HAARP Ionospheric Research Program Set To Continue 112
cylonlover writes "Reports that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) had been shut down permanently were apparently a bit premature. According to HAARP program manager James Keeney, the facility is only temporarily off the air while operating contractors are changed. So why does anyone care? Despite being associated with various natural disasters over the past two decades by the conspiracy fringe, HAARP is in reality a facility for studying the ionosphere. Gizmag takes a look at the goings on at HAARP – past, present, and future."
Maybe this time they'll get it RIGHT! (Score:1, Offtopic)
They were supposed to burn the face off the earth. They were supposed to cause hallucinations. They were supposed to cause Global Worming!!! They were supposed to call Lucifer from the pit to rape innocent virgins who lead the damned in a war against Heaven, er no that's a porn flick.
WE SHOULD BE DOOMED dammit.
Re: Maybe this time they'll get it RIGHT! (Score:1, Funny)
Dude, conspirical contraversies aside...I SERIOUSLY hope nobody is responsible for global worming. Things are bad enough.
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I SERIOUSLY hope nobody is responsible for global worming. Things are bad enough.
My dog had worms so I took him to the vet. Is my vet responsible for global worming? But I'd say quite the opposite would be true if I didn't get rid of the worms.
in korea, its taken to the local cafe (Score:1)
Your dog with worms, becomes a feast for 30 people in Korea.
More efficient and less damaging to the earth than cooking beef cattle which use tonnes of water, co2.
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Yeah but like ourselves, the cow is biodegradable and I'd argue that we all contribute enough to Methane emissions ourselves. At least I do after a couple of Taco Bell burritos so leave the poor cow out of it.
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Worming is a word in the dictionary.
Exterminationist is not but should be.
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Are you sure? I thought it was Dalek.
mark "exterminate!"
At last an actual paper (Score:3, Informative)
According to the paper in TFA they're actually doing some pretty neat experiments while they zap the ionosphere. They've got satellites up there that measure electromagnetic radiation from various events like earthquakes and they're using HAARP to essentially provide a control for those.
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$250 million over 20 years.
It's interesting how casual people are about squandering vast sums of money. Sure, eliminating one program like this isn't going to do much. But there's a lot more than just one program like this.
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Well, it's akin to me complaining that I'm broke so I'll have to stop buying my weekly lottery ticket, but keep up my $1,500 dollar a day habit [youtube.com].
Mind the pennies does indeed make sense, to a point, but when you're comparing a project that costs $12,500,000 per year to $175,000,000 per day, the analogy goes out the window.
Indeed, you only need to cancel 5110 HAARP programs to cover the Afghanistan costs.
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Indeed, you only need to cancel 5110 HAARP programs to cover the Afghanistan costs.
That's not many HAARP programs I see. I bet there's a lot more than that out in number and funding. They might not be scientifically themed, but they all have most of the same excuses. And most of those thousands of programs like HAARP have the consequence of protecting a lot of funding. It secures votes for the status quo. It creates a dependency on government funding.
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Re:At last an actual paper (Score:4, Interesting)
All this pointless yacking about the strawman of immediate monetary return on investment ignores that funding of scientific research is just another economic problem subject to the same rules and constraints as any other human endeavor. To be so profoundly ignorant of economics IMHO makes you the delusional, anti-intellectual.
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You haven't completed the chain of logic. Sure, researchers narrow their projects when funding is tight, but do those narrowed projects ultimately have the same ROI or do we just end up with a few inexpensive projects that provide low returns while missing out on the big win from left field?
If you pick projects based on your estimate of their return, you necessarily pick projects where we already know a lot since you can't estimate the return on an unknown.
So we get pills that grow peach fuzz on your head b
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Sure, researchers narrow their projects when funding is tight, but do those narrowed projects ultimately have the same ROI or do we just end up with a few inexpensive projects that provide low returns while missing out on the big win from left field?
My take is that they have a better ROI than when they enough funding that they don't narrow the scope of their projects.
If you pick projects based on your estimate of their return, you necessarily pick projects where we already know a lot since you can't estimate the return on an unknown.
Well, that's how we do all human endeavors. And I see no evidence that this approach is at all suboptimal. After all, you're just as likely to hit that unknown benefit with a conservative course of action as well as a more adventurous one.
So we get pills that grow peach fuzz on your head but no blockbuster antibiotics for example.
Experience has shown that the peach fuzz is harder than the blockbuster antibotics.
That is an example of the saying "an accountant is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing".
Except that we're speaking of scientists and knowledgeable laymen who
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So what was the apparent ROI of the Crookes tube before the X-ray was discovered? Or all that goofing around with radium? All those loons who thought they could build a flying machine? I doubt very much that Volta could have suggested a likely ROI on his piles nor Ørsted for his research.
If every research endeavor had to be measured against an expected ROI, we'd still be grunting in a cave.
That's not to say that some research isn't throwing way too much money at nothing, but we want to be careful not
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So what was the apparent ROI of the Crookes tube before the X-ray was discovered?
A light source. The neon tube is derived from this angle on the research.
Or all that goofing around with radium?
Discovery of new elements often leads to a variety of new alloys with new properties. And once radium was discovered, it's luminescence turned out to be of considerable practical value, being used for instruments used in darkness such as watches, dials on submarines, etc.
All those loons who thought they could build a flying machine?
Easiest of the lot. Getting from point A to point B faster has considerable economic value. Flying also has game-changing military value for reconnaissance.
I doubt very much that Volta could have suggested a likely ROI on his piles nor Ãrsted for his research.
Did we ask
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You are applying your hindsight. Look at the examples I mentioned again forgetting what they lead to or what came after that made them of obvious value.
For example, the Crookes tube gave off a tiny bit of greenish light. The neon light and fluorescent lighting were discovered LATER as a result of experimenting with the Crookes tube. At the time, nobody was sure what it might be good for if anything. Volta's pile was a primary battery and a handy source of DC current...if there had been any technology at the
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You are applying your hindsight.
No, I'm applying what they knew at the time. Computers or the electric grid infrastructure are after all much stronger arguments for researching electromagnetism than glowing glass containers. But they didn't know about those things.
For example, the Crookes tube gave off a tiny bit of greenish light.
And? You're trying to tell me that they wouldn't be interested in a much brighter light source along those lines? There was already a great deal of research into electricity-based lighting by this point.
Volta's pile was a primary battery and a handy source of DC current...if there had been any technology at the time that used electricity that might have been really cool.
Handy source of DC current for ongoing experiments? Why that's useful!
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And? You're trying to tell me that they wouldn't be interested in a much brighter light source along those lines?
And that's it. Neon hadn't been isolated yet. Several years later, the Moore tube was used for lighting (based on the Geissler tube, not the Crookes tube) but was quickly beaten in the market by tungsten incandescents.
It wasn't until several years later that Röntgen, with little expectation of a payoff, happened to notice a Crookes tube was emitting something that could cause a slight fluorescence in a barium platinocyanide screen.
It was all the sort of idle curiosity that would likely get the axe in
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And that's it. Neon hadn't been isolated yet.
What's "it"? They couldn't be researching lighting because they hadn't discovered neon yet?
It was all the sort of idle curiosity that would likely get the axe in favor of working on more practical probklems like boosting the output of a steam engine.
I see no "idle" curiosity here. And the steam engine led directly to thermodynamics. Practical problems have always led to less mundane stuff.
As for the pile, An experiment that produced something that can be used for more experiments? Where's the ROI in that?
Significant resources go into these experiments. Enabling new experiments or making current experiments more effective is a return.
Surely the Wrights should have been working on something that stood a chance of success?/quote> And they did work on something that stood a chance of success, especially since it did succeed. It's worth noting that they applied the research technologies of the day, such as building a wind tunnel to reduce the cost of their experimentation.
There's a long history of idle experimentation for experimentation's sake.
All I see is a history of certain people mischaracterizing hard work and effort as "idle experimentation". And that mischaracterization seems to be solely intended to justify poorly thought out and dreadfully wasteful public funding of scientific research today.
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The fact is, nobody considered the Crookes tube as a light source. I don't consider the types of experimentation I discussed as not a lot of work, but they are exactly the sorts of things that would get the axe in today's penny wise and pound foolish management style.
Today's boss would tell Einstein to quit daydreaming and get to rubber stamping that pile of patents NOW.
There is a such thing as over optimizing a system. A common result is that it becomes brittle and loses the opportunity to make a leap f
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The fact is, nobody considered the Crookes tube as a light source. I don't consider the types of experimentation I discussed as not a lot of work, but they are exactly the sorts of things that would get the axe in today's penny wise and pound foolish management style.
I wouldn't characterize that as a fact, but rather as an opinion.
As to today's "foolish management style", why do you think that even gets traction? If there really is as big a payoff for R&D as supporters claim, then why don't business succeed more often at it? As you and others have mentioned, the myth is that research somehow doesn't have much of a payoff to the business world, something which was shown false in the industrial revolution. But since that isn't actually true, what can causing busine
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The reason short term management has gained so much traction is simply because that is what creates the most profit for the CEO and his in group now and they don't really give a damn about the people whose retirement is in hedge funds anyway so long as they get theirs. That's why we have seen so many large and apparently stable for decades corporations flame out.
The corporate world has never been particularly good at basic research of the type that eventually pays off in huge ways. It's always been mostly i
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The reason short term management has gained so much traction is simply because that is what creates the most profit for the CEO and his in group now and they don't really give a damn about the people whose retirement is in hedge funds anyway so long as they get theirs. That's why we have seen so many large and apparently stable for decades corporations flame out.
Why did large and apparently stable corporations start flaming out? Why is short term management so profitable now when it wasn't when those large and apparently stable corporations were created? Well, I think I got the reason why - moral hazard from society's mitigation of future risk.
The corporate world has never been particularly good at basic research of the type that eventually pays off in huge ways.
Compared to who? And all I can say is that when one actually looks at the history of research, business-side research has been very productive. And it's also funded some very productive non profit research as well.
Bell labs is sort-of an exception
I can think
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If risk is where it's at, we should just hold a lottery. Loser gets stoned to death, Huzzah!
Corporations are all about limiting risk and liability. They allow the people in charge to make high value short term moves secure in the knowledge that they can deploy their golden parachute before it all comes crashing down. The old stable corporations started crashing when day trading became more interesting than long term holding and the rise or the corporate raider.
Give the CEO and the board some actual liabilit
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Corporations are all about limiting risk and liability. They allow the people in charge to make high value short term moves secure in the knowledge that they can deploy their golden parachute before it all comes crashing down. The old stable corporations started crashing when day trading became more interesting than long term holding and the rise or the corporate raider.
You don't have correlation here, much less cause and effect. As to day trading and corporate raiders, they have value. Corporate raiders help break down businesses that have become stagnant and are worth more in pieces than they are whole. Day traders merely are small scale market makers, adding liquidity to markets.
Give the CEO and the board some actual liability and make holding stock more risky so that investors want to see a steady course and these problems will start to clear up.
CEO and the board do have actual liability so there's no point in complaining about its absence. And holding stock is risky. You're last in line for bankruptcies. Here, what I think is going on
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You have a funny view of risk. Name a CEO that ended up in poverty (Actual poverty, not forced early retirement into an upper middle class lifestyle where they still don't have to give a damn what a gallon of milk costs) after running a corporation into the ground. Having to defer that second yacht is not liability. When Wall Street crashed the economy the banks used their bailout money to pay their CEOs a performance bonus. Even criminal liability is quite limited in the corporate world. If you think they
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You have a funny view of risk. Name a CEO that ended up in poverty (Actual poverty, not forced early retirement into an upper middle class lifestyle where they still don't have to give a damn what a gallon of milk costs) after running a corporation into the ground.
Why would they be risking poverty after running a business into the ground? You mentioned earlier that doing so was actually profitable for the CEO in question. So why would a successful businessperson end up in poverty? I wasn't claiming that running a business into the ground was risky, but rather that society had created a bunch of incentives to ignore future risk.
As for the corporate raiders, mostly they pocketed the gains for themselves and left the stock holders (at least the ones who didn't get out before the music stopped) and the employees holding the bag. Remember the Wall street adoration of Chainsaw Al? Turns out he was a crook.
Chainsaw Al wasn't a corporate raider. He was brought in by the businesses to downsize them and aggressively cut the unprofitable parts of the
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Why would they be risking poverty after running a business into the ground? You mentioned earlier that doing so was actually profitable for the CEO in question. So why would a successful businessperson end up in poverty? I wasn't claiming that running a business into the ground was risky, but rather that society had created a bunch of incentives to ignore future risk.
YOU argued that CEOs faced plenty of liability and so, risk. Now you argue the opposite. I argue they SHOULD face that level of risk/liability. You can't have it both ways. As for why, you yourself claimed that it's the risk that makes them behave in a responsible manner.
You're going to have to pick an argument and stick with it if there is to be discussion.
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YOU argued that CEOs faced plenty of liability and so, risk. Now you argue the opposite.
The two statements require some explanation, but they're not contradictory. For example, tax evasion, sexual harassment, and Sabanes-Oxley compliance are all significant risks for a CEO. Running a company into the ground can be, if the CEO owns a significant piece of the company or committed illegal acts/violations of regulatory law, but it otherwise isn't.
A huge part of the problem here is CEOs who have incentives greatly disengaged from the long term future of the business. That in turn is driven by in
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For example, tax evasion, sexual harassment, and Sabanes-Oxley compliance are all significant risks for a CEO.
So, can't cheat on the taxes, bang the secretary OR cook the books? How terrible for them! It's almost like they have to obey the same law the commoners do or something.
To summarize, my point here has been that the incentives (mostly in the form of "moral hazard" and "tragedy of the commons") in today's developed world societies are all wrong, if you want to reward foresight and long term planning.
And THAT is why the CEO should be risking poverty if he runs the corporation into the ground. If not actual poverty, he should need unemployment benefits to get by and find his retirement in jeopardy like the employees of the company find.
It's why it should be unprofitable to hold stock for a short term. If you need to hold a stock for a per
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It sounds great to me. MWs of beamed energy. They only need to make a collector site with reasonable efficiency and they will have a neat power transmission system.
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Coincidence?
There are no coincidences.
Re:HAARP offline == summer weather good? (Score:4, Funny)
Coincidence?
There are no coincidences.
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Worst. Karma. Whore. Ever.
You actually replied, to the reply to a post, with exactly the same statement and quoted text? Wow, that must take some brass neck!
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Actually I saw an opening for a quick and dirty Funny. Or, barring that, an Informative or Insightful that would be even funnier. Or actually funny...karma, eh. Up, down, whatever.
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Coincidence?
There are no coincidences.
They stopped sending men to the moon about the time I learned to talk. You should pay more attention to my posts.
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California weather isn't actually good for Alaska.
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Good (Score:2, Redundant)
America can't be trusted to think for itself. Bring on the mind control rays!
Mighty conspiracy theories from tiny facts (Score:3)
It is amazing that people think this is such a big deal of a conspiracy.
From the article -
How big is the actual power density in HAARP's ionospheric spot? The total irradiance of the Sun's electromagnetic radiation (everything from x-rays to extremely low frequency (ELF) radio signals) is 1,360 W/sq m, measured by satellite outside the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere. HAARP's power density is about 0.001 percent of the Sun's irradiance – a nearly negligible quantity. Further, while local heating of the ionosphere is caused by HAARP (indeed, that is HAARP's purpose), the overall effect is rather like focusing the Sun's light using a magnifying glass – impressive if one is an ant, but not very significant on larger size scales.
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Given that, if there were to be some sort of vast, malevolent, conspiracy; Joe Average would fill a role somewhere between 'ant' and 'human resource, to be harvested at leisure', I suspect that's exactly the sort of thing that conspiracy theorists wouldn't find comforting...
Rather like trying to convince somebody who thinks you are trying to poison them that, really, cyanide is statistically indistinguishable from the millions of tons of carbon/nitrogen mixtures in the food supply.
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The one movie wonder I love it! Probably the only movie that will be made, literally on the Statue of Liberty though. Fred Ward is getting up there in age so I don't think he's up for a Remo II unless he plays like the Wilfred Brimley part.
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Yeah, but if he gets to close, Grove Industries just blows it up surreptitiously and then collects massive InsuranceBucks!
Ahem... (Score:2)
HAARP is in reality a facility for studying the ionosphere
HAARP is in reality a nuclear-powered facility that alters the ionosphere.
FTFY! :p
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It's really a cover for the US Navy to engage in ELF communications with their submarines by stimulating the Alfven Resonance.
Flippin' elves.This sort of reckless research wouldn't happen if we had a good solid dwarf in the White House.
Tra-la-la-lolly, indeed.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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You could sell this story to Infowars, but you'll probably need to put an evil spin on it and work in references to Prison Planet.
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Conspiracy Fail (Score:2)
The changes HAARP initiates in the ionosphere, although not affecting us on the planet or anything overall in the near distance, planetary detection systems that have the ability to detect atmospheres to a limited degree are thrown off, making the assumption that this is not a water world with a perfect (life sustaining) temperature.
It also makes you wonder what they're putting in our water supply:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3qFdbUEq5s [youtube.com]
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It has to continue (Score:2)
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Clinton was impeached because HE LIED UNDER OATH. It had absolutely nothing to do with having sex, as much as you liberals hate when one of your heroes is criticized.
And Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion. It had absolutely nothing to do with involvement in organized crime.
Rather missing the point.
The right-wingers weren't trying to smear Clinton by painting him as some kind of sex fiend, they were trying to paint him as a perjurer so they could reopen the Whitewater investigation.
They had a legitimate point, but it became a major case of "not seeing the forest for the trees", and they spent entirely too much of the public's time and money trying to pin down inconsequential details.
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Tell you wife its ok to go and do what Bill did every week for $30.
Im sure in her eyes, its equal to having sex.
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Some skepticism is healthy.
Conspiracy theories only serve to alienate you from reality and, in particular, to make you indifferent to the actual injustices of the world.
Re:Those conspiracy wackos (Score:4, Informative)
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Just because the government does some things in secrecy, it does not mean I should start believing bizarre fantasies with no evidence or reason.
Also, there are conspiracy theories to fit every worldview. There are conspiracy theories for leftists (for example, "Bush demolished the WTC), for right-wingers (for example, "global warming is a leftist hoax"), for Christians, for Muslims, for atheists. There is huge pool of conspiracy theories, each one contradicting the others, and each conspiracy-minded indivi
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Just because the government does some things in secrecy, it does not mean I should start believing bizarre fantasies with no evidence or reason.
Also, there are conspiracy theories to fit every worldview. There are conspiracy theories for leftists (for example, "Bush demolished the WTC"), for right-wingers (for example, "global warming is a leftist hoax"), for Christians, for Muslims, for atheists. There is a huge pool of conspiracy theories, each one contradicting the others, and each conspiracy-minded indi
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The most horrible things our government has done have been out in the open, public knowledge, NOT illegal conspiracies.
And there are far more leaks from the US government today than ever before, so we'd definitely hear about it...
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Just look at one example. One would think that a Pentagon plan to commit terrorist attacks against US citizens on American soil in a false flag operation to justify the invasion of another country would be regarded by almost everyone as unadulterated evil, right
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There's no "belief" involved. It's a fact that there have been more classified information leaks under our current president than ever before. Look it up.
Conspiracy nuts dance lightly around this case,
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a correction, if you will, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods [wikipedia.org] [I have excerpted the following from two paragraphs]
"The document was presented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on 13 March 1962 as a preliminary submission for planning purposes. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that both the covert and overt aspects of any such operation be assigned to them.
The previously secret document was originally made public on 18 November 1997, by the John F.
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Well, there are UFOs. They're probably not aliens though, just some advanced planes that are still classified, the way the SR-71 and F-117 were a few decades ago. And also, the NSA IS spying on all Americans. Snowden's being hung out to dry because he gave confirmation for that fact.
I've got no evidence to back it up, so you can take this as a conspiracy theory if you like:
My pet theory about the sudden popularity of UFOs from the middle of the 20th century onwards is that we actually had some foreign incursions into our airspace during the cold war. The cover-ups were real, but the whole "extraterrestrials are coming to earth" bit was just a second level of obfuscation--If you don't want people investigating how enemies slipped past our defenses, convince the general public that only
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"Its not difficult to research"
This much was correct. The rest wasn't. You can learn more through your aforementioned research.