I meant to mention yesterday that the motive for hiding evidence about NTI is unclear to me. It seems like a great way to get more power (“we need more surveillance to deal with NTI”) and more money (“tax revenue is needed to deal with the alien menace”), and to distract from current scandals (“Forget Watergate - it’s unimportant compared to the UFO issue”). But instead by your suggestion, the government has declined these opportunities.
Again, my interpretation is that intelligence in apes an dolphins is more acceptable because it’s potentially observable and repeatable. It’s less fun to study something that might be an intelligence that is moderately good at evading detection (and always teasingly getting better at evasion as our technology improves) or might not exist at all. If a study of apes shows they’re not able to communicate well, in spite of decades of enthusiastic efforts, at least apes still exist.
As a matter of curiosity, what evidence would establish in your mind that UFOs are not NTI
I’m getting mixed messages from this talk by Bell about the discovery
John Pilkington measured the dispersion of the signal which established that the source was well outside the solar system but inside the galaxy. So were these pulsations man-made, but made by man from another civilization? If this were the case then the pulses should show Doppler shifts as the little green men on their planet orbited their sun. Tony Hewish started accurate measurements of the pulse period to investigate this; all they showed was that the earth was in orbital motion about the sun.
Meanwhile I was continuing with routine chart analysis, which was falling even further behind because of all the special pulsar observations. Just before Christmas I went to see Tony Hewish about something and walked into a high-level conference about how to present these results. We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem - if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell first? We did not solve the problem that afternoon, and I went home that evening very cross here was I trying to get a Ph.D. out of a new technique, and some silly lot of little green men had to choose my aerial and my frequency to communicate with us. However, fortified by some supper I returned to the lab that evening to do some more chart analysis. Shortly before the lab closed for the night I was analyzing a recording of a completely different part of the sky, and in amongst a strong, heavily modulated signal from Cassiopea A at lower culmination (at 1133) 1 thought I saw some scruff. I rapidly checked through previous recordings of that part of the sky, and on occasions there was scruff there. I had to get out of the lab before it locked for the night, knowing that the scruff would transit in the early hours of the morning.
So a few hours later I went out to the observatory. It was very cold, and something in our telescope-receiver system suffered drastic loss of gain in cold weather. Of course this was how it was! But by flicking switches, swearing at it, breathing on it I got it to work properly for 5 minutes - the right 5 minutes on the right beam setting. This scruff too then showed itself to be a series of pulses, this time 1.2 seconds apart. I left the recording on Tony’s desk and went off, much happier, for Christmas. It was very unlikely that two lots of little green men would both choose the same, improbable frequency, and the same time, to try signalling to the same planet Earth.
In the paper to NATURE we mentioned that at one stage we had thought the signals might be from another civilization. When the paper was published the press descended, and when they discovered a woman was involved they descended even faster.
It sounds as if they a) immediately recognized that this looked like possible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, b) checked out some evidence relevant to that idea (Doppler shifts), c) worried about the idea that they couldn’t eliminate ETI as a possible source, which was annoying because what she really wanted to do was study natural phenomenon, and d) were delighted when the second discovery established that it was almost certainly not ETIs.
I can’t get access to the Nature paper at the moment, but apparently the idea that ETIs were involved was important enough to be mentioned there, so it sounds like a bit more than a joke.
Got a copy of the Nature paper, and didn’t see anything in it that addressed ETI (in spite of what Bell’s reminiscence said).
The closest to a reference I found was this:
“The remarkable nature of these signals at first suggested an origin in terms of man-made transmissions which might arise from deep space probes, planetary radar or the reflexion of terrestrial signals from the Moon. None of these interpretations can, however, be accepted because the absence of any parallax shows that the source lies far outside the solar system. A preliminary search for further pulsating sources has already revealed the presence of three others having remarkably similar properties which suggests that this type of source may be relatively common at a low flux density. A tentative explanation of these unusual sources in terms of the stable oscillations of white dwarf or neutron stars is proposed.”
emphasis added. they could hardly take advantage of UFOs given that the topic remains just barely in the Overton window, if at all. I attribute that to deliberate misinformation but also to the existence of independent hoaxers.
as for the motive to keep them secret, given the timespan involve, never mind my outsider status, hard to say.
but the ostensible reason has had to do with not exposing the public to ontological shock. particularly in terms of the religious consequences, IMO. a more selfish reason has to do with not incurring backlash and for corporations to maintain monopolies on NHI-based technology.
although, I do find it strange that not only the US but other governments have kept quiet. perhaps they actually know pretty much nothing.
at any rate, I think that the documentary The Age of Disclosure goes into it a bit. I have seen the documentary but I don’t remember whether or not it odes. you also might want to go through r/ufos on Reddit where they’ve talked about “why keep it secret?” a number of times.
answering your second question, you’d have to do two things. one, give a natural explanation for why people have vivid waking dreams lasting hours. no, sleep paralysis doe snot account for it. also, I do not mean cases of addictions recovered under hypnosis. because suggestibility, duh.
seance, you’d have to show me records of the US purposefully fooling the public (with technology that I don’t think exists, at least didn’t it, say the 1970s). although I do think that mundane advanced technology does account for some percentage of the cases.
The phrase little green men has gone out of fashion since its heyday in the 50s and 60s. It has a long history but got a huge boost from Mack Reynolds’ crime novel The Case of the Little Green Men in 1951. It was a joke in that book about a supposedly impossible crime and the sf fan community, which included lots of scientists, played along. But the nutty UFO community kept insisting that LGM were real. Which put a damper on the joke.
I can think of a compelling reason why it might be decided to keep knowledge of alien civilizations secret: because if Earth’s history is anything to go by, undeveloped cultures tend to become overshadowed by technologically superior cultures. We’d want alien tech that we couldn’t make ourselves and end up losing our independence. Earth would become a “third world planet”.
If we assume there’s a secret being kept about “UFOs” then it is indeed strange that all governments have conspired to keep that secret for decades over changes in administration and through crises when the short-term advantages of revealing the secret would be high.
I simply find it hard to believe that all governments would
If, on the other hand, we don’t make that assumption, then there’s nothing strange at all.
Students ask me if I “believe in aliens.” My first reply is, “Is there someone buying a Snickers right now at the corner AM/PM?” We don’t know, and without any way to gather evidence, there’s no point in speculating. Then they bring up the odds of there being a planet with life on it, which is a good point.
Then there’s the concept of all the hurdles to intelligent life that can create spaceflight. Kurzgesagt on YouTube has a good video on this. It might be a lot harder to get this life than it seems, just thinking of Earth life.
Then there’s this: The fastest human spacecraft (as of a few years ago anyway) would take about 80,000 years to go from the nearest star to Earth. The planets there are so hot and bathed in X-rays that we have very high confidence there’s no life there. Even if there was, how fast could these aliens get here? “They’re super intelligent.” Why? Who says? But if they were, it would take them 8,000 years to get here, and they have to be able to survive the trip, and back presumably. “They’re super duper good at this.” They have this down to 800 years? 80 years? That’s a huge amount of leeway to give this scenario, but if I do give it, these aliens traveled 80 years one way to bop around and scare a few people? Even if they went into some sort of sci-fi movie suspended animation, this is what they used their time and talent on? None of this makes sense.
Some kids don’t like this answer, as it’s kind of like finding out that the rabbit was in Teller’s pocket right before he loaded it into the hat. The fantastical nature of the situation is ruined.
Which brings up two utterly different concepts: the first is the presumption that intelligent life exists somewhere else in the universe; and the second are reports where people claim to have encountered extraterrestrials. Said reports having almost mystic or supernatural levels of woo.