I’ve never understood the reasoning behind conspiracy theories that the governments of the world have successfully covered up evidence of aliens for generations.
Governments usually can’t even keep the things they themselves do secret for very long. How would they hide interstellar visitors that are completely outside their jurisdiction? It would be like trying to hide the Great Red Spot on Jupiter or the existence of Tardigrades. Any sufficiently curious, moderately well-equipped science geek would be able to document and publish the evidence long before any government could stop them.
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.
France, Belgium, the UK, and a good number of other countries have basically opened up about the fact that these things are real, they are intelligently-controlled, and they are not human. This now essentially includes the USA, since the December 2017 stories in national media about the Pentagon’s AATIP program.
The main thing keeping governments from being even more open about it is that, as this thread largely indicates, people are not quite ready for it. There is a ton of information out there that strongly indicates this is a real and very, very interesting thing, and it’s likely full-on high weirdness. Most people would rather say “well duh, anything not recognized is technically a UFO” and go about their business, than really look into it, and make an informed opinion.
But the times are changing. 
Well that’s just hogwash, lots of secrets have been successfully kept secret over the years. The first the public learned about nuclear weapons was when we dropped a couple on Japan. There are many Pentagon programs that have existed for years that are not public. We know, for instance, that there is a stealth version of the Blackhawk. Let’s see if you can find a picture of one – and not just the tail that was blown off of one when the DEVGRU took out bin Laden and one was blown up.
Also, there IS a lot of actual evidence for this phenomenon being some weird shit. Have you actually, I dunno… Done a lot of research on the subject?
The important thing, and I can’t stress this enough, is that you have an UFO-clause in your contract.
I’d wondered about this. But, it’s career suicide for scientists to look into it. Informed partly by the government line that, “Alien Flying Saucers are not a Thing”. So the funding is not there.
So, what you’re left with is a bunch of blurry photos and video because low light cameras are still expensive and even if you have one, tracking a fast moving object far away manually is difficult.
Someone, eventually, is going to make a system which has great optical zoom, great motion tracking and great low light (and maybe extended spectrum imaging like IR/UV). And it’s going to drive them bankrupt because UFOlogists don’t tend to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on such a product.
Well, now we also have three F-18 fighter jet videos the Navy declassified, two of which with audio, showing them chasing legit UAPs. Some of the pilots who were involved have gone on the record about one of the incidents the video is from. Again, people need to study the actual evidence. AATIP apparently gathered MUCH.
This latest story even says, openly, that these reportings inside the military are increasing in number. The frequency is going up. So that may well explain why the military is opening up more now than in previous years – they may feel that this is something that may become obviously real to a lot more people, soon. Gotta stay ahead of the story, a tad.
Does this have anything to do with the probing thing? Because you know that there are people on this planet that will do that for you if you ask nicely…
I’m a wee bit suspicious that if the military is chasing unknown craft of any sort, it’s much more likely that it’s of the terrestrial origin sort.
U.S. building advanced aircraft? Cover/disinformation story UFO.
U.S. doing interesting stuff with weather balloons over NM? Definitely UFOs.
Is Russia or China doing anything interesting with military tech? Probably UFOs.
Oh, I am with it, up to date on this. My take is that the recent government disclosures are just the start of a change which leads to real scientists getting real funding to study real phenomena.
But we are not there yet. (Hoping we do get there) I was responding to the sentiment of, “why don’t we have more proof now that this is a real thing?”.
My elbow???
How I wish these were extra-terrestrial in origin.
But color me skeptical, many phenomenon on Earth we do not understand so seeing something that defies first pass explanation should not lead one to shout “Independence Day!”.
Also, sure maybe aliens have different economics than we do, but to spend an inordinate amount of resources to let the grad students go play with the Earthlings instead of maybe electronic surveilance/communcation is another stone in the we are alone (so far) pile.
They’ve gotten to you.
Let me clarify, “staying ahead of the story” was what I meant the military may have to do, if the number of incidents is indeed going up over time. Not you!
It strikes me that when this finally becomes a more widely-understood thing, we’re not going to use these terms to describe it any longer. I mean, we are seeing them on and around Earth after all. Chances are they’ve been around these parts a lot longer than humans have been, if indeed they are so far beyond our own capabilities.
Unless you were Joseph Stalin. Then you had full plans, breakdowns of methods and operational reports as it was happening. (See Klaus Fuchs)
Probably your best examples would be:
ULTRA, the breaking of the German enigma codes during WWII
The Israeli effort to obtain South African Uranium through a phony ship hijacking
But both were disclosed after several notable espionage fiascoes as a way to save face in public and say, “Look we were really competent back then!”
The point being is that secrets have a nasty way of coming out in unexpected ways. Usually having to do with failures of competence by the people holding the secrets in one form or another.
Given how thoroughly the KGB compromised Western intelligence agencies from 1945 to the late 80’s, there is no way we would know about the aliens without the Russians also knowing. We would have seen secret intelligence wars over alien tech. (This would make a wild TV/Film/Book series!)
But it was hardly any secret that the US government was developing secret military technologies. So keeping the details of a specific weapons program from leaking to the public during a war is hardly the same as keeping a global (or even interstellar) phenomenon secret for generations.
The Pentagon only succeeded in keeping the Manhattan Project secret for as long as it did because they controlled every aspect of the Manhattan Project.
To Serve Man
