Our congress is currently wasting time on hearings about UFOs, or UAPs as they’re calling them now. It mystifies me how anyone can believe the crap the UFO weirdos spew.
One of the witnesses is a guy named David Grusch, who sits there making amazing claims that he can’t back up.
David Grusch, who served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, appeared before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee alongside two former fighter pilots who had firsthand experience with UAPs.
Grusch served as a representative on two Pentagon task forces investigating UAPs until earlier this year. He told lawmakers that he was informed of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” during the course of his work examining classified programs. He said he was denied access to those programs when he requested it, and accused the military of misappropriating funds to shield these operations from congressional oversight. He later said he had interviewed officials who had direct knowledge of aircraft with “nonhuman” origins, and that so-called “biologics” were recovered from some craft.
Note: he has not seen any non-human biologics
, he has heard second hand from unnamed officials that they had seen them.
Grusch said he hasn’t personally seen any alien vehicles or alien bodies, and that his opinions are based on the accounts of over 40 witnesses he interviewed over four years in his role with the UAP task force.
“My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country — many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony,” Grusch said, adding that the trove of evidence has been intentionally kept secret from Congress.
It’s a secret, he claims. He constantly deflects when pressed by saying that he can only talk about this extremely confidential information in a SCIF, or “sensitive compartmented information facility”. Right. Why is he there if he has only hearsay to report, and can’t give any details?
The fact is that when we do get details, they’re typically evidence of noisy technology, or reflections. When pilots report that non-aerodynamic objects are flitting at thousands of miles an hour at low altitude, while completely silent, that then abruptly disappear, I think it’s safe to say they’re not chasing physical objects — they are seeing optical artifacts, or technical glitches in their electronics. I don’t find these recordings at all convincing evidence of any kind of alien, or even material, phenomena.
This, for instance, is also not any kind of evidence, except evidence for credulity in some of the people reporting this nonsense.
A 22-year-old from New York City who asked to remain anonymous — “due to stigma that still persists around the subject” — told NPR he made plans to attend “knowing that it’s something that could be a historic moment.”
From an overflow room with about 100 other enthralled spectators, he watched as Grusch, Graves and Fravor — men with long careers in the military — shared their experiences.
Out of context, he said, their stories “sound fantastical” but given the credentials of all three witnesses, he said he’s a believer.
And he wasn’t the only one.
“There was definitely a gasp and everyone was definitely a little bit shocked,” he said, “when Grusch was talking about non-human biologics.” There was a similar response when Grusch later touched on the personal retaliation he suffered, according to the man.
A dubiously reported “gasp” from a meeting of congress means nothing. No history was made.
Grusch is not a credible source.
According to UFO researcher Joe Murgia, Grusch began peddling his UFO story when he attempted to convince Skinwalker Ranch aficionados and dubious UFO weaponizers George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell to help him take it public on their podcast while he was still employed by the government. The two declined, though not before taking him to a Star Trek convention to meet with ufologists, so he turned to the credulous team of reporters connected to his friend, Lue Elizondo.
He’s part of the usual assortment of “UFO researchers” and Star Trek convention attendees, unqualified fantasists with no credentials at all. The association with Skinwalker Ranch is a nail in the coffin. Skinwalker Ranch is an old property in Utah that was bought by con artists who then ginned up an imaginary history of cattle mutilations, Bigfoot, crop circles, and poltergeists, that got turned into books and a Netflix series. It’s bullshit.
Skeptical author Robert Sheaffer believes the phenomenon at Skinwalker to be “almost certainly illusory”, given that NIDsci found no proof after several years of monitoriing, and that the previous owners of the property, who had lived there for 60 years, say that no supernatural events of any kind had happened there. Sheaffer considers the “parsimonious explanation” to be that the Sherman family invented the story “prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow”, with many of the more extraordinary claims originating solely from Terry Sherman, who worked as a caretaker after the ranch was sold to Bigelow.
In 1996, skeptic James Randi awarded Bigelow a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award for funding the purchase of the ranch and for supporting John E. Mack’s and Budd Hopkins’ investigations. The award category designated Bigelow as “the funding organization that supported the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal or occult [claim]”.
In 2023, ufologist Barry Greenwood, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, criticized the $22 million research program led by James Lacatski. He emphasized the lack of any documentary evidence from the ranch after many decades of exploration and characterized Skinwalker as “always in the business of selling belief and hope”.
I tried watching the series. It’s ridiculous. Ten episodes of silly people making up stories about pixels, dead cows, and people in cowboy hats walking around in the sagebrush and complaining about bad cell phone reception. And this is the culture that is spawning these hearings? Nonsense. This is a clear example of the combination of grifting and cultural contagion.
You don’t believe me? Here’s a map of UFO sightings.
Notice anything unusual in the distribution? UFOs seem to be an odd confabulation fueled by English-language media. Yet Chuck Schumer and other congressional biologics found it necessary to stuff these hearing requirements into a defense budget bill. There’s nothing there.
But sure, wheel a gurney bearing the dead body of an alien into the hearing room, and I’ll pay attention…but that won’t happen.
Why wait for a dead one? Yesterday Mitch McConnell’s true form started to reassert itself again. In a few days I expect there will be all the tentacles and pseudopods you could want.
Meh. The saucer people give more attention to anglo-saxons because of their superiority (sark).
An embarassing detail : Scandinavia is not totally devoid of “sightings”.
And what the hell is wrong with Holland and Belgiu… (legal cannabis)…oh.
Wouldn’t “non-human biologics” describe any living thing on this planet that isn’t human? Like for example house plants or moldy cheese?
Just call them NBEs:
https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Non-Biological_Extraterrestrial
Honestly? I can believe there’s intelligent life out there. The surest sign is that it has never revealed itself to a planet infested with humans.
What is the source for the sightings map graphic? I want to use it agitate the rubes.
Ray Ceeya@3–
And, literally, horse shit.
Well clearly the aliens visit the English speaking part of the world because they also speak English, like all TV shows tell us, and as God intended.
But what is bothering me is why isn’t Australia glowing?
I think the only logical explanation is that Australians are not reporting UFO sightings because they ARE aliens!
/snark (do I really need to point that out?)
Remember the highly mediocre and shortly lived TV show, “Project UFO” (Edward Winter, Col. Flagg from MASH)?
I’ll bet the clowns today view that show (and The X-Files) as documentaries.
Just a reminder that Michael Flynn is a former US army general.
Ooooh, biologics! Hey, that sounds like something that could actually be studied, unlike sensor glitches and artifacts. Produce the evidence, baby!
If there were solid evidence, the fighter mafia AF generals would have been in front of Congress lobbying for money to buy F-127 Pteranodon orbital interceptors, while the admirals would be arguing that Halsey-class deep-space carriers would be much more cost-effective.
fusilier
James 2:24
There is proof aliens are here on earth. They have taken over the mind of Donal Trump and his MAGA followers. There is no other logical rationale for what is happening with them.
I know this isn’t true.
All the UFO aliens I know laughed when they heard this.
Their aircraft and spacecraft virtually never crash. They’ve been making and flying them for thousands of years and have worked out all the bugs. They don’t have anything like Elon Musk on their manufacturing staff.
Think about it.
These vehicles are made by people (well sort of like people anyway) who came here in advanced interstellar capable space ships. That isn’t trivial.
Sigh, no. Just no.
The UFO aliens are as concerned with treating their dead bodies with respect as we are. No wonder they don’t hang around with us very often.
Who wants to risk getting caught by graverobbers or have their dead friends, mothers, fathers, or fission-parents end up on TV for no good reason.
Grusch is a loon, pure and simple. He’s made a whole bunch of other UFO claims that he didn’t get to in the Congressional hearing. At one point in an interview with New York Magazine’s Intelligencer he claimed that UFOs were not extraterrestrial so much as extra-dimensional. He also claimed that Mussolini’s government shot one down in 1933, covered it up right through WWII, and Pope Pius XII leaked the info about it to the US. He’s also claimed that the government has had people killed as part of the coverup. But with all this, as is typical with both conspiracy theorists and grifters, he declines to provide details that could in any way substantiate anything. The conspiracy theory insanity around this guy just gets thicker and thicker every time he opens his mouth. Why a Congressional committee is wasting time on him is the real mystery here.
@3: also, the seagull that got caught in their helicopter rotor.
Curious topic whilst two Commanders in Chief :Carter and Reagan claimed to have seen UFO’s So no cover up there.
Again Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, who once had his fingers on The Strike Button, in his memoirs (1997) claimed to have met an extraterrestrial creature named Janus whilst working at Buckingham Palace in the 1950’s.
As has been said since Hume, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence-none is ever offered.
Which party controls the House? Do you think they are going to get reelected by appealing to reasonable, rational people?
From PZ’s link:
What’s the betting that Grusch was completely useless andor already a UFO-nut, and so when this “Task Force” and analyst position were forced on serious organisations, he volunteered/was volunteered for them?
It is not aliens. It is literally demons.
https://youtu.be/llUWbX4M618
Reginald Selkirk@17,
It’s reported of Adlai Stevenson that when he was running for the Democrats against Eisenhower, a woman assured him that “All the intelligent people are behind you, Mr. Stevenson”, and he replied along the lines of: “Thank you, Madam, but I need a majority!”. Even if apocryphal, it could illuminate his failure to become POTUS.
In addition to a security clearance, such “investigators” should pass a test in grammar.
I bet in the chain of hearsay, someone said: I thought I saw something biological that I couldn’t recognize as human, and this turned into to vaunted money quote of “being” non-human. Hearsay is weak for obvious reasons, but it is ALSO as weak as the weakest grammar and listening skills of anyone in the hearsay chain. Ridiculous.
benedic@16,
Janus is famously two-faced, so it was probably just a politician or member of the royal family.
If the biological stuff has the ability to replace the dead cells on the surface with silica -like an organism in a famous film- I will sit up and take notice. Otherwise ZZZZzzzz.
Here’s a bit of a different and real perspective.
An UFO is barely sighted and detected(ish) on radar. It came from the direction commonly used by an adversary nation. It crashes and ground reports show a craft or technological device of some kind, obviously of earthly origin, but not a known aircraft. Its appearance is consistent with low quality imagery of a new device that the adversary nation has developed. Do you call a a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to retrieve it and figure out why radar was having a tough time with it, as well as how it works and what it does? Get a shovel and bury it? Try to cook marshmallows over it?
The space shuttle Columbia disasterously experienced a RUD event upon reentry. Guess what was found in the debris field? Non-human biologicals, including one experiment that remained intact and contained viable specimens. Obviously, it was space aliens, not a literal can of worms.
Hint: It was a sealed experiment that contained worms. It should be comforting to learn that the worms experienced only minor bruising and absolutely no fractures.
Hey, truth can be far more humorous than fiction and every bit of the above is entirely true.
And regardless of clearance, if one has no need to know something about a project, report or program, one will and should be denied access to its information. Had that idiot in need of a village sought access to my Information Assurance reports on my network, I’d deny him access. I’d be far more amenable to an FOIA request.
Which I denied out of hand for certain reports, as they fully described my network and the request was for entirely unredacted information. Had the request allowed for redacted information, there’d be no reason to deny the request and I’d have granted it. The requestor would’ve then been bored to tears.
I certainly can believe that there’s intelligent extraterrestrial life out there. The data seem to indicate that it’s nearly a sure thing.
What troubles me about these claims are the numerous crashes that are purported to have happened. As an electrical engineer, I have a hard time believing that extraterrestrials could design and build craft that can successfully cover interstellar distances of many light years* avoiding all of the associated hazards, and those craft can climb, dive, turn, accelerate and decelerate at what we consider to be impossible rates, and yet, when they get here, they crash. Not just once, but repeatedly. What is happening here? Are we seeing the equivalent of extraterrestrial teenagers stealing dad’s car for a joy-ride, and then winding up stranded in the middle of a field on the outskirts of town? “Hey Joey! Bransklerg found the keys to his dad’s Space Venture 2000, and we’re all going on a ride to Earth! Grab some beers and bring your jacket!”
*Meanwhile, the best we’ve managed is a few light-hours.
Tabby Lavalamp@9 Yeah, I’m seeing our old friend Argument From Authority in comments around these hearings. “Look, he has a security clearance!” The reality is that all a security clearance is proof of is that you somehow managed to pass the vetting to get a security clearance. And that you hung on to it. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen both had high security clearances when they sold intelligence data to the Russians. Ames managed to retain his security clearance for years despite often mediocre performance of his duties and it being an open secret amongst his CIA colleagues he had a drinking problem. The fact he lived in a fashion beyond what he should have been able to on a CIA salary should also have been a clue, but that wasn’t noticed until it was too late.
Similarly being a high government official isn’t proof of anything other than that you convinced the right people to let you keep your job. The US intelligence agencies and military have wasted lots of money on nonsense like remote viewing, and dead end technological ideas like nuclear powered airplanes.
Light hours,! there’s a website that gives the propositionally correct distances between the sun and the planets . It lets you travel at proportional light speed too. I was fascinated at how large the solar system is compared to how large we think it is.
First, education. I couldn’t find a decent biography on Grusch, but what I did find indicates he is a high school grad. Also, Congress, in general, is scientifically illiterate or to be generous very weak. Even Jamie Raskin who I think is a smart and precise guy fumbled around when questioning these witnesses on a topic I thought was low and easy fruit to pick, slice, dice and puree. So, we had the idiots leading the ignorant. A circus of TV little green men gullibility.
Second, the basics. I’ll just say it: I believe it’s stupid to send biology into space. All hail Optimus Prime! The committee should have burst out laughing at the phrase “non-human biologics.” I did! WTF? And, didn’t one of the doofus witnesses say something about “defying what we know about physics?” OMG, calling Spielberg!
Third, psychology and history. At the risk of channeling Hari Seldon, I’ve always been intrigued by the plaque on Voyager. There’s an arrow pointing to the third circle from the big circle. What does that mean to a being that has no history of “arrows” or perhaps pointing, or circles or even measurement? The whole construction is so anthropological; it makes sense to us, but what of a being that has no such evolutionary or social history?
Journalism graduate and non-scientist Nancy Mace asked if they “found the pilot.” This really epitomized to me the provincial thinking of the entire committee: spacecraft, pilot, wings, propulsion. Why? Why any of that? My opinion is that the perceptions of these non-scientists is bound by what they have seen on TV and in the movies, from My Favorite Martian to Mr. Worf.
Finally, lunacy: why can’t Grusch who is a private citizen full of second and third-hand gossip not talk about his bullshit except in a SCIF? Lunacy. The entire hearing was an embarrassment to any intellectual tradition and was just another indication of the decline and fall of the American empire. I think even Louie Gohmert would have been embarrassed!
The website is on joshworth (dot) com . The page is titled If The Moon Were Only A Pixel. You can skip between the planets by pressing their symbols at the top ( Jupiter looks like 24) and travel at light speed by pressing that “c” at the bottom right.
Oh, found the non-human biologicals found. Caenorhabditis elegans.
Some, definitely alien, as they’re not born citizens, all that being born in space and other political conspiracy theories about birthrights and all… ;)
They survived the breakup of the spacecraft and crashing to earth without a single fracture, but loads of sprains.
Yeah, muscle wasting was present in the worms, just as it was in the humans. Microgravity seems to give problems to all complex earth life, why, it’s almost as if that life evolved inside of a modest gravity well.
Well, I spent my whole post-college working life with a security clearance — US Army 98GL (1), and after leaving the Army I was a GS-0025 (2). And I have, personally, seen UFOs. I have seen flashes of light in the sky that moved at incredible speed.(3) I have seen heavier than air machines flying in the sky at amazing speeds that I was unable to identify.(4) I have seen small, zippy flying objects which I have been unable to identify.(5) I have seen unidentified non-human feathered biologics flying and even hovering.(6) Can I testify before the idiots?
And this idiot’s (the ‘Intelligence’ officer, not the congressmen of the Gullible Old Putrescence) testimony sounds like he kept showing up in offices and kept asking stupid off the record questions until the pilots (and others) finally started to feed him bullshit (possibly sharing stories with each other to keep the lies consistent). Because if any of these Air Force officers had actually shared real information, they would have been in violation of almost as many security laws and regulations as Trump.
(1) okay, I blew my knee out in training, but I still went through the security process
(2) okay, a GS-0025 is a Park Ranger and my security clearance was the minimum I needed to deal with PII and federal monies
(3) okay, I know they were meteors, but I don’t actually know if they were metallic or rocky meteors so they were unidentified
(4) okay, they were unidentified until I pulled out my recent copy of Janes
(5) okay, I know they were drones, but I have no idea the model or manufacturer, so they were unidentified
(6) okay, the bird identification books helped, but, still, they were unidentified
Why wait for a dead one? Yesterday Mitch McConnell’s true form started to reassert itself again…
Nope — Turtlefascia is a terrestrial species. And (hopefully) cats will be a starfaring species before that lot ever manage it.
A dubiously reported “gasp” from a meeting of congress means nothing. No history was made.
Khrushchev managed to get “TIMULT IN THE HALL” several times, without mentioning aliens. If all this clown could elicit was “gasp,” he ain’t got shit.
And is this guy gonna blow a big secret, or is he not? Either trot out what you have and face the music, like Ed Snowden and Julian Assange did, or just STFU and stop pretending you have anything worth exposing.
Also, if he’s testifying about all this before the CONGRESS, shouldn’t he have included a specific proposal/request to declassify all the relevant evidence he’s claiming is still kept top secret?
If there were solid evidence, the fighter mafia AF generals would have been in front of Congress lobbying for money to buy F-127 Pteranodon orbital interceptors…
If there were solid evidence, the US military response would have grown too big to keep secret a LONG time ago. And of course other nations would have followed suit, starting with the USSR and China, and hopefully Japan as well.
Aliens are here and they have taken over in the form of non-human biologics – otherwise known as cats.
seversky:
I thought cats were an indigenous species which nominally domesticated humans and bred them until humans reached a high enough technology to invent the internet. For cats.
Also, yeah, the idea that a STARFARING species could make it all the way to Earth, only to start crashing everywhere once they got here, is also pure bullshit. Even if there were good reasons for them to have such accidents, mistakes or malfunctions, they would also have protocols to clean everything up before the natives showed up, leaving nothing for us to “reverse engineer.”
@28: ALL HAIL OPTIMUS PRIME!
Seriously, if an Autobot showed up on this backwater planet, I would beg for asylum so I could emigrate to Cybertron. And I would take my husband with me. 😁
There are many (including a message in a video we produced) that are certain that IF there were intelligent space faring races, they would have carefully observed earth and put a Warning out to avoid it because of the irrational, self-destructive, murderous life form that controls the planet. (Byrds song playing in my head: ‘hey, mr. spaceman won’t you please take me along, I won’t do anything wrong’
“…alongside two former fighter pilots who had firsthand experience with UAPs.”
This reminds me of an article I saw in a newspaper years ago, announcing the annual national UFO convention. The spokesman said, “There will be no kooks at this year’s convention; only scientists and people who have actually been abducted by UFOs.”
We have captured non-human biologics and are preserving them in under refrigeration. Bigfoot gave us the original culture to propagate. They now come in low-fat, regular, strawberry and blueberry flavor. Yogurt, anyone? Seriously, with all the alleged advanced technology for tracking, identifying and documenting objects in flight all they can produce are a bunch of fuzzy images and a lot of highly excited radio voices. That isn’t any better than the grainy 8mm films of ‘ufos’ the 1950’s. (Hey, Roy, throw the hubcap a little higher, I didn’t get a good shot)
Oggie: Mathom @ 31, well PII and public funds is a fair PIA to manage and requires a Public Trust clearance.
Every meteor I’ve ever saw is metallic. Astronomers consider anything not helium or hydrogen a metal. But seriously, I did see a really cool green meteor once, blew overhead over NE Philly, pretty sure it was well out to sea by the time it poofed apart.
I’ve saw flying craft that are decidedly still not in Janes. Some, discontinued, some still classified as seriously boring or something, had they existed.
Many were indeed drones.
Birds aren’t real!
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/technology/birds-arent-real-gen-z-misinformation.html
Ignoring the turds raining from the sky at times. Birds aren’t real, but turds decidedly are.
We really do need to address the earth swerving into oncoming spacecraft and brake checking them. Seriously! I mean, I’m full up here with Mork and Alf. But, at least I got rid of Martin and Stupidman has his own place in DC.
shermanj @ 37, don’t be silly. No need for a warning, as the Culture already has earth in the control group. Nobody’s stupid enough to fuck with the Culture.
@ 39, I’m having some non-human biologics as the guest of honor tonight.
Swai (aka Vietnamese catfish (OK, a relative of the catfish)) and some steamed veggies, with some home fried potatoes. Note none are human. I usually only serve Soylent Green on Saturdays.
Ah, but you don’t understandf the cats cunning plan. Most people tend not to like being invaded which compels the invaders to deploy substantial forces to keep the resentful subject population in line.
What cats did was to inveigle their way into our homes, lives and affections such that, for the most part, we welcome their presence and will willingly go to almost any lengths to provide for their every need. It’s brilliant!
wzrd1 @40
Yeah. I kept getting surprised looks when they saw my clearance history and saw that I had a Top Secret clearance back in 1990.
Okay, I should have written FeNi asteroids or non-metallic mineral matter (which will still be made up of metals, but in non-metallic (geologically speaking) minerals).
Hell, I have created a flying object that was never in Janes. Some of my model aircraft, back in high school got interesting — an 8 engine B-17, or a B-25 with pusher engines and gun pods on the front of the nacelle, for instance.
When I had my old gray Elantra, I cleaned bird poop off my car about once a week. Now that I have a nice shiny bright blue car, they poop on it daily. Birds do exist. To torment me. No other reason.
(You realize that the side conversation we are developing makes far more sense than what this idiot told the idiots in Congress, right? Fuckin idiots.
seversky, our hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. Well, except for origin. But given the cladistic nesting (wait, cats nest?) I think my hypothesis is more parsimoniouser than yours.
David Grusch, such a rube.
This is getting ridicolous. I’d LOVE LOVE LOVE to see definite proof of alien visitations, but if that is all there is… oy.
This Grusch fella is obviously mentally disturbed, and it says a lot that Congress is actually listening to him, rather than leading him away gently while calling an ambulance. And it says even more that he was working for one of the intelligence agencies for 14 years running. Oy again. Hopefully he didn’t have big responsibilities.
Also, the matter of restitutions would arise: Italy for instance is going to demand the return of the “bell-shaped vehicle” which purportedly landed in ’33, was hidden by the fascists and then plundered by the US army during ’45 (alright, they were liberating, but stealing aliens is pilferating).
I’m kinda curious to see how this going to end, but it’s all going to fade away quietly as usual, as soon as the next distraction appears. And so yet again we’ll get no aliens. Oy the third.
You think it’s safe to say? Come on, PZ, you’re an obscure biologist working at a small college in the Midwest, not a highly trained naval aviator. I’ve been following your blog for years, but sometimes I get annoyed at the certitude I hear from you and your followers about subjects you have zero knowledge of. When you talk DNA, evolution, creationism, and the like I’m with you. But here I have to part ways. Those Navy pilots are not some rookies with learners’ permits. If they say those are physical objects exhibiting unusual flight characteristics, then that’s what they are. We depend on those pilots to be able to ID friend from foe. If their equipment is that faulty then that’s a real problem. To date I’ve not heard anyone in a position of responsibility say that pilots flying hundred million dollar aircraft are misreading their screens to such an extent.
Those objects don’t “abruptly disappear.” It’s a big story where I live in SE Virginia. Oceania Naval Air Station is just downriver. Those ‘nonexistent’ objects do loops around our jets. They practically play tag with them. The pilots say they are being engaged. That’s one step away from asking for permission to fire on them.
You picked the ESRI sightings map off of Twitter (I thought you hated Twitter) out of all the other possible maps because it supports your preconceptions. There are other sightings maps online for India, South America, and Asia that show a much denser clustering than this America centric map does. If you were to take the time you’d quickly find that UFO sightings have a pretty even worldwide distribution. They are not restricted to the English speaking world. As a matter of fact, Mexico has more sightings than the USA, but Mexico is black on this map. I’d love to know where ESRI got its data.
The other thing that bugs me is the vitriol you and others heap on anyone who has the temerity to suggest that off-world craft are visiting earth. You’all instantly pull out the ridicule gun. You come down hard with the smugness of a high priest protecting his cloistered worldview. You label anyone who differs with you as a loon, nut, tinfoil hat wearer, ad nauseam. You say you want to see evidence, but you don’t, not really. Here is possible evidence, but you scoff and dismiss it out of hand. This is the scientific method? You should be saying let’s examine this further to see if there’s anything to it. But, no, you go back to counting your spiders.
In short, I think you are wrong. I know it is near sacrilege to disagree you here. I’ve seen how your readers gleefully pile on the odd man out. It becomes a team sport. There’s no place for dissent here. I tend to keep my head down during the feeding frenzies and refuse to join in the stone throwing.
I know I’ve made myself a big, fat, easy target. So, go on, heap all the vitriol you want on me. I know I’m in the right and you are the ones who are wrong on this topic. Ban me if you must. For I have done the most intolerable thing – I’ve committed the high crime of disagreement.
R. L. Foster
I am sure it makes you feel safer trusting the highly trained pilots judgement and trusting that their instruments don’t produce what the medical folk call incidentalomas, which is nice. And I am sure it is a big story round your way, but none of that is evidence anything is actually happening. So no vitriol, just a gentle poking of fun at your lack of scepticism.
“their stories “sound fantastical” but given the credentials of all three witnesses, he said he’s a believer.”
Odd how expertise or “authority” is only believed when it is spouting nonsense.
I disagree.
PS https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/11/i-study-ufos-and-i-dont-believe-the-alien-hype-heres-why
Hey, RL, maybe we should equip pilots with an iPhone so they can get a decent picture!
R. L. Foster @ 47, those pilots don’t identify anything by eye, IFF is done by radar interrogating the other aircraft’s systems, if it’s friendly, it squawks back with the proper friendly code, if not, it won’t send the proper code and it’s flagged as non-friendly or civilian. The only visual determination being, is it a civilian aircraft or military aircraft.
Meanwhile, I can think of 10 cases that were confirmed of those supremely trained, highly experienced pilots chasing reflections off their windscreen of the cockpit, with extreme, “physics breaking maneuvering” going on because it was just a reflection of a planet or satellite off of their windscreen. In other cases, confirmed that they were chasing satellites – to include the ISS. Of course the damned things pulled away, given the ISS is cooking along around 28,000 km/h.
Still, let’s say, just for shits and giggles, ALF is popping by in the family flying tea cup. For reasons imponderable, ALF decides to not only buzz earth, but to buzz military bases and aircraft, then dash off into the sunset. Traveled likely light centuries or more, just to come to a place where the people can barely survive visiting their moon.
ALF then manages, after navigating all of the hazards of deep space and greater dangers of interplanetary space, buzzes military bases and aircraft with phenomenal skill, to finally break off and leave – then promptly crash.
Or, the nudge kept nudging away for shit he wasn’t allowed to access, such as programs to recover adversary (and even some friendly) new and/or experimental aircraft, to include drones and balloons and in sheer disgust, they fed him bullshit, which he then ran with.
Given that if anyone answered his questions, they’d end up under the supermax, yeah, option B. B for bullshit.
A few years ago, I was with a group of friends and we were mystified as to just what was flashing in the sky overhead. It was basically hovering, but flashing impossibly high – far too high appearing to be a helicopter.
So, I dug out my camera, which is one of those “megazoom” models, 12 power zoom in optical, +4 in digital mode on top of that. Braced against a building, I zoomed away to find… A mylar party balloon tumbling in the wind a few thousand feet up.
We have aerostats that hover over the battlefield, one model for communications, another for surveillance and targeting. We have high altitude aircraft to get photographic data, when clouds prevent satellites from seeing what we want to see. Publicized is the still flying U-2, the SR-71 being retired. We don’t retire something with extremely useful capabilities without a replacement. But, nothing has been declassified that approaches the gap between the U-2 and SR-71 and the U-2 has been flying since 1955.
Nope, gotta be space aliens buzzing the military, because experimental military aircraft most certainly wouldn’t operate near military bases, no, they fly out of major airports because they’re top secret and nobody would see them at a major airport – hand wave.
And guess what shines like new coinage in FLIR? Satellites. They have to reflect the IR, otherwise they’d bake in the sun while orbiting.
And here are some orbiting chicklets.
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/understanding-the-odd-shapes-and-sizes-of-satellites
Oh, here’s another delight, a chicklet that’s holding ALF’s ride.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_wind_turbine#/media/File:Kiwee_One.jpg
So.
Aliens.
Out there? Yes. Statistically, we can’t be the only planet with some kind of allegedly-intelligent life on it.
Here? Not unless they are extremely lost road-trippers looking to live through a horror movie.
R.L.Foster@47,
Your faith is touching, but unjustified. There’s no such thing as a reliable observer, however trained.
Yes, I for one do want to see good evidence – not blurry images on radar screens, but physical objects such as Grusch claims exist, or at least high-quality video or photos from multiple independent sources. The thing is, such reports have been around for decades (millennia if you count earlier reports of angels, demons, flying chariots etc.), and yet there is still not one convincing photo or video, or scrap of physical stuff that supports the existence of UFOs (I say “UFO’s” not “UAPs” because your claim is precisely that these are flying objects). Why not?
Yeah, yeah. This sort of pre-emptive whining (you somehow missed calling Pharyngula an echo chamber – very careless of you!) is really rather contemptible. Express your opinion and take what comes, as many of us have (in my case over Covid origins and GMOs, to mention two topics where both PZ and the majority disagree with me).
I recall YouTube’s Edward Current taking on two of the purported UAP’s shown in the video:
“Gimbal”
https://youtu.be/rGzJ9dx3n4o
“Go Fast”
https://youtu.be/-3NYowlCoDcg
;-)
antaresrichard @56 Yeah, I’ve watched those and other videos. Extraordinary claims debunked with very ordinary software and brains. Which is more likely? And why are these hyper-confident pilots not able to let go over their per-conceptions? (That second one is sort of a rhetorical question.)
Look! Up in the sky!
I’d a bird!
It’s a plane!
Yeah, it’s a plane.
Yawn.
@16. benedic : “Again Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, who once had his fingers on The Strike Button, in his memoirs (1997) claimed to have met an extraterrestrial creature named Janus whilst working at Buckingham Palace in the 1950’s.”
Given Janus is a moonof the butterscotch ringed gas giant :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(moon)
I’m guessing Janus was from our Saturn system? Or a referenc eto the double faced Roman god as noted by #22.KG.
@29. brightmoon :
There’s a link here too from when PZ covered this back in 2014 :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/03/05/space-travel-is-boring/
Ever seen Josh Gates’s ExpeditionX series :
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11774420/
That Skinwalker one sounds worse than that. The Expedition X one at least has a skeptic repreresented and some genuinely entertaining and informative parts even if it too is very woo with cryptids, aliens, ghosts, etc .. Seen a few eps personally and find it entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking and genuinely creepy at times.
.* First read that as Skywalker Ranch i.e. Lucas base of Star Wars etc.. fame.
@47. R. L. Foster : I’m open to the evidence and would love it if some that met the Sagan Standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard) would turn up in this area. I’m certain there’s a lot we still don’t know and a lot of puzzling sightings of things but that doesn’t make flying saucers of the Roswell mythology variety real. A lot of blurry pictures and hearsay without corroborating evidence for a very long time in this area leaves me unconvinced. There’s just insufficient evidence and has been insufficient evidence for a very long time now. If that changes, well, it would be awesome.
Oh & people do disagree with PZ at times here and survive fine.
FWIW : Mano Singham has this post on this issue here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2023/07/29/extra-terrestrials-are-obviously-english-speakers/
Does no one remember William Cooper, author of “Behold a Pale Horse”? Bill also served (Navy) and claimed military intelligence work. He saw his first UFO while serving on the USS Tiru but was “ordered” to shut up about it hey once by his superiors. That got him started down the conspiracy trail. “Pale Horse,” his magnum opus, encompasses the Illuminati, aliens and abductions, the Kennedy assassination, the world government conspiracy, and the need for citizen militias. An immensely popular book back when I worked at a Waldenbooks (probably driven out of business by a world government-alien conspiracy for selling so many copies). In other words, Grusch is just a copycat.
@ ^ Daniel Storms :never heard of him, before. Lessee (wikis) :
&
Holy Crank Magnestism Batman!
Plus
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_William_Cooper
Sounds like a dangerous & utterly deluded Conspiracy nutter. If his book was really popular which I doubt then that’s rather disturbing.
Do you think William Cooper was actually right about any of that utter nonsense Daniel Storms?
@34: Apparently, cats domesticated themselves. Twice. Once in the Fertile Cresent and again in China. Seriously.
@54: I always thought that aliens went through our solar system and locked their doors. “Nah, Glorgnak, we don’t want to stop here. Earth is a bad part of the galaxy and those humans are unpredictable and illogical…”
@StevoR
If you never heard of Cooper, how can you doubt that his book was popular, i.e., you don’t know the first thing about him so how can you assert that? I can assure you, his book sold briskly in the early ’90s and his radio show rivaled Art Bell in both wackiness and popularity (but then, you probably don’t know who Art Bell is, either). And no, I don’t subscribe to any of Cooper’s delusions, but many (too many) people do. And my point, in case you missed it, was that this latest UFO brouhaha is nothing new, nor is the conspiracy theories around it.
Daniel, StevoR explicitly said he’d gone to Wikipedia to have a look; clearly, it was not a sufficient perusal to make a determination as to whether the book is recorded as being successful. That’s on him, for sure. A few more clicks, that doubt would have been assuaged and no need to express it.
Your main point stands.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_investigations_of_UFOs_by_governments
—
The imminent reveal has been pending since I was but a beardless youth, but it never seems any closer after several decades. And, by then, Roswell was way back in the past already.
The remarkable thing is that anyone in Congress in the USA actually believes this fluff. If anyone could find out, it would be they, yet…
Obs, soundness of judgement is not a criterion relevant to that exalted position.
@65. Daniel Storms :
Okay, I doubted it’s popularity because it sounds like a terrible book of obviously erroneous conspiracies all mashed up together that I wouldn’t epect to be popular based on the description of its content. Seems I’m wrong which I find depressing in this case. No, I hadn’t heard of Art Bell either. Presumably :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Bell
Okay, fair enough. Thanks for that.
The BBC World This Weekend today aired a ludicrously credulous interview with some journalist who has written an article on Grusch and other UFOnauts for the NYT, without a single mention of Grusch’s history of association with cranks and frauds.
What’s supremely laughable is how many reference the Roswell crash, both sides claiming secrecy that’s long gone. The Air Force declassified the Roswell balloon ages ago. The payload built from state of the art classified components, such as the then brand new honeycomb aluminum panels. All, to monitor the sound profile of Soviet nuclear weapons testing, as well as collecting samples of fallout from the tests.
I guess those Soviet thermonuclear weapons were extraterrestrial flying unicorn farts.
And the raft of sightings, right around when the A-12 first was entering flight testing, later with the SR-71 joining it.
There were no aliens at Skunkworks. NACA, then later NASA got all of them from Germany right after the war.
I have observed flying saucers. Both flying directly toward civilians and in a general direction of an unoccupied area of land for a dog to catch and retrieve. A popular brand being Frisbee.
Are we sure the non-English speaking people aren’t punking the English-speaking people?
The other thing that bugs me is the vitriol you and others heap on anyone who has the temerity to suggest that off-world craft are visiting earth. You’all instantly pull out the ridicule gun.
Have you heard ANY of the claims of alien visitations that we’ve been hearing since grade-school? Von Daniken? “Ancient Aliens?” So you really believe none of those stories are ridiculous? Even someone who considers alien visitors to Earth to be possible (like me), finds all these claims ridiculous, and some of them have been proven FALSE to boot.
And yes, plenty of qualified scientists have debunked at least 90% of all UFO claims, and found perfectly mundane explanations for all of them, from reflections to weather phenomena to sun-dogs to whatever else. Just because USAF pilots are well-trained to fly their aircraft and read their instruments, doesn’t mean they also know about all the weird weather, optical and other quirks that might fool their eyes; nor does it mean their eyes will agree with their instrument readings.
@ ^ Raging Bee : In fairness here, just because something sounds ridiculuous doesn’t mean it didn’t happen – although some famous cases e.g. Roswell have been pretty well debunked and shown to NOT have happened or at least not happened as the UFologist stories say.
Also just because a lot of cases sounds ridiculous and are faked doesn’t mean they all are.
But yeah.
What does matter – for me anyhow – is how thin the actual evidence for UFO’s / UAP’s being space aliens in “flying sauces” is despite the huge amounts of time and effort spent investigating them. A whole field of psuedoscience that I must admit I find intriguing, entertaining and thought-provoking but so far hasn’t delivered anything of sufficient substance to prove the claims. See :
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufology
@47. R. L. Foster :
As the wikipage linked above among other things – including the Congressional hearings here – indicate, these things are being investigated and they haven’t found anything sufficiently compelling to show they are alien spacecraft.
“Here is possible evidence” you say but you’ve cited as this :
Which is eyewitness testimony which is notoriously unreliable. We know that human eyes and minds can easily be fooled.
Plus the blurry pics which, okay, it certainly looks like something’s there but exactly what that something is seems very unclear. I think it does deserves investigation, I’m puzzled and intrigued by this but my personal verdict here is there simply isn’t yet enough extraordinary evidnece to prove the extraordinary claism that are being made. In short we dont know Hopefully we will one day find out.
Also for the record, no, I don’t think you’re a “loon or nut, tinfoil hat wearer” etc.. I’m not going to heap vitriol on you or insult you and I have myself been known to disagree with PZ and others here yet am still here.
Given that we know, for a certain fact, that the US military have straight-up lied about this topic in the past in order to cover up classified activities, why are we taking anything they have to say on the subject as gospel now? Indeed, that the military lies about this stuff is the only definite, indisputable fact we have to work with here.
My usual assumption whenever anybody in the US military or intelligence services starts talking about UFOs is that they’re just throwing out more chaff to cover up some new secret project.
As soon as you accept that you absolutely can’t rely on these people to tell you the truth, and in fact everything they have to say on the subject is almost certainly straight-up lies, the whole issue becomes very straight-forward.
Deja vu from a few months ago, okay, 5 months ago with Congress & UFO’s & “skytrash” discussed by Stephen Colbert here – 12 mins approx long & intro comedy Star Trek parody here – under a minute long with a serious article on them too here :
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/14/what-is-sky-trash-and-is-it-linked-to-the-mystery-objects-shot-down-by-us
From back when the Chinese spy balloon was the media sensation / distraction de jour.
Co-incidentally and conveniently for me that Colbert show ep was repeated in Sth Oz just last night.
In essence, there’s a lot of crap that people have put up into the stratosphere and that flies around and reflects light and can fool and puzzle people. This doesn’t necessarily explain all UFO / UAP sightings but it probly explains quite a lot of them? Maybe?
Oh & another Stephen Colbert episode of possible relevance here – UFO’s bit from the 5 mins 10 secs mark & total length approx 12mins here again from the Chinese spy balloon aftermath.
Dunc, in their place, would you do otherwise? They are entrusted with secrets for a reason.
And the alternative is Doctor Strangelove’s “I like surprises”.
Downside, well, much the same…
Watch Catch 22 for context. I advise first drinking a lot, then getting kicked in the head by a large horse to fully get into the proper frame of mind.
BTW, the cats reported back to their home world. Still no luck in domesticating their humans.