>our entire system of government is basically forfeit.

Yep, that seems accurate. Like it or not, the current US government is full of crackpot theories.

The "evidence" of "aliens" inevitably turns out to be blurry footage where people with bias tell you what you're supposed to think it is.

As for the U.S. Congress, you're talking about a body that has been avoiding it's own responsibilities for decades, particularly so right now. Invoking "Congressional hearings" here is an appeal to an unqualified authority. (Congressional representatives presumably has some experience with laws. I do not believe they are qualified for video forensics.)

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kjkjadksj 4 days ago | parent [-]

Have you seen the footage? It isn’t blurry cell phone videos. It is quite clear thermal imagery from aircraft and drones. The most recent video going around shows a reaper drone tracking one of these objects that does not change its vector much after being hit with a kinetic missile.

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GolfPopper 3 days ago | parent [-]

>thermal imagery

I have seen that one, as it happens. I am not an expert, but it looks to me like the asserted Hellfire hits a cruise missile and knocks some pieces off as the Hellfire fails to detonate, and the cruise missile then course corrects from getting knocked around.

The best way to determine that would be to have a number of experts independently assess the footage without being primed as to its provenance. A presentation by someone who is already convinced it's aliens to some congresscritters in need of a distraction is hardly that.

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kjkjadksj 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If it was merely that, why is it being presented to congress? How would the US military not know the origin of a cruise missile they are tracking? How many cruise missiles out there can take a broadside from a hellfire at 1000mph and continue on its direction of travel?

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GolfPopper 2 days ago | parent [-]

Congress decides what gets presented to it.

Did anyone even ask about larger radar tracks for this "UFO"?

A Hellfire masses less than 50kg. A Tomahawk cruise missile, for example, weighs over 1000kg. The impact is clearly glancing - the Hellfire retains much of its own speed.

	▲	kjkjadksj 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Again, why would a hellfire missile ever be launched at a tomahawk cruise missile? Do the Houthis have tomahawks all the sudden? And this still does not answer why the pentagon would not comment or why this detail was not made available to Congress.

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catigula 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The information you claim to want isn't accessible to you. The US government has "platforms" with vast arrays of sensors and data collection capability - redundant, multiplicative platforms measuring things you and I might not even know about - and they use this data to get a pretty good idea of what they're looking at.

You're seeing a grainy video for a reason. It would be trivial for you to have every piece of data related to an incident but if you did, that might be problematic for multiple reasons, one of them being it would expose capability. Usually, multi-million dollar missiles aren't used on unknown targets with unknown capabilities for unknown reasons. Thus, more information is required.

So, where are we left? With you demanding inaccessible information to draw a conclusion. Given that you can't have it, you're essentially just throwing your hands up and saying "well, I guess we can't know". Fine, but untrue, as we can simply demand to know.

That is what people are doing. If you're at all concerned by any of this, you should be in this camp as well.

Regarding "distraction", how is this a "good" distraction if it's not a widely credibly held position and can clearly damage your reputation? This is just a nonsense idea. There's no reason to believe these people are lying.