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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely fascinating that the top two replies to an article about Aliens! are positing basically the same conspiracy: that this is a deliberate psyop run by a "nation state" and not just... people being wrong about stuff?

Why go through the trouble to refute one unlikely and poorly supported hypothesis just to jump right into a new one? Has Occam taught us nothing? There are no successfully hidden "conspiracies" of that scale. Maybe someone can run a successful assassination once in a while and keep it under wraps for a decade or so, but that's as far as it goes. Lips are too loose and threads are too easy to pull, especially in the internet era.

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Because military brass is not supposed to be wrong by going along with such unlikely scenarios.

They might as well also believe the fairy god-mother decides the outcome of battles and direct their ire at her.

This is The National Enquirer-level stuff.

> military brass is not supposed to be wrong by going along with such unlikely scenarios.

True but that was before we started having idiot legislators in congress willing to throw a few tens of millions at "investigations" by the military. Nothing like easy budget and a cushy assignment for several years to encourage some motivated reasoning. "Hey, if you're payin', I'm investigatin.'"

You mean like being on the board of Theranos?

So it's to make money off of suckers? They are swindlers? We're no better than John MacAfee's banana republic low-level bribe seeking government employees.

The U.S. Inspector General called the claims "credible and urgent" and congress has planned a hearing on the documents provided to them under oath on said retrieval programs.

This clearly goes well beyond someone simply being mistaken.

Wow, nobody has ever lied to congress before! And what are the chances their testimony pops up right after the introduction of a program incentivizing whistleblowers to come forward?

Wouldn't you expect their testimony to pop up after the incentive program independently of it's accuracy or truthfulness?

I wouldn't expect it to be independent of truthfulness. The Cobra Effect [0] suggests that offering a reward for something, in this case public airing of testimony, increases the likelihood of false testimony given the absence of any truthful testimony.

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

I'll just say that I regard the chances of the IG and congress being wrong about something as rather higher than that of an extraterrestrial civilization leaving artifacts on earth recovered only by the US Government. I mean, come on. I love alien stuff too but you need to put the bar for proof in a reasonable place, and this isn't it.

My point wasn't that there's a reasonable factual argument here (there clearly isn't) it's that the "reasonable" people jumping in to re-interpret it were also engaging in unfounded conspiracy paranoia (albeit one with a much more plausible hypothesis).

The "omg aliens" media card always seems to get pulled out when there's no $CURRENT_OUTRAGE and people are looking for something. It's like filler content when there's nothing else to rile people up.

Examples?

When was the last time a UFO/aliens story was competing for air time with a major real world news event (disaster, protest, shooting, terrorist, election, etc)?

The "balloon shootdowns" during the Ohio toxic chemical train derailment.

"UFO/aliens" as in, extraterrestrial spacecraft, X-Files bs

Well, the top story right now is a major dam in a war zone having been destroyed. Given that this story is coming out right now... literally right now?

That story is below the fold, as a small subsection on CNN.com. Their current major top story is "New York City’s air pollution among the worst in the world." It's clearly a slow news day.

I always write it off as one of two things. People are simply wrong. Or they're lying for fame/money. The 2nd one is easy to spot once you see them on a variety of conspiracy talk shows.

It’s another razor (heuristic) like Occam’s Razor.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1235/

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