Maverick's World

UFO article in the NYT

Guys - before you go around screaming "THERES ALEIENSS EVERYWEWHERE!!!" from the rooftops, here is a few things you want to keep in mind.

There are a vast number of unexplained electrical phenomena in the atmosphere. You can broadly call these phenomena "lightning" because as with lightning - we understand jack about them. The entire earth and its atmosphere is a complex capacitor with mobile ions in it. Due to gravity these atmospheric ions have what can crudely be termed a barometric profile in steady state, but given the vagaries of space weather and the unknowable nature of interfacial currents at the earth's surface - we can see large electrical transport phenomena in the atmosphere.

If you ever want to read about this in greater detail, look up the chapter on atmopheric ions in Feynman's book. It is a good starting point for further reading. Feynman doesn't capture the transient phenomena only the static or steady state solutions. The transients are a very rich phenomenology - unless you have worked in that area you basically know nothing about it. There are weird couplings between the Navier-Stokes equations and the Poisson Equation, there are variations in the local gravity field you have to consider and you have to think about what exactly is going on under the specific area of the earth's surface you are on. Sub-surface electrical currents have mirror charge rearrangements above the surface. It's pretty ridiculously complicated and a lot of weird shit happens.

For a scientist - a fellow scientist saying - "Yeah, I don't know what the fuck is going on" is pretty normal. Most of our kind live in that sort of permanent haze where we keep asking ourselves "which way is up?" - ordinary civilians they can't handle that. So most times we offer them the simplest possible explanation to keep them from going ape-shit about something we don't really have any answers for. The civilians make fun of us - "look at those idiots arguing about how many angels fit on a pinhead" - and that's okay - cause face it - you'all can't handle the truth.

Apart from those as yet ill-understood atmospheric electrohydrodyanmic phenomena, there is the a vast array of subterranean SCI aviation projects with (lets just say) "Lofty" goals. These projects usually get their test flights scheduled through a special airspace control which monitors dark spots in satellite coverage and ensures that any accidental imaging in sequestered data (i.e. the central trove of NRO vetted images) is scrubbed. Most of the coverage dark spots are near designated locations in the CONUS and at sea where satellites turn off recording and transmit the data to ground stations. Barring the odd MIL a/c that is outside its task area or accidentally imaging on a non-sequestered camera feed - these "ghost" flights do not turn up. You can  map them, with a couple of SDRs and MLAT - but it takes effort - serious amounts of it to "see" these flights. I strongly suspect a bunch of guys scanning ADS-B channels have this implemented already - but they are keeping it down to ensure the USG doesn't crawl up their asses.

Outside of these unexplained weather and secret planes - there is the realm of the truly unexplained. There is a very small fraction of these "truly unexplained" events in the data. Merely because these events were observed by military or civilian pilot/LE personnel doesn't mean that they fall into the "truly unexplained" category.

If you see a politician complaining about UFOs - they are likely doing so for a reason. That reason usually has to do with the limited nature of external oversight into TS-SCI research projects. The politicians are not evil - there is actually a very bad history here which no one wants to talk about because it just makes you feel miserable. There was a lot illegal human experimentation done back in the day under the guise of TS-SCI programs. Really toxic shit that you wouldn't believe a democratic government would ever do and yet that went on for quite a while. The whole gamut from state sponsored sexual abuse of women and children to unsanctioned medical experiments on infants. It is all completely fucked up shit that went down a while back.

So when you see someone like Harry Reid bringing it up - it should be red flag. A warning that something has shifted in research underworld.

The details of this secret underworld of research activities may be invisible to all of us common folk - but you know who had unfettered access to all this stuff back in the day? - the Project Paperclip guys. Yeah - that's right - "former" Nazis had more access to these secrets than most people serving in the US military or NASA did.

So I personally wouldn't be too surprised if a whole bunch of "UFOs" just popped out of the ground to help Trump seal his grip on power.  And if that ever happened, you should be legit scare but just know - it wouldn't mean that Aliens exist or that they support Trump. It just means a core of Nazis has wormed its way into some TS-SCI projects and it's gonna be a real pain weeding them out.

posted by maverick @ 7:24 AM