The House subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs met in July 2023 to discuss affairs so foreign that they may not even be of this world. During the meeting, several military officers testified that unidentified anomalous phenomena – the government’s name for UFOs – pose a threat to national security.

Their testimony may have raised eyebrows in the chamber, but there’s still no public physical evidence of extraterrestrial life. In fact, most UFO sightings have earthly explanations, from tricks of the light to weather balloons.

Whether or not these testimonials hold any grains of truth, some scholars argue that simply by listening for signs of extraterrestrials, we’re already engaging in the first phase of contact with alien life.

These four articles from our archives dive into what went down during the subcommittee hearing, why perceived UFO sightings usually have human explanations, and how humanity can learn from history when it comes to engaging with extraterrestrials.

1. Whistleblower allegations

The most interesting testimony of the July 26 subcommittee hearing came from ex-Air Force Intelligence Officer David Grusch, who claimed that the U.S. has nonhuman biological material recovered from a UFO crash site. The Pentagon has denied this claim, and it has denied the existence of any program designed to retrieve and reverse-engineer crashed UFOs.

All witnesses at the hearing advocated for more government transparency around reports of UFOs. Intelligence agencies and the Pentagon currently steward this data, most of which is not public. While having access to more data may help understand what’s going on, as the University of Arizona’s Chris Impey put it, “the gold standard is physical evidence.”

2. Sociological explanations

Again, while no physical evidence has been made public, anyone surfing the internet can see plenty of alleged UFO videos, photos and stories. Barry Markovsky, from the University of South Carolina, is a sociologist of shared beliefs and misconceptions who explained why UFOs seem to captivate the public every few years.

People want explanations for ambiguous situations, and they’re easily influenced by others. Social media enables a concept called bottom-up social diffusion. Say one user posts a blurry video claiming it depicts a UFO. It’s easy for that user’s network to see and repost the video and so on, until it goes viral. Then, when organized institutions like news outlets or government sources publish UFO-related information, that’s called top-down social diffusion.

“Diffusion processes can combine into self-reinforcing loops. Mass media spreads UFO content and piques worldwide interest in UFOs. More people aim their cameras at the skies, creating more opportunities to capture and share odd-looking content,” Markovsky wrote. “Poorly documented UFO pics and videos spread on social media, leading media outlets to grab and republish the most intriguing. Whistleblowers emerge periodically, fanning the flames with claims of secret evidence.”

3. Signature detection

While UFOs might have traction on social media, it’s likely that the first trace of extraterrestrial life won’t come from a crashed alien spaceship. Instead, scientists could potentially pick up signals like radio waves or pollution from some distant galaxy that might indicate extraterrestrial technology.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a group of scientists all working on the search for extraterrestrial life. Part of what they do is listen for these “technosignatures”.

As two astronomers who work on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Penn State’s Macy Huston and Jason Wright wrote about how humans often unintentionally broadcast signals like radio waves into space. In theory, extraterrestrial civilizations could be doing the same thing – and if scientists can pick up on these signals, they might have their first hints at alien life.

“However, this approach assumes that extraterrestrial civilizations want to communicate with other technologically advanced life,” Huston and Wright explained. “Humans very rarely send targeted signals into space, and some scholars argue that intelligent species may purposefully avoid broadcasting out their locations. This search for signals that no one may be sending is called the SETI Paradox.”

4. Ethical considerations

While the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence hasn’t yet detected any extraterrestrial technosignatures, a working group of interdisciplinary scholars in Indigenous studies argued that the act of listening for these signals may already count as engaging in first contact with extraterrestrial life.

The Indigenous studies working group argued that first contact may not be just one event – rather, you can think of it as a long phase that begins with listening and planning. Listening can be an act of surveillance, and with that comes ethical considerations.

But research groups like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence don’t often include perspectives from the humanities, even though there are many histories of first contact between groups of people here on Earth to draw from.

James Cook’s 1768 voyage to Oceania, for example, was planned as scientific exploration. But its legacy of genocide still affects the Indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand today.

“The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing,” wrote David Shorter, William Lempert and Kim Tallbear. “No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.”

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Mary Magnuson, Assistant Science Editor, The Conversation

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Suppose you have an issue you are really passionate about – taxes, gun control or some other important policy. You want to do more than vent on social media, so you decide to write an email, place a phone call or even draft a letter to your state legislator expressing your views.

As a citizen, I would praise your sense of civic responsibility and willingness to express your opinion. As a scholar, I would encourage your efforts – they’re more consequential than many people realize.

I teach communication and public policy at Michigan State University and study how constitutents’ communication with lawmakers affects public policy decisions.

In my previous research, I analyzed – with their permission – the efforts of coalitions working to get citizens to contact their lawmakers in support of major legislation in New Hampshire and Michigan. I conducted a rigorous evaluation of the types of contact constituents made, the messages they conveyed and the behavior of lawmakers both before and after receiving those communications.

The results showed that communications from constituents can have a large impact on how legislators vote. For example, emails from constituents encouraging policymakers to support smoke-free workplace bills in New Hampshire increased state legislators’ support on critical votes by an estimated 20 percentage points – a substantial effect.

But a lot of people don’t bother to contact their elected officials, thinking it’s not worth communicating with them.

In today’s polarized political environment, is it possible to get through to policymakers from the other side?

Discounting opposing views

Some work, including my own mentioned above, suggests that policymakers are responsive to communications from the public. But research has also shown that policymakers engage in what’s called biased reasoning, writing off communications from constituents who do not share their policy views.

For instance, political scientists Daniel Butler and Adam Dynes asked state and local policymakers in two online surveys to evaluate a hypothetical communication from a constituent. Policymakers were randomly assigned to evaluate a letter that either supported or opposed a controversial policy and then rated the hypothetical writer letter on various characteristics.

The authors found that policymakers rated hypothetical constituents who disagreed with them as less knowledgeable about the topic. This discounting of constituents who disagree on policy could explain why policymakers tend to have biased perceptions of public opinion, believing the public’s attitudes to be more in line with their own positions than polling suggests.

Is there a way to prevent lawmakers from writing off constituents’ perspectives?

Do your research

In recent work with political communication scholars Hillary Shulman and Dustin Carnahan, I sought to develop strategies to limit policymakers’ discounting of constituents’ opinions.

We asked a national sample of elected local policymakers – among them city council members – to evaluate a hypothetical email writer randomly assigned to express support or opposition to raising the minimum wage. The survey was fielded by Civic Pulse, which specializes in samples of elected officials.

This study was similar to the Butler and Dynes study described above. But we added two randomly assigned conditions – what we called a “read” condition in which the writer expressed having “read a lot about” the topic, without any specific detail, or a “cite” condition in which the writer summarized and cited a study supporting their position.

We anticipated, based on research on biased reasoning, that providing clear evidence that the constituent is knowledgeable about the issue would prevent biased discounting of constituent opinion.

Policymakers in our study were asked to evaluate to what extent they thought that the constituent understood the issue, was representative of the community, and was sincere and held their position strongly, and whether they thought the communication was a form letter rather than a constituent-intitiated communication – and therefore presumably more likely to be written off.

How to not be written off

The results confirmed previous findings that policymakers indeed discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree. When policymakers read an email expressing an opinion that differed from their own on raising the minimum wage, the email writer was rated lower across all five dimensions.

However, if the email writer provided evidence that they knew about the issue – citing research supporting their position – policymakers were more likely to perceive that the email writer understood the issue. The effects of citing evidence are stronger than simply stating that one has read about the issue.

My own work suggests that a constituent expressing an opinion to an elected official can influence the official’s vote on the issue. But just writing to an official is no guarantee that the constituent will persuade the official or have the issue resolved in the way they prefer.

Our study is important in identifying a way constituents can avoid being written off.

We also found that there are no downsides to providing evidence supporting one’s position.

You might expect that when provided with unambiguous evidence that a disagreeing constituent understands the issue, policymakers might direct their efforts to discounting other constituent characteristics, rating the constituent as less sincere or less representative of the community.

We did not find any evidence that this happened. When faced with evidence that their constituent knows the issue well, policymakers are less likely to discount their opinions.

How to be heard

The practical results are clear: When communicating with a policymaker, especially one with whom you disagree, you want to stop them from discounting your opinion. One way to do this is by citing quality evidence to support your position.

While this advice seems straightforward, it did not appear in guides we surveyed created by citizen groups like the Sierra Club, ACLU or Christian Coalition.

When contacting a policymaker about an issue, be aware that they may discount your opinion if they disagree.

But note also that carefully crafted communications can convey your position without being written off – and could improve how accurately the policymaker understands public attitudes about public policies.

Daniel E Bergan, Associate Professor in Communication & Public Policy, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As a woman in my 30s who was constantly typing “ADHD” into my computer, I had something interesting happen to me in 2021. I started receiving a wave of advertisements beckoning me to get online help for ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. One was a free, one-minute assessment to find out if I had the disorder, another an offer for a digital game that could help “rewire” my brain. Yet another ad asked me if I was “delivering” but still not moving up at work.

The reason the term ADHD litters my digital life is because I am a clinical psychologist who exclusively treats patients with ADHD. I’m also a psychiatric researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine who studies ADHD trends across the life span.

But these advertisements were a striking new trend.

The following year, in October 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a nationwide shortage of mixed amphetamine salts, a drug that is marketed as Adderall. The brand name Adderall and its generic counterparts have become one of the most common medication treatments for ADHD. Over the next several months, additional ADHD medications joined Adderall on the list of prescription drugs in short supply.

As of August 2023, the U.S. is still experiencing a shortage of several ADHD medications, with some not expected to be resolved for at least a few more months.

The shortage appears to have been triggered by a combination of high demand and access to key ingredients. In recent months, millions of Americans have found themselves with no guarantee of access to their daily medications.

In March 2023, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an unprecedented spike in stimulant prescriptions between 2020 and 2021. Perhaps most surprising was that the demographic showing the greatest increases in stimulant use – an increase of almost 20% in one year – were in women in their 20s and 30s.

The CDC’s findings, along with the stimulant shortage, raise some interesting – and still unanswered – questions about what factors are driving these trends.

The challenge of diagnosing adult ADHD

Despite the growth in awareness of ADHD over the past couple of decades, many people with ADHD, particularly women and people of color, go undiagnosed in childhood.

But unlike depression or anxiety, ADHD is quite complicated to diagnose in adults.

Diagnosing ADHD in either kids or adults first involves establishing that ADHD-like traits, which exist on a continuum and can fluctuate, are severe and chronic enough to prevent a person from living a normal, healthy life.

The average person has a couple of symptoms of ADHD, so it can be hard to draw the line between ADHD-like tendencies – such as a tendency to lose keys, having a messy desk or often finding your mind wandering during a dull task – and a diagnosable medical disorder. There is no objective test to diagnose ADHD, so doctors typically conduct a structured patient interview, ask family members to fill out rating scales and review official records to come up with an actual diagnosis.

Diagnostic challenges can also arise for psychiatrists and other health care practitioners because ADHD shares features with many other conditions. In fact, difficulty concentrating is the second most common symptom across all psychiatric disorders.

Further complicating things, ADHD is also a risk factor for many of the conditions that it resembles. For example, years of negative feedback may lead some adults with ADHD to develop secondary depression and anxiety. Zeroing in on the correct diagnosis requires a well-trained clinician who is able to take enough time to thoroughly gather necessary patient history.

Stress of the COVID-19 pandemic

Looking back, some clear factors have been at play, but it remains unclear the degree to which they are driving the spike in stimulant prescriptions.

In 2021, the U.S. was still deep in the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. People were still losing jobs, facing financial strains and juggling work-from-home challenges such as having children at home doing online schooling. Many families were losing loved ones, and there was a huge sense of uncertainty over when normal life would return.

The demands of the pandemic took a toll on everyone, but research shows that women may have been disproportionately affected. This may have led to a greater proportion of adults seeking stimulant treatments to help them keep up with the demands of daily life.

In addition, without access to in-person recreational spaces, the pandemic increasingly drove many people to spending more time on digital media.

In 2021, a social justice movement focused on “neurodiversity” was gaining momentum online. Neurodiversity is a nonmedical term that refers to the wide diversity of brain processes that diverge from what has traditionally been considered “typical.” In this moment, #ADHD became the seventh most popular health topic on TikTok. Relatable anecdotes of missing keys, procrastination, romantic mishaps and secret signs of ADHD began to flood the internet.

But while the internet exploded with ADHD content, researchers in Canada began sorting #ADHD TikTok videos into categories based on their accuracy and helpfulness. They reported something important: A majority of #ADHD content was misleading. Only 21% of the posts provided useful and accurate information.

So, amid the growing online community of newly self-diagnosed people with ADHD, many probably did not actually have the condition. For some, cybochondria – or health-focused anxiety after online searching – may have been creeping in. Others may have mistaken ADHD for another condition, which is surprisingly easy to do. Still others may have had mild attentional issues that do not rise to the severity of ADHD.

What ADHD care looked like in 2021

In 2021, the U.S. mental health system was overloaded. Most traditional ADHD providers such as psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health therapists and psychiatric nurse practitioners, had monthslong wait lists for new patients. People who were newly seeking help for ADHD found faster appointments with their primary care providers, who may or may not be comfortable diagnosing and treating adult ADHD. Since demand for ADHD care exceeded capacity, new options were needed to meet patient needs.

Around that time, online ADHD care startups began to pop up, reaching prospective consumers with appealing digital ads like the ones I received.

Compared with traditional care, the startup models were reportedly using cost-cutting methods, such as favoring quick assessments and a low-cost workforce. The startups were also reported to be relying on a uniform care model that did not adequately personalize treatments, often prescribing stimulants over treatments that may have been better indicated.

Some of these companies are now under investigation by the federal government.

Although they were controversial in the medical community, these models may also have reduced barriers to ADHD care for many people.

The verdict is still out

Until the CDC releases its 2022 and 2023 stimulant prescription data, researchers like me will not know whether the 2021 trends of increased prescribing to adults and high demand for ADHD medications will continue.

If the trends stabilize, it may mean that patients who have been unable to access care may finally be getting the help they need.

If ADHD prescribing returns to pre-pandemic levels, we may learn that a perfect storm of COVID-19-related factors caused a momentary blip in people seeking ADHD treatment.

What is clear is that the current shortage of mental health care workers who feel comfortable diagnosing and treating ADHD in adults will continue to affect the ability of new patients to get proper diagnostic evaluation for ADHD.

Margaret Sibley, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.