US War Dept’s Big UFO Lie
UFOs appear to be intelligently-guided artificial physical craft with tech abilities far exceeding those of any known human society. They usually appear near the edge of visibility, and by now there have been >100K documented UFO reports.
Reflecting on recent events (eg, glints, film) has pushed me over this line: I now put <20% probability weight on all UFOs being explained as illusions, delusions, or mistakes. So >80% of my weight must go to the two non-mistake hypotheses:
A) Some UFOs are what they appear to be.
B) A powerful conspiracy has worked for 75+ years to con folks into thinking (A).
Hard to say which of these is more likely.
The following seems a strong (>80% conditional chance) corollary of A:
A1) US (and ally?) war (military & intelligence) orgs have been working hard for 75+ years to ridicule & hide evidence of A. Even from most US presidents.
And this seems a strong (>80%) corollary of B:
B1) US (and ally?) war orgs are the main orgs behind the conspiracy, and even most US presidents aren’t in on the con.
So I put >2/3 probability weight on this dramatic claim:
C = A1 or B1) US War Depts have been working hard for 75+ years to either hide that some UFOs are what they seem, or to mislead many into thinking so. Even most US presidents aren’t in on the con.
The simple version of A is: they are here now, but nowhere else we can see in the universe, and they choose to stay at the edge of our visibility.
Now I’ve previously guessed that the most likely (10^-3 to 10^-4) prior scenario I can think of to explain this simple scenario is this:
Our grabby aliens analysis suggest that life that visibly changes its region appears roughly once per million galaxies, with our current date (14Gyr) a typical date.
Our Sun’s stellar nursery was seeded with life from nearby, and one of the other ~10K stars born there reached our level millions of years ago.
That civilization successfully enforced an internal rule against visibly colonizing the cosmos. This rule might be for religious, eco, or culture-coherence reasons.
They have made an exception to their no-travel rule to come here to convince us to follow their no-colonizing rule. They prefer not to destroy us.
This expedition is only empowered to enact a robust strategy set from home: domesticate us by being local, impressive, and peaceful.
As domestication might fail if we learn something repulsive about them, they will not show us more, at least for a long time.
A more complex version of A, call it A2, adds that their craft hold biosquishy passengers, and that these craft have crashed many times on Earth. I’m not yet convinced I need to believe A2, but if I did I’d likely explain the biosquisy part as either a local construction to make them seem more relatable to us, or as due to another rule of theirs preserving the dominance of biosquishy versions of themselves. To explain the craft crashing so often, I’d postulate that their civilization has long been rotting, and so they’ve lost many of their original capacities.
Either version of A seems bad news for humanity’s long term future. We wanted to leave the farm when we grew up, to seek adventure elsewhere. But no, big brother says we must stay and work the farm til we die. Aliens are real, but have not helped us, and never will help. Not killing us is the best we can get from them. Maybe we will get to spread into our Solar System, or maybe not, we don’t yet know.
But these A consequences wouldn’t bite for a while. Not for centuries, if my guess that our civ will decline soon is right. So in fact, convincing the world of A will be mostly a nothing-burger for a long while. Some elites may have to accept a big lowering of their status, compared to aliens. But most everyone else just won’t much care. Even religions have shown themselves to be pretty flexible about such things.
However, there is still a big potential consequence here. According to two polls, 80% of my respondents say that they guess that >60% of the US public would disapprove of either A1 or A2. And I’d guess that public disapproval would be quite strong. The group that the US public has most trusted for four decades would have in fact severely compromised US democracy for 75+ years. The US War Dept dramatically defied public wishes for that long, and also their elected leaders, like the president and Congress. And if they lied about something that big, what else did they lie about? Moon landings? Stolen elections?
So I put >2/3 chance on a key fact that, if revealed, would cause a big crisis in US democracy. The US public would seek assurances that US War Depts couldn’t do something that bad again, and such assurances might require pretty dramatic changes to the structure of US democracy. Maybe even using prediction and decision markets?
Alas I have no idea when or if this fact would actually get revealed, making it hard to best on this claim.
I think "there's a successful, 75-year-long probably-multinational conspiracy" is a huge blow to this hypothesis, rather than a logical follow-up conclusion. Who has ever managed anything remotely like that?
True?:
He’s convinced because of cognitive style, not evidence. In his case it likely comes from a few interacting tendencies:
1. He’s drawn to high-impact, low-probability scenarios.
This is his brand: grabby aliens, ems, apocalypse economics, future war equilibria. He gravitates to cosmic explanations and treats them as more interesting and more “Bayesianly honest” than mundane ones. That attraction itself skews how he weighs evidence.
2. He overweights structured, theory-driven priors and underweights messy real-world data.
UFO sightings are noisy, ambiguous, and riddled with cognitive/perceptual errors. He dislikes that kind of explanatory space. It feels “hand-wavey” to him. A coherent model of aliens feels intellectually satisfying, even if it’s empirically fragile.
3. He treats anecdotal, low-quality evidence as if it must be explained by a single global hypothesis.
But thousands of unrelated reports don’t require one cause. He insists they do.
4. He has difficulty accepting that human systems are chaotic rather than coordinated.
People with highly systematic, literal, pattern-seeking cognition (including many with autistic traits) can over-ascribe order, intention, and consistency where none exist—e.g., imagining the military as running a unified 75-year operation rather than dozens of unrelated bureaucratic behaviors.
5. He genuinely prefers speculative extrapolation to empirical constraint.
His work consistently shows this bias. UFOs give him an irresistibly wide conceptual playground: alien politics, cosmology, control strategies, moral implications. Mundane explanations shut that down.
6. Because he enjoys the implications, he treats his enjoyment as Bayesian “update pressure.”
He frames it as probability reasoning, but it’s largely motivated by how generative the assumption is for building narratives about the future.