Tag: UAP

Another Congressional Hearing on UAPs and We Still Don’t Know Who Was Driving That Thing

I just sat through the two and a half hour long House Committee Oversight and Accountability hearing dramatically entitled: “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.” The impression I got is that somebody still thinks we can’t handle the truth.

This is the second congressional hearing on UAPs I’ve seen. I have to admit, I thought of Agent K’s line to a low ranking MIB agent in the movie Men in Black 3. It’s in the scene in front of what’s obviously a flying saucer as Agent J is administering a neuralyzer blast to the unlucky human witnesses, who will of course forget what they just saw:

“Check the composition of the fuel units and run a scan on the surface deposits. I want to know who was driving that thing.” Me too.

I don’t think this meeting was much different than the one last July. There were 4 witnesses, one of whom was Luis Elizondo (“I believe what I believe in.”). There were quite a few “I don’t know” and “I’d be happy to answer that question in a closed session” type of answers.

Dr. Gold was the scientist who seemed to play a role similar to retired Commander David Fravor played last year, with an engaging, good humored, “stick to the facts” demeanor.

Nobody talked much about the closed session meetings the previous group had after last year’s meeting, except to point out that the “overclassification” of information about UAPs continues and we still don’t know “…who was driving that thing.”

AARO Wants UFO Info

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is now accepting information about U.S. government programs or activities related to UFOs from “…current or former U.S. Government employees, service members, or contractor personnel with direct knowledge of U.S. Government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945.   These reports will be used to inform AARO’s congressionally directed Historical Record Report.”

You know who you are.

The AARO Finally Has a Website And is it Part of a Zero-Sum Game?

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) finally has a website—more than a year after it was formed.

It looks like there’s an intriguing message in the section “Coming Soon: US Government UAP-Related Program/Activity Reporting.” It says AARO will accept reports of UAP from current government employees who know of any programs or activities related to UAPs dating back to 1945.

One sentence tells you “This form is intended as an initial point of contact with AARO; it is not intended for conveying potentially sensitive or classified information.  Following the submission of your report, AARO staff may reach out to request additional detail or arrange for an informational interview.”

Several other sections provide further information and pictures and videos on UAP.

I wonder if all this is a reaction to the House Oversight Committee Hearing on UAP on July 26, 2023. Either the website has been under construction for all of last year and was just finished a couple days ago or it was just thrown together recently.

This makes me think of a couple of things, one is Dr. George Dawson’s blog post “Is This An Episode of the X-Files?” The other is an X-Files episode itself, “Zero Sum” which Sena and I just saw a couple of nights ago. We don’t remember seeing it when it first aired in 1997. You can read the Wikipedia article about the episode.

The gist of it is that Assistant Director Skinner makes a deal with the Smoking Man in which the latter will save Agent Scully’s life (she’s dying of cancer related to alien experiments) if Skinner hides the death of a postal worker who was killed by a swarm of bees carrying smallpox. This is part of a complex plot by a group called the Syndicate which is either trying to work with extraterrestrials to either exterminate the human race or save it (depending on which episode you watch) by using bees as a vehicle to transmit either smallpox or a vaccine to cure the Black Oil, which screws you up pretty bad. Part of this is my interpretation because the storyline sometimes is not clear about this to me.

Anyway, the back-and-forth actions and reactions of the characters, especially Skinner and the Smoking Man, are pretty good examples of a Zero-Sum game, loosely defined in that neither gets much of an edge on the other as they both try to counter each other’s efforts in what is probably just a power struggle from the Smoking Man’s perspective and a desperate effort to save Scully’s life from Skinner’s perspective.

Anyway, I wonder if the UAP reporters and the government (including the AARO) might be in some kind of zero-sum game. UAP reporters try to get the government to admit that Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (EABs) and Extraterrestrial spacecraft exist. But the government denies it. Neither side ever seems to get much further ahead of the other.

House Oversight Committee UAP Hearing Today

We watched the House Oversight Committee UAP Hearing today and it was one of the most interesting presentations we’ve seen in a long while.

I make fun of the topic a lot but I thought all the witnesses were credible. In my opinion, the most credible witness today was retired Commander David Fravor of the U.S. Navy. His sense of humor and down-to-earth (no joke intended) demeanor lent credibility to the issue of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

I especially liked Fravor’s advice for anybody reporting UAPs: “Don’t make the fish bigger than it is.

David Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence officer, often deferred answering certain questions because the answer would have meant revealing classified information. Ryan Graves, a former fighter pilot for the Navy, emphasized the need for a safe way to let military and civilian witnesses describe their encounters with UAPs.

There will likely be another meeting, one which would allow David Grusch to be more open to answering questions involving classified information.

Who’s in Charge of UFOs and Dehumidifiers?

There’s this great line in the movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” After Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is captured by the military and he has been briefed by scientists, he gets a little upset and says, “Well I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy!”

I feel like Roy about this UFO thing that’s now being called UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon). The UAP Task Force is supposed to give some kind of report on this sometime this month. Reports of UFOs (I’m going to keep using that term) have been going on for years and they’ve been getting more complicated lately as stuff gets declassified about them.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the UAP Task Force report. I have trouble understanding small stuff, like dehumidifiers for example. Sena bought one the other day, one with a 40-pint capacity. Sena asked the salesman how many pints there are in a gallon. The guy asked his smartphone the question—and then said “2”.

OK, I admit I’m no whiz kid in math. But even I could get the right answer by duplicating what he did. I asked my smartphone, for the first time, mind you. I had never tried that feature. It clearly and audibly gave the correct answer of 8 pints in a gallon. I’m not sure how that got messed up at the store. Sena also asked if the dehumidifier had a filter. The salesman said he did not think so. There is a very large, flat filter visible to the naked eye on the rear of the unit that just snaps in and out of place.

And don’t get me started about the operating instructions for the timer on it.  I know it’s not a clock. The instructions tell us how to program the timer to turn the thing on and off by using the arrow buttons. They go on at length about how to program it by pressing the Timer OFF or Timer ON, either when the unit is off or on. They tell you to press the arrow buttons left or right to increase or decrease the Timer by 0.5 or 1.0 hour increments up to 24 hours. You set both Timer OFF and Timer ON and the green lights come on, indicating it’s programmed.

What they don’t tell you is that you can’t program multiple time intervals. You can make it come on and go off for one interval. It does that by counting “down the time remaining until start.” What they also don’t tell you is that you need to set both by using time zero as the starting point. If you set Timer ON for 0.5 hours FROM NOW (say time zero is 7:30, meaning you want it to come on at 8:00), and you want the unit to turn itself off after 4 hours, you need to set Timer OFF counting from 7:30, not 8:00.

A clock would have been nice—and clear instructions as well.

So, I want someone with authority to give me the straight story on UFOs. I want to know who’s in charge here. I have my doubts that I’m going to get straight answers if you can’t get them from a guy selling dehumidifiers who doesn’t even known how to use his own smartphone.

Anyway, I found this website called Metabunk and it debunks a fair amount of UFO phenomena. It’s run by Mick West. I can tell it’s fascinating, but I really don’t understand much of what he and others discuss. It’s over my head (of course, since almost everything is). A lot of the language is technical since a lot of what we’re seeing and hearing about UFOs can be misunderstood because, let’s face it, some of this stuff is faked and some of it is ordinary. There are many camera, CGI, and puppet-type tricks which can be applied to give the impression of strange, alien spacecraft. See the extensive post, “How Do You Stage UFO Photos and Videos? Let Us Count the Ways.”

But Metabunk isn’t just about debunking; it’s also about understanding science and technology. When I watch Ancient Aliens or similar TV shows, I really don’t have to do much thinking because they’re mostly speculative. It helps to see something which challenges that view; see West’s article, “The aliens haven’t landed: Why you should be skeptical of recent reports on UFO sightings.”

Maybe he’ll post about dehumidifiers and dehumidifier salesmen. They can’t be from this planet.