Why UFOs matter

UFOs matter in various ways. My aim in this post is to outline some of the ways in which UFOs are relevant to altruistic priorities, and thereby make a case for why it is worth taking UFOs seriously.^[1]

1. Sufficient grounds for curiosity

The best witness reports and footage of UFOs are more noteworthy than one might expect if one has never looked into the subject. I have tried to collect some of the most credible reports and footage I have been able to find in “What credible UFO evidence?”. In view of such reports and footage, I submit that there are enough (inconclusive) clues to warrant closer attention to the topic of UFOs.

One reason the topic is worthy of closer attention is that UFOs might hint at a significant change in our worldview, such as when it comes to our beliefs about extraterrestrial life and technology (this is at least a possibility, and our prior should arguably not be that low). Given how consequential such a change could potentially be — including when it comes to informing and changing our long-term moral priorities — the current state of evidence seems sufficiently puzzling to warrant further attention.

(If the issue had less potential to be of massive import, the bar for “clues worthy of closer attention” would be higher; I suspect that one reason people tend to dismiss the topic of UFOs is that they do not think about it in such “expected value-adjusted” terms — along with the social stigma and the giggle factor, of course.)

2. UFOs are a serious political and military issue

Whatever one’s view of UFOs, the reality on the ground is that UFOs are starting to be taken seriously by influential political institutions. For example, UFOs were discussed in the European Parliament in March 2024, and retired US Navy pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor gave testimony about UFOs to the US Congress in 2023.

UFO policy can indeed matter a lot more than one might naively think, regardless of what UFOs may be. To give just one example, consider the risk of UFOs being misidentified as foreign adversaries and in turn triggering an international conflict involving nuclear weapons. Having adequate policies in place regarding UFOs could be critical for avoiding such accidental catastrophes.

One might think that this example sounds too speculative to be worth taking seriously, yet the truth is that UFOs have in fact often been observed at nuclear facilities, both in the US and Iran, as well as at regular military facilities in countries like Peru and China (and many others). There are even some reports suggesting that UFOs may have been close to triggering a nuclear conflict in the past, such as in the Soviet Union in the 1980s (see also page 256 in this pdf). Relatedly, US Air Force pilot Milton Torres said that his first concern when he was ordered to shoot down a UFO in 1957 was that he was about to fire the first shot of World War III.

Other issues for which UFO policy may be relevant include aviation safety, (mis)trust in public institutions, and international coordination for better understanding UFOs. (For some additional perspectives on the political relevance of UFOs, see e.g. Alexander Wendt’s presentation “Dangerous Knowledge? UAP Science and the Anthropocentric State” as well as Wendt & Duvall, 2008.)

Thus, developing adequate political and military responses (or non-responses) to UFOs could be a high priority, regardless of what UFOs in fact are. The political and military relevance of UFOs is in itself a sufficient reason to take UFOs seriously.

3. Potential implications of “UFOs as advanced intelligence”

In this section, I will tentatively speculate about what the implications might be if UFOs represent some form of advanced intelligence that is far more powerful than humanity and any human-created technology. I believe that the points and resources found in the earlier section on “sufficient grounds for curiosity” warrant such speculative and conditional exploration, at least in some measure.

A complementary motivation for this speculative exploration is that one may critically ask: So what if UFOs were some kind of advanced intelligence? What would that change in practical terms? The following is an attempt to outline some potential answers to that question, and to thereby show that there is plausibly a lot to say in response to that “so what?” question. It really is a “big if true” conjecture, also from an altruistic perspective.

But let me stress again that I am very much speculating here, and what I write below is to be read as a conditional exploration: if UFOs are some form of highly advanced intelligence, what might be the implications?

3.1 Changing our future expectations and priorities

“UFOs as advanced intelligence” would change our expectations and priorities for the future. In particular, it would probably mean that the long-term future of our corner of the universe is mostly not within the control of humanity or its descendants.

Instead, it seems likely that the (assumed) advanced UFOs would mostly be in control, and that they would prevent humanity from becoming as advanced as they are, since that could in effect threaten their power.

Note that this yields a falsifiable prediction: the picture just outlined would predict that the advanced UFOs should intervene to prevent humanity from developing “optimized technologies” that could compete with theirs (unless there somehow comes to be a sufficient convergence in ultimate aims).

3.2 Two broad shifts: Greater near-term focus and influencing them on their margin

Two broad shifts in priorities seem to follow conditional on “UFOs as advanced intelligence that will mostly control our corner of the universe”.

First, it would seem to update us toward prioritizing impact in the relatively near term. Note that this is a directional claim: the claim is not that near-term impact would necessarily become the main priority, but rather that we should likely update our priorities in that direction (under this kind of scenario). The reason, in short, is that our near-term impact seems relatively unchanged under this kind of scenario, whereas our long-term impact seems greatly reduced (compared to a scenario in which humanity mostly does control this corner of the universe).

Thus, contrary to what one might expect, updating toward “UFOs as advanced intelligence” might in some ways imply a greater focus on more near-term and more commonsensical altruistic priorities. That being said, in light of both the scope and the neglectedness of the long-term future, the magnitude of the update toward (more of) a near-term focus may be quite modest overall.

Second, the best way to have a long-term impact would likely change under this scenario. In particular, if an advanced foreign intelligence will mostly control the long-term future, it could be that the best opportunity we have for long-term impact is to influence that advanced intelligence on its margin (i.e. a limited relative impact on its future actions that could nevertheless be large in absolute terms). At the very least, it seems that our priorities should be updated in that direction under this kind of scenario.

It is difficult to say what we could do to have a beneficial long-term influence conditional on “UFOs as advanced intelligence”, but a helpful first step would probably be to seek a better understanding of this advanced intelligence. In general, if there are advanced UFOs around Earth, understanding their motives and likely future actions would seem to be a top priority for us, as that would plausibly have significant implications for what kinds of political institutions, ideologies, AI systems, and so on we should ideally create and adopt. In concrete terms, this might imply having more researchers seriously exploring these kinds of issues.

3.3 Relevance to the ethics of extinction

The scenario explored here would also be relevant to the ethics of extinction in various ways. For example, it would imply that the extinction of humanity would be a lot less consequential (for better or worse), since humanity would not control much of the universe’s future in any case. As a result, human extinction would plausibly be less important to focus on (from an impartial perspective).

Relatedly, human extinction might not mark the end of humanity’s influence on the future, since human decisions could have a marginal impact on the long-term future even when there are no longer any humans or human descendants around (through the kind of limited relative impact alluded to above: a marginal long-term impact on the advanced foreign intelligence). Indeed, under this kind of scenario, the vast majority of humanity's moral impact might not materialize until long after humanity and its descendants have gone extinct.

The scenario would also have significant implications when it comes to ideas about vacuum phase transitions and the like that might unleash destruction on a cosmic scale (see e.g. Bostrom, 2002). In particular, under this kind of scenario, we should update strongly toward thinking that such events of cosmic destruction cannot realistically be unleashed by humanity or any group of humans. After all, an ultra-powerful intelligence that has not already unleashed such an event itself is unlikely to allow any real risk of such events to be posed by others.

3.4 UFOs themselves might matter morally

If UFOs represent an advanced intelligence, might they be sentient? If they are sentient, and if they permeate much of the cosmos (big ifs, to be sure), they could well be the most numerous sentient beings in the universe, and their welfare might generally dominate in impartial welfare calculations.

In simple expected value calculations, the potentially vast number of sentient UFO probes could mean that their interests dominate in expectation even if we place a relatively low probability on their sentience (conditional on their existence). Indeed, they might dominate even if we place a fairly low probability on the existence of such probes in the first place (i.e. if we make no strong assumptions about their existence).

Of course, there are good reasons to take simple and speculative expected value calculations with huge grains of salt. Yet even so, it seems worth considering the mere possibility that cosmically permeating probes might be the most numerous sentient beings in the universe, and to ponder what the implications of that scenario would be. Furthermore, the state of UFO evidence observed on Earth may be relevant evidence for or against that scenario, which is an additional reason to pay closer attention to the state of that evidence.

3.5 What “UFOs as advanced intelligence” would not change

There is a grain of truth buried in the “so what?” question raised above: in some respects, the existence of advanced UFOs would not imply significant changes. For example, there would still be an important role to play for human agency. There would still be ongoing moral catastrophes on Earth that we can act to reduce, and there would still be future risks that we can seek to minimize, even if our assessment of the broader landscape of future risks would change. In short, our actions would still matter.

4. Concluding meta-notes on UFO discourse

The subject of UFOs has a lot of baggage associated with it. Thus, to motivate anyone to take it seriously, it may be useful to take a step back and make a few comments about the state of UFO discourse.

4.1 Two kinds of UFO discourse

Perhaps the most important point to convey is that there are, broadly speaking, two very different kinds of UFO discourse (although they occasionally have some overlap). The best way I know to describe it is with an analogy to the discourse on “quantum mechanics”.

We can broadly distinguish two rather different kinds of discourse about quantum mechanics. One mainly happens among people who have PhDs in physics — people who do experiments, publish research papers, and make cumulative progress. The other happens among people who are into quantum healing and the like — people who essentially invoke “quantum mechanics” as a way to dress up various supernatural beliefs.

Now, if someone had mostly heard about “quantum mechanics” from the latter group, it would be quite understandable for that person to dismiss all talk about quantum mechanics as lacking in evidence and rigor, and to be hesitant about looking deeper into it, in effect throwing the quantum baby out with the bathwater.

I believe that many people make this kind of mistake when it comes to UFOs. That is, there is a similar distinction to be drawn in UFO discourse, and many people dismiss the UFO topic at large because they associate it with exotic things like sightings of biological aliens and human-looking aliens living among us — the kinds of things that one will mostly find in the “quantum healing” part of UFO discourse.

But this overlooks the rather different, more serious discourse on UFOs. (Along with “serious”, one could aptly refer to it as the “cautious” UFO discourse.) This discourse includes the kinds of reports I have collected in “What credible UFO evidence?”. In terms of individuals and institutions, it includes:

• Academics such as James E. McDonald, J. Allen Hynek, Alexander Wendt, and Daniel Coumbe
• Pilots such as David Fravor, Alex Dietrich, and Ryan Graves
• Intelligence professionals such as Marik von Rennenkampff and John Brennan (former head of the CIA)
• Nuclear missile launch officers such as Robert Salas and Jerome Nelson
• Radar operators and technicians such as Kevin Day and Gary Voorhis
• Journalists such as Donald Keyhoe and John Greenwald Jr.
• Astronauts such as Buzz Aldrin, James McDivitt, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton
• Politicians such as Kirsten Gillibrand, Marco Rubio, and Francisco Guerreiro (and more peripherally, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney)
• The Brazilian Air Force, the Belgian Air Force, and the Iranian Air Force

Generally speaking, this more serious part of UFO discourse is not about biological aliens, but instead about objects that seem to display advanced capabilities beyond those of any known human technology. For example, these objects often accelerate rapidly to supersonic speeds, and they sometimes display what appear to be intelligently controlled maneuvers (e.g. in the Nimitz case and the case of Oscar Santa Maria Huerta in Peru; see also Coumbe, 2022).

Arguably, this part of UFO discourse deserves much more attention than discourse involving biological aliens visiting Earth, based on both priors and the observed evidence.

In terms of priors, it seems likely that advanced forms of intelligence would evolve to become fully engineered and non-biological in the long run. Moreover, when considering the extraterrestrial hypothesis for the origin of UFOs, it seems far more likely that self-steering artificial craft would traverse interstellar distances than that biological creatures would. For these reasons, claims involving non-humanly created craft around Earth are considerably more plausible a priori than claims involving biological aliens visiting Earth. 

Similarly, in terms of observed evidence on Earth, the evidence for the existence of advanced objects that could potentially be non-humanly created craft is generally much stronger than the evidence for biological aliens. For example, the former sometimes involves multi-sensor data with radar evidence, FLIR footage, and eye-witness accounts from professional aviators and radar operators, all in the same case (e.g. in the Nimitz case; see also this playlist and Coumbe, 2022). In contrast, no such multi-sensor evidence exists in the case of alleged biological aliens.

To be clear, these claims about priors and evidence are claims about relative plausibility, suggesting that the existence of non-humanly created craft around Earth is more plausible than biological aliens on Earth. They are not claims about the absolute plausibility of either of these conjectures. Still, the points outlined above underscore that we have good reasons to look at the serious UFO discourse with rather different eyes than the more exotic part of UFO discourse, and to draw a clear distinction between these divergent segments of the conversation on UFOs.^[2]

4.2 Mixed discourse may contribute to neglectedness

Finally, it is worth noting how the mixed discourse on UFOs may contribute to an undue neglect of the topic, including by aspiring altruists.^[3] This can happen for at least two reasons.

First, the mixed discourse can make it unclear from the outside that there indeed is a serious and cautious discourse buried in the dunghill, since that part of the discourse can easily drown in the less cautious one. As a result, most people might never find the serious discourse, even if they casually try to look for it. Note that this state of affairs might sustain itself and even worsen over time due to a kind of adverse selection: those who are turned off by incautious claims and poor reasoning may stay away from the topic altogether (perhaps quite reasonably, based on what they have seen), while those who are less bothered by such things may happily join in and add their accordant contributions.

Second, the less cautious part of the discourse can further increase the strong social stigma that surrounds the issue, which may in turn discourage us from engaging seriously with the topic — lest other people think we have poor epistemic standards or that we belong to the “quantum healing” coalition.

In the marketplace of ideas, a strong social stigma can serve almost as a de facto ban against seriously exploring a given topic. (This is perhaps especially true in academia, where people may need to worry about things like gatekeepers and ladder-climbing.) Thus, similar to how a strict legal ban can prevent an otherwise feasible product from being brought to market, the stigma against UFOs that is fueled by the incautious discourse may likewise impede efficient understanding and updating related to the UFO topic.

In other words, incautious UFO discourse may contribute to a massive inefficiency in humanity’s exploration of UFOs due to human embarrassment and reputational concerns.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dony Christie, Tristan Cook, Henry Shevlin, Pablo Stafforini, and Alexander Wendt for helpful comments.

1. ^{^}

   In recent times, the term “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAP) has become increasingly common, and it is indeed a better term than “UFO” in some ways. For example, the term “UAP” is broader in that it covers more than just objects that appear to fly (e.g. it can include objects that travel under water). Another advantage is that the term “UAP” explicitly refers to objects that seem genuinely anomalous, not merely objects that are unidentified. I here stick to the term “UFO” for what could be called historical reasons, but that choice is admittedly quite debatable, and it is probably worth moving toward using the term “UAP” instead.

2. ^{^}

   Similar points about relative plausibility apply to many other claims found in the broader UFO discourse. For example, when it comes to what kinds of material might be in the possession of the US government (or any other government), it seems that we can rank some of the common claims as follows: p(possession of additional non-public photographic material) > p(possession of materials from crashed craft) > p(possession of alien biological material).

3. ^{^}

   Thanks to Pablo Stafforini and Dony Christie for suggesting this point.