Now this is an interesting UFO documentary.

[Chock 17,769]

2 hours ago, martin-w said:

Interesting isn't it, that Clinton and others when in office tried to find out about UFO's but were unable to find out anything. Not even the president is given all we have on the phenomenon. 

This assumes that what these politicians are reporting is true with regard to their experiences in these matters. It also assumes they get told everything even when it isn't classified.

We know for example, several people in Trump's administration said they just didn't bother to tell him some stuff because they were fairly convinced that he'd either not understand it, or make a complete hash of it if he did try to get involved. An example of the wisdom of that, is the footage where that poor Air Force guy showing stuff to Trump on a visit, is saying the F-35 is invisible to the enemy (meaning in terms of IR signature and radar reflection) but Trump was later literally suggesting the thing was not showing up in the visible light spectrum lol.

Having said that, it is interesting that Trump was the one who implemented a Space Force. The concept of an actual US military branch for space has been around as a potential idea since about 1958, and it came close to being an actual thing under Reagan, but it is Trump's administration which gave it the go ahead, so you never know just how much is behind that beyond the obvious need to organise a military branch to handle satellites and such for purely sensible organisational reasons as opposed to being some kind of line of defence against ET.

One thing I have observed with quite a few politicians over the years though, which does make me wonder about such things, is that it's not uncommon to witness politicians who had very strong stances on certain things when they were in opposition, who then sometimes change their view quite radically when they actually make it into office. This does make me speculate if they get something of a 'wake up call' from some kind of official briefing when they make it into power.

A good example of that, is writing the letter of intent which is literally the first duty given to an incoming Prime Minister in the UK, whereby they have to write a letter which is then sealed and put in the locker on board the UK's nuclear submarines, and is only to be opened if things go pear-shaped and the chain of command is broken. This letter informs the Commander of the submarine what he is to do in such circumstances; i.e. 'launch everything you've got', or 'wait for official contact from HQ', or 'defer to command from an ally' and so on.  This letter's contents are typically never revealed, because it is replaced by a new PM's letter the moment they take office and their new letter is created.

Of course this isn't specific to aliens or whatever, but it does kind of show that once you cross the threshold into being in Government, things get pretty serious and there are things you do which most people do not, and will not, ever know about. So I do kind of wonder if there is another letter they do which tells their nuke commanders what to do if extra-terrestrials attack us, because although this is an unlikely scenario, there is literally nothing which enables us to be certain that this could not happen, and it is the job of a government to be prepared for all possibilities, so as far fetched as it seems, I suspect they must at least have some sort of stance on this.

Reagan famously made that speech about how all governments of the world would likely unite if there was an alien threat, however, it's worth bearing in mind that at the time he made it, the full speech was a bit more along the lines of 'yeah, I know you're all a bit mad at me over this Iran Contra stuff, but, and hear me out, I bet you wouldn't be mad at me if aliens attacked', so it was a bit more crackers and diversionary than it was revealing.

However, a more interesting one on that score - also with Reagan - was when the movie E.T. was screened at the Whitehouse. After the film had played, Ronald Reagan stood up, looked around the room as if doing a head count, and then he said to Steven Spielberg: ‘I want to thank you for bringing E.T. to the White House. We really enjoyed your movie,’ then he paused briefly, looked around the room again and continued:  'And there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.’

Spielberg has commented that whilst Reagan didn't smile when he said it, he does nevertheless think it was intended to be a joke, although he does also say that he can't be certain about that. So you never know eh?

Edited May 20, 2021 by Chock

[martin-w 3,239]

51 minutes ago, Chock said:

 This does make me speculate if they get something of a 'wake up call' from some kind of official briefing when they make it into power.

 

They do. All presidents are briefed by security peroneal and others when they take up office. However, they don't tell them "everything" because presidents are transitory, they come and they go. 

Edited May 20, 2021 by martin-w

[birdguy 3,943]

3 hours ago, martin-w said:

There have been claims of material from UFO wreckage, supposedly in the lab being tested now. We will see if its genuine or not.

Several years ago on our local news it was claimed that someone found a piece of the crashed UFO in Roswell in a closet of a person who had recently died.  It turned out to be a piece of stainless steel.

 

3 hours ago, martin-w said:

As for alien craft crashing or being shot down, in my opinion that's utter nonsense. A craft that can travel thousands of lightyears at relativistic velocities, change direction in an instant without inertia, and do things that seem physics defying, would be hundreds or thousands of years in advance of our technology. They would not then suddenly crash when encountering our atmosphere. That would be the easy stuff. And to suggest we would be capable of shooting such technology down is a bizarre claim. 

Shooting one down would be utter nonsense indeed.  But the one that supposedly crashed in Roswell was during a severe thunderstorm.  That could possible happen, although I think it was the weather balloon.

Noel

[martin-w 3,239]

1 minute ago, birdguy said:

But the one that supposedly crashed in Roswell was during a severe thunderstorm.  That could possible happen, although I think it was the weather balloon.

 

Nope, I don't buy a thunderstorm either. If you can generate an Alcubierre warp field which  would require the energy of an entire sun and have access to negative mass (which we only hypothesize about but have no idea if it exists) and have force fields that can deflect  deadly fragments of dust at lightspeed and can combat inertia, literally mind-blowing stuff... a static discharge from a cloud would be child's play. Even our aircraft are rarely downed by lightning. 

Project Mogul. Not a weather balloon. A balloon monitoring Russian nuclear tests. The official explanation and the right one in my view. 

[dmwalker 608]

4 hours ago, martin-w said:

There have been claims of material from UFO wreckage, supposedly in the lab being tested now. We will see if its genuine or not.

I'm not sure how one would identify wreckage as genuine. It has to be made from elements which are in the Periodic Table so it won't be some mysterious unknown material, as shown in the movies, which resists all attempts to analyse it.

[Christopher Low 5,359]

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

Several years ago on our local news it was claimed that someone found a piece of the crashed UFO in Roswell in a closet of a person who had recently died.  It turned out to be a piece of stainless steel.

Maybe aliens make their spacecraft from stainless steel? After all, if you have anti gravity devices for engines, the weight of your spacecraft becomes somewhat irrelevant

[Chock 17,769]

52 minutes ago, dmwalker said:

I'm not sure how one would identify wreckage as genuine. It has to be made from elements which are in the Periodic Table so it won't be some mysterious unknown material, as shown in the movies, which resists all attempts to analyse it.

Not true at all. The total possible number of elements is unknown, and even of those that are known, some we cannot easily create or only theorise about. Thus the periodic table of elements is incomplete. It has provision for expansion to include an additional row, but the classic table is merely a way to list things and although commonly accepted and useful, it isn't even the only tabular method to list the known elements. There are also some arguments about where some stuff is placed on the periodic table too.

The fact is we do not know that which we don't know, unless we find out about it that is, and then there may be other stuff we don't know. The very word alien means stuff related to extraterrestrials is likely to be strange and unfamiliar.

Basically what we are looking at is the Holmesian Fallacy, i.e. the one where Conan Doyle's character says: 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth'.

It is a great quotable soundbite of course, but it's complete nonsense, since it requires you to find literally every possible explanation, then correctly disprove every possible explanation, except the true and undisprovable one. And you can't be certain you've done that, because there may be explanations which you simply have not thought of.

Edited May 20, 2021 by Chock

[martin-w 3,239]

1 hour ago, dmwalker said:

I'm not sure how one would identify wreckage as genuine. It has to be made from elements which are in the Periodic Table so it won't be some mysterious unknown material, as shown in the movies, which resists all attempts to analyse it.

 

Well that's the claim, that when analysed they would reveal compounds we weren't familiar with. Atomic structure,  mix of alloys, unknown alloys, that sort of thing. There may well be elements in the periodic table yet to be discovered. There are labs smashing atoms together to find new elements, and are ready to start a new line in the periodic table. There's plenty of room at the bottom, as Feynman said. And of course we could find material manufactured by nanotechnology, and perhaps containing nanobots. 😁

 

Quote

3. In a group of buildings in Las Vegas, the government stockpiles alloys and other materials believed to be associated with UFOs.

 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-those-alien-alloys-in-the-new-york-times-ufo-story/

[martin-w 3,239]

42 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Maybe aliens make their spacecraft from stainless steel? After all, if you have anti gravity devices for engines, the weight of your spacecraft becomes somewhat irrelevant

 

Nonsense Chris. They make them out of a combination of lead and concrete. 😁

And interestingly, nothing to do with aliens, but there was a design for a submarine that had NEGATIVE buoyancy. It was made out of concrete and could handle huge depths. It was like an aircraft in reverse in that it needed propulsion to not sink to the bottom. 

 

[dmwalker 608]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

Thus the periodic table of elements is incomplete. It has provision for expansion to include an additional row

 

40 minutes ago, martin-w said:

There are labs smashing atoms together to find new elements, and are ready to start a new line in the periodic table.

The new elements have half lives of fractions of a second and have no practical use. They are synthetic elements not found in nature. The spectra of every star show only the elements which we already know so these are the only elements available for alien construction.

In the same Scientific American article is the statement:

"There are databases of all known phases [of metal], including alloys," May Nyman, a professor in the Oregon State University Department of Chemistry, told Live Science. Those databases include straightforward techniques for identifying metal alloys.

If an unknown alloy appeared, Nyman said it would be relatively simple to figure out what it was made of.

Edited May 20, 2021 by dmwalker

[Chock 17,769]

2 minutes ago, dmwalker said:

 

The new elements have half lives of fractions of a second and have no practical use.

Nope, again it is the Holmes Fallacy. You are basing a statement on what we know and not considering what we don't know. We can only say with certainty that elements with very short half-lives - as far as we know with our current technology - have no practical use.

For all we know, some alien race might base tons of technological things in their society on this particular aspect of those elements. Maybe they snort them as drugs with a guarantee they don't last too long so they can take them in their lunch break, or they are a short-term contraceptive suitable for a one-night stand, or they can listen to the sound of the atomic decay of those elements and dance to noise it makes. We just don't know.

If you were on Mars, a charger for an iPad with a European three-pin 240 volt mains plug would have no practical use, but of course that wouldn't mean it has no practical use elsewhere in the universe, where that kind of technology is in use on a daily basis.

[birdguy 3,943]

4 hours ago, martin-w said:

Even our aircraft are rarely downed by lightning. 

 But they are downed by wind shear and down drafts.

Noel

[dmwalker 608]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

For all we know, some alien race might base tons of technological things in their society on this particular aspect of those elements.

But not the construction of spaceships.

 

1 hour ago, Chock said:

If you were on Mars, a charger for an iPad with a European three-pin 240 volt mains plug would have no practical use, but of course that wouldn't mean it has no practical use elsewhere in the universe

..or elsewhere on this planet.

[birdguy 3,943]

21 hours ago, dmwalker said:

These days, instead of doing a full blown autopsy, it would be really exciting just to analyse a few cells and see how genetically different their structure is from ours.

I think an autopsy would be required for determining organ placement and especially size.

I don't think it would be significantly different.

I would think they would be very similar to us.  All the mammals and even marsupials on the planet are engineered the same.  Four limbs.  The two front limbs use for manipulating objects, killing and eating.  Two eyes, a breathing port, and a mouth.  The eye size might be different depending on how close to their sun the home planet is.  Perhaps different breathing organs depending on how much oxygen their atmosphere contains.

The real difference would be in the brains.  Our brains are what really set us apart from the other mammals on the planet along with our hands and an opposed thumb.  Our brains are what really set us apart from each other.  Some of us are intelligent and others are not.  Some of us are evil and some of us are not.  Along with environment brains are the place where we are different from each other ignoring skin color and race which is becoming less significant.

Our brains would be the significant different from those of a race with the ability to ravel the stars.

Noel

Noel

[Chock 17,769]

3 minutes ago, dmwalker said:

But not the construction of spaceships.

We don't know that either. Maybe the stuff is used to treat metals, or in the paint on the things or literally some other process of which we have no concept. If you went back in time and landed your time travelling spaceship in the Neolithic period, and used your babel fish translator to tell a caveman that those rocks over there are crushed up, then metals are extracted, melted together, forged into panels and that's what your spaceship is made of, and those rocks over there have other stuff extracted to make the nuclear reactive fuel that makes your spaceship go, and they also generate a gravity wave behind it which forms a localised space-time bubble to enable it to sidestep the limitations of not being able to travel faster than the speed of light, he'd have no concept of this at all. To him, that rock is something he uses to bash Sabre-toothed Tigers on the head for his next meal.

Edited May 20, 2021 by Chock