UFOs

There are no UFOs. The whole planet has cell phones the last ten years and all these supposed sightings disappeared.

— Tim Dalton (@thor988835) April 29, 2026

So Trump has confirmed that UFO files are soon to be released, while a guy named Tim Dalton posts trenchant remarks saying no such thing as UFOs. A more extended version of Dalton's reasoning appeared in The New Yorker a couple of years ago:

In February, 2023, photographs of a Chinese spy balloon over Billings, Montana, prompted speculation about aliens. The Air Force eventually shot it down, but first the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane flew past and took a selfie that showed the balloon out the window. “You can see it in exquisite detail,” [University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam] Frank told me. “Where are all those pictures? Every U.F.O. picture is a fuzzy blob. Everybody carries a high-resolution camera in their pocket now, and it’s always fuzzy blobs.”

I've noted here in the past that since the age of systematic scientific observation began in the 1600s, there's been zero tangible evidence of any sort of extraterrestrial gadget constructed by intelligent life, which has created such a speculative gap that believers have been forced to impute such things to ancient hieroglyphics, deciding a Mayan so-and-so looks like he's actually wearing a space helmet or riding a rocket.

One problem is that the Darwinian paradigm has so thoroughly infected logical thinking that people conclude space aliens must be so. The chain of reasoning, according to Wikipedia, goes like this:

• There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
• With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone.
• Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
• Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating.
• Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
• Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.

There are several fallacies in this chain. One is that so far, nobody has been able to prove that, even given the putatively necessary chemicals and environmental conditions, life spontaneously appears. And even if some sort of life were somhow to appear from exactly the right primeval ooze, how long would it take to develop the ability to reproduce itself, via DNA or some equivalent mechanism? And isn't it far more likely that, during the eons-long process of random selection necessary for this to happen, Murphy's Law would intervene and terminate the process before it could perfect itself?

It's like the joke about how billions of monkeys pounding on typewriters could generate the works of Shakespeare. And one day, one of them types out, "To be, or not to be: that is ?6ttdbgoendtgo". How many billions of times would this have to take place before you got through just one act of one play?

But let's grant that given the right conditions, life can evolve from primeval sludge. You have a whole separate problem of reason, which is necessary to develop gadgets that can travel between stars, and this is a problem of philosophy. For instance, according to Wikipedia,

Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was a historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.

The process of building a rocket, or any other sort of interstellar gadget, requires a series of mental judgments based on a mental understanding of physical laws, on which plan might work and which might not -- in other words, a series of judgments that is tested against experimental results. So far, nobody has been able to demonsrate how this mental process relates to the physical brain; there is always a separation between the two. So where does reason come from? It almost certainly doesn't "evolve", and Darwinian natural selection is a shaky paradigm in any case.

So to imagine UFOs requires that we imagine space aliens capable of building them, which in turn requires that we first accept a very shaky hypothesis of how life appears anywhere, but then we have to accept the idea that reason, a non-physical process, somehow arises as a consequence of a physical process that creates a brain or equivalent organ that allows a space alien to think and build a gadget.

This makes my head hurt. It's much easier to recognize that space aliens and UFOs are creatures of fantasy, and there are very good reasons why we've never seen either.