Who else?
"And, anyway, if the CIA can only account for around half of all UFO sightings, then what the hell else was up there peering down on citizens of Planet Earth?"
The Russian planes spying on the US.
The US government's Central Intelligence Agency has 'fessed up about reports of UFO sightings in the 1950s by playfully tweeting "it was us". It linked to a document entitled The CIA and the U-2 Program 1954-1974 (PDF), which was first published in 1998. The CIA decided to flag it up via its Twitter account because it had …
"yet still classified test aircraft."
Indeed.
Once a few photos of the F117 made it into the mainstream reports of triangular UFOs stopped overnight.
Once the existence of stealthed-up choppers got into mainstream, a lot of the slow moving stuff got explained too (I'd heard of stealth blackhawks about a decade before one bellyflopped into /bin/laden's compound, but cursory checking revealed people who mentioned them were generally classed as tinfoilers)
The CIA and several other organisations spent a long time planting people in various tinfoil hat brigades to keep them paranoid and believing in UFOs/alien visitors, as this was an easy way to keep the classified aircraft programs under wraps. In all liklihood they still do.
(FWIW, the standard alien "experiences" tend to follow movies of similar themes - showing that most people involved are fairly suggestible. They may _believe_ they were abducted by aliens, but it's more likely to have been a particularly vivid dream, possibly years after seeing Close Encounters, etc)
FWIW, the standard alien "experiences" tend to follow movies of similar themes - showing that most people involved are fairly suggestible. They may _believe_ they were abducted by aliens, but it's more likely to have been a particularly vivid dream, possibly years after seeing Close Encounters, etc
To pile conspiracy on top of conspiracy, as you said
The CIA and several other organisations spent a long time planting people in various tinfoil hat brigades to keep them paranoid
Let's accept that's true - the ultimate way for the CIA to keep the paranoia (and outward appearance of such) would be to do a few 'alien' abductions themselves. Slip the targets a few drugs and then wear rubberised suits whilst brandishing a certain medical instrument related to the bottom, lots of light's etc.
Mind you, if it came out, I guess an anal-probe could be seen as state sanctioned anal rape....
They may _believe_ they were abducted by aliens, but it's more likely to have been a particularly vivid dream
Agree about the vividly dream. Had I not woken up from my extremely vivid dream I seriously would have thought the government has some mind control programme. The dream sure felt real.
Let's see what TV history has to offer:
Jim Kirk's Enterprise
Planet Express Delivery Ship
Getting back to reality, wasn't there some guy Von Braun working on rockets and such then too? As much as the US tried to keep things top secret, I would believe that the CIA didn't know everything, and that would account for the other half.
The UFOs are trying to understand why the peanut farmers and hillbillies are allowed to breed, because on their planet they have been automated out of existence. As have politicians...Harold Wilson once suggested that decision making would be improved by a set of traffic lights connected to a random number generator, the idea being that the decision would be quick and so if it was obviously wrong it could be reversed. Given the record of recent governments, replacing the Front Bench with a set of traffic lights and letting Change.org vote on what the decisions to be made should be, would lead to a faster, cheaper and more democratic system.
"Do you ever hear of a scientist or academic being abducted?"
Someone hasn't heard of Stanton Friedman then. Harvard Physicist and Alien Abduction expert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanton_T._Friedman
If you're interested, look up something called "The Disclosure Project", in which a whole series of credible witnesses retell incredible stories. Believe them or not, its no parade of " in-bred mid western peanut farmers and hillbillies"
Admiral Lord Hill-Norton: Five-Star Admiral, Former Head of the British Ministry of Defense, July 2000
Sgt. Clifford Stone: US Army
Sgt. Karl Wolfe: US Air Force
Merle Shane McDow: US Navy Atlantic Command
Nick Pope: British Ministry of Defense Official
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell
John Callahan: FAA Head of Accidents and Investigations
Professor Robert Jacobs: Lt. US Air Force
Major-General Vasily Alexeyev: Russian Air Force
Dr. Alfred Webre: Senior Policy Analyst Stanford Research Institute
....there is quite an extensive list of "believers".
[Caveat: I neither believe nor disbelieve personally, but find it an interesting and misunderstood phenomena]
All these sightings over the US were the CIA... perhaps they forget what country they were supposed to be spying on, or more likely it was all a very innocent mistake. I believe that's the standard response when you get caught cock in hand with your pants down surveilling your entire population in violation of the constitution.
Consider that any technology sufficiently advanced would appear like magic....perhaps from a less cynical age that we live in.
A logical stance might be that any technology that was sufficiently advanced might not be *perceptible*.
Consider the caveman finding a digital watch... (HHGTTG!!).
How about some modern technology that has no identifying marks but you need to "know" it sells something.... (thinking of the 2000 a Space Odyssey). Maybe the Obelisk was a particularly sleek Coke machine.... ;-)
In otherwords, aliens visiting the Earth will require such advanced technology, we might not recognise them...
The beer helps...Happy 2015 - we made it.
P.
Probably a lot less of the reports were for the never shot down SR-71
Now that I'm well past the age of caring.... a radar operator at a USAF radar station outside Charleston, SC, detected something flying high and fast in 1967. The Pentagon sent down a major to investigate the "UFO" (the "Purpose of Visit" entry in the orderly room sign-in book said "UFO investigation"). The major advised the operator he hadn't seen anything. I wonder if even that major was cleared to know about the SR-71, which probably is what was detected. The radar operator was a well-grounded, believably serious young man, so until I heard about the Blackbird I often wondered what it was he'd seen.
And my theory is that one reasons Americans are so prone to accepting conspiracy theories is that conspiracy was standard government procedure, and everybody knew it.
From the outside, these were all "UFOs", but remember that pilots / and airline passengers / were routinely being briefed and cautioned.
I'll never forget the woman who said she saw strange lights that went from red, to amber, to green. It was one of those Channel 5 (I think) documentaries. Me and a mate were watching it, while on the beer (think Men Behaving Badly). Both of us simultaneously pissed ourselves laughing, while assuming she was on the Vodka.
Here's why. I've been reading the register for, what 20 years? I've spent as long being a business analyst and systems analyst in the City of London. These are two different things but actually, they both have commonalities - they're both about analysing loads of data and finding a new way through the cruft to create a new and more efficient system that makes more profit.
However, although I've recently thought that a lot of commenters on this site are paid for by the pentagon or by the General Council of the Highly Questionable (I'll leave you to work out the acronym there), the rest of you are the backbone of our technological society as far as my experience goes and you just ain't getting this because you've not looked back into history.
Go back and look at what the electricians where saying at the turn of the 20th Century at the Royal Society. Go back and look at what von Braun was doing in the US before the second world war - and afterwards. Look at the US patents from around the dawn of the 20th Century - everyone knew.
Everyone knew that if you stimulated this thing that the electricians called "ether" with very high voltage, very high frequency electrical currents, then you'd get an equal and opposite reaction - power that was thousands of times greater than the piffling force of gravity and, you could also generate massive amounts of electricity if you contorted that conceptual system in the right way. Check out Tunguska in Siberia if you want to see the effects of that.
When doing your research, you'll find that the Michaelson Morley experiment absolutely discounts the presence of the ether but then, if you dig deeper, you'll find that Michaelson did it again but more rigorously and that countless other physicists have confirmed the results of this experiment that the ether is there.
Energy is free, it's in front of your nose, it's not something that we have to mine, it's not dependent on a mineral that may become scarce, that's just BS from a cartel that will either put you out of business or kill you, the minute you start telling everyone else about their BS. BTW, you really don't have to worry about me - I've spoofed someone else on this board.
The ability to build craft that fly at thousands of miles an hour on virtually nothing and not crush their occupants when doing a ninety degree turn at this speed was all proven by these electricians in 1915 - you're just not taught that at school. WAKE UP. Listen very closely to Admiral Byrd's congressional hearing in the 50's after his force was decimated in Antarctica (operation Highjump) - "What we are faced with is craft that can go from pole to pole in minutes" This is on youtube - check it out.
It's basically nineteenth century electrical engineering that's been buried. So if you see one of these things, don't for a minute think that it's aliens - somebody, somewhere on this planet is manufacturing these devices in volumes that the Nazi's could only dream of (oh yes, there's ample evidence of these things being built in Nazi Germany - and they were electrical, not rockets or jets etc) .
Imagine if we applied this occult (that just means "hidden from you") technology to computing:
“My invention consists of a tower for the purpose of receiving and imparting natural electricity, so as to be in constant contact with upper stratum of electricity which surrounds the earth, by tapping which a never failing supply is formed when brought into contact with the earth.”
William Henry Ward of Auburn, New York - Improvement of Collecting Electricity for Telegraphing &c. Specification forming part of letters Patent No 125356, dated 30th April 1872
...and this guy is a nobody - this stuff was common knowledge. So. How do we power a data centre? What's global warming about, apart from a "carbon tax"?
How about a flying saucer? Well that seems to be a bit more complicated - a DC discharge in the direction you want to go and a high frequency AC current at the opposite end of the craft seems to do the trick. How simple is that? How do we do that? Tesla coils.
May you have an inspired, deeply techy and Happy New Year
Dont worry, I've managed to trace "AC" and he is in fact undergoing the standard care and re-habilitation you'd expect from our alien overlor... oops the CIA :)
On a more serious note , I'd advise our "AC" to goto his doctor and talk to him about paranoia and how it can affect your thinking processes as I've known one of these tinfoil conspiracy nuts (he was into aliens and the "10th planet" bullcrap) and he became increasingly unhinged as us solid engeering types who demand proof, demostrated things like what happens when an earth sized planet on a 3000 yr eccentric orbit interacts with the solar system over 4 billion years.....
Someone showed us a copy of Psychic News when I was in the 6th form and it had stuff much like this in it. Our physics master said that you could, kind of, guess at the school level textbooks the author had consulted and completely misunderstood.
Any electricians at the Royal Society were installing the electric light, by the way.
I'll assume that this is intended as a sarcastic mick-take of a typical loon's ranting, rather than being the real thing.
... power that was thousands of times greater than the piffling force of gravity
Not so much comparing apples and oranges, as apples and furious green ideas.
BTW if you learn how to do a meaningful comparison between the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force, you will discover that the electromagnetic force is of the order of ten to the power forty times stronger, rather than mere thousands. That is one of the most surprising facts about the universe we live in. Nobody has the faintest idea why, other than it being quite clear that if it weren't so, we wouldn't be here.
was the Flying Spaghetti Monster, praise his noodly goodness!. **
And in response to AC who is enraged by us all - do you SERIOUSLY think that none of us have an interest in history? That none of us have read the exact same things that you have? There are some seriously bright and knowledgable folk here*, quite a few of whom have marked anti-establishment tendencies, so if there were any factual basis in the stuff you're talking about, if it actually worked, then you can bet your boots that someone here would have offered proof of it by now or, more likely, made billions marketing the technology. Occams Razor says that you're almost certainly just plain wrong but can't admit it to yourself.
*I am not among them. Still smarting over not immediately seeing the flaws with the Solar Roadways lark :-}
**OK, I know it was probably the Russians really!
There is a family story from the '60s or '70s about a man in Bourne, MA, USA who covered a box kite in aluminium foil, attached battery-powered lights, and flew it after dark on a r-e-a-l-l-y long string. He was listening to the police radio to see who noticed. The nearby Otis Air Force Base, that's who. He reeled the kite in rather quickly when the Air Force scrambled two fighter jets to intercept it.
Wonder if that's true.
There's a similar UK tale about the bored traffic cops who pointed a speed gun at an RAF fighter doing low-level attack training. The radar gun stopped working. Permanently. Later they were advised, over a pint, "don't do that".
"Why?"
"Well, hypothetically, if the pilot had left the electronic countermeasures switched on, it would retalliate with a targetted electromagnetic pulse milliseconds later ..."
"... so that's why our speed gun failed? ..."
"... and next to that switch there's another one that enables the non-electronic countermeasures. Homing missiles ..."
"Oh..."
"Time for another round?"
...i mean, there was a lot of it going on back then weren't there? I think its time for an inquiry into 'Historical Anal Probing'......dunno who would chair such a thing?... ... . maybe Willlam Shatner? Come on, we need to think of the victims here!!!
You may find those probes corresponded to the mysterious disappearance of £50 from your bank account as well.
Maybe if you laid off the drugs and stopped paying strangely dressed men for services, the aliens would disappear as well?
The irony in the CIA's admission is that on 16 December 1953 Kelly Johnson -- the lead designer of the CIA's U2 spy plane -- his wife, and one of Johnson's test crews, who were flying a Lockhead WV2 aircraft in the same vicinity, spotted a UFO that hovered over the Santa Barbara Channel for 6 to 7 minutes.
Johnson's conclusion after his sighting: "I am now more convinced than ever, that such devices exist, and I have some highly technical converts in this belief."
The Air Force's conclusion? "Johnson, his wife, and the airplane crew had seen a lenticular cloud."
http://thenightsky.org/kelly.html
(Dunno, I wasn't there, but...)
From [http://www.theufochronicles.com/2015/01/ex-navy-scientist-slams-cia-ufo-claims.html]
as of 2015-01-05 ~11:00
< pruned <<
The CIA claims (of a ‘tremendous’ increase in reports of UFOs when the U2 spy plane started flying) are wrong according to former US Navy optical physicist, Dr Bruce Maccabee, who says the numbers of sightings per month received by the USAF’s Project Blue Book totally contradict the CIA claim.
The number of sighting reports in July, before the U2 started flying, was 63. In August, when U2 test flights began, the number was 68, an increase of only 5 or about 8%. Then, in September, there was a decrease to 57 reports, a drop of almost 20%, even though the U2 continued to fly. Averaged over a longer time the statistics show little or no impact of the U2 flights on sighting rate.
In his book, "The FBI CIA UFO Connection" published last September, Dr. Maccabee shows that the number of UFO sightings reports for 10 months preceding the first U2 flights is the same as the number of reports collected during the ten months following the first flight.
‘These statistics clearly do not support the claim of a ‘tremendous’ increase in UFO reports when the U2 began flying,’ Dr Maccabee said.
>>>
Sent from my iPhone. No, really...
Sensible attitude: "Hey, what's that light in the sky? I don't know what it is. Might be a new aircraft or something." No news coverage? No problem, it was only a light in the sky.
UFO Conspiracy Lover: "Hey, what's that light in the sky? IT MUST BE AN ALIEN SPACESHIP!" No news coverage? Obviously, there's a cover up!
The former need no CIA explanation. The latter will never accept ANY explanation, because they want it to be space aliens and don't care about the boring old truth. A century ago it was fairies, before that succubi and demons. Some folks just don't WANT the truth.
I was at a millenium party near to an RAF base and got talking to a pilot from there who was part of the rapid response team whose job it was to investigate intrusions into British air space. I asked him if they ever came across UFOs and he replied that they encountered them regularly. He said that recently they'd been scrambled to investigate a fast moving unidentified object that had been detected by radar, as they approached it accelerated to a speed well in excess of a velocity achievable by any plane that he was aware of and vanished. Of course he could have just been having a bit of fun with me after a couple of beers but he was so offhand rather than sensational that I believed him.