US Intelligence Officer Explains Roswell, UFO Sightings (cnn.com) 43
CNN's national security analyst interviewed a U.S. intelligence officer who worked on the newly-released Defense report debunking UFO sightings — physicist Sean Kirkpatrick. He tells CNN "about two to five percent" of UFO reports are "truly anomalous."
But CNN adds that "he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth..." This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That's because, in 1947, a U.S. military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico. A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the U.S. government had covered up the evidence.
Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret. At the same time, the U.S. military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.
Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft...
Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the U.S. military. Kirkpatrick says that's the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the U.S. government's policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.
The pattern keeps repeating. "Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the U.S. government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the U.S. or of benign civilian drones and balloons." ("What's more likely?" asked Kirkpatrick. "The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that's being commercialized down in Florida that you didn't know about, or we have extraterrestrials?")
But the greatest irony may be that "stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who'd heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft. And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people... [F]or decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there's a U.S. government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government."
But CNN adds that "he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth..." This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That's because, in 1947, a U.S. military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico. A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the U.S. government had covered up the evidence.
Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret. At the same time, the U.S. military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.
Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft...
Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the U.S. military. Kirkpatrick says that's the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the U.S. government's policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.
The pattern keeps repeating. "Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the U.S. government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the U.S. or of benign civilian drones and balloons." ("What's more likely?" asked Kirkpatrick. "The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that's being commercialized down in Florida that you didn't know about, or we have extraterrestrials?")
But the greatest irony may be that "stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who'd heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft. And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people... [F]or decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there's a U.S. government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government."
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They are clearly AI-generated "summaries."
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Re:Bad look (Score:4, Funny)
Could you elaborate on this so called "gravity drive" and "post-atomic power source?
Gravity Drive: hold a pencil at arm's length, let go of it, and watch it accelerate.
Post-Atomic Power Source: uhhhh, solar panels?
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I think the more interesting technology revealed in his post is the existance of brain worms.
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I've googled "The Five Observables", my understanding is that it's a part of the UFO lore that lists the hypothetical properties of an aircraft of possible non-terrestrial origin, or at least posessing advanced technology.
the UAP that have been tracked and monitored for decades exhibit what have become referred to as "The Five Observables." These are: 1. antigravity lift 2. sudden and instantaneous acceleration 3. hypersonic velocities without any visible signatures, sonic booms or observable means of propulsion 4. low observability or cloaking 5. trans-medium travel — the ability to operate in extraordinary ways from the vacuum of space to the depts of the oceans without impedance or aerodynamic limitations
So basically flying objects that don't appear to be constrained by limitations that all current aircraft have. One explanation for this could be weather phenomena or simply monitoring equipment glitches - those would produce 'flying objects' that appear to move in impossible and mysterious
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I can do all of those with a laser pointer playing with a cat. Admittedly to get #3 I have to shine it farther away than the nearest wall.
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I think you have definitively solved the problem of why people believe in UFOs. Thank you for clearing this up.
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The red dot isn't sitting on the ground. The requirements specifically say "anti-gravity" which means it has to pretty much anywhere else but sitting on the ground. Also, the easiest way to make it hypersonic is to shine it into the sky.
If you shine it on the moon you can make it FTL.
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Also known as "camera shake" and "sensor artefacts" and whatnot. Had someone show me some crappy "UFO video" of a device that could travel at 20,000mph in sea-level atmosphere and reverse direction instantaneously, which would destroy pretty much anything bound by the laws of physics, not to mention any organic matter contained therein.
He got a bit pissy when I suggested that what he was seeing was most likely camera shake.
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Ah yes, the Military-Industrial Complex, that hobgobblin lurking in the UFO conspiracy theories.
You If mis-states Kirkpatrick's position, and then goes on to imply this misstatement necessitates a "gravity drive" and "post-atomic power source"...wot?
From there you bootstrap into realms of the unknown and get yourself lost in your own paranoia.
US Defense couldn't find China ballons...... (Score:2)
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Radar (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's say you wanted to test another country's radar capabilities. Very useful military intelligence to have. You could bribe people, or try to break into secure facilities, or spend years getting moles into high level positions to get the intel out.
Or you can send a big balloon over their airspace and look for the response.
Let's say you are a country that finds a big balloon flying over your airspace. You know exactly what it is. You know exactly where it came from. All because of your fancy radar systems. Want to let the world know how good your radar is? Tell everyone all about the balloon that just drifted into your airspace.
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ah yes the old "methods and capabilities" denial.
It might even wash if anyone anywhere on the planet doubted NORAD's ability to detect an object like that balloon quickly and at great distance from US airspace.
The story is NOT how long it took us to spot the balloon, the story is how long it took us to decide WTF to do about it and what we finally did.
Personally I think we should have shown aggression. Who know what might have been on that thing in terms of bio-agents etc. We ought to have blown it out of
I too have an explanation. (Score:3, Insightful)
For some people reality falls into two categories: boring and unsettling. So they cling to some unreality that is neither.
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I have another explanation, one derived from "follow the money". Who profits from these wild tales (apart from the National Enquirer)?
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The Weekly World News?
It's also been written (Score:2)
FUD Pays. (Score:2)
Gotta keep up the BS so that money keeps flowing in for useless shit.
Goyi Go & Extraterrestrials: (Score:1)
Next to last paragraph:
"Goyi Go & Extraterrestrials"
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
Dinosaur city (Score:2)
The obvious real reason for secrecy at Roswell is that the government is excavating a Silurian city, "peopled" by hyper intelligent troodontids, buried in silt millions of years ago after the collapse of that civilization.
My own (plausible!) theory (Score:2)
The role of the news media (Score:3)
To quote Arthur C. Clarke (no relation) on the subject of UFOs : "Seldom has a subject been so invested with fraud, hysteria, credulity, religious mania, incompetence and most other unflattering human characteristics".
The least likely group to report UFOs (Score:2)
I'm not saying it's spy-balloons & Venus, but (Score:1)
...it's spy-balloons & Venus!
- alien.
So, what he's saying is... (Score:2)
The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
... and we know it's true because all of those are real things!
Pumped Up By Government UFO "True Believers" (Score:2)
Sure. Because there's no way anyone in the government / military looked at these stories and the reaction they normally get from the more general public and said, hey, there's a pretty good cover story for some of our experimental stuff - let's encourage that some.
Sounds good, but kind of a "brush off" ... (Score:3)
I'm in the camp of people who still question the whole thing, because clearly, the general public is kept in the dark one way or the other.
If everything reported comes down to our government and military doing "secret things"? Still means we have very little concrete information on what people are observing because they're withholding it from us.
And if it's true that we DO have at least evidence of one or two instances of alien life forms visiting Earth? It would only make logical sense that it would amount to a fraction of even 1% of all reported "sightings". Any serious UFO research would primarily involve weeding out all the "noise" of everyone from pranksters making fake crop circles in fields to mentally unstable people, off their meds, who are sure they were abducted.
I'm not even sure it means anything that somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson notes astronomers are "among the least likely" to report a UFO sighting? They're primarily focused on studying very distant stars and things like evidence of black holes or supernovas. Obviously, they're also regularly called on to educate the public about things like upcoming solar eclipses or meteor showers. Their telescopes aren't going to do much good at spotting something like a UFO supposedly crash landing or flying inside our airspace, or suddenly diving into the ocean.
I would expect that the people MOST likely to report a UFO would in fact be the military. You're talking about people constantly doing surveillance, possessing the equipment to do it well, and potentially doing the types of things that some extraterrestrial life form might find curious or worrisome (such as claims of UFO sightings escalating around atomic test sights). Additionally? I find their testimony far more credible than what you'd get from the typical civilian. If nothing else? Active duty military folks have little to gain from making up some big story about aliens. They're not out there trying to sell a book about it or give paid speeches/presentations at conventions about it. It also seems VERY plausible that if military (whether our own or another government) did retrieve a crashed UFO or parts of one? They'd keep such a thing secret and pass it off to contractors to work on reverse engineering technology in it to use in future projects. I can't imagine they'd just openly tell the public about it?
What is the point of this article? (Score:2)
Finally, someone explains this! (Score:3)
Now we'll finally stop having nutcases ranting about government conspiracies. If only this guy had come along sooner!
Obligitory (Score:2)
Agent Mulder declined to comment.