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Comment by lo_fye | Hacker News Reader

Many people have seen them so near that there's no possible way it's a misidentification. For example, standing in the same room, indoors, in their homes... or outside in groups with many other corroborating witnesses (Google "Ariel School Zimbabwe mass sighting"). They're not all lying. In fact, if even just 1 is true, then yes we are being visited by aliens.

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I did not search for it yet, but "Mass psychogenic illness"[1] is a thing. From Wikipedia: "Mass psychogenic illness (MPI), also called mass sociogenic illness, mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria, or mass hysteria, is the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group, originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss, or alteration of function, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic aetiology.".

There also have been mass hysteria cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

I would also like to mention "Folie à deux"[2]. From Wikipedia: "Folie à deux ('madness for two'), also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another.".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux

Many people genuinely believe they have seen Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster (almost entirely disproven at this point), magic, and miracles happen before their eyes.

It doesn't make it true.

The problem is that in the past you had corroborating evidence for gods, demons, angels, witches, etc. until "aliens" became the socially acceptable "unexplained thing."

If those "interpretations" weren't correct, there is very little evidence that "aliens" is a correct interpretation and that future generations won't have a different one.

In addition, the one thing that we now know scientifically is that "first hand observation" is notoriously unreliable.

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