To be be very surprised that USA have not denied the "objects" they shot down could be alien in origin?

[Bjarnum]

Because surely they must know what they are by now. Very odd.

Depends on how you define alien - out of this world, or just not from your country

They wouldn't be very smart aliens if they can cover the vastness of space from the nearest inhabitable planets and yet get spotted the minute they arrive. I suspect they aren't denying it because nobody in their right mind would believe they are alien in the first place. And it's pointless saying anything for those not in their right minds as they will believe what they want.

If you read what was actually said, they basically just said they just aren’t confirming what it is as they haven’t found any yet - they’ll leave it until the intelligence has figured it out rather than making speculations. The media seems to be focussing on that part for click bait. I think they are Chinese. I’m in China and there’s no mention of it in the news - if it was totally innocent, I’m sure it would have been in local news like it is in the news in other countries. All countries do surveillance on each other. This is just a new type of surveillance and the US didn’t know about these balloons at all until recently so it’s not surprising that they don’t know all the details about them yet. China does an awful lot of surveillance.

I think it's a clever way of saying "fuck off, it's sensitive!" "Oh, you know, might be alien!" Type of thing I'd say if the kids were asking me stupid questions.

They're Chinese. It's willy waving. How insulting to the Chinese for the US to care so little about them to pretend they're green creatures from Mars. It's all a game.

I expect they don’t want to get drawn into stupid speculative argument. But given the potential level of stupid speculation, they’ll probably have to say something at some point.

www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html

Well, the US government has set up a task force to look into UAP sightings like this one, which they say remain unexplained. So that May account for the change in messaging.

They must have known people would latch on to the part where the military wouldn't rule out it being extra terrestrial.

Here's Obama talking about it.

There is a chance that intelligent life in the universe came to visit us at this difficult time with a message to humans and the Americans bloody well destroyed it. Typical.

I mean, they had string hanging off them. Don't think string could survive entry through our atmosphere...

The Raelians have even built an embassy where they could have been welcomed and introduced to Earth buy hey ho shoot them down. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism

Oh good grief.........🙄🙄🙄

If extra terrestrial came to earth to look for intelligent life, they'd have to spend a long time on the sorting process.

*terrestrials

Why bother?

People will believe whatever they want anyway

It’s only just after 10 a.m. and already I have my Mumsnet poster of the day.

Thank you @vera99.

In the 1940s and 50s a lot of secret missile testing went on all over the world and the US in particular was happy to have UFO speculation to muddy the waters. The most famous incident was at Roswell when press reported that an alien spacecraft had crash landed and had been recovered by the US authorities. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

its not just that… I listened to the pentagon update last night. They aren’t saying much at all. Very tight lipped.

They're not saying anything because they're dealing with extremely high-level international diplomacy and one wrong word could be disastrous. Obviously 🙄

hahaha. Americuh bad

I'm not up to speed on spy satellites but haven't all the major powers got kit that can virtually read a book from space and so the need for lower altitude surveillance. I remember Trump tweeted out a highly classified photo of an Iranian missile blowing up on the launch pad and the detail was absolutely stunning. They had to quickly declassify the photo once they realised what he had done.

With all the satellites and tech China have I just don’t buy them needing to send drones personally.

^ not for intelligence at any rate

I saw a news story that an asteroid exploded over the English Channel last night. Lots of weird balloons hanging around over America. An alien invasion or ww3 would be just the ticket after the brilliant few years we've had.

Exactly, they’re under suspicion if they deny, under suspicion if they don’t comment…. What are they meant to do?

Only wheeling out ET and holding a press conference would satisfy some people and it’s highly likely they can’t do that so it doesn’t leave them with much to add to that line of conversation.