Former Military Personnel Claim Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes 498
An anonymous reader quotes Reuters "Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby. Six former US Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality." I won't worry until Gort shows up.
Not a Reuters story (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correlation (Score:5, Informative)
For example, you are actually exposed to less radiation while onboard a US nuclear sub than you would receive on the surface.
Re:Not a Reuters story (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed! from reddit:
PR Newswire is NOT Reuters! [reddit.com]
Re:Not a Reuters story (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correlation (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear radiation isn't known to cause that kind of delusion as far as I know. I think you're onto something with the common factor though; being responsible for a nuclear missile might well cause a lot of people to become paranoid, and perhaps even to imagine some higher power taking the responsibility/functionality away from them.
Re:Not a Reuters story (Score:2, Informative)
Exactly. I don't understand why this is being covered (though the AP is always just relaying press releases with no thought or questioning, whatsoever). There are plenty of former military, government, or scientific individuals of various ranks who are simply fucking nuts. They typically become regular guests on the Art Bell show and talk to him about alien autopsies that they've witnessed and how Obama is secretly a grey.
Re:Screw ET, how about malfunctioning missiles? (Score:4, Informative)
But wait.... (Score:5, Informative)
This was a panel discussion held at the National Press Club.
Not a meeting of the National Press Club.
Big difference. They rented the room...
Re:Correlation (Score:5, Informative)
That depends on how near to which parts of them.
That's true - so long as you don't spend any time near the reactor compartment or any nuclear weapons that may be onboard. </neitherconfirmnordeny>
Why yes, I *am* a former SSBN crewman - why do you ask?
Re:Not a Reuters story (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure the parent was being sarcastic.
Re:Yeah, or... (Score:3, Informative)
Your theory is trivially falsified, or at least cast into severe doubt, by the fact that at least one of the 'interventions' took place in the UK and involved what were almost certainly storage sites for gravity bombs.
Next, you have to consider that if the US *did* have such a device - they almost certainly wouldn't test it against deployed operational missiles. They'd use the silos at Vandenberg. (And the control centers would be manned by handpicked personnel rather than random joes in either case.) Not to mention is it completely against the rules to play games with 'live' weapons.
This has happened many times since the late 60s (Score:4, Informative)
This has happened many times since the late 60s and possibly before.
These people are credible enough to handle launching nuclear ICBMs, including one who was a base commander at a foreign base where nuclear weapons were stored, yet some people still doubt their credibility?
It's not just unidentified objects showing up at silos, they've been able to take all of the independent missile systems offline in a very particular way, which shouldn't be possible...In some cases when fighters have been scrambled the objects will lead the fighters many, many miles away then shoot back to where they were in an instant.
I realize that a lot of people like to ridicule this stuff, because they're not used to credible people coming clean about this stuff. But UFOs are a reality, and these events did happen... Back in the 50s UFOs were in the press all of the time, without the added ridicule, there were days in July of 1952 where the capital was swarming with them.
What the UFOs are and where they came from, who knows - but there is something to these reports, so why don't you get all of the facts before you make up your mind. Contempt prior to investigation is a sure way to remain ignorant.
Sure, people will dismiss this and think it's about making money, but there are many, many crews that have stated this going back to the 60s, they're not selling books or anything else.
As a matter of fact: Nope, no fact-checkers (Score:5, Informative)
Newspapers used to have a position called a "fact-checker" .
As a matter of fact, they did not.
While newspapers conventionally have had editors who often checked facts, they weren't called fact-checkers, and their primary function usually was to fix bad writing (sometimes the job was more like translation) and to write headlines to fit layouts. The position was usually called "copy editor" or "copyreader" in the United States and "subeditor" in the UK. The primary responsibility for getting things right has always been placed on the reporter, whose job is to gather information and put it into something resembling the written word.
I've been in journalism for 40 years, and my dad was a newspaper editor before me. The only time I've encountered a "fact checker" has been in connection with a magazine article. Magazine articles often are outsourced to freelancers, whose butts are not necessarily available for kicking the next morning if something is wrong, so fact-checkers are employed to verify information before it's published. Typically they'll call a news source: "Is your name really Heywood Jablome?" There''s no time for that in a daily newsroom.
Of course, the cited "story" is not journalism at all, but rather an announcement pushed out by PR Newswire, which is a publicity release distribution service. Reuters carries PR Newswire because often the "press releases" contain legitimate and useful information, but it fails to adequately label the content for what it really is.
So any perceived decline in the profession of journalism can't be blamed for this wacky crap.
Re:Not a Reuters story (Score:5, Informative)
Don't watch The Colbert Report. That show will confuse the living hell out of you.
Re:Correlation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NASA astronauts admit on video UFOs are real (Score:4, Informative)
In 2005, while being interviewed for a documentary titled First on the Moon: The Untold Story, Aldrin told an interviewer that they saw an unidentified flying object. Aldrin told David Morrison, an NAI Senior Scientist, that the documentary cut the crew's conclusion that they were probably seeing one of four detached spacecraft adapter panels. Their S-IVB upper stage was 6,000 miles away, but the four panels were jettisoned before the S-IVB made its separation maneuver so they would closely follow the Apollo 11 spacecraft until its first midcourse correction.[36] When Aldrin appeared on The Howard Stern Show on August 15, 2007, Stern asked him about the supposed UFO sighting. Aldrin confirmed that there was no such sighting of anything deemed extraterrestrial, and said they were and are "99.9 percent" sure that the object was the detached panel.[37][38][39]