On David Grusch's "whistleblowing" and other apparent (but not quite) nothing burgers

[Empiricist]

The fact that Obama said something during jokes on a comedy show - how on earth can that NOT be relevant?

Probably the words "What is true, and I'm actually being serious here" in the quote which clearly distinguish it from the jokes he makes before and after.

What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there are, uh, there's footage of and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are, we can't explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable path.

To me the quoted text is clearly not in jest. If it were in jest, it's a pretty bad joke. The quoted text is all I included in my original post, because it's the only part of the video which is clearly not in jest.

 

[JMartJr]

What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there are, uh, there's footage of and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are, we can't explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable path.

Says Obama

That is pretty much undeniable, though. Of course things are seen in the sky that we don't know exactly what they are, that seem to move in ways that are not easily explained. (Not easily explained /= cannot be explained, see threads here on the three original Navy UFO leaked vids. They can be explained with some effort and a bit of math.)

Conflating that with jokes about aliens seems a bit of a stretch. Instead, looks to me like, "aliens, joke joke joke. everybpody laughs, but oh, by the way, seriously there are some UFO reports that are hard to explain." The part that the President called serious is not part about aliens.

 

[LilWabbit]

What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there are, uh, there's footage of and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are, we can't explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable path.

Says Obama

That is pretty much undeniable, though. Of course things are seen in the sky that we don't know exactly what they are, that seem to move in ways that are not easily explained. (Not easily explained /= cannot be explained, see threads here on the three original Navy UFO leaked vids. They can be explained with some effort and a bit of math.)

Conflating that with jokes about aliens seems a bit of a stretch. Instead, looks to me like, "aliens, joke joke joke. everybpody laughs, but oh, by the way, seriously there are some UFO reports that are hard to explain." The part that the President called serious is not part about aliens.

Three points are often missed by commentators invoking Obama's, Brennan's and Kirby's statements.

• The core military functions of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) have never been seriously worried about low-resolution footage of blurry blobs demonstrating unthreatening behaviours due to the simple fact that all sensors, no matter how high-tech, are bound to generate such footage at their capability limits.
• These ISR functions have never needed nor relied on a separate modestly funded, politically inspired and unclassified fringe entity in the Pentagon -- that is demonstrably limited in its analytical capacity -- to gain reasonable assurance of likely prosaic explanations to these LIZ UAP.
• Yet, since the UAPTF was known to exist under the Pentagon, it was often the go-to source sought and quoted by senior officials (both legislative and executive) and media outlets in their public communications on UAP. Since Lou was at its helm, these briefings to senior officials likely included the videos we've seen, accompanied by Lou's 'analysis' of physics-defying flight characteristics which have later been somewhat convincingly debunked by Mick.

These three points lend themselves to misleading and hype-generating statements whereby leaked UAP footage, convincingly demystified by others, have been presented as 'Pentagon-confirmed evidence of objects behaving in physics-defying ways which have baffled even the POTUS.'

They're great for scoops, but poor as evidence.

 

[Scaramanga]

What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there are, uh, there's footage of and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are, we can't explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable path.

Says Obama

That is pretty much undeniable, though. Of course things are seen in the sky that we don't know exactly what they are, that seem to move in ways that are not easily explained. (Not easily explained /= cannot be explained, see threads here on the three original Navy UFO leaked vids. They can be explained with some effort and a bit of math.)

Conflating that with jokes about aliens seems a bit of a stretch. Instead, looks to me like, "aliens, joke joke joke. everybpody laughs, but oh, by the way, seriously there are some UFO reports that are hard to explain." The part that the President called serious is not part about aliens.

Alas it all tends to get read under the same guise as 'Pentagon asserts UFOs are real' type reports. Well of course UFOs are real, as people do see 'unidentified' objects. But there are those for whom 'UFOs are real' gets read as 'aliens are real', and thus think Obama is 'admitting' something.

 

[Empiricist]

• Yet, since the UAPTF was known to exist under the Pentagon, it was often the go-to source sought and quoted by senior officials (both legislative and executive) and media outlets in their public communications on UAP.

These three points lend themselves to misleading and hype-generating statements whereby leaked UAP footage, convincingly demystified by others, have been presented as 'Pentagon-confirmed evidence of objects behaving in physics-defying ways which have baffled even the POTUS.'

This explanation is certainly plausible to me, but:

1) Is there evidence that UAPTF was the "go-to source" for comments by senior officials? Particularly to support the argument that the majority of such statements were due to UAPTF reporting? If this has been discussed in a previous thread, feel free to link it rather than rehashing.
2) Notably, this explanation ignores Ratcliffe's "Satellite imagery" comment. Taken as a whole with the other comments, it suggests that more concrete evidence is behind some of those statements rather than just seeing the Navy videos filtered through the lens of UAPTF awe.

When you mention Kirby, are you referring to statements like the following?

Reporter: Is this a legitimate issue? Does the administration believe getting to the bottom of these sightings in the air, is it a real concern, is it a real issue as you see it?
Kirby: Yeah! I mean, we wouldn't have stood up an organization at the Pentagon to analyze and try to collect and coordinate the way these sightings are reported if we didn't take it seriously, of course we do. I mean, some of these phenomena, we know have already had an impact on our training ranges, you know when pilots are out trying to do training in the air and they see these things, they're not sure what they are and they can have an impact on their ability to perfect their skills and so it's already had an impact and we just better want to understand it. We're not saying what they are or what they're not. We're saying that there's something our pilots are seeing, we're saying it has had an effect on some of our training operations, and we want to get to the bottom of it, we want to understand it better. So, yes.

Source (28m30s)

According to your explanation here, am I to understand that you believe that in reference to Kirby's statement here, from July 17, 2023, that:

1) He is referring to an interpretation of events provided by Elizondo-era UAPTF rather than a current, hopefully more-informed understanding of the anomalous events? (After all, Kirkpatrick has said they don't have evidence for non-prosaic explanations.)
2) He is referring exclusively to the Graves/Fravor events that happened 9+ years ago, and not other ones at other training ranges more recently?
3) The events as discussed are exclusively referring to distant LIZ phenomena, despite the ability of the phenomena to "have an impact on [pilots'] ability to perfect their skills"?

If not, could you please let me know how you interpret this recent Kirby comment?


I acknowledge that Kirby's recent comment doesn't explicitly refer to physics-defying behavior, but he seems to be referring to something extant and definitive enough to impact training, which rules out seeing distant jet contrails on FLIR and getting confused. If a phenomenon is real enough and regular enough to have such impacts, and it's suspected to potentially be foreign craft, such incidents wouldn't be reported to a "UAP task force" at all, they would be investigated directly by existing branches of the armed forces as potential foreign interference/spying.

 

[Mendel]

2) He is referring exclusively to the Graves/Fravor events that happened 9+ years ago, and not other ones at other training ranges more recently?

I think he's referring to similar events, where something unknown is found near the range, so some people have to interrupt their training to go fly there and identify it when the long-range sensors can't.

If the DoD had a good way to identify balloons etc. remotely, these disruptions could be reduced.

 

[Kyle McDonald]

I realize this thread has been dead for a month, but I want to revive it because it seems like the best place to discuss the "periphery hypothesis" (which I've been calling the "telephone theory"). I feel this is the best prosaic hypothesis for explaining claims by David Grusch, Karl Nell, Jonathan Grey, and others. So I think it should be considered carefully.

What if we imagine some specific examples of how this could play out, and think about how plausible the theory actually is?

Let's say you see this strange object being driven down the road to the Skunk Works test range. And it even shows up in a satellite picture later.

Might a member of the general public misinterpret this as a secret Lockheed Martin (LM) UFO program? Yes, absolutely.

Let's say for some reason LM outsourced the fabrication of this object, and your company got the contract. Might you misinterpret the project, and think you've been tasked with reproducing alien tech? Possible, but I would guess this is unlikely. Even with some secrecy around this, wouldn't LM tell you the purpose of the object you are building? And if the project isn't outsourced, what reason would they have for such extreme compartmentalization that you are given only the build specifications without any context? Do we have any evidence that there is such extreme compartmentalization inside these defense contractors?

Similarly, let's say you are working at LM as a janitor and see this on the floor for a few weeks:

Would you think it was a UFO? Maybe. But how many of the 40+ people that David Grusch interviewed were janitors? And of the people who had more information, how many would make these kinds of basic mistakes?

When I try to imagine the situations where someone would misinterpret the true nature of the program that they work in, I have to assume they are projecting from a position of low information.

And yet, Grusch and others have indicated that there are people working "inside The Program" with "first-hand knowledge". So, for this "periphery hypothesis" to hold, we have to assume that there is such extreme compartmentalization of secret programs that people regularly misinterpret the nature of the work they are doing (i.e. they project a UFO interpretation onto their own work).

This theory generates a prediction: if a whistleblower comes out with claims of a secret program, we should expect their work to be highly compartmentalized and open to misinterpretation. If they claim to have less compartmentalized knowledge of their work, it works against this theory (but does not falsify it).

Some things that are still unclear for me:

1. Why would Grusch be referred to congress with these claims? Are they, as organizations, susceptible to the same telephone effects?
2. If these secret programs have prosaic explanations that were misinterpreted by UFO believers that Grusch interviewed, why would Grusch be denied access to those programs?

Edit: One explanation for #1 is that the DoD IG did not refer Grusch to congress for these claims, while the IC IG did refer Grusch to congress for his reprisal claims.

 

[Mendel]

1. Why would Grusch be referred to congress with these claims? Are they, as organizations, susceptible to the same telephone effects?

Whistleblowers in the IC have a legal right to contact Congress even if their information is not deemed credible.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/da...-statement-and-ig-complaint.12989/post-291923

Article:

(ii)An employee may contact the congressional intelligence committees directly as described in clause (i) only if the employee—

(I) before making such a contact, furnishes to the Director, through the Inspector General, a statement of the employee's complaint or information and notice of the employee's intent to contact the congressional intelligence committees directly; and

(II) obtains and follows from the Director, through the Inspector General, direction on how to contact the congressional intelligence committees in accordance with appropriate security practices.

Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3033

2. If these secret programs have prosaic explanations that were misinterpreted by UFO believers that Grusch interviewed, why would Grusch be denied access to those programs?

If they're not UAP-related, Grusch had no "need to know", and thus no right to access. It defeats the purpose of having secret projects if everyone can access them. (There are over a million top secret clearance holders.)

 

[jarlrmai]

2. If these secret programs have prosaic explanations that were misinterpreted by UFO believers that Grusch interviewed, why would Grusch be denied access to those programs?

Just because a program is not about alien spaceships doesn't mean it's not classified.

It does lead to a chicken and egg problem though for a UAP investigation, let's say you are investigating a UAP report and the truth of it is that it was X secret project but you obviously don't know this, how do you establish "need to know" for the specific project?

Is a generally "was anyone operating in X areas at X time" good enough, what there method for this?

If they're not UAP-related, Grusch had no "need to know", and thus no right to access. It defeats the purpose of having secret projects if everyone can access them. (There are over a million top secret clearance holders.)

How would a program be decided to be UAP related or not?

 

[Mendel]

How would a program be decided to be UAP related or not?

Quoting Grusch at the HOC hearing ( https://www.rev.com/blog/transcript...os-and-government-transparency-transcript/amp ):

In 2019, the UAP Task Force director asked me to identify all special access programs and controlled access programs, also known as SAPs and CAPs.

Answer 1 is, UAPTF decides, apparently?

I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional read-ons when I requested it.

Answer 2: a UFO crash retrieval and analysis program would be UAP-related.

Yeah, the agreement on measures to reduce the risk of outbreak of nuclear war signed in 1971, unclassified treaty publicly available, and if you cite the George Washington University National Security Archives, you will find the declassified in 2013 specific provisions in this specific red line flash message traffic with the specific codes pursuant to Article 3 and also Situation 2, which is in the previously classified NSA archive. What I would recommend, and I tried to get access, but I got a wall of silence at the White House, was the specific incidents when those message traffic was used. I think some scholarship on that would open the door to a further investigation using those publicly available information.

Answer 3: "Detection by missile warning system of unidentified objects, if such occurrence could create a risk of outbreak of nuclear war between the USA and the USSR" are UAP-related, and it's a shame Grusch wasn't able to review international White House communications.

 

[jarlrmai]

There can probably be an argument made for many, many programs that they might cause a UAP to be reported or be related to UAP in some way.

And if UAPTF needs to make the determination, then they need access to all programs to make that determination.

 

[Mendel]

And if UAPTF needs to make the determination, then they need access to all programs to make that determination.

Well, that was what Jay Stratton thought. The people running the programs apparently disagreed with that.

We've discussed previously that the idea of a fishing expedition like this is preposterous, and that Stratton should've gone through his boss, the Undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and security, instead of tasking a subordinate to abuse his clearances.

 

[Kyle McDonald]

It does lead to a chicken and egg problem though for a UAP investigation, let's say you are investigating a UAP report and the truth of it is that it was X secret project but you obviously don't know this, how do you establish "need to know" for the specific project?

I'm trying to understand what happened here exactly. Was it basically this?

Grusch: Hey SAP #123, I heard you work on UFO crash retrievals, I have been tasked with reviewing all SAPs and CAPs related to UAPs.
SAP #123: Sorry, we can't give you access.
Grusch: Um, that's suspicious. Hey Kirkpatrick, maybe look into this?
Kirkpatrick: Hey SAP #123, do you work on UFO crash retrievals?*
SAP #123: Nope.*
Grusch: Hi Congress, I asked about UAP-related programs and got leads from 40+ people but was denied access.
Kirkpatrick: Well, we asked around and everyone says "nope".

* I'm assuming this part happened at some point, and that Kirkpatrick didn't just completely ignore Grusch.

Of course, Grusch's entire process is essentially insufficient to uncover the kinds of programs that he believes exists.

If there are super secret multi-decade crash retrieval programs—siphoning funds, operating in the shadows, using violence to silence people—why would he expect them to respect his clearance and need-to-know?

Grusch responded to this experience by submitting complaints and speaking to Congress and the media.

Kirkpatrick clearly doesn't take Grusch's claims seriously enough to investigate in the way that would be required. I don't think AARO even has the power they would need in the first place.

Congress, on the other hand, seems to have taken Grusch's claims seriously enough to add subpoena power to the NDAA.

After those subpoenas are issued, we can expect either:

1. They come back with details confirming some or all of Grusch's claims, or
2. They come back negative, possibly with true explanations or false cover stories. Skeptics will interpret this to mean that Grusch's claims are false. UFO conspiracists will interpret this to mean that the programs are so secret they are operating outside any accountability to the US legal system.

Sorry if this reads as thinking out loud, I am still trying to wrap my head around this whole thing. If there are in fact no UFO crash retrieval programs, I'm trying to figure out what it would take to convince UFO conspiracists of this. I guess as the spotlight continues to get brighter, everyone has to decide for themselves if they believe a secret program could still hide in the few remaining shadows?

 

[Mendel]

Kirkpatrick clearly doesn't take Grusch's claims seriously enough to investigate in the way that would be required.

That's a libelous speculation not based on any evidence that I can see [, except for Grusch's own testimony which is biased.]

I don't think AARO even has the power they would need in the first place.

They have the power via the DNI:

Article:

The Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, shall ensure that each element of the intelligence community with data relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena makes such data available immediately to the [All-domain Anomaly Resolution] Office.

Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

I realize this thread has been dead for a month, but I want to revive it because it seems like the best place to discuss the "periphery hypothesis" (which I've been calling the "telephone theory"). I feel this is the best prosaic hypothesis for explaining claims by David Grusch, Karl Nell, Jonathan Grey, and others. So I think it should be considered carefully.

What if we imagine some specific examples of how this could play out, and think about how plausible the theory actually is?

Let's say you see this strange object being driven down the road to the Skunk Works test range. And it even shows up in a satellite picture later.

View attachment 62305View attachment 62306

Might a member of the general public misinterpret this as a secret Lockheed Martin (LM) UFO program? Yes, absolutely.

Let's say for some reason LM outsourced the fabrication of this object, and your company got the contract. Might you misinterpret the project, and think you've been tasked with reproducing alien tech? Possible, but I would guess this is unlikely. Even with some secrecy around this, wouldn't LM tell you the purpose of the object you are building? And if the project isn't outsourced, what reason would they have for such extreme compartmentalization that you are given only the build specifications without any context? Do we have any evidence that there is such extreme compartmentalization inside these defense contractors?

Similarly, let's say you are working at LM as a janitor and see this on the floor for a few weeks:

View attachment 62309

Would you think it was a UFO? Maybe. But how many of the 40+ people that David Grusch interviewed were janitors? And of the people who had more information, how many would make these kinds of basic mistakes?

When I try to imagine the situations where someone would misinterpret the true nature of the program that they work in, I have to assume they are projecting from a position of low information.

And yet, Grusch and others have indicated that there are people working "inside The Program" with "first-hand knowledge". So, for this "periphery hypothesis" to hold, we have to assume that there is such extreme compartmentalization of secret programs that people regularly misinterpret the nature of the work they are doing (i.e. they project a UFO interpretation onto their own work).

This theory generates a prediction: if a whistleblower comes out with claims of a secret program, we should expect their work to be highly compartmentalized and open to misinterpretation. If they claim to have less compartmentalized knowledge of their work, it works against this theory (but does not falsify it).

Some things that are still unclear for me:

1. Why would Grusch be referred to congress with these claims? Are they, as organizations, susceptible to the same telephone effects?
2. If these secret programs have prosaic explanations that were misinterpreted by UFO believers that Grusch interviewed, why would Grusch be denied access to those programs?

Edit: One explanation for #1 is that the DoD IG did not refer Grusch to congress for these claims, while the IC IG did refer Grusch to congress for his reprisal claims.

What you laid out here is what makes up a bulk of these claims.

So, for this "periphery hypothesis" to hold, we have to assume that there is such extreme compartmentalization of secret programs that people regularly misinterpret

Yes but the framing of this isn't exactly on par with what would be happening. This is the concept of where need to know comes into play. If you are tasked with creating some ISR pod for a next generation stealth fighter, that's all that matters, you are creating an ISR pod to fill specific specifications. No one's telling you the rest because it's irrelevant to you making the pod, outside of what is absolutely needed for it to integrate with the planes electronic systems and physically be placed on it.
Or one we see a lot. If you are working as a security guard at these programs, your need to know cuts there, that's all you're doing. You are not being told what you are actually securing, you might see stuff, but no ones telling you jack, not officially at least. What you call "basic mistakes" are less mistakes and more the brain trying to understand things where there is nothing readily available for us to understand it, or in simpler terms, what you are also doing right now with your posts.

I would be thoroughly surprised if those 40 were all "believer" types too rather than people who just talk up seeing weird stuff but don't actually ascribe ET or whatever to it.
Like some guy who pulled security at a hanger where some foreign adversaries stolen helicopter was being exploited, only ever saw it under a tarp, just so happens to be in that spooky section of an airbase that everyone claims houses UFOs and no one in the public knows there's foreign tech exploitation going on. No one tells him what's going on either because it's irrelevant to him making sure no uncarded person waltzes into the hanger, so there exists a gap of information where the only accessible information they have is UFOs.

 

[Mendel]

Similarly, let's say you are working at LM as a janitor and see this on the floor for a few weeks:

View attachment 62309

Would you think it was a UFO? Maybe.

But if you were working at the Helendale RCS facility, where your pictures originate, you'd realize it must be a mock-up—a shape to test the radar return of.

 

[knobby]

I would be thoroughly surprised if those 40 were all "believer" types too rather than people who just talk up seeing weird stuff but don't actually ascribe ET or whatever to it.

I agree. It's quite plausible that there are about 10 true believers from the usual suspects like Hal Puttoff, Eric Davis, Elizondo, etc and the remaining 30 might be "I had an uncle who worked at area 51".

 

[Mendel]

What if we imagine some specific examples of how this could play out, and think about how plausible the theory actually is?

Hypothetical:

• Elizondo tells Grusch about the 1930s Milano UFO that OSS allegedly hauled home to Wright-Patterson AFB after the war
• Grusch sets out to find a secret program at Wright-Patterson and succeeds
• He requests access, but is denied
• "I can tell you specifics of where to look"
• AARO looks, but the UFO is an obvious hoax and the program is for something unrelated
• "no verifiable information", says AARO

 

[Ann K]

1. Why would Grusch be referred to congress with these claims? Are they, as organizations, susceptible to the same telephone effects?

I don't think Grusch was "referred to congress" so much as he was called BY congress. Nor was that done by congress "as an organization", but by a few members of a subcommittee only, and not everyone in the subcommittee approved of the action. It was a hot topic at the moment in the UFO-believing subset of the American population, ever since the gimbal-video and others were released. And congress, far too often, doesn't act, it reacts. Giving a public platform to Grusch and the others is a way of saying to the believers "Look, we're taking you seriously, so can-I-have-your-vote?"

Just as I don't automatically have confidence in the ability of pilots to judge the size and speed of objects with which they're unfamiliar, I don't automatically have faith in members of congress to get to the bottom of things with which THEY are unfamiliar. After all, they are just people who got more votes than their opponents, with no other necessary qualifications.

 

[JWrightBrain]

I agree. It's quite plausible that there are about 10 true believers from the usual suspects like Hal Puttoff, Eric Davis, Elizondo, etc and the remaining 30 might be "I had an uncle who worked at area 51".

I kinda agree. I don't think all 40 witnesses are on the same level either. But they want to bulk up the numbers so they sound impressive.

 

[tobigtofool]

To me the quoted text is clearly not in jest. If it were in jest, it's a pretty bad joke. The quoted text is all I included in my original post, because it's the only part of the video which is clearly not in jest.

To me the quoted text is clearly a salesman trying to get me to buy a used car.

Hypothetical:

• Elizondo tells Grusch about the 1930s Milano UFO that OSS allegedly hauled home to Wright-Patterson AFB after the war
• Grusch sets out to find a secret program at Wright-Patterson and succeeds
• He requests access, but is denied
• "I can tell you specifics of where to look"
• AARO looks, but the UFO is an obvious hoax and the program is for something unrelated
• "no verifiable information", says AARO

For me the issue here is just how compartmentalized the programs are that it creates a perfect example of inefficiency.

If the final result of all these senate hearings are, "everyone was just so compartmentalized, and confused that they made easy mistakes" it makes me think back to my initial take that, these intelligence agencies are kind of out of control.

If I worked at a company, and left and right people were confused about what the company did - and people above and below me are all whispering about how we're doing illegal things - then that's enough for me to say we need to have a total public (because this is American goverment - not private corporation) investigation from the top to bottom about it.

Some folks dont want that because they think we need this to protect us from countries I want to visit. But I don't agree with that - and nothing in our country should prevent us from knowing how our goverment operates, I don't care how cold a war is.

We just shouldn't have top secret organizations that can cause 5+ years of whistleblowing and senate hearings, not to mention the ripple effects that has on 320 million voters.

It just makes people distrust our own goverment more, and the more that happens, the more other bad stuff happens.

Even back to the Obama quote - that validates peoples distrust in their own goverment. Joke, or not.

IMO

 

[Mendel]

To me the quoted text is clearly a salesman trying to get me to buy a used car.

Spoiler: used UFO for sale

https://torontolife.com/life/giant-starship-enterprise-sale-scarborough-lawn/

 

[JWrightBrain]

Spoiler: used UFO for sale

View attachment 62332
https://torontolife.com/life/giant-starship-enterprise-sale-scarborough-lawn/

Used UFO for sale. Never flown.

 

[Ann K]

To me the quoted text is clearly a salesman trying to get me to buy a used car.



For me the issue here is just how compartmentalized the programs are that it creates a perfect example of inefficiency.

If the final result of all these senate hearings are, "everyone was just so compartmentalized, and confused that they made easy mistakes" it makes me think back to my initial take that, these intelligence agencies are kind of out of control.

If I worked at a company, and left and right people were confused about what the company did - and people above and below me are all whispering about how we're doing illegal things - then that's enough for me to say we need to have a total public (because this is American goverment - not private corporation) investigation from the top to bottom about it.

Some folks dont want that because they think we need this to protect us from countries I want to visit. But I don't agree with that - and nothing in our country should prevent us from knowing how our goverment operates, I don't care how cold a war is.

We just shouldn't have top secret organizations that can cause 5+ years of whistleblowing and senate hearings, not to mention the ripple effects that has on 320 million voters.

It just makes people distrust our own goverment more, and the more that happens, the more other bad stuff happens.

Even back to the Obama quote - that validates peoples distrust in their own goverment. Joke, or not.

IMO

Do you mean "We just shouldn't have top secret organizations"? There are perfectly valid reasons for ANY government to safeguard its military technology or its strategic plans. If we have secrets that are not only our own secrets, but also the secrets of other countries, how could we possibly be trusted by any other power in the world if we opened everything to everyone? I think you misunderstand the needs of a government. People have different levels of security clearance for a reason. Opening it all up to you, to me, and to the man in the street is opening it up to the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans. Whether you like it or not, satisfying your own personal curiosity is not the purpose of government, nor should it ever be.

 

[taurusclover21]

Spoiler: used UFO for sale

View attachment 62332
https://torontolife.com/life/giant-starship-enterprise-sale-scarborough-lawn/

Actually, it is probably the most recognizable "spaceship" ever known!

 

[Kyle McDonald]

That's a libelous speculation not based on any evidence that I can see

Sure, I guess that's true. We don't technically know whether Kirkpatrick has taken Grusch's claims seriously enough to investigate further or not, we only know that Kirkpatrick has come to a different conclusion than Grusch.

Like some guy who pulled security at a hanger where some foreign adversaries stolen helicopter was being exploited, only ever saw it under a tarp

Love it. I think this kind of narrative brainstorming is really helpful for building up a cohesive theory for who those 40 people might be. I realize for some folks this just sounds like speculation, but for me I find it important to think through a theory to the end and come up with something coherent even if it's complex.

If they are, in fact, janitors, security guards, and in other low-information roles that's one thing. If they are people working on ISR pods without a need-to-know, and somehow misinterpreting their work as "non-human" tech, that's another. And if they are overseeing the compartmentalization itself, or otherwise have a high-level perspective, that's something else entirely. And finally there are people who have heard rumors and that's it. In the Debrief article we only hear from Karl Nell and Jonathan Grey. These folks do not claim to have first hand knowledge, and they are not working as scientists/researchers/engineers, so we have to assume they either have some high-level perspective or they are speaking based on rumors.

The prosaic explanation demands that Grusch spoke with 40 people who are all low-information, too compartmentalized, misinterpreting their work, or spreading rumors. I'm not sure we can say much more unless some of these 40 people come out as whistleblowers.

 

[Mendel]

Do you mean "We just shouldn't have top secret organizations"? There are perfectly valid reasons for ANY government to safeguard its military technology or its strategic plans.

Yes. @tobigtofool disagrees. We've been over this at length starting from https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ho...on-uaps-july-26-2023.13049/page-4#post-294650 . I'd be very happy if I didn't have to read round 2 of that same discourse.

 

[tobigtofool]

Yes. @tobigtofool disagrees. We've been over this at length starting from https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ho...on-uaps-july-26-2023.13049/page-4#post-294650 . I'd be very happy if I didn't have to read round 2 of that same discourse.

False. You do not know me this well. Your statement about my feelings is your own opinion and untrue - yet you act as if it is fact. It's totally antagonizing and just shows that anything you say is biased and not based on any reality except your own made up fantasies.

There is a difference between burning money to build war machines we never use during peace time, and still having secrecy in our goverment and intelligence agencies.

Do you mean "We just shouldn't have top secret organizations"? There are perfectly valid reasons for ANY government to safeguard its military technology or its strategic plans. If we have secrets that are not only our own secrets, but also the secrets of other countries, how could we possibly be trusted by any other power in the world if we opened everything to everyone? I think you misunderstand the needs of a government. People have different levels of security clearance for a reason. Opening it all up to you, to me, and to the man in the street is opening it up to the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans. Whether you like it or not, satisfying your own personal curiosity is not the purpose of government, nor should it ever be.

No - that's an extreme strawman to build.

I made it extremely clear what I think:

If I worked at a company, and left and right people were confused about what the company did - and people above and below me are all whispering about how we're doing illegal things - then that's enough for me to say we need to have a total public (because this is American goverment - not private corporation) investigation from the top to bottom about it.

This does not indicate at all that I don't think there should be some levels of secrecy in a goverment.

We just shouldn't have top secret organizations that can cause 5+ years of whistleblowing and senate hearings, not to mention the ripple effects that has on 320 million voters.

It just makes people distrust our own goverment more, and the more that happens, the more other bad stuff happens.

This clearly indicates I think at the most we need more oversight based on the behavior and results of our current system.

Not that we should take a totally extreme anti goverment stance on the topic.

In fact all I argued is that the current system, seems to be too compartmentalized and is causing an anti goverment trend and seems to be inefficient.

I started my post with my feelings, and you straightup ignored it and just made up a totally extreme stance to argue against.

For me the issue here is just how compartmentalized the programs are that it creates a perfect example of inefficiency.

 

[Mendel]

This does not indicate at all that I don't think there should be some levels of secrecy in a goverment.

Sure. This does:

Yeah, I get it, but that's just not for me.

But like I said, I'm not going to argue that again.

 

[Landru]

False. You do not know me this well. Your statement about my feelings is your own opinion and untrue - yet you act as if it is fact. It's totally antagonizing and just shows that anything you say is biased and not based on any reality except your own made up fantasies.

Do not make personal attacks.

 

[Rocky]

Here's my take on some of this when it comes to the pilots and Grusch.
1. David Fravor wants so badly to believe what he saw was otherworldly. So I think his observation of what he thinks he saw is skewed. He has a huge interest in UFOs. He even admitted to faking a sighting using his fighter plane during exercises. Plus Deitrich directly contradicts the timeline of the "tic tac" sighting. She says 5 to 10 secs and Fravor says 10 min. And I think he enjoys going to all of those UFO conventions.
2. Graves I believe is trying to do the right thing by keeping the skies safe for our pilots but doesn't consider the most probable explanations for what other pilots said they were seeing or the upgraded equipment that was retrofitted on the fighter jets and their lack of understanding the new sensitive tech. He has not seen these objects himself.
3. Grusch has brought up the Italy UFO story as fact and truth when it's been debunked over and over. So now we have to try to understand why he would do this. I think he may be extremely gullible and maybe even have some psychological issues. (I thought this before the news came out about his issues with PTSD) When he spoke at the hearings recently he certainly seems that way to me. Something is off. And the connections he has with the known liars of Knapp and Corbell. Both of these guys have been caught pushing stories that have been debunked.

 

[tobigtofool]

I do think the conversation (or argument) on the nuances about how I think the entire goverment should be run, is indeed off-topic.

But on topic my initial post still stands, the compartmentalization, if at fault for these whistle blows and senate hearings about illegal behavior, does indeed imply an inefficient way to run organizations.

Addressing that with an outside entity, does not mean that we should wholesale get rid of our intelligence, or secrecy organizations.

 

[deirdre]

This does not indicate at all that I don't think there should be some levels of secrecy in a goverment.

You may not think that is what you are conveying with the words you are choosing. But it is what you are conveying. just fyi.

 

[tobigtofool]

You may not think that is what you are conveying with the words you are choosing. But it is what you are conveying. just fyi.

I really don't know how someone can make that leap.

This is what I said in the quote mendal says I think we should get rid of all secrecy in the goverment:

You and me, are having an argument about UFO sightings from 70 years ago, that were the result of misinformation and misdirection.

that's the point i was trying to make, hysteria back then was perhaps justified (esp with the additional fear from the Cold War itself), but that reasoning doesnt really hold true today. is my opinion. Today most people know (or can just google it) all about how the government doesnt want enemies to know about secret stuff, we know the most common explanations for alleged ufos . etc etc

I feel like what you are saying here is tantamount to saying the goverment should just print false stories about anything, just to quell people.

If you would draw the line somewhere before that, where you and I draw the line are just in different places.

The us military should not be secretly testing weapons of war, we may disagree on that, but there is nothing you can say to change my mind and nothing I can say to change yours. Which is why both opinions are valid.

But I can say with absolute certainty that: misinformation causes more problems than it solves.

What I mean with this statement in context was, if you don't think they should print false stories, cool, neither do I, but where we draw the line isnt exactly in the same place, I seem to draw it somewhere before you.

But where I draw the line isnt "let anyone just run around in the pentagon with full access", as I've been accused of.

If they are going to test flares in Pheonix, or off the coast of San Diego, maybe tell people...

In the second quote, AnnK said it was the governments responsibility to keep everything secret, and I don't agree with that.

Of course we need secrets in this world today. But do we need them on the level we have them? I dont think so.

Of course we need a military in this world, but do we need to spend as much as we do? I very much do not think so.

We've learned many times in the past that our agencies are not infallible, thanks to whistleblowers: WMDs in iraq, Guantanamo bay, NSA spying, just in the last 20 years those are some of a few.

ITT I simply said that if these UAP whistleblower claims about illegal behavior are a result of compartmentalization, then maybe that compartmentalization is out of control, and needs a 3rd party to investigate it.

How does anything I've said here convey we should have no secrecy in our goverment?

Even a 3rd party investigating our military and intelligence agencies would STILL keep the secrets secret. It just means we'd have trusted third party civilian based investigators to audit some of our agencies.

People are acting like saying I like the EPA means I think we should never build anything ever again.

The Marshal Islands, MK ultra, The Tuskegee Syphils study, Operation Northwoods, My Lai Massacre, Agent Orange, Iran-Contra, Operation CHAOS. Should all of this remained covered up?

All of these atrocities came to light as the result of investigators and whistleblowers. Not the military doing the right thing. And none of them were necessary to keep us safe.

 

[FatPhil]

How does anything I've said here convey we should have no secrecy in our goverment?

Answered just above - because that's what you've said.

The Marshal Islands, MK ultra, The Tuskegee Syphils study, Operation Northwoods, My Lai Massacre, Agent Orange, Iran-Contra, Operation CHAOS. Should all of this remained covered up?

No-one's saying they should. Stop contructing straw men with such gusto. Doing so is a logical fallacy.

Just because some secrecy isn't just good, but essential - in fact most is good /because/ it's essential - doesn't mean everything should be secret. You're performing the logical fallacy of Hasty Generalisation too.

 

[Mendel]

Just because some secrecy isn't just good, but essential - in fact most is good /because/ it's essential - doesn't mean everything should be secret. You're performing the logical fallacy of Hasty Generalisation too.

He's not generalizing, but providing examples for situations in which it would've been "good" if the world worked according to his political opinions. And because these opinions always involve trade-offs between different values, blanket statements such as "is good" that don't acknowledge the trade-offs—that the "good" comes with "bad"—are needlessly confrontational.

You can't "win" this argument, and this thread is not the place for it, imo.

 

[Smythe Bacchus]

@Amathia getting back to your OP question:

In an earlier post of mine I expressed a desire to hear people's "big-picture" views of what they think is going on with whistleblowers like David Grusch and other current and formerly high ranking officials coming forward and making the kinds of claims we've been hearing in the news lately.

I came across an article that I think provides a pretty compelling hypothesis that I haven't seen elsewhere and wanted to share it here in the hopes of discussing it...

The periphery hypothesis posited by Luis Cayetano in the blog post linked above isn't just plausible, it's a reality, e.g. the Roswell UFO story was actually reignited by a retired air force officer in the 1970's:

Article:

The incident was forgotten until 1978, when retired lieutenant colonel Jesse Marcel was interviewed by ufologist Stanton Friedman. In that interview, Marcel revealed the "weather balloon" had been a cover story to divert public attention. Based on this, Marcel speculated that the debris might have been extraterrestrial in origin.[7]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

Whilst it has long since been revealed the Roswell incident was actually a top-secret military surveillance ballon (aside: perhaps that is where the Chinese got their idea from?) it remains in the public conciousness as a UFO coverup and is still not always corrected or questioned by the news media.

E.g. Newsmax interview with Rep. Tim Burchett (timestamp 05:35).

Article:

Burchett said the government has been covering up what has been discovered regarding UFOs, including the famous story of Roswell, New Mexico, where alien spacecraft allegedly crashed in 1947.

"I think they're hiding former crash sites," he said. "You should go back to Roswell, New Mexico. In 1947, there was a craft, two crafts apparently, that I've been told had a midair collision.

Source: https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/ufo-uap-roswell/2023/01/16/id/1104625/

You've already read my theory that Grusch's effort is essentially a big bluff:

This appears to be an attempt to bluff the US government into exposing its own deep-state conspiracy by recruiting more powerful players within the government to join the hunt for the alleged deep-state conspirators.
...
Grusch has provided himself with plausible deniability of perjury by claiming his information was obtained through "interviews" of others supposedly with first hand knowledge.

Grusch's claimed witnesses may well have formed their UFO conclusions from "periphery hypothesis" but I also suspect he has bought into the "where there is smoke there is fire hypothesis", except the smoke always seems to be of the recycled variety, like a kind of implausible perpetual motion machine

 

[Mendel]

"where there is smoke there is fire hypothesis"

Article:

Smoke and mirrors is a classic technique in magical illusions that makes an entity appear to hover in empty space. It was documented as early as 1770 and spread widely after its use by the charlatan Johann Georg Schröpfer, who claimed the apparitions to be conjured spirits. It subsequently became a fixture of 19th-century phantasmagoria shows. The illusion relies on a hidden projector (known then as a magic lantern) the beam of which reflects off a mirror into a cloud of smoke, which in turn scatters the beam to create an image.

The phrase "smoke and mirrors" has entered common English use to refer to any proposal that, when examined closely, proves to be an illusion.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_and_mirrors

 

[tobigtofool]

He's not generalizing, but providing examples for situations in which it would've been "good" if the world worked according to his political opinions. And because these opinions always involve trade-offs between different values, blanket statements such as "is good" that don't acknowledge the trade-offs—that the "good" comes with "bad"—are needlessly confrontational.

You can't "win" this argument, and this thread is not the place for it, imo.

To be fair, you are the one that brought it ITT. You should not bring up someone's personal beliefs as a pejorative, if you don't want to hear them try to clarify and defend them, especially when your characterization is way off.

All I am saying is the intelligence community seems to need some type of an internal affairs.

Why is that such a bad thing to say? Why does that mean the most extreme hypothetical?

Why if I say we need more accountability that makes everyone certain I mean we shouldn't have a goverment?

The most I've said about secrecy is that the US shouldn't be secretly testing weapons of war. That doesn't mean they have to tell us every detail, it means if you are doing an test over phoenix that its not a giant secret. If you nuke an island, you don't cover up the results of the test so that it ends up being a total atrocity for people for decades.

And ITT that it seems like there needs to be more 3rd party accountability in the intelligence community. I think that's a totally fair statement.

 

[deirdre]

I really don't know how someone can make that leap.

I see that. or you would stop saying what you are saying and using the analogies you are using.