By Part One: Intro to Everything on the Surface
The old adage goes “there are as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on all of the Earth”, and when you set out to prove either way you are comparing magnitudes that are beyond human comprehension.
Bitcoiners understand that we must set some limits, a hard cap at 21 million for instance, but our ambitions for the world extend far beyond numbers in the protocol. Our hope is much grander than evangelizing “gradually, then suddenly.” Bitcoin changes you, it lowers your time preference. It attracts great talent as well, some that have predicted Ponzi schemes like the recent Terra/LUNA debacle.
Since birds of a feather flock together, Bitcoiners have gathered to celebrate and share their ideas since 2011. At this year’s celebration, Bitcoin 2022, many new faces came to spread their message. Thiel Capital’s Eric Weinstein and Harvard Professor Avi Loeb joined as closing speakers with a talk entitled “Fix the Money to Leave the World.” In summary they tried to appeal to the audience to embrace new physics/ideas to escape the tyranny of dictators/governments around the globe. Bitcoiners clearly aren’t scared of new ideas or a new paradigm of thinking, but the appeal came across as poorly rehearsed and was definitely not long enough to get into the important details. They received some applause, but in the post talk panel Max Keiser said they “completely missed it”, that Bitcoin is the “god particle” that will fix everything. The panelists generally agreed that Bitcoiners hope to fix the world, not leave it. While I completely agree with that sentiment, the institutional interest in space warfare, interplanetary travel, and UFOs has ratcheted up in recent years. Whether it’s the military applications of a rising technology, the search for new physics, or the philosophical implications of being visited by aliens, it is important to tease out the signal from all of the noise on this topic.
Avi Leob was a quiet academic until a few years ago when he evangelized the theory that an object called ‘Oumuamua, observed going past Earth in 2017, might be space trash from some distant alien intelligence. There are some compelling traits that distinguish ‘Oumuamua from asteroids, namely that it is a quarter mile long and only 1/10th as wide. It also has a reddish surface color with no trail of melting ice or debris coming off of it like a traditional comet. Avi felt so compelled by this novel finding that he wrote a book about it called “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth”, and did the rotation of podcasts including Lex Fridman. This outside-the-box theory sparked his current venture at Harvard, the Galileo Project, which aims to find physical proof of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs). The project has many strong academic and industry researchers from around the globe, including the previously mentioned Eric Weinstein, Physicist Stephen Wolfram, and Stanford’s notable “debunker” Professor Gary Nolan. Although this is a brand new project, we should keep track of what our top physicists are up to.
There has been a broad resurgence on the UFO topic since the New York Times reported on the Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program back in 2017. This report detailed how the Pentagon secretly allocated funding to the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Special Application Program (AAWSAP), later known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The program was headed by military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, and funding was initiated by Nevada Senator Harry Reid, and was also supported by Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Senator Daniel K. Inouye from Hawaii. Despite this program being formally “defunded” by congress in 2012, Elizondo continued to lead it under the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and he believes that data is still being actively collected by the U.S. Navy and CIA to this day. Elizondo quit the DIA in 2017, rightly noting that he had hit a dead end within the agency and working outside was the best way to push this topic forward.
Now here’s where things get interesting. The 2017 NYT article had a video of a UFO that was engaged by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004. There’s a fantastic breakdown of that video here by Chris Lehto, a retired F16 pilot of 18 years. Several of the pilots from that encounter have come forward since the tic-tac video aired, but there are two interviews of Commander David Fravor, with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, that are very thorough. There was also an initial Senate briefing in 2019 on reported UFO’s, and the Navy seems to be taking reporting of these events more seriously. These videos were officially verified by the Pentagon, the US Navy and the Department of Defense as of September 2019. The Pentagon submitted a 9 page report to Congress in 2021 that outlines the classification system it uses to analyze Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). The report mentions 144 cases from government sources, 80 of which had been verified with multiple sensors, and 11 were near-misses with military personnel. In 21 reports, again with multiple sensors, the UAPs displayed abnormal flight characteristics such as remaining stationary in high winds, moving without any discernible means of propulsion, and traveling at considerable speeds while maneuvering abruptly.
Across the U.S. government, active and retired, there has been validation of this information. Some of the names include NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Former Pres. Barack Obama, Former Pres. Bill Clinton, Former Pres. George W Bush, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Former DNI John Ratcliff, Sen. Mitt Romney, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Martin Heinrich, Former Director of the CIA James Woolsey, Rep. Andre Carson, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon. Leaders on capitol hill requested more information on the phenomenon, which led to a public Senate hearing on May 17th 2022, and a closed door classified briefing just after. Present for the hearing was the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott W. Bray and Under Secretary for Defense and Intelligence Ronald Moultrie. They explained that there are now 400 unexplained encounters with military personnel since the 9-page report was published in 2021. Lawmakers came ready to pounce, applying pressure for more transparency. Rep. Tim Burchett has been especially outspoken, going so far as to say that the “cover up continues” by the US Government.
I remain skeptical that we will see a fully transparent “disclosure” or answer for these unexplained phenomena, but the idea cat is out of the bag and now is the time to lean on the military and their tactics of obfuscation. There’s a few obvious reasons why this could be a charade: 1) the military always wants more money, 2) as Burchett points out, the American public has a 30-minute attention span and this is a very shiny object, 3) a Bitcoiner favorite, the alien invasion false flag. Let’s just unwind the need for military funding right away; since when has the military starved for funding? Our long winded war in the middle east is a great example. Especially since it was based on bad intelligence, arguably had little public support, and mounds of money “disappeared” in that desert with very little blowback. Right now capitol hill is approving billions in aid for Ukraine in their fight against Russia, again with almost no dissenting voices.
We can’t rule out that the media just wants to fill space with something shiny. The attention span of the public is fleeting, tragically so, but I’d argue there’s been enough institutional support to keep this topic front and center for a while. There will be more updates on capitol hill, other countries like China and Brazil have already brought this topic up publicly, NASA just launched an independent study on UAPs, and there are videos yet to be released.
It’s impossible to ignore the systemic risk right now around the world. We see that debts have ballooned, populism is on the rise, a war is underway by a G20 Nation, and we are likely in a 4th Turning. You can no longer ignore the gaslighting and obfuscation at the highest levels of government. So all that said, is it likely that this UAP phenomenon is a giant ruse? Could there perhaps be some underlying agenda, one that might hasten the Great Reset? A false flag? We know for certain that the powers that be will never let a good crisis go to waste. Could they resort to an alien invasion to unify us while money dies? On the other hand if we apply a reasonable range of values to the Drake Equation it answers that life is abundant. Well if you’ve made it this far, congrats, the world just got a little bit more weird. This topic has at least 75 years of historical records that we can dig into. Brace yourself because the technological implications here could finally actualize what fiat science has failed to do.
