A person I know has, for the past year or more, been trying to convince me that Earth has been visited by UFOs, and that, indeed, some of those spacecraft have been captured along with the bodies of the piloting extraterrestrials. Her claim is that the bodies and the spaceships (presumably crashed) have been given to private companies by the government, and the craft are being reverse-engineered to suss out the technology behind the “UFOs”. Further, the bodies of the pilots (bipedal like us, I’m told) are being examined to see what kind of life they represent. As to why this is all being kept secret, I’m informed that there are important security considerations. But I’m not told which considerations are important enough to keep this huge story secret.
I have read a lot of the information sent to me supposedly supporting this claim, and ultimately it all comes down to the assertions of one David Grusch, who relies on documents he can’t show people and hearsay that he can’t reveal given by others who supposedly have seen the extraterrestrials and their craft. It’s instructive to look up Grusch on Wikipedia, where you read stuff like this:
David Grusch is a former United States Air Force (USAF) officer and intelligence official who has claimed that the U.S. federal government, in collaboration with private aerospace companies, has highly secretive special access programs involved in the recovery and reverse engineering of “non-human” spacecraft and their dead pilots, and that people have been threatened and killed in order to conceal these programs. Grusch further claims to have viewed documents reporting a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini’s government in 1933 and procured by the U.S. in 1944 or 1945 with the assistance of the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have both denied Grusch’s claims, stating there are no such programs and that extraterrestrial life has yet to be discovered. No evidence supporting Grusch’s UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.
Grusch also appears in an infamous 2½-hour hearing by the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on “Unidentified and Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs”. I’ve put it below. The hearing starts at 18:00, several True Believers gives testimony, and Grusch first appears at 46:45 and also later (I have not listened to the whole thing today). Note that AOC is on the subcommittee.
More from Wikipedia, including about this hearing:
On June 5, 2023, independent journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal provided a story detailing Grusch’s claims of a UFO coverup by the government to The Debrief, a website that describes itself as “self-funded” and specializing in “frontier science”. The New York Times and Politico declined to publish the story, while The Washington Post was taking more time to conduct fact-checking than Kean and Blumenthal felt could be afforded because, according to Kean, “people on the internet were spreading stories, Dave was getting harassing phone calls, and we felt the only way to protect him was to get the story out”.According to Kean, she vetted Grusch by interviewing Karl Nell, a retired Army colonel who was also on the UFO task force, and “Jonathan Grey” (a pseudonym) whom Kean described as “a current U.S. intelligence official at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC)”. Kean wrote that Nell called Grusch “beyond reproach” and that both Nell and “Grey” supported Grusch’s claim about a secret UFO retrieval and reverse engineering program.
Grusch claims that the U.S. federal government maintains a highly secretive UFO retrieval program and possesses multiple spacecraft of what he calls “non-human” origin as well as corpses of deceased pilots. He also claims there is “substantive evidence that white-collar crime” took place to conceal UFO programs and that he had interviewed officials who said that people had been killed to conceal the programs.
Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on “football-field” sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was “malevolent activity” by UFOs.
During a July 26, 2023, Congressional hearing, Grusch said that he “was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access”and that he believed that the U.S. government was in possession of UAP based on his interviews with 40 witnesses over four years. He claimed in response to Congressional questions that the U.S. has retrieved what he terms “non-human ‘biologics'” from the crafts and that this “was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the [UAP] program I talked to, that are currently still on the program”. When Representative Tim Burchett asked him if he had “personal knowledge of people who’ve been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal” the government’s possession of “extraterrestrial technology”, Grusch said yes, but that he was not able to provide details except within a SCIF (Sensitive compartmented information facility).
So it’s not just the government that knows this stuff, but private companies, who apparently retain for study the craft and jars of pickled aliens, or “biologics.” (It may be relevant that Grusch has a history of mental disorders, for which he’s been committed twice to institutions.) At any rate, you can see above that not just Grusch, but also two other people who have had respectable military or government jobs, testify to the credibility of extraterrestrial craft.
The hearing itself, with all three witnesses swearing to tell the truth, has been presented to me as giving credibility of the witnesses’ stories. To me all that means is that three people believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials, and yet fail to present convincing evidence. I have no objections to a hearing, because if there were credible evidence of this stuff, the government would like to know about it. So would the rest of us, especially biologists and physicists.
Both the government and other experts who aren’t True Believers have heard the verbal evidence, but for some reason material evidence never surfaces. I’ll revert to Wikipedia for the last time:
Grusch’s assertions are primarily based on alleged documents and his claimed conversations, rather than testable evidence. Claims that the government is engaged in a conspiratorial effort to conceal evidence of extraterrestrial visitation to Earth are broadly considered untrue by the majority of the scientific community, because such claims oppose the best currently available expert information.
Joshua Semeter of NASA’s UAP independent study team and professor of electrical and computer engineering with Boston University’s College of Engineering concludes that “without data or material evidence, we are at an impasse on evaluating these claims” and that, “in the long history of claims of extraterrestrial visitors, it is this level of specificity that always seems to be missing”. Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, published a critique of the Grusch claims on June 22 with Big Think. Frank writes that he does “not find these claims exciting at all” because they are all “just hearsay” where “a guy says he knows a guy who knows another guy who heard from a guy that the government has alien spaceships”. [JAC: that’s an apt critique of the claims.] Frank also said of the Grusch account that “it’s an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, none of which we’re getting”, adding “show me the spaceship”.
Where is the damn spaceship? Where are the bodies of the extraterrestrial pilots?
You can go down the rabbit hole of these claims for days, but all I’ll say is I will remain skeptical until genuine evidence comes to light—and by that I mean production of the “biologics” and their craft. The failure of proponents to provide such evidence, which is always “kept elsewhere” and is “a secret matter of national security importance”, make me think that what we have here is true conspiracy theory. Again, reporters and skeptics should look at this evidence, but they’ve always come up with bupkes.
When I asked my friend why the greatest news story in the history of humanity has not been broken by mainstream news, I get answers involving extreme secrecy. But give me a break: there existed pickled aliens and spacecraft remains, and none of it has been verified by mainstream news outlets, not in decades? Smells like Pizzagate to me!
Finally, when I’m told that the very testimony of people with decent credentials proves that they’re correct, I respond with this: “Well, there are lots of people with decent credentials who said they have had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.” Plenty of Americans believe in the literal truth of the divine-Jesus story and have had Jesus Encounter Experiences, despite the lack of evidence—even historical, extra-Biblical evidence for a divine, crucified-and-resurrected Son of God. These people far outnumber True Believers in UFOs. Should we then take their testimony about Jesus seriously?
I haven’t followed this controversy closely, and perhaps readers, or people like Michael Shermer, have something to say about it. But until I see those pickled aliens, I think it’s more parsimonious to think that their existence is about as likely as that of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot.
I believe they’re supposed to look something like the picture below. If so, it would be a remarkable example of convergent evolution following two independent origins of life on two different planets.
Peacefyre, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Yeah, they’ve been making these claims for decades. When i was a child i was fascinated by the possibility. But it’s all bullshit. Seventy years of these claims and all we get are blurry photos and unconvincing stories. Every day there are more than a million take off and landings, every one of those planes carrying people with cameras. UFOs flying around? Bullshit. I dont think so.
Conspiracies can work if only a handful of people are involved. But this is a secret kept by thousands over decades? Not a chance. Put up or shut up.
I was at a skeptic convention talk given by a man (military?) who had extensively interviewed many of the scientists and technicians at NASA who would have had to have been involved in anything extraterrestrial, study or coverup. It was his considered opinion than these folks couldn’t keep their mouths shut if their lives depended on it; like most nerdy aficionados, get on their pet topic and they’d happily go on and on and on. They, and other experts like them, were the last people to keep a secret and sit tight lipped on a huge scientific discovery for years. Maybe a week, tops.
Sounds likely.
Shades of John Smith. What is it Hitchens said, That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence? I assume that the True Believers are saying that the aliens will usher in the Age of Aquarius or some such Millenarian dream?
I think a light beam elevator into a flying saucer, where you will meet Ben Dover, and Probe-ably a case of amnesia afterwards.
In the 90s, there was an adult film actor named Ben Dover.
Now, his daughter has become an adult film actor. Her name is Eileen Dover.
They were both from Uranus, apparently.
Q: What does the Starship Enterprise have in common with a piece of toilet paper?
A: They both circle Uranus, in search of Klingons !
Do believers explain how a culture with the technology to travel the distances required to reach Earth always crash or are taken hostage by Earthlings, with our far more primitive technologies? Or how how hundreds of people over the span of 80 years have all agreed to keep mum about extraterrestrials? Given their similarities to humanoids, we are lucky they have not introduced something equivalent to smallpox or plague. I know the call for students to be taught “critical thinking ” sounds tiresome by now, but any educated person ought to be able to ask rational questions and dismiss this type of belief.
“Given their similarities to humanoids, we are lucky they have not introduced something equivalent to smallpox or plague.”
Right, and. it’s all nonsense and crank stuff but never underestimate the Credentialed Brave Independent Thinkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_from_Space
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have this covered.
I shoulda known…
No, they don’t. Because these thoughts do not occur to them. And when these inconsistencies are pointed out, they either do not comprehend them, or ignore them out of some great emotional need for this story to be true.
It’s very similar to the ridiculous “aliens built the Pyramids” claims. Ok, so apparently aliens advanced enough to master interstellar travel visited ancient Egyptians, who just knew simple metallurgy and could quarry and construct basic stone structures. So these aliens decided to give them a boost…by showing them more sophisticated ways of building stone structures. No evidence of advanced metals, no alterative sources of power…nothing.
You can only imagine the disappointment of these Egyptians, enviously watching these aliens with their seemingly god-like technology. The day comes that these aliens announce that they will share their secrets with humanity! Will we now be able to fly like a bird, or instantly communicate with others very far away, or cure any wound, or any number of these incomprehensible abilities that they possess?
Aliens: “My dudes, today is your big day.”
Egyptians: “Oh we can’t wait!!! What secrets will you share with us!?
Aliens: “They are…slightly more advanced ways of building stone structures! See how you can only make a pyramid about 100 cubits high. Well, we’ll help you increase that to 150! And, with a bit more precision on the stone blocks…let’s get those tolerances down. You’ll still have to use your primitive tools and your own muscle power or those of your beasts to move them about, mind you.”
I don’t know if believers in these types of conspiracies (i.e. ones that are not only very improbable, but internally inconsistent) suffer from deficits in basic thinking power, have psychological quirks that make them vulnerable to ideas of this type, or some combination of the two.
Very well put!
Very much like XKCD fore-told:
https://xkcd.com/2477/
Aliens built the Easter Island statues: I’ve seen that one, too.
Part of that claim used to rest on the breathless assertion that, like the Tycho Monolith in 2001, no trace of quarrying on Easter Island had ever been found. (I think that was a claim from Chariots of the Gods.) But in fact the stone beds the moai and the different coloured stone top knots were cut from are well known archeological sites, down to the stone tools the workers left behind when they knocked off shift for the last time. Some of the quarries contain partially worked moai. The volcanic tuff isn’t all that hard to work. Google even shows a reconstruction of how the moai could be “walked” vertically to their display sites without having to crane them from horizontal to vertical.
But of course I’ve never been to Easter Island to see for myself and the above is what “They” would want me to believe, isn’t it….
[Cue Twilight Zone music.]
I’ve always wondered about the sci-fi scenario of alien microbes causing a plague. It is probably true that our immune systems would be helpless to attack an alien microbe, but wouldn’t the alien microbes be equally unable to exploit our alien biochemistry? Terrestrial microbes that infect us have coevolved with us for hundreds of millions of years. But it seems to me that if a truly alien microbe entered my body it would simply perish for lack of sustenance. Wouldn’t my proteins be useless or perhaps poisonous to it? Not that I would volunteer to test this theory on myself.
I’m at my comment limit for the thread but just wanted to follow on to this…as yes I’ve always wondered this myself. Also, it seems that at least one author understood that concept at least partially..in H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds”, the aliens successfully invade us but then are thwarted by our microbes, which we are resistant to (because of co-evolution as you point out) but they are not. But then…wouldn’t these advanced aliens have known this would be a problem to begin with??? It’s basic biology man.
That to me demonstrates how hard it is to write science fiction, especially involving future technologies.
The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton
(Late 70s?)
Book and movie each one of my absolute favorites!
The book is so great because it has realistic data output from – IIRC – protein sequencing, X-ray crystallography/scattering, etc….
Chrichton was a clever man and wrote intriguing books. He was also very tall – 6’9″ (206 cm)!
It’s intriguing, what captures peoples’ attention. But that drawing can’t be right. There are no antennae on the head. A more accurate rendition is, I think, In the Dick Tracey comics where the moon people show up, at least so far as I can glean from the Comics Curmudgeon website.
I’m impressed that they can walk around with those gigantic heads without toppling over. Carl Sagan thought that they looked like fetuses.
As Bryan points out in Comment 11 below, there is a religious element in how many people view aliens. People assume that if aliens come here, they will be wise, all-powerful beings who want to help us. Consider the movie “E.T.” : A being comes from the sky, performs miracles, dies, rises from the dead, tells his followers to be good, and then ascends into the sky. The poster for E.T. even alluded to Michelangelo’s “Creation of Man,” with E.T.’s finger replacing God’s.
“Starman” features Jeff Bridges as another alien who can perform miracles. He impregnates a human woman and tells her that she will give birth to a son who will be a great teacher; she protests that she is infertile, but he assures her that the seemingly impossible conception is true, and he then ascends to the heavens.
In “Cocoon,” aliens heal (restore vitality to) a group of senior citizens and end up taking them to a place where “they won’t ever get sick, they won’t get any older and they won’t ever die.” When my mother saw this on TV, she said “People don’t believe in Heaven any more, so they make movie9s like this.” I don’t think she was wrong.
I wonder if science fiction in non-western cultures (one where Hinduism, say, is the dominant religion) is influenced by the religion in that culture?
As for how aliens can travel the necessary distances, Shirley MacLaine explained it to Johnny Carson on an episode of The Tonight Show: Thought can travel faster than light, and the fastest thought is love. The starships are powered by thought, specifically love. I know Carson was a skeptic, and I imagine it took self-control to keep a straight face.
My first boyfriend, who had been brought up in a strict Ukrainian Orthodox family, was a fervent believer in UFOs and alien visitors. He thought the aliens were here to teach us and would give us the secrets of everlasting life. It always seemed to me that he had shed his religious upbringing but needed a “science-y” substitute.
Traversing the cosmos solely via the power of love was the theme of the finale of the big budget movie Interstellar, as I recall. Incredibly dumb. I groaned at the time.
Johnny Carson even attempting to keep a straight face would have caused great mirth in the studio audience. They would have had to cut to a commercial.
Michael Shermer and Skeptic is the best for everything UFO.
I thought UFO stuff was a fad or pure entertsinment through the 70s, 80s, .. X-files… I thought Neil DeGrasse Tyson put the nail in the coffin.
But it is dawning on me that … IMHO … UFO stuff is a modern pseudoscientific version of ancient Gnostic cult thought, perhaps driven by certain incentives.
IOW human nature and its ‘bugs’ have not changed in centuries.. millennia…. perhaps categorized as psychological aberration, but at root a consequence of human nature… ?
“wadda ya gonna do”…
Yep, Michael does a good demolition job of this nonsense here :
https://www.skeptic.com/article/the-aliens-are-here-again-a-review-of-the-age-of-disclosure/
The saying “Three may keep a secret, if two are dead” springs to mind. It’s a conspiracy theory, like the covid lab leak, but far less plausible.
“Her claim is that the bodies and the spaceships (presumably crashed) have been given to private companies by the government, and the craft are being reverse-engineered to suss out the technology behind the “UFOs”.”
So possibly hundreds, even thousands, of individuals are walking around with this information, and no one is leaking credible clues or documenting this in a way that would be convincing to a skeptic? Information that would be the most incredible discovery in human history has been given to members of PRIVATE organizations, and somehow not one person is coming forward?
The probability of this is close to zero. I truly think that people who believe in conspiracies of this type have either a general intelligence deficit, or some psychological trait that renders them very bad at assessing probability from basic facts and premises. A form of innumeracy, in fact.
I wonder if studies have been done on the cognitive capabilities of hard-core conspiracy theorists.
KNox’s Conspiracy Conjecture: For every vast conspiracy X there is a strictly vaster conspiracy Y in which X is an intentional misdirection.
(The infinite ascending chain aspect of this is admittedly a difficulty, but there are workarounds.)
Examples:
● Big Tinfoil (Y) covertly fosters many conspiracies (X), some of them patently ridiculous, so that sales will increase.
● The Aliens (Y) covertly founded Big Tinfoil (X) so that the first wave of the invasion (a.k.a. the Greatest Replacement Ever) can more easily neutralise those few Insightful humans who know The Truth, by means of remote detection and detonation of tinfoil hats.
● The Aliens (Y) also either covertly influence (via mind control) or bribe or threaten some humans to make sarcastic comments about all conspiracies (X) so that the Insightful will be ridiculed, ignored, and generally reduced as a threat. (The Aliens are not barbarians — they kill only when other methods fail.)
Prove me wrong.
The universe has a great many stars. The idea that intelligent life has only existed on just one doesn’t seem very likely. The notion that aliens might visit our planet does not seem completely farfetched. I am not trying to attach credibility to any specific claim. Almost all UFO claims are complete BS. However, ‘almost all’ is not ‘all’.
I’m not a scientist. Nor any kind of statistician. However, I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that in this case, ‘almost all’ is all.
On the other hand, I have never been to Area 51.
Many stars indeed. But we don’t know the probability of life occurring. It may be vanishingly small. And even if simple life is prevalent, there are many other improbable steps after that to get to a space-faring species. And…there is a timing issue. Perhaps an intelligent species did pass by, but it was 50 million years ago.
If technologically advanced species arise and fall at different times, and the distances between them are vast and the speed of light represents a genuine speed limit, then the chances of interactions are almost zero.
I agree but the problem is we don’t know how likely intelligent life is to arise (we have a data sample N=1). And even if life did arise, the likelihood is that the distance from us would make communication, let alone visitation, virtually impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
One assumption behind the Fermi paradox is this:
“If Earth-like planets are typical, then some may have developed intelligent life long ago.”
But we don’t have the slightest idea how likely it is for an Earth-like planet to produce intelligent life. Fermi was having some fun but calling it a “paradox” is a big stretch.
“what we have here is true conspiracy theory”
Is that an oxymoron?
Naah. Of course I meant “classic conspiracy theory”
I can understand that a few people might sincerely believe this stuff for their own reasons. But I find more disturbing the fact that reporters, Congress, and other serious folks give these claims credence despite so little evidence supporting them and so a low probability of them being true.
It seems to me there is a serious hole in our education system; we have produced a crop of leaders who are not very good at weighing evidence or at even understanding what constitutes evidence. Some of JFK, Jr.’s beliefs regarding the dangers of vaccines come to mind. Maybe it has always been this way.
A parallel to religion just occurred to me, the way aliens in UFO conspiracies always look like humans – this is the inverse of Imago Dei (man created in the image of god) / but instead, human creation of aliens in their own image – “man” as god creating alien .. which themselves could be god of “man” … the Gnostic Ouroboros with Aliens ad infinitum…
Starry Messengers used to be angels, now they are Greys.
“I thought that they were angels, but to my surprise,
We climbed aboard their starship, and headed for the skies!”
. . . but much to my surprise . . .
An excellent song reference, Come Sail Away by Styx. When he wasn’t home I’d sneak into my older brother’s room and listen to this album (Grand Illusion) on his audiophile headphones, close my eyes and be transported to another world.
Thanks for the correction; I was just going from memory.
To me, it’s the most perfectly secular couplet in the entire rock ‘n roll canon.
This is why I can’t take these claims seriously. If aliens exist they would be fundamentally different from us in their body plan and maybe even in their biology.
Projection is what I think this all is … from opposite directions:
As seen in The Office meme :
• “Corporate wants you to tell us the difference between these two pictures”
• picture: | Imago Dei | Greys |
• “It’s the same picture“
JW, perhaps not. Take a look at the results of the Miller-Urey experiment. I am reasonably sure that alien life (if it exists) would be different. How different is not clear.
The lack of material evidence leaves me uncommitted. The nature of what is being claimed leaves me skeptical. I do not, however, dismiss the idea that government programs can be kept secret for decades—they can, they have, they do—though this is far more common for inactive programs. Anyone who has worked in or around such a program knows that to reveal convincing details would only make you a criminal, while anything short of that could make you look like a kook.
If you ever want to get caught up in the details, one of the best websites is Metabunk:
https://www.metabunk.org/home/
It was originally started by Mick West, but it’s grown a decently large community that looks into a lot of specific claims of various UFO/UAP sightings. If you remember the trio of Pentagon released videos that made a splash a few years ago, they’ve got pretty good explanations of what all of those videos probably were in reality (spoiler: not alien spacecraft).
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin from Poor Richard’s Almanack, the only way three people can keep a secret “is if two of them are dead.” A similar calculus would seem to apply to numbers greater than three.
My life experiences over my 72 years would support this.
Another relevant observation about human nature is that it’s no fun to have a secret unless you let someone else know you’re keeping it.
The Five W’s of Confidentiality
[TTTO Good King Wenceslaus]
Confidentiality tells
No one
Nothing
Never
Nowhere on land, air, or sea
Not in any measure
“No one” means no one at all
Even the trust-worthy
Promising that they won’t tell —
You leaked, so then why – won’t – they?
© 2024, no charge for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
Let me offer three somewhat contradictory examples. The Soviets thoroughly infiltrated the US atomic bomb project. Conversely, the Soviets were apparently completely unaware that the Germans had invented nerve gas (the Germans never used the poisons that they invented). The third example is the breaking of the Enigma code. Eventually the truth (about the Enigma code) leaked. It took decades.
Ultra was declassified lawfully under the Official Secrets Act in 1974. It created a sensation. The main Anglo-American effort was never leaked, although the Poles and French who were working on the Enigma cipher until their countries were over-run did, after the war, publish their work (which they never disclosed to their German captors and which had greatly assisted the British at Bletchley Park.) Winston Churchill and the senior military men in on it took the secret to their graves, even when their historical legacies might have been vindicated had they been able to say, “You know my bitterly criticized decision to fight the Battle of Britain with small fighter squadrons? Well, …” Not even Alan Turing, tempted though he must have been, used his Bletchley Park work to appeal for leniency. (So far as we know, anyway. I like to think that Buckingham Palace might have had a quiet word with the Home Office to go gently on him — “He’s not one of those homosexual traitors who got away,” — as he did get off rather easy all things considered.)
Keeping really important secrets isn’t all that difficult if you have the right temperament. I was never a doctor to the stars but we all come across public figures from time to time in what anywhere else would be compromising situations. You just know you can never talk about them, any more than you can talk about any patient. It would be a grave transgression. End of story. (In Commonwealth countries the Official Secrets Act is a powerful incentive to silence. The Crown doesn’t have to prove an attempt to damage the Realm. The mere fact of disclosure sends you to prison.)
Even gossipy airheads may be dissembling, being deliberately loose-lipped about trivial matters to create the impression that no one would confide in them about anything, while keeping the important things deep in their hearts.
In 1974, Frederick Winterbotham published a book about the breaking of the enigma secret (The Ultra Secret). Who was he? He was a former RAF Intelligence officer. He did get official approval for the contents of his book. However, it isn’t exactly as if the British government decided to disclose the breaking of enigma.
How many of Robert Park’s signs of bogus science (reprinted at https://quackwatch.org/related/signs/) can we detect here?
1. Pitches claim directly to media;
2. Suppression by establishment;
3. Effect at limits of detection;
4. Anecdotal evidence;
5. Appeal to acceptance in popular culture (or history);
6. Discoverer is “independent” of colleagues, associations, agencies, etc.;
7. Needs new laws of Nature to support claim.
I count at least 5 on a quick review of his claims!
Outstanding article; thanks!
Robert Park is also the author of the excellent book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, which is the book for people who have already read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark and want more of the same.
All of this requires faster than light travel, which remains theoretical. People don’t pay enough attention to Douglas Adams: Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Yes, it would require something like “warp speed.” The probability that members of another civilization have visited Earth is practically zero. How can anyone believe this?
Not theoretical – completely speculative science fiction. There is no evidence of worm holes, folded space to game the speed of light for faster interstellar travel, or “warp fields”. It takes infinite energy to accelerate matter to the speed of light. If black holes rending suns apart and spitting matter out of its poles in jets of particles cannot exceed the speed of light nor gravitational waves from cosmic collisions, then nothing at human scale building contraptions is going to. Interstellar travel is a fiction stemming from human wishful thinking and my knowledge of physics strongly suggests that no creature will be capable of it. Maybe robotic missions within a few lighyears of a home planet over hundreds or thousands of years but for us humans, ask yourself – how many fascinating ET creatures live not within the Milky Way galaxy but within 200 light years of Earth TO visit? I’ll wager zero. We ain’t abducting them, they ain’t abducting us.
The “relying on documents he has but can’t share” reminds me strongly of the Mormon Golden Tablets that Joseph Smith claimed to have but could never share.
Why can’t he share the documents — was this clear to Jerry or his friend?
This is a timely post as we are just leaving the Santa Claus season and won’t get to Easter Bunny time for a while.
Perhaps I should say that I am skeptical for the sake of bend-over-backwards formality, but the claims are so incredibly bogus to me that I am more in the camp of people who say this definitely is pure fantasy. Akin to the chances of there being unicorns and angels.
1. One is asking for 1000’s of people, over generations, to keep an explosive secret. This won’t happen. Threats and even assassinations won’t be enough. And why even try to keep it secret? There is no reason to keep this secret totally secret. Why not say “yes, we have ’em. But we are keeping details secret”.
2. I don’t think that interstellar space travel is even possible for organic beings. I doubt. there is a propulsion system, even in the range of nearby sci-fi fantasy, that can move such a mass at the required speeds for this to work. To say nothing of the ripplingly intense radiation that would be experienced, the relative energy of which only increases with speed.
3. Also, such a civilization would have to be well within ~ a 100 light years from us for them to detect our transmissions and to even know to pay a visit. And yet beyond 100 light years for us to not be in range to detect their transmissions.
4. Individuals with respectable military or government jobs might have a bachelor’s degree. And technical training to be a military pilot absolutely does not mean they have high order critical thinking skills and above average abilities to not fool themselves.
“And technical training to be a military pilot absolutely does not mean they have high order critical thinking skills and above average abilities to not fool themselves.”
True, but I can’t help thinking: Like all those people with post-graduate degrees who believe boys can be girls, and girls can be boys; think it unevidenced that men have a general advantage in most athletic competitions; believe that they had a 25%+ chance of dying if infected with COVID; thought that tales of Biden’s demise were conspiracy theory; and found Kamala the fount of joy and competence? We could go on with the follies all day long.
Is that the type of high-order thinking from our “best and brightest” that you had in mind?! If only education were the antidote to bias and self-deception that you seem to believe it to be.
As an aside, all officers today will have bachelor’s degrees and most will have master’s degrees within ten years of commissioning (though of highly varying quality). Moreover, pilot trainees are drawn disproportionately from the top performers at the Academy and among ROTC distinguished graduates (top 10%); the average will have a STEM degree, and SAT scores well above 1400 (old scale or new) are commonplace. Elite? Some of them. Stupid? Few of them. But as I suggested, intelligence and education are overrated safeguards against folly and self-deception.
See Michael Shermer’s book Why People Believe Weird Things, especially chapter 18, “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things”.
“From my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.”
Richard Feynman
Gotta say I absolutely adore the claim that aliens could have got here using “different dimensions”. Unfalsifiable and also wicked cool.
My father was a USAF officer with sufficient rank to know pretty much all the secrets.
When I was a teenager, I asked him about aliens and whether we had encountered them.
He told me that if we had, the information would be highly classified, and he could not share it with anyone.
However, he pointed out “I do not believe in UFOs”.
If I were an alien in charge of investigating Earth I’d make sure that each UFO I sent out carried a demolition charge that could be triggered remotely in the event of a crash. Expressly to prevent bodies of the crew and advanced technology falling into the hands of the primitives.
If not, why not?
Recruitment barrier, I should think.
Also, the signal from home base to trigger the destruction would take hundreds of years to reach the detonator. By that time the primitive earthlings would have figured out how the damn thing worked….and how to disarm the fuse.
One alien to another: “let’s crash land on that little blue dot”
Skeptical homo: yeah alien! you have the technology and can traverse over light years, but when you have a problem you can’t fix it because Dozo down in the engine room left the spare part at home?.
Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant Sirens of Titan explains the purpose of all of human history: our whole history was guided to produce a spare part for a broken alien spaceship.
This conspiracy thinking is analogous to religion. Perhaps they should start their own church. Claims that are not falsifiable. Influenced by cultural memes of the times (sci-fi books, movies, etc). A desire to believe in something amazing.
The odds of us seeing or interacting with an alien species are so low that it is not much different than believing in a god. Humans don’t have the capacity to grasp the infinite vastness of time and space. There could very well be other life in the universe but the chances of us crossing paths with it are astronomically low.
Space aliens are the modern day version of angels. They watch over us stealthily, highly concerned with our welfare, and visit a privileged few only under mysterious circumstances. If they leave a message, it’s usually a warning about something we’re worried about – pollution and nuclear war being favorites.
When it comes to UFOs I have a “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” attitude. When I was a young teen and a big fan of Sagan I enthusiatically read UFO reports. Every one of them turned out to be explainable so before I believe the next one theres going to be have to be very compelling direct evidence.
I recently watched an intereresting documentary on UFOs – ‘The Age of Disclosure” that included interviews with high level politicians including Marco Rubio that suggested there really are some unusual phenomena ocurring. For example many navy and commmerical pilots have seen very unusual objects. They implied that many of these have been seen or detected by multiple witnesses simultaneously. I assume at this point they know how to rule out optical abberations from camera lenses, radar, canopies and pilot visors etc.
The things that make me most skeptical are the talk of ‘biologics’ and the alien image above along with claims of ‘other dimensions’ etc. Also, our technology has improved in the last 2 decades such that we’d now think UFOs should be autonomous and that the most intelligent entities in the universe will almost certainly be non-biological. But I guess these aliens are stuck in the 1970s
Rod
Any serious discussion of UAPs has to include the 2004 USS Nimitz “Tic Tac”—leaving it out undercuts the whole argument. Navy radar tracked objects dropping from tens of thousands of feet to sea level almost instantly, and pilots visually encountered a smooth, white, wingless craft with no exhaust that easily outperformed their jets: https://youtu.be/zlrz84nEXtk?si=1GY0xCynIdXQpSfZ
Since then, sightings of unexplained orbs—including the widely analyzed Mosul Orb—have increased, showing similar no‑propulsion behavior. This isn’t proof of aliens, but it is solid military evidence that something real and unexplained is happening.
Yes, there are some objects that haven’t been identified, and I realize that. But saying that there are unidentified objects gives credibility to flying saucers and aliens, when we supposedly have tangible evidence of saucers and pickled aliens, is no reason to believe in such things–any more than our failure to understand consciousness proves God.
As for your saying that omission of all the UAPs “undercuts the whole argument,” it’s clear that you don’t understand how a rational argument is made, and what conclusions follow from what observations.
Show me a crashed saucer and a pickled alien, and THEN I’ll be impressed.