Ufology/Black Budgets/ Area 51 Research Material for the FIRE'd

[Guses]

Operatives who set up their accounts years in advance, in anticipation of such an occurance. Clever of them.

TIME TRAVEL!!!!

....


This is a reference to the Show UFO hunter where this is usually evoked as the most plausible explanation for when something remains "unexplained".

[nereo]

The OP mentioned it, and everyone else I saw dismissed it, and the OP never posted again.

I take that as clear and convincing evidence of an active government program to monitor the interwebs for potential discussion of UFO-related conspiracy theories and nip them in the bud by dispatching covert operatives to deflect the conversation down philosophical rabbit holes instead.

Don't give up, OP -- the truth is out there.

It's all Obamacare's fault!!

[Vertical Mode]

The OP mentioned it, and everyone else I saw dismissed it, and the OP never posted again.

I take that as clear and convincing evidence of an active government program to monitor the interwebs for potential discussion of UFO-related conspiracy theories and nip them in the bud by dispatching covert operatives to deflect the conversation down philosophical rabbit holes instead.

Don't give up, OP -- the truth is out there.

Thanks, Mulder ;-)

I'm of the mind that the government is content to let the myth of UFO's propagate as a convenient cover story/distraction for classified aircraft they are testing, that may or may not be stealth-capable. It's also good for the local economy in Rachel, Nevada to have all the UFO folklore.

I've heard from a credible source I trust on the matter that it is safe to assume that the bleeding-edge of the U.S. Government's R&D is about 30-40 years ahead of what we know about/what is available commercially right now.

RE: the Black Budget - how large does everyone suspect this is, and how is it that gov't agencies can funnel money to it without drawing attention? Do they simply underreport gross tax revenues in the public budget data to shrink the pot?

[PathtoFIRE]

While I enjoy the banter, can we please get back to the serious matter of UFOs, and the conspiracy to keep them hidden?

Was that the conversation?  The OP mentioned it, and everyone else I saw dismissed it, and the OP never posted again. 
I didn't think there was anyone defending the idea that any aliens had ever visted Earth, let alone that there was a conspiracy to hide them.

Operatives who set up their accounts years in advance, in anticipation of such an occurance. Clever of them.

I was just surprised Tesla and free energy wasn't also mentioned in the OP's post. The topic seemed familiar to me, I seem to remember someone named freeyourchains from long ago (hence my first post way up top), and a quick search of the members list for "chains" confirms my suspicions...clearly someone set up at least 2 similar accounts years ago

[matchewed]

The OP mentioned it, and everyone else I saw dismissed it, and the OP never posted again.

I take that as clear and convincing evidence of an active government program to monitor the interwebs for potential discussion of UFO-related conspiracy theories and nip them in the bud by dispatching covert operatives to deflect the conversation down philosophical rabbit holes instead.

Don't give up, OP -- the truth is out there.

It's all Obamacare's fault!!

And yet another thing to thank Obama for.

[nereo]

I'm of the mind that the government is content to let the myth of UFO's propagate as a convenient cover story/distraction for classified aircraft they are testing, that may or may not be stealth-capable. It's also good for the local economy in Rachel, Nevada to have all the UFO folklore.

I think that's an obvious strategy.  One of the key ways to hide any covert project is to spread false information around.  If there are bunch of nutjobs willing to do this for you, why not passively support them?  Ditto for the local economy cashing in on it all.  See: Forks, Washington.

I've heard from a credible source I trust on the matter that it is safe to assume that the bleeding-edge of the U.S. Government's R&D is about 30-40 years ahead of what we know about/what is available commercially right now.

Well, yeah.  I mean, our main attack fighter is still the F-22/A, originally designed in 1982... that's 34 years ago.  We've still got hundreds of F-15s in our air force, which first flew in 1972 (44 years ago).  Components of the cutting-edge F-35 JST were being designed and tested in the 1990s.   It seems to take 30-40 years for our advanced weapons to go from design phase to active service, and then they stay in service for another 30-50 years.  So... yeah.... bleeding edge to first action, 30 years seems about right.

RE: the Black Budget - how large does everyone suspect this is, and how is it that gov't agencies can funnel money to it without drawing attention? Do they simply underreport gross tax revenues in the public budget data to shrink the pot?

I'm doubtful about the under-reporting.  My understanding was that there's just a lot of money inked to certain departments that is overly vague.  $100B for "weapons research" and things of that nature. 

[sol]

You guys are a riot.  But on the issue of interstellar travel, you're all thinking too small.

Why abandon your star to spend tens of thousands of years on an interstellar spaceship when you can just take your star with you?  You can make a low mass red dwarf out of existing solar system bodies that will burn for tens of billions of years and is relatively easy to move around.   Collide Saturn and Neptune into Jupiter and you're most of the way there already, and the collisions can destabilize the orbits and send the new star on its way to visit our neighbors.

And that's without even bothering with contained fusion.  That little trick would keep a whole moon warm enough for plenty long enough to make the trip.  I've always thought the idea that starships would look like trucks to be too simplistic.  For trips that long, we need lots of mass.  At least asteroid sized.  A real home to take with you.

And why bother to stay very warm at all?  Our fragile human bodies are well suited to life here, not there.  Much better to transfer/transform ourselves into something more durable and well suited to the journey, with the option to transform into something else upon arrival.  We just recently figured out birth control pills and now we can clone designer babies at will.  It's almost too easy.

Humanity has been around, in roughly the same shape, for tens of thousands of years already.  People had gross dirty sex, lots of women died in childbirth, everyone was a farmer, and you were lucky to see your fiftieth birthday.  Then in the past two hundred year eye blink we went from discovering electricity to putting a live video feed on a Martian robot.  Give us another thousand years and I guarantee you we'll have people on Pluto just itching to go out farther.  Give us another ten thousand and they'll be arguing over how many interstellar ships to send per year.

This is the reason people want to believe in aliens.  If intelligent life doesn't destroy itself, it is possible bordering in inevitable that it is currently exploring the universe and it seems somewhat perplexing that it is so hard to see it everywhere we look.  It should be obvious, given what we know, and the fact that it isn't suggests that intelligent life might not be as stable and long lived as we would like to believe.  Or it's really good at hiding, or we're really bad at recognizing the signs.

[G-dog]

Reasons

Oh god this is so cute! Where did you find it?

[nereo]

You guys are a riot.  But on the issue of interstellar travel, you're all thinking too small.

Why abandon your star to spend tens of thousands of years on an interstellar spaceship when you can just take your star with you?  You can make a low mass red dwarf out of existing solar system bodies that will burn for tens of billions of years and is relatively easy to move around.   Collide Saturn and Neptune into Jupiter and you're most of the way there already, and the collisions can destabilize the orbits and send the new star on its way to visit our neighbors.

And that's without even bothering with contained fusion.  That little trick would keep a whole moon warm enough for plenty long enough to make the trip.  I've always thought the idea that starships would look like trucks to be too simplistic.  For trips that long, we need lots of mass.  At least asteroid sized.  A real home to take with you.
[snip]

I applaud your larger thinking Sol.  Maybe I'm just a homebody, but I keep asking, if we (or any alien life-form) has the capabilities of colliding planets and building a low-mass red dwarf, or making a Dyson sphere, or any of these things.... why bother leaving?  yeah, yeah... 'exploration'! But wouldn't it be far easier to hook up intersteller rovers to our neural networks so that we can see/touch/hear/taste/smell foreign worlds without the long cold journey and without worrying that some sneaky home-world alien would hit you with a stick while you were bent over smelling the Keplarian roses?

...it seems somewhat perplexing that it is so hard to see it everywhere we look.  It should be obvious, given what we know, and the fact that it isn't suggests that intelligent life might not be as stable and long lived as we would like to believe.  Or it's really good at hiding, or we're really bad at recognizing the signs.

Which brings us back to the Fermi Paradox.  We probably are pretty horrible at detecting asteroid-sized space craft in intersteller space.  All of our methods for detecting planets rely on either 1) looking for stars that wobble or 2) looking for periodic 'dimming' of a star's output as the planet orbits around.  For a mega-spaceship in intersteller space, our current strategies wouldn't detect.
Alternatively, all the aliens out there have decided home is hte best place to be, perhaps occasionally hurling some remote probes around just for S&Gs.

I'd love to see some alien life, and I honestly believe we're going to see some evidence of water-bearing "M-class" worlds in the next decade or two.  Maybe SETI will pick something up, or one of our space telescopes will see a world with artificial lights (though why we assume sight would have developed the same way on another world is a whole other tangent).

[brooklynguy]

If intelligent life doesn't destroy itself

Unfortunately, if I had to guess, I'd say that's the most likely scenario for our own brand of intelligent life.  As this morning's headlines of purported thermonuclear detonation should remind us, there are countless ways it could happen, and all it takes is one.

[Vertical Mode]

The other thing I've wondered about - does anyone believe DUMB's (Deep Underground Military Bases) exist? (Beyond NORAD - isn't that buried in a mountain? Also, if anything substantial is actually happening at Area 51, it is almost certainly underground away from prying eyes) What purpose would these base(s) serve? Are they connected via tunnels, as I've seen some people suggest in the dark corners of the interwebs?

[Heywood57]

Maybe SETI will pick something up

I would be happy to be able to get a reliable OTA HD TV signal 60 miles from the transmitter.

[nereo]

The other thing I've wondered about - does anyone believe DUMB's (Deep Underground Military Bases) exist? (Beyond NORAD - isn't that buried in a mountain? Also, if anything substantial is actually happening at Area 51, it is almost certainly underground away from prying eyes) What purpose would these base(s) serve? Are they connected via tunnels, as I've seen some people suggest in the dark corners of the interwebs?

Crap Verticle Mode.... to see what you were talking about I googled "Deep+Underground+Military+Bases" and clicked on a couple of the links that came up.  Now there's a panel van outside my house and a drone circling overhead. 

But seriously - I'm sure we have quite a few bunkers carved into mountainsides, but "large subterranian cities miles under the earth".... I go back to my original line that a large group of humans are never very good at keeping a secret for very long.  Thousands of individuals keeping a secret for decades?  seems unplausable.  And dumb (ha!)

[nereo]

Maybe SETI will pick something up

I would be happy to be able to get a reliable OTA HD TV signal 60 miles from the transmitter.

See... that's the problem.  EVeryone's listening, no one's saying anything. Maybe we are a galaxy filled with species all waiting for someone else to speak up.  'Course, we're all listening for different things on different frequencies and amplitudes and time-scales. 

[sol]

The other thing I've wondered about - does anyone believe DUMB's (Deep Underground Military Bases) exist?

I do.  We built one in the Greenland ice during the cold war.  Wikipedia is your friend.  Fascinating story, full of hardship and disaster and fear.

But for other stuff?  No point in going very deep.  The best bunker buster can't reach the basement of a normal office building, and the infrastructure overhead for hvac and fire escapes is a nightmare.  So there's not really any point.

If the government wants to hide something from you, they don't need to put it underground.  We have top secret nuclear submarines parked all over the place.  The NSA has an office building in DC.  Nevada has thousands of acres of controlled land that nobody can get to.  Why put any of it underground?

[brooklynguy]

In an attempt to get my wife to understand why I spend so much time conversing with strangers on the internet, I just showed her this thread.

Curiously, it didn't work.

[arebelspy]

In an attempt to get my wife to understand why I spend so much time conversing with strangers on the internet, I just showed her this thread.

Curiously, it didn't work.

Not even the dog picture???

A cat person, huh?

Well I've got plenty of those, too. 

Or how about polar bears?

[GuitarStv]

RE: the Black Budget - how large does everyone suspect this is

Isn't there census data for this?  Or maybe you could ask someone at the NAACP?

[Leisured]

Don't give up, OP -- the truth is out there.
[/quote]

Thanks, Mulder ;-)

I'm of the mind that the government is content to let the myth of UFO's propagate as a convenient cover story/distraction for classified aircraft they are testing, that may or may not be stealth-capable. It's also good for the local economy in Rachel, Nevada to have all the UFO folklore.

I've heard from a credible source I trust on the matter that it is safe to assume that the bleeding-edge of the U.S. Government's R&D is about 30-40 years ahead of what we know about/what is available commercially right now.

RE: the Black Budget - how large does everyone suspect this is, and how is it that gov't agencies can funnel money to it without drawing attention? Do they simply underreport gross tax revenues in the public budget data to shrink the pot?
[/quote]

I understand that when large radar antennas were erected in southern England at the start of WW2, people wondered what these large installations were for. British Intelligence put out a misleading story (disinformation), that the antennas interfered with the ignition systems of German aircraft. I drove my car past these installations, and my car stalled. Don't tell everyone.

[FIRE4Science]

If you're just playing the odds there is, in all likelihood, alien life on other planets. Though they probably do not look like what we've envisioned, and I doubt any of them have reached the level of intelligence needed for interplanetary exploration. Then again, with the age of the universe, who knows.

No, odds are they have reached interplanetary exploration.  We're relatively new, as a species.

Odds they've come to earth though, is vanishingly small.  We're out in the middle of nowhere.

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest. In our perspective, it is hard to see with visible light exoplanets due to their stars masking the light of the exoplanet, but the technology is being developed better and better, and the science is making better discoveries everyday for it.

With an even better understanding to "The Structure of Light" we may be able to view exoplanets up close and personal with enough push in scientific research, discovery, and development.

Oh, btw, I love the lists and thread so far. Anyone have any great ufology research links?

[brooklynguy]

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest.

In a nutshell, that's why, in the considered opinion of some of the finest (earthling) minds pondering these questions, we shouldn't be broadcasting signals into space.  Perhaps, in doing so, we will spell our own doom.  Perhaps we already have.

[nereo]

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest.

In a nutshell, that's why, in the considered opinion of some of the finest (earthling) minds pondering these questions, we shouldn't be broadcasting signals into space.  Perhaps, in doing so, we will spell our own doom.  Perhaps we already have.

Perhaps. Our radio signals are likely to have reached about ~512 G stars by now (the number within 100 light years of Sol).  If any of those have advanced life on them, they may be launching their invasion already.  We might only have a few millennia left before they arrive. Damn.

[Glenstache]

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest.

In a nutshell, that's why, in the considered opinion of some of the finest (earthling) minds pondering these questions, we shouldn't be broadcasting signals into space.  Perhaps, in doing so, we will spell our own doom.  Perhaps we already have.

Perhaps. Our radio signals are likely to have reached about ~512 G stars by now (the number within 100 light years of Sol).  If any of those have advanced life on them, they may be launching their invasion already.  We might only have a few millennia left before they arrive. Damn.

I knew he was in science for the government, but I didn't realize Sol was an end of that particular yard stick.

[nereo]

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest.

In a nutshell, that's why, in the considered opinion of some of the finest (earthling) minds pondering these questions, we shouldn't be broadcasting signals into space.  Perhaps, in doing so, we will spell our own doom.  Perhaps we already have.

Perhaps. Our radio signals are likely to have reached about ~512 G stars by now (the number within 100 light years of Sol).  If any of those have advanced life on them, they may be launching their invasion already.  We might only have a few millennia left before they arrive. Damn.

I knew he was in science for the government, but I didn't realize Sol was an end of that particular yard stick.

Sol is certainly the center of my universe...

[Glenstache]

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest.

In a nutshell, that's why, in the considered opinion of some of the finest (earthling) minds pondering these questions, we shouldn't be broadcasting signals into space.  Perhaps, in doing so, we will spell our own doom.  Perhaps we already have.

Well, the finest minds in Hollywood say that's why we have Will Smith.

[matchewed]

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest.

In a nutshell, that's why, in the considered opinion of some of the finest (earthling) minds pondering these questions, we shouldn't be broadcasting signals into space.  Perhaps, in doing so, we will spell our own doom.  Perhaps we already have.

Well, the finest minds in Hollywood say that's why we have Will Smith.

He was just a pilot. Jeff Goldblum... now there was a hero. ;)

[Glenstache]

But all one has to do is light a beacon in the middle of nowhere capable of being seen vast distances, and you may spark an interest.

In a nutshell, that's why, in the considered opinion of some of the finest (earthling) minds pondering these questions, we shouldn't be broadcasting signals into space.  Perhaps, in doing so, we will spell our own doom.  Perhaps we already have.

Well, the finest minds in Hollywood say that's why we have Will Smith.

He was just a pilot. Jeff Goldblum... now there was a hero. ;)

So many alien movies to choose from!