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Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence of Alien Cover-Up 106

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the 1960s, secret test flights of advanced government spy planes generated U.F.O. sightings. More recently, government and commercial drones, new kinds of satellites and errant weather balloons have led to a renaissance in unusual observations. But, according to a new report, none of these sightings were of alien spacecraft. The new congressionally mandated Pentagon report found no evidence that the government was covering up knowledge of extraterrestrial technology and said there was no evidence that any U.F.O. sightings represented alien visitation to Earth.

The 63-page document is the most sweeping rebuttal the Pentagon has issued in recent years to counter claims that it has information on extraterrestrial visits or technology. But amid widespread distrust of the government, the report is unlikely to calm a growing obsession with aliens. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Defense Department spokesman, said the Pentagon approached the report with an open mind and no preconceived notions, but simply found no evidence to back up claims of secret programs, hidden alien technology or anything else extraterrestrial.
The new report suggests that the public's belief that the government is hiding what it knows will probably continue. The report adds: Nevertheless the public is unlikely to be swayed. Many people dismiss the government's claims that nothing interesting is going on in Pentagon videos that appear to show strange objects, citing accounts by Navy pilots that they observed objects whose movements cannot be easily explained. The new report notes that in the past, particularly in the 1950s, there was interest in U.F.O.s, but today the attention on unexplained sightings is greater than ever before. Politico adds: The Pentagon has disclosed that the government once considered a program to recover and reverse-engineer any captured alien spacecraft, an effort that never came to fruition but fueled conspiracy theories about a cover-up.
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Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence of Alien Cover-Up

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  • The Daily Rube (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @01:26PM (#64300381)

    The government investigated itself and says it is not hiding anything. Whelp, case close I guess.

    • That will go over like a lead weather balloon reflecting Venus's light onto swamp gas.

      • by Thud457 ( 234763 )
        They said there was no evidence of alien (ET) spacecraft.

        That allows them to make a factually correct statement while not admitting continual egregious airspace incursions by Grand Fenwick.
    • Re:The Daily Rube (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @02:02PM (#64300489) Homepage
      Even those with a passing belief in the Area 51 Alien Conspiracy are definitely not going to take this as total and gospel truth, to be certain, but this is also a lot more plausible than "swamp gas and weather balloons". Most of the depictions of UFOs from the 60s onwards are of wedge shaped objects, rather than the "flying saucers" of early SciFi, and usually based on sightings by rural USians - exactly the kind of low-population density areas you're going to be running test flights of classified aircraft over.

      The Avro Vulcan delta-wing bomber was already a design concept by the late 40s and first flew in the early 50s, the Lockheed A-12 (the CIA's precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird/Habu) first flew in 1963, and they were followed by the SR-71, F-117A Nighthawk, and B2 Spirit, and various other X-planes like the X-47B, mostly with swept, full-delta, or other unusual wing configurations, as well as the almost impossible seeming manouvering capabilities of vectored thrust aircraft like the F-22 and F-35. Compare those with the profiles and manouvering abilities from UFO sightings years, and in some cases decades, after they first officially flew, and it's extremely likely that most of the sightings were, in fact, just next gen aircraft or their prototypes under test, especially when things like the extreme operating altitudes some of them reach are taken into account.

      That might not explain things like the "Tic-Tac" just yet, but with next gen piloted and autonamous aircraft probably still under wraps, I wouldn't be at all surprised if most of the current UFO sightings turn out to have a remarkably similar profile to next gen fighter aircraft/drones or hypersonic payload delivery systems when they eventually get declassified.
      • Re:The Daily Rube (Score:4, Informative)

        by Jack9 ( 11421 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @02:19PM (#64300557)

        The one UFO my friends and I saw, back in 1996 turned out to be an enormous Boeing stealth blimp (in violation of a US/Russia treaty), which made a lot of sense in hindsight.

        I'm not a believer, but I think it's fun to talk about once or twice a year.

        I enjoyed this video about the physics that can be implied from some of the UAP sightings and trying to pose these as engineering problem bounds.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        • That sounds like a healthy habit. Twice a year check in and see a bunch of obvious hoaxes for entertainment.
        • Re:The Daily Rube (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Friday March 08, 2024 @05:38PM (#64301239)

          The problem with that whole talk is it pre-supposed the observed phenomena are in fact objects. If the "Nimitz" UFO was indeed an object it had 5000Gs of acceleration and used a terawatt of power. If you pumped a terawatt of power into an object the size of an F/A-18 it would turn into plasma.

          So your hypothetical object has completely unsupported "engineering" requirements to simply exist. You don't need to understand all "physics" to know that your hypothesis that a UFO is an actual object and not a mistaken measurement is unfalsifiable. It's basically saying a UFO is magic. Further such hypothesis is not skeptical. It makes unsupported assumption ls because an observation doesn't match an expectation.

          It's far more rational to approach UAP from the position that they're measurement error. Instead of crazy logical leaps assuming these objects run on essentially magic, it only relies on a much more prosaic understanding of the mechanisms of measurement.

          A reflection inside a telephoto lens can look like all sorts of things. The depth of field further transforms in-lens illusions. Lenses designed to correct chromatic aberrations can have an effect on the transmitted image. The projection onto the flat plane of a CMOS sensor further amplifies the odds of optical illusions. Also the fact many cameras are monocular again increases the odds an optical illusion being seen in the output.

          An out of focus moth close to a camera moving at very boring moth-like speeds can look like a much more distant object moving at ludicrous speeds. Camera movement can make a close stationary/slow object appear to be moving quickly. A distant object moving at boring speeds relative to a moving observer can appear to be making crazy movements.

          At the core of these illusions is the fact a monocular lens is projecting rays from any numbers of things at a variety of distances onto a single flat sensor plane. The rays aren't tagged with a distance value. The planar sensor has no idea where a photon originated from. Without good references it's hard to judge the actual size and distance of objects. There's precious few good references in the sky for judging the size of distant objects.

          Jumping to conclusions phenomena are in fact objects is not scientifically rigorous and intellectually lazy. Assuming an observation must be some unknown physics is just god of the gaps logical fallacies. A jillion measurements of different phenomena doesn't really help since the same type of sensors (monocular CMOS cameras with refresh rates of tens or dozens of Hz) will just misidentify the same class of phenomena the same way.

          • The problem with that whole talk is it pre-supposed the observed phenomena are in fact objects

            The people wanting this investigation didn't care. They were running a distraction from other more pressing things.

        • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          > back in 1996 turned out to be an enormous Boeing stealth blimp

          The good ol' days when the doors stayed on Boeing aircrafts and they didn't go in the opposite direction of the pilot's joystick.

      • Re:The Daily Rube (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @04:23PM (#64301031) Homepage Journal

        A good look at it, but UFOs are sighted everywhere. More sightings in rural areas can also be explained with that city people are both more limited due to more light drowning everything else out, and being more used to moving stuff in their airspace to the point that they ignore it - helicopters and planes, for the most part.

        Keep in mind that a lot of reports of UFOs aren't people on the ground, but pilots.

        So I have more suggestions:
        1. Sensor malfunction. Everything from a bug or bit of dirt on the camera lens to human eyeballs under the influence of drugs.
        2. Unusual atmospheric phenomenon - Ball lightning and such. Swamp gas, the classical excuse. Not actually being an "object" means that it doesn't have to conform to the motions of an object.
        3. Errors of perspective. Human eyes evolved to handle the situation on the ground, things far away in the atmosphere were only concerning in vague ways. Thunderclouds and such. Add in seeing stuff on camera, which removes some of the information we're used to processing stuff, and it's harder to tell actual size, distance, and all that.
        Now mix all the above and realize that "1 in a million" is still going to give you a few incidents each year...
        Why is so much of it military? Consider that we have four rough categories:
        1. Commerical flight - fly day and night, but these pilots generally avoid bad weather, have tiny windows, no cameras, and are more concerned with their instruments. So while the most common type of flight, they have a low incident reporting rate.
        2. Private flight - Cessnas and such. They lack cameras, normally fly only during the day, etc...
        3. Military flight - 2nd most common type of flight(I think). Fly under nearly all conditions. Have advanced radars and cameras, are trained and actively using them. Are under orders to report unusual stuff in case adversaries come up with something new. Not scientifically trained on average. Most common source of "reports".
        4. Scientific flight - a very small fragment of all flights. Possibly have even better cameras than the military, but maybe not. Actively interested in unusual stuff, but have the scientific background to identify much of it. Plus, well, with orders of magnitude fewer flights than the military, less opportunities for those rare events.

        • One thing people have pointed out is the number of recorded sightings has dropped since phone cameras have improved. In fact the number of UFO reports has dropped over the decades.

        • by dryeo ( 100693 )

          You left out humans crappy plastic memory. Remember one example at an American Air Force base in the UK that ended up being the combination of a meteor doing a low fireball and a lighthouse viewed through an unfamiliar forest. Some of the observers reports just seemed to get more and more embellished with the observer seeming to believe their changing memory. People, even trained observers, have crappy memories that easily change with time.

    • The Federal Government is not a singular entity. In fact, with almost 3 million employees, it is one of the largest employers in the world with an untold number of branches, divisions, departments...given the scale of the US government and the number of people who would have to keep a secret, it is impossible that government knowledge of alien creatures on Earth could be kept a secret for any significant amount of time.
      • "The Federal Government" You literally just referred to it as a singular entity. Being comprised of many parts doesn't mean there isn't a collective singular entity. It's like saying there are no singular human entities they are all comprised of millions of cells. It's also really weird to bring up that if it were true they wouldn't be able to keep it a secret when supposed leaks have been happening for decades. The secret wasn't kept. Where are you trying to go with this reasoning?
    • Well, I say there's only 2 possibilities: Either they didn't look hard enough or they're in on it.
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      I've been asking the government for years about reports of pink unicorns. They've always denied it. They must be hiding them.

    • So who should investigate classified documents? Beavis and Butthead at the "UFO research and BBQ" in Texas?

    • The government investigated itself and says it is not hiding anything. Whelp, case close I guess.

      Why aren’t we opening a case to investigate who even bothered to ask the Government to comment on this, as if anyone anywhere was actually expecting ANY other answer, than the usual nothing-to-see-here?

      When the answer is that obvious, even asking the question appears to be part of the cover-up.

  • Or, the stuff of adversaries? Or allies?
    • based on the descriptions of maneuvers these things are said to be capable of, if it's our adversaries, we'd have been invaded by now. If it's ours, then we should all have pitchforks and torches out for withholding that tech.

      • Assuming they are not merely misinterpretations of regular stuff, plasma animals from a parallel dimension is one hypothesis. Maybe they evolved a way to "dive" into our dimension to scoop up airborne microbes and then leave before our atmosphere chokes them, comparable to the deep-sea diving sperm whale. That could be why they tend not to hang around long.

      • look at the gimbal stuff or the other vids : they show exactly the same maneuverability and speed as our current airplane or drone are able to. Sure people TELL they saw it doing super incredible maneuver impossible for current plane, but we have only their word, because coincidentally it is never shown on cam.

        And the conspiracy that the US gov hide stuff, make zero sense. That suppose that 1) UFO only lands/crashs in the US, and no other country OR 2) everybody including US's enemy agree to not pipe a wo
        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          look at the gimbal stuff or the other vids : they show exactly the same maneuverability and speed as our current airplane or drone are able to.

          Yeah, go a little further. "They show exactly the same maneuvers and speed as our current airplane is performing."

          Not a coincidence, that.

        • Bob Lazar.

          He claims to be -exactly- what you demand: a former engineer speaking out in public. He's never backed off his story. Passed polygraphs. And other parts of his story originally denied by the government turned out to be true years later.

          • Yeah, no one around here has met a crazy engineer. Engineers are completely stable, just look at the comments on slashdot.

          • I've watched some of his stuff, and he comes across as a guy who told a small lie, and then it ballooned on him, and got out of control, to the point where his lies had to get more and more elaborate to the point where he doesn't even believe his own stuff any more. I watch him, and it looks to me like he feels trapped by all the lies he has to maintain and track and that he's just grown weary of the whole thing.

            Although...hmm...maybe he should run for Senate?
          • Bob Lazar.

            He claims to be -exactly- what you demand: a former engineer speaking out in public. He's never backed off his story. Passed polygraphs. And other parts of his story originally denied by the government turned out to be true years later.

            That does not change the fact that the only thing he has is a collection of tall stories with no independent, objective supporting evidence whatsoever. He makes extraordinary claims, but he does not have any evidence to support them - much less the extraordinary evidence that such claims would require.

            • Good, let's move the goal,posts. Now we need an alien communicator and a hand phaser next to a bucket of dylithium.

              There are two options here:
              1) he's a liar/nut. Could be. I'm not saying he isn't. I don't know.
              2) he's honest and his stories are accurate.

              If #2 is the truth and he stole a hand phaser how long do you think he'd be alive? The government security spook types are deadly fucking serious. Assuming he could even get his hands on something clearly alien, how is he getting it out of an extremely

              • A good explanation of why he might not have evidence isn't evidence.

                • Lack of physical evidence is not evidence of his lying/insanity either.

                  There isn't anything he's ever said that I'm aware of, where we later hit more information from the government that did anything but confirm parts of his story. Not a single bit of counter evidence has been provided. Some confirming evidence has been provided.

                  • No counter evidence is needed. The null hypothesis is that it isn't aliens, and we haven't seen any evidence remotely strong enough to prove otherwise.

                    • Claim: I worked with alien tech at a highly secure lab no normal people have access to. Here's my description of operational procedures and physical state of internal buildings no normal people would know.
                      Counter-claim: he's a nutball who never worked here
                      Facts to come out years later from same govt that said he didn't work there: did work there, descriptions of procedures and buildings were 100% accurate

                      What do we know for fact?
                      1) he hasn't been caught in a single lie or error
                      2) government admitted lying

                    • I never said he never worked there. And no specific explanation of why exactly he said what he said is needed either. There are a couple of obvious possibilities, but all that's needed is that extraordinary evidence has not been presented.

                    • The government originally said he didn't work there.

                      If this was a court (obviously it isn't), the govt having already perjured itself would not be taken seriously on their other claims, such as "there are no aliens".

                      I'm only saying:
                      a) he's never been caught in any form of untruth
                      b) the government has
                      c) we can not know what's really going on there but can't automatically dismiss aliens just because it's an out-there idea and the lying government tells us there aren't any aliens

                      Do I feel he is a lying crackpo

                    • I agree we don't really know what happened. I disagree that we can't dismiss aliens, because that's exactly what we should do with such claims until we see the evidence. But by "dismiss" I don't mean we're totally certain it's not aliens, just that we don't necessarily know what it is, but there isn't sufficient evidence to conclude that it's aliens.

          • ...If you look like a whacko conspiracy theorist.
            Bob runs a great company, tho. United Nuclear.

          • read my post better : "claims, claim all over the place, and zero evidence. Same as the lazar guy and many other, they are all cooks." Emphasis mine. I know of Bob Lazar and a few other with their "building sized UFO in plain sight" shit : they are all claims and bluster , zero evidence.
            • I already covered your point.

              You expect someone to escape from a highly controlled and locked down facility with a phaser or bucket of pure dylyithium. Anything less and he must be crazy.

              I'm not saying he isn't crazy. Maybe so.

              I am saying we can't know with the evidence available but we do know that everything he's said for decades that information later became available for was confirmed true. Not a single new piece of evidence has made a liar out of him. If you're aware of any please post a link.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Venus, weather balloons, lighthouses [wikipedia.org]...
    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Or stars, lens flares, baloons and ducks.

    • That question is far too broad. Each sighting is an independent event, so it's impossible to provide a singular response that addresses "those sightings", and the question is additionally flawed in that it puts the onus on the wrong side of the discussion.

      People doctoring videos and images? Yep, people routinely fabricate evidence for any number of reasons. Optical illusions or perspective tricks? Yep, numerous cases where the cause was positively identified after an unusual recording surfaced. Equipment ma

  • by Rinnon ( 1474161 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @01:27PM (#64300389)
    We even reached out to the department of extraterrestrial coverups and they assured us that there are no extraterrestrial coverups. Case closed.
  • That deserves a million-dollar investigation too!
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      But 7 foot rabbits were spotted moving boxes near election booths in 2020.

    • It is a coverup!

  • It's a fact that governments hide information from their citizens, that's not up for debate. Since the government does hide information, and they'll admit to it, what's the argument being made? People distrust the governments, because governments distrust the citizens, hence why we can't get open record to every possible action.
    • Citizens distrust government? Ok.
      Government distrusts citizens? Holy fuck, no! The government is supposed to -serve- us not rule us. In civilized nations, the government derives its authority from the consent of the people.

      • In theory, governments serve their people, but in practice they try to utilize some form of fascist based control. Using Canada as a reference, we have some of the most restrictive laws in the 1st world regarding speech and expression. The government of Canada is trying to regulate what you can do online, and file charges against people whose messages they don't like.
  • But apparently mostly that extraterrestrial life have somehow solved logistics of space and time, and sightings are more likely than literally any other explanation.

    It's a dumb world we live in.
  • Dont ask questions you dont want the answers to....
  • by John.Banister ( 1291556 ) * on Friday March 08, 2024 @02:09PM (#64300519) Homepage
    It's very clear. We need to build a giant dome over the whole country, and get the aliens to pay for it.
  • You are being duped by the government but there are no extraterrestrials involved. The government has successfully distracted enough people investigating a completely fake conspiracy instead of any real problems in your country or government. I believe there is extraterrestrial life out there but I do not believe is humanities capacity to hide such monumentous discovery for 70 plus years. The Russians stole the atomic bomb and that kind of seemed important to keep under wraps.
  • So then they'll be allowing people in to that SCIF they were talking about and/or prosecuting a bunch of people for giving false testimony before Congress and wasting our time? No? Why not?

  • I would be more inclined to believe them if they would make vague statements about something big happening soon, and then when the time comes it's actually their book release at the UFO convention rather than something substantive.

  • They want to believe aliens exist so anything that detracts from that is dismissed as lies or conspiracies. You could let them wander around every government facility, shadow every official and they'd still claim some elaborate ruse. They'd pretty much have to be bent over by aliens probing them before they were convinced of what they were seeing. It is more of a religious belief than an intellectual one.

  • It's perfect. No bugs. +1, submit.

...though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

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