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it looks intentionally vague and noncommittal, and in classic form, released on a Friday afternoon to minimize coverage.

As a guess, they do that both because this is information gathered for security reasons and there are limits to what they can reasonably say without compromising security and because no matter how they write it it turns into wild speculation about aliens by the general public and conspiracy theories and the like. That stuff even creeps into HN discussion in a way and to a degree that is not the norm here.

Minimizing the public furor is probably the least worst thing they can do, all things considered.

"Security reasons" doesn't pass the smell test -- US adversaries are going to see the report regardless of what time it's released, whereas significantly fewer of its own citizens will.

> That stuff even creeps into HN discussion in a way and to a degree that is not the norm here.

HN discussion isn't some sacred thing, and probably never was. This is an interesting topic (and depending on the true nature of it, arguably the most interesting topic) and there's plenty of information to sift through. If HN discussions were meant to be stifled around official, manicured government and corporate press releases, that sounds more like naïveté than a free thinking scientifically-minded forum. Some of us are interested in other things besides the most elegant possible Haskell one-liner.

Let me try to say that a little more clearly:

A. Maybe they keep it vague for security reasons knowing that other countries will read it, not just the American public.

B. Maybe they publish it on a Friday in hopes of getting the least amount of nuttiness out of the American public.

When you publish something for all the world to see, you have to take into account both of those dynamics, not just one or the other. They will both occur. Addressing only one or the other will go bad places.

One simple reason to not go into depth on the evidence is it would reveal the capabilities of radars and similar sensors.

Likewise, if they know one of these was say a drone test by a contractor from a grey/black program they're obviously not going to disclose that.

So there's a bunch of banal reasons security could apply here.

That’s presuming they actually have more information. If these phenomena really are of a nature that we have no previous experience with then they may be as much in the dark as the rest of us. That situation could be entirely due to the stigma they mention that surrounds reporting such things or if these incidents represent some unknown technology far beyond what we are capable of then it may be next to impossible to gather more information beyond chance radar returns and images without some concentrated effort.

> "There is nonhuman intelligence visiting and engaging with Earth. We could not tell you before for national security reasons, but now we can tell you." At least, not without many years of plausibly deniable hints before-hand.

Do you really think that'll be the outcome?

I'd be shocked.

If there is nonhuman intelligence in our solar system, it's orders of magnitude smarter than us, and I'd also wager it's probably by design impossible for us detect.

> I'd also wager it's probably by design impossible for us detect.

Humans are orders of magnitude smarter than dolphins, yet that doesn't prevent humans from experimenting on them.

An interstellar intelligence is probably post-biology.

Biological aliens are more than likely carbon and water based, and most likely use oxygen/oxidation for energy. The worlds that harbor these must be of a certain temperature and mass, which means the biological aliens evolved adapted to these conditions. Gravity, gravity wells, temperatures, metabolic and resource needs that are far from ideal for space.

Let's also assume post-biology intelligence has the extra benefit of duplicating, transmitting, and modifying memories, experience, etc. and optimizing it. Compute nodes probably have access to more than the sum total of human knowledge at an instant, and can probably run math, chemical, and physical simulations rapidly. These intelligences will be orders of magnitude smarter than us. Imagine a trillion of the smartest humans operating at peak performance, except even smarter.

These intelligences will also be concerned about other intelligences that have more resources and that may not take a friendly disposition. Unless there's an omnipotent intergalactic police force that prevents attack and extermination, intelligences will hide their presence by default.

Since other adversarial intelligences probably also have technologies beyond our own, the technological needs and techniques for advanced cloaking may be beyond our present understanding.

I didn't claim alien intelligence wouldn't study us. (They probably would.) I claimed they would remain very well hidden.

For observation, yes you're right. I'm not disagreeing there. We do that in nature all the time -- e.g. wildlife safaris with large telephoto lenses downwind lions/tigers/etc.

But when we experiment with dolphins, the beach ball has to be visible so we can see what the dolphin does with it (even if we're hidden behind two-way glass). If it is aliens (and I'm not suggesting it is) why can't it be that they're measuring our intelligence capacity? This is the proverbial, beach ball, as it were.

> If there is nonhuman intelligence in our solar system, it's orders of magnitude smarter than us, and I'd also wager it's probably by design impossible for us detect.

Likely in the galaxy, seems unlikely there is advanced nonhuman intelligence hiding in our solar system.

> seems unlikely there is advanced nonhuman intelligence hiding in our solar system

Maybe.

I did some Googling, and apparently the human race has produced between 1 and 2 billion cars in the last 100 years [1]. That's an incredible feat!

Assuming a post-biology intelligence has started space manufacturing, they probably have the capacity to produce an incredible volume of intelligent probes.

Wikipedia claims that the Milky Way galaxy is composed of 100 - 400 billion stars. [2] This figure isn't far out of the ballpark for the number of cars we've made in 100 years.

Creating a single space probe to reach a star is probably within their capability, and I'd wager they can match and exceed our industrial capacity for vehicle production. It's not hard to imagine they could send at least one probe to every star. They have a lot of time to do it, too.

Important factors I'm not accounting for are time of travel and interstellar expansion, but I don't think that changes the fact that an advanced race could manufacture and send a lot of probes in all directions.

Maybe they've already made it here. Maybe before we even arrived.

[1] https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-advice/how-many-cars-are-th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way

What are the time-scales involved in system formation, the evolution of a technologically sophisticated culture capable of doing what you say, sending probes out (at sub-luminal speeds) and reporting back? Isn't that reason enough to estimate that while there may be such advanced alien societies, we will never have the possibility of contact?

Or through a vanishingly small chance, happen to find ourselves in a system relatively near one of those 100-400 billion stars around which such an advance civilization had earlier arisen?

I can't help but wonder that if a non-human post-biology entity has had an extra billion years to develop, they may have solved the distance problem already in ways that we couldn't fathom yet.

> If there is nonhuman intelligence in our solar system, it's orders of magnitude smarter than us

Why would this nonhuman necessarily be smarter than us? Here on earth we are surrounded by animals with non-human intelligence. Do you really believe that they are more intelligent or do you believe that they are not intelligent at all?

Perhaps it is because there is no evidence of nonhuman intelligence visiting and engaging with Earth. I'm not sure who's surprised by this report.

That’s because you’ve only looked on the top side. If you peek over the edge at the bottom you will see.