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The last time we discussed UFOs was here in response to Tucker positively mentioning UFO speculation, and my critical response was here and in subthreads.
What's happening here is, essentially - there are several million people employed in, or as contractors for, the US military and intelligence community. The number who hold positions like 'generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center' are smaller, but (if we're allowed to lump together all kinds of quackery, instead of just aliens) at least 1 in 100. And any time you have ten thousand people, a few dozen of them are going to be, variously - gullible, insane, stupid, have committed to several important intellectual mistakes, intentionally lying for media attention, or are just of average intelligence when actually understanding whether a radar signature shows aliens or noise requires being above average + got sucked into 'exposing aliens' because they genuinely believe it's important. This is how you get things like "the CIA investigated astral projection" or "nobel prize-winning scientist believes in homeopathy" or the fake "bomb detector" that was just a dowsing rod used by 20 different countries' militaries (but, again, that doesn't mean their whole militaries endorsed/used them, just some people in them). It's not surprising that one in a thousand military people believes in aliens if one in a hundred 'normal' people believe in aliens. Yet 999 in 1000 don't believe in aliens. (edit: it's probably significantly above 1 in 1k even among those who are high iq / work in technical fields)
Additionally - there have been dozens of supposed firsthand accounts of interactions with aliens like this one, and all of their details are both incompatible with verifiable history and incompatible with each other. E.g. "arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally" - which technologies? All of the biggest scientific and engineering discoveries have very legible and sensible histories. The progress of science and engineering over the past hundred years hasn't been a secret thing, it occurs in public. Maybe everyone's been tricked, but that should require more evidence than one guy asserting it.
I friend of mine knows lots of high ranking people in the military. He says many of them take UFOs seriously.
I’ve known lots of former special forces guys and they all believe in some kind of exotic conspiracy theory, aliens is a common one. I always wrote it off as the usual tendency for high functioning blue collar men who aren’t either fundies or some kind of truly radical political extremist to embrace weird fringe beliefs straight out of the daytime history channel and assumed military men preferred aliens over Albanian Atlantis theory because tech appeals to them or something.
My point is, I wouldn’t write it off that the military just has an unusual number of people holding ideas about aliens because of some weird cultural quirk.
Wonder if that's because they deal with compartmentalized information for so long, and their brain starts painting in the parts they don't have.
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Can you elaborate on what 'take UFOs seriously' means? Presumably it's somewhere in between 'are confident aliens are real and actively use alien technology' and 'think that Unidentified Flying Objects exist and they're either natural debris or man-made objects'
Objects being observed/recorded accelerating in manners way beyond the technical capacity of anything the US military knows about. They are spooked.
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