The U.S. military takes UFOs seriously. Why doesn't Silicon Valley or academia?

"Takes UFOs seriously" is much different than "thinks there are aliens visiting earth". The US military takes UFOs seriously because they're likely to be foreign military threats or natural phenomena that pose a risk to US security. When the media or your neighbor start talking about UFOs, they probably mean "aliens are here", which there simply isn't much evidence for.

I believe the only reason they take it "seriously" is because they try to get more funding for things such as the space force.

With all the HD smart phones in the world why are all UFO sightings filmed through potatoes?

Discussion of “are these aliens?” aside for a moment, I kinda feel like tech (I’m assuming „Silicon Valley“ is just a stand-in term there) does take them seriously?

Whenever these articles come up on this website there’s a good amount of discussion that goes in a number of interesting directions, be it determining what they actually are or theorizing about the likelihood they’re of exotic origin (terrestrially developed technology or otherwise) and assigning probabilities to those explanations.

The article seems to come from a false premise, that unless scientists entertain non-terrestrial explanations they’re not “taking it seriously”. Okay, but who says that this should be the standard? NBC?

There’s plenty of scientists within the broader Defense space, who, I think we can assume, take this very seriously. It’s just a different definition of “serious”.

It is pretty unlikely that the earth has ever been visited by UFOS due to the physics laws such as light speed and the size of universe, the closest starts where is likely that there is life, are thousands of years away. For instance, the closest galaxy, Canis Major Dwarf, is 25 thousands light-years away from the earth. So, a trip from a galaxy like that to the earth would take thousands and thousands of years. Even the light coming from this galaxy is the image of 25 thousand years ago. That might be the reason the academia is skeptical about UFOs. Another physical limit is that nothing can achieve the speed of light and even at the light speed a trip to the galaxy would take 25k years.

Let’s assume for the moment that these are not erroneous sensors or secret domestic/foreign tech.

Two facts to build upon:

1) We have seen them on Earth

2) We have seen them nowhere else.

This means that although they have sufficiently advanced technology and desire to hide from us across the entire universe, they do not have sufficiently advanced technology and/or desire to hide from us on Earth. So there’s the contradiction: either they want to hide from us but can’t, or they don’t want to hide from us but have. In either case, the contradiction suggests these hypothetical not-erroneous-and-not-secret-tech sightings are also not extraterrestrial.

If not aliens, then what?

I see two options that fulfill the condition of either not desiring to hide from us, or not being able to, while avoiding the question of why we see no evidence for intelligent life in the rest of the universe. Both rely on locality being fixed to Earth:

- human time travelers

- simulation experimenters

In the first case, if time-travel is possible, then the only sightings of time-travelers would be those that do not cause grandfather paradoxes — i.e., they would only travel to the past with such a low-profile that they wouldn’t endanger their own future visits to us. Moreover, if time-travel is possible, it is plausible that future humans would be technologically advanced enough to develop time-travel without being sufficiently advanced to hide from us completely. As unlikely as this seems, it is still more likely than aliens having the power to hide from us everywhere except on earth.

The second possibility is even more fascinating. Why would simulators of our universe need to virtually plug-in and take a joy ride? They wouldn’t, of course. But if they went through the trouble of simulating us, it isn’t hard to imagine them fiddling with their experiment to whatever end it is they have. Laws of physics wouldn’t apply to their fiddling. In this wild scenario, the experiment wouldn’t be generic, but specific: manipulating the simulation so that a lot of people end up talking and thinking about aliens visiting Earth. Beyond those basic conclusions, we’d have to peer into the motivations and goals of the gods, which seems as fruitful as it seemed thousands of years ago.

When the only plausible non-explainable explanations resort to time-travel and gods, you know the initial hypothesis is incorrect.

Beyond erroneous sensors, the real reason for these sightings is our existential angst as it becomes more and more obvious we are alone in this universe. We want to believe.

By reports, they have not taken them seriously enough to shoot any down. That strikes me as extremely irresponsible. If foreign powers are using drones and balloons to collect data on military exercises, that is a direct threat to readiness, both from the collected data and from the failure to control airspace around military assets.

Many people fear the unknown. This is especially true for something that essentially shatters their paradigm of reality. Its psychologically easier to simply ignore anomalies or try to rationalize them away (its just ball lighting!) than to sincerely consider the possibilities.

Shareholders don’t care about UFOs.

It's pretty clear that this is US tech that the military is teasing as ufo to hype it's advanced nature. I think they have developed some advanced drives etc. "Our weapons are so bitchin everybody thinks they are ufos yo!"