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 https://gizmodo.com/drake-equation-update-fermi-paradox-intelligent-life-1851503974
+== Is humanity alone in the Universe? What scientists really think. ==
+Are scientists speculating, or is there a scientific consensus here?
+Peter Vickers, Henry Taylor, and Sean McMahon, The Conversation – Jan 15, 2025 7:44 AM
+News stories about the likely existence of extraterrestrial life, and our chances of detecting it, tend to be positive. We are often told that we might discover it any time now. Finding life beyond Earth is “only a matter of time,” we were told in September 2023. “We are close” was a headline from September 2024.
+It’s easy to see why. Headlines such as “We’re probably not close” or “Nobody knows” aren’t very clickable. But what does the relevant community of experts actually think when considered as a whole? Are optimistic predictions common or rare? Is there even a consensus? In our new paper, published in Nature Astronomy, we’ve found out.
+During February to June 2024, we carried out four surveys regarding the likely existence of basic, complex, and intelligent extraterrestrial life. We sent emails to astrobiologists (scientists who study extraterrestrial life), as well as to scientists in other areas, including biologists and physicists.
+In total, 521 astrobiologists responded, and we received 534 non-astrobiologist responses. The results reveal that 86.6 percent of the surveyed astrobiologists responded either “agree” or “strongly agree” that it’s likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.
+Less than 2 percent disagreed, with 12 percent staying neutral. So, based on this, we might say that there’s a solid consensus that extraterrestrial life, of some form, exists somewhere out there.
+https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/is-humanity-alone-in-the-universe-what-scientists-really-think/
+== Decide Now; We Won’t Know Much More Later Re UFOs ==
+Robin Hanson - Aug 20, 2025
+By now humanity has seen hundreds of thousands of UFO reports, accumulated over more than eight decades. What have we learned about aliens from them? I suggest that we think about this as a four stage learning and analysis process. All four stages can be done at all times, and we do better over time by improving all of them.
+First, we combine the evidence of specific reports, and our cosmological priors, to estimate a chance that each report so far report was caused by an encounter with a strange advanced civilization (wherever from), i.e., real “aliens”, as opposed to human mistakes, illusions, hoaxes, or foreign mischief. This estimation is done jointly, and produces a joint distribution over these chances.
+Second, we define interesting categories of reports (e.g. saucer shaped, had big acceleration, reported by pilot) and then aggregate those report chance estimates across reports into the chances per category that any report in that category was from a real alien. Including a total chance for the total category of all reports. (And maybe also an expected count of alien encounters per category.) Now we have a total chance of any alien encounters, plus a joint distribution over the interesting categories of alien encounter events, conditional on any of them being alien encounters. E.g., most alien encounters tend to be sauce-shaped and to do a big acceleration.
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/decide-now-we-wont-know-much-more
+== Where Are the Aliens? New Study Suggests They’re Stuck Like Us ==
+An astrophysicist has proposed an intriguing explanation for why humanity has never made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.
+Ellyn Lapointe - October 15, 2025
+In 1950, famed astrophysicist Enrico Fermi posed a profound question during a casual lunch with colleagues: Where is everybody? In other words, if there’s an extremely high probability that advanced alien civilizations exist somewhere, why haven’t we found evidence of them?
+That’s how the story goes, at least. But regardless of the circumstances surrounding its utterance, that question—known today as the Fermi paradox—has captured the minds of researchers ever since. In a new paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed, astrophysicist Robin Cordet proposes “radical mundanity” as one possible explanation.
+Cordet, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, suggests the galaxy is home to a modest number of alien civilizations that aren’t that much more advanced than our own. Because their technology is similarly limited, neither civilization can detect the other.
+“The idea is that they’re more advanced, but not much more advanced. It’s like having an iPhone 42 rather than an iPhone 17,” Corbet told The Guardian. “This feels more possible, more natural, because it’s not proposing anything very extreme.”
+https://gizmodo.com/where-are-the-aliens-new-study-suggests-theyre-stuck-like-us-2000672801
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 https://gizmodo.com/these-states-have-the-most-ufo-sightings-2000493512
+== What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: UFO Disinformation ==
+The truth, it seems, is not out there.
+Stephan Johnson - June 10, 2025
+Disinformation has a tendency to metastasize. Lies mutate with each retelling until the final product looks nothing like the original source. This phenomenon is particularly striking in the world of UFOs, where decades of institutional secrecy have created fertile ground for speculation to flourish.
+Late last week, The Wall Street Journal published a report revealing how various governmental and military agencies have been spreading disinformation about UFOs since at least the 1950s. Based on research conducted by the congressionally mandated All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) that was never made public, the WSJ report sheds light on (or explains away) UFO events as varied as Area 51, the Malmstrom nuclear missile incident, and the Air Force's "Yankee Blue" program—three events that have shaped public opinion on UFOs for decades, and, according to the report, were themselves shaped by official disinformation. If this report is accurate, much of what people believe about UFOs is wrong because of deliberate lies fed to us by our government.
+https://lifehacker.com/entertainment/what-people-are-getting-wrong-this-week-ufo-disinformation
+===== Scotland 1990 =====
+== The Mystery Behind the Best UFO Picture Ever Seen ==
+Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday February 11, 2025 11:00PM
+In August 1990, two hikers in Scotland captured photographs of a mysterious diamond-shaped aircraft accompanied by a Harrier jet, but the images and story were suppressed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for decades. Was it a prank, a hoax, an optical illusion or something else entirely? The Guardian's Daniel Lavelle reports on "what really happened in Calvine." Here's an excerpt:
+<blockquote>
+On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre craft shot away vertically and disappeared.
+Craig Lindsay was a press officer at the RAF base in Pitreavie Castle in Dunfermline, 50 miles away, when the Daily Record got in touch a few days later. The hikers, who worked as chefs at Fisher's Hotel in Pitlochry, had sent six photos of the diamond to the newspaper and told their story. The Record's picture editor, Andy Allen, sent Lindsay the best of the bunch. Lindsay had never seen such a clear photograph of a supposed UFO, so he forwarded the picture to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which told him to ask the Record to send the other five photographs and their negatives. The MoD also instructed him to phone the hikers, which he did. One of them told Lindsay the whole story: the diamond, the jet, how it levitated eerily with no sound and accelerated with no obvious propellant. The MoD told Lindsay to leave the case with them. He pushed the diamond to the back of his mind.
+</blockquote>
+https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/02/12/0040242/the-mystery-behind-the-best-ufo-picture-ever-seen
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 https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/11/14/0543247/experts-testify-us-is-running-secret-uap-programs
+==  Witnesses Tell Congress of UFO Sightings ==
+Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @12:00AM
+A U.S. congressional hearing today on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) featured testimony from military veterans and witnesses describing encounters with mysterious craft, including glowing red squares, tic-tac-shaped objects emerging from the ocean, and videos of missiles striking unidentified orbs. While NASA maintains there's no evidence of extraterrestrial life, lawmakers stressed the need for transparency, whistleblower protections, and further investigation.
+There were four witnesses at today's hearing:
+Jeffrey Nuccetelli: U.S. Air Force veteran and self-described UAP witness who investigated the reported "red square" sighting above Vandenberg Air Force Base.
+George Knapp: Award-winning journalist and chief reporter at KLAS-TV, known for his decades of UFO coverage and multiple Peabody Awards.
+Alexandro Wiggins: Navy veteran of 23 years who reported witnessing a "Tic Tac" UAP aboard the USS Jackson in 2023 and noted his father's work at Area 51.
+Dylan Borland: Air Force veteran and UAP witness with little public information or media exposure available.
+"The public senses that it's real and the people in authority dismiss them," said Knapp, arguing that the public can handle the truth. One of the clips he showed lawmakers was of a drone operator tracking a glowing orb off the coast of Yemen before a missile struck the object. "That's a Hellfire missile smacking into that UFO and just bouncing right off," he said. "What the hell is that?" Knapp said the clip is not unique, claiming multiple video servers with similar UAP footage are being kept from Congress. Borland testified: "This craft interfered with my telephone, did not have any sound and the material it was made of appeared fluid or dynamic."
+https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/2336255/witnesses-tell-congress-of-ufo-sightings
+====== Database ======
+== The National UFO Reporting Center Online Database ==
+The NUFORC Databank is the largest independently collected set of UFO / UAP sighting reports available on the internet.   For 25 years, it has been the go-to resource for researchers and the general public interested in following the most recent first hand UFO witness accounts, or delving into a deep archive of historical reports.   The reports are freely available to the public to browse through the indexes below.   For any other use, including commercial use, please refer to our Terms of Service at the bottom of the page.
+NUFORC staff review each report, and grade them as follows:
+  *     TIER 1: The most dramatic sightings – strange structured craft or highly anomalous phenomena seen at close distance.  Indicated by a bright yellow Open! Link.
+  *     TIER 2: Objects exhibiting unusual characteristics such as incredible speed, non-inertial turns, unexplainable propulsion, etc. Indicated by a faded yellow Open link.
+  *     TIER 3: Other reports that cannot be easily explained.
+  *    TIER 4: Reports we feel are explainable by human or natural phenomenon. Explanations are rated as Possible (indicated by ?), Probable or Certain.
+Note: Reports received prior to March 2023 have not yet been graded.
+https://nuforc.org/databank/
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 https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/17/0020242/new-pentagon-report-on-ufos-hundreds-of-new-incidents-no-evidence-of-aliens
+== How False UFO Stories Were Created - Sometimes Deliberately - by the US Military ==
+Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday June 08, 2025 04:34AM
+Last year's Pentagon report reviewing UFO reports "left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs," reports the Wall Street Journal.
+"The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation."
+<blockquote>
+The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology. But the colonel was on a mission — of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.
+</blockquote>
+That's not the only example. The Journal spoke to Robert Salas, now 84, who in 1967 was a 26-year-old Air Force captain "sitting in a walk-in closet-sized bunker, manning the controls of 10 nuclear missiles in Montana." Suddenly all 10 missiles were disabled after reports of "a glowing reddish-orange oval was hovering over the front gate... The next morning a helicopter was waiting to take Salas back to base. Once there he was ordered: Never discuss the incident."
+https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/08/0520236/how-false-ufo-stories-were-created---sometimes-deliberately---by-the-us-military
+== Pentagon Has Been Pushing Americans to Believe in UFOs for Decades, New Report Finds ==
+The government wants you to believe.
+Lucas Ropek - June 11, 2025
+UFOs have been back in the news a lot lately, and it may be the case that the government wants it that way. Last week, the Wall Street Journal published the first of a two-part series that probes the ways in which the Defense Department has been responsible for creating and fostering the UFO mythology in America.
+The article shows that the government has, at various points over the years, purposefully sown disinformation about UFOs, in an effort to make Americans believe in little green men. This news comes as the result of an internal investigation by Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was specifically set up within the Pentagon to investigate UFO sightings. Kirkpatrick, who spoke with the Journal, says he’s found evidence that the government “fabricated evidence of alien technology” in an effort to distract from real weapons programs being carried out by the government in secret.
+The Journal frames its findings as a “stunning new twist in the story of America’s cultural obsession with UFOs” but, while the story’s specific anecdotes are certainly new and quite interesting, its broader findings are not, nor are they particularly stunning. Instead, they parrot what many critics of the UFO narrative have long said: that the UFO mythos grew out of a disinformation campaign created by shadowy defense officials to obscure more terrestrial secrets about America’s national security community.
+https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-has-been-pushing-americans-to-believe-in-ufos-for-decades-new-report-finds-2000614615
+==  Shocking radar footage shows Hellfire missile fired by US military bounce off UFO over ocean ==
+Shane Galvin - Sep. 9, 2025 / Updated Sep. 10, 2025, 6:57 a.m. ET
+The House Committee on Restoring Public Trust unveiled a shocking new video that shows a hulking US military weapon bounce off a UFO as it flew over the ocean.
+The wild footage shared by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) during the disclosure hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday shows a Hellfire missile fired by a US military drone striking a glowing orb that flew off the coast of Yemen.
+The speeding object was paced by a 100-pound Hellfire air-to-ground round fired by an MQ-9 drone, which made contact and bounced right off, as shown in the radar footage from October 30, 2024.
+The footage came from a separate MQ-9 drone, which recorded the orb spinning after the missile made contact and continuing on its way, UFO expert George Knapp said at the hearing.
+“There’s a server where there’s a whole bank of these kinds of videos that Congress has not been allowed to see — that the public has not been allowed to see,” Knapp said at the hearing.
+https://nypost.com/2025/09/09/us-news/shocking-radar-footage-shows-hellfire-missile-fired-by-us-military-directly-hit-ufo-over-ocean/
+== Newly Released Video Shows U.S. Reaper Drone Shooting at ‘UFO’ ==
+A grainy new video provides fresh fodder for America's UFO enthusiasts.
+Lucas Ropek - September 11, 2025
+A recent Congressional hearing revealed video of a Hellfire missile fired by a Reaper drone “bouncing off” an unidentified flying object, which has onlookers—Congress included—scratching their heads. The hearing took place in a House Oversight subcommittee meeting on UFO transparency that was partially hosted by MAGA congresswoman and state-sanctioned UFO investigator Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
+The video sure is, uh, something. As Fox News melodramatically puts it:
+<blockquote>
+    A House hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) stunned lawmakers when video evidence showed a U.S. drone firing a Hellfire missile at an orb off Yemen—only for the object to remain intact and keep moving, raising urgent questions about technology beyond known military capabilities.
+</blockquote>
+The video was first shared publicly by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Missouri), who noted that it was “taken [on] October 30 of 2024″ and characterized it as an “MQ-9 drone tracking an orb or this object off the coast of Yemen.” Burlison said the footage is “presented as received from a whistleblower. Independent review is ongoing.”
+https://gizmodo.com/newly-released-video-shows-u-s-reaper-drone-shooting-at-ufo-2000657322
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 https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/01/nasa_ufo_panel/
+====== National Archives ======
+== National Archives Releases UAP Records ==
+Press Release - Thursday, April 24, 2025
+Washington, DC
+The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today released new records related to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). These records were transferred to the National Archives from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in accordance with sections 1841–1843 of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 118-31). They are now part of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Collection at the National Archives.
+The release of these UAP records is part of the National Archives’ priority to maximize transparency, ensuring that this information is made available to the American people. NARA will continue to add UAP records to the Collection and make them available online through the National Archives Catalog on an ongoing, rolling basis as they are transferred from federal agencies.
+https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2025/nr25-07
 ====== Report ======