Mars UFO: NASA Edits Image

[Buffy]

I just believe in Murphy's Corollary of Conspiracies: "If things can be leaked, they will."...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[infamous]

they have a secret agenda for their many secret agendas!

 

Hummm......................another one liner!!!

[Turtle]

___Exactly Buff, & this time I'm the leaker. What have your JPL buds had to say? No matter if they're curt rebufs or chortling. If you haven't already, ask them to look at the image & give their opinion.

___ :Alien:

[Buffy]

___Exactly Buff, & this time I'm the leaker. What have your JPL buds had to say? No matter if they're curt rebufs or chortling. If you haven't already, ask them to look at the image & give their opinion.

Only one response so far: it was a chortle and had the same question several of us had: the two images are completely different, one is not a doctored version of the other.... So we're all still a bit confused as to where the proof is. I don't think we doubt your integrity though, which is sterling around here...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Turtle]

___GETE I'm the one chortling now. You are right; in the first post where I put links I linked to a different shot on SOL33. :Alien: The image is there unchanged. Speck o' dust no doubt.

___To quote Emily Latella from SNL, "Never mind".

[Tormod]

___Pope or no Pope, NASA has & does hide information & pictures from us; the opportunity to show that with this image now is passed. :)

 

I can't believe how badly you people treat the media folks over at NASA. They keep pumping out images at an unbelievable rate - and most often the RAW images are available for anyone to see before they are worked on.

 

Here in Europe we're lucky if the European Space Agency releases an image a week from Mars Express.

 

Come on, Turtle... :Alien:

[Turtle]

___I think several things are at play here, but in large part it is how the US government has time after time used us for experiments. From nuclear fallout tests on unsuspecting populations, to germ & chemical tests on unsuspecting populations, to satellite surveilance, etc. NASA is more than popular space & science projects for discovery & they do as they are told.

___It is a sad thing to me Tormod especially since NASA & their projects are the single most influence is stimulating my interest in science, space, & astronomy when I was a child.

___Clearly I was mistaken in specifics of this post; flat out looked at the wrong picture; nonetheless, there is a current of suspicion over here concerning NASA that is in no small part earned. It is unfortunate the NASA media folks take the heat when they are only releasing what they have been cleared to release, but its partly due to the higher ups not making themselves available.

___I have a US view & I find it very interesting how you put that in perspective Tormod from a European view. Why does it take them so long to release stuff over there? Is it red tape, bungling, secrecy, or what?

___All in all, with all its foibles, whether it seems so or not, I am an ardent supporter of NASA & I applaud their successes.

[Buffy]

Tormod and I have very different experiences from what you've had. I've known some of the top people at JPL, and the place is more like a college campus than a government installation. Moreover, in distribution of information, Nasa really spits it all out. You have live feeds available both on the web and via satellite if you've got a dish of all sorts of stuff going on 24 hours a day. From mission control to camera feeds at Pads 34A&B. JPL does feed the raw images out, and in real time if you get permission (available to press and schools). Its unbelieveably open. The times they do shut down have to do with personal privacy, which ought to be understandable. Where they have screwed up, there's been more than enough openness to expose the dirty laundry when it needed to be, even if its been painful with a lot of CYA activity that has more to do with preserving careers than it does with anti-UFO conspiracies (and as I've said, many of them think its their job to find little gray men). It is a bureaucracy, but its a heck of a long way from Defense, CIA, State and other departments that can be argued really do damage with their secrecy.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Turtle]

___Here is a link to a document obtained through the freedom of information act that clearly delineates the militarization of spce.

http://www.blackvault.com/documents/space/historydec93/dec93history0.htm

___I'm not saying it happens (secrecy & deception) all the time or that everyone knows, but that it does happen some times & only a few know. Large groups of people can & do keep secrets, for example the Manhattan Project.

[Tormod]

Large groups of people can & do keep secrets, for example the Manhattan Project.

 

Granted, but that was a unique kind of project and most people did not know what everyone else worked with. It's not like big organisations have a "common" knowledge of what they are doing. I don't buy into conspiracy theories...

 

As for why things are so slow here in Europe - I think politics is part of it. It is important for some people to control the flow of information because it is the only thing they feel they can control. It is also a complete lack of understanding about who is paying for what. In the States NASA releases everything into the public domain (ie, back to the tac payers) immediately - although not every center under the NASA umbrella is equally good at it, they are mostly quite incredible.

 

Here in Europe they don't seem to understand that by not releasing much more information at a much higher rate, ESA is actually working against the public's access to information which should be considered public domain. It takes ages for stories to appear on the ESA website, and when they do, the quality is not quite what it should be. News need to be fresh - it's not enough to release an image a week from Mars Express when we could have had thousands available already (compare it to Malin Space Center's 187,000 images from the Mars Global Surveyor!!).

 

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/

 

But to ESA's defence I know they struggle with budget cutbacks, multiple offices where noone knows who is responsible for what - a direct result of trying to make 16 countries cooperate about something as expensive as space exploration and space science. There is a lot of frustration and it will probably take a long time to work out better strategies and also make the countries cooperate more.

 

Remember the Beagle 2 incident. When it was lost, ESA was quite open about the fact that the probe was most likely lost and that they would investigate. Then we heard nothing more until a report was released a few months back, putting all the blame on the project management in Britain. Compare that to the Genesis accident, where the solar plasma collector crashed into the desert in full view of global media! NASA handled that impeccably as far as I'm concerned.

[Buffy]

Large groups of people can & do keep secrets, for example the Manhattan Project.

Haha! You're kidding right? Stalin knew all about it!!!!! When Truman told him at Yalta we "had a secret weapon" he all but said "yeah, I know" later confirmed by many Russian historians.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Turtle]

___Bluffing Buff; he knew something, but not enough. If he had he would have threatened Truman right back with it. It took them years to catch up.

___As to conspiracy theories...well, they are just that until evidence is forthcoming. Keep in mind these theories abound because conspiracy abounds; it's not like it doesn't happen. This is why we have laws in place to address conspiracy.

___To think all conspiracys are known is just as naive as to think all theories posited are true. I think it is not only our right, but responsibility to question the supposed "authorities" inasmuch as we may agree that power corupts. This all may have nothing to do with UFO's or aliens, but money.

___NASA may be better than ESA concerning data release, but they are no less secretive if (when) money or power is at stake.

[infamous]

___Bluffing Buff; he knew something, but not enough. If he had he would have threatened Truman right back with it. It took them years to catch up.

___As to conspiracy theories...well, they are just that until evidence is forthcoming. Keep in mind these theories abound because conspiracy abounds; it's not like it doesn't happen. This is why we have laws in place to address conspiracy.

___To think all conspiracys are known is just as naive as to think all theories posited are true. I think it is not only our right, but responsibility to question the supposed "authorities" inasmuch as we may agree that power corupts. This all may have nothing to do with UFO's or aliens, but money.

___NASA may be better than ESA concerning data release, but they are no less secretive if (when) money or power is at stake.

 

I agree completely Turtle; When I was in the military, I was assigned to a unit of the Army Security Agency. If you think we don't have a multitude of secrets to keep, you are being simply naive. After 40 years, I'm still not allowed to talk about the work I was involved with. NASA may be more forthcoming than most government agencies, but take it from me, there is a much greater volume of classified material compared aganist the information we are allowed to examine. Consider this; The Freedom of Information Act is just about toothless when it comes to information that the government is dead set on protecting. All of the so-called conspiracies we hear about may be just fantasies, but there are underlying secret agendas that we will probably never know anything about.

[Buffy]

Down, boys. There's lots of secrets. IMHO, 99% of them are "uninteresting" to the general public--the guys who want them would kill for them--but they're basically "operational intelligence" or "means and methods". They do have long life spans even (thus the 40 year covenants that just about anyone with security clearance needs to sign), but by far the most important thing is: there are really good reasons to keep them secret, and the people we need to trust to keep them that way, *believe* in them being kept. There's *no* incentive to let them out. The biggest exception is "the enemy" contrary to Turtle's claim, the KGB did in fact have a couple of agents inside Manhattan with direct access to the research division. This explains why it did only take them a year and a half to explode their own fission device, and the KGB records exposing the infiltration have been released. This is not speculation.

 

Now what I find most interesting about studying these secrets is that the public is the last to know, so I *do* share both of your's disgust at the waste of your tax dollars. Some of these counter-intelligence folks we have sound like the Keystone Cops--just look at the Walker family and Robert Hansen, and we get screwed coming and going: we pay for them to let the horse out of the barn, then we pay for it to be covered up. The stuff that's been coming out of the KGB archives makes it look like we had almost *no* secrets that the KGB did not know about, although the converse may be true as well.

 

Now the Keystone Cops characteristic is what keeps secrecy from completely getting out of hand. Do you really think, that with *all* of the resources available to the President of the United States, that we'd have seen Watergate or Irangate or Monicagate? What's wrong with these *all* is that the people involved with the secrecy operations *by definition* are honest people, and these are the first people to leak when they see A) something they know is wrong and :) they know that its really not a good thing, nor will they be able to sleep at night if they're just "good nazis" and keep it quiet. Thus my law above...

 

Now at the same time, there have always been very paranoid control freak types at the pentagon, cia and state, and these guys have the best apparatus and the worst record, and keeping up the pressure is a good thing. Beware of the effect of crying wolf without solid evidence though, because it just creates holes that they can exploit: like the UFO phenomenon which was exploited both in the US and USSR to cover up secret aircraft development work. The alien abduction folks probably set back the FOIA crusaders 20 years, and not just on UFO materials but everywhere because the authorities could just dismiss requests as "being from a bunch of loonies."

 

THAT brings me back to why I rail against stomping on JPL. Nasa as Tormod and I argued above is incredibly open, and I get testy about JPL because its the most open of an open agency. You scream "flying saucers on mars cover up!" at *them* of all people, and all you do is lose your credibility on issues like lack of full disclosure on the rationale for what's being done to the shuttle post-Columbia, and its bad for all of us.

 

:Alien: ...and I *never* use the rant smilie!

 

<gets down off of high horse/>Whew! Feel better now!

 

Conspiratorially,

Buffy

[Turtle]

___I apologize for my error. This thread now belongs in the new strange claims forum.

[paultrr]

I agree completely Turtle; When I was in the military, I was assigned to a unit of the Army Security Agency. If you think we don't have a multitude of secrets to keep, you are being simply naive. After 40 years, I'm still not allowed to talk about the work I was involved with. NASA may be more forthcoming than most government agencies, but take it from me, there is a much greater volume of classified material compared aganist the information we are allowed to examine. Consider this; The Freedom of Information Act is just about toothless when it comes to information that the government is dead set on protecting. All of the so-called conspiracies we hear about may be just fantasies, but there are underlying secret agendas that we will probably never know anything about.

 

I can varify from my own experience about the freedom of information act being rather toothless. I would also agree that there are things our government knows about and has worked on the public at best only knows rummors about. Some of this I know first hand and was there. Some of it I had friends who worked on those projects.The more classified stuff for the most part is still classified to this day and well hidden from the freedom of information approach. Some of what is no longer classified is so well chopped up into fragments here and there, so to speak, that it would require an exact roadmap to find such via that act.

 

Another thing that plays into all this is scientific research done by say other government agencies outside of NASA belongs totally to the government. Has anyone ever noticed that some of the more odd scientists who once worked with the government tend to be more open as a whole to certain subjects than the rest? There is a reason they are that way. I know one out there who's big into the Bohm interpretation of QM who's labeled a crackpot for his views. Yet, this guy worked with the DoD and still does from time to time. He has the views he does because of his experience. I grant he goes way out on a limb on some issues. But there is a real core of truth in what he says that he learned via all that work there. I do wish the government was more forth coming. But then again some of the stuff would scare the hell out of the public if it was known. Some of the stuff would bring down legal court cases on the government too. But as to NASA, they are more open and publish in one format or another everything they know for a fact. If NASA today had evidence of intelligent life out there they would publish such. On that Buffy is dead right. NASA scientists as a whole do not have some smoking guy sitting there ready to cover up everything. Real life is not the X-files at least when it comes to NASA.

[Tormod]

Real life is not the X-files at least when it comes to NASA.

 

Now, the Norwegian Space Centre, on the other hand...ooooh, I could tell you but I'd have to move the US to Mars. :Alien: