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Notes -
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.
It has occurred to me the other day that the whole Bayesian rationality thing is actually a pretty good framework to look at the alien question. Specifically I mean the part about updating priors. Actual calculation doesn't matter, numbers would be pulled out of one's ass anyway – but the principle is important.
Let's say I have some beliefs – that there's 0.0001 probability of aliens being real, 0.5 probability for a random American official to be a honest source of info, 0.33 probability of a large well-hidden Deep State conspiracy with inscrutable goals expressing as psyops or coverups, 0.9 probability that, conditional on aliens being real, I'd see credible scientific research into their artifacts and biology and so on; the whole convoluted Bayesian network plus notions of credibility, what it means to be honest vs trustworthy… Then, a dozen officials swear up and down they've seen ayy lmao and the government hides the truth. And there's still zero scientific corroboration. Should that update my belief in aliens upwards? Slightly, perhaps. But more importantly, it should both tank my confidence in the good faith of American officials and update upwards my suspicion of a conspiracy, just not the one that hides ayys.
I notice a peculiar pattern – the belief in aliens that is supported by insistence of people tied to the American government and nothing else; it is uncorrelated with all other streams of evidence. This thing begs for an explanation. It could be, of course, that I'm very wrong about epistemology and they're very right. But it could be that this whole class of observers generates testimonies by a somewhat less trustworthy algorithm than I've assumed; that they're synchronized by something other than object-level knowledge about aliens. So their «signals» should be assigned lesser credence; and the more they diverge from the consilient world model inferred from other data streams, the less each new bit of their input weighs.
I observe that UAP believers don't actually go about it like this. They never propagate the signal of inconsistency back through the network. They just tally up these testimonies and say «so what now, skeptics, huh? We've got [ostensibly trustworthy name] here, it's no longer a joke!» But I've already reduced the weight of this whole class of names in my model; it is a negligible change at most.
There is an alternative theory, though. Perhaps these people don't delude themselves that they know enough to reason about the object level. For them, objective reality is functionally the same thing as consensus reality (much like for @fuckduck9000 objective morality is the thing that wins wars); human authority is a source of truth that needs no corroboration from mere physical feedback, so you can in principle just say «there's more officials pro than scientists contra» and be done with it; the whole reasoning that real aliens ought to have made a mark on anything other than testimonies of officials is moot. O'Brien really could fly, so long as it were confirmed by other Inner Party members. It's a matter of comparing the cumulative weight of authority on either side of the debate.
I find both those approaches alien.
And one more thought. There has been more rigorous, well-funded scientific investigation of xenobiology than of secret societies, conspiracies and psyops. This asymmetry is interesting. We have learned an awful lot about life and why it'd be hard for life to emerge outside Earth, and nothing in favor of such life. We have seen quite credible examples of conspiracies, and nothing to suggest that better-ran ones are impossible. However, the former remains viable, while interest in the latter has positively plummeted among the educated classes in the last 100+ years. «What if intelligent life beyond Earth, like silicon-based or something, dude, and flying saucers, imagine how it could work» is a respectable enough train of thought: why not indeed, and what's the harm anyway, it's deserving of patronage of eccentric billionaires, academic grants and place in peer-reviewed journals. «What if a well-organized cabal of malicious people manipulates public opinion without legible authority» is a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society. (Like many taboos (e.g not threatening to throw another party's candidate into jail), it's being violated nowadays, to an extent; the ayy guys say the government lies. The government is not the Cabal, of course; it is known that the government keeps some things secret. But I suppose this does blur the line). Most importantly, though, we do not have a serious theory of conspiracy.
Our sociology is on the level of surveys with Lizardman's Constant, shallow economic models, outright fraudulent papers claiming conspiracies can't work because a guy can multiply some numbers, and glib rules of thumb like Hanlon's razor. We don't know what exactly extraterrestial life is like if it exists; but we also don't know jack squat about our home turf. The illusion of familiarity is just that – human networks of power are too big and opaque to comprehend just by casual osmosis. One must be consistently skeptical. If we can't rule out aliens, we sure as hell cannot rule out that dozens or hundreds of high-ranking people in the state machine would lie for some reason we don't see.
After all, why couldn't lizards hide themselves among the human kin, secretly pulling the strings of our regimes and rewriting history? Wouldn't it be strange if we were the first and the only sentient race on Earth in all of 4.6 billion years? Anyone who came earlier would've had a massive first mover advantage…
Personally I do not see why this hypothesis is any more discredited than the one about extraterrestrial life.
That said. If there's a single parsimonious theory of a motive for this psyop that I can seriously propose… It's not my «overcapacity» thesis but rather the opposite. I mean the discrediting of the authority of the USG and army and American intelligence apparatus, through this very Bayesian logic, as @Hoffmeister25 demonstrates. The USG is the supreme secular power of the world, – and it's being reduced to some provincial slapstick comedy, instead of carrying itself with the dignity of the sovereign. It does not command respect, mostly just grudging support, on account of the vileness of its competitors. Give this 10 more years. 10 more years of AI shit torrent, 10 more years of long Covid and demented gerontocrats, 10 more years of Trump and Biden dog-faced-pony-soldier show and lurid, Jerry Springer tier gibberish in Congress. If at some point, say, CIA manages to report something truly ludicrous for Americans, physically plausible but shocking – who knows, maybe Mossad quietly installing backdoors into Deepmind and Anthropic AGI superclusters? – it will just be met with shrugs and condescending scowls. Whoever runs this, wants the legitimate authority of the US to end up in the position of the boy who cried wolf, and then collapse without popular support.
Just an idle thought.
Well, they are handily discrediting themselves without any outside help (or were the last 20+ years of great war on terror cabal securely in control, working as intended?)
UFOs and ayys were big things 50 years ago, but since then, the normie citizen learned to treat aliens as something clownish and ridiculous and dismiss any alien talk without hearing. See near total public disinterest in all these bombshell UAP revelations from the last years - this attitude is hard baked now (perhaps only alien invaders destroying cities with hot plasma for real could change it).
Capable secret cabal would notice that this distraction is not discrediting and not distracting and try something else.
If this thing is about undermining public trust in world's greatest super power, sex scandals, as dirty and disgusting as possible, would do it far more efficiently than any ayy stuff. Sex always sells.
Imagine just one congressional hearing about Epstein case.
Then give us something to investigate. Evidence. A space ship. A body. A signal. A megastructure in deep space. Hell, I’d start taking this seriously if NASA or the Euro space agency were showing interest. I mean seriously, if there were evidence, the phds would be all over it because they’d be world famous and win the noble prize in physics hands down. Nobody wants it? Or it isn’t there?
Even what we know about physics seems to indicate that interstellar travel is likely a generational endeavor, and thus probably not done for trivial reasons. The ship itself would have to be a pretty complete ecosystem and probably pretty big, which means we could or should detect it as it enters the solar system.
There are so many possible explanations distinct from material "nuts and bolts".
https://twitter.com/Berlinghoff_R/status/1313171646828613632
Other than the psychological ones, most of them would produce no actual evidence, and thus they’re not really distinct from angels, demons and jinn. Which if that’s where we’re going, I don’t see how the discussion is in any way scientific.
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