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UFOs, lab leaks, Havana Syndrome: US intelligence's bungling at "sci" investigation

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/dan...-mysteries

INTRO (Dan Vergano): Welcome to 2021. Space aliens are roaming overhead. Russian spies are zapping American diplomats with microwave weapons. And the commies are covering up a viral bioweapon.

This is the year shaky science and government intelligence reports have collided, turning the news into the stuff of a bad thriller — three bad thrillers, actually. Declassified US Navy images of blurs on screens have triggered a UFO frenzy, boosted by breathless reporting from 60 Minutes and the New York Times. Intelligence agencies suspect that Russian agents have fired physics-defying microwave weapons at federal employees in Havana, Beijing, and Washington, DC, according to CNN and Politico. And legitimate scientific questions about whether the coronavirus could have escaped from a lab have metastasized into theories about Chinese bioweapons.

In the absence of any real evidence, US intelligence reports — typically shrouded in secrecy — are fueling a flurry of speculation over today’s biggest scientific mysteries. Yet history has shown that intelligence agencies are not equipped to quickly solve scientific problems, and their findings look more likely to spark fear and confusion rather than crack any cases.

Although they all boast technical expertise, intelligence agencies, at their heart, are not really focused on solving scientific mysteries, said Loch Johnson, a political scientist at the University of Georgia and senior editor of the academic journal Intelligence and National Security. They are good at analyzing political situations and spying, he said, “but when it comes to scientific matters, we really fall off.”

On Friday, a congressionally ordered intelligence report on 144 potential UFO incidents was released, finding...well, not much. “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions,” it concluded. And more intelligence reports are on their way. The US government is conducting intelligence reviews on the origins of the pandemic in China, due on Aug. 24. And an ongoing National Security Council intelligence review is looking into whether cases of the mysterious “Havana syndrome” neurological injuries are happening worldwide.

Just don't be surprised if these efforts, like the UFO report, don’t turn up any real answers, experts told BuzzFeed News. “There is just so much noise around all three of these issues right now; the signal-to-noise ratio, as we say, is terrible,” said former Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist Cheryl Rofer. “I don't see how anyone makes any sense of it.”

Historically, when politics, intelligence, journalism, and science collide, bad things happen. Incidents of federal intelligence agencies botching scientific mysteries go at least as far back as the Cold War and have continued since. In 2006, the FBI and the Energy Department led a nuclear espionage investigation into Los Alamos National Lab scientist Wen Ho Lee that blew up so badly that the government — and five news outlets — paid him a $1.6 million settlement. Another botched forensic investigation caught headlines for linking virologist Steven Hatfill to the 2002 anthrax attacks, leading to a $4.6 million settlement. The same year, the CIA’s “slam dunk” findings of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq became one of the most notorious intelligence screwups in history.

Now some of the same agencies behind these investigations are being asked to dig into the possible national security threats posed by aliens, Russian microwave weapons, and the origin of the novel coronavirus.

Intelligence agencies face big hurdles to solving scientific mysteries like these. The first is that the science is at best absent or half-baked, said Rofer. In reality, scientific investigations of any complexity usually take years. In the meantime, intelligence reports can explore multiple theories, with the most entertaining ones often getting the most attention. “Everyone loves a good death ray,” she said, referring to a theory for why diplomats across the world appear to be suffering from neurological injuries. “It's just not as much fun to hear there's no evidence for a microwave weapon.”

A second is that intelligence reports are never as conclusive as scientific experiments, and almost always have an element of human judgment baked into them. “I think most Americans tend to believe that ‘intelligence report’ actually means something authoritative and vetted, like a peer-reviewed scientific journal article,” said Alex Wellerstein, a science historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “Anyone who has worked with intelligence reports knows that this is an entirely wrong way to think about them.”

Intelligence reports are typically carefully hedged by the level of confidence that analysts have in their sources. This crucial context is often absent from news stories leaking details of reports. “One thing I don't think is widely appreciated is that the classification of something often has less to do with the actual information than with how we got it,” said Philipp Bleek, a nonproliferation and terrorism expert from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who served on a Defense Department task force on Syrian chemical weapons during the Obama administration.

“The information might actually be quite banal, and even available in a newspaper,” Bleek said. “But the fact that we got it by tapping the personal cellphone of a key official, or maybe because that official is an informant for us, that's what makes the information so sensitive.”

The final hurdle, and the biggest one, comes from the motivations of people leaking parts of intelligence reports, or making claims about them. “The people who are getting this out have their own motivations,” said Rofer. “Not all those motivations are in the public interest, and not all of them are even obvious.” (MORE)
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Starting next year, the US military’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) will start to test out an experimental pill that it says can actually stave off the effects of aging on soldiers.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/military-t...aging-pill

INTRO: The experiment, Breaking Defense reports, is part of a push to augment human ability and keep combatants healthy and operating at peak performance for longer. And, pending successful performance and clinical tests, it could make its way out into the public as a new longevity treatment for the masses as well.

“These efforts are not about creating physical traits that don’t already exist naturally,” SOCOM spokesperson and Navy Commander Tim Hawkins told Breaking Defense. “This is about enhancing the mission readiness of our forces by improving performance characteristics that typically decline with age.”

The pill is essentially a dietary supplement that boosts levels of the molecule NAD+, which is a compound commonly found in the unregulated nootropics industry that’s been linked to aging and the myriad ways that the human body deteriorates over time... (MORE)
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