There Are Aliens, but Probably Not Here

Sometimes things remain classified not because of the findings, but because of what those findings would reveal about the capabilities of data collection.

He says there were others who saw the same thing, but this interview alone does not prove that.

Some other things that don't gel about his account:

1 - He says during his encounter he didn't turn on his helmet cam because he didn't think of it. Yet much of the rest of the interview is him talking about how highly trained he was (giving the impression that he's one of the best pilots the US has) and yet he made a critical mistake here exactly at the point where a video would be most useful in corroborating his testimony.

I'd also like to know under what circumstances he's been trained to turn that camera on. If he went against his training by keeping that camera off, that would be a red flag. But we just don't know and the interviewer didn't even ask.

There was also no discussion about whether the other person in the plane had a camera of his own, and if he did have one why he didn't turn it on, or if he did turn it on where that video is.

2 - No one on the ship or any of his commanding officers said anything about the anomaly or did anything about it, and neither did he. The pilot says this is because they were all too busy and because the object didn't have another country's flag on it, but that doesn't seem credible.

If you see something that seemingly defies physics and flies faster than any known technology, it seems very unlikely that no one investigated it or even talked about it... for 16 years.

He said he had debriefings and that's where they learn things. What was the debriefing for this mission like? Did they talk about this anomaly? If not, why not?

At the beginning of his story he said he was actually ordered to investigate the anomaly. You'd think there'd be some discussion afterwards at the briefing about what he and the other people he claims saw it actually saw, and the people who ordered him to check it out would want to hear about what he saw first hand. But he said no one talked about it.

Unbelievable.

1) There exist billions and billions of stars, each of which can be thought of an independent Bernoulli trial with probability P as to whether intelligent life exists in that star system.

2) P must be a non-negligible quantity, because we ourselves exist

3) Therefore intelligent life "must" exist elsewhere in the universe due to the sheer number of trials.

This is an epistemological error that echoes the sort of error made by proponents of intelligent design. They conclude that the chance of thinking beings evolving is prodigiously unlikely, and therefore our existence is proof of a creator.

But in fact, you cannot post-hoc conclude that our existence says anything at all about P, because if we didn't exist, there would be no one to ask the question. Therefore the fact that we are wondering about the value of P means our existence is an implicit axiom of the logical system itself. One way to think of it is there could be infinitely many possible universes with no life at all, and by definition the question of P can only discussed in the one branch, in all that lifeless space of possibilities, where thinking beings actually exist. So P could, in fact, be made arbitrarily small, and Earth could indeed be the only place in the universe with intelligent life.

Note that this doesn't claim that extraterrestrial life _doesn't_ exist. It merely points out the truth in all of this P-hacking: that we have no evidentiary basis for believing one way or the other.