I have been bouncing around a theory for a while about the whole UFO discussion of the last... five years? It's interesting how it has ebbed and flowed in US, even getting a fair amount of discussion (and true believers announcing themselves) on the predecessor forums to this forum. I think the most important and interesting thing is not the phenomenon - how many times are people going to get excited about hazy videos that may or may not show small specks moving in unnatural ways, but the discussion itself - and I think there's a specific reason why the system might foster this discussion.
We certainly know that the US government takes a great interest in social media and has done so since the beginning, as demonstrated by articles like this one. The effective voluntary surveillance abilities offered by Facebook and other security-state-connected social media means that there can now be what amounts to a voluntary distributed vast civilian surveillance operation by the security state.
If media successfully rekindles interest in UFOs, there's going to be photos all over social media, and they might be of some use, as there's timestamps and location data, and you can use rapidly advancing machine learning abilities to, for instance, give credence to pilot sightings by checking if there's relevant civilian sightings, or photographs.
By stoking interest in UFOs, having people photograph or otherwise talk about whatever strange lights in the sky they have seen, they will receive data that they can now categorize and utilize – true open-source intelligence. They can then figure out whether there is a cause for further interest and concern.
Such civilians might not do this just voluntarily. Indeed, many of them are exactly of the suspicious type that would actively refrain from watching the skies if the government directly told them to do so. And it is not just Americans. A successful operation would provoke sightings all around the world, even in enemy countries (as far as those allow the penetration of American social media). And as automatic data analysis capabilities improve, so would the capabilities to use that data.
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Notes -
Yeah, I sort of referred to this in the text.
Of course finding individual cases of people and networks to monitor more closely would be a part of that pulse.
I think this is one major explanation, people generally don't seem to really grasp how many people in the high reaches of government and administration are true believers in weird stuff. However, these don't really shut each other off - you might very well have people form alliances to push this narrative with one being a true believer and another one having more cynical use for it - and one thing I've found is that it really is even possible for same people to 100 % believe in something and at the same time 100 % be aware and pragmatically utilize aspects of the same thing for personal purposes or other agendas. You see this all the time with cult leaders, terrorist leaders etc.
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