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S2E2: UFO Probability Logic

• Spacefare • Season 2 • Episode 2

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We wrote this episode for people new to UFOs, and for UFO enthusiasts looking for better ways to talk to skeptical friends and family members.

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Speaker 1:

What the UFO? I'm Caleb. We're going to talk today about the probability that UFOs are non-human and the probability of UFOs in general. So this is a probability logic rundown about intuitions and expectations, and it's really aimed at people who aren't into the UFO subject yet. So if that's you, that's great, you're in the right place. And if you're really into the UFO subject but you have friends and family who are still kind of figuring it out or still very skeptical, this is also intended to be for them.

Speaker 1:

So the idea is that most people are not paying attention to UFOs because they assume that there's not much there. Some people assume that there is much there and they just aren't very interested. And some people are really deeply into the subject from a debunking standpoint and they have very thorough reasons for why they don't think UFOs are non-human. But my hypothesis is that the majority of people who don't think that UFOs are non-human technology just aren't paying a ton of attention and don't know a bunch of stuff that is formally out there in public, has been said by official agencies and is well documented in serious, rigorous ways. So this is kind of an expectation-setting exercise for those people and I'm going to spend the whole time talking directly to those people, because I've been speaking with people like this in my life. Like most of my friends who have not read a ton about UFOs are very skeptical that they might be non-human at all. And most news commentators that I've heard talk about this, who I deeply respect, are also just very skeptical. And again, I think that's probably mostly because they're not super read in on what's going on. But I could be wrong, of course, and I don't want to intentionally or unintentionally put words in other people's mouths. So this is supposed to be a welcoming, not accusatory, space. It's just about setting expectations and gauging probabilities. So, as a way in to start, I think we should lay down a baseline about what we think of the probabilities so far, and I'm going to talk about five claims, from pretty straightforward, I would say, to the farthest out we're going to go today. And these are the five claims.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so claim one some UAP are real, which means non-illusory, like people are seeing actual things. Two, some UAP are objects, physical objects in the skies or oceans. Three, some UAP appear technological. Four, some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human technology can do. And five some UAP are non-human technology. So, as a baseline. I'd like to get our assumptions, our intuitions about what the probability is for each of these claims. So grab a little piece of paper and a writing, implement and just jot these down. I'll repeat them slowly again. Just lock this in so that you've got a baseline about your intuition of the probability of this statement.

Speaker 1:

One some UAP are real. What's your probability, from zero to a hundred, that some UAP are real? 2. Some UAP are objects. What's your probability, currently, between 1 and 100, that some UAP are objects? 3. Some UAP appear technological. Appear is important here. Write your intuitive probability, between one and 100%, that some UAP appear technological. Four some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human technology can do. So write your intuitive probability, one to 100%, that some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do. And five some UAP are non-human technology. I was going to say likely non-human technology, but I think that is redundant because we're guessing the probability. So guess your probability, your intuitive probability, going into this, that some UAP are non-human technology one to 100%.

Speaker 1:

Now for skeptical friends that I've been talking to. They put that probability very low. They said some UAP are non-human technology. My skeptical friends wrote one to five percent on that. Some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do. My friends wrote five to ten percent on that.

Speaker 1:

Some UAP appear technological. My friends again, who are skeptical and not super read in on this subject, said about 20% on that. Some UAP are objects. My skeptical friends said maybe 60%. And some UAP are real. My friends said sure, 100%.

Speaker 1:

I'm also, in the spirit of open discourse, going to tell you my intuitions about these statements so that we can compare and contrast as we go and then, of course, the point will be at the end to see if your intuitions have moved at all from your initial probabilities. So my intuitions about the probabilities of these statements are some UAP are real 99 to 100%. Some UAP are objects 99%. Some UAP appear technological 100%. Some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do 100%. And some UAP are non-human technology. And I've got this at 99%, which seems very high and to my skeptical friends that seems unreasonably high. So I'm going to see if I can close the gap of that reasonability in the course of this essay slash discussion.

Speaker 1:

So we'll start with UAP or real. What's your rating for this? Uap or real. One to 100? Okay, is it 100%? If there's a delta, let's talk about that. If not, we'll cover this quickly, this one's sort of a softball. It basically just means that people see things that are not illusory. So anything that isn't a cognitive illusion could qualify as a positive answer for this claim, and by that we could mean meteorological explanations, it could mean human explanations, or we could mean more exotic non-human explanations. So my intuition is 100%. These things are at least real, because we have many, many sightings where multiple people have seen the same thing. So if that's your intuition, we're already on the same page and we're off to a great start. If it's not your intuition, I would start with the Tic Tac case, which I'm going to mention in a bunch of other places, so I'll give you a link to that if you haven't watched a short video about it already.

Speaker 1:

Okay, some UAP are objects. My skeptical friends said maybe 60% on this. Great, 60% is a good place to start. Is that near your number? Higher, lower? There are a whole bunch of quotes, luckily, that are going to cover this one really well. One of the best is from the 2021 Office of the Director of National Intelligence from the United States Intelligence Community and I'm going to pick this one specific sentence. Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects, given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors to include radar, infrared, electro-optical weapons seekers and visual observation. So that's the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2021, saying most of these UAP are probably physical objects because they're appearing across multiple sensors. So if they weren't physical objects, they would have to be capable of spoofing at least four kinds of different sensor signals plus visual observation, which seems like a very high bar.

Speaker 1:

It's definitely possible to imagine some kind of meteorological phenomena doing some things that might confuse sensors and look like objects, but it would have to be very widespread, to account for millions of sightings, and it would have to be unlike any other weather event that we've ever seen. Specifically, it would have to look to pilots like objects that were under intelligent control, among other behaviors. It would have to look to pilots like objects that were under intelligent control. Among other behaviors, it would have to make sharp turns, accelerate quickly, hover in stiff winds, change altitude by tens of thousands of feet and appear to respond to pilot actions by following and evading planes. So if you had a meteorological explanation. It would have to cover all of those phenomena which no meteorological phenomena of which we're aware would do. So those are all things that pilots have described and other people have seen UAP do, and that's decades and decades of pilots, many of whom were operating in military positions.

Speaker 1:

Additionally, in the physical objects column, the lead scientists for the Air Force UFO agency in the 50s and 60s, which was called Project Blue Book, wrote in his book the UFO Experience this is Dr J Allen Hynek Scully that several hundred cases of UFOs leaving physical impressions in the ground where they were reported to have landed. That's at least several hundred cases that the Air Force investigated of UFOs that left physical impressions in the ground. He also, hynek, told the United Nations that he knew of over 1,300 cases where UFOs had some kind of physical effect. The UFO United Nations report included a claim that over 1,300, quote physical trace cases are on record and Hynek describes this list as including physiological effects on animals and plants, interference with electrical systems, appearance of disturbed regions on the ground in the immediate vicinity of the reported UFO event. So just regions on the ground in the immediate vicinity of the reported UFO event. So just impressions on the ground. That's several hundred cases Broader physical effects like these other things. That's over 1,300 cases of physical trace evidence. And that's again per, the Air Force's chief UFO scientist in the 50s, reporting to the United Nations, I believe in the 70s, but I'm not looking at a date for that.

Speaker 1:

So it's definitely the case that some sensors produce inaccurate readings sometimes. But for no UAP to be physical objects, that would have to mean that all sensors that have picked them up were wrong, all witnesses were misinterpreting a natural phenomenon and all of the Air Force's records of physical effects were erroneous. To me that possibility is necessarily low. So I have it at 1%. Have I moved your needle on this? What was your probability? Do you still think that there's a significant chance that no UAP are physical objects or have you moved to thinking that 99 to 100% UFO, some UFO UAP are physical objects? By the way, I use UFOs and UAP as the plurals because object ends with an S if you pluralize it, but phenomena does not end with an S. So I say UAP plural. Some people say UAPs. So moving on to three.

Speaker 1:

Some UAP appear technological, some UAP appear technological. My friend pointed out when he said maybe 20% on this that he would have a higher number if we were including normal objects like weather balloons. And I would agree and say that if we include garden variety human objects, then we go up to 100% on this. Some UAP appear technological because most UAP turn out to be identifiable objects and most of those objects are human technology, like weather balloons, for example. So what we're really considering here when we say UAP is the UAP that stubbornly remain unidentified after expert analysis, so after the scientists and the military and intelligence authorities have looked at them and ruled out all the normal human explanations. And that's generally a small percentage of total reports. It ranges between like 5% and 30%, depending on the value of the data. The higher quality of data tends to produce higher unknown rates, which, if you've watched the show before, you're well aware of, and you can source that from a scientific report by the Battelle Institute. It was called Project Blue Book, special Report 14. So if we keep the claim that some UAP that remain unexplained after analysis appear technological, I think we have to be at another 100%. Does that accord with your intuitions? Is it higher?

Speaker 1:

I'm going to go back to the ODNI for this claim and I'll give us another couple reasons too. So the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said a handful of UAP appear to demonstrate advanced technology In 18 instances described in 21 reports. Observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics. Some UAP, for example, appear to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly or move at considerable speed without discernible means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency energy associated with UAP sightings. The UAP task force holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management which is, I think, military, speak for interference with observation, as in like they're masking their own signature and they're interfering with other technology's ability to read them. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary and the ODNI says they go on to say that we're conducting further analysis on this.

Speaker 1:

So, keeping with our some UAP that remain unexplained after analysis and pivoting toward our technological from appear technological, we could consider how likely it is that something could appear technological while in fact being not technological. So, in addition to the behavior described in the ODNI report, this would have to include mimicking some extremely technological sounding form factors. For instance, there were some objects in the Belgian wave reported by police officers that lit up a car so brightly that the officers could read a newspaper at night, which seems like kind of a weird thing for a non-technological object to do, and then these objects were reported to have deployed. Police officers reported that they saw these objects deploy red orbs which then kind of moved around independently of the central objects, and multiple police officers in Belgium saw this. Multiple police officers followed these larger objects while they deployed these red orbs. I believe those red orbs were also reported in the Hudson Valley sightings of the late 80s, but I don't have a citation for that. Also, I'm temporarily forgetting which came first. I think it might be actually the Hudson Valley sightings come before the Belgian wave, but they're similar in many ways. These are two big waves of UFO sightings in the early and then late 80s. So for another example, consider this statement to Congress from one of the two Navy pilots who testified in 2023. This is Ryan Graves speaking here. He says Over time, uap sightings became an open secret among our aircrew.

Speaker 1:

They were a common occurrence seen by most of my colleagues on radar and occasionally up close. The sightings were so frequent that they became part of daily briefs. A pivotal incident occurred during an air combat training mission in Warning Area W72, which is an exclusive block of airspace 10 miles east of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude. Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold. One of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere, motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets were only 100 feet apart and they were forced to take evasive action, so they terminated the mission immediately and returned to base. Our squadron submitted a safety report, but there was no official acknowledgement of the incident and no further mechanism to report the sightings. And that's why Graves has been banging the drum about UAP as a flight risk, a risk to flight safety rather and he started an organization to pursue improvements in that area.

Speaker 1:

So again, whether it turns out that this is a secret kind of human tech or it's something else, a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere sounds very likely to be technological, and that pilot, ryan Graves, has said elsewhere that this was not the only sighting of that object, that pilots have gone on to call him and say hey, we're still seeing these gray spheres inside of gray cubes, inside of translucent spheres. To me that sounds inherently technological, not something you would see popping up in nature. The only thing I could think of like it is there's like a hexagonal storm on Jupiter. That looks sort of mysteriously artificial, but it is a natural phenomenon. So maybe you could imagine it being technological. But it is a little bit of a stretch. It's not very intuitive.

Speaker 1:

I've got one more example of technological seeming UAP. For this we go to the Iranian pilot who chased a UFO in 1976. He describes another object that certainly sounds technological. I'm going to give you a little quote here. Pilot described an object that gave off flashing strobe lights arranged in a rectangular pattern and alternating blue, green, red and orange in color. The sequence of the lights was so fast that all the colors could be seen at once.

Speaker 1:

The object and the pursuing F-4, this was the plane the pilot was in continued on a course to the south of Tehran when another brightly lighted object, estimated to be one half to one third the apparent size of the moon, like seen from Earth, came out of the original object. The second object headed toward the F-4 at very fast rates of speed, a very fast rate of speed. The pilot attempts to fire an AIM-9 missile at the object, but at that instant his weapons control panel went off and he lost all communications UHF and interphone. At this point the pilot initiated a turn and negative G dive to get away. And as he turned, turn and negative g dive to get away. And as he turned, the object fell in trail at what appeared to be three, four nm, maybe knots per mile. As he continued in his turn away from the primary object, the second object went back to the inside of his turn and then returned to the primary object for a perfect rejoin, again unlikely to be non-technological.

Speaker 1:

If you're interested in this pilot, his name is Parviz Jafari. I believe he still speaks on this subject and if you'd like to read his report in full, you could check out Leslie Kane's book UFOs Generals, pilots and Government Officials. Go on the record, parviz Jafari wrote a chapter of that book. So these are just three examples and there are many, many more, going all the way back to the Foo Fighters in World War II, that make me feel that it's very difficult to give more than a 1% chance to the idea that all UAP that seem technological are not technological. So that leaves me at 100%, for some UAP appear technological and maybe 99% for a broader claim, which is some UAP are technological, because it's very difficult for me to imagine how all these things could happen naturally, basically how there could be some meteorological explanation for all of these discrete, highly weird and highly geometric-sounding phenomena. So have I moved your needle on this one? Do you still think that there's a good chance that those three things that I just described are non-technological, or that they might be? What's your rating now that some UAP appear technological? Is it getting closer to 100%? Okay, moving to the next one, natural extension of that some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do. I've got this at 100% and again I want to acknowledge the word appear is very important here. Some UAP appear to do things that no publicly acknowledged human tech can do, and my 100% on this is based straight on pilot testimony. So, with the appear, I think 100% makes a lot of sense for this claim.

Speaker 1:

I've got a scientific paper that I can link to and I'm going to read little snippets of it here. But, as this paper points out, these observations could be erroneous or we could be looking at extremely powerful technology, but either way, these objects appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do. And a little bit of this paper from the abstract opening paragraph is several unidentified aerial phenomena encountered by military. Oh, at the time it was aerial, now it's anomalous. So this paper considers a handful of well-known encounters, including 2004 Nimitz encounter, which is maybe the best that we have currently, as of the early 20s, early 2020s, just to place you in the right century, and I'm just going to hop to the end of this paragraph, they say the observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel, ie if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and potentially cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks proper time. That's assuming they could get up to the speed of light or faster, which is a massive open question we don't have a good answer to right now, which is a massive open question we don't have a good answer to right now. Hard to move my tie in the right direction, but I did it, okay. So another good source for these claims, a specific source is a congressional testimony of David Fravor, which I will attach in full, but I'm just going to read it.

Speaker 1:

In a bit of a segment here he talks about seeing the Tic-tac. If you're not familiar with David Fravor and Alex Dietrich's encounter with the tic-tac in 2004, I think you really should familiarize yourself with this and I will include a link to a 60 minutes segment. It's a six minute segment from a 60 minutes episode where Fravor and Dietrich talk about encountering this object. It's pretty important to engage with this if you want to get a really good probability about the claim that some UAP appear technological and to exhibit superior technology. So Fravor talks about encountering this tic tac. He's at 15,000 feet, tic tac's about 12,000 feet.

Speaker 1:

They pull nose on the wing person. Alex Dietrich is about 8,000 feet above Fravor and as Fravor pulls toward the object, the object just left of his nose, about a half a mile away he says it accelerated rapidly and disappeared right in front of our aircraft also sees this happen and loses visual. So they turn back to their cap point, which is a term for a rendezvous location in a Navy training exercise, which is roughly 60 miles east, and the air controller from their fleet let them know that the object had just reappeared on the Princeton Aegis Spy 1 radar at their cap point. So the Tic Tac object traveled 60 miles in a very short period of time less than a minute was far superior in performance to their brand new FAA-18Fs and did not operate this is Fravor with any of the known aerodynamic principles that we expect for objects that fly in our atmosphere. So that's evidence that these things appear to demonstrate advanced technology, as in more advanced than any publicly acknowledged human technology. And, as Fravor goes on to say at the end of his testimony, he would like to say that the Tic Tac object that we engaged in 2004 was far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today or are looking to develop in the next 10 plus years. If we in fact have programs that possess this technology, fravor says they need to have oversight from the people that the citizens of this great country elected to office to represent what is best for the United States and in the best interest of his citizens, her citizens, its citizens. Okay, so on topic again. If you've never seen the pilots talk about this encounter and you're new to this subject, you really should at least watch the 60 minutes interview. And if you have time for a longer dive, I would recommend the Lex Friedman interview, and I'll put a link down there to that too, but you can also find it on your own. Lex Friedman, david Fravor it's about an hour and 11 minutes in before they start talking about the Tic Tac.

Speaker 1:

So, given all these statements, I think it's true on its face that some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do. My friends gave this quite a low rating. Would you have a low rating now? Did you give it a low rating before, and would you like to update your rating given this testimony and the inclusion of the word appear? Has this moved your needle at all?

Speaker 1:

In a similar way to the previous claim, we can then move on to whether these objects actually do things that no publicly acknowledged human tech can do, or whether they only appear to do so but in fact represent some kind of illusion. One initial instinct that I have about this is that even the appearance of such technological superiority would itself constitute superior technology, because if we were capable, for example, of casting a projection of these objects that could fool both pilot vision and multiple sensor arrays, that would be a novel technology. It wouldn't be as exciting as an object that could go 60 miles in 60 seconds, but it would from basically a standstill. I think the acceleration is just as exciting as the top speed there, but it would still be a novel technology. So by that logic, even the phrase some UAP do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do would also be true on its face, because even if the objects were mere holograms, they would still be. Technology of which we are not publicly aware Doesn't mean it doesn't necessarily exist. So how do you feel about my thinking here? Are you poking any holes in it? Does it feel airtight and careful to you so far? Feel free to leave me a comment or send me a text or find me on X it's at WTUFOshow.

Speaker 1:

I also want to point out that, as with other aspects of this topic, this claim that UAP demonstrate superior technology to humans has held true for over 80 years. I think that's kind of important. So in the very first famous flying saucer sighting of 1947, not the first in all of recorded history but the first really widely reported public source report the pilot estimated the UAP were moving over 1,000 miles per hour, which was faster than any plane at the time. So I've got a quote from the National Air and Space Museum on that and they say the formation was crossing in front of Arnold that's the pilot, kenneth Arnold and he decided to time its passage from Mount Rainier to Mount Adams. He calculated the objects were flying at about 1,200 miles per hour, some accounts say 1,700 miles per hour, which was two times faster than any airplane known at the time. Months would pass before Colonel Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 rocket airplane to the speed of 700 miles per hour and exceeded the speed of sound. So the best human tech publicly acknowledged that year was this Bell X-1 rocket airplane which achieved 700 miles per hour. And again, kenneth Arnold saw and calculated UAP velocities exceeding a thousand miles per hour in that first famous sighting of 1947.

Speaker 1:

Another super significant event was the 1952 DC sightings which made major national news at the time. They took place over about a week and in the context of a national wave of sightings across especially the East Coast of America. This is hundreds of sightings that year. This also coincided with some astronomical plates, which we've mentioned in other episodes, that caught a couple of white dots that look like stars but aren't stars. That appear in one astronomical plate and not the next astronomical plate, which is pretty close to scientific evidence that something was up there. So here's historycom.

Speaker 1:

On the first night of DC sightings At nearby Andrews Air Force Base, radar operators were getting the same unidentified blips, slow and clustered at first, then racing away at speeds exceeding 7,000 miles per hour. Looking out his tower window, one Andrews controller saw what he described as quote an orange ball of fire trailing a tail. A commercial pilot cruising over Virginia and Washington reported six streaking bright lights quote like falling stars without tails. Bright lights quote like falling stars without tails. When radar operators at National watched the objects buzz past the White House and Capitol building, the UFO joke stopped. Two F-94 interceptor jets were scrambled, but each time they approached the locations appearing on the radar screens, the mysterious blips would disappear. By the dawn of July 20th the objects were gone. Disappear by the dawn of July 20th, the objects were gone.

Speaker 1:

So if you're new to this subject, have you heard of this event? I was pretty shocked to learn about it because it's an enormous deal at the time in the 50s, and then it basically vanishes from public memory after that. Again, leslie Kane covers this in her book and she reports that at the time the Air Force told the FBI, secretly as in privately, that they thought these things might be extraterrestrial and meanwhile the Air Force told the public that this was just a temperature inversion, confused the radar operators which, if you've read anything about the radar operators you will know, kind of pissed some of them off, because some of these radar operators felt very strongly that they can tell the difference between a temperature inversion and a metallic object in the sky. So returning to the claim again, the claim is some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do and, based on the consistent reports of surprising acceleration and speed in excess of known human ability, I think we have to rate this at 100% as fully true. Would you agree about that? Have you moved your estimation? Did you put 100% at the beginning? Is it higher now? And if you've moved it higher, are you comfortable expanding from some UAP appear to do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do all the way to some UAP do things no publicly acknowledged human tech can do. Do you think that those things are pretty similar? Or do you think there's a big gulf between looking like they're doing something amazing and only appearing to look like they do something amazing? And also, sub note what do you think of my argument that even appearing to do something amazing qualifies as doing something amazing, because we don't know how to generate these illusions. Okay, take a deep breath. We're going to head for the big kahuna now.

Speaker 1:

This is number five and this is the probability estimate that some UAP are non-human technology. So I have this as very likely. Maybe you have this as very unlikely. Maybe you're somewhere in between. Since it's the big kahuna, it's a bit wider of an answer and I'm going to go to a few more places, but I imagine we'll all be continuing to discuss this subject for some period of time. So the basic logic behind my 99% on this question goes like this One, we've been seeing UAP for at least 80 years, as in at least from the 1940s to the 2020s.

Speaker 1:

Two, throughout that whole time, uap have appeared to demonstrate technology that is significantly ahead of human technology. The whole 80 years we've been seeing them, they've seemed to have been more advanced than our human technology. Three, for UAP to be human technology, that would mean that we humans would have had to develop that technology at least 80 years ago. This is kind of an important stepping stone If it's going to be technology and we're going to try to say that it's not non-human technology, then that would have to mean that humans had this technology at least 80 years ago. So four, if we had developed this superior technology 80 years ago, it would be extremely strange that we had neither incorporated this technology into the rest of our industries nor upgraded our military equipment to include these abilities.

Speaker 1:

It would be bizarre in the extreme that the United States, russia and or China would continue to spend trillions of dollars today on conventional fighter jets if they knew how to build objects that could accelerate and fly at the rapid rates UAP demonstrate. So if we had these abilities to zip around from place to place, to go to 100 or 1,000 Gs, acceleration from a standstill, hover against winds, ascend and descend tens of thousands of feet rapidly why wouldn't we build them into the rest of our military arsenal? Wouldn't it be intuitive that if we knew how to do that, we would build all of our jets to do things like that? What would account for having that secret technology for 80 years but not incorporating it into all the jets that we build? It really is trillions of dollars that these biggest nations spend building jets. So they're putting their money where their mouth is, and their mouth is F-18s, f-20s, f-30s. Sorry, I'm not a military person, but we're building conventional aircraft and we're literally spending trillions of dollars. That's not an exaggeration. So does it make sense to you that we would be spending all that money to build this conventional technology if we humans had the technology to do something far better than what all our most advanced conventional aircraft can do? Does that feel intuitively right to you? Does it feel intuitively strange? Moving on to my next point, this is number five.

Speaker 1:

People in positions to know told us as far back as 1960 that UAP could not have been human technology. And I'm going to go to Admiral RH Hillencotter. This is from a newspaper article in, I believe, 1960. Hillencotter headed the Central Intelligence Agency from May 1947 to October 1950. He was the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the US and he recently declared, in 1960, speaking about the so-called flying saucers. At the time quote the unknown objects are operating under intelligent control. It is imperative that we learn where the UFOs, unidentified flying objects, come from and what their purpose is. Foes, unidentified flying objects come from and what their purpose is. Then, referring to the years of World War II and the years immediately following, he said I know that neither Russia nor this country had anything even approaching such high speeds and maneuvers. Here Admiral Hillenkotter was presumably speaking of at least part of the period during which he was the director of the CIA. So the CIA director from the first years of the organization went on to tell the public that he believed that flying saucers were not human tech and that they were technological because they were operating under intelligent control. So either he was telling us the truth and there really were non-human technological devices flying around as early as the 40s, or he was lying to us for complicated reasons. But I would note along that second avenue that Hill and Cotter was a major public advocate of disclosure of more information about UAP and UFOs. They weren't called UAP at the time. So he was the head of an organization that promoted transparency about UFOs for years and years. He fought a long time for this and then eventually he quieted down as the CIA pivoted into more of a secret phase about this.

Speaker 1:

But that's a different kind of conversation. So number six even with all of those things I've just said, I would still personally cap out my estimation of a human non-human origin. Maybe around 80% Seems unlikely, but who knows what? We don't know. But on top of this you have to consider the experiencers, as we've mentioned in other places before, but you may not be familiar if you're new to the UAP subject.

Speaker 1:

Thousands of people, over decades and decades now, have reported meeting strange beings associated with these craft, non-human seeming beings of various kinds. Before I started learning about this, I would have assumed that this was just a small handful of reports and that their cases were sketchy or largely hearsay. But in fact there are many, many of these people and they've told and continue to tell their stories themselves. They're not third-hand accounts. So, just as a tiny sampling, we have to consider accounts like Lonnie Zamora, a New Mexico police officer, who saw two strange beings beside a UAP that flew away while he followed it in his patrol car. Got to consider Charles Parker, calvin Parker and Charles Hickson, who reported their abduction experience to police and who continued to talk about it earnestly while officers recorded them secretly, hoping to catch them in a lie.

Speaker 1:

You got to consider the 62 kids at Ariel School in Zimbabwe who said they saw a craft and spoke with small beings who emerged from this craft. And again, you can see these kids interviewed recently in season one, episode two of Encounters on Netflix. These kids are adults now. They were young in, I believe 1994 was this sighting. But they're young adults now. And you have to consider, finally, john Mack, who was the head in the 1990s of the Harvard Medical School Psychiatry Department, the head of the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, john Mack, who interviewed more than a hundred people who claimed that they'd met with non-human beings, and that included these children at Ariel School actually. But John Mac wrote a book about seven or eight of these cases and intensely studied over a hundred and what he found in studying these experiencers is that they didn't have common psychological traits, they didn't have overlapping pathologies of any knowable psychological type, so he couldn't basically say that they were mentally unwell or neurodivergent in any specific way, which is pretty surprising.

Speaker 1:

So, at the risk of repeating myself here, this list of people who have seen and interacted with beings is quite long. It's definitely at least thousands of people, and we know that because thousands of people have contacted those experiencers who have gone public to say, yes, I had something like this happen to me. And also, many of these people don't go public. They work with support groups, they talk to each other. They don't necessarily sell their stories for fame and fortune. Only a small handful of people have become very famous telling their stories. Many more of these people just had this happen and don't want to talk about it publicly because it's too weird. So that should rule out for you the idea that all of these people are just chasing attention and making things up, idea that all of these people are just chasing attention and making things up. So the list of people who have had these encounters is long. The list of people who have seen craft but no beings is even longer.

Speaker 1:

In America, one in 10 people say they've seen a UFO. That's over 30 million people. So when I put all these things together, stacking them all up, I see some UAP are real. All these things together, stacking them all up, I see some UAP are real. Some UAP are objects. Some UAP appear technological. Some UAP appear to do things no public human tech can do. Human militaries are spending huge amounts building tech inferior to UAP. Thousands of people believe they've met non-human beings connected to UAP. Pilots up close to UAP say they're like nothing that we have or are working on. And we didn't even mention this. But government whistleblowers have been telling us lately that the US military at least has secret study programs about UAP with potentially retrieved crash objects that they're trying to reverse engineer.

Speaker 1:

So in a way it's like you could start at 1% probability that non-human intelligence is involved in this and then add 1% every time you read a compelling report about UAP behavior or direct encounters with beings, and then just stop at 99% to stop yourself from hitting 100% about a thing that you can't necessarily for sure know yet. So just to sort of be respectful of the idea of logic, you have to stop at 99. But I think ultimately intuitions about this come down to how likely the alternatives seem. I'm going to keep going a little bit on that and say I'm 100% sure that UAP are real, as in phenomena that are happening. I can't assign any higher than a 1% probability to the idea that none of them are physical objects or that none of them are technological.

Speaker 1:

I think you've got to say it's at least 99% that some of them are physical objects and some of them are technological, and I'm 100% certain that they at least appear to be operating at a far higher level than our most advanced publicly acknowledged technology. And I'm 100% sure that many, many people have said that they met beings associated with these crafts. So the alternatives to non-human technology as an explanation have to be that both A humans have had extremely advanced technology for 80 years but kept it secret and spent trillions of dollars developing inferior technologies as their main tools of energy and defense. And B thousands of people have a condition that no psychiatrist has been able to identify or define, which manifests with no co-pathologies and no pattern of shared trauma or overlapping psychological tendencies. So I can't look at those two possibilities and assign the probability that both of them are true any higher than a one out of a hundred. I could see giving just the technology possibility a rating of 20% maybe, or higher.

Speaker 1:

But the repeated, widespread experiencer claims introduce an alternate explanation that's much more intuitive. So let's follow that line of thinking briefly. Along that line, consider the likelihood of non-human UAP from a different direction. One we're finding more exoplanets every day. 20 years ago we barely had a handful, now it's hundreds or thousands, I don't know the exact number. But. Two far more stars than we thought have these exoplanets. We now think it's around one in four stars maybe that have a habitable world. I don't have a quote on that. It could be wrong, but you can look it up. Three we're developing our tech extremely rapidly on the scale of the past few hundred years. 200 years ago we couldn't even fly. Now we're landing rockets and heading back to the moon.

Speaker 1:

Four we behave extremely cautiously around the remaining uncontacted tribes on earth and we're likely to behave cautiously if we ever visit planets that have beings of any kind on those planets. So the only remaining assumptions that you'd have to make about visiting non-human intelligence are that life will evolve on other planets, intelligent life will evolve on some other planets. Therefore, many alien civilizations likely have already evolved and are therefore likely much older than our own. Certainly they've had millions and millions of years in which they could potentially evolve and even if they're a few thousand years ahead of us, they're likely to have much better tech than we have, because next point here propulsion technology is quite likely to evolve significantly beyond our current limits, given how far we've come just recently. And five, visiting non-human intelligence are likely to be cautious, just as we are with the remaining uncontacted tribes on Earth and as we will likely be when we visit other inhabited planets.

Speaker 1:

So this set of probabilities, possibilities, rather seems to me healthily probable, robustly probable, you could say, that life will evolve, intelligent life will evolve, many civilizations older than ours, propulsion technology will get much better than our current technology and that visiting NHI are likely to be cautious, because I think we would be likely to be cautious. So that leaves me trying to explain a fact pattern, which is that some UAP appear to be advanced technology, by comparing a set of things I think are likely, which are that alien technology exists and aliens are likely to be cautious if they visit us, to a set of things that I think are extremely unlikely, which are that humans are holding an extremely powerful technology so secretly that they waste trillions of dollars building inferior machines and thousands of people are delusional in a way that no psychiatrist has ever successfully described. So that's what leads me to the 99% probability that UAP are non-human technology, and that leaves just 1% for a scenario where we developed super tech 80 years ago but we rarely use it and thousands of people have a mental condition that psychiatry has so far failed to explain. So I feel pretty good about this logic and I'm really interested to hear any specific critiques that you have. What do you think so far? Has anything I've shared affected your intuitions? Do you still think what you thought at the beginning about the likelihood of all these possibilities.

Speaker 1:

Going back to your original numbers, do you now think it's more likely that UAP are real, that some UAP are objects, that some UAP appear technological, that some UAP appear to demonstrate superior technology to known human technology, and do you feel, as a result, that it's more likely that some UAP might be non-human technology? Have these numbers moved for you at all? I'd be so interested to hear whether you've changed your mind on any of these and if you haven't moved your intuitions, I'd be really interested to hear why. What part of my argument is not connecting or where do you think I'm making a mistake? That's fascinating to me. I'm super curious about it. So if you want to poke holes in this argument, please really do come at me, find me on X at WTUFOshow.

Speaker 1:

So in writing this, I remembered something that my friend told me once about how, as we all get more educated in narrow fields, we grow up, people go to grad school. They learn lots about different things. We have to explain more and more to each other, to establish shared baselines of understanding, and it occurs to me that some of my conviction maybe a fair amount comes from steeping in UAP research now for almost a year. So I personally really have read double digit number of books about this and I've listened to probably hundreds of hours of interviews and discussions and I've talked and written and thought about it a lot very carefully, about it myself at considerable length, as you can obviously tell. So I personally believe strongly that if you or anyone were to consider the accounts that I've considered by doing this reading or listening to this research, engaging with the dozens or hundreds of sightings and encounter reports and the many careful statements from people who have worked on this issue either in or around government agencies that you or anyone would have a similar set of instincts about the probabilities at play. So, if it's okay with you, I'm going to keep posting things here that I find especially compelling from time to time. I'm not going to mail anybody any books, but I do recommend that people at least check out Leslie Kane's book. It's K-E-A-N but pronounced Kane.

Speaker 1:

Ufos, governments, pilots, et cetera go on the record. And for one fun little contemporary American tidbit, you could check out the legislation that Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds proposed in 2023 and just ask yourself what do you make of it? Do you think that it's likely that a majority leader of the Senate would write a bill that uses the phrase non-human 22 times without acknowledging, without knowing or suspecting something interesting. So you can find the full text of that online Schumer-Rounds UAP Amendment 2023. And you could find the written statements of the witnesses from the 2023 hearing. I'll include those links, but they're also a good thing to look up for yourselves A couple pages each, statements by David Fravor, david Grush and Ryan Graves. And you could also, if you're interested, take a glance at Schumer and Rounds' colloquy in response to the House removing key provisions of their amendment.

Speaker 1:

Of your intuitions about the probability that UAP are technological and that some UAP are therefore likely to be non-human technology, please come at me, even with the burns. I really would love to hear them and, again, the easiest way to do that is on xcom at WTUFOshow. Obviously, one word, because that's how handles work. Very curious also if you're sharing this logic chain with any friends, how those conversations go and whether you get anybody to move their priors from low probability to medium or high. Thank you so much for engaging. I wish everybody good luck and peace and joy thinking about this and, in general, navigating the complexities of life. Thanks again. Bye.