Mr. Elizondo is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study…
Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts…
Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”…
Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
Go here to read the rest. Go here to read more about the article. Well, I am sure they are friendly aliens.
Ah well, maybe the aliens who crashed are the equivalent of drunken frat boys who missed the exit ramp at Rigel.
Drunk Teasers.
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
NB. Harry Reid is three years older than Sundown Joe. Old age can be embarrassing.
So, conservatives are afraid of stating their views out of fear of judgment, but UFO believers in the defense industries aren’t?
I cannot recall a case of a UFO believer having lost his job or being physically assaulted. Many on the Left are UFO believers.
What if the aliens coming by are just really big fans trying to get William Shatner to come help out their civilization?
My husband watches the “Ancient Aliens” and related dreck. He does not understand why I usually end up storming out of the room, after snarling words about “lying sacks”. I try explaining that it’s the constant regurgitation of the same idiocies and outright flagrant lies that does it. sigh In any case, once, years back. I scoured the internet looking up UFO crashes. I came to the conclusion that. if real, the only conclusion I can draw is that, wherever they come from, they can’t drive worth a darn. How do you not miss a whole planet?
Given the earth’s surface area, it’s difficult to believe that many accidental crashes would not have been discovered in a manner governments could not conceal. Given the complex technologies of space flight, all these thousands of alleged UFOs in the sky (if real) would have given us several crashes in the course of a century.
Clearly, although they may be far more advanced than us, they have lousy mechanics and even worse pilots.
Many on the Left are UFO believers.
And adolescents immersed science fiction, and old people who were once adolescents immersed science fiction (and now employed at the Mercatus Center), and the character type who has no aptitude for inductive reasoning and invests in bizarre conspiracy theories (the more rococo the better).
Tom-
there have been several “suspicious crashes” that were discovered in a way that the government couldn’t conceal.
That actually feeds into the whole “UFO cover-up” thing because the ones I’m third-hand familiar with, it was unknown technology, because it was related to the Skunk Works and similar, where there’s enough information to take a guess.
There’s also a lot of fraud, and Cool Story Bro, and the usual crazies, and I suspect no small amount of Soviet type propaganda.
It’s been a few years but at one point there were several websites that collected UFO sightings and tried to guess which stealth plane was in development and may have inspired them– I know there’s been several “strange lights” type UFOs that were triggered by known, announced plane tricks. Usually military, but a couple of the classic plane enthusiast types.
The C-17 isn’t secret at all, but it’s huge, and crazy quiet, and it looks like it’s not moving fast enough to fly. I scared myself half to death one night when I was cruising along at like 25, windows down, radio really quiet and then THIS HUGE FREAKING LIGHT COMES OVER THE TREES AND CROSSES THE ROAD.
It was seriously straight out of a UFO movie. Also awesome. 😀 Yes, I pulled over and squealed like the little fangirl that I am, because it’s cool when you can see something that’s just like it came from a story.
Note:
I haven’t got first hand knowledge of anything that’s cool and classified, the folks I talk to weren’t breaking their classified information oaths, and part of why I dance around details is because sensitive information is a thing. Even if some of my “sources” are stuff like relatives who were in during Vietnam and they wouldn’t say either way even if they DID know anything cool they couldn’t talk about, so totally not cutting edge, and mostly a threat against an empire that’s already fallen.
I have a hard left, socialist cousin who also believes in UFO’s. If you’ll believe in socialism, you’ll believe in anything.
Two of my brothers and I used to hunt deer with a club in the Adirondacks. Two of us are left. Not sure we’ll get in this year.
I played with one brother (RIP) that if I came across a bigfoot, I’d shoot him. My bother said “Don’t do it. It’ll piss of the aliens.”
I’m not sure he was kidding.
My brother (RIP). he was a good man.
Re: UFO’s. If aliens are technologically able to travel here, they’re capable of doing so without being detected/observed.
DOD or who ever handles UFO sightings have started declassifying information on unidentified flying objects. Before, many sightings by Navy and Air Force pilots never went farther than the squadrons. The pilots were ribbed. Now the Office is taking the sightings seriously. Astronaut Gordon Cooper and his squadronmates claimed to see UFOs.in 1951 airspace over Europe. As astronauts James McDivitt and Cooper claimed to see UFOs in space. Cooper did address the idea of extraterrestrial life. To paraphrase he said that if there are intelligent life forms or aliens it is doesn’t conflict with the knowledge/worship of God.
Unidentified Flying Objects doesn’t necessarily mean alien life. It means just what the words are.
Whoever thought of drones in 1951? UAVs are relatively new in the history of aircraft.
Now in the USN and USAF reports of sightings by pilots are required to be sent up the chaino ff command. On legitimate news programs Navy pilots have been interviewed and videos shown. Most UFOs appear saucer shaped.
If these UFOs are extraterrestrial space craft from planets in other star systems hundreds if not more light years away, then how did they get to Earth? Super-luminal travel? Nothing having mass can exceed light speed. Alcubierre “warp” drive, worm holes, tachyon propulsion? Science fiction!
But let’s say these aliens did master Alcubierre “warp” drive or some such other super-luminal propulsion concept. Such mastery would mean they are far more advanced than we. Obviously they didn’t kill themselves off in a nuclear war prior to achieving interstellar flight capability. That means that once arriving in Earth vicinity, they would be smart enough to realize on observing us that we are suicidally mad, bent on violence and self-destruction at every turn, and what’s worse, we have the nuclear weapons to kill ourselves and any else off. Being smart, these aliens would avoid us like the plague. And no, there’s nothing here on Earth (minerals, metals, water, helium-3, whatever) that these aliens couldn’t more easily get in the asteroid belt, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, even Earth’s moon Luna (which has abundant helium-3 reserves for fusion reactors).
Nah! I don’t buy into “the UFOs are aliens” nonsense. Oh, it’s possible. Anything is possible. But it’s not credible that a super-intelligent species capable of crossing a galaxy would want anything to do with a hell-bent violent species like us. And if they were equally hell-bent violent, then they would have already killed themselves off prior to developing faster than light drives.
God established the Laws of Physics for a reason. In this case, one of the benefits is to prevent humanity from exporting its propensity for violence and self-destruction elsewhere, ensuring that humanity’s destructiveness remains in this one solar system without impacting anyone else in a different solar system. Yes, I think there’s intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. God is supreme intelligence and God is supreme life, so there is no reason to pridefully think we are the only intelligent species that God has created. And I am confident that God will protect such species from us. Part of that protection is the insurmountable speed of light limitation.
We know we’re not the only people God created.
It’s not like the angels are unheard of, after all.
Now, for material people… no pride required, just not assuming that “big” means “there must have been people made to live there.” North America was empty of humans at one point, we just spread there.
We know the material world isn’t all that exists- and Himself hasn’t said anything about there being non-human material people, so that’s no help.
It is rather prideful to assume that a fairly recent theory like the speed of light limitation in physics is an insurmountable limitation laid down from on high, rather than a description of the currently most accurate human modeling of God’s creation.
Now in the USN and USAF reports of sightings by pilots are required to be sent up the chaino ff command. On legitimate news programs Navy pilots have been interviewed and videos shown. Most UFOs appear saucer shaped.
So do most planes if they’re not close enough to get a good look at them and see that the wings don’t shade smoothly, especially if you don’t have shadows to help get definition. (picture the sun shining on the front of a bright, silver jet)
My theory is that the change in policy is because we’re not doing anywhere near as much Cool Stuff in poorly located secrecy, but we do have problems like cartel smugglers in ultra-lights, or terrorists with drones, or even just weird kids with balloons and remote controlled planes. 😀
Foxfier, we’ll see if light speed is insurmountable or not – or maybe our children or grandchildren will. If it is surmountable, then Heaven help anyone we meet on our way out of the solar system.
Personally, I’ll believe in time travel before I believe in FTL.
But then, traveling backwards would seem to break all sorts of laws.
Interdimensional beings traveling through the “space between spaces”?
I may have to cut George Lucas a break.
. If we believe in the Ascension and Assumption there must be another dimension. Elijah from the Old Test who was taken up into heaven body and soul in a firery chariot,
We know from the old and new testaments that there are spiritual beings known as angels and they are given the power to take human forms. Also fallen angels known as demons.
To Ernst’s point, the arrow of time points only one way: past to future. Time travel from future to past is as possible as FTL. Furthermore, the universal speed limit in a vacuum for particles containing mass is 186282 mps, and to date there has been no observed violation of this speed limit (with the exception of quantum entanglement and that’s a different thing altogether – takes too long to explain here). Except for the Alcubierre warp drive (which is still more science fiction than anything else), I haven’t seen or read any scientific theory remotely plausible that will allow / enable FTL. Lots of talk about aliens from interstellar space, worm holes, black hole drives, etc. No proof. No reasonable, logical theory of how they got from there to here, or even WHY they would want to come here.
Yes, I give a nod to Foxfier in that it’s possible. Anything is possible. And yes, man breaks speed limits (God help us!). But very unlikely. Not credible.
LCQ-
why would He have more worry for non-human material people meeting humans than humans meeting humans?
Ernest-
what if “time travel” is an illusion?
I found Star Trek’s solution to the speed of light limit to be brilliant– leave the dimension and come back at a different spot.
It’s kind of like how God knows the future, which obviously hasn’t happened yet. It’s because He’s outside of time. Like being able to tell what happens in the left and right side of a picture, because you’re not limited by being in the picture.
Not sure it’d be physically possible to bypass the time dimension, and I’m not sure it would be moral to do so any more than it being possible to create a baby in a test tube makes it moral.
About time travel: I think it’s essential to human nature that we exist in time. We’re unique in that we’re beings of body and soul, both within time and immortal. Our intellect is subject to time: we don’t know things as the angels do, we learn them. I think time travel, for a temporal being, is a violation of our nature – not simply a moral violation, like a sin, but an impossibility.
As for intelligent non-human life: I guess it’s possible. It seems like there couldn’t be other beings with will and sin, though. Christ became a member of our species and died to free us from sin. I don’t see how His sacrifice could be applied to another species. I think He took on human nature and retains that nature along with His divine nature.
I agree on the will and sin front. (Even if really, really like stories with normal people who aren’t human. They’re fun, you can do all sorts of thought-games without having to deal with IRL history and the disagreements that involves.)
For time… well, we can’t naturally leave the ground, non fatally, either. Or the planet. But doing so isn’t immoral or impossible with the right tools.
I just can’t think of a motive to actually use time travel that isn’t an attempt to violate the free will of….well, everybody not timetraveling in that exact instant.
We’re material beings, and there’s nothing to prevent material beings from leaving the ground (except coming back down hard, depending on the situation). As ensouled material beings, leaving the ground doesn’t change the relationship between our bodies and souls. Leaving time would, I think.
Then again, our bodies can temporarily die and be revived with soul intact, depending on your definition of “die”. So maybe existing outside of time would only suspend our consciousness.
I think Ernst is right that time travel forward has a lot fewer complications than time travel backwards, both morally and causally.
“I think Ernst is right that time travel forward has a lot fewer complications….”
Go close to light speed, and time for the person at speed is slower than time for the observer at rest. Go near the event horizon of a black hole, and the same thing happens. We always travel into the future, but depending on location near a gravity well or depending on velocity, time passage will vary. Only the speed of light is constant. And all this reality is predicated on a constant speed of light. The only exceptions that exist do so at the quantum level:
Quantum entanglement
Massless tachyons (a mathematical construct only)
Quantum tunneling backwards for short distances in time
All these effects get cancelled out at the macroscopic level where the arrow of time prevents going from future into the past. Think about the father paradox. I go into the past and kill my father before I was conceived in my mother’s womb, and I will never have been born to even go into the past and commit such an act. And really – do you honestly think God would permit future to past time travel which could wreak such havoc? And no, God does NOT travel into the past. God is present equally in the past, present and future because He sees the four-dimensional sphere of the universe all at once. The end of the world and judgment day are equally present before God as creation day and Adam coming to life are.
Think about the universe as X, Y, Z and W axes. X, Y and Z are length, width and height all at right angles to each other (do it with three pencils). W is the time axis also at right angle to the center (intersection of those three pencils you’re holding in your hand). You can’t do that can you? Because you are in time. Only if you’re outside time can you do that. And only God can do that because He is outside time and space. And that W pencil? It only points one way. Never in reverse. And when you are travelling really, really fast or you are near a large gravity well, the length of the pencil foreshortens. But it NEVER reverses because 186282 mps is top limit.
With all due respect to our friend Foxfier, time travel into the past is as ludicrous as FTL. If a person thinks differently, then kindly explain with real science instead of with the ubiquitous “anything is possible and man always breaks speed limits.”
PS, I would be overjoyed if I am wrong because that would mean the stars are open to humanity, though God help anyone living in other solar systems. So if Foxfier is right and I am wrong, then that’s great!
s ensouled material beings, leaving the ground doesn’t change the relationship between our bodies and souls. Leaving time would, I think.
Why?
Is a genuine question– long history of intuition showing us where to look for the rational answer, after all, but you have to try to figure out why you have that intuition, and I can’t do it because I don’t share it.
I think Ernst is right that time travel forward has a lot fewer complications than time travel backwards, both morally and causally.
I should hope it doesn’t cause problems, since I can’t help doing so at the rate of one second per second. 😉
If a person thinks differently, then kindly explain with real science instead of with the ubiquitous “anything is possible and man always breaks speed limits.”
Just as soon as you explain your objection with something besides you finding it hard to believe.
It’s a shot in the dark to answer objections that are never detailed– the one you did offer, that current theory holds nothing can go faster than light, was answered both by it being the current theory that best models nature (rather than a supernatural law) and by pointing to ways of bypassing limits that do exist.
I don’t have a belief in either direction because I think we haven’t got anything like enough information to make an ignorant guess, much less an educated one!
Which is also why I object to declarations that things are impossible, without limitations or disclaimers to the effect of “according to current theories” or “lacking different information” etc.
It’s been done in history a lot. It doesn’t tend to age well.
(Plus, if folks can explain why they object to/reject the idea of time travel in unconventional directions, maybe I can form a time travel story that I don’t dislike.)
I’ve been stumbling my way through some Aquinas lately, and he’s emphatic that the human and angelic intellects differ with respect to their interactions with time. Now, Aquinas gets some science wrong, but he doesn’t get much theology wrong. I’m just some guy on the internet, and I could be overlooking something obvious, but I can’t reconcile human nature with time travel.
I agree with you that we shouldn’t overstate our claims, but that’s why I put “I think” in like every other sentence. I don’t know. I can’t think of a reason why the speed of light could be unbreakable, or couldn’t be. The only thing in modern physics that really confounds me is the Copenhagen interpretation. If observation collapses the wave function, why doesn’t divine observation? I suspect the answer is one of those little things that God leaves around to remind us we’re all idiots.
Also – I realize that I may have put words into Ernst’s mouth. Sorry.
I don’t believe time travel is possible because I am a presentist. That is, only the present is actually real. The past used to be but no longer is, and the future may be but is not yet.
But even without presentism I have trouble accepting time travel outside of closed loop scenarios because it leads to the notion of “change of timeline”. Since change implies time, this would then require some sort of “meta-time”. And that raises the question of whether we can travel through THAT direction.
For example, at the beginning of Back to the Future Marty’s father is a loser in a dead end job, and at the end of the movie he is a successful science fiction author. But the “time” on the calendar is the same; it’s the same point in 1985. The change occurred over the “meta-time” throughout the course of the movie. So would it be possible for Doc Brown to build a “meta-time machine” which could be used to travel back to the 1985 at the beginning of the movie (without going back to 1955 and undoing Marty’s actions or anything like that, just directly going to the state of affairs at the beginning of the movie)?
And if that is possible and it is possible to change the course of the movie, then that implies a change in the “meta-timeline” which requires a “meta-meta-time” to take place in, raising the question of whether you can have a “meta-meta-time machine” and so on to absurdity.
You could say that the past exists but the “meta-past” does not, so that when the timeline changes it completely overwrites everything that happened throughout all history and the old timeline does not exist anymore (Steins;Gate explicitly does this). But if you are comfortable with this type of “meta-presentism”, why not just embrace presentism where the past doesn’t exist in the first place?
to Ernst’s point, the arrow of time points only one way: past to future.
then how is the one Holy Sacrifice re-presented (made present) in an unbloody manner many times a day in many places?
Because God exists outside of time and space? Because the Laws of Nature don’t apply to Nature’s God?
The laws of nature are inside of time– when folks die and go to heaven, they’re outside of time, too.
And now I’m wondering if time will exist after the end-times….
Anyways.
To Rudolph’s point on a meta-time machine, sounds like it would just be a targeting issue. However you’d target time travel in the first place, anyways. It’s complicated by not having a word for “the 1984 that was after the 1950 where Marty’s dad was a loser but not changed by the 1950 where Marty helped him be cool” because it’s a theoretical situation. 😀
It’s going to hit description walls. Might work to picture it as like a thread, and when someone jumps back it loops around so that the “new” 1960sare at about the same point on the year-line, but the past includes the Marty time-loop.
Sounds to me like somebody watched this until the disks wore out.
He teased.
“And now I’m wondering if time will exist after the end-times….”
Aquinas says, “To express the reward of the good, we say in the Creed: ‘I believe…in life everlasting.’ This life is to be understood as eternal not because of its duration alone, but much more because it is the fruition of eternity.” I think the idea is that in the beatific vision we experience completeness, and because there is nothing wanting there is no change. If there is no change, I don’t think there is time. We rest in Him. I’ll admit I’m struggling with the perspective.