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Senate Intelligence bill gives holders of "non-earth origin or exotic UAP material" six months to make it available to AARO
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- Published
- Jun 24 2023
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- 3827 words
In tangentially related news, Dr. Avi Loeb claims to have recovered tiny fragments from a meteor that can only be explained as an extra-terrestrial techno-signature. He had an interview about it recently.
The short version - they tracked an anomalous meteor that was tougher and lasted longer than 272 others they reviewed over the last decade. It was the anomalous toughness of the meteor that attracted their attention in the first place. This meteor is confirmed to have originated outside the solar system, and it burned up/blew up off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014.
They sent a magnetic sled down a mile under the ocean to hoover up the metal particles that had to be on the ocean floor after it burned up, and they hit a goldmine of tiny metal spheres that clearly boiled off of the meteor. The composition of these spheres includes titanium and alloys that do not match any known natural process, any other meteors on record, or any known human engineering process. It's unique. Dr. Loeb clearly thinks he's got a legit techno-signature on his hands. I'll look forward to reading his report once the analysis is concluded.
Avi Loeb is a bit controversial in that he jumps to insane conclusions very quickly without much evidence, in complete opposition towards the people who have actually been working on extra terrestrial scanning.
This video does a pretty good job explaining why Loeb, despite having hundreds of three page "papers", isn't really approaching the subject with a critical frame of mind and just really wants to find aliens.
This isn't to say he's stupid or whatever. He's a very smart person, but I wholly disagree with his approach and the way he communicates science to the public.
I'm withholding judgement until I see the analysis. It is a pretty interesting way to go at the problem, I'll give him that. I'd expect an extrasolar meteor to have an unusual composition, but I want to see the proof that it's a manufactured metal rather than something funky that got coughed out of a nearby supernova.
Exactly. Most of the criticism that Loeb receives is exactly that; that he jumps to wild conclusions without considering more likely alternatives. Sure, it could be an alien-sourced-material, but what evidence do we have to indicate that beyond the fact that we just don't know the origin?
If he was just silently writing his little "this is theoretically possible" papers without making a fuss I wouldn't hold such a strong opinion about his work, but the fact that he goes around yelling at SETI scientists that they're "close minded" makes it very hard to take him seriously and makes me take everything with his name on it with a gigantic grain of salt.
I have a really hard time believing aliens crash their spaceships this often. Presumably they would be manufactured via some form of nanotech or femtotech, which is to say, no screws, bolts, seams, or other possible failure points in the self-healing finished product. Ships that could be expected to last for hundreds if not thousands of years. Yet they crash often enough for us to have a hanger full of them and see them burning up in the atmosphere? This does not make sense unless we're dealing with visitors from Kerbin.
I wonder how far away a similar provision for cryptids is. One could imagine such a bill existing to reel in "rouge" cryptozoological SAPs to ensure congressional oversight.
This is of course tongue in cheek because the whole situation seems profoundly silly
I can't tell if that misspelling was intentional or not.
At this point aliens better exist and be living under Area 51 or I'm gonna be angry that they set my expectations.
I asked an AI to summarize the article for anyone who wants a quick summary. I'll post it below.
Summary:
The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has unanimously approved legislation as part of the Fiscal Year 2024 Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) that aims to uncover and analyze unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)-associated technology previously controlled by the federal government. The legislation requires anyone who possesses or has information about such materials to notify the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within 60 days and provide a comprehensive list of the materials within 180 days. The bill also includes a provision to protect individuals from legal action if they comply with the notification requirements. Additionally, the legislation contains a funding ban on special-access program activities related to UAP unless properly reported to Congress. The UAP provisions were sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and co-sponsored by Senators Michael Rounds, John Cornyn, and Marco Rubio. The legislation is part of broader efforts to increase transparency and research into UAP-related phenomena