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This week, a House Oversight subcommitte held a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs - or, in slightly more old-fashioned parlance, UFOs and aliens.
The star witness was David Grusch, former intelligence officer turned whistleblower who testified that the United States has been operating a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, which has recovered both technology of non-human origin as well as "non-human biologics" from various crash sites. Allegedly, these programs have been avoiding Congressional oversight and standard disclosure procedures by illegally appropriating funds that were allocated for other purposes. He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.
The UAP issue has slowly been gaining mainstream traction for several years now - see for example The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 sponsored by Chuck Schumer which was previously discussed on TheMotte. It's difficult to dismiss the whole thing as being merely Grusch's personal fantasy when you have Rep. Matt Gaetz saying the following:
Rep. Tim Burchett, who has also seen classified evidence related to UAPs, had the following exchange in an interview prior to the hearing:
When you have reputable government officials - not "former" anything, not "I know a guy who knows a guy", but actual, sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.
It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be. I don't find it very plausible that this is a test run of the government's disinfo capabilities. Modern information warfare is fought with internet memes anyway. If they really wanted to test their ability to influence culture and discourse, they would start with a social media campaign, not Congressional hearings.
At the same time though, I think Yudkowsky's argument against the presence of aliens on Earth is very convincing. He gives a rundown of what I would call the "basic argument" for skepticism: if aliens are here and they want to be known, then why don't they just show themselves? And if they don't want to be known, then they're doing a rather poor job of hiding themselves. Basically, their behavior just doesn't make sense.
Surely any species that's capable of building aircraft that are this advanced should be able to just hang out somewhere in space and get live 8K Ultra HD video of any location on the planet. If all they want to do is observe and study us, there shouldn't be any need to actually fly down here where they can be seen. Hanson's suggestion that this is all part of a convoluted show of dominance on their part is not very convincing.
The best rebuttal that I can come up with to Yudkowsky's argument is that the aliens are simply indifferent to whether we know about them or not. Think about humans who go on expeditions to observe sharks. Obviously we're not going to go right into the midst of the sharks and "announce" ourselves, because that would be silly. But neither do we make any special effort to hide ourselves. If one of the sharks goes and tells his friends about the strange cylindrical object he saw floating just above the water's surface, that's really of no concern to us one way or the other. But even this argument is not particularly convincing. If the aliens were truly indifferent, then one would expect that they would have revealed themselves in some more overt way by now, a UFO going on a joyride one day through the streets of Manhattan for example, anything that's more reputable and verifiable than "my cousin Ed from Nebraska swears that he was abducted one night when he was all alone and he conveniently forgot to charge his phone that day".
Ultimately, I think all possible explanations have their own serious problems. I could believe that UAPs are part of an advanced, non-alien weapons program that's been kept secret by the US government - but that would be pretty crazy in its own right.
"I heard", "I spoke to a guy", "I met someone who said", "single image of a sphere hovering above the water, and four diamond shaped lights from craft on a training mission", "the sensor array was switched off by the aliens" etc etc etc etc etc... Mountains upon mountains of bullshit.
I would have liked just one person to stand up before congress and describe alien physiology, say they met an alien, describe in detail and captured spaceship. Anything. Yes, that could (and almost certainly would) still be either schizo fantasy or outright fabrication, but at least it would be a concrete, real claim. Little green men, ET, flying saucers, weird sci fi computers.
Instead, the stories are always the same. Something heard, something rumored, bright lights, weird shapes spotted by fighter pilots in the distance, sensor arrays messing up. Always vague. Show me the aliens and I'll believe.
Yep.
We're literally half a step beyond bigfoot sightings here.
Oh you found footprints, or clumps of fur, or droppings or heard an unidentifiable animal call, or saw some vague shape staring at you from the woods under the moonlight at 2 a.m.?
Great. Call up NatGeo and see if they'll fund another expedition.
Kinda like you say, that one Bigfoot film is 'obviously' fake upon analysis, but at least they give you a complete view of the alleged creature that isn't solely secondhand evidence.
"Unexplained" phenomena is usually just the result of misinterpreting a rare but otherwise natural event, or possibly being fooled by intentional deceit. Give me something that isn't just explained by a failure of the human senses to accurately perceive something.
Note, I'm willing to save some (extremely low) probability for the existence of aliens on earth, but moving my priors on it would require appropriately spectacular evidence.
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I had made a comment to a similar effect but it evidently didn't post. Basically, as soon as I saw that it was an image taken by a flight crew I lost interest. Another low res photo or video of a moving object taken from another moving object that's miles away. That's obviously also subject to various kinds of distortion and is being taken with equipment designed for another purpose. I wouldn't even go as far as "show me the aliens"; if someone can produce a photograph that's more than just some vague shape or form or light and actually has some detail I'd take interest. Show me a door, or a propulsion system, or some piece of mechanical equipment and I'll pay attention.
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