Michael Shellenberger: US Has 12 Or More Alien Spacecraft, Say Military And Intelligence Contractors

Two of them have testified, including as recently as last year, to both AARO and Congress.

I think it's plausible-to-likely that this testimony actually happened, and that if it did happen, that it's very likely the officials who testified sincerely believe that they have observed strong, concrete evidence of alien spacecraft. Furthermore, I think it's likely that there is actual material at the DoD and Lockheed which many people there believe is at least plausibly from aliens.

These officials are sticking their necks out and making honest, specific, and testable predictions. I confidently predict they're all wrong, despite the fact that they access to more data than I do.

Why? I expect that most or all of these officials:

• have not considered alternative hypotheses for their observations in enough detail and breadth.
• have not explicitly considered the likelihood ratios given their observations for any alternate hypotheses they have thought of.
• have bad priors about the topic (implicitly, I expect most are not thinking in terms of probabilities and Bayesian updates at all)

Note that my own prediction is based on priors, rather than looking into any of the specific claims or evidence available about aliens specifically. And the bullet points above apply more generally to the question of how to treat the beliefs of others, in terms of how much Bayesian evidence they are about the underlying belief.

To quote HPMOR:

"Should I be convinced?" Harry said. He didn't look away. "Just because you believe it? Are you a strong enough rationalist now that your belief is strong evidence to me, because you'd be very unlikely to believe it if it weren't true?

Setting aside the specific scenario discussed in recent news stories, there's ways craft could change hands through interactions that don't involve limited means or inscrutable goals. Some examples:

A combination gift/test: see what we can learn from some samples, and prove we're worthy of joining the interstellar community as they observe what we choose to do with the gains.

A calculated technology transfer, where we get very old junk and then gradually newer junk as our understanding improves. Essentially foreign development aid across a much larger wealth and tech gap.

Anything that's crashed or that we've otherwise obtained, was meant to be disposable, or was so old it was meant to crash long ago. I always assume that if there are aliens watching Earth, they've had automated probes here for millions of years at a minimum.

The message behind the inclinations may merely be incomprehensible for us. If I were an alien civ anticipating these humans to one day become something much more intelligent, and I wanted to tell them not to harshly expand without endangering myself, one strategy to take would be to just say "I'm here" in the form of airspace trinkets with the expectation that the successor civ fills in the blanks on priors. To tell them a whole lot more about myself wouldn't be prudent until I had an idea of what their intentions were.

Semiconductor chips don’t carry the secrets of their manufacture.  Let’s say a modern chip fell into 1958.  They had electron microscopes, so they could see there were tiny structures there.  And they had analytical chemistry for macroscopic samples, so they’d be able to tell the chip was almost pure silicon, with small admixtures of the sort of impurities that form transistors.  But they didn’t have ion milling and scanning microprobes, so they wouldn’t be able to tell how the impurities were arranged into devices.  And they certainly wouldn’t know how to reproduce the highly developed engineering that manufactures these chips nowadays.

So the best they could do would be to start the development of ever-smaller semiconductors, knowing that someday they would be very impressive.  And until then, they would do good stuff along the way.  Which is pretty much what happened in real life.

Epistemic status: I designed chips from 1982 to 1994.  I never saw an alien spaceship.

I'm not familiar enough with material science or any of that to make an intelligent call but does it seem like a logical progression or on inspection does it actually raise questions about recovered UFO technology?

I've studied this history moderately closely; I would describe it as a logical progression, and not like a jump from acquiring alien technology. 

It's funny, because it's kind of like the same story with AI safety and alignment. Why no progress? Well, we've only had like 100-300 people taking it seriously and working on it.

I totally get the impulse, but I am getting a little sick of folks just dismissing completely out of hand without even engaging with the information.

From the original Debrief article:

[Grusch] said he reported to Congress on the existence of a decades-long “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages.”

Edit: oops, meant to reply directly to shminux, my b. Leaving it here for now.

It is the same source, so zero new information if one does not trust the source.