based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures

That only sounds impressive if you don't think too hard about what it means. It's saying that the fragments are made of a fancy alloy that they can't identify. But every military contractor has materials scientists, and being made of fancy new alloys is completely expected for cutting edge military aircraft.

Sure, but suppose you have a flying saucer that you would like to be able to use for some missions. If you release a fragment of the flying saucer and say "it's aliens guys", this maybe means that when other people see a flying saucer later they don't know it's you.

[Or the part of your organization that found the flying saucer fragments, which isn't cleared to know about the flying saucer, releases it to the public with "WTF is this?" which the part which is cleared to know about them is barred from responding to, and part A  didn't know about the existence of part B to clear it with them first.]

Most bets I see are on the order of $10-$1000 which, according to the Kelly Criterion, implies negligible confidence. I'm willing to bet substantially more than that.

If we had a real prediction market with proper derivatives, low fees, high liquidity, reputable oracles, etcetera, then I'd just use the standard exchange, but we don't. Consequently, market friction vastly outweighs actual probabilities in importance.

Perhaps you mean that the other person should come up with the odds, and then you'll determine your bet amount using the Kelly criterion, assuming a 99% probability of winning for yourself.

Bingo. This is exactly what I mean. Thank you for clarifying. It is important to note that "probability of winning" is not the same as "probability of getting paid, and thus profiting". It's the latter that I care about.

Obviously he thinks the chances are lower than 1% that this is true, if he's willing to bet at 99% odds.

That is an honorable offer (I appreciate it, really), but it has negative expected value for me due to counterparty risk, friction, variance, etcetera. (See bayesed's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)].) I'd need substantially better odds for the expected profit to exceed the friction.

I'm willing to bet five figures, in theory, but there's a ton of factors that need to be accounted for like capital tie-up, counterparty risk, the value of my time, etc. So if your odds aren't lower than 90%, then it's probably not even worthwhile to bet. Too much friction.

Wow. Ok, I guess my odds that this is actually an alien spacecraft went up a little bit.

It's interesting that at the end they quote a NASA official who stated that they haven't found any evidence of extraterrestrial life yet, directly contradicting the whistleblower. That means either the evidence the whistleblower has isn't sufficient to convince the scientists at NASA or the DOD isn't sharing it with them.

FWIW Blumenthal says they went to WaPo first and that WaPo didn't pass, but was taking too long to publish the story and that he and Kean felt "pressure" to publish faster. "The Post needed more time and we couldn't wait."

I think we need to just scrap everything we think we "know" about anthropics and grabby aliens and lightcone-tiling AGI if this is true. The Aristotelian epistemology that has led us to those "conclusions" are obviously garbage, if it turns out that no, high-tech aliens with seemingly capped technology are here and they're not doing anything to us. Confirmed UFO craft would be an absurd, catastrophic indictment of the standard LessWrong worldview and our overconfidence in these sorts of arguments.

I definitely mean the latter. I think "advanced tech" is an extremely anthropomorphic concept. Real life is not Star Trek. Best I can imagine there would be some substance that is not familiar to whoever found/investigated it, either as "natural" or human-made. Any kind of a leap into "alien" or "tech" would be very much reaching.

This made me think!

• Literal aliens

I assume you mean the central example, some indisputably organic entities arriving from another star system on something indisputably like a "spacecraft"

• Magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon

Hmm, I don't even know how to identify something like that.

• Time travel

Yeah, I'd bet against that one, no problem. If time travel turns out to be a real thing, the last 100 years of physics are a lie.

• Leftovers of an ancient civilization / Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth

That is less unlikely than the rest, actually. It does not violate my priors against recognizable life forms unrelated to Earth's.

• Some other explanation that's of this level of "very weird"
  • Explicitly excluding merely hyper-advanced human tech
  • I forfeit any and all potential "gotcha" cases.

Yeah, that makes sense for a bet.

• Determination of resolution to be up to you.
  • I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]

definitely quite reasonable.

• I Send you $X Immediately, You pay out $200*X if I win
• I want a 5 year time horizon.

while sensible, it does make me think that even for $10 I'd be (very unlikely but potentially) out $2000 if I lose. I guess my reptile brain shouts nooo! That's too much. Or, well, rather hisses than shouts.

Perhaps this is genuine whistleblowing, but not on what they make it sound like? Suppose there's something being covered up that Grusch et al. want to expose, but describing what it is plainly is inconvenient for one reason or another. So they coordinate around the wacky UFO story, with the goal being to point people in the rough direction of what they want looked at.

My priors are still for all of this being bullshit; some psyop or a psychotic break that snowballed or none of these articles corresponding to reality at all. But if there really is a large number of intelligence officials earnestly coming forward with this, "UFOs are aliens" still seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be what it's about.

On the plus side, the allegations seem to be specific enough to push Congress into actually dealing with them and investigating. 

I can come up with a hypothesis about the behaviour of the sources: the drones you send to observe and explore a planet might be disposable. (Eg we’ve left rovers behind on Mars because it’s not worth the effort to retrieve them from the gravity well.) Although if the even-wilder rumours about bio-alien corpses are true, that one fails too. 

But the broader picture: that there are high-tech aliens out there who we haven’t observed doing things like building Dyson spheres or tiling the universe with computronium? They’re millions of years ahead of us and somehow didn’t either progress to building mega-tech or to AI apocalypse? They’re not millions of years ahead of us and there’s some insane coincidence where two intelligent species emerged on different planets at the same time but also there are no older civs that already grabbed their lightcone? I’m as boggled as you.

I’m kind of hoping this whole thing is a hoax or deliberate disinformation operation or something because I have absolutely no idea what to think about the alternative. But after the amount of leaks about UAPs over the last few years, I’m at at least 10% that there are literal alien spacecraft visiting our planet.

He testified under oath to the House and Senate intelligence committees, purportedly giving them hundreds of pages of documentation including specific names of programs and people to follow up on. All I'm saying is, AFAIK, no UFO claims have been under that level of scrutiny (in the US) before.

And to say that either the ICIG or the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees are either "first timers" w/r/t vetting claims like this or that they fall prey to selection effects for "people spending effort investigating UFOs" rings false to me.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General found his complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022. According to Grusch, a summary was immediately submitted to the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines; the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

From The Debrief article. Oh, and if you mean for the Alex Vindman claim, here's a direct link to the ICIG report from 2019.

Edit: The Independent is now also reporting on this. As is The Guardian.

Sorry, definitely not the most proficient with the lingo. I believe I should have said:

"That said, considering the above, I would suspect updating your priors in the direction of this all being true, at least a little bit, seems reasonable."

I think? Is that closer?

Misusing the term prior is long-held LessWrong tradition

David Grusch also had a lot of documents as evidence that he gave the ICIG and Congress. Grusch himself has seen more than just oral evidence. 

He also doesn't seem to be the only one who talked to the ICIG. Christopher Mellon wrote:

Since AARO was established, I have referred four witnesses to them who claim to have knowledge of a secret U.S. government program involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft. Other sources who, rightly or wrongly do not trust AARO’s leadership, have also contacted me with additional details and information about an alleged secret U.S. government reverse engineering program. Some have supplied information to the intelligence community’s inspector general, others directly to staff of the congressional oversight committees. 

Ross Coulthart who interviewed Grusch and from whose interview the existing NewsNation segment is speaks in another podcast about how he has other sources multiple sources who also tell him about the secret program (going back three years). The difference with Grusch is that he's willing to speak publically. 

Wow that's awfully indirect. I'm surprised his speaking out is much of a story given this.

He gave an extremely roundabout answer to that question, and the reporter did not follow up on it, which makes me think it was either a misleading cut or he was caught up in the interview. He doesn't mention this would-be much stronger evidence in the original article either.

Obviously the idea that the government has alien bodies is ridiculous and if he doesn't walk that back later it's definitely a hoax.

Why would an advanced entity, capable of traveling between stars, separate their body from their spacecraft?

It could be an advanced entity that evolved here on Earth and isn't capable of traveling between stars, perhaps a member of an ancient civilization that predates humanity. 

Remember, "alien" and "extraterrestrial" are not necessarily synonymous.

Thanks! This is fairly tempting. I'm a bit concerned by 

Some other explanation that's of this level of "very weird"

To be clear, if it were just the 4 hypotheses you mention, then I feel pretty good about this, and I'd just want to reflect over 200:1 versus 100:1. 

• For instance, if some form of undiscovered bat or sea creature is actually good at flying and that explains the images, does that count as "very weird"? That is, it's not an animal that can design technologies, but it is the cause of a bunch of the UFO reportings.
• Also "psychic phenomenon" seems kind of ill-defined. Derren Brown can do hypnosis and seances that have strong effects on people, there's a lot of suggestibility in people, if a bunch of UFO sighting were due to someone doing similar things but even better and naturally, does that count as psychic phenomena?
• For the laws of physics, if we discover a new theory of physics, and the UFOs were directly responsible for figuring it out, then I'm happy to credit that as responsible. Time travel would certainly count.

Regarding the hypotheses, I'd probably want to determine now some set of LW posters to resolve it if we disagree. My first guess is that Oliver Habryka, Alyssa Vance, and Vaniver could be good, where if any of them think the bet resolves in your favor then it does.

Better than 90% of amateur fiction posted. 

It doesn't seem very specific to me. In particular, it doesn't seem to think about how the likely future progress of this will go.

If the claim that he gave evidence to Congress is true, the thing that might reasonably happen this year is another congressional inquiry. In it, the authorities might say "Grusch's claim that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force has gathered physical evidence under program XYZ that we didn't tell Congress about before is true. The evidence is highly classified and we didn't think it matched what you asked for when you asked for our monitoring of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena because we think program XYZ is not within the sphere of what you asked for. We can give you a few classified documents about that physical evidence but it's important that you don't share anything more specific because of the necessity to keep national secrets."

I would expect that there's some substance to Grusch's claims but that what will be revealed about that in this year won't be very convincing on the larger question of whether non-human tech really exist.

But many UFOs are ending here, so each branch is getting many visitors - so why one of them is not eating all our atoms? This again could be explained by the existence some overwhelming control force, like super-intelligence which only prevents creation of other super-intelligences. 

I do like Hanson's story you link. :) Yes, panspermia possibility does make it non-crazy that there could be aliens close to us despite an empty sky. Unlikely, but non-crazy. Then there's still the question of why they are so bad at hiding & why their technology is so shitty, and why they are hiding in the first place. It's not completely impossible but it seems like a lot of implausible assumptions stacked on top of each other. So, I think it's still true that "the best modelling suggests aliens are at least hundreds of millions of light-years away."