This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Dept of War has released a new batch of UAP documents at https://war.gov/ufo/
This is supposedly the first in a series of releases that will come out in the coming months. Trump has made repeated comments that he intends to declassify what the government has in UAP and that the public can make up its own mind.
There are many pages of documentation being sifted through this morning. The initial reaction seems to be that this is largely more of the same grainy video that we’ve previously had - with a few key exceptions. The big on being reporting by Peter Doocey is NASA records (picture and communications logs) from the Apollo missions. NASA astronauts reporting and confirming observations of very bright luminescent angular objects tumbling in the moons atmosphere. Also appearing formation in some videos. The NASA comms logs seem significant. Trained military and science professionals of the highest order. Reporting that they see a bogey out the window. Ground control asks “is that the booster?”. Astronaut says “it’s a bogey”.
From a culture war perspective, it’s going to be interesting to see how politics impacts this. Already the /ufo/ subreddit is completely fixated on the fact that Trump is behind this and that it’s a bit distraction from the Epstein files. While there is no smoking gun here, it’s obviously an escalation of the disclosure trend that started nearly 10 years ago. There are reports that subsequent release will include the infamous 46 HD videos that congress has seen. Also reports of potential anomalous (ET?) bodies.
We’re also in a very unfortunate position where conspiracy, uap, and other paranormal phenomena have been politicized. It’s impossible for me to believe that ScienceTM will take any real interest in this. I wonder when that dam will break. They are so invested in the pre-disclosure narrative that they will not update without something truly shocking being released.
It’s understandable that people remain skeptical. That being said, there is now an overwhelming amount of evidence out there that something is going on outside of what mainstream science will recognize. There are countless government insiders that have told their stories.
I personally don’t claim to know what to make of all of this. But I continue to update my priors on the following:
There are NHI entities or technology regularly interacting with earth.
There are one or more ET civilizations that are currently on earth and have formal relationships with various states.
There are public and private organizations that have advanced technologies beyond conventional energy and aerospace tech.
There are terrestrial breakaway civilizations from the deep past or present with otherwise unknown technology.
There are paranormal phenomena and metaphysical entities that are the source of all of these events.
How about you all? Anyone else adjusting lately?
Edit. Link to nasa logs.
https://x.com/the_astral_/status/2052729234435481632?s=46
Can someone provide some context for this phrasing?
Military slang for an unidentified/unknown object, coming from its original meaning of a supernatural creature.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Apollo missions have provided us with weird shit for ages. Consider the opening sample in this song.
If the government had bombshell evidence of extraterrestrials, it managed to keep quiet through decades of competing administrations, including Trump I. Why would that change now?
On the other hand, if there’s nothing new to report…why not now?
Trump is, as usual, signaling his cool outsider status. He wants you to know he’s not afraid of the swamp creatures who have totally been keeping this from you. It’s the same old playbook; I’m not expecting much.
Or, more likely, somebody appointed to the administration for some other reason simply wants this stuff declassified, and Trump, being an outsider who doesn't really care about the issue, is willing to do it. There's also an outside possibility that this is some second order effect of DOGE, where the people pushing to keep this stuff classified got fired.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The scenarios as I see them in order of likelihood.
A: Someone testing the latest generation of classified tech fucked up and got caught, (think opening scene of Top Gun: Maverick)
B: A Stargate type situation where the US government or possibly multiple governments have either developed or discovered something truly Sci-Fi and are trying to keep the metaphorical genie in the bottle.
C: Angels, daemons, and egregores, are real.
D: Predator and Predator 2, are real.
To be clear, I am reasonably certain that the A: is the true explanation and D: is unlikely in the extreme, but I threw it in there because I rewatched those movies recently, and I feel like the idea of the solution to the Fermi paradox being that Earth is essentially a national park/game preserve for Rastafarian Super-Klingons has potential for some really meaty sci-fi from both the human "prey" perspective, and from the perspective of the hunters who discover that the Antelope have invented crossbows and IEDs, since the last time they went on safari.
I feel like people overdistinguish between B(/D) and C. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all. "Demons try to trick humanity into thinking they're aliens to shake our belief in God" is an opinion that's all the rage among fundies these days, and every time I see it, all I can think is, can you really not draw the connection that "angels and demons" and "aliens" could quite sensibly just be two different sets of vocabulary for the same thing? Is "angels and demons might be beings much like humans but from different stars/planets" an inherently heretical view? Did ancient people have any need to be informed of the logistical specifics of how angels and demons came about? If we have faith, why would we presume that aliens don't have their own histories with and views on God, for good or for ill, which would make them, to us, angels or demons? In the event that our elites are secretly in contact with aliens, it seems entirely plausible to me that this is a very evil thing, on both ends of the contact, and that this is functionally occult activity, powerful people with demonic patrons.
Yes, it is heresy for mainstream Christians. Angels are held to be made as, specifically, servants of God and demons are simply those who rebelled. They are not beings with their own civilization.
Did God not make us to be servants, and did we not rebel? All the works of detailed information on the nature of angels and demons that I know of are either extremely speculative, not considered religiously significant by many serious authorities, or both.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Harry Turtledove has an entire series based on exactly this premise.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you're excessively negative on mainstream science in this case. The VASCO survey people put out a study of pre-Sputnik glints around geostationary orbit. These are respected scientists and it's a finding that is, uh, hard to explain without invoking aliens.
John Michael Godier did a video on this(and a good collection of study links). He not only offers a potential solution(nuclear testing), but also points out independant comfirmation of the VASCO study. Amoung other interesting tidbits.
That said, imo, it's never aliens.
More options
Context Copy link
I think my negativity is warranted.
The VASCO stuff is fascinating and those people deserve our utmost respect for doing this work in public.
The VASCO findings, along with everything else released by DoW will be ignored. It seems to me that certain people will not update their priors on this topic. They’ve not considered VASCO and will not consider other evidence that’s been released over the past few years. The rebuttals have not changed in 30 years.
There is a certain institutional arrogance at work here. Opinions have been cemented and mockery has been the protocol. /u/self_made_human made the case against ETs quite clearly. In some people’s mind, we have learned all there is to know about the material world. If we don’t, well the. Surely someone would have published a peer reviewed study on it somewhere and we therefore have incorporated it into the corpus of scientific knowledge.
It’s certainly possible that all of the testimony from government and military personnel is a mass hysteria or a scam. It’s possible the hundreds or thousands of pictures and sensor readings are just mistakes, visual artifacts, or frauds.
I’m rooting for more to be released though. If for no other reason than to see the increasingly absurd contortions that certain people will go through rather than admit they were wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm unimpressed. The "they're here" hypothesis is a stack of conjuncts you have to price separately. I say this every single time this topic comes up, because someone has to.
Physics first. For aliens to be in our atmosphere, getting here without us noticing, physics has to break. Hard. Either FTL or energy budgets that make Kardashev-I civilizations look like loose change. Getting even a 1,000 kg probe to 20% of c needs something like 10^18 joules of kinetic energy, and that's a one-way trip. Sub-luminal crewed travel runs into interstellar hydrogen turning into ionizing radiation past ~0.5c, with deceleration costs equal to acceleration.
The energy costs are far from impossible, but the bigger issue is that deceleration would be a dead give-away. There are plausible approaches to stealth in interplanetary space, such as the Hydrogen Steamer, but when we're talking interstellar travel that doesn't take a gazillion years (especially from outside the immediate stellar neighborhood?). Fuck no. You'd be brighter than most stars from our perspective.
The easiest way to get around detection (for a non-standard definition of "easy") would be to get as close to the speed of light as you can, without bothering to slow down. That minimizes the temporal delta between your emissions giving you away and your arrival in system.
There is, however, a serious problem with that. I hope the keen-eyed reader can parse it. If not? Well: what I've just described is a Relativistic Kill Vehicle. Very different from something carrying a cargo you want to survive a journey, to a planet that you also would prefer mostly intact.
I can hear the response: "our physics is incomplete!" Yeah buddy, I know. It came free with the dark matter and dark energy. But if we grant FTL, reactionless drives, warp bubbles, exotic matter etc etc, then all bets are off. But once you've blown off the cost of the trip, you've blown up the priors on what these beings can do.
A civilization that solved interstellar travel has, with overwhelming probability, also solved stealth, signal control, and not-getting-photographed. Conditioning on "crossed several light-years" and "doesn't want to be caught by humans" should not leave you predicting "keeps getting caught on jet FLIR looking like fuzzy tic-tacs." The more advanced you demand the hypothetical aliens to be, the more evidence you need that the cryosleep has given them brain damage bad enough to explain the terrible OPSEC.
I'm not picking one explanation for what's in the released material. Far more likely, ridiculously more likely that it's several things compounding. Sensor artifacts (Sean Kirkpatrick, who ran AARO until 2023, has consistently argued the famous clips are jet engines doing weird things at long focal lengths). Tired pilots, going off a culture that treats every blip as anomalous. Black programs where one arm of USGov tests toys it didn't tell the other arm about. Adversary hardware misclassified, because, at least in theory, China might have some fun toys. Foreign and domestic psy-ops. Plain grift and running cover. A classified drone test, witnessed by a fatigued pilot, captured on a wonky sensor. This can all give you roughly the corpus we have, for far cheaper evidentiary cost.
Aliens? C'mon. I don't rule them out categorically. I just notice that "we're in a simulation and the admins are messing with us" buys roughly the same explanatory power at roughly the same cost in violated assumptions, and nobody treats it as the modal explanation. Pick your absurdity.*
What would move me is something an advanced interstellar civilization should find trivial. Hijack global comms and broadcast a coherent signal in every language at once. Live-stream a constructive proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Set an undeniable craft on the White House lawn at noon, on every camera. Drop asteroids in the Sahara to spell "ssup?" in characters and craters legible from orbit. None of that is demanding for someone who cracked star travel. The action-to-evidence ratio of "do something unambiguous, once" massively dominates "occasionally appear as a fuzzy shape humans argue about for decades." Our tech has gotten better since the 60s. It would be very awkward if theirs has improved at just the right pace to keep getting caught at the same rate.
So you've got a dichotomy. Either they want us to know they're here, in which case the demonstration is trivial and we'd already have it. Or they don't, in which case routinely showing up on cockpit thermal cameras is a level of opsec failure inconsistent with the engineering required to be here at all.
I don't think the evidence forces me to pick either. I advise that everyone chill the fuck out. If you're going to update, then update at the rate of installing Windows 11 from floppy disks.
*I'll dwell further on the fact that the simulation hypothesis and the alien hypothesis are explanatorily isomorphic in the relevant sense. Both posit an agent with effectively unbounded capability who is, for unstated reasons, choosing to interact with us via low-bandwidth ambiguous signals rather than the high-bandwidth unambiguous ones available to them. If you state your reasons, that really doesn't help, since the usual explanations I've heard are really bad. Embarrassingly so. I'm a hard-SF nerd, so if I can't salvage your argument, who can?
The obvious answer to this is that they got here before we invented telescopes and have been hanging out in the Hollow Earth ever since.
More options
Context Copy link
It’s quite possible for operators of technology to be much less competent / impressive than the people who built that technology. In fact, that seems to be the typical pattern. Perhaps our aliens are the equivalent of a bunch of yahoos driving around Toyota technicals in the Sahel. The fact that their trucks have advanced microchips in them does not mean they are capable of building such microchips. When you consider the possibility of deep time where civilizations exist on the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of years this seems even more possible.
I do agree with you that aliens seem pretty unlikely, I’m just pushing back on the idea that advanced technology implies advanced other things.
Yeah, but trucks don't represent an advanced vehicle for us, back when it did they were probably rare in the hands of yahoos in the Sahel.
Now though this has me wondering about a tangeant. I think humanity has been pretty good at not giving giving idiots access to advanced vehicles. I wonder how many people with sub-100 IQs have ever piloted an airplane (on their own, not like "pilot let me hold the yoke of personal airplane"). Can't be too many, I imagine.
*EDIT: AI guesses seem to be in the million range, though likely strongly concentrated into general aviation (recreational aviation)
More options
Context Copy link
Possible? Yes. Very many things are possible, more than this textbox has the room to catalog or contain.
Plausible? No. More importantly, the more epicycles you tag on, the worse the theory gets. UFOs = alien visitation is rickety enough as is, tacking on "monkeys that found a spaceship" doesn't help.
You're conflating implies with requires. I'm keeping those things separated. It would be very curious if the operators of this sufficiently-advanced technology were just incompetent enough to get caught so infrequently, with such plausible deniability.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You’ve set up a nice strawman there batting down an ET explanation.
It seems to me that more people than ever are exploring non ET explanations.
The point of all of this is that there is a very long list of observations that do not comport to known phenomenon.
We also have a long list of government insiders who have talking about seeing, hearing, and being involved programs that are related to unexplained or unacknowledged phenomenon.
It sounds like you are bit hostile to the idea that there is something going on here that doesn’t fit neatly into our current understanding of how nature works. Why is that?
Someone above suggested I was being a hard on Science. I think this is exactly it right here.
There is a difference between being skeptical and being hostile. I am immensely skeptical, but I am perfectly willing to accept the proposition that "advanced alien civilizations exist in the observable universe". Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is against it. Our telescopes would have spotted Kardashev 3s. The universe has had plenty of time for even a slightly temporally privileged civilization to make a dent in their astrographical vicinity, to a degree we can see from here.
Why rely on the Kardashev scale? Because energy-consumption, while imperfect as a scale for gauging technological progress, is far better than alternatives in the sense that it would be something we could observe, and what we would expect to observe barring a dramatic upsets. Moar energy = Moar good. Why leave all those stars alone, wasting perfectly good negentropy shining into empty rooms?
Then thermodynamics itself imposes constraints in the form of waste heat. It would be extremely implausible that an advanced, older civilization wouldn't make use of available resources, or that it could completely disguise their heat signature.
K2 and below? They still be very likely to leave obvious signatures on interstellar travel. They don't have the same resources, though interstellar travel is hardly out of the question if you own even a thousandth of a Dyson swarm. The question is why you aren't something useful with that capability, instead of engaging in glorified voyeurism on primitive neighbors. For a more mundane example, the CIA could gang-stalk a random farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. But they don't, because they have better uses for their time and energy.
If there are aliens out there, then they're most likely to be pond scum if they're in our galaxy. If they're more advanced, then they're almost certainly further away, and we have pretty decent limits on what is plausible. If you want more, read up on Grabby Aliens (and lack thereof) as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
Length and verbosity is a very poor metric for quality of evidence. You can collect a million people willing to swear on the benefits of homeopathy, still doesn't best placebo.
I think you may have missed my point. You’re confidently suggesting that because ETs are unlikely, the evidence of unexplained phenomena are uninteresting, unimpressive, and not worth further investment.
I want to ask you specifically, have you considered the following:
[https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/many-big-pre-sputnik-earth-orbit](Pre Sputnik Sky Survey) showing anomalous things in our sky
[https://a.co/d/068TpBaG](UFOs and Nukes by Robert Hastings), a clinical examination of UFO observations around US and Soviet nuclear weapons. Includes the record interviews with some of our most well trained service members in control of nuclear weapons. People that are under constant monitoring for substance abuse and mental issues.
Official USA releases of the GoFast, Gimbal, and other AARO videos/pictures showing objects that defy conventional explanation or at the very least, would require other tenuous explanations.
Hundreds of interviews with people who worked in some official capacity at the government that say, on the record, I saw something that is not explained by conventional science.
Historical accounts of similar experiences, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg](Nuremberg 1951) or [https://unidentifiedphenomena.com/people/diana-pasulka/](Diana Pasulka)’s academic research comparing historical religious accounts of encounters that map closely to modern UAP)
Any one story or observation can be explained away. When taken together, in my opinion, there is something happening that that explains all of this that is unknown or concealed from the general public. There’s too much smoke here for it to be nothing. ETs are just one possibility.
I suspect you have not thought too deeply about the specifics here. Especially what’s new to public since 2015. And that’s okay. It’s a niche interest. But to confidently express “I’m not impressed”, and then go on to emphatically explain why one narrow explanation is clearly false… is closed minded.
With all of that said I ask your opinion on this: do you think there is some unexplained here worth further time money and interest to investigate? Or is it a big jerk off waste?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More people than ever can be wrong. Popularity does not measure truth.
Observations are often flawed in a variety of ways.
I can't speak for him, but I've observed that UFOology is a Shepherd Tone, always approaching, never arriving. At this point, I am confident that it never will arrive, and am confident enough to want to stake my position clearly. None of this is going to cash out in significant changes to consensus reality. There will be no new tech, no new avenues of research, nothing productive, just an endless series of what-ifs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't buy the idea that aliens, who have presumably mastered FTL travel, are so incompetent at hiding themselves that we're constantly finding evidence of their ships and whatever else, and they're doing things like anal probing random citizens and crashing in New Mexico but also still competent enough that they've been able to hide themselves for decades and no one can provide any actual evidence better than what exists for Bigfoot. And their competency at hiding, just like Bigfoot, happens to scale to whatever the current human technological level so despite everyone having a camera 24/7 now and tons of privately owned satellites in the sky, we can't find them.
Like that is an extremely specific level of competency needed where they constantly fuck up with little hints and exposures but never end up being revealed. They're always just out of sight in the corner of your eye while your phone is out of battery.
More options
Context Copy link
One thing that I keep considering is that "bogey" just means that we don't know what the hell it is.
It doesn't have to be flying saucers.
I prefer to think that it could be space whales.
More options
Context Copy link
The NASA/Borman audio is also old. I checked the Metabunk thread (my usual source of analysis on UFO stuff) and someone pointed out an 8 year old Youtube video with the same audio. The thread is only a few hours old so they don't have analysis of most of it yet, but the linked explanation of the Chandelier video as a diffraction pattern is typical of how I expect the rest of it to turn out.
More options
Context Copy link
I note the use of a abreviations like NHI and ET. It's to avoid saying extraterrestrial out loud, because that sounds dumb.
I always go back to the guy who said some wreckage contained "Unknown Elements" with no further explanation as to what that actually meant. Elements in the colloquial sense, like how an alternator is an element of an engine? Element Zero or Infra-lead? I'm always disappointed that no one who interacted with anything Unknown Flying Object-related has a paid-attention-in-high-school education.
Also, slightly unrelated, but I always laugh whenever UFOologists talk about "hybrids" interbreeding, and genetic experimentation. Or the anal probing thing. It's so obviously primate sexual anxiety being projected onto the unknown/imaginary.
I want a scene in something where a visiting alien gets asked one too many times about hybrids or breeding and gets annoyed.
What I'm hearing is "miracle health food": all the taste, none of the calories!
More options
Context Copy link
And then we tell him about furries 😁
Furries still have human sexual characteristics, and notably there's few primate furries; it's mostly dogs with boobs.
Yeah, furries almost point in the other direction with this: it's human beings being "attracted to other species" but in reality they're just taking attractive human characteristics and putting them on those species.
Though I guess this does open up an opportunity for arbitrage: imagine an alien species that has some extremely unattractive-to-them feature that maps well to attractive human characteristics, and vice-versa: now the unattractive members of our species and the unattractive members of their species can get together, both finding the other extremely attractive.
How is this not a romance series already?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The academic industrial complex exists to acquire and spend tax revenue on political hobby horses. Environmentalism has been a big one. Critical race and gender theory has been another. I do not foresee ScienceTM caring about extraterrestrial discovery and exploration until those interests align with the blue tribe’s interests. Especially when so much of space exploration is now red coded thanks to Elon Musk and Space Force.
My unsubstantiated theory is that extraterrestrial life exists, and is probably just as inept as we are. I imagine a civilization of E.T.’s shitposting on Alien 4chan and levying random racial slurs over which aliens have more impressive frills or more purple appendages.
This is an almost charmingly reductive model of any job.
My industry also exists to chase tax dollars via hobby-horses. At some level, those hobby-horses are informed by serious professionals asking “is this a reliable product,” “does it align with our doctrine,” or “you’re asking us to pay how much?” Their concerns creep uphill until they meet the goals and political postures rolling downhill. Eventually the two forces reconcile in the form of a budget.
Apply this same model to “ScienceTM.” Some academics have spent decades caring an awful lot about extraterrestrial discovery and exploration. Does that all go away when the top layer of paint changes colors? Not at all. You have to purge a lot more thoroughly to see institutions of this size abandon their missions.
Perhaps another tack. What do you think NASA has been doing since the shuttle was discontinued? I promise you, it wasn’t feminist glaciology.
This account is not encouraging, and coincides with other highly-plausible critiques of NASA culture and procedures. "Feminist glaciology" isn't a perfect description, but "paying people to spin their wheels and produce nothing useful ever while actively abusing those who try to do better" seems like an analogue too close for comfort.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Science" definitely cares about space, but basic math suggests that we are very, very far away from any possible alien life and contact will have to be initiated by them. Space exploration is a giant money sink; the real money is in building satellites, not rockets.
Any civilization that manages to accomplish interstellar travel would surely have to be significantly competent. If they really have reached Earth, it seems unlikely that they would manifest in sketchy flashes of light, often offshore. Maybe they live in water and assume Earthlings do too, though the pattern of lights would clearly suggest complex land based life.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link