-fe ... the-aliens

The zoo hypothesis is fundamentally more Fermi Paradox conjecture. Why would our mathematical models be able to predict the behavior of a truly advanced alien civilization? :hmm: Any modified hypothesis would be limited by our knowledge of how the universe works. And what about UFOs? Why is the scientific community so afraid of PUBLICLY discussing paranormal/unidentified phenomena? Perhaps higher education should offer a 'disclosure' course, and treat this phenomena like any other scientific enigma.

I think astrobiology will eventually corroborate a peer-reviewed Panspermia theory. Can micro-organisms survive artificial space environments? Sure thing!

Astronauts Have Identified Unknown Microbes in Space For The First Time

No aliens... yet.


Wheresoe'er humans roam, there you will also find microbes. It's just a fact of life - we contaminate everything we touch.

Which means, hundreds of kilometres above the Earth, there are trillions of bacteria predicted to be living on the International Space Station.

The ability to identify these microbes right there on the station is something NASA has been working on for a while.

If we can sequence these microbes in space, it could help diagnose astronaut ailments, study how microbes survive in microgravity, and even identify extraterrestrial life - if there is any floating around up there.

Now, thanks to the Genes in Space-3 project, NASA astronauts and biochemists have done just that. They've identified microbes aboard the space station for the very first time.

These turned out to be ordinary microbes that are commonly found where humans live. But now that the technique has been shown to work in space, there's no telling what astronauts might find next.

Previously, the only way to identify microbes on the International Space Station was to send them back to Earth for testing. Microbes had been sequenced on board the ISS, but those samples had been prepared on Earth. There was no way to find something in space and genetically identify it straight away.

"We have had contamination in parts of the station where fungi was seen growing or biomaterial has been pulled out of a clogged waterline, but we have no idea what it is until the sample gets back down to the lab," Wallace said in April.

There are a lot more microbes out there in space than you may think.

We do our best to sterilise space equipment here on Earth before launch, but even the most extreme techniques can only reduce the number of microbes to 300 per square metre (compared to billions for a clean kitchen floor).

Given that microbes have demonstrated the ability to survive in the vacuum of space, having been found living outside the ISS, being able to quickly identify them will help rule out - or confirm - whether they're Earth microbes or not. (So far, all microbes found in and on the ISS have been terrestrial in origin.)

Identifying the microbes was a two-step process. First, NASA astronaut and biochemist Peggy Whitson had to collect samples and subject them to Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), a technique that amplifies a sample of DNA to create many of copies of it.

The second step was sequencing and identifying the microbes.

To do this, Whitson used petri dishes to collect samples from various surfaces around the space station. Then, she just let the samples grow for a week before transferring them into small test tubes inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox - the first time this has ever been done in space.

Weather on Earth threatened the experiment when Hurricane Harvey blocked the microbiologists from their lab at Johnson Space Center, which meant they had to find a workaround.

They ended up connecting via Wallace's personal cell phone so that she could provide support to Whitson as she sequenced the DNA using the handheld MinION sequencer.

This is the same sequencer NASA astronaut Kate Rubin used in 2016 to sequence DNA in space for the first time ever.

The data was sent down to NASA's team in Houston for analysis.

"Right away, we saw one microorganism pop up, and then a second one, and they were things that we find all the time on the space station," Wallace said.

In this case, the microbes were all ordinary, known microbes that are common where humans live and work (NASA didn't specify exactly which species they were).

But confirmation would have to wait until the samples could be returned to Earth and re-tested to make sure the results were correct.

As you already know, they were - marking the first time that PCR and DNA sequencing have both been successfully performed in microgravity as part of the same process, using equipment specially designed for that purpose.

"It was a natural collaboration to put these two pieces of technology together because individually, they're both great, but together they enable extremely powerful molecular biology applications," Wallace said.

https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-ident ... ce-station


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