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I feel sorry for every child who didn't have SETI@home and X-Files at the same time during their childhood.

The truth is still out there.

Oh, I feel this. As a pre-teen, I loved it. SETI@Home running on our family's Pentium 100, X-Files, and hanging out on the "Parascope" forum and chatroom on AOL for all things UFO related. An "I Want To Believe" poster on my wall.

I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that with nostalgia.

Same here, you either move past it or go crazy, if the UFO subreddits are any indication. Given the population was already obsessed with blurry clumps of pixels in short video clips, AI is going to send a lot of those people into trailers in the desert with a lifetime supply of aluminum foil.

And now that we have mass-produced hyper-maneuverable quad-copter drones, the whole "it moved backward in a way that no aircraft ever could!" doesn't really hit as hard.

My current UFO conspiracy brain is that the UAP makers want Greenland as their home, and the US wants to get the benefits of that. Because that would be less crazy to me than what it's really about.

This is probably the reason | except the UAP makers are now us

When conspiracies were a bit more fun.

Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.

Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year.

I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.

It's not a conspiracy anymore

I'd really like to see it disclosed by a government that isn't panicking about epstein files/being impeached and trying to cover up other stories before I'm fully convinced

I mean this is a meta-conspiracy in itself. I don't think you're incorrect/wrong, but using one conspiracy theory to hide a conspiracy with lots of evidence is interesting.

I would be more interested in the former USSR or China, maybe Iran and Latin America. The Eastern Bloc must have covered up a lot of stuff but would have wild stories.

There's some genuinely weird shit unexplained, I'll give you that. Unlike Bigfoot, where you can look at a map of the historical range of bears and see it exactly matches where all the Bigfoot sightings are.

People claim to see Bigfoot creatures in the Mississippi Delta and Florida... Even Scotland. None of these are much noted for their bears.

> the Mississippi Delta and Florida... Even Scotland. None of these are much noted for their bears.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_black_bear

The US South has bears.

There are some outliers (like Hawaii, or the 2 sightings in my local forest preserve) which cannot be bears, but what you will find is there is way more bear populations wandering around than you realize.

The trend is pretty clear.

People claim to see these things in Australia and New Zealand. Not many bears round there. I don't count koalas in Oz as bears.

You forget about drop bears

I dunno. I think the fact that these sightings are always from sleep deprived individuals describing things at the far end of their range of detection (whether that's 5 miles away with the Mk 1 eyeball or 500 miles away with classified superradar) suggests a pretty clear pattern.

It probably is both. Up for debate the ratio.

>I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.

Just to go off of this.. I'm not saying it was aliens.... but it was aliens.

https://www.dictionary.com/culture/memes/ancient-aliens

IMHO, the whole social/psychological aspect of the "conspiracy" or phenomenom or whatever you want to call it is at least as interesting as the phenomenon itself.

Pilots from the Eastern Bloc and NATO countries have had sightings. It's not just a US thing. People have been claiming to see them for longer than the USA has existed.

Not to be that guy, but if the majority of sightings coming from nations capable of producing advanced military aircraft... well perhaps the aliens thought the F-15 was badass and wanted a closer look?

You know when you pass a nice classic car reeeeally slowly so you can get a good look? Aw yeah, don't see many of those, do you?

US sightings get publicised best due to the nature of international media (wide distribution of US films, TV and books)... But there certainly are other places claiming to see them. There are a lot of supposed sightings in Chile for example, which doesn't have a huge air force.

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