Be Aware of The Current UFOs Pandemic. Remember, We Are Alone.

Hey everyone 👋,

In a previous post, I wrote about something that has been sitting with me for as long as I can remember, the uncomfortable feeling of being fundamentally, irreversibly alone. Not lonely in the ordinary social sense, though I am that too, but alone in a deeper, more cosmic way, the kind of aloneness that comes when you look up at the sky at night, count the stars, and realize that despite everything the universe has to offer, none of it has ever reached down to say hello. I wrote in that post about the Montauk Project, about the strange creatures described as aliens that look far too much like something that crawled out of a government laboratory to be anything from another planet. I wrote about how I believe there are no aliens, not because the universe is small, but because the evidence points somewhere far more terrestrial and far more disturbing than most people want to admit. That argument started as a few paragraphs buried inside a very long and very personal post about my life, my struggles, and my thoughts about existence. But it deserved more space than I gave it, because the claim is not a small one and the stakes are not trivial. The current obsession with UFOs, now rebranded as UAPs in an effort to make the conversation sound more scientific, is not a scientific phenomenon. It is a cultural phenomenon, a psychological one, and in some cases a deliberately engineered one. I want to explain why I believe that, and I want to do it carefully, because I am not interested in cheap dismissal or in being the person who just says "aliens don't exist, end of discussion". I want to go where the evidence actually points and follow it honestly, even when it ends somewhere uncomfortable.

I have also been writing allot about intelligence, about what it means, what it requires, and what happens when we mistake noise for signal. In Language is Limited. ASI is Impossible., I argued that language is a compression layer and that intelligence requires contact with the actual structure of reality, not just descriptions of it. In LLMs are Useful. LMMs will Break Reality., I went deeper and argued that the really interesting work in AI is not happening in chatbots but in systems that can discover equations and simulate the physical world. And in Mathematical Equations are Multimodal by Default, I made the case that equations are not abstract decorations but compressed representations of how reality actually works. All of that thinking feeds directly into what I want to say in this post, because the UFO panic is in many ways the perfect example of what happens when people confuse pattern with signal, when they mistake the thing that sounds impressive for the thing that is actually true. I wrote in An Empty Life Filled With Constant Suffering that reality never gives us the comfort we want. This post is about that same truth, applied to the sky above us and to the silence it has always returned.

So let me say it plainly from the introduction: there are no aliens visiting us. We are, as far as every credible instrument humanity has ever built can tell, alone. And rather than being a depressing conclusion, I think it is the most important, most terrifying, and most clarifying fact about the human condition. The silence of the universe is not a mystery waiting to be solved. It is an answer we keep refusing to hear.

The Numbers People Cite Are Not The Numbers They Think They Are

Let me start with the argument that almost everyone uses when they want to make the "aliens-definitely-exist" case feel airtight, and that is the sheer size of the universe. The universe contains something on the order of two trillion galaxies, according to a landmark 2016 study published in The Astrophysical Journal (1). Each of those galaxies contains hundreds of billions of stars. The Milky Way alone has an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars, and around one in five sun-like stars is believed to host an Earth-sized planet in its habitable zone, based on Kepler mission data analyzed by Petigura, Howard, and Marcy (2). If you run rough Drake Equation estimates, the raw numbers seem to suggest that the universe should be absolutely teeming with life, and that intelligent, technological civilizations should be everywhere. This argument feels compelling because large numbers are genuinely hard to argue with, and because the intuition that something this vast cannot be empty is so deeply human that it almost feels like physics. But here is where the sleight of hand happens: astronomical abundance and biological probability are not the same thing, and conflating them is the foundational error that makes the aliens-must-exist argument feel stronger than it actually is.

The conditions required for complex, multicellular, intelligent life are not simply "a planet in a habitable zone". That is the starting point, not the end point, and the distance between the starting point and intelligent life is not measured in miles or years but in improbable coincidences stacked on top of each other like a tower made of smoke and luck. You need the right type of star, one stable enough over billions of years. You need the right distance from that star. You need liquid water, but also a large moon to stabilize the axial tilt and prevent catastrophic climate swings, as described in the Rare Earth Hypothesis by Ward and Brownlee (3). You need plate tectonics, which recycles carbon and keeps the planet habitable over geological timescales. You need a Jupiter-class gas giant in the outer solar system to absorb asteroid impacts that would otherwise sterilize the inner planets repeatedly. You need the planet to avoid being tidally locked, sterilized by gamma ray bursts, stripped of its atmosphere by stellar winds, or suffocated by the toxic outgassing of its own interior. And that is before you even get to the emergence of life, which itself involves the spontaneous assembly of self-replicating chemistry in conditions that remain poorly understood despite decades of origin-of-life research. Each of these requirements, taken individually, might seem plausibly common. Combined, they paint a picture that is far, far less crowded than the simple "two trillion galaxies" argument suggests.

I am not claiming that microbial life is impossible elsewhere, and I want to be precise about that because the distinction matters enormously. Simple life, the kind that sits at the bottom of a thermal vent and converts chemistry into more of itself, might genuinely exist in other places. On Mars, perhaps, or in the subsurface ocean of Europa, or somewhere we have not looked yet. That would be a staggering discovery, and I do not dismiss it. What I am arguing is that the jump from simple microbial life to intelligent, technological, space-faring, signal-emitting civilization is not a small step. It is the largest step in the known history of life on Earth, and it happened exactly once in four billion years, under conditions so specific that we still do not fully understand what made it happen. If it happened only once on a planet that had literally everything going for it, the implied prior probability of it happening elsewhere is not "common across two trillion galaxies." It is something closer to vanishingly rare.

The Drake Equation, which people often cite as justification for optimism about alien civilizations, is not actually evidence for anything. It is a framework for organizing our ignorance. When Frank Drake wrote it in 1961 as the agenda for the first SETI conference at Green Bank Observatory, he populated it with values that were essentially educated guesses, and sixty-plus years later, the most uncertain terms in the equation, the fraction of planets that develop life, the fraction of those where intelligence emerges, the fraction of those that develop technology, and the average longevity of technological civilizations, remain almost completely unknown (4). You can plug in optimistic values and get a galaxy full of civilizations. You can plug in pessimistic but equally defensible values and get a galaxy where we are the only one. The equation does not choose between these answers because we do not have the data to constrain the inputs. Anyone who presents the Drake Equation as evidence that aliens must exist is not doing science. They are doing wishful arithmetic, and wishful arithmetic is not the same as evidence.

The thing that nobody in the UFO conversation wants to sit with for longer than five seconds is the actual empirical track record of SETI. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been running serious, systematic radio telescope surveys since the 1960s, scanning billions of frequencies, listening to hundreds of thousands of targets, and using increasingly sensitive instruments over six decades of dedicated effort. The total haul of confirmed, verified, repeatable signals of unambiguously extraterrestrial intelligent origin is exactly zero (5). Not one. The WOW signal of 1977 was never repeated, never confirmed, and the most plausible natural explanations have grown more convincing over time. The Breakthrough Listen initiative, launched in 2015 with a hundred million dollars and some of the best radio telescopes on Earth, has spent years listening and has found nothing that passes the threshold of evidence (6). This is not a small sample. Sixty years of increasingly sensitive listening across the full radio spectrum, pointed at hundreds of thousands of targets, in a galaxy that should be full of signals if the optimists are right. And silence. Absolute, unbroken silence.

The silence itself is a data point, and it is a devastating one. In 1975, astrophysicist Michael Hart published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society that made the logical structure of this problem precise in a way that Fermi's original lunchtime question did not (7). Hart argued that if technological civilizations were common, they would have colonized the galaxy by now, even at sub-light speeds, because the timescale required to spread across the Milky Way is a few million years at most, which is a geological eyeblink in cosmic terms. The fact that we observe no evidence of this colonization, no megastructures, no signals, no artifacts, no visitors, is not just an absence of data. It is a positive fact about the universe that needs to be explained. Either civilizations are extraordinarily rare, or they hit something that stops them, or they choose to remain invisible in ways that defy all plausible incentive structures. None of these options are reassuring to the aliens-definitely-exist camp. All of them point toward the same uncomfortable conclusion: the sky is quiet because there is almost nothing out there to make noise.

This is the foundation of everything I am about to argue. The numbers people cite are real. The galaxy truly is enormous. But enormous and populated are not synonyms, and the universe does not owe us company just because it contains the raw ingredients. The evidence, all of it, every telescope, every radio receiver, every spectrograph, every Mars lander, every probe sent into the outer solar system, has returned the same answer. Silence. The correct response to silence is not to invent noises. It is to understand what the silence means.

The Montauk Project And The Shape Of The Lie

I mentioned the Montauk Project briefly in my first post, almost as a passing observation, but it deserves a much more careful treatment because it is genuinely important for understanding why the alien narrative has the specific shape that it does. The Montauk Project is a conspiracy theory that was primarily popularized through a series of books starting with The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, published in 1992 (8). The story, in its most elaborated form, claims that the US government operated a secret research program at Camp Hero, a decommissioned Air Force radar station on Long Island, that involved time travel, mind control, interdimensional portals, and contact with extraterrestrial beings. The "aliens" in these accounts are remarkably consistent in their description: hairless, grey-skinned, large-headed, slender-limbed beings with enormous dark eyes and no visible musculature. This description, which appears in Nichols's books, in dozens of subsequent retellings, and in countless "abduction testimonies" collected over the following decades, is worth pausing on. Because the beings described do not look like what evolution would produce on another planet. They look exactly like what a government program in human genetic modification might produce if it were optimizing for specific neurological and physical characteristics.

I wrote in my first post that the creatures described as aliens are almost always hairless, with unusual altered features that make them look like something out of a laboratory rather than visitors from another world, and I want to expand on that here because the pattern is striking once you see it clearly. Human beings have hair because hair is adaptive in the evolutionary environment we came from. We have the body proportions we have because those proportions are optimized for bipedal movement, thermoregulation, and manual dexterity. We have the brain-to-body ratio we have because it represents the most expensive possible trade-off a mammal can make, and natural selection only makes that trade-off when the cognitive returns justify the enormous caloric cost. Now look at the classic "grey alien" description: no hair, which removes an adaptive feature without adding an obvious environmental substitute; enormous head relative to body, which would represent an even more extreme brain investment than humans; tiny, atrophied limbs, which suggest that physical capability has been drastically deprioritized in favor of something else; and enormous dark eyes, which could be adaptive for very low-light environments, or which could be the result of genetic modification of the visual system. Every single feature of the standard alien description is consistent with the results of extreme genetic manipulation of human baseline biology, and not one of them is specifically consistent with what you would expect from a life form that evolved independently on another planet with different gravity, different solar spectrum, different biochemistry, and billions of years of completely separate evolutionary history.

The Montauk Project theory also connects to something that is definitively real, which is the CIA's MKUltra program. MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program run by the CIA from 1953 to 1973, involving more than 80 institutions including universities, hospitals, and prisons, that used LSD, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture to attempt to develop mind control techniques, largely without the consent of the subjects (9). Most of its records were destroyed in 1973 on the orders of CIA Director Richard Helms, precisely to prevent public and congressional scrutiny, and the existence of the program was only confirmed in 1975 through the Church Committee investigation and then further through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977. The lesson of MKUltra is not that such programs are impossible. The lesson is that they happened, were systematically hidden, destroyed their own records, and were only partially exposed through aggressive government investigation, not through normal information flow. If you are tempted to dismiss MKUltra as ancient history that says nothing about what might be happening today, I would ask you to consider how many programs operating under the same secrecy protocols would be visible to you through any mechanism that you currently have access to. The answer is none. That is what operational secrecy means.

I want to be careful here, because I am not claiming certainty about Montauk. I am claiming something more modest and more defensible: that the pattern of the alien narrative, the specific physical description of the supposed visitors, the timing of UFO sighting surges relative to known government experimental programs, the consistent failure of these encounters to produce any physical evidence that could be independently analyzed, and the way the narrative is structured to discourage exactly the kind of investigation that would be most likely to find terrestrial explanations, all of this is far more consistent with a carefully managed disinformation campaign than with genuine extraterrestrial contact. This is not a wild claim. Governments have a well-documented history of using exotic narratives to cover classified programs. The CIA's use of alien mythology to explain U-2 spy plane sightings during the Cold War is now a matter of declassified record (10). When a classified aircraft flying at 60,000 feet was spotted and reported as a UFO, the cover story of "weather phenomena" was replaced with quiet encouragement of the "experimental aircraft" narrative, which itself was sometimes replaced with quiet encouragement of the "alien spacecraft" narrative, because the alien explanation was easier for the public to dismiss and therefore less dangerous to the actual program. That is not speculation. That is documented government behavior.

The Montauk Project's connection to Stranger Things, the Netflix series that made the basic narrative framework mainstream for a generation of young viewers, is also worth noting. At one point, the show was literally going to be called "Montauk" and was set in the same location as the alleged experiments. The Upside Down, the interdimensional portal, the children with psychic abilities who are the products of government experimentation, the creature that appears to be of non-human origin but turns out to be something else entirely, all of these are structural echoes of the Montauk narrative. I am not saying the show popularized the theory, I am saying the theory was already popular enough to be the direct inspiration for one of the most-watched television series in history. That level of cultural penetration is not accidental, and understanding where an idea comes from is not the same as proving the idea is wrong. But it does tell you something about the mechanism by which ideas spread, and about who benefits from certain ideas being present in certain cultural contexts.

What I find most telling about the Montauk Project specifically is not the claims themselves but the architecture of the narrative. It is designed to be unfalsifiable in exactly the ways that matter. The records are destroyed. The witnesses have "suppressed memories" recoverable only through hypnotic regression, a technique that is scientifically documented to reliably produce confabulated false memories rather than actual recalled experience (11). The underground facility is supposedly hidden so thoroughly that no physical exploration of the site has ever confirmed it. And the beings involved are simultaneously extraterrestrial, which places them outside normal investigative jurisdiction, and terrestrial in the sense that the experiments happened right here on Long Island. It is the perfect narrative structure for something that you want to be believed but never proven. I have spent enough time thinking about how disinformation works to recognize that structure, and I recognize it here.

The 2023 Congressional Panic And What It Actually Tells Us

In July 2023, a former Air Force intelligence officer named David Grusch testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee that the US government has been operating a multi-decade "crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program", that it is in possession of "non-human" spacecraft, and that "non-human biologics" have been recovered from crash sites (12). This was not a fringe figure speaking on a YouTube channel. This was sworn testimony before Congress, and it generated exactly the reaction you would expect: wall-to-wall coverage, breathless speculation, and millions of people updating their priors about alien life based on nothing more than one person's claims delivered in a formal setting. Let me be precise about what Grusch's testimony actually consisted of. He said that he had been told, by other officials, that these programs exist. He did not personally witness the craft or the biologics. He did not provide any physical evidence. He provided no documents, no photographs, no materials, and no corroborating witness who had direct personal knowledge of the claimed objects. The Department of Defense and NASA both denied his claims. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, which is the DoD's official office for investigating UAPs, stated explicitly that they have found no verifiable information to substantiate claims about programs involving possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials.

I want to be clear that I am not dismissing Grusch as a liar or as someone acting in bad faith. He may sincerely believe everything he said. But sincere belief is not evidence, and sworn testimony about something you were told by someone else is hearsay, not proof. The history of intelligence communities is full of sincere beliefs based on compartmentalized information that turned out to be wrong, or based on disinformation that was fed into official channels precisely because official channels give claims more credibility when they reach the public. If you operate a classified program using alien mythology as cover, and if you want to maintain that cover, it is extraordinarily useful to have officials at various levels of the bureaucracy genuinely believe the alien explanation, because genuine believers are more convincing than actors. The compartmentalization of intelligence programs means that people inside the system can be fed false narratives just as easily as people outside it, because neither group has access to the full picture. Grusch may have been told the truth, or he may have been told a very elaborate story that serves purposes he is not aware of. The testimony itself cannot distinguish between these possibilities, and neither can we based on what was made public.

What the 2023 congressional hearing does tell us, very clearly, is that there is genuine institutional appetite in certain parts of the US government for UAP transparency, and that this appetite is real and bipartisan and driven at least partly by legitimate national security concerns. Unidentified aerial phenomena in restricted airspace are a real problem regardless of their origin. Pilots see objects they cannot identify, performing maneuvers that seem to exceed the aerodynamic capabilities of known aircraft, and that is a national security issue whether the explanation turns out to be classified domestic technology, foreign adversary drones, sensor anomalies, or genuine unknowns. The Navy and Air Force have formally acknowledged this since 2017, when the release of the FLIR footage of the Tic Tac UAP, captured by pilots from the USS Nimitz, made it impossible to dismiss the phenomenon publicly. Ryan Graves, one of Grusch's colleagues in the 2023 testimony, is an actual Navy pilot who saw these phenomena personally and has been entirely consistent in his account without making the extraterrestrial leap. His testimony is the most credible part of the conversation because it is grounded in personal direct observation and is limited to what he could actually verify, which is that he saw something he did not recognize.

The distinction between "there are genuine aerial phenomena that we cannot currently identify" and "those phenomena are of extraterrestrial origin piloted by non-human beings" is the most important distinction that the entire UFO discourse routinely collapses. These are not the same claim. The first is an empirical observation about the data. The second is a highly specific explanatory hypothesis about what generates the data. Moving from the first to the second requires evidence, and that evidence does not exist. The fact that military pilots see things they cannot identify is not surprising. Advanced drone technology from adversarial nations, classified domestic programs that the pilots are not briefed on, atmospheric phenomena that interact with sensor systems in unusual ways, and limitations of human perception and instrument interpretation all provide abundant mundane explanations for encounters that feel inexplicable in the moment. None of this requires extraterrestrial technology, and invoking extraterrestrial technology before eliminating all terrestrial explanations is not science. It is the opposite of science.

I also want to say something about the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, introduced by senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds, which eventually resulted in provisions included in the FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requiring the establishment of a UAP records collection and the systematic declassification and release of relevant government records (13). I think this is genuinely good and I support it without reservation, not because I think disclosure will reveal alien spacecraft, but because transparency in government is valuable for its own sake and because the conversation about what these phenomena actually are is one that democratic societies should be able to have. If the records reveal classified domestic programs, that is information the public has a right to know. If they reveal foreign adversary capabilities, the specific revelations can be handled with appropriate operational security while the general picture is shared. And if they reveal that there is genuinely nothing more exotic than a combination of classified aircraft, sensor artifacts, and human misperception, then that too is information worth having, because the current state of authorized ambiguity is itself a form of manipulation. Not knowing creates a vacuum, and vacuums get filled with exactly the kind of speculation that serves whoever benefits from public confusion.

What I find deeply troubling about the timing of the recent UAP surge is how perfectly it correlates with political and military utility. Maintaining public concern about unexplained aerial phenomena keeps defense appropriations high, keeps public attention focused on the sky rather than on domestic policy failures, and provides a convenient cover story for the deployment of classified sensor systems, surveillance drones, and next-generation aircraft that cannot be acknowledged publicly. I wrote in As Engineers, LLMs should pay us for tokens usage about how systems are built to extract value from people who do not understand how they work, and the UFO narrative is precisely that: a system that extracts attention, credulity, and political will from a public that does not have enough information to evaluate what it is being told. Attention, once captured, does not go back. And attention pointed at the sky is attention not pointed at the things happening on the ground.

The Psychology Of Wanting Company

I want to step back from the empirical arguments for a moment and talk about the human side of this, because the UFO belief is not primarily a factual error. It is a psychological response to something real and painful, and dismissing it as stupidity is both wrong and unfair. The desire to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence is, at its root, the desire to not be alone. It is the same desire I described in my first post, the one that drove me to search for connection in hackathons, in YouTube comment sections, in IRC channels at 3 AM, in any space where people gathered around shared ideas. It is one of the most fundamental human drives, and the universe, in its indifferent vastness, does not give us what we want. It gives us silence. And silence, for a creature as social as a human being, is psychologically almost unbearable.

The history of how humans respond to silence and isolation is not subtle. Religious traditions across cultures are almost universally built around the belief in non-human intelligences who care about us, who watch us, who have plans for us, who might communicate with us if we are attentive enough. The specific content varies enormously, the specific beings range from gods to angels to ancestors to demons to nature spirits, but the underlying structure is always the same: we are not alone, there are others who are aware of us, and our actions in this life are witnessed and matter. The alien belief fulfills exactly the same psychological function, but in a frame that feels more compatible with a scientific worldview, because the beings are hypothetically biological rather than supernatural. You can believe in aliens without feeling like you are being unscientific, which makes the belief far more accessible to modern people who have internalized the cultural norm that science and religion are in tension. But the psychological need being met is identical, and recognizing that does not make the need less real or less human.

I experienced this directly in the years I spent feeling completely isolated, years I described in my first post in more detail than I have ever wanted to share publicly. When you feel genuinely alone in the world, the idea that somewhere out there something else is watching, even something that has not made contact, provides a form of comfort that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with psychology. The sky becomes populated. The universe becomes something more than an indifferent physical system playing out under mathematical laws that do not know you exist. It becomes a place where you might matter, where the fact of your consciousness might register somewhere, where the universe might eventually turn in your direction and acknowledge you. That comfort is real, even when the thing providing it is not. I understand it completely, because I felt it, and I am not going to pretend I am above it just because I have argued myself out of it.

But there is a difference between understanding a psychological need and endorsing the false belief that fills it. Humans have always found ways to live with the discomfort of not being central to the universe. Science itself is partly the practice of learning to accept that the universe does not care about us while still finding meaning in studying it. The Copernican revolution took us out of the center of the solar system. Darwinian evolution removed the special divine origin of our species. The discovery of the scale of the universe removed our galaxy from any privileged position. Each of these was psychologically devastating to the worldview it displaced, and each of them was true, and each of them ultimately led to a richer understanding of reality than the comfortable myth it replaced. The alien belief is the last refuge of anthropocentrism, the last way of insisting that the universe has taken note of us and sent ambassadors. And it is, like all the anthropocentric myths before it, almost certainly wrong.

There is also something worth saying about the specific way the UFO community handles counterevidence, which is not the way any truth-seeking community handles counterevidence. In a genuine scientific community, when a well-designed study fails to find the expected signal, that negative result is published and updates the overall evidence base. In the UFO community, when a telescope fails to find alien structures, that is taken as evidence of government coverup. When a claimed abduction account contains internal inconsistencies, that is dismissed as the result of memory suppression. When a crashed object turns out to have a mundane explanation, that particular case is abandoned and the next one is elevated with fresh certainty. This asymmetry, where confirming evidence is accumulated and disconfirming evidence is explained away, is the defining feature of unfalsifiable belief systems, and it is what separates the UFO community from any community that is genuinely committed to finding the truth. I am not saying this to be cruel. I am saying it because recognizing the pattern is the first step to not being trapped by it.

The psychological need for cosmic company is real, and it deserves a real response. But the real response is not to populate the sky with beings who are not there. The real response is to understand why we feel alone and to address that directly, which is much harder and much more uncomfortable than looking at blurry photographs and deciding they confirm what we already wanted to believe. I have spent my entire life doing the harder thing, and I am not going to stop now just because the easier thing is more soothing.

What The Government Actually Hides And Why It Matters

I want to be precise about something that I think gets lost in the UFO conversation: the fact that governments lie, hide things, and run secret programs is not evidence that they are hiding aliens. It is evidence that governments lie, hide things, and run secret programs. These are completely separate claims, and collapsing them is a logical error that the UFO community makes constantly and that I want to address directly, because treating it as self-evident rather than as a confusion is one of the things that keeps people in a permanent state of excited credulity about something that has much more boring explanations.

The US government has hidden classified aircraft programs for decades, and the historical record of this is clear and well-documented. The U-2 spy plane, which flew at altitudes that were far beyond what the public or even most military officials knew to be possible in the 1950s, was routinely reported as a UFO, and the government's official response was to cultivate confusion rather than to confirm or deny. The SR-71 Blackbird, the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, and the F-117 Nighthawk all went through periods of being "unidentified aerial phenomena" before being acknowledged. The CIA's own historical review of UFO reports from the 1950s and 1960s concluded that a large fraction of them were attributable to classified aerial vehicles, and that the CIA had actively encouraged the alien hypothesis as a cover story because it was more effective at discouraging investigation than any official denial would have been (10). This is the documented reality of what governments hide in aviation, and it has nothing to do with alien craft. It has everything to do with the competitive advantage of technological secrecy.

The current generation of classified aerospace programs is certainly no less advanced than the classified programs of the Cold War, and possibly considerably more so. The explosion of drone technology, the development of hypersonic vehicles, the deployment of high-altitude surveillance platforms with aerodynamic characteristics that would have seemed fantastical thirty years ago, and the use of advanced directed-energy and counter-drone systems all provide an enormous reservoir of potential explanations for unusual aerial observations that pilots, having no clearance for these programs, genuinely cannot explain. When a Navy pilot sees an object performing a maneuver that their training tells them should be aerodynamically impossible, the most parsimonious explanation is not "alien spacecraft" but rather "a vehicle using aerodynamic principles I have not been briefed on, operated by people with a higher security clearance than mine." This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the basic operational reality of classified military technology in a competitive geopolitical environment.

Beyond aerospace, the fact that real secret programs exist, like MKUltra, like COINTELPRO, like the NSA's mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, should teach us something important about what kinds of things governments actually hide and why. They hide programs that would be politically toxic if publicly acknowledged. They hide capabilities that would be operationally compromised if disclosed. They hide crimes that would result in prosecution or political destruction if exposed. What they are notably less motivated to hide is aliens, because the existence of alien contact would be, for any government that possessed credible evidence of it, an extraordinary instrument of national power and international prestige. The government that could credibly claim first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would not sit on that information for seventy years. The political, scientific, military, and cultural advantages of being the government that revealed verified alien contact are so enormous that the incentive structure for secrecy essentially inverts. Governments hide things that hurt them. Verified alien contact would not hurt them. The secrecy argument collapses under its own logic when you think about it carefully.

I also want to address the dark side of some of the things that governments do admit to hiding, because those admissions are genuinely relevant to understanding what "alien" encounters might actually be. MKUltra, which I mentioned in the Montauk section, is the most important precedent here. The program ran for two decades, involved over eighty institutions, conducted experiments on unwitting subjects in universities, hospitals, and prisons across the US and Canada, and was entirely hidden from the public and from Congress until investigative journalism and courageous congressional investigators forced its partial exposure. The destroyed records mean we still do not know the full extent of what was done. What we do know includes experiments involving the administration of psychoactive substances that cause profound alterations of consciousness and perception, including experiences that subjects later described as encounters with non-human entities. This is not speculation. It is documented in the surviving MKUltra records. The correlation between the descriptions of alien abduction experiences and the documented phenomenology of forced psychedelic states, extreme sensory deprivation, and experimental psychological conditioning is striking enough that dismissing it requires active effort. I am not saying every alien abduction report is the result of a government experiment. I am saying that the government has already proven it is willing to induce exactly the kinds of experiences that people later describe as alien contact, and that this documented capacity for induced experiential distortion is a serious alternative explanation that the UFO community consistently refuses to engage with honestly.

The bottom line is this: governments hide things, and they hide them for reasons that are almost always terrestrial, political, and economic. The alien hypothesis is the least parsimonious explanation for government secrecy because it requires not only that governments have hidden information of literally civilization-defining significance for seventy years without a single leak that holds up under scrutiny, not only that the most powerful incentive to reveal such information, the geopolitical advantage of first-contact disclosure, has been somehow overridden by unspecified competing incentives, but also that the physical evidence of alien technology and biological samples has been successfully hidden from every independent scientist, every foreign intelligence service, and every journalist in the world for seven decades. This is not impossible by the laws of physics, but it is so implausible given everything we know about how secrecy actually works that the prior probability should be assigned accordingly. When the simpler explanation, classified terrestrial programs, government-sponsored psychological manipulation, sensor artifacts, and genuine human misperception, explains all the same observations without requiring any additional assumptions, the simpler explanation is the correct starting point.

We Are Alone And That Is Our Problem To Solve

I said at the beginning of this post that the silence of the universe is the most important, most terrifying, and most clarifying fact about the human condition, and I want to explain what I mean by clarifying, because that is the part people find hardest to accept. Clarity is uncomfortable when it removes options you did not realize you were counting on. The alien belief, even when it remains vague and unacticulated, functions as an emergency exit from human responsibility. If cosmic intelligences are watching us, or if help might arrive from somewhere beyond our solar system, then our failures are not entirely our own problem. Someone might intervene. Something might happen that changes the terms of our predicament. The weight of all the suffering I described in my first post, all the broken systems, all the technological displacement, all the mental illness and isolation and poverty that defines so many human lives, becomes slightly more bearable if you imagine it exists in a universe that contains other minds who might eventually care. The silence of the universe removes this exit. We are here, we are alone, and every problem is ours to solve or leave unsolved. Nobody is coming.

That is, I think, why the alien belief is psychologically irresistible in exactly the proportion that human civilization is failing. The more broken things feel, the more appealing it becomes to believe that something outside the broken system might fix it. This is the same structure as the religious belief I discussed in my first post, where I asked where God is and tried to answer honestly. I wrote there about how I sometimes wonder if the cosmic battle I saw in my childhood dreams was one that was already lost. Here I will say something similar: if you are waiting for alien intelligences to arrive and solve the problem of human civilization, then you are waiting for something that is not coming, in the same way that waiting for divine intervention is waiting for something that has not shown up in four thousand years of urgent human need. The waiting is itself a form of inaction dressed up as hope, and inaction is the last thing the actual situation calls for.

The most important thing that follows from our cosmic solitude is that intelligence itself, genuine intelligence, the kind capable of understanding the structure of reality and acting effectively within it, is extraordinarily rare and therefore extraordinarily precious. I have spent several posts arguing about what intelligence actually is, and here I want to apply that argument to this existential point. If we are alone, then everything that consciousness, understanding, agency, and knowledge represent in this universe exists, as far as we can tell, only here, only on this planet, only in these eight billion skulls. The equations I wrote about in my mathematics post, the compressed representations of how reality works that took thousands of years of human effort to discover, exist only in human minds and human records. The music, the literature, the love, the suffering, the curiosity, the ambition, the kindness, the cruelty, all of it exists only here. Nothing else in the observable universe appears to be aware of any of it. That is not a comfortable fact, but it is a galvanizing one, because it means that the continuation and flourishing of intelligence in this universe depends entirely on us getting our civilization right.

I think of this often in connection with what I have been building with Wise AI and with the broader project of trying to build AI systems that can genuinely understand the world rather than just talk about it. The reason I care about the difference between language models and genuine reasoning systems is not abstract. It is because the only hope for solving problems of civilizational scale, climate, disease, poverty, the coordination failures that keep us from acting collectively on things we all agree matter, is intelligence sophisticated enough to find solutions that individual human minds cannot find alone. In the framework I have been developing across these posts, that means systems capable of discovering and working with the mathematical structure of reality, not just generating fluent descriptions of problems we cannot solve. If we are alone, then the development of genuine intelligence, both human and artificial, is the most important project in the history of this planet, because it is the only thing capable of ensuring that the brief window of consciousness that has opened in this corner of the universe does not close again before it understands enough to keep itself alive.

This is also why the UFO panic makes me genuinely angry in a way that goes beyond frustration with factual error. It is a distraction from something that urgently matters. Every hour of video-watching, every dollar of book-buying, every congressional hearing hour spent on "non-human biologics" testimony is an hour, a dollar, and a congressional hearing not spent on the things that are actually killing people right now. Climate change is a mathematical problem of extraordinary difficulty that we have barely begun to solve. Drug-resistant pathogens are a biological problem that requires genuine scientific investment and global coordination. The economic systems that produce the kind of suffering I described in my first post are social and technical problems that require clear thinking and serious engineering. None of these problems will be solved by aliens, and none of them will be advanced by the cultural energy currently pouring into the belief in aliens. The conspiracy theories, the congressional theatrics, the YouTube channels with breathless thumbnail graphics, all of it is a displacement of cognitive and political energy away from things that are real and toward things that feel more exciting precisely because they would let us off the hook from the hard work of fixing what is broken.

I started this post by connecting it to my first post, to the section where I wrote about the Montauk Project and about my belief that there are no aliens. But the deeper connection is to everything I wrote about what it means to be alone in the world. I have been alone for most of my life, in ways that I described in more detail than was comfortable, and I have learned something from that aloneness that I think scales from the personal to the cosmic. Being alone is not a problem to be solved by inventing company. It is a condition to be understood and eventually accepted, because the acceptance is what allows you to function clearly and to build things that are actually real. The alien belief is, at its core, the cosmic version of refusing to accept solitude. And solitude accepted is not emptiness. It is the beginning of genuine responsibility.

The Specific Weight Of This Silence

I want to end where the argument leads, not where it is comfortable to stop, because intellectual honesty means following things to their conclusions even when the conclusions are heavy. If we are alone, and I believe we are, then the universe has produced exactly one instance of the kind of intelligence that can look at itself and ask why. One. Out of two trillion galaxies, over thirteen point eight billion years, under the action of all the physical and chemical and biological processes that have operated across that unimaginable extent, consciousness has flickered on, as far as we can tell, in exactly one place. On one small rocky planet, orbiting one unremarkable star, in one arm of one average galaxy. That consciousness is us. All of it, everything that thinks and knows and wonders and suffers in the entire observable universe, is concentrated here, in this small collection of living systems on the surface of this particular rock. This is either the most humbling fact that any conscious being has ever had to absorb, or it is the most galvanizing one. I think it is both.

The specific weight of this silence is something I feel physically when I think about it carefully. It is the weight of being the only thing that knows it exists, in a universe that does not know itself. Physicists describe the universe as a vast system of interacting fields and particles, evolving deterministically or stochastically under the laws of nature, and none of those laws contain anything that notices. The particles do not know they are particles. The galaxies do not know they are galaxies. The stars do not know that they fuse hydrogen into helium. The black holes do not know they consume whatever falls into them. Everything happens according to mathematical laws, precisely, faithfully, and without anyone home to observe it, except here. Except us. And the mathematical laws I keep returning to in my posts, the equations that describe how the universe works, were written by the universe itself and then discovered by the only part of the universe capable of noticing them. That is a strange loop, and sitting inside it is strange, but it is where we actually are.

I have been writing across these posts about the relationship between language, mathematics, and genuine understanding, and here I want to bring that back to the cosmic question one more time. The most honest thing I can say about our solitude is that it makes the project of understanding more important, not less. If there are no alien civilizations that have already decoded the deep structure of reality, if there is no cosmic archive of solved problems waiting to be transmitted to us, then every equation we discover is something the universe has never known before. Every piece of genuine insight produced by a human mind is a first. The knowledge of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology that human civilization has accumulated represents the only time in the history of this universe that the universe has understood a piece of itself. The weight of that should not make us despair. It should make us take it seriously beyond any other consideration.

I said in my first post that the real mystery is not "where are the aliens?" but "what are we going to do with the life we have?" I stand by that completely, and I have tried to live it in my own small way, through the years of building things that nobody looked at, through the applications that went nowhere, through the crypto trading systems that ran themselves while I tried to figure out what I was actually for, through everything I described in that post. I am building Wise AI because I want to contribute something to the only project that actually matters, which is the project of getting intelligence right before the window of opportunity closes. Not because I thought it would make me financially secure, but because we are here, and we are alone, and every contribution to the accumulation of genuine understanding is one more piece of something that the universe has never had before.

The UFO pandemic is a distraction from this. It is a way of populating the silence with noise that feels meaningful because it is mysterious and exciting, while the actual mystery, the one I keep writing about, the one about what genuine intelligence requires and what it is capable of, sits quietly in the corner waiting for attention that keeps going somewhere else. I am asking you to redirect that attention. Not toward me, not toward any particular project, but toward the actual question, which is what we are doing with the fact that we exist and we understand and we are alone. That question deserves more than blurry photographs and congressional theatrics and theories about hairless creatures from underground military bases. It deserves everything.

We are alone in the universe. That is the most important thing I know, and it is the thing I most want to say without softening it. The sky is quiet. No one is coming. We are it. And we should probably start acting like it.

Till next time 👋!

References

1. Conselice, C. J., Wilkinson, A., Duncan, K. & Mortlock, A., The Evolution of Galaxy Number Density at z , The Astrophysical Journal, 830:83, October 2016. arXiv:1607.03909

2. Petigura, E. A., Howard, A. W. & Marcy, G. W., Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 110, No. 48, pp. 19273-19278, 2013. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1319909110 - arXiv:1311.6806

3. Ward, P. D. & Brownlee, D., Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, Copernicus Books / Springer, New York, 2000. Springer

4. Drake, F., The Drake Equation - Origins, created for the first SETI conference, Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia, November 1961. Described formally in: Drake, F., The Radio Search for Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life, in Current Aspects of Exobiology, Pergamon Press, 1965. Overview: SETI Institute

5. Tarter, J., The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 39, pp. 511-548, 2001. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.astro.39.1.511

6. Breakthrough Listen Initiative - The largest ever scientific research program searching for evidence of civilizations beyond Earth, $100 million, 10-year commitment announced 2015. breakthroughinitiatives.org

7. Hart, M. H., Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 16, pp. 128-135, 1975. Also known as the Hart-Tipler Conjecture. Wikipedia: Fermi Paradox

8. The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, Preston Nichols & Peter Moon, Sky Books, 1992. Background and analysis: Wikipedia: Montauk Project

9. Project MKUltra - CIA illegal human experimentation program, 1953-1973. Exposed via Church Committee, 1975; further declassified via FOIA, 1977. Wikipedia: MKUltra

10. Haines, G. K., A Die-Hard Issue: CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-1990, Studies in Intelligence (Unclassified Edition), 1997. CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence

11. Loftus, E. F., The Reality of Repressed Memories, American Psychologist, Vol. 48, No. 5, pp. 518-537, 1993. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.48.5.518

12. U.S. House Oversight Committee, Hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Testimony of David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and David Fravor, July 26, 2023. C-SPAN Recording

13. National Archives and Records Administration, Records Related to UFOs and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, established per FY 2024 NDAA provisions. archives.gov/uap