I work on astronomy data pipelines, including groups of scientists that are literally searching for evidence of aliens. One thing that people really underrate is just how many unusual sensor readings you get when you collect a huge amount of data and filter out to look at the one-in-a-million most unusual things.
For example, the "wow signal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal . If you read the wikipedia page you might think, oh there's some debate about what this is, maybe it's aliens. No, nowadays radio astronomers see similar things all the time. Literally millions of them. A big spike that never repeats again and so you have no idea what it is. Well, there are many ways that instruments can malfunction or something briefly interferes with a sensor and you get a reading that doesn't map to anything physically. With modern data collection volumes there are so many anomalies like this, you just have to throw them out.
So the idea of, what's the explanation for these things. For every video of a weird thing there must be an explanation. No, there just isn't an explanation. The sensor acted weirdly and you'll never know why because that's how massive data collection projects work.
I do support looking for UFOs, because it seems like a reasonable thing to investigate, but it doesn't make sense to take this extremely low-quality data and pore over it expecting it to lead to anything. Instead, the people who actually do have a very high-quality data source should spend a little bit of time checking for stuff they don't recognize. For example one obvious entity to do this is SpaceX since there are so many Starlink satellites and they are going to need a lot of high quality data collection to make sure Starlinks don't run into random space garbage. If they notice any space garbage moving unnaturally, that would be interesting to escalate to human analysis.
People understand now that the vast size of the universe across time and space makes it almost a certainty that we are one of many intelligent civilizations in our universe. What people miss is that same grand scale makes it vanishingly unlikely we will ever meet one. In 3.5 billion years of life on earth, we have had a civilization that could use radio waves only for the last 150. A similar civilization on a planet near enough that we could plausibly even detect them could have achieved radio transmission 3 million years ago and died out 1 million years ago, or may not arise for another 3 million. The odds that two intelligent space traveling civilizations will arise in geographical and temporal proximity such that they can be aware of each other are probably extremely small.
There could well be life forms elsewhere in this galaxy. In fact I think it likely. But I suspect the first civilization in a galaxy to become seriously spacefaring essentially colonizes the galaxy on the order of a million years, taking up all the evolutionary niches for technological civilization and effectively preventing other life forms from evolving to that point. If I'm right, then most technological civilizations should expect to be the first in their galaxy. From that point of view, wondering why we appear to be alone in the galaxy is a bit like wondering why humans are the only high tech species on earth--only the first ones actually get to do it.
I totally agree with this article, but I think RH might be shouting into the void a bit here. People who believe in UFO's just believe in UFO's. There isn't much you can say to dissuade them of the idea - after all it is unfalsifiable.
To me, the best evidence that UFOs aren't aliens is in addition to Hannis Jandl's observation below that the vast size of the universe makes it vanishingly unlikely that two civilizations would arise within hailing distance of each other over the plausible duration of such civilizations. (Remember the "hail" can't travel faster than the speed of light, which over the distances involved is a very serious, crippling limitation.) So Hannis's observation is all you really need to debunk UFOs.
For further certainty, consider that life had to evolve not once, but twice on earth to produce our civilization. First life itself had to master membrane-boundedness, nucleic acid synthesis and replication, and enzymes for catabolism and anabolism. These biochemical feats have a certain inevitability to them, once provided with a source of free energy to drive these entropically unfavourable reactions. No need for God's breath. But where does the energy come from?
Here's where, in effect, life had to begin a second time: mastering photosynthesis. Before the blue-green cyanobacteria (and later the green eukaryotic plants), the source of energy was a random sort of thing used today by a small number of bacteria occupying highly restricted niches. These bacteria are called chemo-lithotropes. They get their energy from various chemical reactions confined to those niches and their carbon sources are inorganic carbon. Now enter photosynthesis. The development of green pigments that generate both metabolic energy and the hydrogen equivalents to reduce inorganic carbon (CO2 usually) to sugar molecules (the oxidation of which provided the energy to make, with nitrogen from ammonia, amino acids and the small "bases" that form the genetic code) enabled photosynthetic organisms to harvest the limitless energy showered on the earth by the sun. First you have green plants (photo-lithotropes) and the animals and fungi that feed on them (chemo-organotrophs), eventually evolving into civilizations that look up at the sky and wonder. Without photosynthesis, you have nothing but slow-growing bacteria eking out a living near vents in the deep oceans. Oh, and somewhere along the way a eukaryotic organism had to phagocytose an energy-producing prokaryotic symbiont which we now call a mitochondrion, in order to use effectively all this energy that the chloroplasts (themselves probably once-independent prokaryotes) were generating.
Photosynthesis seems such a bold, unlikely development that the conjoint probability that an exoplanet would have generated both primitive life (step 1) and then photosynthesis (step 2) is surely very close to zero. We really might be unique in the universe.
The simple reason why we are being inundated with pro-UFO content now is that
a) America is certainly experimenting with drones and top secret aircraft that are easier than ever for people to observe (we all have cameras now)
b) other nations — and particularly our opponents on the global stage — have the power to deploy small aircraft, drones balloons, etc. in our airspace (let us not forget the 2023 Chinese balloon incident) that would be better attributed to aliens
If (when?) we find aliens, they will most likely be microbial beings on the surfaces of neighboring planets. It’s fun to speculate about this, more fun to entertain crackpots, but it’s only fun.
Came here to mention the Chinese balloon thing. I actually know someone whose hobbyist weather balloon was shot down with a missile during that time. Woulda been so much cooler if the balloon were an alien space probe
Best evidence that UFO stuff is fake is all the "leaks" to the NYT and WaPo that never result in any prosecutions, and all the military brass and pilots being heralded as courageous for testifying in Congress about UFOs and facing no consequences. Remember when some 20-something reservist leaked documents proving the obvious fact that Biden-Harris was lying about Russia bombing the Nord Stream pipeline? He was arrested by a SWAT team and no one has heard from him in a while.
"Remember when some 20-something reservist leaked documents proving the obvious fact that Biden-Harris was lying about Russia bombing the Nord Stream pipeline? He was arrested by a SWAT team and no one has heard from him in a while."
2) The published documents include substantial and damaging information that had nothing to do with the Nord Stream pipeline (in fact, whatever it said about Nord Stream appears to be so inconsequential it's not listed in the contents of the leak on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_Leaks#Contents )
Cool. Could sub in Reality Winner or others. Where are the prosecutions for the UFO "leaks"? Where's the retaliation against the pilots? Isn't it strange that they're being routed for their bravery when it's clear that they're not breaking ranks and exposing hidden truths?
This is an excellent, well argued article, let down only by references to "I asked Claude...." Like Wikipedia, LLMs are a start to research, not a credible reference in and of themselves. What "I asked Claude" means is "I triggered a stochastic token predictor known for both hallucinations and ignoring relevant content and here's what it output."
Yes, LLMs can be useful for search but everything they produce must be validated by a human.
Treating "UFO"/"UAP" as interchangeable with "extraterrestrial lifeform"/"alien" is a 25+ trillion mile leap of logic, and that's pretty much the whole ballgame here.
Not to get all rationalist about it (god, those people), but people are really bad about being Bayesian, especially when it comes to emotionally charged topics. And this is a weirdly emotional topic for people- are we alone/isolated in the universe? Would ETs bring “enchantment” back to an unenchanted world? There are a few controversial topics where a simple Bayesian analysis just answers the question (this being maybe the best example). It’s sort of cute and quaint- just a good reminder of people’s limits.
Public discourse, as usual, focuses on the straw-man arguments and evidence...
I am waiting to see how the steel-man evidence turns out. I did not know it came under criticism under the last year, but it seems there is also a preprint of a paper that replicates the findings to a degree?
One big issue with the alien UFO conspiracies is that these craft crash at an alarming rate for beings that have supposedly mastered interstellar travel. For instance we have hundreds of thousands of airplanes in the air everyday and yet less than 0.2% of these airplanes crash.
Now aliens that have mastered interstellar travel and physics would probably have significantly less crashes than our aircraft and yet how many UFO stories involve aliens supposedly crashing their craft in our airspace? It's just obviously nonsense.
How are craft that are supposedly interstellar crashing regardless of whether they're piloted manually or not - crashing on Earth? It makes 0 sense unless they want to crash which also doesn't make sense.
Every technology has a failure point. Depending on how many times these beings have visited the planet over a period of time, some percentage of it will result in a catastrophic failure. This assumes they don't get shot down. The phenomon is attracted to nuclear energy/weapons (old Ufologists from the 1950s noted the phenomon was likely visiting us for centuries, but the atomic testing was a technosignature that shows were sapient so they definitely began surveiling us much more. Which explains why the UFO phenomon is a specifically post WWII phenomon.).
Jacques Vallee thinks this phenomona has been visiting this planet for thousands of years, only the UFO form is the most "modern" way we see it as. Think how medieval people saw the universe as a mechanical machine, and now we see the universe as a simulation like a computer game.
This makes 0 sense. Our rate of aircraft failure for airplanes is like 1 out of millions of aircraft. These interstellar craft are presumably significantly more advanced than airplanes and would thus have an even lower failure rate. That means we should be seeing millions of these things in the sky for every 1 to 2 UFO crashes and yet that isn't the case at all.
Even if you are inclined to lend this phenomenon some degree of credulity that something might actually be there, why isn't the obvious most likely answer "weird experimental aircraft" instead of "aliens?" Like, aside from the evidence being generally bad there is any object present at all why should I prioritize the "aliens" explanation over "some kind of weird human drone" explanation if it happens there might be?
*Edit*
And for that matter, why the assumption that an alien craft would almost certainly appear very strange or violate the laws of physics? If anything, I would expect alien craft to look/behave kind of samey because they are not magically immune to the laws of physics.
"It’s also an interesting question why smart people have fallen for this. I think it is a good example of how living in a populist era means that even the best minds are going to occasionally be convinced by nonsense."
Well for one thing Star Trek sounds fun to smart nerds and Big Foot is just dumb, both from an evidence point of view and from a myth point of view. Seriously, big upright gorillas? That's the best you got? Why not dragons or griffins?
A lot of the supposed encounters are said to be stuff China wouldn't have access to, UFO enthusiasts talk about crafts "violating the known laws of physics" because that's how they explain how they appear and disappear so quickly before they can be recorded properly.
The problem is the phenomona has existed in a recognizable form since after WWII. So it couldn't be China, also the description of how the craft behave hasn't changed very much since post WWII (the stuff Fravor said about the craft goes in with post WWII flying saucer reports)
Sure, my point is that many people (even people who don't really believe in alien UFOS) just accepting that "alien craft = uncanny" are missing that this itself is a fairly unexamined, irrational assumption. Basically, if you stop and think about this for a second, it should make the claims more dubious, not less. Maybe something like angels would routinely violate the laws of physics, but it doesn't really make any sense that aliens would.
I work on astronomy data pipelines, including groups of scientists that are literally searching for evidence of aliens. One thing that people really underrate is just how many unusual sensor readings you get when you collect a huge amount of data and filter out to look at the one-in-a-million most unusual things.
For example, the "wow signal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal . If you read the wikipedia page you might think, oh there's some debate about what this is, maybe it's aliens. No, nowadays radio astronomers see similar things all the time. Literally millions of them. A big spike that never repeats again and so you have no idea what it is. Well, there are many ways that instruments can malfunction or something briefly interferes with a sensor and you get a reading that doesn't map to anything physically. With modern data collection volumes there are so many anomalies like this, you just have to throw them out.
So the idea of, what's the explanation for these things. For every video of a weird thing there must be an explanation. No, there just isn't an explanation. The sensor acted weirdly and you'll never know why because that's how massive data collection projects work.
I do support looking for UFOs, because it seems like a reasonable thing to investigate, but it doesn't make sense to take this extremely low-quality data and pore over it expecting it to lead to anything. Instead, the people who actually do have a very high-quality data source should spend a little bit of time checking for stuff they don't recognize. For example one obvious entity to do this is SpaceX since there are so many Starlink satellites and they are going to need a lot of high quality data collection to make sure Starlinks don't run into random space garbage. If they notice any space garbage moving unnaturally, that would be interesting to escalate to human analysis.
People understand now that the vast size of the universe across time and space makes it almost a certainty that we are one of many intelligent civilizations in our universe. What people miss is that same grand scale makes it vanishingly unlikely we will ever meet one. In 3.5 billion years of life on earth, we have had a civilization that could use radio waves only for the last 150. A similar civilization on a planet near enough that we could plausibly even detect them could have achieved radio transmission 3 million years ago and died out 1 million years ago, or may not arise for another 3 million. The odds that two intelligent space traveling civilizations will arise in geographical and temporal proximity such that they can be aware of each other are probably extremely small.
There could well be life forms elsewhere in this galaxy. In fact I think it likely. But I suspect the first civilization in a galaxy to become seriously spacefaring essentially colonizes the galaxy on the order of a million years, taking up all the evolutionary niches for technological civilization and effectively preventing other life forms from evolving to that point. If I'm right, then most technological civilizations should expect to be the first in their galaxy. From that point of view, wondering why we appear to be alone in the galaxy is a bit like wondering why humans are the only high tech species on earth--only the first ones actually get to do it.
I totally agree with this article, but I think RH might be shouting into the void a bit here. People who believe in UFO's just believe in UFO's. There isn't much you can say to dissuade them of the idea - after all it is unfalsifiable.
me
To me, the best evidence that UFOs aren't aliens is in addition to Hannis Jandl's observation below that the vast size of the universe makes it vanishingly unlikely that two civilizations would arise within hailing distance of each other over the plausible duration of such civilizations. (Remember the "hail" can't travel faster than the speed of light, which over the distances involved is a very serious, crippling limitation.) So Hannis's observation is all you really need to debunk UFOs.
For further certainty, consider that life had to evolve not once, but twice on earth to produce our civilization. First life itself had to master membrane-boundedness, nucleic acid synthesis and replication, and enzymes for catabolism and anabolism. These biochemical feats have a certain inevitability to them, once provided with a source of free energy to drive these entropically unfavourable reactions. No need for God's breath. But where does the energy come from?
Here's where, in effect, life had to begin a second time: mastering photosynthesis. Before the blue-green cyanobacteria (and later the green eukaryotic plants), the source of energy was a random sort of thing used today by a small number of bacteria occupying highly restricted niches. These bacteria are called chemo-lithotropes. They get their energy from various chemical reactions confined to those niches and their carbon sources are inorganic carbon. Now enter photosynthesis. The development of green pigments that generate both metabolic energy and the hydrogen equivalents to reduce inorganic carbon (CO2 usually) to sugar molecules (the oxidation of which provided the energy to make, with nitrogen from ammonia, amino acids and the small "bases" that form the genetic code) enabled photosynthetic organisms to harvest the limitless energy showered on the earth by the sun. First you have green plants (photo-lithotropes) and the animals and fungi that feed on them (chemo-organotrophs), eventually evolving into civilizations that look up at the sky and wonder. Without photosynthesis, you have nothing but slow-growing bacteria eking out a living near vents in the deep oceans. Oh, and somewhere along the way a eukaryotic organism had to phagocytose an energy-producing prokaryotic symbiont which we now call a mitochondrion, in order to use effectively all this energy that the chloroplasts (themselves probably once-independent prokaryotes) were generating.
Photosynthesis seems such a bold, unlikely development that the conjoint probability that an exoplanet would have generated both primitive life (step 1) and then photosynthesis (step 2) is surely very close to zero. We really might be unique in the universe.
The simple reason why we are being inundated with pro-UFO content now is that
a) America is certainly experimenting with drones and top secret aircraft that are easier than ever for people to observe (we all have cameras now)
b) other nations — and particularly our opponents on the global stage — have the power to deploy small aircraft, drones balloons, etc. in our airspace (let us not forget the 2023 Chinese balloon incident) that would be better attributed to aliens
If (when?) we find aliens, they will most likely be microbial beings on the surfaces of neighboring planets. It’s fun to speculate about this, more fun to entertain crackpots, but it’s only fun.
Came here to mention the Chinese balloon thing. I actually know someone whose hobbyist weather balloon was shot down with a missile during that time. Woulda been so much cooler if the balloon were an alien space probe
A poor ending for balloon and missile alike.
Or, you know, it's just regarded slop being fed to a world that lives in uninteresting times.
I wouldn’t call these times uninteresting…
You don't know enough history. The world got really boring after the 80s.
Okay 👍🏼
The problem is the phenomon described by Favor is nearly the same as what early flying saucer reports described.
Best evidence that UFO stuff is fake is all the "leaks" to the NYT and WaPo that never result in any prosecutions, and all the military brass and pilots being heralded as courageous for testifying in Congress about UFOs and facing no consequences. Remember when some 20-something reservist leaked documents proving the obvious fact that Biden-Harris was lying about Russia bombing the Nord Stream pipeline? He was arrested by a SWAT team and no one has heard from him in a while.
"Remember when some 20-something reservist leaked documents proving the obvious fact that Biden-Harris was lying about Russia bombing the Nord Stream pipeline? He was arrested by a SWAT team and no one has heard from him in a while."
What are, "Things that didn't happen," Alex?
Jack Teixeira, sentenced to 15 years under the 1917 Espionage Act.
1) Not a reservist (National Guardsman);
2) The published documents include substantial and damaging information that had nothing to do with the Nord Stream pipeline (in fact, whatever it said about Nord Stream appears to be so inconsequential it's not listed in the contents of the leak on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_Leaks#Contents )
3) Teixeira is currently in federal prison, not "disappeared": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Teixeira#Arrest_and_prosecution
Cool. Could sub in Reality Winner or others. Where are the prosecutions for the UFO "leaks"? Where's the retaliation against the pilots? Isn't it strange that they're being routed for their bravery when it's clear that they're not breaking ranks and exposing hidden truths?
This is an excellent, well argued article, let down only by references to "I asked Claude...." Like Wikipedia, LLMs are a start to research, not a credible reference in and of themselves. What "I asked Claude" means is "I triggered a stochastic token predictor known for both hallucinations and ignoring relevant content and here's what it output."
Yes, LLMs can be useful for search but everything they produce must be validated by a human.
Treating "UFO"/"UAP" as interchangeable with "extraterrestrial lifeform"/"alien" is a 25+ trillion mile leap of logic, and that's pretty much the whole ballgame here.
Not to get all rationalist about it (god, those people), but people are really bad about being Bayesian, especially when it comes to emotionally charged topics. And this is a weirdly emotional topic for people- are we alone/isolated in the universe? Would ETs bring “enchantment” back to an unenchanted world? There are a few controversial topics where a simple Bayesian analysis just answers the question (this being maybe the best example). It’s sort of cute and quaint- just a good reminder of people’s limits.
I really don't understand how you can be so clear-eyed about this (and other things), and yet so blind about AI. https://nerdfever.com/on-ai-doomerism/
Public discourse, as usual, focuses on the straw-man arguments and evidence...
I am waiting to see how the steel-man evidence turns out. I did not know it came under criticism under the last year, but it seems there is also a preprint of a paper that replicates the findings to a degree?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned%2C_Multiple-transient_Events_in_the_First_Palomar_Sky_Survey?wprov=sfla1
That poor man shooting the selfie with the weather balloon was born with a freakishly reversed right hand!
I know Tyler does not like him, but I find Mick West’s YouTube videos to be very convincing. I do not find such quality coming from the opposite side.
One big issue with the alien UFO conspiracies is that these craft crash at an alarming rate for beings that have supposedly mastered interstellar travel. For instance we have hundreds of thousands of airplanes in the air everyday and yet less than 0.2% of these airplanes crash.
Now aliens that have mastered interstellar travel and physics would probably have significantly less crashes than our aircraft and yet how many UFO stories involve aliens supposedly crashing their craft in our airspace? It's just obviously nonsense.
That depends on the quality of the craft. Also most of the crashes could just be drones
How are craft that are supposedly interstellar crashing regardless of whether they're piloted manually or not - crashing on Earth? It makes 0 sense unless they want to crash which also doesn't make sense.
Every technology has a failure point. Depending on how many times these beings have visited the planet over a period of time, some percentage of it will result in a catastrophic failure. This assumes they don't get shot down. The phenomon is attracted to nuclear energy/weapons (old Ufologists from the 1950s noted the phenomon was likely visiting us for centuries, but the atomic testing was a technosignature that shows were sapient so they definitely began surveiling us much more. Which explains why the UFO phenomon is a specifically post WWII phenomon.).
Jacques Vallee thinks this phenomona has been visiting this planet for thousands of years, only the UFO form is the most "modern" way we see it as. Think how medieval people saw the universe as a mechanical machine, and now we see the universe as a simulation like a computer game.
This makes 0 sense. Our rate of aircraft failure for airplanes is like 1 out of millions of aircraft. These interstellar craft are presumably significantly more advanced than airplanes and would thus have an even lower failure rate. That means we should be seeing millions of these things in the sky for every 1 to 2 UFO crashes and yet that isn't the case at all.
Excellent post
Even if you are inclined to lend this phenomenon some degree of credulity that something might actually be there, why isn't the obvious most likely answer "weird experimental aircraft" instead of "aliens?" Like, aside from the evidence being generally bad there is any object present at all why should I prioritize the "aliens" explanation over "some kind of weird human drone" explanation if it happens there might be?
*Edit*
And for that matter, why the assumption that an alien craft would almost certainly appear very strange or violate the laws of physics? If anything, I would expect alien craft to look/behave kind of samey because they are not magically immune to the laws of physics.
"It’s also an interesting question why smart people have fallen for this. I think it is a good example of how living in a populist era means that even the best minds are going to occasionally be convinced by nonsense."
Well for one thing Star Trek sounds fun to smart nerds and Big Foot is just dumb, both from an evidence point of view and from a myth point of view. Seriously, big upright gorillas? That's the best you got? Why not dragons or griffins?
A lot of the supposed encounters are said to be stuff China wouldn't have access to, UFO enthusiasts talk about crafts "violating the known laws of physics" because that's how they explain how they appear and disappear so quickly before they can be recorded properly.
The problem is the phenomona has existed in a recognizable form since after WWII. So it couldn't be China, also the description of how the craft behave hasn't changed very much since post WWII (the stuff Fravor said about the craft goes in with post WWII flying saucer reports)
Sure, my point is that many people (even people who don't really believe in alien UFOS) just accepting that "alien craft = uncanny" are missing that this itself is a fairly unexamined, irrational assumption. Basically, if you stop and think about this for a second, it should make the claims more dubious, not less. Maybe something like angels would routinely violate the laws of physics, but it doesn't really make any sense that aliens would.