Flying high in the unidentified sky

There was a bit of excitement recently when a Chinese spy balloon was caught flying over the US and shot down, people freaking out about China having this sort of technology as if the US itself didn’t and hasn’t been using it against other countries… apparently, though, it’s ufologists who are most concerned:

Many in the UFO community — which ranges from science-minded investigators to faith-based believers — had been hoping recent moves in Washington meant the government was finally getting ready to spill the beans on everything it has collected over decades on unexplained aerial phenomena, even if that didn’t include evidence of extraterrestrial life.
But the downing of the balloon complicates their narrative and may lead many Americans to wrongly believe that every weird thing seen in the skies has a quotidian explanation, like balloons. […]
The latest report on unexplained arial [sic] phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released in January, includes 366 newly identified incidents. Of those, 163 were attributed to balloons, 26 to drones, and six to “clutter,” such as birds, weather events or airborne debris like plastic bags.
That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” sightings, according to the report, which notes that some of those sightings “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.”

But everything has a quotidian explanation of some sort eventually. I have always broadly agreed with Wittgenstein at the start of the Tractatus, i.e. that a thing either is or it isn’t. However, I also maintain that the sum total of “everything that is” is probably bigger than our stricter rationalists and atheists would insist. A lot of woo-y stuff is demonstrated bullshit, fuelled by fraud and/or delusion and/or drug abuse and so forth, but at the same time I like to leave open the possibility that some of it might not be.

But the point is that ultimately everything has a rational explanation, whether or not we presently understand it, including “every weird thing in the sky”. And one day we may well encounter something that is in fact some sort of non-human artifact… I just accept that the vastest majority of these things probably are perfectly ordinary, maybe even balloons, and I don’t automatically assume that those 171 uncharacterised and unattributed sightings are

which is the mistake I think a lot of ufologists make. It’s a sort of variant of the “God of the gaps” fallacy, i.e. we don’t a scientific explanation for how something works, therefore God did it. (Maybe in this case “Greys of the gaps” would be a better name for it?)

More from the article:

Some true believers in the UFO community think the government is lying about shooting down a balloon and claim it really shot down something alien, noting the government has released footage of the shoot downs and says it can’t find the wreckage. They note the “cover story” for the Roswell incident, after all, was that it was just a weather balloon.
Stephen Bassett, known as Washington’s only dedicated UFO lobbyist and the founder of Paradigm Research Group, is not one of them.
Bassett believes the government made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence decades ago and has been inching closer to revealing it, but he said he didn’t think the U.S. would shoot at an alien craft, “first, because you can’t hit them and second, because you don’t want to piss off an interstellar civilization.”
“It’s a distraction,” he said of the Chinese spy balloon. “We were making progress in a really steady way toward disclosure and this is not that. This is nuts. I don’t want distractions like this.”

…Why couldn’t you hit an alien craft, though? I can understand the not wanting to aggravate the aliens, cos if they can build better spacecraft than us they’ve probably also got better weapons than us, but the assumption that we couldn’t hit them strikes me as peculiar… Anyway, what would these people do if the US government actually did make contact with aliens and admitted it? Would they actually believe the government then? Or would they assume they were still covering up something even bigger? What do you do when you’ve built your identity on knowing a “truth” that the government denies (aliens, September 11, pandemic, whatever) but then they do admit it?