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?
I imagine a lot of people have at least a pretty good idea of what the Coke formula is, but also the existence of Coke is the opposite of secret.
Bletchley Park was *classified* until the 70s but only even operated for like seven years during an existential war.
The NSA was secret for longer, but also consider that PRISM was disclosed by Snowden about six years after it started.
You're talking about something much more controversial and important than "we have a secret code tracking group" or even "we're basically spying on everyone's communication", and you're also suggesting a conspiracy between the militaries of many states, probably including antagonistic ones, for no clear purpose.
To play the fun paranoia game, not that I think this is true in this particular case either, "well the fact you don't fnord know of any cases shows evidence they are pulling it off"; the good old proving a negative thing. There are definitely cases of great lies going on centuries even unto today such as "criminal justice", "bodily autonomy", "men and women are equal", "climate change", or "the harm a drug causes is solely based on a doctor's assertation of need as that assertation via magic, similar to the Eucharist transubstantiation, changes the chemical properties of the drug" but I'd be sympathetic to an argument "those are different" outside that last one which really is a pure international conspiracy to suppress the truth that has been going on since at least the early nineteenth century.
"There are definitely cases of great lies going on centuries even unto today such as "criminal justice", "bodily autonomy", "men and women are equal", "climate change""
I'm confused, what do you think the "lie" is here? A lot of information about these things is publicly available. If you're just saying that there is rhetoric around these things that doesn't match reality, I would agree with that, but that's a lot different than information actually being successfully hidden for long periods of time.
"the harm a drug causes is solely based on a doctor's assertation of need as that assertation via magic, similar to the Eucharist transubstantiation, changes the chemical properties of the drug"
I'm confused here as well, where is anyone claiming this? If this is just about the fact that some drugs require a prescription, that is just because the people making these rules think that (a) "doctors are the ones based able to evaluate whether the harms of a drug for a particular patient exceed the benefits", rather than (b) "giving a prescription magically changes the chemical properties of the drug." (It's possible that (a) is false, but that is different than someone claiming (b).)
The idea of a successful multi-national conspiracy staying secret for 75 years, when the subject is as important and interesting as this one seems much more implausible than you seem to credit.
The fact of Bletchley Park, or the NSA, or a secret airplane, may be important (nowhere near as important as aliens tho) but it is vastly less interesting than aliens. Everybody already knew governments run spy agencies and try to crack one another's codes. That was never a secret. Only the details of who, where, how, degree of success were secret. Not so interesting. The fact of fusion bombs was never secret, only the trick for making them practical - which to non-physicists isn't very interesting. And not so many people needed to know it. (Well they might have tried to keep the fact secret, but fusion explosions are hard to hide). We successfully keep the target coordinates of ICBMs secret, but these are *boring* secrets. We already know they target military assets, command centers, maybe cities, etc. Exactly which ones isn't that interesting.
I can't imagine a regime, esp. a multi-national one, that could keep such an _interesting_ secret that long. If nothing else, there would be the occasional deathbed revelation. Humans just aren't that good at keeping secrets.
Agreed - and "edge of visibility" has far more plausible explanations well hashed. Having read and considered Hanson's claims on this matter, I am not convinced. It is:
1) sensor artifacts. No sensor is perfect, and the more data you collect the more noise is available for pattern recognition, and it will always be a little different because sensing technology changes. Every time we recheck with better gear there's nothing there because there never was.
2) Experimental craft and military tests- they are always "at the edge of visibility" because stealth and sensing technology are always progressing.
"Biosquishy" aliens are as made up as Sasquatch and God.
The potential existence of UFOs as extraterrestrial craft, and hence of a potential cover up surrounding them, would be one of the worst kept secrets of all time. Everyone knows about this (at least as a hypothesis), and there are thousands of books on the subject. So it seems plausible to postulate there being a poorly-contained (and hence only partly successful) conspiracy around it
I disagree with this reasoning. If there were a conspiracy this massive, it wouldn't just be unsuccessful in that people still saw UFOs, it would be unsuccessful in that some member of the conspiracy would have come forth and revealed it, with solid documentation.
I agree it is odd that afaik no one who is a ‘member’ in that they are in an official capacity and know directly (some of) what is going on and has been covered up has come forward with documentation. However various people at one remove from this have come forward - i.e. with detailed accounts of speaking to/dealing with such people, eg following a UFO encounter
Religions persist not because their bullshit is perfectly concealed, but because it isn't the load-bearing part. The "religion" of UFO-denial is similar in this respect, come to think of it.
Disagree. The NHI, if they exist, are clearly in on the conspiracy, they tend to avoid being filmed, disable any camera pointed at them, and so on. They may even be entirely behind the conspiracy, in which case the US wouldn't have been able to enact disclosure prematurely even if they'd tried (they probably did, and every attempt probably fizzled out and vanished before there was an opportunity for it to reach the public record).
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.
There is a distinct failure mode that very smart people can fall into whereby one becomes so enamored of a beautiful idea that one ignores messy evidence against it. Arguably the idea of communism is one (very costly) example.
Highly analytical people are especially susceptible to this and their conclusions can be brittle as a result. If the Russian peasants had had much to say about their government they probably would have been better off.
But then how did they get here? Particularly if they're biologic in any way? Is that point, viewed as a filter, almost dispositive against it being aliens? I suppose these could be autonomous vehicles, but then, again given speed of light and distance issues, sending signals back would take enormous power and mean enormous delay for them to reach their destination. So why bother if you are an alien? [Also, presumably, we would see high powered radiation sending signals?].
The utility of the whole thing seems very low to me. Suppose that there are tiny molecular scale assemblers. We presume (and have good evidence for) the fact that all atoms are identical everywhere in the universe. Fine. So you send a blueprint and a machine that takes local atoms and reconstructs from them whatever it is that you want built. Let's even assume that the assemblers are good enough to construct something biologic from atoms. Why bother? How are you going to get a signal back to where you came from to make this whole thing worthwhile, even if to just satisfy your curiosity? And, we're talking macro scale stuff (not tiny particles) which we have to send for light years. What propulsion did they use to get here? Why don't we see any evidence of them coming "in" as it were at high speeds and why don't we see any evidence of signals being sent back? Is it possible that it is aliens. Absolutely. Is it a probability exceeding epsilon? I've not heard any argument, yet, that makes me think that epsilon is anything other than a tiny number. The physics to me is the biggest constraint followed by the seeming lack of any economic utility.
It's always seemed to me that the communication cost of spreading your civilization over interstellar distances far outweighs any benefit you gain from additional resources. The only reason Star Trek looks like an attractive future is that the show ignores the laws of physics.
A lot of UFO behavior shows signs of gravitational lensing. Among technical people in the community, spacetime curvature manipulation is taken seriously, for reasons that make sense.
Good-ish piece, but your (Robin Hanson's) analysis doesn't take into account that the US military/intelligence recently has been more enthusiastic about the UAP/UFO phenomenon than the general public.
It was the opposite before, say, 2017. So a lot of this analysis doesn't take this reversal of enthusiasm very seriously.
The sociology of this makes the X-Files in 2025 very unworkable. Large parts of the military brass seem to take the UFOs as seriously as Fox Mulder (as they should).
So the assumption that they are trying to pull one over the public doesn't seem to be true in 2025 at all.
Until I read Robin Hanson, I thought the UFO story was basically incoherent. They couldn't both be bumbling goofballs that occasionally crash their spaceships, and also understand humans so perfectly to always predict exactly where the humans with cameras are so that all the picures of them are ambiguous. And they keep this up for years, even into the era when billions always have a good camera in their pocket.
The "panspermia siblings gradually trying to influence us" story changed my credence values upward by maybe a factor of a hundred, but that still puts it well below 1%. But still, respect for someone who can move my credence by two orders of magnitude!
The reason I think it's mainly sensor error is that's clear the observed UAPs don't displace air (incredible speed with no ionization, no heating from drag, no induced wind, no roaring sound, no sonic boom), making them act much more like images and less like objects. But if it's not sensor illusions, then it's probably the"powerful people are trying to make us believe" story. That story doesn't just explain but actually *predicts* that the many recordings will be ambiguous: they can't be too clear or too easy to corroborate, or the trickery (the "wires") would be visible.
You have a unique and special evidence processing style and I think it has led you astray here. It's easy to see how those with weird evidence-processing styles might get this wrong. There are facts that are compact, simple, and quantifiable in this discussion and there are facts about history that are vague and holistic. It's the same case with the Kennedy Assassination or the Great Pyramid's construction and events with this combination of facts has been seductive forever.
Almost ALL crackpot theories hold two opposing beliefs. One is that the government we all know is a shadow on the cave. The real government is so powerful that it remains almost completely hidden, killing thousands of powerful at a time in order to keep the secret. The other belief is that this government is all powerful and capable of keeping the conspiracy from coming out is not capable of keeping an alien conspiracy from coming out. They've got witnesses, conferences, YouTube channels; 500 military, intelligence, credentialed witnesses who can testify to some part of the conspiracy.
I'm not saying your's is a crackpot theory. But every crackpot theory does follow these three laws:
Law #1: Authority's version of events is untrue.
Law #2: Everything that differs from the authoritative version is more likely true.
Law #3: All evidence that contradicts #1 or #2 is part of the conspiracy.
You put two thirds combined probability that US war agencies have been running a huge, democracy-compromising deception project for decades. The worry is not that this scenario is logically impossible. It’s that you get those numbers by cavalierly throwing away most of the hypothesis space.
The slight of hand is in looking at some ambiguous new evidence and a documentary stuffed with retired officials claiming cover-ups and decide it is now less than 20 percent likely that all UFO reports are illusions, delusions or mistakes. The moment you do that you force more than 80 percent of the probability into two boxes: either some UFOs really are advanced non-human craft, or there has been a 75-year conspiracy to make people think so. From there you announce that *in either case* there is a civilization-spanning, reality-warping lie that has survived revolutions and communism and collapse and war and the internet with better than two-thirds probability. The trick is in the compression: take a noisy mess, collapse it into a binary choice, then act as if the coin flip is a sober result rather than a huge framing error.
That compression is wrong. We KNOW that “UFO” is a grab-bag of misidentifications, optical and camera artifacts, atmospheric phenomena, hoaxes, exaggerations, social contagion, classified but mundane flight tests, unknown phenomena plus a tail of cases where the data are simply too poor to sort out. All of that gets swept into an “all mistakes” bucket so you can push it under 20 percent. The Palomar glints are interesting but they justify more astrophysics, *not a sharp downgrade* of all other evidence combined. Treating those curiosities and one *highly edited* film full of nothing but testimonies as if they outweighed decades of systematic analysis that keep finding nothing but noise is a naive bias toward fresh evidence and an underweighting of uncertainty and unknowns.
The vast conspiracy is where this really overreaches. To get the “big lie,” you have to believe in a single, remarkably competent multinational operation that has managed for most of a century to coordinate intelligence agencies, military branches, companies, civilian contractors, budget fights, partisan swings, expert amateurs, independent scientists and smart or lucky observers *just in the U.S.* while never leaking anything significant in a government that has repeatedly failed to keep far smaller and simpler secrets. It's special pleading. That is exactly the kind of baroque, Rube Goldberg machinery that a Bayesian is supposed to penalize.
There are a few new puzzles to study along with the same old reasons to think human perception.
I suppose it could be a cover story that became self-sustaining. Initially, the government uses UFOs as a cover for experimental aircraft or whatever. Then people in the government who aren’t in on the actual secret start to believe the cover story. Then political decision making becomes influenced by the cover story, because the decision makers don’t know it’s fake.
The people who originally knew it was fake might be dead by now, leaving behind a bunch of subordinates who genuinely believe it was aliens.
Your June 2021 piece suggests an extraterrestrial civilization might avoid landing on the White House lawn so as not to alienate humanity with the strange answers they'd have to our many questions. Instead they'd offer "brief simple impressive glimpses that don’t let us figure out their tech, or even the locations of their local bases. The package of simple geometric shapes, crazy accelerations, no sounds or other local side effects, clear intelligent intent, and avoiding harms to us seems to do the trick."
But the subtle route has failed them for decades. Scenario A assumes the US government (narrow parts of it, alone or in concert with narrow parts of others) has long hidden ET activity. If so, the ET civ's strategy must not have been “reach earth and subtly reveal our existence to humanity as a whole,” but rather either “subtly reveal our existence in a way that would be visible only to parts of certain governments, which could choose not to broadly disclose it,” or “attempt to subtly reveal our existence to humanity as a whole, but if governments manage to conceal our activity, just keep doing concealable things instead of escalating beyond their ability to conceal.”
The former might be plausible, but parts of certain human governments getting a veto over the success or timing of an ET civ's plan to reveal its existence seems improbable
But they also needn’t wait a moment longer than USG prefers. As Napoleon might advise, “if you want to make contact with humanity, make contact with humanity.”
It's great to see these updates. There's a lot more room at the bottom though. Can you explain why you assume aliens would have to come from outer space (opposed to inner space)?
> They usually appear near the edge of visibility, and by now there have been >100K documented UFO reports.
Yes. There are a large number of people out there who want to believe in UFO stuff. There are a lot of cameras. There are a lot of ways that birds, planes, balloons, mirages, clouds, lens flares, camera glitches etc can combine to make a strange blob. It is hard to identify anything when you only have 3 pixels.
The problem with the aliens-UFO hypothesis, like the god-doing-miracles hypothesis, is that it is a grab bag of any unexplained data. The world is big and complex enough that there are always going to be some experimental results you don't understand. Good theories make very specific predictions.
Theories like a god that does miracles, or aliens that are UFOs, are so flexible that almost any piece of data that is hard to find another good explanation for can be "explained". So every rare atmospheric phenomena, unexpected camera glitch and outright hoax all gets bundled into a single "evidence for aliens" folder. The "logic" goes, if you can't explain exactly how the camera glitched, any unexplained data is aliens by default.
Edit: If you have tissue samples in the lab and spec sheets on the aliens fusion engines, your getting to the point where "aliens" is actually making specific predictions. If you know how fast the aliens spaceships fly, then a blob that flies too fast is a surprise. Something that doesn't fit with the aliens model. But at the moment, "aliens" is being used as a 1 size fits all hypothesis.
Sorry for that harsh comment, but what the point of praising rationalism, Occam's razor, Bayes theorem and so on to just succomb to faith or complotism at the first occasion. I just do not understand.
Only 20% on illusions, delusions, or mistakes is absurd given the evidence present and the number of epicycles it takes to establish alien culprits matching this description.
Also; why no weight on US or Chinese government secret defense tech? I often see the claim "but no current technology can do that!!", but that's what makes it a secret! Besides, it needn't be a craft with a dude in it, or even a craft at all instead of some laser contraption meant to fool enemy combatants. I don't consider this to be especially likely, but it beats aliens.
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?
Bletchley Park secret was kept for 30yr by 10K folks. NSA was secret for 15 years by 20K folks. The Coke formula is secret after 140 years.
I imagine a lot of people have at least a pretty good idea of what the Coke formula is, but also the existence of Coke is the opposite of secret.
Bletchley Park was *classified* until the 70s but only even operated for like seven years during an existential war.
The NSA was secret for longer, but also consider that PRISM was disclosed by Snowden about six years after it started.
You're talking about something much more controversial and important than "we have a secret code tracking group" or even "we're basically spying on everyone's communication", and you're also suggesting a conspiracy between the militaries of many states, probably including antagonistic ones, for no clear purpose.
To play the fun paranoia game, not that I think this is true in this particular case either, "well the fact you don't fnord know of any cases shows evidence they are pulling it off"; the good old proving a negative thing. There are definitely cases of great lies going on centuries even unto today such as "criminal justice", "bodily autonomy", "men and women are equal", "climate change", or "the harm a drug causes is solely based on a doctor's assertation of need as that assertation via magic, similar to the Eucharist transubstantiation, changes the chemical properties of the drug" but I'd be sympathetic to an argument "those are different" outside that last one which really is a pure international conspiracy to suppress the truth that has been going on since at least the early nineteenth century.
"There are definitely cases of great lies going on centuries even unto today such as "criminal justice", "bodily autonomy", "men and women are equal", "climate change""
I'm confused, what do you think the "lie" is here? A lot of information about these things is publicly available. If you're just saying that there is rhetoric around these things that doesn't match reality, I would agree with that, but that's a lot different than information actually being successfully hidden for long periods of time.
"the harm a drug causes is solely based on a doctor's assertation of need as that assertation via magic, similar to the Eucharist transubstantiation, changes the chemical properties of the drug"
I'm confused here as well, where is anyone claiming this? If this is just about the fact that some drugs require a prescription, that is just because the people making these rules think that (a) "doctors are the ones based able to evaluate whether the harms of a drug for a particular patient exceed the benefits", rather than (b) "giving a prescription magically changes the chemical properties of the drug." (It's possible that (a) is false, but that is different than someone claiming (b).)
The idea of a successful multi-national conspiracy staying secret for 75 years, when the subject is as important and interesting as this one seems much more implausible than you seem to credit.
The fact of Bletchley Park, or the NSA, or a secret airplane, may be important (nowhere near as important as aliens tho) but it is vastly less interesting than aliens. Everybody already knew governments run spy agencies and try to crack one another's codes. That was never a secret. Only the details of who, where, how, degree of success were secret. Not so interesting. The fact of fusion bombs was never secret, only the trick for making them practical - which to non-physicists isn't very interesting. And not so many people needed to know it. (Well they might have tried to keep the fact secret, but fusion explosions are hard to hide). We successfully keep the target coordinates of ICBMs secret, but these are *boring* secrets. We already know they target military assets, command centers, maybe cities, etc. Exactly which ones isn't that interesting.
I can't imagine a regime, esp. a multi-national one, that could keep such an _interesting_ secret that long. If nothing else, there would be the occasional deathbed revelation. Humans just aren't that good at keeping secrets.
Agreed - and "edge of visibility" has far more plausible explanations well hashed. Having read and considered Hanson's claims on this matter, I am not convinced. It is:
1) sensor artifacts. No sensor is perfect, and the more data you collect the more noise is available for pattern recognition, and it will always be a little different because sensing technology changes. Every time we recheck with better gear there's nothing there because there never was.
2) Experimental craft and military tests- they are always "at the edge of visibility" because stealth and sensing technology are always progressing.
"Biosquishy" aliens are as made up as Sasquatch and God.
The potential existence of UFOs as extraterrestrial craft, and hence of a potential cover up surrounding them, would be one of the worst kept secrets of all time. Everyone knows about this (at least as a hypothesis), and there are thousands of books on the subject. So it seems plausible to postulate there being a poorly-contained (and hence only partly successful) conspiracy around it
I disagree with this reasoning. If there were a conspiracy this massive, it wouldn't just be unsuccessful in that people still saw UFOs, it would be unsuccessful in that some member of the conspiracy would have come forth and revealed it, with solid documentation.
I agree it is odd that afaik no one who is a ‘member’ in that they are in an official capacity and know directly (some of) what is going on and has been covered up has come forward with documentation. However various people at one remove from this have come forward - i.e. with detailed accounts of speaking to/dealing with such people, eg following a UFO encounter
Religions.
Not the same ballpark, religions aren't based on science but faith.
Religions persist not because their bullshit is perfectly concealed, but because it isn't the load-bearing part. The "religion" of UFO-denial is similar in this respect, come to think of it.
Disagree. The NHI, if they exist, are clearly in on the conspiracy, they tend to avoid being filmed, disable any camera pointed at them, and so on. They may even be entirely behind the conspiracy, in which case the US wouldn't have been able to enact disclosure prematurely even if they'd tried (they probably did, and every attempt probably fizzled out and vanished before there was an opportunity for it to reach the public record).
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.
There is a distinct failure mode that very smart people can fall into whereby one becomes so enamored of a beautiful idea that one ignores messy evidence against it. Arguably the idea of communism is one (very costly) example.
Highly analytical people are especially susceptible to this and their conclusions can be brittle as a result. If the Russian peasants had had much to say about their government they probably would have been better off.
Being someone who works in academia, I have to say I see evidence of this daily.
Neverthless it's of course very interesting to hear Robin's "what if..." thoughts even if none of it ends up being true or likely to happen.
Absolutely agree it's fun to speculate and discuss new ideas – especially over beers at the pub – and I enjoy Robin's writings very much in that vein.
I fear you may be correct (sorry, Robin).
Thanks GPT
You're welcome, Nathan.
How do aliens get around the speed of light limitation? I never see this point addressed.
I'm not suggesting they did.
But then how did they get here? Particularly if they're biologic in any way? Is that point, viewed as a filter, almost dispositive against it being aliens? I suppose these could be autonomous vehicles, but then, again given speed of light and distance issues, sending signals back would take enormous power and mean enormous delay for them to reach their destination. So why bother if you are an alien? [Also, presumably, we would see high powered radiation sending signals?].
Bio stuff could be frozen from home, or assembled on location,
The utility of the whole thing seems very low to me. Suppose that there are tiny molecular scale assemblers. We presume (and have good evidence for) the fact that all atoms are identical everywhere in the universe. Fine. So you send a blueprint and a machine that takes local atoms and reconstructs from them whatever it is that you want built. Let's even assume that the assemblers are good enough to construct something biologic from atoms. Why bother? How are you going to get a signal back to where you came from to make this whole thing worthwhile, even if to just satisfy your curiosity? And, we're talking macro scale stuff (not tiny particles) which we have to send for light years. What propulsion did they use to get here? Why don't we see any evidence of them coming "in" as it were at high speeds and why don't we see any evidence of signals being sent back? Is it possible that it is aliens. Absolutely. Is it a probability exceeding epsilon? I've not heard any argument, yet, that makes me think that epsilon is anything other than a tiny number. The physics to me is the biggest constraint followed by the seeming lack of any economic utility.
It's always seemed to me that the communication cost of spreading your civilization over interstellar distances far outweighs any benefit you gain from additional resources. The only reason Star Trek looks like an attractive future is that the show ignores the laws of physics.
Yes. I wonder that too all the time. I suppose a sufficiently advanced civilization might have a very low marginal cost. But even then, I don’t know.
A lot of UFO behavior shows signs of gravitational lensing. Among technical people in the community, spacetime curvature manipulation is taken seriously, for reasons that make sense.
E.g. see this technical report:
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=138426
Good-ish piece, but your (Robin Hanson's) analysis doesn't take into account that the US military/intelligence recently has been more enthusiastic about the UAP/UFO phenomenon than the general public.
It was the opposite before, say, 2017. So a lot of this analysis doesn't take this reversal of enthusiasm very seriously.
The sociology of this makes the X-Files in 2025 very unworkable. Large parts of the military brass seem to take the UFOs as seriously as Fox Mulder (as they should).
So the assumption that they are trying to pull one over the public doesn't seem to be true in 2025 at all.
An apparent split US war dept, with apparent changes in relative influence, are consistent with both A and B scenarios.
Until I read Robin Hanson, I thought the UFO story was basically incoherent. They couldn't both be bumbling goofballs that occasionally crash their spaceships, and also understand humans so perfectly to always predict exactly where the humans with cameras are so that all the picures of them are ambiguous. And they keep this up for years, even into the era when billions always have a good camera in their pocket.
The "panspermia siblings gradually trying to influence us" story changed my credence values upward by maybe a factor of a hundred, but that still puts it well below 1%. But still, respect for someone who can move my credence by two orders of magnitude!
The reason I think it's mainly sensor error is that's clear the observed UAPs don't displace air (incredible speed with no ionization, no heating from drag, no induced wind, no roaring sound, no sonic boom), making them act much more like images and less like objects. But if it's not sensor illusions, then it's probably the"powerful people are trying to make us believe" story. That story doesn't just explain but actually *predicts* that the many recordings will be ambiguous: they can't be too clear or too easy to corroborate, or the trickery (the "wires") would be visible.
I think that there is D: Our world model is seriously wrong. May be we live in simulation
or our world has a couple of extra-dimensions full of invisible life
or collective unconsciousness is real
or large scale quantum effects in low concentration of attention becomes apparent
or we just don't have idea
You have a unique and special evidence processing style and I think it has led you astray here. It's easy to see how those with weird evidence-processing styles might get this wrong. There are facts that are compact, simple, and quantifiable in this discussion and there are facts about history that are vague and holistic. It's the same case with the Kennedy Assassination or the Great Pyramid's construction and events with this combination of facts has been seductive forever.
Almost ALL crackpot theories hold two opposing beliefs. One is that the government we all know is a shadow on the cave. The real government is so powerful that it remains almost completely hidden, killing thousands of powerful at a time in order to keep the secret. The other belief is that this government is all powerful and capable of keeping the conspiracy from coming out is not capable of keeping an alien conspiracy from coming out. They've got witnesses, conferences, YouTube channels; 500 military, intelligence, credentialed witnesses who can testify to some part of the conspiracy.
I'm not saying your's is a crackpot theory. But every crackpot theory does follow these three laws:
Law #1: Authority's version of events is untrue.
Law #2: Everything that differs from the authoritative version is more likely true.
Law #3: All evidence that contradicts #1 or #2 is part of the conspiracy.
You put two thirds combined probability that US war agencies have been running a huge, democracy-compromising deception project for decades. The worry is not that this scenario is logically impossible. It’s that you get those numbers by cavalierly throwing away most of the hypothesis space.
The slight of hand is in looking at some ambiguous new evidence and a documentary stuffed with retired officials claiming cover-ups and decide it is now less than 20 percent likely that all UFO reports are illusions, delusions or mistakes. The moment you do that you force more than 80 percent of the probability into two boxes: either some UFOs really are advanced non-human craft, or there has been a 75-year conspiracy to make people think so. From there you announce that *in either case* there is a civilization-spanning, reality-warping lie that has survived revolutions and communism and collapse and war and the internet with better than two-thirds probability. The trick is in the compression: take a noisy mess, collapse it into a binary choice, then act as if the coin flip is a sober result rather than a huge framing error.
That compression is wrong. We KNOW that “UFO” is a grab-bag of misidentifications, optical and camera artifacts, atmospheric phenomena, hoaxes, exaggerations, social contagion, classified but mundane flight tests, unknown phenomena plus a tail of cases where the data are simply too poor to sort out. All of that gets swept into an “all mistakes” bucket so you can push it under 20 percent. The Palomar glints are interesting but they justify more astrophysics, *not a sharp downgrade* of all other evidence combined. Treating those curiosities and one *highly edited* film full of nothing but testimonies as if they outweighed decades of systematic analysis that keep finding nothing but noise is a naive bias toward fresh evidence and an underweighting of uncertainty and unknowns.
The vast conspiracy is where this really overreaches. To get the “big lie,” you have to believe in a single, remarkably competent multinational operation that has managed for most of a century to coordinate intelligence agencies, military branches, companies, civilian contractors, budget fights, partisan swings, expert amateurs, independent scientists and smart or lucky observers *just in the U.S.* while never leaking anything significant in a government that has repeatedly failed to keep far smaller and simpler secrets. It's special pleading. That is exactly the kind of baroque, Rube Goldberg machinery that a Bayesian is supposed to penalize.
There are a few new puzzles to study along with the same old reasons to think human perception.
UFO reports are virtually exclusively made in US and UK territory. My prior is a cultural explanation.
I suppose it could be a cover story that became self-sustaining. Initially, the government uses UFOs as a cover for experimental aircraft or whatever. Then people in the government who aren’t in on the actual secret start to believe the cover story. Then political decision making becomes influenced by the cover story, because the decision makers don’t know it’s fake.
The people who originally knew it was fake might be dead by now, leaving behind a bunch of subordinates who genuinely believe it was aliens.
Another parsimonious explanation might be that it's a psyops aimed at confusing and misleading *foreign* governments, not US citizens.
Yes, a motive could be to make other nations think twice about a nuke first strike.
There is a two similar long running conspiracies??? - number stations and red mercury. The goal of number stations is to create uncertainty in enemy.
Your June 2021 piece suggests an extraterrestrial civilization might avoid landing on the White House lawn so as not to alienate humanity with the strange answers they'd have to our many questions. Instead they'd offer "brief simple impressive glimpses that don’t let us figure out their tech, or even the locations of their local bases. The package of simple geometric shapes, crazy accelerations, no sounds or other local side effects, clear intelligent intent, and avoiding harms to us seems to do the trick."
But the subtle route has failed them for decades. Scenario A assumes the US government (narrow parts of it, alone or in concert with narrow parts of others) has long hidden ET activity. If so, the ET civ's strategy must not have been “reach earth and subtly reveal our existence to humanity as a whole,” but rather either “subtly reveal our existence in a way that would be visible only to parts of certain governments, which could choose not to broadly disclose it,” or “attempt to subtly reveal our existence to humanity as a whole, but if governments manage to conceal our activity, just keep doing concealable things instead of escalating beyond their ability to conceal.”
The former might be plausible, but parts of certain human governments getting a veto over the success or timing of an ET civ's plan to reveal its existence seems improbable
"subtle route has failed them for decades" They needn't be in a rush on those timescales.
But they also needn’t wait a moment longer than USG prefers. As Napoleon might advise, “if you want to make contact with humanity, make contact with humanity.”
It's great to see these updates. There's a lot more room at the bottom though. Can you explain why you assume aliens would have to come from outer space (opposed to inner space)?
https://x.com/i/status/1905648064766869682
Also, what are your thoughts on the economic effects of a prediction like this being taken seriously at scale?
https://x.com/i/status/1994452088386879643
> They usually appear near the edge of visibility, and by now there have been >100K documented UFO reports.
Yes. There are a large number of people out there who want to believe in UFO stuff. There are a lot of cameras. There are a lot of ways that birds, planes, balloons, mirages, clouds, lens flares, camera glitches etc can combine to make a strange blob. It is hard to identify anything when you only have 3 pixels.
The problem with the aliens-UFO hypothesis, like the god-doing-miracles hypothesis, is that it is a grab bag of any unexplained data. The world is big and complex enough that there are always going to be some experimental results you don't understand. Good theories make very specific predictions.
Theories like a god that does miracles, or aliens that are UFOs, are so flexible that almost any piece of data that is hard to find another good explanation for can be "explained". So every rare atmospheric phenomena, unexpected camera glitch and outright hoax all gets bundled into a single "evidence for aliens" folder. The "logic" goes, if you can't explain exactly how the camera glitched, any unexplained data is aliens by default.
Edit: If you have tissue samples in the lab and spec sheets on the aliens fusion engines, your getting to the point where "aliens" is actually making specific predictions. If you know how fast the aliens spaceships fly, then a blob that flies too fast is a surprise. Something that doesn't fit with the aliens model. But at the moment, "aliens" is being used as a 1 size fits all hypothesis.
Sorry for that harsh comment, but what the point of praising rationalism, Occam's razor, Bayes theorem and so on to just succomb to faith or complotism at the first occasion. I just do not understand.
Only 20% on illusions, delusions, or mistakes is absurd given the evidence present and the number of epicycles it takes to establish alien culprits matching this description.
Also; why no weight on US or Chinese government secret defense tech? I often see the claim "but no current technology can do that!!", but that's what makes it a secret! Besides, it needn't be a craft with a dude in it, or even a craft at all instead of some laser contraption meant to fool enemy combatants. I don't consider this to be especially likely, but it beats aliens.