Reusing a response I made to a previous UFO story, on a mailing list, lightly edited because the same logic still applies.

There's one core truth that you need to understand, and then all the talk of UFOs, videos, and the reactions to them make sense.

The US military has secret aircraft. Other militaries also have secret aircraft. These are kept in reserve for high-stakes operations. For example, in 2011, a previously-unseen model of stealth helicopter crashed in the middle of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. Rumor is that the Chinese military got to inspect the wreckage; if true, this would be a pretty major fuckup, since it would enable them to plan around its capabilities, to design radars to detect it, and to attribute any operations using it to the United States.

The performance characteristics of secret military aircraft are military secrets. They are highly prototypical military secrets. That means the secrecy radiates a few conceptual steps outward: our own country's aircraft are secret, what we know about other countries' aircraft is secret, what we know that other countries know about our aircraft is secret, and so on. Deliberate disinformation is expec... (read more)

I am willing to publicly bet you at 99% odds that, within the next 10 years, there will be no conclusive proof that we have been visited by craft of intelligent, nonhuman origin. I am willing to bet according to the Kelly Criterion, which means I am willing to bet a significant fraction of my total net worth.

[Edit: This gets really complicated really fast. I mean that I'm willing to publicly bet at 99% implied odds on my side, after various costs and risks are factored in. The various costs and risks far outweigh my <1% chance of losing the bet for mundane reasons. A counterparty to this bet would need confidence in a UFO existence far lower than 99% for a bet to make sense.]

It's worth noting that most of the major news orgs passed on this story despite being offered the opportunity to cover it. We don't know why they did it yet, but given that various orgs have covered the Snowden documents and other whistleblowers that the government very much didn't like, my guess is they did it for reasons related to the quality of the story rather than any conversations with government officials who encouraged them not to cover it.

My priors against us having discovered alien tech are very high, though not literally infinite.

But I still don't have a clear story for exactly what's going on. Most of the videos of UFOs look pretty similar: silvery orbs flying around at very high speed. I haven't yet heard an explanation of how this could be explained by camera artefacts, weather phenomena, or anything else.

Other videos like this one released by the Navy show non-spherical objects that even rotate while moving. I struggle to think of what could be causing this.

I'm too lazy to look into it right now, but at the very least there's a scientific mystery here. Whether or not the explanation turns out to be interesting remains to be seen. There seems to be a big stigma again... (read more)

Pieces of vehicles given general stealthy attitude imply capped technology. With sufficiently robust alien psychology, this could mean a Dune regime, in which case aliens would need to go out of hiding or less deniably start derailing human AGI projects. Alternatively, there is a non-corrigible anti-foom alien pivotal process AGI watchdog that keeps the tech below some level, which could itself be superintelligent but specialized for this bounded task instead of doing world optimization. In this case the pieces of vehicles are from the aliens in its care, not indicative of its tech level but indicative of its tech-capping influence, and its interventions against human AGI projects could be much more subtle.

Given that all data on this so far is nonsense, and there is almost certainly nothing we can usefully do about it if true, the pragmatic stance is to ignore until the data improves much further.

I register my (easy) prediction that this is a complete nonsense and there would be nothing that is a central example of an "alien" or an "alien tech". My very charitable odds are 1000:1 against. I do not think it is a complete hoax, the whistleblower probably believes what he says.

Independent reporting seems to put the number of captures vehicles to at least 12.

I'm actually really glad you posted this here, because I think it's worth trying to hash out some of the specifics, and there are a couple things that make this stand out to me:

1. Grusch spent a long time going through proper channels first, including the ICIG and congress. The ICIG deemed his report credible and urgent (same as for Alex Vindman's back in 2019). He testified to congress under oath, providing hundreds of pages worth of transcribed classified information.
2. The reporters on the story are not some cranked out whack jobs. Both of them were the reporters on the initial 2017 NYT article that got the ball rolling on all the latest UFO/UAP disclosures over the past 5-6 years.
3. At least one senior ex-official (Christopher Mellon) is all but corroborating his claims.

I agree that the priors against this all being true are very high. 

That said, the priors against this all being untrue seem at least a little bit lower considering the above.

Would love to hear others thoughts on these standout bits though. Especially #1. To my knowledge no prior claims of this sort have ever been scrutinized like that (let alone been called credible and urgent or been given hours before congressional intelligence committees). I think that does count for something, no?

There's an interview with David Grusch on NewsNation. 

I have not read this post, and I have not looked into whatever the report is, but I'm willing to take a 100:1 bet that there is no such non-human originating craft (by which I mean anything actively designed by a technological species — I do not mean that no simple biological matter of any kind could not have arrived on this planet via some natural process like an asteroid), operationalized to there being no Metaculus community forecast (or Manifold market with a sensible operationalization and reasonable number of players) that assigns over 50% probabilit... (read more)

Looks like someone already made a market for it:

https://manifold.markets/DanMan314/will-claims-of-a-retrieved-craft-of

Haven't whistleblowers talking about how the government has alien spaceships always been a thing?

If crafts are real, it would be an argument for inter-dimensional travel rather interstellar, because it could be cheaper and require less time and energy. 

Maybe there is a way to relatively cheaply move between Everettian branches and hobbyists in the 22 century and routinely doing this as often as we use recreational small airplanes.  

Presumably humanoid bodies inside the crafts is argument for inter-Everettian travel, as some branches can split from our branch like 100K years ago and are very similar to our, except having develop technologies earlier. 

But the question is why we are not colonized by inter-dimensional paperclipper AI?

This being actual aliens is highly unlikely for the usual reasons. The best modeling suggests aliens are at least hundreds of millions of light-years away, since otherwise there would be sufficiently many of them in the sky that some of them would choose not to hide. Moreover if any did visit Earth with the intention of hiding, they would probably have more advanced technology than this, and would be better at hiding.

Given that I basically never hear about the government of any other country meddling with aliens, at this point I am inclined to consider UFO sighthings a culture-bound illness of the US (I can't find the source now, but I'm pretty sure that according to a poll from several years ago, something like 5% of Americans claimed to have personally seen UFOs at least once in their lifetime).

I mean, the priors on sci-fi aliens visiting us is low enough. The priors on aliens visiting just the US should be ridiculously low.

Around 1% of the US population has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I would guess that there are 5 million+ people currently or formerly employed by the US military or intelligence services. Of those, maybe 1% are highly ranked enough that they could testify in Congress about the government hiding UFOs.

All it takes is one of those 50 people getting delusions about UFOs to generate a headline like this. It would actually be weird if something like this doesn't happen every few decades.