The UFO boom is not an astronomy question, it is a question of belief
When the evidence stops at testimony, whether the universe is crowded becomes a matter of faith. The further science advances, the rarer extraterrestrial life looks in the observations; when we talk about UFOs, what we are really talking about is ourselves.
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The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
Six military witnesses gave testimony, and testimony is not evidence
Around six witnesses with military or government backgrounds have sat before Congress, and to many people that already carries weight. Kirsch's reminder is that what they offered is testimony, not evidence that can be tested. Sagan's line still holds: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the sightings on record have still not been matched with a physical object or a clear image. He extends the distinction to religious experience: you cannot deny that a person who saw the Virgin was sincere, but subjective certainty cannot become a fact that anyone else can check. What makes it harder is that claims like these usually come from outside the scientific system, and we happen to live in an age that no longer trusts experts, so the question of who is entitled to rule on their truth becomes the real political question.
— Adam KirschDecades of no clear photographs should not be filed under coincidence
Jung noticed the pattern back in the 1950s: UFOs do not photograph well. A witness may claim to have watched one for an hour and still produce no clear picture. Decades later, with camera equipment everywhere, what survives is still a blurry point of light on infrared radar. Kirsch argues that an absence this systematic cannot be put down to coincidence; the more reasonable explanation is that the claimed events did not happen. People believe they are reporting an object that has never been confirmed, when in fact memory, narrative and expectation have supplied the imagery for an experience that was vague to begin with.
— Adam KirschUFOs became respectable because the gatekeepers changed, not the evidence
In December 2017, The New York Times and The Washington Post published almost simultaneously on the Pentagon's UFO videos and on a Defense Department program code-named AATIP, budgeted at 22 million dollars and running five years. Until then the Pentagon had denied paying official attention to such phenomena, and once the stories ran, the mainstream account turned immediately. Kirsch's specific point is that the shift in public attitudes toward UFOs did not follow new evidence; it followed a change of gatekeepers. Authoritative outlets moved a subject previously classified as ‘conspiracy theory’ onto the front page, and only then did the public allow itself to take it seriously.
— Adam KirschEach change of name is another admission that we do not understand it
The word UFO was itself invented by the U.S. Air Force in the early 1950s, meant to replace ‘flying saucer’, which sounded like a term out of the comics, with something cool and technical. Kirsch points to the mechanism: you can swap the label, but as long as the phenomenon stays unexplained, the word keeps depreciating. Hence the euphemism treadmill — flying saucer, then UFO, then UAP; and the P in UAP shifted from Aerial Phenomenon to Anomalous Phenomenon purely so that objects underwater, underground, and even ‘from the future’ could be swept into the same pocket. Every new word is one more admission that we have no idea what the thing actually is.
— Adam KirschBelieving in UFOs and doubting vaccines come from the same distrust
Kirsch places the interest in UFOs inside a larger social current: it appears alongside Brexit and vaccine skepticism, sharing a single distrust of expert authority. People resent being told what to do and would rather take their claims from social media. Inside mainstream media there is still a line between fact and fiction, but platforms like TikTok grant unverified content the same attention as serious reporting, and the end result is a general ignorance — not an absence of information, but an absence of any basis for judging it. The core of the problem is not whether individual witnesses are crazy; it is that the public no longer concedes that anyone is better qualified than they are to tell truth from falsehood.
— Adam KirschScientists face the opposite puzzle: a living theory and empty observations
The layman's puzzle is that UFOs keep being seen and nobody takes them seriously; the scientist's puzzle runs exactly the other way, because theory predicts a universe full of life while the actual observations turn up nothing. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, the Copernican principle led progressive thinkers to assume that Earth is not special and that alien civilizations must exist; today the solar system has eight planets, and the number of planets known to hold life is one. Hence Avi Loeb's Oumuamua wager: even with the evidence uncertain, one should start from the assumption that an interstellar object might be alien technology, because otherwise nobody will ever design an experiment to test it. The anxiety inside the scientific community is, at bottom, that the gap between the theoretical sky and the observational desert goes unseen by the public.
— Adam KirschWe can only hear civilizations that happen to be in their radio age
Russ offers an argument from time windows: if humanity survives another million years, today's technology will certainly be obsolete, and radio waves will most likely be retired along with it. The alien signals we are able to listen for can therefore only come from civilizations that happen to be in their own radio age, and on a cosmic scale that window is as brief as the era of the horse-drawn carriage, which you no longer see today. Kirsch adds the mirror image: our picture of an advanced civilization has always drifted along with our own technology — in the 1950s we assumed aliens were doing radio astronomy, and now we guess they have long since miniaturized their technology past the point of visibility. Put together, the two lines of thought keep exposing the same limit: an imagination anchored in the present.
— Russ Roberts & Adam KirschOnce God left public discourse, aliens took over the position
The closing movement does not stop at skepticism. Kirsch says that on the map of the universe we always want some coordinate to have ‘something’ written on it. When God withdraws from public discourse, meaning does not disappear; it simply needs a different carrier, and aliens happen to have taken that role — they reopen the universe, give people something to project hope onto, and equip the lonely individual with a larger mind. Having gone the long way around, he lands on a clear position: the longing for UFOs does not deserve mockery, it is a human need worth respecting. We are always our own frame of reference, and talking about aliens is drawing a self-portrait.
— Adam KirschIn their own words · checked verbatim
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Adam Kirsch6:17
One thing about UFOs is that they're not photogenic.
Adam Kirsch17:02
it would be truly amazing if we could find evidence that there's intelligent life not on Earth, in some other part of the cosmos. It would change the way we think about the universe, about life, about intelligence, about ourselves, and our destiny.
Adam Kirsch35:57
for lay people, the problem is that UFOs have been seen. And, for scientists, the problem is that UFOs haven't been seen.
Adam Kirsch53:17
if you don't believe in God, you still have an instinct for meaning. So, then the question is, where does that meaning come from? It could only come from us.
Adam Kirsch57:50
when we talk about aliens--non-human intelligence--we're always talking about ourselves. We're always drawing our own self-portrait.
Adam Kirsch1:01:20
as science progresses, makes life actually seem rarer and more unique rather than more common.
Adam Kirsch1:06:25
I came away from writing this book with a respect for the desire for aliens, a respect for the desire to believe in aliens.
Adam Kirsch1:11:02
Figures
| AATIP program budget | 22 million dollars | 21:41 |
| AATIP program duration | 5 years | 21:41 |
| When the UAP term changed | about 10 years ago | 31:57 |
| Planets in the solar system (now) | 8 | 50:01 |
| Estimated number of potential planets | sextillion or septillion | 57:50 |
| Planets known to hold life | 1 | 57:50 |
| Year of the Hawking lecture | 2015 | 1:08:56 |
Glossary
- UAP
- The official replacement for UFO, covering objects of unknown origin in the air, underwater and elsewhere.
- euphemism treadmill
- The social-linguistic pattern of continually swapping in neutral labels to escape accumulated negative associations.
- book experience
- The experience of finding an explanatory framework in books after living through an event you cannot explain.
- Drake equation
- A formula for estimating the number of detectable civilizations in the galaxy, containing several unknown variables.
- AATIP
- The Pentagon's UFO research program, revealed in 2017.
How to listen
For people building content and media products who are studying how anti-expert sentiment shapes what spreads, and for readers of the history of science who follow the question of life beyond Earth.
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