OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867

View: https://twitter.com/AskaPol_UAPs/status/1786131613421548021

Ask a Pol asks:
How was your meeting with AARO's — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — interim director Timothy Phillips?

Gillibrand:
"I let him know that I'd like to have a public hearing this summer," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand exclusively tells Ask a Pol. "And so he's gonna put together some data and information to disclose in a public hearing to show what work they've done, especially examples of things that were unknown that they've been able to figure out and examples of things that were unknown that they still haven't figured out so that the public can see the difference between what technology brings to this analysis to inform lawmakers on what we need to do."

AARO's declassified report seemed like case closed?
"Oh, it's definitely not case closed. I think that their report was just that their analysis of everything they were shown and everyone they talked to, cause they had no basis to say there's a secret program," Gillibrand told us. "But of note, the two whistleblowers that I've met with did not meet with AARO and refused to meet with AARO. And so maybe the next director they'll meet with, but I can't assess them unless AARO can talk to them, cause I don't — I mean, AARO knows what they know and what they've seen and what they've been shown."

Caught our ear: Schumer's UAP amendment to NDAA
"I thought Chuck got done what he wanted to get done, but maybe I'm mistaken. I thought he accomplished what he wanted," Gillibrand says. "The work I wanna keep doing is to have much more thorough data collection, because we are still seeing so many unidentified aerial phenomena and we don't know what they are. And that's very frustrating."

"It's terrifying from a national security perspective and just for these pilots to have to fly and do their jobs to not be safe and to not know what they're running up against," Gillibrand tells Ask a Pol. "And I'm just very worried about technology that we're not aware of, particularly if it's from an adversary that's doing it for malign interests, whether it's Russia, China, Iran or others. Very important."
 

JetmanJay

Member
Nov 1, 2017
3,528
thehill.com

The Pentagon is lying about UFOs

The decades-long “nothing-to-see-here” approach to UFOs continues, unabated.

I will say as someone who has worked on multiple fighter aircraft radar from different airframes, I found it highly suspect that the radar popped a circuit breaker, has been doing so for months, and couldn't be fixed. That would be the easiest failure to troubleshoot. I have worked on different aircraft for well over 10 years and never seen radar pop a circuit breaker. Usually these radars just have some degraded functionality, random birds/hits on the scope, and they can just not work for a multitude of other more complex reasons, and is generally a matter of determining which part could cause the problem if a fault code isn't tripped - but popping a circuit breaker is a red flashing light to look at the power supply/check for a massive short in the wiring or what not. There would likely be a huge smoking gun, impossible to miss if a power breaker was tripping on radar.
My bullshit meter definitely went off reading that report.

And in an unrelated note - I never get updates to this thread unless I go into Hangouts and actively look for it. Any other thread I'm watching is fine, just specifically this one 🫤
 

JetmanJay

Member
Nov 1, 2017
3,528
I'm probably only subbed to Trump trial threads and this ...my experience is also similar!

Weird! I blame the mod who shoved this thread into a tiny corner of ERA, hoping no one would see it, and that everyone would forget it. Probably put some fucking timer on this thread to quit sending notices after a few months 😩
 
OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867
www.economist.com

Capturing UFOs

From science fiction to science...

When a story about UFOs came across the desk of The Economist's Michelle Hennessy, she was sceptical. A powerful cultural legacy of flying saucers and aliens is hard to ignore. But a recent flurry of interest from U.S defence agencies and NASA, stress the serious and scientific task of shedding light on what's happening in the skies above.
 
OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867

Pennsylvania has investigated more than a dozen UFO incidents in the past decade, records show • Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Pennsylvania's emergency management director Randy Padfield told lawmakers in February the agency tracks UFO sightings. So we looked into it.

After the head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) casually mentioned during a legislative hearing earlier this year that the agency tracks UFO sightings, the Capital-Star obtained records showing PEMA has investigated more than a dozen such events in the last decade.

"We take all reports and we share it with the appropriate agencies to be able to investigate," Padfield told members of the state House Appropriations Committee in February.

"We have had reports of unidentified flying objects in the past," Padfield said before quickly moving on to the role of the Federal Aviation Administration in regulating drones.

"So, wait. Run that back again. What did you say about UFOs?" House Appropriations Committee Chairperson Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia) asked when Padfield had finished his answer.

"Most of them are unfounded, or they're attributable to some other mechanisms," Padfield concluded, prompting another follow up from Harris.

"So, what about the un-most?" Harris asked. "You're talking like ET phone home or something?"

Padfield conceded that some sightings are "undefined" and are difficult to understand unless the person reporting the phenomenon gets pictures but everything is passed along to the appropriate agencies.

Not satisfied with Padfield's answer, the Capital-Star filed a right-to-know request with PEMA seeking records of unidentified flying objects and aerial phenomena and, for good measure, "encounters with unknown beings including those of suspected extra-terrestrial or cryptozoological nature."

Many are resolved with a little bit of research, he said. "We've always taken these cases very open mindedly. We approach them scientifically."

Other reports are less easily explained.

On Sept. 21, 2023, a Shermans Dale man reported a UFO with eight vertical lights he described as white, yellow, and a hint of green hovering about 200 feet above the road near a Perry County gas station. The man attempted to take a video with his cellphone before the lights disappeared but he later discovered the video had not been saved, the PEMA records say.

A Lower Saucon Township man called the Northampton County 911 center Dec. 19, 2021, to report a flying saucer with seven or eight lights on its underside over his development. Police responded but it's unclear from the records whether they took any action. PEMA provided the caller with contact information for Gordon's hotline, the records say.

Montgomery County authorities investigated after an Upper Pottsgrove Township man reported a glowing orb about the size of a small aircraft fell from the sky on Sept. 15, 2014. The object, which he described as orange and yellow fire-colored, floated behind the treeline and did not reappear. An officer who responded reported seeing flashes in the area but no other suspicious activity.

"There are a lot of cases that are very, very detailed that are not easy to explain away," Gordon said.
 

JetmanJay

Member
Nov 1, 2017
3,528
Huh. I wonder if each state has a 'emergency management agency' that files away specific reports of this nature?
 
OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867

View: https://twitter.com/UAPJames/status/1788327183405977884

thedebrief.org

This Well-Known UFO Debunker is Skeptical of the DoD’s Recent Investigations into Aerial Mysteries. Here’s Why. - The Debrief

This prominent UFO skeptic says he has a few problems with recent investigations by the DoD's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

The problems with AARO's analysis weren't overlooked by Mick West, arguably the most well-known UFO skeptic and the administrator of Metabunk, a website that crowdsources information West and other site contributors use to attempt to resolve UAP cases. In a posting on X following the release of AARO's case analysis on the Eglin incident, West was quick to point out that the object in the photos obtained by the pilot bore little resemblance to images of a commercial lighting balloon used for comparison in AARO's report.

The Debrief reached out to West regarding his views on AARO's analysis of the Eglin UAP case, as well as other issues that have arisen with official publications issued by the Pentagon's UAP investigative office in recent weeks; most notably, AARO's long-awaited "Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Volume I," which it released earlier this year.

For West, the lighting balloon theory falls short of offering a definitive resolution for the case, as do several of AARO's other recent assertions.

"The lighting balloon hypothesis always felt like something someone at AARO liked, but wasn't really supported by much evidence," West told The Debrief in an email.

West told The Debrief that Kirkpatrick's remarks had initially sounded "almost as if he was trying to explain the Nimitz Tic-Tac, which would be rather a stretch." However, with the release of the AARO's report on the Eglin UAP case, it is now clear that this was the incident Kirkpatrick had been referring to at the time. West says that although some kind of lighter-than-air object cannot be dismissed, even AARO seemed uncertain whether this was a definitive conclusion, despite the report now being categorized as resolved.

"In the Eglin case, it can't be ruled out, but it's also not the only hypothesis [AARO] put forward," West points out, noting that AARO's recent report on the incident suggests that the Eglin UAP had been "very likely a lighter-than-air object, such as a large commercial lighting balloon," although the report's authors express that limited data on the case makes it difficult to rule out other potential explanations.

"Ideally the data would be public, as the more eyes you have on something, the quicker issues and questions get resolved," West told The Debrief. "AARO works with two partners, an IC (Intelligence Community) partner and an S&T (Science and Technology) partner. It's not clear who they are, but they both seem to have reached similar conclusions. Oddly, neither seem to comment on the lighting balloon hypothesis, which suggests that it was internal to AARO, so three teams."

Fundamentally, West says that working more closely with independent researchers under such circumstances could have helped AARO produce a better, more accurate final report and may have reduced negative responses from many who, justifiably, viewed the report as lacking quality and factual merit.

"There's no real downside," West concluded, "and an error-free report is a much better way of conveying your research and conclusions than what they actually produced."
 
OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867

View: https://twitter.com/MvonRen/status/1788532872493568079

Has the U.S. government secretly retrieved exotic craft of "non-human" origin? Newly declassified documents, along with extraordinary legislation, illustrate how two successive Democratic Senate majority leaders appear to have believed so.

Notably, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) were not alone in their focus on UFOs. The Democratic heavyweights received critical support and encouragement from a bipartisan group of high-profile senators over the years, including former fighter pilot and famed astronaut John Glenn (D-Ohio); Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who observed a UFO as a World War II pilot; Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), then-chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense; 2008 GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.); Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.); Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.).

In late 2011, for example, the top scientist at the Department of Homeland Security met with Lieberman, then chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Reid to discuss the establishment of an ultra-secret UFO program.

As outlined in remarkable detail in newly released documents, the intent of the proposed program was to "gain access to and inventory" UFOs secretly under "investigation in National Laboratories, government organizations and/or contractors."

From there, the program would engage in "laboratory experimentation" and "scientific investigation" to foster "technology exploitation" of the recovered materials.

Notably, the Reid- and Lieberman-backed proposal included an "Oral History Initiative" to interview a pre-identified "list of retired, previously highly placed government, armed services, contractor, and intelligence community individuals" with knowledge of the "location of advanced aerospace technology and biological samples."

More recently, Schumer and a bipartisan group of five other senators introduced extraordinary legislation alleging the existence of surreptitious "legacy programs" that retrieve and seek to reverse-engineer UFOs of "non-human" origin.

In eyebrow-raising comments on the Senate floor, Schumer said the government "has gathered a great deal of information about [UFOs] over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people."

Separate legislation, sponsored by Rubio and Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committee member Gillibrand, cuts off funding for illicit UFO programs. Language accompanying the legislation outlines, in remarkable detail, the various elements that such a program would entail, including UFO retrieval procedures, scientific analysis, reverse-engineering and security and counterintelligence efforts. President Biden signed Gillibrand and Rubio's legislation into law in December.

Moreover, in response to the "government's blanket denials regarding the possession of off-world technology," Mellon recently posted a 2020 exchange describing how a "senior government official" uncovered the "management structure and security control systems" of a UFO retrieval program. The official also claimed to have identified the "gatekeeper" controlling access to the Air Force's secret UFO efforts.
 
OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867
thedebrief.org

UAPs in Canada: A Conversation with MP Larry Maguire on Disclosure, Transparency, and Government Action - The Debrief

Canadian MP Larry Maguire shares his thoughts on the UAP subject and the Canadian government's position on these phenomena.

In a conversation with The Debrief, MP Larry Maguire recently explored his thoughts on the UAP subject, the Canadian government's position, and his proposals for advancing the subject in Canada (the following Q&A has undergone minor editing for additional clarity).

Chrissy Newton: What sparked your initial interest in the topic of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in Canada?

MP Larry Maguire: The New York Times story in 2017, that showed the American government was investigating UAPs.

CN: What made you want to come forward in 2023 to address the alleged crash retrievals and secret multi-nation UAPs program Canada and the United States have participated in?

LM: Policymakers in Canada need to understand that, over the decades, various parts of the government have investigated UAP. I do not know which people know what information or what has been shared with our allies.

CN: Why is it so important that the Canadian government become more involved in investigating these phenomena?

LM: This lies in the fact that the government as a whole is not investigating UAP reports as well as the fact there are countless reports laying around in filing cabinets and no one is dealing with them.

CN: To your knowledge, what Canadian government political parties have been briefed on the UAP topic to date?

LM: I am aware of MPs from the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party who have shown interest and spoken with people in this space.

CN: Can you share any specific incidents or reports that have particularly caught your attention regarding UAP sightings near Canadian nuclear facilities?

LM: There have been several reports regarding UAP sightings near Canadian nuclear facilities. The most recent that comes to mind was in Pickering, Ontario, in 2021.

CN: Mr. Maguire, considering the extensive reporting of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in Canada, including near nuclear power facilities, and the efforts of journalist Daniel Otis to access records related to these phenomena, what steps do you believe should be taken to ensure transparency and public access to information regarding UAP sightings near Canadian nuclear sites?

LM: The Minister of Natural Resources should issue a ministerial directive to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to immediately declassify all incidents and set up a process for future incidents.

CN: Do you think the UAP topic will be used as a political ploy in the next election for votes? If so, how and why?

LM: No.

CN: Looking ahead, what do you hope to achieve or see in terms of government action or policy changes regarding UAP phenomena in Canada?

LM: Having all relevant information given to the Chief Science Advisor, and once we see the Sky Canada report and recommendations, the Parliamentary Science Committee should do its own individual study. Then we can determine the next steps and provide further recommendations to the government.
 

JetmanJay

Member
Nov 1, 2017
3,528
Notably, the Reid- and Lieberman-backed proposal included an "Oral History Initiative" to interview a pre-identified "list of retired, previously highly placed government, armed services, contractor, and intelligence community individuals" with knowledge of the "location of advanced aerospace technology and biological samples.
Notably, the Reid- and Lieberman-backed proposal included an "Oral History Initiative" to interview a pre-identified "list of retired, previously highly placed government, armed services, contractor, and intelligence community individuals" with knowledge of the "location of advanced aerospace technology and biological samples."

This makes it sound like our government has absolutely no idea which contractors have what, or where those 'what's' would even be.
How could there not have been some kind of standard office that controls and manages who has this tech?
 

Akira86

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,614
Even if they did have some centralized control and organization, it would be too classified for almost anyone to know it exists. So, outside-looking-in, it would still appear to be a big disorganized mess where nobody knew where anything was and no one can keep track of anything, and certainly no one would be able come in and follow an organized path back to the origins of who ordered what.

If there was a road map it would take some digging to find. Probably even more digging to find someone who knew what it was. And drilling a hole to the center of the earth to find someone who could actually read it.
 
OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867

View: https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1789249751407358426

If you're into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic.

There's been a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien life, thanks in large part to a 2019 story published in the New York Times about reports of UFOs — also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — off the East Coast a decade ago. Since then, the whole topic of UFOs feels considerably less fringe than it once did.

Diana Pasulka is a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and the author of two books on this topic. Her first book, American Cosmic, was focused on the religious dimensions of UFO mythology. The new one is called Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, and it dives into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien life.

I recently invited Pasulka to The Gray Area to talk about her research, the stories she's heard from people who claim to have experienced UFOs, and how her views have evolved in surprising directions. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Sean Illing
When you write in this book that UFO events are a "spiritual reality" for people, what does that mean?

Diana Pasulka
UFO events are transformative realities for the people who experience them. They're not necessarily good — religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good. I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs and sometimes with what they called "beings associated with UFOs" and it sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record.

I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record. There were no planes, there were no rockets back then. People were seeing things in the sky and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could be souls from purgatory or they could be houses of saints and things like that. I think we're dealing with something here that isn't necessarily a new religion so much as a new form of spirituality.

Sean Illing
So when people tell you that they've encountered aliens or they've been visited by angels, you really believe them?

Diana Pasulka
I believe that they believe it, but that doesn't commit me to the belief that it happened. I'll give you an example. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a very famous mathematician in the early 20th century from India, and he was a genius. And he believed these math calculations were whispered in his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region. I think she was a version of Lakshmi. So that's a story that takes hold and gets repeated.

Now, am I committed to the belief that Lakshmi gave Ramanujan that? No, I'm not. But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse, and I can leave aside the question of the objective existence of these entities.

Sean Illing
I just don't know what to do with some of these stories and characters you profile in the book. The vividness of the accounts, the consistencies, the depth — it is puzzling, to say the least. It's hard to believe there's nothing to see here.

Diana Pasulka
Well, I agree with you. I mean, I started out as a complete nonbeliever. But when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford, and there were so many of them, I was absolutely shocked. And that shock lasted for a couple of years.

I've been studying this now for about 14 years, so that's a long time. I actually believe these people. It's definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as what people are talking about today. We can only say that these people are having these experiences. Most of them will not come out and say that because of their jobs. There's still a stigma and I don't blame these people for not coming out publicly. I'm just not going to disbelieve them because I've met thousands of people who are credible witnesses, and the patterns are so similar.

Sean Illing
The skeptic in me says the will to believe is so strong in the human mind and we can sincerely convince ourselves of almost anything. I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things they're telling you to be true.

But as you were saying, that doesn't mean they're true or it doesn't mean that they're reliably true. So to take one random example, there's that guy you talked to who moved his family out of Los Angeles to live in some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so. That just sounds like the hallucinations of a confused person.

Diana Pasulka
I mean, what did the pilgrims do? Or what did people who had visions and thought that they needed to leave Egypt or go someplace because a god told them to? Or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this? This is how I see that type of thing. I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years. It's a fundamental religious impulse. That's how I see it.

Sean Illing
A religious impulse, sure, but that's separate from the question of truthfulness. And again, I may sound like I'm contradicting myself, but I'm just being honest about my own ambivalence. Despite what I just said about the will to believe being strong, I also think the will to hold on to our current worldview is strong because letting go of that means letting go of almost everything we take to be true — and that's scary.

So there are forces pushing in both directions here. For me, the only sensible position at this point is agnosticism. I'm open to the evidence, but there's not enough yet.

Diana Pasulka
Yeah, I do think that. I also want to push back a little on what you said about the will to believe. It seems like most people don't want to experience these things. That pilot didn't want to experience that. He didn't want to believe it. He was just going about his life, doing fine, and then everything gets turned upside down. He sees this face in the clouds and it's almost mocking him. Who would want to experience that?

This is also the case with people who claim to have seen angels or souls from purgatory in the 1600s or 1700s. They weren't actually looking for that.

I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory, and it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent and she was terrified. And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept to her story and finally Mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough she saw the same thing. And so, they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent prayed for weeks to get rid of it, and it finally disappeared.

Sean Illing
To get back to this broader question about the possibility of alien life, I'm not even going to ask if this discovery would be the most significant event in human history, because it obviously would be. But I do wonder what you think the most significant implication of that discovery would be for us as a species?

Diana Pasulka
For a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in the world believe in nonhuman intelligence because most people are religious. And so within various different religions, you have different forms of nonhuman intelligences that display themselves in different ways to people. It's mostly people in the post-Enlightenment West who are disbelievers in that narrative. So it would absolutely be the most shocking event for us, and the implication would be something like a post-secular society.
 
OP
OP
Forerunner

Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,867

View: https://twitter.com/CTVNews/status/1790806925724020789

A U.S. intelligence agency wanted to meet with Transport Canada's "lead" on UFOs amid heightened interest and headline-grabbing news about the Pentagon's UFO research efforts and congressional hearings in the U.S.

But through multiple freedom of information requests, a CTVNews.ca investigation shows the senior federal transportation official repeatedly tried to downplay the enigmatic issue by contributing to "contradictory" media statements, pushing back against access to information requests, and deflecting questions to the Americans while also being involved in a UFO briefing for the transport minister's office.

Juneau was Transport Canada's director of safety policy and intelligence for civil aviation before moving to another government department in June 2023.

Juneau suggested meeting the Americans in-person during an upcoming December 2022 trip to Washington, D.C. The emails obtained by CTVNews.ca do not reveal when and where the meeting took place, or what was discussed. Transport Canada would not answer direct questions about the meeting and whether or not it occurred. The U.S. ODNI did not respond to a request for comment.

"Do you have any idea why the U.S. is looking for a contact for UAPs?" the Transport Canada policy adviser asked Juneau in a follow-up email.

"Not a clue though I'm fascinated," Juneau responded. "We've had a huge uptick in enquires (sic) on the matter since the announcement of the first U.S. Pentagon report."

Juneau also tried to intervene with UFO-related freedom of information requests. Canada's Access to Information Act allows government institutions to dismiss a request that is deemed "vexatious, is made in bad faith or is otherwise an abuse of the right to make a request for access to records."

In a January 2022 email, Juneau described UFO information requests as "abusive, harassing, and vexatious," a "wild goose chase," and "not in the interests of taxpayers."

"We need an intervention on this [access to information] request and future [access to information requests] of this nature," Juneau wrote to Transport Canada colleagues. "The sheer amount of hours we have lost on these is ridiculous at this point in what amounts to someone's hunt for little green men."

The email was in response to a specific access to information request filed that month. More than two years later, it has still not been completed.

"I do understand their frustration dealing with all the [access to information] requests," Kavalench said. "Perhaps if they got serious about investigating UAP reports and sharing their results those [access to information] requests would go away."

Kavalench says it's also apparent that U.S. officials are taking the UAP topic more seriously than their Canadian counterparts.

"The U.S. ODNI is trying to collaborate with Transport Canada, yet Canadian officials are not taking this issue seriously," the Manitoba lawmaker said in a statement to CTVNews.ca. "The Minister of Transport must issue a directive to his officials to immediately work with our allies and get them to stop deflecting legitimate media inquiries."