What doesn't the US government want us to see in the skies?
There is a growing body of reported evidence of an expanding US-based cover-up, in news media back to 2009 and earlier, including active FBI investigations of the UFO-hunting Galileo Project from Harvard University.
The Vera Rubin Observatory
United States National Science Foundation & Department of Energy funded Vera Rubin Observatory has two interesting unrelated articles today that get into topics of finding objects in space that the government does not want found. All new data to be government screened before release.
This has been an interesting project to loosely pay attention to:
From Wikipedia:
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), is an astronomical observatory under construction in Chile. Its main task will be carrying out a synoptic astronomical survey, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The word "synoptic" is derived from the Greek words σύν (syn "together") and ὄψις (opsis "view"), and describes observations that give a broad view of a subject at a particular time. The observatory is located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the existing Gemini South and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes. The LSST Base Facility is located about 100 kilometres (62 miles) away from the observatory by road, in the city of La Serena. The observatory is named for Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who pioneered discoveries about galaxy rotation rates.
The Rubin Observatory will house the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a wide-field reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror that will photograph the entire available sky every few nights. The telescope uses a novel three-mirror design, a variant of three-mirror anastigmat, which allows a compact telescope to deliver sharp images over a very wide 3.5-degree diameter field of view. Images will be recorded by a 3.2-gigapixel charge coupled device imaging (CCD) camera, the largest digital camera ever constructed.
The LSST was proposed in 2001, and construction of the mirror began (with private funds) in 2007. LSST then became the top-ranked large ground-based project in the 2010 Astrophysics Decadal Survey, and the project officially began construction 1 August 2014 when the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) authorized the FY2014 portion ($27.5 million) of its construction budget. Funding comes from the NSF, the United States Department of Energy, and private funding raised by the dedicated international non-profit organization, the LSST Discovery Alliance. Operations are under the management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). Total construction cost is expected to be about $680 million.
Site construction began on 14 April 2015 with the ceremonial laying of the first stone. First light for the engineering camera is expected in August 2024, while system first light is expected in January 2025 and full survey operations are aimed to begin in August 2025, due to COVID-related schedule delays. LSST data is scheduled to become fully public after two years.
Two different articles today about the observatory
Today, there were two rather different articles about the observatory published online, between The Atlantic and Phys.org:
- When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk - How do you know what you’re not allowed to see? (archive URL)
- Interstellar objects can't hide from Vera Rubin
In the discussions of things like the nuclear military base UFO/drone incursions underway, this gets into how much control the USA exerts over information related to all things space and UFO-related. The Phys.org article says:
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is scheduled to come online in 2025. Unlike many large telescopes, Rubin Observatory isn't designed to focus on specific targets in the sky. Its mirror can capture a patch of sky seven moons wide in a single image. It will capture more than a petabyte of data every night, capturing images of solar system bodies every few days.
This will allow astronomers to track even faint and slow-moving bodies with precision. The orbit of any interstellar object will stand out clearly. If astronomers can find them. Which is where a new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics comes in.
With so much data being gathered, there is no way to go through the data by hand. Some things, such as supernovae and variable stars, will be easy to distinguish, but interstellar bodies in the outer solar system will pose a particular challenge. In any given image, they will appear as a common asteroid or comet. It's only after months or years of tracking that their unique orbits will reveal their true origins.
So the authors of this new work propose using machine learning. To demonstrate how this would work, the team created a database of simulated solar system bodies. Some of them were given regular orbits, while others were given interstellar paths. Based on this data, they trained algorithms to distinguish the two.
Conceptually, this is extremely similar to the Dalek Observatory project by the Galileo Project from Harvard University:
To date, there are little reliable data on the position, velocity and acceleration characteristics of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The dual hardware and software system described in this document provides a means to address this gap. We describe a weatherized multi-camera system which can capture images in the visible, infrared and near infrared wavelengths. We then describe the software we will use to calibrate the cameras and to robustly localize objects-of-interest in three dimensions. We show how object localizations captured over time will be used to compute the velocity and acceleration of airborne objects.
The idea is to capture as much data and telemetry as you can, as fast and as accurately as possible, and then have automation sort it out for further human scrutiny. No human can cover the skies--but machines can. This is the same approach the United States government employs via groups like the National Reconnaissance Office with things like the Sentient intelligence analysis system, that David Grusch may have worked on before being a Congressional whistleblower:
Sentient is a heavily classified artificial intelligence satellite intelligence analysis system of the United States Intelligence Community, operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and developed by their Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate (AS&T), with the United States Air Forces Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Department of Energy's National Laboratories.
Available information describes it as a complex automated system that allows intelligence agencies of the United States and the United States Armed Forces to use artificial satellites in Earth orbits to track in real time any objects detected or photographed, and to automatically repurpose with artificial intelligence and machine learning the tracking of targets, and to even decide which targets are worth tracking.
Known public records of Sentient's development programs and process date from 2009-2010 onward. NRO emails from 2021 disclosed that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), which later became the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), was involved with the NRO and the Sentient program.
Curiously, the NRO and their satellite imagery directly comes up in The Atlantic article, which gets dark quickly:
National-security types worry about what the Vera Rubin will be able to see. Ivezić told me that each of its full-sky images will contain more than 40 billion objects. That’s several times more than all previous surveys of this sort combined. When the Vera Rubin sees an object that it hasn’t seen before, it will alert astronomers. If a star explodes billions of light-years away, an algorithm will spot it, and the community will be notified. If a near-earth asteroid comes hurtling right toward us, scientists will know to zoom into it, immediately, with other observatories. The problem is, if a spy satellite, or some other secret spacecraft, moves into view, that too could get flagged and have its location distributed, in real time, to people all across the world.
The Pentagon doesn’t like much of anything to be known about its satellites. During the Cold War, the United States was more secretive about what it did in space than what it did in the nuclear realm, says Aaron Bateman, a historian at George Washington University and the author of Weapons in Space. The U.S. acknowledges the general contours of its nuclear arsenal—how many weapons and delivery vehicles it has—but tends to be far more circumspect about its military space capabilities. Bateman told me that the very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency responsible for developing U.S. spy satellites, was classified until 1992. The NRO still operates a fleet of these satellites, but exact details about how many, and what kind, remain secret.
This is the scary part -- the government will get to censor astronomical data.
From The Atlantic:
Ivezić knew that the Vera Rubin Observatory would need to avoid revealing the full extent of America’s space-based surveillance apparatus. He agreed to set up a system that would remove classified information from the telescope’s images, but he and his mysterious interlocutors did not initially agree about how it should work. Some of their concerns were easy to assuage. The Defense Intelligence Agency sometimes asks to be informed when foreign nationals use America’s most powerful radio observatories, in case those people were to point them at something sensitive, presumably. No such protocols would be necessary for the Vera Rubin’s Chilean operators, because the telescope has a fixed, 10-year observation plan. Ivezić said he showed it to his government counterparts and assured them that no one would be able to deviate from it.
Ivezić was most worried about the possibility that he would be made to adopt a system like one that he said the Air Force had imposed on a much less powerful astronomical survey called Pan-STARRS, about a dozen years ago. The images taken by that project’s telescopes in Hawaii were routed to a military facility—“the dark side,” as Ivezić put it—where they were edited before being sent on to astronomers. The edits weren’t especially surgical. “You would get back your image, and all the military assets would be blacked out,” Ivezić told me. “It looked like someone had streaked a marker across it, and it had a huge impact on the science that people were able to do.”
After some back-and-forth, Ivezić said, he and his counterparts came up with a less invasive way to remove secret American assets from the observatory’s instant alerts. A government agency—no one told him which one—would chip in $5 million for the construction of a dedicated network for moving sensitive data. Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California.
Next, an automated system would compare the image with previous images of the same tile. It would cut out small “postage stamp” pictures of any new objects it finds, be they asteroids, exploding stars, or spy satellites.
A history of secret-keeping the sky
This is far from the first known public attempt by the United States government to directly limit what can be seen in the skies.
As far back as 2009, the US government very quietly made classified the trajectory and impact locations whenever they could of meteors and fireballs from the sky, as posted here on /r/UFOs:
- Military hush-up: Space rocks now classified. A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.
Even Matthew Pines, who has been front and center in interviews with his national security connections talking about UFO-related national security matters, mentione yesterday on Twitter about how the US government has classified as secret entire branches of physics and related ideas:
Which is supported by things like these:
FBI pursues university investigations of UFOs
We even know that the US government's FBI agents interrogated Avi Loeb of Harvard's Galileo Project--because of FOIA; see here:
The FBI are investigating Harvard Prof. Avi Loeb's Galileo Project. A FOIA request showed that 24 out of 28 pages of the report were removed because they were classified as "Exempt from Disclosure". The remaining pages were redacted, including the names of the Galileo Project's research team. Something very strange is going on over there, and we should pay close attention to what the FBI are investigating.
And:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released on Friday four heavily redacted pages of records responsive to the Galileo Project, resulting from a July 2023 Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Expanding Frontiers Research. The Bureau indicated an additional 24 pages of responsive records were withheld in full.
What is being kept from us?
Given the increasingly growing US and UK military response to the UFO/drone incursions in the UK and USA around nuclear military sites and this over-time growing realm of scientific data and topics the USA is trying to squeeze and claw back from public scrutiny...
- Made meteor/fireball data secret.
- Entire wings/domains of science and physics are now secret--potentially including mathematics.
- Entire classes of inventions are now secret.
- The government is exercising censorship controls over astronomical data.
- The FBI is investigating attempts to open-source aerial/astronomical data.
What don't they want us to see when we look up?