Why I Believe in UFOs - It's All About Priors
Strong priors prevent false positives, weak priors prevent false negatives
Until about a year ago, my line of work was nuclear fusion energy. Now I mostly concern myself with studying and detecting UFOs.
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:
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.
The believers, who want to believe in UFOs, government cover-ups, and psionic beings, believe aliens are already here.
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:
There is no good reason to think UFOs are either very unlikely or very likely.
There is widespread evidence and testimony of flying objects moving in ways that defy explanation.
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
I have an expansive definition of “aliens” which includes pretty much anything weird.