I think (give like 30 per cent probability) that the general nature of the UFO phenomenon is that it is anti-epistemic, that it, it actively prevents our ability to get definite knowledge about about it. How exactly this happens is not clear, and there could be several ideas.
Something jumped out at me here. Regardless of the explanation, there’s a testable experiment in the works here. We could confirm or falsify this anti-epistemic property.
Setup: find the ‘base rate’ of UFO sightings, how often do humans and aircraft sensors see them. Then determine how large of an area you need to cover.
Cover half an area sufficiently large with thousands/millions of constantly recording high resolution cameras. Use AI to check the footage for UFOs.
The other half is your control region. Elicit UFO reports in both regions. (you might put the cameras in both regions but not power the ones in the control region so human reporters don’t know which region they are in)
Prediction: if UFOs are anti-epistemic, you will get no UFO reports from the region covered by cameras, and you will get a statistically meaningful number (because you chose a large enough collection area with enough people) from the control region.
If the cameras ever pick up anything it will be blurry and distant, of course.
Obviously you then swap the groups and run the cameras in the control region.
It would be weird if reality works this way, and we can debate theories after empirical confirmation, but it already is weird in many other ways.
We could check already existing data from e.g. parapsychology for this effect. As I remember, it was observed there that the stronger is control in the experiments, the less is co-called psi-effect which usually was interpreted as evidence against psi.
But suspect that that meta-anti-epistemic nature of the phenomena will appear even in such setup and it will produce initially promising but then declining results.
I think (give like 30 per cent probability) that the general nature of the UFO phenomenon is that it is anti-epistemic, that it, it actively prevents our ability to get definite knowledge about about it. How exactly this happens is not clear, and there could be several ideas.
Something jumped out at me here. Regardless of the explanation, there’s a testable experiment in the works here. We could confirm or falsify this anti-epistemic property.
Setup: find the ‘base rate’ of UFO sightings, how often do humans and aircraft sensors see them. Then determine how large of an area you need to cover.
Cover half an area sufficiently large with thousands/millions of constantly recording high resolution cameras. Use AI to check the footage for UFOs.
The other half is your control region. Elicit UFO reports in both regions. (you might put the cameras in both regions but not power the ones in the control region so human reporters don’t know which region they are in)
Prediction: if UFOs are anti-epistemic, you will get no UFO reports from the region covered by cameras, and you will get a statistically meaningful number (because you chose a large enough collection area with enough people) from the control region.
If the cameras ever pick up anything it will be blurry and distant, of course.
Obviously you then swap the groups and run the cameras in the control region.
It would be weird if reality works this way, and we can debate theories after empirical confirmation, but it already is weird in many other ways.
Really interesting idea.
We could check already existing data from e.g. parapsychology for this effect. As I remember, it was observed there that the stronger is control in the experiments, the less is co-called psi-effect which usually was interpreted as evidence against psi.
But suspect that that meta-anti-epistemic nature of the phenomena will appear even in such setup and it will produce initially promising but then declining results.