Having a look at your link, I see you give 3% to the probability that serious politicians would propose the UAP disclosure act if NHI did actually exist. I'm really puzzled by this. Could you explain why, in a world where NHI exists, you wouldn't expect politicians to pass a law disclosing information about it at some point? Do you expect that they would keep it a secret indefinitely or is it something else?
Since a "UAP disclosure act" type law is pretty specific. Each detail I'd include in what that means would make it less likely in both worlds, which is why it's pretty low in both (probably not low enough tbh). Most of these details "cancel out" due to being equally unlikely in both worlds. The relevant details are things I expect to correlate with each other (mostly can be packed into a "politicians are taking UAPs seriously" bit, which I do take the act to be strong evidence of).
I do think you were right about me handwaving the evidence to some extent, and after a bit more thinking I think it'd be more fair to conceptualize the evidence here as "politicians are taking UAPs seriously", and came up with these very very rough numbers for that. Note that while this evidence is stronger, my prior for "Aliens with visible UAPs" is much lower because I find that a priori pretty implausible for aliens with interstellar tech (and again, the numbers here are meant to be suggestive, and are not refined to the point where they accurately depict my intuitions).
[And I'd strongly encourage you to share a bayescalc.io link suggestive of your own priors and likelihoods, and including all the things you consider as significant evidence! Making discussions like this more concrete was one of my major motivations in designing the site.]
The examples you give sound to me like curiosity-stoppers and I don't find them convincing.
They're meant to gesture at the breadth of Something Else (and I was aware that you had addressed many of these, it doesn't change that this is the competing hypothesis). I'll be curious to see what sort of stuff does come out due to this law! But I strongly expect it to be pretty uncompelling. If I'm wrong about that, I'll update more of course (though probably only to the point of keeping this possibility "in the back of my mind" with this level of evidence).
TL;DR: A recently proposed (7/13/2023) bipartisan amendment to the NDAA for 2024, with senate majority leader Chuck Schumer as its first sponsor and with the aim of declassifying documents related to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). It explicitly defines UAPs as pertaining to objects exhibiting "performance characteristics and properties not previously known to be achievable based upon commonly accepted physical principles" such as, among other things, "instantaneous acceleration absent apparent inertia", "transmedium travel" and "positive lift contrary to known aerodynamic principles". It takes care to separate these from "temporarily non-attributed objects" with prosaic explanations. The terms "Non-human intelligence" and "Technologies of unknown origin" are explicitly defined and encountered multiple times throughout the text. The amendment also non-dismissively mentions "reverse engineering of technologies of unknown origins" and "examination of biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence". It declares that "Legislation is necessary because credible evidence and testimony indicates that Federal Government unidentified anomalous phenomena records exist that have not been declassified".
It is surprising to me that the community has not noticed / discussed the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023, given how much discussion was generated by UFO Betting: Put Up or Shut Up (enough for Eliezer to indicate willingness to bet 150k yesterday) and Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin. I think that anyone that is dismissing the topic out of hand should have a good look at this document. While I do not claim that it provides direct proof of phenomena necessitating an "ontological crisis", I believe that it can be a source of major updates. I also strongly believe that this is the point where a serious discussion must be had about this topic by the community, given the accumulating evidence of *something* going on, together with the potential ramifications of an "ontologically shocking" outcome. The situation at this point displays parallels with the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, in that the topic is not seriously covered by mainstream media yet, despite the available evidence pointing towards some (at least) "interesting" outcomes.
The Document
The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023 is an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2024, which was proposed a week ago (7/13/2023) by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, together with the Republican senator Mike Rounds. The other cosponsors are Marco Rubio (Republican), Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat), Todd Young (Republican) and Martin Heinrich (Democrat). Given the bipartisan sponsorship of the bill and the position of Schumer in the Senate, it is relatively safe to assume that the amendment will become law.
The first thing to notice is the change of meaning for the acronym UAP, from Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, a term which is explicitly defined in the document. This is a sign of things to come, as the text takes care to specify that its contents refer exclusively to non-prosaic phenomena.
At a high level, this amendment aims to declassify and publicly release records related to UAPs. It requires the creation of a collection of UAP records at the National Archives and Records Administration, as well as the public disclosure of all such records that are not deemed potentially harmful to national security by a Review Board appointed by the President with the approval of the Senate. As discussed in a recent Reuters article, the amendment "is modeled after a 1992 U.S. law spelling out the handling of records related to the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy".
Definitions
A good starting point is to note the definition of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena as given in Section 3 (21) of the document:
The authors of the amendment make sure to separate "physics-defying" phenomena from the prosaic "attributed" and "temporarily non-attributed" objects. The definitions for both of these are given in sections 3 (14) and 3 (19):
(Emphasis mine)
Notice the mention of non-human intelligence. The term is also explicitly defined in the text and we will get back to it shortly.
In short, the authors of the amendment explicitly separate what they call UAPs from any phenomenon which can be explained away as human technology based on the currently known laws of physics. They also make sure not to include phenomena that remain unexplained due to lack of data. My reading of these definitions is that some phenomenon is characterized as an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon only when the available data explicitly rules out any other potential explanation involving "current physics". While I am unsure if say a Chinese or Russian drone operating on some kind of unknown antigravity device would be considered a UAP, the fact that the term "non-human intelligence" is encountered multiple times in the text seems to indicate that the authors have a different origin in mind for these unexplained phenomena.
The separation between UAPs and prosaic phenomena is strengthened by the definition of the term "UAP record" in section 3 (22):
(Emphasis mine)
Again, this definition explicitly excludes "temporarily non-attributed objects" from the records. Additionally, it shows that the amendment refers to records that may have been created as far back as during WW2, given the mentions of the Manhattan Project and the progenitor of the CIA. This is potentially significant, as it may indicate that the sponsors of this amendment believe that records of objects behaving in the "physics-defying" ways described in the UAP definition can be found as far back as the 1940s. This would clash with a potential explanation of UAPs as advanced technological objects from a foreign country. Finally, the definition also mentions the private sector, the role of which will be discussed soon.
The term "non-human intelligence" is also mentioned once again. Its own definition is given in section 3 (12):
Withholding any comment for now, other definitions that are just as eye-catching include:
The inclusion of all these terms, and especially the parts on reverse engineering programs and on the examination of biological evidence of non-human intelligence, indicates that the authors of the amendment give credence to the claims of whistleblowers such as David Grusch, as mentioned in Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin. This tracks with recent statements by Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio which were reported in The Hill, namely that
Intriguing Parts and Discussion
The entirety of section 2 is interesting, so I include it here in full. I have emphasized the parts that I consider as most important.
Point 4 is arguably the most interesting part of this section, given the previously stated definition of UAPs. According to this part of the text, there is credible evidence and testimony that the US Federal Government has in its possession records showing objects behaving in ways that cannot be explained by "commonly accepted" physical principles. Again, since UAPs do not include "temporarily non-attributed objects", we should expect the existence of classified records which show objects displaying instantaneous acceleration without apparent inertia, transmedium travel, positive lift contrary to known aerodynamic principles etc. By definition, these records should be clear / descriptive enough and should provide adequate data to rule out conventional explanations.
Another curious part of section 2 is paragraph (7). What are the urgent national security concerns which necessitate open scientific and technological research and development using knowledge related to UAPs?
One way to look at it would be again to assume that UAPs are technological objects from the US's foreign adversaries. Seen in this light, this paragraph would essentially call for the open sourcing of information on foreign drones / craft in the hopes that the mainstream scientific community will be able to understand the physical principles on which they operate and thus nullify the advantage. While this sounds at least slightly reasonable at first glance, on second thought it makes way less sense. First, assuming that these objects belong to some adversary of the US (otherwise it wouldn't make sense to publicize any information about them) we are left with the conclusion that one of the world's major powers has technology which should guarantee absolute air superiority. The question then becomes, why isn't this technology being used today, before the US can catch up? Russia would benefit from using it in Ukraine and China could use it to take over Taiwan. Also, why would the US publicly admit that they do not have such technology? Even if this admission was false with the purpose of furthering some unknown goal, there should be some more subtle and believable way of going about it.
Another option is to reject the validity of anything said in paragraph (7). The whole document may be part of some elaborate psychological operation with unknown goals and thus we cannot trust anything written in it. This is definitely a valid possibility. However, it still begs the question why would anyone go to such lengths to talk about reverse engineering of exotic and potentially non-human technologies, recovery of biological evidence of non-human intelligence and other extraordinary stuff. Wouldn't it be possible to achieve the same goals using some other, more subtle means, with less potential to destroy faith in the democratic institutions of the US? Providing (fabricated) evidence of a seemingly decades-long coverup of UAPs, perpetrated by some shadowy part of the US government, which supposedly operated practically without oversight for close to half a century would be akin to throwing kerosene on the fire of currently existing conspiracy theories. Given such a precedent, many other conspiracy theories start to become much more believable. If this whole situation is indeed a psy-op, it begs the question of what could be so important so as to be worth such a sacrifice?
The third non-weird explanation for the existence of this document would be that the politicians have been misled, purposefully or not, by the available evidence and by the aforementioned whistleblowers. This is the prosaic explanation that I would consider most likely if I had to choose one. Still, this raises a couple of issues. First, these are high-ranking politicians who are potentially putting their career in jeopardy by giving credence to claims that are highly socially unacceptable and which leave them open to low-effort political attacks. I would expect that they would take extreme care to verify that the evidence they have seen is strong enough such that the probability of being wrong tends to zero. Second, both Schumer and Rubio are in the Gang of Eight, which means that they should be privy to highly sensitive intelligence information. This fact both adds more weight to their sponsorship of the UAP Disclosure Act and also means that they should have access to enough high quality evidence to check the claims of whistleblowers, or at least parts of them, until they are sufficiently convinced of their veracity. As a counterpoint to this, from a recent opinion piece on The Hill:
These statements seem to indicate that they lack the means to fully check the claims of the whistleblowers, but that the evidence provided is judged to be substantial enough to warrant the creation of the UAP Disclosure Act. Taking these statements together with everything mentioned in section 2, the update-worthy inference would be to go from "seemingly credible whistleblower says incredibly weird things and claims to be taken seriously by congress" to "congress takes whistleblower information seriously enough to propose new law at the weirdness level of the UAP Disclosure Act". The new question that arises is "why now?".
To try to infer an answer to this, let us return to the actual contents of the document. Coming back to section 2 (7), there is another possible way to read this part, which is more in line with the recent claims from whistleblowers. Specifically, Grusch mentioned that both the US and other foreign governments have located and retrieved crashed crafts related to UAPs. According to The Debrief article:
If we assume that Congress takes these claims seriously, then this would mean that such reverse engineering programs in the US were unsuccessful. The "avoiding or mitigating potential technological surprise" part could provide a potential justification for why this whole thing is happening now: The US has reason to believe that corresponding programs in one or more countries have made more progress or may be closing in on some breakthrough and it is thus seeking to nullify their advantage. It aims to achieve this by publicizing the topic along with the knowledge related to these technologies with the hope that "mainstream" scientists will manage to publicly reverse engineer said technologies and thus negate any advantage foreign adversaries may have. This theory should have the following observable result: The US should be itching to publicize such information as quickly as possible, with the constraint of not causing public panic. I am not sure if this can actually be said about the current situation.
Putting this aside for now, some interesting parts also exist in section 4, which discusses what documents to collect along with other administrative stuff:
(This section includes more parts that I have omitted. Emphasis mine)
Again, the targeted records should relate to UAPs, technologies of unknown origin and non-human intelligence. I think it is safe to assume that this signifies that the sponsors of this amendment have at least some evidence pointing to the existence of such records.
Section 5 describes the collection and review process. It essentially requires all government offices to look for records of UAPs, to find all records classified or not that fit the description according to some identification aid and to send them to a Review Board (to be defined in a bit) and to the Archivist of the United States. This will lead to the creation of a collection of UAP records with a declassified and a classified part. As mentioned in section 5 (E) in page 27:
Section 6 gives exact definitions for when the release of a UAP record can be postponed. It includes standard reasons such as hurting current intelligence activities or damaging national security in general. I am very curious about what UAP records they will actually be able to release given that Section 6 gives quite broad reasons for retaining the classified status of said records.
Sections 7 and 8 discuss the Review Board:
The most striking parts of these two sections can be found in the required qualifications for the members of the Board:
The document bars from participating in the Review Board any person who may have taken part in legacy programs related to the reverse-engineering of technologies of unknown origin and to the examination of biological evidence of non-human intelligence. This is the first time that the term "Legacy Program" shows up in the main text after being defined in section 3. Again, this rule makes sense given the general gist of the document, but it makes one wonder how much evidence do the sponsors of the amendment have and to what extent does it actually support the existence of such legacy programs. I think it is safe to assume that they have whistleblower testimony, and if we take Rubio at his word, we are talking about multiple whistleblowers with high clearances. The question then becomes whether they have evidence apart from whistleblower testimony, such as video / pictures, materials or documents corroborating what they have heard from the whistleblowers. Going back to section 2 (4), we have that
This paragraph indicates that they may indeed have evidence, separate from whistleblower testimony, when it comes specifically to the existence of UAP records. I expect that this evidence is quite strong, given previously known facts about UAP sightings. For example, in the 2021 Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Report indicates that
Note that the term UAP in the 2021 report is used differently since it relates to aerial phenomena only, and, at that moment in time, it also included "temporarily non-attributed objects". The change in terminology between the two reports is interesting in itself.
Returning to the question of evidence of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the 2021 report indicates that a large number of sightings involved multiple sensors, which makes it more likely that the observed object corresponded to some physical thing and not just to malfunction or sensor artifacts. In general, I believe it is highly likely that the credible evidence of UAPs mentioned in section 2 paragraph 4 includes clear footage of objects displaying the "physics-defying" characteristics described in the UAP definition, probably corroborated by data from multiple sensors.
What about evidence for recovered technologies or for recovered remains of non-human intelligence though?
Some indications towards an answer can be found in section 10, provided here in full:
First of all, let me note the sheer weirdness of finding a section with such a title in an official document that is soon to be law. Putting this aside, the first paragraph seems to indicate that the sponsors of the amendment have reason to believe that private entities may hold material related to UAP. This is a staple of UFO lore, as it is argued that outsourcing the examination of such material to private companies will exempt all documents produced during such efforts from Freedom of Information Act declassification requests. However, the second paragraph seems to indicate that the evidence for the existence of such private efforts is not that strong. I am unsure whether the emphasized sentence only refers to private efforts or to the existence of such material in general.
Nevertheless, I find it puzzling why this amendment would even mention non-human intelligence in the first place. From what I know, before Grusch came out, the issue was mostly focused on UAPs as unexplained aerial phenomena with the more recent inclusion of transmedium vehicles. The amendment could just as easily be focused only on records of UAPs, without requiring any reference to non-human intelligence or legacy programs or any other of the more weird stuff. The sponsors could have played it safe without seemingly going off the deep end of the more "conspiratorial" parts of this phenomenon. Personally, this is the most important question at the moment: "What kind of evidence have they seen that makes them certain enough to look for legacy programs, technologies of unknown origin and connections to non-human intelligence?"
Conclusion
Why take the UAP topic seriously at this point:
There are also indications that the topic will become more mainstream in the following months / years. There is already a public hearing scheduled for the 26th of July, by the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, where David Grusch will be testifying, together with Ryan Graves and David Fravor. Additionally, a Senate hearing on the topic seems to also be in the works. And, of course, the declassification of UAP documents sometime next year, after the UAP Disclosure Act becomes law, should also generate some media attention, depending on the contents of the declassified material.
Putting all of the above together, I strongly believe that the UAP topic should not be discounted without careful consideration. It also seems that the potential for "ontologically shocking" outcomes should now seriously be taken into account.
I look forward to more discussion on the topic by the community.