I'm absolutely certain No Earthly Power has developed that level of technology - AND has not applied any fraction of it to advancing their economy and wealth, AND kept it completely secret.
Not applying any fraction of it to advancing your economy or wealth - the disincentives are absolutely enormous, and the upside nearly zero. And it's also extremely difficult, because you've got thousands or tens of thousands of people involved in developing the technology, plus presumably a cadre of military people actually using and training with it, and they ALL have to be held prisoner and kept silent - because of the enormous incentives for them to make STUPID amounts of money by taking the tech to another country.
And keeping it secret only starts there. Not only do you have tens of thousands of people with enormous incentives to make STUPID money by being the first to take the tech to another country, whom you can't just murder because you need the researchers to maintain and further develop it. But also sooner or later spies happen. And even if you have some tech that makes your entire nation spy-proof, that in itself is going to be sufficiently remarkable that other countries will definitely take notice.
So, no. It's clear to me that no Terrestrial power is responsible for these things.
Non-Terrestrial powers ... Again, I point to the Great Silence. There's no place they could have come from. And if it were a Non-Terrestrial power, it makes absolutely no sense to put a physical probe inside our atmosphere. I try not to anthropomorphize aliens too much when I speculate about motives, but what motive would there be to send physical probes down here instead of holding off to a safe distance -- like, say, the orbit of Sedna or so -- and discovering everything they need to know about us by remote sensing? If they really need to send physical probes, they'd be nanotech devices lodged in grains of sand or two-meter rocks etc, that look just like all the other grains of sand and two-meter rocks etc that come from the outer solar system, and they'd hit our atmosphere like all that other stuff does, and we'd never goddamn notice because that happens all the time. Nanotech devices, even just spreading on the wind, can get to see everything and hear everything and sample everything in fairly short order. So if they're doing research about our world, there's no reason for them to do anything we can see.
I can -- just barely -- entertain the notion of a local Bracewell Probe, but if so, time being what it is, the species that sent it is probably no longer even extant. If it still existed it would be another species - or another several species - by now, and when I say "if it still existed" I point at the Great Silence again. I think the odds aren't good. Also a Bracewell probe is an investment with a hundred-million-year breakeven, at best, and if their economies are anything like ours funding decisions would be weighed against investments with a thirty-year breakeven. Again anthropomorphizing our hypothetical aliens, spreading Bracewell probes just doesn't seem like a worthwhile pursuit.
So I'm eliminating human activities and alien activities. That leaves "These craft do not exist." And so I turn to the more logical question, "Why do these reports exist?" And I think,
(A) Pentagon brass duped by foreign power
(B) Pentagon brass duped by internal confusion and inter-branch secrets and rivalries, etc.
© Pentagon attempting psyop on public (my own choice in the poll).
Under (A), I've thought of one thing since posting the poll that seems the most plausible scenario, at least to me. It's just barely possible that some of the sensor/camera/etc hardware that our military is using has been compromised in the supply chain. That is, the chips or the ROMs may have been manufactured in a plant controlled by or infiltrated by an adversary, with undocumented behavior that can be triggered by software. In that case, what we're seeing now might be that adversary making a "test run" of its ability to make US military hardware see hallucinations.
I think that's probably more likely than anything I actually put on the poll.
Not applying any fraction of it to advancing your economy or wealth - the disincentives are absolutely enormous, and the upside nearly zero. And it's also extremely difficult, because you've got thousands or tens of thousands of people involved in developing the technology, plus presumably a cadre of military people actually using and training with it, and they ALL have to be held prisoner and kept silent - because of the enormous incentives for them to make STUPID amounts of money by taking the tech to another country.
And keeping it secret only starts there. Not only do you have tens of thousands of people with enormous incentives to make STUPID money by being the first to take the tech to another country, whom you can't just murder because you need the researchers to maintain and further develop it. But also sooner or later spies happen. And even if you have some tech that makes your entire nation spy-proof, that in itself is going to be sufficiently remarkable that other countries will definitely take notice.
So, no. It's clear to me that no Terrestrial power is responsible for these things.
Non-Terrestrial powers ... Again, I point to the Great Silence. There's no place they could have come from. And if it were a Non-Terrestrial power, it makes absolutely no sense to put a physical probe inside our atmosphere. I try not to anthropomorphize aliens too much when I speculate about motives, but what motive would there be to send physical probes down here instead of holding off to a safe distance -- like, say, the orbit of Sedna or so -- and discovering everything they need to know about us by remote sensing? If they really need to send physical probes, they'd be nanotech devices lodged in grains of sand or two-meter rocks etc, that look just like all the other grains of sand and two-meter rocks etc that come from the outer solar system, and they'd hit our atmosphere like all that other stuff does, and we'd never goddamn notice because that happens all the time. Nanotech devices, even just spreading on the wind, can get to see everything and hear everything and sample everything in fairly short order. So if they're doing research about our world, there's no reason for them to do anything we can see.
I can -- just barely -- entertain the notion of a local Bracewell Probe, but if so, time being what it is, the species that sent it is probably no longer even extant. If it still existed it would be another species - or another several species - by now, and when I say "if it still existed" I point at the Great Silence again. I think the odds aren't good. Also a Bracewell probe is an investment with a hundred-million-year breakeven, at best, and if their economies are anything like ours funding decisions would be weighed against investments with a thirty-year breakeven. Again anthropomorphizing our hypothetical aliens, spreading Bracewell probes just doesn't seem like a worthwhile pursuit.
So I'm eliminating human activities and alien activities. That leaves "These craft do not exist." And so I turn to the more logical question, "Why do these reports exist?" And I think,
(A) Pentagon brass duped by foreign power
(B) Pentagon brass duped by internal confusion and inter-branch secrets and rivalries, etc.
© Pentagon attempting psyop on public (my own choice in the poll).
Under (A), I've thought of one thing since posting the poll that seems the most plausible scenario, at least to me. It's just barely possible that some of the sensor/camera/etc hardware that our military is using has been compromised in the supply chain. That is, the chips or the ROMs may have been manufactured in a plant controlled by or infiltrated by an adversary, with undocumented behavior that can be triggered by software. In that case, what we're seeing now might be that adversary making a "test run" of its ability to make US military hardware see hallucinations.
I think that's probably more likely than anything I actually put on the poll.