CIA on UFO Sightings: 'It Was Us' 197
mrflash818 sends word that the CIA has taken the blame for a majority of early UFO sightings. In a tweet, the agency said, "It was us," and linked to a document summarizing their use of U-2 spy planes from 1954-1974 (PDF).
"High-altitude testing of the U-2led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects," the CIA wrote in the document, which it wrote in 1998. "In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and [many] military aircraftoperated at altitudes below 40,000 feet. Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports." [T]he CIA cross-referenced UFO sightings to U-2 flight logs. "This enabled the investigators to eliminate the majority of the UFO reports," the CIA wrote, "although they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause of the UFO sightings."
Oh yeah? (Score:5, Funny)
If I was a Sleestak alien overlord, that's exactly what I would say.
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If I was a Sleestak alien overlord, that's exactly what I would say.
You would say "Oh, yeah?"? Oddly, that actually makes sense.
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I'm not saying it was aliens... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it was aliens.
(BTW, what happened to the other half?
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But it was aliens.
(BTW, what happened to the other half?
Ask their overlord , Im not saying it was aliens but it was that crazy Alien with the weird hair on H2.
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Russian spy planes. What do you think the CIA was looking for?
Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... (Score:5, Funny)
)
There it is.
Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... (Score:5, Funny)
Weather Balloons - Swamp Gas - Reflections of the Sun against ice particles in clouds - The planet Venus, Mars, Jupiter - Sputnik II - The Jupiter II - The USS Enterprise - that just about covers it...
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Weather Balloons - Swamp Gas - Reflections of the Sun against ice particles in clouds - The planet Venus, Mars, Jupiter - Sputnik II - The Jupiter II - The USS Enterprise - that just about covers it...
"just about covers it" you say.. I wonder what the rest were? Especially the silent ones flying in formation with large panels on their bottoms flashing bright primary colors that I saw go right over my head at night at perhaps 50 feet off the ground in the direction of Mt. Rainier, which about 10 minutes later were followed by two Air Force jets at slow speed but higher up. Then a while later what sounded like helicopters with strong search lights flew around over the forest to the side of the house where
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Say what you will, but at the very least there is tech flying/floating around this world that no Government is yet admitting to having.
Since about 1917, that has been true every day. Though more so since the 1950's.
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I'd like to see the CIA claim credit for the "Flying earthenware vessel" spotted over Edo Japan in 1180 AD.
I guess they were doing really early recon for WWII. Just to make sure the Japanese weren't hiding anything...
LK
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I saw something in the early 80s. I'm not trying to ascribe them to an extraterrestrial origin but they were peculiar.
What I saw wasn't a group of U2 planes in formation. I suppose it could have been A-12 Avenger IIs, but there's no evidence that they ever fielded airworthy aircraft. So, they're still unknown to me and thus it's accurate to call them UFOs.
What's funny to me is that even though I didn't know it at the time, they were moving away from an area with a nuclear research facility that employs a fa
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> I wonder what the rest were? Especially the silent ones flying in formation with large panels on their
>bottoms flashing bright primary colors that I saw go right over my head at night at perhaps 50 feet off the
>ground in the direction of Mt. Rainier,
lysergic acid diethylamide :)
hawk
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But it was aliens.
H1B visa issues?
Other than that, this U2/UFO thing has been kicking around for years. When first reading the headline, I'm thinking why did the CIA have say "it was us" (like why ruin a good story with facts)?
Hmm... (Score:2)
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CIA agents wearing black suits? What do you THINK their uniform is?
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And the silver ray-gun that looks like a dildo with a handle? That's not CIA-issued.
(If that went over your head, check out this [wikipedia.org] and that [wikipedia.org].)
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Especially the 3rd one, it was just aweful.
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The second one was awful, 3 was decent.
So the CIA = Aliens? (Score:1)
Re:So the CIA = Aliens? (Score:5, Funny)
that would explain the anal probes
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on a serious note, the dates also line up with MK ULTRA. so sadly yes. "Alien abductions" in the 50s and 60s, assuming they where not made up, had a chance of actually being CIA performing MK ultra.
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Ahh, that makes sense, this is about the Catholic Intelligence Agency!
Prieeeests iiiiin spaaaaaace...
Skeptical (Score:2)
Re:Skeptical (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
...and don't forget the SR-71...
F-117 and U2 were practically average looking compared to that thing. My father was in the air-force and got to see one land before they were declassified. He said his first reaction was ALIENS! But changed his after it landed like any normal aircraft.
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Re:Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who once worked for Project Senior Trend, the sibling post has it dead-on.
It was much preferable for the USAF to have folks think that ET stopped by, than to let them realize that what they were really seeing were F-117s flying overhead (mind you, nearly all sorties were done at night, but things happen, and dawn/dusk is kind of an awkward time, at least visually.) In profile (side or front/rear), the jet has a saucer-like shape, and definitely something that doesn't look like an ordinary civilian or military aircraft. Funny enough, the Soviets were more than happy to foster and even encourage alien conspiracy theories, if only to keep their own population from thinking that they saw some secret military project flying overhead.
Other notable examples of military aircraft that would cause confusion and optical illusions? The SR-71/A-12 in its early days, the B-47 flying wing, and its grandkid, the B-2 bomber.
Re:Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
The SR-71 - which moved about 3x as fast as almost all military aircraft at the time - was first tested around the early 1960's. Then there was suddenly a surge of sightings of triangle-shaped ufos blazing around at mach 3 speeds, which _obviously_ couldn't have been from a military jet because no military jet went that fast.
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Then we get the 'aliens at Area 51' stories and every teenage boy on the planet knows about the base.
They know about... that base.
The USAF owns something like 1/3 of Nevada as test range. Area 51/Groom Lake is only a very, very small piece of it.
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Holy shit UFOs are real Aliens?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have always thought it was bunk until now.
This right here though is kind of hard to ignore, since we know the CIA has never told the truth to the American people about anything unless congress speciifcally drags it out of them or there is a leak....so....I think its safe to assume that none of these incidents were them, and in fact, they can't rule any out....and even the fact that they are commenting on this strongly implies a coverup.
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This right here though is kind of hard to ignore, since we know the CIA has never told the truth to the American people about anything unless congress speciifcally drags it out of them or there is a leak....so....I think its safe to assume that none of these incidents were them, and in fact, they can't rule any out....and even the fact that they are commenting on this strongly implies a coverup.
You realize, of course, that for anyone following your logic, the CIA can get them to believe whatever the CIA wants them to believe, simply by stating the opposite.
If you really don't trust the CIA to tell the truth (and I don't blame you for that), the rational response is to ignore anything the CIA says, since there is no way to tell whether it's true or not. Always believing the opposite of what they say is just as bad as always believing what they say.
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> You realize, of course, that for anyone following your logic, the CIA can get
You realize, of course, that ..... It's a joke son, youre supposed to laugh.
> You realize, of course, that for anyone following your logic, the CIA can get
I prefer making fun of it and attacking their credibility humorously.
That's not all.. (Score:4, Funny)
The "majority" is only 51%! (Score:3)
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Secret projects they can't tell us about yet. Duh.
Did these fly from Area 51? (Score:3)
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Also people subconsciously process the images from their eyes and this processing can sometimes mislead the conscious brain. In particular we take the 2D images from our eyes and process them into a 3D scene. Unfortunately a 2D image does not directly tell us the size of or distance to an object, merely the angle the object takes up in the view. This angle is roughly proportional to size/distance.
The brain uses several cues to try and resolve this ambiguity.
1: binocular vision, this works great at short dis
Why is a spy plane more like a UFO? (Score:2)
What I'm not getting: OK, so there's a new kind of plane up there, flying especially high. Does it look that much more like a UFO than other planes? Up that high, isn't it just a speck? People are calling in to report, "Look, I saw a speck in the sky, it must be aliens"?
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People are stupid. And the planes have to get up there somehow. And, shockingly, most UFO reports (in the proper sense of the term, not "aliens") are near military bases and airports.
No doubt there are a million UFO reports because people were drunk, don't recognise Venus or there was a shiny bit on their windscreen.
You can't explain away everything but this just confirms what we already know - experimental aircraft are often the cause and CANNOT be confirmed until declassified. And, by definition, they
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People call in to report that they saw Venus and it must be aliens.
The credible reports come from radar and pilots who report seeing things that move "impossibly" fast and high. Or from people who report seeing things flying that don't appear on radar. During the cold war people who saw something funny in the sky would call the air force to report it because it could be a soviet bomber! So when they got the answer "nope, there's nothing there".
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OK, that makes sense. Thanks.
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At an unusual altitude, the distance will make the movements seem less natural, and your conscious and subconscious will argue over what you're really looking at.
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Is it an object? Is it unidentified? Is it flying? Then it is by definition a UFO.
That's literally all the criteria involved.
Where are the anal probe results? (Score:4, Funny)
I am submitting a FOIA request to get that anal probe data.
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Well, it's probably cheaper than going to the doctor.
Well... (Score:4, Funny)
http://xmb.stuffucanuse.com/xm... [stuffucanuse.com]
Way to kill a perfectly good conspiracy story (Score:2)
That's not fair, ok? Taking away our toy after we spent so many years explaining how THEY keep us in the dark and how THEY cover up everything, then come out with a perfectly reasonable explanation. But it's all just a plot! Plans within plans within plans. They just SAY that it was their now-no-longer-secret planes to make us think that they did hide something, that they had some good reason for it and now we're supposed to believe them telling us the truth just because it is rationally sane and makes perf
hmmm...no. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is such horseshit. Regardless of what you think of UFOs, of the hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, many reported by military people, law enforcement and people trained to observe aircraft, hardly any of them resembled anything like a U2 spyplane.
Last time I checked, a U2 spyplane was not really capable of hovering motionless and then accelerating to the horizon in a moment. Nor were they gigantic triangular craft.
I don't think for a second that there are aliens from Ork involved with the UFO sightings that have been common for the last five millennia, but I doubt more than a handful were people who were seeing U2 spyplanes. Who knows fuck-all about what those UFOs really were or whether they were inside or outside the observers heads? But at the moment, I'm not prepared to believe a goddamn thing the CIA says about anything. In my opinion, they're a bigger threat to people's safety and sanity than practically any outside threat, including North Korea, Iran, Russia or Israel (who are all plenty bad),
Now, if you want to tell me that the abductions people have been reporting for the past 40 years are the CIA, I may buy that, because they are some sadistic motherfuckers who love putting things up peoples' asses, as we have learned from recent government leaks. Yeah, anal probes, mutilations, etc, that sounds just like the CIA's speed.
Re:hmmm...no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I checked, a U2 spyplane was not really capable of hovering motionless and then accelerating to the horizon in a moment. Nor were they gigantic triangular craft.
Last time I checked, people were incredibly bad at objectively reporting what they see, and other people were incredibly bad at relating what the first people said they saw, and then other people get what they heard from the second people confused with something they saw on TV, and then yet more people read books by Erich Von Daniken
What I find weird is that the kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices over the past few decades seems to have scared away all the UFOs. Why, a week hardly went by in the 1980s without a flap, but now...
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You have a point.... People manage to catch all the stupid accidents, cute pets, and any other silly thing that happens and post it on youtube, by now someone should have some great footage of bigfoot or UFOs.
Re:hmmm...no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to record an aircraft from your cell phone? It really doesn't work.
By your logic, if cell phone recording was the only way to establish something's reality, commercial aircraft don't exist either.
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Have you ever tried to record an aircraft from your cell phone? It really doesn't work.
What, are planes completely invisible on cell phone cameras? Did not know that. You can still capture something. An F-117 (not a big aircraft, really) at 10000 feet would (rough calc) cover 15 pixels on my 5mp non-zoom cell phone camera - possibly enough to identify shape. Certainly it would be enough to capture position and motion relative to landmarks and other useful information that could be used to clarify a UFO sighting.
Also I didn't specify cell phone* - I just said video recording device. 10x zoom a
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Give it a try. It's not the size, it's the lack of contrast looking into a daytime sky.
Well, your argument did amount to, "If those UFO sight
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Because cell phones are the only "personal video recording devices" in existence, right?
https://www.youtube.com/channe... [youtube.com] would seem to indicate that getting videos of planes isn't exactly impossible.
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By your logic, if cell phone recording was the only way to establish something's reality, commercial aircraft don't exist either.
Lots of aircraft crashes are caught on cell phone. I'm not going to bother to LMGTFY, because you are willfully ignorant. But there are thousands (if not millions) of clips of aircraft on YouTube. You assertion otherwise just shows insanity, not a reasonable argument.
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That's not what happened. There are just as many digital pictures of UFOs as there ever were of film. They're posted all the time. Seen all the time. But without any sort of explanation or understanding, there's just less reason. MUFON gets so many new reports with photographic evidence that there just seems to be some fatigue among people talking
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If you think the "era of UFO footage" is over, I would suggest taking a look at just a small fraction of the sightings (with pictures) that have occurred in the past few weeks.
You can just go down the line on MUFON's news site and see one sighting after another. Like I said, I don't believe there are extraterrestrials visiting Earth in flying saucers, but there has been a surprisingly consistent number of UFO sightings for a long long time, dating back to before there was "science fiction" talking about fl
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http://www.mufon.com/ufo-news [mufon.com]
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What I find weird is that the kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices over the past few decades seems to have scared away all the UFOs. Why, a week hardly went by in the 1980s without a flap, but now...
Yeah, except... Take a look at the number of "real ghost-hunters" reality TV shows, for example, to see how a "kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices" has clearly contributed to people claiming to find all sorts of recorded "evidence" of weird crap. It's broadcast on TV every freakin' day, and clearly somebody must think some aspect of it is legit, or there wouldn't be so many shows about it.
Interest in UFOs was a particular kind of fad. Everything from the clear increases in human
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clearly somebody must think some aspect of it is legit, or there wouldn't be so many shows about it.
TV shows are selected based on legitimacy. They're selected based on whether or not they are likely to get people to watch advertisements.
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TV shows are selected based on legitimacy. They're selected based on whether or not they are likely to get people to watch advertisements.
I'm assuming you meant "aren't" in that first sentence, and in that case, obviously you're right. Most TV is obviously fiction, for example.
On the other hand, reality TV trades on the illusion of realism -- and if no one thought the people in those shows were actually in scary situations, potentially involving supernatural phenomena, then no one would watch them... And they wouldn't be able to sell advertising.
I personally love a good ghost story, like I love a good fantasy or sci-fi story, but I'm abl
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Don't make the mistake that pop skeptics make that "unidentified" means "supernatural". It just means we don't know. The problem with people who think it's real skepticism to think this way is that we end up with the swamp gas theory, which is plenty wacky itself.
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This is an extremely common story, told by military, commercial pilots and other people who know a little about aviation.
And yes, there are pictures. But of course, the pop skeptics are going to say they're just "swamp gas". I don't know what these things are, but I doubt there's any truth to the CIA's story of "U2 spyplanes".
Pay no attention... (Score:3)
Pay no attention to the torture, er I mean Enhance Interrogation Technique, er I mean EITs, yeah EIT's sounds better. Look UFO's!
Never mind that we cruelly froze an innocent guy to death, UFO's!!!
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In the second part of the CIA report, they confirm all that torture recently attributed to the CIA actually was done by extra terrestrials.
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Never mind that we cruelly froze an innocent guy to death...
You would think that this is when they would have realized that they had overstepped their mandate.
Future sightings (Score:2)
Once the CIA has everyone believing the UFO sightings were actually spy planes, they'll be ready to blame all the upcoming CIA drone sightings on extra-terrestrial vehicles.
Here's what REALLY happened (Score:2)
This is .... (Score:2, Funny)
U2 doesn't seem very UFO-ish (Score:2)
Unreliability of your perception of things you see (Score:4, Interesting)
If you look at one of those Internet compilations of Photos you really need to look at to understand [buzzfeed.com], it is very impressive just how confused you can be by chance juxtapositions of visual elements.
#18 [buzzfed.com] is particularly interesting. It's not a precise juxtaposition. The shadow looks like the shadow of a flag; it's not shaped like the rug. You can understand intellectually what's happening in about five seconds. And yet it takes a real effort of will to perceive the rug is lying on the sand. Relax for an instant and it once again looks as if it is levitating.
Old News (Score:2)
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Ceiling (Score:2)
WTF does the aircraft flight ceiling have to do with anything? 20,000, 40,000, or 60,0000... The article seems to indicate that the rise in UFO's was due to spyplanes that flew at 60,000 feet. Sorry, if a spy plane is flying at 60,000 feet you won't even see it, that is kind of the point (and the fact that they are harder to detect and intercept). The only time UFO sightings would even be possible, would be when they come in to land or take off. Which would make sense if the sighting were situated around a
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If you really want to blow someone's mind, point out that fax machines existed in the 1800s. [wikipedia.org]
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To add to that, physics has been telling us about the speed of light limit for over 150 years now. Maxwell's equations (published in 1861), contained them implicitly, and for a few years nobody really noticed (or tried to offer alternative explanations like the aether). In 1905 (110 years ago), Einstein finally formalized the concept. In those 150 years no experiment or even speculative theory has hinted to us that FTL is even remotely possible. Everything tells us its flat-out impossible. Stuff like wormho
Re:What about "The Day After Roswell" book? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes military aircraft probably accounts for the majority of sightings, but not the ones that zip around faster than anything we have even today, stop on a dime and go another direction just as fast..
I've seen objects like this, multiple times, but I've always been able to explain in mundane terms after watching closely -- I'm the kind of guy who keeps binoculars in the car just in case the night skies are clear. I'd *love* to see an alien spaceship, but being a habitual sky watcher things that occasional sky watcher might take as a spacecraft look like ordinary phenomena to me.
And it's not because I only see what I'm told could be real. Decades ago I experienced something which science said was impossible: meteors shooting overhead with a rocket-like sound. The reason this is impossible is that meteors are fifty or a hundred miles up -- sound could not travel fast enough through the atmosphere. But I knew what I saw and heard, and in 2001 scientists actually observed this phenomenon, electrophonic meteors [wikipedia.org].
Re:What about the power cosmic? (Score:2)
convinced Canada's former Minister of National Defense (Paul Hellyer) to go public about American involvement with alien technology and beings.
Paul Hellyer also believes that we could end our reliance on fossil fuels by harnessing the power cosmic, if only it weren't for those pesky bankers!
The world could end its dependence on fossil fuels by harnessing "the energy that exists in everything within the cosmos."
People could replace their car engines and furnaces with a little box that harnesses the "exotic energy" of the universe except the world's banking "cabal" prevents people from accessing the technology, Hellyer says. - http://www.ottawasu [ottawasun.com]
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Book summary from Amazon follows. U2 aircraft flying high in the sky doesn't debunk this book:
"Backed by documents newly declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.), a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council and former head of the Foreign Technology Desk in the US Army, has come forward to reveal his personal stewardship of alien artifacts from the Roswell crash. He tells us how he spearheaded the Army’s reverse-engineering project that led to today’s integrated circuit chips, fiber optics, lasers, and super-tenacity fibers, and “seeded” the Roswell alien technology to giants of American industry. Laying bare the US government’s shocking role in the Roswell incident—what was found, the cover-up, and how they used alien artifacts to change the course of twentieth-century history—The Day After Roswell is an extraordinary memoir that not only forces us to reconsider the past, but also our role in the universe."
Oh yeah? Where is the thingy that that was supposed to replace the compact disc?
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you mean hd-dvd?
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Great filter dogma aside, there very well could be advanced, universe-exploring civilizations that are mathematically unlikely to visit earth.
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It doesn't debunk this book either:
http://www.amazon.com/Bible-En... [amazon.com]
My father worked on developing the first lasers during his masters degree. I don't think he got any alien-inspired tips.
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There's an easy answer to that book: the author was an alien and sent here just to gin up that sort of misinformation. Let's hear what that expert of all things alien has to say about it:
Interviewer: So, Giorgio, what do you have to say about these stories that the aliens landed in N. Mexico at Roswell?
Giorgio A. Tsoukalos: Well, the aliens are known sneaks and liars, I wouldn't put it past them to plant these stories and then claim the aliens did it.
Interviewer: But....but if the aliens planted the stories
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Re:What's the real story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever the CIA admits to something, I wonder, what's the bigger lie they're trying to cover up? Or, am I just being paranoid?
Citizens of other countries might think you're being paranoid. To Americans, it's obvious that you are right.
However in this case it might not be so much of a "cover up" as it is an effort to get everyone's mind off of torture.
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Yes, you are being paranoid, but Paranoia grants a 10% bonus to chance to detect stealthed enemies...
...and a 60% bonus chance of suffering from irritable bowel.
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Take a moment to think. Where would you conduct test flights? Over foreign soil where you not only won't have the aid of the local authorities in your "there is nothing to see here" coverup when the crate croaks and goes down prematurely but won't even get your ass expensive toy back to find out just WHY it broke apart in mid air?
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Actual sightings by USAF officers include multi-mach multi-G maneuvers by UFOs, sorry kid, you must be new to this.
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> Mitchell and Cooper were both nuts. In which case how did they qualify as astronauts in the first place?
At least one report issued by Project Blue Book stated that there were cases that they could not explain. The majority of these cases appeared to have been close encounters of the third kind. Both Mitchell and Cooper were interested in those encounters.
To get more information about those encounters, they had to be willing to talk with anybody, about any alleged event. Furthermore, in those discussio