Aliens really exist? Do they come in peace or have they already arrived?

David Grush, Ryan Graves, and David Fravor are at the centre of a new controversy regarding UFOs, or UAPs to be precise. Under oath, the three veterans stated, in front of the Congress, that not only does the USA government know a lot about extraterrestrial technologies, but it is also in possession of entire spaceships and non-human biological entities. The three veterans demanded from the government more transparency and better communication about this situation with American citizens, yet none of the vaguely mentioned reports have been made public (even though the hearing was made public precisely with the aim of being more transparent).

While reading about it, I wasn’t really impressed or worried about the news itself, but as soon as I got to read the reaction of the media, journalists, and American people, I got scared. As a matter of fact, virtual places like Twitter are filled with people sharing conspiracy theories, sightings that have already proven to be false, and statements that really made me reevaluate to what extent nonsense could go. Thus, I believe it’s crucial, in this moment of confusion and mediatic chaos, to reflect and analyse the data we have, trying to understand their value and meaning.

Where are the ufos?

Browsing the internet looking for some data about ufo sightings, I came across this interesting map, designed by Esri, which shows where and when ufo sightings have occurred.

Do you notice something strange?

The majority of sightings happen in America, not the continent North America, but in the USA. But how big is the USA? The United States of America occupy 9 834 000 km2 of earth’s surface , which seems big but compared to the 17 125 306 km2 of Russia seems like nothing. However, Russia is basically empty, no one in Russia ever saw an ufo or something similar. Someone may argue that we need to consider that Russia is not a free country as the USA is, thus people may have seen an ufo but the government might have covered it.

Although, this objection doesn’t stand for two reasons: the timeline goes from 1906 to 2014 and specially in the period of great growth of this phenomenon (which goes from the end of the 1990s to the start of the 2000s) the russian president was Borís Nikoláevič Él’cin, who had better relationships with the West, and only from 1999 ‘till now the president of Russia has been Vladimir Putin, who at the beginning had better relationships with the rest of the world.

The second reason is that ufo sightings, specially in the recent period, have often been reported by citizens during commercial flights, which means that if someone saw an ufo it is most likely that he saw it during a flight from one country to the other (a situation that also the three veterans admitted to be extremely common). As a result, the probability of sightings in Russia, or China, or India, etc are the same as in America or any other country in the world.

What about Europe?

Europe, which in terms of values and freedom is at the same level as America, also has a great number of sightings, even if, in terms of percentage, it only contributes to 15-20% of the global sightings, where America is the leader.

However, let’s try to be more specific and precise, taking one country to make the comparison. To be fair, I won’t take the country with the highest level of sightings, (also considering that some countries in Europe have no reported sightings) but the one with a fair number: Italy.

In Italy, the Air Force decided to set up a special body just to properly handle these reported sightings called “OVNI” ( which in Italian is the acronym for Unidentified Flying Objects, UFO). Here is some data that the OVNI published:

As we see, all the sightings from 2001 to 2023 add up to a total of 170. A number that seems big but is nothing compared to the 510 that the US National Intelligence stated to be aware of only in 2021. Moreover, OVNI together with INAF (in Italian: National Institute of Astrophysics), analysed the 69 sightings that occurred between 2010 and 2014 and created these tables where we can see what time these sightings happened the most, who saw them the most, and if you visit this link, also the colours and the shape of the UFOs.

What do we understand from this data? We see that Europe, which occupies 4 233 262 km2 of the Earth’s surface, presents the same phenomenon but in a smaller portion compared to the USA. Furthermore, we see how little the entire continent contributes to the sightings, and we can see that, in the country we took as an example for the whole, common citizens are more likely to see a UFO than pilots (either in the military forces or in commercial flights companies). At this point, the question comes naturally: is it possible that aliens are interested only in the USA? If they are on a mission to have contact with humans or just spy on them to get more information about them, is it possible that they are looking only at Americans (considering also that the most populated country is China, with India in second place and America only in third)?

Hiding data

The central question of the whole controversy concerns the act of governments hiding data. I want to start by saying that every theory about this practice can be only speculation because we don’t know and we will never know unless we have tangible evidence, whoever says the opposite is already stating the false. With that said, we can start by saying that hiding data can be a double-edged sword with potential consequences for the population, thus we have to consider the two sides of the same coin.

On one hand, this practice could be harmful for the citizens because, when overused or used to conceal important information from the public, it can breed mistrust, undermine transparency, and violate citizens' rights to know about issues that directly impact them. Governments may use the justification that the populace wouldn't be able to understand or handle the information correctly to justify withholding data. However, because it limits people's freedom to make informed judgments and participate in meaningful conversations, this strategy might promote a paternalistic mindset and undermine democratic norms.

On the other hand, secrecy is necessary in order to protect national security, avoid the exposure of vulnerable information that, if disclosed, could harm public safety or jeopardise diplomatic relationships. This case stands particularly well when the matter involved concerns national security, military information, territories information, and citizens specifics. For instance, the government that rules the country you live in is highly likely to have information about you, your job, your house, and other sensitive information… and, if not given by you in another context (ex: when subscribing to a social media platform), these informations are not shared by the government due to sharing them would harm the government itself.

Therefore, even if demanding better communication and more transparency is fair, we have to remember that data regarding UFOs or UAPs are very sensitive and concern matters of national security and it’s reasonable that they are not shared so openly with the public (also considering that among these unidentified flying objects there could be other nations’ military drones, secret military aircrafts that are being tested, and so on).

Hindsight Bias

Finally, we come to the reaction of the American public, journals, etc. What I perceived reading about these events, either on the traditional media and on social media such as Twitter, was that almost all the statements, the speculations or the opinions had a background of hindsight bias, but what is it?

Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were. People often believe that after an event has occurred, they would have predicted or perhaps even would have known with a high degree of certainty what the outcome of the event would have been before the event occurred. Hindsight bias may cause distortions of memories of what was known or believed before an event occurred, and is a significant source of overconfidence regarding an individual's ability to predict the outcomes of future events. For example, due to hindsight bias, we may believe that we "knew" a couple in our social group would split up. This is due to the fact that our current knowledge enables us to easily reinterpret any prior disputes or dubious behaviour as a hint of disaster. When we try to understand an outcome, we tend to have hindsight bias. As we go through this process, we essentially "rewrite the story," emphasising some aspects while ignoring others. Which is exactly what happened in these days, when many people, influenced by the statement of the three veterans, started assessing that what before was a latent impression, most of the time not even considered, is in reality true. Therefore, they started publishing videos of sightings that are clearly fake or advancing the most nonsense theories about aliens, UFOs, the government cooperating, or even being ruled by aliens. All of this was caused by the attempt to align the recent statement with these phenomena, completely ignoring most of the data we dealt with before.

What do we do?

In conclusion, I believe that at this moment, also considering that for now there has been no update on the matter, it’s crucial to not overreact or get overwhelmed by such news, also because there is nothing we can add that could be valuable for the discussion of this topic. Most importantly, we don’t have to be influenced by our own biases due to, even if it’s all true (which I highly doubt), it is a matter of scientific inquiry and global security, thus everything would be analysed and studied with objective methods that provide scientific truths.

What the public opinion now is doing, especially on social media, is only pushing for certain narrations (completely ignoring data) that, most of the time, aim for a particular view of the world, which has been proven countless times to be a distorted view. What is being generated is just noise that hinders the true data and misinterprets reality, and that’s why, in this as in many other cases where information or news can easily be altered by narrations, we need to have a look at the data first, from the right source (which most of the time is the institutional one), and then deal with the opinions, the narrations, the speculations, and so on, with scepticism, critical thinking, not forgetting what the true data say, and an open mind. Because I truly believe that if even a quarter of people really considered the data we analysed, there wouldn’t have been such a reaction to this news, plus there wouldn’t have been such a spread of conspiracy theories.