Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Up close and personal! Scene from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers circa 1956.
Image credit: Columbia Pictures

Skeptic magazine publisher and historian of science Michael Shermer has issued a $1,000 bet that discovery or disclosure of alien visitation to Earth in the form of UFOs, UAPs, or any other technological artifact or alien biological form, as confirmed by major scientific institutions and government agencies, will not happen by December 31, 2030.

And what better person to take on Shermer’s bet than Harvard astronomer and Director of the Galileo Project, Avi Loeb.

Oddsmakers: Avi Loeb (Left), Michael Shermer (right).
Image credit: Skeptics Society

Detailed terms

The detailed terms of the Shermer-Loeb wager:

By December 31, 2030, at least two of these three scientific organizations

• NASA
• the National Science Foundation
• American Astronomical Society

will affirm that discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence in the form of UAPs, UFOs, or any other interstellar objects that are determined to be ETI technological in nature, or any alien biological life form found here on Earth, has been made.

Credit: Orbitz

The wager is placed through the Long Now Foundation’s “Long Bets” program.

“Predictor” Shermer’s argument

Since the founding of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine in 1992, I have been documenting predictions by UFOlogists that discovery or disclosure of alien visitation to Earth is coming any day now.

Believers appear in the media boldly predicting that by the end of the year we will have proof of alien contact—33 years later I’m still waiting for said proof. More recently, proponents of UAPs as alien spacecraft have appeared before the U.S. Congress, confidently claiming that they know people who have seen and even touched aliens and/or their spaceships, back-engineered their technologies, and even communicated with the aliens.

Yet when pushed for evidence, they always demur, saying that it’s “classified,” “top-secret,” that Men-in-Black threatened them into silence, that their careers and even their lives are at stake if they disclose said evidence, that they could only reveal the evidence in a “SCIF” (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) but not in Congress, and that many people in the U.S. government, CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. (never named) have this information and evidence of alien visitation.

The purpose of this bet, in keeping with the rules of Long Bets and the philosophy of the Long Now Foundation, is to reveal the actual confidence of UFO/UAP alien believers by getting them to put their money where their beliefs appear to be.

You say we will have alien disclosure by the end of the year? O-kay, let’s place a wager on that prediction. I say it won’t happen.

Credit: Piplsay

“Challenger” Avi Loeb’s argument

The search for technological artifacts has just started in earnest in 2025 with the discovery of the anomalous interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, the launch of the Rubin Observatory and the construction of three Galileo Project Observatories.

Given that there are billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way galaxy—most of which are billions of years older than the solar system, and that it will take less than a billion years for our Voyager spacecraft to cross the Milky-Way disk, we must engage in the scientific search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts.

It is better to be an optimist because life is sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why I am engaged in the search with the hope that we will find a partner on our blind date with interstellar objects.

The $1,000 stakes will go to Galileo Project Foundation if Shermer wins, or if Loeb wins, the money goes to the Galileo Project Foundation.

The bet stretches over 5 years in duration.

For more details, go to:

https://longbets.org/964/