29
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No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?
Link information
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- Title
- How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs
- Authors
- Nicholson Baker
- Published
- Jan 31 2024
- Word count
- 6928 words
Curious how the author's name, when you rearrange and change some letters, spells out "ALIEN INVADER".
You can't reason with the unreasonable, which is exactly what extrapolating "tiny blobs of metal" to "interstellar (...) technological gadget with artificial intelligence" is. Who cares if an astronomer said so, this is textbook argument from ignorance that's sadly polluting his work. He's not saying it as an astronomer, he's saying it as a UFO hunter. It's one thing to see ʻOumuamua and request radio surveillance, it's another to make such a wild leap. And his terrorist comparisons... sigh.
He should know better, but smart or not, no one is immune to unreasonable mind-traps. As long as they're being enabled and even profitable, they'll persist.
I am skeptical about the UFO phenomenon, I agree that the vast, vast majority of these sightings and stories, if not all, are balloons, drones, secret prototype aircraft and rockets or even intelligence services psyops to spread disinformation.
But I love sticking my Mulder hat on now and again and digging into sightings and stories, but the usual talking heads or whistleblowers like Corbell, Knapp, Lazar (especially Lazar), Coulthard and Elizondo are all just grifters.
I do find Grusch's story to be interesting, he interviewed a ton of people who discussed recovery and reverse engineering programs with him, and also claims to have been read into one of the programs he was investigating at one point and is trying to clear further info about this program through DOPSR. He also at least doesn't seem to be trying to sell a book, TV show or documentary...yet. Also interesting that Karl Nell, a US Army Colonel who worked on the UAP Task Force alongside Grusch stated,
"Grusch's assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence.”
The Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act recently passed alongside the NDAA, although in a much more stripped down state than initially presented after Republican push back, so it'll be interesting to see what comes out of that as government agencies begin handing over their files and records on UFOs and UAP's.
As I said, I'm skeptical and I get the feeling a lot of people involved in the space are grifters, snakes (not interdimensional lizard people) and con artists, even incredibly intelligent people like Jacque Vallee come off as slimy to me but I've always loved the X-Files and films like They Live, The Thing and Close Encounters so I've got a soft spot for imagining there's a clandestine group of shadowy figures hiding the truth from us all haha.
I'm sorry but I just can't see how anyone can take Grusch's claims as anything other than nonsense and attention seeking. Sourcing from the wiki article because it's tiring digging into this stuff every time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grusch_UFO_whistleblower_claims
1.He's claiming multiple hidden crashed craft AND alien corpses held by the US government. Some that are football field sized.
This already stresses credibility with just how bad ANY country is traditionally at hiding information, let alone information that would INSTANTLY be reported by some people, and also by opposing countries. Flat earth also requires that everyone in a position of power on the planet is magically in on some high level conspiracy, including any amateur who could verify or prove otherwise.
Questions this brings up to me:
How do we have these craft?
How did these craft arrive on earth?
When did they arrive on earth?
How the fuck did they keep this a secret? A craft that can travel the light-years required, is the size of a football field, and crashed is going to be fucking noticeable. The amount of energy involved in any of this would be the sort of thing that would light up EVERY amateur scientists tools let alone the literal sky.
Why are programs like SETI not jumping up and down about this and have no information showing this?
Why are aliens capable of traveling the void between stars crashing on our dingy planet?
Why are the aliens who are showing up at our planet bothering to be secretive about it?
2.He's claiming there's been malevolent activity by these aliens.
This is even more confusing because now we're not just dealing with "well millions of years ago they crashed in Kansas and we dug it up". There is within human lifetime "malevolent activity".
Questions this brings up to me:
Pretty much everything before x10.
If they're actively doing "malevolent" things, why be secret about it?
Why aren't the tons of people with equipment that should detect this detecting anything?
How in the hell is anyone keeping this a secret when uploading some cell phone footage to youtube takes about 5 minutes?
3.White collar and literal assassinations have been performed to cover this up.
So this "answers" some of the previous questions. Naturally we're dealing with a shadow government with a license to kill.
Questions this brings up to me:
Again, how in the hell is this section of the government so clued in and so good. An alien can be ANYWHERE in the world, but we just so happen to be able to silence or kill anyone with evidence?
4.He speculates the UFO's could be coming from extra dimensions.
I want to quote from a near primary source here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblower-is-back-with-more-crazy-claims.html
Questions this brings up to me:
What the fuck physics is he talking about? (seriously this reads like every crackpot with a lower level degree opining on high level theoretical physics without close to enough background)
If they're "co locating from a higher dimension", then once again, why in the hell are they crashing/secret? They just so happen to have never colocated in remotely populated area?
HOW IS THIS A SECRET AT ALL IF SOMEONE JUST TOLD THIS GUY?!
Augh i'm trying to keep this more distanced from emotions but I just can't. "yeah trust me bro someone told me that there's secret government programs" is just so eye rolling. They've kept this whole thing tight lipped, to the point of murdering people, but these random interviews are somehow just deciding to tell this guy and let him go to congress?
I'd love to go further but I don't think I can do it dispassionately and I don't want to come across as hostile or inflict more bias. I get why people want to believe these things, I get why at first glance they can sound somewhat believeable, but I literally could spend the rest of the day opining about all the things wrong with this.
Ultimately, what is more likely? That all of these questions, and the ones I didn't put up there, have legit answers, or that there's at least one person willing to tell stories/make claims and not directly benefit from it?
The media signal boosts the shit out of this stuff and so did the congress because we'd rather turn politics into reality tv than deal with our problems, and suddenly the fact he's not publishing a book makes this guy credible? None of this makes anything close to sense. I'd more readily believe there's evidence we're all in some matrix simulation with our real bodies in pods because at least that's near impossible to prove/disprove, while these claims just require so many "well you see..." fixes that it's impossible for me to take this serious.
As for the main article itself-
Smart, is a loaded and pretty lousy term. Specialist would probably be a much better one. We think people who get PHD's are super smart. In my experience they're SUPER specialized. You want to know about their field of expertise there's no one better. You want them to not send money to a Nigerian scam or some similar level of "how in the hell did you fall for that/believe it?" This is also how you get so many crackpot theories in science. They're sometimes from "smart" people in other fields (engineering, math, law, medicine, some other science) who just can't believe that they don't understand something, so they explain why everyone who's made this their career is wrong and clearly they must be right.
And that's before you get into scum like Avi loeb/Michio Kaku who are versed in the field, but completely willing to say whatever will get them attention in this media circus age. They don't "believe" shit, they just want another 15 minutes/grant/reason to keep their position.
I totally get you, I'm in no way saying I believe Grusch, I just find him at least a little more credible than nutjobs like Lazar, Pasulka, and Kean or hacks like Corbell, Nolan, and Coulthard. So he's either one in a million telling some form of the truth, he's being lied to in a very complicated psyop, or and this is what I personally believe, he's an intelligence officer who's probably knowingly spreading disinfo for some reason that him and his superiors are aware of and he shouldn't be trusted.
As my original message said I'm skeptical about the whole thing, I genuinely believe they're all balloons, rare weather phenomena, drones, satellites (especially weird when starlink trains are visible) or secret aircraft and weapons testing.
Also, yes, you're correct, the word smart is not accurate. Jacque Vallee is a specialist, he is smart regarding his speciality but he is just as fallible as everyone else. I covered this in another comment but I find him slimy because his claims are ridiculous but because of his intelligence regarding computer science, you get a lot of calls to authority claiming that he must surely be telling the truth.
Sometimes I just like to use my imagination a little and pretend we're living in the X-Files universe when I look into the vast lore around UFO's and put my tinfoil hat on.
You don't think he could just be a dude making stuff up for attention?
Yeah, sure, its another incredibly probable option.
This was an interesting write up and analysis - I had fun reading, thanks.
I really want the "Non-Human origin" bit to be super advanced cephalopods that have been hiding from us deep in the ocean. It would fall in line with advanced craft, Non-Human biology, and take away the barrier of space travel being difficult.
Do I think it's likely? Absolutely not, but it would be the most plausible explanation if Gorsuch has good Intel.
I think Grusch had posited on the back of someone questioning the terrific distances these craft would have to travel through space to arrive on Earth that, in his opinion, they could be beings, perhaps terrestrial, extraterrestrial or interdimensional simply casting a 3D shadow as they pass through a higher dimension used to travel great distances.
I've read all the crazy stuff about sea dwelling non-human beings.
The 4chan leaker was fun with the giant hamburger shaped, underwater UFO base that produces different drone-like UAP for different scenarios. Or the Reddit leaker who claimed that there's a highly advanced cephalopod race that lives deep under the Earth's crust, in a large pocket where certain materials exist in different forms due to the intense pressures of the surrounding environment that they use in their craft (something called Ringwoodite). Apparently, Carter nuked them in the 70's (disguised as a test obviously) and they're going to invade in 2027 for all out war.
All fun LARPs and they'd have made great X-Files episodes but I don't put any stock in them really, made for fun reading before bed though!
This is exactly the vein of conspiracy theory I just love to read. It's like its own genre, a cross between science and historical fiction. Batshit crazy and fun.
Yeah, it's a ton of fun to read through a good UFO "leak", always entertaining.
As an aside, I think "interdimensional" is one of those words that kinda reveals that someone's been dipping into sci-fi. The only reason string theorists have been allowed to get away with their 11 dimension bullshit is because they've made it so that they're so tiny and coiled up on themselves that we wouldn't notice them on the macro level.
I have no real physics knowledge but yeah, even I have to roll my eyes at interdimensional. As I've said in a previous comment, I'm pretty skeptical of it all and don't take much of it seriously. Fun to dip into every now and again, but then I just get on with business and reality as usual.
Its why I find Jacque Vallee so slimy, he's a very well respected scientist who was integral to the development of modern computers and the internet but he pushes a lot of crazy hypotheses in his UFO writings, interdimensional beings, fairies and other creatures from folklore are actually these beings in reality and that then leads to calls to authority from those who believe him, "He's an incredible scientist, so therefore he must be right!" etc.
Man I feel the same way as you do! Those "leaks" sound so interesting, I'd love to read about them if you have any links handy.
Here's the 4chan "leak". This is quite lengthy.
And here's the Reddit "leak". This user posts a bunch of info and then responds to some comments. Funny thing is they talk about how it's gonna be all out global war with this race of advanced cephalopod's, truly changing the course of history or resulting in our extinction, and then once they finished posting in the thread just went back to discussing football in the NFL subreddit haha.
They're complete nonsense of course but I thought they were fun in that sort of internet creepy pasta kind of way.
Another LARP that came to mind was a large substack article found here about how a conceptual UAP reverse engineering program could have hypothetically been run from the 1940's to present. I get the feeling the author is using "hypothetical" with a wink wink nudge nudge and is pretending to be an insider of some sort, nonsense but it's a fun read anyway.
It's tradition. A non-negligible percentage of every generation of luminaries gets sucked into conspiracies or fringe spirituality or some other "there has to be something more" trap.
My take on aliens: The technological advancement required to get to us from wherever they were, distant space or another dimension, means they would be so far beyond us that if they didn't want us to detect them, we just wouldn't. There wouldn't be wrecks to recover or corpses to dissect.
Do you have any resources on Lazar off the top of your head? The last time I had a tinfoil hat on I remember being truly conflicted about the guy, but that was many years ago and I feel like it's a trillion times harder to sift through the last 6 years of shit on top of the usual crazies.
The Rational Wiki page will fill in most of the bullshit Lazar has said.
Guys just a bullshitter who for some reason is still taken seriously by some in the UFO community.
I don't recommend you watch the Lazar "documentaries" on Netflix and/or Prime, but if you do then by the end you'll see how the guy is a total crank. He has his followers go sit out and look at the night sky, says you can "will" UFOs to appear, and they point at every moving light in the sky as evidence of this.
I don't know why you'd put words in my mouth, I never said that I believe any of these people, I've actually said multiple times over my comments that I believe the phenomenon is a mix of balloons, drones, rare weather events, secret test aircraft or rocketry.
I just mentioned who he was and his title as part of my message to add context (plus his name being Karl Nell and him being a Colonel is pretty funny). I actually mention in a separate message as well that if I had to put money on it I think Grusch and his superiors are purposefully spreading misinformation. That's why I find Grusch interesting because he doesn't seem like the usual snake oil salesman trying to hawk a book, or documentary, although he may just be saying these things for shits and giggles and could have a book deal in the works for all I know.
As I've mentioned, I'm skeptical of the whole thing and I don't actually believe in aliens but sometimes I find it fun to put my tinfoil hat on.
Finally, I know you're joking, and I'd hope you're not trying to do so at what you think is my expense thinking I'm a kooky UFO believer therefore I'm likely to believe in the Loch Ness monster, but I am Scottish and Loch Ness is a beautiful place. I can highly suggest a visit, but it can get very busy during the summer.
If you really need to stay awake one night for whatever reason, I recommend reading up on the various Alien Abduction pages on wikipedia. It will keep you awake and alert!
I want aliens to be real for the same reason I want magic to be real. I grew up on Star Trek and Asimov and LeGuin and Pern and Babylon 5 and more fantasy novels than I can name.
But I'm a self identified unwilling agnostic as well, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it tracks.
Billions believe in gods with absolutely no evidence they exist beyond what people of the past have written down or word of mouth, despite the many holes in those writings. Many believe in bigfoot too. Yet, someone would question why aliens, the most plausible of these things, can be believed to be real? 🤨
We may not have proof aliens exist, but it's at least highly possible that other intelligent species can exist. Then add to that the fake sightings, fake proof, abduction stories (where they truly believe they were abducted), conspiracies of which the most unbelievable ones assume the US Government is competent enough to keep a lid on having real aliens for so many decades while aliens always somehow fall into their clutches, and real documented UFO sightings (even if they're more likely to NOT be aliens). It's easy to believe in them.
No one credible is denying that aliens exist somewhere in the vastness of space and time.
We are simply denying that aliens with advanced technology happened to visit us at the exact same time in history when we existed as an intelligent species that is capable enough of comprehending them. But without leaving any credible evidence. Yet leaving enough evidence for the conspiracy theorists.
because smart people see more avenues as an attack vector:
So it enters this deadlock that really can't be broken without some major event (which probably isn't happening). I don't take too much of this news buzz seriously but am definitely in the camp of "not yet". Humanity is only about a million years old which is a blip on a cosmic scale. Perhaps there just isn't enough time (or we'll destroy ourselves before we get to that point).
Fermi Paradox makes a couple assumptions I don't agree with. Interstellar travel, near or faster-than light speed especially, might just be impossible. That alone all but guarantees that two intelligent civilizations existing at the same time will never know about the other. Second: data like TV broadcasts quickly gets lost to background radiation so the only way we'd detect a signal from another planet is if they transmitted a focused beam. And we would have to be looking and listening and exactly the right time.
It all seems to me like two blind people at opposing ends of a tennis court throwing individual grains of sand at each other are more likely to achieve a mid-air particle collision than we are to be contacted by extraterrestrial life, let alone physically interact with.
One note about the Fermi Paradox. It doesn't need FTL to work. If a spacefaring civilisation existed 100 million years ago, it should already have colonised the entire galaxy, even without FTL. Signals should be coming from everywhere, from every time. Our planet should be raw material for whatever crap they're building.
I happen to think that intelligence is stupidly rare (because it's usually not that useful), and that when a civilisation does arise, it usually destroys itself (like we're doing right now).
But this is just idle speculation. The galaxy is oddly silent, even without FTL.
Those are huge assumptions. Assuming a civilization can last that long. Assuming that interstellar colonization is worthwhile. Communication between two worlds would be delayed by years at least, any physical transfer might as well be impossible. Signals just aren't stable beyond a few light years, they fade into the background. And that's assuming they're doing unaimed broadcasting of any kind. We sorta stopped with the switch to digital TV, so there's a narrow window of time to even detect our noise.
The energy requirements to come all the way out to the rim of the galaxy to tear up a rock with a substantial gravity well has to be asburd. We're talking Dyson spheres. Plenty of mass in asteroids and they're easier to maneuver. Much more stuff toward the center of the galaxy so the efficient plan for a hypothetical spacefaring civilization is to go inwards.
We're a backwoods curiosity. Best thing we have going on is that ambient temperatures on most of the planet allow for liquid water, and our moon is the perfect size and distance for the occasional solar eclipse.
But it's not a monolithic "they". It's not assuming the whole of their society thinks interstellar colonisation is worthwhile. It's assuming 0.000001% of their society does it, whether for economic, religious, social or other reasons we can't comprehend.
The reverse assumptions are just as massive. If a civilisation became spacefaring 50 million years ago, you have to assume that no one colonised anything. Because all it takes is a fraction of their society to do. The only way that happens is if they die before they become spacefaring, because something not being viable or reasonable or profitable wouldn't stop us. If it was possible, someone would do it.
The energy requirements to come here are irrelevant. An expanding civilisation comes here, period, even if they were born on the opposite end of the galaxy. Why wouldn't they? They'd colonise the star system next to them. Add a thousand years, they colonise the system next to them. Then add exponential growth.
An exponentially expanding civilisation comes here, and goes literally everywhere until the galaxy is full.
Not to mention that smart people can be guilty of the teleological approach as well. I've wondered a lot of my life why "smart" people can believe in gods, specifically believing that their god of the thousands of gods of thousands of years of thousands of religions of thousands of denominations, etc, is the correct one. But many people have an objective in mind and try to rationalize it, as opposed to being more open-ended and waiting for more data. The smarter people, if also myopic and stubborn which are other traits required for dogmatic belief, are just better able to rationalize and fill the holes of doubt with possibilities relying on other possibilities, ad infinitum. Emotion and sometimes circumstance causes one to take a more teleological approach and bias output unfortunately, we're all susceptible to it to some degree.
That said, I'm just as prone to believe in aliens visiting us as gods but I don't consider either a high probability.
People give the US government more credit than it deserves with secrets, especially interesting ones.