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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.
Without very strong evidence it does not make sense to treat aliens as a serious possibility.
Why not? Given the fermi calculation, I'd say it takes very strong evidence to not treat aliens as a serious possibility (evidence arguably provided by modern telescopes etc. not picking up any signs)
The Fermi calculation is a multiplication of numbers most of which have an uncertainty that spans several orders of magnitude. One can derive any outcome from "there's a civilization in 99% of star systems" to "one civilization every 10,000 galaxies" just by using more optimistic or pessimistic numbers.
I know, but it's commonly used the way I used it since even very pessimistic estimates seem to contradict what we see in the universe.
I'm not convinced of that; pessimistic estimates quite easily result in fewer than 1 advanced civilization per galaxy.
We can see hundreds of billions of galaxies and have not yet discovered one advanced civilization. Fewer than one per galaxy is one thing, but fewer than one per hundred billion galaxies is quite another.
Depends how long you think it takes advanced civilisations to emerge. Most of those hundreds of billions of galaxies can only be seen as they were billions of years ago - and the Cambrian explosion was less than a billion years ago.
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