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Love UFO stuff too. I think it comes from growing up in the X-Files era :-)

Your paradox point is the same with most conspiracy theory. It's usually along the lines of "they're keeping a big secret from us / they like to drop hints and love symbolism". It never makes sense to me. What purpose would hints or symbolism ever serve? Why reuse 'crisis actors' etc. Secrets are hard enough to keep without 'dropping hints'. And as anyone that's tried to organise a social event for a group of grown ups knows, organising people is nigh on impossible. The idea some shadowy 'they' cabal is coordinating all these massive conspiracies seems so highly unlikely. But maybe that's what they want me to believe..?!

You presuppose some monolithical "they".

I don't presuppose 'they' are monolithic or otherwise :-)

>But I think it's far more likely that it's all part of a government disinformation campaign,

I think it, for the last few years, is 10,000% to secure more funding for the space force. Get people worked up about an issue = more moneys for my sweet budget. I don't think there is a grand conspiracy outside of that.

This is actually a pragmatic answer I am surprised I have yet to hear before - and it would make perfect sense. Put out a few questions about what these objects are (aliens? advanced tech from another country?) and get the ball rolling on more money. Sometimes the the truth ends up being rather simple.

Honestly, the simplest answer isn't always the best, but I legit believe this one.

And I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because nobody seems to put together the increase in leaks/statements/interest from the government in UFO's and the creation of the space force. It seems super obvious.

This literally comes up in every thread about the UAP/UFO/Chinese spy balloon thing that appears on HN, it's one of the most commonly presented rationales. I don't know how you all have been missing it.

I think there's something much more compelling than just who is involved in this project, related to recent history. Two interesting things happened in 2018:

1) The government started overtly hinting at UFO stuff. In particular this is when the patents for sci-fi type technology, assigned to the military, started being published. Here [1] is one for an "inertial mass reduction device." Besides the entire patent sounding like it was written by a technobabble trained chatbot, there's a more mundane point. Patents don't stop foreign states from doing whatever they want, and you would have (if this was real) just revealed a potentially unmatchable (with current technology) state secret, for no apparent gain. All you really do is advertise "we're researching alien tech" to a the general population.

2) 2018 is also the first year that branches of the US military started missing enlistment goals since 2005. In 2018 it was "only" by about 6,500 enlistees, but obviously the trend would have been clear before then. Last year the army missed their goal by 25%, or about 15,000 enlistees. [2] Quoting the final line of that article, "...if the declining enlistment trends continue, the Pentagon may have to reassess its force requirements and find ways to make the military a more attractive profession to the eroding number of young Americans who can meet mental and physical requirements for service."

And what better way than trying to reshape the military from being a place where you go enlist to die in pointless geopolitical conflicts on the other side of the world (and I mean no disrespect whatsoever to the soldiers who have lost their lives in such, but it's a truth that should not be sugar coated), to one where you can go research aliens and get access to [not so] ultra-top-secret technology. Sounds better than dedicating your life to commercial businesses which largely come down to finding new ways to spam people with ads they don't want to see, at least.

It's just a recruitment campaign, targeted at a different audience than the ones that propaganda videos at e.g. football games target.

[1] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

[2] - https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/10/02/army-mis...

If you're interested, the author of that patent, Salvatore ("Sal") Pais joined the Theories of Everything (TOE) Podcast to talk about it [0].

It's worth a watch on a rainy Sunday (when I do most of my UAP "research" :D), but I'm not sure he does much to dispel the many reasons to be skeptical of this patent. If anything, he sounds more like a disinformation agent than someone with experimentally valid, groundbreaking physics. But it's a fun watch.

Personally, in general, my justification for consuming UAP content is that it's led me down some really fascinating rabbit-holes of "actual" educational material relating to quantum physics, cosmology, etc. I don't mind subscribing to a likely disinformation campaign if it piques my curiosity in more feasibly tangible ways. For that kind of educational content (with a basis in actual science), I recommend "The World Science Festival," "Closer to Truth," and a few Lex Fridman podcasts (I'll watch anything with Roger Penrose, Brian Greene or Leonard Susskind). For more far-out Sci-Fi content, "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur" is really great. I like to listen to this stuff when I'm cooking or cleaning around the house.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E6QyAhTB3o

> But I think it's far more likely that it's all part of a government disinformation campaign

Two possibilities I've entertained:

- The whole UFO / UAP thing is a psyop. As to what such a psyop is supposed to achieve is beyond me though.

- Some UFOs are the real deal and are intelligences vastly greater than ours and are merely watching us. Since they're exponentially more intelligent they probably just see us as ants, so we're not important.

Perhaps the UAPs are a psyop from the Aliens ;) (Funnily enough, that's actually not too far off from the interpretation of "the phenomenon" advocated by Jacques Vallée. Although it's too kookie for me, especially when it gets into Hal Puthoff's "remote viewing" territory. That stuff is nuts.)

> The whole UFO / UAP thing is a psyop. As to what such a psyop is supposed to achieve is beyond me though.

I've always suspected that the "show and tell" had to do with securing funding or status for the program(s). Can the dumps of footage and breathless claims be related to budget cycles or some predictable bureaucratic wrangling?

The ancestor program, AATIP (2007), was the pet project of a senator and was funded for five years. It seems to have been resurrected or reconstituted multiple times, most recently as AARO in 2022. I presume these programs are populated with true believers who find themselves in the unpleasant situation of needing to demonstrate some value for the public largess.

Was Hynek a disinformation agent in the same way too?

This has been logged by governments at least since ww2 and the IC has worked to cover it up since. Lue is fairly new in terms of the timeline.

No idea about Hynek, but when I say Lue Elizondo is a career disinformation agent, I'm not being facetious, but rather rephrasing the first sentence of his Wikipedia entry [0]:

> Luis Elizondo is a media personality and former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and former employee of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

In a true "leak" scenario, I would expect the first leaks to come from someone in the Navy, not the counterintelligence office.

Also, I don't think it's a coincidence how closely his physical appearance matches that of the stereotypical Q-Anon believer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Elizondo

> Also, I don't think it's a coincidence how closely his physical appearance matches that of the stereotypical Q-Anon believer.

Ngl, my experiences in life processed and summarized by my gut and intuition lead me to believe there is some truth in Physiognomy. I suppose it probably has more to do with fashion choices than bone structure... but still.

> a disinformation campaign

My sense of this as well. If you recall the past 3 years, the announcements were coordinated and we had former Mossad and CIA heads pushing it.

So the question is for what purpose would you try and sell the idea of ET visiting Earth to the masses?

My speculation -- this is just speculation -- is that it will be a component of an attempt to create a new unified global religion to basically wrap [and undermine the narrative of] the existing (problematic in certain views) global religions. [You know, ET as angels and prophets as ~abductees.]

p.s. this looks like an interesting read (that closes with):

Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence.

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90, Gerald K Haines, National Reconnaissance Office historian

https://www.cia.gov/static/105bd8290b90de13ee136fecc9fe863f/...

p.s.s.

I see a [dead] comment accusing me of "pushing conspiracy theories" and that is not the case. I am very skeptical of the idea of aliens waiting until humans reached a certain level of technology to make an entrance. If anything, pre-modern humanity was far more accepting of fantastical beasts, beings, places, magic, you name it. ET would have fitted right in. Why wait until the age of reason?

So given that lack of belief in ET (not in their existence but rather in their presence on our planet), coupled with 1st tier media and personalities promoting it, and the fact that ET apparently only contacts Five Eyes countries, the question then arises as to why are they pushing this bs?

A speculation followed.

That's the gist of "Project Bluebeam," but I think there's also a much more benign explanation, which is that DIA wants to corral the people most susceptible to conspiracy theories into a group that they control. They saw how Q-Anon played out and decided to get on top of it before our adversaries could.

Which half of the US population do they want to corral exactly?

I didn't say half.

Less than 25% of eligible voters voted for Donald Trump.

Don't know it, will check it out.

I think your benign explanation is +more likely than mine and covers the flat earth cohort as well.

I think if there is any intentional misdirection going on, it's for a far more mundane goal. Governments and militaries are flying all sorts of weird, but perfectly terrestrial, craft, for all sorts of purposes, benign and some probably malicious. There will be less public discussion of strange flying things if reporting one gets you automatically assumed to be a crazy alien nut. Commercial airline pilots see a lot of things they don't report through the usual pubic channels. I think some may prefer it that way. </tinfoil hat>

This has always been my pet theory. The supposedly alien craft are laid out to intimidate and or misdirect foreign opposition. These could be actual craft our totally fabricated illusions. For me this felt the most plausible. As with everyone else speculating here, I have no practical way to test this hypothesis.

As a disclaimer, I am aware that seemingly implausible things happen regularly and that this pattern of analysis would fail under those scenarios.

My favored hypothesis is that the videos released by the government are known by the government to be mundane, and they were publicly released because they got sick of responding to FOIA requests about it. The demand for the release and subsequent narratives around the release have been driven by true believers, who are more than a little kooky. See: "Skinwalker Ranch"

Has it actually resulted in a decrease of FOIA requests? My initial assumption would be that it would cause an increase in requests.

There are basically two options: either ETs are visiting or not. Your take on the matter clearly implies only one of these?

If you admit, you cannot really know whether or not they are (much less give a reasonable estimate for likelihood), you have to look at both options equally.

Interestingly, given ET-visitation, just as posited by "UFOlogy" taking place since at least Roswell, fits remarkably well with observations mentioned here. At the very least, there doesn't seem to be any real contradiction?

The leaks you mentioned weren't instigated by "the government", by the way. Rather, some group of relative insiders did that.

Not really. I think there is a matrix: UFOs either are or are not visiting us, and the Government either is or is not lying to us. The varying skepticism comes down to what you believe is the conditional probability of one given the other. There is some famous quote which goes (roughly) "I don't know if aliens are visiting us, but if the government ever tells me they are, I'll know they are not."

Also, just because you can segment something into true/false, absolutely does not mean you have to look at each case equally. You either have or do not have cancer. That doesn't mean there's a 50% chance you have cancer.

With cancer, you have enough statistical data to tell the likelihood. With ETs, you do not.

Your matrix of course splits nicely with "ETs or no" and on the other hand is arbitrarily extendable in various dimensions. But in any case, just because yours has four entries shouldn't keep you from considering each option.

What does "consider" mean to you? I personally have spent an unhealthy amount of time consuming speculative media about UFOs. As I said, I would love nothing more than for it to be true that Aliens are visiting us. I also think that, if we really are seeing UAPs in the sky as described by the government, then we should be investigating them and destigmatizing reports about them from pilots and other government employees. But we should also be weary of the resultant cobra effect [0] such destigmatization can produce. Ultimately, I think there will never be any real resolution to this until an alien mothership hovers over some major city for multiple days. And even then, there would be people who refuse to believe it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...

With "consider" I mean taking implications into proper consideration. Which you didn't do above.

The recent behavior of the US government/military is not compatible with "no ETs anywhere". Confabulations to the contrary universally suffer from serious plotholes.

But as you say, people's assumptions prevent them from considering options without irrational bias.