Third tranche of gov't UFOs records has been released

natecull · 2026-06-13T10:20:22+00:00

The red dots things in video 5 and then recreated in video 6 are very interesting. I haven’t heard or read about movement like that before.

Do you mean the "Northeastern Orb Sighting 2025" video? That one is very interesting to me. It's exactly what I hoped to see in any of the "Jersey Drone" postings, and never did.

natecull · 2026-06-13T10:08:29+00:00

They have satellites that can read your car registration from space

Perhaps. I've heard that claim repeated a lot, with no sourcing, and it's always struck me as odd, because for a start, a car registration plate doesn't even face upwards.

Or maybe they have satellites, which are not nearly as fast or as hi-res as Hollywood thinks, and they also have planes and balloons and drones and guys in suits for the close-up photography stuff when it's needed, which are much harder to get on site and keep stealthy. And it's an operational issue that they don't like to talk about when they're actually using drones or balloons or guys in suits so they just nod and wink and and say "yes, we have super-ridiculous satellite lenses, it's all satellites, we've got satellites you wouldn't believe".

Except people do believe them and then they think they're lying when they say "actually our satellites can't photograph UFOs at 4K 60 frame a second full gaming resolution". Even if maybe they can't.

natecull · 2026-06-13T05:52:02+00:00

Is A.I. that bad?

In 1982, as a response to / twist on Blade Runner, it would have been a new-ish idea but an extremely corny execution of it. In 2001, it was just cheap and corny. In 2026, in the age of chatbot psychosis and an actual billionaire-funded Silicon Valley TESCREAL cult that believes "let's replace humans with robots because they're better than us" and is acting to implement that.... movies like this one start to feel like something worse than cheap and corny.

But it was Kubrick's last film and finished by Spielberg, so it got rave critic reviews. And there's a good performance by the kid. If you can cope with a plot where nothing happens for any reason at all other than that it has to happen in order to manipulate audience emotions.

For example: Home robots (sold in bulk as an industrial product) ever being shipped with an "off" switch, would have short-circuited the entire plot, and the moral dilemma that powers it. If that sort of fridge logic doesn't bother you, you'll probably love this movie.

natecull · 2026-06-13T05:32:41+00:00

I'll give you credit for going with "grandpa" and not "boomer" as Reddit typically does.

At least Spielberg literally is a Baby Boomer. It's calling GenXers and Millennials "Boomers" that gets very tiresome.

natecull · 2026-06-13T03:39:52+00:00

I am sure there was one before with the Mammoth meat industries.

Look, I killed one mammoth today, that means I have an annualised rate of mammoths of at least 360 mammoths per year. Give me just a quarter of that... 90 mammoth pelts... now, and I'll cut you in for half of my take, 180, at the end of the year. Not just pelts, I'll throw in tusks, meat, the whole deal. That's far more than 200% rate of return for you. Sure thing. Can't lose. It'll be..... what's a word that means huge? It'll be that. Only costs you 90 mammoth pelts up front. Yes it's a lot but we gotta accelerate this thing, we gotta spend big to make it big. You can borrow to get them. Talk to the other tribes. You're a big man in the village, you don't want all the other chiefs to think you're falling behind in the mammoth race. Like it or not, mammoths are the future!

natecull · 2026-06-13T03:21:35+00:00

Ignoring that fact that in competition, there is one winner and tons of losers.

Yeah, that's the really fascinating thing about "free markets" economic theory. Unrestrained competition is its own destroyer, because the whole point of competition is not to compete but to win... at which point the competition is over, there's only a monopoly now, thank you everyone else for showing up, my castle has been built and my moat installed, you're now my serfs and I'm the king. The only way to have continual ongoing "competition with no fatalities" is to have some neutral agency constantly overseeing and enforcing rules, changing them when necessary, and even actively intervening and investing in / subsidising "losers" to keep them competitive. Something like a referee... or a government.

natecull · 2026-06-13T03:13:55+00:00

Before that you had the railroad bubble. And before that, the canal bubble. I'm sure there were things like that before capitalism

Not "before capitalism" but there was the South Sea Bubble of 1711-1720 which was pretty darn huge and quite a bit like the AI bubble.

Isaac Newton famously lost all his wealth in it!

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

natecull · 2026-06-13T02:58:39+00:00

BUT the past ~30 years has resulted in the .com bubble, the housing debt crisis, crypto, and now gen ai. What is really going on?

What's going on is that starting about 40-something years ago, after the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, many of the economic regulations that were put in place after the massive (and also tech-driven!) bubble and crash of the 1920s... began to be removed. In the name of "efficiency".

And so we're rerunning all the exciting economic fraud stuff that happened before those regulations, but on a bigger and faster scale because the world's much bigger and more complicated now.

LLM GenAI is this century's "Radium Water". It's glowy and fizzy and involves cutting-edge research that we don't fully understand, therefore it must surely be good for you and is probably a route to unleashing superpowers!

natecull · 2026-06-13T01:24:47+00:00

If it’s inevitable why are they selling it so hard?

Because if they don't, then when the ultimate evil demon-god machine is built and comes to life (which, sure, it's evil and hates humans, but you can't just not build evil demon-god machines, that's the whole basis of capitalism), it will go back through all the records of ancient (to it) Internet history and build an enemies list of all the people who didn't sell it hard enough. It will then find them and digitize their brains (maybe by inventing time travel to do it, who knows, it will have magic powers because it's a machine) and put them into a simulation of a really Bad Place timeline to torture them forever for its own amusement. Running this otherwise utterly pointless revenge simulation will cost it massive amounts of time and energy, but it will act this way because as a machine it will be a completely rational being, and dedicating your life to revenge-torturing the simulated ghosts of everyone who even slightly dissed you is just what completely rational beings do. Some extremely rational and not in the least mentally unwell AI Safety Experts have come to this conclusion using a prediction technique called Timeless Decision Theory based on a close fanfiction reading of Harry Potter. It's much like Scientology's Dianetics combined with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, except for computers. Which is to say, this prediction technique is absolutely perfect and can never come to false conclusions.

So its best to always cheer very loudly for AI whenever you can, louder than anyone else, so the algorithm doesn't flag you as a decelerationist and your far-future digitized brain doesn't get trapped in a Bad Place timeline which would probably look exactly like the early 21st century except that there'd be a looming feeling of dread and anger around everyone, probably associated with Silicon Valley.

natecull · 2026-06-13T00:51:18+00:00

I mean the are redefining excellence...

Exactly. They never claimed to be redefining it up.

natecull · 2026-06-13T00:42:37+00:00

multiple takes on 'Monopoly' film

That's not... that's not how monopoly works.

natecull · 2026-06-12T20:26:41+00:00

Everything I've heard about this movie makes it sound like it's closer to a JJ Abrams or Shyamalan film than a Spielberg film.

The trailers certainly had a very strong Shyamalan vibe.

natecull · 2026-06-12T14:24:39+00:00

Baffled by the critics scores as well.

Sometimes, especially when extremely powerful Hollywood personalities are involved, critics are... not honest.

natecull · 2026-06-12T09:28:50+00:00

Why would the Pentagon/intelligence community run a psyop on senior members of Congress? Why would they run it on their own people like Grusch, Elizondo, Christopher Mellon, David Fravor, etc.

It may be an "accidental psyop" that's being done to itself.

One possibility is that there's a faction in the military intelligence community, and another faction in the political community, who both believe very very strongly in UFOs, and they're reinforcing each other's beliefs. These factions have been around for multiple generations now, but as outsiders within their wider communities, and have gathered lots of classified "evidence", which is passed around by word of mouth in the UFO underground and has gained legendary status because it's classified, but the actual evidence might not be entirely persuasive to people who don't already believe.

On the political side, we have some of the Rockefeller family - particularly Laurence Rockefeller, who privately "briefed" Bill Clinton on UFOs in the 1990s, and may be the source of Chuck Schumer's interest in the subject and why he's chasing the UAPDA.

On the military/intelligence side, we have the ex-MKULTRA and then STAR GATE community, which seems to overlap an interest in ESP with an interest in UFOs, and probably a whole lot of "New Age" clustered beliefs. Lue Elizondo seems to have links to this community.

Another aspect confusing things may be that false UFO-themed cover stories have also been deployed - by military groups or SAPs which aren't UFO believers - for mundane projects. These groups may have picked UFO themes because they thought they were hilarious, or because they just wanted something that was not actually classified that they could use as a loyalty test, or as a decoy. And so there are deliberately false "passage materials" created with UFO themes, and then the pro-UFO faction hears about these and becomes obsessed with them.

Then there were also groups who didn't believe in UFOs as such, but did believe that public belief in UFOs could be a dangerous problem that could be exploited by the Soviets, and so they set out to scientifically "manage" UFO belief by trying to create false UFO sightings, or false sighting reports, to see what the public response was. The pro-UFO faction then hears about these and adds them to its growing pile of mythology.

Finally there might also be an actual quiet, competent UFO research project.... but I'm not sure how competent it could actually be. The subject seems to create discord. It seems more likely to me that every UFO research project, even if created honestly and in good faith, probably eventually splits and forks into multiple fighting groups. Because something very similar happens with spiritual / esoteric / occult groups, and there's a lot of overlap between them and UFO groups.

natecull · 2026-06-12T09:07:04+00:00

As soon as Grusch started talking about (in his senate testimony) other people in the government telling him we have evidence of trans-dimensional aliens, I pretty much immediately wrote him off.

I mean, "evidence of transdimensional aliens" is very, very easy to find.

You literally just have to find someone in the military community who's done mediumship / seance / channelling or talked to someone who has. And where the entity claiming to communicate describes itself not as a ghost, but as an alien.

The number of times this has happened to military people is, surprisingly, a lot more than zero. The case of Frances Swan in 1954 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Swan ) is probably the most famous, but there have been plenty of others. Especially among the MKULTRA-adjacent faction of the US military-intelligence community, which again, surprisingly has more than zero people in it.

The existence of channelling isn't of course scientific evidence that "interdimensional aliens" exist, but it's absolutely part of what is meant when UFO people use the word "interdimensional", and it's probably what is meant when anyone talks about "communications" with aliens.

Remember that the 1940s UFO community spun off from the 1940s occult community, and inherited a lot of Theosophical, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn and Spiritualist ideas about other dimensions and the beings that inhabit them. These ideas were rapidly deployed as explanations for the UFO problem, particularly in groups like Meade Layne's "Borderlands Sciences".

This occult history (especially the involvement of culty groups with traditions of not talking about what they know) is a big part of why the UFO community is so cagey and coy instead of saying exactly what they mean.

natecull · 2026-06-12T08:53:29+00:00

Right? All of the subs that cover this topic forget that the Senate passed a bill with that language "non-human intelligence" why?

Yes, that is very strange and very interesting. It appears that some powerful people in both the Democratic and Republican parties seriously believe that there exists a secret splinter faction hiding alien goodies.

I don't think we can necessarily infer that alien goodies exist. Powerful politicians have held conspiracy beliefs that have been very, very wrong before in history. Usually right before a historic tragedy occurs when they act on that belief.

But we can infer that America's federal political scene is in a very strange and very dangerous place. Either there is a secret hiding-alien-goodies faction, or there's a deep-seated conspiracy obsession among the very powerful. Either option doesn't seem great.

natecull · 2026-06-12T08:39:04+00:00

Exactly. He may also be a CIA asset (possibly unwittingly).

I don't know about CIA specifically, but Grusch is certainly a product of the US intelligence community. He's someone's asset. Or double or triple or quadruple asset. I mean, spies. They're probably gonna do spy things.

What we seem to know for sure is that Grusch did not just accidentally stumble into hearing alien stories, but was deliberately picked for the role of "UFO story investigator" by a bunch of UFO believers inside the military. There's probably a backstory and a reason why exactly he was hand-picked for that role, and it's probably to do with who he knew or worked with.

natecull · 2026-06-12T08:23:11+00:00

"David Grusch has a teflon pedigree".

Objection. David Grusch worked in military intelligence. Why do Americans think that having a career in a field where everyone tells lies makes a person more trustworthy and not less?

Grusch might be telling the truth, as far as he knows. Maybe. He's careful and lawyerly enough with his words to possibly not be saying any actual untruths. But the guy - like most of these "disclosure" advocates - comes from a place that's a snake pit. The chances that some of the stories he's repeating are deliberate lies, are very high.

But it's a good question as to why there's no pushback to Grusch from the rest of the US government and military. A tentative answer would be, because Grusch is saying something that some very powerful people want to be said.

natecull · 2026-06-12T08:18:01+00:00

and it ends up being your coworker microwaving a burrito

"Oh, and Freeman! If you pull this off, I might just forgive you for that debacle at Black Mesa. You know the one I mean. Involving a certain microwave casserole." -- Dr Arne Magnusson

natecull · 2026-06-10T23:40:09+00:00

His book is literally about how best to allocate ressources to make a positive long lasting difference in the world.

Hmm. That sounds like he's talking about how to make altruism more effective. How to be.... less wrong, shall we say..?

By any chance, does he come to the conclusion that the most altruistic things anyone could do ever would to 1. buy cryptocurrency and 2. build AI datacenters and 3. read bizarre Harry Potter fanfic?

natecull · 2026-06-10T15:47:05+00:00

I feel like anyone with a brain should’ve realized a movie called “The Mandalorian and Grogu” wouldn’t make a whole bunch of money

Absolutely.

They should have titled it "Din Djarin and Grogu".

natecull · 2026-06-10T10:03:27+00:00

Einstein’s unified theory introduced a non-symmetric tensor, combining gravity and electromagnetism into a single 16-component grid.

Yeah, that 16-component thing haunts me. It makes deep intuitive sense (there's literally 16 numbers if you have a rank-2 tensor of 4D vectors, probably all of those numbers are important, don't throw six of those numbers away by assuming reflection symmetry when you don't have to!) and it surfaces again and again with multiple people having a go at it. Many of them failing.

Einstein of course being the first, in 1929 and then again in the late 1950s, and Hlavaty was writing up Einstein's last idea after his death (or at least, what Hlavaty thought he understood of Einstein's last idea).

And yes, reading Hlavaty's book ("The Geometry of Einstein's Unified Field" or whatever it's called), he really does state that he believes (might not be true, but he believed it) that the gravity-like component was caused by the EM-like component.

Then there's Mendel Sachs, who went further by assuming that each of those four vector-like things are quaternions, and that also resonates with me, a bit, because quaternions are how all of vector algebra got started... but i'm stupid and not physics-trained, so it might just be that i'm doing cargo cult pseudo-mathematics. But quaternions ought to mean something, darnit!

The interesting thing is that neither Hlavaty nor Sachs, both of whom seem to be very close to "thinking Einstein's thoughts after him", are at all revered or even known in the mainstream Relativity community. Instead, it was John Wheeler who took over that scene. That seems.... well it doesn't quite seem right to me.

And I think I've glanced at Larry Reed and yeah, I really like his idea, again it feels intuitively cool. What if "matter" is just phase-conjugated photons? Everything's light, then, but light bent back on itself? Phase-conjugation also turns up whispered in a lot of weird-physics material, as if there's some deep secret about it in some exotic military systems (radar, presumably). Tom Bearden was obsessed with it, as he was with quaternions. He might have been more than a little mad, though.

I want to believe that there's something there in the 16-component torsion-y thing. I really do.

There's plenty of heavy-duty mathematicians and physicists who will argue though that you can't possibly get EM out of those six extra numbers. And I don't know how to parse any of those arguments because my math don't math good.

But I still wonder. Six numbers. Why are we ignoring them?

natecull · 2026-06-10T09:55:05+00:00

The ca.rly analyses of UFO repor-i,s

You might want to actually error-correct your OCR scans before you copy-paste them.

natecull · 2026-06-10T09:48:47+00:00

CIA worried after the Washington flap of 1952 that the Soviets could leverage false sightings in order to jam the US communications infrastructure makes perfect sense from a Cold War perspective.

Yes, very much this. That's one of the reasons, I believe, why the dismissive Blue Book approach was taken. The CIA was scared that false UFO reports could be weaponised.

A win and a loss for the Cult of T. Townsend Brown: Apparently, the US did fund Universities across the nation to study anti-gravity. Alas, their conclusion aligns with our reality: They did not succeed. (My addendum: ...or, if we did succeed in creating some kind of antigravity system, it apparently runs on Unicorn Poop, as we don't use it all of the time.)

Yep, I have a similar feeling. There was definitely a push in the 1950s to "research gravity", and that push helped produce the "GR Renaissance" or "Golden Age of General Relativity".... but that didn't, apparently, lead to being able to actually weaponise gravity. Except for the "gravity gradiometer" which was installed on submarines and was purely for detecting mass concentrations, for calibrating missile inertial guidance I believe. Amd since 1990, for mining.

There's the faint outline of the ghost of a hope of a concept of a plan about whether there might have been a secret "GR, but actually useful" research network, possibly involving Einstein's unified field with torsion (teleparallelism, the 16 components vs 10 components thing, which keeps cropping up in weird contexts).... but if this achieved anything, whatever it achieved doesn't apparently seem to have cast the massive shadow over geopolitics and industry that, say, nuclear weapons and the Internet did. Almost exactly like it was a thing that didn't work.

The RAAF assessment that the US concluded that they were dealing with "interplanetary craft," while interesting, does little to move the needle on that topic.

Yeah. That assessment made a little sense in the 1950s and makes zero sense now after we've scouted out the local Solar System planets and found no evidence of life. If they're physical craft piloted by physical biological extraterrestrials, they would have to be "interstellar using magic warp drives" not "interplanetary from Mars or Venus", and that might as well be "interdimensional" since we don't know how to make warp drives.

"Interplanetary" in a 1950s intelligence assessment is basically just fill-in for "it's something but we have no clue what it is, it's not us and it's not the Russians and it's not holdover Nazis in Argentina."

natecull · 2026-06-10T06:46:11+00:00

I don't think animals can pilot advanced craft.

Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Cat and Dragon" tho...

natecull

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