Pentagon Official Floats a Theory For Unexplained Sightings: Alien Motherships (politico.com) 118
The official in charge of a secretive Pentagon effort to investigate unexplained aerial incursions has co-authored an academic paper that presents an out-of-this-world theory: Recent objects could actually be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth. Politico reports: In a draft paper dated March 7 (PDF), Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be "probes" from an extraterrestrial "parent craft." It's unusual for government officials, especially those involved in the nascent effort to collect intelligence on recent sightings, to discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, although top agency officials don't rule it out when asked. After Loeb posted it online, the paper gained notoriety from a post on Military Times and has also circulated among science-focused news outlets.
More than half of the five-page paper is devoted to discussing the possibility that the unexplained objects DoD is studying could be the "probes" in the mothership scenario, including most of the page-long introduction. One section is titled: "The Extraterrestrial Possibility" and another "Propulsion Methods." Kirkpatrick's involvement in the academic paper demonstrates that the Pentagon is open to scientific debate of the origins of UFOs, an important signal to send to the academic world, experts said. But they add that his decision to attach his name to a theory considered in most academic circles to be highly unsubstantiated also raises questions about AARO's credibility.
The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped "Oumuamua" that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 "could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth." The paper goes on to compare the probes to "dandelion seeds" that could be separated from the parent craft by the sun's gravitational force. It examines the physics of how the smaller craft could move through the Earth's atmosphere to reach the surface, where they could be spotted by humans. The paper notes that the "probes" could use starlight to "charge their batteries" and the Earth's water as fuel. It also speculates on the motive for aliens to send exploratory probes to Earth. "What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders," the authors write. "As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet's surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration."
More than half of the five-page paper is devoted to discussing the possibility that the unexplained objects DoD is studying could be the "probes" in the mothership scenario, including most of the page-long introduction. One section is titled: "The Extraterrestrial Possibility" and another "Propulsion Methods." Kirkpatrick's involvement in the academic paper demonstrates that the Pentagon is open to scientific debate of the origins of UFOs, an important signal to send to the academic world, experts said. But they add that his decision to attach his name to a theory considered in most academic circles to be highly unsubstantiated also raises questions about AARO's credibility.
The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped "Oumuamua" that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 "could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth." The paper goes on to compare the probes to "dandelion seeds" that could be separated from the parent craft by the sun's gravitational force. It examines the physics of how the smaller craft could move through the Earth's atmosphere to reach the surface, where they could be spotted by humans. The paper notes that the "probes" could use starlight to "charge their batteries" and the Earth's water as fuel. It also speculates on the motive for aliens to send exploratory probes to Earth. "What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders," the authors write. "As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet's surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration."
Yeah, sure (Score:2, Funny)
You can't think "aliens" without thinking "probes".
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Just ask Cartman
Re: Yeah, sure (Score:2)
He did not get an anal probe.
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When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:5, Insightful)
my first reaction is to wonder what embarrasing issue they're trying to divert attention away from.
Re:When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:5, Insightful)
My first thought was "Why hasn't he been kicked out of his job and replaced with a non-idiot?"
Re:When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds to me more like somebody trying to justify his budget than do anything useful.
Re:When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Or in the same vein, someone is simply trying to justify their job.
Ever since we sold out blue collar America for plastic junk made in China,
the only way to get basic necessities is to go to college and get a "real job"
which most frequently involves shuffling paperwork, pointless meetings,
marketing aforementioned plastic junk to the general public, and so forth.
Add to that the institutional FOMO of a very real technical revolution and
anything you can half-bullshit away as "innovative" will widen the door for a
promotion and/or get you extra brownies at bonus time.
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:2)
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Re:When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Rampant speculation is not what most people see as an "academic" pursuit, outside of the social studies department. The idea that 'Oumuamua seeded the solar system with probes, triggered by the Sun's light, is unfalsifiable (given our current technologies) and so it's not a scientific hypothesis. You might just as well ask J. Stoner Physicsgrad why we have so many UFO reports.
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It's a reasonable speculation, but a theory should be testable, at least in principle.
OTOH, getting all worked up because he writes a report that would be exciting if true, but which is a very low probability isn't reasonable. It's a "theory" that lots of people have played with, and some believe. But it seems (from the summary) to be so vague as to have no way to test.
He was probably asked two write some explanation that tied everything he was investigating together without invoking mechanical failures o
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:2)
Because the groups this 'info' is targeted at is unhinged nutcases, and people who are trying to keep food on the table and have no time for this.
I think it's just the government (either the US or foreign) screwing around and the US gov't is spewing "aliens" because they don't want to cause a panic.
Also, how do they know for sure a ship flying through Earth's atmosphere is a "mothership"? More like talking out of their asses and putting holes in their own stories.
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:2)
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:1)
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:3)
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That is a very good observation. Probably true. The abysmally embarrassing Ukrainian leak that massively helps Putin?
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:2)
Or maybe Kirkpatrick is just as big of an idiot as Loeb. Never underestimate the sheer ingenuity and intelligence of the committed idiot. They can bubble up to the upper echelons of any organization.
A job title (or a last name) is no guarantee that there's not raging nonsense and mush between those ears.
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Indeed. I have run into some stellar examples of this effect as well. Fortunately managed to never have any of those as my boss so far.
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my first reaction is to wonder what embarrasing issue they're trying to divert attention away from.
How about instead, this is one of the first steps to prepare humans for the realization we are not alone in the universe. Over time, drip out these tidbits, increasing the specificiity of what is being said until the groundwork has been laid to reveal they've known these are craft from other worlds but didn't want to panic the public.
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:2)
Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
Re: When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:2)
No matter what they do, some religious nut will flake out and blow himself and others up upon hearing the news.
And of course there will be truthers saying that aliens do not exist (no matter how good your evidence to the contrary is) and that they are just government experiments on humans.
Hell we got people bickering over the supposed skin color of Jesus. So you know how they will hate and despise ET. If there are aliens, best to just keep it under wraps, for now at least.
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Are we invading iran again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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This is how science is meant to work (Score:2, Interesting)
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The solar system is a petri dish (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure. Also,the sun is the heat lamp for our local petri dish. In other news,under the surface dust, the moon may really be made of cheese.
Are they really this dumb, or do they have some reason to feed conspiracy theories?
Re:The solar system is a petri dish (Score:5, Insightful)
"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders."
--George Carlin
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American schools, [...] If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders."
Who controls education? Oh yeah, the leaders.
Re: The solar system is a petri dish (Score:2)
Who controls the media? The religions? The ebbs and flows of the economy? Housing? Food production? Transport, imports, exports and immigration? Yeah I get the picture.
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Pol Pot already knew that dumb people are easier to control.
At least so far our great leaders didn't start rounding up people wearing glasses.
Politicians are the product of the machine (Score:3)
The Robert Redford film 'The Candidate' gives a depressing dissection of how a principled individual is shaped by his campaign manager into what wins elections. And the public keep voting for these creations. So they're not the 'best' - they're the ones who have been shaped to win and who fool the public.
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Are they really this dumb, or do they have some reason to feed conspiracy theories?
Somebody clearly has that reason. PsyOps preparing a coup?
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The sun is probably more like a shotgun that continually fires.
As for being this dumb, can you blame them when you consider the audience?
https://twitter.com/qikipedia/... [twitter.com]
"...Floats a Theory..." (Score:2)
I see what you did there.
Idiots and dilusional simpleton are everywhere ... (Score:5, Insightful)
but to see them in a high position in the US military like here is scary.
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but to see them in a high position in the US military like here is scary.
Yep. These people are making billion $$$ decisions that change people's lives. How does that work?
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The "UFO" videos shown in congress, have been explained logically. Here is an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Basically, idiots that don't understand their equipment...looking at stars.
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The Bond With Satan Has Been Made (Score:2)
Now to convince everyone they are 'aliens'.
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Hey! Ok, I admit, I haven't been the best guy in the past couple millennia, but stop blaming every shit that happens on me! You're grown up now, you can make your own mistakes without me meddling all the time.
Cheese-us, talk about megalomania. You think I have nothing better to do than to tell you to kill each other? Most of you get that bright idea on their own, no prodding needed.
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Now to convince everyone they are 'aliens'.
Actually, Satanists seem to be pretty nice bunch of people: https://thesatanictemple.com/ [thesatanictemple.com]
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That's the old crazy talk. The new crazy talk is they are more advanced than we know in genetic manipulation, cloning and various other things and have created an "alien" which they now need a good entrance story for. Mothership out in space where it can't be verified is just about perfect.
"which appear to defy all physics" (Score:2)
Kudos to the editors for filing this under "entertainment".
It could be worse (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if this isn't an improvement on "swamp gas", at least it's a change, so it's worth something.
Authoritarian types have a real problem admitting they don't know what's going on, so that could be a part of it as well.
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They can't suggest "weather balloon" anymore, because now that requires a fighter jet scramble and a couple million dollars worth of Sidewinders.
They're finally in a position where the lies are more costly than the truth: Aliens. Ancient ones. I'm glad we have citizens like Tom DeLonge who relentlessly pressured our government for the Truth.
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Asking for a friend.
No, they float a... (Score:2)
hypothesis.
If it was a theory, then the hypothesis would have already been tested and accepted.
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It's not even a hypothesis, if anything, I'd compare it to the effects of digestion problems.
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A hypothesis of this type is more properly called "pseudo profound bullshit", with "bullshit" meaning "quite obviously very likely not true but not proven so"
Avi Loeb (Score:3)
An good example of how there is a very fine line between genius and madness. This is the guy who thinks Oumuamua was an alien craft despite standard physics being able to explain its "unexplained" acceleration.
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There is no fine line. There is genius, and there is madness. This guy is decidedly in the latter camp, no genius in sight whatsoever.
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Maybe the fine line is between "cracked record" and "cracked pot".
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"no genius in sight whatsoever"
I suggest you check out the real science he's done and papers published in the past before he lost the plot.
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Past records don't necessarily mean anything for current events. I mean, take your favorite billionaire. Had a huge hit once but now steps from blunder to blunder. Whether you take Musk, Zuckerberg or anyone else. Just because you had a spark of genius at some point in time doesn't mean you are one.
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The thin line is not about the ideas on either side being produced being close. The line is thin with regards to how easy it is to cross it. All it requires is to degrade your own fact-checking ability enough or to stop using it. While I personally find that very hard to do, for most people fact-checking is a tenuous thing and often viewed as optional.
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It might also be an example of dementia. Or perhaps it's just somebody who go overly excited about a chunk of rock and is playing the "well, it *could* be" game.
Or maybe he just wants to sell books.
Aliens are the new gods (Score:2)
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Yes, pretty much. I know that many/most people are desperate afraid of things being unknown and hence make up, or more often adopt, some fantasy how it has to be and then desperately believe them. I do not get why they do that though. While I construct fantasies about as much as the next smart person, I always know they are just fantasies and used to simulate and try out more complex ideas. I have absolutely no problem with classifying something as unknown and to wait and see what happens.
So what is the iss
When it's not eleased via a leak (Score:4, Funny)
Yep, got to keep the idiots excited (Score:2)
Far easier that way. And a pool of people this gullible and easily manipulated may come in handy some day.
Play can’t tell the difference between (Score:1)
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That could be changed by cosmetic surgery. Try again.
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That's true in every cell of any person who doesn't have a drastic genetic abnormality. The "trans" people you're thinking of are just mentally ill.
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That was my point. It's not the presence or absence of a penis or a vagina that determines whether one is male or female. There's really no simple answer that works everywhere. E.g. many fish are either male or female at any particular time, depending on circumstances. In at least one variety the dominant individual is a male, and everyone else in the school is a female. But if the male is removed, the next in line does a sex change.
For that matter, the y chromosome has been shrinking, and there's been
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Humans are not fish.
Irrelevant speculation.
Which is why I included "drastic genetic abnormality" as a possibility. 99.9+% of the human race is either definitely male or definitely female, regardless of their personal opinion or whether they've had themselves mutilated.
I lost one of my legs in an accident. That do
Wait a minute,,,... (Score:2)
The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped "Oumuamua" that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 "could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth."
What a fabulous thing to say. .. And fast, goddamnit!"
Is he just looking for a budget to subsidize new space toys? "There is a tremenous chinese.. err.. Alien., erh,. Yes, that's right!,. A Chinese -Alien- threat. We need more things!.. In space... We need more Space Things.
Or has he been Loebed up by Avi?
We must look like a bunch of baboons (Score:3)
destroying the earth with our pettiness.
stopped reading at... (Score:2)
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Doest thou aimst thine laser at thee?
Re: stopped reading at... (Score:2)
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Oh? Are there other brands of space based lasers?
Not much in that paper (Score:2)
br A large
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It's quite a like method...if you accept panspermia
Which isn't impossible, if a bit unlikely.
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Well, in most versions of panspermia, the distribution happens by accident. So asking about the function is irrelevant. That's just the size of chunk that happened to break off. (Say there'd been life on Earth the The1a hit, and the moon was just the largest fragment. There'd have been lots of other fragments of all sorts of sizes.
In the versions which are directed panspermia I guess the large body would be a radiation shield, but directed panspermia has always seemed exceedingly unlikely to me, so I n
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Start somewhere else (Score:2, Insightful)
HOWEVER
During the pandemic, since I was stuck indoors for so long, I watched a few episodes of "Ancient Aliens"... and while it's kind of corny, it raises some valid questions. For serendipitous reasons, I recently began applying
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See if you can find "The four faced visitors of Ezekiel" from Astounding Science Fiction (or possibly it was already Analog).
FWIW, I have a friend who insists that the stones of the pyramids were ancient cement, cast in place. And it's been fairly well established that the folks who build them were "reasonably for the time" paid craftsmen.
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Try harder to be brief.
So, (Score:2)
They just want to get stoned (Score:1)
Don't look here, look over there ... (Score:2)
If you wanted to apply a slow burn paranoia experiment on the population of a country, you could do worse than what we've seen happening over the last few decades.
An increasing tilt toward "there could be aliens amongst us" by the US military.
Keep it gently bubbling on the back burner, gently feed into the well saturated cultural fiction of aliens, in novels, comics and movies that the population have been steeped in for generations.
Eventually, you'll have the opportunity, should it arise, to point citizens
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I concur, if it only was aliens, that would be a great boon to humanity, especially if we can correctly infer nefarious purposes from their side. Maybe then humanity could unite instead of this constant fear mongering and we against them think. (When we and them are actually the same).
But the truth is so much worse, that even if it was aliens, they are probably shaking their heads in exasperation over our never ending stupidity, and some -- let's not say who, since we all know -- would claim that they are h
more proof (Score:2)
More proof the govt needs weekly drug tests for its employees.
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On the contrary, make drugs mandatory for all higher-ups in federal agencies. Keep them churning out these hilarious, batshit reports instead of planning coups in Central America or SWAT-ing a dude's family for being baited into a firearms-related technicality.
You just made this up. (Score:2)
Avi Loeb is mocked in the astro community (Score:1)
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ahhh so that's who he is.
Keep the rubes distracted (Score:2)
With nonsense like this, because the truth would get people scared, angry, and even more distrustful of the government.
The truth which does not involve space men.
Scientific inconsistency (Score:1)
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The people who have a better science education background understand that FTL isn't happening and that getting from one planetary system to another takes a LOT of energy and time and almost certainly has an incredibly high potential for failure... and the ROI just isn't there.
It's incredibly unlikely anyone "out there" has sent an autonomous ship that's launching atmospheric probes to study us, simply because between that and pointing a bunch of telescopes at us it just isn't worth it in terms of time, effo