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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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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:

  1. There are NHI entities or technology regularly interacting with earth.

  2. There are one or more ET civilizations that are currently on earth and have formal relationships with various states.

  3. There are public and private organizations that have advanced technologies beyond conventional energy and aerospace tech.

  4. There are terrestrial breakaway civilizations from the deep past or present with otherwise unknown technology.

  5. 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

I’ll always go back to the first important question of whether or not there’s the possibility of aliens or alien technology: if they are really aliens, why can’t we point to a signal from deep space? Why can’t we hear chatter or detect engines or Dyson spheres or other forms of building in either deep space or on a planet? In short, how are these things getting here without bases, ships or cities on another planet. We needed a global civilization to launch glorified missiles at the moon. That’s almost nothing compared to the amount of infrastructure needed to launch something like the fictitious Enterprise. Even if we grant the rather dubious idea of FTL travel, you still need advanced civilization based on at least one planet to build the ship (likely several planets linked by trade). Yet, we have no evidence of even life on other planets. Certainly no cities have been discovered, let alone solar system spanning infrastructure necessary to build our starship. Absent that, I don’t see any reason to invent concepts of aliens to explain this stuff. 1,2 and 4 require that there be a solar system spanning civilization out there. 5 and 3 don’t. And 3 would be something that the government would want to protect. You don’t want Chinese spies to know exactly which companies are producing technology decades ahead of conventional technology.

Sounds like you’re just talking about Fermi’s paradox.

First of all if they were out there, how would we see them? The problem isn’t that we don’t see them but we shouldn’t even expect to. Our television and radio broadcasts don’t even reach beyond the heliosphere. It’s the sphere of charged particles at the edge of the solar system. A lot of those radio waves are just going to get annihilated, or scattered or absorbed.

Even if they did though, the inverse square law entails that the signals going to degrade substantially and so quickly that eventually it’s going to be below the standard background radiation (and therein invisible, it’ll be static; like looking at a TV). I’ve seen calculations done before that about one hundred light years is roughly the maximum distance (and this is even if you don’t take into account the cosmic dust that absorbs radio signals) it could travel theoretically. And even if you multiplied the strength of the broadcast by say two, that doesn’t increase the distance by two.

But let’s say life occurs once every thousand light years. Even in our galaxy alone, they’d be too far away for us to ever see them. Even if they’re millions of years older than us, because those signals are simply gone. Even if you had nuclear powered spaceships roving around the galaxy, they still aren’t generating anywhere near the amount of energy that starlight does. So Fermi’s paradox isn’t really a paradox for me. The best takeaway from this is to assume that intelligent life is roughly less than one per hundred light year radius.

SETI researchers fully acknowledge all of this.

Except that the entire argument is simply trying to explain away finding absolutely no evidence that there are aliens out there. And while accept that radio waves don’t propagate infinitely, you still have to explain why we don’t see Dyson swarms or spheres, why we’ve never detected life, let alone civilization anywhere in the universe. At some point, the thing becomes silly. They’re definitely out there, but they’re invisible, you see, and no you can’t possibly detect them no matter what methods you use, or what you’re looking for. I find it much simpler to say that until there is concrete, public evidence to the contrary, there’s no good reason to insert aliens into the picture, or if the picture includes anything people believe is out there, no reason to include aliens and exclude angels, demons, ghosts, or Asgardians. Until there’s evidence of aliens in deep space, it’s just speculation. They should be there, perhaps, but we don’t know if they actually are there.