Thread by @HPSKate

Ask and ye shall receive.

What is going on with #UFOs, a thread:

https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1395110797387370502

In 1947, Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine crescent-shaped metallic objects in flight over the Cascade Mountains. He assumed based on behavior that these were intelligently-controlled aeronautical craft. When he landed, he told his pals, and then called a reporter.

At some point after that - the record is unclear as to exactly when - he called the local U. S. Army Air Force base. This was late June, 1947. To reiterate, he described the objects as illustrated below. This is Arnold himself.

However, a reporter misheard him and whereas Arnold described them as "moving like saucers skipping over water," the reporter wrote "flying saucers" and here we are. Within the week, the "flying saucer" image had overtaken KA's description.

The story took a few days to go national, but once it did, people were hooked. Need evidence? Look no further than newspaper ads from mid-July selling all kinds of circular things using flying saucer imagery. (I have a bunch of great ads tucked away for talks.)

Now, there are really two things you need to understand for what comes next, and I'll try to take them one at a time.

The first regards the military. You'll notice I typed "U.S. Army Air Force." In June 1947, the Air Force is not yet an independent branch of the US military.

But it's locked in combat to become one. The Air Force emerged as a major force in the Allied victory in WW2 and the USAAF is now trying to protect its autonomy, budget, and prestige in peacetime. It is making vehement arguments that US air power won WW2.

The USAAF sees itself as being both the foremost offensive AND defensive branch of the service, and at the cutting edge of military R&D and weapons/defense capability. (Arguably, they're not wrong.) The USAAF is arguing that it IS the future of the American military.

Simultaneously, the post-war period sees actors at every scale trying to come to terms with the unprecedented technoscientific advances that took place during WW2. We can't talk about postwar/Cold War without talking about The Bomb, of course...

...but there are a ton of other achievements, too. And America wasn't the only country making them.

Also, things aren't /great/ with the Soviets in 1947. Relations between the US and the Soviets are deteriorating.

So let's go back to the beginning. It's 1947, we're in the PNW - closer to Russia than, say, Kansas or something - and a pilot (we'll come back to this later) says he sees technology he's never seen before, and it looks like aircraft, and it looks intelligently controlled.

AND you have a branch of the service desperate to maintain its independence and autonomy fervently making an argument that the future wars will be airborne.

You're seeing where we're going here, right?

The objects Kenneth Arnold and his copycats see over the coming months are seen to potentially pose a -very real national security threat-.

"Jesus," everyone says, "What if they're Russian??"

("Jesus," the USAF will say, "What if they're Navy?")

Fn: The modern UFO predates the United States Air Force.

Anyway, the USAF becomes an independent branch of the military in July 1947 and gets responsibility for the "flying object" investigations on the grounds that the things are in the sky. The Navy's annoyed about this because everyone assumes these things are terrestrial in origin.

I'll say that louder for our comrades in the back:
Everyone assumes these things are terrestrial. Which means they very likely represent some new technology. And everyone wants a piece of that.

But the USAF gets it and for reasons that make a lot of sense.

And that's the thing, right? When you put the UFO investigations in their context, it seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do. And that's why the investigations continue after Project Sign concludes in 1948. Because sometimes people see things.

And in a world of jets and ICBMs and atom bombs, those things might just represent an existential threat. Sure, 99% of sightings are bunk. But all it takes is one new missile or jet to wipe out DC.

Okay, the second thing to understand, or really the first thing, part two. The earliest reports are coming from pilots. And pilots aren't just anyone. They're men who have chosen to serve their country and met certain benchmarks. They've received specialized training.

They're understood to be calm under pressure and experts at what they do. They're not hysterical or prone to exaggeration. They are /reliable witnesses/ who we should, nay, NEED to take at their word.

Again, recall, this is a national security issue.

**As an aside, there are UFO-esque reports that predate KA - e.g., the foo fighters of WW2. And after the KA story gets out, some radar operators in the USAAF or Navy in California report having seen similar things in '46. My feelings are mixed, but I want to acknowledge them.

So even though you have all these idiot civilians making reports, you also have your USAF pilots making reports, and most early reports that get investigated are those that come from pilots and military personnel. Those are the ones initially deemed worth investigating.

You should see some resonances here with the current goings-on with the Navy pilots. We treat the Navy pilots differently than we do the weird neighbor down the street and don't pretend like we don't. That we do is the -point-.

And if this was a conference Q&A this is where I'd spin off about "reliable" and "trustworthy" and "credible" and how the USAF tries to define and control for all these things but this is a thread for context about now.

I HIT A THREAD LIMIT. MORE INCOMING

Okay, so now you have the USAF investigating these things and soliciting sighting reports from everyone. It's a national security issue. And they investigation tends of thousands of cases over more than two decades and "solve" a vast majority of them. We're talking 92-98% per yr.

In some years, that "8% unknown/unidentified" will be <10 cases. And they're marked "unknown/unidentified." And everyone's okay with that. We /don't know what accounted for the sighting./

And the USAF isn't in the business of speculation, y'all.

And again, this is perfectly reasonable. A pilot reports seeing a strange light in the evening sky and we can't reliably conclude what it was, and have ruled out pilot error? Then it's "unidentified."

The USAF isn't going to speculate about what the pilot saw.

NOR are they going to just wantonly suggest that the pilot was being dishonest or hallucinating. Not because the USAF was above accounting for pilot error, but because it was interested in a straight-forward accounting of the possibilities.

Fn: the USAF absolutely recorded when "pilot blackout" or "hallucination" was possible, especially in cases where test pilots were flying new craft or trying new maneuvers at particular speeds or trajectories or whatever.

SO, TO PUT THINGS IN CONTEXT: I have no doubt the pilots saw what they think they saw, and I'm not surprised that people are saying "We don't know what it was." There's a possibility they just don't know what led to these reports.

And again, it's important to remember that we would all largely agree that we /want/ our pilots to report strange experiences they have while in flight. We want them to do these things. It's perfectly reasonable to ask them to do so.

And it's perfectly reasonable to also expect that, due to the subjectivity of human experience, some subset are going to be forever unaccounted for. We weren't all there. We don't know what was seen or not seen.

In short: It is perfectly reasonable that the US military has been investigating sightings since the late 1940s and continues to, and indeed we should expect them to. We should be more shocked if they weren't, frankly.

Okay, I owe you a part 2 and it's about witnessing, evidence, how we make scientific knowledge, both practically and theoretically. New thread tomorrow? Or today?

*And they investigate tens of thousands, lulz

And also part 3 about how and when pilots become UNWILLING to report - it's not because of the military. It's because of the rest of us.