A group in Los Angeles has attracted U.F.O. enthusiasts from all over the world. They’ve formed together around the common question: What are these things in the sky, exactly, and how can they know more about them?

Robert Bingham has “seen things.” When he was 39, he looked skyward and noticed a worm-shaped ship about 20 feet tall zipping through the clouds.

Unusual things kept popping up around him — or above him, rather. He saw a saucer and some flying objects shaped like beans next. He snapped a picture.

For over ten years, he kept his sightings to himself. That changed in 2010, when his neighbor came over to do some plumbing work. Mr. Bingham showed him his photos. The neighbor asked if he could invite his brother, who was very interested in unidentified flying objects, or U.F.O.s.

In awe of what they saw, they asked if they could invite more people to speak with Mr. Bingham — 40 more, actually. More than eight years ago, that was the first meeting of what is now known as “Summon Events with Robert Bingham,” at a park in Los Angeles across the street from where Mr. Bingham worked as a security guard.

Mr. Bingham, 62, an unassuming man who describes himself as shy, has become the nexus of a community of U.F.O. hunters in Los Angeles, fervent believers who come together to share their stories and persuade skeptics that extraterrestrial communications aren’t just a conceit for television shows.

Since then, he has attracted U.F.O. enthusiasts from all over the world, drawn together by the same questions: What are these things in the sky, exactly, and how can we learn more about them?

While there is just not enough documentation or scientific evidence to begin to explain or even confirm these sightings, that doesn’t stop the dozens of people that once a year descend on the same park to watch and assist Mr. Bingham as he tries to summon the “objects,” as they call them, and also to hang out with other enthusiasts who have turned into friends.

“It’s a great community because you can talk about anything and you’re not worried about being called crazy,” said Hans Boysen, 53, who has participated in the last seven summoning sessions with Bingham since 2011.

Other groups, like the U.F.O. and Paranormal Research Society, don’t organize sighting sessions, but rather focus on discussions, often with speakers who talk about their research and experiences. A nonprofit group called the Mutual U.F.O. Network, or Mufon, founded in 1969, has over 4,000 members worldwide and convenes a yearly symposium. This year, a former Pentagon intelligence officer, Luis Elizondo, will give the keynote address.

Last year, The New York Times conducted interviews and obtained records pertaining to the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The program — parts of which remain classified — investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials. According to the article, officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012. The article also stated that Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

As much as scientists deal with probabilities, they rely on data and the reality is, no matter how many videos people upload on YouTube, they’re simply not enough to draw any definitive conclusions from.

But that doesn’t stop this community from searching.  Many in the community that forms around Mr. Bingham believe that the multimillion-dollar alien research efforts of the former Blink-182 guitarist and singer Tom DeLonge are just the beginning to finding out some answers. Mr. DeLonge made headlines after To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a research group he founded — Mr. Elizondo is its director of global security and special programs — released declassified footage from the Department of Defense and continues his efforts.

Angel Llewellyn, 49, drove to the event from San Jose, Calif., for a second year as a form of pilgrimage. She said she started seeing things right after attending to Mr. Bingham’s event for the first time.

“It’s like he charges you,” she said. “He teaches you how to call them and what to think and they just, boom, boom, boom. It’s like fishing. You never know what you’re going to get.”

That’s not to say that everyone in the group is on the same page. There’s a variety of ideologies — some beliefs are grounded in religion, while some prefer a more scientific foundation — and different levels of intensity. Rafael Cebrian, 29, a two-time attendee, brought a curious friend who was visiting from Spain. He said it was about being open and being in the right state of mind. He went to Mr. Bingham’s event last year on a friend’s recommendation. He said he didn’t think he was a skeptic anymore, but he also insisted he didn’t know anything for sure.

Mr. Bingham may have brought them all together, but now factions abound.

One such group is the L.A. U.F.O. Channel, a monthly Meetup group founded by Mr. Perez and Hans Boysen, 53.

“I know they’re never going to believe a video that they think was created in somebody’s basement,” Mr. Perez said. “I see the events as a bigger way to change people’s minds.”

Mr. Boysen was once a skeptic himself and tried to contact Mr. Bingham in 2011. “Like most people, I suspect, I thought he was a nut case or lunatic,” he said. But as a skeptic, he was “willing to keep an open mind and look at what he had to offer.” He instead found Mr. Perez, who helped him discover his passion for the unknown flying objects in the sky, something he has always been interested in since he was a child.

Yasmin Joyner, 35, an artist, says she has a more straightforward approach to sightings and doesn’t like to engage in conspiracy theories. “Unidentified flying objects: That’s what a U.F.O. is, right?” she said. “I’m not saying it’s an alien. I’m not saying it’s from another planet. I’m not saying it’s even a being. I don’t know!”

“I try to go with what I can say I know,” she continued. “I’m not going to look at something and try to equate that it might be an animal or something biological. I don’t know that and I will never claim to know that.” She recently formed another group, Indigo Army, that she hopes will attract a younger and more diverse crowd. Because it’s still a small group, its members have been able to organize sightings at one another’s houses and nearby parks.

For Ms. Joyner, going public with her belief of U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial communications wasn’t a decision she took lightly. She understands that there are consequences to being outspoken about beliefs that many people may deem weird or crazy.

“I think my family was a bit worried that I had snapped or something, but once they saw my footage and what I was seeing, they understood,” she said. Her mother is fully supportive and claims to have seen unknown objects flying in the sky near her home in Los Angeles multiple times.

Mallory Jackson, 26, who attends Meetup hangouts led by Mr. Bingham and the Indigo Army, says she finds it difficult to maintain relationships outside the U.F.O. community with people who might not be as understanding of her interests. She discovered Mr. Bingham’s event through a friend she met at a metaphysical center that does reiki healing, with whom she later confided in about her sightings. She said she became friends with several members “right away” before later meeting Jim Martin, 38, another longtime attendee of Mr. Bingham’s events. Mr. Martin is now her boyfriend.

“When we do our events, you’ll see all ages, all ethnicities, all genders,” Ms. Jackson said. “It’s beautiful, and we’re all just trying to figure it out as we go. We don’t know what they are, but we make all make our assumptions and best guesses.”

Around noon on a punishingly hot day in April, Mr. Bingham gathered everyone around him for the first so-called group summoning of the day. “Let’s make this world a better place,” he said. “Enjoy this day because it’s going to be incredible.” As he concluded his opening remarks, he turned around and led the group to hope for something good to show up.

So, how exactly does the group try to summon U. F. O.s? Everyone has a different method, but most agree that it’s similar to meditating. Some say that they feel physical sensations when they do it. The most important thing, Ms. Joyner said, is to focus. At the event in April, some participants closed their eyes and stood silently. Some stared intently into the sky. A few newcomers simply looked around, appearing confused.

As soon as someone in the group spots something, they yell at Mr. Boysen, who has a telescope connected to a camera and a screen that shows what he’s seeing. Once he spots it, he holds out his arm to ask for someone to guide him back to his chair without losing sight of the object. He adjusts his telescope in search of it, while the guide looks at the screen to tell him if he’s got it or not. Everything is recorded as video footage that he will later stabilize using Adobe After Effects, a video-editing software. “Nothing more,” Charles Cassey, 50, Mr. Boysen’s frequent guide, insists. “All he does is stabilize the footage so it’s not so shaky.” Mr. Cassey puts his hand on the focus knob and adjusts it as soon as Mr. Boysen centers on the object.

Effectively capturing objects in the sky from dozens of miles away requires a significant financial investment. Ms. Joyner uses a camera with a lens that can magnify objects up to 40 times, which could capture things in the sky as if they were only 20 feet away, but in broad daylight, it can still get a little tricky. Mr. Martin works his way around such issues by combining a super-zoom lens with infrared, which helps him spot things in the sky easier. He is frequently praised by people in the community for his consistently high-quality footage, and his YouTube page is full of well-edited clips from various sightings, as well as other U.F.O.-related videos.

The group’s members encounter their fair share of people who don’t believe them online. It’s not unusual to see U.F.O. believers try to debunk each other’s videos by dissecting them frame by frame. “Some people’s opinions are so hardened that I just let them think what they want and focus on research that I think is valid,” Mr. Martin said. “Through the videos that I post, I try and set an example of what I think is good evidence to kind of rise against some of the misidentification.” This forms a core part of the new mission of the Indigo Army: to look harder at the evidence and be more selective about what the group claims to be a U.F.O.

Ms. Joyner agrees, and thinks they can only get better by scrutinizing everything closely, including their own work. “There are videos that I have that I questioned a year later and I don’t have any issues doing that,” she said. “If we have a problem with being wrong, there’s never going to be any truth.”

“Oh, that video? Might’ve been just birds. And I’m O.K. with that. But this video? This video isn’t birds.”

Source: NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/theyve-seen-things.html

The Russian attacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the country’s continuing election-related hacking have happened across all three dimensions of cyberspace – physical, informational and cognitive. The first two are well-known: For years, hackers have exploited hardware and software flaws to gain unauthorized access to computers and networks – and stolen information they’ve found. The third dimension, however, is a newer target – and a more concerning one.

This three-dimensional view of cyberspace comes from my late mentor, Professor Dan Kuehl of the National Defense University, who expressed concern about traditional hacking activities and what they meant for national security. But he also foresaw the potential – now clear to the public at large – that those tools could be used to target people’s perceptions and thought processes, too. That’s what the Russians allegedly did, according to federal indictments issued in February and July, laying out evidence that Russian civilians and military personnel used online tools to influence Americans’ political views – and, potentially, their votes. They may be setting up to do it again for the 2018 midterm elections.

Some observers suggest that using internet tools for espionage and as fuel for disinformation campaigns is a new form of “hybrid warfare.” Their idea is that the lines are blurring between the traditional kinetic warfare of bombs, missiles and guns, and the unconventional, stealthy warfare long practiced against foreigners’ “hearts and minds” by intelligence and special forces capabilities.

However, I believe this isn’t a new form of war at all: Rather, it is the same old strategies taking advantage of the latest available technologies. Just as online marketing companies use sponsored content and search engine manipulation to distribute biased information to the public, governments are using internet-based tools to pursue their agendas. In other words, they’re hacking a different kind of system through social engineering on a grand scale.

Old goals, new techniques

More than 2,400 years ago, the Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu made it an axiom of war that it’s best to “subdue the enemy without fighting.” Using information – or disinformation, or propaganda – as a weapon can be one way to destabilize a population and disable the target country. In 1984 a former KGB agent who defected to the West discussed this as a long-term process and more or less predicted what’s happening in the U.S. now.

The Russians created false social media accounts to simulate political activists – such as @TEN_GOP, which purported to be associated with the Tennessee Republican Party. Just that one account attracted more than 100,000 followers. The goal was to distribute propaganda, such as captioned photos, posters or short animated graphics, purposely designed to enrage and engage these accounts’ followers. Those people would then pass the information along through their own personal social networks.

Starting from seeds planted by Russian fakers, including some who claimed to be U.S. citizens, those ideas grew and flourished through amplification by real people. Unfortunately, whether originating from Russia or elsewhere, fake information and conspiracy theories can form the basis for discussion at major partisan media outlets.

As ideas with niche online beginnings moved into the traditional mass media landscape, they serve to keep controversies alive by sustaining divisive arguments on both sides. For instance, one Russian troll factory had its online personas host rallies both for and against each of the major candidates in the 2016 presidential election. Though the rallies never took place, the online buzz about them helped inflame divisions in society.

The trolls also set up Twitter accounts purportedly representing local news organizations – including defunct ones – to take advantage of Americans’ greater trust of local news sources than national ones. These accounts operated for several years – one for the Chicago Daily News, closed since 1978, was created in May 2014 and collected 20,000 followers – passing along legitimate local news stories, likely seeking to win followers’ trust ahead of future disinformation campaigns. Shut down before they could fulfill that end, these accounts cleverly aimed to exploit the fact that many Americans’ political views cloud their ability to separate fact from opinion in the news.

These sorts of activities are functions of traditional espionage: Foment discord and then sit back while the target population becomes distracted arguing among themselves.

Analyzing, let alone countering, this type of provocative behavior can be difficult. Russia isn’t alone, either: The U.S. tries to influence foreign audiences and global opinions, including through Voice of America online and radio services and intelligence services’ activities. And it’s not just governments that get involved. Companies, advocacy groups and others also can conduct disinformation campaigns.

Unfortunately, laws and regulations are ineffective remedies. Further, social media companies have been fairly slow to respond to this phenomenon. Twitter reportedly suspended more than 70 million fake accounts earlier this summer. That included nearly 50 social media accounts like the fake Chicago Daily News one.

Facebook, too, says it is working to reduce the spread of “fake news” on its platform. Yet both companies make their money from users’ activity on their sites – so they are conflicted, trying to stifle misleading content while also boosting users’ involvement.

The best protection against threats to the cognitive dimension of cyberspace depends on users’ own actions and knowledge. Objectively educated, rational citizens should serve as the foundation of a strong democratic society. But that defense fails if people don’t have the skills – or worse, don’t use them – to think critically about what they’re seeing and examine claims of fact before accepting them as true.

American voters expect ongoing Russian interference in U.S. elections. In fact, it appears to have already begun. To help combat that influence, the U.S. Justice Department plans to alert the public when its investigations discover foreign espionage, hacking and disinformation relating to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections. And the National Security Agency has created a task force to counter Russian hacking of election systems and major political parties’ computer networks.

These efforts are a good start, but the real solution will begin when people start realizing they’re being subjected to this sort of cognitive attack and that it’s not all just a hoax.

Source: The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/weaponized-information-seeks-a-new-target-in-
cyberspace-users-minds-100069

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