You Might Soon Believe In Aliens

I have been asked before if ATVBT has any official editorial positions, and I believe the only one is "aliens are real and extremely nearby".

This position was widely mocked until extremely recently, is currently on the cusp of social acceptability, and (I think) will soon be extremely mainstream, with everyone pretending that they were always open to it and never mocked it (while of course shunning the weirdos who were saying it twenty years ago).

Luckily, if you start investigating aliens today, you can be at just the right time to be part of the "early majority" – your friends will remember that you were talking about it just before it became popular, but after the New York Times published testimony from US Navy pilots that they'd seen objects doing things that no known human technology can do.

A good place to start for alien exposure is the recently-released movie Age of Disclosure. It tries to convey that there's a bipartisan understanding at the top of the US government that
1) aliens exist, in a non-trivial near-earth sense,
2) there's been some shady maneuvering for a while now to prevent democratic oversight of the government's alien knowledge, and
3) the dam is breaking and it’s all coming out soon, one way or another.

I have some quibbles with the movie. There is some really unnecessary equivocation between the extremely uncontroversial position "humans are not the only intelligent life in the universe," which ~most people I know believe in the abstract, and the not-yet-popular position "aliens exist and are in contact with the earth."

In an effort to assert bipartisanity, the trailer for the film gives equal billing to headline interviewees Marco Rubio (Republican) and Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat), but in the movie itself Gillibrand basically just says that alien life probably exists somewhere and that the intelligence services and defense contractors should be accountable to democratically elected representatives, both of which I think are uncontroversial but not groundbreaking.

I think this is a useful pattern to remember when looking at alien stuff: it will simultaneously be true that most of the claimed evidence for aliens is shoddy and/or fake, and also that the best evidence is sufficient to be convincing. (This is actually a helpful thing to remember for many other arguments, but that’s another story).

The good news is, I think the movie is convincing after you chop out the fluff. Basically:

• Marco Rubio – the current Secretary of State – seems to legitimately believe that aliens are near earth, gives cogent explanations of why this information has not been made public sooner, does not seem like a crazy person (no matter your preexisting beliefs), seems to have a strong understanding that saying this stuff makes him sound crazy, and is willing to spend political capital on saying it anyway.
  
• Archive footage of Harry Reid, long time Democratic Majority Leader, really does seem to indicate he believed in near-earth aliens, and believed that intelligence agencies were giving the democratically elected government the run-around on near-earth aliens.
  
• Clips from the movie make it seem plausible (but not certain) that Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama have some kind of knowledge about aliens. I think the evidence here is at least arguable, just watch the clips and see how you feel, but they don’t-deny it when asked rather than actively confirming it, where it feels like something that’s incredibly easy to deny if you want to. There’s also a bananas story about George HW Bush being told, while head of the CIA (!), that he didn’t have a “need to know” about aliens, but it’s told second hand.

Overall, for me, the movie backs up the claim that either near-earth aliens are real, or the US government wants you to think that near-earth aliens are real, and either way it should be a massive story. That's really the number one question for me to people who think it's all a hoax or misdirection: ok sure, but isn't that kind of huge deal too? I have to stress this is from very senior people in both political parties.

One interesting thing to do if you’re alien-curious is just to go around asking your friends if they’ve seen UFOs. One of the first things that pushed me towards belief in aliens was sitting at a random hangout with 6 people and one of them brought up aliens, turned out 4 out of 6 had seen a UFO (alas I was one of the remaining two). Everyone seemed surprised to learn about each other’s UFO stories, and all the stories were more detailed and meaningful than I would have expected.