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 -
Gimbal lock doesn't explain anything but making slow things appearing fast. Radar is most likely a bug or some kind of tests designed to trick radar (which the US has conducted in the past). Could you expand on what you mean by infra red signature? If you're talking about my example, nothing was fooled there. The pilots knew they were watching a bird but they saw the infra red video it looked like a UFO so they uploaded it.
Birds on IR don't look like mostly static pill shapes.
Well, you can't convince someone against something they really want to believe. The fact is we have no conclusive evidence of anything breaking physics at all. The physics says it's impossible, or if it could somehow happen we should also have time travel. Why has no one ever come back if time travel will one day exist?
As Charles Stross said on his blog: people who believe we're being visited by aliens don't understand just how vast space is.
I mean, I'm on record of being skeptical of the whole thing (thought it was a psyop from the start), and now I'm leaning towards what Dasein says.
But we've seen a plenty of IR footage from the recent war.. and yeah. A bird's a bird.
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