...well, duh. Of course they're real, but color me a skeptic: just because something isn't identified doesn't make it extraterrestrial. Just means that whoever spotted it didn't know what it was.
Lots of fun being had about the US military UFO release, and mostly just amusing but not really important or meaningful, but it's weird to me when people try to parse meaning into the whole search for extraterrestrial life/intelligence. And then we hit my triggers...
This Dylan Matthews article is very myopic about things. Also, it isn't even wrong. He posits there are exactly 3 possibilities and 2 of them are "alarming" and the only one that isn't is that some UFOs (pardon: UAPs) are actually some visit by a probe or something from an extraterrestrial based intelligence. [eye-roll emoji]
Of course, that's just BS. If you really want to align your variables correctly there are more possibilities than just those 3 and there's a pretty damned good chance that at least one of those is more likely than the 3 mentioned. One issue is our ability to detect intelligent life. We think we know what we're looking for but we don't actually. We're looking for us (carbon based life requiring liquid water), but that may not be the only path.
Next, we're looking at the past. Even in our own galaxy, when we look across the disk, we can be looking 10s to 100s of thousands of years in the past: 100,000 years ago we weren't disturbing the EM spectrum either. When we look to galaxies outside of our own we are looking even further into the past and whenever you look backwards in time you are less likely to find advanced intelligence than if you could look forward.
We also aren't seeing everything: there's a lot of obscuring dust in the Milky Way so when we look across our galaxy there is a lot that is hidden from us and it's hard to know exactly what that is--we know about how much mass there is and rough distribution but planets with intelligent life? nah. On a larger scale dark matter (and dark energy) make up (much) more of the universe than things we can see, and there is no way for us to know what is hiding in that dark (probably not intelligent life).
Even the things we can see we don't really see all that well. Stars are big and bright, and yet even those can be barely a pixel wide in a telescopic field of view. Planets we "see" through gravitational wobble or dimming of the star they orbit...but small mass planets (like Earth) that orbit at an angle relative to our observation are going to be all but invisible, and even if some lifeform is pumping em-radiation out into space, it is going to pale in comparison to the star, and will mostly disappear into the background. ...and all that is for observations in our own galaxy!
I'll grant that the "calculations" that people do to try and figure out the probability of intelligent life pretend to factor at least some of that in, but the fact is that all of those "equations"--going back to the Drake equation that started it all--are overloaded with wild ass guesses. They really aren't even educated guesses (hypothesis) as we don't have any other data from which to make an educated guess. We have a single data point for intelligent life in the universe: us. The probability that we are alone in the universe is between 0 and 100% (actual between, not inclusive).
The vastness of space-time and the brevity of our stint as "intelligent" life on this planet should be a stronger indicator to someone who writes about science that we don't really know all that much, but no, there are only 3 options, 2 are bad, and the last is unlikely at best. Whatever, dude.
