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What does the Motte think about UFOs/UAPs? I ask because there was a relatively big instance of "disclosure" today within the UFO community. A former senior US intelligence figure (who allegedly had enough high level classifications to report directly to the president) has apparently stated to Congress and journalists that the US has recovered "non-human technology."
From the article:
I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand. Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all? What would?
For those who, like me, think this (in conjunction with the massive amount of other evidence for UFOs/UAPs/etc.) is fairly good evidence that this phenomenon is real, what might be the social and political implications of this? It's kind of hard for me to imagine anything changing our current political stalemate and trajectory, and I can definitely imagine a situation where the US completely admits to the existence of "non-human intelligences" only for the story to be overtaken the next day when Trump says something allegedly racist, or whatever. And unless reverse-engineered non-human technology starts seeping into consumer electronics or something, it's hard to see it affecting people that much on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine news that could be more important.
I've raised this issue before and gotten a bombardment of scepticism. The issue is that people set base rates too low and then use that to explain why they won't accept evidence that would raise their base rate. Cameras? We have decades of recordings from radar and military jets! We have 'Foo Fighters' from WW2, we have the Wow signal.
And why should the base rate for alien civilizations be so low? We really don't know what we're dealing with - we are not an ancient civilization. We haven't reached the highest levels of technological attainment. Our understanding of the universe is very limited. What is 'dark' matter and energy (95% of the universe's matter/energy)? How does gravity work with the rest of physics? We don't have stellar-scale particle accelerators or superintelligences, we don't even have controlled fusion.
We don't have the knowledge necessary to model advanced civilizations. Would they be building Dyson Spheres en masse or are Dyson Spheres pleb-tier megastructures? Are there far better ways to acquire resources that we just don't know about? Would this have some relation to dark matter and dark energy, which make stars look rather small and ineffectual?
Even based upon what we do know, interstellar travel is trivial for a powerful civilization. According to wikipedia it would only take half a million years for Von Neumann probes to proliferate throughout the galaxy at 0.1c. Even if there are 10x more unexpected difficulties, 5 million years is peanuts. If we remove the 'UFO's definitely aren't aliens' firewall, then we get to solve the Great Silence mystery as well.
Sure, the 1561 sighting could be some combination of 'a very unusual sundog' and excessive religiosity. Radar does have glitches. People get drunk and make mistakes. Fakes are not unknown. But what couldn't be explained away in such a fashion? Everything short of a gigantic Independence Day style battleship! If there are any extraterrestrials that use even a modicum of subtlety, this approach would miss them. We need a more targeted, precise epistemology (without all the people who airily pronounce that interstellar travel is extremely unlikely, they've disqualified themselves).
Furthermore, I dislike the attitude of the skeptics. CuriousCA goes on about how highly credentialed experts in the field are fabulists (or some proportion of them). Wouldn't this wipe out Newton or Galileo? Our understanding of the universe improves when a small number of experts disagree with the crowd. Most critically, we advance by assessing evidence, not smearing people as quacks if they dare swim against the current. The people best equipped to assess evidence are those at the National Reconnaisance Office like Grusch or 'I founded eight biotech companies' tier biologists as in the last time this came up. I reckon we'd have a lot more such whistleblowers without the universal derision field for the whole topic, as with HBD or other matters.
We have radar, pilot testimony, aircraft cameras, testimony from high-ranking officials (from many different nations). What more is needed apart from little green men waddling around on the White House Lawn? If that is what you need to update, going from 0.0001 to 1 in a moment, then you're not a good rationalist.
If the US couldn't cover up its torture chambers in Iraq, fake Russiagate stories or spying on the public for more than a few years, how can they cover up a massive psy-op lasting since the Nimitz sightings in 2004, if not longer?
When we detect a difference one part in one thousand between (something like) the mass of an electron and a theoretical prediction, we put thousands of (amortized) man hours, many from the smartest people in the world, into figuring out if it's experimental error or new physics. We probe the bottoms of the ocean for new species of life smaller than a single cell of your body. We accelerate protons to within a hundred millionth of the speed of light, or build experiments the size of football fields / tanks of a billion liters of water to detect microscopic events with a frequency of one in 10^34.
And yet the evidence for UFOs remains "fuzzy pictures and videos" or "rumors from experts". Where are the international collaborations between top scientists here? Why haven't the 30cm/pixel imaging satellites gotten good images? Why aren't we blowing the UFOs out of the sky with lasers or something and putting the debris in a mass spec? Imaging technologies have improved by, maybe, ten orders of magnitude over the past century, yet modern UFO evidence is recognizable to someone familiar with UFO sightings in the 1950s.
Electrons and protons are replicable things that we control, UFOs are the equivalent of an old-timey safari. The big game might not show up when you want it too.
What do you expect, military-grade video is always grainy. Apache gunships produce only grainy black and white videos of the people they gun down. And the Nimitz footage is pretty clear:
I don't know, were they looking at the right place at the right time? 30cm/pixel imaging satellites could render the entire category of stealth aircraft obsolete, if they're looking in the right place at the right time. Yet the world's governments are investing trillions in stealth aircraft, they probably know a thing or two about the limits of our real-time satellite surveillance techniques.
Lasers are only good for short-range missile defence right now, they're an experimental technology, not even fully deployed. Whenever we tried shooting these things down (and we've been trying for decades) our interceptors disappear or the UFOs outrun them, sometimes both. Lake Superior 1953, for instance: https://www.history.com/news/ufo-fighter-jet-disappears-over-lake-superior-kinross-incident
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