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[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
The mood in the UFO community has been pessimistic since Schumer's UAPDA was gutted at the end of last year, and the release of Volume I of AARO's Historical Record Report today isn't helping:
The report affirms the theory advanced publicly by former AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick that rumors of US government involvement with recovered alien technology were originated by a small group of government insiders who ultimately lacked verifiable evidence to substantiate their claims. Furthermore, these rumors may have been grounded in short-lived and/or proposed programs that actually kinda were meant to study aliens, even though none of these programs ever actually found any aliens:
Most sane people would be content to leave things here.
Nonetheless.
There are multiple tantalizing loose ends in this saga that remain unresolved. After a classified briefing in January, multiple members of Congress indicated that they learned information that substantiated the claims brought forward by David Grusch in June about a secret UFO reverse engineering program. Immediately after the briefing, Republican Rep. Tim Burchett stated "I think everybody left there thinking and knowing that Grusch is legit" and Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz stated "Based on what we heard many of Grusch claims have merit!". The "skeptical" interpretation of these remarks would be that only some of Grusch's claims have merit, namely the more mundane claims about the DoD's misuse of funds and the personal reprisals against him, while the claims about UAP reverse engineering remain unsubstantiated. Regardless of what the appropriate interpretation is, I think that the full contents of the January briefing should be declassified and made public so that we can decide for ourselves.
We also know for a fact that many photos and videos relating to UAP incidents exist and remain classified. A recent FOIA request revealed details about a USAF pilot's encounter with a UAP, and it included the pilot's drawing of the object, but we weren't allowed to see the video:
The reference to Gaetz here is due to remarks that Rep. Matt Gaetz made in July to the effect that he had seen an image of a UAP that seemed to demonstrate "technology that we don't posses anywhere in our arsenal, and none of our adversaries posses either". It's unclear to me if the case Gaetz was referring to is identical to this case that was uncovered by the FOIA request, but regardless, I would advocate for this video and for the image that Gaetz saw to be declassified and released to the public.
It may be surprising to people who haven't closely followed this story, but there actually is a culture war angle here.
Redditors with a vested interest in UAP disclosure have become uneasy over the fact that the Congressional effort for transparency has been spearheaded by Republicans of a decidedly MAGA variety (Burchett, Luna, Gaetz), and the few Democrats involved (Moskowitz, and to some degree AOC) have been generally more reserved and tepid in their support, or have simply withdrawn from the issue altogether over the last few months. This has fueled concerns that everyone has been swindled into supporting a "fringe right-wing conspiracy theory"; there's a desperate plea for more people with respectable left-wing credentials to come forward and lend credibility to the movement.
Which has me wondering: I think it's clear that the whole idea of a "conspiracy theory" has become firmly associated with the right. But is there any validity to this? Are people on the right more prone to believing in conspiracy theories? And if so, is this a recent historical development, or does this reflect something that's more deeply-rooted in the right-wing personality?
To be clear, I'm using the term "conspiracy theory" in the most neutral way possible, even though it's typically used as a pejorative. Even though I'm (somewhat) sympathetic to the possibility that the US government actually has concealed evidence of extraterrestrial life, that belief is, in the most literal sense, a conspiracy theory: it necessarily depends on the allegation that certain individuals conspired together in secret. The same goes for other popular beliefs on the right, like the allegations about improprieties in the 2020 presidential election. Even though I'm relatively neutral about the truth of those claims, it's hard to deny that they literally do constitute a conspiracy theory.
Alex Jones? Yeah, I'd say he's a conspiracy theorist. If you bring up Davos or the UN in any right-wing circle? Someone will probably insist that they're conspiring at some point.
Again, I don't view any of these claims as pejorative because I have no trouble thinking that some conspiracy theories might simply be true! I reject the Generalized Anti-Conspiracy Principle; I've never heard a convincing argument that made me think that substantial conspiracies are impossible, or that it would be impossible to get people to keep a secret for long enough (obviously some people can keep some things secret some of the time, otherwise your bank would have leaked your SSN by now).
For historical examples, many people would point to conspiracies in fascist states about ethnic minorities, although this would have to be counterbalanced by potential left-wing conspiracy theories: the paranoia about counter-revolutionaries in communist states and during the French Revolution, and potentially the foundations of Marxism itself (is it a "conspiracy" to say that the capitalists run everything?).
I do have to wonder if the tendency among right-leaning people to be more religious primes them to be more accepting of the possibility of unseen forces acting in the world. A surprising number of people in the UAP space have a Christian background (including certain highly-placed people in government), in spite of the general perception that belief in extraterrestrials would be incompatible with religious faith.
At this point, anyone who has anything to say re: UAP is presumed to be a hostile bullshitter. I'd not believe in UAPs even if videos of them were shown all around mainstream media.
I'm willing to give a pass to people who say "come and see this crazy plane on saturday, it can pull 50 gees" or "here is 50 gigabytes of top secret data showing anomalous craft, here are military personnel who collected it".
I'd love for the idea of (peaceful) interstellar contact to be a reality, but the problem is that it just really isn't feasible unless several major widely accepted parts of physics are actually false. The time and energy requirements needed for interstellar travel so high that any non-supernatural (i.e. angels or demons etc. instead of aliens) explanation for UFOs is prima facia false.
IMO that's an interesting but rather strange objection. Doesn't the presence of angels and demons require more flaws in the scientific understanding of physics than fast interstellar travel, not fewer?
Supernatural entities would presumably operates by rules separate from those of the physical universe. Aliens have to follow the same rules as us.
What is the difference between "rules separate from those of a physical universe" and "following the same rules as us yet exploiting the parts of them that we haven't discovered yet"?
Relativity and the speed of light put a pretty hard limit on things
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I mean, I get where you are coming from, but the main objection to interstellar travel isn't energy (you could do it with Voyager 1 amounts of energy) it's just time. Which humans have very anthropocentric ideas about that may not generalize to any other entities out there.
Most of the barriers on interstellar travel are barriers on human interstellar travel, that vanish if you have a relatively long time horizon and are fine sending GPT as your ambassador instead of a human. We could almost certainly send a (very small) spacecraft to another star in my lifetime via a starwisp if we really wanted to (and maybe we will!) Relatively fast nuclear-powered travel is also theoretically possible (it should be within the laws of physics, but obviously that's a huge engineering challenge!)
With slightly more advanced technology than we have now, it should be possible to send some sort of a small constructor (not grey goo, or anything crazy like that) that could construct larger devices. Iterate to even more advanced technology, and it could even construct lifeforms ("biologics") in artificial wombs, or, even if not from scratch, from frozen embryos.
Thus you could have a situation where there are little green/grey men crashing spaceships in New Mexico like all the most far-out theories claim without breaking any physical laws, or really any novel technology that humans haven't already considered and mathematically sketched out since the early Cold War.
Frankly, I think the weird reported behavior of some of the objects (e.g. instantaneous acceleration) is much more of a problem from a physics/materialist view in my mind than the problem of interstellar travel. And of course ironically is that we have much better reasons to believe there is something out there engaging in eye-wateringly fast acceleration within Earth's atmosphere than we do that it came here from Over There. So while I'm sympathetic to the "it makes more sense for it to be supernatural" approach, I really don't think interstellar travel is the barrier that some seem to think it is. It's just that interstellar travel might not look like Star Wars.
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I’d be willing to entertain the notion if anyone “convinced that Gorsch is legit” had any background in the hard sciences. Or if we had any sort of evidence of life in space. You find me a JWST image of a spaceship, we have something to talk about. If the head of the astrophysics department at MIT hears what Congress just heard, then okay there’s at least some reason to begin considering the idea. What we actually have at best are weird photos taken by the general public, statements by a few airmen, and a bunch of Congress members who haven’t taken physics since high school.
None of that in my view constitutes either someone qualified to make a judgement about what is or is not alien, or whether or not the data collected is meaningful. And none of the evidence we see is considered even interesting by anyone who is an expert on space.
I’ll say what I said when this little sideshow started. I don’t believe because there’s nothing that makes it plausible. We don’t have any evidence that interstellar travel is remotely possible, we might, maybe, have a highly speculative theory if negative mass and negative energy can exist. We don’t have evidence of life in deep space. We don’t have signals that are unambiguously artificial in origin. We don’t have images of anything artificial in space that we didn’t put up there ourselves. Until we have even one of those things there’s no reason to consider aliens a reasonable hypothesis.
There are people like that (e.g. Jacques Vallee, Eric W. Davis, Hal Puthoff, Jack Sarfatti, to a certain extent Eric Weinstein) but unfortunately they’re all pretty much ‘unhinged’ to the point where it doesn’t really matter. They all believe (besides Weinstein) in things like remote viewing and parapsychological phenomena which would disqualify any materialist from taking what they say seriously prima facie, and coincidentally, all of them besides Weinstein have worked for intelligence services (ONI, CIA, NSA, etc.) before. Weinstein is a bit of a wildcard since he doesn’t believe in things beyond the materialistic paradigm he was taught in, but he also is totally divorced from academia and many people think he’s a crank since he indicates that people like Ed Witten are intelligence operatives and String Theory is a psyop, etc.
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Would you support declassifying the information that was shared in the January briefing that convinced the two lawmakers I cited that Grusch was legit? Then people with a background in the hard sciences could take a look at it (whatever "it" is).
Depends on what gets declassified and why. I’d at minimum want the information looked at by an outsider with a background in the relevant sciences so that we aren’t left with “Marjary Taylor Green sat in a closed session, came out and said Gorsch is telling the truth.” She has no background to let her determine what she’s seeing.
With classified stuff, even if it’s UFO stuff, it might well reveal things of use to other military and spy agencies. In order to study the airman pictures properly, you need a pretty deep understanding of the systems in the aircraft. Which would also be very interesting to China. Giving an astrophysicist clearance is probably safer.
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Depends on why it is kept secret.
If it is coverup of secret weapon/sensor tests by USA military? Then probably better to keep it classified.
Is it an attempt to get Chinese to waste enormous pile of money chasing aliens? Keep it classified if it helps.
I think it's just a lot more mundane than that - the US just over classifies everything as a habit.
Also if a UAP turns out to be some PLA wunderwaffen or technical gremlin, then that's something you really shouldn't publicise. The thing about unexplained phenomena is that you don't know what they are, so better not take the risk.
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and even then...
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