Tag Archives: aliens

Did an alien spaceship land in the ocean, and can we find it?

Yes and yes, according to at least one serious astronomer, Avi Loeb, who was also a strong proponent of Oumuamua being an alien spaceship. Although the fierce debate over that one might be hard to resolve with hard evidence, Loeb is now looking for a specific object that crashed into the ocean in 2014.

Loeb co-authored another paper, this time with a student, Amir Siraj, suggesting that the meteorite was yet another interstellar object, based on its speed and orbital trajectory. Later, the Department of Defense issued a statement in support of Loeb and Siraj’s hypothesis. The statement reads, in part, “Dr. Joel Mozer, the Chief Scientists of Space Operations Command, the United States Space Force service component of the U.S. Space Command, reviewed analysis of additional data available to the Department of Defense related to this finding. Dr. Mozer confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory.”

Having locked down an interstellar origin, Loeb set about recovering any remains of the object, now dubbed Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1). He’s interested in IM1 not only because it’s a piece of material from beyond our solar system, but because he thinks there’s a good chance — or he’s at least operating on the assumption — that it’s a piece of technology made by aliens.

Syfy.com

It’s interesting to think that we might find evidence of aliens in outer space, and yet argue over it or never fully believe it. On the other hand, if someone found incontrovertible evidence in the ocean and made it public before a government or private entity could stop them, that could be the most interesting thing that ever happened.

Artist’s impression of ʻOumuamua (Weryk 2017)

Austin Powers – Rocket Scene

June 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Before 2007, Americans bought around 7 million guns per year. By 2016, it was around 17 million. In 2020, it was 23 million. Those are the facts and figures. Now for my opinion: no matter how responsible the vast majority of gun owners are, you are going to have a lot more suicides, homicides, and fatal accidents with so many guns around. And sure enough, firearms are now the leading cause of death in children according to CDC. That makes me sick to think about.

Most hopeful story: It makes a lot of sense to tax land based on its potential developed value, whether it has been developed to that level or not. This discourages land speculation, vacant and abandoned property in cities while raising revenue that can offset other taxes.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The U.S. may have alien spacecraft at Area 51 after all. Or, and this is purely my speculation, they might have discovered anti-gravity and want to throw everybody else off the scent.

the truth is out there…but it’s not aliens…but it is???

I can’t vouch for the site public.substack.com, but it says the U.S. government has “12 or more” alien spacecraft. I have seen it referenced by other, more mainstream, news organizations, for what that’s worth. We weren’t supposed to take this stuff seriously, and then we were supposed to accept that “unexplained aerial phenomena” existed but weren’t necessarily aliens in origin, and now we are supposed to believe they maybe are?

But, Grusch said, he soon learned that United States government possessed “quite a number” of different kinds of non-human vehicles. “I have plenty of current and former senior intelligence officers who came to me — many of whom I knew almost my whole career — [and] who confided in me.”

This is not the first time government officials have suggested that the U.S. may possess alien spaceships. “I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,” said the late Senator Harry Reid, who fought for greater disclosure. “And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that.”

Former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, recently reported that he has spoken to more than four witnesses who say they know of “a secret U.S. government program involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft… Some have supplied information to the intelligence community’s inspector general, others directly to the staff of the congressional oversight committees.”

public.substack.com

Thoughts: (1) There’s always the Fermi Paradox. If we are here, and life arises by some sort of random chance under the right conditions, there just simply should be aliens out there given the size and age of the universe. And there should be a lot of them. (2) Another logical explanation is still that somebody here on Earth has more advanced technology than everybody else here on Earth, and is hiding it from everybody else using disinformation about aliens. Both the U.S. and Soviet Union are known to have done this during the Cold War. (3) Maybe alien civilizations released autonomous probes a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and they are cruising our atmosphere now gathering information. Maybe they are just machines, but machines that interact with known laws of physics in more advanced or different ways than human machines have to date. (4) Maybe aliens are all around us and have the technology to hide themselves from us, and have chosen for whatever reason not to interact with us directly (this is a well-known logical resolution of the Fermi Paradox). Or maybe human governments have or are interacting with them and are keeping that secret from each other and/or from the public. In this case though, it seems odd to me that they would need toys zipping around in the atmosphere to gather information. Surely they would have nanotechnology or remote sensing (which we have) or other ways of gathering information undetected. Or maybe the vehicles are just that – toys.

I tend to believe that intelligent life is out there, based on the logic of #1. But I also tend to suspect these particular vehicles we are hearing about are somebody here on Earth messing with us under the logic of #2. Let’s say the U.S. military-industrial complex has made even a small advance related to, say, the nature of gravitational fields and how to mess with them. That would put them ahead of everybody else, particular so-called “near peer rivals” who are trying to spy and catch up on the technology. They then come up with a propaganda campaign that they strategically leak (with or without cooperation) to a few key politicians and media organizations. That might throw the spies off the trail at least for a little while, and with whatever time that buys the scientists and technologists can try to stay another step ahead.

2021: Year in Review

As per usual, I’ll list out and link to the stories I chose as the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting each month in 2021. Then I’ll see if I have anything smart to say about how it all fits together.

Survey of the Year’s Stories and Themes

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.
  • FEBRUARY: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.
  • MARCH: In the U.S. upper Midwest (I don’t know if this region is better or worse than the country as a whole, or why they picked it), electric blackouts average 92 minutes per year, versus 4 minutes per year in Japan.
  • APRIL: One of the National Intelligence Council’s scenarios for 2040 involves “far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation”.
  • MAY: The Colorado River basin is drying out.
  • JUNE: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.
  • JULY: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.
  • AUGUST: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?
  • SEPTEMBER: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.
  • OCTOBER: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.
  • NOVEMBER: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them as a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.
  • DECEMBER: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.
  • FEBRUARY: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer, HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.
  • MARCH: I officially released my infrastructure plan for America, a few weeks before Joe Biden released his. None of the Sunday morning talk shows has called me to discuss so far. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources of the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve available to me. Of course, neither does he unless he can convince Congress to go along with at least some portion of his plans. Looking at his proposal, I think he is proposing to direct the fire hoses at the right fires (children, education, research, water, the electric grid and electric vehicles, maintenance of highways and roads, housing, and ecosystems. There is still no real planning involved, because planning needs to be done in between crises and it never is. Still, I think it is a good proposal that will pay off economically while helping real people, and I hope a substantial portion of it survives.
  • APRIL: Giant tortoises reach a state of “negligible senescense” where they simply don’t age for a long time. Humans are distant relatives of giant tortoises, so maybe we can aspire to this some day. They are not invulnerable to injury and disease.
  • MAY: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.
  • JUNE: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.
  • JULY: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.
  • AUGUST: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.
  • SEPTEMBER: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.
  • OCTOBER: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.
  • NOVEMBER: Urban areas may have some ecological value after all.
  • DECEMBER: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.
  • FEBRUARY: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.
  • MARCH: One study says 1-2 days per week is a sweet spot for working from home in terms of a positive economic contribution at the national scale. I think it is about right psychologically for many people too. However, this was a very theoretical simulation, and other studies attempting to measure this at the individual or firm scale have come up with a 20-50% loss in productivity. I think the jury is still out on this one, but I know from personal experience that people need to interact and communicate regularly for teams to be productive, and some people require more supervision than others, and I don’t think technology is a perfect substitute for doing these things in person so far.
  • APRIL: Hydrogen fuel cells may finally be arriving. Not so much in the U.S., where we can’t have nice things.
  • MAY: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.
  • JUNE: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.
  • JULY: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.
  • AUGUST: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.
  • SEPTEMBER: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.
  • OCTOBER: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?
  • NOVEMBER: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.
  • DECEMBER: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

Continuing Signs of U.S. Relative Decline

Signs of U.S. decline relative to our peer group of advanced nations are all around us. I don’t know that we are in absolute decline, but I think we are now below average among the most advanced countries in the world. We are not investing in the infrastructure needed in a modern economy just to reduce friction and let the economy function. The annual length of electric blackouts in the U.S. (hours) compared to leading peers like Japan (minutes) is just one telling indicator. In March, I looked at the Build Back Better proposal and concluded that it was more like directing a firehose of money at a range of problems than an actual plan, but I hoped at least some of it would happen. My rather low but not zero expectations were met, as some limited funding was provided for “hard infrastructure” and energy/emissions projects, but little or nothing (so far, as I write this) to address our systemic failures in health care, child care, or education. The crazy violence on our streets, both gun-related and motor vehicle-related, is another indicator. Known solutions to all these problems exist and are being implemented to various extents by peer countries. Meanwhile our toxic politics and general ignorance continue to hold us back. Biden really gave it his best shot – but if this is our “once in a generation” attempt, we are headed down a road where we will no longer qualify as a member of the pack of elite countries, let alone its leader.

The Climate Change, Drought, Food, Natural Disaster, Migration and Geopolitical Instability Nexus

2021 was a pretty bad year for storms, fires, floods, and droughts. All these things affect our homes, our infrastructure, our food supply, and our water supply. Drought in particular can trigger mass migration. Mass migration can be a disaster for human rights and human dignity in and of itself, and managing it effectively is difficult even for well-intentioned governments. But an insidious related problem is that migration pressure can tend to fuel right wing populist and racist political movements. We see this happening all over the world, and the situation seems likely to get worse.

Tipping Points and other Really Bad Things We Aren’t Prepared For

We can be thankful that nothing really big and new and bad happened in 2021. My apologies to anyone reading this who lost someone or had a tough year. Of course, plenty of bad things happened to good people, and plenty of bad things happened on a regional or local scale. But while Covid-19 ground on and plenty of local and regional-scale natural disasters and conflicts occurred, there were no new planetary-scale disasters. This is good because humanity has had enough trouble dealing with Covid-19, and another major disaster hitting at the same time could be the one that brings our civilization to the breaking point.

So we have a trend of food insecurity and migration pressure creeping up on us over time, and we are not handling it well even given time to do so. Maybe we can hope that some adjustments will be made there to get the world on a sustainable track. Even if we do that, there are some really bad things that could happen suddenly. Catastrophic war is an obvious one. A truly catastrophic pandemic is another (as opposed to the moderately disastrous pandemic we have just gone through.) Creeping loss of human fertility is one that is not getting much attention, but this seems like an existential risk if it were to cross some threshold where suddenly the global population starts to drop quickly and we can’t do anything about it. Asteroids were one thing I really thought we didn’t have to worry much about on the time scale of any human alive today, but I may have been wrong about that. And finally, the most horrifying risk to me in the list above is the idea of an accelerating, runaway feedback loop of methane release from thawing permafrost or underwater methane hydrates.

We are almost certainly not managing these risks. These risks are probably not 100% avoidable, but since they are existential we should be actively working to minimize the chance of them happening, preparing to respond in real time, and preparing to recover afterward if they happen. Covid-19 was a dress rehearsal for dealing with a big global risk event, and humanity mostly failed to prepare or respond effectively. We are lucky it was one we should be able to recover from as long as we get some time before the next body blow. We not only need to prepare for much, much worse events that could happen, we need to match our preparations to the likelihood of more than one of them happening at the same time or in quick succession.

Technological Progress

Enough doom and gloom. We humans are here, alive, and many of us are physically comfortable and have much more leisure time than our ancestors. Our social, economic, and technological systems seem to be muddling through from day to day for the time being. We have intelligence, science, creativity, and problem solving abilities available to us if we choose to make use of them. Let’s see what’s going on with technology.

Biotechnology: The new mRNA technology accelerated by the pandemic opens up potential cures for a range of diseases. We need an effective biological surveillance system akin to nuclear weapons inspections (which we also need) to make sure it is not misused (oops, doom and gloom trying to creep in, but there are some ideas for this.) We have vaccines on the horizon for diseases that have been plaguing us for decades or longer, like malaria and Lyme disease. Malaria kills more children worldwide, year in and year out, than coronavirus has killed per year at its peak.

Promising energy technologies: Space based solar power may finally be getting closer to reality. Ditto for hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles, although not particularly in the U.S. (I’m not sure this is preferable to electric vehicles for everyday transportation, but it seems like a cleaner alternative to diesel and jet fuel when large amounts of power are needed in trucking, construction, and aviation, for example.)

Other technologies: We are actually using technology to catch fish in more sustainable ways, and to grow fish on farms in more sustainable ways. We are getting better at looking for extraterrestrial objects, and the more we look, the more of them we expect to see (this one is exciting and scary at the same time). We are putting satellites in orbit on an unprecedented scale. We have computers, robots, artificial intelligence of a sort, and approaches to use them to potentially accelerate scientific advancements going forward.

The State of Earth’s Ecosystems

The state and trends of the Earth’s ecosystems continue to be concerning. Climate change continues to churn through the public consciousness and our political systems, and painful as the process is I think our civilization is slowly coming to a consensus that something is happening and something needs to be done about it (decades after we should have been able to do this based on the evidence and knowledge available.) When it comes to our ecosystems, however, I think we are in the very early stages of this process. This is something I would like to focus on in this blog in the coming year. My work and family life are busy, and I have decided to take on an additional challenge of becoming a student again for the first time in the 21st century, but somehow I will persevere. If you are reading this shortly after I write it in January 2022, here’s to good luck and prosperity in the new year!

September 2021 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.

Most hopeful story: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.

astrobiologists on what aliens might actually look like

Well, astrobiologists don’t know what aliens might look like, because they haven’t observed any. But they do have an idea what conditions on other planets (“at least 100 billion in our galaxy alone”) might be like, and by assuming the principles of evolution and natural selection will apply, they can theorize what kinds of organisms might inhabit them.

Darwin’s aliens
Making predictions about aliens is not an easy task. Most previous work has focused on extrapolating from empirical observations and mechanistic understanding of physics, chemistry and biology. Another approach is to utilize theory to make predictions that are not tied to details of Earth. Here we show how evolutionary theory can be used to make predictions about aliens. We argue that aliens will undergo natural selection – something that should not be taken for granted but that rests on firm theoretical grounds. Given aliens undergo natural selection we can say something about their evolution. In particular, we can say something about how complexity will arise in space. Complexity has increased on the Earth as a result of a handful of events, known as the major transitions in individuality. Major transitions occur when groups of individuals come together to form a new higher level of the individual, such as when single-celled organisms evolved into multicellular organisms. Both theory and empirical data suggest that extreme conditions are required for major transitions to occur. We suggest that major transitions are likely to be the route to complexity on other planets, and that we should expect them to have been favoured by similarly restrictive conditions. Thus, we can make specific predictions about the biological makeup of complex aliens.

Cambridge University Press

Shouldn’t the abstract give us some idea of what those “specific predictions” are? Luckily, this is an open access article. There are some fun passages about why my hands are willing to help my testicals reproduce, rather than trying to reproduce themselves. This is because “their interests are aligned”, and my testicles have (or once had, at the risk of providing way too much information to the reader…) the potential to produce more hands at some point. Like a termite colony, I have gone through a transition to a complex organism, and my various parts are not out for themselves but are working together in a harmonious whole. (That’s the theory, although I’m not sure those testicles were aligned with my brain during my teenage years…)

So there might be simple alien life out there, in the form of single-celled viruses, fungi, bacteria, algae, or whatever. What we are really interested in is complex alien life, which would consist of “a nested hierarchy of entities, with the conditions required to eliminate conflict at each of those levels”. They could have complex individual bodies along the lines of ours, or some kind of creepy colonies made up of simpler organisms, more like ants or termites but with more tentacles. There are some pictures in the paper, have a look.

Universities have astrobiology departments, and it seems like a fun thing to study. You get to learn about biology and astronomy, combine theory and observation.

the UFO report

Here is one place to access the official UFO report. It says next to nothing, and is almost not worth the time. It was clearly typed out in a few hours by a summer intern. Like any good research report that concludes nothing, the authors would like to collect more data, they would like to do further studies, and they would like someone to pay for that.

Anyway, here are the possible explanations they give for UFOs:

  • airborne clutter: birds, balloons, “recreational unmanned vehicles”, and plastic bags
  • natural atmospheric phenomena: ice crystals, moisture, thermal fluctuations (because these things can show up on sensors)
  • “USG or Industry Development Programs”: they don’t bother to define USG, but I am thinking United States Government. “We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.”
  • Foreign Adversary Systems: “China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity”, such as a Bond villain. Okay, I added that last one.

Conspicuously missing from the list is aliens, a previously undiscovered deep-sea civilization exploring our atmosphere (see Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series), or entities operating in parallel universes (see Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series). I have no evidence for any of these theories, which is to say I have exactly the same amount of evidence presented in this report in support of the theories above. My recommendation is to spend your time reading science fiction/fantasy series by Charles Stross rather than this report. You will be much more entertained, and no less informed.

June 2021 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.

Most hopeful story: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.

more UFOs from Harry Reid

Harry Reid learned how to swim in a brothel. That’s a fun fact is this NYT op-ed about UFOs. He talks about how he tried to destigmatize reportings of sightings by servicemen during his time in the Senate. He also talks about a new government report scheduled to come out in June although it “may be delayed”.

As for what they are:

What have I personally learned from official investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena so far? The truth, disappointing as it may be, is that there’s still a great deal we don’t understand. It’s unclear whether the U.F.O.s we have encountered could have been built by foreign adversaries, whether our pilots’ visual perception during some encounters was somehow distorted, or whether we truly have credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. There may be other, as yet unknown explanations for some of these strange sightings.

New York Times

In plain English, I would say there is an increasing consensus that UFO sightings are real, but there is also a significant likelihood of a terrestrial explanation. Better put Robert Mueller on it to make sure we get a clear and unambiguous report we can all agree on.

UFOs getting harder to ignore

There are more videos coming from the military, and they are getting harder not to take seriously. Apparently, the military looks at these videos pretty closely and if they thought it was a drone or a balloon of some sort, they would call it that. If they can’t explain the technology that would produce the behavior observed, it becomes an “unidentified aerial phenomenon”.