This is a data issue as well. We can not say what the motivation of an alien civilization would have to visit here, we have no context to make that determination. There are infinite reasons that they would come here and infinite reasons why they wouldn’t. Until we gather the information, we just don’t know either way. Maybe we are alone in this galaxy, which has it’s own horrors and hopes.
There is no reason why the F35 for instance cannot have an imaging system that is far better than the F22. The military spends hundreds of billions of dollars on these next generation planes, upgrading every piece of hardware yet somehow the camera remains the same crappy thing it was before?
I know the Pentagon has a reputation these days for being a bit short on logic and on financial sense, but something is wrong when off the shelf civilian hardware which fits in a phone can do a better job.
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It is highly unlikely, that there is something, so let’s spend money on it anyways?
In the most likely scenario that there is nothing to be found, we did not advance our understanding. It would not exclude the possibility that such things exist.
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Well lets put this in another way, how likely is it ET? My argument is that we can not know given the amount of data we have to work with. It’s like pulling out a bucket of water from the ocean and saying there are no fish in the ocean because your bucket had no fish in it. The amount of data we have of UAPs is so infinitesimal that we can’t make a determination either way. But something is going on, shouldn’t we at least investigate and see what it is?
AARO was created in part because of the aviation hazard these objects create. In one instance a training exercise had to be canceled because a UAP was parked right in the middle of the entrance to the training area.
These days, literally anyone can create a made to order UFO sighting by purchasing a drone, slapping some LED lights on it, and dressing it up so it looks like a saucer or a silver orb. The craft you can buy have only gotten faster and can fly further from the controller (so it is easier for the pilot to not make it obvious who is controlling it).
To really sell it, wait until after sunset and make sure those lights are animated, and optionally add a photograph that you do not post until after you add noise and blur in GIMP.
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This is what Dr Sean Kirkpatrick said in his testimony to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities Committee on Armed Services.
In the middle what we have done is reduce the most typically reported UAP characteristics to these fields, mostly round, mostly one to four meters, white, silver, translucent, metallic 10,000 to 30,000 feet with apparent velocities from stationary to Mach two.
No thermal exhausts are usually detected. We get intermittent radar returns, we get intermittent radio returns, and we get intermittent thermal signatures. That is what we are looking for in trying to understand what that is.
Mach 2, no drone can be that fast with a 12 foot diameter mirrored sphere on top of it (or on the bottom). Also no thermal exhaust, so if this data is correct, these are not drones.
You can find the complete transcript here…
While I do actually agree with your premise that alien life exists and it most likely has encountered our earth at some point, I’ve seen enough Senate hearings to not put much stock in those either. Mark Zuckerberg’s was enough for me to realize what a joke those are, let alone Sam Altman. I still think that it’s more likely that the “eyewitnesses” we have are lying for fame and money.
What I actually believe is that alien life encountered our planet long before humans were here- this planet is billions of years old, and humans barely go back a few hundred thousand. We’re a tiny, insignificant, blip, in this planet’s history, and our relation to a cosmic time scale is so small as to be laughable. It feels like typical human arrogance to assume that in the .00000000000000000001% of the time the universe has existed that we have as well, that’s when the aliens show up
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The problem I have with your thinking is that it paints with too broad of a brush. Statistically you can’t say that every person and every Senate hearing is lying for fame and money. You would have to lump in every pilot (military and civilian), every person, every government agency, etc. quite a conspiracy.
It’s ironic that this argument is also used to discount this being ET, as it’s a government conspiracy. There is no way that the government could have kept this a secret for so long (if it’s been going on since the 1940s). I agree, that is another thing that makes this so interesting for me. There are contradictions through out this.
All I’m saying is that we should let this continue and see if anything comes of it.
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To me, the question is whether it is reasonable to spend resources to investigate UFOs. The very clear answer is no.
When you have a bucket of water from the ocean, you can at least investigate it. You can get replicable data, because you know how to get more buckets of water. You know that the water actually exists.
The data is not showing that something is going on as far as I can tell. There are people who seem to want to believe there is something, but that is not backed up by rigorous data.
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Any species technologically able to travel here is so far above us on the evolutionary scale that we are most likely insignificant to them. This isn’t equivalent to Columbus meeting the Native Americans, this is Captain Kirk discovering squirrels. Do you think they need to “contact” us? Maybe they look at Earth as a zoo… look around and study the animals and their behavior, but don’t get too close because they might throw poo at you. Sure, they could recognize that we are able to understand that an advanced civilization has visited and is observing us, but that doesn’t mean they would want to make themselves available for a media sit-down.
I agree with Joseph about our society and its money problems. Money is the root of (almost) all evil and ultra rich folks aren’t interested in sharing it… only about making more. There are about 724 billionaires just in the US. If say, 200 of those are worth more than 10 billion, and each one gave up a tenth of their wealth to solve some problem, think of how much better we would be as a society. The problem is that most billionaire’s wealth is tied up in the stock market, which rises and falls on a whim most of the time.
</off topic rant on> Most company’s stockholders (the ones who make all the company’s decisions) got into their position by being the highest bidder – they don’t have a clue, at first, on how a company operates, and they make decisions on what’s best for their bottom line, rather than what’s best for the consumer. I’m not anti-capitalism, but the stock market, as it operates now, is a menace to our well-being..
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None among us are without sin
Like it says in a song “You don’t wanna die, but still you want to go to heaven”
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Add on to that (first paragraph part) that it’s quite possible that we/they might not even .recognize. each other as “life,” muchless intelligent life. if senses are radically different, would we even “see” each other? for instance if they only saw in a part of the spectrum where we humans appear almost invisible, or only hear between 30khz to 50khz, how would that change their perception of this planet and the life on it? we’re only relatively recently researching theoretical non-carbon based life (usually silicon-based).
one of my favorite Star Trek (original) episodes was the “blob” episode, where it took them awhile to figure out the silicon blob was not only life, but intelligent as well, just so far out of our realm of understanding.
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And that’s why so much “first contact” fiction tends to go straight into “unimaginable cosmic horror” 
It’s not that the space is evil. It just doesn’t care to play by our rules.
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leave my elder gods out of this. rofl 
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
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Or we simply do not know the rules at all, the James Webb telescope alone has already discovered tons of things out there that our theories state should either not exist or are impossible. The more we discover the less we know, it might sound like a oxymoron but we continually find ourselves admitting we know less about the universe than we claimed before.
This even implies in terms of finding life, the list of variables keep growing and we are finding out that not only is Earth fairly unique among planets, but the Sun is fairly unique among stars as well. The much hyped Trappist system for instance is now thought to have too many flares pelting the goldilocks zone for life to have a chance (so it appears the Sun is rather quiet by galactic standards). Then you have the factor of ET’s system likely needing a giant planet like Jupiter to act as a janitor (soaking up rocks that would otherwise destroy everything).
As a result, the internet is filled with believers in ET who are admitting that Earth is quite lucky to have life at all, dashing hopes of an endless list of civilizations to meet the moment we figure out faster than light travel.
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I dunno about you, but if I was an extraterrestrial being with FTL travel, I’d totally be messing with earth just for fun. These earthlings take everything so seriously! What do you do in your free time when you’ve achieved post-scarcity and refined technology? Screw with the young planets, of course.
But seriously, it doesn’t really matter in the long run. If they have the technology to get here unnoticed and they don’t like us, we’re done for. There’s no use worrying about that scenario.
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Apparently that stealth tech has one flaw: they can only be noticed by whatever US agencies and people with reeeally bad cameras.
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Related - how come no one outside of the USA ever talks about this? (Government wise) Do the aliens only visit US airspace? Are the aliens under FAA jurisdiction? If so… their flight paths have to be registered and public record, so that should make things really simple 
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IIRC after the UAP pentagon reports there were some mentions of UK and France collaborating some of the similar sightings around their nuclear sites. But tbh I don’t have time for goose chases so I’m not paying too much attention to that.
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France I could see as credible. I have a hard time taking the UK government seriously when they can’t seem to hold onto a PM or go without a major scandal for more than a week
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