Are we really Nearing Disclosure of Extraterrestrials?

Well, the title says it all - can we really be near something definitive? There's been a lot of noise in the press recently starting with the Trump administration's announcements from the Dept of War and some more initial analysis here. Nevertheless, the first point to call out is that there are no references to the terms of “UFOs” (other than a small tag) or “extraterrestrials” in the government release notes. All text points to UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) - which implies the releases are still in the realm of anomalous objects that could originate anywhere. The primary quote being:

"The American people can now access the federal government's declassified UAP files instantly. The latest UAP videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire United States government are all in one place – no clearance required. While past administrations sought to discredit or dissuade the American people, President Trump is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files."

 

Granted, you can search the released declassified documents for those terms. As far as I’ve been able to tell - nothing earth shattering has appeared. Both The Conversation and The Skeptic did a nice job reviewing this early release (from which I have to quote one author noting - “...absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space.”)  Scientific American also did a short overview noting a statement from Sean Kirkpatrick, "There’s nothing unexpected in their release. And without any analysis or context, [it] will only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and armchair pseudoscience, particularly from the playhouse politics theater company..."

No matter your political affiliation it is readily apparent that the administration is attempting to appease critics complaints about not following through on some of the early campaign promises. This doesn’t imply, however, that national security would be compromised in any way if the US or any government entity had some strategic advantage from anything technological be it from other countries or extraterrestrial in origin - this being the most problematic part of disclosure.  

So here we sit again with just as much (if not more) speculation regarding extraterrestrial life. It's difficult to note whether this stands in Level 3 or Level 2 of the exoastronomy categorization - but, it mostly fits in Level 2 due to government classification and documentation.

You can go out and download the released material directly (as have thousands on social media that are full of speculation). I’m sure there’s more to come.  

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Trump Continues the Stir about Alien Life

Whitehouse.gov Photo

Well, not to be outdone, President Trump announced he would be releasing government files about aliens, UFOs and extraterrestrial life just after Obama had mentioned the possibility of alien life in an oddly  stated verbal attack. Thursday he stated on Truth Social:

 

Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.

This places obvious pressure on the defense department to release something - but, I'm not convinced there will be much. If the black budgets of the overall US spend on defense (est to be about 7% of $1 trillion) had any advanced technologies that gave the US any strategic advantage, they're not going be transparent about it.

There's a lot more to say about this in a future post regarding some of the nonsense surrounding the AARO and other attempts of disclosure. More to come.

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Washington Post Skeptic Op-Ed on UAPs

NASA UAP Study Committee

Recently, the Washington Post ran an editorial speculating about the origin and beliefs surrounding UAPs. If you’ve looked at my categorical breakdown of how to classify any information regarding UFOs or UAPs, you’ll see this clearly falls under my lowest Level 4, or, non-verifiable conjecture or opinion (see the definitions of levels here). Now, you might disagree with me and the author based on all of the testimonial evidence provided by government hearings. But, Mr. Shermer is espousing his own opinion on the matter as a contributor to Skeptic Magazine.

As usual, even the small additions of wording like “tinfoil-hat-wearing kooks” (even when written in the negative as “not kooks”) and “Bart Simpson balloon” still pushes the public stigma against positive and constructive conversations regarding the phenomena. Those types of small stereotypes printed in the negative do not help with modifying the conversation towards positive, scientific and cultural discussions.

The real meat of my disagreement comes in the punch line “could UAPs really be space aliens?” And, as usual, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is thrown under the bus with the tired old skeptic standard - distances between stars is too far, grainy photographs, etc. What’s interesting is why I consider this a Level 4 analysis in my rating system. The answer is that it is just as easy to post a similar op-ed with a different viewpoint using the identical argument. In fact, the entire article could be exactly the same except for the last 2 paragraphs that focus on religious-like beliefs due to declining religiosity. These could be rewritten to emphasize stronger evidential analysis while compiling scientific evidence (moving the conversation to Level 3).

If you’ve read this far you probably think I’m in complete disagreement with his opinion. I’m not. It’s more about the tone of the discussion and where we need to focus on both rational and scientific investigation without throwing the old stones (that I’ve been seeing since the 1960s).

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Avi Loeb Continues to Push the Science of ET

Oumuamua - Credit ESO M. Kornmesser

It's great to see a respected Harvard scientist push the envelope on extraterrestrial life. Avi Loeb was chastised for his speculation on Oumuamua but has bounced back with backing for his Galileo Project - "the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations".

 

Loeb published an interesting op ed in Scientific American yesterday outlining his opinions on AI-enabled self-replicating technologies exploring the galaxy and how we might be able to detect these extraterrestrial objects. It's a short read but demonstrates the core idea of his project.

 

Loeb is no lightweight here and has published a number of scientific papers (one example Lingam & Loeb 2019) working through the problems of alien panspermia, probabilities of encounters and implications of the galactic environments on extraterrestrial life.

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Astronomers, UFOs and the Null Hypothesis

In a recent article, Ethan Siegel a Senior Contributor on Astronomy in Forbes magazine, provides a very good overview as to why scientists seems to remain mostly mute on the topic of UFOs. Clearly, part of the problem is that UFOs as a general topic doesn't specifically apply to one scientific discipline such as astronomy - it applies to many different areas of science, sociology, biology, engineering, philosophy, etc. Astronomers tend to get the brunt of the questions - especially due to SETI and astrobiology (or, just because they keep their eyes on the sky).

Many people complain that science isn't doing enough to study the UFO evidence. But, is it really a scientific problem? If aliens revealed themselves wouldn't it fall directly into a social/political problem space? Yes, scientists and engineers would be happy to start extending our knowledge based on what we might learn at that point but currently the types of science we need falls more into statistical work and observational evidence since much of the measures are not repeatable. This is more in line with investigators, sociologists and other disciplines (like the military, of course).

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Significant UFO Disclosures on the Rise

Interesting to see the amount of press interest in UFOs / UAPs recently. It's really quite unusual to see the mainstream media start to report these sightings and stories without some silly, campy quips or side stories to save face (in 'My Blog List' in the right column of the home page, the reporter Billy Cox, aka Devoid, was quite serious on the topic but was shut down recently).

I will be writing much more on this in the future, but to hear a former President of the United States admit there are unknown craft in the sky and that's reported in mainstream media might just raise the extraterrestrial problem more into the scientific realm (even though the discussion was still part of a comedy program).

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