What happens to UFOlogy in the world of AI?

The impact of Artificial Intelligence is now an issue that is turning up in the cultural conversation virtually every day and more and more industries are grappling with the implications of this technology every day. Education is certainly wrestling with it, trying to figure out how to deal with cheating machines…I mean ChatGPT AI programs that write flawless papers for students. So, basically, cheating machines. Film industry professionals, critics and analysts as well as fans are likewise leery of the way this technology can upend all filmic storytelling and render scores of jobs in Hollywood obsolete once AI can create images and scenes that in the past used to take multiple teams of people to accomplish. 

 

And recently, I was interviewed for this Cybernews article about AI’s impact on something much more fantastic: UFOlogy and the search for signs of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. If we consider the rise of ever more sophisticated and perfect-looking AI videos can have a major impact on the UFO phenomenon and the public’s desire to know the truth about what these mysterious objects in the sky might be. Knowing how perfect-looking images can be created by AI, the technology could either inspire a more precise and scientific examination of alleged alien sightings and contact, or it could completely damage the field of UFOlogy.  

 

For one, being aware of how easily fraudsters can create AI videos of virtually anything, those who are open minded to the possibility of UFOs being some kind of extraterrestrial, or interdimensional phenomenon, could be dissuaded from their beliefs more than they ever would by the arguments of skeptics from the worlds of science and academia. If enough UFO videos are exposed as hoaxes, if the public becomes just cynical enough about video evidence of any sort, the interest in trying to figure out the truth behind this phenomenon could fade. If we assume that anything could be faked, then the claim of something as extraordinary as UFOs will just automatically be assumed to be a hoax and visual evidence will automatically be discounted as anything worthy of further investigation.

 

However, I would add that the impact of cynicism on UFOlogy by AI is should not necessarily be seen as something negative. Even those who are open minded to the possibility or otherworldly visitation to the Earth should admit that our suspicion of AI trickery would merely demand absolutely solid, incontrovertible proof of the existence of UFOs. Disclosure will be accepted as being a real once someone can produce evidence better than just videos. The standard of proof for extraterrestrial visitation will just be raised. We would need to see actual alien aircraft or extraterrestrials themselves before we can believe in their existence. So, people like Lue Elizondo and Ross Coulthart and David Grusch would need to go beyond merely making claims about being given inside information by their unnamed sources—people who keep claiming to have seen crashed alien craft, alien creatures, and back-engineered technology but can never produce any actual physical evidence. 

 

Governments might actually be able to use our growing suspicions over AI to further deny and obfuscate the UFO issue. Rather than just merely giving the official denials of the existence of extraterrestrial craft in the skies, as the government has been doing for decades, the best debunking effort could actually use deepfake AI videos to do the job. This could involve the government’s creation of debunkable AI-created UFO videos and flood the Internet and social media with them. After enough of the “shocking” UFO videos would be exposed as hoaxes, the general public’s interest in the topic would fade and so would calls for further investigations. In the public’s mind, there really would be no need for any disclosure, or costly investigations, into something that does not exist. 

 

Furthermore, another purpose intelligence agencies could have to create AI-generated UFO videos would be as a part of a social/psychological experiment. There would be a lot of value in understanding how the modern world reacts to claims of the fantastic. It could lead to a more nuanced understanding of how people react to the unknown, to what extent they are afraid of the unknown, and how they form new belief systems in the new world of synthetic media.

 

This is perhaps among the greatest dangers AI could pose for the social fabric. Questionable videos and images all around us will ultimately erode consensus reality. It will erode a collective experience of reality and the objective world. Moreover, perfectly lifelike AI images flooding cyberspace will also dissuade people from believing any information that is not in line with their existing dogmas. People could say something to the effect that “I don’t care that the news showed me images of a war zone or a natural disaster or a crime being committed somewhere. Those images are probably AI fakes and I don’t believe that war actually happened or that a hurricane struck somewhere.” In 1993 the satirical novel “Wag the Dog,” by Larry Beinhart used a plot of the first Gulf War being nothing more than a hoax orchestrated by the government and Hollywood producers. Very soon, thanks to AI, we might actually wind up in the world of “Wag the Dog.” 

 

New communication technology has always had profound impacts on people’s perceptions of reality. In the case of alien contact, we saw the kind of panic that could be created by a real-sounding radio broadcast in 1938 when Orson Welles famously touched off a panic among some listeners with his “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Although radio was not a new medium at the time, Welles’ adaptation of a news-broadcast-format for his dramatization of the H.G. Wells novel was unique. Some people in the audience simply could not believe that something presented on the radio could possibly be a hoax. Welles’ audience was given perhaps the same kind of shock as the kind we are feeling today in the age of AI: how can we possibly believe what’s real or not if it sounds so real? 

 

Close Encounters of Every Kind

I was recently interviewed about a subject that's quite a favorite of mine because it's so hard to come to conclusions about. It's a topic that requires and open mind, but one that won't be easily filled up with garbage...

UFOs.

This article on the How Stuff Works website (and you can listen to its podcast version as well) details the complex classification system of alleged UFO encounters, everything from strange lights in the sky to encounters with otherworldly beings and all the way to purported human/alien hybrids walking among us. The classification system was originally devised by the legendary astronomer J. Allen Hynek, and it would eventually provide the title for Steven Spielberg's iconic science fiction film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Hynek's system only had three kinds of close encounters. As the article details, at least seven more have been added, including complex subheadings of encounters.

But Hynek's involvement in UFOs I find very intriguing since the eminent astronomer who had originally worked for the Air Force's research projects into the phenomenon was originally a skeptic. He changed his mind while working on the infamous Project Blue Book.

I'm quite open minded about the topic of UFOs myself, but I guess I would consider myself an open-minded skeptic. The recent Pentagon report on UFOs (or UAVs as they like to call it), I thought, made an intriguing case for the consideration of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. There is something flying around in the skies, physical objects of some kind, aircraft that could not have been built by any known technology on Earth today. So where does that leave us about this issue...?

I don't know.

I kind of like the Sherlock Holmes approach to UFOs: once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, has to be the answer. So far the Pentagon report made a pretty good case for the elimination on Earthly technology behind the phenomenon.

So does that leave aliens?

I don't know. 

So my mind is open about the issue, but just as long as we don't get into the territory of absurdly complicated government conspiracies about back-engineered UFOs, demonic UFOnauts, and U.S. presidents having made deals with aliens in abduction/technology-exchange deals.

A Nice Little Gem of a Movie In Light of Recent Events

While you wait for more information on the Defense Department’s report of its UFO studies to be released in full to Congress by the end of June and peruse the news for analysis of the parts of the study that have already been leaked, I would like to recommend a nicely original little film about alien encounters. 

I ran across “UFO” (2018) while randomly looking through Amazon.com’s recommendations of science fiction films. I was in a sci fi mood and desperately hoping to find something more interesting than superhero films or Star Wars. The user comments for this film were very positive, making the story sound blessedly original. I was definitely not disappointed after adding the DVD to my collection.

 

The film is based on a 2006 sighting of a disc-shaped object over Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, an event quite familiar to UFO enthusiasts. You can check out the overview of the O’Hare incident right here. The plot involves a mathematics graduate student who is able to figure out that the FAA’s explanations for strange aerial phenomenon over an airport (moved to Cincinnati from Chicago) don’t make sense. After convincing his friends and one of his professors (Agent Scully herself, Gillian Anderson, in a nice bit of casting) that there is something unusual going on and government investigators’ prosaic explanations don’t make sense, our headstrong hero finds himself under surveillance by a shadowy group of investigators who want to know how he figured out what he did.

 

That synopsis might sound like something that could have been recycled from a million UFO-conspiracy films, but the film is much more than that. It uses the archetypes of the genre to examine the psychology of what it’s like to crave answers, the obsessive need to know in the face of an unsolvable mystery. I don’t want to go into more details about plot points because I don’t want to spoil anything, but do check out the film to see how effectively one can tell a story about the true nature of the unknown.

 

It might make you look at the latest UFO discussion and speculations playing out in the news every day in a whole different light. Just what if there really is something extraordinary flying around in the skies out there, but we may never know what it is? What if there is nothing more in the hidden government files than the admission of total ignorance?

Fascinating!

UFO’s are all over the media lately, and not just on the History Channel and the Travel Channel. 60 Minutes recently did an extensive story on the government’s admission that it had started investigating the phenomenon again in 2007. The 60 Minutes segment can be seen on YouTube here, and several extensive stories about the new UFO revelations can be read here and here. 

And this month, the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Defense are required to share their findings with Congress.

 

The US Air Force had conducted several research efforts into UFOs in the past, starting with Project Sign in 1948, then Project Grudge in 1949, and finally the famous Project Blue Book that ran from 1952 until 1969. Once Blue Book was shut down, the government said that it would no longer spend resources trying to figure out what was behind the phenomenon. The study’s official conclusion was that the vast majority of sightings were misidentifications of everything from temperature inversions, unusual cloud formations, meteorites, swamp gas, and stars, to birds, weather balloons, and conventional aircraft. Since UFOs appeared to pose no threat to national security, there was no reason for the government to be in the business of studying them.

 

That changed, apparently, in 2007 when Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, had been given information about Navy and Air Force personnel—including fighter pilots and radar operators—routinely seeing unidentified flying objects. These UFOs (or UAPs, “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” as the term UFO had been rebranded) would routinely exhibit flight capabilities beyond those of any existing aircraft in the world. Just as decades’ worth of UFO sightings claimed, the unidentified objects would be capable of speeds exceeding those of any known Earthly aircraft and would perform maneuvers, again, beyond the capabilities of aircraft manufactured by anyone in this world. The UAPs reported by the military personnel must have been powered by technology we can’t even theoretically conceive of. Aside from their abilities to accelerate or decelerate at rates that would most likely compromise the structural integrity of any aircraft—and kill any living being inside it—several of these mystery craft had been seen plunging into the ocean or emerging from it to fly away into the sky. 

 

Harry Reid’s reaction to this information was the request that $22 million be allocated to the Pentagon’s black budget to study these UAPs. As the Senate Majority Leader, he got what he asked for.

 

As the links to the stories attest, the result was the establishment of a study group called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), run by the Defense Intelligence Agency and tasked with cataloging the UFO/UAP sightings. AATIP was funded until 2012 and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force was a follow-up program.

 

We now know all this because a former AATIP director, Luis Elizondo, leaked the information to the media after resigning, allegedly frustrated by the Pentagon brass’ lack of interest in trying to determine what the UAP’s are. In 2017, the New York Times broke his story in this article.

 

So, any day now, we could get the Defense Department's report on all this and, at the very least, it’s expected that the report will acknowledge that the military is aware that some sort of hyper-advanced aircraft are able to enter U.S. airspace at will and evade our most sophisticated defenses. What these aircraft are, the report will no doubt say, nobody knows.

 

If, in fact, the government is “keeping something hidden,” as so many UFO-conspiracy films, TV shows, and books have claimed, that hidden information, I always suspected, is this sort of ignorance. There is something in the skies and we don’t know what it is.

 

Such information would be quite sobering, if not disturbing. It’s actually much more disturbing than all the rococo conspiracy theories about retrieved alien flying saucers and back-engineered UFOs in Area 51. The unknown is the most frightening thing in the world. 

 

It should inspire what past governmental studies of UFOs could not: a broader investigation of the phenomenon by the scientific community. Hopefully scientists might step up and do what Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book’s skeptic/debunker-turned-believer called for when he said the subject needed “agnostic” investigators. It needed people who neither blindly wanted to believe, nor their mirror-image opposite, the zealous debunkers who had made up their minds that UFOs could not possibly exist before examining the facts.

 

What might eventually derail any such open-minded investigative efforts would be the hard-core conspiracy theorists once more. The conspiracy culture in the UFO community had already driven scientists away once before. As French information scientist and UFOlogists Jacques Vallee wrote in his 1991 book, “Revelations,” by the 1980s scholars like himself had walked away from UFO investigations because the field had been taken over by the saucer-crash proponents and the uncritical believers of ever increasingly outlandish theories about aliens in underground bases experimenting on human abductees, extraterrestrials living among us and walking next to us on the street, or ETs clandestinely running the countries of the world. The sober, cautious, and conservative investigations of lights in the sky and distant sightings, Vallee writes, was just not as sexy as the lurid tales of alien abductions and clandestine military/alien partnerships. But the “sexiness” of the conspiratorial claims had also killed the chance of mainstream science taking the UFO phenomenon seriously.

 

Hopefully that won’t happen again.

Aliens on the radio!

I was interviewed by Lisa Valentine Clark on her podcast a few weeks ago and my segment can be heard right here. We were discussing all things extraterrestrial with an overview of some of the major topics in UFOlogy, spanning from ancient astronaut theories to abductions, Roswell, and the Men in Black. It's a topic I am endlessly fascinated by, both as a sociological phenomenon and in the big "what if" question. Some 7 to 10 percent of UFO sightings around the world are unexplained, so it's intriguing to ponder just what if the phenomenon really could be the manifestation of something extraterrestrial or interdimensional.

Enjoying "Project Blue Book"

And now for something completely different…a few of my impressions of the new History Channel series, “Project Blue Book.” 

I’ve seen the first two episodes of this series and as someone who used to love the X-Files (even as my skepticism of large-scale conspiracies grew), I am so far liking it. It is a good-looking series boasting some nice production values in its recreation of the early 1950s. I also like its quiet, silently menacing tone. It, so far, appears to be a show that wants to reward the patient, attentive viewer who is willing to invest his time in following the unfolding of a complex narrative and layered mythology. I hope the show will continue on this path of low key, subtle mystery and not devolve into ever more garish, hysterical conspiracy theories and over-the-top action. There is a place for action in the proper context, but “Project Blue Book” would be more interesting if it stays on the path of menace, mystery and unease.

The show is a very loose dramatization of astronomer J. Allen Hynek’s side gig as a consultant for the U.S. Air Force’s three major UFO-study projects: “Sign” (1947-49), “Grudge,” (1949-52) and “Blue Book” (1952-69). As the title of the show makes obvious, it focuses in on his “Blue Book” years. Hynek would become famous for being perhaps the most prestigious member of the scientific community to publicly declare that he had come to believe that the UFO phenomenon was the manifestation of something truly unexplained, perhaps extraterrestrial visitations or something extra-dimensional. He would also coin the UFO-encounter classification system of “close encounters of the first kind,” “second kind,” and “third kind.” He even had a cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg’s iconic film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Interestingly, Hynek was originally a staunch skeptic for decades when it came to the issue of UFOs. Throughout his years consulting for projects Sign and Grudge, he would enthusiastically debunk claims of UFO encounters as misidentifications of natural phenomenon. He had also famously dismissed a series of sightings in Michigan as being caused by nothing more than “swamp gas.” The swamp gas explanation of UFOs had become something of a punchline in the debate of the phenomenon.

But it was during Hynek’s time with Project Blue Book that his view of the phenomenon changed. Prompted by eyewitness testimony he had grown to trust as being credible, made by competent people whose character was beyond reproach – as well as his realization that some 11% of professional astronomers claimed to have seen unexplainable aerial phenomena – Hynek had become a staunch believer in the otherworldly nature of UFOs. He would eventually found the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago.

So I am curious as to the approach this show will take toward the claims of government cover-ups and vast conspiracies. The real Hynek, of course, would claim that the Air Force and top-level government officials also suspected the extraterrestrial nature of the UFO phenomenon but they were set on denying it from the public. But TV shows and movies have already shown perhaps literally hundreds of iterations of the “vast, shadowy government conspiracy to hide the aliens.” I am curious about where this show will go.

It would be interesting to see the show differentiating between a cover-up – the U.S. military wanting to hide that fact that it knows nothing about the true nature of this unexplained phenomenon – and outlandish conspiracy theories about back-engineered alien UFOs in Area 51.

I will admit that I am very much open minded to the idea of intelligent alien life somewhere on other planets. Scientists having detected scores of Earth-like planets over the last several years, it only makes logical sense that life would arise elsewhere in the universe. I am even open minded to the idea that intelligent, technologically advanced alien races have discovered the means to interstellar travel and visited the Earth. A significant percent of UFO sightings have never been satisfactorily explained.

But it is the outlandish conspiracy theories I found completely unbelievable: the back-engineered UFO theories, the alien bases under government installation theories, the claims that aliens made deals with the governments of the Earth to abduct humans for ghastly experiments in return for providing our scientists with fabulous technological secrets…which said scientists have kept secret for some reason. As if incredibly advanced alien visitors would actually need to make deals with the Earth’s leaders.

But J. Allen Hynek himself was the proponent of a very conservative and strictly rigorous scientific analysis of the UFO phenomenon. I am certain that today he, too, would be appalled by what the “conspiracy community” have come to believe as the gospel.

And I’m sure J. Allen Hynek would detest Alex Jones.

UFO abduction expert David M. Jacobs on WSPC Culture Wars!

You definitely want to check out the podcast of the latest episode of Culture Wars right here.

Ernabel Demillo and I had an excellent discussion with Temple University Professor, Dr. David M. Jacobs, one of the most prominent experts on the UFO abduction phenomenon and a historian of the UFO controversy.

Dr. Jacobs is the author of books like Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of Alien Abductions, The UFO Controversy in America, and The Threat.