…Who could be scared of a balloon? The comedy sidebar in a future textbook writes itself. Maybe it’s the “call the enemy infinitely strong but also infinitely weak” fascist thing. Maybe tastemakers just feel confident that no Western liberal anymore, from right to left, who still reads “the news” sees their job as believing “their” side of a story, instead of seeing themselves as miniature crowd-sourced propagandists. Because in this case, “balloon” works the same in every version, so it’s maybe just not worth the effort to agree on a scary name for it, or to promote the Pentagon PowerPoint scary name for it. It’s not scary because the scare-story audience is now close to 100% people who barely pretend to be scared.
like to imagine though it’s because every Illuminati potentate is full of giggles as they write The balloon. over and over, and think of balloons and how fun they are… gap moe.
ok.
cars posted:…Who could be scared of a balloon? The comedy sidebar in a future textbook writes itself. Maybe it’s the “call the enemy infinitely strong but also infinitely weak” fascist thing. Maybe tastemakers just feel confident that no Western liberal anymore, from right to left, who still reads “the news” sees their job as believing “their” side of a story, instead of seeing themselves as miniature crowd-sourced propagandists. Because in this case, “balloon” works the same in every version, so it’s maybe just not worth the effort to agree on a scary name for it, or to promote the Pentagon PowerPoint scary name for it. It’s not scary because the scare-story audience is now close to 100% people who barely pretend to be scared.
like to imagine though it’s because every Illuminati potentate is full of giggles as they write The balloon. over and over, and think of balloons and how fun they are… gap moe.
americans want to fuck the balloon
As in she is a Democrat Congressoid who is also actual literal CIA.
tears posted:thinking of the balloon
how were they supposed to know it wasn't a frenchman
and then you look around at the stuff they could be covering instead, like capital-induced toxic clouds in ohio killing fish and livestock and pets for miles and probably spiking cancer rates in several states over the next couple decades, and it makes perfect sense why they instead roll with "nation glowers at balloon for hours and hours" interspersed with gentle cautioning not to discharge your firearms into the air at any suspected balloon, as you are more likely to kill someone across town than the object drifting at 60,000ft
The US has not found any evidence to connect the objects to China’s balloon surveillance program nor to any other country’s spy program, national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters.
officials fear the military may not be keeping up with china's vaunted balloon surveillance program, which could rise to the forefront in the global theater of balloon espionage
Edited by dimashq ()
Constantignoble posted:they shot down a few other balloons in the last week, too. i think washington adopting a new posture of Very Serious chest-thumping belligerence that sums to "virulently anti-balloon" is probably one of the funnier things in the news right now
seems likely too that a couple of these weren't even balloons, or anything at all really, the Pentagon just has a reason to trickle out the sort of tax funded Erowid trip report that 1st Lt. Amph E. Tamine will file for them automatically, every single day. The original late-'40s "flying saucer" hysteria was 99.9...% secret-Commie-superweapon nonsense too, and there is nothing about it that the DoD press office can't or won't recycle, for instance, how go-pill-munching U.S. Navy FLOPGUNs will see backscattered sun glare through a 0.5 mm scratch on the canopy, chase it for 300 nautical miles in pure pursuit maneuvers while shrieking that "bogey" keeps matching speed and changing direction, greyout to vertical g-LOC for their full 15 seconds a day as they try to follow a real-life wedding-photo filter into the stratosphere and write it all up with Zodiac Killer diagrams rather than go to therapy.
Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down By USAF
A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.
The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.
But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.
There are suspicions among other prominent members of the small, pico-ballooning enthusiasts’ community, which combines ham radio and high-altitude ballooning into a single, relatively affordable hobby.
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The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.
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Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade. Meadows and his son Lee discovered it was possible to calculate the amount of helium gas necessary to make a common latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, along with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to update their positions to ham radio receivers around the world. At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.
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The community is also nervous that their balloons could be shot down next. Medlin says one of his balloons—call sign W5KUB-112—is projected by HYSPLIT to enter U.S. airspace on Feb. 17. It already circumnavigated the globe several times, but its trajectory last carried the object over China before it will enter either Mexican or U.S. airspace.
“I hope,” Medlin said, “that in the next few days when that happens we’re not real trigger-happy and start shooting down everything.”
lo posted:i think it's neat that some local balloon enthusiasts got the US airforce to use up one of their missiles that costs eleventy squillion dollars. one cool tip for wasting american military cash
Arguable one of the most humane uses of money the US military has ever accomplished
cars posted:go-pill-munching U.S. Navy FLOPGUNs will see backscattered sun glare through a 0.5 mm scratch on the canopy, chase it for 300 nautical miles in pure pursuit maneuvers while shrieking that "bogey" keeps matching speed and changing direction, greyout to vertical g-LOC for their full 15 seconds a day as they try to follow a real-life wedding-photo filter into the stratosphere and write it all up with Zodiac Killer diagrams rather than go to therapy.
tears posted:
Airpeople balloon-popping bonus stage with the Air Force Global Strike Command Master Sword…… for Freaking Epic Win………
https://tannerfboyle.substack.com/p/manifestufo posted:These operations serve several different purposes. First and foremost, perpetuation of a UFO mythos obscures the existence of advanced, secret military aircraft from not only the American public but from enemies and allies abroad. So too, the infiltration of UFO communities has been a wellspring of intelligence sources, keeping tabs on what those who are looking at the skies the most see on a regular basis. Also becoming more common is perpetuating UFO stories as a means to convince the American public for more defense spending to both monitor or confront the possible enemies in the sky. Indeed, in recent years, the majority of publicized reports come directly from defense organizations and the majority of public funding for UFO investigation is given to defense organizations and contractors. Rather than independent investigations of unexplained phenomena, we instead get a continuous circulation of ideas in UFO sphere that never runs fair afield of the military-industrial complex. It increasingly appears plausible that UFO stories serve a very specific role within the continuation of the MIC. After all, we need defense funding in order to tackle the gargantuan threat these elusive craft present.
Even in the realm of UFO abduction, we have explored the possibility that experiencers are being experimented on with novel methods of torture/coercion or non-lethal weaponry. It should be alarming that a vast amount of abduction researchers’ case notes (without the consent of their “patients”) was handed over the Robert Bigelow, a major player in the realm of paranormal-oriented defense contractors.3
If Bosco Nedelcovic was telling the truth, like the UFO phenomenon in general, alien abduction too might be a crafted narrative obscuring nefarious government action. Even in the case of Nedelcovic, his State Department or CIA connections warrant immediate suspicion of his stories and motivations in coming forward.
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My honest recommendation when it comes to military or intelligence contributions to the field of ufology is to throw out both the bathwater and the baby—the bathwater is radioactive and the baby is DOA. We can only perform an autopsy and retrospective analysis to see where we went wrong. As it stands now, the UFO community holds a great respect for the very forces that have deceived it and taken advantage of it in the past. The path forward is not so clear, but a deep mistrust of the military, intelligence agencies, and defense contractors should be a given. Their motivations for instilling a sense of UFO reality in the populace are self-serving in virtually every respect and should be met with great skepticism. Ufologists made a grave misstep when the sightings and beliefs of an intelligence officer began to hold more weight than that of any other individual. The study of UFOs has come to require a reverence for the US government and all of its military apparatuses—warts and all. I would urge a movement away from this, instead adopting a useful suspicion of the motivations of these figures and the common coercive propaganda tactics used in ramping up military support. As mentioned earlier, I am a disillusioned Fortean. Charles Fort was a man distrustful of any authoritative stance on unexplained phenomena and while the world of the paranormal is vastly different today, I think an approach such as his is warranted once again. An even-keeled paranoia is an appropriate and necessary method of analysis to tackle the endless disinformation, infiltration, and weaponization of ufological communities. I say this not as a skeptic, but as someone who finds the world of Forteana fascinating and worth protecting from aggressive co-optation and military fervor.
https://ufo-info-ops.medium.com/the-ufo-misinformation-operation-a65f150e9166 posted:Publicly available evidence suggests TTSA is a commercial cover organization for an agency of the US government and that it was formed to carry out an unlawful influence operation against US audiences related to UFOs.
Two of TTSA’s founders, Jim Semivan and Hal Puthoff, spent decades in the CIA and NSA. Semivan and Puthoff were able to disguise TTSA’s potential government-sponsored financing by forming the company through a series of complex stock transactions between six shell entities owned by rock musician Tom DeLonge — a “useful idiot” who has served as the company’s “interim” CEO since the company was created.
Once TTSA was formed, no fewer than nine former officials of the US defense and intelligence community were installed as members of the Board of Directors and the company’s “Advisory Board.” Many of these individuals spent their careers in government as experts in psychological warfare and counterintelligence operations.
TTSA made repeated statements advertising itself as an ambitious aerospace company going so far as to hire a former Lockheed Martin executive. SEC filings show, however, that TTSA never invested in any product, service, or technology of any kind. Instead, the company’s only reported source of revenue involves marketing, promoting, and advertising Tom DeLonge’s music, novels, and band: Angels and Airwaves.
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For decades defense and intelligence agencies have taken a furtive but well-established interest in feeding disinformation to prominent members of “the UFO community.” These include influence operations against Robert Emmenegger in 1973, Ward Kimball in 1979, Paul Bennewitz in the 1980s, Linda Howe in 1983, Dan Smith in 1991, Robert Bigelow and Gary Bekkum in the 1990s, and Ryan Dube and Brendon Burton in 2006. These individuals received fake UFO “briefing books,” and “government documents” delivered in unmarked envelopes containing misinformation about an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. These individuals were selected because defense and intelligence agencies believed they would best propagate misinformation widely among other UFO enthusiasts.
Today, social media has supercharged the tools and techniques of state-sponsored government misinformation campaigns. And there are more national security officials talking about UFOs now than at any other point in American history. These include two former presidents, two former CIA directors, the former and current Directors of National Intelligence, the director of NASA, and the former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security. Each of these officials’ public statements reflect the same scripted bafflement about UFOs origins while maintaining a healthy distance from outright characterizing their source as extraterrestrial.
As I have attempted to outline here, there is substantial evidence today’s UFO mania is the result of a coordinated defense or intelligence influence operation. FOIA released documents prove that the DoD authorized dissemination of the three UFOs to the New York Times via “former” officials Elizondo and Mellon. And public evidence shows Mellon deliberately misinformed the public about the DoD’s role in approving release of those videos. Perhaps most alarmingly, SEC filings indicate an agency of the US government appears to have financed a covert commercial enterprise to conceal its involvement in the overall operation.
cars posted:Seems obvious to me the goal is defense spending in a vague way but I’m curious if anyone here has specifics to suggest.
like… i did not expect "in a vague way" to be the part where i was right the most here.
Edited by cars ()
I don't think it will affect the program much here, which is just adding one more argument to shut down possible future social-democrat or reactionary-isolationist complaints about "defense" payola, and to otherwise keep the spigots open, by ginning up public interest with maybe-aliens stories and then presenting the pragmatic "truth" as a new wave of secret Sino-Slavic superplanes that must be countered by spending a lot of money in Huntsville. If you hate the Russians, they made the UFOs; if you hate the Chinese, they made 'em; either way, we need our own. That is banal and will likely work out, because the politicians who think it's more in their cynical interest to demand the Pentagon turn over the insect men from Andromeda are still much fewer and a little further away from the levers of power. This is a closed loop really.
But I definitely think this was supposed to be the moment when the stage was given over completely to "Our analysis of these troubling facts concludes that the wily Asian war machine has invented the saucer-bomber." Today's when every chump who would ever take it all half-seriously was supposed to heave a sigh of relief that it was "only that", fashionably "concerning" for the sort of person who actually still watches cable TV news but also reassuring to those types that respectable politicians weren't saying entirely crazy shit. It could then all be filed away against the remote possibility of pushback on weapons spending or NATO-pumping from near-future booj politicians, or merely as a way to suggest that voting for loose-cannon types would get some U.S. ally saucer-bombed by China.
Instead, a surprising number of people apparently think that Congress and the Pentagon confirmed today that space aliens are coming soon to save us all, and a couple politicians seem intent on derailing the P.R. campaign at what was supposed to be its triumphant close by demanding the DoD produce the insect men in open hearings, which they would never do even if they had some. And this is with every spook-journo mouthpiece noting five times in each article today that the Pentagon wants those politicians to shut up, since the bullet-heads have Now Confirmed that none of the alien stuff they floated earlier was actually real. The effort was intended as, among other things, a shield against the unstable types, not more ammo for them, as the men from Mars were revealed to be merely from Beijing. But the U.S. has entered another stage in history like the 1950s, where people there are bored and nervous enough that this alphabet-agency-annoying tangent can happen, and regardless of how much saner the intended bullshit sounds. Funny stuff, to me.
https://booty.substack.com/p/the-hill-abduction-as-counter-insurgency posted:The fact that the Hills were socially involved with multiple spooks despite their beliefs and political activities is enough for me to feel confident that they had drawn the interest of one or more US intelligence agencies prior to their abduction experience. Their geographic location further strengthens this idea, as the Hills lived a 10 minute drive from Pease AFB, which at the time happened to be a Strategic Air Command base.21
In other words, Betty and Barney lived directly adjacent to a place that, according to Wikipedia, “maintained a combat-ready force for long-range bombardment and nuclear strikes. B-47 Stratojet, B-52 Stratofortress, and FB-111 Aardvark bomber aircraft, as well as KC-97 Stratofreighter and KC-135 Stratotanker air refueling aircraft and C-97 Stratofreighter, C-124 Globemaster and C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft, were all based at Pease AFB at varying times.”22
The Hills had a regular weekend appointment to hang out with their spook buddies at a node in the US Air Force’s command-and-control network for nuclear weaponry.
I may be beating a dead horse at this point, but I think the above adds a whole additional layer to things: it is extremely bizarre for a pair of communist-leaning civil rights activists to be permitted to hang out with intelligence personnel on and around an active nuclear base. Given this, there is no question in my mind that Betty and Barney were being closely monitored and evaluated.