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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.
Ironically these UAP videos just make me have a higher respect for fighter pilots in general.
I look at them, and I can't tell what the hell I'm seeing. Is that a UFO, defying the laws of physics? Or a normal plane? Maybe a fishing boat, a bird, or just a ball of static? It all just looks like a grainy grey mess to me. Somehow these fighter pilots are able to look at it and instantly distinguish all those things, and tell me that "something ain't right with this one." But then there's the debunkers, who claim it's all perfectly normal and just gimbal effects or whatever. I have a degree in physics, and I have no idea what the hell is going on in any of them. I feel like I would need to spend a long time flying military aircraft to really know.
In the meantime, "UAP" seems like a good acronym. There's a lot of weird shit in the atmosphere. ball lightning, for example, is famously real but hard to explain. There's probably other stuff like that too. Or it could just be a pilot who's tired from flying too many hours and starting to see things, combined with a sensor glitch, I don't know.
I'm not totally a skeptic. I think the Fermi Paradox is a real, interesting problem. So maybe it is UFOs! I just don't know.
A more "medium" explanation might be classified military experiments on something like maurader a plasma gun that can shoot projectiles at 3% of the speed of light. That would certainly look "weird" on any normal sensor equipment.
When it comes to the UFOs, there has existed a longrunning conflict, if you can call it such, between UFOlogists who subscribe to the "nuts'n'bolts" explanation - there's nothing supernatural here, they're beings from some other planet flying physical ships - and UFOlogists who subscribe to theories as UFOs as interdimensional creatures, ie. offer an explanation not covered by our current understanding of science, a supernatural explanation.
There's also a longrunning trend of nuts'n'bolts ufologists eventually becoming interdimensionalists and starting to include all sorts of woo in their spiel - the current congressional effort seems to be leaning that way already, and it's understandable that secular lawmakers, which Democrats would generally tend to be, would be leery of this direction, since there's a short skip, often barely disguised, from "UFOs are interdimensional creatures" to "UFOs are demons, let us pray".
Personally, I've argued for some time that this whole flap has other explanations already, but frankly, if I had to accept that the UFOs really represent something extraterrestrial, I'd go with an interdimensional explanation, too, since the interplanetary one doesn't really make sense logically at all. Why the heck would the ayyys be sending ships here just to... do stunts? Where are the promised goods?
Also, regarding conspiracies, I'd say that there are two separate reasons why different fractions of the left are leery of them. The more mainstream liberals have adopted a trust-the-science, trust-the-experts sort of a worldview, which doesn't really offer that much space for conspiracy theories, especially considering that most conspiracy theories usually just boil down to the supposed experts and technocratic governance just being a smokescreen for some sort of a sinister plot to tell lies to take power.
This doesn't mean a complete aversion to conspiracy theory - you can still decribe conspiracies by dark forces seeking to dethrone the benevolent experts to take over, like the idea of a Trump-Russia plot - but it's also not particularly necessary to do so, you can always just blame the forces of stupidity for the fact that the best and the most scientific advice is not being listened to.
Meanwhile, on the socialist left, where there's more distrust of the experts (particularly of the mainstream economic and foreign policy set in the West), there's an aversion to conspiracy theories, since it's seen as an "easy", lacking explanation for things that have deeper structural causes. Ie. socialists find it weird when right-wingers bang on about the WEF, specifically, despite WEF representing a group of capitalists, since the suggestion seems to be that the problem is just that there's this cabal of bad capitalists and if we just expose them and... somehow... get rid of them, then capitalism will start working properly and all would be good again.
Between these there has traditionally existed a populist left that's too left-wing to be liberals but not really socialist enough to be socialist, and this crowd has generally been more amenable to conspiracy theories, but there just seems to be less space for them than previously.
I don't believe in Aliens, I think there would be evidence the government and academia working together can't hide even if they do manage to work together, but I don't think this is a very good argument. After all, we went to the moon basically just to show off. A civilization capable of interstellar travel is probably using a similar portion of capabilities; we don't know how to travel between stars, we're civilizationally in 1865, when From Earth to the Moon on that question. It took another hundred years to be able to do it. Our civilizational capacity in the 1960s was orders of magnitude beyond what it was in the 1860s, and no doubt in another hundred years it'll be orders of magnitude more than it is now assuming we don't collapse before then.
Right, but the ‘UFO phenomenon’ is seen by most Ufologists as mostly pertaining to involvement beyond simple scientific or recreational activities on behalf of the so-called ‘Ufonauts’, or the intelligence behind the phenomenon at large, given the fact of how intricate the deception and psychologically-based operation of this intelligence seems to be. This seems to be indicative of something beyond simple probing for the sake of another intelligence understanding a lesser one (especially since, if these things are actually aliens, and could engineer the space-time metric like no-one’s business, something like nanotechnology or ancestor-like simulations wouldn’t be too far away in the tree of technological development most likely, and having nuts-n’-bolts style data-collection would be too ‘clunky’). Jacques Vallee formulates a handful of arguments against the hypothesis that these are actual interplanetary spacecraft here if you take the data seriously. As a corollary of this, the ‘control system’ that Vallee describes the UFO phenomenon as being (some sort of atemporal ‘higher-dimensional’ memetic phenomenon attempting to manifest its existence to us through manipulation of our mental, spiritual, and physical faculties) also seems to be very hard to distinguish from some sort of intelligence operation done on behalf of the US government, as some of the first abduction experiences also seem to point to some psyops entirely. The issue is that the intelligence community also seems to have some sort of belief in these things (as shown with Grusch et al.) and also seem to consider themselves as ‘superior’ to the rest of the population due to their knowledge of such things ultimately.
So we’ve come to this weird impasse where elements of the intelligence community are attempting to manipulate phenomena like this, while also ostensibly believing in it, to the point where the so-called ‘gatekeepers’ consider themselves incumbent to manipulate the rest of humanity with this given technological advantage for the ‘greater-good’ in a mode of absolute secrecy, which coincidentally is very reminiscent of the top-AI labs and the idea of ‘pivotal acts’. Also, the whole ‘this memetic structure from a higher atemporal dimension is attempting to manifest itself through us without direct causal actions, mentally and physically’ idea is an antecedent to the Landian accelerationist idea of AI & capitalism as a basilisk which has itself been succeeded in this community by e/acc people. So it’s interesting to see how that plays out.
EDIT: some links fixed.
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Every single explanation for why actually existing socialists states have been failures and horror shows rests on a giant conspiracy theory. Sanctions, reactionary forces within the state, take your pick. Hell conspiracy theories are a good part of the reason why said states became horror shows to begin with, since they resorted to conspiracy theories about kulaks and speculators as an explanation for their own failures, and punished these people accordingly.
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"Systemic" explanations are a cope of the autist. Libertarians think they can create a good system by drafting just the right constitution, that will keep the state small for sure this time. Ancaps think they can create a good system by just abolishing the state. Socialists are scattered across a similar spectrum with regards to capitalism. Hlynka's Cat is laughing at them all.
The fact that we've been stuck so long acting systemic explanations are better because they're systemic probably says something about the usefulness of our academic elites, but that's another story.
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