I’m from the USA, and my wife is from India. When it comes to levels of trust in various US government organizations, she and I have different baselines.
I grew up in Rocket City. I have always had great respect for NASA, and still do. I have always felt much more negatively toward weapons development and defense contracting in general, which I was also surrounded by. Despite the colocation of science-focused and defense-focused organizations in my area, I never had much difficulty keeping them separate. I’ve always known that they share resources when it was convenient, otherwise what would even be the point of colocating, but I never had the impression that NASA and DoD were bedfellows.
On the one hand, NASA fully supports their public claims with details of their experiments and the resulting dating, and a lot of people see this as proof that they are fully honest. I’ll admit that this is a weak point. It only applies to what they are willing to be public about in the first place.
NASA is a civilian-run organization. This is one of the stronger points in my favor, I think. I known tons of people that work for NASA. I’ve never asked them, but I’m not under the impression that they have to keep a bunch of secrets. Then again, they are mostly engineers, but I think most of the scientists involved are not even directly employed by NASA; most of them work at universities.
I did work on a SBIR contract with NASA during a brief stint working for a defense contractor (during which my opinions on the defense industry became stronger), but it was just relating to encrypted communications, something I think most of us would agree is a reasonable thing for any space agency to want for legitimate purposes.
She does not have the optimistic point of view that I have about NASA. She thinks they know things that they are not allowed to reveal. Huge things, like relating to UFOs and ETs. I think they would love to go public with findings about UFOs; it’s just that, until very recently, they didn’t even think of UFOs as relevant to their research and didn’t pay them much attention. There hasn’t even been much evidence that they are from space, which, after all, is what the S in NASA is for.
Anyway, I’ve read a little bit about NASA here, but I’m curious what people here generally think. Are they trustworthy?
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