What should rationalists think about the recent claims that air force pilots observed UFOs?

While these objects may be unidentified, the idea that they are the products of aliens, a simulation, AI, or something else seems unlikely given the low quality of the evidence. In all cases I'm aware of evidence for something like this being the true origin of a UFO would have to overcome the more likely alternatives of

• secret, experimental, or stealth aircraft, probably military, with advanced capabilities undisclosed to the public;
• observational errors and instrumentation glitches;
• misremembering, embellishment, and outright lying.

For a comparison, the literature on cryptids (claimed to be real but unobserved by science animals like bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and the chupacabra) is full of cases where the evidence looks pretty compelling...so long as we only look for evidence that confirms the hope that a cryptid exists. Perhaps sadly, there are no cryptid humanoids or sea monsters that we know of, and all evidence of them thus far collected is either best categorized as hoaxes, misidentifications, and hopeful misinterpretations or turned out to be evidence of real, undiscovered, and not fantastical animals.

Rationalists should be deeply interested in the Princeton-Nimitz encounters, regardless of whether it was confusion, aliens, or a secret human technology, because cases of confusion on this level teach us a lot about how epistemic networks operate, and if it were aliens or a secret human technology that would be strategically significant.

So, since those were pretty much the only possibilities, I was deeply interested.

I eventually settled loosely into the theory that the tictacs were probably a test of a long-range plasma volumetric display decoy/spoofing thing. More from David Brin. I did get the impression that the higher ups on these ships were consistently, sharply less curious about the UAPs than the rest of the crew: Perhaps they'd been warned in advance.
There are a few loose threads, though:

• Engineer Vorhis of the Princeton said he couldn't imagine a way of spoofing phased array radars. I haven't heard of one.
• Obama would seem to be lying, in saying, of them, "We don't know exactly what they are". He could just be lying by omission, though. It's conceivable to me that when a president starts to realize it's probably a secret US technology they will generally pull back from their investigation, lose curiosity, and choose to stay as ignorant as possible, knowing that, if they knew, they'd be kind of obligated to tell people, and that would just slightly weaken the US, and potentially increase the distance between military and public representatives which wouldn't be healthy.
  • Earlier presidents seemed more interested than Biden is, in getting to the bottom of these things and telling the public, but it's conceivable that they didn't have the decoy thing working during Clinton's term so there weren't any actual US UFO techs to report.
• There are a couple of little details in the report that don't line up with this theory (for instance, tictacs having detailed parts on the bottom, or seeming to be clearly physical objects? (though note, Voorhis reported them having a glow to them, at night (I'd guess that they were the glow, and that it was only non-obvious that they were glowing during the day because the sun was bright enough that they could be read as reflective white objects instead), and they were hot, on the FLIR)), but I'd expect a certain number of details in any report of a mysterious phenomenon to be confabulations, due to the fact that whenever a person sees anything, they see it through their interpretations of what they think it is, they don't just give you raw images, that's not how human sensation or memory or language works. If you want to find a novel (more correct) interpretation of any phenomenon, you have to be prepared to disregard some of the details as confabulations that people made up and perpetuated as a result of seeing everything through an interpretive lens.

I initially agreed that aliens would not look like this. Then Robin Hanson wrote a series of rationalization stories about why an alien civilization might look like this, which has bamboozled me. (In short, his theory was: They're an extremely centralized, conservative civilization who evolved recently, and nearby, relative to us, due to being siblings of the same panspermia event. They give their visiting parties only limited agency to execute the simplest possible plan that would gradually convince us to look up to them and become like them. (While still allowing us enough doubt and agency that our choice would be meaningful?))

XKCD.

Rationalists should have mental models of the world that say if aliens/AI were out there, a few rare and poorly documented UFO encounters is not at all how we would find out. These stories are not worth the oxygen it takes to contemplate them.

In general, thinking more rationally can change confidence levels in only two directions: either toward more uncertainty or toward more certainty. Sometimes, rationalism says to open your mind, free yourself of prejudice, and overcome your bias. In these cases, you will be guided toward more uncertainty. Other time, rationalism says, c'mon, use your brain and think about the world in a way that's deeply self-consistent and don't fall for surface-level explanations. In these cases, you will be guided toward more certainty.

In my opinion, this is a case where rationalism should make us more certain, not less. Like, if there were aliens, is this really how we would find out? Obviously no.