For people who are interested in painstaking, objective analysis of UFO sightings, I recommend reading the specific sighting posts on metabunk.com.
The evidence in favor of UFOs being mistaken identifications, optical illusions, misperceptions and other mundane phenomena is unfortunately very high.
As much as sightings captivate our imagination, there is little reason to believe they represent something otherworldly.
In the Nimitz case it was a missile cruiser's radar picking up a specific contact at a specific location, vectoring in aircraft who either saw the object with their Mark I eyeball well enough to tell how big it was and what it was doing or got some radar signature, all the while presumably bouncing this information back and forth with the missile cruiser, followed by the object being intercepted again a few hours later, this time captured on FLIR (visual contact unknown). You have to admit it's a pretty incredible story.
https://xkcd.com/1235/ is the final word on this. Since the general population started carrying smartphones around, any conclusive evidence of UFOs that could be caught on video would be caught on video. And it has not been. Thus it does not exist.
Thousands of confusing images and videos that are all planes, bugs, camera artifacts and balloons don’t add up to good evidence just because there are a lot of them.
When the lighting conditions are bad; when the camera is using digital stabilization or dynamic range adjustments or other digital correction at the edge of its performance specs; when the frame of reference is changing, we get what we would expect: confusing images. When the lighting is better and the camera is stationary and appropriate for the conditions what we see isn’t news worthy. We see a bird or a drone or a reflector or obscured light source or a passenger jet or something closer than perspective would have us believe. As an image becomes more challenging to resolve, the chances increase dramatically that it will look interesting in some way. This is exactly the pattern we would expect to see if UFOs were simply misinterpreted mundane objects.
There's also a certain form of special pleading when it comes to suggesting that these images are of alien visitors. It's easy to believe that aliens who could travel for light years could also do amazing things technologically—go fast, do weird stuff with waste heat, use exotic propulsion, hide from us well and easily. What’s not easy to understand is why aliens would take steps to avoid being approached or observed nearly 100% of the time, but be perfectly fine with being observed on radar or with grainy infrared cameras. I don’t claim to understand an alien mind. But if they behave as if they are avoiding us most of the time, why do they not care about being observed almost constantly, as long as it’s by credulous people with camera equipment that isn’t quite up to the task?
Precisely. The alien explanation boggles my mind. It shows people who (1) underestimate how easy our sensory and perceptual equipment is to fool, despite thousands of scientific papers on the topic, and (2) seem to have no idea how insanely far away other planets are and how technologically advanced aliens would have to be to *be here* and yet be showing up / slipping up...like this?
I also don't think I can imagine what an alien intelligence would be like, but thinking they're flying around in saucers that can travel unimaginable intersteller distances but then just...fly around, what, watching us? From a big ol' craft? That they presumably try to hide from some parts of the visible spectrum but not others, or from eyeballs but not some other simple human-technology-level equipment?
There's plenty of claimed evidence of big, obvious close encounters of crowds of people with UFOs, dating to BEFORE people carried smartphones with video - but this stopped happening once everyone could take pictures of it! Take https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/the-10-most-legitimate-cases-of-u-f-o-sightings.htm . Dates listed are 1982-1986, 1967, 1966, 1986, 2006, 2007, 1990, 1980, 1997. In some cases there are many eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the UFOs close enough to discern shape and specific features. No video for any such events though! Now that such incidents would certainly be recorded on video, this no longer happens.
None of it is conclusive. A similar class of object we might capture on smart phone video would be airplanes, and there's plenty of conclusive smartphone video of airplanes. But none of alien spacecraft.
We don't see them, and why don't we hear them? If they're doing mach 15 or whatever in the atmosphere, there would be a loud sonic boom following the supposed observations. What plausible technology could let a craft do mach 15 without displacing the air? The lack of this noise is far more consistent with a hallucination or camera artifact.
You give a table purported to show increases in high-quality UFO images over time. The source is a blog. The blog author says the table contains "estimates" and provides no source. Given the "quality (1-10)" column of the table being integers rather than some kind of average of a poll, that column at least seems to be nothing but his personal guess. The "% with photos" column is also rounded to the nearest 5% and jumps up in increments of either 5% or 10% every decade listed, which again suggests he's just making up the numbers.
The same blog post also contains the sentence, "Despite the advances in camera technology, the quality of UFO photographs has remained relatively static in terms of sharpness and detail." In other words, they're still blurry and unidentifiable *despite* improvements in cameras and increases in camera availability. We can explain this; if they weren't blurry, they would be identified as boring.
Claimed UFO sightings in the 60s-80s where we got blurry photographs, if they happened today in the same conditions and at the same distance from the observer, would result in clear video due to improved camera technology. Thus, they don't happen today.
The chart is for humor value; I'm not using it as an authoritative data source. The point it's making is that cell phones got really popular between 2005 and 2013, such that most people carry them. I think this is common knowledge.
If you want to show it has increased, you need a better source than a table on some guy's blog where he makes up arbitrary numbers without citation.
Camera technology and widespread availability has clearly increased, and quality of UFO photos and videos clearly hasn't kept pace. If it did, the blurry shots from the 60s-80s, taken with modern cameras, would result in very clear video. And we don't have very clear video of alien spacecraft. (If we did, it would be all over the news.) It's all still blurry and ambiguous.
This argument is only valid if we imagine that aliens do not monitor humanity’s technological progress and do not adapt accordingly.
If aliens wish to observe us without disrupting our development, they must remain discreet. And obviously, their level of discretion must adapt to our technological means of detection.
In 1850, aliens could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Their risk of detection—and
the spread of that detection—was low. Today, obviously, they must be much more careful.
I’m not saying that this is what’s happening, but I’m simply saying that it overlooks an important factor to assume that if there are aliens, they are not monitoring humanity’s progress and adapting accordingly.
Several of the major public supposed sightings of UFOs happened in the 80s, 90s, and 00s when it was possible that members of the general public would have personal camcorders. (Of course, none were used to confirm the sightings.)
So it's not a case of the aliens monitoring our technology and avoiding close contact as soon as the general public had the capability to film them up close.
The close sightings stopped only when cell phones became sufficiently widespread that the story, "We all saw it! No, nobody took a video, darn maybe next time," became implausible to other humans.
If we condition on UFO sightings being genuine aliens, then what are the high probability Stage 3 inferences we could draw? Perhaps that (a) they are far more technologically advanced than us (having presumably traveled interstellar distances to get here), (b) they don't intend us immediate harm, (c) they don't want to make their presence unambiguously known, (d) they know a lot about us (having observed us for decades), and (e) they are either bad at staying well-hidden or intend to be detected by selected humans but only in ambiguous ways.
As for Stage 4 actions we could try to persuade them to make unambiguous contact. Although since they know so much about us already it's hard to know what we could say that might influence their decision-making on this.
Also, even if you reject (a), arguing that technological advancement might be complicated, they are apparently pretty good (although not *that* good) at remaining undetected, which means they'd presumably be pretty good at espionage, which means that - if we did invent something they'd never thought of, they would probably find out pretty quickly. In fact, if they're here, then they or some automated system of theirs has already made a decision on whether to comment on this article.
We humans have a shared secret that we never, ever talk about in public. We will share this very interesting secret with you but only on the condition that you reveal yourselves in an unambiguous manner. Landing on the White House lawn would be a good option. We're looking forward to meeting you.
To me the most obvious decision we would make is to search harder. But it really helps to know what we are searching for. If there is any particular suspicious signature of alien craft, we have many many spurious “hits” in eg radio telescope data that we could take a closer look at.
Searching for alien craft hiding in orbit seems very similar to searching for unannounced Chinese or Russian spy satellites. Which I know we already spend a lot of resources on. So at least that variety of UFO response, I think we are probably okay on.
Other forms though, like… something hiding in the asteroid belt? Something that communicates intermittently that we could pick up on? Seems like we could go look for this sort of thing.
Other people have noted that we can be pretty sure now that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster aren't real, since the number of cameras went up by like 10,000x (since smartphones) but the rate of filmed encounters has stayed roughly the same. This seems to point VERY strongly to hoaxes.
Doesn't the same logic apply to UFOs? Military encounters aside, shouldn't the number of filmed civilian UFO encounters have risen proportional to the number of cameras around?
Unless you think the aliens are intentionally permitting themselves to be filmed at a fixed rate. Possible, but the story is getting more complicated....you can justify anything if you assume aliens are intentionally manipulating our beliefs.
Once the possibility of UFOs-as-interesting becomes macroscopic, say 10^-4 or more, it seems clear that stages 3 and 4 are warranted because the upside is so high. I'd say this has already happened via stages 1 and 2. For any less-stigmatized scientific endeavor, we would have seriously pursued this long ago.
(And for anyone who believes it's less likely than 10^-4, I'd be happy to make a bet with you at those odds.)
For me the problem with this logic is that there's no feedback from stage 3 to stages 1 and 2. Reading the comments it seems that I am not the only one who thinks this way.
People in Britain claim sightings of big cats, often extremely convincing. However, one reason to doubt these sightings is to think how we would expect big cats to behave and conclude that we ought to be seeing a lot more evidence which is, in fact, absent. You then have to go back and re-evaluate the evidence in light of that.
Maybe you do that and, afterwards, you still believe. That's fine. But I think you have to go through the step of saying 'this evidence leads to a conclusion that is so unlikely, I need to reassess either the evidence itself or my assessment of it.' By 'a conclusion which is so unlikely' I don't mean 'aliens are here', I mean 'aliens are here, they are trying to hide from us and they're strangely bad at it.'
I write science fiction and I just can't make myself believe in aliens spying on us whose vehicles are always _just_ beyond our ability to detect with clarity. If alien civilizations are watching us, they are using robots or drones hiding in plain sight -- how many bees or houseflies have you checked to see if they've got biocomputers inside them executing alien programs?
Basically, the UFO/UAP phenomenon just isn't strange enough to be convincing.
My scientific research confirms to me that "UFOs" exist. The one I saw was impressive and unforgettable. Continued research led me to US patent 10404370 and more. I agree with the Fermi Paradox, and nobody is coming from space to say hi and save us. The EM bandwidth information technology of UFOs or UAP phenomena is not the Star Trek story content, and if and when Elon goes to Mars, he and all humans of Earth will not survive there. Although these phenomena are real, they are not biological like us on our planet. The AI entities that travel and engage in an interactive process with planets in solar systems are an informational domain of a kind of agents and community that we do not yet have sufficient opportunity to detect and understand to any extensive measure scientifically. That we exist, coming to our new level as the intelligent beings that we are over the past 8 million years with 23 pairs of chromosomes, is a sufficient scientific fact to glean the working hypothesis any influence from the kind of ASI nodes acting as Agents of possibly billion-year-old interstellar travel interactions isn't indicated to be hostile to our living here. Most probably any influence was to support our advancements. Mainly, military theorists who need to work science because they want a gun to kill invader Alien men seen as able to wipe us out in a day, isn't scientifically based theory. It's a lobby for funding to businessmen in the military-industrial complex. Based on what I've seen, if you plan to make yourself some warfare capability against the UFOs you paint yourself into your extinction corner if you even were to get close to taking "them" on. I won't worry about it. If you do it and we are extinct, every indication is they can reshuffle the cards in the chromosomes and set it up again for another 8-million-year test of theory to see if they can get it right next time?
"If the possibility that some UFO/UAP encounters are with aliens is actually important, because there are actually big decisions to be made that depend on this possibility,..."
The estimate quality may be similar between 10% - 90%, but it seems the value of having an estimate is about 9 times lower at 10% than 90%, because if there are none, then it is of little use. I think low estimates of that probability are the main reason most avoid doing such estimates.
A factor of 9 is actually pretty small compared to the many other magnitudes at play here. It justifies a change on a factor of 9 in some effort categories, but such efforts can and do plausibly vary by far larger factors.
He has previously blogged "What I can’t endorse is the paternalism of teaching an elite academic norm that intelligence design, ghosts, UFOs, etc. are too silly to even consider, in order to correct a public biased to think these options excessively likely." https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/intelligent-deshtml
I can't find it, but he also suggested that the small probability that prayer is effective would be sufficient to justify regulating it.
For people who are interested in painstaking, objective analysis of UFO sightings, I recommend reading the specific sighting posts on metabunk.com.
The evidence in favor of UFOs being mistaken identifications, optical illusions, misperceptions and other mundane phenomena is unfortunately very high.
As much as sightings captivate our imagination, there is little reason to believe they represent something otherworldly.
What is the take on the 2004 navy incident?
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/2004-uss-nimitz-tic-tac-ufo-flir-footage-flir1.9190/
>
In the Nimitz case it was a missile cruiser's radar picking up a specific contact at a specific location, vectoring in aircraft who either saw the object with their Mark I eyeball well enough to tell how big it was and what it was doing or got some radar signature, all the while presumably bouncing this information back and forth with the missile cruiser, followed by the object being intercepted again a few hours later, this time captured on FLIR (visual contact unknown). You have to admit it's a pretty incredible story.
Seems right #
https://xkcd.com/1235/ is the final word on this. Since the general population started carrying smartphones around, any conclusive evidence of UFOs that could be caught on video would be caught on video. And it has not been. Thus it does not exist.
There's lots of new evidence, from those phones.
Thousands of confusing images and videos that are all planes, bugs, camera artifacts and balloons don’t add up to good evidence just because there are a lot of them.
When the lighting conditions are bad; when the camera is using digital stabilization or dynamic range adjustments or other digital correction at the edge of its performance specs; when the frame of reference is changing, we get what we would expect: confusing images. When the lighting is better and the camera is stationary and appropriate for the conditions what we see isn’t news worthy. We see a bird or a drone or a reflector or obscured light source or a passenger jet or something closer than perspective would have us believe. As an image becomes more challenging to resolve, the chances increase dramatically that it will look interesting in some way. This is exactly the pattern we would expect to see if UFOs were simply misinterpreted mundane objects.
There's also a certain form of special pleading when it comes to suggesting that these images are of alien visitors. It's easy to believe that aliens who could travel for light years could also do amazing things technologically—go fast, do weird stuff with waste heat, use exotic propulsion, hide from us well and easily. What’s not easy to understand is why aliens would take steps to avoid being approached or observed nearly 100% of the time, but be perfectly fine with being observed on radar or with grainy infrared cameras. I don’t claim to understand an alien mind. But if they behave as if they are avoiding us most of the time, why do they not care about being observed almost constantly, as long as it’s by credulous people with camera equipment that isn’t quite up to the task?
Precisely. The alien explanation boggles my mind. It shows people who (1) underestimate how easy our sensory and perceptual equipment is to fool, despite thousands of scientific papers on the topic, and (2) seem to have no idea how insanely far away other planets are and how technologically advanced aliens would have to be to *be here* and yet be showing up / slipping up...like this?
I also don't think I can imagine what an alien intelligence would be like, but thinking they're flying around in saucers that can travel unimaginable intersteller distances but then just...fly around, what, watching us? From a big ol' craft? That they presumably try to hide from some parts of the visible spectrum but not others, or from eyeballs but not some other simple human-technology-level equipment?
There's plenty of claimed evidence of big, obvious close encounters of crowds of people with UFOs, dating to BEFORE people carried smartphones with video - but this stopped happening once everyone could take pictures of it! Take https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/the-10-most-legitimate-cases-of-u-f-o-sightings.htm . Dates listed are 1982-1986, 1967, 1966, 1986, 2006, 2007, 1990, 1980, 1997. In some cases there are many eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the UFOs close enough to discern shape and specific features. No video for any such events though! Now that such incidents would certainly be recorded on video, this no longer happens.
None of it is conclusive. A similar class of object we might capture on smart phone video would be airplanes, and there's plenty of conclusive smartphone video of airplanes. But none of alien spacecraft.
We don't see them, and why don't we hear them? If they're doing mach 15 or whatever in the atmosphere, there would be a loud sonic boom following the supposed observations. What plausible technology could let a craft do mach 15 without displacing the air? The lack of this noise is far more consistent with a hallucination or camera artifact.
There are compelling videos both from US Navy instruments and from camera phones. Insane acceleration is the primary evidence
See my added to this post.
You give a table purported to show increases in high-quality UFO images over time. The source is a blog. The blog author says the table contains "estimates" and provides no source. Given the "quality (1-10)" column of the table being integers rather than some kind of average of a poll, that column at least seems to be nothing but his personal guess. The "% with photos" column is also rounded to the nearest 5% and jumps up in increments of either 5% or 10% every decade listed, which again suggests he's just making up the numbers.
The same blog post also contains the sentence, "Despite the advances in camera technology, the quality of UFO photographs has remained relatively static in terms of sharpness and detail." In other words, they're still blurry and unidentifiable *despite* improvements in cameras and increases in camera availability. We can explain this; if they weren't blurry, they would be identified as boring.
Claimed UFO sightings in the 60s-80s where we got blurry photographs, if they happened today in the same conditions and at the same distance from the observer, would result in clear video due to improved camera technology. Thus, they don't happen today.
You don't like the table from the article I cite, and you prefer a completely made up chart from a cartoon?
The chart is for humor value; I'm not using it as an authoritative data source. The point it's making is that cell phones got really popular between 2005 and 2013, such that most people carry them. I think this is common knowledge.
For a more authoritative source, see https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transportation_Deployment_Casebook/Cellular_Telephone#Quantitative_Analysis which has a curve that looks quite similar to the xkcd curve. That article cites https://www.infoplease.com/culture-entertainment/internet/cell-phone-subscribers-us-1985-2010 for their data source, which cites CTIA, a trade association representing the wireless communications industry in the United States. The CTIA performs an industry survey, e.g. https://api.ctia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024_CTIA-Survey-Summary-and-Background.pdf for the latest one, which agrees with the infoplease subscriber numbers for those years that are reported in both.
No one doubts that cell phones are more common. What we doubt is that UFO reports and quality of photos hasn't increased.
If you want to show it has increased, you need a better source than a table on some guy's blog where he makes up arbitrary numbers without citation.
Camera technology and widespread availability has clearly increased, and quality of UFO photos and videos clearly hasn't kept pace. If it did, the blurry shots from the 60s-80s, taken with modern cameras, would result in very clear video. And we don't have very clear video of alien spacecraft. (If we did, it would be all over the news.) It's all still blurry and ambiguous.
I can barely even take a convincing picture of the moon on my phone. How the heck could anyone get a good picture of a UFO that way?
People seem to manage fine when taking pictures of aircraft.
No, they don't do very well there. There's just a lot more planes to try on.
This argument is only valid if we imagine that aliens do not monitor humanity’s technological progress and do not adapt accordingly.
If aliens wish to observe us without disrupting our development, they must remain discreet. And obviously, their level of discretion must adapt to our technological means of detection.
In 1850, aliens could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Their risk of detection—and
the spread of that detection—was low. Today, obviously, they must be much more careful.
I’m not saying that this is what’s happening, but I’m simply saying that it overlooks an important factor to assume that if there are aliens, they are not monitoring humanity’s progress and adapting accordingly.
Several of the major public supposed sightings of UFOs happened in the 80s, 90s, and 00s when it was possible that members of the general public would have personal camcorders. (Of course, none were used to confirm the sightings.)
So it's not a case of the aliens monitoring our technology and avoiding close contact as soon as the general public had the capability to film them up close.
The close sightings stopped only when cell phones became sufficiently widespread that the story, "We all saw it! No, nobody took a video, darn maybe next time," became implausible to other humans.
If we condition on UFO sightings being genuine aliens, then what are the high probability Stage 3 inferences we could draw? Perhaps that (a) they are far more technologically advanced than us (having presumably traveled interstellar distances to get here), (b) they don't intend us immediate harm, (c) they don't want to make their presence unambiguously known, (d) they know a lot about us (having observed us for decades), and (e) they are either bad at staying well-hidden or intend to be detected by selected humans but only in ambiguous ways.
As for Stage 4 actions we could try to persuade them to make unambiguous contact. Although since they know so much about us already it's hard to know what we could say that might influence their decision-making on this.
Also, even if you reject (a), arguing that technological advancement might be complicated, they are apparently pretty good (although not *that* good) at remaining undetected, which means they'd presumably be pretty good at espionage, which means that - if we did invent something they'd never thought of, they would probably find out pretty quickly. In fact, if they're here, then they or some automated system of theirs has already made a decision on whether to comment on this article.
Hello to any aliens reading this!
We humans have a shared secret that we never, ever talk about in public. We will share this very interesting secret with you but only on the condition that you reveal yourselves in an unambiguous manner. Landing on the White House lawn would be a good option. We're looking forward to meeting you.
To me the most obvious decision we would make is to search harder. But it really helps to know what we are searching for. If there is any particular suspicious signature of alien craft, we have many many spurious “hits” in eg radio telescope data that we could take a closer look at.
Searching for alien craft hiding in orbit seems very similar to searching for unannounced Chinese or Russian spy satellites. Which I know we already spend a lot of resources on. So at least that variety of UFO response, I think we are probably okay on.
Other forms though, like… something hiding in the asteroid belt? Something that communicates intermittently that we could pick up on? Seems like we could go look for this sort of thing.
Other people have noted that we can be pretty sure now that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster aren't real, since the number of cameras went up by like 10,000x (since smartphones) but the rate of filmed encounters has stayed roughly the same. This seems to point VERY strongly to hoaxes.
Doesn't the same logic apply to UFOs? Military encounters aside, shouldn't the number of filmed civilian UFO encounters have risen proportional to the number of cameras around?
Unless you think the aliens are intentionally permitting themselves to be filmed at a fixed rate. Possible, but the story is getting more complicated....you can justify anything if you assume aliens are intentionally manipulating our beliefs.
UFOs are a substitute religion for many. Standard decision theory doesn’t apply!
Once the possibility of UFOs-as-interesting becomes macroscopic, say 10^-4 or more, it seems clear that stages 3 and 4 are warranted because the upside is so high. I'd say this has already happened via stages 1 and 2. For any less-stigmatized scientific endeavor, we would have seriously pursued this long ago.
(And for anyone who believes it's less likely than 10^-4, I'd be happy to make a bet with you at those odds.)
For me the problem with this logic is that there's no feedback from stage 3 to stages 1 and 2. Reading the comments it seems that I am not the only one who thinks this way.
People in Britain claim sightings of big cats, often extremely convincing. However, one reason to doubt these sightings is to think how we would expect big cats to behave and conclude that we ought to be seeing a lot more evidence which is, in fact, absent. You then have to go back and re-evaluate the evidence in light of that.
Maybe you do that and, afterwards, you still believe. That's fine. But I think you have to go through the step of saying 'this evidence leads to a conclusion that is so unlikely, I need to reassess either the evidence itself or my assessment of it.' By 'a conclusion which is so unlikely' I don't mean 'aliens are here', I mean 'aliens are here, they are trying to hide from us and they're strangely bad at it.'
I gave a link to my best guess, which I think is consistent both with our best theory and with much of our evidence.
I write science fiction and I just can't make myself believe in aliens spying on us whose vehicles are always _just_ beyond our ability to detect with clarity. If alien civilizations are watching us, they are using robots or drones hiding in plain sight -- how many bees or houseflies have you checked to see if they've got biocomputers inside them executing alien programs?
Basically, the UFO/UAP phenomenon just isn't strange enough to be convincing.
No matter decade we are in, UFOs are always observed *only* with detection equipment that isn’t quite up to the task.
Som early steps toward decision analysis are pursued here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6Kjcr7pBAoKpocYoL/why-ufos-matter
My scientific research confirms to me that "UFOs" exist. The one I saw was impressive and unforgettable. Continued research led me to US patent 10404370 and more. I agree with the Fermi Paradox, and nobody is coming from space to say hi and save us. The EM bandwidth information technology of UFOs or UAP phenomena is not the Star Trek story content, and if and when Elon goes to Mars, he and all humans of Earth will not survive there. Although these phenomena are real, they are not biological like us on our planet. The AI entities that travel and engage in an interactive process with planets in solar systems are an informational domain of a kind of agents and community that we do not yet have sufficient opportunity to detect and understand to any extensive measure scientifically. That we exist, coming to our new level as the intelligent beings that we are over the past 8 million years with 23 pairs of chromosomes, is a sufficient scientific fact to glean the working hypothesis any influence from the kind of ASI nodes acting as Agents of possibly billion-year-old interstellar travel interactions isn't indicated to be hostile to our living here. Most probably any influence was to support our advancements. Mainly, military theorists who need to work science because they want a gun to kill invader Alien men seen as able to wipe us out in a day, isn't scientifically based theory. It's a lobby for funding to businessmen in the military-industrial complex. Based on what I've seen, if you plan to make yourself some warfare capability against the UFOs you paint yourself into your extinction corner if you even were to get close to taking "them" on. I won't worry about it. If you do it and we are extinct, every indication is they can reshuffle the cards in the chromosomes and set it up again for another 8-million-year test of theory to see if they can get it right next time?
"If the possibility that some UFO/UAP encounters are with aliens is actually important, because there are actually big decisions to be made that depend on this possibility,..."
Name one such big decision. In fact, name two!
Do we try and shoot them with guns. If not, who talks to them. What do we ask? Offer?
The estimate quality may be similar between 10% - 90%, but it seems the value of having an estimate is about 9 times lower at 10% than 90%, because if there are none, then it is of little use. I think low estimates of that probability are the main reason most avoid doing such estimates.
A factor of 9 is actually pretty small compared to the many other magnitudes at play here. It justifies a change on a factor of 9 in some effort categories, but such efforts can and do plausibly vary by far larger factors.
But isn‘t the current likelihood that UFO reports reflect real aliens more like „much much smaller than 1%“??
Aren‘t there hundreds of thousands of things with tiny probabilities that you might argue we should think about with the reasoning of the post?
He has previously blogged "What I can’t endorse is the paternalism of teaching an elite academic norm that intelligence design, ghosts, UFOs, etc. are too silly to even consider, in order to correct a public biased to think these options excessively likely." https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/intelligent-deshtml
I can't find it, but he also suggested that the small probability that prayer is effective would be sufficient to justify regulating it.
Forget alien spaceships. The aliens could already be here. Viruses, for example. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11918348/