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?
That's actually just false, just FYI. By reports, fairly often they show up specifically as though they're trying to be seen.
There's also a whole set of incidences where UFOs showed up to fuck with nuclear machinery, demonstrating that (a) they knew exactly where the "hidden" bases were and (b) they could control the launch process better than the people at the control panels. Understandably, this isn't something that gets advertised very much and can be explained away. It's pretty important to make such incidences as plausibly deniable as possible given the game theory of MAD.
But in terms of "better sensors make the UFOs seem to vanish", that's just flat-out false. That's not what the reports suggest basically at all.