SETI chief says US has no evidence for alien technology.

The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so.

To help visualize why, Diamond urges people to try a thought experiment.

If you sent that spacecraft to our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, it would take 80,000 years to get there," said Diamond. "Any civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension.

If such beings exist, they would likely send hardware here first and not biology, and they certainly wouldn't crash-land in our deserts

One other scoop of skepticism Diamond added is that every single UFO — now tied to the term Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — are all "accidental observations.

Therefore, they are highly unreliable. They don't have instrumentation, technology, or methodology to discern what they are looking at," said Diamond

https://www.space.com/seti-chief-bill-di...visitation

To help visualize why, Diamond urges people to try a thought experiment.

If you sent that spacecraft to our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, it would take 80,000 years to get there," said Diamond. "Any civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension.

If such beings exist, they would likely send hardware here first and not biology, and they certainly wouldn't crash-land in our deserts

I find the evidence lacking at this stage, but refutations based on thought experiments such as the one above are embarrassing for the debunker.  Using pure, not well thought out conjecture to counter what you see as conjecture is just bad faith argumentation.

https://www.space.com/seti-chief-bill-di...visitation

A closed-minded biased seemingly ignorant trashing of a vast and real phenomenon having been observed by many highly qualified observers over many years. Probably politically motivated, and has nothing to do with truth or actual investigations.

I find the evidence lacking at this stage, but refutations based on thought experiments such as the one above are embarrassing for the debunker.  Using pure, not well thought out conjecture to counter what you see as conjecture is just bad faith argumentation.

How do you see this conjecture as not well thought out? I find his arguments extremely logical and in agreement with science used in common consumer applications.

A closed-minded biased seemingly ignorant trashing of a vast and real phenomenon having been observed by many highly qualified observers over many years. Probably politically motivated, and has nothing to do with truth or actual investigations.

The inevitable but meaningless handwave and void of facts or logic.  Probably emotionally motivated and nothing to do with open minded intelligent thinking.

The inevitable but meaningless handwave and void of facts or logic.  Probably emotionally motivated and nothing to do with open minded intelligent thinking.

These words are actually a fairly good description of Diamond's apparently deliberately ignorant statement casually dismissing UFOs/UAPs.

I find the evidence lacking at this stage, but refutations based on thought experiments such as the one above are embarrassing for the debunker.  Using pure, not well thought out conjecture to counter what you see as conjecture is just bad faith argumentation.

I think the claim that all UAP are just accidental observations to be poorly thought out, but I am more accepting of the argument that possession of alien technology is unlikely.

That said I do think a lot of UFO armchair debunking is pretty weak, as noted in this previously posted discussion that I think serves as a good baseline: