UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The subject of UFOs has undergone a bit of a renaissance in recent weeks, following a landmark New York Times report that detailed the Pentagon’s ongoing interest in the phenomenon. However, these recent revelations are not the only government information that has been released on the subject in the last few years, nor are they by any means the most perplexing.

And to wit, neither is the United States the only country to have revealed documents that detail its interest in UFOs. Among the most unusual UFO disclosures that have occurred since the new millennium were the release of a series of Russian Navy files in 2009, detailing a number of bizarre underwater encounters with the strange objects.

“At last!” exclaimed Phil Ewing, writing at Navy Times‘ Scoop Deck blog. “Some post-Soviet documents the world can really sink its teeth into! Enough of this people-who-the-KGB-tried-to-assassinate nonsense: The Russian Navy has declassified its records of encounters with UFOs.” According to one naval intelligence officer quoted after the release, “[The objects] are most often seen in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, in the southern part of the Bermuda Triangle, and also in the Caribbean Sea,” prompting former Russian navy officer Vladimir Azhazha to claim the documents “are of great value.”

So looking back, just what did the documents have to say on the subject, and how does it contrast with more recent dialogue on the subject of UFOs, following the release of information about a (possibly ongoing) Pentagon UFO program?

“On several occasions the instruments gave reading of material objects moving at incredible speed,” one sub commander was quoted by Wired. “Calculations showed speeds of about 230 knots, or 400 kph. Speeding so fast is a challenge even on the surface. But water resistance is much higher. It was like the objects defied the laws of physics. There’s only one explanation: the creatures who built them far surpass us in development.”

Russian language users on the popular Above Top Secret forum also managed to post translations of some of the relevant portions of the document, which included reports of strange lights that appeared to emanate from deep below the lake, which some observers had likened to light produced by electric welding:

(There is) very impressive data on the observation of a UFO in Baikal lake. (Within) the depths of the lake sailors repeatedly observed luminescence resembling searchlights and flashes similar to electric welding, as well as in the lake radius in the form of unexplained bright luminous silver discs and cylinders.

However, the most tantalizing incident that the report detailed, and one that was widely reported coinciding with the release of the Russian documents, involved an alleged incident that occurred in 1982, during which several divers were killed during a training exercise under mysterious circumstances:

In summer 1982 military divers, during their training, dived in the water of Lake Baikal several times and almost came face-to-face with underwater swimmers in their body-fitting silver jumpsuits. They looked similar to normal people, only about three meters tall. In addition, at a depth of 50 meters, (the beings) had neither an aqualung, or any other devices, but their heads were concealed in spherical helmets. Attempting to catch (the) unidentified divers ended tragically. From seven people trying to do this using a net, four became disabled and three died.

Laik Baikal as seen from satellite imagery, featuring an unusual circular area of think ice believed to have been caused by convection.

These incidents, and in particular the 1982 account involving divers that were injured or killed, are very unusual, to say the least. In truth, they have perplexed many of us for years; are they an early instance of Russian “fake news” and propaganda, which media in different countries–America in particular–bought hook, line, and sinker? Or, to the contrary, had the odd nature of the Russian releases been due to the fact that the tone of the information differed from the way U.S. government agencies might have dealt with similar disclosures (which have traditionally maintained secrecy toward the UFO subject)?

On an interesting side note, Lake Baikal has long been associated with strange phenomena and, yes, even UFOs. In 1946, Russian science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev wrote a fiction short story titled “A Visitor From Outer Space” which offered an imaginative explanation for the 1908 Tunguska Blast: it was caused by the explosion of a Martian spacecraft’s nuclear engine, as it attempted to gather water from the lake.

The U.S. Navy has also disclosed information pertaining to incidents that seem to have involved UFOs. One widely reported case involved the USS Princeton, which according to a 2004 report had been tracking mysterious objects for several weeks. Popular Mechanics reported of the incident that “two F/A-18F (twin seater) Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz were flying 100 miles off the coast of San Diego when a nearby U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser, the USS Princeton, contacted them and asked what weapons they were carrying.”

Still image from footage of one of the responding Super Hornets during the famous 2004 USS Princeton incident.

At the time, the Super Hornets were carrying unfirable AIM-9 Sidewinder “dummies,” to which the USS Princeton responded by saying, “Well, we’ve got a real-world vector for you,” which led to an interception attempt with a pair of objects, one of which had been located directly below an area of churning water, the other hovering approximately 50 feet above the surface. Neither of the unusual objects, detailed in the Popular Mechanics article, were able to be intercepted or identified. The fighters from the Nimitz were able to document parts of this interception on film, parts of which were publicly disclosed last year coinciding with the December 2017 New York Times article.

For many who ignored UFO reports such as these, and dismissed them as being far-fetched, the December 2017 New York Times article on Luis Elizondo and the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. program (along with accompanying video purporting to show the objects) was indeed revelatory. However, as such naval records obtained from both U.S. and Russian sources listed above have shown, the Times article was only the most recent installment in a long, confusing narrative involving unusual phenomenon in our skies–and our seas–for which no conclusive explanation has yet been offered.

When it comes to identifying existential threats posed by technological innovations, the popular imagination summons visions of Terminator, The Matrix, and I, Robot — dystopias ruled by robot overlords who exploit and exterminate people en masse. In these speculative futures, a combination of super-intelligence and evil intentions leads computers to annihilate or enslave the human race.

However, a new study suggests that it will be the banal applications of A.I. that will lead to severe social consequences within the next few years. The report — “Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence” — authored by 26 researchers and scientists from elite universities and tech-focused think tanks, outlines ways that current A.I. technologies threaten our physical, digital, and political security. To bring their study into focus, the research group only looked at technology that already exists or plausibly will within the next five years.

machine learning

Image recognition software has already surpassed human competence.

What the study found: A.I. systems will be likely expand existing threats, introduce new ones and change the character of them. The thesis of the report is that technological advances will make certain misdeeds easier and more worthwhile. The researchers claim that improvements in A.I. will decrease the amount of resources and expertise needed to carry out some cyber attacks, effectively lowering the barriers to crime:

The costs of attacks may be lowered by the scalable use of AI systems to complete tasks that would ordinarily require human labor, intelligence and expertise. A natural effect would be to expand the set of actors who can carry out particular attacks, the rate at which they can carry out these attacks, and the set of potential targets.

The report makes four recommendations:

1 - Policymakers should collaborate closely with technical researchers to investigate, prevent, and mitigate potential malicious uses of AI.

2 - Researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence should take the dual-use nature of their work seriously, allowing misuserelated considerations to influence research priorities and norms, and proactively reaching out to relevant actors when harmful applications are foreseeable.

3 - Best practices should be identified in research areas with more mature methods for addressing dual-use concerns, such as computer security, and imported where applicable to the case of AI.

4 - Actively seek to expand the range of stakeholders and domain experts involved in discussions of these challenges

How A.I. can make current scams smarter: example, spear phishing attacks, in which con artists pose as a target’s friend, family member, or colleague in order to gain trust and extract information and money, are already a threat. But today, they require a significant expenditure of time, energy, and expertise. As A.I. systems increase in sophistication, some of the activity required for a spear phishing attack, like collecting information about a target, may be automated. A phisher could then invest significantly less energy in each grift and target more people.

And if scammers begin to integrate A.I. into their online grifts, it may become impossible to distinguish reality from simulation. “As AI develops further, convincing chatbots may elicit human trust by engaging people in longer dialogues, and perhaps eventually masquerade visually as another person in a video chat,” the report says.

We’ve already seen the consequences of machine-generated video in the form of Deepfakes. As these technologies become more accessible and user friendly, the researchers worry that bad actors will disseminate fabricated photos, videos, and audio files. This could result in highly successful defamation campaigns with political ramifications.

neural network

In just four years, generative neural networks learned to create photorealistic human faces.

Beyond the keyboard: And potential malfeasance isn’t restricted to the internet. As we move toward the adoption of autonomous vehicles, hackers might deploy adversarial examples to fool self-driving cars into misperceiving their surroundings. “An image of a stop sign with a few pixels changed in specific ways, which humans would easily recognize as still being an image of a stop sign, might nevertheless be misclassified as something else entirely by an AI system,” the report says.

SpotMini is relentless. Credit: Boston Dynamics / Youtube.

Other threats include autonomous drones with integrated facial recognition software for targeting purposes, coordinated DOS attacks that mimic human behavior, and automated, hyper-personalized disinformation campaigns.

The report recommends that researchers consider potential malicious applications of A.I. while developing these technologies. If adequate defense measures aren’t put in place, then we may already have the technology to destroy humanity, no killer robots required.