Here's what I thought of the NASA UFO panel presentation
Maybe not the reaction you'd expect from me.
On May 31, NASA’s Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team (which seems to defy acronyms) held its first public meeting. To summarize it in one sentence, they said the only things they couldn’t identify were videos so bad that you couldn’t tell anything from them., and there’s no evidence of aliens.
As with all of these UFO official presentations, the Alien Truthers (my attempt at a shortened term for the people who insist that we are actively visited by aliens and the government knows all about it) believed that this was going to be Disclosure — their version of Judgment Day, when the Alien Truthers will be set apart and the rest of us will fall into the abyss of wrongness, as the government finally reveals the glorious truth about our alien visitors. Once the presentation was underway and it became clear that this was pretty much the opposite of that, the online followers turned to extreme cynicism about the team (predictably), it’s just another psy-op to fool us into complacency.
I’m a bit cynical myself, about the term “UAP”. It was an effort to escape the stigma of the term “UFO”, period. It was first invented by the Invisible College people, a long-time group of true believers in alien visitation who are behind the 2017-present UFO rage. They wanted to be taken more seriously by the press, so they decided not to use the term UFO. This reminded me of a famous scene from Futurama:
…and unfortunately the term UAP caught on, to the point that it’s now the government’s official term for UFOs. I’m not sure who’s in charge of this, but UAP’s meaning has even been updated once, from Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Like, including ghost and Bigfoot photos? Stick with UFO. The stigma is from the belief, not from the acronym.
It was nice to see astronaut Scott Kelly give some remarks during the meeting. From his tone you could tell he had a fairly skeptical attitude toward the Alien Truthers — which apparently include his backseat guy in an F-14 he was once flying (recall that I recently wrote about how Alien Truthers can be found in all walks of life, including pilots, including the military, including government). But the most interesting thing about Kelly’s remarks was the comments in the live chat (the event was live streamed and viewers could type in the chat box). The majority of comments were saying that Kelly was obviously a paid shill, paid to deny alien visitation. And again, comments cynical about Kelly were the majority. That’s kind of scary.
But in the interest of finding common ground — and this is the major theme of my UFO movie — we should be clear that the Alien Truthers are not entirely irrational. Real science does indeed tell us that it’s likely there are other civilizations out there, or have been, or will be. Considering the staggering number of possible civilizations, there’s an unknowable chance that there have been alien astrobiologists who search for life with telescopes, as we do now. There is an unknowable chance that some of them have seen the Earth, with out magnificent spectrum showing every possible biosignature; and in the smaller chance they’ve seen us since 1900 (or will see us), they have seen (or will see) our technosignature. These are real possibilities, probably small but definitely non-zero, and they’re very exciting.
Excitement about this possibility is something all rationalists share with Alien Truthers. It’s very solid common ground. Where we differ is in how much we let wishful thinking influence our beliefs. We all share that wishful thinking too; it’s just a matter of how much we’re able to keep it separated from our empirical conclusions about the probabilities. The lack of evidence of alien visitation is something we incorporate into our conclusions or ignore, to varying degrees.
So don’t expect too much from any of these government UFO panel presentations. And try to remember that you have more in common with even the most fanatical Alien Truther than you differ. We are all — or at least we should be — on the same team here.