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S1E12: 7 Assumptions UFO Skeptics Make

May 26, 2024 • Spacefare • Season 1 • Episode 12

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They don't teach UFOs in school, so most people don't know much about them. Because of that, most people make a series of assumptions about UFOs that aren't necessarily well-founded.   

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Speaker 1:

What the UFO? I'm Caleb Alone today, again going to do something a little different than the last time. Not a formal essay, but kind of like a script-ish thing that I set out for myself. I'm going to talk about the assumptions people make before they figure out that UFOs are real. So broad headline I'm thinking is we have way more evidence than people think we have that UFOs are real, and I guess I'm just going to talk my way through this.

Speaker 1:

So about a year ago I still assumed that UFOs were fake. I always liked the idea, but I thought they were just a fun sci-fi concept. I was into the X-Files, I love Star Wars, I watch all that stuff, but I never assumed that it was real. I never even thought maybe it could be real. And then, I guess in 2017, I must have woken up a little bit to that, but for some reason it didn't flip the switch for me. What flipped it for me was listening to David Fravor patiently, quietly, calmly explain to Lex Friedman about his experience with the Tic Tac. And then David Fravor went on to testify to Congress and that particular incident is just like so compelling and he's such a credible witness that it really sort of opened the doors to my perception and I started researching. And then, once I started researching as in reading, I think, maybe the 15 books that I've read about this now so far it started blowing my mind how much information we had out there. And so I want to talk about this headspace of assuming that we don't have that information, because I think that's probably why people who don't think UFOs are real feel that way, and I did get some numbers for us.

Speaker 1:

So there are three polls between 2021 and 2023 about this subject, and it looks like where we basically are in the early 20s is that between like 30 and 40 percent of Americans think some UFOs are non-human craft like are willing to say they might be aliens, are willing to say they might be aliens, and it nudges up to 42% if you ask are they real? But they could be real and not alien. So take that with a grain of salt. So about a third to 40%-ish of Americans in the early 20s think UFOs are probably non-human that some UFOs are probably non-human. These polls, by the way, are Ipsos, gallup and YouGov, so reliable sources and then, meanwhile, on the other side, about 34 to 50% of people think they're all human objects or natural phenomena. They're all human objects or natural phenomena and somewhere between nine and 34% don't know what to think. So as high as half the American population thinks they're all natural or human and that UFOs can't possibly be non-human craft. And then you could square that with what people say overwhelmingly, which is that the military knows more than they're telling us. That number is like 60, 70% of Americans believe that the military knows more than it's saying. But you can imagine that some people think that these are secret craft, and so they assume that the military is not telling you about its secret technology. So the bottom line here is that it's about a hard 35% of America, a hard third plus of Americans, believe that these things are, some of these things are alien, and then, like half to two thirds, either think they're definitely not or don't know what to think. So that's the situation we are. It's 30, 70, 60, 40. It's still a minority opinion that UFOs are aliens, and so what's striking about that is that it's wrong, and we're going to talk a little bit about what the assumptions are that people are making who think that they're not real.

Speaker 1:

So a year ago, when I didn't think UFOs could possibly be aliens or non-human or some other exotic form of intelligence. I was assuming probably all seven of these things, and I think if you think that UFOs are not aliens or non-humans of any kind, you probably believe at least one of these seven things. So here they go and then I'll take them point by point, but I'll run through the seven first. Assumption one we have no good evidence that UFOs are physical objects. Assumption two scientists have researched and explained UFOs. Assumption three sightings have been rare and unsubstantiated. Four people who report UFOs are unreliable. Five secret military tech could explain most sightings. Six government couldn't hide a secret this big. And seven if they were here we'd probably know.

Speaker 1:

So most of the people who think that UFOs are definitely normal objects almost certainly believe one or more of these things. And the only thing that I didn't include here is some people think that these things might be meteorological and some people think that there's just like a widespread delusion going on. And I think both of those hypotheses are really low percentage, to the point of not even really being worth addressing, but they may come up in this conversation. So I'm going that UFOs are physical objects. They show up in multiple kinds of sensors and we can source quotes about that from people like the Director of National Intelligence in the US, and they show up to the naked eye and at least hundreds of them have left physical effects on the world around them. I went back and looked at Dr J Allen Hynek's the UFO Experience book and he says in that that he had at least 300 cases of burned circles or indents in the ground following or associated with UFO sightings and then he told the United Nations in 1978 that over 1,400 of these sightings had come with some kind of physical effect. But he includes damage to vegetation in that he includes electromagnetic effects like changing lights or turning off people's cars. In 1978, we had at least 1,400 examples of UFOs having physical effect on the world. They're showing up on multiple sensors, they're seen to the naked eye. They are widely reported as metallic. These things are physical objects, so that really rules out the meteorological explanation. They can't be some kind of ball lightning. The recent sort of plasma-based theories are also extremely fringe in my opinion. People are seeing metallic-like objects and they've been seeing them for 80 years and we've got them on all kinds of sensors and recording equipment. They are physical objects, period.

Speaker 1:

Okay, scientific research. This is sort of the biggest thing that I assumed. I assumed that had, uh, looked into this and that there was just no good evidence basically of anything funny. I I assumed that everybody would acknowledge that UFOs were real if they were real, because if they were real there would be evidence and science would have found that evidence and delivered it to us. So that turns out to just be wrong for some important reasons, and the main one is that science has not turned its eye of Sauron onto this subject very thoroughly. We've had not a ton of rigorous research done and the rigorous research that we have done has turned up large unknowns.

Speaker 1:

So there's this famous study in the 50s, for example, that the Air Force commissions, through Project Blue Book, they hire Battelle, which is a scientific institute, to do a very thorough rundown of these sightings, and Battelle divides the sightings into poor, okay-ish, good and excellent in terms of credibility and sensor sources, and as the data improves, the rate of unexplained gets higher. So at the low end, where it's poor, the rate of unexplained is low. They think they can probably figure out what all those things were, their astronomical objects or their planes or people are just confused for one reason or another. Balloons are on these lists. But then as you get into doubtful and then good and then excellent, that number of unexplained objects goes up. So the better the information we have going into the study, the wider the unexplained column is at the end, which means that there's a fundamental phenomenon that we haven't figured out here, and even the most recent report from NASA in the early 2020s basically just says we should look into this and NASA says now that they would like to do that. Open question whether the military will let NASA do that. The military will let NASA do that because it seems like there's a serious secrecy effort afoot and we'll come back around to that later.

Speaker 1:

But so research the big takeaway is scientific research of UFOs has been extremely limited and the few investigations that we have seriously conducted have left us with more questions than answers. So it hasn't been researched and we definitely do not have an answer. So it is not the case when people say there's no good scientific evidence. It is not the case that we have done rigorous research and come up with no evidence. In fact, all the rigorous evidence, all the rigorous research we've done, has left things unexplained.

Speaker 1:

Okay, sightings, part three. In the US today, in the early 2020s, about 5,000 people see a UFO every year. So that's about 20,000 in the century so far and one in 10, wait, that can't be right. Anyway, it's 5,000 people in the US that see UFOs every year, so it could be like 150,000 annually worldwide. It's got to be 100,000-ish in the early 21st century Sorry for my shitty pocket math. And 1 in 10 Americans have seen one at some point. So that means 30 million Americans plus have seen a UFO at some point. 30 million Americans say they've seen a UFO at some point. That's striking.

Speaker 1:

Thousands of events have involved multiple witnesses Over the 80 years that people have been seeing what you would call like the modern UFO phenomenon. Many of these cases have involved large amounts of witnesses. In a few cases hundreds and even thousands of people have seen one incredible thing, like the football stadium in the 50s in Italy that saw a giant silvery egg thing, or the Phoenix lights in Arizona in the late 90s, where maybe as many as 20,000 people saw a strange triangular formation of lights moving slowly across Arizona and then hovering over Phoenix for hours, and, moreover, thousands of people have recorded and reported being interactions. Thousands of people have reported encountering beings of some kind, usually either humanish or classic gray alien, but some weirder varieties too, like reptile type things or blob type things or insect type things or even robot type things. People have seen a wide variety of stuff, but the important thing to take away there is that thousands of people have seen that stuff.

Speaker 1:

So you've got thousands of people, probably tens of thousands, actually almost certainly millions of people who have seen UFOs, and then you have at least thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands of people, who have had direct interactions with some kind of other worldly being associated with these objects. So if you want to dismiss those thousands of reports of people who have directly encountered beings which many people do want to dismiss their eyes just sort of glaze over, they don't want to hear it, it's, it's. People do want to dismiss, their eyes just sort of glaze over, they don't want to hear it, it's impossible for them to intellectually encounter this. But if you want to dismiss that, you have to postulate that thousands of people are weirdly delusional in a very specific way. And I want to move into the next chapter here, which is witness credibility, and I'll just stay on the experiences for a minute, because the psychiatrists who have looked at these people which is not a ton.

Speaker 1:

But in the 90s there was a Harvard psychiatrist named John Mack who did a bunch of research on this. He almost lost his tenure for publishing research about alien experiencers or otherworldly non-human experiencers, and he found no shared psychopathology across these people. He couldn't identify any unifying mental phenomena that was causing them all to have these feelings. His instinct was to look for a shared trauma. People who were abused young might be disproportionately likely to see UFOs or something, but that didn't show up. It wasn't. It didn't correlate with any other psychopathology anxiety, withdrawal, trauma, abuse. It didn't correlate, it didn't match up to any of those things. So whatever's happening is either a real interactive phenomenon in which people are meeting other worldly beings, or there's some like very pervasive psychosis, uh, that affects people who are not otherwise psychologically, um, abnormal in any way. Uh, so I think I find that pretty compelling.

Speaker 1:

I know that this is one of the harder parts to talk about, but I think it needs to not be, because it plugs into the UFO nuts and bolts objects in a way that kind of grounds them and makes them real. And if we spend all our time just talking about tic-tac type objects and we just ignore the thousands of people who have had direct encounters with these beings, then we're missing a big part of the story that can contextualize it and tell us what's going on. And there is a strong temptation to do that, but it's not intellectually grounded in anything other than a motivated impulse to avoid coming to the conclusion that there might be non-human beings here. I'll just throw one example on this fire the kids of the school in Zimbabwe. That's a ton of kids who saw a craft and then a ton of kids who met these beings. It was broad daylight. These kids are still as adults recounting that broad daylight. These kids are still as adults. We're counting that. That's pretty compelling stuff.

Speaker 1:

So I think people who don't know that UFOs are real and who haven't read the research and looked at this material, they don't know that there are thousands of reported sightings. They maybe assume that there are like a few and they assume that these people are not very credible. But just stepping back to the people who witness the UFOs, many of those people like hundreds, probably thousands of those people have been highly trusted authority figures. A lot of them are cops. A lot of them are pilots, military personnel In the app Enigma that tracks people's careers and where these things are spotted. The number one biggest segment of the population reporting them is veterans, but I believe scientists is also really high up and pilots I can get you this exactly. Yeah, it goes veteran scientist, law enforcement pilot and then active military those are the five most likely kinds of people to report UFOs on the Enigma app and also to identify themselves as having one profession. But you can check that graph out. I'll put it in the article online. So there are a ton of sightings, thousands and thousands over 80 years, and there are a ton of witnesses, and many of these witnesses are extremely credible. Many of these witnesses also experienced things in big groups and many witnesses had direct interaction with non-human beings of some kind, and psychiatrists have found no evidence that there's any psychopathology that would specifically make people think they had experienced such an encounter and, moreover, most of those people kept this information either to themselves or shared it only with a few other people in the experience or community. In other words, most of these people are not selling their stories to the National Enquirer. Most of these people are regular private people who never take their story public or profit from them in any way. Okay, so that's sightings and witnesses.

Speaker 1:

Military tech. This is a really big one because it's a very natural assumption and I would say, probably after non-human intelligence, military tech is the next best possible explanation for UFOs and unfortunately I don't think it competes with non-human intelligence. But I think people who don't know much about the subject assume that it does, and that's probably because they assume that there are only a few sightings and they're relatively recent and the government is more powerful than we think. I think people don't don't know about the dozens and hundreds of sightings in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. They assume, maybe, that military secret technology has been behind all of these sightings. Military secret technology has been behind all of these sightings. Maybe that people were confused at first and then in the more recent sightings, that we have some really special, advanced stuff that people don't know about, and it is almost certainly the case that militaries do have technology that the broader public is not aware of and doesn't have access to. We should obviously accept that as a likelihood. It's been true for the history of the military. It will be true for the future. We have things we haven't shared yet and, you know, 30 years from now we'll know what they were flying around in the early 2020s, but for now they're secret.

Speaker 1:

However, those secret planes almost certainly can't do the kinds of things that David Fravor described and many other witnesses have described regarding altitude, rapid trajectory changes, hovering against the wind. If we are able to do that stuff and this technology is not broadly public, that would be extremely surprising. It's not impossible, of course, but it would be. It would be shocking, and want to just like dial in on that and give you some specifics. David Fravor said in his statement to Congress that his crew, his ship controllers sorry, the air traffic controllers on a ship in David Fravor's fleet were watching objects for two weeks descend from over 80,000 feet to about 20,000 feet, where they would hover for a couple hours and then go back up For two weeks. Flight controllers in this naval fleet watched objects come down from what Fravor described in his Congress hearing as the edge of space to 20,000 feet, hover and then go back up. So If we have that technology, if we had that technology in 2004, that would have been astonishingly revolutionary, like we didn't even learn how to land rockets until the 20 teens.

Speaker 1:

So the idea that we might be going back and forth between space at will. It kind of stretches credulity, kind of stretches credulity. And, moreover, that particular incident should count as evidence for people who are looking for strong data that suggests that these things have some kind of spacefaring capacity Above 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and then back up repeatedly over several weeks, tracked by high-end Navy hardware. That seems to me extremely compelling as evidence of non-human technology. But if it's still not a smoking gun, you can zoom back into the 90s, 80s, 60s, 50s, 40s and you will still find reports of objects moving at thousands of miles an hour, changing trajectory quickly and flying higher than pilots can follow. And in the 40s it's basically impossible to believe that humans developed that kind of technology and then kept it secret for the next 80 years. It's extremely unlikely that we would have been able to build that technology before World War II, when we didn't even know how to build an atom bomb, and it's extremely unlikely that we would have been able to keep that secret, or that we would even have wanted to keep that technology secret instead of incorporating it into the economy, where it could have completely changed the world since then. So you've probably heard some of those arguments from me before, but I think they bear repeating because they're a really important part of the logic puzzle for me. So military tech as an explanation doesn't hold water for me, and I don't think an objective observer should feel that it holds water. But even with that said, it's still the next best explanation after non-human intelligence flying some kind of technology from some other place.

Speaker 1:

Okay, six government secrets you hear this a lot. The government wouldn't be able to keep something like this secret for this long. The answer to this has a couple parts. One is yes, they probably could. And splitting that up a little bit, the government, the government being the elected officials and then the military being, you know, the hired lifelong career professionals who work in defense and intelligence. And those people are not always accountable to the elected officials. In theory and and in much of practice, they are generally accountable.

Speaker 1:

The budget for the military comes from elected officials. The highest elected official is the president, who oversees the military and theoretically has access to all military information if the president wants. But in practice, everyone below the president can easily be excluded from the military's need to know classification system. So even if you're the highest elected legislative representative, who heads the Senate, for example, the military might still tell you that you don't need to know and therefore you can't be read into some special access programs and there is no switch that Congress can pull to say yes, I do need to know and you will give me this information.

Speaker 1:

That is one of the but the basic assertion here is that the nondisclosure agreements are extremely serious within the military and high classification, that the military controls cannot be controlled by Congress. So the members of Congress who've been trying to get this information don't have any way to force the military to give it to them without passing laws, and they've been trying to do that. And in the last few years Congress has passed some laws that have made it easier for whistleblowers to report. They created the Intelligence Community Inspector General position, which reports to Congress. That's the person who's been overseeing David Grush's complaint and who will hopefully oversee other whistleblower complaints in the years ahead. But Congress has hit a wall trying to pass more full-throated legislation that would tell the military and intelligence community to share everything they have and, as far as we know, the reason that that got stopped was that defense contractors, who control the funding for a couple of key members of Congress, probably blocked it. We don't know that for sure. But zooming back out on military classification, the non-disclosure agreements are extremely serious. They can come with a sort of standard issue threat of death. They might come with a bypass of the regular judicial system. So if you were to squeal on a UFO program that was happening in the military and intelligence communities, you might just get frog walked right into a federal penitentiary and never get to make your case in public.

Speaker 1:

Several people, despite this, have come forward over the years and told us that there is a secret UFO program that the US knows more than it's letting on. Those people have been widely ignored. Some of them in some ways have been discredited, which might be the result of them being shady. It could also be the result of disinformation campaigns that have been waged against them. More likely it's a combination and some aspects of some of these people are a little shady. Some aspects of their stories are true, but the point there is that we have had some leaks.

Speaker 1:

So answer one to could the government keep this secret is yeah, they're actually pretty good at keeping secrets. They have a really strong classification system and a need to know basis for super special access programs and they have very serious NDAs. Then two, we actually have had some leaks. People have come out and told us that things were happening. And then three, we have had in a public way, without acknowledging the secret program, many military officials of very high ranks, all the way up to the president, tell us that there really are UFOs that we don't understand. And the best quote for this is Barack Obama telling James Corden what is true is that there are objects in the skies that followed unpredictable trajectories, with patterns we didn't understand, and we have photo and video of these and we don't know what they are. So that's probably Obama being careful, but it's about as clear a statement as you're going to get from the military, the highest of the high that we know UFOs are real. That alone doesn't answer the military tech questions, but I think we addressed that suitably above. So, finally, where are we now on? This?

Speaker 1:

Congress is pushing for more information from the military and intelligence agencies, and the sort of state of play in 2024 is that we're trying to get another version of the Schumer-Rounds amendment passed, maybe at the end of 2024. And we're waiting, as of summer 2024, for the fall 2024 release of a bunch of documents that Congress requested from the security state. So theoretically, they'll be released in October. We'll see how much we get from that. But the point, broadly, is that Congress is pressing against the military and intelligence community to get more information on this subject. So it's not as simple as just the government keeping this secret. The government is composed of lots of different agencies, some of which are elected, others are appointed lifetime positions, so it's a mix and those agencies are interacting with each other and there's tension. There may even be tension within the secret programs, if they exist, uh, where some people are pressing for more disclosure and some people are pressing for more secrecy. So, um, there's a lot of smoke around the government that suggests that there's more information yet to come, uh, which is something that the majority of people already believe. Okay, so finally, we would know.

Speaker 1:

Some people think it would be obvious if aliens were here, that we would just see them. We all have smartphones, right Goes the Neil deGrasse argument. But as I've discussed before, so I'll do this quickly the evidence suggests that whoever is controlling these UFOs are cautious. They rarely appear in front of large groups during the day 50s Italian soccer matches notwithstanding and they have never deliberately made themselves available for broad public investigation. They have never landed somewhere with a lot of people and said everybody, come on into our spaceship and check out our cool stuff. And said, everybody, come on into our spaceship and check out our cool stuff. And finally, when we explore the stars someday we will very likely behave in that same exact way, and we can sort of tell that about humans already, because that is how we behave with the Earth's remaining uncontacted tribal communities. There are over 100 uncontacted tribal communities in the early 2020s still on earth today, and the rest of earth's civilizations largely avoid them. We don't interact with them, we don't stop by to tell them all the cool stuff we've got. So it's, it's pretty easy to believe that that's how more advanced civilizations might think about us.

Speaker 1:

So my takeaway from all this now, as somebody who thought it was silly even just a few years ago and now has done a ton of reading, is that an objective, rational person who engages with this evidence, reads the research, hears the history, will come to the conclusion that it is quite possible and even likely that non-human intelligences of some kind have been visiting Earth and surveilling humans for at least 80 years and probably a lot longer, and in fact, taken together, the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that this is the most likely explanation for UFOs, that this is the most likely explanation for UFOs. So there are other theories that people have propounded and any individual case has debunkers lining up to explain what could potentially have accounted for that strange phenomenon. But when you take it all together, the thousands and thousands of reports of the sightings, the thousands of reports of the encounters over decades and decades, and then official military statements and government pressure to reveal this information, it sure looks an awful lot like you have to assign a majority probability to the chance that we're encountering non-human intelligence, and I guess, as an outro, I would just say I'm finding, in talking to my friends, that the hard part really isn't drawing those conclusions. The hard part is holding this all in your head simultaneously, and I think there's a really strong urge to look away from this subject. I've described it as the octopus sliding off your windshield. Uh, there's, there's also sort of like a repulsive magnetic effect to this. It's like you. You reach toward it and then you miss it.

Speaker 1:

Um, because there's there's something about the subject that just sort of makes people not want to believe that it's true and I think it. That's. That's probably from one of two sources and maybe it's just both. One is the like weird uncomfortable feeling that we might not be the superior species on our planet. That's pretty nerve wracking and it's also it sort of flies in the face of everything we've been taught our whole lives. Of course we're the most advanced species and we're just like very used to thinking of ourselves in that role. And then the second is the social stigma. The sort of like ontological concern are probably the main things that push people off of this subject.

Speaker 1:

So I have found, in talking to people and trying to convince pals, that it's just really difficult to get people to line up all this information simultaneously and encounter it together. They want to like dismiss the parts of it one by one and they don't want to put the whole puzzle together and just like process it um. So I'm having a little bit of success with people talking to them about the percentages, like how likely you think it is that aliens are visiting earth as a baseline. And then, after learning things like the thousands of sightings and all the mass sightings and all the encounters and the government statements, after learning all that, has your probability estimation changed? And finally, what I'm asking friends at this point is what else you got?

Speaker 1:

Basically, because it doesn't seem like there is a huge range of potential explanations and what I've been hearing a little bit is I just don't know. I don't know what it is. People saw something and it's not my job to explain to you what that might be, and that sort of sounds like the scientific findings that we've been dealing with over the past few decades, which amount to question mark unexplained, and you hear a lot this idea that if we just had more data we could explain this. And yeah, I mean sort of on its face, that's a truism. If you had the data that this was an alien probe, you could say this is an alien probe and we certainly should get more data. So it seems like the only sane place to land here is that we need more information and that we should move toward getting that information in an orderly and rigorous fashion. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Keep watching the skis Bye.