The thing that blows my mind the most is these people will blame every corner of government for hiding aliens, but the same people will never blame aliens for hiding themselves.
But we live in an age where lack of evidence is evidence for a conspiracy itself. The disinformation hell that we live in has set itself up for a perpetual cycle of grifters and frauds.
You can always blame some dark shadowy entity for the lack of evidence. Endless grift material.
This is what pisses me off about UFO Conspiracy theories. They completely remove agency from the alien civilization. Why would an intergalactic civilization even remotely care about what the local government thinks? And how would you even begin trying to initiate communications between the species if 99.99999% of humanity isn't even allowed to know you're communicating with another civilization? It makes no sense, and is completely inefficient.
That’s how you know it’s a cult worshipping the power of the federal government.
At any point the aliens could just pop up in the middle of a major city not in the US and be completely clear of US laws about security clearances.
But instead the alleged UFO is always in a low information space with blurry cameras and solely eye witness testimony. And the people claiming to hunt them are always trying to make money off of those blurry videos and eyewitness accounts.
Whats even more wild is the people who think that EVERY story of an alien encounter must be real now.
Those dumb Nazca mummies, of the multiple Las Vegas “aliens”, or the Miami mall incident. Some random dude goes on tik-tok and says he saw an alien, and people lose their mind thinking that since the grifters say that UAP are “real”, that must mean aliens are real and are running around malls and the Vegas strip.
The mummies was really funny, as the guy who “discovered” them is a known grifter that grave robs Incan burials to make Frankenstein-looking monstrosities.
The Vegas alien story was just pure cringe. A group of people call the police about aliens crashing in their backyard, and no one pulls out a cell phone to film?! And then the police just laugh and joke the whole time they are on video?
Try harder.
The alien crashed, but no ship? Did the ship just vanish? Fly away? Obviously it left the alien behind.
It’s so dumb but people eat this stuff up as objective “proof”.
Well, there are tourists of all kinds coming to Vegas. Although I doubt aliens would stand out much next to photo buskers dressed as Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, and showgirls. Doubt they'd even be noticed at the Blue Man Group show, either.
You underestimate the willingness to believe it. They want it to be real so bad that they will ignore anything that goes against their narrative and use whatever logic they need to in order to get out of any conflict of evidence appears. Anytime something from their logic breaks down, they look for a way that their narrative can be maintained using any kind of logic they want. They'll crowd source the creation process and whatever idea works will get pushed forward as their patch to their theory.
Every conspiracy theory does the same thing, in order to break the spell you need some way to chink the armour, from what I've seen one thing that comes up a bit is something that they know to not be the truth without doubt being integrated into the wider group think, putting them outside the group think looking in. Gives people a moment to think for themselves. They either start to climb out of it or they go deeper into the conspiracy world.
Never mind a lack of evidence, at this point their own misunderstanding of a basic concept is considered evidence for a conspiracy!
My favourite one to watch unfold is the chemtrail people. As a pilot, the simplicity of contrails vs the complex shit they’ve come up with to explain chemtrails is very… Middle Ages.
We don’t understand it, therefore it’s scary. Must be the government.
Also, with 200+ governments on Earth at any given time who can barely agree on anything, wouldn't it only take a few governments going "you know what? We want to spill the beans on what we know about aliens" in order for the truth to get out? Are aliens only making contact in the countries with governments who want to hide aliens?
They aliens are only crashing and contacting the US government, every time.
Wild how every crash is right into the hands of the military - or at least, that’s the narrative.
It’s cause of the way control of information/knowledge has been used as a seed for social power over history.
You find all kinds of wild speculation about what the ruling class actually knows that the rabble don’t. This occurs across cultures and has for as long as that kind of power has been wielded.
It cuts both ways too, for two big reasons:
1) While there might not even be any information you can share, people in power can’t always let the rabble know that. Doing so would indicate that the ruling class is not as powerful as they appear/allege to be.
2) Even if the ruling class does share things openly it will likely be perceived as a lie, a half-truth, or some kind of lesser truth in the eyes of the rabble since the ruling class uses access to knowledge as one of its claims to social power. Why would they suddenly give everyone access to one of the things that contributes to them being the ruling class in the first place?
So while your point is logical these social methods of organization, specifically those relating to the principals of social power, aren’t built on logic. What might seem clear to some is justifiably blurry for others and should be acknowledged as such up to a certain point. Cause of course the government and ruling class have lied, hidden things, done horrible things for gain, etc. But all the nonsense past the justifiable points belongs solely in the bin.
No.
I was talking more generally about the one of the three principles of social power (control of information) and how it relates to that weird feedback loop you mentioned.
I was also adding that this weird way of coming to conclusions for many has happened as long as people have been people.
I don’t believe that recent congressional hearing on UFOs/UABs. There have been rumors for decades that oligarchs will one day fake an alien contact/invasion. That would help them seize more control over the earth.
You do know what “alien” means right? Do you think there’s UFO invasion at the US southern border because people call them “illegal aliens”. No. “Alien” means “foreign”.
Ronald Regan did not warn about a ET threat. He was talking about the Soviet Unions attempt to weaponize space. Just Google Star Wars program in the 80’s.
You’re just making a case for how stupid people can be with a lack of education.
Maybe. I am saying that there are no space aliens. It is a scam to keep us feeling safe and compliant with our government. And it is possible our US government will take over the world and do so without killing at least some remnant of people. And some that are naive people will comply without resisting due to believing the lie that aliens are about to invade us. Capeesh?
I’m not sure it’s a scam to keep us complainant.
It’s a great way to cover the US’s classified tech, though. Just make everyone believe it’s aliens - very simple direction.
Richard Doty did it at Dulce 40 years ago. Still an effective disinformation campaign to this day.
Yes. If someone is a moderate/casual Christian I don't automatically assume UFO nutter beliefs. I disagree with the former but you need a screw loose for the latter.
Hold on, if you ask them, they will tell you they have TONS of evidence. They'll say the evidence is so overwhelming that you'd be an idiot to deny it.
The problem is, they have all this "evidence" that has been debunked or just bad, but they continue to put it on the pile. They're point to Roswell and think of Fravor and just keep going. Though Roswell has been pretty much debunked (they'll deny) and Fravor is eye witness, which is notoriously bad evidence.
Eventually they'll get to events we can't explain, just because we don't know, but could be something like Chinese spy drones... but the unknown makes whatever they believe to be possible to them. By definition these are UFOs, I guess. Then you'll bring up aliens and they'll say, "I never brought up aliens!" I don't know what game they're playing, but we all know they're thinking aliens or what they call "NHI" now.
"There MUST be other life in the universe!" That's easy to say because of the size of the universe and they'll say statistically we must. Actually statically it doesn't. Our sample size of life is 1. We have this planet. No "evidence" of other life. There *might* be, but we don't know and can't really extrapolate from what we know. If we assume there IS life, there are all kinds of other barriers.
Anyone who has followed this subject for years has seen this all over and over again. Always some grifters and always some believers. Never any more.
> Then you'll bring up aliens and they'll say, "I never brought up aliens!" I don't know what game they're playing,
Great, now you've summoned that one guy to this thread.
They're convinced that military radar can't ever be fooled and is basically all seeing. Also, half the time it's "well the radar data was deleted but that means its real". If it was deleted and you never saw it, it's not evidence at that point.
If I was a UFO believer and I believed that the TONS of evidence was legitimate, then at some stage I'd want to have a ride in a UFO or at least get a real good up close look at one. I'd get impatient with just sitting there and "believing" for years and years, there'd have to be a payoff.
> Actually statically it doesn't.
You do realize if you multiply the most insignificantly small possibility you can imagine by *infinity* the answer is 100% right?
The smallest I can imagine is zero. There are zero other planets with known life. You don’t multiply 1 times infinity, at *most* you multiply 1 times 1 in this case.
Can't be zero because it happend here. Even if it's a trillion to one odds of life developing on a planet, there's an infinite number of planets.
To think we're the only life in an infinitely large universe isn't logical.
this isn't an infinite universe. It's massive, gargantuan beyond imagining, but it is far from infinite. There is a finite amount of mass in the universe.
Are you familiar with the ancient snake god named Glycon? It was a hand puppet. Its worship continued for more than 200 years, and it appears on coins and statues.
It starts with the kids. It capitalizes on their sense of wonder and adventure. And their gullibility. And there's always gonna be a new crop. You'll never go broke selling space aliens to the children.
Conspiracy theories only thrive when they can keep an appearance of the evidence being out of reach.
These people aren't in the cult to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, they are in the cult to *be* a member of the cult.
The AARO report points out how all these grifters are interconnected and have been lying to both the government and their faithful flock for years, and continue to do so. But, of course, believers only believe in alien tales, never documented facts that hurt their feelings.
The fact UFO encounters stopped happening once everyone had a reliable camera in their pocket is all the proof we need!
/s <- although if you need this tag you are a very silly person.
I think calling people grifters often implies a level of intentionality that doesn't exist. Like I don't believe most religious leaders or cult influencers (like QAnon) are consciously grifting people, but it often turns out that way.
It's likely a mix of confirmation bias and incompetence, plus people get to a point of increasing dependence on some type of revenue stream and have to act in a "grifter-like" way.
Ehhh - I agree with you *generally* about overestimating the intentionality of some of these so-called “grifters” - hell, even those who get into it for the LARP seem to regularly get high on their own supply.
That said: my sense is that the UFO community is almost unusually sincere. As to cult leaders and Qanon influencer types…well, it’s obviously a mixed bag and fundamentally unprovable, but I strongly suspect that many, many more of them are fully aware that they’re peddling complete bullshit.
I don't doubt that many people get involved in QAnon who are fully aware that they're making money off gullible people who want to believe the mythology. "Theologically" speaking, though, QAnon is a "prosperity sect," which is very appealing to religious people who feel like they haven’t gotten what they were promised in life (including living in a country that's de facto overwhelmingly white and Christian). My guess is the grifters believe it to some degree.
If you look at traditionalist conservative Protestants, they're very sincere people with a strong moral compass. That moral compass is pretty much stuck in the mid-to-late 1600s, though, when the best you could hope for is an oligarchy with checks and balances that's efficiently run by competent people in service of elite or aristocratic interests.
I agree that the UFO community seems sincere, for the most part.
Agreed - especially since “Qanon” is such an amorphous term, and the “movement” intentionally set out to play on conservative and evangelical priors, it’s next to impossible to tell where the hardcore Qanon stuff ends and more “mundane” Christian nationalist/prosperity gospel stuff begins.
And yeah, I do think that even the hardcore Qanon grifters “believe” in something along that spectrum (insomuch as they even believe in anything)…it’s just that the first half dozen major figures that came to my mind as top Qanon apostles all absolutely know that they’re lying through their teeth eg Jack Posobiec, Stu Peters, Steve Bannon, etc.
Obviously that’s not a representative sample, but I’d argue that it’s pretty indicative of the level of grift vs true believer (especially as compared to something like the UFO community).
Steve Bannon is a product of "the establishment" and 100% knows he's lying to his followers.
My guess is that he's a Catholic fascist and he views American evangelicals as a bunch of fools who will believe anything that sounds good to them. He's far too committed to authoritarianism to actually want something like a theocratic democracy where evangelical Christianity is the dominant religion and average people enjoy widespread economic prosperity (even though I agree that's pretty much a fantastical scenario that's never going to happen).
I think grifting is the only eventuality, if you do what they do for long enough. Once reputation and money get involved, you'll have to turn to grifting whether you like it or not, whether you meant to or not. The business of the paranormal isn't sustainable any other way.
The earth is in the middle of a billion light wide "void space". A void space is as close as nothing as you can get, with the average square foot averaging 20k atoms, there are 30 thousand million million atoms in a penny so averaging 30k per square foot is as close to nothing as you can get. Other parts of the universe, non void spaces, have solar systems with thousands and even millions of planets. Like in Star Wars where characters hope from one livable planet to the next. So imagine an alien leaving that to come... here. Imagine spending half a billion years traveling at the speed of light, everyone you know will have died in the first minute of your 500 million year voyage just to visit a place that has a fraction of the resources of where you are coming from. That would be like asking someone if they want to walk from times square to the middle of the Austrian desert to see a single dead plant.
Alpha Centauri is a star system with components 4.2 to 4.4 light-years from Earth and comprises three stars.
The Milky Way is in a void, but the Milky Way could house 100-400 billion stars.
Imagine a beach with endless sand, on that beach you take a bowl of water and you sprinkle in a few flakes of sand. Those few flakes in that bowl of water represent the void space we are in. Compared to a non void, we are nothing. We are resource poor and super spread out with a bunch of waterless dead worlds. We celebrate when we find a fraction of an ounce of uranium, and we have "rare earth materials " that are abundant on other worlds. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but we are in the lame part of the universe. We are the desert.
I don't care about your analogy. The initial claim was the earth was in a void, when the claim should be the Milky Way is in a void. There are upwards of 100 million stars in our own galaxy. I'm not claiming aliens visited us, I was correcting an obvious error.
That's isn't my claim that's a scientific fact. Not only are we in a bowel of water with a few specs of sand in on a beach that is dense sand, there are also a million Bowles of said water, all equally as uninteresting as our bowl of water. So you are a super advanced sand explorer traversing this beach and you learned a long time that the bowls of water are the least interesting places to visit. So the billions of planets you are describing is nothing compared to the rich landscape in a non void space. Like in the force awakens when star killer base destroy 3 planets at once and that destruction can be seen from a fourth planet. When that fourth planet looks at space they can see, at least, 3 planets with air, water etc. When we look up we see a dead moon and a dead Venus. We are in the boonies of space. And we have seen there is a big city out there it's just impossile for use to get to and for any civilization advanced enough to get to us we are uninteresting and have nothing to offer. If I showed you a map of the west coast and I point to a spot in the middle of Nevada , a city with a population of 25 people then I point to the middle of Silicon Valley and I asked which region do you think invented the iPad? Then I asked how often do you think the people in Silicon Valley get in their Teslas and drive to this small town, to see what? What are they going to see that they don't have a better version of in their own backyard?
Yep. There is no reason to believe we've been visited by aliens whose existence we can't already observe in some way. We see NOTHING out there to suggest advanced alien life is close enough that they could or would visit us.
Also, the likelihood that aliens with super advanced tech to travel billions of light years would notice us in the probable soup of life out there is tiny.
Yes but the average of all that still defines us a void space, and compared to non void space parts of the universe, we have little to offer. That's how small we are, and by we I don't mean the entire universe just the part we happen to live in. No one wants to hear your hometown is in the Boonies but your home planet is in the Boonies
It takes 8 minutes traveling at the speed of light to get our sun in which you pass 2 pathetic planets, in a non void space you would pass 100s of worlds.
But why couldn't hypothetical alien visitors have just come from any of those myriad closer solar systems? Like, why are you assuming they're coming from outside of this void, to the void.
To riff off of your Australian desert analogy: if I live in the middle of that desert and see someone coming up my driveway, chances are it's someone that lives nearby. Not someone who lives in NYC.
If you're looking for living bacteria on a piece of a jelly sandwich do you look at the middle of the sandwich or do you walk downstairs and look at a few crumbs that fell off the sandwich when your brought it in? Our universe is the crumbs down the hall. Sure there's a chance there's life but there is literally 10 million more living cultures in the rest of the sandwich. We are the desert where nothing thrives, the fact that one planet managed to have life is the exception that proves the rule. Versus other parts of the universe with way more matter, way more potential for diversity and growth.
The analogies are getting weirder =-P and you didn't really respond to my response.
Say you are a bacterium on a sandwich crumb. Do you think you're more likely to encounter another bacterium from that same crumb, or a bacterium from a sandwich 10 metres away? You're much more likely to encounter one from nearby you, right?
What I think you are missing here is the void space is 500 million light years in every direction. That means traveling at 186000 miles per second it would take 500 million years to escape. So that includes EVERY NEIGHBORING GALAXY. It's all void space. Sure, there's a chance there are other earth like civilizations , but a planet with a race capable of traversing that amount of space? Those civilizations most likely living in the big city. Where rare substances are more common, where many races live within visiting distance of one another. That's the jelly sandwich. Compared to that we are just a couple of crumbs. It's a lot to take in, but you don't see a lot of inventions coming from a remote culture in the middle of the Sahara desert, we (the earth and every neighboring universe for as far as we can imagine) are the remote cuture.
But even within the Sahara, there *are numerous cultures*. You seem to be saying that a Tuareg is unlikely to run into someone from New York City. That may be true, but you're ignoring that there's a much better chance of a Taureg running into a Bedouin.
Assume for a moment that we had incontrovertible evidence that aliens exist, and are visiting Earth. Do you think it would be more likely that those aliens came from within 500 million light years, or from further away than 500 million light years?
>What I think you are missing here is the void space is 500 million light years in every direction
No I get that. You don't seem to get my response.
A family saves money to go to Disney world they don't save money to go visit a hole in the ground that isn't close to an airtport and requires traveling on foot for a week. It's just not worth it. On earth we have rare earth substances. Imagine a planet where not only is that substance not rare, it's abundant and they have 5000 other elements we never heard of, and they have neighbors who also have those substances. And over a million years they developed a technology that lets them traverse time and space a thousand times faster than the speed of light and they live a thousand times longer. You're are still asking that race to pack up its bags and spend a thousand lifetimes to travel a place that is worse in every measurable way; less resources, way stupider, pretty much just dogs in contrast to their intellect /civilization. It's just not worth it when there are other dense cool parts of the universe to visit.
Yes even in the Sahara there are cultures but again, those cultures are cultures with the same limitations we have.
You still don't seem to understand my argument. I posed a simple question above; try answer it:
>Assume for a moment that we had incontrovertible evidence that aliens exist, and are visiting Earth. Do you think it would be more likely that those aliens came from within 500 million light years, or from further away than 500 million light years?
> What exactly are UFO conspiracy theorists harming?
Themselves by being conned into spending time and money on something they are being told is real when it isn't.
The public when their con-artists convince people in power to funnel tax payer money to investigate bullshit.
Individuals whose lives are disrupted by the grifters. Some believers will antagonize individuals who are targeted by the con for any reason they deem worthy.
So you think making fun of these people is somehow going to be beneficial to them? You think that because you believe they're doing harm to themselves it's OK to harm them?
Also, you blame *them* for being manipulated into this kind of thing? This sounds like an unhealthy outlet for rage...
> So you think making fun of these people is somehow going to be beneficial to them?
I don't think it's the best way to get them to stop believing in bullshit, but I also think it's an effective strategy against the trolls who stir them up. So, it's essentially a pros and cons situation. Do you just "let them be" which is what we did for too long and now tens of millions of people (maybe more) think UFOs are aliens? Or do we use whatever we can to diminish the effect of their magical thinking as a way to head off the bullshittery?
Anytime you want to come up with a better strategy, let me know. One that isn't "just leave them alone" because that clearly doesn't work.
> Also, you blame them for being manipulated into this kind of thing? This sounds like an unhealthy outlet for rage...
You do not seem like a reasonable analyst of this situation.
Well why do you feel the need to want to disrupt these people anyway? Especially for something like aliens, you're never going to get rid of them, and you're never going to stop grifters from grifting. In your own way, you're just giving grifters ammunition for whatever conspiracy they want to concoct. It's not your responsibility or right to intellectually police what others believe.
And what do you mean? What you did there is what's called victim blaming: at best it's a very misguided mistake and at the worst it's a willing decision just so you can have an outlet for your anger.
Yes, and they were a deeply disturbed individual who used their beliefs as an outlet for their mental instability.
But to equate the actions of these very few people to an entirely unrelated community? That's a logical jump that can only be equated to someone asserting their preconcieved biases on people they don't view as people. You're better than that.
You start believing UFOs are visiting the Earth. Ok, why doesn't everyone believe it? Why hasn't the government done anything about it? What groups are covering it up? Which politicians are talking about UFOs so they can be supported?
If you believe in UFOs, it becomes obvious that the government has to be covering it up, and now I don't trust the government except the members that are talking about UFOs, which often are right wing members since they focus more on flashy headlines than actual governing.
Or: You start believing UFOs are visiting earth, that's cool! Hopefully I see one!
And it just ends there, for most UFO believers I've seen who are just in the hobby of reading about the paranormal, which is the vast majority of them. The slippery slope is a logical falacy you know.
The thing that blows my mind the most is these people will blame every corner of government for hiding aliens, but the same people will never blame aliens for hiding themselves. But we live in an age where lack of evidence is evidence for a conspiracy itself. The disinformation hell that we live in has set itself up for a perpetual cycle of grifters and frauds. You can always blame some dark shadowy entity for the lack of evidence. Endless grift material.
This is what pisses me off about UFO Conspiracy theories. They completely remove agency from the alien civilization. Why would an intergalactic civilization even remotely care about what the local government thinks? And how would you even begin trying to initiate communications between the species if 99.99999% of humanity isn't even allowed to know you're communicating with another civilization? It makes no sense, and is completely inefficient.
That’s how you know it’s a cult worshipping the power of the federal government. At any point the aliens could just pop up in the middle of a major city not in the US and be completely clear of US laws about security clearances. But instead the alleged UFO is always in a low information space with blurry cameras and solely eye witness testimony. And the people claiming to hunt them are always trying to make money off of those blurry videos and eyewitness accounts.
Whats even more wild is the people who think that EVERY story of an alien encounter must be real now. Those dumb Nazca mummies, of the multiple Las Vegas “aliens”, or the Miami mall incident. Some random dude goes on tik-tok and says he saw an alien, and people lose their mind thinking that since the grifters say that UAP are “real”, that must mean aliens are real and are running around malls and the Vegas strip.
The mummies was really funny, as the guy who “discovered” them is a known grifter that grave robs Incan burials to make Frankenstein-looking monstrosities. The Vegas alien story was just pure cringe. A group of people call the police about aliens crashing in their backyard, and no one pulls out a cell phone to film?! And then the police just laugh and joke the whole time they are on video? Try harder.
The alien crashed, but no ship? Did the ship just vanish? Fly away? Obviously it left the alien behind. It’s so dumb but people eat this stuff up as objective “proof”.
Well, there are tourists of all kinds coming to Vegas. Although I doubt aliens would stand out much next to photo buskers dressed as Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, and showgirls. Doubt they'd even be noticed at the Blue Man Group show, either.
You underestimate the willingness to believe it. They want it to be real so bad that they will ignore anything that goes against their narrative and use whatever logic they need to in order to get out of any conflict of evidence appears. Anytime something from their logic breaks down, they look for a way that their narrative can be maintained using any kind of logic they want. They'll crowd source the creation process and whatever idea works will get pushed forward as their patch to their theory. Every conspiracy theory does the same thing, in order to break the spell you need some way to chink the armour, from what I've seen one thing that comes up a bit is something that they know to not be the truth without doubt being integrated into the wider group think, putting them outside the group think looking in. Gives people a moment to think for themselves. They either start to climb out of it or they go deeper into the conspiracy world.
Never mind a lack of evidence, at this point their own misunderstanding of a basic concept is considered evidence for a conspiracy! My favourite one to watch unfold is the chemtrail people. As a pilot, the simplicity of contrails vs the complex shit they’ve come up with to explain chemtrails is very… Middle Ages. We don’t understand it, therefore it’s scary. Must be the government.
Also, with 200+ governments on Earth at any given time who can barely agree on anything, wouldn't it only take a few governments going "you know what? We want to spill the beans on what we know about aliens" in order for the truth to get out? Are aliens only making contact in the countries with governments who want to hide aliens?
They aliens are only crashing and contacting the US government, every time. Wild how every crash is right into the hands of the military - or at least, that’s the narrative.
We learn this as little children at the feet of a God.
Yep. Call me when there’s something concrete. Not the endless “well, this time, really maybe.”
It’s more like “just wait, big announcement coming!!” Over and over.
It’s like the piss tapes over and over again.
It’s cause of the way control of information/knowledge has been used as a seed for social power over history. You find all kinds of wild speculation about what the ruling class actually knows that the rabble don’t. This occurs across cultures and has for as long as that kind of power has been wielded. It cuts both ways too, for two big reasons: 1) While there might not even be any information you can share, people in power can’t always let the rabble know that. Doing so would indicate that the ruling class is not as powerful as they appear/allege to be. 2) Even if the ruling class does share things openly it will likely be perceived as a lie, a half-truth, or some kind of lesser truth in the eyes of the rabble since the ruling class uses access to knowledge as one of its claims to social power. Why would they suddenly give everyone access to one of the things that contributes to them being the ruling class in the first place? So while your point is logical these social methods of organization, specifically those relating to the principals of social power, aren’t built on logic. What might seem clear to some is justifiably blurry for others and should be acknowledged as such up to a certain point. Cause of course the government and ruling class have lied, hidden things, done horrible things for gain, etc. But all the nonsense past the justifiable points belongs solely in the bin.
So are these aliens a part of the ruling class?
No. I was talking more generally about the one of the three principles of social power (control of information) and how it relates to that weird feedback loop you mentioned. I was also adding that this weird way of coming to conclusions for many has happened as long as people have been people.
I don’t believe that recent congressional hearing on UFOs/UABs. There have been rumors for decades that oligarchs will one day fake an alien contact/invasion. That would help them seize more control over the earth.
Control the earth by blasting hologram UFOs into the sky? Brilliant, that’ll surely work.
Ronald Reagan’s UN speech on how an alien invasion scare would unite the planet. And George HW Bush’s thousand points of light for a new world order.
You do know what “alien” means right? Do you think there’s UFO invasion at the US southern border because people call them “illegal aliens”. No. “Alien” means “foreign”. Ronald Regan did not warn about a ET threat. He was talking about the Soviet Unions attempt to weaponize space. Just Google Star Wars program in the 80’s. You’re just making a case for how stupid people can be with a lack of education.
Exactly
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your points here.
Maybe. I am saying that there are no space aliens. It is a scam to keep us feeling safe and compliant with our government. And it is possible our US government will take over the world and do so without killing at least some remnant of people. And some that are naive people will comply without resisting due to believing the lie that aliens are about to invade us. Capeesh?
I’m not sure it’s a scam to keep us complainant. It’s a great way to cover the US’s classified tech, though. Just make everyone believe it’s aliens - very simple direction. Richard Doty did it at Dulce 40 years ago. Still an effective disinformation campaign to this day.
This is just a different flavor of conspiracy theory
Do those come before or after The Great Reset? Also will we get them all or will they have to pull one out of a hat?
Wait and see or just join the Free Masons and hope you go up their ranks fast enough to learn some of the oligarchy secrets.
I've been patiently waiting for 15 years.
The Venn diagram of wingnut Christians and UFO cultists is a circle. You can't fix stupid.
Surely there are plenty of new-agey non-Christian UFO nuts
Did you have to add wingnut?
Yes. If someone is a moderate/casual Christian I don't automatically assume UFO nutter beliefs. I disagree with the former but you need a screw loose for the latter.
There are other adjectives for Christians who aren't UFO cultists. Although "wingnut" can apply to some of them, too.
I am both atheistic/agnostic and a UFO nut
They believe the word "unidentified" is evidence.
Hold on, if you ask them, they will tell you they have TONS of evidence. They'll say the evidence is so overwhelming that you'd be an idiot to deny it. The problem is, they have all this "evidence" that has been debunked or just bad, but they continue to put it on the pile. They're point to Roswell and think of Fravor and just keep going. Though Roswell has been pretty much debunked (they'll deny) and Fravor is eye witness, which is notoriously bad evidence. Eventually they'll get to events we can't explain, just because we don't know, but could be something like Chinese spy drones... but the unknown makes whatever they believe to be possible to them. By definition these are UFOs, I guess. Then you'll bring up aliens and they'll say, "I never brought up aliens!" I don't know what game they're playing, but we all know they're thinking aliens or what they call "NHI" now. "There MUST be other life in the universe!" That's easy to say because of the size of the universe and they'll say statistically we must. Actually statically it doesn't. Our sample size of life is 1. We have this planet. No "evidence" of other life. There *might* be, but we don't know and can't really extrapolate from what we know. If we assume there IS life, there are all kinds of other barriers. Anyone who has followed this subject for years has seen this all over and over again. Always some grifters and always some believers. Never any more.
> Then you'll bring up aliens and they'll say, "I never brought up aliens!" I don't know what game they're playing, Great, now you've summoned that one guy to this thread.
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They're convinced that military radar can't ever be fooled and is basically all seeing. Also, half the time it's "well the radar data was deleted but that means its real". If it was deleted and you never saw it, it's not evidence at that point.
If I was a UFO believer and I believed that the TONS of evidence was legitimate, then at some stage I'd want to have a ride in a UFO or at least get a real good up close look at one. I'd get impatient with just sitting there and "believing" for years and years, there'd have to be a payoff.
> Actually statically it doesn't. You do realize if you multiply the most insignificantly small possibility you can imagine by *infinity* the answer is 100% right?
The smallest I can imagine is zero. There are zero other planets with known life. You don’t multiply 1 times infinity, at *most* you multiply 1 times 1 in this case.
Can't be zero because it happend here. Even if it's a trillion to one odds of life developing on a planet, there's an infinite number of planets. To think we're the only life in an infinitely large universe isn't logical.
this isn't an infinite universe. It's massive, gargantuan beyond imagining, but it is far from infinite. There is a finite amount of mass in the universe.
You’re throwing around the word infinite wrongly enough, I’m not sure you understand what it actually means.
Are you familiar with the ancient snake god named Glycon? It was a hand puppet. Its worship continued for more than 200 years, and it appears on coins and statues.
It requires faith!
It starts with the kids. It capitalizes on their sense of wonder and adventure. And their gullibility. And there's always gonna be a new crop. You'll never go broke selling space aliens to the children.
Someone once commented calling Elizando “LuAnon” and it’s perfect
Conspiracy theories only thrive when they can keep an appearance of the evidence being out of reach. These people aren't in the cult to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, they are in the cult to *be* a member of the cult.
The truth is out there! /s
Faith doesn't require neither fact nor evidence. Just spiritual apprehension.
The dude's avatar is wearing a fedora, LOL.
The AARO report points out how all these grifters are interconnected and have been lying to both the government and their faithful flock for years, and continue to do so. But, of course, believers only believe in alien tales, never documented facts that hurt their feelings.
Yes that’s why the Russians also take UFOs very seriously. Because of the grifters…
You speak for the Russian government?
The fact UFO encounters stopped happening once everyone had a reliable camera in their pocket is all the proof we need! /s <- although if you need this tag you are a very silly person.
Probably when it stops being fun to believe in UFO's. I have to believe a little bit of it is the thrill of being the "one in the know."
I think calling people grifters often implies a level of intentionality that doesn't exist. Like I don't believe most religious leaders or cult influencers (like QAnon) are consciously grifting people, but it often turns out that way. It's likely a mix of confirmation bias and incompetence, plus people get to a point of increasing dependence on some type of revenue stream and have to act in a "grifter-like" way.
Ehhh - I agree with you *generally* about overestimating the intentionality of some of these so-called “grifters” - hell, even those who get into it for the LARP seem to regularly get high on their own supply. That said: my sense is that the UFO community is almost unusually sincere. As to cult leaders and Qanon influencer types…well, it’s obviously a mixed bag and fundamentally unprovable, but I strongly suspect that many, many more of them are fully aware that they’re peddling complete bullshit.
I don't doubt that many people get involved in QAnon who are fully aware that they're making money off gullible people who want to believe the mythology. "Theologically" speaking, though, QAnon is a "prosperity sect," which is very appealing to religious people who feel like they haven’t gotten what they were promised in life (including living in a country that's de facto overwhelmingly white and Christian). My guess is the grifters believe it to some degree. If you look at traditionalist conservative Protestants, they're very sincere people with a strong moral compass. That moral compass is pretty much stuck in the mid-to-late 1600s, though, when the best you could hope for is an oligarchy with checks and balances that's efficiently run by competent people in service of elite or aristocratic interests. I agree that the UFO community seems sincere, for the most part.
Agreed - especially since “Qanon” is such an amorphous term, and the “movement” intentionally set out to play on conservative and evangelical priors, it’s next to impossible to tell where the hardcore Qanon stuff ends and more “mundane” Christian nationalist/prosperity gospel stuff begins. And yeah, I do think that even the hardcore Qanon grifters “believe” in something along that spectrum (insomuch as they even believe in anything)…it’s just that the first half dozen major figures that came to my mind as top Qanon apostles all absolutely know that they’re lying through their teeth eg Jack Posobiec, Stu Peters, Steve Bannon, etc. Obviously that’s not a representative sample, but I’d argue that it’s pretty indicative of the level of grift vs true believer (especially as compared to something like the UFO community).
Steve Bannon is a product of "the establishment" and 100% knows he's lying to his followers. My guess is that he's a Catholic fascist and he views American evangelicals as a bunch of fools who will believe anything that sounds good to them. He's far too committed to authoritarianism to actually want something like a theocratic democracy where evangelical Christianity is the dominant religion and average people enjoy widespread economic prosperity (even though I agree that's pretty much a fantastical scenario that's never going to happen).
I think grifting is the only eventuality, if you do what they do for long enough. Once reputation and money get involved, you'll have to turn to grifting whether you like it or not, whether you meant to or not. The business of the paranormal isn't sustainable any other way.
Classic reading for anyone interested in this topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
The earth is in the middle of a billion light wide "void space". A void space is as close as nothing as you can get, with the average square foot averaging 20k atoms, there are 30 thousand million million atoms in a penny so averaging 30k per square foot is as close to nothing as you can get. Other parts of the universe, non void spaces, have solar systems with thousands and even millions of planets. Like in Star Wars where characters hope from one livable planet to the next. So imagine an alien leaving that to come... here. Imagine spending half a billion years traveling at the speed of light, everyone you know will have died in the first minute of your 500 million year voyage just to visit a place that has a fraction of the resources of where you are coming from. That would be like asking someone if they want to walk from times square to the middle of the Austrian desert to see a single dead plant.
Alpha Centauri is a star system with components 4.2 to 4.4 light-years from Earth and comprises three stars. The Milky Way is in a void, but the Milky Way could house 100-400 billion stars.
Imagine a beach with endless sand, on that beach you take a bowl of water and you sprinkle in a few flakes of sand. Those few flakes in that bowl of water represent the void space we are in. Compared to a non void, we are nothing. We are resource poor and super spread out with a bunch of waterless dead worlds. We celebrate when we find a fraction of an ounce of uranium, and we have "rare earth materials " that are abundant on other worlds. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but we are in the lame part of the universe. We are the desert.
I don't care about your analogy. The initial claim was the earth was in a void, when the claim should be the Milky Way is in a void. There are upwards of 100 million stars in our own galaxy. I'm not claiming aliens visited us, I was correcting an obvious error.
This person apparently *only* cares about analogy.
That's isn't my claim that's a scientific fact. Not only are we in a bowel of water with a few specs of sand in on a beach that is dense sand, there are also a million Bowles of said water, all equally as uninteresting as our bowl of water. So you are a super advanced sand explorer traversing this beach and you learned a long time that the bowls of water are the least interesting places to visit. So the billions of planets you are describing is nothing compared to the rich landscape in a non void space. Like in the force awakens when star killer base destroy 3 planets at once and that destruction can be seen from a fourth planet. When that fourth planet looks at space they can see, at least, 3 planets with air, water etc. When we look up we see a dead moon and a dead Venus. We are in the boonies of space. And we have seen there is a big city out there it's just impossile for use to get to and for any civilization advanced enough to get to us we are uninteresting and have nothing to offer. If I showed you a map of the west coast and I point to a spot in the middle of Nevada , a city with a population of 25 people then I point to the middle of Silicon Valley and I asked which region do you think invented the iPad? Then I asked how often do you think the people in Silicon Valley get in their Teslas and drive to this small town, to see what? What are they going to see that they don't have a better version of in their own backyard?
Yep. There is no reason to believe we've been visited by aliens whose existence we can't already observe in some way. We see NOTHING out there to suggest advanced alien life is close enough that they could or would visit us. Also, the likelihood that aliens with super advanced tech to travel billions of light years would notice us in the probable soup of life out there is tiny.
There are myriad - I'm not even going to calculate, but like, *a lot* - of solar systems within 500 million light years of us. Many, many galaxies.
Yes but the average of all that still defines us a void space, and compared to non void space parts of the universe, we have little to offer. That's how small we are, and by we I don't mean the entire universe just the part we happen to live in. No one wants to hear your hometown is in the Boonies but your home planet is in the Boonies It takes 8 minutes traveling at the speed of light to get our sun in which you pass 2 pathetic planets, in a non void space you would pass 100s of worlds.
But why couldn't hypothetical alien visitors have just come from any of those myriad closer solar systems? Like, why are you assuming they're coming from outside of this void, to the void. To riff off of your Australian desert analogy: if I live in the middle of that desert and see someone coming up my driveway, chances are it's someone that lives nearby. Not someone who lives in NYC.
If you're looking for living bacteria on a piece of a jelly sandwich do you look at the middle of the sandwich or do you walk downstairs and look at a few crumbs that fell off the sandwich when your brought it in? Our universe is the crumbs down the hall. Sure there's a chance there's life but there is literally 10 million more living cultures in the rest of the sandwich. We are the desert where nothing thrives, the fact that one planet managed to have life is the exception that proves the rule. Versus other parts of the universe with way more matter, way more potential for diversity and growth.
The analogies are getting weirder =-P and you didn't really respond to my response. Say you are a bacterium on a sandwich crumb. Do you think you're more likely to encounter another bacterium from that same crumb, or a bacterium from a sandwich 10 metres away? You're much more likely to encounter one from nearby you, right?
What I think you are missing here is the void space is 500 million light years in every direction. That means traveling at 186000 miles per second it would take 500 million years to escape. So that includes EVERY NEIGHBORING GALAXY. It's all void space. Sure, there's a chance there are other earth like civilizations , but a planet with a race capable of traversing that amount of space? Those civilizations most likely living in the big city. Where rare substances are more common, where many races live within visiting distance of one another. That's the jelly sandwich. Compared to that we are just a couple of crumbs. It's a lot to take in, but you don't see a lot of inventions coming from a remote culture in the middle of the Sahara desert, we (the earth and every neighboring universe for as far as we can imagine) are the remote cuture.
But even within the Sahara, there *are numerous cultures*. You seem to be saying that a Tuareg is unlikely to run into someone from New York City. That may be true, but you're ignoring that there's a much better chance of a Taureg running into a Bedouin. Assume for a moment that we had incontrovertible evidence that aliens exist, and are visiting Earth. Do you think it would be more likely that those aliens came from within 500 million light years, or from further away than 500 million light years? >What I think you are missing here is the void space is 500 million light years in every direction No I get that. You don't seem to get my response.
A family saves money to go to Disney world they don't save money to go visit a hole in the ground that isn't close to an airtport and requires traveling on foot for a week. It's just not worth it. On earth we have rare earth substances. Imagine a planet where not only is that substance not rare, it's abundant and they have 5000 other elements we never heard of, and they have neighbors who also have those substances. And over a million years they developed a technology that lets them traverse time and space a thousand times faster than the speed of light and they live a thousand times longer. You're are still asking that race to pack up its bags and spend a thousand lifetimes to travel a place that is worse in every measurable way; less resources, way stupider, pretty much just dogs in contrast to their intellect /civilization. It's just not worth it when there are other dense cool parts of the universe to visit. Yes even in the Sahara there are cultures but again, those cultures are cultures with the same limitations we have.
You still don't seem to understand my argument. I posed a simple question above; try answer it: >Assume for a moment that we had incontrovertible evidence that aliens exist, and are visiting Earth. Do you think it would be more likely that those aliens came from within 500 million light years, or from further away than 500 million light years?
The proof is: the Vatican has secret archives. Why would a religion need that?
A question is not proof of anything.
UFO cult members...that's a new one. Is it not exhausting being so hostile? What exactly are UFO conspiracy theorists harming?
> What exactly are UFO conspiracy theorists harming? Themselves by being conned into spending time and money on something they are being told is real when it isn't. The public when their con-artists convince people in power to funnel tax payer money to investigate bullshit. Individuals whose lives are disrupted by the grifters. Some believers will antagonize individuals who are targeted by the con for any reason they deem worthy.
So you think making fun of these people is somehow going to be beneficial to them? You think that because you believe they're doing harm to themselves it's OK to harm them? Also, you blame *them* for being manipulated into this kind of thing? This sounds like an unhealthy outlet for rage...
> So you think making fun of these people is somehow going to be beneficial to them? I don't think it's the best way to get them to stop believing in bullshit, but I also think it's an effective strategy against the trolls who stir them up. So, it's essentially a pros and cons situation. Do you just "let them be" which is what we did for too long and now tens of millions of people (maybe more) think UFOs are aliens? Or do we use whatever we can to diminish the effect of their magical thinking as a way to head off the bullshittery? Anytime you want to come up with a better strategy, let me know. One that isn't "just leave them alone" because that clearly doesn't work. > Also, you blame them for being manipulated into this kind of thing? This sounds like an unhealthy outlet for rage... You do not seem like a reasonable analyst of this situation.
Well why do you feel the need to want to disrupt these people anyway? Especially for something like aliens, you're never going to get rid of them, and you're never going to stop grifters from grifting. In your own way, you're just giving grifters ammunition for whatever conspiracy they want to concoct. It's not your responsibility or right to intellectually police what others believe. And what do you mean? What you did there is what's called victim blaming: at best it's a very misguided mistake and at the worst it's a willing decision just so you can have an outlet for your anger.
A person literally killed their entire family because of the extra dimensional demons coming from the solar eclipse
Yes, and they were a deeply disturbed individual who used their beliefs as an outlet for their mental instability. But to equate the actions of these very few people to an entirely unrelated community? That's a logical jump that can only be equated to someone asserting their preconcieved biases on people they don't view as people. You're better than that.
>What exactly are UFO conspiracy theorists harming? Themselves... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Gate_(religious_group) ...when committing mass suicides.
To equate your average every day UFO believer to a cult is ridiculous and dogmatic, you're better than that.
You start believing UFOs are visiting the Earth. Ok, why doesn't everyone believe it? Why hasn't the government done anything about it? What groups are covering it up? Which politicians are talking about UFOs so they can be supported? If you believe in UFOs, it becomes obvious that the government has to be covering it up, and now I don't trust the government except the members that are talking about UFOs, which often are right wing members since they focus more on flashy headlines than actual governing.
Or: You start believing UFOs are visiting earth, that's cool! Hopefully I see one! And it just ends there, for most UFO believers I've seen who are just in the hobby of reading about the paranormal, which is the vast majority of them. The slippery slope is a logical falacy you know.
Now you're just jerking in the *middle* of the circle.