I think you're greatly underestimating how much of everything people believe to be true about what they have seen, heard or experienced is just a hallucination.
This is why the recent wave of military UFO sightings is interesting. Not because pilots are inherently more credible than anyone else, but because some of these cases have lots of correlated sensor data. Radars, infrared cameras, whatever, to go along with what pilots say they saw.
This isn't slam-dunk evidence either -- what if it's a disinformation op? what if it's Chinese electronic warfare tech? -- but I don't think it can be dismissed as hallucinations.
I agree that the recent wave might plausibly turn out to represent something like Chinese drone ops, but this kind of correlative evidence from radar plots is much less strong than it might first appear.
The thing we have to understand is that radars and other such sensors do not just passively collect all available information (like the return signal from a radar) and then process and filter it into an unambiguous final picture. Rather, they are controlled by operators who adjust the parameters of the system in an active and motivated way to obtain the information they want. This allows *expectations* to enter the system, and the possibility of a runaway feedback loop.
It's not theoretical. We already know for a fact that this is how the 1952 Washington DC UFO scare happened. A temperature inversion caused radar signals in the area to bend towards the ground and reflect off DC-area buildings in an unusual way, which a single inexperienced radar operator mistook for a real aerial return. Innocuous ripples and air currents caused the apparent location of the return to fluctuate, which was incorrectly interpreted as a sign of an aircraft with unusual performance characteristics instead of an indicator that the return wasn't a real target at all. The operator called another radar station and they said they could see it too – they were just as poorly trained as he was – so an interceptor aircraft was launched. The pilot thought he actually saw something (I have no clever gee-whiz explanation for this part, sorry) which caused the radar operators to adjust the system to get a better picture of the area in which it was spotted, which caused the illusory return to disappear – which was interpreted as the enemy aircraft detecting the interception and teleporting away with its special abilities.
And this understanding was conveyed to the general population of Washington, DC area radar operators, who were advised to keep a special lookout for recurrences.
And within two weeks the skies over Washington, DC were basically filled with interceptor aircraft chasing down, ultimately, the tops of buildings and trees as viewed reflecting off an atmospheric layer.
It was eventually debunked – the smoking gun evidence was that the periods of frequent sighting corresponded exactly to periods of atmospheric temperature inversion – but a lot of people refused to accept it, and insisted that the whole thing was an implausible just-so story. This is actually the major cultural wellspring for a lot of our ideas about UFO coverups. Remember that part in "Men in Black" where Tommy Lee Jones brainwashes the UFO contactee - "swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus" and then Will Smith clowns about how dumb and implausible the explanation is? Yeah, the idea that the government is going around promoting obviously ridiculous explanations for UFOs that no sensible person would believe, but dumb drones are believing it anyway, comes pretty directly from this incident and the difficulty of getting people to accept its well-proven explanation.
Basically the sensors were locking on to distant planes that didn't look like planes to the pilots due to glare and the sharpening filter of the infrared camera, or in one case, a drifting balloon. The objects seemed to be moving fast to the pilots because they misinterpreted parallax/distance and the movements of the gimballed camera. Rotating glare effects gave the illusion of the object itself rotating. As a result they mistook mundane objects for something anomalous doing crazy manouevres.
If it seems unlikely that trained military pilots would misinterpret sensors like this, bear in mind that there are recorded cases of sailors and pilots mistaking the planet Venus for an enemy balloon, mistaking a small balloon for a distant, fast-moving UFO, etc etc.
Also recall that after the Chinese spy balloon was detected, the US Air Force started looking for more balloons (I read that radar signatures from balloons are normally below the threshold that the air defence system pays attention to, and balloons are not tracked by the normal air traffic control system). They ended up shooting down some harmless hobbyist balloons. There are probably a lot more drifting balloons launched by hobbyists or that escaped from parties and other events than you would expect.
The military probably knows that these are not UFOs - one of the released files where the object seems to move fast because of the camera gimbal was named GIMBAL. I don't know why they chose to release the footage without also explaining what it was. Maybe they realised that any official debunking would be rejected by UFO enthusiasts anyway, or maybe they wanted to make Chinese/Russian analysts confused.
Well, the thing is, I know there are various kinds of evidence, and that there's dispute about how to interpret them, but I'm not really qualified to have first-hand opinions about that. I know next to nothing about fighter jet sensor systems.
What I am qualified to do here is follow a set of heuristics about social knowledge: who to pay attention to and whose judgments / consensus to trust. Until a few years ago, said heuristics were pretty clear that UFOs are a weird conspiracy theory and there was nothing to see here.
More recently, a surprising number of prominent politicians, scientists, intelligence people have all publicly stuck up for the idea there is something, exactly what TBD, to see here. It's hard to see what they have to gain from lying about it: why would Barack Obama and various Republican members of Congress want to be known as UFO guys? Even carrying the Pentagon's water for a disinformation operation would be strange; it doesn't fit well with their political incentives.
All of this makes me more open to (but not convinced of) the possibility that there's something strange going on here. Not aliens necessarily either: a big coordinated bipartisan disinformation push about UFOs raises a whole bunch of questions about why it's happening.
There's precedent for the various parts of the military-industrial complex being enthusiastic about unusual ideas with sketchy evidence, like the programme to militarise remote viewing. If one high-ranking person is enthusiastic about a far-out idea, it doesn't always immediately get shut down. Water companies still employ dowsers.
This might be cyclical - in the early days of the UFO flap, 'serious' people could reasonably think was worth investigating - after a few decades of collecting sightings, it turned out there was no good evidence of an alien origin, and UFOs and the Gray alien mythology became pop culture cliches that would be embarrassing to talk about as a 'serious' figure. But now UFOs and aliens are less common in popular culture than in the heydays of the X-Files, it's become acceptable to talk about them again.
Barack Obama only said that there are objects that "we don't know exactly what they are", it's not like he came down hard on the side of the alien hypothesis. He may just have been reacting to the public videos, rather than any prompting from the Pentagon.
This is the largest factor, by far. I find some of the leaps in this piece perplexing, even without interacting with the grabby aliens bit.
Not just perplexing, but disorienting momentarily, to see one of the most insightful humans on the internet say he looked into something and then link as his one example a -- forgive me for even uttering the word -- a /documentary/. Documentaries are inherently non-credible, possibly even necessarily wrong (though this is harder to demonstrate). Documentaries are the heavyweight champions of the Gell-Mann Amnesia bloodsport -- videos in all their forms are the heavyweight class, and documentary videos absolutely dominate it. Anyone not truly an expert at debunking the speciic angle a documentary takes lacks the capacity to fact-check it fast enough in real time that the amnesia won't get him at least somewhat. Any non-expert is simply lost.
But, the disorientation is only momentary -- we all fall for hoaxes some of the time (I've probably fallen for three this morning), and Hanson being on the shortest of short lists doesn't make him immune. His other points remain valid.
Grabby aliens and UFO sightings do have one thing in common -- doesn't matter how good your math is if you accept the faulty reasoning that provides the data, just like the "99.999% likelihood we're simulated" bit.
I assumed the link to the film (The Phenomenon) was a joke, it'd be like trying to learn the facts behind the JFK assassination by watching Oliver Stone's JFK film. Made to entertain or to persuade, not as an attempt to figure out the truth. Or maybe I'm being cynical there?
Yes. We live in a society that happily believes in magic, in flying saucers, that Donald Trump is the leader of a rising tide of white supremacist terrorists, or that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates are trying to depopulate the earth - all of which can be supported by well-produced and convincing documentaries.
In a TV world, questioning the sacred documentary is insane.
Cf. religious experiences! I'm sure Robin doesn't think everyone's lying about religious experiences, or that there's a vast conspiracy to falsely report religious experiences (yes, I know, point to the Catholic church and saints if you must, but that doesn't cover all), or that every religion was started by a disbelieving charlatan (even if a couple possibilities come to mind). Which leaves lots and lots and lots of people having weird religious experiences. Per Robin's logic, that means aliens! Joking, of course, that means you should believe. But I suspect that's not convincing to most nonbelievers.
5. A genuine (but possibly amplified by misremembering) observation of a natural or man-made phenomenon which has nothing to do with any secret groups?
Right. How can one ignore this? My understanding is that some of the "now explained" strong events that, viewed and photographed from a military jet, appeared to be spherical objects suddenly rising without visible means of propulsion were actually balloons doing what balloons do, and might well have been earlier instance of the Chinese spy balloon tracked across the country and eventually destroyed over the Atlantic. I first read this as a possible explanation for the phenomenon about two years ago someplace on the net, but I didn't jot down the reference.
This is textbook False Dilemma. The possible scope of reasonable explanations is far larger than four, but by claiming that it can only be these four you create a scenario where the logically valid choice will be whatever you want it to be.
Previously unknown natural phenonema, like the fairly recently discovered red sprites and blue jets in the upper atmosphere.
Classified experimental military aircraft/drones (not from a 'secret group' but from the US or another military) - the 'black triangle' UFO sightings seem like they could fall into this category. Either they genuinely behave in exceptional ways (for example secret hypersonic aircraft), or their unusual characteristics combine with observer errors where someone mistakes the size/range of the craft (for example, mistaking a formation of drones for a single huge object).
Mistaking a known phenomenon for a UFO seems quite different from observing a little known phenomenon for possibly the first time. Robin thinks it’s unlikely that trained people could mistake some mundane thing for a UFO, but what if there is a previously unobserved natural phenomenon that creates glowing orbs that fly around at high speed, and maybe it only happens every 100,000 years so it’s never been observed before? Conditional on that existing, seems much more likely that it would be mistaken for a UFO even by experts.
Also a “secret group” is a different thing from “secret activities carried out by a known organisation that has a track record of doing secret things”. The USAF isn’t a secret group but it’s well established that it creates advanced secret aircraft and flies them around. “Secret group” makes it sound like something way more far fetched. If someone saw an F-117 in 1984 (weird black triangle, doesn’t show up on radar), they wouldn’t have seen something created by a “secret group of humans.”
You should have a separate category for an unidentified human aircraft that's not part of a conspiracy. That probably is the majority of impressive UFOs, such as those recently declassified by the US military. Unidentified drones, balloons, commercial or military aircraft, with apparently strange behavior due to camera artifacts or misjudging distance.
What I want to know is how come all the UFO videos are so blurry? Usually they are seen as only a few blurry dots. It's like, why is Bigfoot always blurry? The obvious explanation is that if the object were imaged in more detail, it would be clear how to identify it.
UFO sightings drastically falling in the age of smartphones and constant recording should put much more weight on #1 and #2. When SpaceX launches a rocket, we have 5,000 angles from hundreds of miles out.
So you've seen how viral videos circulate the globe very, very quickly these days? And yet I've never seen nor heard of a viral video of a UFO sighting? Which seems very, very suspicious? And we know eye witness testimony is very unreliable? And people don't realize they may be seeing lightening sprites or mirages or whatever? I love how the smartest people can convince themselves of things that just don't make much sense. Basically, there's no reason to think aliens would come here, particularly so soon after we get tech. So you're left with enormous conspiracy in world where nothing stays hidden (so not that), or user error. When in doubt, bet on humans being idiots in all sorts of interesting ways.
Citation needed. Searching for this information I found a few claims that reported UFOs increased somewhat over the past two or three years according to MUFON, but no information about the number of reports per year from the pre-smartphone era compared to today.
John's claim that sightings decreased is equally in need of citation.
My guess would be that reports have risen, but only because in the information age it is now easier to discover where to make such reports and then make them.
I don't understand why people think there is any likelihood of us having contact with alien life any time soon. When you consider that life on Earth evolved about as early as it could, we may be among the first intelligent life in the known universe. Add in the stupefying distances involved, and the low probability that any life that does evolve ever becomes highly intelligent, and the default position seems to me that it is overwhelmingly unlikely that aliens are here. All the blurry sightings are just too silly to be taken seriously.
Regardless of whether life evolved on earth as early as possible (which seems literally wrong, given dinosaurs, which could have had tech tens of millions of years before we did, but likely didn't, and also, you know, the size and age of the universe), and regardless of whether there's a low probability of intelligent life (which again seems wrong, given, you know, history of earth), it's not the distance, but "why bother?", plus a helping of "earth just turned on the lights very, very recently, no reason to think anyone would notice plus get here that quickly."
You should follow the work of Mick West. A huge proportion of all the "highly credible" cases he has examined have plausible boring explanations. Something like well over 90%.
West usually ignores all the other evidence in a case, and looks only to explain a particular photo or video. I'm considered all that other stuff as well.
Then I would be very interested in a short post explaining why you think there is enough evidence to support that the "human error" interpretation is insufficient in a sufficient number of instances to raise an alarm, because after looking into it I realized that I had vastly underestimated the frequency of such errors. It's actually very common.
What I struggle with the whole UFO thing is the impact of a definitive answer. So if we confirm yes extraterrestrial UFOs are “real”, so what?
1. There isn’t any technological value to it - if proven, we can’t suddenly increase our tech.
2. It won’t change our approach - since “they” haven’t contacted us in any serious fashion - a simple radio broadcast hitting the world would easily announce their presence.
3. It seems counter intuitive that a civilisation can be so advanced that they can build technology which can avoid all civilian official detection and government detection (some governments may agree to keep quiet but not all governments all the time) yet travel to other worlds only to randomly buzz/flyby and scare up the locals.
And then taking the theories themselves through a basic set of what-if assumptions, it seems even more unlikely.
If the assumption is there are other living worlds with much more advanced technology yet space travel is still difficult - then we should see any visit from another planet as a big/complex and obvious event (why incur such expense to be ultra secret about it?) Or conversely if travel is so expensive why invest in “stealth” technology.
If the assumption is there are other living worlds and travel is easy - then we should have seen many space tourists “buzzing” us.
If the assumption is there are other living worlds which can produce technology or live outside our perception of reality / the world, then the argument itself is mute. Since such an argument can be used to “prove” anything.
It feels like a logical fallacy by restricting the logical framing and choices to one’s which support your reasoning. There are many other potential options beyond the 4 described (including 5. mentioned by Oleg Eterevsky). We know mass imagination events are possible and the “credibility” of a given whiteness is subjective as we know humanity has a biological design to create memories.
Given the size of our universe, I think it is likely there are other living worlds. Yet I don’t think we have any definitive proof or likely evidence that any of those civilisations have bothered to send a spy space craft to freak out a few pilots on a late night flight. The logic just doesn’t add up once we consider associated complexities.
It does have some impact. It mildly reduces x-risk predictions (maybe aliens would save us), and substantially reduces the predicted magnitude of impact Earth-originating life could have (unlikely we could colonise the galaxy, or a paperclip maximiser tear it apart, if aliens are already everywhere). It also has potentially concerning implications for the morality of other civilizations (why haven't they reached out? Why don't they prevent wars, plagues etc?). And it might suggest SETI efforts are pointless (since aliens are uncaring) or more valuable (since it increases the likelihood that there are a lot of aliens out there.)
I can see that but in consideration of a priority set of “things that we can impact and impact us” it seems close or at the bottom of. Thus my point that even if it’s conclusively proven, we don’t gain anything of value as they have not made a concerted effort to contact us.
The morality point I’d disagree with as I don’t think we have passed the threshold of “it’s cheap to travel to other worlds and yet everyone has super stealthy technology and just like to scare pilots and random groups of people”.
Given the size of the universe, I think we can say it’s reasonably likely that there is other intelligent life out there, that long-distance space travel is expensive and difficult. As if it was cheap, easy - we would get tons of tourists (whether morally aligned or not).
Along the lines of advanced tech that we can’t figure out, isn’t broadly noticeable to us and where they have some interest in visiting our planet randomly - starts to sound a lot like religion and gods. That there are aliens with technology so advanced that it is effectively magic and they are effectively gods. I guess it’s like a Marvel Universe thing at that point. And the morality point is clear at that point. Christians are very clear why their gods don’t intervene.
There are a lot of historical "weird lights in the sky" attestations that UFO enthusiasts retroactively consider to be UFO sightings, although obviously they weren't referred to as such at the time.
As opposed to weird lights in the sky from storms, lightening sprites, northern lights, solar storms, etc.? Seriously, have people not seen the insanely cool stuff mother nature routinely dishes out that looks like something out of close encounters?
I noticed in the historical record a mention of Pliny the Elder. I had searched for historical ghost sightings, https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/historical-ghost-stories, and Pliny the Younger shows up. Ghost sightings and UFO sightings in my mind have a lot in common. Maybe all the aliens are also ghosts!
1940 is around the time that various governments were building up their military capabilities, and so their observational and organizational capabilities as well. It is plausible that pre-1940 sightings existed, but as there was (1) no organized effort to track unexplained aerial phenomena and (2) little in the way of mass communications, those pre-1940 sightings may be lost to history.
After December 7, 1941, Americans got a lot more concerned about what they might see in the sky. The modern era of UFO sightings as a media phenomenon began in 1947.
> But in order to explain most strong dramatic events this way, I just don’t think it works to postulate scattered amateur liars and hoaxers. Instead I think one needs a big conspiracy, wherein a coalition of orgs has secretly and professionally coordinated to spend big budgets over many decades to have many lie, and to fool others via what are essentially magic tricks.
What do you think about the idea that people like to half-believe things that are exciting and dramatic, and that sometimes this happens in self-reinforcing groups?
You see plenty of examples of this with other miraculous or improbable events, and UFOs are an established idea out there for people to latch on to.
We can see weaker versions of this right now with things like QAnon or [redacted] that I think people only half-believe (some more, some less) but enjoy participating in.
I haven't looked at the evidence myself, so maybe the strong events you're talking about can't be explained by "eyewitnesses" getting caught up in a sort of game. But I don't think you need a long running conspiracy to explain people sometimes getting together and agreeing on a UFO story that is greatly exaggerated or entirely made up.
I still don't get how #4 (alien spaceships) fits the data. You would expect alien spaceships to be either invisible or highly invisible, why have they arranged themselves so that they are just partially visible from time to time and never clearly and incontrovertibly visible? Seems very low propbability. And why aren't the number and quality of sitings increasing as billions of people have become equipped with smartphones with excellent cameras. The data seems to fit much better with hallucinations or optical illusions.
I love the "aliens are so advanced they traveled across the universe to check us out on a whim almost immediately after we started sending signals into space" but "aliens can't hide from our tech." And "testing" us with random appearances for decades doesn't make much sense.
Yes, I'd expect 'grabby aliens' to be advanced enough either to scan us from far away, or if they needed to send probes into the atmosphere, the probes would be tiny and capable of self-destructing into something that looked mundane. Why would they need to send a fast-moving, glowing orb to buzz Navy planes? If it's some kind of test of capabilities, they can just watch the planes during exercises to figure that out.
One explanation for the lack of clear photos/videos is that it's very hard to get good images of fast-moving objects. They end up blurred and are hard to reconstruct. You have to assume the hypothetical aliens are moving very quickly, which has a bit of an epicycle feel to it, but in that case it does explain why the military with its excellent cameras appears to have more convincing evidence.
> My awkward inference starts here: it seems clear to me that #1 can only plausibly explain a modest fraction of strong dramatic events. Most errors would have to be much closer to gross incompetence than to “oops”. (If you’ve also looked but can’t see this, I just don’t know what to say. Pay more attention?)
I find this to be a highly dubious claim backed up by an unfortunate level of self-confidence. The fact is that people are grossly incompetent observers as a matter of course. There are too many documented cases of things like highly skilled fighter pilots crashing into the water while trying to avoid being shot down by the planet Venus to ignore.
If it is true that elites have a bias against #3 or #4, which I'm really not sure is true, it clearly seems like this would be an overcorrection or backlash to the fairly obvious fact that dumb and poorly informed people are more likely to prefer #3 and #4 because they are simpler to understand and explain despite being overwhelmingly less plausible explanations in virtually every single case.
Look at it this way. Everybody knows that educated elites are more atheistic than the general populace, and everybody knows that this is at least partially just a cultural bias. But the fact is that in a modern context religion preferentially appeals to people who are less intelligent and more poorly informed. So do UFOs. This doesn't disprove either of the things but it does mean that "educated elites are biased against splashy explanations for the UFO phenomenon" is not a good reason to take the UFO phenomenon more seriously. It's just an elaborate and self-referential way of turning the fact that dumb people are biased towards UFOs, or God, into somehow being a positive argument in favor of them being real.
Ah, the smug assumption that the religious are less educated and/or intelligent. I'm sure you've got completely non-biased stats to back that up! (I'm not religious, but the amount of casual religious bigotry amongst the purported intellectual superiors is pretty amazing.)
It is not a smug assumption and I am not going to look up stats and present them to you because the very fact that you would present it as seriously debatable suggests that you would simply dismiss the stats in a motivated fashion. It's possible that at the extreme low end of education and intelligence, the curve bends back around, depending on how you instrumentalize religiosity, but the overall trend is extremely clear.
Robin I'm not sure which part of that link is supposed to answer the question, but it contains at least one howler, in which you claim that the Second Tonkin Gulf incident, which was the United States excuse for the Vietnam War, was faked. This is one of a number of easily debunkable conspiracist claims about the secret agenda behind Vietnam War which are widely accepted by the public despite the fact they are definitively known to be false. The agenda behind the Vietnam War was exactly what they said it was.
The Second Tonkin Gulf incident is extremely well established as an incident of jitters and shooting at ghosts following from the First Tonkin Gulf incident, which was real. LBJ did not know this, but he knew or reasonably knew that it was possible, and chose to treat the incident as a second attack. However, this was basically unimportant, even within the narrow context of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which itself was not really some kind of hinge point that altered the overall trajectory of the war, despite how people talk about it today. It didn't get the United States into Vietnam any more than the Reuben James incident got the United States into WW2.
(Side note: There are actually *so many* myths out there denying the well-established fact that the Vietnam War was fought to protect the government of South Vietnam from encroaching Communists backed by Moscow and Peking and perceived as part of a common conspiratorial front, and not for some bizarre bankshot socioeconomic reason, that I originally assumed your link was going to be about the Pentagon Papers, which have been endlessly mined for out-of-context passages from argumentative memos which can be misleadingly juxtaposed with official public statements as proof of deceit. But the fact is the Pentagon Papers debunk the antiwar movement's conspiracy theories rather than supporting them.)
I think you're greatly underestimating how much of everything people believe to be true about what they have seen, heard or experienced is just a hallucination.
This is why the recent wave of military UFO sightings is interesting. Not because pilots are inherently more credible than anyone else, but because some of these cases have lots of correlated sensor data. Radars, infrared cameras, whatever, to go along with what pilots say they saw.
This isn't slam-dunk evidence either -- what if it's a disinformation op? what if it's Chinese electronic warfare tech? -- but I don't think it can be dismissed as hallucinations.
I agree that the recent wave might plausibly turn out to represent something like Chinese drone ops, but this kind of correlative evidence from radar plots is much less strong than it might first appear.
The thing we have to understand is that radars and other such sensors do not just passively collect all available information (like the return signal from a radar) and then process and filter it into an unambiguous final picture. Rather, they are controlled by operators who adjust the parameters of the system in an active and motivated way to obtain the information they want. This allows *expectations* to enter the system, and the possibility of a runaway feedback loop.
It's not theoretical. We already know for a fact that this is how the 1952 Washington DC UFO scare happened. A temperature inversion caused radar signals in the area to bend towards the ground and reflect off DC-area buildings in an unusual way, which a single inexperienced radar operator mistook for a real aerial return. Innocuous ripples and air currents caused the apparent location of the return to fluctuate, which was incorrectly interpreted as a sign of an aircraft with unusual performance characteristics instead of an indicator that the return wasn't a real target at all. The operator called another radar station and they said they could see it too – they were just as poorly trained as he was – so an interceptor aircraft was launched. The pilot thought he actually saw something (I have no clever gee-whiz explanation for this part, sorry) which caused the radar operators to adjust the system to get a better picture of the area in which it was spotted, which caused the illusory return to disappear – which was interpreted as the enemy aircraft detecting the interception and teleporting away with its special abilities.
And this understanding was conveyed to the general population of Washington, DC area radar operators, who were advised to keep a special lookout for recurrences.
And within two weeks the skies over Washington, DC were basically filled with interceptor aircraft chasing down, ultimately, the tops of buildings and trees as viewed reflecting off an atmospheric layer.
It was eventually debunked – the smoking gun evidence was that the periods of frequent sighting corresponded exactly to periods of atmospheric temperature inversion – but a lot of people refused to accept it, and insisted that the whole thing was an implausible just-so story. This is actually the major cultural wellspring for a lot of our ideas about UFO coverups. Remember that part in "Men in Black" where Tommy Lee Jones brainwashes the UFO contactee - "swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus" and then Will Smith clowns about how dumb and implausible the explanation is? Yeah, the idea that the government is going around promoting obviously ridiculous explanations for UFOs that no sensible person would believe, but dumb drones are believing it anyway, comes pretty directly from this incident and the difficulty of getting people to accept its well-proven explanation.
Those military UFO videos are credibly explained here: https://www.leonarddavid.com/debunking-navy-ufo-videos/
Basically the sensors were locking on to distant planes that didn't look like planes to the pilots due to glare and the sharpening filter of the infrared camera, or in one case, a drifting balloon. The objects seemed to be moving fast to the pilots because they misinterpreted parallax/distance and the movements of the gimballed camera. Rotating glare effects gave the illusion of the object itself rotating. As a result they mistook mundane objects for something anomalous doing crazy manouevres.
If it seems unlikely that trained military pilots would misinterpret sensors like this, bear in mind that there are recorded cases of sailors and pilots mistaking the planet Venus for an enemy balloon, mistaking a small balloon for a distant, fast-moving UFO, etc etc.
Also recall that after the Chinese spy balloon was detected, the US Air Force started looking for more balloons (I read that radar signatures from balloons are normally below the threshold that the air defence system pays attention to, and balloons are not tracked by the normal air traffic control system). They ended up shooting down some harmless hobbyist balloons. There are probably a lot more drifting balloons launched by hobbyists or that escaped from parties and other events than you would expect.
The military probably knows that these are not UFOs - one of the released files where the object seems to move fast because of the camera gimbal was named GIMBAL. I don't know why they chose to release the footage without also explaining what it was. Maybe they realised that any official debunking would be rejected by UFO enthusiasts anyway, or maybe they wanted to make Chinese/Russian analysts confused.
Well, the thing is, I know there are various kinds of evidence, and that there's dispute about how to interpret them, but I'm not really qualified to have first-hand opinions about that. I know next to nothing about fighter jet sensor systems.
What I am qualified to do here is follow a set of heuristics about social knowledge: who to pay attention to and whose judgments / consensus to trust. Until a few years ago, said heuristics were pretty clear that UFOs are a weird conspiracy theory and there was nothing to see here.
More recently, a surprising number of prominent politicians, scientists, intelligence people have all publicly stuck up for the idea there is something, exactly what TBD, to see here. It's hard to see what they have to gain from lying about it: why would Barack Obama and various Republican members of Congress want to be known as UFO guys? Even carrying the Pentagon's water for a disinformation operation would be strange; it doesn't fit well with their political incentives.
All of this makes me more open to (but not convinced of) the possibility that there's something strange going on here. Not aliens necessarily either: a big coordinated bipartisan disinformation push about UFOs raises a whole bunch of questions about why it's happening.
There's precedent for the various parts of the military-industrial complex being enthusiastic about unusual ideas with sketchy evidence, like the programme to militarise remote viewing. If one high-ranking person is enthusiastic about a far-out idea, it doesn't always immediately get shut down. Water companies still employ dowsers.
This might be cyclical - in the early days of the UFO flap, 'serious' people could reasonably think was worth investigating - after a few decades of collecting sightings, it turned out there was no good evidence of an alien origin, and UFOs and the Gray alien mythology became pop culture cliches that would be embarrassing to talk about as a 'serious' figure. But now UFOs and aliens are less common in popular culture than in the heydays of the X-Files, it's become acceptable to talk about them again.
Barack Obama only said that there are objects that "we don't know exactly what they are", it's not like he came down hard on the side of the alien hypothesis. He may just have been reacting to the public videos, rather than any prompting from the Pentagon.
This is the largest factor, by far. I find some of the leaps in this piece perplexing, even without interacting with the grabby aliens bit.
Not just perplexing, but disorienting momentarily, to see one of the most insightful humans on the internet say he looked into something and then link as his one example a -- forgive me for even uttering the word -- a /documentary/. Documentaries are inherently non-credible, possibly even necessarily wrong (though this is harder to demonstrate). Documentaries are the heavyweight champions of the Gell-Mann Amnesia bloodsport -- videos in all their forms are the heavyweight class, and documentary videos absolutely dominate it. Anyone not truly an expert at debunking the speciic angle a documentary takes lacks the capacity to fact-check it fast enough in real time that the amnesia won't get him at least somewhat. Any non-expert is simply lost.
But, the disorientation is only momentary -- we all fall for hoaxes some of the time (I've probably fallen for three this morning), and Hanson being on the shortest of short lists doesn't make him immune. His other points remain valid.
Grabby aliens and UFO sightings do have one thing in common -- doesn't matter how good your math is if you accept the faulty reasoning that provides the data, just like the "99.999% likelihood we're simulated" bit.
"Documentaries are inherently non-credible" - that's just crazy talk.
I assumed the link to the film (The Phenomenon) was a joke, it'd be like trying to learn the facts behind the JFK assassination by watching Oliver Stone's JFK film. Made to entertain or to persuade, not as an attempt to figure out the truth. Or maybe I'm being cynical there?
Yes. We live in a society that happily believes in magic, in flying saucers, that Donald Trump is the leader of a rising tide of white supremacist terrorists, or that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates are trying to depopulate the earth - all of which can be supported by well-produced and convincing documentaries.
In a TV world, questioning the sacred documentary is insane.
Cf. religious experiences! I'm sure Robin doesn't think everyone's lying about religious experiences, or that there's a vast conspiracy to falsely report religious experiences (yes, I know, point to the Catholic church and saints if you must, but that doesn't cover all), or that every religion was started by a disbelieving charlatan (even if a couple possibilities come to mind). Which leaves lots and lots and lots of people having weird religious experiences. Per Robin's logic, that means aliens! Joking, of course, that means you should believe. But I suspect that's not convincing to most nonbelievers.
What about
5. A genuine (but possibly amplified by misremembering) observation of a natural or man-made phenomenon which has nothing to do with any secret groups?
An observation of a natural phenomenon interpreted as an extraordinary device would fall into category 1, wouldn’t it?
As for a man-made observation, since there are no known non-secret groups doing such things it would have to be secret?
Right. How can one ignore this? My understanding is that some of the "now explained" strong events that, viewed and photographed from a military jet, appeared to be spherical objects suddenly rising without visible means of propulsion were actually balloons doing what balloons do, and might well have been earlier instance of the Chinese spy balloon tracked across the country and eventually destroyed over the Atlantic. I first read this as a possible explanation for the phenomenon about two years ago someplace on the net, but I didn't jot down the reference.
Adding #5 seems good but it doesn't much change what Robin says, I think.
It reduces the probability of explanations #2-4 and makes UFO-promoting conspiracies less likely.
Yes. I suppose that adding #5 reduces the probability of #1, also. I guess the significance of #5 is a matter of the probability one gives it.
This is textbook False Dilemma. The possible scope of reasonable explanations is far larger than four, but by claiming that it can only be these four you create a scenario where the logically valid choice will be whatever you want it to be.
What would the fifth category of explanations be? Or what is an example of an explanation that doesn't fall in 1-4?
Previously unknown natural phenonema, like the fairly recently discovered red sprites and blue jets in the upper atmosphere.
Classified experimental military aircraft/drones (not from a 'secret group' but from the US or another military) - the 'black triangle' UFO sightings seem like they could fall into this category. Either they genuinely behave in exceptional ways (for example secret hypersonic aircraft), or their unusual characteristics combine with observer errors where someone mistakes the size/range of the craft (for example, mistaking a formation of drones for a single huge object).
You can put "previously unknown natural phenomena" in 1, mistakes / errors. And I think "classified" military groups count as secret groups.
Mistaking a known phenomenon for a UFO seems quite different from observing a little known phenomenon for possibly the first time. Robin thinks it’s unlikely that trained people could mistake some mundane thing for a UFO, but what if there is a previously unobserved natural phenomenon that creates glowing orbs that fly around at high speed, and maybe it only happens every 100,000 years so it’s never been observed before? Conditional on that existing, seems much more likely that it would be mistaken for a UFO even by experts.
Also a “secret group” is a different thing from “secret activities carried out by a known organisation that has a track record of doing secret things”. The USAF isn’t a secret group but it’s well established that it creates advanced secret aircraft and flies them around. “Secret group” makes it sound like something way more far fetched. If someone saw an F-117 in 1984 (weird black triangle, doesn’t show up on radar), they wouldn’t have seen something created by a “secret group of humans.”
You should have a separate category for an unidentified human aircraft that's not part of a conspiracy. That probably is the majority of impressive UFOs, such as those recently declassified by the US military. Unidentified drones, balloons, commercial or military aircraft, with apparently strange behavior due to camera artifacts or misjudging distance.
What I want to know is how come all the UFO videos are so blurry? Usually they are seen as only a few blurry dots. It's like, why is Bigfoot always blurry? The obvious explanation is that if the object were imaged in more detail, it would be clear how to identify it.
UFO sightings drastically falling in the age of smartphones and constant recording should put much more weight on #1 and #2. When SpaceX launches a rocket, we have 5,000 angles from hundreds of miles out.
But UFO reports have just not fallen; they have risen.
So you've seen how viral videos circulate the globe very, very quickly these days? And yet I've never seen nor heard of a viral video of a UFO sighting? Which seems very, very suspicious? And we know eye witness testimony is very unreliable? And people don't realize they may be seeing lightening sprites or mirages or whatever? I love how the smartest people can convince themselves of things that just don't make much sense. Basically, there's no reason to think aliens would come here, particularly so soon after we get tech. So you're left with enormous conspiracy in world where nothing stays hidden (so not that), or user error. When in doubt, bet on humans being idiots in all sorts of interesting ways.
Citation needed. Searching for this information I found a few claims that reported UFOs increased somewhat over the past two or three years according to MUFON, but no information about the number of reports per year from the pre-smartphone era compared to today.
John's claim that sightings decreased is equally in need of citation.
My guess would be that reports have risen, but only because in the information age it is now easier to discover where to make such reports and then make them.
I don't understand why people think there is any likelihood of us having contact with alien life any time soon. When you consider that life on Earth evolved about as early as it could, we may be among the first intelligent life in the known universe. Add in the stupefying distances involved, and the low probability that any life that does evolve ever becomes highly intelligent, and the default position seems to me that it is overwhelmingly unlikely that aliens are here. All the blurry sightings are just too silly to be taken seriously.
Regardless of whether life evolved on earth as early as possible (which seems literally wrong, given dinosaurs, which could have had tech tens of millions of years before we did, but likely didn't, and also, you know, the size and age of the universe), and regardless of whether there's a low probability of intelligent life (which again seems wrong, given, you know, history of earth), it's not the distance, but "why bother?", plus a helping of "earth just turned on the lights very, very recently, no reason to think anyone would notice plus get here that quickly."
This question is part of the set of things it is wise to not be curious about. This set also includes a list of things included in the set.
You should follow the work of Mick West. A huge proportion of all the "highly credible" cases he has examined have plausible boring explanations. Something like well over 90%.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus
West usually ignores all the other evidence in a case, and looks only to explain a particular photo or video. I'm considered all that other stuff as well.
Then I would be very interested in a short post explaining why you think there is enough evidence to support that the "human error" interpretation is insufficient in a sufficient number of instances to raise an alarm, because after looking into it I realized that I had vastly underestimated the frequency of such errors. It's actually very common.
Do you have a reading list for people who want to learn more about the strong UFO events?
What I struggle with the whole UFO thing is the impact of a definitive answer. So if we confirm yes extraterrestrial UFOs are “real”, so what?
1. There isn’t any technological value to it - if proven, we can’t suddenly increase our tech.
2. It won’t change our approach - since “they” haven’t contacted us in any serious fashion - a simple radio broadcast hitting the world would easily announce their presence.
3. It seems counter intuitive that a civilisation can be so advanced that they can build technology which can avoid all civilian official detection and government detection (some governments may agree to keep quiet but not all governments all the time) yet travel to other worlds only to randomly buzz/flyby and scare up the locals.
And then taking the theories themselves through a basic set of what-if assumptions, it seems even more unlikely.
If the assumption is there are other living worlds with much more advanced technology yet space travel is still difficult - then we should see any visit from another planet as a big/complex and obvious event (why incur such expense to be ultra secret about it?) Or conversely if travel is so expensive why invest in “stealth” technology.
If the assumption is there are other living worlds and travel is easy - then we should have seen many space tourists “buzzing” us.
If the assumption is there are other living worlds which can produce technology or live outside our perception of reality / the world, then the argument itself is mute. Since such an argument can be used to “prove” anything.
It feels like a logical fallacy by restricting the logical framing and choices to one’s which support your reasoning. There are many other potential options beyond the 4 described (including 5. mentioned by Oleg Eterevsky). We know mass imagination events are possible and the “credibility” of a given whiteness is subjective as we know humanity has a biological design to create memories.
Given the size of our universe, I think it is likely there are other living worlds. Yet I don’t think we have any definitive proof or likely evidence that any of those civilisations have bothered to send a spy space craft to freak out a few pilots on a late night flight. The logic just doesn’t add up once we consider associated complexities.
It does have some impact. It mildly reduces x-risk predictions (maybe aliens would save us), and substantially reduces the predicted magnitude of impact Earth-originating life could have (unlikely we could colonise the galaxy, or a paperclip maximiser tear it apart, if aliens are already everywhere). It also has potentially concerning implications for the morality of other civilizations (why haven't they reached out? Why don't they prevent wars, plagues etc?). And it might suggest SETI efforts are pointless (since aliens are uncaring) or more valuable (since it increases the likelihood that there are a lot of aliens out there.)
I can see that but in consideration of a priority set of “things that we can impact and impact us” it seems close or at the bottom of. Thus my point that even if it’s conclusively proven, we don’t gain anything of value as they have not made a concerted effort to contact us.
The morality point I’d disagree with as I don’t think we have passed the threshold of “it’s cheap to travel to other worlds and yet everyone has super stealthy technology and just like to scare pilots and random groups of people”.
Given the size of the universe, I think we can say it’s reasonably likely that there is other intelligent life out there, that long-distance space travel is expensive and difficult. As if it was cheap, easy - we would get tons of tourists (whether morally aligned or not).
Along the lines of advanced tech that we can’t figure out, isn’t broadly noticeable to us and where they have some interest in visiting our planet randomly - starts to sound a lot like religion and gods. That there are aliens with technology so advanced that it is effectively magic and they are effectively gods. I guess it’s like a Marvel Universe thing at that point. And the morality point is clear at that point. Christians are very clear why their gods don’t intervene.
Were there UFO events before 1940? It seems a bit of a coincidence to me that we only start reporting UFOs once flying becomes common on earth.
There are a lot of historical "weird lights in the sky" attestations that UFO enthusiasts retroactively consider to be UFO sightings, although obviously they weren't referred to as such at the time.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg
Wikipedia has a list of alleged examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reported_UFO_sightings
As opposed to weird lights in the sky from storms, lightening sprites, northern lights, solar storms, etc.? Seriously, have people not seen the insanely cool stuff mother nature routinely dishes out that looks like something out of close encounters?
I noticed in the historical record a mention of Pliny the Elder. I had searched for historical ghost sightings, https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/historical-ghost-stories, and Pliny the Younger shows up. Ghost sightings and UFO sightings in my mind have a lot in common. Maybe all the aliens are also ghosts!
1940 is around the time that various governments were building up their military capabilities, and so their observational and organizational capabilities as well. It is plausible that pre-1940 sightings existed, but as there was (1) no organized effort to track unexplained aerial phenomena and (2) little in the way of mass communications, those pre-1940 sightings may be lost to history.
Or, way more likely, 1940 is around when humans started flying things that might be mistaken for alien visitors!
After December 7, 1941, Americans got a lot more concerned about what they might see in the sky. The modern era of UFO sightings as a media phenomenon began in 1947.
No, instead there were many sighting of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Different mental frame. BVM instead of UFO.
> But in order to explain most strong dramatic events this way, I just don’t think it works to postulate scattered amateur liars and hoaxers. Instead I think one needs a big conspiracy, wherein a coalition of orgs has secretly and professionally coordinated to spend big budgets over many decades to have many lie, and to fool others via what are essentially magic tricks.
What do you think about the idea that people like to half-believe things that are exciting and dramatic, and that sometimes this happens in self-reinforcing groups?
You see plenty of examples of this with other miraculous or improbable events, and UFOs are an established idea out there for people to latch on to.
We can see weaker versions of this right now with things like QAnon or [redacted] that I think people only half-believe (some more, some less) but enjoy participating in.
I haven't looked at the evidence myself, so maybe the strong events you're talking about can't be explained by "eyewitnesses" getting caught up in a sort of game. But I don't think you need a long running conspiracy to explain people sometimes getting together and agreeing on a UFO story that is greatly exaggerated or entirely made up.
I still don't get how #4 (alien spaceships) fits the data. You would expect alien spaceships to be either invisible or highly invisible, why have they arranged themselves so that they are just partially visible from time to time and never clearly and incontrovertibly visible? Seems very low propbability. And why aren't the number and quality of sitings increasing as billions of people have become equipped with smartphones with excellent cameras. The data seems to fit much better with hallucinations or optical illusions.
I love the "aliens are so advanced they traveled across the universe to check us out on a whim almost immediately after we started sending signals into space" but "aliens can't hide from our tech." And "testing" us with random appearances for decades doesn't make much sense.
Yes, I'd expect 'grabby aliens' to be advanced enough either to scan us from far away, or if they needed to send probes into the atmosphere, the probes would be tiny and capable of self-destructing into something that looked mundane. Why would they need to send a fast-moving, glowing orb to buzz Navy planes? If it's some kind of test of capabilities, they can just watch the planes during exercises to figure that out.
One explanation for the lack of clear photos/videos is that it's very hard to get good images of fast-moving objects. They end up blurred and are hard to reconstruct. You have to assume the hypothetical aliens are moving very quickly, which has a bit of an epicycle feel to it, but in that case it does explain why the military with its excellent cameras appears to have more convincing evidence.
Is there anywhere I can find in one credible place the different reports that led you to discard 1?
> My awkward inference starts here: it seems clear to me that #1 can only plausibly explain a modest fraction of strong dramatic events. Most errors would have to be much closer to gross incompetence than to “oops”. (If you’ve also looked but can’t see this, I just don’t know what to say. Pay more attention?)
I find this to be a highly dubious claim backed up by an unfortunate level of self-confidence. The fact is that people are grossly incompetent observers as a matter of course. There are too many documented cases of things like highly skilled fighter pilots crashing into the water while trying to avoid being shot down by the planet Venus to ignore.
If it is true that elites have a bias against #3 or #4, which I'm really not sure is true, it clearly seems like this would be an overcorrection or backlash to the fairly obvious fact that dumb and poorly informed people are more likely to prefer #3 and #4 because they are simpler to understand and explain despite being overwhelmingly less plausible explanations in virtually every single case.
Look at it this way. Everybody knows that educated elites are more atheistic than the general populace, and everybody knows that this is at least partially just a cultural bias. But the fact is that in a modern context religion preferentially appeals to people who are less intelligent and more poorly informed. So do UFOs. This doesn't disprove either of the things but it does mean that "educated elites are biased against splashy explanations for the UFO phenomenon" is not a good reason to take the UFO phenomenon more seriously. It's just an elaborate and self-referential way of turning the fact that dumb people are biased towards UFOs, or God, into somehow being a positive argument in favor of them being real.
Ah, the smug assumption that the religious are less educated and/or intelligent. I'm sure you've got completely non-biased stats to back that up! (I'm not religious, but the amount of casual religious bigotry amongst the purported intellectual superiors is pretty amazing.)
It is not a smug assumption and I am not going to look up stats and present them to you because the very fact that you would present it as seriously debatable suggests that you would simply dismiss the stats in a motivated fashion. It's possible that at the extreme low end of education and intelligence, the curve bends back around, depending on how you instrumentalize religiosity, but the overall trend is extremely clear.
95% number 1 and maybe 5% number 2. Wishful thinking can account for a huge number of reported sightings.
As a reference point what do you consider to be the largest revealed conspiracy?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ufos-as-usa-psychophtml
Robin I'm not sure which part of that link is supposed to answer the question, but it contains at least one howler, in which you claim that the Second Tonkin Gulf incident, which was the United States excuse for the Vietnam War, was faked. This is one of a number of easily debunkable conspiracist claims about the secret agenda behind Vietnam War which are widely accepted by the public despite the fact they are definitively known to be false. The agenda behind the Vietnam War was exactly what they said it was.
The Second Tonkin Gulf incident is extremely well established as an incident of jitters and shooting at ghosts following from the First Tonkin Gulf incident, which was real. LBJ did not know this, but he knew or reasonably knew that it was possible, and chose to treat the incident as a second attack. However, this was basically unimportant, even within the narrow context of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which itself was not really some kind of hinge point that altered the overall trajectory of the war, despite how people talk about it today. It didn't get the United States into Vietnam any more than the Reuben James incident got the United States into WW2.
(Side note: There are actually *so many* myths out there denying the well-established fact that the Vietnam War was fought to protect the government of South Vietnam from encroaching Communists backed by Moscow and Peking and perceived as part of a common conspiratorial front, and not for some bizarre bankshot socioeconomic reason, that I originally assumed your link was going to be about the Pentagon Papers, which have been endlessly mined for out-of-context passages from argumentative memos which can be misleadingly juxtaposed with official public statements as proof of deceit. But the fact is the Pentagon Papers debunk the antiwar movement's conspiracy theories rather than supporting them.)