Official admission of a secret military project for studying UFO's

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This is being celebrated almost universally by UFO enthusiasts as a landmark victory against what is called "The Truth Embargo By the Government of the UFO Reality." This is a rock-solid admission by official military and government representatives (without any flinching or back-pedaling) by both the military and the government (Senator Harry Reid is the government representative in this scenario) that they have been studying this topic. The budget for this particular program was rather small --just $22 million. But three super-important take-aways resulted:

1) They released gun-camera footage (a first in UFO history) from two separate encounters between military pilots and these craft. As a bonus, the footage included the audio where we can hear the pilots marveling over what they are seeing.

2) They inadvertently admitted to these encounters going beyond just "The First Kind" and alluded by default that "The Second Kind" has also happened. The heart of this admission lies in a claim made by the NYT reporter Ralph Blumenthal who helped break this story about the UFO study project. Blumenthal says he was told by an insider about a Las Vegas warehouse with bits of unidentifiable material (perhaps a collection of strange metal alloy?) which the military collected and stored there. The important thing here is that while Blumenthal doesn't say where the metal was collected from, or how it was even able to be collected, the unspoken implication here is the military engaging in an activity known to UFO researchers as "crash retrieval," and THAT qualifies as "The Second Kind".

3) All the key players in this story were dead serious, made zero jokes about "little green men," nor did they reach for any forms of dismissive downplay of the gravity of the whole story.

All of this is just sheer ufological gold.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program
By HELENE COOPER, RALPH BLUMENTHAL
and LESLIE KEAN -- DEC. 16, 2017


...
For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties....



(I don't understand why the quote boxes are being so screwy)



Here's an MSNBC interview which includes NYT reporter Ralph Blumenthal's reference to the Las Vegas warehouse with the mysterious material stored in it. Please note that Las Vegas is just a stone's throw from Area 51. Skip ahead to 02:21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Dp1FzKods




Here's a CNN interview with one of the military pilots.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w0aXTfDDq8





And here's one of the two clips of the gun camera footage released.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RlbqOl_4NA





 
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Diana Hignutt

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I love that here it is low key disclosure, and no one cares. People are too busy with Trump, corrupt tax plans, net neutrality, the holidays, and arguing about The Last Jedi to be concerned with the question of whether or not we're alone in the universe.
 

cbenoi1

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I think people knew all along there were little green men observing us. We're stumped about what do we do about that?

-cb
 

Albedo

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It'd hardly be the stupidest thing the Pentagon's spent 22 lousy mil. on. That's like, 1/1000th of what it costs to not fly the F-35 a year.
 

cbenoi1

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It is named Project Blue Book ( link ). Started eons ago. Even got a TV show ( link ).

Surprise. Surprise.

-cb
 

Chris P

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It makes total sense that the government would have a program to investigate sightings, if anything to keep an eye on what the Soviets were cooking up and flying, and now Russia, China, or anyone else. Any such program would have covered anything unearthly we might have encountered. Are any of these sightings alien craft? I'm not going to say "no never," but I'm skeptical.

BTW, growing up I remember a TV show called UFO, but the description on IMBD doesn't sound like the show I remember. I remember something more X-File-ish and on the air closer to 1980 (post-Close Encounters). Anyone remember this?
 
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Diana Hignutt

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It makes total sense that the government would have a program to investigate sightings, if anything to keep an eye on what the Soviets were cooking up and flying, and now Russia, China, or anyone else. Any such program would have covered anything unearthly we might have encountered. Are any of these sightings alien craft? I'm not going to say "no never," but I'm skeptical.

BTW, growing up I remember a TV show called UFO, but the description on IMBD doesn't sound like the show I remember. I remember something more X-File-ish and on the air closer to 1980 (post-Close Encounters). Anyone remember this?

I think that was Project Blue Book. Which began with the narration: "Ezekial saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw..." It lasted most of a season.
 

Chris P

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Found it! It was "Project UFO" from 1978 to 79, and was based on the Project Blue Book documents. The Project Blue Book TV series linked above looked too new, although it didn't list any dates. Google says the newer series was produced by A&E, which as far as I know wasn't around yet for the series I remember.

ETA: IMDB gives an alternate title of "Project Blue Book."
 
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Celia Cyanide

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I love that here it is low key disclosure, and no one cares. People are too busy with Trump, corrupt tax plans, net neutrality, the holidays, and arguing about The Last Jedi to be concerned with the question of whether or not we're alone in the universe.

I think we've been concerned about it for quite some time. What else are we supposed to say about it?
 

cornflake

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Reid had suggested that if Hillary was elected he was going to go public with this stuff; there was a decidedly excited undercurrent then. Yeah, the whole 'impending nuclear destruction of the planet due to a pissy little twitter war,' thing seems to have eclipsed the actual (sortof) reveals.

There's only so much drama we can take and it's been nonstop for like a year.

This was nice, though it's also kind of a reminder of what could have been --more info, more substantive discussion on the meaning, the import, what to do, where we go from here, etc. Now it's just into the wind.
 

Kjbartolotta

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This was nice, though it's also kind of a reminder of what could have been --more info, more substantive discussion on the meaning, the import, what to do, where we go from here, etc. Now it's just into the wind.

Yep. Not to say we'd have anything like 'full disclosure' or any such nonsense, I've always maintained that the reason we don't know very much is that there isn't very much to know (though there's no shortage of reputable military dudes with absolutely crazy stories out there). But I agree with Cornflake here, it really could have been a watershed moment, and hopefully maybe even get some serious people invested in the subject and clear out all the fake news and bad faith that makes the topic so much less fun than it should be.

OTOH, how can there possibly be aliens if Trump's president and he somehow has the self-control to avoid tweeting about it?
 

Kjbartolotta

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Right now or in general? I have no idea how something would be orchestrated, though Oumuamua seem the natural place to start.
 

Diana Hignutt

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Has anyone considered the possibility of a Watchmen scenario?

Like a fake alien threat to unite the planet? Conspiracy theorists refer to this as Project Blue Beam. Unless you're talking about giant blue dongs....
 

shakeysix

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"The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs" by Mark O'Connell is a biography of J. Allen Hynek. It came out this summer and, although I believe that Stanton Friedman deserves a share of this title, it was good, solid reading about the man who went from swamp gas to they must have seen something. Like Friedman, he never goes beyond the idea that the U in UFO means Unidentified, so we'd best go from there and study these encounters.

The earth is being monitored by beings from outer space. Clearly the argument is an argument from ignorance--that doesn't mean that the arguers for or against the claim are ignorant, only that there are simply not enough concrete facts to support or deny the claim. The best course in an argument like this is to wait for more information to research and catalog. The fact that the government is using ridicule to dismiss solid witnesses make me suspect that there are more facts to the sightings than we are allowed to know and knowing them is up to us.

On this cold, bleak December morning, when our country, if not the world, seems to be swirling, la boca arriba, down the drain in a tub of gray lies, this ridicule of solid witnesses, hundreds if not thousands of them since Kenneth Arnold, is especially vexing. I cannot help thinking of the decades of sexual harassment claims that were kicked back on the victims because believing those claims would be inconvenient for the powers that be. I believe the term is plausible deniability--or swamp gas. It is time to walk past the swamp gas, time to hear out the witnesses.

One of my very first memories, I'd say about 1953-54, is of a group of neighbors standing at the end of our street-- 26th street, in Great Bend Kansas, studying a strange object in the evening sky. It wasn't just housewives and kids, there were several WW2 vets there too. It turned out to be a weather balloon. I can still remember the binoculars and my neighbor holding them for me. The fact that it was a weather balloon made everyone laugh a little but I also knew that the grown ups had been afraid of something. A neighbor man had seen something that year, and everyone was on edge, what with the radio and Flying Saucers and those weird, grainy photos in the newspapers.

My parents knew the whole story, although I didn't hear it until I was older. The man was named Gary, a driller on the oilfield. Most of the men in my neighborhood were oilfield hands as was my dad. The job involved walking out to locations--places that were being drilled for oil-- that were far from even country roads, across pastures and through fields. On the way to the well the crew--about 4 men-- saw something silvery and round, not as big as an airplane, on the ground. Now this is Kansas, so there were no trees, no buildings to muddle the view. They changed course to investigate and the thing flew straight up into the air--like a helicopter, only there were no blades, no wings. It was gone before they could think what to do, but they had all seen the same thing. Now, these guys were all solid, 1950s type dads, so they walked on to their location and did their day's work before they told anyone. It never came back, although they watched for it. By the time they got "off tower" they had decided not to call the newspaper because everyone who did was called a hoaxer or plain nuts. They needed to work, not answer a lot of questions.

This was just the first of maybe a hundred sightings I have heard about over the years. Like Hynek and Friedman, I have sorted through the stories and the witnesses. There are maybe 5 that I believe are credible: A couple of teacher friends were coming home for Christmas break from college. They had left the dorms late because they had papers to write so they were driving across Iowa, very late at night, on the 23rd of December. There was a snowstorm, not exactly a blizzard but enough to keep most sane people off the highways. Both girls lived on farms and they were in the country, headed towards a town called Woden, when they saw lights in a field just off the highway. They drove past the lights, trying to decide what they were because they were two girls and felt incapable of helping anyone with car trouble; still, being mid westerners, they decided, after a mile or two, to go back and help--no cell phones in those days and the nearest town was even smaller than Woden. So they turned around on the highway and went back to help. Only the lights were now colored lights, one said it looked like a carnival. They stopped the car in the highway and both got out. I think they had to climb a fence and there was noise. About halfway to the object it took off, straight up into the sky--no rotors, no wings. The snow was blowing so hard they couldn't see it for long. They really didn't get scared until they were well down the road and then it was more that it might be following them than what they had seen was from outer space. Two clueless college girls near hysteria because they saw a swamp gas in a snowy cornfield? Their families believed them but they figured no one else would, so it stayed with them and never was investigated.

Then there was my grandfather's brother, my Uncle Cecil, a career army man, a major stationed on a base, in the northwest, in the late fifties. He was a butcher, a meticulous, methodical man, who bought meat and supplies for the base. He would not tell the story to just anyone, but my mother persuaded him to tell my sister and me one awful night while we were sitting up at the hospital with our dying grandfather. The story was weird coming from our matter of fact uncle, a car suddenly stalled on a highway, coasting until it came to stop with other stalled cars, on the sides of a highway. There were people pointing to the night sky, saying they are coming again! And then there were lights weaving across the sky, making patterns, "like they wanted to tell us something" from horizon to horizon and then they were gone and the cars started again.
A scene from "Close Encounters" that my poor senile uncle stole into his subconscious to explain a formation of flare dropping planes? Not hardly. He told us the story in July of 1971. Long before Close Encounters came out. He was so nervous telling us the story that I know he must have seen something. And he was warned not to talk about it the next day. --s6
 
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Chris P

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I'm not using this anecdote to argue for or against alien visits, but WWII seems to be the start of a lot of "death from above" paranoia. In The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, there is an account of the scientists at Los Alamos getting a little stir crazy. One night they reported a bright light in the sky. Convinced it was a Japanese spy plane, they called the Air Force. USAF replied the next morning with a telegram expressing regret that they were not able to shoot down Venus.
 

Brightdreamer

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And possibly the suggestion of building a wall between America and space...

And the aliens... the aliens are gonna pay for it. (Though a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we're already behind a "wall" that filters out evidence of extraterrestrial life and activity, having been quarantined by the the sane species of the galaxy and left to flounder and fail in our intrinsic inability to deal with the Other.)

On this cold, bleak December morning, when our country, if not the world, seems to be swirling, la boca arriba, down the drain in a tub of gray lies, this ridicule of solid witnesses, hundreds if not thousands of them since Kenneth Arnold, is especially suspect. I cannot help thinking of the decades of sexual harassment claims that were kicked back on the victims because believing those claims would be inconvenient for the powers that be. I believe the term is plausible deniability--or swamp gas. It is time to walk past the swamp gas, time to hear out the witnesses.

Yep.
 

Albedo

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And the aliens... the aliens are gonna pay for it. (Though a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we're already behind a "wall" that filters out evidence of extraterrestrial life and activity, having been quarantined by the the sane species of the galaxy and left to flounder and fail in our intrinsic inability to deal with the Other.)



Yep.
Really it's less of a wall, more of a one way mirror. Feeding us or interacting with us in any way is universally recognised as a bad idea, but by Xenu are we popcorn fodder.

Re: a Watchmen-style fakeout, an obviously staged alien invasion would be perfect cover for a real alien invasion, would it not? 🤔
 

James D. Macdonald

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I certainly hope the military is investigating unidentified flying objects. Along with unidentified surface objects, unidentified submerged objects, and unidentified orbital objects.

Identifying stuff is part of their mission.