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WillowOne's Positions

UFOs and UAP

My Positions

  1. Some things seen in the sky remain unidentified. "Unidentified" means we do not know what it was. It does not mean we know what it was and it was aliens. The entire subject lives in the gap between those two sentences.
  2. No UFO or UAP case has ever produced a piece of physical evidence, a clear photograph, or a measurement that survived analysis and was inconsistent with known physics. Every famous case that has been fully investigated has turned out to be a balloon, an aircraft, a bird, a satellite, a planet, a sensor artefact, a trick of parallax, or a hoax. The residue is the cases with too little data to resolve, and a residue of unresolved cases is what you would expect whether or not anyone is visiting.
  3. Life elsewhere in the universe is plausible, perhaps likely. Visitation is a separate claim, and the distance between "there is probably life out there" and "it is here, and the government has the bodies" is the distance the Sagan Standard exists to measure.
  4. Governments do keep secrets about aircraft, sensors and surveillance, and that is why some sightings are classified and some officials are evasive. The inference from "they will not tell us what it is" to "they know it is alien" is a non sequitur, and the 2024 Pentagon review found that most of the "secret programme" stories were garbled accounts of exactly this kind of mundane secrecy.
  5. I would be delighted to be wrong. Nothing in this vault would thrill me more than a saucer on the lawn. That is precisely why I distrust my own readiness to believe it.

Rejected Positions

The Navy videos show craft beyond human technology

  • Claim: The three US Navy videos released in 2017 and 2020 (FLIR1 or "Tic Tac", 2004; "Gimbal" and "GoFast", 2015) show objects accelerating, rotating and moving at speeds no aircraft could manage, and the Navy has confirmed they are real.
  • Basis: The videos themselves; pilot testimony, in particular from the 2004 Nimitz encounter; the Navy's 2019 statement that the footage was authentic and showed "unidentified aerial phenomena"; the Pentagon's 2020 release.
  • Reason for rejection: The Navy confirmed that the videos were genuine Navy videos and that the objects in them had not been identified. That was reported, and is still repeated, as if the Navy had confirmed the objects were extraordinary. It had not. Mick West's frame-by-frame analyses, since broadly endorsed by the Pentagon's own office, found ordinary explanations for the apparent anomalies: the GoFast object appears to skim the sea at great speed but the camera's own numbers put it at around thirteen thousand feet moving at roughly wind speed, the impression of speed being parallax from a jet passing at five hundred knots; the Gimbal object "rotates" in step with the camera's de-rotation mechanism, which is what a glare from a hot engine does when the gimbal housing turns; and the Tic Tac video's sudden departure coincides with a change of zoom and loss of tracking lock. The 2004 pilots' accounts are sincere and were given years after the event, with no retained radar data released and the usual divergence between witnesses. Sincere testimony about a brief, confusing event is the weakest kind of evidence we have (Eyewitness Testimony Argument), and infrared cameras designed to track jets are not instruments for measuring the size, distance or speed of an unknown blob.

Whistleblowers have proved a crashed-craft retrieval programme

  • Claim: In July 2023 a former intelligence officer, David Grusch, told Congress under oath that the United States has recovered "non-human" craft and "biologics" and has reverse-engineered them in secret for decades, and other insiders have since confirmed it.
  • Basis: Grusch's testimony; a 2024 hearing at which Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon official, and a journalist described a further programme they said they had been told about; the general plausibility of government secrecy; Roswell.
  • Reason for rejection: Grusch testified that he had not seen a craft, a body, a photograph or a document himself; everything he reported was told to him by others whom he would not name in open session. That is hearsay, and hearsay under oath is still hearsay. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office then did what a whistleblower claim invites: it interviewed some thirty witnesses, including Grusch's sources where it could identify them, reviewed every programme it could find back to 1945, and reported in March 2024 that it had found no evidence that any US government investigation, academic study or contractor had ever confirmed extraterrestrial technology, and that several of the stories traced to authentic classified programmes, with no alien content, that had been misunderstood by people who had heard of them second-hand. The 2024 hearing repeated the pattern: documents described but not produced, programmes named but not evidenced. A secret that has supposedly been kept by thousands of engineers for seventy-five years, and that is now being revealed by people who have each heard it from someone else, has the structure of a rumour, not a leak. See Burden of proof and the silence-of-thousands test in Moon Landing.

Roswell

  • Claim: A flying saucer crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947, the Air Force recovered the craft and the bodies of its crew, and has covered it up ever since.
  • Basis: A 1947 press release from the base saying a "flying disc" had been recovered, retracted the next day; the recollections of the intelligence officer involved, interviewed thirty-one years later; subsequent books, witnesses and a 1995 "autopsy" film, since admitted to be a fake.
  • Reason for rejection: The debris was a balloon train from Project Mogul, a then-classified programme to detect Soviet nuclear tests with microphones carried at high altitude, which explains both the odd materials (foil, balsa, tape with flower patterns) and the Air Force's clumsy cover story. The "bodies" entered the story in the late 1970s and match the anthropomorphic dummies dropped in parachute tests over New Mexico in the 1950s, remembered and relocated in time. The case was dormant for three decades, which is not how a town that had seen aliens behaves, and the mythology was assembled afterwards from the recollections of elderly witnesses in interviews with people who already knew the answer. The Air Force's two reports of the 1990s are dull and conclusive.

Alien abductions

  • Claim: Thousands of people have been taken aboard craft, examined, and returned, and recover the memory under hypnosis.
  • Basis: The Hill case of 1961 and the wave that followed Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987); the consistency of the accounts; the sincerity and apparent sanity of the experiencers.
  • Reason for rejection: The accounts are consistent because the script is cultural: the large-eyed grey alien entered popular culture through television and film and the abductees describe what the culture had already shown them (the first "wraparound eyes" were described by Barney Hill twelve days after an episode of The Outer Limits featured exactly that). The memories are produced by hypnotic regression, which is a reliable method for manufacturing detailed false memories and is no longer admissible in court for that reason. The experience itself is sleep paralysis, which affects a large minority of people at some point, and which produces precisely the features reported: paralysis, a sense of presence, pressure on the chest, figures at the bedside, and a terror out of all proportion. Susan Clancy's studies at Harvard found abductees to be ordinary people with ordinary memories and a slightly greater tendency to create false ones under suggestion. See Near-Death Experiences and Ghosts for the same experience with a different costume.

Alien bodies have been displayed, and an interstellar object was a probe

  • Claim: In September 2023 two "non-human" mummified bodies were presented to the Mexican Congress; and the interstellar object 'Oumuamua, which passed through the solar system in 2017, was an artificial probe, as argued by the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb.
  • Basis: A television presenter with a long history of hoaxes; 'Oumuamua's unusual shape and slight non-gravitational acceleration.
  • Reason for rejection: The Mexican "bodies" were assembled from llama and human bones and had been seized by Peruvian customs years earlier; their presenter had previously announced a different alien corpse that turned out to be a mummified child. 'Oumuamua's acceleration is explained by outgassing of hydrogen from a water-ice body, without exotic assumptions, and Loeb's subsequent expedition to dredge "interstellar spherules" from the Pacific recovered what other analyses found to be coal ash. Loeb's own stated method, that an alien explanation should be preferred until ruled out, is the burden of proof inverted and an Appeal to Ignorance in a Harvard chair.

Notes

  1. The pattern since 2017. The modern wave began with a New York Times story about a twenty-two-million-dollar Pentagon programme that had been secured by a senator for the benefit of a contractor friend who owned a "haunted" ranch in Utah, and it has run on a single rhetorical engine ever since: officials say "we don't know what some of these are", and this is reported as "the government admits UFOs are real". The 2021 intelligence assessment that is routinely cited as a confirmation reviewed 144 reports, identified one as a deflating balloon, and said of the rest that there was not enough data. That is not a mystery; that is a filing cabinet. The NASA study of 2023 said the same in more words. The February 2023 episode, in which a Chinese surveillance balloon was followed by three more objects shot down over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron, was the best natural experiment the subject has had: for a week the objects were "unidentified", and then they were hobby balloons, and the people who had spent a week saying "unidentified does not mean alien" turned out to be right.
  2. Why I would expect unresolved cases anyway. The sky is full of things: forty thousand aircraft a day, millions of balloons, tens of thousands of satellites and pieces of debris, birds, insects on the lens, Venus, meteors, flares, drones, lens flare, and the artefacts of cameras built to do something else. Human perception of distance, size and speed against an empty sky is poor, and that is not an insult; it is a fact about the geometry of a single eye with no reference point. A record of a million sightings in which a few hundred cannot be explained from the available data is not evidence that the few hundred are extraordinary. It is evidence that the available data are sometimes inadequate (Appeal to Ignorance). The question "where is everybody?" is real and interesting, and "they are here but only ever show up as a blurry dot" is the least interesting of its answers.
  3. The structure. This is the folder's standard shape with a better budget. The claim is unfalsifiable: every investigation that finds nothing is itself the cover-up. It requires the silence of thousands, now stretched over eight decades and several governments that detest each other, any one of which would gain enormously by exposing the others. It mistakes the proponent's inability to identify a dot with the impossibility of identifying it (Personal Incredulity). And it prefers a grand secret to a dull one (Hanlon's Razor): the Pentagon has been evasive because it was hiding its own surveillance aircraft, its sensors' capabilities, and its embarrassment, none of which is a saucer.
  4. What would change my mind. A piece of material whose isotope ratios are not of this solar system, examined by independent laboratories. A photograph with a reference object in frame. A radar track corroborated by two independent sensors and a visual. A prediction. The believers have had seventy-five years and the best cameras in history, every one of us now carries one, and the photographs have got worse. Carl Sagan, who spent his career hoping for contact, put it as well as it can be put: I would love to believe, and that is exactly why I have to be careful.

Sources

  • All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I (March 2024) — https://www.aaro.mil/
  • Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (June 2021)
  • NASA, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team Report (September 2023)
  • House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, hearing on UAP, 26 July 2023 (testimony of David Grusch, David Fravor and Ryan Graves)
  • Mick West, Metabunk analyses of the GoFast, Gimbal and FLIR1 videos — https://www.metabunk.org/
  • United States Air Force, The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (1995) and The Roswell Report: Case Closed (1997)
  • Clancy, S. A., Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (2005)
  • Bergner, J. B. and Seligman, D. Z., "Acceleration of 1I/'Oumuamua from radiolytically produced H₂ in H₂O ice", Nature 615 (2023)
  • Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995), chapters 4 to 10

Also see