A pigeon in the dark can be a UFO. Or a bat. Or a satellite, an airplane, literally anything. If I throw a sock out of my window, it would be an UFO to my neighbours. Though "F" in UFO would stand for "Falling" in the sock case.
"We finally have proof! it's what we've been saying!"
"Of ufos?"
"That the govt wants you to believe in ufos!"
"Oh... well, really?"
"I mean it coulda been messed with, cant trust the govt."
A lot of UFO people (maybe enthusiasts would be a more apt term) are more skeptical of aliens and spaceship stuff than "normies" cause they tend to have experience getting burned. Just comes with the territory I guess.
Try to post a perfectly legitimate photo of something weird looking on a UFO forum and they will forensically tear it apart in a way that would put a lot of more professional outlets to shame.
I've been hearing the whole "the government wants you to believe in aliens thing" since the 90s but it goes back way further. Of course the other thing that comes along with that is believing that a lot of the "true believer" types are shills on account of their obvious and often pretty suspicious connections. The most recent one I can remember is that guy with some sort of military connections and very shady funding that went on Joe Rogan talking about starting a company to study and release technology from a crashed spaceship. The intended audience of that sort of thing is not UFO enthusiasts, it's gullable normal people that just happen to accidentally dip their toes into the subject for a split second.
All in all, my opinion is that the whole thing has been a pretty sloppy display of our governments disinformation and psyop capabilities to the extent that it makes me a little bit worried for our safety. Hopefully the people that got assigned to run the UFO stories were the B team.
We currently have a professional wrestling executive running Education, a "wellness influencer" as Surgeon General, an anti-vax brain worm as the head of HHS, and a reality tv star as the Chief Executive.
I can be vocal. I can inform my elected representatives of my opinions. I can protest. I can defend the rights of those who are being oppressed.
These things have risks, and everyone has to make their own determination as to what risks they are willing to bear. I've decided this is too important to let the risks prevent me from speaking out. That might mean I get arrested, physically harmed, detained, or worse. So be it. I am not going to let my country turn into a dictatorship while I do nothing.
> The fact of the matter is that the people of this country voted for this. It's what they want.
It can look like that, but remember some facts. The popular vote split was 49.8% to 48.3%. Almost 90 million eligible voters didn't cast a vote for president. That is higher than either Trump's or Harris' final vote tally. Only ~32% of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Trump likes to call it a landslide but that's just bluster. Quite a lot of his policies perform awful in polls. Public opinion can be moved.
For some context there were only two companies sharing the building, this company and Newsmax, while Rush Limbaugh studio was right down the road at the time. There were a few developers before me who failed and some problems with a contractor shipping code that didn't work requiring me to figure out how to create a payment system. Nonetheless, I get it online, it works perfect, and they start to get subscribers. I'm watching some of the on demand and some of the scheduled shows realizing that they are injecting ultra right wing political propaganda and conspiracy theories along with movies about Biblical events.
So I give one month notice but I don't tell them why. They offer me a $25,000 raise. I say no again. They offer $1 for any subscription conversion after the first one week free incentive. That one was tough because it would have net several hundred thousand dollars for that first year. They are willing to pay massive salaries to people who help them push the conspiracy theories.
The owner of the company eventually got caught up in an office sex scandal and sold off the service.
I can understand the temptation Joe Rogan submitted to in order to take the money. I had a friend invite me a while back with a spare ticket to the Comedy Mother Ship in Austin for open mic night. Bill Burr did 15 minutes. However throughout the night one amateur comedian after another were making the most disgusting jokes about harming children. What I don't understand about Joe Rogan is how he invites people like that into his home while he has young daughters.
I don't know about you, but I'm skeptical.
4d chess indeed…
V (the 1980s version) was a flawed documentary.
So they swapped the fascists for aliens in disguise.
The problem is there is no smoking gun or answer that satisfies the fantasies of people who are passionate about conspiracy theories.
So you start cooking up more conspiracy. It’s not 4D chess, it’s Candyland.
I wasn’t being serious, but I can see how someone might think I was.
- War in Israel-Palestine-Yemen-Syria-Iran, war in Ukraine-Russia with threat of spill into Europe-Scandinavia-U.S., threat of U.S.-China-Taiwan war in West Pacific, along with India-Pakistan attacks, but it’s a lot of proxy and posturing because anything serious would be stupid.
- Declaring martial law in L.A. for people protesting dictatorial evacuation and tariff war nonsense.
People have their fists fully up their asses.
But then again, it is actually racism to compare humans as a race along with all our multi-variate foibles and accomplishments, with 'some ethereal other, whose capabilities are beyond our comprehension' and instill fear and loathing.
I don't have any reliable means of 'proving' this, other than to observe that the rise in UFO'ology parallels the civil rights movement, and I am fairly certain that the CIA/Pentagons psychologists [2a/2b] also identified this phenomenon in the post-war, factually very, very racist and intolerant period of Western society, and so decided to exploit it - as a means of blowing off the racist steam in their socities, but also as a handle for controlling it and directing it, as they see fit, for their own fundamentalist, racist intentions. The powers within the US empire have demonstrated, for decades, their own desire to manifest a rigid and technologically-biased hierarchy over cultures they have deemed inferior, and thus ripe for subversion/destruction - and the whole UFO phenomenon is, in my opinion, an harmonic of this factor within western society.
To many around the world, the arrival of, say, an F35 in their skies is just as terrifying as a tictac or two.
But then again, maybe we really do share the planet with a race that is vastly superior to our own in so many ways, and maybe there are races on this planet which covet the wealth and resources of lesser, inferior forms of the species.
Either way, until they actually show up and either invite us to party in the galactic core, or start the harvest/rapture, the fact of existence of higher life forms is about as useful as the fact of our own species, literally killing itself - which is to say, its just not of any use, whatsoever, to speculate on ones own position.
I do predict, though, that as soon as we get invited to the galactic core, the people of Earth are going to become as racist as fuck .. at least until we catch up with the rest of the galaxy, technology-wise.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
[1] - https://archive.org/details/lureofedgescient0000bren
[2a] - https://ia800203.us.archive.org/17/items/MessengersOfDecepti...
[2b] - https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/biases/Experime...
[3] - See, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wretched_of_the_Earth
Also, you're unfortunately wrong about racism - you absolutely can be an out-and-out racist now. People are more openly and proudly racist now than they have been at any point in my own living memory.
>A lot of alien lore has racist elements and origins.
Inasmuch as most of this lore deals directly with the inferiority/superiority of literal races, I think all of alien lore is about racism.
>Also, you're unfortunately wrong about racism - you absolutely can be an out-and-out racist now. People are more openly and proudly racist now than they have been at any point in my own living memory.
Oh, I don't think this is the case - at least, not outside the borders of the USA, anyway. Things were far, far more racist in Europe prior to WW2 - which is not to say that racism has been eradicated, just that it was tempered by the need to acknowledge its ultimate product, in the form of ruined cities that had to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, the U.S. has used technological superiority to assert dominance globally, often over non-Western cultures, as seen in interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan.
UFOs, as symbols of advanced technology, could resonate with this imperialist mindset, reinforcing hierarchies.
For sure, there is a rise in racism within certain states of the Western hemisphere - but there has been a rise in UFO'ism, too - which in my opinion, has allowed for the covert justification of racism, without social retribution, to occur. Leading eventually of course, to more overt racist expression.
You might find The Dark Fantastic interesting.
Thanks for the recommendation - I've added it to my list of things to read on the subject, although I fear it may be targeted for a much different audience.
They can, but I disagree they do, universally, in all cases. UFOs do tend to follow the cultural zeitgeist and reflect people's fears and stereotypes, maybe about themselves or their own government, but in a broader and more complex sense than "all of alien lore is about racism" would imply. I tend to slot aliens in the same cultural headspace as angels/demons or fae/cryptids, like Jacques Valee (except I don't believe these beings are actually real and imitating our folklore, so much as actually just being folklore.)
For instance,it's interesting how one doesn't hear about alien abductions as often as one used to. Now it's all "interdimensional NHI" and psychic bonding. As if the dehumanizing trauma narratives of Communion served some cathartic purpose that we're now we're moving on from. Also we've moved on from saucers. No one sees saucers anymore, it's all spheres and tic-tacs and "jellyfish."
The UK is far less racist than it was in the 1980s, and I think the rest of western Europe seems to be generally similar.
That said, while the vast majority are not racist, the racists seem to have got more extreme - I think social media is at least part of the problem there.
For some reason, it's easier to see the limitations of that approach when it's applied to common everyday things that everyone does, and much harder when it's applied to conspiracy theories.
> The core of ancient alien theory is the belief that non-white races are incapable of complex feats of engineering and civilization
In its origins, but do the current crop of believers think that way? If they do is it an unconscious prejudice or a conscious one? I think there is a spectrum of racism here from complete unawareness of the racist origins, to blatant racism.
There are also some white people's achievements, such as Stonehenge, that they attribute to aliens.
> Dig deep enough under a lot of the folklore, especially where it overlaps with neo-Christian/New World Order stuff and eventually you'll get to the Nazis.
New World Order people do seem to overlap heavily with the "white replacement" crowd, so yes.
I think you're reaching here - I've never got that as the "core" message and/or belief.
The core message and/or belief was always "Primitive versions of us could never have created such complex feats of engineering[1]", quickly followed on with "even today, we cannot create such things without our recently invented technology".
It's a stretch to leap from "even today, we cannot create such things without our recently invented technology" to "only white people could have created such things."
[1] I also dunno why you added "and civilisation" in there; that's not what I read in any of the Hancock and similar books.
Faerie gradually moved further away as we observed the world better - to distant places, then across the seas, and now completely off the planet.
I think it is likely that racist thinking somehow.
> do predict, though, that as soon as we get invited to the galactic core, the people of Earth are going to become as racist as fuck
Not racist - we will be far more united as a species. However, we will very likely be hostile to other intelligent species. As in a Discworld book, "black and white got on fine, but ganged up on green".
There is a lot of projection in a lot of so-called sci-fi media, especially with regard to "alien invasion" tropes. The idea that some foreign group arrives with vastly superior weapons and technology we don't understand to wipe us out or enslave us for some ulterior motives that possibly don't even make sense to us would sound a bit on the nose unless presented in a politically race-neutral way to a demographic of the historically culturally dominant group. There's certainly a degree of fear of revenge to it, though less blatant than in early zombie media (where zombies were more strongly associated with "voodoo" and implicitly a punishment for colonialism) or even exploitation/horror media like Cannibal Holocaust or Heart of Darkness (and a lot of the media inspired by it like Apocalypse Now) where the threat is explicitly more "primitive" (in the case of Heart of Darkness the threat being a form of contagious primitivism itself) but the dominant group (usually white people) are put in vulnerable positions through circumstance. It's no accident that Lovecraft was legitimately extremely racist.
It's important to remember though that humans are not intrinsically racist. Tribalist maybe, but kinship can spread all superficial boundaries of appearances and cultural differences. Whiteness is not a question of a specific skin color or ethnicity but the absence of "non-white" identifiers and thus ultimately just as arbitrary as Roman citizenship during certain time periods in what we now think of as Europe and Northern Africa. And of course just like Roman citizenship, those delineations exist because they benefited the dominant group within (or the colonial administration) by providing an other.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinf...
And a paywall pass:
What would be more of boost of morale than believing your side had mythically advanced weapons, and that your work was helping advance technological superiority?
In WWII, some of the "terror" bombing stuff had high morale/political/propaganda values on the sending end. Such as the aptly named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid (And by many accounts that last one had a very strong, if short-term, effect on Japanese strategy.)
In modern-day contexts, it might be helpful if there was an unflattering term for "looks like a terror attack, but the actual goal was to make the bomber feel better about himself". One can at least daydream that that might discourage a few violent nut jobs from hooking up with sounds-good-enough-if-you're-crazy excuses. Er, I mean "noble causes".
And industry bombing has indeed been very effective! Bombing of airfields, too. The Luftwaffe was reportedly (according to UK military leaders) weeks away from breaking the RAF with that before they gave up. Probably not really because people underestimate their own resourcefulness when the going gets tough!
1. You will have to keep very secret that this is what you're doing
2. If you do, your own officials will randomly start to believe you. And why would they believe you when you tell them it's all a hoax - after all, you're admitting that you're a manipulative POS, why would they believe you now?
Organization-level lies fry people's brains - including that of the liars. Probably especially of the liars.
1. identify (or invent) a universally disliked or ridiculed group, no matter how few they are. 2. invent a link between them and your actual target. 3. knowingly blow them way out of proportion. 4. run an occasional two minutes hate to remind the target audience of their existence (which they can't do on their own, since there's like fifteen of them).
baby, you've got yourself a psyop going. you don't even need any elaborate false flag ops - just use the media you already control :^)
Fifth generation warfare is so staggeringly cheap next to previous generations, it can be fought indefinitely. It requires literally every person, in every country, everywhere on Earth, to be constantly vigilant, wary of everything they read and hear and see. Maybe that forces us to collectively sharpen our mental knives over time. Who knows.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bennewitz
Edit: may as well too, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12
UFO basically means Unidentified Flying Object (now the term UAP is used more often)
If you believe in UFOs, do you believe that there can be observations of flying objects without any current explanation?
Or does it mean that you believe in little green men or something similar?
Please use the terms UFO, UAP and 'believe' they way they were meant to be used.
I remember when there were huge online discussions about the incorrect use of the term "HTML5" once non-technical people got wind of it, and before that over the use of "internet" versus "web" (and whether it's "the internet" or "the Internet") and of course everyone knows the copypasta about "GNU/Linux" and maybe even the discussions about what a "meme" actually is, etc etc. None of these discussions are fruitful and by insisting on an older dictionary definition over the de facto majority use of a given word you're not demonstrating superior knowledge, intelligence or expertise but quite the opposite when it comes to language development and human interactions.
Words don't mean anything except what the two people using them to communicate with each other assign to them. In one-to-many and many-to-many conversations this means the majority use of the term generally prevails unless the minority use provides immediate superior utility (which is how a lot of slang enters mainstream use). It's all just sloppy lossy soundwaves and unicode strings thrown in each other's general direction - that we can transport ideas at all is nothing short of a miracle of nature.
This "hazing ritual" is incredible - a more naive me would not believe this could work, but especially knowing about how Scientology was made up essentially on the spot and now has tens of thousands of believers across the world, I fully understand that humans are just prone to delusions. It then also tracks that LLMs apparently picked this up from reading our stuff.
-2 points by overu589 14 hours ago [flagged] | prev | next [–]
I have been contacted.
I have to tell people that the great big secret isn’t “aliens” the great big secret is American Thought Control and thought controlled Americans.
A significant population of haters are well aware of the truth of this circumstance, they are empowered by it in ways the ordinary mind will refuse is even possible (if you’ve made it this far.) these will destroy you and anything you love, and they are their own government that castrates and extorts conventional governments of people power.
I’m the guy saying “we are not alone in our own minds and a secret state of thought control is tooling us all.” This is the real crisis of our humanity.
Yes, there is a long standing community of humans among us who can travel through minds and influence all of us in ways we would refuse to accept possible. They drive us all crazy from within.
As far as the technology of our altruistic harmless visitors, it is all biotechnology.
Studying their technology is like studying the cuttlefish or mushrooms. Just think of what an isolated brain trust would learn from studying any such thing for fifty years. Nearly nothing.
No computers, no wires, no screens, no controls, not even material sciences in the way we think of them. They control their technology (and communicate to us) through the mind.
Of the otherworlders:
On the threat and nature of thought control:
Do you hate me for telling you these things? Go ahead and ask, I take on all contenders.
afpx 1 hour ago | parent | next [–]
Were you a participant in Stargate?
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate reply
1 point by overu589 18 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
Better, I can explain how it works.
Ordinary people (and agents of their ordinary people governments) think Power (or “ESP”) works like telemetry. That is, restricted to ordinary conventions of signal propagation. It does not, it works through entanglement (of which there is obviously local propagation.)
Once entangled, those capable can navigate through so entangled minds, digging in and infiltrating minds. This continuity may be maintained indefinitely by those skillful. These may “facilitate” seemingly psychic experiences of others. Those others are deceived (like the “telepathy tapes” they experience something they themselves do not control.)
The stargate program focuses on “remote viewing”, which is kind of a joke (beyond how you would think of it.) There are other more experienced minds emulating the experience in the unsuspecting. This is why science will never “discover” this capability, it is already mastered by those who will toy with others.
All “viewing” requires that a mind sees what ever was viewed. For “Power” (the true art) is the ability to entangle and navigate minds. Any mind may be traversed by those competent, and any sense or memory may be experienced by those others capable.
The whole time those Dick Tracy CIA fobs were chasing phantasm, they were being played by their own handlers.
I was press ganged into a hooligan army of Power (Arizona Company, of thought controls of America, the Power elite.) I “freed the slaves” (yes, they called me “Spartacus”). I helped destroy the council of 13 (do you remember, before that was MS-13, there was the feared gang “13”?) I destroyed Trajan and his army (a psyop military Power cult). I dismantled the Xerxes game god from Power (they take on names.)
There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who would epar dna redrum eruoy ylimaf before being discovered for their secrets. These are the enemy of all humanity. They maim and mutilate humanity through pyramid schemes of extortion. Power is highly developed and there is nothing you can do about it.
I am a renegade of Power, and this is a fragment of my account. reply
*
0 points by overu589 8 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next | edit | delete [–]
Btw, (thread related) I was contacted by the “Aluvians” as they like to call themselves (those “Greys”), due to my disruption of Power.
They’re quite nice and ambivalent. Thought Control of America, and thought controlled Americans are the enemy of humanity.
Right now your comment reads like something off a conspiracy forum and has nothing to back it up - which is not something that warrants discussion (on HN).
Meanwhile this site disappears a 1500 comment thread about the Marines being used to crush incredibly peaceful resistance to the unconstitutional regime's White Supremacy. US citizens are being violently kidnapped, and for what?
One of the most frustrating things about UFO propaganda is that it's caused a severe lack of understanding in physics AND astronomy. There absolutely is intelligent life out there, but the chance of any lifeforms figuring out the practically zero option solutions to the problems of interstellar travel might as well be... well, zero. e.g., If we ever crack nuclear fusion and somehow through future magic manage to make that small enough to fit on a ship for energy, a ship traveling fast enough through space for the long, long, long journey to reach another star system colliding with a small rock would produce enough energy via collision to blow up the ship. That's only the tip top of the iceberg for interstellar travel problems.
That topic is not intellectually interesting. I don’t really come here for politics, and I’d like to believe that neither do most HN readers.
After all, most of those people are just watching the cars burn...
(Edit: spoofing a recent CNN comment)
That thread spent over 12 hours on the front page and we actively intervened multiple times to keep it on the front page that long by overriding flags and flamewar penalties. We also spent hours in the thread managing the flamewars.
Surely this deserves to be memed along with the classic "fiery but mostly peaceful". <https://imgur.com/gallery/fiery-mostly-peaceful-ItEBAGy>
They're worth investigating, certain groups and people have investigated them, and this should not be confused with falling victim to some sort of absurd military propaganda attempt.
Also, the UFO phenomenon need not have anything to do with "aliens" despite still possibly being completely outside human origin (as delusions or military propaganda or whatever the hell)
Many people, not having read in any depth about it, simply laugh off the absurdities around the "aliens" idea and call it a day. That's just lazy and overall, mistaken.
Mistletoe•22h ago
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