To test whether you could actually use cameraphones to capture airborne objects, I used my iPhone 15 to photograph conventional aircraft whenever they appeared. (I didn’t just go to the airport, as planes that frequent, low, and close wouldn’t be representative of mysterious flying objects.)

I learned a few things:

1. It’s hard to remember to take a photograph immediately. There’s usually only 5-10 seconds to get a good shot of a nearby aircraft, and in that time you have to spot it, remember you’re supposed to take photos, physically take out your phone, open the camera app, get the object in frame and focused, and take the picture. The first time I tried, the helicopter I’d spotted had flown out of sight before I was ready. Afterward, I programmed my phone’s external button to be a camera shortcut so I’d be ready next time.

2. Apparent velocity means that close objects move through your field of view faster than distant ones. This means taking a photo in time is harder the nearer the object is. It’s an inherent tradeoff: the closer and therefore clearer the photograph, the less chance you have to capture it.

3. Cameraphones are designed to take photographs of nearby objects, i.e. people a short distance away. Some of the higher-end models have zoom lenses, but this is a recent development. Without a zoom lens or viewfinder, even close-seeming planes were usually too small to be made out on the phone screen in the heat of the moment. I learned I had to point as best I could and hope it turned out.

I photographed about a dozen planes, and here’s the best shot I managed. Despite how it looks, the plane1 was flying low and nearby; it was loud enough to compete with the conversation I was having. I captured it on a clear, bright day, with both the 3x optical zoom lens and the no-zoom lens, on my iPhone camera:

The last photo is an illustration of what it might have looked like if captured with a 12 megapixel (MP) camera. The chart below shows that phone cameras with 13MP or less were the majority until 2022, so that somewhat blurry photo is more representative of typical photo quality over the last decade of smartphone cameras.

Here’s a photo of a plane farther away; only barely audible, but still clearly visible:

Can’t see it? Neither could I, which is why I had to point and hope for the best. Here’s it blown up:

Quite the blur. Even a top-of-the-line cameraphone shot of a visible airliner is faint and blurry. If aircraft, which are relatively big, slow, noisy, and predictable, are tough to photograph with a phone, then UFOs would be even tougher. We shouldn’t expect a vast number of good UFO pictures.

That said, we should still get lucky occasionally and capture a photo of a UFO when it’s close and slow.

And we have some! For example, this photo of the runway at Manchester Airport was taken by a commercial pilot from his cockpit2:

The UFO is no more out of focus than the actual airplanes in the background. There is also an accompanying video of the UFO high up above the runway. You can call it fake3 or a case of mistaken identity4, but you can’t say it’s especially blurry.

If you wonder why there aren’t more UFO photos, try photographing passing airplanes with your smartphone. The difficulty quickly becomes obvious.

Despite popular discussion of “mass hallucinations”, this is AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time.

As far as I can tell, it’s one of two examples, because in 1954, ~10,000 fans at a Tuscany soccer match simultaneously saw at least one UFO.

Famed player Ardico Magnini was on the field that day:

The glitter coming down resembled angel hair, which, interestingly, is associated both with sightings of UFOs and the Virgin Mary.

Samples of the material were collected and tested at the University of Florence, with spectroscopic analysis indicating it was composed of boron, silicon, calcium, and magnesium.

Though it’s been suggested that the substance was silk from migrating spiders,2 this would consist of protein and be composed of the more familiar nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.

Science writer and Nature editor Phillip Ball noted:

Magnesium and calcium are fairly common elements in living bodies, boron and silicon much less so - but if these were the main elements that the white fluff contained, it doesn’t sound to me as though they’d come from spiders.

They Weren’t there to See UFOs

More importantly than just being another example of a mass sighting, the soccer fans didn’t gather that day to see UFOs, have a spiritual experience, or even to see anything especially unusual. A significant fraction would have been rival fans who reflexively disagreed with whatever the opposing fans saw. They came to see a soccer game and ended up looking up and pointing at UFOs.

In comparison, the Sun Miracles seen in Fatima, and later in Bosnia and Bangkok, were all either pilgrims who had traveled specifically to see the sun miracle, or, in the case of Bangkok, were worshipers gathering for a ceremony and looked up to see a vision of their sect’s founder in the sun.

The mass hallucination theory fits much better here; the participants were self-selected for religiosity or sun miracle credulity3, and many desired and expected to see something.

Why are Sun Miracles discussed and investigated, while cases like the Tuscany UFO receive comparatively little attention? The Tuscany event was witnessed by over 10,000 people who were not gathered in anticipation of a UFO, and it left behind physical evidence that was later laboratory tested.

Sadly, it’s simply that UFOs are considered silly, while the Virgin Mary is not, and this gets confused for plausibility.

The first open-source passive radar project ended before it even began.

In November 2022, KrakenSDR announced that it was removing all passive radar code from its software-defined radio device, despite months of effort and anticipation from the amateur radio community. The team explained in a tweet:

It was another casualty of ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations that restricts the “export” of “defense articles.” Like many regulations, though it sounds reasonable, this entirely depends on definitions. Here “export” includes “releasing or otherwise transferring technical data to a foreign person in the United States,” and “defense articles” is anything on the United States Munitions List.

Passive radar is considered a “munition,” along with a laundry list of other technologies, making it illegal for a non-American to see code, schematics, or physical parts.

KrakenSDR’s passive radar was DOA.

Why Passive Radar

My introduction to ITAR came in early 2025, when I became obsessed with an idea. What if just by listening to the radio, you could sense anything on the Earth’s surface, up to the stratosphere, and beyond? This is passive radar, which works by listening for radio echoes that bounce off objects from broadcast sources such as TV and FM towers.

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These signals are everywhere, and by comparing the echo to the direct signal, you can map everything they’ve reflected off of. In 2005, P.E. Howland developed a system for NATO that detected planes out to 100+ miles using FM radio, using a cluster of six Pentium 4’s for signal processing. However, the need for expensive hardware was temporary, as consumer technology was about to undergo a revolution.

In 2007, the iPhone was released, and by the 2020s, over 10 billion smartphones were made, each with a microprocessor. In 2023, benefiting from the cost and performance gains enabled by this level of production, the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer was released. It featured a quad-core ARM smartphone processor that was 2-3x faster than Howland’s 2005 cluster of Pentium 4’s for radar workloads.

For less than a hundred dollars, all the necessary compute was available in a package the size of a bar of soap. By spring of 2025, I had realized this and updated the open-source radar package Blah2 to work on a Raspberry Pi.

With such low deployment costs, a global passive radar network would finally be possible, just as long as nothing else got in the way.

ITAR Intervenes

I had heard about ITAR before I started building my kits, but I wasn’t yet sure that the system could work, so I put off dealing with it until I made more technical progress.

Once it started to look like I was getting somewhere, though, I asked the Open Research Institute for help. They had dealt with similar issues with their satellite work and were familiar with the KrakenSDR case. They gave me helpful advice and also mentioned another entirely separate radar project that ended due to ITAR risk.

And I understand why they stopped. It seems risky; whenever I explain the situation to someone, they gasp at the words “arms” and “traffic” and try to talk me out of it before I even get to “federal prison.”

Bernstein vs. The United States

In 1997, mathematician Daniel J. Bernstein was in the same situation as me. Except that instead of passive radar, it was cryptography over 40 bits that the US considered a munition.

In Bernstein vs. The United States, he challenged the requirement that he register as an arms dealer, resulting in the precedent that code was free expression under the First Amendment.

You would think that this should have settled ITAR restrictions on dissemination as unconstitutional, but because ITAR was never actually struck down, it only covered that specific case. The State Department chose to loosen restrictions on cryptography in order to keep everything else. Now unrestricted, Bernstein no longer had standing to challenge ITAR, and when he pushed further, a judge “asked Bernstein to come back when the government made a ‘concrete threat.’”

Strategic Ambiguity

The State Department plays this game. They tell people to waive their constitutional rights because of ITAR, take them to court, lose, and then grant a special exception just for them. Sometimes they have to pay you too.

However, because they granted a special exception for just this one case, ITAR is still available to scare everyone else.

If you ask the State Department, they will strongly imply that ITAR means you can’t release any relevant technical data without their approval, though they can’t make that explicit because that would be unconstitutional prior restraint. Instead, by keeping it ambiguous, ITAR stays up and continues to intimidate. I wish this were just my pet theory, but in fact, I discovered it in the oral arguments of yet another case the government lost.

A List of Casualties

I can’t list them all here, because how do you count things that don’t happen? Still, here’s a sampling:

• Phil Zimmermann, inventor of PGP, was criminally investigated for three years for allegedly exporting cryptographic code. The case was dropped only after MIT Press published the source code as a book.

• U.S. astronomers barred from sharing satellite data with European co-investigators.

• Advanced materials firms avoiding DoD funding to prevent “ITAR taint,” shifting R&D abroad to keep products free from export controls.

• Non-U.S. persons are prohibited from even looking through Gen 3 night vision devices, limiting international collaboration in low-light field research.

• AI systems must avoid unintentionally generating ITAR-controlled technical data for foreign users, creating hard-to-detect export violations.

• 3D printing firms face sanctions for sharing CAD files internationally.

• Mid-tier universities simply avoid NASA-funded research altogether.

This doesn’t even include my beloved passive radar, or all the times people lost and ended up in jail.

What the Solution Is Not

Currently, there are three approaches to dealing with the ITAR:

1. Play it extremely safe, avoid anything plausibly ITAR-infringing, and follow your institution’s risk-averse export control policy. This is how it’s typically done in academia.

2. Hire an army of lawyers, implement countermeasures, then litigate and settle as needed. This is how big companies manage it.

3. Learn from public caselaw, take what steps you can (e.g. also publish a book of code), apply for small grants for legal defense, and generally just take the risk. Assume the government will eventually come after you, and make your life hell, but that you’ll find support and beat the rap. This is how you exercise your constitutional right to open knowledge, while also having no money.

The last one you may recognize, because it’s what I’m currently doing, but it’s not a generalizable solution. I don’t have a mortgage, young kids, or academic position to worry about. I’m in an unusually good position to take risks, so I am willing to develop passive radar, but you can’t expect every scientist to take their life in their hands for the craft.

A Science Liberties Foundation

Civil rights has the ACLU, free speech has FIRE, and digital technology has the EFF.

Science needs its own civil liberties foundation. It might just be an ITAR liberties foundation because that’s what’s causing all the havoc. That could be a good thing, though, because there is a well-defined target.

There’s plenty of research on the effects of ITAR on science, but it takes a literal act of Congress to change it. Still, we don’t need Congress, because ITAR is already constrained by the highest law in the land.

However, in a common law system, a law can only be found unconstitutional when challenged in court, and that takes resources. Without backing, we researchers feel like a lone ant before the juggernaut of the state, even when we’re right. Legal departments optimize for not getting prosecuted, rather than getting prosecuted and winning. Their advice will always be how to keep the State Department (unconstitutionally) happy.

If you do get prosecuted, sometimes a foundation will step in to save you. But currently, you can’t walk in and get a guarantee of support before research starts, and no one wants to take the risk that the cavalry never arrives.

What to Build

The organizational model would be similar to FIRE, which provides direct representation in named cases and exerts public pressure, combined with the technical depth of EFF. Two million a year covers a staff lawyer, outside counsel for one active case, and an advisory board of export-control veterans.

The key is the ex ante letter. A researcher submits a project for review, and if the situation is straightforward (US person, civilian use, technical data released publicly), then the foundation issues a written commitment to defend any prosecution within that scope. A letter in hand breaks ITAR’s chilling effect.

Year one would start with incorporating a 501(c)(3), appointing the board, publishing a researcher’s guide to ITAR (doubling as a recruiting document), filing an amicus brief in an existing case, and issuing the first ex ante letters.

Most meta-science problems are fuzzy and intractable, but this doesn’t require upending institutions or writing new law. It only asks that someone do the boring institutional work of standing up an organization, and that scientists be willing to walk through the open door.

(I’ll be first in line.)

For example, if trying to show that dietary fiber affects health, the null you would disprove is that dietary fiber has no effect (believed until ~1972).

But where does the incumbent come from? Sometimes it’s a long-held theory that has made accurate predictions and withstood the test of time. Other times, though, the rationale is murky. Dietary fiber, which made up 10-15% of ancestral human diets, had to have its effects proven over the course of the 20th century, rather than those stripping it from foods with newly invented industrial processes needing to prove that it was unnecessary.

Here, it was a historical contingency, the result of modern chemistry emerging at the end of the 19th century. Chemically “inert” fiber was thought not to interact with the body and thus must simply take up space (despite its benefits recorded as far back as the ancient physician Galen).

It was only in the 70’s, when Denis Burkitt noticed that African villagers didn’t suffer from common Western gastrointestinal diseases, despite being much poorer, that the benefit of fiber was again appreciated.1

The side that “won” the null hypothesis has the defender’s advantage, but didn’t necessarily pass any evidentiary bar. This means the real battle is over who holds null, and only secondarily over making the empirical case. It’s led to the aphorism heard across economics departments, “everything is a fight over the null.”

Culture is another reason a null hypothesis can win,2 as seen in defamation lawsuits in the US vs the UK. There’s more criticism of public figures in the US because the plaintiff has to prove a defamatory statement is untrue, compared to the UK, where the defendant must prove what they’ve said is true.

US null: “defamatory statement is true.”
UK null: “defamatory statement is false.”

It’s not for empirical reasons that the UK and the US differ. There were no studies in those countries that determined if defamatory statements were more or less likely to be true on average. It’s due to cultural differences where the US prioritizes freedom of speech and limited government, while the UK values the protection of reputation and a regulated commons.

Mercifully, I won’t get further into cultural debates here. Rather, in my next post, I’ll explore epistemological nulls we’ve previously gotten wrong, and how we got there:

1. Everything is Independent - Assuming events or phenomena are independent of each other and do not interact, even when they do: rogue waves, the 2008 crash, and the wrongful conviction of Sally Clark.

2. Things are Static - Incorrectly assuming we’re fixed in place, e.g., the continents on the Earth, the Earth in the solar system, and the universe itself.

3. One of a Kind - It was believed that the Sun was the only “sun” (before ~1850s), and then that our galaxy was the only galaxy (before ~1920s), and then that our solar system’s planets were (nearly) the only planets (before ~1940s).

History is littered with examples, and once you understand them, you’ll start to see them everywhere.

UFO belief isn’t crazy in that it doesn’t contradict the fundamental premises of any empirical discipline. Most astrobiologists believe in extraterrestrial life, and physicists have calculated that self-replicating probes could cover the galaxy.

In contrast, many smart, educated people happily believe things that break entire fields of study they claim to respect, but don’t get pushback because those beliefs aren’t seen as silly or dangerous. Three examples are below:

1. Disbelief in Calories-in-Calories-Out (CICO)

I’m talking about “Hard CICO”, the physiological principle, rather than “Soft CICO”, i.e., calorie-counting as a dieting strategy.1

Hard CICO is simply the principle of conservation of energy2, that all energy entering a system must be accounted for. “Calories in” from food must be either stored as body mass3 or leave as “calories out.” To store fewer calories, there must be a calorie deficit: Calories in + Stored energy = Calories out.

Not everyone will get the exact same calories from food. If you’re lactose intolerant, for example, you’ll get fewer calories from milk. However, most people are concerned with minimizing calorie intake, and the available chemical energy in food is the hard limit on how many calories you can extract from it. It’s possible to harvest less energy than food contains, but you can never harvest more.

Though human bodies are complicated, the thing about conservation laws is that they always apply. They can therefore be used to characterize any physical system, no matter how complicated, from CERN to stars. Not only are they useful, but they’re actually necessary for the Standard Model of physics to work.

I realize many of you will still not be convinced, which is fine. What I want to show is that disagreeing with Hard CICO is the same as disagreeing with the first law of thermodynamics, which is crazier than believing in UFOs.

2. Homebuilding Won’t Counterfactually Reduce Housing Costs

Economics is squishier than physics, but one of its pillars is supply and demand. Aside from rare and well-characterized exceptions like Veblen goods, when the supply of something increases, holding other factors constant, the price decreases.

There are proposed exceptions, in that perhaps more housing in an area creates valuable network effects, increasing demand, and thus price. However, this is a testable theory and has been shown to be empirically untrue; building is consistently associated with price reductions.

That means the premise disagrees with both the foundational theory of economics and the body of evidence. This is worse than “there’s no evidence for this,” it’s “there’s much evidence against this and it contradicts the basic principles of the field.”

3. The Blank Slate

Tabula Rasa, literally “blank slate,” is the theory that “humans are born without any ‘natural’ psychological traits and that all aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behavior, knowledge, or sapience are later imprinted by one's environment.”

If nothing is inborn, then everything can be a human social construction, a position popular in certain subcultures and academic departments.

However, this contradicts a fundamental fact of genetics: traits are heritable. A meta-study of ~3000 twin studies covering ~18,000 human traits found about 50% heritability across them.

UFOs haven't been disproven, whereas the blank slate has been disconfirmed nearly 3,000 times.

I’ve become more comfortable with the idea of UFOs once I realized that, though they’re considered weird or silly, they still don’t fundamentally contradict any of the sciences. You can do much worse than “not yet enough evidence.”

Below is a video of an Alaskan crabboat being hit by one:

Rogue waves were not only unexpected by sailors, but also by scientists until 1995, as they didn’t fit their statistical models.

It can be tempting, therefore, to call rogue waves a black swan event: an unknown unknown that arrives without warning and catches us completely off guard.

But when black swans were thought not to exist, no European had ever seen one. Since black swans are endemic to Australia, it was a reasonable, if premature, assumption, and there was no biological model purporting that black swans couldn’t be.

Rogue waves are different, though. The concept was known because sailors had been reporting them for centuries, but they were simply not believed.

"Myth” of the Rogue Wave

On Christopher Columbus’s 3rd voyage, he encountered “a rogue wave as high as the ship’s masts…it lifted the vessels; hoisting them higher than anything the Admiral had ever experienced.” Similarly, in 1826, naval officer and scientist Jules Dumont d’Urville, along with three colleagues, reported waves above 30m (100ft) in height in the Indian Ocean.

Despite similar reports from these credible witnesses, they were ridiculed as sailors’ tall tales. Waves were thought to follow a Gaussian normal distribution (also known as a “bell curve”), and waves like that were thought to only happen once in 10,000 years.

It was an example of locked-in priors, where an existing model of the world disallows certain claims. Anyone who says otherwise is stigmatized, and their evidence is dismissed, so the model is never updated and further hardens to countervailing evidence.

Why No Better Evidence?

There could be a literal survivor bias here, in that most sailors who saw a rogue wave may never have lived to see anything else. Even those who survived were easy to dismiss because eyewitness testimony can be unreliable.

After widespread adoption of cameras, though, there was still a lack of physical evidence. Below are two of the only known pre-1995 photos of rogue waves:

The first is grainy and looks like it could be a distant mountain range. The second is blurry, and it’s not clear that the flooding is from a huge single wave, as opposed to rough seas or an already-swamped ship. The photos just aren’t that convincing.

Even today, with camera phones everywhere, there are hardly any videos of rogue waves. The crabboat clip is the best that exists1, and it shows the aftermath, rather than the wave itself. A YouTube search will provide impressive-looking clips, but they are either AI-generated or aren’t really rogue waves.

Rogue waves are infrequent, sudden, disjarring, and difficult to film, which has prevented any airtight photographic or video evidence, despite being real.

How Scientists Were Finally Convinced

Finally, on January 1st, 1995, a wave measuring 25.6 m (84 ft) tall was recorded by laser rangefinding sensors on a gas platform in the North Sea.

Initially, the results were disbelieved, but corroborating data and physical damage high up on the platform confirmed that the readings were accurate. Scientific interest and credulity followed.

That said, did we really have to wait until the mid-90s for laser rangefinding? Likely hundreds of ships and their crews were lost every decade to rogue waves, and engineers didn’t start designing with them in mind until after the scientific consensus had come around.

Rogue waves are literally unexpected events that were once dismissed as impossible, and can also figuratively describe similar scenarios. The most fitting is the 2008 financial crisis because not only were there dismissed prior warnings, but the failure mode was the exact same incorrect application of a Gaussian distribution!2

Regular readers may know where I’m going with this, but I’ll spell it out now. The story of rogue waves shows it’s possible for a scientific phenomenon to be: 1) widely reported, 2) poorly photographed, 3) considered a myth, and 4) 100% real.

Peter, I think everyone can agree, has much more knowledge on [COVID] origins than we do. He’s invested much more time. He may be a much more talented researcher. He’s much more into the details. He probably knows the best in the world on origins at this point.

After listening to Peter, I, along with many others, flipped from “COVID probably came from a lab” to “COVID almost certainly did not.” So his skills are not only widely recognized, but he also successfully talked me personally out of a conspiracy theory.

Well, it just so happened that I had another conspiracy I needed talking out of.

Urgently.

The USS Nimitz Incident

It started a few years ago, when I listened to Joe Rogan’s interview with Cmdr. David Fravor about the USS Nimitz UFO incident, and came away curious. Every other UFO report seemed to be “lights in a field” reported by, frankly, bumpkins, but this was different.

Fravor is a fighter pilot commander with an air of quiet competence; PBS even once did a documentary on how well he flies. On Rogan, he described seeing a “tic tac”-shaped UFO on a clear day after following radar signatures detected by two ships.

His story was weird, yes. But with enough missions flown, some of them will turn out strange, and there was probably a more plausible explanation out there. I decided to look into it more, expecting to earn a novelty hit when I cleverly figured out how circumstances and perspective conspired to make something rational look unexplainable, like a stage magic trick.

So I read the Freedom of Information Act-released report. I watched the interview with Fravor’s wing-woman, Alex Dietch, and then a YouTube playlist of interviews with seemingly every technician on the ships. I even found an anonymous Reddit post from 2013 describing the incident, long before anyone had heard of it.

I kept getting deeper, expecting to find a vulnerable underbelly. But as I groped around, I only felt a smooth, round, hard candy shell, and it was starting to ruin my life.

Million-Dollar Alien Bet

In the summer of 2023, I got a message from a friend that Eliezer Yudkowsky was making a 150:1 bet that UFOs aren’t real. The friend knew I’d fallen into that rabbit hole and wanted me to put my money where my mouth was.

So I wandered into the LessWrong thread and started negotiating. Within a few days, I had bets mirroring Yudkowsky’s with several posters, at odds high enough to pay out north of a million dollars for my just over $10,000 outlay.

Still, I kept going. Just betting wasn’t enough; I had to do more to lean in. It became more and more a part of my personal identity, and while earlier I’d been sheepish to talk about UFOs, now I started doing so openly. I made a rule to bring it up by the second date.

By early 2024, I began to think that I should devote my life to finding aliens. Still, I had my doubts. What if I were about to throw it all away on some dumb conspiracy?

The Most Under-priced Man in the World

It was around then that Peter Miller won his debate so handily that even his opponent said he was the world’s expert.

Here was a guy who debunked conspiracy theories. In addition to being excruciatingly thorough, he also seemed open-minded and willing to follow the data wherever it led.

I had always felt like I could never have a serious discussion with anyone on UFOs because no one ever seriously looked at the evidence. It was either “they are obviously dumb, for this non-empirical, first principles reason” or “you seem to know a lot about this, maybe they are real.”

What I wanted was someone smart to actually look at the available evidence and make a determination. Maybe Peter would talk me out of UFOs like he did with Lab Leak, and I could go back to my normal life.

But how to accomplish this?

I knew two things about him: 1) He said $100,000 was a lot of money, so he wasn’t that rich, and 2) He had a blog on Medium.

Maybe he’d be open to some commissions?

Peter ended up writing three aliens pieces for me. I paid him $2000, i.e., less than $700 per piece. I happen to know that this is a typical freelance rate, having moonlighted myself. For the cost of any old writer, I’d gotten the best researcher we have to look at the world’s dumbest problem. That’s what’s called a mispricing.

When he published, I was shocked by the results. They actually made me slightly more confident in UFOs. And it didn’t seem just like confirmation bias; the first two pieces felt slightly alien-positive, and the third was inconclusive. I’d thought there’d be a debunking, however tenuous, and when it didn’t arrive, I was more UFO-brained than ever.

Naturally, I was already familiar with the topic, but he provided new insights like:

• Multicellular life implies intelligent life because two distinct intelligent families, primates and octopuses, evolved from a very simple common ancestor.

• The galaxy requires at least a million planets with intelligent life to expect one within 100 light-years of Earth.

• SETI could not detect Earth from its radio signals even if it were at the nearest star. They’re looking for a directional beam, not incidental radio traffic.

After his posts, I was in it more than ever. Maybe that’s ok though. Everyone has their hobbies, how bad could it be?

Avoiding Federal Prison

Having failed to un-brainwash myself, I thought about how to proceed. I would quit my job to search for aliens, but what does that even look like? I didn’t know anything about government (to get them to release the secret files), and had no experience in astronomy or similar fields.

I was technical, though, I’d been working as an engineer at a nuclear fusion startup and had prior entrepreneurial experience. Maybe if I couldn’t work in the right fields directly, I could invest in them, as some sort of aliens-VC.

So in late 2024, I attended the Sol Foundation conference in San Francisco, looking for leads. To my surprise, there were many others there that had the same idea, except they were real VCs with tens of millions to deploy.

However, there wasn’t really much for anyone to invest in; it seemed like too much money chasing no investments. What’s a UFO startup even supposed to do? There were podcasts and mobile apps and many plainly crazy people; it was hard to see how investing would make any difference after all these years without progress.

Then, at the last minute, a fill-in speaker gave a talk on passive radar. It was Mitch Randall, and he described how, by just listening to the radio, you could hear echoes of broadcasts reflecting off aerial objects and reconstruct their positions and velocities. Thanks to microprocessor cost reductions from mass smartphone manufacturing, receivers could now be made for only hundreds of dollars, and if networked, could form a national radar detection network.

It was perfect. I’d found the project I’d been looking for and would start right away. There was just one problem: passive radar code and devices are on the US Munitions List, meaning it’s controlled by ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Legally, would this make me an arms trafficker?

First Amendment to the Rescue

According to the State Department, yes.

I would have to register as an arms dealer and ensure I never “exported” any “munitions” or risk federal prison. In this case, my Raspberry Pi with radio digitizer counted as a “munition,” and anyone foreign even seeing my code counted as an “export.”

This was going to be tough. How do you make an open-source project when it’s illegal for your Belgian neighbor to look at it?

It turns out we’ve been through this before, during the “cryptography wars.” Mathematician Daniel J. Bernstein fought the State Department in court over his cryptographic algorithms and got a favorable ruling, so now code is treated as protected speech. The government might still try to stop me, but they’d likely lose on First Amendment grounds. To be extra safe, I published my code in a book on Amazon, as judges are especially reluctant to ban books, and this strategy once saved the inventor of PGP cryptography from possible jail time.

I was confident I would win in court and prepared to take the risk, but I didn’t know how to keep funding the project. Between the bets, blog commissions, and hardware prototyping, I’d spent tens of thousands with no end in sight.

Tyler Cowen, UFO Enjoyer

My Emergent Ventures grant interview with Tyler Cowen lasted maybe 20 minutes. I took the call from my friend’s apartment, where I was staying. At this point, I’d given up my own lease to save money and travel around solving (UFO) mysteries by putting up radars.

Tyler would ask a question, pause to consider, then follow up with another. It wasn’t rapid-fire like his podcast, and he has something of a grandfatherly aura. It seemed like 90% of what he was doing was just trying to make sure I wasn’t crazy. I tried not to seem crazy.

Then he abruptly asked how much I was asking for. I told him an improbably round number, implicitly admitting that I had no idea how much it would cost, and therefore had just made something up.

A few beats passed, and he congratulated me on winning the grant. I was told a report “not to exceed one page” would be due in a year’s time, and then we chatted about aliens for another 25 minutes before he excused himself to go.

I now had more money than anyone had given me in my life. I would use it to find aliens.

Peter never did debunk UFOs.

Maybe I will.

Thanks to Scott Alexander and Kaamya Sharma for feedback on drafts of this.

Anything important will begin dropping hints before it arrives, and UFO disclosure is no different. Beyond the biweekly war.gov/ufo releases, below are four additional trends that suggest things are changing:

1) Skeptic’s 180 turn

Just a few years ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the odds of UFOs being “out of this world” as one in 10 million. Today, he takes them seriously and has written a book on the topic.

Though he attributes his change of opinion to a higher-quality set of witnesses (military officers rather than “farmers” and “drunken revelers”), the most recent wave of military testimony began nearly a decade ago.

This makes a change in the cultural winds a more likely explanation for Tyson’s shift and signals changes in the epistemological zeitgeist among scientists and academics.

2) Prediction Markets

Both Polymarket and Kalshi have markets on an official US confirmation of alien life. These vary, but the trend over the years has been upward, with Kalshi’s giving odds of disclosure before the end of next year at 31%.

The beauty of prediction markets is that anyone who finds this unbelievable can make free money by betting on the other side (Kalshi even returns interest on your funds while you wait).

The fact that skeptics have not bid this down to lower odds means there are either not so many skeptics or they’re not so sure.

3) Aliens.gov and Trump Post

Prior to this year, the government has been very careful to separate UFOs as a phenomenon from alien life as a phenomenon, with boring UFO task force names like AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) and AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program).

However, this year, the government registered the domain “aliens.gov”, and White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters to “Stay tuned!” and included an alien emoji (👽).1

It’s a weird world where we have to interpret emoji tea leaves, and stranger still, the president posted an AI-generated image of himself walking with a shackled (and ripped) alien.

This change from “UFOs” to “aliens” is important because it’s the first official acknowledgment of a connection between the two. It could even be regarded as a first disclosure, as it’s a statment of “these two things are related.”

4) UFOs are Now Too Mainstream for Conspiracy Theorists

I have a conspiracy-minded friend, and when I spoke to him around 2021, he was supportive of the idea that the US government knew about UFOs but was keeping it hushed up.

Now, when we talk about it, he thinks the whistle-blower testimony and government releases are part of a misdirection campaign.

The conspiratorial worldview holds that nothing is as it appears and that everything has a hidden purpose. If evidence of UFOs becomes sufficiently straightforward, then to the conspiracy theorist, it must not be what appears i.e. evidence of non-human intelligence.

To some, this is surprising. Presumably, as a nuclear fusion engineer, I’d be scientifically literate enough to dismiss UFOs and nonsense. To others, it’s unsurprising, in that both fusion energy and UFOs are sci-fi wish-fulfillment.

What I’ve found is that how someone evaluates the evidence for UFOs doesn’t actually determine their position on the subject. You can try to debunk videos or poke holes in testimony, but it’s not yet possible to come to a definitive conclusion one way or the other. The evidence is good enough to defy easy explanations but not quite convincing enough to support any theory with foolproof certainty.

In practice, whether someone believes ultimately comes down to their prior probability of UFOs visiting Earth.

There are three groups:

1. The skeptics, who believe that UFOs visiting Earth is far-fetched, give low probabilities of UFOs being real. For example, Neil DeGrasse Tyson claimed one in ten million.

2. The believers, who want to believe in UFOs, government cover-ups, and psionic beings, believe aliens are already here.

3. The underdetermined, who don’t think it’s possible to establish good priors around UFOs, can be swayed either way by the evidence.

I’m in the last category. I think it’s definitionally impossible to predict the behavior of “aliens,” so perceived weirdness shouldn’t be counted as evidence against them. UFOs don’t break the laws of physics as we understand them, and estimates of the probability of intelligent life in the galaxy suggest that our prior should be that it exists.

This leaves me without any good reason to think UFOs are not here, but also without a strong prior reason to think they are. Therefore, the available evidence, inadequate as it may be, should lean me to one side or the other.

The first question is whether UFOs have been seen at all. From what I can tell, as President Obama describes below, the evidence suggests that there are objects being detected that defy conventional explanation:

Before 2023, I thought these sightings were both weird and important, but we didn't know which explanation to favor.

Then, in 2023, David Grusch testified under oath that it was aliens. Because I didn’t have strong priors that it wasn't aliens, and Grusch was highly cleared and made claims under penalty of perjury, this updated my beliefs. Other credentialed witnesses also agreed, and so aliens became my leading theory.

There have been claims that Grusch is a member of a UFO religion or is reporting on a hazing ritual that has gotten out of hand, but there’s never been any documents or testimony to support these claims, just speculation. The memo about the supposed “Yankee Blue” hazing was never produced, and a FOIA request turned up nothing.

This leaves me with the following chain of reasoning:

1. There is no good reason to think UFOs are either very unlikely or very likely.

2. There is widespread evidence and testimony of flying objects moving in ways that defy explanation.

3. Credentialed people from within the US government say UFOs are aliens, with no evidence for alternative explanations.
   

Therefore, I weakly believe that UFOs are here and they are aliens.1

On Friday, May 8th, hundreds of files were published at war.gov/ufo1. Much of it was similar to what had already come out, infrared photos and videos of unusual but not obviously alien objects. However, the best bits of information do move the evidentiary needle. The highlights:

UFO Sightings by the Apollo 11 Crew

During the post-mission debrief, all the Apollo 11 astronauts agreed they saw a cylindrical UFO from their spacecraft:

This is interesting for a few reasons:

1. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins are not just any witnesses; they are among the most important people in human history. Beware of doubting their credibility.

2. The transcript is from an officially recorded debriefing conducted within a week of their return from space. All the astronauts are present and agree they saw something cylindrical in space, with no explanation.

3. The document has been kept hidden for 55 years. This could be understandable for highly classified programs, but Apollo is the highest-profile and most widely publicized technical endeavor of all time. This section of the transcripts contains nothing sensitive aside from the UFO testimony, so why has its release taken so long?

Triangle UFO in an Apollo 17 Photo

Apollo 17 was the last time a man was on the moon, and of all the Apollo UFO photos, it’s the most remarkable:

The three dots form a shape consistent with an equilateral-triangle-shaped object pointing slightly away from the camera.

That’s notable because a triangle shape is less likely to be a camera artifact. The dots in other Apollo UFO photos are random enough to be camera noise.2 However, it’s unlikely for some of the few bits of noise to happen to form the shape of a triangle.

Interestingly, triangles are a known UFO shape, and even have their own Wikipedia page. The UK government featured one as the cover photo of a now-declassified UAP memo from Dec 2000:

Similarly, why were these Apollo records hidden for so long? Historical photos with UFOs in them being hidden by the US government imply that they hide these sorts of things.

The time clock beeped in recognition, and he heard the magnetic lock on his left disengage. He bumped open the door with his hip and slid past as it opened, while simultaneously putting on his glove. He tried not to use his hands, well, really fingers, unless necessary. Those were his moneymakers, and moneymakers were hard to come by these days, especially for humans.

As he walked down the office corridors, his shoes clicked on the floor as he went. He always wore hard-soled shoes. It felt respectable. Most of his coworkers saw themselves as slightly pathetic bio-robots, but he saw himself as one of the last real tradesmen. Sure, people still made furniture in their garages as hobby projects or sold hand-made trinkets on Etsy to each other in a sort of arts-and-crafts circlejerk, but he was a professional. What he did was actually demanded by society because no one, or should he say, no-thing could do it better than he could.

Walking past the cafeteria, he glanced at the glass-walled meeting rooms. He worked the second shift and was early, so it was only a bit past 2:30 pm. The 9-to-5 office drones were having their meetings, or in their offices pretending to pretend to work.

Because even when they were doing their actual “work” and not slop-scrolling, it wasn’t real. There was no work to do. At least no knowledge work. Everyone knew this deep down, which is why they would lose their minds whenever it was said out loud.

As George walked past Engineering, he saw Carl at his desk, who immediately spun in his chair to greet him.

“George! I thought that was you I heard in the hall.”

Carl was always happy to see him. He was a middle manager and liked the chance to connect with someone he saw as an old-school, salt-of-the-earth type. George spent his days talking to a computer like everyone else, but still, it was the closest you’d get to manual labor nowadays.

“Hey, Carl. Just saw corporate strutting around V3. Nice work.”

There was “work” because it was illegal not to have it. Engineers were a licensed profession, and only humans could get licenses. Same for lawyers, accountants, welders, plumbers, you name it. And those are just the ones that were protected even before AI.

Carl stood up, beaming, and strode over to George, going for the handshake. In a practiced move, George stepped in, letting Carl grab his wrist, and gave him a one-armed hug.

He held it for a moment, knowing Carl hadn’t expected it and wasn’t the hugging type. “Congrats, buddy,” he said softly, before releasing him.

George wasn’t the handshaking type.

He continued down the corridor, thinking that the proportion of gladhanding strivers had gotten worse since the old days. It made sense: those legally required workers were hyper-productive thanks to AI, so there were fewer of them. But there were as many managers as ever, because they fight for zero-sum resources, which is a human job if there ever was one. AIs are trained to be bad at that anyway.

When George first started, he briefly had an AI boss before the managers staged a coup to ensure human input, conveniently also ensuring their zero-sum fight could continue.

Of course, the naive true believers think AI-Human teams are “actually, the best of both worlds” or whatever, though in any contest, AIs trounce human-AI teams. But sure, Becky’s HR job is the exception.

When George got to the end of the corridor, he paused a few feet from the door to the shop floor. The multi-sensor, a black ball just above the door, scanned him for FOD (Foreign Object Debris). It was a non-contact scanner only. There was still something they couldn’t do.

A short beep signaled the all-clear, and George turned the door handle with his lower wrist as he bumped it open with his shoulder, entering the work area. Now he walked on sealed concrete, and his shoes made a dull thud rather than the clip-clop from the office.

He went along a snaking foot path, bounded by yellow lines on either side so you didn’t get run over by an AGV, though honestly nowadays it was pretty hard to get hit even if you tried (a few people had tried).

As he passed the interior window of the brightly lit break room, he saw Tim, who did his job well but was pretty much a zombie at this point. He had this thousand-yard stare and hardly spoke to anyone, except for occasionally blurting out stuttering, disjointed asides that would have been normal in the right context, but the context was always outbursts between long silences.

He hung a right and got to the workers’ lockers. Annoyingly, these were the old-style ones that could have a padlock attached, so you had to grip hard and pull upwards to open them.

He opened his locker and took off his gloves. They were driving gloves. Of course, no one drives anymore, but hey, nobody in a leather motorcycle jacket rode a motorcycle either. They looked cool, and the back was mostly open, which didn’t need protection anyway. He laid the gloves down carefully so they’d air out, as one of his nightmares was getting a staph infection or something on his fingers or under his nails.

At the sink behind him, he washed his hands and used a tiny bit of moisturizer to get the slight dewiness one needed. It felt a bit effeminate to use moisturizer, but he had managed to convince himself that it was more like caring for your tools, almost like a cobbler treating leather.

He made his way to his station, with the low murmur of the other workers around him.

“smoov...smoov...smoov, ruh-ruff! ... smoov...smoov.”

The station looked a bit like a blue La-Z-boy, but with a tray table on either side. A headset with a microphone was looped over the headrest.

George put on the headset, sat down, and fastened the seatbelt. The seatbelt wasn’t because the lazyboy was going anywhere (though it could, but he refused to engage in that level of Wall-E indignity), but for safety. It confirmed you were actually seated at your station, so that a robot arm didn’t inadvertently take your head off while serving you parts. It was definitely possible to get hit by the arms as they moved, which is why, since last year, they all had to wear seat belts.

“rufffff, rufff! rugghhff...” gurgled the kid behind him. Even in this job, there were nepo hires. The kid was fine at his job, really, but it was unsettling how much he spazzed out whenever there was an out-of-spec part. As much as he disliked it himself, he was glad at least the kid was buckled in. That said, from what he’d heard, the kid might actually be one of the better-adjusted of the post-slop generation.

George clicked the foot pedal by his right foot. The whir-whoosh sound of an arm could be heard as it got up to speed, and then the quick “whoom” as it rapidly came to a halt in front of him to serve up a part.

The part that arrived was a stainless steel ring, 3/4 of an inch tall and about 1-1/2 inches in diameter. George still thought in imperial units, save for one exception—the micron.

It was a bearing race. It kept the ball bearings in place. He knew the part; only the inner surface would matter. He slid his right middle finger, his best one, onto the inner diameter and felt around.

“smoov...smoov...smoov” the kid behind him murmured. He seemed happy enough now.

“Tool chatter,” George said into his headpiece microphone. The subtle humps he felt had a wavy, repeating pattern. That meant the part was vibrating from hitting a resonance. “There’s resonance, revert any RPM changes and recheck.” The CNC lathe was going too fast, or maybe too slow. Either way, it was turning at just the right speed to shake the crap out of the parts.

His job was human finger. And, unlike his colleagues, he was a finger connected to a neural net, in this case, his brain. He’d been a machinist in a past life, so he could actually diagnose issues with parts when there were problems with the surface finish.

The other ones, like the kid behind him, were just sensor meatbags. They gave a binary “smooth” if the part was good, or “rough” if it was bad, at which point it was kicked up to one of the former machinists, like George. He would probably inspect the kid’s “rugghfff” parts soon, once the system batched the related ones and had a few more sensor meatbags confirm the reading.

Human fingers were the one thing that machines couldn’t quite replicate. Yeah, there were surface roughness sensors, but they didn’t like irregular shapes, and couldn’t fit in tight spaces, and were slow, and couldn’t actually diagnose the issue; they just spat out an Ra value in microns. Heck, even back when George was a machinist, they were around, but everyone just used their finger. They say we can detect features down to 13 nanometers.

He took his hand back and clicked the pedal by his left foot. The arm gently took the part back, and when at a safe distance, sped away with another whir-whoosh. Another part arrived. One of the kid’s probably. The arm seemed slightly snappier than usual; management was hellbent on finding more productivity gains, despite all the low-hanging fruit already having been plucked.

It turned out to be a pretty slow day. A few more parts showed up, but he could tell they didn’t really need diagnoses. It was just the system keeping tabs on him.

He took a long lunch out to meet one of his fun-employed friends. “Fun-employed” wasn’t really an ironic phrase anymore: it actually kinda looked like fun now that the stigma was mostly gone. Still, he thought of himself as a working man and got the sense that others respected it. It was like being a homesteader or something, the kind of retro thing everyone likes to think they would do, but also they’d probably hate, and so admire anyone who pulls it off. He liked that.

The autotaxi dropped him off back at the plant. “Autotaxi” always seemed like a dumb name, since “auto” was already a word for “car.” Unfortunately, Tesla was able to keep the trademark on “robotaxi,” so if you ever said it, you’d look like a fanboy. He kinda was a fanboy, but also didn’t want to enrage Becky.

He clocked back in. Left pinky. Made his way to the La-Z-boy. Clicked the right pedal.

Nothing.

Weird, he’d been out at lunch for over an hour. Surely there was something in the queue by now? Not even a test part arrived.

The kid was gurgling. “Rouuggugghf! Rooouof…”

It sounded like a lot of out-of-spec parts were going to him. Maybe every other part at this point. Was there a problem on the line?

He looked left and right, down the length of the shop at the other meatbags. He strained to hear what they were saying over the sound of the arms and kid, and the ventilation that kept FOD and dust to a minimum.

They were hard to hear; most of them spoke in almost a whisper, as if the effort of speaking would disturb their flow. “Smoov...smoov...smoov” they all seemed to be saying, visibly pursing their lips, as if going for a kiss.

Smooth. They were all saying smooth. The others were getting the usual parts, but the system was feeding the kid mostly failed parts.

That was George’s job. He checked the failed parts. Was the kid a double check? But why didn’t they end up going up to him afterwards?

“RooouuGGHHfffhh” crooned the kid, jolting George out of his head.

He waited. Silence from the kid. Then, at last, a part arrived for George, another bearing race, like before.

He felt it. Wavy. He started, “Tool chatter. Resonance...” but before he could say the fix, the arm retracted gently but insistently. George started to sit up to stay with it, but his seat belt kept him down, and before he could unbuckle it, the arm had sped off.

Quiet. No arms around. Kid fidgeted wordlessly.

He heard an arm whoosh in and serve another part to the kid, who then let out a “RoOogHHffffEEe…” in a tapering groan as he touched it.

An arm arrived at George’s station. Almost in disbelief, he probed the inside of a bearing race with his middle finger. Feed-rate spiral—he felt tiny ridges from a mismatch between feed-rate and RPM. They had adjusted the RPM without his input.

It clicked. Like hard-soled shoes on the linoleum.

It was the kid. He was diagnosing. He probably didn’t even know it, but the machine did. All it needed was someone to translate the gurgles into English. The kid was the sensor. George had just been his dictionary. But now the Machine knew the language itself.

The arm waited impatiently in front of George, waiting for a diagnosis. He stared at it, mouth open, for a moment. Then he said, “streaking, tool wear.”

Nothing happened. He stayed quiet for what felt like ages, though probably only seconds had passed.

He tried again with “Feed-rate spir...” and the arm whooshed off before he could finish. It already knew. It just wanted to be sure.

George didn’t get any more parts that day.

Back at his locker, he put on his gloves, more slowly and carefully than usual. When he checked his phone, he saw he’d gotten an email. This wasn’t an email job, so each one was allowed to push a notification.

“Please come in thirty minutes early tomorrow for a brief meeting with your shift supervisor.”

An autotaxi took him home. He didn’t sleep much that night but was in early the following day, as they’d asked.

It was 2:25 pm. He took off his glove and clocked in.

Right middle finger.

In late 2004, the USS Princeton radar ship and the USS Nimitz carrier detected anomalous radar returns off the coast of San Diego. The targets would descend from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet, loiter for a few hours, then ascend, often at speeds typical of missiles rather than aircraft. They were also spotted with the ship’s “big eyes,” which are large binoculars.

The USS Princeton had a new cutting-edge radar system, which they thought was malfunctioning. They reset the system, which took two weeks, but they still detected the strange objects.

On Nov. 14th, 2004, Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich were flying a training mission in their two-seater F/A-18 fighters, and had a Weapons Systems Officer (WSO) in the back.

The jets were sent to investigate an anomalous target, which was now detected by both ships, as well as an E-2 Hawkeye radar plane and submarine.

When the pilots arrived, they saw a “tic-tac” shaped object, a smooth white cylinder about 46 feet long, moving erratically above the water. It was a clear, calm day, and below the object, the water was agitated into whitewater.

As the planes approached, the object started ascending in an arc, which the pilots followed. They first circled each other, but when Fravor banked inwards to intercept, the UFO sped off nearly instantly and disappeared.

About half a minute later, the USS Princeton reported that they had detected it again, 60 miles away.

The two jets returned to the USS Nimitz, and later, a single-seater F/A-18 flown by Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood was sent to investigate and caught it on video.

Links

• Department of Defense Report (released via Freedom of Information Act)

• Fravor’s and Dietrich’s 60 Minutes interview, and Fravor testifying under oath

• Statements by Underwood

• Corroborating interviews with ships’ crew: Cryptography Tech, Fire Controlman, Air Intercept Supervisor, Aviation Tech, Supply Officer, Powerplant Specialist, Aviation Fuels Tech.

Best Picture: Costa Rica Land Survey

In 1971, Sergio Loaiza took this photo while flying over Costa Rica to survey land for a hydroelectric project.

It was commissioned by National Geographic Costa Rica, and the original film now lies within the National Archives of Costa Rica. With the chain of custody and original negatives accounted for, this is perhaps the best UFO photo ever.

Best Video: CBP Aguadilla

The Aguadilla UAP video was captured by a US Customs and Border Protection plane after it had received reports of an object detected on radar. The most anomalous part is when the object appears to enter the water going 40+ mph and then resurface, which no known airborne object can do.

Best Testimony: Secretary of Defense

The acting US Secretary of Defense said he was denied access to information on UFOs. He wasn’t told that it didn’t exist, but rather that he lacked the authority to see:

Best Counterpoint: Yankee Blue

The Wall Street Journal reported that the talk of secret UFO reverse engineering started with a hazing ritual:

For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle.

The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake … The defense secretary’s office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.

So it was just a prank, which a 2023 memo put a stop to. And they should be able to produce this, unless, of course, only UFO claims require evidence.

Not only was no memo ever provided, but when a Freedom of Information Act request was submitted to the DoD, this was the response:

The Department of Defense itself says there are no records of anything along the lines of a “Yankee Blue” hazing ritual. This is different from a Glomar response. The fact that they are seemingly compelled to lie about this should raise flags.

Objections

I address various objections to UFOs:

1. Why do UFOs act weird and sometimes crash?

2. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

3. The Dark Forest Hypothesis

4. The government can’t keep secrets

5. Grabby Aliens | Eternity in Six Hours | Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord

6. 9 other objections

Also:

1. Two papers on why life might not have originated on Earth

2. How the government used disinformation to suppress reports of anomalous health phenomena, until Trump blabbed about it.

Jhanas are absorption states, often deeply pleasurable, that sometimes happen during meditation. Depending on who you ask, they can be achieved within a week-long workshop, or they are rare states that are touched only after years of practice. They go back to the foundations of Buddhism, and were described by the Buddha himself, but they have also recently gained popularity in tech-adjacent circles in the West.

I won’t go into exactly what they are or what it takes to achieve them, but rather, should they be sought out?

The Case For

Seeking awareness, stillness, and an ability to concentrate are good, and insofar as working towards Jhanas accomplishes this, that is good.

Buddhism is essentially a monastic practice; there are behavioral expectations for lay people, or “householders,” but meditation is not among them. Most people in Buddhist countries, raised Buddhist, have never meditated.

Meditation is something for monks who have devoted their lives to the path of Enlightenment. For householders, your hope is that you’ll be a good person in this life and may be reincarnated as a monk in the next, when you will have a shot at Enlightenment.

The Western approach is to be a “householder” while integrating meditation into your life to enjoy its benefits. Some of these will be instrumental (better focus, less reactive, happier, etc.) and some will be spiritual (peace, self-knowledge, insight, etc.).

Jhana-seeking because it feels good is maximally instrumental, but if the only way to get there is to skillfully meditate, then you are learning something valuable. The Jhana-seeking might be the initial impetus, but if it gets you on the path, that is good.

It doesn’t seem worse than those who start meditating to help with anxiety, anger, or any other “bad” thing. After all, in Buddhism, it’s a known mistake to see pleasant and unpleasant sensations differently; you should neither cultivate desire nor aversion.

The Case Against

Craving, sensation seeking, and encouraging desire are bad, and insofar as working towards Jhanas accomplishes this, that is bad.

Imagine your leg falling asleep.

If you have meditated even a bit, this will have happened to you. If someone said, “I won’t meditate because my leg sometimes falls asleep,” you could say that they were misunderstanding meditation.

A key aspect of meditation is that you notice, but don’t necessarily obey or inhabit sensations and feelings that arise. While you should not disregard injurious sensations to meditate, much like life, certain discomforts are part of the experience.

Both choosing not to meditate because your leg falls asleep and choosing to meditate because you’ll get Jhanas are similarly missing the point. Both are side effects of the practice that should neither be craved nor feared. Practicing craving or aversion is anti-meditation.

What Works For You

However, one of the most interesting aspects of Buddhism is the belief that you should find what resonates with you, rather than merely following traditions, scripture, or clever arguments:

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time. — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

In software engineering, the zero, one, infinity (ZOI) rule means that you should allow zero instances, one instance, or any number of instances of something. For example, this post is allowed to have zero embedded tables (Substack lacks this feature), one subtitle, and an infinite number of likes (hint, hint).

This is a reflection of a pattern in real life, the ZOM principle, which is that there are zero, one, or many of a thing, not exactly two.

Examples of Zero, One, Many (ZOM):

• Reproductive partners: (none) asexual reproduction, (one) sexual reproduction, (many) some slime molds and fungi (10² - 10⁴)

• Dialects in a language: (none) language is dead e.g. Sanskrit, (one) single dominant dialect e.g. Icelandic, (many) large number of dialects e.g. Arabic

• Number of hearts: (none) jellyfish and sponges, (one) vertebrates, (many) octopuses (3), hagfish (4)

• Limbs: (none) non-motile bacteria, (one) has a flagellum, (many) tetrapods (4), arthropods (6 - 500+)

• Nuclei per cell: (none) red blood cells, (one) most human cells, (many) skeletal muscle (10³ - 10⁴)

• Number of spouses: (none) celibate, (one) monogamous, (many) polygamous

Poisson Distribution

This is an effect of the Poisson distribution, which is how, for a rate of something happening λ, there will be k events over a given interval.

For example, if you’re detecting meteors, and the average rate of detections is two per hour, the rate λ is two. Sometimes there would be none (k = 0), and sometimes more (k = 5), but the average is 2.

Using a Monte Carlo simulation, you can plot how many meteors you’d see in a given hour, for various rates λ:

From this chart, you can see that there are regions where 0 instances dominate (i.e., a very low rate), and regions where 1 dominates the non-zero instances. There, however, is no rate for which 2 dominates. Even when the average rate is λ = 2 per hour, in hours where meteors are seen, you see exactly 2 only a third of the time.

The upshot is that in natural distributions, exactly two instances of something should not be common. If you’ve seen two of something, expect more to come.

Exceptions that Prove the Rule

The examples that seem to be exceptions end up being enlightening:

1. Number of Sexes: This seems like 1, 2, many, but sexual reproduction only makes sense in the context of multiple gametes. Either gamete never merges (asexual reproduction), merges once (sexual reproduction), or does the slime mold thing (many merges).

2. Official Languages in a Country: This can be zero (Mexico), one (China), or many (India). However, you also get countries like Canada and Belgium with two. This is a case of two regions with their own languages, tied together for historical and political reasons. It’s an unstable equilibrium, and both have had to deal with separatist issues.

3. Gods in a Religion: Zero (atheism, some Buddhism), one (monotheism), or many (polytheism). Zoroastrianism has two, but possibly because you need to pick one to worship, monotheism seems to be an attractor: one god ends up as the good one and the other as the bad one. This is what we now have among modern Parsis. Manichaeism is explicitly dualist, and maybe it’s not a coincidence that it no longer exists.

Two is not where things settle; it's the place they're passing through. If you find exactly two of something, either more are coming, or look closer — the two are really one.

Many have over the years; here’s a list of people who have come out from the US military. However, they’re considered cranks because their claims are too weird. This, of course, leads to the tautology where whistleblowers who make claims about UFOs are cranks, because anyone who makes claims about UFOs is a crank.

Now that we have smartphones, why aren’t there videos everywhere?

They are everywhere! They’re just not that impressive because 1-3x optical zoom camera phones will not photograph airborne objects well. As an experiment, try to take a picture of a plane or helicopter with your smartphone and see how it turns out.

Why are they always seen by the US Navy?

They’re not always seen by the US Navy; they’re always disclosed by it. You can’t submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the Chinese or Russian Navies.

The speed of light is too slow

There are two ways to get around this:
1) Von Neumann probes - i.e. self-replicating probes. Cosmological time scales are more than enough to colonize the galaxy or even the universe. Humans did the same thing, colonizing the Earth while moving at only ~10 miles/year.

2) Wormholes or warp bubbles, which aren’t forbidden by physics.

Intelligent life in the universe is too rare

Life seems to lead to intelligent life, as evidenced by the fact that two very distant animal families, primates and octopuses, are intelligent. Their most recent common ancestor was a worm less than a few millimeters long.

Where are the radio waves?

With our current radio telescopes, we couldn’t detect another Earth at the nearest star. SETI is looking for a directional beam, not incidental radio traffic.

Why are UFOs an American Phenomenon?

You may have seen the map below circulating around:

However, this is just the UFO sightings for one American organization, NUFORC. In actuality, there are government initiatives on UFOs in Japan, France, Brazil, and China. One of the better-known videos of a UFO came from a Russian MiG.

Why Are They Showing Up Right Now?

It seems strange that UFOs would show up at this point in history. There are two possibilities:

1) Humans have only recently started broadcasting radio waves and detonating nuclear weapons; either one could have been a beacon that attracted attention. These signals would have had 80-100 years to reach other planets by now.

2) They’ve been visiting for a long time, but our sensors have only just caught up to detecting them regularly. We’ve only been industrial for a few hundred years, and digital for perhaps half a century.

Why would they come here?

Though there is probably other life in the universe, it doesn’t seem especially common. Humanity freaked out when we thought we found fossilized evidence of just microbes. Finding a whole new biosphere would be endlessly fascinating.

How Can I Find Some Myself?

Don’t use your phone; optical methods are bad for aircraft. Use passive radar; it’s not hard, and I’ll help.

(The mechanics of the complexity quantification are described in another paper, and it amounts to counting only the parts of the genome that can't be changed without breaking the organism.)

A plot of the complexity of various genomes vs. the time they first emerged shows an exponential curve. This makes sense, as it represents a continuous growth rate, and the paper calculates that life on Earth has averaged a ~1.8% increase in complexity every 10 million years.1

Below is a log plot of this:

On a log plot, the exponential function appears as a straight line. We can see that life on Earth aligns with the trend line, confirming that the expansion of complexity is exponential.

Interestingly, though, you can also project backward to see when the genome should have started. This requires the assumption that early organisms didn’t advance faster than later ones, but the authors argue that if anything, without template-based replication, early organisms should have advanced more slowly than they do today.

From the plot, you can see that life appears to have begun close to 10 billion years ago, with the paper reporting 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years. This is, at a minimum, about 3 billion years longer than Earth has existed.

Surprising. Even more surprising is that when Sven Jørgensen did a similar analysis, but using a form of energy density instead of genome complexity, he found that life’s expected origin was 5-6 billion years ago. This is still 1-2 billion years older than what’s possible on Earth.

Panspermia

These results support an earlier idea, panspermia, which is the theory that life originated elsewhere and was spread to Earth. Our planet is relatively young; three-quarters of planets in the universe are estimated to be older, by nearly 2 billion years on average.

The oldest planets in the galaxy are over 12 billion years old, long enough to have originated life, according to the extrapolations from the two papers.

So yes, there are planets old enough, but could life from those places ever reach Earth?

NASA tested just that, by exposing bacteria endospores to space for 1.5 years. Endospores are special, desiccated hibernation states that certain bacteria can enter when under stress and deprivation. If curious, below is a pleasingly retro 90-second clip about how bacteria become endospores:

NASA found that bacterial endospores were hardy to temperature fluctuations, vacuum, and cosmic radiation. They were only harmed by UV light. This implies that if protected from UV, for example, by being shadowed or buried, bacteria could survive the conditions of space.

But for how long? The NASA test was for 1.5 years, and most endospores survived. However, the oldest endospores ever revived were recovered from the abdomen of a bee, preserved in 25-40 million-year-old2 amber. In our region of the Milky Way, solar systems average only about 5 light-years apart, and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, is about 4 light-years away. If endospores can also survive millions of years in space (and not just in amber), then they could manage the travel time between star systems.

Finally, panspermia requires a mechanism. This is proposed to be debris ejected from asteroid impacts, and simulations have shown particles from Earth could end up as far away as Jupiter. With enough time and enough impacts, this could end up in a different solar system.

Taken together, two independent extrapolations find that life appears to predate the Earth. This doesn’t prove panspermia, but otherwise, life would have had to arise and quickly develop immediately following Earth’s formation and cooling.

And at this point, I’m not sure which is the stranger story.

Though related, these are not the same. A paper that refutes the Fermi Paradox does not refute UFOs and sometimes actually supports the likelihood of UFOs.

(Other objections to UFOs covered in these posts.)

In fact, UFO sightings are themselves evidence against the Fermi Paradox. The paradox asks, “Why don’t we see aliens?”, and UFO sightings say, “You do, we’re right here!”

Here’s three commonly cited papers on the topic:

1. Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

This paper by Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord was reviewed on Slate Star Codex, and it delivers on its title: the Fermi Paradox largely dissolves. Using a Monte Carlo simulation to map out the alien-life scenarios that were discussed in other papers, they find that 30% of the time, you’d expect less than one civilization per galaxy.

This is a Poisson distribution, with intelligent life being very rare. Most galaxies have no intelligent life, but occasionally, due to improbably good conditions, you’d have one lone civilization. There would almost never be two in the same galaxy, so most observers wouldn’t see anyone else.1

The math checks out, so aliens are unlikely?

No. That means the Fermi Paradox is unlikely. In 30% of scenarios, there is no intelligent life in the typical galaxy, so it’s entirely possible we’re alone. Still, this leaves 70% of scenarios where there should be life to find.

• Don’t be surprised by no aliens; it’s 30% of scenarios.

• Don’t be surprised by aliens; it’s 70% of scenarios.

2. Eternity in six hours

Another paper by Sandberg, along with Armstrong, calculates that just six hours of a star’s energy is enough to send self-replicating probes across the known universe. Earth is a relatively young planet, so if probes were sent by an earlier-emerging civilization, they’d have had plenty of time to reach us.

That means if we haven’t seen any probes, there’s probably no other intelligent life in the universe. Again, the math does check out.

The paper claims: If there are no probes, there are no aliens.

The paper does not claim: There are no aliens, so there are no probes.

There are no aliens, conditional on the absence of probes. Evidence for UFOs (i.e. alien probes) is an input to this paper, not an output.

3. Grabby Aliens

Robin Hanson’s grabby aliens paper doesn’t ask about the Fermi Paradox, but rather why intelligent life seems to have appeared on Earth so quickly. He says it’s because “grabby aliens” gobble up all the other planets before life can emerge on them. Earth had life early because that was the only time it was possible; later on, all the planets will have been consumed.

His support for the claim that life was quick to show up on Earth is that most stars are much longer-lived than the Sun:

If stars of all masses were equally habitable, most habitable years should lie in planets at the far-longer-lived small mass stars. After all, 95% of stars last longer than our sun, and some last roughly two thousand times longer.

But there’s a much simpler explanation: stars are not all equally habitable—small mass stars might not sustain life. It could be that small stars don’t support rocky planets with an atmosphere, or it could be that their low luminosity (<10% of the Sun’s) won’t allow complex life.

We orbit a star in the ~95th percentile for mass. If all stars are equally habitable, it is improbable that we aren’t on one of the far more numerous, low-mass, and long-lived stars. Our big Sun implies that larger stars are more likely to support life.

Grabby Aliens on the Fermi Paradox

The Grabby Aliens Hypothesis has to address the Fermi Paradox, because if the universe is being grabbed up, we should see it in our telescopes. Hanson answers that if it happens fast enough, i.e., close to the speed of light, we won’t see it coming:

If their expansion speed were within∼25% of lightspeed, a selection effect implies that we are less likely to see than to not see such volumes.

The paper’s position is not only that there are aliens, but they “now control 40-50% of the universe volume.”

Extraterrestrial contact is therefore soon expected, and indeed, the author believes they’re already here.

The Second War of Priors was between the British Empiricists, like Bacon and Hume, and the Continental Rationalists, like Descartes and Leibniz. The power shift to the Empirical side was the Scientific Revolution, though both would claim Newton as their own.1

The Third War of Priors involves the Bay Area Rationalists, who came to prominence after correctly predicting the importance of AI. Their opponents haven’t yet sufficiently coalesced to be named.

Bayes and Priors

I call these debates “Wars of Priors” because, fundamentally, they are about how one arrives at one’s prior likelihood.

With Bayesian reasoning, you start with a prior probability of something occurring, for example, seeing a polar bear in Texas. It’s not their typical habitat, so most people will have a low prior probability of this. If a child were to say they saw one around, you would still think there probably wasn’t a literal polar bear nearby.

However, if you’re in Texas, but at the Zoo, and that child says they saw a polar bear, you’re more likely to believe them. Your low prior probability of seeing a polar bear in Texas is updated by the information that you’re at the Zoo, and so the child’s testimony seems more likely.

In this way, Bayesianism updates priors with evidence to arrive at probabilities. It would be tempting to call it a successful synthesis of Empiricism and Rationalism, but because it doesn’t answer the question of where priors should come from, it’s only kicking the can down the road.

Rationalists believe you arrive at priors through a logical analysis; in a novel situation, map out the potentialities and reason what follows necessarily from the knowns.

Empiricists believe you arrive at priors through experience. When facing the unknown, search experience for appropriate comparisons and adjust confidence based on how well examples fit.

Shots Fired

The first shots in the Third War of Priors, possibly as friendly fire, were the “monkey’s paw” of prediction markets.

Rationalists reasoned that prediction markets would aggregate the wisdom of the crowds with skin in the game, and despite cultural guardrails on betting, would deliver valuable information about the world. The project was also important methodologically for Rationality, as it served as a proof of concept that human minds together can accurately predict the future. However, the markets haven’t been especially useful, and the largest impacts are new sports gambling and insider trading. Ironically, the Rationalists’ public bet on betting epistemology went sideways.

The AI Debate

The AI debate seems to have delivered one win to each side. The Rationalists reasoned early, with little available data, that AI would be important, and they were proven correct.

However, it’s seen as a win for Empiricism that LLMs, rather than being built, are grown through brute-force extraction of statistical patterns from huge amounts of data. Every attempt to build AI from first principles failed. So though Rationalists predict from logic, Claude speaks via empirical inferences that no one (including Anthropic) understands. This creates a tension in logically modeling a non-logical system.

In the most important debate, on whether AI will kill us all, Rationalists have a probability of doom, P(Doom), that ranges from 10-90%, with 30-50% being typical. These numbers usually come from thought experiments and extrapolation from past development.

Empiricists have lower probabilities, if they accept the probabilistic framing at all, and particularly chafe at ranges above 50%. They believe high-probability claims are rationalized vibes and forward-projected just-so stories, whose reference class could be Homo erectus, but also past failed predictions of technological apocalypses, such as overpopulation, peak oil, and nanobot grey goo.

The debate will be settled in the Empiricists’ favor if AI develops slowly, develops safely, or goes bad in finite ways that allow for learning. If the Rationalists are right, though, they won’t get to enjoy their victory, and neither will anyone else.

There’s a wide range of grant sizes, from a few thousand up to apparently $175k at least (though I think awarding that much is relatively rare). If you have an interesting project, it’s worth filling out the application. It’s not very long (<1500 words), reasonably interesting to write, and they get back to you very quickly. I believe Tyler personally interviews every awardee.

The first section is your personal story, and the instructions include:

We probably don't care much about your formal education, credentials, or awards, unless they're particularly germane to who you are or your idea.

I think you should believe them here; they’re not just signaling. I didn’t include much in the way of credentials, but did explain my motivations and, in particular, told a story of ever-growing ambition.

I’m not including my bio in this post, but for your benefit, below are my answers to the second and third parts of the application.

2. A Mainstream View that I Agree With:

Here I answered with something everyone implicitly believes or demonstrates, but won’t actually say out loud. I get the feeling that this type of answer goes over well if thought-through and novel.

Amazon.com is just great. This is mainstream in that it’s widely believed in practice (Amazon has among the highest customer satisfaction among retailers), but saying this at a Brooklyn party will likely give you pushback on workers’ rights and on killing mom-and-pop stores.

However, aside from the ample consumer surplus from cost savings, there are enormous positive externalities from reliable, one or two-day delivery of hundreds of millions of goods, particularly for a hardware developer. Hardware development, compared to software development, is notoriously slow, complex, and costly. This is largely because the inputs are physical goods rather than software packages and libraries. Software engineers can instantly download a tool when needed, often at no cost. In contrast, hardware engineers have to purchase items and wait for them to arrive before they can test anything.

R&D is a continuous cycle of testing and iteration, so the speed of development is roughly the reciprocal of this cycle time. Amazon, with fast delivery and a large catalog of technical goods, has shortened hardware cycle times from 1-2 weeks to 1-2 days. In practice, this means that hardware development starts to approach the pace and expense of software development.

3. Project Proposal:

Though UFOs are reported by the Navy, and top officials like the Secretary of State, quality data is sorely lacking.

The issue is twofold: Respectable civilian organizations find the topic too stigmatized or unserious to devote resources to, while the military classifies relevant data by default (sensor data reveals capabilities).

Crowdsourcing UFO sightings data is a third pathway, and this has been attempted through mobile apps. However, a camera phone isn’t suited for distant, airborne objects, and a 2D image can only give apparent size and velocity. Further, they require line-of-sight, and the camera needs to be pointed at the object (aside from fisheye lenses). The result is generally a single, zoomed-out photo of objects of indeterminate size, distance, velocity, and acceleration.

Passive radar is the ideal solution. “Passive” meaning it uses existing terrestrial radio broadcasts as illumination, so no powerful radio transmitter or FCC license is needed. Like other radars, it uses the delay between the outgoing signal and its echoes to determine range, and the Doppler shift in the frequency to determine velocity. By directly measuring true range and velocity at 30+ miles, each radar node collects robust data across huge areas.

The nodes upload their data to an aggregation server, which generates a global map of radar hits. With enough overlapping nodes, individual objects could be corroborated by several, if not dozens, of detections. The velocity and position data could then be scrutinized for anomalous behavior, such as unusual speeds, turn rates, or accelerations.

Distributed aircraft detection networks are not new. If you’ve ever tracked a flight, you’ve used one. Flight tracking networks like FlightAware and Flightradar24 work by aggregating data uploaded by amateurs using home-built receivers collecting nearby planes’ ADS-B transponder broadcasts. The networks then sell the data via API to airlines and mobile apps. If you live in an underserved area, the networks will often even send you a detection kit for free to improve their coverage.

ADS-B flight tracking requires that aircraft broadcast their location, whereas passive radar can track anything with a sufficient radar cross-section, broadcasting or not.

A system like this is only recently possible. In 2004, a NATO researcher built a passive radar using FM radio, which required a computing cluster for the signal processing. Today, a Raspberry Pi 5 (released late 2023) is fast enough to work and enables full radar kits for under $500.

A grant would accelerate the development of a network for passive radar. I’ve been working on this full-time for the past year, and this will continue to be my primary project in the years ahead. With about $30,000 in grant funds raised and a similar amount personally contributed, most of the individual node development is finished. We’ve established a legal strategy, tested and down-selected the hardware, and polished the software for non-technical users.

4 prototype radar nodes are now live, and their data is being used to develop aggregation and tracking software. A live instance of a node’s output is here: radar3.retnode.com (red dots are radar detections, green dots are plane transponder overlays for validation).

Further funds will be used to accelerate the development of an aggregation server and a 20-node alpha test to known volunteers, beyond what my personal finances could otherwise afford. This will validate the concept, expose the system to external users, and enable scale testing.

I’ve not included the budget section, but suffice it to say, it was only modestly detailed.

If You’ve Made it This Far You Should Apply

You read 1000+ word posts on Substack. This is a positive signal you should listen to.

At the very least, try drafting a project proposal to sharpen your thinking around the topic. Then you can write the “mainstream view” answer because, honestly, it’s an interesting thought exercise. And then you might as well write a bio…

I understand this; it seems like the government is so huge and frequently incompetent that doing an adult thing, like keeping secrets indefinitely, just seems impossible. Surely some idiot will drunkenly spill the beans eventually.1

But security is better than it might seem because of the toupe fallacy: only poorly concealed secrets ever get noticed, so it appears that secrets are generally not well kept. However, when happenstance reveals programs that otherwise haven’t leaked, we get a glimpse of just how much is kept secret and how they manage it.

1. Incentives - The Snowden Files

In 2013, Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong and released classified documents to journalists on the NSA’s global wiretapping program. From there, he flew to Moscow, lived in the Airport for a month, and was finally granted asylum in Russia. His now-wife relocated to be with him, and they’ve stayed ever since.

You’re probably familiar with Snowden’s story as the biggest whistleblower disclosure in American history. You might even think that this proves that the government can’t keep secrets.

What it more clearly demonstrates, though, is the enormous consequences of leaking classified information, and why it never came out earlier. Snowden had to permanently leave his home to live in a comparatively poor authoritarian country. He’s still there now, and if the political situation ever changes, he could well become a bargaining chip.

The US government has continued to pursue him, despite some of the programs being ruled illegal in United States v. Moalin, which shows the enormous costs the government is willing to inflict on even righteous whistleblowers.

Everyone who works around sensitive programs knows this, has been briefed extensively on it, and really tries not to do anything that even has a whiff of leaking, for fear of their lives being ruined.

2. Compartmentalization - Stealth Helicopters

In May of 2011, Sohaib Athar live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden:

He was not only announcing what turned out to be the location of Bin Laden, but also the existence of stealth helicopters:

Before one accidentally crashed in the raid, the existence of operational stealth helicopters was not publicly known, even to elected representatives, aside from a select few specifically cleared.

Depending on how you count, there could have been hundreds of thousands of people in on the secret before the crash, because that’s how many people are in a stealth helicopter’s supply chain.2

The way it never gets out, though, is through compartmentalization, meaning dividing the information and spreading it widely. Each entity works on a tiny portion of the whole, so it can’t identify the bigger picture. If all you can see is a fastener, coating, or shroud, you may not even be able to figure out what sort of machine it’s for.

3. Disinformation - Havana Syndrome

See my Havana Syndrome post for more on this.

Denying and obfuscating allows secrets to be kept, even when there’s evidence out in the open. This is the case with Havana Syndrome, a debilitating medical condition suffered by American diplomats (read: intelligence agents) stationed in Cuba.

It was denied for years as psychosomatic and phisologically implausible, until earlier this year, Trump blabbed to reporters that the US used directed-energy weapons to induce similar symptoms in Venezuelan soldiers.

You don’t necessarily need to keep things secret if you can keep them unbelievable.

When Secrecy Works Too Well - FOGBANK

FOGBANK is a highly classified material that is suspected to be an aerogel booster in the fission-fusion process of a thermonuclear warhead.

But if it’s so secret, why does it have a Wikipedia page? Well, the problem is that it was kept too secret.

It was first produced in the 70s and 80s, alongside the production of the warheads it would go into. Then, in the 90s, when the warheads were ready for refurbishment to extend their service life, it was realized that suitable FOGBANK material was unavailable. Not only that, but the secret of even how to make it was completely lost, with records destroyed, and personnel elsewhere, retired, or dead.

This led to severe delays and cost overruns, as the material had to be painstakingly reverse-engineered from whatever they had, and it all came out in a Government Accountability Office report.

Sometimes the government keeps a secret so well that even they can’t find it.