A year ago I tried to come up with the most plausible story I could for why some UFOs might be aliens. In that story, life started long ago on some planet Eden, which then via panspermia seeded life onto thousands of planets in Earth’s stellar nursery. One of those other planets reached our current advanced level probably at least a hundred of million years ago, after which it enforced a policy preventing any part of it from expanding to colonize the universe. (Maybe for eco, governance, or stopping-change reasons.)
I know we wont' agree on this. But FWIW, I think calling this an intentional hoax misses the most essential aspect of what's going on. The organizational incentives to find stuff and misrepresent it are extremely powerful and strong. As Feynman says, the easiest person to fool is yourself. Add on top of this security measures and using them as a political screen to avoid open scrutiny, and what happens is no deliberate hoax is needed. Just a game of telephone were incentives are strong to exaggerate. And intelligence agencies during a cold war are very similar in terms of internal incentives.
I think it's great you are taking UFOs are a serious topic and working through possible scenarios. The Eden idea is excellent and original idea as a scenario possibility.
But we should not assume the data itself is reliable and put there as a deliberate hoax. It's bad data exaggerated and people fooling themselves. We won't agree on this, but I still believe that's a reasonable position. Your solution assumes far more competence in government than mine. Which I guess shows your prior that people in governments are super smart and never do anything dumb. :)
I think by far the most likely explanation is that a group of influential people in the Pentagon have become true believers in alien origins for UFOs, and enthusiastically interpret ambiguous evidence as confirmation of their beliefs.
I predict that they really believe that there is unambiguous evidence of alien origin craft, but it will turn out that they just misinterpreted weird earthly technology (like aerogels) or fell for hoaxes.
I like your idea that maybe for some reason, like civilisational decay, the aliens are far less powerful than you'd expect, and that explains why they are so easy to detect.
Maybe the squishy bio pilots are constructs designed to spread disinformation - see The Forge of God by Greg Bear for a well-written example of hostile aliens using a bio puppet to mislead humans.
There's an axiom in medicine that when you hear hoofbeats you should think horses, not zebras.
Based upon the history of UFO "evidence" in the last fifty years, if you hear "the government is hiding alien bodies", you should think human cognitive failure, not "mutual descendents of the same stellar nursery are a remnant population who have had a 'Butlerian Jihad' while the rest of the species became artificial. They seek to prevent expansion of their neighbors by appearing only in ways that can easily be mistaken for camera artifacts but if--against all odds--are seen accurately will seem inscrutable and impressive enough to keep all nearby civilizations from becoming starfaring, except for their in-silico cousins who for some reason still remain invisible."
There is a VERY long chain of assumptions that I each find to be highly improbable in this conjecture. Considering how much better than I am at thinking through the probabilities of something like the Great Filter, it's difficult to understand how you can include a dependent step that includes an alien government rotting because they changed their institutions too slowly.
Also I think it's worth considering the possibility that lots of this is just people being kinda dicks. Let's say you are working on a top secret project at area 51 how much fun is it to tell someone you're working on aliens. How much more fun is it if you can get some stick up his ass big shot who isn't read into the program to believe you.
Also, sometimes ppl get glimpses of shit they aren't supposed to see and u can't exactly explain it's a super secret new aircraft. I'd be shocked if the kind of ppl who work on these projects hadn't had fun telling people it was aliens.
"I’d be surprised to find our descendants vehicles piloted by squishy bio creatures a hundred million years from now," You are thinking of aliens as one homogeneous block. Just as some humans want to get back to nature and eschew as much technology as they can, so these aliens could be their versions of hippies, rebelling against giving up their bio bodies, flying what for them are rickety old ships.
What about the idea that they are trying to kill with the fewest resources possible. Operation Space Mincemeat - by sending us down tech trees they know if we follow without deeply understanding we will blow ourselves up. They send squishy bio as part of the plan in order to sell it. Why this tech isn't too dangerous or too complicated because squishy bio from other places has figured it out we can too.
I'm finding it a bit hard to understand the claim/argument you are making in this piece. Some people are claiming that the US government has programs analyzing alien pilots etc. But that's just a claim, what exactly is the evidence put forward and how does it relate to events in China and the USSR?
Are you saying in fact there is compelling evidence that there are US programs that internally pretended to be investigating aliens (not just didn't discourage alien fever when their secret tech was spotted by the public)?
When you say that there are similar events in other countries do you mean that we have evidence those other countries also have military programs that present themselves as investigating aliens? Or do you just mean that there are people in those countries that believe various events were alien encounters?
Like what is the evidence that there is a global conspiracy to get the military deciscion makers to really believe this as opposed to just letting the public run with the alien thing rather than tell them it was actually foreign overflight or secret research?
To your question “how could they be competent enough to come here but not enough to avoid detection by humans, crashing and getting seized?” Maybe the reason would be that they don’t want us to feel scared, so they would deliberately make themselves seem weak and less intimidating. Why would they want us to feel comfortable?
1. Perhaps they want to help us, but don’t want to risk an instant outbreak of panic or war, so a very gradual exposure to a non intimidating species is the better option.
2. Perhaps they want us to underestimate their true capabilities while establishing some relationship with us, or to keep us from feeling spurred by necessity to start developing a proportional military response.
Poor kooky Eliezer was right about one thing: the space of mind designs is far vaster than the physical universe around us.
That creates two problems for your theory Robin. Doesn’t it rely a lot on the aliens having minds like ours? They are prone to stagnation, they enforce rules and taboos, they have environmentalists and they “can’t bring themselves to kill us outright.” Humans do all those things. Real aliens would be much weirder.
Also, if their psyches are weird to us, ours will be weird to them too, especially if they aren’t grabby and don’t travel much. For them to pursue a plan that manipulates our mental responses so much might be more difficult than we realize.
There's a weird potential alternative for squishy pilots. And I mean *weird.*
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that living beings have a "spiritual" "something" that makes them be them, that cannot be replicated by machines or AI, and that can only exist/manifest/whatever via biologically evolved creatures. Whatever connectome, interface etc. is required for their linkage can only be established via squishy carbon brains. Insert Quantum this or that technobabble as required. In short, religions had the correct intuition there, even if they're wrong on the specifics, materialism got it wrong, and neurology merely hasn't advanced enough to figure this out.
In such a scenario advanced species might embrace technological bodily enhancements via protheses, genetic engineering etc., but uploading would be impossible, and so a biological core would remain. Also, those civilizations, once they became aware the "spiritual stuff" is real, would try to actively prevent AI from becoming strong enough to forcibly replace their biological parents, since AI would necessarily lack that thing, and once all biological bodies were replaced, there would be nothing for that spiritual stuff to attach to, possibly leading to its extinction.
The result would be biological species expanding over the cosmos only at speeds compatible with the squishy parts of their bodies still remaining within whatever technological shell they used. For humans that'd mean no expansion, and in-person colonization, involving accelerations and decelerations higher than ~1g, which would *greatly* reduce our grabbiness. And first contacts would necessarily be between biological agents, even if mediated by advanced but limited AI probes traveling around and reporting back to their respective origins (supposing someone didn't go full "dark forest", evidently).
Out of curiosity, what would your prior be for this option?
stay tuned for the impending false flag of an alien invasion to continue to cover-up the technologies hidden away and the illegal government programs. Dr. Greer has made great strides uncovering all of this. https://ce5master.substack.com/p/the-lost-century-of-hidden-technolog
To the extent that DMT entities may have an independent existence, it's worth considering what was written in the "Conversations With God" series on the topic of Earth having visitors. The backstory for that series is that the author had some kind of dissociative experience in which he wrote an angry letter to "God", and then his hand started moving on its own to provide a response. The responses are on the whole very measured and well thought out, so to the extent that thoughts have a representation that exists independently of a brain (which is certainly suggested by the research on parapsychology e.g. https://avshrikumar.medium.com/are-we-created-by-our-brains-or-do-we-tune-into-our-brains-until-we-die-5387bf35529c#79a7), it seems plausible that the author was indeed channeling something "external" and much wiser.
Anyway, the fourth book in the series was explicitly on the topic of Earth having visitors and this is what it had to say: https://imgur.com/a/TP2L6sl
The gist is that there are multiple factions, some more evolved than others, and on the whole humanity doesn't need to worry about being destroyed by another species because the benevolent factions won't let that happen, even if they will allow humanity to destroy itself as that is our own choosing. So consider that some of those crafts may have been brought down for reasons other than incompetence.
If they are alien, then events are communication. Calling them 'gods' and then assuming they make mistakes seems contradictory. The rational stance as a being of significantly less intelligence evaluating something with significantly more is that it's doing whatever it wants to do competently, and if crashes are aliens this doesn't change. **Disclaimer this in no way indicates I believe current evidence is sufficient to claim alien presence.
I know we wont' agree on this. But FWIW, I think calling this an intentional hoax misses the most essential aspect of what's going on. The organizational incentives to find stuff and misrepresent it are extremely powerful and strong. As Feynman says, the easiest person to fool is yourself. Add on top of this security measures and using them as a political screen to avoid open scrutiny, and what happens is no deliberate hoax is needed. Just a game of telephone were incentives are strong to exaggerate. And intelligence agencies during a cold war are very similar in terms of internal incentives.
I think it's great you are taking UFOs are a serious topic and working through possible scenarios. The Eden idea is excellent and original idea as a scenario possibility.
But we should not assume the data itself is reliable and put there as a deliberate hoax. It's bad data exaggerated and people fooling themselves. We won't agree on this, but I still believe that's a reasonable position. Your solution assumes far more competence in government than mine. Which I guess shows your prior that people in governments are super smart and never do anything dumb. :)
I think by far the most likely explanation is that a group of influential people in the Pentagon have become true believers in alien origins for UFOs, and enthusiastically interpret ambiguous evidence as confirmation of their beliefs.
This is described here: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/03/07/how-believers-paranormal-birthed-pentagons-new-hunt-ufos.html
I predict that they really believe that there is unambiguous evidence of alien origin craft, but it will turn out that they just misinterpreted weird earthly technology (like aerogels) or fell for hoaxes.
It sounds unlikely that hard-headed military men would behave like that, but elements of the US military-industrial complex enthusiastically pursued psychic remote viewing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project - and hippy warrior monks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Earth_Battalion
I like your idea that maybe for some reason, like civilisational decay, the aliens are far less powerful than you'd expect, and that explains why they are so easy to detect.
Maybe the squishy bio pilots are constructs designed to spread disinformation - see The Forge of God by Greg Bear for a well-written example of hostile aliens using a bio puppet to mislead humans.
There's an axiom in medicine that when you hear hoofbeats you should think horses, not zebras.
Based upon the history of UFO "evidence" in the last fifty years, if you hear "the government is hiding alien bodies", you should think human cognitive failure, not "mutual descendents of the same stellar nursery are a remnant population who have had a 'Butlerian Jihad' while the rest of the species became artificial. They seek to prevent expansion of their neighbors by appearing only in ways that can easily be mistaken for camera artifacts but if--against all odds--are seen accurately will seem inscrutable and impressive enough to keep all nearby civilizations from becoming starfaring, except for their in-silico cousins who for some reason still remain invisible."
There is a VERY long chain of assumptions that I each find to be highly improbable in this conjecture. Considering how much better than I am at thinking through the probabilities of something like the Great Filter, it's difficult to understand how you can include a dependent step that includes an alien government rotting because they changed their institutions too slowly.
Also I think it's worth considering the possibility that lots of this is just people being kinda dicks. Let's say you are working on a top secret project at area 51 how much fun is it to tell someone you're working on aliens. How much more fun is it if you can get some stick up his ass big shot who isn't read into the program to believe you.
Also, sometimes ppl get glimpses of shit they aren't supposed to see and u can't exactly explain it's a super secret new aircraft. I'd be shocked if the kind of ppl who work on these projects hadn't had fun telling people it was aliens.
"I’d be surprised to find our descendants vehicles piloted by squishy bio creatures a hundred million years from now," You are thinking of aliens as one homogeneous block. Just as some humans want to get back to nature and eschew as much technology as they can, so these aliens could be their versions of hippies, rebelling against giving up their bio bodies, flying what for them are rickety old ships.
What about the idea that they are trying to kill with the fewest resources possible. Operation Space Mincemeat - by sending us down tech trees they know if we follow without deeply understanding we will blow ourselves up. They send squishy bio as part of the plan in order to sell it. Why this tech isn't too dangerous or too complicated because squishy bio from other places has figured it out we can too.
I'm finding it a bit hard to understand the claim/argument you are making in this piece. Some people are claiming that the US government has programs analyzing alien pilots etc. But that's just a claim, what exactly is the evidence put forward and how does it relate to events in China and the USSR?
Are you saying in fact there is compelling evidence that there are US programs that internally pretended to be investigating aliens (not just didn't discourage alien fever when their secret tech was spotted by the public)?
When you say that there are similar events in other countries do you mean that we have evidence those other countries also have military programs that present themselves as investigating aliens? Or do you just mean that there are people in those countries that believe various events were alien encounters?
Like what is the evidence that there is a global conspiracy to get the military deciscion makers to really believe this as opposed to just letting the public run with the alien thing rather than tell them it was actually foreign overflight or secret research?
To your question “how could they be competent enough to come here but not enough to avoid detection by humans, crashing and getting seized?” Maybe the reason would be that they don’t want us to feel scared, so they would deliberately make themselves seem weak and less intimidating. Why would they want us to feel comfortable?
1. Perhaps they want to help us, but don’t want to risk an instant outbreak of panic or war, so a very gradual exposure to a non intimidating species is the better option.
2. Perhaps they want us to underestimate their true capabilities while establishing some relationship with us, or to keep us from feeling spurred by necessity to start developing a proportional military response.
Poor kooky Eliezer was right about one thing: the space of mind designs is far vaster than the physical universe around us.
That creates two problems for your theory Robin. Doesn’t it rely a lot on the aliens having minds like ours? They are prone to stagnation, they enforce rules and taboos, they have environmentalists and they “can’t bring themselves to kill us outright.” Humans do all those things. Real aliens would be much weirder.
Also, if their psyches are weird to us, ours will be weird to them too, especially if they aren’t grabby and don’t travel much. For them to pursue a plan that manipulates our mental responses so much might be more difficult than we realize.
There's a weird potential alternative for squishy pilots. And I mean *weird.*
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that living beings have a "spiritual" "something" that makes them be them, that cannot be replicated by machines or AI, and that can only exist/manifest/whatever via biologically evolved creatures. Whatever connectome, interface etc. is required for their linkage can only be established via squishy carbon brains. Insert Quantum this or that technobabble as required. In short, religions had the correct intuition there, even if they're wrong on the specifics, materialism got it wrong, and neurology merely hasn't advanced enough to figure this out.
In such a scenario advanced species might embrace technological bodily enhancements via protheses, genetic engineering etc., but uploading would be impossible, and so a biological core would remain. Also, those civilizations, once they became aware the "spiritual stuff" is real, would try to actively prevent AI from becoming strong enough to forcibly replace their biological parents, since AI would necessarily lack that thing, and once all biological bodies were replaced, there would be nothing for that spiritual stuff to attach to, possibly leading to its extinction.
The result would be biological species expanding over the cosmos only at speeds compatible with the squishy parts of their bodies still remaining within whatever technological shell they used. For humans that'd mean no expansion, and in-person colonization, involving accelerations and decelerations higher than ~1g, which would *greatly* reduce our grabbiness. And first contacts would necessarily be between biological agents, even if mediated by advanced but limited AI probes traveling around and reporting back to their respective origins (supposing someone didn't go full "dark forest", evidently).
Out of curiosity, what would your prior be for this option?
stay tuned for the impending false flag of an alien invasion to continue to cover-up the technologies hidden away and the illegal government programs. Dr. Greer has made great strides uncovering all of this. https://ce5master.substack.com/p/the-lost-century-of-hidden-technolog
You might be interested in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/14lwwmz/an_explanation_of_why_hard_evidence_has_been/
To the extent that DMT entities may have an independent existence, it's worth considering what was written in the "Conversations With God" series on the topic of Earth having visitors. The backstory for that series is that the author had some kind of dissociative experience in which he wrote an angry letter to "God", and then his hand started moving on its own to provide a response. The responses are on the whole very measured and well thought out, so to the extent that thoughts have a representation that exists independently of a brain (which is certainly suggested by the research on parapsychology e.g. https://avshrikumar.medium.com/are-we-created-by-our-brains-or-do-we-tune-into-our-brains-until-we-die-5387bf35529c#79a7), it seems plausible that the author was indeed channeling something "external" and much wiser.
Anyway, the fourth book in the series was explicitly on the topic of Earth having visitors and this is what it had to say: https://imgur.com/a/TP2L6sl
The gist is that there are multiple factions, some more evolved than others, and on the whole humanity doesn't need to worry about being destroyed by another species because the benevolent factions won't let that happen, even if they will allow humanity to destroy itself as that is our own choosing. So consider that some of those crafts may have been brought down for reasons other than incompetence.
If they are alien, then events are communication. Calling them 'gods' and then assuming they make mistakes seems contradictory. The rational stance as a being of significantly less intelligence evaluating something with significantly more is that it's doing whatever it wants to do competently, and if crashes are aliens this doesn't change. **Disclaimer this in no way indicates I believe current evidence is sufficient to claim alien presence.
What you write is pure ficton, type fantasy.
Plausible without a millonth of a grain of substance.
Plausibility is not evidence, by any means or imagination.
> Resulting in a new prior of roughly one in a million. Which is about the size of our usual prior in a murder accusation.
Err, what? You think the average person accused of murder is only guilty one time in a million!?