# I just watched the Open C3 Subcommittee Hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UFOs). Here's a succinct summary and commentary + some background

Background on UFOs, Disclosure, and Rationality
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There have been reports of various strange flying objects for [a very very long time](http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lucullus.html) (read the paragraph with "Boeotia". Note, a "hogshead" seems to be a type of barrel.), but, for me, it wasn't until quite recently that it became really unambiguously clear to me that something is really going on there. I'd recommend looking into the Princeton/Nimitz "tic-tac" incidents specifically. IIRC, at least 6 navy staff on those boats have very publicly and extensively testified to having seen a very strange propulsion technology. I've come across no story as to how, or why any human faction would be keeping a propulsion technology like that secret, and out of deployment for so long.  
(A half-baked theory though: Perhaps this propulsion tech could be used to make devilishly fast, non-interceptible ICBMs, the existence of which would make the world worse, so maybe it's a technology that we should avoid publicly acknowledging for as long as possible?)

However, it's possible that it wasn't a propulsion technology, and that it's more of a plasma image projector used in combination with a radar spoofing technology, as [futurist David Brin seems to confidently believe](https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2021/07/whats-really-up-with-uaps-ufos.html?m=1). In that case it's a lot easier to understand how the technology could have been kept hidden - it hasn't been mature for very long, and it has fairly limited applications, and it isn't salacious enough to leak about.  
So this would be one of my dominant hypotheses, the tic-tacs really look like they're just this, to me. But there are a few contrary details in the account of commander Fravor and US officials (including Obama, among other former presidents) swear up and down that they'd tell us if that were it.

So I kinda have to keep paying attention to this stuff.

### But isn't it wildly implausible? How can a rationalist entertain the possibility that aliens would be like this, or behave like this? The econ/tech-eschatology of it doesn't make any sense!

I'm sympathetic to that. My intuition says that if aliens had reached us, their construction projects would have filled our night sky, they wouldn't be hiding from us, because whatever the value of hiding, the costs are greater. [Robin Hanson talks extensively about the dynamics of economically plausible aliens](https://grabbyaliens.com/) and finds that it wouldn't generally support these sorts of observations.

But the observations seem to be disagreeing with my intuitions, so I seek a more detailed model.

[Robin Hanson *also* talks extensively about the a less prevalent but still believable set of dynamics that we might expect to see](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/panspermia-siblings.html) in panspermia-sibling aliens who happen to have developed a sclerotic world government (a development which is not especially unlikely, and might happen to us) that could temporarily resist the laws of instrumental convergence towards "grabbyness".  
That story *could* support these sorts of observations.

Regardless, if you are *sure* that it's definitely not aliens, you should be extremely interested in the possibility that humans, hence, appear to have created practical alcubierre drives.  
I think that would warrant some discussion.

Summary and Commentary of the Proceedings of the Open Subcommittee
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(The subcommittee hearing can be watched [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSDweUbGBow))

*   There's a new US govt UFO investigation program: Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, "Or, AIMSOG".

Congressman André Carson:

> Today we will bring that organization out of the shadows. ... Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way. For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis, pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did, DoD officials relegated the issue to the back-room or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community. Today, we know better. UAPs are unexplained, it's true, but they are real, they need to be investigated, and many threats they pose need to be mitigated.

*   Possibly new video of something reflective going past or being passed by a plane. Later in response to a clarifying question of Mr Himes, Mr Bray says yeah it's "probably moving very very slow".
*   They've figured out what that weird night vision footage of hovering triangles were! Just US drones producing a really weird camera lens effect in an IR lens being filmed by another camera. "We're now reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area. The triangular appearance, is a result of light passing through the night vision goggles, and then being recorded by an SLR camera"
*   (after faffing around trying and failing to get VLC to show a still of the flyby thing from that maybe new video. (It doesn't occur to anyone to try slowing down the playback :|||| like, should I be reading into the fact that there was this very basic technical puzzle in front of them and in all that time, not one of these guys thought of this))  
      
    Mr Schiff: "Is this one of those situations where it was observed by the pilot and it was also recorded by the aircraft's instruments?", "Ah, we'll talk about the multisensor part, in a later session" (a closed one? :|| Why. It's possible this is just because talking about what the sensors saw would require talking about the sensors themselves, which is generally secret info.) "But in this case, we have, \[gestures at the footage\] *at least* that." :< neither confirming nor denying correlation from other sensors.  
    I think I like Mr Schiff a lot. He is a live player. Regarding the hovering triangles, he questions this frankly surprising explanation optical artifacting, and asks whether they've reproduced that effect experimentally. Yes, apparently, it has been done.
*   Mr Wenstrup: 'have allies or adversaries reported similar sightings', "we should save that for a closed session" :\[
*   Mr Gallagher asks them about the Malmstrom incident (I think [this](http://www.cufon.org/cufon/malmstrom/malm1.htm) is it) where a UAP seemed to interfere some nuclear missiles. They say they haven't looked into it or heard of it. I'm as concerned as Gallagher is to hear that. They say they don't have the resources to follow up on that sort of story without an authoratative figure requesting it. Mr Gallagher says 'I don't claim to be an authoratative figure but for what it's worth I would like you to look into it'. Moultrie says "will do".
*   Mr Krishnamoorthi asks whether we have records of anything under the sea. Moultrie: "I think that would be more appropriately addressed in closed session, sir"
*   Mr Moultrie confirms that they do have processes "to ensure that we are not potentially reporting on something that may be a developmental platform or a US operational platform that is performing either testing or performing a mission".  
    He states that there don't seem to have been any cases where they've accidentally reported a potential US technology. I don't place much stock in this, though. They wouldn't be able to do this job at all if they weren't willing to lie about whether something is a US technology, alas, we should expect them to lie about those cases, so maybe it doesn't ultimately mean very much that the government are consistently denying having any tech programs that could explain the observations.

I approach a model: It's conceivable that that what's actually going on here is, the story of Alien UFOs is useful for hiding novel technologies, but it's also been an impediment to national security, it's created a stigma around reporting, which means that if a rival nation actually had propulsion technologies like this, their radar crews might not report it. The US wants to maintain the cover of the AUFO story, but they also want to dissolve the stigma. I think this new group are going to do that exceptionally well.