She probably didn’t come from Planet Clare

Andrew Gelman points out that Slate has just run an embarrassingly terrible conspiracy-mongering piece about Congress’s forthcoming inquiry into the almost certainly completely non-existent evidence that the Earth has been visited recently by intelligent life from other star systems/galaxies/dimensions/whathaveyou:

Here’s an article titled, “We’re A About to Find Out if UFOs are Real. Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again”:

UFOs found their way back into the mainstream spotlight in 2017 when the New York Times reported on the existence of a clandestine Pentagon program dedicated to investigating “aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.” . . . Six years later, two of the journalists who worked on that report for the Times—Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal—published an article in the Debrief in which a former intelligence official named David Grusch claimed that the government and various aerospace companies possessed objects “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin),” including not just aircraft (or sea-craft, in some cases), but bodies of the creatures that piloted those vehicles. Grusch has already testified before Congress in closed-door sessions . . . Despite the fact that UFOs have been in popular culture for decades, there’s something about this moment that feels categorically different. After Kean and Blumenthal’s initial report, we’re no longer in tinfoil-hat territory . . .

Whoa! Stop right thar, pardner. Let’s look up some of these people. Palko found some details on that obscure site known as . . . wikipedia:

[David] Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that Pope Pius XII had “back-channeled” the existence of a UFO crash in Magenta, Italy in 1933 to the United States, the remains of which were kept by Benito Mussolini’s government until the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), coordinating with the Five Eyes, procured it in 1944 or 1945; that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on “football-field” sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was “malevolent activity” by UFOs.

In short, we are in tinfoil-hat territory.

The Slate article continues:

It might turn out that the truth about UFOs/UAPs is somewhere between Chinese spy balloons and time-traveling aliens. It might turn out that there’s nothing there at all.

Uh, sure, why not, right? The Slate article refers to some science fictional treatments of aliens and concludes:

All of these narratives have one thing in common: an understanding that if we discover the existence of intelligent alien life, nothing will ever be the same again. . . . In light of the reporting in the Debrief and the steps toward disclosure being taken in Washington, it’s reasonable to say we should prepare ourselves for the possibility of that very experience.

As the saying goes, Big if true. A century-long UFO conspiracy involving the Vatican and multiple governments . . . mind-blowing, huh?

I’ll say. As Gelman might well ask, what are the odds?

I’m going with “almost infinitesimally tiny.”

For the Earth to have been visited recently by aliens, we have to posit:

(1) The existence of not just intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, or if you’re being super generous, other galaxies, but the existence of beings vastly more technologically advanced than humans currently are. But that’s just the beginning, because you also have to posit that

(2) There are enough such beings scattered around the galaxy that at least one of them has stumbled upon this particular planet, which is revolving around one of the 100 to 400 BILLION stars in the Milky Way. That seems like a stretch to put it mildly, but you ALSO have to posit that

(3) These beings just happened to do so in the last few decades, even though the Earth has been around for a few billion years, which also seems like a heck of coincidence; and

(4) They haven’t bothered to announce their presence after all that effort, and/or they ineptly crash landed their crafts, which doesn’t seem to line up real well with the whole super-advanced technology capable of interstellar travel part of the package.

Leaving aside that the “evidence” for any of this happening consists of random nuts claiming that the Vatican Knows the Truth etc, another absurd thing about the Slate piece is the claim that the discovery that We Are Not Alone would mean nothing would ever be the same again. What does this even mean? If we were to somehow discover that we are in fact alone, wouldn’t that be just as portentous a discovery?

All of this reminds me of Ralph Blumenthal’s very interesting book about John Mack, the head of the psychiatry department at Harvard, who in the early 1990s decided that his patients who claimed they had been abducted by aliens were neither delusional nor lying. This led to a fascinating exploration of the limits of academic freedom, among other things.

I have some ideas about why so many people are obsessed with the idea that Earth has been visited by aliens, which I’ll save for another post. But as Gelman says, Slate should be embarrassed to be printing this kind of nonsense.