"But they need to get over it because balloons of various kinds — high-altitude weather balloons, cosmic-ray research balloons, sound-detecting balloons, thunderstorm-study balloons, aerial-reconnaissance balloons, 'rockoons' that shoot missiles, propaganda balloons, toy balloons, and, most secret, crop-warfare balloons — are at the heart of this high-altitude adventure we’ve been on as a culture. None of it is paranormal, but it’s still strange.... The effect on the U.S. of all this Cold War balloonery is pretty obvious. The Air Force, the Navy, and the CIA seeded the sky with helium ghosts and made us crazy. The country was, and is, suffering from a paranormalization of the plastic bag."
I'm reading "No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth/Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?" by Nicholson Baker (the novelist/essayist), in New York Magazine.
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One time flying North by Northwest up the Salinas Valley out of King City at about 6,500-ft, I encountered a over a dozen balloons almost like a bunch of grapes about the size of a hot air balloon. Not exactly a Foo Fighter.
When I was a kid in the San Fernando Valley, people would launch small weather balloons and very large homemade Chinese lantern balloons.
That's All I can recall.
Unidentified Flying Objects are documented with full disclosure.
I have written it before- if it is every definitively proven alien species have visited the Earth, I will take it as proof that we are living in a computer simulation of some kind.
How do you explain James Carville?
Why is reason so difficult?
Just a cursory glance at astronomy will tell you that the probability of getting visited by intelligent species from another planet is pretty close to zero.
Now Bigfoot on the otherhand..........
I don't know if people are not identifying balloons or whether we have been visited by life from another world. I do know I laugh each time someone suggests the US must have alien technology and that we are using it for our own spacecraft. The Space Shuttle program ended over 12 years ago. Its replacement is capsule that has been in development for 20 years and has yet to carry a crew. If it wasn't for that evil billionaire that destroyed Twitter; the US wouldn't be flying crew to ISS.
Nobody's been made crazy (though some crazy people have gotten caught up in it). It's fun to think we've been visited. If we haven't, that's disappointing. But either way, I am no more or less crazy and my life won't change.
I get so tired of this kind of lazy hyperbole.
I think the military has figured out that there's money in stoking the UFO rumors. They'll get funding to "investigate."
Don’t forget all of the Baby Trump balloons that started popping up around 2018, too.
What Brazel didn’t know, because it was a secret, was that he’d found one of Moore’s Project Mogul balloon trains. The pieces of gray rubber were fragments of neoprene balloons that had darkened and hardened in the sun. The item that looked like a kite was a foil-covered radar reflector of a somewhat unusual type; it was faceted so it would work in all directions, and it looked shiny and a bit starlike.
I interviewed Moore over the phone when he was at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, for a pre-internet newspaper, 1995. Our paper was located near Lehigh University, where one of these massive balloons was launched. (We included an illustration that ran sideways across two pages.)
He added one more tidbit: They ran out of tape one time and ran to the store, where the only thing available was children's tape with playful doodles on them. This became "alien writing" to those attracted to Roswell conspiracies.
"...made us crazy" Speak for yourself there buddy-boy.
I have no doubt that among many UFO sightings are mis-identification of balloons. However, are there any balloons that sit fixed in spot for prolonged interims, without the slightest movement from air currents? I ask because I did see a metallic silvery globe in the sky in NYC 20-odd years ago. It was morning and I was on my way to the subway to go to work. Before heading down the stairs, I spotted the object. It was too big and sharply distinct to be Venus, which I would see often in the morning sky. I stood there for five minutes or so, trying to understand or discern what it might be. For the whole of the five minutes plus I scrutinized it, it did not move an iota, either in place or on its surface.
I did finally have to go so as not to be late to work, but I've always wondered what it was. I keep "unknown metal controlled aerial object" in the "possible" section of my mental Venn diagram.
Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth / Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?
The idea that asking what the "smart people" think can help us better understand what's going on in the world and what to do about it no longer applies, if it ever did. On the contrary, it probably creates more confusion and misunderstanding.
Apart from expertise in a narrow domain, the "smart people" are no better judges of the issues of the day than the average person on the street. Like the rest of us, "smart people" often believe preposterous things and the intellectual elite have largely turned out to be a bunch of prestigiously credentialed mediocrities.
crop-warfare balloons....
Now, what the heck is 'crop warfare', and how are they able to organize balloons?
I know for a certainty that what I saw was not a balloon. Both sightings were witnessed by multiple people and not one of would believe the balloon explanation. That this guy waves it ALL away, not just some of the sightings, is a perfect illustration of why no one trusts the establishment to tell the truth. Is he really trying to say the famous US Navy "tic tac video" of phenomenal aerial maneuvers (ABC news video on YouTube) is just a balloon, dunking itself in and out of the ocean and moving faster than the jets filming it?
I can't say for sure it's aliens, but these UFO sightings have never, as in not one damn time, been adequately explained by the people who should know, and all the usual terrestrial suspects have officially declared themselves NOT responsible for the craft we call UFO or UAP. Note that the U stands for "unidentified" which is till 100% true until we positively identify the source(s) of the "Flying Objects" or "Aerial Phenomenon" so UFO is perfectly operable identifier.
So I ain't buying the stupid balloon explanation. The Chinese spy balloon showed us just how crude the movement control is for balloons, right there where we could all see it. Balloons don't reverse course on a dime and resume the supersonic speeds or fly in formation for long periods or zoom from the stratosphere to tree top and back like people have observed. The high-hair dude on Ancient Aliens has more credibility than this essayist.
Little known fact: most of the high altitude balloons launched in the 1950's were produced by General Mills in Minneapolis and launched at the University of Minnesota airport north of the Twin Cities campus.
Shorter Cook: It warn't no god damn balloon!
I spent 37 years flying for a living, both military and civilian. Unless you know what an object is that you’re seeing, you have no basis to judge how big, how fast , or high it is, particularly if you yourself are moving.
Untagged Foreign Oranges (UFO) are real and delicious.
john podesta is one of them
I may have to read that article to see how the author proved a negative.
Untempered Fiscal Overtures (UFO) are first-order forcings of catastrophic anthropogenic progressive prices (PP).
Unidentified Fetal Organs (UFO) are profitable.
Men, women, and our Posterity are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus... the aliens are here and they are queer.
queer (adj.)
c. 1500, "strange, peculiar, odd, eccentric," from Scottish, perhaps from Low German (Brunswick dialect) queer "oblique, off-center," which is related to German quer "oblique, perverse, odd," from Old High German twerh "oblique" (from PIE root *terkw- "to twist").
- etymonline.com
Baby Lives Matter (BLM)
It actually is aliens - Chinese aliens, who are now also swarming across our open southern border.
@Robert Cook: However, are there any balloons that sit fixed in spot for prolonged interims, without the slightest movement from air currents?
Balloons can go well into the stratosphere, which has almost no water vapor, and, hence, no weather. Average windspeed is about 15'/sec, 45 mph. Very difficult to discern from the ground.
Unaffiliated Feminine Organizations (UFO) have been alienated from the sisterhood of traveling... migrating pants.
It's not possible to give a definite answer about whether aliens have ever visited Earth. All you can say is that there is no definitive evidence of aliens visiting the Earth so it is very unlikely that they ever did. But you can't say that it definitely never happened. After all, the Earth is millions and millions of years old. Remember the movie, 65, with Adam Driver, where he crashed on Earth 65 million years ago? (BTW, I thought that they missed a good way to end the film. At the end of the movie, they lock the camera on the area where he crashed and then fast forward in time to modern times. Now he left a lot of stuff behind, including most of his ship. They should have had a scene at the very end where a modern construction crew starts to dig up some of this.)
remember the olden days? me neither, but they "taught" me about them back in high school.
Supposedly, the Stupid Christians were So Stupid, that they thought that man and the earth were the center of the universe.. As If the universe would Even Notice man or this dust mote called earth!
NOW, thanks to "experts", by which i mean journalism majors, we KNOW that:
a) the Biggest Factor influencing weather is the Evil of Man!
b) the Number ONE concern of "space aliens" is coming to earth, so they can anal probe Man!
I kinda think, that IF your civilization has star travel, your ONLY interest in earth would be: NONE
As per the reading..
I liked the idea that "space aliens" that could develop star travel, would be foiled be a mechanical lock on a chastity belt. Want Proof, that people are Moronic Idiots? Read this paper
I suppose it is an unwritten rule of English that whenever general interest in your peculiar obsession begins to flag it is time to coin new terminology. Thus what started as "ghost rockets" and "foo fighters" during the Second World War became "flying saucers" in the 1950s, then UFOs, and now UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. I further suppose New York Magazine is desperate for anything, no matter how fatuous or irrelevant, to publish other than genuine information which is all uniformly disastrous for Biden, the Democratic Party, and progressivism generally.
The ghost rockets turned out to be real rockets, specifically experimental sub-scale prototypes of Germany's A4 ballistic missile (dubbed the V-2 by Joseph Göbbels). Several of these launches overflew Swedish territory before crashing into the Baltic, thus sparking the ghost rocket legend. Foo-fighters were also German rockets. In their increasingly desperate effort to counter the Allied strategic bombing of the Nazi Reich, the Luftwaffe tried many weapons besides fighter planes and FlAK cannons. Among these alternatives were a range of experimental AA rockets, some carried aloft by multi-engine aircraft such as the Me-410 and the Ju-88, others launched from the ground. Known combat tests of these weapons exactly correspond to many Allied foo-fighter reports by date and location.
Flying saucers were born in the press report of the testimony of one Kenneth Arnold in 1947. Arnold, a firefighting equipment salesman claimed to have witnessed a formation of up to nine unusual aircraft flying in formation near Mt. Rainer at supersonic speed. The published report described the craft as saucer-shaped, though Arnold vehemently objected to that description. Nevertheless, reports of flying discs from outer space flooded into the offices of law enforcement and the military for decades thereafter. Evidently, the LGMs, taking a clue from the Democrats, revised the design of their spaceships to please the journalists.
UFO replaced flying saucer when the soi-disant "serious investigators" lost all tolerance of the saucer cults led by such colorful personalities as George Adamski and George Van Tassel. The saucer occupants obediently complied with the new style, becoming UFOnauts piloting far more angular interstellar vehicles. They also surrendered their Venusian passports and became natives of nearby suns like Zeta Reticuli.
After more than 70 years the UFO tag has become threadbare and shopworn. Anyone who reports a UFO is now a hopeless fogey unaware that the alien ship designs have been revised once more. What were fireballs, that became darting saucers, which became titanic triangles, are now galactic Tic-Tacs known generically to the as UAP. So be a hipster, not a spinster, see only mysterious UAPs from now until the next acronym becomes fashionable.
Aliens are a very reasonable assumption given the core fact on the ground:
Within living memory of the conquest of Earth's atmosphere, the entire space capable world decided that nah instead of continuing to expand and explore and exploit a literal universe of resources and possibilities, ensuring not only our people's survival but vast wealth and high standing... let's babysit an infinity number of global southerners instead.
Did aliens tell our leaders to knock it off in exchange for future satrapy powers, or perhaps just intimidated them into surrender? I don't know, but I do know that the timing over a wide range of nations is something that suggests more than coincidence at play here.
Well, I used to not believe in UFOs, but now that Nicholas Baker, pretty obviously writing on behalf of the Biden administration, has attempted to pooh-pooh them, now I am concerned that they really are spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin.
/sarc
Big Mike writes, "The acronym 'UFO' has been officially replaced by 'UAP', which some say stands for 'unidentified anomalous phenomenon' while others say stands for 'unidentified aerial phenomenon'."
Unidentified anomalous phenonmenon is far too broad for the subject of alien spacecraft. You can spot UAPs of that sort in any public restroom.
Joe Smith said...
How do you explain James Carville?
2/1/24, 10:54 AM
Perfect response Joe!!
Ruppelt, head of Project Bluebok, gives a detailed report of the work done in the late Forties and early Fifties.
Some of the investigations are pretty thorough and still come up with nothing explainable. Others are kind of funny. Were the Lubbock Lights actually plovers?
Doesn't take much. Couple of times, looking down sun near dusk, previously invisible--due to distance--sea gulls suddenly glowed as they banked away from the shore and their white, oily breast feathers caught the sun light, at that point practically horizontal. And in a bunch. Flamed, so to speak, into visibility and then disappeared again.
What is more interesting is the background, the world we lived in. Ground Observer Corps. A radar guy in the midwest gets an odd return, makes a call, and two jet interceptors are on the scene very shortly. Which means, without saying it, strip alert in, maybe, Indiana.
A couple of reports from P47--then called F47--doing donuts over Oak Ridge. Guard or Reserve pilots flying clapped-out WW II fighters over Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, far from the ocean, 24/7. That they saw something is less interesting to me than that they were there in the first place.
Very interesting book. Ruppelt is hard on the facts but still....kind of wonders.
"Report on Unidentified Flying Objects" Last I looked, available on Abe books.
"Shorter Cook: It warn't no god damn balloon!"
No, it was NOT a balloon. I cannot say what it was.
Sailors in the 18th century consistently reported seeing mermaids. Wonder what the governments at the time were hiding? Maybe its as simple as extreme sensory and sexual deprivation can lead to hallucinations.
In liberal fashion, gender language has evolved with Uncritically Arbitrary Pronouns (UAP) to accommodate simulated gender (i.e. sex-correlatedattributes), cisgenders, bisexuals, et al.
"Flying saucers were born in the press report of the testimony of one Kenneth Arnold in 1947. Arnold, a firefighting equipment salesman claimed to have witnessed a formation of up to nine unusual aircraft flying in formation near Mt. Rainer at supersonic speed. The published report described the craft as saucer-shaped, though Arnold vehemently objected to that description."
Right. His description had to do with their movement, (as he perceived it). He said "the objects moved like saucers skipping across the water." (You forget to mention that Arnold was also an aviator.)
For what its worth, in some of the footage of alleged UFOs shown in various programs about UFOs, this same odd appearance is sometimes apparent, such that the objects seemed to be very swiftly "skipping" from one point to the next.
@Quaestor, I mistakenly thought the article was paywalled and made an assumption. So that led to a second mistake, because he does address the acronym UAP replacing UFO. Subsequently I deleted my original comment and rewrote it. My apologies.
@Quaestor
At 75, I've been following these reports since the late fifties and that tracks well.
Don't forget that the passengers on the 'UFOs' evolved in time with our news/entertainment depictions as well. The first were varied and strange until those 'prophets' like Adamski who said they talked to them and they looked just like people. Then little grays, then suddenly whites, blues, reptiles and whatever happened that looked like variations.
Now we've got goofballs with cheap editing software cranking out all kinds of stupid stuff for the gullible to fall for.
I actually lost an acquaintance because I pulled up information about the "Black Knight Satellite" that he had fallen for hook, line and sinker. The fable got so bad they were saying it was an unknown alien spy satellite that had come from a star (not gonna look up the name) 30K lyr away. If it's unknown, how the hell would they know?
I suppose it is an unwritten rule of English that whenever general interest in your peculiar obsession begins to flag it is time to coin new terminology. Thus what started as "ghost rockets" and "foo fighters" during the Second World War became "flying saucers" in the 1950s, then UFOs, and now UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. I further suppose New York Magazine is desperate for anything, no matter how fatuous or irrelevant, to publish other than genuine information which is all uniformly disastrous for Biden, the Democratic Party, and progressivism generally.
The ghost rockets turned out to be real rockets, specifically experimental sub-scale prototypes of Germany's A4 ballistic missile (dubbed the V-2 by Joseph Göbbels). Several of these launches overflew Swedish territory before crashing into the Baltic, thus sparking the ghost rocket legend. Foo fighters were also German rockets. In their increasingly desperate effort to counter the Allied strategic bombing of the Nazi Reich, the Luftwaffe tried many weapons besides fighter planes and FlAK cannons. Among these alternatives were a range of experimental AA rockets, some carried aloft by multi-engine aircraft such as the Me-410 and the Ju-88, others launched from the ground. Known combat tests of these weapons exactly correspond to many Allied foo-fighter reports by date and location.
Flying saucers were born in the press report of the testimony of one Kenneth Arnold in 1947. Arnold, a firefighting equipment salesman and a general aviation pilot (h/t Robert Cook) claimed to have witnessed a group of up to nine unusual aircraft flying in a V-formation near Mt. Rainer at supersonic speed. The published report described the craft as saucer-shaped, though Arnold vehemently objected to that description. Nevertheless, reports of flying discs from outer space flooded into the offices of law enforcement and the military for decades thereafter. Evidently, the LGMs, taking a clue from the Democrats, revised the design of their spaceships to please the journalists.
UFO replaced flying saucer when the soi-disant "serious investigators" lost all tolerance of the saucer cults led by such colorful personalities as George Adamski and George Van Tassel. The saucer occupants obediently complied with the new style, becoming UFOnauts piloting far more angular interstellar vehicles. They also surrendered their Venusian passports and became natives of nearby suns like Zeta Reticuli.
After more than 70 years the UFO tag has become threadbare and shopworn. Anyone who reports a UFO is now a hopeless fogey unaware that the alien ship designs have been revised once more. What were fireballs, that became darting saucers, which became titanic triangles, are now galactic Tic-Tacs known generically as UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena. Oddly given the general decay of everything, UAP is a slight logical improvement over UFO. The O stands for object, implying something solid and discrete, whereas phenomena are less restricted to materiality. So be a hipster, not a spinster, and see only mysterious UAPs from now until the next acronym becomes fashionable.
************
Going over my earlier comment I noticed some rather bad proofreading on my part and an oversight regarding Kenneth Arnold's aviator qualifications. Therefore I cleaned things up and clarified stuff.
On the subject of the Arnold sighting, in 1948 a civilian investigator for Project Sign interviewed Arnold, creating the first official report of the incident. One series of questions concerned Arnold's estimate of the objects' extreme speed, specifically his reasoning given the uncertainties of distance and scale. Arnold was led to admit his speed estimations were unsupportable by his observations. When asked to draw the outline of the objects, Arnold drew a tailless crescent-shape craft not unlike the experimental flying wing aircraft designed by Jack Northrop in the United States and the Horten Brothers in Germany, i.e. nothing like the typical flying saucer that became a sci-fi icon. Some members of the Air Material Command, the authority commanding Project Sign, were intrigued enough to make a CIA inquiry into whether either Walter or Reimar Horten were working in the Soviet Union. The reply was negative. From 1947 to 1994 Reimar Horten lived and worked in Argentina after failing to gain employment in the UK or China. There he continued to design and build flying-wing aircraft, mostly gliders, but he never received another military contract after 1944. Walter Horten remained in Germany to teach engineering at Göttingen University. So the case for Nazi UFOs is pretty weak.
Oligonicella writes, "I actually lost an acquaintance because I pulled up information about the "Black Knight Satellite" that he had fallen for hook, line, and sinker."
I hear ya. I too have jeopardized friendships over this mindlessness. Sometimes smart people think nothing of jettisoning their brains in favor of gahhh-lee sensationalism.
The Black Knight is an exceptionally ephemeral member of the class of thoroughly conjectural objects. No matter what demonstrable fact you can summon from the documentation, the "real" Black Knight is something else. Since its existence is unrestrained by evidence any attribute you want attaches to it. (I vaguely recall a law of formal logic about falsehoods at work here.) For example, Betty Hill claimed to have seen a star map while being held prisoner aboard a flying saucer, which she sketched under hypnosis. That sketch was analyzed by one Marjorie Fish, who determined that the home port of the alien ship was the binary star Zeta Reticuli, which is 39.3 light-years distant. Most astronomers are unimpressed by the Fish analysis, particularly since the ESA Hipparcos mission remapped the local stellar neighborhood. Nevertheless, as formal logic warns us, a false antecedent implies any consequent, regardless of its truth value. Therefore the Black Knight is from Zeta Reticuli.
BTW, Zeta Reticuli is a binary star with no known planets. Years ago, Congress critters and Hollywood celebs insisted that the exoplanet hunters train their instruments on that system in the hope of finding ET's homeworld. So far, zilch, which is not unexpected given the inevitable fate of the junior partner in Newton's three-body problem.
If you take a large 1mil thick plastic bag, the sort used by janitors in office buildings to collect paper trash, it makes a great balloon. Just hold the bottom open with two crossed sticks, put a candle at the intersection of the sticks, watch the principles developed by the Mongolfiers work, and voila, a baloon that will fly into the night sky, emitting an eerie glow.
Of course, using Hydrogen gas and putting a slow fuse on it was a lot more fun back in my undergrad days.
"For what its worth, in some of the footage of alleged UFOs shown in various programs about UFOs, this same odd appearance is sometimes apparent, such that the objects seemed to be very swiftly "skipping" from one point to the next."
FWIW plasma glows. It can take odd shapes besides round; oval lozenge shaped, etc. and as it dissapates it can dart from place to place. Balls of plasma often occur during periods of siesmic activity.
1999 driving south on Tara Blvd. coming home from a football game, stopped at the light on the 138 spur, about 1:15 in the morning. I watched a light go straight down to the earth, then take a 90 degree turn and was out of sight in a second, maybe two. Never seen anything like it before or since.
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