The long awaited government report is finally out there.
Government report can’t explain UFOs, but offers no evidence of aliens
A new intelligence report sent to Congress on Friday concludes that virtually all of the 144 sightings of unidentified flying objects documented by the military since 2004 are of unknown origin, in an extremely rare public accounting of the U.S. government’s data on UFOs that is likely to fuel further speculation about phenomena the intelligence community has long struggled to understand.
The Pentagon, assisted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, found no evidence to indicate that they mark a technological breakthrough by a foreign adversary, or that the objects are of an extraterrestrial origin — though neither explanation has been ruled out in what has been described as a preliminary assessment that lacks sufficient data.
Not exactly a surprise. Although to true believers this was a crushing disappointment and likely a retreat into conspiracy, that the US government has alien ships, bodies, and so on, hidden away in Area 51 or that warehouse where we keep the Ark of the Covenant. However if you look, there is plenty of skepticism of even the 144 mystery sightings are really that mysterious. Scott Adams has done a great, almost off handed debunking of many of the UFO claims, and if you look, you can find other debunking sites and videos.
As a kid, I would have been excited and hopeful that aliens actually existed and were frequent visitors to the coolest planet in the Milky Way: Earth. However as an adult, I’ve (mostly) put away childish things, and it makes more sense that we’re alone in the cosmos.
But what about the vastness of space? What about all of those planets? What about the Drake Equation? Although a fun way to engage in conversation, the Drake Equation is meaningless when all of the values are unknown. My skepticism is pretty simple and boils down to this; we’ve advanced pretty far in our understanding of biology; “life” as we know it, but we can’t create it from scratch in the lab. That’s a trick we should have mastered decades ago if it was a simple and inevitable process of natural forces. That suggests that “life” may be a totally off the wall, once in a zillion occurrence. How that would happen I don’t have a clue, but since we can’t replicate it, we can’t estimate the odds of it occurring elsewhere no matter how many planets in the universe are in the Goldilocks zone.
There may come a time that we are able to replicate it experimentally in a way that could occur naturally, and at that point I’ll reconsider my position, but right now, I feel pretty safe in thinking that we’re alone in the universe.
Mike Street Station 