I Hired a Pro to Debunk Aliens. It Backfired.
You may not like it, but this is what Peak Agency looks like.
Peter Miller is the world’s best debunker. I know this because he single-handedly beat a think tank in a debate on whether COVID was a lab leak, this decade’s most contentious question, and won $100,000. The losing side said this about him:
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 direction 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 from 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.