Unfortunately, Aliens

Aliens are hard to take seriously. Until recently, the most I’d thought about aliens had been in connection with former FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s claims about having been abducted by them and when a local Aurigny pilot saw a UFO near Alderney - neither of which seemed desperately believable at first glance. But back in 2022, US Congress held its first hearing on UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the new term of art for the now-passé UFO), which piqued the interest of one of my friends. After he spent some time going down the alien rabbit-hole, he pitched me on doing the same, and seeing as I respect him, I did my best to engage in good faith. This post is the first of several that will explain what I’ve found.

I must make an additional disclaimer that I, like many others who are interested in UFOs, have something of a conflict of interest. I love science fiction and have done for my entire life. The idea of there not only being an intelligent species somewhere else in the universe, but of potentially having the chance to interact with them, fills me with awe¹. Much like my beloved Phoebe Bridgers, I want to believe. I’m not alone either - a 2023 Ipsos poll showed that 42% of respondents believed in UFOs²³, with 10% claiming to have seen one. If you doubt the epistemic faculties of a representative sample of the US population, then according to this study, 18.9% of university professors⁴ answered “yes” to the question “[h]ave you or anyone close to you ever observed anything of unknown origin to you that might fit the U.S. government’s definition of UAP?” with a further 8.77% answering “maybe”. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both claimed to have seen them, not to mention Shaquille O’Neal, Aaron Rodgers, Muhammad Ali, Kurt Russell, Shirley MacLaine, Dan Aykroyd, David Bowie, John Lennon, Nick Jonas and, of course, my boy Tom DeLonge⁵. So perhaps seeing things in the sky, without necessarily claiming they are of extraterrestrial origin, isn’t quite as weird as we usually think.

With all this being said, I also want to believe true things, and this matters to me significantly more than realising my sci-fi fantasies - although this certainly isn’t universally true.

There is a lot of incentive to cry alien. Sure, it’ll let you fulfil your cosmic fantasies, but much more importantly you can get rich and/or famous. Maybe it’ll just be that you get your face in the local fishwrapper, or maybe you’ll build your entire career off it. Perhaps you’ll become one of the most recognisable memes on the internet.

As a result, there are an absurd number of claimed UAP sightings - for example this RAND report looked at 101,151 in the US prior to 2023 alone and Enigma’s database boasts of well over 300,000. The overwhelming majority of these have obviously mundane explanations, capable of derivation even by non-experts; common human technology like drones and weather balloons, unusual weather patterns, camera artifacts, hallucinations (including dreams) or simply fabrications. The RAND analysis supports this in the numbers - the two key findings were that UAP findings clustered near military bases (where we might expect to see unusual-but-still-distinctly-human aircraft) and in sparsely-populated rural areas (where there are few people whose lack of corroboration might discredit us).

Even if 101,150 of the reports in the RAND dataset are bullshit, if that 101,151st is a bona fide, slam dunk extraterrestrial visitor then that’s the biggest news story in my lifetime, maybe in anyone’s lifetime. There is a tension here between trying to evaluate every claim in good faith, and the fatigue of wading through an inordinate number of blatantly implausible, flimsy ploys for attention.

Fortunately, there is a community dedicated to precisely this kind of wading, namely Metabunk, unofficially led by Mick West. West is great - calm, rational, respectful, and I sincerely wish that everyone involved in this debate shared his demeanour. Metabunk threads do an excellent job of identifying the unidentified in photos and videos, usually into one of the categories mentioned above, providing extremely compelling accounts that satisfy Occam’s razor infinitely better than “aliens”.

But… the Metabunkers don’t have a 100% success rate. There remain cases that defy obvious explanation by this band of spunky pseudonymous sceptics. And naturally the believers have their greatest hits - or perhaps more accurately greatest hit, given how much more intriguing the USS Nimitz case is than its nearest neighbours. The Nimitz is everything the believers have hoped for for years - multisensor detection (radar and infrared), and multiple corroborating witnesses, who in this case are highly trained naval personnel who are, theoretically, extremely credible. My next post in this series will cover my opinion of all things Nimitz.

Now there have been five Congressional UAP hearings, these also provide a trove of particularly juicy claims. The protagonists of the Nimitz re-iterated their stories under oath. Ex-and-current military, police and intelligence personnel shared similar eyewitness reports of UAP appearing over military bases. Perhaps most noteworthy were the claims made by former Air Force officer David Grusch who earnestly told the elected officials present that the Pentagon had a secret special access program that had retrieved and reverse-engineered crashed alien craft. Even better, he claimed they’d retrieved non-human “biologics”, all while seemingly unaware of what that word means. These pose their own flavour of question, succinctly articulated by none other than Secretary of State Marco Rubio:

It has, as I said, claims from people that were former admirals, naval fighters, people with high clearances in government.  Some of them are pretty spectacular claims.  I’m not calling these people liars.  I don’t have independent knowledge that what they’re saying is true.  The one observation I had is we had people that did very important jobs in the U.S. Government who are saying these things.  So we have people with very high jobs in the U.S. Government that are either (a) liars; (b) crazy; or (c) telling the truth, and two of those three options are not good.  I don’t know the answer.

And hey, I don’t know either, but given fewer people will be mad at me if I brand any service personnel as crazy or liars, I will also do my best to unpick the claims made by the various whistleblowers.

Along the way we’ll meet Congresspeople, admirals, psychiatrists, tenured professors, a famed debate savant and men who stare at goats. I truly mean it when I say that I hope they lead us to aliens, and along with them, FTL travel, Dyson Spheres and the fully automated luxury gay space communist utopia that me and my fellow TESCREALists dream of.