D-Pad posted:

Honestly I dismissed the whole ocean thing out of hand when I first heard it

neutral milf hotel posted:

this is me reading this thread

https://twitter.com/GumbyScreens/status/1472346036769275905

Hooplah posted:

birds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjAMDEfdluY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5tekHDC1zE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouTmMtHSAEM

Daddy Catholic posted:

I couldn’t find anything but early this morning I saw something burning in the sky and it stopped and then stayed still in the sky for like 1 minute and then disappeared
Wasn’t a shooting star because it was going up towards space
...
I was on the 210 heading west and it was like 450am and everyone on the freeway slowed down like it was a movie to see wtf it was

Junkie Disease posted:

Ok skinwalker book is real bad. Starts off saying how it has bonifeds then just does hearsay and never goes into methods.
Just trust me the brave veterinarians just no it's mutilation that's not done by a wild animal just trust the unnamed vets.

my bony fealty posted:

I read some ufo interview with a military person recently suggesting that there's one weird trick to summon ships out of the sea and that's fascinating, the navy just has to go to the right place and wave their arms around and tictac appears

implies that it's some kind of automated system that can be figured out which owns

Wheeee posted:

can’t shake this feeling that chris and lue’s excellent adventure to bring disclosure is actually a bogus journey to get out ahead of something inevitable and manage the narrative

Wheeee posted:

can’t shake this feeling that chris and lue’s excellent adventure to bring disclosure is actually a bogus journey to get out ahead of something inevitable and manage the narrative

Wheeee posted:

can’t shake this feeling that chris and lue’s excellent adventure to bring disclosure is actually a bogus journey to get out ahead of something inevitable and manage the narrative

Junkie Disease posted:

Ok skinwalker book is real bad. Starts off saying how it has bonifeds then just does hearsay and never goes into methods.
Just trust me the brave veterinarians just no it's mutilation that's not done by a wild animal just trust the unnamed vets.

Wheeee posted:

can’t shake this feeling that chris and lue’s excellent adventure to bring disclosure is actually a bogus journey to get out ahead of something inevitable and manage the narrative

Bilirubin posted:

like what?

The Saucer Hovers posted:

Inspector Hound posted:

You know this really is kind of never addressed in sci-fi stuff

The Demilich posted:

My friend had this to report today (18th):

Maybe someone else saw it or has more information?

Wheeee posted:

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar. The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn't. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous.

We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world's children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy. Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.

All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel. They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.

Or so we thought.

The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.

The first human spacecraft were exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.

It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet. We would have laughed, if it hadn't terrified us.

Humanity, at long last, was awake.

It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.

The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at... stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.

We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.

It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world. What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room. The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra.

The situation in the senate could only be described as "absolute, incoherent panic". They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.

We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.

Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.

There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.

A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.

It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to short it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.

When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.

I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.

I remember the symbol emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. it was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds. It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. it was painted in white, over a red cross.

The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.

Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, "You are the head doctor?"

I nodded.

The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a "grin", an expression of friendship and happiness among their species.

"We are The Doctors Without Borders," she said, speaking slowly and carefully. "We are here to help."

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

Dude in the reddit post is apparently a sci-fi author so...

Sounds like larping

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

Talked my wife into trying Gateway to help with her anxiety:
"It was fine."
"Would do it again"
She found Monroe's voice charming

e:
also
https://twitter.com/andrewducker/status/1472594755498430466?s=20

Wheeee posted:

can’t shake this feeling that chris and lue’s excellent adventure to bring disclosure is actually a bogus journey to get out ahead of something inevitable and manage the narrative

Bilirubin posted:

like what?

Hooplah posted:

implied the best way to transmit evidence of intelligent life on earth over extremely long timespans would be to encode it in DNA, so i guess you could look for messages there.

problem is, there's a loooot of dna in our genome and it turns out a lot of it actually contains information already. so... sorting out "exogenous" sources of info that happen to be in highly conserved regions (but only in introns and/or "junk" regions?? i don't know) would be a pretty goddamn complicated task. although i guess finding something like a portrayal of the fine structure constant or the fibonacci sequence in DNA would be pretty sus

GWBBQ posted:

SpaceX launch from VAFB

global tetrahedron posted:

really enjoyed the first two bits of wave 1 in gateway experience, i’m looking forward to doing more. i was amazed at how relaxed i got, definitely highlighted how tense i am physically

Failson posted:

Gonna be huge bold print saying: COVID IS OVER!

Didn't one of the recent Roswell books say the saucer and the crash were Soviet, and was piloted by experimented-on kids, and it was never disclosed because the US was doing the same kind of stuff?

Failson posted:

Didn't one of the recent Roswell books say the saucer and the crash were Soviet, and was piloted by experimented-on kids, and it was never disclosed because the US was doing the same kind of stuff?

Fly Ricky posted:

Yeah, and it was later revealed to be something the author heard from a single individual.

As opposed to the roughly hundred people confirmed to have been deployed at the site who have since come forth swearing on their lives it was nothing they could possibly explain as terrestrial.

The Carey/Schmitt series of books are the definitive investigations into Roswell. Almost literally everything else is trash. Even Friedman’s book is sorely outdated and inaccurate.

Azathoth posted:

Don't forget that the author heard that it was literally Mengele who the Soviets kept alive on Stalin's personal orders breeding deformed child pilots specifically so that when they crashed, the US would scream "aliens" and then superior Soviet science could just chuckle and say "oh you lazy capitalists, those are obviously just deformed humans" and then the US would look foolish.

Fly Ricky posted:

Lmao, I think Kean does some good work but she falls for the dumbest poo poo. Or maybe she’s just smart; it sells books based on controversy. Surviving Death is another one with tons of good info marred by chapters devoted to obvious frauds.