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U.S. Military: UFO Investigations, Knowledge & Disclosure

Reference to above DailyMail article, for 70 years UFOs have been presented as fantasies but a lot of government and congress people have doubled down to make sure no information about UFOs gets into the hands of the public.

So what is being hidden from the public ?

What are government people afraid of ?
 
charliebrown said:
Reference to above DailyMail article, for 70 years UFOs have been presented as fantasies but a lot of government and congress people have doubled down to make sure no information about UFOs gets into the hands of the public.

So what is being hidden from the public ?

What are government people afraid of ?
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As mentioned before, it's just as likely that nothing is being hidden, because there's nothing to hide.
 
Frideswide said:
Why are they "afraid of" something?
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Potentially, they may be afraid of human nature. Of losing control. Of facing up to having to admit they (potentially) have been secretive, misleading and possibly manipulating their populations for some time, whether about ETs, or other nations having much more advanced tech, or maybe something else entirely. I don't necessarily say they have been lying or concealing stuff, but these are the things they might have been doing and what they might be afraid of. When you lie about something, how do you get to the point where you admit that you have been lying and then still have the people you've been lying to keep their trust in you?
 
CharmerKamelion said:
Potentially, they may be afraid of human nature. Of losing control. Of facing up to having to admit they (potentially) have been secretive, misleading and possibly manipulating their populations for some time, whether about ETs, or other nations having much more advanced tech, or maybe something else entirely. I don't necessarily say they have been lying or concealing stuff, but these are the things they might have been doing and what they might be afraid of. When you lie about something, how do you get to the point where you admit that you have been lying and then still have the people you've been lying to keep their trust in you?
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It's all circular. Like saying that growing rhubarb keeps the elephants out of my west of Scotland garden. The proof? No elephants so it must work.

How about the idea that "they" (unspecified) have used a public meme to keep a small part of the public occupied so they don't start getting involved in politics? or start building cabins and compunds in the woods? or campaigning of better public healthcare? or stalking people?

Saying that (not you particularly @CharmerKamelion !)

* there is something that "they" are hiding
* it's aliens!
* and the proof is that "they" are hiding it

doesn't work as reasoning :( I am trying very hard to understand all this. I've read the UFO forum twice in the last 6 months. There's some interesting stuff but this whole gubbmint conspiracy stuff...?

I just Don't Get It :dunno:
 
Frideswide said:
It's all circular. Like saying that growing rhubarb keeps the elephants out of my west of Scotland garden. The proof? No elephants so it must work.

How about the idea that "they" (unspecified) have used a public meme to keep a small part of the public occupied so they don't start getting involved in politics? or start building cabins and compunds in the woods? or campaigning of better public healthcare? or stalking people?

Saying that (not you particularly @CharmerKamelion !)

* there is something that "they" are hiding
* it's aliens!
* and the proof is that "they" are hiding it

doesn't work as reasoning :( I am trying very hard to understand all this. I've read the UFO forum twice in the last 6 months. There's some interesting stuff but this whole gubbmint conspiracy stuff...?

I just Don't Get It :dunno:
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Gubmint conspiracy has been an integral part of ufology from the start. Retired USMC major Donald Keyhoe, the patron saint of nuts and bolts ufologists, argued that the government both had a duty to investigate and was covering up the truth about saucers and it's just continued from there.

I think this all accelerated after Roswell's 'rediscovery' in the late 1970s. Not coincidentally this was a few years after Vietnam, Watergate and a more general loss of trust in government and the honourable motives of the military. In fact I've even seen Roswell described as a "cosmic Watergate" in publicity of that era.

Really the conspiracy stuff brings ufology a bit closer to other varieties of 'religious' experience: the witness, or ufologist, is given access to information of supreme importance to humanity, but is ridiculed, pursued and suppressed by the forces of temporal power. A quick glance at how Reddit is going on about 'disclosure' at present will show this (with the added thing that I'm pretty sure there are forces at work all too pleased to propagate the 'your government is lying to you' narrative through social media).
 
BS3 said:
(with the added thing that I'm pretty sure there are forces at work all too pleased to propagate the 'your government is lying to you' narrative through social media).
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Brill! the summary of where I am, that I couldn't untangle my brain enough to externalise! @BS3 :bpals:

BS3 said:
(with the added thing that I'm pretty sure there are forces at work all too pleased to propagate the 'your government is lying to you' narrative through social media)
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Yup, this too. Buying into the gubbmint thing is actually playing into the schemes of a different subgroup - something that concerns me. :(

So, if we (can) ignore much/most of the conspiracy stuff, what is the actual core, the grist that these huge and profictable mills are grinding?
 
Frideswide said:
Brill! the summary of where I am, that I couldn't untangle my brain enough to externalise! @BS3 :bpals:



Yup, this too. Buying into the gubbmint thing is actually playing into the schemes of a different subgroup - something that concerns me. :(

So, if we (can) ignore much/most of the conspiracy stuff, what is the actual core, the grist that these huge and profictable mills are grinding?
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I'm quite firmly in the Jungian camp which treats it as a modern myth, reflecting 20th century anxieties (or a 20th century version of age-old human anxieties). But myths, as David Halperin puts it, are in a sense real.

I think at the centre of it there is the Phenomenon - which is really made up of the experiences of the witnesses. These are personal, unrepeatable and unclassifiable (despite the best efforts of ufologists to classify them, or to get them to repeat). Some seem to be hallucination, some misperception, and others...well.

Then around that you have 'ufology', which is made up of sighting reports - the unknowable experience of the witness filtered through the bias of an investigator and formalised into the texts through which the myth propagates. Further around that you have the mass of people who 'want to believe' and engage with the myth in ways that satisfy them (some will go on to become witnesses themselves). This latter bit is where conspiracy comes in as people are either drawn into projecting their own anxieties onto ufology or are perhaps manipulated by governments only too happy to misdrect people away from earthly secrets, undermine their enemies, or gather information on subversives.

Either way it's certainly a bit more complicated than spacemen visiting us from Mars or Venus, as the early contactees presented it.
 
MAGNIFICENT!!!!!

I wish I'd asked before instead of just chewing it over...
 
As an example of a possible government-sponsored interference in ufology, it seems probable that the US allowed some of its high-altitude balloons to be misperceived as alien spacecraft because it was planning to fly them over the Soviet Union in order to gather information on nuclear testing (if I remember correctly).

The UFO narrative was no doubt extremely useful to the state at various times and I'm pretty sure it still is.
 
I think the problem is we want to know. We don't know what it is we want to know, and even if it isn't anything, we want to know. If they don't know, we want to know that they don't know. And the more they say they don't know, the more we want to know what it is they don't know. I don't know why anyone had a problem with that.
 
BS3 said:
Then around that you have 'ufology', which is made up of sighting reports - the unknowable experience of the witness filtered through the bias of an investigator and formalised into the texts through which the myth propagates.
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This rather reminds me of the seemingly endless debates over what constitutes 'canon' when it comes to the Jack the Ripper* case. Not only are there, similarly, those deemed - and even self-appointed - 'experts' but there are also 'outcasts' (those whose theories contrast with the ones proclaimed by gatekeepers or even keepers of the faith). But maybe such mysteries defy the standard scientific methods anyway, and to have a priesthood (effectively-speaking) in place seems like presumption on its part at best.


*I don't have a theory about who the killer(s) may have been, btw. It just bothers me that even JtR-case authors whose conclusions I completely disagree with are often dismissed by the 'pariish council' as either barely worthy of acknowledgement or suffer worse treatment not limited to condescension.
 
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CharmerKamelion said:
I think the problem is we want to know. We don't know what it is we want to know, and even if it isn't anything, we want to know. If they don't know, we want to know that they don't know. And the more they say they don't know, the more we want to know what it is they don't know. I don't know why anyone had a problem with that.
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A lot of people want to know, but seem to have already decided what the answer is.
 
BS3 said:
A lot of people want to know, but seem to have already decided what the answer is.
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True. In my book, being too sure you know what 'the answer' is, is as questionable a position as being sure what 'the answer' isn't. There are people (on here and elsewhere) who are pretty sure, one way or the other. It must be very comforting. I am keeping an open mind for now.
 
Many UFO witnesses such as Jesse Marcel senior and junior, Gordon Cooper, Lonnie Zamora, and Antonio Vilas-Boas never changed their UFO experience until they died.

I must be one in one billion because I have had more than one UFO encounter.

Rumors that can not be substantiated are that the extremely strong “ industrial-military comple. “ has been given extraterrestrial material to develop the “ultimate “ weapon.

This could be why Chuck Schumer’s UFO disclosure was ripped from the Defense Bill, and Schumer did have several congress representatives behind him for disclosure.

Supposedly in 2009 UK’s DoD claimed UFOs were not hostile and ended their UFO studies.

So does this mean that the UK’s DoD admitted UFOs are real and friendly ?
 
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CharmerKamelion said:
True. In my book, being too sure you know what 'the answer' is, is as questionable a position as being sure what 'the answer' isn't. There are people (on here and elsewhere) who are pretty sure, one way or the other. It must be very comforting. I am keeping an open mind for now.
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There are certainly people who are pretty sure after having experienced the 'Phenomenon' for themselves, though I can't say it seems like a very comforting experience to have.

In ufology itself there are or have been a wide range of models - Eric Oullet identified seven basic hypotheses;

1. The 'nil hypothesis' - (Klass, Menzel) - it's all misperception

2. The ETH - (Keyhoe, Lorenzen, these days Jerome Clark or Kevin Randle) - it's aliens

3. The 'paranormal hypothesis' (Keel, Vallee) - it's another nonhuman intelligence

4. The psychosocial hypothesis (Rogerson, Harney and the other Magonia contributors) - it's a "mass phenomenon" made of "socially shared narratives" inspired by science fiction, cinema, etc

5. What Oullet calls the "improved" psychosocial hypothesis (David Clarke, other academics) - a bit like number 4 except the witnesses themselves also have a role in creating and reinforcing the myth

6. What he calls the "sophisticated" psychosocial hypothesis (David Halperin) where numbers 4 and 5 are also joined by the psychological makeup and experience of the witness; ie you can't study a UFO 'sighting' without understanding the inner world of the person experiencing it

7. The "parapsychological" hypothesis, which integrates the previous approach but also allows for "social psi" (eg telekinesis, ESP) as a factor

I don't know if the general public necessarily thinks about it in precisely these terms but most 'believers' (or interested skeptics) will adopt elements of these.
 
BS3,

I never thought about or was interested in UFO’s until on a return trip from the grocery store on a rural road with my mom when a UFO passed over our road.

As the bright white neon light was seemingly absorbed back into the UFO, the UFO did not make the dark area any brighter.

My mother and I made a promise not tell anyone, not even my dad.
 
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BS3 said:
In ufology itself there are or have been a wide range of models - Eric Oullet identified seven basic hypotheses;
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would you consider making a poll? Just the numbers to choose from to encourage people to read the full info which is your post copied!
 
Trouble is, the hypotheses numbered 1, 4,5, and 6 are all just extensions of each other. Any particular sighting may be purely misperception (1) at first, but once the witness compares it to other people's accounts, or talks to other witnesses, or talks to any reporters or UFO/UAP investigators who may or may not have their own agenda, then 4,5,and 6 take over. Talking to other people about your memories can change them significantly; I've even had people recount other people's experiences as their own, because they could visualise them so distinctly.

So my answer would have to be 1,4,5 and 6, but not all of these apply to every sighting.
 
I don't particularly agree with Oullet's splitting the PSH into three types as I think the differences are quite small, though I think there's a bit of a gap between those PSHers who emphasise the folklore side more (eg Clarke) and those who emphasise psychology (eg Halperin). As with a lot of ufology people tend to pick the explanations that are closest to their own personal or academic interests (hence Halperin with psychology, Clarke with folklore and the likes of Gordon Creighton with batshit-insane occultism).

And personally I think the 'psychology' bit does apply to every sighting. Even the sort of 1950s military radar-visuals beloved of ETHers like Keyhoe and James McDonald. We're not just misperceiving things, we're actively projecting our own internal narratives onto them, which is perhaps why so many UFO sightings seem very particularly aimed at the witness.
 
BS3 said:
I don't particularly agree with Oullet's splitting the PSH into three types as I think the differences are quite small, though I think there's a bit of a gap between those PSHers who emphasise the folklore side more (eg Clarke) and those who emphasise psychology (eg Halperin). As with a lot of ufology people tend to pick the explanations that are closest to their own personal or academic interests (hence Halperin with psychology, Clarke with folklore and the likes of Gordon Creighton with batshit-insane occultism).

And personally I think the 'psychology' bit does apply to every sighting. Even the sort of 1950s military radar-visuals beloved of ETHers like Keyhoe and James McDonald. We're not just misperceiving things, we're actively projecting our own internal narratives onto them, which is perhaps why so many UFO sightings seem very particularly aimed at the witness.
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It's a Human condition.
 

Metallic egg-shaped UFO the size of an SUV was kept at the highly-classified Air Force base in the 1980s​


An egg-shaped metallic UFO was kept at Area 51 in the 1980s, a whistleblower claims.

Engineers at the Nevada airbase claimed the CIA found the strange craft in the desert and brought it to them for investigation – but later shipped it to another base after they were unable to get inside the object.

Eric Taber has been a defense aerospace contractor for 13 years and has held a security clearance to work on military aircraft.

In an interview, he revealed the story his late great uncle Sam Urquhart, an Area 51 contractor, told him about a UFO at the mysterious desert base.

'[His uncle, Sam Urquhart] said, 'When I first got there in 1997, I had a personal conversation with a senior EG&G engineer whose group was tasked with trying to reverse-engineer an object that was brought there by some CIA people in the 1980s.'

'It was supposedly just found in a remote desert location fully intact.

'The senior EG&G engineer described to my great uncle that it was egg-shaped, about the size of an SUV, smooth and seamless, metallic-looking, silverish gray in color, with no control surfaces, no flaps, no inlet, and no exhaust, and no writing or symbols on the outside.

'These are the best and brightest engineers you can think of. They tried to no avail to figure out what the power source was, how to activate it, and how it works. They tried to induce electricity to it.

'X-rays couldn't penetrate it; it showed up on X-ray as a solid object. They tried to open it and penetrate its hull; they couldn't.

'They said that they were able to take some very small samples of the material. And I'm not an expert in chemistry, but I guess from the isotope ratio or the mixture of elements, they concluded it was not made on Earth.' "

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...gg-shaped-UFO-1980s-whistleblower-claims.html

Double cutout (via dead uncle, from unnamed engineer):

:bs::bs:

maximus otter
 
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maximus otter said:

Metallic egg-shaped UFO the size of an SUV was kept at the highly-classified Air Force base in the 1980s​


An egg-shaped metallic UFO was kept at Area 51 in the 1980s, a whistleblower claims.

Engineers at the Nevada airbase claimed the CIA found the strange craft in the desert and brought it to them for investigation – but later shipped it to another base after they were unable to get inside the object.

Eric Taber has been a defense aerospace contractor for 13 years and has held a security clearance to work on military aircraft.

In an interview, he revealed the story his late great uncle Sam Urquhart, an Area 51 contractor, told him about a UFO at the mysterious desert base.

'[His uncle, Sam Urquhart] said, 'When I first got there in 1997, I had a personal conversation with a senior EG&G engineer whose group was tasked with trying to reverse-engineer an object that was brought there by some CIA people in the 1980s.'

'It was supposedly just found in a remote desert location fully intact.

'The senior EG&G engineer described to my great uncle that it was egg-shaped, about the size of an SUV, smooth and seamless, metallic-looking, silverish gray in color, with no control surfaces, no flaps, no inlet, and no exhaust, and no writing or symbols on the outside.

'These are the best and brightest engineers you can think of. They tried to no avail to figure out what the power source was, how to activate it, and how it works. They tried to induce electricity to it.

'X-rays couldn't penetrate it; it showed up on X-ray as a solid object. They tried to open it and penetrate its hull; they couldn't.

'They said that they were able to take some very small samples of the material. And I'm not an expert in chemistry, but I guess from the isotope ratio or the mixture of elements, they concluded it was not made on Earth.' "

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...gg-shaped-UFO-1980s-whistleblower-claims.html

Double cutout (via dead uncle, from unnamed engineer): :bs::bs:

maximus otter
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I find these stories are released to just further muddy the waters to confuse us more, or perhaps fragment serious research into the subject
 
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