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As many people have noted, the decline of religion in mainstream society has left a lot of people with a yearning for something like religion. Some people channel that into politics, some into sports, and some into esoteric new-age beliefs like the idea that UFOs are faeries. Or, sure, maybe the relics of some ancient civilization that developed AI and then went extinct, leaving their robot-ufos to forever roam the Earth without a purpose.
I'm not a believer but I'm open-minded. I've never been fully convinced by any of the arguments against UFOs-as-aliens. I certainly don't buy the idea that the government has some sort of decades-long project that makes super-advanced aircraft which seem to defy physics, and has also kept it hidden all these years. They're just not that competent. We know about all their high-tech research projects, because those projects involve a huge amount of money and people working on them.
One theory I do like is that it's the opposite- it's a conspiracy by the air force to cover up their own lack of knowledge. They see all these bizarre events, they've tried to research it, and just never come to a satisfying conclusion. It looks really bad for the air force to admit "weird shit is happening in our skies, and we have no idea what it is or how to stop it." Of course the "weird shit" might just be odd aerial phenomenon like ball lightning. Or it might not be. it could also be that all the pilots are just going crazy from too much time staring at clouds, and starting to hallucinate things that aren't there, but that looks even worse for the air force to admit.
Anyway, it's clear that a large number of people really want to believe in aliens, thanks to science fiction and a lack of religious meaning in their life. But there's also a large number that really want to not believe, because it makes them feel comfortable and secure in their worldview of scientific certainty. It's hard to find people that can actually investigate this in a rigorous, open-minded yet skeptical way.
Well...yes, but I feel compelled to point out that, because of this, we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics (and perhaps more relevantly to a lot of UFO sightings, to make it seem like there are objects, including possibly physics-defying ones, where none exist – that's electromagnetic warfare for ya!)
Like what? Making an aircraft (briefly) hover in mid-air doesn't defy physics, it's just really difficult and expensive. Same with electromagnetic warfare. Defying physics would be something like instantaneous acceleration or faster-than-light travel.
Well, I guess in theory, if you have a sufficiently broad understanding of physics, nothing can violate physics.
But yeah the government has conducted various covert research endeavors on things in the ballpark of what you mention. The Navy got a patent that included gravity manipulation technology in 2018 and the US military/defense industrial complex has been researching "antigravity" for decades.
Edit-to-add: as an aside, it's interesting to ask if the fact that the government has put effort into tilting at these particular windmills indicates a belief inside certain corners of the US military-industrial complex that these things are possible, perhaps itself due to observing UFOs/UAPs. Food for conspiratorial thought for the so inclined!
I think it mostly just shows that they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes. It doesn't sound like they put a lot of effort into it, just gave a bit of money to one crackpot to work on "antigravity" for a while. Similarly there was the time they did some research on psychics and remote viewing which... didn't work out.
Anyway, notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light. They're not good at keeping secrets!
Well, that implies that the purpose of those programs was definitively looking for psychics rather than simply just trying to either psyop certain individuals into believing in psychics, or stigmatizing the field even further. Hal Puthoff (one of the leaders of the CIA-contracted Stanford study of ESP) most probably conspired with Uri Geller to deceive Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell to raise thousands of dollars for further research through making him think that Geller could spontaneously teleport lost keepsakes. The main weirdness comes in the personal anecdotes of outside-party observers whose soundness of mind would otherwise be assumed in good faith. Jacques Vallee, for example, wrote down in his private diary an example of Geller receiving hidden information psychically after Vallee sent other information the last second. Vallee otherwise notes (in the same diary) LLNL engineers allegedly measuring Geller's telekinetic abilities and receiving interference patterns on photographic machinery only possible through an external source of light that was otherwise absent, which lines up with other weird stories like Jack Sarfatti (PhD physicist, personal hippy friend of Lenny Susskind) talking to LLNL physicists throughout this fiasco and bringing up to them the fact that if Geller was actually psychic to the extent they were claiming, he would have no issue in activating or neutralizing nuclear weaponry remotely, to the group's horror. The resulting conclusion would be that either the entire program was able to convince highly-technical observers individually and in groups upon personal contact that ESP was real when it actually wasn't (up to and including the President, as Jimmy Carter stated that remote viewing found a downed aircraft when prosaic means couldn't) for some unknown ulterior purpose, or that this entire operation of conmanship was operating on some foundation of otherwise hidden knowledge of ESP or crashed spacecraft or whatever. Vallee personally came to the second conclusion, thinking that Geller was a genuine psychic who also engaged in widespread fraud for whatever reason. It should also be noted that Geller was discovered and brought to America in the first place by a MKUltra doctor who also brought psychedelic mushrooms to America, whose sessions of hypnotism made Geller think that he was empowered by an artificially superintelligent computer onboard an alien spacecraft from the future, but that's neither here or there.
As you can tell, all these very people involved in the ESP research fiasco for the government are also the very people involved in the modern UFO "cover-up" scene. Hal Puthoff himself was good friends with a Lockheed Martin Vice President (James T. Ryder) who was also a Luciferian theosophist, and people around Puthoff (including the people who work for him) all claim that this Vice President literally handed over a flying saucer that Puthoff's team broke into and looked inside. This is the event that David Grusch talks about when it comes to the 'crash-retrieval program'. The purely fascinating aspect of this is that either there actually exists some sort of supernatural thing everyone is acting totally fucked-up around, or we have hugely powerful and influential people in our governmental black programs roleplaying about parapsychological things for no apparent reason other than to psyop their own black-world colleagues. It makes absolutely no sense.
For what it's worth, I appreciate the long effort post response and all the links. Though I do feel a bit um.. Gish-galloped/Eulered. I don't really know what to say in response to all this. I feel like I would have to do a very long deep dive into 1970s psi research to really respond properly, and I'm not prepared to do all that right now. But still, thanks.
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Highly capable people acting kooky is nothing new.
Critical thinking is completely uncorrelated to intelligence.
And of course, the barren cheerlessness of the materialist, Darwinian worldview promotes grasping at straws behavior from people who evolved to be kooky animists.
The above does not seem to me to be mere ‘uncritical thinking’, but some sort of memetic disease or contacted mental illness. It’s one thing to imagine that there may be UFO programs because of uncritical thinking, it’s another thing to probably earnestly believe that a Lockheed Martin VP handed over a flying spacecraft which you broke into and looked inside. The thing that ‘did not make sense’ that I referred to earlier is that either there is something there, or there is a mass-psyop going on similar to what happened to Paul Bennewitz, just on a higher scale, whose motivation I cannot make out whatsoever. That opaqueness is the main thing that is confusing me, as otherwise I am willing to believe that there might be a ‘UFO phenomenon’ simply due to the fact of my own theory of mind and the fact that people I trust have seen unexplainable things.
You can't? Well..
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It makes perfect sense. Even the most intelligent powerful people get swept up in religious cults and movements. Some might have schizophrenia-esque disorders, or even low key schizophrenia. Others might just be the kind of people easily swept up in this kind of thing. Some of it is fraud and some of it is true belief.
There isn't anything that needs explaining about people getting swept up in religious cults. We have countless examples throughout history that haunt the world to this day. Just accept that the supernatural isn't real and that people are in general prone to schizo-reasoning. From Siberian shamans, to West African witch-doctors, to psychics in 20th century America.
I did not mean that the dichotomy did not make sense, just that the reasons behind both hypotheticals would not make sense to me even if they were true. The government is not acting the way I would expect it to if the supernatural existed, and even then, they are acting in a way that I would not expect them to even if I thought they were trying to make the supernatural seem to exist even when it didn’t. My hypothesis space for what the ‘UFO psyop’ is is completely barren, especially when you look deeper into UFO lore.
Exactly! They are acting in the way true believers would act in a world where UFOs and the supernatural aren't real. A world where the supernatural and UFOs are fake, but they believe they are real. They are psyopsing themselves.
There is no psyops, just gullible boomers. Just like there never was a Christ who could do miracles, just gullible Galilean Jews. There was no Zarathustra, who received visions from Ahura Mazda, just gullible Iranians. And, there was no Joseph Smith, who found golden tablets, just gullible Mormons. The list could go on and on.
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Yep, I 100% agree with this, and am glad someone is doing so.
Well, admittedly there's some contention on this point.
I...am very skeptical of this logic. Imagine if you were the director of the CIA and someone told you you didn't need to worry about Russian spies because all of them that you were aware of had been uncovered eventually!
But anyway, to my point: the government's definitely done far-out research like this. I broadly agree there's not solid evidence they've hit any real "physics-defying" breakthroughs, just that they've looked for them. (However if they found them, I'd obviously expect them to lock it down very tightly.)
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I want to believe in aliens because an intelligent non-human civilization would be a treasure trove of philosophical data. What are they like? Is their conscious experience anything like ours (vision, touch, taste, etc), or is it totally different? Do they have art? Do they have a concept of good and evil? Do they have math? Is it isomorphic to our math, or is it built from different concepts? Are they a collective hivemind, do they have a concept of individual rights? Do they have conflict, do they have war? Do they care to ask any of these questions about us, or are they not interested?
I don't need any more meaning. My life is more meaningful than I know what to do with already, if anything I suffer from too much meaning. I just think aliens would be cool, is all.
So, do you believe in them? or, to put it another way, what would you guess is the probability that aliens exist? Bearing in mind your bias that you want them to exist.
In terms of intelligent aliens who have actually visited this planet (as opposed to say, alien bacteria existing literally anywhere else in the universe)? It's not that likely. But unlike the staunch skeptics, I don't think the probability is 0 either. The US government has acted quite shady about the whole thing over the decades, and congressmen have claimed to have seen enough shocking things in classified briefings that I think it's worthwhile to dig deeper and get more of this classified information (and we know for a fact that this information exists, even if we don't know its actual contents) out to the public.
The US government acts shady about lots of things. If looking into something would expose classified projects that have nothing to do with space aliens, their reaction is going to look an awful lot like someone acting shady about space aliens.
An extremely funny but prosaic explanation for a lot of this stuff is that the government just keeps lying about aliens to conceal their totally mundane projects and occasionally people within the government get fooled and the story gets out of hand and it's embarrassing to admit how much you lied/got fooled, so...
An even funnier and scarier version of this is that this and the "aliens are real and can hurt you" theories are true and the people who know about the aliens actually prefer alien stories to circulate anyway since it's helpful for people to peel back the layer and find that the "real" story is that the aliens are just a cover for the next stealth bomber or whatever.
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