Sometimes I pride myself on my taking an intellectual strategy of tackling neglected important questions. However, one indicator of a topic being neglected is that it seems low status; people who discuss it are ridiculed, and their intellectual ability doubted. Thus my strategy risks lowering my status.

To protect against this risk, I can set a policy of only tackling topics that seem to have a substantial synergy with my skills and prior topics. Which seems a valid policy, even if not entirely honest. For a long time this protected me against UFOs as aliens, one of the most ridiculed topics ever. But then I started to study loud very distant aliens, and the topic of alien UFOs became more relevant.

To limit the damage, I once tried to talk only on what UFOs would imply if they really were aliens, but not crossing the line to discuss if they actually are. But on reflection I can see that this topic is in fact neglected, important, and has synergies with my skills and other topics. So now I am shamed into trying to live up to my intellectual ideals, which if truth be told aren’t as strongly rooted in me as I’d like to pretend. Sigh. So here goes, let’s talk about explaining UFO encounters.

I see four major categories of explanation:

• (A) Honest mistakes: This includes misunderstandings of familiar phenomena, delusions and mental illness, and natural phenomena that we now poorly understand.

• (B) New Govt. Tech: Some current Earth government is testing new tech far more advanced than anything publicly admitted. Or is using it for limited secret purposes.

• (C) Hoaxes & Lies: Some are going out of their way to fool observers into thinking they see weird stuff, or just straight lying to say they saw stuff they didn’t see.

• (D) Aliens, Etc.: This tech seen is far more advanced than anything available to any current Earth government. So it is from a hidden more advanced society on Earth, aliens from elsewhere, time-travelers from the future, or something even weirder.

Now it seems pretty obvious that if we are rather inclusive in our definition of “UFO encounter” then (A) is the best explanation for most of them. The interesting question is how best to explain the few hardest to explain encounters. Here is a related Twitter poll I just did:

How best explain top 10 hardest-to-explain UFO cases?
(A) Delusions, mistakes, & misunderstandings,
(B) Secret advanced our govt. tech, honestly seen,
(C) Lies & hoaxes, both decentralized & govt. funded/ coordinated,
(D) Adv. tech by foreign powers, secret societies, or aliens.

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) May 5, 2021

Notice that I made the mistake here of lumping foreign governments into option (D), instead of into option (B) as I do above. If I had done the poll right, my guess is that we’d see: (A) 57%, (B) ~23%, (C) 10%, (D) ~10%.

Over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of reading and watching and thinking on this topic, and I do think I have a judgement to report, a judgement that should represent news to those inclined to copy my judgment. First, (A) or (B) seems to me much less likely than (C) or (D). Second, between (Ca) spontaneous decentralized hoaxes and lies, and (Cb) hoaxes and lies coordinated by a big central organization, (Cb) seems much more likely. And third, among (Da) aliens, (Db) secret societies, (Dc) time-travelers, and (Dd) something even weirder, (Da) seems more likely.

Thus I see the main choice as between (Cb) and (Da), which would together be supported by only ~10% of poll respondents, and between which I can’t decide. Thus I am making a relatively strong claim here, at least relative to poll opinions. Let me outline some of my reasons.

First, if you look at the details of the usual hardest cases, to ones to which UFO fans most often point, you will see that there are often a lot of pretty sober looking people who all say they saw the same pretty clear and dramatic things under pretty good observing conditions. And often what they say they saw is solid-looking objects with remarkable combinations of location, speed, and acceleration, with no attendant thrust or control surfaces of the sort we’d use if we were trying to achieve those combinations.

I know enough physics and tech to know that these claimed abilities are just far beyond anything Earth governments will have access to for a long time, at least if the past is any guide. Or anything that natural weather could make. And similar abilities have been seen for over a half century, so if governments were hiding these abilities they’d be hiding them for far longer than they usually hide techs.

I also know enough human nature to know that these are not close to the sort of things that honest sober sane people would claim to see, if they just somewhat misinterpreted something that they saw or heard. And most of the people reporting in these strongest cases do seem pretty sober and sane. Thus in these strongest cases, the story that all these people are merely mistaken or deluded just doesn’t work, at least for the sorts of things they say they saw in these hardest cases. Nor does the story work that this is advanced government tech that they will release to show everyone in at most a few decades. So I must reject cases (A) and (B), which leaves me only with cases (C) and (D).

[Added 6May: Note that I am making judgements here about particular cases that I’ve considered in some detail. I am not saying I always believe what anyone says they saw. For a comparison, I find the usual evidence presented re ghosts and fairies to be much less persuasive. ]

Yes, humans like to play practical jokes on one another, and sometimes they take those jokes to some pretty far extremes. Sometimes they even try to make the jokes last for years. And often they are inspired to copy the jokes of others. But to explain most of these hardest cases mainly in terms of practical jokes seems just a bridge too far. Really, thousands of disconnected people all around the world playing the same big scary jokes for decades, and then almost never breaking down and laughing and crowing about their jokes even decades later? In contrast, governments, especially their spy parts, have run some pretty big, well-funded, and long-lasting disinformation campaigns. So I have to favor (Cb) over (Ca) by a big margin.

Regarding (D), time-travel seems impossible without crazy extreme physics, and known secret societies on Earth have never reached within orders of magnitude of the scale and degree of secrecy that this would require. Yet spirits or creatures from other dimensions seems even more crazy. Aliens, in contrast, are predicted to exist by our best theories. It is just a matter of finding a plausible scenario wherein they’d be here now doing what we see them doing, and not doing other stuff we don’t see them doing. I’ve tried to work out such a scenario, and find one that is a bit tortured, but far more believable than secret societies or travel across time or between dimensions.

Note that both (Cb)  and (Da) are hypotheses that I would have found priori implausible. So the entire existence of the familiar pattern of UFO encounters was a priori implausible, and so now that I see it I struggle to explain it. And as both of the most likely explanations are low status topics, i.e., aliens and a record-breaking-huge government conspiracy, you can see why most people would rather just avoid the topic.

This post is already too long, so I will stop here once I make one last point: (Cb) is a theory of remarkable government competence. Some governments, or a consortium of them, have managed to get thousands of people to either lie and say they saw stuff they didn’t, or paid for expensive enough tech to fool them. And yet this conspiracy has remained hidden for a great many decades, even from the top levels of their own governments.

In contrast, (Da) seems to require a scenario of remarkable incompetence, among the aliens themselves, among our governments, and even among the UFO activists. So which is more likely: surprisingly high government competence, or incompetence?

Added 7June: This poll agrees with me.