21 ms·

UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

108 points by cinquemb 5y ago

JulianMorrison 5y ago
I think it's undercounting or failing to consider the likelihood of natural causes. That is to say, physics, biology, higher-dimensional weirdness, etc, that we don't know of and can't anticipate, but is as natural as red sprite lightning. Planes chasing tic-tac aliens could be doing the high-tech equivalent of kittens chasing a laser pointer.
ladzoppelin 5y ago
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_phenomenon https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_phenomenon What is crazy is that if the people in this movie are not lying, then every person on earth should be trying to solve this mystery. It would take crazy technology and time for anything to travel from another galaxy and be able to handle this environment without slowly studying and incorporating our DNA into theirs over a period of time.(60 years is nothing when you think about it) What is even crazier is that a whole civilization could be living in our own ocean without detection, especially if said civilization had the technology to get here in the first place. Look it all sounds crazy but nothing is crazier than aliens from another planet actually finding us and traveling the distance. The intelligence and technology to do this is not even comparable using living things born on earth. (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Honestly if the UFO thing, which has been an issue since the 40's, turn out to be some counter intelligence mind control military garbage.. My theory: Humans are at an evolutionary point where they can't advance without outside help. For example we think we are smart ("Mars is out next home") yet we cannot even stop ourselves from dumping chemicals into our oceans, knowing it is making it harder for us to reproduce.
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  There’s not much to investigate. People say they say something that’s not there now and wasn’t when they reported it, in most cases that nobody else saw and with little useful information.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > What is crazy is that if the people in this movie are not lying, then every person on earth should be trying to solve this mystery. If the people in the movie are not lying, are not taken out of context, and are not mistaken.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > What is crazy is that if the people in this movie are not lying, then every person on earth should be trying to solve this mystery To be fair that's also true of Lord of the Rings :) But being serious, the scientific mindedness of army personnel and politicians is not widely reputed. I find it still far more likely that they are overblowing simple flukes for fear of dismissing a legitimate threat, than I find it that we are occasionally stumbling into high-technology that contradicts our understanding of physics. The fact that these sightings are almost always happening at high altitudes and in stressful situations makes it even more likely that they are instrument or human blips, or rare weather-related phenomena.
  - zionic 5y ago
    >The fact that these sightings are almost always happening at high altitudes and in stressful situations But that isn't a fact. I strongly recommend you read up on the complete timeline of the Nimitz incident. It happened over several days and was recorded on an entire suite of sensors including multiple sets of human eyeballs.
- seniorivn 5y ago
  you are saying we can't stop destroying environment, but it's entirely possible we just haven't managed it yet. as you said 60 years is not that much history wise
- dogma1138 5y ago
  > (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Eh? That’s a really weird way of looking at intelligence. By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. Now one can argue that aliens might be much more physiologically intelligent than humans on a biological level but that’s not necessarily a given or a requirement. “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is true but it doesn’t mean that you can’t understand if it’s explained to you. An alien civilization that simply has a time lead on humanity might be much more advanced but it doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to understand the physics of how they got here once we learn about it. An ant is severely limited by biology, for the most part it can not really learn or understand things on an abstract level. Humans on the other hand very much can, if aliens can travel faster than light by exploiting some new physics we just need access to their Wikipedia.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - aspaceman 5y ago
    Yeah ancient folks were still smart. Engineers and scientists of all sorts still. I think people often give way too much weight to intelligence, and not enough to just tools. Give a dude in 1000 a voltmeter and things get crazy.
  - admissionsguy 5y ago
    The aliens might also be less intelligent than humans, but more advanced technologically due to the lead time or just higher cooperativity. "Dumb aliens" could be a refreshing premise for a sci-fi story.. although it lies on the same continuum as any ant-like intelligent collective, so it's nothing new after all.
    - suby 5y ago
      It's a cool idea. I'd bet that it's unlikely for a sufficiently intelligent species (say one capable of creating machines to cross interstellar distances) to stay dumb, though. Humanity is fast approaching the point where we can edit our genes or otherwise select for intelligence. Even the idea of creating non-human super intelligent agents of some sort is arguably within reach over the course of the next few hundred years. I like to think that though the starting average intelligence for a given species might be lower than others, eventually we all wind up at the same place, either turning ourselves into or building some hypothetically (given the laws of the universe) maximally intelligent system.
- graderjs 5y ago
  I'm with you on this. What I think is crazy tho is how ready and willing many people are to discount, absolutely discount and say, "well that is crazy" the experiences of so many people, who open themselves to ridicule and share some weird thing that happened. And these people are prepared to judge, discount, minimize and dismiss, these other human beings, because....it didn't personally happen to the person judging? That seems incredibly ungenerous, and low empathy. Even for regular human behavior. So, why, in this case? There's even more respect, in the main, between people of different religious faiths. So why? Because some big "Authority Agency with Capital A" has not come out and told everyone, "It's OK, it's OK for you to think this is true now, because we can tell you, we checked, and it's True." Is it really driven by fear of stigma and lack of endorsement by authority? Are we really all living in the Earth-centric, pre-Galileo, dark ages? The sad, and I think the crazy, thing is, yes, to some extent we are still living in that time, with regard to human mindset and the manipulability of people in large groups via narratives and authority. Even in this age, with all our progress, all our tech, all our ideas and discussions and connectedness. Like why are we trusting all these theorists and commentators over the people who say they have experience? A striking parallel I think is with the Time's Up / Me Too movement. It strikes me that we as a society, used to, and in many ways still do, treat survivor's of abuse, domestic and sexual violence as "crazy UFO nuts", who no matter how many come forward, often at great personal cost, to share their stories, and to try to establish some equality, healing and justice. Despite this, and despite the obvious reality that (Ca) there must be some reality behind all these stories and (Cb) not all of these people are simply delusional or making things up, people are so ready and willing to just discount them, and to listen to all the theorists and commentators discounting their experiences. What I wonder is, how can we as a society do that, and how can the people who judge them do that, when we, and those people judging them, have no idea either way, but are ready to do so, to these other human beings who may be at one of their most vulnerable times. Even when multiple people corroborate their stories. So while it's a different set of stories, our reaction, and lack of consideration for these brave people, is strikingly similar. To me at least. Maybe now's ripe for a Time's Up or Me Too movement for people who's stories of UFO encounters and ET contact have been dismissed, minimized, discounted and ridiculed for too long. No? The other thing I think is crazy, is how so many of us are prepared to dig in a position on this topic where none of has really has any idea what's going on. Stake out a tiny circle of our own certainty and say, "Now, here is the truth. All those who doubt me, are clearly nuts." Why does this topic trigger such idiotic, low-empathy and crazy behavior from otherwise extremely logical, balanced and productive individuals?
- phyalow 5y ago
  I watched that documentary, it is certainly very well researched. I note that Christopher Mellon (fmr. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense) on May 5 appeared on the Joe Rogan show for 3 hours, it's worth a listen. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V0uWX1C4m8xEL0HHYqbnE https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V0uWX1C4m8xEL0HHYqbnE
Pyramus 5y ago
The author's explanations of UFOs: (A) Honest mistakes (B) New Govt. Tech (C) Hoaxes & Lies (D) Aliens, Etc. It seems an obvious oversight to me that unexplained physical phenomena are missing, e.g. weather/atmospheric effects that are extremely rare and wait to be discovered. In terms of likelihood the complementary event is "we have discovered all existing weather/atmospheric effects" which has probability zero. That's the exciting thing about UFOs - rule out mistakes, hoaxes and aliens and you are left with new tech and new physical phenomena!
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Unknown or poorly understood physical phenomena are included in (A): "…and natural phenomena that we now poorly understand."
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    Yes you are correct - still don't see why they could be subsumed under honest mistakes which lead to this oversight.
- nprateem 5y ago
  That's category A isn't it?
DrBazza 5y ago
UFOs exist. Alien spaceships do not. Occam's Razor. Also, having the technology to fly light years through interstellar space, means that you should surely be able to construct a craft that doesn't crash on Earth (Roswell), or waste your time flying for years to dip into the atmosphere, do a little light show and fly off, or harassing a farmer in the middle of nowhere vs landing in Central Park. The gimbal video and others have all be plausibly explained. Everyone on planet Earth now carries the best photographic equipment in human history in their pockets. Where are 20MP pictures of flying saucers? Similarly Bigfoot (Bigfeet?), Yetis, the Loch Ness monster, and so on.
- 02020202 5y ago
  yep, people just want to believe there is something more than just boring daily life.
- mbnull 5y ago
  Occam's Razor postulates that the simple solution is often the right one. That does not mean it's always so. For the longest time Occam's Razor would have favored a flat earth, before we knew better. Alien intelligence would also be alien enough if it wasn't interstellar. Interplanetary, inter-dimensional or subterranean would be alien by my standard, too. The Videos might have been plausibly explained, but i would argue that the pentagon has certainly more footage and sensor data to base their statement on. And please do try to take photos of planes in the night sky with your smartphone camera. The image quality is not great.
  - KSteffensen 5y ago
    Medieval people did not think the Earth was flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
    - mbnull 5y ago
      Medieval people certainly believed that. The linked wikipedia page does not say otherwise. It states that "European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat". Most people in Medieval times were not scholars or educated. Furthermore I haven't even said anything about Medieval times. There are other examples like rocks falling from the sky or the earth- or solar-centric cosmos, if you prefer.
ThalesX 5y ago
tl;dr; just a story of how I saw a UFO when I was young, nothing actionable... I feel somewhat bad for sharing life stories on a technical forum, but here it goes. As a young boy, 5-ish, I was sleeping with my mother and father in the room, and my grandmother rushes in, all pale, shouting something which directly translates to "Flying body! Flying body!". I distinctly remember having nightmares afterward with flying torsos of humans, because my mind interpreted the "Flying body" statement as literal. My parents take me with them and the four of us go outside. Sure enough, super close to the top of the buildings is a huge incandescent ... circle. It felt like it had no height, just a 2D circle, just moving somewhat slowly, soundless, above the buildings. Now, this went on for a total of 5 minutes until we lost all visibility, to the other buildings (again, this thing was very very very close to the building tops). Add two more decades to my life, and I remember this incident. I look online and sure enough, I find an old phpBB forum where people talk about 'the incident'. Apparently, several people tracked it that evening and wrote about it. Unfortunately, I can't find the forum anymore, and going to the library to look for newspaper clippings yielded nothing, so this is always going to be a story that I'll believe, but probably no one else. My parents still remember the incident, my grandmother is no longer with us. I've thought about what it might have been, trying to come up with a somewhat reasonable explanation, but I have yet to find any.
- Fiahil 5y ago
  Like this ? https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelcinematicuniverse/images/5/5b/DS_Hospital_Portal.png/revision/latest?cb=20170806211636 https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelcinematicuniverse/im...
  - ThalesX 5y ago
    Hi. Hotlinking doesn't work directly, but I figured out what you were pointing to: the portal from Dr. Strange. I took the liberty to illustrate how I remember it, note that the picture is randomly from the internet and not as it was: https://i.postimg.cc/3NbJ0tvT/HNUFO.png https://i.postimg.cc/3NbJ0tvT/HNUFO.png .
- simion314 5y ago
atweiden 5y ago
As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe. It’s a lot like discussing an imminent asteroidal impact. There is absolutely no reason to believe any human-extraterrestrial contact would end well for humanity. If anything, I’d expect it to be like playing a chess game against an AGI where the loser gets “terminated”. Anyway, the basic human need to expediently file away all low likelihood ideas into the deep recesses of the brain, never to be examined; the proliferation of general con artistry rooted in financial desperation; and the immense social stigma attached to the pursuit keep people from contemplating the potential of extraterrestrial intelligence. None of those are an especially good reason.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > ...any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    > This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. What about enslavement? Here Hawkings / Neil deGrasse Tyson make another interesting point: any civilization which could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. The very act of wanting to colonize self-selects for violence/exploitation. > It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops. Surely any civilization advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be better than we are at gathering intelligence and predicting humanity’s next move, which for all we know might threaten their interests. If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism?
noodles_nomore 5y ago
UFOs shouldn't be synonymous with alien intelligence. If anything evolved to travel through the universe, wouldn't it be logical to assume that it originated from a place where this ability was necessary for survival, e.g. the edge of a black hole? Such a life form could be quite different from our rock-bound existence. They might be closer to fish than to us.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  My intuition is that every intelligent species is interested in space travel. That ability will be developed if possible regardless of whether it is an imperative.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Stanisław Lem has explored this sort of idea in his works very often. Like in Solaris, where the entire planet is very clearly an organism - it exhibits reactions to events, it maybe even has conscious thought, but it's on such a gigantic scale and on such long timeline that any idea of "communicating" with it is just fantasy. Or in Fiasco where there is a whole planet covered in microorganisms which have evolved a "society" including weapons to defend themselves with, but which again have no way to communicate with us. Or in Invincible, where life has evolved into self assembling nano machines whose only directive is to survive and consume - clearly an "intelligent" construct but one which isn't in the slightest open to "communication". List of examples could go on and on and on.
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    Lem is a treasure of science fiction and I can’t recommend him enough.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) explores this idea.
notahacker 5y ago
The whole thing is a masterpiece of bizarre statements dressed up as reasoning Take: Second, between (Ca) spontaneous decentralized hoaxes and lies, and (Cb) hoaxes and lies coordinated by a big central organization, (Cb) seems much more likely. Apply this to reports of something other than UFOs, like, say fairies, ghosts or angels. You don't need to be an Oxford research associate writing about overcoming bias to realise the most common explanation for the phenomena is clearly (Cc) other such reports are already circulating in the public consciousness, and people are very impressed by them. Neither spontaneity nor coordination is required to explain a sharp rise in sightings of saucer-shaped starships and little grey aliens after ships which flew like saucers and little grey aliens hogged the media for a decade, just like there isn't any conspiracy required to explain why people were a lot more likely to interact with spirits than be probed by 'greys' a few centuries back. (The great thing about "popular consciousness" explanations is they intersect with honest mistakes and delusions as well as big fat lies) If Nick's desire for stuff that's in the movies to be real is so obvious he neglects the existence of the actual movies in his reasoning, he should probably consider renaming his blog
- ydbrurgsu 5y ago
  I fully agree. Side note: this post is by Robin Hanson, not Nick Bostrom.
- nathias 5y ago
  Yes, there is also the very contextual nature of psychosis that always expresses a very local cultural content.
- graderjs 5y ago
  It's possible that your bias against believing this means your interpretation is a lot of bizarre takes dressed up as the only possible conclusions. What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both just tin foil hat flunkies clinging to your own special precious version of the coming apocalypse. Your own special cult. Why can't people be more: (Ca) open to nuance and ambiguity and comfortable with their not being a resolution right now, and (Cb) genuinely curious and accepting of other people's perspectives rather than so "sweaty fear sprung" to be full of conviction that everyone who doesn't swallow their brand of belief on the matter is clearly a crank? More specifically, in your case, you have an actual mirror case of crank-iness: you have a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence, rather than a conspiracy for the suppression of it. I mean, don't you see that parallel? And aren't you a little suspicious of that? That's what I mean. I don't blame you specifically. Something about this topic seems to short-circuit everyone to leap logic and arrive directly at certainty. It's a big human blindspot. I wonder why this topic triggers it? Maybe because we don't have any answers, but the stakes, perhaps, are so high. I'm sorry but your casual debunking, dressed up as reasonableness, is no better than the crankiest of crank theories. Let's all do better, so... meet you somewhere in the middle. :) ;P xx
_ph_ 5y ago
The discussion is basically answered by this short picture: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 Not only has the quality of cameras increased increadibly in the last decades, especially thanks to modern digital cameras, but in the last 10 years, most of us are carrying a quite good camera in their pocket all of the time. This would easily allow for documenting any strange phenomena. And that this works is shown. When the meteor struck chelyabinsk some years ago, there where plenty of videos thanks to dash cams. When recently debries of a SpaceX second stage reentered the atmosphere near Seattle, there were plenty of videos taken showing this event. This is not even taking into account all the advanced amateurs, who are shooting images of the ISS in orbit, or even any professionals, whose job it is to track the air and space around earth for things. Any metal part in orbit is tracked by NORAD for obvious reasons. So, where are such videos showing the aliens? It is obvious, that people constantly are seeing things which are not directly explainable, especially to non-scientists. But somehow they are not recorded. One good explanation is: a lot of them are recorded and in the record, they are easily identifiable as what they really are and no longer mentioned.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Any phenomenon which decreases in rate proportional to our ability to measure it is very unlikely to exist. This reasoning applies to all historical mumbojumbo: ufos, bigfoot, ghosts, etc. These ideas are plausible insofar as they are constructed to be almost unmeasurable. The preponderance of camera phones today means we have 1bn+ people able to measure their environment at abitary frequencies, and all such phenomena have essentially disappeared. Either somehow all ghosts, bigfoots, aliens, etc. are disappearing because we are measuring them; or they never existed. NB. These ideas "go together" only socially, ie. believed by a secular-religious community. The objects they describe have no intrinsic relationship (bigfoot is not like a ghost). When you have a class of such ideas, it is likely they are wholesale false (ie. mythological). It is possible to somewhat statistically predict P(IdeaSet is Mythological) by the degree to which each idea in the set is in a common domain with the other ideas. A conspiracy/mythology is an IdeaSet which is mostly disjoint.
  - 5y ago
BoardsOfCanada 5y ago
So I'm reluctant to post this but here we go.. In this case it is most probably high competence. Coming out of WW2 it wasn't difficult to take national security extremely serious. I thought that there wasn't much to the crash(es) near Corona in 1947 but the witness testimonies are just very very convincing, I actually changed my mind after reading up on the subject recently (before I would have said I don't know anything about it but I'd be amazed if it was true). A lot of observations had been made the weeks previous to the crash and gathered a lot of headlines, including the one in Portland that coined the expression "flying saucer". The person in the photo with the weather balloon is on record saying that it was not a weather balloon, that was a cover story, as are a lot of other people involved in the handling of wreckage and bodies in the days after. These are people that didn't come forward but had to be found after several decades. And this was the press release by the military before it was withdrawn and replaced with the balloon story: "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County" I encourage anyone who is interested to look at Stanton Friedman's interviews with witnesses, they are on youtube.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  The speed of light essentially prohibits space travel. The fastest possible speed for any material object to travel at is incredibly slow compared to any meaningful distance. It is millenia just from the sun to the edge of our solar system, let alone to anything "near by". The universe is not the kind of place where living things can travel "between worlds". This is scifi -- and it is no coincidence UFO sightings peak in the era of Star Treck, and space races. P(All life is organic | All known chemistry) ~= Very High P(All intelligent organic life degrades) ~= Very High thef. P(Alien Life Lasts Long Enough To Travel | Above ) ~= Very Low Physics & Chemistry basically rule out alien contact. Once you insert these priors into your reasoning the "D - it's aliens!" becomes extraordinarily implausible. It's remarkable this author finds D-Aliens more likely than D-SecretSociety. The latter only requires plausible localised advancements in knowledge and conspiracy; the former requires believing everything we know about biochemistry and physics to be radically incorrect.
bl4ckm0r3 5y ago
Why does everyone assume the belligerent nature of aliens thinking they evolved as we did? Maybe aliens evolved from a capybara and all they are looking for in the universe is a warm lake to bath in.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Warm lake tech likely comes before interstellar travel in the tech tree.
jl2718 5y ago
It’s both. “The government” is not one entity. Even a commander himself may be baffled by sightings of an advanced technology that he is paying for but isn’t privileged to know about.
tgflynn 5y ago
This article didn't really live up to my expectations based on the title. What I would say, based only on information that almost everyone should agree on (ie. public statements and a very small number of authenticated videos) is that there are three possibilities. 1. Surprising government incompetence This would be the case if all reported military encounters with UAP's could be explained by misinterpretations and mistakes (possibly including failure to identify foreign adversarial technology), as people like Mick West propose, and the government has been unable to determine this. 2. Surprising government competence This would cover scenarios where the government has either created the UFO phenomenon from scratch as some kind of disinformation campaign (for unclear reasons) or has secretly developed technology far in advance of the publicly known state of the art and has kept it hidden for many decades. 3. A real phenomenon unknown to science This covers aliens in the broadest possible sense of the term as well as unknown natural phenomena that somehow seem to exhibit intelligent behavior.
- saberdancer 5y ago
  I don't agree with #1. Why would it be surprising government incompetence? Government is not one person with infinite knowledge, plenty of them are elected officials with questionable level of understanding of various phenomena. Most sightings can be easily explained with misinterpretations and mistakes just like Mick West shows. Recent number of videos (gimbal, tic tac, ...) are probably released to muddy the waters and the Navy knows what they are showing.
  - tgflynn 5y ago
    Because the government presumably has access to large numbers of highly competent individuals, some at least as smart as Mick West, who should have been able to conclude that all of these sightings amount to nothing, if that is indeed the case. They also presumably have access to far more data on the subject than West or anyone else.
    - saberdancer 5y ago
      My suggestion is that they did conclude that. Best proof is that there is no widespread research into UFOs funded by the government or the military. Military even released couple of videos captures by their own aircraft, if it was anything sensitive or secretive they wouldn't release these videos to the public (and to the adversaries).
chadcmulligan 5y ago
Didn't the CIA admit that UFO's were a disinformation campaign for the soviets? https://www.deseret.com/1997/8/3/19327002/government-lied-to-public-about-ufo-sightings-cia-admits https://www.deseret.com/1997/8/3/19327002/government-lied-to... Edit: added a public link
ncmncm 5y ago
See, this is why it is always so hard to take these rationalist arguments seriously. They assume their own competence, at the same time as pretending not to. The most likely alternative is obviously E: something we (personally) don't know. That doesn't depend on time travel, extra dimensions, or aliens. It's not a clear majority, > 0.5. But to fail to mention it amounts to a big hole in the argument.
- milanandreew 5y ago
  Why wouldn't that count as A?
gaoshan 5y ago
Government competence is either surprisingly high or low? I'm going with the latter on principle.
andrewla 5y ago
Words fail to describe how skeptical I am of this, but let's focus on the particular point that the author is making. They correctly assert that if you look at the totality of UFO sightings, then A -- "Honest mistakes: This includes misunderstandings of familiar phenomena, delusions and mental illness, and natural phenomena that we now poorly understand" -- is by far the dominant conclusion. If we just look at the hardest to explain ones, the author asserts, then that option disappears because that is what makes them tricky; we've ruled out (via multiple witnesses, or very reliable witnesses) that option. So let's just get to the nitty gritty -- what are some examples of the top 10 hardest to explain ones? I ask because I've never seen one that I would consider "hard to explain" in that sense.
- tgflynn 5y ago
  > what are some examples of the top 10 hardest to explain ones? The Nimitz 2004 incident taken as a whole seems to be in a category by itself in terms of how difficult it is to explain.
  - kcplate 5y ago
    Call me skeptical, but why all of a sudden would a government go from “swamp gas” and “weather balloons” to “we don’t know what the hell it is”. Seems awfully contrived.
fallingfrog 5y ago
Sane, rational people see things that aren’t really there all the time. I want proof, or else I’m positive that the answer is a) honest mistakes. I mean, there are how many cell phones in the world now? And how many unambiguous pictures of aliens or ufo’s?
dsugarman 5y ago
The author doesn't present a single logical argument that I could follow. The entire piece is just hand waving with a self proclamation of logic. I'm confused how this could reach the front page of hn. My best guess is people just want to discuss their own theories on UFOs and it presented a forum for that, but it feels like we are collectively giving this piece credibility. The first line sets up the entire charade: Sometimes I pride myself on my taking an intellectual strategy of tackling neglected important questions.
- istorical 5y ago
  This is an unfortunately common phenomenon. People vote for headlines not for articles. Not new though.
- twic 5y ago
  A lot of people hold the Rationalists, of whom Robin Hanson is a leading light, in high regard. So, even if a particular post is not very good, it will be received positively because of its authorship.
FrameworkFred 5y ago
That essay completely misses the simple quantum truth of the matter which is that it's all of the above. It's all clearly just the universe acknowledging that, with all of our ramped up observational capabilities and all of our beaming radio waves into space, it's becoming more and more likely that we should have had some encounters with advanced spacefaring civilizations by now. The logical conclusion is that any given Schroedinger's Spock is more or less likely to be a mistake, some new government tech, a hoax, AND traveling aliens whose DNA both is and isn't a branch off some human ancestor's...until the autopsy. 'Cause when you reach over and put your hand into a pile of goo that was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do! Forget it, Marge, it's Chinatown.
maweaver 5y ago
It seems to me that aliens as an explanation for UFO sightings is inherently contradictory. If you assume they came and are attempting stealth, then they've done a terrible job of what should have been a trivial task. Assuming they have the technology to detect intelligent life on our planet from many light-years away, one would think they could safely observe us from inside our solar system but outside the atmosphere, where they would be virtually impossible to detect. If they do need to enter our atmosphere, it should be easy to set some rules on movement (acceleration limits, etc) such that, at the very least, they do not immediately strike a casual observer as an unusual phenomenon. Instead, they have managed to be seen and recorded so many times that they have not only been sporadically observed, but have actually inserted themselves into our cultural zeitgeist. On the other hand, if you assume they are here but do not care about being observed, one would expect much better documentation of them. For that matter, if they do not mind being observed one would expect they would hover or land near objects of interest: cities, planes, near world leaders, etc. Instead, UFOs always seem to have almost a furtiveness to them, quickly accelerating away when they realize they are being seen.
- avaldes 5y ago
  That's a lot of assumptions about alien psychology and behavior. We barely understand animal psychology and language. There's literally zero ground to begin to understand an intelligent alien species capable of interstellar travel.
lamontcg 5y ago
Why did this get so highly upvoted when it is just a mashmash of nonsense?
Cyberthal 5y ago
Rise in UFO reports is due to stealthy drone ubiquity.

108 points by cinquemb 5y ago

I think it's undercounting or failing to consider the likelihood of natural causes. That is to say, physics, biology, higher-dimensional weirdness, etc, that we don't know of and can't anticipate, but is as natural as red sprite lightning. Planes chasing tic-tac aliens could be doing the high-tech equivalent of kittens chasing a laser pointer.

ladzoppelin 5y ago

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_phenomenon https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_phenomenon What is crazy is that if the people in this movie are not lying, then every person on earth should be trying to solve this mystery. It would take crazy technology and time for anything to travel from another galaxy and be able to handle this environment without slowly studying and incorporating our DNA into theirs over a period of time.(60 years is nothing when you think about it) What is even crazier is that a whole civilization could be living in our own ocean without detection, especially if said civilization had the technology to get here in the first place. Look it all sounds crazy but nothing is crazier than aliens from another planet actually finding us and traveling the distance. The intelligence and technology to do this is not even comparable using living things born on earth. (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Honestly if the UFO thing, which has been an issue since the 40's, turn out to be some counter intelligence mind control military garbage.. My theory: Humans are at an evolutionary point where they can't advance without outside help. For example we think we are smart ("Mars is out next home") yet we cannot even stop ourselves from dumping chemicals into our oceans, knowing it is making it harder for us to reproduce.

alphabettsy 5y ago
There’s not much to investigate. People say they say something that’s not there now and wasn’t when they reported it, in most cases that nobody else saw and with little useful information.
tshaddox 5y ago
> What is crazy is that if the people in this movie are not lying, then every person on earth should be trying to solve this mystery. If the people in the movie are not lying, are not taken out of context, and are not mistaken.
tsimionescu 5y ago
> What is crazy is that if the people in this movie are not lying, then every person on earth should be trying to solve this mystery To be fair that's also true of Lord of the Rings :) But being serious, the scientific mindedness of army personnel and politicians is not widely reputed. I find it still far more likely that they are overblowing simple flukes for fear of dismissing a legitimate threat, than I find it that we are occasionally stumbling into high-technology that contradicts our understanding of physics. The fact that these sightings are almost always happening at high altitudes and in stressful situations makes it even more likely that they are instrument or human blips, or rare weather-related phenomena.
- zionic 5y ago
  >The fact that these sightings are almost always happening at high altitudes and in stressful situations But that isn't a fact. I strongly recommend you read up on the complete timeline of the Nimitz incident. It happened over several days and was recorded on an entire suite of sensors including multiple sets of human eyeballs.
seniorivn 5y ago
you are saying we can't stop destroying environment, but it's entirely possible we just haven't managed it yet. as you said 60 years is not that much history wise
dogma1138 5y ago
> (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Eh? That’s a really weird way of looking at intelligence. By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. Now one can argue that aliens might be much more physiologically intelligent than humans on a biological level but that’s not necessarily a given or a requirement. “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is true but it doesn’t mean that you can’t understand if it’s explained to you. An alien civilization that simply has a time lead on humanity might be much more advanced but it doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to understand the physics of how they got here once we learn about it. An ant is severely limited by biology, for the most part it can not really learn or understand things on an abstract level. Humans on the other hand very much can, if aliens can travel faster than light by exploiting some new physics we just need access to their Wikipedia.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- aspaceman 5y ago
  Yeah ancient folks were still smart. Engineers and scientists of all sorts still. I think people often give way too much weight to intelligence, and not enough to just tools. Give a dude in 1000 a voltmeter and things get crazy.
- admissionsguy 5y ago
  The aliens might also be less intelligent than humans, but more advanced technologically due to the lead time or just higher cooperativity. "Dumb aliens" could be a refreshing premise for a sci-fi story.. although it lies on the same continuum as any ant-like intelligent collective, so it's nothing new after all.
  - suby 5y ago
    It's a cool idea. I'd bet that it's unlikely for a sufficiently intelligent species (say one capable of creating machines to cross interstellar distances) to stay dumb, though. Humanity is fast approaching the point where we can edit our genes or otherwise select for intelligence. Even the idea of creating non-human super intelligent agents of some sort is arguably within reach over the course of the next few hundred years. I like to think that though the starting average intelligence for a given species might be lower than others, eventually we all wind up at the same place, either turning ourselves into or building some hypothetically (given the laws of the universe) maximally intelligent system.
graderjs 5y ago
I'm with you on this. What I think is crazy tho is how ready and willing many people are to discount, absolutely discount and say, "well that is crazy" the experiences of so many people, who open themselves to ridicule and share some weird thing that happened. And these people are prepared to judge, discount, minimize and dismiss, these other human beings, because....it didn't personally happen to the person judging? That seems incredibly ungenerous, and low empathy. Even for regular human behavior. So, why, in this case? There's even more respect, in the main, between people of different religious faiths. So why? Because some big "Authority Agency with Capital A" has not come out and told everyone, "It's OK, it's OK for you to think this is true now, because we can tell you, we checked, and it's True." Is it really driven by fear of stigma and lack of endorsement by authority? Are we really all living in the Earth-centric, pre-Galileo, dark ages? The sad, and I think the crazy, thing is, yes, to some extent we are still living in that time, with regard to human mindset and the manipulability of people in large groups via narratives and authority. Even in this age, with all our progress, all our tech, all our ideas and discussions and connectedness. Like why are we trusting all these theorists and commentators over the people who say they have experience? A striking parallel I think is with the Time's Up / Me Too movement. It strikes me that we as a society, used to, and in many ways still do, treat survivor's of abuse, domestic and sexual violence as "crazy UFO nuts", who no matter how many come forward, often at great personal cost, to share their stories, and to try to establish some equality, healing and justice. Despite this, and despite the obvious reality that (Ca) there must be some reality behind all these stories and (Cb) not all of these people are simply delusional or making things up, people are so ready and willing to just discount them, and to listen to all the theorists and commentators discounting their experiences. What I wonder is, how can we as a society do that, and how can the people who judge them do that, when we, and those people judging them, have no idea either way, but are ready to do so, to these other human beings who may be at one of their most vulnerable times. Even when multiple people corroborate their stories. So while it's a different set of stories, our reaction, and lack of consideration for these brave people, is strikingly similar. To me at least. Maybe now's ripe for a Time's Up or Me Too movement for people who's stories of UFO encounters and ET contact have been dismissed, minimized, discounted and ridiculed for too long. No? The other thing I think is crazy, is how so many of us are prepared to dig in a position on this topic where none of has really has any idea what's going on. Stake out a tiny circle of our own certainty and say, "Now, here is the truth. All those who doubt me, are clearly nuts." Why does this topic trigger such idiotic, low-empathy and crazy behavior from otherwise extremely logical, balanced and productive individuals?
phyalow 5y ago
I watched that documentary, it is certainly very well researched. I note that Christopher Mellon (fmr. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense) on May 5 appeared on the Joe Rogan show for 3 hours, it's worth a listen. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V0uWX1C4m8xEL0HHYqbnE https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V0uWX1C4m8xEL0HHYqbnE

Pyramus 5y ago

The author's explanations of UFOs: (A) Honest mistakes (B) New Govt. Tech (C) Hoaxes & Lies (D) Aliens, Etc. It seems an obvious oversight to me that unexplained physical phenomena are missing, e.g. weather/atmospheric effects that are extremely rare and wait to be discovered. In terms of likelihood the complementary event is "we have discovered all existing weather/atmospheric effects" which has probability zero. That's the exciting thing about UFOs - rule out mistakes, hoaxes and aliens and you are left with new tech and new physical phenomena!

Sharlin 5y ago
Unknown or poorly understood physical phenomena are included in (A): "…and natural phenomena that we now poorly understand."
- Pyramus 5y ago
  Yes you are correct - still don't see why they could be subsumed under honest mistakes which lead to this oversight.
nprateem 5y ago
That's category A isn't it?

DrBazza 5y ago

UFOs exist. Alien spaceships do not. Occam's Razor. Also, having the technology to fly light years through interstellar space, means that you should surely be able to construct a craft that doesn't crash on Earth (Roswell), or waste your time flying for years to dip into the atmosphere, do a little light show and fly off, or harassing a farmer in the middle of nowhere vs landing in Central Park. The gimbal video and others have all be plausibly explained. Everyone on planet Earth now carries the best photographic equipment in human history in their pockets. Where are 20MP pictures of flying saucers? Similarly Bigfoot (Bigfeet?), Yetis, the Loch Ness monster, and so on.

02020202 5y ago
yep, people just want to believe there is something more than just boring daily life.
mbnull 5y ago
Occam's Razor postulates that the simple solution is often the right one. That does not mean it's always so. For the longest time Occam's Razor would have favored a flat earth, before we knew better. Alien intelligence would also be alien enough if it wasn't interstellar. Interplanetary, inter-dimensional or subterranean would be alien by my standard, too. The Videos might have been plausibly explained, but i would argue that the pentagon has certainly more footage and sensor data to base their statement on. And please do try to take photos of planes in the night sky with your smartphone camera. The image quality is not great.
- KSteffensen 5y ago
  Medieval people did not think the Earth was flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
  - mbnull 5y ago
    Medieval people certainly believed that. The linked wikipedia page does not say otherwise. It states that "European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat". Most people in Medieval times were not scholars or educated. Furthermore I haven't even said anything about Medieval times. There are other examples like rocks falling from the sky or the earth- or solar-centric cosmos, if you prefer.

ThalesX 5y ago

tl;dr; just a story of how I saw a UFO when I was young, nothing actionable... I feel somewhat bad for sharing life stories on a technical forum, but here it goes. As a young boy, 5-ish, I was sleeping with my mother and father in the room, and my grandmother rushes in, all pale, shouting something which directly translates to "Flying body! Flying body!". I distinctly remember having nightmares afterward with flying torsos of humans, because my mind interpreted the "Flying body" statement as literal. My parents take me with them and the four of us go outside. Sure enough, super close to the top of the buildings is a huge incandescent ... circle. It felt like it had no height, just a 2D circle, just moving somewhat slowly, soundless, above the buildings. Now, this went on for a total of 5 minutes until we lost all visibility, to the other buildings (again, this thing was very very very close to the building tops). Add two more decades to my life, and I remember this incident. I look online and sure enough, I find an old phpBB forum where people talk about 'the incident'. Apparently, several people tracked it that evening and wrote about it. Unfortunately, I can't find the forum anymore, and going to the library to look for newspaper clippings yielded nothing, so this is always going to be a story that I'll believe, but probably no one else. My parents still remember the incident, my grandmother is no longer with us. I've thought about what it might have been, trying to come up with a somewhat reasonable explanation, but I have yet to find any.

Fiahil 5y ago
Like this ? https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelcinematicuniverse/images/5/5b/DS_Hospital_Portal.png/revision/latest?cb=20170806211636 https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelcinematicuniverse/im...
- ThalesX 5y ago
  Hi. Hotlinking doesn't work directly, but I figured out what you were pointing to: the portal from Dr. Strange. I took the liberty to illustrate how I remember it, note that the picture is randomly from the internet and not as it was: https://i.postimg.cc/3NbJ0tvT/HNUFO.png https://i.postimg.cc/3NbJ0tvT/HNUFO.png .
simion314 5y ago

atweiden 5y ago

As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe. It’s a lot like discussing an imminent asteroidal impact. There is absolutely no reason to believe any human-extraterrestrial contact would end well for humanity. If anything, I’d expect it to be like playing a chess game against an AGI where the loser gets “terminated”. Anyway, the basic human need to expediently file away all low likelihood ideas into the deep recesses of the brain, never to be examined; the proliferation of general con artistry rooted in financial desperation; and the immense social stigma attached to the pursuit keep people from contemplating the potential of extraterrestrial intelligence. None of those are an especially good reason.

zhdc1 5y ago
> ...any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.
- atweiden 5y ago
  > This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. What about enslavement? Here Hawkings / Neil deGrasse Tyson make another interesting point: any civilization which could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. The very act of wanting to colonize self-selects for violence/exploitation. > It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops. Surely any civilization advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be better than we are at gathering intelligence and predicting humanity’s next move, which for all we know might threaten their interests. If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism?

noodles_nomore 5y ago

UFOs shouldn't be synonymous with alien intelligence. If anything evolved to travel through the universe, wouldn't it be logical to assume that it originated from a place where this ability was necessary for survival, e.g. the edge of a black hole? Such a life form could be quite different from our rock-bound existence. They might be closer to fish than to us.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
My intuition is that every intelligent species is interested in space travel. That ability will be developed if possible regardless of whether it is an imperative.
gambiting 5y ago
Stanisław Lem has explored this sort of idea in his works very often. Like in Solaris, where the entire planet is very clearly an organism - it exhibits reactions to events, it maybe even has conscious thought, but it's on such a gigantic scale and on such long timeline that any idea of "communicating" with it is just fantasy. Or in Fiasco where there is a whole planet covered in microorganisms which have evolved a "society" including weapons to defend themselves with, but which again have no way to communicate with us. Or in Invincible, where life has evolved into self assembling nano machines whose only directive is to survive and consume - clearly an "intelligent" construct but one which isn't in the slightest open to "communication". List of examples could go on and on and on.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  Lem is a treasure of science fiction and I can’t recommend him enough.
ceejayoz 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) explores this idea.

notahacker 5y ago

The whole thing is a masterpiece of bizarre statements dressed up as reasoning Take: Second, between (Ca) spontaneous decentralized hoaxes and lies, and (Cb) hoaxes and lies coordinated by a big central organization, (Cb) seems much more likely. Apply this to reports of something other than UFOs, like, say fairies, ghosts or angels. You don't need to be an Oxford research associate writing about overcoming bias to realise the most common explanation for the phenomena is clearly (Cc) other such reports are already circulating in the public consciousness, and people are very impressed by them. Neither spontaneity nor coordination is required to explain a sharp rise in sightings of saucer-shaped starships and little grey aliens after ships which flew like saucers and little grey aliens hogged the media for a decade, just like there isn't any conspiracy required to explain why people were a lot more likely to interact with spirits than be probed by 'greys' a few centuries back. (The great thing about "popular consciousness" explanations is they intersect with honest mistakes and delusions as well as big fat lies) If Nick's desire for stuff that's in the movies to be real is so obvious he neglects the existence of the actual movies in his reasoning, he should probably consider renaming his blog

ydbrurgsu 5y ago
I fully agree. Side note: this post is by Robin Hanson, not Nick Bostrom.
nathias 5y ago
Yes, there is also the very contextual nature of psychosis that always expresses a very local cultural content.
graderjs 5y ago
It's possible that your bias against believing this means your interpretation is a lot of bizarre takes dressed up as the only possible conclusions. What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both just tin foil hat flunkies clinging to your own special precious version of the coming apocalypse. Your own special cult. Why can't people be more: (Ca) open to nuance and ambiguity and comfortable with their not being a resolution right now, and (Cb) genuinely curious and accepting of other people's perspectives rather than so "sweaty fear sprung" to be full of conviction that everyone who doesn't swallow their brand of belief on the matter is clearly a crank? More specifically, in your case, you have an actual mirror case of crank-iness: you have a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence, rather than a conspiracy for the suppression of it. I mean, don't you see that parallel? And aren't you a little suspicious of that? That's what I mean. I don't blame you specifically. Something about this topic seems to short-circuit everyone to leap logic and arrive directly at certainty. It's a big human blindspot. I wonder why this topic triggers it? Maybe because we don't have any answers, but the stakes, perhaps, are so high. I'm sorry but your casual debunking, dressed up as reasonableness, is no better than the crankiest of crank theories. Let's all do better, so... meet you somewhere in the middle. :) ;P xx

_ph_ 5y ago

The discussion is basically answered by this short picture: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 Not only has the quality of cameras increased increadibly in the last decades, especially thanks to modern digital cameras, but in the last 10 years, most of us are carrying a quite good camera in their pocket all of the time. This would easily allow for documenting any strange phenomena. And that this works is shown. When the meteor struck chelyabinsk some years ago, there where plenty of videos thanks to dash cams. When recently debries of a SpaceX second stage reentered the atmosphere near Seattle, there were plenty of videos taken showing this event. This is not even taking into account all the advanced amateurs, who are shooting images of the ISS in orbit, or even any professionals, whose job it is to track the air and space around earth for things. Any metal part in orbit is tracked by NORAD for obvious reasons. So, where are such videos showing the aliens? It is obvious, that people constantly are seeing things which are not directly explainable, especially to non-scientists. But somehow they are not recorded. One good explanation is: a lot of them are recorded and in the record, they are easily identifiable as what they really are and no longer mentioned.

mjburgess 5y ago
Any phenomenon which decreases in rate proportional to our ability to measure it is very unlikely to exist. This reasoning applies to all historical mumbojumbo: ufos, bigfoot, ghosts, etc. These ideas are plausible insofar as they are constructed to be almost unmeasurable. The preponderance of camera phones today means we have 1bn+ people able to measure their environment at abitary frequencies, and all such phenomena have essentially disappeared. Either somehow all ghosts, bigfoots, aliens, etc. are disappearing because we are measuring them; or they never existed. NB. These ideas "go together" only socially, ie. believed by a secular-religious community. The objects they describe have no intrinsic relationship (bigfoot is not like a ghost). When you have a class of such ideas, it is likely they are wholesale false (ie. mythological). It is possible to somewhat statistically predict P(IdeaSet is Mythological) by the degree to which each idea in the set is in a common domain with the other ideas. A conspiracy/mythology is an IdeaSet which is mostly disjoint.
- 5y ago

BoardsOfCanada 5y ago

So I'm reluctant to post this but here we go.. In this case it is most probably high competence. Coming out of WW2 it wasn't difficult to take national security extremely serious. I thought that there wasn't much to the crash(es) near Corona in 1947 but the witness testimonies are just very very convincing, I actually changed my mind after reading up on the subject recently (before I would have said I don't know anything about it but I'd be amazed if it was true). A lot of observations had been made the weeks previous to the crash and gathered a lot of headlines, including the one in Portland that coined the expression "flying saucer". The person in the photo with the weather balloon is on record saying that it was not a weather balloon, that was a cover story, as are a lot of other people involved in the handling of wreckage and bodies in the days after. These are people that didn't come forward but had to be found after several decades. And this was the press release by the military before it was withdrawn and replaced with the balloon story: "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County" I encourage anyone who is interested to look at Stanton Friedman's interviews with witnesses, they are on youtube.

mjburgess 5y ago
The speed of light essentially prohibits space travel. The fastest possible speed for any material object to travel at is incredibly slow compared to any meaningful distance. It is millenia just from the sun to the edge of our solar system, let alone to anything "near by". The universe is not the kind of place where living things can travel "between worlds". This is scifi -- and it is no coincidence UFO sightings peak in the era of Star Treck, and space races. P(All life is organic | All known chemistry) ~= Very High P(All intelligent organic life degrades) ~= Very High thef. P(Alien Life Lasts Long Enough To Travel | Above ) ~= Very Low Physics & Chemistry basically rule out alien contact. Once you insert these priors into your reasoning the "D - it's aliens!" becomes extraordinarily implausible. It's remarkable this author finds D-Aliens more likely than D-SecretSociety. The latter only requires plausible localised advancements in knowledge and conspiracy; the former requires believing everything we know about biochemistry and physics to be radically incorrect.

bl4ckm0r3 5y ago

Why does everyone assume the belligerent nature of aliens thinking they evolved as we did? Maybe aliens evolved from a capybara and all they are looking for in the universe is a warm lake to bath in.

ALittleLight 5y ago
Warm lake tech likely comes before interstellar travel in the tech tree.

jl2718 5y ago

It’s both. “The government” is not one entity. Even a commander himself may be baffled by sightings of an advanced technology that he is paying for but isn’t privileged to know about.

tgflynn 5y ago

This article didn't really live up to my expectations based on the title. What I would say, based only on information that almost everyone should agree on (ie. public statements and a very small number of authenticated videos) is that there are three possibilities. 1. Surprising government incompetence This would be the case if all reported military encounters with UAP's could be explained by misinterpretations and mistakes (possibly including failure to identify foreign adversarial technology), as people like Mick West propose, and the government has been unable to determine this. 2. Surprising government competence This would cover scenarios where the government has either created the UFO phenomenon from scratch as some kind of disinformation campaign (for unclear reasons) or has secretly developed technology far in advance of the publicly known state of the art and has kept it hidden for many decades. 3. A real phenomenon unknown to science This covers aliens in the broadest possible sense of the term as well as unknown natural phenomena that somehow seem to exhibit intelligent behavior.

saberdancer 5y ago
I don't agree with #1. Why would it be surprising government incompetence? Government is not one person with infinite knowledge, plenty of them are elected officials with questionable level of understanding of various phenomena. Most sightings can be easily explained with misinterpretations and mistakes just like Mick West shows. Recent number of videos (gimbal, tic tac, ...) are probably released to muddy the waters and the Navy knows what they are showing.
- tgflynn 5y ago
  Because the government presumably has access to large numbers of highly competent individuals, some at least as smart as Mick West, who should have been able to conclude that all of these sightings amount to nothing, if that is indeed the case. They also presumably have access to far more data on the subject than West or anyone else.
  - saberdancer 5y ago
    My suggestion is that they did conclude that. Best proof is that there is no widespread research into UFOs funded by the government or the military. Military even released couple of videos captures by their own aircraft, if it was anything sensitive or secretive they wouldn't release these videos to the public (and to the adversaries).

chadcmulligan 5y ago

Didn't the CIA admit that UFO's were a disinformation campaign for the soviets? https://www.deseret.com/1997/8/3/19327002/government-lied-to-public-about-ufo-sightings-cia-admits https://www.deseret.com/1997/8/3/19327002/government-lied-to... Edit: added a public link

ncmncm 5y ago

See, this is why it is always so hard to take these rationalist arguments seriously. They assume their own competence, at the same time as pretending not to. The most likely alternative is obviously E: something we (personally) don't know. That doesn't depend on time travel, extra dimensions, or aliens. It's not a clear majority, > 0.5. But to fail to mention it amounts to a big hole in the argument.

milanandreew 5y ago
Why wouldn't that count as A?

gaoshan 5y ago

Government competence is either surprisingly high or low? I'm going with the latter on principle.

andrewla 5y ago

Words fail to describe how skeptical I am of this, but let's focus on the particular point that the author is making. They correctly assert that if you look at the totality of UFO sightings, then A -- "Honest mistakes: This includes misunderstandings of familiar phenomena, delusions and mental illness, and natural phenomena that we now poorly understand" -- is by far the dominant conclusion. If we just look at the hardest to explain ones, the author asserts, then that option disappears because that is what makes them tricky; we've ruled out (via multiple witnesses, or very reliable witnesses) that option. So let's just get to the nitty gritty -- what are some examples of the top 10 hardest to explain ones? I ask because I've never seen one that I would consider "hard to explain" in that sense.

tgflynn 5y ago
> what are some examples of the top 10 hardest to explain ones? The Nimitz 2004 incident taken as a whole seems to be in a category by itself in terms of how difficult it is to explain.
- kcplate 5y ago
  Call me skeptical, but why all of a sudden would a government go from “swamp gas” and “weather balloons” to “we don’t know what the hell it is”. Seems awfully contrived.

fallingfrog 5y ago

Sane, rational people see things that aren’t really there all the time. I want proof, or else I’m positive that the answer is a) honest mistakes. I mean, there are how many cell phones in the world now? And how many unambiguous pictures of aliens or ufo’s?

dsugarman 5y ago

The author doesn't present a single logical argument that I could follow. The entire piece is just hand waving with a self proclamation of logic. I'm confused how this could reach the front page of hn. My best guess is people just want to discuss their own theories on UFOs and it presented a forum for that, but it feels like we are collectively giving this piece credibility. The first line sets up the entire charade: Sometimes I pride myself on my taking an intellectual strategy of tackling neglected important questions.

istorical 5y ago
This is an unfortunately common phenomenon. People vote for headlines not for articles. Not new though.
twic 5y ago
A lot of people hold the Rationalists, of whom Robin Hanson is a leading light, in high regard. So, even if a particular post is not very good, it will be received positively because of its authorship.

FrameworkFred 5y ago

That essay completely misses the simple quantum truth of the matter which is that it's all of the above. It's all clearly just the universe acknowledging that, with all of our ramped up observational capabilities and all of our beaming radio waves into space, it's becoming more and more likely that we should have had some encounters with advanced spacefaring civilizations by now. The logical conclusion is that any given Schroedinger's Spock is more or less likely to be a mistake, some new government tech, a hoax, AND traveling aliens whose DNA both is and isn't a branch off some human ancestor's...until the autopsy. 'Cause when you reach over and put your hand into a pile of goo that was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do! Forget it, Marge, it's Chinatown.

maweaver 5y ago

It seems to me that aliens as an explanation for UFO sightings is inherently contradictory. If you assume they came and are attempting stealth, then they've done a terrible job of what should have been a trivial task. Assuming they have the technology to detect intelligent life on our planet from many light-years away, one would think they could safely observe us from inside our solar system but outside the atmosphere, where they would be virtually impossible to detect. If they do need to enter our atmosphere, it should be easy to set some rules on movement (acceleration limits, etc) such that, at the very least, they do not immediately strike a casual observer as an unusual phenomenon. Instead, they have managed to be seen and recorded so many times that they have not only been sporadically observed, but have actually inserted themselves into our cultural zeitgeist. On the other hand, if you assume they are here but do not care about being observed, one would expect much better documentation of them. For that matter, if they do not mind being observed one would expect they would hover or land near objects of interest: cities, planes, near world leaders, etc. Instead, UFOs always seem to have almost a furtiveness to them, quickly accelerating away when they realize they are being seen.

avaldes 5y ago
That's a lot of assumptions about alien psychology and behavior. We barely understand animal psychology and language. There's literally zero ground to begin to understand an intelligent alien species capable of interstellar travel.

lamontcg 5y ago

Why did this get so highly upvoted when it is just a mashmash of nonsense?

Cyberthal 5y ago

Rise in UFO reports is due to stealthy drone ubiquity.