In his latest blog, Robin Hanson writes
There have been over 100K UFO sightings reported worldwide since 1940. Roughly 5% or so are “strong” events, which seem rather hard to explain due to either many witnesses, especially reliable witnesses, physical evidence, or other factors.
Yet, I am not aware of a single UFO encounter that can't be explained by one of:
- Unreliable eyewitnesses
- Things that go away when we get better cameras
Importantly, Hanson's post did not include a link to the "Wikipedia of UFO encounters" listing all 100k UFO sightings and which 5000 he considered most credible.
Where is that Wikipedia?
For whatever it's worth: Jacques Vallée highlighted how the baffling & seemingly nonsensical nature of these encounters is one of the few constants. One I recall (off the top of my head — I was told this one, I have no idea how to offer references here) was a report of some ship landing in a farmer's field and then perfectly normal-looking people coming out to offer the baffled farmer… pancakes. Just pancakes. Upon close inspection it became clear that they were perfectly normal pancakes with the single exception of having absolutely no salt.
There are other oddities like MLB encounters where the MLBs were driving absolutely brand-new cars from half a century prior. If these are to be taken at face-value, one has to wonder what kind of being goes through the effort of looking human and trying to blend in but constructs a car that's several decades out of style and basically cannot be acquired that new anymore. It smacks of the way Rowling's wizards are strangely clueless about how to pass as muggles.
Vallée's point, though, was that these phenomena seem to adapt to what's expected of them, but always with a twist. It's almost as though they're trying to keep us off-balance as to what they are, confirming our suspicions whatever they may be 90% of the way and then tossing in something bizarre that doesn't fit the picture at all.
A number of people have noticed the strange similarity to DMT entities, and to legends of faeries.
Of course, I'm sure there's nothing to these. Just statistical anomalies plus quirks of human cognition. That seems to clearly explain 90% of the phenomena. There's just this little bit off to the side that we haven't quite figured out how it fits…