reply to post by A51Watcher
Nice thoughtful reply. I am curious since you are not sure what to think about Roswell, what do you think about the hundreds of flying saucer
reports from all across the nation in the few months before and few months after Roswell?
Any different than hundreds of UFO sightings leading up to and following the "Houston Lights" incident?
There's a sort of selective bias to watch out for. It's like when my father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and people started trying to
compile together statements he had made in the days and weeks before he simply didn't wake up. They were looking for some kind of indication that he
knew ahead of time, and pulling things from whatever context they could.
In the end - I don't think he really knew - consciously or subconsciously. He had a reputation for making some off-the-wall observations and
comments, choosing one particular time to focus on tends to make those sorts of things stand out more, despite their regularity.
Similarly - if you choose a particular day to try and pick out UFO sightings - you're going to likely find more "than expected." Further - there
is a sort of 'social bias' at work, too. A reporter picks up a story about an alien saucer crashing in the desert and it's front-page news in the
national paper before the end of the week, and suddenly everyone has UFO-on-the-mind and is thinking back about every strange light or object they can
think of.
But - again - if the military was testing something - you'd expect more UFO sightings and reports. Just as you would expect more sightings and
reports after a UFO incident makes a national media buzz. Or, just as you would expect if aliens were conducting some kind of operation.
You can read into it whatever context you want. It "makes sense" from any angle. Everyone is simply going to choose to read into it the way they
feel comfortable doing so. I am most comfortable speculating - so I tend to treat everything as a hypothetical proposition rather than try and pick
one to state as truth. I can state that certain proposals are improbable due to the number of presumptions that must be made or real-world examples
demonstrating similar things performing contrary to the proposed scenario... but it comes back to the difficulty of proving a negative - so there is
always a degree of uncertainty.
Good speculation there. Besides the invaluable flight control system, have you considered the implications of the power plant and weapon system
on this thing? At the very least they make our atomic bombs look like a firecracker.
That's not necessarily true. If we do have a machine that is capable of performing the described feats of many UFOs - then we are dealing with a
system operating on mechanics unknown to the vast majority of industry and experts in the field - if the people utilizing it even understand the
mechanics involved.
The system could require anywhere from celestial-scale amounts of power to less than a jet fighter. This becomes especially true if you begin
exploring the more "weird" possibilities where concepts like conservation of energy/mass go out the window (or are so fundamentally altered as to
render common understanding irrelevant).
But this is really going to get pretty fruitless, without having an actual craft to look at - it's kind of difficult to get into how powerful it may
or may not be. Further - the most valuable technologies would not be in terms of how many armies it could waste in a single blast of its 'laser' -
but in star-trek-like scanner capabilities, should they be present. That capability changes the face of urban warfare and espionage. Some of the
most advanced devices out there today take hours to perform an infra-red scan of a building that can be used to 'look through walls' and identify
machinery and other objects of interest. Something that can practically build you a CAD model of the whole building with sub-millimeter precision in
a manner of seconds would make Tom Clancy scream like a school girl.
The military implications alone made this worth hiding at all cost.
From who?
The Manhattan Project - one of the craziest classified projects to date, both in scale and in success, was successfully infiltrated by the Soviet
Union - in the small circle of people directing and coordinating development.
The media, at the time, didn't even have access to these people - most of the world wouldn't know their names for decades to come - much less in
association to the atomic bomb.
So, if we're sitting here yip-yapping about UFOs and what certain popular figures in the R&D field back-in-the-day said about them... then you can be
certain Russia was already keenly aware of the program and what kinds of success it was seeing. Their first generation of infra-red seeking missile
was a direct copy of the early Aim-9 Sidewinder - part number and all.
If I were in charge back then - I'd have jammed that stuff into a warehouse and kept it as far away from operations as possible - the Russians were
'all up in our business' and simply working on it would have essentially guaranteed they would get a hold of it.
Which, interestingly enough - may be just what happened to recovered extra-terrestrial artifacts (presuming there have been some) - or other artifacts
of mythic proportions (doesn't all have to be extra-terrestrial). Hidden from the very powers seeking to find it - possibly so well that it remains
hidden to this day.
Sounds a bit like Warehouse 13, now that I think about it....
Add to the equation that current religion would be vaporized by the revelation
A rather baseless assertion.
People have two general responses to the unknown - awe or fear. Some would (and have already) proclaim aliens to be demons. Others have proclaimed
them to be angels. I read a sci-fi short story where "aliens" were a sort of ascended state granted through enlightenment in Buddhism (though not
necessarily the author's belief - it was an interesting read).
Some would abandon religion, yes - others would cling more strongly to it. Simply because some critter comes flying in from space doesn't mean
people will (or should) start forsaking their ideals. It would be similar to instances where 'advanced' cultures have encountered more
'primitive' cultures. Some of the native Americans welcomed the new humans as gods/heroes from their history and religion - others responded to
them with hostility. Some embraced the religious ideologies of the newcomers, others did not.
I doubt it will be much different on the extra-terrestrial scale. Though such a species capable of traversing the stars is likely post-scarcity and
would not be coming to our planet looking for resources or to harass us - so, that's a plus. Though we also raise chickens and dogs to fight each
other for our own enjoyment as spectators... so - we're not exactly off of the hook for an unpleasant encounter with ETs.
and that the blitz of daily sightings was clearly causing public 'hysteria' to increase at an alarming rate, and you now have the
justification for official implementation of a coverup of unprecedented proportions.
Or, it could have been the crash of some kind of upper-atmospheric nuclear monitoring equipment - similar (but perhaps a bit more) to the story being
told now.
When you stop and think about the implications of a project monitoring Russia's nuclear testing over their own airspace - there's plenty of reason
to cover that up, too - even going so far as getting a few of the locals to tell tales about aliens.
Or it could be just about anything, to be blunt.
If you believe it was an alien crash - then the idea that everything we see now is a coverup is justified by the perceived impact of ET contact.
If you don't - then the cover-up and confusion was a masterful way of keeping the Russians from figuring out what we were really doing, and having
them busy trying to break into programs that didn't exist.
Either one is perfectly valid until more concrete evidence is turned up. Then one may suddenly become far more probable over the other.