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Keef

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Posts posted by Keef

  1. I'm from Abilene, Texas and so is my mom.  My dad's from near Rising Star.  Both sides have been in Texas 4 generations plus.  I don't ever think I will move back (and certainly not the fuck back to Abilene), but I want to be buried there someday.  The dirt gets in your blood.

  2. 29 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    giphy.gif?cid=6c09b9529gdzzdhcp3peak3vr0

    I had a law school class with Bryan Garner.  Zero self-awareness and zero humility.  He got in front of the class and talked endlessly about how smart he was, pausing only to hit on some 3Ls in the front.  He's like a fatter, nerdier, lawyer version of Ron Burgandy, or a chatty, far less accomplished Philip Bobbitt.  I found it endlessly entertaining.

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  3. 45 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

    I have to think the dangling, kicking outcome happened a few times though.

    Yep.  Decapitations happened fairly frequently as well if the measurements were done wrong.

  4. - If that's what you read from those quotes (and the numerous others from highly credible government officials) then I'm not sure what to say.

    - There's no logical jump.  I'm relying on the testimony under oath from David Fravor and Ryan Graves, highly trained observers, whose observations were validated by videos, sensor readings, radar, etc., much of which the DoD still remains classified.  Fravor and Graves observed maneuvers, speed changes, and propulsion that defy our understanding of physics.  From Graves: "They can move at incredible speeds, they can change direction instantaneously, and they can disappear and reappear without a trace...They don't have any visible engines or propulsion systems, and they're able to perform maneuvers that are simply impossible for anything that we've ever built."

    The thing that bothers me is that people seem content to just say, hey, we should rule out birds, or maybe this is China or Russia.  Fravor's encounter is from 2004 - I cannot understand how anyone can believe that China (which was a shell of its current self in 2004) or Russia (which has publicly embarrassed itself for two years in Ukraine) had this technology years before the first iPhone was released.  

    The government has also had years (in the case of the Fravor counter, 20 years) to rule out the planet Mercury or whatever other mundane explanation people will trot out, and they can't do so.  I don't buy for a minute that they just collectively shrugged their shoulders when these craft were tracked and flew circles around one of our Pacific carrier groups.

    The logical jump, in my view, is to assume our tech was wrong, our pilots were wrong, our cameras/FLIR caught the crafts at weird angles and thus malfunctioned, our radar operators were wrong, and our analysts weren't good enough to find an alternative explanation.  Wrong multiple times on close, well-documented encounters over multiple decades.  I think it's exactly what the pilots and the government say it is - metallic orbs that appear to be intelligently piloted doing shit that is blowing our minds.  

    - If your view is that ICIG, after reviewing classified materials provided by Grusch, simply gave a green light to some of the most explosive accusations against the US government and DoD ever because it didn't look very hard, I'm again not sure what to say.  The New York Times specifically reported that the ICIG investigated his claims and determined a number of them to be credible and reported so to members of Congress who received the classified briefing last week.  And on Grusch, it is undisputed that he led the NGA's UAP task force and had special access program clearance.  On top of that, he's a decorated veteran, testified under oath, and offered to provide any documentation requested by Congress to support his claims in a SCIF, which the DoD has still not provided Congress access to.  The DoD, the very party who is being accused of withholding information, is the one blocking further inquiry into the matter.  I'm not sure what relevance his government pay grade has to anything, or the tried and true, "maybe he's making money from this".   

  5. 20 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Point by point:

    - I think you’re misrepresenting what a lot of these people have said.  No one here argues with the basic thesis that there are real things and artifacts in the sky that don’t have a positive ID and that it’s worth trying to figure that out. I do think it’s notable that no one ever rebuts the substance of people like West’s analysis and instead choose to just attack the source. 
     

    - I am pretty sanguine about the gaps in our sensor and other technology. I also think you’re conflating a number of different incidents and pieces of evidence to create a narrative that doesn’t exist. 


    - I think that we’d be a little more worked up about regular visits from aliens than we would be about adversary tech, or things that we can’t know for sure but are likely prosaic. 
     

    - I think there is a third option, which is that “credible and urgent concern” has a very narrow and tailored application under the ICWPA as implemented by the ICIG and that a finding of “credible and urgent” in this context does not mean that any of the underlying claims of existence of crashed spaceships and murders have been found credible or even been given a cursory investigation. I think the UFO crowd’s deliberate blurring of these statutory and bureaucratic terms to make them more expansive than they are kind of gets at the heart of why the drivers of this movement are not credible in the layman’s sense. 
     

    - I think that the conspiracy world is littered with doctors, lawyers, intell officers, uniformed service, journalists, political figures, pilots, plumbers, and anyone else you can think of who showed no signs of being kooky until they went kooky.  I think that I need more than “this one guy told me” to believe in Mussolini’s spaceship. 
     

    But back onto you.  What, specifically, is not credible about @Viper’s post where a former drone pilot that sees shit through FLIR all the time tells you that “Jellyfish” is likely party balloons? Why doesn’t the appeal to authority work when it’s debunking these claims? Why would you doubt what he’s telling you? 

    Also point by point:

    - Disagree strongly. 

    Brennan: "some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life."

    Obama: "There is footage 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 pattern. And so I think that people still take seriously, trying to investigate and figure out what that is."

    Reid: "I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,” the Democrat told the media outlet.“And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don’t know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me."

    Ratcliffe: "Look, the bottom line is, unidentified aerial phenomena — many, many cases we’re able to explain it away for reasons like visual disturbances, or weather phenomenon, or foreign adversaries and their technologies, or even our own experimental technologies with certain aircraft and vehicles, but what this report really underscores … is that there are a number of instances — and the specific number remains classified — but a number of instances where we’ve ruled all of that out. And there are technologies that we don’t have and frankly that we are not capable of defending against — based on those things that we’ve seen, multiple sensors, in other words, where not just people visually see it but where it’s picked up on radar, where it’s seen on satellites. And so, you know, it’s an issue of national security..."

    All of these are very serious people.  People now accuse Reid of being a kook - why?  Because he's saying stuff that makes you uncomfortable?  He was one of the 10 most powerful politicians in the world for a decent portion of his career and had access to information none of us have.  This is not a court of law where both sides are presenting evidence and endeavoring to give us a clear picture.  This has been an area of immense government secrecy for years, and from the bits and pieces that are now getting out, I think it's clear that people in power believe there is significance to the phenomena.

    - OK - you chalk up the Pentagon UFO videos from 2017, 2021, and 2023 to gaps in our technology and erroneous identification by our pilots and crew.  I do not.  I trust our tech, pilots, and analytics, especially over multiple versions of the same category of sightings.

    - Disagree.  I think it means we either: (i) know what it is and don't feel threatened by it or (ii) we don't think we can do a damn thing about it.

    - OK - what is this alternative meaning?  I believe the report is still classified, but I'm curious what alternate interpretation would allow this finding.  Grusch's whole claim is elements inside the military are concealing non-human intelligence from Congress.  The IG reviewed the claim and the supporting documentation, found it urgent and credible, and the whistleblower complaint went through.  And, in the recent debrief to members of Congress by the IG, the New York Times reported that the IG found a number of Grusch's claims credible, although not much information got out since the briefing was classified and the contents of the meeting can't be discussed (e.g., which claims, how were these claims investigated, etc.).

    - Sure, understand.  But my perspective on this is that he was put in charge of investigating the phenomenon, has an incredible and distinguished track record in the intelligence community, had access to highly classified reports, and Congress doesn't seem to question him.  In fact, many Congressmen are frustrated at what they feel is the DoD slow walking the disclosure process and generally stonewalling at every opportunity.  He's not Bob Lazar who had endless issues with his resume and claims.  He's a serious person who played an important role in our government and I'm inclined to believe him.  He wants more transparency from the DoD on this issue.  Everyones like, why can't he produce the goods?  But these are highly classified materials and I believe he's trying to go about bringing whatever is buried in the Pentagon to light in a responsible way.  Plus he probably doesn't want to get Chelsea Manning'd.

    - On @Viper's post, it sure doesn't look or act like balloons to me and I have no way of evaluating the credentials of some random guy on tick tock.  He seems to have knowledge and thinks it is balloons, so you have to give some weight to that.  

  6. 8 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Lol at Grusch getting held criminally liable for what he’s saying. He hasn’t even claimed to have first hand knowledge of anything, it’s all just stuff he claims other guys with code names told him and then he got denied access to actually see.
     

    It’s a nesting doll of bullshit all the way down, with a little bit of “and they’ll kill you if you say too much!” Yeah, he saw these papers where Mussolini and the Pope found a crashed Klingon Bird of Prey.  No, he doesn’thave them. But the government is covering it up! 
     

    I can turn invisible when no one is watching. Prove that I’m lying. 
     

    Forget critical thinking, we have done a miserable job at teaching people to catch basic flim-flam men in their bullshit. 
     

     

    Allow me to distill this down a bit into some simple questions:

    - Do you think that Barrack Obama, John Ratcliff, Harry Reid, John Brennan, etc. are lying or that you and Mick West's Youtube channel have access to superior evidence and analysis?  It can only be one or the other. 

    - Do you believe that our military (including the expert pilots and sensors both on the ships and the aircraft, which tracked these crafts independently) is incapable of ascertaining whether the crafts in the three videos authenticated by the Pentagon are tricks of the light or the planet Mercury?  

    - Do you believe that, if we really thought these crafts were Chinese or Russian, we'd be behaving in such a laissez-faire manner?

    - Do you think that the Intelligence Community Inspector General is incompetent or corrupt?  Grusch confidentially provided highly classified information to the Department of Defense Inspector General concerning the withholding of UAP-related information from Congress.  The Inspector General made the determination that Grusch's complaint was credible and urgent based on the evidence presented, much of which remains highly classified and not in the public domain.  So the choice is either: (i) the Inspector General of the intelligence community is incompetent or (ii) the Inspector General is corrupt.

    - What in Dave Grusch's past gives you concern that he is a fraud or otherwise untrustworthy?  He was privy to some of the most sensitive secrets in our entire military.

  7. On 1/20/2024 at 6:41 PM, Viper said:

    but did they? Are we sure he's not just repeating stories he's "been told" again? Like when he repeats 90 year old Italian UFO hoaxes as fact?

    I have no idea if Hitler and Italy had a crashed UFO.  But I do know that the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which, importantly, could view classified evidence that he put forward, found Grusch’s complaint to be “credible” and “urgent” in July 2022 and a summary was given to the Director of National Intelligence, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  Grusch puts himself in criminal jeopardy if he is lying.  There is also a line of senators and congressmen/women lining up to get classified briefings from Grusch, some of which rely on information so highly classified it can only be viewed in a SCIF.  I am inclined to give a decorated intelligence officer that we put in charge of investigating this phenomenon and who has publicly put his skin on the line the benefit of the doubt.

  8. 2 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Former director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) comes in hot on this topic. 
     

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-what-i-learned-as-the-u-s-governments-ufo-hunter/

    TL;DR, “whistleblowers” refuse to provide evidence upon invitation, the media and congressional furor is circular reporting, Harry Reid is kooky. 

      Reveal hidden contents

    AARO thoroughly investigated these claims as part of its congressionally mandated mission to not only technically evaluate contemporary UAP observations but also review historical accounts going back to the 1940s. One of my last acts before retiring was to sign AARO’s Historical Record Report Volume 1, which is currently being prepared for delivery to Congress and the public. The report demonstrates that many of the circulating allegations described above derive from inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technology. Some are misrepresentations, and some derive from pure, unsupported beliefs. In many respects, the narrative is a textbook example of circular reporting, with each person relaying what they heard, but the information often ultimately being sourced to the same small group of individuals.

    The operational mission Congress has assigned AARO is important. Accumulating observations by highly trained U.S. military and other credible personnel of unidentified anomalous phenomena at or near sensitive national security areas and activities calls for a serious effort to understand what’s going on. Simply put, “unidentified” is unacceptable, particularly in these times of heightened geopolitical tension. Part of the problem we face today, however, is that the modern media cycle drives stories faster than sound research, science and peer review time lines can validate them. More worrisome is the willingness of some to make judgments and take actions on these stories without having seen or even requested supporting evidence, an omission that is all the more problematic when the claims are so extraordinary. Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter. Members have a responsibility to exhibit critical thinking skills instead of seeking the spotlight. As of the time of my departure, none, let me repeat, none of the conspiracy-minded “whistleblowers” in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their “evidence” and statement for the record despite numerous invitations. Anyone that would rather be sensationalist in the public eye than bring their evidence to the one organization established in law with all of the legal process and security framework established to protect them, their privacy, and the information and to investigate and report out findings is suspect.

    I can assure you as its former director that AARO is unwaveringly committed to harnessing science and technology to bring unprecedented clarity to these fascinating, important, and stubborn mysteries and to do so with maximum transparency. Its talented staff and team of supporting scientists are at this very moment striving in collaboration with the armed forces, intelligence community, government agencies, national laboratories, scientific community, academic community—and soon the general public—to collect and analyze hard, measurable data—i.e., extraordinary evidence—in this heretofore eyewitness-rich but data-poor field. The AARO team will go wherever the data takes it, without fail, and will not be swayed by any attempts to influence its findings otherwise. Science cannot be left on the side of the road in the mad dash to uncover some great conspiracy. Carl Sagan would expect no less, and neither should the American people.

     

    This is, of course, disingenuous cherry-picking. Sean Kilpatrick is the latest in a long line of US bureaucrats whose job it is to obfuscate the UFO issue.

    Harry Reid, one of the most successful senators in US history, is far from the only public figure to express belief in the topic.  See, Barack Obama, who has said publicly that the phenomenon is "real", Jimmy Carter, who in 1973 said that he saw a UFO in the sky, U.S. Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller stated that "the objects in the videos are real" and that "we don't know what they are", Hillary Clinton, Senator Mark Rubio, John Ratcliff, John Brennan, James Woolsey former NASA Administrator James Webb, former Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson...the list goes on and on.

    Next, one must ask why these very reputable individuals, whose opinions are often informed by our most sophisticated data collection and analysis, are saying this.  Do they not have access to Mick West's YouTube content? 

    The recent Schumer Amendment, which would have required the U.S. government to disclose any evidence of non-human entities, was stripped of that language.  Why was there such a fight to remove that language?  The "FLIR", "GoFast", and "Gimbal" videos, filmed by some of the best pilots in our military, have been publicly acknowledged by our military as unexplained, despite our best efforts.  The pilots are exceptionally credible witnesses utilizing the best technology that we offer. 

    There are five options in my view.  First, it's our tech.  Second, it's another country's tech.  These are equally unlikely, in my opinion, as I don't think any nation could reach the propulsion development demonstrated in the Pentagon UFOs without intermittent developmental steps being made public.  Third, in a startling number of instances, the most advanced military in the world can't identify bug splatter, balloons, or tricks of the eye, even when engaged with the UAPs directly.  I think that is insane.  Fourth, it's us trying to create a smokescreen around other advanced US tech we're developing, and fifth, it's non-human intelligence.  The fourth and fifth are far and away the most compelling.

    It is crucial that we approach the UAP phenomenon with an open mind and a willingness to explore all possibilities, no matter how unconventional they may seem. By doing so, we can help to advance our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Frankly, it's people who cloak themselves in faux academia and ridicule the topic that prevents the general scientific body from feeling comfortable enough to engage with UAPs seriously.  

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  9. 3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

    The legal team is solid. Tom is good people, and a damned good lawyer (I've known him for years, have worked with him on a matter or two, and send referrals to him from time to time).

    But don't forget, the whistleblowers are super-duper Trumpy true-believer types as well.  "Not as shitty as Ken Paxton" is not exactly a glowing character endorsement.

    Confirmed.  I know one of the whistleblowers personally and he's about as die hard Republican as they come.

  10. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree.  I don't find any of that convincing, particularly in light of all the other videos being released from our military. Maybe the stars aligned and separate bunches of balloons from Party City Baghdad moved perfectly and unnaturally like that, but I don't buy it.  I guess we've at least put bug splatter to rest.

    But I will say on Ingo Swann and Pat Price, the CIA concluded they were the genuine article.  They definitely didn't hit 100% of the time, but they were far above anything that could be a statistical chance. 

    One story from Annie Jacobsen's excellent book Phenomena that really stuck with me was, during a remote viewing experiment conducted by the CIA, Pat and Ingo were shown coordinates of an undisclosed location. Despite conducting their remote viewing separately, they both produced similar sketches, describing a high-tech compound featuring a large radar dish, a guardhouse, and roll-up doors in Jeeps. Price even claimed to have read documents on the site, including a cabinet labeled "Operation Pool," which contained green folders named "Q Ball," "14 Ball Eight," and "Ball and Rack Up." However, when the team presented their findings to the CIA analyst who provided the coordinates, they were told that the sketches were "nonsense" as the coordinates corresponded to the analyst's cabin in West Virginia. 

    Further investigation revealed that the remote viewers had in fact seen a military installation, the Sugar Grove facility in West Virginia, which was situated just over the ridge from the analyst's cabin. The facility, which was used to capture information from Soviet satellites and serve as a listening post for various transmissions, was one of the most secret NSA installations in the country. 

    There are numerous other stories in this vein.  The CIA concluded that certain individuals possessed abilities that couldn't be adequately explained.  The issue the government ran into was that it couldn't teach this ability to others or otherwise scale it.  You either had it or you don't.  So, it abandoned the project once it became public in the nineties.  Assuming, of course, they did in fact abandon the project.  They also claimed not to be looking at UFOs/UAPs and we know that's not true.

  11. 6 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Update: Probably balloons.  No cloaking just the entire camera adjusting. 
     

    When confronted with blurry images always reach for the prosaic explanation first. 

    If you actually watch the video, the author is basically shrugging his shoulders and saying "balloons are the best I got".  The entire rationale is based on the object moving in the same direction as it appears the wind is blowing from a single shot of a flagpole.  Have you ever seen balloons move in the wind like that?   Not moving upward and generally keeping a linear path?  Because I haven't.  And where are these balloons coming from?  There aren't a lot of party stores near remote US military bases in the Middle East.

    Context is also important.  This video doesn't exist in a vacuum.  Military officials have leaked other videos of anomalous objects around our military installations and craft.  The US military has publicly acknowledged that they have no explanation for these craft, despite having access to the most sophisticated equipment and personnel in the world.  Again, I'll maybe buy that this is a disinformation campaign.  We have a sad history of that - google Paul Bennewitz.

     

    3 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Also wanna drop here that Dave Grusch is on record saying that remote viewing/ESP is real. 
     

     

    Yes David Grusch is saying that.  Also to be clear, so did the CIA, so he's verbalizing the position of the US government.  Pat Price and Ingo Swann had some absolutely astounding successes that have been declassified.  

  12. 21 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    The thing is, you’ve got to work the other way.  Until you’ve ruled OUT tons of conventional explanations, you’re just looking at something that’s hard to understand and making the leap to an extraordinary claim. And even “propulsion system we don’t understand” is a huge leap, so much more needs to be ruled out before even going there, let alone aliens. 
     

    The delivery of this video is highly eye rolling. Anytime you hear “and I’ve got even better stuff, that I just cant show you…..” that’s con man talk. 

    Jeremy Corbell is annoying af and I can't stand listening to him BUT he has delivered very credible video evidence leaked to him by high level defense department individuals like Christopher Mellon.  Our military (the most advanced on earth) had zero idea what the crafts were in the "go-fast", "Gimbel" etc. videos were.  Once the videos were leaked, the Pentagon confirmed they were legitimate and they didn't have a conventional explanation for them.  Obama, Clinton, Harry Reid, and other high level officials have also discussed the UAPs and acknowledged we have no idea what they are.  Foreign governments (notably the French, Russians, and Italians) take this subject very seriously.

    So I'm inclined to believe there's something there.  It's not bug splatter, and it's hard for me to take anyone seriously who is so forcibly grasping at straws.  A conventional explanation I will entertain is that this is all a big counterintelligence ploy by the US military to hide the ball on some sort of other technology we're developing.  I don't think that is the most likely explanation, but it's plausible, unlike insulting explanations in the vein of "swamp gas".

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  13. 1 hour ago, Bodacious Bevo said:

    Criteria (in order): prestige/history, access to talent (location is biggest but not only factor), NIL capabilities, in-state competition (if access to talent is predicated on that)

    Tier 1 (no particular order within tiers): Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, Michigan, USC

    Tier 2: A&M, Notre Dame, Florida, Florida State, LSU, Rutgers, Penn State, Oklahoma, Oregon, Penn State, Tennessee

    Tier 3: Miami, Washington, Clemson, Nebraska, Michigan State

    wtf Rutgers?

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  14. 2 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    FYSA, the military no longer calls these things “UFOs,” they are “unidentified aerial phenomena” which is a tip-off that many of these things are not “objects” at all—- encapsulating everything from a bug splat to a malfunction. 

    LOL - yes, that's the reason they started using UAP.  They wanted to make sure bug splats were looped in.

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