Way to kill the UFO fun, heebie. Next you are going to be saying Elvis is dead.

This reeks of human gullibility and an "if horses had gods" kind of narrow-mindedness.

Oh, fuck you. I'm Missouri Synod Lutheran.

On the internet, no one knows that your one-eyed king is a horse.

But they'll notice everything keeps going round in circles.

I like to hold out hope but Elvis is way past the life expectancy for men born in 1935 by this point.

My first thought about the thing in the video--not knowing what exactly the crosshairs, etc., semantically mean--is that it's crud on the lens.

Billionaire friend sounds like a clear boondoggle. This was probably the most fun kickback Harry ever worked on. Can you imagine the conversations at the bar afterwards?

This is from one of the dudes involved. Look, if ESP is your thing, you're automatically non-credible to me.

"We're sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener," said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program.

The other guy, who just offhandedly mentioned "alien alloys", is speaking as a private citizen and isn't trustworthy. If they were real we'd spend a hell of a lot more than $22 million over five years investigating them.

5: Hitler's secret base inside the earth, accessible only from the South Pole and lit by the secret internal sun, has advanced medical technology keeping Elvis's hips swinging.

On the internet, you're probably Salman Rushdie.

If they were real we'd spend a hell of a lot more than $22 million over five years investigating them.

That's a good way to think of it. Because $22 million is a bunch of money for a boondoggle, but nothing compared to what somebody who really believed and how power would spent.

5: That reminds me of the bumper sticker "If Jesus Had a Gun, He'd Still Be Alive Today."

What I love about that is that I couldn't come up with any combination of belief/nonbelief in Jesus or guns which made this statement make any sense at all.

You got to hope that's satire.

11: Yes, and hope is all we have left.

7: I checked with teo, and he said there's no hole at the poles.

Fravor, the commanding officer of a Navy squadron at the time, said he saw a flying object about the size of his plane that looked like a Tic Tac after a break in a routine training mission

Is it just me or is that a very badly constructed sentence?

13: It's hidden under an inconspicuous tree stump.

14: "me" in this instance refers to peep.

14: No. Most planes look like Tic Tacs after a break in a training mission.

15: That's right. That's where Pooh found it.

You know how a Tic Tac after a break in a routine training mission looks. They're all banged up and dented.

There's a Deadspin post going around on the theme "WTF dude" which goes especially gooey on the idea that they're storing unidentified alloys. Someone in the comments there pointed out all the article actually dubbed them was "metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena".

I like to hold out hope but Elvis is way past the life expectancy for men born in 1935 by this point.

Well, he was known to be alive as recently as his appearance in the background of the movie Home Alone in 1990.

Hitler's secret base inside the earth, accessible only from the South Pole and lit by the secret internal sun, has advanced medical technology keeping Elvis's hips swinging.

This is bullshit though. Elvis was a patriotic American, and would never have worked with Hitler.

I choose to believe the pilots because in that released video they have absolutely pure Orange County/San Diego accents. "It's rotating, dude."

The only UFO possibility I'm open to is that bridge thing between two planets far, far away.

Did we ever find out what on earth heebie was thinking of when she said this? I feel like it's been discussed before but we got distracted.

ArmsControlWonk are very scathing about the UFOs:

As you ponder the confirmation bias, superstition and general lack of critical thinking on display in that DOD UFO story, remember this:
Your life depends on these very same people being infallible when it comes to nuclear weapons, false alarms and launch under attack.

This twitter thread is quite good as well
https://twitter.com/Comparativist/status/942760735469289472

I have a friend who was pretty high up in the Defense Intelligence Agency who was a UFO crank. He might still be a UFO crank, but he doesn't bring it up any more in my presence, perhaps because he has come to his senses, or perhaps because I mock him mercilessly when he does.

On the video: fighter pilots have previously attempted to intercept geese, airliners, clouds and the planet Venus on the basis that they thought they were enemy aircraft.

23.1: I assumed that was a reference to Stargates with the serial numbers filed off.

23.1 - was it the star whose weird blinking could "only" be explained by an alien interplanetary megastructure? I feel like that was a thing.

23.2 - "dude it's an ICBM"

Gotta imagine that people who are already UFO cranks are going to be very interested in getting jobs at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Watch the videos in that Twitter thread, by the way. Both interesting. Especially the point that things seen through FLIR look very very different from the way we expect things to look on visual. That's a FLIR video - thermal imaging, black hot. So an airliner doesn't look like a thin tube with swept wings; it looks like four big fuzzy black blobs. Everything other than the engines is too dim to make out. Essentially anything with a single heat source (an engine) seen through FLIR will look like a circular blob from far enough away.

26: I was thinking Contact.

27.1: ah, maybe that was it.

Let me be the first to suggest we look for a Dyson sphere.

You can get those at Target but they cost like $200

In the vacuum of space, nobody can hear you clean.

Also pilots make really stupid identification errors sometimes. To kill a lot of your own allies, you'd have to be flying over a bit of the desert where you've been told you aren't allowed to shoot, and you'd have to misidentify a couple of small vehicles with little turrets and tiny guns for a couple of huge vehicles with enormous missiles on their roofs, and you'd have to miss the fact that both of them had great big air ID panels on their roofs to mark them as friendly, and one of them actually had a great big flag as well.

But yet they manage.

23: yes! Someone placed the thing I had thought of, and I read about it again yet added no new details to my understanding. I'm pretty sure it's some sort of space promenade where you propose to your alien girlfriend and tie your shoes around the railing. It's controversial because it lacks proper access for those with disabilities.

23.link is indeed a good thread.

Oh c'mon heebie, the only thing realer than UFOs and aliens is the pee tape. This I believe.

Things that are real

1) LOVE

2) Pee tape

3) UFOs

4) Imaginary Internet Friends

I checked with teo, and he said there's no hole at the poles.

Fake news!

In other news, 'Oumuamua still appears to be just a rock, albeit an interesting rock.

ome sort of space promenade where you propose to your alien girlfriend

"I have an alien girlfriend in Canada."