I still think it's unlikely we're observing alien aircraft

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan lays bare the naive optimism and ignorance behind belief in alien UFOs.

Aliens would be the greatest discovery in man's history. There would simply be no way to suppress it. If they can indeed be captured on cameras and sensors, the sheer number of cameras and sensors in the world for the last few decades would guarantee several high definition videos and measurements with no other rational explanation. The greatest minds in science would be clambering over each other to study them.

Sagan also goes to great lengths to explain that there would be very little chance of aliens appearing or behaving the way they purportedly do. For example, they would certainly not fly almost exclusively over North America. The aliens are also not likely to change with the times, as is suggested by the fact that UFO conspiracy theories often follow patterns that change every few years or so. Alien sightings used to be green men in flying saucers, then they left crop circles, now they are little pill-shaped objects.

In short, we lack any evidence at all, many who claim to see them later recant or admit to being charlatans, and the descriptions of aliens are rather unimaginative when compared to the actual possibilities of how alien life may look or behave.

Great claims require great evidence, but it's still at the level of blurry bigfoot videos and grandma saying she can talk to the dead. It's more than likely we're observing an international relations psyops gambit to waste bullets against inflatable tanks.[0] A conspiracy to plant the idea of wild conspiracy theories seems a more defensible lie because there are enough people who already want to believe in supernatural and exotic explanations than accept reality is more mundane. Tabloid media loves this shit and will happily parrot anything for eyeballs. Many of these so-called alien videos from LANTIRN / FLIR pod have been disproven as phantom reflections causing false targets that move with the optics, and pilots end up chasing their tails.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank

The most telling thing, to my mind, is how little of this fanciful technology we see in the real world. Yes, the manhattan project was super-secret, but within 10 years that science was everywhere. If we really had our hands on the kind of nearly-magical tech that all these breathless tabloid releases suggested, we'd see it leaking into actual tech. The First Nation to develop a TARDIS, is going to USE that TARDIS.

> If alien aircraft were on Earth, they would need to be carefully calibrated to give us grainy distant glimpses (in every possible way) but never more. If alien aircraft are here, they’re screwing with us.

Or maybe they're way faster than we are and possibly much smarter and therefore can, as liberally documented, evade us with ease.

I mean just take for a second, the great lengths the us government went to recover a single f35 that botched a carrier landing. Now imagine your species developed FTL travel. Jack Black ironically nailed it: we don't have the technology.

It's obviously unattainable for most of the population to accept the are seeing something they can't explain (even if "the government" knows what these things are), nor they get to understand the further consequences of the several rational hypothesis available.

Even being rational, these hypothesis and what happens next if one of them is true, surpass everything recognizable for the daily standard human experience anywhere in the planet, hence these things can't exist.

That's it.

I've said before here that aliens as a hypotheses have little to no explanatory power. What I mean is that if you accept that people have witnessed this marvellous tech then either

(a) it's possible and someone has figured out how to do it, OR

(b) it's possible and someone has figured out how to do it and aliens exist

Don't get me wrong, I get it: the argument is that if someone on earth had figured it out then we'd simply have to know about it, thus it must have come from somewhere else.

It's just that I think that no matter how hard it is to believe that someone on earth could have invented this and kept it a secret, its still more plausible than aliens.

For anyone who has trouble with this, let me ask you to consider this: what if it's not that advanced? What if it just appears that way?

I claim that if someone has figured out a way to draw shapes in the sky that have no mass and move them around at will, then that is enough to explain most of it. Can I explain how they would do that? No. But is is less likely to you than aliens?

This is what happens when someone goes for the Bayesian approach with an incomplete surface level analysis. Arguments are formed with incorrect premises, resulting in confidently wrong conclusions.

> We now know that Roswell was a government coverup

With this we see the author is uninformed and has not properly accounted for, or perhaps even unaware of, the period of concerted government disinformation surrounding this topic since the 70s, proven by the modus operandi of project bluebook and testimonies of the project coordinator, J. Allen Hynek.

I caution those new to this topic that you are about to wade through an epistemic minefield. You must reserve judgement on current events until you understand the full history or you will lack the necessary context for an informed opinion.

I've researched this topic intensely for years, analyzing all sides of debate.

I'm telling you all that even prior last week of recent whistleblower testimonies that there is enough circumstantial evidence in public domain to lend genuine merit to the UAP hypothesis.

Now with the testimonies set in motion, the dam has broken and official disclosure is soon to be upon us.

For those that want to genuinely understand, start here with this expose on project bluebook

https://youtu.be/QXXeVdMNzmY

this is why I tune out the media. they hype unsubstantiated stuff like this all the time. whether it's errant balloons or grainy videos of alleged aliens, it's always something that momentarily captivates the public.

They'll call first.

usually i love hype but this alien hype is so dumb