Tag: Silicon Valley

This Silicon Valley Startup is Dedicated to Detecting UFOs Off the California Coast

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Article by MJ Banias                       October 23, 2019                         (vice.com)

• A team of venture capitalists, university professors, and military veterans are launching a non-profit project to track UFOs (or the new term UAP – Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) off the coast of California. Based in Oregon, UAP eXpeditions will provide “the public service of field testing new UAP related technologies.”

• Along with some of the Silicon Valley UFO Hunters, UAP eXpeditions will pioneer the ability to predict, find, observe, and document UAP for study and analysis. Says Kevin Day, the group’s founder and CEO, the company will use “classical observation techniques, by trained observers and scientists, while using the latest experimental technologies—in the right places and the right times.”

• Day is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer and radar operator who served on the USS Princeton during the 2004 “Nimitz Tic Tac UFO Incident”. He has also appeared on the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation and Discovery Channel’s Contact.

• Day recalls tracking the infamous “Tic Tac” UFOs for several days around Catalina Island off the coast of California using the USS Princeton’s advanced radar system. Now, he believes that these objects continue to operate along the same trajectory and “migrate” from Catalina Island (off of LA) south along the California coast to Guadalupe Island (off of the Baja Peninsula of Mexico).

• Day believes that his experience tracking these unidentified objects has given him special abilities such as “advanced cognition”.

• UAP eXpeditions intends to put state-of-the-art cameras, experimental monitoring devices, and other high tech gear into the field and attempt to track unknown aerial objects off the coast of California. This way, the company can “offer technology developers a way to test their new tech at no direct cost to them.”

• Leading the UAP eXpeditions’ team of scientists is Dr. Kevin Knuth, a former scientist with NASA’s Ames Research Center, now an associate professor of physics at the University of Albany specializing in machine learning and the study of exoplanets. Knuth says, “[T]he goal of the expedition is to give us some ground truth. We aim to try to observe these objects directly, and record them using multiple imaging modalities.”

• First, the team “will obtain current satellite imagery of the area and determine whether these anomalous objects can be observed. We will monitor these satellite images both manually and using machine learning and build up a database of detections, classifications, and any observed patterns of activity,” says Knuth. Second, in about a year the team will anchor a large boat off the coast of California loaded with various cameras and sensors to detect and record anomalous aerial activity. If the satellite imagery identifies a cluster of unknown objects, the team will go hunting for UFOs.

• “We plan to have high-quality drones in the air with imaging capabilities. We are looking into IR imaging, as well as detectors for x-ray, gamma-ray and custom-built neutron detectors (which are designed to look for dark matter),” says Knuth. “The key to ensuring consistency is reproducibility and this requires additional study.”

• It is, admittedly, a bit of a wild goose chase and will cost a boatload of cash. While Day’s team is working on grant proposals and potential crowd funding, they know that the vast majority of funding will have to be private. Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and MIT technologist Rizwan Virk and the Toronto-based CEO of the quantum computing company, ReactiveQ, Deep Prasad have both signed on to help with securing investment for the project.

• Other individuals on the team include Luis Elizondo, former Pentagon staffer who quit his job to hunt UFOs with Tom DeLonge; Sean Cahill, the former Chief Master-at-Arms who served aboard the USS Princeton during the 2004 Nimitz Incident; and optical physicist and UFO researcher Bruce Macabee.

• Knuth states, “The failure to study these (UFO) phenomena scientifically has resulted in a state of ignorance, which is unacceptable.”

 

With this summer’s revelation that the US Navy considers UFOs and “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs) to be real, a team of venture capitalists, university professors, and military veterans are launching a project to track UFOs off the coast of California.

Kevin Day

UAP eXpeditions is a non-profit group based in Oregon that will “field a top-notch group of uber-experienced professionals providing the public service of field testing new UAP related technologies.” With some of the Silicon Valley UFO Hunters, UAP eXpeditions will pioneer the ability to predict, find, observe, and document UAP for study and analysis. They will use “classical observation techniques, by trained observers and scientists, while using the latest experimental technologies—in the right places and the right times,” Kevin Day, the group’s founder and CEO, wrote in a Facebook post viewed by Motherboard.

              Dr. Kevin Knuth

Day, who has appeared on the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation and Discovery Channel’s Contact, is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer and radar operator. Day served in the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group on the USS Princeton during the 2004 infamous “Nimitz UFO Incident” which was reported by The New York Times in December of 2017.

He recalls tracking the infamous “Tic Tac” UFOs for several days around Catalina Island off the coast of California using the USS Princeton’s advanced radar system. Now, he believes that these objects continue to operate along the same trajectory and “migrate” from Catalina Island south along the California coast.

The company’s white paper is pretty wild. It asks, “Do fleets of UAP ‘migrate’ from Catalina Island to Guadalupe Island with a certain frequency? And if so, how well do whale songs correlate, if at all, to UAP appearances?” It’s unclear how whale songs are relevant here, but let’s move along.

Day, who believes that his experience tracking these objects has led to some curious special abilities, such as “advanced cognition” told Motherboard that the organization is hoping to “offer technology developers a way to test their new tech at no direct cost to them.” Using state of the art cameras and other experimental monitoring devices, the idea is to put this high tech gear into the field and attempt to track unknown aerial objects off the coast of California.

Leading the team of scientists is Dr. Kevin Knuth, a former scientist with NASA’s Ames Research Center, now an associate professor of physics at the University of Albany. Knuth specializes in machine learning and the study of exoplanets.
While the organization and the project is still in its infancy, Knuth told Motherboard that “the goal of the expedition is to give us some ground truth. We aim to try to observe these objects directly, and record them using multiple imaging modalities.”

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How the Increasing Belief in Extraterrestrials Inspires Our Real World

by D.W. Pasulka                  March 11, 2019                     (vice.com)

• It used to be that mainstream scientists such as Stephen Hawking would describe believers in UFOs and extraterrestrials as fringe “kranks”. But today, many respectable scientists not only believe in ET and UFOs, but claim to have been in communication with them, or have even had a close encounter. The article’s author, Diana Walsh Pasulka, has written a book entitled: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, which reveals how the increasing belief in nonhuman intelligence inspires our science and entertainment.

• Jacques Vallée is a computer scientist who has long been open to the reality of the extraterrestrial presence on and around the earth. He consulted on Steven Spielberg’s movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he paved the way for other Silicon Valley scientists and biotechnologists to draw from alien technology, using technology from alien spacecraft crash sites and information from mental downloads.

• Technology entrepreneur Rizwan Virk claims to have spoken with top researchers at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard who have actually seen alien “artifacts”. Virk also says that he accompanied several research scientists to an alien spaceship crash site in New Mexico, which was not the Roswell crash.

• Pasulka maintains that religions are social phenomena that emerge from their environments. Today’s digital environment (through films, phones, and computers) is producing new forms of religious beliefs which take for granted that extraterrestrials are in regular communication with humans on earth. The difference between these “religious” beliefs is that traditional religions require blind belief without real proof. The belief in extraterrestrial intelligence interacting with earth humans, however, is something that will be proven true.

• Until now, scientists and researchers have shied away from expressing their belief in an extraterrestrial presence, due to what Pasulka calls “the John Mack Effect.” Dr. John Mack was a Pulitzer Prize winning research psychiatrist working at Harvard University. In the 1990s Mack began a study of people who believed that they were in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and found that they were not delusional, but were perfectly normal. Still, Harvard University questioned his motives in an internal investigation, and portrayed him as a ‘kook’. This produced a chilling effect related to the study of UFOs as scholars became unwilling to risk their reputations to study the phenomena.

• However, a recent presentation by Garry Nolan of Stanford University at the Harvard Medical School’s Consortium for Space Genetics, argued that the people who would be best equipped to explore space would be those whose brains were attuned to nontraditional forms of knowledge, and who have the ‘hyperintuition’ – the ability to know things beyond normal means, like a sixth sense. These are the types of people who should be chosen to investigate extraterrestrial destinations, says Nolan.

• For her book, Pasulka interviewed a biotechnologist named Thomas, who works in the field of cancer research. Thomas has introduced ‘implant technology’ to the field, using implant devices etched with a laser and coded so that human tissue recognizes and adapts to them. But he made a point not to reveal to his fellow scientists that he got the idea of an implant from alleged extraterrestrial technology. Says Thomas, “It would have been so far removed from their own belief systems that it would have been impossible for them to implement my vision. So, I keep that part secret.”

• The potential of almost unimaginable space infrastructures has created a new form of religion based on possible realism. Given the ways in which religious and spiritual beliefs develop, the emerging connection between Silicon Valley technopreneurs and alien technology is not surprising. As Vallée said, ‘the apparent absurdity of the claims does not mean they are not true’.

 

I first met Thomas* through a mutual friend. By most societal standards, Thomas would be considered “normal”—he’s a successful biotechnologist with a partner and kid, he enjoys long walks on the weekend and eating out. In his work, he helps create technologies that help people recover from illnesses, such as cancer. But the inspiration for some of Thomas’s most successful technologies—such as implant devices that are etched with a laser and coded so that human tissue recognizes them as itself, and not a foreign agent, or the use of an ancient stem cell that appears to help alleviate pain associated with cancer—is not something he openly shares. Why? Because, he explained to me, the implants were inspired by “nonhuman intelligence.” In other words, it wasn’t his own brilliant idea, nor was it another human’s. He believes that it came from a supernatural source, perhaps extraterrestrial.

His research protocol was, to be blunt, not transparent. He never told any of the scientists he recruited to his team where he acquired the idea for the new technology, because, according to Thomas, “First, they would have thought I was really weird, and second—and most importantly—it would have prevented them from being successful in implementing the necessary steps to create the technology. It would have been so far removed from their own belief systems that it would have been impossible for them to implement my vision. So, I keep that part secret.”

     Diana Walsh Pasulka

It has long been the case that people who believe in UFOs or extraterrestrials are characterized, as Stephen Hawking has described them, as “cranks” or fringe dwellers. Despite that association, some of the world’s brilliant, Nobel Prize–winning minds, among them the mathematician John Nash and the biochemist Kary Mullis, have had experiences they perceive to be close encounters. The University of Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, famous for his advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as his disbelief in God and religions, nonetheless has suggested that human civilization may have been seeded by an alien civilization.

More strikingly, according to research by psychologists, belief in extraterrestrials is increasing in unprecedented ways. I myself found this to be the case, especially among contemporary technopreneurs (entrepreneurs who use technology to make an innovation or fill a need), just like Thomas. A belief that was once on the fringe now appears to be the new black. Spending a day with high-functioning believers—as I have done several times in the past few months as research for my book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology—reveals a lot about how the increasing belief in nonhuman intelligence inspires our real world as well as our entertainment.

                 Riz Virk

Perhaps the first technopreneur who has long been “out” concerning his belief in UFOs is Jacques Vallée, who worked on ARPANET (the proto-internet), a program funded by the military. In fact, he was working on this new technology while experimenting with telepathic phenomena, what some would call “woo-woo” science. Vallée was so well known for his study of UFOs that Steven Spielberg asked him to consult on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the French scientist played by François Truffaut in the movie is based on Vallée). He was one of the first vocal technologists to advocate for the study of UFOs, and he paved the way for a slew of other Silicon Valley scientists and biotechnologists who believe that the secret to their success is alien technology—in other words, artifacts found at alleged alien spacecraft crash sites or information provided to them through mental downloads.

                            Garry Nolan

The gaming expert, technologist, and investor Rizwan Virk confirms this new direction in the belief and practices associated with UFOs. In an article on the website Hacker Noon, he wrote, “I can say that I have personally spoken to researchers from top universities (Stanford, MIT, Harvard) who have seen the “artifacts” that the article references, and other similar ones that are even more secretive (and perhaps more functional).” In my own research, I have also met scientists who believe in these artifacts; I’ve even accompanied several of them on an expedition to an alleged alien crash site in New Mexico, which, I was told, was “not Roswell.” But I couldn’t tell you where, exactly, we were, as I was blindfolded so I wouldn’t be able to identify the location.

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An AI God is Already Under Development

by Paul Seaburn        October 5, 2017         (mysteriousuniverse.org)

• Anthony Levandowski, the founder of self-driving Google cars and Otto trucks wants to “promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence.”

• Levandowski has established “Way of the Future”, a non-profit religious corporation that worships this Godhead.

• A friend said that Levandowski “had this very weird motivation about robots taking over the world—like actually taking over, in a military sense. It was like [he wanted] to be able to control the world.”

• Artificial intelligence is feared by scientists and technology gurus like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk.

• Silicon Valley sees the singularity – when robots or AI surpass human intelligence – to be not too far off.

• All of sudden, jokes about “AI Overlords” aren’t so funny anymore.

 

“To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”

That’s the mission statement of Way of the Future, a nonprofit religious corporation founded by Anthony Levandowski, the god of self-driving vehicles. He’s the engineer who built Google’s autonomous car and founded Otto, a self-driving truck company that was acquired by Uber. He’s now being sued by Alphabet, the parent company of Goggle, for allegedly stealing trade secrets and infringing on patents. Perhaps that’s why he needs an AI god.

“He had this very weird motivation about robots taking over the world—like actually taking over, in a military sense. It was like [he wanted] to be able to control the world, and robots were the way to do that. He talked about starting a new country on an island. Pretty wild and creepy stuff. And the biggest thing is that he’s always got a secret plan, and you’re not going to know about it.”

That quote from an engineer friend is in an article in Wired and sums up Levandowski’s view on robots … and on Way of the Future. Not much is known about the company/religion. While just discovered now, Wired found that he filed the incorporation paperwork in 2015. There doesn’t appear to be a website or anything more from Levandowski, which goes along with his reputation for “secret plans.”

Anthony Levendowski

Artificial intelligence alone is already feared by scientists and technology gurus like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, who sees AI as the antithesis of conventional religion or “summoning the devil.” Others in Silicon Valley see the singularity – when robots or AI surpass human intelligence – to be not too far off. Silicon Valley is said to be moving towards transhumanism, where the human condition is transformed and improved (saved?) by technology.

Is Way of the World already working on the next phase beyond transhumanism where AI becomes a savior and a god? All of sudden, jokes about “AI overlords” aren’t so funny anymore, especially when one considers that plenty of gods destroy many humans while selecting those qualified to be saved.
Levandowski made his name developing a self-driving car which must someday make god-like decisions when in an accident situation where it has to choose who to save and who to run over. Perhaps he’s creating this new religion out of guilt because he knows what the answer will be:
“Pretty wild and creepy stuff.”

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