Surging Belief in Alien Visitors Is Becoming a Serious Problem for Our Society

The underlying paper is really odd. It says nothing good about King's College London or the International Astronomical Union that they publish stuff like this.

The author Tony Milligan doesn't do any research, the paper is really just a blog post arguing that the solution to belief in aliens is ... <drumroll> ... for scientists to research the claims! The author even invents an acronym for his new idea: the Scientific Research Program (SRP). He then helpfully outlines that SRPs should be built on "robust argument structures", should use Ockham's Razor, should "avoid sensationalism" or anything "beyond the pale" and that whilst it's OK to feed "unhelpful background noise" at the start it should stop doing so later (??). That's the end of the paper.

Weirdly, he also argues that as long as scientists believe any alien ships encountered are derelict or look natural, this is rational and doesn't "step outside the normal bounds of science" (last paragraph page 4). But believing that alien crews could survive or that an alien ship would look artificial presumably does.

The obvious problem with this plan is that most claims of UFO visitations include a government coverup of the evidence, so there's not much available for scientists to research. When evidence does emerge it's usually better investigated by people with an engineering background like Mick West, who can work out explanations to do with camera mechanics and the like.

The guy's bio is perhaps explanatory:

"Current research, as part of the KCL (China) team and the University of Manchester (Russia) team within the Cosmological Visionaries project, takes in the ethical aspects of dialogue building between local scientists, indigenous peoples and national minorities in Russia and China in the face of climate change. The key theme uniting my broader areas of research is otherness and our shared future. This works its way into various publications on Space (other places), philosophy of love (other people), and animals (other creatures). Tony is also an Affiliate of the Lau China Institute."

This "everything ideologically fascinating is connected to everything else" claim crops up all over the place in academia in recent years and always seems to yield low quality scholarship.

Prominent astrophysicists I trust say there is no evidence for Elizondo’s claims.

Have we examined all motives here? Possible motives include:

A government program for uniting religious belief to some end.

A government program to gauge how people would react to disclosure if non-human intelligence was ever discovered (arguably we are already there with LLMs).

A cover for advanced military craft.

And finally, by far the most likely in my opinion, the profit motive. To the Stars Academy, LLC, now known as To the Stars (TTS), is essentially an entertainment company. The supposed other operating arms of aerospace and science divisions have not and probably will never generate any revenue.[0,1]

[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420417...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_The_Stars_Inc.

Paywalled article points to open access publication in astronomy journal:

Equivocal encounters: alien visitation claims as a societal problem

https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/293600954/IA...

The risks according to the article are that these modern stories of alien visition could:

- encourage conspiracy theories, which could undermine trust in democratic institutions

- get in the way of legitimate science communication

- threaten to overwrite indigenous storytelling

From an anthropological view, myths of supernatural or superhuman beings are the norm, rather than any unique phenomenon arising from modern society. Many religions have stories of gods, angels, or ancestors who live among the stars and visit the earth on occasion.

Are religions a "serious problem" in our society? Some would argue yes, especially as such stories can compete for mindshare with the worldview and narrative of science.

What about traditional myths and legends? Or astrology and other non-scientific metaphysical beliefs? Fantasy and science fiction? I guess this last one is not a problem since people know it's for entertainment and don't actually believe in them.

So Lue Elizondo (who is very much not a fringe person, with a lengthy career of service in the military and federal agencies) publishes a book that makes many assertions about the reality of non-human intelligence and now we've got this condescending thinkpiece by some academic scold about how the peons are crazy?

And after reading the paper, it's filled with the predictable moaning about protecting "indigenous stories".

> If all of this stayed in its own box, as entertaining fiction, then matters would be fine. But it doesn't, and they aren't. Visitation narratives tend to overwrite indigenous storytelling about sky and ground.

How does this get any play? Overwrite? In the digital age when the ability to publish and maintain and distribute information has never been easier? It's amazing the sorts of people who are able to get a foothold in academia cause this is seriously laughable.

The last 20 years has basically been the elites clutching their pearls at the crazy stuff the riff-raff believe, now that riff-raff are able to publish their thoughts on the internet without any sort of gatekeeping. The "crazy uncle" stereotype is one everyone can relate too, well there's a lot of uncles out there and there always has been.

> All this is ultimately encouraging conspiracy theories, which could undermine trust in democratic institutions. There have been humorous calls to storm Area 51. And after the storming of the Capitol in 2021, this now looks like an increasingly dangerous possibility.

I really don't mind which conspiracy myths is currently trending. People who believe these myths will believe the next best thing and are ignorant towards science and facts. Therefore I don't see any particular risk from any of these myths. They're equally "risky", when choosing to use that terminology.

And same goes with the calls to storm Area 51. That has the same trend as any other TikTok trend. And I wouldn't compare the storm of the Capitol with something dumb as Area 51. The Capitol thing was provoked by right-wing extremists and used by Trump to stay in power. That is VASTLY different and an ACTUAL threat to society!

> All this is ultimately encouraging conspiracy theories, which could undermine trust in democratic institutions. There have been humorous calls to storm Area 51. And after the storming of the Capitol in 2021, this now looks like an increasingly dangerous possibility.

I really don't mind which conspiracy myths is currently trending. People who believe these myths will believe the next best thing and are ignorant towards science and facts. Therefore I don't see any particular risk from any of these myths. They're equally "risky", when choosing to use that terminology.

And same goes with the calls to storm Area 51. That has the same trend as any other TikTok trend. And I wouldn't compare the storm of the Capitol with something dumb as Area 51. The Capitol thing was provoked by right-wing extremists and used by Trump to stay in power. That is VASTLY different and an ACTUAL threat to society!

> It is increasingly clear that belief in alien visitation is no longer just a fun speculation, but something that has real and damaging consequences.

Really?