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From The NY Times: The Pentagon's Secret UFO Program


******** URGENT APPEAL TO BROTHER REALM ******

Brother @Realm !!!! Please heed this urgent warning and do not, under any circumstances, visit the Bigelow Big Top in Las Vegas and handle any of those meta-materials. You may be allergic to them and suffer severe discomfort, though not death or insanity. You many not become mentally ill, but you will definitely become, well, meta-ly ill! With a hey nonny nonny and a Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!

Too late. Since Elizondo hasn't provided any actual data about the materials, I tried to desperately remote view them, and now I'm possessed by a demon, probably Cthulhu Slug, as there seems to be a constant outflow of his offspring through my throat. Mental, isn't it? Although there's still a slight chance it's flu instead. I haven't decided yet if I should see a doctor, an exorcist, or one of those remote energy healing "torsion physics" scam-artists.

Such debris are “out of place artifacts” that are not yet meant to be. They are things that are not from our past or present nor are they from our planet. Exposure to these items represents the premature arrival of the future and could be disorienting to some people.

Oh Brother... Where do they even invent that stuff... Premature arrival of the future... Why, of course it is.

But I guess based on the actual available scientific data that we should be looking according to Elizondo, such conclusions are as valid as anything else. And by Elizondo's definitions, paranormal, and hence just not normal yet.
 
Isn't that about the right ratio for the off-topic topic of UFOs in general? If we look at e.g. the talks in that UFO Congress, most of it doesn't/shouldn't have much to do with unidentified flying objects.

As a continuation for that, CSI/CSICOP fellow Robert Sheaffer has participated in the UFO Congress and reported his views of some talks in 4 blog posts. This is the last one, featuring Elizondo (links to others on the side):
Bad UFOs: Skepticism, UFOs, and The Universe: A Skeptic at the 2018 UFO Congress, Part 4 (last)

For the most part, it seems to have been an event of a whole lot of (off-topic) nonsense. Funnily, one of the speakers, who is "the executive director of Paradigm Research Group (PRG)", has even tried to make a confused denial of that party balloon explanation:
Bassett said that he does not accept the claim that the "bone UFO" shown in the TTS announcement video during Chris Mellon's talk is in fact a mylar balloon. No mylar balloon could possibly manoeuvre like that, he insisted! I think that Bassett is very confused about this - the "bone UFO" has nothing to do with any of DeLonge's videos.
Some great research there.

There's also this interesting tidbit about Elizondo's supposed role, that I was also planning to mention:
What I thought was most interesting, he said his job is "Director of Security" at To The Stars Academy, protecting persons and things. So his background (such as it is) in managing UFO investigations is not directly relevant to his job. He is, in essence, their Bouncer.
So again, adjust your expectations what he will do in the future accordingly.
 
Bassett said that he does not accept the claim that the "bone UFO" shown in the TTS announcement video during Chris Mellon's talk is in fact a mylar balloon. No mylar balloon could possibly manoeuvre like that, he insisted! I think that Bassett is very confused about this —- the "bone UFO" has nothing to do with any of DeLonge's videos.

Just think. If Steve Bassett were ever to admit his interpretation error regarding the “Bone UFO”, then it would become . . . Hold on! Wait for it! . . . . . The Boner UFO!!

Ba-Da-Bing!!! :rolleyes:

With a hey nonny nonny and a Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk! :p
 
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Brother @Realm, you ought to be very happy that the new Director of Research for MUFON is a working chemical engineer wanting to put MUFON on a rigorous scientific foundation.

At the end of this interview, he is asked about TTSA.

INTERVIEW: MUFON's 'mad scientist' Chris Cogswell's scientific approach

Q: Thoughts on the recent Pentagon videos , To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, and other new research organizations?

COGSWELL: "I honestly don’t know what to think, although I am hopeful. I believe that there being a Pentagon team that was investigating these things shows that it is a useful endeavor and one to be taken seriously. At the same time, I hope that the folks over at To The Stars Academy are taking this as seriously, cautiously, and rigorously as they ought to.

The UFO field, and the public at large, is placing a lot of faith in this team of researchers and the results they may put out there. Therefore if one of them, or one of their pieces of evidence, is shown to be lacking, or flawed, or if there is even a question of mishandling or something then it could damage the entire field. So far they seem to be doing a good job of being careful with information and sensitive to the importance that will be placed on what they say, so I am very hopeful for the future.

But I still think that it is particularly important that there be more UFO organizations out there doing this research, so that if one of us falls, the entire field doesn’t collapse.
 
So far they seem to be doing a good job of being careful with information and sensitive to the importance that will be placed on what they say

It doesn't look like he has followed that story in too much detail...


But I still think that it is particularly important that there be more UFO organizations out there doing this research, so that if one of us falls, the entire field doesn’t collapse.

...or maybe he has but tries to be polite.
 
Here's another strange claim I decided to investigate. If I remember it correctly, Elizondo mentioned in that new C2C interview Nobel nominated scientist(s), and I'm guessing that refers to this claim about Puthoff by DeLonge:

Nobel-Nominee Physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff, Co-Founder of To The Stars... has created the Science and complex Mathematics, with peer review, behind our plan to build the exotic vehicle that uses Advanced Electromagnetic Propulsion to Bend the fabric of Space-Time.
Tom DeLonge

He has given more detail on the Instagram:
INFO: He was nominated in Physics (with two colleagues Haisch & Rueda) for a fundamental vacuum physics model for inertia.
Official Tom DeLonge on Instagram: “Nobel-Nominee Physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff, Co-Founder of To The Stars... has created the Science and complex Mathematics, with peer review,…”

That is not a new claim, as back in 2008, a press release by the Arlington Institute about a lecture by Puthoff has apparently claimed that:
Puthoff was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize
Berkeley Springs-based research institute focuses on the future
Cumberland Times News Newspaper Archives, Jan 25, 2008, p. 19

Two years earlier, his close ally George Knapp didn't seem to be aware of such nominations though:
Hal Puthoff is a great man. I'm serious as a heart attack. He's done things and taken risks that would knock your socks off. I've seen them. One of these days, Hal is going to be a Nobel Prize candidate (and it won't be a Burisch-style bogus nomination by a famiily pet or publicist.)
Interview with George Knapp - Part III, page 1

So, let's just check the lists of Nobel nominees to find out if that's true, right? Wrong. Here's the deal:
The Nobel laureates are selected by the Nobel Committee for Physics, a Nobel Committee that consists of five members elected by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In the first stage that begins in September, around 3,000 people – selected university professors, Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry, etc. – are sent confidential forms to nominate candidates. The completed nomination forms arrive at the Nobel Committee no later than 31 January of the following year. These nominees are scrutinized and discussed by experts who narrow it to approximately fifteen names. The committee submits a report with recommendations on the final candidates into the Academy, where, in the Physics Class, it is further discussed. The Academy then makes the final selection of the Laureates in Physics through a majority vote.
...
The names of the nominees are never publicly announced, and neither are they told that they have been considered for the prize. Nomination records are sealed for fifty years.
...
The rules for the Nobel Prize in Physics require that the significance of achievements being recognized has been "tested by time". In practice, it means that the lag between the discovery and the award is typically on the order of 20 years and can be much longer.
Nobel Prize in Physics - Wikipedia

So, in principle, he shouldn't even know if he was actually nominated. In practice, that would require for example one friend among those 3000 who would make such nomination and break confidentiality, or alternatively just claiming to have done so, knowing the truth wouldn't come out in 50 years. Obviously if one wants to make up an impressive sounding achievement, a nomination nobody can verify for half a century is not a bad choice.

So what is that Arlington Institute that seems to have made such claims first? Apparently:
The Arlington Institute (or "TAI") is a 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank specializing in predictive modeling of future events, that is, futures studies. It was founded in 1989 by former naval officer and military expert John L. Petersen[1] in Arlington, Virginia.

According to this odd story:
In honor of US Independence Day, Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), released a document supporting her claims that the US Navy initiated a plan in 1998 to adjust its operations for a future where extraterrestrials exist and live among us. She claims the plan was commissioned by the Undersecretary of the US Navy and was undertaken by the Arlington Institute, an NGO located near the Pentagon with many military clients, where Fitts served on the Board of Directors. She was asked to assist with the plan and claims she was given an opportunity to meet a live alien, but declined. When I contacted the Arlington Institute in 2008, two members of the Board of Directors repudiated Fitts claims. The document released on her website is the official minutes of a Board of Directors meeting held at the Arlington Institute in 2000. The document confirms key elements in her version of events, especially that Arlington Institute was actively discussing plans for how to best prepare the general public for disclosing the existence of, and contact with, extraterrestrial life.
US Navy plan to prepare for extraterrestrials among us secretly developed in 1998

One of those other board members was Joe Firmage, UFO enthusiast and founder of International Space Sciences Organization (ISSO), for which Jack Sarfatti did work. Apparently that Arlington Institute also believed into "real precognizant dreamers who have had experience with intelligence services" "who had explicit dreams about the 9/11 affair" and so on:
Arlington Institute asks for precognitive dreamers

So once again, it seems to be a small world, and it is clearly one of those organizations whose press releases should not be trusted without supporting evidence.

So let's get back to DeLonge's version "He was nominated in Physics (with two colleagues Haisch & Rueda) for a fundamental vacuum physics model for inertia," which seems to originate from this paper from 1994:
Phys. Rev. A 49, 678 (1994) - Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force

The primary author is Bernard Haisch, who seems to be another UFO enthusiast and believes into some sort of pandeism and how everyone is "immortal spiritual being, a spark of God". He is also a former editor of the pseudo-science Journal of Scientific Exploration that was under discussion here earlier. It's a small world again.
Bernard Haisch - Wikipedia

Here's his "conjecture" regarding the AATIP from his own UFO site:
Sources tell me that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. A group of four related but separate unacknowledged SCI programs tracing back to a 1947 Truman memorandum still exist and were housed as of the 1990s in major aerospace companies such as for example Lockheed, TRW, Raytheon, Aerospace Corp. etc. These would be expensive programs since the cost of secrecy can be several times higher than the research. The AATIB program has no relation to these four much better funded deep black ones. Indeed, the black programs collectively have budgets in the $10B range and up. Topics apparently include both reverse engineering and extraterrestrial biology. The AATIP did find the UFO crash retrieval program via official channels, but was denied access to it because the AATIP itself is not a SAP. Sen. Harry Reid petitioned the DoD to confer SAP status to the AATIP, but the DoD denied his request.

This is what that Wikipedia page tells about that work DeLonge was referring to:
In an extensive series of papers, Haisch and Alfonso Rueda, a physicist currently teaching in the Department of Electrical Engineering, California State University, Long Beach, California, have developed a controversial hypothesis in the context of stochastic electrodynamics. In his recent mainstream non-academic book (see section below), Haisch has summarized this "quantum vacuum inertia" hypothesis as follows:

There exists a background sea of quantum light filling the universe and that light generates a force that opposes acceleration when you push on any material object. That is why matter seems to be solid, stable stuff that we, and the world, are made of. So maybe matter resists acceleration not because it possesses some innate thing called mass as Newton proposed and we all believed, but because the zero-point field exerts a force whenever acceleration takes place.

—Bernard Haisch, The God Theory

This assertion, that accelerated observers experience a force due to the zero-point field, and that this "electromagnetic reaction force" is responsible for the inertia of material objects, rests upon a computation in which Haisch and Rueda have computed a nonzero "zero point field Poynting vector". (See the 1998 Foundations of Physics paper cited below.)

Computations by other physicists, such as Bill Unruh, apparently contradict this result. The mainstream view is that the zero point field does not give rise to a physical force on observers accelerating with respect to "the vacuum". However, it is known classically that without the zero point field the spin state of all matter would collapse inward almost instantaneously.

"A controversial hypothesis" that other results contradict is hardly along the lines of "tested by time", as required for Nobels. Here's an example of how controversial that is, from a paper that was published in that same journal:

In the article by Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff (HRP) [Phys. Rev. A 49, 678 (1994)], an explanation of inertia as an “electromagnetic resistance arising from the known spectral distortion of the zero-point field in accelerated frames” is proposed. In this paper, we show that this result is an error due to incorrect physical and mathematical assumptions associated with taking a nonrelativistic approach.
Phys. Rev. A 79, 012114 (2009) - Inertia as a zero-point-field force: Critical analysis of the Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff inertia theory

Haisch himself acknowledges in this interview how their work is controversial and mostly ignored by the physics community:
I've been doing mainstream astrophysical research for the past 20 years ... It was pretty interesting science, but nothing that would win me any Nobel prizes, put it that way. Then in the early 1990s I got involved with zero-point energy research and published a paper in 1994 with Alfonso Rueda and Hal Puthoff, in which we proposed to have found a possible origin for the inertia of matter. I thought at the time that it would be really important, since there's been a long-standing question about where mass and inertia comes from. It's usually attributed to the Higgs field, and here we had a completely new and different approach to the origin of inertia.
...
But it was pretty much ignored in the physics community and no one else followed up on our work. We received a grant from NASA to continue our research, and this took me into the investigation of the quantum vacuum, also knowns as the electromagnetic zero-point field.

This research has been somewhat controversial, both because of the scientific implications of our research, but also because the concept of the zero-point field and zero-point energy has been usurped by many people who claim it's everything from a near-endless source of energy to the nature of God.
Cosmic Conversations

The rest of that interview consists of making all sorts of weird links between that and religious concepts, in a similar way Puthoff did in one article I quoted here before. And he as the primary author doesn't make any claims about Nobel nominations there, after having just sort of expressed his hopes of such awards.

It's quite evident that claim by DeLonge is also bunk, or at least it would require someone showing mylar balloon levels of bad judgment, breaking confidentiality, and total ignorance of the actual requirements for Nobel prizes.
 
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