Do we believe in UFOs? that's the wrong question | Hacker News Reader

Do we believe in UFOs? that's the wrong question

nytimes.com

25 pointsgraderjs59 comments

Is anyone else here being asked about their opinions on UFOs a lot at the moment? I know I've been finding people in my family and friends suddenly becoming convinced that aliens are visiting Earth, and have been for a while.

This past year, more and more frequently, I've had to explain that just because the US government has a small UFO program and just because there has been some odd reports of UFO sightings this doesn't mean aliens are actually visiting Earth, or that this explanation is even remotely likely.

Given how politicians, the media and tech companies have been putting so much time and money into cracking down on "conspiracy theory" content recently it strikes me as odd how this conspiracy is apparently perfectly fine by the standards of the very same media companies and tech companies cracking down on other conspiracy content. Some influential figures have even gone so far to simply declare on platforms like YouTuve that they believe aliens are probably visiting Earth and that the government is likely actively trying to cover this up. In some cases I've seen people suggesting that the aliens are trying to send us a message about (global warming|nuclear weapons|[some other potential dangerous technology]) and as far as I can tell this content is never restricted. Additionally, warnings or links to Wikipedia are never added to the content as you might see when it's content about 5G, COVID or flat Earth theory.

Does anyone know why so many people in power are encouraging conspiratorial thinking when it comes to UFOs while seemingly holding a completely different perspective when it comes to other government conspiracies? To be clear, I'm personally fine with people believing and discussing whatever they want to online, but there seems to be a double standard when it comes to alien conspiracy theories.

The only proper answer is that it's a conspiracy to cover up something!

One way to forward a conspiracy theory is to make vague assertations about an idea that are impossible to disprove. To say Does anyone know why so many people in power are encouraging conspiratorial thinking... without giving any examples seems conspiratorial to me, someone who honestly hasn't seen anyone of note make these claims. I mean, it is a leading question and is impossible to answer without first taking it as a matter of fact.

It doesn't seem so dissonant to me. Conspiracies regarding vaccines are squashed because they could damage public health efforts.

With UFOs, even taking the more wild conspiracy theories, widespread belief is unlikely to actually interfere with normal government functions.

Same reason we have religion in 2021 - People suffer in some way or the other - They crave/need an escape from that reality - A whole bunch of jobless people find employment catering to that need to escape giving them stories they want to hear. Large parts of the Media have been programmed to chase this crowd because the Like/View/Click data makes it easy to targets these people.

And don't have any doubt there are people with serious delusions and mental health issues in journalism, military etc who find each other and reinforce beliefs.

A networked world and its network effects makes escape easy. Some people even suggest its not a bad thing cause society isn't sophisticated enough to provide anything better than escape at scale - https://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=3061712

It's strange. The biggest change isn't with the evidence, but with the narrative. For decades it was just pure crankery, but now we have 60 Minutes with a big episode with US Navy pilots, Obama talking about it, the mass media, late night shows, etc, all taking it seriously. This all would have been considered crazy just a year ago.

It would appear we are being prepped to get comfortable with a new narrative. Sam Harris, who I'd consider trustworthy and hard to fool, was given a heads up about what's to come. If he's right about his source being reliable, then we may have to have to contend with this:

"I got contacted by somebody who gave me a heads up with respect to all of this happening and he more or less told me listen, when this other shoe drops you’re going to be in the position of having to acknowledge that all the experts are on the same page, and there’s just this blanket declaration that we’re in the presence of alien technology, and we don’t know what to make of it. So prepare your brain for that and figure out what you’re going to do."

https://samharris.org/podcasts/252-alone-universe/

Sam Harris is definitely a fool.

I'll never really understand why people latch onto a figure and think that they have all the best ideas and inside info they're not that special go get the inside info yourself

How is the idea of UFOs even a "conspiracy theory" anymore?

UFOs or UAPs are now a verified phenomenon that seem to be observed fairly regularly by trained military, "every day for a couple of years"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY

The parent poster is not talking about "the idea of UFOs", they're talking about aliens among us!

This is an issue - as this disconnect shows, "UFO" clearly means different things to different people, so it's easy to see how a seemingly clear message can be understood very differently among a large group of people (and maybe a conspiracy is born/given more fuel).

This doesn't just happen with "UFOs" either.

"Visiting Earth" in my mind means entering Earths atmosphere, but yeah I cant comment on if aliens could be walking among us, but if they had made it to our atmosphere, why wouldn't they go the extra couple of km's?

The point is that just because there is something unidentified does not mean its aliens.

why would they visit us? We have an average sun, a weird planet with a bit too much iron, but no more ressources than any other planetary system. Would they want to study us? In this case they have a technology capable of contourning any physic law we nknow of, and bypassing any method of detecting invisible objects based on particles that we know exist, and still manage to disable this tech at weird moments? Because of a glitch? And don't get me started on Alien "crashes".

(also, if they are among us and capable of feat we can't imagine, this is hugely improbable that the presence is recent. Like one in a billion)

There is two solutions: Either aliens visited us or they didn't. If they did, this would be VERY concerning that their software is glitching that bad.

My rational theory is this: Aliens visited us or did not, and i don't really care (treating them the same as god or any new-age consciousness theory), but UFOs are a bigger proof of human bias than alien visit in any case.

It is still nonsense in the sense that nothing anyone observed, wrote a book about, or whatever was caused by aliens. Sure, there are unexplained things, but they are not caused by aliens.

If the events are not caused by the US military, which they claim they are not, and if the events are not caused by a rival super power, which there is absolutely no evidence of, then what caused it?

I'm curious to know your thoughts about that, because people are often quick to shutdown the idea of aliens because of social norms, but with little other explanation what else do we have?

We do live in a strange universe, so maybe there is something else at play that is beyond our understanding, but in any case, its very exciting.

It could be atmospheric effects or another trick of nature. Also, the USG could deny ownership and still be the owner, either because they are lying or because one hand doesn’t know what the others are doing.

Optical illusion, atmospheric phenomenon, weather balloon, bird, commercial aviation, civil aviation, private drone.

[...] shutdown the idea of aliens because of social norms [...]

It is just a lack of evidence. There is as much evidence for alien as for Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, God, unicorns, ...

It's because the DoD was ordered to release everything (sans classified stuff, I suppose what shows off too much of our own abilities) they know about UFO's by June 30th. This somehow got in one of the COVID relief bills from last year.

The report is supposed to come out this Friday. Some congress people saw it last week, including the classified stuff that will remain classified, and pretty much just shrugged after the briefing.

So all that is at least why the media has been talking about this so much lately.

I'll also add that Sam Harris said he had someone from the DoD, or at least connected to the DoD reach out to him about "How do you go about revealing evidence of alien technology to the public". Sam's stance on this possible revelation has been "The source is legitimate, but we'll have to see what they actually come out with."

There must always be one or more distractions to keep the American people from thinking too hard about why we still don't have universal healthcare, sane vacation time, or any number of other European standards. Wars were the pastime of old, they've gone more or less out of fashion, you'd think a pandemic would encourage universal healthcare but of course those in power made sure that would not get any media cycles, and now we have aliens.

Oh, there are so many other distractions, they don't need one more.

In any case, people have been complacent with regards to your list of complaints anyway, it's not as though we're on the verge of a revolution (we're not VZ or NK or IR, needing vigorous distractions)

Or maybe we're not VZ, NK, or IR precisely because our distraction machine is so darn productive, in that it gives us new distractions even when we don't need more.

All the nonsense surrounding the Jan 6 riots goes in hand with this. Remember all the talk a year ago about the tremendous good that would come from Dem controlled house, prez, and senate? Yeah nah, we're just stuck debating possibly starting an investigation of a one time event from half a year ago.

I think a lot of that is just playing to a base. The Dem base is upset that they cannot achieve "a dream scenario" prog agenda, so the mainstream Dems throws them a bone. On the Repub side, the mainstream would throw the 'repeal ACA bone' in lieu of not being able to deliver their own "dream scenario."

But I don't think that's classic redirection to avoid revolution Cuba-style. In those places it's eternally the day-after the revolution. Marches, efforts, pronouncements, denouncements, mobilizations, speeches, external scapegoating, etc.)

You raise a very good question. Why are social media platforms Okay with some conspiracies but then totally complicit with other conspiracies, given their stated policies?

I think this shows their hand. That they want to defend some interests (political, social, economic) but others that don't affect their positions are okay.

When people bring up the possibility of Aliens in our vicinity, I ask them what laws of physics would allow this kind of interstellar travel. What strategies would they use to travel these vast distances and given those constraints what purpose would a visit have? If they are probes, how would information be sent back that is not stale and would be useful to presumably a future generation of theirs.

Maybe I'm not being open enough to the possibilities. I'm all ears.

UFO conspiracies are seen as quaint and not harmful. The social media bans are based on what is a pretty flear “harm to others” standard. Antivax certainly harms others, but I can’t see how ufo believers harm others.

All of your questions would be easily answered. Physics? We don’t know about it yet, but do you think we know so much that it’s impossible? Purpose? To explore. Etc.

I’m not suggesting those are the right answers, but with the right motivated reasons, they are trivial to come up with, and unlikely to create a gotcha moment where the theory believers doubts their conspiracy theory.

I'm not so much trying to create a gotcha moment but rather have them logically explain how something would be possible. Hopefully we could think it through and determine if it made sense knowing what we know. If we leave it at "Magic" then that's okay, at least we know we don't have a currently viable explanation for the belief.

Is there room between "evidence" and "magic"? We all believe a ton of things that we personally don't have a viable mechanism of action. (Just ask the average person to explain how a car works! Or the economy!)

Yes, there is room, and to me it's "'I don't know' together with 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'".

So if I don't know how a car woks, then the mechanic or builder should be able to explain it to someone who understands the principles of how it works.

While there may always be unexplained phenomenon, it's hard to ascertain how long UAV/Quadcopter technology has existed. Perhaps the battery tech hasn't been here, but who's to say nuclear reactors aren't in play. People describe these things as big silent objects hovering. You have to wonder if nuclear engines haven't been a thing.

To go from 'unidentified flying object' to sentience or some sort of being instead of just "some weird phenomenon" is the hardest point to make with people I talk to. It's frustrating.

Sort of makes me think that there's a they live situation where the government's being controlled and they're hoping the population catches on but they can't say a thing

If UAPs are a natural phenomenon, then why such secrecy? Why make a meeting behind closed doors at the government level?

If they are advanced craft/drones from Russia/China, then what about all the various UFO sightings and reports collected all over the world over a period of 70+ years?

Now, does it mean aliens are behind the phenomenon? Not necessarily, but I think we have to be open to that possibility, yes. Even if we don't understand their motivations in visiting us. I'm not sure why people are so polarized about it.

> "Why such secrecy?"

I don't know, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario where the US military benefits from people believing they have access to such advanced technology. Much like how Russia uses literal inflatable "tanks" to bolster the appearance of their military.

If you were them, would you really want to dispel the belief that you might be even more powerful than you let on?

Because you don't want to publish "this weather balloon was incorrectly identified at first because the only radar system pointed in that direction can't tell the difference between a flock of birds and fleet of bombers" or "we know that wasn't a chinese stealth drone because we already know that looks like this."

By disclosing what you identify and how, you reveal your capabilities and limitations. While some information may be harmless, you never know what a sufficiently clever adversary could exploit. Given that there is no benefit to making the information public, secrecy is a good default behavior.

Given that the various "tictac" reports appear not to be natural phenomenon, what's more unsettling? That there exists terrestrial technology that can confuse top-quality domestic military flight sensors, or terrestrial technology that can replicate the motion and behaviour of the various "tictac" videos and reports from domestic military observers, or there's extraterrestrial technology that can do the same?

IMHO, the ET solution is both the most boring and the least unsettling. If there is a terrestrial explanation for this phenomonen then that means there's a foreign adversary decades or more beyond American flight technology. If it's ET, then they haven't hurt us yet, and don't appear to be interested in doing so, and also not interested in sharing tech.

It means they likely have an advanced energy source that might benefit all of humanity.

There is a third option which is that it's all a psy-op. Either way the way we are thinking/talking about this is insane.

Eric Weinstein has several great threads about this, but I'll summarize some of his points. The military itself is saying it's aliens without using the word alien. It doesn't matter how you read this story, it should be the biggest thing. If there's aliens, it's the biggest story in history. If the military is pulling the wool over our eyes in a psy-op, it's a really big story. If we've been significantly outclassed by a foreign military tech, that's a huge story. But we're not talking about it like this. If it's aliens or enemy military, why are we not collecting our greatest scientists/physicists to work on this?

None of it makes sense no matter which narrative you think is most likely.

That sounds a lot like our bewilderment over inaction on climate change, several decades ago. Here was a civilization-ending, even species-threatening catastrophe unfolding before us and it was nigh-on impossible to invigorate a meaningful response from Governments and passion from the public.

My gut reaction is that most folks are brushing it off as a non-event because it doesn't directly concern them, and they've become numb to outlandish, world-changing news.

That's because climate change is still not proven after 30 years every model every prediction is almost ultimately turned up to be wrong or reversed yes the Earth is changing natural History shows us that it does that very rapidly whether or not we caused it or not is still the issue. I look at it this way smog is climate change it changes an entire city climate it also kills people with bad lungs but you're not going to get people to stop making it.

> Given that the various "tictac" reports appear not to be natural phenomenon,

[citation needed]

The general consensus about the forthcoming "On or before June 29" report is that the most likely natural explanationt may be some incredibly improbable, but still remotely possible, simultaneous combination of sensor error and eye witness mis-identification that somehow corroborates each other.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-weigh-in-...

The videos that have been released all have simple and boring explanations that fit perfectly, and are things like "camera artefacts" and "a bird".

> Given that the various "tictac" reports appear not to be natural phenomenon

Kyle Hill makes a very thorough and compelling case for jet engine exhaust in IR, here: https://youtu.be/I_n1xpKBBcs?t=1074

I'm not sure that "what's less unsettling" is a good criteria. Also you only provide two options, which given the unknown character of the phenomenon, would count as a false dichotomy.

It really grates on my nerves how easily people jump from "UFOs" to "extraterrestrials" in this topic. You'll see it everywhere, "OMG, the Pentagon just admitted UFOs are real and nobody cares! How crazy is this pandemic that nobody cares we aren't alone in the universe?!"

Nobody ever denied that there are Flying Objects that are Unidentified. It's just stupid clickbaitism.

Additionally, I find the assertions that "these things move in impossible ways" to be extremely disingenuous. The footage that gets released is universally very bad. It's low resolution, often shot in infrared transformed to visible light, being taken from aircraft moving at a high rate of speed, executing their own aerial maneuvers. "Oh, but these are experts in the field saying this". I know some of these experts. They aren't experts in every single system between camera sensor, tracking systems, and the limits of airframe motion.

There's one particular video (I can't find it right now) that shows a supposedly "impossible" roll and change in direction. Or, it could be that the filming aircraft rolled and the camera tracking system hit a gimbal lock situation, either because the tracking motors aren't able to move as fast as necessary, or because the tracking math wasn't implemented correctly.

But again, "glab glab glab, these are experts, I can't believe they'd make such a basic error as using Euler angles instead of Quaternions to calculate the SLERP." But I've seen some of this code with my own eyes. YES! A lot of control system engineers apparently don't know about Quaternions! Just because game developers do doesn't mean the majority of control system developers do. There are innumerable cases of things that people would consider "cross-domain knowledge" that doesn't actually end up crossing because of institutional momentum and industry insularity.

We like to rah-rah our military industrial complex as "the most advanced in the world". That doesn't mean it's the most high tech, best equipment possible, or that the best equipment was even installed on these aircraft.

Do you know anything about how government procurement works? "Military grade" often means "already 5 years obsolete by the time it hits the field". The tracking camera in something like an F-18 was not built in some Manhattan Project-style operation. It was built by a contracting firm who won the lowest bid. And they probably put their A-team on the avionics and the leftovers on everything else. They probably had just-out-of-grad-school electrical engineers who specialized in camera systems and only took the minimum requirements for control systems. They almost certainly did not hire the best experts in the field just to make a 1% component of the project, especially one that was probably designed to be replaced in 10 years under a new contract.

You speak about videos, sensors and tracking. But there are many cases over the past decades where radar records match what multiple eyewitnesses observed simultaneously: Physical objects performing maneuvers not possible with human technology.

Name one that actually has verifiable records.

European cases are for example detailed (in German) in:

Unidentifizierte Flugobjekte über Europa. Wissenschaftliche Beweise durch Radargeräte, optische Sensoren und militärische Luftraumüberwachung. Mit 4 Tabellen und einem Katalog der über Deutschland gesichteten UFO-Formen. ISBN 10: 3776621109

Well, that tells me absolutely nothing at all, what with not having that book and not reading much German.

You can do better than that, surely.

There is no need for a condescending tone.

I referenced von Ludwiger's work because he is in possession of raw radar data, for example from Switzerland.

If you just want to scroll through a short selection of radar-visual cases, start here: http://www.ufoevidence.org/Cases/CaseView.asp?section=Radar&...

I haven't seen those particular ones. But it's still a stretch to take their word that it's "not possible, period". Eye-witnesses are not at all reliable. Radar is spoofable and confusable, even just by meteorological events. And just because the radar saw something and the eye witnesses saw something doesn't mean they are the same thing. There's a lot of room for error.

Is it likely that when we advance physics beyond all we can possibly imagine, our cloaking tech won't be material-based but powered, and some glitches will be so big that sometime, the energy distribution and the cloaking will fail?

Also, i would totally make contact with an industrial civilization that threaten to destroy most of its ecosystems before they do so, and if ET are visiting us, they are at the very least jerks. The "studying us" explanation doesn't fly, because if we are ever capable of navigating through the stars, we will be able to simulate false worlds with human who think they are biological and not simulations on them.

Ok, I found what I think are the videos you're talking about. Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKsLK_Na7iw

All I can say is, take a look at what the Navy is willing to publicly say about what they're working on:

https://www.nrl.navy.mil/Our-Work/Areas-of-Research/

https://www.nrl.navy.mil/tewd/

https://www.nrl.navy.mil/tewd/vrs/

Just because the Navy's camera man or the radar techs he talked to didn't know what they were, doesn't mean the captain of the ship didn't know what they were.

> people jump from "UFOs" to "extraterrestrials"

But that's where all the fun of it is!

What kind of available material exists in this universe that such small aircraft can enter Earth without burning up?

"Do you believe in X" is almost always the wrong question.

But that also ignores that most humans do have opinions/beliefs on a wide variety of topics, including whether UFOs are of alien origin. It's legitimate to ask whether in someone's opinion the evidence is such that they think XYZ. Do aliens civilizations exist somewhere out there? A majority of scientists think they probably do. Of course that doesn't mean they have visited or even know about us, but it also means one can form beliefs about things which aren't known for sure, unlike the sun.

The point isn't about UFOs specifically, as I don't believe they constitute evidence for ETs, but rather that facts and data don't exist independent of the various webs of human beliefs, including what that shining thing in the sky is we call the Sun.

Beliefs are often a bit too crude relative to the modern rational mindset we should encourage in ourselves and others.

A scientist may, in casual conversation speak about whether they "believe" in aliens or not, but if you ask them to be precise, they'll correct themselves and talk about probabilities and possibilities, not beliefs.

The thing that bothers me about the "do you believe" question is that it seems to exclude this moment of hesitancy and letting things sit in "superposition" of possible outcomes.

I.e. if you ask someone "do you believe in God" and they answer "maybe I do", you might consider their response sarcastic.

Another problem with "do you believe" is that it often targets very broad and very fuzzy concepts, that everyone understands however they wish, but we insist on calling by a common name. It's very crude, and doesn't help further the debate.

And "I believe" is almost always a bad answer. (Belief only makes sense when it can be provably quantified, like, for example, what they do in statistics.)

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