More UFOs Than Ever Before

There is an epistemological truth here that is overlooked: for any non-reproducible phenomenon, physical or psychological, we can make no judgments on what happened.

The default answer is always going to be "no" for some people and "yes" for others. These are the folks who just have to have a firm answer. The actual answer is "nobody knows"

I also want to believe, so I tend to be extremely skeptical of any UFO stories. But looking throughout history, I have to admit that I am in no position to make a decision one way or another. A bunch of really respected guys made some observations of a thing with instrumental evidence that we don't understand? Cool. There's something we don't understand. Spinning up some tale of the atom bomb or aliens? That's just to sell books to the rubes. We don't know. That's okay.

If there are other intelligent lifeforms around, and if they have any developmental parallels in their society to ours, they probably think of us as nothing more than a particularly advanced form of fungus. And if they were to come here to observe, they'd either use a blind or come and go in such a way to create the kind evidential noise we currently see in the public record. So while I wish something is going to come along and settle this, it ain't going to happen.

If UFOs are real, it's unlikely they started to appear only recently and most likely had Earth as their playground (vacation destination/ZOO), and maybe even originating life. Who knows, maybe this is some alien university project on how to make life on a distant planet from the scratch? We can observe that cells/DNA are programmed to adapt to local changes; we have no idea how they make sudden jumps for a more efficient design; maybe somebody was doing alien PhD in a better bipedal design in carbon-based life forms and just planted results here to see how they proliferate...

If you look at religions, they all resemble optimization algorithms to build civilizations with different attributes; one could seed different "rules" to different parts of the world and observe which rules become the dominant ones and which kind of civilizations they bring. Moreover, having a conflict between different civilizations that couldn't be reconciled by any other way than a total annihilation, it could provide a needed impetus for progress as the permanent conflict it brings forces people to develop quickly and throw out inefficient ways to survive. From this point of view, globalization might be worse for our progress as species; USA vs China competition might be a needed conflict to progress in any meaningful way.

Seeing unknown/strange things in the sky above a secret military test facility or air force base really doesn't seem that baffling or strange to me.

> There are so, so many atmospheric phenomenon that can produce 'ufos'.

Neil Degrasse Tyson commented on this by saying that the difference between a layperson seeing a UFO and an astronomer (or whatever) is that the latter knows what strange natural phenomenon they're looking at (or at least can conceive that its natural based on other similar things that they do know) while the layperson doesn't and therefore jumps to conclusions that someone who spends a lot of time looking at the sky wouldn't.