Preview of Luis Elizondo's UFO book: "Imminent"

[Tezcatlipoca]

I should have been a bit clearer. What I found interesting was this part of the quote from the Wiki:

In addition to alleged security violations from uncleared civilian psychics working in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs),

I'd like to find out a bit more about these allegations, because to me it sounds like yet another side-hustle. Not to sound like a broken record, but IF true, here is another example of a believer in UFO/Psy/(insert fringe thing here) fooling around with this stuff in the DoD/IC. In the case of Elizondo and Stratton's AATIP, it becomes evidence that the US government is officially involved in these things.



Agreed. However, I'd argue some of these programs are in fact farces. AAWSAP spending $20 million to study stuff at SWR certainly was a complete farce.

Stargate wasn't much better. Yes, some thought the Soviets were successful with Psy, so the US needed to look into it, but the biggest deal in the early years of Puthoff and Targ was Uri Geller. In the mid '70s, Geller was the star at SRI, but Geller had been outed as a fraud on The Johnny Carson Show in 1973. Nevertheless, he and Puthoff and Targ continued on at SRI. It wasn't until Ray Hyman looked at the work of SRI and declared Geller a complete fraud that Puthoff and Targ lost funding. With no useful results and a known fraud as the best part of the program, it continued on anyways and by the '90s the reins were almost completely handed over to yet another believer, Edwin May:

In 1991 most of the contracting for the program was transferred from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with Edwin May controlling 70% of the contractor funds and 85% of the data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

Stargate was finally cancelled in 1995, 23 years after Puthoff and Targ had started testing Geller. Aside from some possible statistical anomalies in a meta-analysis, the program(s) never produced anything in those 23 years. Sounds pretty farcical.

Despite this, if Elizondo is to be believed, there were folks still trying to make it work long afterwards.

On re first part, it would be interesting to track these down but would probably have to FOIA some things to get a better picture. From what Elizondo presented though I do agree, this secondary "Stargate" absolutely was explained as another pet project like the later AATIP, *not* an actual formal continuation of the program or etc.

And on the farces part, I meant "farce" in the sense the programs were/weren't actually being ran for Deception purposes, rather than, being exploited adjacently for that reason. Full agree most, if not all of these, are farces from the frame of the actual originators.

I think the government "official" side of this is interesting. I probably rest in an area a bit diff than others, think you've seen most of my comments on it now. I think, in a bit of a convoluted way, yes, the government does "officially" support these (ACTUAL LEGIT PROGRAMS, NOT PERSONAL PROJECTS), as programs - not necessarily how they're practiced. They just generally are practiced in a way that does not run afoul of rules & regulations, or at least, in some cases (cough AATIP for sure) the issues are happening in isolated manners that prevent it from being acted on incidentally. I do not think the government "officially" supports it in the sense of say, actually hunting for Dino Beavers or Aliens.
I think the Kona Blue documents are a hilarious example of how this stuff probably has worked. Look at how much from the DHS side was focusing on actual, legitimate stuff, and not really thinking in terms of woo - but we know it came from the woo crew. This presents an individualized disconnect amongst participants with different goals, objectives, and interests in mind. These people taking it on in DHS, as far as we know, were not on that woo train, they just happened to know these people, although, tangentially ended up progressing their goals also since it was a kind of inherent result of them bringing it to DHS.
The government lets these programs happen, not for the woo, but for everything they can collect while in search for the bullshit. These guys never get booted out of the government fully because, as bullshit and whacky as their programs are, somewhere along the path, they end up churning out something actually relevant, but usually not from their frame.
Look at all the AAWSAP DIRDs for example, despite coming out of a whacko program, some of that did have a legitimate basis for continued research to progress legitimate sciences or already standing functions. Such as "Cognitive Limits on Simultaneous Control of Multiple Unnmanned Spacecraft" - this isn't talking about mind-controlling space craft, it's speaking to the actual human cognitive capabilities to manage multiple drones operating in space, something we may see in the future as we develop more space based capabilities in a mil/govt sense.
Or the example I gave earlier with how some electromagnetic warfare concepts dealing with biophysical effects rooted from these same sorts of programs, because, historically, they were categorized under the same "New Age" category that things like military neuroscience and etc were emerging under too.

 

[John J.]

Aside from some possible statistical anomalies in a meta-analysis, the program(s) never produced anything in those 23 years.

Even the statistical anomalies (if we're thinking along the same lines) were really only seen as significant by Jessica Utts who was part of the AIR panel which reviewed the Stargate Project. She was a dissenting voice on the AIR conclusions and recommendations.

Her subsequent paper An Assessment Of The Evidence For Psychic Functioning (1995, PDF attached) describes some of the RV experiments she thought successful at Stargate under SRI and SAIC.
Professor Utts makes her belief in ESP clear in that paper;

There is little benefit in continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.

There is some discussion of Utts, and possible oversights she might have made in drawing her conclusions in the thread
Claim: Remote Viewing is a Scientifically Proven Technique that Utilizes a Natural Human Ability to Enable Access to Hidden Information. There's a PDF of a paper by Dr Richard Wiseman and Dr Julie Milton in post #99 (1999, Journal of Parapsychology), that criticises one of the experiments Utts found convincing ("SAIC Experiment One").

...and by the '90s the reins were almost completely handed over to yet another believer, Edwin May

Edwin May was the judge of SAIC Experiment One, and responded to Wiseman and Milton; they in turn replied that their methodological concerns had not been refuted by May; supporting links/ PDFs in the post #99 link above.

 

[MapperGuy]

I should have been a bit clearer. What I found interesting was this part of the quote from the Wiki:

In addition to alleged security violations from uncleared civilian psychics working in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs),

I'd like to find out a bit more about these allegations, because to me it sounds like yet another side-hustle. Not to sound like a broken record, but IF true, here is another example of a believer in UFO/Psy/(insert fringe thing here) fooling around with this stuff in the DoD/IC. In the case of Elizondo and Stratton's AATIP, it becomes evidence that the US government is officially involved in these things.



Agreed. However, I'd argue some of these programs are in fact farces. AAWSAP spending $20 million to study stuff at SWR certainly was a complete farce.

Stargate wasn't much better. Yes, some thought the Soviets were successful with Psy, so the US needed to look into it, but the biggest deal in the early years of Puthoff and Targ was Uri Geller. In the mid '70s, Geller was the star at SRI, but Geller had been outed as a fraud on The Johnny Carson Show in 1973. Nevertheless, he and Puthoff and Targ continued on at SRI. It wasn't until Ray Hyman looked at the work of SRI and declared Geller a complete fraud that Puthoff and Targ lost funding. With no useful results and a known fraud as the best part of the program, it continued on anyways and by the '90s the reins were almost completely handed over to yet another believer, Edwin May:

In 1991 most of the contracting for the program was transferred from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with Edwin May controlling 70% of the contractor funds and 85% of the data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

Stargate was finally cancelled in 1995, 23 years after Puthoff and Targ had started testing Geller. Aside from some possible statistical anomalies in a meta-analysis, the program(s) never produced anything in those 23 years. Sounds pretty farcical.

Despite this, if Elizondo is to be believed, there were folks still trying to make it work long afterwards.

Science fiction writer Larry Niven in his book: Known Space: The Future Worlds of Larry Niven listed what he called Niven's Laws.
The one relevant here is: "Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless".

Why? Because if they existed somebody somewhere would have done SOMETHING noticeable with them by now.

If they thought they could train Remote Viewers then among the billions of people on the planet shouldn't there be people who, without training, can naturally do this? There are billions of people alive today, and NONE of them it appears have reliable, accurate PSI and/or magical powers.

 

[Ann K]

If they thought they could train Remote Viewers then among the billions of people on the planet shouldn't there be people who, without training, can naturally do this? There are billions of people alive today, and NONE of them it appears have reliable, accurate PSI and/or magical powers.

The inverse square law should be sufficient to dismiss any claims of a mechanism that could work at an unspecified distance.

 

[Mendel]

The inverse square law should be sufficient to dismiss any claims of a mechanism that could work at an unspecified distance.

Imagination works at any distance.

 

[FatPhil]

Even the statistical anomalies (if we're thinking along the same lines) were really only seen as significant by Jessica Utts who was part of the AIR panel which reviewed the Stargate Project. She was a dissenting voice on the AIR conclusions and recommendations.

Her subsequent paper An Assessment Of The Evidence For Psychic Functioning (1995, PDF attached) describes some of the RV experiments she thought successful at Stargate under SRI and SAIC.
Professor Utts makes her belief in ESP clear in that paper;

There is little benefit in continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.

There is some discussion of Utts, and possible oversights she might have made in drawing her conclusions in the thread
Claim: Remote Viewing is a Scientifically Proven Technique that Utilizes a Natural Human Ability to Enable Access to Hidden Information. There's a PDF of a paper by Dr Richard Wiseman and Dr Julie Milton in post #99 (1999, Journal of Parapsychology), that criticises one of the experiments Utts found convincing ("SAIC Experiment One").

Edwin May was the judge of SAIC Experiment One, and responded to Wiseman and Milton; they in turn replied that their methodological concerns had not been refuted by May; supporting links/ PDFs in the post #99 link above.

Couldn't Utts have got a pretty good headstart on setting up her own PSI research facility with Elizondo using the million dollars they won off Randi?

/s

Utts is a junk scientist. She deliberately does things like overlook experimenter prompting (i.e. the "scientist" is able to tell the test subject how to evaluate things) in experiments with a *biased* experimenter. These kinds of experiments are trivial to double-blind, to not do so is just bad science. The "current collection of data" is useless garbage, except as anecdotal evidence for a claim that PSI researchers are terrible researchers. Randi knew this, Wiseman knows this, they've seen it first hand.

 

[jdog]

Science fiction writer Larry Niven in his book: Known Space: The Future Worlds of Larry Niven listed what he called Niven's Laws.
The one relevant here is: "Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless".

Why? Because if they existed somebody somewhere would have done SOMETHING noticeable with them by now.

If they thought they could train Remote Viewers then among the billions of people on the planet shouldn't there be people who, without training, can naturally do this? There are billions of people alive today, and NONE of them it appears have reliable, accurate PSI and/or magical powers.

My thought experiment on this has long been professional sports, where you have thousands of hometown fans at any given stadium wishing for balls to travel different trajectories (not to mention whoever's watching at home) -- and despite millions of hours of recordings from multiple angles with real-time commentary over several decades there's no clear evidence of balls showing physics-defying behavior.

 

[JMartJr]

despite millions of hours of recordings from multiple angles with real-time commentary over several decades there's no clear evidence of balls showing physics-defying behavior.

Maybe the psychic powers of the other team's fans cancel out?

 

[John J.]

Maybe the psychic powers of the other team's fans cancel out?

We need an experiment:
Sell the tickets for a major match/ game, let the fans take their seats, and just before the start time have the referee/ umpire run out and put the ball on the centre spot, blow the whistle and beat a hasty retreat.
No players on the field, but the normal quota of assistant refs/ judges in case the ball goes out of play.

 

[JMartJr]

Which all points out the problem with woo-y claims -- ad-hoc explanations of why the woo doesn't work as expected are un-ending. (Though John J.'s experiment sounds like fun.)

 

[NorCal Dave]

Just another tidbit in the side-hustle culture at the DoD and Intel community. Unfortunately, this is a bit of 2nd hand from Jason Colavito's blog where he referenced the now absent preview of Elizondo's book on Google books.

Mick made mention that someone had put 189 pages of it on Scribd and while I did manage to copy a few pages of it into a Word document, I only got some of Mellon's hagiography intro about Lue. None of it appears to be on Scribd now, or at least I can't find it. So, I'm going a bit with Colavito's paraphrase for now as we wait for the book:

Elizondo also offered yet another explanation for his otherwise undocumented title of "Director of AATIP." This time, he alleges that after AAWSAP ended, he personally transferred parts of the program to his own portfolio without anyone's knowledge or consent and diverted part of his budget as Director of National Programs, Special Management Staff to "dual-use" the money to investigate UFOs, giving Hal Puthoff access to his materials.

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/...-of-torture-haunted-by-bubbles-talks-nephilim

Colavito is usually pretty good with references and research, so I'm thinking this was in the preview, we just didn't get to it before it was taken down. IF true, here we have the upfront admission that AATIP was nothing more than his personal side-hustle and he may have "diverted" some of his department's funds for his, and likely Stratton's, own use. It was never anything official and few if anyone knew about it. His whole schtick he presented to Kean and the NYT was straight up BS.

Maybe I will have to buy this damn book. The Kindel version should be cheap enough.

 

[RTM]

Maybe I will have to buy this damn book. The Kindel version should be cheap enough.

I think the 2030 edition will be discounted heavily.

 

[Ben Harris]

I should have been a bit clearer. What I found interesting was this part of the quote from the Wiki:

In addition to alleged security violations from uncleared civilian psychics working in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs),

I'd like to find out a bit more about these allegations, because to me it sounds like yet another side-hustle. Not to sound like a broken record, but IF true, here is another example of a believer in UFO/Psy/(insert fringe thing here) fooling around with this stuff in the DoD/IC. In the case of Elizondo and Stratton's AATIP, it becomes evidence that the US government is officially involved in these things.



Agreed. However, I'd argue some of these programs are in fact farces. AAWSAP spending $20 million to study stuff at SWR certainly was a complete farce.

Stargate wasn't much better. Yes, some thought the Soviets were successful with Psy, so the US needed to look into it, but the biggest deal in the early years of Puthoff and Targ was Uri Geller. In the mid '70s, Geller was the star at SRI, but Geller had been outed as a fraud on The Johnny Carson Show in 1973. Nevertheless, he and Puthoff and Targ continued on at SRI. It wasn't until Ray Hyman looked at the work of SRI and declared Geller a complete fraud that Puthoff and Targ lost funding. With no useful results and a known fraud as the best part of the program, it continued on anyways and by the '90s the reins were almost completely handed over to yet another believer, Edwin May:

In 1991 most of the contracting for the program was transferred from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with Edwin May controlling 70% of the contractor funds and 85% of the data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

Stargate was finally cancelled in 1995, 23 years after Puthoff and Targ had started testing Geller. Aside from some possible statistical anomalies in a meta-analysis, the program(s) never produced anything in those 23 years. Sounds pretty farcical.

Despite this, if Elizondo is to be believed, there were folks still trying to make it work long afterwards.

There are still folks trying to make it work. Lol.

 

[FatPhil]

We need an experiment:
Sell the tickets for a major match/ game, let the fans take their seats, and just before the start time have the referee/ umpire run out and put the ball on the centre spot, blow the whistle and beat a hasty retreat.
No players on the field, but the normal quota of assistant refs/ judges in case the ball goes out of play.

You could let the teams on the pitch so that they too could will the ball into the net from a closer range, after all they are the professionals with the most invested in the result - surely their will power would be more focussed?

However, you'd be dangerously close to the start of the Monty Python's /International Philosophy/ (AKA /Philosopher's Football/) sketch at that point (trivially findable on youtube, but it's too OT to inline).

 

[FatPhil]

Which all points out the problem with woo-y claims -- ad-hoc explanations of why the woo doesn't work as expected are un-ending. (Though John J.'s experiment sounds like fun.)

Alas it's not so ad-hoc, it's fairly consistent, and, worse, internally consistent. "Bad vibes from doubters stopped the demonstration from working", to paraphrase most of them at one time in their careers if/when put to the test. Our doubt-woo beat their effect-woo, which proves the woo exists. They don't have the rhetorical nous to realise that, for at least the ones seeking governmental (i.e. taxpayer) funding, "so if this power can be so easily nullified, it doesn't really have any use at all" is an immediate follow-up to such claims. Then put the burden on them and get them to help design an experiment that can't be so easily foiled - and if they can't do that, they're clearly not interested in doing science. (C.f. the lengths that physicists went to to perfect (making "loophole-free") the testing of the EPR paradox and violations to Bell's inequalities, which had so many "aha, but what if it's something else instead" twists and turns in its history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test#Loopholes .)

 

[jplaza]

Maybe the psychic powers of the other team's fans cancel out?

I think I would expect something like "Drunk Man random walk"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk

 

[jarlrmai]

I think I would expect something like "Drunk Man random walk"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk

In order to see that you would have to track whatever metric you believe was being affected the the psychic powers of the crowd.

 

[Mendel]

In order to see that you would have to track whatever metric you believe was being affected the the psychic powers of the crowd.

Well, the performance of the team would be the most likely to be affected.
Now, in sports, you're going to have more fans psychically influencing the team when the team has a "home" game, as compared to an "away" game, and so teams doing better in home games is what we'd expect to see. And we do!
You'd also expect big nations to outperform smaller nations, and that's also very likely.

Now, if only there weren't all these confounding factors...

 

[MapperGuy]

My thought experiment on this has long been professional sports, where you have thousands of hometown fans at any given stadium wishing for balls to travel different trajectories (not to mention whoever's watching at home) -- and despite millions of hours of recordings from multiple angles with real-time commentary over several decades there's no clear evidence of balls showing physics-defying behavior.

One of the best real-life, real-time experiments to document the existence (or non-existence) of Psi and/or magical powers has been running for many decades and will continue to run probably forever. Involving millions of participants and billions of data records that are poured over by brilliant minds and computers every hour of every day.

That is the Stock Market.

Millions of people are always trying to "beat the market" without any assistance from Psi or magic. Any person who DID have such abilities would stand out from the crowd like a lighthouse, and probably be a Trillionaire. They would be immediately identified by all of those people and agencies whose job is to detect fraudulent trades and insider trading and investigated because of their abnormal ability to always make the right stock pick. Or at least they would be far more right than all of those other traders without the "gift" such a person would have. They would stand out from the crowd, and everybody on Wall Street would know their name.

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

One of the best real-life, real-time experiments to document the existence (or non-existence) of Psi and/or magical powers has been running for many decades and will continue to run probably forever. Involving millions of participants and billions of data records that are poured over by brilliant minds and computers every hour of every day.

That is the Stock Market.

Millions of people are always trying to "beat the market" without any assistance from Psi or magic. Any person who DID have such abilities would stand out from the crowd like a lighthouse, and probably be a Trillionaire. They would be immediately identified by all of those people and agencies whose job is to detect fraudulent trades and insider trading and investigated because of their abnormal ability to always make the right stock pick. Or at least they would be far more right than all of those other traders without the "gift" such a person would have. They would stand out from the crowd, and everybody on Wall Street would know their name.

I wish I could double react, so, you're stuck with the laughing face. This is such a hilariously legitimate point to bring up, great example given.

 

[Scaramanga]

Millions of people are always trying to "beat the market" without any assistance from Psi or magic. Any person who DID have such abilities would stand out from the crowd like a lighthouse, and probably be a Trillionaire. They would be immediately identified by all of those people and agencies whose job is to detect fraudulent trades and insider trading and investigated because of their abnormal ability to always make the right stock pick. Or at least they would be far more right than all of those other traders without the "gift" such a person would have. They would stand out from the crowd, and everybody on Wall Street would know their name.

The trouble is that without a controlled test you'd have no way of knowing if any small effect existed. This precisely why proper psi tests have to state in advance exactly how many runs there will be, otherwise you get the 'drawer effect' where people just publish their best results. I recall this was one of the charges levelled against a psi researcher called Daryl Bem when he published seemingly remarkable psi results in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Bem

 

[Mendel]

The trouble is that without a controlled test you'd have no way of knowing if any small effect existed. This precisely why proper psi tests have to state in advance exactly how many runs there will be, otherwise you get the 'drawer effect' where people just publish their best results. I recall this was one of the charges levelled against a psi researcher called Daryl Bem when he published seemingly remarkable psi results in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Bem

Yes.
The proper process would be to identify a seemingly talented individual, and then check their ability under controlled conditions. The James Randi Foundation has done exactly that, and no psychic ability has ever been confirmed by such a test.

 

[Scaramanga]

The proper process would be to identify a seemingly talented individual, and then check their ability under controlled conditions. The James Randi Foundation has done exactly that, and no psychic ability has ever been confirmed by such a test.

The worst example I've seen was the Global Consciousness Project, which made all manner of spurious claims of correlation between their 'devices' and world events....including a claim of recording global consciousness of the 911 attacks. Even a casual look at their 'correlations' shows that they have an entire world to look at for some 'newsworthy event' that day. I'd be amazed if they didn't find 'correlations' !

This sort of nonsense is precisely how UFOs end up having 'evidence' and how the likes of Elizondo end up believing it. Its all the smoke and mirrors of badly assessed 'correlations'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Consciousness_Project

 

[NorCal Dave]

Yes.
The proper process would be to identify a seemingly talented individual, and then check their ability under controlled conditions. The James Randi Foundation has done exactly that, and no psychic ability has ever been confirmed by such a test.

Not to go completely off topic, but Elizondo does talk about being a remote viewer. Even without a proper controlled experiment, IF Psy were real there should be countless examples of extremely wealthy people who got rich using Psy. Be it sports betting, casino games, the Lottery, stocks and bonds there's a mirid of ways for one to acquire wealth if one can accurately predict the future or remote view places out of time.

Just look at Puthoff and Targ's Stargate collection of supposedly highly accurate viewers including Geller, McMoneagle, Swann, Langford and others or the Soviet bomber finding Smith over at the Air Force. To my knowledge none of these people are in the Musk, Gates, Zuckerburg league wealth wise. Only Geller was known for making millions, but not with his Psy, rather as an entertainer.

Even if they tried to keep a low profile, eventually someone is going to notice a very wealthy person with no real means of attaining that wealth.

Same goes for some sort of altruistic use of all these Psy powers. If any of these people had accurately predicted things like 911 or the London train bombings, clearly articulating what was going to happen when and where BEFORE the events, even if not believed then, they might be taken seriously now. But that never happens.

 

[Ann K]

Same goes for some sort of altruistic use of all these Psy powers. If any of these people had accurately predicted things like 911 or the London train bombings, clearly articulating what was going to happen when and where BEFORE the events, even if not believed then, they might be taken seriously now. But that never happens.

I think if they had predicted any of those things beforehand, suspicions would fall on them as being either a spy or a co-conspirator. Since we know spies and co-conspirators exist and work according to the known laws of physics, either would be a far more likely supposition than "psi" powers.

 

[Ben Harris]

That might be a possibility, but we'd need some sort of evidence to definitely apply that to the Stargate Project.

The CIA commissioned a 1995 report by the American Institutes for Research (PDF attached) into the utility of Stargate; the report's findings -essentially that there were no useful results- is seen as being instrumental in the Stargate Project being cancelled on grounds of cost and (zero) utility.

Their 29 September 1995 final report was released to the public 28 November 1995. A positive assessment by statistician Jessica Utts, that a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the laboratory [the government psychics were said to be accurate about 15 percent of the time], was offset by a negative one by psychologist Ray Hyman [a prominent CSICOP psychic debunker]. The final recommendation by AIR was to terminate the STAR GATE effort. CIA concluded that there was no case in which ESP had provided data used to guide intelligence operations.

Federation of American Scientists, STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing] https://irp.fas.org/program/collect/stargate.htm
(Didn't know FAS were interested in this kind of thing).

(1) There would be no need to commission AIR's audit if Stargate were known to be primarily a cover story.
(2) If it were a cover story, why recruit claimed psychics like Ingo Swann? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann).
Just have an on-paper-only establishment and budget, and have a handful of bright int. folk knock out the odd piece of disinformation once in a blue moon.
No need to commission a report seeing if it was effective if it was to be closed down.
(3) Though declassified, there isn't documentary evidence (AFAIK) that Stargate was run as a cover.
(4) The recent Congressional UAP hearings, Grusch affair etc. show us there are politicians and reasonably senior officers in the US services who believe in, or are prepared to consider, what might be considered fringe theories by some.
This might have been even more the case in the heady 60s/ 70s;

This effort [Stargate] was initiated in response to CIA concerns about reported Soviets investigations of psychic phenomena. Between 1969 and 1971, US intelligence sources concluded that the Soviet Union was engaged in "psychotronic" research. By 1970, it was suggested that the Soviets were spending approximately 60 million rubbles per year on it, and over 300 million by 1975. The money and personnel devoted to Soviet psychotronics suggested that they had achieved breakthroughs, even though the matter was considered speculative, controversial and "fringy."

FAS, link above.

(5) Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ must be considered "believers" in ESP.

At the moment, I think it's likely the Stargate Project was set up to "genuinely" investigate remote viewing, and its sponsors thought RV worth investigating. That Stargate ran for so many years might suggest that critical oversight was lacking.

It sure was, Remote Viewing us a trick!

 

[MapperGuy]

Yes.
The proper process would be to identify a seemingly talented individual, and then check their ability under controlled conditions. The James Randi Foundation has done exactly that, and no psychic ability has ever been confirmed by such a test.

And where would you find that "seemingly talented individual"?
Maybe the stock market?

The whole point of using the stock market is that because of the vast number of participants and the vaster number of trades an individual with even a very small ability to see the future would over time amass vast wealth.
Plus the number of regulators seeking out people with unusual success, on the assumption that it is from insider trading, would quickly identify them and tell the world by trying to throw them in jail.

This is what I would call a "natural experiment" one that is being performed simply by people going about their lives, not trying to find people who can see the future, but whose activity would reveal them nonetheless.

 

[JMartJr]

And where would you find that "seemingly talented individual"?
Maybe the stock market?

The whole point of using the stock market is that because of the vast number of participants and the vaster number of trades an individual with even a very small ability to see the future would over time amass vast wealth.
Plus the number of regulators seeking out people with unusual success, on the assumption that it is from insider trading, would quickly identify them and tell the world by trying to throw them in jail.

This is what I would call a "natural experiment" one that is being performed simply by people going about their lives, not trying to find people who can see the future, but whose activity would reveal them nonetheless.

I'm not sure the logic has been carried all the way through. If I can see the future, wouldn't I see that being conspicuously successful would get me thrown in jail, and see exactly how far I could go without getting flagged and hassled by The Law? I'd expect the true precognitive individual playing the stock market to never become noticeable to regulators, they'd know where the This Far, No Farther line is.

Not that I think there are any, just playing with the concept.

 

[Scaramanga]

I'm not sure the logic has been carried all the way through. If I can see the future, wouldn't I see that being conspicuously successful would get me thrown in jail, and see exactly how far I could go without getting flagged and hassled by The Law? I'd expect the true precognitive individual playing the stock market to never become noticeable to regulators, they'd know where the This Far, No Farther line is.

In order to arrest someone for using psychic powers there'd have to be proof that psychic powers even existed. And even then, there's no actual law against using any such powers, precisely because there's no evidence they exist.

 

[JMartJr]

In order to arrest someone for using psychic powers there'd have to be proof that psychic powers even existed. And even then, there's no actual law against using any such powers, precisely because there's no evidence they exist.

I thought the concept was, people with the ability to see the future would stand out because they'd make too much money in the market, and be caught by regulators to investigate why. If the "why" was "they're psychic," we'd then know about them. But that would not happen if they could see that if they went beyond whatever the point is that catches regulator attention, and so stop short of the line.

But yeah, there is no evidence that they exist, so there is no specific law against using such powers. Though I wonder if that would count as "Insider Trading," since they would indeed have insider knowledge, just puleld from the Psychic Realm or whatever? Would make an interesting case! ^_^,

 

[FatPhil]

One of the best real-life, real-time experiments to document the existence (or non-existence) of Psi and/or magical powers has been running for many decades and will continue to run probably forever. Involving millions of participants and billions of data records that are poured over by brilliant minds and computers every hour of every day.

That is the Stock Market.

Millions of people are always trying to "beat the market" without any assistance from Psi or magic. Any person who DID have such abilities would stand out from the crowd like a lighthouse, and probably be a Trillionaire. They would be immediately identified by all of those people and agencies whose job is to detect fraudulent trades and insider trading and investigated because of their abnormal ability to always make the right stock pick. Or at least they would be far more right than all of those other traders without the "gift" such a person would have. They would stand out from the crowd, and everybody on Wall Street would know their name.

It would demonstrate some types of "predict the future" woo, but not other types of woo. Remote Viewing that depends on picking up emotional waves emanating from when an important action happened in the past, such as a crash, would be completely oblivious to such a test. You're doing a hasty generalisation, some woo implies all woo.

 

[JMartJr]

You're doing a hasty generalisation, some woo implies all woo.

But I'd think that the existence of one previously unknown psychic power being proven would at least make the existence of others more plausible.

Also, is this discussion drifting too far from Mr. Elizondo's upcoming opus? Should it be split off?

 

[jdog]

But I'd think that the existence of one previously unknown psychic power being proven would at least make the existence of others more plausible.

Also, is this discussion drifting too far from Mr. Elizondo's upcoming opus? Should it be split off?

I foresee that happening.

 

[Mendel]

@Mick West's video, apparently using Elizondo's audiobook?

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Pc48yXWyI


I wonder if the "the government is lying to you" people are going to get on the "Louis Elizondo is lying to you" bandwagon. Probably not.
(The first lie is on the cover: AATIP was never an official, funded Department of Defense program.)

 

[jarlrmai]

Lue's book has acted as rallying call, I feel it's not supposed to actually reveal any evidence it's a platform for Lue to say without contradiction all the things he believes about UFOs and basically tell his UFO stories.

And in my experience UFO people absolutely LOVE stories, videos get upvotes on the reddit, but the 'telling my story' posts get comment engagement from true believers, videos can be debunked (again) or are blurry lights (again) but stories, they are the real deal no-one can really debunk a story.

They just need the background detail that they are all supposed to be true, or maybe it's the LARP element as well, people using it as an escape a partial belief, a suspension of disbelief that goes a bit to far.

Vist r/ufos at the moment Lues book has reignited the engagement and Mick plays the part of the 'boo hiss' villain for them to rally around.

Of course in a few months when of course nothing has actually changed I guess it dies back down again? Till I guess I dunno Grusch's book comes out?

There's a few things that seem to be emerging in the new flap and some crystalised in Elizondo's book.

1. The US Navy videos (and seemingly Aguadilla) MATTER, a lot, they are foundational to it all.
2. New civilian videos don't matter anywhere as much as they used to, they come out, they get debunked and they never quite hit the same spot as the 3/4 bug hitters.
3. It seems increasingly unlikely we'll get more Navy style videos now, I think this was a one off play from the privileged access they had.
4. It's hard to know what to make of the government involvement, veneer of plausibility by having politicians wave the images around and use the same language? Force the government to try to prove negative? A mix of both?
5. Will there ever be enough political will to "sort this all out" I don't mean AARO's boilerplate I mean address the people issue head on, call out them out by name, use plain language? I don't think so.

I also love that we have had 'UAP not UFO' beaten over our heads for years now and there it is right on the front page of Elizondo's book.

 

[Mauro]

Tangential to this thread, but as usual there are mainstream medias eagerly picking up the sexy part and trying to grab views with extraordinary titles. A disgusting disservice to the public, imho, and I guess one of main reasons why even otherwise sensible people 'believes' in UFOs, "because the newspaper said that".

This is on the home page of one of the main Italian newspapers, La Repubblica, since yesterday:

Ufo, an insider in USA secret matters writes in a book: "We are not alone. And there are risks to national security"

The article by itself acritically repeats some of Elizondo's claims (physics-defying objects and Roswell...), adds a detail I was unaware of (it might have been mentioned here previously, I was on vacations without access to Metabunk):

Nel libro, Elizondo non limita il racconto alle sue esperienze professionali ufficiali. La narrazione include anche eventi inquietanti nella sua vita personale, come la presenza di sfere di colore verde che fluttuavano nella sua casa, un evento testimoniato dalla sua stessa famiglia.

In the book, Elizondo does not write only about his official professional experiences. He includes disturbing events of his personal life, such as green coloured spheres floating inside his home, an event witnessed by his own family.



And the conclusion is in the style of "I don't say they're UFOs, but they are" with a final colouring touch of human worries and compassion:

Qualunque sia la verità, le affermazioni di Elizondo pongono interrogativi su qualcosa che potrebbe essere stato nascosto al pubblico per decenni e di cui ci sarebbero prove, conservate in luoghi segreti. Tra queste, le conseguenze sulla salute di militari che hanno avuto incontri ravvicinati con gli Uap.

Whatever the truth (sic!), Elizondo's claims ask questions about something which could have been hidden from the public for tens of years, and for which proofs are believed to exist, hidden in secret locations. Among these, the consequences on the health of military personnel who had close encounters with UAPs [another claim new to me].




Addendum

This might please @deirdre : La Repubblica is considered to be politically centre-left in Italy, which I guess could translate to extreme left in the USA. And it spreads bunk.

 

[CasualDebunk]

And in my experience UFO people absolutely LOVE stories, videos get upvotes on the reddit, but the 'telling my story' posts get comment engagement from true believers, videos can be debunked (again) or are blurry lights (again) but stories, they are the real deal no-one can really debunk a story.

This completely mirrors my experience with the UFO community. I can relate, as I have a soft spot for my granddad's stories from his days as a commercial fisherman in the '50s and '60s, though some of them really push the limits of believability.

Then Mick, or someone like him, comes along and carefully points out the holes in the story, and suddenly the magic fades a little as the rational explanations start to take hold. They are mad at the debunker now for spoiling the story and not their favorite UFO-influencer for spreading tall tales.

Under normal circumstances it's a bit of fun but, with UFO's, I don't even want to know the amount of money/time/productivity that the US government has sunk into playing Scooby Doo with these ghost stories when kids across the country still go to school everyday hungry.

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

I honestly can't get beyond the title.

How long until it becomes an embarrassment on the bookshelf? A year? 5 years?

 

[Duke]

I honestly can't get beyond the title.

How long until it becomes an embarrassment on the bookshelf? A year? 5 years?

In the meantime, I suspect the book will sell well, maybe even a best seller.

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

In the meantime, I suspect the book will sell well, may even a best seller.

Oh, no doubt.

But it's a ballsy move to name your book something that's gonna mock your readers as time goes on.