45 Comments

Nimitz tic-tac example is an acceptable one to focus on. But a great many stat analyses draw conclusions from dataSETs, conclusions they could not draw from single datums in those sets. Consider also that people tend to believe in ball lightning even though there is no single compelling example.

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I watched the first video. It makes no effort to say which incidents are convincing (indeed it includes a bunch that it acknowledges are explained, and a bunch that it doesn't acknowledge as explained but where the explanation is quite obvious). If there is in fact compelling evidence, I expect someone to be able to point to *some particular* example that they consider hard-to-explain, and ideally to a significant set of examples *all* of which seem hard-to-explain (or else all of which are individually *somewhat* hard to explain and share some common features rather than looking like obviously different stuff), so that an observer could update after looking into it and evaluating whether it was in fact hard to explain.

I think this is particularly important because the examples all appear to have different "mundane" explanations (so that no mundane explanation is plausibly consistent with all of them), and some of them aren't totally mundane (e.g. some are very likely to be observations of US government aircraft, and some seem very likely to be foreign aircraft poking at US sensors or surveilling military facilities).

If looking into this more, my next step would be looking at the Nimitz tic-tac example (and maybe other sightings of sufficiently similar-looking objects). You say that our beliefs don't live-or-die on one example, but my current understanding is that there aren't *any* compelling examples. No one is providing a list of purportedly compelling examples, and so if I look into one apparently-most-compelling example and it's actually uncompelling then the conclusion feels pretty clear to me.

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I think this is largely right.

https://xkcd.com/718/Given the cultural phenomena that surrounds UFO's, I think the rest of the evidence is about what we would expect. There are enough atmospheric optical and camera phenomena that aren't known to the typical UFO observer to leave mysterious blobs in the sky a common occurrence. When you select for the most impressive looking "evidence", you get something that looks like evidence.

You get strange triangular craft that turn out to be aeroplane lights seen through an unfocussed camera with a triangular aperture. I think this is typical. Of course, don't expect all the footage to be that easy to explain. Cosmic rays causing compression errors in the cameras embedded processors. Novel drone designs. A partial view of some other object, refracted back and forth by layers of warm and cold air. A fly trapped between the lens and the Cmos chip. A doezen more things I haven't thought of.

The problem is that the alien ufo hypothesis doesn't make any specific predictions about what the ufo should look like. And natural phenomena I haven't thought of yet doesn't either. The only way to rule out the latter is to exhaustively consider every possible natural phenomena.

The evidence we see for alien UFO's is about what we would expect in a world where there are no aliens visiting. But a lot of complicated, not well understood things going on. And many unknowns are ascribed to aliens by the media. And the evidence is filtered.

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Blue Book Special Report 14 directly refutes the idea that the unexplained cases are unexplained merely because there was insufficient data. We know this because "insufficient data" was its own category in the report. This document is worth a read, and is highly illuminating.

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You are correct from what I tell on the nature of their distribution, but to say that central authority automatically means berserker I think is wrong. I mean, if their only alien-interaction rule enforced via galactic technology is "Be Excellent To Each Other," then we could find ourselves in a situation just like our current one.

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If they run away from their own unfriendly AI, this AI will arrive here soon, given it will have the same travelling speed.

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They need some kind central authority working in all directions for millions of light years to prevent their own von Neumann Probes and other civilizations from creations of megastructures, not just one-direction nomads.

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Let's say aliens have never visited the earth. Or that aliens visit the earth but are capable of hiding flawlessly. So any UFO sightings have terrestrial explanations and have nothing to do with aliens.

In a world like that, what would you expect would look different compared to our current experience?

Would the top 0.1% of hardest to explain UFO sightings not occur?

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They don't have to be berserkers. They could be nomads who don't originate here and would not have changed the space we see.

Or could be they find doing physics themselves dangerous and want to harvest results from others. If there are ways to destroy the universe they might want to copy technology, but not do fundamental science themselves as it risks doom.

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They could be here to learn tech from earth in the future.

Aliens that A: want more technology, B: Find it hard to develop the tech and C: Are the most advanced civilization they have seen themselves could act like the UFOs do.

Assume for instance a small civilization that hasn't solved death, doesn't have AGI but which has relativistic speed. They try to survive by going into the future at relativistic speeds while waiting for somebody else to solve their problems. Maybe they are a few survivors from a late great filter and don't want to take risks.

They would not necessarily have extreme competence or resources. They would want to study us cheaply. They would send probes at us.

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The Nimitz tic-tac is a fine example, but a key point is that it is only one example; there are many others. Which is exactly why my beliefs don't live or die based on what happens with that one example.

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The 1/10 is a MINIMUM.

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> is it possible aliens are weird?

It's possible, but it's already unlikely enough that interstellar aliens exist, that they have travelled to Earth, and they have not visibly remade the universe around them. That they then proceed to behave seemingly irrationally to me is much more unlikely than the UFOs being natural phenomena, some sort of psy op campaign by the US government, or some sort of weird military technology.

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I'm not sure if I have much to go on with that response, except to ask, is it possible aliens are weird? :)

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I'd consider a more rational action to be staying one of entirely hidden, opening up communications, or not caring if humans observe them. Letting humans get brief glimpses of super-advanced craft but no more is very weird.

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So if aliens are here, they have to be some kind of berserkers, which stop civilizations after they reach some threshold.

But what kind of berserkers will act in absurd and crazy ways? The only one who want to demonstrate their existence, but also want hide motives and capabilities.

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