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The USA shot down several UFOs
2 years ago995 words
Have you been keeping up with the news about this?

I have, and it's strange.

First, there was the Chinese spy balloon, which was openly referred to as such and once that was shot down, details - including images of the recovered debris - were shared openly and quickly.

Then, shortly after, three other things were shot down, and the people involved seem to be making a point of using the term 'objects' instead of balloons and saying that they don't know what they are, or who they belong to, and they've been unable to recover any debris even though it's been three or four days now.

∞ The r/UFOs subreddit has been buzzing with new posts every few minutes ∞, which I've been checking occasionally. Included among those posts are clips of... press briefings? Or whatever the term is. Government types with microphones in their faces, or what look like official White House announcements; not really a world I'm familiar with so I don't know how it works.

I found this clip with a guy called Marco Rubio (who could be the High Wizard of the Baby-Eating Party for all I know or care as a non-American) particularly interesting:

...I'd prefer a youtube embed, but I don't know if it's available anywhere other than this website: [LINK]

From what I gather, the US senators were all given a briefing about the situation, and he's speaking about it here as if these objects were presented as being in the same categories as UFOs or 'UAPs'.

The thing I find most fascinating is how the long-held cultural attitude of ridicule towards UFOs has been shifting in recent years, and I've seen several of these clips where reporters seriously ask about whether it's aliens and get a serious reply.

(Though not always; I saw one annoying clip where the government representative was asked if it was aliens and laughed it off and said she 'liked ET' (the film) etc.)

Others have just pointed out with exasperation that no, there are no signs that it's aliens.

In my current view, whether they're manmade or space aliens' starships or probes is a false dichotomy!



I've been interested in the UFO topic since I was tiny, and for most of my life I believed, as most people do, that they were alien spacecraft.

These days, after looking into it a whole lot more, I hold a different view.

Or rather, I still think they're a non-human intelligence (rather than, say, camera/visual artefacts or weather phenomena), but I think the idea of that being just little grey men in metal flying saucers is extremely naive and small-minded. Something truly alien would be well beyond our comprehension, as it seems this thing is.

There's a well-known UFO researcher called Jacques Vallée who you may or may not have heard of, who for years has been pushing the idea that the entirety of human history is full of strange things that are likely this same phenomena taking different forms. Now, it's big-eyed greys in saucers, but centuries ago it was the fairy folk who lived just beyond the hills, or flying galleons whose occupants came swimming down through the air or offered bread in exchange for fuel or info.

I recently read Passport to Magonia, one of his better-known books, which goes into detail about this and includes a vast collection of historical strange stories as supporting evidence.

The basic idea seems to be that whatever this intelligence is, it communicates metaphorically, on grand scales, and it tailors its forms to what would be just on the edge of onlookers' ability to comprehend. So something mostly familiar but just slightly odd or more advanced, which opens the mind to new possibilities. Instead of communicating plain facts, it seems more concerned with influencing mythology and enduring beliefs.

They also don't necessarily seem to be physical objects (though the divide between 'a real thing' and 'not a real thing' might be less rigid for them than for us). One of the dismissals of the existence of UFOs is that people are 'just imagining' them, but this plays with that and suggests that they are, in a sense, 'imagining' them, but this imagining is directed by another intelligence. So in a sense, they're illusions tailored to the viewer. Several people might witness the same abnormal event but report it in drastically different ways because they actually did see different things.

It may also originate here on Earth, or extradimensionally, or it might exist 'on top of us' in a way we aren't equipped to perceive or understand in a similar way to how we can't see the wi-fi, radio, or x-rays zapping around us all the time.

So questions like '"why don't the greys just land on the White House lawn?" seem as absurd as an ant asking "why don't the humans just come before the queen and emit these particular pheromones?", maybe. And "why would they travel all this way to see us?" might be like someone from 1750 balking at the idea of instant messages across continents because it takes weeks or months to sail across the seas.

Here's a not-too-long video that I feel serves as a decent starting point for this train of thought:



It's interesting then that the US claims to have shot down a number of things that at least some of these senators are speaking about as if they're in this same category. Are they unable to find the debris because of this not-exactly-physical nature of the phenomenon? Or is it slippery in a way that they have no idea what to make of it?

Or maybe it's just something boringly mundane and it'll all be forgotten about in a few days, like always!

Still, entertaining to think that maybe something could be happening, at the very least.

19 COMMENTS

Lordofsea19~2Y
So basically like George Lucas' conception about The Force from Star Wars?
1
Tobias 1115~2Y
I don't think so? Though is there some lore stuff you're familiar with and I'm not? I'm not exactly a big Star Wars fan so I don't know the deeper stuff.
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astralwolf92~2Y
I do not know why you entertain beliefs that are not backed up by any evidence. This reminds me of the days where you fawned over myers-briggs tests and other assessments that werent scientifically validated
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Tobias 1115~2Y
I don't know why your reaction to someone talking about something they're clearly passionate about is to essentially stomp on it.
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astralwolf92~2Y
Its a combination of 3 things - having passion for knowledge, distaste for pseudoscience, and being an asshole
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Astreon152~2Y
You cannot have passion for knowledge and distate for pseudoscience: learning about pseudosciences...is acquiring knowledge.

You have passion for what you consider real science. That leads to obscurantism (one only has to observe the difference between occidental healthcare and oriental healthcare to realize it), because orthodox scientists are so used to proving they are right, that they forget that the absence of proof is not the proof of absence (not to mention they forget that they are humans before being experts, which by itself is a hindrance to the learning process).

The only right answer to "are there aliens out there" is "maybe", because their existence is, currently, as unprovable by science as their inexistence. Anything other than that is faith, which is never neither right nor wrong.

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Astreon152~2Y
Don't let it get to you Tobias: science is a something the aliens invented to better hide their existence, by making it impossible to scientifically prove, and letting people think that what is not scientifically proven does not exist :)
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Tobias 1115~2Y
To what degree do you think our human minds understand - or even can understand - the nature of reality? Something like 99%, just a few details need ironing out?
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Astreon152~2Y
That's 2 reaaally different questions.

"Understand", i'd say not much, but that's because human thinking is unfortunately not only a rational process. Since we're not computers, we do not only calculate objectively to analyse a situation: education, emotions and such interfere with and hinder our comprehension. How many people actually manage to "put themselves in another's shoes" to see a situation from their perspective ?
If you picture the sum of all knowledge as a sphere, most people only have a needle approach to it. An expert might have a needle so long it actually pierces through, but hardly anyone manages to have a global apprehension of any given situation, even if only superficial.

"Can understand", i have absolutely no clue. Neuroscience is trying to figure it out, and there's the legend that we're using only a tiny percentage of our brain's overall capabilities. But i don't really have an opinion on this topic: what matters to me is what i'm able or unable to understand, not what there theoretically is to understand.

Also, in order to even define what "the nature of reality" that i'd need to understand is, wouldn't i have to have the ability to understand it ?

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Slothboy2531~2Y
I totally agree with you that the idea of aliens in flying saucers is just too simplistic. I mean, if they're advanced enough to travel through space, why would they need a clunky metal craft like that? Maybe they're just using it as a decoy, and their actual bodies are made of some sort of energy or consciousness. Or they're just really into retro aesthetics...

And I do like the idea of communication through metaphor. They could be speaking in a language that we haven't quite learned yet. Kind of like when my mom texts me in all emojis and I have to decipher what she's saying ^^
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Mantis_Toboggan5~2Y
I've always been a believer in aliens and, it's great, that the US is finally taking UFOs seriously. Who knows, maybe I'll get to see some drastic changes in how we perceive these things over our lifetimes!
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Maniafig222~2Y
I can't really comment on what those press releases said, since I've not really seen them, but that one theory from Jacques Vallée sounds more like he's got a conclusion and then constructing the only possible reasoning under which the contradictory facts somehow still reach a conclusion makes sense, rather than looking at the facts and then coming to the most reasonable explanation.

It's not been the first time the topic's come up here, and the comments section always becomes a circus when it does. Will we be here again on the cusp of a new understanding in 2024? 2025? It's sort of a "boy who cried wolf" thing for me at this point.
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Astreon152~2Y
Now that i've seen "future man", the tale of "the boy who cried Wolf" has a whole different vibe too it XD
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astralwolf92~2Y
Your beliefs on the matter are predicated on confirmation bias and motivated reasoning
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