People on Xitter think the James Webb space telescope has been classified because it found aliens
And no, they don't in fact have any reason to think this. They just do. Because they pretty much believe anything they hear that comports with the government suppressing some truth about aliens.
Hi. Thanks for reading my free newsletter that seeks to separate reality from bullshit in pop culture. Normally these Thursday editions are for paid subscribers only, but the following shitshow was a big enough deal on Xitter this week that I felt this one should be free to all. Enjoy, and if you like it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It would bring me joy, and I know that secretly that’s what you want the most.
So over this past weekend, a rush of excitement swept the UFO community on Xitter (they often tag their posts #ufox or #uapx or #ufotwitter or #uaptwitter or similar). The community collectively pipe-dreamed the idea that the James Webb space telescope (JWST) has found aliens, and the government quickly classified it and secreted away that evidence.
This is incredibly implausible for a long list of reasons, which I’ll get to. But first, here’s how it all went down.
Time on JWST is allocated to researchers based on proposals they submit. It’s very competitive. Those that are approved get assigned a slot, and then they get to decide where to point the scope and which instrument(s) they’ll want to use. A fair number of these proposals are looking for interesting exoplanets (here’s a list), hopefully finding ones with a spectrum indicating they might have water or other neat stuff. Astrobiologists want to use JWST to look for biosignatures (signs of life, like chlorophyll) or technosignatures (proof of intelligent manipulation of the environment, like smog or concrete). JWST is probably close, but not quite, capable of resolving these. But it’s the best instrument flying right now, so everyone wants to use it to try.
These exoplanetary results are frequently published — here’s one from 2023. Here’s another that has tantalizing molecules in its atmosphere. Probably, someone on Xitter came across one of these and decided “Wow! NASA has found life in space!”
Because what happened over the weekend was that AskaPol, a UFO website that tries to demand politicians reveal all about the aliens living under the Pentagon, posted this about asking Rep. Andre Carson if he’d received a classified briefing about JWST. Since of course he hadn’t because that’s not a thing, and he probably had no idea what the guy was talking about, he said, “No comment.” UFO Xitter exploded:
Leading UFO luminaries like Australian UFO reporter Ross Coulthart quickly jumped on the bandwagon:
Even some who appear to be legitimately mentally ill took up the cause:
I tried to engage with some of these folks and explain why all of this was incredibly implausible, but was told how stupid and naive I was, because of course “the government” could classify JWST data at any instant.
So here is my giant list of why that didn’t, wouldn’t, and won’t happen.
JWST received no military funding and has no national security relevance. It is operated 100% by civilians, and classifying and gagging civilians is a non-trivial process.
The reason JWST has no military or intelligence application is that it physically cannot be turned to look toward the Earth-Moon system. It can’t see the Earth or anything orbiting the Earth. It can’t be used as a spy satellite. So the military doesn’t care about it.
Sidebar: The reason JWST can’t be turned toward the Earth is that it has to hide its sensitive deep space instruments behind a giant sun shield. If it rotated toward the Sun, those instruments would be instantly fried and destroyed. JWST orbits the Earth’s L2 Lagrangian point, which is about 1 million miles from the Earth on the side farthest from the Sun. Its orbit is big, about the same size as the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, so it’s always in direct sunlight. Thus the need for that mighty sun shield.
I was told by UFO Xitter people that JWST had undoubtedly spotted an incoming alien spacecraft — how that craft’s destination had been determined by the Xitter users was not offered.
So, OK, let’s imagine JWST did see an alien spacecraft, or something else so extraordinary that the military, or the CIA, or someone — I’m not even sure there is a national security agency that cares about deep space — decided they’d have to classify it. (Let’s call this hypothetical government agency THEY.) Here are the problems with that.
Data from JWST goes through the NASA Deep Space Network of radio antennas. From there it goes directly to the Space Telescope Science Institute located in Baltimore, MD. It’s a nonprofit operated by AURA, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. Data from a number of space telescopes goes directly into their archive, MAST, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. It is permanent and is protected by appropriate physical and electronic security systems including multiple offsite mirrors.
Anyone with a MAST account or other authorization, which is easy to get, can access the entire history of all JWST data. It’s among the data sets my daughter queries every single day; I’ve even worked with her a bit on that.
Researchers whose proposals are approved and get their time (here’s a list, they are all always public) are able to request that they get “exclusive access” to their project’s data for 3, 6, or 12 months (12 months is the max) in order to publish their findings without anyone scooping them. However, most don’t request this, as it harms their proposal’s chances of getting approved. But of those that do, that’s the only case where any data on MAST is accessible only to a limited number of users.
When something wild happens in deep space, like a supernova, there is a provision called Director’s Discretionary (DD) where they can go “Whoa, hold everything, point the scope over there.” If someone saw something as extraordinary as an alien spaceship, that would almost certainly trigger a DD event. All DD events are always public. That means anyone in the world can watch as it’s happening. By the time THEY got around to it, the data would already have been downloaded and trumpeted to the world a zillion times.
But let’s say these researchers decided to keep the alien spaceship to themselves. Here’s how scientists work — I got a glimpse into this recently when my astrophysicist daughter discovered one of 15 known circumbinary exoplanets. The entire team studies it. They bring in their colleagues to discuss and confirm. They reach out to more colleagues all around the world to discuss and confirm and see if anyone else has already seen this. So now dozens of people have seen it, many of whom are outside the US.
So we conjecture that someone on the science team decides, for reasons hard to fathom, to go behind their colleagues’ backs and inform THEY. I’ve never met a scientist who would do that, but the UFO Xitter people insist it would be all the scientists’ first thought. So let’s pretend THEY find out about it, and decide to classify it and forbid these dozens of researchers around the world from ever speaking of it.
Since these are all private citizens, THEY would need a judge to sign gag orders on every person. Obviously enforcing these is impossible, because almost no realistic research team anywhere includes only Americans.
To classify or seize or block the access of the data on MAST, THEY would also need a warrant — this is a private civilian operation. Warrants take time. Judge’s orders take time.
Could THEY decide this is of such importance that they’re going to enact some sort of emergency clause, and just storm in with armed soldiers and seize everything that way? Of course they could, probably, I presume. It would be in every newspaper. Nothing like that happened this past weekend. All’s well in Baltimore. You can go to MAST/STScI and verify for yourself, parts of the campus are open to the public.
So the bottom line is that there is no realistic way that THEY could successfully block the dissemination of an interesting find on JWST before it already got out through normal legal channels.
We now return to our regularly scheduled UFO wackadoodlery.
This all sounds just like what THEY would want you to say :)
Oof. The level of dumb is stratospheric.