Friday was a big day for aliens. The night before, the US Department of War (I think I liked it as Defense better) released a highly anticipated trove of documents related to UFOs and extraterrestrials. The “disclosure” came in the wake of President Trump reacting to former President Obama making waves with a misinterpreted comment about “aliens being real”
So the documents get released and I get up early and starting pouring through them. I click. I read. I watch videos. I click again. And then I realize…
There’s nothing here.
This highly touted disclosure amounts to just an endless parade of fuzzy images (or videos) and unverifiable personal testimony. Some of the documents go back 70 years but it’s all basically the same. Taken as a whole, it’s the kind of thing we’ve seen for decades: fuzzy images; unverifiable personal testimony; no hard evidence. There’s even a laughable image of flashing “orb‘ in a wheat field made by photoshopping a bad cartoon onto to a photo. It was an FBI technician’s attempt to illustrate someone’s account of a sighting.
Given the explosive congressional hearings we seen where witness claim the government has lots in crashed alien spaceships and dead alien bodies, I was kinda hoping for a whole lot more. It was all just so… boring.
If you want to see my arguments about why, if people are going to keep making these incredible claims, we should be expecting much more you can read this piece I did for The Atlantic (it’s paywalled but you can usually get a couple of free articles)
Today, I just want to amplify two thoughts from that article. The first is about the kind of evidence we should demand from the people making these claims.
If for some reason no actual spaceships or bodies can be shown, then at least give us reports that have real data in them. If UAPs have made inhuman aerial maneuvers, then show us the actual radar data, including the radar systems used, so that independent researchers can plot trajectories and see whether anything involved really did break the laws of physics.
If artifacts have been recovered, share high-resolution, detailed images whose veracity can be confirmed. The kinds of tests that a modern scientific lab would run on a sample of supposedly alien metal are not hard to imagine—let’s see the numbers from those tests, along with a detailed description of the instruments used to get the data. This is exactly what would get recorded in any other scientific investigation: collection methods, data tables, charts, graphs.
The same should be true for those alien bodies. I can go online and get the detailed results of my blood work from last week. Where are those kinds of data for the aliens? If all of this is real, the resulting investigation would have to generate pages and pages of basic physiological test results. Those results should be the disclosure documents.
Of course, I get that the whole idea is the government is covering stuff up. If that’s the case then the ex-intelligence folks showing up in congressional hearings or documentaries like Age of Disclosure need to be specific about what needs to get disclosed as well as offer more explicit details about where this information lives (since they claim to know).
The second , related point is where I think this is likely to lead unless some real hard evidence shows up in the next couple of years. As I said in the article,
In the end, this latest trove of documents makes me think of the John F. Kennedy assassination and the endless swirl of conspiracy theories that still surrounds it. Since 1992, multiple rounds of documents relating to that ill-fated day in 1963 have been released. None of it has resolved what happened for the conspiracy-theory prone. Perhaps nothing ever will. This may be what happens with UFOs/UAPs. It’s easy to imagine that a decade from now, we’ll still be rehashing the same claims and the same arguments about those claims.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all in favor of disclosure if it leads to real scientific evidence that alien life exists. But if we keep getting these weak versions of “disclosure” that showed up Friday, I think the whole UFO thing will just collapse on itself. How many disclosures without hard evidence can there be before the whole thing stops being interesting to most people.
Meanwhile the real science of alien hunting, the kind done with super powerful telescopes marches on. Everyday we’re getting new data and building better tech for seeing alien planets hundreds of light years away. That, I think, is where the action is.
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PS If you have specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]
PPS I could not get this proof-read so please excuse typos etc.
— Adam Frank 🚀
