There Are Aliens, but Probably Not Here
fakenous.net
fakenous.net
I get that not everyone in the Navy has access to the same equipment/expertise, so maybe this is just a matter of some easily excitable folks ignoring the experts from the very beginning....
There are two pilots and two wizards that saw the same with their own eyes (even I have only see the other pilot confirming it). That's an UFO. That doesn't mean that it's extraterrestrial.
To say that it's extraterrestrial at this point, is, in my opinion, so ridiculous like to say that there is nothing to explain (like the author of the article seems to believe).
(1) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E (this is a great interview interesting in its own right, even without the UFO part)
That's still not true. It's more likely to be one glitch you haven't thought of than three successive glitches that you have thought of.
This is not pedantry but an important distinction. What the pilots saw were images in their retinas that they interpreted as an object.
Claiming the unidentified phenomenon is an object is begging the question; we need to prove what the phenomenon is before we can rightly categorize it as an object.
He says there were others who saw the same thing, but this interview alone does not prove that.
Some other things that don't gel about his account:
1 - He says during his encounter he didn't turn on his helmet cam because he didn't think of it. Yet much of the rest of the interview is him talking about how highly trained he was (giving the impression that he's one of the best pilots the US has) and yet he made a critical mistake here exactly at the point where a video would be most useful in corroborating his testimony.
I'd also like to know under what circumstances he's been trained to turn that camera on. If he went against his training by keeping that camera off, that would be a red flag. But we just don't know and the interviewer didn't even ask.
There was also no discussion about whether the other person in the plane had a camera of his own, and if he did have one why he didn't turn it on, or if he did turn it on where that video is.
2 - No one on the ship or any of his commanding officers said anything about the anomaly or did anything about it, and neither did he. The pilot says this is because they were all too busy and because the object didn't have another country's flag on it, but that doesn't seem credible.
If you see something that seemingly defies physics and flies faster than any known technology, it seems very unlikely that no one investigated it or even talked about it... for 16 years.
He said he had debriefings and that's where they learn things. What was the debriefing for this mission like? Did they talk about this anomaly? If not, why not?
At the beginning of his story he said he was actually ordered to investigate the anomaly. You'd think there'd be some discussion afterwards at the briefing about what he and the other people he claims saw it actually saw, and the people who ordered him to check it out would want to hear about what he saw first hand. But he said no one talked about it.
Unbelievable.
https://youtu.be/Eozxt_HnPu4 around 52min)
The issue is that the data is classified and it was not released yet, making it more difficult to independently prove those claims.
If I put my conspiracy theorist hat, this "To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science" smells to me to a "Intelligence Community" front.
It's that if you check the founders they are related to the "intelligence community", and the way the video was "leaked" to the NYT feels kind of funny too. This guy Luís Elizondo (1) is clearly from the "community", what it's not so clear is that he was in charge of investigating UFOs as he is claiming. I don't know, maybe they just want to make money or they are legitimate and just want the truth.
Of course, this is just a "feeling" that I have, so, I'm not claiming is falsifiable or it's the true, for now it's only something to have an eye on that I wanted to share.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859896
tl;dr it is a "psyop" but the target is our servicemembers who were too scared to report weird phenomena.
I don't know if laughing or crying about that statement and what it says about humans.
As far as it being bad news — it’s never comforting to learn a different civilization has vastly superior technology, and may not share your values.
The writer of the article is dismissing evidence to fit his theory. And the guy is a professor of epistemology.
The planes might also (I mean, yes, they have, but we don't know what it is exactly) classified capabilities and sensors. And "black boxes" (not exactly that, but more like FOQA probably).
It is also likely someone took data from those flights and tried to plot the possible object paths. Did any (unclassified) conclusion come from that?
Human observations are the least reliable form of evidence. There are countless ways you can incorrectly interpret what you see.
For example, it's very hard to correctly estimate the distance or size of an object in the sky. Pilots are no better at this than anyone else. If you think something is closer than it actually is you'll also incorrectly interpret its speed and size.
I don't question the pilots or radar operators who report seeing things they believe to be extraterrestrial in origin. But with enough missions, sooner or later the radar data will synch up with human eyes in a way that seems to indicate almost anything.
1) There exist billions and billions of stars, each of which can be thought of an independent Bernoulli trial with probability P as to whether intelligent life exists in that star system.
2) P must be a non-negligible quantity, because we ourselves exist
3) Therefore intelligent life "must" exist elsewhere in the universe due to the sheer number of trials.
This is an epistemological error that echoes the sort of error made by proponents of intelligent design. They conclude that the chance of thinking beings evolving is prodigiously unlikely, and therefore our existence is proof of a creator.
But in fact, you cannot post-hoc conclude that our existence says anything at all about P, because if we didn't exist, there would be no one to ask the question. Therefore the fact that we are wondering about the value of P means our existence is an implicit axiom of the logical system itself. One way to think of it is there could be infinitely many possible universes with no life at all, and by definition the question of P can only discussed in the one branch, in all that lifeless space of possibilities, where thinking beings actually exist. So P could, in fact, be made arbitrarily small, and Earth could indeed be the only place in the universe with intelligent life.
Note that this doesn't claim that extraterrestrial life _doesn't_ exist. It merely points out the truth in all of this P-hacking: that we have no evidentiary basis for believing one way or the other.
What is the basic chemistry and biology of life? Chemicals, heat, water, single celled organisms, multi cellular organisms, bacteria, viruses, genetic materials, gene transfers etc. All of that in the context of universe, stars and planets.
I would like to see a research from that point of view. If anybody knows of such research papers I would like to read them.
I _thought_ that was the underlying assumptions of all these probability figures including Drake's equation. I could be wrong...
However in alternative universes, with different underlying constants, chemistry and biology might differ somewhat, possibly in unexpected ways.
That said, in this particular Universe, I suspect life is reasonably likely. Intelligence may be impossible, however.
Consider two hypothetical universes. In one, p = 10^-1000, but by a statistical miracle, here we are. We would certainly be alone in this universe, because the number of stars in the visible universe is inconsequential compared to this number.
In the second one, the universe is the same size, but p is such that there are 100 planets with intelligent life like ours.
If you cannot say "anything at all about P" from our existence, then we should be indifferent between these two hypotheses, on the basis of the evidence of our existence.
However, this is not the case. The evidence supports the second hypothesis much better than the first. If X occurred, and is more likely under hypothesis B than A, then X is evidence for hypothesis B, otherwise you don't have a consistent system of probability.
Now you can further imagine that God comes down from heaven and tells you that in fact both of these two universes actually exist, and they are the only two universes that exist, so you are definitely in one of the two, but doesn't tell you which one. Is your posterior probability now 50% between the two?
"God" here represents the anthropic principle leaning over and saying "psst, don't worry about the 10^-1000, because, well, here you are". But you still have to worry about the difference between 1 and 100. If N beings in universe A and 100 * N beings in universe B all face this same question, your only reasonable conclusion as one of them is that the odds are 100-to-1 in favor of you being in universe B.
So it's not the case that our existence tells us nothing about p. Of course, p is what it is, and only physics and chemistry and biology can actually reveal it, but the fact that we are here means that theories that make our existence much less likely are themselves much less likely.
> If X occurred, and is more likely under hypothesis B than A, then X is evidence for hypothesis B, otherwise you don't have a consistent system of probability.
The point is, this idea breaks down when neither hypothesis would exist if X had not occurred. This differs from other questions of probability because the conditional probability of an event is predicated on the ability of an observer to ask about it. We should indeed be indifferent between the two hypotheses, if our own existence is all we have to go on. (This might seem strange, if you think of hypothesis B as having 100x the prior probability, but the point here is that we really don't have a basis for a prior at all.)
> Now you can further imagine that God comes down from heaven and tells you that in fact both of these two universes actually exist, and they are the only two universes that exist, so you are definitely in one of the two, but doesn't tell you which one. Is your posterior probability now 50% between the two?
No, of course I would assume I was in universe B. This is a very different question. Instead of "what is the nature of our universe" the question is "of the two existing universes God has described, which do I occupy?"
The two scenarios don't seem all that different to me, because "there are two possible universes, and you're in one, but you don't know which" is how I think about probability and belief in general.
Here's a third scenario:
Instead of God and two universes, let's use an unknowable physical constant and one universe. In this scenario, we have solved physics, except for one fundamental physical constant that we know for a fact can take one of exactly two values, but for some reason we know that experimental evidence will never be able to distinguish between the two. From the physics side, it will always be a toss-up between values A and B. But, as before, we also know for some reason (maybe it has to do with conditions in the early universe that can never be reproduced) that if the value is A, then p is 10^-1000, and for B etc. as before. What would you say in this case?
In this case, all that's changed is that we don't say that both universes exist. Instead only one exists, but we don't know which one it is. We also said that from the physics side, A and B are equally likely, which means our state of knowledge about A and B are meant to be the same as in scenario two. Would you now say that we should be indifferent between A and B in this case?
A fourth scenario:
There's a multiverse, and universes exist with every possible value of p. The distribution over values of p is unknown to us. If it's uniform, then almost all the people asking themselves this question are in universes where p is high, because those universes are teeming with life. None of the people are in universes where p is 0, which is just the anthropic principle again. Where p is very low, most universes are completely unpopulated.
Chemistry and biology may give us arguments to say that p is low, so our prior over p certainly shouldn't be uniform. But whether you look at it as all the universes existing, or whether you look at it as a state of uncertainty about the universe, either way, as far as I can tell, the math has to work out the same way. If most reasoning beings are in the universes where reasoning beings are more likely, then we are justified in saying it is more likely that that's the kind of universe we're in.
> This differs from other questions of probability because the conditional probability of an event is predicated on the ability of an observer to ask about it.
I think this is the part of your argument that I don't follow. The physicists in the third scenario will report that either the physical constant is B, and we can start looking for the 100 other civilizations, or it is A, and a miracle occurred. Observers exist in both cases. Wouldn't we say that the case that requires a miracle to have occurred is less well supported by the evidence?
The fourth scenario is more interesting because we've admitted the distribution of p is unknown to us. You note that if p is uniform, all intelligent lifeforms should conclude they live in a universe where p is high, but I'm not certain of that. It seems to me that this logic only works if you conclude there is _one_ universe for each possible value of p. But if, for each possible value of p, the multiverse contains universes for each possible outcome of a Bernoulli trial with probability p, then we can't conclude anything at all. To see this, notice that the number of Lucky universes (where p is high) is uncountably infinite, just as the number of Unlucky-Lucky universes (where p is low but a miracle has occurred) is uncountably infinite.
I haven't thought this next part through as deeply, but I believe this problem compounds given the unknown distribution of p. This is because subjectivist models of probability (e.g. Bayes' Theorem) are heavily influenced by the distribution of the prior when we have only observed one trial. And in cases like this one, where the only trials that _could_ be observed are successes, I believe it's all but entirely driven by the distribution of the prior. (You could imagine a hyperprior - a distribution of distributions of p, but I don't think we have any good reason for deciding what that would be either).
Anyway, thanks for this. I love geeking out about epistemology.
The fourth scenario, to me, is the closest to our actual situation. The many universes correspond to our uncertainty about p. It doesn't matter whether they are actual universes and we are in one, or whether they are possible universes and we are in one.
I wasn't sure why you had the number of universes uncountably infinite. Is it because p is a real number? To make this argument, wouldn't you need to show that not only are they both uncountably infinite, but that they have equal measure? We can construct two sets that are both uncountably infinite, but one has measure 1 and the other measure 0.
If the Lucky and Unlucky-Lucky universes have equal measure, there's still more people in the Lucky ones. Only if the measure of Unlucky ones is much higher, then there would be more people in the Unlucky-Lucky universes.
We said we don't know anything about the distribution. But! In my opinion, we do have some idea about the distribution. It's just our prior, from whatever we know of chemistry, biology, etc, about p. We have some reasons to believe it's low. (The arguments the intelligent design folks make.) Then we update that with the observation that we exist. In other words, we start with a distribution over possible universes based on what we know about physics, and the complexity that's necessary for life, and we say that it's remarkable that we are here. But then we update by saying that, of all beings capable of reasoning through this, more of them would be in universes where it's less remarkable. So it doesn't tell us what p is, but it should shift our distribution over values of p to the right.
Eventually, we may get such a clear understanding of how life must have formed, that we could say exactly what steps had to happen and in what order, and how probable they all were, and could determine p exactly, and even simulate everything. Then this argument wouldn't buy us anything. Because the physics is what it is, and p is what it is. It's only because our prior over p is currently so vague, that the argument is interesting.
Anyway, it's an interesting discussion and you may be completely right. I'm certainly not certain of anything here :-)
I don't know what is really going on in those videos, but, in my opinion, this gentleman, that it seems is a professor of epistemology!, is not following the scientific method.
You don't start with the solution and then fix the evidence to it. It's very easy to explain the videos away if you don't hear what the people that was there, or the experts on how the cameras work, have to say.
I mean, if this is explainable phenomenon (let's say, atmospheric) it would be in the interest of the aviation community to know it.
Upper Atmospheric lightning is known at this point. No need for mystery or keeping things under wraps.
The government may need if there is other implications beyond flight security.
The fact that they explicitly said that there's more classified data about it, clearly shows that concern.
Sometimes things remain classified not because of the findings, but because of what those findings would reveal about the capabilities of data collection.
EDIT: I'd love to understand the downvote, considering as I write this the linked website is still presenting an open installer wizard for Wordpress!
I won't comment on the debunking. I am sure there's a logical explanation but I am not qualified to make decisions using the evidence I have (which is often true of people on both sides of the discussion, here, generally).
I terms of "are they here", it isn't totally crazy to imagine an AI that can self replicate it's frame, and use this ability to explore the galaxy. When it finds places of interest or that are particularly useful for replication it might hang around.
I'm do not think that is what is going on but it is certainly a possibility. Very remote, of course.
The craft being observed (all over the world) are from a breakaway civilization. They were developed within the last century, possibly with the aid of extraterrestrials via an archeological finding or even direct communication, but that's an unknown for me.
I do however know the names of most of these craft, and once you know the names there is more detailed information out there including close-up images. They are quite cool, but to my knowledge are entirely terrestrial. The USG may try an alien false flag as a ploy for funding in the near future.
I agree and put in Bayesian terms it seems to me that the prior for “aliens are here, and are hiding from us, but are hiding badly” should be non-zero but very low.
The kind of evidence we have seen should just our priors upward very slightly, but has too many other (more likely) potential explanations to have a significant impact for me.
However, a self replicating probe might well be monitoring the earth, and watching for various milestones (fire, wheels, radio, spread spectrum, nuclear, fusion, stealth, inter planetary probes, plasma drives, etc). Certainly many things could be monitored passively, but occasional active monitoring might be justified.
Things like pestering military vehicles in relatively crowded seas (Off the coast of San Diego) to see what exactly we do when confronted with a unknown vehicle. What sensors do we use? How sophisticated are they? Do we risk the lives of fellow humans opening up on the unknown with multiple weapons?
Anyway I don't think intelligent aliens have visited us. I think the physics just makes it an improbability even if there is intelligent life in the universe.
tinfoil hat If your AI is directed enough to replicate itself and "explore the galaxy" for some reason, I think it's safe to say that there would be failures and it would understand the implications of it's technology being adopted (by another intelligence, AI or not).
Science has been an incredibly fruitful pursuit, but it has left itself utterly un-equipped to deal with aliens.
Does this person happen to work in tech?
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
Isaac Asimov
And the pilots say it's something they can't explain, and have never seen before, on the record. More than one account.
The problem is the writer dismisses all of this, and takes the explanation of people who saw only the video. How dismissive the writer is of other's lived experience and expertise in their own domain is what I have trouble with.
At the end of the day, everyone is fallible -- and even the experts are sometimes surprised.
These reports can only be treated as best efforts to fit observed phenomena into an existing framework of (inherently limited) understanding. When the phenomenon is adequately oddball, you have to expect an increased level of misinterpretation. See also: doctors, scientists, infosec practitioners, ...
Clearly, this is adequate justification for collection of additional data, but it's not enough to draw conclusions from.
The people he is calling liars and incompetents are journalists and news media, not pilots.
I don't blame him for his anti-alien position, but his "there is nothing weird here" position is kind of unsustainable. If instead, he would say: "there is no reason to explain this with aliens" and stopped there that would be a perfect rational position.
But he solved the problem like this:
>>"Utter incompetence: It took me under an hour on the internet to find the above explanations. I looked for explanations on YouTube, and the first video I found referenced Mick West. I then looked up Mick West’s web site, which lists all his videos. That was my research."
That was his research. Mr. West also forgot to explain (in the Tic-Tac case) the pilots testimony and, if I remember correctly, the previous radar signatures from the ships.
So, a professor of epistemology solve the problem estimating his priors from how he feels about the issue, an argument from authority (because he didn't bother to check if Mr.West get his facts right) and selecting only the evidence that fits his theory. Wonderful.
If there were alternative explanations that were plausible, sure. But they tend to invoke conspiracy theories, aliens, or alternative physics. Maybe other explanations will come around that are plausible, but it is reasonable to settle on the boring, seemingly plausible explanations for now. That's not an argument from authority.
2. Your supposed "experts" are relying on equipment they do not understand that regularly produce phenomena they do not understand.
Ironically, I think you've made a good case that philosophers (experts) should be the ones tackling this issue.
> Some members of Congress were given advanced details about Pentagon report, which is scheduled to be released before 25 June
> A group of senior American politicians have warned that UFOs pose “national security concerns” after getting a confidential briefing on a highly anticipated report on unidentified aerial phenomena that is set to be released later this month.
> Some members of Congress were given advanced details about the contents of the Pentagon report, which is scheduled to be released before 25 June, and several said they are deeply worried about the findings.
> “Clearly, something’s going on that we can’t handle,” Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, told TMZ.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/17/ufos-us-repo...
Indeed if you look up the definition in dictionaries for the word "Alien" you get definitions all routed in `fear of the unknown`. For example Colins: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/alien
Makes you wonder how things can be interpreted and some extraterrestrial species did discover us, would they have the same fear of the unknown definition.
I disagree with him when he proposes that (a) a civilisation founded a billion years ago might still exist; and (b) that such a billion-year-old civilisation would have overcome aging (and on a long journey, they'd have to overcome evolution too).
Further, my view is that our interest in aliens is something that has grown up in the last 200 years. Once it becomes clear to us that no aliens are close-enough to us to be reachable, or to reach us, we'll lose interest.
And we'll stop looking for their signals; we'll understand that after something in the order of 200 years of them discovering the universe, they'll have realised that there's no point in communicating with us.
My guess is that there's a pretty short window when a civilisation is interested in communicating with aliens.
See Diamond Age, Accelerando, etc.
This is journalism, the entire industry, in a single sentence.
These Navy videos are not glitches, human error, or aliens.. or foreign tech. I think these are meteors with qualities yet to be undiscovered!
Given eye-witness testimony by trained pilots there are two possibilities that I see:
+ Pilots are telling the truth, the phenomenon is real, the actors unknown (could be the US, foreign adversaries, ..)
+ Pilots are lying and this is some sort of prank or government propaganda / psychological operation.
What's not at all probable given the facts, are the explanations that fakenous.net put up.
Sounds like the New York Times model. I think journalists basically feel the need, in fact it’s their job to do this because they think the narrative is paramount to everything else.