Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2023 March 19

= March 19 =

An alien spaceship in the solar system?
Those last days I got several news sites reporting that, according to the Pentagon, there is an alien spaceship somewhere, releasing probes into the planets. It seems to be a report about objects such as Oumuamua and the IM2 meteor. None of those, however, seems to be a big name, such as Reuters or CNN. So which is the proper news here? Is the Pentagon really giving credence to ET stuff? Is this alien ship releasing probes just a random idea, or is there any actual suspicion and/or attempt to locate such a ship? Or are they just open to all posibilities and those sites simply took a quote from a report and magnified it for its click-bait potential? Cambalachero (talk) 04:16, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Most likely the latter. The clickbait headlines probably originated from a paper by Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard's astronomy department, e.g.:
 * And possibly conflating this with an "official" 2022 Pentagon report on UFOs:
 * --136.56.52.157 (talk) 05:21, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Not quite. AFAICT the recent tabloid frenzy was set of by the release of this draft paper [//lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/LK1.pdf] by Loeb, and Sean Kirkpatrick the director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The latter is how the Pentagon comes into it although the director of some tiny part of the Pentagon authoring a draft paper doesn't make it the Pentagon's view anymore then Loeb's involvement makes it Harvard's view. To be fair I think most sources do say Pentagon officials or scientists rather than Pentagon so are a little less misleading although I'm not sure why these are plural. Sometimes they cover by combining the two [//www.indiatimes.com/technology/science-and-future/ufos-could-be-defying-physics-595972.html] so theoretically you could argue it's accurate even if it only involves one person from the Pentagon and one person from Harvard but not always [//torontosun.com/news/world/its-possible-alien-motherships-have-already-visited-pentagon-officials]. While not a RS this Forbes Sites blog [//www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2023/03/09/uap-sightings-get-a-closer-look-from-pentagon-and-harvard-experts/] is one of the better articles I saw on it. Fairly uncritical but at least not wildly sensationalistic. I have no idea how much of the crazy stuff is actually in the paper and how much is just from ramblings of Loeb at one time or the other. Nil Einne (talk) 02:02, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * From the AARO talk and edit history I found [//www.aol.com/news/strange-highly-manoeuvrable-ufos-seem-081713986.html] which originates from the Independent. Nil Einne (talk) 02:23, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * the director of some tiny part of the Pentagon authoring a draft paper doesn't make it the Pentagon's view anymore then Loeb's involvement makes it Harvard's view Hmm, not sure about that. Harvard researchers can publish papers without needing approval of their hierarchy or funding bodies, so in that sense jumping from "a researcher from Harvard said X" to "Harvard said X" is incorrect. But that is an academia-specific thing (see: academic freedom); lots of other places, companies etc. forbid their employees to do any external communication on their behalf without following some internal procedure; in that sense, what those employees say is indeed the company’s view.
 * Of course "the Pentagon" is a big place, with a spectrum of people going from "secret operators whose existence can neither be confirmed nor denied" to "a standard researcher, but with a payslip that says 'defense'". Depending on the sub-direction we are talking about, it could be either "some researcher of the Pentagon" or "the Pentagon". Tigraan Click here for my talk page ("private" contact) 11:39, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * While it may be true that government agencies often require approval before publishing something, that does not mean granting that approval makes it is an official statement from the agency. It just means that the agency has decided to allow the specific paper to be published. If you want to go further than that, you could say they've decided it's acceptable that it is slightly associated with them, but that's about the furthest you can go. (The level of freedom granted will depend on the specific agency, topic and person.) You're seriously mistaken if you believe all papers published by researchers from NASA, the CDC, NIAID etc represent official statements from these agencies. Even a paper co-authored by the director of the NIAID e.g. [//academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/11/1768/5719366] [//www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1916753] does not automatically represent the official view of the NIAID unless they publish it as such. (It is probably close to their official view.) When these agencies want to publish something official, they make it clear they are doing so. Nil Einne (talk) 20:19, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * BTW, in this modern social media age, it can actually be fairly common for people working for government agencies etc to talk about stuff without in any way claiming to represent the official views of the organisation. The organisations will often have social media policies in place which may restrict what they can say. And so people can get in trouble if they don't follow them and sometimes even if they do but the organisation comes under too much pressure, the BBC is an infamous recent example of one of those. But there is often tolerance of at least some level of commentary definitely when the organisation has no real official view on the matter and often even when it may partly be at odds with the official position of the organisation. Have you never seen a social media profile from someone who says they work for some US (or other) government agency or really any company, but views are their own? Because they're quite common e.g. [//twitter.com/_youmioh], [//twitter.com/LeighSzucs], [//twitter.com/KoBarrettIPCC], [//twitter.com/AnnieCSpace], [//twitter.com/mvankerkhove]. Okay the last one isn't associated with the US government I think, but still the same issues largely apply. I included it to illustrate the point it may apply even to very high level positions. Although as that sort of also illustrates, for a variety of reasons people at high level positions will often be less likely to be using their social media much and when they do use it might often actually just be promoting the official view of their organisation. This will depend on the organisation e.g. despite the FBI supposedly [//www.quora.com/Can-FBI-agents-have-social-media-accounts] (I don't trust the Quora commentator at all) encouraging their agents to use social media and engage with the public I didn't find any current special agents Twitter profile. I'd say it's not an organisation which fits well with people engaging on social media in that way, most profiles which do exist probably don't mention their connection to the FBI and I suspect are used to engage with family and friends rather than the general public. (Although I suspect there's still some that do identify and do engage with the general public.) Nil Einne (talk) 20:59, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * If they land, Ron DeSantis will have them shipped to a blue state. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:41, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe they're coming in disguise as Sargassum. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:51, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * They first arrived in kudzu form before their aquatic form evolved in the Sargasso Sea.[Citation needed] --136.56.52.157 (talk) 07:32, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Here ya go:Chevrolet Citation II front.jpg
 * ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:54, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Here ya go:Chevrolet Citation II front.jpg
 * ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:54, 20 March 2023 (UTC)


 * In Europe, the Kudzu vine has been included since 2016 on the list of Invasive Alien Species of Union concern. BB's 1984 brand of "citation" carries a scrap value of $200-$650. Philvoids (talk) 16:55, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The media portrayals are certainly exaggerations, but the U.S. military does seem to be deliberately encouraging such rumors since at least 2019. I have no specific expertise here, but my personal opinion is that they're spreading false rumors about UFOs mostly for their own soldiers.  When their own military detection and targeting systems detect nonexistent or irrelevant flying objects, the soldiers, knowing that the systems are glitchy, would normally find these glitches uninteresting and ignore them.  The goal is that if they give the hope that the glitches may represent interesting UFOs, then the soldiers will document the glitches properly and propagate usable bug reports with enough details.  How this affects mass media or Wikipedia editors is irrelevant to the military.  – b_jonas 16:54, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
 * It has been suggested (he weaseled) that following the supposed Roswell incident, the US military deliberately created/encouraged the 'alien spaceship' hypothesis and planted various slightly differing fake reports on it in different classified channels to (i) divert the Soviets to wasting their resources investigating the possibility, and (ii) track down security leaks by seeing exactly which fake details turned up in Soviet hands. Much the same may also be going on today, alongside other games such as b_jonas suggests. The bluff levels have probably reached sextuple by now. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 5.64.160.67 (talk) 23:32, 22 March 2023 (UTC)