This paper has been making the rounds recently after being severely misrepresented in the media, with headlines like "pentagon says there could be an alien mothership in the solar system." The actual paper is much more reasonable, with the simple goal of putting constraints on what we would expect from Alien probes in terms of our tools for observing them, e.g. establishing bounding calculations we can use to rule out alien craft based on data like how much or how little light they're emitting on our FLIR systems.
Personally, I love the UFO stuff and would like nothing more than to learn aliens are visiting us. But I think it's far more likely that it's all part of a government disinformation campaign, mostly based on the fact that Lue Elizondo (aka Lue Anon) is a career disinformation asset, and the entire saga has played out exactly as you'd expect a disinformation campaign to go. The only "data" we have on UAPs comes from military "leaks" and second-hand reports. The paradox of the UFO community is that on one hand, they accuse the government of lying to us for 70 years, but on the other hand, they point to evidence "released" (selectively leaked) by the government as incontrovertible proof of "the phenomenon."
As for Avi Loeb (first author of the linked paper), I have great respect for him and anyone who would keep such an open mind, but I have to admit he's also a bit of a charlatan huckster. I remain curious to see the results of his Galileo project, but I'm skeptical they'll be able to find some tiny fragments of a meteor that crashed into the Pacific ocean a few years ago. And if they do find such fragments, and claim that they're part of an alien ship, I'll be even more skeptical.
Love UFO stuff too. I think it comes from growing up in the X-Files era :-)
Your paradox point is the same with most conspiracy theory. It's usually along the lines of "they're keeping a big secret from us / they like to drop hints and love symbolism". It never makes sense to me. What purpose would hints or symbolism ever serve? Why reuse 'crisis actors' etc. Secrets are hard enough to keep without 'dropping hints'. And as anyone that's tried to organise a social event for a group of grown ups knows, organising people is nigh on impossible. The idea some shadowy 'they' cabal is coordinating all these massive conspiracies seems so highly unlikely. But maybe that's what they want me to believe..?!
>But I think it's far more likely that it's all part of a government disinformation campaign,
I think it, for the last few years, is 10,000% to secure more funding for the space force. Get people worked up about an issue = more moneys for my sweet budget. I don't think there is a grand conspiracy outside of that.
This is actually a pragmatic answer I am surprised I have yet to hear before - and it would make perfect sense. Put out a few questions about what these objects are (aliens? advanced tech from another country?) and get the ball rolling on more money. Sometimes the the truth ends up being rather simple.
Honestly, the simplest answer isn't always the best, but I legit believe this one.
And I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because nobody seems to put together the increase in leaks/statements/interest from the government in UFO's and the creation of the space force. It seems super obvious.
This literally comes up in every thread about the UAP/UFO/Chinese spy balloon thing that appears on HN, it's one of the most commonly presented rationales. I don't know how you all have been missing it.
I think there's something much more compelling than just who is involved in this project, related to recent history. Two interesting things happened in 2018:
1) The government started overtly hinting at UFO stuff. In particular this is when the patents for sci-fi type technology, assigned to the military, started being published. Here [1] is one for an "inertial mass reduction device." Besides the entire patent sounding like it was written by a technobabble trained chatbot, there's a more mundane point. Patents don't stop foreign states from doing whatever they want, and you would have (if this was real) just revealed a potentially unmatchable (with current technology) state secret, for no apparent gain. All you really do is advertise "we're researching alien tech" to a the general population.
2) 2018 is also the first year that branches of the US military started missing enlistment goals since 2005. In 2018 it was "only" by about 6,500 enlistees, but obviously the trend would have been clear before then. Last year the army missed their goal by 25%, or about 15,000 enlistees. [2] Quoting the final line of that article, "...if the declining enlistment trends continue, the Pentagon may have to reassess its force requirements and find ways to make the military a more attractive profession to the eroding number of young Americans who can meet mental and physical requirements for service."
And what better way than trying to reshape the military from being a place where you go enlist to die in pointless geopolitical conflicts on the other side of the world (and I mean no disrespect whatsoever to the soldiers who have lost their lives in such, but it's a truth that should not be sugar coated), to one where you can go research aliens and get access to [not so] ultra-top-secret technology. Sounds better than dedicating your life to commercial businesses which largely come down to finding new ways to spam people with ads they don't want to see, at least.
It's just a recruitment campaign, targeted at a different audience than the ones that propaganda videos at e.g. football games target.
If you're interested, the author of that patent, Salvatore ("Sal") Pais joined the Theories of Everything (TOE) Podcast to talk about it [0].
It's worth a watch on a rainy Sunday (when I do most of my UAP "research" :D), but I'm not sure he does much to dispel the many reasons to be skeptical of this patent. If anything, he sounds more like a disinformation agent than someone with experimentally valid, groundbreaking physics. But it's a fun watch.
Personally, in general, my justification for consuming UAP content is that it's led me down some really fascinating rabbit-holes of "actual" educational material relating to quantum physics, cosmology, etc. I don't mind subscribing to a likely disinformation campaign if it piques my curiosity in more feasibly tangible ways. For that kind of educational content (with a basis in actual science), I recommend "The World Science Festival," "Closer to Truth," and a few Lex Fridman podcasts (I'll watch anything with Roger Penrose, Brian Greene or Leonard Susskind). For more far-out Sci-Fi content, "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur" is really great. I like to listen to this stuff when I'm cooking or cleaning around the house.
> But I think it's far more likely that it's all part of a government disinformation campaign
Two possibilities I've entertained:
- The whole UFO / UAP thing is a psyop. As to what such a psyop is supposed to achieve is beyond me though.
- Some UFOs are the real deal and are intelligences vastly greater than ours and are merely watching us. Since they're exponentially more intelligent they probably just see us as ants, so we're not important.
Perhaps the UAPs are a psyop from the Aliens ;) (Funnily enough, that's actually not too far off from the interpretation of "the phenomenon" advocated by Jacques Vallée. Although it's too kookie for me, especially when it gets into Hal Puthoff's "remote viewing" territory. That stuff is nuts.)
> The whole UFO / UAP thing is a psyop. As to what such a psyop is supposed to achieve is beyond me though.
I've always suspected that the "show and tell" had to do with securing funding or status for the program(s). Can the dumps of footage and breathless claims be related to budget cycles or some predictable bureaucratic wrangling?
The ancestor program, AATIP (2007), was the pet project of a senator and was funded for five years. It seems to have been resurrected or reconstituted multiple times, most recently as AARO in 2022. I presume these programs are populated with true believers who find themselves in the unpleasant situation of needing to demonstrate some value for the public largess.
No idea about Hynek, but when I say Lue Elizondo is a career disinformation agent, I'm not being facetious, but rather rephrasing the first sentence of his Wikipedia entry [0]:
> Luis Elizondo is a media personality and former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and former employee of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
In a true "leak" scenario, I would expect the first leaks to come from someone in the Navy, not the counterintelligence office.
Also, I don't think it's a coincidence how closely his physical appearance matches that of the stereotypical Q-Anon believer.
> Also, I don't think it's a coincidence how closely his physical appearance matches that of the stereotypical Q-Anon believer.
Ngl, my experiences in life processed and summarized by my gut and intuition lead me to believe there is some truth in Physiognomy. I suppose it probably has more to do with fashion choices than bone structure... but still.
My sense of this as well. If you recall the past 3 years, the announcements were coordinated and we had former Mossad and CIA heads pushing it.
So the question is for what purpose would you try and sell the idea of ET visiting Earth to the masses?
My speculation -- this is just speculation -- is that it will be a component of an attempt to create a new unified global religion to basically wrap [and undermine the narrative of] the existing (problematic in certain views) global religions. [You know, ET as angels and prophets as ~abductees.]
p.s. this looks like an interesting read (that closes with):
Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence.
CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90, Gerald K Haines, National Reconnaissance Office historian
I see a [dead] comment accusing me of "pushing conspiracy theories" and that is not the case. I am very skeptical of the idea of aliens waiting until humans reached a certain level of technology to make an entrance. If anything, pre-modern humanity was far more accepting of fantastical beasts, beings, places, magic, you name it. ET would have fitted right in. Why wait until the age of reason?
So given that lack of belief in ET (not in their existence but rather in their presence on our planet), coupled with 1st tier media and personalities promoting it, and the fact that ET apparently only contacts Five Eyes countries, the question then arises as to why are they pushing this bs?
I think if there is any intentional misdirection going on, it's for a far more mundane goal. Governments and militaries are flying all sorts of weird, but perfectly terrestrial, craft, for all sorts of purposes, benign and some probably malicious. There will be less public discussion of strange flying things if reporting one gets you automatically assumed to be a crazy alien nut. Commercial airline pilots see a lot of things they don't report through the usual pubic channels. I think some may prefer it that way. </tinfoil hat>
This has always been my pet theory. The supposedly alien craft are laid out to intimidate and or misdirect foreign opposition. These could be actual craft our totally fabricated illusions. For me this felt the most plausible. As with everyone else speculating here, I have no practical way to test this hypothesis.
As a disclaimer, I am aware that seemingly implausible things happen regularly and that this pattern of analysis would fail under those scenarios.
My favored hypothesis is that the videos released by the government are known by the government to be mundane, and they were publicly released because they got sick of responding to FOIA requests about it. The demand for the release and subsequent narratives around the release have been driven by true believers, who are more than a little kooky. See: "Skinwalker Ranch"
That's the gist of "Project Bluebeam," but I think there's also a much more benign explanation, which is that DIA wants to corral the people most susceptible to conspiracy theories into a group that they control. They saw how Q-Anon played out and decided to get on top of it before our adversaries could.
There are basically two options: either ETs are visiting or not. Your take on the matter clearly implies only one of these?
If you admit, you cannot really know whether or not they are (much less give a reasonable estimate for likelihood), you have to look at both options equally.
Interestingly, given ET-visitation, just as posited by "UFOlogy" taking place since at least Roswell, fits remarkably well with observations mentioned here. At the very least, there doesn't seem to be any real contradiction?
The leaks you mentioned weren't instigated by "the government", by the way. Rather, some group of relative insiders did that.
Not really. I think there is a matrix: UFOs either are or are not visiting us, and the Government either is or is not lying to us. The varying skepticism comes down to what you believe is the conditional probability of one given the other. There is some famous quote which goes (roughly) "I don't know if aliens are visiting us, but if the government ever tells me they are, I'll know they are not."
Also, just because you can segment something into true/false, absolutely does not mean you have to look at each case equally. You either have or do not have cancer. That doesn't mean there's a 50% chance you have cancer.
With cancer, you have enough statistical data to tell the likelihood.
With ETs, you do not.
Your matrix of course splits nicely with "ETs or no" and on the other hand is arbitrarily extendable in various dimensions. But in any case, just because yours has four entries shouldn't keep you from considering each option.
What does "consider" mean to you? I personally have spent an unhealthy amount of time consuming speculative media about UFOs. As I said, I would love nothing more than for it to be true that Aliens are visiting us. I also think that, if we really are seeing UAPs in the sky as described by the government, then we should be investigating them and destigmatizing reports about them from pilots and other government employees. But we should also be weary of the resultant cobra effect [0] such destigmatization can produce. Ultimately, I think there will never be any real resolution to this until an alien mothership hovers over some major city for multiple days. And even then, there would be people who refuse to believe it.
With "consider" I mean taking implications into proper consideration. Which you didn't do above.
The recent behavior of the US government/military is not compatible with "no ETs anywhere". Confabulations to the contrary universally suffer from serious plotholes.
But as you say, people's assumptions prevent them from considering options without irrational bias.
A fun coincidence I keep asking: has anyone made the connection that the interstellar object ʻOumuamua came from the direction of Vega, much in the same way that the alien signal in the film 'Contact' came from Vega?
Preliminary orbital calculations suggest that the object came from the approximate direction of the bright star Vega, in the northern constellation of Lyra. However, it took so long for the interstellar object to make the journey―even at the speed of about 59,000 miles per hour (26.4 kilometers per second)―that Vega was not near that position when the ‘Oumuamua was there about 300,000 years ago.
For anyone interested, the author (Avi Loeb) has a very accessible book titled "Extraterrestrial" that goes into the details of why the Oumuamua interplanetary object may be more likely to be a "space buoy" or light sail than a comet.
I watched a video recently of a physicist criticizing his recent work. He is a Harvard professor, so obviously a smart guy, but there are things to think about here.
First of all, he's going on and on about the establishment and how they're not doing enough and so on. He was literally calling out Jill Tartar the famous SETI scientist that was the inspiration for the contact book/movie. It is a little weird to poop on someone who has spent their entire life begging congress for money to do more research looking for alien life. He sounded completely irrational during it and suggested they didn't want to do anything when SETI does everything they can with their very limited funding. He then tried making fun of her for not publishing as many papers when his publishing record is suspect due to the sheer number of papers he puts out. Someone pointed out that being an author on 7 papers a month is basically impossible. When other scientists started looking in more depth, they noticed that the papers were mostly all very rough sketches of water cooler ideas and not the kind of quality that would normally be acceptable in journals if you weren't already a Harvard physicist. Then, I find some of his statements to baffle me as they seem obviously immature. He's basically said that it has to be an alien probe as nothing else makes sense. Other scientists are just saying...well sure...it could be that, but it seems more likely that we just haven't figured out the non-alien cause yet.
I'd appreciate some feedback from an actual physicist on the matter.
As to the part on the papers, I was open that it was just hearsay and asked for someone with better background to weigh in. Here's a physicist going into some depth on what I referred to:
I haven't read that book yet, but if I understand correctly his reasoning for the "space buoy" hypothesis is that Oumuamua's velocity was quite close to the Local Standard of Rest. Is that accurate? At least, that's the reasoning he claims in his "Six Strange Facts About`Oumuamua" article: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08832
In his book, does he address the counterargument (https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.01910) that such a velocity is entirely in line with expected parameters, being within the predicted distribution of values for intestellar objects detected by asteroid surveys, which was published months before Oumuamua was even discovered (https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02237) ?
He outlines a number of anomalies but one of the larger points is that it deviates from its expected trajectory, leading to the possibility it’s a light sail. But I don’t recall if he addresses any specific studies.
I didn’t get the impression that he’s married to the idea that it’s a buoy. My main takeaway from the book is that he wants the establishment to at least be open to the idea of it being a of extraterrestrial origin rather than immediately dismissing the idea. He outlines some of the perverse incentives in academia that prevents many from seriously considering that idea.
If his book addresses the counterargument and dismisses it, fair enough. But if he doesn't address the counterargument at all, then I have to conclude that he is deliberately misleading his readers by selectively presenting only the evidence that supports his favored conclusions.
I haven't read the book yet so I don't know how or if he responded, but some sort of response is certainly warranted. He claimed these orbital parameters were "strange" but here is a paper published before the discovery of Oumuamua that says Oumuamua's parameters are mundane and expected. That's not the sort of counterargument that should be ignored.
Can you possibly link to those articles directly? I'm not really able to add much based on just the abstract.
My thoughts on the book was that he was not making hard claims, but that the anomalies, particularly the joint probability of such anomalies, should lead us to at least be open to the idea of ET origins. His issue seemed to be that the idea was being superficially dismissed and not allowing it to be discussed, particularly with younger scientists without it potentially damaging their career. My recollection was that he wasn't even saying it was probable, just not impossible, and gatekeeping around investigating that possibility is bad science.
I have been listening a good deal to Rob Kristoffersen's excellent "Our Strange Skies" podcast [1] and it just highlights a lot of the seemingly arbitrary nonsense that so-called UFO's get up to once they land. The kind of planetary science we can get up to with a orbiting probe seems to be much more cost effective than the reports of ten little guys landing in the middle of some rural road and getting out to look at rocks and sticks.
Was in a hotel with my family last weekend, and took part in one of our favorite traditions: watching garbage TV. It seems like every show on the History channel is now about ancient aliens/unexplained "mysteries"/etc., with the same rotating cast of huckster talking heads. Many of the UFO-themed episodes featured stories as "mysteries" that were convincingly explained years ago (i.e., the Chilean navy video of the jet with exhaust contrails).
The question my (entertained, but skeptical) daughters kept asking was: why are the aliens permanently just beyond clear identification? They are so bad at hiding themselves that there are thousands of "sightings"...yet so good at hiding that none of these sightings offers convincing proof. Why are the photos and videos always so grainy/tiny/out of focus?
The obvious answer: the videos that are in focus are clearly not aliens. It's an example of selection bias.
Random question I'll throw out into the ether because I've been mulling it over for the last month or so:
If you're 70% certain the UFOs were aliens, but know they won't "reveal themselves" or share any knowledge, or do anything useful for the next 10,000 years; should we care about them?
What’s up with these UFO stories popping up everywhere? Apparently, some of them were shot down. Are there any reports about what they found at the crash site?
Implying there is a limited resource of research effort that is being diverted from vaccines and into aliens, and that if all that research effort was put into vaccines it would translate into better results in a shorter period of time. If this was true, maybe it should all be reverted to curing infant cancer, or solving global hunger and bad distribution of wealth.
In any case, those assumptions don't necessarily hold: we can very well study aliens, at the same time we research vaccines and try to redistribute wealth.
I always thought this was the most likely explanation.
Advanced civilization builds self-replicating probes, probes spread out over the whole galaxy. Stationed in every system to catalog signs of life evolving.
Really, the most likely explanation for a fast blur on some airplane's sensors is an alien self-replicating physics defying probe from a hyper-advanced civilization?
Oumuamua is an interplanetary object that was able to be studied for days by multiple telescopes as it passed through our solar system. Not some "fast blur on some airplane's sensors". You may be conflating the the article's topic with other UAP stories in the recent news.
> Oumuamua is an interplanetary object that was able to be studied for days by multiple telescopes as it passed through our solar system. Not some "fast blur on some airplane's sensors".
No, not a fast blur on aircraft sensors; rather a fast blur on telescope sensors.
All those telescopes saw was a very dim dot of variable brightness. They couldn't even see what shape the object was and even today nobody really knows what it was shaped like. From the period of it dimming scientists have inferred what shape it might have, but they don't really know because there are many geometries which could explain the observed data. It might have been cigar shaped, or it might have been more of a flat disk (a hypothesis favored by Avi Loeb I believe, one of the authors of the OP article). Nobody really knows because nobody actually got a good look at it. The limited data the telescopes were able to get leave a lot of room to interpretatation making it perfect UFOlogist bait, just like those videos from the airplane sensors. Actually the airplane sensors got a much better look at their objects than any telescope got of Oumuamua.
That’s fair, but I’d still argue it’s not a fast blur on a telescope. They had 11 days to collect data so I’d have to be very charitable to call that “fast” at least in the context of comparing it to aircraft sensors.
They saw it moving fast relative to our system, and all they were able to make out was a faint dot. I think comparing it to a "fast blur" on an aircraft sensor is actually too charitable, because those aircraft sensors actually got better looks at their objects.
And slow relative to other celestial bodies, depending on the amount and type of data collected. I guess if we're being subjective we can call it whatever we want.
If you aren’t aware of the broader context, the author (Avi Loeb) has used the various techniques within the paper to make the case that Oumuamua is of ET origins.
The direct context of the article is meteorites (like Oumuamua), not the “fast blurs on aircraft sensors” you seem to be referencing.
I know who Avi Loeb is and his previous work in this area. But this paper is very explicitly not about meteorites or objects seen by advanced telescopes, it is exactly about the fast blurs on aircraft sensors.
Here is a piece from the conclusion:
> For example, one of the most common sets of data
within the military holdings comes from FLIR (forward looking infrared) pods. These sensors provide an accurate
resolved image of relative thermal measurements across the scene. Typical UAP sightings are too far away to get a highly resolved image of the object and determination of the object’s motion is limited by the lack of range data.
Not to mention, 'Oumuamua was emphatically not a UAP, it was a pretty-well-identified spatial object. UAP in fact refers exclusively to sightings that are not even clearly known to be "objects" at all, hence the move away from "UFO".
It's both. The UAP context is a meteorite (i.e., '-ite' defining that it comes in contact with the earth's atmosphere). The article seems very much about meteorites (or possible, mis-identified meteorites), using RF, military FLIR, and observational telescope data.
>"Parallax data from the James Webb Space
Telescope may identify the nature and 3D trajectory of more ‘Oumuamua-like or smaller interstellar objects crossing
through or trapped within the solar system.
Below we show that any supersonic motion by such devices through the Earth’s atmosphere would inevitably be
accompanied by bright optical emission and detectable characterization signatures."
He first describes how such an object (i.e., Oumuamua-like meteorite) travelling through the Earth's atmosphere can be measured through its luminosity signature. He then describes how RF and thermal (i.e. FLIR) signatures can also be used.
If you believe this to be likely reality, you're going to have to explain it in light of the Fermi Paradox because a galaxy-blanketing swarm of self-replicating machines is a lot of heat and mass to hide.
Wouldn't the explanation be that there never was any paradox, but rather we just hadn't noticed the alien probes yet? This is in contrast to the hypothetical scenario of finding microbial life on Mars, which as Nick Bostrom is fond of explaining [0], "would be very bad news" because it would imply the Great Filter is ahead of us.
Would it be possible not to notice them? The more probes there are, the more likely one of them happens across Earth. Interstellar space should be full of them. Unless we're talking about, like, one or two probes making a breadcrumb trail to Earth from wherever.
Well, I think it's a bit of a circular question :)
But it seems like one of the conclusions of the linked paper in the OP (which is trying to put parameters on this very question) is that it actually would be hard to notice them, for certain scales of probe (on the order of 1 meter), at least while they're in outer space:
> At a distance d from the Sun and the telescope, objects that are a meter in diameter and reflect a fraction a ≈ 10% of sunlight impinging on their surface would yield a flux of optical light of ∼ 0.2(d/1 AU)−2 nJy, well below the detection threshold of even the James Webb Space Telescope
But it goes on to suggest that we could notice them, even at sizes less than a meter, with radar technology, once they're in the atmosphere:
> In contrast, the radar signatures of a meter class object would be detectable with our deep space radars and space fence, much like IM2 was, out to beyond geosynchronous orbit at an altitude above 36,000 km. Such objects could also become optically detectable as they get close to Earth, especially if they create a fireball as a result of their friction with air.
But, such FLIR systems also produce a lot of false positives, i.e. actual everyday meteors in the atmosphere. So the challenge is narrowing down the data to find the most anomalous objects. And indeed that's what Loeb has done with the Galileo project, as he's identified one such object that landed a few years ago, and is chartering a ship to go try to find it in the Pacific Ocean. Estimating the chance of success of his quest is an exercise left to the reader, but we'll have to see what comes of it.
Then why do the mostly stay hidden but sometimes leave exterior lights on?
It seems to me that UFO behaviour isn't consistent with likely alien goals. I would expect them to either announce themselves openly or else be entirely invisible.
Maybe your assumptions about "likely alien goals" are just wrong?
If you want not to shock people, you don't sneak up on them, but rather you start by giving the faintest hint, alerting their attention to your presence.
"Having lights on" has the additional benefit of obscuring your vehicle quite effectively from camera sensors.
Personally, I love the UFO stuff and would like nothing more than to learn aliens are visiting us. But I think it's far more likely that it's all part of a government disinformation campaign, mostly based on the fact that Lue Elizondo (aka Lue Anon) is a career disinformation asset, and the entire saga has played out exactly as you'd expect a disinformation campaign to go. The only "data" we have on UAPs comes from military "leaks" and second-hand reports. The paradox of the UFO community is that on one hand, they accuse the government of lying to us for 70 years, but on the other hand, they point to evidence "released" (selectively leaked) by the government as incontrovertible proof of "the phenomenon."
As for Avi Loeb (first author of the linked paper), I have great respect for him and anyone who would keep such an open mind, but I have to admit he's also a bit of a charlatan huckster. I remain curious to see the results of his Galileo project, but I'm skeptical they'll be able to find some tiny fragments of a meteor that crashed into the Pacific ocean a few years ago. And if they do find such fragments, and claim that they're part of an alien ship, I'll be even more skeptical.