I’m curious how many people on this forum actually think aliens are a plausible explanation. As near as I can tell, there are only two people in this thread who would claim such a thing – @Wallapuctus and @Mr.GRIM – and to be fair, I’m not even sure if they would claim such a thing. So here’s my attempt to ask with language as neutral as I can make it:
Are unexplained sightings (i.e. UFOs) evidence of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth?
Keep in mind your vote is public! And is there a better way to phrase the question?
-Tom
Menzo
1589
I think it’s a little vague. I mean I don’t know if they’re evidence of aliens, but I don’t think they can only be explained by aliens.
Depends on what you’re after. “Might unexplained sightings be evidence of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth?” is going to get you a slightly different set of answers, I think. My answer would still be no, mind you.
I also wonder if the answer distribution would shift if the voting weren’t public. I suspect our resident believers would tell you there’s a stigma about this, and they’re not entirely wrong.
Maybe just ‘do you believe extraterrestrial life is visiting Earth’ or something. I don’t think believers rely solely on unexplained sightings, they are swayed by witness accounts and supposed whistleblower testimonials as well.
So, for everyone going “I’m not saying it’s little green men, but…”, what comes next? What would you consider as a plausible explanation for those recordings? Because if you rule out sensor artifacts, natural phenomena, and man-made vehicles, then you are in fact saying it’s little green men.
I think they’re incredibly weak evidence. In the same way, but more so, that maggots were weak evidence for spontaneous generation.
Menzo
1594
Sure, if you rule out all the stuff that we’re not ruling out. But my explanation is that it is literally anything else that exists on Earth.
Of course I said yes. I’ll explain my answer.
The argument against aliens always comes back to is FTL is impossible, and that space is too big.
Aliens doesn’t necessarily mean FTL space ships or breaking our understanding of physics. It’s entirely possible to travel to another star and have it take a really long time. We just say it’s impossible because we only live 80 years, 40 of which are useful years. Extraterrestrials could live 40 years or 400 years. There’s research going on right now to extend human lifespans. 1000 years from now we could make a machine or AI and send out to gather information and just let it take it’s sweet time.
Regarding the size of space: In a few years, we’ll have space-based telescopes that are going to be able to analyze exoplanets’ atmospheres for the signatures of life. We can create a list of candidates to explore based on that. I imagine if some other star is looking at ours and sees Earth, they’d flag us as a candidate for life too.
Did I phrase that wrong? There have been a number of posts here explaining why those USN videos can’t possibly be any of those things, but at the same time pointedly stopping short of saying they are definitely alien sightings.
ET! That’s a really good point; ET is absolutely one of the best 2600 cartridges. Indeed, it serves even in the present day as a shibboleth of sorts to distinguish girly-gamers who don’t like ET and wear pink panties from pure barbarian gamers who like ET and literally can’t wear underwear or even pants because their balls are too big. (I assume that’s what you mean by baggage.)
So I would have voted no with how the question was asked in the poll, but I said yes with this caveat: I think these sightings COULD be non human intelligence. There’s not quite enough data to come to that conclusion yet though.
It’s also worth noting, that the people with access to the classified information are saying some pretty eyebrow raising things that lean in that direction also. Eric Wienstien puts it best:
This interview with Sen. Martin Heinrich, who is part of the intel committee and has received classified briefings on the subject from today:
“I Cant Imagine it being a foreign government, we would have seen some indications of these advanced technologies”
Luis Elizondo, the guy who ran the UFO program has said that it is aliens in every way he can without actually saying it outright.
Those comments from the people in the know sure make you think. On top of that, you have these recent, well attested sightings being quite similar to other very well attested sightings from the 50’s 60’s etc… That’s worth noting.
Finally, I don’t believe interstellar travel is as impossible as people here seem to think it is.
To paraphrase James Randi, I can’t tell you how that was done, but I can show you a method to do it exactly the same that is completely rational.
Menzo
1600
I can’t believe I’m posting this, because I am NOT a believer in aliens, but…
If the government knew aliens existed, or at least had a strong feeling they did, the current drip, drip, drip escalation of denying it, then slowly releasing some videos that maybe show it, while also starting to say things like “these videos show things that no other country is capable of,” is exactly how you’d warm up the population to the eventual announcement that yes, it’s aliens.
Unfortunately it’s also what you’d do when there are hundreds of different people in or previously in the US government with different opinions who feel free to share them with the world, even if it turns out it’s just broken equipment, lens flares, weather balloons, experimental craft, or whatever.
MikeJ
1603
What do you mean by plausible? For instance, I’d think there is maybe a 50% chance that one or more alien civilisations currently exist in the galaxy. In some significant slice of those scenarios, many alien civilisations have existed long enough (millions of years) that they could have placed some sort of automatons over a significant fraction of the galaxy. So maybe there is a 10% chance that alien artifacts are operating in the solar system?
In most of those possible scenarios we’d have no hope of detecting such artifacts. It would certainly be extremely odd if the alien tech behaved like the supposed objects in some of these incidents do. On the other hand, how confident are we supposed to be in our models of likely alien behaviour? It’s hard enough to predict what people will do in familiar scenarios. The objects seem to violate well-established physics (making the observations more likely to errors), but again, how confident are we supposed to be in what capabilities a drone from a million-year-old civilisation could possibly have?
Anyway, it’s worth investigating properly.
Counterpoint: If they knew it and presumably had some access to their tech, where are the near-magical advances? We’re still basically just figuring out better radar and making slightly better rocket cones through what appears to be decades of material research and development. My question would be: is there a breakthrough we’ve made in the last 70 years that seems implausible?
Uh, guys, if interstellar travel is easier than we think it is, the case for aliens is even worse. Because if it’s easy to spread out from star to star, they’d already be here, in force, and would have been a long time ago. We’d look up in the night sky and see it teaming with civilization. We don’t. Interstellar travel being preposterously difficult is at least part of the explanation for the Fermi Paradox, though it doesn’t get you all the way there. If interstellar travel’s simple, where is everybody?
I tend to think there’s no active, technological civilization inside our particle horizon. That still leaves room for a functionally infinite amount of intelligent alien life in the universe, mind you.
If you start at 50%, which I presume means 50% they’re operating now, and you include the entire galaxy, then even if they were lightspeed tribbles the sheer vastness of the galaxy throws any chance of contact down into the ten-thousandths of a percent, to throw out a number. The galaxy is not a small place.
Honestly this feels like creationism vs. evolution, where the primary disagree is that the creationists simply haven’t grasped the depth of time that we have very good evidence for. Evolution makes perfect sense considering adapting and changing organisms over millions and billions of years, it’s inevitable. Aliens in our skies right now (and oddly not contacting us or not being prevalent until the movies came up with them in the 40s and 50s) is equally ignoring depth of space.
A point that should be repeated often, nobody argues that there isn’t life out there, previous or post or right now, just that it being here in the preferred format of “flying around a bit” is vanishingly unlikely.
Timex
1609
Cars exist, but there are lots of places on earth where no car has ever driven. And the galaxy is a lot bigger than earth.
We are in some backwater solar system on the edge of the galaxy. Maybe no one’s here because there’s no reason for anyone to have come here, because there’s nothing here that’s interesting.
