An uptick in UFO sightings by military pilots raises all sorts of interesting questions. [View all]

For the last several years, the U.S. military has observed an increase in what it calls “unexplained aerial phenomena.” The rest of us may know them by their more common name — unidentified flying objects — and we should all strive, as the Navy is doing, to take these reports more seriously.

Sometimes, according to the Washington Post, well-trained military pilots “claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.” They also appear to exceed all known aircraft in speed and have been described by a former deputy assistant secretary of defense as embodying a “truly radical technology.”

No, I don’t think the proverbial “Little Green Men” have come. But maybe you wonder about the probability, even if quite small, that aliens are visiting. An alien civilization doesn’t have to send its people. It could build a few self-replicating von Neumann probes, as they are called, carrying artificial intelligence and powered by solar or nuclear energy. At some point you would expect such probes to wash up on our shores or transmit messages to us.

You can debate the actual numbers, but on the grounds of pure theory alone, the chance of alien contact of some kind is not so small. So on the yes side, on behalf of the notion that something truly strange is happening here, we have both pilot testimonials and pure theory. That is not nearly enough, in my view, to believe in alien visitation, but it is more weight than many people think.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-02/ufo-sightings-u-s-military-takes-them-seriously-you-should-too